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This week's movie was Susanne Bier's Efter brylluppet (After the Wedding), starring Mads Mikkelsen, with Rolf Lassgård, Sidse Babett Knudsen, and Stine Fischer Christensen. After the Wedding is a deeply affecting film about family and regret, and about the natural limits of benevolence.
It's also impossible to say more than that without giving away the plot, so stop here if you want to be surprised by the movie.
The Daily Blague extends the heartiest happy birthday wishes to Brooke Astor, who turns 105 today, although who's counting? (She almost certainly, sadly, isn't.) We also do our best to conceal our ghoulish anticipation of the lowdown, written, if we're lucky, by Dominick Dunne, about her son's financial stewardship, which was stripped from him in December.
And while we're wishing, let's hope that the front-page story, "Testimony by Giuliani Indicates He Was Briefed on Kerik in '00," together with an oddball but completely that's-our-guy accompaniment, "In His White House, Giuliani Says, His Wife Might Have a Very Visible Role as Adviser," put a big hole in the hull of the former mayor's presidential candidacy.
His third wife, let's not forget. Not that I'm scolding. Mrs Astor had three husbands, too.
Louis XVI, Benedict XVI... can we arrange a switch? Louis was actually a good old boy who was true, in his way, to his school. Benedict is not so worthy.
Kathleen and I have dried our tears; we are ready to get on with the day. We cried ourselves silly over Joyce Wadler's piece in today's House & Home section, "It's Not You, It's Your Apartment." New York is a tough town. You're good-looking, you're successful, you don't ask your date to help pay the bill - what could go wrong? Well, you could stop by your house to pick up an umbrella and, getting a little distracted, lead her up to your bedroom in the attic. Innocently, of course!
"We walked up three flights of stair to the attic," she says. "It looked like a teenager's room. The computer was up there and the twin bed, his clothes were all over the floor. I was like, uuuuuh-huuuuh. He didn't even seem sorry that he lived in a 12-year-old boy's room, this was like normal behavior. It said to me, this person is not grown up yet. It was frightening. He's lived his whole life in the attic."
But it wasn't the stories of home-decor disaster that reduced us to tears; it was Ms Wadler's excellent writing. The extract just quoted comes from a section headed, "There Is a Reason Nice Buildings Are Not Named for Norman Bates." Even better:
Spring is here and the restaurants will soon be filled with anxious and hopeful couples, ordering wine, dusting off their most luminous lies, thinking they might finally have found love. Then they will see their dates' homes for the first time. And suddenly some of them will realize that they cannot be with this person a moment longer..."
There are some real characters, as we say in Gotham, in Ms Wadler's menagerie of I'll-do-it-my-way Martha Stewarts - most of whom, by the way, are men. There's Albert Podell, the well-to-do septuagenarian lawyer who has somehow managed to preserve cartoon-themed bedding for nearly forty years. (I know the secret, but it's too disgusting to repeat.) There's Bob Strauss, happily smiling as he holds up the stuffed baby seal (not a toy) that he inherited from relatives in Miami. Most touchingly, there's Evan Lobel, the modern-furniture merchant who thought that what his boyfriend would really like when he got back from a Peace Corps stint was a $2.4 million loft with a $25,000 chandelier.
Aaaaannnnnhhh!
"He said, 'What is this? I can't live in a place like this. I was just around people who were hungry and dying'," Mr Lobel says. "In the end we were breaking up. For a while I regretted even buying that apartment."
Thank goodness he got over the regret!
What I'm reading these days is Virgin Soil, Ivan Turgenev's last novel, and A Hall of Mirrors, Robert Stone's first. They are very unalike. Turgenev's social comedy - which, I expect, is not going to be so funny by the end - is dry and understated, prone to refrain from judgment while making it impossible for the reader to do the same. His characters are offspring, legitimate or otherwise, of the upper classes; some are richer than others but all would pass, in the England of the time, as gentlefolk.
A Hall of Miirrors takes place in a New Orleans that is unlikely to inspire nostalgia. For the down-and-out characters whose alternate stories twine through the opening of the book, New Orleans is anything but the Big Easy. It's a gritty, unwelcoming burg at the end of the Illinois Central tracks. Rheinhardt, now a drunk, was at one time a promising clarinetist at Juilliard. Geraldine's face is nastily scarred - car accident, she says. She'd like to get a job as a waitress, but prospective employers have another line of work in mind.
Somewhere in Virgin Soil - I haven't come upon it yet - a character gives the aristocracy another thirty years. In the event, they had forty, which is close enough. Everybody in the book seems to believe that some sort of fundamental change is inevitable; something like a revolution lies ahead. In A Hall of Mirrors, the revolution has already taken place. The air giddy expectation that colors Virgin Soil are replaced by the shut-down self-protectiveness of A Hall of Mirrors.
There is a streak of wild black humor in A Hall of Mirrors.
He tried to think who it was that had developed the surrender theory - and remembered Bruce, the stage Englishman with whom he had worked at WLOX in Chicago. One sad cold night, Bruce had walked into the bar of the Redcliff Hotel, where the radio studio was, and, with his overcoat draped dramatically across his narrow shoulders, announced that he was going to kill himself. He was quite eloquent about it, but the customers of the bar, Rheinhardt among them, had affected not to believe him. The Redcliff regulars sensed the remote possibility that something at last might happen around the Redcliff Hotel and did not want to spoil it. Some of the others perhaps realized that in dissauding a man from suicide they would be taking on a grave and probably improper moral responsibility for him; and that moreover, to dissuade him it would be necessary to listen to him talk at some length. The bartender was in some financial difficulty with the police and declined to sound any alarms. So Bruce, hiccoughing slightly, walked out into the properly snowy January night with a wild oath and an Old Vic flourish of his coattails.
Then, it was told, Bruce staggered across the Clark Street bridge to the Loop, had another Scotch and decided he might yet buy his life with surrender. So he sat down in the snow on the corner of State and Van Buren resolved to offer public surrender to the first authority, vehicle or private person that should happen by. Since it was the coldest of January nights with a blizzard well underway, Bruce waited for some time. But at length, there passed a two-hundred-fifty pound Mississippi cotton picker who had just debarked penniless and fighting mad from the last bus out of Dixie, who, on encountering Bruce asleep on the curb and incapable of voicing surrender, creased him over the top piece with a mail-order blackjack and stole his suicide note and wallet. Somewhat later, the Van Buren Street bus also encountered Bruce and ran over his left foot.
