O’Brien’s First Christmas by Jeanette Winterson, 1998
The magic trick:
A satirical premise that only sets up an even more satirical resolution
It’s funny how quaint complaints about commercialism from 20 years ago sound now. Gosh, was it really so exhausting shopping in a mall for gifts?
At least you had malls! At least you did something semi-communal that actually involved interacting with other human beings!
Anyway, “O’Brien’s First Christmas” is very funny. It does something neat – and incredibly cynical. It doesn’t just build a satirical premise to set up a life-affirming character development and resolution, as we see so often. It builds a satirical premise that only sets up an even more satirical resolution.
And that’s quite a trick on Winterson’s part.
The selection:
O’Brien flicked through the Lonely Hearts. There were extra pages of them at Christmas, just as there was extra everything else. How could it be that column after column of sane, loving, slim men and women, without obvious perversions, were spending Christmas alone? Were the happy families in the department store a beguiling minority?
She had once answered a Lonely Hearts advertisement and eaten dinner with a small young man who mended organ pipes. He had suggested they get married that night by special licence. O’Brien had declined on the grounds that a whirlwind romance would tire her out after so little practice. It seemed rather like going to advanced aerobics when you couldn’t manage five minutes on the exercise bicycle. She had asked him why he was in such a hurry.
‘I have a heart condition.’
So it was like aerobics after all.
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