He is praised on the jacket in extravagant terms: one Mary Karr demands “you rush out to buy his grasp-you-by-the-throat collection”. The only people I want to grasp by the throat are writers who use language like that, but we shouldn’t judge a book by the cover, so does Greif pass the Orwell test?
Certainly not on wit or brevity. Greif doesn’t do brevity. Many of these essays were first published in n + 1, a magazine he co-founded in 2004 and where he can presumably write at whatever length he likes. There’s not a lot of wit either. Greif is the archetypal Guilty White Liberal Narcissist, earnest to a fault, grappling with the great issues of our day: reality television, going to the gym, punk (most over-rated of pop music genres), the West’s obsession with food. There’s a lengthy disquisition on hip-hop and rap that manages to ignore their obsessive violence and misogyny while arguing that their language makes a priceless contribution to American culture. Well, that certainly passes the originality test.
Politically, he comes across as tiresomely Corbynist. His solution to the problem of inequality: tax all income above $100,000 at 100 per cent, while giving every citizen a basic $10,000 income from the state. Simples! “I’d rather live in a more equal world at a slower pace,” he concludes.
Greif writes: “I grew up Jewish in the Boston suburbs,” but religion is conspicuous by its absence from these essays, as is the need to work, which is a fair reflection on the state of contemporary progressive Western thought. As a boy, he lived near Walden Pond and Thoreau’s influence is apparent throughout these pages, and acknowledged.