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.
This collection is not all devoted to navel-gazing, although too much of it is. There is a thoughtful piece entitled Afternoon of the Sex Children, which looks at the spread of internet pornography, our society’s sexualisation of teenagers and concurrent obsession with, and fear of, paedophilia. He tentatively reaches some interesting conclusions: perhaps we should de-emphasise sex (not a widely held view in progressive circles) and, as our culture places its highest value on clever, beautiful teenagers while abhorring paedophiles, “shouldn’t we wonder if there’s some structural relation in society between our supergood and absolute evil?”
More reflections of that quality and fewer on transient cultural phenomena might make me look forward to Greif’s next collection. Until then, I recommend re-reading Orwell.
Robert Low is consultant editor of ‘Standpoint’ magazine