Why Are You So Sad?: A Novel - Softcover

Porter, Jason

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0142180580 ISBN 13: 9780142180587

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

"Jason Porter could find a place on the shelf beside Richard Brautigan, George Saunders, and David Sedaris. This is a quick, odd, wonderful book, one that pinned me back on my heels and made me laugh."
–Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin

Have we all sunken into a species-wide bout of clinical depression?
 
Porter’s uproarious, intelligent debut centers on Raymond Champs, an illustrator of assembly manuals for a home furnishings corporation, who is charged with a huge task: To determine whether or not the world needs saving. It comes to him in the midst of a losing battle with insomnia — everybody he knows, and maybe everybody on the planet, is suffering from severe clinical depression. He’s nearly certain something has gone wrong. A virus perhaps. It’s in the water, or it’s in the mosquitoes, or maybe in the ranch flavored snack foods. And what if we are all too sad and dispirited to do anything about it? Obsessed as he becomes, Raymond composes an anonymous survey to submit to his unsuspecting coworkers — “Are you who you want to be?”, “Do you believe in life after death?”, “Is today better than yesterday?” — because what Raymond needs is data. He needs to know if it can be proven. It’s a big responsibility. People might not believe him. People, like his wife and his boss, might think he is losing his mind. But only because they are also losing their minds. Or are they?

Reminiscent of Gary Shteyngart, George Saunders, Douglas Coupland and Jennifer Egan, Porter’s debut is an acutely perceptive and sharply funny meditation on what makes people tick.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jason Porter was born and raised in southeastern Michigan. He is, or has been, an English teacher, customer support representative, landlord, traveling musician, and the overnight editor for Yahoo! News and The New York Times. Currently, he writes fiction. Why Are You So Sad? is his first novel.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.***

Copyright © 2014 by Jason Porter

 PART ONE

SHORT ANSWER

 

I was in my bed when the thought came to me: Have we all sunken into a species-wide bout of clinical depression? A severe, but subtle, despondency, germinating in every single one of us. The thought hit me. Smacked me as true. Its flawless pitch rang on and on, adhering to my consciousness like shit on shoe.

I was on my back. My hands making a tent on my sternum. I was staring at the ceiling fan spinning above, its body wobbling gently in reaction to its rotating blades. It was a sort of meditation, focusing on the blades; an attempt to quiet my senses and fall into sleep. As if the thought were not distracting enough, a car alarm went off outside. A squawking robotic bird with Tourette’s syndrome. But I pressed on. Still committed to easing my mind, I endeavored to appreciate the beauty of the silence that existed between the beeps and screams of my neighbor’s BMW. It was a nearly impossible task, but in those spaces I did find something. I found the calls of the dead. I found the dinosaurs. They said, It started like this for us too. We were down. Nobody noticed because it was gradual. It snuck in like fog. We were moody and sluggish and complacent, and we were too busy eating things to take notice.

In time the car alarm relented. I stared with even greater focus at the ceiling fan. I could hear the buzz of the lighting element in the reading lamp. I was aware of every hair on my body. I itched. I knew that at the very least, I was depressed. I wondered if the depression had always been there. It was not unlike listening to the song “American Pie.” You reach a point in the song when you ask yourself, “Have I always been listening to this song?” To answer yes defies rationality, but to answer no discredits your experiential reality.

I reconfigured. I fluffed the pillows. I got fetal. Closing my eyes, focusing inward, I tried to call up something cheerful that might set my thoughts on a hopeful course—a giggling infant, the toss of a wedding bouquet, a grandfather happy to receive a call from his grandson—but all I could think of were third-world viruses that sold newspapers and dissolved brains. I quickly composed a mental catalog of friends, colleagues, former roommates, elderly neighbors, and the anonymous faces who sell me gasoline, deliver my mail, and fill my prescriptions; I uncovered alcoholics, overwhelmed parents, hoarders, diet addicts, news junkies, tabloid gobblers, sexless marriages, teenage diabetics, cell phone dependents, and uninsured back pains resulting from unresolved childhood rage.

