Tonight the funniest comedy on television ends its seven-season run, and I feel compelled to say a word of farewell to 30 Rock. I came late to the show, in part because everyone I knew who enjoyed it kept talking about how great Alec Baldwin and Tracy Morgan were. I had trouble believing either claim. And for what it’s worth, I was right about Tracy Morgan — he was and is just as limited and barely adequate in his performance on 30 Rock (playing a version of himself named Tracy Jordan) as I’d always thought he was on Saturday Night Live. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter much; if the show is often funny in spite of rather than because of his presence, it’s still very, very funny. On the other hand, as Jack Donaghy, an NBC exec, Alec Baldwin was a revelation. I still find him fairly odious as a celebrity/public figure, and I’m still scornful of his under-rehearsed, cue-card-dependent appearances on SNL and elsewhere. He even seemed bizarrely unfamiliar with his own show when the cast appeared together on Jimmy Kimmel Live Late Night with Jimmy Fallon (whoops) last week. But on 30 Rock, Baldwin is a one-man master class, turning in an utterly disciplined performance with consistently perfect comic timing. Even in the two live episodes they did, Baldwin brought his A game. He is indeed a major reason for the show’s success.

The major reason, of course, is Tina Fey, 30 Rock‘s creator, star, and guiding sensibility. The show is ostensibly based on her experiences as head writer at SNL, but it’s really about the character of Liz Lemon, who happens to be the creator of a lame sketch-comedy show on NBC. The writers’-room stuff has always been hit or miss; the personnel connected with the show are often funny but, on the whole, disappointingly one-note (in part because there are so many of them; certain minor characters disappear for such long stretches that the show cracks nervous jokes about it when they return). The writing is always sharp and original, and every character has quotable one-liners. But it’s Liz quirks, and her fraught relationships — with New York City, with work, with success, and most vividly with Jack, her boss — that make 30 Rock satisfying and, for a lot of viewers (say, young women balancing careers and life and various insecurities in NYC), amazingly familiar. Liz is specific and finely detailed, and while I’m reluctant to start picking her apart as a feminist role model/betrayal to the cause of womanhood (as many have done and still do), I will say that I see in Liz a kind of womanhood-on-television that I haven’t seen anywhere else: fully individual, smart and driven but also flawed and human and hilarious, and frankly anxious about the very questions of What Should a Woman Be? that critics and commentators project onto her. (A recent episode found Liz fretting about the trappings of being a bride. Her supportive boyfriend told her, “Liz, it’s OK to be a human woman!” prompting her to moan, “No, it’s the worst! Because of society!”) Read the rest of this entry »

Chance will have us discover patterns, but then we also believe that there are no coincidences. Do those two statements demand the admission that we read what we have to? To be less riddling: I posted admiring comments on Richard Ford’s Canada over a week ago. In particular I admired the narrative voice: Del Parson looks back after fifty years at his experiences at fifteen.  Apparently irresponsible decisions by adults in his life had defining and inescapable consequences. The very next novel I took up was John Banville’s Ancient Light in which the narrator, Alex, looks back over fifty years to the time he was fifteen; he also has to come to terms with defining experiences -  in this case an affair in which he was seduced by the mother of his best friend. Clearly an adult acted in ways that affected his life forever. The two plot outlines are similar, and the two narrative first person voices give the respective novels their extraordinary appeal, and yet the two books could not have greater differences in artistic effect.

Ford’s Dell retains his ingenuous, almost naïve tone, allowing the fifty years of adult reflection to heighten the immediacy of experience long since passed. Banville’s Alex never loses the stance of memorialist. Surely the intensity of the recollection is clear, but the meditative and self-castigating adult consciousness never fails to censure the actions of the teenager. As Ford’s narrator waxes philosophical, attempting to draw out of the displacement and violence sustaining truths, Banville’s offers poetic assurances to himself, ones that open wider his already yawing sense that the past has left him washed in “ancient light.”

As a narrative, Banviille’s book is more convoluted than Ford’s. It is the third installment in a trilogy involving Alexander Cleave, a retired actor, and his daughter Cass. The shifts in time both measure the effects of the past and indicate the motivation behind the examination of incident and character. Alex’s sexual relationship at fifteen with the mother of his best friend has left him with a sense of unsurpassed emotion overlaid with guilt. He contends as well with the suicide of his daughter, Cass, ten years before the commencement of the narrative, and with the reanimation of his acting career. He comes out of retirement to take a leading role in a motion picture that sets him opposite a beautiful actress who almost inevitably appears to recapitulate the life of his daughter. Finally, there is the history of Axel Vander, detailed at length in the earlier book, Shroud, the philosopher/literary critic whom Alex impersonates in the biopic for which he has been cast. Vander’s sinister presence adds a further touch of desperation and the possibility of redemption to this extraordinarily rich tale.

The interplay, if not downright confusion, of memory and imagination lies at the center of Alex’s recreation of his – and he often hesitates over the term to use to describe his relationship – affair with Mrs. Gray. Again and again he notes the contradictory associations that he remembers as stunningly evident but clearly impossible when he traces significant moments in his time together with his lover. He is unforgiving in analyzing his callow desires and his selfishness, granting only that, giving the circumstances and his age, he could not easily have acted in any other wise.

Incident after incident is rapturously recalled, but that rapture always qualified by admission of failure: potential failure of accuracy in memory, failure to understand himself, and failure to fathom the motivation that drove Mrs. Gray. But the real fascination in the work seems to me Banville’s ease in letting memory take its own way, in the divergences, the filigree touches of his associations, where event triggers further event in that web that is the stage for all out internal dramas. Frankly, I found myself almost abandoned at the end of the tale, no longer able to listen to Alex follow the associative traces of his memories, in their sensuous and metaphor rich meanderings. Given the fullness of the created fictional world summoned by the Cleave trilogy, it is little wonder that Banville won the Booker prize a few years ago.

I began with a comparison of Richard Ford and John Banville, at least in terms of their strikingly similar narrative stances in their two most recent publications. Reading just a page or two of one or the other would indicate the strong differences in narrative voice and tone. Yet in every way both authors give testimony to the power of memory in the imagination.

I would hate to sound like Pauline Kael on Nixon or Peggy Noonan on Obama, but could someone please tell me: who loves Lena Dunham’s much-discussed HBO show Girls? Or maybe someone could tell me if he or she thinks Girls is worthy of all the hype it has received. I’d settle for anyone who thought the show was compelling. It seems as though all the Very Serious Critics* think Girls has touched the Zeitgeist in some important way. It was nominated for an Emmy Award in the Best Comedy category. Dunham has recently inked a $3.6 million deal for a book tentatively titled “Not That Kind of Girl: Advice by Lena Dunham.” Dunham had a “Shouts and Murmurs” piece in the New Yorker. She was featured in an on-line campaign ad for President Obama. There was even a New Yorker profile about her mom’s art. In the last week, there have been articles everywhere discussing the beginning of the next season.

The new season of Girls starts tomorrow night. I’d like to register what I take to be a minority report. I have no doubt that Lena Dunham is talented, but Girls is barely a good show, and it is certainly not a great show. Read the rest of this entry »

Controversy attaches to Oscar nominations as reliably as it does to American actions in combating terrorism (which isn’t to equate the type or degree). Rarer is the case when it overlaps.

The absence of Zero Dark Thirty director Kathryn Bigelow from the nominee list for best director has some wondering whether something else is afoot, something in fact related to the events Zero Dark Thirty depicts. The movie is frank in its portrayal of what was euphemistically termed “enhanced interrogation,” and there’s a scene that has gained some scrutiny for possibly suggesting that torture helped extract key information in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Now the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, whose Democratic members have long contended that torture played no role in revealing clues to bin Laden’s whereabouts, wants to investigate whether Bigelow and screenwriter Michael Boal were used by CIA consultants on the film to advance CIA propaganda—namely, that torture was used and thus is effective. The committee may go so far as to examine records of CIA officials’ contact with the filmmakers.

The scene in question is murkier than the reaction from the senators and other concerned viewers might suggest. If anything, it leaves the impression that the detainee subjected to stress positions, water-boarding, sleep deprivation, and other torture techniques was rendered incapable of lucid response, to say nothing of offering what has come to be known as actionable intelligence. But neither does the movie use the moment to make plain that torture did not work. What the movie does is show torture, as we have come to understand what that entailed in the years that members of the Bush administration were systematically redefining it and lowering barriers to its use.

Yet whether it “worked” or not is beside the point. In depicting torture, the filmmakers had the opportunity to take a moral position on its use. But they didn’t, at least not in any obvious way. Should Bigelow and Boal be faulted for this? Zero Dark Thirty is a creative representation of “actual events.” Its power as a dramatic work lies mainly in the chase—the gains and the setbacks, the details of forensic procedure and surveillance, the persistence of the protagonist (played by best actress nominee Jessica Chastain). There is no character development to speak of; the principles are pose-able action figures programmed to deliver TV-grade dialogue and stare intently into computer monitors. None is shown to be troubled by what the detainees suffer; none questions orders or methods; none contemplates the ramifications, not even expressively in solitary moments. The only thing that bothers anyone is the apparent lack of useful leads.

Fine—let the viewer make his or her own judgment. But the movie does not establish a thematic or aesthetic space in which a viewer can do so. The CIA operative conducting the most brutal of the interrogations—and meting the punishment out directly—is rugged and intelligent, quick with the quips, dashing in his scruffy beard and dusty jeans. He doesn’t brood or agonize. He’s cute, as a female operative notes, and there’s a frisson of sexual attraction between him and the Chastain character (the other female operative character explicitly raises the prospect of  physical intimacy). What is one supposed to make of this? What is one supposed to make of the scene in which he’s near tears beside an empty cage because the monkeys he’s kept as pets have been confiscated? That there’s inner kindness and depth, or that there’s madness? What about when he’s shown later, having returned to Washington, clean-shaven in a shirt and tie, efficiently and articulately contributing in high-level meetings at CIA headquarters? That torturers might also come in suits? That he’s civilized? That really he’s just a simple technocrat whose actions in Afghanistan were solely the result of the unforgiving environment into which he’d been thrust?

Maybe the nature of their work governs against real-life agents possessing agency. But when they’re characters in movies, they really should have some. Their creator cannot take cover behind the flimsy screen of objectivity when so much subjectivity is otherwise at work. A filmmaker devises the dramatic situations that define character, so that the character might act in response to the situation, thus becoming more defined as a character in the process (and yes, that includes morally defined). Whether the filmmakers’ elusiveness on this point is intentional or the result of faulty execution amounts to the same thing: They get to have it every way they want—praise not only for “unflinchingly” portraying violence, but also for providing sexy heroes, riveting action, and a satisfying ending, in that the objective of the actual mission is met. Thus too is the cynically cinematic one.

I reckon we all lay great store in compelling fictional voices. Coleridge summons this up in his Ancient Mariner who fixes the Wedding Guest with “his glittering eye . . . He cannot choose but hear.” The artistry of great story tellers lies in their ability to establish not simply a credible voice, but one which, for want of a better word, enchants. The commonplace (after Hemingway) is that Mark Twain in Huck Finn offered a paradigmatic American voice, ingenuous, colloquial, and convincing.  Twain gives us something authentic: mimetic, unique, and yet representative. To read the critical praise of Richard Ford’s Canada is to be asked to think over the issue of creation of voice. The narrator, Dell Parsons, is a retired sixty-five year old English teacher who recounts the events he lived through in Great Falls, Montana, fifty years before. Dell’s coming of age is unusual: he must deal with the devastating fact that his parents have crossed a significant boundary. To rescue themselves from debts owed to Native Americans, co-conspirators in a stolen beef racket, Dell’s parents rob a bank, are caught and imprisoned. They leave Dell and his twin sister, Berner, alone and about to be placed in the care of the state. Both elude that fate in dissimilar ways. But it is Dell’s voice as much as the story he tells that arrests. The very immediacy of incident that Huck characteristically conveys so also does Dell. Yet the latter has fifty years of hindsight to distance himself from the events that led to his escape into Canada.

Ford deftly balances two perspectives throughout the telling of Dell’s story. The rendering of the incidents of 1960 is as vivid as if recorded at the time. Then effortlessly, the distance lengthens and we have ruminative passages, clearly the result of years of reflection, that attempt to understand the emotions remembered by Dell’s younger self. Ford allows the mature Dell to place them in a context of lessons learned or attempts to approximate universals in all lives.

These sections never lay heavily upon the jarringly juxtaposed transitions Dell must accommodate. He is suddenly removed without explanation to a remote village in Canada, his hopes for an education are frustrated, and he finds himself living in a hovel and forced into menial duties. He services goose hunters who are guests in a hotel owned by Arthur Remlinger, the man who nominally protects Dell. Arthur grooms Dell for his work with the hunters through his surrogate, Charlie Quarters, a riddling, violent half-breed whose menacing presence is off-set by his tutoring of Dell in the arts of digging “goose pits” and dealing with goose carcasses.  The questions that surround the sudden change in his life, the motives of his parents and the designs of Arthur and Charlie make him a cautious and intensely observant presence. His senses are alert to the subtlest nuances of smell and sight. He understands that he is being put to use by Arthur, but to what end he fathoms only after the fact. Again and again, Ford’s mature Dell tries to explain to himself the motivation of his father, of his emotionally distant mother, and of his intimately close but utterly different twin. The reflections are compelling. Take this example quoted in The Guardian’s review:

: “I believe in what you see being most of what there is… and that life’s passed on to us empty. So, while significance weighs heavy, that’s the most it does. Hidden meaning is all but absent.”

Dell never descends to commonplaces. When his tale is complete, when we know what has happened to his mother, father, Berner, Arthur, and Charlie, we know deeply what has happened within Dell. Ford creates for us a partner in a dialogue from whom we seem unable to disengage.

Being the mother of the crucified, risen and glorified savior must be a bit like being a retired pope. Just what exactly are you supposed to do? This, in any case, is something of the challenge that the Irish writer Colm Tóibín, him of The Master fame, has assigned himself this Christmas, though a less Christmassy book it would be hard to imagine. Toibin’s novella, The Testament of Mary, reflects on the events of Jesus’s public life and death from the perspective of a mother who understandably wished it had never happened. Looking back from years later, Mary is in some kind of house arrest or at least close supervision at the hands of Jesus’s followers. They seem not to be the disciples he gathered around him during his life, whom she dismisses as “a group of misfits,” but a more deliberate and dedicated generation who will “thrive and prevail,” while she will die. We are, I think, to assume that they are the evangelists who will make Jesus’ life and death into the stuff of the gospels. Mary, meanwhile, has abandoned the synagogue for the temple of Artemis.
Now, of course, all of this is somewhat shocking to believers, but perhaps only because our access to the historical Mary is through the brief gospel references and the myths that grew up around her in the years of the early Christian community. What Tóibín has taken on himself is answering a question that believers have asked all too rarely, just how was it for the mother of Jesus of Nazareth? If one is not satisfied with the idea that Mary simply believed in her son as the Messiah and Son of God–and even if you go that route, the question of how she coped with being the mother of such a creature still remains–then imagining her coming to terms with the brutal events through which, eventually, perhaps after her death, his followers will have come to believe in his divinity, is all that is left to us. This is what Tóibín has attempted, and much of it is persuasive, if not all. Mary in particular is a figure of gravity and plain humanity in equal measure, loving the memory of her son and wanting him back again, the way he was in the years of his youth. Martha, her sister Mary and especially their poor brother Lazarus are thought-provoking expansions upon their gospel personae, rather than distortions, which may not be the way many readers will feel about the picture of the mother of Jesus herself. And whether or not you buy Tóibín’s implication that the Christ of faith is a product of a generation later than the one that actually knew the historical Jesus of Nazareth, there is no question that the Jesus of the gospels is in part a work of the creative imagination of the evangelists, though it does not seem to me that they need to be as menacing as Tóibín has made them. Unless, of course, they are afraid that Mary will give away the secret of how it all actually was.
While the word “cynical” has been used to describe this novella, I do not think this is accurate. The perspective is that of Mary, disturbed and confused whether or not Jesus was self-deluded or the Son of God, not that of Tóibín. “How it was” and “what it meant” are not confused or interwoven, and while the assumption might be that the author is unconcerned with faith or its absence, this is not the point. Mary is the point, a woman who as a human being seems to disappear from Christian history at the moment of Jesus’s death. The Church that followed may venerate her as mother of God and blessed virgin, but hasn’t ever seemed to care about the question Tóibín explores: “how was it, really, for her?”

Then Herod, when he saw that the had been tricked by the Wise Men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the Wise Men. Thus was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah:

“A voice was heard in Ramah,
Wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
She refused to be consoled,
Because they were no more” Matthew 2:16-17

Each night before I put him in his crib, I sing the “Salve Regina” to my son. We have been performing this little ritual almost every day of his almost six months of life. And, as you might imagine, the words “gementes et flentes/ in hac lacrimarum valle” have taken on a deeper valence the last couple of weeks, and will certainly do so again tonight on this Feast of the Holy Innocents. Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Elie has a cover essay in today’s New York Times Book Review in which he posits that contemporary fiction has lost its faith.

[I]f any patch of our culture can be said to be post-Christian, it is literature. Half a century after Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Reynolds Price and John Updike presented themselves as novelists with what O’Connor called “Christian convictions,” their would be successors are thin on the ground.

So are works of fiction about the quandaries of Christian belief. Writers who do draw on sacred texts and themes see the references go unrecognized. A faith with something like 170 million adherents in theUnited States, a faith that for centuries seeped into every nook and cranny of our society, now plays the role it plays in Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “This Blessed House”: as some statues left behind in an old building, bewildering the new occupants.

It’s not stories of Catholic upbringings or knuckle-wrapping nuns that he’s seeking (“even today, there are as many novels of religious childhood as there are parochial schools and Bible camps”), but work that plumbs the deeper question of belief and how belief “can seize individual lives.” Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” meets this criterion, in Elie’s opinion, as does Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. But not much else, maybe not even Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which Elie calls “representative… set in the past, concerned with a clergyman, presenting belief as a family matter, animated by a social crisis.”

Is Elie overlooking anyone? He mentions Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo, but gives short shrift in my opinion to DeLillo’s story “The Angel Esmeralda,” speaking of it only in the context of Underworld, the huge novel into which it was eventually absorbed, and boiling it down to the scene in which its nun protagonist sees the vision of a murdered girl on a billboard in the Bronx. The standalone version of the story (originally appearing in Esquire and later included in Best American Short Stories) lays much more groundwork for this climactic scene, with belief and faith in action at the forefront, not with what Stuart Dybek might think of as the “primitivism, incantation and metaphor” suggested by a paraphrase of that ending.  Dybek himself is not mentioned in Elie’s essay, nor is Robert Stone (Damascus Gate and A Flag for Sunrise both come to mind). Nor is Richard Bausch’s “Design,” about the relationship between a Catholic priest and the dying pastor of the neighboring Baptist church, or Lydia Davis’s “Pastor Elaine’s Newsletter,” in which a non-believing narrator fastens on to a quote from Paul in Romans: “ ‘I do not understand what I do; for I do not do what I like to do, but instead I do what I hate. What an unhappy man I am.’”

I don’t cite these as a way of suggesting Elie is purposely or neglectfully leaving anyone out, but rather as a way to continue the discussion. Are there writers out there today who make faith central to their fiction? Perhaps like Elie, I don’t read contemporary fiction with the expectation of encountering themes of belief, but when those themes are present I do find myself engaged in a deeper way, if at first only out of surprise. And Elie himself reveals that he is about to “get some skin in the game”: he’s at work on a novel “with matters of belief at its core.”

I suspect that each of us wishes to pick up a book without being overly prejudiced one way or another about its worth.  True, there is little hope of approaching a favorite author without positive expectations. A Booker prize winner is likely to have the same effect. But what happens when an author who is both a favorite and a prize winner publishes a work that you know has been negatively received by critics you admire? How do you give that book a fair reading? Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Sweet Tooth, has provoked mixed reactions.  The day before I started to read it, I heard an off-putting analysis on NPR that slated the work for its attitude, implied and stated, to women. The critic admitted that she felt this way despite being a fan of McEwan’s other fiction. I also read comments about the risks he courted in using the spy/thriller genre and on the surprising twist in the plot, close to the novel’s close, that was reminiscent of a similar ploy in the writer’s Atonement.  Christopher Ricks, in the latest NYRB, wrote a canny and teasing epistolary response, more send-up than put-down.

I was certainly not un-prejudiced as a found myself easily led by the tale, seduced you might say, by its plot and fluent prose. The first person narrator, a twentyish daughter of a bishop, Serena Frome, pronounced as “plume,” studies Mathematics at Cambridge. She is also prepared and then recruited as an agent for MI5 (in the late sixties) by a university tutor who is also her lover. He gives her the historical education necessary for her future role. Her first active assignment has her posing as a literary agent for a foundation whose secret aim is to promote Western values as deterrent to Soviet idealism. Serena is successful, beyond expectations. She not only finds the promising novelist, Tom Haley, (an alter McEwan) required for the project, but she also falls in love with him and he with her. She sponsors his successful career.

Her deception and the suspect nature of her lover’s success ground the conflict. She is both in love with and “running” her author. As a sub-plot there is an awkward relationship with a fellow spy who is Serena’s immediate superior. He in turn forces the novel to its climax.

We sit in with Serena on various meetings with those in the upper echelons of MI5, and McEwan indulges us with some humorous institutional satire. We have to ask if these men are really Cold Warriors? Her own life in London is ably sketched along with her infrequent returns to her family and her meetings with her father, The Bishop. So far, so believable. Realism’s illusion prevails, as does conformity to conventional spy dramas.

There are of course inevitable post-modern ploys: Serena reads some of Tom’s stories and recounts them in digest form in the tale; these recall specific early McEwan pieces. The themes of the stories mirror the central tensions of the larger plot and these parallels are noted in a letter from Tom to Serena. Her mathematical background has her pose for Tom a “counter intuitive” solution to a problem. Serena has the distinct psychological advantage in terms of her superior mathematical skills: she has the power in a relationship that she also controls through deception. Her comeuppance is inevitable, indeed announced on the first page.

Crisis arrives, Serena’s cover appears to be blown, and the novel heads to its peculiar resolution. This occurs through a narrative sleight of hand that depends in turn on a suspension of disbelief that to me threatens the whole work. When a novel thrusts its artifice at the reader and lays on it the burden of character and technical climax, then we have to ask about the tone of the author towards his audience. McEwan is far too skilled a writer to do a patch work job at resolving his plot. That the novel has such an ending seems to signal a great deal about the writer’s regard for his readers. Are we simply being admitted to the great game of story-telling?

Yet, there are so many things to enjoy about the book. The suppleness of the writing and the recreation of the not-too-distant English past make the novel an engaging read. Even the mathematical problem Serena sets for Tom is based on the old TV show hosted by Monty Hall, and gives a reader pleasurable pause in understanding the logic of the solution. Yet I still come away with the sense that I have been involved in an authorial scam, manipulated in a way that is unsettling.  Is the work one of authorial bravado or condescension?

Now all of this relates to the prejudicial comments that I could not avoid hearing or reading before I began the book. Admitting that this is so does little to help evaluate my own judgment. I suppose I would like to hear the opinion of others.

I found myself a few weeks ago recounting a bit of family history to a friend. I tried to give a sense of the four sisters and one brother (along with estranged mother and father) who arrived in New York in the 1890s from Germany. My grandmother and great aunts and uncle, especially to the eyes of a child, were strange and awkward beings, living in an American world never really far from the Old Country, at least in their reminiscences. (I heard only in whispers and never understood what transpired between their father and mother.) Noting this my friend suggested that I might like Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, a novel published in 1934, forgotten and then resurrected in the sixties when it appeared in paperback. As I found out upon reading but a few pages of the work, it justly deserves the status of “classic.” It is an extraordinary achievement.

I do not think I found much by way of shared experiences, at least as I remember them being retold, between my family and that of Roth’s fictional David Schearl’s, but the book took me to a world strangely foreign and strangely familiar: the consciousness of a hypersensitive child. The childhood eye, the lens that magnifies and distorts, and yet often registers intuitively great truths: this is Roth’s great narrative achievement. His text is modernist in its experimental style, unforgettable in its creation of character, and uncannily accurate in conveying sensory detail. The Noonday Press edition offers an essay by an Israeli scholar who explores one of the means that Roth uses to achieve his ends: the interplay of languages. We find the narrative and dialogue in English, which represents in speech Yiddish, the phonetic transcription of the heavily accented speech of the streets, Yiddish itself, and Hebrew and Aramaic in ritual use.  The interplay can make some passages difficult to comprehend (sounding out the phonetic spellings to understand what the character is saying) yet the immediacy of the speech is such that the print fairly yells at times of great stress.

This is a coming of age novel and takes in the attempts at assimilation to the “Golden Land” by David, his father and mother, and his Aunt Bertha. David’s father is an unforgettably violent and emotional man, suspicious of his wife, resentful of his son, and brutal in his treatment of both. The difficulty between husband and wife is introduced in the very first scene (she fails to recognize her husband at Ellis Island as he waits for her arrival), but the source of that difficulty is revealed gradually, through the increasingly comprehending eyes of David, their son. Aunt Bertha is an unforgettable shrew whose arguments with her brother-in-law reach poetry in their vitriol.

The mother, presumably very beautiful and smothering in her protective concern for David, is his emotional anchor; he clings to her, infuriating his father, and occasions his own fear in his furtive observations of the life that goes on about her – in one case, the attentions of his father’s work mate.

The mysteries of sex seem to be linked to dark cellars and “playing bad” with his neighbor’s daughter, and later with the step daughters of his Aunt Bertha. David’s fears are reflected in the building and on the streets of the Lower East Side. At one stage his gets lost in his wondering and is unable to communicate the name of his street to the solicitous policeman – his Yiddish English is too heavily inflected.  The scenes in the cheder, the Hebrew school that he attends, are aching in their portrayal of academic success and the pressures to exonerate himself.

The final section, multi-voiced, collage-like in construction, built around a central monologue that is stream of consciousness, moves in an almost hallucinatory way to climax and doubtful resolution. The loss of consciousness that ends the novel is the “It” that can be called “sleep” of the title. The waking from that sleep is David’s life to come.

Roth clearly had read his Joyce and other great modernists; he adapted their ideas to a unique rendering of immigrant life. The autobiographical elements are undeniable and piercingly conveyed in the consciousness of the child David. And then there is the sense of New York in the early years of the last century – teeming, chaotic, multi-voiced and intrusive. The stark contrast between the isolation of the boy and the throbbing demands of the city creates a tension that resonates with the rising conflicts of characters.

Somewhere, I think, David and his parents might have crossed paths with those German immigrants, Catholic not Jewish, but similarly culture-shocked, making their way to a new life in “the Golden Land.”

Authors call their writing “work” for a reason, and there aren’t many who worked like Philip Roth—or took it as seriously. Use of the past tense is necessary now that he’s officially announced his retirement. Forget his output for the moment; anyone aware of his daily writing routine—long, solitary hours spent standing at a podium because of a bad back—would probably agree the man deserves a break, and on his own terms.

But then there is that output. I was in high school when my mother, who grew up on the Newark-East Orange border and professed to know people who knew the people Roth was writing about, steered me to Goodbye Columbus and The Ghost Writer (I later picked up Portnoy’s Complaint on my own, along with Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson). A college roommate, generally allergic to literary fiction, came back from English class one afternoon unable to stop talking about “The Conversion of the Jews.” When my wife and I first met, she was reading (and recommending) The Professor of Desire, Letting Go, and When She Was Good; she later had a colleague who insisted on the brilliance of Sabbath’s Theater. All of these would have been enough, but American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain, The Plot Against America, and Everyman were still to come. It seems as if there’s always been something new from Roth to read, and when there wasn’t, there was still plenty to go back to: He wrote 31 novels, novellas, and collections over his career, eight since 2000.

And none of it, he notes in a New York Times interview, came easy.

I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration — it’s daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. It’s just like baseball: you fail two-thirds of the time … I can’t face any more days when I write five pages and throw them away. I can’t do that anymore.

The admission is admirable, and the self-awareness preempts the possibility of a misfire like those that have come from other writers (take your pick) in late-career. “If I write a new book it will probably be a failure,” he has said. Roth mentions baseball, and maybe he knows it’s better to go out like Ted Williams with a homer in your final at-bat than, say, like Willie Mays circling under fly balls in a Mets uniform. He is said to be at peace with the decision, happily learning the intricacies of his iPhone and entrusting the estimable Blake Bailey with his biography.

Work is ever-present in Roth’s fiction, in the portrayals of his protagonists’ families and forbears—shop-keepers and ditch-diggers and glove-makers and radio actors. But so is the work of his writer-narrators, like the oft-appearing Nathan Zuckerman laboring to understand the tragedies and injustices one is doomed to suffer in the short course of a lifetime. “Amateurs look for inspiration,” says his Everyman narrator, quoting the painter Chuck Close. “The rest of us just get up and go to work.” Notwithstanding Alice Munro (81), William Trevor (84) and Nadine Gordimer  (89 today), it’s the kind of work that takes its toll, especially when, as D.G. Myers notes, Roth (79) didn’t simply write, he understood “the moral obligation to write well.”

Unburdening himself of that obligation must come as a relief. According to the Times story, Roth has a Post-It note on his computer reading: “The struggle with writing is over.”

Amazon is persisting with its Election Heat Map, which on November 5 showed Mitt Romney leading Barack Obama 59 percent to 41 percent based on the purchase of “red” books versus “blue” books (and which at last check has the post-election gap “narrowed” to 57-43).

D.G. Myers, in one of his last posts at Commentary (he was recently fired after sixteen months as its literary blogger but is still writing here), dismisses the books on both sides as “perishable,” then offers his own lists of acknowledged non-perishables—the authors of which are all dead, canonically white, and mostly male—from Plato’s Republic, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, and Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath on the blue side to Virgil’s Aeneid, More’s Utopia, and Kafka’s The Trial on the red. Why no contemporary writers? Because they’d fall predominantly into the blue category, he says, thanks to “leftist domination of humanities faculties” and the primacy of “self-regard” among those in the writing community. “Anyone who reads very much contemporary literature … knows there are not enough ‘red’ books for a short reading list,” he says, before claiming Saul Bellow, Eudora Welty, and Ralph Ellison—all only recently deceased, relatively speaking—for today’s red team, along with Tom Wolfe.

The Daily Beast’s James McGirk also goes in search of serious literary fiction for Republicans. Among the works he proffers are Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Lame Shall Enter First,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy (“Republicans may enjoy Dos Passos as they watch 12 characters careen through history, each of them eventually wanting to settle down”), and James Ellroy’s American Tabloid.

McGirk’s list shares something with Myers’s, namely that most of the writers on it are no longer writing: “With the exception of Ellroy,” he notes, “the authors mentioned are all dead.” Yet rather than roll out shibboleths like “leftist domination” as an explanation for the preponderance of blue books by living authors, McGirk laments the mutation of a once-familiar political party:

The Republican Party is in a moment of crisis, and there is a difference between being conservative and being a member of today’s right wing. The right has been radicalized by a ridiculous ideology that would be outrageous if expressed in literature. By comparison the liberal left is in an elegiac mode and mourning for an America that used to at least try to include everyone. The Democrats are perhaps the true conservatives, the nostalgic ones. In the year 2012, Republican writers are not publishing much literary fiction of note, as the right has traded in sentimentality for fantasy, spirituality for fanaticism.

And empathy for apathy, if not cruelty: Pre-election polling consistently revealed the perception of an empathy gap between parties (one only slightly narrowed by Mitt Romney’s first debate performance), and even some on the right  have in their post-mortems cautiously ventured that characterizing large portions of the electorate as freeloaders or eventual self-deporters  doesn’t help win hearts or minds. (You can see reflections of the schism in how Myers apportions blue- and red-lit traits: Blue is “a literature of ideals with a strong nose for justice [and] a healthy suspicion of inherited position or class,” while red themes include “decline, responsibility… [and] a commitment to institutions.”)

Cultivating empathy, however, could be as easy as actually reading any of the books Myers and McGirk identify. As Kevin Dutton, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, notes:

Whenever we read a story, our level of engagement is such that we “mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative,” according to [researchers at Washington University]. Our brains then interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses.

Reading a book carves brand-new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world—makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay, “The Dreams of Readers,” “more alert to the inner lives of others.” We become… more empathic.

Old books, new books, it probably doesn’t matter. But if Myers is to be believed, then coming up to speed on contemporary representations of the inner lives of others will require red readers to reach across the literary aisle. The election’s big winner has shown a willingness to do so: In addition to the contemporary blues (Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Robinson’s Gilead) on his Facebook favorites list, Barack Obama includes Moby Dick, which Myers puts firmly in the red column.

Dawn Powell once remarked, “All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.” This quotation has been in my mind lately. Thanks to the presidential election, we’ve been hearing a lot about Ohio over the past few weeks. It has been declared the swing state of all swing states, the bellwether of all bellwethers. If President Obama maintains his slim but consistent lead in the state, then he’ll likely win a second term and secure the continued existence of things like Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank Act. If Governor Romney battles back and takes the state, then he has a good shot of beating Obama in the Electoral College and, afterwards, repealing (and replacing, he claims, but with what he won’t quite say) both health care and financial reform. For a few more days, we are all Ohioans. Read the rest of this entry »

No-holds-barred mysticism rarely finds its way to the contemporary American stage. But this fall, the Folger Theatre, in Washington, D.C., is musing on humanity’s thirst for the divine. Through Nov. 25, the Folger is presenting award-winning director Aaron Posner’s production of “The Conference of the Birds,” a dramatization of a 12th-century Persian poem that draws on the tradition of Sufism, a mystical strain in Islam.

Written by Farid Uddi Attar, who was born around 1145 in what is now Iran, “The Conference of the Birds” chronicles the quest of the earth’s bird population to find a mysterious and all-powerful king. The play version, written by the legendary director Peter Brook in collaboration with Jean-Claude Carrière, centers on the character of the Hoopoe, a wry visionary who’s given to challenging his avian peers with vivid, unsettling and sometimes funny parables. The Hoopoe urges other feathered folk to join him in his quest to meet the Simorgh, an elusive, transcendent ruler. Many birds are reluctant to set off on the grueling journey, preferring to nurse their earthly vanities, preoccupations and fears. But the Hoopoe knows that the birds will find true fulfillment and peace only in the presence of the Simorgh.

“The Simorgh is hidden behind a veil,” the Hoopoe explains. “When he appears outside the veil, even for an instant, his face is as radiant as the sun….As no one can look him in the face, he made a mirror, so that all can see his reflection.”

“What is this mirror?” the Dove asks.

“It’s your heart,” the Hoopoe answers.

As a stage piece, “Conference of the Birds” dates back to 1971, when Brook, who has been interested in creating theater that transcends cultural boundaries, took a group of improvising actors, and a dedication to Attar’s text, on tour through Saharan Africa. (Brook’s cast at the time included the 26-year-old Helen Mirren, who, according to journalist John Heilpern, the tour’s chronicler, had cast her lot with Brook because “she couldn’t decide whether to be a classical actress or a Hollywood movie star.”)

A later incarnation of “Conference of the Birds” opened at the Avignon Festival in France in 1979. (Six years later, Avignon would see the premiere of Brook’s celebrated nine-hour version of the ancient Indian epic “The Mahabharata.”) Since then, the adaptation of Attar’s poem has not exactly been a staple of the Anglo-American stage.

But Posner, who has won multiple Helen Hayes Awards (the D.C.-area equivalent of the Tony Awards) for his directing in recent years, has long been fascinated by the colorful but enigmatic piece.

“I find it beautiful, provocative and genuinely wise,” he observed last week in a phone interview. “And I have never fully understood it and still don’t,” he adds, suggesting that the play’s inscrutability only adds to its appeal.

He first learned about “Conference of the Birds” during high school, when he developed an obsession with the art and theories of Peter Brook. Posner went on to stage the play at The University of the Arts, in Philadelphia, but that experience didn’t exhaust his enthusiasm for the Hoopoe’s quest.

“This is one of the most collaborative things I’ve ever done,” he says. So, “if I were to do it again next week, in a different place, with different people, it would be a different play.” (Among the collaborators he has assembled for the Folger production is composer-performer Tom Teasley, renowned in D.C. for creating and performing—live—breathtakingly resonant and exotic soundscapes for stage productions.)

While religiously inclined people may be drawn to “Conference of the Birds” as spiritual allegory, Posner believes the piece speaks on a variety of levels.

“All of us are on a journey toward some kind of distant goal—love, success, self-knowledge, enlightenment, or any goal, spiritual, practical or aesthetic,” he points out. So, since “Conference of the Birds” is “a core journey story,” he says, “people can relate to it in a lot of different ways— meaningful ways.”

John Connelly, the sage of Regis High School in New York City, once told a class of 30 sixteen year-olds, “Gentlemen, the culture wars are over. We lost.” The class’s discussion was emphatically not about any number of “hot button” social or political issues of the day. In fact, the reading assignment we were discussing described the way nineteenth-century German scholars came to define academic curricula, about what counted as “classics,” and whether literary works written in modern languages were worthy of study. At the time, these seemed to be recondite matters, worthy of academic study, perhaps, but not the sort of thing to keep me up at night. But I’ve come to realize that the discussion those German scholars had was more influential than even they realized. Our entire education system owes a lot more to nineteenth-century Germany than it does to laws written in state or local capitols or to popular magazine rankings. If the culture wars are over, that’s largely because we’ve largely forgotten how history influences who we are.

At least, most of us have. There are people like Brian Daley, SJ and Frank Oakley who haven’t, and we should all be thankful that their scholarly work helps keep alive cultural possibilities that most of us never knew existed. Both scholars have been on my mind lately, and I’ll discuss Daley’s work in this post and Oakley’s in a subsequent post.

Last weekend Pope Benedict XVI awarded Daley and the French historian of philosophy Remi Brague the Ratzinger Prize, which has been described as the “Nobel Prize” in theology. During the ceremony, the Pope said, “Father Daley and Professor Brague are exemplary for the transmission of knowledge that unites science and wisdom, scientific rigor and passion for man, so that man might discover the [true] ‘art of living’.” The Pope also said “It is of precisely such people who, through an enlightened and lived faith render God credible and close to the man of today.” Although some Catholic news services have mentioned the story, I don’t think it has quite gotten its due. (You can see a short article on the prize here, and you can see a video of the awards ceremony here.) Read the rest of this entry »

In a recent post, Dominic Preziosi described how delightful reading James Wood’s reviews in the New Yorker can be. I’m a huge Wood fan, too, and I love many of the things that Dominic seems to love: the “mini-tutorials on fiction,” the clever turns-of-phrase, the joy of seeing Wood size up and then take down an overpraised writer (in this case, Tom Wolfe). What Dominic doesn’t mention, however, is how infuriating it can be to read Wood, even for a fan.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some months after the fact, The New York Review of Books is running an essay by Allan Gurganus to mark the occasion of John Cheever’s one hundredth birthday, which fell on May 27 of this year.

There’s not much that’s new in the piece, which is a mixed bag of anecdote and reflection. Gurganus, long since identified as an object of Cheever’s late-in-life infatuations, shares some tales on that topic, while delighting in the fact that “John Cheever wore size-six Weejuns.” The author, he also says, was “selfish and ruined. He was a child, he was a genius. He was a scamp, he was a man.” Dualities, in other words. Or maybe multitudes. To some degree or another, this has all been documented–in the journals and letters of the man himself, in the memoirs of his children, in the biographies from Scott Donaldson and Blake Bailey, and even, infamously, in a Seinfeld episode.

As for the work, Gurganus notes as many have before him that “Cheever’s fiction celebrates daylight as a form of salvation,” then follows with the observation that, “of course, his pages creating brilliance had to be offset by a contrasting ink-jet blackness, as dark as the pitchiest corner of a Goya masterpiece.” Cheever also “had to believe in God because he knew the devil.” More dualities, which leads Gurganus, perhaps predictably, to conclude by citing the famous final lines of the story “Goodbye, My Brother,” the one in which the narrator, after violently attacking his brother, watches his wife and sister, “naked, unshy, beautiful, and full of grace…  walk out of the sea.”

Granted, it’s unfair to demand a specific kind of tribute. Gurganus is a gifted and successful writer and, after all, he knew Cheever well. But there’s nothing wrong in seeking something that delves a little deeper, that more compellingly explains why people should still read Cheever today. Something like this, maybe, from Ralph C. Wood. Even though it’s taken from a larger piece published thirty years ago in the Christian Century shortly after Cheever’s death, it’s worth resurrecting in the centennial of his birth:

It lies beyond the province of art, I believe, to announce God’s own glad reconciliation of the world unto himself. But Cheever’s restrained and compassionate kind of humanism can provide at least a distant echo of the gospel. At its best Cheever’s fiction serves magnificently to enlarge our lives by giving renewed witness to the primordial human truths, yet without pretending that they are sufficient to deliver us from evil. And in his extraordinary presence as a companionable and forgiving narrator, Cheever offers a literary parable of God’s own unstinted grace. Ours is an era of harsh righteousness among many religionists, and of shrill alarmism among many secularists. Against such alternatives, John Cheever’s modest and charitable humanism is admirable indeed.

“I don’t want to beat it and I don’t want to leave him here alone, and so I quickly do the only thing I can think of and put my arms around him, pull him close to me and hold him tight. Very tight. . . . Arvid loves his father. It has never occurred to me. . . I don’t know if I dare let him go. If I do, I will feel naked and cold and lost in this world.”

An adolescent awkwardly attempts to console a friend devastated by his father’s humiliation at the hands of young thugs. He is unable to express himself, shocked by the profound expression of love; he is vulnerable, cold and without place in the scheme of things should his ferociously tenuous grasp fail. The voice is Audun Sletten’s, the first person narrator of Per Petterson’s It’s Fine By Me, a coming-of-age story set in Oslo in the late sixties and early seventies. Readers unfamiliar with Petterson should note that this is an early work, written twenty years ago, preceding Out Stealing Horses which won Petterson such deserved praise in 2006. His publisher is releasing translations slowly; the present book is the third issued in the intervening years.

Petterson is an author whose voice immediately opens to a distinctive world –  A dark world for the most part in which the chief character most often struggles against family and fate to achieve some sort of respectable life, one that offers a resolution born of resilience..

The author deals elliptically with time, but the foci of the ellipsis anchor the narrative: the death of Audun’s younger brother and the brutality of his terrifying father. His mother puzzles him with her weakness and permissiveness; yet in the end, Audun can accept the man whom she is to marry. He finds extraordinary surrogates, an aged farmer and his wife, who provide the one respite that cushions his wariness.

The sole break in the first person account offers a sudden and disturbing view of the father, ranging as a hunter through the Norwegian woods – a loner, predatory and self-sufficient. His reappearance at disparate times shocks Audun into defensive reaction. Yet he cannot contain the drunken energy (His father has a pistol which he too easily uses.) that this chaotic presence threatens. These scenes are grotesquely unforgettable – a drinking buddy delivers Audun’s father to their home in the bucket of a front loading tractor. Audun retreats as the father rears from his drunken sleep in anger.

Audun’s one friend, Arvid, mentioned above, shares his left wing politics and rebelliousness, demonstrating this in the raising of an outlawed flag in the school yard. The two boys share intrigues and novels, discussing “purple prose” as well as the Vietnam War, and inevitably their dysfunctional families that teeter about them.

Audun’s steady determination, his innate good sense, sees him through the awkwardness that he seems perpetually to court: a terrible beating for the support he gives Arvid, his friendship with an old man to whom he delivers newspapers, his rejection of the advances of a middle-aged woman on that same route.

The novel reaches a hectic peak in the scenes that surround Audun’s work in a printing factory. In the company of his much older workmates, he begins to find a place as he develops real skills in the handling of the dangerous presses.

At every stage, the dialogue, even in translation, is thoroughly  convincing. I could not but be engaged by Audun’s daily struggles and the breadth of what should be the narrow compass of his life. One can only wonder at the delicacy of Petterson’s rendering of the pains of coming of age.

I don’t think that there is a “best place to start” if you haven’t read Petterson. The strength of the writing will inevitably lead you from one book to another. He is remarkable indeed.

Exelon

Hilary Mantel fans already know the news: The author of Wolf Hall and other novels has won the 2012 Man Booker Prize, for Bring up the Bodies (becoming only the third writer, and first woman, to win the award twice). But do they know she also wrote for Commonweal? See her piece from our Summer Reading issue of 2001 here.

I listen to audio books daily. I find them, in part, a type of ear-blinker, a vocal filter for the noise about. They (almost) replace (almost all of the time) the voice of the monologist inside my head – but inadvertence, a disturbance like a falling leaf or an acorn dropping on my shoulder, can muffle the sound track and cause me to try to walk in reverse, as if to play back the narration I have missed. Yes, I listen while I walk: exercise and diversion, along back roads in the tangles of suburbia.  I can associate fiddle head fern with Anna Karenina’s leap into oblivion. Staring at the verge of the road as the novel screeches to climax produces strange links: I walk and think: that is where Anna died, just there by the granite rock blocking the run-off in a dry wash.

In reaction against a surfeit of audio fiction, I chose one of the local library’s Great Courses: Timothy Luke Johnson’s Greco-Roman Moralists, largely because I recognized the lecturer as a frequent contributor to Commonweal. I was not disappointed and now find signals of Cicero’s “On Duty” and Plutarch’s Moralia among the shedding beeches and fallen oak leaves.

To struggle up a steep hill conscious of the puffing effort needed to mount the summit has all the more relevance when set against classical admonitions to practice, repeatedly, virtuous acts and so approach a moral summit.  Professor Johnson lectures enthusiastically, declaring at one stage that he is more a follower of Epictetus than of any other philosopher – and he makes a strong case for the moral vision and practice of his mentor. Perhaps more striking are the lectures on Plutarch in which he contrasts the world view of this thinker, especially as regards the conduct of the virtuous life, with the vacuity of so many of us who blindly follow the promptings of modernity. The concluding lecture, “The Missing Page in Philosophy’s Story,” makes an interesting case for the role of philosophy in later antiquity (stronger than at any other time, before or since in the West) and discusses why so few university courses in philosophy mention Musonius Rufus, Dio Chrysostom, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch or Philo of Alexandria – the focus of his study. Modern courses in philosophy and the history of philosophy are about ideas and theories, not about living the just life. Professor Johnson’s authors directed their attention to daily life and the cultivation of virtue. That they were so prolific, and that they were representative of many more such writers, indicates the popularity if not the influence of their moral treatises.

I wish only that I could retain the information he presented if not follow the moral guidelines he reviewed, so clearly, in these ancient writings.  Twelve hours of lecture contain a great deal to grasp, so I was again pleasantly surprised when someone suggested that I follow the course with reading Alain de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy, a work that treated similar themes.

This is not an academic study but a knowledgeable book that wears considerable learning lightly; de Botton poses various crises in life and considers the “consolations” philosophers might offer. He is particularly strong on Epicurus, redeeming the much maligned philosopher from charges of excess and luxury – this a helpful complement to Johnson’s treatment.

By far the greatest warmth in his consideration is generated in the discussion of Montaigne. de Botton quotes so liberally from his sources that his text takes on the liveliness of his (translated) original. The one image I shall always keep is that of Montaigne’s ceiling, whose beams were decorated by painted apothegms. The fifty-seven succinct  warnings that he had inscribed testified to the limitations of philosophy and the pretension of human reason. Stern antidotes for one who was so learned in the classics.

I have to reflect on the strange and wonderful woodland company I keep, as I try to avoid reckless pickup trucks and precarious road shoulders. The disconnect between the lively discussions I am graced to hear and the at times threatening environment in which I walk proves happily symbolic: the path of virtue and the vicissitudes of life. If so simple an exercise as a morning walk could be the just way.

Among the pleasures of reading James Wood in the New Yorker are the mini-tutorials on fiction woven into his critiques. A case in point is his piece on Tom Wolfe’s new novel, featured in the current issue. It’s highly entertaining as a review (it really is), but the take-down also comes with instructive examples and a warning on the danger, in fiction, of trusting too much in the power of fact.

Of course, many novelists have done research, or have simply slipped chunks of witnessed or remembered reality into their books. But often their swerves away from research are more interesting than their fidelities… .

The important details, the ones that make fiction’s intimate palpability, cannot simply be scooped up off the sidewalk. Tolstoy, praised as a realist by Tom Wolfe, took the germ of ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ from an actual story about a judge in a nearby town who had died of cancer; but one of the most beautiful moments surely came from Tolstoy’s imagination—or rather, from his patient loyalty to Ivan’s invented reality [emphasis added]. I mean the moment when Ivan Ilyich, lying on his couch, in great distress and loneliness, remembers ‘the raw and wrinkly French prunes of his childhood, their special taste, and how his mouth watered when he got down to the stone.’

Too much faith in the force of reality, says Wood, “results in weak fiction and forceful facts.” Information is imparted, but little else—only “the expected detail, the properly stamped sociological receipt.” But the French prunes, Wood says, “come out of nowhere, and surprise us with their singular surplus….”

It’s not just about selecting the right detail. It’s also about resisting the impulse to flood the page with data (the make and model of the cell phone, the vital stats—height, weight, hair color—of the protagonist) in the mistaken belief that it will ensure authenticity or verisimilitude, and that by simple abundance will something essential be conveyed.

Wood’s “singular surplus” sounds a little like Flannery O’Connor’s belief in the power of a properly chosen object to function at both the literal and symbolic levels, “in depth as well as on the surface,” and how just such an object “increases the story in every direction.” She also advised on how to dispense information: “To say that fiction proceeds by the use of detail does not mean the simple, mechanical piling-up of detail. Detail has to be controlled by some overall purpose, and every detail has to be put to work for you.”

That purpose apparently isn’t evident in Wolfe’s novel, which is set in Miami. But let Wood make the point himself: “It is useless to feature Russians in your novel, just because they exist in Miami, if this is how you render their speech: ‘You vant to share zees studio?—eet’s yours, my fren!’”

The most recent Commonweal features an article by Professor Joseph Amar about the fate of Syrian Christians in the current violence in that country. In a short space, Amar discusses the political situation of contemporary Syria and the relationship between the Syriac churches and the West. Amar also gives a brief introduction to St. Ephrem the Syrian, who is arguably the greatest Syriac poet and theologian and one of the greatest of all Christian poets and theologians. (Only Gregory of Nazianzus and Dante can claim to be as important as theologians and poets.)

I was introduced to Ephrem and to the Syriac language in graduate school, and so I thought I might offer a few things for those intrigued enough by Amar’s article to learn more about this vital Christian tradition.

First, here is a brief video of Professor Sebastian Brock, the foremost authority on Syriac literature in the English-speaking world. Here Prof. Brock discusses some aspects of Syriac theology and spends some time talking about Ephrem and St Isaac the Syrian.

Sebastian Brock on the Syriac tradition

Second, I hope that Verdicts readers will want to pick up a volume that Prof. Brock translated, St. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise. This volume is part of St. Vladimir Seminary Press’s Popular Patristics series, which is edited by the very talented Prof. Fr. John Behr, himself an Orthodox priest and expert on second-century Christianity, especially Irenaeus of Lyon. These volumes are pocket-sized and relatively inexpensive, and they somehow thread the needle between being resources for scholars and laypeople alike. Each volume is, in its own way, a spiritual treasure.

That is certainly the case for Hymns on Paradise. The volume contains fifteen hymn-homilies that Ephrem gave on Genesis 2-3. In these hymns, Ephrem links creation to judgment, the old covenant to the new, and Adam to Christ. As Prof. Brock notes (and this is a point Prof. Amar made in his article), “because Ephrem’s theology is not tied to a particular cultural or philosophical background, but rather operates by means of imagery and symbolism which are basic to all human experience … his theological vision, as expressed in his hymns, has a freshness and immediacy today that few other theological works from the early Christian period can hope to achieve” (p. 40). Brock’s introduction to the volume offers an excellent introduction to Ephrem’s theology, his verse, and his context.

Let me offer just a taste of one of Ephrem’s homilies. (This is the second stanza of the first homily in the volume.)

I took my stand halfway
between awe and love;
a yearning for Paradise
invited me to explore it,
but awe at its majesty
restrained me from my search.
With wisdom, however,
I reconciled the two;
I revere what lay hidden
and meditated on what was revealed.
The aim of my search was to gain profit,
the aim of my silence was to find succor. (p. 78)

The space between awe and love is the space that all Christian theology should inhabit. Ephrem’s theology has much to teach contemporary Christians about how they can respond to the invitation that comes from yearning for Paradise. Thanks to this volume, we can learn from Ephrem’s meditations, profit from his search, and find succor, not in his silence, but  in his words.

Condition of England novels were a recognized genre in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Works such as Hard Times captured the social tensions of the country, sampling the spectrum of class, industry, education and mores. The subtitle of Martin Amis’s Lionel Asbo, is tellingly, “State of England.” Amis presents the novel in the tradition of Dickens, Gaskell and Disraeli. The title character, the monstrous Lionel Asbo, appears in hyperbolic form as the state of English society and culture. His life’s history and his interaction with authority, upper classes and particularly the media propel a satiric and raucously funny attack on modern Britain.  He is the monster “other” by which we know what we are and are not.

By chance, as I was reading Lionel Asbo., I found myself starting another new English novel The Facility by the author Simon Lelic. As is Lionel Asbo, the book is a satire, but in the Orwellian dystopian mode with, as a cover blurb notes, a mixture of Kafka. The monster in this story is the state, a repressive near-future regime which has through legislation, careful monitoring, and thuggish brutality, scuppered human rights and the free press. There is no lightness or humor in the work, only an ending that pulls away from the punch of final despair.

Two visions, two perspectives, and two very different experiences in reading: one drives with a comic energy into and through grotesque dissipation (Lionel wins 140 million pounds in a lottery), the other questions anxiously and paces towards answers that are never sufficient. One world ends in a bang, the other in a whimper.

In Amis’ work, the target of the satire is the loss of heritage, the overweening importance of money and the rapacious attacks of a sensationalist press. Once Lionel is made infamous by wealth, he attracts the paparazzi and the deference of his titled lawyer and agents. In the fluidity of such social evaluation, Lionel seeks the security of prison where he knows where he is and who he is. Internment then is an affirmation of the self in a system that all too often knows no boundaries.

The Facility however uses prison as the great threat to individual identity, the last stop before obliteration of the self for the “good of the state.” Arthur Priestley, a divorced dentist, is suddenly and inexplicable arrested, beaten in interrogation, and then interned. The menacing “Facility,” holds people who like Arthur have been snatched, drugged and transported to this hospital-come-prison.  Their crime is infection, or supposed infection, by a virus much like HIV but more virulent and with no known treatment. The remnants of public accountability for the actions of the state (and a lapse of secrecy) insure that there are no survivors to testify to ill treatment. Warders and “patients” alike succumb.

Both works focus on the innocence of children and their threatened victimization: Lionel seeks to take vengeance on the child of his nephew Des for the incestuous relationship Des had with Lionel’s mother ; Philip’s son narrowly escapes death in an arranged accident intended to stop investigation of Philip’s disappearance.  The waywardness of society directly exposes the next generation to danger; we abandon our future.

Jonathan Swift once quipped that satire is frequently most appreciated by those whom it targets (and never improves). One can enjoy Amis’s energy, invention, and impossibly clever dialogue (What language does Lionel speak?) but Lelic seems to stagger a reader with the force of his conspiracy theory. There is no simple draw to the call: are we to be done in by runaway indulgence that is guaranteed by fame and money, or are we to lose what individuality we have through abuse of government power? Amis’ book has the strength of energy and comic invention that might suggest the gallows laughter that is never quite heard in The Facility.

Standing back from both works, I have to wonder which recent novels by American authors might offer readers something like the “Condition of the United States”? Any suggestions for a reading list?

It’s been a while since I left a movie theater scratching my head but The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest product, did it for me. This movie has received a lot of plaudits for the two central performances by Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Master himself and Joaquin Phoenix as the alcohol-raddled victim of post-traumatic stress disorder who somehow blunders into the closed family world of Lancaster Dodd (the Master) and is taken on as an evidently pro bono project. The film also looks beautiful and I didn’t find the two and a half hours dragging much if at all. But the question you’re left with is a big one: what is The Master about? Is it indeed a thinly-veiled account of the early life of L. Ron Hubbard whose Scientology cult had and has much in common with “The Cause,” as Dodd and his family refer to their movement? Or is it primarily a look inside the mind of Freddie Sutton and the futility of all the efforts, his own or those of others, to help him rejoin society? At the beginning of the story we see him in the Pacific theater of war, already sick from the deadly mix of various alcohols that he distills and imbibes, and part of a group of similar casualties who are being told by an officer that they will be helped to take up a useful role in society in some humble capacity or other. The next thing we know he boards a pleasure boat which just happens to be where the Master’s daughter is about to be married and Dodd and Sutton strike up an acquaintance, though how it came about we never actually see. Some of the details of the story incline us to think that it is all a fantasy in Sutton’s head, and surely some at least of it is. But then, why would a drunk’s delirium produce a convincing version of an L. Ron Hubbard-type religious charlatan? Some at least of this part of the story seems like a superior kind of bio-pic. Then there is Dodd’s wife played chillingly by Amy Adams. But why is she seven months pregnant for most of the movie and then in England at the end of the movie, no longer so? And why in the odd English castle that Dodd seems to have made his headquarters do the students appear to be a mix of schoolchildren and policemen?
[Spoiler alert!]
I don’t mean to be carping about a movie that holds your attention by the sheer power of the two principal actors, though I suspect that there is either a little sloppy editing or, more likely, some unfair obfuscation. In the end, perhaps, the story itself is less interesting than the interactions between the characters. It draws a fine picture of a cult, with that enticing mixture of extreme religious baloney on the one hand and a warm and supportive camaraderie on the other, but this has been done before. It also suggests that some battlefield trauma may just be too difficult to overcome entirely, though Freddie seems to make some progress. How much or how little may be indicated in the final scene where, having sex with a compliant English woman he has picked up in a pub he interrupts their pleasure to put her through a little verbal therapy he recalls from the techniques of the Cause. He’s going to cope, maybe, but he’s never going to be normal. Dodd on the other hand, whom Hoffman plays as a kind of Hemingway character complete with shotgun and handgun and motorcycle and beard, copes only too well in his tightly-wound persona, at times ingratiating and at others full of rage. In the end he gives Freddie the choice of going or staying. Perhaps I’ll stay in the next life says Freddie, and walks out a free man. Mostly.

When a book advertises itself as a police procedural and a psychological thriller, you can assume that you will be taken, step by step, through an investigation of a crime and an exploration of a criminal mind. Who-done-it? is not displaced by aberrant psychology, but the latter often provides a focus for analysis, sometimes ghoulish. The novelist can give access to the psychology of the criminal in many ways: revelation by the unnamed perpetrator interleaved in the narrative, a series of letters, diary entries, or direct interior monologue. Tanya French in her acclaimed, Broken Harbour, reverses the focus of the psychology. Her first person narrator, Detective Michael Kennedy, unravels the knotted workings of his consciousness as he methodically (and at times mistakenly) works out the sequence of events that has led to murder. In some sense, the motivation of the murderer, while clearly developed, is not at all as convincing or as interesting as that of the protagonist,.

I must say that I listened to the book, which is an experience that deserves its own comment. Accepting that, the skill of the reader, an Irish actor called Stephen Hogan, made the urgency of Kennedy’s repressions a function of skillful intonation and pacing. He created a commanding voice, convincing in his anguished dealing with demons. In a way, Kennedy’s pain over his mother’s suicide and his sister’s bi-polar strains outweigh his methodical but halting accumulation of evidence. True, he shares with so many noir detectives the obligatory failed marriage, troubling relationships with his family, and a work driven intensity that shatters his mental and physical health, but the character is in no sense stock or hackneyed.

The characterization involved in his relationship with his junior partner is complex, and ultimately tragic. French also manages to convey the obsessions that push Kennedy into the brutal interrogation techniques that she has him deploy. Most disconcerting is his direct address to his audience in what amount to self-definition. Kennedy wears many masks.

There is no end of suspense in the story. French is particularly successful in limiting the information we receive about the crime and the testimony of the witnesses. Spot-the-Killer becomes a proper collaborative act, reader and detective, working through the clues. Of course, the narrative is conducted with hindsight; Kennedy signals wrong turns or deceptions in the gathering of information and so undercuts any self-congratulation in the apparently easy solution to the mystery of the murders.

The novel’s success is also a function of French’s uncanny ability to create a sense of place; the ghostly and sinister setting in an abandoned housing estate along the Irish Sea anchors pervasive loss – of hope, of promise and of the ties of family. The Celtic Tiger roared once and mauled in its passing a generation who thought they were doing everything right. When good intention and bad credit left them unemployed and hopeless, in Auden’s words, “the crack in the tea cup opens, A lane to the land of the dead.”

The book is in no way pretentious, but it offers an autopsy not only of the bodies of the victims but also of Irish society. The Emerald Isle in this novelist’s vision offers no green valleys and welcoming pubs. Foreclosure notices, tacky, jerry-built houses, and internet fueled isolation are the factors that lead to despairing murder.

Compliance is the second feature from director Craig Zobel, and when it was shown at Sundance earlier this year, audience members reportedly booed and walked out. The concession worker at the theater where I recently saw it told me she hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to watch it, and, while no one at the showing I attended booed or walked out, there was a lot of nervous whispering and disbelieving laughter, which soon enough turned to grim silence. Sitting through Compliance is an ordeal, and it’s meant to be.

The movie forces the audience to watch what happens when people unquestioningly follow orders, even when it results in harm to others. That Compliance is a “small” film is what makes the subject matter even more powerful. The setting is familiar and intimate: a fast-food restaurant on a busy winter Friday, manned by a skeleton staff of teenagers overseen by a harried middle-aged manager (Sandy, amazingly played by Ann Dowd).

Routine is broken when a caller identifying himself as a police officer asserts that one of the workers (Becky, played by Dreama Walker) has stolen from a customer, then deputizes Sandy to detain Becky and initiate an interrogation in the restaurant office, out of the sight of other employees and diners. The accused girl responds with increasing disbelief to the increasingly degrading demands of the unseen officer, relayed and carried out by the pliant Sandy: This is stupid, Becky says; there’s no way it can keep going like this. But it does, and then it goes on some more, and then just when you think it has to stop, it goes even farther—with other employees dragooned into taking part while the late-afternoon rush kicks into gear on the other side of the door.

Unadorned writing and tight direction keep the main questions prominent: Why would ordinary people let themselves be talked into taking things to such lengths? Why wouldn’t they rise up and say “stop”? The answer is that ordinary people are often only too willing to comply. Psychological studies like the infamous Milgrim obedience experiment, in which test subjects readily inflicted pain on innocents if the instructions came from an authority figure, demonstrate it. We like to think we’d be brave enough, or aware enough, or smart enough to do the right thing in such instances, but maybe we’re not.

Few in Compliance are, least of all the hapless Sandy. Unsure, indistinctly middle-aged, clad in the color-coordinated scarf and blouse mandated by corporate for its female store managers, she’s a ready mark for the smoothly manipulative presence on the phone. She’s already having a crappy day—unruly staff, ungrateful regional supervisor, no pickles or bacon in the freezer. So she’s eager to help, hungry for praise and validation, and blind not only to Becky’s degradation but her own.

Amid the many unsettling moments is a low-key, single-shot scene outside the restaurant. Instructed by the voice on the phone to move important evidence to her car, Sandy sets out over the cracked parking lot, skirting piles of dirt-encrusted snow to reach her salt-grimed Subaru (model year 2001, the film makes sure to note). A discarded Styrofoam cup skitters across her path, but she’s oblivious—she needs to hurry back to monitor the prisoner. Yet after depositing the evidence in the front seat as instructed, she stops to remove papers and cups littering the passenger side, lest she leave a bad impression for the officer arriving to retrieve it. It’s an arresting segment, providing a momentary respite from the misery unfolding inside but also a sadly revealing glimpse of the neediness that makes Sandy so willing to help, so eager to please, so easy a mark. People who are hurting may prove more capable of hurting other people, especially if their actions are met with approval every step of the way. This is what gives Compliance such relevance and so much more immediacy than a psychological study, and what makes it work as art.

Unquestioning compliance leads inexorably to complicity, and the locked office of a generic fast-food restaurant will spur thoughts of Abu Ghraib, concentration camps, and other arenas of atrocity. Sandy doesn’t make these associations; in the end, explaining to another character that she was simply doing what she thought was expected of her, she blurts: “It all seemed normal to me.” Of course: She was only following orders. There’s a beat, and then she switches to the topic of the weather—much less troubling to ponder since it involves no introspection.