Some people said Bruce subsequently died of influenza. Some said he became a Trappist monk of saintly renown. Other said he had entered the Federal Civil Service. There was a further story to the effect that behind a friend chicken parlor on the South Side, the Chicago Police discovered the mysteriously dead body of a fugitive Hines County stomper - a man of little education and violent background, whose pockets yet contained a suicide note reflecting the most refined and subtle sentiments and concluding, remarkably, with whole passages from Oedipus's farewell speech in the temple at Colonus. In any case, Rheinhardt thought, Bruce had proved the impossibility of surrender on anything like acceptable terms.
I'm sure that several monographs have been written about the Subotchevs - Fomushka and Fimushka - who provide the entertainment in Chapter 19 of Virgin Soil. This elderly couple has never quite moved into the Nineteenth Century. These souvenirs of the ancien régime - the time when it seemed that Russia just might progress peacefully beyond autocracy - have preserved their Queen of Spades style of life, as much as the decay of their fortunes permits. They're both polished and dim. (The translation is Constance Garnett's.)
Then Fomushka began talking of the French of to-day, and expressed the opinion that they must all be very wicked!
"Why so, Foma Lavrentyevitch?"
"Why, only see what names they have now!"
"What, for instance?"
"Why, such as Nozhan-Tsent-Lorran (Nogent Saint Lorraine), a regular bandit's name!"
Fomushka inquired incidentally, "Who is the sovereign now in Parks?"
They told him "Napoleon," and that seemed to surprise and pain him.
"Why so?"
"Why, he must be such an old man," he began, and stopped, looking round him in confusion."
I'm also reading essays by Montaigne, but they deserve their own entry. I haven't read Montaigne since school; now, I feel old enough to appreciate them.
The title of Elaine Sciolino's story, "Typical French Town Is Split Over Elections," is misleading. Ms Sciolino's report is all about voters who can't make up their minds about "Sarko, Ségo," or the self-styled Third Way, François Bayrou.
The indecision cuts across class and ethnic lines, uniting workers, merchants, union leaders, students, bureaucrats, the children of immigrants and the unemployed. Even voters who have chosen a candidate confess that their support is shallow at best.
Everyone Ms Sciolino talks to appears to have surrendered to a certain realistic cynicism: none of the candidates, if elected, will fulfill campaign promises.
Has Jacques Chirac's careerism been so corrosive as to undermine the French electorate's faith in representative government? Or does a Yoplait worker, Jean-Pierre Bertin, put his finger on the problem when he says, "France is always complaining. We always complain. But we never take action."
France today is like a guy who's sleeping in. He's very comfortable - oh! so comfortable. He would like to stay where he is forever. Trouble is, he has to pee. Five more minutes, he says. And keeps saying. Until finally he sweeps the bedclothes away and lurches to his feet. He knows that there's no point in going back to bed; that delicious comfort has been lost forever. Life goes on.
France has been dawdling in a bed of bloated public-sector employment and stringent job-protection regulation. It would seem that everyone in France must have a family member who works for the government, or who holds a job thanks only to laws that make it difficult to fire employees. Why, in other words, would anyone outside the functionally excluded pool of magrebin children want to change the system? But the system must be changed - who knows how.
Charles DeGaulle was the last man truly to lead the French, and even the slightest glance at his character and competence makes it painfully clear that there is no one like him on the scene today. French voters are probably going to have to learn to make do without magisterial authorities. They - the voters - are supposed to be the ultimate authorities. They're the ones who will have to decide to get out of bed - who ought to be making that decision now. Democracy goes on.
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.
What is Leni Riefenstahl doing on the cover of this week's Book Review? The same thing she always did: looking great. She was a beautiful and industrious filmmaker. These are not criteria of greatness, however. If Riefenstahl holds any interest for us today, it's in her long success at shrugging off her Nazi past - and that's not a very nice story. Riefenstahl is one of those absurdly irritating figures who thrive, even posthumously, in any kind of attention.
Erica Wagner's Essay, "Call Me, Ishmael," only half-humorously proposes that the cellular phone will drive dramatic irony from the novel.
And that's another insidious aspect of mobile telephony: its retrospective ability to make even a relatively recent novel look quaint. While it's true that the peculiar bunch of students in Donna Tartt's Secret History would never fit a common model of contemporary behavior, it's hard to believe that the murdered Bunny wouldn't have a cell, and his disappearance might be just a bit less mysterious. But the novel was published in 1992, which counts as the olden days now.
In the center of the issue, Rachel Donadio profiles book dealer Glenn Horowitz, the man behind some very rich sales of books and literary archives. The piece ends up trivializing literature by showing Mr Horowitz as just another purveyor of luxury goods.
Yes
The following titles appear to deserve coverage in the Book Review. The reviews may still be inadequate or useless.
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, by Dinaw Mengetsu. Rob Nixon gives this novel about a displaced Ethiopian who keeps a small grocery in Washington, DC, such a strong review that I ordered a copy on the spot.
In Mengetsu's work, there's no such thing as the nondescript life. He notices, and there are whole worlds in his noticing. He has written a novel for an age ravaged by the moral and military fallout of cross-cultural incuriosity. In a society slick with "truthiness" - and Washington may be the capital of that - there's something hugely hopeful about this young writer's watchful honesty and egalitarian tenderness. This is a great African novel, a great Washington novel and a great American novel.
That certainly made me sit up and pay attention!
Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy, by Andrew Cockburn. Jacob Heilbrunn is just the man to review this partisan book. It is clear that he shares Mr Cockburn's dim opinion of the former Secretary of Defense, but he raps Mr Cockburn's knuckles all the same for overstating a few cases.
The European Economy Since 1945: Coordinated Capitaliism and Beyond, by Barry Eichengreen. Sheri Berman's favorable review is also a good one. Mr Eichengreen, she writes,
reminds us that economic development calls for much more than simply the unleashing of market forces; it demands institutions capable of generating the resources, skills and relationships necessary to handle the particular economic challenges a country has to face at a particular time. And by demonstrating how institutions helpful in one era can become counterproductive in another, Eichengreen has important lessons about the future to teach both policy makers and publics.
