Alan's latest effort, The Old Air, is a masterful synthesis of personal and social themes, by turns fanciful, somber, and triumphant, its threads coming together with symphonic force and then drifting apart into artfully discordant narratives. This is fitting, given its subject matter, but I am getting ahead of myself.
The book is set in the not-too-distant future where, as a last ditch effort to stop climate change, the government has pumped huge quantities of a synthetic gas into the atmosphere. The gas (confusingly called "syngas," a term that currently refers to man-made hydrocarbons) is relatively cheap to produce and has an effect that is the opposite of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. By spewing large quantities of it into the atmosphere, humanity has been able to stabilize temperatures a few degrees above their present equilibrium.
Syngas is controversial, but most of the dire effects that were predicted by its opponents have not materialized. Overall, cancer rates do not appear to have gone up or down, and while certain types of cancer have become slightly more prevalent and others slightly less so, in all cases the changes are very small in magnitude. Much the same can be said of agriculture—yields are down slightly on average, but the change is almost negligibly small. In fact there is scientific dispute about whether these phenomena are real, or are even caused by syngas. Perhaps some effects of increased global temperatures simply took time to manifest themselves, or perhaps they are caused by something else entirely. Or perhaps it is all statistical noise.
One consequence, though, is indisputable and universally acknowledged. Syngas changes the way waves propagate through the air, deadening and distorting the sounds we hear. People can still understand each others' speech, and things like police sirens still work, though the volume must be increased. But most music is completely ruined. Church hymns sound ghastly; concerts are pointless. Music fans buy special headphones that form a seal with their skin, and then pump the headphones full of carbon dioxide from a cartridge. (The same system is used in movie theaters.) But syngas slowly leaks in, and within an hour or two the headphones have to be purged again. Music becomes an expensive taste, and live music of all kinds quickly disappears.
Of course adaptations soon emerge. Concert halls are retrofitted to be airtight, and the syngas-laden air is pumped out and replaced with a combination of pure nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide—the "old air." The audience is admitted through an airlock, and for a few hours music sounds the way it once did. But this is preposterously expensive, and so real, live music is available to only two categories of people: the very rich, and the musicians themselves.
The protagonist of the story is Marcus Weller, a pianist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Weller is a highly talented musician, and so his access to music is assured. But his girlfriend, a librarian, is neither wealthy nor musically talented, and although Weller can get her into the occasional performance for free, it is obvious that music doesn't mean very much to her.
Before long the orchestra begins experimenting with a combination dormitory/practice space that is sealed from the environment and filled with old air. This is fairly economical, because it is really the airlock—which allows people to go back and forth between the atmosphere and the old air—that is expensive to operate. And so Weller is sequestered with his fellow musicians for weeks at a time, straining his relationship with his girlfriend.
Inevitably, the orchestra soon begins renting out rooms in its sealed dormitory, which is augmented with gyms, stores, and restaurants. Wealthy patrons join the musicians for weeks-long stays, working remotely during the day, or perhaps enjoying movies without the need for headphones. Every night there is live music. Weller earns some extra money at night by playing in a dark, redolent, joyously raucous bar. For a few hours, at least, it is possible to forget everything and lose himself in the music, and he leaves every night with a full tip jar. But he wakes up every morning alone, missing his girlfriend, missing the outdoors, and feeling that there is something artificial and repellent about playing piano in a dive bar populated by the super-rich.
One day Weller is practicing by himself, and when he finishes a song, he turns to find that a guest has come into the room. Although it is against the rules, Weller lets her stay, and by the time he is done practicing she has started to weep, stirred by the music.
You can imagine where it goes from here. Weller is forced to confront deep questions that he has long repressed, most importantly, can he truly love someone who doesn't appreciate music? And how much control can he exercise over his feelings? Is love the kind of thing that can be made subject to reason?
But it is more than that. Weller foresees a dark future of growing separation between the haves and the have-nots, a world without any shared love of music. In short, a world in which music is a luxury that can be enjoyed only by people with talent or money, musicians and musical tourists. A world in which blessings are showered freely on the elites and denied to everyone else. How is a good person who loves music supposed to navigate a world like that?
And so The Old Air adroitly focuses the reader's attention on real-life questions about the foundations of love and the quandaries of privilege in an increasingly unequal world. Here I give Alan credit for his light touch. He doesn't pretend that there is any easy or satisfying answer to these questions. In fact, he suggests that we are caught on the horns of a society that is charging forward onto morally and aesthetically untenable ground. And our only choice, if we have a choice, is to be impaled on one horn or the other.
Sunday, December 3, 2017
Monday, October 9, 2017
Calista's Ignominy, Part 2
Among all the stories in Calista's latest effort, Ignominy, "Doomed to Repeat It" is the one in which she most clearly wears her heart on her sleeve. "Doomed" tells the story of Rafael ("Raff") Stafford, a young black man who became politically active on campus as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. Determined to continue fighting for change, Stafford makes a long-shot run for governor of Missouri, campaigning on a promise to reform law enforcement and the justice system.
At first things go Stafford's way. A veteran Democratic politician, seemingly a shoo-in for the nomination, decides not to run due to a family health issue, and he unexpectedly endorses Stafford. Capitalizing on the endorsement, and finding an unexpected joy in (and talent for) campaigning, Stafford wins a narrow victory in the primary and prepares for the general election. His opponent, Mark Ligett, is a fellow alumnus of the University of Missouri, a smarmy white classics major who spent his college years as a right-wing provocateur, inviting controversial speakers to the campus and then capitalizing on any impropriety in the resulting protests.
Early in the race, Ligett goes on Fox News and claims that under Stafford's leadership the black students on campus had tried to "subjugate" the Mizzou football team, an explosive charge in Missouri. Stafford responds angrily, arguing that Ligett's attack is a preposterous racial provocation. The fact of the matter is that Stafford had requested that the football team enter the practice field through a pathway on the opposite side of the field from an area where BLM activists gathered during a campus protest. Stafford's request was simply meant to keep the activists from getting in the players' way and vice versa, and he can't imagine why it would be considered "subjugation."
But by this point Stafford's luck has run out. The path that he had suggested for the football team took it beneath an ornate gateway—literally, the team was being asked to walk sub jugum, "under the yoke" (that is, beneath the horizontal cross-piece of the gateway). "Subjugate," far from being a racial provocation, was in fact a refined, erudite, and completely true way to describe Stafford's proposal. Stafford faces near-universal condemnation for his ignorance of history and his haste to play the race card.
