The fact that the social contract of a novel is a story; Or at least the implied contract of a long novel is a long story, or perhaps even better story than one that could be offered because of the economy of pages; The fact that this book manages to remain sparse of anything constituting a story and also devoid of any illuminating prose making the palavering screed worthwhile; the fact that other books (every other novel I've ever read) accomplishes more with less; the fact that one funny remark per 150 pages is a bad ratio; the fact that the narrator exhibits the most annoying neurosis of modernity which is convincing herself that her predicament is uniquely worse –rather than overwhelmingly better of not even just similar– to the rest of all of history; the fact that she makes this statement explicit, and circles back to it repeatedly with statements such as

The fact that people today must be the saddest people ever because we know that we ruined everything. After complaining about chemical plants, exploding children, dying people being kidnapped.

and

the present is always more relevant in the past no matter what historian say

the fact that she rattles off NPR scare statistics in TEDx talk fashion and the fact that since there is no one else but her internal monologue to bear witness to these claims they go uninvestigated and unchallenged; the fact that it's not hard to see how such an impressionable doomer-type person would be insufferable; the fact that maybe that's the point of the book, but that that's not a very good point to make with a book, ibid.; the fact that she does a rather bad job of presenting the premise of being in the mind of a liberal woman; the fact that she makes it suck, and not be very interesting, or challenging, or thought provoking; the fact that the point of the book seems to be that it's overwhelming or bad; the fact that she doesn't do a good job of convincing the reader that this is anyone's fault but the narrator's, thus kneecapping any implicit argument about The State of Things; the fact that I kept holding out for some emergent background plot – not even like a mystery or anything that intriguing, just a plot; the fact that one wa not forthcoming; the fact that variation in the construction of a run-on sentence could have been used to great dramatic effect (see, Septology for an at least interesting take on this format); the fact that no such opportunity was taken; the fact that she thinks about Trump as much as she does; the fact that I think this dates the book rather much; the fact that existentialism can be done much better (see like any book written in the past two centuries); the fact that Wittgenstein's Mistress pulled this off and was great; the fact that it seems painfully easy to improve upon this; the fact that it's only gimmick is how long it is, like that is the only gimmick; the fact that I guess you deserve a pity point for having written a thing when most people never write things; the fact that any thing else probably would have been better though; the fact that soliloquy can be great; the fact that insufferable characters that [the authors of which] don't realize they're insufferable can ruin a whole book; the fact that with nothing else but a monotonous listicle makes it really hard to find anything redeeming about this sort of screed.

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