THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO - Stieg Larsson - Fiction

Feminism and genre fiction can be uncomfortable bedfellows. The tropes upon which genre fiction relies can frequently come into conflict with more enlightened ideas about, for example, who can be a detective, who can be a victim, and with what severity certain crimes are treated. There is little doubt, to me, that Stieg Larsson intended to write a mystery novel which aims to be feminist, and certainly addresses feminist issues. Each segment of the novel is introduced by a statistic about violence against women in Sweden. Its original title in Swedish is MEN WHO HATE WOMEN (possibly toned down for a primarily-female American mystery-reading audience). It references many female titans of the genre--Dorothy Sayers, Sue Grafton, Agatha Christie, Sara Paretsky--and takes a laissez-faire view of relationships, propounding polyamorous setups and female choice.

The series has two main characters, Mikael "Kalle" Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander, the latter of whom is, quite simply, competent miles beyond the scope of the mystery and dangers contained in the novel. Lisbeth is a preeminent computer hacker, a punk, physically small but extremely fit and strong, capable of astonishing feats of research, endowed with a photographic memory and excellent intelligence, and quirkily pretty. But, lest she start to sound like a Mary Sue--too perfect to be real--we are told that she also has cavernous faults, involving a tumultuous and abusive childhood resulting in her affectless, vindictive personality, hatred for (almost all) men, and legal status as a ward of the state, despite being an adult. She's a smart, antisocial vigilante, admittedly admirably, that being a category that admits few women in popular media. (Perhaps the most obvious comparison is River, from the TV series "Firefly.") Although this setup would lead us to believe that the "socialization" of a reclusive prodigy like Lisbeth is to be the focus of the novel, she isn't introduced to the central mystery until halfway through the book. (In the first half, she is preoccupied with her own research, and with revenge on her state-appointed guardian, who violently rapes her twice before she strikes back, violently and definitively, blackmailing him into giving her almost total control over her life.)

However, it is, perhaps, a wise move to keep Lisbeth away from the mystery for so long, because she solves it handily even though she spends less than a third of the time on it that Blomkvist has. She also digs up earlier crimes that tie together to provide crucial clues to the present mystery, and rescues Mikael from a psychotic killer in what seems like a laughably short amount of time, due to a technological security system she set up just days earlier. She then pursues the killer on her motorcycle until he commits suicide by purposely crashing into an oncoming tractor-trailer. Because this leaves us with a fair amount of spare pages until the end of the novel, she also helps Mikael with another aspect of the mystery, and then goes ahead and performs an astounding feat of hackery that rescues Mikael from the charges of libel he is convicted of at the beginning of the novel; she is able to provide information from an industry mogul's own computer files that exonerate Mikael and show evidence of even shadier dealings, boosting the journalistic coups of his magazine, Millennium, to even greater heights of glory. Lisbeth is amazing, and her talents here are not even slightly stretched, much less put to any sort of test. Lisbeth is infallible. It is inconceivable, within the confines of this story, that Lisbeth would ever lose, so of course she doesn't--with the exception of a love affair with Mikael, which ends up breaking her heart with the realization that Mikael does not love her exclusively, or nearly enough for her liking.

But wait; Lisbeth hates men, has a tortuously troubled past that has left deep psychological gashes and scars, is legally declared incompetent by the state, and is almost criminally misanthropic. Why would she fall in love with Mikael? And why would Mikael enter into a relationship with this woman, knowing about her personality quirks and yet knowing nothing about the past that produced them? Well, because everyone in this novel loves Mikael Blomkvist. He is conducting a long-standing affair with his colleague and co-editor, Erika Berger, a situation to which Erika's husband assents and accomodates. (Notably, at least to me, Erika's husband is never in-scene for the entire novel; either he, a semi-famous artist, is completely uninteresting, or, more likely, the novel's favoritism towards Mikael's perspective only wants to know that, so long as he must exist, he won't get in the way of romance.) Mikael was married once, and had a daughter, but was divorced over his unwillingness to give up other women, including Erika. While investigating the disappearance of a wealthy businessman's daughter, he has a brief affair with Cecilia, the businessman's niece and Mikael's temporary next-door neighbor. He is apparently alluring and kind, a good lover and a good conversationalist, and almost comically undemanding, needing to know next to nothing about a potential lover aside from her willingness to be romanced. He has his moments of weakness and naivete, but if I had to point to a character who was fulfilling the hopes and dreams of his author, Mikael Blomkvist would be it. This is a man who enjoys his stint in jail, gets offered a rich salary to do a type of detective work which he has literally never done before, for the thinnest of pretexts, and in the meantime befriends and seduces everyone around him who doesn't happen to be a murderer, or the associate of one.

Because Lisbeth is mysterious, pretty, and smart, it doesn't stretch credulity that Blomkvist, or a man in a similar position, would be attracted to her; what does is that her violent outbursts, hatred of most of humanity, and extreme unwillingness to share personal information don't raise any questions or warning bells in Blomkvist's mind. Salander doesn't want to get close to men who want to control her in any way, even if that means attempting to help her better her own situation, and Blomkvist's lackadaisical attitude toward their relationship certainly fits that bill. But, in the end, he cannot tear himself away from other women--most notably and continuously, Erika--and Salander, like Blomkvist's first wife, drops him because of it. And yet, this was obvious from the start; Mikael makes it clear upon mention of Erika that they are in a relationship which is unlikely to end, and that he prefers to keep it that way. Lisbeth's appreciation for Mikael causes her to conveniently ignore this sticking point, and become well-nigh infatuated. Then, with little fanfare, she sees Mikael and Erika together, realizes she plays second fiddle, and renounces their relationship.

Although the second and third volumes in the trilogy do promise to address this, there is the feeling of getting short shrift with respect to Lisbeth's inner workings. Mikael is, for all intents and purposes, the first emotional relationship she has ever had--she has sexual relations with men and women, but these are rarely long-term and never emotionally involved. What about Mikael makes her comfortable, aside from his lack of curiosity about her? What is she feeling, letting someone into her life, however tentatively, who is old enough to be her father, and physically large enough to overpower her? When the mystery they investigate uncovers a serial murderer and torturer of women, who conveniently dies right after his crimes are discovered, Lisbeth blames the women who knew about his actions and did nothing for their cowardice, and blames Mikael for agreeing not to go public with the story to save the reputation of his benefactor. Her hatred for authorities of any kind prevent her from going public herself. But what are her thoughts throughout this process? Is she, in some way, making up now for being unable to rescue herself from a similar captor in the past? Because Lisbeth's intelligence and physical strength cannot be tested, her psychological composure becomes an object of curiosity, but remains unprobed. Mikael is an interesting protagonist for an Everyman, but the narrative focuses on his inner life unnecessarily; the shifts toward Lisbeth's perspective promised later in the series will hopefully herald the arrival of feminist thought and discourse from a female perspective, fulfilling the novel's promise.

(A brief note about the text--certain types of descriptors are comically absent, whether because of the original Swedish or the translation; Lisbeth refers to the men she hates as "creeps" "fools" or "pigs," which is almost quaint--less charmingly, Lisbeth herself is continually and preoccupatively referred to by the narrator as "tattooed and pierced" and "anorexic" despite having more salient--and accurate--features.)

UNDER THE DOME - Stephen King - Fiction

I tried to write a short story on these themes once--tried a few times, actually--telling the story of, among other things, an outsider who struggles between concepts of personal and public religion, told through the lens of genre fiction. Need I say outright that Stephen King is far more accomplished at telling this story than I was? Of course, he benefits from nearly 1100 pages in which to tell his tale of an extraterrestrial terrarium that unleashes the tyrannical impulses of the second selectman in a sleepy small town in Maine. King admits that he wanted to tell a metaphorical tale about the Bush/Cheney administration, from the perspective of the evils of power and the many ways in which frightened and confused people can be manipulated and misled. He succeeds, in a pitch-perfect narrative encompassing nearly fifty important characters and yet taking place over less than a week. We come to hate Jim and Junior Rennie, and to love Dale Barbara and his ragtag group of problem-solvers, and their plights seem continually real, despite the science fiction touches of a race of "leatherhead" aliens who end up being responsible for the Dome.

Of course, the solution to the Dome ends up being so unempowering as to make it seem that King believes there is little hope in preventing such circumstances as bring out the evil that lies dormant in powerful men. The citizens of Chester's Mill end up having to beg for their freedom from aliens who, for all we know, can't really understand them at all, and they are spared only because the alien they manage to catch between playtimes is a young child with some capacity for pity. If this summary seems awkward, it's because the plot point is--we know that our heroes have to succeed in lifting the Dome, and soon, because they are running out of breathable air, but rather than a scientific breakthrough or a show of cunning, they are left to beg for their lives and hope for the best. One almost wishes the Dome were a military experiment gone awry, to carry through the metaphor of the misuse of governmental fiat. Instead, the military is just as helpless as we are, and happen to be represented within the Dome by Dale Barbara, town hero, and so we are made to sympathize with them, even though our liberal consciences insist that they are part of the problem. Instead, local police become the brownshirt villains of this tale, and terrorize the town simply because their personalities predispose them to doing so.

I really never thought of King as being a feminist before--CARRIE being what it is--but UNDER THE DOME does bring to the forefront a number of strong female characters, including the town's newspaper editor, who succeeds in bringing down the Dome, bedding Dale Barbara, and single-handedly foiling Jim Rennie's every move. There are a number of strong narrative choices made in UNDER THE DOME, and one of the best is allowing women to save the day and outsmart the sexism of Rennie and colleagues.

UNDER THE DOME is a quick and compelling read, made more accessible than its brother-in-arms, THE STAND, by its circumscribing devices: containing the action within a single town and a number of days, and making the antagonists easily recognizable and the threat from outside concrete and quantifiable. If you prefer THE DARK TOWER, you'll prefer THE STRAND; if you like the scope of IT, then UNDER THE DOME is a natural extension.

