Brilliant Disguises

Harry Potter and the Journey on the Silver Screen

2011-07-16T16:17:00.001-05:00

There is a “through the looking glass” moment deep into the final hour of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II.” Moments after Lord Voldemort has slit his throat, the dying Professor Severus Snape urges Harry Potter to collect one of his tears. Harry needs to do this, as he will feed the tears to the Pensieve, a device which allows him to see the past, like a movie. We need this moment to understand all that his life has meant, not only to Snape, to the dead Professor Albus Dumbledore, to his archenemy Voldemort, but also to himself. We as the audience need this if we are to understand what may happen once Harry walks into the Forbidden Forest to face his nemesis, presumably for the last time. The movie becomes a movie about a movie which tells those in the movie what the movie has been about. A story, if it goes on long enough, ultimately begins to tell another story, which is itself a story about the story it sprang from.

We have grown together, the Boy Who Lived and his audience, first as readers and then as viewers. The last 10 years have brought eight installments of the Harry Potter series, the most successful “franchise” in the history of motion pictures. The Harry we were introduced to in the pages of the J.K. Rowling’s series is, in some ways, very different from the one Daniel Radcliffe embodies. And the movies have created something else, as they usually do, a country of their own out of the universe Hogwarts and the Death-Eaters inhabit.

It’s become commonplace to say that the first two Potter movies are the weakest of the lot. A frequently heard criticism is that they are slavish to the books and try too hard to satisfy the reader without creating a magic of their own. By the second movie, “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” there are glaring “Ten points for Gryffindor!” moments that seem to beg for cutting. But the overall criticism, I think, is on the whole ungenerous - the filmmakers were still trying to figure out what they had. By the time the first film made it to the screen, there were only four of the seven promised books available. It was important to establish the world, especially if they didn’t know where the story was going to end.

Looking back on those first two movies, directed by Chris Columbus, the sets and costumes once Harry enters the magical world evoke memories of Dickens and Victorian England, or an England at home with our cultural knowledge. We may not know exactly what “Oliver Twist” is about, but we recognize the capes and hats and long tailed coats of an earlier age. We understand the charm of a hearth, and appreciate how it can just as easily be the portal to another place.

With the third film, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” the tone changes to something else. Most critics favor this installment, directed by Alfonso Cauron, over the others. It’s worth remembering that “Azkaban” is the only film which does not feature Voldemort as a character. In it, the (perceived) threat is from the escapee, Sirius Black. But the children are teenagers now, and a little wiser after a few brushes with death. This is still mainly a child’s story, but there are hints of what is to come.

Rowling’s “Goblet of Fire” is much longer than its predecessors, much more sprawling in its imagination, and the beginning of the series’ slide into a sometimes stifling darkness. This is not a criticism - too often stories opt for a rose-colored threat which can easily be dispatched, rendering their heroes hardly worth celebrating. But here is another point where the movies differ from the books - the appearance of a fully-embodied Lord Voldemort, back from the grave, played perfectly by Ralph Fiennes. The movies give us, I think, a better Voldemort than the books.

The two books where Voldemort figures heavily - “Chamber of Secrets” and “Half-Blood Prince” - show us that Voldemort is a much more vivid character when we discover his backstory than the hissing murderer who pursues Harry in the present. When Fiennes appears, his Voldemort has a grand malevolent intelligence which convinces us that Harry could perish before the story is over. For that matter, Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry is nicer, more obedient, less rebellious and less arrogant than the Harry of the books. The absence of these qualities is necessary - after all, this is still a Hollywood production. We like less-complicated heroes on the screen.

The Voldemort appearance at the end of “Goblet of Fire” helps that episode immensely, as it is the weakest of the eight pictures. Because the story had so many diversions, (Harry and Ron, the Tri-Wizards Tournament, Mad-Eye Moody) the filmmakers had a hard time keeping a cohesive narrative. They righted themselves with “Order of the Phoenix,” the shortest film from the longest book. The appearance of director David Yates also signaled another change in tone. The next three Potter movies slide us out of the Victorian magical background and into something that looks more like the modern world. The Ministry of Magic, an immense set, give us something that looks like an office building, creating the bureaucracy of spells. Harry, Ron and Hermione are becoming adults, and the magic of their childhood is becoming darker, more threatening, and closer to reality.

In “The Half-Blood Prince” and the first part of the final installment, Yates gives us quiet moments instead of the busy music of the earlier films. He trusts the material to work the magic, and instead of a childish fantasy, we begin to see some of the larger themes of Rowling’s work. Those themes arrive full-blown in the final film, where we are once again in the magical world of the first two films, full-blown action, wands and wizards flying past us as Harry learns what his journey means.

When Harry dips Snape’s tear into the well of memories, he sees that Dumbledore has been in effect “using him,” knowing he would have to die in order for Voldemort to be destroyed. But death in Harry Potter’s world, as it can be in ours, is not totally the end if one inspires love. Dumbledore has been preserving Harry’s life, but so has Snape, so long the bane of Harry’s existence. Thankfully, the movies did not attempt to water down this part of Rowling’s story, which is almost Biblical in its subtlety and power. We, like Harry, are shaped at a distance by the power which watches over our lives. The power that protects does not always shield us from danger, and the spirit which corrects and humbles is not always against us. In the figures of Snape and Dumbledore, the “two bravest men” Harry ever knew, we see a picture of the double qualities of Providence, protecting and preparing us for the eventually journey to the Forbidden Forest.

On the page, Rowling’s coda showing Harry at the train station to see his own child off to Hogwarts reads awkwardly at first, as though she was unwilling to lead the story finally end. But on the screen, it fits. We are reminded of how we first encountered Harry, as children, our bundles ready for a journey that will take us into a world prepared for us, where we will learn through hard lessons the best parts of ourselves.

The Aeneid by Virgil - Translated by Robert Fagles

2011-06-19T23:30:00.002-05:00

Perhaps the most affecting portion of Virgil’s great masterwork on the founding of Rome is its namesake’s visit to the Underworld, which comes at the midpoint of the story.

After a trip to Sicily to honor the memory of Anchises, his father, Aeneas ventures to the land of the dead to see the man one more time. It is there that Virgil shows us the wandering souls of the dead - ‘numberless races, nations of souls/like bees in meadowlands on a cloudless summer day/that settle on flowers, riots of color, swarming round/the lilies’ lustrous sheen, and the whole field comes alive/with a humming murmur.”

Here is not only a trope from the ancient world - a hero among the living momentarily steps across the curtain to visit the departed, safe himself from the sting of death - but the poetic inspiration for Dante’s Divine Comedy, which will employ Virgil as a guide for its first two-thirds. Here are the heartbroken who have gained the knowledge that Virgil lacks. His father, by virtue of this home, reveals to his son the glories of Rome that will follow Aeneas once he leaves to fulfill his destiny.

Robert Fagles’ translation of “The Aeneid” is a worthy successor to his excellent translations of “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.” Most of what I could say about these three works has been said many, many times. Though “The Odyssey” is the more well-known story and the most easily copied, the “The Iliad” is a more satisfying story on a much broader canvas. While Odysseus is the obvious star of the later work, there are so many personalities in “The Iliad” beyond just the angry Achilles that one can quickly lose, regain and lose himself again in its rich maze of action and character.

But both of Homer’s works were meant to be performed, declaimed, shouted even. There is an academic polish, a host of page-bound flourishes in “The Aeneid” that mark it as different in tone and spectacle. Though Virgil was obviously following the style of the two earlier epics, “The Aeneid” is its own animal. Though it takes up the story from the Trojan War and involves the Olympian gods in the affairs of men, there are several voices present here which were absent earlier.

Anchises’ prophecy, for example, points to “The Aeneid’s” main difference - the sense of destiny. That exists in the Homerian epics as well, but not the extent as Virgil’s work. Where Homer was concerned with the fate of individuals, the warriors who bled outside Ilium and on the waters back to Ithica, “The Aeneid” is chiefly concerned with the empire that will flow from the point of Aeneas’ sword. There is about his shoulders the flourish of history, the sense of fate.

“Others, I have no doubt,
Will forge the bronze to breath with suppler lines,
Draw from the block of marble features quick to life,
Please their cases better, chart with their rods the stars
That climb the sky and foretell the times they rise.
But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power
The peoples of the earth - these will be your arts:
To put your stamp on the works and ways of peace,
To spare the defeated, break the proud in war.”

When the Fire God forges Aeneas’ shield, we are told he takes delight in the images he forges there - images that for Virgil are Rome’s glorious past, but for Aeneas will be their future - but even the Fire God knows nothing of what these events mean. He only knows that these images give him pleasure.

While Virgil wants his readers to feel the swell of martial pride at the thought of Roman arms, he also takes another cue from Homer - the terrible cost of war. At the end, when Aeneas has conquered a portion of Italy, he stands over the defeated Turnus, who yearns for his life. Aeneas shows him no mercy and stabs him with his sword after he sees Turnus is wearing the belt of the dead Pallas. The foe is sent to join Anchises in the realm of the dead. Aeneas has a nation to build.

It is hard to tell, two thousand years later, whether Virgil is decrying the same war he is glamorizing in his lines. Some of this confusion may be simply to what our modern ears expect to hear, and some of it may be the dimly perceived reminder that even destiny entails death and pain.

We get from Virgil a sense that there is ultimately meaning - for all time - in the struggles of Aeneas and his men. They are the inheritors of a proud tradition from Troy, while the home that they knew is gone forever. Their quest to build a new home, and their fortitude in doing so builds a great empire.

What we don’t know however, much like anyone who feels a personal sense of destiny, is what is to become of us and our dreams. It is Aeneas’ memory of the whispered prophecies of his father in the land of the dead which drive him onward. Like Orpheus coming back from a similar trip, his steps are deliberate, but he looks forward rather than back, because he knows nothing will bring back the home he knew. It is not worth the effort. Instead, there is only the kingdom that has been prepared for him, a kingdom for the taking.

Of Salesmen, Living and Dead

2011-06-17T23:59:00.002-05:00

On Tuesday, December 8, 2008, the Wall Street trader Bernard Madoff had a meeting with his brother Peter, in which it is believed he revealed for the first time the extent of his billion-dollar, multi-decade Ponzi scheme. Over the previous months, it had become increasing clear to Madoff that the economic cataclysm of the previous September and October had taken him down as well, and it was time, reluctantly, to come clean on the biggest fraud in American financial history.

In Diana B. Henriques book, “The Wizard of Lies,” she writes of the moment when Peter came to learn that most of his and his brother‘s professional lives had been built on lies. It is more likely, she says, that Peter’s mind just stopped and tried “ to rewind an entire lifetime in a split second, to get back to something real and true.”

Madoff was a salesman, who made an illegitimate fortune on an uneasy mountain of mendacity. He sold himself, in the classic American fashion, by appearing to succeed.

In David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning classic “Glengarry Glen Ross,” we are introduced to an office full of men who would be Madoffs, if they had had a few more connections. In the course of one evening, five real estate salesman are introduced to the realities of success and failure.

Levene is an aging salesman in his fifties, assuring his boss Williamson that he has been hot in the past and will be again if he is simply given better leads toward clients. Shelley “The Machine” Levene will take on the world, if he can get just one good sale in the midst of a bad streak. He attempts to bribe his way back to success, which is better than his colleague Moss, who decides it’s better just to steal the leads and give them to a rival for the promise of a better job.

Commenting on this indirectly is Roma, a charismatic salesman who desperately wants to close a deal with Lingk, a man whose wife has understandable second thoughts about the soundness of her husband’s newly purchased land deal.

Interspersed among the various and florid profanities of Mamet’s excellent dialogue is a depiction of the desperation of men whose worth comes from their ability to legitimately rob others through their personal magnetism. Levene is haunted by his past, and what he perceives is his lost ability to beguile someone out of their money. Moss is frustrated by the inability of his office to see his potential, or the potential of the market. Even in Levene’s desperation and Moss’ woebegoneness is a shared arrogance.

“What is our life?” Roma asks Lingk, in the act of seducing him into a deal. “It’s either looking forward or looking back.” Roma looks forward. He is momentarily frustrated by Lingk’s cold feet, but there will always be another sale. He has none of Levene or Moss’ angst.

Mamet’s salesmen share a common bond with the most famous salesman in American drama, Willy Loman. Arthur Miller, in his memoir “Timebends,” recalls that he wrote “Death of a Salesman” just after the end of the Second World War and the start of what he calls a new American Empire. “I wanted to set before the new captains and the so smugly confident kings the corpse of a believer,” he said, a “pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.”

Willy Loman is that man, disintegrating even as he spouts the repeated platitudes of a lifetime, extolling the rewards of personal likability, connections and moxie, even as he contradicts himself in the next breath. It is mildly amusing that Miller saw Loman as an American and not universal character, which he absolutely is. In him is the pent-up bitterness not of capitalism, but of stubborn humanity requiring a positive score at the end of life, hoping for some validation to the slights and shattered dreams. “A man has got to add up to something,” Willy tells the ghostly memory of his brother Ben.

Mamet’s Roma, railing at his boss Williamson, roars out the question, “Whoever told you you could work with men?” Again and again, in both plays, there is the invocation of the characters’ masculinity, that a man who strives must be respected. It is Willy’s wife Linda who gives the memorable command that “attention must be paid” to Willy, because he is a human being and he is exhausted by a life of seemingly vain toil. And Linda’s presence amongst the men of the play identifies her with their dilemma as well, because all of Miller’s characters live by a personal sense of honor. Just as Willy has given his life for his business, so Linda has given hers in defending and defining and deifying her husband. All of that toil must amount to something, because it defines her too.

Levene though, is a man, and he eventually must pay for his desperation. Roma, who observed that Levene wasn’t really a machine, but a man and thus part of a dying breed, still wants Levene’s stuff, his commissions, as he is carted off. Whatever legacy he had will not survive even a day. Willy’s crime, in the eyes of his son Biff, is the unfaithfulness he was guilty of years before. All of his borrowed wisdom and surface integrity was shown to be a façade. If this is an unfair judgment, we sense in Willy that his mental deterioration is his own verdict, that he too believes he has failed fundamentally. Willy has a Pyrrhic afterlife following his suicide, his memory a pall over his two sons and wife, his debts paid but little remaining.

Miller’s assault on the senselessness of acquisition and ambition is of a different plane than Mamet’s examination of human greed, mostly because Miller is writing a grand tragedy, and Mamet has created a melodrama. Miller wants to show capitalism’s moral bankruptcy, that it is a tragedy worthy of humanity’s collective tears when one small man dies the desperate death of a Willy Loman. Mamet shows a capitalism where survival is all-important, and exploitation is merely self-preservation.

Roma, in his sales pitch, gets at this, giving an altar call to both the spiritually needy and the greedy: “There’s an absolute morality? May be. And then what? If you think there is, then be that thing. Bad people go to hell? I don’t think so. If you think that, act that way. A hell exists on earth? Yes. I won’t live in it. That’s me.”

Doubt by John Patrick Shanley

2011-06-17T14:27:00.001-05:00

In Scene VII of John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt," Father Flynn admits to Sister James that he fabricated a story he told in a sermon on gossip. "What happens in life is beyond interpretation," he tells her. "The truth makes for a bad sermon. It tends to be confusing and have no clear conclusion."

"Doubt," which was later expanded into an excellent movie, won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for drama in no small part because it adheres to these words.

Father Flynn's is the first voice to confront us, giving us a short sermon on doubt. We immediately like him because his voice is familiar and modern, even though the play's action takes place in 1964. He reassures us that to doubt makes us part of a larger community, struggling to make sense of all around us. Doubt obscures the truth we strain to see, but it bids us on further, changing who we are in the process. The community hearing these words beyond the church likes their easy comfort. There is no reason to take tough stands and make hard choices. Salvation is free and easy, just as God is.

We then encounter Sister James, a bright, enthusiastic teacher with the Sisters of Charity in the Bronx. She is speaking to the school principal, Sister Aloysius. We like Sister James also, because of her sunny enthusiasm and zeal for her students. She is eager and loving and quick to forgive and forget, just as God is.

Zeal describes Sister Aloysius also - but zeal of a different sort. We don't necessarily like her. In a few words of dialogue, she comes off as judgmental, unnecessarily rigid, callously traditional and authoritarian. She warns Sister James not to let students use ballpoint pens as it destroys their penmanship. She chides her for "performing" rather than teaching. And she criticizes her as overly innocent, not only to her students but to the dangers around them. "Innocence is a form of laziness," Sister Aloysius says.

There is something in us that does not like Sister Aloysius, but this feeling diminishes the longer she talks. She is vigilant, just as God is, because the world is not on our side. We recognize her as the stereotypical Catholic school nun who rules over her charges with an angry kind of devotion and puts the smell of brimstone in their nostrils. But the longer she talks, the more we perceive why she is this way. She tells Sister James to think less about herself and observe what is around her. This is sound Christian advice - after all, the sisters are there to serve. In doing so, we can perceive what follows in two different ways.

Time passes, and Sister James returns to indirectly report what Sister Aloysius suspected - Father Flynn may have had inappropriate contact with Donald Muller, the school's only black child. Did Sister James perceive something because Sister Aloysius inspired her to, or did she actually see something she wants to discount because of how she feels about the sister?

The backdrop of "Doubt" - the Catholic sex abuse scandals of the last decade - gives us reason to draw conclusions from the action. But Shanley's characters cannot be so easily pegged, nor is this play simply yet another indictment of the Catholic Church. Flynn may indeed be innocent, but there is something in his quickly offended manner that feels guilty. Sister Aloysius may be a martinet with a vendetta against a priest she sees as overly accommodating, but we are willing to go along with the behavior if she is right about Father Flynn's guilt. We want to think the best of Sister James as she struggles between the two poles of opposition, but we see her partially in the same light as Sister Aloysius, and in the same way we see ourselves. Sometimes doing the right thing is not as important to us as appearing to do the right thing. The stakes in this - the life of a child - can easily be ignored so long as our lives continue and our self-images remain. It is this climate that allowed many guilty priests to survive in parishes for so long, with so many lives destroyed.

But Shanley doesn't construct an easy dragon for vanquishing, on either side of this contest. Just consider, for a moment, how "Doubt" could have ended. If Father Flynn, for example, had been proven to be guilty, then Sister Aloysius' determination would have been justified in our eyes. We might have drawn a conclusion that her traditional ways are superior to the more modern teaching and social styles of Flynn and James. If Father Flynn had been proven innocent, then we would see Sister Aloysius as the play's villain, the forces of openness and virtue having triumphed over the church's long catalog of overzealous homegrown persecutors.

But the play is about doubt, which means that neither outcome will happen. Indeed, no real accusation is ever fully stated. The worst intimation is that Flynn gave Donald wine. When Sister Aloysius confronts Flynn about what may have happened, he responds, "What exactly are you accusing me of?" This is to be expected, and it may be calculated on Flynn's part. He could be goading the sister to either make an accusation or retreat, gambling perhaps that she will retreat. She instead reminds him that she hasn't accused him of anything, but merely asked him what happened. The accusation is one he perceives - but he is right in assuming there is one.

The audience will side one way or another, but they will see that perhaps a traditional nun, no matter how dictatorial, may have been that way for a reason. They may see that a man accused cannot necessarily prove himself innocent without losing something, or everything, in the process. They will see that choosing sides is never so easy as rallying to a cause against this or that irredeemable force.

Shanley throws another wild card into the works with the entrance of Donald's mother into the play, who is summoned for a conference with Sister Aloysius. Nothing is ever spelled out, but Donald's mother is clear on one thing - Donald is different. Does this mean he is receptive to what Sister Aloysius believes are Flynn's homosexual advances? We aren't sure. We do know that Donald is different enough to spark angry beatings at the hands of his father. The mother tells Sister Aloysius plainly that she is willing to put up with whatever attention Father Flynn gives, because it will only last until the school term is up. Donald needs this education. She is willing to ignore the rest. As with much of this play, we suspect what is going on- but we don't know for sure.

This adds another layer - not of race, though Donald's blackness adds to the tension. Father Flynn is a man, and still in a position of authority in 1964. (It is interesting that this play takes place just before the Sexual Revolution.) Sister Aloysius, Sister James and Donald's mother have to navigate their powerlessness. Even Sister Aloysius must be circumspect in how she proceeds with her accusations, knowing that they could be easily ignored by her male superiors within the church. Donald's mother doesn't care about the sister's concern - she will side with her son "and those who are good to him," meaning Father Flynn.

The mother also offers this judgment: "You can't hold a child responsible for what God gave him to be." In the current environment, this sounds like an defense of what we perceive is Donald's homosexuality. But what of Father Flynn? Did God make him a child predator? Is he a child predator? What is Donald? We are never sure. Even this statement, which appears to be a defense, cannot be digested whole.

Shanley is not content to give us an ending with Father Flynn quietly removed from the parish. Indeed, he is promoted, and even the rock solid Sister Aloysius is left to doubt whether her suspicions were ever correct.

But there is also the layer of faith to all of this. We must never forget these characters are devout and carry on their lives in a community of belief. Does Father Flynn's promotion mean that God has protected him from a false accusation, or is this ironic comment on the protection the church provided predatory priests for decades? Does the fact that such things happen give us serious doubts about the justice of God, or even His existence? That feeling of emptiness, where something has occurred but we are not sure of its exact nature, readmits us to the community of doubt where we began the play. There is no last word, Shanley says, not even in a church, an indeterminate distance short of Heaven.

Gilgamesh Translated by Stephen Mitchell

2011-05-29T22:18:00.003-05:00

The dawn of narrative fiction and epic poetry gets a suitably spectacular treatment in Stephen Mitchell's wonderful English translation of the epic of Gilgamesh. What Mitchell calls "the oldest story in the world" tells the tale of a king who befriends his nemesis, watches him die, and then travels to the ends of the earth to demand of an immortal the secrets of final victory of death itself.

Gilgamesh is a tyrannical king, two-thirds divine, whom the gods frustrate with the creation of a twin - Enkidu. They do this in answer to prayers from Gilgamesh's people that he has crossed over the bounds. Enkidu's coming is in order to "let them balance each other perfectly," so that the Kingdom of Uruk can have some peace. Enkidu is a wild man, living like an animal in the wilderness. He is eventually tamed by the sexual enticements of Shamhat, Ishtar's priestess, who tells him of Gilgamesh's existence. Enkidu sets out to confront the king, but the two soon forge a friendship. They best the fierce guardian of the Cedar Forest, Humbaba, and then vanquish the Bull of Heaven before the gods demand Enkidu's life.

The death of his friend drives Gilgamesh to contemplate the mystery of death, and the possibility of the passing of his own life and the end of his kingdom. This fear drives him to travel to the edge of the earth, to confront the only survivor of the Great Deluge, Utnaphistim. Though the old man is immortal, he whispers a secret- Gilgamesh need only retrieve a plant from the deep that will give him victory over the fear of death. But carelessly, he loses the plant to a passing snake, and then returns home to record his story in verse.

The biggest change in Gilgamesh's life occurs, obviously, with the death of Enkidu. Consider that when the two heroes decide to confront Humbaba, it is Enkidu who is fearful. Gilgamesh reminds him that they are not gods, and that only gods live forever. "Why be afraid then, since sooner or later death must come?" These are brave, even reckless words, but we somehow feel that Gilgamesh, though he is mindful of death, does not expect to die. It is later when he sees his friend dead, not in battle, but by the hand of the gods, that darkness falls over his life. He wanders in mourning, asking, "How can I bear this sorrow that gnaws at my belly, this fear of death that restlessly drives me onward? If only I could find the one man whom the gods made immortal, I would ask him how to overcome death." It is only after Utnaphistim is convinced that Gilgamesh has suffered that he offers the stricken king the secret of life.

Here, in stark terms, is the world of the Babylonians. The gods are vengeful, spiteful, lustful, and arbitrary in the prayers they listen to and answer. They oppose the proud only fitfully, and reward the meek hardly at all. Life is mean and cruel and that is its way. What is a man to do who is not a Babylonian superman? The ancient Utnaphistim, who remembers the world before the flood, had to endure the death of all life before he could see his way to conquering its end.

But this is a world where man must suffer, and whatever knowledge or grace he gains is earned at extreme cost, if anything is gained. The gods take - they do not give freely. Gifts come with incalculable price.

My biggest gripe with this book is not the translation, which is exquisite, but the stupendously silly essay that accompanies it by translator Stephen Mitchell. In a ham handed attempt to make the text "relevant," he ties it to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and finds in Gilgamesh and Enkidu's slaying of Humbaba a dark parable on the dangers of "preemptive attack." These are but two aspects of the work, which strain mightily with the text to draw conclusions and make inferences that simply are not there.

One of the problems of Mitchell's interpretation is that he is projecting backward rules of drama and narrative fiction that Gilgamesh predates. He praises the economy of the poet for passages that simply were important to the narrative demands of the time. He constructs an internal narrative logic for Gilgamesh that does not exist, and looks for Greek notions of drama and storytelling which the Babylonians didn't realize they were supposed to provide for our modern eyes. For example, the attack on Humbaba, Mitchell says rightly, is the sort of daring-do heroes are supposed to risk.

But one can make a case that our heroes pay not for the slaying of Humbaba, but because they killed the Bull of Heaven. The gods, which assisted in the death of Humbaba, must be appeased after the insult of killing the bull.

Another problem is that Mitchell also projects backwards in time a flimsy humanistic philosophy with traces of suitably secular spirituality. He finds much that is commendable in Gilgamesh's refreshingly sexual frankness, which predates Judeo-Christian morality, but ignores the obviously exploitative nature of temple prostitution worship rites. He is simultaneously celebratory over Gilgamesh and Enkidu's pretensions of male superiority, but squeamish when they behave as Babylonian alpha males and not as humanistic milquetoasts. He appends at the end of the text the idea that Gilgamesh is somehow wiser for his travels, with "a wisdom that is impartial, humorous, civilized, sexual, irreverent, skeptical of moral absolutes, delighted with the things of this world..."

Where to begin with this? What about Gilgamesh's own words, upon losing the plant of renewed youth, the antidote to the fear of death, when he tells Urshanabi that "I have gained no benefit for myself?" Of course Gilgamesh is sexual, but it is not a self-satisfied modern enlightened sexuality of equality but one involving the will of the king, who at the poem's beginning was a tyrant. Skeptical of moral absolutes? One wonders if Mitchell means those inconvenient Judeo-Christian morals, through which we tend to see everything in modern life, or the moral absolutes of the poem's era, which largely deal once again with the will of the king and the capricious will of the gods. I don't know Mitchell, but I might take a guess that his conclusion says more about how he views himself than the wisdom Gilgamesh has gathered as a result of his travels.

Herbert Mason's translation of Gilgamesh, for example, ends with the monarch's return to Uruk and his realization that the people will not share in his sorrow. When he asks a blind man if he had ever heard the name Enkidu, the man shrugs and turns away. This is the bleak wisdom of Gilgamesh and the world he documented, a world without Christ, where life is fleeting, as is glory, as is hope.

The Ghost, The Ghost Writer and Tony Blair's Journey

2011-04-21T16:05:00.002-05:00

Rarely is a writer's own autobiography "scooped," but such a thing happened to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. When his book, "A Journey," landed in stores last year, readers had already had three years to chew on Robert Harris' "The Ghost." A thriller involving a figure much like Blair, Harris' novel was also the basis for Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer."

Harris' novel is told by an unnamed writer who has specialized in quickie celebrity autobiographies, brought in to ghostwrite the memoirs of former British prime minister Adam Lang. The "ghost" gets his job because of the untimely death of the previous ghost, a staff member of Lang's named Mike McAra.

Lang's memoirs are in need of pruning and shaping into a coherent narrative, and the Ghost gets to know, among others, Lang's brittle and ambitious wife, Ruth. But in the course of the assignment, Lang learns he is being pursued for war crimes due to his assistance in the capture of four suspected Pakistani terrorists. The four were later taken to Guantanamo for rendition, with one dying, presumably of heart failure.

The ghost has more than a few problems keeping his subject's mind on telling his own story. He also develops a relationship with Ruth, but his biggest problems come from his own ghost - the notes left behind by McAra, which point to Lang's shadowy association with the CIA. The truth that McAra uncovered - that probably killed him - is hidden in the horrendous first draft of Lang's book. It is only at the book's end that the Ghost discovers the actual truth.

But "The Ghost" is about more than war crimes. It's true subject is the leader away from power. Lang, as Harris draws him, was an aspiring actor when he was plucked from the stage and drawn into the life of Ruth. It was Ruth's drive which eventually resulted in his political career - a sequence of events which makes Ruth bear more of a resemblance to Hillary Clinton than Cherie Blair.

But like Blair with his "third way" politics, Lang is a cipher to those around him, leaving a mystery in his shadow, his intimates wondering just who he is and what he aspires to do. When the unnamed ghost writer says he does not know Adam Lang, the former defense minister Rycart responds with a laugh:

“Who does? If you met him on Monday you probably know him as well as anyone. I worked with him for fifteen years, and I certainly don’t have a clue where he’s coming from.”

Blair’s memoir, “A Journey,” is a remarkably candid, well-written book that nevertheless renders the self-portrait of a cipher. We learn several times of Blair’s passion, surpassing politics, he says, for what he vaguely refers to as religion. We read this several times, but with no elaboration at all. We assume Christianity, of course, but we wonder why there isn’t even a hint of what he means. Is he talking about a specific faith, or the study of religion in general?

What the book does reveal about him, though, is a soul who isn’t afraid to question himself, his motives, the way he saw the events of his time in office and the efficacy of his decisions. Blair - the real Blair - chose to end his book on this note:

"My conclusion, strangely, is not that the power of politics is needed to liberate people; but that the power of people is needed to liberate the politics. An odd thing for a politician to say; but then, as you will gather from this memoir, it has never been entirely clear whether the journey I’ve taken is one of triumph of the person over the politics, or of the politics over the person.”

There are many human moments, rich in humor and irony, which present a much better portrait of Blair than any contemporary journalism. The Blair in these pages is not necessarily a man who can win over those who opposed him, but one rendered a little more easily understood. That makes him different from Lang, who resembles a caged animal, impotent against the forces conspiring against him, embittered that he is being pilloried for making difficult decisions in difficult times.

But Harris doesn't make him a villain any more than he makes Rycart, the minister now trying to get him prosecuted, into a hero. The ghost sees Rycart as an intellectually vain man who is “as hell-bent on revenge as any discarded lover.” Rycart eventually double-crosses the Ghost into working for him, to get something tangible that can be used against Lang in court.

“Look,” said Lang, “I don’t condone torture, but let me just say this to you. First, it does produce results - I’ve seen the intelligence. Second, having power, in the end, is all about balancing evils, and when you think about it, what are a couple of minutes of suffering for a few individuals compared to the deaths of - the deaths, mark you - of thousands. Third, don’t try telling me this is something unique in the war on terror. Torture’s always been part of warfare. The only difference is that in the past there were no ****ing media around to report it.”

These responses do sound much like Blair’s, right down to his exasperation with the media reaction to every decision, every hint of scandal. Blair relates a similar set of fears following the July 2006 London Underground bombings, which occurred directly after London was awarded the 2012 Olympics and the UK hosted a G8 summit. Blair returned home to his family, his thoughts a blur:

“I reflected on the awesome nature of the weight on my shoulders; the pain and the excitement. Politics: noble causes, ignoble means; the plans you make and the events that turn them upside down; the untold misery and the imperfect attempts to alleviate it…”

Blair is overwhelmed by the responsibility of his decisions, and where the fault lies for the mothers and fathers mourning their children, dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, the horror of snuffed out lives. He also tackles the question: Was the war, and Blair, responsible for homegrown deaths at the hands of terrorists? Blair fights the notion because, he says, “if you give even a sliver of credence to the argument, then suddenly it’s our fault, not theirs, which is, naturally, the very thing they want.”

