And then I think I will read a later passage.
And I will give you a tiny bit of context for this.
So this particular novel is set in the early 1990s, when
gangsta rap was just starting to be a big thing commercially
and cross over into the white mainstream of listeners
to pop music.
And so this particular passage has
to do with the National Public Radio host, Terry Gross.
And in it, Susan, the main character whose point of view
I was just reading from, she's being sued by her relatives
for her inheritance, which is this mansion in Pasadena.
And she's headed to court to meet that suit.
"Jim was supposed to meet her outside the court building,
so she was driving there in her own car.
She was nervous, dressed neatly in conservative clothes,
with pearl earrings and flat, unglamorous heels.
And she listened to the radio as she drove.
She had always been irritated by NPR, all her adult life.
And yet, all her adult life she had listened to it faithfully.
One exit's worth of freeway driving
was all it would be, first surface streets, then
a mile on the freeway, then surface streets again.
And yet, as soon as she emerged onto the 110, on NPR,
a well-known interviewer, Terry Gross,
was earnestly complimenting a rap musician on his genius.
She knew she would never make it.
[LAUGHTER]
The traffic was stopped, bumper to bumper as far
as she could see, though in the opposite direction
it was moving freely.
Technically, it was spring, but the smog
was more like summer smog, heat rippling in the dirty air.
And a torpor had descended over the long lines of cars.
Up ahead, people had gotten out of their vehicles
and were walking back and forth, some standing aside
by themselves and smoking cigarettes, others in groups,
talking and gesticulating.
It had to be an accident.
She wished she had a cigarette, but then she
never bought them herself, only bummed them off Jim.
She thought of getting out of her car, like the others,
and asking one of the other smokers for one,
but then that seemed too disgusting.
Anyway, she'd never liked to get out
of her car on the freeway, even when the traffic was bumper
to bumper, and at a dead halt.
The concrete had a gray desolation
and the air was unbreathable.
And she knew a cigarette would seem even viler as soon as she
stepped from the car.
She waited 15 minutes with the windows up,
cooled by the air conditioning, glancing frequently
at the digital clock on her dash, jiggling her foot,
and occasionally swearing as the minutes ticked away,
and the hour of the hearing approached.
When it was six minutes before the hour,
she became irritated with Terry Gross, whose earnest tone,
it seemed to her, had grown more and more sycophantic.
More and more, the intimacy of this trademark Terry Gross
tone, as she spoke to the rap star and flattered him several
additional times with her eager references to his
'brilliance and creativity,' seemed to suggest that she,
Terry Gross, was a longtime proponent and appreciator
of rap music, and even quite possibly a credentialed expert
on the rap music subject.
The longer Susan listened, becoming increasingly
frustrated and impatient, the more it seemed that
the impression being conveyed was that she, the white,
middle-aged female Terry Gross--
unlike she, the white, middle-aged female Susan--
was a proud, savvy, collective owner
of what she lavishly called the rap music phenomenon.
Susan felt resentful of this pandering self-inclusion,
of this proprietary, rap-music-savvy,
rap-music-loving, Terry Gross.
At four minutes till her court date,
she switched off the radio in a fit of pique,
and rolled down the windows all the way.
Let the heat flow in, she thought.
Let it boil.
The fumes from the idling cars almost choked her,
but stubbornly, she refused to roll up her windows again.
Not yet, she thought, not yet.
In her annoyance and frustration,
her incipient rage, she associated
the rolled-up windows and air conditioning
directly with Terry Gross.
If she closed the windows again and switched the AC back on,
it would be necessary to turn the radio back on too.
And it would have to be NPR, because the commercial stations
were all manner of products screaming at you, which
was even more hateful in this situation of car
entrapment than the quiet, earnest, middle-class,
educated, and maddeningly empathetic tone of Terry Gross.
[LAUGHTER]
And so the rolled-up windows meant
letting Terry Gross and her sycophantic rap music interview
win.
Three minutes, two minutes, one, still no movement.
She wished she had a car phone like T, or possibly
the rap guy.
