beat your wings

REVIEW: “Brave New World”

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Have I pretended to have read it before? Oh God, more times than I can count. Every time was another needle of shame in my gut. Ugh. Sorry to everyone I’ve ever talked to.

Why’d I read it? In order to preserve my dignity before it was too late. Look, for years, I’ve been peddling this line about how I’m really fascinated by dystopias (dystopiae?). I’ve repeatedly blabbered my thoughts on the subject (see here and here, for example). But all along, I harbored a horrible secret: I’d never read one of the canonical dystopian texts! The one where everybody’s like, “Sure, Nineteen Eighty-Four is great and all, but smart people know that Brave New World is the greatest literary dystopia.

You’ve been in this situation, right? Like, when there’s a book you’re supposed to have read, and you lie to people and say you’ve read it, and then you’ve screwed yourself, because you can’t let people see you reading it, for fear of being found out — I’m not the only one who’s done that, right? Guhhhhh.

Anyway, with the advent of my Kindle™, I could finally read this thing anonymously, after nearly a decade of faking it. I mean, my girlfriend and her dad found out, which sucked, but I survived.

Would I be embarrassed to diss it? No! Because it’s a pretty shitty novel!

Be honest: did you enjoy it? Not really, no. It’s full of interesting ideas, sure, and it made some reasonable predictions about where consumer drugs and the division of labor were going. But the characters are barely even one-dimensional, the entire first third is just ham-fisted exposition, and the plot is dull as hell.

Talking points for a dinner party:

• “This book is pretty bad.”
• “I’d like to tell you all the things that make Nineteen Eighty-Four both a vastly better novel and a more revelatory dystopian vision. Do you have three hours?”
• “This is a snob’s dystopia. The only thing wrong with the world it describes is that people don’t read books, they like movies, and they generally don’t think too hard. Boo-fucking-hoo. Most of the characters lead happy lives and their society isn’t built on anybody’s suffering. I’d love to live in that world.”
• “What’s with all the weird racial depictions of Native Americans?”
• “The prose is often experimental, but the experimentation is usually just there to cover up dull parts of the narrative.”
• “What an overrated piece of junk.”
• “What do you like about it?”