Books like Good Morning, Midnight

A disaffected, thirty-something guy abandons his wife, moves to Paris and sleeps with some prostitutes. His name is Henry Miller and the book is called Tropic of Cancer.A disaffected, thirty-something woman, after being abandoned by her husband, goes to Paris and almost sleeps with a gigolo. Her name is Jean Rhys and the book is called Good Morning, Midnight.As near as I can figure, Miller and Rhys were in Paris at the same time. Maybe they even hung out in the same cafés and bought each other rounds of Pernod. Beyond that, you’d be hard-pressed to find two people more different. Miller looks at the world, sees himself everywhere and shouts, “Fuck, yeah.” Rhys peeks out her window, sees herself everywhere and mutters, “Meh.” Then she crawls back into bed with a bottle of gin and stares at the bugs on the wall.I’m not convinced Henry Miller is a good role model for the thousands of middle-class boys who read him in late adolescence and are given this incredibly seductive picture of life as an endless bachelor party, with wall-to-wall pussy and intermissions of boozy philosophical chatter. It’s like learning all about girls from that disreputable uncle who used to keep back issues of Penthouse lying out in plain view and who spoke vaguely yet appealingly about Zen Buddhism. You know, the same uncle who was always hitting your parents up for “short-term loans.”Rhys, then, is the anti-Miller. She’s a gigantic but necessary buzzkill. Where Miller is all about acquisition—of books, women, experiences—Rhys is all about loss. Her fictional alter ego is slowly losing everything: her looks, her faith in humanity, her will to live. There’s no self-pity; just the bitter resignation of someone who, out of pure disgust, has decided to drink herself to death.Okay, so maybe Rhys isn’t such a great role model either. I could see how her world-view might have the same warping effect on a certain type of girl as Miller’s does on a certain type of boy. But I still say Good Morning, Midnight is a more grown-up book than Tropic of Cancer, just as Rhys’s Paris—glum, bitchy, lower middle-class—is less romanticized than Miller’s Brassai-esque version.Wisdom would probably consist in finding some middle path between these two poles of egotism, but if I had to choose, I guess I’d take Rhys’s route. I mean, I have no desire to end up a depressive alcoholic in a rented room—though that’s a definite possibility at this point—but that does seem a marginally better fate than becoming a priapic fifty-year-old pontificating about Nietzsche to his cronies. Or I could get married, move to the suburbs and avoid the whole sordid dilemma. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.