I could not resist when our local library offered free lessons in Mandarin Chinese but, sadly, I was not an apt student.  On the other hand, the lessons led me indirectly to the books of Henry Chang and to an immersion in “otherness” that I have not often experienced.  The sense of place in Chang’s novels – Chinatown Beat, Year of the Dog, and Red Jade — is extraordinary.  New York’s Chinatown is a place like no other, except perhaps for its cousins in San Francisco, Seattle, and other points along the Chinese diaspora.

Detective Jack Yu, NYPD, works the Fifth Precinct, in Chinatown, a world peopled by the Ghost Legions, and the Hip Ching and On Yee tongs.  Aggressive Fukienese newcomers push hard against the territory of the Toishanese and Cantonese old-timers. It seems that just behind the inviting hubbub of tourist Chinatown is a world of criminality and menace.  Gambling parlors, drug dens, and brothels hide behind ordinary storefronts.  Powerful triads in Hong Kong and Taiwan use local businesses to launder dirty money.

Henry Chang grew up in Chinatown and he describes its dark side in vivid, almost pulsing, detail.  Yet his books tell another story, one which pierces the armor of Jack Yu’s cynicism.  It is the story of the dreams which propelled generations of Chinese to America in search of a better life, “. . . sons and daughters of the Celestial Kingdom (who) . . .lived their own lives by their own set of cultural rules.”

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All philosophy begins in wonder, Socrates tells us, and it is a mark of the greatest forms of human enquiry – from Homer to Heisenberg – that they increase our sense of wonder at the universe (or multiverse, if you must) and our place in it. The highest goal for teaching and commentary is to keep this wonder close at hand because it is all too easy to lose sight of it in our world of utility and commerce.

My reading tends to be more eclectic than it should be (although I’m glad I’m not alone among Verdicts bloggers on this), and in the last few days I’ve read Geoffrey Hill’s Style and Faith and Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind (part of which appeared as an article in Commonweal; subscribers can read it here.). Both remind me that true wonder doesn’t come cheap. Read the rest of this entry »

Just posted to our books page, Eduardo Moisés Peñalver’s review of Immigrants and the Right to Stay:

Immigrants and the Right to Stay is a tiny book that raises a big question: Are undocumented immigrants who have managed to remain in the United States for an extended period of time—say, five to ten years—entitled to remain? The book consists of a short essay by Joseph H. Carens, a professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, and responses by six eminent scholars. Carens argues for allowing the passage of time to help determine how to treat undocumented immigrants. His position, in a nutshell, is that, after a certain period of time, such immigrants become members of our society and are therefore entitled to remain here. Deporting these people is inhumane because it functions as a kind of exile that, in other contexts, we do not accept as a legitimate form of punishment. Moreover, at least for immigrants married to lawful U.S. residents, it disrupts family life by separating undocumented immigrants from their spouses and children.

Read the rest here.

Karen Russell, the author of the terrific 2011 gothic/horror/magical realist novel Swamplandia!, has talked in passionate terms about how her early love of reading led to her later life of writing. When Russell was an anxious child, she says, reading seemed a magical force, a “really convenient rabbit hole” into which she could disappear. She loved what she calls “weird” writing, works that traded in the uncanny and the bizarre. (She lists Dante and Stephen King as early favorites.)* Russell’s own writing seems an attempt to recapture this sense of wondrous strangeness: Swamplandia! takes its subject (and its title) from the self-declared “Number One Gator-Themed Park and Swamp Café” in the Florida Everglades, while Russell’s first short story collection was memorably titled St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. If, as Wordsworth wrote, the child is father to the man, then Russell’s writing shows that the reader can be mother to the writer.

It seems appropriate, then, to begin a review of Swamplandia! by comparing this first-time novelist to some of her predecessors. Russell’s incredibly weird, occasionally violent characters bear a family resemblance to the grotesques of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction; her interest in re-telling the fantastical history of the Florida region calls to mind Peter Matthiessen; her sensitivity to, and sympathy for, the experience of young adults—their specific ways of talking, their painful bids to fit in, their occasional resorting to magical thinking—remind me of the Israeli novelist David Grossman; finally, her physical descriptions, in particular her ability to invest landscape with both beauty and a sense of physical, moral menace, seem to echo certain passages in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Nostromo.

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I’m pleased when one of my students is excited to discover that something we are talking about in the course I’m teaching actually connects to something in another course! But I found myself falling into the same set of feelings without the justification of inexperience or youth when two of the eight or ten books I am currently “reading” (that is, periodically picking up and putting down) revealed the same serendipitous connection. Charles Taylor and Mark Jordan may well be old friends for all I know, but if not, they should sit down together and have a long talk.

In a way it’s not so surprising that they might have things in common, at least in the books I have been reading, since the focus of both is the question of teaching, specifically teaching with “magisterial authority.” In fact “Magisterial Authority” is the title of the chapter Taylor contributed to the book I promised a few weeks ago that I would revisit, namely, The Crisis of Authority in Catholic Modernity (see “The Power of Being Well-Informed,” July 12). Taylor’s essay is by far the briefest piece, perhaps a surprise for those of us who have waded through A Secular Age, alternately impressed by his wisdom and insight and appalled that he didn’t have a better editor. Taylor, one of the most distinguished Catholic philosophers of our day, takes up two questions in his short essay, the scope of magisterial authority and the manner in which it should be exercised.  While what the magisterium guards and teaches is vast, “the deposit of faith” or “matters of faith and morals,” how it should teach is significantly more constrained. Thinking especially of moral teaching, which seems to be pretty much all that the magisterium concerns itself with these days, Taylor points out that principles and goals lead to moral decisions only when we have some grasp of the situation in which they have to be applied, and this grasp can’t be derived from faith. In other words, there is clearly a normative component in magisterial teaching, but it has to be offered in an inductive context where what Bernard Lonergan might have called “taking a look” is actually quite important. So, if you don’t actually take a look but allow yourself to be panicked then you might end up like Pius IX trying to stop the clock on essentially dynamic issues about liberalism, democracy and so on. Taylor suggests that U.S. and Canadian bishops who want to censure politicians for their stance on abortion law or gay marriage may be repeating the same error of failing to see the limits of magisterial authority. He offers several explanations for this phenomenon, some of them—like legalism and “false sacralization,” (that is, identifying a particular historically conditioned mode of thought like natural law ethics as “essential to the faith”)—quite familiar, and others, such as the failure of “respect for the enigmatic,” arrestingly unfamiliar, at least the term itself. What it comes down to, of course, is the charge that magisterial teaching frequently fails to respect the ambiguity and complexity of lived life. Taylor’s point, I take it, is that the magisterium often oversteps its legitimate responsibility and unwittingly tramples upon the indispensable roles of conscience and authentic freedom in making practical moral judgments. Bishops have the right and responsibility to teach, says Taylor, but without threats. Otherwise, given the Christian emphasis on the responsibility to conscience, teaching could end up “commanding us not to do what we are in conscience bound to do.” As, for example, would certainly be happening if bishops told us how we should vote.

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Too often the easy response (“I liked the book better.”) to television or film adaptation of a novel comes about through dissatisfaction: it seems that the richness of the original cannot be reproduced in a different medium. But since I had not read the book, I could not make even this hackneyed remark about Any Human Heart based on William Boyd’s novel of that name (PBS Masterpiece production last winter). By the time, months later, that I found the novel in the local library, I had read other works by Boyd. I count myself lucky to have seen the adaptation, both for the success of the production and for the fact that it had given me the incentive to read more of Boyd.

Just a brief look at the author’s web site indicates something of his range, but Brazzaville Beach, a work that won prizes in the ‘nineties, stands out for me. The plot encompasses primate research in Africa, professional fraud and deceit among scientists, political revolution set against a story of marital failure of the English female narrator – the collapse driven by the psychological delusions of her spouse.  The novel is masterful in its parallel construction and its handling of voice. It succeeds in bridging two disparate places and the discontinuities they bring in the life of the narrator, managing to tie revolution to renunciation. It is wise and subtle in unraveling of the knotted difficulties that beset the narrator who views her life in retrospect.

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Let’s say you’re a British poet publishing your first book in 1937, and you want to ensure its success by getting favorable blurbs from other, more established poets. Who would you look to? The most obvious first choice would be T. S. Eliot. By 1937, Eliot had already published The Waste Land (1922), was the editor of the Criterion (arguably the most important literary review of the time), and, in his role as editor at Faber & Faber, helped determine which young poets got into print in the first place. A close second would be W. B. Yeats, the 1923 winner of the Nobel Prize whose poetry seemed only to be getting stronger and stranger with age. And, just to mix things up, maybe you decide your third choice is W. H. Auden. While not as august a figure as Eliot or Yeats, Auden was certainly the most famous (and influential) young poet around—there’s a reason that the 1930s quickly became known as the “Auden decade.” Secure the good opinion of these three poets, you figure, and your present and future fame are guaranteed.

In his great World War I work, In Parenthesis, the Welsh poet and painter David Jones managed to quickly win over all three of these literary luminaries. As W. S. Merwin relates in his foreword to Jones’s poem/novel/memoir (it’s impossible to classify this truly singular work, which is written in a strange mixture of verse and prose), Eliot read In Parenthesis in manuscript form and declared it “a work of genius.” Yeats sought out Jones at a 1938 literary gathering and then, very publicly, bowed towards him, saying, ‘I salute the author of In Parenthesis.” Finally, Auden declared The Anathemata, Jones’s later, most complex work, “probably the finest long poem in English in this century.”

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Carl Hiassen’s face, as he looks out at you from book jackets, has changed little over the years: he has a few wrinkles and the wavy hair now has a touch of gray, but the warm and friendly smile remains unchanged. Yet, he is the angriest of men.  Hiassen’s great success as a novelist has only sharpened his indignation at the cheaters and scammers among us, the greedy politicians and businessmen who have turned his native Florida into a theme park.  In his books he creates memorable bottom feeders whose comeuppances are nearly biblical in their aptness.  He is a very funny writer, but behind the satire is a strong message to be good or else.  In Star Island, Hiassen’s latest excursion into the swampland of human folly, he points his harpoon toward real estate schemers, the paparazzi, and the cult of celebrity.  Although it is not one of his best,  Star Island does bring back two of my favorite characters from earlier books:  Clinton Tyree, aka Skink, and Blondell Tatum, aka Chemo.

Years earlier Skink, the idealistic governor of Florida, fled Tallahassee before the end of his term, distraught by the magnitude of political corruption surrounding him and repelled by civilization in general.  His disappearance is now just a blip on the political landscape.  Skink lives in the mangrove swamps of the Florida Keys, subsisting on road kill and owning no clothes except for a filthy trench coat and a shower cap for those rare occasions when he feels it inappropriate to be naked.  His great love is the land, and his enemy is the real estate developer.  ”The cherished wild places of his childhood had vanished  under cinderblocks and asphalt … hijacked by greedy suckworms disguised as upright citizens.”  To the dismay of the one or two people who know of his existence, Skink occasionally metes out a rude justice to those who abuse the land or its creatures.

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On the cover of Rachel M. Brownstein’s new book Why Jane Austen? is a photo of a “Jane Austen Action Figure” perched atop a row of books. You may have seen, may even have purchased or received, one of these figures—part of a cheeky assortment of novelty gifts for nerds. The figurine has jointed arms to permit the only “action” for which Jane Austen is known: the doll can write.

How did Jane Austen, the early-nineteenth-century novelist who died at forty-one, become “Jane Austen,” the pop-culture phenomenon? Why does she attract such a clubby following, despite her relatively hidden and uneventful personal life? Why have her lapidary novels inspired so many vulgarizations? Whence all the sequels and imitations? Why are there so many more film versions of Pride and Prejudice alone than a culture could ever want or need?

Brownstein’s book reads like a collection of notes from a long acquaintance with the novelist: reflections on Austen’s writing, on others’ writing about Austen, on Brownstein’s experiences teaching Austen, and on the many facets of “Jane-o-mania.” She investigates the surge in Austen’s pop-culture presence beginning in the 1990s, from Clueless to Bridget Jones’s Diary to the BBC’s much adored (and exhaustive) Pride and Prejudice. Brownstein meets with Janeites at pilgrimage sites and ponders their fantasy of a personal connection with the author. But she also insists on evaluating Austen as a writer, an artist, not a woman-who-wrote or a biographical puzzle to be solved. If the question in the title is interpreted as “Why bother reading Jane Austen?”, Brownstein has a simple answer: “The claim I make about Jane Austen here is that she is a great writer, delightful to read.” Read the rest of this entry »

Oliva Blanchette’s Maurice Blondel: A Philosophical Life* is the first biography of the dynamic French thinker to be written in English, and its publication this year offers an opportunity for American readers to become acquainted with the thought of a nearly-forgotten philosopher. The problem is figuring out just who those American readers might be. Blondel has never had much of an influence in American thought, Catholic or otherwise,  but he did make an impression on some of the great minds of the twentieth century—among them, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Paul Claudel, William James, and even the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. However, apart from the Balthasar scholars who naturally would want to learn more about one of von Balthasar’s seminal influences, it is unclear who would be motivated to read this biography. We should examine this lack of motivation.

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Readers of contemporary fiction have been waiting for the publication of Chad Harbach’s first novel, The Art of Fielding, ever since Little, Brown paid a stunning $650,000 for the manuscript at auction in 2010. The novel, which is set to come out in September, tells the story of a trying season for the Westish College baseball team, examining the team’s various players and the ways in which the game affects their lives. So, in anticipation of this book—and keeping in mind David Gibson’s post about baseball and Catholicism—I’m planning on slowly making my way through the pantheon of great baseball novels. On deck I have Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, and Mark Harris’s Bang the Drum Slowly.

My early nominee for best baseball novel (and by “best” I mean both the best novel that happens to be about baseball and the novel that best gives a sense of baseball’s essence) is Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. Coover’s second novel was published in 1968, the famous “Year of the Pitcher” in which Bob Gibson finished with a 1.12 ERA (with 13 shutouts!) and Denny McLain won 31 games in helping the Detroit Tigers to the championship. It’s a wonderful accident of history that one of baseball’s most historic seasons coincided with one of the most inventive baseball books ever written.

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Last week I posted an argument defending, in part, marital monogamy – in the strict sense. Nothing, “monogamish.” The responses were illuminating and provocative. And, I very much appreciated the engagement. Something that stood out was how deeply gendered some of the responses were. In some replies there was an insistence that monogamy worked better for women than for men. Others wondered about the power differential between the sexes and the effect that might have on whether being “monogamish” was deemed a virtue.

The cacophony of responses provoked another question for me, “Was I just being a girl, some state of nature response, defending monogamy?” Or “Was I being Catholic?” Or better yet, “Was I being a Catholic girl defending monogamy?” And, how might these two identities be related. That is, how might being a 21st century woman still committed to the Catholic Church resonate with a commitment to monogamy. Not in some doctrinal way (i.e. the Church’s long commitment to the sacramentality of marriage) but rather how might Catholic women particularly have learned to navigate the pain, love, loyalty and betrayal that comes with remaining Catholic in ways that make them particularly well suited for arguing for monogamy? Indeed, perhaps the challenges of staying committed as women to the Catholic Church are echoed, in some ways, by the challenges of staying committed to a marriage. This might not be “natural law” but it certainly is part of the Catholic tradition.

Recently, Cindy Peabody in an essay in America Magazine (July 19, 2001) “Staying Power: What Keeps Women in the Church?” called on Catholic women to talk more candidly about our relationship with the Catholic Church. Indeed, she describes how eager many Catholic women are to do just that: “I am no longer surprised,” she says, “when women jump at the chance to talk about the muddled mess of feelings they have toward the church. Love, betrayal, commitment, tradition, shame, anger, compassion—what do we make of all this?”

Sounds suspiciously like the nettled complexity of a marital commitment, no? And, so I began to see how my commitment to monogamy is echoed in my feminist commitment to the Catholic Church. I’m reminded of a conversation I once had with Patricia Hempl about “staying Catholic” in which she said, “There’s just too many things I love so I can’t leave.”

Oddly, Peabody (like Savage regarding monogamy) describes how a young Catholic colleague lamented that “staying in” was getting harder. She believes that a whole new order of church is in the offing….” But, perhaps, “staying in” might be getting easier; there’s now generations of women who have figured out how to stay a part of the Catholic Church with integrity. A generation, at least (!) who understands that being a Catholic woman is not a tag for false consciousness. They are, as Peabody (quoting Chastiser ) calls them “rebuilders….those who take what other people only talk about and make it the next generation’s reality. These are the superstars of the long haul…. They give up prestige and money….and build the new world right in the heart of the old.” Perhaps as Catholic women wrestle with the challenges of monogamy they can consult some of their own success in staying committed to another vexed institution, the Church.

“Experimental” or innovative fiction can have peculiar effects. The novel is aimed at going beyond story-telling, and it generally broaches philosophical themes or makes inroads into the structure of language and notions of “theory” that can be as puzzling as the various forms and oddities of construction that the novelist employs.

Tom McCarthy, an English novelist, established himself in his first book, Remainder, as a writer of this sort of demanding fiction. His second novel, C, nominated for the Booker Prize, is equally challenging; it did not find much favor when it was reviewed in Commonweal.

C is driven by a straightforward chronological narrative presenting the life of Serge Carrefax. The time involved spans the years before the First War, includes Serge’s participation in that conflict as a pilot/observer/signal man, and ends in Egypt with the remains of Empire very much complicating the “communications” that Serge is to further in setting up a British wireless base. The book attempts much in exploration of meaning – communication through the media of signs, from language to art to cyphers and code. McCarthy explores the earliest stages of radio development and transmission, looks with expert analysis at the adoption of these advances in technology to warfare, and then goes on, through his characters to speculate on the meaning of messages encoded in ancient Egyptian tombs. Serge’s eccentric father, silk-manufacturing mother and precocious, suicidal sister all contribute to a heady primal family scene. The sister’s death by her own hands weighs on Serge (so we might interpret his later visit to a spa in Germany to convalesce) and, as had been suggested by reviewers, might account for his emotional flatness: he surprises someone who later interviews him by admitting that he liked the war. His fate, embraced in a listless obedience to the demands of his governmental department, communicates little, beyond a hermetically sealed reverie induced by fever from blood poisoning. This is one of a number of rhapsodic passages in which Serge’s consciousness probes the meaning of his experience: the form of the novel is an experiment in the limits of language in these cases. McCarthy is a master stylist, but there are few revelations following from such explorations – a controlling irony leaves us with just that: consciousness tortured by its partial realization of its isolation.

The joys of the book, and despite its jarring demands there are many, come for me at least, not in the excursions into the symbolic and narrative explorations of weighty issues – “the meaning of meaning” as one reviewer put it, but in the quirky eccentricity of Serge’s family. Their story evolves in the first section of the book and captivates. There is much here to admire, voice, plot, literary allusion and pathos – evinced in the restricted understanding of Serge of the events that surround him, even as he becomes expert in telegraphy and radio. Likewise, McCarthy opens up another aspect of the First War’s conflicts, concentrating on the use of aircraft in target spotting and signaling. The plethora of detail and the expert management of scene and incident are revelatory. The lengthy discourses on the history of ancient Egypt, delivered by Laura, one of Serge’s companions on a journey up the Nile to an archeological site, succeed less well, but again their focus is narrative and interpretation of narrative. As in earlier accounts of bogus séance-contact with the dead, the novelist asks us to consider what endures in the interplay between life and death. The sense of fictional mystery, that of the clairvoyante or that of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, informs C – even as it might occasion profound analysis of its weighty themes. But here a confession: I have to admit, given the intellectual power behind the writing of C, that I found its rewards in the narrative that develops eccentric characters and in those sections on aircraft in the Great War. I suspect a good story bears its own telling, and in that process more often than not goes beyond what is said. The contrast between the knotted and allusive passages that beg in their form for further analysis and those in which the story gets told simply constitutes the lasting impression I have of this novel. I hesitate to venture that this is indeed central to its meaning and to its limitations.