Next stop: oblivion

An underachiever's guide to Cambridge

by Elizabeth Manus

Ah, Cambridge. The polar fleece. The Volvos. The fresh-faced students and the well-groomed Red Line commuters, travel mug in one hand and reading material in the other. Everyone on the way somewhere, whether it's dinner, or New Hampshire, or a lecture, or a protest. And all around, in that understated New England way, money, power, and ambition are quietly thrumming.

But not everyone aspires to those goals, and it is those people we're concerned with today. At my side is Ben Anastas, author of the witty new novella An Underachiever's Diary, which spins an entire philosophy of life around the seemingly simple idea of underachieving.

The book's narrator, William, is the model underachiever. William has "no interest in the compromises of success" as society defines it. He doesn't try to improve himself. He relentlessly avoids tenderness and love. He is painfully aware of his own weaknesses, and willfully succumbs to them. More deliberate than slacking, more inert than real protest, his kind of underachieving is at once pointless and rather seductive. William is a memorable character strictly for what he doesn't do.

And, needless to say, William is from Cambridge.

Yes, it's a world-renowned bastion of overachievement, home to Harvard and its Kennedy School of Government. Home to bourgeois success stories like Au Bon Pain; home to Nobel laureates and winners of MacArthur Foundation "genius" grants. But on the flip side, Cambridge has also been home to generations of underachieving types: the dissipated PhDs, the conscientious objectors to success. Where are they in today's yuppified city? What are Cambridge's underachiever-friendly spots? Anastas -- a native Cantabrigian himself, though hardly an underachiever -- has come up from Brooklyn today to help answer those questions, leading me along a different sort of Freedom Trail.

All this useless knowledge: Algiers Coffehouse, Widener Library

Anastas has told me that his "own secret wish in writing this book was that it might incite widespread underachieving the same way [Goethe's] The Sorrows of Young Werther started a Romantic suicide wave." So the first question: What might an underachieving world look like?

"People would stop showing up to class, or show up with a Walkman and stare into space. Enrollments would fall. . . . Maybe there would be a work slowdown at the DMV. Trading on Wall Street would be very light -- the Dow might rise or fall by a half-point or so." In other words, the machinery driving Horatio Alger's America would grind to a halt as each cog broke away.

Anastas marvels at coggery. Here, upstairs at the Algiers Coffehouse, on Brattle Street, among the bright-eyed students, he leans over his coffee and anise biscuit. "On the train last night, there were these two loser businessmen," he says. "They had been downsized, but the amazing thing was that they still talked the talk. They were exchanging these self-help businessy slogans like `Well, you can't stand on the sidelines for too long, you've got to get in the game,' that kind of thing. As many times as they'd been pushed out of the system, they just wanted back in so badly." There is genuine sympathy in his tone, and a note of gratitude one might expect from someone who says he was deeply influenced by Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross. Listening to the Babbitts, wondering "what might be in their hearts," Anastas had thought, There but for the grace of God. He pauses for a moment before returning to the subject at hand.

"The underachiever would find himself in the system and say, `Forget it. I don't want to be part of this.' " Now, partly, this is because the underachiever is not a team player. Yes, he happens to be a rotten athlete, with all the painful childhood memories that implies (Anastas, by contrast, rowed crew in high school). But the more salient point is that he believes more in individuals than in groups. Not in individual gain, but rather in unadulterated individual value.

Anastas, his back against the wall here at Algiers, has a better view than I do of the students and student types who fill the tables. Some of them are reading, some are laughing; many are setting words on paper between foamy sips. They're not underachievers, we decide, even though their activities suggest a certain superficial kinship. Anastas scans the room briefly before saying: "Wasting time is essential for an underachiever -- a diary or an autobiography is a really good thing." But the idea of café culture is anathema to the underachiever. "Anything culturally inscribed is to be avoided altogether," Anastas says. The idea is to achieve a sort of hyperpostmodern state of über-irrelevance in society. No referents; no reference.

That would be practically impossible for the postadolescents around us, who are trying to make their mark on the world (and not, like William, trying to dull their signals so much that the world's radar screen will never pick them up). How can you develop an identity -- individuate, as it were -- in a vacuum?

"Well, it's basically a descent into absolute solipsism. The most important idea in the book is that William is arguing for a kind of private value," Anastas explains, without gesture. "He's setting up an opposition between his values and the prevailing ones in the world. What means something to him shouldn't necessarily mean something to anybody else."

