Book Club discussion

I finished this book on an airplane, about a week ago, and have been thinking of it, but mostly other things since. Also, I'm typing on a public computer in a hostel in Kyoto with a frustratingly weird (Japanese) keyboard, so, disclaimer, and I should update this later, but likely won't.

I liked this book, this is a book I wanted to like, but I did quite enjoy this book. I like the idea of quote the alarm bells had been ringing for years endquote. I saw an article on facebook today from the New York Times saying that we live in the age of anxiety, also that everyone says that, but also that now is the time. I've been feeling it more in my life, that general sense of ''oh fuck.''

The book is about these short term anxieties. Enid wants the kids back together for Christmas, and then we hear about how all the children are dealing with this. Through this we see the larger conflict, how these short term anxieties are the result of long term problem, long term conflicts, of the way the characters (we as people) life their lives dealing with short term anxieties which blinds them to the longer term implications of how they're living their lives.

The book is about the three children. All unique, all representing some facet of a modern person, or at least they're all representative of something like the career paths.

Chip: The academic/creative/failed career.

Denise: The girl, therefore the one who defies expectations by wanting a career.

Gary: The responsible career.

Denises story arc ends up being the most uniting when it talks about how the book ends, but I can't exactly remember how Denise ends the book other than it ends for her okay.

Gary is the son who earns enough money to do okay and have a family, but is a depressed alcoholic. It looks like he most closely resembles Alfred through most of the book, until the end of it. Gary is a banking VP, so part of this concerns me because I took the stable accounting career.

Chip is the one who learns the most through the whole book. Makes the biggest corrections in the end, provides the most laughs, I think, or at least minus the criminal elements, Chip is also the guy I could imagine myself being at times, he's spontaneous and unfocused.

Actually, all of the children aren't that likable.

I was at a big buddhist temple in central kyoto today, and when I was there I picked up a pamphlet, it talked about the three queues: i) wanting money ii) wanting to win iii) wanting fame and power.

Gary is not buddhist at all. Gary is concerned with money

It's late and I need to go to bed, but I forgot about the parents,

Enid, is the mom. She's a mom archetype. She just wants to get the family back together, for one last Christmas. She judges her children. She lies to everyone including herself about Chip. She lies to herself. She gossips and judges Denise and always compares them to their neighbor who got rich by insider trading, But, by the end of the Enid is cool. Her children are the fucked up ones, and she ended up married to Alfred, and it wasn't the right marriage, but times were different then. The self delusions seem ultimately justified thanks to her having to be married to Alfred.

Alfred. Straight lines, rule of law (Japanese culture). Alfred can't live with himself. His body starts failing him and the rule of law descends into anarchy. Straight lines begin to falter. But Alfred has been a sort of hero all along. He bore great personal suffering to protect his daughter. He has dementia for most of the time covered by the book.

I need to wrap things up.

The corrections is a tie-in to market corrections, like stock market crashes.

The corrections that we make in our lives. That you didn't realize you needed to change, but, then the change you need to make is so obvious that it hits you. Hard.

The corrections. The little pieces of anxiety in our day to day that we attempt to mask. If you're like Gary, it's with alcohol, or Denise, sexual experimentation, or Chip, correcting your screenplay/random plot developments.

The alarm bells are ringing, but it's easier to tune them out.