THE INNER CIRCLE - T.C. Boyle - Fiction

There are two ways to write about this incisive, trenchant, detachedly anti-humanist book. In one, we contemplate the importance of sex research, and the sex education and greater levels of community and personal acceptance to which it led--in the 40s, when Alfred Kinsey was publishing his watershed works, homosexual behavior was strongly condemned, and many were unaware that women had active and sometimes "deviant" sexual desires--while contrasting these beneficial outcomes with the always-slippery slope of research into areas of strongly conflicting moral opinion, noting that Kinsey sometimes used himself as a research subject, and that many accounts point to his widely varying sexual appetites as impetus for his research. Yet down this path lies no real conclusion: T.C. Boyle masterfully mixes fiction and fact in his portrayal of Kinsey as part man, part monster, and of the fictional John Milk as his docile right-hand yes-man. We are shown both Kinsey the great biologist and dynamic proponent of scientific research and work ethic, as well as Kinsey the coercer of men and women, who rides roughshod over his team and his wife, and decries differing moral opinions as "sex-shyness." The very term, first brought up by our narrator, Milk, and later echoed many times over in Kinsey's conversations, goes from a quaint piece of researcher dialect to a threatening and two-faced accusation: the sex-shy are inhibiting Kinsey's work, and the sex-shy are those he defines as people unwilling to share their sexual lives with him. Quite the conundrum.

The other way to discuss the impact of this novel is to ask how, and to what extent, we will encourage or tolerate fiction about the lives of real people. Fan fiction on the internet has gone from being a cult activity (Star Trek fans wanting to write about Kirk and Spock) to a mainstream pursuit that has recently drawn legal attention (Harry Potter fans writing stories involving their favorite magical wizards are frequently recipients of cease-and-desist letters warning against stealing the intellectual property of the hottest entertainment conglomerate in town.) It's hard to say that THE INNER CIRCLE, accomplished and literary and beautifully written as it is, isn't another piece of fan fiction. Alfred Kinsey and his wife (whose nickname is Mac) were real people, and Kinsey's work is as much the stuff of record as of legend. Sure, Milk isn't real, and Boyle has largely invented the individual interactions between Kinsey's staff and their varied interview subjects. But, the portrait painted here is at times intensely unflattering, and it's hard to imagine another author who could get away with describing another subject's painful "urethral insertions" with such aplomb.

How much respect do we owe the dead? And how much can we get away with by attaching a disclaimer saying "this is a work of fiction?" These are as much legal questions as artistic ones, but they also carry a degree of artistic responsibility. One would have to go back to source material and biographies in order to determine how much of Kinsey's work as depicted in THE INNER CIRCLE is real, and one's first reaction, coupled with the suspension of disbelief inherent in fiction, is to assume it is all real, to the probable detriment of the reader's perception of Kinsey's work. In the fan fiction community, writing stories about real people--for example, writing about the actors who play Kirk and Spock, rather than Kirk and Spock themselves--is seen as somehow more morally questionable than writing about fictional characters, even though legally a charge of libel is harder to prosecute in these circumstances than a charge of copyright violation. The idea here, as I see it, is that inventing sexual relationships for real people is an invasion of privacy--and although libel requires the person being libelled to be alive, I would argue that the rule is perhaps even more important if the person in question is dead, because he then can't answer to the charges.

The ethics of fiction primarily concern fabrication of non-fiction, or plagiarism, as many recent high-profile cases can attest. In general, celebrities can make name-dropping appearances in fiction without much cause for concern. But I almost wish that Kinsey could write a rebuttal to this novel, not solely for the joy of his prose, but because he would have been apoplectic at such a challenge to the validity of his work.

EATING ANIMALS - Jonathan Safran Foer - Nonfiction

Every fact in this book is something you should know. I mean that two ways--it is important, and nearly imperative, to know about the conditions under which the meat you (most likely) eat is grown, killed, and prepared. But you also know most of these facts already--most of us are familiar with factory farming, slaughterhouses, and large-scale fishing, and their impacts on the environment and our health. Most of us already know that chickens are stuffed full of antibiotics and given space equivalent to a sheet of paper to live in. Most of us know that bycatch from commercial fishing is draining the ocean of its marine mammals, sea turtles, sharks, and endangered fish. Most of us know that slaughterhouses frequently send live cows down the line, dismembering them while they are still fully conscious. And yet, most of us scoff at "those PETA people" and eat meat not only willingly but avariciously, enthusiastically, at the exclusion of other food groups. Jonathan Safran Foer, in a conversational style reminiscent of his novels, tries to explain why.

I read this book having already become a pescatarian--someone who eats seafood along with a vegetarian diet--but the book has impelled me to start giving up fish. I honestly can't imagine another reaction. There's the animal rights standpoint: why do we keep animals as slaves and brutally kill them, solely for their taste, when eating meat is not biologically necessary to remain healthy? There's the public health standpoint: why do we consume unnecessary antibiotics, and allow the animals we raise to encourage antibiotic-resistant bacteria to proliferate, and eat meat that has been soaked in a bath of tepid fecal matter? There's the personal health standpoint: why, when meat and dairy products have been shown to contribute to a range of diseases, including heart disease and cancer, and living near factory farms has been shown to exacerbate asthma and lung cancer, do we allow these practices to continue?

I've seen criticisms of this book, arguing that Safran Foer isn't saying anything new, that he acts as though he is the first person to have thought of these arguments despite the copious amounts of ink spilled on the matter, that because he wrote this book after having a child and deciding what to feed that child, he is inexcusably solipsistic. In fact, one of the best and most convincing aspects of the work are the sections Foer gives over to other voices: an animal-rights activist with whom he infiltrates a farm, the owner of one such farm, the operator of a 'more humane' slaughterhouse, the founder of Niman Ranch, a cattle ranch, and his vegetarian wife, a PETA employee, and more. Foer wants you to have the whole picture, and he wants you to hear personal accounts from people whose lives are tied into the industry of meat: either supported by it, or fighting against it. These testimonials and justifications lay bare the equivocation and denial necessary to eat meat and tell yourself it's okay to do so. These essays are really all you need.

But Foer's personal story is useful too, because this decision is a personal one at heart. What you are going to eat is going to affect your personal relationships: what you tell your parents to serve you when you come home on the holidays, what you order when you eat out with your friends, what you make for a potluck dinner party, and where you buy your groceries. Not eating meat is not difficult. It's healthy, it's cheap, and it's accessible, by now, with every restaurant offering vegetarian options and every grocery store stocking Boca burgers and textured soy protein. The difficult part is telling yourself, when it comes time to choose between pepperoni and cheese, that the decision you're making is not just about what would taste good to you, what you can afford, or what you would prefer--it's about the life of an animal, about your health and the health of others, and about your moral relationship to animals. It's about being able to look at an animal--your dog, or a cow on a farm--and not feel guilt. It's about hearing about a disease like MRSA, a bacterial infection resistant to multiple antibiotics, antibiotics which we feed to chicken and pigs to prevent them from getting sick under terrible conditions--and knowing whether or not your choices have contributed to its spread. It's about feeling good personally.

On a personal note, giving up meat, even months ago when I gave up everything but chicken and fish, and again when I gave up chicken, and now, giving up fish, I feel wonderful. I've lost weight, I feel like I have more energy, and I feel healthier. I'm happier being able to make that choice at every meal, and feel good about myself. I'm happier to be part of a community of people who have thought about their actions and are choosing a moral good, rather than acting as though such considerations are beneath them. I like having something in common with Jonathan Safran Foer. I would like to have this in common with you.

WICKETT'S REMEDY - Myla Goldberg - Fiction

It's a good thing that the dead are around in Myla Goldberg's novel, supplementing the text with David Foster Wallace-style sidenotes giving their charming and often befuddled recollections, because otherwise this book would be depressing as hell. With a death toll admittedly appropriate for the time (the 1918 flu pandemic), there are still four primary characters felled in rapid succession, of an above-the-line cast of perhaps three times that many. The first death, that of Lydia Kilkenny's earnest and wonky husband, Henry, comes as a striking blow to a narrative constructed around the couple's quest, after Henry drops out of med school, to concoct and market a flavorful tonic designed to cure illness by the force and wit of its accompanying letters of introduction. Lydia shows promise of blossoming into a businesswoman, and Henry comes out of his shell as he realizes the import of his talent with words.

Then Henry dies, immediately and as a result of a bout of what we will later learn is the deadliest influenza ever to blanket the world. Her entrepreneurial hopes cast aside, Lydia turns the reigns of their operation over to Quentin Driscoll, who, as the text has been preparing us for continuously, is to turn the false medicine into a real soft drink sensation. Perhaps the weakest part of the novel, the intercut newsletter (the QDispatch) and press releases from various arms of QD soda are so obviously false and cloying and twee that I instantly disliked Quentin Driscoll, despite the text's attempt to paint him as an up-and-coming young man who inspires confidence and awe in Lydia from their first--and unfortunately only--meeting. This plot putters on, showing us an aged Quentin Driscoll who has stolen the recipe for QD Soda from Lydia without providing her their agreed-upon royalties, and only fesses up when he is about to turn the business over to Ralph, a delivery boy who has risen through the ranks to gain Driscoll's favor. Of course, he also gains Driscoll's favor for sharing the name of Driscoll's deceased son, the victim of, perhaps, a suicide at sea on the part of his mother, Driscoll's last and best love. Now, none of this happens in scene; we hear of it all through imagined newsletter correspondences written by Ralph in quite an ass-kissing tone. The plot is interesting enough to make me want to hear more about it, but aside from these chapter-ending missives, we are given nothing at all to continue this plotline.

Instead, with her brother killed immediately after shipping out for the war, and her neighbors half felled by flu, Lydia discovers that her true calling is nursing, and answers a newspaper ad to be a nurse (or, really, a nurse's aid) at an island of medical experimentation designed to demonstrate how the flu is transmitted (in a cute exchange of anonymous dialogue bookending two chapters, two patients argue over "whether influenza is really bacterial at all!" Of course, as we now know, it is a virus.) On the island, Lydia meets the man who is to be her next husband (again, a fact we only know second-hand through the voices of the dead and these end-of-chapter text selections; can't we have anything in-scene in this novel besides death?) and comes to terms with the grotesqueries of attempting to infect navy deserters with the flu in exchange for commuted sentences.

The novel does a masterful job engaging the reader with the importance of language and friendship in curing disease, and paints a wonderfully vivid picture of 1918 Boston, and particularly Southie. In the end, though, it feels like two novels--one about Lydia-as-entrepreneurial-medicine-saleswoman, and one about Lydia-as-influenza-nurse, and although Lydia's transformative moment, a day as a volunteer at an overrun hospital, is beautifully written, the fact remains that the narrative is held at a joint, and hinges the reader's attention in an ultimately dissatisfying way.

THE BELIEVERS - Zoe Heller - Fiction

There's something anachronistically comfortable about the richly detailed, character-driven novel, and Zoe Heller pulls it off perfectly in THE BELIEVERS. Centered around the Litvinoffs (husband and wife Joel and Audrey, two daughters, Rosa and Karla, and adopted son Lenny, as well as numerous spouses, roommates, hangers-on, and friends) the novel cannily chooses to forsake plot for a multi-faceted exploration of issues, ranging from, of course, belief, to feminism, marriage, varying forms of anglophone culture, and race. With every viewpoint given a character to side with and a character to hate, the explorations of THE BELIEVERS are enjoyable rather than pedantic, and carried out in sparkly witty, if acerbic, dialogue.

The novel suffers slightly from having no strong male characters for the group of women to play off of (Joel is felled by a stroke in the novel's first few pages; Lenny is a resolute fuck-up and a manipulative drug addict who I still do not believe as a thirty-four-year-old; the various husbands and dates are, to a man, blase). The most charming and interesting scenes, from the point of view of pure story, show Joel as a father, making French toast for his children's breakfast while explaining the necessity of armed struggle. Another interesting exploration for the novel: how revolutionaries deal with the quotidian aspects of day-to-day life, marriage, and child-rearing. The novel wants to answer a broad and flip "not well" but where it gives us detail, it is insightful and clever.

In an interview with Heller, conducted shortly after the novel's release, she stressed her desire to make Rosa's conversion to orthodox Judaism believable. Although the state of her push-me-pull-you conversion is left ambiguous even at the novel's end (she is seen wearing a headscarf at her father's funeral, but never shied away from embracing some aspects of tradition while rejecting others) I have to say that Rosa's interest never fully came clear for me. There's the moment of divine revelation in the synagogue, when Rosa feels a deep inner sense of belonging, and comes to tears at the end of a service; there's the admiration of tradition and the desire to fully adhere to a set of strictures in order to prove her seriousness to the world; there's the convenient aspect of Rosa's self-denial of physical pleasures, and the inverse pleasure she takes in that denial. And yet. The rabbi who guides Rosa's conversion immediately jumps into the tough stuff: rejection of Darwinian evolution, subservient roles for women, adhering strictly to the Sabbath. It's never quite explained why Rosa goes straight for Orthodox Judaism rather than easing into it through one of the other flavors of Judaic belief; perhaps it's her family's nature that half measures will not do, and the most extreme point of view must be the line taken, but many of the difficulties Rosa has with the more inexplicable aspects of Orthodox belief would be easily taken care of by following a less commanding version of the religion. Rosa's response to the rabbi's nonsensical argument that evolution may not be true because the Hebrew word translated in the bible as god's "six days" may refer to any period of time is met by Rosa's equivocal thoughts that there may be something in that theory. Really? Someone as needy as Rosa when it comes to being seen as worthy by the world will have invested much more of herself in her intelligence than we see. Her rejection of scientific principles should bear a higher cost to her self-worth than it seems to.

But there's always that one character to hate. Heller has been criticized for providing no purely "relatable" characters in this novel (as though the heroine of NOTES ON A SCANDAL were relatable?) but that's simply one of the joys of the character-driven novel: seeing real people, hearing intimate conversations, and never having to meet Audrey and her family in real life. Here's to the Litvinoffs.

AWAIT YOUR REPLY - Dan Chaon - Fiction

(Admittedly, it is hard to top the title of Chaon's previous novel, YOU REMIND ME OF ME.)

The August 2008 issue of the New Yorker ran a fascinating article about a man who calls himself the Chameleon, a Frenchman in his thirties who has impersonated teenage boys, from American runaways to Spanish orphans, for years. At its most literal definition, what the Chameleon does could be considered identity theft: though he doesn't try to extract money from the bank accounts of his identities, or falsify their passports, he does in a baser sense assert their identity as his own. The article details how for over a yeear he fooled--or perhaps didn't--an American family looking for a missing son.

Dan Chaon's novel is also concerned with identity theft, both the computer-scam and bank-account variety, and the more subtle theft of identity by a disease (schizophrenia, Hayden's diagnosis) and by circumstance: many characters are orphans, like Lucy, and one, Ryan, was given up at birth to his father's sister, and has been lied to about his real parents ever since. But Lucy and Ryan are just kids, really, enthralled by promises of restarting their lives, and rebuilding them in the image of something better. Their stories are plumbed for hidden emotional depths, but don't have much to give up: Ryan was failing out of college, after being pushed into academic success by his overbearing mother; Lucy had fallen short of her ivy league dreams, and needed to escape the small town that suffocated her. Both are essentially naive, and plunge into their sometimes immature fantasies of jet-setting and high-stakes thievery. The eventual deflation of these hopes is obvious to the reader, but realized painfully slowly by Lucy and Ryan.

The stars of the novel are Hayden and his twin brother Miles. Raised by a hypnotist/clown father and a manipulative, unforgiving mother, Miles dawdles toward obscurity while Hayden, buoyed by his rich fantasy life, escapes into his delusions and the avenues of excitement awarded him by his cunning. Described as a genius, Hayden is able to take on any identity and run any scheme--though his master plans, incuding posing as a graduate student in mathematics, embezzling from top Wall Street firms, and planting evidence that destroys the career of a hated Yale professor, are never explained, much to this reader's dismay. During the course of his impersonations, he picks up hangers-on and romantic attachments, as well as an ersatz son, who seems to fulfill a deep inner need for family and dependency, but we are not shown his most daring and improbable feats, nor are we ever allowed inside his head, to glimpse his motivations, despite being shown the intriguing detritus of his obsessions. Some are tabloid-worthy and others hint to the secrecies of successful capitalism, but Hayden's personal narrative is never explains, which hampers the flow of the overall narrative: Miles is chasing Hayden, and has been chasing him all his life, but never gets to meet him face to face. Hayden warns Miles against many things, and implies that some of his past crimes are catching up with him, but these are never confirmed, including his suspicions against the Matalov family, who run a novelty shop patronized by the boys' father. (This, one of the novels most interesting sub-plots, has a run-down Miles returning to his boyhood town, and, somewhat improbably, finding work with the Matalovs, while becoming infatuated with Mrs. Matalov's granddaughter. Hayden believes that the family wishes them harm, but aside from a possible connection to Hayden's repressed childhood memories, which Miles strongly believes to be fictional, the supposed Matalov threat is left hanging, despite vivid personal descriptions of the Matalovs and their storefront.)

Ultimately, crime does not pay. In the end of the novel's temporally-last narrative thread, Hayden-as-George Orson is apprehended in the Cote d'Ivoire, and, presumably, killed, though his traveling companion only provides us enough detail for us to understand that two Russian goons, seen throughout the novel, are inside his hotel room, and are presumably more effective than the betrayed cyber-hackers who confront Hayden-as-Jay but only end up injuring Ryan. For a genius criminal mastermind, what we see of Hayden is remarkably uncertain, nervous, and messy, perhaps even amateur. Due to a narrative interlude at the end of the novel's first section, there is a slight insinuation that perhaps Hayden has even fallen for a spam email phishing scam, although in the world of the novel, there is equal evidence for his having stolen millions of dollars from JP Morgan Chase, leading us to wonder whether Hayden is just lucky, and exactly how much skill he has at the crimes he attempts. He seems to rely overmuch on the confidence of others, while never letting Miles, seemingly his ideal business partner, catch up to him. Somewhat incomprehensibly, he also sticks to the midwest, never attempting to lose himself in a city, although the small towns he ends up in do invariably draw him attention as an outsider.

Hayden could be a genius or a kook. He could be a schizophrenic or a kid with a strange sense of humor. He could be a lost boy yearning for personal relationships without the baggage of his family history, or he could be the ultimate manipulative deviant, feigning love to gain an accomplice. He could be a successful criminal, hunted by governments and corporations, or her could be a small-time internet hacker, ultimately drawn in by the same schemes he attempts to carry out himself. Hayden seems to fall prey to identity theft, in an ironic twist that means the end of his life with Ryan, but confusingly doesn't seem to know what to do about it. He unplugs his computer, as though that will solve the problem. It seems that seeing Hayden and Miles together would reconcile the mystery, as our understanding of Hayden depends on seeing Miles, our part-time narrator, as sane, although even this is called into question in certain passages. Though the events of the novel require great suspension of disbelief, on the part of government officials, Lucy, Ryan, and Hayden's business contacts, the novel asks us to suspend our disbelief about its very conceits--and I'd like a few more details, please.

IN DEFENSE OF FOOD - Michael Pollan - Nonfiction

A lot of what Michael Pollan will tell you, you already know. High-fructose corn syrup is bad for you. Eating too many processed foods is also bad for you. In general, the industrialization of our food supply has led to foods with fewer nutrients and more processed food-like additives, the effects of which on our health are dubious. Pollan, attempting to convert a following, lays out these arguments as though for the blind who now can see: you didn't know! You didn't know that factory farming was making fruits and vegetables less nutritious, you didn't know that eating twinkies was bad for you, you didn't know that artificial flavoring and partially hydrogenated corn syrup was fooling your body into taking in more calories than it needs. You didn't know! But, of course you did. What Michael Pollan wants to convince you is that science--food science in particular, but science more generally as well--has led you astray. By focusing on the individual aspects of food, Pollan says, the carbohydrates and proteins and fats, as well as the vitamins and anti-oxidants and minerals, we have lost sight of the bigger picture: that what we eat matters as a whole, not only to us, but to the environment from which we obtain it. Pollan then champions a return to more traditional forms of eating: a traditional diet, ANY traditional diet, he says, which is not the "Western" diet, not made of processed foods and more corn and soy than a pastured chicken could shake a feather at.

