Alan's latest effort, The Residence of the Soul, is a remarkable novel that represent's Alan's first, and hopefully not last, foray into historical fiction. (I am excluding All of Gaul, the best-selling comedy from his early "New Orleans" period. All of Gaul consists of the dispatches of a Roman general to his compatriots in Rome, intended to burnish the general's reputation but in fact revealing him to be a petulant, self-regarding buffoon. The book makes no pretense to historical accuracy, and should be categorized not as a historical novel but as a farce.)
Residence is a much darker work. At the beginning of the book, the protagonist, Andrei Solovyov, sails to New York seeking work as a war reporter. (Solovyov is not to be confused with Andrey Soloviev, a real-life Russian war photographer.) Solovyov is not so much chasing foreign adventure as fleeing domestic strife: both his mistress and his wife are pregnant, and his creditors are hounding him for his gambling debts. Solovyov may also be envious of the attention paid to his younger brother, Anatoly, who fought in Crimea and who is now a respected opinion columnist with a decidedly nationalist bent.
Solovyov's experience in the United States is first sobering and then shattering. He expects to find an egalitarian utopia, but instead is repelled by the unrefined and avaricious Americans he meets. He is surprised to find himself nurturing a snobbish disdain for the Americans' lack of culture and their barely-disguised social-climbing, and he wonders if this undignified scramble is the price of democracy, and if so, whether it is worth paying. However, in a stab of painful introspection, he admits to himself that his family would be better off if he were imbued with some of the American passion for money.
Solovyov briefly mingles with politicians and diplomats in Washington, and is amazed that an ungainly and unpolished rube like Lincoln has been entrusted with the presidency. But soon Solovyov is on the front lines, filing reports of the major battles in the Western theater and becoming accustomed to a rough and unpredictable way of life. It is here in the heart of the country that Solovyov will lose himself.
Following the surrender of Vicksburg, the last holdout of the Confederacy on the Mississippi River, Solovyov heads north to follow the Union's Army of the Cumberland, which, under the able leadership of General William Rosecrans, is chasing the Confederates out of Tennessee. (Coincidentally, Vicksburg's surrender came on the day after the withering Confederate defeat at Gettysburg. The tide of the war has turned, though much blood remains to be shed before it is through.) Solovyov's abolitionist, pro-Union sentiments have already made it difficult to file objective reports, and at Chickamauga he goes over the edge. Responding to cries for help, he finds a Yankee soldier who has taken a shot to the head and who is missing a large piece of his skull. Union surgeons have made a fateful mark on his coat—according to the cruel dictates of triage, he is to be left for dead, since he is beyond medical help. But the soldier is a mere boy, and Solovyov cannot ignore his need for water and his desperate fear of being abandoned to the advancing Rebels. Solovyov cradles his head in his lap, trying to keep the brains from spilling out, and alternately cries and talks to the boy. Clearly slipping away, the soldier starts slurring his words and becomes incoherent, and finally Solovyov must leave him. As Union soldiers hustle him away in front of Longstreet's charging Confederates, Solovyov casts his mind back to his parting from his tearful son in Russia, now thoroughly ashamed of his own indifference. Solovyov is almost literally beside himself, perceiving with terrible clarity the wretchedness and selfishness of his existence. He finds a kind of purity in his self-abhorrence and in his love for the dying soldier, whose name he never learns. (Rosecrans, too, is unnerved by the slaughter at Chickamauga, and despite Lincoln's reassurances, he effectively resigns his role as leader of the Army of the Cumberland.)
Abandoning his journalistic pretensions, Solovyov joins the Union army as a nurse and follows General Grant from his ingenious reinforcement of Chattanooga (besieged after the Union's retreat at Chickamauga) through his pursuit of General Lee and the remnants of the Confederate army two years later. President Lincoln joins Grant in Virginia, where he is thronged by ecstatic freed slaves (freed not just by the Emancipation Proclamation but by the Thirteenth Amendment, recently passed by the House of Representatives and awaiting its inevitable ratification by the states). Solovyov is ashamed by the shallowness of his original assessment of Lincoln, who is now his idol. When Lincoln is shot, Solovyov, beset by grief, decides that his time in the United States has come to a close. It is time to return to Russia to face the music.
Now begin Solovyov's trials. His family is shocked by his self-proclaimed pacifism, and his brother goads their father into disinheriting him. (Characteristically, Solovyov refuses to accept the label "pacifist," insisting that his standards for just war are simply too high for any actual war, short of the Civil War, to satisfy them. His father declines to honor this distinction.) His wife, fearing for the welfare of her children, leaves Andrei for his younger brother. Andrei tells Anatoly not to get too big a head: "she comes with the house."
This is unfair. His wife is actually impressed by his new depth, and where before he was sleek and rakish, he is now lean and hardened. She has never been so attracted to him. But she is frightened by his political extremism and strange philosophical meditations, and his spiritual awakening strikes her as a convenient way to deflect her anger over his mistress. Solovyov sails back to the United States alone, this time for good.
Alan now draws a curtain over Solovyov's life, hereafter revealing only the general shape of things. The Russian expatriate, head in the clouds, moves to Philadelphia and experiments with Quakerism; after several theological quarrels, he renounces the faith and moves to New York City. Revealing unexpected talent as a bookseller, he nevertheless lives in borderline poverty because of his tendency to use his money to support any oppressed minority that comes to his attention. He is particularly concerned with the welfare of freed slaves, and as a result he becomes involved in Republican politics. Predictably, though, he has a falling-out with his fellow Republicans over an arcane point of political philosophy, and he founds his own political party, which attracts a few dozen members at its peak.
All of this is presented in detached, sketchy prose. But Alan pulls back the curtain when Solovyov's daughter, now a young woman, arrives to tell him that his wife has left Anatoly and wishes to reconcile. Solovyov is in turmoil. He has embraced celibacy and fears the temptations that his wife will bring him. Mixed with this fear is his shame about his financial condition—he is little better off than he was when he left Russia, and without his estate, he has no way to provide for his family. Unable to corral his unruly thoughts, he takes his daughter on a trip to visit the battle site of Chickamauga. There for the first time he tells the story of his life-changing encounter with the injured soldier, and he breaks down.
I'll leave the story there (in fact, Alan doesn't take it much further), and part with a few thoughts. I'm gratified to find that Alan's immersion in Civil War history has yielded big dividends in the form of immediacy and verisimilitude. The war is not just a backdrop to the story, it provides the impetus for the big philosophical and spiritual ideas that animate the novel. I wish more authors would bring this kind of unifying conceptual coherence to their work.
This coherence can also be found in my favorite scene of the book. Solovyov, seeking refuge from family drama, goes for a ride through the Russian countryside. Here, he encounters a former serf who begs him to describe his encounters with Lincoln. (By itself, this is a fascinating set-piece, a serf freed by imperial proclamation, mostly ignorant of the world beyond his village and yet hungry for information about the great American emancipator.) Solovyov's conversation with the peasant lasts only a few pages, but in capsule form it captures Solovyov's volatile feelings, his grandiosity (almost justified by the subject matter) and his depression (almost appropriate given his idol's tragic end). We see a man gripped by powerful feelings but unable to navigate them or channel his frantic but sporadic energy, a man with rare moral vision but no means to turn it into anything meaningful. A waste of human potential, maybe, who recognizes himself in the vast waste that was the Civil War.
Monday, December 28, 2015
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Calista's Into the World
Calista's latest effort, Into the World, a novel of manners set at a prestigious American university, seems almost quaint in light of recent campus tensions, but it provides a welcome respite from weightier matters. Calista owes a clear debt to novels like Lucky Jim, but she updates its madcap aesthetic to take full advantage of the absurdities that abound in modern academia. I confess I can't get enough of this kind of send-up of the modern university—you might even call me an academia nut!
As the book opens, Peter Goldthwaite, a professor of philosophy, has been accused of selling drugs to undergraduates. The accusations are not quite true, but the disciplinary committee is unmoved by Goldthwaite's insistence that he never accepted money from the students. However, Goldthwaite's friend and lawyer, the irrepressible Alain de la Droite, manages to shift the venue to the School of Humanities, which provides more fertile soil for his theory of the case. There, de la Droite argues that it is spurious to identify present-day Goldthwaite with the individual who distributed the drugs more than a year ago. Present-Goldthwaite bears no more resemblance to past-Goldthwaite than present-Goldthwaite does to any other professor, de la Droite claims. But it would be wrong to punish one professor for another professor's actions. Present-Goldthwaite is an innocent man! By a narrow margin, Goldthwaite prevails, and the charges are dropped.
But Goldthwaite's nemesis, the sinister Dean Villiers, hatches a plan to take revenge on the arrogant philosopher. A nontenured philosophy professor, Diane Rothblatt, acting as Villiers's cat's-paw, befriends Goldthwaite and encourages him to delve back into his work. Eager to forget his trials and reinvigorated by the admiration of the young, attractive Rothblatt, Goldthwaite dusts off some of his old drafts and gets them into shape for publication. After sending off his final revisions to the galleys, Goldthwaite invites de la Droite and Rothblatt to his house for celebratory champagne, and that night Goldthwaite and Rothblatt consummate their budding love affair.
But Rothblatt is riven by self-loathing, for Goldthwaite's moment of triumph also sets the stage for his destruction. Later, at the launch party, just as Goldthwaite is preparing to give a few remarks, Villiers storms in with the campus police and escorts Goldthwaite off campus. The professor stands accused of plagiarizing large passages of his new book from the work of past-Goldthwaite, who has been adjudicated to be a separate legal person. It's an open-and-shut case: side-by-side comparisons of the just-published book next to Goldthwaite's prior drafts reveal that entire passages have been copied verbatim. Rothblatt confesses her duplicity to de la Droite and flees, afraid to face Goldthwaite's disappointment.
De la Droite, calling Goldthwaite's destruction on the rocks of his (de la Droite's) legal strategy "the story of my life," becomes despondent and gives up hope for his good friend. But Rothblatt returns and startles him from his brandy-soaked self-pity with an audacious suggestion: Goldthwaite's book is plagiarism only if it fails to credit past-Goldthwaite for his intellectual labor. But the book simply names "Peter Goldthwaite" as the author. All they have to do to prevail is to convince the disciplinary committee that the reference of "Peter Goldthwaite" is fixed on past-Goldthwaite, not present-Goldthwaite. If Villiers had waited a few more minutes before raiding the launch party, present-Goldthwaite would undoubtedly have taken credit for the book, sealing his fate. But Villiers's impatience has left a small door open, though which de la Droite must steer Rothblatt's intricate argument.
Rothblatt throws herself into the defense. It is hard going—this is not her area of expertise, and she has never had much patience with arguments about reference. But the bigger problem is that Goldthwaite's brilliant early work, the work that earned him tenure, involved "problematizing" the theory of reference. Rothblatt and de la Droite must overcome not only Villiers's ingenious arguments (he has recruited Goldthwaite's many rivals from the philosophy department to develop the prosecution's case) but also Goldthwaite's own philosophical positions.
And so the novel skips cheerfully into 50 pages of dense philosophical argument, leavened by Calista's sharp irony and almost slapstick sensibility. (You can get a sense of the issues at stake here.) Calista gets a lot of mileage out of the mismatch between the sophistication of the arguments trotted out by de la Droite and Villiers, on the one hand, and the disciplinary committee's befuddled attempts to follow them, on the other. I won't reveal Goldthwaite's fate, noting only that Calista has a few philosophical tricks up her sleeve to keep the plot aloft until she sticks the landing.
I hesitate to compare the book to other philosophical works of fiction. Dave's famous "philosophical mystery novel" Will We Ever Arrive? (inspired by a webcomic of the same name) is simply a reprint of his magisterial tome on artificial intelligence, with a new opening chapter in which Detective Montrose discovers that the murder weapon is a magisterial tome on artificial intelligence, which is then replicated for the reader's edification. No conclusion to the mystery is provided, a move that Dave justifies on the grounds of "exercising the atrophied American imagination." Into the World is every bit as erudite as Will We Ever Arrive?, but its ratio of fiction to philosophy is far more satisfying.
But however you categorize Into the World, it provides a welcome escape into the world of ideas and the lighter side of the modern university. When I finished the book and put it down, I found myself wanting to stay a little while longer in its unpredictable but oddly comforting universe.
As the book opens, Peter Goldthwaite, a professor of philosophy, has been accused of selling drugs to undergraduates. The accusations are not quite true, but the disciplinary committee is unmoved by Goldthwaite's insistence that he never accepted money from the students. However, Goldthwaite's friend and lawyer, the irrepressible Alain de la Droite, manages to shift the venue to the School of Humanities, which provides more fertile soil for his theory of the case. There, de la Droite argues that it is spurious to identify present-day Goldthwaite with the individual who distributed the drugs more than a year ago. Present-Goldthwaite bears no more resemblance to past-Goldthwaite than present-Goldthwaite does to any other professor, de la Droite claims. But it would be wrong to punish one professor for another professor's actions. Present-Goldthwaite is an innocent man! By a narrow margin, Goldthwaite prevails, and the charges are dropped.
