Dave's The Carriers

Dave's latest effort, The Carriers, is something of a return to form for the reclusive novelist.  After the commercial failure of his nonfiction opus Entertaining Anecdotes from The Lives of U.S. Senators Told from the Perspective of Someone Who Urgently Needs to Urinate, Dave retreated to a rental apartment in Osaka and ignored all communications for 14 months, to the consternation of his readers and the wider literary world.  But when Dave emerged last summer, pale and blinking in the bright August sunlight, he held in his hands a typewritten manuscript running to some 2,200 pages.  Since then the book has been laboriously translated into English from a private language that Dave invented and then partially forgot, and it has been stripped of the many passages that Dave copied verbatim from Entertaining Anecdotes.  The result is The Carriers, one of the greatest novels ever written about illness and the struggle for human connection.

Set in a thinly fictionalized Victorian England, the book chronicles the appearance and rapid spread of a devastating sexually transmitted virus.  People who are infected go through a symptomless (but contagious) stage and then develop terrible lesions, debilitating organ failure, sterility, and in many cases premature death.  But not everyone is vulnerable:  10-15% of the population is completely immune.  The virus can't gain a foothold in their bodies, and they neither experience symptoms nor transmit the disease.

But a much smaller fraction of the population has a different response:  their bodies never develop the symptoms of the disease, but they remain contagious for their entire lives, exposing anyone they have sex with.  For some time, the existence of these "carriers" is a matter of scientific dispute, and here Dave weaves an enthralling story about scientists and policymakers and their grim efforts to understand the disease and stem its tide.

But the book really gets going about a third of the way through, when the existence of carriers is proved conclusively and the government implements "the Programme"—a policy of isolating carriers from the rest of the population for the remainder of their lives.  (It is thought unnecessary and cruel to isolate people who are exhibiting symptoms, since there is no danger of contagion other than through sexual contact.  On the other hand, temporary quarantines are set up for people thought to have been exposed to the virus, so that they don't transmit it before the symptoms set in.)

The problem is that carriers are almost impossible to identify unless they turn themselves in.  Charles Stonton, the administrator of the Programme, launches a controversial campaign to track the carriers down using forced interrogation and peremptory detainment.  Members of Parliament, Government officials, judges, and doctors are split on the effectiveness and legality of Stonton's tactics.  Stonton's hand is strengthened considerably, though, when he rounds up seven men who continued having promiscuous sex even though they very likely knew they were carriers.  But are the men representative of a larger trend, or are they sensationalized outliers, of the sort bound to crop up in a large country?

Dave's most compelling prose is reserved for the domestic dramas that ensue—women who fear that their husbands are carriers, husbands who without explanation stop having sex with their wives, wives who join their husbands (accused of being carriers) in isolation camps.  People are forced to put aside the platitudes and evasions they formerly relied on, because too much is at stake if they are wrong.  And people are forced to reexamine the assumptions that, in a more innocent world, seemed built on stone.  One woman bemoans the "strange new math that we have been forced to learn" and remembers fondly the days when math seemed "useless and remote, a chilly cathedral" that was compulsory to learn but not to use.

The book's triumph comes from its reconciliation of two seemingly contradictory aims.  First, it is unblinking and unromantic about the remorseless logic of the disease and the stringent measures taken to fight it.  But bizarrely, a deeply moving romanticism develops regardless, emerging from the struggles, painful failures, and rare triumphs that people find.  "Somewhere out there," a husband says, gesturing vaguely toward the New World, "There is a place where none of this has happened, where people can love freely and without consequence.  But we have been shattered, and all that is left for us is to make what we can of the pieces.  Of life itself."  He is speaking of his marriage, but it would be a fitting summary of this masterful novel.