But what distinguishes Blair from Lang is that Lang accepts the opposition's definition of torture, as if to say that though a moral wall has been breached, it was worth it so that his people could be protected. Blair has denied the torture allegations, and reserves some of his harshest criticisms for the terrorists and for his own critics, such as those who opposed the UK's entry into the Iraq War:

“(The Iraqi terrorists) conducted this attempt at destroying a nation with a wickedness and vicious indifference to human life and human suffering that almost defies belief. Suicide bombers sent into markets. Worshippers targeted at their place of prayer. Soldiers and police, there to help put the country on its feet, assassinated. UN officials, NGOs, civilian workers trying to assist the Iraqi people to a better life, gunned down, blown up, kidnapped and killed. Yet after saying all this, my conclusion does not concern the bombers’ attitude to this carnage…but ours. When was there a single protest in any Western nation about such evil? Where was the moral indignation? ..Where was the focus of criticism?”

Lang defends his actions by reminding Rycart that he is, in fact, just a man. After all, Lang says, Jesus was unable to solve all the problems of the world, despite being the Son of God, so wasn’t it unreasonable to think he could in ten years time?

At the book's close, Lang is killed by a suicide bomber - in the film, he is shot while exiting a private jet. His nemesis dead, Rycart joins those paying tribute to him, his opposition a conveniently forgotten memory.

The ghost remains alive to tell the story, at least, for the moment. In this way, the ghost functions as the stand-in for the reader and the conscience of the book. If Lang did what he did because he believed it was right, Harris seems to be saying through his characters that those beliefs were much more complicated than the citizens who voted for him were led to believe. The ghost is the only innocent in a political world spinning out of control, a man entrusted to tell a story that seems simple on the surface but challenges the beliefs of both left and right about what is good and evil.

Make no mistake - Harris' Lang is guilty of something, no matter how much he rages. The wrongness of his involvement eventually undoes the ghost himself, as evidenced in the film. The nameless writer disappears off-screen carrying the manuscript full of secrets, with a car pursuing unseen. The viewer hears a thud, and pages billow in the wind, an indictment that is no longer valid but will remain unanswered forever.

But the questions of "The Ghost" and of Tony Blair remain. How far can a free society go in defending itself without compromising its essential nature? What is too far? How far can a leader go in making difficult decisions before his people no longer see him as a visionary and instead see him as dangerous? Where is prudence and where is compromise?

The Ghost reminds us, in the last line of his story, “I’m afraid in life you can’t have everything.”

The Pale King and the Apostle Paul

2011-04-12T13:11:00.001-05:00

The sixth chapter of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous, unfinished novel “The Pale King” features a character wrestling with the consequences of his actions at the same time his mind keeps summoning up quotations from Paul’s epistles.

Lane A. Dean Jr. sits with his girlfriend Sheri by a lake in a park. They appear to be clean, well-scrubbed kids in a wholesome setting, but something unspoken hangs in the air. By indirect language over the course of the chapter, the reader is left to assume that Lane has gotten Sheri pregnant. The couple met in “campus ministries,” and Lane has been praying, chewing on the moment. The idea of a child in their future forces Lane to realize that, while he likes Sheri, he doesn’t love her enough to want to marry her, or even perhaps to see the child born. Over seven pages, no dialogue is ever directly quoted. The two sit side-by-side, with the narrator wholly in Lane’s mind. Even when we hear Sheri, we must be conscious that this is Lane’s projection of what she might say, what he hopes she will say, what he fears might happen. He is contemplating an abortion for her.

But his larger fear - even more than an abortion, or the fact that he doesn’t love her - is that he might be, in fact, a hypocrite:

“He was desperate to be good people, to still be able to feel he was good. He rarely before had thought of damnation and hell, that part of it didn’t speak to his spirit, and in worship services he more just tuned himself out and tolerated hell when it came up, the same way you tolerate a job you have got to have to save up for what it is you want.”

Lane reveals himself as a little more self-centered than he wants to admit, not as careful as he would like to believe. And while he doesn’t necessarily believe in hell, he suddenly understands why what some might feel are archaic Biblical rules of sexual conduct suddenly make sense. Yet he still wonders if he is a hypocrite “who repented only after, who promised submission but really only wanted a reprieve.” He keeps thinking, the narrator tells us, of I Timothy 6 and “the hypocrite therein who disputeth over words.”

What he is referring to is an extended discourse in Paul’s letter to Timothy which deals with how “the Man of God” must conduct himself in a sinful world. Paul is warning, specifically, about false teachers within churches who stir up controversies out of their own conceits. False teachers, he is saying, create strife and constant friction because of their corrupted minds, displaying an obsession over terminology instead of truth. Paul’s contention is that this is godlessness, a self-centered delusion that makes the other person feel their false gospel is more true than the real kind. He goes on to warn of those who use the Gospel for financial gain, leading to the summation that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” Considering that “The Pale King” deals in part with the Internal Revenue Service, there is a flash of irony.

So what is Lane saying? Considering that his lack of belief in hell is, in fact, heresy, is Lane a false Man of God? Of course the dispute in this chapter of the novel isn’t doctrinal on the face of it, but having more to do with his behavior. However, the Apostle Paul would state categorically that one goes with the other - that you can’t have a watered down Gospel without making other compromises in your life which eventually catch up to you. Lane may believe in a “living God of compassion and love” and not of a burning lake of fire, but even he sees the hellish vision of “two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent.” The reality of hell is only a whisper, but enough to make him realize what he carries within.

Still later, though, he imagines that Sheri will tell him that she cannot go through with an abortion, that she will carry the child to term, and that he need not worry because she will make no demands on him. In a vision, Lane has seen them both, and himself not as a hypocrite but as just another foolish fallen man. Don’t worry, he imagines her telling him, but he also imagines that even this is a lie, a desperate lie she might tell him to force him into caring for her, that within herself she knows she cannot care for a baby or put her family through the shame. She is gambling, in this imagined scene, that he really is the good man she believes. But his imagination, which has brought all of this out, quotes half of Galatians 4:16: “Have I now become your enemy?”

In this letter, Paul is appealing to the Galatian church against what he sees as the corrupting influence of what has come to be called the Judaizers - a sect believing that one must first become Jewish and observe a Jewish diet and cultural customs as part of, and as a prelude to, becoming a Christian. Paul, who previously had been an observant Jew and a well-educated one, had particular invective for the Judaizers, appealing instead to a Gospel of grace and faith instead of one of supposedly earned salvation through works.

But the full quotation is telling - “Have I now become your enemy because I tell you the truth?” Paul is reminding this church, which he helped create, that God’s salvation cannot be earned through works. We were once together and one, Paul says, so why are we now at odds? You trusted me once with the Gospel, so why have you changed into believing I am dishonest?

This is an interesting juxtaposition when we fold it back on Lane and Sheri. Lane wants grace - in that he wants to not have to face the consequences of his choices with Sheri. Sheri has faith - faith that Lane is not the kind of man who would get a woman pregnant and then abandon her, all the while talking of Jesus. Neither of them have earned any kind of salvation through their works, unless by salvation one means love. And yet it’s obvious that the love they share isn’t really love at all, but the fading colors of a passing and passionate lust. And lastly, they are both struggling against the truth - that they have many troubling decisions to make, not just about their circumstances, but about who they are, or who they might think they are. Will they become enemies if they are simply honest with each other?

The truth, Wallace’s narrator leaves us believe as the chapter closes, is that Lane only lacks courage to be able to confront the issue at hand and trust that his heart will make the right choice. One can see that God working in catastrophe forces upon us our truest and most terrible reflections. And as the Apostle Paul knew, that is when we not only are ready for forgiveness, but we long for it, with all our hearts.

Seventeen by Kenzaburo Oe

2011-04-05T22:41:00.003-05:00

Earlier, I wrote about Yukio Mishima's "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" and the way the novel documents "the angry loner" who often seems the source of political terrorism and myriad acts of motiveless violence. Mishima's novel grew from a real event in Japanese history, much as did "Seventeen," by Kenzaburo Oe. The winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, Oe creates a character that seems at times a caricature and an accurate depiction, which says something about the nature of his art and his subject.

Oe stands, uneasily, at the other end of the spectrum of Japanese politics from Mishima, who died in what is often termed an attempted rightist coup. "Seventeen" was based on the case of Otoya Yamaguchi, a teenaged rightist who assassinated the Socialist leader Inojiro Asanuma on live television during a speech in 1960. Yamaguchi went on to commit suicide in prison.

Oe wrote two works based on the story, the first being the novella "Seventeen." Its sequel, "A Political Youth Dies," has never been translated outside Japan and deals with the actual assassination its storyteller carries out. In reading "Seventeen," one feels like the narrative is interrupted at the precise moment in which the character has arrived at what he perceives to be his destiny. It is like someone has excised about a third from Don DeLillo's "Libra" and left a novel about Lee Harvey Oswald which ends with his misadventures in New Orleans in the summer of 1963.

Oe does not name his storyteller, whose story begins on his seventeenth birthday. From the first page, the youth's self-loathing is understood and reinforced with every sentence. He is obsessed with his inconsequentiality. He feels unobserved, and fears his life has already seen its happiest moments. To illustrate this, Oe has the boy describe over and over in detail his habit of masturbating. For half of the novella, in fact, which grows tedious early on. It is tempting to think that Oe is merely offering commentary on the political thoughts that will later seize the boy - that they are a sad, lonely exercising of the same ideas, over and over, with the same result each time, only growing smaller and less satisfying. Such an explanation redeems the book for a point that more probably is meant to insult the rightist politics the boy later embraces.

At the same time we learn about his lack of sex life, we witness multiple embarrassments and humiliations. The boy makes a mild embrace of leftist politics in his home and is dressed down by his older sister. He loses a foot race at school. He is left with a blood lust he indulges in the privacy of his room, with his hidden sword. We realize with the hand-me-down leftist phrases he parrots back to his sister, the boy isn't interested in politics so much as feeling the satisfaction of being right about something. He wants to make someone pay for the way he believes his life has turned out.

The turning point comes when he is recruited to go stand and applaud during a rightist rally. The boy embraces the idea and the occasion, and even as he sees through the speaker, he identifies with his anger and impotence, a word and attitude that figures heavily in "Seventeen" and in "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion." Impotence can be seen as the natural outgrowth of a man robbed of his own importance, or of Japan following its defeat at the end of the Second World War. And as in Mishima's earlier work, Oe's "hero" makes various mentions of hell - the hell of surrender, not on a national but a personal level.

"Unconditionally, I forgive myself," the boy thinks at the rally, and the underpinning for all his future work has arrived. His loathing is now held in check, and a sense of destiny and superiority rises within him. His family now is glad to see him involved in something to give him self-worth, and his friends see some of his inexplicable behavior in the past as having had a covert, political edge. His identity is now set as well, and the shame he felt and perceived among others - or The Others, as he referred to them - is gone. His political arguments are only weapons he trots out for power. He is transformed. "To my golden vision I promise a bloodbath," he vows, at the story's end. As with Mizaguchi in Mishima's work, the angry loner doesn't care what philosophy he clings to as long as it gives him a feeling of being someone of world historical importance, a feeling that cannot be taken away and is only reinforced by the insults and retaliations of others.

The wholeheartedness with which he embraces this destiny is explained in a short, earlier section, wherein he confesses his fear that death, will not, in fact, be the end:

"The death I fear is like this: After this short life, I'll have to endure billions of years in unconsciousness, as a zero. This world, this universe, and all the other universes, will go on being for billions of years, and all that time I'll be a zero. For all eternity!"

In receiving his own forgiveness, he extends to himself grace to do whatever his will imagines, with disastrous consequences. Our hero feels singled out at both ends of his metamorphosis, by a higher power that seems both to designate him for punishment and then for distinction, with the reader to assume that the later end will also lead to the former, and just whom that higher power may be.

Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky

2011-04-03T21:10:00.007-05:00

Among the many factors that can determine the longevity of an artist's career beyond his lifetime is a compelling life story - one that adds the barest seasoning to an already intriguing catalog of work. Because of this, David Foster Wallace is well on his way to becoming the transcendent American author of our times, judging by David Lipsky's recent book, "Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace." The book is equal parts mythmaking and mythbusting, allowing the reader to engage in whichever feels right.

With the release of David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel "The Pale King" only weeks away, I thought it was time to tackle this work, which frankly cries out to be made into a movie. It's an obvious road picture, as Lipsky transcribes the running dialogue he recorded between himself and Wallace during the book tour for "Infinite Jest." Lipsky taped their conversations as part of a profile he was preparing for "Rolling Stone." Wallace was flush with success, his likeness gracing news magazine covers, the words of his cult sensation essays gratefully quoted, his abundant ambition evident in his newly published 1,000 page novel. He arrived in the popular consciousness like a thunderclap, and twelve years later was dead by his own hand following his surrender to clinical depression.

Because of Wallace's tragic end, it is impossible to read these conversations without feeling various emotional tugs - poignant appreciation of how talented he was, a mournful anger when considering what was ahead of him, a knowing laughter at some of his opinions, seasoned with humor. What grabbed me in reading it was the spiritual dimension to many of his observations.

When reading, it's necessary to remember that Wallace is not offering his opinion out of a need to express himself. He's selling a book, and its a book that he knows is good and will forge his reputation as a serious American writer. Moreover, he's responding to questions designed to ferret out his opinions on life, his background and what he's hiding about his nervous breakdown and drug use, and his answers (and off the record comments) are calibrated to satisfy a reporter's curiosity.

The book is overflowing with his particular persona, right down to the awkwardly structured, overly long title, which comes from one of Wallace's statements. It's amazing how vague the dialogue is. Wallace is hesitant to make a definitive statement, so he qualifies his statements, and sprinkles them with mitigating phrases, and kinda, sortas and maybes, like, abound. This is a painfully self-conscious dialogue, as the interview is self-conscious when the interviewee is overly conscious of what he perceives are his own inadequacies to the moment itself. But he is also refreshingly honest about some aspects of his career, such as how unsatisfying he thinks the ending to "The Broom of the System" was. He both praises and savages John Updike, and points out the flaws of Stephen King while at the same time lauding him. He believes that the death of serious reading will mean that identity has also ceased to exist. He sees the flaws in experimental writing. He has endless riffs on movies. All of these observations are laid out in caffeinated, postcollegiate patois, complete with all the you knows, uhs, and likes that we all struggle against in our own daily speech. Some of this is superficial pedestrian woolgathering masquerading as philosophy, and some of it is brilliant observation. The distance between the two isn't all that great.

Wallace also lays out some of his theories on what it will take for the writer to grab the attention of his over-stimulated, undereducated, 24-hour-news cycle audience. As Wallace is talking, we are pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook, with the Internet only just beginning to grab the attention and time of the public. What strikes Wallace, again and again, is the "loneliness" of modern life - how little connectivity has actually connected anyone. And upon reading, the horrifying reality is that this condition has only worsened since these interviews took place.

But Wallace also believes that human beings are "absolutely dying to give ourselves away to something." He believes this, but he also believes it is virtually impossible to write in a contemporary voice about God:

"I mean the culture, it's all wrong for it now. You know? No, no. Plausibly realistic characters don't sit around talking about this stuff. You know? So...I don't know. But the minute I start talking about it, it just, it sounds number one: very vague. Two: really reductive. And the whole thing to me was so complicated, that you know it took sixteen hundred pages of sort of weird oblique stuff to even start to talk about it. And so feel stupid, talking about it."

Of course, the real characters of this book are talking about it, and neither sounds like Dostoevsky. So why does he feel uncomfortable talking about it? "Because I don't have a diagnosis. I don't have a system of prescriptions," he says. Yet later, he and Pinsky understand that modern America and their generation is growing up in "the rubble of the old system" - that is, the "ridiculous and hypocritical...old authoritarian...don't-question-authority stuff." But, like Jonathan Franzen, Wallace has nothing to replace it with, no direction to point to, no diagnosis, no prescription. He knows enough to know that the same generation is "dying...on the toxicity" of the idea that pleasure and comfort provide the ultimate meanings for life.

"I'm talking about the number of privileged, highly intelligent, motivated career-track people that I know, from my high school and college, who are, if you look into their eyes, empty and miserable. You know? And who don't believe in politics, and don't believe in religion...And who just..who don't believe in anything. Who know fantastic reasons not to believe in stuff, and are terrific ironists and pokers of holes. And there's nothing wrong with that, it's just, it doesn't seem to me that there's just a whole lot else."

But reading this, it's evident there is indeed something wrong with that, and Wallace knows it. One wonders whether he did have some idea of what was wrong, but didn't feel comfortable providing an answer. I'm not suggesting a Christian answer, though it is interesting that Wallace leaves Pinsky to go to a church where "everyone more or less wants to leave each other alone." Much of Wallace's work deals with the loneliness, the lack of meaning, the aimlessness of existence, and the search for meaning, or just, how to kill time. But a writer with the ambition to write an epic novel, with the courage to look at the hole in modern existence, is also mature enough to recognize that he doesn't have all the answers. The question of existence remains. Being able not to believe in something isn't necessarily a strength, when one ultimately doesn't believe in anything at all.

In the book's forward, Franzen provides an observation: "Does it look now like David had all the answers?" In retrospect, we can see that he at least was on to the right questions. But Lipsky's epitaph resounds: "His life was a map that ends at the wrong destination."

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima

2011-04-02T19:03:00.004-05:00

Among the plays slated for later this year at the Lincoln Center Festival will be the American premiere of "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion" by Japan's Kanagawa Arts Theatre, a dramatization of Yukio Mishima's most well-known novel. Anyone who saw Paul Schrader's "Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters" will remember that one of those chapters was taken up with this spell-binding story, replete with Mishima's customary violence and obsession with obsessions.

“The Temple of the Golden Pavilion” tells the story of the stuttering, antisocial Buddhist acolyte Mizoguchi, who will eventually set the fire that destroys Kinkaku-ji, the 550-year-old temple in Kyoto. Based on an event that occurred in 1950, Mishima supposedly went so far as to interview the real arsonist, a schizophrenic, in prison in preparation. Inside this novel is a carefully drawn portrait of a mind’s slow descent into madness, but also the struggle of an individual frustrated by his surroundings, searching for freedom.

“He who chases fantasies lacks judgment,” or such is the judgment of Proverbs 12:11. Mizoguchi, from an early age and inspired by his father, sees the Golden Temple as the very essence of beauty. Not the Temple itself, which initially disappoints him, but the image he has created in his mind. Because of this, he easily contrasts it against himself, the personification of ugliness. Interestingly, Mishima - or his translator, Ivan Morris - decides not to let us hear Mizoguchi’s stutter for ourselves. His thoughts, of course, which tell the story, flow freely. But they are a contradictory lot, with conflicting observations about the nature of beauty, ugliness, being and nothingness, good and evil. From an early age, Mizoguchi is alone and proud of being misunderstood, which is the beginning of his fall. It gives him a sense of mission, which is key to his development as the story unfolds.

Halfway through the book, Mizoguchi reminds himself that “the essence of Zen is the absence of all particularities, and that the real power to see consists in the knowledge that one’s own heart possesses neither form nor feature.” In a way, he longs for the nothingness, the lack of attachment, of his calling, but his pride in his otherness keeps drawing him out of this. “It is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other,” he says. But he stands in opposition to the beauty of the Temple, the ever-present, suffocating, undeniability of the Temple. Mizoguchi does not “have any feeling of solidarity with nothingness.” Indeed, he cannot, not because of his defect, not because of the Temple. It is little wonder that his encounters with women repeatedly find him impotent.

One can spot several different messages arising within the story. Beauty acts as an ideal, but also as a curse. It reminds Mizoguchi - and us - that the trials of the world are not so easily escaped even by the devoted and devout. The obsessions we wrap ourselves in can dominate us, and easily turn what is just a historical building of great beauty into a reminder of the unworthiness we perceive in ourselves. One is left to wonder if the individual within Mizoguchi might have been encouraged, in a different setting, or if the process of encouragement itself would have any effect. After all, what would he be encouraged to do? But we also have an all-too familiar picture of the angry loner, a figure who comes to believe that only through destruction does he define himself, that destiny has fingered him for an awful end, but it is his own end, and he will embrace it willingly because it is his. The Christian idea of sin, of malignant desire for that which is beyond redemption or even beyond understanding, is recognizable. But there is something else - a rebellion against the eastern concept of the ideal, which is an existence beyond attachment, identity and struggle.

With the death of Mizoguchi’s father, he begins his career at the Temple, and he befriends Tsurukawa, an upright man. But Mizoguchi’s malevolence is growing, “a wordless force” that seeks to possess him. He nurtures it as he recognizes it, and it blooms when he makes a new friend, Kashiwagi. An arrogant, malicious, self-absorbed man with a club foot, he projects all of these twisted qualities onto Mizoguchi and shows him how to use his disability to his disadvantages.

The appearance of Kashiwagi midway through the novel is Mizoguchi’s catalyst, and the beginning of his emotional apprenticeship. Mizoguchi also learns about the nature of hypocrisy from the Superior, Father Dosen, who has both frustrated and advanced Mizoguchi’s career. At its beginning, Mizoguchi held the ambition to one day succeed him, but only later does this contort itself into the desire to destroy the Temple. After all, the Temple is more alive than Mizoguchi.

Near the end, before Mizoguchi carries out his plot, he begs a visiting father to see past his face and look into his heart. We realize that he too recognizes what is going on inside him, that he does care, that he perceives the outer “ugliness” has taken root inside him, but the father cannot see inside him, and instead unknowingly inspires him to go ahead. Given the author, one might expect Mizoguchi to kill himself in sight of the flames of the Temple. But instead, he smokes a cigarette and embraces the freedom he has found for himself, the individuality, the singularity of his existence. It is not our thoughts which define us to others - but our actions. But our thoughts define us to ourselves, and make the action inevitable.

Silence by Shusaku Endo

2011-03-26T22:54:00.003-05:00

One of the director Martin Scorcese's future planned film projects is reportedly a movie based on "Silence," a novel by the Catholic Japanese writer Shusaku Endo. In an interview with the writer Richard Schiekel, Scorcese states that he has been contemplating a film about the book since a copy was given to him following the release of his 1988 film, "The Last Temptation of Christ." Endo's tale, stepped in the early history of Christianity in Japan, reveals the story of people whose faith survived even as they outwardly denied it.

Endo uses several strategies of structure and voice to tell his story. It begins with news from Japan relayed back to Europe that the Jesuit priest Ferreira, after 33 years on the island, has become an apostate following torture. This inspires the journey of two priests, Sebastian Rodrigues and Francisco Garrpe, who go to Japan to discover the truth about their former mentor. As Francisco observes, "there is no one more wretchedly alone than the priest who does not measure up to his task."

There is more than the fate of a single priest at issue though. The Shogun of Japan is waging a bloody campaign to stamp out Christianity, torturing and killing priests and requiring thousands of villagers to desecrate the holy images they venerate. The Japanese authority does not wish to become yet another European colony in the Far East, with the church serving as its advance guard. The church, in turn, is afraid that its toehold on this island at the edge of the world is disappearing.

After a brief introduction by a narrator, we then follow several chapters of letters penned by Rodrigues, who relates the journey of the priests to Japan and their struggles to remain underground once they reach the islands. Their journey is aided by Kichijiro, a Japanese drunkard later revealed as a Christian brother who succumbed to fear and became an apostate at the point of death. We hear Rodrigues' voice as he thrills to the adventure of discovering that Christian faith thrives still in secret, as he administers baptisms, conducts mass and hears confessions from Japanese starving for the sacraments. It is in these chapters that we relate most to Rodrigues, the reader bonding with his devotion to the faith.

Two themes begin to introduce themselves at this point. One is the image of the face. Rodrigues studies the faces of the Japanese, who look alien and expressionless to him. Are they really devoted followers, and who among them may be ready to betray them to the authorities? Behind the face, we see, is the truth of a person and, we believe, the measure of his faith. Rodrigues senses that Christianity acts as an antidote to the fatalism endemic in the Japanese people, but he detects a diabolical nature behind their outward passivity. Even still, Rodrigues observes that "Our Lord himself entrusted his destiny to untrustworthy people." The face that is mentioned more than any is that of Jesus. Rodrigues, as his situation deteriorates, obsesses over the portrait of Jesus he paints in his own imagination. This is necessary, considering that that very face will be the one that measures his own destiny during the course of the book.

The other theme, though, gives the book its title. "Silence" may stand for the kind employed by the Japanese Christians, who practice their faith in secret and are driven to deny it even as they cling to it. But Rodrigues mentions the awful silence of God, as his faith is challenged again and again. After a few believers are killed, and Kichijiro questions why they must endure alone among men, Rodrigues pens these words:

"I have long read about martyrdom in the lives of the saints - how the souls of the martyrs had gone home to Heaven, how they had been filled with glory in Paradise, how the angels had blown trumpets. This was the splendid martyrdom I had often seen in my dreams. But the martyrdom of the Japanese Christians I now describe to you was no such glorious thing. What a miserable and painful business it was! The rain falls unceasingly on the sea. And the sea which killed them surges on uncannily - in silence."

But the scene abruptly shifts to a narrator again once Rodrigues is captured. The silence he mentions is overpowering, even as Kichijiro again proves himself, in Rodrigues' eyes, as an unreliable believer. The inevitable meeting comes with Ferreira, who is now an unrepentant apostate with a Japanese name and wife. He is a defeated man, and he believes Christianity will never take root in Japan because the Japanese will eventually twist the faith into whatever gods and superstitions they already possess.

Rodrigues feels himself twisted, as the pain mounts, even questioning the existence of God and his own place in an increasing absurd fate. He has traveled around the world to find his mentor an unbeliever, and he feels his impending death as the final death blow to the faith in this alien land. He will be "a missionary defeated by missionary work." And he compares himself to Christ in his sufferings, drawing inspiration, but also asking questions and nursing doubts. The peril of free will is that even as we may be succeeding in life, we can still fail in the ultimate test of divine approval. The closer we draw to God, the more we are aware of how far away we are, how utterly lost without Him.

In hearing a final confession, Rodrigues hears what he thinks is the voice of Jesus, with the distance of the cross providing a last blessing and comfort. The silence has been necessary, he learns, so that he could identify with his Lord in a special way unlike any other. His existence has kept the faith going, even if his example has failed. By giving us this novel, Endo speaks on the paradox of evangelism - that even the outward failure of the individual can lead to ultimate success if the message is carried on, if the life speaking of it draws sufficient attention with its passing on of the light. It is not the individual who succeeds, but the Word itself. In the telling of the story of Jesus, we not only identify with Him, we discover Him, even as we bring others to Him.

In the end, God thunders loudest in appalling, scandalous silences, when our spirit gnaws at the end of our faith like a ravenous dog on a dessicated bone. It is the craving for His voice to comfort, to reassure, even to explain, that ultimately reveals His face, and ours.

Sanshirō by Natsume Sōseki

2011-03-25T15:11:00.001-05:00

Reading Haruki Murakami again led me to this classic of Japanese 20th century literature, since Murakami provided the introduction to this latest translation by Jay Rubin. "Sanshirō" is the story of a young country boy who goes to Tokyo for his university education, and Murakami's introduction points out that, if the book is effective, it is because it provides an affectionate and accurate representation of the "fragrance" of this particular time in one's life, regardless of where the reader may live.

The setting is 1908. Japan, after centuries of non-contact with the West, is open to European and American influences in art, dress, religion, politics, philosophy and expression. The setting, then, is a hurricane of societal change, and that alone would be worthy of a panoramic novel of ideas. But Sanshirō, who has experienced rural life with its suppositions and superstitions, is thrust into modern Japan to receive his education. He approaches the city with a mix of skepticism, innocence, fear and expectation.

What follows then is a story with an intimate setting and a small cast of interrelated characters. "Sanshirō" is a novel of college life, but its most important aspects are not lectures or the ideas the characters wrestle with, but what characters learn about the world they will encounter, and themselves, and how they deal with each other. Just as in every university the world over, passionate young people display inordinate emotion over ideas they barely understand, but which dominate them. The students give birth to ideas that have been rubbed raw, already thought and rethought a thousand times. These minds are too young to know how unoriginal these fancies are, but vain enough to exult in the ideas as if they are brand new. "How many aeons did nature expend in fashioning a precious jewel?," one asks. "And how many aeons did the jewel lie gleaming in the earth until fate brought it forth?"

Sanshirō is a familiar character, a wise fool who is oblivious to experience as he makes friends with the ebullient Yojirō and pursues the shy Mineko. He "smells of the farm," Yojirō tells him, but his reticence keeps him in awe of the figures he encounters and mindful of danger.

This marks him, though, as a "coward," as evident in his first encounter with a woman on a train headed to Tokyo. He ends up sharing a bath and a bed in an inn with a strange woman, but nothing passes between them. It is only at their parting that he realizes she was waiting for him to make a move. Later, his mother repeats the charge that he has always been cowardly. Yet it took some courage for Sanshirō to venture to college in the first place. What we see is not so much a man who is avoiding danger as one who is blind to it. The only question is how willingly blind he is. He is learning, and more than anything, learning to understand. The emotional language of those he meets is foreign to him - just as foreign as "Hamlet" is when he waits for the Danish prince to say something more recognizably Japanese.

The question of Japanese identity lies dormant in the novel, as the definition is still being debated during this period. The Japanese are learning, in the early 1900s, to become part of a larger world community. There is awe at some western ideas and healthy skepticism. But a professor counsels Sanshirō from the beginning "not to surrender himself" to the ideas he encounters, which is also a theme running through the novel. All of these grand philosophical and societal ideas are nothing, the same professor says later, because man does not operate according to mechanical laws. The same experiences inspire different responses from men living side by side.

The professor offers another critique, in that western ideals have made people less hypocritical, because they are "hyper-villains" - instead of caring for others for the benefit of public approval, they now care for themselves out in the open. This has made society meaner, but more honest, "natural ugliness in all its glory," the professor says. This is one of the paradoxes of modern living, of course. We surrender civilization in the service of "honesty," but we instead give dishonesty a bigger home in wider society. We surrender altruism because it inconvenient, but we mourn the loss. And where does Sanshirō fit in? All he seems to want, even though he doesn't understand it, is Mineko.

The bittersweetness of college, though, is that it eventually ends, as does youth. Mineko will not marry Sanshirō, but only because he eventually proves the prophecy of his cowardice. Later on, Sanshirō learns that Mineko is a Christian, which makes her common judgment on others - that they are "stray sheep" - more understandable. It also makes the heart ache to hear her parting words to him, from Psalms 51: "For I acknowledge my transgression, and my sin is ever before me." She has mistakenly given her heart to a man who will not take it. He has learned something, but we are unsure if it is enough to change him.

after the quake by Haruki Murakami

2011-03-21T23:15:00.004-05:00

The indelible pictures of devastation following this month's 9.0 earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan continue to mesmerize - with YouTube videos of cars bobbing in the water, homes carried away on currents, and the smoldering ruins of nuclear reactors, with no one knowing where the devastation may end. The Japanese themselves struggle with not only how to rebuild, but what "meaning" they may attach to this parade of disasters.

The last time the nation went through a comparable catastrophe was the 1995 Kobe earthquake, which killed more than 6,400 people. It also inspired "after the quake," a short story collection by Haruki Murakami peopled with characters dealing with its aftermath.

But the effect is largely at a distance. The book's six stories do not feature even a single survivor of the quake, nor is there a description of the moment of devastation. The characters of the book tend to experience the disaster as much of Japan and the world did - secondhand, through television images and reports of the devastation. Komura, the main character of the opening story, "UFO in Kushiro," (which is being reprinted in this week's New Yorker) sees a morning paper of reports:

"He read it from beginning to end on the plane. The number of dead was rising. Many areas were still without water or electricity, and countless people had lost their homes. Each article reported some new tragedy, but to Komura the details seemed oddly lacking in depth. All sounds reached him as far-off, monotonous echoes."

The stories have common traits, common images, common themes. One is obviously a sense of loss. Komura's wife has used the earthquake to leave him. Another character has run away from his wife. One story takes place not in Japan but Thailand, with the earthquake only mentioned in passing, reminding a woman of a lost child. Still another character has what may or may not be a mystical experience that prevents a larger quake from striking Tokyo, but with the expectation he may lose his life.

Another element is the aftermath of sudden calamity. In all cases, the earthquake is only a far-off trauma that mirrors one closer to home. The death of loved ones, the loss of certainties in life, the suddenness of unwanted loneliness, the approach of death - all of these shake and shape our characters in ways far beyond that of trembling earth. The heart figures prominently in a few of them, as an image and the obvious stand-in as the seat of our emotions, our longings for freedom, and our insistence on love.

But the characters in these stories also deal with meaning, and the loss of meaning brought on by disaster. Komura, our hero from the opening story, does not know why his wife left and struggles with understanding how he can continue in her absence. Katagiri, in "Super-Frog Saves Tokyo," believes he is being guided by a walking, talking frog who means to save the capital city. He is told that if he has faith in the frog, who has been watching him and silently admiring his integrity, then they will be successful. But even if they are successful, no one will know it has happened.

Yoshida, the main character of "All God's Children Can Dance," deals with the absence of the defining idea of his life, as his religiously devout mother raised him to believe, as part of her pseudo-Christian cult, that he was a Son of God. Consequently, as the years continue, he abandons his faith because of "the unending coldness of the One who was his father: His dark, heavy, silent heart of stone." In the face of so many losses, Yoshida asks the question why "if it is all right for God to test man, why was it wrong for man to test God?" Even Yoshida, in the end though, cannot totally abandon God anymore than he can abandon the faith he barely comprehends. Like our other characters, he struggles against a profound sense of loneliness that seems just as persistent as it is indefinable. More than one character struggles against a sense of personal darkness that threatens to overwhelm him or her.

The New York Times, in reporting on the response of the Japanese people to the 2011 earthquake, noted that at least one citizen mentioned tapping the nation's "hidden strength." "Implicit in the praise of Japanese traits of endurance, perseverance and grace - strengths evident in the orderly response to the unfathomable destruction up north - is a criticism of the perceived values that led to the nuclear accidents: the postwar blind pursuit of material wealth and comfort..."

The stories of "after the quake" illustrate that disasters sometimes serve only as the background music in the lives of individuals to illustrate the loss of control we all experience, even at our sanest and safest. We struggle for meaning because we do not want an accident to be responsible for carrying away all we ever knew, but we struggle against it simultaneously because we don't think the meaning we perceive may be one we wish to confront. We want to assign blame elsewhere, or we are too quick to attach it to ourselves. We want clarity, until we perceive it, and then we insist on ambiguity, with nothingness growing in our hearts, in order to preserve our all-too-fragile notions of who we are and where we think we are going.

A headline this week in the USA Today on the disaster read, "For survivors, daily struggle of life and death." Murakami, in evoking Kobe, reminds us that such a headline can deal with much more than the aftermath of an earthquake.

The Man by Ray Bradbury

2011-02-15T09:14:00.002-06:00

One of the more tantalizing verses of Scripture is John 10:16, where Jesus tells His disciples: “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.”

The verse is usually interpreted to mean the gentiles who will believe following the Resurrection and the work of the disciples. But this is the verse I thought of after I read Ray Bradbury’s interesting short story, “The Man,” one of the stories collected in “The Illustrated Man.”

Published in 1948, “The Man” is full of the whiz bang fun of classic science fiction - rocket men traveling through the stars in search of meaning. The story is like others of the period, it quickly gets to the business of storytelling, with characterization in a few phrases and mannerisms, right before the main idea is served up for the reader.

In this case, our story concerns two rocket men, Hart, the captain, and Martin. Their rocket lands on the outskirts of some town on some planet in full view of the city folk, who make no effort to come out and welcome them. Hart is a cynical, cigar smoking voyager, impatient for answers, “looking for our own lost souls.” He laments that science has left man with little except traveling into the heavens looking for a better world than the one they left. One is reminded of Charlton Heston’s Taylor from “Planet of the Apes.”

Martin listens but doesn’t comment on these observations. He goes along with them amiably enough until Hart sends him into town to discover why the townspeople don’t come. When he returns, he is visibly shaken and momentarily unable to speak. The reason there was no welcoming committee for the rocket, Martin says, is that the town was busy celebrating. An unnamed man “they’d waited a long time for” had suddenly appeared again, rendering their landing meaningless. Who is he? An unnamed man who heals the sick and comforts the poor, who fights hypocrisy and dirty politics. “He didn’t have a name. He didn’t need a name. It’d be different on every planet, sir,” Martin reports.

“You don’t mean - you can’t mean - That man you’re talking about couldn’t be -” Hart stammers, until Martin nods that the man, indeed, is.

The two go into the city, where vague talk of miracles are on everyone’s lips. But Hart wants more than the pie in the sky poetry he receives in return for his questions. When asking the mayor of the town about what happened, the mayor replies, “We are all witnesses.” When asking a woman what color the man’s eyes were, she says, “The color of the sun, the color of the sea, the color of a flower, the color of the mountains, the color of the night.”

The two spacemen, though, cannot agree on what they are seeing. Martin resolves to stay on the planet, telling Hart, “They’ve got something you’ll never have - a little simple faith- you’re boiled because someone stole your act, got here ahead and made you unimportant…Take your filth somewhere else and foul up other nests with your doubt and your - scientific method!”

The captain, though, is unconvinced. He sees this as an elaborate scam, perpetrated by his nemesis Burton. His logic is simple - what they have seen can’t possible be what it appears to be. But another rocket crash lands, and the two men discover that Burton has been dead two days and never made it to this planet. This is no ruse.

Hart, like his name, is impulsive, even reckless, we later discover. We see that he has a logical, scientific mind, but we also see that the logic is in the service of his nature. He does not believe, perhaps, because he does not want to believe. Faith is beyond him. He must have proof. But we sense that even proof will not be enough for Hart. Even truth might have another explanation. Martin, (perhaps Luther?) on the other hand, is a believer, because he wants to believe. Even the doubts that Hart plants in him do not take root. He is just as passionate, though he sees Hart’s doubt as something corrosive and harmful, not to himself, but the people they were meant to discover.

But after this revelation in a burning rocket, though, Hart is ready to believe. The two men go back into the city, but cannot find The Man. “Each man finds him in his own way,” the mayor tells Hart. But the captain, impatient for answers, pulls a gun on the mayor, convinced he is hiding The Man. The mayor observes that while Hart thinks he wants to believe, that he finally can believe, the reality is - the spaceman just wants an answer. Any answer perhaps will satisfy him, for the moment.

Hart resolves to go on to the next world, and the next, until he finally catches up to the mysterious man. Maybe he’ll keep missing him, but eventually, he’ll find him. And what will he ask The Man for? “A little peace and quiet,” he says. He will not rest, nor can he rest, and when asked why, he does not understand the question.

It is only after he leaves that the Mayor reveals to Martin that “The Man” is still there, and mustn’t be kept waiting.

So what is Bradbury trying to say, if anything? We can sense another face of the Almighty in Hart himself, the impatient captain who flew his rocket over the city, expecting hordes of curious townspeople to come out in expectation, but instead, is left with his lonely ship. Why don’t they come? he wonders, like the lord of the feast from Jesus’ parable, who has prepared his house for guests but finds it empty. The questing heart is wounded by the indifference of the one he seeks.

In the mayor’s comment, that each man finds Him in his own way, one senses a creeping pantheism, that Jesus is just another name for any other vehicle man might worship. But the inability of Hart to believe, and his stubborn insistence on finding out for himself, leads the reader in another direction - even proof does not necessarily prove. One must have faith to believe in anything, whether it be resurrection, reincarnation or radioactivity. Yes, some things are easier to prove than others, and some things are undeniable fact. But even the hardest, truest things in life sometimes cannot overcome a brittle heart.

And some journeys of unimaginable distances don’t require a rocket ship, simply because they have already been made for you.

The History of History by Ida Hattemer-Higgins

2011-02-14T10:27:00.002-06:00

This first novel by Ida Hattemer-Higgins is subtitled, “A Novel of Berlin,” and the city literally seethes and breathes on every page. Margaret Taub is a tour guide, with an intimate knowledge of its streets and the ability to describe not only what is seen on them but what the streets themselves have witnessed. For any modern novel of Berlin must have a memory, unspeakable memories, and a voice to reveal them.

But Margaret has amnesia - a limited case of amnesia, covering a period in 2002 and 2003. Her amnesia though, is meant to remind us of the collective amnesia of the German people over the mass insanity of the Nazi period. As Margaret begins her investigation into what happened during her missing months, she is pursued by the spirit of Magda Goebbels, the wife of Hitler’s propaganda minister, in the form of a tempting, accusing harpy. Magda, of course, is notoriously remembered for having murdered her six children in the Fuhrer Bunker, even after Hitler’s suicide, rather than spirit them to safety.

Margaret sees herself in Magda, and in Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress and wife for a day. She sees herself in the family Strauss, who killed themselves rather than face the horror of the war. She sees herself passing judgment on victim and murderer alike, finding kinship with each alike, until all human action is revealed as corrupt. Her observations and obsessions lead her to believe that what she is doing is domesticating her fear, homogenizing the terror.

Margaret is an American with German ancestry, so she (believes she) is an outsider to the recriminations and excuses that modern Germany’s collective memory offers to the Holocaust. But the creeping insanity that she battles is something that anyone who plunges into the history of the Third Reich feels. We see the camps, we see the abandoned shoes and abandoned clothes and abandoned lives, and we desperately want it all to mean something. The sufferings of millions crystallize for us for just a moment in one solitary life, and we mourn, though we are not sure what precisely we are mourning.

Margaret’s visits to a Dr. Arabscheilis confirm some of this:

“’If you read some scrap of history,’ the doctor said, ‘you are doing nothing but replaying your own life, only in heavy makeup. The world is pregnant with your own face, and it will never give birth to anything else. You know nothing but this life of yours, which is plain and pure emotion, stripped of all gratification of meaning - just a whimper in the dark. A story, by contrast, is a symphony blooming in the sunlight, trying to draw you away from chaos.”

Later in the novel, Margaret again speaks to the doctor about the similarity, on a smaller and at the same time more epic scale, between the Holocaust and the Crucifixion. Margaret wonders that if since the death of one man led to spiritual enlightenment, can the death of millions more help the world in the same way. The doctor dismisses this, saying, “The murder of the Jews of Europe in the twentieth century is only interesting to people for whom it is not unbearable. Interest in terrible things is always a sign of detachment.” In the beginning, we tried not to talk about it, and now we perhaps talk too much about it, with the feeling we will never comprehend it at all.

Humanity still hasn’t figured out a way to make sense of the murder of six million Jews, much less the death of 50 million in the Second World War, which is one of the reasons why fiction dealing with the Shoah usually suffers from two defects - the story does not do justice to the reality we know, or the story attempts to borrow the clothes of the event for itself and disguises a defective story. But Hattemer-Higgins wisely uses the idea of the tour guide as both outsider and insider, and her prose mirrors the mental confusion of Margaret Taub as she realizes her journey is one of self-discovery. The narrative veers into magic realism occasionally, and adopts an almost Biblical language at times, as if conventional English is somehow unworthy of the trauma at the heart of the story.

Because this is a story not just about collective, historical evil, but about personal evil and the will to want to forget. I was reminded of Ron Rosenbaum’s “Explaining Hitler,” a wonderful book written in 1998 about Hitler explainers - those philosophers, historians, psychologists, theologians and Holocaust survivors who argue over the question of whether Hitler was evil - in other words, did he know his dream of mass murder was evil, or was he, in the words of one biographer, “convinced of his own rectitude?” It is not a small question, as Rosenbaum states:

“…what we talk about when we talk about Hitler is often not the Hitler of history but the meaning of evil. Not evil as some numinous supernatural entity but evil as a name for a capacity of human nature. To what degree does Hitler represent some ultimate, perhaps never-before-seen extension of that capacity? Or does he represent not a qualitative leap in that capacity but rather a figure whose distinctiveness and importance in this regard have been inflated by the quantity of his victims?”

But Margaret Taub, her name means deaf, is not a victim of Hitler, but of a man named Amadeus, whose name means “work of God.” Her love affair with this older man starts her on a bitter road that brings her face to face with her own origins, and headed for a destination that ends up being her undoing. It is the memory of Amadeus and what became of their affair which is the genesis of her amnesia. Her suffering is a particularly feminine kind of suffering, and we perceive that her passion will not be assuaged by the passage of time. The fact that the world continues in the face of her pain is real and devastating. We often abandon our secret shame at the doors of others, only to see it wither in their indifference, the screams going ignored, and then silent.

In this regard, Margaret Taub’s odyssey through the pulsating streets of Berlin, her ears ringing with the accusations of millions, the hands of creeping death fondling her imagination, bears some kinship with the narrator of Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” herself employing the language of the Shoah to describe her fascination with death:

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I have a call.

Because the picture of Hitler, trapped in the bunker of his own creation, a victim of his own accumulating sins, fascinates us in the same way as grand opera, only more so because we know it to be real. And we know that the nature of humanity’s capacity for evil has never fully been appreciated or understood, just as the supreme sacrifice to undo it has remained, for many, ignored and unaccepted.

The Kings Speech, and the Queen's

2011-02-07T08:41:00.002-06:00

“The King’s Speech” is the early favorite to win Best Picture honors at this year’s Academy Awards. The story of King George VI, and his relationship with a speech therapist, as he learned to control both a stammer and his crushing fears, is the inspiring story of a man who happened to become King of Great Britain.

But what Winston Churchill called “the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire” has made for many great motion pictures, which is why “The King’s Speech” functions roughly as a prequel to another recent movie about the British royal family - the story of George’s daughter Elizabeth, “The Queen.”

The climax of both films, strangely enough, comes when both sovereigns give speeches - though the speeches come under very different sets of circumstances.

George VI, still trying to overcome his stuttering and grow into his position, must give a rallying speech to the British Empire by radio on Sept. 3, 1939, the day his nation declared war on Germany. It is the second time in little over a generation that the world has plunged into war. George, or Bertie as he is known, stands before a microphone with his coach, Lionel Logue, giving the speech to free his people from what he called “the bondage of fear.”

The film brings us to this moment by showing us a man who lived in the shadows of his father and his older brother, his own fears and his lack of self-esteem. Though Logue can help him with the physical aspects of his defect, it is only when he confronts the man’s inner pain that the words begin to flow. It is only when he accepts himself that he is able to become the monarch he wishes to be.

For “The Queen,” Elizabeth must give a speech following the death of her ex-daughter-in-law, Princess Diana, in order to calm the emotions of the British public. The nation’s tabloid culture has turned its venom on her, largely in order to shield itself from accusations Diana was killed by a stalking paparazzi. The Queen, however, has committed the sin of not being properly mournful enough.

When Elizabeth speaks, she has no impediment, except perhaps her own stubborn insistence on tradition. As a woman who has spent her whole life embodying a symbolic idea of herself as her people, the moment is crushing. She experiences a temporary loss of identity, when she realizes that she has miscalculated the mood of the people. It is only by humbling herself, by calling attention to her position “as your Queen, and as a grandmother” in the speech, that she regains her position and something she did not have before. She is now human, a virtue which before now has not been valuable to herself or her position.

It is George V, her grandfather, in “The King’s Speech,” who warns Bertie of this, as the son sits in front of a microphone, unable to read the traditional Christmas greeting. The King tells the future king that the microphone, and therefore modern media, will transform them into human beings, and require more of them than simply being a lone figure on horseback, or standing on balconies to wave to crowds. When we hear this speech, we are reminded of Elizabeth’s dilemma, seventy years in the future.

On both of these film journeys, the two monarchs have guides - Logue for Bertie, and Tony Blair serves somewhat the same function for Elizabeth. But in the end, the action must come from the sovereign. Only the King can be king, only the Queen can be queen.

Which is why the royal family, and power in general, has always served as a subject for high drama. The idea of “divine right” - you are king because God chose you - can be understood by the noble and ignoble alike. The question of destiny has always been an essential mechanism of drama, because the human condition sometimes can be easily reduced to the question of “why me?” Why did this have to happen? What has brought me to this moment? One need not be a monarch to feel this, nor to feel the finger of God holding one in a very uncomfortable place, until the skin slides off your illusions and reveals them for what they are. Oedipus, blind and raging against the will of the gods, is only a slight step removed from Hamlet, dogged by a ghost toward a revenge he cannot comprehend, which is only a slight step away from Richard Nixon speaking to a silent painting of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on the walls of the White House, taking in an accusation only he can hear.

When the subject is a ruler, all the power in the world is sometimes no comfort at all when it serves to remind one of how truly powerless one is.

Or, as George VI said to his people, standing at the threshold of war once again, “we can only do the right as we see the right, and reverently commit our cause to God.”

Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke

2011-02-04T16:13:00.002-06:00

Jesus is recorded as saying that little children are "such as" the Kingdom of Heaven. Children also figure heavily in some of the signature fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, as symbols of how far humanity has to intellectually travel to confront the stars, or how little we know, or how the promise of humanity is like that of a child, with an entire lifetime ahead.

"Childhood's End," though, shares some of the other characteristics of his fiction. Like the more well-known "2001: A Space Odyssey," this novel has the human race encountering a much more advanced alien species, known here as the Overlords. The images of "Childhood's End" are familiar to anyone paying attention to popular science fiction movies of the past 50-plus years: Ships, appearing over major cities, with alien races putting humanity "in its place" through technology and superior intellect.

I was surprised at how many times Clarke reverts to Biblical quotations and allusions in telling his story. Early on, it is the figure Van Ryberg who quotes the Bible, that man cannot live only by the bread the Overlords provide. Clarke uses this to illustrate that the conflict against the Overlords, at first, has its roots in humanity's dependence on religion.

Clarke wisely (and humorously) decides to introduce the Overlords with a mystery - what do they look like? It is several generations after their arrival before they finally allow humanity to see them, and Clarke tells us they decided this was necessary since it would take that long for the religious impulses to die away and humanity to grow accustomed to them. When the Overlords reveal themselves, we see why - they resemble the medieval conception of the devil, with horns, tail and wings. When the Overlord's planet is finally revealed, it resembles the ancient idea of Hell. (His explanation: Mankind was seeing it's far distant future, not remembering an idea from the past.) What is interesting is that Clarke opts in this Overlord-created utopia on earth to never actually mention Christianity, though the absence draws attention to itself. His fiction actually aims for a kind of synthetic Buddhism - a nonthreatening mysticism that he presumes will allow for an open mind. There are less demands upon us, presumably.

It is this curiosity about the Overlords that leads one human - Jan - to stowaway on one of their craft. Clarke's humor is satisfied again when he places Jan inside a model of a whale, recreating the story of Jonah, who also tried to thwart an almighty will.

Clarke uses several human characters to tell the story - the Secretary General of the UN, Jan, and a couple, the Greggsons. Though we still don't know, deep into the novel, what the Overlords want, we are intrigued when one of them takes an interest in psychic phenomena. It is the use of an Ouija board - and it's answer about where the Overlords live - that brings about the solution of the mystery of why they came at all.

"Childhood's End," inevitably, is about the end of the human race, and it is the most human voice that belongs to Karellen, the Overlord who supervises Earth. He reveals, at the end, that the Overlords came to Earth to witness and safeguard the next step in the human race's evolution - into a group mind with immense intellectual gifts. Fittingly, these gifts make them seem primitive to us, but that too is part of Clarke's imagination: Hope is couched in the simple, with the idea that it masks a much deeper complexity than is apparant to the unenlightened eye.

The novel has, as one would expect, a lingering Cold War sensibility, since the Overlords pride themselves on saving humanity from nuclear destruction. War actually gave birth to the novel, as it is filled with images from World War II - the exodus of children to the British countryside, the evacuation from Dunkirk, and even the Overlords' ships, which were inspired by the barrage ballons that floated over London during the Blitz.

When the secret is finally revealed, Karellen tells humanity that science is the only real religion of mankind, but it is not the only story. Clarke tells us that religion shares with science an understanding that there is more to life than is apparent to the eye, and that understanding is possible, but Clarke has the Overlords state that religion can only give an incomplete picture:

"Yet your mystics, though they were lost in their own delusions, had seen part of the truth. There are powers of the mind, and powers beyond the mind, which your science could never have brought within its framework without shattering it entirely."

The child image - that mankind must put away its childish things and grow up - comes off as condescending. He aims to trade Jehovah for his own created Overlords, though in the end, they also serve an even higher power. But Clarke is not engaging in his own mysticism, for a higher power would seem godlike to a less intelligent species, regardless of whether that power was divine or not.

Clarke insisted on the rational, which is why the novel in its first printing carried the odd disclaimer that events in the book did not reflect the views of the author. In his utopia, religion is swept away easily, but so is scientific investigation, and so we arrive at a problem. Humanity that does not quest after something ceases to be human, which is why this particular vision feels unreal. Mankind without the heart of a child - the curiosity, the sometimes blind faith, the willingness and openness, the neediness - would not be worth saving.

Which brings us back to Jesus, who said that we could not enter the Kingdom of Heaven unless we possessed the faith of a child. Clarke's fiction would have us also place a childlike faith, but instead of the hand that fashioned the stars, we are asked to believe in ourselves, with the stars remaining as a goal. It is hardly a rational trade.

We wonder at the motivation of a mind which rejects the mind of God, especially when one of Clarke's characters declares, "No one of intelligence resents the inevitable."

The Drinker by Hans Fallada

2011-01-30T19:15:00.002-06:00

How unreliable is the unreliable narrator? In the case of Hans Fallada’s “The Drinker,” we are able to chart the moment Erwin Sommer’s descent into alcoholism starts, and mark each digression down into it by his excuses, his explanations, his evasions. As Sommer says early on, “Man gets used to anything, and I am afraid that perhaps he gets used quickest of all to living in a state of degradation.”

Hans Fallada was no stranger to alcoholism or degradation. Last year, his final novel "Every Man Dies Alone," became a surprise bestseller 60 years after he wrote it, a fitting tribute to a trouble life. In Nazi Germany, he was committed to an insane asylum during the war as his marriage broke down because of his drinking problem.

But there is no mention in "The Drinker" of Hitler, or Nazis, or even the slightest political tinge to the story of Sommer, who slowly devolves from a respectable businessman into a man who threatens his wife’s life for a drink. Yet we are confronted with the question of how an author who obviously felt himself at odds with the ruling system could write a novel like this and it not, somehow, be about the evil all around him.

But let us come back to that. From the moment Erich Sommer enjoys a bottle of wine with his wife, we can see his self-control slip away as he warms to alcohol. But there is more to it than that. Erich tells us that he also gives his wife some money to ease over a quarrel, and that this is a ruse - he is really masking the fact that his business is not doing well. We know that he feels animosity toward his wife, Magda, because she is better at running the business than he is. His anxiety blossoms to jealousy, rage and self-pity under the alcohol, and soon he is making eyes at a bar maid, just for another glass of schnapps.

Fallada does a remarkable job at rendering the alcoholic in stunning clarity. His denials reveal, his explanations obfuscate, his evasions point to the very facts he hopes to obscure. He cannot see the flaw apparent to others, yet he perceives the stealing of his soul in the clink of a glass. And even as Erich Sommer leaves home, becomes a thief, then a criminal, then is committed, he has perfectly good explanations for each situation which contradict his earlier resolves. He is not interested in the future, but only in surviving the present.

In doing so, he presents us with a reminder of the nature of persistent sin. Sommer carries around the idea of himself as a gentleman, respected in his community, valued as a member of society. But he perceives his enemy as his wife, so each degradation is somehow his twisted revenge against her. And yet, at the same time, he ignores those degradations and sees no change in who he essentially is, even as his nature bears little resemblance to the man who began the novel.

Contrast him with Lobedanz, his temporary landlord, who keeps him supplied with alcohol and sheltered from the world even as he is bleeding him dry of money and possessions. Lobedanz caters to Sommer’s self-image as he fingers Sommer for an easy mark. “I’m sorry sir,” he says, at their first meeting. “I’d like to have you as a lodger, an educated man who wants to frighten his wife a bit in a gentlemanly way. We beat our wives, it’s simpler and cheaper.”

Sommer doesn’t even bother trying to justify his behavior later, once he enters the asylum. He relies on his own wit and instincts to save him, and succeeds in plunging deeper into delusion and decline. He becomes disfigured in a prison fight. Leaving for the asylum, he must walk in handcuffs through his hometown “like my own ghost.” The asylum, which he describes as “hell,” offers some hope of eventual release, but Sommer’s problem isn’t alcohol, but the denial that there is a problem at all. “In this life, you are driven forward pitilessly. There is no rest, no remission,” he says.

So is this novel about an alcoholic, or the collective denial practiced by millions of Germans who gave their lives and their futures over to Adolf Hitler? There are hints at the soiled, soul destroying tyranny, such as the way in which Sommer and his wife Magda communicate near the book’s climax, when he is hesitant to say anything negative about the asylum for fear he will never leave. There is Sommer himself, who carries the literal wounds of his experience in prison. The book’s climax shows that there is never really any escape for ourselves from prisons of our own making, which means that our unreliable narrator may be the most clear-eyed character in the book.

But it hardly matters whether Fallada was trying to say something more than is apparent in “The Drinker.” The story was familiar enough long before Hitler’s rise and fall - how a person’s own justifications can twist them, while at the same time convincing them that if this is true, if they are irredeemable, then they are merely a reflection of a world twisted beyond repair, with no rest, no remission, no hope of grace this side of Heaven.

Creating 'The Social Network,' Creating Us

2011-01-25T11:03:00.003-06:00

Art is a tool we use to invest meaning in our lives, and the best art comes from the most familiar yet least expected places, and the least expected meanings we recognize there.

Today’s announcement of the nominees for this year’s Academy Awards includes “The Social Network,” with seven including Best Picture. Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay follows some of the construction of the book he adapted, “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich. The information was taken from interviews and court proceedings, which is why the movie uses the construct of depositions to tell the story, during which the characters retell their versions of what happened. Before seeing it, one wonders how anybody could make an engaging film about the creation of Facebook.

But to keep the movie from playing out like a trial, Sorkin instead bookends it with a device much like Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud” - the key to understanding the main character, Mark Zuckerberg, is in the scene which opens the movie.

Mark and his date Erica Albright are discussing Final Clubs - Harvard’s tradition-bound exclusive societies which tap students to join and seemingly propel them onto lifelong success. Mark tells her that he must do something to get the attention of the clubs, because they are “exclusive and fun and lead to a better life.” Erica chastises him for being obsessed with the clubs, but their relationship breaks down when she asks Mark what is the easiest club to get into. Mark assumes that she is asking which one he would have the best chance of joining, and we see immediately that Mark, for all his genius, has no self-image or self-esteem.

The scene is a primer in characterization, in rich dialogue, and in mimicking life. Erica and Mark discuss three or four subjects at once, with Mark’s opening question - “How do you distinguish yourself?” - establishing the keynote for the movie that follows. We realize immediately with Mark’s seemingly-rote question, “Would you like to talk about something else?” that he has no social skills.

Erica assures him she isn’t “speaking in code,” to which he tells her there is a difference “between being obsessed and being motivated.” But we know that Mark is both. Erica attempts to reassure him, then in a half-joking, half-earnest voice, tells him he should be “the best you you can be.” This phrase, of course, rings hollow with him, as she intended it. But its triteness masks its relevance, for it’s the sort of thing you would hear in an elementary self-esteem lesson instead of a college bar. But it reminds us once again of who we are dealing with - a socially stunted yet brilliant person on the cusp of a life-changing event.

Erica leaves Mark, with him questioning “Is this real?” Real life is much harder than the Internet, which is where Mark retreats in anger and begins blogging about the evening, calling her names, saying that her bra size is much smaller, and creating a website that allows voters to pick the hottest between two women. We realize just how gifted Mark is, and once again, how unable he is to connect with another person. Eventually, his exploits lead him on to the other characters who will be there at the creation of Facebook, and the eventual carnage of those friendships.

Mezrich’s book states plainly why Facebook emerged from other social networking sites to become an astounding success:

“…it was going to mimic what went on at college every day - the thing that drove the college social experience, drove people to go out to the clubs and bars and even the classrooms and dining halls. To meet people, socialize, converse, sure - but the catalyst of it all, the burning engine behind those social networks, was as simple and basic as humanity itself.”

Later in the movie, flush with success at Harvard, Mark encounters Erica again in a club. We sense he wants to apologize, and he asks if she’s aware of Facebook. She will have none of it, still remembering his blog entries, not caring what he does “in a dark room.” He is anti-social, she says, and no amount of success will make him anything less. “Good luck with your video game,” she says, dismissing him as he leaves her with the friends she did not wish to be rude to by leaving. Immediately after this meeting, Mark decides it’s time to expand Facebook.

Just this week, Pope Benedict XVI issued a statement, “Truth, proclamation and authenticity of life in the digital age,” which lauded social networking sites as a way to connect but warned of the danger of substituting such contact for real life encounters.

"Entering cyberspace can be a sign of an authentic search for personal encounters with others, provided that attention is paid to avoiding dangers such as enclosing oneself in a sort of parallel existence, or excessive exposure to the virtual world," he said. "In the search for sharing, for 'friends', there is the challenge to be authentic and faithful, and not give in to the illusion of constructing an artificial public profile for oneself."

Earlier, I wrote about how Facebook gives us a window not only into how we encounter people in the here and now, but also in the hereafter. But Sorkin’s script introduces a few interesting points about social networking - that in creating a different world for ourselves in the virtual, we risk bringing our own individual contradictions with us. We cannot expect honesty in a world we create when we are dishonest in the world we did not choose. No matter what our visions are about ourselves, reality intrudes, even in the world that is unreal.

As Facebook expands in “The Social Network,“ the movie explores various other, older concepts of how people interact- for example the Winklevoss twins’ hesitancy to sue Zuckerberg because of the concept of the Harvard gentleman. But Mark needs a new muse, and Sorkin introduces the character of a young, female lawyer called in for jury selection consultation, perhaps to take up Erica’s missing space in the narrative.

She speaks to Mark during off times in the depositions, with him finally telling her “I’m not a bad guy.” She tells him he’s not, but “you’re trying hard to be.” As the movie ends, we see Mark has been checking Facebook throughout the picture and he’s finally found the profile page of Erica Albright. He continues to refresh the page, hoping to find out what she’s up to, even after he’s cast aside the idea of sending her a friend request that he knows she’ll refuse. He is a billionaire, alone in a room in a tall building, master of an unreal empire where he alone is its sole monarch and, seemingly, its only subject.

In the background, the Beatles’ “Baby You’re a Rich Man” plays, asking the question:

How does it feel to be
One of the beautiful people?
Now that you know who you are
What do you want to be?

Inception and a Grief Documented

2011-01-17T23:07:00.002-06:00

One day after his mother died in 1977, the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes began jotting down notes, recording each stage and random thought of his grief. Only a few weeks into it, on Nov. 3, he made this observation, after confronting, as many in mourning do, the image he held in his head of his mother and what he perceived she still demanded of his attention.

“On the one hand, she wants everything, total mourning, its absolute (but then it’s not her, it’s I who is investing her with the demand for such a thing). And on the other (being then truly herself), she offers me lightness, life, as if she were still saying: “but go on, go out, have a good time.”

Barthes’ struggles with grief were documented last year in the posthumously published “Mourning Diary,” which collects the scraps of paper upon which he poured out momentary pangs of grief, embarrassed at them and fascinated by them, perceiving in them hard truths won at a very high price. The information we gain, the character we tell ourselves we are building at the price of dealing with the loss of a loved one’s life seems hardly a fair bargain.

I was reminded of this recently watching Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” a brilliant movie that not only deals with the difference between dreams and reality, but how we mourn the loss of the beloved, the loss of possibilities, and the loss of home. Rarely has any conventional Hollywood thriller ever tackled such themes in so compelling and subtle a way.

There are chases and gun battles aplenty in “Inception,” but we are assured these are merely projections in the dream worlds we enter - projections of either the dreamer protecting himself from unwelcome visitations or projections of the dreamer’s inner turmoil. Our hero is Cobb, a man who specializes in heists from the dream world, stealing vital information while the victim literally sleeps. He is hired by Saito, a Japanese businessman, to stage an inception - in other words, to plant an idea inside the mind of one of his key competitors.

To tell this complicated story, Nolan hit upon a conventional framework - the heist film. Cobb assembles a committed team and they carefully plan how they will conduct Fischer, the target, through many layers of dreams until Saito’s intended idea is introduced into his subconscious. But every heist film needs a villain, as well as a femme fatale, and “Inception” has both - in the form of Cobb’s wife, Mal. But we learn deep into the film that Mal is, in fact, not Mal but a projection of Cobb’s which follows him from dream to dream, tormenting him. The real Mal is dead, and this projection is a vengeful ghost, the memory of her conjured up by Cobb’s guilty conscience, bent on convincing him to remain in the dream world.

Cobb is a man plagued by guilt - survivor guilt. Both he and Mal shared a lifetime within a dream world of their own creation. The dream world still exists, and for Cobb to return home once and for all, he has to confront this false Mal, to her face, on why he cannot stay with her:

“I wish more than anything, but I can’t imagine you with all your complexity, all your perfection, all your imperfection. Look at you. . You’re just a shade of my real wife. And you were the best that I could do but I’m sorry, you’re just not good enough.”

True to form, the false Mal stabs him, asking him if it feels real. This set of circumstances would seem all too real to another grieving widower, C.S. Lewis, recording his feelings in a book he published under a pen name as “A Grief Observed.” Lewis, after despairing that he was losing vital memories of his wife after her death, realized that his memory created something dishonest in her absence. His words are much like Cobb‘s:

“All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.”

The lesson of “Inception” perhaps can be found in the parting words of Cobb’s partner Ariadne as she leaves the collapsing dream world - “Don’t lose yourself.” But Lewis realized that the loss of his wife could only remind him of how our imaginations buckle and fall short when we try to imagine, or understand, God. Jesus is the ultimate reminder that the idols we erect in our minds fall just as short as the ones we fashion with our hands:

“He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.”

“Inception” lures us through a maze of false realities, with the world “up top” just beckoning us. It doesn’t take too large a leap to see Nolan offering a commentary on the hope of an afterlife. Reunion with loved ones long gone is one of the hopes of Heaven. And while modern rationalism tells us this is a false hope, a dream, that pang of doubt itself seems its own dream. Why should all that we are have no meaning? Surely, there must be something somewhere waiting for us that is real, that is truth. If we might only wake up and find the way…

In the end, Cobb escapes the dream world, and his avenging, tormenting memory of Mal, to a reunion with his children. Or does he? The final shot of the film leaves the question open. One of the oldest stories in human history is the longing for home, to finally return home. The assurance and security seem far-off, sometimes even when we are there. We wonder what else we require for bliss. Reality seems stubbornly unforgiving when compared to our dreams. The question “Inception” leaves us with is - when we "get home," how will we know we are really there?

Mark Twain - Blogger

2011-01-04T08:44:00.002-06:00

Mark Twain may have been dead for a century, but news of his continued life is no exaggeration.

With the recent publication of his autobiography, Twain became a best-selling author in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And he is proving once again how little technology and mass communication have changed - or improved - the makeup of guilty man.

For many years, Twain wanted to write his own life story, but found the usual style of autobiography a straitjacket of dates, times, places and memories, to be put into some chronological order. For a self-invented man, this kind of artificial order for the sake of palatable narrative was not to his liking. It didn't feel true, he wrote. And so, he began dictating a series of daily talks, with observations on the day’s news, sprinkled with memories and seasoned with his own singular humor.

Basically, he was blogging.

On January 10, 1906, Mark Twain sat down to dictate that day’s entry. In the news was a little item he referred to as ‘the Morris incident,’ and Twain wondered what the verdict of history would be on it in fifty years time. “The Morris incident comes up and blots the whole thing out. The Morris incident is making a flurry in Congress, and for several days now it has been rioting through the imagination of the American nation and setting every tongue afire with excited talk.” He then goes on to state, rightly, that by the time people read his autobiography, they will have no idea what he is referring to.

He is correct, of course. The reader can be excused for not remembering the plight of Mrs. Minor Morris, who came to the White House on January 4, 1906, to ask President Theodore Roosevelt to have her husband reinstated to his post at the Army Medical Bureau. Unable to see the president and unwilling to leave, she was dragged out by police screaming and arrested for disorderly conduct, then temporarily charged as insane. She was later released and told her indignant story to reporters from her sick bed, resulting in six months of charges, countercharges, investigations and the sort of general public spectacle that Washington, even then, was good at manufacturing.

Twain’s reason for inserting this into his autobiography was not because he felt it was important - but rather that it was the stuff of life. The stuff that consumes most of our time and attention, Twain is saying, may not be as important in scope as the events we believe invest our lives with meaning, but they have some importance because they illustrate the quotidian nature of existence.

The item is also instructive because of how familiar it is to our news junkie sensibilities 100 years later. One common complaint among bloggers is that daily news topics sometimes act as a convenient ideological bait and switch for “the real issue.” The idea is that some group, invested in keeping “the real truth” from the public, either invents a cause celebre or serves up a steady drumbeat of stories about some inane topic and the American people conveniently seize on that topic instead of paying attention to this or that issue which begs for change. Everything from short attention spans to lack of education to the lure of “infotainment” is offered up as an explanation. If only the public weren’t so gullible, we are told, then they would see these banalities for what they are, and we would finally have genuine change.

For example, a quick Google search of the words “media smokescreen” calls up accusations that the story of the “Ground Zero Mosque” was a right wing plot to divert attention from President Obama’s bringing the last combat troops out of Iraq. Another site complained that last year’s stories about the private peccadilloes of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford were the liberal media’s attempt to divert the nation from recognizing Obama’s policy failures and inability to restart the economy.

I’m sure readers can immediately call to mind at least a dozen news stories from the past decade that received disproportionate coverage from their relative importance. It took the cataclysm of 9/11 to wipe the Gary Condit-Chandra Levy case from the 24-hour news cycle. Anna Nicole Smith’s death, Michael Jackson’s death and other celebrity funerals have had the same effect. The disappearance of Natalee Holloway, during the summer of 2005, was also labeled a distraction drummed up to divert attention from the mounting dead in Iraq, even as ratings mounted for chat shows that did nothing but dissect such diversions.

Critics complain of ideological bias as driving news judgments, while others point to shadowy corporate interests intent on controlling the news and thereby controlling political thought and discourse, as well as dissent.

But Twain’s observations come in 1906 - before radio, television, the Internet and ideological blogs. In fact, the 24-hour news cycle did not exist in any recognizable form. News was strictly disseminated by word of mouth and by newspaper. Whatever the news topic of the day, it may not have arrived at any given spot for days, or even weeks.

Looking at the Morris incident a century on, we see that perhaps the public’s appetite for news hasn’t changed as much as we might like to believe. It also reveals another truth - people tend to digest these stories, and hunger for similar news, because of the stories’ larger narrative significances.

Twain points out what the Morris affair says about Theodore Roosevelt and his character. “Certainly a biography’s chiefest feature is the exhibition of the character of the man whose biography is being set forth,” he observes, with his point being that Roosevelt was a man of extreme enthusiasms, passion and an occasional inattention to courtesy, which he naturally transferred to his secretary, who dealt with Mrs. Morris. The reason for the Morris incident’s hold on the public’s imagination in 1906 was what it said about the first Roosevelt White House and the occupant at that time.

The death of Anna Nicole Smith, for example, was yet another all-too-familiar example of how little happiness money can buy, or how outer beauty does not guarantee inner peace. Mark Sanford’s multiple denials of infidelity, and then his daily reactions to the uncontestable proof, appeal not just to a gossipy public but act as confirmation of our worst fears about politicians - that they are, in fact, human beings. By seeing his failures, we see ourselves, or we see what we hope we might never become. It isn’t a shadowy conspiracy diverting us as much as our own curiosity and temptations not to fill time with what is important, but with what is, on some level, a little more exciting, or petty or fun.

Twain’s voice sounds amused and astonished: “You set the incident down which for the moment is to you the most interesting. If you leave it alone three or four weeks you wonder why you ever thought of setting such a thing down - it has no value, no importance…But that is what human life consists of - little incidents and big incidents, and they are all of the same size if we let them alone. An autobiography that leaves out the little things and enumerates only the big ones is no proper picture of the man’s life at all; his life consists of his feelings and his interests, with here and there an incident apparently big or little to hang the feelings on.”

Reading Twain, one is reminded that much of life is forgotten, and forgettable, but almost never dull.

"Brilliant Disguises' one of the year's ten best!

2011-01-01T23:09:00.004-06:00

Christy's Book Blog named "Brilliant Disguises" one of the year's ten best books in Christian Fiction.

To see, look here.

To read Christy's original review, which she called "the rare self-published book that is truly worth a read," look here. She concluded: "Thornton has much to offer the Christian fiction genre, and I hope that a publishing company picks him up soon."

To order the book, visit www.brilliantdisguises.com

Another satisfied reader

2010-12-14T08:40:00.002-06:00

"This is one INCREDIBLE self-published book, and worth the time you need to take to read it...In the grouping of books that make you think, Brilliant Disguises and Imaginary Jesus are on the top of my list for this year. If you are able to get a copy, grab one quickly!"
That the verdict of blogger Carol Keen. You can read her review here.

You can order your copy of "Brilliant Disguises" in hardback, paperback or e-book at www.brilliantdisguises.com, or at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble or Books-A-Million.

Facebook and the Heavenly Community

2010-12-14T07:25:00.003-06:00

An interesting thing happened to me recently on Facebook.

A friend began a discussion on a topic in the news and I contributed to the thread. I asked some questions and made a few comments, as anyone does when contributing on Facebook. While my friend and I disagreed on the issue, we could see each other’s viewpoint and perhaps came to understand each other a little better. But the longer this thread went on, another person and another contributed, and at one point, I found myself arguing with someone I didn’t even know. Not wishing to offend, I tried to terminate my end of the discussion. To tell the truth, I also felt insulted by the other person’s comments.

I was then accused of trying to “take my ball and go home.” In my defense, I felt I responded in the same way anybody would in that situation, and I told the person I hoped I hadn’t offended them. I didn’t really know how else to respond. I felt a host of contradictory emotions - I was offended, I felt a vague lust for revenge, I had an appalling realization of my intellectual vanity, and a regret that I obviously hadn’t expressed myself well enough for one person to get my point. Then, I reminded myself that, in the end, the issue wasn’t worth all that much fuss anyway. Even reasonable people can be unreasonable, given the right circumstances.

But in the ridiculous emotional aftermath of this situation, I found myself curious about the person I had suddenly encountered on Facebook, so I looked up this person’s information. Among the vital statistics was the word “Christian.” And it suddenly occurred to me that, if I believe what I say I do and this person does as well, then one of the souls I’m going to be spending eternity with is this person, who basically let me know that I’m unreasonable, my opinions (at least on one issue) are uninformed, and that I don’t particularly sound like someone worth knowing. You can imagine my longing, at that moment, for the bliss of Heaven.

But Facebook presents us with an interesting set of facts, not only about our fellow men (and women), but ourselves. Facebook operates on a system whereby you seek out, identify, categorize, and bond with a set of friends. You make new friends. In some cases, you drop old friends. You perhaps bond with casual acquaintances that, in real life, you may have little or no interest in or contact with. Through other friends, you make connections with people that you may never have met in your whole life, nor ever will. Because it is a “social” network, your interaction with it depends on just how social you feel like being. You get out of it what you put in.

Like other people, one of the things I find amusing about Facebook is what you find out about your friends that you might never have known otherwise. A lot of my friends, for example, enjoy the games on Facebook that I have absolutely no interest in whatsoever. I find out about my friends’ interests, hobbies, likes and dislikes. At one point, I learned that one of my friends liked, at the same time, Robert Pattinson and Jesus Christ, a juxtaposition that I found amusing when I saw both names at the same time, given equal billing. I suspect how much enthusiasm there was for either.

The status update, or the “poke,“ gives you a window on other people too. Some people like to tell you what they’re up to, at any given moment. Some just like to check in and let you know where they physically are at any given moment. Some will vent. Some want to show you how amusing they can be. Song lyrics get quoted, jokes get shared, stories are passed, and life in all its permutations unfolds before your eyes. Because of this, others like to check updates without letting you in on where they’re drinking coffee or what kind of lunch they’re enjoying or how they feel about the election. Political opinions get shared too, and you can either be shocked at a friend’s extremism or angry that they didn’t go far enough. You don’t have to necessarily reply if you disagree, or you can engage them and make them defend their point of view. And everyone has seen friends suddenly take opportunities to make personal statements about themselves - by changing their profile picture, or showing their concern for a particular issue. Occasionally, your friends even opt out, sometimes without a word of explanation.

And as my disagreement illustrates, the age of social media also introduces us to the more unpleasant aspects of our earthly confinement. Facebook doesn’t give you an idea of the tone of other people’s voices when they try to make points. It doesn’t let you see their facial expressions. Like other aspects of the Internet, it may even allow you to hide anonymously behind a name (that may not be your own) and even a picture. It can and has been a mechanism for stalking, intimidation, abuse, and anguish. One pastor said Facebook could be used as a tool to facilitate adultery, and then proved it - whether he intended to or not - by revealing how he had used it for that very purpose. So social media, like so much else in life, is morally neutral. We can use it however we see fit, and often, we see it through the only eyes we have, as fallen beings.

But there are other stories, such as my friend who suddenly lost his wife a year ago and regularly receives encouragement from me and the rest of his friends in dealing with her loss. Or the friend who lost her job and is using Facebook to look for another, with friends eager to help. My divorced friends who need daily reminders of their worth as people and their importance to me and others. Or the regular calls for prayer for sick loved ones and friends, or those feeling the anguish of everyday life.

And it’s this aspect that I find myself curious about. Jean-Paul Sartre famously stated that “Hell is other people.” But Heaven will most assuredly be other people, and Facebook teaches us something about that ultimate destination. The Golden Rule - “Do unto others and you would have them do unto you” - is often interpreted to mean civility, or little more than good citizenship. But citizens in the Kingdom of Heaven are called to not simply refrain from doing evil. The command is much deeper and much more demanding - that we actively seek the good in each and every situation and do it. And that good involves being consumed with the welfare and well-being of those around us, both the friendly and the not-so-friendly. That we see the other as God sees them, and we sacrifice for them as He was willing to sacrifice for them.

Jesus died for everyone - including that guy you can't stand, the one who can’t spell, or the one who didn’t like the health care bill, or the one who said the unpleasant thing about your brother-in-law. Like it or not, we are going to be spending a lot of time together in the future, to put it mildly. We can’t just “take our ball and go home.” And we are learning here and now, as never before, how difficult that can be.

The rules and the situations will be different there, of course. We will not see ourselves and each other through the prism of sin, which clouds and corrodes every movement and every touch. Our words will not have their ever-present patina of malice draped over them, nor will we be automatically guarded and unconsciously alert to every perceived slight. We will not be carrying the emotional baggage of every incautious word we have either spoken or heard. And we will be finally stripped of the ignorance we bring to each and every moment of our lives. We will know, just as we are fully known, forever. No secrets. No 20-year-old profile pictures. No hiding behind Farmville. You and the other, in the presence of God, who Himself will be fully revealed and worthy of worship. The implications of that are both terrifying and exhilarating.

The reverse is just as stark. What if hell, for instance, isn’t other people at all, but solitude? Separation from God is one thing, but the silence of God must be filled, either with the anguish of others or the magnitude of our own. An eternity to contemplate, in exhausted and exhaustive detail, the regrets of a lifetime, perhaps by ourselves, or burned by the torment of others can be seen in the momentary collapses of civility we see on Facebook and elsewhere. Some situations are only tolerable because of the presence of others. But a relentless torment with no relief, with not even the comfort of camaraderie? This is the ultimate end of what we carry inside us when we lash out, or lash back, for whatever reason here. “Dislike” doesn’t even cover it.

So Facebook is a window and an opportunity, a foreshadowing of what is to come, and a laboratory for what is still possible. As we discover each other, we discover ourselves. And we discover Him through each other, which is what He wants us to do, peeking in on each others statuses, giving the occasional poke, as we update each other along the way.

Who Killed Palomino Molero? by Mario Vargas Llosa

2010-10-13T08:18:00.004-05:00

Last week’s news that Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature led to me pick up “Who Killed Palomino Molero?” Llosa’s version of a hard-boiled detective mystery translated into backwater South America.

What permeates this whole work is a feeling of listless indifference. The first chapter describes the body of Palomino Molero - an bony young airman in the Peruvian Air Force who is later found dead, virtually emasculated. Lieutenant Silva and Officer Lituma begin their investigations in a lackadaisical fashion - not by choice, but because of their limitations. They need a cab to the crime scene. They walk long distances when they cannot get a ride. Though witnesses mourn the loss of Molero’s singing voice, they don’t seem all that interested in who killed him, or why.

Llosa does something interesting here with pace and tone. This novel is only 150 pages long. Descriptions are spare. Dialogue dominates the narrative. There are the usual tricks of the mystery in that information we glean may only be momentarily correct. But action is, like the setting, listless and slow. Suppositions often lead to recalibration. Palomino Molero, for example, is not a draftee but an enlistee. The reason for this becomes clearer when Silva and Lituma uncover the reasons he joined. As a barmaid says, “He brought on his own tragedy.” Silva and Lituma must then navigate the no man’s land between military and civilian justice.

The reason for everyone’s indifference, outside our two lawmen, is the corruption one sees on every page. Molero’s murder is an outrage because “in these parts, people kill each other fair and square, man to man. But crucifying, torturing, that’s new.” Whatever solution Silva and Lituma find is discarded as being a cover story to allow the real guilty parties, shadowy higher-ups, to escape unnamed and unpunished.

As with all good hard boiled noir, Llosa gives you as much atmosphere as mystery. But instead of a big city with the corruption of politics and technology, instead we get the sweat from the sun in a mostly rural, corrupt backwater fetid with the scent of chicken droppings and endless toil.

Even Silva does not seem to care so much about catching a murderer as catching the barmaid whom he spies on at the riverside during her morning bath. Llosa gives, in the middle of a murder investigation, a playful, laughing regard for life. Life - which eludes easy definition and promises mystery once the first question is asked.

As Lieutenant Silva says, “Only death is definitive.”

Morality by Stephen King

2010-10-08T14:58:00.004-05:00

Tucked away in Stephen King's recent mini-book "Blockade Billy" was a disquieting little story called "Morality," worthy of a 19th century Russian author.

In a few short pages, King introduces us to Nora and Chad, a couple living in New York in the midst of the recession, scrambling to pay bills. Chad is an aspiring writer who hopes to finish a non-fiction collection and bring in some extra money. But this is just a prayer, and even though our young couple are earnest and believe in each other, reality rarely yields up the answer to a prayer the way one hopes. The solution to their money problems, though, comes through Nora, a nurse who works with a retired minister, Winston. The old clergyman, who conveniently has a horde of ready cash, is a stroke victim who has had a lot of time to ruminate on what he's been missing out in his life.

The story contains a few tropes familiar to any longtime King reader. Chad is a smoker, and when Nora asks him for a puff, he knows she's been shaken, since she constantly harps on the money going out to pay for his habit. Not only is this a well-documented crib from what we know of King's early married life as a struggling writer, it is also a hallmark of King stories that the passing of a cigarette is a symbol for temptation or moral laxity. The other easily recognizable King image is Winston himself, for he comes in the form King has sometimes used in the past for his men of the cloth - that of the tempter. Winston, with his "long sheep's face" and sheep eyes, is a wolf, or a dog "that bites and runs away." The biography he recounts, of simple selfless service, seems like a spectacular lie in light of what he reveals about himself later through his actions.

Nora reaches for a cigarette because Winston has offered an ungodly amount of money to Nora if she will help him do something his condition denies him - he wants to commit a sin. "This is not about sex," he assures her, and King slyly waits until the moment the sin occurs before he reveals just what it is Winston wants her to do. With Chad standing nearby holding a video camera to record the event, Nora is to go to a playground, pick out a child, and punch the child hard enough to draw blood. The meaningless act of violence will satisfy the terms of his bargain, and give the couple enough money to restart their lives away from the city, pay all their bills, and chase down Chad's dream of publication.

King's choice of "sin" is interesting. Strictly speaking, it is assault. Motiveless violence. The fact that a child is the victim touches on the violation of innocence that is the heart of this story. We like Nora, and we like Chad, because they are familiar, striving, young people who are beginning to feel the injustice of life, where no one will pay them for their good intentions but reward criminals in skyscrapers who make millions on empires of lies. Winston, obviously, is no ordinary clergyman, but he is diabolically good at this sin business. And he knows forgiveness is open to him even after the deed is done. But Winston, though it is never stated in the story, seems to miss the power of the pulpit. "We hold out heaven, then make people understand they have no hope of achieving it without our help," he tells Nora, and we see that his bet is a weird, negative recreation of his years of ministry. He warns her that he doesn't want to wallow in sin, but dive headlong in, regardless of whether he is chained to the life of a walking invalid. Winston perceives innocence in his nurse, and he means to destroy it.

The offer has the desired effect. Chad calls it a "bridge to nowhere," but during a sleepless night, the two contemplate how they might carry it out, and what they can do with the money. And suddenly, this proposition does indeed seem to be about sex, because the two of them are aroused by it. The effect, though, is that they are being spiritually violated by Winston, with the consequences to come. Nora delivers the punch, much harder than she intended, and releases something inside her in the process.

The child who receives the punch isn't seriously harmed, but Nora nervously keeps rewinding and watching the image of her delivering the blow. Chad and Nora's relationship is now rougher, coarser, harsher toward each other. The hostility they have unleashed is now aimed at each other. Winston revels in the damage he has wrought. After he watches Nora watching herself punch the child, he asks "is feeling dirty always a bad thing?" Nora, an agnostic, asks Winston how he intends to square this with God.

"If a sinner like Simon Peter could go on to found the Catholic Church, I expect I'll be fine."
"Did Simon Peter keep the videotape to watch on cold winter evenings?"

The sin of Simon Peter was denial - the denial of Jesus at the moment of his betrayal and condemnation. What we can glean from the Bible is that Peter needed forgiveness is order to be useful to God with the founding of the church. He understood that his faith was his only means of salvation. Winston, the only believer in this story, sees faith merely as a diving bell - which allows him to view the depths of human experience while still within a life-sustaining cocoon. Though this story is very old in its sensibilities, it's interesting that King uses the motif of the video image - record, rewind, rewatch, commit to memory - to facilitate the sin. This sort of spiritual pornography is what Winston wants to gorge on, with the help of his accomplices.

Once the deed is done, Nora leaves her job with the money in hand. In the end, Winston either dies or kills himself, but Nora wonders if he had set up a video camera to record his own exit. She indulges in wild sex with anonymous men and her marriage dies as Chad's bookish ambitions run aground. They have fled the city, but the money has not fulfilled them - not as much as their brush with iniquity. They are not happier. We understand, at story's end, that Nora knows something about the nature of morality, but King chooses not to tell us what it is. We don't know whether he expects us to know, or believes each individual reader will find an answer.

Nemesis by Philip Roth

2010-10-05T18:24:00.001-05:00

There is a classic air to Philip Roth's "Nemesis." The sun is evoked like an object of veneration. Children worship momentarily a man who hurls a javelin in a display of manly athletic power. Stories of ancient rites and ancient men are told around campfires to wild-eyed, bewildered listeners.

The style of "Nemesis" is similar to the other books in this ongoing series, which a Roth works list at the book's beginning helpfully describes as a cycle entitled "Nemeses: Short Novels." Like "The Humbling," "Desperation," and "Everyman," we are presented a male main character who faces an emasculating life or death trauma. "Nemesis" is written with long, complex sentences that wind through characters and situations back upon themselves. The story is told briskly, in less than 300 pages.

"Nemesis" follows Bucky Cantor, a Jewish gym teacher in New Jersey in the year of 1944, when life and death dramas are played out daily in Europe and the Pacific. Bucky, a 4-F, was denied glory on the battlefield because of his eyesight, and he struggles against his vision as do the other protagonists of Roth's late short novels - their aspiration forever frustrated by reality. Bucky, however, cannot escape the feeling that his misfortunes are his own fault. In this case, the problem is a polio epidemic in the Jewish neighborhood, and as the children Bucky watches over begin to succumb to disease, and death, he feels a growing sense of responsibility.

An obvious conclusion is that Roth is returning to the New Jersey of his childhood for this particular story. But one is conscious of the backdrop - World War II - and the ongoing liquidation of Europe's Jews in the concentration camps. Instead of fighting that menace, Bucky instead fights fear that begins to grip his community as families and children begin looking for the secret sources of the growing contagion, which robs the limbs of power and the lungs of breath. When one frantic parent asks, "Our Jewish children are our riches...Why is it attacking our beautiful Jewish children?" one has the Holocaust in miniature. A grief stricken father says for the whole planet, "The meaninglessness of it! A terrible disease drops from the sky and somebody is dead overnight. A child, no less!"

Which brings us to the other feature of "Nemesis," which is the feeling that stirs in Bucky that what follows him may not be a horror of his own making but a supernatural one. As Bucky begins to wonder at the purpose of innocent children suddenly being robbed of life, he begins to suspect that God is behind it all. This feeling grows in him, as tragedy piles on top of tragedy, both at home among his children and on the battlefield with his friends:

"Bucky's conception of God, as I thought I understood it, was of an omnipotent being whose nature and purpose was to be adduced not from doubtful biblical evidence but from irrefutable historical proof, gleaned during a lifetime passed on this planet in the middle of the twentieth century. His conception of God was of an omnipotent being who was a union not of three persons in one God-head, as in Christianity, but of two" - a sadistic soul and an evil genius.

It's interesting that Roth gives his character a sentiment C.S. Lewis expressed in "A Grief Observed" - that God can sometimes feel like a cosmic vivisectionist, that His power is not perfectly displayed in His grace, but instead in His ability to torture creation. Roth, who does not believe in an afterlife, God, Christ, or otherwise, creates a character who feels the presence of God in the negative, and presumes a God intimately involved in our day-to-day lives, for the purposes of destruction, like a child who destroys the sand castle he has spent the last two hours creating. This proof is not comforting, for how does the created hope to last against the Creator? The feeling that one strives against a Being who will not bless him even if he should grab hold of Him dogs Bucky and haunts the reader.

In mid-story, Bucky flees the playground to the summer camp where his girlfriend works. He feels secure in the mountains, and enjoys the love of the woman he intends to marry. His girl sings "I'll Be Seeing You" to him, a song that he resurrects later in life, the story of a lover who is reminded of the beloved in the familiar places of life that they have shared. But one wonders if this love song isn't instead a more menacing reminder that God is always watching. It falls to the book's final third act, where we see our faceless narrator revealed as one of Bucky's grown playground children, to allow events to reveal Bucky as he existed before and as these fears are realized, in his mind. Whether they are, in fact, so, is yet one more question for the reader to navigate.

"Nemesis" of course, was the Greek goddess of retribution. But the word also means an antagonist who brings punishment, or the cause of inevitable downfall. Whatever Roth's intent, he has created a universe of possibility in the chaos that forms, like a contagion, in the air of summer camps and summer romances where danger is thought to be distant but secrets itself behind our desperate longings, and in a negative faith that offers no consolation.

Solar by Ian McEwan

2010-09-27T09:46:00.000-05:00

Ian McEwan’s “Solar” swirls with a vortex of false narratives. The hapless hero, Michael Beard, is a physicist at the book’s beginning in 2000 who is brooding over the ruins of his fifth marriage. He is a Nobel Laureate, coasting on the accomplishments of his youth and seemingly doomed to playing out the string of his life by gaining weight, taking teaching positions and engaging in research of little distinction.

But that’s only the truth of his position. Beard senses his wife’s infidelity, so he fabricates a lover of his own, and the damage is done. Through a typical series of McEwanesque calamities, he pins a murder on another man, uses a dead man’s research as his own, and ultimately in entangled with a woman who fabricates her own lover to tease him. Any character’s individual honesty is only as good as their least elegantly told lie.

But all of these fictions point to something else - one of the grand narratives of our time - global warming. The idea that human consumption of energy is slowly but inevitably heating the atmosphere and will have catastrophic effects on human life is accepted by the scientific community but dismissed by much of the public as either an elaborate hoax or the kind of doomsday scenario scientists dream up for more government funding.

McEwan’s aim - to write a novel “about” global warming - seems a task tailor made for him. McEwan’s supple prose has been used before in illustrating, through fiction, the beauty of science. His usual combination of macabre happenstance and an appreciation for the comic in the human condition are up to the task here. But instead of writing a big, important novel about the dangers of consumption, McEwan has written a comic novel so subtle and enjoyable that his message, if he intended one, might be totally unrecognized.

McEwan slyly plays on the public’s skepticism about global warming to construct a story about false stories. And over ten years time, we follow Beard as his false stories grow through his career, his relationships, and his objectives. But we are aware, even as he is not, that none of these stories will last forever. The truth will not be held at bay indefinitely. Men framed for murder eventually leave jail. Jilted lovers will not be ignored. Plagiarism will out. A lifetime of junk food, alcohol and sedentary living will eventually choke the heart. McEwan leaves the parallel there, untouched, for the reader to pick up - that global warming can’t be ignored forever. Eventually, all the doubters will have to acknowledge they were wrong. But will it be too late by then? This is a playful invitation to believe, and quite refreshing. As someone who is dubious of the doomsday claims myself, I found his “argument” strangely compelling.

This isn’t a book of long sermons in the service of Al Gore-like hysteria. Instead, even as Beard gives speeches and engages in conversations about the dangers of global warming, he is thinking about his next meal, his insistent nausea, his lover. This is quite a journey, since at the book’s beginning, Beard is an indifferent, slightly skeptical believer in the truth of our rising temperatures. Predictably for McEwan, the book’s devout believer is a crank - a brilliant crank whose research Beard appropriates after the man’s untimely and convenient death.

Beard, our “hero,” reminds one of Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, the character in John Updike’s famous tetralogy on American life. Rabbit grows thick around the middle and hastens his own demise through his self indulgence and indifference to the consequences of his actions. It is Beard’s self-satisfaction that keeps this book grounded, as he leaps from lover to lover, trying to stay ahead of time itself, inventing his own explanations that only serve a little while. He even notices this himself, and is amused by it:

“At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short-and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy.”

McEwan is an atheist, which makes his book that much more interesting, because he has created a book about belief. Michael Beard doesn’t believe in global warming until it suits him, but we aren’t sure he believes so much as he wants to wrap himself in something that will make others believe in him. He clings to his image even as it deserts him, and at book’s end reaches out for the touch of the toddler daughter he was a second before ready to abandon. He doesn’t need rising oceans to signal the end of the world - he unwittingly brings it on himself.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

2010-09-18T14:12:00.003-05:00

“To imagine a man wholly destitute of freedom is the same thing as to imagine a man destitute of life.”

These words come not from Jonathan Franzen‘s heralded new novel but from the novel that keeps getting mentioned in it - Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” Many times, Tolstoy reminds us that free will is something that diminishes the more we become entangled in the affairs of others, because their individual and collective senses of freedom are inescapably tied to ours.

The question of freedom, and “Freedom,” is ultimately what it means. Franzen’s novel has gotten plenty of attention - and backlash - since its publication earlier this month. Like its namesake, Franzen’s work will probably mean many things to many different people. To me, it was an endlessly frustrating reading experience.

“Freedom” bears more than a passing structural resemblance to “The Corrections,” Franzen’s 2001 book that earned him the praise and ire of Oprah Winfrey, and the reputation he enjoys today. “The Corrections” began with a scene-setting set piece to introduce us to its family, the Lamberts, then individual sections that focused on each member - the parental couple and their three children, Chip, Gary and Denise. For example, the section that dealt with Chip, and presented the self-important literary “hump” to the book, was derided by critics as being a trial to navigate before unlocking the rest of the rich novel. The other sections fleshed out our expectations. The book concluded with a bittersweet grace note epilogue that ties all of its characters together, “corrected” by each other and the events in their lives.

“Freedom” begins with the Berglunds, another Midwestern family, this time with two children - if one doesn’t count the passive-aggressive father Walter and the neurotic obsessive mother Patty. Instead of a third child, we have Walter’s best friend Richard, the secret repository of Patty’s sexual fantasies going all the way back to college.

The “hump” section of “Freedom” is Patty’s story, written by her for her therapist, with Patty referring to herself in the third person. More than a few readers have pointed out that Patty sounds a lot like Franzen stylistically, which reveals one of the major flaws of this very ambitious book. “Freedom” offers many observations, but the reader is not at all sure sometimes where these observations are coming from. Are they from the characters, or Franzen? Does this matter? It does when the tone of the book continues to become and more misanthropic as the book progresses. One sees the rest of the world - with all its other people, with all their disgusting otherness - as a travesty, a hindrance, a check on the characters’ freedom, to the point where the reader is left wondering if this is characterization, an artistic pose, or the author’s lack of regard for the rest of us mere mortals. One is reminded of the couple at the other table in the restaurant who continue to eat while cursing the food, the waiter, the other diners, etc.

We move through Walter’s story, Richard’s story, and find that the three adults are supposed to remind us of Tolstoy’s troika of Prince Andrei, Pierre and Natasha from “War and Peace.” More on that later. We then move on to Joey and Jessica, the Burglund’s two children. Jessica, a perfect liberal, is forever at odds with Joey, the Republican dolt. Joey’s chief occupation is running to and from Connie, the neighbor who very obviously would put her head through a plate glass window for him if he wished. Jessica exists to make her father happy, in the way that Patty dotes on Joey and is forever frustrated with him.

The party affiliations also bring up another gripe. There’s a disturbing political morality to all of this that is constantly off-putting. More often than not, Republican is shorthand in this novel for evil, just as religion is wrapped up in politics, and rendered either bad or annoying. All of this is fine for a campaign commercial, but this is supposed to be art. If the Great American Novel can be boiled down to a simple equation of Liberal Democrat= virtue, vision, intellectual, true, good - and Conservative Republican = mean, viscous, evil, stupid, greedy - then the field of candidates for the Novel has simultaneously gotten a lot bigger and much shallower. George W. Bush broods over this novel like a volcano menacing a sleeping city. Franzen seems to forget that his audience lived through the last ten years just like him. The familiar and tiresome gripes of the Iraq War, etc. have been rehearsed so many times that they lose any power they might have emotionally or intellectually. We get it, Jon. You didn’t agree with Bush v. Gore.

But the novel has many virtues. One is its sprawling inventiveness. Franzen gives us the history of the Berglunds going back several generations, which illustrates how much of these characters’ decisions are as much genetic predispositions as responses to the moment. Another is his use of the environment to describe how far the characters self-regard will clash with their regard for others. As the novel progresses, one sees that the inspiration for Walter’s interest in the hardly-endangered bird he hopes to preserve is merely his own long-checked ambition.

Franzen is also good at illustrating the divide between the elder Berglunds, boomers that they are with all the obligatory neuroses, with their children, who are destined not to understand them as much as they are misunderstood. Though the Berglunds have labored mightily to give their children a sense of freedom, the children don’t appreciate it, in the way that each generation squanders and ignores the lessons of the last one. This is one of the endearing, enduring qualities of the book. Franzen gives the reader fully-realized characters in ways that many novelists can only aspire to, with a rich leavening of information about weapons contracting, nature preserves, mountain top removal mining, and the politics of music. But he doesn't lose sight of the human. Toward the end of all of these moments, Patty's mother Joyce tells her, "I guess my life hasn't always been happy, or easy, or exactly what I wanted. At a certain point, I just have to try not to think too much about certain things, or else they'll break my heart." Many readers will nod their heads, having heard them before, or said them.

But he forgets something crucial, and that is that the reader desperately wants some reason to believe in these people, to like them. The Berglunds and the universe around them grow tedious after a few hundred pages, chiefly because there is very little to actually like about them. If they ring recognizable for stretches, it isn’t discomfort that makes them tiresome but how little we sense Franzen thinks of them. And somehow, of us.

For all the comparisons to “War and Peace,” the endless passages about freedom that pockmark this book reminded me of Tolstoy’s other great work, “Anna Karenina.” Levin, contemplating his impending marriage to Kitty, muses that he is about to lose his freedom, and then smiles at the question. “Freedom? Why freedom? Happiness is only in loving and desiring, thinking her desires, her thoughts - that is, no freedom at all - that’s what happiness is!”

Franzen seems to be telling us something similar to Tolstoy - that freedom is something we define for ourselves, and our conception of it defines us. But Tolstoy’s definition was a radically Christian one - that freedom spent on the self is squandered and meaningless. The illustration that Franzen provides us is the negative of Tolstoy’s, and our time with his book feels as misspent as a life spent only unto itself.
　
　

Brilliant Disguises: Now available as an e-book

2010-07-23T08:13:00.005-05:00

"Brilliant Disguises" is now available as an e-book at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and other outlets. The reviews are rolling in:

"Thornton has much to offer the Christian fiction genre, and I hope that a publishing company picks him up soon." Christy's Book Blog reviews Brilliant Disguises here:

http://christysbookblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/brilliant-disguises.html

The book is "compelling, calling the reader to examine their own life with regards to their actions and motives." Radiant Lit also liked the reader's guide:

http://radiantlit.com/2010/10/review-brilliant-disguises/

"Enjoyable" "Convicting" "An inspiring book with a great message." That's what an Ohio blogger says about "Brilliant Disguises." You can read the review here:

http://thoughtsofasojourner.blogspot.com/2010/03/brilliant-disguises-by-william-thornton.html

Book Critiques gave the novel four stars. You can read that review here:

http://bookcritiques.blogspot.com/2010/03/brilliant-disguises-by-william-thornton.html

AusJenny, an Australian blogger, said "Brilliant Disguises" is "thought-provoking" and "a great read." You can read the review here:

http://ausjenny.blogspot.com/

"Brilliant!" You can read Winning Readings review here:

http://winningreadings.blogspot.com/2010/06/reviewgiveaway-brilliant-disguises.html

A Mention in the Leeds News

2010-02-11T13:48:00.000-06:00

Brilliant Disguises got mentioned in The Leeds News here.

I will be signing copies at Moody's Doris Stanley Memorial Library Thursday, Feb. 18 at 11 a.m.

About the Book

2010-02-05T15:10:00.001-06:00

Advance praise for BRILLIANT DISGUISES

"With this stunning debut novel, William Thornton joins the ranks of the mystic Christian writers of the past, such as C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle. As a bonus, Brilliant Disguises is a great read, with enough plot twists to keep the reader up late, turning pages!"

- Cassandra King, author of The Sunday Wife

William Thornton makes his fiction debut with BRILLIANT DISGUISES, the tale of a man who poses so well as a Christian that he fools everyone - everyone, that is, except for himself and the One he cannot escape from. In the process, he seemingly works miracles but cannot satisfy the hunger inside himself to find out who he really is.

Thornton's novel concerns the life of Cameron Leon, a newly-hired worker for the Forster Foundation, a world-wide charitable organization led by a reclusive billionaire. To get the job, Cameron has to join a church. However, Cameron, still mourning the recent death of his brother Peter, decides he will only pretend to "get saved." In the process, he impersonates not only a Christian, but on occasion, his brother. Cameron continues to receive tearful phone calls from Peter's widow, Cecelia, who wants to hear her late husband's voice. Cameron, a born mimic like his brother, flawlessly impersonates him but feels the need for a personal kind of cleansing. Cameron discovers not only how many faces he has, but how many there are among the people around him. In the end, he finds he has been impersonating someone - or Someone - all along.

According to Thornton, BRILLIANT DISGUISES grew from a longing to see the inner life of a Christian in a fictional setting. But the only way to make such a familiar setting appear unfamiliar to Christian readers was to have the story told by someone posing as one. Thornton says, "Probably anyone who has attended an evangelical church, or any church for that matter, has a story of someone who volunteers for everything, is there for every service, has been a model of prayer and devotion for what seems like generations. It could be the Sunday School director or the lady who helps out in the kitchen or the organist. Then one Sunday, they come forward during the invitation and announce that they've never felt they were saved. I wondered how that could happen, and I figured it would help if we were dealing with a character who was a born mimic."

By turns comic and probing, dark and daring, BRILLIANT DISGUISES is about trying to hide behind the Light, and seeing things as they really are.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William Thornton is an award-winning writer who has been a newspaper reporter for the past 21 years. He teaches a Sunday School class and is a deacon in a Southern Baptist church. He also maintains a blog on Christian themes in religious fiction, non-fiction and popular culture. He lives in Alabama with his wife and daughter.

BRILLIANT DISGUISES
By William Thornton
with book discussion group guide and Bible study options
An Xlibris soft cover
978-1-4415-9130-2/$19.95
Available at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, Books-a-million.com and www.brilliantdisguises.com

Brilliant Disguises - The First Chapter

2010-02-05T13:00:00.002-06:00

Here's the first chapter of my novel, "Brilliant Disguises."

Profession of Faith

1.

When I think back on the interview, it doesn’t seem that it was me sitting there in that office as much as somebody else. I suppose that was the whole point.

****

I had a similar feeling at my brother’s funeral. It was the sensation that I was a spectator, that I had stepped outside myself into some impassive, Elysian plain of existence and no longer had any control over what I was doing. Or what was happening, I should say. It wasn’t really a conscious decision — just the accumulation of a manic heartbeat and senses on a trip wire waiting for whatever might reveal itself in the next instant. I have never really understood how or why events reveal themselves like this. Perhaps that too is the whole point.

****

I was sitting in an office, yawning, still feeling like I had the night before — a feeling that I needed to be clean. In reality, I needed a new job. I had an interview just after lunch. Dr. Benjamin Forster of the Forster Foundation had an opening on the public relations wing of his empire and I wanted to be part of it. It easily paid twice what I was making, and I had the keen ability not to see any possible reason why they wouldn’t hire me, given my qualifications. That is, provided I got a good night’s sleep, which I didn’t.

The interviewer was Prescott — Charlie to his friends, though he didn’t make me feel like one — who identified himself as Forster’s adjutant but never quite defined what that position meant. I noticed hanging in a closet behind his desk a few suits that had just been dry cleaned, swathed in sheets of shining cellophane. I wondered if picking these up for his boss was part of the job description.

Prescott did not dress the part of what I would consider an adjutant. That is, unless the job description included no sense of fashion. The man wore a suit that accentuated his overly rounded belly, topping his ensemble off with a vulgar-looking belt buckle so shiny it must have been made of chrome. This made him look like the human equivalent of a Mack truck angling for respectability. He was a very tall man, which may have explained his ill-fitting clothes, but I would have presumed a man working for Forster would be more image conscious. I immediately wondered if I should have dressed down. On his desk, positioned for any visitor to be overwhelmed by it, was a large framed picture of a woman I learned later was Prescott’s wife, though it was natural to infer so from its prominence. On a wall near his desk were two classical Greek drama masks, with a happy face and a frowning one. Though they were meant to remind me of Sophocles and Euripides, I found myself thinking of the beginning of Three Stooges movies. How strange, the connections our minds can make.

Sitting there, waiting as Prescott looked over my resume, I realized I was wearing the same black suit that I had worn for Peter’s funeral. It still had flecks of dried dirt on the pants’ legs.

****

"Mr. Leon. Am I pronouncing that right?" he asked.

"Yes. Just like it’s spelled."

"Splendid." He used the word rather self-consciously, as though he wanted me to be impressed by it. "Everything seems to be in order here."

"Oh, good." I thought it might be better to act pleasantly surprised at his observation. Then I wondered if that might not sound too vain. No, I silently corrected myself, vain would be second-guessing a two-word response to a compliment during a job interview.

Prescott stood up. He must have been about six five, and the desk made him seem even more absurdly tall. His belt bucket hit the desk top, making a sound like a bullet ricochet in an Old West movie. "There’s just one question I have to ask you, Mr. Leon."

"Yes?"

He looked mildly embarrassed. "I have to say that we’ve had your resume for more than a month and we’ve been very impressed with everything."

"Good."

"I should let you know that very few people get this far. You wouldn’t believe how many apply for this position that either don’t have what it takes or wash out when we get to this point."

"I see." Or I was trying to. We hadn’t actually gotten to a point that I could see, at least one where someone would wash out.

"Do you feel comfortable? Can I get you anything?"

"I’m fine. Do I look uncomfortable?"

"Well, you do look a little tired at least. Troubled, maybe?"

My eyebrows arched involuntarily, and though I denied anything was wrong, Prescott could probably tell I was lying.

"I wouldn’t want you to feel ill at ease, especially in light of what I’m about to say." Prescott cleared his throat, came around to the other side of the desk and sat down. He looked embarrassed at first, then relaxed into something knowing and fatherly. "But there is one thing that isn’t covered in the resume." I had braced myself for what I thought he might say. I expected a short primer on the strange habits of my potential boss. Forster was largely known through his voice — he did a series of radio spots providing little homilies on how life could be lived more richly. They smacked of easy answers to difficult questions, bromides worn bare like borrowed clothes, but delivered in his sincere, booming, believing voice. He always wrapped with the same exhortation, almost ridiculous in its enthusiasm — "Have an exceptional day!" One didn’t really know what he looked like, but you guessed at some majestic, unassailable sincerity. What little else was known about him was tantalizing. Legend had it that Forster thought nothing of calling employees in the dead of night and asking the most outlandish tasks of them to be completed within hours.

But then, I’m used to that already, considering last night, I thought.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Mr. Leon…Cameron… can I call you Cameron?"

"Yes. Please."

"Cameron, have you ever been born again?"

It was at this point that whatever illusions of control I had over myself left me, for reasons I’m still not quite sure about. "Excuse me?"

"Born again." He repeated the two words slowly, in a grave voice but with an inappropriate smile.

"I’m not sure I follow," I said. I remember squinting and leaning forward in my chair, probably because I felt like I needed to do … something.

"Are you a Christian?"

****

I wanted to be sure. "A Christian?"

"Yes."

There is probably a moment in every job interview where the applicant realizes the secret agenda at the heart of the querying. The prospective boss relays through gesture or statement what the position entails, or what is expected of the would-be employee, or what kind of man the employer is, and the interviewee immediately tailors his gifts, his experience, his very life with neat scissor snips until a workable, passable garment emerges for inspection.

A more intelligent person than myself would probably have said something different from the next thing that came out of my mouth. "You mean, like, with that Jesus guy, right?"

"Yes!" he exclaimed, as a game show host might for a contestant who suddenly recalls the answer to a question. "That same guy. I presume you’ve heard of Christianity?"

As ridiculous as my question had been, he responded with an off-putting level of ernestness and an annoying acceptance of my flippancy at face value. I had expected him to be suitably offended, thus pleasing me. But he didn’t. And so we did this strange dance, with me alternating between the kind of self-interested lying to get a job that applicants routinely indulge in, punctuated by glib, sarcastic responses to questions I was sure were none of his business.

"Yes, yes, of course. Born again?" I said.

"I’m sorry. We’re sort of fundamentalist around here. It’s second nature to say it like that. It’s something, a term you might say we use to identify ourselves to ourselves."

"Sort of like a code word, you mean? Or a secret handshake?"

"Hadn’t thought of it quite that way, Cameron. What do you say?"

"I’m not quite sure what to say, really. If you mean God, I mean, I saw ‘The Da Vinci Code.’ Twice." This was actually a lie. The second time I had wandered into the wrong theatre. It took a few minutes for me to realize it because I didn’t remember Tom Hanks’ hair being that long.

"Well, that’s a start, I suppose," Prescott said, in all earnestness. "I take it you do believe in God."

"Was that a prerequisite for the job?"

"You see, I told you not many people make it through this part of the process. I’ve seen people leave here…"

"I don’t see…"

Prescott held up his hand, nodding his head as if pleading for patience. "This is a foundation, Cameron, a multi-million dollar operation. A lot of money and effort goes into what we do, and we don’t want to waste the opportunity. But you must also realize this is a ministry. Mr. Forster believes heavily in a sense of mission. And that means that the job you’ve applied for carries, in a very real sense, some of the spirit of that …Spirit, if you take my meaning."

"I do," I said. I was lying again, but I suppose I wanted the job badly enough at that point and sensed it was ascending beyond my grasp.

"I would assume then, Mr. Leon…"

I didn’t like the way he lapsed back into the formal. "Cam, please…"

"Sorry, Cam. I would assume then that you’re not a Christian? Do you belong to a church?"

"Um, I gave some money to the United Way. Once."

"Do you remember how much it was?" Clearly, he wasn’t taking the bait.

I thought for a minute. Then I realized I had pledged to send money but never actually made out the check. I stayed quiet for a second until he gave up on getting an answer.

"You’re not a Christian."

"I did once get a Bible trivia question right when I watching ‘Jeopardy!’" I couldn’t quite remember what it was.

"You’re not a Christian," he repeated.

"Well, no, not as you define it."

"How do you define it, Cameron?"

"Well didn’t Jesus say, ‘Live and let live?’ That’s always been my motto."

Prescott never gave me the pleasure. "No, actually He never said anything like that."

I cleared my throat. "Why do you ask?"

Prescott began talking with his hands, gesturing like an after-dinner speaker. "I’ll be frank. Cameron, our benefactor, I’m sure you’re aware, is a very driven, very opinionated man. He feels strongly that if our work is to succeed, everyone must be of one mind, and one body."

"One body?"

"The body of Christ, I mean."

****

I should tell you that some of my responses to his questions were because of my lack of sleep. But I didn’t feign much of my ignorance. I don’t want you think of me as a ignorant man. I suppose what follows will convince you one way or another. Let me just say that the one remove of reality I was grappling with at that moment, the darkened glass I was looking through, if you will, kept me from associating what his words were with actual meanings. And as far as that moment was concerned, I didn’t truly know my own body, let alone Christ’s.

Maybe he figured this out from the expression on my face.

"I’m telling you, Cameron, that if you want this job, you need to go home and seriously think about your salvation."

I don’t think the look on my face changed.

Prescott rolled his eyes, like a man giving up at a game of charades. "I mean, you should go home, pray about this, and ask Jesus to come into your heart."

"I thought you said something about being born again. Now you’re talking about my heart?"

"It’s a figure of speech."

"Another code word?"

"It has very definite meaning."

"I would think so. I think I remember a song about somebody not being born is busy dying, or something like that. I don’t remember if it said anything about the heart. You want my heart born in Jesus, or Jesus born in my heart, or something… I’m still not getting it. I don’t have any medical training, either in cardiology or obstetrics. I thought my resume covered that."

Prescott shook his head, still not taking the bait, still not giving up on me. "You’re sure you’ve never heard of any of this?"

I yawned, and my hand went up to cover my mouth. My eyes went down to the floor. It seemed like a gesture of shame, even though I wasn’t sure what I needed to be ashamed about. "He who would distinguish the true from the false must have an adequate idea of what is true and false," I said, finally.

"Who said that?" he asked, knowing I had to be quoting somebody.

"Spinoza."

"Very good. Interesting that that you’re able to quote Spinoza but seemingly unacquainted with Christendom." So he could give as good as he got. That kept me from thinking too long on whether, after his prying, I really wanted this job after all.

****

I thought he might be about to ask me to leave. I finally said, "How do I do that? This born again thing."

"I don’t want to pressure you…"

"Oh, no. Not at all."

"I mean, I realize you want this job and everything."

"Well, I do, but I’m not sure what you want me to do."

"Come again?"

"You say you don’t want to pressure me, but you tell me I should pray about this. Is there something about me that you think is …evil?" I shifted in my chair because I was curious just how much this man knew about me, how much he could read from my face.

"No, not at all," he said.

"Well, you said something about me looking troubled."

"Right, right. No, look, I don’t think there’s anything evil about you, Cameron. I wouldn’t still be interested in you for the job if I did."

"But you still think I should…"

"I just know you’re a man."

"Yeah, even though I didn’t mention that on my resume either."

He forged on. "As a man, we’re all prone to the weaknesses of men. We struggle with ourselves. Within ourselves. We have things we aren’t proud of, things we can’t quite cope with. We all know there’s someone inside us, someone we know closer than anyone else, that we never can quite become. But in time we see all too clearly what we really are."

"I thought this was a public relations job…"

"It’s a big step, I know, but you’ll never regret it."

"You mean getting the job?"

He shook his head. "Cameron, like I said. Go home and think about it. Pray about it." He gestured again, as though he expected me to get up from my seat. Actually, he looked as uncomfortable as I probably felt.

"You’re just giving me a day on this?"

"How much time do you need?"

I looked at my watch for some unknown reason. "Today’s Friday, right? Alright, let me have the weekend."

"Fair enough. Three days is plenty of time."

I remember standing to shake his hand, though I don’t remember particularly wanting to. The whole thing was vaguely insulting. I still wasn’t sure where or what he expected me to do. It was obvious that what he wanted me to do was important to him at least, though I wasn’t sure why. He had given me vague instructions with an indeterminate goal and expected me to satisfy his requirements well enough to get the job he was supposedly offering me.

****

One of the great things about living in a democracy is that you can assemble a personal philosophy from the enduring ideas of the world, like someone pulling items from the shelves of a grocery. It’s not even necessary to understand the ideas or know what the words mean. They’re just words. They’re just ideas. And the people and circumstances behind them are just brand names, like Coke and Pepsi. If these ideas fail, you can be comforted by knowing they weren’t your ideas in the first place. And your own misinterpretation or willful ignorance is allowed under the Constitution. Mr. Leo Tolstoy, for example, told us that when we commit an act, any act, we are convinced we are doing it of our own free will, but examining it among the mass of mankind, we become convinced of that act’s inevitability. The more alone we are, the more unrestricted our possibilities might be. The more we are connected to others, the less free we are.

But whatever control I had over myself returned during that interview just long enough for me to ask Prescott, "They would be able to tell me what I needed to know in church, right?"

He gave me, for the first time, a skeptical eye. "It depends which church you go to."

"Tell me," I said, "Which church does Mr. Forster attend?"

****

Point Omega by Don DeLillo

2010-02-02T08:16:00.002-06:00

In the time it takes you to read this post, an infinite amount of action passes seemingly without your noticing. The chest rises and falls with each breath. Blood courses through the body. Eyes blink. The body shifts, nervous energy makes the foot rock back and forth, the head moves, as do the eyes. And that's just for the individual. Time that is irrecoverable, used up like waste paper, looking for purpose and meaning.

Since the achievement of "Underworld" in 1997, Don DeLillo has focused more of his energy on a series of novella-like creations, and this theme of time - its passage, consumption, wastage, etc. - dominates them all. "Point Omega" can be taken as an anti-war message, a parable on the multiple meanings of existence, on the ability of mankind to make meaning for itself, but what spoke to me was its obsession with time.

"Point Omega" begins with a man in a gallery taking in "24 hour Psycho," a screening of Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" at two frames per minute, meaning that one viewing of the film would take an entire day. At that speed, the imperceptibly moving image begins to have more meanings than just those a low-budget slasher film made by a genius. "The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw," the narrator tells us. It's interesting that DeLillo chose "Psycho," even though there is an exhibition of the film at the Museum of Modern Art. David Thomson's book, "The Moment of 'Psycho,'" shows that the film is a veritable funhouse of meaning and imagery. "Psycho" is concerned with murders created by a monster, and what they mean - crimes of passion, not profit.

Most of the action of the book has to do with film, though. The documentarian Finley wants to make a movie about Richard Elster, a "wise man" academic like Ravelstein called in by the Bush Administration in the run-up to the Iraq War in order to give the enterprise some intellectual heft. Elster, naturally, seems haunted by this (naturally, because rarely is a character in a DeLillo novel ever not "haunted" by something) and a need to escape into the desert. Finley's wish is to do, not a "Fog of War" film examination, but a relentless interview with just the face on the screen, offering explanations. Later on, after Finley has had time to emotionally bond with Elster's daughter Jessie, she disappears into the desert and Elster must cope with the loss.

"Point Omega," like "The Body Artist," "Cosmopolis" and "Falling Man," at times resembles not so much a narrative as a series of declarative character statements in the guise of narrative. Given DeLillo's politics, Elster is an enigmatic figure who must bear the pain of his complicity in the war. "There were times when no map existed to match the reality we were trying to create," he tells Finley. But the events are cold. Elster may bond emotionally with Jessie, but we see little evidence of it. All of these people seem exhausted by events.

Or by time, perhaps? "Time is enormous," Elster says, later restating that "every lost moment is the life." In a few sentences of dubious logic, he makes clearer, perhaps, the author's intent: "Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down... when you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story."

The book's cover gives us the infinite image, the eight turned sideways, an endless loop that circles back to itself. And that is the dubious logic - because the city built to remove time from nature only restates time and nature in all its terror. Buildings fade and fall. Cities age, rot, are rebuilt only to rot again. Meaning, like time, is elusive. The disappearance of Jessie, and the lack of resolution, may disappoint a reader looking for an explanation, but DeLillo isn't interested in explanations, because in his view, life isn't. And that lack of explanation is deadly, just as deadly as a war that a man may plan from the safety of an office thousands of miles away, unaware of where his ideas will take others. "The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters the body. All the man's grand themes funneled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not."

A Perfect Day for Salinger

2010-01-28T15:36:00.003-06:00

Today's news of the death of J.D. Salinger will no doubt bring many tributes to Holden Caufield's creator, who famously hasn't published a word since the New Yorker printed the mammoth, "Hapworth 16, 1924," a letter from the ridiculously precocious seven-year-old Seymour Glass. Since that June 19, 1965 issue, not a word. Salinger's sole printed output is one novel, one short story collection, and two collections of four novellas.

Obituaries will dwell on Salinger's most enduring work, "The Catcher In the Rye," the story of Holden Caufield's extended escape to New York City. I came to Salinger, and "Catcher" late. Instead of discovering the teenage protagonist in my adolescence, I was a 26-year-old on the eve of my wedding. Why so late? Those of you who remember the eighties will recall the almost mystical stigma that briefly hovered over "Catcher" after John Lennon's assassin, Mark David Chapman, and then Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin, John Hinckley, were arrested with copies of the book, Chapman going so far as to read passages in court as he was sentenced. There was something about the book, in it's simple scarlet cover, it seemed, that drove people nuts.

By the time I finally got around to reading it, I was fully aware that it wasn't some voodoo novel with the power to unhinge, but the imaginings of a frustrated teenager on the borders of adulthood, enjoying the first flush of freedom. At times, he enjoys himself. At others, he seems disturbed that there isn't more to it. He has the reaction of a child - a child who opens a gift on Christmas Day, only to find it's a pair of socks.

But my deeper connection has been with Salinger's Glass family stories, the most famous of which are "Franny" and "Zooey," collected together when finally published in book form. In the Glass family characters, Salinger fixates on the lingering ghost of Seymour, who killed himself in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." Seymour appears as a golden child - indeed, all the Glass children, of course, were stars of a radio program called "It's a Wise Child." Seymour is an almost messianic persona who grows into an awkward adult, his wedding the source of anxiety in "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters." For example, Seymour is remembered as having said "that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next." By the end of his published output, Salinger strayed far from conventional narrative fiction and created characters capable of long, philosophical digressions and investigations, with only the individual character tics there to urge the reader onward. Stories occasionally take on a mystical Christian property, especially "Franny" and "Zooey," which both deal with the concept of the Jesus Prayer.

"When you don't see Jesus for exactly what he was, you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don't understand Jesus, you can't understand his prayer — you don't get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission."

Salinger's understanding of Christianity is unmistakably Eastern, with its emphasis on the meditative aspects of faith as a path to secret, inner knowledge. This almost Buddhist conception makes his characters seem distant, even as they are teenagers and young adults trying to impress with profanity and borrowed erudition. What we know of Salinger's private life points to him as a searcher - someone who experimented with Christian Science and Dianetics, among many other things. But his use of religion in his stories seems to copy the kind of consciousness with which teens approach the supernatural - intrigued by the possibility of forbidden or unspoken knowledge, attracted by the idea of wisdom, and a simultaneous wish to cast off dead ritual and take up intriguing practices.

But in the Glass stories, we get a picture of Christ which has had lingering effect, both good and bad, in popular culture. We get a slightly aloof, all-knowing Christ who is the greatest adept in the world, capable of overflowing love but seemingly detached from our knowing Him. We pursue, but we are not guaranteed of overtaking him. We wrestle not with an angel, but with the shadow of a certainty.

Interview with Syncopator Familias

2010-01-19T14:19:00.002-06:00

My friend Greg Richter did an interview with me for his blog, Syncopator Familias, about "Brilliant Disguises." You can read it here.

You can also get a copy at my signing Sunday at Mountain Brook's Emmet O'Neal Library at 2 p.m. See more about that here.

A Nod from The Gadsden Times

2010-01-11T10:26:00.004-06:00

The Gadsden Times did a notice on "Brilliant Disguises" last week before our signing at Gadsden Christian Bookstore. Here it is:

The Gadsden Times
Friday, January 8, 2010

Thornton to be signing debut novel
By Matthew Martin
Times Features Editor
To everyone around Cameron Leon, he is a perfect man. But instead of being perfect and truthful to those around him, Leon has many faces.
That's the world author William Thornton has created with his fiction debut, “Brilliant Disguises,” which was released about a month ago.
In his book, Thornton's protagonist is leading a double life, pretending to be a Christian.
Leon gets hired for a job on one condition: that he join a church. But instead of really joining the church, he pretends to get “saved.”
His act becomes so believable he starts to deceive himself and winds up hollow and longing.
Thornton, a Gadsden native, said several things inspired him.
“One was how, at times in church, you'll find a person who comes forward to make a profession of faith who has been a fixture there for years, sometimes decades,” Thornton said. “They may be the Sunday School superintendent, or the lady who works in the kitchen for meals, or a volunteer in the nursery who never misses a Sunday. Everyone in the church knows them and looks up to them, yet they make that walk down the aisle and say they've never felt like they were saved. They may very well be a Christian, but doubts are eating away at them.
“I was interested in how that could happen.”
Even though the novel is considered a Christian book and being sold in Christian bookstores, the appeal has a broad base.
Through Leon's self-made life and the psychology that comes with that, the personal shortcomings become universal. Thornton said that is what drew him to write the book.
Thornton finished the book about two years ago. He said it only took him about six months to write the novel.
He is a former staff writer for The Gadsden Times who now works for the Birmingham News.
He will be signing copies of the book at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Gadsden Christian Bookstore on Broad Street.
It can be purchased there, as well as at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Books-A-Million Web sites. Copies also can be bought at brilliantdisguises.com.

The book also got mentioned in Atlanta Christian Family Magazine last month and can be seen on page 8 here.

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro

2009-12-26T16:16:00.003-06:00

"Nocturnes" opens with a haunting short story, "Crooner," which for me is the best of this collection. "Crooner" gives us vividly what is best in Ishiguro's fiction - his ability to draw characters and his use of carefully concealed information - sometimes from the reader, sometimes from his characters.

The narrator is a saxophone player in a Venice nightclub band who grew up in Eastern Europe under communism. During a set, he sees a popular cabaret singer whose career has seen better days sitting at a table. The narrator introduces himself, expecting a hasty greeting followed by a tactful exit. Instead, he finds himself invited into the singer's life and, subsequently, his troubled marriage.

In "An Artist of the Floating World," Ishiguro gave us the portrait of an artist recounting his life, artfully and obliviously concealing his involvement in wartime Japan's martial culture. The artist's spiritual twin is Stephens, the butler of "The Remains of the Day," who is unaware or unwilling to admit his employer's complicity in appeasement with the Nazis or his love of the head housekeeper. Ishiguro's characters are human beings who live by, because of, and imprisoned in their own illusions.

The narrator of "Crooner," however, draws a few conclusions, as does the reader about Tony Gardner, our seemingly forgotten singer who dreams of a Tony Bennett-like comeback. The narrator also gives a few words of encouragement as he assists Gardner in a midnight serenade of his wife from a Venice canal. But not everything is what it seems. Just as the narrator's mother was a "prisoner" of communism and lost love, it is apparent that either Gardner or his wife Lindy too are prisoners of something, whether it be lost fame or love. Figuring out which is left up to the reader.

Ishiguro's characters in this story, as in the other stories of this book, are adequately described in one story as "well-intentioned mediocrities" - people who are in the grip of music and hover just on the borders of notoriety or popularity. There is an appreciation both for the arrogance of the musician, and the humility playing music demands from its practitioners. As in the final story, "Cellists," we hear from the same narrator as "Crooner," who tells of another friend in a relationship that is not quite love. A cellist meets a woman he believes to be a virtuoso, but instead is someone who hasn't played in years because she doesn't wish to "damage her gift" with the well-intentioned mediocrity of a teacher. What in another writer's hands would be a tiresome crank becomes a character of beauty and, of course, blissful ignorance.

Ishiguro's other stories toy with humor giving action that sometimes feels forced but entertaining. When a character begins describing a fascination he has with a female dentist, the explanation made me laugh for several minutes uncontrollably. It is good to see him occasionally straying out of the darkness, but it is there that he, like the crooners of old, is able to work his old black magic.

Twilight: New Moon by Stephanie Meyer

2009-12-25T09:13:00.002-06:00

Fall in love with someone, and you fall in love with them in time. Whatever they experienced in the past makes up who they are. The present is wrapped up in the life of the other. The future, presumably, is about the constant renewal and tending of that love. Even a temporary relationship entails a marriage of sorts - circumstances and ambitions bound together, for whatever reason, for however long.

Having spun out a love story in "Twilight," Stephanie Meyer then has to necessarily expand the universe she created into a larger world. Simple stories, like simple organisms, must at some point grow in order to survive. A love affair between a teenage girl and a vampire caught forever between his teen and adult years may go on, but for how long? When Bella, the teenage narrator of "New Moon" asks early in the novel, "What's so great about mortality?" she is angry that her love, Edward Cullen, will not transform her into a vampire, presumably to share immortality with her. Her ambition is that the love she feels for Edward go on, and not be tainted by age or circumstance.

But an unwelcome reminder of Bella's humanity drives Edward to leave - for her sake - and unwittingly triggers the next step in the story: Bella's association with Jacob, the werewolf guardian. Jacob appeared briefly in "Twilight" and planted the seed of the enmity between the werewolves and the "cold ones" - the Cullen vampire clan. Bella, caught between Edward and Jacob, of course chooses Edward. But this sets in motion her meeting the Volturi, an ancient group of vampires who require that she eventually become one of the undead.

Confession: I did not enjoy "New Moon" as much as "Twilight," frankly. Bella's birthday party, cut short by the accidental spilling of her blood, seemed forced, in light of "Twilight's" climax when Bella's blood was everywhere. The extended period during which Bella sleepwalks through life after Edward's departure went on much too long, and was wisely cut short by the makers of the movie. (They also introduced an e-mail correspondence between Bella and Alice which helped move the story forward.) The writing also seemed rushed - it would be nice if Stephanie Meyer could find some other word to describe Edward besides "beautiful," over and over and over. Word choices are often overwrought and overly dramatic. I also was put off by the almost camp attitude of the characters toward their supernatural surroundings. "Sure, I had a lot on my mind - revenge-obsessed vampires, giant mutant wolves..." Bella observes, before asking:

"What kind of a place was this? Could a world really exist where ancient legends went wandering around the borders of tiny, insignificant towns, facing down mythical monsters? Did this mean every impossible fairy tale was grounded somewhere in absolute truth?...Wasn't one myth enough for anyone, enough for a lifetime?"

It's in the best interests of a writer of the fantastic not to ask a question like this, not to point to the zipper down the monster's back and ask the audience not to notice.

Having said that, there was many things I enjoyed. As I said, for this story to go on, it has to grow. And Meyer gives us a higher vampire hierarchy and the idea of something even beyond immortality. When Bella and Carlisle begin to speak of the hereafter for vampires, she reminds us of why we were originally spellbound by Edward - his fallen angel character, the idea that he might be redeemed, presumably by Bella's love. We also have Jacob, a reluctant (teenage!) werewolf who takes on the guardianship of his people, and presumably, Bella.

Reading these books, the phrase that pops to mind is courtly love - and it probably comes from the inspirations for these two stories - "Pride and Prejudice" and "Romeo and Juliet." Passion burns sweetly, but only so long as it is passion and nothing more. Bliss is eternal, if not confused with the day-to-day business of love. Anyone can look like a god as long as you don't have to watch him pick his teeth after a meal. Which is why these books have attained their status in culture - they're safe. Vampires who hunt animals and only attack other vampires, werewolves who attack vampires and not humans, and a woman caught between the two of them. "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds..."

It is also a mark of the author's ambition when she tackles the eternal, as she does in the words of Carlisle. "But never, in the nearly four hundred years now since I was born, have I ever seen anything to make me doubt whether God exists is some form or the other. Not even the reflection in the mirror."

The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov

2009-12-15T23:23:00.002-06:00

The subtitle of this posthumous novel is "Dying Is Fun," and one senses the sarcasm even from beyond the grave among the bones of this work. Nabokov, as he succumbed to a host of ailments toward the end of his life, left "The Original of Laura" with his family to destroy - the first draft of a novel scrawled on 138 index cards, which are faithfully reproduced for the reader after decades of indecision by Nabokov's family. Index cards, we are told, because Nabokov liked to arrange and rearrange his passages as the mood hit him.

One sees, upon a first reading, why Nabokov might have wanted to spare the public this work in progress. It is hard to divine just where he was headed, what he might have changed, what he might have expanded upon. What is here is only the barest outline of a plot - a young woman named Flora becomes the subject of a novel as she is prisoner in a lifeless, loveless marriage. Beyond that, it's difficult to judge where he intended to go. Scenes are only barely sketched in. Extended dialogue is scarce. This is only the beginning of birth pangs.

What is here is interesting, nonetheless. There are typical Nabokovian puns and putdowns - observations such as how people seem to stare with "nasty compassion," or how an aging child molester died of a stroke in an elevator - "going up, one would like to surmise." We get the opinion that Malreux and Mishima, among other writers, "could get away with the most excreble writing, provided they represent their times." The introduction proves that this kind of literary snobbery did not die with the author but is alive and well with Nabokov's son, Dimitri, who wrote the forward.

And that makes the whole business tantalizing enough. I found myself wishing there were just a little more flesh here among the bones. It is nearly impossible to see what Nabokov meant by some of this. For example, would he have retained the name Hubert H. Hubert for one of his characters, which seems such an uninspired homage to "Lolita?" While Nabokov's style is evident here, it is not fluid and not constant throughout. The total is occasionally as indicipherable as his handwriting.

But this is clear: much of the book deals with self-destruction. From what we know about the state of his health just before his death, this would have been a welcome subject for Nabokov, as it is for his narrator. What few observations are intact among these pages deal with losing toes, limbs, and the welcome effects of oblivion:

"I hit upon the art of thinking away my body, my being, mind itself. To think away thought - luxurous suicide, delicious dissolution! Dissolution, in fact, is a marvelously apt term here, for as you sit relaxed in this comfortable chair (narrator striking its armrests) and start destroying yourself, the first thing you feel is a mounting melting from the feet upward...(card ends)."

Christianity, critics often charge, has been too obsessed with the body, or its negation. Those who take it too literally, we are told, pay too much attention to covering up the body in unseemly modesty, or placing too much hope in the promise of resurrection and not enough on the here and now. Explanations for everything from the rise of obesity in America to perceived Republican indifference to the hungry and poor have been wrapped up in such criticisms. Nabokov's novel (and the circumstances under which it was written) reminds us that the inescapable fact of life is that it is not eternal, in this reality at any rate. The very fact that this novel is not finished, that the intelligence that created it has been gone for thirty years, is enough to drive that point home.

But much of who we are is wrapped up in our bodies, and warped by them. When we are most beautiful, we may be simultaneously powerful and vulnerable. Age showers us with the wisdom of experience at the exact moment we become spectators instead of actors. Bodies break, and the spirits within them do as well. Shuffling the cards may change the organization, but the ending is always the same, written or unwritten. This is an unpleasant truth, but it means that unlike another posthumous author's work - Dickens' "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" - the ending, and the culprit, has already been divulged.

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer

2009-12-07T08:40:00.002-06:00

Much of the first book in Meyer's vampire romance series, strangely enough, is concerned with images of imprisonment and living up to expectations. From the very beginning of "Twilight," Bella Swan is happy "to be left alone, not to have to smile and look pleased" around her father. Later on, she remarks about her new hometown of Forks, "You could never see the sky here; it was a like a cage."

There are several reasons for this, of course - Bella is a teenager, the new kid in a sleepy, dreary town who feels abandoned by her mother, and misplaced with her father, who never has recovered from his broken marriage. But as we will soon find, Bella is the hunted, the prey "staring into the dark eyes of the hunter," her love, the 100-year-old vampire Edward Cullen, forever sentenced to be a teenager.

I was suspicious of "Twilight" for several reasons, not the least of which its omnipresent nature in the national consciousness. Every trip to the bookstore means passing a massive table with all four of the Twilight novels as well as their movie spawn, Meyer's "The Host," and teen picture magazines with Robert Pattinson. But also, the book's premise made me slightly suspicious. The vampire in literature- Dracula, obviously - represents evil. Not merely in the creature's bloodlust, since that equates the vampire with the animal outside of human morality, killing for survival. But the vampire represents a perversion of nature - the undead, apart from salvation. The idea of a teenage romance with a vampire, on its face, made me think on our culture in general, shaking hands with evil and attempting to "understand" it, even excuse it. We live in a world where Hitler's self-serving stories of beatings as a child are sometimes used to illustrate the dangers of child abuse, as Ron Rosenbaum remarked. Such easy explanations not only seem to wish for an understanding of evil, but offer it an excuse.

But "Twilight" is closer to romance than the supernatural; a redressing of the standard teenage narrative of the girl who tries to "save" her dangerous boyfriend. The characters are sometimes obvious but just edgy enough to be interesting. Bella is a snarky but basically good girl with a few cynical observations thrown in for depth. Edward is a vampire, but he's a "good" vampire who lives off the blood of animals rather than humans. He's environmentally conscious. He tells Bella she is better off staying away from him, yet saves her life. His warning - "What if I'm not the super hero? What if I'm the bad guy?" - points to something else. All of these qualities are sometimes ludicrous and amusing but necessary for the story to work.

I could have done without the multiple reminders of how "beautiful" Edward is, but Edward Cullen is a close cousin to Milton's Lucifer, with a little of Anne Rice's poet vampires mixed in. But whereas Lucifer is a beautiful being who chooses rebellion against God, Edward awakens during the influenza epidemic of the 1910s to find his life transformed into something immortal and infernal. There is an absurdist quality to it, since Edward feels he should have died nearly a century earlier; The vampire who asks, "Why am I still here?" is also a prisoner, though of something much worse than teenage angst. This self-loathing makes Edward tragic and interesting enough to keep our attention as he and Bella go through the usual steps of teenage infatuation, even as they threaten to bring the book's narrative momentum to a standstill.

But toward the book's close, when Edward is forced to drink Bella's blood, he arrives at the moment he has dreaded - since he is drawing out the venom that would turn her into a vampire. He loves her but does not want her to join him among the world of the undead. Sacrifice? On many levels - in love, in consciousness, in existence. The dangerous guy narrative usually exists with the girl attempting to save her man with her love. Salvation, through love, a Christian idea but one which replaces Christ with the redemptive quality of passion. But the dangerous guy narrative usually ends when he lures the girlfriend, against her will and sometimes his, into destruction. Only Christ can redeem with love, because danger is stronger than passion.

This story, which seems absurd on the surface, could only succeed with a vampire who sees the absurdity of life. An immortal character, who strangely enough, longs for something enduring. "Twilight" succeeds because of this.

Dickens'...uh, Disney's...A Christmas Carol

2009-11-15T15:28:00.004-06:00

It says something about the imagination of Charles Dickens that only in 2009 could technology finally give an adequate expression of the artistic vision encompassed in a story he wrote in 1843. The Disney movie, directed by Robert Zemeckis, (Forrest Gump, The Polar Express, Beowulf) is only the latest cinematic expression of "A Christmas Carol," but it also shows technology can only do so much to compete against the ghosts of Scrooges past.

First of all, Zemeckis' movie is slavishly faithful to the Dickens original. Moments that are sometimes excised from the narrative - for example, the twin children Want and Ignorance hidden in the robes of the Ghost of Christmas Present - live in this version. Zemeckis, who wrote the screenplay, uses Dickens' dialogue almost totally, and when the text does stray, it still manages to remain faithful. For example, Gary Oldman's Bob Cratchit pronounces the verdict of the book's narrator, that Scrooge in the end was "better than his word." This is a sensible artistic choice, given that Dickens' narrative is not only perfectly suited to the constrains of a two-hour movie but that the dialogue still crackles with life and a familiarity that can only be compared to Shakespeare.

Jim Carrey's Scrooge is surprisingly restrained. I expected it to veer into broad comedy and pratfalls but the old miser keeps his dignity much longer than I would have guessed, even as the three spirits strip the last vestiges of his pride away from him. I wasn't sure if it was the computer animation, or the quality of his performance, but I found myself wanting some of the nuance I remembered from previous performances by George C. Scott, or Albert Finney, or the great Alastair Sim. By giving such an understated, and faithful, interpretation, it allows the more sentimental aspects of Dickens story to show themselves. Scrooge is revealed as a surprisingly easy touch - his brutishness, so clearly displayed to the charity men who accost him in his office early on - wilts depressingly easy once he is carried through the events of his early life.

The movie also reminds us of why "A Christmas Carol" continues to grip our imagination - much like its American cousin, "It's a Wonderful Life." That's because it has the ability to scare the Scrooge out of us. When Marley's ghost appears in all his morbid glory, he is there to remind Scrooge - and us - that life is not an endless proposition. When the Ghost of Christmas Past bids Scrooge return to the still-familiar corners of his forgotten life, we see the choices he has made and the life he unconsciously created in the pursuit of wealth. But Marley's epitaph for himself - "Mankind should have been my business!" - rings in the air.

Even the relatively saccharine scares of the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present have teeth - Past is unafraid of showing Scrooge the great failures of his personal life until Scrooge forcibly ends the journey. Present, with a booming laugh and an image of endless gluttony, propels Scrooge to every stop where his name is cursed and ridiculed. Both ghosts seem to exist to remind him of the terrors of life; of failure and waste, want and cruelty, the sorts of things that make the joys of Christmas ring hollow in our hearts.

All three ghosts are not at all inviting - which gives us a contradiction at the heart of the celebrated Christmas story. Christmas can be a terrible thing, as Scrooge himself observes at the beginning, a time "for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself another year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you?" One presumes that if the ghosts appeared to another, they might take on other forms, but they seem to exist with the idea of torment in order to remind a twisted heart of the season's - and life's - meaning. At Christmas, we look around and measure it against its previous incarnations - who is alive, who is dead, are we better off than the previous year, did we get everything we wanted, were we able to provide what others wanted. The ghosts serve almost the same function as Christmas, with its mental balancing of life's books at the year's very end - both for good and ill.

Only Tiny Tim, the object of so much of the audience's fear, can inspire hope. Tim Cratchit's presence, so appallingly sentimental - a lame, brave, good-hearted child ("good as gold") who hopes to inspire church-goers to remember "who made lame beggars walk and blind men see" - points the way to the hinted-at end of the story. Tiny Tim, whom the narrator assures us "did NOT die," gives Scrooge a tangible life for his money and newfound benevolence to save. And Dickens, who leaves the figure of Christ carefully off-stage in this Christmas pageant, indicates that perhaps this lame beggar did walk because a blind man - Scrooge - finally was able to see something besides the coins he had striven his whole life to hold.

One of the strengths of Dickens incredible art is that no technology can adequately show the change wrought in a life by hope - even terrifying hope.

Homer and Langley by E.L. Doctorow

2009-11-13T08:23:00.002-06:00

So many of E.L. Doctorow's novels resemble the home of the two Collyer brothers - vast rooms of antique splendor littered with what some might consider refuse, seemingly preserved for a reason known only to the assembler of the vast collection. Then, when one arrives at the end, one is left with a satisfying appreciation of what remains and how it was assembled.

Doctorow is sometimes erroneously called a historical novelist, but his work merely uses history as a starting point. To tell his story, Doctorow feels no inclination to "stick to the facts." "Homer and Langley" is a prime example of this. The story seems a natural for Doctorow, which his love of Old New York and the passage of American life. But Doctorow takes the tale of the infamous hoarders and moves it from Harlem to Fifth Avenue, extending the lives of the brothers into the seventies.

The story is told through the eyes of Homer, which is interesting since Homer is blind. The novel begins when the brothers' parents are still alive, taking us through Langley's return from World War I forever changed. As Homer loses his sight and becomes more dependent on his brother, he also begins to witness - from a distance, emotional and visual - his brother's decline into madness.

Over the decades, the Collyers turn their home into a safe house - for musicians, a Nisei family enduring suspicion during World War II, a gangster, hippies. And of course, for the wretched refuse of New York; chiefly, the newspapers Langley hordes in his attempt to create a one-time newspaper for the ages cataloging the times of their lives.

Langley fancies himself as a rationalist, unable to believe in anything except the absurdity and cruelty of life. When the brothers receive a letter from a missionary friend, he observes that it is "interesting that someone in the grip of such a monstrous religious fantasy - believing she is doing the Lord's work - is doing the work that the Lord would be doing if there was a Lord?" When they are left alone by a gangster on the lamb, Langley remembers how, as a boy, he decided he wanted no part of Heaven. "And if God is there after all, we should thank Him for reminding us of His hideous creation and dispelling any residual hope we might have had for an afterlife of fatuitous happiness in His presence."

All we need know of Homer is his response to this: "Langley was always able to life my dark moods for me." Homer trusts his brother, even as he seems him sink deeper into disconnection. Homer cries out for a companion, a protector, especially a female presence. His existence is a reminder to Langley that life is unfair and some things are beyond our control. But the brother nevertheless forges on with his quest to remain aloof from the world, untroubled by it, passing judgment from behind their shuttered rooms, choked floor to ceiling with clutter.

Much of this novel deals with the illusion of control, and the worlds we construct in order to flee the one outside our doors. But Doctorow's story, which could easily have been absolutely dark, instead brims with comedy and warmth. He lingers predictably over the familiar baby boomer touchstones of the sixties, but the journey is never obvious or heavy-handed. Instead, one feels some admiration for these brothers, each blind in his own way, viewing their lives through the yellowing headlines of a lifetime's collection.

Conquest of the Useless by Werner Herzog

2009-11-10T08:10:00.002-06:00

Anyone who has seen the wild-eyed, white suited Klaus Kinski gesticulating wildly into the South American jungle in Herzog's film "Fitzcarraldo" knows what obsession is. The motion picture tells the story of a European who decides to build an opera house in the middle of the jungle in order to lure Enrico Caruso to perform there. But after a boat trip down the Pongo, our hero decides his multi-ton steamboat must be towed over a mountain to the other side of the river to complete the trip. Only his faith in his own lunacy, and the help of scores of inscrutable Indians, are able to make the dreams of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald real.

"Conquest of the Useless" is a journal kept by the director, Werner Herzog, during the making of this ill-starred production. Though they are notes kept contemporaneous with the filming of the movie, they are by no means a diary of the production. Those hunting set gossip will find all too little within this book. Instead, one samples Herzog's daily observations on the jungle and the collision he creates between the modern and the primordial. In the process, he creates a modern-day rendering of "Heart of Darkness," with Herzog not sure whether he is Kurtz or the tale's narrator, or both at the same time.

There's no small humor that at the beginning of this book, Herzog is at the home of Francis Ford Coppola, the director of the Godfather films who is wrestling with is own obsession - "Apocalpyse Now." It too deals with a "Heart of Darkness" theme, and it's production history was perhaps even more infamous than that of "Fitzcarraldo." By the end of Herzog's production, he would have to recast key scenes in the film and refilm some of its most grueling passages.

One appreciates Herzog's language as he struggles to describe what he sees in the Amazonian jungle. There is a sense that nothing has changed in centuries out there in the water and vines. The jungle is the book's largest character - a steamy, sweaty, malevolent, amoral presence which does not value human life and corrupts it just as it rusts the equipment brought into it to record its excesses. This is a land where babies die in their mother's arms, where soldiers' bodies come bobbing down the river and are left to drift further, where the loudest sounds are the snapping and falling of trees alive since before Columbus crossed the ocean:

"The jungle is obscene. Everything about it is sinful, for which reason the sin does not stand out as sin. The voices in the jungle are silent; nothing is stirring, and a languid, immobile anger hovers over everything."

Herzog struggles to hold himself together, even as his life seems to him nothing more than an invention "with its pathos, its banalities, its dramas, it's idling." His film, which threatens to spiral everything out of his control, eventually gets made but that story seems strangely secondary by the end. He is merely trying to survive. That is what this diary is about - the survival of aspiration. "Is the desire to fly innate to all creatures?" the director asks, even as he lugs his own great ship up into the clouds.

Mad Men: Shut the Door, Have a Seat

2009-11-09T07:56:00.004-06:00

"It's going to be temporary," says Don Draper to his two children, as he begins to explain to them that his marriage to their mother is ending. Betty shakes her head silently. The truth, ever elusive in this drama, hurts too much for childish ears. Don, an eternal childman, is suddenly forced to grow up, but cannot bring himself to admit it to other childish ears.

This was just one moment of the season three finale of "Mad Men," "Shut the Door, Have a Seat," wherein Don's advertising agency, Sterling Cooper, suddenly finds itself without its partners as they break off to form their own firm in December 1963. When we saw Don a week ago, he and his colleagues were all dealing with the calamitous events of Nov. 22. When Don's children asked him what would happen after the murder of President Kennedy, he assured that all would be well after a little mourning. But Betty, his wife, wants a divorce, after having discovered the secret that Don has kept from them for their whole marriage - that he is in fact Dick Whitman, living on a borrowed identity from the Korean War.

"It's going to be temporary." One remembers Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous valediction on the Kennedy years - "We'll laugh again, but we'll never be young again." The sixties are humbling Don and the other characters with change - massive doses of it. Roger Sterling embraced change in the form of his 20-something wife, and now seems to regret it. Joan Harris married a man she should have known would disappoint her, but she quit her job nonetheless. Pete Campbell, so desperate to get ahead, looked for any way out of what he perceived a dead-end job. Price, the British executive, found his faith in the company betrayed when it seemed happy to jettison him. As Don tells Peggy Olson of the people their ads reach, "The way that they saw themselves is gone."

But Don Draper, the show's hero, has been humbled this season. He was maneuvered into signing a contract, beaten by drifters at one point and forced to confront his real life as his marriage disintegrates. When Conrad Hilton saw Don's desk earlier this season, he observes that Don has no Bible nor any family photographs on it. In doing so, he sums up Don as a man who believes in nothing but himself. The truth is only what will get him through the day. But the certainties - his abilities, his charm, his bullying power - are going. Even as Don tries to assure himself it's only temporary, he knows it isn't.

It's interesting that after so much drama, the finale should end on a light, hopeful note - Sterling Cooper reborn in a hotel room, the secretarial pool and its thuggish office politics seemingly wiped away. Sharing smiles over sandwiches, the new partners look on their new horizon at a time when the nation was still in a deep funk over losing a symbol of the best parts of itself.

One of the reasons television comforts us is that it gives us situations that we can return to where change can safely be held at bay. We live our lives with the illusion of status - that routine and tradition are unshakable and will hold us no matter what happens. We depend on them, and we do so at the risk of great disappointment. When Don tries to tell his children how things will be apart from them, he tells that wherever they go will still be home. "It's just a different home." That elusive home that Don has always been looking for - that he never had as a child, that he is now deprived of both personally and professionally - lies in the future.

Perhaps, armed with a new understanding of what he can do, he might find it.

Brilliant Disguises - The Soundtrack

2009-11-07T12:01:00.002-06:00

Since the narrator of "Brilliant Disguises," Cameron Leon, is posing as a Christian, I began looking for songs by "secular" groups which either mention Jesus, or use Jesus in the title, or have a slightly Christian theme.

Imagine my surprise when I found how extensive a list that is! However, after some careful pruning, I have come up with a playlist you may enjoy while reading the novel. If you have a suggestion, e-mail one in.

1. The Word - The Beatles/Rubber Soul
2. Reach Out To Jesus - Elvis Presley/Ultimate Gospel
3. Spirit In the Sky -Norman Greenbaum/The Definitive Anthology
4. Personal Jesus - Depeche Mode/Violator (there's also a very good Johnny Cash version)
5. Jesus Just Left Chicago - ZZ Top/The Best
6. Jesus - Queen/Queen
7. The Cross - Prince/Sign "O" The Times
8. Property of Jesus - Bob Dylan/Shot of Love
9. They Laid Jesus Christ In His Grave - Woody Guthrie/The Library of Congress Recordings
10. Gloria - U2/October
11. I Have Forgiven Jesus - Morrissey/You Are the Quarry
12. Loves Me Like a Rock- Paul Simon/Negotiations and Love Songs
13. Jesus to a Child - George Michael/Ladies and Gentlemen
14. Jesus Is Just Alright - The Doobie Brothers/Best
15. Jesus Walking On the Water - Violent Femmes/Hallowed Ground
16. Jesus Was an Only Son - Bruce Springsteen/Devils and Dust
17. Jesus - The Velvet Underground/The Velvet Underground
18. Beatitudes - Sweet Honey From the Rock/Gospel Live from Mountain Stage
19. I Just Want to See His Face - The Rolling Stones/Exile on Main Street
20. Are You Gonna Go My Way? - Lenny Kravitz/Greatest Hits
21. The Lord's Prayer - Frank Sinatra/Christmas Songs by Sinatra

And now, a word from our Sponsor…

2009-11-07T11:51:00.001-06:00

I began writing the novel “Brilliant Disguises” in March of 2007. Kurt Vonnegut had only died a few days before, if memory serves, and his widely quoted passage from “Mother Night” was still probably ringing in my head - “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” In Vonnegut’s work, however, he had been talking about a man pretending to be a Nazi, who perhaps might be one, though he isn’t even sure.

I can remember a distinct moment of inspiration. I was in a Barnes and Noble bookstore in Birmingham, AL looking through the stacks and saw “The Double,” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I had never read it, and bought it instantly, going on nothing but the title. A man who looks like another. But beyond anything I might have found in between the covers, I had been bitten instantly by another idea - a man pretending to be a Christian. Immediately, I had a few questions about this proposition - why would he do so? How long could he keep it up? How hard would it be to fool anyone around him? Or, more importantly, how does one pretend to be a Christian?

The more I thought over the idea, the more I began to warm to it, and so the character of Cameron Leon was born. I soon began assembling him from conversations I’d had over the years with women and men who have spent lives in churches as pastors, deacons, volunteers, teachers, etc. As teenagers, they never could have foreseen themselves occupying those positions of spiritual responsibility, and suddenly, they found themselves feeling like imposters, waiting for their cover to slip. “What? Me a Sunday School Superintendent?” I understood that, in some ways, these are merely feelings of personal inadequacy, or doubt, or even simple amusement at the gentle ironies of life and faith. There are even those people who spend lives in churches, assuming great responsibilities, casting long shadows and leaving great reputations, only to step forward one day and ask for salvation, claiming they had never known it before. Whether or not they are, or were saved, is between them and the Lord.

But what about someone who really is an imposter?

I should also mention that, for some time before that, I had been fascinated with the idea of impersonation. The idea of assuming another name, for example, or attempting a slight or even major change in appearance, is something I’ve looked for in books and movies. I had tackled this several years before in a short story about a man who is able to mimic other people’s voices. He takes a silent pride in this ability, until one day he receives a desperate telephone call from the widow of his recently deceased brother. She wants to hear his voice again, and she knows the brother will be able to provide the correct impersonation.

And so, resurrecting this premise and marrying it to the one already on my mind, I began the novel. I was about halfway through one day when I was driving to work listening to one of my favorite songs - “Brilliant Disguise,” by Bruce Springsteen. I realized I had a title when he ended this moody, enigmatic song with the words:

Tonight our bed is cold
Lost in the darkness of our love
God have mercy on the man
Who doubts what he’s sure of

But where Springsteen’s anonymous narrator was troubled by the idea that his lover has another face unknown to him, Cameron Leon isn’t sure how many faces he has. Or how many are needed from him. Or which one may be his own, if one really exists.

The novel also gave me a chance to try something out. Though it wasn’t a model at the time, I can see looking over it again that Arthur Miller’s only novel, “Focus,” played some inspiration. In it, the hero Newman, a WASP, acquires a new pair of glasses and begins to be mistaken for a Jew. He, and the reader, experiences anti-Semitism as a case of mistaken identity.

Christianity itself, hinges on this idea of mistaken identity. We are called by Christ’s name to exhibit Him - His attitudes, His love, His caring, His anger at sin, His blessings for mankind. If someone sees something good, there’s often the question of whether they understand its source. If someone sees something else, will they attribute the negative to Jesus or to us?

But what Miller did - just as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and countless other Jewish-American writers of their generation - was make the Jewish-American cultural experience discernable to both Jew and Gentile. I decided that any novel I wrote from the Christian perspective should attempt something similar. Intellectually, there is much about the evangelical Christian in America’s cultural experience that is alien to the rest of the country. Some of that is understandable, given the political climate and the tenor of the times. But it is also a void that fiction can in part address. What is it about the evangelical that makes Jesus’ life an imperative for him or her? What can that mean for the faith? For the country? For the individual?

But Cameron Leon, our narrator, is not a Christian. How do all of the situations that the evangelical knows - prayer, church, volunteering, counseling - appear to an outsider? Indeed, on outsider who wants to remain so, even as he is inside? A mimic, who can’t even live his life without relying on the quotations of famous people and thoughts of others? Is his life his own? Is anyone’s life truly their own? Who really knows you?

I invite you to find out, though the life of an invented man, and the lives he invents for himself.
　

Nazi Literature In the Americas by Roberto Bolaño

2009-10-29T08:01:00.003-05:00

This novel? short story collection? pastiche? served as my introduction to the work of Bolaño, the Chilean novelist who died in 2003. Taking the form of a series of what pass as encyclopedia entries, Bolaño documents the lives and works of various fictional writers who found their voices in the service of fascism. One review referred to these made-up lives as a "parade of monsters," but more accurately "Nazi Literature in the Americas" comes off as a parade of cranks.

Grouped by family, associations, or by subject matter, these stories document not only the lives but the works of poetry and prose these Nazi sympathizers put forth in Bolaño's imaginary world. In Bolaño's vision some of these lives extend into the future, where their deaths are documented. Indeed, all of these figures meet death, some in spectacularly grisly fashion, silencing their literature forever. Yet Bolaño's authorial voice documents how their words survive, however long, in obscure journals, zines, and scholarly studies.

The stories of this book never deviate from their sort of Wikipedia style, sometimes tantalizing us with just enough information about some controversial work in the author's oeuvre, but never actually letting us read the words for ourselves. Buried in the material of their lives are various hints of obsession and style, often as hilarious as they are laconic. For example, the career of Argentino "Fatso" Schiaffino, 1956-2015, includes the information that during the 1990 World Cup in Italy, Schiaffino "expressed a wish to meet with the British hooligans" he had earlier encountered "for a reconciliation ceremony consisting of a mass for the casualties of the Falklands War, followed by a barbecue." Later, the anonymous narrator remarks of one of his books that it "left all but a few readers wondering why he had written and, having written, published it."

And what is the sum of these stories? Our writers achieve various levels of mediocrity instead of acclaim, and while they encounter actual flesh and blood writers they either rebuff them or are unimpressed by them. Nothing touches the perceived brilliance of their personal dreams. The passion of their love affairs and the quality of their works do not seem to say as much to the narrator, at least, as the simple facts of their lives. As noted with one subject, he "practiced the art of the novel, which stubbornly declined to yield its secrets to him." In the end, "his manuscripts were probably thrown out with the trash or burned by the orderlies."

The stories are followed by a list of "secondary characters" from the stories, their birth and death dates dutifully noted along with facts such as "a pathetic loser, in the opinion of his family," or "for more than twenty years he fooled his colleagues into believing that he could speak Russian." Following that is a list of Bolaño's fictional magazines and publishing houses, among them "Iron Heart," a "Chilean Nazi magazine which survived for a number of years not in an Antarctic submarine base, as its ardent instigators would have preferred, but in Punta Arenas."

Bolaño's work often deals with forgotten or obscure works of literature, and the politics of the writer are not so much ideological as how much the writer is willing to risk for the ideas he so fiercely clings to. In interviews, Bolaño said he was mainly holding up a mirror image of leftist writers in creating the lives and works of these fictional double images. Instead, he creates a vast world of forgotten literature and the forgotten lives that produce it for its own consumption and understanding. Acceptance is a human longing, and the heart curdles at the lack of it, or curdles when the wrong kind is given. As Bolaño remarks of one of his creations, "real life can sometimes bear an unsettling resemblance to nightmares."

Fasting by Scot McKnight

2009-10-28T19:58:00.004-05:00

An entry in Thomas Nelson's series "The Ancient Practices," this book examines one of the least spoken about practices in Christianity - the denial of food for spiritual growth. "Fasting" is an effective short primer on the subject, which not only gives the Biblical background and its theological underpinning but the practical side of this discipline.

One might be tempted to ask - as I did, picking up this book - what the advantages are to be gained by fasting. McKnight makes a simple, elegant and eloquent case that fasting not only works as a way to focus the mind and body on spiritual matters but also functions as an act of faith itself - relying on God for spiritual sustenance. He also states what fasting is not - a magic formula for getting God's attention when seeking the answers to prayers. McKnight also understandably covers the medical drawbacks to fasting.

To make his case, McKnight puts forward a definition for fasting - "Fasting is the natural, inevitable response of a person to a grievous sacred moment in life." By doing so, he immediately demonstrates not only that fasting is not some aberration left over from some dark, shared human past, but a normal biological response, and even a wholesome one. He did this to also repeat how fasting can be misused or substituted for the act which is paramount - understanding and responding to God's leadership and Lordship.

He also connects the reader to the rich history of fasting within the church, and its antecedents in Judaism. In today's world, full of distraction and competition for every moment of consciousness, when consumer society is geared toward satisfying not just hunger but cravings, nothing focuses quite like the denial of food. In the absence, the believer replaces prayer needs, items of spiritual turmoil and thanksgiving, trusting that what is needed will be provided.

For my own part, the book persuaded me enough to try it for myself. Going without one meal - just one - was enough to convince me that the subject bears further study and practice, which is probably all one could ask of this brief and ultimately very satisfying book.

Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon

2009-10-27T12:53:00.003-05:00

I've been a fan of Michael Chabon's since his Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," and subsequent novels such as "The Yiddish Policeman's Union" and "Gentlemen of the Road." He's been very busy of late, producing two novels, a collection of essays entitled "Maps and Legends," and this latest work, a hybrid of memoir and essay and meditation on the creative processes in fiction and families.

"Manhood for Amateurs" sheds plenty of light on Chabon's biography, much as "Maps and Legends" did. "Manhood" is a sort of cousin of the earlier work, covering topics such as Chabon's first marriage, his early childhood, his maturation as a writer, and his fascination with science fiction and fantasy, comic books, baseball, etc. with each genre and sub-genre listed dutifully. It also covers his marriage to Ayelet Waldman and their lives with their children. Chabon marches through the passage of time, the expectations of fathers and mothers, and the nature of the universe with the same gentle humor and wonder that he marshals in his fiction.

I should say I did not want to read this book at first. I'm noticing too many of the novelists I follow suddenly giving me books about their lives and observations in place of the fictions I crave from them. Whether it be creative nonfiction or memoir or essay or whatever, I find myself losing patience when someone I admire thinks I'd rather read their all-too-predictable thoughts on the 2008 election or depression or, you name it. I realize this is part of the writer's mystique... after all, it's all about you, even if it isn't. But Chabon manages to make this journey pleasurable because of his beautiful prose and the gentle wisdom in his observations. Yes, he does talk about the election, but you're willing to forgive it because he doesn't dwell there for too long or indulge in the expected.

One piece in particular bears scrutiny here: "Xmas," a piece toward the end about Chabon's childhood as a Jew in the land of Christmas, and his reaction then and now to the Christ story. Chabon rails against the denatured Christmas as a holiday shorn of its inspiration, the birth of Jesus. Make no mistake, Chabon spends just as much time making clear he is no fan of what he refers to as religious fundamentalism. He is dubious, it seems, of religion in any stripe, and describes himself as agnostic but mildly observant. But he does find himself remembering the words of Luke's gospel, quoted in "A Charlie Brown Christmas," by Linus, and being inspired:

"I still know that chapter and verse of the Gospel of Luke by heart, and no amount of subsequent disillusionment with the behavior of self-described Christians, or with the ongoing commercialization that in 1965 had already broken Charlie Brown's heart, has robbed the central miracle of Christmas of its power to move me the way any truly great story can."

Chabon, though he considers the story of Jesus to be basically "a lie," says that it offers us a way to see the Truth. He's not far from the Kingdom of God, here, and actually sounds a lot like C.S. Lewis, if you ignore the pop culture references and occasional profanity. And he's able to summon up a great deal of wonder that I'm not sure Christians are able to tap into while they flit from store to store, trying to find the perfect gift for their imperfect budget.

Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife by Francine Prose

2009-10-19T08:28:00.002-05:00

I might never have bought this book except for a tiny item on the New York Times web site - a link to about 12 seconds of video on You Tube - the only known existing moving picture images of Anne Frank. There, in just an instant, is the young girl looking down from a window on a newly married couple. I sent a link to a few people, and the ones I heard back from responded with gratitude. It was like hearing from an distant old friend, or discovering a memento of a departed family member.

Unlike others, I did not come to Anne Frank as a child. It wasn't until I was in my thirties that I read "The Diary of a Young Girl." I had just finished Philip Roth's "The Ghost Writer," about which a major plot point revolves around the life of Anne Frank. I approached it with a bit of trepidation - thinking it was probably one of those books that gets assigned to schoolchildren for being easy to read, and from which a close reading leaves one underwhelmed. I was probably 10 pages in before I realized what an idiot I was to be so skeptical.

Francine Prose's book examines the phenomenon of the diary through Anne Frank's life, how the book came to be, and what has come since. Among the book's highlights is how much time Prose spends recounting how the book was "crafted" - for example, I had no idea that Anne began revising her diary in the Secret Annex (the space she and her family shared for two years during World War II) nor that the publication of the diary set off interesting stories of obsession among those who had helped it to success. Prose touches on some of this in her own response to the book:

"I understood, as I could not have as a child, how much art is required to give the impression of artlessness, how much control is necessary in order to seem natural, how almost nothing is more difficult for a writer than to find a narrative voice as fresh and unaffected as Anne Frank's. I appreciated, as I did not when I was a girl, her technical proficiency, the novelistic qualities of her diary, her ability to turn living people into characters, her observational powers, her eye for detail, her ear for dialogue and monologue, and the sense of pacing that guides her as she intersperses sections of reflection with dramatized scenes."

And to think, she did all this without knowing how her story would end. And it is the story's end, off stage but ever present, which gives every page of the diary its power. Prose asks the question that others have - would we care about the diary if Anne had survived the Holocaust? And how, exactly, does the story end? Does it end with Anne's affirmation that "people are basically good at heart?" Or does it end with her in the camp, weak and emaciated, the part we never see in the diary but are aware of? Does one ending cancel out the other? Do we cheapen the diary's power when we wish for some kind of happy ending for this little girl, something that affirms the human spirit, when we all know she died as a victim of a movement that dubbed itself "a triumph of the will?"

We are drawn to Anne because she is a child - not innocent at all to what happens, for she makes her neat marks in the book at night as she hears the bombers overhead. What is essential within a child is within the pages - the part of ourselves that we want preserved against the part we wish to destroy, and which wishes to destroy us. The nature of time makes the essential nature of any moment disappear, so that we never again see it as it is, but only how it appears reflected through another now. The original moment itself is irrecoverable, just as the next one is, and the next one. Prose's book reminds us of this, and by examining the diary and the life it came from, she reminds us that Anne's words will forever mean things to us that she never could have guessed at, as it touches generations she never lived to see.

Perhaps eternity is the indestructible moment, in all its power, never growing dim, never growing weary, never growing old.

The Humbling by Philip Roth

2009-10-17T17:04:00.003-05:00

Not too long ago, I was in a bookstore speaking to the owner about Philip Roth. "Do you ever finish one and start another one and feel as though you're reading the same book?" he asked. This is the 15th Roth novel I've read, and "The Humbling" feels indeed like familiar territory, though perhaps not for the same reason my friend spoke of.

Simon Axler is a well-known actor in his sixties who suddenly experiences stage fright and retires from performance. From the moment he leaves his familiar life, he struggles toward understanding who he really is. Suicide begins to appeal to him. He finds himself in a recovery program:

"Everybody else would be sitting there gloomily silent, inwardly intense and rehearsing to themselves - in the lexicon of pop psychology or gutter obscenity or Christian suffering or paranoid pathology - the ancient themes of dramatic literature: incest, betrayal, injustice, vengeance, jealousy, rivalry, desire, loss, dishonor, and grief."

In the process, Axler has an unlikely reunion with Pegeen, a young woman whom he has known for all of her life, since she is the daughter of a couple he has known since before she was born. Pegeen has been living as a lesbian, but she forms an attachment with Axler and begins transforming herself into a compliant, feminine companion for him. But there is something artificial about Pegeen, just as there has been something artificial about Axler before he lost the ability to be someone else on stage.

Reading Roth one gets a sense of secrets revealed, writ large, magnified to a staggering power, so that the characters stagger under the weight of them. Like many of Roth's later protagonists, Axler is dealing with the effects of age, or "the panic that comes with age." While Axler feels something with Pegeen that he hopes is genuine, he also suspects it too is an act. He is struggling against time, and against reality, as we all do. This makes him a paler cousin of Nathan Zuckerman, without the writer's prolific and poetic disgust.

As with his last book, Roth sets all these meditations down in a spare prose, barely sketching in some details and letting his characters flail about against themselves against tragedies that are foreordained as much as Oedipus'. Toward the novel's end, Axler is attached to Pegeen and goes wherever she takes him, which inevitably leads to his "humbling." What makes this novel unsettling - and somewhat unsatisfying - is the ending that is telegraphed from the beginning, which doesn't seem to affirm anything other than the luckless and loveless nature of Axler's life, and one assumes, life itself. "The failures were his, as was the bewildering biography on which he was impaled." So in the end, one senses that the despair Axler feels is really Roth's, and that Roth says it should be our own.

Chiefs by Stuart Woods

2009-07-05T18:00:00.003-05:00

The one calling card of civilization is murder. For as long as human beings have lived in communal groups, villages, towns, cities, urban areas, they have killed each other for varying reasons, and the nature of those crimes tells us much about the culture and lives of those involved.

For the past 25 years, Stuart Woods has made a very good living pumping out entertaining murder mysteries, but his career began with "Chiefs," a novel revolving around a series of unsolved murders spanning forty years in a small town in Georgia. I am not a regular reader of Woods' work, and I became familiar with "Chiefs" first as a three-part miniseries that aired in the eighties starring Charlton Heston, Wayne Rogers, Brad Davis and Billy Dee Williams, among others.

In the early 20s, the small milltown of Delano sprouts up southwest of Atlanta and anoints Will Henry Lee, a farmer wiped out by the boil wievel, as its first police chief. Lee is honest, dependable, a fatherly figure who gradually grows into the job of small-town lawman. But he is haunted when the nude, tortured body of a teenage boy turns up at the bottom of a ravine. Over time, Lee begins to believe that young runaways are disappearing somewhere in his town, murdered by someone who sits in the town's church pews and frequents its shops.

The story later leaps forward into the 40s, following Lee's son Billy, an up and coming politician, and Sonny Butts, the returning war hero who becomes police chief. Sonny is a classic Southern thug cop, a closeted Klansman who extorts money and beats confessions out of innocent people. But he latches onto the missing boys as a way of saving his job. The book ends with Tucker Watts, the town's first black chief, who looks for a solution to the case even as he battles the state's racist law enforcement apparatus.

Briefly stated, this is not Faulkner or O'Connor. "Chiefs" is a page-turner, and it is unabashed in its status as an entertaining story, not social comment. The characters have some complexity, just enough to keep the reader hooked. No one is overly repugnant except the villains, the scoundrels are kept interesting, the heroes are suitably and predictably heroic. But Woods isn't just interested in a nice beach read here. He manages to work in an engaging story of the growth of a small Southern town and the inexorable pull of history. Deep into the book, the town's ancient banker, Hugh Holmes, observes:

"I never thought I'd be afraid of change - not change I could control. That's what bothers me. This thing has begun to control us, instead of we it. It's the first time in my life I've had the feeling of having to run to keep up."

C. Vann Woodward and W.J. Cash, among others, have observed that the idea of the South as an unchanging monolith, a preserve of tradition and order, is a lie. The traditions that Southerners cling to are often less than a generation old, or merely shadows of former traditions that are themselves built on previous ones. Holmes represents the Southerner who appeared at the turn of the last century, bent on rebuilding the South's material wealth and influence. Those dreams, eventually, helped drag the South into modern America just as much as Martin Luther King Jr. In the end, the lust for money killed segregation just as much as the courts, as when Delano hires Tucker Watts in hopes of attracting Northern industry. It was the genius of King, though, to realize that it would take something beyond law and order or money to change the soul of a nation.

But order is much of what "Chiefs" is about. The town's mysterious murderer is actually revealed early in the book, but it is the path to ending his spree that makes the journey interesting. The killer himself seeks a kind of order, imposing it on victims who have no idea what he seeks or what kind of impulses he longs to satisfy. The police chiefs who people the story seek order by their own definitions, honest and dishonest. Murder, the ultimate crime, comes to define their lives and give its own order.

In the end, Holmes is heart broken at the prospect that the town he has nurtured for half a century will become "a synonym for perversion and death," but similar realizations happen to many of the characters in "Chiefs." It is this touch, frustrated hopes and ambitions, which gives the novel a heft it might not otherwise carry. Its people are sometimes denied the ends they wish, and instead have to find meaning in what is left. The world it sketches out may be an idealized fiction, but it is not that far from the worlds we create and cling to in order to survive in the real world.

Michael Jackson: The Pain Is Thunder

2009-07-04T22:43:00.004-05:00

By now, the image has been touched and retouched so much that it seems hard to remember where it began.

For me, the past week has been a rediscovery of sorts, as I suddenly had my teenage years resurrected before my eyes with the death of Michael Jackson. Words are not sufficient to describe the absolute saturation of his image in the early 80s. No star - not even Elvis or the Beatles - ever had the same kind of domination displayed for two or three years over the pop music world. Their reach may have been greater, but the very nature of technology dictates that Michael Jackson's accomplishment ran deeper and more vividly for its time. History, as it always does, will judge who had the greater impact.

His was the first cassette I ever bought with my own money. When he and his brothers came to Birmingham, Alabama to rehearse for their world tour, it seemed inconceivable to my friends and I that he wasn't coming to all of our homes to speak to us. Even now, 25 years later, I can remember the half-second he waved to a crowd waiting hours to see him emerge from the top of a hotel portico near a busy interstate. It didn't last very long, though, the wave or his fame. Within a few months, his star was overtaken by others who some would argue outstriped him in creativity and popularity. (It's worth recalling that when Michael Jackson had a son, he named him "Prince.") But little did we realize that the central image of his life and career was contained in his most ambitious artistic project - the 15-minute music video for Thriller.

It's important to remember the circumstances of the work. At the time Michael Jackson sank more than $1 million into the video, he was a former child star who had made the unheard of leap into adult longevity. He had more or less shed the image he entered the public conscience with - a smiling, soulful prodigy - and replaced it with a mature, hip, accomplished performer. No one remembered ABC by the time he finished his first moonwalk across the stage of the Apollo Theater. He was, at that time, an R&B crossover performer who stunned with his dance moves and had showed himself a shrewd showman with limitless ambition. His two videos had finally broken a color barrier on MTV. His album had probably peaked by this time, as his record company judged when he went to them looking for money to make the video.

From the moment he finished the video for Thriller, he officially crossed the threshold into phenomenon, the album going on to regain its footing and hold its position at the top of the Billboard album charts for the better part of a year. He convinced millions to buy VCRs so they could watch the Thriller video on videocassette. He brought the nation to a standstill one evening when he burned his hair filming a Pepsi commercial. When he penned a song with Lionel Richie for Ethiopian relief, a who's who of American popular music turned out to sing the lyrics. And he had begun, what now seems inevitable, his long slide from maturity back into a stunted, artificially prolonged childhood before succumbing to the perversity of stardom.

But the video itself begins with Michael in vintage clothes that recall a idyllic, pseudo-50s background - the high school boy in the car that runs out of gas, just as he's got the good-looking girl with him. We sense his innocence even as we laugh at his less-than-honorable intentions. He takes the opportunity in the moonlight to tell her he wants her to be his girl. Then he breaks the news to her - he's not like other guys, in that weird falsetto of his. She protests that this explains her love for him, but she doesn't understand. When the moon emerges from the clouds, he suddenly begins to transform into a monster that will hunt her down.

But wait! All of this is an illusion. Suddenly, we're watching Michael on a screen, and he's in the audience, just like us. And he's singing! By now, we are too because we know the words. But the danger isn't over. Other monsters are now surrounding them, and about to devour them, when suddenly, Michael is one of them. He's some kind of monster though. You can't take your eyes off him. Then, at the chorus that's been held for our anticipation, he turns to reveal he's Michael again, singing with a vengeance, just before he and his zombie horde once again chase the heroine - and us - into an abandoned house were it seems that this is really the end...

But wait again! It's Michael. "What's the problem?" he asks. "I'll take you home," he reassures, in that falsetto again, just light enough to tickle the spine, as they walk out. And Michael turns to the camera, and we realize that maybe just a little of the monster still lies within him. Only this time, he's smiling. Maybe it's a joke, maybe it's not, but he's enjoying it, and funny thing, so are we. It's the sort of scene - Hollywood kitsch meets Freud - that permeates every page of, say, West's "The Day of the Locust."

Thriller was a turning point, in more ways than one. The early arc of Michael Jackson's mature career is marked by a string of generally positive, upbeat anthems, stretching from his time with the Jacksons to the height of his popularity - Can You Feel It?, We Are the World, Man in The Mirror, Heal the World. Even his album titles with the Jacksons and on his own reflect this - Destiny, Triumph, Victory, Thriller, Bad, Dangerous, HIStory - one word titles with pretentions of forces beyond commerce and art to life and death. But from the moment he was accused of child molestation in the nineties, Jackson's artistic world became a much darker, more defiant place, a retreat he stubbornly fled to from which to pass judgment on those who judged him - Leave Me Alone, Scream, Invincible. His songs then frequently gave the voice of a man who felt threatened by his fame, betrayed by those he thought had loved him, alone.

The speed with which the media world that craved every lurid story about him has suddenly taken to celebrating his life and work would probably shock him, were he still alive to marvel at it. The ability of the public to forgive him for what he might have done is yet another example of the power of entertainment, obscuring the facts and replacing them with fantasy. In some ways, he understood this. He may not have wanted this kind of ending, but I believe he expected it, just as he might have expected his music would obscure the unanswered questions of his life, at least for the time being. A month ago, his work presented embarassing problems and nagging questions. Now, it inspires awe.

It's interesting that when God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, the prohibition against fashioning a graven image is one of the first. Yet we obviously didn't pay much attention, because in several thousand years' time we've managed to migrate from setting up stones and golden calves to anointing various odd personalities to virtual godhood based on their ability to perform a very narrow set of skills - sing and dance, pretend to be others, throw, catch or hit a ball, or promise us endless miracles from behind a podium or in front of a seal. We invest a multitude emotions in them, and it breaks our collective hearts when we learn, as we inevitably do, that they are just like us. In every case, these people either never sought the level of fame they achieve, or quickly try any way they can to divest themselves of it and reclaim some measure of themselves when they sense their own destruction approaching.

Only Christ, personally, calls on the individual to take on His guise, learn by His example, follow His lead. His call is personal, and individual, and it is the kind of call that no sane man would make unless he could pull it off. All of our heroes tend to be crushed under the weight of our adulation, our dreams too great a burden for their backs. Our dreams tend to claim victims, both us and those we give them to. Jesus is the only one who emerges from the wreckage and shows us our dreams for what they are.

The image of Michael Jackson, of course, never remained static during his life. His skin color, face, maturity, safety, all seemed beyond definition. But which image is it that he leaves us with? The innocent boy who becomes a monster? The canny performer who emerges from the audience, singing his song before bending the monsters who surround us all to his own rhythm? Or perhaps it is the smiling figure who will take you home, smiling because he knows a secret that you may or may not find out, but a secret powerful enough to keep you coming back for more.

The Damned Utd By David Peace

2009-06-19T14:51:00.002-05:00

Occasionally, it's a good idea to pick up a book for which you have no frame of reference. It can serve as an education, a corrective to bad assumptions, or just a nice diversion from your usual reading. I know very little about European football (soccer) and have virtually no knowledge of the English leagues, which was why David Peace's novel was not only an introduction but also as something much deeper. It also serves as the basis for a movie starring Michael Sheen.
Peace, more well known perhaps for his crime noir Red Riding quartet and his reputation as a British James Ellroy, takes as the novel's subject the short, turbulent career of football manager Brian Clough heading his long-time nemesis, Leeds United. The story is told from Clough's point of view, in short, clipped, often vulgar stretches of self-flaggelation and rage. It isn't necessary to know the backstory to appreciate very early on the stakes.
Clough, a footballer whose career ended prematurely due to injury, becomes the manager of Derby County and quickly gains a reputation as a brilliant manager. His nemesis, though, is Don Revie's Leeds United, a championship club he holds in the utmost scorn for what he perceives as their dirty play. He is publicly critical of them and their manager while at the same time building his own legend in Derby. When he is forced out in Derby, he becomes Leeds' unlikely hire after Revie takes the England manager's job.
From there, Clough embarks on a whirlwind 44 days as manager, trying to change the character of the team while at the same time hating what he has inherited. It is Peace's achievement in this novel to tell both stories of Clough's rise and fall simultaneously, showing the seeds of his downfall in his rise. Constantly, Peace's Clough understands it's not his team, but Revie's. There is no changing them, and even as he tries to lead them, he still hates them. Even a reader with no interest in soccer can appreciate the humanity in the observation, "They love me for what I'm not. They hate me for what I am."
Clough does not believe in God, but he does believe in sport, which makes him believe in himself. It's easy to recognize the familiar egotism that runs through virtually every athlete. The idea that particular teams can be cursed, that the game can help one overcome life, that to beat an opponent is in some ways a moral exercise. "You believe in football; in the repetition of football; the repetition within each game, within each season, within the history of each club, the history of the game - "
But again and again, life intrudes to recalibrate what Clough feels about himself and the game, and the games outside the game. The turning point comes when Clough's mother dies. She isn't really a character in the novel (indeed, characters in the novel mostly serve as foils for the portrait of Clough that emerges) but it is her death which begins the descent that eventually carries him to Leeds, "The end of anything good. The beginning of everything bad..." Clough doesn't believe in an afterlife, no heaven, no hell, no God, nothing, but after her death, "for once in your life, just this once, you wish you were wrong."
Clough, in real life, went on to once again achieve success with Nottingham Forest, becoming the sort of sports figure for whom statues are erected. Peace's novel though reminds us that even the worlds we create within our world -entertainment, sports, business - all seek to operate outside life according to rules of effort, and fairplay. Rules we devise. And yet, even there, the ball seems to bounce against us, no matter what strategies we devise, what defenses we deploy, whatever trophies we think we may capture.

A-Rod: The Many Lives of Alex Rodriguez by Selena Roberts

2009-05-09T11:37:00.002-05:00

Last night, Alex Rodriguez returned to the New York Yankees' lineup after recovering from surgery. He took the first pitch he saw from the Baltimore Orioles' starter and parked it in left field for a home run, thereby demonstrating several things - his credentials as a major leaguer and why he should be the subject of a controversial biography, and the ability of a crowd to forgive a man who can hit a baseball over a fence.

"A-Rod" is not really a sports biography in a real sense, any more than Kitty Kelley's biographies were history. "A-Rod" is a celebrity biography, a beach read that gives a superficial dusting of biographical facts for anyone curious about its subject. It was in that spirit that I came to the book. It would be impossible to ignore the obvious hype around its speculations that Rodriguez may have used steroids as early as high school to gain an edge on the diamond, that he "tipped" pitches to opposing teams, that he has alienated his teammates over the years with prima donna behavior in various clubhouses.

I say speculations though - not revelations - because Roberts relies so heavily on speculation and innuendo as to undercut the case she makes. Anonymous sources carry the heavy lifting in this story, and Roberts places the greatest weight in the narrative on what they have to say. The prose is replete with loaded words and exclusionary thinking, all focused on Roberts' premise - that there is no real A-Rod, just an amalgam of shifting personalities tuned to whatever the demands of the moment are. Rodriguez can be humble when talking to a reporter and monomaniacal when dealing through his agent. He can be humble at the All-Star Game when giving up his position to Cal Ripkin Jr., or selfish in announcing new contract demands during the final game of the World Series. "The truth was that Alex's baseball career and almost every other part of his life consisted of one artifice atop another," Roberts writes.

That sentence illustrates the problem with this book - those are Roberts' conclusions. She finds others who will back them up, but not enough to successfully convict. She shouldn't be making those conclusions as the author, but quoting someone else who will. The narrative voice has "inside" information that we doubt she could know - many times we are treated to A-Rod's "thoughts" when we know she can't possibly have them (how can she, if Rodriguez is the shape-shifter she says he is?)

That's not to say the entire book is a fabrication. Obviously not. Alex Rodriguez has long been dogged by accusations that he is too selfish a player, too needy, too focused on statistics to ever gain the fan acceptance and reputation he would need to accomplish what he longs for - a world title. And in light of the Manny Ramirez suspension, the idea of A-Rod relying on performance enhancing drugs isn't at all implausible. In that, he seems the latest example of his species - the modern professional athlete, with otherworldly talents but all-too-human frailties. But that should engender a measure of disappointment, not the kind of personal distaste that Selena Roberts revels in between the pages of this book. This is a nasty book, a vicious, personal screed where the author seems to think her subject guilty of much more despicable things that one can find between its covers. Leaving its journalistic integrity aside, one wonders what might have inspired it. If there is more to this story, it should have been nailed down more precisely than it is here.

On the issue of steroids itself - it is now obvious that both the owners and players of Major League Baseball colluded, whether by design or accident, in the steroid use of the last 20 or so years. We have now entered a climate where sports journalists, using sources of varying veracity, are seeking to expose the users and thereby render judgment on whether their accomplishments are "real." This is an endless, ridiculous quest, and it won't result in any kind of satisfaction if any end is ever reached. The records, broken and set by steroid users, are there. They happened. To decide which ones we will recognize and ignore after the fact is to render a moral judgment that I think is outside the bounds of the discussion, especially since it's being rendered by journalists who are not exactly disinterested observers, as this book proves. The athletes who are the subject of sports journalism are, unfortunately, human, and while undeserving of the salaries and adulation they garner, they also don't deserve a witchhunt which won't punish fairly or totally and will only diminish both the games journalists cover and the profession they practice.

One last point - Roberts, in the act of telling this story, renders a moral judgment on Rodriguez's life. That's obvious. That's why we - and Roberts - pay attention when A-Rod courts Madonna or when he indulges in celebrity Kabbalah clinics. It's an old story. It's the nagging feeling that being the highest-paid player in the history of the game isn't enough, and will not satisfy. When A-Rod's trainer tells him he's leaving, fed up with the celebrity behavior, Rodriguez asks him what he wants. "I'll give you whatever you want," Roberts tells us A-Rod said.

We shouldn't be surprised when the trainer, who has worked for Rodriguez for 10 years, hands him a slip of paper bearing the words - Find Jesus.

Frost/Nixon vs. Frost/Nixon

2009-04-30T12:24:00.001-05:00

What would a previous generation think of our obsession with the ghost of Richard Nixon, which now goes on in the artistic world? He was castigated in his lifetime as a plastic man, incapable of human emotion; a bloodless, small-minded crook who cheapened the nation's institutions, seemingly out of frustrated resentments going back to high school? Yet he appears in movie after movie, is a constant laughline, has even been animated in "Futurama," has remained in our consciousness in a way no one might have guessed back in 1974. Perhaps we miss him still.

The latest example is the Ron Howard movie "Frost/Nixon," starring Frank Langella as the latest screen incarnation of the thirty-seventh president of the United States. It's based on a Peter Morgan play, which also starred Langella and his opposite number, Michael Sheen, as the interviewer David Frost. Peter Morgan, who also produced the screenplay, is the screenwriter of "The Queen" and scripted "The Last King of Scotland."

A series of television interviews might not make for gripping theater, but the Nixon/Frost interviews (as they were previously known) were theater of their own, and they were gripping. What Morgan did was take the obvious story - of Nixon's first attempt at rehabilitation - and marry it to the story of Frost, as a frustrated entertainer angling for respectability, fame, and what our current age refers to as "gravitas." By putting Frost's name first, he shows us the entertainer, the one asking the question, is now more important than the one who is being questioned.

Langella does a serviceable Nixon, giving the gentle side of Nixon in ashes, though I think the definitive screen Nixon was provided by Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone's movie. Langella's Nixon at times lapses into a bellicosity and plainspoken rhythm that seems false when compared to the real man. The real Nixon, strangely enough, presents a dilemma for the dramatist. Viewed in retrospect, the many aspects of Nixon's legend - the sweaty upper lip, the shifty eyes, the anger - were much more subtle in real life than a motion picture is capable of showing. Hopkins wisely chose to give us an outward picture of the internal soul wrestling we could distinguish in the real Nixon. Langella's Nixon is already broken, but he remains a proud man who isn't yet ready to bow to the demands of the historical record.

The Frost character undergoes the biggest transformation from play to movie. In the play, Frost was the other boxer in the ring, a Rocky who gets his unexpected date with the prize fighter and bests him. This survives, but Frost's "lightweight" credentials, his fecklessness, come forward more and somehow make him less of an adversary. He seems more of a spectator in the film. The boxing metaphor, which survives, feels inadequate, at least until the end, when we have the inevitable montage of the previously disengaged Frost suddenly cramming the night before the final Watergate interview like Sylvester Stallone on the heavy bag.

The play, I think, is superior to the movie because of its brevity. The movie also feels the need to quickly dismiss Nixon from the stage after a final meeting between the two, giving him a dismissive ending that doesn't quite match what comes before. The film has spent two hours convincing us of a certain amount of grandeur in this frustrating man, but he receives an unsatisfactory epitaph. Frost goes off to renewed celebrity, but he need only look at Nixon to understand how long it may last. The play was tight, while the film wants to be about more than it is.

The reason we're treated to Nixon yet again, of course, has more to do with the present than the past. As several extras on the DVD make clear, "Frost/Nixon" has direct bearing on our own late political age, the age of George W. Bush. As one of the participants in the real "Frost-Nixon" interviews observes, Nixon's defense that "when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal" is just as relevant in the shadow of waterboarding, Abu Gharib, and warrantless wiretapping. There's a fundamental problem this this logic.

In the play, Reston, one of Frost's researchers and one of Nixon's harshest critics, laments his time in a California hotel room, trapped with a television constantly replaying the same skin flicks. "Is there anything more depressing as a porno the second time around?" he asks. Watergate, in effect, was porn for all those who hated Nixon. It paraded his worst character flaws and transformed them to national legends, and it cemented the worst suspicions about Nixon's party in the national consciousness.

With Bush, the skin flick seemingly gets a second national viewing. But the audience at the end of "Frost/Nixon" probably feels some sympathy for the fallen president who gropes toward an apology at the end. Morgan wisely avoids the kind of demonization all too evident in the last eight years. By replaying Watergate and reexamining its chief actor, we are reminded that our national obsessions only reveal for us that the monster in the palace often looks a lot more like us than we want to admit, and the hatred they engender is because they remind us of the fallacy of faith in heroes. We question them, but the answers don't seem to ever satisfy. It's a point worth remembering as the hysteria fades and we embrace another leader with ever more urgent needs for a savior.

Crash by J.G. Ballard

2009-04-30T07:48:00.003-05:00

Last week's news of the death of J.G. Ballard focused inevitably on his most famous work, "Empire of the Sun," made popular by the movie version directed by Steven Spielberg. That work dealt through fiction with Ballard's experience in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, a nightmare vision he carried with him into the rest of his works. But obituaries also dealt with easily his most infamous work, the 1973 novel "Crash," which was also famously made into a movie by David Cronenberg.

Ballard was famously pessimistic about the ability of technology to improve the human species, as well as any hopes he might have harbored about the moral improvement of man. This view becomes abundantly clear with "Crash," a book in which Ballard said he "wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror." The anger of that statement shines through on every page. Ballard supposedly submitted a much longer manuscript which one publisher rejected, saying the author was beyond any psychological help.

It's easy to see why. "Crash" is a hard book to read, even now, more than 30 years after its publication. The story is told by a man in an open marriage who falls under the influence of a man sexually obsessed with car accidents. One may draw his own conclusions when one learns the narrator's name is James Ballard. The collision of cars serves as a metaphor for the unexpected consequences when individuals unite sexually. In its short 200 plus pages are crammed drug use, adultery, homosexuality, and a host of unhealthy fetishistic behaviors. A cast of numb characters rehearse a number of liasons in junked cars, with Ballard's prose flitting back and forth between their limbs and glands and the instrument panels of the automobiles they occupy, without any detectable difference between the living and the inanimate. Characters do not seem to be living and breathing as much as so many orifices and body parts to satisfy urges they cannot understand or articulate. They are objects, supposedly for satisfaction, though no one seems satisfied by anything.

Every accident is unique, with its own trajectories, vectors, circumstances, outcomes. The fictional Ballard's mentor Vaughn plans in intricate detail his hoped-for fatal crash - that of Elizabeth Taylor. He drives a Lincoln Continental, the same car President Kennedy rode in when he was assassinated. When Ballard is involved in a car accident, he is shaken to discover there is a victim, a man who dies sprawled on the hood of Ballard's car. Ballard then takes up with the dead man's wife. You get the picture. Ballard, the real one, may have wanted to make a statement about human depravity and how technology facilitates it, but he seems to be enjoying himself too much in the seemingly endless cataloguing of bodily secretions, wounds and deviancies, as when the fictional Ballard reveals, after his own crash, thinking of other disaster victims, "the injuries of still-to-be-admitted patients beckoned to me, an immense encyclopedia or accessible dreams."

What struck me the most about this book was its artificiality, which I suppose is the point. Ballard, Vaughn, and the other characters are survivors of car accidents, yet their lingering on the accident scene isn't so much a longing for the accident as the idea of it. It's worth considering that, much like society's current obsession with the virtual world of the information age, these characters live in a fantasy world divorced from the reality of what their obsessions really are or mean. We are a society that talks a great deal about love, but the love we seek is often not love at all but a biological urge that becomes warped by our own inarticulate, misunderstood urges. When our fantasies are placed side by side with reality, or perhaps compared with the ideal of what we seek, we quickly understand the great distances the human imagination can quickly travel and how inadquate its sense of direction is. This became abundantly clear to me yesterday when I witnessed an actual car accident.

I was driving north on the Interstate when I noticed a dust cloud in the median. I looked in my rearview window and saw a rising cloud on the opposite shoulder of the southbound lane and dozens of cars slowing down. I got off at the next exit and quickly crossed over to the other lane to see if help was needed. At the foot of a steep hill, an SUV laid on its side, smashed and smoky after tumbling several times. Hand tools, CDs, clothes, and other articles lay strewn in the tall grass. Standing amidst onlookers was the driver, a thin trickle of blood coming from his forehead. He was shaken, but alive and intact. And grateful. When I asked him what had happened, he gave a vague explanation, what shock would allow of an instance that lasted perhaps 10 seconds at most.

Accidents remind us of the random nature of life, and the reality that technology can only do so much to save us from ourselves. A wrong turn at too great a speed can be deadly, or exhilirating if survived. As we've observed here before, it is the danger inherent in sin that makes it attractive, regardless of how vivid the consequences may be in our minds. Just as the characters of "Crash" know what the outcome of a car collision might be, we continue to take the curbs of our lives too fast, our foot a little too far from the brake, our eyes straying from the path ahead.

Together Through Life by Bob Dylan

2009-04-29T22:20:00.003-05:00

On a beautiful late summer day eight years ago, Bob Dylan released one of his greatest albums on the same day 19 men with boxcutters changed the New York skyline and the world. It was one of those strange incidences of synchronicity, much as this week, when Dylan again released an album at the same time Air Force One inadvertently made New Yorkers run for cover again. In the same spirit, "Together Through Life" shows all the earmarks of Dylan's late career renaissance, but only serves to remind the listener of the uncanny greatness of this latest, unexpected phase.

At the end of the sixties, when Dylan had produced six records in a row redefining both folk and rock music, he produced "Nashville Skyline," a short, spare record with carefully crafted, seemingly benign and banal love songs. While it wasn't "Blonde On Blonde," it was one of his most delightful and unexpected works. "Together Through Life" plays in much the same way, the music flitting between Tex Mex and Zydeco, not quite reaching the level of "Modern Times" or "Love and Theft" but still staying with the listener long after listening.

The album opens in a similar vein as Dylan's last three, with the haunting "Beyond Here Lies Nothing." The tone of the song is the same as most of Dylan's late work - hard-edged, bluesy, brimming with mocking pessimism. But the words reveal a desperate love song, frustrated by a seemingly finite future. From there, Dylan progresses into "Life Is Hard," and the character of the record begins to reveal itself. It is an old-fashioned crooner's ode, much like "By and By" or "Spirit On the Water," with the melody hovering high just on the cusp of Dylan's haggard husky whispering croak. Maybe he does, as he later sings, have "the blood of the land in his voice." His narrator simply wants "strength to fight the world outside."

From there, the record becomes an exercise in fun, revealed most starkly as Dylan laughs (!) toward the end of "My Wife's Home Town." Many of these songs resemble, in structure, rhythm and lyrics, those of the past 10 years in Dylan's catalogue. Lyrics seem lifted from the obscure tunes he spins on "Theme Time Radio Hour." Impressionistic thoughts fill the air. He explores familiar themes of haunted, frustrated love in "Jolene." His songs seem divorced from time, as the hero of "If You Ever Go to Houston" reveals he was nearly killed in the Mexican War. The melody of "Forgetful Heart" reminds one of the meandering menace of "Ain't Talkin'" only at a softer, lighter pitch.

The man who once sang "The Times They Are A'Changin'" now gives the world "I Feel A Change Comin' On," not a Obamaian anthem but a personal song about individual happiness. Dylan doesn't do utopian dreams anymore, if he ever did. "We've got so much in common/We strive for the same ends/And I just can't wait for us to become friends." Billy Joe Shaver and James Joyce get called out, and William Shakespeare quoted.

But Dylan wouldn't be Dylan without a tough, sarcastic jeremiad to the present age, which closes the record, "It's All Good." This song will remind listeners of similar tales of frustration, resignation, alienation, such as "Everything Is Broken" and "Things Have Changed." No one seems to care that no one seems to care anymore. But Dylan keeps smiling, it seems, as the lies and lives pile up.

If this record lacks one thing, it is the usual veiled spirituality of his earlier albums, the pseudo-Gospel that has dusted his music since his conversion in the late seventies. That is, unless you count the fact that he identifies Hell as his wife's hometown. Or perhaps the border longing of "This Dream Of You" isn't so much a love song to a woman as much as Someone else, as he speaks of his "earthly death." When Dylan speaks of crossing over, it usually isn't the Rio Grande he means, but either the River Styx, or the River Jordan. His mood is all important.

What Was She Thinking? (Notes On a Scandal) by Zoe Heller

2009-04-24T21:05:00.004-05:00

About midway through the story of teacher Sheba Hart’s illicit romance with one of her teenage students, she confesses to the narrator of the story, her friend Barbara Covett, what motivated her:

“But the truth is, Barbara, doing that kind of thing is easy. You know how you sometimes have another drink even though you know you’re going to have a hangover tomorrow? Or, or, you take a bite of a doughnut, even though you know it’s going straight to your thighs? Well, it’s like that. You keep saying No, no, no until the moment when you say, Oh bugger it. Yes.”

My experience with “The Believers” sent me on to Heller’s second novel, which proved to be every bit as entertaining. Many may be more familiar with the Oscar-nominated movie starring Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, but no movie could do justice to this book. It’s one of those tightly-written mini-masterpieces that British authors are so annoying at producing like we churn out bad talk shows. When I wasn’t reminded of Ian McEwan by the flawless style, I was reminded of the great Russian authors in the book’s moral vision.

The story is familiar to anyone who reads the news. A good looking, married teacher, a mother to several children, suddenly attaches an unhealthy fascination on a young man in her classroom. Heller adds on a few details unique to the British setting, such as how Sheba’s upbringing and class consciousness might have played a part. But she adds to this tale the figure of Barbara, one of the most unreliable narrators in literary history. It is Sheba’s misfortune to play out her role in the gaze of a lonely, thoroughly obsessed colleague.

Actually, it’s unfair to describe Barbara as unreliable. Indeed, she meticulously records her life as an unmarried woman lurching toward oblivion in harrowing detail. The key, though, is the understated, desperate detachment that resounds as she gives selected peeks into her life, as it exists apart from Sheba. What upsets us beyond the way Barbara veritably stalks Sheba is how desperate she is for someone, anyone, to take an interest in her.

But as her confession above demonstrates, Sheba learns a little bit about the nature of sin in the course of her romance, after it blows up in the tabloid press and threatens to send her to prison. One of the pleasures of this novel is to watch Sheba, through Barbara’s eyes, delude herself as her interest in a young man crosses a series of uncertain lines, until she realizes the distance she has traveled from conscientious teacher to reckless lover. There is a part of us all that doesn’t care when we cross the line, and we are painfully aware of where that line is. The justifications we use last only long enough for the line to be breached. In the end, we are proud of what we do, even when we know it is morally reprehensible.

At first blush, when confronted with this kind of story in the news, we quickly pass judgment and we want swift punishment. But the novel reminds us that within this relationship are thousands of questions - who is in control, the older woman or the young man? At what point does a wife slightly bored with the conventional nature of her marriage suddenly become a vamp preying on the young? "A woman who interferes with a minor is not a symptom of an underlying tendency. She is an aberration. People don't see themselves, or their own furtive desires, in her." At what point, simply, does evil become “evil?”

When Barbara tells the reader, toward the end, that “the time we have spent here has been terribly sad, of course. But terribly intense too and even wonderful in its way,” she might as well be talking about the lives of these characters, and the character of our lives.

Who is Mark Twain?

2009-04-21T08:16:00.004-05:00

Today is the 99th anniversary of Mark Twain's death, and news of the late Mr. Clemens' departure is still being greatly exaggerated, as evidenced by a new collection of unpublished material released today by Harper Studio. Not that he would have cared. As he observes in these very pages, "I have long ago lost my belief in immortality - also my interest in it."

Perhaps no writer, save Ernest Hemingway, left behind the trove of unpublished and unfinished manuscripts that Mark Twain did when he rode out on the tail of Halley's Comet in 1910. Several biographers, including Justin Kaplan, have explained how, in the years after the deaths of his wife and daughters, Twain would turn out veritable bales of manuscript, asking questions on the nature of fate and faith that seemingly had no answers. In these pages, we can see by turns a man who seems bitter, boyish, cynical, hopeful, cantankerous, mysterious, probing, sentimental and funny, forever funny.

The pieces in this new collection span his literary career, and show most of Twain's gifts as both a writer and entertainer. One of the many, many endlessly fascinating aspects of Mark Twain, the literary creation of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is his ability to hold us spellbound with his own character as well as the characters that sprang from his imagination. He was a performer, a highly unlikely profession for a writer, as well as the most introspective of men. He draws both skeptics to his work, because of his knee-slapping rationalism, and believers, because of the moral tone of his work and the rhythms of his language, steeped as they are in 19th century American Protestantism. As the editor Robert Hirst observes, he is "always capable of surprising us into smiling at some shameful trait of the damned human race."

One of these pieces is an unfinished dialogue, "Conversations with Satan," which casts the devil as an aristocrat clothed as an Anglican bishop. The narrator encounters him in Vienna, and identifies Satan as "one of my most ardent and grateful admirers." They then begin a rambling discussion of stoves and tobacco before Twain abandons the idea. In fact, Satan, after appearing, begins to disappear into a monologue of very Twainian character.

Satan is often mentioned in Mark Twain's work, from early in his lecture career to the posthumously published "The Mysterious Stranger" and "Letters From the Earth." One recalls his stage joke, of Satan saying to a newcomer in Hell: "You Chicago people act as though you own the place, whereas you are merely the most numerous." At times, he protrays Satan as deceptive, while at others, he is a wronged, slandered figure forever in the shadow of the Almighty, seemingly over some undisclosed family spat. Like Mikhail Bugakov, Twain's Satan (in this story) is a man of impeccable manners and civilization, courteous and solicitous, eager to please. He comes in the guise of a clergyman, and he is well-travelled. Yet he assures our narrator he hasn't been to America as he is "not needed there."

The dialogue on tobacco seems a ruse, since Twain begins a discussion of how ignorant some smokers are in telling the difference between good and bad cigars. When one travels the earth, one tends to adopt the native cigar as though it were the best in the world, no matter the quality, he says. But it becomes evident after awhile that, in this case at least, sometimes a cigar is more than a cigar:

"I am well satisfied that all notions, of whatever sort, concerning cigars, are superstitions - superstitions and stupidities, and nothing else. It distresses me to hear an otherwise sane man talk of 'good' cigars, and pretend to know what a good cigar is - as if by any chance his standard could be a standard for anybody else."

Is Twain talking about moral judgments, religions, personal tastes, or just tobacco? We might never know, since the few odd pages here represent only a beginning. The title implies a series of conversations, not a monologue. We presume that even Satan would be able to get a word in edgewise when combating with Twain's garrulous frontier voice.

But like Kipling, I stand in awe of the great, godlike Twain, since reading one piece in this book, the notes for an ungiven New York lecture, provided me with one of the hardest laughing fits I've had in years. That a man, almost a century in the grave could provide that, provides us a very vivid answer to the question of who Mark Twain was, and is.

Naming Infinity by Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor

2009-04-20T15:44:00.002-05:00

Kudos to whomever came up with the cover design for this book, which bills itself as "A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity." I might never have come across this had it not been for the subtitle and a gorgeous cover painting. A robed religious figure, holding a cane, walks alongside a scowling, pensive man who looks vaguely academic. They are in a wooded setting. The scene calls to mind perhaps Russia, perhaps some other place, but the picture immediately made me pick it up.

"Naming Infinity" is non-fiction, but it touches briefly on the world of literature, as I'll come to in a moment. The book chronicles the unlikely connections between Russian mathematicians specializing in set theory, and an enigmatic group of Russian mystics called "Name Worshippers." This sounds like the stuff of a Borges' story, with a seemingly unlikely connection between two disciplines that seem miles apart in the modern world.

About the book itself - I am no mathematician, and I have the feeling that a closer investigation of set theory would find me lost and quickly losing patience. It's a testament to both the story and the storyteller that I learned just enough to keep me interested without losing the basic narrative line. The writers wisely began with the religious side of the equation, since it is easily more accessible. (At least to this reader - to some mathematicians, it's possible the practices of the Russian Orthodox Church will seem just as indecipherable as theoretical numbers are to me.)
Name worshipping itself will be familiar to readers of J.D. Salinger's collection "Franny and Zooey," which dealt with "The Jesus Prayer" - "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner." The idea behind the prayer is to repeat the words relentlessly until the one saying the prayer attains a bodily harmony, matching heartbeat and breath with the prayer, and one finds oneself literally "praying without ceasing." There could have been a discussion in the narrative about the similarities between this practice and Eastern mantras, but that might have easily diverted a reader already struggling with two diverging disciplines. This practice was deemed heretical by the Russian Orthodox Church, and the pre-Revolutionary Russian government moved to stamp it out.

The naming concept, the authors tell us, later was taken up by those working in set theory - literally categories, or sets, of theoretical numbers. The idea that by naming something it is given form and substance is as old as recorded history. The Egyptians, for example, felt the dead lived on as long as their names were spoken. Moses famously asked for God's name when they met at the Burning Bush, leading to God's mysterious reply, which seems to indicate that a proper name for God only serves to illustrate the awesome potentials of His existence.

But the concept mathematicians wrestle with between the covers of this book is infinity, into which our numbers as well as our imaginations ultimately stretch out. How to give a name, or a value, to something that may only be a potentiality, not an actuality? The rationalist mathematicians, acting solely within the bounds of their experience, struggled with the concept. It was only in Russia, where the lines between math, science and religion were culturally blurred, that such a concept could be made understandable.

If the book has a limitation, it is that there are the bare bones of a much longer, more engrossing story here that are never fully given form and flesh. We learn the names of the players, are given some anecdotes about their lives, some indication of their faith or their lack of it, but only enough to frustrate our curiosity. And we must take it on faith, frankly, that a connection existed in their lives between the religious and the rational, and that connection led to their breakthroughs. The authors don't do nearly enough to forge that link with supporting evidence - say diary entries, letters, or anecdotes. This may be because they were dealing almost a century later with scrupulous men who held intense, private beliefs, and later were forced by the Tsarist and the Soviet governments to forsake those beliefs, or keep them silent.

Still, a host of interesting personalities take shape between the pages of this short, bewitching book. And a host of interesting ideas. Early in the story, the authors recount the medieval notion, put forward by Gregory of Rimini, that "something that was infinite could be equal to a subpart of the whole infinite." Could such an equation yield forth ...Jesus?

Poe: A Life Cut Short by Peter Ackroyd

2009-04-17T23:00:00.003-05:00

After an unintended sabbatical, I'm coming back with a little non-fiction to get things starting again. The British biographer, essayist and historian Peter Ackroyd is currently turning out a series of quick, 200 page biographies, one of which focuses on every high school kid's favorite dark, spooky poet, Edgar Allan Poe.

I'm a sucker for short bios in this vein. My shelves are lined with the Penguin Lives series, as well as Times Books' American Presidents series, both of which can become quite addictive. While such books don't usually serve as more than an extended meditation on the life of the subject, the format allows the right writer to illuminate the major themes lying within any given biography and provide the right introduction to a reader who wants to dig a little deeper.

With his short, turbulent career and the mysteries surrounding his death, Poe is ideal for this. Ackroyd pays Poe a compliment that few American literary scholars seem capable of - he takes him seriously. Poe is problematic for several reasons - chiefly that while technically brilliant in his verse, his dark subject matter make some ready to dash him off to that same literary ghetto where H.P. Lovecraft dwells and Stephen King seems destined to occupy. That kind of blinkered thinking regarding the literature of the fantastic probably won't be extended to the natural realists.

Ackroyd pays plenty of attention to Poe the critic, the meticulous poet who believed in the musicality of verse, and the dogged craftsman - while giving us the haunted man who is convinced of his literary star. Ackroyd dispenses with a few myths I harbored - for example, that Poe was never adequately appreciated in his lifetime. On the contrary, his reputation was already assured by the time he died, though he never received the money he might have expected for his efforts in another age. But the picture of the desperate, pale, haunted author of "Annabel Lee" is still recognizable. It's interesting to consider in this year, the bicentennial of Poe's birth as well as Lincoln, that if Lincoln had been a short story writer, his subject matter might well have been as dark as Poe's.

Ackroyd also points beyond a particular story to the man it sprang from, such as his musings on "The Imp of the Perverse:"

"It was a narrative of rueful contemplation in which the narrator muses upon the human capacity to act in a contrary manner "for the reason that we should not." To do that which is forbidden - to do that which goes against all our instincts of self-love and self-preservation - therein lies the power of the imp. Never to stay long in any employment; to be drawn towards young women who were dying; to quarrel continually with friends; to drink excessively, even when told that the indulgence would kill him. Therein dwells the imp."

It might be fair to ask why we are drawn to tales of darkness. It's not enough for a literary heroine to fall in love with a dangerous man. Such things happen everyday. But make the dangerous man a vampire, and you have the Twilight series. Poe's life was a life of the mind, and the human mind is a very dark place - where sin and the self-contradictions of our moral awareness lie and cheat and steal against each other with our soul as the prize. If there is a mystery we cannot fathom in our lives, like Poe struggled with in his, it is the riddle of what we are to do with our lives should we rise above the passions that stalk our deepest dreams.

We can find two things in Poe's life as in his fiction - the fascination with a life that seemingly dwells beyond what might normally be anticipated, and the all-too-human outcomes that even the supernatural cannot undo.

The Believers by Zoe Heller

2009-03-29T08:55:00.004-05:00

Late in this very good novel, George W. Bush pops up to give a speech on a television in the background where he gives his often stated belief that terrorists attacked America in 2001 because they hate America’s freedom, particularly its religious freedom. The appearance is problematic - we don’t know whether the author agrees with what is being said or not. That kind of neutrality is what makes “The Believers” a very engrossing and altogether challenging book - challenging not in how it tells the story, but what it asks of the reader.

The novel follows the Litvinoffs, the kind of family that seems to exist solely to provide anger for Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. The head of the family is Joel, a socialist lawyer in his 70s who has made his mark defending society’s “human debris,” as Rush Limbaugh might term it. His wife of 40 years is Audrey, a Brit who has fed his ego, adopted his politics, and raised his three children. The novel’s brief opening chapter shows how they met in the early 60s and the seeds of their relationship. They are, in a political sense, “true believers,” the kind of people who scrawl “There is no God” on Bar Miztvah invitations sent to them before mailing them back.

But fast forward to 2002, to the city still reeling from the previous September. Joel, naturally, is defending a man accused of terrorism when he collapses in court from a stroke. Before long, he is in a coma and beginning an inevitable slide toward death. The novel weaves in and out of the lives of Audrey and her children - Rosa, a former socialist experimenting with Orthodox Judaism, Lenny, a stoner who needs intervention, and Karla, a social worker ashamed of her own body and unable to bear children.

Much has been said about the unpleasantness of these characters. Most of that displeasure centers on Audrey, a woman who wakes up in her husband’s absence to find the intellectual pose of serial displeasure that she chose in her youth has transformed her into a harridan. To hear her unwanted opinions, her unjustified anger, her knee-jerk judgments (there isn’t any other way of putting it) is to be reminded of everything you might ever have said about “limousine liberals.”

But all of these people have a “gift for conviction” - the ability to find a way of understanding the world and remain faithful to that belief system. Nick Carraway, the narrator of “The Great Gatsby,” observes that life is often looked at more successfully from “a single window.” But Joel’s death, the slow reality of it, forces them all to take stock of their lives. Death, the end of life, the certainty of it, reveals many of the truths they have held onto to as being insufficient to sustain them. I don’t mean to say the novel passes judgment on the social justice causes to which they’ve devoted their lives. As I said before, these people’s lives are rendered with an omniscient and benign eye. A reader can reach their own judgments, expecting the author to share them, only to have the tables turned in the next chapter.

Take Rosa, for example. She returns from several years in Cuba disillusioned with socialism and finds a home in a synagogue, to the horror of her parents. But she struggles with its rigor-what she perceives as its “Iron Age” attitudes toward women. It takes her awhile to understand that God deserves the same benefit of the doubt she was willing to give Karl Marx.

A scene involving Rosa’s introduction to purification rites for women introduces her to the idea - almost totally alien to the secular world today - that there is something “different” about God. God is apart from us. He requires holiness to be approached and understood. If this is inconvenient, then He is worthy of worship. If this causes pain, it is because of us, not Him.

Lenny is not really present in the story, though its hard to tell whether this is because he is a ne’er-do-well or because he is not as well rendered as the female characters. Karla, who struggles with self image, embarks on an affair she feels is wrong. But one remembers the impulsiveness of her mother in the opening chapter, and sees her drawn to someone who will tell her she is beautiful.

In fact, all of these people want to believe, in something or someone. They are willing to excuse realities eruptions only so long as they feel some sense of relief. Because the characters are Jewish, I found myself moved by their hitting right up against the idea of Christ but not quite reaching it, or Him. By the idea of Christ, I mean the idea of peace, relief, salvation. They struggle within the idea of belonging to a sacred community - whether it be political or religious - yet they are individuals. They want the ability to say “I’m different” due to the quality of their ideas, but the idea of a personal God is unconsciously longed for and yet somehow unbelievable. When a rabbi later tells Rosa that she must believe before she understands, one senses the gulf that all the world struggles with when the spiritual world beckons, but the offered hand seems stretched over a deep and unbridgeable chasm.

Comic relief, of a sort, is provided by Berenice, an African-American woman who appears from nowhere at Joel’s bedside to reveal her affair with him, and the child she bore him. When Rosa and Karla later meet her, she tells them that Joel wasn’t a bad person:

“He didn’t choose to fall in love with me, any more than I chose to fall in love with him. It was something that happened. The truth is, we all do some hurtful **** in our lives from time to time, but it doesn’t, you know, make us evil. It’s part of what makes us human.”

Rosa walks out on this, offended by the idea of adultery as a humanist gesture. There is no idea of sin here, just the idea of self-gratification that may lead to pain, but that can't be helped. She later walks out on her social work when she finds others ready to give self esteem to children who “haven’t done anything estimable.” When man tries to give God’s love without God‘s presence, she sees it for what it is - something hollow.

Joel’s funeral inevitably takes place in a church, because of the size of the crowd. The mourners sing “The Internationale,” and one is struck by the juxtaposition of ideas, the brotherhood of mankind and how little mankind has actually done to bring itself together for a common good. God’s monumental gesture - the coming of Christ - remains ready to be claimed, as we hold tightly to our lullabies, whispering ourselves to sleep.

The Secret Art of Resurrection

2009-03-26T14:10:00.002-05:00

One of the lessons of our new century is that tragedies of all stripes can pass almost unnoticed in a sea of instant information. It was announced this week that Nicholas Hughes, the 47-year-old son of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, killed himself, apparently by hanging. He worked as a biologist in Alaska, studying aquatic life, and seemed determined to put a world between him and the story of his famous (and infamous) parents. As with everything else in the Plath-Hughes story, even the microscopic details are capable of tearing one's heart out.

Sylvia Plath, best known as the author of "The Bell Jar," married the British poet Ted Hughes and had two children with him, Nicholas being the eldest. She killed herself in 1963, sticking her head in a gas oven as the children slept in the next room. Her poetry, prose, journals, virtually all of her adult life seemed in some ways as aiming toward that moment, as least in the imagination of both her admirers and critics.

The story might have closed here except that six years later, Hughes' second wife Assia Wevill (with whom he had an affair while married to Plath) killed herself in the exact manner as Plath. Only she took their four-year-old daughter with her.

Hughes went on later to become the British poet laureate and was publicly silent about the more tragic circumstances of his life. But in the intervening years, Plath became a feminist icon, the subject of endless speculation and adulation. She easily has outpaced her contemporaries in generating comment, criticism and imitation. Speculation about what drove Plath, in life and to her death, focused attention and vitriol at Hughes. Did he drive her to a decision she had reached long before, or would she have sought out her own destruction no matter whom she might be married to?

I am more familiar with Plath's work than Hughes' and, despite the sometimes crushing morbidity of her words, I think she easily encapsulates the experience of the 20th century woman in her art - dark and dangerous, alluring and condescending, simple in its architecture yet dense in its knowing power. In "Lady Lazarus," Plath appropriates the Biblical resurrection image and turns it inside out. One has to die before one can be reborn, and death is a horrible experience of decay and desolation. She mixes the Christian image with that of the concentration camp, using and reusing German words and Nazi tableaux before burning out with the image of the reborn Phoenix, bent on what sounds like revenge.

Plath reminds us subliminally that the feminine experience is inextricably linked to that of reproduction. Men shed blood in wars, but women bleed in the monthly ritual that is aimed at creation. This draining of life, and emotion, is messy, upsetting, horrifying. Yet it gives the female a power that makes men uncomfortable with their own vain, self-important visions. When we read Plath, both men and women come away with the impression that men may, in fact, be superfluous. But the life and death imagery in "Lady Lazarus" also reminds us that one can plumb these depths for only so long without losing something irrecoverable. Solitude hardly seems like existence at all.

But one is inevitably tempted to ask, what does it all mean? Nicholas Hughes picked not the anniversary of his mother's death but the 40th anniversary of Assia Wevill's. His death seems more the outcome of a life struggling with depression, the same as his mother. Finding a meaning there, one runs into the same difficulties whenever one reads poetry. Suicide, like a hastily scribbled poem, may in fact be an impulsive act, only without the possibility of withdrawal. It is a measure of human existence that our ambition, frustrated, ultimately turns toward self-destruction.

In "Mishima's Sword," Christopher Ross notes that while everyone knows the day they were born, only someone planning their own death knows what God knows, the day it will happen. Apart from the biographer's narrow ambitions, our only hope is to let God provide the meaning and the worth of life. For the clinically depressed or the silent doubter, this takes daily acts of almost punishing faith. The will of God is also unwilling to reveal itself, under even the most careful scrutiny.

In "...Or Not To Be," Marc Entkind collects suicide notes of the famous and obscure, finding anger, resignation and messages that can only be understood by the person no longer there to explain them. Probably with the Plath-Hughes story, there is much we will never know, no matter how many explanations we attempt.

Some people don't need suicide notes. Their lives, discarded like paper, blow about in the years as their absence grows. We snatch them out of the air expecting words, and find nothing.