{"id":70980,"date":"2014-05-08T17:42:52","date_gmt":"2014-05-08T21:42:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=70980"},"modified":"2014-05-08T18:06:36","modified_gmt":"2014-05-08T22:06:36","slug":"in-earnest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/05\/08\/in-earnest\/","title":{"rendered":"In Earnest"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Edelfelt_La\u0308sande_kvinna<\/a>

Albert Edelfelt, La\u0308sande Kvinna (Reading Woman)<\/i>, 1885<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cEvery time I buy a book here, it changes my life,\u201d the man told me earnestly. He was not the bookseller, but he was minding the stand on Broadway and Seventy-Third Street while the proprietor got a fruit juice from the nearby cart. He clearly wanted to do right by his friend, the owner, in his brief absence, and I was eager to help him. There was not much that appealed to me, but I finally found a hardcover, lavishly praised the interim salesman to the returned proprietor, and handed him the five-dollar bill that would, he remarked, cover the cost of the mango drink he was now sipping.<\/p>\n

I did not really think that The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Cookbook<\/em> (1992) would change my life. If I\u2019d thought more about it, I might have hoped to share the book with a few likeminded friends, where we\u2019d marvel at the dated food styling and speculate about the quality of \u201cLiza\u2019s Salade de Provence,\u201d which involves corn, raw mushrooms, pink grapefruit, and hearts of palm. In short, I guess you could say what interest I had was ironic.<\/p>\n

But then I sat down at home and opened it, and I was reading it, and the act of reading\u2014the process of assimilating letters and sounds and translating that into meaning\u2014is not ironic, is it? In fact, in the absence of other people, there isn\u2019t much irony at all. I might have tweeted something about Joan Collins\u2019s menu planning\u2014\u201cExtravagance is the only way when it comes to buying beautiful dresses and to making salads\u201d\u2014or shared a picture of the \u201cSmoked Salmon Bruschetta\u201d that was allegedly a specialty of Elle Macpherson\u2019s. But instead, I just read, and thought, and maybe smiled a little at some things, but not at anyone\u2019s expense. We were in it together. <\/p>\n

There is nothing left to say about irony, really. Nothing that hasn\u2019t been said before, and better. Not after David Foster Wallace, not after the last twenty years. A recent Fast Company <\/em>article went so far as to suggest that irony fatigue is propelling, in part, new \u201csadvertising\u201d trends, designed to tug at viewers\u2019 heartstrings rather than\u2014well, I can\u2019t say \u201cfunny bones.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anyone who has been a teenager knows that negativity and its derivatives are a certain kind of social glue. Powerful, potentially intoxicating, and, to overextend the metaphor, noxious when abused. Conversely, maybe solitude kills irony; there is certainly nothing more truly earnest. I\u2019m not even sure we can be funny when alone\u2014not without, at least, some distanced part of ourselves as audience.<\/p>\n

I will surely show my cookbook to people, and maybe we\u2019ll even do a themed meal of Valentino\u2019s risotto, and the \u201cBanana Soft \u2018Tacos\u2019\u201d served by Texas hostess Caroline Hunt to visiting royalty. But secretly I will feel bad about it, because I will know that when I read about Dame Barbara Cartland\u2019s pink-hued ninetieth birthday party, it was without any mockery, and that when she said, \u201canything to do with love makes me happy,\u201d it was hard to second-guess.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cEvery time I buy a book here, it changes my life,\u201d the man told me earnestly. He was not the bookseller, but he was minding the stand on Broadway and Seventy-Third Street while the proprietor got a fruit juice from the nearby cart. He clearly wanted to do right by his friend, the owner, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[64,512,13844,53,13843,13842],"class_list":["post-70980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-cookbooks","tag-irony","tag-lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous","tag-reading","tag-robin-leach","tag-sincerity"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe End of Irony<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein explores how, with the absence of other people, there isn\u2019t much irony at all.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/05\/08\/in-earnest\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"In Earnest by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"May 8, 2014 \u2013 \u201cEvery time I buy a book here, it changes my life,\u201d the man told me earnestly. 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