Stafford soon lags Ligett by double digits in the polls, and his campaign sheds staff as donations dry up. Stafford crisscrosses the state with a few loyal volunteers, trying to convince voters that he is not the caricature the media has portrayed him as, but as election day approaches it seems like an impossible task.
Once again, though, fortune smiles on Stafford. With just a week to go until the election, Ligett goes on Sean Hannity's show to crow about his inevitable victory. Hannity asks him what he plans to do in office, and Ligett says that he wants to fight back against all the policies that have been put in place by "Obama, Schumer, Pelosi, etc." Hannity, stunned, asks Ligett to rephrase his point. Ligett repeats himself using essentially the same words, and Hannity buries his face in his hands.
Then, his voice tinged with regret and breaking at times, Hannity explains that while et cetera and et alia both mean "and others," et cetera means "and other things," while et alia is the expression used to mean "and other people." Ligett has just referred to three politicians—a black man, a woman, and a Jew—as things rather than people. Ligett tries to plead ignorance, but Hannity, who spent hours talking up Ligett's knowledge of the classics during "SubjuGate," won't hear it. He kicks Ligett off of his program and apologizes to the audience for what they have just seen.
The next morning, Rush Limbaugh coins the nickname "Ligett the bigot," an epithet that will follow Ligett for the rest of the campaign. Republican candidates across the country disavow Ligett in an attempt to contain the damage. For the most part they succeed, but Stafford wins in a landslide that brings with it majorities in both the Missouri House of Representatives and the Missouri Senate. By this point the "subjugate" controversy has come to seem quaint and overblown by comparison to Ligett's open bigotry, and Stafford holds his victory party on Mizzou's practice field, where supporters can walk "under the jugum" in tongue-in-cheek celebration. A new day has dawned for racial justice in Missouri.
Early in the race, Ligett goes on Fox News and claims that under Stafford's leadership the black students on campus had tried to "subjugate" the Mizzou football team, an explosive charge in Missouri. Stafford responds angrily, arguing that Ligett's attack is a preposterous racial provocation. The fact of the matter is that Stafford had requested that the football team enter the practice field through a pathway on the opposite side of the field from an area where BLM activists gathered during a campus protest. Stafford's request was simply meant to keep the activists from getting in the players' way and vice versa, and he can't imagine why it would be considered "subjugation."
But by this point Stafford's luck has run out. The path that he had suggested for the football team took it beneath an ornate gateway—literally, the team was being asked to walk sub jugum, "under the yoke" (that is, beneath the horizontal cross-piece of the gateway). "Subjugate," far from being a racial provocation, was in fact a refined, erudite, and completely true way to describe Stafford's proposal. Stafford faces near-universal condemnation for his ignorance of history and his haste to play the race card.
Stafford soon lags Ligett by double digits in the polls, and his campaign sheds staff as donations dry up. Stafford crisscrosses the state with a few loyal volunteers, trying to convince voters that he is not the caricature the media has portrayed him as, but as election day approaches it seems like an impossible task.
Once again, though, fortune smiles on Stafford. With just a week to go until the election, Ligett goes on Sean Hannity's show to crow about his inevitable victory. Hannity asks him what he plans to do in office, and Ligett says that he wants to fight back against all the policies that have been put in place by "Obama, Schumer, Pelosi, etc." Hannity, stunned, asks Ligett to rephrase his point. Ligett repeats himself using essentially the same words, and Hannity buries his face in his hands.
Then, his voice tinged with regret and breaking at times, Hannity explains that while et cetera and et alia both mean "and others," et cetera means "and other things," while et alia is the expression used to mean "and other people." Ligett has just referred to three politicians—a black man, a woman, and a Jew—as things rather than people. Ligett tries to plead ignorance, but Hannity, who spent hours talking up Ligett's knowledge of the classics during "SubjuGate," won't hear it. He kicks Ligett off of his program and apologizes to the audience for what they have just seen.
The next morning, Rush Limbaugh coins the nickname "Ligett the bigot," an epithet that will follow Ligett for the rest of the campaign. Republican candidates across the country disavow Ligett in an attempt to contain the damage. For the most part they succeed, but Stafford wins in a landslide that brings with it majorities in both the Missouri House of Representatives and the Missouri Senate. By this point the "subjugate" controversy has come to seem quaint and overblown by comparison to Ligett's open bigotry, and Stafford holds his victory party on Mizzou's practice field, where supporters can walk "under the jugum" in tongue-in-cheek celebration. A new day has dawned for racial justice in Missouri.
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
Calista's Ignominy, Part 1
Calista's latest effort, Ignominy, is hard to categorize. I suppose it could be called a book of short stories, though some aren't particularly short, or a series of novellas. Maybe it's best simply to call it a collection of absurdist political vignettes with surprisingly complicated human dimensions. I'll write a separate review for each of a handful of stories, starting with one of my favorites, "High Desert."
The story follows a Democratic political consultant, Anne Borland, as she tries to rescue what should have been an easy Democratic campaign for a Senate seat in Oregon. The problem is that the Republican candidate, Grant Sissley, has proven to be considerably more charismatic and eloquent than the Democrat, Jim O'Neal. A fourth-generation hop farmer, Sissley was an early and vocal supporter of gay rights, making it hard to depict him as a typical Republican. After a strong debate performance, Sissley takes a modest but steady single-digit margin in the polls, and Borland is sent by the national party as a "big gun" to take control of the situation.
Borland quickly launches a vigorous "oppo research" project, and before long it has hit gold. The hops that Sissley grows, it turns out, are not the strong, resinous hops used to brew the Pacific Northwest's famous "dank" IPAs. Instead, he favors noble varieties descended from the mild, herby, spicy hops of central Europe. Borland rolls out a "Cascadia Challenge" booth at political rallies, where undecided voters can sample beers brewed with Sissley's hops and beers brewed with more typical Northwest varieties like Citra, Simcoe, and Centennial. A large majority of voters leave the booth shaking their heads, wondering how they could ever have viewed Sissley as "one of us."
Borland is scrupulously fair when she procures the beers for the Cascadia Challenge—the beer brewed with Sissley's hops is a well-crafted pilsner beer that shows off the hops to good effect. But Oregon drinkers consistently reject the pilsner in favor of what, in all honesty, can only be described as a mediocre double IPA.
