The Anchoress
Spoiled Rotten America: Outrages of Everyday Life, by Larry Milller
Comedian/Actor Larry Miller – you might remember him as the obsequious shop manager in Pretty Woman “you are not only a powerful man, but a handsome man…” – has always been a favorite, and he’s got a new book of 17 essays on life in America that is just knocking my socks off. It’s funny, yes, but also very insightful.
I don’t know about you, but I spend half my life looking at people through Norman Rockwell lenses: loving them, seeing their decency and generosity, smiling at the foibles of their children, feeling their sweetness and cheerful good manners in every small encounter of the day; watching the gentle rustle of a tree in the low, western sun and knowing, really knowing, the perfect joy of it; and so, so grateful for the mysterious good fortune to be born here, now, together.
The other half of the time, I look around me and think, “how sweet it would be to kill them all.”
Do you know that feeling? Do you know what I mean? Of course you do. We all do.
Most people swing back and forth between light and dark like a silver-backed gorilla with nothing but time. Sometimes people act out their good instincts. This is called charity. Sometimes they act out their bad instincts. This is called strangling. And sometimes they shuffle quietly from home to work and back again, simply puzzled by it all. This is called The Rest of Us.
Remember that old game where you pull the petals off a flower while saying, “she loves me…she loves me not…(you kow, the one where we seek to confirm our affections by taking the most beautiful thing we can find and then mutilating it?) I’m thinking of patenting an updated version: “She loves me…she can’t believe we ever went out…she loves me…she’s stunned by how the passage of time doesn’t make my stories any funnier…she loves me…she wants to bludgeon me whenever I’m chewing cereal…”
That’s just the beginning of the introduction…but it’s not what the book is about. As Miller writes later (still in the intro):
That’s what this book is about – the hamburger and the stadium, the large and the small, the innocent and the cynical, division and unity. The joyous sylph dancing ’round the glade, while the plump bureaucrat glances up just in time to see Western Civilization spiraling down like a gumball at the Guggenheim.
The American pendulum swings only to extremes. The news is on all day, but we know less and less; there’s music in ever mall, but we don’t hear it; everyone has a phone but nothing to say. The chubbiest of us have the strictest diets, because we can’t learn to modulate and moderate. It’s all or another…she loves me, she loves me not…
I’ve only read a few essays into it, but they’re staggeringly good. I was particular taken with his story of being a young man of privilege at a premeire college and the greatest lesson he learned there, which stemmed from his rudeness toward a woman in her sixties. And I loved his imagined conversation between Moses and God on the whole issue of adultery, marital fidelity and whether or not there might be some way around it.
It’s a good book – and if you’re stumped for a Christmas gift for someone with a sense of humor and an appreciation for biting prose, I think Amazon is still promising delivery by Christmas, for a little while longer!
UPDATE: I’ve added another terrific book to this last recommendation, thanks to my being corrected on a matter of usage. I picked it up for my son and it looked like fun. I’ll clearly have to borrow it from him! :-)
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