it's difficult grouping books together (and harder still to find snappy titles for the categories) - these are all books considered "classics" written in the "modern" era.
this seems to be a popular book on the internet - it's here because i think it's an interesting book, not a great book.
the main character (harry heller) is an aloof white nietszche-reading aesthete who regards the rest of his (bourgeois) world with condescension. he is troubled by Deep Thoughts, preoccupied with both his own mortality and the tension between his civilised upbringing and his animal instincts (the wolf of the steppes, hence the title).
although harry despises the average citizen, you can't help thinking that they have a happier life than he does - but that's because, presumably, they're all unthinking ignorants who just don't understand.
by now it's probably clear why this is such a popular internet book. it's hard to not to think that harry is an adolescent in disguise.
anyway, luckily for harry, he meets a beautiful woman who takes him under her wing (on condition, of course, that she kill him at some point). she introduces him to dancing - which turns out to be fun - popular music (jazz), drugs and casual sex.
by now it's probably also clear why this was such a popular book for the beat generation.
eventually harry gets to explore his many different personalities and learns, apparently, that the way to deal with the problem of existence is to laugh (not even a good belly-laugh, but a "gallows laughter" - "a frightful laughter of the other world that is scarcely to be born by the ears of men").
which doesn't seem much of an answer to me.
it's easy to mock. i guess this is a book written by a man pushed far into despair, coming from one great war and looking another in the face.
maybe i'm lucky - i live in a safer age (at least, on this continent) and perhaps somewhere in my culture there's an echo of sartre, just getting on with living in good faith.
but whatever the excuse, don't the "fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity" have a point? the book smacks of arrogance - that other people manage to go through life without his pompous self-important despair means simply that they do not think. bollocks.
people think. people worry. people survive. if harry can't cope maybe it's his problem, not theirs. maybe he should get a little counselling. maybe he should look again when they "pay calls and carry on conversations" - rather than being "compulsory, mechanical and against the grain [..to] be done or left undone just as well by machines", it is a beautiful dance, a delicate balance of social interplay. the art of the social animal.
harry wants to build a machine without oil. when friction makes it jam and fail he kicks and screams with temper. a wiser person would add a little oil, make a slight adjustment here, move something there, and let the machine run and run.