Thursday, January 31, 2019

Review: Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion by Sam Harris
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Review of Sam Harris’s Waking Up

This book wasn’t written for me, but it is awfully interesting, and I respect it for the influence it’s had on some people I really respect. (Shout out to my brother Ed!)

To begin with, I’m frustrated by the frame of Harris’s project. As his subtitle suggests – “A Guide to Spirituality without Religion” – he’s trying to justify his interest in spirituality to an audience inclined to be skeptical of it. I get the impression that his ideal audience for this part of the book is the late Christopher Hitchens, whom Harris acknowledges as a friend and influence. If you are an avowed atheist, as Harris and Hitchens are, then you no doubt look on most interrogations of the spiritual as intrinsically flawed. If you insist always on logic and reason, then there’s a lot to be suspicious about when someone starts talking about consciousness and the illusion of the self.

In his first chapter or so, Harris rehearses a quick set of reasons to dismiss traditional religion entirely. As he sees it, it’s a series of “myths, superstitions, and taboos,” a set of harmfully distracting fairy tales. As he makes that case, though, he relies on a lot of assumptions among his target audience. Hitchens would no doubt nod in agreement with such a phrase, but what about the rest of us? (It doesn’t help, by the way, that Harris seems to have little understanding of the crucial and nuanced ways in which Judaism is different from the other Abrahamic traditions he speaks about. For that matter, I suspect he’s mistaken about Islam and its Sufi traditions as well as Christianity and many of its esoteric strains.)

There’s no reason for me to rehearse the argument here – in brief, I’d argue that Harris conflates what I think of as a crisis of literalism, the misapprehension by contemporary “faithful” of texts that previous generations understood more poetically, with what we’d both agree is something like idolatry. But I’d argue as well that there’s no reason Harris needs to rehearse this argument here either. He frames his thoughtful discussion of spirituality and meditative practice with this quick, and in many ways condescending, overview. It’s like a devotee of Picasso and Matisse trying to explain why there might be something worth valuing in a comic book, or a classically trained dancer explaining why we should pay attention to hip-hop dance. Those metaphors fail, though, because there are thoughtful “highbrow” thinkers who find a way to value both types of art. Harris seems to feel he has to start from the sense of religion as flawed and harmful before he can try to extract elements of value from it.

All that’s just the frame, though. The main thrust of Harris’s book is a thoughtful take on what spirituality is and how we might come to study it through the tools of self-reflection and meditation. Starting from his background as a neuroscientist, one who has spent much of his life trying to learn from practitioners of meditation across the world, he bolsters his description of what it means to meditate with what’s taking place inside the brain. (There remains a trace here of what I call the “error of his frame.” It’s as if he’s trying to tell the Hitchens of the world that – don’t worry, bro’ – there’s still a lot of science behind the soft sounding stuff.)

As I read all this, I am intrigued by what it would be like to be a successful meditator, and I am led to think more carefully about reports from a couple good friends who say that regular meditation has improved the quality of their lives. That part of this book strikes me as meaningful, and I’m not sure anyone else could have written it – certainly no one else I’m aware of.

And, if it feels like I might be quibbling with what I call the “frame,” I find myself resisting the thrust of this part on a more thoughtful level.

The fact is, I’m a bad meditator. I enjoy yoga, but I have learned it’s agonizing for me to do it without a sense of how time is passing. (In fact, I have to sneak a watch in with me. So long as I know where I am in the hour, I can relax. When I lose sight of that, I feel a vague panic that time might have stopped. It’s “against the rules,” but I enjoy the experience only when I am hyper-conscious of time rather than lost within it.)

And, while I acknowledge the value of others’ experience, I don’t apologize for my own resistance. Good for others – and I mean that without condescension or sarcasm – if they can find strength and calm in discovering that the self is an illusion. I find comfort in the idea that I’m called always to better my “self,” however illusory that notion may be. I respect traditions that push toward a sense of the self as quantum, but I also respect the Western philosophical tradition founded on Socrates’s challenge to “know thyself.” When I write in the essay tradition of Montaigne, I understand myself as limning my own self, my own experience, and I value the experience of encountering others attempting the same thing. In that light, I think of Kurt Vonnegut, who was famously hostile to meditation and its practices (supposedly because his first wife got “lost” in such experience as he saw it). Instead, Vonnegut insisted that there was a “Western” practice of meditation. It was, he said, called reading, and he understood it as the experience of discovering (as opposed to losing) a sense of self through its similarities and contrasts with others.

