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.

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.

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.

Dave's As Long As Life Endures

Dave's latest effort, As Long As Life Endures, is starkly simple—in fact, it was reportedly shot in under a day.  The film lasts only 10 minutes, it is set entirely inside a New York City subway car, and includes no dialogue apart from the conductor's announcements.  For the first few minutes there are few indications that anything is out of the ordinary, as the camera turns from person to person, some of them reading, some of them occupied with their own thoughts.

Then a muffled explosion sounds, and the subway car rocks slightly from side to side.  Its power goes out and it slowly rolls to a halt.  When the lights come back on, the conductor tries to make an announcement, but there is too much static for her words to be comprehensible.  For the most part the passengers remain strangely calm, as though an attack was not unexpected, but we can see the fear on their faces.  Another explosion sounds.  The lights flicker.  The conductor tries again, her voice rising with panic, but it's still impossible to make out her words.  The passengers look around, as if to take stock of who might lose it and become dangerous.

Then we hear a quavering voice:  "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound..."  The camera searches from face to face, looking for the passenger who has started the song.  A few more voices join in.  The hymn is ragged, but it begins to swell as more and more people start singing, and it keeps going strong even as the explosions resume outside the car.  A black man holding an umbrella starts shouting out the lyrics ahead of each line, so that everyone can sing the less well known verses.  Still they stumble over the words, but enough people know the lyrics to keep the thread.  Many others just hum the melody, creating a strange, other-worldly effect.  The lights go out again, but the music continues.

Critics have argued that As Long As Life Endures derives its power from Trump's election, and that it will be soon forgotten with the ephemera created by the literary opposition.  But the movie need not be read in such a literal way, and I predict that it will retain its power after Trump is gone, assuming anyone survives to watch it.

Translating The Carriers

When Dave published The Carriers in the middle of 2015, he received his usual plaudits from the leading lights of the literary world (you can read my review here).  But the book was published in translation, having been written in a private language of Dave's invention called Üxtil.  When Calista read the book in its original Üxtil, she identified scores of errors in the hastily-prepared English translation, some of which have serious implications for the way the book has been analyzed and understood.

Calista's discovery drew the attention of practically every major writer and unleashed a flood of academic papers re-appraising the book.  As new translations have appeared, writers have been forced to take sides, and at this point partisans of one translation can scarcely bring themselves to talk to partisans of another, much less collaborate or share a stage at a literary conference.  The resulting chaos makes the perennial Tolstoy vs. Dostoevsky argument look like child's play.

The main contenders for "best translation" are Alan's, Nora's, and Calista's, while Pevear and Volokhonsky's is the most commercially successful.  The book was originally translated by Dave's longtime collaborator Akina Uehara, who in fairness was operating under severe time constraints, as well as having to learn Üxtil from scratch based on Dave's fragmentary instructions.  Despite all this, and despite the errors that Calista has identified, Uehara's translation is still the favorite of a small but committed minority of writers, who regard her mistakes as more than compensated by her natural, poetic sensibility.

Notably absent from this list, of course, is Dave's translation, which was published earlier this year.  The dearth of critical support for the author's own translation has sparked a heated discussion of how "authoritative" the author is, particularly in a case like this one, where the author created the language from which the work is being translated.  Alan has made much of this "novel" situation, but it is not my concern at the moment.  Instead I will take a close look at a few passages from The Carriers, and I'll explain how the translators handled the interpretive issues that they present.

The first passage is a playful one.  A sailor teases a woman selling tea cakes by the dock, and she chastely responds.  Here's Uehara's original translation:

"That certainly looks tasty," the sailor called out, leaning nonchalantly against the rail. Katie turned to face him, wrinkling her nose.

"The blue ones are a day old—still good, and half the price!" she replied.

"What about the pink ones?"

"Too expensive for you!" the captain bellowed, clapping the sailor on the back. Katie giggled.

In her original paper, Calista questioned whether this passage should be so sexualized.  One problem is that "tasty" is much more specific than the Üxtil word used in the original, a memoridt, which simply means "pleasing" or "sufficient."  It seems likelier that the sailor is commenting on the entire scene, not the cakes or the woman.  Moreover, "What about the pink ones?" is a bit of a reach—in the original, Dave uses the term nuori pestel'e, which literally means "this dawn's harvest" or "this dawn's catch" and only connotes pink inasmuch as that is the color of the dawn.  Here is how Calista translates it:

"This is a fine scene!" the sailor exclaimed, gesturing from the main deck, his hand on the rail. Katie looked up at him and squinted.

