Love in the Time of Contagion

A Diagnosis

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For folks seeing my one-star rating at Goodreads: it's subjective, I just didn't like it. As the kids say (but usually abbreviate): your mileage may vary. It might be useful and insightful to someone else, maybe you. Theoretically possible. But not me.

Why did I read it? Well, it's my library book rule: if I check it out, I have to read it. I might not have checked it out if we were in the pre-Covid days of leisurely library browsing: glancing at a few pages might have caused me to put it back on the shelf. But we've gotten into the habit of putting books on hold online, picking them up a few hours later.

I thought it would be a safer bet. I really liked Kipnis's previous book, Unwanted Advances. I blogged about her conflicts with Kampus Kancel Kulture pretty frequently in the 2017-2018 era: here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. But there's not much about that here. No warning signals were emitted when I listened to her interview with Nick Gillespie at Reason. So:

It's purportedly an examination of how the Covid pandemic has affected our intimate relationships, with callbacks to the AIDS disaster of the 1980s. There's precious little actual data on that here; Kipnis relies mainly on her own experience, and those revealed to her by her acquaintances. An example is her fourth chapter, in which she talks about her Zooming with an ex-student "Zelda", described as "queer, Black, and very online". Sample paragraph describing a social media incident Zelda had to deal with:

So why had [Frank] sent [Zelda] Camille's tweets? "Okay, this is kind of messy," she said, laughing a little self-consciously. Zelda had known that Frank knew Camille—in fact she'd first encountered Camille on one of Frank's social media pages, and texted him when she and Camille first started dating to say "Wow, Camille's cute and kind of cool." Frank hadn't at first told Zelda that he'd also had a brief thing with Camille until Zelda said, "You're acting weird, like did you sleep with her," and he said yeah, and Zelda was like, okay whatever. Frank also knew Olivia, Zelda's current girlfriend, and he was just scrolling through his timeline and saw Camille's tweets, figured they were about Zelda and probably thought, Camille's making a fool of herself, so I'm gonna screenshot these tweets because they'll be gone soon.
The legend of Zelda takes up about 40 pages of this 210-page book. I was uninterested the whole way through, but really uninterested in that.

But guess what? "Queer, Black" folks have fraught relationships, just like white heterosexuals. Things are certainly exacerbated when a large chunk of that aspect of their lives is revealed in social media. (To show off my fuddy-duddiness, being promiscuously sex-obsessed is probably adding to the drama.)

That's not all, but that's enough. I was occasionally amused by Kipnis's prose artistry, but she's just not speaking to me here.


Last Modified 2024-01-17 4:00 PM EDT