And maybe that’s the point.

The Guest tells the story of 22-year-old Alex, the high-end escort turned live-in girlfriend of Simon, an older, wealthy executive with a penchant for stability and routine. It’s summer in what appears to be the Hamptons, and Alex’s listless days are filled with beach trips and painkillers, until she commits a faux pas at a dinner party and is abruptly ejected from Simon’s manicured mansion and life.

From there, the novel oscillates between upstairs/downstairs-style narrative to grifter account, only half-heartedly accomplishing either. That may be intentional, the novel coyly suggests a few times, but is it a cop-out on the part of the author? Either way, it’s debatable if the novel is intriguing enough to make the exercise worth it.

Part of the lack of personality stems from Alex’s former life as an escort. She explains that the key to client cultivation is subduing her own quirks and turning herself into a blank slate onto which potential patrons can project their own fantasies. She defaults to these skills to survive in the Hamptons once Simon kicks her out, closely observing those around her—from entitled homeowners and their apathetic children to the butlers, gardeners, and nannies who make their fiefdoms run—to procure food, shelter, and electricity to power her dysfunctional mobile phone.

There’s a metaphor being constructed here, one meant to lecture readers about class and privilege. America has turned people at the bottom of the economic ladder into products to be consumed by greedy consumers at the top. Alex articulates this point most successfully in her commentary on 21st-century art collection. She notes that "sometimes the work was a mere idea of the work, existing only as an image emailed back and forth, collectors reselling a piece they bought before they even ever saw it in person."

Cribbing from postmodern theory, she convincingly emphasizes the primacy of marketing, advertising, and hype over a painting’s inherent value—defined, perhaps, by the spiritual toil that went into producing it, and its degree of participation in God’s creation—and compares this to how sex work functions. The hyperreality generated by advertising, she seems to say, commodifies the most beautiful and transcendent parts of life—art and sex—rendering them into the transactional byproducts of shrewd power brokering.

To Cline’s credit, Alex is complicated enough that this lecture comes across as less annoying than it would otherwise be: she’s not just an avatar of woke moralizing. She’s flawed insofar as she’s too self-absorbed to recognize her own contribution to the chaos and excess she condemns, giving herself a pass for what she seems to think is the inherent virtue of being essentially homeless. She inconveniences the working class with whom she supposedly sympathizes, while violating the affluent to degrees beyond what they deserve for their supposed crimes of privilege.

In this way, the novel is reminiscent of HBO’s White Lotus, to which other reviews have compared it. The popular series is notable for casting a critical eye not just on wealthy patrons of the titular resort, but on the flawed men and women who help run it, and everyone in between.

Then again, aside from the contradiction of being both class-conscious and self-absorbed, Alex isn’t that complicated after all. The plot goes out of its way to deny readers any indication of Alex’s background: where she’s from, why she became an escort, or what her future goals might be. This blank-slate anonymity is part of the larger argument the novel is trying to construct—but at what cost? There’s no personality for readers to latch onto, just a portrait of a woman reduced to survival mode, with a keen instinct for social observation.

It's interesting that female protagonists in these types of tales are becoming more and more wan and detached from familial and romantic connection. They also keep straying farther from the traditional female plot, that of marriage and reproduction. (Even Edna had a husband and children!) Feminists will celebrate this as some type of victory for liberation, however flawed. But it makes for a boring, sad story of a single woman that reinforces the categories of a sterile, vapid, materialistic world, where the only fertile force is debt, which seems to multiply.

The Guest is not a remarkable novel—and that’s by design. Those who enjoyed the sparklingly offbeat accounts of other female scammers—like Anna Delvey, Caroline Calloway, and Sarma Melngailis—may enjoy it. But be warned that the book has been stripped of the glitter and peculiarities that made those other women memorable—all in the service of spinning a yarn into a parable.

The Guest: A Novel
by Emma Cline
Random House, 304 pp., $28

Nora Kenney is director of media relations at the Manhattan Institute.

The post Great Exploitations appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

That was then. A lot has changed in the decade since. As Eberstadt acknowledges in the book’s updated version, Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited, the social unrest of the last 10 years has primed a rising skepticism of liberation’s false fruits, sometimes among the most unlikely sources.

I should start by saying I was reading Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited at the same time I was rereading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the 2006 novel about a father’s tortured mission to protect his son in a post-apocalypse inhospitable to the most vulnerable. My reading of the two colored each other. And so, I was struck, like others, by Eberstadt’s discourse on the "fury of the fatherless," which draws a connection between a pill that enables would-be fathers to abdicate their responsibilities and a raging fatherless generation that turns to identity politics and activism to foster a false sense of kinship that a traditional family, in a bygone era, would have otherwise provided. This is in stark contrast to the selfless father in The Road, who tirelessly wills the good for his child, in the most brutal circumstances.

Let’s unpack that. The arc of one of Eberstadt’s primary arguments goes something like this: The innovation of the pill has undermined the natural law that conception is the co-creative end of sex, instead suggesting it’s a result more of the woman’s agency, insofar as she has the option to take the pill or not. It also enables women to delay childrearing in favor of career, which amplifies competition in higher education and frustrates hypergamy (marrying up). Both conditions have undermined male agency which, coupled with the government’s willingness to play "super-daddy" by providing welfare to single moms, has exacerbated fatherlessness in America. "Some 40 percent of all children lack a biological father in the home," Eberstadt writes.

Of course, none of this is new to the ultra-religious right. What’s new is the colorful array of examples the past 10 years have provided of the disorder a fatherless society can foster. Eberstadt connects the "fury of the fatherless" to the uptick of violent unrest in America surrounding flash points like the confirmation hearing of Amy Coney Barrett, who defies the idea that childrearing, faith, and career achievement must conflict, or the BLM protests in the summer of 2020. Many of the leading anti-racist activists, themselves, she points out, are wounded products of broken homes.

At the same time, she warns, Christians shouldn’t take for granted that their church will always stand in defiance of the sexual revolution’s permissive ethics. Many haven’t—to their own demise. "The churches that have tried to protect themselves from intolerance by ceding to its demands are dying," Eberstadt warns, alleging that "some will not even exist a hundred years from now." This is part of a larger arc, detailing how Christianity has fallen apart in the last century because of a civil war between two camps: one hoping that the revolution can be accommodated and another "convinced by history that this experiment has been tried over and over and has always failed." She describes the undoing of mainline Protestant churches "over their chronically unsuccessful attempts to build the Church of ‘Nice’"—an aim we see in the news just this month as the Church of England considers gender-neutral pronouns for God.

But it’s not just Protestants. Even Catholicism isn’t safe. Eberstadt documents the "scramble over doctrine in the Catholic Church," driven by advocates who believe Catholic teaching can be reconciled with the faith of secularism, which, she demonstrates, has a fervent religious nature of its own.

That there is perilous division in the Catholic Church is poignantly underscored by the fact that the book’s introduction is written by the late Cardinal George Pell, who died in Rome earlier this year. In the weeks following his death, Vatican journalist Sandro Magister told the Associated Press that Pell had been the author of a controversial memo, written under the pseudonym "Demos," that had circulated among cardinals last year. The document had called the pontificate of Pope Francis "a disaster," pointing out among other complaints that the Holy Father had fueled confusion by elevating voices that flout sexual morality, while engaging in "active persecution" against those who adhere to traditional teaching.

In other words, "Demos"—Cardinal Pell, if Magister is to be believed—accuses Pope Francis of fostering what Eberstadt’s book would call "Christianity Lite," instead of acknowledging that stricter churches are stronger churches.

So, where does this leave us? One of Eberstadt’s central messages is the importance of Humanae Vitae, the papal encyclical that first inspired her deep-dive into contraceptive culture 10 years ago. Anyone skeptical of post-liberation should challenge themselves to read it, even if they wouldn’t consider themselves religious. As for Christians, they should recover strong adherence to it, recognizing that the "effort to throw out the unwanted bathwater of the sexual code takes the proverbial baby—the rest of Christian practice and belief—along with it."

Another core message is the need for compassion toward the "walking wounded," those injured by the soft biowarfare post-liberation has inflicted (so, all of us, to some degree). Children of divorce, men addicted to pornography, women bruised by hookup culture—these people are in pain, Eberstadt exhorts. But whereas "the rival church of secularism shortchanges mankind," Christianity has answers. "The human race, plodding and delinquent though it may be, perpetually shows signs of wanting more than the church of the new secularism can deliver."

To that end, she includes a beautiful passage about Chartres Cathedral—where Pell was to have offered the traditional Latin Mass this summer with those same "Traditionalists" cited in his memo. She writes that 11th-century Christians in Chartres, having witnessed their town devastated in a fire, were wounded and defeated. But they set to work rebuilding.

"Among the most sublime creations on earth, [the cathedral] is the legacy of men and women in a particular time and place who had witnessed the signature disaster of their era—and who refused to resign themselves to it," Eberstadt writes. "So too will the Church of tomorrow come to be built, not by partisans of the new intolerance, or by people who buckle to censorship or self-censorship; it will instead be laid stone by stone by some of the very people burned in the original fire."

Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited
by Mary Eberstadt
Ignatius Press, 199 pp., $19.95

Nora Kenney is director of media relations at the Manhattan Institute.

The post Daddy Issues All the Way Down appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

A new book from Jim Towey tells the story of the unlikely kinship between the tiny missionary and glamorous monarch, as well as others he witnessed as legal counsel and devoted friend to the saint. To Love and Be Loved: A Personal Portrait of Mother Teresa is a powerful "white pill," masterfully weaving together vignettes from Towey’s own life with the arc of the Albanian nun pursuing the will of God.

In the opening, Towey is a winsome twenty-something D.C. staffer for Republican senator Mark Hatfield. He’s on the political fast-track by day, and barhopping by night—yet unfulfilled. Meanwhile, Mother Teresa, who grew up Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, is a child coming of age amid complicated civil unrest, helping her mother provide for the family after her father is poisoned by political rivals.

One of the most moving moments early in the book is when Mother Teresa says goodbye to her mother, Drana, at the age of 19 to enter the Sisters of Loreto and begin missionary work in India. "They would never see each other again," Towey writes, describing what would become an excruciating cross for both to bear.

Likewise, Towey’s story is not without crosses. In a heartbreaking passage early on, his best friend commits suicide shortly after college, following a failed marriage and bout of despair. Towey describes the "snide cynicism, nurtured by the phony social rituals and mercenary friendships of Capitol Hill" he cultivated following the loss.

It’s in this sullen state that Towey first encounters Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity (MCs) on a trip to Calcutta on Hatfield’s behalf. At first, he’s disgusted, assaulted by the "smell of sewage and burning garbage" of the decaying city. But during his brief meeting with Mother Teresa, whom he calls "Mother" throughout the book, she persuades him to visit Kalighat, her Home for the Dying, and later, the MCs in Washington, D.C.

The trip to Kalighat is a disaster, humiliating the "white-bread congressional staffer" who fails to embrace the service tasks assigned to him before retreating from India altogether to a luxurious vacation in Hawaii that puts his spiritual angst into perspective. But when he returns to D.C., he resolves to honor his promise to visit the sisters living there—and finally a spark ignites. Towey falls in love with the MCs, eventually quitting his job to pursue full-time volunteering, and even discerning with the MC fathers at their Tijuana seminary.

After realizing he is not called to the priesthood, Towey begins to serve the MCs in a legal capacity, offering advice as the order blossoms internationally. Meanwhile, he paints a picture of Mother’s significance in a fast-paced 20th century that sees the disabled, the elderly, and even the unborn, as increasingly inconvenient.

It’s important to understand the scope of her accomplishments: "By the time of her death, she had 3,842 sisters, 363 brothers, and 13 fathers operating more than 650 soup kitchens, health clinics, leprosy centers, and shelters for the desperately poor and sick, in 120 countries," Towey writes.

But Mother Teresa did not build her "multinational empire" for fame or success. Throughout the story, she rejects "hacks" that could increase the efficiency of the order but are misaligned with the charism to share "the poverty of those they served." At one point, when someone suggests the sisters could serve more souls if they used washing machines instead of laundering saris by hand, "Mother responded that she had taken a vow of poverty, not efficiency." Similarly, when a critic points out that she could never help every single street dweller in Calcutta, she responds: "God doesn’t call me to be successful. God calls me to be faithful."

Such a philosophy is a shot through the heart of a convenience-driven, efficiency-obsessed culture. Carter Snead describes it well in What It Means to Be Human, which shares in Mother’s spirit, encouraging society to honor those whose bodily impediments exclude them from "expressive individualism." Similarly, Ross Douthat’s book, The Deep Places, condemns excessive meritocracy, suggesting that suffering, which our technocratic world lacks the categories to appreciate, is replete with inherent value.