But Goldthwaite's nemesis, the sinister Dean Villiers, hatches a plan to take revenge on the arrogant philosopher. A nontenured philosophy professor, Diane Rothblatt, acting as Villiers's cat's-paw, befriends Goldthwaite and encourages him to delve back into his work. Eager to forget his trials and reinvigorated by the admiration of the young, attractive Rothblatt, Goldthwaite dusts off some of his old drafts and gets them into shape for publication. After sending off his final revisions to the galleys, Goldthwaite invites de la Droite and Rothblatt to his house for celebratory champagne, and that night Goldthwaite and Rothblatt consummate their budding love affair.
But Rothblatt is riven by self-loathing, for Goldthwaite's moment of triumph also sets the stage for his destruction. Later, at the launch party, just as Goldthwaite is preparing to give a few remarks, Villiers storms in with the campus police and escorts Goldthwaite off campus. The professor stands accused of plagiarizing large passages of his new book from the work of past-Goldthwaite, who has been adjudicated to be a separate legal person. It's an open-and-shut case: side-by-side comparisons of the just-published book next to Goldthwaite's prior drafts reveal that entire passages have been copied verbatim. Rothblatt confesses her duplicity to de la Droite and flees, afraid to face Goldthwaite's disappointment.
De la Droite, calling Goldthwaite's destruction on the rocks of his (de la Droite's) legal strategy "the story of my life," becomes despondent and gives up hope for his good friend. But Rothblatt returns and startles him from his brandy-soaked self-pity with an audacious suggestion: Goldthwaite's book is plagiarism only if it fails to credit past-Goldthwaite for his intellectual labor. But the book simply names "Peter Goldthwaite" as the author. All they have to do to prevail is to convince the disciplinary committee that the reference of "Peter Goldthwaite" is fixed on past-Goldthwaite, not present-Goldthwaite. If Villiers had waited a few more minutes before raiding the launch party, present-Goldthwaite would undoubtedly have taken credit for the book, sealing his fate. But Villiers's impatience has left a small door open, though which de la Droite must steer Rothblatt's intricate argument.
Rothblatt throws herself into the defense. It is hard going—this is not her area of expertise, and she has never had much patience with arguments about reference. But the bigger problem is that Goldthwaite's brilliant early work, the work that earned him tenure, involved "problematizing" the theory of reference. Rothblatt and de la Droite must overcome not only Villiers's ingenious arguments (he has recruited Goldthwaite's many rivals from the philosophy department to develop the prosecution's case) but also Goldthwaite's own philosophical positions.
And so the novel skips cheerfully into 50 pages of dense philosophical argument, leavened by Calista's sharp irony and almost slapstick sensibility. (You can get a sense of the issues at stake here.) Calista gets a lot of mileage out of the mismatch between the sophistication of the arguments trotted out by de la Droite and Villiers, on the one hand, and the disciplinary committee's befuddled attempts to follow them, on the other. I won't reveal Goldthwaite's fate, noting only that Calista has a few philosophical tricks up her sleeve to keep the plot aloft until she sticks the landing.
I hesitate to compare the book to other philosophical works of fiction. Dave's famous "philosophical mystery novel" Will We Ever Arrive? (inspired by a webcomic of the same name) is simply a reprint of his magisterial tome on artificial intelligence, with a new opening chapter in which Detective Montrose discovers that the murder weapon is a magisterial tome on artificial intelligence, which is then replicated for the reader's edification. No conclusion to the mystery is provided, a move that Dave justifies on the grounds of "exercising the atrophied American imagination." Into the World is every bit as erudite as Will We Ever Arrive?, but its ratio of fiction to philosophy is far more satisfying.
But however you categorize Into the World, it provides a welcome escape into the world of ideas and the lighter side of the modern university. When I finished the book and put it down, I found myself wanting to stay a little while longer in its unpredictable but oddly comforting universe.
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Sarang's The Fedwire: How It Works and Why It Matters
Sarang's latest effort, The Fedwire: How It Works and Why It Matters, is a probing and detailed exploration of the Federal Reserve's funds transfer system. The book is part of Sarang's "the infrastructure of our society" series, which seeks to educate the public about the legal, technological, and institutional structures that underpin our system of democratic government and free enterprise. Fedwire traces the history of the Fedwire and explains how it works today. He also includes a chapter of interviews with political leaders, heads of labor unions, and captains of industry—men and women of real substance who describe the importance of the Fedwire in carrying out their services. When I put the book down, I had a new appreciation for the role that the Fedwire plays in American capitalism.
But did I also detect a certain elegiac tone to the book? For there is an elephant in the room: Sarang's otherwise exhaustive account makes no mention of Bitcoin, the disruptive cryptographic currency that is rapidly displacing obsolete technologies like the Fedwire. It is as though Sarang has crafted a loving homage to the horse-and-buggy just at the dawn of the automobile era. The Fedwire currently moves several trillions dollars a day, but that daily volume will surely plummet as the Bitcoin system, which is fully digital and (as a result of its encryption technology) far more secure than the Fedwire, supplants it. Right now a bitcoin trades for around $320, a sign that not just the Fedwire but the dollar itself may be on the way out.
And so Fedwire decisively proves Sarang's consummate skill: even in a technical and somewhat dry work of nonfiction, he manages to "bring/The eternal note of sadness in."
But did I also detect a certain elegiac tone to the book? For there is an elephant in the room: Sarang's otherwise exhaustive account makes no mention of Bitcoin, the disruptive cryptographic currency that is rapidly displacing obsolete technologies like the Fedwire. It is as though Sarang has crafted a loving homage to the horse-and-buggy just at the dawn of the automobile era. The Fedwire currently moves several trillions dollars a day, but that daily volume will surely plummet as the Bitcoin system, which is fully digital and (as a result of its encryption technology) far more secure than the Fedwire, supplants it. Right now a bitcoin trades for around $320, a sign that not just the Fedwire but the dollar itself may be on the way out.
And so Fedwire decisively proves Sarang's consummate skill: even in a technical and somewhat dry work of nonfiction, he manages to "bring/The eternal note of sadness in."
Dave's The Party of Lincoln
When Dave shared a stage with Aaron Sorkin at the Conference on American Television in the 21st Century (CAT21C) this summer, the tension was palpable. Sorkin had previously called Dave "a purveyor of cynicism and doubt," while Dave had started an Indiegogo campaign to buy Sorkin a writing class. But against all odds, the men quickly found common ground, and co-sponsored what turned out to be the only manifesto to emerge from CAT21C. (The CAT21C attendees were near-unanimous in their condemnation of the second season of True Detective, which Sarang called "Truly Defective," but his motion to repudiate the show bogged down when Dave inserted a poison-pill amendment endorsing the use of a chain-type price index for calculating cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients.)
The Dave/Sorkin manifesto, entitled "What Kind of Day Has It Been?", bemoans the polarization that has gripped American politics and the partisanship that has frozen our institutions of governance. While both men largely blame the rise of an ignorant and aggressive right-wing movement mobilized by resentment and hate, the manifesto argues that "sometimes to build a bridge, you have to reach out from your side of the chasm and trust, no, hope that someone is reaching out from the other side, bolting steel on steel in the mists." In that spirit, the manifesto calls on American liberals to "find what is good in the Republican Party and celebrate it not just in our work but in our hearts." (Dave has issued an addendum reaffirming the manifesto but disclaiming any responsibility for its prose.)
One can fairly ask whether Sorkin has upheld the spirit of the manifesto. By and large, in the months since the manifesto he has praised Republicans who are pro-choice, Republicans who believe in global climate change, Republicans who favor gun control... in other words, he finds Republicans praiseworthy mostly when they aren't being Republicans. This is not perhaps the best way to build a bridge.
Dave's latest effort, The Party of Lincoln, takes a very different approach. Despite the name of the book, Dave focuses on the personal, not the political, and portrays conservatives in moments of personal integrity or sacrifice. He opens with a domestic story about a conservative politician in rural Indiana. The man's politics are decidedly conservative, with a strong undercurrent of spite against homosexuals and single mothers. But when his teenaged daughter begins acting out in high school, often disrupting class or skipping school altogether, he defends her and manages to avoid her expulsion in exchange for a promise to get counseling. His wife wants to send her to their minister, who is also a good friend and political supporter. The politician insists on hiring a licensed psychologist from a big town, someone with no personal or political entanglements with the family.
Dave never explains what motivates the politician's stubbornness in the face of intense pressure from his wife and his fellow parishioners. Does he sense something in his daughter that might make his minister an unsuitable source of counseling? Does he harbor doubts about his minister? Or does he simply believe that his daughter deserves to be helped by a professional psychologist? Whatever the reason, he risks paying a high personal and political price to get his daughter the counseling she needs.
My favorite story revolves around a gun store owner in Florida in the Vietnam era. His son is seeking conscientious objector status, and he asks his father to sign an affidavit attesting that he (the son) is a member of the Communist Party. The story shifts back and forth between present-day (late 1960s) and 1950, when the father's unit withstood a savage attack by the Communists at the Pusan Perimeter, a battle that cost him his left arm. It's clear that the father has never been able to acknowledge his son's politics, but over the course of the story he engages in the painful process of disentangling his son's values from his love for his son. It's a beautiful and touching story that remains psychologically true-to-life even though it could stand as an allegory for the entire Dave/Sorkin project.
Unfortunately, it seems probable that Dave's efforts will be unavailing, at least in the short term. Already conservative reviewers are calling the gun store owner a "pussy" and attacking Dave's protagonists as RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). But in a way it doesn't matter: the book is more than justified by its artistic merits, and it will have served its purpose even if for now it only expands liberal minds and hearts.
The Dave/Sorkin manifesto, entitled "What Kind of Day Has It Been?", bemoans the polarization that has gripped American politics and the partisanship that has frozen our institutions of governance. While both men largely blame the rise of an ignorant and aggressive right-wing movement mobilized by resentment and hate, the manifesto argues that "sometimes to build a bridge, you have to reach out from your side of the chasm and trust, no, hope that someone is reaching out from the other side, bolting steel on steel in the mists." In that spirit, the manifesto calls on American liberals to "find what is good in the Republican Party and celebrate it not just in our work but in our hearts." (Dave has issued an addendum reaffirming the manifesto but disclaiming any responsibility for its prose.)
One can fairly ask whether Sorkin has upheld the spirit of the manifesto. By and large, in the months since the manifesto he has praised Republicans who are pro-choice, Republicans who believe in global climate change, Republicans who favor gun control... in other words, he finds Republicans praiseworthy mostly when they aren't being Republicans. This is not perhaps the best way to build a bridge.
Dave's latest effort, The Party of Lincoln, takes a very different approach. Despite the name of the book, Dave focuses on the personal, not the political, and portrays conservatives in moments of personal integrity or sacrifice. He opens with a domestic story about a conservative politician in rural Indiana. The man's politics are decidedly conservative, with a strong undercurrent of spite against homosexuals and single mothers. But when his teenaged daughter begins acting out in high school, often disrupting class or skipping school altogether, he defends her and manages to avoid her expulsion in exchange for a promise to get counseling. His wife wants to send her to their minister, who is also a good friend and political supporter. The politician insists on hiring a licensed psychologist from a big town, someone with no personal or political entanglements with the family.
Dave never explains what motivates the politician's stubbornness in the face of intense pressure from his wife and his fellow parishioners. Does he sense something in his daughter that might make his minister an unsuitable source of counseling? Does he harbor doubts about his minister? Or does he simply believe that his daughter deserves to be helped by a professional psychologist? Whatever the reason, he risks paying a high personal and political price to get his daughter the counseling she needs.
My favorite story revolves around a gun store owner in Florida in the Vietnam era. His son is seeking conscientious objector status, and he asks his father to sign an affidavit attesting that he (the son) is a member of the Communist Party. The story shifts back and forth between present-day (late 1960s) and 1950, when the father's unit withstood a savage attack by the Communists at the Pusan Perimeter, a battle that cost him his left arm. It's clear that the father has never been able to acknowledge his son's politics, but over the course of the story he engages in the painful process of disentangling his son's values from his love for his son. It's a beautiful and touching story that remains psychologically true-to-life even though it could stand as an allegory for the entire Dave/Sorkin project.
Unfortunately, it seems probable that Dave's efforts will be unavailing, at least in the short term. Already conservative reviewers are calling the gun store owner a "pussy" and attacking Dave's protagonists as RINOs (Republicans In Name Only). But in a way it doesn't matter: the book is more than justified by its artistic merits, and it will have served its purpose even if for now it only expands liberal minds and hearts.
Monday, October 19, 2015
Sarang's Don't Look Down
Sarang's latest effort, Don't Look Down, is one of his saddest and best movies to date. (The movie should not be confused with Eliseo Subiela's No mires para abajo, which is called Don't Look Down in its English translation.)
The movie centers on the relationship between Jason O'Neil, a law firm librarian, and his wife Margaret. At work, Jason is stressed out, barely able to keep up with his tedious work. At home, he is disrespected when he isn't ignored. In a revealing scene, Margaret tells him that her friends are coming over for drinks. There is an awkward back-and-forth until Jason realizes that Margaret is asking him to leave the house until her friends have come and gone. Margaret can be cruel, but she can't bring herself to acknowledge her own cruelty.
It's no wonder, then, that Jason finds refuge from both spheres of his life by taking long, unnecessarily meandering walks to and from work. Here, striding along the sidewalk, admiring his surroundings, Jason seems happy and in his element. He can name the types of the trees and the architectural styles of the houses. His sense of the city, its contours and rhythms, its impulses and pent-up energy, is encyclopedic.
