Why I Love Tiger Mom

"Your parents will be proud of your grades," a law professor told a group of anxious 1Ls yesterday, "unless they want to be the next Tiger Mother." Indeed, the Tiger Mother as portrayed in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua has come to symbolize extreme parenting that makes everyone uncomfortable. Her oft-cited Wall Street Journal list of things Chinese mothers never let their children do includes going to sleepovers or getting a grade lower than an A. Americans have generally responded with skepticism and scorn, pointing out that this strict form of parenting doesn't foster the creativity that makes America great. Chinese-Americans have responded by trying to distinguish themselves from Chua. "My parents let me go to sleepovers and I turned out ok," my Asian friends wrote on Facebook.

In the few weeks following the initial backlash, people have pointed out that our response might reflect our insecurities about America's decline. Or that Chua is merely pushing our buttons, and that we should just ignore it. Indeed, Tiger Mother, is intentionally polemical, easily leading commentators to read what they want into the book. After listening to Slate Audio Book Club's "definitive" discussion of Tiger Mother, I was left with the impression that Chua is not introspective, fails to admit weakness, and seeks validation from her daughters' musical accomplishments.

Nonetheless, after going ahead and reading the book anyway, I am convinced that all the pundits have got it wrong. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother is not a how-to book; it's not a foreign policy book disguised as a parenting book; it's not even a straightforward memoir. What it is is a hilarious jab at the yuppie holy grail--and those who can't take the joke should keep their mouths shut. The holy grail, of course, is the yuppie offspring. Having gone to a respectable private college, gotten high paying jobs in liberal cities, yuppies' next--and most satisfying--accomplishment is raising little Lelands and Morgans who will be just as successful as they are, except more artistic. This is why--as my boyfriend always points out--any article in the Times or The New Yorker about Ivy League admissions immediate gains most-emailed status. This is why we have dozens of parenting books, classes, and Baby Bjorn stores to promote creativity and child self-actualization. So when someone comes along and pokes holes in our theory of parenting, backlash ensues.

And really "poking fun" of western parenting is what Chua does best. Chua on creative school projects: "there's nothing I hate more than all these festivals and projects that private schools specialize in. Instead of making kids study from books, private schools are constantly trying to make learning fun by having parents do all the work." Chua on Chinese parents' tendencies to compare their children: "The mother told Kathleen [a friend] that her daughter, who was a student at Brown, was probably going to lose [a tennis match]. 'This daughter so weak,' she said...'Her older sister--much better. She go to Harvard." Chua takes shots at herself too. Describing her daughter, Lulu's decision to take up tennis instead of the violin, Chua says, "Had I perhaps chosen the wrong activity for Lulu? Tennis was very respectable--it wasn't like bowling. Michael Chang had played tennis." This last sentence isn't a serious justification for why tennis is respectable, but a facetious characterization of Chua's reasoning. Maybe you have to come from an Asian-American/immigrant background to appreciate it, but I found Chua's descriptions of herself to show an ultimate awareness of her blind areas.

Chua admits that Chinese parenting is very lonely, especially in the US; you have to make up excuses why you're daughters can't go on playdates. So her very act of describing her extreme moments is an invitation for criticism. In one section, Chua displays some unedited "notes" that she left for her daughters to guide their music practices each day. One has the title "Chow Chow LeBoeuf," then goes on to say "HELLO LULU!!! You are doing great. Light!! Light!!!! LIGHT!!!...10 minutes: Kreutzer #32. Work it through YOURSELF, with a metronome. SLOW. Light bows. If you can do this, you rock." These notes embody so much of Chua's personality. Some craziness, some humor, and a lot of dedication. We see her daughters rolling their eyes as they read this, but smiling enough to follow the instructions.

One Day: Best Beach Read of 2010

It's not often that a cover of a nearly-kissing-couple reveals a profound novel underneath. David Nicholls bucks the trend by combining breezy language and fast-paced storytelling with epic themes and deep character portrayals in his new novel One Day.

One Day is quite gimmicky on the surface. It's about a boy (Dexter Mayhew) and a girl (Emma Morley) who have a one night stand the evening of university (they're British) graduation on July 15, 1988. The book then checks in with the two of them on July 15 of every year for the next twenty years. But the way Nicholls does this sets it apart from typical chick-lit fare. Instead of contriving a meeting every year, say at a wedding or randomly bumping into each other at a restaurant, Nicholls deliberately checks in with them each July 15, using the opportunity to fill us in on their lives the other 364 days of the year. Nicholls makes clear that Dex and Em are part of each others' lives year round. Instead of filling us in on their lives through removed third-person omniscient, he spends equal amounts of time communicating in Dex and Em's respective voices.

Through this method, we get two fully realized characters. One chapter set in the early Nineties begins with Dexter's voice: "These days the nights and mornings have a tendency to bleed into one another. Old fashioned notions of a.m. and p.m. have become obsolete and Dexter is seeing a lot more dawns that he once used to." A couple pages later, Nicholls switches to Em: "Emma Morley east well and drinks in moderation. These days she gets eight good hours sleep then wakes promptly of her accord just before six-thirty and drinks a large glass of water." These sentences don't simply fill us in on the characters' lives, but do it in such a way that shows what the characters think of themselves. These are thoughts that they would have believably used to describe themselves.

Sure, the characters each do a few things that make you want to roll your eyes, but their big decisions are recognizable to all. Immediately after the one night stand, for example, Dexter does a stint of world traveling, going from country to country "teaching English," but also bedding various women. He is then saved from the nomadic lifestyle by a television gig, becoming rich and more dependent on drugs in the process. Though this screams cliched rich-kid story, Nicholls excellent portrayal renders Dexter as a real person who needs to reconcile luck with success. In one passage, Dexter muses on how to "dump" his friends for more successful, attractive friends. Even if you haven't faced this specific problem, everyone can relate to the idea of outgrowing acquaintances. Meanwhile, Em must ask how to find the courage to do what she really wants as she endures a thankless job while yearning to be a writer.

Though Dex and Em eventually grow out of their twenties, the early twenties is a great time to read this book. From my perspective as a recent college grad, One Day provides perspective on how one's priorities change through the ages. Obsessed with success and being other people when their young, the characters learn to appreciate family and themselves over time. In this sense, it reminds me of a much more serious book, The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard, that follows two sisters from the 1950's through the 1980's. The difference is that One Day is written in a way that's conducive to the beach.

Nicholls provides some acute social commentary throughout. From the beginning, he makes fun of Emma's type even as he creates her. Looking around Emma's progressive, hipster-ish room during the one-night stand, Dex notes that "the problem with interesting girls is that they were all the same." Later, Nicholls jabs at overblown weddings:
"They have started to arrive. An endless cascade of luxuriously quilted envelopes, thumping onto the doormat. The wedding invitations."

Current events from 1988 to 2007 take a backseat in this book. (There's no mention of 9/11, but some discussion of the subsequent war). While the cultural references--"I have tickets to the London premier of Jurassic Park"--might attract audiences of a certain age, they are entirely gratuitous. Though the situations could have only occurred in the late 20th century and first decade of the twenty-first, the story of two young people figuring out their lives is timeless.

The Imperfect Imperfectionists

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman has gotten a lot of press coverage since its debut. A "novel" about journalists working a struggling English-language paper based in Rome, it has attracted the attention of many journalists who might feel a connection. The Washington Post lauds The Imperfectionists as a novel "about what happens when professionals realize that their craft no longer has meaning in the world's eyes." This is a great idea, and could have led to profound character studies. Unfortunately, Rachman's execution of The Imperfectionists has resulted in several shallow portrayals of many instead of a more coherent examination of a few.

