Incest, Writing

Oh my. I just want to shake this kid so hard . . . . His letter is a prime example of the kind of overstuffed pretension that a seventeen-year-old would think was "literary." A brief visit to New York has already revealed him as an obsequious puppy, precociously able to drop old companions for the next cool thing to come along. His ambitions, though, are both enormous and sadly limited:

I just really like [Gessen's] ideas, just the way he portrays the sort of meandering young New Yorker. It’s kind of what I aspire to be, so it’s kind of really poignant.

The proper follow-up to an allegation of incestuousness is not adopting into the clan and promptly bedding all your new brothers and sisters. Honestly, these people are much less off-putting.