PanThe New YorkerSome readers will be dismayed that Bering seems insensible to larger sociological concerns ... Suicidal contains no mention of economic inequality or the 2008 recession. For those interested in the nonbiological motivations for suicide, these are strange omissions. After all, to ignore the extent to which depression and suicide are responses to the larger culture is to assume that the deprivations of our moment cannot be amended ... Given Bering’s dogged fatalism—his personal mantra is \'nothing matters\'—the question of whether people feel this anxiety now strikes him as retrograde and impertinent. This despite evidence that many do. ... For Bering, parsing the etiology of a person’s mental health leaves little room for the musty errand of ideological contemplation.
Dan Fox
PanThe Los Angeles Review of BooksHis final recommendation on behalf of pretension is that it 'keeps life interesting,' which seems like a pretty low bar to clear. In the end, his book comes to epitomize a new genre of criticism that forgoes the task of evaluation and instead admits that all qualitative assessments are futile, arbitrary, and ultimately meaningless. Maybe so, but Pretentiousness is, as a result, baggy and oblique, loosely organized around a scattering of muzzy proclamations that do not clarify the central concept but stretch it to the point where it no longer seems to mean anything.
