Bliss enlivens her own critique of capital in the 2020s by delving into the trouble we all avoid discussing — and then staying with it ... A middle-age, middle-class white American writer and professor, Biss lays bare her own privilege from the start ... Loose in its greater arc but always tethered to an awareness of the insidious influence of capitalism, each essay originates in conversation or personal observation. This allows her to explore the candid ways we reveal our own biases around money, class, wealth, property and work ... If there is not an exact category for this type of book, that’s by design. Biss’ works of nonfiction expand the definition of personal essays. She is not afraid to disclose personal details, but she isn’t writing memoir; she is illustrating points. What guides her writing is careful attention to language and behavior, cause and effect ... In both her scrutiny and her style, Biss implies that the only way to address our complicity is full transparency ... It’s not uncommon for essayists to be 'in conversation' with writers (like Didion) who came before them. But Biss takes that sense of collaboration further than most. She retains firm control over her own lines of inquiry, but — fittingly for a critique of capitalism’s warped and warping individualism — she allows others to amplify or shape her thinking...Biss drives the story forward, but she isn’t alone at the wheel ... I’d argue that Having and Being Had is a reminder that even discussing our contemporary chaos is an act of awakening and a call to action ... Ultimately, this is not a book that aims for catharsis or redemption ... Biss examines these stories of ideas in order to help us live with our fate — asking, among other questions: To what degree can we come to know our passions as something free from consumerism? How can we live a life of dignity — with flashes even of luxury and indulgence — without sacrificing ourselves through work without joy or income beyond purpose?
... enthralling ... Her allusive blend of autobiography and criticism may remind some of The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, a friend whose name pops up in the text alongside those of other artists and intellectuals who have influenced her work. And yet, line for line, her epigrammatic style perhaps most recalls that of Emily Dickinson in its radical compression of images and ideas into a few chiseled lines ... Biss wears her erudition lightly ... she’s really funny, with a barbed but understated wit ... Keenly aware of her privilege as a white, well-educated woman who has benefited from a wide network of family and friends, Biss has written a book that is, in effect, the opposite of capitalism in its willingness to acknowledge that everything she’s accomplished rests on the labor of others.
There is a sense that Biss is after something specific, even if she doesn’t know what it is. Metaphors are tested, ironies pressed upon. Etymologies abound, as do precise distinctions: the difference between a privilege and a luxury, between work, labor, service and care ... Having and Being Had is meant to be the kind of book most authors have dreamed of: one that does not sacrifice any of the writer’s egalitarian, socialist principles while nevertheless earning her a hierarchical, capitalist income, which can then let her produce more books ... Opposing ideas unified in a tense symbiosis—double meanings, awkward reversals—appear often throughout the book. The idea is that Having and Being Had is hip enough to critique the conditions of its own creation. But how impressive is that, really, if Biss has set the conditions of its creation precisely to critique them? ... Some sections seem almost entirely composed of quotations and paraphrases; the contemporary scholars Lewis Hyde, Alison Light and David Graeber, among others, are cited so often that it seems part of Biss’s plan to buy time had to involve stealing it from other writers.
This book is essentially an account of Ms. Biss’s contradictions, her ambivalence as a relatively well-off consumer in a rich and richly unequal country. But instead of being humorless and apologetic, Having and Being Had is incisive, impressive and often poetic ... The marvel of this book, and of Ms. Biss’s prose in general, is the spare and engaging way she interrogates such complex and abstract concepts. With references to Adam Smith and Dire Straits, Karl Marx and Scooby-Doo, she turns what is essentially a chronicle of white guilt and anxious privilege into a thoughtful and nuanced meditation on the compromises inherent in having a comfortable life.
Eula Biss is a master of vivid imagery ... One of the troubles with taboos is they’re often so uncomfortable that our avoidance of them makes them invisible. Yet Biss is not only unafraid of taboo, she leans into it. She uses the form of the essay to interrogate, break apart, and complicate something in order to make it fully known and understood ... makes the invisible visible ... Sometimes, these titles repeat in other sections, creating a strange, whirling effect that feels as inescapable as American capitalism's grinding wheel. Each vignette takes a lived experience from either Biss' own life or the lives of authors she reads and uses it to question a unique aspect of privilege and power ... The style is deceptively simple and often declarative. The arguments are also impressively concrete compared to the cliché- and abstraction-filled ways most people talk about money ... One of the most delicious facets of the book is how it weaves into the discussion of art (including writing) the socioeconomic class and status of those who get to make it ... While talking this openly about money can make a reader squirm, the transparency is disarming and effective ... These sections about Woolf and other writers are a juicy pleasure to read, but they also show us that time, as much as money, is a marker of privilege and power ... While the discrepancies explored in Having and Being Had are not as vast or as maddening as this one, Biss' ability to note their madness and inequity might be just what we need right now.
As a writer Eula Biss has two great gifts. The first is her ability to reveal to the reader what has, all along, been hidden in plain sight ... Her other talent is for laying bare our submerged fears ... In Having and Being Had, both gifts are on display ... if you are not deeply discomfited by the time you finish reading On Having and Being Had, you have no conscience.
Biss is limited by her interest in modernity, which stymies her research. She uses the term feudal or feudalism several times throughout the book, for example, to contrast modern systems of labor and capital with society in earlier times. But “feudalism” itself is not defined rigorously enough—historians themselves rarely use it these days—becoming a conveniently vague place for Biss to put her ideas about what other possible lifestyles might be out there beyond market capitalism, as if she doesn’t want to look at them too closely or get too far away from the material conditions before her ... Biss is curiously modest, to the point of uncertainty, when she make her observations. She is interested in power, money, and exclusion, and the way these invisible forces have created the visible environment of modern America. Her self-deprecating attitude, as well as her use of first-person perspectives, seem designed to avoid causing offense. Perhaps she's cognizant of the optics of speaking too loudly about her own comfortable white life ... Though Biss might consider bringing more fire to her next project, a little treachery toward our property-obsessed suburban norms—and the racist attitudes they continue to spawn—is better than none.
