2666

I finally finished Roberto Bolaño's 2666. Wow. As many of you know, I am a sucker for the giant, messy, ultimately failed encyclopedic novel, and I'm pretty sure this is one of them. I'm just hoping it sticks with me--like V or GRAVITY'S RAINBOW--and doesn't fade into obscurity because in the end it isn't all that good--like AGAINST THE DAY. I have a book of photographs at home called something like JUAREZ, THE LABORATORY OF OUR FUTURE. It's one of these dystopian projects in which they take pictures of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, and argue that all of its nastiness and violence and exploitation is what we're in for. I certainly hope not. Anyway, 2666 feels a bit like that book of photos is percolating underneath every page.

naipaul and menand

Although I finished it several weeks ago, I'm still not sure what I think about V.S. Naipaul's A BEND IN THE RIVER. He's one of those authors that I'd heard a great deal about, essentially all of it wildly positive, but still didn't know much about even after reading one of his classics (A HOUSE FOR MR. BISWAS, which I read about five years ago). A recent and very sensationalistic authorized biography of Naipaul caused a commotion in the book-review press, as the biography dwells on Naipaul's taste for rough sex and his often brutal and generally callous treatment of the women in his life. None of this was an entirely new story, of course, as Paul Theroux had already written extensively about what a bastard Sir Vidia is/was, but to have this in an "authorized" biography was pretty delicious. Anyway, apart from all of the gossip I'd always heard that Naipaul was one of the great stylists in English and that if his politics weren't so uncongenial to the project he'd be the great postcolonial writer. (His novels certainly document the fragmenting of the old colonial order, but not in the celebratory way that lefty postcolonials prefer.) I had slogged through MR. BISWAS without it making a great impression, but since A BEND IN THE RIVER is considered Naipaul's greatest work I tried it out with my last Audible.com credit.

Like MR. BISWAS, it wanders and meanders and doesn't feel particularly tightly plotted. Huge events occur during the novel, and the main character (Salim) observes them from his unimportant position, and they determine Salim's development, but it's hard to say about this novel "this happened, and it led to this, and it ended up this way." Salim is an Indian Muslim from the Indian trading diaspora, here in southern Africa (an unnamed nation but most critics see it to be what used to be called the Belgian Congo and then Zaire). He leaves his "cosmopolitan" coastal city for a city in the interior where he buys a general-store business. The city in which he lives waxes and wanes with the nation's fortunes; over the course of the book the foreigners who give the city culture and money are driven out by "bush" people during decolonization, then return when the nation normalizes, then start to leave again when the Big Man leader (likely modeled on Mobutu Sese Seko) begins to rile up those "bush" people. It's a fascinating look at a little-known group of people and at a predicament I'd never thought much about.

After that I quickly sped through Louis Menand's THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB, a kind of heavy-hitters lineup of mid-19th-century American intellectual history: Dewey, Holmes, Agassiz, Peirce, William James, and many others make appearances. Menand is a New Yorker writer and he brings that blessed clarity to this book, but even at that I'm such a philosophical illiterate (and lazy reader of this book) that I couldn't quote back at you Menand's explanation of what "pragmatism" actually is. Oddly enough, I did start to understand why statistics was such a breakthrough by reading THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB.

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES

I can't remember where it was, but recently someone--was it in Slate or Salon? one of those things I constantly read--made a snarky but pretty accurate comment about how there's really only room in the U.S. for one Latin American writer at a time, but that that writer will be universally recognized as a genius, everyone will start reading him/her, and all other Latin American writers will be forgotten for the duration of that one's reign. This began with Garcia Marquez and then moved on to Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Isabel Allende, and so on. Now, of course, the ruling Latino is the late Roberto Bolaño, a cosmopolitan Chilean. Bolaño was relatively unknown during his life; he started what is by most accounts a very minor movement called "infrarealismo" in Mexico City in the 1960s, spent a good deal of time in Spain, and ended up dying young, at 50, a few years back. THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES came out in the US about two years ago and it's been a big hit. I think that one reason so many readers like him is that he's a different kind of Latin American writer, one who not only rejects the dominant practices (mysticism, magical realism, and a fascination with the country and the rural world) of the "Boom" but explicitly attacks, through his characters, the way that the Boom's writers came to dominate the literary world back home.

I read, over break, THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES and although it was a slog at times, relatively plotless, overall I thought it was very strong. It's a kind of oral history of a Mexico City literary movement, "visceral realism," led by two students, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima. Beginning with a month's worth of diary entries of a young man who is joining the movement, the book consists largely of putative oral histories, taking the story from the time of the diary to the present, of various other people's encounters with Lima and Belano as the two poets wander from Mexico City to Managua to Tel Aviv to Barcelona. Bookending the novel is the final section, further diary entries from the young man, taking up the story precisely where he left off. In the end, the visceral realists go north, to the small desert towns of Sonora and Baja California, looking for a poet from the 1920s who was the initial inspiration for visceral realism. Because I get tired of realism, I really enjoyed the intricate narrative structure of the book. At times in the middle of the endless oral history section I found my attention drifting, but I suppose this is part of the point: Belano and Lima are rootless, and the job of the reader is to pick up, from the voices of the people whom they meet, what is motivating them so we can proleptically understand the significance of their quest to find Cesarea Tinajero, the desert poet.

LEGACY OF ASHES

The first purchase I made with my Christmas-gift subscription to Audible was Tim Weiner's history of the CIA, LEGACY OF ASHES. It certainly won its share of recognition--the National Book Award, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, and one of the "Best Books of 2007" on countless national lists. It deserves it. There is no shortage of books on the CIA, and in fact Weiner makes that a constituent part of his thesis--American conservatives have lionized the agency and leftists across the world have seen the agency as the very embodiment of evil in the world, but (Weiner argues) this is due to a grave misunderstanding. We think, he says, that we only know about their failures (Bay of Pigs, the Afghan mujahedeen "blowback", the Guatemalan and Salvadoran disasters, and the "slam dunk" Iraq intelligence) and that their "successes"--whether we see them as sinister or inspired--remain secret, but, Weiner insists, the reason that the only things we know about are failures is because that's pretty much the only thing they've accomplished. Weiner draws on all of the previously published sources in his book, but he also accessed a bunch of materials that were declassified only in 2006 as well as interviewing almost every principal in the story. (He was a NEW YORK TIMES national security reporter, so that helps in getting people to return your calls.)

Weiner's thesis is, of course, that the CIA has been a failure from the beginning, due to infighting, bad decision-making, a lack of understanding on the part of the executive branch, and, probably most important, due to the rivalry of the intelligence-gathering services of the Defense Department and the National Security Agency, which have tried constantly to undermine CIA. Weiner is surprisingly sympathetic to the agency, almost to a fault at points, but his criticism doesn't spare the agency's shortsightedness. It's Presidents who don't know how to use the agency, though, that he really attacks. George W certainly is the worst of these, and Weiner starts with the Nixon administration to show how Cheney and Rumsfeld developed their hate and mistrust of the agency back in those days, but Weiner faults everyone for not understanding the agency. George H.W. Bush is perhaps the least culpable of these in Weiner's eyes--he ran the agency briefly and gained a great deal of respect for its work, probably another reason behind Rumsfeld and Cheney's orientation against CIA. If there's one worst figure in this book, it's probably Bill Casey, who ran the agency under Reagan. He was, according to Weiner, a precursor to the current Bush administration, for rather than trying to learn from facts he selectively heard only those facts that confirmed the things he wanted to believe--or, rather, had already decided were true. People with facts that didn't confirm his preconceptions were terrorist Communist sympathizers. One thing I learned from this book that surprised me was just how gung-ho of a covert enthusiast Bobby Kennedy was--JFK considered having him run the agency, and throughout RFK thought that covert actions, assassinations included, weren't being used enough.

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES

Most anyone who is interested in the subject of American cities or urban planning or Robert Moses or the "urban blight" of the 1950s and 1960s not only knows of Jane Jacobs' classic DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES but assuredly knows its thesis: diversity is good; central planning tends to screw things up; segregating the functions of a city (commercial, transportation, residential, civic, cultural) will damage each of them; cities are complicated organisms not apt to respond well to simplistic theories of how to improve them; the "Radiant City" or "Garden City" or Le Corbusian towers-in-a-park are abominations and antihuman. Okay, I not only get that, but I couldn't agree more.

Jacobs' book, read now almost fifty years after publication, is particularly interesting for Pittsburghers, for Pittsburgh is one of the cities that she has clearly studied. Just to mention a couple of the times she discusses the Steel City: in a section about how cities that segregate their cultural districts away from downtowns and residences so that the residents thus need to drive between the two (and park both places), she points to the "new civic center" (i.e. Mellon Arena) as a place far enough away from downtown that people have to drive between the two. She also discusses the Gateway Center development by Point State Park as an example of "Radiant City" design (i.e. towers in a park) where the open space isn't used, as opposed to Mellon Park, which is heavily used during the daytime hours. She has quite a few very insightful things to say about Pittsburgh's failings in terms of urban redevelopment and planning in the 1950s and 1960s, and she doesn't even mention the mass displacement that followed the construction of the Civic Arena and the subsequent gutting of the lower Hill. Read in conjunction with the recent NEW YORK TIMES article on how Pittsburgh is "adjusting" to its aging population, it's an eye-opener about mistakes made in the past and their current ramifications.

Puerto Vallarta reading

We just returned from a very successful week in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where we used my parents' time-share and were accompanied by my sister-in-law and her daughter. The three kids LOVED playing in the pool and on the beach, and apart from the fact that they ate an enormous amount of junk food and didn't get anywhere near enough sleep they were great. And contrary to my fears, I was able to even get some relaxing in (it's usually pretty difficult when chasing around a very busy toddler and his affectionate/rivalrous older brother). In fact, I read FOUR whole books! Two barely count; they were very short little mysteries by one of Mexico's leading genre writers, Paco Ignacio Taibo II: SOME CLOUDS and NO HAPPY ENDING. They're clever and full of local color (Taibo knows Mexico City well and captures it vividly if much more concisely than another local-color genre writer like James Lee Burke) but neither had all that much besides that--the plot was pretty cursory, and the scenes of violence perfunctory and excessively stylized.

After Taibo I decided to postpone my reading of Arendt's ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM (I've finished Part I and needed a break) and took on one of the first English-language novels, Henry Fielding's JOSEPH ANDREWS. I like Fielding quite a bit, and I like novels from that period, from before people really knew what the novel should be. I was concerned when I read that many critics feel that JOSEPH ANDREWS bears a great deal of resemblance to DON QUIXOTE, because frankly I find that book incredibly boring. I know that plot in novels is a bourgeois convention, blah blah, but when I try to get through the plotless prose works like Cervantes or Rabelais I just can't do it. But Fielding is different (because he was a dramatist as well? maybe). TOM JONES is, of course, brilliant and very intricately and teleologically plotted, but it's also really funny and really willing to go off on digressions. JOSEPH ANDREWS did definitely have more of the whole DON QUIXOTE, picaresque structure/nonstructure to it, but its constant themes really worked. The introduction to the novel (I read the Penguin edition) said that the real theme of the novel was charity and the hypocrisy of a purportedly Christian society that doesn't hold to charity, but I actually felt that the novel was much more about the obligation of hosts to guests--a deeply classical theme, in keeping with the novel's deeply classical learning (embodied, of course, by Pastor Adams).

WILLING

After hearing his interview with Terry Gross on FRESH AIR, I immediately put in a request for Scott Spencer's WILLING. I knew nothing about Spencer, and I only learned from the radio program that Spencer had written the novel ENDLESS LOVE (on which the Brooke Shields film was based--but Gross was quick to say that the novel was SO MUCH BETTER than the film) and also A SHIP MADE OF PAPER, which I'd heard of but never read. The novel is a first-person narrative from the point of view of a 37-year-old freelance writer/loser whose girlfriend cheats on him and who "lucks" into, through a magical uncle, an all-expenses-paid, $135,000 two-week "sex tour" of Nordic countries. Avery Jankowsky, the narrator, is a self-pitying, self-deluding creep, and the majority of the meat of the novel consists of the nerdy, nebbishy Jankowsky's interactions with the hypermasculine members of the sex tour. Jankowsky lucks into a very lucrative contract to write a book on this tour, and so he spends most of the tour telling himself that he's just there to stealthily take notes for his book and NOT to take part in the sex aspects of the tour, but of course his resolve crumbles. It's a short book, and Spencer utilizes several pretty seriously contrived plot devices to move the story along (some of which don't really go anywhere). I found the novel pretty disappointing, in the end. The prose is magnificent: Spencer is an effective stylist, but in constructing Jankowsky's voice Spencer really shows his talent: Jankowsky is a writer, and judging from the narration of the novel and one excerpt of his writing a pretty good one, and I ended up surprised that Jankowsky wasn't more successful given the really sharp observations he makes. This, of course, plays back into character construction, underscoring the fact that Jankowsky's failures aren't due to lack of talent but rather to character flaws (which are on full display in the novel). As a character sketch it's great. But as a novel that one is drawn to because of its sensationalistic plot and setting, it's kind of a failure. We want more: Spencer must have done his research into this sordid world, and into the vilest kinds of testosterone-fueled behavior that capitalism can enable, and we just end up wanting more of this.

memoirs

Reading memoirs about addiction, I was telling my wife, feels in some sense like watching reruns: most of them have pretty much the same elements, told in the same order. Horrifying tales of degradation and desperation; hitting bottom; false starts at recovery; resistance to the 12-step program; acceptance and a recognition that sobriety is tenuous. This doesn't in any way invalidate those stories, or make them trite; they continue to be moving and fascinating. (I watch A&E's Intervention weekly.) So I found Nic Sheff's TWEAK pretty much a replay of James Frey's famous A MILLION LITTLE PIECES (yes, yes, I know, "except that it's true," or at least we think, until the time we find that Sheff altered some things...). One difference is that Sheff, for all of his false modesty, really isn't much of a writer. He's certainly not much of a stylist, and apparently Ginee Seo Books isn't spending much money on copyediting, given the grammatical errors in the prose. Sheff's story is, predictably, shocking and horrifying, sad and pathetic, and in the end hopeful.

His father's much more famous (and well promoted) memoir, BEAUTIFUL BOY, is a different matter. It's the father's point of view on Nic's story, prefaced by long stories of Nic's upbringing, his parents' divorce, and the dad's perspective on what drove Nic to drugs. It was much tougher to deal with, just because the prospect of seeing either one of my boys in Nic's situation is terrifying.

The third memoir I read, Shalom Auslander's FORESKIN'S LAMENT, was by far my favorite. Auslander is a frequent contributor to THIS AMERICAN LIFE, and I love his pieces on that show, but his memoir is a tour de force. It's hilarious (and the fact that I listened to it as an audiobook, and it was read by Auslander himself, really helped--although his voice doesn't rise to Sedaris level in terms of really adding a dimension to the prose, it's on that scale).

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD

After his big success with THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA, which is legitimately a great book, Michael Pollan's editors (including the legendary Ann Godoff) have evidently rushed him to get another one out there to capitalize on his "heat." IN DEFENSE OF FOOD is a slim little thing, rehashing many of the points made in THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA, but that doesn't make it not worth reading. If the structure of the DILEMMA was a "natural history of four meals," examining how food gets from the ground/hoof/wing/lab to your table, DEFENSE is much more of a manifesto. "Eat food. Not too much. Mainly plants," he says on the cover and throughout the book, and that turns out to be recommendation that the book leads to.

He starts, though, with a genealogy of "nutritionism," the idea that foods can and should be reduced to, and understood as, nutrient-delivery systems. This way of thinking about food began as a way to understand how we should eat, but as Pollan points out it is a system of thought peculiarly well-suited to an economy in which large food companies make most of their money by taking cheap raw materials (soybeans, corn, wheat, and rice) and processing them, adding value through this processing and packaging: resulting in what he calls the "Western diet," in which the vast majority of calories come from processed starches and meats. Nutritionism tells the public that these high-starch foods (and Pollan believes that the vast majority of processed foods are precisely that--starches from seeds, with chemicals added for flavors) can be made "healthier" by tinkering with their chemistry--adding a vitamin here and there, or a mineral, or a bit of fiber on top of what is all essentially the same processed starch. Nutrition science agrees with this, saying that to make food healthy we just need to adjust the proportions of molecules in it. Food, in this formulation, becomes fuel and nothing else.

Pollan rejects this, first by saying that the constant paradigm shifts about what is the basic sin in our diet (Fat! Saturated fat! Carbs! Trans-fats! Cholesterol!) result from the fact that we can't understand how nutrition works if we look at foods as nutrient-delivery systems. He of course alludes to the "French paradox": how can they eat everything we think is bad (butter, eggs, wine) and still be healthier and skinnier than we are? And why do people (such as Aborigines in Australia or Inuit in Greenland) with diets we'd ordinarily find to be horribly deficient NOT develop the kinds of diseases that they do end up developing--diabetes, heart disease--when they adopt the Western diet? Pollan argues--and here he comes very close to the good parts of Bill Buford's HEAT--that there is a deep cultural knowledge embodied in a culture's folkways of diet; trial and error over millennia have shown cultures how best to take advantage of what their particular "habitat" has to offer, both in terms of energy and in terms of health.

I think the most interesting, although ultimately depressing, thing he argued in this book was that even when we try to eat "mostly plants," we could be losing out if we're getting those veg at the supermarket. The vegetables grown industrially for supermarket sale, he points out, are generally the species with the greatest yield. That is, the species or variety of broccoli, beans, celery, or what have you that the supermarket carries is of the one species that grows biggest and fastest with the least investment of food, and these species have fewer "nutrients" than other varieties, which by growing longer produce more of what makes them good and which by sending down deeper roots suck more of the good things out of the soil. (Organic veg, of course, are better, because by being grown in organic soil they grow in a medium in which there is more good stuff to extract.) So, in addition to his tripartite slogan of how to eat better, he'd probably also add "Buy those plants at farmer's markets. And if they're organic, so much the better."

THE NINE

Just finished Jeffrey Toobin's THE NINE, a personality-driven history of the Supreme Court since the Reagan years. Toobin writes on legal affairs for the NEW YORKER and is a TV talking head, so his take on many of these issues has become pretty familiar. Basically, the book argues that the Rehnquist court got more and more liberal over its history, largely because the most conservative voices (Scalia and Thomas) were either so bombastic or so extreme that they could never really dominate and because Rehnquist himself was a much better leader in an administrative rather than an ideological sense. So although for a while eight of the Justices were Republican appointees, the court kept moving to what Toobin sees as the left. This happened because the intellectual and practical center of the court became Sandra Day O'Connor, whose country-club Western Republicanism started to look more and more like liberal Republicanism. Her legal philosophy, according to Toobin, came from her experience as a legislator in Arizona: she was always looking to split differences, compromise, get things done, rather than to make the sweeping decision that would overturn precedent. And because of this moderation, she was able to get the other moderates (Souter, Kennedy) to go along with her for the most part, and they tended to side with Stevens and Breyer and Ginsburg, because the other side was so extreme. He argues that things continued to get even more liberal up until the time that O'Connor and Rehnquist left the court essentially simultaneously, bringing Roberts and Alito to the court--Justices whom nobody doubted would side with Thomas and Alito most of the time. How did this happen? Toobin traces the genesis and ultimate success of the Federalist Society, the reactionary legal organization born around the time of Reagan's ascension largely in response to the utter domination of law schools by the left. By the time Bush II took office, the Federalist Society had 40,000 members and it essentially became the sole source of personnel for Bush II legal jobs, from the Justice Department to the courts to the White House.

It's a smart book and, much like a New Yorker article, focuses much more on personality than on nuts and bolts. But Toobin is good with the context of landmark cases like Casey, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, and Lawrence v. Texas. It's a profile, not a scholarly book (not that I WANT a scholarly book on this topic).

the ethical implications of FAST FOOD NATION

I had a class of freshmen read Eric Schlosser's FAST FOOD NATION last week with several aims--looking at how a single argument comes out of a wide variety of sub-claims; examining how very vivid facts and anecdotes are used to create emotional appeal and bolster an argument whose logic is at times shaky; diagramming how his sub-claims are necessary for his larger claim but themselves rest on shaky logic at times; describing how his totalizing view of the "Fast Food Nation" and its component parts and genealogy relies on an ethical claim that he doesn't give audiences the chance to reject. But the students enjoyed it--I could tell from the buzz in the room beforehand that they were struck by his descriptions of the slaughterhouses, working conditions, etc. (Only of my students had worked at anything that could be considered a "fast-food" place, Panera, which I found interesting--I've taught at places with what one might euphemistically call a different student demographic, and in some of those classes almost half of the students had worked at fast-food joints.)

We discussed the book and the students focused on many of the issues about how the "fast-food nation" affects what Schlosser paints as the least powerful: the McSerfs, the slaughterhouse workers, the franchisees, the small family farmers, the local businesses and suppliers. They were horrified at the stories of the injuries suffered and the argument that the fast-food nation concentrates power up. And of course they were grossed out by the stories of, as Schlosser indelicately puts it, "shit in the meat."

When I asked them whether the book had in any way changed their attitudes about eating in fast-food joints, they all looked blankly, like this question was a non-sequitur. When I prodded them, three gave variations on "well, it's unlikely that I'll get sick--sure, there's a chance that I might get E. coli, but the odds are against it." One gave a kind of fatalistic response: "well, yeah, Schlosser makes this seem really awful, but every industry is like this--just look at coffee." And the rest just continued to look blankly. It was amazing to me: immediately after expressing their horror, and even anger, at all of the injustice of the "fast-food nation," their only ETHICAL response was either fatalism (which I can understand) or what might be seen as narcissism--"how does this affect ME?" The "news-you-can-use" approach.

But then I came into class the next day and thought about it. Schlosser talks about how Upton Sinclair, lamenting the way that his pro-socialist novel THE JUNGLE achieved nothing he wanted and instead spurred the Pure Food and Drug Act, said "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit it in the stomach." And I think there's a little to this in Schlosser: he wraps up his argument with his discussion of how food-borne disease is spread more easily by the industrial production models of the fast-food nation, and includes heartbreaking stories about Shiga toxins and dead children. And this serves, partially, to overwhelm the rest of the argument (which is really about "how does the fast-food nation affect others") and emphasize instead "how does this affect me"? And students, and readers, aren't stupid: they know that although there are a few spectacular cases of contamination, and that even if there really are 500 annual cases of E. coli-caused death in the US, this represents a tiny chance of THEM actually being at risk.

the realist novel

By the time I was studying "postmodernist" fiction--the late 1980s--its generally cited epitomizer, Alain Robbe-Grillet, was cited far more often than he was read. Not only have I never read him, but I remember no classes that I took or heard about in many years of schooling in literature assigning his works. Yet the critics always refer to him as the inventor of the "nouveau roman," the new novel, the form that utterly rejected 19th-century realism and that was purported to be the new wave. But of course, these new novels weren't fun to read; they were made for graduate students and comp-lit departments.

Robbe-Grillet died last week, a sad event that has predictably led literary critics to "reassess" his achievements, and the assessment is generally pretty pessimistic. The "nouveau roman" was a gimmick, a theory much better left as theory than as practice; Robbe-Grillet won't last, and, in fact, hasn't even lasted until today. The corollary to this rule is that the realist novel, with its 19th-century heritage, has become hegemonic. In the most hostile formulations, the novel is seen as essentially a realist form, suited for the bourgeois reader. The only difference between the 19th-century novel and today's literary novels is that since World War II, the bourgeois are much less concerned about the stability of their social position (looked down upon by the aristocracy, threatened by the roiling urban proletariat), their dominant position in Western society is unquestioned, and thus their pet form--the novel--is much more inward-looking, psychological, and concerned with intra-bourgeois relations rather than cross-class relations. Short stories are the same way. Our great writers of the day almost all practice some variety of the classic bourgeois realist, psychological NEW YORKER story mixed with the 19th-century realism of Dickens, Gaskell, James: Zadie Smith, Lorrie Moore, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Claire Messud etc. If the precise reproduction of reality in "fiction" is the goal here, is it any wonder that the memoir is on such a roll? And that memoirists who fictionalize are so viciously reviled?

a thought--this insistence on pure facts in memoirs, I think, has some roots in our general unease with the political establishment's happy, if denied, embrace of postmodernism, of the idea that "facts" themselves are relative, just narratives--that scientific fact, whether it be evolution or the link between abortion and breast cancer or global warming or the actual number of people killed and dollars spent in this senseless war in Iraq, are just points of view, things to be debated and given equal time and treated as rhetoric.

Here Ron Suskind's great NYT Magazine piece (17 October 2004) needs to be quoted again: "The [unnamed Bush White House] aide said that guys like me [the reporter] were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''"

When facts are denied or derided by our president, when we have a president who has made it clear that expertise and research are of at best equal value to, and frequently worth less than, passion and religious conviction, it's no wonder that people want to grasp onto facts somewhere, and maybe this is why James Frey's pathetic little embroideries have taken on such importance to pop-cultural arbiters like Oprah, who seem to spend relatively little time and outrage on the Bush administration.

But in an interesting if perhaps too glib article today in Salon.com, Stephen Marche argues that experimental novels got a bad name because of Robbe-Grillet and his insistence that HIS experimentation is the only valid kind of experimentation for the contemporary novel. Unfortunately, novel-readers didn't like the "nouveau roman" and didn't like being told that they were wrong for liking realism. Marche says that novels have always been experimental--he cites TRISTRAM SHANDY, of course, for this, but also ROBINSON CRUSOE and GULLIVER'S TRAVELS--and that 19th century realism is less the natural form of the novel than one style that managed to attain an exceptionally wide audience. And I agree. Even in the heyday of Robbe-Grillet, experiments in the novel that have proven much more appealing to audiences were occurring in Latin America--Garcia Marquez, Puig, Clarice Lispector, and so on. I also see, as does Marche, a strain of contemporary fiction that draws upon the more playful experimentation of the Latin American writers of the 1960s. I look to Jonathan Safran Foer (whom Marche cites), but also to Colson Whitehead, David Foster Wallace, even Dave Eggers as writers who can return a little playfulness and a little modernist sophistication to the novel.

THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG

Is it possible to start out a post on Norman Mailer's THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG without mentioning that it's a doorstop? Even in paperback? 1056 pages, in my edition. Fortunately, it reads quickly. I decided to read it after Mailer died last November; most obituaries seemed to argue, or actually stated, that THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG was Mailer's best book. I've read a few of his books--THE NAKED AND THE DEAD, WHY ARE WE IN VIETNAM, and I think something else. I remember that THE NAKED AND THE DEAD was impressive, but again I was 19 when I read it. Then I began to run into 1960 and 1970s refugees who either passionately loved or passionately hated Mailer. For me, he was one of those just slightly kitschy figures from the recent past, like Linda Ronstadt or Henry Kissinger (the famous naked centerfold of whom was framed in one of my parents' friends' dens back in the 1970s--I'll never forget that image). I knew he was famous, and I knew what he looked like, but I didn't know that much else about him.

