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
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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
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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
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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.
Filed under Book Reviews | Comment (0)
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.
*~*~*
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.
Filed under Book Reviews | Comment (0)The House of Mirth
Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. New York: Bantam Books, 1986.
I have tried hard — but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else. What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole?
- Lily Bart in Wharton’s The House of Mirth
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Edith Wharton‘s The House of Mirth is both a painful and beautiful read. Originally published in 1905, the novel describes the plight of Lily Bart, a New York socialite with a good name to uphold but little money with which to do so. Invitations into New York’s most prominent households depend upon one’s ability to maintain a current, fashionable wardrobe and one’s willingness to lose money at the host’s bridge tables. Thus Lily, who lives with her aunt and receives only a small, irregular stipend, finds herself continually in debt for the purpose of remaining both popular and presentable. The only respectable means of escaping her debt lies in marriage to a wealthy man — and at 29, Lily realizes she needs to act quickly.
Wharton presents Lily’s suitors comically at first. The incredibly wealthy Percy Gryce is almost too shy to speak with Lily until she feigns interest in his collection of old books. Yet Lily’s forced enthusiasm is short-lived, for while Gryce refrains from both gambling and smoking on religious grounds, Lily cannot rouse herself from bed early enough to accompany him to church. The Jewish investor and social climber Mr. Rosedale repeatedly expresses interest in Lily, yet his over-familiarity and lack of social grace repulse her. The married George Dorset would willingly leave his wife for Lily, and the brazen Gus Trenor would gladly take Lily as his mistress, but, despite the fact that women like Carrie Fisher and Bertha Dorset carry on fairly open affairs throughout the novel, Lily, whose relative penury renders her more vulnerable than her wealthier female friends, finds such options dangerous and unsavory.
The tragedy of the novel, Greek in its proportions, is that Lily becomes the scapegoat of the very people she longs to please. Lily’s planned late-night visit with Judy Trenor instead becomes a shouting match with Gus, who practically demands sex in exchange for the money Lily had previously taken from him, naively believing that he had been investing her money wisely and delivering the dividends. Later, on a European cruise, Bertha Dorset publicly accuses Lily of having an affair with George and throws Lily off the Dorset boat. News of the two scandals reaches Lily’s aunt in New York, who promptly rewrites her will and dies, leaving Lily just enough to repay her debt to Trenor. Lily resorts to working for a living, first as a social secretary to an disreputable Westerner, and later as a hat maker. Her old friends refuse to acknowledge her, and she is left to her own devices, limited as they are by an upbringing and education that focused on poise and grace rather than on utilitarian skills.
Wharton’s inclusion of Lily’s male counterpart, Lawrence Seldon, heightens the tragedy by revealing opportunities from which Lily could benefit but may not pursue simply because she is a woman. Lawrence must work for a living as well, but, as a man, he was permitted to study law and become a lawyer. He lives independently in his own apartment, and when he invites Lily over unaccompanied, the critical glares of those who see her exiting the building are never cast upon him. Selden travels through France freely and alone, while Lily must seek refuge with cousins when Bertha Dorset revokes her hospitality. Lily’s rashness throughout the novel — her decision to snub Gryce in favor of a walk with Selden, her impulsive dress-buying, the impromptu cruise — often gets her in trouble, but this same trait simultaneously illuminates the energetic, spontaneous, witty part of Lily that longs to be unbridled, to enjoy the independence that Selden takes for granted. Lily at one point laments, “I wasn’t meant to be good!” However, more accurately, Lily wasn’t meant to be an early 20th-century woman — protected by relatives, monitored by men, watched and whispered about, always clinging to an appearance of virtue (unless, of course, one had the money to silence the talk), and perpetually at the mercy of baseless gossip and upper-class whims. Lawrence’s education and profession, available only to men, allow him to exist somewhat outside of the social scene that dominates and eventually destroys Lily.
Lily never marries, as her ruined reputation renders her untouchable among the elite. Selden, her kindred spirit and confidante, finds the courage to defy convention and profess his love for Lily too late, as Wharton thwarts the unrealized love with a frustrating yet powerful ending in the vein of Romeo and Juliet. The last chapters of The House of Mirth, which contain Lily’s reflections on her fall, her pride, and true happiness, constitute a poignant must-read, while the novel as a whole functions as an important and insightful commentary on the historical status of women.
Filed under Book Reviews | Comment (1)The Age of American Unreason
Jacoby, Susan. The Age of American Unreason. New York: Vintage Books, 2009.
Reading good books [. . .] does little to improve reading skills — certainly not after the age of seven or eight — but it does expand the depth and range of the reader’s knowledge and imagination in just about every area of conceivable interest to human beings. When Anna Karenina throws herself in front of the train, the reader is left with an endless series of questions about the nature of betrayal, the sexual double standard, the compromises of marriage, parental duty versus personal fulfillment, family loyalty, religion in nineteenth-century Russia — the great and the quotidian dilemmas of life in every era and the red meat of intellectual discourse.