I’m not dismissing what Harris is arguing here, and I don’t want to do him the disservice of casting his arguments as absolute. While he focuses here on the power of meditation, he’s also clearly spent much of his life pursuing science and other forms of intellectual inquiry. Still, I can’t help but put the end-frame on my own take on his work:

I have heard a number of times, but most movingly at my nephew’s bar mitzvah, the story of a rabbi who used to insist that we carry notes in our left and right pockets. On one he’d write, “I am the center of the universe.” On the other, “I am meaningless before the divine.” The idea was to strike a balance between a sense of self as all-encompassing and a sense of it as, to steal from the traditions Harris valorizes, illusory. It was also, I like to think, an effort to strike a balance between means of inquiry. It takes doubt – a doubt that Harris admirably uses through his application of science and reason to these questions – but I believe as well that it takes faith – a kind of faith that I think Harris too readily disdains – to accept the other crucial half of our place within the world.

I admire Harris for shining doubt on aspects of spirituality, for reclaiming them for the Hitchens of the world for whom they would otherwise be inaccessible. I also think he misses a big part of the picture in his seeming inability to look through the lens of faith at the same phenomena.




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Wednesday, January 23, 2019

Review: Touch

Touch Touch by Claire North
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Claire North has a recipe (or so I take it from The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August and The Sudden Appearance of Hope) and I generally like it. She takes a sci-fi premise – a man is born again at the same historical moment life after life or a woman leaves no lasting impression on the people – but that’s only the start. Where lesser writers just dump the premise and run, she explores it, brings out its contradictions, and resolves them. Then, working that exposition throughout the larger plot, she produces an exciting climax where our protagonist, meeting a character of the same nature, has a final showdown determined by the rules of the universe she’s created.

As if all that weren’t enough, she draws out a worthwhile philosophical interrogation about the nature of identity. Who are we if we’re born again with the capacity to “improve” on the decisions we made in our first life? How is it possible to fall in love if no one is ultimately like you? And what might it mean for us ordinary humans if there are other types with superior awareness?

I loved those other two of North’s novels, and I look forward to reading more of her work, but I think this one comes up somewhat short.

For starters, the sci-fi premise here is that the central character is a kind of ghost, a spirit who inhabits the bodies of others. He/she can move from person to person by touch. The mechanics of those movements are vintage North. There are some great scenes where our ghost protagonist, Kepler, passes from a body that’s been shot into the body of someone wounded nearby, into the body of the shooter, and then on to safety by a rapid switch of passers-by. It’s a whole new kind of thriller action.

As this goes along, though, I think it begins to undermine itself. Because the ghost takes on so many characteristics of his/her host, he is constantly in flux. There’s no stability, no “there there.” By the end of the novel, when Kepler declares him/herself in love with a human who’s gotten pulled into a conflict between Kepler and another ghost, it isn’t clear what that might mean. Kepler has been so many different people, has allowed so many hosts to get killed and hurt as a consequence of his/her actions, that how he/she would experience a sense of a self falling in love never comes clear.

It may be that I read this one too slowly and allowed my attention to drift, but I found myself less and less interested in the internal premises of its action. Kepler would be after a character who appeared one way and then after the same character who appeared completely different. I’d get a sense of the particulars of a scene, and then the scene would shift altogether.

As a reader, I’d find myself getting caught up in the action, and then it would change so dramatically that, even after I recalibrated which body which ghost was wearing, I couldn’t recover the same interest. It’s as if North, who is investigating the nature of identity, obscures identity so much here that one of her central premises more or less evaporates.

I’m still on for more of North’s work, but I think this one – the second she wrote under this pen-name – simply outsmarts itself.


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Monday, January 21, 2019

Review: Erratic Facts

Erratic Facts Erratic Facts by Kay Ryan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I stumbled across this collection at the MLA, and I picked it up because the first several poems simply grabbed me. I’ve been challenging myself to read more collections of poetry, so that’s something I sometimes do: pick up a volume and see if it talks to me. As a result, I don’t read any poetry that I don’t already like a lot. There’s so much of it in the world that it seems silly to spend time on something that doesn’t talk to you.