The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh, by David Damrosch. Jonathan Rosen's largely favorable review of this account of, among other things, the decoding of the cuneiform tablets that traveled from Mesopotamia to the British Museum in the Nineteenth Century, ends on a sour note.
Damrosch's eagerness for universal themes leads him to stumble awkwardly in his coda, where he compares Saddam Hussein's first novel, which draws loose inspiration from Gilgamesh, to Philip Roth's Great American Novel, which features a baseball player named Gil Gamesh.
Maybe
It is difficult to tell whether these books are actually as indifferent or pointless as the reviews suggest.
Christine Falls, by Benjamin Bright. Kathryn Harrison's review of this crime novel by John Banville writing under a pseudonym begins on a very positive note. "More than a seamless performance in fulfilling the demands of its genre, Christine Falls is executed with what feels like authorial delight." The last word in the next paragraph, however, is "perfunctory." Toward the end, the review becomes outright unfavorable.
Because Quirke and his supporting cast are types rather than fully realized characters, they're immune to the kind of analysis, or significance, imposed on a Moses Herzog or a Rabbit Angstrom or, for that matter, a Freddie Montgomery, the protagonist of John Banville's novel The Book of Evidence. But it's hard to dismiss what emerges as a particularly insidious strain of misogyny in Christine Falls - insidious because it masquerades as Quirke's concern for the fate of unwed mothers and their babies.
If that's a fair characterization of Christine Falls, then the review doesn't belong in the Review, even if a noted novelist wrote it.
Winterton Blue, by Trezza Azzopardi. Liesl Schillinger devotes two paragraphs of her favorable review to Ms Azzopardi's prior two novels, something that ought to be a matter of course in the Review. Nowhere, however, does Ms Schillinger actually issue a judgment about the new novel as a whole: the favorable nature of the review is more a vibration than an expression.
Lost City Radio, by Daniel Alarcón. Sarah Fay wants to like this novel more than she does. Having just judged the second half of the novel as "marred by dull descriptions ... that lapse into sentimentality," Ms Fay interrupts herself:
Still, there's enough here to confirm that Alarcón is talented - and wise - beyond his years, that he remains intent on challenging himself and his readers.
Unfortunately, there is no evidence of this in the review.
Inheritance, by Natalie Danford. It's difficult to tell from Ligaya Mishan's review whether Inheritance is a genuinely literary novel, with characters on whom "significance" may be "imposed," or just a high-end beach book with a nasty betrayal at its core.
When an Italian asks Olivia to explain the difference between the English words "story" and "history," she's stumped. "History," she ventures, is "bigger and involves more people - like the history of a country, or a way, or a revolution. Story is smaller." This deceptively slender novel belies that distinction.
An ambiguous remark.
Leni: The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl, by Steven Bach; and Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, by Jurgen Trimborn, translated by Edna McCown. Clive James's essay about Riefenstahl insists that even great artistry does not neutralize complicity in political wrongdoing, and he suggests that Riefenstahl's artistry was not great. Mr Davis argues persuasively that Riefenstahl lied about her unawareness of the dark side of Fascism, and that she was able to shrug off culpability with the help of time and "her histrionic abilities."
Luckily for her, she had feminine wiles to burn: until she was old and gray, she met few men who didn't fall for her on the spot. It could be said that she had looks and energy but no real brain. The evidence was overwhelming that she didn't need one.
Beyond pointing out which of the two books ostensibly under review has the better pictures (Mr Trimborn's) and which has the better text (Mr Bach's), Mr Davis has almost nothing to say about either. Mr Davis condescends to the readers of the Review no more graciously than he condescends to a celebrated filmmaker's feminine wiles.
Virgin: The Untouched History, by Hanne Blank. While there's nothing essential oddball about virginity, it seems to spawn a lot of kooky ideas. Alex Kuczynski passes a few of these along in her storytelling review. Of the book itself, she writes that it is "a useful, if sometimes clumsy, antidote to our confusion." For starters, who can name the five types of hymen?
Lonely Avenue: The Unlikely Life and Times of Doc Pomus, by Alex Halberstadt. Divorce specialist Raoul Felder's brother Jerome did indeed have an unlikely life, but I'm not persuaded, at least by Alan Light's review, that unlikelihood merits book-length treatment. Jerome had polio as a child and was disabled by it; developing an interest in the blues, he became a noted singer before writing the lyrics to some pop hit classics, such as "Teenager in Love." Mr Light tells the story but engages with the book only glancingly.
Halberstadt, a freelance writer, never met Pomus, but he vividly links the melancholy and yearning in these songs with Pomus's own personal and professional frustrations while never overplaying his hand.
Tales From the Torrid Zone: Travels in the Deep Tropics, by Alexander Frater. Christopher Benfey's very favorable review did not convince me that this is an important book, but I am no connoisseur of travel writing, and I gather that Mr Frater is pretty good at it.
As a child of the tropics himself, born into a family of Presbyterian missionaries in the New Hebrides, Frater has written a book that is part memoir, part travel yern, a hymn to solar lands where people "wear their shadows like shoes. ... While most of his "tales" are set in the South Pacific, Frater takes as his province all the "70 or so warm, wet countries" he has visited between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. As a result, Tales From the Torrid Zone feels both wide-ranging and a bit disjointed.
No
These books, if they deserve coverage at all, ought to grace other sections of The New York Times.
Billy the Kid: the Endless Ride, by Michael Wallis. T J Stiles writes,
Wallis's account, though solidly reliable, is not always so compelling. He sometimes steps on his own storytelling, referring to events he has yet to narrate and garbling what should be dramatic scenes. He attempts to add flavor with goddurn-it, get-along-little-dogie lingo, turning a hanging into a "neckstretching," shouts into "hollers," and murderers into "mankillers." A heavy salting of clichés proves at least as distracting: in this book, a "leader of the pack" who "called the shots" might bully "working stiffs" on "the straight and narrow."