- Susan Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason
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Several weeks ago, I parked myself in front of my television for my daily intake of current events while I drank my morning coffee. CNN’s morning anchor was interviewing the lead singer and guitarist of a band I had never heard, and as I listened to the 50-year-old singer describe her impossible love for her much younger guitarist, I waited for the connection to the “real” news – that they were, perhaps, raising money for flood victims in Pakistan or for AIDS medication for Africans. Alas, I soon came to realize that pop promotion had usurped the place of real world occurrences, as a mini-concert replaced any news of brewing hurricanes and upcoming elections.
Susan Jacoby‘s The Age of American Unreason discusses the American culture of anti-intellectualism that has permitted the above-mentioned conflation of entertainment, pop culture, personal testimony and opinion to replace straight information and true culture — literature, music, fine arts — over the course of the last century. It is not unusual for Anderson Cooper to speak of Supreme Court rulings and Lindsay Lohan over the course of a single broadcast, nor is it unlikely that viewers will be more familiar with Lohan’s legal troubles than with a recent ruling that allows corporations to make unlimited contributions to political campaigns as a form of free speech under the first amendment. Jacoby’s purpose in writing, however, is not simply to chastise Americans for our diminished attention spans and passive absorption of infotainment, but to detail the development of the pervasive cultural force that too often prompts us to distrust the educated, cater to the emotional, and discount fact as political distortion.
Americans have long had a contentious relationship with education and the educated. Indeed, we revere the self-made man, the autodidacts Ben Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, the college drop-outs turned billionaires Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg. Americans strive to send their children to college while simultaneously glorifying those without degrees. Jacoby illustrates in great detail how this phenomenon is partially the result of early twentieth-century intellectuals’ penchant for Marxism, which public opinion conflated with Soviet Communism and Stalinism, particularly during the McCarthy era. That some educated people supported Marxism as a philosophy is different than intellectuals wholeheartedly supporting a Stalinist world order, yet the intellectual-Communist-anti-American conflation of the 1930s and ’50s was born and persists, as we saw in the 2008 presidential election, during which Sarah Palin and her fellow conservatives branded Columbia- and Harvard-educated Barack Obama a “socialist” for advocating progressive taxation. Thus to be uneducated is seen as somehow more genuine, less frightening, and the American voters have been more willing to trust the verbally bumbling George W. Bush than they have more educated politicians with the experience and capacity for nuanced thought required for leadership, diplomacy, and forming public policy.
Another factor fueling American anti-intellectualism is religion, particularly fundamentalist Christianity, whose followers espouse a literal interpretation of the Bible that forces the faithful to discount any science, logic, or facts that might challenge their literalist reading and thereby endanger their salvation. This fundamentalist resistance to reason has rendered the United States the only developed nation in the world in which evolution and climate change remain matters of heated debate, as what Jacoby terms “junk thought” has achieved equal status with scientific evidence and study. Yet while the political and religious right have employed junk science to further their refutations of carbon dating and global warming, left wingers are, in this instance, equally guilty of dumbing down scientific discourse. As Jacoby concisely states, “Since the late sixties, there has been a growing acceptance of social and psychological theories in which great weight is accorded the passionate emotional convictions of believers. In this realm of emotion, absolute value is placed on personal testimony based on personal experience.” Personal belief is thus elevated to the level of objective research, and something becomes “true” simply because one “feels” it to be true. Whether such conviction stems from personal experience or literalist religion, the result is a subjective, arguable “truth” that can be manipulated for political or personal gain while facts and hard science are forgotten.
An additional — and, to me, the most deplorable — force driving anti-intellectualism in this country is Americans’ failure to read. I chose the epigraph for this review carefully and with purpose, for in it Jacoby powerfully illustrates that reading rises above mere entertainment. Reading — reading literature in particular — exposes readers to history, to opposing points of view, to ambiguity, to the traumas and turmoils of humankind. Reading and analyzing literature requires critical thinking, promotes discussion, and teaches readers to construct well-supported arguments based on textual evidence. Reading is both intellectually demanding and personally enriching. Unfortunately, the advent of television in the 1950s and video games in the 1980s and ’90s spurred a decline in both reading and the conversation that often accompanies the exposure to new ideas through reading. Our educational system, which ought to encourage students to read, only further contributes to the decline in that it mandates reading as part of a student’s hated homework regimen to the point where homework has become, in Jacoby’s words, the “enemy of reading for pleasure.” Reading is now something to be dreaded and avoided rather than sought and experienced and loved. Our university English departments, once bastions of culture, now struggle to defend their existence, remaking themselves into composition programs that perform the utilitarian service of teaching students in other majors how to construct a thesis statement, cite sources and use the library. A nation that does not read knows itself but little, lazily relying on other media and individuals — television networks, pastors, politicians — to rewrite its history and define its beliefs.
