despair | writingontherim

Earlier today I am sitting in a coffee shop in Claremont, California, drinking horchata and eating tiny donuts, a specialty of this shop. I look around and realize I must be at least 4 times older than the average age of most of the other customers–it is a college town. Three library books form a stack in front of me as I decide which one to open first. I pick up “Supersaurio” by Meryem El Mehdati, a young author who was born in Morocco but lives in the largest of the Canary Islands which is the setting of this, her first novel.

The main character is also named Meryem, just like the author. She is twenty five, a college graduate, unable to find the job of her dreams so she is stuck in an internship at the largest super market chain in the Canary Islands. She hates her boss, finds her job dreadfully boring, and wonders if life is worth it, if she would choose to be born if she had a choice. “I’m not at all what I thought I’d grown up to be. I was convinced I would…succeed. That I’d become a financially independent adult.” She’s not. “I for one don’t know where heaven is anymore, or hell.” I’ve gleaned all this in just the first seven pages as I sit here watching all these young people getting their drinks and others on their computers or chatting. The nearby Claremont Colleges are top colleges with high tuitions. I’ve heard the news, heard young people comment, their frustrations. Yesterday, on the news I heard a young woman from a good college in the Southeast with an electrical engineering degree and good grades say she had sent out over 400 applications and nothing. She’s wondering if AI is a factor. Then they interviewed some top professor who had no advice except for her to hang in there. Really. Is this supposed to make her feel better? On another bit of news I heard that 25% of those looking for employment have been looking for at least six months.

What stuck me is this: If I did not know the setting for this novel is in the Canary Islands, I would have thought it is in the US. It sounds exactly like what I hear on the news, from individual young people. What will the future hold for them and not just in the US, globally?

I only acquired this book because the author of “Delights”, Ross Gay, recommended it as one of his favorite books. I almost quit reading it but kept going because I wondered why he loved this book. Perhaps if you watch a lot of movies (I am not a movie person), it would be better because Shields critiques a lot of movies, almost none of which I had ever even heard of. He also seems to prefer non-fiction and critiques a lot of non-fiction essay writers. To be honest even though I read hundreds of books, most of the books he mentions I have never read. His taste apparently differs greatly from mine. I have read Joan Didion, John Cheever, Gertrude Stein, Yeats, as he has and I do agree with him about the essay, “Killing an Elephant”. In this essay George Orwell describes a horrible event he experienced as a young man while working for the British in Burma (now Myanmar). I agree with Shields that this essay describes better the horrors of colonialism and racism better than most books written on those subjects.

What bothers me about this work by Shields is the relentless negativity. I consider myself to be a rather realistic person, often perhaps too blunt for my own good. Nevertheless, I do not view my life or that of others as nearly as hopeless and lonely as Shields seems to view it. Here is a quote from near the end of the book:

“I believe in art as pathology lab, landfill, recycling station, death sentence, aborted suicide note, lunge at redemption. Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself. That’s why I pick at my scabs” and four pages later at the end: “I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn’t lie about this–which is what makes it essential.” I know lots of folks talk about the plague of loneliness permeating society these days. He focuses on this relentlessly for 207 pages. Do most people feel this awful a lot of the time? Am I naive? How did I escape it?

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