Mr Stiles concludes that "to understand [Billy] is to glimpse something of the making of modern America." That is really a quite monumentally fatuous thing to say.
All God's Children: Inside the Dark and Violent World of Street Families, by Rene Denfield. Tara McKelvey writes,
All God's Children is both fascinating and flawed. Denfield describes, in a factual and sometimes choppy manner, searing brutality ... and extremem egoism .... But even murderers can evoke sympathy - or at least seem human - in a well-constructed book. In Denfield's, they don't.
Off the Record: A Reporter Unveils the Celebrity Worlds of Hollywood, Hip Hop, and Sports, by Allison Samuels. Baz Dreisinger writes,
Actually, those looking for plain old journalism might also look elsewhere: Off the Record is not so much journalism as meta-journalism - a journalistic account of journalistic accounts.
He concludes:
The moves celebrities make during interviews are, to an eager journalist, like the events of a dream to a devout Freudian: revealing, but subject to overreading. Sometimes a random remark is just a random remark - and sometimes even a veteran reporter gets dazzled by fame.
Rory Stewart is a young British diplomat who is redefining what it means to be a "British diplomat." A former soldier, he is now very much a man of peace, overseeing the reconstruction of civil society in the Kabul region. He was reluctant, he writes in an Op-Ed column today entitled "What We Can Do," "to help re-establish ceramics, woodwork and calligraphy and restore part of the old city of Kabul." But he found that these were objectives in which Afghans were keenly interested, and thriving markets emerged, at least according to him. He modestly asserts that there are many more successful projects running throughout Afghanistan.
My experience suggests that we can continue to protect our soil from terrorist attack, we can undertake projects that prevent more people from becoming disaffected, and we can even do some good. In short, we will be able to do more, not less, than we are now. But working with what is possible requires humility and the courage to compromise.
We will have to focus on projects that Iraqis and Afghans demand, prioritize and set aside moral perfectionism; work with people of whom we don't approve; and choose among lesser evils. We will have to be patient. We should aim to stop illegal opium growth and change the way that Iraqis or Afghans treat their women. But we will not achieve this is the next three years. We may never be able to build a democratic state in Iraq or southern Afghanistan. Trying to do so through a presence based on foreign troops creates insurgency and resentment and can only end in failure.
"You are saying," the politician replies, "that we ought to sit back and do nothing." On the contrary I believe we can do a great deal. But ought implies can. We have no moral obligation to do what we cannot do.
In other words, as has been clear to me since before the Iraqi misadventure was even undertaken, the problem lies not in the Middle East but in arrogant, apparently faith-based ideologues in Washington: the people who agree about "ought" implying "can" but who believe in the moral obligation to undertake the impossible. Especially the impossible. "Bring it on!"
Bach and still more Bach: this time, played by Orpheus at the Temple of Dristan. That's what visitors to the museum used to ask to see - perhaps they still do. Another mass solecism: "Where are the Oscar Mayer Galleries?" (It's André Meyer.)
I feared that the adamantine surfaces of Dendurland would make hash of Bach's counterpoint, but the music sounded lovely. I happened to pick a seat on the aisle that the musicians used to come and go - one of the neatest things about Orpheus is that the musicians walk on all at once, like a wave of commuters at Grand Central, only carrying instruments. I got to take a good look at many half-familiar faces.
What planet are these people from? I'm talking about the people who have a problem with John Edwards's continued candidacy.
Mrs Edwards's health has been a prime topic of discussion for the past few days among American debating whether Mr Edwards, who is seeking the Democratic nomination, should continue to pursue his political ambitions. Some critics have suggested that he might try to exploit her condition to win votes.
That's Patrick McGeehan, a Times reporter whose byline I don't recall seeing before. I don't know whether I'm angrier with him or with his editors. This "debate," these suggestions about exploitation - who is having this conversation? Nobody I know, that's for sure.
What we have here is yet another instance of No Right Answer. Faced with a partner's catastrophic illness, some people throw themselves into their professional lives with redoubled vigor. Others retire. Neither course is inherently praiseworthy, and neither can be called "selfish." Different people create different relationships between home and work. This isn't to say that some people put work ahead of relationships. Rather, some people bring work home, while others don't. For some couples, particularly high-achieving ones, careers are part of the marriage itself, not distractions from it. The Edwardses would appear to have such a marriage.
If there's No Right Answer, there's No Wrong answer, either.
The Edwards story reeks of media manipulation, and if the Times is going to take it up at all, that is what it ought to be covering.
Jean-Philippe Toussaint's La Télévision has been in my pile for an unconscionably long time. It wasn't until I bought Jonathan Stump's English translation that I made real headway, but I did read the novel in French.
(From the Department of You Learn Something Every Day, there's this, said of a sandwich purchased outside a museum: Je n'avais pas fait une affaire." Come again? "It was no bargain.")
In either language, Television is a great read and, because it makes you feel about television instead of just asking you think about it, it's an important book.
Risotto has a somewhat intimidating reputation, but I can't for the life of me think why. Of course, I say the same thing about the soufflé. Both dishes require a certain focused attention at one or two steps of the production, but that's it. If you make sure that your egg whites are absolutely free of yolk before you beat them, and if you incorporate the beaten whites into the yolk mixture with a gentle hand - and if you resist the temptation to open the oven door to see how the soufflé is coming along! - your soufflé will be spectacular and delicious. Those aren't big ifs, in my view.
With risotto, you have to find the right setting for your burner. You want medium-low heat - just as you do for macaroni and cheese. As the rice heats up, it absorbs broth, swelling greatly in size. If the heat is too high, the rice will scorch and the broth will boil off. Once you've got the temperature down, all you need is a good sauté pan,* so that you won't have to stand over the risotto, stirring constantly. That's because risotto won't stick to a good pan.
While I wouldn't go so far as to say that risottos are as handy for using up leftovers as soufflés are, the chances are that you have the fixings of an interesting risotto somewhere in the fridge. All you really need is a bit of onion and reasonably fresh arborio rice. (If you haven't made a risotto in years - as was the case chez moi - just throw the old rice away and start over.) Last night, I made a shrimp risotto that I'd been dreaming about. It came out very well. Kathleen almost always praises whatever I put on the table, but she waxed quite extravagantly about the dish.
