This weekend brings a momentous decision: To watch, or not to watch, Season 2 of “The Killing”? Anyone who forged through the first season of this AMC police procedural (a remake of a Danish hit) last year is probably still fuming about the lack of answers in the final episode. For weeks, we had been watching the stubborn and slightly self-destructive Seattle detective Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) plod around the city—often in the pouring rain—as she attempted to solve the murder of high school student Rosie Larsen. We had glimpsed the light at the end of the tunnel: Following an ingenious bit of gumshoe work, a culprit had been arrested! Justice had been served! Detective Linden was on a plane to sunnier climes! And then, the episode’s final minutes—with fiendish glee, it seemed—subverted that resolution, saddling us with questions we have now lived with for almost a year.

 According to The New York Times, AMC’s head of original programming has promised that the whodunit will be wrapped up—really and truly—at the end of Season 2, which begins this Sunday. Of course, even if we trust his pledge, there remains the fact that “The Killing” has so far been a real downer of a program. Many of its elements—the red-herring clues, the multiple suspects, the sleuth with personal problems, the law-enforcement turf battles—are detective-story standards. But has there ever been a police procedural that focused so intensely on the grief of the victim’s family? In Season 1, scene after scene conveyed the Larsens’ pain: We saw Rosie’s parents suffer as they planned her funeral and suffer as they debated whether to clean out her room and suffer as they fielded detectives’ questions. We saw Rosie’s younger brothers suffer, too, as their pain-deluged parents ignored them. (In one heartbreaking scene, the boys, getting their own breakfast, wondered whether they dared eat some of their dead sibling’s favorite breakfast cereal.)

 The cinematography made the saga even more depressing: Season 1 was shot in blue tones that made each image even more lugubrious than it might have been otherwise. The police headquarters, in particular, might have been dredged up from the bottom of the Slough of Despond. All in all, “The Killing” strays far from the escapist-puzzle mode that is the default option for the mystery genre. And yet….Yes, I admit it. I will watch Season 2. The lingering suspense from Season 1 is just too strong. But listen, AMC: Don’t count on me for any Season 3.

The paperback edition of David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published The Pale King has just been released. At the top of the front cover, the publishers have let us know that the paperback contains “four previously unpublished scenes.” Over at the Millions, you can read one of these unpublished scenes in full.

As I mentioned in my review at the time, it’s a bit of a misnomer to call The Pale King Wallace’s “last novel.” More accurately, it’s a collection of writings unified (barely) around a set of themes: boredom and its relation to transcendence, consciousness and its relation to crippling self-doubt. As such, The Pale King is an excellent introduction to Wallace’s work—it’s the one book I would recommend to someone who hasn’t read Wallace before and wants to give him a shot—and the excerpted scene on the Millions is itself an excellent introduction to The Pale King. It gives you a sense of Wallace’s wildly inventive syntax, his ability to add clause upon clause upon clause so as to make sentences that don’t so much build towards a conclusion as uncoil and recoil endlessly; it illustrates Wallace’s abiding interest in the specifics of Midwestern culture and geography (“Peoria and Lake James and Pekin were corn, Decatur and Springfield soybeans for the Japanese”); and, finally, it shows Wallace’s concern, despite his famous stylistic experimentation and intense authorial self-consciousness, for achieving “exacting care and metal-minded clarity and precision.” In fact, it’s one of the many wonders of Wallace’s writing that he is able to achieve such care, clarity, and precision not in spite of his postmodern tricks but through them.

Anyway, the paperback edition of The Pale King is well worth the investment, both for those who don’t own the hardcover and even for those who do.

Sometimes things are hidden in plain sight. I haven’t blogged for a few weeks because the books I’ve been reading have either been disappointing (Stephen Greenblatt’s Swerve), endless (Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: a Biography, which is superb, but I’m barely half way through it), or predictable (Harold Bloom’s latest on the King James Bible. I’m enjoying it, but, well, basta Bloom).

Yet the extraordinary books I’m privileged to teach have been in front of me the whole time. Right now, my students and I are discussing Soren Kierkegaard’s masterpiece Works of Love, which, I would argue, is one of the most important discussions of love in the western canon. Kierkegaard structures the book as a series of essays that interpret Biblical passages about love. As Lent gives way to the Triduum and Easter, and Christians prepare to celebrate the love of God shown in the death and resurrection of the Son, Kierkegaard’s words are particularly timely. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week’s New Yorker contains a typically wonderful short story by Alice Munro. (Here it is; subscription required.) “Haven” tells the story of a young girl who is forced to live with her aunt and uncle for a year during the 1970s after her parents go off to teach in Ghana. The move from one household to another is a culture shock. The narrator’s parents, who lived in Vancouver before leaving for Africa, are liberal both in religion (they are Unitarians and believe, the girl says, “that every person has his own idea of God”) and in lifestyle: they encourage religious discussion, afford the women of the house a real voice, and generally maintain an environment of “intellectual seriousness and physical disorder.”

Things are altogether different with Aunt Dawn and Uncle Jasper. There, grace is said before every meal, without fail. There, the house is clean and crisp, with “bright sterling spoons and forks, polished dark floors, comforting linen sheets.” There, gender roles are defined quite clearly. Jasper is a doctor, and Dawn is a housewife; he talks, and she listens; “the house was his, the choice of menus his, the radio and television programs his,” while the cleaning and the cooking are hers (with help from a maid named Bernice). At one point, the girl tries to sum up the feel of the household: “‘Haven’ was the word. ‘A woman’s most important job is making a haven for her man.’ Did Aunt Dawn actually say that? I don’t think so. She shied away from statements. I probably read it in one of the housekeeping magazines I found in the house. Such as would have made my mother puke.”

In an essay trumpeting Munro’s brilliance, Jonathan Franzen praised the writer’s “rhetorical restraint” and her “almost pathological empathy for her characters.” Given these gifts, it should come as no surprise that Munro challenges the easy binaries—liberal versus conservative, lively versus stultified—laid out above. We come to see that an orderly house “could be quite agreeable,” even if this agreeableness comes at a cost, and that charitable intentions can unwittingly hurt others. (As the narrator says, “I had not approved of my parents’ going to Africa. I had objected to being dumped—my word for it—with my aunt and uncle. I may even have told them, my long-suffering parents, that their good works were a load of crap.”)

Munro even succeeds in humanizing the bullying Jasper. At one point, after being served a dissatisfying meal, Jasper quietly expresses his disapproval and then makes himself a peanut butter sandwich: “he had eaten [all of the meal] before pronouncing his verdict. So he was propelled not by hunger but by the need to make a statement of pure and mighty disapproval.” This is Jasper at his worst, domineering and uncaring.

But even here, Munro forces us to reconsider the situation: “It occurs to me now that something might have gone wrong at the hospital that day, somebody might have died who wasn’t supposed to—perhaps the problem wasn’t the food at all. But I don’t think that occurred to Aunt Dawn—or, if it did, she didn’t let her suspicion show. She was all contrition.” The conditional—“might have”—is a distinctively Munrovian tense, and “Haven” is shot through with “maybes” and “perhapses.” Munro’s fiction is obsessed with what might have happened, both in the sense of lost opportunity (characters constantly think of how their lives might have turned out differently) and in the sense of the ultimate mystery of other people: we can never know what other people are thinking or feeling, a fact that should lead to sympathy and forgiveness.

This isn’t to say that Munro explains away all wrongdoing. Regardless of why Jasper reacted in the way he did, his actions hurt Dawn, and this is a fact that can’t be ignored. Rather, Munro reminds us that people are more complex—both more culpable and more deserving of forgiveness—than we normally imagine.  This is something that Munro’s stories have been teaching us for a long time. “Haven” is further proof that Alice Munro is one of our best best living writers.