And herein lies Borland's ethical quandary. Borland is a beer enthusiast and she recognizes that Sissley's hops are a true accomplishment, creating some of the best pilsner she has ever tasted. She knows Sissley's beer is better, and yet voters are rejecting it out of hand. The Cascadia Challenge is everything that is wrong in American politics, trading on voters' ignorance, tribalism, and prejudice, their unwillingness to engage with anything that is different or challenging. This is not why Borland got into politics! In the voters' rejection of foreign-tasting beer she detects shades of the anti-immigrant sentiment that swept Trump into power.
And so the story hurtles toward its dramatic conclusion, with Borland out of control and drinking more and more of the Cascadia Challenge pilsner, Sissley growing increasingly bitter and desperate as his lead dissovles, and the race slipping into the dark territory that has come to grip American politics...
The story follows a Democratic political consultant, Anne Borland, as she tries to rescue what should have been an easy Democratic campaign for a Senate seat in Oregon. The problem is that the Republican candidate, Grant Sissley, has proven to be considerably more charismatic and eloquent than the Democrat, Jim O'Neal. A fourth-generation hop farmer, Sissley was an early and vocal supporter of gay rights, making it hard to depict him as a typical Republican. After a strong debate performance, Sissley takes a modest but steady single-digit margin in the polls, and Borland is sent by the national party as a "big gun" to take control of the situation.
Borland quickly launches a vigorous "oppo research" project, and before long it has hit gold. The hops that Sissley grows, it turns out, are not the strong, resinous hops used to brew the Pacific Northwest's famous "dank" IPAs. Instead, he favors noble varieties descended from the mild, herby, spicy hops of central Europe. Borland rolls out a "Cascadia Challenge" booth at political rallies, where undecided voters can sample beers brewed with Sissley's hops and beers brewed with more typical Northwest varieties like Citra, Simcoe, and Centennial. A large majority of voters leave the booth shaking their heads, wondering how they could ever have viewed Sissley as "one of us."
Borland is scrupulously fair when she procures the beers for the Cascadia Challenge—the beer brewed with Sissley's hops is a well-crafted pilsner beer that shows off the hops to good effect. But Oregon drinkers consistently reject the pilsner in favor of what, in all honesty, can only be described as a mediocre double IPA.
And herein lies Borland's ethical quandary. Borland is a beer enthusiast and she recognizes that Sissley's hops are a true accomplishment, creating some of the best pilsner she has ever tasted. She knows Sissley's beer is better, and yet voters are rejecting it out of hand. The Cascadia Challenge is everything that is wrong in American politics, trading on voters' ignorance, tribalism, and prejudice, their unwillingness to engage with anything that is different or challenging. This is not why Borland got into politics! In the voters' rejection of foreign-tasting beer she detects shades of the anti-immigrant sentiment that swept Trump into power.
And so the story hurtles toward its dramatic conclusion, with Borland out of control and drinking more and more of the Cascadia Challenge pilsner, Sissley growing increasingly bitter and desperate as his lead dissovles, and the race slipping into the dark territory that has come to grip American politics...
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
My Apology to Sarang
Clearly I owe Sarang an apology for what happened this week, and I offer one without reservation. But I also want to explain what happened in detail so that, I hope, my readers can see that I had no malicious intent.
Literature has never been a particularly good way to make money, and in recent years a lot of traditional revenue models have been challenged. I now derive almost all of my income from this site, which frees me from certain pressures, but which also requires me to promote myself more aggressively than previous generations of literary taste-makers. To drive traffic, I often tweet excerpts from an interview before publishing it. (This practice is not uncommon and is not inherently problematic, though obviously in this case it was inadvisable.) And so when Sarang agreed to a phone interview while touring in support of his latest effort, The Tricolour, I knew that I had to make the most of my opportunity. That's why on Monday I started tweeting a few of the most interesting parts of the interview.
Among them was this now infamous tweet:
This was all the more troubling because The Tricolour is set in Ireland (both the Republic and Northern Ireland), and Sarang's publisher is relying heavily on the book's success to make up for the commercial disappointment of his previous novel, Lady Chatterjee's Lover. I will post a full review later, but suffice it to say that The Tricolour is a nuanced exploration of Irish identity and, as it happens, is set almost entirely outside of Dublin.
I posted the tweet on Monday, but it got almost no attention (including, apparently, from Sarang, who is not among my 113 Twitter followers) until it was retweeted yesterday by Colm Tóibín with the pithy comment, "My god..." By then, Sarang was on a jet to New York, blissfully unaware of the firestorm that my tweet had ignited. #HasSarangLandedYet quickly shot to the top of Twitter's trending topics, and everyone from Colson Whitehead to Alec Baldwin weighed in with biting commentary.
Worse, once he arrived in the U.S., Sarang was whisked straight from JFK to Charlie Rose's studio, so he was blindsided when Rose read him the tweet out loud and asked him if it was accurate. Sarang confirmed that it was and expressed surprise that anyone might disagree. Many of his ardent fans had stuck by him this far, assuming I had misquoted him, and so his calm reaffirmation of the statement sparked a new wave of shock and revulsion across the globe. (The interview has not aired yet, but leaked footage of this back-and-forth spread quickly on social media.)
My only defense is that conversation with Sarang is never easy, and it is all the more difficult when carried out on cell phones across the Atlantic. Here is my initial transcription of my recording of that portion of the interview (we had been discussing the extent to which different countries are dominated by a single preeminent city):
And so I wholeheartedly apologize for my tweet and for the anguish that it has caused Sarang and his readers. I hope that we can move past this painful episode. I also hope that Sarang's publisher will take my sincere apology into account when considering its legal options.
[UPDATE: Sarang has asked me to post a more complete excerpt from my transcript, which I have done below.
Literature has never been a particularly good way to make money, and in recent years a lot of traditional revenue models have been challenged. I now derive almost all of my income from this site, which frees me from certain pressures, but which also requires me to promote myself more aggressively than previous generations of literary taste-makers. To drive traffic, I often tweet excerpts from an interview before publishing it. (This practice is not uncommon and is not inherently problematic, though obviously in this case it was inadvisable.) And so when Sarang agreed to a phone interview while touring in support of his latest effort, The Tricolour, I knew that I had to make the most of my opportunity. That's why on Monday I started tweeting a few of the most interesting parts of the interview.
