Oryx

On vacation I read:

Too Beautiful for You, by Rod Little. Short stories. Wicked, dirty, nasty, hilarious. Read the first, and if you’re laughing at the end, you’ll like the rest of the book. If it makes you sick, stop there.

Dirty Havana Trilogy, by Pedro Juan Gutierrez. Did I say the previous book was dirty? This is, as its title implies, dirty. It’s about this guy who avoids dealing with economic and social and spiritual collapse by having a lot of sex. It’s not porn, I promise.

Best of all, Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. I particularly liked that the protagonist is “the words guy” overshadowed by his “numbers guy” friend. The numbers guy becomes a great success and hires the words guy and puts him in charge of advertising and marketing an exciting new product that will reshape humanity. Eventually, everyone dies.

There are brilliant, meditative bits about how and why humanity is being reshaped. But more importantly, there are some brilliant, hilarious bits about the absurdity of the humanity being reshaped. Like where the “words guy” goes to the Martha Graham Academy, which is desperately striving for relevance as a fine-arts or even liberal-arts college, and so adds the motto “Our Students Graduate with Employable Skills” to the original Ars Longa, Vita Brevis. So he studies “Problematics” which includes things like “Applied Rhetoric” and “Relativistics” and goes on to a career in marketing: “The prospect of his future life stretched before him like a sentence, not a prison sentence, but a long-winded sentence with a lot of unnecessary subordinate clauses…” Anyway, this is brilliant, brilliant work, and you should read it now.