This is starting to get a little abstract. Time to move away from time-wasting to time-spending. Anastas holds the door for me.

"Is underachieving about pursuing meaning?" I ask him on the way to Widener Library.

"In a backwards way, yes. Underachieving is a way of avoiding all culturally sanctioned forms of meaning in order to find a better meaning."

Anastas and I stop before the steps of Widener, in Harvard Yard, whose three-million-plus volumes make it the largest university library in the world. Walking the stacks can induce mild euphoria in certain people. The underachiever, for instance.

"To the underachiever, a library is a storehouse of useless knowledge, and what's better than that?" One wonders whether the thought ever crossed Harry Widener's mind in such a way. "Reading holds little value in society," Anastas continues. "It only holds personal value. An underachiever is going to read like crazy and never do anything with it -- just create a storehouse of totally arcane knowledge."

Basically, then, true underachievers do the same thing the doctoral candidates who populate Widener do -- just without those three little letters looming before them.

Slack for sale: Urban Outfitters

"So much of youth culture is culturally scripted nonconformism," Anastas says as we brush past a window of deliberately broken glass at the entrance to the Harvard Square branch of Urban Oufitters. Young women in barrettes and kidney-colored nail polish shuffle along, laughing, their flared pants trailing on the floor.

So this is all a sham?

"Gen X is the ultimate meaningless label," Anastas says. "And `slacking' is an aimless, scripted self-indulgence. Underachieving is a far more serious pursuit."

His eyes narrow politely as he takes in the scene. Clearly Anastas, whose look might be described as "privileged Florentine," doesn't shop here often. He regards a display of Hawaiian shirts uneasily, as if he doesn't know which is worse, the fact that they are part of a soulless alternative culture that adorns the homes and bodies of the twentysomething set, or the fact that a person would actually put one on.

Urban Outfitters was born near U Penn, in 1970, one year after Anastas came into the world with his twin sister, Rhea. Back then, when there was a counterculture, it was known as the "Free People's Store." Anastas remembers its Cambridge outpost, which opened in 1976, as the city's inaugural urban-chic store: "It was the first place you could buy pointy boots. It represented the antithesis of the townie look. Flannel shirts, ratty jeans . . . whereas now --" He breaks off emphatically. Whereas now, it markets the grunge look to yubbies (young urban bourgeois bohemians) who are striving to look like underachievers. Only thing is, making an effort to look like an underachiever automatically disqualifies them.

William, Anastas's alter ego, is the picture of genuine, unstudied grunge. He tends to look, the book says, "like a cabdriver."

Anastas and I climb the stairs toward a spinning disco ball, and talk about how underachievers shop. "Commercialism in general baffles the underachiever," he says. "Far too many choices." Also: "Where a slacker might pull out a Gold Card, an underachiever would pull out old bills, lint, tissues."

Here we stop at a clear plastic inflatable sofa. "Now this an underachiever might buy," says Anastas, pressing the shapely bubble. He is intrigued. "Because it looks really cheap and flimsy. It would probably last about a week. It's a totally absurd thing to have in the house."

What about something smaller, such as a watch? "No," Anastas tells me. "Underachievers never wear a watch. They're dependent on other people or public clocks."

"How do they manage their time?"

"Poorly, if at all."

"What time is it anyway?" I ask him.

He holds up a bare wrist.

Game boys: Au Bon Pain

Midwinter, Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square -- which Anastas refers to as "the Pain" -- probably has, on average, one underemployed PhD for every 10 square feet in the back section of its sun room. That's where the square's chess players hold court for hours, apparently to the management's dismay. For one thing, their ratio of scone purchases to table time tends to be rather low. But they are as much a part of the Cambridge culture as ABP itself, which was founded at the beginning of the Reagan era by two Harvard alums (one of the college, the other of the business school), and which juts into the small municipal park that used to front Holyoke Center when Ben Anastas was a kid.

Here sit the kind of men and women who once calculated the tensile strength of bridges, or spliced DNA, but now drive taxis or work, as they vaguely put it, "in sales." Some are good enough to be masters or grand masters, but they aren't officially ranked. Are they underachievers? Sure looks that way. The chessboard, says Anastas, is a good place to disappear into total oblivion. "If the chess playing gets in the way of their careers and their personal lives, then they fit the profile of the classic underachiever," he says. In the novel, William's college thesis, which examines failure and notable underachievers in history, includes this line: "The underachiever is entrusted with a master key to opportunity's home office, and misplaces it."

