The Book of Ayn

June 1, 2023

Following her Miles Franklin/Center for Fiction's long-listed Inappropriation, Freiman's latest features Anna, who gets caught up in the philosophy of Ayn Rand after being called out as classist for her recent novel. She hurries to Los Angeles, hoping to make a TV show about Rand, then ends up hopping from New York to Lesbos to find herself. Prepub Alert.

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September 1, 2023
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.

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September 11, 2023
Freiman follows up Inappropriation with more mischievous satire in this acerbic and affecting story of a canceled novelist who struggles to reinvent herself. After Anne’s novel of the opioid epidemic is labeled “classist” by the New York Times, given her relative privilege compared to the book’s characters, the criticisms spike online (“Twitter wanted to kill me,” she claims). As a result, she can no longer get published and loses her friends. After reading some of Ayn Rand’s objectivist writings, she embraces Rand’s philosophy of radical individualism and abandons the hostile New York City literary scene for Hollywood, determined to write a TV script. She meets a gorgeous young influencer who designs an animal avatar for her called Ayn Ram, and though the avatar goes viral, Anne can’t figure out how to create her Randian TV satire. Disillusioned, she joins an ego-killing meditation commune on a Greek island. Though long explanations of Rand’s ideologies grow wearisome, Freiman makes up for them with a slew of sly passages (“no one wanted to read Eat Pray Love narrated by Humbert Humbert,” Anne laments, torpedoing her idea for another book). There’s also depth to Anne, who wants to be a serious writer. Freiman’s portrait of a hapless artist is provocative and surprisingly moving. Susan Golomb at Writers House.

November 1, 2023
Anna is a writer determined to shake up the status quo with her satirical writing. But after her latest novel was deemed "classist" by the New York Times, she was shunned in the artistic community and sent into a spiral to find meaning in her hurt. When she discovers Ayn Rand's philosophy, she becomes a radical follower of Rand's theories of individualism and begins blaming others for her novel's failure. This radicalism leads to greater alienation from Anna's friends and family before an opportunity for a TV show sends her even further away, to the West Coast. When Anna eventually finds herself struggling and alone, she returns disillusioned to New York and joins a commune that teaches her the exact opposite perspective on life. Freiman's (Inappropriation, 2018) satirical novel explores the existential search for meaning with hilarity and absurdity. At the heart of the book is a tender empathy for Anna and others like her who are so focused on finding a greater purpose that they miss where they are in the present.

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