J.D. Salinger: A Life
Slawenski, Kenneth. J.D. Salinger: A Life. New York: Random House, 2010.
I know I am known as a strange, aloof kind of person. I pay for this kind of attitude.
- J.D. Salinger in a 1974 New York Times interview
*~*~*
J.D. Salinger, best known for authoring The Catcher in the Rye (1951), valued and guarded his privacy. Tucked away on his forested acreage in Cornish, New Hampshire, Salinger isolated himself from family, friends, and fans alike, perched before his typewriter on a discarded car seat, composing novels, novellas, and short stories, none of which saw publication after 1965, though Salinger lived until 2010. Kenneth Slawenski‘s new biography, J.D. Salinger: A Life, seeks to tell the story of this famously reclusive storyteller. In A Life, Slawenski coalesces eight years of research into a chronological collage of biography and literary analysis, drawing on Salinger’s published and unpublished works, as well as on his ample, pre-1965 correspondence, which is now archived at the New York Public Library, Princeton, and the University of Texas at Austin. Though Salinger vehemently opposed the public archiving of his correspondence (in 1987, Salinger successfully sued Ian Hamilton for quoting from these letters in J.D. Salinger: A Writing Life) and scorned the re-release the less polished stories of his early career, Slawenski’s approach to these materials in A Life is always respectful and often reverential, as he presents Salinger as a man damaged by love and war struggling to heal himself through writing.
Jerome David Salinger was born in 1919 to a doting mother of Irish decent and to a Jewish father, who worked for a company that imported European meats and cheeses. Despite the fact that his childhood coincided with the Great Depression, Salinger’s upbringing was one of comfort and affluence. Like his character, Holden Caulfield, Salinger attended prep school, where he exhibited sociability and creativity but was markedly lacking in work ethic. He later enrolled at Columbia, where he decided to become a writer after reading Faulkner under the tutelage of Whit Burnett, but he left without taking his degree. He engaged in a brief romance with Oona O’Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene O’Neill, though she later left him for actor Charlie Chaplin.
Though Salinger suffered following O’Neill’s rejection, the true suffering began when Salinger, who had been drafted into the army in 1943, was sent to serve in the D-Day invasion at Normandy, where he was in the second wave of soldiers to storm the beach. From there Salinger proceeded to Hürtgen Forest, where he disabled landmines that the Germans quickly replaced in a two-month-long engagement generally “viewed by historians as a military failure and a waste of human life.” After failing to take the forest for the Allies, Salinger’s regiment proceeded to Luxembourg, where it took part in the Battle of the Bulge, after which it proceeded to liberate six concentration camps in the Dachau network. After VE Day, after watching his fellow soldiers die uselessly in Hürtgen, after witnessing the horrors of Dachau, Salinger traveled to Austria in search of a family that had once hosted him during a pre-war European excursion, only to learn that this family had perished in Hitler’s camps. Salinger then checked himself into a military hospital on account of ”battle fatigue,” or what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
Amazingly, Salinger wrote and submitted stories for publication throughout the war. Slawenski views the stories Salinger composed in 1944-45 as a lens into the author’s soul, equating the characters’ struggles with seemingly senseless death and their subsequent affirmation of the world’s beauty as a mirror to Salinger’s psychological turmoil and emotional progress.
After a rash, ill-fated marriage to a German opthomologist, Salinger returned to the U.S., where in 1947 he became a salaried writer at The New Yorker and penned his first and only published novel, The Catcher in the Rye, which drew upon several of Salinger’s previously published stories and was released to great critical acclaim in 1951. Salinger’s subsequent collections — Nine Stories (1953), Franny and Zooey (1961), and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour — an Introduction (1963) — were likewise immensely popular — among readers if not among critics. During this prolific decade, Salinger also remarried, fathered two children, and purchased the property in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he would live until his death.
Yet Salinger was unprepared for the fame his success inevitably brought, and he shunned his newfound status as celebrity and cultural icon. A Zen Buddhist and follower of Vedantic mystic Sri Ramakrishna, Salinger, in Slawenski’s view, embraced writing as both a calling and a form of meditative prayer. Thus the characters in his later works grow more contemplative, more spiritual, effectively functioning as mouthpieces for Salinger’s Vedantic views. Salinger continually struggled to subordinate his ego, to achieve peace and humility, but this proved difficult with fan mail and positive reviews inflating the very ego he sought to contain. Salinger’s response, therefore, was to withdraw from the world that jeopardized his spiritual growth, as well as to retain tight control over the works he had already deigned to release. Salinger insisted on plain, stark designs for the covers of his books, prohibited the use of his photograph on book jackets, and forbade the reprinting of his earlier stories, even by editors who had once been his friends. He ordered his agent to destroy thirty years worth of correspondence to prevent such letters from landing at the University of Texas at Austin, and, after The New Yorker published “Hapworth 16, 1924″ in 1965, no new Salinger works ever appeared in print again. Salinger died peacefully in Cornish 45 years later. His family has yet to comment on the status or volume of unreleased works Salinger produced during his four decades of public silence.