I’d never heard of Kay Ryan, but, as it turns out, I’m hardly making some deep discovery. She’s won a Pulitzer and been the U.S. Poet Laureate, so there’s really nowhere up to go from there. That’s the nature of 21st Century American poetry, I guess – even the stars are obscure. (That makes the broad acknowledgement of Mary Oliver’s death so startling; most of us simply don’t know our poets.)

Ryan’s poems are all short. She works with a line-length well less than a breath, and her work has a zen koan quality to it. She boils her insights down to such an essence that we’ve swallowed them whole before we quite realize it. There’s a meditative quality in the work, but there’s also a lot of humor. She’s taking her ideas and her poetry seriously, but she doesn’t seem to be taking the idea of poetry too seriously.

Most of my favorites are the very first ones. Consider, for instance, “New Rooms”

The mind must
set itself up
wherever it goes
and it would be
most convenient
to impose its
old rooms—just
tack them up
like an interior
tent. Oh but
the new holes
aren’t where
the windows went.

I love the brevity of this one, but I love as well the way it lingers. I think that feeling, the sense that, after a major change in my life or world, I want to get back to a familiar rhythm. Instead, as she says, “the new holes aren’t where the windows went.” That tight, slanted-truth seems almost worthy of Emily Dickinson, a truth that we recognize as truth only after she says it.

Another that prompted me to pick this up is “On The Nature of Understanding”

Say you hoped to
tame something
wild and stayed
calm and inched up
day by day. Or even
not tame it but
meet it half way.
Things went along.
You made progress,
understanding
it would be a
lengthy process,
sensing changes
in your hair and
nails. So it’s
strange when it
attacks: you thought
you had a deal.

That too seems to capture a truth I’d almost already known. I have that sense of getting locked within myself in the midst of a new project, a new attempt at understanding. Just because I set myself the task of coming to understand a thing, it doesn’t mean that I will succeed. Ryan reminds me that understanding has to be a conversation, a dialogue, and one of the great potential errors is to assume that which the other is saying.

I can’t help having read this in the context of another book I picked up at the MLA, Lee McIntyre’s Post Truth, a study of the way we have reached a point of such contested sense about what it means for something to be “true” in Trump’s America. I see here a playful response to that uncertainty. Read within the moment, Ryan is showing how the mind pushes toward knowledge and then pulls away nearly as fast. The title poem isn’t one of my particular favorites, but its title suggests just that point: we necessarily perceive the world with expectations, but those expectations – in their erratic application to the world as it is – often lead us into error.

She gets at that same sound-of-one-hand-clapping insight with an excerpt from “Trench Like That.”

The question
is does
the sea go
exactly back
after a ship
passes. Is
a trench like
that an event
or not…

That image simply works for me. I’ve often wondered at the strangeness of doing a thing that leaves no trace (something I did just yesterday when an hour of shoveling snow seemed to matter not at all to the additional half inch that had fallen behind me as I worked). I feel Ryan posing a question, and I feel compelled to answer it even as I know I can’t.

Other favorites include “Token Loss,” “All Your Horses,” and “Why Explain the Precise By Way of the Less Precise.”

I’m going to stick this one on the shelf and, given the bite-sized conundrums it offers so widely, I expect I’ll pull it down again every so often.


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Saturday, January 19, 2019

Review: The Best American Essays 2018

The Best American Essays 2018 The Best American Essays 2018 by Hilton Als
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this volume most years, and I realize I’ve been coming to it, metaphorically, the way you might go to an office holiday party. That is, part of me wants to go – I enjoy good essays, and I enjoy a good party – but another part of me dreads it. It means having fun on someone else’s schedule; it means being in the middle of something and being called upon to share the larger emotion. (And it means thinking about how I want to use it in my upcoming class.)

I’m happy to say that this is one of the stronger volumes in the series, one of the better parties. (It may fall a bit short of 2006, but then Lauren Slater may be the best essayist we have going.) As usual, our host is Bob Atwan, and that’s a good thing. I like Atwan as a writer and as a thinker about the essay form, and I like him as a teacher and person. I worked briefly with him more than a decade ago, and he has been considerate and responsive any time I’ve had to reach out to him since. This whole series is his brainchild, and he’s built it from a good idea into arguably the central event of the genre every year.