Sarang's Cool It! How We Can Tap the Upper Atmosphere for Safer, Healthier, and More Sustainable Lives

Sarang's latest effort, Cool It! How We Can Tap the Upper Atmosphere for Safer, Healthier, and More Sustainable Lives, is very different from his previous works.  Bookstores have not been given clear instructions on where to display the book, and so it has popped up in fiction, nonfiction, politics, science, opinion, and fantasy.  Just about the only place it hasn't appeared is the New York Times bestseller list—not because its sales have disappointed, but because the New York Times refuses to "countenance Sarang's ridiculous performance art" by choosing whether to put it on the fiction or nonfiction list.

Cool It! proposes the construction of 4-mile-high towers shaped like the St. Louis Arch (except that each tower would consist of two arches set at right angles to each other and meeting at the top).  Pipes would carry water (actually a solution of water and propylene glycol) through the arches, radiating heat away at the top (where temperatures average about 75°F below the temperatures at ground level) and then returning to the surface to be used in air conditioning and refrigeration.  Sarang calculates that a few dozen towers could cool an entire city—indoors and out—eliminating the need for air conditioning and allowing people to enjoy outdoor activities all summer long.  The towers would also contain lightning rods and would protect vast areas from lightning strikes.

Sarang's reputation precedes him, and critics have approached the book gingerly, fearing that it is some sort of Sokal hoax.  Malcolm Gladwell fulminated, "How can I review a book that refuses to put its cards on the table?"  (He declined to take the book at face value and called it "a mockery of the brand of journalism I have practiced my whole life, and which I still believe in.")  Cass Sunstein greeted Sarang's idea warmly, but noted, "By endorsing the idea, I may be setting myself up for the biggest embarrassment of my life."  (Dave tweeted: "Apparently Prof. Sunstein has forgotten about Republic.com 2.0.")

For what it's worth, Sarang insists the plan is real, and has offered to install the system in any city willing to pay a fee that is "commensurate with the services I will be providing and sufficient to cover my expenses while leaving me with a modest profit."  So far, no one has taken him up on his offer.

I'll go out on a limb and say that I think the suggestion is worthwhile whether it is serious or not.  We are faced with calamity on a grand scale, and it will require every ounce of inventiveness and daring to save our planet and our civilization.  The towers must be built—and the sooner the better.

James's The Zealots

James's latest effort, The Zealots, is hard to read.  Set in Hamburg in the near-future, it tells the story of slutbangers.com, a pornographic website that mostly features user-submitted videos.  The story begins as the proprietors of the website stumble upon a delicious discovery:  the daughter of a prominent Muslim cleric in the city has become addicted to hard drugs and has left home.  The men lure her into their studio, where they induce her to perform in a degrading hardcore video, which they entitle "Muslim Bitch Begs For It."  Although their website generally requires viewers to pay by the minute, they post "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" free for all to watch.  Soon it has garnered tens of millions of views, and while it has not directly generated any revenue, it has brought thousands of new paying users to the website.  Buoyed by their success, the proprietors of slutbangers.com devote an entire section of the website to hardcore videos featuring Muslim women being humiliated.  The young Muslim woman (the cleric's daughter) kills herself with a probably-intentional overdose.

But at this point the story takes a dark turn.  Two young Muslim men, enraged by the perceived disrespect being paid to Muslim women, storm into the offices of slutbangers.com and kill the proprietors as well as several staff members.

The world is shocked.  "Wir sind slutbangers.com!" is the slogan on everyone's lips and on the front pages of all of the major Western newspapers.  Political leaders hail the courage and free-speech advocacy of the slain men.  It soon emerges that, just prior to the attack, they and their lawyers had been courageously fending off the Muslim cleric's attempts to use German privacy law to force them to remove "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" from their website.  This only cements their status as martyrs for free speech.

