We have reached peak feedback. The customer is not only always right, but always writing, rating. The bank, the phone company and the hospital want us to evaluate our experiences with them on a scale of 1 to 10. There are Yelp reviews of Planet Earth.
The constant assessment of daily life is among the all-too-familiar but strange developments scrutinized by Emily Mester in her unsettling first book, a collection of personal essays about consumption called, in contrast to its slimness, “American Bulk.” Even at the grave, she notes, buyers are weighing in on the many choices of coffin: “One wrote ominously ‘I will purchase again.’”
Writing as the alter ego “Em” — folksy or menacing, depending on how you squint — Mester herself used to post online reviews of scratchy throw pillows, bad haircuts, a mean history teacher, until a restaurant owner responded to explain the human struggle behind a disappointing burrito.
Looking for confirmation of her choices begins to seem, as the young ’uns say, sus. “In my attempts to reduce the frictions between me and certain objects,” Mester writes, “I’d multiplied the frictions that invariably remained. If I believed there was a best body wash, I had to fear the worst.”
Death by synthetic fruit scent?
“American Bulk” is framed by Mester’s family dynamic, all roads leading to Storm Lake, Iowa, the longtime home to her paternal grandmother — an English teacher and champion tightwad — who collected freebies eventually to the point of hoarding, and finding the sameness in places including South Carolina and New York City, where the author now lives. Another towering figure in the book is her father, a MAGA Republican and successful lawyer who used to take his five children to Costco instead of church on Sundays. “Chain restaurants are soothing,” Mester theorizes, “because they are the same everywhere, like hymns.”
Her worship of junk food as a teen landed her in a fat camp, which she describes in “Live, Laugh, Lose,” one of the less original essays, but worth reading for its correctly shuddering assessment that “raw tomatoes are enemy No. 1 for picky eaters.”
Mester and her father, too, accumulate mountains of stuff, in different ways: She dithers over her purchases and (often agonizingly) returns them, seeking joy; he amasses, in a spirit of practicality, and sometimes just walks away from the piles. “The American Dream, as we know it, is abundance,” she writes. “But it is an equally American dream to be able to abandon, drop everything, to jettison, without guilt, anything that weighs you down.”
This is not the book to turn to for the true and gruesome ecological consequences of wastefulness. But it excels at restoring texture to the smooth banalities of our consumer existence. Mester is like a Midwestern Baudrillard, distinguishing between the “earthy bourgeois glamour of Whole Foods,” “Target’s warm graphic buoyancy” and “the hot American urgency of 7-Eleven.” She notes how brands have leached the beauty from phrases like “olive garden,” “mountain dew” and “hidden valley.” Succinctly and painfully, she describes how new efficiencies in the meatpacking business and a farm crisis in the 1980s decimated Main Streets and small towns.
Mester was an indifferent boarding school student who felt alien to the “windblown, affable” prepsters (she wears her lesbianism lightly) — and unlike her dad, who left the Ivy League with resentment and credit card debt, returned to Iowa for college and graduate school.
Before starting the University of Iowa’s M.F.A. program in nonfiction, she got a job as a sales associate at Ulta, the cosmetics emporium, where “the customer is king, the C.E.O. is divine, and between them, like an isthmus, stretches your cheerful smile.” She scrubbed toilets and still marvels at the corporate jargon: “A shelf was a gondola, a shelf was an endcap, a shelf was an étagère.”
An office internship later on involved writing for standardized tests, during which she rarely exceeded a step count of three figures, only putting the phone down, reluctantly, to defecate, undress and sleep.
That screens can consume the entirety of one’s existence is hardly news in 2024, but Mester’s confessional, her sustained examination of the shame of shopping more than you need to, has dash and daring. There are underdeveloped stretches, like in the still-bustling malls the book patrols, but “American Bulk” is always alert to the sudden sign that reveals meaning amid all the merch.
In this our Review Nation, a cultural critic of such promise deserves a big welcome mat.
The post Shopping and Shame Share the Shelves in ‘American Bulk’ appeared first on New York Times.