Slawenski’s dedication to his subject is admirable, his research diligent and copious; nonetheless, A Life violates the most basic tenet of literary criticism in that it conflates Salinger’s characters with Salinger himself. While an author’s personal experience often does — indeed, must — inform the works he or she produces, it is irresponsible to assume that characters speak for their creator, even if the narration is in the first person, and even if, like Salinger, the author admits to writing from experience. Thus, when Slawenski declares that “Salinger aligns himself completely with the narrator” in “The Last and Best of Peter Pans” or references “A Boy in France” as proof that Salinger underwent a “religious experience” during WWII, we must remember that such statements represent an enthusiastic biographer’s speculation rather than documented fact. Slawenski’s biographical readings of Salinger’s fictional characters prove particularly ironic when, late in A Life, Slawenski argues that characters achieve an existence, a resonance beyond their creators: “Holden [Caulfield] had long ago meshed with the lives of readers. He belonged to the rebel who admired him, the outcast who drew strength from him, the young girl enamored of him. [. . . Holden was] uniquley re-created each time a reader opened a copy of The Catcher in the Rye.” In this reader-response model, Salinger’s characters are neither Salinger nor his embodiments; instead, they exist independently, impacting each reader differently. Thus Holden Caulfield became both a symbol of ’60s resistance and the inspiration for Mark David Chapman’s murder of John Lenon. If Salinger and his characters are one and the same, each story has but one interpretation, one correct answer, which belongs to Salinger himself; Slawenski cannot responsibly argue along these lines and then later endorse the reader-response position when it proves convenient (i.e. Slawenski takes issue with Salinger’s argument that he owed Holden Caulfield in a 2009 lawsuit against a Swedish publisher that tried to publish a sequel to Catcher.). Furthermore, Slawenski’s description of Salinger fans’ internet tributes to Salinger’s works following the author’s death is overly sentimental and even inappropriate. While Salinger would have felt honored by the revived interest in his works his death engendered, he would have found fans filming their responses to the news of his death and posting them online showy and self-aggrandizing.
Nevertheless, if we distinguish the biography from the literary while carefully acknowledging their overlaps, we walk away from J.D. Salinger: A Life with a rekindled affection for the man who brought us Holden Caulfield and Seymour Glass. Slawenski’s biography details the horrors and hardships Salinger endured while serving in WWII, which most likely contributed to his eccentricity and informed both the despair and epiphanies later experienced by his characters. Indeed, Slawenski’s love for and commitment to Salinger’s works is pervasive and palpable throughout A Life. Nonetheless, for obvious reasons, Salinger would hate it.
Filed under Book Reviews | Comments OffSuper Sad True Love Story
Shteyngart, Gary. Super Sad True Love Story. New York: Random House, 2010.
[I]f there is more than one truth, then learn to do the difficult work — learn to choose. You are good enough, you are human enough, to choose.
- Lenny Abramov in Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story
*~*~*
It is the not-too-distant future, a post-literate, debt-driven, technologically saturated future. People read text, not books, which are considered overly demanding in a culture that reads nothing lengthier than that which fills the screen of an äppärät, an iPhone on steroids that allows you to publicly rank the attractiveness of those surrounding you while simultaneously broadcasting your collective credit scores. Responsible journalism has given way to random streaming, as untrained members of the new Media broadcast advertisements, sex, and decontextualized observations from their äppäräti. This is a hypersexualized world of transparent jeans and porn for children, a hyperstratified world of racial and class tension. This is the future Gary Shteyngart‘s Super Sad True Love Story envisions.
Super Sad True Love Story centers on Lenny Abramov, a 39-year-old Russian American who falls for 24-year-old Korean-American Eunice Park. Lenny works for the aptly named Post-Human Services division of the Wapachung Contingency, located in a former synagogue to signify the replacement of religious belief with technology and youth-worship. His job is to recruit and evaluate high net worth individuals (HNWIs) willing to pay top dollar (as long as it’s backed by the much stronger Chinese yuan) for immortality. Those who successfully complete Lenny’s screening process are those who respond stoically to emotional stimuli, those who can handle watching their children grow old and die, those who lack empathy and compassion. Only those sufficiently wealthy and heartless are approved for the dechronification treatments that repair cellular damage and restore youth. Lenny, an anachronism of sorts in that he still owns and reads “smelly” books, clings to Eunice and her literal and symbolic youth, motivated by a fear of mortality, not because he fears physical death, but rather because the finitude of life demands that we make something of it, that we justify and locate meaning in our existence. And finding meaning in a world of incessant shopping, of debilitating personal and national debt, in which even government signs bear misspellings is no easy feat.
Lenny attempts to create and sustain meaning by falling in love with Eunice, by supplanting post-human isolation with human connection. But Eunice, despite her near-biological attachment to her äppärät and porno-worthy underwear, is perhaps too human on certain levels in that she is wounded and broken in ways so many of us are. She grew up in an abusive household, where her mother and sister walked on eggshells in an effort to appease Eunice’s alcoholic doctor-father. As a result, Eunice both loves and hates her father, leading her to both distance herself from him and take great pains to protect him during the financial and societal collapse that ensues when China revokes its support of the U.S. financial system. This emotional oxymoron in turn informs all of her relationships with men. Angry and love-starved, Eunice seeks the attention of the kind though bumbling Lenny, the low net worth individual (LNWI) activist David, and the Wapachung tycoon Joshie, vacillating between love, conscientiousness, and filial duty as she wanders from man to man. Through his tense, flailing relationship with Eunice Park, Lenny indeed experiences the human in the post-human world, learning the painful lesson that to be human, despite the emotional richness thereof, is to be damaged, struggling, aging, dying.
I didn’t like this book when I first began to read it. The writing seemed splintered, the content vulgar and borderline pornographic. It wasn’t until I began to glimpse our current society — our cell phone/blue tooth/email/GPS/Facebook reliance, our recent financial meltdown — that I could appreciate Shteyngart’s Orwellian depiction of our national and cultural future. When Lenny laments, “My äppärät isn’t connecting. I can’t connect,” he alludes to the disconnection, fragmentation, and isolation technology has brought to human relationships. When Lenny’s dating friends, Noah and Amy, simultaneously stream their respective verbal blogs, talking next to each other without actually communicating, I think of all the couples I see walking down the street, holding hands, each talking on a cell phone to someone other than the person whose hand they are holding. The world Shteyngart depicts in Super Sad True Love Story simply takes this scenario one step further; he presents a world in which we have stopped holding hands.