Jacoby’s arguments are timely, well-researched, and convincing; nonetheless, if her purpose is to ignite fervor in readers in need of an intellectual conversion, her abrasive tone at times works against her. Referring to all religion as “superstition,” for example, will immediately alienate a religious reader who may otherwise have been open to arguments against biblical literalism. Jacoby disparages Americans’ unwillingness to expose themselves to ideas differing from their own while simultaneously denigrating faiths she does not share and the very people she is trying to convince. Similarly, when Jacoby speaks of the Soviet Union’s censorship of music and poetry as an agent of intellectual expansion (Jacoby writes that the Soviets she encountered while living abroad in the ’60s demonstrated a greater appreciation of the arts because their exposure to such was limited and criminalized), she scolds Americans for enjoying too much freedom in an oddly anti-democratic and off-putting passage. Finally, despite the cover’s claim that the 2009 edition of The Age of American Unreason has been “revised and updated,” the editorial seams are painfully visible. Jacoby periodically refers to the Bush administration in the present tense, as though Bush were still in office, while elsewhere referring to Obama as the current president. It is maddening that such a carefully researched book is at times undone by its editorial deficiencies. But, as Jacoby emphasizes repeatedly, not liking something, or disagreeing with something, is not an acceptable reason for failing to read and engage those ideas with the intellectual vigor this country so desperately needs.
Filed under Book Reviews | Comments (3)In Cold Blood
Capote, Truman. In Cold Blood. New York: Vintage Books, 1965.
It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize.
- Perry Smith’s last words before his 1965 execution, quoted in Capote’s In Cold Blood
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Sitting in the Atlanta airport, awaiting a flight to Salt Lake City, I watched the gate’s flat-screen TV broadcast the gruesome details of a crime committed three years ago in Connecticut. Steven Hayes, whose trial began this week, and Joshua Komisarjevsky took hostage a family of four, drove the mother to the bank to withdraw $15,000, and then proceeded to beat the father, rape and strangle the mother, rape the 11-year-old daughter, and set the house on fire, killing all but the father. I looked down at the book in my lap, Truman Capote‘s In Cold Blood, struck and saddened by the continued relevance of Capote’s nonfiction account of a family murdered in Kansas in 1959.
In Cold Blood details the lives and crimes of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, who in 1965 were put to death by the state of Kansas for murdering four members of the Clutter family in the remote town of Holcomb. Informed by a cellmate that Mr. Clutter kept a safe in his home, parolees Perry and Dick drove from Kansas City to Holcomb in the middle of the night, tied up each member of the family, and shot each of them in the head with a shotgun. Ironically, had the murderers bothered to make further inquiries about Mr. Clutter, they would have discovered that he was famous for never carrying cash and paid all of his expenses by check. Thus there was no safe found in the home, and the killers headed to Mexico with less than $50 in loot, a pair of binoculars, and an old radio from the Clutter ranch.
What lends In Cold Blood more depth than an episode of Law and Order, however, is Capote’s efforts to understand how the criminal mind is formed, particularly with regard to Perry Smith. Perry was one of four children born to a white father and a Cherokee mother. His parents divorced when he was young; his mother became an alcoholic, while his father remained emotionally and often physically absent, content to leave his children in state custody when their mother could no longer care for them. Two of Perry’s siblings went on to commit suicide. A mixed-race child in an intolerant America, a chronic bed wetter from a dysfunctional family, Perry barely completed the third grade and maintained no close friendships. A motorcycle accident that maimed his legs inspired him to tone his upper body until it was disproportionately large; however, despite his efforts at compensation, he remained embarrassed and uncomfortable in his own skin. Thus, while shooting four strangers at point-blank range is never justifiable, Capote aptly conveys the factors — the abuse, the neglect, the loneliness — that may lead one to desire to annihilate the world. In so doing, Capote locates what scraps of decency remain in the shooter — Perry’s unwillingness to allow Dick to rape 16-year-old Nancy Clutter, for example — and paints a portrait of a killer that is both terrifying and eerily sympathetic.
And yet, even though Perry pulled the trigger, Dick Hickock scares me the most. This charismatic, personable pedophile and would-be rapist came from a respectable family. His parents, though far from affluent, provided Dick with a comfortable life. He married young, had several children, got into debt. He passed bad checks as a means of maintaining his lifestyle without caring that the cheated vendors would later demand payment from his parents, even after his father was diagnosed with cancer. Dick recruited Perry for the crime in Holcomb, pretending to be his friend, egging on the unstable, eager-to-please ex-con with repeated references to “no witnesses.” Dick was all talk when it came to killing people, but he was enough of a sociopath to inspire others to do his killing for him. He was manipulative but charming; he could tell a good joke, could pass as normal. Whereas Perry both behaved and appeared creepy, Dick was the average guy down the street, the criminal in plain sight, thus rendering him far more dangerous.
Try as he might, though, Capote never solves the nature vs. nurture riddle. Despite leading vastly disparate lives and stemming from completely different families, Dick and Perry joined forces for the same crime, wound up in the same prison, and were executed by hanging on the same night. Perhaps better parenting and education may have saved Perry, though parental love and a high school diploma clearly had no positive impact on Dick. And while one criminal proves sympathetic while the other does not, the Clutters are nonetheless dead, their murders nonetheless unforgivable. 50 years later, as we view the mugshots of Hayes and Komisarjevsky on the news, wondering how two human beings could discuss, conspire, and agree to commit such a heinous crime, we find ourselves in Capote’s shoes, longing to decipher human evil, only to find that the humanity of a killer renders the evil all the more baffling.
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