THIS APPEARED ON a "new fiction"shelf at my local public library, and I picked it up wondering whether it had anything to do with Ayn Rand. It did, of course. Anna, the novel's narrator, has just published her second novel, but the reviewers have given it bad marks for classism and like shortcomings. Feeling herself a victim of cancel culture, she takes solace in the philosophy of Ayn Rand, with its contempt of the herd and its celebration of pursuing one's self-interest.
(Pretty clever premise...but I probably would have put the book back on the shelf had it nor borne a blurb from Joshua Cohen, one of my favorite novelists and not a promiscuous blurber. So to the self-checkout station I went.)
Weary of New York City, where everyone she knows has seen the humiliating reviews and no one wants to hear about Ayn Rand, Anna takes off for LA, where she hopes to sell a series based on Rand's life and thought. Hollywood offers as splendid array of targets for satire as New York City's publishing scene, so Freiman has as much fun in the middle third of the book as she did in the first third.
In the final third, Anna becomes disenchanted with Rand and decides to take up a friend's offer to accompany her to a meditation retreat on a Greek island, where Freiman takes aim at a whole new set of satiric targets clustering around the Eat Pray Love scenario.
Anna is a bit of a Candide figure (with Rand as Pangloss) in that she seems misled by others and by herself and often obtuse, but retains readerly sympathy and finally achieves some sort of clarity, perhaps. I was undecided whether the clarity was true clarity or merely part of the parody of the Eat Pray Love trope, but Anna does seem ready to cultivate her garden and let her wilder ambitions go, so we can hope for the best.
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