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From the beginning, Gidding lists the strikes against him. He’s a straight, white, privileged, Boomer male who, at age twenty-four, penned a panned autobiography—Failure: An Autobiography. His degrees in classics (dead white males) and English secured him a professorship at a mediocre college, where he plodded through a standard life of marriage (two wives, one died) and children (one son). What isn’t standard is his take on it all.
A German alter ego named Joβche keeps Gidding in his place with deprecatory and darkly humorous commentary on yet another Gidding-written autobiography. Caustic conversation punctuates a confessional, transparent memoir riddled with feelings of inadequacy, inner dichotomies, and overarching white guilt. Gidding is a self-confessed liberal Democrat who envies Trump fans and their “complacent, gleeful, untroubled white faces.” He joins a Whiteness Awareness Study Group, which “was about as far as I could go in the direction of any kind of racial activism,” and festers with guilt since his father marched at Selma.
Through his narrative, Gidding comes across as relatable, erudite, philosophical, funny, and lyrical. Writing about the little things in life, especially ones that shape personality, is not easy. His teenaged insensitivity to having a Black maid, the private language and shared humor of marriage, and the banal customs and petty cruelties of humans that he shares in the book are straight from a Philip Roth novel. Readers of Karl Ove Knausgård will enjoy this extraordinary journey through an ordinary life. With honest, confessional, and transparent prose, Gidding and his alter ego entertainingly “sweep things back out from under the rug, for all to see.”