I’ve wanted to read this book for a while, but you know me, I need to find it for cheap before I go any further. Even Amazon wasn’t really doing it too cheap as when I looked at it. I ended up finding it on a used bookstore again and thus, buying it. I didn’t know it was a hardback when I bought it, I tend to steer clear from hardbacks because they are a) harder to store and b) not great if you want to carry them around. I prefer paperbacks or even books on my phone or Kindle. Anyways, the bluntness of one Fran Lebowitz is something to behold…
This book combines two publications by Lebowitz called Metropolitan Life and Social Studies. They are satirical, humorous and often very blunt. I like her blunt style, sometimes it can seem a bit like she’s trying to hard to be different but she does make some very good observations. Her thoughts on American culture are pretty interesting and the way in which she comments on human absurdities, things we just accept without question is sometimes quite funny. I think her sense of humour is definitely an acquired taste – like marmite – you’re either going to love it or hate it. I think after careful consideration, I would like to say I do love it.
She’s witty, she’s fastidious with her observations and often looks a bit too carefully. She’s a New Yorker whilst also being an outsider (from New Jersey) whose intolerance for inefficiency, pretension, and bad manners becomes a comedic vantage point. It’s funny the way she puts it into ‘graphs’ sometimes and I like the way she makes everything just so simple to understand. When it comes to observations on humanity, it’s almost so simple you find it stupid that you didn’t think of it yourself and just accepted these odd, unwritten rules.
There’s an odd pretension to her work which comes out as an irony towards New York and being a New Yorker. She’s cranky and goes through her day-to-day life which this dragging nature that could only let you believe that she hates slow walkers (she comments on that in the book too). She looks at everything within the social stratosphere including: actors, writers, waiters, landlords, the wealthy, hipsters and even intellectuals. She often comes to weird conclusions, for example – there’s a section where she comments on appearances where the conclusion is basically that someone who is unattractive must be ‘leaking’. I mean I don’t want to give too much away but you could read it for yourself.
From: Amazon
There’s lots of things that annoy her and thus, bring out her blunt humour coated with irony and tinged with irritation. These can include everything from children to smoking bans. It’s all pet peeves until its moral frustrations and then, it almost becomes universal. Who is not annoyed from time-to-time by a screaming child? Who is not tired of standing in queues (I say this as a British person, all we do is queue up for things)? Besides this there are her complaints about class performance in the city and how exaggerated wealth destroys people and makes them unbearable. Another thing I enjoyed is that she constantly pokes fun at dieting, therapy, self-help, careerism, celebrity culture, parenting, education, and the American love of “improvement.” She sees many such obsessions as forms of neurosis disguised as progress. It’s quite funny if you allow it to be.
She constantly sees herself as both someone who is in New York and someone who is observing New Yorkers. I think she most likely represents this sense of individualism we all have in thinking ‘I’m not like them’ even when we are. It’s quite a universal experience again. As she observes, so do we – as she critiques, we ourselves become more judgemental and so, we learn something about ourselves – we are willing to follow through. I have no idea how skewed her viewpoint is when she is observing, but she’s all we’ve got at this point. It’s both a blessing and a curse if you catch my drift.
I quite loved this book and that’s weird because I’m normally not too into edgy humour. Fran Lebowitz definitely gives us a reason to laugh and find her irony quite clever though, so I was willing to keep an open mind. I would urge you to read this. It’s short, snappy and observant – we get a perspective that isn’t quite misanthropic but it also isn’t ironic without being charming.