John Williams’s Stoner, published in 1965 and reissued by New York Review Books in 2003, is a strange work. It’s a campus novel that, unlike many of its predecessors in the genre, refuses to devolve into farce or caricature. In the world of Stoner, academics are quirky and petty, but they are never merely quirky, never merely petty; in their mixture of flaws and strengths, they resemble actual human beings. It’s a narrative with few moments of obvious drama—a professional scorning here, a failed love affair there, but that’s about it, and even these moments are met not with wailing and gnashing of teeth but with quiet, sad resignation. The novel is written in a style so lucid that it’s easy to dismiss as flat (though it isn’t, at all), and it’s about a state, Missouri, that has received little literary attention since the days of Mark Twain. Read the rest of this entry »

Hoo boy. Having inevitably wondered when I read Cloud Atlas how it could ever be made into a movie, I thought I might find a clue in the trailers available now online. From the original six-minute clip and its two-minute reboot, I think I have–and the prospects aren’t pretty.

Author David Mitchell himself enthused in a recent New Yorker piece that “this could be one of those movies that are better than the book!” (the three-member creative team was somewhat less committal). But the music swelling behind big thoughts earnestly expressed—plus the ever-annoying sound of Tom Hanks intoning in his guileless meaningfulness—don’t bode well for the picture in its final form. Nor does the visual mishmash with its heaping helping of long-familiar mainstream movie references—The Matrix meets Inception meets Lord of the Rings meets Master and Commander, plus some Forest Gump and Cast Away and, hmm, Avatar, mixed in, and, oh, because it’s still here in the cabinet, a little of that old Ivory-Merchant staging for esthetic finish. What looks to be missing is any trace of the dark humor that seeped up now and then from the pages of the novel, or any signs that the filmmakers considered treating the source material with anything but the seriousness with which some feel serious writing must be engaged, regardless of how the writing might engage its audience. Thus nuance and complexity look as if they’ll succumb to bombast and inch-deep meditations on death, life, birth, and other things like that. What a surprise.

But wait! They’re only trailers, and trailers are marketing devices, so maybe the marketing team is to blame for the mess. Or maybe Cloud Atlas can’t be made into a movie. Only a full and fair viewing, come its release in October, will tell.

‘Cloud Atlas’ extended trailer

‘Cloud Atlas’ edited trailer

One might quip that A Hologram for the King is a “state of the States” novel except for the fact that it is set in Saudi Arabia – and in the mind of the book’s protagonist, Alan Clay. David Eggers’ new novel, has a thematic force that places Clay between Willie Loman and Vladimir and Estragon. He has all of the failed salesman’s dogged pursuit of success and the two clowns’ deferred expectation. Much of the story unfolds in a new city in a barren part of Saudi Arabia, echoing in its physical condition the surreal distortions of Beckett’s play.

To be sure, this is the globalized world of outsourced manufacturing and multinational corporations. Alan, at fifty-four, is old enough to have learned the salesman’s trade from mentors with the same techniques as those who taught Willie. But to his chagrin, Alan has participated in the demise of American manufacturing, Schwinn bicycles in particular, unable to stop the forces that moved production to places of cheapest labor. The IT contract that Alan is attempting to sign with King Abdullah on behalf of Reliant, a huge American communications firm, will, he thinks, be his remaking. The commission will clear his debts, reinstate his college age daughter’s respect, and placate the carping criticism of his father.  So Alan finds himself, the head of a sales team that includes three young technicians with whom he shares little, sequestered in a tent outside the administration building of KAEC (King Abdullah Economic City, pronounced “cake’) waiting for the king. Their hologram technology takes video conferencing to another level: a participant thousands of miles away can appear to walk about the stage in the tent. Alan is certain, or tells himself that he is, that he will make the sale to the King.  And so he waits, and has opportunity to explore the kingdom in the limited way allowed to foreigners.

Eggers offers us a measure in Alan: American enterprise in a highly competitive and sophisticated global market. The old sales techniques don’t work. Wi-Fi signals mean more than personal connections, and Alan is beset with memories of his Massachusetts neighbor walking irrevocably to his death by hypothermia in the frigid pond that abuts their houses. “KAEC,” in its futuristic aspirations, both inspires Alan’s hopes for millennial change and inevitably takes him by comparison back to the losses of his past: divorce, failure as a manufacturer of bicycles, and as a father. He has ambiguous and confused liaisons with an attractive European bookkeeper and then with a Saudi female doctor who removes a troubling cyst from Alan’s neck. Identity, both professional and personal, become key issues.

One can’t help but like Alan. His swings in mood, his corrosive honesty in self-examination (best exemplified by the steak knife he takes to his cyst), and his openness to hope and fresh experiences weigh happily against the beaten self-doubt that his waiting for the King seems always to summon.

The relationship Alan forms with his driver, a young Saudi who has spent a year in the States, also allows Eggers to explore some of the contradictions of the Kingdom. Their friendship seems to peak when Alan accompanies his driver to his remote family village. He believes he has crossed cultural divides in the ease of his relationship, only to evoke near tragedy at the peak of his fellow-feeling.

About him Alan finds unresolved relationships with women, tortured attempts (by letters) to reconcile himself and his daughter to a wayward mother, and his inability to placate his unrelenting union-organizing father. Lost potential, “ what-might-have-been,” and Alan’s determined attempts to fulfill the American dream blister into torpor in the unrelenting Saudi sun. What virtual reality his hologram may provide is displaced by the simple fact of waiting for the king.

Critics often note the clean and precise prose Eggers commands; his tone, somehow both ironic and compassionate, makes us care about Alan’s fate. His driver at one point remarks, “I am trying to remember why I like you.” That about sums up the effect of this canny and compelling work.

Philip Carey is so prolific and assured a writer that any new work of his must be a source of happy expectation. His latest novel, The Chemistry of Tears, does not disappoint. As he did in his early Oscar and Lucinda, Carey recreates Victorian times and shows himself effortlessly at ease with that world – and with an eye focused on outsized characters and situations. But this is also a contemporary novel, one that works by parallels. The book opens in 2010 with an horologist, Catherine Gehrig, overcome by grief at the loss of her lover and co-worker in The Swinburne, a fictional London museum. The Victorian narrative is the tale of Henry Brandling, a gentleman who is beset by worry over his tubercular son and who commissions an elaborate automaton in hope of stimulating the boy’s “magnetic agitations.”  As a remedy for Catherine’s grief, Eric Croft, a friend and her supervisor at the Swinburne, gives her a task – the restoration of Brandling’s mechanical swan. The latter’s notebooks, recording his trip to Germany and ultimately his securing the skills of the master craftsman, Herr Sumper, offer the second narrative, one that Catherine reads obsessively and with clear projection of her own emotional loss.

Late in the novel, Eric consoles Catherine by giving her a precise formula for the chemistry of tears; according to Croft, tears provoked by emotion (as opposed to physical irritation) contain, among other compounds, a natural pain killer, one that can cushion even her grief. And in that juxtaposition, the polysyllabic roll of chemical taxonomy set against the crushing experience of grief, we have the polarity that is central to the novel: the certainties of science and the ambiguities of human life, the organic and the material, the inventor and the machine.

It is also Eric Croft who provides Catherine with an assistant, a beautiful graduate student Amanda Snyde, whose mental imbalance makes Catherine’s recovery more difficult. Amada challenges Catherine with her own pursuit of Brandling’s revelations; she is also dating Catherine’s deceased lover’s elder son.  Amanda’s deep unease over the pollution caused by the BP oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, further underscores the novel’s focus on the very mixed benefits of man’s mechanical achievements.

Catherine’s narrative is grief in over-drive: alcohol sodden, embittered and histrionic, yet undeniably real. She is at once angry with and grateful to Eric for his “gift” of the automaton; she is also suspicious and deceptive. (She breaks protocol and secrets Henry’s notebooks out of the museum to read at her leisure.) Her counterpart, Henry, similarly emotional, lives at Sumper’s beck and call, desperate to hasten the completion of the machine in order to offer his dying son the stimulus to live. But his emotional and physical violence – he seems always to be striking or threatening Sumper – breaks across his despair over saving his son.

Carey’s ease in creating the mid-Victorian world of both a remote German village and the dirty metropolis of London (Sumper travels to Britain to pursue his craft as clockmaker) is remarkable. Sumper, outsize in body and emotion, embraces an eccentric nobleman, Lord Cruickshank (a fictionalized Charles Babbage?), a genius and inventor, and attempts to gain Prince Albert’s approval and funding of Cruickshank’s mechanical computer. (To do this he pole vaults into Buckingham Palace landing most accurately in the sleeping Prince’s bedroom!)

Sumper’s sparring with Brandling, and Brandling’s suspicions of the master craftsman, constitute the brilliantly eccentricity of Carey’s characterization. What is the source of Carey’s invention?

This novel carries its weighty themes with little effort: Catherine’s attempts to deal with death in her life by reanimating life-in-death moves easily to the consideration of mechanics of the body and the limitations of invention. The mystery of tears of grief lingers in the chronicle of the dead Brandling’s love for his son and in Catherine’s living memory of her lover. Above all it is the energy of the novel, the imaginative drive that suggests what can survive through artifice. And the novel lives on, almost haunting the imagination.