John Cena Fan 33

I am not sure if this is a Skylar from Breaking Bad moment but Mother gives me bad vibes and I feel bad for Father in some respects. I know in class we have been painting Mother as the good guy and Father the bad guy in a lot of the domestic issues. I know why we have been painting Father out to be bad obviously but Mother is very judgmental and guilty of some of the same things that Father is. It rubs me the wrong way and I have grown to dislike her.  I think this is the passage that made me dislike Mother: “He came in staggering through the waves, laughing, his hair flattened on his head, his beard dripping and his costume clinging to him immodestly; and she felt momentary twinges of dislike, so fleeting she didn’t even recognize what they were.” After Father comes home from an expedition for years and goes along with everything she throws at him, Mother has beef with him for living his best life? I just don’t get it. Father is trying his best. He may be resistant to new ideas a...

This book is interesting but I feel like Doctorow is saying very little novel. Because postmodernism is the setting and worldview in which we have all been raised, ideas that were once new and foreign are now commonly accepted. This book suffers as a result and I find myself following Doctorow’s bland characters that are intended to be vessels for his ideas rather than the ideas themselves. (I will say the book is picking up a lot with the introduction of Coulhouse though.) The main message of the book appears to be that exploitative capitalism is bad. Oh no! Really? I was under the impression that people getting their hands chopped off at the end of their 16 hour shift was a good thing. I don’t think a single person went into this book with an opposing opinion on the gilded age. I mean maybe these themes were subversive and crazy at the time when the US was the economic powerhouse in the world but I am not impressed with this thesis by Doctorow. Anyone with an education past the 4th g...