blackbird27's review
4.0
I wrote about this book on my Tumblr when I first read it nearly five years ago; but that was a library copy and I recently bought my own. Donald Ogden Stewart, as I noted in my Tumblr review of The Crazy Fool (my Goodreads blurb is now archived in a zine), is best known today as an Academy-Award-winning adapter of plays and books to classic Hollywood movies, but as an comic writer in the 1920s his only peer was Robert Benchley (who did not attempt fiction): later, more famous absurdists like S. J. Perelman, James Thurber, and even Looney Tunes owe more than is often recognized to Stewart's tonally precise non sequiturs.
Gilbert Seldes compared him with the Dadaists in a characteristically perceptive 1925 review: and although Stewart's method and ambition were entirely different from the high-art total renovation of culture and meaning that Dada and their inheritors the Surrealists championed, the effect of his work is often serendipitously congruent with their aims, a sort of lowbrow pop-culture echo of what was going on across culture (thanks at least in part to the society-rearranging influences of motor vehicles, the movies, and jazz). It's not enough for Stewart, as it might have been for any other humorist, to poke fun at the limited worldview and provincial ignorance of his midwestern family traveling to Europe — he satirizes an entire bourgeois civilization of committee meetings, stump speeches, and salesman's patter more ruthlessly and with greater economy than (say) Sinclair Lewis, while deftly resetting his scenes according to dream logic, unhampered by the necessity of maintaining a coherent fictive universe.
The absurdism that results is so rare in prose fiction that I find myself reaching for comparisons to things like cartoons, sketch comedy, or the anti-comedy of Tim and Eric, which latter at least gets at the profound mundanity of Stewart's satire, the close attention to, and in some way celebration of, the dull and ugly textures of contemporary life from which aesthetic sensitivity usually recoils. On the other hand, the habitual pomposity of manner and social scale which Stewart is reflexively puncturing has been almost entirely wiped out in the twenty-first century; we are so thoroughly without couth that the minor snubs and social anxieties he dramatizes to absurdity register almost meaningless today.
It doesn't matter. It's still a profoundly comic (which doesn't necessarily mean funny; especially on a second reading, my actual laughter was limited) achievement, a marvelous prose performance as exquisite in its own genre as The Sun Also Rises (in which a roman à cleffed Stewart plays a significant role) was two years later.
Gilbert Seldes compared him with the Dadaists in a characteristically perceptive 1925 review: and although Stewart's method and ambition were entirely different from the high-art total renovation of culture and meaning that Dada and their inheritors the Surrealists championed, the effect of his work is often serendipitously congruent with their aims, a sort of lowbrow pop-culture echo of what was going on across culture (thanks at least in part to the society-rearranging influences of motor vehicles, the movies, and jazz). It's not enough for Stewart, as it might have been for any other humorist, to poke fun at the limited worldview and provincial ignorance of his midwestern family traveling to Europe — he satirizes an entire bourgeois civilization of committee meetings, stump speeches, and salesman's patter more ruthlessly and with greater economy than (say) Sinclair Lewis, while deftly resetting his scenes according to dream logic, unhampered by the necessity of maintaining a coherent fictive universe.
The absurdism that results is so rare in prose fiction that I find myself reaching for comparisons to things like cartoons, sketch comedy, or the anti-comedy of Tim and Eric, which latter at least gets at the profound mundanity of Stewart's satire, the close attention to, and in some way celebration of, the dull and ugly textures of contemporary life from which aesthetic sensitivity usually recoils. On the other hand, the habitual pomposity of manner and social scale which Stewart is reflexively puncturing has been almost entirely wiped out in the twenty-first century; we are so thoroughly without couth that the minor snubs and social anxieties he dramatizes to absurdity register almost meaningless today.
It doesn't matter. It's still a profoundly comic (which doesn't necessarily mean funny; especially on a second reading, my actual laughter was limited) achievement, a marvelous prose performance as exquisite in its own genre as The Sun Also Rises (in which a roman à cleffed Stewart plays a significant role) was two years later.
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