Independence Day by Richard Ford

My guess is that Real Estate has some strong (if also mixed) significance to a lot of Americans, particularly those around my age, who grew up roughly concurrent with the housing bubble, or those from one of the parts of the country that was changed most by the explosive development.

Both of my parents' have worked at least tangential to the real estate industry. On Sundays, we used to visit model homes just for fun, critiquing the interior design choices and picking out rooms. (I would still enjoy it if my more urban and environmentally-minded partner didn't find tract housing sort of reprehensible.) I'm at a point in my life now where home ownership is, for the first time, a possibility.

So I'm well-poised to find a story about a real-estate agent pretty compelling.

Independence Day is the second in a series of three novels about Frank Bascombe, a one-time sportswriter, now real-estate agent in the fictional Haddam, New Jersey. Frank is divorced, with two children: a troubled teenage son and a younger daughter. Another son died long before the events of this novel. He's divorced, and his wife has remarried, though he lives alone. He's in the middle of what he calls The Existence Period, a sort of float-with-the-tide attitude characterized by a willful avoidance of his own emotional needs.

Over several days leading up to the fourth of July, Frank shows some homes to a couple from Vermont, checks in on a rental property of his own, visits his girlfriend, and then picks up his son for a road trip to the basketball and baseball halls of fame. And that is, basically, the plot.

Suburban middle class white life is a well worn subject of fiction, and it tends to follow a few predictable paths. The first and most obvious is to use the 'burbs as a subject for satire, an object with which to poke fun at our materialism, small-mindedness, cultural sterility, and conformity.

The second is some ways the first's opposite: to treat domesticity as deeply meaningful, and elevate the sorts of everyday activities of most of our lives (cf. Toni Morrison's directive to "mystify the familiar"). I'm sure you know what I'm talking about here--stories where backyard trees will glisten with dew and the wind will billow sheets on the clothesline. Much will be implied.

But Independence Day charts a middle path, and tries to paint everyday life neither larger nor smaller than it actually is. It doesn't denigrate our boring lives, but it also doesn't pretend as though they're more meaningful than they are. This is one of things I found most admirable and also impressive about the book. Frank's life is modest and a little alienated, and the book doesn't treat modesty as a either a sin or a virtue.

It does this on the sentence level. Where another writer might be ironic or poetic, Ford is chatty, almost rambling. Which isn't to say that the writing is plain. The sentences are fabulous. It's maybe overly aphoristic, but the advice and adages are particular to the character, and you get into the rhythm so that it doesn't matter much. Here's a representative sample taken more-or-less at random:

"My own view is that the realty dreads (which is what the Markhams have, pure and simple) originate not in actual house buying, which could just as easily be one of life's most hopeful optional experiences; or even in the fear of losing money, which is not unique to realty; but in the cold, unwelcome, built-in-America realization that we're just like the other shmo, wishing his wishes, lusting his stunted lusts, quaking over his idiot frights and fantasies, all of us popped out from the same unchinkable mold. And as we come nearer the moment of closing--when the deal's sealed and written down in a book in the courthouse--what we sense is that we're being tucked even deeper, more anonymously, into the weave of culture, and it's even less likely we'll make it to Kitzbuhel. What we all want, of course, is all out best options left open as long a possible; we want not to have taken any obvious turns, but also not to have misread the correct turn the way some other boy-o would."

I should just let that stand on its own. But notice not only the content (which seems pretty solid to me), but also how long and careful those sentences are. In his Paris Review interview from around the time Independence Day was published, Ford described his writing like this,

"Sometimes I’ll write a sentence that sets up an opportunity for say, a direct object or predicate adjective and I won’t have a clue what the word is except that I know what I don’t want—the conventional word: the night grew dark. I don’t want dark. I might, though, want a word that has four syllables and a long a sound in it. Maybe it’ll mean dark, or maybe it’ll take a new direction. I’ll have some kind of inchoate metrical model in my mind." 

And I think you can see that approach in the quoted section above. It's careful but also casual and approachable. It stays interesting by introducing variation to the structural level, rather than the word-choice level.

I really like it.

This is an earnest book. It's only occasionally ironic. I can see a few things about Frank that he can't see about himself, but not many. The book and character are good-faith representations.

Towards the very end of the book, Frank begins to move towards permanence. He even predicts an upcoming "Permanence Period" to mirror his Existence Period.

"...that long, stretching-out time when my dreams would have mystery like any ordinary person's; when whatever I do or say, who I marry, how my kids turn out, becomes what the world -- if it makes note at all -- knows of me."

But I don't know if I think he will change much. He's haunted by the death of his son. He still seems to love his ex-wife. His son (the living one), who has plans to come and stay with Frank in Haddam, may shake him out of his ego and funk, if only out of necessity, but who knows.

There is, at least, a third book where I could find out.

Winter Morning Walks by Ted Kooser - B+

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan - C+ 

Aslan's first book is one of my favorite non-fiction works. But the organizing insight here, that the two things we know about the historical Jesus are that he was Jewish and that he was crucified (and therefore executed for political reasons), can't sustain interest for a whole book, and is probably a little stale to a lot of interested readers anyway.

One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling by Hanan Al-Shaykh - C+

Mythological / fairy-tale / oral-story type writing. Not my style.

Thirst by Mary Oliver - C

Honestly, sometimes I love Oliver to death, but this book was her at her worst, her most cloying and saccharine. Some of these poems were like bad parodies of an Oliver poem. 

Given Sugar, Given Salt by Jane Hirshfield - A

Come, Thief by Jane Hirshfield - A

Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx - B

The more famous stories in this collection (Half Skinned Steer and The Mud Below) didn't impress me too much, and I was really disappointed by Brokeback Mountain, the movie version of which is probably in my top 15. But even those three were solid enough, and some of the others--A Lonely Coast, in particular--were great.

Tampa by Alissa Nutting - B-

Super gross, but very readable.

Seating Arrangements by Maggie Shipstead - A-

Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Bachelor - B+

The content in this book is too life changing. He does an admirable job of translating the Eastern jargon and claptrap of Buddhism for a secular, Western audience, making a case for ejecting the supernatural elements of the religion and embracing the Dharma practice alone. But the practice is too real and scary and hard soooo...

The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch - A

Second time reading this. Still great! 

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

It's not easy to separate a thing from its hype, from its physical and cultural packaging. Pour cheap wine into a fancy bottle and slap on a hefty price tag? Sommeliers swoon. Switch the labels on Pepsi and Coke? Even experts can't tell the difference. Tell an art critic that some scribbles by an orangutan are the work of an up-and-coming abstract painter? She'll praise the sophistication of the line work.

The above makes some people uneasy. They think it means that we're all shallow liars, eager to impress or fit in. But to me it only means that our sensory and aesthetic experiences are more broad than we imagine. We are actually tasting the label on a bottle of wine and the story of its cultivation as much as we are tasting its ingredients. When we drink a Coca-Cola, part of that taste--not just the experience of drinking it, but also the actual taste--comes from a hundred years of advertising and Americana.  Our appreciation of a work of art is informed by the story of Art, and the story of particular artists.

Which is all to say that it's hard to know when this book, which is sometimes too long and occasionally kind of a mess, is genuinely great, and when as a reader I'm only sort of projecting greatness onto it through the filter of its (and its author's) cultural status.

Well, who cares? "Authenticity" is a red herring. There are no bad reasons for enjoying something. And I really, really enjoyed this book. As in, really really. As in, reference-to-the-title-of-this-blog enjoyed it.

The plot of the novel, so much as it has one, is made up of three largely separate threads:

1. The Enfield Tennis Academy, an ultra-elite school/camp that prepares tennis prodigies for The Show (professional play). ETA was founded by James O. Incandenza, ex-optics-expert-and-avant-garde-filmmaker whose children, esp the middle child Hal, constitute the narrative focus of these sections. 
2. The Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, a halfway house in Boston. The newly-recovering live-in staff-member Don Gately and the veiled Joelle van Dyne anchor these sections. 
3. Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents, a wheel-chaired Quebecois separatist/terrorist group, who are searching for a copy of Infinite Jest (aka "The Entertainment," or the samidzat), a fatal art film by J.O. Incandenza which is so entertaining that it turns viewers brains to a kind of mush as they watch it repeatedly to the exclusion of other activities. 

Chronology is divided into "Subsidized Time," which is exactly what it sounds like (e.g., The Year of the Whopper, The Year of the Trial-Sized Dove Bar, etc), and seems to me mostly a clever way for DFW to keep the story feeling both vaguely contemporary and a-historical.

The events take place in a combined superstate of America, Mexico and Canada called the Organization of North American Nations, or O.N.A.N. While reading, I wrote off the name as a gag, and a sort of childish one, but now I'm realizing that it may be more important than I had noticed from the weeds, that there is something masturbatory not just about the at-least-semi-self-indulgent book itself, but also about the characters, who are moved by strong emotional forces that simulate connection but who are ultimately isolated, and about the world too, which is built on a foundation of pleasure and rote style without substance.

The book is big. 1079 pages. Tall and extremely dense pages. Paragraphs and even sentences that go on for pages without break. Medical, mechanical, mathematical jargon. 92 pages of endnotes, some of which are as long as a serious short story.

And its difficult. Or difficult-ish, anyway.

Reading IJ is like training for a marathon; its a lifestyle choice. And some significant part of the experience is contained in its size and in its difficulty. While it would probably be fairly easy to curate the course of a marathon to include only the best and most beautiful and most interesting stretches, doing so kind of defeats the purpose. You want not only to run the marathon, you want to have run it, you want to be a person who is capable of running it. IJ is like that at least a little bit. Part of the reason people read this book is to prove to themselves that they could, and to become the kind of person who has read it.

But so, the content.

It's a book about addiction and recovery, as you would guess. It's a book about entertainment, and parents and their children, and greatness and mediocrity. It's about the things to which we devote ourselves. And in a big way it's about loneliness. Not just because so many characters are depressed, attempt or commit (or just imagine) suicide. There's something lonely about its zany structure, too. It's a book about existing in a busy, exciting, at times overwhelming sensory experience, surrounded by the sounds and images of people, and feeling alone. And though the stories are intertwined in lateral, out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye ways, and though they gain momentum in the final third and seem to be moving towards a convergence... they never actually meet in the middle. The book ends abruptly, a blank spot on the map where the roads ought to make an intersection.

Something else worth saying about its structure: for all its gimmicks and winking, the book is actually fairly friendly for long stretches at a time. Most of the times when I found myself frustrated and ready to skim, a new section would begin that I couldn't help but read. And the best sections of this book are some of the best literature I've ever read, full stop. Perfectly crafted on the sentence-level and dripping with charity and understanding towards others.

I'll read this again, 4 sure.
 
I don't know if it's worth saying anything about the Writer. The autobiographical elements of the novel are all over the place (drug addiction, tennis, etymology, genius, depression, suicide). But its hard to know where the appropriate or helpful line is there. So, let's do two things. First, it's worth mentioning the Writer if just in regards to the creation of the thing, how impressive it is, not just for its size but also for its power and vivacity and ambition. There's no understating the energy and time and obsession and love required to make a thing like this. It's humbling and inspiring and sort of gives you a good feeling about what humans can do in the way that only serious art and lit can.

Second, here's a line from a poem Mary Karr,--memoirist, poet, and one-time-girlfriend of DFW--wrote a year after his suicide:

"I just wanted to say ha-ha, despite
           your best efforts you are every second
alive in a hard-gnawing way for all who breathed you deeply in,
     each set of lungs, those rosy implanted wings, pink balloons.
          We sigh you out into air and watch you rise like rain."

-------
Also: I like making graphs, so here's a little behind-the-scenes magic for the superfans.

Non-Fiction Auiobooks

Since I last updated, I've been making my way slowly through something big. I think I should be done in the next month or so, and will have a long update then.

In the meantime, I've been listening to some nonfiction audiobooks. All three are about, in some way, infiltrating private groups of passionate people. My thoughts:

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright

There's something inherently interesting about liminal belief systems, those groups in the fuzzy border between cultural status as a "cult" and as an established "religion." It's part of the reason for all my fascination with Mormonism. After all, even the mountains of our religious landscape today must have begun more modestly, and who's to say that some weird contemporary niche group won't take hold and resonate more broadly going forward? Most religious practices and histories can sounds strange to outsiders.

All that said, Scientology is bonkers.

I went into this without much knowledge about the organization outside of that South Park sketch, but basically expecting to leave with some sympathy for it. That's what usually happens when you get to know something better. Not so here, not even with Wright's even-handed approach. There's just no way out of the fact that Scientology as an organization is abusive, myopic, aggressive, and greedy, that L. Ron Hubbard was a conman and David Miscavage is borderline psychopath.

Very great book, though!

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court by Jeffrey Toobin

The rarefied and secretive culture of Supreme Court, not to mention its proximity to and influence on our lives, makes for a good book subject. And Jeffrey Toobin is a perfect non-fiction writer: clear, entertaining, brief. I've gone to his New Yorker summaries every time the Supreme Court has done anything newsworthy over the last couple years.

This book is a history of the Court in very recent history, going back only 30 years or so. It chronicles the changes in the court, mostly making a case that its become increasingly partisan, and even more particularly increasingly conservative. He was, himself, more partisan than I had expected, and it took me a while to get used to it. But once you settle into his perspective, the book is incredibly readable.

The profiles of the individual judges alone are worth the effort.

I'm not sure how much of a better understanding I have of the political machinations behind the Court's appointments, but I have a better sense of the chronology. And I have a favorite Justice!

The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean

What a beautiful little book, almost ruined by a terrible audio book narrator.The author follows one particular Orchid enthusiast in south Florida who is on trial for stealing plant material from protected swampland, and uses his story as a anchor onto which she ties chapters about the history of orchid cultivation and crime, the biology of the plants, the story of the region's ingenious peoples,  etc etc. It's a story about passion and obsession, and the narrator commits the only cardinal sin in literature: she is arch and judgmental and condescends towards her subjects.

It's a real shame, because the words don't seem to really be written this way. They're great words! I remember in particular, Susan Orlean described the air around the swamp as thick and drapey like wet velvet curtains. What a baller metaphor! It's not a joke or a complaint, just a good sensory description. But the narrator hams up her delivery like a community theater actor describing having eaten a bug. "The air was THICK and DRAPEY like WET VELVET. BLEECH!" She didn't really say "bleech," but still.

Annoyed But Still Pretty Positive Book Reviews

The first half of this memoir about being cyber-harassed is terrifying and unputdownable. Then it gets boring. Lasdun is a professional fiction writer, and he writes like someone who knows his way around a sentence. Which... is just not super helpful for a tense thriller about feeling unsafe and helpless? And then at the end he takes a trip to Israel?

I love me some Agatha Christie. This is a good one. What is there to say? You know if you want to read this kind of book. I give it Four Agathas up out of five.

Super-great feminist sci-fi. If I hadn't gone to a very religious middle school I would've half-read it like ten years ago for class and never even appreciated how very good it is.

Strout wrote one of my all-time favorite books, Olive Kitteridge. This book is about two brothers who are lawyers from Maine, and their sad nephew accidentally commits a hate crime against Somali immigrants during Ramadan. It's not as good as Kitteridge, but that's just because it's a novel (whereas Kitteridge was a series of connected stories), and all novels are sloppy and imperfect compared to short stories. But it's still very, very good, and its pretty cool that Strout tackled subject matter that was probably outside her comfort zone.

What a weird book! A sort of morality tale slash coming of age story slash lives of the rich and famous episode. Some people like this better that The Great Gatsby, which is... I mean, who cares obviously, and this book is fine, but it's also kind of all over the place. It feels like an artifact to me, more than anything else. It feels like it's not for me.

Far From The Tree

Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon

"Having always imagined myself in a fairly slim minority, I suddenly saw that I was in a vast company. Difference unites us. While each of [the experiences described in the book] can isolate those who are affected, together they compose an aggregate of millions whose struggles connect them profoundly. The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state."

In Far From The Tree, Andrew Solomon introduces the  concept of "horizontal" identities. These are differentiated from "vertical" identities, or those elements of your identity that you share with your parents, such as being black or having a propensity towards sports or music. A horizontal identity is one that you don't share with your parents, but which you do share with peers, such as being gay. Where vertical identities are encouraged and reinforced, horizontal identities are often resisted, and can cause pain, difficulty and shame for parents and children both.

Solomon is a gay man. In what began as an attempt to understand his parents' experience, he spent 10 years researching and interviewing for this book about the tough business of parenting children who are unlike you. His goal is general exploration, but he often also has a more particular agenda: to shift his and the readers' conversation around certain circumstances from disability or disadvantage to identity politics. He focuses on nine kinds of children: those who are deaf, those who have down's syndrome, autism, or other disabilities, those who are prodigies, schizophrenics, criminals, transgender, or are born of rape.

The YouTube videos embedded are of particular subjects of the book, or Solomon's own thoughts about its themes. I think they're worth watching.

Although he's currently a PhD Candidate in Psychology, Solomon admits early on: "I have relied primarily on anecdotes, because numbers imply trends, while stories acknowledge chaos." In this way, this is almost the inverse of a science book, in which trends and statistics tell a story flavored by occasional personal anecdotes. Solomon instead relies on personal stories to make up the bulk of his (very bulky!) book, and these are only peppered with the occasional statistic or explanatory study.

For this reason, I was afraid the book would be my nightmare: a long parade of cherry-picked stories and quotes meant to present a unified, celebratory experience of finding meaning in difficulty. But Solomon was obviously committed to representing the full breadth of experiences within each topic, and the result reveals the full humanity of his subjects.

That is, we see that deaf people are not just one way, are not a bloc or type. They don't have just one feeling about their deafness or about deaf culture. They are people. Their experience is as variable as any non-deaf person. This is obvious in the abstract, but I don't know how real it feels to us most of the time, and reading about that variability is illuminating.

The book is about so many things. It's a sad book, obviously. The chapters about schizophrenia and rape are almost unreadably sad. It's also--and also obviously--about the meaning and strength that can come from adversity and sadness. It's about parents generally, but mothers in particular, as caregivers and activists and amateur scientists. It’s a book about illness, stigma, and identity.

It’s a book about politics, but it’s not a political book exactly. It’s too personal for that kind of attribution. Abortion is a popular topic, as genetic testing allows parents to abort fetuses who would otherwise have down’s syndrome or dwarfism. Peter Singer’s work is referenced often.  It just touches these kinds of things lightly.

Mostly it’s a book about empathy. It’s dense with the stuff. It challenges the reader to confront the boundaries of  her empathy and then holds her hand as she moves forward from there.

On a personal note, the chapter that was most revelatory to me was the one that focused on transgender individuals. I've never known a transgender person. And although I'm a male with a pretty strong helping of traditionally feminine qualities that I really like about myself, it's hard for me to imagine the desire to actually, physically be another gender. Like any good liberal, I've fully supported the rights of people to do whatever they like without harming someone else, but the shameful truth is that I've found transgenderism as an idea... kind of icky and sort of indulgent. But the heart-breaking, human stories of young men and women struggling with their gender included in this book are a strong antidote for that kind of resistance.

One of the best non-fiction books I’ve read in a long time.

"Children with horizontal identities alter your self painfully; they also illuminate it. They are receptacles for rage and joy — even for salvation. When we love them, we achieve above all else the rapture of privileging what exists over what we have merely imagined."

Short Stories

  

I'm not sure why short stories aren't more popular. Sometimes I think that the popularity of a book is a function of how easy it is to talk about that book. Non-fiction (esp. nonfiction about politics, pop-psychology, etc) is very easy to talk about. Novels can be easy too. You can summarize a novel plot-wise, without ever appealing to its themes or emotional content. It's like a movie. Just, The book was about this guy in a situation, and it was good! 

But if a novel is like a movie, a short story collection is not like a television series. There isn't an overall plot or set of characters. A collection is made up of discrete elements, which makes them hard to talk about in aggregate. Unless you want to get into the awkward territory of emotional resonance (and don't do that)(Seriously. There is nothing more awkward than people talking IRL about the really individual and vague emotional responses they have to art), you're limited to, Did you like this story? How about this one? Yes, it was very good, wasn't it?

It may also be the (not totally unfair) sense that contemporary short fiction mostly trades in a narrow band of unhappy subjects borrowed from the tradition of Raymond Carver et al.: quietly desperate people having extramarital affairs or caring for sick loved ones or just sitting at kitchen tables becoming alcoholics. 

Not all stories are actually like that, of course. Take Jim Shepard's Like You'd Understand, Anyway. Shepard is famous for his careful and thorough research. Most of his stories are historical in one way or another. The first story in this collection is about three brothers at the failure of Chernobyl. Another is about a sentry at Hadrian's Wall. They are stories deeply concerned with context and with jobs or work, and so on their surface miles away from small interpersonal dramas that might seem to typify the medium.

And they do have lots of energy! Each piece has a clear hook, and there's a certain fun in absorbing the context and trivia of each new setting. But the three stories that I think were best were those closest in history and space to here and now. One is about a man who has set up an appointment for a vasectomy without telling his wife. One is about a boy whose younger brother is suffering from mental health problems. One is about a fatherless high school football player. As much fun as it was to read the wilder pieces about Russian Cosmonauts or Nazi Yeti-Hunters (really), it was these three smaller-scale narratives that floored me. Shepard is--for me--at his strongest when he's at his most quotidian. 

Because stories are more like poetry. Their value comes from moments, these little shinning diamonds of language and perception that just kind of jump out at you and elevate everyday experience. Or maybe that makes stories more like jokes. They take those secret, half-formed thoughts and experiences you have somewhere in the back of your mind and bring clarity to them in a way that just knocks you on your ass. 

The reigning queen of the quotidian is Alice Munro. I had very nice things to say about Runaway, and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is similarly great. Her stories are very long, and all kind of meander, but she somehow manages to keep them feeling tight by the end. It may have something to do with the cleanness of her writing on the sentence level, or it may be how well she manipulates time. I'm honestly not sure how she does what she does. But finishing a 40 page Munro story often feels like finishing a short novel. 

I've seen Robin Black, whose first collection is the awesomely-named If I Loved You I Would Tell You This, compared to Munro. And at Black's best, I can almost see it. But this collection was much more uneven than anything by Munro. For all Munro's meandering, her stories usually have a mysterious sort of gravity that keeps the elements fitting together cleanly. Black's little observations about everyday life seem sometimes like diversions rather than essential drivers of story. Black's stories are looser, sloppier if I were being a jerk about it. 

Still, some of the pieces are very good, and nearly all have at least one moment of real emotional weight. I think about the first story, in which the protagonist--a father whose teen-aged daughter was blinded as a child by an exploding aerosol paint can (and who is having an affair)(of course)--reveals that he had found the boy with whom she had been playing when the accident happened, picked him up and started to shake him as hard as he could. "Shake it harder, Lila. Shake it harder. Is that what you told her? Is it?" 

Short stories!

The Righteous Mind and A Thousand Acres

Most of my short reviews start, in my head, as long ones. Thousand-plus-word things. I often take hundreds of words of notes on the books I read without ever turning them into anything resembling a coherent argument about the work... because good sentences are easy, but smart structure takes time and attention. And like most people with a full time job and a part time drinking problem, I only have so many hours in a day to devote to writing and reading, and sometimes (often times!) other books or writing projects take my attention before I can organize my thoughts about the book I've just finished.

Here are some sort reviews that deserve to be much, much longer!

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

I've been a fan of Haidt's research for a while, and written about it elsewhere. The basic argument of the first two-thirds of this book is... 1.) Moral reasoning is a post-hoc process. Intuitions come first, reasoning second. We often circle around sacred, social values and then share post-hoc "reasons" why we are right. Haidt introduces the image of our minds as a small rational rider on a large intuitional elephant.

2.) Morality can be described more broadly than in terms of Fairness and Harm. His research has suggested that those who identify as conservative tend to have a broader palate of morality than those who identify as Liberal, considering not only Harm and Fairness (which all Westerners think of as highly important, regardless of politics), but also Purity, Authority, and Loyalty as moral considerations.You can take Hiadt's surveys at YourMorals.org.

And 3.) Humans are really groupish and we tie our moral thinking to the groups in which we belong.

These ideas are basically valuable as a vehicle for appreciating the biases in your own moral stances, and trying to overcome the Manichean grossness of modern political discourse, or more broadly for just understanding people unlike yourself, which I think is one of  the (the very?) highest aims a person can take.

The last section of the book talks about religion, and is sort of a response to who he calls "New Atheists," like my boy Sam Harris. I wish I had the energy to write down my thoughts about this. Basically: Haidt's talks about "beliefs" in a context of behaviors and social groups, where all of these elements influence one another. It seems much richer and more complete to me than the way thinkers like Harris usually choose to talk about beliefs (though I hope they wouldn't disagree with the conceptual model). But I like Harris because I think of him as more understanding of religious conviction than thinkers like Dawkins and Hitchens (boo!), and I think his work just focuses on a particular relationship within the kind of model Haidt describes rather than necessarily rejecting it. Both writers are either misunderstanding each other, or I'm misunderstanding both.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in politics, in science, in the differences between conservatives and progressives, in understanding people unlike themselves. The writing is good and the structure is so elegant. Just read it!

Here's a highly-condensed version of Chapter 12, on politics and polarization.

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

This novel is a retelling of King Lear in semi-contemporary, rural America. I don't know that I would've recognized that if it weren't written on the back cover.

It's a story about a farmer who turns over ownership and management of his farm to his three daughters and their husbands. He begins to go senile shortly thereafter, and as the family unwinds all sorts of secrets surface.

Some of the middle parts are occasionally clunky, particularly with some of the major "twists." But at its best the character writing is incredible. I started to mark the best lines, thinking I would lay a few of them down for you here, but if I included all of the exceptional sentences, there'd be more words in this single review than exist in total on my blog.


Letter to a Christian Nation  by Sam Harris

Somehow, this short book was available on Youtube. Nothing surprising! Same old Sam Harris--good stuff!

The Descendants by Kari Heart Hemmings

The Descendants is a book about a wealthy man in Hawaii--Matt King--who, after the hospitalization of his wife, must take care of his two semi-estranged daughters. As his wife takes a turn for the worse, they travel around the island, delivering the bad news to friends and family members. Later, he confronts his wife's lover. Alexander Payne made a movie out of the story starring George Clooney.

When I was in college (that's right--COLLEGE), I took a Post-Colonial Literature course. It was one of the best, and most difficult courses I took. In addition to several amazing novels, we read a fair amount of "Theory," like Edward Said and Hommi Babba, and (at least when I'm paying attention) it still effects the way I see media.

Tangential to the family drama, The Descendants is hiding a second story--a story about Matt King's looming decision regarding a large piece of land he's inherited. You see, he's the descendant (!!!) of a white missionary and Hawaiian princess, and as a result his family is one of the largest land-owners in the state. He describes his situation at one point like this: "We sit back and watch as the past unfurls millions into our laps." I picked up the book hoping that it would provide more depth to the identity and colonial conflicts of this second story than the movie did.

Matt and his daughters are phenotypically white. They don't speak the local pidgin. Although technically the descendant of Hawaiian royalty, he has no real love for its history, and admits that he likes the strip malls and condominiums more than the Hawaiian towns they are replacing.

But outside of a few sprinkled lines, Hemmings doesn't take this story as seriously as the first. There's no shame in that, necessarily;  I'd prefer to read a perfectly crafted domestic drama (e.g., Revolutionary Road, The Corrections) over some abstract exploration of identity politics any day.  Unfortunately, Hemming's insights into the minds of her characters didn't hit home for me. Her writing is sparse and good enough, but there were maybe only one or two occasions when I had that big, transcendental feeling of "Yes! That is how it feels to be a person!" that good interior writing can bring.

It may be that I've been reading short stories so much that I'm a little impatient with the relative looseness of a novel, but.

So, anyway, the movie was better!

The Book of Tea & others

The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzō

Written for a Western audience in 1906, The Book of Tea tries to explain the importance of tea in Japan, from a perspective of its history, philosophy, and ceremony. Kakuzo's writing is beautiful and clear and surprisingly political. His frustrations with the West are full-throated (if a little bit beside the point). He has interesting things to say about East/West cultural differences, about Taoism and Zen, about art and more particularly about living a life that is itself artful. I started this on a whim--while at an amazing tea shop near where I live where I buy loose leaf tea in bulk--but it's surprisingly absorbing. 

I'm far enough away from college that I'm starting to phase out some of my undergraduate habits. I almost never stay up past 10pm, even on weekends. I don't have time to play video games as much as I did as a student. 

And sometimes I'll have tea after work instead of a beer. It fills a lot of the same needs: it's a fussy, ancient ceremony meant to be enjoyed slowly; there are a range of flavors and styles to master and appreciate; I can be a big snob about it. 

Specialty drink-ware is a plus. 

Anyway, this book in very short and very good. There's a very nice-looking .pdf file available, if you're interested. Great for reading on your tablet.

The Leaf and the Cloud by Mary Oliver 

This is a book-length poem, organized into seven long sections. 

Good art, I think, is often able to come right up to the line of sentimentality without crossing over. Oliver's work is deeply concerned with nature, with the beauty of it. A lot of poetry is shares the subject, and a lot of it is very bad! But Oliver is as good as it gets for that genre. Of the seven sections, one spills over into sentimentality, two are ordinary, and two are absolutely breathtaking. Here's "Flare," and "Gravel," the poem's strongest sections. 

If you can't be bothered to click, here's a highlight:

It is our nature not only to see
that the world is beautiful
but to stand in the dark, under the stars,
or at noon, in the rainfall of light,
frenzied,wringing our hands,
half-mad, saying over and over:
what does it mean, that the world is beautiful—
what does it mean?

The Discomfort Zone by Jonathan Franzen

I like Franzen for the same reason that people seem to find him personally off-putting: his misanthropy, his pretension, his cocktail of arrogance and self-loathing. These personal essays are uneven, but the best ones are very good. "House for Sale," is about putting up the old family house after the death of his last parent, and it comes closest to the painful (but brilliant) familial intimacy of his fiction. "Two Ponies" (printed originally as "Comfort Zone" here), about Peanuts creator Charles Schultz, and "My Bird Problem," about Franzen's obsession with birding are the collection's other highlights. 

Joseph Smith and Goon Squad

For the second year in a row, I've somehow overwhelmingly read books written by men. I'm not sure why. My guess is that it's partly a function of the subtle ways in which our culture gets slightly more excited about male writers than female writers (the male "genius" archetype), and I am pretty deeply vulnerable to hype. Also, it may be that as an aspiring writer, when I read a book I look to identify with its creator, and so seek out fellow dudes. In any case, I'm going to try and keep things a little more even this year. So, here we go ladies!

No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith by Fawn M. Brodie

I've mentioned in an earlier post how much I love Mormonism, and I've been meaning to read a good book about Mormon history for awhile. Brodie's biography of Smith is considered a classic, and its easy to see why. The writing is florid (sometimes too florid), and the narrative is amazingly neutral. I really recommend this to anyone who's interested in the topic. Even just reading through a few random chapters would be worthwhile.

I had originally intended to use this opportunity to write a long-ish thingy about religious conviction and experience, and about modern day Mormon culture and the ways in which religions seem to change over time. But are you even kidding me? Do you know how long that would take? Its the weekend! Let's all just go outside and go for a walk. I know it's pretty cold right now, but it's a refreshing sort of cold, you know? Let's try that Greek restaurant you always walk by on the way home that you've heard is great even though it looks kind of run down.  Lets have a beer and catch up on our Netflix. Have you seen Breaking Bad yet? I'll watch it again from the beginning if you're down, I really will.

A Visit From the Good Squad by Jennifer Egan

Holy moly. Just wowza, this book! Amazing!

Okay, just... give me a second, because this is a hard one to describe. It's a novel written as a series of stories, but they're all deeply interconnected, involving the same large cast of characters over the course of several decades, non-chronologically. Some are in first person, some in third (one in second!). One chapter is written as a magazine profile--and pretty bald-faced parody of David Foster Wallace--one chapter is literally a PowerPoint presentation. One takes place in the near future and is populated by an omnipresent form of communicating called "T's" (essentially texts) like th blu nyt, th stRs u cant c, th hum tht nevr gOs awy.

Will Blythe's appropriately dizzying summary of the plot over at NYTimes can't be beat:

"The book starts with Sasha, a kleptomaniac, who works for Bennie, a record executive, who is a protégé of Lou who seduced Jocelyn who was loved by Scotty who played guitar for the Flaming Dildos, a San Francisco punk band for which Bennie once played bass guitar (none too well), before marrying Stephanie who is charged with trying to resurrect the career of the bloated rock legend Bosco who grants the sole rights for covering his farewell “suicide tour” to Stephanie’s brother, Jules Jones, a celebrity journalist who attempted to rape the starlet Kitty Jackson, who one day will be forced to take a job from Stephanie’s publicity mentor, La Doll, who is trying to soften the image of a genocidal tyrant because her career collapsed in spectacular fashion around the same time that Sasha in the years before going to work for Bennie was perhaps working as a prostitute in Naples where she was discovered by her Uncle Ted who was on holiday from a bad marriage, and while not much more will be heard from him, Sasha will come to New York and attend N.Y.U. and work for Bennie before disappearing into the desert to sculpture and raise a family with her college boyfriend, Drew, while Bennie, assisted by Alex, a former date of Sasha’s from whom she lifted a wallet, soldiers on in New York, producing musicians (including the rediscovered guitarist Scotty) as the artistic world changes around him with the vertiginous speed of Moore’s Law."

Egan's ability to make these desperate elements feel cohesive is pretty amazing. There was maybe only one occasion when I felt as though I were starting over. Her writing is exciting and poetic. The characters feel real; they're enormously flawed but written with real generosity and authority.

It's a book about success and failure, and about change and the effects of time on our lives. Read it!