Several people sent me this last week so let’s talk about it!
The idea of a literary red flag comes up in social media conversations every six months or so. This is the latest iteration of it. The answers to these prompts are always fairly similar: true red flags (e.g: Mein Kampf), flags of incompatibility (self-help books/finance books/diet books, this depends on who the OP is), flags of “toxicity” (see below).
Allow me to take everything a bit too literally: I would never leave a date immediately. I would have no story to tell! Apart from the obvious (see again: Mein Kampf), I can’t think of a single title that would prompt me to leave immediately. Case in point – I once went on a date with someone who told me at the dinner table that he liked Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. There was no second date, our personalities were way too different, but it wasn’t because he was a parrot of Peterson’s ideology. Some of his beliefs did overlap with Peterson’s writing and I found those off-putting. But I learned that through conversation, not from looking at his bookshelf. One of my favourite people in the world likes Peterson sometimes (“I wouldn’t say I’m a BIG FAN though”) and that’s fine with me! He writes decent things sometimes. I’ve never felt the effects of Peterson’s “ideology” in our friendship, I think my friend is very intelligent and has good opinions.
At the heart of the red flag conceit is that somebody’s book taste can tell you something significant about their personality or their compatibility with you. That’s not true in my personal experience. Some of my best friends describe themselves as “non-readers” but that doesn’t demonstrate that they’re not curious about the world or that they don’t engage with culture critically. They just don’t read that many books. Likewise, the ex with the best book taste was mean to me. :(
If you look at the books that make it onto the “shit boys” list, they’re always the usual white male suspects: Infinite Jest, On The Road, stuff by Hemingway, Bukowski etc. The Tiktok that’s linked in this Tweet represents this perspective well. It also doesn’t really make sense. It starts with “these are the books that straight millennial men who make fun of women for reading diverse authors own”. What is a “diverse author” lmao. A single individual cannot be “diverse” because “diverse” means variety. I’m sure a lot of millennial men do read these authors and it might be because they’re not looking outside of a traditionally masculine canon that isn’t diverse. But this genre of complaint strikes me as the classic “making up a guy to get mad at”, or as the philosophers would say, “straw man”.
I suspect that the reason this is such a popular dunk amongst millennial women is that it’s a really easy way to demonstrate disdain for men and distance one’s self from heterosexuality because it seems like the progressive thing to do!!!
It’s common in 2021 to see shallow criticism that equates cultural consumption with someone’s politics or ethical commitments. Liking “problematic” things could imply that you are problematic.
This popular Booktuber goes through a Buzzfeed list of “red flag” books and declares that anyone who likes On The Road probably does because they “think they’re Jack Kerouac”. She concludes that people should be allow to enjoy books (“Who cares? We could all drop dead tomorrow. Read whatever the fuck you want!”) but still essentially agrees that some books are red flags. A red flag is a big statement! It’s an indication that somebody might be abusive or toxic in relationships. Tons of abusers read really good books. Some of them are professors of literature. It’s a slippery slope to equate bad taste with a bad personality because it implies that the inverse might be true too. Being able to spot signs of potential harm is actually a really good skill to develop. Focusing on the wrong markers can obfuscate the important things.
Of course, I couldn’t write a newsletter about dating without consulting my long distance lover. He said a lot of really smart things that I won’t repeat because he’ll overshadow me in my own newsletter. I did like this thought: most people’s hatred of a book isn’t based on them actually reading the book. It’s via proxy; they read a bad review or heard somebody use it as a punchline to a joke. Saying “I could never date someone who loved Normal People, that book is a huge red flag” is a way to flex one’s taste and to look morally superior. I agree! The social media prompts are obviously a fun way for people to talk about what books they dislike (and a foolproof way to generate engagement for the OP). I understand fun! I also really understand the desire to talk to people about books. I’m not here to tell you that the literary red flag conversation is wrong to have, I’m just interested in why we keep talking about books in this way.
Incidentally, the aforementioned smart man and I went on a date because I was really impressed by the book he was reading at the time. I will not reveal the title publicly because it makes us both look a bit cringe.
Some books I read recently
“You’re on our rock, sweetie. You’ve been enlisted as a human barnacle by the Wildlife Preservation Initiative. Remember?”
My rock neighbor is an older woman with shells cluttering her hair. She notices me noticing her shells.
“I’m Barnacle Betty, but you can call me Joan. I’m trying to build a convincing crust.”
Her shells extend through her braids, down her arms, and over her sandy, pruney hands, one of which encloses my palm in a delicate, crumbling carapace.
“We’re filling in for a species on the brink of extinction!”
Temporary is really funny. The book tells the story of The Temporary, a woman who is a permanent temp. She takes absurd job after absurd job – barnacle, pirate, ghost – in search of some form of steadiness or belonging. I’ve seen commentaries suggesting that it’s the perfect gig economy book. I can see that but I think it also points to a larger sense of alienation that is eerily familiar to salaried workers too. Corporations brand themselves as families and work-life balance is a myth for so many of us. How much are you willing to do to be the worker who doesn’t get jettisoned when the tide turns?
I don’t want to say too much about the set pieces here because they’re delicious when you go into them with no prior knowledge. I laughed out loud at several points of the novel. Despite really enjoying it, I’m glad that it’s as short as it is. My proof copy was 181 pages long and every single one of them was used to great effect. The author’s restraint made the premise feel fresh instead of gimmicky.
I’ve linked to this New York Times story about how COVID has impacted the book industry before. Temporary gets a mention here as a book that underperformed because of the fallout from the pandemic. Please read it. I think it deserves a wider audience.
The Appointment by Katharina Volckmer
This was another short book, coming in at only 96 pages. It’s a book-length monologue but unlike Ducks, Newburyport (is it a red flag if a girl keeps mentioning that she read Ducks, Newburyport?), there is an audience for this address. The protagonist is in a clinic and speaking to her1 doctor. It’s not clear what she’s there for til about midway through the novel when she reveals that his head is between her legs. She experiences gender dysphoria (“I could never get over the disappointment of my body”) and is midway through a phalloplasty. She starts by recounting a dream where she was Hitler and waking up sad because she would never embody the Aryan ideal she had so fervently promoted – “the feeling that I would never be what I felt I should have been”. The novel doesn’t equate the trans experience with sympathy for Hitler but the Nazi legacy and German guilt are mined for effect throughout the book. The protagonist is German. Her doctor, Dr Seligman, is Jewish. She doesn’t let him forget this.
I guess it is one of the reasons why I came to see you; to be honest, it’s probably the main reason, and I know this might sound a little strange, Dr Seligman, but when I was younger I always thought that the only way to truly overcome the Holocaust would be to love a Jew. And not just any old Jew, but a proper one, with curls and a skullcap. Someone who’s devout and can read from the Torah and doesn’t leave the house without a black hat. I know that this was in poor taste, and I am only telling you this to make you understand where I am coming from, and maybe also to confess that I always had a thing for those curls.
Are you offended yet? The author expects that you might be. In an interview with The Guardian, Volckmer suggests that she’s trying to create space for an “open conversation” about the Holocaust in Germany. Speaking about the book’s reception from non-Jewish Germans, she says “they think it’s vulgar to bring your body into a discussion about the Holocaust, because it should be the main topic – these things can’t be mixed.”
The book is vulgar, impressively so for such a short book, thanks to the protagonist’s inventions of sexual fantasies with Hitler (to spook her therapist), recounting of an affair she had with a married man, and all of the uncomfortable descriptions of Jews. I can’t help but feel like this is pretty unsophisticated. The book is out there but I’m not sure that makes it radical in the political sense of the word. The juxtaposition of two topics that are taboo in the mainstream doesn’t necessarily make the book good or interesting. The shock value is present but I didn’t find it effective. Perhaps this is a case of lacking the cultural context to properly appreciate the text? “German guilt” has always been an intellectual concept to me, not one that I understand emotionally, and it might just this land very differently for an audience that has an intimate connection with that narrative. If you are interested in learning more about the book, I found Jensen Davis’ reading of The Appointment in Bookforum to be more poignant than the book itself.
She postures as a Hitler-obsessed German—digs up the dirtiest, most obscene longing she can find and shoves it in Dr. Seligman’s face—to gauge the upper limit of his horror. Sarah fakes a fixation specifically to distract from, and thus guard, her central desire: to become “the boy [she] always wanted to be.”
You know what is a red flag though?
Lying about the books you’ve read. Do you think this dog can read? I don’t.
(I’m sorry there’s so much Hitler in this email. Unexpected. We’ll have a Nazi-free streak after this, I promise.)
I’m using she/her pronouns for the protagonist because that’s how the author referred to the character in interviews.