I becmae interested in THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG several years ago when I went to the Guggenheim to see the installation of Matthew Barney's masterful/ludicrous "Cremaster 2", which includes a great deal of thematic material relating to Gary Gilmore and his execution. But I never got around to reading it until this Christmas.

It's pretty great. First, although Mailer is a NY/NJ guy to the core, and it would have been understandable had he not "gotten" the intermountain West, I found his deep and sympathetic portrait of the life of various lower-middle-class people in Utah to be utterly believable and truthful. I could recognize Western places that I know--southern Oregon, for instance--in his picture of Utah, and I also found his description of daily life in a Mormon-dominated community to ring true. (I grew up in a town with a very large LDS population and had many Mormon friends growing up.) I was also impressed by his ground-level portrait of the workings of the justice system, a feature that became especially telling to me as I read the last two hundred fifty pages while sitting in Judge Borkowski's courtroom in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas, waiting to get called for a jury. (I didn't.) I found myself less interested in all of the machinations about various journalists and TV producers obtaining the rights to Gilmore's story, interviewing him, trying to get him to open up. I guess in the end, thirty years later, it seems like that whole debate is pretty irrelevant: Mailer told the story, wholly and comprehensively, and nobody else could have conceivably done it better. (I haven't seen the film, by the way). And finally, Mailer's portrayal of Gilmore himself is stunning: he's as completely visualizable as any character I remember reading for years. (Again: of course, Mailer had 1050 pages to do this.)

(I'm trying to watch a Swedish film, TOGETHER, about a 1970s commune while I write this, and I can't help but subconsciously compare the events of THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG with what's going on in this film, which takes place only a year before. I'm mostly getting the images in the film, because it's subtitled--I don't speak Swedish--and I'm looking at the computer screen, not the TV screen.)

GOMORRAH

Roberto Saviano's GOMORRAH is a nice remedy for the current American fascination with the Mafia, and especially its teddy-bear de Niro and Gandolfini faces. In the book, which was a very big hit in Italy, Saviano spews out what he knows about the Camorra, the Neapolitan organized-crime system that calls itself "the system" and that Saviano calls "the clans." "The system" is both petty and unimaginably powerful, he asserts, and it controls not only picturesque old central Naples but also the hideously ugly and inhumane suburbs that sprawl through the Campania region. While Saviano's book is in no way systematic, it is quite well-informed, and like an amateurish Eric Schlosser Saviano examines not just the public face of The System but its hidden tendrils--the ways that it has facilitated the commerce in drugs, guns, sex workers/slaves, and all kinds of other contraband from Eastern Europe to Western Europe. (Unlike Schlosser, though, Saviano has written a book more like the angry rants of a man who knows an enormous amount and just needs to UNLOAD and less like the systematic storytelling-as-argument of which Schlosser is a master.) The System, though, is also benefiting from and expediting the rapid expansion of the global market for Chinese-manufactured items. Controlling the Port of Naples, through which a significant percentage of Chinese exports enter Europe, the System is able to "tax" these transactions, bring contraband in, evade taxation, and enable the distribution of counterfeit goods (such as "Made In Italy"-labeled apparel).

What's certainly earned Saviano the anger of the System is his happiness in gossiping about the crimes of the Camorristi: the murders and gang wars, the beat-downs, the extortion. He names names, gleefully. He grew up in these godforsaken towns north of Naples, managed not to get sucked into the System or to emigrate to northern Italy, and he wants the world to know what it's like to live here, in this fundamentally dysfunctional political and social system.

The book isn't systematic, but it doesn't try to be, and thus can't really be faulted. But the choices made by the translator--Virginia Jewiss--are unforgivable. I know that journalistic Italian works differently than journalistic English, and that the sentence fragment is acceptable. But Jewiss has decided to translate this almost word-for-word, apparently. The prose is abysmal, with sentence fragments in almost every paragraph. Look, I realize that that's Saviano's voice: angry, conversational, pointed. But, as I tell my students, this choice JUST DOESN'T WORK in this forum. A few fragments might have gotten the tone across; the thousands that we do get just make the book seem sloppy and underscore the impression that it was written in six caffeine-fueled nights.

1950s intellectuals

Richard Pells' 1985 THE LIBERAL MIND IN A CONSERVATIVE AGE has become a classic of intellectual history, but I found it less than engaging. It is, as the jacket copy calls it, a "synthesis" or an overview of the stances of most of the arguments of the leading intellectuals of the 1950s in the US. Divided into predictable chapters on McCarthyism, economic thought, social conformity, and peace and totalitarianism, the book does provide a very valuable survey of what the most important thinkers were saying about the most important issues of that time. All of the usual suspects are here--Hannah Arendt, Paul Goodman, Irving Kristol, James Burnham, Daniel Bell, David Riesman, C. Wright Mills--and the format is convenient, but I missed what I think could have been Pells' opportunity to make a larger argument about the "liberal mind" in the 1950s. Certainly, some of the set pieces here--such as the one on Arendt's ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM or Riesman's LONELY CROWD--do a great job of summarizing complicated arguments, and I wouldn't hesitate to point graduate students to Pells as a model of how to respectfully and comprehensively summarize arguments. But as a unified argument about what the liberal intellectuals of the 1950s really meant, I thought that there was a central thread lacking, for all of Pells' amazingly comprehensive overview.

Appearing frequently in Pells' book, of course, is the great intellectual Dwight Macdonald, and after finishing Pells I picked up AGAINST THE AMERICAN GRAIN, which is just great. Its leadoff essay on "Masscult & Midcult" is a classic, and although he didn't come up with the term "middlebrow" he defines it better here than almost anyone ever did. His "reviews" of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible and of Webster's Third New International Dictionary are also well-known; basically, the take on each is that they dumb down the original and enshrine as acceptable what authorities would once have condemned as incorrect. (Should linguists be prescriptive or descriptive? Macdonald is very much on the side of the former.) Praising Macdonald's style for being erudite, funny, and combative all at the same time is pretty commonplace, but when you compare his to the style of someone today who gets praised for exactly the same combination (I'm thinking of you, Christopher Hitchens), almost makes it necessary to agree with Macdonald that the language is in a bad way, and getting worse.

THE LAST CHICKEN IN AMERICA

For this Immigrant Experience in Literature class I'm teaching next term I've decided to include two Pittsburgh-centered texts: the classic OUT OF THIS FURNACE and the very recent THE LAST CHICKEN IN AMERICA by Ellen Litman. I learned about Litman's book from a NEW YORK TIMES review (it hasn't received much pub here in the city--odd, since any crap movie or TV show filmed here or even set here even if it has not the vaguest feel for the city gets front-page treatment in the POST-GAZETTE), and read it in an evening. It's a short-story cycle, a series of stories with recurring characters and a constant setting: Squirrel Hill, especially the Russian Jewish immigrant community based there. Few of the stories stand out; they're largely about character and setting and tone, not plot, and so that's not surprising. She clearly knows Pittsburgh inside and out, and I appreciate that. And although my only experience with the Russian Jewish immigrant community came from my years as a member of the Squirrel Hill JCC, where I played pickup ball with at least one ceaselessly obnoxious member of that group and worked out alongside several other much more pleasant ones, I think she's nailed them. Not because I understand them, but because they are fully fleshed characters, alive and real and believable. Litman blogs about her book abnd book tour and in that blog alluded to the hostile reaction that at least one reviewer had to her book on Amazon.com. It's a first collection, with the typical faults of a first collection/first novel, but it's also full of her promise: in addition to the features adumbrated above, she's also got a real mastery of short description and striking metaphor.

two books about eating

Leaving Heathrow on Monday morning, I had breakfast at an Irish pub (what's wrong with a pint of bitter at 10am?) and ate what they called a "typical Irish breakfast": eggs, potatoes, bacon, and "black pudding." I had my suspicions about black pudding but tried it anyway; it was fairly innocuous, if a bit cloying. I was not pleased, then, to get on the airplane, start reading Zola's THE BELLY OF PARIS, and discover that a key ingredient is a whole lot of fresh pig blood. Ugh. I have been on a bit of a Zola kick over the past year, and after a long-standing debate within my wife's family about the proper pronunciation of the Parisian market Les Halles (lay all, or lays all?) I was thinking about Les Halles, and then discovered that Zola wrote a novel all about the giant 19th-century market. THE BELLY OF PARIS is, as the Sun and Moon edition jacket copy says, "little known in English." But Sun and Moon put out an edition in 1996, and Oxford is publishing it in the US this year.

Like many of Zola's novels, the plot isn't much; it's all about the immersion in the details of a group of people in a very particular milieu. At times the novel seems like a basic framework intended just to string together a bunch of set pieces about food. Zola revels in the different food stalls in the market, enumerating the various kinds of cherries or fish or sausages available. His descriptions go from savory to disgusting, precisely in the same way that eating far too much rich food goes. I don't think I'm going to ever forget the pages about the making of sausages, black puddings, and the like--I could smell the fat in the air and could only imagine--given how modern scrubbing techniques still can't get the grease smell out of fast-food joints--the smell of the small unventilated basement rooms in which the butcher boils fat. I wanted some very vivid, tactile, olfactorily unforgettable descriptions of the Paris markets circa 1860 (because I have become very interested in farmers markets today and have been to some huge comestible markets, in places like Oaxaca, that must be like what Les Halles was like back in the day.

I read THE BELLY OF PARIS on the way back from England, and on the way there I read another very similar (in subject-matter) book: Bill Buford's HEAT. I read Buford's amazing AMONG THE THUGS a year or so ago and was amazed--it's about a very smart writer--a guy who ended up being the fiction editor for the NEW YORKER and who founded GRANTA, for chrissake--who became so fascinated by the world of English soccer thugs that he joins them and even travels to international games to get involved in their riots. A real "new journalist," he gets far too involved in his subjects. HEAT is about his fascination with the celebrity chef Mario Batali and, ultimately, his quest to repeat, and even transcend, Batali's own training regimen. Unlike many big-time chefs, of course, Batali didn't train at a high-end place (CIA, Cordon Bleu), but rather at the most down-home kind of Italian trattoria. HEAT wavers between profiling Batali's life and strategy to start his own new kind of Italian place in New York, and Buford's own desire to learn what Mario does. Buford begins by working in Batali's kitchen at the great Babbo in Greenwich Village--and of course learning in the process the great traditions of the urban commercial kitchen, also elucidated well in Anthony Bourdain's KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL. He then journeys to Italy to meet Batali's mentors, before coming to the realization that it's not enough to COOK the meat--you've got to butcher and cure it yourself--so he's off to the butt-end of Tuscany to learn that from the masters. The underlying theme of the book is one I'm increasingly drawn to: the disappearance of our relationship to the origins of our food. In THE OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA and FAST FOOD NATION the authors draw political conclusions from this; Buford is much more interested in the gastronomic and cultural ramifications. The most telling example he brings up is one that would be touch for any but a specialist to discern: there are cuts of meat typical in parts of Tuscany that just don't exist elsewhere, because the very ways that animals are butchered are rooted in place. At some level, this book is a lament for the rapid loss of those millions of local traditions that have determined how and what people eat. Culture, Buford says here, in a very literal sense begins with what we put in our mouths, and the complicated textures of world culture, he suggests, are quickly being flattened out.It's really a fantastic book, if characterized a bit too much by Tina Brown-era NEW YORKER fascination with celebrity.

