Within three pages, I realized that I hated everyone in this novel. Yet, I still found myself invested in their love triangle which was annoying.

Peter Cunningham is a Ph.D dropout ne’er-do-well who lives off his brilliant girlfriend. He meets Leslie, a manic pixie dream girl with a punk edge. What is his attraction to her? Mainly, her propensity for a chaotic personal life.

They are both writers who struggle to write which is understandable. But they use their love of literature and their not writing as an excuse for their amoral and selfish behavior. This is supposed to be ironic. This book is the justification for the amoral behavior that produced this book, a real ouroboros.

I noticed that Very Smart People seem to love this book. From what I gathered, it’s a cynical statement on white privilege. But the characters themselves use cynicism as a distancing measure and they never really contend with their privilege. In fact, people of color are barely in the novel except at the prison where Peter teaches. But you do have to have a certain amount of privilege to have these sorts of problems. Black and brown people, poor people, LGBT people are facing a world that is increasingly hostile to them. The characters in this book spend their time reading, not writing, doing drugs, moving around the country, having sex with people they shouldn’t and notably, not really worrying about money.

There is a threesome that goes horribly wrong and one of the characters ends up with a physical trauma. It is described so viscerally I felt kind of nauseous. Is this good writing?

I did end up staying up late to finish this book. I’m old so that means 10:30. So it did hold my attention. I’m curious what others think of it. I give it three stars.