The dilettantes

There's too much TV nowadays. Too many movies, too much media to consume for the average person! The completist (a depressingly un-endangered species nowadays) will lament this, because what's the point of doing anything if you can't do everything?

But there's a fix! Nowadays, in addition to actual criticism (I saw a thing, and I have a background in these things/can string together two sentences about it), the internet saw the invention and flourishing of the recap, wherein we take the old TV Guide synopsis of any given TV show and expand it into its own novella.

But the biggest oddity to me is not the synopsis (or its cousin, the spoiler-laden review/complaint). It's the people who only follow a TV show (or whatever media) via these recaps: The equivalent of Cliff's Note-ing, if Cliff is actually a guy you know who you asked to give you the gist of Romeo and Juliet in the five minutes before class.

This brings me to The Dilettantes. The subject matter (college newspaper) intrigued me, because I worked at a college newspaper. I've been to college, I've met lots of collegians, and ... very few of the people the book looked like anyone I've ever met before.

And it didn't seem to be the case (as is possible) that these were just types of people I didn't meet. It more seemed like these weren't people at all, but vaguely sketched stereotypes that you might think about when trying to categorize the young people. In essence, the world was populated by someone who never actually met individual students/people, but rather heard about these “millenials” secondhand and tried to describe them: The “recap” version of character development. I think the author may be a millenial (or close to it) himself, but the analogy still stands.

As you can image, this injures the book. For a novel that hangs so much on irony (or lack of definition/artful use thereof), at best it was reaching for an arch absurdist take on the modern college experience/person, but came up fumbling and groping inexpertly. And who needs that when there's so much else out there to (not) watch/read?