When we meet the couple, Margaret is barely bothering to conceal her affair with Jin-woo, a real estate speculator. But things are more complex: through Margaret, Jin-woo has met Jason, who turns out to be hugely useful in Jin-woo's work. Jason can tell him, almost as an afterthought, whether a particular house is undervalued or overvalued. He has an instinctive sense for which neighborhoods are about to pop, and Jin-woo easily translates these insights into huge profits.
But it is more than that, and here Sarang draws down some of the audience's sympathy for Jason. When Jin-woo is selling a house, he arranges for the real estate agent to "bump into" Jason while showing prospective buyers around the neighborhood. Jason then poses as a neighbor and gushes about how much he loves the neighborhood. Jason has a gentle, avuncular appearance—a running joke throughout the movie is that people keep mistaking him for Cass Sunstein, even though Jason is in his early 40s. While Jason doesn't look like Margaret's idea of a good husband, he looks like almost everyone's idea of a good neighbor: earnest, enthusiastic, and ever-so-slightly disheveled.
But of course it's a ruse—Jason doesn't actually live in whatever neighborhood the sale is in—and it's a little hard to see what Jason gets out of it. Jin-woo doesn't give Jason a cut of his enviable profits, though Jason could certainly use the money. Perhaps Jason just wants to feel useful, even in such a tawdry and compromising way. But whatever the explanation, Jason's behavior raises interesting questions about Jin-woo's relationship with Margaret. Jin-woo appears to be losing patience with her. Maybe he is sticking around not because he wants Margaret but because he needs Jason. The three are locked in a triangle that is more transactional than any of them can admit, balanced at the edge of the precipice. And none of them dares to pull any of the loose threads because of what might be revealed, and what might be lost.
The only discordant note came not when I saw the movie, but afterward, when I sent a congratulatory note to Sarang about it. He must have thought I was being sarcastic, because he responded with a quick apology, urging me not to "take it personally." I have no idea what he thinks he's apologizing for. It is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. I wonder if our correspondence is another one of Sarang's performance art pieces, like the time he published a Chrome extension designed to "improve the accuracy of the internet" by deleting the string "syncra" from all descriptions of me. I still haven't figured out what that was about, either.
The movie centers on the relationship between Jason O'Neil, a law firm librarian, and his wife Margaret. At work, Jason is stressed out, barely able to keep up with his tedious work. At home, he is disrespected when he isn't ignored. In a revealing scene, Margaret tells him that her friends are coming over for drinks. There is an awkward back-and-forth until Jason realizes that Margaret is asking him to leave the house until her friends have come and gone. Margaret can be cruel, but she can't bring herself to acknowledge her own cruelty.
It's no wonder, then, that Jason finds refuge from both spheres of his life by taking long, unnecessarily meandering walks to and from work. Here, striding along the sidewalk, admiring his surroundings, Jason seems happy and in his element. He can name the types of the trees and the architectural styles of the houses. His sense of the city, its contours and rhythms, its impulses and pent-up energy, is encyclopedic.
When we meet the couple, Margaret is barely bothering to conceal her affair with Jin-woo, a real estate speculator. But things are more complex: through Margaret, Jin-woo has met Jason, who turns out to be hugely useful in Jin-woo's work. Jason can tell him, almost as an afterthought, whether a particular house is undervalued or overvalued. He has an instinctive sense for which neighborhoods are about to pop, and Jin-woo easily translates these insights into huge profits.
But it is more than that, and here Sarang draws down some of the audience's sympathy for Jason. When Jin-woo is selling a house, he arranges for the real estate agent to "bump into" Jason while showing prospective buyers around the neighborhood. Jason then poses as a neighbor and gushes about how much he loves the neighborhood. Jason has a gentle, avuncular appearance—a running joke throughout the movie is that people keep mistaking him for Cass Sunstein, even though Jason is in his early 40s. While Jason doesn't look like Margaret's idea of a good husband, he looks like almost everyone's idea of a good neighbor: earnest, enthusiastic, and ever-so-slightly disheveled.
But of course it's a ruse—Jason doesn't actually live in whatever neighborhood the sale is in—and it's a little hard to see what Jason gets out of it. Jin-woo doesn't give Jason a cut of his enviable profits, though Jason could certainly use the money. Perhaps Jason just wants to feel useful, even in such a tawdry and compromising way. But whatever the explanation, Jason's behavior raises interesting questions about Jin-woo's relationship with Margaret. Jin-woo appears to be losing patience with her. Maybe he is sticking around not because he wants Margaret but because he needs Jason. The three are locked in a triangle that is more transactional than any of them can admit, balanced at the edge of the precipice. And none of them dares to pull any of the loose threads because of what might be revealed, and what might be lost.
The only discordant note came not when I saw the movie, but afterward, when I sent a congratulatory note to Sarang about it. He must have thought I was being sarcastic, because he responded with a quick apology, urging me not to "take it personally." I have no idea what he thinks he's apologizing for. It is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. I wonder if our correspondence is another one of Sarang's performance art pieces, like the time he published a Chrome extension designed to "improve the accuracy of the internet" by deleting the string "syncra" from all descriptions of me. I still haven't figured out what that was about, either.
Saturday, October 10, 2015
Dave's Tabula Rasa
Dave's latest effort, Tabula Rasa, marks a return to the intellectual but action-packed science fiction that launched him to fame in the first place. Charles Tully, an insurance company executive who has been convicted of embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars (leaving the company bankrupt), is given the option of an experimental new form of punishment: instead of serving the rest of his life in prison, he will undergo a procedure that will destroy most of his memories. On some level this is like the death penalty—little of his identity will remain when his memories are gone. On the other hand, the procedure will have no noticeable effect on Tully's body or his intelligence. He will be allowed to build a new life, in freedom and with no liability for the crimes of his "past self." He won't even be told that he committed a crime—the "new Tully" will be told that he suffered a trauma that robbed him of his memories.
Once the procedure is done, Tully is held for a few weeks. The procedure sometimes overshoots a little, and so Tully is monitored while the technicians make sure that he can still function in society. But Tully's "wipe" was clean, and soon he is freed. Legally, Tully is a new person, but before the procedure Tully chose to remain married to his wife, Susan, and so she picks him up from the prison. Tully doesn't recognize her, of course, but his reconditioning has prepared him, to some degree, to return home.
Here is where the story takes its first bizarre turn. A few weeks after returning home, Charles realizes that Susan is lying about something that happened in their previous life. The lie itself is not consequential, but Tully is shocked. He shouldn't have been able to recognize it at all. It appears that some of his memories are intact, though they are not accessible until something brings them out of the recesses of his mind.
Charles begins to find clues about his previous life, and they spark more memories. Susan tries to shield him from the facts about his previous life, but to the reader, some of her lies are inexplicable. Susan is hiding something. She packs Charles off to spend time with his sister, a federal judge, and we feel that we are on the cusp of discovering what her motives are. But then there is a knock at the door, and the stranger on the doorsteps announces that he is Charles Tully, returning home from an extended hospitalization. He tries to kiss her and is upset when she pushes him away.
"Real Charles," meanwhile, confronts his sister and demands an explanation for his patchwork of memories. She tries to evade his questions, but he has pieced together quite a lot, and finally she tells him about the embezzlement, the conviction, and the punishment. She also tells him about his previous life—his alcoholism, his depression, his gambling, his adultery. We realize that his marriage was essentially over when the FBI arrested him. And we learn that when he was arrested, the FBI found only a tiny fraction of the money that he had stolen. Susan's behavior begins to make sense.
Meanwhile Susan has managed, with considerable awkwardness, to convince the stranger who thinks he is Charles Tully to rent a hotel room, and the two order delivery food and eat it there. Unlike the "real" Charles Tully, this man has easily accessible memories of the time period that was wiped from her husband's memory. But the memories are patchy and mostly incoherent, and from time to time he pauses and loses his composure as inconsistencies crop up. He is clearly on edge, barely hanging on to the thread, and in his confusion he has become childlike and easily manipulated. Susan plies him with beer and coaxes his story from him.
Of course, what has happened is that the team responsible for wiping Tully's memory has intentionally done an incomplete job, in an attempt to track down the hundreds of millions that they assume Tully has hidden away. A smaller group of conspirators has tried to implant Tully's memories into another prisoner undergoing the procedure. The memories proved to be too fragmented to track down the money, and the team had no choice but to release the man on schedule.
That's about as much of the plot as I should divulge—I've probably gone too far already—but there's one interesting technique that Dave uses that, unfortunately, probably means that the book can never be made into a movie. In the last third of the book, Dave starts referring to each of the men simply as "Tully," introducing intentional ambiguity about which man Susan ultimately chooses. Of course this ambiguity is untranslatable to film, which is too bad in a sense. Dave has recaptured the vivid, cinematic feel of his early science fiction, and Tabula Rasa would make a stunning movie and a welcome break from the stream of comic book blockbusters and superficial fantasy movies that have proliferated in recent years. This was not to be—but the book is still a sheer joy to read.
Once the procedure is done, Tully is held for a few weeks. The procedure sometimes overshoots a little, and so Tully is monitored while the technicians make sure that he can still function in society. But Tully's "wipe" was clean, and soon he is freed. Legally, Tully is a new person, but before the procedure Tully chose to remain married to his wife, Susan, and so she picks him up from the prison. Tully doesn't recognize her, of course, but his reconditioning has prepared him, to some degree, to return home.
Here is where the story takes its first bizarre turn. A few weeks after returning home, Charles realizes that Susan is lying about something that happened in their previous life. The lie itself is not consequential, but Tully is shocked. He shouldn't have been able to recognize it at all. It appears that some of his memories are intact, though they are not accessible until something brings them out of the recesses of his mind.
Charles begins to find clues about his previous life, and they spark more memories. Susan tries to shield him from the facts about his previous life, but to the reader, some of her lies are inexplicable. Susan is hiding something. She packs Charles off to spend time with his sister, a federal judge, and we feel that we are on the cusp of discovering what her motives are. But then there is a knock at the door, and the stranger on the doorsteps announces that he is Charles Tully, returning home from an extended hospitalization. He tries to kiss her and is upset when she pushes him away.
"Real Charles," meanwhile, confronts his sister and demands an explanation for his patchwork of memories. She tries to evade his questions, but he has pieced together quite a lot, and finally she tells him about the embezzlement, the conviction, and the punishment. She also tells him about his previous life—his alcoholism, his depression, his gambling, his adultery. We realize that his marriage was essentially over when the FBI arrested him. And we learn that when he was arrested, the FBI found only a tiny fraction of the money that he had stolen. Susan's behavior begins to make sense.
Meanwhile Susan has managed, with considerable awkwardness, to convince the stranger who thinks he is Charles Tully to rent a hotel room, and the two order delivery food and eat it there. Unlike the "real" Charles Tully, this man has easily accessible memories of the time period that was wiped from her husband's memory. But the memories are patchy and mostly incoherent, and from time to time he pauses and loses his composure as inconsistencies crop up. He is clearly on edge, barely hanging on to the thread, and in his confusion he has become childlike and easily manipulated. Susan plies him with beer and coaxes his story from him.
Of course, what has happened is that the team responsible for wiping Tully's memory has intentionally done an incomplete job, in an attempt to track down the hundreds of millions that they assume Tully has hidden away. A smaller group of conspirators has tried to implant Tully's memories into another prisoner undergoing the procedure. The memories proved to be too fragmented to track down the money, and the team had no choice but to release the man on schedule.
That's about as much of the plot as I should divulge—I've probably gone too far already—but there's one interesting technique that Dave uses that, unfortunately, probably means that the book can never be made into a movie. In the last third of the book, Dave starts referring to each of the men simply as "Tully," introducing intentional ambiguity about which man Susan ultimately chooses. Of course this ambiguity is untranslatable to film, which is too bad in a sense. Dave has recaptured the vivid, cinematic feel of his early science fiction, and Tabula Rasa would make a stunning movie and a welcome break from the stream of comic book blockbusters and superficial fantasy movies that have proliferated in recent years. This was not to be—but the book is still a sheer joy to read.
Saturday, September 26, 2015
Alan's The Weight of the World
It is always a pleasure to watch a new literary light appear on the horizon, although in Alan's case, some critics maintain that a more appropriate term would be "literary lite." Alan's first effort, The Weight of the World, is an experimental science fiction novel that takes its inspiration from President Reagan's famous statement that humans of all nationalities and ideologies would unite in the face of an alien invasion.
The Weight of the World envisions a strangely familiar near-future in which Russia, teetering between democracy and authoritarianism, capitalism and gangsterism, elects as president a young technocrat named Alexei Gorbachev, who ran on an anti-corruption platform. His project is derailed when a group of Russian petroleum engineers is captured by an extremist Muslim group operating in Libya, forcing him to focus all of his attention on the crisis as it develops.
In the midst of this disruption, a far bigger threat appears: a fleet of alien spaceships approaches Earth and threatens to invade. Now President Reagan's hypothesis is put to the test, as a common threat looms over all of humanity and our common fate is readily apparent.