Our caterer is Hilton Als. I’ve admired Als through his work in earlier volumes of the series, but I haven’t always felt in step with him. He’s written a couple pieces I’ve thought worthy of sharing with students (a high honor) but I’ve also felt as if I weren’t quite picking up on all his cues and references. I worried he’d select from among Atwan’s semi-final suggestions some essays that wore their difficulty on their sleeves. I prefer the essay that glides, and I prefer the essay that begins with the personal and moves into the public or political. (To be fair, Als writes that way himself; he just sometimes moves into the public in a rhythm that catches me off guard.)

To be fair, nothing makes it into any of these volumes without being pretty good, but I’m always on the lookout for the personal essay as opposed to the topical, political, or analytical. That’s what I’m teaching – how an essayist can open up to the world – but it’s also often more satisfying. If you can make something compelling from your own compulsions, well, you’ve done it all without a net.

In this case, Als is broad in the different pieces he’s selected, but everything has a touch of the personal. I’m glad to find that even the ones steeped in research give a glimpse of the thinker/essayist beneath. There’s something to enjoy about the self even in the essays by Baron Wormser or Leslie Jamison, ones that generally report on, respectively, Hannah Arendt and the women’s march on Washington.

There are people here whom, to keep the party metaphor alive, I generally try to stay on the other side of the room from. There’s Noam Chomsky, for instance. He’s often irritating not so much because he’s right – which he often is – but because he seems always to be hectoring. He’s a progenitor of a certain kind of political purity; you’re with him or you’re against him. I’ve read his work and felt an intolerance of perspective; I may also disdain the perspective, but I don’t have the same impatience or judgement for it. This time, at this party, he’s well-behaved, though. His piece on climate change as existential threat is, oddly, milder in tone than I’m used to. He is as correct as he usually is, but he’s simply less obnoxious about it.

And over there is Rick Moody. He’s that weird guy, the one you don’t feel comfortable admitting you have a lot in common with. He can be self-indulgent – and his tangent here about his thoughts on Nick Cave’s one-time guitar playing certainly feel that way – but he’s onto something with his “Notes on Lazarus.” For much of this, as with the best essays, you feel a restless mind at work, one that slowly moves toward something like peace. Moody doesn’t exactly do peace – at the very least, in what I’ve read, he’s attacking the form of his genre – but he catches a powerful wave and invites us to ride it with him for a while.

As far as I’m concerned, the best of these are the ones by Marilyn Abildskov, Beth Uznis Johnson, and Kathryn Schulz. The first is a clever and moving depersonalization; Abildskov tells the story of a near relationship through the technical challenges of weaving a story. In hers, Johnson explores a “friendship” she finds with the mutual friend of someone who committed suicide. Through the weirdness of Facebook, they’re “introduced” by the dead friend, and the echoes are moving. And Schulz starts with a seemingly light series of reflections about what it means to “lose” things in the sense of misplacing them, and then somehow ratchets it into a beautiful meditation on losing her father.

Beyond those excellent ones, there really are no stinkers at all in this collection. Granting that, in this context, there’s something to admire in anything Atwan awards semi-finalist standing, there aren’t any here that turn me off with their self-indulgence, esoteric tone, or pretentiousness. Three home runs is about the average for me in reading these anthologies, but there are usually at least a couple “stinkers.” Given that most of the others I haven’t mentioned are also very impressive (I think of the terribly sad, posthumous essay by David Wong Louie in particular) this is certainly worth picking up.


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Tuesday, January 8, 2019

Review: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Haroun and the Sea of Stories Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Somewhere, someone is spilling poison into the sea of stories, threatening to ruin the way we narrate a full sense of ourselves. That’s a paraphrase of this sometimes magical book, but it’s also – necessarily – a reference to our own historical moment. I am reading this alongside Lee McIntyre’s Post-Truth and Kay Ryan’s Erratic Facts collection of poetry, very different works that all invite us to think about what it means to be shaped by the stories around us.

