I read Beautiful Days during the first major heat wave of what the zeitgeist has taken to calling the coolest summer of the rest of our lives. The fit was good. To beat the heat as New York City fulminated into an early summer, air conditioners rumbled out cool air from every window and ice cream trucks spewed sweet treats alongside planet-warming chemicals. It was exactly the kind of beautiful day referenced in the book’s title: Idyllic; shot through with menace.
The collection’s ten stories are full of days like this. A mother’s long evenings in a vacation rental where the holiday never ends and her baby never grows. Brothers glimpsing deer on their family’s decaying estate, “buttery and cool” with “irradiated eyes.” A father’s slippery bathtime with a toddler who’s sprung an extra toe. The stories are speculative, with protagonists who’ve been hounded into delirium by the predicaments of modernity. Yet the story’s eye never fails to find transcendent beauty in the decline.
Masculinity is a major preoccupation. Throughout the collection, men are constantly failing to provide for their families, taking matters into their own hands, being cucked (metaphorically and literally), and avoiding both their feelings and each other. I found it refreshing to see a collection grapple with what it means to be a man in America today without falling into uncritical tropes of misogynistic, incel blowhards. Which isn’t to say that the allure of misogyny is absent. The opening story, “Trial Run,” finds a mild-mannered office worker hunting for the author of emails (“Lisa Horowitz is a CULTURAL MARXIST—¡WHITE GENOCIDE!” reads one) that defame a female coworker. There is no shortage of suspects, from a security guard who spouts antisemitic conspiracy theories to Shel, an officemate who needs advice on his divorce from a “needling wife” who “goaded” him into threatening her life. In this bath of horrible men, I sympathized with the narrator, even identified with his quest to make it out of the office with integrity intact. The ending, though, made it clear my sympathy was profoundly misplaced. My identification curdled into anxiety about the things “nice” men hide from themselves.
But I felt “Ghost Image” provided the most interesting portrait of contemporary American masculinity. An artist with more ambition than talent’s already tenuous grip on reality loosens when his son grows into a reincarnation of his old boss: Joe Daley, an office park IT manager whose only flicker of internal life is a dream of one day driving the Disney World monorail. The artist’s project, a systematic recreation of Thomas Kinkade’s oeuvre, tracks his decline. What starts as a project of “getting something ecstatic” into kitschy Americana dissolves into “high strangeness and violence—UFOs bombing Cinderella’s castle, brother and sis fucking on Main Street, their folks gagging each other with smoked turkey drumsticks.” Barely noticed in the background is the decline of America itself, as homeless encampments spring up on golf courses and cell phones can no longer reach other states. What separates the artist most from his son, though, is not the war, but Joe Daley’s embodiment of insipid masculine mediocrity. “You were a sports watcher. A reader of mass-market biographies on noted tech entrepreneurs. The only music you liked was from video games. You were boring, Joe … too unselfish to hoard things inside you—weird desires, dark complexities.” It’s only when wildfires drive the artist, now a destitute wanderer, into the remains of Disney World that he can feel nostalgia for the kitsch comforts of a simpler time and find love for his son. I found it darkly poignant to watch this snooty narcissist ache for cringe.
By the end of Beautiful Days, though, I wished the collection would broaden its scope beyond America and The Men. Though each story’s setting, tone, and level of engagement with reality were varied, they did, for the most part, share a thematic structure: A character is alienated by society, grapples with some trauma, and finds catharsis in making a better life (either real or imagined) for the people they care about most. Though effective in each story, it grew repetitive. Similarly, though there were some notable female characters, such as the mother of an unkillable infant in “Wood Sorrel House,” the book was a straight male parade of posturing, paranoia, and avoidance. Contemporary straight American masculinity is a worthy focus, but if it had played opposite a broader slice of humanity, the book may have accessed a larger thematic and emotional range.
But despite my misgivings about its narrow scope, the book presents a morbidly compelling picture of contemporary America. In the story “Lucca Castle,” the titular mad prophet perhaps captures it best as he initiates the story’s protagonist into his cult of American decline: “Pedestrian fatalities are up. So are train deaths. There’s falling debris, manhole explosions, rusted-through cellar doors swallowing people whole. But it’s more than that. The fabric’s wearing thin. Everyone’s afraid of one another. You can feel it; everybody knows it—it’s all going to shit out there.” Though his proposed course of action, scratching Greek curses into hardware store cement, feels less like a solution and more like neopagan accelerationist arts and crafts, it is perhaps only because Lucca Castle is less interested in repairing the social fabric than in tracing its rips. “Economic and technological development are a form of mass suicide. We know that. So how do we understand the impulse toward it?” he asks, perhaps echoing the questions driving the book itself. How do we understand the impulse toward self destruction? And how do we make beautiful the days when it all goes to shit?
Publisher: Doubleday
Publication date: June 11, 2024
Reviewed by Taylor Poulos