I was disappointed by Yesteryear because I thought I was going to get a story about a character being punished for being deceptive. (She allows her audience to believe that she is superhumanly capable- making elaborate meals from scratch in an old-fashioned kitchen and effortlessly raising five children, yet in reality the kitchen hides lots of modern appliances and she has two full time nannies off screen to help). But ultimately she is punished for being socially conservative, which is fine but just not terribly interesting. The book also indulges in the tired trope that there aren’t any actual sincere conservatives- they are all just angry hypocrites who want to control others. I was disappointed because I think there are some potentially really interesting ideas about performance and artifice and how damaging that can be, but I don’t think Yesteryear executed those ideas very well.
Haha I was just talking about how the story you describe would be boring to me - I feel like I already see 5 "tradwives are fake" send-ups for every piece of actual tradwife media. "Vaguely-feminist, vaguely-liberal Atlantic thinkpiece expanded into novel" sounds insanely boring.
I would have been more interested to hear the actual interior perspective, and the idea that the author doesn't even give the character a specific religion seems so negligent as to be insulting - I say as an atheist raised in a Mormon community. Especially for an adult convert character. It's hard to imagine this book as reading anything other than disdain for it's main character
AI detectors are consistently inaccurate and unreliable. Why would you turn to a technology with a proven record of both false positives and false negatives? This book's subject matter / obvious political leaning would bias you against it, so giving in to using a notoriously unreliable technology to "confirm" your assumptions seems pretty sketchy and calls into question your own commitments to truth and reason.
I agree that it’s not a novel with much to say except that being a woman is not fun regardless of one’s choices. I was also a bit bothered by the nonspecificity of the protagonist and her husband. The father in law is supposed to be a Senator who reads as very conservative but the family estate is in California so it makes no sense. It felt a little like she didn’t want it to be about Ballerina Farm exactly so she had the characters drink alcohol and espresso so they wouldn’t be Mormon. But it was readable which is a feat in itself.
Or perhaps some Tom Wolfe, for excellence in satire:
Going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice in San Francisco. The poverty program encouraged you to go in for mau-mauing. They wouldn’t have known what to do without it. The bureaucrats at City Hall and in the Office of Economic Opportunity talked “ghetto” all the time, but they didn’t known any more about what was going on in the Western Addition, Hunters Point, Potrero Hill, the Mission, Chinatown, or south of Market Street than they did about Zanzibar. They didn’t know where to look. They didn’t even know who to ask. So what could they do? Well … they used the Ethnic Catering Service … right … They sat back and waited for you to come rolling in with your certified angry militants, your guaranteed frustrated ghetto youth, looking like a bunch of wild men. Then you had your test confrontation. If you were outrageous enough, if you could shake up the bureaucrats so bad that their eyes froze into iceballs and their mouths twisted up into smiles of sheer physical panic, into shit-eating grins, so to speak–then they knew you were the real goods. They knew you were the right studs to give the poverty grants and community organizing jobs to. Otherwise they wouldn’t know.
I was disappointed by Yesteryear because I thought I was going to get a story about a character being punished for being deceptive. (She allows her audience to believe that she is superhumanly capable- making elaborate meals from scratch in an old-fashioned kitchen and effortlessly raising five children, yet in reality the kitchen hides lots of modern appliances and she has two full time nannies off screen to help). But ultimately she is punished for being socially conservative, which is fine but just not terribly interesting. The book also indulges in the tired trope that there aren’t any actual sincere conservatives- they are all just angry hypocrites who want to control others. I was disappointed because I think there are some potentially really interesting ideas about performance and artifice and how damaging that can be, but I don’t think Yesteryear executed those ideas very well.
Haha I was just talking about how the story you describe would be boring to me - I feel like I already see 5 "tradwives are fake" send-ups for every piece of actual tradwife media. "Vaguely-feminist, vaguely-liberal Atlantic thinkpiece expanded into novel" sounds insanely boring.
I would have been more interested to hear the actual interior perspective, and the idea that the author doesn't even give the character a specific religion seems so negligent as to be insulting - I say as an atheist raised in a Mormon community. Especially for an adult convert character. It's hard to imagine this book as reading anything other than disdain for it's main character
"Vaguely-feminist, vaguely-liberal Atlantic thinkpiece expanded into novel" sounds insanely boring.
Fantastic. Sounds a bit like Franzen's "Freedom," though I may be the only person who didn't like it.
AI detectors are consistently inaccurate and unreliable. Why would you turn to a technology with a proven record of both false positives and false negatives? This book's subject matter / obvious political leaning would bias you against it, so giving in to using a notoriously unreliable technology to "confirm" your assumptions seems pretty sketchy and calls into question your own commitments to truth and reason.
https://humtech.ucla.edu/technology/the-imperfection-of-ai-detection-tools/
https://teach.its.uiowa.edu/news/2024/09/case-against-ai-detectors
https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-work/
https://lawlibguides.sandiego.edu/c.php?g=1443311&p=10721367
I agree that it’s not a novel with much to say except that being a woman is not fun regardless of one’s choices. I was also a bit bothered by the nonspecificity of the protagonist and her husband. The father in law is supposed to be a Senator who reads as very conservative but the family estate is in California so it makes no sense. It felt a little like she didn’t want it to be about Ballerina Farm exactly so she had the characters drink alcohol and espresso so they wouldn’t be Mormon. But it was readable which is a feat in itself.
Or perhaps some Tom Wolfe, for excellence in satire:
Going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice in San Francisco. The poverty program encouraged you to go in for mau-mauing. They wouldn’t have known what to do without it. The bureaucrats at City Hall and in the Office of Economic Opportunity talked “ghetto” all the time, but they didn’t known any more about what was going on in the Western Addition, Hunters Point, Potrero Hill, the Mission, Chinatown, or south of Market Street than they did about Zanzibar. They didn’t know where to look. They didn’t even know who to ask. So what could they do? Well … they used the Ethnic Catering Service … right … They sat back and waited for you to come rolling in with your certified angry militants, your guaranteed frustrated ghetto youth, looking like a bunch of wild men. Then you had your test confrontation. If you were outrageous enough, if you could shake up the bureaucrats so bad that their eyes froze into iceballs and their mouths twisted up into smiles of sheer physical panic, into shit-eating grins, so to speak–then they knew you were the real goods. They knew you were the right studs to give the poverty grants and community organizing jobs to. Otherwise they wouldn’t know.