Reviews and Comments

I really liked it! There's storytelling and narrative in it that makes it a really exciting read, but it's also incredibly intelligent, honest, and well researched.

Two critiques:

The whole thing is very Western-centric. I understand that the stories come from the author's own experience, but like ... there are cultures which have other really interesting examples of holistic agricultural systems. Like it just seems weird that the book about "the future of food" takes basically an American experience (even a very specific one), and then a Spanish experience (again, not even all of Spain), and you're meant to extrapolate that out to the world. Like, I got really excited early on when the author was discussing the Eight Row Flint because I think it could have been really interesting to address Indigenous food ways in North America really meaningfully, given that they did co-evolve with the local landscape in the way that American culture hasn't managed. But it seems like it was just kind of a one-time thing.

Also, I just think the phrase "the third x" is overused. It works well as the central conceit of this book I guess but like ... I'm just not a fan.

On one level I really enjoyed this book. It's really honest about a family that's often made up of people with good hearts doing horrible things. It's a sympathetic, and unshakeably real portrayal of a life.

But, it's interspersed with some truly worrying social commentary. Vance (who works for the cartoonishly evil tech giant Peter Thiel, by the way) genuinely believes that the white working class did this to themselves, and he genuinely believes that if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, join the military, and then make it to Yale law school, you too can do better. The personal stuff in this story is really sympathetic and interesting and cool, but the political commentary in it is truly insidious. He makes arguments that the poor don't deserve welfare because they misuse it, while failing to address the real reasons that so many working class jobs have evaporated in the last couple of decades.

This book has become a touchstone for the liberal person trying to understand where the Trump campaign came from, and I confess that's partially why I picked it up. And to me it seems to give all the wrong answers. It's not that the author avoids the question, but rather than honestly addressing the ways in which the white working class lashes out against immigrants and racialized people in an effort to gain the "psychic wage of whiteness," Vance chooses instead to frame the white working class--and poor people in general, as lazy and somehow deserving of their fate. Rather than coming to a productive place of understanding, you leave the book with the distaste for poor people it seems that the author has, even though he once was one.

This was my first ever Zadie Smith book and I expected to be wowed a lot more than I was.

I think in part it's just difficult to like, sympathize with, or care about the main character. She's just ... there. And I think that's really the problem. She's not actually fleshed out enough initially that she has any sort of character arc, so a coming-of-age story about her just kind of falls flat. I would happily have read a book about her mother, her father, Tracey, the bodyguard (I forget his name), or like ... basically any other character, because everyone else has an excitement and a life of their own in a way that the protagonist doesn't.

Because the main character is clearly just a background for social commentary, the social commentary to me really falls flat. Like. I study critical race theory, I really like that sort of thing, but it just felt forced here. It felt in places like the author had constructed the narrative to air out as many grievances as possible without any sort of coherence. First it's about the hardship of being mixed race growing up in London, then there's some half-baked critique of the global humanitarian regime, and then there's a totally underdeveloped reference to cultural appropriation that the author just sort of expects us to "get." And with a totally un-engaging protagonist you just really can't be bothered to care.

Also, the ending? It just doesn't make sense. Why does she make him come to England just to like ... abandon him? Why not just leave him in Senegal?