SHAPIRO REVIEW DRAFT - 8/30/2022

INTRO

They are bad. This observation, like Ben’s work, is neither poignant nor original. I do not like Mr. Shapiro, and I will not claim to approach this review from a place of impartiality. To do so would be dishonest of me. At the same time, I wish to highlight the opportunity this collection represents. It would be easy –very easy– to tenderize the carcass of Ben’s work with endless blows about its gauche prose, clumsy theming, and slippery grasp of sentence structure, but to do so would be to grind a flank of rare and exotic meat into hamburger.

Right Wing Grifter Dickheads never shut up. They talk, they write, but it is truly rare that they attempt to create. Because creation, artistic expression, requires a degree of vulnerability that these types almost universally view as weakness. Try as he might, Mr. Shapiro cannot flense himself from his work. I am here to root around for the ambergris. Hold your breath.

As for what introduction the works may deserve, I must say I was surprised, perhaps even a bit proud of ben. My expectations were colored by my experience with his later work, specifically the exquisite quasi-fascist abortion that was True Alliegance. I think that in terms of overall quality, “Whats Fair” stands head and shoulders above True Allegiance, not simply for the (very) relative quality of its prose, but for its ability to go its entire length without vomiting up a cambion of racist caricature. This collection may be clumsy, but I am pleased to report that it lacks the pathetic xenophobic temper tantrums of Ben’s later work. Maybe he was saving them up.

WHATS FAIR

If you wish to bake Ben’s opening story “Whats Fair” from scratch, google the top 50 or so most popular early to midcentury American novels, and pick out the ones you remember from high school. Fry the nuance out of Harper Lee, cut the edges off Stienbeck, throw in some raw chunks of Faulkner, season with a downright plagerous amount of Aruthur Miller, boil the whole pot into jelly, and serve in broken sentence structure.

“Whats Fair” is Ben’s attempt at being folksy, an attempt to assemble some rusty americana from books he vaguely remembers from high school. A hilarious thrust, given that if a cowboy were to sit down in a dusty saloon in the 1830s, and google “city slicker” the top result would be an image of Mr. Shapiro. The tone of the story is handled so improperly it is often downright comedic.

The story follows Tommy (read: Ben) a young man in some unnamed rural American town. He’s a folksy down to earth type who just wants to play football. His older brother Jim is smart, and went to Insert Name of College to do all sortsa book-learnin. Several disasters fall like dominos. Their father dies, their mother spirals into grief and becomes unable to feed and bathe herself, Ben loses a football scholarship after a knee injury, and is left to handle the farm on his own while Jim attempts to perfect a new type of mill he says will revolutionize farming. Ben festers in his resentment for years. One night, Jim comes to Ben elated, saying that the mill finally works, that they’re going to be rich. Its at this moment that the resentment bubbles to the surface, Ben stabs Jim and kicks his body under the whirling plow blades, mutilating the corpse. The story ends with Ben attempting to sell the plow to a manufacturer, only to realize that he doesn’t know how to operate it. The potential buyer, and potential fortune lost, Ben sulks alone in the empty barn, lamenting his rotten luck.

I googled it. Ben, in real life, does not actually have an older brother.

Ben, in the story, is a sort of second fiddle. His father gives his older, smarter brother a watch, while he is given a hunting knife. Quote: “I didn’t really like my hunting knife. I wasn’t big like Jim then -- it wasn’t until later that I hit my growth spurt.”

This is the first of our recurring meta-themes. Ben Shapiro, often theorized to be insecure about his height, seems incapable of not creating protagonists that underwent the growth spurt he never got. Sharp-eyed readers will recognize this motif from the protagonist of True Allegiance, Brett “Bear of a man” Hawthorne, who also underwent a similar dramatic growth spurt. Seeing this motif repeated in Ben’s earlier work was oddly humanizing. In my mind, this is all but explicit confirmation that yes, Ben is actually deeply insecure about his height. I will say that I feel a degree of measured compassion for Ben in this regard, modern standards of masculinity are a prison. I will also say I would feel significantly more compassion for him, if he did not constantly use his media presence to perpetuate the exact toxic standards of masculinity he clearly suffers from. And thus the serpent consumes its own tail.

Speaking of unintentionally revealing story elements,

FROM THE PIT

UTOPIA