The Pomeranian/Parker House Roll Space

a review of The Book of Delights by Ross Gay

Delight is the cotton candy of emotions and the linchpin of the Disney-Pixar industrial complex. It’s the feeling you get when you see someone on the bus smiling at their phone, or when you drink coffee alongside a fig and crushed walnut danish, or when any baby interacts with any dog. And Ross Gay collected a whole book of them! There are enough comma splices to muddle a middle schooler’s conception of the English language, but he is a poet so it’s no matter.

It is easier to find gravitas writing about negative emotions. I was watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade even though it’s infinitely subpar Thanksgiving television compared to the Westminster Dog Show. Savannah Guthrie was introducing the next float, talking about the timeless beauty of Coach bags, when a sooty blanket of sadness fell over me. First of all, coach bags are, like, fine but they’re not permanent examples of aesthetic excellence. Second, a month ago Sav was holding Trump’s flat feet over hot coals at a televised town hall and now she’s plugging Coach bags with Hoda Kotb? Come on!! She’s already proven herself! Give the girl a hard-hitting assignment for once! Third, it was such a transparent ploy by Big Coach Bag to get us to buy more shit!!! During a pandemic, of all times! As a highly susceptible member of the most targeted marketing demographic in America (female, 20s), I would love to bathe in the heavenly blue light of a screen and not be beseeched to buy something frivolous.

“This parade is bumming me out,” I declared and changed the channel to the Westminster Dog Show where I was greeted by a Pomeranian who shares a name with my friend Ben. I baked a squirrel’s mattress of buttery parker house rolls and tried to push those pesky Coach bag subliminal ads out of my cobwebbed mind.

Gay, in The Book of Delights, inhabits the pomeranian/parker house roll space. The book is asimmer with good things: independent coffee shops, “toddling” as a way of movement, and interactions with strangers that make you feel less alone, instead of an awkward speck in our increasingly atomized existence. It is nice to be reminded of the good things, to remember to seek them out even if they’re hidden.

At one point, Gay notices he’s hoarding delights to present them as delights he’s prepared earlier. He stops himself, because part of the exercise, he decides, is trusting that delights will present themselves even on the cloudiest, most Coach bag sponsored days. It’s easy to sink into a scarcity mindset when it comes to life’s purest pleasures. If that random Outdoor Voices influencer on instagram is happy, surely I cannot also be. But what Big Coach bag doesn’t want you to know, is that delight/joy/success/love exists in abundance and there is enough of it to go around, like bread at the Cheesecake Factory. I finished this book the same day I watched Joy and I felt like saying I love you to the three fat squirrels who live outside my apartment.