Happy Hour
Marlowe Granados
Verso, 2021
I’ve never seen critics assume such patronizing tones as when reviewing Marlowe Granados. Happy Hour is celebrated for its rejection of literary seriousness, its party-girl verve and pragmatic sensibility. Adjectives like “fizzy” and “effervescent” appear in every review. It is universally acclaimed, and it is handled like a children’s book.
Happy Hour is not, by my lights, a children’s book, although it is a fairy tale. Isa and Gala are pleasant and charismatic; nothing bad happens to them. It’s a bit of a high-wire act, modesty being difficult for a novelist to approximate. Still, I think Granados is a better writer than Happy Hour allows, which makes me skeptical.
The women in Happy Hour get by on their pluck and beauty; none of them has a job. (There’s some by-the-way grumbling that Isa and Gala can’t work due to their visa status, a convenient narrative alibi.) They go out every night and sleep until mid-afternoon. The male characters are interchangeable boors — which almost goes without saying, because Isa and Gala hang out with investment bankers and club promoters. Isa charms her way into dinners and vacations, then gets shoved back into precarity by her jealous benefactors.
Happy Hour almost works as a novel, but I can’t accept it as a document. I’m the same age as Granados, and spent my twenties traipsing across Lower Manhattan. In 2013, everyone I knew — even those with rich parents and fancy degrees — worked sixty-hour weeks for $35,000 a year while living five to an apartment. Whatever, there wasn’t a pandemic then. Granados’s women sashay between Balthazar and Bemelmans without ever picking up a check, yet feel stifled by their finance-bro escorts. If you’re constitutionally averse to working and leeching off millionaires, maybe New York isn’t for you!
It’s not just that I find Granados’s city unrecognizable. It’s boring! The parties are lame, the dialogue is tedious, the sex and pathos occur offscreen. Here’s what gets me about the whole Literary It-Girl discourse — if you’re gonna write a novel, you can’t be too cool for school. Yes, literary fiction is stuffy and pretentious. But prose isn’t a visual medium: if you want to be an influencer, a ringlight and an ab routine will pay quicker dividends. The coolest thing you can do as a novelist is go for it. I’m not saying you need to write The Recognitions, but the format lends itself to characterization and detail. Why read a novelist who’d rather be on Instagram?
Start Finish Repeat
Paul Wall and Termanology
Perfect Time, 2023
Ten years ago I thought Statik Selektah was one of the best producers working. He was, in my estimation, a DJ Premier for the FruityLoops era, wrangling wistful samples into sleek, digitized templates. Where his peers pursued spacey minimalism, he sought evocative melodies; he championed East Coast classicism without veering into mawkish nostalgia.
To his credit, Statik’s the same producer he’s always been, mentoring promising upstarts and coaxing dynamic performances from semi-retired masters like AZ and Fizzy Womack. It’s not that his drums suck (people have complained about Pete Rock and 9th Wonder’s snares for twice as long) or even that he’s been lapped by showier contemporaries like Harry Fraud. Here I can’t help but default to sportswriting clichés: his mechanics are fine, but he lacks a feel for the game.
Credited to Paul Wall and Termanology, Start Finish Repeat boasts a dozen of this century’s most distinctive rap voices, including Peedi Crakk, Big K.R.I.T., Nems, and Bun B. There’s an aesthetic flattening that occurs on these projects: Statik corrals the funkiest, most idiosyncratic rappers in his Rolodex, then shears them of regional flair. In Statik’s hands, Paul Wall — a stylistic icon, an American treasure — is transposable with Millyz and Marlon Craft. I’m not sure if it’s the tempos or the vocal engineering, but Wall barely even has an accent here. In lieu of unifying concepts, the vocalists must defer to Statik’s dreamy idealism; they treat it like a work-for-hire. If you landed a session with Donald Byrd, you wouldn’t give him Glenn Miller songs to play, right?
It’s a strangely morose affair given the principals. Wall and Term are self-identified family men who’ve weathered major-label extinction events, non-Black artists who’ve become mainstays of Black music. Their endurance is testament to charisma and community. (Term is not a particularly charming fellow, but it’s grimly fascinating to behold a replacement-level punchline rapper who thinks he’s Big Pun.) Start Finish Repeat’s plodding second half is mired in regrets and admonishments, treacly chords and saccharine R&B hooks. The tone is all wrong: any of these songs might’ve worked as a pace-breaker, but no one needs a lecture from these guys.
Speedboat
Renata Adler
NYRB Classics, 2013 reissue
OK everyone can stop reading Renata Adler. Originally published in 1976, Speedboat had been out-of-print for 25 years when NYRB reissued it to rapturous acclaim in 2013. It’s not the book’s self-impressed flippancy that bothers me; it’s not Adler’s use of the royal we, the suggestion that her narrator embodies a generational voice whilst noodling on jet-set Ivy Leaguers. It’s not even her bored vignettes, the sterilized voice that became de rigueur among a certain self-styled Manhattan It-Girl in the 2010s.
What annoys me is Speedboat’s scandalized insistence that Watergate was the end of history, even as the book itself surveys Middle-Eastern conflict and African revolution. Jobs and wealth lure Adler’s characters to developing nations, which propels Speedboat’s humor: What happens when prep-school liberals confront Ayatollahs? Leisure-class foibles are dissected at length, atrocities referenced in breezy allusions. It’s the Me Decade, you’re too modern to care about despots and war crimes when you’re on the Concorde to Biarritz.
In which case, fine, enjoy your vacation. But Watergate is what grinds your gears? What, some Republicans bugged an office building? You had faith in American exceptionalism, knowing what you know and seeing what you’ve seen? It’s precious, it’s decadent, it doesn’t compute. There’s an entire chapter devoted to snipes at her Brooklyn neighbors — no wonder the boomers fell for Reagan — and supposing the racism is satire, it’s Red Scare edgelord crap. Speedboat’s impressionism is cute in a bong-rip sort of way (Ever notice how…episodic and contradictory life is, man?), but for all the gushing about its prescience I can’t imagine a book less pertinent to this moment.