"The blue cakes are from yesterday. Half price!" Katie sang out.

"And what about this morning's batch?"

"You have no money to spare for cakes at any price. Back to work!" the captain shouted, with a hearty back-slap. Katie laughed gaily and turned back to her customers.

But there is another difficulty here, one that Uehara and Calista both avoid.  Where is the captain during the first part of the dialogue?  Has he come up behind the sailor during the exchange, or has he been there the whole time?  In this case, the word for "captain" includes a particle that indicates the writer is gesturing toward someone the reader is already acquainted with.  (The closest English approximation would be something like, "the cat appeared" vs. "a cat appeared."  The former indicates that we the readers have already met the cat.)

Conveying this information in English is difficult.  Here is Nora's effort:

The sailor stood on the deck next to the captain and surveyed the scene before them. "A fine day!" the sailor exclaimed, indicating the bustling docks. Katie squinted at him in the bright sunlight.

"Cakes for sale! The blue ones are a bargain, day-old but still good!"

"What about the ones you baked this morning?"

"Enough banter! We have work to do," the captain grumbled, clapping his hand to the sailor's back. Katie's merry laugh rang out as she turned back to her cart.

Nora preserves a sense that the sailor and Katie are flirting, but resists the over-sexualized reading given by Uehara.  However, she also omits the captain's slightly insulting remark regarding the sailor's finances.

After this relatively low-stakes warm-up, let's turn to a much more difficult passage.  By way of background, Clara Newgate has learned that her husband's lover is displaying symptoms of the disease, but Charles Newgate himself is asymptomatic.  Again we'll start with Uehara:

"When did the symptoms appear?" Clara asked, her voice clipped.

Charles turned from her and examined the books on the wall. "In the middle of January," he said. "You were in the north."

Clara quickly calculated while Charles pretended to read. "Charles, in January!" Clara gasped. "But we—"

Charles grabbed her by the elbow and spun her around. "As if you're so innocent!" he snarled.

This is not one of the passages that Calista flagged in her initial paper, but her translation is markedly different from Uehara's:

"When did you begin to fight?" Clara asked sharply.

Charles examined the books on the shelves. "In the middle of January, when you were visiting the north."

Clara did the math in her head while Charles pretended to read. "January, Charles!" Clara said with surprise. "So you and I—"

Charles took her by the elbow and brought her into an embrace. "You're safe," he said.

In Uehara's version, Clara is asking when Charles's lover started displaying symptoms, and she seems to indicate that she and Charles have had sex since January.  Charles then accuses her of adultery.

In Calista's version, by contrast, Clara is asking when Charles and his lover fought, that is, when they stopped having sex.  January, it appears, was early enough that Charles probably wasn't exposed to the disease.  Clara realizes that they can have sex, and Charles responds that Clara will be safe.

It's a remarkable thing that each of these interpretations is viable!  Dialogue in Üxtil can be extremely elliptical, allowing Clara and Charles to circumnavigate delicate subjects, but leaving us with little idea of what is going on.  Alan's translation mostly sides with Calista's, but at the end he adopts yet another reading of the language:

"When did the... seas get rough between you?" Clara asked probingly.

Charles turned and ran his eyes over the spines of the books lining the wall. "In the middle of January, while you were in the north."

Clara opened a calendar in her mind while Charles pretended to read. "January, Charles! Then when we—"

Charles squeezed her elbow and held her close so that she couldn't see his face. "And yet you're clear," he said as if accusing her.

In Alan's translation, it appears that Clara and Charles have had sex at a time when he might be contagious, and yet Clara is symptom-free.  Perhaps Charles suspects that they are both carriers, and that Clara is the source of his lover's illness.

The passage is obviously a difficult one, susceptible to widely varying translations, and yet everyone was startled by Dave's translation:

"After all, we haven't made love since I don't know when!" Clara spat out with venom.

