trivialchemy's Reviews > The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I recently had a brief relationship with a young lady who had studied philosophy at a university in southern California. The relationship was destined to be a brief one, as she left for the Philippines to join the Peace Corps just a week or so ago. On one of our last evenings together, she thanked me for something that I found curious.

She said, "Isaiah, have you ever met someone at a party or something who finds out you studied philosophy -- and then they just try to talk to you the whole rest of the night about random philosophers they happen to know about, when all you want to do is play beer pong and find someone to make out with?"

I'm not sure I would have voiced the sentiment in exactly the same words, but I know what she was talking about. Actually, for me these days my background in philosophy is fairly inconspicuous, but the exact same thing happens to me for my work in the space industry. I'll meet someone at a bar or a house party who has a subscription to Scientific American, and he'll find out where I work and then he'll tag behind me for the entire rest of the party asking my opinion about aliens, or string theory, or any number of subjects almost totally unrelated to my actual specialty or areas of interest except they happen to fall under the general heading of space sciences. Or perhaps in a rare case he might want to talk about space policy, or advanced propulsion systems, or something else that I do actually care about. But it's Friday night, man. Can't you just chill out? Let me get drunk? Wait... do you by any chance have a sister?

"Anyway," she continued, "thanks for not ever doing that."

Now to understand why I find it curious that she would thank me for such a thing, you do have to realize that we had certainly had conversations about philosophy. I remember one particular rant about utilitarianism, Mills, and his relationship to his father on a concert lawn somewhere. And I'm sure I made plenty of my categorically unfunny cracks about Kantian imperatives.

But the point was that I didn't bring it up when it was totally irrelevant and then refuse to drop it the whole night because I didn't understand that even people that love philosophy don't walk around thinking about philosophy all day (barring, of course, our dear MFSO), nor do they give two shits that you are marginally acquainted with a few Wikipedia entries on phenomenology. And even if they did, couldn't it wait until after we meet your sister and I've got a decent buzz going?

Well, this book is that guy. He follows you around at a party boring you with his pent-up discussion questions from a survey course on philosophy that his professor didn't care enough to work out of him.

Don't misunderstand me. My issue with this book is not the literary name-dropping or the dime store philosophizing. Some authors can get away with this stuff, even brilliantly. Kundera, for example. The difference is that Kundera is interesting. Whereas nothing and no one in this book is anything but a one-dimensional bore.

Who cares about these people? Why should I care about them? One's a concierge, the other's a privileged brat with the exact same hormones as every other 12 year-old girl on the planet. Now, you might say, that's the point, Barbery is trying to show that these people are marginalized, and look how beautiful they actually are in their minds and spirits. But they're not beautiful. I don't give a damn that they're smart. You know what, lots of people are smart. Smart people are a dime a dozen. That doesn't make you, or me, or Renee or Paloma a special beautiful flower. It makes them smart, but they're still completely uninteresting.

I mean, that's really the crux of the irritant right there. Barbery spends half of this book droning on and on about how this concierge and schoolgirl are so unseen because of social expectations, and she would have them be redeemed because they are both intelligent and tender. But that's absurd. That's like Good Will Hunting without the dénouement. I'll say it right now, I don't care about Renee, because she's a concierge in a building in France. I read the whole book and I still don't care. Is it because I'm stilted by my class astigmatism? Please. I'm barely middle-class. I grew up in trailers and fertilized lawns for a living. I don't care about her because she is a concierge and has done nothing interesting with her life except sit in her apartment with a fat cat and read Tolstoy. And the ultimate stupidity -- the most absurd thing in this entire book -- is this ridiculous and unbelievable artifice that Renee has to "hide" who she is, because of the expectations of the upper class. As if they're going around with spyglasses on trying to root out concierges who have read too much Marx. What garbage! If I found out my concierge had read Marx, I would (a) not give a shit and (b) avoid her as much as humanly possible, out of fear that she would talk to me in exactly the way Renee talks to the reader in this book: interminably.

If anything, I"d be more interested in her if she were an ignorant working-class stiff. I'd like to know what her life is like, then. Carver writes about people like that all the time, and its enthralling. Because he makes you care about these people and their motivations. Intelligentsia pretensions in a do-nothing concierge? Excuse me while I pour some more bourbon in this drink.

Same goes for Paloma. She's precocious, fine. That's charming, I guess, but it's not redeeming. She wants to kill herself and burn down her family's house. Wow. That's really unique. I guess I should care about her "plight." Or... just maybe... she's exactly the same as every other precocious 12 year-old brat in the bourgeoise world and she'll get over it as soon as she discovers penis and marijuana.

I've read this book be described as very "French" in its casting of the class divides, but I think that's totally incorrect. The invisibility of people who aren't interesting is universal. The ethic espoused in this book -- that Renee and Paloma are profoundly worthwhile because they are intelligent and tender is unequivocally American. Only in modern western cultures would we say, "oh! how wonderful and individual that you are smart and feel alone! you are a special flower! everyone gets a participation ribbon!" No. A brat who wants to burn her house down and a concierge who has done nothing with her life except isolate herself are not special, no matter how many books they've read. They are every single uninteresting person that I don't want to read books about.

Don't even get me started on Kakuro, the messianic father-figure (or the absurd Japanese fetish that permeates the book like one of those guys that follows you around at a party talking about natural healing because he read the Tao Te Ching and thinks sushi is real tasty). He's a paper-thin romance novel male. Dominant, austere, "deep," and sexually unconscious. After reading Kakuro in Hedheog, I understand why women get so upset about male-fantasy portrayals of women in novels by male authors. This is the exact other side of that coin.

This was more of a rant than a review, so here's my summary for the book jacket: stupid, stupid, stupid. I was irritated the whole time.