A number of people I know and respect — including Phil Christman — think that Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book The Message is a very good one. I, on the other hand, believe it to be one of the worst books that I’ve read in years. Normally when I bounce off a book that hard I don’t finish it, but I kept hoping that it would correct itself. (I’ve seen Coates do that in the past.) I lost all hope when his primary reaction to a visit to Yad Vashem was to sneer at what he calls “the moral badge of the Holocaust,” but I was close enough to the end that I decided to keep going. I found Coates in this book to be intellectually and morally incurious and strangely self-absorbed — self-absorbed in ways that make for bad writing, as Parul Sehgal shows in this review.
Or at least I think she shows it. Presumably the people who like the book wouldn’t agree.
So what do you do when your response to a book is so different than that of other readers whom you admire and know to be thoughtful — especially when your own response is strongly negative? One strategy is to simply say de gustibus non disputandum est and go on with your life. Certainly that’s what I’m tempted to do in this case. I suspect, though, that I have failed in charity, which would not be good. I don’t want to let myself off the hook with the de gustibus line.
But: I really hated the book and find myself resenting the time that it cost me, time that I think I could better have spent in other ways. Revisiting it now would feel pointlessly self-punitive; plus, I doubt that I could read the book any more charitably while in this frame of mind.
So I will wait. I will just live with the uncertainty and the cognitive dissonance and in the meantime hope that, at some point down the line, I’ll be able to revisit the book in a cooler mood and see if it strikes me differently. There is of course a good chance that I’ll never get around to it; other challenges, other difficulties, the tyranny of the urgent always tend to crowd out such revisitation. But that’s life, you know? There are always things we want to think about, to pause and reflect on, but the flow of experience keeps moving. As Kierkegaard famously said:
It is quite true what philosophy says: that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards. Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with the thought that temporal life can never properly be understood because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt the position: backwards.
I just wanted to dislike a book in peace, and now I have this existential dilemma facing me! Man, self-examination sucks.