Charles turned away in shame, occupied with mental book-keeping. "We made love in January," he concluded. Then he added accusingly, "You wanted it up the ass."

Clara seemed to be choosing her words carefully while he pretended to read, but then burst out, "January! Charles! We didn't make love in January!"

Charles whipped her around and squeezed her cheeks with one hand. "You were drunk," he said. "Your lapse in memory is a terribly convenient way to maintain your innocence." Disgusted, he turned her head away with a sudden jerk.

To be honest, it's hard to support this translation at all.  Yes, "the north" can be used in an anatomical sense, as Üxt's northern territories are often called "the country's asshole" or "the ass-end of the country."  But this term is almost never used to refer to actual anatomy, and when it is, the point is to emphasize the back of the country as opposed to the front.  So for instance, a man might sit on a horse's "north," that is, its back—he is not sitting on the horse's ass!  This makes Dave's translation seem like quite a stretch.  In any case there's no express mention of sex in that line of the original text.

But that's just one isolated detail.  Dave's reading of the entire passage requires considerable leaps of logic.  For instance, after Clara asks her question (and by the way, it is very clearly a question in Üxtil, notwithstanding Dave's translation), Charles looks toward the wall of the room they are in, which is a library.  To assume that he is looking at mental books requires adding a concept that isn't in the text while ignoring where the characters are standing!

Moreover, in the original Üxtil, when Clara has done her mental math, she simply says the words for "Charles," "January," and "we."  All of the translations must fill in the gap to some extent, but adding a denial that they made love in January makes no sense.  If this were her meaning, she would have appended a complementary negative particle to "we."  The only way to support Dave's reading is to suppose that she is making an elementary grammatical mistake, unlikely for a woman of her class (or really any class...  this would be a very obvious mistake in Üxtil).

Finally, there is no mention of drunkenness or memory in the last paragraph.  In the original Üxtil Charles simply indicates that Clara is "spotless" or "unblemished," which could either mean that she is innocent or that she has not broken out in the lesions that are symptomatic of the disease.  Of course it could also be ironic, as in Uehara's translation.  But in any case, Dave appears to be making up most of the passage out of whole cloth.

Passages like this one have convinced most critics that Dave's translation is untrustworthy, despite the fact that he invented Üxtil, and despite the fact that Üxtil dialogue is admittedly allusive and indirect.  But I want to stay well clear of that argument, which is vexing and, in my view, ultimately irresolvable.  For one thing, much of our understanding of Üxtil and the culture and customs of Üxt is derived from Dave's magisterial four-volume A History of the Üxtil-Speaking Peoples, which was published in both Üxtil and English.  So to argue that Dave's translation of The Carriers is erroneous is to argue that he was more reliable in his translation of History than he was in his translation of The Carriers, and there is little basis for this conclusion.

Before we move on, I should mention that, in the context of the book, I think Uehara's or Alan's translation of this passage makes the most sense.  We ultimately learn that both Clara and Charles are carriers, but that Clara was most likely not the source of the disease that struck down Charles's lover.  Calista's translation is also defensible on the grounds that Charles might have thought they were both uninfected based on what he knew at the time.

The translators make other choices that involve the traditional translational choices among fidelity to the text, clarity, and elegance.  Where Calista writes that a Member of Parliament is "flying a kite," Uehara has him "floating an idea," and Alan has him "running it up the flagpole to see who salutes."  In another passage, Nora, translating fairly literally, writes that Charles is "fire-breathed," while Calista writes that "his breath was on fire with the vapors of whisky," and Alan writes that "his breath singed her nose with hot tongues of pungent whisky."  (Dave writes:  "Dragon-like, into her chest he poured the flames, igniting almost nothing in that empty space, but nevertheless consuming with a hot vengeance the pine needles shed by her wintering heart."  None of that, apart from the fire-breath, is in the text.)

But perhaps the most interesting passages are those that force us to confront the radical differences between Üxtil and English.  Üxtil contains a vocabulary of emotion that has no counterpart in English.  In one of the most beautiful and haunting passages in the book, Katie (whom we met earlier on the docks) speaks with Henry Tilden, her ex-lover, who has been incarcerated in a carrier colony on a cold, rocky north Atlantic island, where Katie has joined him.  Tilden and Katie can no longer have sex, for she might be vulnerable to the disease.  Tilden indicates all of this with a gesture toward their surroundings, and Katie simply responds, "Bueh."

"Bueh" (or "a'bueh") is an Üxtil word with no precise meaning in English.  It is used to convey emotional reassurance, and its meaning is heavily dependent on context.  Uehara renders the scene in this way:

Katie and Henry huddled in the dwindling light, heads touching, so close that from a distance they might have been mistaken for a single well-insulated seal gazing at the waves. "Katie, I have nothing to offer you anymore, not even... there is no beauty here. And I may die or go insane, leaving you with nothing. You deserve forests and cities and warmth, and here I have nothing but wasteland..."

"I know all this, and I will stay here, not in sorrow, but with gladness in my heart," Katie said. "Your love is like a million worlds to me."

Alan adopts a similar approach but puts more of the words in Katie's mouth:

Katie held Henry close, his head next to hers, their coats forming a single layer of insulation against the brisk wind. Henry looked up at Katie and half hoped that she would go live the life she deserved on the mainland.

"Don't you think I've considered all of this?" Katie said. "You would not tell me which books to like, or what kind of bread to enjoy. And yet you think to decide for me whether I would find more joy on shore or here with you! Purge your mind of this nonsense. I am here because I love you, and your presence makes this island the most beautiful place in the world to me."

Finally, Dave's translation is the most literal, while remaining uncharacteristically restrained:

The wind picked up, but Henry and Katie had overlapped their coats and now peered out at the waves like a polar bear from its cozy den. Henry turned his head, as if to say, "Can this ever be enough for you?"

With a single word Katie set his mind at ease.

One can complain that this translation fails to capture the full richness of the word "bueh," but it's hard to argue with its elegant simplicity.

And so we are, I think, left with no single "best" translation, but instead with a rich diversity of approaches, each with its own merits.  For those readers who don't have the time to learn Üxtil, I don't know which one to recommend, but ultimately I don't think there's a wrong choice.  The beauty of The Carriers comes through in all of them.

Alan's Tooth and Claw

Alan's latest project, Tooth and Claw, has perhaps the most emotional depth of any of his efforts.  What makes this surprising is that there are no human characters whatsoever, apart from the dry, economical narrator.  In fact, you can barely call it fiction—Alan prefers the term "speculative ecology."

What Alan has produced is a series of "field notes" documenting the behavior of species that do not exist.  Birds that glide upside down, lizards that engage in primitive agriculture, carefully cultivating little shaded patches where desert plants can thrive.  A cow-like ruminant that has evolved to brew beer in one of its stomachs, though it serves no discernible biological purpose.  Calista provided sketches, which she rendered in a traditional, realistic manner that looks as though it could have been found in a natural history book published anytime from 1700 to 1900.

My favorite field note describes a symbiotic relationship between a bison-like animal and a diving seabird.  They live on a sparse, windswept, sandy seaside bereft of trees.  Because of the lack of trees, birds have evolved to nest in the warm, insulating tangle of hair that grows above the bison's shoulders.  Our naturalist observes a fox greedily approaching a nest full of eggs, which appears to have been built on a hillock.  But suddenly the ground lunges up, and as the fox tumbles to the sand, a giant bearded face swings around, its horns pointed right at him.  He scurries away to find an easier meal somewhere else.

The birds have learned to communicate with the bison, flying high over the sand to scout out edible vegetation and report it back to the bison.  This allows the bison to conserve energy as it looks for food or a mate in the inhospitable land, which is too poor to support the large herds that are familiar from the American West.  At times, when vegetation can't be found on land, the pair will strike out into the ocean, the bird guiding them to a rich patch of seaweed for the bison to eat, tarrying sometimes while the bird dives into a rich school of fish.

When a bison gives birth, a young bird befriends the calf, and they grow up together and become lifelong companions.  They know each other's voices and use their distinct, evocative calls (high and haunting in the case of the seabird, low and rumbling in the case of the bison) to find each other over long distances in the sere landscape.  The birds are quasi-monogamous, but their relationships with their mates are nowhere near as close or enduring as their relationships with their bison companions.  Because of the effectiveness of their cooperation, both bison and bird can satisfy their nutritional needs in relatively little time, and they spend much of their days playing games or simply chattering to each other and enjoying each other's company as they wander along the shore, occasionally taking a dip in the salty ocean.