Of course, the evidence that Pollan uses to back up his claims, both for the unhealthful effects of the Western diet and the benefits of the traditional diet, are steeped in the same nutrition science he repudiates a few chapters before. Pollan is keen to point out that the narrow focus of some scientific studies fails to find a correlation between associations we "know" to be true: that eating more fat leads to heart disease, that anti-oxidants protect against cancer, and that diets low in carbohydrates lead to weight loss. Pollan says that we cannot dissociate one aspect of the food (the type of protein it contains, the amount of fats, the number of glasses of red wine) from the diet as a whole, and that synergistic effects of food and culture contribute to health in mysterious ways. No doubt this is true, but Pollan misses the point of science: science doesn't intend to tell you what is healthiest. The best science tells you is that if you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight, and that's all that most people really want to know. Science is interested in finding building blocks, and then finding connections between those building blocks. And before you say that this method doesn't work, remember who told you that smoking causes cancer. Even though a number of traditional ways of living include smoking: the Native Americans, healthy though their wild-game-based diets may have been, kept smoking as an integral part of a balanced lifestyle. And focusing only on traditional ways of eating fails to take into account what is probably the most important part of a traditional way of living: it was hard work. Pollan tells us not to eat at our desks, without pointing out that the most important part of that injunction is to not be at a desk at all: the traditional way of life was bolstered by a traditional diet that took into account a lot of traditional hard labor. The healthy cultures Pollan points to are ones that needed to do a lot of physical labor, and exercised more than we are accustomed to.

Pollan is even willing to admit that a more "traditional" American diet--i.e., pre-70s--is better for us than our modern diet. He cites the moderating influence of "Mom" as the arbiter of portions and ingredients, leaving aside for a second that our move from dependence on "Mom" to dependence on every, or any, member of the family is hands down a positive accomplishment. Pollan blithely assumes that if we just remembered what our mothers cooked for us, we'd be a healtheir populace, skipping over the possibility that your mother wasn't all that healthy herself, and that if it's now a Dad who's cooking the meals, the entire family might be healthier for its modernity and sharing of responsibility. But again, there's a deeper problem with this assumption: the assumption that food choices are a solely personal concern, and that the best ways to get healthier foods are to pay more for them, and to grow them oneself. Pollan doesn't advocate any sort of protest or overthrow of the giant food corporations that are making a lot of these unhealthy choices for us. He doesn't provide any suggestions or avenues for advocacy. He doesn't even advance some of the suggestions he offers in his classes at Berkeley, such as pushing for the decoupling of the Farm Bill: unlinking subsidies for farms from subsidies for food stamps. Instead, Pollan assumes that all we need to make us a healthier society is to plant victory gardens, go to the farmer's market, and "stick to the edges of the supermarket" instead of the processed-food inner aisles. He also glosses over the idea that many families eat poorly because processed food is cheapest, and a nice filet of fish three times a week is a sizeable expense for a family of four. He admits that this is "regrettable" but then says that, on average, we spend less than 20% of our income on food anyway, and that perhaps we should increase that number, for the good of our health.

Pollan is right to be skeptical of mainstream nutrition science. As he points out, fad diets are a dime a dozen, and studies purporting to support or debunk their beneficial effects are hard to interpret and hard to believe, when longitudinal studies that could really tell us who lives longer by eating what understandably take a lifetime to complete. His main points, that we should eat more fruits and vegetables whole, and keep a close eye on what is in our food, are important and simple. However, many of his predictions smack of regressive thinking, of the wistful idea that if we returned to the 50s--to a garden in the backyard, and a Mom with enough time to tend to it and cook three meals a day from scratch--we'd be better off for it. Realistically, in achieving progress we have sacrificed some of the more basic pleasures, like enough time in the day to leisurely prepare a demi-glace, and go shopping at a farmer's market in the middle of the day. Grocery stores are open until midnight, and there's definitely a need for that. If I could only get milk on Thursdays from three to seven (the hours of my local farmer's market) I would just drink less milk. And that's what has happened. The solution is not to ask people to go out of their way to get healthy food. The solution is to demand that healthy food be put back in front of us, conveniently: in the grocery stores and the 7-11s and in every aisle, not just the perimeter. Personal efforts, like replacing lightbulbs and inflating tires, can only take us so far, and that "so far" is often only 5% of the way. We need political and legal change, and someone to lead us there: someone who, it seems, will not be Michael Pollan. He'll be too busy with his garden.

THE ANTHOLOGIST - Nicholson Baker - Fiction

A poem is a rhyming piece of verse, says Paul Chowder. A poem that doesn't rhyme is a plum. And so, welcome to the lusciously illustrated cover of this novel, a gorgeous, dark plum at the bottom of a cream-colored jacket. Baker's novels encompass all the senses, and this illustrative collaboration in particular is apropos. In the bookstore, I saw it and reflexively declared "I want that."

It's Nicholson Baker, so the subject doesn't matter. This one, of course, strays a little less afield than some of his previous work, dealing as it does with poetry, rhyme and meter, and the life of a modestly successful poet with ambitious theories about scansion and notation. If you're interested in plot, there is predictably little: Paul Chowder's girlfriend has left him over his inability to complete any work, and he is still unable to finish the introduction to his forthcoming anthology of rhyming poetry, partially over concern about his own poems, and partially out of the sense that this may be his last widely-received polemic, and his last chance to make a mark on the greater literary community. He befriends his badminton-playing neighbor, drives to a few poetry readings, visits the Grolier poetry bookshop in Harvard Square (always good to see wonderful real-life bookstores pop up in fiction) and composes a few lovely minor-key tunes for the lyrics of his favorite poetry.

If you are not a singer or a sight-reader, you may miss the beauty and unexpected notes in these short phrases. I play the cello, so I was able to go back after reading and play the music for myself; if you don't have access to your own instrument, I would suggest using something like this online piano to hear Chowder's music for yourself. He sings these songs in the attic of his barn, while trying to write, and then to shorten, his introduction, and their tone is not the jolly serenade I was expecting.

Part of the joy in poetry is reading aloud, and Baker exhorts the reader to do this throughout, counting out syllables, enumerating pauses, and playing fast and loose with typography as a guide to pronunciation. If the reader hasn't been introduced to much poetry, from Poe to Mary Oliver, Baker is the ultimate guide, knowing and name-droppy and entirely lacking in condescension. Paul Chowder may have been kicked out of his teaching job, but Baker is an entertaining educator.

P.S. THE ANTHOLOGIST is also the New Yorker's October book club selection, if you are interested in more discussion.

THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET - Reif Larson - Fiction

THE SELECTED WORKS OF T.S. SPIVET is a beautifully illustrated novel about a twelve-year-old boy, T.S., a map-maker, scientific illustrator, and adventurer, who is awarded a prize from the Smithsonian for his work and decides to head out to Washington DC to claim it. Not being old enough to drive, or arrange his own transportation, he hops a train with the help of a rather clever technique, and embarks on a series of adventures obviously evocative of Huck Finn. Along the way he fends off an attack by a homeless man, befriends a native american rail-jumper, and is picked up by a helpful, if racist, long-haul truck driver. Once in DC, T.S. learns to appreciate the opportunities afforded by a wondrous place like the Smithsonian, and also comes to terms with a real love for his hometown in Montana, and his distant but loving family.

The story is peppered with delicious details, quirky charaters, and of course, entrancing illustrations representing the maps T.S. creates of the places and events he experiences. For fans of vaguely metatextual work [HOUSE OF LEAVES, INFINITE JEST, even I AM AMERICA (AND SO CAN YOU)], the extra details are confetti frosting on the cake. But what of the cake? Even with the addition of two intriguing sub-plots (T.S.'s brother was killed in an accident when the boys were playing with guns; T.S.'s mother is secretly a novelist, perhaps edging out her public avocation as an entomologist) the plot is loosely spun. The characters are over-drawn in the sense of young adult fiction; they accept T.S. too easily, are too single-minded in nature, and become vehicles of fancy more than form. The conniving Smithsonian official who invites T.S. out becomes drawn into his fantasies of using T.S. to promote science to the public, and take on the insidious infiltration of creationists into the American landscape. T.S.'s father, though eventually revealed to have a modicum of caring for his son's well-being, is the quintessential tough cowboy, from his pickup truck to his hat to his "sett'n room" with its shrines to pop-culture Westernalia. And of course, everything that T.S. had dreamed about is real: hoboes do exist, and they ride the rails with the help of a telephone hotline, manned by members of the Megatherium club, a type of scientific secret society that still slinks through the halls of the majestic Smithsonian, which still inspires in T.S. the type of spirited awe that simultaneously rings true for a boy of his age and interests and also makes you wonder how piteously cruel his adolescence will be.

The question remains: who is Larson's audience? Aside from a small joke at the beginning, the book is perfectly pitched to appeal to the middle school reader. (The joke being: the Smithsonian calls for T.S., assuming he is older; he has been out shucking corn with his sister Gracie and tells the caller that he lives with Gracie. The caller assumes Gracie is his wife; he says no, we were just shucking when you called. The reader can imagine.) Comparisons to Huck Finn are natural and practically elicited; Milo of THE PHANTOM TOLLBOOTH also comes to mind and, in a way, Stuart Little. We learn only what T.S. learns about his parents and their relationship, the effects and possibly the causes of his brother's death, and the best ways to conduct oneself amongst adults who may not have one's best interests in mind. In the most disturbing scene, T.S. is being knifed by an insane man who believes himself to be a religious saviour; T.S. at first accepts this as his fate and his retribution for not being able to save his brother, and only fights back as a physical response to the pain. Yet, we aren't given to see T.S. as suicidal, or even very perceptive about the resonating effects of what must have been the most traumatic event in his parents' lives. His father quite obviously and excessively loved T.S.'s brother Layton more. His mother is shown to have given up a scientific career in favor of a family, and perhaps, hidden literary ambitions. But despite T.S.'s frequent references to Layton, even hiding his name in every one of his maps, he is less than perceptive about the reciprocal reactions of his parents.

