A Triumph of Underachievement
Book feature for The Stranger, 5/26/99
AN UNDERACHIEVER’S DIARY
by Benjamin Anastas
Spike/Avon, $10 (paperback)
Success, success, success. Sometimes all the damned ostentatious displays of wealth, power, and smugness out there just make one want to throw up, or at least momentarily escape from it all with this beautiful, spare novella. The book’s a success itself, but that’s forgivable because it successfully celebrates failure.
One of its many triumphant aspects is its (relatively) unapologetic defense of that venerable American personality type, the scion of affluence who rejects striving in favor of what pessimists call “slacking” and what optimists call “voluntary simplicity.”
As the back-cover blurb explains, “In the mid-1960s, William was the firstborn of identical twins. It is the last time in his life he will ever be first in anything.”
What gets in the way is a series of debilitating childhood illnesses, which keep him out of school for the better part of two years and permanently affect his self-image. Narrating from adulthood, he insists he wasn’t and isn’t looking for anybody’s pity. He claims his underachieving was a deliberate life choice, a path of bitter struggle to contrast with his twin’s charmed life of effortless grace.
“Please, do not confuse this diary with a memoir written for a therapeutic purpose, designed to exorcise my demons and provide a thrill for everyone who cares to watch them all take flight….”
You don’t have to be familiar with the literary “theory of the unreliable narrator” to detect a taste of self-serving defensiveness.
But no matter what the motivation, William’s early life certainly is one defined by its missed marks.
Almost fatally introverted, he cuts down on his opportunities to strike out with girls by asking his parents to send him to a boarding school he calls “The Boys’ Prison.”
From there it’s five years in a hilariously undistinguished little college, where he adopts “a steady diet of beer and chicken wings” while his classmates wander “through the dirt and rubble smiling like idiots, name tags affixed to their ‘Coed Naked Frisbee’ T-shirts” (and while his brother wows ’em all at Harvard).
From there it’s a series of go-nowhere jobs, ending as William hooks up with a small-time religious cult, not out of any worshipful fever but for the convenience of letting someone else make all the decisions for him.
Of course, it’s no real autobiography. Benjiman Anastas comes from out of that ever-acclaimed Iowa Writer’s Workshop gang, and his elegant prose ripples with the mark of patient polishing with which any real William wouldn’t bother, even when defending the nobility of the underachiever:
“The underachiever’s life is a lonely one, devoid of sustaining warmth, and fundamental intimacy; this statelessness, if you will, can be the source of boundless happiness, a kind of transcendental bliss known only to the deepest American thinkers (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Tony Robbins)…”
