Odell is a writer about whose prior work, How to Do Nothing, I have decidedly mixed feelings. It starts promisingly enough: the opening line, “Nothing is harder to do than nothing”, is, as the kids say, a “banger”. But it soon becomes clear that Odell, an admittedly privileged person who has had lots of free time across various academic residencies, has nothing to offer me, a person who has been working 40 hours a week since his 16th birthday. Nothing, you see, is the easiest thing to have in your bank account, but you cannot subsist for long on a diet of zero income and birdwatching in Oakland’s Morcom Rose Garden. Odell, having been freed from being “occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff”, as Thomas Jefferson would have wanted it, she is able to fill an inordinate amount of it.
