SHAPIRO REVIEW - 9/8/2022

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 like Ben 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. It calls to memory the strange PR photos of Ben standing be-jeaned and stetson’d, leaning uncomfortably against the side of a 2018 ford F-150, its exterior flawless as a newborn soul. There are motions towards aesthetics, an infatuation with particular images of rugged americana, but a glaring lack of interest in the realities that spawned them. Phrases like “I’m out there, busting my hump to bring in the bread,” and “If he scuffed it up, he’d buff that scuff right out” miss the mark of authenticity by a margin so wide, they enter the realm of the uncanny and beautiful. The infatuation with these images of americana are not insincere, quite the opposite. Ben’s love for a particular image of America is deeply sincere, even aspirational. But images are only images.

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. It is 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, there is a crucial domino of farcical tragedy that I left out of the earlier summary. We must now discuss our second meta-theme, Ben Shapiro and the erotic. Consider the following quote, in which Ben’s character takes home a girl for the first time: (Its formatting has been edited for clarity.)

“We walked up to the door and I took her in my arms. And that’s when Jim opened the door. He was back from State, where he was studying agricultural engineering, and he looked at me, laughing with his eyes, and said, “Hey, brother. I’m home.”

When I turned back to introduce Em, she was looking at him. They were married six months later.”

This scene became the central image of the story for me, the axis upon which the entire tale revolves. There is a sincerity to this scene that is not present in the rest of the work, which is reasonable. Losing a crush to someone else is an experience I think many people share, or can at the very least understand. This image of the stolen crush becomes a sort of map for the rest of the story.

Throughout the work, Ben’s older brother is depicted as a bit disconnected, a sort of high-falutin intellectual with every advantage in life, a man who sits in an air-conditioned barn all day, toying with his grand ideas of fantastic inventions while subsisting off the profit generated by the “real” worker, who is forced to live in a house with presumably the only girl he has ever had a crush on, now married to his older brother.

I will get this out of the way quickly: Yes, it is very funny and more than a bit sad that Ben wrote a story where his clear standin gets "cucked." However, to end the conversation here would be a disservice to the story, as there are elements to the work that go beyond the ordinary quasi-fascist insecurities around cuckoldry.

Psychosexual elements aside, there is a sense throughout the story that Ben’s character is nobly bearing a burden. Ben is stepping up, being the man of the family when nobody else has the balls to, while simultaneously being denied the “benefits” of his (gender) role. (read: a woman) He spends the majority of the book in masculine silence, never even attempting to voice his feelings to the rest of his family, and only ever speaking to his brother twice: after a fistfight, and before the murder. A murder, I will remind you, that comes immedeately after Ben’s brother excitedly tells Ben that the machine does work, and that they will be rich. This is no mere flight of fancy either. It is clearly implied by the potential interested buyer that the machine would have been a tremendous profit. Ben cannot allow his older brother to succeed. For his brother to succeed, that would mean that Ben wallowing in silent misery over the girl, the house, the farm, would have been for nothing. It would mean that he truly did not deserve the girl.

Even the climax, which on first read will likely come as a surprise, is explained by this dynamic. Ben, unintentionally I think, paints a fairly accurate picture of the sort of quasifascist incel despair that far too many of us are far too familiar with. It is the despondent temper tantrum of a man who sees himself as an ordinary, salt-of-the-earth everyman, but is in reality a manchild who plunges headlong into avoidable situations out of a childish idea of what he is owed.

All that said, let us be fair to Ben for a moment. The interpretation of the work that I have relayed is only a single interpretation. If the story does anything well, it is in the ambiguity as to who the reader is supposed to “root” for. Not to say that every story must have a clear protagonist, not at all. One could easily read the older brother as a hardworking, innovative capitalist who bootstraps himself above crass and proletarian activities like football and farmwork, only to be betrayed at the moment of victory by his jealous dullard of a brother. This interpretation would indeed fall in line with other quasifascist tropes of betrayal and entitlement. To this I offer a rebuttal; what about the growth spurt? In my mind, the younger brother’s growth spurt implies that he is a clear self-insert for Ben, and the intended target of sympathy from the audience.

Let us give Ben the benefit of the doubt. Let us say that he intended the story to end on a muddled note. If this is true, well done! Although, I suspect that sort of narrative hat trick is –and I am being generous here– a feat beyond Ben’s command of language.

“But who cares?” I hear you ask, “so Ben Shapiro wrote a bad short story, who gives a shit?”

What do we owe to an artist? Both I as a critic, and you as a reader, what do we owe to Ben Shapiro? I find myself returning to Roger Ebert, and the paraphrased maxim of “What’s it trying to do, and how well does it pull that off?” It is a method of analysis that assumes a certain level of clarity from the work. How can I judge Mr. Shapiro’s work by its goals, if those goals cannot be determined? Perhaps I lack the subtlety to understand Mr Shaprio. Perhaps Mr. Shapiro is simply a bad writer.