He certainly had a car phone.
Most likely he was using said car phone
to converse with Terry Gross.
Then it was 15 minutes past, then 18,
and the tension drained out of her because she had to give up.
She'd missed it.
There was no reason for her to be sitting there anymore,
no reason save the obvious fact that she was trapped.
A bearded man in a baseball cap walked by her car,
and she rolled the window down briefly
to ask him if he knew anything.
He told her there was a multicar pileup where
the 10 merged with the 5.
Cars had crashed and people were hurt, he said.
'So count your blessings, lady.'
She watched him in the rearview mirror
as he continued down the line of cars,
slouching, moving so slowly it seemed
he felt no urgency at all.
He walked like a defeated or dazed person.
Yet, he had spoken sharply.
Maybe he'd seen something.
Maybe he was grieving.
When Casey had her accident, there
were courageous bystanders who went in
to help the trapped and wounded victims.
One or two of them talked to Hal and Susan later,
in the hospital, told how the accident
had changed their lives too, though they had not
been physically injured.
Some of them never recovered fully, but wrote to Casey,
and told her how they cried themselves
to sleep at night for months after they came upon the scene.
And they had not been hurt at all.
After the men disappeared from her rearview mirror,
she surrendered to Terry Gross, surrendered completely.
She closed her eyes and listened to the empathetic Terry Gross
tone, and to the rap-loving earnestness
as it flowed over her.
I love rap music too, she thought,
making a generous gesture.
She would reach out to Terry Gross, the rap guy,
and their mutual passion, thus elevating her own mood.
I also find it creative and brilliant, she said in her mind
to Terry Gross, and the rap guy.
It is brilliantly creative.
It is creatively brilliant.
[LAUGHTER]
Not only that, but all of it is brilliant,
not just the white-friendly, woman-friendly versions
favored by college students, but also the gangsta version,
the version with bitches, hos, and gets,
the completely misogynistic, racist,
homophobic, and violent, even nihilistically brutal version.
I love it, love it, love it.
[LAUGHTER]
Mmm-hmm, I love it, and I love all self-expressions,
ironic and otherwise, all of them under the sun.
I love pornography, gangster rap, war video games,
all fantasies of violence.
These fantasies preoccupy the insane men,
and keep them from their actual work of angrily murdering.
Let us not condemn these proliferating,
vibrant simulations, these models of brutality.
No, let us praise them as though they were condoms.
[LAUGHTER]
Maybe that explained Terry Gross and her rap appreciation.
Maybe the gangsta rap was viewed, by Terry Gross,
less as an incitement to gangsta-type
acting out than as an artistic, prophylactic screen against it.
Maybe the rap Terry Gross and the Planned Parenthood Terry
Gross were actually one and the same.
[LAUGHTER]
I am a nice person, Susan thought steadily.
No one will take my house from me.
She was a murderer, sure, like the angry men who did not
listen to enough rap music.
Perhaps this was her own problem also.
Perhaps she needed a larger dose of rap, but not
of the angry variety.
She was a polite murderer, the white kind, white-skinned,
and white-collar.
Although, come to think of it, she had liked an Ice Cube song
Sal forced them all to listen to after the dinner at Casey's
apartment, the night before Hal flew off.
Hal, her husband, had been sleeping then, passed out,
and Sal played for them an album titled Death Certificate.
In fact, the song had been hilarious.
Her favorite part was a line concerning oral sex, where
the slutty daughter ate nuts voraciously, not unlike, said
Ice Berg--
Ice--
[LAUGHTER]
--not unlike, said Ice Cube, hummingbirds.
It could be ascribed to poetic license, she thought.
But let's face it, Ice Cube lacked a solid education
on the subject of bird diets.
[LAUGHTER]
He was funny anyway, whether because
of the curious nut-eating hummingbirds,
undiscovered in the annals of nature, or despite them.
It was hard to say.
The natural history of hummingbirds was not the point.
The point was that they rhymed with cummingbird."
[LAUGHTER]
And I think I'll stop that on that lovely note.
[APPLAUSE]