Book Reports /
How to see the themes in a text & write a Rogerian-style letter to the Author [6]
Here is what I got:
Dear Don Snyder,
Thank you for your desire to make people aware of the incredibly difficult, and heartbreaking, journey faced, often in silence, by millions of Americans upon losing their jobs. Your willingness to be completely open and honest about your personal struggles and shortcomings require possession of a certain amount of confidence, a sense of self-worth, a combination that is hard to come by, and should be respected. However, when that same willingness is coupled with a desire, and an ability, to share those struggles, failures and successes alike, with anyone willing to listen, as you have in your book,
The Cliff Walk: A Job Lost and a Life Found, then you are to be admired and respected.
At the outset, the disbelief and shock is there, when your "first reaction was that some mistake had been made" followed by the simple idea that "they got the wrong guy. They don't know that we've got a new baby coming, and that my father has a brain tumor" (14-15). It is the emotional rollercoaster that provides a constant illustration of the reality. One day you are so full of optimism that you can "afford to be smug", your search for a job "would be a piece of cake" (23). Only to be followed by so much self-doubt and anger that you turned your "final months at Colgate into acts of subversion and revenge", considering your colleagues to be "poor unimaginative people stuck where they were" (26). There are so many emotional aspects to each of us such as, pride, anger, love, sadness, joy, and fear, that conflicting emotions are not unexpected, perhaps just not on such a grand scale. The most difficult, and dangerous, aspect of a journey like yours is the point in which you try to get past the anger only to find doubt in its place. You know that you want your "life to be important" but you ask "how could it be unless I was doing important work" (41).
It is your unresolved feelings of doubt and fear that manifest themselves physically. For instance, when you felt that there was "this peculiar sense of leaning back too far" and you "felt off, like ... standing on a table and the table was being tilted slightly" followed later when you described "feeling the momentum of ... life falling away from" you (55-56). You never give into your anger completely, not even with the businessman at the Little League field constantly pushing you and although you say that you "remember the angry days best" with days in where you "let the anger wash through", coming "more and more easily" (65). The irony of your relationship with the businessman is displayed quite well when he offers actual help, instead of telling you "to come up with some anger" and that "what you need to survive out there is anger and plastic", it is then that you decide that you "wouldn't return again the Little League field." (86, 98). What a perfect illustration of the uncertainty that is so overwhelming to both your family and you, which I imagine creates an immense, perhaps unbearable, amount of stress.
The positive change really seems to begin when you admit to yourself "that it takes a very weak man to lose his way when he has a beautiful wife and four healthy children living under his roof" and so you found a job building a house (164). It is now that you finally begin considering the advice that is being offered to you over the past months, like Cal's suggestion "that the reason so many people were unhappy these days was because they had lost control of their" (229). Once the positive came, you seized a hold of it, even if it was just the "feeling of being lucky" (246).
However, I would like to approach your book from a different perspective because as I began reading, progressing further and further into the passages it is apparent that there is a more striking and, from my view, more important message to be gleaned from your writing; the fallacies of pursuing privilege and status, also known as the American dream. You detail a consistent discussion of status and the need to achieve a privileged life, to move up in society, describing your adult life as "shaking hands, making promises, and smiling at the right people in order to be liked and to get ahead, to stay ahead and never slip" in an effort to be "in the passing lane, leaving behind" your relatives "who lived out there lives as low-wage, no-ambition, ...classic American working stiffs" (10-11). Even as you achieved the privileged life that you so desired with a great job, you were "always looking for a better" job (11). You can see where this thinking comes from by looking at the those around you, such as your father, where in your description of him you said that "the thing he wanted most was to be like everyone else...to be the same" and that it wasn't until he joined the military that "he felt at once that at last he was the same. He was on the inside of something" (238). This desire to be part of something is what drove you to earn your "way into their world from the poor side of the city by scoring touchdowns and hitting home runs and being lucky and once" you "beheld the splendor of their lives .... I wanted to be part of it." (67-68). It became so important to you that upon getting promoted to manager at your summer job that you were snobby and aloof to those very same wealthy friends, behaving as if they "were beneath notice" (71).When you had all those things that you originally set out for, it wasn't enough because there was "the desire for more money, more security, more status, more respect or more of a promise for more" and you considered yourself to be "a member in good standing of the class of managerial mercenaries...who moved anywhere for money, who called places home...where the opportunity for advancement was high" (37). It is the quintessential story of the young, hard-working American worker striving to create a better life, or so it seems.
At first glance a reader might think that your discussion of these desires is almost wistful and that perhaps you miss all of the status, privilege and all that it entails. In fact, I too felt drawn to that conclusion at the outset, however as I delved deeper in to the context of the story, the contempt and disgust that you feel towards your past behavior and those who behaved as you did is obvious. You even go so far as to chastise yourself for "all the judgments" that you made throughout your life that "were built upon an extraordinary arrogance and privilege that came along with the territory of success" (221). As a result of these desires and privileged status, you were unprepared for the loss of your job and wasted your time lamenting "over the dismal possibility of living in a working-class neighborhood without a job that was exalted enough to distinguish me clearly from my neighbors" (28). You went even further, getting angrier and angrier, so angry in fact that Colleen finally reaches a point where she seems to give up and points out that during the "whole last year, ever since you were let go, you've been getting angrier" (27). A bit later in the book, Colleen again voices her opinion that "you look down on people who just do regular jobs so they can pay their way" and that she thinks "you always have" (200). Who would know you better than your wife? You. You are the only one that can truly know yourself and you did that at the moment when you compared yourself to Willy, saying that "it was plain to me at last. Like so many in my generation I had been a salesmen my whole life, selling myself to whoever I thought might make me more of a success" (222). It was from that realization that you could finally say that you "felt changed" (223). Your realization of what you have been putting yourself, and your family, through to achieve success is what has enable you "to raise a family without the wild and demeaning acrobatics that most parents are required to perform if they both hold down jobs" in their attempt to achieve success (253). I truly appreciate all of the strength and determination that you have shown while persevering through such an arduous period in your life. You should be proud to have such a wonderful and supportive family, especially your wife. I look forward to reading your next book.
