Comfort

A couple months ago, after a bout with stress, I called up my friend Michael and said, “I need some stupid fun.” We went to a throwback arcade, played Skee-Ball, pinball, Galaga and Pac-Man. After a while, we did a few laps around the place, commenting on this or that outdated technology, the silliness, the kitsch. Then we happened upon The Simpsons, a game we’d both played growing up at arcades and roller rinks. Because the place operates on a flat rate at the door, the games are set to free play. Every time we got a “GAME OVER,” the screen prompted us with a CONTINUE? And you bet your little behind we continued. We played through all the levels, beat all the bosses, high-fived like properly overgrown twelve-year-olds. It was fun, purely and stupidly—and that was the point.

Beyond a few blips of reflection—how far back does nostalgia travel? Can you be nostalgic for something you never experienced? Can nostalgia get recycled? How so?—the night yielded nothing from my critical faculties.

Ever since a student told me about “cozy fantasy,” books whose characters seek personal growth, cute moments, and lattes, I’ve been thinking a lot about comfort, how we seek it and why, and our seemingly increasing need to hoard it.

My past life as a critic taught me I can take anything apart, and the taking apart started to come second nature. Movies, music, even people—nothing was immune to a takedown. My reading life felt out of balance. My life life felt out of balance. I was constantly straining to sound smart. I wanted the superior opinion. And I wanted to prove it with thoughtfulness and being more well read than anyone I knew. But the unrelenting dint of appraisal made it difficult to love anything—or to allow myself to love anything.

I’m learning, albeit slowly, how to allow a love to blossom, and how to allow myself to sit with something my past self would smother.

I love J. Ryan Stradal’s three novels—Kitchens of the Great Midwest, The Lager Queen of Minnesota, and Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club— about congenial Midwesterners for this same reason I loved the arcade that night. They’re charming and lighthearted and funny. Stradal knows the people I come from. He knows the cut-a-bitch aunts (we say “aunt” with a short “o” sound – like “ont”— not “ant” like the insect), he knows the gun-toting uncles, and he knows we’re more apt to be nice to someone’s face and then rip them apart the moment they’re out of earshot. He knows the people who say “that’s different” when asked if they like the green goddess dip, who say “he’s interesting” when they dislike someone, who say “Well, Criminy Fluffernuggins” when people cut them off in traffic.

Were I to deconstruct these books, I’m sure I’d find them (insert jackass opinion), but I’ve chosen to keep my critical faculties at arm’s length, because I sought them in times when I needed some comfort, and comfort is what I got in return. A critic’s job, in a sense, is to ruin the surface level, but I don’t want the surface level ruined here. That’s not to say that Stradal peddles schmaltz, and I do think these books would hold up to some scrutiny. People in these novels grieve and suffer hardship and miscarriages and come to the edge of losing everything. One strength of them lies in their ability to warm the heart without tipping into sentimentality. “Risk sentimentality,” the late, great Jack Driscoll once told my writing workshop, “or you’ll wind up stone cold.” I don’t think Stradal was angling for the Booker Prize with his depiction of Mariel Prager struggling to keep the Lakeside Supper Club afloat, nor when he writes, in Kitchens of the Great Midwest, “Maybe in Florida they sang hymns in their bikinis, but that wouldn’t fly up here.” The sweetness is the point.

Reading is one of the great acts of freedom. It’s us and some symbols, symbols to images bouncing around our minds, inner voices competing, arguing, talking back, or simply relishing the waking dream. The lone reader, the beach, the room, the prison cell, the tree fort, the bus, the bench, the nook, the chair with the ratty arm rest. So, why not spend that freedom looking for freedom of mind?

I love sweat and innovation and challenge. I love to feel cajoled, disoriented, and disturbed. Books that comment on the dark underbellies of late capitalism. Books that skewer the corporate workplace. Books that depict grit and expose systemic fracture and illuminate little-known violences. Books that crush you under their weight and force you to take breaks or a bath after you flip the last page. Hurricane Season, One Friday in April, Ghostroots. But lightness for the sake of lightness isn’t a bad thing, nor does it mean you’ll lose your critical faculties if you give them a momentary rest.

You deserve comfort every now and then—and you deserve to feel comfortable enough that, were you to feel disturbed, it wouldn’t ruin your week. So, how to find the middle way? Great question. Maybe ask the Buddha, because I sure haven’t figured it out.

I think it’s hard to demand much from readers these days, and I would say I don’t know why but I think we all have a hunch, and I’ll spare you my usual soapbox about jacked nervous systems and dopamine addiction and forfeiting our attentions to the dubious morality of data miners and groupthink. I am not immune to these forces either. We’re at a comfort deficit, that much is clear. So, embrace comfort if comfort is what you need.

I love the band The War on Drugs. They bring me such comfort, and I can put their music on at any time. Steady backbeat, swelling synths and guitars washing forward and back like competing oceans—and let’s not forget the bitchin’ guitar solos. After listening to one of their records, I find myself humming their songs all throughout the day. I’ve heard the criticism – all their songs sound the same, the lyrics are too vague, and, in the case of the friend who caught them at an outdoor festival? “Most expensive nap of my life.” I get it. And I still love them. Will these criticisms ever penetrate my enjoyment of the music? Maybe, but maybe not. For now, I won’t hear any of it.

Some of us are more inclined to seek out a challenge, while others are more inclined toward comfort. Neither is more right or valiant. These are just modes of being.

I’ve probably squashed more than a few of my friends’ comforts with quickfire criticism over the years—as if they needed my opinion—but we like to believe our taste is superior, don’t we? We’re far too eager to twist ourselves around our comfort blankets—or our discomfort blankets—clinging to them as if they contain modicums of identity. It’s just a thing you like (or pretend to like). Tomorrow you will like a different thing.

How about you? Do you ever wall yourself off from criticism of certain things you love? Do you fear too much critical thinking will spoil that experience? What books bring you comfort?

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Please spread the love to your local libraries, independent booksellers if you can, or shop online at Bookshop. Thanks, as always, for reading.