Ultimately, the author that TSWoTSS reminds me of most is Nicholson Baker: not in subject matter, thank goodness, or in tone, but in the sense that it is the extraneous details, the afterthoughts and observations and attention to weft and grain, that lift the power of the story away from its plot, and elevate it beyond.

THE MAGICIANS - Lev Grossman - Fiction

Perhaps the more we write about magic, the more it stays the same. Grossman's book has been described as fanfiction about fanfiction, as it uses a fictionalized and gently lampooned version of Narnia ("Fillory") to create its own fictionalized and utterly more street-savvy version of Harry Potter. Grossman's main character, Quentin, is a nerd from Brooklyn, a high-school senior interested in magic tricks as just another way to divert his precocious and overbearing intellect. On his way to a Princeton interview with his best friends, he gets shanghaied into an entrance exam for a magical college, simultaneously breaking open and confirming his dearest inner fantasies. Then, offered acceptance after a dazzling magical feat brought on by stress and sleeplessness and utter indignation, Quentin dithers, wondering whether he has perhaps been tricked into a second-rate magical institution, a community college of sorcery rather than Magic Harvard. This guy is great!

Really, Lev's biggest accomplishment is making Quentin so real, while also giving him enough of a hero complex to lend his later journeys plausibility. Quentin has a hard time accepting the reality of his situation, looks down on some of his peers, and takes a classmate's apology for fighting him as an excuse to tell him that if he tries it again, Quentin will fucking kill him. I love a wizard from Brooklyn. I only wish that more of this side of Quentin had bled into Brakebills, his magical college; a magician who introduces other magicians to rap? A magician with street cred? Quentin is a little too bookish for that, making his relationship with his nerdy girl-magician counterpart practically inevitable, but he also makes a lot of the same mistakes that other twenty-somethings do, throwing himself into his first relationship with gusto, floundering after college and diving headfirst into drugs, making sexual mistakes, and underestimating people until it's too late.

As the novel points out, and references frequently, the people of Harry Potter, the Chronicles of Narnia, and the Lord of the Rings are ultimately too strong, too willing to undertake pain and grief, and too committed to ideals about stewardship of other worlds and quests for unknown treasure. Quentin takes his defeats hard, and legitimately so. He takes years to get over them. He goes into hiding. He gives up his gifts. In Lord of the Rings, characters give up their entire families with one scene of tears, and a few wistful remembrances. While parent/child relationships are resolutely terrible across the board at Brakebills, friendships seem to mean a lot more.

I suspect we will never tire of reading about normal children realizing their inner magical abilities and riding off into great adventures and fascinating educations. However many times and in however many ways this story has written, it continues to be entertaining, even as certain aspects (the boarding-school nature of all magical academies, for instance, and their complete isolation from the outside world) are repeated again and again. It would be great to read about a magical university completely integrated into a regular one--a special major at State U, classes enchanted to look like business classes to outsiders, where students who have to deal with living, working, and playing among the mundane world are actually studying for a Bachelor's of Sorcery. The trick of putting all your wizards in one basket is too easy, and, as Grossman points out, doesn't prepare them for the endless possibilities and paradoxical emptiness of the real world, once magicians are thrust back into it. But a school where you're the only magician on your crew team, and you have to hold yourself back from casting Oars of Quickness? The story of the young magician is the story of the outsider, the hero, the student, and the adept all at once. Even if Grossman's characters suspect that they have lived too long to go back to Fillory, the story never gets old.

MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS - Tracy Kidder - Nonfiction

Without his clinical practice, Paul Farmer believes he would be nothing. It seems that, without Paul Farmer, his clinical practice also believes it would fail. The organization he has set up, Partners in Health, is a model for third-world healthcare, an oasis in the drought- and TB-stricken central plateau of Haiti. There's not much Paul Farmer can do about the drought, though he does stigmatize the foreign city planners who proposed the dam that shut off much of central Haiti from the river that used to irrigate its plains. What he and his team can fix, though, is TB, and through a combination of begging, borrowing, and stealing, they have dramatically lowered the number and severity of instances of TB throughout the region of Haiti which they serve. He and his collaborators have also started programs in Peru and Siberia to deal with MDR-TB, multiple-drug resistant strains, and the World Health Organization has, after much prodding, accepted his criticisms and proposals for change in the way they deal with TB and MDR-TB in rural and developing areas.

A worthy life, to be sure. Farmer has also written multiple books and more than 100 articles, received an MD and a PhD in anthropology from Harvard Med, and was awarded a MacArthur genius grant. He heads many boards of directors for organizations dealing with global health. As of the writing of Mountains Beyond Mountains, Farmer had one daughter with his wife Didi, who was living in Paris finishing up her doctoral studies. This is what we know about Farmer from the book, as far as facts go. But a book with the author as a pivotal character becomes as much a work of fiction and of fact, and with a life as large and conspicuous as Paul Farmer's, it is just as important to note where Tracy Kidder has tried to spin Farmer's story.

Although Farmer's relief efforts in Haiti and his proselytizing for better global healthcare are portrayed as unambiguously good, and a little scattershot--Farmer is portrayed as being mostly unable, or unwilling, to prioritize--his personal life is given a little more glamor than it, perhaps, deserves. Much is made of Farmer's wife and children living in another country, and seeing Paul only when he is forced to delay his business activities, such as when he is injured. One is given the impression that his daughter is growing up fatherless, and his wife is being neglected. True as it may have been at the time, Farmer now lives with his family, which has grown to include two more children, another daughter and a son. Whatever we can say his responsibilities may or may not be, with regard to his family, he certainly doesn't seem to be as much of a failure as Kidder portrays. Another juicy plotline involves Ophelia Dahl, one of the five co-founders of Partners in Health. Farmer met her when she was 18, doing charity work in Haiti, and we are led to believe that they shared a great romance, which ended when Farmer proposed, and Dahl realized that Farmer was too single-mindedly dedicated to be anything more to her than a friend. Later, when Farmer meets Didi, a Haitian, Ophelia sends her well-wishes, but the tone of the narrative is that Dahl is somewhat regretful. Now, perhaps this is true, but Dahl is open about her lesbianism, and has a child with her (female) partner. It's hard for me to believe that much love was lost between Dahl and Farmer.

It also seems nearly incredible that someone as much of a whirlwind as Farmer could do as much as he has done--complicated, time-consuming endeavors like running charity organizations, writing nonfiction books about Haitian politics, teaching at Harvard Med and Brigham and Women's hospital, and working on global healthcare policy with the WHO. Farmer is shown as nearly frenetically active, and I'm not doubting his sheer ability to perform these feats; rather, I question Farmer's seeming lack of premeditation and planning. If we are to believe Kidder, a man who cannot remember to change his clothes every day is simultaneously capable of working with a multinational policy organization, drafting changes and additions to a laborious document that will lay out the steps that need to be taken by any organization dealing with tuberculosis outside of a first-world hospital. At the very least, there must be more to Farmer than meets the eye. Though we are, again, given only brief snapshots into his medical and graduate careers, in order to have been successful, he must have also been able to at least borrow an eye for detail, for taking care of loose ends, and figuring out what needs to happen when, in order to get an MD, a PhD, a functioning healthcare organization, and a TB mandate. Kidder is happy to make it seem as though Dahl runs the show from behind the scenes, but Farmer and his list-making deserve some of the credit.

LUNAR PARK - Bret Easton Ellis - Fiction

This novel is amazing.

Without knowing a thing about Ellis's prior work, LUNAR PARK succeeds as a remarkably well-thought-out thriller, segueing seamlessly from Ellis's real, sensational past to a fictionalized present, including a marriage and a move to the suburbs, after which his past literally returns to haunt him. The plot draws handily from the genre--a possessed stuffed animal, a shape-shifting house, a group of young boys going missing one by one--and puts the character of Bret right in the middle of it, an already notedly unreliable narrator in personal rehab, reacting with first disbelief, then alcohol, then absolutely numbing terror, to his personal creator and fictional creations seemingly coming to life. Sons become fathers here, boys run away and return, and family is touchingly redeemed, outside of its upper-class nuclear formation. Without attempting to draw a John Irving comparison, a primary message of this novel is the importance of a father's role.

Though as adept as Stephen King (and with the same fascination with old-model cars), Ellis depends less on outside malevolence, eventually rejecting as laughable the idea that his house might be built on a burial ground, and instead is only seriously threatened by what seems to be the work of his own hand. And while these apparitions and attacks are frightening, equally frightening is the fictional Bret's behavior toward his wife, his friends, and his addiction. In this aspect, Ellis returns to a vein that runs through his work from LESS THAN ZERO through THE INFORMERS, AMERICAN PSYCHO, and GLAMORAMA, in presenting crimes equally horrific as daily behavior. The college-age swingers and drug abusers in LESS THAN ZERO are as frightening waking up from a horrendous binge as they are kidnapping a child; Patrick Bateman's sadistic emptiness is exposed just as much in his discussions with his secretary and his long-winded explanations of his outdated and indiscriminating music taste as in his murders. In exposing the upper-class guignol that passes for suburban family life among the rich and paranoid, Ellis illustrates a horror that matches that of his private haunting.

For those readers familiar with Ellis, the novel is even more enticing, as it offers the details we think we know about Ellis (some of the same things we think we know about Chuck Palahniuk, who dives into non-fiction on occasion, to supplement the record). His public castigation for AMERICAN PSYCHO by liberal factions natonwide is the jumping-off point from the intro's factual summation of Ellis's previous crimes into its delineation of his new, fictional transgressions. In a way, this novel is an answering redeption of Ellis, who doesn't hurt a thing but in self-defense: the monster we have come to believe is behind Patrick Bateman turns out to be merely a repentant alcoholic with an uncovered familial streak. Unmasked, Ellis separates himself from The Writer--a character who resides mainly in his head--and a younger version of himself, or possibly his father, who ends up only trying to warn him of a real imposter. As everything in this work is finely wrought and twice-measured, the first sentence is "You do a very good impression of yourself." This applies both to the fictionalized Ellis in LUNAR PARK and the public figure Bret Easton Ellis, gossip column alumnus and well-known bad boy, yet somehow, the novel implies, not the real man at all.

