Antivehicular posted:

All right, I'm home from work, let's take a look at Chapter 6, The Supermarket.

Before I get into the detailed critique, there are two main points I want to make here: two elements that are vital for satire and that, in my opinion, this chapter does very badly.

1. Specificity. Satire, above all, needs to be sharp: as carefully observed and specific as possible, both about the world it's creating and about the world it's commenting on. There needs to be clear themes and a strong, pointed thesis. This chapter has none of these things. The initial topic is tepid and flabby on its own ("the grocery store: we buy food there! And get this -- the store wants to make money from us buying food!!"), but there's a huge lack of description and specificity throughout, and the few details that are observed go nowhere and do nothing. They're not fresh, they're not funny, they're not interesting, and they're not even particularly accurate; I can't even guess at authorial intent for most of this. There are also a few half-hearted attempts at theses, and none of them go anywhere.

2. Character. If you want to write a "protagonist struggling against an absurd or malicious world" story, the protagonist's character and voice are of critical importance. Are they a disoriented outsider, a relatable everyman, a sardonic mastermind, a buffoon? I can tell which of these R.L. (I would love to keep writing out his name, but if I do, I'm gonna go into a fugue and this is just going to turn into "RECTUM LEVITICUS, BROOKS CRACKTACLE, CHERRY VENUS" for pages and pages) is supposed to be, but in practice, he's just a cipher. We get shockingly few details of what he's doing (besides "the smart thing"), and in general everything is focused on how cool and smart he is, not who he is. This chapter fails to answer the most basic question about its protagonist for any genre of fiction: "who is this guy, and why should I care about what he's doing?" In a sample chapter! This is poison.

Anyway, onto a closer reading:

The first two paragraphs, taken on the whole, are worthless, just vague bloviation about how big supermarkets are and how they separate us from our roots, or something -- the first sentence is particularly bad, just archetypal "high-schooler padding out word count" stuff. If you told me an AI wrote this, I frankly wouldn't be shocked. We have a hint of a thesis here, the idea that the supermarket destroys "meaningful human interaction," but no glimpse at all of what kind of interaction R.L. wants. Does he want to be connected to the people who grow his food? (Farmer's markets exist; why is he at the supermarket?) Does he want to speak to professionals about his grocery needs? (Upscale grocery stores with expert staff exist; why isn't he going to one of those?) Does he just want to hit on cashiers?

This is the first example of lack of specificity, lack of character, and weak observation of the world. It's absurd to have the narrative voice bemoan the world's insufficiency when we're given no clue what R.L. wants, what interaction need the supermarket isn't meeting (and whether that's remotely reasonable for R.L. to expect!), and what his options are. Even a casual glance at the modern shopping landscape shows that there's a world of options for food shopping these days, many of which might address R.L.'s needs and his complaints about the supermarket selection, so... why is he here? Even a basic "he can only shop at Crapmart, because he lives in a crummy small town/it's the only place within walking distance and he has no other transport/freelance work is tight and he can't afford Nicefoods right now/he gets out of work at 2 AM and Crapmart is the only place open" would go a long way towards making R.L.'s predicament here more sympathetic and towards defining him as a character. Instead, we are merely told that he enjoys this and has a "love-hate relationship" with the grocery store, which suggests that R.L. is the kind of person who does poo poo he hates because it's more fun to feel smug and superior than to take initiative for your own happiness. I suspect this is a theme.

Onward to an extended jack-off session about how R.L. is very smart and marketing doesn't work on him, he does couponing, blah blah blah. What strikes me first is how absurd it is for this book to present smart shopping as some brilliant ubermensch lifehack -- R.L.'s approach is sensible, but it's also common. (You know who tends to be really good at it? People on limited incomes, whom I'm sure the rest of this book thinks are all idiot sheeple. Just a hunch.) We're already in the realm of "lifehacks" that the rest of the world would call "everyday household hints," but have to be presented as galaxy-brain stuff to convince pseudointellectuals that they're worth their time. This is also a huge missed opportunity to characterize R.L.; we're talking about his shopping habits, but all we're told is that he's "highly selective," and that he buys generics. (Once again, this is not brain genius stuff.) Is he the kind of guy who can shop on the cheap because he doesn't care much about what he eats, so he can stock up on rice, beans, and whatever protein is on sale? Does he enjoy the challenge of turning whatever's on sale into an interesting meal for himself? Are there any treats that tempt him, and does he indulge or deny himself? Who knows! We're told that he cooks for himself (once again: THIS IS NOT RARE), with the implication that he primarily cooks for himself so he can prepare food to "his own preferences instead of market research." What those preferences are, who knows, except that they're better than the sheeple's, clearly. At this point, there's a sense that the book is dodging telling us anything about R.L. except how great he is, because otherwise the reader might form their own opinion, I guess?

(A digression: good satire and commentary on consumerism and material culture recognizes that a great deal can be said about how people interact with objects and commodities, what choices they make in personal consumption and expression, and that everyone at every level of consumption culture is making interesting decisions in this regard. This is where specificity shines. We're clearly not getting it here.)

