I: WHAT IS A GIFT
I have always been intrigued by the unspoken aspects of people’s actions. The complexity of their motivations and the intentions that trigger their behavior usually serve a dual function, one reflective of their own desires and one in combination to the desires of others’. The concept of gifting certainly abides to this symbiosis, and varies depending on the specific circumstances of the relationship between a gift’s giver and its recipient.
In a 1992 interview for BOMB, the artist Mike Kelley stated his insightful views on the topic of gifting:
Basically, gift giving is like indentured slavery or something. There’s no price, so you don’t know how much you owe. The commodity is the emotion. What’s being bought and sold is emotion. I did a piece called More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid. I said if each one of these toys took 600 hours to make then that’s 600 hours of love; and if I gave this to you, you owe me 600 hours of love; and that’s a lot. And if you can’t pay it back right away it keeps accumulating… Interest. That’s more love that you can ever pay back. So what? You’re just fucked then. I wasn’t even thinking about the objects as objects, I was thinking about them as just hours-of-attention.
Kelley’s understanding of gift giving is beautiful in its tragedy. But he seems to be more concerned with a different action altogether: gift getting. That is why he expands on the overwhelming anxiety of an individual being unable to quantify how much s/he owes for a present s/he received. There is an assumption here about the receiver’s desire or willingness to reciprocate the gift, to “pay back” for the emotion the gift “cost” its giver. The best gifts are the ones that escape their material limitations by being transformed into experiences, even beckoning an immaterial dialogue between the two—or more—parties involved.
II: LACEY’S GIFTS
There are three books I have received as gifts from the same friend, Lacey, for every Christmas. I am curious in understanding—or attempting to, at least—what my friend wanted me to gain from these books. Why did she choose to send these specific titles over time, and how successfully did they manage to foster an immaterial dialogue between me and Lacey?
1. YEAR ONE
In an email entitled “Des livres pour toi!” from September of YEAR ONE, Lacey recommends the following books to me:
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
Black Swan Green – David Mitchell (also of his, Cloud Atlas and Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but I haven’t yet read them)
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
Call Me By Your Name – Andre Aciman
The Line of Beauty – Alan Hollinghurst
You know, I look at my library and most of the books I have are by male writers. Do you find that strange, coming from me?
Naturally, I don’t buy any of them, even though I was the one who had asked her for book recommendations. During Christmas of YEAR ONE, I received a package including one of the titles she had suggested, as if she knew I wouldn’t act on her suggestions. It was Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Line of Beauty,” and it came with a thoughtful card written on fancy stationary in an envelope sealed with a tiger sticker. Once I killed the tiger sticker, I took out the card, which said “I am sending you one of my favorite books. Coke, sex, class and Thatcher, doesn’t get much better than that.”
She then thanked me for being an amazing host during her visit in NYC—which I highly doubt because I wasn’t too thoughtful during that time—and lived in an apartment that couldn’t allow for me to host her amazingly merely on real estate terms, what with the five steps in between all different “rooms.” It was my first “young professional” year in New York, and I must have been a douchebag at the time, because she specifically thanked me for taking her out to fancy nightclubs, which surely remain the right places for all douchebags who have recently moved here as the ultimate destination. On the redeeming side, she also thanks me for the “KFC takeaway.” It closes with her wishing (or declaring!) that that year I would be “seriously published.”
It is an interesting choice of words: “seriously published.” It is also a choice that is further substantiated with her gift: a serious book, critically acclaimed and winner of the 2004 Booker Prize. At the time I was writing very little, but she knew that I wanted to pursue it more. I was mostly running around NYC with fellow-douchebags, sometimes because I was naively excited sometimes because I made myself naively excited by doing too much coke.
“The Line of Beauty” gives a detailed and elaborate account of the English sociopolitical climate during a time of crucial change: Thatcher’s return to power. He succeeds in chronicling the intricacies of the time through the lens of Nicholas Guest. Nicholas is a young gay intellectual of humble background who is invited to spend time with the privileged Fedden family, whose paterfamilias is a conservative elected in Parliament.
The constant motion, both of the novel’s characters and of their environments captured my full attention, often facilitated by the use of dry humor and elegantly smart prose. It is Hollinghurst’s remarkable wit that makes it possible to emanate a silent criticism of Thatcher throughout the novel sans directly featuring negative criticisms of her. Overall, the most obvious message Lacey was trying to get across was a friendly warning: be hesitant to trust others, and remember that what might seem glamorous or fun could feel cheap once you attain it, the way Nicholas occasionally felt in the novel as he witnessed his affluent surroundings.
2. YEAR TWO
This time, Lacey’s package included “Paris Trance,” by Geoff Dyer, and while I am certain her fancy stationary was once again put to use, I am no longer in possession of the card that came with this book. (Thankfully, a large sticker of a jaguar can be found on the inside of the book’s cover page. The wild animal is probably a member of the family of stickers Lacey used to seal my first gift.)
Dyer’s protagonist is Luke, who finds himself in Paris with a meaningless job and an artistic vision he is not actively working toward pragmatizing. Luke quickly falls in love with—and quickly idealizes— Nicole. They are joined by their friends Alex and Sahra, a second couple, in what develops into a self-destructive, nihilistic summer they spend in each others’ presence, often indulging in the use of drugs.