It is unclear whether they understand death.  On one hand, each engages in elaborate mourning rituals if the other dies.

On the other hand, if they do understand death, then the animals' subsequent behavior is hard to explain.  If the bird dies first, the bison ceases its itinerant grazing pattern and spends most of its time tracing wider and wider circles around its companion's burial place, behavior that resembles a searching pattern.  Likewise for the bird, which upon the death of the bison launches a search that will last for the rest of its life, circling high in the air, swooping down sometimes when it sees a lone bison in the sand, but flying away once it recognizes that it has not found its lifelong friend.  In either case, the widower from time to time emits the cry that it once used to summon its companion, and then pauses, listening intently for a response that will never come.

Alan's Balls to the Wall

Alan's latest effort, Balls to the Wall, is a bold, frenetic mess of a book, almost as if Alan had adopted the title of the book as his personal credo while writing it.  The book follows Francis Vorlauf, a "speculative etymologist," as he basks in newfound superstardom.  Vorlauf, having discovered several instances of "Stonewall" being used in an arguably pro-LBGT context prior to the famous Stonewall Riots, has published a groundbreaking paper arguing that "Stonewall" (as used by the gay rights movement) actually stems not from the Stonewall Inn, but from General Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson, a Confederate general who stood "like a stone wall" for LBGT rights.  (Coincidentally, he also stood "like a stone wall" for the Confederate army at the First Battle of Bull Run, and it is the unlikelihood of this coincidence that has made Vorlauf's theory such a controversial and gripping one.)

But being an academic celebrity has its downsides as well.  Al Peretti, a government etymologist working for Cook County, Illinois, is trying to get the feds to help him debunk some of Vorlauf's earlier work.  In particular, Peretti believes that Vorlauf greatly exaggerated the strength of his evidence that "bailout," meaning the government rescue of banks during the financial crisis, refers to bailing someone out of jail, rather than bailing water out of a boat.  But Peretti is getting no traction, and his stodgy attire and abrupt, nerdy way of speaking are no match for Vorlauf's smooth, polished style.  In a confrontation on Charlie Rose's show, Peretti is easily outclassed, even when the evidence is on his side.

Meanwhile Vorlauf is struggling to find new topics to write about—he is caught on something of a treadmill, since each paper needs to dial up the controversy and sexiness of his ideas, or he will fade from public attention.  He toys with the possibility that the "card" in "discard" might refer to the human heart, an idea that would bring a little romance into his work.  He can't find much evidence for this proposition, which ordinarily wouldn't slow him down much, but with Peretti nipping at his heels he has to think twice.

What neither Vorlauf nor Peretti knows is that the federal etymologists are not indifferent to Peretti's claims—they are taking them very seriously indeed.  But so far their investigation is stymied by bureaucratic infighting, as Treasury tries to shut down the investigation, forcing the investigators to come up with a "smoking gun" or give up their case.  Meanwhile they are forced to withhold public comment, giving the impression of inaction.  In a violation of protocol, they decide to contact Peretti, and they find him at a Las Vegas conference arguing about whether "a storm is brewing" relates to brewing tea (the sky darkening like the water in a teapot) or brewing beer (the atmosphere churning as if roiled by fermentation).  (Peretti's responsible, measured answer—that it could be either, and likely doesn't relate to either in particular—neatly illustrates why he will always be a public sector etymologist.)  The agents pull him aside to pool their information, leading to a shocking discovery.

I'll leave the rest of the plot to the reader to discover, for at the end of the day, Balls is a book that you read for the thrill of discovery.  Not just learning what happens next, but that sudden feeling of gratification when you realize that "sidetracked" is about railroads or that "calibrate" comes from the caliber of a gun.

As for the book's messiness and its many loose threads left hanging:  I actually found that the shagginess of the story matched the fuzziness and loopiness of its main character and his ideas.  Where others see a book that badly needs an editor, I see a book that deserves to be appreciated in its raw form, a testament to the giddy full-steam-ahead, damn-the-torpedoes style that Alan practices so well.