May 31st, 2021 - A, S, D, F
Dear TNY,
It’s official: my summer cross-country adventure has begun and the first offering of the trip is “A, S, D, F”.
And it’s meh. Obviously it’s meh. The craft is very TNY, that being devoid of any freshness or errors. Beige. Seemingly focus-grouped to death. Cool story, bro. And the content, woof. This is a story about the whitest, wealthiest shit imaginable. I mean, art in Aspen? Booooooooring. Even if the “trick” of this story is to tell it from an outsider’s perspective (in the way that receptionist is supposed to come off as blue collar), it doesn’t work. It still comes off pretentiously. There are fucking receptionists in poor communities with less money and more problems that would be more interesting than this shit. For example, I don’t even know what’s wrong with this person’s life? He seems to have a decent job in a fucking next level town. He even has shit to complain about. That’s not an interesting character.
On that note, I keep saying “this character” and it’s hard for me to write “he” because it wasn’t until page 11 of my 25 that it was confirmed, to me at least, that this character was a boy. And that came as a surprise because I was reading this character as a girl the whole time. Even when I knew, I still read the character, internally as it is first person, as a girl. Maybe he identifies internally as feminine. I’m not here to judge that. What I am here to judge is that we should have known sooner that he was a he. When we meet/see someone in real life, we get information up front; it’s up to the writer to give us that with 26 characters arranged however they make it work. Now, that real life information can be moved, changed, etc; but we still have a lot of information to modify. In this story, I had nothing but a voice and that voice didn’t match the gender assignment later. Again, that’s fucking fine. Just give me the assignment up front so I don’t spend 11 pages building a character that doesn’t exist.
Okay, here’s a positive. Mimi? She’s interesting. A six-year-old girl who sits in front of a Monet for half an hour is fucking cool. I want to get to know her. Read her story. So why the fuck am I reading 23 pages of boring-ass, elitist bullshit to get to something interesting in the last page and a half? Is the author laughing? Is this ironic? Is it a joke that when the story really begins, the choice was made to end it? In the words of my youngest son: BIG DUMB. And if all that boring shit ahead of time was supposed to color the last scene more vividly via contrast, it doesn’t. I don’t care about any of the Aspen shit, so it’s falling flat.
Well, that’s all I’ve got. And minus an interesting girl sitting in my lap, smelling of white wine, and kissing me, the life I have going on outside of your “literature” is vastly more interesting. I’ll go do that now.
And if Mimi is out there, send her this way.
So, in the immortal words of Wayne White, later sugartit.
Nick
P.S. The title is obnoxious.