THE FIRE GOSPEL - Michel Faber - Fiction

I was introduced to Michel Faber through his opus THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE (about Victorian-era prostitutes, not, as the title might suggest, racial segregation at Harvard.) Since reading and loving that novel, everything else he writes seems fairly tossed off, especially the more modern pieces. Unless you're David Foster Wallace, a 700+ page book is never going to be followed by something better. Now, FIRE GOSPEL isn't really supposed to be anything more than a trifle. It's Faber's contribution to something called the Myths series, famous contemporary authors reworking a myth in their own styles. Faber's is, I guess, the myth of an additional gospel--adding to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--but I had never heard of this particular "myth," so to me the story seemed rather inventive, which can only have made it better. (To get a sense of my background, or lack thereof, I had to google the names of the original gospels, and I had thought that Isaac was one of them.) The plot draws parallels to Dan Brown's work, but the Aramaic scholar protagonist, Theo, is firmly in Paul Giamatti territory. The thing is, everyone else is, too--the men who kidnap him turn out to be gay and more than a bit confused about the actual purpose of the kidnapping, and the female foils are an unsympathetic girlfriend who dumps Theo when he returns from a close call at a museum in Iraq, and an unscrupulous literary agent who takes the customer satisfaction of her publishing company's biggest star very seriously.

This--let's call it a novella--took about 45 minutes to read, and not quite as long to anticipate, even with its ambiguous ending. Money can't buy you love, religion makes people angry no matter what the message, and instant satisfaction isn't a road to fulfillment. But reading THE CRIMSON PETAL AND THE WHITE is, coincidentally.

INFINITE JEST - David Foster Wallace - Fiction

As you can see, I haven't posted anything in a month, because I've been doing Infinite Summer (http://infinitesummer.org) --reading Infinite Jest cover to cover from June 21 to mid-September. As you can see, I've finished early. There comes a point in every engrossing mid- to enormous-length novel at which I am so caught up in the story that I have to finish it as soon as possible, and for me that point came about two weeks ago, when I started reading Infinite Jest whenever I could--at work, while eating breakfast, while on the bus, while walking home if that were possible. It was a combination of wanting to finish it so that I could think about it, wanting to know what happens to Hal and Don Gately and Madame Psychosis, and loving the visual of moving my two bookmarks farther and farther back. (Two: one for the regular text, and one for the footnotes.)

Infinite Jest is a novel about adolescent tennis players, recovering addicts, dysfunctional families, independent filmmakers, disabled and disfigured people, terrorists, bumbling politicians, and obsessive compulsives. It is set in the future, has about forty main characters, involves complex acronyms frequently, and gives the full chemical name and manufacturer of every drug, medicinal and recreational, mentioned in its pages. And yet, it is one of the easiest-to-read and most compelling books I've ever come across. I tried to read this book in high school, when a friend was deeply into it, and stopped after about a hundred pages, caught up in other books, sidelined by the need to keep so many names and facts and incidents in play at once.

I now think that was simply not the right time. This book is about a lot of very depressed people, and as such, probably requires at least a passing familiarity with and a fair amount of temporal distance from a form of long-term ennui that you might call depression. I'm not the addictive personality, I've never felt a residual craving for any of the capital-S Substances that I've ingested over the years, but I think that this book would be even more meaningful to someone who has been addicted, even if, as an acerbic aside mentions early on, there might as well be 12-step programs for anything which one could possibly enjoy.

Infinite Jest proposes, in a number of ways, that interaction with the outside world is imperative--a supremely entertaining video turns people into vegetative viewing-machines, drugs repeatedly close people off from their circumstances, characters frustratedly and impotently lose the ability to speak and communicate, and live radio is described as the most fascinating and affecting type of entertainment available. Hiding in other ways--hiding waste in a giant feral ditch in the northeast, hiding drugs and illicit activity from school authorities, hiding possible deformity behind a veil, hiding love or caring concern--has unfortunate effects. This isn't a terribly complicated thesis, but as any reader of Wallace's journalism will realize, Wallace needs to prove to the reader everything, and if he felt that the modern world's dependence on things for entertainment and validation was worth addressing, it makes sense that he would spend a thousand pages proving that it was so.

In order to talk about this book in any comprehensible way, I'll have to limit myself to only one topic, so I'd like to talk about the distinction between the portrayal of AA, NA, and their meetings (Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous, respectively) and the meeting of a men's-feelings-empowerment group that Hal stumbles upon by accident, hoping for a remote NA meeting. Because in the world of Infinite Jest, AA is a categorical force for good. AA helps people, one day at a time, to stay people, and resist destructive impulses which they term a disease. AA is described as incomprehensible to the novitiate, and a little like a cult, but successful and powerful, as well. The meeting that Hal goes to, though, is clearly embarassing and disturbing for him, what with its regressed men and emphasis on an "inner infant" whose needs have to be cared for from within. Here is the first contrast: AA demands that a Higher Power be invoked, anything from God to fate, which is appealed to for help, and thanked for each day of successful sobriety. The method takes away some of the fear and doubt that comes with a disease that is ultimately a disease of the brain and the will: if we believe it is instead in the charge of a Higher Power, we don't have only our fallible, disappointing selves to rely upon. The support group that Hal happens upon also regresses its participants, makes them think and act like infants again, in order to surpass some perceived childhood trauma. AA, on the other hand, demands that its participants think of themselves as adults, act like adults, and accept total responsibility for their actions. AA frowns upon any thinking that blames a person's problems on the influence or actions of others, whereas the men's support group firmly places blame on childhood experience.

But is Hal even the right person for an AA or NA program? Hal quits marijuana cold turker, and completely loses touch with himself--he is unable to think clearly, then unable to control his facial expressions, and finally, as was revealed at the very beginning of the book, unable to even speak. It seems in some ways that marijuana was holding Hal together, possibly due to the stress of having spectacularly lost his father, or the stress of being a nationally-ranked junior tennis player at a demanding academy, or the stress of having a mother who is emotionally schizoid, and carrying on a sexual relationship with his primary tennis competitor. Perhaps due to the stress of all of these, combined. Nevertheless, Hal is demonstrably better able to perform and cope WITH his Substance, rather than without it. All the stories we are told of drug addicts who have Surrendered to AA and Come In involve people who were functioning incredibly poorly Out There--Hal is functioning incredibly well, at least until he gives up the Substance. It's an interesting story for Wallace to sketch, even as he seems so celebratory of AA.

WHITE NOISE - Don DeLillo - Fiction

Do we still bandy about the concept of the Great American Novel? Is there anything to be said about our reliance on consumption, our supermarkets, our television? DeLillo may have drawn the curtains on observations of our depraved, superficial natures. It has now become ironic and passe to draw attention to these aspects of Americanism, and it is this irony which is itself now the subject of novels drawing attention to the depths of our national character. What we would now think of as the supremely ironic class, the cultural theorists that make up the Eastern university at which DeLillo's protagonist, Gladney, teaches, are instead presented as deadly earnest in their devotion to cultural minutiae, a small bellwether that points to the differences and decade-and-a-half between, say, WHITE NOISE and PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER.

By comparing those two, I betray my tastes towards the novel, and the genre of rampant cultural navel-gazing as a whole: I didn't like it. I'd prefer not to. Of course, some of Gladney's observations are spot-on, and of course his children, especially his sons, are quite interestingly characterized--one, the somewhat morbid and disturbing fact-collector and philosophizer, the other quite obviously autistic and willfully undiagnosed, untreated, and unrecognized--but ultimately, what do we gain from reading about the supermarket as the great center of rebirth, of housefires as the most recent recharacterization of the primordial firepit, around which the tribe gathers to pass on life lessons? What is the point in repeating brand names that get enough repetition on the news as it is? Is pointing something out by continuing it actually helping? I have the same concerns with documentaries that point out the plight of starving children or neglected animals, and yet do nothing to help the very problem that they are pointing out as so drastic and worthy of our immediate help. Is writing a novel about the worst aspects of American culture not simply contributing to that culture? Wouldn't it be better and more satisfying to either redeem, as David Foster Wallace and Michel Faber do in their writing, or to change and permute, as Dave Eggers and Miranda July? DeLillo attempts a near-perfect mirror that only sickens, where, for example, Bret Easton Ellis instead chooses a rusted, twisted mirror that grows more and more distorted as our gaze progresses downward, both entertaining and wrapping us in his vision.

It could be that my reaction to the novel is a lack of familiarity with the very specific time and place which it describes. WHITE NOISE was published in 1985, and I was born three years later--altogether too late to perceive the zeitgeist that DeLillo captures. There seem, now, perfect holes in DeLillo's narrative to talk about the internet, about social media, about neoconservatives and 9/11 and shock talk radio, and, in short, everything that came after WHITE NOISE and yet somehow seems presaged by it. Is this a measure of the novel's success, of DeLillo's prescience, or of culture's imperturbability, the inevitability of its course and of the long, muddy, s-winding curve of human nature?

After reading WHITE NOISE, everything seems like a DeLillo interlude. At the bank today, the teller tried to talk to me about the tv show "Jon and Kate Plus Eight." At the supermarket, individual-sized bottles of ranch dressing. Nestle recalling its prepackaged cookie dough because people are eating it raw and getting salmonella. Swine flu. The reaction to swine flu, and the strange non-event it is when a baby is diagnosed with it--here are the fluids, here are the medications, go home and wait it out. Jack Gladney is perpetually interested in defining the point of his wife, "the point of Babette." This seems to be the most salient idea to take from the novel--the idea that rather than caricaturing the people we don't know, it is the people closest to us who come to take on symbolic value, who stand for things and are "about" things and have "a point" and who disastrously, inevitably, betray our expectations.

THE WITHDRAWAL METHOD - Pasha Malla - Fiction

There are certain motifs in Malla's short stories--terminal diseases, childhood innocence, underemployed twenty-somethings--that make you wonder about his own experiences. That, and the fact that one of his narrators shares his name. Autobiographical or not, these stories are intricately constructed and minimally revealing, diving into uncomfortable and even melodramatic territory. Malla's subjects range from a more or less successful foray into historical fiction (telling the story of the Mechanical Turk chess-playing machine as it travels from owner to owner, and is eventually destroyed in a museum fire) to a story, THE SLOUGH, which starts out as something approaching science fiction (involving a cream that allows the user to shed his skin in one piece, like a snake) but then abruptly changes course, concerning itself with the main character's skin cancer, making the reader wonder whether the first half of the story was supposed to be a tale the narrator tells himself to make talking about his girlfriend's illness more bearable.

