I just finished Brian by Jeremy Cooper, the story of a man who goes to daily screenings at the British Film Institute from around 1980 - 2020. He keeps his life purposefully dull as a hedge against anxiety, and bits and pieces of his traumatic early life in Ireland emerge through a narrative that’s mostly a catalog of films that he and presumably the author have seen. The protagonist is aloof, often dissociative, in his daily life, but the screenings are a safe, controlled microcosm where he and his fellow film buffs’ aesthetic judgements are sovereign. There’s something here about the mind’s natural tendency to right itself from even foundational insults when you run enough experience through it, even if a total realization of its potential under these circumstances might require longer than the life-span of a human body. There’s also a spirit that strikes me as very un-American in it, about getting on in life without any grand hopes or plans. The book touched me as a sympathetic portrait of someone who shares the aspects of myself that I’m least happy about (aloof, sexless, judgmental, habit-bound) and as such I expect to be chewing on memories of it for a while.
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