a book that absolutely resonated with me. i’ve reread this book 3/4 times. i plan on reading it again. and eventually buying at new one. ( )

Why Are You So Sad? by Jason Porter is a recommended satirical novel.

In Why Are You So Sad? Raymond Champs is going through a hard time. He is a senior Pictographer at the North American Division of LokiLoki, an Ikea-like store. The novel opens with Raymond in bed, pondering whether we have "all sunken into a species wide bout of clinical depression?" He tries to ask his wife about it but as she is less than encouraging him along these lines of thinking, he decides that what he needs is "an emotional Geiger counter that could objectively measure other people for sadness." But how does an average corporate desk jockey come up with a way to measure sadness?

Naturally, Raymond decides to write a questionnaire. He can have people at work take it under the auspices that it is from management. This would provide him with a random sampling of the data he needs to prove that we are all depressed. He knows that his co-workers are all compliant. "They do as they are told, like sheep waiting for paychecks. Corralled over to meetings that serve no purpose. Filling out forms they never hear about again. Sitting in on career development workshops with box lunches and guest speakers who had just flown in from the middle of the country. It was a natural fixture within the terrain, jumping through unnecessary hoops." And so he writes out his questions, many of them unconventional, sends the completed questionnaire to the copier and has 50 copies made.

Immediately his coworkers start answering the questions he poses on the form and putting their completed forms in a basket marked for them by Raymond's cubicle. Questions include, in part:
Are you single?
Are you having an affair?
Why are you so sad?
When was the last time you felt happy?
Are you who you want to be?
Is Today worse than yesterday?
If you were a day of the week, would you be Monday or Wednesday?
and more....

I did find the idea that a man might wonder if we are all as a species going through clinical depression intriguing. As Raymond's wife tries to talk him out of his mission, Raymond battles his depression by looking for answers and maybe empathy or camaraderie from others who feel the same way. (There is one scene in a movie rental store that had me thinking that it should have been re-written as an encounter in front of a Red Box because I don't even know of a store location anymore.) While Why Are You So Sad? is smart and funny, I might find it funnier if I worked in a cubicle for a large corporation.


Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of The Penguin Group for review purposes.


( )

This story just never got going for me. The main character Raymond, is bored with his corporate job, and seriously depressed. But the the book is just not that funny. ( )

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Have we all sunken into a species-wide bout of clinical depression?

Porter’s uproarious, intelligent debut centers on Raymond Champs, an illustrator of assembly manuals for a home furnishings corporation, who is charged with a huge task: To determine whether or not the world needs saving. It comes to him in the midst of a losing battle with insomnia — everybody he knows, and maybe everybody on the planet, is suffering from severe clinical depression. He’s nearly certain something has gone wrong. A virus perhaps. It’s in the water, or it’s in the mosquitoes, or maybe in the ranch flavored snack foods. And what if we are all too sad and dispirited to do anything about it? Obsessed as he becomes, Raymond composes an anonymous survey to submit to his unsuspecting coworkers — “Are you who you want to be?”, “Do you believe in life after death?”, “Is today better than yesterday?” — because what Raymond needs is data. He needs to know if it can be proven. It’s a big responsibility. People might not believe him. People, like his wife and his boss, might think he is losing his mind. But only because they are also losing their minds. Or are they?

Reminiscent of Gary Shteyngart, George Saunders, Douglas Coupland and Jennifer Egan, Porter’s debut is an acutely perceptive and sharply funny meditation on what makes people tick.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM LIBRARY THING'S EARLY REVIEWERS PROGRAM

My Review: Reading this book is like watching Jim Carrey play Rabbit Angstrom in a shelved TV pilot of Rabbit, Run. It's like reading John Updike's hitherto-unknown draft of a spec script called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It's quite similar to a lost Seinfeld episode in which George and Kramer get drunk and fool around...or was that an ayahuasca-fueled nightmare...?

I'm not quite sure why the publisher labeled this satire. It's black comedy, and quite dryly amusing in many spots. It's satirizing...what? Modern Society? Permaybehaps I'm no longer With It and don't get the satire. That's more than a little possible.

Porter has an MFA (ruh-roh, Raggy) from Hunter College and is blurbed by my dote Colum McCann. I entered these portals an eager acolyte in the making. I exited the service entrance wondering just how the hell I got onto the loading dock. The not-really-an-ending felt like I was here at the business end of the edifice but there wasn't a delivery truck in sight.

