The book is short - just under 200 easy pages - so I was able to read it pretty quickly. I was very disappointed. I found the book unbearably elitist and condescending. I mainly got the impression that Spiegelman would be happy if only he could live in (pick: Venice, Copenhagen, Bavaria, New York, etc, you get the idea), and go to world-class art galleries all day. Unfortunately, he is stuck in the unenlightened backwater of Dallas, which is inhabited by knuckle-draggers. But if you happen to live in a big eastern seaboard city, or can regularly attend ballroom dancing classes, there might be a chance for you to find happiness with compromising your intellectuality.
The book does, as the review says, focus mainly on the point that one can be an intellectual and be happy, at the same time. But I don't see this as a big revelation. In fact, I think that assuming the opposite is pretty silly. It's sort of a silly argument for a whole book.
I was also intrigued by the review because of the subjects that Spiegelman picks to write about: writing, reading, walking, swimming, listening - all things that I already enjoy doing. (except swimming in indoor lap lane pools.) So I thought it would be pleasantly self-affirming to read about how they give others pleasure, too.
He did make a few points that I liked, and I'll list a few.
•In recounting the joys of translating the classics from Latin, he writes that "the study of Latin accomplished something that my studies in English and French had failed to do: it made me aware of how poetry actually works. My native language did not have the same effect on me; because I understood it, I mistakenly thought that I could read it less carefully." My experience with biblical poetry confirms this.
•He likes to read while eating. Me too.
Okay, on to a few places that show why I was put off:
•On walking - "Dallas, TX, my latest residence, offers plenty of resistance to walkers...it is mostly physically unappealing, and it is hot..." and he follows up by contrasting how awesome a time Kierkegaard probably had walking around in Copenhagen, instead. There are some very pretty parts of Dallas - White Rock Lake, for example. I think it's enjoyable to amble along quiet streets in Highland Park and admire the landscaping. My mom, sister, and I, and even the dudes, love taking walks in Dallas. We have a quiet and beautiful neighborhood, with lots of big shady trees, to walk in. We like checking on the turtles in this one little backyard pond halfway through. Spiegelman refers to the opening scene of Mrs. Dalloway in which the said Mrs. goes out to get the party flowers, and how she waxes about the smell of lilacs: "For someone like me, so long resident in Texas, the mere fact of lilacs in redolent bloom and chestnut trees (both species unavailable in Dallas) gave a promise of sensuous bliss." Spieg, you are trying to write a book about happiness, right? So why the complaining about what you don't have? Why don't you also appreciate the southern mountain laurel or magnolias?
•The rest of his stuff about walking is mainly how great walking is in Venice. I bet it is. But something about going on and on about how great it is to walk in old European cities doesn't quite jive with the premise about ordinary happiness, to me. I had expected to see, maybe, the joys of taking an early-morning walk in the suburbs, with squeals of little kids, smells of breakfasts, etc...
•He writes briefly about how he is an atheistic Jew, but that he likes going to Quaker meetings. He writes, "Even a religious Refusenik like me has been known to enter places of worship, for a wedding or funeral..." Gee, how kind of him. And how irritating to refer to atheism with the term Refusenik. The suffering that the real Refuseniks endured because of their religion.....
•On listening to music: His favorite example of how a visual production matched the music was this one: a 1976 production of Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites, "performed on a mostly bare stage and opening with the nuns in their habits splayed facedown on the raked floor in the form of a cross. The opera ends with an ascent to the scaffold as the huddled women sing their final prayer to the Virgin and march to an invisible guillotine..." I do believe he was serious.
•In his chapter on "listening," he discusses playing music at some length, but doesn't seem to make any distinction between the two activities. Odd.
•Finally, he is impressed that the Quakers are allowed to convene in Dallas, "in the land of guns, in a state that loves the death penalty." I doubt that any Texans love the death penalty. Some might think it is necessary. That's a very different thing. And to say otherwise is just plain mean. In the beginning of the book he quotes The Nichomachean Ethics: How does one become just? By doing just deeds. Who does just deeds? The man with the sense of justice. (He does follow this with a quote from Legally Blonde. Another early tip-off). Anyway, he uses Aristotle's reasoning to apply to happiness: you get happy by doing happy things. What's the point of his condescending snark about the people who fund his university? It made me unhappy.
What made me happy again was the arrival, on the following day, of Gertrude Himmelfarb's new book, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot.
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