As many have pointed out, The Imperfectionists is more of a series of linked stories than a bona fide novel. Each chapter focuses on one employee of an unnamed international newspaper. (Rachman himself used to work at the International Herald Tribune). Each chapter explores how that employee undergoes an ironic twist as the newspaper marches towards its demise. So we've got the obituary writer who faces death in his personal life, a business writer who gets scammed, a devoted reader who doesn't know anything about current events, and so forth. Perhaps one ironic twist would be believable, but a dozen are not. As a whole, the stories make for a heavy handed way of saying "look how these characters have to confront their true selves just like how the newspaper needs to confront its true importance." Clever, perhaps, but not thought provoking.

This 280 page book consists of about a dozen 25 page stories. Rachman demonstrates that there's just not enough space in 25 pages to paint believable characters. He relies on types for most of them. There's the bitter, single middle aged woman who loves to complain about her proofreading job, but can't live without it (Ruby Zaga). There's the type-A Editor-in-Chief who must have control over her professional life, but lacks control over her personal life (Kathleen Solson). There's also the poor little soft rich kid publisher who went to Yale and inherited responsibility for the paper (Oliver Ott).

However, some segments are more original than others. The stories that do work successfully convey a person's entire life in a few short pages. The opening story is about Lloyd Burko, an aging foreign correspondent who is now short on cash, having been demoted to a freelancer. He roams the streets of Paris as he tries to rekindle with a daughter and then a son from two of four different marriages. We get the sense that he used to be a ladies man and is now reduced to watching his current, much younger wife, have affairs with the next door neighbor. Though Burko could have easily been a cliche of a washed-out asshole who everyone now loves to hate, Rachman puts us on his side immediately. We root for him as he attempts to seek redemption through his son.

Despite my criticisms, it's not like Rachman set out to write a profound, earth-shattering novel of ideas. The Imperfectionists succeeds as a light-hearted series of escapades. Funny lines are scattered about. Here is Arthur Gopal, the obit writer, trying to avoid work:

"No one had died. Or rather 107 people have in the previous minute, 154,000 in the past day, and 1,078,000 in the past week. But no one who matters. That's good — it has been nine days since his last obit and he hopes to extend his streak."

The Imperfectionists is a great beach read that will keep one's attention without creasing one's brow.

David Mitchells Shows Off Storytelling Chops in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Reading Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's third novel, several years ago, I was impressed by how he wove together post-modern elements to form a thoroughly believable story arc spanning thousands of years. Cloud Atlas is technically a series of six linked stories that begins in the eighteenth century and ends at some unknown future civilization. The main character of each story finds the memoirs by the main character of a previous story, so that each story is revealed to be hidden in another story. Together, these tales form a sweeping meditation on humanity's failings and hopes.

Since Cloud Atlas, Mitchell has reverted to more traditional story-telling. His Black Swan Green is a semi-autobiographical novel of a boy growing up in England in the 1970's. Though not a thrilling story, Mitchell captures the tweenage boy's voice perfectly.

Mitchell's latest novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, reprises the straightforward approach to tell the story of a Dutch clerk falling in love with a Japanese mid-wife while uncovering corruption in 1799 Dejima, Japan. Jacob de Zoet is trying to make his fortune in a five year stint before returning to Holland to marry his sweetheart, Anna. Of course, the moment we read of Jacob's plans, we know things are probably not going to turn out quite the way he hopes. A fish out of water, his first mistake is to announce to some of his colleagues that he's there to help the chief root out corruption. His second mistake is to be too trusting of his superiors. His third is to fall in love with Orito, a disfigured Japanese mid-wife. Meanwhile, the war back in Europe between Holland and England brews, stirring up consequences for the small army of traders on Dejima.

All of these story lines are evoked with remarkable detail. Like in Black Swan Green, Mitchell is able to get into the minds of his characters and describe what they see convincingly. When first arriving in Japan, Jacob notices the “gnarled old women, pocked monks, unmarried girls with blackened teeth." These details are something that a Dutchman could believably pick up without having any insight into Japanese culture.

At the same time, this historical novel can not escape typical historical flourishes. The accents are awkward at times. The Dutch speak like Eighteenth Century Englishmen. When the Japanese speak Dutch, their sentences come out in stereotypically incorrect English. But when the Japanese speak to each other, presumably in Japanese, the sentences come out in stereotypically formal and stiff.

Though following a traditional approach, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is also a meditation on the art of storytelling itself. The plot of the novel is nearly entirely driven by minor characters' revelations through orally communicated stories. When most authors do this, the revelation comes as a convenient plot device, explaining away mysteries neatly with a bow on top. Most of the time, it's pretty fake though sometimes entertaining. Mitchell's stories feel real because he has explained the motivations behind why characters would keep their stories, and only reveal them at necessary moments. For example, an ex-convict doesn't reveal his secret past until he might get killed for not revealing it. In addition, Mitchell doesn't rely on story-as-revelation as his only method of revelation. An important revelation about paternity is discovered through the father's own eyes as he sets sights on his son.

Moreover, there are so many of these discrete anecdotes that they become a fact of life. It's as if everyone on Dejima sits around telling stories, so the reader never knows when one story in particular will be important. Early on, some of the traders sit around drinking. One tells the story of how another one pretended to be wealthy to get a wealthy wife, only to find that he had been tricked in the same way:

“On Mr Grote’s last trip home,” obliges Ouwehand, “he wooed a promising young heiress at her town house in Roomolenstraat who told him how her heirless, ailing papa yearned to see his dairy farm in the hands of a gentleman son-in-law, yet everywhere, she lamented, were thieving rascals posing as eligible bachelors. Mr Grote agreed that the Sea of Courtship seethes with sharks and spoke of the prejudice endured by the young colonial parvenu, as if the annual fortunes yielded by his plantations in Sumatra were less worthy than old monies. The turtledoves were wedded within a week. The day after their nuptials, the taverner presented the bill and each says to the other, ‘Settle the account, my heart’s music.’ But to their genuine horror, neither could, for bride and groom alike had spent their last beans on wooing the other! Mr Grote’s Sumatran plantations evaporated; the Roomolenstraat house reverted to a co-conspirator’s stage prop; the ailing father-in-law turned out to be a beer porter in rude health, not heirless but hairless.”

This anecdote isn't particularly useful except to say what types of desperate situations drive people to come to Dejima. But it is a funny story with lots of attention to detail. Such details make Thousand Autumns a vivid, satisfying read.

How Lydia Davis is Redefining the Short Story

Lydia Davis is a perfect companion for a long flight. Writing stories that are often less than a page, her Collected Stories is conducive to putting down for nap time. At the same time, Davis' stories are compulsively readable. Many stories are revelatory, with the main insight wrapped in one or two particularly well-placed sentences. The reader keeps reading in anticipation of what surprise the next sentence might bring. Here's a story, "Disagreement," in its entirety:

"He said she was disagreeing with him. She said no, that was not true, he was disagreeing with her. This was about the screen door. That is should not be left open was her idea, because of the flies; his was that it could be left open first thing in the morning, when there were no flies on the deck. Anyway, he said, most of the flies came from other parts of the building: in fact, he was probably letting more of them out than in."

