Review of The Gospel According to the Simpsons by Mark I. Pinsky

I've had to look up the word "virago" at least five times. The "bright" part I get, but a virago is a horrid old monster, and when I think of Bright, I come up with (a) a person who is a far cleverer Simpsons fan than I am (I wasted a big part of my life quoting this show, but still all the good profiles in that old post were hers) and probably a cleverer person in general, (b) someone almost congenitally nice (at least in my experience--I missed all those smackdowns of the stupid that switters likes to talk about), and (c) possibly the most non-annoying believing person that I have ever met. She's got a wit that doesn't rely on vulgarity and insults (unlike some ignorant asshole book reviewers I know) which I recall hearing is a mid-western thing. Maybe she (also) figures that decency aura she has to be perplexing, but still, virago? I just can't see it.

(I liked the way this icon came out better, but thought the character might be hard to place.)

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So with those tidbits of character, I actually sprung eleven bucks on the least likely book of this whole series so far, The Gospel According to the Simpsons. I've been exposed to a little of this sort of thing, as a young person still associated with a sort of liberal church. It was a little before the Simpsons came out, but there was other "cool" Christian literature we'd talk through in those days, looking for unceremonious expressions of faith to maybe stoke up the youth. They were something similar, but I don't remember if these books worked as badly as theological argument as Gospel does. In the opening sequence, Pinsky pretty well nails his case shut before he opens it. He brings up a scene from the series in which Homer Simpson throws up an intercessionary prayer:

"confirmation of the deal, he prays, will come in the form of 'absolutely no sign.' There is no sign." [God doesn't even mind if Homer eats the offering of cookies and milk himself] "Homer mutters the benediction, 'Thy will be done.'"

The ensuing discussion calls upon the Intelligent Design authority William Dembski (even barring what I think about ID, Dembski deserves ridicule for heading a chapter with 'Recognizing the Divine Finger' without irony), along with Biblical chapter and verse to overanalyze the theological argument, while committing the worst sin of all, completely failing to get the joke. (Hint: possibly something to do with the milk.) It's not all that bad, but it's a bad opener. Pinsky himself shows ample signs of equanimity, but he's far too credulous of his experts for my tastes. Reaching back to other religious "thinkers" like Jonah ('what should dismay liberals is that so many of today's pieties are constructs of the Left') Goldberg in the conclusion really doesn't do the cause any favors. The deep Godly content is already a stretch before the dimbulb scions of the moral majority get drug out to support it.

Pinsky commits a couple other notable failures in the getting-the-joke department. In a cartoon television series, God's occasional tendency to grant wishes through prayer doesn't actually affirm any real aspect of the universe's nature. I hate to remind the guy it's fiction, although it does fill the need for so many classic storytelling motifs. Likewise, the point about Ned Flanders, who gets a whole chapter to himself as the model Evangelical, is that he is indeed a nice man, but the joke very often is that his rigid Christianity can also make him inhuman (sometimes in a positive way, but hardly always). These tidbits grate, but on the whole, the middle part of this book is surprisingly readable and enjoyable. Or maybe not surprising: Pinsky basically runs down at length the favorable approaches the show has taken to religion, and the entire middle of it is more of a report than it is an argument, often summarizing entire episodes, pointing out the religious jokes that the writers threw in. They're still funny. Most of it has to do with a run-down on the mild-mannered Protestantism the family participates in, but there's the show's token Jewish entertainer, and the Hindu character gets a chapter, as did the one episode of Buddhism. (Oddly, Pinsky didn't mention Homer's native American vision quest brought on by a Guatemalan pepper.) As they get further from the Abrahamic faiths, the writers come off a little more shallow, and the parts they right or wrong was analyzed in a shallow way, but it was not unappreciated. I can't say I've read any interviews with the writers before, and Pinsky's discussion of their backgrounds and roles writing the show was the most interesting bit of original content.

But let's point out the obvious. Although there is faith depicted in the series, The Simpsons is not about religion. The writers of the show, to their credit, have complex enough viewpoints about Christianity and other religions to offer a spectrum of positions as they suit the story or, more importantly, the humor. Most people think about projection in psychological terms, extending ones viewpoint out onto others, but when I think of projection, I usually go back to my math classes, that is, representing a complex shape in less than its complete dimensions (a projection like a map, in other words), which necessarily loses information. The Simpsons has religious and other conservative elements, and is, in fact admirable about balancing their worth, but calling the show a religious experience is reducing it. What The Simpsons does have is damn good comedy writing, and after 15 years of watching the silly program, I thank Pinsky for reminding me of that.

Review of Mr. Pye by Mervyn Peake

Although it wasn't my first choice, I'm liking Michael Daunt (né Schadenfreude) as Mr. Pye. (This would have been my first choice, especially after thumbing through the index.) It's fun to picture the publisher of quiblit magazine as a moral shepherd, gently guiding a small flock to some ideal productive behavior that is liberated from our vices. There's good material at quiblit, excellent writers, a chance of an audience, and Mike does a great job of tying it all together. That our angel from heaven is as tempted by malicious glee as the rest of us makes the venture so much more delicious, but (mixing up my mythologies), surely in the celestial balance, his heart would be judged lighter than a little blue feather. Quiblit deserves its wings.

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In the novel Mr. Pye, You can see a little bit of Gormenghast, Peake's (deservedly) more famous and more popular brainchild. There is some of the the castle's oppressive stone landscape reflected in the sea-carved features of the island setting, and both places are populated with a similar set of grotesques. Mr. Pye is more human-scaled though, and anchored to known geography. It's also a great deal shorter, and more thematically driven, as if the author had a different mission than letting the great, looming masonry create a mood. Oddly, I don't think this served him all that well: at his best, Mervyn Peake created brilliant edifices of prose that I always want to call "painterly", luridly colored, overly shadowed, heavily textured, and in which the details of visual composition are conceived to the point that their relevance surpasses the dynamical stuff of plot. A good deal of that was lost with Pye's softened setting and constrained scope, and while I usually support excision of superfluous detail, Peake sacrificed what he was best at.

The story takes place on Sark, a small island in the English Channel. Peake actually spent a good deal of his life there, as an artist before the war and later with his family, and his characters of the painter Thorpe and the titular Pye, the two aliens in the island society, are almost surely depictions of the author himself. It's a fascinating viewpoint, because each are loaded up with profound measures of love and contempt, as if they're two little vehicles of intense self-deprecation, executed with enough social intelligence to loathe the self-absorption as much as anything. Thorpe, a minor character, is merely a dope, easily swayed but impervious to conversion, a man with an occasional eye but who is lacking either sufficient motivation or sufficient talent to turn those visions into anything like an artistic truth. Mr. Pye is ostensibly a man of all the right kinds of conviction, an earnest seeker who is punished for the effort. (It would be an interesting exercise to contrast Peake's conception of himself the artist to Franz Kafka's. Both suffer for their genius, but Kafka goes for martyrdom, the art ultimately understood only by the artist, and Peake finds only derision in that pose.)

In the novel, Harold Pye comes to Sark to gently proselytize a vague message of goodness, a church of God the great omnipresent Pal, winning the locals over by wit, respect, and example. Pye is so self-possessed, so pure, so sweet, and so right that he begins to transform the moral landscape of the island. He's so good that his Pal gives him wings, which, on real people, isn't precisely a blessing. To get rid of the horrifying things, he abandons his evangelism to try to work them off with sin, the results of which have their own unsettling supernatural manifestation. He's a weird character, and it's hard to judge what the author is trying to communicate about him. Until he gets the growths, Mr. Pye reads like some allegorical figure, too simplified to really be connected to this world, and his human reaction, when it comes, doesn't feel fitting. With that normal response interjected, the reader is left questioning how the man got his fortune, how he embraced that honesty, and what he sacrificed for it. Except for this sudden earthly motiviation (and a couple of briefly glimpsed Peake-ish attributes, a penchant for nonsense verse and doodles) Pye remains more cherub than man until the end.

I want to tell you that Peake doesn't play his spiritual dichotomies well either. Pye's goodness is of an ecumenical sort, pushing at ideas of spiritual harmony, forgiveness, and emotional moderation, and those wings, they make more sense as divine irony than as a vehicle for character study. At the climax of Pye's evangelism, the author throws the putrefying corpse of a whale onto the shore, and this feels allegorical too--it feels like celestial sabotage--but still, the authorial voice is not ironic, doesn't feel like deadpan. The evil that Pye undertakes to remove his wings isn't the naturally opposite antisocial sort, but instead tends more biblical. In an effort to make his wings shink, the character engages in some petty vandalism, which is funny, and yes, he corrupts one comically deserving member, but other than that, he refrains from actually hurting anyone or from going after the obvious avenues of emotional abuse (or gratification). Instead, he's diverted to some silly off-camera Satanism, something suggestively involving goats.

