A review by jdglasgow
Socialist Realism by Trisha Low
1.0
You know that sitcom trope of the New Yorker or Los Angeleno who cajoles their unwilling friends into coming to watch their self-indulgent, supposedly “vulnerable”, endless and uninteresting one-person show? That’s what Trisha Low’s SOCIALIST REALISM feels like, but in book form. Also, I am not her friend so I didn’t even have the luxury of being guilted into reading this exhausting, childish mess: I did it for free. My thinking was that, at 158 pages, it wasn’t terribly long—I could bear it—and, moreover, it would allow me to write this review.
Part memoir, part list of books she’s read, part… I don’t know, convoluted philosophical musing, the book is a stream of conscious collection of thoughts and memories with no unifying theme beyond Low’s disaffected aimlessness, about which she has nothing particularly insightful to say. It’s interesting she references LiveJournal at one point because that’s exactly what this feels like: the petty complaints of a teenager trying to sound profound. It’s hard to believe she was 32 and already a published writer when this book was released; she writes like a 15-year old novice.
If it makes a difference, you can read this review as 1.5 stars, because there are glimmers of ideas that could have been developed into something more meaningful. Low’s crisis of identity between her Singapore roots and California dreams seems like fruitful material, but it doesn’t really congeal into anything here. I also honestly thought the parable about the waterboarding S&M workshop, in which she was told she didn’t know “how to struggle correctly” was funny and held some deeper metaphor about life, but then Low beat it into the ground by repeating it again and again. Most often, though, it’s stories about pronounless theyfriends going to art shows or talking about fucking. She loves to talk about fucking and loves calling it “fucking”, because that’s super transgressive.
I stumbled across this book on the library shelves when picking up Cheryl Strayed’s WILD. I was intrigued by the title, SOCIALIST REALISM, and the blurb on the back which describes Low moving west to find utopia or revolution, and dealing with severed relationships, a family whose values do not align with her own, and the toxicity of right-wing politics. That synopsis seems similar to my own journey from Arkansas to the PNW so I thought I would find the book relatable, but my only thought is that I hope I am not as insufferable as Low and her clique are. The low point (no pun intended) is an extended section where she gets caught up in performative argumentation about a fictionalized poem about domestic violence posted on Buzzfeed. She feels compelled to have an opinion because she’s been compared to the author of the poem but then gets shut down on all sides no matter what position she takes. What she doesn’t appreciate is that neither she, nor anybody else involved in the kerfuffle, has anything of worth to say. It’s about their compulsion to be listened to more than anything. And though the phrase “socialist realism” is deconstructed three or four times, by the end of the book I still can’t tell you what it means or how it relates to whatever story Low is trying to tell.
I’m very disappointed in this book. There’s maybe some nuggets of good ideas buried in it, but those ideas are poorly developed here, and the writing has a distinctly teenage-y, uncritically self-involved, faux-poetic tone that makes the whole endeavor tiresome. It feels like it was really written for an audience of one: Low herself.
Part memoir, part list of books she’s read, part… I don’t know, convoluted philosophical musing, the book is a stream of conscious collection of thoughts and memories with no unifying theme beyond Low’s disaffected aimlessness, about which she has nothing particularly insightful to say. It’s interesting she references LiveJournal at one point because that’s exactly what this feels like: the petty complaints of a teenager trying to sound profound. It’s hard to believe she was 32 and already a published writer when this book was released; she writes like a 15-year old novice.
If it makes a difference, you can read this review as 1.5 stars, because there are glimmers of ideas that could have been developed into something more meaningful. Low’s crisis of identity between her Singapore roots and California dreams seems like fruitful material, but it doesn’t really congeal into anything here. I also honestly thought the parable about the waterboarding S&M workshop, in which she was told she didn’t know “how to struggle correctly” was funny and held some deeper metaphor about life, but then Low beat it into the ground by repeating it again and again. Most often, though, it’s stories about pronounless theyfriends going to art shows or talking about fucking. She loves to talk about fucking and loves calling it “fucking”, because that’s super transgressive.
I stumbled across this book on the library shelves when picking up Cheryl Strayed’s WILD. I was intrigued by the title, SOCIALIST REALISM, and the blurb on the back which describes Low moving west to find utopia or revolution, and dealing with severed relationships, a family whose values do not align with her own, and the toxicity of right-wing politics. That synopsis seems similar to my own journey from Arkansas to the PNW so I thought I would find the book relatable, but my only thought is that I hope I am not as insufferable as Low and her clique are. The low point (no pun intended) is an extended section where she gets caught up in performative argumentation about a fictionalized poem about domestic violence posted on Buzzfeed. She feels compelled to have an opinion because she’s been compared to the author of the poem but then gets shut down on all sides no matter what position she takes. What she doesn’t appreciate is that neither she, nor anybody else involved in the kerfuffle, has anything of worth to say. It’s about their compulsion to be listened to more than anything. And though the phrase “socialist realism” is deconstructed three or four times, by the end of the book I still can’t tell you what it means or how it relates to whatever story Low is trying to tell.
I’m very disappointed in this book. There’s maybe some nuggets of good ideas buried in it, but those ideas are poorly developed here, and the writing has a distinctly teenage-y, uncritically self-involved, faux-poetic tone that makes the whole endeavor tiresome. It feels like it was really written for an audience of one: Low herself.