After finishing the novel, I recommend Super Sad True Love Story wholeheartedly. Shteyngart’s dark, biting, hilarious satire ultimately proves winning, as he constructs a postmodern, post-literate, post-human society that aptly deconstructs and critiques our own. It is a plea for love in a world that may soon forget what love is.
Filed under Book Reviews | Comment (1)The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Mengestu, Dinaw. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.
Where is the grand narrative of my life? The one I could spread out and read for clues as to what to expect next. It seems to have run out, if such a thing is possible. It’s harder to admit that perhaps it had never been there at all.
- Sepha Stephanos in Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
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Dinaw Mengestu borrows the title of his debut novel from the closing canto of Dante’s Inferno, in which Dante’s pilgrim climbs the giant, frozen body of Satan and emerges from hell to see stars, “Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears.” In Mengestu’s novel, Joseph, an immigrant from the DRC, a former student and current waiter, adores the Inferno‘s final lines because, as an African who has escaped both war and dictatorship, he correlates the pilgrim’s journey through and out of hell with his own immigration. Yet the relevance of Dante to The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears on the whole is broader and deeper than Joseph’s reader-response critique reveals, as the novel, like Dante’s epic, is ultimately a tale of loss, wandering, and finding one’s rightful place.
Dante’s pilgrim begins his journey by waking in the woods and finding himself surrounded by allegorical monsters. Mengestu’s protagonist, Sepha Stephanos, begins his journey in Ethiopia, where his father is murdered by the ruling regime after Sepha brings revolutionary pamphlets into their home. Sepha escapes to the Washington, D.C. area to share his uncle’s apartment, work at a hotel, and dabble in university education. The longer Sepha remains in the U.S., the less connected he feels to his homeland, the less contact he has with his mother and brother, and yet he simultaneously fails to forge new bonds with his adopted country. Sepha attempts to rectify his fractured sense of belonging by moving out of his uncle’s all-immigrant apartment building and opening his own business, Logan’s Market, a convenience store in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood called Logan’s Circle. Yet even this large step towards the American dream leaves Sepha feeling detached and unfulfilled — until a white woman and her biracial daughter move in next door.
The white woman, Judith, is a college professor with a fondness for Emerson and remodeling old houses. She buys and refurbishes a dilapidated mansion next to Sepha’s apartment in Logan Circle, and her daughter, Naomi, begins frequenting Sepha’s store. Naomi’s father, a Mauritanian economics professor named Ayad, is off teaching in Europe; thus Sepha becomes a surrogate father of sorts, as he and Naomi create imaginary friends and read The Brothers Karamazov to fill the slow afternoons in Sepha’s store. The biracial Naomi eventually serves as a link between her white American mother and black African pseudo-father, bringing the three together into an awkward, witty pseudo-family.
Sepha longs to transform his tenuous adopted family into a real family, to provide himself with the sense of permanence and place he has lacked since childhood. He tries to emulate Judith; he reads the books she admires, the books she has written, and goes through several rolls of wrapping paper trying to make his Christmas gifts appear as attractive as the ones that fill Judith’s living room. But an ill-spoken joke on Judith’s part jars Sepha back to reality: He is not like her, nor can he ever be.
Discontent with his status as a figurative wandering pilgrim, Sepha hopes he can repair the relationship, but further wedge issues develop nonetheless. As more affluent whites move into Logan’s Circle, rents rise, forcing the neighborhood’s poorer, black residents to move or be evicted. Judith gets heckled at a community meeting when she attempts to convince Logan Circle’s long-time residents that she shares their concerns and frustrations, a humiliating moment that unveils the divide between black and white, rich and poor that Sepha had previously sought to ignore.
In the post-meeting portion of the novel, Sepha leaves his store and goes on a long, aimless walk — to his uncle’s, to the restaurant where Joseph works, and back to Logan’s Circle. He roams among family, friends, and the familiar, comtemplating his life’s losses, mirroring Dante’s pilgrim as he drifts through a personal hell of displacement and indecision. Yet at the end of his journey, Sepha sees not stars but his store, dumpy and dirty, yet nonetheless his own, offering hope and home in a fragmented world simply because it is his.
While we witness the pilgrim’s encounter with God at he end of Dante’s Paradiso, we never see the end of Sepha’s journey. Whether or not he can stave off eviction depends on neighborhood forces and his rekindled commitment to working regular hours. However, life’s journeys are often as important and transformational as their endings, if not more so; therefore, Mengestu’s roundabout novel is worth reading not for its conclusion, but for its contemplation, illumination and hope.
Filed under Book Reviews | Comment (0)The Way We Live Now
Trollope, Anthony. The Way We Live Now. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005.
I suppose we ought to love the best people best; but I don’t.
- Hetta Carbury in Trollope’s The Way We Live Now
*~*~*
Anthony Trollope‘s impressive, 800-page, 1875 novel, The Way We Live Now, features overlapping and intertwining tales of love and money. The indifferent Baron Felix Carbury and Lord Nidderdale feel compelled to compete for the hand of Marie Melmotte, daughter of the renowned financier Augustus Melmotte. The lowly but feisty Ruby Ruggles chases Felix Carbury on account of his good looks and his title, while the genuine though ineloquent John Crumb in turn pursues her. Hetta Carbury, Felix’s sister, falls for the penniless Paul Montague, who returns her affections, despite his prior engagement to a beautiful American widow of questionable background, and despite the fact that Roger Carbury, Hetta’s cousin and a man of impeccable character, settles his heart on her as well. And yet, amidst all these love triangles, that which everyone loves most is money.
