If you’ve never heard of the book “Bream Gives Me Hiccups,” you probably never heard of Jesse Eisenberg. If you’ve never heard of Jesse Eisenberg, you probably never heard of the 2010 film The Social Network. And if you’ve never heard of The Social Network, it’s really about time you go and watch this masterpiece.

At the risk of redundancy, I will introduce Jesse Eisenberg to those who don’t know him. He is a curly-headed Jewish-American actor with piercing blue eyes, a magnetic voice, and maintaining, at first glance, a timid posture. However, once you’ve seen him act in many works, you’ll realize he’s an actor capable of great emotional influence. He seems to be able to display a unique lovable fragility that gives his characters a more characteristic three-dimensional strength.

I know he’s an outstanding actor, which makes it unbelievable that I discovered his exceptional writing skills only recently. The book Bream Gives Me Hiccups is a 2015 collection of stories and prose written by Jesse himself (which deserves emphasis among the ghost-writing trend lately in the acting community).

Author Sheman Alexie commented on this book, saying “If David Sedaris wrote about Carmelo Anthony, the Bosnian [censored], and ramen-stealing college freshmen, it would probably come out something like Jesse Eisenberg’s Bream Gives Me Hiccups.” David Sedaris is a prized American humorist and essayist best known for his sardonic autobiographical stories and social commentary. He tends to write with an underlying tone of depression beneath the sarcastic jokes and humor—much like Chandler from Friends, you could say his characters use humor as a defense mechanism. This judgment can be accurately placed upon Jesse’s works. Let’s delve into his clever game of words, tone, and the whole literary package!

Each Story is a New Conversation

Jesse writes with an extremely unique literary choice. He tends to turn the stories into conversations, whether between different characters or directly with the reader. In “RESTAURANT REVIEWS FROM A PRIVILEGED NINE-YEAR-OLD,” we speak directly with a nine-year-old child whose parents are going through a divorce and whose mom isn’t taking it well.

The nine-year-old boy never told us directly that he was insecure and in need of love, instead, he expresses his oppugnation towards fancy restaurants he goes to with his mother. He rates these restaurants based not on food, but on how they made him feel.

In this way, descriptions are suddenly packed full of concrete emotions. We feel the boy’s disappointment in being abandoned and neglected by his depressed, alcoholic single mother and the crushing love he still holds for her through his description of a crappy restaurant he dined in with his mother alone, rating it the highest of all. Everything that the child has to experience is almost too much to bear for his age, so he has no other outlet than to project it onto something more straightforward—and that’s food.

This is how Jesse Eisenberg utilized perspective. If the nine-year-old was writing prose poetry about his feelings and emotions, we wouldn’t have felt so dearly the piercing pain and the crushing love. Now, it’s like we’re facing a nine-year-old telling his story, and not a projection of his future self, and we revel in that conversation because we can see through the surface. His story is a tragic one, but we as readers laugh a little before we even realize that.

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Game of language

Jesse is a master of language. His words consist of exaggeration and satire beyond measure. I almost felt like my brain was rewired just listening to his characters talk.

Listen to a male feminist end his attempt to pick up a woman at a bar: “It’s hard enough as it is with social pressures to conform to an unattainable idea of masculinity perpetuated by a patriarchal and antiquated set of phallocratic norms.”

Unnecessarily vague and looming vocabulary, over-the-top and complicated sentence structure, all signs point to something being masked under the exaggerated surface. We as readers realize the reiteration of something convoluted indicates the opposite of support and understanding, and are prompted to immediately rethink the feminist discourses we’re constantly surrounded by in our political and social environment. Are they really that different?

What conversations are we truly looking for? With precise language, Jesse paints us a picture of our world through a comedic satirical lens.

Jesse writes other million-dollar lines: “Have a good night, which is just an arbitrary illusion created by the Earth blocking the sun.”

“You’re a progressive reformationist stuck in the counter-reformation.”

And jokes like: “What did one Marxist-Socialist say to another? Like you, I also advocate a proletarian revolution culminating in collective ownership.”

It’s almost as if he’s documenting the “intrusive thoughts” jumping into his mind, chiseling them down to express satirical comedic notions. The flexibility, creativity, and passion with which his mind works is unbelievable. One might think back to the comparison between him and David Sedaris, both express tragedy through comedy, and both hold satire as a lens through which they view the world.

I think this is something we should normalize in our present, post-COVID world. With everything, whether politics, social reforms, or entertainment, going in directions completely unexpected and unpredictable, we need something to help us make sense of this chaotic world. And what better sense is there than this chaotic game of satirical language that is so colossal in expression of meaning that it’s able to contain all the craziness we might encounter?

Depictions of the Outsider

In our present society, one of the greatest social movements we have is the normalization of previous “outsiders.” We are rooting for the rights of the minority in every which way, propelling inclusion and acceptance. In sync with this growing social culture, Jesse’s characters are almost always out of place in the social milieu. Sometimes, it’s so exaggerated that it seems like their whole existence is antithetical to social order—like they’re a puzzle piece that doesn’t have the right corners to fit.

A typical example would be the cynical, nihilistic college girl suspecting her kind roommate stole her ramen. An outsider all her life, she doesn’t feel like she belongs in the college environment, and thus shrouds everything she sees with a cloud of hatred and disgust. What she’s hiding, however, is that secret desire for love and understanding. When her roommate eventually gives her that, her armor crumbles down, and though still out of place, she can accept it.

The depiction of characters like these is just a reflection of the experiences every one of us has gone through as readers. No matter how outgoing and interactive, every one of us remembers a time when we feel out of place in a social setting like we haven’t quite found our groups yet.

Jesse takes that feeling blows it up like a balloon, and forces us to examine it more closely. The funny thing is, when we start to do that, the pain and the anxiety start to fade, and we start to find comedy in the matter—a kind of self-satire, and then, we finally move towards being over the matter.

In conclusion, I would describe Bream with a quote from Shakespeare: it’s a “play written by a fool, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Its exaggerations are loud, eye-catching, and so blown up it’s impossible not to laugh when reading them. At the same time, it lessens the tragedy expressed underneath. What seemed like the world to us a few moments before as its blow mitigated, and we’re able to reinterpret what we previously perceived to be our downfall. There is so much to mull over about this book, and it truly is a modern classic.