Nick Jones > Recent Status Updates

I'd like this more if the main character wasn't constantly doing stupid things while KNOWING they're stupid. "I promised, but," "I shouldn't, but," "It's dangerous and irresponsible, but," "It might get me, my family, and/or my friends killed, but."

I have the sinking feeling that I've figured out the mystery of this book based purely on the way narratives work. A politician's daughter is introduced as a side character, then a murdered girl's possessions included campaign flyers. So, even though no attention was drawn to the flyers and the daughter is currently treated as unimportant to the plot, the politician (or a connected proxy) is the killer.

I'm less than 10% into this book and I am shocked by how much time is spent by the characters talking about white people. Native Son feels as though it was written by a white author trying to (badly) write black characters whose lives revolve entirely around white people.

The titular boy just tried to commit check fraud and rip off an innocent old lady, only to be found out and run away. Then we're just on to the next vignette. No self-reflection at the time, no self-reflection from an adult perspective, just endless unrelated situations where the adolescent Wolff acts like a sociopath. Hard to believe a book about such an awful kid is also dull as dirt, but here we are.

Halfway into the book, something that might've been vaguely interesting almost happened in Wolff getting a chance to move to Paris. This American Boy's Life in Paris might've had something to care about, so I knew it wasn't happening because nothing interesting ever happens in this book. It failed to pan out and immediately switched to a pointless anecdote about Wolff's stepfather claiming to have met Lawrence Welk.

With the constant harping on "workers", "labor", and class divide talk I'm getting a definite communist vibe from Harris. I hope the central thesis of this book isn't going to turn out to be that we need to overthrow the capitalists and toss them into gulags.

Oh good gods, I flipped to the end and the "about the author" page literally leads his bio with "MALCOLM HARRIS is a communist." That explains so much.

Whiny, self-absorbed millennial thinks his generation is awesome, it's everyone and everything else in the world that sucks.

Whiny, self-absorbed millennial thinks his generation is awesome, it's everyone and thing else in the world that sucks.

While one can look back upon turn of the twentieth century works of science fiction and excuse them for being silly, a book that reads identically to one from that time period yet was written in 1982 has no excuse for not having absorbed the lessons of the vast corpus of literature produced in the intervening years.