I won't reveal what happens, but I will share perhaps the most controversial scene in the book, one that has divided critics and confounded any attempt to categorize The Weight. By this point in the book, humans have developed a technology that can convert the force of gravity into a devastating beam, the only weapon capable of piercing the armor of the alien spaceships. As the humans prepare to mount a final decisive attack, they realize that they must measure the incremental gravity that will result from millions of barrels of mercury that are being pumped haphazardly into the Great Wall in China. The U.S. president turns to his ally and exclaims, "Mr. Gorbachev, tare down this wall!"
Alan's harshest critics claim that he started with this scene in mind and that the rest of the novel amounts to an elaborate setup for a groan-inducing pun. Other critics have defended the pun, and some have even argued that Alan has launched a new literary school, one centered around the use of wordplay to convey deep human feeling. If that's true, then it will be very interesting to watch this new genre unfold. And I look forward to reporting on it.
The Weight of the World envisions a strangely familiar near-future in which Russia, teetering between democracy and authoritarianism, capitalism and gangsterism, elects as president a young technocrat named Alexei Gorbachev, who ran on an anti-corruption platform. His project is derailed when a group of Russian petroleum engineers is captured by an extremist Muslim group operating in Libya, forcing him to focus all of his attention on the crisis as it develops.
In the midst of this disruption, a far bigger threat appears: a fleet of alien spaceships approaches Earth and threatens to invade. Now President Reagan's hypothesis is put to the test, as a common threat looms over all of humanity and our common fate is readily apparent.
I won't reveal what happens, but I will share perhaps the most controversial scene in the book, one that has divided critics and confounded any attempt to categorize The Weight. By this point in the book, humans have developed a technology that can convert the force of gravity into a devastating beam, the only weapon capable of piercing the armor of the alien spaceships. As the humans prepare to mount a final decisive attack, they realize that they must measure the incremental gravity that will result from millions of barrels of mercury that are being pumped haphazardly into the Great Wall in China. The U.S. president turns to his ally and exclaims, "Mr. Gorbachev, tare down this wall!"
Alan's harshest critics claim that he started with this scene in mind and that the rest of the novel amounts to an elaborate setup for a groan-inducing pun. Other critics have defended the pun, and some have even argued that Alan has launched a new literary school, one centered around the use of wordplay to convey deep human feeling. If that's true, then it will be very interesting to watch this new genre unfold. And I look forward to reporting on it.
Saturday, September 19, 2015
Sarang's Render to Caesar
All the excitement in television this summer centers on Sarang's HBO series, "Render to Caesar" (tagline: "Drugs. Murder. Sects."), which has finally allowed Sarang to operate free of the prudish constraints of network television. The show follows a unit of the Roman police trying to maintain order in Judea, which is seething with revolutionaries, cults, and everyday criminality. Sarang portrays the Roman institutions of governance as dysfunctional and ineffective, but when a high-ranking official's somewhat soft-headed brother-in-law gives away all of his money following an encounter with a shadowy religious zealot, a special unit is formed to investigate. Although the unit is staffed by castoffs and misfits, its intelligent, pragmatic leader and his commitment to "real po-lice work" soon produce results.
Whether those results will be palatable to the existing political and religious power structure is another question, though, and in many ways Sarang's exploration of this issue constitutes the core of the show. In Judea, truth is the first victim of the political machinations of the elites, and the justice system is merely the stage on which political ambitions play out. The only people who can operate with integrity are low-level players such as an arrogant, alcoholic detective from Hibernia, who is the closest thing the show has to a hero.
An interesting aspect of the show is that it portrays several groups in parallel—the police, of course, but also religious groups, politicians, and a network of criminals smuggling contraband through the province. (The second season will apparently focus on dockworkers in the port of Caesaria Maritima.) The viewer comes to realize that in their dysfunction and alienation, these groups are more similar to each other than they first appear. Institutions are all alike, Sarang tells us. They crush individualism, compromise human values, and smother individual efforts to make sense of the world and achieve anything resembling justice. Only by carving out protected spaces in bureaucratic backwaters can individuals accomplish anything meaningful, and when those pockets of effectiveness come to the attention of the incumbent elites, the results are cataclysmic.
I caught up with Sarang at the release party for the pilot episode (which Sarang annoyingly insists be rendered "the Pilate episode" in all written materials). Unfortunately, we didn't get to discuss the show very much, because Sarang spent most of the time lashing out at Dave, whose reaction to the show has been... less than generous. When Sarang started tweeting short clips of the show to generate interest, Dave and his arena rock band, Boltzmann Penis, released the parody song "Blurred Vines," which has become a huge hit and generated intense controversy when it was played at the VMAs. Dave has since made his rounds through the talk shows, criticizing Sarang's decision to film the show in English rather than Greek, Latin, and Aramaic. (Dave invariably describes Sarang's decision as "selling his artistic integrity for 30 pieces of silver." He also likes to joke that Jesus was lucky that Peter disowned him only three times before the cock crowed, whereas Sarang forsakes literature and good taste "basically every time he turns on a camera.") On Charlie Rose, Dave mocked Sarang's decision to focus the second season on a largely white cast of characters, predicting that Sarang's attempt to widen the show's appeal would backfire artistically.
I wouldn't be so hasty. Sarang has found compelling drama in unexpected places before, and most of the cast from the first season will return to reprise their roles. When the Season 2 DVDs arrive (and I expect them any day), I doubt I will be able to resist binge-watching the season over the course of a weekend. The show's verisimilitude and incredibly compelling plot more than make up for whatever deficiencies Dave has found, and I can't wait to plunge into the world of the show again.
Whether those results will be palatable to the existing political and religious power structure is another question, though, and in many ways Sarang's exploration of this issue constitutes the core of the show. In Judea, truth is the first victim of the political machinations of the elites, and the justice system is merely the stage on which political ambitions play out. The only people who can operate with integrity are low-level players such as an arrogant, alcoholic detective from Hibernia, who is the closest thing the show has to a hero.
An interesting aspect of the show is that it portrays several groups in parallel—the police, of course, but also religious groups, politicians, and a network of criminals smuggling contraband through the province. (The second season will apparently focus on dockworkers in the port of Caesaria Maritima.) The viewer comes to realize that in their dysfunction and alienation, these groups are more similar to each other than they first appear. Institutions are all alike, Sarang tells us. They crush individualism, compromise human values, and smother individual efforts to make sense of the world and achieve anything resembling justice. Only by carving out protected spaces in bureaucratic backwaters can individuals accomplish anything meaningful, and when those pockets of effectiveness come to the attention of the incumbent elites, the results are cataclysmic.
I caught up with Sarang at the release party for the pilot episode (which Sarang annoyingly insists be rendered "the Pilate episode" in all written materials). Unfortunately, we didn't get to discuss the show very much, because Sarang spent most of the time lashing out at Dave, whose reaction to the show has been... less than generous. When Sarang started tweeting short clips of the show to generate interest, Dave and his arena rock band, Boltzmann Penis, released the parody song "Blurred Vines," which has become a huge hit and generated intense controversy when it was played at the VMAs. Dave has since made his rounds through the talk shows, criticizing Sarang's decision to film the show in English rather than Greek, Latin, and Aramaic. (Dave invariably describes Sarang's decision as "selling his artistic integrity for 30 pieces of silver." He also likes to joke that Jesus was lucky that Peter disowned him only three times before the cock crowed, whereas Sarang forsakes literature and good taste "basically every time he turns on a camera.") On Charlie Rose, Dave mocked Sarang's decision to focus the second season on a largely white cast of characters, predicting that Sarang's attempt to widen the show's appeal would backfire artistically.
I wouldn't be so hasty. Sarang has found compelling drama in unexpected places before, and most of the cast from the first season will return to reprise their roles. When the Season 2 DVDs arrive (and I expect them any day), I doubt I will be able to resist binge-watching the season over the course of a weekend. The show's verisimilitude and incredibly compelling plot more than make up for whatever deficiencies Dave has found, and I can't wait to plunge into the world of the show again.
Sunday, July 12, 2015
Calista's The Devil and the Deep Sea
Calista's latest effort, The Devil and the Deep Sea, is a subtle and nuanced examination of the way we negotiate the terrain between art and law, and the extent to which personal dimensions govern that space. The story, which is set in the early 1980s, is loosely based on the artwork "Shoot" by Chris Burden, in which Burden was shot in the arm with a .22 rifle. In real life, there were no legal consequences. In Calista's version, the matter comes to the attention of Louis Gelb, a prosecutor in Memphis, Tennessee. Gelb vacillates, but ultimately he brings charges against Robert Fink—not the artist, but a friend of the artist who was roped into the art project and who pulled the trigger. The artist, Jim Sullivan, is also charged, but the charge—disturbing the peace—results only in a 30-day suspended sentence and a $50 fine. Sullivan pays up, and no controversy is generated.
But Gelb brings felony charges against Fink, and this stirs up the hornets' nest that drives the rest of the book. Fink is an earnest college student who simply thought he was helping Jim Sullivan, his idol, produce an avant-garde work of art. Gelb and his wife are ostracized from their social circle in Memphis, and Gelb comes under heavy criticism from the media.
Calista has a sharp eye for the ways that people's responses, varied and fluid at first, harden over time. She also writes insightfully about the way that the reaction of Memphis's elites says as much about their insecurities and ambitions as it does about Gelb and Fink. Gelb brought his family to Memphis after his wife was threatened on a subway in New York, and his arrival in the city was heralded as a sign that Memphis was cosmopolitan enough to compete with bigger, higher-status cities. Now his decision to prosecute Fink is portrayed in the New Yorker and elsewhere as a sign of the city's provincialism and redneck mentality.
Why does Gelb insist on prosecuting Fink? The book gives us several possible answers. The one that puts Gelb in the best light involves a case that came to him as a junior prosecutor in New York. A black teenager, relentlessly bullied because of his obesity, took an unloaded handgun to school as a last-ditch effort to scare his tormentors into leaving him alone. Gelb believed this was a desperate strategy employed by an otherwise sweet-tempered and law-abiding young man, but he was forced to bring weapons charges that ended the boy's high school career and effectively ruined his life. Gelb dwells on the disparity of outcomes... a scared black kid makes a mistake and ruins his life, whereas an entitled white kid knowingly shoots someone and wants to get off scot-free. Fink's lawyer doesn't help matters when he tells Gelb that his client is "a good kid... not one of those," gesturing at the jail cells behind them, filled mostly with black men.
But darker motivations may lurk beneath. Gelb's marriage is in trouble, and it is hard to exaggerate how big a chip he has on his shoulder about his working-class upbringing. His wife's old boyfriends, as well as a friend she reconnects with over the course of the novel, are all upper-middle-class Jews... much like Fink.
It is also pretty clear that while Gelb enjoys his initial success with high society in Memphis, even then he despises the city's small, monochromatic, unsophisticated upper class. After a cocktail party, Gelb won't stop mocking their acquaintances ("Oh, yes, I so enjoyed Wuthering Heights by Jane Austen. Such appreciation for the classics these Southerners have!"). This sparks one of the ugliest fights between Gelb and his wife, and the next day Gelb learns that a hospital has reported a gunshot injury to the police, launching his involvement in the Fink case.
Several chapters follow a New Yorker writer who is dispatched to Memphis to cover the story, and in many ways these chapters are the most illuminating in the book. Sullivan, for instance, gives a several-page monologue on the borderline between art and non-art, his role in exploring that boundary, and Gelb's role in defining it according to the dictates of his conscience. But Sullivan, wracked with guilt over Fink's involvement, ultimately decides to take a much more simplistic line, calling Gelb a bullying cretin and joining the calls for his dismissal. Calista plays this as an understandably human reaction, but also as a betrayal of Sullivan's artistic integrity. In some ways Sullivan's struggle is the moral heart of the book.
I actually had a chance to sit down with Calista to discuss the book at the 92nd Street Y, and the conversation touched on some very interesting points. Here is a partial transcript:
James: Let me start by saying that this book is almost certainly top 10 for the year. I mean, I don't want to sort of pre-shadow—
Calista: You don't want to spoil the much-anticipated—
James: —right, the highly anticipated James top-10 list. That's going to be clickbait in like the middle of December. But anyway this book is just stunning, but counter-intuitively I want to start with maybe my biggest criticism, which is in the nature of a missed opportunity.
Calista: Is this about the jury deliberations? Because you know, it's interesting, I had originally written it—
James: No, forgive me, no, it's just. You've got Memphis high society, you've got the smaller circle of Jewish, I don't want to call them intellectuals, but highly educated Jews who are friends of the Gelbs. And you've got this New Yorker writer, and the larger media culture. And the sentiment is, this guy is a philistine. He's Memphis at its worst, redneck... That's sort of, initially the response is much more varied, but things kind of solidify and everyone gets on the same page. Even Sullivan.
Calista: That's right, I'm really glad that came through, because that was absolutely... you know, the book is set in the 1980s, but in a lot of ways I think you see this dynamic today on Twitter. People don't know what to make of something, and so they—
James: Okay, but here it is. The guy's name is Louis Gelb. Lou Gelb. And I sort of thought to myself, why not name him Phil E. Stein? Get it? Phil E. Stein. It's even a Jewish name.
[long pause]
Calista: Well, let me put it this way. I think that's a joke that only someone at your intellectual level would really appreciate.