But soon a split appears in Western opinion.  On one side are people who, however much they may dislike pornography and find it distasteful, are unwavering in their support of slutbangers.com.  On the other side are people who deny that you can truly support slutbangers.com unless you embrace their mission of producing and viewing hardcore pornography.  After all, how can you defend the right without defending the practice?  This latter camp (by far the more numerous one) spawns an ice-bucket-challenge-like phenomenon, in which supporters of slutbangers.com film hardcore sex videos and post them online.  At the end of the video, the participants can nominate another couple to "take the slutbangers.com challenge," and if the second couple doesn't post a sex tape within 24 hours, they must make a donation to a charity that primarily or exclusively funds projects in non-Muslim countries.  Soon there are few athletes, actors, or elected officials under the age of 70 who have not shown their support of slutbangers.com in the most personal way possible.

The story takes another dark turn, though, as George Clooney not only refuses to take the slutbangers.com challenge, but casts the sole vote against "Muslim Bitch Begs For It" for the foreign-language Oscar.  All across the internet, thinkers and pundits condemn Clooney's bizarre hatred of free speech.  Clooney gives a brief statement, most of which he spends condemning the violent attack on slutbangers.com, before noting his disapproval of the way its proprietors treated the cleric's daughter and his doubts about the merits of the video compared to that year's other nominees.  This pivot is pilloried as the "Liar's But," in the sense that everything he said before the "but," before criticizing "Muslim Bitch Begs For It," was disingenuous filler.  "Always wrong to resort to violence," "nothing can ever justify," blah blah blah.  Obviously Clooney couldn't wait to get to the part of the speech where he slandered the men behind slutbangers.com.

One freelance pornographer who worked for the site goes so far as to suggest that until you've sexually humiliated a Muslim woman on video, you can't understand what the website was all about and you have no standing to criticize it.  The feeling that you get, he argues, just can't be conveyed except through direct experience.  Many people feel that this particular argument goes too far, but they endorse the contention that slutbangers.com was misunderstood because many people unaccustomed to pornography took the site's "degradation" porn out of context, construing it as extreme, when really it was well within the mainstream of internet pornography.

The book ends happily with George Clooney drummed out of Hollywood and the surviving staffers of slutbangers.com (including the man who, in the video, sodomized the cleric's daughter and then forced her to fellate him) accepting the Oscar award with a tearful speech, as the entire Western world unites in its support of their noble work.

Sarang's How the World Is Made

I don't know quite what to make of Sarang's latest effort, How the World Is Made.  On one hand, the tract has been met with near-universal dismay in the literary, scientific, and philosophical establishments.  Colin McGinn called it "undoubtedly the most inane and perverse book of his benighted oeuvre, somehow managing to be astonishingly illogical and yet deadly boring."  Oliver Sacks labeled it "puerile and pedantic."  Dave's scathing review was given the headline "An Innovation in Geometry If Nothing Else:  Sarang's Reasoning Is Both Elliptical and Circular at the Same Time."  (An excerpt from Dave's review was blurbed on the book's cover as follows:  "Sarang's book is…  a tour de force of…  philosophy.  Your time would be better spent…  reading this [book].")

On the other hand, some observers have praised the book.  Hatchjaw found it to be "profound but accessible," while Le Clerque has hailed its universal relevance and penetrating insight.  But whereas Dave pilloried the book from the pages of the Paris Review, and Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker, the book's defenders have mostly written on obscure blogs.  Among the academic and literary elite, the tide of opinion has run very much in one direction.

As for me, I seem to be one of the few reviewers who is neither delighted nor disgusted by the book.  I will be the first to admit that it is not an easy book to read.  Its acknowledgement section reads, in its entirety, "After de Selby," but I think the book owes as much to Kant and Kierkegaard as to the mysterious de Selby, whose works I have been unable to find.  There is definitely something to Sarang's arguments, but he always seems to push his reasoning into obscure and poorly-supported territory, well past anything his data can support.

An example will clarify what I mean.  In the chapter "Of Cities and Men," Sarang "problematizes" the traditional economic and geographical explanations for the rise of cities.  Sarang develops startling evidence that the traditional explanations involving density, agglomeration effects, and specialization are ill-founded.  For instance, it is commonly thought that the skyscraper revolutionized cities by permitting highly dense business districts to flourish.  This theory has become so dominant that it has displaced theories emerging from the Freudian, Marxist, and de Selbian traditions.  But is it all based on a lie?

