Tumbling through the Neon Wasteland

The book that introduced me to “expatriate nihilism” and changed my outlook on life forever…

During college I would go through different “writer periods” where I would skip class and sit in a booth in the Burger King on Nassau Street in Princeton, NJ, reading book after book. I would normally choose a writer I liked and literally read everything I could find by him. It was September or October of my sophomore year when I discovered my first Hemingway “expatriate” novel—The Sun Also Rises (I’m sure I had to read “The Old Man and the Sea” in High School, but that book isn’t part of the same canon). I couldn’t put the book down, and I probably read the thing eight or ten more times over the next several years. It led me to other, similar books like “A Movable Feast” and “The Great Gatsby” (yes, I know the difference between Fitzgerald and Hemingway, but in a very real sense it was Hemingway that led me to Fitzgerald, even though I was attending Fitzgerald’s alma mater and his name was pretty much everywhere—in fact, a friend of mine lived in a quad in Rockefeller College with a wooden window seat upon which FSF supposedly carved his initials). It also eventually led me to contemporary writers whose stories bore modern similarities to their forbears—writers like Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney.

How did “The Sun Also Rises” open my eyes? It showed me that the trappings and characters of polite society could be simultaneously seductive and grotesque. In certain ways I related to Jake, not in the sense of his physical infirmity, but much like Nick Carraway in “The Great Gatsby,” I related to his essential goodness and eventual resignation to the types of people he would continue to attract and by whom he would most likely be surrounded throughout his life. Remember: I was a public school kid at Princeton at the time. I had friends with private planes at the local airport, and I certainly knew girls like Brett Ashley. But more than that, there was an attraction to the idea of the expatriate lifestyle that, at the time, seemed difficult to resist. I had spent several months in France after my senior year in high school, and my young mind (I think) felt that it could relate to Jake’s inner conflict and eventual ambivalence. because, in the end, that’s what these books were about—the ambivalence of the wealthy, the shallow, or the simply disinterested just trying to fill up their days. And even after all the drinking, beaches, card games, and bull fights, you can still feel the desperate emptiness. And I think there was a time, when I was drifting a bit aimlessly through college, when I could relate to that…

It’s funny, but the parallels throughout what I consider the larger “young nihilistic” canon are unmistakable. At the end of “The Sun Also Rises,” as Jake is riding in the cab through Madrid to deliver her back to Mike, Brett sadly remarks that she and Jake could have had a wonderful time together. And he responds, “Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so?” At the end of “Less Than Zero,” Blair and Clay meet for one last time at a restaurant overlooking Sunset Boulevard, and her final words to him are, “You’re a beautiful boy, Clay, but that’s about it.” I always loved that line…