WHAT IS THE WHAT

I think Dave Eggers gets a bad rap. He's too often seen as uber-ironic, hipster, precious in that BELIEVER way, but I just don't buy it. Yes, A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS really has come to stand for a particular kind of late-90's hipster attitude, and YOU SHALL KNOW OUR VELOCITY was slight, but I've been paying a little bit of attention to his recent projects (the reading education rooms in SF, LA, and Brooklyn, for example) and I heard him talk quite credibly about education at the CCCC conference a couple of years back, and although I kinda want not to like him I just can't do it. So I was interested in his most recent book, WHAT IS THE WHAT, a novelized autobiography of the Sudanese "Lost Boy" Valentino Achak Deng.

It's an impressive and genuinely moving book. As many reviewers have remarked, Eggers' voice is so knowing, so postmodern, so snarky-yet-earnest that it would seem impossible for him to lose it, but judging from this book he really is able to--which speaks well for his staying-power as a writer. The structure is really interesting. Throughout, Deng is located in the present in Atlanta, where he is being robbed, then waiting forever at an urban emergency room, then working at a health club, but while waiting in those places he narrates his long backstory, from an idyllic "primitive" (Deng has no problem using that word to describe his upbringing) childhood to years of nightmarish flight from war and starvation and wild animals to arrival and culture-shock in the US. It's angering without being angry: a tough task for Eggers and Deng to pull off. I'm definitely going to use it in my immigrant-lit class in the spring. And I'm going to try to get a speaker (perhaps Deng himself) to come, arranging it through the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation.

BLACKWATER

I swear that I had intended--fully intended--to read Jeremy Scahill's BLACKWATER: THE RISE OF THE WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL MERCENARY ARMY long before the recent, um, "unpleasantness" about Blackwater mercenaries indiscriminately killing Iraqi civilians and being threatened with ejection from the country by the Iraqi government. But I did run to the Carnegie Library the day that the story broke and picked up Scahill's book. I was expecting a more "measured" book, like IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY or Ricks' FIASCO, but Scahill isn't hiding his lefty methodology. And because of that it's very interesting. It's damn well documented, although Scahill doesn't get much of the first-hand sourcing that Chandrasekharan or Ricks or Woodward get. But although Scahill's general thesis--this Blackwater company has benefited from a "perfect storm" of terrorism, right-wing craziness for privatization, and what Scahill identifies as a "theoconservative" network of militaristic religious fanatics, and in the process Blackwater's activities and influence force us to confront what it means to have our military undertakings, and even civilian rescue efforts such as in post-Katrina New Orleans, run by unanswerable, unelected private companies that can't even be sued for their actions--is pretty easy to swallow for most people, what I like is the way that he understands his history and is willing to do a little digging. John Negroponte, for instance, who was US Ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s dirty wars and then was posted to Baghdad, Scahill links with death squads: he argues that Negroponte actively supported and even organized death squads in Central America in the 1980s, and brought that strategy to Iraq with him. Essentially, Scahill's saying that the Bush Administration either set up or winked at Shiite death squads (whose killings, Scahill points out, rose dramatically right as Negroponte came to Baghdad) as a way to "deal with" the Sunni insurgency.

Because of the Blackwater stories over the past few days, Scahill's gotten a boost in sales, but I haven't seen him making the rounds as much as one would expect. I do subscribe to the theory that the "mainstream media" tries to redefine the "center" as being much more to the right that most people would think, and that they label as crazy or cranks anyone who questions the US's determination to use military and economic power to dominate the world, so this is why I think that Scahill is getting largely ignored even though he quite literally wrote the book on Blackwater.

a minor zola novel

Finally, finally I can put Emile Zola's THE DEBACLE back on the shelf. I brought it to Texas this July, thinking that I'd read it quickly there, but I only got a few chapters into it before we returned to Austin. Then school started, I had to write a presentation, this and that, and so it took forever to finally finish it: but finish it I did, last night. It's certainly the least of the Zola novels I've read, but it was still relatively interesting. It's a grunt's-eye view of the battle of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian Wra of 1870, a war whose planning, at least on the French side, seems to make Don Rumsfeld look like a tactical genius. I decided to pick it up, I think, because it promised to be a fictionalized depiction of the Paris Commune of 1871 (which it really wasn't). What it was, though, was GORY, of a Cormac McCarthy level. Let's just say that field surgery in 1870 involved a lot of amputations. A lot. Pretty much that was what "medicine" consisted of. And there weren't those neat "HAZARDOUS MEDICAL WASTE" bags either--just piles of limbs.