Day in the Life of an Idiot

Love the cover.

This big blockbuster climate change novel got an avalanche of reviews calling it a masterpiece. I am baffled. To be fair, I DNF'd pretty early on. On the other hand the parts I did read were the bad version of The Ministry of the Future and grossly male-gazey and objectifying about women, and especially women of color.

I am excerpting portions so you can share the WTF. The first set are from chapter one, from the POV of a male climate scientist. I'm not even excerpting all the sexist and male fantasy parts in that chapter, just the worst ones. I'm using * to separate passages so there won't be huge blocks of text in italics.

* Milling outside a Yale lecture hall years ago Tony found himself unexpectedly talking to a young woman, Black and wide-hipped with round breasts stretching a T-shirt with a picture of Lando Calrissian lying seductively on a bearskin rug. He thought she was gorgeous then and would continue to think that past a decade and two children whose faces grew into hers year by year.

This was the kind of woman you needed when the world was teeming with morons, and you got hate mail for studying the phase transitions of methane hydrates. *

Here he is talking about his DAUGHTER, who he's nicknamed "Khaleesi." (All else aside, about 95% of the pop culture references have aged like milk.)

* And he felt it then again, years later, when a teenage Khaleesi got into a car accident, and the idiot father of the idiot boy she’d been with couldn’t remember the name of the hospital they’d been taken to. He felt it when he saw the Mother of Dragons in a hospital bed with her arm in a sling, dried blood in her kinky red-brown hair, and a couple of nasty black eyes that would set her accelerating beauty back for a few months. *

UGH UGH UGH.

Here's a chapter narrated by a different person. Kate is a sexy politician of the sort white liberal men with unexamined biases love to write. She's hot! She's wild! She's a woman of color (Jamaican grandfather) but it never comes up other than just stating it! She's bisexual and has wild sex with absolutely everyone!

*I’d quickly realized Colter Bay wasn’t exactly awash in attractive women, and our clientele was mostly Asian tourists and the minivan set. Even if we’d been renting canoes strictly to beauties, Kate would have caught anyone’s attention. Tall and athletic, her stride registered in the world. First, I took in her dark skin and huge head of curls. Then, as she got closer, her pretty snub nose, full lips, and a wide, hungry smile. She held out the slip and looked at the three of us like she’d caught us comparing scrotums.*

About two pages later:

*“How about dinner? I’ve been meaning to try that Thai place everyone raves about.”

“Ugh, dinner?” she moaned. “You are going to be a total cornball, aren’t you?”

Before I could fire back, she stopped, grabbed my face, and brought her lips to mine. I wasn’t prepared, and her open mouth locked over my closed one. Then I got with the program, and her tongue corkscrewed through the tunnel of our lips. *


* So much of that summer was learning how to be with her and her blunt, unapologetic approach. She’d lost her virginity at thirteen to a college freshman she picked up in Powell’s Books; when she was nineteen she booked a flight to Honduras, spent a week in a place called the Mosquito Coast by herself hiking and meeting people, and found out only after she got back that the US government had issued a travel warning for drug cartel and kidnapping activity; she had an abortion in college and the nurse invited her to her birthday party. *

BARF. Love the total lack of agency given to the college freshman who RAPED A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD. Oh, but it totally wasn't rape! The thirteen-year-old picked him up!


Here's an in-book news article about her:

* Until six months ago, no one but a handful of infighting climate activists even knew who Kate Morris was. Now she takes fire from all sides. She’s been called, among other things, “a feminist traitor making nice with Trump country,” and “the manic pixie dream girl of global warming.”

[Kate says] “I get it. I get why people look at me like, ‘I’m fucking sick of these whacky socialist bitches trying to take away my hamburger.’ Hell, even I’m sick of Greta! I’m sick of AOC!"

An unbuttoned flannel flaps in the wind. Her skin has the weathered quality of a woman who’s spent a great deal of time in sun and dry air. She never wears makeup. Her curls must require maintenance, though, and her hands never leave them alone, always sweeping, tugging, or corralling.

Since Morris arrived on the scene, the apostasies of A Fierce Blue Fire have stoked controversy: She allies with pro-life groups; she decries antinuclear activists as “climate denialists in their own right”; and she once called President Hogan’s version of the Green New Deal “a five-trillion-dollar healthcare bill with a green coat of paint.” Yet nothing has stirred more outrage than FBF’s strategy of aggressively recruiting, cultivating, and supporting Republican candidates to run primary challenges. Forget about stances on abortion rights, gun control, LGBTQIAA+ issues. All these Republican challengers have to do to access FBF’s money is run campaigns based on “the scientific consensus of anthropogenic climate change” and pledge to vote affirmatively on FBF’s model legislation. *

The white male liberal asshole's wet dream: a fuckable woman who'll solve everything by throwing all those pesky women and minorities under the bus, because obviously that's what you gotta do, while being an every-minority herself (but not in any way that matters) so he can point to her and say it's okay.

I skipped to the end. ( Read more... )

Forgot to mention that the real-life mass murderer of children, Anders Breivik, is elected Norwegian Prime Minister, which is possibly the most offensive thing in the entire book.

Fuck this gross book.