Cultured Travel Guide Books - The air-conditioned nightmare |
![The air-conditioned nightmare]() |
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Binding: Unknown Binding
Label: New Directions
Manufacturer: New Directions
Number Of Pages: 292
Publication Date: 1959
Publisher: New Directions
Studio: New Directions |
| Spotlight Customer Reviews: |
Customer Rating:  
Summary: Dated Incoherent Ramblings
Comment: A friend of mine gave me this book and said "You ought to read this, it is very old, but his obsevations about America are dead on!"
I found it to be a rambling hash of stories that rarely touches on America at all.
First of all, I am not a big fan of the genre of "America is bad because.." books, as these are quite overdone already, and taking potshots at America serves little or no purpose and is an easy sport. Running down WalMart or McDonalds or the American suburban sprawl is like shooting fish in a barrel. And such books have been around for a long, long time. (oftentimes the writers of such tomes will gush about Stalin's Russsia, or Mao's China, or today, Chavez' Venezuala, without such a crtical eye as they apply to the US). So another America-bashing book did not appeal to me. If America is so rotten, why stay?
Second, the material is dated. America in 1939 was a different place than today. However, it does offer some scary insight into Miller's thinking. Early on in the book, his dismisses Hitler and World War II in a couple of sentances, essentially wondering what all the fuss is about. Basically he argues that governments come and go, and Hitler will be gone soon enough if we just wait him out. I wonder if he felt the same way after the liberation of Auschwitz. His blase treatment of Hitler and fascism sort of alarmed me, and clued me in that this guy is not a heavy thinker. In case you haven't a clue, either: Nazis = Bad, OK? Remember that.
Much of the rest of the book is similar shallow trope. He arrives in America to see his dying father, clearly hoping to inherit. Unfortunately, Dad has other ideas and refuses to kick the bucket. A true bohemian, Miller sponges off friends for several months before coming up with the idea of writing an America-bashing "on the road" type of book. He is given an advance of $500, which he spends before he leaves Manhatten. He grouses that he deserves $5000, and much of the book is a long diatribe about how artists like himself are not appreciated.
He goes on at length about his car troubles. Without bothering to learn anything about cars, he buys one, and then like a hypochondriac, takes it to mechanic after mechanic, convinced it is overheating. He indulges in the all-too-common habit of the elite in grousing about car troubles, while simultaneously lauding technical ignorance as some sort of badge of honor. Cars! Tee-hee, they're so complicated! I can listen to "car talk" on NPR if I want that sort of drivel. But, like most leftists, he secretly loves his car, even if he does not take care of it properly or bother to learn anything one would need to know to own one.
And Miller's very few real observations about America are hardly well-thought-out indictments of the American way. Rather, they are more shallow and superficial observations based often on only cursory views of a city or a particular issue.
For example, his ship lands in Boston. He walks from the dockyard to the train station. Dockyards and train stations are hardly the most glamorous parts of any city, even Paris or London. However, after his two-hour stay in Boston, he dismisses the entire city based upon his experiences in these industrial parts of that town. This is beyond shallow.
Other episodes are confusing and weird. Arkansas is lauded for siding the with Confederacy (apparently slave-owners and Nazis are OK with him!) and he spends the entire chapter discussing the ill-fated "Arkansas Pyramid" and its promoter, who he hails as a man of genius and laments that there are not more like him in the world. The problem is, the fellow who wanted to build this pyramid in Arkansas was clearly a crackpot, and while it is an interesting story, I don't think, as Miller suggests, that the problem with America is a lack of crackpots like him.
As others have noted, other chapters are essentially wasted in long gushing and fawning descriptions of his meetings with other, more important artists, such as Stieglitz. Miller is clearly a suck-up in that regard. It is almost embarrasing to read these parts. He sounds like a groupie.
So much of that sort of thing pads this thin tome that there is little in the way of the searing indictment of American, 1939, that the title and cover art promise.
America is not a bad place, but you can't sell books with titles like "America sure is swell!" in 1939 or even today. People like to hear bad news, and they like to be told how rotten they have it, no matter how wealthy and well-off they are (the greatest health problem in this country among the very poor is obesity - think about how that looks to your average African).
But this book fails to even deliver on that level. As an America-bashing book, it does not bash very well. Miller had a good time on his trip and then cobbled together this book from a number of mediocre short essays. At least that is how it appears to me.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Sometimes illuminating, but mostly rambling, dull and pretentious
Comment: This book was sort of a sprinter. It started off interesting with pretty solid essays on post-WWII America. But towards the end I found it pretty hard to get through. When Henry's writing works, it's really good stuff, but when it doesn't it seems dated and pretentious. I found his narrative of a Hollywood party to be useless and his long winded tirade about war to be about as valid as some drunk at a bar. It's interesting how Miller's stream-of-consciousness style of writing may have permanently changed modern literature, but if it came out today, I doubt anybody would take it seriously
Customer Rating:
Summary: 'But the ashes are still warm.'
Comment: In reading Henry Miller's surprisingly contemporary 'The Air-Conditioned Nightmare I experienced the same kind of desire to 'see' America as I did when reading Kerouac's 'On the Road', but for very different reasons.
While Kerouac's narrative was that of his experiences with people he encountered along his way while traversing the country, Miller seems most at ease in dozens of miles of empty desert highway, alone with his thoughts.
Miller, returning from many years of living abroad, decided to write about his experiences traveling across America, and what his native people were really like; what the country had become, since the ideas and ideals put forth by the founding fathers.
His scathing, relentless narrative berates the 'American Dream' and 'Way of Life'...and the pursuit of such. Americans are painted as greedy, self-indulgent, ignorant of history, bereft of morals, and devoid of honor and dignity.
But Miller also finds along the way things that he loves. A greater understanding of the workings of an automobile, a love of the land itself that he never had while living in America, and much more.
Juxtapositioned with his disdain for American culture and standards, it illustrates how Miller himself learned to separate the people from the place, and love America itself for it's most basic beauty and qualities; while bemoaning those who inhabited its soil.
An excellent read by a gifted narrator, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is not a book for the very patriotic. While it might give such people cause to re-think their love of life here in the states, it also has the potential to offend.
Highly recommended, but only to like-minded readers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fragments of Brilliance
Comment: In some ways, Air Conditioned Nightmare is one of Henry Miller's most accessible books. It can be consumed, processed, and enjoyed by readers who are not, per say, Miller fans, as the themes are somewhat broader than his usual subject matter of himself and his friends.This is a great book to introduce newcomers to Miller's work. It also is a fascinating portrait of America at a point in time and from a certain perspective. Especially given the modern habit of romanticizing the WW2 era, Air Conditioned Nightmare gives an alternative, cynical view that remains insightful today. What holds me back from giving the book five stars is that it falls victim particularly harshly to Miller's characteristic laziness. His favorite trope of gushing over some new friend of his for a chapter or two unfortunately dominates the book, and he rambles off on some very dull tangents about things like car trouble. Nonetheless, there's plenty of Miller's brilliant diatribes and observations, which make it quite worth the while to plough through the hubris.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Still true!
Comment: Miller's observations of the USA are still true 60 years later. The contrast is between the man-made horrors and some of the wonderful artists Miller found in out of the way places. My favorite chapter is the story about Weeks Hall's mansion "Shadows" at Bayou Teche, Louisiana -- it inspired me to visit the place, which was still as mysterioso as Miller had described it.
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