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A review by audreyloopy
You Deserve Nothing by Alexander Maksik
I confess, I read this book only because my curiosity was peaked by the article about it on Jezebel, and I wanted to be able to judge it for myself.
That said, it's sickening.
The tone somehow manages to strike a balance between self-loathing and unparalleled conceit, which is a pretty staggering achievement in its own perverse way. I am, of course, reading this work through the lens provided me, that the characters involved and goodly number of the events portrayed are real. What Maksik has done probably isn't that different from the path a lot of authors take to create a novel, but when drawing on your life experiences has you putting words in people's mouths and actions in their lives geared toward your self-aggrandizement, there's a term for that: Mary Sue. And given that the particular act he's Mary Sue-ing to the high heavens is an affair with a 17-year-old student, I can't muster up much more than some serious disgust. He even manages to interweave the tenets of existentialism into his narrative as a motif of apologism, as if being forced to take responsibility for his own actions dooms him to failure time and again and no one can expect any better from him.
The only remotely likable character is Gilad, but even when he seems to be shaking off his infatuation with the eminent Mr. Silver, Maksik cannot let him go. His narrative ends before his freedom is truly realized.
All in all, it's a masturbatory pity-party of a novel, and if it stopped there, it wouldn't be much worth the paper it's printed on. The fact that it is quite possibly a betrayal of a very intimate trust to boot makes it downright horrid. If your curiosity (like mine) gets the best of you, I urge you to get it from your public library, so at least someone in the wretched thing's chain of custody will benefit.
But for my money, I'd rather read Nabokov.
That said, it's sickening.
The tone somehow manages to strike a balance between self-loathing and unparalleled conceit, which is a pretty staggering achievement in its own perverse way. I am, of course, reading this work through the lens provided me, that the characters involved and goodly number of the events portrayed are real. What Maksik has done probably isn't that different from the path a lot of authors take to create a novel, but when drawing on your life experiences has you putting words in people's mouths and actions in their lives geared toward your self-aggrandizement, there's a term for that: Mary Sue. And given that the particular act he's Mary Sue-ing to the high heavens is an affair with a 17-year-old student, I can't muster up much more than some serious disgust. He even manages to interweave the tenets of existentialism into his narrative as a motif of apologism, as if being forced to take responsibility for his own actions dooms him to failure time and again and no one can expect any better from him.
The only remotely likable character is Gilad, but even when he seems to be shaking off his infatuation with the eminent Mr. Silver, Maksik cannot let him go. His narrative ends before his freedom is truly realized.
All in all, it's a masturbatory pity-party of a novel, and if it stopped there, it wouldn't be much worth the paper it's printed on. The fact that it is quite possibly a betrayal of a very intimate trust to boot makes it downright horrid. If your curiosity (like mine) gets the best of you, I urge you to get it from your public library, so at least someone in the wretched thing's chain of custody will benefit.
But for my money, I'd rather read Nabokov.