This is not a story of Trump’s America. On the surface, it’s an inventive children’s adventure, one full of terrific notions like the idea that all stories have their source in a bottomless sea, that it’s possible to have a sword fight with one’s shadow, or that there can be laminate-like jackets that keep you warm while weighing next to nothing.

As a children’s adventure it’s fun but slight. For all that we’re told that happy endings are rare in life and story, the apparent convention of the story argues that we’ll end up happy. There are hoops to jump through, but the bottom line is that this is for children and there is no way Rushdie would let them down.

Of course, as I well recall, this was the first thing Rushdie wrote after the staggering controversy of The Satanic Verses, the international best-seller that won him a death sentence from the Ayatollah Khomeini. That was a terrifying and inspiring time, and Rushdie became a symbol of the power of narrative in the West as a device for fighting the intolerance and fundamentalism of the East (and maybe within our own society too).

So I know – and I consulted a quick reader’s guide to reassure myself – that this is also a kind of allegory. Haroun and his father Rashid are more or less innocents who find themselves awash in story as various adversaries try to undermine them. It’s easy – maybe too easy – to see the worst of these villains as a kind of Khomeini figure, a smaller-in-person character intent on poisoning all stories at their root.

For all that temptation, though, for all the similar temptation to see this as something presaging the moment of Trump, I can’t make this story work for me as allegory overall. I simply don’t know the situation of early 1990s international Islam well enough, and I don’t know enough of the references. I spot the occasional 1001 Nights nod, but there are too many things that come to me as esoterica. (Rushdie acknowledges that when he gives a quick afterword on where his names come from.)

So, while I enjoyed the play of language and many of the particular inventions here, I couldn’t make it work as political allegory and I ultimately found it only satisfying as a tale of magic and adventure. I might have enjoyed this more in an annotated edition (or without a narrator who, excellent most of the time, brought in a variety of over-the-top Hannah-Barbara voices for some of the characters) but, bringing to it what I have, I found it only modestly satisfying.


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Monday, January 7, 2019

Review: Post-Truth

Post-Truth Post-Truth by Lee McIntyre
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Soon after the 2016 election, I read Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, and – slim masterpiece that it is – it helped me make some sense of the rise of Donald Trump. It’s still a brilliant argument (it was even before then) suggesting that, beyond lying, the bullshitter consciously undermines the possibility of truth. He or she degrades our mechanisms for communicating and, as a result, makes it difficult to answer clearly false claims with truth.

This book is the closest I’ve seen to Frankfurt’s. Like that one, this is short (though it may be close to twice as long) and it goes for the philosophical jugular. We live in a moment when the term “post-truth” is “trending,” when we recognize widely that the truth is no longer an absolute defense or even an effective counter. We live in a world, as McIntyre puts it, of post-truth, of a condition in which may think that “the crowd’s reaction actually does change the facts about a lie.” We know intuitively much of what Frankfurt laid out, but the question is how this came to pass.

McIntyre begins his study with a fantastic first chapter on the nature of post-truth. He extends what Frankfurt is doing to argue that, where bullshit is generally an annoying phenomenon that occasionally leads to someone taking undue advantage, the situation of post-truth is a calculated political one. As he puts it in one chilling observation, “To say that facts are less important than feelings in shaping our beliefs about empirical matters seems new, at least in American politics…never before have such challenges been so openly embraced as a strategy for the political subordination of reality.”

McIntyre works throughout this book to avoid something like blunt partisanship, but he notes the difficulty of that early on. As he puts it, one side of the political debate sees the status of “post-truth” as a crisis while the other ignores it. Taking a stand that the problem exists is therefore a political statement, one that takes on partisan implications, but it is also a project that grows out of the philosophical tradition. Socrates pondered the problem, so McIntyre feels he has disciplinary standing to take on the question.

This is not quite an historical examination of how we have arrived where we are, but it is rooted in a five distinct historical strands that McIntyre sees coming together. A few are the usual suspects. He has a good chapter on the history of science denial – initially around the link between smoking and cancer and then moving into the vaccine controversy and finally into climate-change denial – as a charade in which lobbying interests create fake “controversy” around legitimate scientific consensus. He has another that reviews various areas of cognitive bias that nudge us toward scientific skepticism. Then he has one on the decline of traditional media and another on the corresponding rise of fake news through clickbait and social media.