Now we come upon one of the first times the text chooses to give us detail: R.L. counting objects! Specifically, the concept that all the options at the supermarket are "nearly identical!" This is pretty well-trod satirical ground (although as observed above, you could write something interesting about how and why people make the choices they do and what those choices mean to them), but it's not pursued in any way besides the statement that there are many different kinds of soap and pet food. (Why is R.L. in the pet food aisle when he only owns a gecko, which he observes the store doesn't carry anything for? Is this the kind of guy who walks the aisles when he doesn't need anything? Who knows.) We get a lengthy chunk of speculation about the store carrying fewer varieties of cat food than dog food because of the need for shelf space for cat litter, as one of R.L.'s first concrete observations, and... okay? I mean, maybe? I'd have to talk to someone who does grocery store planograms, and that would be way more interesting than anything happening on the page. It's not funny, it's not absurd, it's not even interesting, it's just something R.L. saw, slapped down on the page and going nowhere. If you're going to give concrete descriptions of this little, what you do give has to hit, and this whiffs.

In quick succession, as if to mock me, we get two more concrete observations that whiff: speculation about why supermarkets also sell some home goods (because a lot of people use them as a centralized shopping location? It's not like having non-food items in the supermarket make the food go bad, dude), and everyone's favorite bugbear, food additives! Here we get R.L. musing on "drinking sodium silicialuminate," which approximately thirty seconds of Googling reveals to me a} is called sodium aluminosilicate, b) is a powder anti-caking agent/desiccant added to other powders, not anything you'd drink and not a preservative, c) is not listed by its chemical name on food labels, and d) is completely safe for human consumption. Satire needs to be sharp, and if you're taking as tired an anti-intellectual bit as "boy, there are a lot of big words on this food package!", you need to do way loving better than this. If the cat-food bit is a swing and a miss, this is fouling the ball off your own groin.

And now we come to the checkout line, and the first establishment that other people exist, aside from a reference to "naive" shoppers earlier. (One presumes in this universe, they're just knocking every box on the shelf into their carts like a Supermarket Sweep player in the diaper aisle, because only minds on R.L.'s caliber display behavior like "choosing less expensive products" or "buying bulk necessities.") We get a vaguely amusing anecdote about someone loving up the express lane and the person behind them being mad, which is... almost a concrete description, and actually kind of a real joke, to my immense surprise? The fuckup here (because of course this gets bobbled) is that, after starting this piece, R.L. merely watches in "bemused fascination," and then we get an aside about now that he's older and a proper nihilist, he understands how meaningless everything is, even the checkout-line rules. (Because the cashier is "oblivious" and doesn't care, of course!) There are two huge unforced errors here, to go back to the well of baseball metaphor:

1. Having R.L. reflect on how he was "a bit younger and less nihilistic," and now he's much smarter, is somehow a high-water mark of adolescent characterization even for this piece. It is 100% a 13-year-old talking about how punk they are, not like when they were 12 and a baby! Mortifying.

2. We started this piece with two insufferable paragraphs about the idea that the supermarket prevents "meaningful human interaction." This scene was an opportunity to have R.L. search that out! Even something like having him nod in commiseration to the woman stuck in line, creating a tiny moment of connection between these two strangers about a common human frustration, would have called back to that and suggested something much more interesting about R.L. than anything we've got here. Instead, he gets to keep himself above it all, Much Smarter Than You, Placid, Unbothered, Nihilistic. All I can assume about the character is that he doesn't want to connect with people, he just wants to feel superior to people; it's a characterization moment, but the character it's developing is "shithead."

(Another note: isn't it interesting that the two people we see here, the stupid rule-breaking 25-item lady and the irrational angry three-item lady, are both women who exist so a man can feel calmly superior to them? I think that's very interesting! I suspect this may be a running theme!)

Onto the apparent delights of the checkout aisle. We get a description of tabloids that would have been trite in 1985 and suffers once again from a lack of specificity -- no description of the headlines and what might be amusing about them, merely that it's all relationship gossip, of course! And the sheeple eat that up! (Hmm, what kind of sheeple in particular would that be? Who are checkout-aisle magazines usually marketed at? No matter. I'm just collecting data points.) R.L. being snide about the magazines being written at a "fifth-grade reading level," as if increasing the difficulty of the prose in popular journalism would serve any purpose at all, hits that right tone of smugness before the further smug observation that there are twelve different kinds of mints on the rack. (Why would there be any demand for different flavors of mint, after all?) And then... oh, look, condoms! And a stupid pun, which is at least identifiable joke-shaped content, before we get to another interminable observation of a "clever" mind.