To find out, Sarang looked at data on travel within skyscrapers, an area traditionally ignored by geographers (who focus on commuting patterns across horizontal space).  He found that if you add up all movements from floor to floor (using positive numbers for upward movement and negative numbers for downward movement), you find that the vast majority of office workers move, on average, zero floors per workday!  So what is the point of building dozens of floors, if the average worker never leaves the lobby?

Dave calls this calculation "methodologically unsound" and "so much hooey," but you can't discount a striking empirical regularity like this with such a perfunctory dismissal.  Gone are the days when empirical evidence was excluded from serious discussion of social phenomena—we live in a data-driven society now, and we are better for it.  If we are going to understand cities, we have to grapple with Sarang's almost unbelievable findings.

But here is where Sarang pushes his reasoning to places where I am unwilling to follow.  It may be true that most floors of a typical skyscraper are "merely so much surplusage," but it doesn't follow that skyscrapers are built merely as an obscene gesture of phallic display.  Here I find Sarang's extended exegesis of the word "erection" to be misguided and tedious.  Sarang may have proven that skyscrapers are not used for their ostensible purpose, but that's a long way from establishing that they are the fulfillment of corporate executives' "adolescent fantasies of female-anatomy-destroying revenge for the indignity of the birth canal."  For one thing, Sarang doesn't address the likelihood that many CEOs were delivered by C-section—but that is just a minor example of the many flaws in his rather tortuous reasoning.

Sarang, like Tolstoy, is better at ridiculing the ideas of others than he is at building an affirmative intellectual framework.  To upend major areas of economic and geographical thought is no small thing, but to achieve greatness Sarang's philosophy would have to build a convincing alternative as well.  He hasn't done it yet, but let us hope that the chilly reception the world has given How the World Is Made doesn't dissuade Sarang from trying again.  The world deserves as much.

Sarang's Under a Clear Blue Sky

Sarang's latest effort, Under a Clear Blue Sky, offers a piercing, insightful look at the difficulty of advancing in journalism today, particularly for women.  The protagonist, Kelly Walters, is a reporter for a conservative website, and she is covering her first big story since being promoted from its ranks of unpaid bloggers.  In a sense, this is a great opportunity for her, but the assignment requires her to write with a degree of nuance and emotional intelligence that pushes her to her limits.

The difficulty is that Walters essentially has to tell three stories simultaneously.  The first is the story of an entitled, socialistic cadre of pampered fast-food workers, many of them black and/or overweight, but all of them elitist, whose selfish protest for a $15 minimum wage blocked heroic, mostly-white, all-male emergency workers from reaching the scene of an accident at a construction site.  The second is the story of lazy, entitled, unionized public employees (the rescue workers) who, instead of finding an alternative path to the accident site, simply sat in traffic while the hardworking, long-suffering victims of the construction accident bled to death.  The final story is that of the entitled, incompetent, job-stealing illegal immigrants (the workers at the construction site) who are now, along with the relatives of the workers who died, suing the protestors—that is, people who are here legally, exercising their First Amendment rights like the salt-of-the-earth American citizens that they are.  The illegals want to hold them responsible...  for what, exercising their Constitutional rights?  What's next?

Walters tries to keep these storylines from becoming tangled, and mostly she succeeds, but only by carefully separating the strands from each other, telling one story at a time.  This tripling of her workload requires Herculean effort, and Walters' personal life suffers.  Here Sarang is especially sensitive to the obstacles facing women in the workplace, especially professional women who are upwardly mobile but "not there yet"—that is, women who can't yet afford servants.  In a touching scene, Walters is trying to arrange a date by text message, when she looks up and realizes she doesn't have enough quarters to finish drying her load of laundry.  She simply stands, frozen between her smartphone and her soggy clothes, and contemplates the flowers on a tree she hadn't even noticed blooming.

Blue Sky doesn't just cement Sarang's status as one of the most thoughtful writers on women's issues.  It also marks a turn away from the strident anti-didacticism of his earlier work.  We can build a better society, Sarang tells us, if we empower women like Kelly Walters to chase their dreams.  Women shouldn't have to choose between a romantic life and a career in conservative journalism.  Right now, Walters is just a junior reporter learning to give her readers the information they need.  But if she can stick with it, if we can find a way to support women like her through the tough times, then she may bloom into a thought leader and respected political commentator, repaying society's investment a thousand times.

Dave's The Name of the Butterfly

Dave's latest effort, The Name of the Butterfly, has not made nearly as big a splash as his previous novel, All the World Is Beer, an experimental coming-of-age story told from the perspective of a single cell of yeast.  In some ways Butterfly is a much more conventional book, but I don't think that accounts for its muted reception.  I think the book's richness takes time to unfold, and because it lacks some of the fireworks that critics have come to expect from Dave, it simply hasn't attracted the sustained attention that it demands (and deserves).

The book is set in a vaguely 19th-century, Holland-like country, but it makes no pretense to historical precision.  The main characters are Pieter, an actuary in a bustling commercial city, and his wife Saskia.  The couple met as young revolutionaries, members of the underground Socialist Party, and after the revolution they settled down to domesticity.

Pieter is discontented.  You might say that he was unnerved by the revolution.  He has become convinced that the decisions made by the Party leaders were rash and irresponsible, and that only an unlikely series of events, combined with the King's unwillingness to shed his subjects' blood, prevented a catastrophe.  Pieter's mind keeps returning to the square where he and Saskia had assembled with the other revolutionaries, where the King's soldiers could easily have mowed them down . . .  and where, overruling his advisors, the King ordered his troops to stand down and announced his abdication.  Pieter is horrified that the revolution came so close to bloodshed, and ashamed that this was only averted by the mercy of a man Pieter had previously slandered.

Part of Pieter's dissatisfaction with the revolution has to do with its incomplete attainment of its aims.  The King is gone and the Republic has been established, but the Socialists have been marginalized and the capitalists are firmly in charge.  Abroad, the government has adopted a far more colonial and imperialistic stance than the King ever did.  At home, religious fervor is on the rise, and Jews and homosexuals (who enjoyed the tacit protection of the King) have been driven out of public life.  On the whole, Pieter is not sure that the dissolute, tolerant, somewhat haphazard reign of the King was so much worse than the hyper-capitalist, religion-drenched war-mongering of the Republic.

Saskia, on the other hand, only regrets that her brush with great events was so brief.  She has reconnected with another revolutionary, Willem, who has prospered under the new regime.  From Pieter's view, Willem is one of the upper-class opportunists who never believed in the revolution but coopted it and perverted its turbulent course to his own benefit.  Willem in fact is a major stockholder in the insurance company that employs Pieter, and he divides his time between the capitol (where he cultivates his revolutionary connections) and his country estate, where he styles himself a naturalist.

As we come to see, Pieter's view of Willem is perhaps unfair.  Willem was never a socialist, and he took considerable personal risk, first in financing the early stages of the revolution, and then in publicly calling for a republic at a time when the King still had a firm grip on power.  Moreover, while Willem's lobbying efforts are venal, he takes no real interest in them and spends most of his time cataloguing butterflies.

And Willem, though taken with Saskia, does not use any of the means at his disposal to pursue her.  In fact, to his and Pieter's mutual chagrin, Saskia uses Willem's connections to insinuate herself into the amoral, psychosexually charged world of the capitol.  Here Dave writes with a light hand:  it is up to the reader to decide if Saskia is genuinely interested in lawmaking and party politics, or if she is merely addicted to the thrill of the fast-moving political world.  Either way, the novel takes on a frenetic and intoxicating energy when it focuses on her escapades in the capital.

The book is Dave's second-longest, at 798 pages, but it doesn't feel like a long book.  Perhaps this is because it never stops moving:  following Pieter to Willem's estate, then both the men to the capital, then Willem and Saskia back to the estate, then Saskia to Pieter, and so on.  But perhaps, too, there is something in the book that makes it feel very un-book-like.  Dave's writing has become far more placid and natural than it was during his coked-up "New York" phase, and Butterfly feels almost dream-like.  When you are finished, you will feel not so much that you've read a story, as that you've recovered a memory - that Dave has lifted up the veil a little, to show you the world as it truly is.

Sarang's Bletchley Park

Sarang's latest effort, Bletchley Park, is his most ambitious novel to date.  The story follows Basil Thwaite, a young mathematician recruited to work at the WWII-era code-breaking facility that gives the book its name.  Basil excels at his work, but he struggles to fit in with his fellow cryptographers.  He is not bullied, as he was at public school, but he finds social interaction to be baffling and embarrassing.  He retreats further and further into the clean, crystalline world of math, searching for meaning in the intercepted Nazi messages that flow into Bletchley Park.

Here the story takes a bizarre turn.  Where the rest of the team struggles to decrypt the incoming gibberish, Basil starts to discover too much meaning.  The dramatic moment arrives when Basil, discomfited by an encounter with an attractive coworker, accidentally starts decrypting a message he had already decrypted.  As the message resolves, Basil realizes that its interpretation has changed, that a slight difference in sequence has resulted in an entirely different, but completely intelligible, message.  The first message described a petrol shortage on the eastern front; the second assesses the political reliability of a Vichy official.  Basil is thrilled—he seems to have defeated the Nazis' attempt to smuggle one message under the cover of another.

But as more and more possible meanings emerge, excitement soon gives way to doubt and confusion.  After all, which of the interpretations is correct?  Is it a petrol shortage?  A disloyal operative?  New orders for the U-boats?  A warning about Dutch saboteurs?  It is beyond belief that the Nazis would undertake the laborious task of weaving all of these messages together.  After all, why bother?  But what other explanation could there be?

The Allied leadership becomes frustrated as Bletchley Park's output becomes sporadic and unreliable, and severe pressure is placed on Basil's superiors to fix the problem.  But there is no way to justify choosing one interpretation over another.  It is unacceptable to give the generals dozens of interpretations of each intercepted message; it is equally unacceptable to pick interpretations at random.  The Allies expend significant resources in a desperate attempt to test the different interpretations, but no systematic pattern emerges.  The longer Basil works on an intercepted message, the more interpretations he produces, but all interpretations seem to have an equal (and low) chance of being correct.

In the hands of a lesser writer, Bletchley Park could easily dissolve into a hazy morass, but Sarang doesn't let the Allies' dilemma overwhelm the story.  In fact, as Bletchley Park becomes near-useless, Basil becomes increasingly detached from his work.  Distrusted by some of his coworkers and despised by others, he spends his time reading philosophy, history, and economics, occasionally venturing to the local pub for beer-soaked debates.  Bletchley Park shifts back and forth between Basil's forceful, slightly muddled arguments and tense discussions within the Allied leadership.  As Basil broadens his analysis, the military view narrows, and we see an inversion of sorts.  Basil is concerned with the big questions of the Empire:  Indian home rule, Palestine, the sterling area.  Meanwhile the Empire is increasingly focused on the narrowest of questions:  what is it to make of the profusion of increasingly erratic intelligence coming from Bletchley Park?

Some readers will find Sarang's meandering, discursive storytelling unsatisfying, while others will find his hyper-realistic sex scenes unsettling.  But the book is the most emotionally honest that Sarang has written, and the first that can really be called a book of ideas.  One gratifying result is that Sarang has managed to avoid the irony/sincerity debate entirely.  The book is so earnest, and yet appears so light and effortless, that it seems to exist on a different dimension, like an imaginary number hovering over the real number line.  It is not always a pleasure to read, but it leaves the reader with such a whirlwind of ideas that few readers will be able to put it out of their minds until long after they finish it.