The most controversial part of this book – controversial because it’s the only part that’s potentially offensive to anyone who’s likely to read it – is a chapter that traces the rise of post-truth to the postmodern, politically progressive, academics of the 1980s and 1990s. Though he acknowledges Lyotard and Foucault are obscure figures to most of the right-wing that’s employing post-truth as a political instrument, he makes a solid case for a link. He finds a handful of right-wing operatives who openly cite their familiarity with postmodern thought, and then he points as well to mea culpas from some important theorists who worry their approach may have helped undermine ‘truth’ in a way that’s made this subsequent threat possible.

McIntyre’s tone changes in that penultimate chapter; he’s clearly a little more apologetic, and he seems to be anticipating push-back. He won’t get it from me, though. I’m not necessarily convinced that the work of such theorists is necessary to the rise of post-truth as we’re seeing it in Trump’s moment, but I am convinced there’s at least something to the critique. If we embraced epistemological doubt in the theory-crazed 1980s, we may well want to reconsider that today. (I was never that sort of theory head myself, but you couldn’t escape in graduate school of the 1990s.)

McIntyre wraps up with a final chapter on fighting post-truth. I wish he had a more concrete prescription, but, drawing on his fine historical breakdown, he puts some weight behind the obvious: in the face of untruth, we have to assert – and re-assert – truth. In a strangely optimistic moment, he cites the Republican mayor of Coral Gables, Florida who has come to acknowledge that barely-above-sea-level cities simply can’t ignore climate change. It may clash with some Republican party ideology, but accepting the truth of climate change means staying alive. That is, we may deny truth, but that’s not going to keep truth from doing what it wants to us in the end.

Read Frankfurt On Bullshit if you haven’t. If you have, though, and if you’re hungering for someone who takes those ideas a step further, read McIntyre.


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Friday, January 4, 2019

Review: The Insufferable Gaucho

The Insufferable Gaucho The Insufferable Gaucho by Roberto Bolaño
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I think of Bolano, whose 2666 is deservedly recognized as one of the recent world classics, I think of bulk. 2666 and The Savage Detectives find their themes – generally a kind of disintegration of culture as the bulwark between modern society and the beasts we humans are always threatening to become – over vast tomes. There’s something concussive about his best-known work, something that makes its point by slowly strangling the resistance out of you.

So, it’s strange to read Bolano’s short fiction in this collection. No one story is all that long, and few of them really talk to one another. Each is its own experiment in form and tone, and each accomplishes something different. If I had to take a stab at connecting them to one another, I’d say they deal with the beguiling limits of story-telling itself: literature gives the promise that it can reshape the world. It always breaks that promise but then, like a skilled con-man or a tormenting lover, it pledges this next time will be different.

The title story seems to me to be about the ease with which contemporary culture can melt away. The gaucho in question is a lawyer/judge in Buenos Aries who, in an economic downturn, decides to return to his family’s ranch and live as a gaucho off the land. There are some slapstick moments as he adjusts, but he eventually proves comfortable in his new role. He discovers, though, that the entire country is diminished. There’s a troublingly funny repeated detail that, as the cattle and horses have mostly gone, the place has gone to the rabbits. The opportunity for ambition is gone, and our upper-crust protagonist, by embracing some form of self-reliance, emerges as a mildly heroic figure, perhaps even a 20th century Don Quixote.

My favorite is probably “Police Rat,” a story that turns out to be a tribute to a Kafka story called “Josephine the Singer.” Where, I gather, the Kafka story imagined a mouse (or rat) who aspired to become an artist, this one features Pepe, one of her relatives, who signs up to be a detective within the rat world. He investigates a crime unthinkable to most of his neighbors, a rat who serially murders other rats. There’s a solid noir tint to the experiment, and then there’s the larger question: how are we humans any less animal than these rats, rats who cannot readily think to harm one another in ways that we take for granted as part of human reality. It may have been striking to see Kafka imagine a rat who’d dare to create art – an expression that, in us suggests a hunger for something better than what we are. Here, as we see rats unable to conceive of the violence we virtually take for granted, we’re called on to see how animal-like we really are.