*Julia Child once remarked - over lunch at the Cirpriani in Venice, as I recall reading - that all a good cook really needs is a good sauté pan and a couple of good knives. I'd phrase it differently. I'd say that even the best cook can't get by without them.
On the strength of Anthony Lane's rather strong review, a 10:15 showtime, and sheer proximity, I went to see Mike Blinder's Reign Over Me yesterday. I expect that it's going to be a very big hit. It's not often that I like a picture that would also entertain the staff at a trading desk, and I can't wait to talk about it with people who have seen it.
Barry Schwartz in the London Review of Books, writing about Avner Offer's The Challenge of Affluence:
Offer points out how much we care about what he calls 'regard,' how we look to others. Status or regard can be derived from many things: virtues of character, occupation, acts of kindness or charity and of course wealth. In a society in which efforts are concentrated on increasing GDP, and life is oriented toward consumption, wealth becomes an increasingly important yardstick of status, and other things recede into the background. Thus the treadmill: how much wealth is enough? The answer is: more wealth than your neighbours. A rising tide that lifts all boats doesn't change your own relative position; you may be a better car, but you won't get more status. The result is a kind of arms race of wealth acquisition that thrives on inequality but leaves no one better off.
The disgust roused in me by this morning's House & Home story, "The Year Without Toilet Paper," is as visceral as the most rabid homophobe's response to the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Act (a bill that I support). I have an overpowering desire to exterminate (why beat around the bush?) preening and precocious urban environmentalists like Michelle Conlin and Colin Beavan, who ought to be thrown out of their Lower Fifth Avenue building for keeping a composter in their apartment.
Someday, I'm sure, the post-consumer life that the Conlin-Beavans are trying to lead will be forced upon all of us, but I expect an industrial, not a Thoreauvian, solution. That is, we will finally apply our enormously sophisticated technology to the task of minimizing its own impact. What the Conlin-Beavans are doing is a retrograde, autarkic form of playing house.
Those who did not experience the folly of the Sixties seemed doomed to repeat them. "If I was a student," Ms Conlin tells Penelope Green, "I would march against myself." The more telling quote is Mr Beavans.
Like all writers, I'm a megalomaniac," Mr Beavan said cheerfully the other day. "I'm just trying to put that energy to good use."
The far more urgent task is ridding Manhattan, and perhaps the entire Metropolitan Area, of diesel trucks.
A gloomy day was yesterday, but I had a nice walk just the same, and, what's more, I needed it. More at Taking Stock.
The news that Upper East Side ZIP Code 10021 will be broken up did not reach me in time to invest in Dempsey & Carroll, or any of the other stationers who will make a bundle between now and July, when the change goes into effect. Joe mentioned it yesterday - he'll still be "in the two-one" after the switch - but, according to this morning's Times, the story broke in Monday's Sun. Do you know anybody who reads the New York Sun?
The new ZIP Codes will be 10065 (60th-69th Streets) and 10075 (76th-80th Streets). The sloppy fingerprints of underpaid, inexpert bureaucrats are all over the move. The tripartition ought to have been vertical, with 10021 running its current length while stretching from Fifth Avenue only as far as Lexington. Few millionaires would be complaining in that case. The third ZIP Code ought to have been reserved for the New York Hospital/Rockefeller University complex along the river.
But that's not how it's going to work. Thousands of upstanding New Yorkers are going to be de-cacheted.
"The truth is, there are some people whose whole identity is their ZIP code," said Michele Kleier, the president of the real estate brokerage Gumley Haft Kleier.
"I don't think that everybody is going to move out of 80th Stree, but obviously this is the most famous and most desired ZIP code in the city and in America," she said.
[Gay] Talese said, "The first thing you think of is your stationery. "
Well, he is a writer.
Those who worry that their property values may plummet when they're exiled to 10065 and 10075 may just have to think outside the box. Outside the house, anyway.
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.
There are many doubtful books this week, which is not surprising, given the streak of oddball topics that runs through the issue. I'd have put several of the Maybes in with the Noes, but people might think I was stuck up. There are two or three books that I'd have put in with the Yeses, but the reviews weren't strong enough. Dispiriting, overall.
I almost bought Then We Came to the End a couple of weeks ago, when I was loitering at the Hunter College branch of Shakespeare & Co. The opening pages read very well. But my backlog of unread books didn't permit my venturing a novel about which I'd heard, at that point, precisely nothing. Of course I'll get it now.
Yes
The following titles appear to deserve coverage in the Book Review. The reviews may still be inadequate or useless.
Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. James Poniewozik gives this novel about paranoid cubicals in the spasms of late-stage corporatocracy a review that's as good as it is favorable. He tells us bits and pieces of the story, but for the most part he looks at Mr Ferris's writing, which is, of course, the issue with any major novel.
Ferris, who once worked at a Chicago ad agency, is fluent in the language of white-collar wordsmiths under siege. His characters even concoct their own vocabulary for the layoff process. Being fired becomes "walking Spanish down the hall," a phrase with origins in pirate days borrowed from a Tom Waits song about an execution.
Surveillance, by Jonathan Raban. The other worthy novel in this week's issue also seems to focus on American malaise. Bob Shacochis's passable review suggests that Surveillance is a novel of ideas, but he adds, "The characters also bloom into their bodies, lives and loves." Because he does not describe this blooming, however, we have to take it on faith.
Biography: A Brief History, by Nigel Hamilton. Scott Stossel manages, in the course of a glib and condescending review, to convey the impression that this book is worth reading. The review is a tissue of storytelling; whether Mr Stossel is an expert in the history of biography or is merely cribbing from Mr Hamilton's book without giving credit remains uncertain. Less uncertain is the possibility that Mr Stossel has reframed the arguments underlying the book and then faulted the author for failing to reply to them.
Still, while Hamilton is right to contend that the best biographies have a novelistic feel, the unpardonable sin - from the historian's perspective, certainly - is the failure to acknowledge the point at which knowable fact has given way to fiction. On this, Hamilton is mostly silent. Does this mean he has concluded it isn't a sin at all.
