Book Review: "You Know You Want This" by Kristen Roupenian

You Know You Want This (2019)
Kristen Roupenian (1981)
225 pages

The title of Kristen Roupenian’s collection of short stories, You Know You Want This, serves readers as both a lascivious intimation of what to expect when we venture inside the book, as well as a mischievous provocation that we won’t be able to look away once we do. But those who want it --- whether characters or readers --- should be careful what they wish for, as Roupenian gives no quarter, shows no mercy, to her characters or her readers. This collection, in fact, satisfies a quality I look for in a book or a movie: that it grab one by the throat, and not let go until the end --- that it be impossible to look away.

Roupenian gets right down to business in the first story, Bad Boy, which opens with a couple commiserating in their kitchen with a friend who has broken up --- yet again --- with his girlfriend. The couple oscillates between sympathy for their friend and exasperation at his having “so little insight into the causes of his own problems” (1), and ultimately these disparate reactions prove toxic when combined with their friend’s desperate need for acceptance. Out of an initial desire to be supportive the couple gradually adopts the friend into their home and their lives, but their contempt for him soon comes to the fore. They begin to treat him more and more like a pet or a toy, one that they find spices up their lives in ways they hadn’t realized they were lacking, and the friendship devolves into a disturbing dominance that spirals out of control, with shocking consequences. For those familiar with the Stanford Prison Experiment, this story has a bit of the same feel, except taken to a very personal level, and an even more extreme conclusion.

This structure, of opening with apparently innocent and common place settings and characters before veering inexorably into dark and dangerous corners, runs throughout the collection. The most disquieting aspect of these tales is, in fact, that the characters initially seem non-threatening; they may admittedly have some salacious or perhaps even slightly depraved thoughts, but these are not so very different than what may dance around in the back of many people’s minds as idle, internal voyeurism, never meant for the light of day.

In Roupenian hands, however, these idle thoughts become unleashed, her characters acting on them, taking them to their logical conclusions; and so, in the twelve stories of this collection, the familiar story tropes of romance and dating spin horrifically out of control. Each opens a bit like the Non Sequitur cartoon below --- a bit lewd but hardly aggressive; for Roupenian, however, there would come a second frame, containing a dark and perverse twist, in which the customer proceeds to turn his thoughts into actions, and then a third, in which extreme consequence become realized.

Thus, the story Cat Person certainly starts out innocently enough: Margot, a co-ed working at a movie theater concession stand, flirts with a customer, a bit drawn to him perhaps, but mostly to pass the time behind the counter. Then, on his next visit to the theater when he asks for her number she gives it to him, and their relationship slowly develops around a seemingly light-hearted exchange of text messages. Margot notices, however, that “if she took more than a few hours to respond his next message would always be short and wouldn’t include a question, so it was up to her to reinitiate the conversation, which she always did.” (78) She ignores this early warning sign, however, and discovers too late that it comes to characterize their relationship: he reacts to the slightest hesitation on her part by pulling back, and each time he does she takes a step toward him, more in the hopes of placating him than out of attraction to him. We watch her begin a running, internal dialogue that makes clear she recognizes the ridiculousness of the situation she’s gotten herself into even as she feels powerless to extract herself from the degrading relationship. Through Margot, Roupenian presents an unforgiving portrait of the destructive power of insecurity and rationalization.

Though these themes of self-deluding and self-destructive desire run through all of the stories in the collection, Roupenian uses a variety of genres to explore them. The Mirror, the Bucket, and the Old Thigh Bone, for example, takes the form of a legend, telling a tale of a long ago king who becomes increasingly frustrated with his daughter’s refusal to settle on a suitor --- though each has his charms, she finds none quite good enough. When the Royal Advisor decides to intervene with a plan of his own to trick her into making a choice, his gambit fails spectacularly, as the true source of the princess’ hesitation is revealed.

Roupenian turns to fantasy in Scarred, in which the main character discovers a book of spells half-hidden among the stacks at a library. She sneaks it out of the building and, once home, gives the first entry in the book a try; though she has little expectation that anything will happen, a desperate desire drives her on. When she discovers that the spells actually do work, and that she can have whatever she might want, she gradually finds her humanity overwhelmed by an intoxicating greed.

All of the stories in this collection reveal, and revel in, the dark and dirty underside of human desire. The characters inexorably debase themselves through a series of little steps, each taken with a seemingly inconsequential bit of rationalization, until at some point they find themselves beyond recovery. And we, Roupenian’s readers --- at least those not so shocked by the degenerate cruelty of the first story that they don’t continue --- will also need to plead guilty to being unable to turn away. We become voyeurs, virtual participants in a feast of perversity, and in that sense we come to realize that Roupenian is correct in saying to us, you know you want this.

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Other reviews / information:

Details about the Stanford Prison Experiment at wiki.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "The Art of Stillness" by Pico Iyer

The Art of Stillness (2014)
Pico Iyer (1957)
79 pages

The importance of finding ways to at least periodically disconnect from the frenetic pace of the modern world has become a popular theme in media reports on health, culture and technology. Such articles generally lament the inability of so many to set aside their electronic devices, to resist the urge to frequently, even obsessively, check in at work or update social media accounts. The solutions offered tend to involve such relatively modest steps as putting one’s phone in a drawer at dinner time, or for an hour before bed time; at the more extreme end, some propose electronics-free weekends or vacations.

