I went into this book mostly blind as to what it contained. The Goodreads description was thin, and I'd never heard of it before (I'm not very big on 90s memoir phenomenons, believe it or not). Sure, I was slightly skeptical—I usually try to stay away from nonfiction—but I tried to keep an open mind. The entire world seemed to like it, so it couldn't be so bad, right? Wrong. Very, very wrong. I tried to look for good things in this novel, whatever deep and profound ideas other people saw in it; I spent hours thinking on its underdeveloped morals, but when it comes down to it, Tuesdays with Morrie is bland. It has completely dislikeable characters, it's repetitive, and it can't look at the deeper issues to save its life.
The characters are atrocious. Everyone supposedly loves Morrie, and while I'm sure he was a nice enough man in life, Mitch Albom does him no justice. He was judgey and stuck in the superiority complex he didn't know he had. Morrie's whole thing was that he loved everyone, but the entire novel was chock-full of him hating everything about American culture. And, you know, I get it, capitalism drives greed. There are plenty of parts of American culture that are unhealthy and destructive, but that doesn't mean it's wholly evil. That doesn't mean he gets to insult everyone in the world and act like he's so much better because he doesn't use phones or enjoy modern media. It's just such a trivial and small-minded way of thinking. How am I supposed to find him charming and refreshing when he said—I kid you not—he misses the 60s and 70s because everyone was empowering themselves and fighting for their rights. A cishet white man with wealth and a safe, steady job said he missed one of the most politically charged, hateful times in modern American history. Who does he think he is? How dare he say that he wanted to live in a time period where people of color and queer people were fighting with everything they had for the right to survive? I know that wasn't his intention, but it was completely insensitive and generally just missed the point of those decades entirely.
Mitch was more annoying than offensive. He's passive in everything and buys into what Morrie tells him without question. I didn't really feel as though the book gave me any reason to care about him. He was one of Morrie's students who only got back in touch with Morrie when he found out Morrie was dying. He was just a regular sports writer before the events of this book. I guess the point was that he wasn't interesting until Morrie was back in his life? Except I didn't like Morrie, so that didn't really help me feel interested in Mitch.
If the book were well written, I might not care as much that the characters are all terrible. The thing is, it's not well written. Every chapter felt like a repetition of the last. I don't think I could describe any specific scene to you (except, maybe, when Mitch talked about his brother, but that was all of ten pages). In each chapter, Mitch visited Morrie and received bland, generic advice. It was almost always the same thing: "only love is permanent" or "accept death and you can live" or "love wins." I mean, really, after a couple of chapters, his point had been beaten to a bloody pulp. I was listening to the audiobook at 2.5 speed while I read and it still wasn't fast enough.
It didn't help that every message was about as deep as a Hallmark greeting card. I understand that this released in 1997, but do you know when Hallmark released? 1910! Almost a hundred years prior! Morrie thought he was the wisest, most enlightened man alive, but really, all he did was clump together surface level issues and claim that had everyone been less focused on material items and more focused on love, there wouldn't have been any problems. He generalizes everything and blames it all on whatever is most convenient for him. Take, for example, his beliefs on relationship problems in his age group. He tells Mitch about older men constantly divorcing and remarrying younger women. To Morrie, this is social commentary on how his generation is unable to find real love and connection because of technology. Yes, you read that right. Technology. According to Morrie, it is not related to sexism. It is not related to the objectification of women. It is not related to a gendered power dynamic taking over an entire generation and stifling the emotional growth of everyone. No, no, that would be silly. This is about smartphones and too much TV. Because what problem isn't, right?
Part of the blame, of course, falls to Mitch. He's the author of the story. He should be able to spin this into something. He's a writer! Finding meaning in anything and everything is practically in the job description! But alas, Mitch is a mediocre sports writer who takes the words of an old white man with a penchant for sweeping generalizations as those of a god.
This book wouldn't make me so angry if I didn't find it so very damaging. Tuesdays with Morrie had a huge cultural impact. People were eating it up; Oprah was shouting about it from the rooftops (and, in those days, the word of Oprah really was the word of god). But did it have a healthy impact? Not at all, in my opinion. Morrie practically says that we shouldn't move forward as a society. He wanted to revert three and a half decades because his singular life was better. He glorified history and ignored, dismissed, or trivialized many of its negative aspects. His core belief, really, is that anything modern is bad. Tuesdays with Morrie fed into anti-technology culture. Because of the novel's impact, it's not far-fetched to say that society as a whole was affected by that, when in reality, technology is far more helpful than harmful. The world was on the verge of a technological revolution and one of the most popular books of the decade dismissed it with contempt. Most bad things about technology, like the normalization of violence for children and the addictiveness of social media, didn't even exist yet! What's wrong with a phone or a pager or a walkman when all they did was encourage people to connect with each other. Sure, it was a different kind of connection than Morrie was accustomed to, but that's how the world works. The way humans do everything changes with time and evolution and discovery, but writing it off as a wholly bad change is judgemental and hurtful.
I tried to find good in Tuesdays with Morrie. I wanted to understand its appeal, but, to be brutally honest, it felt like what stupid people say to make themselves feel smart. Its arguments are easy to fall back on, but they're evasive to the more complex bigger picture.
It was a rantier one today. It's been a while since I've gotten a good scream out about a book, so if you made it this far, I'm impressed. Sometimes when my book anger builds up, it comes out as a vicious rage and can be a bit difficult to stomach. My next post (if I find the time to work on it during the short, bitter month of February) will be something special for my blogiversary! Mark your calendars (or don't, because that would actually be weird, since it's not your blogiversary): on February 21, 2022, the book blog turns three! Until then, keep reading, readers.