Given my interest in consumer culture and what it does to people, I was glad the TLS asked me to write about Eula Biss’s new book about her own vexed relationship to things:
Having and Being Had dwells on Biss’s unease about her participation in a system whose values she does not embrace, even as she savours its rewards. No pleasure can be simple. She evokes the never-satisfied hunger that characterizes life as a consumer under late-stage capitalism: “In the furniture stores we visit, I’m filled with a strange unspecific desire. I want everything and nothing.”