Mother Teresa understood that well. Towey describes her crippling battle with "darkness," based on revelations that surfaced after her death. While those surrounding Mother assumed her relentless capacity for service was driven by an intimate relationship with a God "whispering sweet nothings into her ear," the reality was bleak. The saint spent decades of her life in impenetrable darkness, carrying the private cross of almost unbearable spiritual anguish. "Even deep down, right in, there is nothing but emptiness and darkness," she wrote. "It pains without ceasing."

What’s remarkable is that she persisted despite such desolation. "Mother knew her life was not about her," Towey writes. Following a mystical call from God she received on a train to Darjeeling in the foothills of the Himalayas, she pursued her vocation despite the complete stripping away of every possible comfort, physical and spiritual.

Such heroic selflessness reaps rewards. Resplendent moments of grace are scattered throughout the book, including one told through the voice of the tormented princess of Wales: "Today, something very profound touched my life—I went to Mother Teresa’s home in Calcutta and found the direction I’ve been searching for all these years. The Sisters sang to me on arrival, a deeply spiritual experience and I soared to such great heights in my spirit."

Perhaps the only faint shortcoming of the book is that it’s situated too squarely in the era of dignitaries like Princess Diana, and her peers Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton, and John Paul II, all of whom appear in the story. Indeed, while Towey addresses Mother’s critics from the left, offering a beat-down of Christopher Hitchens, he fails to address critics from the increasingly traditional rightward flank of the Church, who raise questions about her ecumenicalism or reception of Communion in the hand.

Then again, while the edgy Dimes Square crowd might call saints like John Paul II and Mother Teresa "normies," it’s important to understand their profound spiritual legacy, more relevant now than ever. In defending the dignity of suffering against a culture that increasingly valorizes euthanasia as a solution to conditions like John Paul II’s Parkinson’s, or Father Stu’s muscle degeneration as dramatized in the eponymous film, luminaries like Douthat and Snead write in a rich tradition that the Polish pope learned from his spiritual sister, Mother Teresa. It’s one we must urgently recover—and Towey lights the way.

To Love and Be Loved: A Personal Portrait of Mother Teresa
by Jim Towey
Simon & Schuster, 288 pp., $27

Nora Kenney is director of media relations at the Manhattan Institute.

The post Good Habits To Follow appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Maya Sinha’s debut novel The City Mother toils with similar themes. How aware are we of patterns and moods that hide in plain sight, lurking just below the surface of our busy lives? What are the moonwalking bears dancing across the sets of our own daily dramas, just beyond the threshold of conscientious detection?

For the main character, Cara Nielsen, pain and suffering are ready teachers, heightening her awareness of previously unseen realities. In college, for example, she develops a paralyzing bout of agoraphobia, which enables her to read English literature with a degree of penetration previously inaccessible. She realizes that a fear of certain spaces drives much of Tennyson’s poetry, earning an A for a term paper about the "agoraphobic imagination" informing his work.

Later, as a small-town reporter in her early 20s, Cara undergoes a similar revelation. Assigned to write about the town drunk, she casts her subject, Livingston, as impoverished and destitute, concluding her piece with a conventional, tidy call for improved homelessness services. But she receives a call from Livingston’s sister after the story runs, informing her that Livingston has voluntarily chosen vagrancy despite a significant inheritance.

Livingston’s bewildering preference for vagabondage is the moonwalking bear that escapes Cara’s detection. She determines from that day forward to stick to verifiable facts in her reporting, realizing that the truth, when carefully observed, is stranger than fiction. "This hidden story gave me my first glimpse into a great mystery," Cara says. At the center of the story, "the thing that could not be reported squatted like a toad, cold to the touch and blind, inexplicable and uncanny." The closest she can come to approaching the toad, she realizes, is to contemplate the objective reality surrounding it.

These vivid interludes, however, are just flashbacks within the broader plot. The novel’s present-day setting is a psych ward.

