Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, by Joan Acocella

Willa Cather is an easy writer to undervalue. I’ve noticed, over the years, that many of the people who express admiration for her books (which I recommend often) are the sort of people who don’t usually read “serious” novels. Even in 7th grade, when I first read My Àntonia, I remember thinking, excellent, she doesn’t make you work too hard – and hard work and confusion, I assumed, for quite a long time, were the signs of a really great book. Cather, though, tends to make it clear enough what effect she’s aiming for: her symbols are monumental and apparently obvious, and when she has an idea, she doesn’t try to conceal it in some elaborate way; she tells you as clearly and gracefully as she can. Her books often feel artlessly constructed: one scene after another, and stories that seem inserted wherever the author felt like it.

But when I finished My Àntonia, all those years ago, and began the usual, unconscious process of assimilating the novel into my way of looking at the world, it stopped seeming so simple. There was something dark there that wouldn’t spread itself thin in my imagination and disappear. So I read the book again, several years later, and never felt like I was covering old ground, the simplest test of a classic. And as I read Cather’s other great books – A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, her short stories and essays – the outlines of a disturbing vision became apparent. Most of them are stories of disappointment, where everything good has already happened – and where hope for anything but a deeper appreciation of the past seems destined for failure.

Joan Acocella, in her wonderful little book on Cather and her critics, identifies this vision more precisely than I’d ever been able to manage myself: “Each of the four novels [from My Àntonia to Death Comes for the Archbishop],” she writes, “makes the same point: to desire something is to have as much of it as you will probably ever have.” Proust, Acocella points out, on the other side of the ocean, had a similar insight, and spent many more pages – wonderful pages – laying it out.

It is an insight, though, that it is difficult not to eventually rebel against, especially when an author insists too much: insists, for example, that mature romantic love is largely a lie, that most of our deepest feelings for other people are fantasies spun out by the imagination – and are, in fact, somehow more beautiful for being self-created, since this means we might actually be able to hold on to them. There can be something sickly and self-defeating about this outlook, and I got annoyed about halfway through Cather’s bitter, accomplished novella, My Mortal Enemy, which I wrote about a few years ago.

In Cather’s greatest books, however, the vision is bracing and honest – there is a convincing world on the page that gives the philosophy life. Each of these books is, in Cather’s own wonderful description of Norris’s McTeague, as “disagreeable as only a great piece of work can be.” Disagreeable in its deeper implications, I mean, but still filled with beauties, because Cather’s outlook is entirely compatible with humor and an appreciation of the world – especially the natural world – and its gifts.

As Acocella discusses, Cather has been ill-served by critics since the beginning. She never dealt explicitly with the concerns – political, economic, feminist, and now sexual – that serious, committed people, in various eras, wanted her to deal with. And so she was patronized, given faint praise, and occasionally condemned. In recent years, critics have started taking her very seriously indeed, but only because it has been decided (admittedly, with some evidence) that she was a lesbian, and so everything she wrote – as an outpouring of subconscious, repressed desires – has become relevant in the right ways.

Acocella makes these academics look pretty silly, but that isn’t too hard to do – all you have to do is quote, after all – and I became a little impatient with this part of the book, because I just don’t believe that these professors make much of a difference to ordinary readers. The majority of the book, luckily (minus a short, interesting biography), is simply an appreciation of Cather’s work, the best I have ever read. We have so little decent criticism in America that it’s easy to forget how useful and even stirring a real reading of great work can be.

Acocella looks closely at individual passages and shows how tightly knit they are, despite the illusion of artlessness - and manages to convey a sense of joy at getting closer to the source of their power. And she doesn’t treat the books as closed systems – networks of imagery and language that refer only to themselves – but as arguments for a way of looking at the world. She teases the author’s changing vision and its contradictions out of the books, and looks at it seriously for its value as a philosophy of life. You get the sense that she believes that how you read a book is a matter of genuine consequence. Her criticism – even her dance criticism, which I’ve read despite my complete lack of interest in dance – is consistently excellent, and her recently published collection of essaysis entirely worth reading.

As for Cather, I think she’s one of America's best writers – up there with Melville and Twain as a writer of imaginative prose. Until recently, I’d never realized just how much great writing she produced. Apparently she only allowed one of her stories, “Paul’s Case,” to be anthologized, but there are dozens of others, virtually unknown, that are just as great, and her essays in Not Under Forty, along with many of her reviews – which, by the way, show sparks of genius even when Cather was in her mid-20s – are all worth owning. The good people at the Library of America have put out a volume called Stories, Poems, and Other Writings,which has been a real education for me. I recommend it to everyone, along with Acocella’s book.

Liars and Saints, by Maile Meloy

Most serious modern novelists, having committed themselves to a marginal medium, feel the need to defend the virtues of prose against the film camera. So they tend to write books that show off what words can accomplish - with labyrinthine plots that could never be put on screen, for example, or long essayistic passages; baroque prose, language games, individualized 1st person voices - all ensuring that no one ever accuses them of writing glorified screenplays.

Which is fine and understandable, and some great work has been done – but there is also a self-consciousness about this attitude that robs readers of one of the primary pleasures of stories: escapism, immersion. Immersion itself seems, for many writers, something to be wary of, since it is one of the things that film can accomplish so easily, a lazy and dangerous pleasure.

So it’s good to remember sometimes that prose doesn’t need too hysterical a defense; its virtues can be apparent even in ordinary storytelling by a good writer. Here is a paragraph about a third of the way through Maile Meloy’s wonderful first novel, Liars and Saints. It is about a crumbling marriage. The husband, Henry, has run for a position in the California state legislature, won, and moved to the state capital. His wife Clarissa has been stuck in the house with their baby, Abby.

When Henry came home, with drafts of bills to read, she said that if they were going to make this marriage work, they couldn’t live apart. He was too busy and too tired to argue very long, so she went with him to Sacramento, and moved into the tiny apartment he kept there. She took Abby to watch the debates, and made friends with Henry’s colleagues, and met lobbyists in the halls. Henry accused her of flirting with them, but she was only talking about the bills – and if the lobbyists liked her, so what? It could be useful. They said she had good ideas. She thought about becoming a lobbyist, too; she might be good at the research and the persuasion. But on three different afternoons she wanted to listen to important hearings, so she left Abby playing on the lobby carpet, just outside the chambers, perfectly safe. And each time, someone found Abby crying in a marble hallway somewhere else, with a full cloth diaper, and took her to Henry in committee, and Henry came out of his committee to find Clarissa. The first time it happened he smiled and said, “I have a job, Clar, and it’s to stay in that meeting.” The second time he just said, “Diaper.” The third time he handed Abby over silently, with a dark look, and that was the end of Clarissa’s lobbying career. She moved back to Sebastopol, less happy than ever.

This is the story of several months in a paragraph. Films have tried jumps like this – think of Kane and his wife at the breakfast table, the marriage dissolving in three cuts – but these scenes inevitably come off as a sort of glib shorthand; we never really understand what happened.

Here, along with the three filmable scenes, we get Henry’s mood and the texture of Clarissa’s mind – “perfectly safe,” she thinks about the baby left in the hallway – along with some of Clarissa’s naiveté, written in just the words she would use herself: “she might be good at the research and the persuasion.” Still, obviously, a kind of shorthand – that’s what art is, after all – but for me much more satisfying. The marriage is inhabited, and the story is told with a naturalness that makes it clear that this is the only medium in which to tell it.

Much of Liars and Saints moves at this same pace, and with the same sense of ease. The novel manages to cover three generations and more than fifty years in 260 pages; I can't imagine it being successfully filmed, even with its tight and involved plot. But I was lost in it; I read the book in great gulps over three days, anxious to find out what happened, and only stopped occasionally to let out little shouts of admiration. (How did Meloy write something this good this young?) The book is the story of the Santerre family: Teddy and Yvette, the father and mother, their two daughters Margot and Clarissa, and their marriages and children. Over the course of the story, which treats the points of view of various characters in short chapters, Meloy writes convincingly as a WWII pilot (Teddy), an old French-Canadian woman (Lenore, Yvette’s mother), and a fidgety adolescent boy, along with several others.

The story moves at a breakneck pace – with pregnancies and incest and deaths – and covers so much time that the events don’t feel as unlikely and melodramatic as they otherwise might: wait long enough, after all, and something huge will happen to you. The book doesn’t feel formless or arbitrary, either – there is a sense that the writer has discovered the shape of the narrative while writing; certain connections suggested themselves and pushed the book where it needed to go.

The story's disturbing implications only become apparent slowly; Meloy rarely steps in and spells anything out. As things go increasingly haywire for all of the characters, one gets the sense that – for all of the decisions these people get to make – the actual control that they have over their lives is pretty minimal. Genetic inheritance, family decisions, the historical moment, their own compulsions, bequeathed to them from God knows where – one starts to feel the truth of just how compelled most actions are.

Even the simple fact that Yvette passes on her beauty to her two daughters – as Clarissa, in turn, passes it on to hers – entirely changes the course of all of their lives: they are constantly in the path of other people’s desires, and so many of the events in the book would not take place if someone’s face happened to be differently proportioned.

That’s a terrifying thought, isn’t it? And this sort of determinism tends to make for dark and not entirely satisfying books; people expect (quite reasonably) change and personal agency from characters. And Meloy gives us some near the end, and it doesn’t feel wholly implausible – after all, I hope some sort of growth is possible over the course of a long life.

But still, something feels off about the later parts of the book, although the galloping plot certainly maintains interest. Meloy introduces the rather annoying voice of a child struggling with religious concerns (the whole family is Catholic, which is significant throughout) and can no longer hold back the urge to lay some ideas on us: evil is inextricably tied to good in life, etc. There is also a confrontation between two characters that has been waiting to happen for half the novel and comes off as completely false. The whole last chapter is a bit of a life-goes-on shrug.

But enough complaints. It's been a long time since I read a new first novel that was this good. Everyone should go out and read it and feel happy that such good stories are still being written.

A last note: Meloy wrote a sort of sequel to this novel called A Family Daughter, where one of this book's characters, from a similar but not identical family, turns out to have written Liars and Saints. The novel is not quite a disaster – she is too good a writer for that – but it is a real step down in inspiration. I gave up about halfway through. I felt like Meloy was blowing on embers that had already burned themselves out quite brilliantly in this novel. And A Family Daughter ends up scrambling the world that Liars and Saints creates so memorably.

The book, along with her collection of stories, also showed how Meloy's interest in the ramifications of beauty - so well-handled in Liars and Saints - can become limiting. Throughout her work, she seems to be almost exclusively interested in lovely people and their various entanglements. She likes things to happen quickly and it's easier with good looking people, I suppose. Meloy's primary obsession as a writer is sexual desire and the mess it can make of things - a worthy theme, certainly - but I'll admit that, as I've read more of her work, I've gotten slightly jealous and then occasionally bored with how monotonously desirable all of her people are. Even her older characters were invariably once beautiful, so the only loneliness in her books is the kind people feel when they've done everything and haven't found what they were looking for - and this is certainly not the most common variety.

Anyway, I'm hoping the sequel was an aberration, because if Liars and Saints is representative of her talent - and if Meloy can broaden her interests to include some different sorts of people - I think she will be one of the great writers of this generation. I’m looking forward to her new book of stories, which is coming out in a month or so.

An Interview with Tim Parks

An interview I did with Tim Parks for the literary magazine Redivider is online here. As I've written earlier, I think Parks is one of the really great living writers. (Judge Savage is my current favorite among his novels, and the Adultery collection is probably my favorite modern collection of essays.)

Anyway, it was an immense and slightly mortifying honor to get to correspond with him. The interview takes a little while to get going - mostly because of my stammering attempts to impress him with my questions - but eventually gets interesting. I hope everyone enjoys it. Here is a favorite exchange:

AA: You mentioned earlier that some of these inflated literary reputations might have to do with America’s economic power. How do you see these two things affecting each other?

TP: Akshay, you hardly need me to clarify that for you… Do you? It isn’t obvious?

AA: Not entirely. I can see how America’s economic power might help spread the English language, but why would it compel praise for so-so art from people in other countries?

TP: This is rather extraordinary to me. It seems such an obvious equation. The world, certainly my part of the world, looks to America and the Anglo-Saxon culture in general as a model of the future, a motor of new fashion, the new thing. This despite all the hostility to American foreign policy. Books that are best sellers or much admired in the US are more or less automatically translated in Europe and other countries, because offering insight into the culture that drives the world. A best seller in Serbia, or Norway, or Kenya simply does not draw this attention. A brilliant writer in Croatia might easily be completely ignored, unless some political aspect of his work intersects with international interest. And reputation travels. Nobody needs to “compel praise”. It takes an extremely independent mind to read an author who comes on a tidal wave of hype and assess the material for what it is. Most people really do accept celebrity for quality. They do not question it. Add to this that very few countries have a tradition of independent criticism and the picture is complete. In Italy education does not train kids to imagine the majority might be wrong. It’s bad taste to scorn something universally admired. It’s unpleasant. Newspapers and publishers are owned by the same companies and work together and a journalist simply doesn’t set about taking to pieces a book that has been highly praised elsewhere and for which a great deal of money has been paid. At most they might choose not to talk about them.

Note, it is not a question of spreading the English language. Hardly anyone is reading Delillo or Franzen in English here. They are simply automatic exports the way our cinemas are automatically filled with the top ten Hollywood film, dubbed. But this was ever the way with the dominant power in the world. The Roman empire at its height was not admiring works coming out of Carthage or Londinium, nor was the British empire at its height paying much attention to anything from elsewhere, while all the world was reading Byron… To imagine that the success of books really depends on a large number of independent critical minds arriving at a positive judgment is simply not to pay attention to what’s going on. Obviously, certain qualities are required, but once the tidal wave of received opinion has begun to roll, success is guaranteed.

The Beggar Maid, by Alice Munro

There is a widespread consensus in North America that Alice Munro is among the best living writers in English. Jonathan Franzen’s impassioned and silly defense of her work came after Munro's last collection had already been on the bestseller list, and long after most readers I know had felt compelled to read at least some of her work.

I have read maybe twenty of her stories – most from the big Selected volume and the Hateship collection – and have consistently felt something strange. It is not dissatisfaction, exactly. I have always been very impressed and then, with one exception, have never felt the need to read any of the stories again. "That was good," I would think, and know that I was done with it. It’s been years since I cracked open the Selected Stories. There must be more good things in there, but I’m never in the mood.

The exception I mentioned is a story called The Beggar Maid. As soon as I finished it, I knew that one of these days I would need to read it again. I found out it was part of a collection of linked stories and decided to make an effort to read Munro seriously through an entire collection.

The collection is called The Beggar Maid in America, with the subtitle Stories of Flo and Rose; the Canadian edition, which appeared first, has a better and less misleading title, Who Do You Think You Are? I say misleading because the whole book is really about Rose. Her step-mother, Flo, is a minor character who disappears for most of the middle of the book, and none of the stories, in any case, really focus on her.

The plot is an old one, and its broad outlines are revealed early, since Munro loves skipping ahead. Rose is an imaginative and intelligent child growing up in a poor town with her father and step-mother, Flo. She manages to go to high school and then college on a scholarship. In the process, she rids herself of all the things that might mark her as a bumpkin – her accent, her habits of dress. She learns how to tell the ugly stories of growing up poor in a way that will amuse her middle-class friends.

In college she marries unwisely with the son of a rich family. After a number of rocky years, marked by infidelity and depression and fights, they divorce. The woman slowly finds her way and achieves a measure of fame as an actress. Her step-mother, old and alone now, eventually has to be put in an old age home. The Beggar Maid, which disturbed and impressed me so much, is the story of Rose and her husband’s courtship, and an encounter they have many years after they divorce.

In some ways, I wish I had just re-read that story. Its blank spots and mysteries were more interesting when left unfilled. The rest of this book only gave me the same feeling I’ve had with so much of Munro's other work – how intelligent, how perceptive – and then, again, the sensation that these stories had nothing left to tell me.

Reading this collection helped me locate what I think is unsatisfying about Munro's work. Her writing feels almost entirely like a product of her conscious knowledge. It is too figured out, too completely fathomed – the writer spells out every implication and leaves nothing for the reader’s imagination. I am sure Munro follows random paths and has bursts of inspiration while writing, but before she is done she mercilessly tracks down every plot development, every stray bit of emotion, and pins it wriggling to the page with a fine phrase. And when I finish the stories most of them feel so dead.

Here is a representative quote. This is after Rose has already become famous:

It was part of her job to go on local television chatting about these productions, trying to drum up interest, telling amusing stories about things that had happened during the tour. There was nothing shameful about any of this, but sometimes Rose was deeply, unaccountably ashamed. She did not let her confusion show. When she was talking in public she was frank and charming; she had a puzzled, diffident way of leading into her anecdotes, as if she were just now remembering, had not told them a hundred times already.

This is good writing. Munro has noticed something and gotten it just right. And in passage after passage she gets such things right. But I realized something after admiring so many bits of observation: I was never surprised by them. I never had to struggle to figure out what she was getting at. I immediately knew what she meant, because these are things that everyone has felt and noticed, although few of us can express them quite so well. Who hasn't told the same story a few too many times and felt a little fake? It is near universal; and Munro consistently expends her powers on capturing such universal experiences and emotions. Her main characters rarely feel like individuals living independent existences; they are vessels for identification, and gain their aliveness from the extent to which they are like us.

So you think yes, that’s just what it’s like to be spanked by your parents, or to wait for a lover’s phone call – or “Ah, well put!” – but this sense of recognition is, for me, one of the secondary pleasures of literature. What I look for - vaguely, because it is a large and nebulous thing - is the sense of a writer struggling to get at something that's just beyond the capacity of words, trying to dramatize some internal conflict that won't quite be soothed into manageable shape. With Munro everything feels shaped and managed; I have little freedom to look at the story in a way other than the one she has laid out for me. There are plenty of unresolved spots, but even these seem determined.

For example, there is a carefully placed ambiguity at the end of Simon’s Luck, where Rose finds out, years later, that a lover she had thought abandoned her had been sick and died of pancreatic cancer. Had Simon meant to see her again? Was he already dying when he knew her? Here is how Munro handles the moment. Rose is acting in a soap opera, and compares the moment she learned about Simon's death to what the viewers of the soap expect in a plotline:

People watching trusted that they would be protected from predictable disasters, also from those shifts of emphasis that throw the story line open to question, the disarrangements which demand new judgments and solutions, and throw the windows open on inappropriate unforgettable scenery.

Simon’s dying struck Rose as that kind of disarrangement. It was preposterous, it was unfair, that such a chunk of information should have been left out, and that Rose even at this late date could have thought herself the only person who could seriously lack power.

This is a skillful ending and it unites a lot of the story’s concerns (the last phrase echoes an earlier line). But notice how Munro is not willing to simply leave the mystery in the air; she needs to sum it up, to point out that life is often like this. And yes, it is. We find out things later that seem to throw whole periods of our life out of focus. Again, I know just what I'm supposed to think about what has happened.

To clarify, I am not looking for pointless mystification. This story would not be better if Munro left out the concluding passage. It wouldn't make sense without it; what she has already written demands such a passage, and the story wouldn’t generate implications simply because its obvious and quite satisfying conclusion has been left out. In her later stories, in fact, such passages are often omitted, but the stories never open out because of it, because Munro is fundamentally a clinical writer. She uses scenes to diagnose people, and her characters rarely have much life outside of the implied diagnosis. There is no tale to trust outside of the teller.

One of the marks of this style of writing is that the big scenes in a story rarely happen between people. They happen when the main character is isolated in some way, realizing things. The confrontations, the unpredictable conversations, the general messiness of interaction between fully engaged people - these are consistently skipped over or quickly summarized. So there is never enough reality pushing up against the explanations. In this book, for example, we miss the details of Rose's divorce, her rise to fame, and most other things that might set her apart as an individual; what is left is the beautifully realized passages of common experience.

There is a passage from Milosz's The Captive Mind that I remembered while I was reading this book: "It is sometimes better to stammer from an excess of emotion than to speak in well-turned phrases. The inner voice that stops us when we might say too much is wise." This stammer is missing from Munro. She knows a great deal, and she knows it too well to be a really interesting writer for me, although she is certainly a good one.

The only place where I have heard this stammer from her – this reaching after some complicated and unmanageable truth – is in the title story from this collection. It is still the closest thing to a great story that I have read by her, and it contains all the hard scenes that I feel like she tends to skip. You can find it in her Selected Stories too, and I think everyone should read it. Her prose is much less smooth in The Beggar Maid; the narrative voice seems to keep correcting itself, wiping out its own assertions. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to feel and I don’t think the writer does either. It has the undertow of confusion that is one of the things that keeps a story alive. I wish Munro would allow herself to feel it a little more often.

The Little Virtues, by Natalia Ginzburg

Virginia Woolf said something interesting once about marriage. I can’t track down the quote, unfortunately, but approximately it was that the ordinary days of any long relationship were like plain beads being put on a string, one after another, and then – at a moment when we’re beginning to get impatient, or perhaps after we’ve been impatient for some time – something magical is slipped on the thread, some invaluable, unexpected stone that would be much less beautiful if it were not set off by the beads that came before and the ones that will follow.

This idea is pleasing, but I don’t think it sits comfortably with most people today. Intensity is a more easily celebrated goal: feeling things as strongly as possible for as much of one’s life as possible, diamond after diamond on the string. We could easily be falling in love today – or visiting another country, fighting our old limits, and then sinking ourselves in some strange and exquisite pleasure. Or all at once! - the more intense the better.

I’m not sure which one I believe – neither, entirely – but I know that very few modern writers apply Woolf's advice to their books. The goal is to dazzle, line by line and page by page, because otherwise the reader – the extraordinarily beautiful creature who has agreed, for some reason, to go on a blind date with us – will get bored and leave. It is the rare writer who considers that the reader’s boredom might actually be a valuable tool in her arsenal. Not cranky and impatient boredom, of course, which we experience when a person’s forced liveliness fails to enchant, but the gentle, lazy variety. This kind of receptive boredom is a valuable state for a writer, because the most profound and surprising truths can be slipped under the table of the reader’s fully engaged consciousness.

One of the marks of Natalia Ginzburg's originality, I think, is her use of the constructive possibilities of boredom. In several of her best essays, I wondered in the middle why I was bothering to read this stuff at all, and only continued because Ginzburg's plain, conversational style kept pulling me through sentence after sentence, until, usually near the end of the piece, she would slip on that magical stone that transformed everything that came before.

The essay that first captured me was He and I, included in Philip Lopate’s wonderful anthology of the personal essay. It is about Ginzburg’s long marriage. Here are the first few paragraphs:

He always feels hot, I always feel cold. In the summer when it is really hot he does nothing but complain about how hot he feels. He is irritated if he sees me put a jumper on the evening.

He speaks several languages well; I do not speak any well. He manages – in his own way – to speak even the languages that he doesn’t know.

This is already getting a little annoying. I skipped this essay in the anthology several times because it felt like one of those narcissistic relationship features in the lifestyle section of the newspaper. But as the essay continues, it becomes apparent that Ginzburg is writing out of a belief not in her extraordinariness but her complete ordinariness - the opposite of narcissism. She feels quite sincerely that she is much like other people (several of her essays are written in the first person plural) and is comfortable using her own life to get at some general truths. And so the essay continues, alternating between her husband’s attributes and her own:

There are certain restaurants in England where the waiter goes through a little ritual: he pours some wine into a glass so that the customer can test whether he likes it or not. He used to hate this ritual and always prevented the waiter from carrying it out by taking the bottle from him. I used to argue with him about this and say that you should let people carry out their prescribed tasks.

This is mildly interesting and it makes you think about how different people are, but it isn't exactly scintillating. I kept reading with half-focus, a little bored, and when I had to do something else, I marked the page and set the anthology aside. I could easily have never picked up the essay again. Which shows what a dangerous strategy this exploitation of ordinariness can be for a writer. Good filmmakers – who have always known how to use boredom, just think of Tarkovsky or Ray or Ozu – only need us to stay in our chairs and keep our eyes open. But writers can't rely on inertia. Luckily, Ginzburg’s pieces are short; I saw the book a few days later and decided that I might as well finish the essay.

He and I continues in list form, with all the accumulated knowledge and schisms of a long relationship: the couple’s different approaches to cleanliness, and shopping, and how they fight. And then, near the end, Ginzburg mentions the first time they met and walked along the Via Nazionale, many years before they were together as a couple. Then there are a few more details about how her husband dressed differently then than when she came across him again. And the essay ends with this paragraph:

If I remind him of that walk along the Via Nazionale he says he remembers it, but I know he is lying and that he remembers nothing; and I sometimes ask myself if it was us, these two people, almost twenty years ago on the Via Nazionale; two people who conversed so politely, so urbanely, as the sun was setting; who chatted a little about everything perhaps and about nothing; two friends talking, two young intellectuals out for a walk; so young, so educated, so uninvolved, so ready to judge one another with kind impartiality; so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever, as the sun set, at the corner of the street.

This was magical for me when I read it – "so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever" – and I knew that it could not have had the same effect if not for all of those mundane details that I had half-sleepwalked through earlier in the essay. And then, in those last few lines, a rush of illumination, achieved in a way that would have been impossible through more direct means.

Illumination about what, exactly? It’ll sound hackneyed as soon as it’s written out – the great mystery, the strangeness of life! – which is why writers have to find other ways to get at it.

Impressed, I picked up The Little Virtues, a collection of Ginzburg’s essays translated from the Italian, including He and I. It's a slim collection, just over a hundred pages. When I began, I was convinced that I’d found a new favorite writer. Winter in the Abruzzi is a masterpiece; like He and I, it is a simple narrative of family life, entirely transformed by its last few paragraphs. And I really liked Portrait of a Friend, about Cesare Pavese.

And then my enthusiasm started to tail off. There are three essays about life in England with a few extraordinary passages, but full of untenable, abstract generalizations – about the obscure sadness of England, its tasteless cuisine, and various other gripes that sound like the laments of an Italian in an unfamiliar country and not the unassailable truths that Ginzburg seems to think they are.

This trend continues in the essays about life in Italy after the Second World War. At a certain point, I stopped being able to follow what Ginzburg was talking about. Here, for example, is a quote from Silence, which she considers a vice that “poisons our epoch”:

We have been advised to defend ourselves from despair with egotism. But egotism has never solved despair. And we are too used to calling our soul’s vices illnesses, to putting up with them and to letting them rule our lives, or to soothing them with sweet syrups in order to cure them as if they were illnesses. Silence must be faced and judged from a moral standpoint. It is not given to us to choose whether we are happy or unhappy. But we must choose not to be demonically unhappy.

This is simply too vague to be satisfying for me. And the less I understand an author, the more the use of “we” feels like an imposition. Maybe the audience of Ginzburg’s time knew exactly what she was talking about – in another essay, she directly addresses the survivors of Fascism in Italy – but I think a writer needs to be less insular to survive her age.

Ginzburg is at her best when she has a concrete subject to work with – her own life, or her friend’s life – instead of abstract ideas. But she is too good and careful a writer not to have at least one interesting thing to say in any piece she bothered to write and publish. The Little Virtues, for example, the title essay, is a wonderfully wise and thought-provoking set of maxims on how to raise children, going very much against the modern grain. And even though Ginzburg only duplicated, for me, the beauty of He and I in a single essay, I still think the book is entirely worth reading. Even a weaker essay like Human Relationships can contain a passage like this one, worth remembering for a long time (Ginzburg is talking about the moment when we know we are truly adults):

In that brief moment we found a point of equilibrium for our wavering life: and it seemed to us that we could always rediscover that secret moment and find there the words for our vocation, the words for our neighbour; that we could look at our neighbour with a gaze that would always be just and free, not the timid or contemptuous gaze of someone who whenever he is with his neighbour always asks himself if he is his master or his servant. All our life we have only known how to be masters and servants: but in that secret moment of ours, in our moment of perfect equilibrium, we have realized that there is no real authority or servitude on the earth. And so it is that now as we turn to that secret moment we look at others to see whether they have lived through an identical moment, or whether they are still far away from it; it is this that we have to know. It is the highest moment in the life of a human being, and it is necessary that we stand with others whose eyes are fixed on the highest moment of their destiny.

On Wings of Song, by Thomas Disch

I was an occasional reader of Thomas Disch's blog, Endzone. Most of the posts were just ordinary musings, but there were also some brilliant bits of verse and an obviously immense intelligence on display. When I was looking at John Crowley's website a few weeks ago, I found out that Disch had committed suicide in his apartment.

Something about following a person's life online and then hearing this was really disturbing, maybe even more than when I heard about David Foster Wallace. Which was also tremendously sad.

This is the best of the tributes to Disch that I've read online. The story of his last days is pretty awful. I'm sure that money wasn't the only problem, but it's depressing to think that such a great writer might have been even partially compelled to end things because of a lack of resources.

Because he was, it turns out, a great writer. I picked up one of Disch's old novels, On Wings of Song, after I found out what had happened to him, as an ineffectual form of tribute. The book is out of print and I had to request it from library storage.

It is a brilliant novel, one of the weirdest and most imaginative I've ever read. Any description of the plot is going to sound a little silly, and I was resistant at first, I'll admit. I was never a big reader of science fiction growing up, and I'm still much more susceptible to silliness when it's wearing some armor and swinging a sword. But this book won me over quickly and entirely.

On Wings of Song is set in the near future. Most of the book takes place in Iowa, which has become a severely repressive place, both by law and convention. There is a faction known colloquially as the "undergodders" dictating most social policy, such as the availability of certain newspapers and radio stations. (Realistically, however, most of these media do end up getting into the state through surrounding, more progressive areas like Minnesota.) The undergodders save their most virulent hatred for the practice of flying -- I guess you could call it a "wedge issue" in this world -- which is the process by which people, using music, can escape their physical bodies and become creatures called fairies.

These fairies cannot actually be detected, although there are devices to trap them using sound and other stimuli. Fairies can, however, re-enter their bodies after flying and give accounts of their experience, but the experience of flight is often so intoxicating that many people abandon their bodies and leave them to die -- in a corporeal sense, at least, since fairies appear to be immortal.

I know, I know, it sounds silly! But trust me, give this book about forty pages and you'll be completely hooked. Its protagonist is Daniel Weinreb, the fairly ordinary son of a dentist who ends up, through a venial crime, in one of the state's prison camps.

After hearing a man sing in the camp, Daniel becomes obsessed with flying, which is actually quite difficult and requires both musical skill and something like depth of soul -- it takes complete involvement in a song that one is singing (along with, sometimes, the help of various devices) to achieve the escape velocity required to leave the body.

Along the way, Disch throws off some brilliant and terrifying details of this particular future. What makes his world so endlessly interesting is that it isn't monopolar. Unlike a fair amount of science fiction, everything in his world doesn't follow from one central conceit, with the rest of the author's energy going towards tracing obvious consequences and inventing bits of technological embroidery. Disch's world is actually alive and random and in flux; policies change and become more or less repressive, and there are economic and technological and social changes that don't all cut in a single direction.

I'll leave the disturbingly plausible P-W lozenge for readers to discover themselves, but here is an example of what I'm talking about. This is a description of part of Daniel's job at the prison camp, which involves:

.. the breeding of a specially mutated form of termite that was used as a supplement in various extended meat and cheese products. The bugs bred at Station 78 in all their billions, were almost as economical a source of protein as soybeans, since they could be grown in the labyrinthine underground bunkers to quite remarkable sizes with no other food source than a black sludge-like paste produced for next to nothing by various urban sanitation departments. The termites' ordinary life-cycle had been simplified and adapted to assembly-line techniques, which were automated so that, unless there was a breakdown, workers weren't obliged to go into the actual tunnels.

This horrific passage might not even be forward-thinking anymore; the book was written in 1978, and for all I know this is already happening in some form, at least for animal feed. But the primary appeal of this book -- for me, at least -- is not in futurological details, as impressive as they might be. And it isn't even the passages of extraordinary psychological perceptiveness scattered throughout the book. For example: "Grandison Whiting listened to the exposé [Daniel is talking about the abuses in the prison camp] with a glistening attentiveness behind which Daniel could sense not indignation but the meshing of various cogs and gears of a logical rebuttal."

With so many phrases in the book -- "glistening attentiveness" -- I thought yes, yes that's exactly right. (I also loved the line, "She was already, at fifteen, a fanatic in the cause of her own all-conquering good looks.")

So what is wonderful about this book? I'm not sure I know. Maybe its unpredictability, its ability to expand in the mind. Flying -- which Daniel keeps unsuccessfully trying to do as the plot winds its way through several twists and changes in perspective and location -- is obviously a metaphor for transcendence: artistic, athletic, religious, whatever. And even though the book stays true to its reality and doesn't seem like an exercise in connecting allegorical dots, the idea of flying becomes, by the end, incredibly charged and resonant.

It might especially connect with people (I am one) who are more moved by music than any other art, and enjoy singing and playing instruments, but have never quite been able to get good enough -- in technical terms and in terms of complete internal commitment -- to lose themselves in the process of creating music.

There is something, it is true, that is a little juvenile in this obsession with losing inhibitions. And, in a wonderful interview, Disch acknowledged that "science fiction, in our culture, is basically intended for children, or young adults, as they say, and a certain amount of science fiction has to fulfill the emotional and intellectual needs of 13, 14, 15-year olds."

He obviously wasn't trying to describe his own work, but there were parts of On Wings of Song where I felt like this was still true. There is a character named Barbara, for example, in the prison camp, who chides Daniel for not running away from Iowa at fifteen like his friend did: "In any case, Daniel," she says, "age has nothing to do with anything. It's the excuse people use till they're old enough to acquire better excuses--a wife, or children, or a job. There are always going to be excuses if you look for them."

Deep inside, I heard a little cheer from myself at 15, who is still in there somewhere. Because the emotional and intellectual needs of young adults don't actually go away; they just get wrapped in layers of complexity and compromise and tolerance (and wisdom?) But they can still be reached -- and should be, every once in a while, because they are legitimate needs and we muffle them at our own peril.

There are some things, though, that I do feel I've outgrown. I'm more bored than thrilled by sacrilege at this point, and the book's satire of fundamentalism didn't do much for me. Also, it doesn't end that well. In a scene near the end, when Daniel is singing a song about honeybunnies on stage after dyeing his skin to look like a black man (I think he might have been in a bunny costume, too) the old spectre of silliness finally re-emerged. Part 3 of the book in general, where this scene takes place, didn't click for me except in parts, and the conclusion is surprising but not really satisfying.

But On Wings of Song is at least two-thirds of a masterpiece, which is more than enough for me. It should really be back in print. I'm going to read Camp Concentration and 334 next, and maybe some of Disch's essays and poetry. I'm sorry I didn't find them sooner.

Great American Hypocrites, by Glenn Greenwald

I generally don't bother with political blogs but I've been making an exception lately for Glenn Greenwald. He's a good writer, and a more serious thinker than the hundreds of people around the Internet who lavish their intelligence on the daily minutiae of poll movements and stray gaffes. Over the few years his blog has been online, Greenwald has brought several issues to people's attention simply by taking the time to read the documents that the government releases, and this is while professional reporters have regurgitated the administration's press releases or reproduced quotes from opposite camps, assuming that the truth would somehow determine itself.

Greenwald also writes at length. He doesn't have the addictive but finally enervating habit of posting link-plus-half-a-paragraph entries each hour, and he doesn't jump on the story of the day to give you his "take." He isn't part of the echo chamber, at least not usually. Greenwald focuses, instead, on a set of his own central concerns. On a weekly basis, he discusses torture, indefinite detention, and warrantless surveillance (he was and possibly still is a practicing lawyer). Most media outlets covered these stories for roughly a week, almost nothing changed, and then the news cycle marched on to something else.

So if Greenwald is occasionally indignant and repetitive, I'm glad: Americans need to have these things shoved down their throats on a daily basis. All of these prisoners are still there, and some of them have been locked up for almost a decade without any opportunity to prove their innocence in a court of law. And the administration is either unwilling or unable to prove their guilt; considering the scant evidence that it has actually put forward, the latter seems much more likely. Yet people who were once paranoid about the encroachment of the federal government on fundamental rights have barely made a sound. I'm not sure what conservatism means anymore if it doesn't include some respect for the founding documents of this country and what were once the basic tenets of our system of law: habeas corpus, the necessity of warrants, every human being's right to humane treatment.

I wrote several years ago about McCain's finally pointless "stand" on torture. After I wrote that article, McCain had a chance to vote for legislation that explicitly banned waterboarding in February 2008. He chose not to, opting instead to leave in place the hazy set of regulations in the Military Commissions Acts from 2006, which McCain knew gave the president the right to determine the legality of any interrogation practice himself. Mccain had already lost my vote at this point, but he succeeded in also losing my respect.

Greenwald lays out the case against McCain in the last chapter of Great American Hypocrites. Like most of the book, the chapter seems hastily written and temporary in the way of most such political screeds. I wish I could recommend the book more highly because I really do admire his blog.

Greenwald's central points are at least interesting. Basically, he argues that the Republican Party has won most of its recent elections by engineering a narrative of traditional masculinity versus elitist effeminacy; or, if their opponent is a woman, by painting her as an excessively masculine, gender-confused weirdo.

The media has run with this strategy because it is extremely easy to understand -- the real man versus the professorial loser -- and also entertaining for viewers, since it makes the private lives of politicians increasingly "relevant" to the election. Even columnists that are supposedly liberal traffic in the same basic dichotomies because they lend themselves so effortlessly to readable satire (Maureen Dowd is an obvious example). And the narrative also plays to the insecurities of people who are increasingly stuck in stores and offices, and aren't sure how their lives fit into the old archetypal American narratives of personal courage and heroism.

This insecurity, Greenwald argues, is a driving force behind the bellicosity of the Republican Party. The neo-conservatives who pushed for war, to a rather extraordinary degree, are people that avoided service in wars they vociferously supported, while demonizing anyone that urged caution, including many who had actual military experience. Greenwald sees the standard-bearer of this mentality in John Wayne, who managed to get numerous suspect deferments in WWII and then spent the rest of his life cheering on other wars, while denouncing people who disagreed with him as anti-American. Naturally, Wayne is now an icon, especially with conservatives, for playacting the sort of heroic life that people long for. And today's heroism-by-proxy -- sending other people to fight and showing "courage" by keeping them there -- is essentially the same thing as playacting.

Unfortunately, Greenwald lays out these points in maddeningly repetitive fashion. Whole paragraphs of text are repeated verbatim, and certain phrases come up numerous times without alteration. Also, it is hard to analyze a frivolous phenomenon without occasionally seeming frivolous yourself. Gleenwald catalogues the spread of media chatter on a handful of largely forgotten stories, and it is as exhausting to read as it was to watch. The book's exposure of hypocrisy also includes dozens of prominent conservatives who defended traditional values while living lives that were either highly untraditional or genuinely debauched. So a section of the book is basically a long list, often of obscure figures and their salacious scandals, and it ends up feeling as pointless and gossipy, again, as the non-stories on TV. This kind of stuff, at best, belongs in an appendix as a form of highly anecdotal evidence, but Great American Hypocrites has no endmatter and no references, which seems strange for a lawyer.

I'm only bothering to write this review first to recommend the blog, and second because there is a little discussed quote from McCain near the end of Great American Hypocrites that I wanted to put online as my small contribution to election discourse. It's quite extraordinary (the bold is in the original). Greenwald begins by quoting the New York Observer's Jason Horowitz:

In a small, mirror-paneled room guarded by a Secret Service agent and packed with some of the city's wealthiest and most influential political donors, Mr. McCain got right to the point. "One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit,'" said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardia, an invitee, and two other guests.

That's the thoughtful, insightful view of the highly experienced, profoundly serious maverick for whom foreign policy a mastered discipline. Apparently, all Iraq needed for the last five years was some profanity-laced commands issued by the American President to the frightened sectarian simpletons, and harmony would have reigned.

Stop the bullshit, indeed. I would dismiss this as a stray remark if it didn't seem so typical of the attitude that has governed America for the last eight years. Conservatives complain about the nanny state, but when in power they don't actually work towards a lean, sensible government that sticks to a few basic responsibilities; their actual dream, as evidenced in this quote, is the daddy state, where resources that were once used to help people (deserving or not) are now used to punish those that step out of line. The daddy state doesn't tolerate excuses or bother thinking about root causes; it has no respect for privacy or sense of limited authority. Anything it does is automatically within its rights. And if the children complain, or don't step into line, the daddy state simply tells them to cut it out, and then delivers spankings when, mysteriously, they don't. It's a disastrous, patronizing, and profoundly stupid way to look at the world.

It's hard to get too enthusiastic about most American politicians, but I'll at least be thrilled to get rid of such people for a little while.