Suck It: Hipster Novels

I picked up David Bledin's Bank purely because it was already on the bookshelf and it looked like a light, easily discardable read to take on the plane. It was pleasant enough, as far as it went. But, it didn't really go anywhere. Nothing happens. It chronicles more Starbucks trips than anything else, and the characters ultimately learn...that investment bankers are douchebags. Why, what a revelation! How can this possibly take 300 pages to realize? Also, what made anyone think that the rest of the world is interested in a behind-the-scenes look at the monkeys manning the spreadsheets for mega-capital megaliths?

After pondering these mysteries through the entire second half of the novel (I have this inability to walk away from even the most soul-deadeningly mediocre of entertainment once I've started it), I reached the end, and an Afterword that made me angry, confused, and sad. Apparently, this novel began as a whiny email circulated amongst financial district drones carping about their long hours and demeaning jobs. I gather they've never cleaned toilets, mucked horse stalls, or done any other actual labor, but that's beside the point. The real point is that this email landed the young Mr. Bledin first an agent and then a novel publication.

And it's hardly the first time. I've read a handful of novels and memoirs which began their life online. That's lovely. I don't even blame the semi-enterprising individuals who turned their boring ass lives into boring ass blogs and then boring ass books. No. I blame us, the reading public, who are so lazy that we want to read a blog in book form--because it will lay down with us on the beach without costing us a grand in repairs. I blame us, too, for thinking that a twenty-three year old with BY HIS OWN ADMISSION no experience 0utside adolescence and then ninety hour weeks in a cubicle would have anything new or interesting to impart.

This is part of a trend of giving annoying hipster twenty-somethings contracts to spend two years in a dead-end job, and then parlay their brief excursion in paid labor into a multi-media empire of pseudo-celebrity. It must stop, before Barnes & Noble starts shoving down our throats the adventures of a twenty-year old barista who, like, really really thinks making cappucinos is hard and stuff.