Some people have a hard time paying for college. Thanks for the heads up, New York Times! Love to love you.
Last week I was on an airplane and needed to visit the bathroom. I clambered over my seatmates, up the aisle, and pushed open the lavatory door. A woman — a dignified older woman, dressed in white, topped by a floppy white church hat — was inside, pulling up her underwear. Oh! I apologized and let the door shut, embarrassed for the both of us. A couple in the bulkhead row mustered watery smiles in sympathy. The older woman emerged and shot me a look. “There’s a sign!” she said, indicating the VACANT / OCCUPIED window that had, when I’d approached, indeed read VACANT. She walked off, uninterested in any reply.
How I felt right at that moment is similar to how I felt upon reading Alexandra Jacobs’s review of How to Be Useful in this Sunday’s New York Times. A critical review I can handle — hey, I’m an anxious, middle-class striver from the Midwest; we love hearing of ways we might improve ourselves! But a review that doesn’t engage the book’s real premise is harder to process. People who don’t wrestle with what actually happened, be they an old lady who neglected to lock the bathroom door or an over-worked book critic…let’s just say they make life infinitely interesting.
All I’ll say in defense of HTBU is that I’m surprised it was read as evidence that I find careerism and the office “fundamentally boring.” I believe quite the opposite. I hope you’ll read the book and agree.