Author Pico Iyer, however, has embraced a much more profound change to bring quiet to his life, and in his book The Art of Stillness, he describes his path of transformation. A writer of books and articles on world affairs and cultural topics, Iyer notes that in his twenties he traveled extensively --- nearly year-around --- to exotic locations throughout the world, both for reporting opportunities, as well as for vacations. He recalls, however, that,

[although I] had the life I might have dreamed of as a boy, … for all the daily excitement … something inside me felt that I was racing around so much that I never had a chance to see where I was going, or to check whether I was truly happy. Indeed, hurrying around in search of contentment seemed a perfect way of ensuring I’d never be settled or content. (11)

Then, some years ago, his travels took him to an isolated hermitage in the mountains above Los Angeles, to interview the poet and singer Leonard Cohen on his decision to retreat from the world and his celebrity. To Iyer’s surprise, Cohen explained that despite all he had experienced in his long life on the world’s stage, “sitting still, he said with unexpected passion, was ‘the real deep entertainment’ he had found.” (2) Cohen spoke so convincingly of the peace and beauty he had discovered in the quiet of the mountain retreat that Iyer, as he drove back to LA and the noisy chaos of his daily life, began to reconsider his own choices and future.

These reflections led him to take a dramatic step of moving for a year to Kyoto, Japan, to live in a small room on a back-street. This stay in Japan became his first extended experience of retreating from the world, and so changing the life he had to that point made for himself.

Upon his return to the U.S., however, he resumed traveling for work, quickly sliding back into his old ways of life. Though he found himself enjoying these trips, he soon longed again for the contentment he had found during his year of living simply in Japan. Eventually, seeking to reconnect with the benefits of that experience, he traveled to a Benedictine retreat house in the mountains of California to spend a few nights. Once there, he was so taken by the peace he discovered that already before leaving he made reservations to return for a longer stay. And thus began his serious pursuit of stillness.

His experiences during these retreats led him to understand “how making a living and making a life sometimes point in opposite directions,” (4) and, deciding that he had been sacrificing too much to his career, he emerged from this period resolved to pivot his focus to “making a life.” Deciding to make this resolution concrete, he moved back to Japan for good.  There he moved into a tiny apartment in which he and his wife “have no car, no bicycle, no bedroom or TV [he] can understand.”  Though still working to support his family, he has created a simpler life for himself, one in which “the freedom from distraction and complication means that every day, when I wake up, looks like a clear meadow with nothing ahead of me, stretching towards the mountains.” (16)

Iyer’s resolution to withdraw from his established life and its expectations by seeking out an existence less encumbered by the demands of the world recalls the similar path followed in Ernst Wiechert’s The Simple Life (Das einfache Leben, my review linked to at right) by the main character, Thomas. A naval captain who had served in the German navy in WWI, Thomas’ experiences during the war leave him disenchanted with society and unable to find peace with himself. And so he leaves home, heading into the German countryside in search of “the simple life.” Eventually, he settles to live and work in an isolated corner of a distant estate, where he comes to realize that:

only now did he know what inner peace was, the deep breath of an existence that wanted and coveted nothing, that had nothing to regret and nothing to remember, that was not happy or sad. (198)

While Wiechert’s story suggests the concept of a person finding inner peace through a return to nature and “honest” hard work on the land, in The Art of Stillness, Iyer focuses more on the need to rid oneself of distractions, and thereby learn to sit still and become comfortable allowing one’s mind to wander freely. And, in that sense, Iyer’s approach is more broadly applicable to a modern life. Certainly, as a writer, Iyer himself has a particularly suitable occupation for living in physical isolation. But, although he helps himself in his pursuit for stillness by withdrawing to an isolated setting, he does acknowledge that not everyone can simply relocate to the backstreets of Kyoto (or, as in Wiechert’s novel, to a distant farming estate). His message, in fact, is that we should not all isolate ourselves; rather, the point is for us to learn to find stillness within ourselves, whatever we may do for a living,  wherever we may live, and whatever we might have going on around us.

Though Iyer mentions in the book that he has not directly followed a path of meditation to achieve the stillness he has found --- saying in fact that he has “never been a member of any meditation … group” (6) --- he does note “the quantifiable, scientific evidence that meditation would lead not just to clearer thinking and better health but to emotional intelligence.” (42) Such findings are the subject of books such as Robert Wright’s Why Buddhism Is True, which, as its subtitle explains, examines The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment. (My review linked to at left.) Wright’s book grew out of his earlier exploration (and writings) on the field of evolutionary psychology, and his subsequent desire to “operationalize the truth --- a way to put the actual, scientific truth about human nature and the human condition into a form that would not just identify and explain the illusions we labor under but would also help us liberate ourselves from them.” (Wright, 11)

And so, like Iyer, Wright pursues stillness, though he explicitly chooses the practice of mediation as his path. Interestingly, during an interview about his book, Wright described himself as the least likely person to be able to meditate efficiently, his mind a roiling chaos of distraction, far from quiet (interviewed on Sam Harris' podcast Waking up).  It raises the question, as we learn about Iyer’s largely self-taught approach, of whether Iyer simply started closer to his goal, was perhaps predisposed to settling into a quiet lifestyle, and so less reliant on following a formal regime or training to achieve the stillness he sought. For those of us without this beneficial inclination, however, meditation offers a more structured path to achieve what Iyer has apparently discovered on his own.

Even if we cannot all free ourselves from the noisy commotion of our daily lives by disappearing to a back street in Kyoto, Iyer’s wonderful essay helps point us in the direction of what we can perhaps achieve, each in our own way, within the context of our own lives.

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Other reviews / information:

Iyer’s book is part of a series called TED Books, each intended to be short enough to read through quickly, and each associated with a TED Talk. The TED Talk that Iyer gave as a companion to this book is linked to here. 

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf