AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE - Lucy Grealy - Memoir

If you've read Ann Patchett's memoir TRUTH AND BEAUTY, you know the Lucy Grealy story. And honestly, Patchett's is a better version, as Grealy's autobiography completely elides mention of Patchett, her best friend through college, grad school, and beyond.

It's hard to say that an autobiography by a woman who died--from complications dating back to her childhood cancer--is at all bad. It's true, it's her story; it quite adequately describes the pain and psychological effects of having cancer, losing normal facial appearance, and spending years in and out of hospitals, learning and unlearning the particular variety of helplessness that accompanies drastic surgery.

But goodness, for a book that spends so long dissecting loneliness, failing to mention the existence of a friend like Patchett seems like a grave omission. Grealy's parents are inexplicably distant, to the extent that Grealy's father's death hardly affects her, and the familial anecdotes seemed pitched and perhaps concocted to make sure that all the sympathy flows downhill, to Lucy. Her siblings are mentioned in passing, where their lack of reaction to her deformity is interesting, but it is particularly jarring to look at how much time Lucy spends, as a child and an adolescent, wondering what she would have looked like without the surgery, when she has a female twin. A twin! That is almost exactly how she would have looked, and if we're to believe the narrative, she never realized this. It just seems remarkable.

Ann Patchett wrote a postscript to this memoir, recounting a shared book tour she and Grealy embarked upon, after AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FACE was met with resounding success. In a transcribed question and answer, Grealy bristles at being asked how she remembered so much; she is a writer, she tells the befuddled questioner, and she made it up. I wonder, though, how much is made up, especially knowing the, shall we say, personality quirks of Grealy as depicted by Patchett. How much is for sympathy, and how much for show? Grealy is said to have joked about writing a follow-up to this memoir, a sort of "Behind the Music" explaining the "real" story. If only she had written that book the first time around.

POINT OMEGA - Don DeLillo - Fiction

I'm working off a huge backlog of reviews--turns out it's easier to read books than to write about them, who knew?--so I thought I would start with the best, which is conveniently the most recently released. Go, read POINT OMEGA! Even if Don DeLillo put you off with FALLING MAN (which, to be honest, I liked a lot), there's something for the old-school UNDERWORLD fan in his latest. It's been said around the internet that its length might have something to do with its appeal (my hardcover version was around 120 pages) but my favorite fiction is the kind that can be expediently and expertly condensed, and this is quite the example. It's a pint-sized thriller that seems so simple in construction, but has such graceful, economized sentences that it's worth the multi-year wait between books for something like this.

The plot is: a documentary filmmaker accompanies a sort of Donald Rumsfeld-like figure to his vacation home in the desert, hoping to convince him to star in a film project that sounds like an Errol Morris production: one man, one take, one hour, a plain wall as a backdrop, explaining the war from his experience helping to plan it. There are complications: Richard Elster, the war-planning academic, is more interested in having a companion at his desert retreat than agreeing to do any film. And time does seem to stop for both of them, in the vast heat of the desert, even when Elster's daughter arrives for a vacation, providing a welcome distraction for our narrator, Jim.

The novel is bookended by two interesting scenes of a video installation in the MoMA, describing a real piece, "24 Hour Psycho." The video consists of the film Psycho slowed down to take a full 24 hours of runtime, and the first scene of the novel takes us into the exhibit through the eyes of an obsessive sociopath who is entirely in tune--almost too much so--with the underlying meaning of the exhibit. He wishes for a woman to come into the exhibit with him, and stay for a suitable amount of time--at least half an hour--and he wishes for the exhibit to be more structured, to last all 24 hours and not admit anyone after starting, or allow anyone to leave. To take a writerly step back, the portrayal of a disturbed character is spot-on, here. The guy is creepy, and we can tell that from the first two pages alone, without anything overtly creepy having to happen. It's a perfect setup, but the beauty of it, in the one-two punch of my favorite literary technique ever, is that we forget about it by the time we get around to its relevance to the main story. Because Richard Elster's daughter was involved with a man who gave her mother the willies, in her New York life, and a few weeks after she comes to live with her father in the desert, she disappears.

The landscape comes into play here, its neverending sprawl, its deceptively long sightlines, its ability to swallow up a human, or an ill-prepared hiker, and never spit her out. When Richard and Jim come back from the grocery store to find Jessie utterly vanished, with none of her personal belongings touched, it is immediately hopeless. The desert is too big, and people too frail, as their abortive search efforts demonstrate. Jim and Richard leave without Jessie, and her disappearance is a mystery, though with a few hints, we know exactly what happened. And then, the final scene, we are back in 24 Hour Psycho,with our very own psycho of the first scene, and we see him meet Jessie. Jessie stays for half an hour. He follows Jessie out of the exhibit, and gets her carelessly relinquished phone number. And thus it starts. And we knew it all along.

Focusing on the mystery and its construction doesn't do justice to the meditative parts of the novel, the parts that focus on war and its effects, the academicization of war, and the distancing mechanisms used by its instigators. And these masterful flights of dialogue are difficult to describe simply because they are so trim and spritely. It will take you only a couple of hours to read POINT OMEGA, and there is no question that those hours will be worth it. That if it were possible to stretch the text out over 24 hours, we might never cease to find further meaning.

CHRONIC CITY - Jonathan Lethem - Fiction

I was one of the few readers who enjoyed YOU DON'T LOVE ME YET, the novel preceding CHRONIC CITY in Lethem's hipster-slacker-chic oeuvre. So it is with some actual sadness that I report, after four-hundred-some pages with Perkus Tooth and Chase Insteadman, that this novel at best resembles the first draft of a passably good novel. In tone and plot points, it owes a tremendous and unacknowledged debt to Bret Easton Ellis--GLAMORAMA in particular--yet fails to get its strange and guarded characters off the ground. Everything, from the muddled mystery of an underground tiger on the loose, to Chase's astronaut fiancee, stranded on a space station, to the quest for the impossibly beautiful chaldrons, is a massive let-down. Lethem attempts reversals on the order of M. Night Shyamalan--is it real? Is it fake?--and then doubles back on himself, sometimes giving two contradictory explanations for the same mysterious phenomenon, as though writing both potential endings to a set-up and forgetting to delete one. Is the tiger a runaway drilling robot, or an actual two-story-high phantasmic tiger? Both, we're told, with equal narrative sincerity. This doesn't work. This kind of narrative disarray doesn't make these characters more interesting, or their daily stoner peregrinations any more purposeful. It leaves us with a mess of loose ends and no sense that there was a cross-stitch pattern underneath. It hampers the suspension of disbelief: halfway through this novel, it became almost stressful to read, because I wasn't sure that Lethem was actually going to be able to finish a coherent narrative. And he didn't, really. He threw a few smoke bombs, killed a character, and escaped citing the unpredictability and ineffable nature of real life.

I'm going to ruin a few of the novel's surprises, here. First of all, Chase Insteadman's fiancee, the astronaut trapped on a space station that has drifted into a field of orbiting Chinese mines? One of the only truly funny and interesting characters in the novel? Ends up being fake, a character written into a screenplay by Chase's new girlfriend Oona Laszlo, even though Oona enters the picture long after Chase supposedly receives the screenplay from a team of unknown young producers. Also, having received that screenplay, Chase somehow not only agrees to play the part but completely internalizes it, acquiring a weird form of selective amnesia about his past life such that he believes he really does have a fiancee in space. Chase does this without even realizing it. Then, Chase runs into the producers at a party, and they ask him WHAT HE THOUGHT OF THE SCREENPLAY. Even though Chase has apparently already STARTED PLAYING THE PART, so not only do they know what he thinks of the screenplay, they are EMPLOYING HIM.

This isn't clever storytelling. This is shoddy editing.

Okay, and then there are Chaldrons. Chaldrons are both holograms of vases and icons of vases in a virtual-reality game based on Second Life. They are difficult to make, although it is apparently both possible to make them if you have some skill, and impossible to make them unless you are the virtual world's creator. This isn't my misunderstanding. Both facts are presented, less than a hundred pages apart. We are told that Biller, one of Perkus Tooth's friends, has made a fortune crafting chaldrons for the virtual world and selling them on ebay. Then we are told by the mayor's personal assistant that her brother, the creator of the virtual world, made a certain finite number of chaldrons for the game, and that more chaldrons cannot be created, so their value keeps increasing. BOTH OF THESE CANNOT BE TRUE, AND THIS IS NEVER ADDRESSED. Furthermore, Chase, Perkus, and their third Musketeer Richard Abneg spend days--if not weeks, months--attempting to purchase a chaldron, believing that chaldrons are physical pieces of pottery. They try multiple times to bid for one on ebay. So, what, they never read the item description? They never read the wikipedia article on chaldrons, even though wikipedia is read and referenced by the characters? It seems highly implausible that three men could somehow not know that what they were attempting to spend thousands of dollars on was an item of currency in an online game. If the name sounds familiar, it may be because an actual chaldron is an obsolete measure of volume used for coal. The associations with "cauldron" are obvious and linguistically supported. Nevertheless, Lethem is really, really into his idea of chaldrons, and even produced a limited-edition tie-in item available through Thing Magazine: a pair of hipster glasses with text on the side-pieces. This he calls the Chaldron Optical System. Need I explain how ludicrous and annoying this is?

This review may not be adequately conveying my feelings about this book; I read it. I finished it. The first half I even found entertaining. It was the second half, as I realized that the book was on a downward arc that would never intersect with my expectations, that brought me to this point of annoyance and dismissal. I don't blame Lethem, I blame his editor, for not reigning in his tangents and forcing him to confront the inconsistencies of his text. Better luck next time.

THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE - Stieg Larsson - Fiction

Last time I reviewed THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, the first installment in Stieg Larsson's Millennium series, I was unsure whether the series would live up to the hopes of its author, as a feminist and female-forward (if such a term exists) mystery. Its heroine, Lisbeth Salander, is certainly problematic, and I was ambivalent in the truest sense of the word about her relationship with Mikael Blomkvist, journalist and do-gooder and seemingly infallible man. Luckily, the second volume doesn't reprise their relationship; Lisbeth moves in with her lesbian lover Mimmi, and is on the lam for most of the novel. It does, however, deepen my concern and confusion about the book's feminism, and what it means to be a feminist mystery novel.

After reading an illuminating discussion with YA author Maggie Stiefvater about what makes a strong heroine, I'm even more troubled by Lisbeth. Already, in the first book, we know that Lisbeth is skinny, short, and boyish. She is often mistaken for a child of twelve. She is quite possibly a psychopath, with strong emotional reactions and an aversion to authority and the police; she does not make friends easily, and is very blunt. In this novel, we are frequently told that Lisbeth is "moral" but has "her own morals" and that these sometimes deviate from the norm. Lisbeth herself deviates from the norm in her choices of sexual partners, body modifications, and style of dress. Thankfully, these are not portrayed as negative choices, but are clearly and repeatedly "othered" and marked as different. Throughout the narrative focusing on the police manhunt for Salander, her and Mimmi's sexual proclivities are focused on to an offensive extent by the local police. Luckily, this fixation is portrayed in a negative and salacious light, and all of the heroes trust that Salander is innocent or the victim of circumstances, and will be cleared once more facts come to light.

Salander is not a particularly good role model. Her distrust of authority forces her to take matters into her own hands, sometimes dangerously. She fails to inform others of her plans even when they put her life at risk. She takes stupid chances. She resorts to physical violence frequently. She never shows fear, even when it would do her good. She steals. She burns bridges like a pyromaniac. She is so powerfully offended by mistreatment that she would rather dig herself deeper into terrible situations than lose some of her pride by cooperating. She is not a particularly caring romantic partner. She doesn't understand the concept of job security, and only holds on to her jobs because her employers are fond of her, or intrigued by her oddness. She betrays her friends' trust, and like every cliche of a jilted woman, reads her ex-lover's email.

This is not to say that Salander is not a "real" character or not deserving of respect; she is powerfully intelligent and talented, superhumanly strong, and fairly adept at intuition. (Sometimes the powers attributed to her are downright supernatural: when chased by a man easily three times her size, Salander escapes him by dropping to the curb, rolling underneath a parked sedan, and coming up on the other side in a fighting stance, in a matter of seconds. Go outside and look at any Toyota parked by the side of the road, and tell me how it is remotely possible for a human being to execute a barrel roll under the chassis of a car and come out the other side in seconds, ready to tussle.) Salander's emotional difficulties don't make her less of a feminist heroine, or less believable as a woman. THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE gets some negatives for giving Salander breast implants and fixating on them, implying that they make her feel like a woman in some fundamental way she lacked without them, but the novel gets positives for the initial chapters, in which Salander spends her time on the beach reading complex mathematical texts and making forays into Fermat's last theorem (already solved, of course, but Lisbeth doesn't want to cheat and look at the answer.) In fact the first two chapters are quite interesting and neat; Salander is vacation on an island hit by a hurricane, which gives her the opportunity to rescue her younger native-islander lover and save a vacationing woman from her husband's murderous impulses; the husband dies, being swept away by the storm, and Salander manages to be an unobtrusive hero, while she ponders her math and lives off of her stolen fortune. Inexplicably, these plot points are completely dropped for the rest of the novel; we never hear more about the woman Salander saves or her new love interest, and next we see her, she has returned to Sweden.

Of course, she needs to be in Sweden if she's going to get wrapped up in Mikael Blomkvist's latest journalistic endeavors, because once again, the series seems to be told from the tunnel-vision of Blomkvist's world. Salander plays a major role in the events that unfold, but these events are motivated by Mikael's muck-raking instincts. A brief mention of the Berger-Blomkvist-Salander love triangle: one of the most awkward elements of the novel is the lack of communication between Mikael and Erika. For two people who have been lovers for most of their lives, and refuse to compromise their relationship for nearly anything, they do not talk. Mikael won't tell Erika about his lingering feelings for Lisbeth, Erika won't tell Mikael about her job offer at a rival newspaper, which she intends to take, and they certainly aren't going to talk about their relationship, and what the continuous interruptions of Lisbeth Salander mean for its longevity. It seems obvious that Mikael's pet project is becoming more of a live-in obsession, but this rift between Mikael and Erika is left to rub awkwardly against the plot-line whenever the two come into the same scene.

Here's the thing: Salander is great to root for. She is nearly infallible (only succumbing at the end to overwhelming emotion, which makes her forget her training as a security systems analyst, and wander right into a fairly obvious surveillance trap, and the wrong end of her father's gun.) Sure, it's a bit sticky at the end, with Salander being tortured and shot by her father, who badly abused her mother, leaving her brain-damaged; it's also awkward that the primary villain we see throughout turns out to be Salander's half-brother, a man as immune to pain as Salander herself is to fear. It is even more awkward that Mimmi is abducted by this man, and has to be rescued by a boxer ex machina, inexplicably defeating by force the very man who cannot feel pain--isn't there a more clever way to deal with such a monster than a kick to the nuts?--but nevertheless, the plot is exciting, Lisbeth's derring-do is exhilarating, and it's somewhat refreshing to see a female main character who insists on going it on her own, without help from even the most obvious sources.

Yet, there's something troubling about the way in which Lisbeth's strength is uniformly defined in terms of masculine definitions of "strong." Lisbeth is a physical powerhouse, despite being small and, well, boyish. She's a computer whiz who's bad at feelings and bad at romantic relationships. She loves fast motorcycles and tropical islands. She's a female James Bond, without any of Daniel Craig's remorse. And sure, there's a part of me that loves to see that, to see a woman kicking ass--but let's draw the obvious comparison, with Trinity from the Matrix. Trinity was a motorcycle-revving ass-kicker in tight black leather and a punk sensibility. She was technologically adept. And yet, she was even more powerful because she was afraid, afraid that Neo wouldn't be the one, that the ship wouldn't survive its squidlet attack--but she tried anyway. She believed in her shipmates and honestly loved them, mourned their deaths and threw herself behind the long odds on their quest. Salander wouldn't have been on the Nebuchadnezzar because she can't get along with people, and if someone told her she wasn't the One, there's no way she would have self-sacrificed for some other One. Somehow, this seems like a problem.

There's also something a little over-the-top about the way that Salander's past, and her entanglement with the Swedish medico-legal system toys with her psyche and allows her disenfranchisement to fuel the entire storyline. We're led to believe that Salander hates men who hates women, and so would have fallen afoul of the traffickers and hit-men targeted in Millennium's expose, but really, she has personal reasons for all of her grudges, and makes new ones throughout her murder-suspect ordeal. She hates the traffickers because they are run by her father. She hates the police and the psychiatrists because they were paid off by associates of her father to keep her in custody so she couldn't reveal anyone's identity. Any sense of problems larger than herself, social injustices, or connections with other women are simply absent--and that's what keeps me from labeling Lisbeth Salander a feminist heroine.

LOGICOMIX - Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou - Graphic Novel

There isn't much competition in the class of graphic novels about mathematics. Even so, LOGICOMIX is a meta-graphic novel about mathematics, which is rather unnecessary--the interludes in which the storytellers, inkers, artists, and mathematician consultants gather around and pontificate about various directions for their loose biography of Bertrand Russell seem stagy and coy, whereas the lives of the mathematicians themselves are sometimes tossed off too quickly and incidentally. The mathematics needs room to breathe, and tossing off years like calendar pages to show the agony that went into Russell and Whitehead's magnum opus unavoidably compresses the scope of their achievements.

The conceit of the work is that Russell, a logician-cum-pacifist, is giving a speech on logic at a university beset by pacifist protestors. Russell convinces them to hear his speech before he will agree to lend his support to their cause, and his speech becomes an oral history of his life and mathematical journey, even delving into his marital difficulties and alienating childhood. The university audience is almost completely forgotten, as the major players of twentieth-century mathematics are brought onstage to allude to their discoveries and provide fascinating and tortured mannikins who stalk the page with their madnesses and mathematical miracles in tow.

What these mathematical miracles really are is hard to say, as the format makes it particularly difficult to go into the mathematics with any depth. (At the same time as this reading, I was also in the midst of David Foster Wallace's book on infinity, which has many of the same players but much more room for academic complexity, which was greatly appreciated.) But, I have to consider audience, and it's true that many readers will be glad that the nuts and bolts of proofs are left out of the speech bubbles. Had I been reading this at twelve, I would undoubtedly have been excited and prompted to seek out the original texts referenced, which would have been a great boon for a budding mathematician. Providing this impetus may be the primary goal for LOGICOMIX in which case its mission is admirable, and I believe it would succeed.

But while the mathematics is glossed over in parts, the salacious bits are also handled with kid gloves and packed away quickly. Russell's parents' polyamory, Russell's love for Whitehead's younger wife, the man's own four wives, and his agonizing courtship of Alys, his first wife, and brushed over; Russell's family's bouts with schizophrenia are oft-mentioned but shown in-scene only twice. Russell's own son was schizophrenic, and his granddaughter burned herself alive; for all the time that LOGICOMIX's creators spend mulling over the themes of madness, they could have gussied up the story with a little more of this flashy human interest. Life isn't all mathematicians' conferences and invited university lectures.

THE CHECKLIST MANIFESTO - Atul Gawande - Nonfiction

How are great ideas spread? Judging by the progress of social media over the past five years, you might say that facebook and twitter are the easiest ways to get a message out. But Atul Gawande is going back to the grand tradition of the pamphlet--or, in this case, the slim (less than 200 pages) manual for change. Gawande's causes in the past have been the medical education of the public, and the promotion of better surgical standards and practices, and here he hews close to his beaten path, championing the cause of, as he says, "the humble checklist." As an aid to surgical improvement, it might easily be overlooked, but his carefully compiled and cross-checked statistics make a convincing case for its indispensability at the operating table.

Checklists, as Gawande notes in a number of chapters, are used successfully to govern many of the complicated procedures we engage in as a society. On airplanes (and space shuttles), in construction projects, restaurant kitchens, and disaster response, checklists are already used with great success and acceptance. Surgery, however, doesn't have a good system in place for making sure that commonplace errors--errors which, crucial to Gawande's position as the WHO's point man for safe surgery worldwide, happen no matter where the surgery is taking place, or who is performing it--are discussed and prevented. Gawande shares some horror stories in his introduction, contributed by a friend of his working at a hospital in San Francisco. In one case, a patient was given an accidental overdose of a common supplement, and it stopped his heart on the operating table. In another case, a man's stab wound was dangerously ignored because doctors assumed it was caused by a short-bladed knife, when it was in fact caused by a bayonet-wielding halloween partier. In other, more commonly discussed cases, surgical tools or sponges are accidentally left inside patients, patients are given the wrong procedure, or given surgery on the wrong side of the body, or proper preparation is not carried out, and blood supplies or crash carts are not available. Anyone who has ever planned a birthday party or organized an international trip will know that the easiest way not to forget something is to write it down--and cross it off. And, Gawande proposes, this is exactly what medicine needs to do: come up with a short, simple checklist, to be implemented at three stages during the surgical procedure, involving simple checks and announcements of information meant to streamline and verify the operation.

This is not exactly reinventing the wheel, and clinical trials at individual hospitals, as well as WHO's Gawande-led efforts worldwide, have shown the efficacy of such a checklist. In fact, the people Gawande blames for impeding the implementation of surgical checklists are surgeons themselves. According to the author, one of the most renowned surgeons in the country, surgeons are pompous and proud, slow to change and easy to offend. Tell a surgeon that his quality of surgery will improve by using a checklist that asks everyone to agree upon what procedure will be performed, what the patient's medical details are, and whether the blood bank has been informed of the surgery, among other items, is apparently akin to asking a professional baseball player to confirm, before each game, that he intends to run the bases counter-clockwise. And yet, although baseball players never run the wrong way, the sheer amount of information that a doctor must keep in his head at once ensures that mistakes do happen, tools are left inside sutured incisions, and checklists can, and do, save lives. Gawande admits that even he was reluctant to use the checklist, thinking that his surgeries could hardly be better, but saw significant improvements when he did, and in all likelihood avoided killing a patient when an improbable mistake required immediate access to extra liters of blood.

The descriptions of all these near-death experiences deliver more chills per minute than a Stephen King novel, and Gawande knows exactly what he's doing. By tapping into our emotional responses to his idea, he is taking a checklist from a bureaucratic time-wasting device to an essential upgrade in life-saving technology: exactly what hospital administrators need to believe, and surgeons need to demand. A number of countries have already instituted checklists in every hospital, at every surgery, although the U.S. has not--perhaps something to ask for in healthcare reform?--and it would be good advice to ask your surgeon, if you can, whether he intends to use a checklist for your surgery…and to strongly suggest that he or she does.

THE GLASS CASTLE - Jeannette Walls - Nonfiction

There are a lot of opportunities to lay blame in THE GLASS CASTLE, Walls's memoir recounting her inconceivably impoverished childhood. At the center are Walls's parents, by all accounts two psychopaths with no business having children who nevertheless had four; her mother a delusional narcissist and her father a megalomaniacal alcoholic, Jeannette and her siblings come off remarkably normal and mentally unscathed.

We might blame Jeannette's maternal grandmother, a relatively sane older woman in possession of a large amount of land in Texas and a home in Arizona, for not doing more to curb her daughter's downward spiral, or her grandchildren's maltreatment, beyond feeding them when they came to visit, and introducing them to the only stable home they would live in for their entire childhoods. We might blame Jeannette's friends and neighbors, the people who encountered the family in its peripatetic journey across the lower half of the U.S., and failed to intervene or contact authorities. However, the one encounter Jeannette remembers having with a bureaucrat from child services ends in a detente and is never followed up, leading us to another receptacle of blame: the authorities who would allow a family such as this to exist, to allow children to live in an unheated home with no electricity or running water, sleeping in cardboard boxes and wearing tarps as blankets to avoid the leaking ceiling.

We could blame Jeannette's teachers, who offered a few opportunities to her and her sisters and brother, but never truly seemed to grasp the magnitude of their recurring familial tragedy. We might blame everyone who came into contact with Jeannette's father, Rex Walls, recognized his alcoholism and mental illness, but did nothing to have him committed. We might blame Jeannette and her siblings themselves, for not running away, calling the police on their parents, or cutting off their parents' sources of funds for good--especially when those funds were earned by the children and stolen by the parents.

Each of these failures is individually unconscionable, and snowballs into such a compendium of monstrosity as has never been encountered in the history of a successful Park Avenue resident and MSNBC correspondent. The fact that Jeannette and her siblings were able to rise from rags to riches is less a story of an American Dream fulfilled, and more a proof of the existence of psychotically capricious luck. Jeannette's story should not be inspirational, it should be prohibitory: just as Kitty Genovese's tale would not have been heartwarming had she survived her attack, so should this extended tale of crimes against children be read not as a success story but as a warning, to be a better guardian of one's community, and to remember that poverty is not an indication of saintliness, but of the existence of underlying evil.