Portrait of a reporter in mid-sneer: David Rakoff's 'Half Empty'
David Rakoff. Photo by Don Denton.
11:19 am Sep. 28, 2010
David Rakoff’s new book, Half Empty, is a collection of personal essays—very light on the personal. His essays in this volume, as in his 2005 collection Don't Get Too Comfortable, are loosely organized around a theme; this time, it’s aggressive pessimism as a means of defeating life’s randomness and brutality.
This reversal of the cheesy folk-wisdom of books like The Secret forcefully contrasts with a false positive thinking Rakoff senses floating in the cultural atmosphere, though one wonders which cultural atmosphere, exactly, that is, and just how close to 2010 these anthologized pieces were originally published or conceived.
Rakoff’s arguments are striking, at first, even when they’re straw men.
“The sunniest, most positive child in Malaysia laboring in a fucking sneaker factory can visualize all the good fortune he wants,” Rakoff writes in the book’s first essay and its sort-of manifesto, “but without concrete changes in international models of global trade, finance, and educational opportunities along with some very temporal man-made policies, just for starters, guess where he’s going tomorrow morning?”
Hard to argue with that! As Rakoff’s collection moves towards arguments against the constructed worlds of Rent and of LDS Utah, though, the sense of Rakoff’s book being hard to argue with becomes a weakness, not a strength. (This is leaving aside, for the moment, his lengthy condemnation of the Bush administration in the first essay—none of Rakoff’s demographic will disagree, but some may be hungry for some fresher red meat.) On Rent and its cast of fauxhemians, Rakoff turns a dandy phrase, at least: “Some of them have AIDS, which, coincidentally, is also the name of a dreaded global pandemic that is still raging and has killed millions of people worldwide.”
Still, to write about Rent at this point—to summarize its plot for the uninitiated, no less—is a bit like writing an essay where 9/11 forms a turning point more significant to the author, personally, than to thousands dead. (Rakoff does this, too.) So much ink has been spilled that the author must do something new! Give Rakoff credit for trying: his essay on Rent jitters through asides about The Red Shoes and old-school New York talent agencies in its final pages, after an aside about how hard it is to criticize something universally popular. One assumes he doesn’t think that’s what he’s doing here.
More striking still is that essay on Utah, which moves from a religious “Hell House”-type attraction to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty with little more connective tissue than an observation that not everything in Utah was the pits. Rakoff, pessimism aside, has been lucky enough to get paid to go have experiences—that he enters each experience already halfway through his dismissive sniff is perhaps why he gets paid to do it (the commissioner knows what he'll get) and why he shouldn't (we already know what we'll get). You won’t need three guesses as to whether Rakoff left the Hell house before the show started: if he’d stayed, at least we might have had a bit more experiential journalism and a bit less of Rakoff’s fulmination on a young performer’s acne.
One is reminded, somewhat, of Rakoff’s last book, on privilege and its pitfalls, a book whose reader sometimes simply wanted Rakoff to stop observing chips in the Concorde’s crockery and eat the caviar. Here, though, the experiences Rakoff places himself in have no obvious allure besides the opportunity for good quotes and copy, and Rakoff shies away even from that, preferring instead to use their obvious lameness to bolster his notion that pessimism protects.
It’s easy to be pessimistic about things that have zero chance of being worthwhile, or have already proven themselves a bust: Rakoff commemorates the seven-year-old decision to go to war with a meditation on the Bush administration’s congenital dishonesty and lack of forethought. He’s not nearly so bold as to venture an opinion on the nearly two-year-old Obama administration. Possibly pessimism is too simple an emotion for something that’s still unfolding, whose alternatives seem so much worse.
Never mind that! Bush dispensed with in the opening essay, Rakoff goes to certified world’s-most-depressing-places like a Disney-manufactured futuristic prototype home and (oh, dear) the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In Hollywood, Rakoff stays in a hip hotel, possibly on the dime of whoever published his dispatch, and writes sarcastically of the hotel’s alienation of its un-hip guests, “again, permit my organs to rupture in surprise.”
Such a construction is fine once but not twice in a paragraph, and one begins to get the sense that Rakoff’s carefully constructed pessimism only works when it’s given the predictable to push up against. I came, I saw, I rolled my eyes.
A porn convention is grist for Rakoff’s meanest aside of the book. On three audience volunteers for a group lesbian kiss: “One is a Yale scholar in bioethics, another is a botanist studying the rapidly disappearing Belizean rain forest, and amazingly enough, the third works for an NGO trying to bring potable water to sub-Saharan Africa. Just kidding.”
Well, I wouldn’t likely gravitate towards the three women Rakoff describes, in archetypal capitals, as “Goth Girl,” “Belly Dancer,” and “Platinum Blonde,” but their lack of an education as accomplished as Columbia ’86 Rakoff’s isn’t damning. (Also, how they represent optimism rather than the most pathetic and degrading evocation of capitalist society, in Rakoff’s eyes, is never made clear.) In “Big Red Son,” David Foster Wallace’s essay on a porn convention, which said all that needed to be said about such events for all time, really, Wallace displayed the results of hours of conversation in intimate character sketches and finely drawn moments. Rakoff can tell you what the porn-show attendees would be like at jury duty (real jerks), and what they’re not (smart), but he has no idea who they are. That’s fine; one gets the sense he never expected to make a connection.
And so it goes, a forced march through Rakoff’s loathing of the late Olivia Goldsmith and a variety social interactions that cause him discomfort, and the reader is about ready to put down the book and wait for Rakoff to redeem himself in one of his “This American Life” segments, a length that plays far more to Rakoff’s strengths. Out of seemingly nowhere, though, come the book’s two strongest essays: Rakoff’s reaction to his analyst’s death, and his confronting his own mortality in light of a cancer diagnosis. These essays are relentlessly self-centered—this reader isn’t sold on ending an essay about a person’s death with the writer’s dream about that person as a child—but the Rakoff that emerges here is one that the reader doesn’t mind paying attention to.
It’s in himself—his surprising forbearance in the face of his own death, his refusal to indulge himself in self-pity after the death of another—that Rakoff finds the interesting and the sublime for which the reader has been waiting. He even allows himself an oblique comment (likely more pointed at the time of the essay’s writing but still well-taken) on Obama, realizing in his own health crisis that “It is the duty of society to take care of its individuals, plain and simple. We will never be healthier that our sickest member.”
Spinning a moral out of personal experience and looking for concrete ways to improve upon society—that sounds a little optimistic. Don’t worry, Mr. Rakoff. You haven’t become what you most loathe—the giddy Walk of Fame tourist or the porn-show attendee or a character in Rent. You’ve simply, at the eleventh hour, complicated your viewpoint, and that’s reason to look forward to your next book with a bit of hope.
