Not To Be a Poet

A WRITER'S WIT
Divorced men are more likely to meet their car payments than their child support obligations.
Susan Faludi
Born April 18, 1959

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Rebecca Mock

April 18, 2016, Colin Barrett, “Anhedonia, Here I Come”: Poet Bobby Tallis, twenty-nine-year-old denizen of a “First World Western” country utilizing Euros (answer to the riddle: Ireland), nonetheless supports himself by penning cartoon porn for AllFreeekArt. ¶ Some iteration of this character has emerged in literature before: John Kennedy Toole’s Ignatius J. Reilly, Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, maybe even Kerouac’s Dean Moriarty. However, if Bobby is angry like the first two, he buries it with the help of alcohol and weed. And if he is like Moriarty, he has neither wheels nor the exuberance to see beyond the senior-citizen building in which he lives because it is both cheap and quiet. ¶ I confess that I had to look up a-n-h-e-d-o-n-i-a: the lack of pleasure or ability to experience it. It is the key, as any word appearing in the title should be, to understanding this narrative about a failed young poet, who fairly wallows in his obscurity, his quiet life of words, until he learns that his muse-mentor, also a failed poet, has changed his allegiance to a twenty-two-year-old woman who has just won her first publishing contract. Upon learning this, Bobby pounds down five pints and trudges home. Against the fire department’s wishes, he enters his gas-laden building and opens a window in his apartment:

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“He put the joint in his mouth and brought the lighter to it. Friction: he looked out across the city sky and flicked the lighter’s wheel, prepared for the night to go up all around him, but the night, as the night was wont to do, rolled impersonally on. After a while, Bobby began to hear the Dopplered gulling of the sirens as the fire trucks made their approach” (69).

Bobby is about to suffer the ultimate inability to feel or experience pleasure, and I’m not sure I care. Barrett’s collection, Young Skins, was published in 2015.
Illustration by Rebecca Mock

NEXT TIME: My Book World

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"Snarked"
"Killing Lorenzo"
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