A dash of pretension

I had my book group last night. Very entertaining. We discussed if our story has a hero, who is the guilty party in the marriage, and if it is more damaging to the male psyche to be considered unsuccessful or a bad lover (with a tangent about whether Balkan and English men have different answers to that question). There was a super well-read participant who made me feel dumb with his references to ‘The Invisible Man,’ ‘Anna Karenina,’ and other classics that I either haven’t read or have forgotten much of. Another participant had read every book by the author and gave us a thorough analysis of common themes in his writing. The story had the words ‘fucking’ and ‘cunt’ in it, both of which were never spoken – even when people read aloud the passages with those words in them.

There was also much searching for what my ninth grade English teacher called ‘the deeper meaning.’ In general, I am not a fan of reading things as symbols and metaphors and our story seemed particularly unsuited for such analysis. I can't imagine the author sitting down and saying, 'not seeing any fish through the glassbottom boat means that we can't see inside each other, even if we try.' During this phase of the discussion, a participant chimed in with the most quotable thing I have heard in a long time: “sex is a metaphor for paying the bills.”