At the novel’s outset, few characters have much money, but all are eager to acquire it. Lady Carbury, mother of Felix and Hetta, writes poorly researched historical fiction and befriends newspaper editors in hopes that these friendships will lead to positive reviews and increased sales. The Longstaffe family bickers over whether and how to sell one of the family’s estates in order to pay off the debt on the first home. The members of the gentleman’s club, the Bear Garden, persist in gambling yet pay each other in IOU’s only. And then Melmotte arrives in London. He buys a spectacular house and remodels it to host the Emperor of China. He rents a second London home and buys the Longstaffes’ extra estate. He becomes chairman of the board of the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway, buying and selling shares in an alleged effort to fund the construction of a rail line from Salt Lake City to Vera Cruz. All of London clamours to be in Melmotte’s good graces, to attend his parties, to sit on his board, to marry his daughter.
Melmotte’s extravagance is, however, a carefully calculated illusion. As Paul Montague’s one-time fiancee, Mrs. Hurtle, explains, “There must be money where there is all this buying and selling of shares.” This assumption of wealth, rather than wealth itself, is what propels Melmotte forward. Melmotte commits forgery and mortgages property whose ownership is contested in order to fund his extravagant lifestyle, but the lifestyle is all anyone sees. No one involved in the railroad possesses any genuine desire to build a rail line on a distant continent, but they have a pointed interest in “float[ing] a company” — in generating and selling shares, in raising revenue from thin air. Money trumps morality, and when Paul Montague begins to question the ethics of the board’s activities, he remembers “the delight of his wealth” and finds himself for a time unable to exchange material comfort for integrity. Though rumors of Melmotte’s prior shady dealings on the continent follow Melmotte to London, the Londoners continue to covet the company of the arrogant, brazen financier because he pays and entertains well.
Melmotte is the Bernie Madoff of the 1870s — he fools as many people, and he falls just as hard. After the fleeting victory of being elected to the House of Commons — because money wins elections, too — Melmotte faces his impending financial collapse. Felix Carbury has already backed off his pursuit of Marie Melmotte after Melmotte threatened her with disinheritance, and Lord Nidderdale breaks his engagement with Marie, leaving her to espouse a doubtful view of love — “I don’t know anyone who loves anyone else” — that echoes Lady Carbury’s philosophy of matrimony and finance: “Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.” Marie ultimately succumbs to her cynicism and marries Hamilton Fisker, the smooth though unscrupulous American capitalist who first involved Melmotte in the railway, because he is the only man who pays her any attention after her father’s disgrace. We are left wondering whether Fisker’s wealth — his San Francisco estate, his railroads — is any more real than Melmotte’s.
I was, however, somewhat disappointed by the novel’s ending. Melmotte indeed receives his comeupance, but there is otherwise little fallout from his financial fraud, at least which Trollope deigns to show us. Mr. Brehgert, a wealthy banker, sustains a loss of 60,000 pounds, but he absorbs the hit gracefully, deciding that he will maintain one family home instead of two in order to preserve a substantial inheritance for his children. The Longstaffes receive payment for their essentially stolen house out of Melmotte’s estate. Marie reveals that Melmotte hid assets in her name, enough to comfortably support her and her stepmother. And everyone else either gets married (Hetta and Paul, Lady Carbury and Mr. Broune, Ruby Ruggles and John Crumb) or, in the case of the more troublesome characters (Felix Carbury, Mrs. Hurtle, Marie Melmotte), goes abroad. Trollope never tells of the defrauded shareholders who never recovered their wealth, and the only seeming injustice left looming at the novel’s end is that Roger Carbury, the novel’s only truly strong, honest man, the man Hetta contradictorily deems too good to marry, must watch the love of his life marry his impecunious friend and face a life of perpetual bachelorhood.
Overall, especially in light of the global financial crisis that has unfolded over the past three years, The Way We Live Now is a timely work about money, greed, and deceptive appearances. The characters conflate money and love, and those who find love are happy, while those who pursue money — or the illusion of money — are often, but not always, thwarted, exposed, and crushed. The Way We Live Now is both a good story and an important lesson, one we would do well to heed as we recover from our latest recession.
Filed under Book Reviews | Comment (1)Juliet, Naked
Hornby, Nick. Juliet, Naked. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009.
One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.
- Duncan in Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked
*~*~*
Annie, a museum curator in her late thirties, has been living with her boyfriend, Duncan, in Gooleness, England for 15 years. Duncan spends his days teaching at a local music conservatory and his nights blogging about a retired, reclusive ’80s rocker named Tucker Crowe. Annie, perpetually dissatisfied with her childless, mundane life, finally allows her submerged resentment to boil forth when Duncan receives a copy of Crowe’s previously unreleased demo version of his most famous album, Juliet. When Duncan in his euphoria posts a glowing review of the demo, dubbed Juliet, Naked, on his blog, Annie submits her own thoughtful, well-crafted review that argues, contrary to Duncan’s belief, that Juliet in its final, polished form is superior to Juliet, Naked. The insight as well as the mere reasonableness of Annie’s review spurs Tucker Crowe himself, now living in Pennsylvania, to send her a gracious email. And so begins Nick Hornby‘s latest novel, Juliet, Naked.
Though the plot of Juliet, Naked proves far-fetched (enigmatic singer-songwriter emerges after 20-year hiatus to praise random blogger), the novel unfolds as an illuminating commentary on what constitutes art. Duncan and his blogger buddies spend years deconstructing and analyzing the lyrics of the tortured love songs that comprise the original Juliet, an album inspired by Crowe’s affair with a married woman, Julie Beatty. However, the age of Crowe’s eldest daughter reveals that Crowe was in fact sleeping with someone else while he was with Julie, that his love was not as all-consuming and transformative as Juliet conveys and as the blogosphere believes. Crowe ultimately abandoned his rocker lifestyle because “he had come to the inescapable and unhappy conclusion that Juliet [. . .] was utterly inauthentic, completely phony, full of melodrama and bullshit[,] and he hated it.” Crowe retired from music because he felt his art was garbage, and he disdains fans like Duncan for their failure to see his music for the hollow imitation that it is.
But does the artist’s judgment reign supreme when it comes to the valuation of his or her own work? When a family tragedy brings Crowe to England, he and Annie are able to meet. In an act of vindictiveness and one-upmanship, Annie invites now ex-boyfriend Duncan to meet his idol, who in turn mortifies Duncan by criticizing his fawning fan page and recent rock pilgrimage to the U.S. But the sheepish, humbled Duncan makes a strong argument for the listener’s role in determining the value of art: “I’m not the only person who thinks you’re a genius. And while you might think we’re . . . we’re inadequate as people, we’re not necessarily the worst judges in the world. [. . .] I don’t pretend to understand what those songs meant to you, but it’s the forms of expression you chose, the allusions, the musical references. [. . .] I don’t think people with talent necessarily value it, because it all comes so easy to them, and we never value things that come easy to us. But I value what you did on that album more highly than, I think, anything else I’ve ever heard.” When Crowe hears his own album, he hears its falseness, its lies; when Duncan listens to Juliet, he perceives its metaphoric density and appreciates it as art. Duncan’s impassioned assessment startles even the jaded Crowe, who feels genuinely moved by Duncan’s enthusiasm, even though he remains unmoved by his own songs. Even Annie, who began listening to Crowe only because Duncan forced her, finds herself enjoying Juliet and defending Crowe’s artistry to guys she meets in a bar. Perhaps it is the awe Juliet inspires it its hearers that transforms mere imitation into art.
Ironically, the novel ends with the release of Crowe’s long-awaited comeback album, So Where Was I?, which, though inspired by the peace and genuine happiness Crowe eventually finds, receives a cold reception amongst Crowe aficionados. The fanatical blogosphere, committed to rhapsodizing about the torment and longing laid bare in Juliet, is unmoved by songs about reading and gardening. The false grief of Juliet earns Crowe more acclaim than the true contentment of So Where Was I? One album is authentic, the other is authentically art, and the valuation of each proves completely unconnected to said authenticity.
However, if I make it sound as though Juliet, Naked were a series of philosophical discussions about art, I do Hornby’s novel an injustice. While the artistic debate deepens the novel, Juliet, Naked is also funny, satirical, and sarcastic — all in typical Hornby fashion. I laughed audibly when Annie’s attempt to construct a museum exhibit about Gooleness in the 1960s yields mostly pictures (and actual preserved pieces!) of a dead shark that washed ashore one summer. I also appreciate the irony of a blogging community that simultaneously reveres and proliferates misinformation about an artist. All in all, Juliet, Naked — thoughtful, insightful, and amusing — is well worth the read.
Filed under Book Reviews | Comment (0)Marry Him
Gottlieb, Lori. Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. New York: Dutton, 2010.
[H]ere’s the truth: A happy ending is always possible, but a happy ending is a lot less likely than — and will look a lot different from — a happy ending for someone ten years younger than me. The older you get, the more complicated dating becomes, and no amount of attitude adjustment can turn back the clock and change those realities.
- Lori Gottlieb, Marry Him
*~*~*
I grabbed Lori Gottlieb‘s Marry Him off the New Books display at my local library because of its provocative title. I expected Gottlieb would offer some common-sense dating advice for the romantically challenged. Instead, she depressed me terribly, and I spent Valentine’s Day switching back and forth between Marry Him and an episode of A&E’s Intervention – which featured a homeless, bulimic heroin addict and her abusive boyfriend — as the show complemented the mood the book had inspired.
In Marry Him, Gottlieb combines anecdotes and advice gleaned from professional matchmakers, dating coaches, married friends, still-searching singles and her own experience in an effort to convince readers to discard the mostly superficial list of qualifications we all create while seeking the perfect partner. Women must be willing, she asserts, to date someone bald, overweight, or unstylish in case he might possess the more important qualities that ultimately make for a lasting relationship, namely kindness, thoughtfulness, and honesty. (Ironically, Gottlieb resists labeling this realistic assessment of one’s romantic options “settling,” though the word “settling” appears in her title.) This is sound advice, for, to find love, we must be open to it, with all of its flaws, idiosyncrasies, and challenges.
I agree with Gottlieb’s opinion that the soul mate concept — the notion that each of us has only one person for whom we are truly intended and with whom we will ever achieve deep happiness — is misguided and most likely wrong. I agree that one’s partner need not always induce butterflies in one’s stomach, that kindness ought to override baldness, and that one primary function of marriage is to provide a stable and loving environment in which to raise children. However, I found Gottlieb’s depiction of married life as one spent sitting around in sweat pants disconcerting. Gottlieb argues that marriage holds an economic advantage to dating, as dating women must spend large sums of money on facial waxing, professional hair dyeing, dating sites, and nights out trying to meet men, while married women can just stay home on the couch. This implies that marriage is easy once the wedding is over, that women never make efforts to look attractive to their husbands, and that such efforts are unnecessary. While Gottlieb expresses an awareness of marriage as work in the chapter on arranged marriages, she more often describes marriage as an end rather than as a relationship or a process requiring constant attention, maintenance, and care.
I likewise take issue with Gottlieb’s analysis of why so many women remain perpetually single. According to Gottlieb, there is a certain pervasive hubris of youth that keeps women second-guessing themselves, that causes them to seek better men even when they already find themselves in comfortable and rewarding relationships. These women hold out for perfection when no such thing exists, or abandon good relationships as soon as a new, exciting man walks into their lives. Gottlieb describes such women as Sex and the City types — professional, successful, intimidating — and generalizes this grass-is-greener tendency to nearly all single women. She interviews numerous women who ended relationships for which they now long in order to lend credence to her claim. While it is true that holding out for perfection will ultimately result in loneliness, it is unfair for Gottlieb to profess that all single women are single because they at some point in their lives threw away good men. She never considers that some women are single because they have yet to be in a relationship with a good man.
Furthermore, there is little logic in Gottlieb’s argument that the pool of available men shrinks as women age. Gottlieb’s experiences with speed dating and online dating showed her that single, older men usually seek younger women, often due to the purely biological reason that younger women are more capable of having children. Thus childless men in their 40s and 50s seek women in their late 20s and early 30s, leaving women over 33 to squabble over the self-absorbed, the divorced dads, and the otherwise wounded, broken shells of men willing to date a woman past her prime, who, if she doesn’t condescend to date someone outside her construct of an ideal man, will wind up alone in an apartment with a well-used Netflix subscription. Is the situation for singles truly so bleak? If women make up only slightly more than 50% of the population, it seems there should be enough men to go around. It also makes little sense that marriages would have thinned the pool of singles down to only the most ambitious women and most damaged men.
Perhaps my greatest obstacle in reading Marry Him is that I simply do not identify with Gottlieb. At 37, Gottlieb had established herself as a successful writer yet found herself still single. She thus went to a sperm bank to conceive a son, whom she now puts in daycare so that she can continue to write successfully about her singleness and complain that no men want a 41-year-old woman who had a child via sperm donor. She chastises women for ignoring and rejecting good men without offering advice on how to tell the good men from the bad men pretending to be good. She hired a professional dating coach to help her email men on Match.com and published a book on settling when she herself has not yet settled (The epigraph to Marry Him reads, “For my husband, whoever you are.”). Her life resembles mine in no way other than that we are both still single, and I finished Marry Him in no way confident that Gottlieb is the woman to help me change that.
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Denialism
Specter, Michael. Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives. New York: Penguin Press, 2009.
Experts chosen to represent a specific point of view are cheerleaders, not scientists. And people who rely on them are denialists. No matter what happens on this planet — even if genetically engineered foods continue to feed us for centuries — there will be those who say the theoretical dangers outweigh the nourishment they can provide for billions of people. Impossible expectations are really just an excuse to seek comfort in lies.
- Michael Specter, Denialism
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To Michael Specter — health, science, and technology columnist for the New Yorker — the greatest threat to scientific progress lies neither in student apathy nor religious fundamentalism, but rather in a more mainstream state of what he calls denialism, a societal aversion to science rooted in misinformation and fear. Denialism is willful ignorance writ large, a cultural desire to forgo the pursuit of scientific knowledge that could benefit humanity because of the unknown threats such a pursuit might entail. Throughout Denialism, Specter references highly publicized controversies, such as the Vioxx scandal and the ongoing debate surrounding GMOs, and illuminates less discussed fields of study, namely synthetic biology, to construct an argument in favor of progress and against blind fear.
Though discussing complex topics like pharmaceutical research and synthetic DNA, Specter’s writing is clear and accessible. He begins with an analysis of the familiar — Vioxx and the false connection between vaccines and autism — to ease readers from the familiar to more complex areas of medical and biological research. Specter argues that while Merck’s response to data that indicated Vioxx should not be prescribed to heart patients was evasive and incriminating, this one episode should not have induced the widespread mistrust of pharmaceuticals that followed. Such mistrust fosters a welcoming environment for poorly administered studies that reinforce pharmaceutical companies’ image as one of greed and heartlessness. (I would like to add, however, that the Vioxx scandal is not the only example of pharmaceutical companies placing profits before patients. The ways in which drug companies manipulate patent law and drug trials for financial advantage are discussed in depth in Marcia Angell’s repetitive but informative The Truth About the Drug Companies.) Within this atmosphere of doubt, the now disproved connection between vaccines and autism gained popularity, with well-intentioned celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, and Robert Kennedy, Jr. conflating ethyl mercury, once used in vaccines, with the deadly methyl mercury found in industrial waste in a misinformed and emotional crusade against childhood vaccines that has since led to a resurgence of diseases like measles and whooping cough. Unscientific and fear-driven campaigns such as the anti-vaccine movement ultimately cause more harm than good, rendering children susceptible to preventable diseases in an effort to protect them from an unrelated autism diagnosis.
Specter’s case for GMOs (genetically modified organisms, or food) is likewise convincing. He is careful to distinguish between breeding — an incremental process involving inner-species mating to achieve desirable traits like disease resistance and improved flavor — and genetic engineering, which involves an inter-species splicing of genes to achieve similar goals. Both processes offer a form of human-guided, fast-tracked evolution that enable us to feed a growing human population with a limited amount of arable land. Informed laypeople view breeding as an acceptable, more natural process; it is breeding, after all, that brought us roses, domesticated animals, and the Green Revolution. Cross-species tampering with DNA, however, engenders a fear of the unknown that has resulted in the growing popularity of “natural,” organic foods and a refusal amongst leaders of African nations to feed their starving populations with GMOs offered by wealthier nations. Specter criticizes the aversion to pesticides and GMOs as a luxury harbored by privileged Americans and Europeans who have never known true hunger. We cannot feed the earth’s growing population on organically grown foods; to insist upon such a feat would be to condemn much of the earth’s already impoverished population to starvation.
While these first several chapters are well-argued and -evidenced, I find many of Specter’s latter assertions more ethically questionable. The chapter entitled “The Era of Echinacea” argues against the unregulated health supplement industry, whose specious claims generate billions of dollars in sales without demonstrably improving its customers’ health. And while I share Specter’s disgust with an industry that does not deliver what it promises, his claim that “[a]ssessing data and gathering facts are the only useful tools we have to judge whether a treatment succeeds or fails” discounts the placebo effect he purports to respect. For example, if a patient dealing with chronic joint pain feels less pain after taking a supplement, this is a positive development, even if the relief is a purely psychological phenomenon that cannot be credited to the supplement. Feelings and perceptions are not quantifiable, and yet how we feel directly impacts the quality of our lives, our relationships, and our daily activities. While I would never advise using homeopathy to cure polio, there are clearly some subjective aspects to health that Specter at times ignores.
The chapters on synthetic biology are even more disconcerting. While the ability to create living organisms from loose genetic components has already resulted in brilliant medical accomplishments – such as the successful synthesis of artemisinin, plant matter used to combat drug-resistant malaria that cannot be grown in large enough quantities to meet current demands – the ideas of resurrecting extinct species or manufacturing viruses prove more ethically complicated. While reintroducing the woolly mammoth or the Neanderthal may be interesting to see, would it be humane? Would efforts at responsible environmental stewardship disappear in a world in which everything species that dies can be recreated in a lab? And while synthetic and mutated versions of known viruses can expedite the creation of vaccines, they could also become agents of bio-terrorism. Specter sidesteps these issues, instead claiming that there are a million ways to die or be killed by terrorists — planes, bombs, anthrax — and that fear should not impede the pursuit of knowledge. Though I share Specter’s enthusiasm for knowledge and progress, I believe such research needs to have clearly defined goals, security measures, and ethical standards governing it. It is contradictory to advocate saving lives through GMOs and vaccines but to ignore the deadly potential of synthetic viruses or the ethical implications of genetically modifying ones offspring.
Finally, it is interesting that Specter fails to address the contribution of religious conservatism to denialism. I once stopped attending services at a particular church in part because of the pastor’s insistence that the world’s scientists are colluding to dupe people into a false faith in evolution. Such religious leaders present science as conspiracy, as an intricate lie, thus resulting in widespread denial not only of evolution, but of climate change, the age of the earth, and the benefits of recycling. Pundits who share these views, like Rush Limbaugh, receive ample air time and spread doubt in the face of scientific certainties. It is curious that Specter devotes no time to this pervasive cultural force.
Nonetheless, Michael Specter’s Denialism is largely well-argued, well-researched, and thought provoking. Even if you do not agree with his scientifically progressive positions, the questions he raises are worth our time, thought, and public discussion.
Filed under Book Reviews | Comment (0)Falling Man
DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. New York: Scribner, 2007.
Are we ready for a novel about 9/11?
Fiction is many things — imagination, entertainment, meaning condensed. It is the soul if not the fact of a story. It is life on paper, sometimes clear, sometimes tangled, and we often struggle through stories — questioning, pausing, backtracking — in much the same way we stumble through our own lives. 9/11 wounded our national consciousness, our sense of safety and invincibility, in a way only Pearl Harbor managed to scar the older generations. And as these wounds slowly heal, perhaps it is appropriate to engage fiction that undergoes this journey with us.
Don DeLillo‘s Falling Man centers on Keith, who worked at 1 Liberty Plaza the day the planes struck. He walks away from the fallen towers, from the smoke and ash, carrying someone else’s briefcase and with a torn ligament in his wrist. He returns home to his estranged wife, LeAnn, whose editorial experience and work with Alzheimer’s patients leave her ill-prepared for aiding a husband who has just survived a terrorist attack. Falling Man‘s characters cope in different, disjointed ways whose futility even they recognize. Keith and LeAnn’s son, Justin, uses binoculars to scan the skies for Bin Laden. LeAnn researches Islamic extremism, talks to her mother, and attempts to connect with God. Keith has a short-lived affair with the owner of the wayward briefcase, a woman who also survived the attack. He avoids his friends, unable to endure the presence of those who remain alive while remembering those who died. He participates in poker tournaments, longing for the ritual, the order of his old weekly games. As the members of LeAnn’s Alzheimer’s group long to remember, writing about 9/11 as a poignant exercise in memory, Keith ironically cannot forget, and the novel ends before it began, back at 1 Liberty Plaza amidst collapsing ceilings, dying friends, and a surprisingly orderly exit into a changed and chaotic world.
But Keith is not the falling man. David Janiak, a cryptic character who suspends himself from bridges and buildings in a pose resembling that of a man photographed jumping from the towers, is the performance artist known as Falling Man. His art is both literally and figuratively painful; his harnesses lack elasticity, thus rendering his jumps excruciating, while his symbolic pose induces surprise, discomfort, and anger in those who witness his “art.” Yet the Falling Man is also a reflexive character, for he represents the very question DeLillo must have asked himself while writing this book: When and how is it appropriate to combine national tragedy and art? When does that pain — so fresh, so visceral — become available to the creative impulse? The Falling Man startles and offends, and his untimely though natural death at the age of 39 leaves us wondering what his final performance — a jump without harnesses — would represent. I can’t help but equate DeLillo’s novel with the final jump, a leap of artistic faith, dangerous, exposed, offending and exhilarating, seemingly inappropriate yet completely relevant.
Little is resolved by the end of Falling Man. The plot is circular, the characters hurt and confused. Even after Keith’s wrist heals, he continues with his physical therapy exercises, bending and stretching, remembering that pain along with many others. Yet, as unsatisfying and frustratingly open an ending as this may be, is this not exactly the situation in which America finds itself? We tell ourselves we are resilient, but even as we try to prove this — to others, to ourselves — we are hurt. And while we heal, we go through the motions of our old lives, and think about what has changed. Falling Man simply suggests that art, specifically fiction, play a role in this healing process.
Filed under Book Reviews | Comment (0)High Fidelity
Hornby, Nick. High Fidelity. New York: Riverhead Books, 1995.
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Rob Fleming is not marriage material. Neurotic, broke, and compulsively compiling top-five lists of anything and everything — songs, breakups, careers — it comes as no surprise that his lawyer girlfriend, Laura, leaves him for their former neighbor. Nick Hornby‘s High Fidelity chronicles Rob’s attempts to reestablish his relationship with Laura through visiting girlfriends past and engaging in circular self-analysis.
Although this is not often the case, I actually prefer the 2000 movie version of High Fidelity, for while John Cusack’s Rob is every bit as pathetic as Hornby’s, Cusack’s Rob — who spends much of his time standing in the rain and staring in his exes’ windows — is amusing, while Hornby’s Rob is fundamentally sad. In both versions, Rob is a 36-year-old, single record store owner whose sole passion is flaunting his knowledge of pop music. When Laura leaves John Cusack’s Rob, he pursues her with a creepy yet somehow flattering single-mindedness fueled by grief and emotion. Yet when Hornby’s Rob loses Laura, he loses his identity. He celebrates his birthday by guilting two random and not very close friends into meeting him at a bar for beer and strained conversation. Both Robs eventually come to realize that women are more than sexy lingerie, that relationships are complicated and frustrating and real, yet the movie Rob seems genuinely happy as he holds Laura at a party celebrating the release of a single on his own record label. Hornby’s Rob shows no initiative to start his own label; instead, Laura, after determining that she is “too tired” not to resume her relationship with Rob following her father’s death, forces Rob back onto the DJ scene he so enjoyed when they first met. In the novel, their relationship moves backwards rather than forwards, as Laura tries to re-make Rob into what he once was despite his post-funeral declaration (above) that he has already become a different person. The novel thus charts a relationship in regression rather than growth, espousing a philosophy of “love” in which two people settle on each other out of fear, loss, exhaustion, and lack of vision. Laura bosses Rob around, and he accepts that, for he doesn’t know who he is without her.
A more cynical reader might enjoy High Fidelity more than I have. But if your hope is to love rather than to resign yourself to another person, I recommend seeing the movie — and buying a different book.
Filed under Book Reviews | Comment (0)This is Your Brain on Music
Levitin, Daniel J. This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York: Plume, 2006.
Americans spend more money on music than on sex or prescription drugs.
- Daniel Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music
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After a recent drive to Spokane, most of which I spent listening to ’80s pop music, I spent an aggravating four days with Jefferson Starship’s “We Built This City on Rock and Roll” stuck in my head. Fortunately, I had purchased Daniel Levitin‘s This is Your Brain on Music on this same trip, and with the continuous refrain of “We built this city!” replaying in my head, I sat down to learn about the neurology of music — how our brain deconstructs, measures, and derives pleasure from organized sound.
Levitin, a neuroscientist and former sound engineer, writes accessibly despite the complexity of his topic. He diplomatically believes that we are all expert music listeners, even those of us who lack formal musical training, and therefore writes with a broad audience in mind. In fact, the first chapter, “What is Music?”, which defines terms such as meter, rhythm, pitch and timbre, is so simplistic that it can probably be skipped by any reader who has so much as looked at a piano. The following chapters remain dry, packed with scholarly citations and a puzzlingly large number of references to Paula Abdul. Nonetheless, Levitin’s discussion of the neurological process of listening to music proves engaging.
Unlike most human activities, which cause simultaneous neurological firings in only a few sections of the brain, listening to music both triggers and requires neurological activity in every part of the brain. Different parts of the brain, from the primal cerebellum to the more advanced frontal lobes, are responsible for deconstructing and comprehending the different components of music, and they do so effortlessly, without training. The result of hearing what one considers “good” music — a subjective and culturally conditioned classification – is the brain’s increased production of dopamine, the neurochemical that induces pleasure. A less pleasurable aspect of listening to music — getting a song stuck in one’s head — is simply the result of misfiring neurons that cause an internal broken record of song fragments to play over and over in one’s brain.
I was most interested to learn why the music we hear as teenagers becomes particularly ingrained in our minds and emotions, only to be disappointed by a neurologically sound yet mundane answer. Our hormone- and drama-driven teenage years cause us to latch onto the music we hear then more strongly, and, as we age, our willingness to experiment musically stiffens and evaporates, leaving us in the comfort zone of our middle- and high-school tastes. I thus harbor a particular fondness for Weezer, Oasis, and Green Day because I happened to be going through puberty when I first heard them, not because of any empirical greatness or neurological power they exert.
Overall, despite its catchy title, This is Your Brain on Music is interesting but not remarkable. But it will make you want to buy an iPod.
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