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| Simon Rich: ‘Art? It’s for maniacs’ | Simon Rich: ‘Art? It’s for maniacs’ |
| (14 days later) | |
| “There’s nothing I despise more,” says Simon Rich, “than watching a film or reading a book and realising the protagonist is a heroic artist. It’s an oxymoron! They don’t exist! I put artists on the same level as breweries. I’m thankful for them and I think they’re cool and I benefit from their existence but I don’t think they’re particularly noble.” | “There’s nothing I despise more,” says Simon Rich, “than watching a film or reading a book and realising the protagonist is a heroic artist. It’s an oxymoron! They don’t exist! I put artists on the same level as breweries. I’m thankful for them and I think they’re cool and I benefit from their existence but I don’t think they’re particularly noble.” |
| Rich beams. He does so almost constantly – double deck of teeth, face completely creased – regardless of the gravity of the topic. Death, narcissism, the redundancy of religion in an age of hedonism, he’ll still be grinning. “It’s insane anyone idolises artists,” he continues. “It is an intrinsically self-indulgent, frivolous profession. Especially given there’s so much wonderful art already out there. Anyone who’s throwing more drops into the ocean must be a maniac.” | Rich beams. He does so almost constantly – double deck of teeth, face completely creased – regardless of the gravity of the topic. Death, narcissism, the redundancy of religion in an age of hedonism, he’ll still be grinning. “It’s insane anyone idolises artists,” he continues. “It is an intrinsically self-indulgent, frivolous profession. Especially given there’s so much wonderful art already out there. Anyone who’s throwing more drops into the ocean must be a maniac.” |
| He returns to his espresso and octopus: the breakfast of the maniac. But Rich is fresh off a plane from New York, and one of the most idolised artists of the age, so we’ll let him get away with it. He has six books behind him – four story collections and a couple of novels. Critics have compared him to Waugh and Wodehouse, Borges and Thurber. He’s scripted movies for Pixar and is the youngest writer ever to join Saturday Night Live. Two of his books have been optioned – one by Seth Rogen, the other by Jason Reitman. Another is about to become a sitcom. He’s just turned 30. | He returns to his espresso and octopus: the breakfast of the maniac. But Rich is fresh off a plane from New York, and one of the most idolised artists of the age, so we’ll let him get away with it. He has six books behind him – four story collections and a couple of novels. Critics have compared him to Waugh and Wodehouse, Borges and Thurber. He’s scripted movies for Pixar and is the youngest writer ever to join Saturday Night Live. Two of his books have been optioned – one by Seth Rogen, the other by Jason Reitman. Another is about to become a sitcom. He’s just turned 30. |
| Rich’s most recent collection takes his usual formula – lampooning the mundane by making it epic – and adds moral bite. Spoiled Brats is a very funny, endlessly inventive broadside against the horrors of hipster society and the cosseted monsters who populate it. It’s not a manifesto, and Rich retracts from the idea of satire, but it does offer an indication that his ambitions go deeper than killer skits. | Rich’s most recent collection takes his usual formula – lampooning the mundane by making it epic – and adds moral bite. Spoiled Brats is a very funny, endlessly inventive broadside against the horrors of hipster society and the cosseted monsters who populate it. It’s not a manifesto, and Rich retracts from the idea of satire, but it does offer an indication that his ambitions go deeper than killer skits. |
| “I always have to write about something that’s emotional,” he says, “otherwise it comes across as boring or shallow or didactic.” His approach is scattergun: chuck stuff at the wall and see what sticks. The test? “Is it funny, is it high stakes, and is it visceral?” | “I always have to write about something that’s emotional,” he says, “otherwise it comes across as boring or shallow or didactic.” His approach is scattergun: chuck stuff at the wall and see what sticks. The test? “Is it funny, is it high stakes, and is it visceral?” |
| Visceral is right; three times in the 13 stories someone vomits in the face of privilege. The first to gag is a hamster, Princess Jasmine, enduring a special kind of torture as the class pet in an elite Manhattan prep school. Another to throw up is a toy elf, sent by Santa to sit on a bedroom shelf to check if a child has been bad or good (in fact he’s depraved). | Visceral is right; three times in the 13 stories someone vomits in the face of privilege. The first to gag is a hamster, Princess Jasmine, enduring a special kind of torture as the class pet in an elite Manhattan prep school. Another to throw up is a toy elf, sent by Santa to sit on a bedroom shelf to check if a child has been bad or good (in fact he’s depraved). |
