Category: Reviews

The Mirage

Mustafa used the van’s ignition key as a crude knife and managed to get the package open. Inside, in a slim plastic case, was a deck of playing cards. Each card bore a picture of a man’s face, captioned with an English transliteration of his name and a job title. Mustafa recognized many of the names and faces–almost all of them were prominent Baath Union members–but the job titles were whimsical.
The Mirage by Matt Ruff

Matt Ruff’s “The Mirage” starts as a police procedural and political thriller set in a topsy-turvy, through-the-looking-glass world: a world where the destruction of the World Trade Center towers in Baghdad on 11/9/2001 by a group of American Christian fundamentalists has plunged the United Arab States into a War Against Terror, embroiling it with the failed states and theocracies in North America. It’s a world where the Jewish state was established after World War II in occupied Bavaria, and where Israel and the United Arab States are allied against European and American Christian terrorists. Many of the transformations are broad and obvious, some are subtle and intriguing, and for about 200 pages the conceit holds together well. Ruff’s characters, particularly the Homeland Security agent Mustafa, are well-rounded and interesting, not merely plot devices, and the main characters’ conflicts rise as much from personal history as from the geopolitical world Ruff has created.

But the second half, with a massive expository dump by CIA agent David Koresh (just one of many recastings that seem satirical though not played for obvious laughs) and a too-literal deus ex machina, strains the suspension of disbelief a bit too much. Certainly a major theme of the book is the eruption of alternate realities into one another–Mustafa has begun to find artifacts from our own world, like New York Times articles about 9/11 and a set of the Saddam Hussein “playing cards” issued during the early days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq–but the eruptions become increasingly jarring and crudely drawn as the story winds down. It may have been a more satisfying read if it had ended with the mystery unrevealed, or if it had stretched to twice its length with more time to develop the alternate world and wrap it up more convincingly.

Despite this flaw, though, I found “The Mirage” well worth the read: it’s fast-paced and action-packed at the same time that it raises interesting questions, a combination that is fairly unusual.

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

Deception

It had all begun with Sabitha saying, on the way to school, “We have to go by the Post Office. I have to send a letter to my dad.”

There are a lot of things to note about “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” the title story of Alice Munro’s tenth collection: her handing of perspective, the way she sketches just enough setting to bring post-war Saskatchewan to life, how she illuminates a character through their reflections on other characters. But what makes it most interesting from a writer’s perspective is how she builds the story around a deception that is never uncovered by any of the characters.

Deception is difficult in fiction: it depends on the characters being truly in the dark, while the author and, eventually, the reader are thoroughly in the know. But because the characters spring from the author’s mind, it’s far too easy to subtly tip the characters off to the subterfuge. And if it was an especially good deception, the temptation is to have a big reveal scene, where the deceived parties discover the truth and reflect back on how they were fooled all along.

Munro doesn’t reveal that there is a deception until the middle of the story. Until then, we are entirely within the perspective of Johanna, a spinster housekeeper and nanny who is preparing for a journey west. She’s revealed to be a matter-of-fact, no-nonsense woman whose practicality is only slightly derailed by a suggestion of romance. The scene in the dress shop, where she is selecting an outfit that she will wear to be married in–not “pure white froth or vanilla satin or ivory lace,” but “a brown wool dress … about as plain as you could get”–is wonderful, revealing much about her character and nothing about her history in her conversation with the shopkeeper.

The deception is introduced in a sudden change in perspective, when the consciousness of the story switches from Johanna to Edith, the clever friend of the girl, Sabitha, whom Johanna cares for. Johanna’s entire undertaking–the selection of the dress, the arrangements for transporting furniture, the journey to Saskatchewan–is thrown into question, and we stop admiring Johanna for her pluck and practicality and start to pity her for being played for a fool.

And if she had ever learned of the deception, Johanna would have remained pathetic; but because she continues straight ahead on her plans–her character never changes, just our perspective on it–she soon regains our esteem. The deception in this story is helped by distance–it’s a long way from Toronto to Gdynia–and by its tight conspiratorial circle of two. There is a hint that Johanna has put the pieces together in the end, but she is too unreflective to dwell on it: she lives very much in the present, with her focus on practical matters.

The successful deception is, in a way, anti-climactic: there’s no reveal, no great scene of recrimination and accusation. A childish prank launches a woman on a new life she would otherwise never have pursued; whether it’s actually a better life than the one she leaves behind is almost beside the point. Edith is both relieved and embarrassed by her part in the story, and also amused that she has played the part of Fate without intending it.

What makes the deception in “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” work is Munro’s management of the characters’ knowledge. The story is told mostly in a close third-person perspective, with the consciousness moving primarily between Johanna and Edith (with a brief slip into the mind of Mr. McCauley, Johanna’s employer, mostly for expository purposes); nothing that either one of them could not know–the letters, the state of the hotel in Gdynia, the history between McCauley and his son-in-law–makes its way into their respective sections. With an omniscient narrator, or with a first-person perspective, the story wouldn’t have worked as well: an omniscient narrator would risk revealing too much too quickly, and neither Edith nor Johanna knows enough to be able to tell the whole story. Sometimes voice dictates a story, as when a character suddenly speaks up and demands to be heard; but sometimes the story dictates the voice. Knowing which to let lead is part of the wisdom of a writer of Munro’s caliber.

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The Magicians

That’s what makes you different from the rest of us, Quentin. You actually still believe in magic. You do realize, right, that nobody else does? I mean we all know magic is real. But you really believe in it. Don’t you.
The Magicians by Lev Grossman

Lev Grossman’s The Magicians offers a fantasy world cribbed heavily (and quite openly) from the Harry Potter and Narnia books: schools for magicians, portals to magical realms, a gang of school chums who face danger and adventure together. But Grossman’s world is more emotionally and morally fraught that Narnia and Hogwarts: the characters are a little older than the child adventurers in the source books, and are navigating the realms of love, sex, loyalty, and responsibility at the same time that they’re learning to cast magical spells and travel to the mystical world of Fillory. In her blurb, Kelly Link compares “The Magicians” to Jay McInerney; to me it seems a bit more like Bret Easton Ellis’ “The Rules of Attraction” and Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History.”

The novel is broken into three sections: the world of Brakebills, an American school for young wizards based on the Hogwarts model; the post-Brakebills world, in which the school’s graduates slip into self-indulgent debauchery because their magic can provide them with everything except purpose; and finally an ill-fated and tragic adventure in Fillory, the Narnia-like world of the childhood books that formed the characters’ earliest impressions of magic. The Brakebills section takes up a little more than half of the novel, and is the most deeply realized, with the school’s traditions, curriculum, and rivalries brought wonderfully to life: it’s an enjoyable read, very much a Harry Potter for grown-ups built around the coming of age of Quentin, a boy plucked from the tedium of Brooklyn and brought to the magical hothouse of Brakebills. But it’s the middle section, where the characters navigate (mostly badly) their early adulthood in Manhattan, that is the moral core of the book. When given so much power so young, how can the Brakebills children find their way in a non-magical world?

The Fillory section feels a bit thinner than the rest. Though it’s interesting to watch the characters encounter the talking animals and sinister characters that have been hinted at all along while they discuss their childhood fascination with the Fillory stories, the world of Fillory is not as well-realized as Brakebills. The end of the Fillory story feels rushed, as if Grossman were trying to wrap things up but also trying to include more Fillory details that had been foreshadowed in the first section.

The very end of the novel also feels contrived and tacked on. Quentin’s emotional and moral growth after Fillory has been built around a renunciation of magic and the embrace of a non-magical world (though he has no qualms about using his Brakebills connections to secure a job that requires only that he show up and occupy a large corner office); it’s not a full nor especially well-considered transformation, but for a young magician who has gone through a pretty horrific chain of events it’s a significant change. And then a magic globe shatters his office window: this sets things up for the sequel, but doesn’t feel like an organic development. It’s a little like Doc Brown’s sudden return at the end of “Back to the Future,” and we all know how that turned out …

The characters in “The Magicians” are solid enough, though, that they may be able to withstand a sequel. Provided, of course, that they continue to grow up in tragic, tentative, and clumsy ways.

Claustrophobia in space

My Netflix account is used mostly for the boys to watch “Mythbusters” on demand and Kelly to get her British crime dramas. But lately the dog, who has never really got the concept of weekends and is sliding toward doggy dementia in spite of her senior blend food with fish oil, has been getting me out of bed at 5:30 AM on Saturdays and Sundays, so I’ve been taking advantage of the lack of competition to watch some movies that no one else in the family would like. Inspired by Jason Pettus at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, I thought I’d “justify” my Netflix account by commenting on what I’ve been watching.

Three of the movies I’ve caught have clustered around the problem of people trapped in a confined space with no clear way out. They’re all science fiction movies–Moon, Pandorum, and Stranded–but have more psychological density and darkness than the genre typically offers.

Duncan Jones (née Zowie Bowie) tells a story of a man literally trapped with himself in Moon. Its main character, and almost the only human ever on screen (a few others appear occasionally in flashbacks and via teleconference), is coming to the end of a three-year assignment as the only person at a helium mining station on the Moon. An accident which should have killed him puts him face to face with the secrets of his employer’s clever solution to labor relations. The story unfolds slowly, and is as much about memory (much of it false) as it is about isolation. Science fiction fans who are used to laser shootouts and galactic dogfights won’t find much in this story; but readers of Harlan Ellison, Arthur C. Clarke, and especially Philip K. Dick will find a lot to like in this dark little story.

Pandorum is a little more on the action-packed sci fi side of the scale, but still high-concept and thought-provoking. It reminded me a lot of Greg Bear’s Hull Zero Three: two crew members of a long-haul space flight wake up with foggy memories and a decided lack of knowledge of what has been happening on the ship during their sleep between shifts. They discover quickly that a lot has been happening indeed, none of it good, much of it violent and bloody, and that their mission has changed from a bold venture to colonize a far distant world to a desperate attempt to preserve the last parcel of humankind in the universe. The cinematography is dark, the spaces are small, and the overall sense of the film is desperation bordering on madness. Some threads are left dangling at the end, and some ideas are skimmed over in favor of action sequences, but “Pandorum” manages to explore the claustrophobia and disorientation of its characters in some interesting ways.

Stranded reminded of John Varley’s “In the Halls of the Martian Kings”, though quite a bit less fanciful than the Varley story. The crew of the first mission to Mars crashes on the red planet, and their landing craft is crippled. A rescue mission from Earth will take about two years to arrive, but the supplies of water, food, and air for the five survivors will last only about a year. The classic lifeboat debate occurs–who should stay and who should go?–and three astronauts leave for their final exploration on foot, discovering something quite unexpected. The dialogue in “Stranded” is more wooden and stilted than usual, made a little worse by the fact that most of the actors are delivering it in English while being native speakers of Spanish and Portuguese. But once past the tendency to exposition through speechifying, this is actually a compelling movie, and delves into a few of its characters more deeply than I expected.

Hull Zero Three

“What is conscience?” the voice asks.
…
“The willingness to sacrifice for a greater good,” I say.
“Sacrifice what?”
“Dreams. Plans. Personal stuff.”

Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear

Warning: spoilers inherent in this

Greg Bear’s Hull Zero Three is science fiction at its best: it is shaped by big ideas, is filled with technical puzzles, and asks questions about the future of humankind as well as the future of humanity (by “humankind” I mean the trajectory of DNA that includes our species; by “humanity,” the moral and emotional components that have been carried along with that DNA for the last 50,000 years or so). It may be a little thin in characterization–like medieval and Renaissance allegory (and this book has definite echoes of “A Pilgrim’s Progress”), its characters carry its ideas more than their own personalities. But Bear manages to keep the story interesting by allowing it unfold slowly, with much confusion and misinformation along the way.

Hull Zero Three takes place on Ship, a spacecraft traveling far from Earth in search of a new home for its human cargo. Ship’s origins are unclear: there are hints that Earth has become uninhabitable, that there are many such ships, that the architects of Ship had some nefarious plans. The past is muddied by the false memories that have been planted in the characters’ brains, apparently modified according to the needs of Ship’s mission. Indeed, Ship seems designed to adjust its cargo’s composition according to the mission’s situation, creating a wide range of humanoid beings suited to the conditions of deep space, or landing on an uninhabited planet, or–rather chillingly–taking over an inhabited planet by eliminating its native life.

Something has gone terribly wrong, though, and Ship has been riven by factions. What the factions are, and what the consequences of this civil war might be, unfolds slowly through the eyes of a Teacher clone who has been awakened in a frozen, incredibly dangerous part of the ship, by a strange little girl who wants to bring him to Mother. This Teacher–who remains nameless through the first two-thirds of the book–meets monsters, gathers clues, and eventually finds other creatures who have been awakened to a mysterious mission.

The Teacher’s journey reminded me a bit of a first-person video game: he (or other persons generated from his template) have tried, and failed, at this mission before. There is a feeling of repetition and déjà vu throughout the first part of the book: Teacher has to solve puzzles to overcome obstacles, has to learn to read the subtle cues of the changes in gravity and temperature, and discovers the collected knowledge of his other “selves” in a coded notebook. Each successive incarnation has moved a little further in this “game,” often leaving behind grisly reminders of failure that the Teacher finds along the way.

The big moral quandary that Hull Zero Three presents is that of humankind vs. humanity. The mission of Ship seems to be to spread the human species across the galaxy, whatever the cost: while it is capable of creating humans we would recognize on our current Earth, it can also create monsters capable of ruthless and efficient extermination. More troubling than its monsters, though, are its lies: the Teacher clones in particular not only have lies packed into their memories that include visions of a bucolic home Earth, but also are designed to present lies, to be the vessel of propaganda that can justify extermination. The civil war on the ship appears to have been sparked by dissension about the mission, with a part of the system bent on continuing to a planet that can be made ready for humankind only by wholesale slaughter and another by a faction more than simply queasy about this prospect. Where the strange band that must make its way to Hull Zero Three fits in this conflict, and how they come to choose a side, is the moral heart of the novel.

a year in reading, 2010


photo by happy via

As 2010 comes to a close (with over a foot of snow and more coming down outside my window), I’m looking back over some of the books and such I’ve enjoyed; there have been some great and thought-provoking reads in the last year, and some that were pretty good but didn’t quite hit their potential. All in all, though, a good year for reading. Here are some of the books and articles that have made their way to these pages this year.

I closed 2009 and started 2010 with Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, the story of a German couple’s quiet but daring campaign against Hitler. The novel is gripping as both a moral exploration of the German people under Hitler, and as a police procedural; and even the back story of the novel, and of Fallada’s own life under the Nazis, is a harrowing tale.

In the Spring, I was inspired by a series of posts by Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Atlantic Magazine’s web site to learn more about life under another repressive regime: the plantation system in the South during the Confederacy. Andrew Ward’s The Slaves’ War is drawn from the words of the people who survived the war, particularly from a rich collection of interviews with ex-slaves and their descendants from the 1930s. The slaves emerge as actors in their own liberation with some ambivalence toward both sides of the Civil War.

Also in the Spring I read Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges and Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt, two books which complement each other well. Hedges’ book is a Jeremiad against a cruel, crass, and corporate-controlled culture, with an all-too-brief ode on the “human capacity for love.” Judt, in contrast, is largely level-headed and reasonable, offering a history of the decline of the welfare state, politics’ retreat from “the common good,” and the uncritical acceptance of a rhetoric of perpetual market growth. A combination of Hedges’ passion and Judt’s analysis, bolstered by the empiricism of The Spirit Level, seems a good, if unlikely-to-be-followed, way forward.

I also made a dent in my stack of New Yorker magazines, though they’ve crept up on me again in the last couple months. (The current blizzard might be a great opportunity to revisit that project.) Of the stories and articles I read–an Italo Calvino fugue, a report on free diving, and stories by Joshua Ferris and William Styron–I think it was Sherman Alexie’s War Dances that I enjoyed the most. Alexie is always true to his voice, and voice matters a lot.

Marc Jacobson’s The Lampshade also deals in voices–ranging from a blues historian to Holocaust deniers to museum curators to a Santaria priestess–to tell the story of a voiceless object, a lampshade that appears to have been made from human skin of unconfirmed provenance. Jacobson pulls together the Holocaust, Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, the Jim Crow South, and Mardi Gras to tell the story of this lampshade and his quest to find it a home.

Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is less a time-travel sci-fi tale than a family drama about a son searching for his secretive father’s inner life. It uses the tropes of science fiction in some interesting and original ways. But it has some stylistic quirks, tics, foibles, follies, that drove me a little nuts, batty, crazy, around the bend. Another round of editing might have helped.

The last book I’ll likely get up on this site this year, given my holiday and other obligations, is The Word for World is Forest by Ursula LeGuin. It’s a story of colonial exploitation not unlike “Avatar,” but without that movie’s colonial baggage: LeGuin’s exotic green aliens don’t require a human helper to stage their revolt; indeed, their only human ally turns out to be a bumbler who does more harm than good. A LeGuin novel, even a very short one like this (a slightly different version won the 1973 Hugo Award for best novella), lives up to the promise of speculative fiction: a rich collection of ideas, an extended thought experiment, and a human moral drama in an alien place.

The Word for World is Forest

“Wonderful,” Lepennon said, and his white skin paled further with pure excitement. “A human society with an effective war-barrier! What’s the cost, Dr. Lyubov?”

The Word for World is Forest by Ursula Le Guin

Reading Le Guin’s novella “The Word for World is Forest” in 2010, it’s hard not to draw the parallels with James Cameron’s “Avatar”: an exploitative colonial force of humans encounters a technologically primitive but psychologically advanced people on a paradisiacal world, and the encounter forces the peaceful natives to take up arms against the invaders. Le Guin’s Athsheans differ from Cameron’s Na’vi in more than appearance, though (the Na’vi are tall, blue, and lithe; the Athseans are short, green, and hairy): they don’t require a savior from the human world to goad them to action, and remain thoroughly alien to the end.

Reading “The Word for World is Forest” in 1973, when it won the Hugo Award, the obvious parallel would have been the Vietnam War. The diurnal “creechies,” as the Terran colonists call them, live in tunnels beneath dense forests, and their shuffling good nature belies a deep and complex culture. When finally forced to violence, a series of increasingly brutal retaliations and counter-retaliations commences, including a very My Lai-like massacre led by a Captain Davidson who makes Lieutenant Calley seem a model of civilized restraint. Deforestation and “firejelly” are the invaders’ primary weapons against the Athseans. In case anyone were to miss the parallels, Le Guin includes a Vietnamese officer among the colonials, who observes of the futility of a thousand Earthlings surrounded by three million Athseans,

You can’t disable a guerrilla type structure with bombs, it’s been proved, in fact my own part of the world where I was born proved it for about thirty years fighting off major super-powers one after the other in the twentieth century.

Global politics aside, “The Word for World is Forest” is another example of what Le Guin does best: she constructs a human (or human-like) society based around some novel quirk (for the Athseans, it’s a culture built around lucid dreaming), throws it up against an external challenge, and chronicles how it adapts to the challenge. Her best novels, of which this is surely one, are instances of experimental anthropology. Selver, the waking-dreaming “god” who arises from the horrors of his world’s invasion, is a wholly Athsean creature, and his innovations fit wholly (if uncomfortably) within his culture.

The Athseans’ story also follows a classic Fall-from-Eden arc: Selver introduces violence, and a particularly merciless variety at that, to a previously pacifist culture. Once introduced, the innovation can’t be undone:

“Sometimes a god comes,” Selver said. “He brings a new way to do a thing, or a new thing to be done. A new kind of singing, or a new kind of death. He brings this across the bridge between the dream-time and the world-time. When he has done this, it is done. You cannot take things that exist in the world and try to drive them back into the dream, to hold them inside the dream with walls and pretenses. That is insanity. What is, is. There is no use pretending, now, that we do not know how to kill one another.”

As is typical of Le Guin, “The Word for World is Forest” packs a universe of ideas and dilemmas into 189 pages in a way that much longer books seldom contain. Simple as the story is, it is dense, rich, and troubling long after it’s over.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

I fix time machines during the day (whatever a day means for me–I’m not sure I even know that anymore), and at night I sleep alone, in a quiet, nameless, dateless day that I found, tucked into a hidden cul-de-sac of space-time.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

Charles Yu’s “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” uses the tropes of science fiction to explore questions of identity, memory, and loss. Though wrapped in the trappings of science fiction, with various time-travel paradoxes playing a part in the plot, the novel is really a story about an immigrant father and his son, and the mutual disappointments that inform their relationship.

And though I enjoyed the book very much, I found that its style kept me just on the verge of hurling it across the room. This novel suffers from a style that I’ve encountered in a few recent books, in which repetitive descriptions are stitched together with commas into long strings. It’s a sort of elegant variation on steroids. Used sparingly, this trope can enhance a passage: it can convey an uncertainty on the part of the narrator, who struggles to find just the right words, and provide just a touch of uncertainty when the pile of descriptors contradict each other. But used constantly, it feels cluttered and rough, and in desperate need of an editor. “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe” would likely have lost a quarter of its weight had passages like these been trimmed down to size:

My father would forever be the guy who did not get the credit, the one swallowed up, enveloped by security, swept away and lost in time.

If I could tell him just one thing, wherever he is, pass him one message, it would be this: he had something. Something to his thoughts, his ideas, the papers in his notebooks, the work we did in his garage. Beyond just a purity to his ideas, a sincerity to his belief, a genuine curiosity, a determination that, if he just sat there long enough, thought hard enough, failed enough times, he’d find a way in. His idea was good enough, would have been good enough for the director, for the world, good enough to be a serious contribution to fictional science, good enough for me, but I don’t know where he is, and I have never been able to tell him this.

Pages and pages of these passages fill up the middle third of the book–unfortunate, because this is the most affecting part of the novel, in which the protagonist re-lives the moment his father succeeds, and fails, with his time travel invention. A recent article by Alexander McCall Smith demonstrates the power of concision against this sort of overwrought prose. While I don’t think every writer needs to sound like Hemingway or (Gordon Lish’s version of) Carver, I do value some editing.

Luckily, Yu’s book was compelling enough to overcome its style. (I never finished Arthur Phillips’s The Song Is You because this stylistic tic was combined with cloying self-obsession.) I look forward to reading more of his work, perhaps in a more rigorously edited version.

The Lampshade


With this lampshade you can say it had a first history, which is that identification with the Buchenwald camp and people like Isle Koch. … Then there is the second history. The history with you. Your adventures and your thoughts. There is the strange and frightening idea that someone would make a lampshade out of a person and it has arrived in New Orleans after a storm.

Mark Jacobson, a New York Magazine writer who splits his time between New Orleans and New York City, acquired, third-hand, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a lampshade apparently made of human skin. Four almost four years he tried to determine its actual provenance, and to find a fitting home for it; it proved to be an artifact that no one wanted, a horrible “white elephant” shunned by mainstream Holocaust historians and Holocaust deniers alike. The lampshade’s wanderings, in a custom-made carrying case, take it to Buchenwald, Jerusalem, New Orleans, and New York City, stitching together the threads of the Holocaust, the Jim Crow South, 9/11, Katrina, and the “Faust” legend (both in Goethe’s native woodlands and at the midnight crossroad where Robert Johnson sold his soul).

As a “Holocaust detective story,” The Lampshade has few actual clues. Jacobson has a DNA profile made at the lab that identified the meager remains of many 9/11 victims, which shows that the lampshade is likely to be human, though the age and degradation of the material makes an absolute determination impossible. Antique dealers place the metal frame of the lamp in the first half of the twentieth century, of a middle European style: the atrocities at Buchenwald fit within this broad historical geography, but it’s insufficient evidence to pinpoint the lampshade’s origins. The official record, in particular the Nuremberg trials and the trial of Ilse Koch, the infamous “Hexe von Buchenwald,” alludes to lampshades made of human skin, but there is little direct evidence of these particular horrors within the context of the greater horror of the Holocaust. In short, there’s little opportunity for a Sherlock Holmes to deduce the lampshade’s origins with much clarity.

But the heart of “The Lampshade” is less the quest for the lampshade’s origins, than it is an investigation of the tangled stories of racism and injustice in Germany and the United States. The book starts with Goethe, whose favorite walking site would become the location of the Buchenwald concentration camp, and with Robert Johnson at the crossroads in Clarksville, Mississippi, where the man who gives the lampshade to Jacobson spent years trying to get fitting recognition paid to the area’s rich musical legacy. Throughout the book, Jacobson illuminates connections between lynchings, neo-Nazi marches, grave robbing, medical cadavers, Mardi Gras krewes, and care for the dead. He interviews a wide range of characters, from Louisiana racist David Duke to the Jewish American communications officer in charge of opening Buchenwald to the world after the camp’s liberation; he discovers that Holocaust deniers are more open to the lampshade’s possible Holocaust connections than are the Holocaust museums in Washington, DC, and Jerusalem, and that Buchenwald itself, tainted for half a century by East Germany’s Cold War interpretation of the camp and struggling to overcome the heroic anti-fascist myths of the Communist era, isn’t particularly interested in a homecoming.

Though unsatisfying as a detective story, “The Lampshade” is a fascinating look at history through a macabre lens. The lampshade is both illuminating and obfuscating, directing light to interesting places and blocking the light from some hidden corners. It may not provide new insight into either the Holocaust or the history of New Orleans, but it raises uncomfortable questions.

Ill Fares the Land

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land is the perfect companion, and foil, to Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion. Where Hedges’ essay is a Jeremiad against the specific ills of contemporary culture, Judt’s is a cerebral assessment of where we took the wrong turn and how we might start to move back onto a path that was started in the years after the Second World War. They are both incensed by the same thing–a political culture dominated by corporate interests and an uncritical belief in the efficacy and naturalness of “free” markets–but Judt’s cooler analysis suggests possibilities where Hedges’ leaves the reader in despair.

Judt tells the history of Anglo-American political economy from the Great Depression to the present, as the story of the rise and fall of Keynesianism and social democracy. In his version, social democracy–in which a regulated market is guided by broad political consensus to provide material comfort for the majority of citizens, while also subsidizing culture (he devotes quite a bit of space to entities like the BBC, PBS, and public-private initiatives to support the arts)–was done in by its success. Over-confident planning created a drab and fettered world for too many–the council flats and public housing of the working class, the conformist suburbs of the middle class–and in the rebellion against conformity, the baby of the public good was tossed out with the dreary bathwater. The ideology of individualism, with the radical economics of the Austrian and Chicago theorists, threw the whole social democratic project into question; and with the fall of Communism, of which social democrats were far too uncritical, it became almost impossible to make a convincing case for the government’s role in building a just society.

Though clearly rooted in the Left, Judt’s analysis owes quite a bit to a particular brand of English conservatism. Echoes of Burke, Oakeshott, and Carlyle run through the book; Judt’s case is that it is the contemporary free-marketeers, not the New Deal and welfare state up to the early 1960s, who should be considered truly radical. The most radical effect of the 1980s turn to free market ideology has been to define the terms of debate such that social democracy has become unthinkable: as he quotes Margaret Thatcher, “there is no alternative” to unregulated markets.

The last two years (really, the last twenty, during which the living standards of the working and middle classes have failed to keep pace with the rise in GDP, and the lot of the poor has actually declined) should suggest that there are alternatives. Judt’s social democratic solution is based not on a bold vision of the future, but on a chastened fear of further economic catastrophe. It’s a very cautious program, focused on preventing future calamity rather than building a Great Society: social democracy ought to be as chastened by its history of failure as the free market ideology.

Judt’s clear, level-headed arguments, with a solid foundation in the conservative (rightly understood) ethical sense undergirding civil society, ought to win adherents looking for a way out of the corporatist dead end. I worry, though, that it is a bit too level-headed, and too lacking in vision. He’s right that the collapse of Communism makes bold visions look suspiciously totalitarian; note how the decidedly center-right Obama administration is tarred as “socialist” for even suggesting a minimal public role in health care, finance, and energy policy. Real Communists (there must be a dozen or so left someplace, perhaps in Cuba; clearly there are none in China anymore) must be scratching their heads at the rhetoric of the Right. Level-headed arguments may convince the academic class, but they don’t mobilize voters.

Some marriage of Hedges’ passion and Judt’s temperance is needed. There was a moment in the 2008 Presidential campaign–perhaps in Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, when he described the failures of the Bush administration and declared that “[w]e are a better country than this”–when it seemed as if a vision of a different future was forming. Alas, that moment seems to have passed; and despite Rahm Emanuel’s exhortations, a good many crises have been wasted without resurrecting a vision. The technocratic solution that Judt offers would certainly be preferable to what has passed for policy in the wake of the latest (but surely not the last) financial meltdown, but without some vigor, and maybe just a touch of brimstone, it is likely to remain a highly reasonable road not taken.

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