James: You know, I guess that's right, the book needs to work on all levels. It needs to work for people who might not have quite my level of... but you know, won't it just go over those people's heads? Won't it be, like, no harm no foul? Like if you get it, great, but if you're maybe a little less intelligent, a little less sensitive to literary allusions...
Calista: Is that a... is that a literary allusion, really?
James: Let's move on.
But Gelb brings felony charges against Fink, and this stirs up the hornets' nest that drives the rest of the book. Fink is an earnest college student who simply thought he was helping Jim Sullivan, his idol, produce an avant-garde work of art. Gelb and his wife are ostracized from their social circle in Memphis, and Gelb comes under heavy criticism from the media.
Calista has a sharp eye for the ways that people's responses, varied and fluid at first, harden over time. She also writes insightfully about the way that the reaction of Memphis's elites says as much about their insecurities and ambitions as it does about Gelb and Fink. Gelb brought his family to Memphis after his wife was threatened on a subway in New York, and his arrival in the city was heralded as a sign that Memphis was cosmopolitan enough to compete with bigger, higher-status cities. Now his decision to prosecute Fink is portrayed in the New Yorker and elsewhere as a sign of the city's provincialism and redneck mentality.
Why does Gelb insist on prosecuting Fink? The book gives us several possible answers. The one that puts Gelb in the best light involves a case that came to him as a junior prosecutor in New York. A black teenager, relentlessly bullied because of his obesity, took an unloaded handgun to school as a last-ditch effort to scare his tormentors into leaving him alone. Gelb believed this was a desperate strategy employed by an otherwise sweet-tempered and law-abiding young man, but he was forced to bring weapons charges that ended the boy's high school career and effectively ruined his life. Gelb dwells on the disparity of outcomes... a scared black kid makes a mistake and ruins his life, whereas an entitled white kid knowingly shoots someone and wants to get off scot-free. Fink's lawyer doesn't help matters when he tells Gelb that his client is "a good kid... not one of those," gesturing at the jail cells behind them, filled mostly with black men.
But darker motivations may lurk beneath. Gelb's marriage is in trouble, and it is hard to exaggerate how big a chip he has on his shoulder about his working-class upbringing. His wife's old boyfriends, as well as a friend she reconnects with over the course of the novel, are all upper-middle-class Jews... much like Fink.
It is also pretty clear that while Gelb enjoys his initial success with high society in Memphis, even then he despises the city's small, monochromatic, unsophisticated upper class. After a cocktail party, Gelb won't stop mocking their acquaintances ("Oh, yes, I so enjoyed Wuthering Heights by Jane Austen. Such appreciation for the classics these Southerners have!"). This sparks one of the ugliest fights between Gelb and his wife, and the next day Gelb learns that a hospital has reported a gunshot injury to the police, launching his involvement in the Fink case.
Several chapters follow a New Yorker writer who is dispatched to Memphis to cover the story, and in many ways these chapters are the most illuminating in the book. Sullivan, for instance, gives a several-page monologue on the borderline between art and non-art, his role in exploring that boundary, and Gelb's role in defining it according to the dictates of his conscience. But Sullivan, wracked with guilt over Fink's involvement, ultimately decides to take a much more simplistic line, calling Gelb a bullying cretin and joining the calls for his dismissal. Calista plays this as an understandably human reaction, but also as a betrayal of Sullivan's artistic integrity. In some ways Sullivan's struggle is the moral heart of the book.
I actually had a chance to sit down with Calista to discuss the book at the 92nd Street Y, and the conversation touched on some very interesting points. Here is a partial transcript:
James: Let me start by saying that this book is almost certainly top 10 for the year. I mean, I don't want to sort of pre-shadow—
Calista: You don't want to spoil the much-anticipated—
James: —right, the highly anticipated James top-10 list. That's going to be clickbait in like the middle of December. But anyway this book is just stunning, but counter-intuitively I want to start with maybe my biggest criticism, which is in the nature of a missed opportunity.
Calista: Is this about the jury deliberations? Because you know, it's interesting, I had originally written it—
James: No, forgive me, no, it's just. You've got Memphis high society, you've got the smaller circle of Jewish, I don't want to call them intellectuals, but highly educated Jews who are friends of the Gelbs. And you've got this New Yorker writer, and the larger media culture. And the sentiment is, this guy is a philistine. He's Memphis at its worst, redneck... That's sort of, initially the response is much more varied, but things kind of solidify and everyone gets on the same page. Even Sullivan.
Calista: That's right, I'm really glad that came through, because that was absolutely... you know, the book is set in the 1980s, but in a lot of ways I think you see this dynamic today on Twitter. People don't know what to make of something, and so they—
James: Okay, but here it is. The guy's name is Louis Gelb. Lou Gelb. And I sort of thought to myself, why not name him Phil E. Stein? Get it? Phil E. Stein. It's even a Jewish name.
[long pause]
Calista: Well, let me put it this way. I think that's a joke that only someone at your intellectual level would really appreciate.
James: You know, I guess that's right, the book needs to work on all levels. It needs to work for people who might not have quite my level of... but you know, won't it just go over those people's heads? Won't it be, like, no harm no foul? Like if you get it, great, but if you're maybe a little less intelligent, a little less sensitive to literary allusions...
Calista: Is that a... is that a literary allusion, really?
James: Let's move on.
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Dave's The Carriers
Dave's latest effort, The Carriers, is something of a return to form for the reclusive novelist. After the commercial failure of his nonfiction opus Entertaining Anecdotes from The Lives of U.S. Senators Told from the Perspective of Someone Who Urgently Needs to Urinate, Dave retreated to a rental apartment in Osaka and ignored all communications for 14 months, to the consternation of his readers and the wider literary world. But when Dave emerged last summer, pale and blinking in the bright August sunlight, he held in his hands a typewritten manuscript running to some 2,200 pages. Since then the book has been laboriously translated into English from a private language that Dave invented and then partially forgot, and it has been stripped of the many passages that Dave copied verbatim from Entertaining Anecdotes. The result is The Carriers, one of the greatest novels ever written about illness and the struggle for human connection.
Set in a thinly fictionalized Victorian England, the book chronicles the appearance and rapid spread of a devastating sexually transmitted virus. People who are infected go through a symptomless (but contagious) stage and then develop terrible lesions, debilitating organ failure, sterility, and in many cases premature death. But not everyone is vulnerable: 10-15% of the population is completely immune. The virus can't gain a foothold in their bodies, and they neither experience symptoms nor transmit the disease.
But a much smaller fraction of the population has a different response: their bodies never develop the symptoms of the disease, but they remain contagious for their entire lives, exposing anyone they have sex with. For some time, the existence of these "carriers" is a matter of scientific dispute, and here Dave weaves an enthralling story about scientists and policymakers and their grim efforts to understand the disease and stem its tide.
But the book really gets going about a third of the way through, when the existence of carriers is proved conclusively and the government implements "the Programme"—a policy of isolating carriers from the rest of the population for the remainder of their lives. (It is thought unnecessary and cruel to isolate people who are exhibiting symptoms, since there is no danger of contagion other than through sexual contact. On the other hand, temporary quarantines are set up for people thought to have been exposed to the virus, so that they don't transmit it before the symptoms set in.)
The problem is that carriers are almost impossible to identify unless they turn themselves in. Charles Stonton, the administrator of the Programme, launches a controversial campaign to track the carriers down using forced interrogation and peremptory detainment. Members of Parliament, Government officials, judges, and doctors are split on the effectiveness and legality of Stonton's tactics. Stonton's hand is strengthened considerably, though, when he rounds up seven men who continued having promiscuous sex even though they very likely knew they were carriers. But are the men representative of a larger trend, or are they sensationalized outliers, of the sort bound to crop up in a large country?
Dave's most compelling prose is reserved for the domestic dramas that ensue—women who fear that their husbands are carriers, husbands who without explanation stop having sex with their wives, wives who join their husbands (accused of being carriers) in isolation camps. People are forced to put aside the platitudes and evasions they formerly relied on, because too much is at stake if they are wrong. And people are forced to reexamine the assumptions that, in a more innocent world, seemed built on stone. One woman bemoans the "strange new math that we have been forced to learn" and remembers fondly the days when math seemed "useless and remote, a chilly cathedral" that was compulsory to learn but not to use.
The book's triumph comes from its reconciliation of two seemingly contradictory aims. First, it is unblinking and unromantic about the remorseless logic of the disease and the stringent measures taken to fight it. But bizarrely, a deeply moving romanticism develops regardless, emerging from the struggles, painful failures, and rare triumphs that people find. "Somewhere out there," a husband says, gesturing vaguely toward the New World, "There is a place where none of this has happened, where people can love freely and without consequence. But we have been shattered, and all that is left for us is to make what we can of the pieces. Of life itself." He is speaking of his marriage, but it would be a fitting summary of this masterful novel.
Set in a thinly fictionalized Victorian England, the book chronicles the appearance and rapid spread of a devastating sexually transmitted virus. People who are infected go through a symptomless (but contagious) stage and then develop terrible lesions, debilitating organ failure, sterility, and in many cases premature death. But not everyone is vulnerable: 10-15% of the population is completely immune. The virus can't gain a foothold in their bodies, and they neither experience symptoms nor transmit the disease.
But a much smaller fraction of the population has a different response: their bodies never develop the symptoms of the disease, but they remain contagious for their entire lives, exposing anyone they have sex with. For some time, the existence of these "carriers" is a matter of scientific dispute, and here Dave weaves an enthralling story about scientists and policymakers and their grim efforts to understand the disease and stem its tide.
But the book really gets going about a third of the way through, when the existence of carriers is proved conclusively and the government implements "the Programme"—a policy of isolating carriers from the rest of the population for the remainder of their lives. (It is thought unnecessary and cruel to isolate people who are exhibiting symptoms, since there is no danger of contagion other than through sexual contact. On the other hand, temporary quarantines are set up for people thought to have been exposed to the virus, so that they don't transmit it before the symptoms set in.)
The problem is that carriers are almost impossible to identify unless they turn themselves in. Charles Stonton, the administrator of the Programme, launches a controversial campaign to track the carriers down using forced interrogation and peremptory detainment. Members of Parliament, Government officials, judges, and doctors are split on the effectiveness and legality of Stonton's tactics. Stonton's hand is strengthened considerably, though, when he rounds up seven men who continued having promiscuous sex even though they very likely knew they were carriers. But are the men representative of a larger trend, or are they sensationalized outliers, of the sort bound to crop up in a large country?
Dave's most compelling prose is reserved for the domestic dramas that ensue—women who fear that their husbands are carriers, husbands who without explanation stop having sex with their wives, wives who join their husbands (accused of being carriers) in isolation camps. People are forced to put aside the platitudes and evasions they formerly relied on, because too much is at stake if they are wrong. And people are forced to reexamine the assumptions that, in a more innocent world, seemed built on stone. One woman bemoans the "strange new math that we have been forced to learn" and remembers fondly the days when math seemed "useless and remote, a chilly cathedral" that was compulsory to learn but not to use.
The book's triumph comes from its reconciliation of two seemingly contradictory aims. First, it is unblinking and unromantic about the remorseless logic of the disease and the stringent measures taken to fight it. But bizarrely, a deeply moving romanticism develops regardless, emerging from the struggles, painful failures, and rare triumphs that people find. "Somewhere out there," a husband says, gesturing vaguely toward the New World, "There is a place where none of this has happened, where people can love freely and without consequence. But we have been shattered, and all that is left for us is to make what we can of the pieces. Of life itself." He is speaking of his marriage, but it would be a fitting summary of this masterful novel.
Monday, May 4, 2015
Sarang's Cool It! How We Can Tap the Upper Atmosphere for Safer, Healthier, and More Sustainable Lives
Sarang's latest effort, Cool It! How We Can Tap the Upper Atmosphere for Safer, Healthier, and More Sustainable Lives, is very different from his previous works. Bookstores have not been given clear instructions on where to display the book, and so it has popped up in fiction, nonfiction, politics, science, opinion, and fantasy. Just about the only place it hasn't appeared is the New York Times bestseller list—not because its sales have disappointed, but because the New York Times refuses to "countenance Sarang's ridiculous performance art" by choosing whether to put it on the fiction or nonfiction list.
Cool It! proposes the construction of 4-mile-high towers shaped like the St. Louis Arch (except that each tower would consist of two arches set at right angles to each other and meeting at the top). Pipes would carry water (actually a solution of water and propylene glycol) through the arches, radiating heat away at the top (where temperatures average about 75°F below the temperatures at ground level) and then returning to the surface to be used in air conditioning and refrigeration. Sarang calculates that a few dozen towers could cool an entire city—indoors and out—eliminating the need for air conditioning and allowing people to enjoy outdoor activities all summer long. The towers would also contain lightning rods and would protect vast areas from lightning strikes.
Sarang's reputation precedes him, and critics have approached the book gingerly, fearing that it is some sort of Sokal hoax. Malcolm Gladwell fulminated, "How can I review a book that refuses to put its cards on the table?" (He declined to take the book at face value and called it "a mockery of the brand of journalism I have practiced my whole life, and which I still believe in.") Cass Sunstein greeted Sarang's idea warmly, but noted, "By endorsing the idea, I may be setting myself up for the biggest embarrassment of my life." (Dave tweeted: "Apparently Prof. Sunstein has forgotten about Republic.com 2.0.")