| The third is Herschel, Rich’s great-grandfather, who in 1912 emigrated from Lithuania to Brooklyn, only (and here’s where it gets fictional) to be preserved after falling into a vat of brine in the pickle factory in which he works. A century on, he’s revived by conceptual artists reclaiming the building as a performance space, and tracks down his descendant. To Herschel’s delight, he learns Rich is a doctor. A doctor of scripts, corrects Rich, who’s currently working on something called Penguin President. He’s also vain, lazy, alcoholic and avaricious, a cowardly egomaniac addicted to porn and thrilled by minor celebrity. | The third is Herschel, Rich’s great-grandfather, who in 1912 emigrated from Lithuania to Brooklyn, only (and here’s where it gets fictional) to be preserved after falling into a vat of brine in the pickle factory in which he works. A century on, he’s revived by conceptual artists reclaiming the building as a performance space, and tracks down his descendant. To Herschel’s delight, he learns Rich is a doctor. A doctor of scripts, corrects Rich, who’s currently working on something called Penguin President. He’s also vain, lazy, alcoholic and avaricious, a cowardly egomaniac addicted to porn and thrilled by minor celebrity. |
| “It is a pretty bluntly self-loathing book,” says Rich, smiling wildly. “It does come from a place of guilt. From time to time I’ll find myself obsessing over some trivial problem. This was my way of jolting myself back into awareness.” | “It is a pretty bluntly self-loathing book,” says Rich, smiling wildly. “It does come from a place of guilt. From time to time I’ll find myself obsessing over some trivial problem. This was my way of jolting myself back into awareness.” |
| Of course, real-life Rich is nothing like as awful as this twisted mirror vision. Like one of his heroes, Woody Allen, he writes seven days a week, is scrupulously polite, sweet, careful, alarmingly smart. Yet this ghastly alter-ego cameos in other stories, too; as “a pudgy, hyperactive boy with some kind of undiagnosed emotional problem” in the hamster story, for instance. | Of course, real-life Rich is nothing like as awful as this twisted mirror vision. Like one of his heroes, Woody Allen, he writes seven days a week, is scrupulously polite, sweet, careful, alarmingly smart. Yet this ghastly alter-ego cameos in other stories, too; as “a pudgy, hyperactive boy with some kind of undiagnosed emotional problem” in the hamster story, for instance. |
| The other recurring character in Rich’s work has long been God. After a series of bit parts in early stories, he landed the lead in What In God’s Name – about a lazy deity who wants to chuck in the universe and start up a Thai fusion restaurant. In Spoiled Brats, though, divine beings are just guys out to do a job, like the benevolent grim reaper who kills people’s artistic dreams before they waste too much time on them. | The other recurring character in Rich’s work has long been God. After a series of bit parts in early stories, he landed the lead in What In God’s Name – about a lazy deity who wants to chuck in the universe and start up a Thai fusion restaurant. In Spoiled Brats, though, divine beings are just guys out to do a job, like the benevolent grim reaper who kills people’s artistic dreams before they waste too much time on them. |
| The believers, meanwhile, are the good guys: devout Herschel in Sell Out, Carlos the Catholic janitor who saves the hamsters. Even Princess Jasmine himself: “I, too, am a Christian, although lately I’ve struggled to make sense of God’s plan.” | The believers, meanwhile, are the good guys: devout Herschel in Sell Out, Carlos the Catholic janitor who saves the hamsters. Even Princess Jasmine himself: “I, too, am a Christian, although lately I’ve struggled to make sense of God’s plan.” |
| “I used religion because most religions preach humility and they’re really designed to give humans perspective on their relatively small place in the universe,” says Rich. Raised Reform Jewish in New York, Rich read the Torah at a young age and admired its easy way with apocalypse. His work still bears the hallmarks of a childhood spent with the Old Testament in one hand, TV remote in the other. | “I used religion because most religions preach humility and they’re really designed to give humans perspective on their relatively small place in the universe,” says Rich. Raised Reform Jewish in New York, Rich read the Torah at a young age and admired its easy way with apocalypse. His work still bears the hallmarks of a childhood spent with the Old Testament in one hand, TV remote in the other. |
| In the dedication to one of his books, Rich thanks his mother for allowing him to sit through five episodes of The Simpsons a night. Both parents have their roots in old media: his mother an editor at HarperCollins, his father, Frank, a former New York Times columnist and notoriously vicious theatre critic (“the butcher of Broadway”). His stepmother is also a journalist, his brother Nathaniel another novelist – but of meaty polemics, supplemented by editing literary journals. | In the dedication to one of his books, Rich thanks his mother for allowing him to sit through five episodes of The Simpsons a night. Both parents have their roots in old media: his mother an editor at HarperCollins, his father, Frank, a former New York Times columnist and notoriously vicious theatre critic (“the butcher of Broadway”). His stepmother is also a journalist, his brother Nathaniel another novelist – but of meaty polemics, supplemented by editing literary journals. |
