THE BOOK OF AYN

The tailspin created by a bad review in the New York Times sends an author into the arms of Ayn Rand.

Filled with gleeful and often politically incorrect humor (one running joke revolves around the idea that only gay men wear Hugo Boss underwear), Freiman's sophomore effort kicks off as our narrator, Anna, is trying to recover from having her satire of the opioid epidemic labeled “classist” by the paper of record. But, as she explains in her own defense, there can be empathy in satire: “Jokes cared, just in a different way. They were a natural and necessary thinking-through-of-things. A thinking that had to go barreling straight through consensus to see what was on the other side. Even if that thing was just laughter. Just the useful acknowledgment that things were never solely good or bad; sometimes they were also, mercifully, funny.” Useful insights like this play a gonzo game of tennis with absurd and hilarious plot twists—for example, during an encounter with a group of “sexagenarian beanie babies” touring Ayn Rand's New York, Anna learns that Rand's first book was also savaged by the Times. While Anna had previously considered Rand “the gateway drug for bad husbands to quit their jobs and start online stock trading,” she now discovers that she and Alisa Rosenbaum (Rand's real name) have much in common. “In 1917, the Bolsheviks had seized her father’s pharmacy and twelve-year-old Ayn had stood by impotently, witnessing his humiliation. Here, I saw a parallel with my own father—the hard-working orthodontist—where the Bolsheviks were his two fourteen-year-old daughters, my half sisters, who mocked him relentlessly for being bourgeois and accidentally misgendering their friends.” If you like this, you’ll love Anna's move to Los Angeles to script a TV show about her new muse; her affair with a content creator she calls Big Boy, who gives her an animal avatar, Ayn Ram; her pilgrimage to a retreat center in Greece that she characterizes as “Eat Pray Love narrated by Humbert Humbert.” Or, perhaps, Ottessa Moshfegh.

Lively, sexy, and funny, with an actual quest for meaning at its core.