Malla isn't afraid to talk about anything, really. There are two separate stories that really seem to glory in the repetition of the word 'vagina,' two that describe in detail the way a woman cleans herself after sex. One story is about a pet therapy center in the basement of a hospital having problems when a bonobo chimp takes a liking to the pet sheep in residence. I don't mean to be prudish, but Malla goes the distance.

The most tightly wound story of the bunch, the most affecting and the most richly detailed, is THE PAST COMPOSED, which manages to work in a midwife, a lost child and a lost marriage, and a neighborhood orphan determined on deluding either himself or those around him that he has a family--a very revealing story, but the story that should go in fiction anthologies under "Show, Don't Tell," as it manages to work in every plot point as an off-hand revelation, allowing the reader to connect all the dots.

The second best is a very short, two-page story that closes the collection, a bit of historical-fiction-cum-fan-fiction titled WHEN JACQUES COUSTEAU GAVE PABLO PICASSO A PIECE OF BLACK CORAL. Based off a real event in Cousteau's autobiography, the piece manages to hint at a deeper relationship between the two and throw off some beautiful imagery, of the coral passed between two palms, the painter shrugging and putting it in his pocket, only to use it to seal a subsequent goodbye handshake between the two. The story is all about gesture, and unspoken feeling sublimated into physical proximity, and succeeds wonderfully. Not one uncomfortable moment to be found.

EVERYTHING RAVAGED, EVERYTHING BURNED - Wells Tower - Fiction

Wells Tower's stories have that McSweeney's, fiction-workshop feel to them. And that isn't a bad feel. Two of the stories are the same tale, told from the different points of view of two of the main characters. One is the story of a raid, narrated by a Viking who doesn't want to vike anymore. There are the usual suspects--adultery, a young girl being seduced by an older man, an older man preying on a young boy. In one of the most disturbing but surprisingly unexplored passages, a father driving his daughter and his ex-wife's new husband home from camp is told that his daughter's disturbing habit of falling asleep on car rides with the gearshift in her mouth is just something she does to calm down. Try to get a mental image of your daughter's new stepfather telling you that her fellating part of a car is no big deal. There's something a little exploitative in these stories, as there is in the conversation between a stepmother and son, in "Executors of Important Energies," in which she complains to the young man that she wishes she could go back and have sex with everyone who ever offered. The story "Door in Your Eye" is built around the interactions of a father and daughter, each determined to make the other uncomfortable--the daughter through her fearlessness, and the father, inexplicably, by bringing up his sex life again and again. One gets the sense that these are not quite real people.

But that's okay! For all the concern and hand-wringing over the departmentalization of the short story, the workshop effect and the over-edited, purposely quirky feel of the story-writer's story, these are great. These are the real thing. These are rude, petty, self-absorbed people who throw away money, and kill their pets by accident, and are just a little pissed off that their date with a new man ends abruptly when the man's son is molested in an outhouse. In a way, these are updated fairytales, with evil stepparents, where the prize to be won is a new, more confident and popular self. You can think of them as exercises for a budding writer.

If you like the types of stories that make it to the BEST AMERICAN NON-REQUIRED READING anthologies, or ST LUCY'S HOME FOR GIRLS WHO WERE RAISED BY WOLVES or a more masculine, gruff Miranda July, give Wells a try.

PARIS TO THE MOON - Adam Gopnik - Essays

In telling me about this book, my boyfriend admitted that I should have read it before he and I went to Paris. It does explain a lot of the particulars of French eating, driving, and recreational habits--what is the difference between a cafe, a brasserie, and a restaurant, anyway?--but it's just as enjoyable to read after coming back from Paris, relaxing into American life, and then being reminded of the French in small, subtle ways. For someone who came back to Berkeley, the book is particularly interesting, as it spends a few essays discussing American implementations of French food, including the work of chef Alice Waters, whose Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse is a cultural landmark here and abroad. Adam Gopnik spends some time wandering an open-air produce market with her, cooks dinner for her, and ties yet another aspect of French culture, the distinction between experimental, high-class cuisine, and terroir or earthy, regional dishes. Gopnik is able to condense all of his observations of Paris into the distinction between a French sense of abstraction fitting into what seem to us to be small, individual problems or peccadilloes, and the three tiers of French explanations for problems: first, it is the responsibility of a single man; second, it is the responsibility of the system, of the government or a broader set of rules; and third, that is the way it has to be, and there' s no sense arguing with it, a sort of cosmic throwing of hands and relinquishing of responsibility.

Gopnik's own move to Paris can be explained in these three tiers; first, it was the responsibility of his family, he and his wife, both wanting to rekindle their first romance, and raise their firstborn son in such a magical and romantic setting. Second, it was the fault of American culture: the Gopniks didn't want to raise their son with Barney, or many of the other low-key television babysitters. They wanted him to grow up bilingual, with an appreciation for beauty and a sense of mature, and even slightly archaic entertainment. Finally, it was impossible for it to happen any other way: Adam Gopnik found himself in France, and being there, had to continue his stint at the New Yorker by writing essays about his experiences. From experiencing his wife's second pregnancy and the birth of their daughter, to swimming at the Paris Ritz with his son, to trying to join a health club and trying to set up an American christmas tree, Gopnik had adventures big and small, and was involved in politics from the local (strongly protesting the change in ownership of a beloved local restaurant) to the national (attending the war-crimes trial of Papon, a functionary who signed papers sending French Jewish children to the camps that held their parents, and to their deaths.) Gopnik's style is generally humorous, but it was this last essay, touching as it did on post-WW2 politics and the lingering image of the Vichy era in the French collective unconscious, that really displayed his understanding and quiet questioning of the French system as a whole. Gopnik manages to both point out small, funny idiosyncrasies in the French system of being, and simultaneously sketch out their raison d'etre. Plus or minus a few lariats of christmas lights.

Read this book if you're going to France, or if you're in France, and then read it again, once you've come back, to remember the little streets that only permit U-turns of taxis, the bridges everywhere, the desertion of Paris in August, and the triumph of Parisian bakeries. And then, read Gopnik's sequel, fittingly enough about New York City.

PALACE COUNCIL - Stephen Carter - Fiction

Stephen Carter writes wide-ranging historico-political thrillers that are widely enjoyed by the African-American community, who factor prominently in his work. At least, that's what the librarian told me when I checked out PALACE COUNCIL, after having read NEW ENGLAND WHITE a few years ago. (PALACE COUNCIL is something of a sequel, and both follow on the tail of THE EMPEROR OF OCEAN PARK.) All of his novels draw characters from the same pool of elite Harlem figures, people from a community with the same class gradations and ruling families as Early Modern France. At times, Carter seems to be poking fun at these people, and their concerns for what the important people in their society would think of them, and at times not. Carter also sets up his main characters as novelists, one early in life and one later, and throws out marks of literary prestige as though they meant as much as the Légion d'honneur--which in the world he has created, they may. It's hard to tell if Carter's positioning of his main character is due to the traditional novelist's blindness, which sees a writer as the most interesting occupation for any character, or if he is instead also poking fun at himself, at the notion that an author would be caught up in the kind of overblown, rip-roaring plots that embroil Eddie.

There is a lot of disbelief to be suspended in this five-hundred-plus page account of a national conspiracy that spans decades, involves Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Langston Hughes, and other notable political and cultural figures, and draws upon men from the upper echelons of white and black society to come together in a plot, couched in Satanic terms, to overthrow the government peacably and secretively, installing a President sympathetic to the needs of the African-American community. It was interesting to read this novel after watching the campaign and election of Barack Obama, and as the novel was published in 2008, Carter must have had some wind of events that might come. But of course, the idea of political machinations or an African-American president are not the less credible events of this story. From a strictly realistic standpoint, the cloak-and-dagger antics of the FBI and CIA agents who pursue Eddie, and the cabal of men who form the secret society based on obscure literary references to passages of Milton and Lawrence, start out terrifying and end up tedious--the last confrontation between Eddie and his pursuer, on a bridge in Ithaca overlooking a gorge, just sputters out, using up all of its possible tactics of scare and suspense to leave me waiting impatiently for the bad man to leave, having yet again succeeded in 'warning' Eddie without leaving a scratch on him.

I also have to say that the idea of a man waiting fourteen years to reclaim the woman he loves--waiting through her husband and two children, through her indecision over the direction of her life, over whether she has feelings for Eddie at all, over whether she can marry him, and, ultimately, over whether she can continue to please her society friends if she seemingly justifies all the rumors--is ludicrous. Romantic, yes, but entirely unbelievable. And the ending--which gives some of the reasons for Aurelia's hesitations--is even less believable, because it ruins the entire premise of the novel, the premise that, despite their different choices in marriage, career, and friendship, they are involved in the same hunt, the same mystery, the same desire to answer the same questions. And reader, in the last twenty pages we discover that they are not. That Aurelia has as good as led Eddie on for the past twenty years. I don't believe it, and I don't understand it--Aurelia calling in favors from Nixon, writing to Eddie with breathless concern over his trip to Vietnam, attending his father's funeral, all while hiding from Eddie what he most wants to know? Either Aurelia is hopelessly cruel, or hopelessly misguided, and given that the reader is meant to root for romance between the two throughout the entire tortured plot, I can't really hope for either.

The bright spots in this novel are the finely written caricatures of known politicos--Nixon, Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover--who entertain and shock, and offer an idea of how fun it must be to have the confidence as a writer to not only rejigger history, but to take on the voice and mannerisms of some of American history's most infamous players. Writing dialogue for Nixon! It sounds so audaciously fun, and looks so on the page. Really, that's the most we want out of historical fiction, isn't it? Because however true or false the overlying mystery/thriller plot seems, the joy of writing a novel that spans time from the 1930s to the 1980s is being able to throw your own masks over people who you knew only through the reporting of others--being able to take a picture from the newspaper and animate the black-and-white man inside it, pulling the strings, reanimating the flat characters of our collective social unconscious. Here, Carter does a bang-up job.

