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emma copley eisenberg's housemates has over 100 holds on it at the library right now and is being massively amped up by the local literary scene. i am here today to tell you... it's bad.
basic premise of the book is something like this: two roommates embark on a cross-pennsylvania road trip in the wake of the 2016 election to capture the landscape in writing and photography and have a lot of sex along the way. first mistake this book makes is that it spends the entire first third setting up how these characters get to know each other before even getting to the road trip part. this mistake is the first of many. i could go on for so long (sooooo long) about the issues i have with this book--not least of which its refusal to call anything by name, dear god emma say the words "city hall station" and "university of pennsylvania" and "instagram", you are saying "south street" and "waffle house" anyway so are you naming things or not pick a side. and then there's the description of people's bodies. two things i did like are the book's engagement with fatness (i'm a generally societally acceptable weight, the author isn't, the way she wrote about it was interesting) and the way she allows her characters to be a bit gross because people just are, but she takes this second thing a bit too far imo. i do not need that many detailed descriptions of sex or of scraping dead skin from under one's hair or of one of the characters wiping when she goes to the bathroom and ruminating on her vagina. not to mention the way none of the dialogue uses quotation marks, making it incredibly hard to follow; or the weird omniscient narrator business who we never learn too much about and who is clearly a real and alive person but how does she know all these details about these characters it's never really explained; or, the second-most egregious sin emma commits, naming the characters and the central photography project after TWO REAL WOMEN WHO DID THIS IN NEW YORK CITY A CENTURY AGO, and then never owning up to this until a tiny scrap of a sentence in her thank you notes. emma, you could have put a foreword. might have helped.
but the main thing? the real big thing about this book that drives me crazy and will make me absolutely shit talk it to anyone who asks (which is nobody)? how performatively activist it is. everyone, even characters from rural red PA who in real life would never talk like that, talks self-deprecatingly about being white, old white men, etc. every character's race is mentioned, even when we're looking through the lens of... someone from rural PA who doesn't automatically note the number of white people in the room. she somehow finds a way to shoehorn in "israel bad, free palestine". the two pages that she spends situating the characters in time using entirely NYT headlines from the three years on either side of when the action begins. just say after the trump election but before covid emma it is really that simple. her characters debating the merits of a halfway house for former addicts (phrased not with those exact words but just as clunky) versus an arts program. reducing the opioid crisis across the state down to the kensington neighborhood. there's this line about a side character going around the block and introducing herself to all her neighbors at all hours of the morning and engaging in aggressive conversation with them because if she's going to engage in gentrification she should at least know her neighbors' names and this being framed as like, a good and positive thing that she did. idk it feels like emma is shouting from the rooftops i'm a good person!!! i'm a good white queer look at me am i hitting all the buzzwords??? will you blow me up on social media please please please???? oh my god we get it you're so anticapitalist and so correct. it's exhausting and by the end of the book feels like a mockery of actual left-side politics. like this is what conservatives think you talk like. is this what west philly is really like? because that sounds fucking exhausting.
and the last thing that really bugs me? all the local reviewers saying that this really captures the west philly zeitgeist and that it's such a great snapshot of this moment in time and sooooo reflective finally of what it's like to live here and finally we have the great philadelphia novel. maybe it's because i'm from south and not from west. maybe it's because i'm not leftist enough, or the right kind of leftist anyway. maybe it's because i've only been living in the city limits for a couple of years. but i actually felt deeply alienated by this book. this book doesn't feel like my philadelphia at all. AND THEY SPEND HALF THE BOOK IN RURAL PA, TOO.
i've got a coworker who's lived in both south and west and she told me once that west philly queers are all talk but south philly queers will use the wrong words and still step up to fight when it counts. not me personally lol i am not that cool and not leftist enough for some of these people clearly but i do think i have my feet more on the ground than emma does.
basic premise of the book is something like this: two roommates embark on a cross-pennsylvania road trip in the wake of the 2016 election to capture the landscape in writing and photography and have a lot of sex along the way. first mistake this book makes is that it spends the entire first third setting up how these characters get to know each other before even getting to the road trip part. this mistake is the first of many. i could go on for so long (sooooo long) about the issues i have with this book--not least of which its refusal to call anything by name, dear god emma say the words "city hall station" and "university of pennsylvania" and "instagram", you are saying "south street" and "waffle house" anyway so are you naming things or not pick a side. and then there's the description of people's bodies. two things i did like are the book's engagement with fatness (i'm a generally societally acceptable weight, the author isn't, the way she wrote about it was interesting) and the way she allows her characters to be a bit gross because people just are, but she takes this second thing a bit too far imo. i do not need that many detailed descriptions of sex or of scraping dead skin from under one's hair or of one of the characters wiping when she goes to the bathroom and ruminating on her vagina. not to mention the way none of the dialogue uses quotation marks, making it incredibly hard to follow; or the weird omniscient narrator business who we never learn too much about and who is clearly a real and alive person but how does she know all these details about these characters it's never really explained; or, the second-most egregious sin emma commits, naming the characters and the central photography project after TWO REAL WOMEN WHO DID THIS IN NEW YORK CITY A CENTURY AGO, and then never owning up to this until a tiny scrap of a sentence in her thank you notes. emma, you could have put a foreword. might have helped.
but the main thing? the real big thing about this book that drives me crazy and will make me absolutely shit talk it to anyone who asks (which is nobody)? how performatively activist it is. everyone, even characters from rural red PA who in real life would never talk like that, talks self-deprecatingly about being white, old white men, etc. every character's race is mentioned, even when we're looking through the lens of... someone from rural PA who doesn't automatically note the number of white people in the room. she somehow finds a way to shoehorn in "israel bad, free palestine". the two pages that she spends situating the characters in time using entirely NYT headlines from the three years on either side of when the action begins. just say after the trump election but before covid emma it is really that simple. her characters debating the merits of a halfway house for former addicts (phrased not with those exact words but just as clunky) versus an arts program. reducing the opioid crisis across the state down to the kensington neighborhood. there's this line about a side character going around the block and introducing herself to all her neighbors at all hours of the morning and engaging in aggressive conversation with them because if she's going to engage in gentrification she should at least know her neighbors' names and this being framed as like, a good and positive thing that she did. idk it feels like emma is shouting from the rooftops i'm a good person!!! i'm a good white queer look at me am i hitting all the buzzwords??? will you blow me up on social media please please please???? oh my god we get it you're so anticapitalist and so correct. it's exhausting and by the end of the book feels like a mockery of actual left-side politics. like this is what conservatives think you talk like. is this what west philly is really like? because that sounds fucking exhausting.
and the last thing that really bugs me? all the local reviewers saying that this really captures the west philly zeitgeist and that it's such a great snapshot of this moment in time and sooooo reflective finally of what it's like to live here and finally we have the great philadelphia novel. maybe it's because i'm from south and not from west. maybe it's because i'm not leftist enough, or the right kind of leftist anyway. maybe it's because i've only been living in the city limits for a couple of years. but i actually felt deeply alienated by this book. this book doesn't feel like my philadelphia at all. AND THEY SPEND HALF THE BOOK IN RURAL PA, TOO.
i've got a coworker who's lived in both south and west and she told me once that west philly queers are all talk but south philly queers will use the wrong words and still step up to fight when it counts. not me personally lol i am not that cool and not leftist enough for some of these people clearly but i do think i have my feet more on the ground than emma does.