In this story, Davis employs her signature matter of fact tone to convey a series of events without judgment. She brings to light the ridiculousness of the disagreement by not providing any of the motivation behind it. In the telling of events, she also mirrors the typical pattern of an argument. Isn't it just like a couple to argue over something insignificant?

Davis' longer pieces often consist of shorter pieces stitched together under the umbrella of one title. For example, the memorable "We Miss You," is a series of individually titled sections about an elementary school classroom that writes letters to one of its hospital-ridden members over a holiday season in the 1940's. It's a mock analysis of the children's writing to their classmate. One section analyzes references to classmates - "only two children make references to their classmates"-- while other sections analyze spelling, references to Christmas presents, and references to classroom activities. Though each individual section is blandly told, narrowly focused on a somewhat boring topic, the entire exercise is a fascinating study of a way of looking at children's letters.

Indeed, Davis' main talent is revealing the thought and the meaning behind mundane actions. The New Yorker's James Wood points out that Davis' stories are self-aware in a non traditional way. Instead of allowing readers to eavesdrop on characters' thoughts, as in the standard short story, Davis allows readers to eavesdrop on the narrator's thoughts. So we are exposed to the agony behind small decisions. Here is a character waiting for someone to call, "When he calls me either he will then come to me, or he will not and I will be angry, and so I will have either him or my own anger, and this might be all right, since anger is always a great comfort, as I found with my husband."Davis simultaneously gives us much insight into the narrator—it’s probably a she; she is kind of neurotic—while holding back vital details. Why is this woman waiting for someone to call? Why is she waiting for someone who is not her husband to call? The story succeeds in making it possible for the woman to be anyone, yourself included. As she starts to analyze her impatience and anger, you do too.

Most of my friends have not heard of Lydia Davis, and I like to describe her as someone who’s pushing the edge of what the short story does—whatever that means. Though hard to describe, this kind of boundary bending style is something you know when you see it. Here’s a final example called “Head, Heart:”

“Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again: You will lose the ones you love.
I want them back, says heart . . .
Help, head. Help heart.”

Tinkers Explores the Predominance of Family in Ourselves

It's not often that a novel gets into one's dreams. When one does, it's usually due to some super gory, explicit detail covering Hannibal Lecter's latest kill, or the misery of a post-apocalyptic world where people must eat babies to survive.

Tinkers, Paul Harding's 2009 Putlizer Prize winning novel, is neither gory, nor apocalyptic. However, it is about death. "George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died," the novel opens. The next 190 pages of this taut story chronicles Crosby's flashbacks of his childhood, of his clock fixing tinkering, and especially of his father. Tinkers pervaded my dreams, not because of any scary content, but because of its beautiful descriptions of Crosby's flashbacks. He hallucinates that the walls are caving in around him, that the ceiling is falling in. Finally, the sky and the stars also collapse on top of him. Harding evokes all this with an incredible control of language, conveying the sense that he's actually seen what this looks like first hand:

"The very blue of the sky followed, draining from the heights into that cluttered concrete socket. Next fell the stars, tinkling about him like the ornaments of heaven shaken loose. Finally, the black vastation itself came untacked and draped over the entire heap, covering George's confused obliteration."

Harding's gorgeous sentences keeps the image in one's mind and haunts one's dreams.

Intertwined with George Crosby's thinkings is the story of his father, Howard Crosby, as a salesman in the 1920's. We learn that Howard is an epileptic. Harding's descriptions of Howard's do-it-yourselfness (he pulls a homeless man's tooth) during his travels and his epileptic episodes parallels George Crosby's tinkering and death-bed hallucinations. Readers wonder just how similar sons are to their fathers, whether or not by choice.

Indeed, much of Tinkers' power lies in what it omits. The only suspense comes from wondering if anything strange will happen to George Crosby on his death-bed. Though a new plot line creeps up three quarters into the book when we find out why Howard Crosby leaves his family when George is ten, the compression of the next seventy years into the last forty pages is much more profound than the actual details of the events.

Harding shows simply how quickly a lifetime goes by. As George dies, "He remembered all of the time that stood between himself as a boy of twelve and himself as a middle-aged husband and father contracting to zero." Harding encapsulates an entire life without showing us who George is as a husband, as a father, or as a grandfather. It's up to us to fill in the gaps based on the structure that Harding has provided us; based only on George's interactions as a boy with Howard, and George's propensities for clock-fixing in old age. By only providing these limited details, Harding proposes that maybe one's roots are all that matters.

The Ask Questions Social Class in America

The Slate Culture Gabfest is discussing Sam Lipsyte's new novel, The Ask, next week as part of its first live show in New York City. Loyal listener that I am, I picked up this novel and was immediately surprised to find that cultually-minded Slate readers are both the target audience and the target of its biting satire.
The Ask's central character is a university development officer, Milo Burke. The book opens with him losing his job after telling off a development student. But when Purdy Stuart, a billionaire and Milo's college housemate, becomes a potential "ask" for the development office, the university hires Milo back. Milo soon realizes that working Purdy for a donation means working for Purdy, as Milo gets enlisted in a series of unsavory tasks for his ask.

Meanwhile, Milo's not doing so well on the home front either. He lives in Queens, which is the closest to Manhattan that he and his wife can afford. His wife, Maura, is a sometimes lesbian who may or may not be having an affair with a male coworker who may or may not be gay.

What makes Milos situation more pathetic is his self-awareness. Written in first person, Milo's witty sarcasm reveals the derailment of the American dream. He sees himself as a loser. Purdy's accountant scolds Milo, "For heaven's sake, the system's rigged for white men and you still can't tap in." Indeed, Milo does feel like someone who once had opportunity, and now doesn't. He admits, "Maybe I wasn't going anywhere...I had always been bitter, was still bitter, was bitter about the bitterness." He tells us about the the story of a stay-at-home dad neighbor who was a chef. When Milo read that the chef and his young family died in a car accident, Milo feels an empathic sense of relief. "He would never go down in history, or case history, as a shitty father. Whereas me, I still had a decent shot." But it isn't clear if Milo's failure is simply due to Milo's lack of trying or to a larger, systemic American problem.

But Milo isn't only pointing out a flaw in his life trajectory; it's also a flaw in the trajectory of the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Bachelor's in Liberal Arts toting, wannabe artist twenty-somethings who flooded New York City over the past decade, only to become disillusioned thirty somethings who have resigned themselves to real jobs. When the novel opens, Milo reflects on the disdain he says for the privileged students who squander their parents money at his university. But then he realizes "I'd been just like these wretches once. Now they stared through me, as though I were merely some drone in their sight line...They were right. That's exactly what I was."

As Milo's story moves forward, he also takes us back to moments of opportunity in the past, and how he never took advantage of them. For instance, after college, Purdy actually asked Milo to become involved in an online music store. Milo brushed this off to work on his painting. Soon enough, Purdy sold his store for hundreds of millions; Milo didn't sell any paintings.

Milo and others' bitterness comes across as a rant against America. His coworker, Horace, opens the novel ranting, "America...was a run-down and demented pimp. Our republic's whoremaster days were through...We're the bitches of the First World." America's a bitch because Americans were either bitches or bitch masters. Milo sees himself in the bitch category, serving Purdy in his quest to cover up the existence of a twenty-something son who lost his legs in Iraq and is now determined to get what's his from Purdy. Though I found myself classifying each character as either servant or served, I started to realize that this book isn't exactly about such clear divisions. Each character has some limitations in their opportunities, no matter how wealthy they started out their lives. In addition, Milo's life isn't all that shitty compared to others in the novel. Milo has no skills, squandered his time as an artist, and still managed to get a cushy job, after all. Milo is a sympathetic character, but is also the butt of the joke. Instead of beating down on America, Lipsyte suggests there is still hope yet. It's not about the class into which one is born, but what they do with it once there.

Amy Bloom: The God of Love Doesn't Exist

Amy Bloom’s new short story collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, is ironically titled. Ironic for the way it insinuates that there is such a thing as the God of Love, when the behavior of the characters in these short stories suggest otherwise. If there were a God of Love, Bloom suggests, then He lives in each of us, as both the angel trying to save us from poor decisions, and as the devil egging us on.

For each of the stories in Bloom’s collection features people who need to decide if they are going to pursue one relationship at the expense of another. Bloom’s characters are not driven by selfishness or passion—the usual culprits of poor decisions—but by various other psychological factors which she deftly explores. The title story is about a man and his daughter in law who find themselves questioning if they are married to the right spouse. Don’t worry, the two do not hook up, but do bare their souls to each other. We learn that they are each suffering from a case of feeling outclassed. Macy, the daughter-in-law, married into the family to gain a sense of middle-class security. Ron married his wife “for better or for worse,” but he doesn’t know when the better ended and the worse began. Now, he is thinking of trading Eleanor, she of Emily Post’s manners, for a bartender, Randeanne. Bloom sets up these doubts so that it makes sense for a young newlywed and a recent retiree to think about dumping their spouses.

The collection also includes two sets of related quartets. The opening quartet is about Clare and William, a couple “with one hundred and ten years between them,” who start having an affair when their respective spouses are in the same house, fast asleep. Clare and Williams don’t do this out of boredom, but out of an extreme comfort with each other. It’s as though they feel like they have already been married for decades. We, like they, think “hey—this isn’t so immoral, especially since the spouses seem not to care at all.” Again, Bloom hints at the psychological rationale behind this subversion. Both Clare and William feel kind of inadequate compared to their spouses. Charles and Isabel are always impeccably behaved, dressed, and fit. Clare, in contrast, is grouchy, while William is overweight. Their getting together can be seen as self-punishment for having “gotten the better end of the deal” married to their spouses for the past thirty years.

The most powerful story arc in the collection follows Lionel Jr. and Julia. Julia is 34 year old white woman married to a black jazz musician, Lionel Sr., who has just passed away. The day following the funeral, she has a carnal encounter with the 19 year old Lionel Jr, Lionel Sr.’s son from a previous marriage. The rest of the stories in this quartet trace the fall out from this one night. But while other authors may attribute all the mess in the son’s life to his stepmother’s actions, Bloom directs the real question as: how much of Lionel Jr.’s decisions through the rest of his life are really a reflection of the encounter, and how much is due to everything else? As one might expect, Lionel lives abroad and goes through women like others go through shirts. But is Julia really the cause, or just the justification? In the story’s final twist of events that permanently separate Julia and Lionel Jr. Bloom leaves us to make our own decisions.

Joan Didion's America

"Didion voted for Goldwater in 1964. Since then, she has voted only twice," Michiko Kakutani wrote in a 1979 profile of Joan Didion for The New York Times. I was shocked when I first read these words. After all, Didion, now 75, is known for contributing to such liberal outlets as the New York Review of Books.

But reading her collected non-fiction, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, over the past few weeks, I've come to recognize that Didion's reluctance to participate in American Democracy, and her once affiliation with Barry Goldwater, stems not from apathy but from an inability to take things at face value. Didion does not simply report on the stories and ideas that her subjects convey to her; instead she reads between the lines to uncover the origins of her subjects' tales that they didn't even know about. Her style of journalism is about showing the misunderstandings between groups of people to illuminate the tensions in society. As such, the forty years of reporting covered in this collection give us a history of a post-War America that is broken due to Americans' refusal to do anything other than talk past one another.

The collection begins with Didion's first and most well-known book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. This book is famous for giving readers a peek of the hippie lifestyle in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the 1960's. Didion goes beyond mere description, however, to explain why exactly the hippies seemed so foreign to non-Hippies. After interviewing many illustrious residents, from teenage runaways to drug dealers, she concludes "We were seeing the desperate attempt of a handful of pathetically unequipped children to create a community in a social vacuum." In other words, the hippies were lazing around not because of some rebellious streak, but because they were lost.

Didion next collection, The White Album, published more than ten years after her first, picks up where Slouching left off. The focus of this second book is to discuss the groups that were left out by the revolutions of the Sixties. She profiles a group of churchgoers who feel misplaced in a world that didn't deliver on the promises due to those with good behavior. In this world where the values seem to change on a daily basis, "we tell ourselves stories in order to live," Didion claims. By this she means that we rationalize our behavior and place ourselves in neat narratives to avoid dealing with actual issues:

"The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be 'interesting' to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest."

Her next four books, Salvador, Miami, After Henry, and Political Fictions, give detailed examples of just the sort of stories that we say to ourselves and to those who agree with us at the expense of others. Didion shows how these generalizations translate into cultural isolation. In Salvador, she pitches the American foreign service officers at odds with the Salvadoreans. In Miami, she shows how the white Americans see the Cubans as foreign even though the Cubans have in many ways been more successful than their more native counterparts. This has led to a variety of willful misunderstandings including the belief on the Floridian side that all Cubans are Communists, and the belief on the Cuban side that JFK purposely lied about toppling Castro.

In her next two books, After Henry and Political Fictions, Didion takes on the political establishment. She paints a damning picture of how Washington insiders, including both politicians and the press, are completely out of touch with "the average American." Instead, Washington insiders basically battle each other over the airwaves at everyone else's expense. In a devastating portrayal of Ronald Reagan, Didion reduces him to nothing more than an actor playing the role of the president, like a puppet to powerful lobbying interests. She handles Whitewater and Clinton's affairs deftly, accusing both Democrats and Republicans of opportunism. She points out the irony of the leaders of a country where "the average age of first sexual intercourse ...[is] sixteen,"--a country where "six out of ten marriages...are likely to end in divorce...after engaging in extramarital sexual activity"-- calling for "full contrition" or even resignation from the president. Didion points out the hypocrisies in many political trends to emerge over the last decade, from Newt Gingrich's popularity to "compassionate conservatism."

Despite Didion's acuity about political issues, she is still best when writing about herself. She is famous these days for her memoir of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, which centers on the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Where I Was From, Didion's most recent book included in this collection, gives her an opportunity to reflect on her life's work. She discusses her obsession with California by using many anecdotes about her own family's 200 year history in the United States. California is a land of cognitive dissonance. Californians value independence do-it-yourselfness as fiercely as they cling to government contracts for jobs in the defense and prison industries. Californians are as quick to call themselves "old-timers" for being in the state for five years as they are to shun immigrants. Though Didion only brings up these points explicitly in Where I Was From, it doesn't take much to realize that these are exactly the points she wants to make about America in all of her books. That we live in a land of contradictions, that we tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of it all.

No Oomph Behind Solar

Ian McEwan's new novel, Solar, reads more like Rebecca Goldstein's latest, than Ian McEwan's. McEwan typically probes human psychology. The strength of his writing on a sentence by sentence basis allows us to get into the head of his characters, most of whom do gruesome things. In The Cement Garden, one of his earlier novels, three children pack their mother's body in cement, and keep the block of cement in their basement. This lurid concept is made palatable as we come to understand the children's decisions. At the moment of their mother's death, they don't want to be removed to foster care, and happen to have a bag of cement handy, so --why not? McEwan's short 2007 novel, On Chesil Beach, explores the lead up to a virgin couple's wedding night, its ultimate letdown, and the aftermath of the couple's life. One can hardly imagine any other novelist describe at length the couple's humiliation. But McEwan does a thorough job, first showing the husband's embarrassed outraged, followed by the wife's quiet, but unapologetic attempts to soothe him. She proposes a compromise, which he is too proud to accept, cleaving their married lives the moment it starts. McEwan spends the second half of the novel explaining what the next forty years entails for each of them. While he summarizes their lives in a short amount of space, he has so successfully up their lives with his in-depth examination of their wedding night that readers completely understand the motivations behind each of the characters' actions.

Solar, in contrast, lacks the psychological depth of McEwan's previous works. Nearly a week after reading it, I'm still struggling to pinpoint McEwan's main point. On the surface, it seems to comment on some of society's current obsessions: global warming, the petty politics of science funding, organizations like the Aspen Institute, and philandering husbands. The academic satiric is akin to the recent 36 Arguments for the Existence of God. Like Goldstein's novel, McEwan's focuses on a scientist whose main successes in life seem to have been achieved by accident. Michael Beard is a Nobel winning physicist whose main ideas happened to occur at the right time to be recognized. But in contrast to Goldstein's Cass Seltzer, Beard is an ornery, almost detestable man who thinks he is better than everyone else. The novel's opener sums up Beard's self-love: "He belonged to that class of men -- vaguely unprepossessing, often bald, short, fat, clever--who were unaccountably attractive to certain beautiful women. Or he believed he was, and thinking seemed to make it so."

The novel opens in 2000. For the next nine years, Beard participates in exactly the type of behavior that you'd expect someone who fit the above description to practice. He cheats on his long-term girlfriends; he steals an idea from a student and markets it as his own. One farcical event even involves Beard covering up an accidental crime. Throughout, he takes no responsibility for anything that happens. As a result, throughout, it seems like McEwan is getting at the idea that we live in such a ridiculous world where the selfish get everything. Throughout, Beard also gets fatter, as if McEwan is providing us with a literal manifestation of Beard's greed. But just when we think Beard cannot be redeemed, he is faced with an actually stumbling block. Except this happens at the very end of the novel, with no clear resolution. The reader is left wondering if Beard will take the opportunity to redeem himself or continuehis old ways.

Unfortunately, all this plot seems to have left McEwan very little room to do what he does best: dwelling on very specific, small actions to reveal profound psychological truths about his characters. Instead, McEwan spends much time describing the absurdity of certain farcical set pieces. In one instance, Beard incompetently outfits himself for a snowmobile trip and gets his penis frozen to a tree when he urinates. Funny, yes, but also better done by a number of other British writers (Barnes, Amis even).What I want to know is why Beard is so shallow.

What makes Solar ultimately disappointing is that by avoiding much psychological probing, the novel is also bereft of McEwan's lyrical writing. Instead, it's sentence of plot after sentence of plot. Beautifully written free-indirect style thoughts are rare. Perhaps Solar was an experiment, and all writers are entitled to that. I just hope McEwan goes back to his forte in his next endeavor.

Two Paths of the Short Story

Last year, Zadie Smith wrote a piece in the New York Review of Books that pointed to the two paths that the novel could head toward today. The first path, that followed by Joseph O’Neill, is that of lyric Realism. The main tool is the sentence. The main goal is to create a believable world using believable characters. The sentence must strike the right tone and mimic what a real person would observe and think. The second path, that followed by Tom McCarthy, is wholly postmodern. The main tool is the unreliable narrator. The main goal is to cause the reader to question what he’s reading. If O’Neill and McCarthy represent these two modes in the novel world, then their counterparts in the short story world could be David Vann and Miranda July.

David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide is a collection of five stories and a novella that won him the Grace Paley Prize. Based on his father’s suicide at the age of forty, the six tales are loosely connected around a father, Jim, a son, Roy, Roy’s mother, and Jim’s second wife, Rhoda. Vann’s stories are mostly told from the perspective of the young Roy. Since he’s a child, many of these stories are impressionistic. They are entirely believable and are meant for us to get inside Roy’s head. Each of his stories have a psychological oomph to it. In one, a grown-up Roy goes to visit the woman with whom his father once had an affair. Roy finds the woman and the woman’s husband and invites them to dinner. We see him deflate as the woman confounds his initial expectations; instead of being a cheap whore, she seems to be extremely intellectual. We also see Roy gain a new respect for his father for being attracted to such a cultured woman.
The opus of the collection is a 100 page novella about Roy and his father living on Sukkwan Island, off of Alaska for a year. An old-fashioned story of redemption, the descriptions evoke Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. While the course of events seems somewhat too perfect to be believable, Vann’s story is grounded in the tradition of legend, or myth that Melville followed. When the series of events concludes, we understand it’s about a father losing his son, and how he then tries to reclaim him.

No One Belongs here More than You by Miranda July strikes an entirely different chord. Many of July’s characters reveal ulterior motivations that make us question their reliability. For example, the narrator of one story prefaces it by saying that she is telling her ex-boyfriend in an attempt to impress him, but it happened long ago so she doesn’t really remember the details. Then she goes on to narrate a short tale about teaching elderly people to swim in her kitchen. She would make them lie down on the floor with their faces in a bucket of water to mimic a pool. Highly skeptical. Through this technique, July asks us to put aside our biases toward reality to search for a higher meaning beyond the literal interpretation of what happens on the page. For instance, another story called “The Sister” is about the protagonist’s constant inability to meet his co-worker’s sister. With each thwarted attempt, the protagonist’s fantasies become more acute. He ultimately finds out that the co-worker is gay and was merely trying to lure him into a relationship. The two men then sleep with each other. Instead of being creeped out, I like to see this as July’s attempt to force her readers to think of how genuine their own relationships are, and what our expectations are of each other.

Both Vann and July excel in their crafts. Though I prefer lyric Realism, July’s darkness and creativity are still worth reading.

The Complacency of Lorrie Moore

The first thing you notice about Lorrie Moore’s stories is that the characters speak in puns. The second thing you notice is that these puns are the characters’ attempt to distance themselves from their situations. In the opening story of her first collection Self-Help, “How to Be Another Woman,” Charlene finds herself dating a married man. Patricia, he tells Charlene, is an attorney. So in her own spare time, waiting for her boyfriend, Charlene ends up making to do lists: “CLIENTS TO SEE- Birthday Snapshots, Scotch Tape, Letters to TD and Mom.” Every time her boyfriend calls after several days of silence, Charlene rejoinders with a joke over the phone when she really wants to tell him how much she cares.

Indeed, the theme of each of Moore’s collections, Self-Help, Like Life, and Birds of America touches on the idea of the distance between oneself and one’s life. Self-Help is mostly told in second person. With titles such as “How,” and “To Fill,” it tells the stories of a mysterious “you” as she goes through events, as if telling you, the reader, how to behave in those events. For example, “How to Be Another Woman” opens with the narrator saying you should wait in front of Florsheim’s department store in a raincoat, and meet a stranger with whom you flirt. You later get depressed and find out he is not only cheating with you on his wife, but also on the woman he lives with. This second-person tactic distances whoever the narrator is from the events that are happening.

Like Life collects stories of women and some men who find themselves living the kind of lives like they once envisioned for themselves, but not quite getting it right. There’s the flameout playwright whose doctor girlfriend finally leaves him. There’s the poetess Zoe who finds herself out of place and too snooty for teaching at a Midwestern liberal arts college. There’s the New Jersey homemaker turned conservationist whose son is in jail and daughter never visits. Of course, each of these characters uses humor to cope with themselves. They would be pathetic if it weren’t for the fact that they also recognize the flaws that keep them from what they want. Zoe, for instance, knows she is too picky, especially when it comes to men, to acclimate herself to a happy, Midwestern existence. Moore’s stories document the journeys of discovering these flaws.

Moore fully fleshes out this idea of helplessness in her last collection, Birds of America. While the title doesn’t make any direct appearances in the book, I like to think of it as a reference to the characters’ flightiness. Nearly all the stories center around characters who want to escape their current situations, but feel stuck. Unfortunately, they don’t really know what they need either. Illness often appears as a metaphor for helplessness. In one of the most memorable stories, “People Like Them Are the Only People Here,” a writer copes with her baby’s cancer. Moore documents the writer’s initial disbelief which grows into a final acceptance. The only agency the writer has is to document her baby’s progress, and her family’s experience living in and out of the hospital. “Real Estate” tells about a middle-aged empty nester with terminal cancer. She convinces her husband to move into a new house. Since the house turns out to be a lemon with bats living in the attic, she learns that a simple move can’t solve her problems. Even when the protagonist’s gun lessons culminates in a cathartic, surprising moment, she immediately goes back to her old self.

On one level, Moore’s stories can be seen as demoralizing. After all, America is built on the idea of self improvement. But on the other hand, Moore placates us by showing that self improvement is overrated. It’s key to enjoy our lives in the present instead daydreaming about what could have been.

The Privileges: Rags to Riches in the Twenty-first Century

Jonathan Dee's new book, The Privileges, has been paired with other novels about money and the 2009 economic collapse in recent reviews. This seems like a logical choice for a novel that traces the lives of Adam and Cynthia Morey, an extremely attractive couple who quickly rises to the upper echelons of Manhattan wealth after getting married at the age of 22. The Moreys (think more + money) are a couple that inspires envy and hate. Blessed with two beautiful children, they are also favored by Adam's wealthy boss, allowing Adam to become fabulously wealthy--seemingly without--any work.

About ten years into the marriage, Adam becomes involved in a classic insider trading scheme. But the story doesn't end here. Dee doesn't take Adam down. The point is not to show how wealth leads to greed. Instead, Dee lets Adam walk away without criminal prosecution, and go on to leave a productive life in New York high society. The point is to show how greed leads to wealth.

This is because, at its heart, The Privileges has more in common with The Great Gatsby than with The Bonfire of the Vanities. Like Gatsby, the Moreys embrace the wholly American definition of success. Like Gatsby, the Moreys are also driven by love; in this case, their "epic love" for each other, as their son puts it, pushes them forward. Most importantly, like Gatsby, the Moreys are determined to free themselves of the shackles of their histories. Adam and Cynthia come from middle class backgrounds, from parents whom they refuse to ever acknowledge. Though we meet Mr. Morey at Adam and Cynthia's wedding, we don't hear about his again until Adam is forced to tell his firm that his father is dead. The silence is painful when Adam fails to understand his colleague's shocked expressions. As far as Adam is concerned, his father has nothing to do with his current identity as a rainmaking venture capitalist.

No - the Moreys are not likable. Dee uses free indirect style to show us how Adam and Cynthia think. They are disdainful of anyone who hangs on to their pasts or acts based on nostalgia. Cynthia's stepsister accuses her of raising two spoiled children. Maybe she should withhold things from time to time, she suggests. Cynthia silently laughs at this idea; what's the point of imposing hardship on children simply to replicate some romantic notion?

While Cynthia and Adam remain flat throughout the novel, the only dynamic character who's morality is at stake is their son, Jonas. He is into indie music, art, and actually gets along with Cynthia's stepsister. The novel's climax involves a moment when Jonas has to decide if he'll pursue and interest in art and history, or focus on living in the present, with eyes set on the future like his parents.

Throughout, Dee creates a tension in the reader. We are at once jealous and horrified at the Moreys. On the one hand, we want to be like them; so forward looking and unburdened by the past. On the other hand, we pity them for their myopia -- their inability to see how their lives lack meaning and create a destructive path. To be or not to be like the Moreys? It's up to us to decide.

Not Preaching to the Choir

While flying to Arizona a few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of finishing a brilliant novel on the plane. 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Novel by Rebecca Goldstein was so good that I deigned to carry the hardcover on board with me even though I only had 30 pages left to read. This self-proclaimed academic satire makes fun of the recent phenomenon of best-selling atheist books (think, God is Not Great, The God Delusion, Letter to a Christian Nation, etc). Cass Seltzer, a religion professor, suddenly finds himself in the spotlight having written a tract entitled 36 Arguments Against the Existence of God. Included is an appendix that outlines the 36 most prevalent arguments, and the logical refutations to each of these.

In addition to Cass, the cast of characters includes a raving, red-haired feminist anthropologist (Roz), a menschy university president who cannot quell student protests, a self-absorbed brilliant female mathematician (also Cass's girlfriend), and Cass's rambling, incoherent yet highly regarded Ph.D adviser (Dr. Jonas Klapper). Of course, these characters all engage in witty bantering on philosophy, mathematics, science, and religion. These asides that allude to everything from William James to game theory make each chapter fun, challenging, and nostalgic to read. They recall the pretentious conversations that are unavoidable in academia.

But the biggest joke that runs throughout is that Cass has no idea how he became a bestselling author; he was basically writing about something he'd mulled over his entire life at the right time. It was nearly an act of divine intervention. Cass's reaction is appropriately transcendent. 36 Arguments begins with Cass standing on a bridge, overlooking the Charles River, feeling closer to something spiritual than he ever had before, as he reflects on his newly acquired fame.

Indeed, this transcendent feeling crops up several times throughout the novel, suggesting that a spiritual connection can be felt regardless of one's religious belief. Goldstein makes this theme most clear by interjecting a somewhat forced storyline of Azyra, a Hassidic boy whom Cass meets first as a grad student, and mentors for the next twenty years. Azyra is more or less a child math prodigy. While his family and neighbors recognize that he's special, they think he's been touched by God and should become the next Rabbi. As Azyra becomes a teenager, he needs to decide if he should leave his town and go to college to reach his mathematical potential, or stay and become the next Rabbi. Ultimately, Azyra does choose to become a rabbi, demonstrating that the knowledge of some things, like family, may be the best knowledge of all.

Journeys to the American South and Contemporary China

I can’t stop recommending two recent non-fiction books that I read in the past month: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot and Country Driving: A Journey from City to Country by Peter Hessler. Both works are ostensibly journalistic endeavors, the first about the woman whose cancerous cells became the famous HeLa cells used for cancer research today, and the second about development and life in contemporary China. While these are seemingly disparate topics, Skloot and Hessler share a similar strategy in their reporting. They both inject themselves into their stories so that their narratives are more memoir-esque than typical journalism. But they do this extremely well to uncover new insights into their subjects.

Henrietta Lacks was a thirty year old black woman with cervical cancer who checked herself into Johns Hopkins hospital in 1950. When her physician discovered that her cancer was rapidly spreading, he took a sample without her knowledge. His lab soon discovered that these cells could easily replicate in culture. They became the first immortal line of human cells. Soon, these cells found themselves in labs all around the world, influencing polio research, cancer research, and even HIV research. Skloot remains silent in the narrative about Lacks’ life and the scientific community’s use of her cells. But Skloot injects herself in the narrative to introduce another theme to the story: that of race. Skloot, a white student of science and aspiring journalist decided after college to track down the story of Henrietta Lacks. She read up on all previous journalistic reports of Henrietta Lacks and tracked down Lacks’ doctors. This research is evident throughout the book. But the final thing for Skloot to do was track down Lacks’ family; her husband and children were still living, and Skloot knew that they were the missing piece in telling the complete story of Henrietta Lacks.

So Skloot drove down to Lacks Town in rural Virginia to find Deborah, Henrietta’s daughter. Here, the book becomes more of a memoir. Skloot chronicles the difficulties of getting Lacks’ relatives to speak to her, but along the way, learns of just why they were so secretive. Once word got out in the late 1970’s that Henrietta was the provider of HeLa cells, everyone wanted a piece of the Lacks family. By the time Skloot came around in the early 2000’s, the family had become jaded. Skloot weaves the family’s mistreatment into Henrietta Lack’s story as an illustration of racial disparities in the US. Skloot’s close relationship to the family, however, also shows that she is not merely using them, but recording a version of the Lacks’ family history, as they would like.

Similarly, Country Driving tells the personal stories of the many people Peter Hessler encounters on the road as he drove around China in the past eight years. These aren’t people with many tangible records or documents, but regular migrants, village politicians, and museum guides who have all been affected by China’s incredible change over the past fifteen years. The book is divided into three sections: first, Hessler takes weekend trips from Beijing to Inner Mongolia, following the Great Wall; second, he purchases a second home in the rural suburbs of Beijing to write and finds himself involved in village politics and development; third, Hessler travels to southern China to witness the growth of factories and emergence of cities in formerly sparsely inhabited mountains.

While each section could stand by itself, they together tell a story of change. The Inner Mongolia chapter sets up China’s rich history well by discussing the Great Wall and China’s long history of keeping foreigners out. This tradition contrasts nicely with Hessler’s experience of traveling in Inner Mongolia where people were friendly towards his foreign face and mostly couldn’t care less about the history the Great Wall represented. The second section shows how China’s economic growth affects one family. After moving to Sancha, the rural village near Beijing, Hessler befriends the Wei family. Though their annual income starts at 150 dollars a year when Peter first meets them, it grows to 800 a year by the end of their acquaintance five years later. In that time, the government built a paved road to Sancha, which helped the Weis launch a food business. But as the family’s wealth grows, their unease does as well. The father of the family smokes and becomes more controlling of the wife, while the son gets overweight and watches more television. But Hessler doesn’t mock them, only describing how rational decisions got the Weis to where they were. Finally, the last section shows an entire region’s growth and the individual spirit that forms its base. In Zhejiang province, Hessler meets Boss Wang who starts a factory that produces bra parts. Hessler describes the migrant workers who come to seek jobs with compassion and humor, likening the booming factory industry in China to the booming factory industry during the American industrial revolution. It’s an era where people are still playing by the ear and ingenuity is rewarded.

While Hessler’s descriptions of Inner Mongolia and his attempts to navigate Chinese highways occasionally carry a comedic travelogue tone, his book accomplishes a serious task. He tells individual stories that reveal China’s heterogeneity while painting an overall image of a country still making up its mind about what it wants to be.

Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court

Two weeks ago, Amy Bach spoke at Busboys and Poets, DC's famed progressive cafe-bookstore, about ordinary injustice. Such banal injustice is the brand of American justice that goes in county and local courtrooms that chooses expediency over justice when it comes to most minor crimes. Bach outlined her theory that the adversarial system lacks checks and balances on attorneys and judges. The incentives are misplaced so that it's not worth it for defense lawyers to fight for their clients, or for prosecutors to prosecute unwinnable cases. Although defense lawyers and prosecutors are supposed to oppose each other in court, it is generally easier to cooperate at the expense of defendants and victims. Bach was promoting her book, Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court. In it, she builds her case against ordinary injustice by profiling a public defender who didn't defend, a judge who didn't judge, and a prosecutor who didn't prosecute.

The public defender's story stands out the most. Bach focuses on Robert Surrency, the public defender of Greene County, Georgia. On the first day that Bach arrived in this courtroom, she saw a throng of people waving papers at their state appointed attorney, Surrency. It was clear that Surrency had no idea who his clients were. This was because Surrency had a huge caseload. Since most counties are left to decide how to fund indigent defense, there is no nationally used system. Greene County happened to use a system where a public defense contract goes out to the lowest bidder. That year, Surrency bid the lowers for all public defense cases. This means he had his case load on top of his regular full time job. Needless to say, he did not have time to carefully examine each case. Instead, it made sense for him to plea bargain his clients as quickly as possible, whether or not that gave them the best outcome.

The prosecutor's story in Quitman County Mississippi struck a similar chord. Bach found that over the past two decades, nearly all domestic violence cases had been dropped because the prosecutor's investigator deemed these to be the least winnable cases. Juries notoriously feel unsympathetic towards domestic violence victims. In addition, the victims themselves often refused to testify against their abusers. Again, it made sense for the prosecutor -- an elected official-- to simply shove these cases away in a drawer and focus his attention on the big media cases.

Bach's chief insight is that both of these above examples could be mitigated with oversight. The current system doesn't provide incentives for lawyers to check each others work, but the average citizen could check lawyers' work with the right public data. Bach suggests for people to demand information on the number of guilty pleas without an attorney present, the public defender's typical caseload, the numbers and types of cases that go unprosecuted, and the bails and number of days spent in jail for those charged with crimes. With these data, Bach bets that patterns would emerge, holding key players accountable.

Summertime - Most Innovative Novel of the Year...So Far

One imagines that there comes a time in any reputable novelist's life when he/she (mostly he) thinks that he can get away with anything. They can experiment with all those forms and conceits that a publisher would have refused to publish earlier in their lives. As a result, the public gets a few terrible prose works inflicted on them. Works that we're compelled to read because of the writer's reputation, but works which then leave a terrible taste in the mouth. I'm thinking late Philip Roth. Both 2008's Indignation and 2009's The Humbling were self-indulgent pieces about Roth-like characters that obsessed over death. Indignation is written from the perspective of a young man who dies during the Korean War. He is looking at his past and all the failures that resulted in him getting drafted. The Humbling's about an older actor who has lost his virility--in all senses of the word. Both novels are short, brutal, and gratuitous, basically warning the reader that death comes to us all.

This year, J.M. Coetzee, another well-respected, older writer, shows that a dead protagonist can be done well. His latest novel, Summertime, is the third in a trilogy of novels/memoirs about a character named J.M. Coetzee. This one covers his life as a young adult, before he has written his first book. The book's main innovation is that it takes place after Coetzee has died. Rather, it's told from the perspective of his biographer who goes around the world interviewing people who knew Coetzee in the 1970's. The book opens and closes with chapters of Coetzee's diary from the era. In between, it contains five interviews: His cousin Margot, 3 romantic interests, and an academic colleague.

Each interview sheds light on a different aspect of Coetzee's character. While some are more admiring of Coetzee than others, each humbles him. Margot tells us that Coetzee lacked the manliness she expected in South African men. Julia, a married woman with whom Coetzee had an affair, derides him for being emotionally out of touch while making love. Indeed, the running theme is that Coetzee is not a great man. His prose is perfectly tuned; each interviewee is given a unique voice, making all their pronouncements believable.

At the same time, Coetzee's mere ordinariness makes his writing accomplishments that much greater. It leaves the reader wondering how the socially awkward thirty year old became a Nobel prize winner. Unfortunately, Summertime is supposed to be the last of the trilogy, but I would have been happy to read more.

Self-conscious memoirs: no thanks

Reading best of lists last month, I noticed that Michael Greenberg's "Beg Borrow Steal: A Writer's Life" showed up many times. At first this was a good sign. Finally something I hadn't heard of before that I might truly enjoy. But as I turned the pages of this collection of Greenberg's columns from the Times Literary Supplement, it became increasingly clear that this was not something that I would enjoy. Greenberg writes with a wincingly high level of self-consciousness. For most of his life, before the publication of his well-received memoir Hurry Down Sunshine, Greenberg knew what he looked like to most people. He was a struggling writer slash high school drop-out. This becomes apparent in his writing. While Greenberg is frank about all his exploits, he also has a way of suggesting that he is nobler than others who may be wealthier or more respected by society. For instance, the book begins with an anecdote about Greenberg's refusal to join his father's business of scrap metal. Right off the bat: "My old man was like Zeus's father Cronos: he couldn't bear the idea that any of his children might surpass him." Thus, Greenberg's escape to the writer's life is a noble fuck-you to his father, as his life is a fuck-you to society.

But is it really glamorous to live in government subsidized housing, to try to rent your room on Craigslist in order to make more money, to hold on to a dog that bites children, to have an established publisher tell you that your work is everything he hates about fiction, to obsessively check your Amazon rank? Or is it just irresponsible?

Perhaps the reason for its high praise is that so many other writers identify with Greenberg. But as a younger, cynical reader, I can't forgive his indulgence.

The Original of Laura: Journeying inside Nabokov's Mind

The Original of Laura belongs on the coffee table more than it belongs on the bookshelf. Vladimir Nabokov's posthumously published "novel" reproduces the 138 index cards of a novel he was working on at the time of his death. The pages of this Knopf production consist of card stock, with perforations surrounding each index card to boot. Typeset text of Nabokov’s words accompanies each index card, like the descriptions of paintings accompanying a coffee table collection of Van Goghs. This package feels nice and heavy in your hand. Flipping the pages reveals interesting tidbits about Nabokov’s thought process. He numbered his index cards in an elaborate system, identifying first the chapter, and then the number within that chapter. He also misspelled many things, whether because he couldn’t be bothered to spell things correctly or because he was unsure of the correct spellings.

Flipping through the pages, however, does not provide a comfortable reading experience. The reader is solving a mystery, both trying to piece together a narrative that makes sense from Nabokov’s index cards, while trying to figure out whether or not he intended the readers to read it that way. As far as I can tell, the story is about a woman named Flora, who has a book written about her by a former lover called “My Laura.” The real Flora is married to an older professor, Philip Wild, who tries to figuratively make his body disappear, and thus, to die. Nabokov’s index cards tell both the story of Flora and the story of Laura, occasionally confusing the reader about which is which.

Moments of gorgeous prose about the female body or about what it feels like to cut off to remove one’s toes are pleasurable, but are not enough to go by to judge the quality of Nabokov’s novel.

The unfinished-ness of The Original of Laura raises the whole question of whether or not incomplete manuscripts should even be published. As Sam Anderson points out in New York Magazine, Nabokov was a perfectionist—he even wanted the original Lolita to be burned—who would not have been pleased by the prospect of strangers reading his scribbles. At the same time, The Original of Laura probably contributes to Nabokov’s reputation as a brilliant thinker who could piece together intricate plots by shuffling index cards. This fan, at least, is grateful for the opportunity to experience a Nabokov work in progress.

Three Terrific Short Story Collections

Short stories are what I turn to when trying to figure out how fiction works. Though short stories are often less rewarding than novels, they are often punchier and more revelatory when handled by the best writers. I've recently been on a short story binge, reading the selected stories of Raymond Carver, Alice Munro's latest collection, Too Much Happiness, and Maile Meloy's latest collection Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It. Short stories are seen by most fiction readers as novels in training wheels. Yet, the difficulty of selecting exactly the right words and sentences is felt more acutely in short stories than longer novels. It's thus helpful to read collections by the best authors to see exactly what they choose to reveal, and to what effect.
Reading these three authors in such a short time period illuminates the effects of different stylistic choices. Raymond Carver's stories typically describe a short time period and may not even have a beginning middle and end. His entire story may span the course of an afternoon or a day. One of his more well known stories, "What we talk about when we talk about love," centers around a conversation four people have during dinner. Over the course of dinner, they reveal their romantic histories, as well as their current attitudes towards love. The action takes place over conversation and sideways glances. In the end, we get a picture of four people's outlook on love at one very specific point in their lives. Carver doesn't choose to tell us much about his characters' histories or their futures; his scenes are merely snapshots of his characters' lives. Readers can make up the rest.

In contrast, Alice Munro's stories are almost like short novels. Her recent collection, Too Much Happiness, features many protagonists reflecting on their lives. Munro uses this perspective to tell an entire life's story in twenty pages. By doing this, she essentially distills a life to one aspect of it. This is necessary to fit everything in twenty pages, but also gives the reader a skewed sense of what is significant in a character's life. For example, the story "Fictions" begins as the story of a marriage between a woman, Joyce, and her husband. Her husband leaves her for a lumberjack-type woman. In the second half of the story, Joyce is a 65 year old married to her second husband. At a party, she meets a woman who is the daughter of the woman that Joyce's first husband left her for. The daughter is now a successful short story writer. Joyce picks up her book at the bookstore, and -- of course-- one of the short stories is about her. The story then unfolds as a series of Joyce's predictions about the short story and the author's subsequent ability to exceed these expectations. We see everything from Joyce's perspective, but through the short story, we see everything as a film reversal.

Finally, Maile Meloy's Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It tells beautifully constructed, yet more conventional stories than either Munro or Carver. In precise, twenty page stretches, Meloy shapes a beginning, middle and end. Most of her stories are set in the Northern Midwest/Plains states and evoke a sense of isolation. They range in theme from stories of growing up to stories of settling into marriage. Meloy's voice, however, reveals something new about each of these themes. Her story "Spy vs. Spy," for example, at first appears to be a typical story of sibling rivalry. Aaron and his younger brother, George, gather for a ski trip with Aaron's family and George's girlfriend. Over the course of the trip, we learn that Aaron is the responsible one who resents his brother's free-wheeling life. Of course, Aaron challenges George to a black diamond slope, falls, and gets in a fight with George. But Meloy peppers Aaron's thoughts with childhood memories that add dimension to the characters.

"If they'd had it out when they were younger, really whaled on eac other, then maybe it would be out of their systems...But George had always been younger, and Aaron too restrained to take advantage of his greater strength."

This come at exactly the moment when we're wondering why they hadn't fought before.

In all, these three collections made terrific holiday season reading, and will be remembered all year round.