Recommended Art
On Lily Allen, Ottessa Moshfegh, that gooning article, new fiction by Sam Lipsyte and more.
Hello friends! I’m trying a new thing where I share with you what I’m listening to, watching and reading. This week, the theme is existential alienation —but make it fun! Hope you enjoy.
Listen:
West End Girl (Lily Allen)
As a geriatric millennial, I still remember when Lily Allen was the undisputed queen of moody, story-forward pop. With her sweet-sounding voice backed by winsome synths, she could make existential alienation and brattiness sound almost romantic. Throughout the albums It’s Not Me, It’s You and Alright, Still she critiqued topics emblematic of our age group: George Bush, rampant consumerism, classism and MySpace fuckboys, generally.
Her newest album takes aim at another perennial hot topic: open marriages. While Allen has been careful in interviews not to link every detail in the album to the collapse of her marriage with David Harbour, everyone online is obsessing over just that. (The casual asides and emotional undertones present during an AD tour of their townhouse in Brooklyn has come under special scrutiny.)
But honestly none of this would be noteworthy if it weren’t for Allen’s masterful storytelling. While excavating the wreckage of her marriage, she has penned a devastating roman à clef that plays with genres and tones as skillfully as an Oscar-winning film (no surprise she was nominated for an Olivier Award a few years back for her performance in 2:22: A Ghost Story). If you don’t have time to listen to the whole album, at least check out Pussy Palace.
Watch:
Twinless (James Sweeny)
Twinless is about many things: abandonment, loneliness and the pleasures of straight-gay friendships. But the deception at the heart of the film is what really makes it sing. I don’t want to give too much away, but this is a film that will make you feel surprising things, and its artful construction will keep you enthralled.
The third act, especially, is fully of surprises: I’m such a sucker for smart, funny, unlikable protagonists, especially when their unlikability is only fully revealed in the denouement. I was also shocked by the versatility of actor Dylan O’Brien. (Again, because of spoilers, I will leave it at that!)
Read:
Eileen (Ottessa Moshfegh)
When it comes to unlikeable protagonists, Eileen takes the cake. A miserable woman in her early twenties living in an unnamed, freezing New England town, she spends her days as a secretary at a boys’ prison and her evenings half-heartedly taking care of her abusive, drunk, ex-cop father.
I often wondered why I was subjecting myself to this book, but its narration — from the perspective of an older and wiser future Eileen — effectively hinted at dark developments to come, and the Booker Prize committee had promised a shocking twist at the end. (Yes, the twist was shocking, but I’m still not sure it was worth the slog.)
That said, I was struck by all the gross things Eileen does, and I thought it was fairly radical to write a female character who’s so unabashedly disgusting. I was also impressed by Moshfegh’s graphic yet never sensationalist descriptions of all the macabre happenings in said town. Overall, I guess I recommend it!
Fraud (David Rakoff)
Okay so there’s some nostalgia at play here: Rakoff reminds me of an era in which fat magazine budgets yielded long, literary essays on esoteric topics of all stripes. The writer, who always made himself the jester, had an uncanny knack for the absurd and an encyclopedic cultural knowledge that transformed even the most anodyne assignment into delightful romps. Fraud is one of the best compendiums of his articles, but Half Empty is excellent as well.
I’d like to think if he were still alive, Rakoff would be the most popular Substack writer on the platform. What can I say? I miss the guy.
Final Boy (Sam Lipsyte)
Lipsyte is one of my favorite satirists of the indignity in which we all live under late capitalism and his newest short story doesn’t disappoint. In Final Boy, his narrator labors as a teletherapist whose every therapeutic word is fed to him by a learning language model (LLM). He’s essentially a human meat puppet for folks who miss a certain level of human contact but don’t want to deal with the awkwardness of actually trying to connect with a non-algorithm.
There’s a lot more going on in this story — including a very sick friend, a tenuous housing arrangement, and a lot of talk about the literary ambitions of fanfic creators — but what really made me laugh was what happens when the narrator has to contend with a heinous update to the LLM which makes him sound like an abusive shitposter. This story blended comedy and heart in a way that made me supremely jealous.
The Goon Squad (Daniel Kolitz)
This gripping (heh) article about obsessive masturbators genuinely shook me. I can’t help but feel the pandemic has ruined most of us in ways that will take at least a generation to fully understand.
That’s it for this week. I guess I’ll try to do this more often!