THE MAN IN THE GREY FLANNEL SUIT - Sloan Wilson - Fiction

With the recent upsurge of interest in the 1950s, including the tv show MAD MEN, and the reissue of Richard Yates' REVOLUTIONARY ROAD, it's hard not to compare Sloan Wilson's novel to these examples. The same dissatisfaction with suburban life, concerns over salary and raising young children in a changing economy, and preoccupation with conduct in the war preside over MAD MEN and Yates's oeuvre as well as Tom and Betsy Rath. They're raising three children in a starter home, purchased after Tom's return from WWII as a successful paratrooper who nevertheless made some mistakes which he keeps from Betsy. He has a job at a charitable foundation, arranged for him by his wealthy grandmother, but it pays too little to give him hope of moving to a better neighborhood, so he applies for an ill-defined job at United Broadcasting Company. He is eventually appointed assistant to the head of UBC, a workaholic who represents the kind of man that many 50s careerists were supposed to become: obsessed with working to the point of not seeing his family for weeks at a time, he schedules appointments for every waking minute, is polite to a fault, and never seems to be able to rest or reflect on his situation, except under extreme duress.

In contrast, Tom Rath is only concerned about work insofar as it brings him the money he needs to repair his house, send his children to school, and approximate the standards of living to which he was accustomed, growing up. The minor intrigues of family life, including managing an inheritance from his grandmother, a disgruntled former housekeeper, and a new job with a vague and ever-larger set of responsibilities keep Tom busy, but the real knot at the heart of this novel is the question of how to raise children responsibly. Tom's boss, Ralph Hopkins, is only able to provide money for his daughter, and as a result, she is recognizable as a member of the popular heiresses of today, attracting men, continuously at parties and plays, and unable to articulate plans for the future beyond 'having a good time.' The accusation that Hopkins has failed his daughter by his absence from her life is best, and most damningly, articulated through his wife, who has grown so accustomed to having Ralph out of the house that she refuses his company even in the wake of her daughter's surprise elopement.

Tom sees his children nightly, commuting from New York City to their home in the suburbs of Connecticut, but the primary conflict in the story is Tom's reluctance to admit to his wife that while he was stationed in Italy during the way, he lived with a young woman, who may or may not have been a prostitute, and left her pregnant and alone when he was sent on to attack an island in the Pacific. News of his illegitimate child comes from an elevator operator at his new job, a man he served with during the war, who married his own Italian sweetheart and brought her to America with him, to be an elevator operator as well. Although it is obvious from the example of Hopkins that providing a child with money is not enough to consider oneself a parent, Tom's only concern is being able to get money to the child in Italy, first without his wife knowing, and finally without becoming a part of small-town gossip. Tom is neatly able to draw parallels between himself and Ralph Hopkins, in order to illustrate the striving Protestant work ethic by which he is reluctant to structure his life, but doesn't seem to realize that leaving his child in Italy while he went home to a secure future and the beautiful Betsy amounts to the same abandonment as Ralph Hopkins spending his time at work, instead of with his family. Tom looks back fondly on his time in Italy because of the continuous present in which he lived, every day fearing that he would be called to ship out to the Pacific, but at the same time faults Hopkins for not thinking about his future, and what would happen when he was forced to retire, or see his daughter grow up without him, or finally pay attention to his encroaching health problems. In a neat ending, Betsy accepts Tom's infidelity after a few hours' drive to collect her thoughts, and the Raths seem on their way to happiness, and the completion of their real estate money-making schemes. The future of Tom's Italian child, though, is less certain, and the money Tom promises to send is unlikely to convince the child that his father didn't abandon him with a sense of relief--the same sense of relief with which Ralph returns to the office, to his work, to ignoring the plights of his wife and daughter.

SKIM - Mariko Tamaki - Graphic Novel

Comic books and graphic novels have become the realm of the outcast, with GHOST WORLD, BLANKETS, and PERSEPOLIS exemplifying the genre's acceptance of the generally socially rejected. Kim, the protagonist of SKIM, falls snugly within this category in a number of ways. She's an overweight half-asian teenage wiccan, a budding lesbian, and a goth. Her best friend is also an outcast, and the popular girl has just suffered the double setback of her boyfriend breaking up with her and then committing suicide. If you follow the threads of teen genre cliches, you know what's going to happen--as the girls grow into puberty, they will leave each other behind, one embracing boys and the cool crowd, and one sticking with her individuality and her art; the popular girl will turn out to be not so bad, maybe even a little weird herself; the misappropriated affections directed toward a teacher will be softly rebuffed, and first heartbreak will wax and wane. The plot is not the strong part of this story, it's the little jokes--"if I was taking someone to an AA group, I would have mentioned that EARLIER"-- and the short reversals of a few of the teen angst conventions. When Kim and another shy girl are kicked out of the popular girl's slumber party, Kim frames it in terms of race, wondering if that's how her foreign friend assumed parties ended--"Asians first." When the final memorial service is held for the boy whose death sparked a crusade against depression and suicide in the girls' school, the rumor going around is that he killed himself because he was ashamed of being gay, and remarkably, nearly all of the girls seem to accept this in stride, without having to go over the conventions of the homophobic majority stood up to by the plucky outsider. Perhaps it's because it's Canada, but the girls, most of them smokers at 16 and adept at finding dates, seem more mature than their American counterparts.

Despite the story's focus, the art is inconsistent, and the most adeptly rendered characters are Kim's caucasian father and her shakespeare teacher, fair and freckled. Kim herself has a lumpy, highly mutable face that seems to morph through an array of ages and nationalities, never settling on anything remotely pleasing or recognizable. There are similar problems with Lisa, Kim's friend, and for the most part the Asians in the story are portrayed quite unattractively. If it was a conscious choice, it's a disruptive one, because the storyline practically begs the reader to sympathize with Kim, but doesn't give enough of a mental image of her to hold on to, even when she stars in nearly every frame.

UNBELIEVABLE - Stacy Horn - Nonfiction

In 1930, backed by prevailing cultural interest, J.B. Rhine started a laboratory at Duke University to study the possibility of parapsychology. By now, all that remains are letters and records in the Duke archives, and a few splinter groups, one run by the descendants of a purported medium, one a controversial member of the AAAS, and none university-affiliated, despite Princeton's dabbling in PEAR, the Engineering Anomalies Research lab. Though the phenomnea investigated by Rhine and his colleagues ranged from poltergeist activity that inspired many films to mediums, psychics, and unexplained 'hauntings' and spooky lights, Rhine's attitude was always that of a strict scientist and experimentalist, and the vast majority of his experiments dealt with ESP cards--cards printed with a series of five symbols drawn from a deck and not shown to a subject, who was supposed to guess which symbol was on the card. The point of the experiment is that, if the subject is truly guessing, then probabalistically he should only get one out of every five cards right. If he gets many more than that correct, then something else is at play. According to Horn, who regrettably does not reproduce any of the data or statistical analyses, Rhine had a number of subjects perform significantly above chance, a conclusion which he took as evidence of latent ESP ability in much of the population.

Rhine is frequently described as a charismatic, driven figure, and presumably because of this, the book is much more taken with descriptions of the people and relationships that formed the parapsychology research community, rather than the actual experiments or data. Experiments and fieldwork are described, and some tantalizing evidence presented--a mother who envisioned her son in danger on the battlefield and yelled "Duck!" later to find in a letter that her son heard her, followed her direction, and saved his life in doing so; a deathbed vision of a recently deceased relative who the ill woman didn't know had died; a house where objects slid across counters and fell to the floor of their own volition, in the presence of reporters and policemen. Of course, the skeptic's reaction to all of these is that it must have been trickery, and the viewers and scientists present simply must not have investigated thoroughly enough. No evidence presented on the page is going to be great enough to convince a reader who isn't able to be there for herself. But of course, Rhine knew that, which is why he shied away from many of the unexplained occurrences brought to his attention by members of the public, and persisted with his ESP card experiments for his entire scientific career.

Horn reports that she has seen the data from these experiments, and believes it, at least in the case of Rhine's most spectacular cases. I have no reason to doubt her, but where her report falls flat is that she doesn't print even a single data table, for us to run the numbers on ourselves. She mentions that after years of debate centered around Rhine's statistical analysis, an American society of statisticians published an official report validating Rhine's methods, and insisting that any objections to his results have to come from methods, not from statistics. However, this was much before Bayesian statistics caught on, and as we now know, frequentist p-values and confidence intervals can be highly overstated without taking into account prior knowledge. If I were to run a statistical analysis on Rhine's data, I would use a very skeptical prior, which might show that even runs of card-guessing much higher than chance would fall within normal probability. Pointedly, Horn mentions that Rhine was accused of stopping experiments whenever he wanted, probably because such a card-flipping experiment could go on as long as the experimenter was willing to reshuffle the deck. However, in any run of coin-flipping, there are bound to be periods of greater-than-average tails frequency, as well as periods of greater-than-average heads frequency. It is easy to imagine Rhine stopping when he was ahead, or going only one round with a subject who was performing so far below chance that no ability was suspected at all. Horn takes a very sympathetic viewpoint toward Rhine, and dresses down skeptics for being willing to ignore evidence, but she also doesn't indicate that she has done her own statistical analyses, or investigated any of these phenomena herself. Her references to pertinent literature are spot-on, and recognizable to any student of the field, but even accepting that Rhine had the best of intentions, it's easy to see what one wants to see in perfectly objective data. In a number of anecdotes, Rhine is unwilling to exploit the grief of mourning families to test or recommend mediums and psychics, but he is willing to take the money of philanthropic donors interested in the question of life after death, or a persistence of spirit, even though he never directly addresses these questions. It may have been his conscience that drove him to produce results to satisfy his benefactors in some way, even though he was unwilling to venture into questions less scientifically examinable. Even the best scientists feel pressure to produce, and when one's salary is in some way dependent on one's continued progress, it would be no surprise to find that, even subconsciously, one starts to skew the data.