30 Novels, day 5: The annual Christmas catalogue
When I was a kid a new
edition of this eagerly-awaited novel came out every year, in the fall. I
couldn’t wait to get my hands on it. I fought with my siblings over it. I
poured over each marvelous page countless times as the snow fell and the
holiday season approached. Well, to be accurate I only skimmed through most of
the chapters because the ones I really wanted to read were the last few.
Okay, the Christmas
catalogue wasn’t a novel. But then again, in a way it was. And still is. If one
definition of the novel is a work of fiction about a society and its values, then
the Christmas catalog was certainly a novel. As you turned its pages you saw good-looking,
mostly pale-skinned people enjoying themselves in their new blouses and skirts
and slacks and suit jackets. You saw them relaxing on their new sofas, admiring
their new drapes, happily using their new cookware and vacuum cleaners. And in
the last few chapters, you saw kids playing with their marvelous shiny new toys.
Although oddly enough they usually weren’t playing with the toys, they were just posed beside them, smiling at them. There was something eerie about those
kids. They were too well-behaved.
Each image in the book was
carefully posed, perfectly lit. There was no conflict in this perfect world,
which should have made it a very boring novel. But of course it wasn’t. It was
pure wish fulfillment. Every page was a happy ending.
Except for those excluded
from this ideal society. You didn’t see very many old people in the book’s
pages. You didn’t see many people of different ethnicities, and no one with
tattoos, or differently abled, or homeless, or sad. You didn’t even see just
plain ordinary-looking people like the ones you knew. Everyone in the book was
beautiful.
Maybe the Christmas
Wish Book was really a utopian novel of the future. Surely the people in this
book acted as if they lived in a society free of all of the hangs-ups of ours.
The women seemed perfectly happy to stand around in their bras and girdles without
a trace of shame or embarrassment, and the same for the men in their briefs and
long underwear. How strange that it
wasn’t okay to want to look at undressed people in real life, but okay to look
at them in a book.
When I was a kid the
novel took me to a kind of toyland heaven, where there were never any adults
around. If only I could get all of the things I saw and desired in those pages.
If only that’s the way life really was. If only, if only…
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