Book Review - Americanon

 What does it mean to be an American? We might think of ideas like a melting pot or middle class values, apple pie or baseball. But being “American” is also a brand, one that has been assiduously cultivated from the founding of our nation and continues to this day. The belief in education, hard work, and thrift. That wealth is obtainable to anyone willing to work hard. The power of positive thinking. These ideas and others are central to Americanon, where Jess McHugh curates nearly 250 years of writing into a tidy thirteen book bibliography explaining our nation’s definition of itself. 

But contrary to the book’s subtitle that it is an “unexpected” survey of American history, McHugh focuses on blockbuster best sellers that sold in the millions or tens of millions (and in at least one case, more than 100 million!) marketed to and bought by the predominant class of people (white, protestant) that have, by and large, controlled our nation since its founding. In other words, focusing on the imprint Noah Webster and his speller and dictionary have had for 200 years, the folksy aphorisms attributed to Ben Franklin that still inform our work ethic or that a generation of wives and mothers wore out their copies of the original Betty Crocker cookbook, is unsurprising.

 

These books as well as others like The McGuffey Readers, The Old Farmer’s Almanac, and Catherine Beecher’s A Handbook to American Womanhood, may seem like relics to our forgotten, horse-and-buggy past, but as McHugh shows, they not only formed the scaffolding upon which we hang our national identity, they are still with us today. Franklin’s quip that “early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” and its implicit suggestion that clean living is a means of success finds purchase in self-help books like Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The McGuffey Readers, first published in the 1820s to teach Bible-based lessons to school-age children, are still used today by home-schoolers who have turned their backs on secular education.

Americanon can also be seen as a running commentary on our nation as it evolved from agrarian to industrial. For example, Emily Post’s Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home arose as fortunes were being accumulated in the early part of the 20th century. To be sure, it was targeted to (and to some extent targeted at) high society, but for Americans who believed that great wealth was obtainable by dint of their own effort, it offered a press-your-nose-against-the-window aspirational view of a possible future. Ultimately, the concepts Post espoused on polite company trickled down into popular culture and are now so pervasive that anytime social rules are needed for something like whether to turn your cell phone off at dinner, Post’s name is immediately associated with it even though she’s been dead for more than 60 years.

 

As McHugh journeys closer to our current day, we see the blending of advertising and aspiration in the form of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book and Dale Carnegie’s (nee Carnagey) How to Win Friends and Influence People. That Crocker was conjured out of thin air, like something out of Mad Men, to exemplify the perfect housewife while Carnegie, was truly self-made, are just two sides of the same coin. Each trafficked in the dreams and insecurities of their readers. Crocker represented what was expected of housewives in the 1940s and 1950s, whose mission as wife and mother was met by putting food on the kitchen table. Carnegie’s “fake it ‘till you make it” leitmotif with heavy doses of self-affirmation would be adopted by traveling salesmen and CEOs alike for decades to come.

 

But implicit in these and other Americanon books is that not reaching these goals is entirely your own fault, thus creating the vicious cycle that has spawned an entire self-help movement that is now so big, the New York Times devotes a separate bestseller list to them. McHugh combs the General Mills archives, plucking heartbreaking letters written by women to Betty Crocker - who they thought was a real person - expressing their anxieties about their marriages and whether they were failing as wives and mothers if they did not meet some just-out-of-reach ideal. It does not take much to draw a straight line from these letters to the current day “mommy wars” and back and forth over whether (or how) women can “have it all.”

 

Of course, myth making is part and parcel of the American experience. Whether or not George Washington actually chopped down that cherry tree is less important than the underlying message that story sent – do not lie. McHugh’s authors were no different. You may never eat a meal where you have to know which fork to pick up for the salad course, but courtesy and manners matter. If you want someone to swipe right on your dating profile, you need to know the difference between “your” and “you’re” - something 18^th and 19^th century writers like Beecher, Webster, and Franklin would surely approve of.

If there was a missed opportunity in Americanon it was in using the book’s tenth chapter as a broader survey of modern self-help works by people like Covey and Louise Hay that mostly reinforced what McHugh already said. That real estate would have been better served focusing on books that have helped flip our nation’s narrative. For example, McHugh points out that Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask drew a bright line between conventional, heterosexual behavior (good) and homosexual behavior (bad) thereby tagging millions of Americans as deviants. So too Beecher’s attitudes toward other women, who she championed when it came to education but spoke out against publicly when the topic was suffrage. Surely there was an opportunity to highlight how books like Letter From Birmingham Jail, Silent Spring, and Fear of Flying elevated the voices of the disenfranchised and dispossessed and nudged our own understanding of being an American in a more just direction.

 

And this is not to say that the foundational beliefs these authors instilled in us are bad. Individualism and risk taking have informed the lives of everyone from Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs. Post’s elevation of etiquette is the lubricant that greases our every social interaction. A cottage industry of cook books has sprouted in Crocker’s wake and expanded the field well beyond expecting a stay-at-home mom to do all the work. But there is also a dark side to our nation’s credo of self-reliance. As McHugh points out, a devotee of Hay’s power of positive thinking? Donald J. Trump.

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TV Review - Kevin Can F*** Himself

As someone who stayed in a bad marriage long past its expiration date, a scene from the second episode of AMC’s recently-concluded first season of Kevin Can F*** Himself hit hard. Allison McRoberts, a liquor store clerk whose dream of moving out of a rundown part of her blue color hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts and into a planned community of granite counter tops and manicured lawns was snuffed out when she learned her husband Kevin had drained their joint savings account, gives a thinly veiled explanation of her plot to kill Kevin to a barely-paying-attention librarian. As Allison finishes describing her protagonist moving on to a life of morning outings to the local café for scones and coffee while reading a book, the librarian looks up and asks simply “why doesn’t she just leave him?” 

It is a question anyone in a failed marriage contemplates, but Kevin is, albeit in an unconventional way, more than a story about a shitty marriage, it is about the abuse one partner heaps on another when societal norms deem it acceptable to do so. Kevin (the show) and Kevin (the husband) are modeled on familiar sitcom tropes like Everybody Loves Raymond and The King of Queens. Kevin is a stereotypical “Masshole” – a 35-year-old man/boy who worships at the altar of New England sports (a Wade Boggs photo by the front door, Tom Brady look-alikes at his birthday party, vanquishing a former New York Ranger in an eating contest to defend the honor of the Boston Bruins, etc.) has never met a chicken wing he did not want to eat, or a responsibility he could not avoid.

When the show focuses on his point of view, it is punctuated in bright colors and laugh tracks, with his equally dim best friend (and next door neighbor) Neil and gruff, always-in-a-barca-lounger dad Pete, acting as a sort of greek chorus of white male privilege affirming every outrageous thing that comes out of Kevin’s mouth. Allison is of course the wet blanket, a nagging mother figure cum wife who is the butt of every joke and the voice of reason constantly shot down by the men and Neil’s sister Patty, a sort of “guy’s girl” who joins in the pile on.

As viewers who have seen versions of this type of man portrayed on television over and over, Kevin conditions us to see the humor in Kevin’s behavior but it is only when the camera shifts to Allison’s drab, single camera, no-laugh-track point of view that the emotional cost of his conduct is fully realized. There, Kevin is not the hero of every story, but rather, the villain, a narcissist whose ego leaves no room for his put-upon wife whose treatment borders on emotional abuse, no matter how firmly she tries to eye roll it all away. 

When Patty tells Allison that Kevin has squandered the savings she so diligently squirreled away, thereby crushing Allison’s dream of a better future, she has her “breaking bad” moment and decides that Kevin must die. But as the season goes on, we realize that Kevin never suffers any consequences for his actions while Allison is always getting hit with the shrapnel. To take one example, as Kevin and Neil are preparing their “famous” chili, Allison messes with them, artificially creating a fight that leaves the two men competing instead of collaborating. But instead of chalking up a small win, she simply creates a new problem for herself. Not only does Kevin need a new partner (her) but he must now one-up his competitor by slow roasting a whole pig. When Allison can no longer deal with Kevin and gets the two to reconcile, Kevin marches off, leaving her to deal with the dead animal’s now charred remains. In another episode, Allison uses Kevin’s car for a road trip, but when she does not answer his constant texts and phone calls, he reports the car stolen, leaving Allison to deal with the cops who pull her over.

In sitcom world, Kevin’s behavior might be laughed off as an unenlightened man’s perverse way of showing love, but in her world, it is effectively a death sentence – a needy, controlling man who will never let her out of his grasp and she, with less than $200 to her name and limited job options, will never escape. It is a grim tableau effectively painted in the show’s first few episodes, but having established the human stakes involved, it felt as through the writers lost the thread. When I watch TV, I am usually on the lookout for fat that could be trimmed, storylines that could be tightened, and general padding that if shorn away would make the show better, but with Kevin I had the opposite reaction. It felt as though too much was being packed into its eight episodes for the various story lines to be given the room they needed to develop.

For example, Patty, as it turns out, is not so different than Allison. She stews over Kevin and Neil’s unearned position within their social circle, but she responds to it not by plotting their murders, but into a down-low hustle as the local area pain pill dealer thanks to a hook up at the pharmacy. And as Allison and Patty start appreciating the similar situations they find themselves in (Patty’s romantic life, such that it is, is an antiseptic relationship with a boyfriend whose idea of a good time is sitting on the couch nibbling on salad while watching shows saved on his TiVo) they go from frenemies to besties.

While their evolving friendship is nicely framed, it is in service to the rest of a story that feels rushed, mostly by taking the one thing out of Allison’s hands that should have been valued the most – her agency. Instead of going through with her plan to make Kevin’s death look like an accidental overdose by slipping Oxycontin into his food, a series of events (which again, happen rapidly) force her to rely on Nick, a local criminal who is leaning on Patty to keep sourcing him drugs even though her connection is in jail, to do the deed for her. In the meantime, Patty dumps her limp boyfriend and becomes involved with Tammy, the police detective investigating the local drug scene, while Allison reconnects with Sam, a former flame who has moved back to the area with his wife.

If your head is spinning that is understandable. It is A LOT to pack into what are effectively only five episodes and it shows. Crucially, Allison trades reliance on one man for two even though the show wants to lean into female allyship. She will forever be beholden to Nick as his co-conspirator in her husband’s murder and becomes dependent on Sam for emotional and financial support by starting an affair with him and also taking a job at the diner he owns. A ten, or twelve episode order might have provided more opportunity to flesh out these story lines; instead, they felt more like plot device than character development.

Finally, the show lost sight of the more important (and I would argue, compelling) elements it established in the first place: of male privilege, the emotional burdens women carry and how those things are perceived depending on whose story is being told. Ultimately, it landed right where it began. When Nick strikes out on his own and decides to fulfill the hit earlier than Allison expected, Kevin shoots him dead with a gun Allison had stolen when she and Patty traveled out of state earlier in the season and then hid in the backyard. Kevin is hailed as a hero and turns his newfound minor celebrity into a run for Mayor with a grim-faced Allison as his reluctant partner. Instead of being a cri de couer for female empowerment, Kevin reinforced the status quo.