I rolled over to get my wife’s opinion. She was lost in a gigantic children’s novel. Her brown eyes, even bigger behind glasses, were scanning the pages left to right. In her glasses I could see the whole room reflected. I could see the white curtains we bought at a bargain through my employee discount, the matching dressers purchased through the same discount, and a fern that wasn’t thriving. I took turns looking at her through one eye while the other was closed, toggling back and forth. From both perspectives she didn’t seem to notice I was staring at her.

I said, “Brenda, is it me or is every single person we know depressed?”

She let out a dramatic sigh and slowly closed her book. She didn’t want to leave the story. As she turned to look at me she spilled a little bourbon. It’s a habit of hers. It drib- bled down her chin and onto her nightgown. She kissed me on the forehead like she was putting a stamp on a letter, and said, “You are.” And then as she turned off her light and shifted onto her side, facing away from me, she said, “I’m not.”

She wasn’t one to dress things up. I let what she said settle, but it did nothing to calm my anxieties. I inched over and held her. She didn’t feel dead. Nor did she feel awake. I then reached past her, taking the bourbon from her night- stand, almost knocking over her alarm clock. Like a baby bird being fed by its mother, I held the glass over my mouth for every last drop, enjoying the harsh warmth in my throat and chest.

The bourbon made no difference. I stared at the ceiling fan for hours.

 

Are you single?

No, I am married to Brenda Champs, formerly Brenda Brynschzchvsksy. She took my name, Champs, not out of some nod to tradition, but because she hated having a name nobody could ever pronounce, including her new husband, me. It certainly wasn’t for the children, because we don’t have any.

 

 

 

The following morning I found myself no less preoccupied. I was driving to work. My car stereo had been stolen the previous week. I could hear my thoughts too clearly: That man driving that car is sick. That other man driving that other car is sick. I am sick. We are all sick. Something is in the water. It is in the soil. We are all symptoms of a grieving planet.

I was coming up on the backup to the General Eisenhower Bridge. We were all merging to pay the toll. Traffic choked on itself here without fail. Red brake lights flickered. Drivers were greedy about their lanes. Their despair and emptiness reached out to me through the glass and steel and molded plastic. I could feel myself in each car. I was for a moment each of these people. I felt it all. And it was their breath mints that pushed me over the edge.

I realize that sounds a little crazy. But hear me out. I heard their talk radio: awful. I chewed on their fingernails: mindless. I sipped on their lukewarm coffee while gazing at their reflections in the rearview mirror: hateful. I felt the way they dreamed about what might happen next in their lives: lonely, depressing, barely imaginative. But nothing was worse than the breath mints. I carefully imagined breaking them down with my tongue. Pressing them into the roof of my mouth. It tipped the scales. It was revolting. They tasted as if the chemists who design all of our commercial food additives had developed a purely artificial flavor that was in itself the absence of flavor. They were minty, sure, but in such an intentionally absent way. Hardened on the edges by the sharp chemical nontaste of erased calories. It was absolutely horrid. The fact that all these people could suck on these mints, driving along in a limping herd, actively not tasting things—it overwhelmed me. Completely. This was disease. Rot. Evolutionary peril. My empathic sensors, or whatever the hell they were, were overheating. Watching the stuttering cars, and all the miserable, unsuspecting people trapped inside of them, it became obvious that I needed to either confirm or disprove my suspicion. I needed to get some irrefutable science behind this. Otherwise it risked carrying on in my mind like a phantom odor: What is that smell? Is something burning? Maybe I am only imagining that something is burning? Am I imagining that something is burning? Am I burning?

What I needed was an emotional Geiger counter that could objectively measure other people for sadness. I looked at the woman in the car next to me. She was applying makeup during the stops, opening and closing her mouth like a feeding fish, staring at her red lips in the rearview mirror. I imagined holding the Geiger counter to her forehead. I would ask her a question about her children. Were they an accident? What dreams did they make impossible? She would say, “They are the best thing I ever did,” and the readout would expose her lie with a pixelated frown.

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0142180580
• ISBN 13: 9780142180587
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 208
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar