Onward

Schultz, Howard. Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life Without Losing Its Soul. New York: Rodale Books, 2011.

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Back in 2004-2005, I was a broke intern earning $7o per week at a publisher in New York City.  As such, one of the sole methods of entertainment available to me involved walking around the city for hours at a time, as walking was free.  Then, for Christmas, a family member and a co-worker each gave me a Starbucks gift card.  Armed with someone else’s money, my walks now had a destination, and I set out to visit a different Starbucks each time I used the cards.

This was back in the heyday of Starbucks’ expansion, when it was not unusual to see two Starbucks stores across the street from each other in New York.  This was after Starbucks founder Howard Schultz had stepped down as ceo (ever the democratic leader, Schultz prefers not to capitalize titles within his company) and moved into the less involved role of chairman.  This was after Schultz’s hand-picked successor and friend had retired from the ceo position, at which point a former Walmart executive took over, driving Starbucks to expand its presence and multiply its locations at an unprecedented rate.  Schultz’s 2011 book, Onward, is the tale of this period and of Schultz’s surprising decision, in 2008, to return as ceo of Starbucks in order to refashion and redirect the company he holds dear.

When Schultz regained the reins of Starbucks in 2008, the company’s stock price was plummeting, and the number of customers visiting its stores was spiraling downward.  Difficult cost-cutting methods had to be implemented — closing 600 under-performing or poorly located stores, laying off employees, re-engineering the supply chain for maximum efficiency, and abandoning new products that weren’t justifying the cost of their production.  But, unlike many corporate executives, Schultz recognized that layoffs alone do not provide a sustainable means of attaining profits.  He sought to motivate and reinvigorate his remaining employees through expanded training, technological updates at the stores, and a conference in New Orleans that enabled employees to perform community service in an area recently ravaged by hurricanes.  Schultz reexamined and improved the atmosphere of Starbucks stores, eliminating smelly cheeses and grinding fresh coffee on site to improve stores’ smells and designing shorter espresso machines so that baristas could more easily engage with customers.  He also emphasized product quality, retraining baristas in the art of drawing espresso shots, introducing innovative products like Via instant coffee, and populating Starbucks menus with healthier alternatives to frappuccinos.

As one might expect, the tone of Onward is undeniably corporate, despite Schultz’s decision to label his employees “partners.”  When he talks of corporate retreats organized by consulting firms that provide each attendee with his or her own iPod containing Beatles tunes, or when he casually mentions biking around Hawaii with the CEO of Dell, a palpable sense of privilege emerges that at times feels alienating.  Nonetheless, Schultz’s care for his business and his compassion for the coffee growers and employees that make it possible come across as genuine.  Throughout Onward, Schultz makes it clear that atmosphere — the way Starbucks locations smell, feel, and function as social and emotional spaces in customers’ lives — and ethics — ensuring that farmers are paid a fair price for their crops, providing health insurance to both full- and part-time employees, matching employees’ retirement contributions even in the midst of the recession — are just as important as the bottom line when it comes to running — and saving — a business.

As tempting and convenient as it would be to label Starbucks the Walmart of coffee, the corporate soul-killer of the coffee-drinking experience, the company and its ceo have made enormous and admirable efforts to avoid becoming that.  I appreciate that not all Starbucks locations are exact reproductions of one another, that the Starbucks at Union Square retains its WPA-era tile floor.  I appreciate the friendliness and efficiency of baristas who are happy to have health insurance, especially the ones in New York that would give me a free drink if I had to wait longer than four minutes for my order.  But most of all, I appreciate a good cup of coffee, which Starbucks provides every time.  I have no problem getting behind a company that produces a good product and treats customers, employees, suppliers, and investors fairly.

The Virtue of Selfishness

Rand, Ayn. The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. New York: Signet, 1964.

 Those who assert that “everyone is selfish” commonly intend their statement as an expression of cynicism and contempt.  But the truth is that their statement pays mankind a compliment it does not deserve.

- Nathaniel Branden, “Isn’t Everyone Selfish?”

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The challenge to the Affordable Care Act argued before the U.S. Supreme Court this past week was not, in fact, an argument about health care.  Rather, it was an argument about what constitutes the ethical and political concept of “rights” and the lengths to which a government may go to enforce those rights.  Are we, as Americans, and as humans, entitled to health care, and can the government, in order to ensure affordable access to health care for all, require us to purchase health insurance?  Those who view the expanded access to health care provided under the Affordable Care Act interpret the Act as a protection of rights, while others view the government mandate for individuals to purchase insurance or face penalties as an infringement on rights.  Faced with these timely questions of ethics, finance and liberty, it is worthwhile to explore the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, whose advocacy of limited government and unhindered capitalism many Republicans have adopted whole-heartedly in the current debate.

In The Virtue of Selfishness, a collection of essays, lectures and articles written by Rand and her one-time associate (and later disgruntled ex-lover) Nathaniel Branden, Rand painstakingly defines her Objectivist philosophy, its ethical implications, and its political implementation.  Rand is careful to distinguish Objectivism from what it is not: It is not mysticism, which undermines human agency by ascribing value and power to a supernatural being; it is not subjectivism, a system of non-ethics in which anything goes; it is not moral agnosticism, which values the “abdication of moral responsibility” inherent in the refusal to pass judgment; and it is not hedonism, whereby one might argue that something is good simply because one desires it.  Most importantly, though, Objectivist ethics are in stark contrast to altruist ethics, which Rand calls “moral cannibalism.”  In altruism, the focus is the beneficiary of a given action rather than the actor; the actor subordinates his own happiness to the happiness of others in an act of sacrifice involving, in Branden’s words, “the surrender of a higher value in favor of a lower value or a nonvalue.”  Such an act conflicts with the actor’s own rational desire for self-preservation and personal happiness, and the ensuing internal conflict leads him to practice altruism imperfectly, sporadically.  Rand summarizes the impact of altruism as follows: “If you wonder about the reasons behind the ugly mixture of cynicism and guilt in which most men spend their lives, these are the reasons: cynicism, because they neither practice nor accept the altruist morality — guilt, because they dare not reject it.”  The altruist, then, remains perpetually suspended in a state of moral torment, chastising himself for incompletely living up to a moral code that so blatantly denies his own happiness, prosperity, and productivity.

Objectivism, however, asserts that “the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose,” happiness being “that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s own values.”  The Objectivist values are Reason, Purpose, and Self-Esteem, which, when pursued, lead to the virtues of Rationality, Productiveness, and Pride.  Rand argues that genuine love of others is not possible unless preempted by and stemming from self-love, for true love involves the recognition and celebration of one’s own values in another person.  In an Objectivist society, everyone has a special skill to offer and a service to provide; the market functions based on the demand for and trading of these services.  No sacrifice is necessary when everyone is productive and has something of value to offer.

The role of government in such a system, then, is minimal.  Government exists to ensure individual rights, which Rand defines as “moral principles which define and protect a man’s freedom of action, but impose no obligations on other men.”  Government ought to provide national defense — solely for the purpose of defense, not for military aggression – and its domestic counterpart, the police.  It should also provide a court system, an arbiter “charged with the task of protecting [. . .] rights under an objective code of rules” in the event of a dispute.  Any expansion of the role of government beyond this most basic level, “to accept ‘just a few controls,’ is to surrender the principle of inalienable individual rights and to substitute for it the principle of government’s unlimited, arbitrary power, thus delivering oneself into gradual enslavement.”  Any compromise on this matter, according to Rand, amounts to “moral treason.”

Even the most minimalist of governments, however, requires funding.  This is where Rand begins to trip over herself.  In a perfectly rational world, everyone would acknowledge the value and necessity of these government services and provide voluntary financial support for their existence.  But Rand knows the U.S. is not perfect, so she proposes a method of government funding whereby individuals purchase insurance on contracts that entitles them to sue if the other party fails to fulfill his or her contractual obligation, thus making civil justice available to only those who can pay for it.  This, essentially, is the problem underlying the implementation of Rand’s entire philosophy: The very services that facilitate not only a successful life but life itself — health care, education, transportation, civil justice — are available only to those who can pay for them.  And, since any rational person knows that individuals do not all begin life on a socially and economically equal playing field, some individuals will enjoy advantages denied to others based on money and not merit.

There also remains the issue of the “unproductive” — the elderly, the disabled, the handicapped, children.  Under Rand’s system, mandatory taxation and government programs that provide support to such people infringe on the freedom of the productive.  Successful, productive individuals may choose to pay for services and projects — bridges, interstate highways, schools and universities – that benefit others, but they are under no obligation to do so.  Thus the financial security and medical care of many of the elderly, our roadways, our airports, our parks, our universities, would be constructed and maintained at the behest of the wealthy, and if the wealthy chose not to provide these services, they would simply not exist.  Rand is consistent in championing the rights of those who have embraced capitalism, worked hard, and earned their fortunes; however, she remains silent about the rights of those who are unable to pursue, denied access to, or have tried and failed to follow this path.

In an Objectivist United States, the Affordable Care Act would be a non-issue, because it would not exist.  Anything currently funded by taxpayer dollars other than military and police protection would be available only to those able to pay, and any governmental attempt to expand access to those services would be considered overreaching and an infringement on individual liberty.  This is precisely the argument of those opposed to the Affordable Care Act: Why should I, even if I have no trouble affording it, be required by the government to pay into a system that renders health care more affordable and accessible to others?  To answer this question, this Conservative/Libertarian/Republican question so often posed by Rand enthusiasts, I present Rand’s own words: “There is only one fundamental right (all others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life.”  This is the ultimate, paramount right we all claim, enjoy, and fight to preserve.  It imposes a universal moral and financial responsibility on all who claim it, for while some of us may gripe about being obligated to pay for others, none of us has the right to deny another person the right to his or her own life.  If we deny a a person his or her life by denying him access to health care, all we have proven is that rights as well as services belong only to those who can pay for them.

The Problem of Pain

Lewis, C.S. The Problem of Pain. New York: HarperCollins, 1940.

And here is the real problem: so much mercy, yet still there is Hell. – C.S. Lewis

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Christians and non-Christians alike have long grappled with what C.S. Lewis terms “the problem of pain,” namely, if the Christian God is infinitely good, loving, omnipotent and omniscient, to what purpose does He permit His creations to suffer?  In his short but poignant book, The Problem of Pain, Lewis deliberately and humbly tackles this age-old conundrum.

As a Christian, Lewis presupposes that God is good, that every action we take or emotion we feel somehow fits into His will.  This is the necessary jumping-off point; to reject these grounds is to disavow Lewis’s entire argument.  Therefore, to follow Lewis’s argument, we must accept that God’s act of creation, our own existence, is good.  And part of His creative act was to grant humanity free will so that we might freely choose to love Him, pale and weak as our reciprocal love is compared to that of our Creator.  After all, only love offered freely, both human and divine, has any value.  Unfortunately for humanity, “choice implies the existence of things to choose between,” and the “free will of rational creatures, by its very nature included the possibility of evil.”  The ability to choose only good negates the existence of choice; therefore, evil exists so that we may contemplate it, consider it, and reject it in favor of good.

Of course, free will also carries with it the freedom to choose wrongly, which is what transpired in the initial Fall and what happens continually when we sin.  It is humans, after all, who commit murder, instigate war, build weapons, and cause the vast majority of the misery experienced by other humans.  It is important to understand, then, that most human suffering has a human origin, but that does not mean that that same suffering cannot serve a divine purpose.  Lewis asserts that a “recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity,” referring to what is now more popularly termed “Catholic guilt.”  Within this “old sense of sin,” we perceive our own wickedness, as initiated and evidenced by the Fall.  We recognize that our bad acts are not singular events; they are indicative of our bad character.  We do not excuse our badness because those around us behave in a similar fashion.  We do not obscure the definitions of good and evil by believing that “minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection.”  Instead, we suffer.  This suffering, this ongoing pain, demands our attention and alerts us to the fact that something is amiss.  Suffering calls out our mistakes, our poor choices, and prompts introspection, repentance, and change.  In this way, suffering forms a component of what Lewis terms the “complex good,” for through suffering and shame, we may learn, grow, and once again find ourselves in God’s good graces.

But then there is pain that cannot be attributed to human sin, such as the loss and destruction caused by natural disasters.  Still, Lewis weaves pain derived from these sources into God’s plan for our betterment, noting that “it is [hard] to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us.”  Suffering “shatters the illusion that all is well [. . .] that what we have, whether good or bad in itself, is our own and enough for us.”  The value of pain from any source is that it prompts us to attempt to eliminate the pain, a process that can result in spiritual insight and redemption.  In times of crisis, we turn to God, and the crisis is therefore – is its own, roundabout way – good.

Then there remains the problem of pain that can have no redemptive value: the pain of Hell.  We might ask why, in His infinite mercy, God constructed Hell.  Lewis’s response to this question is twofold.  First, to sin is to choose sin, and to sin continually with no effort at repentance is to reject the mercy God offers.  Lewis explains that forgiveness is a reciprocal act: “forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete: and a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.”  To admit the unrepentant sinner to Heaven would be to condone his sins rather than to forgive them.  Secondly, Lewis discusses the fact that pain in Hell may not involve the fiery torture depicted in medieval paintings.  Instead, while Heaven is populated by a human community, Hell “is to be banished from humanity,” where the damned “enjoy the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved.”  The pain of the damned lies in their rebellious choice, the eternal perpetuation of that choice, and the negation of their humanity through their rejection of good.

With the exception of an out-of-place and unconvincing chapter on animal pain (Lewis argues that because there is no biblical evidence to support the notion of animals having souls or higher consciousness that they must feel pain physically, instantaneously, rather than experiencing the prolonged, corrective suffering reserved for humans.  And, somehow, this is acceptable.), The Problem of Pain echoes the arguments of Paradise Lost before it, though with less emphasis on the human capacity for reason.  When asked why God permits suffering, Lewis turns the tables, asking instead why we have caused our own suffering and what we might do to correct it.  In a seeming contradiction, Lewis posits that God allows us to suffer because He loves us, because in suffering lies the opportunity for betterment: “whether we like it our not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.  Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.”  Thus Lewis’s circular yet somehow believable argument leads us back to the core of Christianity, to a good and loving God who, in His infinite benevolence, has given us the freedom to love Him back.

Committed

Gilbert, Elizabeth.  Committed: A Love Story.  New York: Penguin Books, 2010.

[E]very intimacy carries, secreted somewhere below its initial lovely surfaces, the ever-coiled makings of complete catastrophe.

- Elizabeth Gilbert

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As lovely and introspective and redemptive as Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love proved to be, I regret my need to say that the novel that follows, Committed, is shallow both by comparison and in its own right.  In Committed, Gilbert grapples with her reluctance to remarry following a devastating divorce, a reluctance she is forced to confront when her Brazilian boyfriend, Felipe, is deported from the U.S. and denied further entry unless he can obtain a visa through marriage to an American citizen.  While traveling abroad and waiting for Felipe’s immigration papers to be processed, Gilbert seeks to understand and define marriage, hoping to discover or create a version of matrimony that both guarantees her independence as a woman and satisfies her family and U.S. officials.  The book that emerges from this journey, however, seems more like Gilbert’s publisher’s attempt to capitalize on the success of Eat, Pray, Love than a genuine exploration of marital commitment.

Gilbert acknowledges early on that she cannot begin to tackle the concept of marriage as fully and deeply as she would like.  What she produces, though, does not even approach an attempt.  She asks a few Vietnamese women to relay their tales of how they got married.  She expresses reservations about becoming part of a tradition that has historically been used to deprive women of their property, money, and rights.  She asks if pledging eternal love and exchanging rings in the privacy of a hotel room constitutes a spiritual, if not a legal, marriage.  Mostly, though, she discusses Felipe’s restlessness and her anxiety during their eight months of expatriation.  The novel essentially describes a long waiting period, and we, as readers, feel as though we wait with them as we read.

Committed, then, emerges as a jerky, superficial discussion of marriage rather than a true exploration of matrimonial bonds.  Reading this book feels like waiting in an airport for a long overdue flight.  My recommendation is to read Eat, Pray, Love — even though the conclusion deprives us of the satisfaction of a wedding — and to skip Committed, for the self-indulgence of the former novel is far preferable to the expedient composition of the latter.

The Fifth Mountain

Coelho, Paulo. The Fifth Mountain. Trans. Clifford E. Landers. New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998.

From heaven, God smiles contentedly, for it was this that He desired, that each person take into his hands the responsibility for his own life.  For, in the final analysis, He had given His children the greatest of all gifts: the capacity to choose and determine their acts.

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In The Fifth Mountain, Paulo Coelho retells and expands the Old Testament story of the Israelite prophet Elijah.  The original tale, which appears in 1 Kings, describes the tyranny of the Phoenician queen Jezebel, who, upon marrying Ahab, king of Israel, imposed her polytheistic faith upon her adopted country.  All Israelite prophets and those who refused conversion were put to death, save Elijah, who, under the protection of God and His angels, managed to escape to Phoenicia.  There a widow cared for him, until it was time for him to demonstrate the power of the one, true God to the unbelievers.  Coelho’s story embraces all of these elements while simultaneously infusing the old tale with an interesting perspective on suffering and divine will.

The Elijah of The Fifth Mountain is visited by a guardian angel throughout his childhood.  He thus knows he is a prophet; however, the lonely and painful lifestyle of the self-flagellating prophets he sees in town frightens him, and he is glad when the visitations cease.  Later, though, an angel of the Lord comes to him, ordering him to deliver a message to Ahab and Jezebel, and when the monarchs respond less than kindly to Elijah’s prediction of sustained drought, he similarly follows the angel’s command to abandon Israel for Phoenicia. 

I have often wondered how one distinguished between prophecy and lunacy in biblical times.  I suppose it all depended on the outcome of a given situation.  If a far-fetched prediction came to fruition, the speaker was a prophet and his tale entered national lore; if it didn’t, the prophet was scorned and forgotten.  Coelho’s Elijah never doubts his sanity; he does, however, find it difficult to interpret and enact God’s often vague commands.  He knows he must go to Phoenicia and eventually return to Israel.  But why the wait?  Why does God withdraw Elijah’s ability to conduct miracles after raising just one person from the dead?  Why does God allow the hospitable widow, whom Elijah grows to love, to die amidst the burning rubble of her home?  Elijah commits himself to doing God’s will, but when that will is unclear, or when it permits extensive and seemingly purposeless suffering, what is the prophet to do?

After much suffering, struggling, and contemplation, Elijah realizes that all things God wills and permits — exile, invasion, death — are encapsulated in a single, existential question: “What is the meaning of thy struggle?”  Through his pain and confusion, the prophet learns to view suffering as an ongoing challenge that requires him to cultivate the best in himself — his emotional perseverence, his intellectual strength, his physical drive.  God presents us with lives of suffering so that we may better ourselves through struggle, so that we may think and grow and choose how to move forward, improving our judgment and ability in the process.  In blindly following God’s commands, Elijah “had acted in the selfsame way as those who at no time in their lives had ever made an important decision;” he later comes to understand that the Lord “had led him to the abyss of the unavoidable” in order “to show him that man must choose — and not accept — his fate.”  Thus suffering becomes a sign of the Lord’s generosity, for in presenting us with conflict and loss, God provides an opportunity for us to fulfill His will with intellect, feeling, and conviction.  In undergoing this process, Elijah progresses from blind faith to deliberate faith, and though his doubts and questions initially appear rebellious, he discovers that what he “thought was a challenge to God was, in truth, his reencounter with Him.”

I appreciate Coelho’s nimble unwinding of this complicated and controversial message — controversial in that such an argument could be used to justify suffering and deemphasize compassion.  However, Elijah’s experiences, though they strengthen him, do not harden him.  After reaching this deeper understanding of God’s intent, Elijah inspires the survivors of an Assyrian invasion to gather and grow food, to learn to write, and to rebuild their city.  He challenges them, as God challenged him, but he never abandons them.

Interestingly, while the Old Testament ends Elijah’s time on earth with his bodily assumption into heaven, The Fifth Mountain leaves Elijah mid-story, among the people he helped to restore, a human prophet in a human world.  The novel therefore remains relateable, and the intellectual challenge it presents appears doable.  Those up for a challenge should read this novel — not because I say so, but because you choose so.

Eat, Pray, Love

Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

I keep remembering my Guru’s teachings about happiness.  She says that people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you’re fortunate enough.  But that’s not how happiness works.  Happiness is the consequence of personal effort.  You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel the world looking for it.  You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.

- Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love

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Had I not run across a copy of Elizabeth Gilbert‘s Eat, Pray, Love selling for fifty cents at a rummage sale that otherwise featured only children’s clothing and ugly quilts, I wouldn’t have bothered to read it.  I rented the movie last year and found it disjointed and sappy, largely because I find it impossible to feel sorry for Julia Roberts under any circumstances.  However, the memoir itself pleasantly surprised me.  Its sustained emphasis on spirituality and selfhood nicely bind the three-part account of Gilbert’s efforts to find happiness and balance in three different countries.

In her early thirties, Gilbert had a lucrative and successful writing career.  She was married, owned and home, and she and her husband were trying to have a baby.  Nonetheless, she was deeply unhappy.  After nights of crying in her bathroom to the point of exhaustion, after uncharacteristic and exasperated prayer, Gilbert gradually and painfully accepted that this life, her life, wasn’t what she wanted.  She realized that “it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection,” and she therefore discarded the imitation of her married life in favor of discovering her own individual destiny.

Of course, Gilbert’s divorce and a subsequent whirlwind relationship left her so drained and disoriented that she barely knew where to start.  Nonetheless, she gave herself a year to find her bearings.  After depositing the advance for Eat, Pray, Love in her recently depleted bank account, Gilbert moved to Italy for four months, where she made friends, learned Italian, and indulged in cappuccino, pizza, and pastries.  She regained the weight she had lost during her prolonged divorce; she allowed herself to experience pleasure that had nothing to do with men.  Next, she spent four months at an ashram in India, where, through meditation and with the help of a new friend, she began to forgive herself, forgive her exes, and look forward with wonder rather than back with longing, confusion and need.  She spent the final leg of her journey in Bali, passing her afternoons with an old medicine man, befriending a healer, and, after much conversation and careful consideration, rediscovering love with an older Brazilian man who adores her.

The book’s too-perfect ending — divorcee finds love with affectionate man willing to cross continents for her! — may induce some eye-rolling, but Eat, Pray, Love is hardly a how-to guide for landing an amazing boyfriend.  Rather, it is a chronicle of deliberate, sometimes excruciating introspection which can, when endured and fully accepted, lead to a self-awareness that in turn makes sublime happiness possible.  Gilbert’s travels are spiritual as well as physical, and even I was glad to forget Julia Roberts and enjoy Gilbert’s journey with her.

Esau and Jacob

Machado de Assis, Joachim Maria. Esau and Jacob. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2000.

Wit, good will, curiosity, call it what you will, there is a force that drags out here everything that people try to hide.  Secrets themselves get tired of remaining silent — silent or sleeping.  Let us keep that other verb, which serves the image better.  They get tired, and they help in their own fashion what we attribute to the indiscretion of others.

- from Machado de Assis’s Esau and Jacob

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This novel’s heavy title caused me to expect a story of biblical proportions — something stormy, something epic.  I expected the twin brothers of Brazilian writer Joachim Maria Machado de Assis‘s 1904 novel to resemble their biblical counterparts — one smart, cunning and wily, the other strong yet slow, willing to sell his birthright for a bowl of soup.  Yet the title Esau and Jacob proves more of a foil to the brothers whose story it names, for the practical doctor Pedro and revolutionary lawyer Paolo squabble rather than feud, annoy rather than destroy each other.

The novel opens in mid-19th-century Brazil with the twins’ pregnant mother traveling to see a fortune teller, the cabocla, to inquire about her sons’ destiny.  The cabocla observes the twins fighting in their mother’s womb and issues a cryptic if not insincere prediction of their future greatness.  However, much like the novel’s title, the prophecy leads to high expectations that remain largely unfulfilled.

Machado de Assis sets Esau and Jacob, his fourth novel, in late-19th-century Brazil, a time of political turmoil marked by conflicts surrounding slavery, the overthrow of a monarchy, and the building of a tenuous republican system.  These events, however, color the pages of Esau and Jacob sporadically and only as background noise.  As children, Pedro supports the monarchy, while Paolo leans toward republicanism, though they do so more to antagonize each other than out of true conviction.  As adults, serving as members of parliament from opposing parties, they contest each other’s policies, yet exact details of their political ideals go unmentioned, for the novel’s focus remains the twins’ continual and mutual aggravation of each other rather than any legitimate grounds on which their disagreements might be based.  Thus it is no surprise that the novel’s primary conflict is not politics; it is love.

Pedro and Paolo love the same woman, Flora, the daughter of a civil servant who alternates between affection and indifference in her approach to her suitors.  Flora is unable to choose one twin above the other.  To Flora, the brothers are so alike, they are one; she cannot bear to hear one criticize the other, as the very act strikes her as contradictory and self-destructive.  When she is with Pedro, she stands up for Paolo, and vice versa, preserving the wholeness and oneness they represent to her at the expense of having her actions misinterpreted as indecision or aloofness.  Aires, the novel’s sometimes-narrator, assigns Flora a seemingly fitting adjective: inexplicable.  Flora’s efforts to force two conflicting men into one indivisible love ultimately consume her, as the twins’ incessant attempts to one-up each other — to arrive earlier, to write the best letter, to engage her in the more enjoyable conversation — drive her into a fever and an early grave.  Vowing to repair their relationship in Flora’s absence, the twins’ dormant competitiveness resurfaces almost immediately, and they soon find themselves in secret competition to see who can visit Flora’s grave the earliest, the longest, or while offering the best prayers and wreathes.  Even in the face of death and lost love, Pedro and Paolo fail to transcend the pettiness that has defined their relationship since childhood.

Critics try to locate deeper meaning within this pettiness.  Indeed, the jacket copywriter credits the twins with “liv[ing] out the conflicts of a nation trying to reconcile itself with the inexorable demands of progress.”  But the politics within the novel are so buried, and the brothers’ attempts at reconciliation (each time following the loss of a loved one) are only reactions to trauma; I see little evidence of “trying” and none of “progress.”  Perhaps this is an ironic critique of 19th-century Brazil, an exposé of a politically immature and stagnated country.  Such a critique befits the character of the novel’s ironic narrator, Aires, who often digresses into discussions of word choice and suppositions about his readers (“As for you, my gentleman friend or lady friend, depending on the sex of the person who reads me, if not two and of both sexes, an engaged couple, for example…”), juxtaposing politics and personal whims, fraternal fights with fancies, and never serious, even when rumors of incoming soldiers fill the town.  The result is a moderately amusing novel whose narrative tone undermines the potential gravity of its subjects — animosity, love, national progress — in a way that flattens the story, depriving it of both depth and sincerity.  The novel’s message is thus muddled, its characters either superficial or insufficiently explored, and Brazil’s future a vast unknown.

Absurdistan

Shteyngart, Gary. Absurdistan. New York: Random House, 2006.

I saw a nice democrat killed in front of me, and I try to grieve the best I can for him, but I can’t.  And I try to grieve for my papa, but nothing, as you say, ‘comes to mind about that.’  And I try to be good, I try to help people, but there’s no way to be good here, or if there is, I don’t know it.  And I’m scared, and I’m lonely, and I’m unhappy, and I’m chastising myself for being scared, and lonely, and unhappy, and for being alive for thirty years and having nobody [. . .] who would care for me.

- Misha Vainberg in Gary Shteyngart’s Absurdistan

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 Gary Shteyngart‘s second novel, Absurdistan, revolves around Misha Vainberg, the thirty-year-old, obese heir to a Russian con man’s ill-begotten fortune.  Educated at the U.S.’s satirically named Accidental College and dating a former topless dancer from the Bronx, Misha returns to Russia to visit his father, only to be barred from re-entering the U.S. when his father murders an American businessman and is subsequently murdered himself.  In order to circumvent the visa restrictions preventing his return to America, Misha travels to the oil-rich nation of Absurdistan to buy a Belgian passport, only to find himself trapped in the midst of a third-world civil war.

Misha’s character is borderline sympathetic.  He is obsessed with sex — which, despite his girth, he is able to obtain from numerous attractive women, including his stepmother – and thinks constantly of his poorly circumcised penis.  He decides to found a charity, Misha’s Children, which he places under the charge of two prostitutes and a Russian artist without providing any guidelines as to how the charity ought to operate.  He also thinks he can rap.  Nonetheless, his adventures in Absurdistan, a former Soviet republic whose ironic name references the numerous countries Americans cannot identify on a map, reveal Misha as a symbol of recent Western intervention in countries abroad — wealthy, over-fed, mostly self-absorbed, somewhat well-intentioned yet bumbling and uninformed.  Misha quickly learns that Haliburton controls Absurdistan’s economy, their oil wells polluting the water and defining the skyline.  And when the oil runs out, Haliburton colludes with a handful of wealthy Absurdis to manufacture a civil war grounded upon ancient, meaningless religious differences in an effort to provoke U.S. involvement and to land the lucrative defense contracts that would inevitably accompany such involvement.  Misha learns too late that the oil is gone; he has already begun a relationship with the daughter of a corrupt Absurdi official, and he is trapped in a country where civil servants are gunned down and mothers prostitute their daughters so that they can afford to eat.  Misha experiences guilt and self-loathing when Americans still cannot locate Absurdistan on a map and USAID does not arrive.  On September 10, 2001, Misha makes a last-ditch effort to escape Absurdistan and return to New York.  Given the date, it is doubtful he makes it.

As a critique of the wealthy West’s global economic activities and of media coverage of third-world devastation, Shteyngart’s satire proves apt.  However, reading Absurdistan after reading Shteyngart’s third novel, Super Sad True Love Story, results in Absurdistan coming across as a more vulgar, less poignant rough draft of Super Sad.  Both novels feature wealthy, thirty-something, Russian male protagonists infatuated with non-white American women and fixated on sex.  Both novels rely on the characters’ loss of cell phone service to signify their lack of connection to other humans as the societies around them begin to crumble.  In its prologue, Absurdistan purports to be “a book about love;” however, it is more accurately a book about violence, loss, and emotional paralysis.  To experience these elements — along with more complex characters, better developed plot and satire, and love as well — I recommend Super Sad over Absurdistan any day.

The Fountainhead

Rand, Ayn.  The Fountainhead.  Centennial Edition.  New York: Signet, 2005.

A truly selfish man cannot be affected by the approval of others.  He doesn’t need it.

- Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

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This is the motive and purpose of my writing; the projection of an ideal man.  The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself — to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means.       [. . .] I write — and read — for the sake of the story.

- Ayn Rand’s The Goal of My Writing address, delivered at Lewis and Clark College on October 1, 1963

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The highly partisan and seemingly incessant debate surrounding our national budget brought an interesting fact to light some months back: House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) requires his staffers to read the works of Ayn Rand.  Ryan credits Rand for inspiring his political aspirations — she is the “reason I got involved in public service, by and large,” Ryan stated in December, 2010 — and interwove Rand’s Objectivist philosophy into his recently proposed budget, which seeks to transform Medicare into a voucher system for those under 55 and to make one third of Social Security funds available for private investment.  Fascinated by the impact a 20th-century novelist and philosopher is having on our 21st-century political and social landscape, I set out to read Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead.

The novel, initially set in 1920′s New York, opens with a juxtaposition of character foils whose conflicts and contrasts Rand sustains throughout The Fountainhead.  Howard Roark and Peter Keating are both students of architecture.  Roark is creative and uncompromising; he designs for the sake of design — his work is inherently original; it is art.  Keating, on the other hand, wished to be a painter but ultimately followed his mother’s pleas to channel his artistic ambitions into a more lucrative career as an architect.  His work imitates the Classical and Renaissance architects that preceded him; it is commonplace.  Yet Keating is charming and well-liked, and while Roark is expelled from college for failure to mimic old styles, Keating’s personality propels him into a prominent position at the firm of one of New York’s leading architects.

Howard Roark is Rand’s “ideal man,” as she wrote in 1963.  His integrity is perfect and absolute; he knows what he wants — to design, to build — and lets nothing stand in his way.  When he is expelled before taking his degree, he convinces a once great architect, Henry Cameron, to mentor him.  He accepts and is fired from numerous positions as a draftsman — stealing a few high-profile clients along the way with his deep understanding of clean, modern design and its integration with rather than destruction of existing landscape.  He is selfish, an egoist; he cares nothing for the opinions of others, existing on his own terms, pursuing his own happiness, his own goals.  In a powerful speech I felt compelled to read at least six times, Roark defines even love in selfish terms: ”I’ve given you, not my sacrifice or my pity, buy my ego and my my naked need.  This is the only way you can wish to be loved.  This is the only way I can want you to love me. [. . .] To say ’I love you,’ one must know first how to say the ‘I.’” Love, then, is the coexistence of two entirely independent egos; their connection is one of celebration rather than sacrifice, affirmation rather than submission.  Love, like true happiness, is the product of independence, individuality, and selfishness, is a full-fledged commitment to the self, and Roark embodies this commitment consistently, fully.

Keating functions as Roark’s antithesis.  While Keating’s penchant for socializing and entertaining earn him status and authority within his firm and within the New York architectural community, he relies on Roark to revise his stale designs, as he lacks the originality and vision that Roark implements so easily.  Keating is perpetually self-conscious, feeding off the popularity others grant him, never confident in either his ability or likability: “He was great; great as the number of people who told him so.  He was right; right as the number of people who believed it.  He looked at the faces, at the eyes; he saw himself born in them.  He saw himself being granted the gift of life.”  Keating regurgitates opinions expressed in reviews and editorials when asked to proffer his opinions.  He marries his boss’s frigid daughter, Dominique Francon, because others expect it, abandoning his fiancee, Catherine Halsey, the only person with whom he is ever comfortably honest, in the process.  Keating exemplifies what Roark terms the second-hander, for he “lives within others” rather than within and for himself.  Keating loses his identity in his quest for others’ good opinion, and his character is reduced to sheer “indifference” by the novel’s end, as he is too empty to inspire even pity.

While the press praises Keating and condemns Roark, whose bold designs engender discomfort and offense, there are few characters who rightfully comprehend Roark’s greatness and Keating’s shallowness.  Architectural critic, columnist, and cultural authority Ellsworth Toohey perceives the distinction — and fears it.  Toohey is a Marxist; he uses his newspaper column to espouse the value of every man, to emphasize the common good.  He speaks at labor rallies, forms committees and clubs, advocates collective action and selfless motivation.  He praises convoluted novels and ridiculous plays; he lowers the cultural standard for what constitutes “art” so that the truly great are not appreciated and mediocrity rules — “Don’t set out to raze all shrines [. . .] Enshrine mediocrity — and the shrines are razed.”  His motives are sinister, for even he realizes the falseness, the impossibility of the values he proclaims: “Preach selflessness.  Tell man that he must live for others.  Tell men that altruism is the ideal.  Not a single one of them has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will.”  True altruism is self-destruction, for selflessness requires one to supplant his desires with the needs and wants of others, the result of which is loss and servitude, “a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness.”  The selfless are thus left needy and pliant, easily manipulated by one such as Toohey, who understands that “where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings.”  Toohey, who proudly tells Keating, “I’m the most selfless man you’ve ever known,” goes so far as to enact his destructive theory of selflessness on his own niece, Catherine, who dedicates her life to social work only to age prematurely and lose the easygoing quality that made her so lovable to the young Keating.  “Great men can’t be ruled.  We don’t want any great men,” Toohey says while plotting to destroy Roark’s career.

Gail Wynand, Toohey’s employer, likewise enjoys corrupting the integrity of great men.  Owner of a powerful and popular newspaper, the Banner, Wynand hires individuals of impeccable integrity for the sole purpose of corrupting that integrity.  He pays scientists to champion mysticism and atheists to advocate religious faith; he pays such men exorbitant salaries for the pleasure of watching them break.  Wynand is shrewd — he rightfully despises Toohey — and when he finds a person of truly unfaltering integrity (Roark), he respects, befriends, even loves him.  Yet Wynand is no egoist; he craves power too much.  There is a paradoxical weakness inherent in power, for all rulers require subjects to rule and are thus dependent on others, as Roark explains: Rulers “create nothing.  They exist entirely through the persons of others.  Their goal is in their subjects, in the activity of enslaving.  They are as dependent as the beggar.”  Indeed, Wynand’s pursuit of power and unmitigated influence proves his downfall.  When he seeks to defend Roark through Banner editorials, to bend public opinion towards greatness rather than towards the mediocre, Wynand experiences the limit of his power when the public resists, rejects Roark, and greatly reduces the Banner‘s circulation.