I want to tell you that these things don't balance at all, but the book feels subtler and more powerful in hindsight than it felt while I was reading. As constructed, it works a lot better as a backhanded condemnation of God. It would explain the charitable positivist religiosity, which only resulted in the well-timed punishment by a capricious deity. It would explain the goofy nature of evil, and the (uncondemned) sexual characters that came closer to naturalism than the Great Pal ever did. Does the author hate Pye for his self-satisfied benevolence? I can tell you that I didn't connect to it that much, but there's not enough to him to really annoy either. And in context, Pye's good works produce good humanist consequences, which makes it tough to paint subtle irony onto what's written. The bad deeds that follow (pitching the old bat down the stairs, say) are as intentionally nasty as the prior events were wholesome, and they don't really come out as unintended consequence of good effort. While subtlety and humor had their places in the novel, they didn't enter in here, and I can't decide whether these explanations are my own clever revisionism or if they were intentional. For me to buy into the deeper meaning of Mr. Pye, I'd have to believe that the author meant it. I could be convinced of that, I think.

Review of Slake's Limbo by Felice Holman

If the prolifertion of online opinion has had any result in the world at all, it has been to reduce the value of the written word. I don't mean to say that people are reading less, or even less thoroughly, or feeling weaker civic emotions, I mean that, giving a billion housebound geeks an unconstrained place where people might actually read their horrible manifestos, blogging has reduced the value of individual written words. In online travels, it's positively a delight to find the rare entity who has the power to say more with less. Daveto rarely over-stretches his points (and rarely understretches them, a nice contrast to the gang which speaks in hints as well), and he usually has an entertaining way of getting to them, a little bit like he's tossing out a casual thought, or better: revealing a bare thought without the forty pounds of prosaic folly or muddied rationalization that most of us use. It really drives some people (and mostly the right people) to frothing incoherence, which is one reason I like him. I also take it as a sincere posture, and I actually think he's among the most sincere of my various online acquaintances. Admittedly, this impression is enhanced by the fact that he's brought up daughters, evidently done it well, and he seems to be as bemused about it as I feel most of the time. So why is Slake's Limbo, a book I read to my girls, the choice for daveto? Because it's huge, that's why.

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With that introduction, it's an odd thing to put Felice Holman's prose against daveto's. Slake's Limbo is positively turgid with written curlicues and unannounced asides and flashbacks, and utterly shameless about piling on the gusty pathos. "Aremis Slake," the protagonist's name, almost encapsualtes the whole aesthetic. It's an interesting fictional name, but you can feel how hard she tried to get just the right one, one with the precise literary heft, exactly the right combination of dirt and dignity. Slapped with that moniker, the poor boy is destined for verbose melodrama. Slake's Limbo is written for young people, and I don't want to imply that the language is challenging exactly, but the form is a far cry from the approved, formulaic "chapter books" they get assigned from school to beginning readers. It comes from a 1970s school of children's vérité, where edgy urban reality (that is actually pretty well over the top) is presented unflinchingly. The boy is brought up utterly neglected, malnourished, suffering the indignities of bullying by drunk eighth graders, of his retarded companion hit by a bus, and, as we quickly learn, hiding out in a New York subway for four months straight.

It can be tough to tell if my kids enjoy the books I read to them. I think they like the experience more than the books themselves, which is fine. My older girl's tells were a little clearer with this one though, and the source of enthusiasm was, best I can tell, a strong desire to "know what happens to poor Slake." (I offered her a guest spot on the blog if she feels like writing down what she liked or didn't like about it. Stay tuned for that.) It's similar to how she talks about the cats, and Slake as a little lost animal is an appropriate interpretation. His worldview, at 13 years old, is strikingly primitive (for example, he makes a futile stand against the passing seasons, trying to tie leaves onto the trees) he's described in animal terms (his fear is a bird), with animal companions (gee, is that rat significant of the boy?), alarmed by positive human attention, and he's got a burrowing creature's obsessive habits. He can evidently read without trouble though, and he sat through a few years of school and learned stuff. If his weirdness got the attention of his classmates, somehow his autism was invisible to any adult. I think Holman means us to read that Slake is severely stunted in terms of imagination and emotion, and his time in the subway is spent taking those baby steps toward becoming human. I think this is a strong point of entry for young enough readers, for whom that same sort of maturation is close to them.

With a limbo in the title, you can bet that (barring any Jamaican dancing) the metaphysical imagery is going to get laid on pretty thick. Thankfully Holman doesn't detail the spiritual journey explicitly, which is a blessing of sorts, because I didn't care to delve into the religious concepts. It's more Dante and Virgil (or Jonah, or Jesus, or you know, take your pick of mystical underground ordeals that end in ascension) than Adam and Eve (or whoever). Hammering out the time-honored fictional devices is a fine analysis for a term paper, but at the blunt level they're used in this story, I'm happy enough just making the acknowledgement. When the kids get to the point when they're deconstructing catharsis and rebirth and all the associated literary mumbo-jumbo, they can do worse than to remember Aremis Slake.

Review of Shadows of the Mind by Roger Penrose

Improbably, "Books for Buds" continues. This one is for TenaciousK, and evidently not a moment too soon. Evidence for TK can still be found here, and although he ventured into the Outland some months ago, you can still catch him around once in a while. The rationale for Shadows of the Mind is that it's about consciousness and the brain, which is something that TK writes about frequently and, evidently, is involved in professionally. Sounds good as far as it goes, but the author of Shadows of the Mind is a mathematician, and approaches the subject from the edges of math philosophy and quantum theory, whereas our subject would be better described as a behaviorist, looking at the various identified or speculated physical and chemical processes in the brain, and assessing how they affect people's actions and thoughts. Does this book really suit TenaciousK? Well, let's put it this way: Roger Penrose opens up with a fair-minded 3000-word discussion about gendered pronoun conventions--I think it works out just fine.

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I don't mean to imply that the author's verbosity (or TenaciousK's for that matter) is a handicap. For his abundance of words, Penrose reads is quite a pleasant read. (Careful observers may note that it took me the better part of a month to plow through this anyway. I blame free time.) He writes with an enthusiasm that can be charming in professors, an animated spasticity that translates, with a a lot of exclamatory asides and italicized profundity, to the written equivalent of popping out of his chair with and gesticulating excitedly when the ideas frequently take him. You get the feeling that here's a guy who'd miss meals in the throes of inspiration, and who'd whip about the front of a classroom like a sprite--four chalkboards filled with wild illegible scribbles--as he teaches students. It's infectious: I'd absolutely love to see one of this guy's lectures.

I do wonder who his purported students of Shadows of the Mind are supposed to be. I imagine them to be people like me, with an adequate technical education, but outside of the field. He writes generically to lay people, but without the various slapdash theoretical concepts I've gathered over the years (my quantum has always been pragmatic, and still inadequate for my job), I'm not sure I'd follow very well what the hell he was talking about at all. He does a good job of keeping the language easy to follow, but in the process, he necessarily obscures mathematical details. It's cutting right to the hanging philosophical questions, but glossing over how they arise, and while his practical examples are cute, they're a bit confusing. He doesn't leave the reader in a good situation: deferring the details of his ideas, as he must, it's not easy to challenge them, and well, they're the proverbial extraordinary claims. A lazy dolt like me is stuck going after his logic.

Here's what he's basically done: he has taken the weird mysteries of cognitive science (where does consciousness come from?), and looked for the answers in the difficult fringes of mathematical philosophy (a sound algorithmic system can not observe certain mathematical facts about itself), quantum theory (at what point does quantum superposition give rise to classical observation, and for that matter, how the hell does gravity fit in?), and cellular biology (is the cytoskeleton involved in information processing?). When he finally gets to them, his propositions are pretty wild, but Penrose is too smart and too honest not to recognize counterarguments, and the problem is that they sound more convincing (to me), and no less weird, than what he's advocating. Why must we insist, for example, that human thought is a sound algorithm? That it is algorithmic (that is, it follows rules to change its internal state and output, which in this case would be physical rules), certainly appears to be the physical case, and considering the mathematics, a quote from Alan Turing claiming that some level of fallibility is (perhaps) a necessary condition for intelligence resonated better than a chapter's worth of disclaiming that very thing. He needed to ride on a sophisticated appeal to incredulity that such a machine as ours cannot contradict itself internally. The other issue is that for his pondering on quantum mechanics, I have difficulty accepting that brain physics are special in any way that device physics aren't. Yes, there are quantum state reductions that must occur for information to propagate in neurons, but this is also true for electrons in transistors (or you know, in almost every physics we exploit for anything), and, for that matter, more obviously the case.

