continuous escalation
This Week in Reading:
The Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
Finding myself book-less one morning, I dug through Sophie’s room for something to bring to work. “What should I read?” I texted her. “I’d recommend a John Irving” she responded in what I imagine to be a deadpan tone. Sophie only owns two shelves of books, and 80 percent of them are by John Irving.
So that’s how I found myself reading The Hotel New Hampshire, a book I can only describe as a true novel. It exists solely to tell a story. It is not a manifesto; it is not trying to impart wisdom. It is not trying to be something bigger than what it is, which is, quite simply, a plot, fashioned around a family of characters.
And what a plot! Dan, who grew up in New Hampshire, told me that The Hotel New Hampshire was wacky, but that descriptor feels like a gross understatement. In the very first chapter, the mother and father of the Berry family meet Freud (no not that Freud, a different Freud) at the resort they are working at and end up buying his trained bear off of him. (The bear's name is State o’Maine and only travels by motorcycle sidecar.) Later, the family will open the first Hotel New Hampshire in Dairy, New Hampshire, and a second Hotel New Hampshire in Vienna and a third Hotel New Hampshire in Maine. The grandfather’s name is Iowa Bob. The youngest child in the family is called Egg. At some point the novel take a sharp dive right into incest. At another point, the family stops a terrorist attack. Wacky doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Hotel New Hampshire isn’t a parable but it is, perhaps, an example of what it looks like to lead a life based on the principle of continuous escalation. What would happen if every decision you made was simply the most extreme possible reaction to the preceding event? What if, when given the opportunity to buy a trained bear and motorcycle, you took it? When you put the family dog down because it was old and farts too much, what else is there to do but taxidermy it? And once the trained bear dies, the obvious reaction to an invitation to go to Austria would be to open a hotel that is actually a whore house with a trained bear that is actually a lesbian in a bear suit.
Living by the principle of continuous escalation will often lead to a fascinating life, but so often people only see routes of escalation that point downward-- seeking excitement through increased consumption of illicit substances, compulsive cheating, and various other forms of self destruction. Interest is often conflated with darkness. It is assumed that one must experience true suffering, or extreme trauma, in order to have a story worthy of being told. Trauma porn is everywhere; we gobble up misery. I just wish something would happen to me, people bemoan. They won’t say it, but what they really mean is that they wish something bad would happen to them, a tragic plot point to center their narrative arc around. Suffering is a kind of currency— we buy intimacy by telling the story of the worst thing that ever happened to us. But in truth, darkness is boring. Many people have experienced the types of loss, addiction and trauma that feature so prominently in best selling memoirs. Tragedy is ordinary. There are, of course, plenty of valid reasons to discuss personal hardship, but don't do it because you think it’s interesting. The Hotel New Hampshire presents an alternative model. What if instead of continuously escalating into greater misery, we escalated into wackiness? What if instead of telling the story about the way in which we were most hurt, we told a story about the time we trained a bear to take off a suit and tie?
Escalating silliness does not inoculate you from tragedy— the Berry family faces multiple deaths, a brutal rape, lifelong disability— but it does keep your life from being consumed by it. Those hardships impact the characters for their entire lives, but they do not define them—they have already escalated to something bigger, something weirder, something crazier.
I never really learned how to de-escalate anything. When I tell a story I automatically grow louder and faster until I’m basically incomprehensible. I dive straight into new friendships with breezy questions like “do you think your parents are proud of you?” I don’t really “do” casual friendships, once I have made a friend I fully expect that person to be in my life until I am dead and in the ground. There is nothing I value more than commitment to the bit. I’d go as far as to argue that an art practice is nothing more than a way of committing to the bit. Most of my projects start with the thought: isn’t it funny/weird/sad that ____, and then the final piece is simply the physical manifestation of that thought, taken to its furthest extreme. Wouldn’t it be funny if I created a new system of time that centers around Taylor Swift? What if I only read books I bought at the grocery store? What if I stripped fruit naked and left them nude on the vine? Right now I’m making a set of jock tarot cards: meticulously photoshopping basketballs and lacrosse sticks and football helmets into illustrations of the Queen of Pentacles or the 4 of Cups. Making art is simply seeing a whim all the way through to the end. If art isn’t profitable it might as well be fun.
My resume reads like the set up for some kind of joke: a gallery in a gated vacation community for old people, the lesbian sheep farm in Vermont, a sushi restaurant, Alaskan Girl Scout camp, my stint as internet ghost writer, the crate shop. I want every job I have to be more bizarre and random than my last one. I am trying to continuously escalate my life until I end up on freaking Jupiter. What’s next? Reupholstering vintage couches? Black market koi-dealing? Maybe I should buy a trained bear.
Further Reading:
Other novels that felt entirely like novels: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, The Secret History by Donna Tartt.