Among them was this now infamous tweet:
Of course, "#provocative" was putting it mildly. Sarang has always enjoyed a very strong following all over Ireland, and his readers outside the capital city were shocked and dismayed. Dublin is the largest city in Ireland, but it was first a Viking city and then the seat of British rule, and a large majority of Irish people do not live in Dublin... so claiming that the soul of Ireland resides there came across as, at best, a tendentious and simplistic way to understand Irishness.Sarang: "Dublin is the soul of Ireland and has been for a very long time..." #CallousLiterature #books #novels #provocative— James (@15c3PO) August 21, 2017
This was all the more troubling because The Tricolour is set in Ireland (both the Republic and Northern Ireland), and Sarang's publisher is relying heavily on the book's success to make up for the commercial disappointment of his previous novel, Lady Chatterjee's Lover. I will post a full review later, but suffice it to say that The Tricolour is a nuanced exploration of Irish identity and, as it happens, is set almost entirely outside of Dublin.
I posted the tweet on Monday, but it got almost no attention (including, apparently, from Sarang, who is not among my 113 Twitter followers) until it was retweeted yesterday by Colm Tóibín with the pithy comment, "My god..." By then, Sarang was on a jet to New York, blissfully unaware of the firestorm that my tweet had ignited. #HasSarangLandedYet quickly shot to the top of Twitter's trending topics, and everyone from Colson Whitehead to Alec Baldwin weighed in with biting commentary.
Worse, once he arrived in the U.S., Sarang was whisked straight from JFK to Charlie Rose's studio, so he was blindsided when Rose read him the tweet out loud and asked him if it was accurate. Sarang confirmed that it was and expressed surprise that anyone might disagree. Many of his ardent fans had stuck by him this far, assuming I had misquoted him, and so his calm reaffirmation of the statement sparked a new wave of shock and revulsion across the globe. (The interview has not aired yet, but leaked footage of this back-and-forth spread quickly on social media.)
My only defense is that conversation with Sarang is never easy, and it is all the more difficult when carried out on cell phones across the Atlantic. Here is my initial transcription of my recording of that portion of the interview (we had been discussing the extent to which different countries are dominated by a single preeminent city):
J: England is sort of in between.
S: Perhaps. London is obviously the most important city, but you've also got Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham... but for my purposes what is more important is that Dublin is the soul of Ireland and has been for a very long time.Sarang now claims that he meant that Dublin is the Seoul of Ireland. I hope you will agree that my interpretation was reasonable, but I take Sarang's word for it that he was comparing Ireland's largest city to South Korea's.
And so I wholeheartedly apologize for my tweet and for the anguish that it has caused Sarang and his readers. I hope that we can move past this painful episode. I also hope that Sarang's publisher will take my sincere apology into account when considering its legal options.
[UPDATE: Sarang has asked me to post a more complete excerpt from my transcript, which I have done below.
S: Of course, the U.S. has any number of cities preeminent in their sector. New York for finance, San Francisco and Seattle for tech, Washington for politics, Los Angeles for God knows what... all the filmmaking energy is in Frankfurt now... [Editorial note: Sarang has taken advantage of extremely generous German tax subsidies to move his independent film studio to Frankfurt.]
J: But not France.
S: No, not France, everything is in Paris. And more to the point, not South Korea. Seoul is the epicenter of everything in the country, there isn't a major sector it doesn't dominate.
J: England is sort of in between.
S: Perhaps. London is obviously the most important city, but you've also got Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham... but for my purposes what is more important is that Dublin is the soul of Ireland and has been for a very long time. I mean in some ways it is a hypercharged soul, it is more soul than soul. I don't even know what Irish city would be comparable to Busan, which is clearly South Korea's "second city." Belfast, if you count that. Otherwise I suppose it would be Cork?I hope this clears everything up and we can move on.]
Monday, June 19, 2017
Sarang's The Coleridge Proof
Sarang's latest effort, The Coleridge Proof, is a slim volume, but its density of ideas and Baroque style give it a much bigger impact than its page count would suggest. Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as Calista's Into the World (which I reviewed in these pages) and Francis Spufford's Red Plenty, and owing more than a little to Sarang's previous work Bletchley Park (which I also reviewed), The Coleridge Proof explores the overlap between abstract ideas and personal interests, policymaking and the war of ideas.
The novel opens as Anabel Coleridge, a political philosopher guest lecturing at the University of Chicago, achieves the holy grail of left wing scholarship: a formal proof refuting neoliberalism. In the opening pages of the book, Coleridge alternates between carefully checking her work, covering page after page with careful, neatly written notation, and strolling through Hyde Park, her mind on fire with the astounding implications of her proof. Of course she understands that capitalism is not going to go away without a fight, but her proof of its incoherence will remove any last vestige of intellectual justification, and slowly but surely the new socialist order will take shape. Of course Coleridge also stands to become famous, a towering figure in academia, a God on Twitter.
The turning point comes when Coleridge, almost finished writing up her proof for publication, idly works out a few of its logical implications. She is brought up short when she realizes that her proof not only refutes capitalism, it also proves that walkable urbanism lacks any rational justification. Coleridge desperately works through the proof again and again, but the stubborn fact remains. She cannot launch her attack on capitalism without exploding walkable urbanism as well.
Once she has resigned herself to the harsh truth, Coleridge confronts her unpalatable options. She could, of course, publish the proof without making any mention of its implications for urban policy. For some period of time, she would reap all the rewards for her accomplishment without any price being paid. It is even possible that the destruction of any intellectual case for walkable urbanism would go unnoticed for years, decades... maybe forever.
But the difficulty is that Coleridge's proof is certain to inspire a deluge of derivative academic work—the proof will be the basis for thousands of papers mining it for new ideas. It would be foolhardy to think that its implied refutation of urbanism will go unnoticed, especially when so much money is riding on it. And while Coleridge despises neoliberalism and longs to sound its death knell, she loves cities almost as much, and would hate to give up her carless lifestyle, enabled by the very mass transit and dense zoning that her work has the power to destroy. But is her reluctance to publish simply an expression of her own privilege? Doesn't integrity require her to publish her ideas even at great personal cost? (Though she tries to be high-minded about all of this, among other things Coleridge can't ignore the huge and vocal urbanist presence on Twitter—if she publishes the proof, then so much for her dreams of widespread Twitter acclaim!)
In desperate need of advice, Coleridge turns to an online forum for academics working in political philosophy. Obviously she can't reveal the full extent of her dilemma, but she lays it out in abstract form. Alas, even this general description is enough to pique the interest of Charles Laval, a veteran lobbyist for the car industry. In his youth, Laval was working toward an irrefutable refutation of urbanism with a brilliant Vietnamese philosopher, Dr. Phan, when the war interrupted their collaboration. Laval made it out of Saigon on a helicopter; Phan didn't. Without Phan's help, Laval was unable to complete their work, and he eventually quit philosophy for a career on K Street.
Now, decades later, Laval notices a few seemingly innocuous details in Coleridge's forum posts that suggest that she has stumbled on the same argument that preoccupied Laval and Phan so many years before. Of course, Laval is now in a position to mobilize vast resources in service of his clients' interests, and, perhaps haunted by his failure to get his friend out of Saigon, he sets in motion a plan that ultimately brings The Coleridge Proof to its stunning denouement.
It is not my place to spoil the ending of the book, so I will simply note that I wish more novels were as convincing as The Coleridge Proof in describing the ways in which academic work and personal foibles interact. We may like to think that grand ideas exist on some elevated, airless plane, far above our petty concerns and personal feuds. But in real life they are all a jumble, and it is only when we confront this truth about our ideas that we can evaluate them in their true light.
The novel opens as Anabel Coleridge, a political philosopher guest lecturing at the University of Chicago, achieves the holy grail of left wing scholarship: a formal proof refuting neoliberalism. In the opening pages of the book, Coleridge alternates between carefully checking her work, covering page after page with careful, neatly written notation, and strolling through Hyde Park, her mind on fire with the astounding implications of her proof. Of course she understands that capitalism is not going to go away without a fight, but her proof of its incoherence will remove any last vestige of intellectual justification, and slowly but surely the new socialist order will take shape. Of course Coleridge also stands to become famous, a towering figure in academia, a God on Twitter.
The turning point comes when Coleridge, almost finished writing up her proof for publication, idly works out a few of its logical implications. She is brought up short when she realizes that her proof not only refutes capitalism, it also proves that walkable urbanism lacks any rational justification. Coleridge desperately works through the proof again and again, but the stubborn fact remains. She cannot launch her attack on capitalism without exploding walkable urbanism as well.
Once she has resigned herself to the harsh truth, Coleridge confronts her unpalatable options. She could, of course, publish the proof without making any mention of its implications for urban policy. For some period of time, she would reap all the rewards for her accomplishment without any price being paid. It is even possible that the destruction of any intellectual case for walkable urbanism would go unnoticed for years, decades... maybe forever.
But the difficulty is that Coleridge's proof is certain to inspire a deluge of derivative academic work—the proof will be the basis for thousands of papers mining it for new ideas. It would be foolhardy to think that its implied refutation of urbanism will go unnoticed, especially when so much money is riding on it. And while Coleridge despises neoliberalism and longs to sound its death knell, she loves cities almost as much, and would hate to give up her carless lifestyle, enabled by the very mass transit and dense zoning that her work has the power to destroy. But is her reluctance to publish simply an expression of her own privilege? Doesn't integrity require her to publish her ideas even at great personal cost? (Though she tries to be high-minded about all of this, among other things Coleridge can't ignore the huge and vocal urbanist presence on Twitter—if she publishes the proof, then so much for her dreams of widespread Twitter acclaim!)
In desperate need of advice, Coleridge turns to an online forum for academics working in political philosophy. Obviously she can't reveal the full extent of her dilemma, but she lays it out in abstract form. Alas, even this general description is enough to pique the interest of Charles Laval, a veteran lobbyist for the car industry. In his youth, Laval was working toward an irrefutable refutation of urbanism with a brilliant Vietnamese philosopher, Dr. Phan, when the war interrupted their collaboration. Laval made it out of Saigon on a helicopter; Phan didn't. Without Phan's help, Laval was unable to complete their work, and he eventually quit philosophy for a career on K Street.
Now, decades later, Laval notices a few seemingly innocuous details in Coleridge's forum posts that suggest that she has stumbled on the same argument that preoccupied Laval and Phan so many years before. Of course, Laval is now in a position to mobilize vast resources in service of his clients' interests, and, perhaps haunted by his failure to get his friend out of Saigon, he sets in motion a plan that ultimately brings The Coleridge Proof to its stunning denouement.
It is not my place to spoil the ending of the book, so I will simply note that I wish more novels were as convincing as The Coleridge Proof in describing the ways in which academic work and personal foibles interact. We may like to think that grand ideas exist on some elevated, airless plane, far above our petty concerns and personal feuds. But in real life they are all a jumble, and it is only when we confront this truth about our ideas that we can evaluate them in their true light.
Saturday, June 3, 2017
Calista's Flameout
Calista's latest effort, Flameout, is a sharp send-up of the surveillance state, as well as a pessimistic exploration of morality and personal responsibility. Flameout is buoyant and entertaining, but it carries a hard cynical edge that was missing from Calista's earlier satires.
As the story starts, a government agent, Brian O'Malley, is trying to hack into a personal computer used by Julie Fleishman, a minor politician in the opposition party. O'Malley is good at his job, but he has begun to question the morality of the surveillance. As his supervisors push him for results, he squirms, trying to find some way to avoid complicity. But he is saddled with student debt, and if he leaves his job the government will do its best to tarnish him in the eyes of potential employers. There appears to be no way out. O'Malley sinks into depression, unable to take pleasure in anything, and starts drinking heavily. Even his favorite hobby, homebrewing, ceases to offer any escape for him, and simply becomes an excuse for more drinking.
But O'Malley's darkest moment also proves to be his salvation. He finally breaks into Fleishman's computer, where he finds nothing more embarrassing than a few racy (but non-pornographic) pictures and a few unflattering emails. But more importantly, he also finds Fleishman's beer recipes (she, too, is an avid homebrewer). O'Malley brews a tart wit beer using one of the recipes, and it is delicious. In fact it is by far the best beer that O'Malley has brewed. Suddenly he sees a way out! He surreptitiously fixes the security flaws on Fleishman's computer, pretends to his bosses that he was unable to penetrate it, quits his job, and opens a brewpub. Fleishman's amazing recipes make it an instant success, and it soon grows into one of the largest and most beloved craft breweries in the country.
Here, though, the story sours. Fleishman's career does not go as well as O'Malley's—after losing a close election, she leaves politics to open a brewery. The problem is that her beers are seen as unoriginal knockoffs of O'Malley's best-selling beers—in fact they are basically identical. Fleishman endures the ridicule of beer reviewers and the scorn of beer drinkers. She is forced to rely on her retired parents for money to keep the brewery afloat, and she feels like a failure.
All of this would be more tolerable if O'Malley felt some responsibility for Fleishman's predicament. But he feels no guilt. Worse, he sees his actions as heroic, having shielded her from surveillance. Of course he ignores that his surveillance has also ruined her life. Here we are forced to consider what the real cost of surveillance is. Would Fleishman have been happier if the government had seen her pictures and emails, but her recipes had been ignored? Is it the act of surveillance or its real-world consequences that should concern us?
But the deeper questions are moral ones. Calista cuts into them with a deft, almost surgical touch, and yet for the reader the result is like being mauled with a hammer. Are humans driven to cast themselves as heroes no matter what the truth is? Are they self-justifying to the point of absurdity? It is hard not to answer those questions in the affirmative, and it is a bleak picture that emerges. After all, if a wrongdoer is forever shielded from recognizing the wrong, then how can true justice ever be done?
As the story ends, Calista has set O'Malley and Fleishman on a collision course. O'Malley is scheduled to appear at a beer festival to give a talk on recipe design. Fleishman will be at the same festival, pouring a new beer that she hopes will redeem her reputation and save her brewery. But first, she attends O'Malley's talk, where she recognizes his recipe... and here the book closes with the fuse lit, but the fireworks unexploded. It is for us to imagine the likely confrontation, and for us to argue about whether O'Malley can redeem himself, whether humans are capable of transcending their petty self-righteousness, whether, after all is said and done, there is any hope for us.
As the story starts, a government agent, Brian O'Malley, is trying to hack into a personal computer used by Julie Fleishman, a minor politician in the opposition party. O'Malley is good at his job, but he has begun to question the morality of the surveillance. As his supervisors push him for results, he squirms, trying to find some way to avoid complicity. But he is saddled with student debt, and if he leaves his job the government will do its best to tarnish him in the eyes of potential employers. There appears to be no way out. O'Malley sinks into depression, unable to take pleasure in anything, and starts drinking heavily. Even his favorite hobby, homebrewing, ceases to offer any escape for him, and simply becomes an excuse for more drinking.
But O'Malley's darkest moment also proves to be his salvation. He finally breaks into Fleishman's computer, where he finds nothing more embarrassing than a few racy (but non-pornographic) pictures and a few unflattering emails. But more importantly, he also finds Fleishman's beer recipes (she, too, is an avid homebrewer). O'Malley brews a tart wit beer using one of the recipes, and it is delicious. In fact it is by far the best beer that O'Malley has brewed. Suddenly he sees a way out! He surreptitiously fixes the security flaws on Fleishman's computer, pretends to his bosses that he was unable to penetrate it, quits his job, and opens a brewpub. Fleishman's amazing recipes make it an instant success, and it soon grows into one of the largest and most beloved craft breweries in the country.
Here, though, the story sours. Fleishman's career does not go as well as O'Malley's—after losing a close election, she leaves politics to open a brewery. The problem is that her beers are seen as unoriginal knockoffs of O'Malley's best-selling beers—in fact they are basically identical. Fleishman endures the ridicule of beer reviewers and the scorn of beer drinkers. She is forced to rely on her retired parents for money to keep the brewery afloat, and she feels like a failure.
All of this would be more tolerable if O'Malley felt some responsibility for Fleishman's predicament. But he feels no guilt. Worse, he sees his actions as heroic, having shielded her from surveillance. Of course he ignores that his surveillance has also ruined her life. Here we are forced to consider what the real cost of surveillance is. Would Fleishman have been happier if the government had seen her pictures and emails, but her recipes had been ignored? Is it the act of surveillance or its real-world consequences that should concern us?
But the deeper questions are moral ones. Calista cuts into them with a deft, almost surgical touch, and yet for the reader the result is like being mauled with a hammer. Are humans driven to cast themselves as heroes no matter what the truth is? Are they self-justifying to the point of absurdity? It is hard not to answer those questions in the affirmative, and it is a bleak picture that emerges. After all, if a wrongdoer is forever shielded from recognizing the wrong, then how can true justice ever be done?
As the story ends, Calista has set O'Malley and Fleishman on a collision course. O'Malley is scheduled to appear at a beer festival to give a talk on recipe design. Fleishman will be at the same festival, pouring a new beer that she hopes will redeem her reputation and save her brewery. But first, she attends O'Malley's talk, where she recognizes his recipe... and here the book closes with the fuse lit, but the fireworks unexploded. It is for us to imagine the likely confrontation, and for us to argue about whether O'Malley can redeem himself, whether humans are capable of transcending their petty self-righteousness, whether, after all is said and done, there is any hope for us.
Monday, April 3, 2017
Dave's Unreadable Latest Effort
I have a strict rule that I must read a book cover to cover (or watch a movie start to finish) before I post a review in these pages. It's part of my implicit contract with my readers. This is why I read the entirety of Calista's ill-conceived "bike lane" trilogy. It is why I watched all 16 hours of Sarang's n Things I Hate About You. It is why I haven't posted a review of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled and probably never will.
And yet I feel compelled to break my rule and review Dave's latest effort despite having read far less than 1% of it. The reason is simple: Dave has simultaneously published 10 million detective novels, and even if I could read them at a rate of 100 per day, I could not finish a third of them before dying. Clearly an exception was called for.
As you will have guessed, Dave didn't actually write 10 million books. Or at least, not directly. The novels were procedurally generated using an algorithm that Dave "trained" on the collected works of Agatha Christie. Dave claims not to have edited the results at all, or even to have read very many of them. (This raises the bizarre possibility that I have read more of Dave's books than Dave has.)
The books themselves, at least the ones I read, were highly enjoyable, featuring plenty of unconventional plot twists but never straying far from the eminently satisfying formula that Christie perfected. Pleasingly, there seem to be plenty of Poirot mysteries, which have always been my favorites.
However clever the plot, though, it was seldom difficult to identify the murderer, at least after reading two or three of the books. It is not that the identity of the killer is always the same—the murderer might be almost anyone, from an over-the-hill chess genius, to a willowy débutante, to a surgeon with a deadly secret. But Dave programmed the algorithm so that the murderer is always given the same name—"the Great War" or "World War I." The other characters blithely use these names, giving no indication that they are in any way out of the ordinary. This can be quite confusing when the actual war is discussed.
Needless to say, the consequence is that the books do not quite match Christie's capacity to surprise. But of course this is the point. As the books go on, one after another, the Great War's death toll rises, and the ridiculous number of books hammers home the sheer enormity of the disaster. (By the way, you may have noticed that the number of novels doesn't match the actual death toll from World War I, which was about 17 million. My theory is that this is because there are sometimes multiple murders in a single book.)
Shortly after publication, it emerged that several libraries had set up their acquisition systems automatically to order Dave's books upon publication, and the resulting delivery attempts were astonishing, with fully loaded trucks lined up for dozens of miles. Overnight, Dave became the best-selling author of all time, and his books now account for more than 6% of the Library of Congress and more than half of the Harvard library.
Those statistics get more and more stunning the longer you think about them. The Harvard library is a massive compendium of human knowledge, but it would take more than half of it to devote even a slim novel to each victim of World War I. (I say "would take" because Dave's books don't describe the actual victims, whose personalities are almost entirely lost to history. It merely gestures at the scale of the project if one were to attempt to do so.) And each of those victims was fully human, imbued with character and passions and personality, so that one doubts whether a single book would be enough to capture the individual in full. And then the true horror of the war forces itself into your awareness, in a way that it has never done before.
And yet I feel compelled to break my rule and review Dave's latest effort despite having read far less than 1% of it. The reason is simple: Dave has simultaneously published 10 million detective novels, and even if I could read them at a rate of 100 per day, I could not finish a third of them before dying. Clearly an exception was called for.
As you will have guessed, Dave didn't actually write 10 million books. Or at least, not directly. The novels were procedurally generated using an algorithm that Dave "trained" on the collected works of Agatha Christie. Dave claims not to have edited the results at all, or even to have read very many of them. (This raises the bizarre possibility that I have read more of Dave's books than Dave has.)
The books themselves, at least the ones I read, were highly enjoyable, featuring plenty of unconventional plot twists but never straying far from the eminently satisfying formula that Christie perfected. Pleasingly, there seem to be plenty of Poirot mysteries, which have always been my favorites.
However clever the plot, though, it was seldom difficult to identify the murderer, at least after reading two or three of the books. It is not that the identity of the killer is always the same—the murderer might be almost anyone, from an over-the-hill chess genius, to a willowy débutante, to a surgeon with a deadly secret. But Dave programmed the algorithm so that the murderer is always given the same name—"the Great War" or "World War I." The other characters blithely use these names, giving no indication that they are in any way out of the ordinary. This can be quite confusing when the actual war is discussed.
Needless to say, the consequence is that the books do not quite match Christie's capacity to surprise. But of course this is the point. As the books go on, one after another, the Great War's death toll rises, and the ridiculous number of books hammers home the sheer enormity of the disaster. (By the way, you may have noticed that the number of novels doesn't match the actual death toll from World War I, which was about 17 million. My theory is that this is because there are sometimes multiple murders in a single book.)
Shortly after publication, it emerged that several libraries had set up their acquisition systems automatically to order Dave's books upon publication, and the resulting delivery attempts were astonishing, with fully loaded trucks lined up for dozens of miles. Overnight, Dave became the best-selling author of all time, and his books now account for more than 6% of the Library of Congress and more than half of the Harvard library.
Those statistics get more and more stunning the longer you think about them. The Harvard library is a massive compendium of human knowledge, but it would take more than half of it to devote even a slim novel to each victim of World War I. (I say "would take" because Dave's books don't describe the actual victims, whose personalities are almost entirely lost to history. It merely gestures at the scale of the project if one were to attempt to do so.) And each of those victims was fully human, imbued with character and passions and personality, so that one doubts whether a single book would be enough to capture the individual in full. And then the true horror of the war forces itself into your awareness, in a way that it has never done before.
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Calista's The Collaborator
I don't know if it is a coincidence, but this year longtime friends and sometime rivals Calista and Alan have separately published novels called, respectively, The Collaborator and The Collaborators. Naturally I devoured them both—in this post I'll review Calista's latest effort, and in my next post I'll review Alan's.
The Collaborator is written in spare, unadorned prose. I found it to have a staccato quality—sudden moments of drama or revelation punctuate a calm, somewhat melancholy resting state. Like a calm sea voyage suddenly blaring with the warning of torpedoes—but more on that later. At times the novel felt excessively dreary and philosophical, but I soon learned that it was at exactly such moments that I should expect the next torpedo to arrive.
The story is set in wartime Zurich, where Tom Cullen lives with his daughter Mary. Cullen is an Irish expatriate, a veteran of the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War (on the Anti-Treaty side). Cullen has maintained contacts with fellow hardliners in the IRA, but he is no longer active in the movement. He runs a small bar popular with refugees and outcasts, including deserters from both sides, many of whom have entered Switzerland illegally. The bar scenes have a vivid cinematic quality, inspiring Dave to describe the novel as "The Magic Mountain meets Casablanca."
It is a rowdy, colorful existence, but Cullen does not seem to find any joy in it. A morose and sardonic man with a tendency to alienate those who care about him, Cullen mostly dwells on the perceived slights and indignities that he suffered at the hands of his rivals and former friends. ("Sullen Cullen," I took to calling him.) He feels forgotten and unimportant—never more than a bit player in history, he senses that even his minor role has come to an unsatisfactory end.
That quickly changes when he is approached by men claiming to represent the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence service. Cullen's cosmopolitan clientèle and his Fenian contacts make him a promising conduit for information about the Allies, particularly about their convoys across the Atlantic. Here at last is Cullen's chance to strike a blow against his first and truest enemy, the British Empire. (Whereas Cullen is conflicted about the Irish Civil War, particularly the death of his boyhood hero Michael Collins, he has never felt a trace of sympathy for the British.)
But Cullen is no monster, and so ensues the quiet moral struggle that forms the heart of the book. Too intelligent and intellectually honest to equate the British Empire with the Third Reich, Cullen considers contacting British intelligence in order to double-cross the Germans. (He would much prefer to work for the Americans, but the U.S. espionage apparatus, at least in Zurich, is pathetic. Meanwhile, so adroit are the British spies that Cullen can't rule out the possibility that his "Abwehr" contacts are actually British agents.) But the idea of working for the British stirs up terrible memories, long repressed, of what Cullen and his compatriots did when they discovered collaborators in their midst.
So the past continues to weigh on Cullen, but with a new valence. Every night in his bar he sees Hitler's victims, and every morning he walks the streets, reliving the depredations of the British, the partition of Ireland, the murder of his friends and family. But then he flinches as he imagines torpedoes finding their mark, the sudden jolt of the deck under frightened Canadian feet, smoke in the air, blood in the water. He goes in circles, trying and failing to find some way to make a fit of his wildly discordant loyalties, to his country, to his morality, to his fragmenting sense of self.
I had better leave it there. Partly I don't want to reveal what Cullen decides to do, but more importantly, we must remember that Cullen is a fictional character and as such his decision has no implications except for the fate of his fictional soul. It is the struggle that matters, and here there are no surprises to reveal, just a realistic and wrenching portrayal of a man caught in the trap of history, like a fly in a saucer of milk or coffee.
The Collaborator is written in spare, unadorned prose. I found it to have a staccato quality—sudden moments of drama or revelation punctuate a calm, somewhat melancholy resting state. Like a calm sea voyage suddenly blaring with the warning of torpedoes—but more on that later. At times the novel felt excessively dreary and philosophical, but I soon learned that it was at exactly such moments that I should expect the next torpedo to arrive.
The story is set in wartime Zurich, where Tom Cullen lives with his daughter Mary. Cullen is an Irish expatriate, a veteran of the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War (on the Anti-Treaty side). Cullen has maintained contacts with fellow hardliners in the IRA, but he is no longer active in the movement. He runs a small bar popular with refugees and outcasts, including deserters from both sides, many of whom have entered Switzerland illegally. The bar scenes have a vivid cinematic quality, inspiring Dave to describe the novel as "The Magic Mountain meets Casablanca."
It is a rowdy, colorful existence, but Cullen does not seem to find any joy in it. A morose and sardonic man with a tendency to alienate those who care about him, Cullen mostly dwells on the perceived slights and indignities that he suffered at the hands of his rivals and former friends. ("Sullen Cullen," I took to calling him.) He feels forgotten and unimportant—never more than a bit player in history, he senses that even his minor role has come to an unsatisfactory end.
That quickly changes when he is approached by men claiming to represent the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence service. Cullen's cosmopolitan clientèle and his Fenian contacts make him a promising conduit for information about the Allies, particularly about their convoys across the Atlantic. Here at last is Cullen's chance to strike a blow against his first and truest enemy, the British Empire. (Whereas Cullen is conflicted about the Irish Civil War, particularly the death of his boyhood hero Michael Collins, he has never felt a trace of sympathy for the British.)
But Cullen is no monster, and so ensues the quiet moral struggle that forms the heart of the book. Too intelligent and intellectually honest to equate the British Empire with the Third Reich, Cullen considers contacting British intelligence in order to double-cross the Germans. (He would much prefer to work for the Americans, but the U.S. espionage apparatus, at least in Zurich, is pathetic. Meanwhile, so adroit are the British spies that Cullen can't rule out the possibility that his "Abwehr" contacts are actually British agents.) But the idea of working for the British stirs up terrible memories, long repressed, of what Cullen and his compatriots did when they discovered collaborators in their midst.
So the past continues to weigh on Cullen, but with a new valence. Every night in his bar he sees Hitler's victims, and every morning he walks the streets, reliving the depredations of the British, the partition of Ireland, the murder of his friends and family. But then he flinches as he imagines torpedoes finding their mark, the sudden jolt of the deck under frightened Canadian feet, smoke in the air, blood in the water. He goes in circles, trying and failing to find some way to make a fit of his wildly discordant loyalties, to his country, to his morality, to his fragmenting sense of self.
I had better leave it there. Partly I don't want to reveal what Cullen decides to do, but more importantly, we must remember that Cullen is a fictional character and as such his decision has no implications except for the fate of his fictional soul. It is the struggle that matters, and here there are no surprises to reveal, just a realistic and wrenching portrayal of a man caught in the trap of history, like a fly in a saucer of milk or coffee.
Monday, January 16, 2017
Alan's Something Shining in the Stream
Alan's latest effort, Something Shining in the Stream, is a return to form for the eclectic artist, and it proves beyond a doubt that he still has the capacity to surprise. Something Shining is a collection of short stories, except that it starts with a novella, "Pear-Shaped," which revolves around a Washington farmer named Frank Gustafson. For Gustafson, we are told, things have indeed gone pear-shaped. He is trying desperately to hold his family together in the face of various struggles—his son can't get his career on track, his daughter has just broken up with her boyfriend and moved back in, and his wife wants to spend more time in Seattle, where many of her friends live.
But as we eventually learn, Gustafson is hugely grateful that things have gone pear-shaped. Gustafson owns a pear orchard, and if the fruit on his trees hadn't gone pear-shaped he would be financially ruined. As it is, his excellent harvest enables him to support his children while renting a small apartment in Seattle where he and his wife can spend time when they want to be in the city.
It is this sort of unexpected and yet logical turnabout that makes Alan's fiction such a delight. Other stories in Something Shining describe a middle-aged woman who, we are told at the outset, has been taken to the cleaners by her financial adviser, a sarcastic country doctor who gets a taste of her own medicine, a love lorn student who is barking up the wrong tree, an archaeologist who can read the writing on the wall, a lawyer who puts on a dog and pony show for his clients, a studio musician who knows where his bread is buttered, and an elderly author who has lost his marbles and whose son is a few bricks shy of a load. In each case, Alan sets expectations at the beginning of the story and then dashes them by the end, and his ability to startle us with these plot twists is unparalleled on today's literary scene—to be honest, it sometimes feels as though no one else is even trying.
But as we eventually learn, Gustafson is hugely grateful that things have gone pear-shaped. Gustafson owns a pear orchard, and if the fruit on his trees hadn't gone pear-shaped he would be financially ruined. As it is, his excellent harvest enables him to support his children while renting a small apartment in Seattle where he and his wife can spend time when they want to be in the city.
It is this sort of unexpected and yet logical turnabout that makes Alan's fiction such a delight. Other stories in Something Shining describe a middle-aged woman who, we are told at the outset, has been taken to the cleaners by her financial adviser, a sarcastic country doctor who gets a taste of her own medicine, a love lorn student who is barking up the wrong tree, an archaeologist who can read the writing on the wall, a lawyer who puts on a dog and pony show for his clients, a studio musician who knows where his bread is buttered, and an elderly author who has lost his marbles and whose son is a few bricks shy of a load. In each case, Alan sets expectations at the beginning of the story and then dashes them by the end, and his ability to startle us with these plot twists is unparalleled on today's literary scene—to be honest, it sometimes feels as though no one else is even trying.
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