FROM THE PIT

From The Pit is an abortion metaphor, probably. It takes place in a near-future setting in which a wealthy plutocrat with a mortal fear of dust mites has invented a technology which allows exterminators to be temporarily shrunk to microscopic size to more effectively exterminate said dust mites. The story follows one such exterminator, who patrols the plutocrats home but is accidentally ingested by the plutocrat mere days before the process is supposed to wear off. The result is a game of cat-and-mouse between the exterminator attempting to escape before he explosively un-shrinks, and the plutocrats doctors attempting to kill him.

I liked this one. I genuinely and unironically liked this one. It is not a good short story by any means, Ben’s command of language still hovers roughly around the high school freshman level, and by god the story suffers for it, but it just has that spark. It has that absolutely unapologetic 100-miles-an-hour all-gas-no-brakes commitment to its fucking bizarre premise that I cannot help but fall a bit in love with.

I would even argue that Mr. Shapiro’s poor technical skill with writing actually helps the story. His incompetence with figurative language so thoroughly confuses the trite and annoying abortion metaphor that it becomes lost, causing Ben to stumble backwards into a solid 3/10 sci-fi short story.

There are several angles I could take here. I could take the psychosexual angle, and explore the bizarrely libidinal language of the exterminator being consumed. I could take the anticapitalist angle, and discuss the clearly unintended yet still on-the-nose imagery of a worker literally being consumed by the ruling class. I could even simply continue to make fun of Ben for writing another protagonist that is very small, and then grows. I think, as repayment for the fact that I actually kinda enjoyed this story, I will spare it from the ridiculous slings and arrows of half-serious literary criticism. I will allow the story to be bad in an uncomplicated way.

Ben, however, deserves no such mercy. Ben does not write, per se. His work reads like an extended description of a movie that he is acting out. It has the tone and pacing of an extended first-person chatroom RP in which Ben is a rugged action hero. “The mites are above me, but they haven’t sensed me yet. I take out my hook from my belt, and tear it into the cigarette wall with a satisfying thunk. Then I lash it through my belt and lean back.” The tone of this story is more action-focused, and it allows Ben to walk us through its narrative without trying anything too fancy and tripping over himself. The bare-bones prose serves its purpose, and nothing more.

It is difficult to spend this much time with an author without pondering why they write. I have trudged through far too much of Mr. Shapiro’s work not to at least consider the question. This collection was published in 2015. Ben was 31. Why write this? Ben wasn’t hurting for cash or notoriety, in fact, his career was seeing a bit of a renaissance. It is easy to suspect simple vanity, but I find the assumption crass. For all his faults, I would not call Ben a vain man. There are better things to call him. If given the opportunity, I would reccomend “white supremacist” or “insufferable pissbaby.”

In Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, a woman wishes to “rehearse” the experience of motherhood beforehand so she may prepare for her eventual marriage. Nathan spends an extraordinary amount of HBO’s money to build as close a simulacra of her perfect, idealized life as possible. The actors playing her children are swapped out regularly to simulate the experience of the child growing to 18. A garden is dug, and filled with crops overnight. All of the materials for a thriving home soap business are provided, complete with fake addresses for the woman to rehearse the process of shipping out completed packages.

What becomes rapidly apparent is that the woman in question has no actual interest in participating in the act. She refuses to engage with any of the difficult parts of her simulated motherhood. Crops go unplanted and unharvested, cookies go unmade, homemade soaps are left unshipped and hidden inside cabinets. The generous simulacra goes untouched, unmet in the middle. The fantasy and reality clash as they always will, sign and imagined signifier grinding against each other like a motorcycle accident against pavement. There is a violence here, and it leaves the real world feeling hollow and disappointing.

There is a sense that Ben wants to see himself as a writer, a sort of sharp witted renegade like a more intellectual Limbaugh, or a Hunter S. Thompson if he was afraid of women. Mr. Shapiro is paid well, and I suspect he has the time and resources to publish just about anything he wants. He can afford a good editor. He does not hire a good editor.

We have now entered the frontier of speculation, but I do not know how else to explain the bizarre disparity of Ben’s work. It doesn’t have to be bad. He could hire any number of editors, ghostwriters either, yet he does not, he opens the word document and decides to write his damn self.

There is a sense that Ben wants to see himself as a writer, but I think he is wholly uninterested in, even bored by, the actual craft of writing. Ben puts pen to paper like a bad date to the body, unconcerned with anything but facile self-gratification.

If you are wondering about the abortion metaphor, here: ““Yes,” says The Whale. “But it’s my body. And what’s in it is my purview. That’s the law. Look it up. But look it up after you call the doctor.” That’s it. Ben is able to maintain an allegory for slightly less than two lines. At least it’s over quickly.

UTOPIA