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A review by gcbf
The Dismal Science by Peter Mountford
2.0
I had high hopes for this book. I was immediately drawn to it by the cover - I'd just finished reading Dante - and the blurb made it seem as if it would be a book covering the fragility of identity. Unfortunately, neither of these first impressions were exactly true.
Purgatorio makes an appearance, but the allusion appears more than halfway into the book, too far along to be effective. There are moments when Mountford almost hits upon things unseen and unheard, but sadly these have little to do with identity and appear only sparsely in the first half.
The rest of the book is pretty prosaic. Our hero, Vincenzo d'Orsi, is a bland old creep whose hobbies include comparing everything to a game of chess and thinking about how hot women look when they're angry at him. This wouldn't be bad if it weren't for the fact that there's no reader-author relationship; everything is filtered quite closely through Vincenzo's worldview, so there's no separation from the world through his eyes. There's no apparent self-criticism in the writing, no wink to the reader.
Vincenzo isn't so much a character study as someone Mountford seems to think of as an aspirational protagonist - someone we all "can relate to". He doesn't treat Vincenzo's biases and thoughts in an objective way. We're too close. And that's problematic when this book is supposed to be "an exploration of the fragile nature of identity" - he doesn't pull far enough away to show us that he understands what he's exploring. He's not examining his own biases when it comes to the viewpoints of other white men. And honestly, that means it can never be any good - it's not a study, it's just a plot-based book without a plot.
Also, what's up with the female characters in this? The only women are people Vincenzo's related to or people he'd like to fuck. If you want to talk about the human experience or whatever, you should actually understand all humans first.
Purgatorio makes an appearance, but the allusion appears more than halfway into the book, too far along to be effective. There are moments when Mountford almost hits upon things unseen and unheard, but sadly these have little to do with identity and appear only sparsely in the first half.
The rest of the book is pretty prosaic. Our hero, Vincenzo d'Orsi, is a bland old creep whose hobbies include comparing everything to a game of chess and thinking about how hot women look when they're angry at him. This wouldn't be bad if it weren't for the fact that there's no reader-author relationship; everything is filtered quite closely through Vincenzo's worldview, so there's no separation from the world through his eyes. There's no apparent self-criticism in the writing, no wink to the reader.
Vincenzo isn't so much a character study as someone Mountford seems to think of as an aspirational protagonist - someone we all "can relate to". He doesn't treat Vincenzo's biases and thoughts in an objective way. We're too close. And that's problematic when this book is supposed to be "an exploration of the fragile nature of identity" - he doesn't pull far enough away to show us that he understands what he's exploring. He's not examining his own biases when it comes to the viewpoints of other white men. And honestly, that means it can never be any good - it's not a study, it's just a plot-based book without a plot.
Also, what's up with the female characters in this? The only women are people Vincenzo's related to or people he'd like to fuck. If you want to talk about the human experience or whatever, you should actually understand all humans first.