Anastas regards the untidy kingdom around us. "I think for all the high achievers in Cambridge, there's always that disheveled and disillusioned grad student working at Kinko's," he says. "Underachievers have this ideal version of themselves -- like the rest of us -- that they're holding themselves up to. But to underachieve is to throw in the towel and say, `I'm never going to be that ideal creature.' He's going to be something else, something so irrelevant that that's the achievement, misdirected as it is."

Toxic shock syndrome: Harnett's

An orderly place with warm lighting and blond-wood everything, Harnett's Homeopathy and Body Care, up Brattle Street, feels the way Sweden might feel on a good day. Toned and mindful citizens browse shelves lined with all manner of soap, ointment, salve, powder, and pill. Health is in the air. Underachieving is not.

An underachiever's life is "a running critique of healthy-mindedness," says Anastas. In fact, an underachiever might come here precisely to get in touch with that alienation. He's opposed to the conceit that there is a state of wellness we're all supposed to reach -- that we should be happy, healthy, productive. Underachievers ask: "Why? Human beings are imperfect. Why should we be those things? Some of us are, some aren't."

Vitamins, then, are simply out of the question, "unless you take such high doses that it becomes toxic." Energy shakes are also out. "Fatigue is good," says Anastas, who himself regularly goes to the gym and follows each workout with a ginger-spiked juice concoction called a Royal Flush.

What about stress relievers? "Absolutely not," Anastas says, his voice low so as not to alarm nearby shoppers. "Stress should be heightened." On the other hand, smoking is highly acceptable. And lots of bad coffee.

Again, it's beginning to sound a lot like academia. Stress and fear are prime movers in grad school. And scores of Cambridge's brainy overachievers inhabit the same kind of foul rag-and-bone shop that underachievers call home.

"Would an underachiever even care how long his life is?" I ask.

"Actually . . . no," Anastas says. "Whether his life is short or long is unimportant. The most important thing is to manage his quality of life to see to it that it's pretty bad."

Seen and not heard: The Lucy Parsons Center

Ben Anastas's father was a social worker who wrote a book about the Penobscot Indians of Maine, and the Lucy Parsons Center (formerly the Red Book Store), in Central Square, reminds Ben of the bookstores his father used to drag him to. It has the requisite bad vinyl chair, the stained and worn carpeting, the malnourished-looking clerk. "Where's the cat?" Anastas whispers, craning his neck. "Places like this always have a cat."

We begin perusing the shelves. Cassette tapes of Noam Chomsky's lectures. A memoir by a guy who was blacklisted. Stacks of fliers announcing protests and other bile-driven activities. One is an order form for T-shirts that read FUCK YOUR FASCIST BEAUTY STANDARDS.

For the underachiever, this place is both alluring and off-putting. On the one hand, the Parsons Center is a hotbed of totally marginal thinking. "These people couldn't be any more marginal," Anastas murmurs. "They have no real voice in the political conversation. Which is beautiful, in a way." On the other, the isms blaring for attention here -- Marxism, socialism -- are unappealing. "Any ideology holds no attraction for an underachiever," Anastas explains. "If he does happen to be politically minded, he might give every movement one try, and then drop out after the first or second meeting." In the meantime, he remains an unregistered voter and an embittered taxpayer.

We look over the center's informational flier, which states that the place is dedicated to agitating for "real democracy -- real freedom and equality." The implication is that a place like Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, just upriver, is espousing some sort of fake democracy. But to the underachiever, both places are selling a form of righteousness, trying to foist a collective viewpoint upon individuals.

A political button catches Anastas's eye: IF YOU THINK THE SYSTEM IS WORKING ASK SOMEONE WHO ISN'T. He laughs. "That's a really good one. The idea that people who aren't working know more than people who are is an interesting one, and probably true."

Is there any cause, then, that an underachiever might fight for? Anastas looks out the window and across the street to a motley crew parading listlessly with hand-lettered signs, protesting the encroachment of chain stores in Central Square. "Well, maybe picketing Starbucks for over-roasting their coffee," he says. "A minor point like that. Because it's a hopeless cause."

Elizabeth Manus can be reached at emanus[a]phx.com.

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But seriously, folks . . . Jason Gay explores
Cambridge's changing political landscape.

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