| Yet despite these origins, Rich has become something of a poster boy for Twitter-age prose. Many associate his snappy articulacy with social media. He disagrees, “because all my influences are either old or dead”. Yes, he concedes, half his reading is now done online. Yes, he believes email has “fundamentally changed the way people receive text”. And yes: he thinks the best writing around at the moment is to be found on blogs. But as for him? No. All the internet has done is made him even more keenly aware of the competition. | Yet despite these origins, Rich has become something of a poster boy for Twitter-age prose. Many associate his snappy articulacy with social media. He disagrees, “because all my influences are either old or dead”. Yes, he concedes, half his reading is now done online. Yes, he believes email has “fundamentally changed the way people receive text”. And yes: he thinks the best writing around at the moment is to be found on blogs. But as for him? No. All the internet has done is made him even more keenly aware of the competition. |
| “Whenever I imagine a reader looking at one of my pieces online,” says Rich, “I picture 30 links surrounding it, from sites like ESPN and dozens of pornography links geared towards their specific tastes. So I want to make sure it’s good and fast enough to hold somebody’s attention. In the back of my brain I have: if I bore them for a page then I’ve lost them forever. So that’s maybe a 2014 concern more than a 1914 concern.” | “Whenever I imagine a reader looking at one of my pieces online,” says Rich, “I picture 30 links surrounding it, from sites like ESPN and dozens of pornography links geared towards their specific tastes. So I want to make sure it’s good and fast enough to hold somebody’s attention. In the back of my brain I have: if I bore them for a page then I’ve lost them forever. So that’s maybe a 2014 concern more than a 1914 concern.” |
| Rich’s insight belies his years. In his books, he offers a commentary on the contemporary from a place of curious maturity. He skewers his own generation’s pretensions by regarding them from afar: the past, the future, the perspective of a chimp, a ghost, a condom. When Herschel goes to a nightclub, for instance, he explains that “the person in charge of the music machine has gone crazy. He is playing two records at the same time, mixing the songs together so that it all sounds horrible. The room is so loud and crowded, it reminds me of when I was in steerage. I wanted to survive, but there was also a part of me that prayed for the sweet release of death.” The scene in which he faints on first hearing the price of a potato at Whole Foods, likewise the one in which he starts making a fortune selling scummy rainwater pickles to gullible fans of the artisanal, somehow tickle both the targets of the joke and those who loathe them. | Rich’s insight belies his years. In his books, he offers a commentary on the contemporary from a place of curious maturity. He skewers his own generation’s pretensions by regarding them from afar: the past, the future, the perspective of a chimp, a ghost, a condom. When Herschel goes to a nightclub, for instance, he explains that “the person in charge of the music machine has gone crazy. He is playing two records at the same time, mixing the songs together so that it all sounds horrible. The room is so loud and crowded, it reminds me of when I was in steerage. I wanted to survive, but there was also a part of me that prayed for the sweet release of death.” The scene in which he faints on first hearing the price of a potato at Whole Foods, likewise the one in which he starts making a fortune selling scummy rainwater pickles to gullible fans of the artisanal, somehow tickle both the targets of the joke and those who loathe them. |
| Soon, our fish breakfast is over, and Rich must taxi to Clapham to read at a Bookslam. He’s not raising his hopes. “I’m always just grateful anyone shows up. We’ve come a long way since the days when Homer reciting his Odyssey was the only game in town. There’s like 100 things on television tonight that will be more interesting than anything I could possibly offer.” | Soon, our fish breakfast is over, and Rich must taxi to Clapham to read at a Bookslam. He’s not raising his hopes. “I’m always just grateful anyone shows up. We’ve come a long way since the days when Homer reciting his Odyssey was the only game in town. There’s like 100 things on television tonight that will be more interesting than anything I could possibly offer.” |
| The event, it turns out, could have been ripped from the pages of his book. It’s rammed with skinny jeans and vegan options; girls with ironic totes and guys on the pull. Rich comes onstage, incredibly slight in his nautical top and linen slacks, so thin and flat you could fold him in two like a picnic table. The crowd listens to him read with what looks like a creeping sense of genius. By the end, everyone is smiling as wide as the man himself. | The event, it turns out, could have been ripped from the pages of his book. It’s rammed with skinny jeans and vegan options; girls with ironic totes and guys on the pull. Rich comes onstage, incredibly slight in his nautical top and linen slacks, so thin and flat you could fold him in two like a picnic table. The crowd listens to him read with what looks like a creeping sense of genius. By the end, everyone is smiling as wide as the man himself. |
| • Spoiled Brats by Simon Rich is published by Serpent’s Tail (£8.99). To buy it for £7.19 with free UK p&p go to guardianbookshop.co.uk or call 0330 333 6846 | |
| • Read our review of Spoiled Brats | • Read our review of Spoiled Brats |