The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge, by Adam Sisman. "Like other successful duos," writes James Campbell, "Wordsworth and Coleridge were temperamentally dissimilar..." He concludesthat the book
is fascinating, and might have been even more so if the author's prose had the zip of that of, say, Richard Holmes, who has covered the lives of both poets in his own Coleridge biography and other books.
What, I ask, is the point of such a lopsided comparison? "Zip"?
Maybe
It is difficult to tell whether these books are actually as indifferent or pointless as the reviews suggest.
Next Life, by Roe Armantrout. Stephen Burt gallantly sings this poet's praises, but cannot conceal what appears to be a blanketing negativity.
Armantrout's dissonant still lifes, unsettling meditations and uncomfortable domestic interiors will not suit every taste. Her poems reject almost all the consolations we expect literature to contain: they do not tell us that love (or anger) will endure, they do not say that our lives can satisfy us, and they never advise us to trust our instincts. The poems give, instead, the invention, the wit and the force of a mind that contests all assumptions as much as it can: they say that no matter how much we doubt ourselves, at least one poet has doubted us more.
The Post-Birthday World, by Lionel Shriver. This novel, about the alternative lives that a woman might live if she leaves her husband or stays with him, has garnered a lot of attention, perhaps because its author is a fetching young woman, but more likely because Ms Shriver won the Orange Prize two years ago for We Need to Talk about Kevin. Julia Scheeres's review is characteristically unilluminating. Ms Scheeres lays out the story but does not engage with the writing except to fault it.
Shriver stumbles across provocative themes - the private erotic fantasies of long-time lovers, unplanned pregnancy in middle age, the sexuality of anger - but doesn't dwell on them long enough to enliven her characters or her story. If the book spurred one emotion in me, it was hatred for snooker.
That's quite unhelpful, really. If the characters are not "enlivened," then what's the book doing in the Review?
You Don't Love Me Yet, by Jonathan Lethem. David Kamp suspects that this novel about a rock band dates from the author's hardscrabble twenties, which he spent in California. "The band members," he writes, "are little more than thin constructs with identifying tics..."
As they say in the rock magazines, this new release is worthwhile for the Lethem completist, but perhaps not for the first time buyer.
The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution, by Pagan Kennedy. Mary Roach spends most of her review on telling the sad story of Laura/Michael Dillon, but she praises the author's immense tact.
If you read this book, you will not gawk or laugh at Michael Dillon.
Ms Roach claims that her favorite character is the plastic surgeon who made the sex-change operations possible, and perhaps if Ms Kennedy's book had been centered on him, it would less questionably merit its place in the Review.
Villains' Paradise: A History of Britain's Underworld, by Donald Thomas. Andrew O'Hagen gives this book a very favorable review, calling it "a thrilling and thoughtful encapsulation of a national fascination." But the few quotations do not suggest a very exciting read.
Poor People, by William T Vollmann. While Walter Kirn sees a certain documentary value in this book's reportage about poverty around the world, he questions the author's philosophical ambitions.
Poverty presents a host of challenges, but knowing it when we see it isn't one of them. Vollmann writes as if it were, though. He acts as if he were the Louis Pasteur of poverty, identifying its forms for the first time through the lens of some sociological microscope. "And so I came to wonder," he reflects during one of the philosophical interludes that undermine and dilute the stretches of portraiture, "whether one characteristic of poverty might be surrender to defeat."
Mr Kirn goes on to point out that Mr Vollmann's impoverished interlocutors attribute their condition to other causes, such as fate and guilt. What on earth is "surrender to defeat" - aside from a vaguely GOP-sounding formulation?
Waiting For Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, and Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night, and One Woman's Quest to Become a Mother, by Peggy Orenstein; and Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence, by Rebecca Walker. Personally, I don't know what these books are doing in the Book Review. Alexandra Jacobs isn't very impressed by Ms Orenstein's book, and she has no use at all for Ms Walker's. The latter claims that realizing that she would have to give up recreational shopping when her baby arrived "was like walking into an airplane propeller." Ms Jacobs retorts,
Not to begrudge the author such luxuries, but there was no need to make the world privy to them. Orenstein's interrogation of her own profiteering pregnancy comes across as a welcome, even necessary exposé; Walker's merely a paean to pampering.
Shout, Sister, Shout!: The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, by Gayle F Wald. Laura Sinagra calls this a "short, absorbing biography" of an important if unlikely progenitor of rock-'n'-roll guitar playing, a woman more famous during her lifetime as a Gospel singer. Ms Sinagra also praises the author for her "taste for the messiness and necessary creativity at the margins of American cultural life."
Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life, by Ralph Pite. Mr Pite's book has the misfortunate to follow closely in the wake of Claire Tomalin's biography of the great novelist, and, according to reviewer Brenda Wineapple, it suffers by comparison.
But because Pite more or less confines his research to Hardy's two-volume [auto-] biograpny and his published correspondence, the result is a rather airless psychological study, undertaken without corroborating evidence.
The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino, by Alec Wilkinson. Gary Kamiya's review points up the difficulty that even a New Yorker writer like Alec Wilkinson will have when writing a genuine oddball, one who, in this case, crossed the Atlantic on a raft and devised a football play "which would work only in a laboratory," not to mention many other strange resume items.
Neutrino's story screams "Tell me!" - it is ragingly picaresque, filled with larger-than-life adventures and unexpected plot twists, and its sheer weirdness is fascinating. On the other hand, there is something utterly enigmatic about Neutrino, something that resists all definitions and categories. He is not just a psychological puzzle but an epistemological one: since we have almost no knowledge of anyone like him, he goes in and out of focus.
No
These books, if they deserve coverage at all, ought to grace other sections of The New York Times.
The Terror, by Don Simmons. Terrence Rafferty can find nothing good to say about this account of the doomed Franklin Expedition (in search of the Northwest Passage), except to praise the author's perseverance; the book is nearly eight hundred pages long.
When the Light Goes, by Larry McMurtry. According to John Leland's review, this latest installment of Texasville fiction is about Viagra and "sexual instruction videos."
It's not something that I'm proud of, but I rarely read the Letters to the Editor in the Times. (Lately, I haven't been looking much at the editorial page itself. I'm in agreement with most of the positions taken by the Times editorial staff, but that's just it: what's new?) Today, however, a passage from a letter from Daniel J Callaghan, of Manchester, New Hampshire, caught my eye.