R.L.'s ruminations on the condoms being left behind is a good example of a major flaw of this text, which is assuming a situation is inherently stupid and absurd when it's no such thing. We saw it before with the cat-food shelving (not remotely absurd) and the product varieties (people have different preferences for soap scent and mint flavor, who knew?), but now we have it with the question of why someone would abandon condoms if they came up short on grocery money. Anyone with even a vague awareness of how grocery shopping works, and the slightest ability to imagine coming up short on cash at the checkout, can come up with plenty of plausible reasons: condoms are pretty expensive, they're not covered by food-assistance benefits, they're a lot easier to survive without until payday than staple groceries or toiletries... but all the mind of R.L. can conjure up is the vague idea that someone might have made that decision while looking at an utterly mundane array of groceries, with no further interest or speculation. Are we supposed to find it funny or droll that the theoretical shopper bought an issue of the Enquirer? That they bought light beer? There's more unpleasant odor of "stupid sheeple" here (this guy R.L. made up likes alcohol! And tabloids! And having sex!!), but it's not even detailed enough to get angry at, just another vague idea thrown on the pile to rot, without either R.L. or the narrative bothering to explain why this deeply ordinary situation is worthy of laughter or scorn. When you presuppose everyone and everything around you is completely stupid, you don't have to try and prove it to the reader, I guess?

At last, God help us, R.L. has purchased his groceries. He's saved a lot of money, and he's very proud of how smart he is, in case we haven't intuited that element of his character yet. We're now told that he's getting "stares of disbelief" as he "rip(s) off the unnecessary cardboard boxes and other assorted packaging and thr(ows) them away." The extreme paucity of detail about what he's actually doing here, and what products he's doing it to, makes it very hard to picture this scene. Presumably, in this sort of midcentury-phantasmagoria Generic Horrible Supermarket, all products come in bulky unnecessary cardboard boxes; in the real world, most products in cardboard boxes need to be and are more conveniently carried home packaged, even for someone going with a backpack on foot. It doesn't matter, though, because we have no visual on what he's doing! Are people staring at him because he's scattering cardboard everywhere? Because he's standing in the middle of the exit blocking foot traffic? (As people leave in a "hasty and harried rush," a good example of using three words that add nothing to each other.) It makes no sense that people would stare because he's repacking his groceries to fit in his backpack and bags; people do that all the time, at least in the real world. (In this one, maybe it's another concept that only R.L., the only sapient being alive, has discovered.) I'm just picturing him peeling raw meat off the tray so he can put it in his own Tupperware, then opening his bags of chips to squish the air out and crush them into his backpack. Is this stupid? Yes, but it's exactly as textual as any mental image of R.L. doing something that makes sense.

Finally, we come to "Survival Tips," which appears to be "the author tries to retell us the jokes he liked the best," and make it clear that there's nothing even remotely resembling a thesis here. We get a weird non-joke about a website, the idea that grocery shopping is still superior to hunting-gathering (not suggested or supported by the text), a repeat of the "food labels have funny words on them" joke, and a suggestion that people are gross, while the previous reference to sanitizing wipes suggested that people were stupid germophobes. So are the sanitizing wipes useful or not? I guess it doesn't matter, as long as we make it clear that everyone except R.L. is stupid!

Now, with the details out of the way, I'd like to circle back to the two ideas I discussed at the beginning of the critique: specificity and character. The failure of specificity in this case comes from both the paucity of concrete detail and in the confusing choices of what to describe when detail is chosen, giving us pointless anecdotes about cat-food shelving and incorrect chemical names. The fundamental issue here is that old truism, show vs. tell: specifically, the idea that the author has decided that everything around R.L. is obviously absurd by first principles, telling us at great length how above it all R.L. is without ever showing any evidence that anything ridiculous or even unusual is happening. R.L. isn't a great wit surviving in a mad world; he's an ordinary person doing ordinary things in a rational world. (It's very conspicuous that, for a "survival guide," R.L. never seems to encounter any struggle or conflict, nor is any suggested by the text. He's not coupon-cutting because he's struggling with money, just because he's Really Very Smart; he shops at the crappy supermarket because he enjoys it, not because his options are constrained; he doesn't make any purchasing decisions he isn't smugly satisfied with. He doesn't even get caught in the checkout line behind an rear end in a top hat! That happens to someone else! If he's supposed to be just surviving, shouldn't something negative happen to him at some point?) Some of this, I suspect, is because of weak authorial observation skills, such that there isn't anything interesting to put in R.L.'s brain, but there's also a sense of self-satisfaction here that makes me think the author wasn't trying very hard.

On the subject of not trying very hard: character! As I mentioned repeatedly, it's shocking how little detail we get about R.L. and his life, aside from "he does the smart thing, because he is smart, and he is bemused because he's a nihilist." We learn he cooks for himself, but we have no idea of his relationship to food except to feel smug about how much better his choices are. We learn he has a pet gecko named Mephisto, whom he envies for the "nostalgic hunter-gatherer lifestyle" (???) of an animal, although he also prefers the grocery store to hunting and gathering, I guess? (I have no idea what's going on with the hunting-gathering motif. I'm not sure anything is.) We learn by implication from the first two paragraphs that he craves human connection, and yet the only two other humans he sees he regards with silent scorn -- er, "bemusement!" -- and then he makes up a guy to be disinterested in. R.L. is a cipher, but the one thing that comes through loud and clear is that the thing he values most is his perception of superiority over other human beings, without the text ever making him remotely clever. In short, this guy is a prick, and five pages of him going to the grocery store was insufferable. Who could read an entire book of this?