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.

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."

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.