In objective narrative terms, very little takes place. It is mostly Luke’s passive attitude toward everything, except for Nicole and their romance, that becomes a problem. Nevertheless, Dyer does an excellent job at portraying the intensity of young love, providing strong depictions of physical intimacy, and later, the emotional dependency young lovers may experience.
I think that the timing of the gift was orchestrated to alleviate the constant misery I felt following the official end of a long relationship, one seeming quite similar to the couples Dyer follows in “Paris Trance,” in terms of being both indulgent and unsustainable. The gift was a perfect choice accounting for my circumstances, because my recent break-up had me questioning my ability to intimately trust someone again. “Paris Trance” cajoled me by making me feel that what I had recently experienced was not necessarily unhealthy in its intensity, but perhaps an experience shared by others.
3. YEAR THREE
In this year’s annual package, the card was black and the wishes written in silver ink. There is also an alligator sticker seeling YEAR THREE’S envelope. First, Lacey congratulates me on writing a lot more regularly—since I had moved on from being a douchebag at this point— and getting published. She encourages my longform preference, because she thinks it is good that “they let me incorporate lots of research and incorporating many different texts.” Then she drops the heavy question, several years after we first began joking about it: “Does that mean we’re not sticking to that LSE plan?” She knows the answer, and she knows I won’t vocalize it. The tone of this question is that of a confrontational joke, one celebrating that we are not convincing ourselves to give Quantitative Economics a shot.
For YEAR THREE’s Christmas, Lacey introduced me to yet another meaningful book: Aleksandar Hemon’s “The Book of My Lives.” This selection of essays by the Bosnian writer really impressed me with its clarity and refreshing humor. A difference from the previous books she had gifted me was that this one was non-fiction. (Interestingly, Hemon confesses he is more comfortable in writing fiction, due to his skeptical approach of what comprises reality.) He does a stellar job, whether he is comically dramatizing childhood stories about being stranded without money in Italy or seriously confronting a parent’s worst nightmare. The overarching connection between all the vignettes presented is the spirit Hemon brings forth.
I think the intention behind Lacey’s choice was encouraging me to think about my national identity and how in touch I am with that history and my family past. A large emphasis is placed on identity in several of Hemon’s essays, as in one way or another, Hemon has always been confronted with it: being raised in Sarajevo during the ethnic tensions with neighboring Bosnia, and eventually emigrating to Chicago.
The nature of creativity is a recurring theme for Hemon, and so is his fascination with the duality of elements as well, such as matter and anti-matter. In an essay discussing his frequent escape during his twenties to acquire literary solitude where he read and thought sans interruption, he questions how healthy his obsessive behavior was. Being cognizant of the dark nature of his artistic drive, he has tried to morph it into a healthy routine, to build a functional role for himself as a father and family man.
III. BONDING OVER FICTION
I met Lacey in college. We became friends, but did not spend much time together as students. There was little overlap in our academic pursuits, and the first time we took a class together was during our senior year. The class was a seminar on global leadership taught by a notorious professor who prided himself in being difficult, Professor Difficult. Eventually, the professor invited us to his home, where it became clear he never read fiction. Mountains of books surrounded us and they were all historical or social science and humanities, but none of them were fiction. “I don’t read fiction. It’s not for me,” Professor Difficult announced at some point during that evening. Nobody said anything in response, but some of us grimaced. Could such a person—one whose intellectual curiosity was greatly limited—really comprehend an elusive concept such as “global leadership” meaningfully enough to teach a class on it?
Professor Difficult’s fixation on non-fiction must have been useful in forming his authoritative teaching style. Things were a lot more frequently “right or wrong” than they were “debatable” or “ambivalent.” There even seemed to be a formula for the “right” paper in this class: it would be one conforming to the format presenting the theory first, followed up by empirical evidence that proved (or disproved) that theory.
Lacey thought my choice of a leader to extensively investigate for my research paper was brilliant: Jeff Skilling. Skilling would be a fascinating subject, as an arrogant McKinsey alum who served as the CEO of Enron during its failure. I wanted to write a thorough analysis of the performative leadership of Jeff Skilling, emphasizing how leaders’ capacity to convince others in seeing the world through the lens their leaders choose for them is a powerful tool. Predictably, Professor Difficult—who never read fiction!—found this choice invalid. I needed a “real” leader. Thus, we compromised on George Soros, who he found “real” enough and I considered an almost equally fascinating leadership study of leadership prowess.
This negotiation partially mirrors how Professor Difficult understood reality as an extension of materiality. To Professor Difficult, Soros seemed an acceptable choice due to his ability to advance within a legally appropriate context, even if he was benefiting from “playing” the economic systems of entire countries, profiting from their demise. Skilling’s leadership role at Enron represents the immaterial power that institutional labels can create. Enron’s power was derived from manipulating the public’s trust via bureaucratic processes of ambiguous transparency.
“Money seems to negotiate this place between the immaterial and the material,” states Ann Lauterbach in “Under The Sign.” Lauterbach also underlines the importance of combining inside meditation with outward connectivity in writing. Professor Difficult would ask any student holding similar views to choose a different approach, one aligned to his formula for the “right” paper in his class: it would be one following his strictly defined theory/ empirical evidence format.
[Gifts between people who truthfully respect one another are free of conditions: they are given to relay a message, if their receiver wants to find it.—>that’s the point of the piece, but I want it to be unspoken/ conveyed ]
