A math textbook taken at bed….or, another BOOK REVIEW.
I just read a book that was different than the usual fare I read. I just read The Book of Dahlia by Elise Albert a young, new author. Something else I rarely do is read new authors. I usually read classics or from authors that are very established and have much to choose from and usually have a paranoid element to their stories. I wanted something a little different and I sure got it.
Dahlia is a 29-year-old mess up with a directionless life that suddenly is diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. The whole book is about how she faces dying and memories or her very sad past life.
She is not a battered wife, a prisoner, mentally ill, or desperately poor. Dahlia’s tragedies are emotional. Her family is upper middle class Jewish but very dysfunctional. I doubt she is a ti unless her tumor is electronically caused.
Ever since early childhood when her parents break up and her brother becomes her enemy, Dahlia is adrift. She keeps on half-assedly trying to find her groove but nothing ever sticks. She drifts through school and college and then goes on to temp work, bartending, and even soft core prostitution before she is forced to give up and let her rich indulgent father buy her a house. She sits around watching movies high on pot and strolling the streets of her upscale Cali town drinking Starbucks.
After her seizure which leads to her diagnosis, she ends up buying a book at Borders that is supposed to be a cancer (rah rah rah you can beat this!) book but Dahlia’s take on it is hilarious. Her slow decline is tragic made even more so by the attempts of the people around her to “help” her as she is dying. To be perfectly honest, Dahlia was already dead even before the diagnosis.
Most other people who have read this book focus on the fact that Dahlia had an aimless life and whether it’s appropriate to mourn someone who never “did anything” with their life. I would like to take another view of the novel and focus on whether it is appropriate to mourn for a whole generation of aimless drifters: the progeny of the upper class Jewish Baby Boomers and Yuppies: mostly people under 40.
I don’t see how Dahlia could ever have had a real life after reading about her upbringing. No one ever instilled her with values. All she was surrounded by was superficiality and pop culture. She never felt a stinging need to work to prove herself to anyone or to stand up for her nonexistent values. Her love for her family was deadened by long years of emotional abuse and apathy. The one man who seems to love her gets rejected by her.
Her peers were either busy starving themselves or preparing themselves for Law School or trying to have sex with every boy that moved. No one had any desire but for more of the same prosperous spiritual deadness that defines upper middle class “cultural” Jews.
They have a long history but no faith. They have the traditions but not the God that is behind them. They are full of comedy shtick about Jewish things and love books on other Jews and movies about Jews and Jewish celebrities but do not know anything about the Bible beyond the little they learned in Hebrew school.
The only Gospel they ever hear is the social Gospel of do gooding which is sort of comfortable sub culture in and of itself. Endless cycles of fundraising, and dinners and pictures on the society pages of every newspaper. Some will quit eating meat because it’s “humane” and some won’t wear fur or even leather for the same reason. They help out the homeless sometimes, they love giving to the disease of the week. They love the little rubber bracelets and ribbons that denote the “cause” you are behind. It’s all crap.
Some of them know the Jewish prayers from their youth and can “doven” with the leanest meanest Hassid, yet, synagogue is just another social tool for them. When the rabbi gets up to preach the sermon it’s just watered down social gospel–there’s no real sermon no conviction no downcast eyes. Many liberal churches are like this as well.
It’s the children that suffer the most from these social climbing Jews-in-name-only even if they don’t appear to be suffering. They look well fed (some of them), well dressed, and very “articulate”, but they are dead inside. Like Dahlia, they sort of drift through high school and college partying and f*cking until they “decide” on a career some way towards the end of college wherein they go to graduate school and become a newly minted Yuppie with a mortgage, a shul membership, a late model car, and a scrawny insecure emotional wife. Then they try to survive in this shitty economy and with a looming dictatorship. They go thousands of dollars into debt to perpetuate an “image” to their equally self centered friends and neighbors. They know every brand name of shoes out there but know almost nothing of the Bible. They must keep working to pay on the debt…..it’s death in the flesh.
Terms such as “good” and “evil” mean nothing to them. A few will have setbacks in life and end up getting off the money track and may even find religion of some sort–either that or they go around blindly following one guru after another and one movement after another looking for fulfillment.
A few might find a fulfilling job if they get off the corporate ride and work for the poor full time or get a career that takes them on site in a jungle or desert somewhere working for science or a religion, but not many. Some will become homeless when they try to fall back on their distant, superficial families. The ones who do will never be the same.
Some will die. For some that is the most merciful option barring the fundamentalist belief that all unsaved people go straight to Hell which I don’t totally believe.
Should we mourn this generation, this pampered petted generation, the spawn of shopping malls, manicures and pedicures, USY getaways, laser whitened teeth and fancy vacations? Yes, we should, because they are dead before they even lived, save for the few that see tribulation and wake up to the real world. They, too, “never had a chance” even though they never spent one day as a ti.
As a postscript, I would like to add that people who lack direction and principles are commonly recruited as perps. Being a perp, for some empty souls, gives them “meaning” to life, and by the time they realize they are enslaved for life, it’s too late. How many little preppy yuppie sluts “got into perping” after realizing life had nothing for them since they failed to plan or even to make the most of what they had?