I don't want to sell his speculations short--they're fascinating hypotheses--and it would be thrilling to have them proven right. But Penrose is also interesting as hell, and expertly grounded, as he points out the disconnects in the theories of AI and quantum mechanics. These discussions make up (perhaps tellingly) the bulk of the book, and I'd probably recommend it for the background more than for his particular conclusions.

Review of Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

I originally met most--okay all--of the "buds" from this book project in Slate Magazine's discussion group, the Fray. Over the past year or so, I've been weaning myself off of it, because even though I continue to enjoy the virtual company of many of its denizens (or keep meaning to anyway), the forum itself lost that feeling for me of being a fun place to visit. Partly, it was because of the games of status that a magazine of ambivalent quality kept playing with its network of forums (I've had crazy girlfriends that loved and hated me as much), partly there's the house brand of online malice that would occasionally bubble throughout the boards, there was a smidgen of annoyance at the habits of the local trolls too (but that's the same anywhere), and a big thing was the awareness of a bigger world out there, even for blogging dorks. Back in the day, nobody surfed the Fray as purposefully as did Ender, which makes him seem like an odd person to vocally mount a charge to break through its boundaries, but a year or so ago, that's what he did. These days, you can find him here, trying to parlay his online manipulation skills into something more profitable, evidently by writing about a giant mutant chicken or something. A book selection for this guy is too obvious a choice to ignore, and it led to some interesting speculations as to what he was once trying to do with the Ender persona. More about that shortly.

In the decades before he became known as a tendentious political whacko, Orson Scott Card wrote decent science fiction novels, and Ender's Game is, if not his best, probably his most well-known. It's not bad, delivering something in excess of my expectations anyway. I'm not the sort of reader to go in for barracks philosophies, nor for alien space battles, but this novel kept the interest up for its entirety, and contained characters that I cared about. It centers on a child, Ender Wiggin, who is lucky enough to get such an astounding grade on his career aptitude test that, at six years old, he's drafted directly into military school. It's not just any junior academy, but rather an intense and futuristic training program designed to identify and select kids with both incredible reflexes and that ineffable leadership quality that inspires tactical innovation, confidence, and obedience among the ranks.

If the premise looks silly (and it does--we're talking zero-gravity Laser Tag as the best hope to groom sophisticated military minds here), Card gets away with it in context. These aren't just any kids, but carefully-screened early prodigies selected for capability and maturity, and their environment is built to encourage those things. The school is regimented, isolated, and nearly adult-free, and the kids are given something close to the life-or-death authority of real soldiers, constantly exposed to violent propaganda and unforgiving decisions. It produces adult behaviors,* but their inner childlike sensitivities are still revealed to the reader by authorial exercise. History has ample evidence of children behaving as murderously effective bastards, and even though your horrible memories of middle school might seem like a starting point, children have been soldiers for as long as there has been war. The evil of it, at least from a more enlightened cultural perspective, doesn't negate the truth that kids can do this sort of thing, and certainly have. A different sort of writer (possibly a better one) might have analyzed these labyrinthine moral contexts for hundreds of pages, but Card moves this novel forward as three-quarters adventure story, and whatever doubts arise do so from Ender's own exculpatory point of view, and the briefly revealed conflicts of the administrators.

Child abuse isn't the only horror presented in this story; what they're training for is a civilizational war, a dishonorably pre-emptive one, with an ultimate resolution that is an abomination beyond description. The conflict itself is born out of the inability of two species to communicate with one another, and like most of the underlying ethical poses, it feels more honest for the brief spotlight that the author gives it. Card solves these dilemmas for the purposes of his story--every horror is conducted out of real necessary, every authoritarian abuse is verified as the lesser of evils, and every crime is repented, forgiven, inevitable, or committed without knowledge--but beyond the narrative, the ethical framework is left hanging, I think wisely, because exploring the depths of criminality here would require a much different sort of book. (The author, whatever political views he'd reveal 25 years later, deserves an ounce of credit for raising them.)

(Parenthetically, it's my opinion that the third-person omniscient view is a root of much of the world's evil. It legitimizes shoot-but-cry narratives, allowing the depth of thought to weigh equally with the depth of consequence. It pretends that the moral calculus in any heinous act is fully known. It gives us a template on which to write our many apologia.)

Old science fiction is sometimes trippy to read because badly predicted technology has a habit of growing absurd as time proves it infeasible, and the stuff that was spot-on has a tendency to become invisible to modern readers. Orson Scott Card gets some geek cred for being the first writer (to my knowledge--Ender's Game was published in 1977) to accurately guess what video games, simulators, and the internet would eventually look like. There's an entertaining subplot in which Ender's brother and sister (they're as precocious as he is) scheme to take over the world by gaining political influence through, basically, their blogs. It's funny, given the unpaid internet writer's place in the contemporary opinion heirarchy (sort of like the wart on the asshole of the American body politic--occasionally uncomfortable, but hardly life-threatening), especially considering the inflated sense of worth of, say, your average Daily Kossie. This subplot is of special interest in the context of this book review too, as the plan that these children outlined for global domination is strikingly similar to the one that Ender the poster would later use to gain power within the Fray, building anonymous nicknames, generating issue-driven contention, and gradually convincing the public of his credibility. Whether he succeeded is an open question. The Slate Fray, at least for a while, was better than many other interactive forums, competitive in a way, with approval awarded to good communicators and interesting posts. I'd always figured it was the editorial policy of awarding official brownie points that made it this way, but what the hell, maybe it was abetted by the internal subversion to a higher degree than I'd ever given it credit. Ender's Game as a manual to turn one backwater burg of the internet into the novel? Good times.



*Except cursing. Even though everyone says fart all the time, and the word "bugger" is mentioned in 1129 separate instances, nary a shit or fuck to be found.

Review of The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

That's right, "books for buds" is on an eponymous kick, and if I know a guy who insists on calling himself Gregor Samsa, then he'd have to be pretty damn forgettable to avoid this list. Gregor, as it happens, is not. He's interesting enough to get away with being a contrarian prick, a deadpan provocateur, and when misjudged, he can toy with his verbal opponents as if they were insects. The depth of his irony can be hard to judge at a glance, and you wade casually into his posts at your peril. His style is what makes him go though, a reasonable argumentative voice, and he uses that voice to be funny, wry, or, you know, seriously argumentative, or sometimes all those things at once. Almost like that Kafka guy.

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The Metamorphosis is so canonical, it's hard to offer an honest (or an interesting) review. A story like this one especially, which is loaded with bizarre props in an otherwise realistic story, drives academic types to hunt hard for symbolism. The endnotes to the story contain the most tedious sorts of observations, whether offering strong hints that it's an allegorical story (the business with the father throwing apples at Gregor), or the cultural symbolism of open or closed doors and windows, or dreary notes on technique (the three boarders are indistinguishable, which cleverly adds to the spookiness of the story--sorry, if I saw it used in Bugs Bunny, then I refuse to be awestruck). It may all be true even, but although Kafka is careful about the mood he builds, the purpose of the story isn't quite that mind-boggling. Importantly, the story holds up just fine as a story. It's more an odd exhibit to be appreciated than it is a puzzle to be solved, and Kafka manages to evoke emotions and convey scenery with economy and skill, and on the basic level, here's one that doesn't shy from being read and enjoyed.

I'm sure that any pointy-headed academic would be the first to tell you that the sturdy storytelling is part of what makes this story so damn beguiling (and here I start off on my own wacky overanalyses). The style holds up against, and cleverly contrasts, the giant absurdity of the premise. Kafka avoids in his own language, as does Gregor himself, the predictable hysteria that would surround the appearance of a gigantic insect in Gregor's bed one morning. His bugginess is by no means ignored, but there is, in places you'd otherwise expect it, a big, beetle-shaped hole in the exposition. (It's a shame sometimes what breaks through into the vernacular. Wouldn't a cockroach upstairs be more evocative than proverbial family-room pachyderms?) It's a different sort of balancing act than Robbins was into, one that gets the very structure of the narrative up onto the tightrope with everything else.

And as much as I hate to dig into the comparative meaning of every-goddamn-thing here, Kafka does choose his language with precision. The opening, "as Gregor Samsa awoke from unsettling dreams" sets up his contrasting views splendidly. It's not just an opposition between the concrete prose and absurd circumstances, there's a deep division at work here between the intellectual (or realist) and emotional planes. Gregor is the thinker of the story, approaching his new body with (quite obtuse) rationalism. How will he open the door, he thinks, how will he explain to his boss that he's late? He's the character that is shown trying (and failing) to express himself with reason instead of the predictable alarm. But Gregor's every action is verminous, and without his point of view, would only be seen as mindless: he exudes filth and craves garbage, scuttles about the ceiling and stuffs himself into dark places. To his family, he hisses uncontrollably in anger, and creeps around stealthily surprising their conversations. The people in the story act, by contrast, emotional and un-intellectual when confronted with the monstrous Gregor. Their actions are all expected and natural, but Kafka robs them of their reason in the face of horror. Kafka pulls all sorts of switcheroos with these dichotomies, playing with Gregor's empathy (much stronger than his family's, though his sister shows glimmers of it), with physical strength (Gregor's and his father's waxes and wans), and morality.

The last contrast was perhaps Kafka's most dearly expressed. It's not hard to imagine how a young man working for an unappreciative, exploitive family (but one which is loyal in its fashion), could come to view himself as an unloved pest, with the story proceeding from there as a literal interpretation of that sentiment. He goes on to invert it however: Gregor's efforts to keep his family afloat had been enabling them to be lazy and useless, and through the young man's transformation and eventual death, they (especially the sister) grow, and become transformed themselves, in a positive, and conventional, human way. I think it lacked universality, frankly. Yes, it took some novelistic chutzpah to turn that blame the misfortunes on Gregor himself, and enable their growth only with his misfortune, but it read as more personal, more of a projection, than the rest of the story did. Kafka evidently hated the ending, and perhaps it was because the family's transformation wasn't as compelling as Gregor's.

Review of Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, by Tom Robbins

So now I've come across both a Switters and a switters, a character (upper case) and a person(a) (lower case--I'll try not to put him at the beginning of a sentence--you can find him rarely here, and also more regularly on quiblit.com). Fierce Invalids is a "books for buds" selection, and one of the more obvious choices. A student of chemistry may come across the German prefix zwitter at some point, signifying the embodiment of dual and opposing characteristics. Tom Robbins and switters both embrace this concept philosophically (though surely not biologically--that's enough semantics for today, kids), finding a middle ground between light and dark, purity and prurience, id and ego, animal and divine, and at the very center, where Apollo is bitching at that slob Dionysus over the racket of the incessant waves of yin pounding at the eternal shores of yang, they discover a profound silliness. Or is it enlightenment? Are you going to tell me there's a difference?

I don't want to tell you this is anything new. It's got to predate Hegel and Freud by three thousand years, the Manicheans (who doesn't love a heretic?) and those krazy koan kats by at least a couple millennia. We've had midworlds between heavens and hells for as long as people imagined elsewheres for gods, and there's no shortage of writers who like to play in that sandbox.* The humor is a newer angle, and Robbins takes it as what separates the modern from the primitive, what divides the enlightened from the subhuman tools who take shit too seriously. There are plenty of absurdist writers these days too, but Robbins does go a little beyond jokes as a defense mechanism or a social equalizer. (Still, an omnipotent god with a sense of humor is about the only way such a divine existence can be forgivingly supposed and, I think, is the soundbite explanation of the Jewish tradition of comedy.) Robbins' dichotomy as a writer is that he acts like he's discovering all of these things for the first time, but also that he reinvents them so very well.

It helps a lot that I buy into it. This is a great theme, and fun to explore. Along with a more interesting central character, it helped raise my enjoyment level of this one relative to the other Robbins book I read. Fierce Invalids allows the sequence between them to be more linear, which gives it a more coherent feel, which is another plus in this author's case. Robbins can paint a picture, and it's lot of fun how he gets you to think, but he doesn't really excel at big plot mechanics, and if Switters is a memorable character, it's a damn good thing we have all the opportunities we do to look into his head. His joie de vivre is infectious and all, but there's a fine line between the rejection of false moralities (quite well and good) and on creepy amorality. A couple of times Robbins has to work hard to reveal his characters to be not quite over this divide.

This book (and Jitterbug Perfume too) is broken down into a multitude of sections not more than a couple pages long. Each of these is like a miniature essay or vignette or story, varying slightly in tone from one to another, and it allows the author to chuck in more than the usual variety of philosophical speculations, character sketches, drama elements, and jokes and keep it looking natural. There's another balance that Robbins must hold with his humor, keeping it enlightening but not distracting, the playfulness looking genuine and not forced, and usually he steps right. The highly subdivided structure makes it easy to reject the couple of stinkers as outlying data points. I think it's great that this works for him. I imagine him coming to the keyboard for a few hours a day and cranking one or a couple of these inspired little pieces out (it really makes for a lot of gems), inching his whole story along that way. Keeping the prose flowing over a long stretch is very difficult, and breaking it frequently is one of those things that the pros can do, but you can't.

The ending of this one was a little abrupt, and left many conflicts unresolved. I hope there is more Switters out there--and more switters--to get at the truth that lies in the humor that lies in all the inherent contradictions. Some people get it.


* Sparked by a couple shared props in The Anubis Gates, I found myself frequently comparing Robbins to the delightful Tim Powers, who occupies similar balances of metaphysics, language, erudition, and humor. I think I give the edge to Powers, who holds back a little on the disruptively goofy elements, and who also celebrates himself a little less.

Review of The Great Democracies by Winston Churchill

This one is for Urquhart, he of the extraneous Us and proxy dominator of the German Empire (um, maybe still). It's easy to fit him into the Victorian world of Punch magazine and heady diplomacy. Whatever kind of conservative Urquhart may be, I imagine (quite unfairly) that it involves formal dress, horses, and drinks with gentlemen in private clubs as much any specific political philosophy. I (also unfairly) picture an aged, bald Churchill jovially composing these histories in such a setting, dictating around a cigar and between the evening's many highballs, a team of secretaries furiously copy-editing and eliding the more caustic quips. I can see Urquhart jawing brilliantly with that guy in front of the fireplace, over cards.

The Great Democracies is the last volume of Churchill's longer A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and I didn't read the other three. It covers the period between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the death of Queen Victoria, focusing on British and American history mostly, gliding over (like everyone else) Canada and Oceania, and covering the affairs of the other peoples in Europe, Africa, and Asia so far as Churchill saw it affecting the goings-on of those treasured progeny of the British Empire.

It's well known that he had done time as a war correspondent and as a fighting man, and evidently esteemed himself highly as a writer and a historian. And he does have some strengths. Churchill ably puts realistic human faces on the historical actors of those hundred years. Even though they're pumped up large, the style is like modern reporting, and over the space of a century or two, these great men come off less like mysterious primitives in powdered wigs than they do twentieth-century humanized celebrities. Churchill carries on the narrative of their doings in a conversational tone that makes for a comfortable read, almost as if he's storytelling. Their State founders on uncertain international and domestic seas, to which those leaders respond well or badly, and the waters must be navigated with aggression or avoidance as circumstances dictate. He paints pictures of men who rise or fail to the occasions, and there may be great movements among the masses, but it is the prerogative of the leaders to ignore or respect them. It's not a world without principles (he harps against Protectionism some, for a sort of Democracy, for honoring commitments, although he dances carefully through ideas of monarchy and colonialism), but there are no slices of life of the little guy in this history. If he avoids the small theaters of human experience, he did have a fine sense of large-scale drama, however, and this book is really a gripping read.

Like many authors of American histories (and commentary), Churchill sees his own country as having attained the closest thing yet to a perfect system, and the past is interpreted in the context of where we have arrived. I can't much agree with that take. Modern politics looks like so much more of the same--making contemporary parallels when reading history is damn near unavoidable. Churchill opens up in the Britain in 1815 or so, where after the defeat of Napoleon, the British parliament wrestled with a half-century of moribund two-party politics and defective kings. He takes us in sections through the various evolutions of the Tory and Whig governments, which differed mainly in their effectiveness within the system, their justifications for foreign intervention, and the extent to which they included Radical (closer to classic Liberalism of Burke than any Socialist philosophy). On American shores the dynamic looks familiar too. Churchill outlines the then-new demographics of the antebellum U.S.A., with free-spirited and democratic rubes from the west against notheastern con artists and patricians, the still-familiar strawmen that are nearly as ugly and as banal as the nasty old English class categories. He treats American radicals a lot more contemptuously than the British variety, and while American Reconstruction was rotten, I don't think I can get behind the author's universal views on the horrors of weakening the executive.

U.S. history from this period is actually a good half of the book, and it's interesting to see it told from the English perspective. Churchill isn't shy, for example, at pointing out the flagrant land-greed of the nineteenth-century states (even as he's cautious about discussing British colonialism), which at points made Canada uneasy and Mexico bereft. The U.S. Civil war looms large through that century, and as Churchill's preferred perspective is a military one, there are great exciting swaths of text describing maneuvers, strategy, and execution. His version is not overly susceptible to Lincoln hagiography: although the take-charge moves are presented as necessary, the cause (both with respect to slavery and preserving the union) just, and his altruism commendable, he blames the mess of Union political pressures, to which Lincoln often caved, for extending the war.

If Churchill is comfortable with politics as a gentlemen's club, he positively loves generals, and his respect for Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee is deep. Americans tend to forget that there was a lot of other military action going on in the world in those decades, and it's particularly interesting to compare Churchill's laudatory treatment of Jackson and Lee to that of Otto von Bismarck, whom he respected but obviously deplored. Even as Churchill complains about failure to trust the generals, and tries to find a unified version of British imperialism, he criticizes German realpolitik as without honor. We, of course, do it for the right reasons. Always the diplomat, eh?

Review of Sandbag Shuffle by Kevin Marc Fournier

If I were picking a book to review for Mr. Fournier (who can be found here), it would surely be some garishly-bound long-forgotten penny dreadful that I scrounged from some used book purgatory. I'd find merits to enjoy, and I'd bear the faults with the loving bemusement I'd normally reserve for an eccentric uncle. That's what I would do, but Kevin had to go and write a novel of his own. The bastard.

Sandbag Shuffle is deep and thoughtful examination of health care of two neighboring countries. The voyage of Andrew and Owen from the Dickensian horrors of an orphanage on the south side of the US/Canada border into the civilized northern landscapes, whose progressive institutions give handicapped Owen the real mobility and the figurative inner strength he needs to save Winnipeg from the Red River flood of 1997. It's a deep, brilliant metaphor for...

Ah, I can't do that. The absence of that sort of highblown pretense is exactly what makes this book a keeper. I remember the young adult books of my day, of the S. E. Hinton or M. E. Kerr vintage (initials-only must have been the key to authenticity in those days), that tried to get it real by introducing some heavy urban grit and some over-the-top drama that'd take a young person to forgive for its ham-handedness. Even though Owen and Andrew are escapees from a group home, even though one of them is legless and both are quite capable of being devilish little pricks, Fournier avoids all of that high drama, and the two boys would no doubt flip a heartfelt finger at your sympathy, or take advantage of it. The characters don't suffer deep lessons, they don't hit bottom (although they skim it awhile), they don't find true love or any of that. Instead, we follow them around as they bicker and scheme and survive. This is the same guy that recommended Chekhov (below) and Colette (to come), and I can see some of that in there. It's not a voyage of self-discovery, but a presentation of characters that are fully realized from the start. Plotwise, you can say a bunch of stuff happens, but the point isn't unfolding a masterpiece of structure, it's taking a good ride with a couple of likable people.

The two of them are a lot like the boys I knew growing up: little ur-bastards, the good-parts combination of those little shits who were great friends (to the small degree you could break into the circle) and horrible influences. Owen and Andrew have no respect for authority, nor for charity, but they have each other, and if they're not trained for society, they're teeming with streetwise instincts and a feral charm that--and this is important--comes across in the writing. Their faults of knowledge are profound, and when they bicker over them, Fournier elevates it to comic art. He's got a good trick with breaking the fourth wall too, adressing the reader at times ("now you and I know..."), and shifting to the present where-are-they-now tense when it fits to do so.

Young Adult, I've been told, is hard to do well, and I imagine that it's got to be hard to avoid the condescension. I can offer my own opinion on that, but the ultimate of arbiter of something like this, of course, is my daughter, who I read it to. Must have been a trip for her. She got a whole lot of embarrassed cursing when I couldn't think of an on-the-fly edit (PG-13 gets you exactly one "fuck" and unlimited shits and damns so long as they stay appropriate). It's the sort of thing I'd have rather left for her own discovery because, hey, if there's a lesson here, it's how to be a good person while still giving authority the (dis)respect it deserves, and, like, I'm the alleged authority here. A recommended read, if you don't mind subjecting Junior to that level of suversion.

Review of No Place Like Home, by Barbara Samuel

Usually, when I select a book to read, it'll be something that's been vaguely within my focus for a while. Often that means it's been sitting on my shelf for years, but maybe I've heard of the author, got a recommendation, read a review, know the genre, or just seen it mentioned everywhere. The hunt for a book for Topazz came with none of those tools, only me and google. Specifically, I was searching for something that got in the head of newly single mother of teenagers, and if it caught Topazz's charm and scandalous wit, then so much the better. (And if, paraphrasing some other amateur reviewer, the character landed a searing hunk of man-meat, then so much the better as well.) Stepping into the divorced-mom neighborhood of the chick-lit* ghetto was a serious liklihood here, and I followed some romance buffs' online conversations to discover there's No Place Like Home. With a protagonist named Jewel (get it?), I felt I had no choice but to step right in. (The second one I looked at actually had a Topaz in it, but not in the right role.)

No Place Like Home was touted as a "genre-blender," and the conservative cover (another reason for my choice) would seem to support this classification. I don't read much in this style, but it seems to this caveman that the only thing that kept Fabio off the cover is fifteen years of gravity audaciously added to subtly drag down the bosoms, and some sentimental familial elements to get that patina of respectability. None of this gets around the way the male lead (improbably named Malachi), is introduced:

"...hair the darkest shade of cinnamon brown, eyes the color of bitter chocolate, skin tanned as dark as Brazil nuts because that's where he'd been, leading an adventure tour down the Amazon. He wore a shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of jeans and heavy boots for riding that motorcycle...".

I try to keep an open mind about genre fiction, especially for something like romance--80% of the novels ever written contain a romance, after all--which to my mind, is only separated from the general fiction shelf by a good review and/or a hunkless cover. What's more, I get it that different writers, writing for different markets, will have their own values of what's noticable and worthy of description, which probably explains why Samuel doesn't let a page slip by without gushing over some aspect of Malachi's hypermasculine phsysique. Hell, I can accept some measure of fantasy wish-fulfillment too, even if we're not talking about my particular brand of fanboy escapism here.

But there is a mighty temptation to sin in any sort of genre writing, and the biggest snare is to let the readers' expectations write your book for you. Down in the genre projects, a lot of the blueprints are already in place, and an imaginative writer can use these to show off some creativity, or to turn the lens on the structural assumptions, or to use the stock outlines as a starting points to go somewhere else entirely. It's not the scaffold itself that's interesting, it's all the stuff that the scaffold holds up. If you just deliver the expectations without testing them, then there doesn't, as they say, end up being a lot of there there, just another McMansion you drive past in Romancetown.

Samuel wanted a there, at least a physical one. No Place Like Home is a story about a woman who followed a band out of her (and the author's) hometown as a teenager, now returning with a teen of her own and a dying friend in tow to rediscover home and family, to find a place in it. Samuel handles some of the interactions with reasonable competence, if not very deeply. The more interesting aspects--her relationship with her Dad, her relationship to a terminal friend, the family's Italian-ness, her son's reticence at encountering a potential new father (and husband) figure--all get shortchanged to extol the indulgent lie of a character that is the male lead. Malachi is a dangerous and preternaturally handsome loner who also manages to be protective, communicative, thoughtful, and committed, needing only the right woman to save him. (It's enough to make me keep holding out for my own sexy green-skinned Martian babe.) He's good match for Jewel the reformed rebel, I suppose, but then this book doesn't attempt to capture rebellion very ambitiously, which, as a consequence, doesn't lend much force to all the wholesome reconciliation happening in between the paeans to Malachi's nut-brown torso. The redemption theme keeps it slightly less fluffy than I expected from this sort of book, but it's still all a little easy, and a little light. In other words, not great literature here, but enough to get your rocks off.

Keifus

*Sorry. Anyone got a better word?

Review of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

This is for my bud, Biteoftheweek. Bite has said she's evil, but I've never seen witchcraft there. The worst I've witnessed is bluntness, and, frankly, that aspect of her style is similar enough to that of people close to me that it's worth understanding. I like the adjective wicked better than I do evil. There's a word that connotes, to me, sinfulness and impertinence rather than malice: wicked ways, a wicked tongue. The word wicked suggests a more complicated place on the dour old good-n-evil axis, which, on many levels, badly needs a poke every now and then anyway. Sometimes, wicked can be wicked cool.

So you see where I'm going with this, right? Gregory Maguire's novel promised to expand on the legendary character from L. Frank Baum's (and less from Victor Fleming's) The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, presumably with the exculpatory context of the land's "punishing political climate." He seems to take some pride in his disquisition of good and evil, but is the witch bad...or is she wicked?

The story opens in oppressive economic times--drought and government expansion--but dumps the characters into a confrontation with evil of a more metaphysical sort. Maguire plays with these contrasts throughout the book, each well enough in their turn, but incongruously with one other. The middle portion of the book, surprisingly rich with political and the character development, doesn't jibe well with the magical events that bookend the witch's biography. It's difficult to resist the comparison with The Iron Dragon's Daughter, a novel which explored the dark places in storyland, and found their organic connection to the human version. Swanwick was able to find that frightening spot where the evil in our hearts is indistinguishable from the corruption of society. Maguire has them as two unrelated things, and his story is the weaker for it.

Elphaba (it works better as Elphie--the witch part gets added late) is the only character forced to embody both of these things, and it it makes her a different person in different sections. She's introduced under deep omens, born green-skinned and shark-toothed, with an innately dark and violent disposition. (She begins her life with a memorable bite!) But in the space between her first word ("horrors") and her first college roommate, the weight of the occult is lifted. Elphaba the student is an intelligent, caustic little atheist. She has no soul, she believes, but she's got character to spare, and she's got a moral sense, whether she acknowledges one or not. Even green, she's the sort of self-possessed, interesting girl that any boy who was watching wishes, later in life, that they could have possibly understood. (Yes, there are a couple of boys in the story who don't know they are in love with her.) For a while, she lives up to the appealing versions of wickedness. She rebels against the smothering and manipulative school hierarchy, becomes a subversive for the cause of oppressed peoples, takes a lover and loses him in the political turmoil created by the usurping wizard. Though Ozzie politics seems a silly notion at first, Maguire makes them real by viewing it through the small and convincing context of individual points of view. He takes ineffective missionaries, bored housewives, misfit students, horrid children and makes them all individually real enough to add up to a quality setting. There are horrors, but his people are people, and I cared about them. I'm not going to tell you it wasn't a good read.

These vignettes are Maguire's real strength, honest and convincing, but peppered in there are vague hints of greater powers and grand designs that actually diminish any transformations that come through character. You could paint Elphaba's development as a quest to find a moral center despite her atheism and despite her oddness--this is devalued if she's deprived of her will, or if she really is uniquely soulless. (There are better ways to mix determinism with character than dumping the former on the latter.) She can't avoid the events of Baum's source book any more than she can her secret mystical assignments, but the novel Wicked is hardly set up to make them look inevitable (the necessity of picking up plot coupons--bees and monkeys and shoes and so forth--got tedious by the end too). Her well-known cackling madness, quite at odds with the inwardly struggling character portrayed up to that point, is presented as an unnecessarily comical Lady MacBeth style decompression, and it's not earned. If indeed her end was imposed by greater forces, then let her exit with grace, or with tragedy, or with middle finger extended--those are things her character deserved. Maguire's wicked witch really was misunderstood. And robbed.

Review of In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes

Lost in the bowels of the human network is a conversation I had with Splendid IREny shortly before she went intentionally missing. I mentioned that I expected to next hear from her via book jacket, presumably encasing the published story of the female noir hero she was then toying with. (Maybe she's working on it now.) I knew exactly what the photo would look like.*

As a "books for buds" entry, I wanted to uncover dark crime fiction that, if I couldn't find something with a female detective lead, at least somehow subverted or played with the hypermasculinity I associate with noir. A hunt on Amazon revealed a series of pulp classics authored by women, and In a Lonely Place got the highest ranking of the bunch. I'm going to be thinking about that brilliant insight as I stuff this in the stacks between my collection of Peter Whimsy stories and my lone Agatha Christie tome. I guess crime fiction was hardly just (or hardly best) a man's game sixty years ago, anymore than it is today. Oh well.

When I cracked open this novel, I felt a tremendous let-down: the prose is just awful. Hughes wrote the whole book as a series of simple declarative sentences that evinced no particular rhythm, and certainly no pleasures of sound, expression, or description. In the few places where the tension accelerated my reading, the prose aspired to be invisble, but in the subtler dramas of shared looks and perceptions (He was angry. He looked at her. She couldn't tell. She gave him a stare.), it was completely unevocative. Oddly, I felt guilty about this. If I'm reviewing a book for someone, I want it to be a good book.

It took nearly half the book to realize that Hughes' poor "telling" didn't overturn any old writing maxims. Her vision is fine, she's just not very good at saying it. In fact, by the end of the book, I became impressed by the subtlety of how the author tugged at expectations. The point-of-view character, Dix Steele, is introduced as (and is named like) a traditional war hero: ace pilot, good looks, confident. The author sets up a good chill by the third page--the "hero" is a cold-blooded bastard, a killer. His point of view is refreshingly not cerebral. Dix doesn't analyze himself, there are no boring internal monologues or tired episodes of psychobabble. Hughes doesn't get past Dix's own self-image in the narration, which is indolent, narcissistic, not very articulate (for a would-be writer), and hinges on a confidence that's genuine but not always maintainable. It must have been a challenging storytelling approach: it succeeds exclusively on what's shown. (For this reason, I bet the movie was great.)

I didn't like the character, but despite his evil, he's not insane exactly, and I almost wanted an out to present itself. His background doesn't inspire the confidence he shows (and though Hughes barely mentions it, war death appears to have affected him strongly). I don't know if it takes a woman to poke holes in that masculine self-assurance and to expose the possessive notions of romantic love, but she calls it for a facade, opaque enough to obscure the other characters as well as the plot itself. The red-headed femme fatale is not the frighteningly sharp vixen she appears, his friend's wife's odd behavior isn't attraction, and the investigation proceeds not through detective heroics, but routinely and behind the scenes as Dix Steele spins his borrowed wheels with growing urgency. The unraveling is cleverly paced, and manages to rise above the blank narration. Glad I stuck with this one.

Addendum (from comments): Hemingway, anti-heroes, etc.: talk about your low-hanging critical fruit. Did I ever mention I was an engineering major?

*Go ahead and click on it. I spent hours tweaking my original pencil sketch from a Napoleon Dynamite special (I spent, like, three hours on shading the lower lip alone) into something (I hope) not insulting.

Author: Dorothy B. Hughes
Title: In a Lonely Place
Genre: fiction, mystery

Review of I Dont Know How She Does It, by Allison Pearson

Rundeep is super. Afflicted with an online writing addiction as bad as my own (but more diverse, incisive, and well-regarded), she seems to balance this with a successful and happy marriage, a high-visibility career, and, evidently, time to be a great parent as well. Either she's got it totally figured out (in which case she's my hero) or else she's brilliantly faking it (in which case she's my hero). Rundeep is hard to pin down as a book choice because she seems to have a smart angle on everything. So what could I do but find some fictional character that seems to manage it all? I don't know how she does it either, but I'd sure like to figure out something similar. I'm honored to include rundeep as one of the buds.

#

There's a certain prose style that's been working its way into the literature for the past 20 or 30 years, a certain brand of ironic hyperbole that compounds everyday observation with huge absurd metaphors, almost at the end of every sentence. Off the cuff, I'll guess that it started as soon as anyone saw fit to parody Raymond Chandler, but whatever the origin, it's worked itself into something of a standard form, identifiable a couple paragraphs in. I love it, and Allison Pearson wins big points for doing it well. She has a lot of fun with the verbal gymnastics, and the pace of the language is a good match for the frantic knot of the main character's mental state. Low on plot (but with an entertaining movie-script denoument), the book flies by as fast as Kate Reddy thinks. I'd have read it in a sitting if I'd had enough of a sitting.

I Don't Know How She Does It is told in the first person, in present tense, in roughly real time, a framing device that doesn't quite work. 8:17 AM: Am rushing to cab... Logistically, she can't possibly be dictating, but the book is too diary-like to be an internal monologue either. Even so, it's more than enough to get intimate with the Kate's internal thoughts. Her racing mind dwarfs the stimuli from her external life, and the contrast of her thoughts (stern at home, sweet and funny at work) to her actions (sweet at home and stern at work) are a great vehicle to reveal character. She's an easy woman to like, if only she'd calm down for ten minutes.

I'm not sure I identify with her though. I suppose I'm more like her husband--I've had a good upbringing that's robbed me of overambition--but I don't quite get that dude's dull entitlement either. (He's easy to write myself onto because Kate spends the novel ignoring him.) I had kids at the same chronological time as that fictional couple (though I am younger), and while in grad school, did some daddy-at-home time while my wife won bread. A man, especially a young one, was at best a novelty, but more often was beneath the notice of the local Muffia, and I really enjoyed Pearson's pokes at those overbearing ghouls. (Now my poor wife spends more time scratching her head over their bizarre commitments.) I couldn't get behind the noxious men who had a path paved to business success (if I were to encounter in the workplace the level of overt misogyny that Kate did, I'd be appalled), nor the women who were conflicted about their maternal instincts, even if I could (and still can) relate to the way that dual incomes run roughshod over family life.

The premise of this novel--a woman that tries to succeed as both a proper English mum (can I ever tell you how much English classisms bug me?) and a badass executive--is one that invites an exploration of gender roles, but none of the major or minor characters captured very well the complicated perspectives of the people even I know. Even with humor (and maybe especially with humor), this honesty is essential, and I think it's where Pearson lost the opportunity to write something powerful instead of something light and disposable. It would be difficult to resolve the setup without appearing to approve one side or other of Kate's dual drives, and when she starts extolling motherhood as a compulsion straight from the womb, you can hear the faint crackle of a message, and by the time she introduces and quickly martyrs the novel's only saint, it's screaming in your ear. The successful (balanced) women in the showcase are either wives, or else have assumed some bullshit girl-acceptable career. (To put it another way, I'd rather have any one of Kate's female friends managing my hypothetical funds than the douchebag men she worked with.) The men, the best and worst of them, are all overgrown boys that need a little mommying. She doesn't criticize the subtler chauvinism of Kate's "good" boss, nor that of her inappropriate romantic interest--they're just boys who have been failed by women. It's all so very comfortable with old traditions by the end, I found it disappointingly at odds with the way Pearson opened the story. For rundeep, I wish I came up with something that was balanced in substance as well.

Author: Allison Pearson
Title: I Don't Know How She Does It
Genre: fiction

Review of Punctuated Equilibrium by Stephen Jay Gould

Biology's not my thing, really, but go ahead and ask Archaeopteryx about it, or even better, get him started about evolution denial. He's great at thrashing the idiots and it's fun to watch. Reading something along the lines of denial-bashing seemed like the fun angle for a reading selection, but I was disappointed to learn that what's the matter with Kansas doesn't really begin or end with wrongheadedness about evolution, but evidently falls under the usual broad, glib, partisan brush, and partial as I am to East Coast elitism, I don't really need to accentuate my biases.

So after striking out on my first choice for Arch, I decided to go straight, and chose Punctuated Equilibrium by Stephen Jay Gould. It makes a nice companion subject to the previous reading selection. I expected the world from this book, but left feeling that I could have done better for the best ornithologist I know.

I'm not at all sure who the intended audience for this book was supposed to be.* It seems too jargon-heavy and detailed for the omnivorous science reader, and too fluffy and personalized for a monograph. Most of the book is explaining ad infinitum the way in which the punctuated equilibrium model has affected the field, positively and negatively. If you want to call it something of a memoir and something of a rebuttal to his critics, then it succeeded on those levels.

Punctuated Equilibrium leaves the unfortunate impression that evolutionary biology is a science of words and not math. And (statistics aside) there may be something to that. If a physical or chemical principle is in dispute, you can go to the lab and construct experiments that can, in principle, confirm or deny the hypothesis. In paleontology, there are rarely extra data for the taking, and so instead it gets down to argument. Next to dropping enormous words with unforgivably compounded suffixes, examining researcher bias seems to be Gould's chief hobby horse. To hear him describe his field, it's a disappointingly lawyerly form of inquiry. Say it ain't so, Arch! I expected so much better from the most celebrated scientific writer of our times.

Punctuated equilibrium is only part theory. Gould identifies three legs of it: (1) the fossil record prevalently shows stasis of species accompanied with sudden changes, not the gradual transformation that Darwinism predicts, (2) species are proper evolutionary individuals, not (only) organisms, (3) that this explains the pattern of stasis and sudden change in the fossil record. These are Gould's descriptions by the way, though he acknowledges (at book length) that there is broad contribution (and criticism) that goes into the theory itself. Point 2 of his triad is the theory part. (1) is an observation, and (3) is a predicted result. I'd have been interested if he worked up a general mechanism for punctuation when it occurs, but it can almost be any old thing, and it may be many things. Gould mentions that some various researchers have demonstrated the third part of his theory in simulations, but he spends surprisingly little time on it. He spends more time describing how enhancing the debate is a validation of his ideas. I don't think it made for good reading.

I love the idea of species as individuals though. It seems right in teh context of my own way of looking at things, in which populations need to get pushed out of their stable states. I can think of several parallel and unrelated examples. In evolution, interbreeding is what locks that stability in, and in a way, same-species sexual preferences can be seen to preserve the species-individual (take that old man Darwin). I don't think Gould much approved of reasoning by analogy, by the way, but as a harper on researcher bias, he'd probably realize how we people tend to construct our models similarly, in a way that we can use the same language to describe different trends. Calling species out as Darwinian individuals, locked into stability by sexual compatibility, doesn’t seem so bold to me, and I'm comfortable enough with it in the above context. Like geology, the part that's hard to wrap a mind around is that even if speciation may approach human timescales, stasis is spread throughout the ridiculously long geological history of the earth. Speciation is a useful way to look at the quasi-individual at incomprehensible slowness--and Gould went far enough to address every counterargument he could think of on that one--and we talking apes are just fly-by observers of that long slow dance.


*much like this blog

Review of Earth: an Intimate History by Richard Fortey

So I'm trying to explain the book project to Twiffer.* "Something to reflect one of the many aspects of you, dude."

"The many aspects of Twiffer? That's a laugh."

"No, you know, I want to read something that captures your personality in some way, or something that inspires or interests you, or makes me think of you, or works in whatever minor level of free association. Hell, it could be about the life of the water buffalo for all it matters. This isn't meant to be deep psychological science here, just an excuse to read interesting stuff."

"Interesting stuff? That inspires me? All right, you might like this one."

Thank god I didn't make myself read that book about the Red Sox. Twiff and I have traipsed over a lot of the same geology anyway.

#

Any detailed history of the earth would fill (and has filled) volumes. Earth: an Intimate History is less a catalogue and more a survey of well-chosen interesting bits. Richard Fortey relates the world's geological features like a man telling old family stories by the fireside. You can picture him unwinding them around his pipestem, getting animated at the exploits, chuckling at his occasional and minor wit, and making long sad eyes when the human timeline is inevitably compared against all those great, slow rocks. (Commendably, he resists the urge to lay too thickly on that last bit.) There are a lot of anecdotes at his disposal, and they fit neatly into the arc of history. The reader is carried along with the flow of narrative, finding himself suddenly rubbing his eyes as the storyteller concludes, and stumbles out the door to see a world around him that looks slightly different before, older and bigger.

Science, it's said, changes one funeral at a time. I can see what Twiffer was getting at when he hinted that hypothetical immortality could be the death of science. On the other hand, certain branches seem to be more susceptible to cults of establishment, geology evidently among them. If the 20th century was chemistry's triumph,** then the 19th belonged to geology. But this explosion of earth science was in a way behind the times, as the astronomers of the day had already survived running afoul of the church, and a culture of doubt and falsifiablity was already firming up. Still, along with the contemporaneous evolutionary theories, geological science had a tough go of it when it bumped up against the creation myths--there's more disappointment at stake in dating the age of the earth than in describing whether electrons more resemble particles or waves--and the entrenchment around either side of religious debate surely took some time to break up.

Fortey struck me with the degree to which geology and biology (and biology's footnote, sociology) intersect. The earth is bout four and a half billion years old, and has a fossil record of about 3 billion. Geological time scales coincide neatly with evolutionary ones, and in the same time it took the continental plates to dance and drift from the poles to the tropics, open and close oceans, the earth exploded in shellfish, the dinosaurs came and went, mammals scurried from the trees and along the plains. Climates have always been shaped by plate tectonics. Mountains capture rain, and the local rocks supply minerals with the abandon of a drunken youth or the parsimony of an old miser. The appearance of people clinging on the end of the evolutionary chain is an instant in all of this, but just the same, geology shapes cultures too. It supplies water, arability, building materials, and borders. For all the usual talk about biology as a whole outliving the human race, life itself remains an impermanent and mutable scum on this massive and quivering globe of rock. Mull that on over for a couple thoughtful puffs on the briar.

I'm not a big-time inorganic chemist, but one interesting thing about playing with minerals in the lab, is the general inability of people to reproduce natural materials. We can attain the pressures and temperatures with reasonable ease, but it is impossible to grow crystals at geological slowness. The crystallinity, the phase and compositional distribution, they seem like unimportant things, but they make all the difference in the properties of rocks at the human scale. It seems like the geologist can find nearly as many morphological variations in silicate minerals as the organic chemist recognizes in carbon bonding, and you have to admire the complexity with which molecular tetrahedra can be assembled, and wonder if it ultimately holds the same potential for higher level organization.

Fortey reveals the earth as a stately dynamic body. The continents float on a gently convecting mantle, bumping and separating like toy boats battling in the bath. The mantle is heated (and this was a big surprise to me) radioactively, and the crust sags into it under the weight of oceans and mountains and glaciers, and the whole ball jiggles like torpid gelatin as they bang into one another. It leaks into the ocean floor, and resorbs the rigid plates at subduction zones, a two-dimensional non-Euclidian lava lamp of rocky masses. It feels wrong to even try to spread my mind to such scales of time and length.

