The Inactivist

Tom Venetis is a professional journalist and editor in Toronto.

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek notes that people buy organic food
not to be healthy, but rather to gain some kind of solidarity between
themselves and others who supposedly care about nature. Advertising and
modern capitalism allow us to buy an ideological stance, even one that
is supposed to critique advertising and modern capitalism.

Chris Eaton’s Kitchen, the advertising copywriter in The Inactivist,
is someone who lives through advertising, seeing and experiencing the
world through slogans and brand messages. Happiness, for Kitchen, is a
Žižekian ideological stance. The problem is that Kitchen is miserable,
first breaking up with his activist girlfriend and later dumping
another. His problem seems to be that while he is connected to the world
of advertising, he is cut off from the real world around him. The novel
is an attempt to dramatize that disconnection and its consequences.

4

s unit … her sentences constructed mostly of verbs; nothing seemed
important unless it involved citizens,” Eaton is unable or unwilling
to connect this rhetorical description to a discussion of the politics
and society that the description suggests. This problem, which persists
throughout, leaves the reader with the suspicion that the book, for all
its proclamations of depth, is in fact rather shallow.