Beetlejuice

Growing up as a child in our obsessively self-referential late 20th century culture, I was generally exposed to the ironical mimesis of things long before I knew about the things themselves. And because the things we know first will always be more true for us, my sense of reality while navigating much of pop culture was inverted. I knew about Jellystone National Park, where many a pic-a-nic basket has been filched, long before I knew that a real entity in our world had so nearly stolen the name. I knew about the singer Madonna long before I realized that there was a more famous person referred to by this title. And I knew about the cartoon Beetlejuice, long before I knew that it had been based on a popular 1988 Hollywood movie directed by Tim Burton, longer still before I knew that there was a star in the night's sky called "Betelgeuse."

A Crisis for Mr. Biswas

If Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh was the great book of my -- and everyone else's -- 25th year, then V.S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas is just the book to read three years afterward. If the happy ending of the first sees our hero Ernest safely ensconced in a state of delicious autonomy, having attained self-sufficiency away from his family of origin -- the goal of the student stage of life -- then the second tells us what comes immediately after -- the difficulties and angst of the householder stage (and, as if by design, I noticed that the IKEA in Massachusetts -- a place where every person who is transitioning from one phase of life to another will likely find themselves -- is using copies of the Swedish translation of the book as shelf decoration in its model showrooms). It reveals that the quest for autonomy is not in fact the final struggle. Rather, once obtained, it contains the seeds of its own crises and self-doubts.

If The Way of All Flesh is the great epic of young adulthood, then, Biswas is a tale for those experiencing the first intimations of middle age.