Mind Picker: To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is an ambitious book that attempts to capture and explain the detachment of modern life, but as the main character is so unrecognisable as a real person -- someone whose experiences fall totally outside of the norm -- it fails entirely to provoke that "Ah, yes, that's just how it is" of universal recognition.

Paul O'Rourke is a dentist, essentially a middle-aged orphan, who has a history of falling in love hard with women (to the extent of trying to become a member of their extended families and erasing his own self in the process), and as a result, spends most of his time alone, his eyes glued to his "me-machine". He has spent his entire life trying to find that something that can be his everything -- his reason for living -- and his obsessive fandom for the Boston Red Sox (he watches every game live, wearing his ballcap, after eating chicken and rice, refuses to watch the sixth inning, tapes the games on a VCR -- of which he has a stack of extras for when his burns out -- and then immediately rewinds and rewatches each game) was nearly that everything until they went and won the World Series in 2004 and provoked in O'Rourke a crisis of faith. Although he spends most of his free time online, O'Rourke refuses to engage in social media:

I was already at one remove before the Internet came along. I need another remove? Now I have to spend the time that I'm not doing the thing they're doing reading about them doing it? Streaming the clips of them doing it, commenting on how lucky they are to be doing all those things, liking and digging and bookmarking and posting and tweeting all those things, and feeling more disconnected than ever? Where does this idea of greater connection come from? I've never in my life felt more disconnected. It's like how the rich get richer. The connected get more connected while the disconnected get more disconnected. No thanks man, I can't do it. The world was a sufficient trial before Facebook.

So when a website for his dental practise suddenly appears online -- one complete with Old Testament-sounding scripture and a surveillance-grade picture of him -- O'Rourke the atheist takes it as a personal attack. Because he never had a Facebook or Twitter account, the impersonator was able to create them under the name PaulCORourkeDDS, and as the posts and tweets from those accounts start to take on a vaguely anti-Semitic tone, the real O'Rourke has a hard time convincing people that he wasn't their author. As more and more information about a mysterious lost tribe called the Amalekites becomes the focus of the online presence, O'Rourke grows ever more fascinated while those he knows (essentially just his office staff) grow ever more alarmed.

There are funny bits in this book -- mostly in the snappy dialogue -- and that's the only thing keeping it from getting bogged down in all the quasi-philosophical stuff. This following device was used a few times, and as I never saw it before, I found it satisfyingly clever:

Mrs. Convoy leaned into the desk, flattening her knuckles on it like a linebacker bracing against the hard earth, and with eyeballs floating above her bifocals asked why I felt it necessary to sit in my own waiting room during peak hours. I told her, she said, “And how is the ‘complete experience’?” I told her, she said, “And do you think the ‘complete experience’ might be enhanced by a dentist who tends to his patients in a timely manner?” I told her, she said, “We will not get a reputation for being a drill-and-bill shop just because you tend to patients in a timely manner. Jesus Mary and Joseph,” she said. “Sometimes I think we all work for Toots the Clown.”

(And that has an added layer of irony when we learn that O'Rourke prefers his "porn with clowns in it", lol.) Yet, the main thrust of this book is about the disconnect we're all feeling from each other and how the secularization of society has robbed us of the rituals and higher purpose that used to give life meaning. Recalling his past obsessions with first a Catholic and then a Jewish woman, O'Rourke tried to piggyback onto their traditions, feeling that it's the rituals themselves and not necessarily their meanings that give life purpose. O'Rourke calls the Catholic Church "an abomination to man and a disgrace to God" and the Jewish extended family of his next girlfriend is turned off by his philo-Semitism (thinking of it as a form of reverse racism), and no matter how borderline the online comments about Jews become, the reader is told repeatedly that this isn't anti-Semitism so much as pro-Amalekitism (so, of course, there's no reason to ever take offense). And so who are the Amalekites? They were an ancient tribe of the Middle East, nearly wiped out by Moses and the Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness. When God finally appeared to the last member of the defeated tribe, King Amalek, His only instruction was to doubt in His existence. The irony of a god physically appearing and yet commanding doubt is appealing to O'Rourke because it promises a tradition where one can have rituals and community and fellowship without actually needing to believe in a deity. (And by using the actual biblical tribe of the Amalekites, the author is able to slide in commentary about land claims in Israel by non-Jews, and the Jews as the first perpetrators of genocide, and deflect criticism by having characters constantly explaining that this isn't anti-Semitism).

I found To Rise Again at a Decent Hour to be a really uneven book that lacked a clear vision of what it wanted to be; how it's on the 2014 Man Booker shortlist is beyond me. Joshua Ferris is an obviously talented and inventive writer, however, and although I haven't read him before, I've learned enough about him to want to read him again. And I should probably floss more.