Phoebe Kate

In the interests of objectivity and fair play, I watched the second episode of “Mad Men” last night.  It wasn’t any better than the first.  I give up.

For a literary nutritional supplement to offset the additives, filler and fluff of such shows, I suggest large doses of John Cheever.  He was, hands down, the master of artificial ingredient-free, totally spot-on sagas of mid-20^th century upwardly mobile suburbanites.  He wrote what he knew and lived what he wrote.  His complete collection of short stories is available used from Amazon for as little as $4.99, and it will pump much-needed reality into every fiber of your being. 

Try “The Swimmer.”  A good place to begin, as it may seem vaguely familiar.  It was made into a film starring Burt Lancaster and even if you missed it in 1968 (which you might have through no fault of your own, having not been born yet) you’ve probably caught this cautionary tale of the perils of too much success on AMC or TMC during a sleepless night or a week in bed with the flu.     

Then move on to sampling “The Seaside Houses,” and “A Miscellany of Characters That Will Not Appear,” and “The Death of Justina,” and “The Lowboy,” and “Just Tell Me Who It Was,” and “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill.”  Feel better already, don’t you?

Or, if you’re short of time, just ingest these lines, spoken by a Manhattan yuppie wife in the story, “The Season of Divorce,” published in The New Yorker in 1978.  Her husband finds her inexplicably weeping in the middle of the night and asks why, to which she unexpectedly replies:

“Why do I cry?  I cry because I saw an old woman cuffing a little boy on Third Avenue.  She was drunk.  I can’t get it out of my mind…I cry because my father died when I was twelve and because my mother married a man I detested or thought I detested.  I cry because I had to wear an ugly dress—a hand-me-down dress—to a party twenty years ago and I didn’t have a good time.  I cry because of some unkindness I can’t remember.  I cry because I’m tired and I can’t sleep.”

Modern existential angst, eloquently defined in eight sentences. 

And there’s where well-meaning shows like “Mad Men” fail.  Life really isn’t all about glamour or power or sex or success.  It’s about the mysterious and seemingly bottomless chasm of emptiness inside, and the cup of pain from which we so eagerly drink and drink again, and the scary truth that none of us really knows who or what we want to be when — and if — we grow up.

–phoebe kate