The later stories become less narrative and more persona-based meditations. I find those more uneven, but the one that leaves the deepest mark is “The Myths of Cthulhu.” In it, our speaker reflects on the unhappy claim – unhappy to an aspiring ‘serious’ writer – that the public is never wrong in its tastes. That is, if the writer’s job is ultimately to entertain, then the writer who can entertain the most people is necessarily the best. All that makes the best-seller the be-all of writing. Who of us should care that our work is subtler, more original, or more nimble in its cultural critique? If most people can’t happily pick it and read it, then it’s not as good as, well, the things they can.

Our speaker names names. He admires Garcia Marquez, for instance, but thinks Isabel Allende, with her stories of Eva Luna, is as unworthy a successor as Thabo Mbeki (the South African President who denies the existence of AIDS) is to Nelson Mandela. At bottom, though, I think the story works through its irony into a position it stands behind: writing is always a mystery, always a process that will leave us short of where we’d hoped it might take us. We will always be disappointed by what we read, but we ought to be even more disappointed if we leave the writing of books only to the hacks who are determined to de-fang it, determined to give us only tame and settled dreams.


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Review: The Sea

The Sea The Sea by John Banville
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I make it a principle not to judge the way others mourn. It’s not for me to say how someone else should behave, not for me to assign roles or rituals to someone who’s lost a parent or a spouse. My job, as I understand it, is to help the person realize she or he isn’t alone – to listen in sympathy and try to echo back whatever he or she wants to hear.

This novel is a novel of mourning. Max Morden has lost his wife, and he’s dealing with it by returning to a summer cottage where he spent a time in his childhood. It’s where he first fell in love and [SPOILER] where he first had to deal with the death of someone he cared about.

At the same time, this is a deeply clever novel, one that comes to us as a self-conscious verbal game. It opens with a striking sentence, one that I think may well be indecipherable until we’ve read the final pages. Our speaker is arch in his vocabulary – a point driven home to me by the fact that the library book I read had hand-written notes defining obscure words every several pages. And he’s fond of blunt assessments of the people in his world: he says he thinks his daughter is unattractive, and he refers to her sometime boyfriend as “chinless.”

I admire each of those separate ambitions – the effort to limn mourning and the Nabokovian word-play – but I confess I found myself missing the rhythm of their interplay. It’s almost as if, at a shiva, wake, or memorial service, I’m finding myself listening with the wrong attitude. I’ll think the mourner needs a somber face from me, and I’ll get a joke. Then I’ll assume a more humorous stance and get the “I’m just devastated” confession.

As I say, then, I’m not here to judge the way Banville – or, more properly, Max – mourns the loss of his wife, but I find I’m a poor audience for him as he does it. On the one hand, much of this novel deals with the present-tense moment of Max’s return. He gets caught up in looking over the old place and indulges in spurts of superior feeling. He grew up as a “townie,” as a kid who lacked the money to be part of this particular world, but that one magical summer he fell in love, moved on to marry a wealthy woman (whose father got the money through unspecified crimes), and now returns as an adult to a place once closed to him.

The flashbacks to that summer are more fun, but they too dodge the weight of the loss of his wife. At first he falls in love with Chloe’s mother, and the Lolita parallels are almost laugh-out-loud funny. He has scant interest in Chloe, who is his own age and vaguely interested in him, but rather trails the mother, drawn to her middle-age, post-pregnancy fullness. Eventually he discovers that he is indeed attracted to Chloe, and their adolescent romance is quirky and interesting. He doesn’t fall in love all at once but rather plays their summer games into affection.

[SPOILER] As the book comes to a close, though we discover that Chloe and her brother were swept away to sea in the rising tide referenced in the first sentence. Max has lost her before he has really known her, and his trip back to the beach community has been as much about giving himself permission to mourn Chloe as to mourn his wife.

As I describe that, I find it moving and admirable. As I read it, though, I kept waiting for the nature of the mourning – or some indication of the avoidance of mourning – to present itself. Instead, the book seemed to me always on the brink of becoming something else, some deep literary puzzle that demanded a riddle-like solution rather than an emotional coming-to-terms.

