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I found fascinating Borkowski’s rumination on the tendency of post-World War II America’s obsession with consumerism and correlative hyper-marketed youth culture, and how these phenomena have resulted in a crisis of what it means to be an adult male in the U.S. Certainly, the infantilizing elements of American consumer culture are not exclusively gendered, but Borkowski describes the particular hypocrisies and inclinations of the generations of men following WW II.
It is always profoundly satisfying, enriching even, to encounter writing that fluently expresses an idea or ideas that one has always harbored but never articulated, perhaps even to one’s self, in quite as cogent– or at least in precisely the same– way. In chapter 4 (“Child’s Play”), for example, Borkowski writes
“So convinced had we become of the veracity and validity of these fictional fathers that we eventually elected a couple of boys to be pres- ident… one touting the manly appeal of the phony fighter pilot’s codpiece after his staged plane landing on an aircraft carrier. It ran on the news like one of our favorite TV shows. How childish had we become? Shouldn’t we have grown up after Vietnam and Watergate? But that was the point. We didn’t want to, or we weren’t allowed to. We had to stay “innocent” and infantile. Childish attitudes and behavior make you want things.” (46-47)
It will be interesting to see how Borkowski structures and frames the rest of his story, after revealing on the first page that the police shot him multiple times. As a narrative framing device, this is almost noir-ish, reminiscent of shadowy films from the 1940s and 1950s that begin at the end and then unfold in reverse to reveal how the narrator, a corpse, caught a bullet in the back or wound up floating in that swimming pool. Has Borkowski written the “Sunset Boulevard” of memoirs?
Not quite, I don’t think; he survived.
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