"a strange quality of ineptitude"
Pamela Lu's Pamela, from 1998, is 5.39 x 8 x 0.34 inches & 98 cerebral pages.
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Last month, I’d just wrapped up an article about cherishing my own incompetences (how do I twine together self-deprecation and self-admiration so well, so often, I do not know!), when I had an enormous regret. I’d started Pamela, by Pamela Lu and it opens with an extraordinary character description about an especially incompetent friend:
I wish I’d read this just two days earlier because then I could have described a desire for more ineptitude as a desire to exist almost exclusively on the conceptual level.
Pamela, published in 1998, follows a group of talky, thinky friends and their intellectual concerns. “Returning to the subject,” is the first clause of this book, which is telling. Pamela does the impossible, it captures the ongoing conversation among a group of people. It illustrates the shared life-of-the-mind that happens among a crew in an academic setting together. There’s intellectual fervor and competition and the joys of being friends with really smart, really verbal people. They have quick wits and deep thoughts and endless energy for accurate characterizations of each other. It’s like Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk, but among a set of dilettante academics who make jokes about praxis and “praxis”:
Below, a passage recounting their conversation on mediated relationships to experience and how those change desire:
They want the feelings without the narrative. As Lu’s narrator refers to it, they want “the love story abridged”. And Pamela, this slender and dense little book, is a perfect example of that thrilling compression.
Pamela was also the January installment of Purse Book Gals-On-The-Go Official Book Club Book. Ultimately, the crew answered “yes!” : it is an asset for a Purse Book to be plotless and ruminative! “It induces day-dreaming and you’re usually in a situation where you can put down the people and people watch.” !
Here’s what a couple other Gals on the Go thought:
“Can we not forget the Patty Hearst opening line*? Unexpected even though it was the first thing I read!” — Mac A.
“A perfect encapsulation of the intellectually-driven social dynamics. This made me miss grad school so much and not at all.” — Christina
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*The Patty Hearst epigraph:
