George W. S. Trow (1943–2006)

I would like to say what this book is about, but honestly? It isn't about anything. I suppose with the title, that would make sense, but this is yet another book by someone who thinks he gets it and needs to tell everyone else about it. It is more a rambling stream of consciousness than a scholarly work, though it pretends to be the latter. He never really gets to the point of WHAT IS THE DAMN BOOK ABOUT! What point is he trying to make? He is all over the place, there is no organization, he has an annoying habit of writing a string of sentence fragments, and he appears to think he is clever. He admits up front that he comes from a privileged world where he didn't interact much with the so-called common man, but it doesn't appear he interacted with anyone who could knock some knowledge of the world into him. He makes statements, p;resents no argument or rational process by which he arrived at his conclusion, and name drops celebrities. I am really sorry I wasted time and money on this book.… (more)

Trow's stories are darkly whimsical - they all seem loosely set in a mouldy universe of hotel tenants, but there is a slipperiness about that setting, and in one or two cases, I wasn't sure the story was in the same place as the others. Some are morbidly hilarious - some are rather creepy and dark. I think some stories are stronger than others, but not enough to call it an uneven collection - it's unique, and curious, and certainly worth a read to fans of the short story, of cynicism and weirdness, and of a sort of bemused hopelessness about the human condition.… (more)

George Trow's "Within the Context of No Context", an essay originally published in the New Yorker, is a long complaint about the vulgarization of American culture by the mass media interspersed with anecdotes from the author's past. The former is what made the essay's reputation, but it's the latter that is more revealing. Like many hell-in-a-handbasket types, Trow combines a refined sensibility with a profound solipsism, leading him to misdiagnose his personal sadness as a generalized cultural malaise.

As for the malaise, you've heard it all before. According to Trow, in recent decades (meaning the 60s and 70s, since the essay was published in 1981), a tranquil, contemplative, and authentic American cultural scene has been poisoned by a loud, crass, celebrity-worshiping, bauble-shilling rot promulgated by tabloids and television. To his credit, he manages to find a novel way to package this time-worn complaint. Much of the essay consists of brief (ranging from a few sentences to a few pages) aphoristic sections in which Trow's terse newspaper-like diction is put into the service of a weirdly compelling vagueness, a sort of lobotomized New Journalism. His metaphors skitter right up to the edge of making sense, then slink teasingly away, leaving a sympathetic audience plenty of space to read in their own desired meanings.

Of course a lot of American mass culture really is vulgar, so along the way Trow can't help but make some cogent observations. For example, he keeps returning to the idea of a gap between the "grids" of "two-hundred million" and "intimacy". Reading charitably, he seems to be making a valid observation about how strange it is that people gossip about celebrities as if they were acquaintances. Elsewhere Trow breaks out of his navel-gazing funk to interview an editor from People who describes the way that magazine tries to maximize sales by timing its cover photos to be just behind the zeitgeist. It's a fascinating bit of media anthropology, but it's also the only place where Trow steers the focus away from his own curmudgeonly obsessions. Mostly he just ambles around bemoaning things, oblivious to the fact that others have advanced the same complaints under the heading of "alienation" or weltschmerz years before anyone even dreamed of television.

This book contains another essay, "Collapsing Dominant", written fifteen years later as a kind of follow-up. Though essentially the same stuff (the world is still going to hell, though Trow is surprisingly fond of Quentin Tarantino), this one feels more honest because it is openly autobiographical. Trow talks at length about his family, a New York publishing dynasty, and his distress at watching the eastern WASP establishment culture they represented fall out of favor in the 1960s just as he was becoming an adult. The free-floating anguish of the earlier essay now shows itself as originating in Trow's sense of being denied his birthright. This is hopeless snobbery, of course, but Trow comes off better here for being forthright about his frustrated sense of entitlement, and spells out more of the personal details that lie at the heart of his angst. Perhaps most revealing is an aside about his time at Exeter in the late 1950s, when he belonged to a clique who called themselves "negos", because they had a negative attitude towards the world that sprung from the deep well of disaffection known only to the most bright, sensitive, and privileged young men. Perhaps this is the secret of Trow's enduring appeal: he speaks to the clever adolescent so many of us once were.… (more)