The present-day Cara is a new mother, driven off-kilter by crushing responsibilities, an eroding marriage, and a beautiful apartment that’s falling apart. The anxieties of motherhood have changed her in indelible ways, agitating buried generational traumas and unlocking fresh, unanticipated fears. Now, instead of divining the paranoid motivations driving Victorian poets, or looking for the "toads" to make a newspaper story pop, she notices the dark, menacing energies underlying fire escapes, landings, balconies, and knives. The landing at the top of the stairs is threatening to pull her infant son headfirst down the long stairway. The fire escape is beckoning for her to jump. The world, she observes, is filled with precarious threats. Objects that once seemed ordinary are now ever-present reminders of inevitable doom.

Intriguingly, the concept of the "city" becomes a particular catch-all for Cara’s postpartum anxieties—both in a mythopoetic, literary sense, and in a pragmatic, material one. On the one hand, she sees in the city the type of grotesquerie and folk-carnivalesque that her literary hero, Baudelaire, ascribes to 19th-century Parisian slums. At the same time, if the people on the streets are "raggedy and demented" in a way suited for Romantic poetry, the ethos driving the city’s broader functions is garish and empty, a beacon of cultural postmodernism. "Everything is so clean—so fun and nice and pleasant! iPad! Wi-Fi! Vente Latte! Baby Gap! And on and on," Cara explains. But for all the sleek, name-brand amenities glittering on the surface of urban life, there’s a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the realities of suffering and evil—one that Cara finds destabilizing.

"We live in a society that tries to keep us dazzled with euphoria in a bright cloud of lively and joy-loving slogans," Cara says, quoting Thomas Merton. "Yet nothing is more empty and more dead, nothing is more insultingly insincere and destructive than the vapid grins on the billboards and the moron beatitudes in the magazines which assure us that we are all in bliss right now." Merton’s acerbic diagnosis of the postmodern world captures Cara’s feelings toward the city and its artificial comfort. Instead, Cara longs for medievalism, where leering gargoyles scale towering cathedrals, acknowledging to the peasants below that yes, evil is real. Or as Cara puts it: "To let you know you weren’t going crazy!"

The postmodern world offers no reverence for suffering, Cara concludes. And what of the people who can thrive in such a society? By Cara’s estimation, they are a chic, efficient breed from which she feels increasingly alienated. Technocratic and idealistic, they revere diversity, scorn off-color jokes, and pursue green initiatives. Drinking bone broth, brewing specialized coffee, and riding $1,400 bikes, they’re neither youthful nor old, but able-bodied young professionals, lifehacking their way through prim, intellectual careers.

Against this backdrop, The City Mother weaves together Cara’s investigation of a multilayered set of psychological mysteries. On the broadest, philosophical level, she puzzles over the meaning of life and the purpose of evil. "I felt a pressing need to ascertain the nature of reality, not as an academic matter, but because I had brought a child into it," she explains. On a more psychoanalytical level, she wants to understand the twisted nature of the city and of herself. And, on the most concrete level, amidst the philosophical puzzles, hallucinations, and dirty diapers of her life, she pursues a missing person’s case, a hardboiled whodunit of shady suspects and perplexing clues.

Sinha’s new book is deeply engaging, and Cara’s voice is literary and full of wit. The only shortcoming is that a few of the mysteries unravel without satisfying conclusions. Even more mystifying is the novel’s handling of Cara’s relationship with her mother, Claudia, whose own trauma is key to understanding both her shallow relationship with Cara, and Cara’s pathological response to childrearing. But despite the emphasis on the theme of maternity, the degree of resolution achieved between mother and daughter is insufficient.

But it’s not too late for Sinha to follow up in a sequel, and I desperately hope she will. Specifically, many of the resolutions to Cara’s inquiries are tied up with her conversion to Catholicism, a theme that warrants further investigation. Particularly, Cara finds in the figure of the Blessed Mother the satisfaction of confounding paradoxes: Mary, the Mother of Sorrows, is an icon both of pain and ecstasy, of mundane practicality and numinous rapture. These epiphanies help Cara make sense of her own maternity—of the good and evil, the practical and supernatural, characterizing it.

"Pain is the root of knowledge," Cara says, quoting Simone Weil. She’s right. It’s thanks to the simultaneous joy and pain of motherhood that Cara notices moonwalking bears in her own life, enabling her to solve mysteries in salvific ways.

The City Mother
by Maya Sinha
Chrism Press, 192 pp., Kindle $4.99

Nora Kenney is deputy director of media relations at the Manhattan Institute.

The post REVIEW: ‘The City Mother’ appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.