For what it's worth, Sarang insists the plan is real, and has offered to install the system in any city willing to pay a fee that is "commensurate with the services I will be providing and sufficient to cover my expenses while leaving me with a modest profit." So far, no one has taken him up on his offer.
I'll go out on a limb and say that I think the suggestion is worthwhile whether it is serious or not. We are faced with calamity on a grand scale, and it will require every ounce of inventiveness and daring to save our planet and our civilization. The towers must be built—and the sooner the better.
Cool It! proposes the construction of 4-mile-high towers shaped like the St. Louis Arch (except that each tower would consist of two arches set at right angles to each other and meeting at the top). Pipes would carry water (actually a solution of water and propylene glycol) through the arches, radiating heat away at the top (where temperatures average about 75°F below the temperatures at ground level) and then returning to the surface to be used in air conditioning and refrigeration. Sarang calculates that a few dozen towers could cool an entire city—indoors and out—eliminating the need for air conditioning and allowing people to enjoy outdoor activities all summer long. The towers would also contain lightning rods and would protect vast areas from lightning strikes.
Sarang's reputation precedes him, and critics have approached the book gingerly, fearing that it is some sort of Sokal hoax. Malcolm Gladwell fulminated, "How can I review a book that refuses to put its cards on the table?" (He declined to take the book at face value and called it "a mockery of the brand of journalism I have practiced my whole life, and which I still believe in.") Cass Sunstein greeted Sarang's idea warmly, but noted, "By endorsing the idea, I may be setting myself up for the biggest embarrassment of my life." (Dave tweeted: "Apparently Prof. Sunstein has forgotten about Republic.com 2.0.")
For what it's worth, Sarang insists the plan is real, and has offered to install the system in any city willing to pay a fee that is "commensurate with the services I will be providing and sufficient to cover my expenses while leaving me with a modest profit." So far, no one has taken him up on his offer.
I'll go out on a limb and say that I think the suggestion is worthwhile whether it is serious or not. We are faced with calamity on a grand scale, and it will require every ounce of inventiveness and daring to save our planet and our civilization. The towers must be built—and the sooner the better.
Thursday, April 30, 2015
James's The Zealots
James's latest effort, The Zealots, is hard to read. Set in Hamburg in the near-future, it tells the story of slutbangers.com, a pornographic website that mostly features user-submitted videos. The story begins as the proprietors of the website stumble upon a delicious discovery: the daughter of a prominent Muslim cleric in the city has become addicted to hard drugs and has left home. The men lure her into their studio, where they induce her to perform in a degrading hardcore video, which they entitle "Muslim Bitch Begs For It." Although their website generally requires viewers to pay by the minute, they post "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" free for all to watch. Soon it has garnered tens of millions of views, and while it has not directly generated any revenue, it has brought thousands of new paying users to the website. Buoyed by their success, the proprietors of slutbangers.com devote an entire section of the website to hardcore videos featuring Muslim women being humiliated. The young Muslim woman (the cleric's daughter) kills herself with a probably-intentional overdose.
But at this point the story takes a dark turn. Two young Muslim men, enraged by the perceived disrespect being paid to Muslim women, storm into the offices of slutbangers.com and kill the proprietors as well as several staff members.
The world is shocked. "Wir sind slutbangers.com!" is the slogan on everyone's lips and on the front pages of all of the major Western newspapers. Political leaders hail the courage and free-speech advocacy of the slain men. It soon emerges that, just prior to the attack, they and their lawyers had been courageously fending off the Muslim cleric's attempts to use German privacy law to force them to remove "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" from their website. This only cements their status as martyrs for free speech.
But soon a split appears in Western opinion. On one side are people who, however much they may dislike pornography and find it distasteful, are unwavering in their support of slutbangers.com. On the other side are people who deny that you can truly support slutbangers.com unless you embrace their mission of producing and viewing hardcore pornography. After all, how can you defend the right without defending the practice? This latter camp (by far the more numerous one) spawns an ice-bucket-challenge-like phenomenon, in which supporters of slutbangers.com film hardcore sex videos and post them online. At the end of the video, the participants can nominate another couple to "take the slutbangers.com challenge," and if the second couple doesn't post a sex tape within 24 hours, they must make a donation to a charity that primarily or exclusively funds projects in non-Muslim countries. Soon there are few athletes, actors, or elected officials under the age of 70 who have not shown their support of slutbangers.com in the most personal way possible.
The story takes another dark turn, though, as George Clooney not only refuses to take the slutbangers.com challenge, but casts the sole vote against "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" for the foreign-language Oscar. All across the internet, thinkers and pundits condemn Clooney's bizarre hatred of free speech. Clooney gives a brief statement, most of which he spends condemning the violent attack on slutbangers.com, before noting his disapproval of the way its proprietors treated the cleric's daughter and his doubts about the merits of the video compared to that year's other nominees. This pivot is pilloried as the "Liar's But," in the sense that everything he said before the "but," before criticizing "Muslim Bitch Begs For It," was disingenuous filler. "Always wrong to resort to violence," "nothing can ever justify," blah blah blah. Obviously Clooney couldn't wait to get to the part of the speech where he slandered the men behind slutbangers.com.
One freelance pornographer who worked for the site goes so far as to suggest that until you've sexually humiliated a Muslim woman on video, you can't understand what the website was all about and you have no standing to criticize it. The feeling that you get, he argues, just can't be conveyed except through direct experience. Many people feel that this particular argument goes too far, but they endorse the contention that slutbangers.com was misunderstood because many people unaccustomed to pornography took the site's "degradation" porn out of context, construing it as extreme, when really it was well within the mainstream of internet pornography.
The book ends happily with George Clooney drummed out of Hollywood and the surviving staffers of slutbangers.com (including the man who, in the video, sodomized the cleric's daughter and then forced her to fellate him) accepting the Oscar award with a tearful speech, as the entire Western world unites in its support of their noble work.
But at this point the story takes a dark turn. Two young Muslim men, enraged by the perceived disrespect being paid to Muslim women, storm into the offices of slutbangers.com and kill the proprietors as well as several staff members.
The world is shocked. "Wir sind slutbangers.com!" is the slogan on everyone's lips and on the front pages of all of the major Western newspapers. Political leaders hail the courage and free-speech advocacy of the slain men. It soon emerges that, just prior to the attack, they and their lawyers had been courageously fending off the Muslim cleric's attempts to use German privacy law to force them to remove "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" from their website. This only cements their status as martyrs for free speech.
But soon a split appears in Western opinion. On one side are people who, however much they may dislike pornography and find it distasteful, are unwavering in their support of slutbangers.com. On the other side are people who deny that you can truly support slutbangers.com unless you embrace their mission of producing and viewing hardcore pornography. After all, how can you defend the right without defending the practice? This latter camp (by far the more numerous one) spawns an ice-bucket-challenge-like phenomenon, in which supporters of slutbangers.com film hardcore sex videos and post them online. At the end of the video, the participants can nominate another couple to "take the slutbangers.com challenge," and if the second couple doesn't post a sex tape within 24 hours, they must make a donation to a charity that primarily or exclusively funds projects in non-Muslim countries. Soon there are few athletes, actors, or elected officials under the age of 70 who have not shown their support of slutbangers.com in the most personal way possible.
The story takes another dark turn, though, as George Clooney not only refuses to take the slutbangers.com challenge, but casts the sole vote against "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" for the foreign-language Oscar. All across the internet, thinkers and pundits condemn Clooney's bizarre hatred of free speech. Clooney gives a brief statement, most of which he spends condemning the violent attack on slutbangers.com, before noting his disapproval of the way its proprietors treated the cleric's daughter and his doubts about the merits of the video compared to that year's other nominees. This pivot is pilloried as the "Liar's But," in the sense that everything he said before the "but," before criticizing "Muslim Bitch Begs For It," was disingenuous filler. "Always wrong to resort to violence," "nothing can ever justify," blah blah blah. Obviously Clooney couldn't wait to get to the part of the speech where he slandered the men behind slutbangers.com.
One freelance pornographer who worked for the site goes so far as to suggest that until you've sexually humiliated a Muslim woman on video, you can't understand what the website was all about and you have no standing to criticize it. The feeling that you get, he argues, just can't be conveyed except through direct experience. Many people feel that this particular argument goes too far, but they endorse the contention that slutbangers.com was misunderstood because many people unaccustomed to pornography took the site's "degradation" porn out of context, construing it as extreme, when really it was well within the mainstream of internet pornography.
The book ends happily with George Clooney drummed out of Hollywood and the surviving staffers of slutbangers.com (including the man who, in the video, sodomized the cleric's daughter and then forced her to fellate him) accepting the Oscar award with a tearful speech, as the entire Western world unites in its support of their noble work.
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Sarang's How the World Is Made
I don't know quite what to make of Sarang's latest effort, How the World Is Made. On one hand, the tract has been met with near-universal dismay in the literary, scientific, and philosophical establishments. Colin McGinn called it "undoubtedly the most inane and perverse book of his benighted oeuvre, somehow managing to be astonishingly illogical and yet deadly boring." Oliver Sacks labeled it "puerile and pedantic." Dave's scathing review was given the headline "An Innovation in Geometry If Nothing Else: Sarang's Reasoning Is Both Elliptical and Circular at the Same Time." (An excerpt from Dave's review was blurbed on the book's cover as follows: "Sarang's book is… a tour de force of… philosophy. Your time would be better spent… reading this [book].")
On the other hand, some observers have praised the book. Hatchjaw found it to be "profound but accessible," while Le Clerque has hailed its universal relevance and penetrating insight. But whereas Dave pilloried the book from the pages of the Paris Review, and Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker, the book's defenders have mostly written on obscure blogs. Among the academic and literary elite, the tide of opinion has run very much in one direction.
As for me, I seem to be one of the few reviewers who is neither delighted nor disgusted by the book. I will be the first to admit that it is not an easy book to read. Its acknowledgement section reads, in its entirety, "After de Selby," but I think the book owes as much to Kant and Kierkegaard as to the mysterious de Selby, whose works I have been unable to find. There is definitely something to Sarang's arguments, but he always seems to push his reasoning into obscure and poorly-supported territory, well past anything his data can support.
An example will clarify what I mean. In the chapter "Of Cities and Men," Sarang "problematizes" the traditional economic and geographical explanations for the rise of cities. Sarang develops startling evidence that the traditional explanations involving density, agglomeration effects, and specialization are ill-founded. For instance, it is commonly thought that the skyscraper revolutionized cities by permitting highly dense business districts to flourish. This theory has become so dominant that it has displaced theories emerging from the Freudian, Marxist, and de Selbian traditions. But is it all based on a lie?
To find out, Sarang looked at data on travel within skyscrapers, an area traditionally ignored by geographers (who focus on commuting patterns across horizontal space). He found that if you add up all movements from floor to floor (using positive numbers for upward movement and negative numbers for downward movement), you find that the vast majority of office workers move, on average, zero floors per workday! So what is the point of building dozens of floors, if the average worker never leaves the lobby?
Dave calls this calculation "methodologically unsound" and "so much hooey," but you can't discount a striking empirical regularity like this with such a perfunctory dismissal. Gone are the days when empirical evidence was excluded from serious discussion of social phenomena—we live in a data-driven society now, and we are better for it. If we are going to understand cities, we have to grapple with Sarang's almost unbelievable findings.
But here is where Sarang pushes his reasoning to places where I am unwilling to follow. It may be true that most floors of a typical skyscraper are "merely so much surplusage," but it doesn't follow that skyscrapers are built merely as an obscene gesture of phallic display. Here I find Sarang's extended exegesis of the word "erection" to be misguided and tedious. Sarang may have proven that skyscrapers are not used for their ostensible purpose, but that's a long way from establishing that they are the fulfillment of corporate executives' "adolescent fantasies of female-anatomy-destroying revenge for the indignity of the birth canal." For one thing, Sarang doesn't address the likelihood that many CEOs were delivered by C-section—but that is just a minor example of the many flaws in his rather tortuous reasoning.
Sarang, like Tolstoy, is better at ridiculing the ideas of others than he is at building an affirmative intellectual framework. To upend major areas of economic and geographical thought is no small thing, but to achieve greatness Sarang's philosophy would have to build a convincing alternative as well. He hasn't done it yet, but let us hope that the chilly reception the world has given How the World Is Made doesn't dissuade Sarang from trying again. The world deserves as much.
On the other hand, some observers have praised the book. Hatchjaw found it to be "profound but accessible," while Le Clerque has hailed its universal relevance and penetrating insight. But whereas Dave pilloried the book from the pages of the Paris Review, and Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker, the book's defenders have mostly written on obscure blogs. Among the academic and literary elite, the tide of opinion has run very much in one direction.
As for me, I seem to be one of the few reviewers who is neither delighted nor disgusted by the book. I will be the first to admit that it is not an easy book to read. Its acknowledgement section reads, in its entirety, "After de Selby," but I think the book owes as much to Kant and Kierkegaard as to the mysterious de Selby, whose works I have been unable to find. There is definitely something to Sarang's arguments, but he always seems to push his reasoning into obscure and poorly-supported territory, well past anything his data can support.