The administration began this war four years ago with inadequate planning in Iraq and disregard for those who would serve. As a result, the war has become a quagmire in Iraq and more than a million veterans have returned home to face insufficient care and services.
I looked up and saw that Mr Callaghan's was one of six letters gathered under the rubric "On the 4th Anniversary of the War." I read them all and agreed with them all. Ita Hardesty Mason, of Kingston Spring, Tennessee, writes, "We have more enemies now, not friends." Meg Hillert, of Dallas, reminds us that "If America were in Iraq's shoes, we would fight to the death to protect our country, families, and way of life." Cy Shain, of San Francisco, regrets that "We are paying a heavy price for our haste to invade Iraq without having a full appreciation of the fatal consequences and painful complications or our actions." Judy Brewton, of Stamford, Connecticut, lashes out at the President. "From the outset of this falsified war, George W Bush has used America's soldiers cheaply - almost as if they were poker chips."
But if I had to choose only one of these letters to endorse as my own, it would be the one written by Rick Armstrong, of Brooklyn.
Frank Rich reveals that 71 percent of sampled Americans supported the war on March 19, 2003. He also mentions that on March 17, 2003, NBC cut short its news coverage to show "Fear Factor" because it knew that was where the ratings were.
Both of these examples show that in the end, American citizens deserve the blame for this war because politicians respond to perceive voter approval.
The buck stops here.
As I was taking a break during the interval at last week's New York Collegium concert, I overheard someone complain that a program consisting of three Bach cantatas was "a bit much." Not for me, it wasn't. These works have a bottomless appeal for me. I don't like them equally - I don't even know most of them at all, or well - but their relentless transformation of liturgical utility and formal complexity into the most seriously delightful music ever written never ceases to amaze me.
When I got home, I thought I'd check out the library to see if I had any recordings of the the three works, BWV 22, 23, and 75. And what do you suppose I found? I found that these three connected cantatas have all been recorded together as Volume 8 of the impressive Bach Collegium Japan series on BIS. I bought a lot of these back in the late Nineties, all at once, so it's no wonder that I never got round to knowing this recording. I have to wonder if it inspired Mr Parrott's programming.
Sadly, the program announced that the Collegium, which has been somewhat strapped for funding recently, will not offer a subscription series next season. That's an awful blow. Where are all those hedge fund zillionaires?
Interesting legal developments reported in today's Times:
¶ Citations from law reviews are down. Law Reviews, as you may know, are the scholarly apparatus of the legal academy. Professors write learnedly on fine points of law, while diligent students compile useful overviews of such things as the laws of inheritance in all fifty states. Traditionally, law reviews have provided the American legal system with its intellectual ventilation.
Lately, however, it seems that critical theory has infected the law-school professoriat. Reviews have multiplied, and the Internet has put an end to their indispensability. "Law reviews, by contrast, feel as ancient as telegrams, but slower," writes Adam Liptak.
¶ It is a commonplace to say that US District Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president, who can dismiss them at will. What the president cannot do, however, is obstruct justice. Adam Cohen, on the editorial page, outlines four possible violations of 18 USC 1505 and 1512. Noting that the Attorney General's chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, is in the hot seat, Mr Cohen writes,
Let's take the case of Carol Lam, United States attorney in San Diego. The day the news broke that Ms Lam, who had already put one Republican congressman in jail, was investigating a second one, Mr Sampson wrote an e-mail message referring to the real problem we have right now with Carol Lam." He said it made him think that it was time to start looking for a replacement.
As they say in human resources, you can fire somebody for no reason, but you can't fire somebody for the wrong reason. I thought everyone knew that.
Isn't Rupert Everett a little young to be issuing an autobiography? Not so much, as you'll discover if you read it, and I strongly advise that you do.
Do you have a favorite Rupi movie?
One of the most savory of savory dishes is Welsh Rabbit. It's also great comfort food that can be varied to suit a wide range of tastes. Give it a try.
It's nearly two, and I've just come back from breakfast across the street, where we watched stragglers from the St Patrick's Day parade drift down 86th Street. The parade terminates at Lexington Avenue these days, not Second, so we're spared most of the drunks and detritus, not to mention the motor coaches and traffic barriers. Kathleen will give me an eyewitness account of the moraine when she gets to the office. When we parted after breakfast, she headed for the bank and the subway, right in the thick of things.
Ordinarily, I'd be dusting and vacuuming and listening to one of Bach's Passions, but I'm feeling sheepish about not having seen the Eric Rohmer film, L'amour l'après-midi, known here as Chloe in the Afternoon. The movie that I saw yesterday, Chris Rock's I Think I Love My Wife, is said to be a remake. I don't know why I've seen none of Mr Rohmer's films aside from L'anglaise et le duc, but I've not always been as enthusiastic about French movies as I am now. In any case, that's what I'm about to do - see L'amour l'après-midi.
***
Watching L'amour l'après-midi, a grave, talky, but extremely interior film, I wondered how it had ever held the interest of a brash American comedian, much less inspired him to remake it as a comedy. And what a fascinating remake I Love My Wife is! If you set aside the interpolations that make it funny, the newer picture is remarkably faithful to the original in terms of scenes, sequence, visual details, and, not least of all, dénouement. But the result of this fidelity is to emphasize the vast difference between the respective protagonists' romantic adventures, as well as the gulf between French cinematic sensibility thirty-five years ago and its American counterpart today.
Another puzzle: what would I have thought of L'amour l'après-midi if I hadn't seen I Think I Love My Wife?
What exactly is critical thinking? There's a Wikipedia entry that suggests an approach to understanding the matter, but it's written at a fairly high level of abstraction. What it boils down to in my view is a corrective for the natural virtuosity at self-justification that accompanies average-to-superior intelligence. Most of "what stands to reason" generally doesn't, for the simple reason that reason hasn't been applied.
In The New York Review of Books, Andrew Delbanco reviews six books about the "Scandals of Higher Education." Which is worse, madly skewed admissions policy or the failure to educate the lucky ones who get in?
This week's Friday Front.