[SPOILER: It’s a small point, but I am troubled by how little Banville/Max does with the late-revealed fact that his present-day landlady is Chloe’s one-time nanny. That seems an opportunity for another perspective on loss, for someone else to try to understand how the death of another can transform a survivor’ life, but it just lands and does little more.

I chose this book because it’s supposed to be Banville’s best – and because I have never known the Booker-Prize winners to disappoint – and because everything I read about Banville told me I was sure to like his work. I’m inclined to give him another chance because his reputation is so high and because I realize I am missing some of the cleverness tying the whole together, but I worry I may simply be the wrong reader to give him the sympathy he’s asking for with such skill.




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Review: In the Café of Lost Youth

In the Café of Lost Youth In the Café of Lost Youth by Patrick Modiano
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The English of the title here introduces a nice ambiguity that isn’t quite there in the original French. (Shout out to Mrs. Nichols and Mrs. Bork – I’m using my French!) The French is in the singular which tells us that which is lost is a concept, a feeling/time of our protagonist’s long-ago youth. In English, though, “youth” can mean the singular or the plural. It can also refer to those youth who were part of that world with the result that it would refer to multiple protagonists.

Even without that ambiguity – at least without it to the same degree as it’s present in English – this is a novel that feels as if it could be two different things. In structure, we get four “chapters,” four perspectives that border each other as character studies of a young woman, generally known as Louki, who’s a young woman in the Paris of the late 1950s. One perspective comes from a regular at a café where Louki often goes, one from a private detective hired by her husband to determine why she has left him, one from Louki herself, and one from her wannabe writer lover.

The initial perspective gives the impression this is a story of “youth” in the plural. It feels like a group biography, or at least a group snapshot. I found myself imagining the Left Bank of Sartre and DeBouvoir, a Gitane-smoking, beret-wearing carnival of philosophical cool. At the heart of this café community is the budding intellectual Guy DeVere – I wouldn’t have known to spot him if not for the back-cover commentary, nor would I have connected him with Guy DeBord of whom I know only a little in his role as influencer of many of the French Postmodernist philosophers.

This feels for a time, in other words, like a study of the “youth” who came of age under the wings of those thinkers who survived World War II. They’re the ones who saw the tomorrow that their no-tomorrow elders found after fascism had been defeated but at a price staggeringly high. As such, there’s a melancholy to it; the fact that Modiano has written it is testimony that these “youth” grew up themselves, that the frozen-in-time café where they gathered and quietly observed their elders nurtured them with its existential cool.

At the same time, read backwards, this is a novel about one youth in particular, one who both matters more than all the others and yet who remains entirely a mystery. [MAJOR SPOILER] In the final pages, Louki kills herself, jumping out of a window without giving any hint of what motivated her. Her lover, who calls himself Roland (though that doesn’t seem to be his real name), mourns her, but less as a woman in her own right and more as a path he never followed. She is, for him, a could-have-been more than a woman in her own right.

The effect of that late reveal is to push us backwards to look for clues, to figure out what pushed her to it. She has many personal disappointments; her mother is an exotic dancer at the Moulin Rouge, and she herself is at least mistaken for a prostitute on several occasions. The weighty DeVere suggests books for her to read, and whether she reads them or merely carries them around isn’t clear.

But I get the impression that the larger cause, at least as Modiano’s various characters lead us to it, is that she is almost a necessary sacrifice as they grow older collectively. We are never allowed to see Louki in full, never allowed to see enough of her past and her potential to understand her on her own terms. She is always an object – of curiosity, of protection, or of desire – and even in her own narrated section she is acted upon more than acting. Her death seems to suggest the loss that stamps them all as “Lost.” It’s not until she dies that they can see themselves with some of the survivors’ glow they recognize in the older few around them.

I’ve wanted to read Modiano ever since he won the Nobel. I’ll hold off offering judgment on him until I’ve read another one or two. For now, with this one, I love the atmosphere, and I admire the skill of the different, complementary narrators. Excellent and movingly ambiguous as it is, though, it strikes me as possibly too empty. Modiano hints at many things, but he consistently cuts them off. Whether this is “youth” in the singular – as a story of Louki and her unknowable sadness – or of “youth” in the plural – of the way a now aging generation found themselves unscarred children among wounded survivors – it feels slighter than its ambition.


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