An example will clarify what I mean. In the chapter "Of Cities and Men," Sarang "problematizes" the traditional economic and geographical explanations for the rise of cities. Sarang develops startling evidence that the traditional explanations involving density, agglomeration effects, and specialization are ill-founded. For instance, it is commonly thought that the skyscraper revolutionized cities by permitting highly dense business districts to flourish. This theory has become so dominant that it has displaced theories emerging from the Freudian, Marxist, and de Selbian traditions. But is it all based on a lie?
To find out, Sarang looked at data on travel within skyscrapers, an area traditionally ignored by geographers (who focus on commuting patterns across horizontal space). He found that if you add up all movements from floor to floor (using positive numbers for upward movement and negative numbers for downward movement), you find that the vast majority of office workers move, on average, zero floors per workday! So what is the point of building dozens of floors, if the average worker never leaves the lobby?
Dave calls this calculation "methodologically unsound" and "so much hooey," but you can't discount a striking empirical regularity like this with such a perfunctory dismissal. Gone are the days when empirical evidence was excluded from serious discussion of social phenomena—we live in a data-driven society now, and we are better for it. If we are going to understand cities, we have to grapple with Sarang's almost unbelievable findings.
But here is where Sarang pushes his reasoning to places where I am unwilling to follow. It may be true that most floors of a typical skyscraper are "merely so much surplusage," but it doesn't follow that skyscrapers are built merely as an obscene gesture of phallic display. Here I find Sarang's extended exegesis of the word "erection" to be misguided and tedious. Sarang may have proven that skyscrapers are not used for their ostensible purpose, but that's a long way from establishing that they are the fulfillment of corporate executives' "adolescent fantasies of female-anatomy-destroying revenge for the indignity of the birth canal." For one thing, Sarang doesn't address the likelihood that many CEOs were delivered by C-section—but that is just a minor example of the many flaws in his rather tortuous reasoning.
Sarang, like Tolstoy, is better at ridiculing the ideas of others than he is at building an affirmative intellectual framework. To upend major areas of economic and geographical thought is no small thing, but to achieve greatness Sarang's philosophy would have to build a convincing alternative as well. He hasn't done it yet, but let us hope that the chilly reception the world has given How the World Is Made doesn't dissuade Sarang from trying again. The world deserves as much.
Monday, April 20, 2015
Sarang's Under a Clear Blue Sky
Sarang's latest effort, Under a Clear Blue Sky, offers a piercing, insightful look at the difficulty of advancing in journalism today, particularly for women. The protagonist, Kelly Walters, is a reporter for a conservative website, and she is covering her first big story since being promoted from its ranks of unpaid bloggers. In a sense, this is a great opportunity for her, but the assignment requires her to write with a degree of nuance and emotional intelligence that pushes her to her limits.
The difficulty is that Walters essentially has to tell three stories simultaneously. The first is the story of an entitled, socialistic cadre of pampered fast-food workers, many of them black and/or overweight, but all of them elitist, whose selfish protest for a $15 minimum wage blocked heroic, mostly-white, all-male emergency workers from reaching the scene of an accident at a construction site. The second is the story of lazy, entitled, unionized public employees (the rescue workers) who, instead of finding an alternative path to the accident site, simply sat in traffic while the hardworking, long-suffering victims of the construction accident bled to death. The final story is that of the entitled, incompetent, job-stealing illegal immigrants (the workers at the construction site) who are now, along with the relatives of the workers who died, suing the protestors—that is, people who are here legally, exercising their First Amendment rights like the salt-of-the-earth American citizens that they are. The illegals want to hold them responsible... for what, exercising their Constitutional rights? What's next?
Walters tries to keep these storylines from becoming tangled, and mostly she succeeds, but only by carefully separating the strands from each other, telling one story at a time. This tripling of her workload requires Herculean effort, and Walters' personal life suffers. Here Sarang is especially sensitive to the obstacles facing women in the workplace, especially professional women who are upwardly mobile but "not there yet"—that is, women who can't yet afford servants. In a touching scene, Walters is trying to arrange a date by text message, when she looks up and realizes she doesn't have enough quarters to finish drying her load of laundry. She simply stands, frozen between her smartphone and her soggy clothes, and contemplates the flowers on a tree she hadn't even noticed blooming.
Blue Sky doesn't just cement Sarang's status as one of the most thoughtful writers on women's issues. It also marks a turn away from the strident anti-didacticism of his earlier work. We can build a better society, Sarang tells us, if we empower women like Kelly Walters to chase their dreams. Women shouldn't have to choose between a romantic life and a career in conservative journalism. Right now, Walters is just a junior reporter learning to give her readers the information they need. But if she can stick with it, if we can find a way to support women like her through the tough times, then she may bloom into a thought leader and respected political commentator, repaying society's investment a thousand times.
The difficulty is that Walters essentially has to tell three stories simultaneously. The first is the story of an entitled, socialistic cadre of pampered fast-food workers, many of them black and/or overweight, but all of them elitist, whose selfish protest for a $15 minimum wage blocked heroic, mostly-white, all-male emergency workers from reaching the scene of an accident at a construction site. The second is the story of lazy, entitled, unionized public employees (the rescue workers) who, instead of finding an alternative path to the accident site, simply sat in traffic while the hardworking, long-suffering victims of the construction accident bled to death. The final story is that of the entitled, incompetent, job-stealing illegal immigrants (the workers at the construction site) who are now, along with the relatives of the workers who died, suing the protestors—that is, people who are here legally, exercising their First Amendment rights like the salt-of-the-earth American citizens that they are. The illegals want to hold them responsible... for what, exercising their Constitutional rights? What's next?
Walters tries to keep these storylines from becoming tangled, and mostly she succeeds, but only by carefully separating the strands from each other, telling one story at a time. This tripling of her workload requires Herculean effort, and Walters' personal life suffers. Here Sarang is especially sensitive to the obstacles facing women in the workplace, especially professional women who are upwardly mobile but "not there yet"—that is, women who can't yet afford servants. In a touching scene, Walters is trying to arrange a date by text message, when she looks up and realizes she doesn't have enough quarters to finish drying her load of laundry. She simply stands, frozen between her smartphone and her soggy clothes, and contemplates the flowers on a tree she hadn't even noticed blooming.
Blue Sky doesn't just cement Sarang's status as one of the most thoughtful writers on women's issues. It also marks a turn away from the strident anti-didacticism of his earlier work. We can build a better society, Sarang tells us, if we empower women like Kelly Walters to chase their dreams. Women shouldn't have to choose between a romantic life and a career in conservative journalism. Right now, Walters is just a junior reporter learning to give her readers the information they need. But if she can stick with it, if we can find a way to support women like her through the tough times, then she may bloom into a thought leader and respected political commentator, repaying society's investment a thousand times.
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Dave's The Name of the Butterfly
Dave's latest effort, The Name of the Butterfly, has not made nearly as big a splash as his previous novel, All the World Is Beer, an experimental coming-of-age story told from the perspective of a single cell of yeast. In some ways Butterfly is a much more conventional book, but I don't think that accounts for its muted reception. I think the book's richness takes time to unfold, and because it lacks some of the fireworks that critics have come to expect from Dave, it simply hasn't attracted the sustained attention that it demands (and deserves).
The book is set in a vaguely 19th-century, Holland-like country, but it makes no pretense to historical precision. The main characters are Pieter, an actuary in a bustling commercial city, and his wife Saskia. The couple met as young revolutionaries, members of the underground Socialist Party, and after the revolution they settled down to domesticity.
Pieter is discontented. You might say that he was unnerved by the revolution. He has become convinced that the decisions made by the Party leaders were rash and irresponsible, and that only an unlikely series of events, combined with the King's unwillingness to shed his subjects' blood, prevented a catastrophe. Pieter's mind keeps returning to the square where he and Saskia had assembled with the other revolutionaries, where the King's soldiers could easily have mowed them down . . . and where, overruling his advisors, the King ordered his troops to stand down and announced his abdication. Pieter is horrified that the revolution came so close to bloodshed, and ashamed that this was only averted by the mercy of a man Pieter had previously slandered.
Part of Pieter's dissatisfaction with the revolution has to do with its incomplete attainment of its aims. The King is gone and the Republic has been established, but the Socialists have been marginalized and the capitalists are firmly in charge. Abroad, the government has adopted a far more colonial and imperialistic stance than the King ever did. At home, religious fervor is on the rise, and Jews and homosexuals (who enjoyed the tacit protection of the King) have been driven out of public life. On the whole, Pieter is not sure that the dissolute, tolerant, somewhat haphazard reign of the King was so much worse than the hyper-capitalist, religion-drenched war-mongering of the Republic.
Saskia, on the other hand, only regrets that her brush with great events was so brief. She has reconnected with another revolutionary, Willem, who has prospered under the new regime. From Pieter's view, Willem is one of the upper-class opportunists who never believed in the revolution but coopted it and perverted its turbulent course to his own benefit. Willem in fact is a major stockholder in the insurance company that employs Pieter, and he divides his time between the capitol (where he cultivates his revolutionary connections) and his country estate, where he styles himself a naturalist.
As we come to see, Pieter's view of Willem is perhaps unfair. Willem was never a socialist, and he took considerable personal risk, first in financing the early stages of the revolution, and then in publicly calling for a republic at a time when the King still had a firm grip on power. Moreover, while Willem's lobbying efforts are venal, he takes no real interest in them and spends most of his time cataloguing butterflies.
And Willem, though taken with Saskia, does not use any of the means at his disposal to pursue her. In fact, to his and Pieter's mutual chagrin, Saskia uses Willem's connections to insinuate herself into the amoral, psychosexually charged world of the capitol. Here Dave writes with a light hand: it is up to the reader to decide if Saskia is genuinely interested in lawmaking and party politics, or if she is merely addicted to the thrill of the fast-moving political world. Either way, the novel takes on a frenetic and intoxicating energy when it focuses on her escapades in the capital.
The book is Dave's second-longest, at 798 pages, but it doesn't feel like a long book. Perhaps this is because it never stops moving: following Pieter to Willem's estate, then both the men to the capital, then Willem and Saskia back to the estate, then Saskia to Pieter, and so on. But perhaps, too, there is something in the book that makes it feel very un-book-like. Dave's writing has become far more placid and natural than it was during his coked-up "New York" phase, and Butterfly feels almost dream-like. When you are finished, you will feel not so much that you've read a story, as that you've recovered a memory - that Dave has lifted up the veil a little, to show you the world as it truly is.
The book is set in a vaguely 19th-century, Holland-like country, but it makes no pretense to historical precision. The main characters are Pieter, an actuary in a bustling commercial city, and his wife Saskia. The couple met as young revolutionaries, members of the underground Socialist Party, and after the revolution they settled down to domesticity.
Pieter is discontented. You might say that he was unnerved by the revolution. He has become convinced that the decisions made by the Party leaders were rash and irresponsible, and that only an unlikely series of events, combined with the King's unwillingness to shed his subjects' blood, prevented a catastrophe. Pieter's mind keeps returning to the square where he and Saskia had assembled with the other revolutionaries, where the King's soldiers could easily have mowed them down . . . and where, overruling his advisors, the King ordered his troops to stand down and announced his abdication. Pieter is horrified that the revolution came so close to bloodshed, and ashamed that this was only averted by the mercy of a man Pieter had previously slandered.
Part of Pieter's dissatisfaction with the revolution has to do with its incomplete attainment of its aims. The King is gone and the Republic has been established, but the Socialists have been marginalized and the capitalists are firmly in charge. Abroad, the government has adopted a far more colonial and imperialistic stance than the King ever did. At home, religious fervor is on the rise, and Jews and homosexuals (who enjoyed the tacit protection of the King) have been driven out of public life. On the whole, Pieter is not sure that the dissolute, tolerant, somewhat haphazard reign of the King was so much worse than the hyper-capitalist, religion-drenched war-mongering of the Republic.
Saskia, on the other hand, only regrets that her brush with great events was so brief. She has reconnected with another revolutionary, Willem, who has prospered under the new regime. From Pieter's view, Willem is one of the upper-class opportunists who never believed in the revolution but coopted it and perverted its turbulent course to his own benefit. Willem in fact is a major stockholder in the insurance company that employs Pieter, and he divides his time between the capitol (where he cultivates his revolutionary connections) and his country estate, where he styles himself a naturalist.
As we come to see, Pieter's view of Willem is perhaps unfair. Willem was never a socialist, and he took considerable personal risk, first in financing the early stages of the revolution, and then in publicly calling for a republic at a time when the King still had a firm grip on power. Moreover, while Willem's lobbying efforts are venal, he takes no real interest in them and spends most of his time cataloguing butterflies.
And Willem, though taken with Saskia, does not use any of the means at his disposal to pursue her. In fact, to his and Pieter's mutual chagrin, Saskia uses Willem's connections to insinuate herself into the amoral, psychosexually charged world of the capitol. Here Dave writes with a light hand: it is up to the reader to decide if Saskia is genuinely interested in lawmaking and party politics, or if she is merely addicted to the thrill of the fast-moving political world. Either way, the novel takes on a frenetic and intoxicating energy when it focuses on her escapades in the capital.
The book is Dave's second-longest, at 798 pages, but it doesn't feel like a long book. Perhaps this is because it never stops moving: following Pieter to Willem's estate, then both the men to the capital, then Willem and Saskia back to the estate, then Saskia to Pieter, and so on. But perhaps, too, there is something in the book that makes it feel very un-book-like. Dave's writing has become far more placid and natural than it was during his coked-up "New York" phase, and Butterfly feels almost dream-like. When you are finished, you will feel not so much that you've read a story, as that you've recovered a memory - that Dave has lifted up the veil a little, to show you the world as it truly is.
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Sarang's Bletchley Park
Sarang's latest effort, Bletchley Park, is his most ambitious novel to date. The story follows Basil Thwaite, a young mathematician recruited to work at the WWII-era code-breaking facility that gives the book its name. Basil excels at his work, but he struggles to fit in with his fellow cryptographers. He is not bullied, as he was at public school, but he finds social interaction to be baffling and embarrassing. He retreats further and further into the clean, crystalline world of math, searching for meaning in the intercepted Nazi messages that flow into Bletchley Park.
Here the story takes a bizarre turn. Where the rest of the team struggles to decrypt the incoming gibberish, Basil starts to discover too much meaning. The dramatic moment arrives when Basil, discomfited by an encounter with an attractive coworker, accidentally starts decrypting a message he had already decrypted. As the message resolves, Basil realizes that its interpretation has changed, that a slight difference in sequence has resulted in an entirely different, but completely intelligible, message. The first message described a petrol shortage on the eastern front; the second assesses the political reliability of a Vichy official. Basil is thrilled—he seems to have defeated the Nazis' attempt to smuggle one message under the cover of another.
But as more and more possible meanings emerge, excitement soon gives way to doubt and confusion. After all, which of the interpretations is correct? Is it a petrol shortage? A disloyal operative? New orders for the U-boats? A warning about Dutch saboteurs? It is beyond belief that the Nazis would undertake the laborious task of weaving all of these messages together. After all, why bother? But what other explanation could there be?
The Allied leadership becomes frustrated as Bletchley Park's output becomes sporadic and unreliable, and severe pressure is placed on Basil's superiors to fix the problem. But there is no way to justify choosing one interpretation over another. It is unacceptable to give the generals dozens of interpretations of each intercepted message; it is equally unacceptable to pick interpretations at random. The Allies expend significant resources in a desperate attempt to test the different interpretations, but no systematic pattern emerges. The longer Basil works on an intercepted message, the more interpretations he produces, but all interpretations seem to have an equal (and low) chance of being correct.
In the hands of a lesser writer, Bletchley Park could easily dissolve into a hazy morass, but Sarang doesn't let the Allies' dilemma overwhelm the story. In fact, as Bletchley Park becomes near-useless, Basil becomes increasingly detached from his work. Distrusted by some of his coworkers and despised by others, he spends his time reading philosophy, history, and economics, occasionally venturing to the local pub for beer-soaked debates. Bletchley Park shifts back and forth between Basil's forceful, slightly muddled arguments and tense discussions within the Allied leadership. As Basil broadens his analysis, the military view narrows, and we see an inversion of sorts. Basil is concerned with the big questions of the Empire: Indian home rule, Palestine, the sterling area. Meanwhile the Empire is increasingly focused on the narrowest of questions: what is it to make of the profusion of increasingly erratic intelligence coming from Bletchley Park?
Some readers will find Sarang's meandering, discursive storytelling unsatisfying, while others will find his hyper-realistic sex scenes unsettling. But the book is the most emotionally honest that Sarang has written, and the first that can really be called a book of ideas. One gratifying result is that Sarang has managed to avoid the irony/sincerity debate entirely. The book is so earnest, and yet appears so light and effortless, that it seems to exist on a different dimension, like an imaginary number hovering over the real number line. It is not always a pleasure to read, but it leaves the reader with such a whirlwind of ideas that few readers will be able to put it out of their minds until long after they finish it.
Here the story takes a bizarre turn. Where the rest of the team struggles to decrypt the incoming gibberish, Basil starts to discover too much meaning. The dramatic moment arrives when Basil, discomfited by an encounter with an attractive coworker, accidentally starts decrypting a message he had already decrypted. As the message resolves, Basil realizes that its interpretation has changed, that a slight difference in sequence has resulted in an entirely different, but completely intelligible, message. The first message described a petrol shortage on the eastern front; the second assesses the political reliability of a Vichy official. Basil is thrilled—he seems to have defeated the Nazis' attempt to smuggle one message under the cover of another.
But as more and more possible meanings emerge, excitement soon gives way to doubt and confusion. After all, which of the interpretations is correct? Is it a petrol shortage? A disloyal operative? New orders for the U-boats? A warning about Dutch saboteurs? It is beyond belief that the Nazis would undertake the laborious task of weaving all of these messages together. After all, why bother? But what other explanation could there be?
The Allied leadership becomes frustrated as Bletchley Park's output becomes sporadic and unreliable, and severe pressure is placed on Basil's superiors to fix the problem. But there is no way to justify choosing one interpretation over another. It is unacceptable to give the generals dozens of interpretations of each intercepted message; it is equally unacceptable to pick interpretations at random. The Allies expend significant resources in a desperate attempt to test the different interpretations, but no systematic pattern emerges. The longer Basil works on an intercepted message, the more interpretations he produces, but all interpretations seem to have an equal (and low) chance of being correct.
In the hands of a lesser writer, Bletchley Park could easily dissolve into a hazy morass, but Sarang doesn't let the Allies' dilemma overwhelm the story. In fact, as Bletchley Park becomes near-useless, Basil becomes increasingly detached from his work. Distrusted by some of his coworkers and despised by others, he spends his time reading philosophy, history, and economics, occasionally venturing to the local pub for beer-soaked debates. Bletchley Park shifts back and forth between Basil's forceful, slightly muddled arguments and tense discussions within the Allied leadership. As Basil broadens his analysis, the military view narrows, and we see an inversion of sorts. Basil is concerned with the big questions of the Empire: Indian home rule, Palestine, the sterling area. Meanwhile the Empire is increasingly focused on the narrowest of questions: what is it to make of the profusion of increasingly erratic intelligence coming from Bletchley Park?
Some readers will find Sarang's meandering, discursive storytelling unsatisfying, while others will find his hyper-realistic sex scenes unsettling. But the book is the most emotionally honest that Sarang has written, and the first that can really be called a book of ideas. One gratifying result is that Sarang has managed to avoid the irony/sincerity debate entirely. The book is so earnest, and yet appears so light and effortless, that it seems to exist on a different dimension, like an imaginary number hovering over the real number line. It is not always a pleasure to read, but it leaves the reader with such a whirlwind of ideas that few readers will be able to put it out of their minds until long after they finish it.
Friday, January 9, 2015
Sarang's A Safe Place
Sarang's latest effort, A Safe Place, is not his most exciting movie, and it's not his funniest. Fans expecting a reprise of his madcap comedy The Sociology Department are bound to be disappointed. Where his previous films have drawn comparisons to Sidney Lumet and Steve McQueen (the director, not the actor), A Safe Place defies easy categorization. The closest precedent I can think of is La Fille du RER, André Téchiné's touching story centered on a false allegation about an anti-Semitic attack on a Paris train. Like La Fille, A Safe Place revolves around a dramatic, nationally covered news story, but focuses almost all of its attention on the smaller, human-scale drama that surrounds the central players. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Frank Cavanaugh (played by Gabriel Byrne) is the Republican governor of Kansas and a serious contender for the Republican nomination in the upcoming presidential election. Having established good relations with the Tea Party, Cavanaugh seeks to burnish his foreign policy credentials with a whirlwind trip around the globe. He dazzles Conservatives in Britain and gives a well-received speech to Venstre party activists in Denmark. Soon he is catching a baseball game in Tokyo and then taking a quick swing through Korea and China.
It is in China that he comes to grief. During a tour of Nanjing, while listening to an account of the atrocities, Cavanaugh breaks down. He simply loses it, seemingly unable to cope with the enormity of the suffering. Here Sarang is ruthless: the camera doesn't turn away, even as Cavanaugh's sobs turn ragged. There is no music and little background noise—we mostly hear Cavanaugh's labored breathing. The scene lasts for minutes, as officials stand solemnly, unsure what to do.
Of course this disqualifies Cavanaugh for elective office. Even in the more refined precincts of the conservative movement, it is felt that Cavanaugh's conduct was unbecoming. As one conservative intellectual puts it, "True, the Japanese atrocities at Nanking were reprehensible. But only a few years later, the Communists swept through the country and made the Japanese look like amateurs. Maybe Cavanaugh should shed a few tears for their victims." The response among conservative bloggers and activists is, needless to say, much less restrained.
But thankfully, Sarang quickly moves away from such large-scale concerns and focuses on the personal repercussions for Cavanaugh and his family. Where the Nanjing scene was raw and brutal, Sarang's depiction of the aftermath is delicate and indirect. Cavanaugh's wife, Susan (played by Mary McDonnell), has to navigate an unfamiliar political and personal landscape, and we learn as much from her carefully maintained (if at times somewhat rigid) façade and her minor duplicities as we do from her direct interactions with her husband. This is a woman whose whole conception of her life and her marriage is shifting tectonically, buckling the terrain and causing unpredictable upwellings and stress fractures.
Frank Cavanaugh tries to support his wife, but he is distracted by politics in Kansas, where his friends and allies are being driven out of power and replaced with his old foes. Here Cavanaugh's sense of impotence begins to grow, as some of his friends are not just replaced but humiliated, with no one to protect them anymore. His wife casually asks about an old friend; Cavanaugh feels that she is mocking him, because the man has just lost his license to do business with the state and is about to declare bankruptcy.
Separately, Cavanaugh visits his son in Kansas City. The scene is a reminder of just how light Sarang's touch can be: it appears that Cavanaugh wants to tell his son that it is all right to come out of the closet now, and to apologize for whatever pressure has been put on the young man to remain closeted. But Cavanaugh doesn't manage to say any of that, and the scene is wrapped in ambiguity. The characters speak over each other, and then retract what they were going to say. It is perhaps the most realistic and heartbreaking scene Sarang has ever filmed.
A Safe Place is superficially about the ways that love and family are contingent on worldly considerations, and the pain that comes when those links are severed. But I prefer to see it as an exploration of what remains, the safe spaces where we connect, which are within our power to build or destroy, and the way our connections of love and affection draw us back even when there is little to see but rubble and devastation.
Frank Cavanaugh (played by Gabriel Byrne) is the Republican governor of Kansas and a serious contender for the Republican nomination in the upcoming presidential election. Having established good relations with the Tea Party, Cavanaugh seeks to burnish his foreign policy credentials with a whirlwind trip around the globe. He dazzles Conservatives in Britain and gives a well-received speech to Venstre party activists in Denmark. Soon he is catching a baseball game in Tokyo and then taking a quick swing through Korea and China.
It is in China that he comes to grief. During a tour of Nanjing, while listening to an account of the atrocities, Cavanaugh breaks down. He simply loses it, seemingly unable to cope with the enormity of the suffering. Here Sarang is ruthless: the camera doesn't turn away, even as Cavanaugh's sobs turn ragged. There is no music and little background noise—we mostly hear Cavanaugh's labored breathing. The scene lasts for minutes, as officials stand solemnly, unsure what to do.
Of course this disqualifies Cavanaugh for elective office. Even in the more refined precincts of the conservative movement, it is felt that Cavanaugh's conduct was unbecoming. As one conservative intellectual puts it, "True, the Japanese atrocities at Nanking were reprehensible. But only a few years later, the Communists swept through the country and made the Japanese look like amateurs. Maybe Cavanaugh should shed a few tears for their victims." The response among conservative bloggers and activists is, needless to say, much less restrained.
But thankfully, Sarang quickly moves away from such large-scale concerns and focuses on the personal repercussions for Cavanaugh and his family. Where the Nanjing scene was raw and brutal, Sarang's depiction of the aftermath is delicate and indirect. Cavanaugh's wife, Susan (played by Mary McDonnell), has to navigate an unfamiliar political and personal landscape, and we learn as much from her carefully maintained (if at times somewhat rigid) façade and her minor duplicities as we do from her direct interactions with her husband. This is a woman whose whole conception of her life and her marriage is shifting tectonically, buckling the terrain and causing unpredictable upwellings and stress fractures.
Frank Cavanaugh tries to support his wife, but he is distracted by politics in Kansas, where his friends and allies are being driven out of power and replaced with his old foes. Here Cavanaugh's sense of impotence begins to grow, as some of his friends are not just replaced but humiliated, with no one to protect them anymore. His wife casually asks about an old friend; Cavanaugh feels that she is mocking him, because the man has just lost his license to do business with the state and is about to declare bankruptcy.
Separately, Cavanaugh visits his son in Kansas City. The scene is a reminder of just how light Sarang's touch can be: it appears that Cavanaugh wants to tell his son that it is all right to come out of the closet now, and to apologize for whatever pressure has been put on the young man to remain closeted. But Cavanaugh doesn't manage to say any of that, and the scene is wrapped in ambiguity. The characters speak over each other, and then retract what they were going to say. It is perhaps the most realistic and heartbreaking scene Sarang has ever filmed.
A Safe Place is superficially about the ways that love and family are contingent on worldly considerations, and the pain that comes when those links are severed. But I prefer to see it as an exploration of what remains, the safe spaces where we connect, which are within our power to build or destroy, and the way our connections of love and affection draw us back even when there is little to see but rubble and devastation.
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