But two things have stuck with me, two contributions to my ever-smaller stock of Stuff I Want to Remember:
1) The image of happiness, complete and sincere and freshly made happiness, as like the feeling of putting new socks on clean feet. Can't pull the quote without spoilers. But the image is instantly relatable and also fresh (pun optional).
2) The Fearless and Searching Moral Inventory (how twelve-steppy I'm feeling today!) that Ray passes around in questionnaire form. I love it!

Why are you so sad?
Are you single?
Are you having an affair?
Are you who you want to be?
Would you prefer to be someone else?
Are you similar to the "you" you thought you would become when as a child you imagined your future self?
When was the last time you felt happy?
Was it a true, pure happy or a relative happy?
What does it feel like to get out of bed in the morning?
Do you realize you have an average of 11,000 to 18,250 mornings of looking in the mirror and wondering if people will find you attractive?
Do you think people will remember you after you die?
For how long after you die?
Do you believe in life after death?
Do you believe in life after God?
Are you for the chemical elimination of all things painful?
Do you think we need more sports?
Have you ever fallen in love?
If yes, were you surprised that it, like all other things, faded over time?
Do you hear voices?

It's like a sociology class exercise designed by someone who's drunk and lonely. I was bemused that this questionnaire was a central organizing device of the sort novel. It took up a lot of space that would have been more satisfactorily used in traditional means of character development, either of Ray himself, or the people answering his trippy survey. But it made me smile, of itself and as a shortcut to the purpose of making readers invest in the lovable loon that is Ray.

My life may not be changed by the book, but my smile muscles are exercised and my chuckle-box got wound up a time or three. I call that a win.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. ( )

Why are you so sad? is a wonderful debut novel taking a comic look at the disaffected life of a young designer working in an Ikea clone. It is not a stretch to see the world through Ray’s depressed eyes since we, too, have experienced the monotony and forced cheeriness coated with shades of ambition that greet Ray every day at work. Jason Porter, however, creates in Ray a character part Holden Caulfield and part Peter Gibbons from the movie Office Space. Ray sees the world in terms that are slightly subversive, and therefore, highly entertaining. He is another example of how comedy depends on life’s troubles.

Ray is depressed by just about everything in his life but the worst moments seem induced by his job at Loki Loki. That name alone conveys a lot of the controlled Disneyesque world of Loki Loki whose motto is Everyday Living is Getting Better Every day. Ray, who draws instructional diagrams for Loki Loki’s assembly instructions, begs to differ. It’s not much better at home with his wife who is perfectly satisfied at work, sleeps well, wakes up raring to go, and asks him a lot of questions to be sure he’s not saying what he really thinks at work.

And what does he really think? Here’s one example.
How are you feeling?
Why ?
I’m your wife. I can ask these questions.
I don’t know
Well, that’s an improvement.
Okay I guess I feel like a robot that was programmed to believe it was a little boy, but that just cut itself and to its dismay discovers it can’t bleed.

One day Ray has a moment of insight. His creative side is not completely stifled by Loki Loki. He sees that he is not alone. The whole world is actually suffering a “species wide” depression. In this aha moment, he acts by creating a survey to measure the degree of the pending epidemic. Ray moves from being preoccupied with avoiding work to wondering how his coworkers will answer the survey which he anonymously distributes to them. The survey includes earnest questions delivered in Ray’s deadpan take on everything. The questions, though oddly personal, are actually believable to the employees accustomed to the management tendency to pretend to care about them.

Porter sustains the comic voice but Ray is definitely marching to his own, alienated drummer. There is no sugar coating of Ray’s perception of the world. He looks at a colleague’s perfect teeth and imagines the skeleton beneath the salesman flesh. Later on he experiences a deep awareness of the moment but even that is short-circuited because he doesn’t know what to make of it.

I read this story around the same time that I saw the movie Her in which the main character, Theodore, falls in love with his computer operating system. Both stories deal with the lack of intimacy in a contemporary or near future world. Ray, however, is in a more acute state of crisis. Theodore has become the norm in his world but Ray is not. Ray feels not only is he in a state of pain but that it’s his duty to tell everyone else that yes, we are all on a sinking ship. In this sense, then, he is actually somewhat heroic. He was the one human being trying to be honest and he would not go down quietly. “I either had to solve the problem or prepare for a life underwater.”

Porter’s satirical take on the human condition will make you laugh even as you recognize the bitter truths. It will also make you sympathize with whoever wrote the Ikea manual you can’t decipher.