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.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Saturday, May 23, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
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.
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.
Monday, May 4, 2009
INDIGNATION - Philip Roth - Fiction
While firmly rooted in Roth's characteristic subject matter--the sexual impulses, guilt, and familial disharmony of the genetically Jewish male--INDIGNATION also unimpugnably addresses a more contemporary topic: the mistreatment and disenfranchisement of the American atheist. Couched in situations that resonate with the mistreatment of other socially marginalized character types (the Jewish family, the sexually liberated young woman living in the early 1950s), Marcus's experiences show, with great dignity, an ethical and principled young man whose hot-headedness and unwillingness to compromise throw him into circumstances that expand increasingly out of his control, resulting in his death as a private in the Korean war. Throughout the narrative, it is ironically the fear of this possibility that continually drives Marcus's choices, and the smallest of slip-ups that brings about his drafted entry into the war.
INDIGNATION shows a more mature Roth than the creator of PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT and THE BREAST. Some of the same complications surrounding meat, family, an idolized mother and a respected but distanced father are present again, but treated with much more tact, and restraint. Marcus's views on sexuality and family are a product of his times, but an explicitly self-aware product, which prompts him to evaluate them, and himself, when he reacts prudishly to his first sexual encounter, or breaks into tears at his mother's announcement that she is considering divorce. Marcus is incredibly self-disciplined, in thought and action, having progressed from high-school debate captain to straight-A student and future lawyer, devoting himself entirely to his studies and to the logical interrogation of the beliefs in which he was raised. Sparked by Bertrand Russell, Marcus quietly renounces all religious belief, and becomes increasingly disturbed by his college's chapel requirement, which purports to educate its students in religiously proscribed self-contemplation and determined action. Despite the unassailable correctness of his arguments against forced religious participation, Marcus makes an enemy of his school's Dean of Men when he attempts to directly address this infringement on his rights, instead of circumventing it by hiring another man to sign in at chapel for him, as Marcus later discovers is done by most of the Jewish men on campus.
Having been raised by his father to do what was right (exemplified in an anecdote by his father's strict adherence to the rules of his kosher butcher shop, despite a lack of overseeing authority to stop him from bending or breaking the kosher strictures), Marcus initially balks at cheating the system as the boys in the Jewish fraternity do. When Marcus comes up against something he doesn't like, his preferred method is passive resistance; in a clever riposte to the background of the Korean war, Marcus chooses to remove himself peacefully rather than enter into a confrontation with his father, or later his roommates, and only attacks when provoked, as when the Dean of Men calls Marcus into his office, and levels insinuations at Marcus' character, Jewishness, and conduct among his peers.
Two characters provoke Marcus's ruin: first, a poorly sketched-out homosexual roommate who desecrates Marcus's dorm room while he is at the hospital, and necessitates his retreat to the second, Sonny, a representative of a sort of privileged class of Jewry to which Marcus neither belongs nor aspires. It is Sonny who gets around Marcus's defenses, and Sonny who represents, to Marcus, the type of son who might be able to fix his parents, as his father declines into paranoia and his mother contemplates divorce. It is also Sonny who first provides evidence of the potential treachery in Marcus's girlfriend, Olivia, who hides from him first her suicidal, alcoholic past, and then her extracurricular affections, for Sonny and most likely for other men, as eventually Marcus's Dean reveals to him that Olivia is pregnant--quite unexpectedly, for Marcus, whose contact with Olivia is limited to hands, mouths, and a great deal of worry and self-depredation.
What makes this novel particularly tragic and frustrating is that Marcus's actions are resolutely understandable, when not outright admirable. Although nearly all the men of his college participate in a widespread assault, Marcus abstains. Where other men would shun and smear Olivia for being so uninhibited, Marcus tries to look beyond her past, and fights with himself to avoid judging her actions without also judging himself and his desires. Marcus disregards the slights of his fellow students, who call him 'Jew' during his campus job as a waiter, ignore him and best and are openly hostile at worst, and shun him because of his upbringing. It's hard to consider him a saint, when he argues with his father and finds himself uncomfortably unable to forgive Olivia her past relationships, but he is close to a perfect college boy, and yet is insidiously undermined by the old-boys network of his college, and the prevailing WASPy attitudes of the time and place. Roth, usually a fairly conservative writer, has delivered an excellent treatise on how the personal becomes political, and how effortlessly a minority viewpoint can be punished, even by omission.