Roark finds his near-equal only in Dominique Francon.  Like Wynand, Dominique admires pure integrity, as Wynand, her second husband, observes: “Do you know what you’re actually in love with?  Integrity.  The impossible.  The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art.       [. . .] But you want it in the flesh.  You’re in love with it.”  Initially, Dominique does not believe perfect integrity exists; thus she makes a farce of all pretense toward integrity, mocking charitable organizations that ask her to speak at their events, telling her boss that she desires perfection “– or nothing.  So, you see, I take nothing.”  She feels nothing, loves nothing, takes nothing seriously.  This changes when she meets Roark, whose genius she senses immediately and whose sexual assault (disturbingly) forces her to acknowledge the existence of a human perfection she once thought impossible: “They had been united in an understanding beyond the violence, beyond the deliberate obscenity of his action; had she meant less to him, he would not have taken her as he did; had he meant less to her, she would not have fought so desperately.  The unrepeatable exultation was in knowing that they both understood this.”  This exhultation becomes instant love, yet Roark knows that Dominique is not ready for the selfish, self-affirming love he demands.  Thus Dominique seeks to destroy what she cannot have — sabotaging Roark’s career with scathing editorials, disuading potential clients from offering Roark commissions — and to punish herself with a soulless marriage to Keating.  She defiantly yet proudly tells her boss at the Banner, “[N]othing that you do to me — or to [Roark] — will be worse than what I’ll do to myself [. . .] wait till you see what I can take.”  Dominique maintains her integrity, her reverence for Roark, her essential self throughout her self-imposed trials and emerges ready to love as Roark always wished — selfishly, celebrating her self as she simultaneously reveres his.

Rand’s theories are interesting, sometimes mind-bending — that selflessness leads to self-annihilation; that a rape produces self-awareness and, consequently, freedom; that selfishness is desireable, reasonable, natural, and results in perfect love.  I recommend reading The Fountainhead simpy for the intellectual exhileration that comes from attempting to rationally justify egocentrism, to glorify selfishness and unfettered independence as “the only gauge of human virtue and value.”  In short, one does not need to believe the philosophy Rand and her characters espouse in The Fountainhead to appreciate the intellectual exercise of tracing Rand’s path to her conclusions.

Applying Rand’s philosophy to a system of government, however, remains a stretch.  A dictator or monarch would find himself trapped in the contradiction of power that entraps Wynand — namely, that a ruler is dependent upon the ruled for his power.  Similarly, an elected official is dependent upon his constituents; he cannot govern if there is no one to govern.  The entire concept of government, too, is collective — “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln said in his Gettysburg Address — that cannot function if is representatives or those they represent are entirely self-consumed.  Any government that values the individual only, that views programs to aid the poor, unemployed, and elderly — Social Security, Medicare, unemployment — as instruments of parasitic motive that corrupt those they seek to aid by discouraging self-reliance cannot be “of the people, by the people, for the people.”  It would instead be of the egoist, by the selfish, for the individual, in which case government would implode and cease to exist, and all those services that benefit us all — interstate highways, hydroelectric dams, medical care for the elderly — would be unmaintained or expunged.  A Rand-inspired government is no government at all — which, I fear, is exactly what Paul Ryan and his Tea Party compatriots seek.

Into the Forest

Hegland, Jean.  Into the Forest.  London: Arrow Books, 1998.

Somehow we reach the flat.  Eva sinks to the ground, and I fall beside her, holding her, rocking her in my arms, muttering praise and thanks and blessings to all the things beyond and within us that allowed us to reach this place.  When I finally raise my head to look around, I see the dank forest, the rain-dark sky, the roofed stump filled with barrels, and for a moment I know I am crazy.

- Nell in Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest

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A friend loaned me his copy of Jean Hegland‘s Into the Forest because Hegland, now a creative writing instructor at Santa Rosa Junior College, was raised in our small town of Pullman, Washington.  While reading Hegland’s novel, however, I couldn’t help but think of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, which I finished not long ago.  Both stories are set in a United States crippled by both financial and governmental meltdown; Hegland’s novel, however, offers a quieter, more measured narrative populated by more isolated, wholesome characters. 

Teenaged sisters Eva and Nell reside in a Northern California forest thirty miles from the nearest town.  When the collapse of infrastructure and the onset of disease make food, gasoline, and human kindness scarce, when cancer claims their mother and an accident takes their father, the orphaned siblings are forced to abandon their passions in order to focus on survival.  At first, they try to preserve what remnants of high culture and education they can — Eva practices ballet to a metronome while Nell reads her father’s set of encyclopedias — but the longer the lights stay off, the more their food supply dwindles, more basic needs begin to take precedence.  Nell turns down a haphazard journey to Boston with her former crush Eli to instead combine instinct, her father’s canning lessons, and what information she can glean from the books around the house to learn gardening, canning, drying, and, eventually, hunting and medicine.  When a passing man rapes Eva and she subsequently becomes pregnant, Nell becomes the de facto family leader, gathering wild fruits and herbs and shooting wild pigs in an effort to nourish and protect her weakened sister.  In the end, after numerous deaths, arguments, injuries and close calls, Eva and Nell grow to appreciate both the bounty of nature and each other, relying on one another rather than on the fantasy of an increasingly improbable rescue.

While the novel’s emphasis on love and self-sufficiency is both sweet and sensible, I found the narrative pace slow.  The initial two thirds of the novel consist largely of flashbacks — trips to town to get drunk with teenaged boys, learning to can beans, the girls watching their mother weave — and silence broken only by the click of Eva’s metronome.  I suppose the pace accurately reflects the sudden slowness of a life cut off from modern amenities, but Into the Forest nonetheless proves difficult to read due to its lack of inertia.  When the novel does pick up the pace — a rape, a pregnancy, a new garden, a birth, a hunt, a bear, a fire — the activity seems forced and jarring in comparison to the earlier stillness of internal monologue and waiting.  The result is a rather unbalanced tale of sisterly love and survival, which, though Nell’s narration is at times beautiful and deep, lacks the bite of Shteyngart’s satire, rendering its post-apocalyptic setting surprisingly boring.