Having and Being Had also takes the literature of self-aware privilege to a certain logical extreme: The book is an account of the precise material circumstances that enabled Biss to write it. Yet the spirit is less one of legalistic disclaimer and preemptive self-defense than of genuine scrutiny ... The predicament here—the queasy appeal of consumer pleasures to those who want to believe that they know better—is a common one, and one that’s also become somewhat commonplace as a subject ... Still, even on somewhat familiar terrain, Biss is a more thoughtful guide than most. She proceeds with a calm, attentive curiosity. She makes conversation with strangers; she looks words up in the dictionary. She is earnest, but not relentlessly so ... things grow increasingly interesting when she stops thinking about life as a consumer and begins considering what it means to work ... clarity of purpose is what makes Biss refreshing. Midway through the book, she describes sitting on a friend’s back porch, looking out at the tall grass in her yard ... Her commitment to her art is complete and unembarrassable. And as I read it, it occurred to me that perhaps the problem with 'self-aware' writing isn’t just the tiresome disclaimers but the failure of nerve. Why read an essay or a novel whose own author seems unconvinced it should exist? Biss may be exhaustively self-aware, but she writes like her writing is work worth doing.
... timely ... a work that also feels as if it will outlast this moment ... [Biss's] sentences have retained a poet’s precision, if not the same wonder. Her writing, compressed here into short, brisk sections with titles such as Work, Art, Capitalism, is clean, taught, clarifying, satisfying for this reader in its brevity and accuracy, even if it didn’t quite make my heart ache.
It’s a work that...feels as if it will outlast this moment. As with all of Biss’s books of prose (this is her third), Having and Being Had is not so much an analysis of a situation as a personal response to it ... her sentences have retained a poet’s precision, if not the same wonder. Her writing, compressed here into short, brisk sections with titles such as Work, Art, Capitalism, is clean, taught, clarifying, satisfying for this reader in its brevity and accuracy, even if it didn’t quite make my heart ache ... So what to do? Biss is hardly the type to come to any firm conclusions: her style has always been nuanced, musing, calling attention to social and economic inconsistencies while acknowledging how she remains enmeshed within them. But the book does arrive at a resolution of sorts, with Biss making the decision to sell her work into the economy she is so fearful of, in order to buy herself the time she so desires ... her trade-off feels pretty close to having, rather than being had.
If 'White Debt' was about the ease of colluding in whiteness, Biss' new book Having and Being Had maps out the ease of colluding in capitalism ... While Having and Being Had does reckon with race, Biss's project here is broader: an inquiry into the American value system of buying and owning, and what we trap ourselves in when we invest in the trappings of the middle class ... behaves less like a collection of essays and more like poetry, reminiscent of Claudia Rankine ... Toward the end of the book, Biss writes 'if I were paid wages for the work of making art, then everything I do...would be subject to the logic of this economy.' This presents several conundrums that Biss, for once, does not scrutinize ... By rooting each meditation in lived experience, Biss captures the way that the capitalist value system has weaseled itself into our everyday. She implicates herself ... What Biss seems to yearn for is not an alternate economic system with an emphasis on public and common goods, or one that values making art, but what she calls the 'gift economy' she lived in as a young poet ... Having and Being Had made me question my aspiration for capitalist comforts, yes, but if making a salary and owning a home is not the answer, scraping by and giving away art doesn't seem like a viable alternative ... Having and Being Had—which illuminates capitalism for what it is, and records discomfort with it—is a start. But it is enough to dismantle the narrative of the system without pushing for change, both on the individual and larger levels?
... compulsively readable ... blends research (the notes section is nearly 50 pages long), reflection and richly rendered personal experience ... Noting how a person’s economic norms are largely determined by their social group, Biss brings people from her life into this story—acquaintances she sits by at dinner parties, friends with whom she swaps books, academics at Northwestern and fellow parents. She thinks about her mother and brother, her husband and son, her house and belongings, her old neighbors and new neighbors, and the big abstract things that inevitably shape how she sees and moves through the world: gentrification, whiteness, privilege and consumption. Through all of this, she keeps a careful eye on how engaging in capitalist economic systems—even as someone experiencing success—brings an unavoidable sense of alienation ... For Biss, art can address this feeling of alienation. And the artfulness of Biss’ prose is fully on display in this memoir, which is made of tiny short-form pieces strung together like beads on a necklace, each one leading to the next yet also standing alone like a perfectly formed droplet. This is a book that asks to be read, absorbed and read again.
[Biss] ventures into the topics of race and economic inequality, but generally returns to her admitted position of white privilege. This makes for a few uncomfortable moments, and readers may well wonder if perhaps Biss was unable to truly appreciate some of the nuance she sought to achieve.
... brief, potent essays ... Biss prescribes no solutions except perhaps to encourage more candor about the problem ... A typically thoughtful set of Biss essays: searching, serious, and determined to go beyond the surface.
... a stylish, meditative inquiry into the function and meaning of 21st-century capitalism ... Biss doesn’t shy away from acknowledging her own privilege, and laces her reflections with unexpected insights and a sharp yet ingratiating sense of humor, though she doesn’t push too hard for change, either in her own life or her readers’. Still, this eloquent, well-informed account recasts the everyday world in a sharp new light.