Regarding the human race, Fortey's about as sanguine as I am, which is to say that even while not thinking very much of humanity as a species, he still holds a lot of affection for the thoughtful oddballs he sees as part of his own sphere. He's got a soft spot for the unsung gatherers and compilers of information, and a bit of reluctant love for the attention-gathering theorists. He makes a point to forgive the sins of closed-mindedness for scientists who enabled greater advances. He puts people and the earth together in a sort of lonely, awestruck, and intimate worldview, and as something of a recreational misanthrope and eschatologist myself, who nonetheless cherishes his human connections, it's a voice I was able to deeply enjoy.

* You can find the actual exchange somewhere down below,. My memory always tries to make conversations more entertaining in hindsight.

** Fair to say, I think. Spectroscopic analysis, kicking in the 1940s roughly, blew the field out of the water (as did two war efforts). Physics was famously big in the 20th of course, but then physics has been flourishing madly since Newton.

Author: Richard Fortey
Title: Earth: an Intimate History
Genre: non-fiction, science, natural history

Review of Candide by Voltaire

Grade: B+

You gotta love IOZ. A book that represents that guy would almost have to be a satire, the more caustic, the more felicitous, the better. The subject would certainly have to be the poverty of the human condition, especially in a time of war, but not too heavy on that egalitarian crap please, an intellectual and aristocratic cast would be more his angle: IOZ is the kind of guy who can draw the line between equality and justice. Can anybody think of an author that reflects IOZ's puckish passion, his airy artifice, silly pseudonym, flagrant Francophilia? Yeah, I think I've got something.

Candide works at its most obvious level as a travelogue of eighteenth century woe, a thumb of the nose at any divine optimization, however ineffable. The eponymous character starts his days in a cozy fortress in Germany, makes some eyes at the baron's daughter, which earns him a big boot o' exile, and things only go downhill from there for the poor bastard. Candide chases his beloved Cunégonde across the old world and the new, at various times conscripted, beaten near to death, taken sick, driven to murder, and bearing witness to the gravest misfortune of others. Voltaire tries to outdo himself with atrocity (looking, sadly enough, not very far at all), but his touch is so light, and his pace so quick, that, well, it's not that you don't notice--that would miss the point--but you can't get through something like this without a tremendous helping of humor.

You'd think the repetition of theme would get old too--for most of the novel, Voltaire doesn't stray far from his idea that life is a miserable farce--but the tone is what keeps you engaged. It's why satire, done well, is brilliant. Voltaire seems to take a poke at every stodgy and horrible artifact of the pre-Enlightenment society that he can think of, and while I'd be lying if I claimed a deep familiarity with the literature of his time, he seems to be mocking with the form of this novel the clumsy romance of his (or any) day, and the unreadable Puritanical allegory that infected the previous century. Candide, as his name implies, is an impressionable shell of a man, but, while luckier than most (he's got to live through the hundred and so pages after all, if sometimes barely), he suffers the consequences of his naivete as such a creature might really be expected to. (Uh, usually.)

Voltaire skims a wide range of current events to establish the futility of optimism. A quarter millennium later, this modern reader was happy enough for the contextual footnotes. I picture some future generation of historians chuckling at America: the Book, as oblivious of 8/10 of the relevance as I was for Candide. Voltaire's prose, even in English, is witty and enjoyable, which highlights my general hatred of translations. For the bit of wordplay I caught, it kills me to know how droll the thing was in its original French, and in its original context. But regardless of how heavy it leans on popular references, it's the universal themes that keep Candide robust through the centuries. No one remembers whatever the hell Leibniz was on about philosophically, but that doofus Pangloss resonates to this day.

I was amused in this novel (and considering Jonathon Swift too) to compare the role of pamphleteers in the eighteenth century to bloggers today. Voltaire has a special place in his heart for the unlettered critics and hecklers. For the record, I'll accept his description for this sort of writing, cranked out by "one of those vipers in literature who nourish themselves with their own venom, a pamphlet-monger...a writer of pamphlets, a fool." Shit, I can't explain the blogosphere better than a Frenchman 250 years ago.

No review of Candide is complete without a dissection of the ending. I'll spare you the trouble: it sucked, a total cop-out, replete with the future-is-what-you-make-of-it shit, a coda as trite and necessary as Roger Waters brought us in The Wall or Mike Judge in Office Space. If not optimism, then at least there's honesty, something something, blah blah blah. But on the plus side, as I read the conclusion, eyes a-rolling, a fluffy white kitten (honest to god) happened to curl herself up in my arm. Maybe this is the best of all possible worlds after all.

Keifus

Organization
Author: Voltaire
Title: Candide
Genre: fiction, satire, classic literature

Review of Gullivers Travels, by Jonathon Swift

Grade: B
Though most of us like to imagine ourselves anonymous as we crackle along the corners and concourses of these internets, individual character still has an annoying tendency of poking through. You can try to control your electronic output, position your profile in the best available light, and so on, but few of us are quite the actors as we imagine, and once you get the dynamic down, knowing people online doesn't have many fundamental differences with knowing them on the outside. Of my handful of pixellated pals, hipparchia is probably the worst offender of badly-hidden anonymity--she's got half a dozen versions of herself floating around (that I know of), but she can't keep her genuine and idiosyncratic charm out of any of them. She's got the likability and affability thing down, but she's also been known on occasion to strike an argument with a giant and necessary 2x4. Hipparchia is great.

If you're a more observant reader than me, you'll probably pick up right away that someone named hipparchia (among other things) is a horse-lover. In fact, I've got it on pretty good authority that rule by intelligent horses beats rule by dumbasses any day of the week. I can make a good guess as to what human novels such a creature might prefer, and so I reviewed one. As for me, I'm glad hipparchia still bothers to slum it with us yahoos.

The conventional way to introduce Gulliver's Travels as an adult is as a series of shocked revelations. Why, it's not a children's book at all. Oh my. Gasp, choke. I suppose that I got some of that when I was twelve, but to be fair, thanks to my parents' draconian television policies, I read Swift well before I ever caught wind of any terrible kiddified version. My grownup self was more interested in how the vitriol held up. My opinion is mixed.

You could maybe forgive producers their tender renditions if they only read half of the thing (which I suspect gives their attention spans too much credit). Swift's game throughout the book is as much to poke holes of honesty into various human fantasies (size, immortality, utopia) as into actual human institutions and character. Gulliver's voyages to Lilliput and Brogdingnag play more for straight laughs than scathing ones, and while it's funny enough to consider Gulliver fighting disgusting Brobdingnagian flies over scraps of meat (and so forth), the author is only knocking down houses of his own construction when he does that. The first half of the book isn't empty of political satire, but what's there is of a roughly Seussian sort, reduced enough into silliness that it doesn't sting very much.

The protagonist spends a lot of time treating with kings and nobles, and Swift doesn't knock them very hard from Gulliver's point of view, instead he treats them with a naive and likable narrative voice. In this mode, Swift's probably at his best when he lets his character get indignant about defending some horrible human institution or other. I didn't feel that he was painting monarchy as an evil in itself, merely a corrupted one, as all of our endeavors must be. His portrait of an essentially defective human nature suffuses every page.

Swift's pen gets sharper as the story progresses, however, and he gets consequently funnier too. His swipes at the Academy are priceless, whether it's scientists attempting to recover food from excrement and sunlight from cucumbers, extorting funding, or engaging in the self-evidently futile pursuit of competent and just government, Swift's in his highest gear driving across the kingdom of the floating island. If you were looking to skim this novel, I'd recommend skipping all the crap about the little people.

Gulliver's final journey is to a populated by a utopian society of reason-endowed horses and nasty, brutish, unintelligent humans. It's a mechanism, of course, to mock our faulty pretenses toward reason, but I didn't find myself liking the houyhnhnms all that much, with their annoying certitude (none really accepted their bestial natures in other societies), and their intolerance. Though Gulliver, like all humans, may be an imperfect intellect, the houyhnhnms cast him out only because he resembles the other yahoos. Swift (perhaps remarkably, given his times, and all his generalities about fictional foreign societies) avoids racist ideas, but the houyhnhnms, while admirably not dumbasses, are a bunch of speciesist bastards. Screw them.

Satire, like any writing, is an art. To succeed at it, you need to both tell the truth (or at least a truth), the harder the better, and you also have to be funny without being too silly. Now and then, Swift's truths seem a little easy, and he sometimes treats his subjects a little indulgently. He's an adorable sort of misanthrope. Which is maybe not a bad fit for hipparchia at all.

Organization
Author: Jonathon Swift
Title: Gulliver's Travels
Genre: fiction, satire, classic literature