Book 323: A Posturing of Fools
Man, was this book ever a pile of crap. I read it a few years ago, and must have thought that it had some redeeming qualities, because I kept it, but I don’t know what those qualities might have been, because, my god. Seriously. This book reads like an adolescent fantasy.
It’s about a frustrated author working in sales, and a conference he attends at a fancy resort. Maybe it’s supposed to be a satire, lampooning the lives of the wealthy and frivolous, but it ends up just being stupid. The narrator criticizes other people for being snobby, but he’s the biggest snob of all, obsessed with brand names, money, cars, how people look and act and dress and where they live. It’s unbelievable. In the same paragraph, we can see him sneering at his boorish boss for being a snob, and then mocking the shirts his boss wears.
He’s a sycophantic sellout with no self-integrity.
The narrator is, I think, supposed to be enlightened and above it all, but he’s just as bad as the people he makes fun of. He’s stupid and self-involved. He has a series of sexual encounters with fantasy women who of course feed his ego, making stupid statements about how “all women are bitches.” His wife, Rose, is portrayed as a whiny, self-involved woman, but I’d be curious to see her side of the story, what with her husband’s raging misogyny. I swear to God, this book reads like it was written by a 16 year old boy who had never seen a naked woman before, all fantasies of silk slips and big cocks and a variety of other topics which I, quite frankly, find totally dull.
Maybe that’s the whole point. We’re supposed to hate the narrator and think he’s a dolt, because the book is some kind of “statement” on American society. But I don’t read it that way. I don’t think that Robertson wants us to hate the narrator. Hell, the book practically reads like hero-worship.
Definitely putting this on the top ten list of bad books this year, and wondering why it’s been lingering on my shelves for so long.
Demographics:
A Posturing of Fools, by Brewster Milton Robertson. Published 2004, 408 pages. Fiction.
Tags: book project