Tagged: review

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.

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.

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.

Free Fruit for Young Widows

He made it through the camps. He walks, he breathes, and he was very close to making it out of Europe alive. But they killed him. After the war, we still lost people. They killed what was left of him in the end.

Nathan Englander’s Free Fruit for Young Widows is more parable than story, sketching two acts of brutal self-preservation–one at the end of World War II, one during the Suez Crisis–and the very different reactions of two men. The characters, though, are more fully realized than is typical of a parable, and the result is a haunting story that brings abstract moral arguments down to concrete human terms.

Englander’s story would be memorable in any context, but especially so after a series of New Yorker stories that haven’t lived up to the standards of the magazine. (Was anyone else deeply disappointed by Doctorow’s Edgemont Drive, which was stilted, predictable, and not up to the standards of an undergraduate writing class? Were all the fiction editors on vacation that week?) I hope it’s an idicator of a better summer ahead.

Empire of Illusion

The cost of our empire of illusion is not being paid by the corporate titans. It is being paid in the streets of our inner cities, in former manufacturing town, and in depressed rural enclaves. This cost transcends declining numbers and statistics and speaks the language of human misery and pain.

Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion

Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion is in part an angry screed, in part a Jeremiad lament, and (in small) part a vision of a better America. With a mixture of raw anger and sharp analysis, he covers a wide range of topics–professional wrestling, brutal pornography, the military-industrial-educational complex, the cozy relationship between journalism and power–and finds very little hope in the American landscape. All these topics are linked by the thesis that power in America is weilded less by elected government than by profit-seeking corporations, and that American culture has embraced a collection of illusions to mask this silent coup.

At its best, Empire of Illusion supports its thesis with devastating analysis: the circularity of media leaks that helped the Bush administration make the case for war in Iraq, the impact of globalization on workers in America and abroad that expose the myth of capitalism’s perpetual growth, the way pseudo-events distract the public from the truth. The topics are so wide ranging and tenuously connected, though, that it’s hard to follow the thread of Hedges’ argument through the entire book. What holds the book together more than logic is emotion, the righteous indignation at the blatant lies and distractions that the powerul use to maintain their power. Of course, righteous indignation was one of Aristotle’s virtues, and a little anger is more than called for in the cases Hedges brings to light; it runs the risk, though, of alienating rather than convincing readers who aren’t already in the choir.

The vision of the future that Hedges offers, following the economic and environmental implosions that even the most powerful illusions won’t be able to cover up, is especially grim:

A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits, from Christian demagogues to simpletons like Sarah Palin to loudmouth talk show hosts, whom we naively dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. The elites … will retreat into their sheltered enclaves of privilege and comfort. We will be left bereft, abandoned outside the gates, and at the mercy of the security state.

It’s a vision that isn’t hard to imagine, given the anger and fear that has been churning in some quarters for the last decade. And without rational voices to counter the anger and fear, which have been painfully silent, it’s a frighteningly possible future.

Hedges does not, however, offer a concrete program to thwart such a future, and to reclaim democracy from corporate power. Empire of Illusion closes instead with a short hymn to love. “[N]o tyranny in history has crushed the human capacity for love. And this love–unorganized, irrational, often propelling us to carry out acts of compassion that jeopardize our existence–is deeply subversive to those in power.” And while I think that love is a fine answer to the world’s problems–my heroes tend to be Quakers, Buddhists, and pacifists–I find Hedges’ solution a bit thin after so much dystopia. If a counter thread of examples of the power of love had run through the book–not a maudlin Kumbaya, but the hard work of love in the tradition of Martin Luther King and Mother Jones–I would be more convinced. Instead, I came away from Empire of Illusion feeling a bit more uncertain in the future than I did going in.

The Slaves’ War

They stole away on a Sunday night . . . with her mother and another pair of slaves, and made the distance, more than fifty miles, to Fredericksburg, in fourteen hours, and Mr. Ballton declares they were not tired because they had something to walk for.

The Slaves’ War, Andrew Ward

Inspired by a series of posts by Ta-Nehisi Coates on The Atlantic Magazine’s web site, I’ve been trying to fill out my understanding of the Civil War this past month. I was a Civil War buff as a kid, and had the great good fortune of spending a summer moving from Maine to Kansas with my family, visiting as many Civil War battle fields along the way as we could. In graduate school I was exposed to some Civil War history–studies of Quaker and Methodist reactions to the war, quantitative histories of the economics of slavery, ante-bellum splits within Baptist churches over the morality of slavery. Until reading Andrew Ward’s book, though, I was largely ignorant of the people whose lives were most altered by the war.

Ward relies on interviews and written accounts of former slaves, many gathered through the WPA in the 1930s. Coates discusses the three sides of the war: Secessionists seeking to maintain slavery, Unionists seeking to maintain the Union, and slaves fighting for freedom. The voices in this collection represent what may be a fourth side: most of the accounts are from people who were unable to leave slavery during the war, who didn’t enlist in the Union army, and who were in many ways caught in the middle of great events over which they had very little control. There is a great deal of ambivalence in their stories: hopeful that the Union would prevail and free them, fearful that the war would make things worse on the plantations, sometimes personally loyal to masters and suspicious of the Northerners who cut a bloody path across the South, and finally bitter that liberty was not the prelude to equality that many had hoped for.

A complex portrait of slavery arises from the accounts Ward gathers. We hear the voices of field slaves, who are viciously worked on the plantations; slaves from the manor houses who have internalized the mores and habits of aristocracy; and urban slaves who have a strange and attenuated sort of liberty. The “Peculiar Institution” appears to be a sort of distributed totalitarianism, with its subjects kept in ignorance of the world around them, and great variation from owner to owner, and from year to year, in how the slaves’ daily lives are managed. It is also a system riven with internal contradictions: enforcing an ideology of white supremacy required tactics that implicitly recognized the slaves’ human potential, like prohibitions on literacy and communication.

The slaves’ accounts of the cruelties of slavery–not only the physical violence, but the merciless breaking up of families, the soul-crushing restrictions on news and travel, the constant fear and ignorance–are truly horrible. But what is also striking in these stories is the resolve that the slaves exhibit: they aren’t mere victims, but approach their lives with humor, wisdom, and candor.

Ward’s account of their lives after slavery is as harrowing as their lives before and during the war. Ward calls the Civil War “the Second American Revolution,” which surely it was: the cynical compromises that allowed the United States to be half free, half slave, came crashing down at Appomattox Courthouse. But it was an imperfect revolution, resulting in nominal liberty but not equality for the four million people freed by the war’s end. De facto re-enslavement was the experience of far too many freedmen, who were liberated with no attempt at reparation or justice. Coates’ “three sides” argument comes into stark relief in the last chapters of “The Slaves’ War”: the Secessionists lost, the Union was restored, and a shabby sort of freedom indeed was left in the wake of the war. This is a failure–a failure of planning, of vision, of justice–whose effects we suffer still, a century and a half after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter.

Apparition and Late Fictions


Some days on his walk Harold Keehn thought about his wives. Some days it was caskets. Others it was the heartbreaking beauty of the natural world such as he had come to know it.

Apparition and Late Fictions by Thomas Lynch

These four elegiacal stories and one novella are about death, regret, death, loneliness, and death. Set largely in rural Michigan, and peopled by characters who have suffered loss or care for those who have, they have a slow and solemn pace. Lynch tends toward the long line, the slow and stately sentence, amplifying the adagio tempo.

Thomas Lynch is, not surprisingly, a funeral director by day; two of the stories–”Hunter’s Moon” and “Bloodsport”–are very explicitly about the business of burying, with much rumination about the changes in casket design over the last quarter century and the work of laying out a body for viewing and burial. And the stories that aren’t about funeral directors or casket salesmen have the disposition of remains as a key touchstone: a son takes his father’s ashes on a fishing trip, and a poet’s widow reflects on a stillbirth and how to care for her husband’s literary reputation. Though the novella, “Apparition,” isn’t so clearly about death, it is very much about loss, following a young pastoral assistant’s transformation from minister to self-help guru by way of infidelity and the collapse of his marriage.

Lynch works very successfully with time in these stories, moving deftly between the present and the past. The present action is largely within the characters’ heads; the real action occurs in the past, and in the way the past becomes reshaped in reflection. The stories unfold slowly and gracefully, and resolve with a sense of acceptance, if sometimes tinged with resignation. These are very grown-up stories, not unlike Thomas Williams’ Leah New Hampshire or William Kittredge’s collections, and put the reader in a reflective mood.

Midnight in Dostoevsky

I placed the book on a table and opened it and then leaned down into the splayed pages, reading and breathing. We seemed to assimilate each other, the characters and I, and when I raised my head I had to tell myself where I was.

Don DeLillo’s Midnight in Dostoevsky is a nervous parable of obsession, more Kafka than Dostoevsky in its unease. It follows two college students in their efforts to construct a narrative around Ilgauskus, their mysterious Logic professor, and a nameless old man they’ve seen on winter walks around town. They are interested in building a consistent story, filled with details, that links the old man and the professor, and are resistent to outside details that threaten their crystalline tale. The world and its facts are a threat to their constructed system of context and meaning.

Jill Lepore’s essay on the politics of death, and the unfortunate convergence of medical technology, overheated rhetoric about Nazis, and the medicalization of life’s inevitable end, was also a highlight of the November 30 2009 New Yorker. But DeLillo’s anxious fable is the piece that sticks with me.

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