INDIGNATION shows a more mature Roth than the creator of PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT and THE BREAST. Some of the same complications surrounding meat, family, an idolized mother and a respected but distanced father are present again, but treated with much more tact, and restraint. Marcus's views on sexuality and family are a product of his times, but an explicitly self-aware product, which prompts him to evaluate them, and himself, when he reacts prudishly to his first sexual encounter, or breaks into tears at his mother's announcement that she is considering divorce. Marcus is incredibly self-disciplined, in thought and action, having progressed from high-school debate captain to straight-A student and future lawyer, devoting himself entirely to his studies and to the logical interrogation of the beliefs in which he was raised. Sparked by Bertrand Russell, Marcus quietly renounces all religious belief, and becomes increasingly disturbed by his college's chapel requirement, which purports to educate its students in religiously proscribed self-contemplation and determined action. Despite the unassailable correctness of his arguments against forced religious participation, Marcus makes an enemy of his school's Dean of Men when he attempts to directly address this infringement on his rights, instead of circumventing it by hiring another man to sign in at chapel for him, as Marcus later discovers is done by most of the Jewish men on campus.
Having been raised by his father to do what was right (exemplified in an anecdote by his father's strict adherence to the rules of his kosher butcher shop, despite a lack of overseeing authority to stop him from bending or breaking the kosher strictures), Marcus initially balks at cheating the system as the boys in the Jewish fraternity do. When Marcus comes up against something he doesn't like, his preferred method is passive resistance; in a clever riposte to the background of the Korean war, Marcus chooses to remove himself peacefully rather than enter into a confrontation with his father, or later his roommates, and only attacks when provoked, as when the Dean of Men calls Marcus into his office, and levels insinuations at Marcus' character, Jewishness, and conduct among his peers.
Two characters provoke Marcus's ruin: first, a poorly sketched-out homosexual roommate who desecrates Marcus's dorm room while he is at the hospital, and necessitates his retreat to the second, Sonny, a representative of a sort of privileged class of Jewry to which Marcus neither belongs nor aspires. It is Sonny who gets around Marcus's defenses, and Sonny who represents, to Marcus, the type of son who might be able to fix his parents, as his father declines into paranoia and his mother contemplates divorce. It is also Sonny who first provides evidence of the potential treachery in Marcus's girlfriend, Olivia, who hides from him first her suicidal, alcoholic past, and then her extracurricular affections, for Sonny and most likely for other men, as eventually Marcus's Dean reveals to him that Olivia is pregnant--quite unexpectedly, for Marcus, whose contact with Olivia is limited to hands, mouths, and a great deal of worry and self-depredation.
What makes this novel particularly tragic and frustrating is that Marcus's actions are resolutely understandable, when not outright admirable. Although nearly all the men of his college participate in a widespread assault, Marcus abstains. Where other men would shun and smear Olivia for being so uninhibited, Marcus tries to look beyond her past, and fights with himself to avoid judging her actions without also judging himself and his desires. Marcus disregards the slights of his fellow students, who call him 'Jew' during his campus job as a waiter, ignore him and best and are openly hostile at worst, and shun him because of his upbringing. It's hard to consider him a saint, when he argues with his father and finds himself uncomfortably unable to forgive Olivia her past relationships, but he is close to a perfect college boy, and yet is insidiously undermined by the old-boys network of his college, and the prevailing WASPy attitudes of the time and place. Roth, usually a fairly conservative writer, has delivered an excellent treatise on how the personal becomes political, and how effortlessly a minority viewpoint can be punished, even by omission.
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