Our moment of spring here in New York is coming to an end as I write, with temperatures dropping and rain predicted to turn into snow. Happily, there's the extra daylight.
When I stopped in at McNally Robinson last Friday, to buy novels by Turgenev on a whim, I picked up a schedule of the bookshop's coming events. My heart sank when I saw that they'd be presenting their first francophone event ever on Tuesday (two nights ago), an evening for which I had grand tickets to hear the Russian National Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall. Even though I didn't know the first thing about any of the Quebecois writers who would be reading from their work, I thought I really ought to go, and so did Kathleen and Fossil Darling and Ms NOLA.* Getting rid of the tickets was a pain; I ended up handing them over to a young German couple on the 6 train. I hope that they realized that, if they were going to use them - the woman seemed very eager, the man not so much - they'd have to find a train heading in the opposite direction.
McNally Robinson was fairly overflowing with people interested in participating in a francophone event.** I would find out afterwards that lots of those one hand were francophone only to the degree that I am - very roughly, in other words. I will write about the readers and their books as I get to them - the books, that is. For the moment, I can say that I'd had a lubricating Manhattan before heading downtown, and my comparable disinhibition meant that I jumped right in speaking French, however badly. I also joined in a conversation that several guests were having with the extremely affable Quebecois cultural attaché, M Jean-Pierre Dion.
Did the evening mark a change in my life? Since Ms NOLA began supplying me, about two years ago, with interesting dates around town, I've been to more book events, mostly by myself, than in all the prior years of my existence. But this time, I gave up a very good concert in order to do so. I was very torn about the decision, and still regret not hearing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto the Prokofiev Fifth - not to mention my favorite Stravinsky, the Scherzo Fantasque. Next to that familiar, beloved music, the reading at McNally Robinson was new and different, and far more demanding. But that's just it. It didn't have to be more demanding. I could have just sat there. But I was determined to interact. This determination to interact isn't exactly new anymore. But it didn't trump a concert until Tuesday.
* NB: Had Kathleen been able to go to the concert - and we knew by the weekend that she wouldn't be - the dilemma would never have arisen.
** All three books were promoted in English translation; only one was also available in the original.
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.
On the whole, an attractive range of good books; even the iffy ones appeal in one way or another. Tony Judt's excoriation of David Burleigh's Sacred Causes suggests that there needs to be what in my kindergarten class was called the nuisance corner. Mr Burleigh would appear to be a nuisance, and it's useful to have that pointed out. Execrable books - books that ought to be avoided - could be reviewed in periodic batches, and very, very briefly. Mr Judt is a top historian and critic, he knows Mr Burleigh's field. Perhaps he could be accommodated on the Op-Ed page some Sunday.
Yes
The following titles appear to deserve coverage in the Book Review. The reviews may still be inadequate or useless.
Heyday, by Kurt Anderson. Geoffrey Wolff's gee-whiz review is not very helpful. He retails the plot outline of Mr Anderson's historical novel but does not quote very extensively from it. It's not unlike carnival barking.
Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, by Michael A Lerner. Pete Hamill delivers a favorable review of this account of the havoc wrought by Prohibition on New York City. He indulges in a lot of storytelling, though, and when he does engage with the book, it's to point out the topics that aren't explored.
But Lerner's book is a serious work, suggesting that there are still lessons to be learned from the 13 years, 10 months and 18 days of a utopian American delusion. There remain a number of Americans today who are filled with similar angry visions, hoping to make them into law.
Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline, by Lisa Margonelli. Ted Conover's review is exemplary. He conveys, by quotation, the flavor of Ms Margonelli's writing, and he makes it clear that Oil on the Brain is a solid book.
The specialized knowledge of those who deal with oil is mainly what Margonelli sets out to channel in these pages. ... Her approach is quirky but comprehensive, informal but rigorous: Margonelli has a facility with humbers and an easy way with questions of policy, and the narrative passages here, lightly first-person and often funny, help make accessible the facts of our dependence on oil.
My Father's Secret War: A Memoir, by Lucinda Franks. According to Dorothy Gallagher, this is a book in which the author comes to terms with her subject. She is modestly favorable about it.
A child's reconciliation to a parent is not small thing, but one wishes that Franks's overbearing questioning of an old man added a little more weight to our understanding of the horrific war he fought, the genesis and ramifications of which contsumed more than half of the 20th century.
At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches, by Susan Sontag (edited by Paolo Dilonardo and Anne Jump). Pankaj Mishra gives this collection a very favorable review. He is acute about the power of Sontag's work:
Sontag asserted a uniquely American privilege by embracing multiple European traditions, and she used a word prone to much abuse - "spiritual" - often and remarkably precisely to make a higher consciousness appear imperative for political as well as artistic engagements with the world.
Curves and Angles: Poems, by Brad Leithauser. David Kirby gives this collection, which, he suggests, owes a great deal to Borges, and even something to Lorenz Hart, a favorable review that's a bit too subtle and evocative.
Maybe
It is difficult to tell whether these books are actually as indifferent or pointless as the reviews suggest.
The Weight of Numbers, by Simon Ings. I hadn't gotten very far into Erica Wagner's review of this novel before I found it difficult to follow and glanced up at her byline. Of course. I can never make sense of reviews produced by the Times of London editor. She makes Mr Ings's plotting sound preposterously complicated. She might be right the the author "has many talents, but lacks in this book the control to make them serve his purpose," but her review suffers from a similar lack of control.
Fed Up: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong, by Barry Glassner. Times food writer Kim Severson concludes:
It's too bad The Gospel of Food is so uneven, because we do need to approach what we eat with a side dish of skepticism and a dose of clearheaded thinking. Too often, though, Glassner commits the same sin he sees in others - taking the pleasure out of food.
This belongs in Wednesday Dining In/Dining Out section.
Don't Stop Me Now: Stories, by Michael Parker; and Lately, by Sarah Pritchard. Tom Barbash declines to offer a reason why these two collections of short stories share a review. He talks about one book, and then he talks about the other, noting only that, while Mr Parker's characters act out their emotional distress, Ms Pritchard's suppress theirs. He seems to like them both well enough, but short story collections require more pointed - and personal - enthusiasm.
Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth