Nothing Beside Remains

It is all the chattering classes can talk about.  How did Calista's presidential campaign implode so suddenly and in such spectacular fashion?

In my view the question misses the point.  A year ago her campaign was widely treated as a joke and no one would have given her more than a 5% chance of winning.  So the real question is not why she crashed, but why she climbed so high in the first place.  And why did almost no one predict her meteoric rise?

In a sense, everything was telegraphed well in advance.  Calista had been hinting at a run for years, using her Twitter feed to excoriate politicians "who neither see nor feel nor know,/But leechlike to their fainting country cling."  Still, it was commonly assumed that Calista was too busy running her highly lucrative business (she owns the Sometimes a Great Lotion chain of cosmetic stores) to consider a run for the White House.  McKay Coppins even wrote a mocking Buzzfeed profile accusing Calista of continually dangling a candidacy in front of the media, only to shy away when the time came to put her money where her mouth was.

And so it came as something of a shock when Calista, declaring that she had "balanced all, brought all to mind," launched a run for the White House.  Her bombastic announcement speech shocked the world with her controversial claim that "good fences make good neighbors" and that she would make Mexico pay for it.  But her campaign quickly seemed to founder when she attacked John McCain with a gratuitous smear:  "An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick."  Rick Perry declared that the attack made Calista "unfit to be Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces" and said that she "should immediately withdraw from the race for President."

But the unexpected happened:  Calista's poll numbers didn't fade away, but instead continued their steady climb.  Maybe it was her oft-repeated promise to "get rid of Time's worst statute on Day 1 #FullRepeal."  Or maybe it was her evocative campaign slogan, "Let America Be America Again!"  Whatever the source of her appeal, she had soon built a durable coalition of white, less-educated voters that would remain loyal even through her erratic debate performances and questionable retweets.  She even survived an extended quarrel with Megyn Kelly of Fox News, which started when Kelly asked a scathing debate question and escalated the next day when Calista suggested that "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned."  Calista denied that she was referring to menstruation, but her remarks were considered over the line by almost everyone, including Red State founder Erick Erickson, who revoked her invitation to a conservative conference.  Still, the affair put only a small, temporary dent in her poll numbers.

What brought her down in the end was not her crudeness, her Twitter account, or the hapless #NeverCalista movement, but rather a cell-phone video of a closed-door session with major campaign donors.  The video is grainy, but Calista can clearly be heard responding to a question about the "47%," the "takers":

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn.

Confronted with the video, Calista insisted, "That is not it at all,/That is not what I meant, at all."  For a brief time it seemed as though she would weather the scandal.  It's true that the video was taken out of context, and that in view of her complete answer, it appeared that she was actually expressing solidarity with the workers, however inelegantly.

But soon more footage came out, showing Calista describing voters as "petals on a wet, black bough."  This was the final straw.  Her campaign came crashing down, with her opponents delivering the coup de grâce in the Connecticut primary.  And so she announced the suspension of her campaign from a peak in Darien.

Sarang's We Are Not Afraid

Sarang's latest effort, We Are Not Afraid, is one of the hardest to read of all his books.  I admit I put it down several times, and only the need to generate blog content compelled me to pick it back up.

To a large extent this is attributable to the book's subject matter, which is unrelentingly dark and sharp-edged.  Afraid is set in Louisiana in the period leading up to the 50th anniversary of a major civil rights march.  The governor's office, mostly represented in the book by the governor's oleaginous chief of staff, Blake Stenner, is planning a series of corporate-sponsored events to commemorate the march.  But civil rights activists feel that the governor, a white conservative Republican, is trying to co-opt the movement's symbols, paper over the state's abysmal record on civil rights, and draw attention away from how little progress has been made.  The activists are organizing their own independent commemoration of the march and are energetically vying for media attention.

Meanwhile, living in a poorly-insulated mobile home in a run-down trailer park, slowly dying of kidney disease, and minimally employed, Robert Percy Johnson seems at first like an unlikely object of attention for the governor's office and the civil rights activists.  But as a young man, Johnson took part in the march and, crucially, appeared in its most iconic photograph.  Recreating that photograph fifty years later has become a fixation for the media, and so Johnson's loyalties will help determine which camp, if any, scores the coup.

But where do Johnson's loyalties lie?  A white man, he is not much of a civil rights activist anymore, as we are reminded by his casual and frequently expressed (albeit fairly mild) racism.  Actually, we learn, he was never exactly a true believer.  At the time of the march he was dating a black woman, Sarah Hadley, and he went along to the march to be with her.  In the iconic photograph, he is on one side of a large sign, and she is on the other, and they are looking into each other's eyes.  In between, behind the waist-high sign, the marchers look straight ahead toward the camera, their black faces solemn and their jaws set.  The contrasting spontaneity and joy in the faces of Robert Percy and Sarah lighten the picture and make it the classic that it has become.

At first, as both camps reach out to Johnson, we don't understand why their approaches are so oblique and guarded, and his reactions so unpredictable and volatile.  Soon we learn, though, that Sarah broke up with Johnson years ago, and that he has never dated since.  Nevertheless, he gradually lowers his guard and begins to bond with Sarah's daughter Chloe, a New Orleans lawyer and civil rights activist who is helping to organize the counter-commemoration.

But we eventually learn that it wasn't only the breakup of his relationship that embittered Robert Percy.  A few weeks after the march, probably motivated by the famous picture (which was splashed across the front pages of local and national newspapers), the KKK abducted and castrated him.  His attackers were never caught, and while Sarah went on to bigger and better things, Johnson never left town and never really regained control of his life.  He dropped out of school and worked minimum-wage jobs, becoming obese and veering toward alcoholism.  He has experienced life as a series of humiliations and setbacks, brief moments of hope always dashed by his limits and his self-destructive behavior.

The book's title (drawn from the hymn and civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome") comes to seem sarcastic.  After all, Johnson is afraid of everything.  He's afraid of his not-too-distant death.  He's afraid his tormentors will never be brought to justice.  He's afraid Sarah was his only chance at love, and he's afraid that he would have lost her even if he hadn't been castrated.

Sarang has plenty of surprises in store for us, but they don't include redemption for Robert Percy, and to make matters worse, we steadily lose sympathy for Chloe as her controlling, selfish impulses drive the plot forward.  By the time Sarang is finished, life feels pervasively squalid and corrupt, and the end of the book brings finality but not closure, answers but not justice.  And so maybe in all its ugliness and inconclusiveness Afraid faithfully tells the story of race and class in America, leaving the reader with a bitter pill to swallow.

The RNC's 2016 Primary Post Mortem

Probably the most famous line in The Third Man celebrates the creative forces that are generated by turmoil and strife:

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

The cuckoo clock is German, not Swiss.  But is the logic still true on a fundamental level?  The Republican National Committee is testing that hypothesis by taking the highly unusual step of commissioning a "post mortem" on the 2016 primary before the general election has even happened.  And it turns out that the stormy political scene has created fertile ground for unconventional, piercing analysis.  Partly this is because the RNC hired writers operating outside the usual collection of think tanks and conservative groups.  It is hard to think of a less likely roster than the one that ended up producing the post mortem:  Alan, Calista, Sarang, and Dave.

I should say post mortems, because fractious infighting meant that each writer produced a "minority report," none of which attracted any co-signers.  (There was no "majority report.")  The RNC made a virtue of necessity and published the reports as four separate books, with Reince Priebus noting wryly that the process of producing the post mortem was a pretty good metaphor for the primary itself.

Sarang's entry, Race Ipsa Loquitur, is the longest and has the broadest scope, starting with the strong civil rights plank in the Democrats' 1948 party platform (which, incidentally, was adopted in Philadelphia, the same city that will host the 2016 Democratic National Convention) and exploring at length the Republican Party's troubled and troubling connections to racial animus and resentment.  Sarang is at his most persuasive when he unpacks Trump's statements and connects the dots between his attacks on President Obama and his appeal to white racists.  Unfortunately for Priebus, Sarang's concluding advice to the GOP ("close your books, pack up your things, slink away in shame, and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out") is less than constructive.

Dave's book, Behind the Veil, argues that the defining characteristic of the modern Republican Party is its embrace of ignorance.  Most groups are imperfect at acquiring and processing knowledge, Dave argues, but the Republicans are unique in their cheerful celebration of idiocy and their elevation of the conservative pundits and "journalists" who peddle it.  Dave's case is compelling, but my advice to the casual reader is to skip chapters 5-14, in which Dave explores the too-cute conceit that the Republicans are actually trying to replicate the Rawlsian conditions for discovering social justice.  The book picks up steam again as Dave turns to his stark prescription for the party:  cut itself off from Fox News and its ilk and return to mainstream sources of knowledge.  Dave persuasively argues that the Democrats have been well-served by the absence of a "partisan comfort blanket" that merely parrots their views.  The Republicans might lose a few elections without their propaganda machines, but ultimately the party and the country would be better off because of it.

Alan's book starts with a cheerful message for Priebus:  keep doing what you're doing, everything is fine.  But if Priebus keeps reading Worse Than the Disease, his comfort will evaporate pretty quickly.  "The Republican Party is sick all right," Alan writes.  "And the disease is conservatism."  Alan argues that conservatism as it is understood and practiced in the United States is a force for evil.  The only hope for our country is to channel conservatives into futile political projects that seldom or never attain power and that alienate as many voters as possible.  By that standard, the 2016 primaries were a rousing success.  Not only is Donald Trump one of the least electable candidates of all time, but the nomination process unearthed rich veins of idiotic and offensive statements that the Democrats can use to bury him in November.

To finish on a lighter note, Please Clap, Calista's chronology of the primary, recounts the hilarity that was one of its most remarkable features.  Calista shifts focus between small moments of levity, like the inartful Bush phrasing that gave the book its title, to the larger and darker jokes, like Ben Carson's endorsement of a man who compared him to a child molestor.  Calista mostly keeps the book light, but over the course of her narrative she develops a deep and troubling theme:  when people start laughing they often stop thinking.  This all-too-human response was crucial to Donald Trump's ascent, and may yet catapult him to the White House.  Don't stop laughing, she advises, but remember that if we don't work to defeat Trump, the joke may be on all of us.

Sarang's Through the Center of the Earth

Sarang's latest effort, Through the Center of the Earth, is generating a lot of buzz in the literary world—so much so that when Michael Chabon participated in an Ask Me Anything on Reddit, the majority of the questions were not about his own work, but about his opinion of Through the Center.  And the New York Times famously ran dueling reviews of the book on the same day, one by Woody Allen ("arguably the best book of the century") and the other by John Banville ("simply this:  a triumph—undoubtedly the best of the young century").  It's all anyone can talk about.

But I can't help feeling that people are paying attention for the wrong reasons.  The collection of short stories is mostly remarked upon for its imaginative and downright weird plotting.  This isn't misguided, exactly:  the stories really are fascinating.  (More on this in a moment.)  And his plotting really is much tighter and more focused than it was in Bletchley Park.  But hidden behind the well-crafted stories are hauntingly personal themes of loneliness, depression, and alienation, and unfortunately this nuance is at risk of being lost in all the celebratory fanfare.

About those plots:  Through the Center is, to a large extent, an exercise in implausible ideas made to seem plausible through the alchemy of Sarang's vivid prose.  In one story, the CIA recruits an up-and-coming Latvian chef, Māris Rubenis, to infiltrate the world of Soviet cooking.  After establishing himself as the USSR's foremost culinary star, Rubenis introduces what he calls "socialist realist cuisine," the most notable feature of which is that it involves eating prodigious amounts of asparagus at every meal.  As a result, the CIA is able to round up thousands of KGB agents, easily identifying them by the pungent odor of their urine.

But where do Rubenis's loyalties really lie?  Having defected to the United States, he serves the entire National Security Council a meal with well-disguised beets in every course.  After dinner, the council members are horrified when their urine is almost blood-red, and because their insecurities prevent them from talking to each other about it, a national crisis ensues.

This is all amusing enough, and no one does mordant humor better than Sarang.  But it is not just a clever story.  The all-consuming paranoia of national security finds its echo in Rubenis's relationships with his wife and her relationship with her lover, a Ukrainian expert in livestock management.  We come to realize that Rubenis's many deceptions are intimately bound up with his inability to trust other people.  In fact, Sarang suggests that an essential part of happiness may be the ability to trust the people we love, even (or especially) when they don't deserve our trust.  Everyone gets the joke when the urine starts flowing blood-red, but few readers seem to pick up on the quiet tragedy of Rubenis's gradual alienation from the people he loves.

Throughout the book, Sarang escalates the stories to ever-increasing levels of silliness.  In the title story, a physicist, Jan Elias, is hired to develop a system of communication between New York and Tokyo that works by projecting a beam of neutrinos through the center of the earth.  The story is an extrapolation from a real-life project using a trans-arctic cable to profit from a faster connection between those financial centers.  With their even-faster system, Elias's financial backers hope to get rich at the expense of their competitors.  Elias builds a giant tank of water directly beneath the Tokyo Stock Exchange and a particle accelerator directly beneath the New York Stock Exchange, and soon his employers are busily using their market-best informational edge to accumulate vast profits.

Part of the joke here is the ease with which Elias accomplishes otherwise impossible tasks, thanks to his financial backing.  (Imagine building a particle accelerator under the most densely populated land in the United States.)  Of course, the corruption of late-stage capitalism has been a theme throughout most of Sarang's work, but here it has a particularly sharp edge.  Sarang hints that the financialization of our society is inexorable, and the only chance at preserving anything of value involves tawdry compromises.  (For instance, Elias slips a lot of pure science into his project, and finds that he is better-funded than any of his colleagues in the civilian world.)

But again, these themes, which ramify and deepen as they reverberate through the characters' lives, don't seem to be getting any attention.  Wall Street traders are said to like the story, apparently not recognizing themselves in its villains.  (Or, more chillingly, they are embracing the villainy.)  Sarang is in danger of creating a paean to the world he is trying to puncture.

The book has plenty more to offer in the way of fabulous storytelling.  In one story, Nabisco spends a large portion of its marketing budget encouraging people to use the term "Triscuit conditional" in place of the traditional "biscuit conditional," and the campaign is so successful that soon all of the major snack companies are scrambling to keep up.  In another story, a psychologist develops a highly effective method of teaching patients self-control.  But the method is catastrophically successful:  the modern economy is so dependent on exploiting people's addictions and self-destructive impulses that when they gain the willpower necessary to lead happy, healthy lives, the economy implodes.

But I urge you not to get carried away by Sarang's high-flying flourishes.  Re-read the stories with an eye to the sadness and sense of loss that is so easily obscured.  The surface is beautiful, but the real substance lies beneath.

Calista's The Phantom Laundry

Do poetry and politics have anything to do with one another?  Political oratory occasionally ascends to rarefied heights—Lincoln's "better angels of our nature," Churchill's "broad, sunlit uplands," Nehru's "tryst with destiny."  But rhetoric aside, is there any meaningful way in which poetry influences politics or vice versa?  Or are these human endeavors mutually incomprehensible, and insulated from each other by their incomprehension?

These are the issues broached by Calista in her latest effort, The Phantom Laundry.  The book opens with a typical scene from modern American politics:  a young conservative governor from the Midwest, who has just launched his campaign for the presidency, appears on a Fox News morning show.  Smooth and winning, white, religious, and very conservative, Governor Wilkerson seems to have everything it takes to make it in the modern Republican Party.  The cheerful, puppyish interviewers lob a few softball policy questions and then start chatting about his favorite movies, his favorite music, and so on.  When they ask about his favorite book, Wilkerson says that apart from the Bible, his favorite book is The Bell Jar.  "I think voters might have chosen very differently in 2008 and 2012 if they had heeded its message," Wilkerson says, shooting a knowing look at the camera.

The interviewers move on, but something is pulling at the corner of Wilkerson's mind.  Only as he walks off the set does he realize his mistake:  he meant to say The Bell Curve, not The Bell Jar.  It was an inexplicable slip-up, since he has never read The Bell Jar.  But his campaign is just making its first impression on the voters, and now is not the time to admit that he bungled a simple question on national television.  He has no choice but to stick to his answer.

Wilkerson hastily reads the book, comes up with a few trite things to say if anyone asks about it, and then focuses on his tour through Iowa.  But almost in spite of himself, he finds his thoughts returning to the novel and its harrowing story of youth, ambition, and mental illness.  In minutes stolen between campaign appearances, he looks up Sylvia Plath poems on the internet, compulsively clicking from one to the next.  His aides find it harder and harder to draw him away from his smartphone to go on stage or to work a line of voters.

Meanwhile, the Republican primary devolves into a clown show, with each candidate vying to be more outlandish and obnoxious than the last, like a political version of the penis game.  Here Calista is at her sardonic best, punctuating long chapters of prose with punchy interstitial material consisting of candidates' Twitter feeds.  The madness of the race is palpable.

As the novel builds toward its climax, Wilkerson finds himself on the ropes, unable to compete with the lunatics who have come to dominate the race.  Where Wilkerson tends to use dog whistles to attract bigoted voters, his competitors freely express their bigoted thoughts, almost as asides, easily drawing in the voters who previously would have gone to Wilkerson.  His campaign is capsizing, but he can salvage it with a strong performance in New Hampshire, and so he spends more and more time in the state, practicing the retail politics that launched his career in the first place.

It is here, in front of a gaggle of cameras and microphones, that he gets a troubling question from a distraught young woman.  She describes her struggles with addiction and mental illness and holds up a tattered copy of The Bell Jar.  Laboring to enunciate her words through her tears, she says that she knows Wilkerson must be able to empathize with people like her, since he found Plath's book so touching.  But if the Affordable Care Act is repealed, then treatment will be beyond her reach.  What will Wilkerson do for people like her if he is elected?

We don't see his answer.  Instead, the book closes with a long car ride home from New Hampshire, the defeated candidate tired and pensive, surrounded by his dejected but loving family.  Did he do the right thing?  Calista doesn't answer, at least directly, and a lively debate has flared up, with many commenters insisting that no race-baiting Republican could possibly be redeemed by reading Sylvia Plath poetry, of all things.  But if you believe that poetry can mean something even to a politician, that once it takes hold in someone's heart it never stops exerting its tidal pull, then maybe you have found a different answer somewhere in the pages of this beguiling novel.

Alan's The Residence of the Soul

Alan's latest effort, The Residence of the Soul, is a remarkable novel that represent's Alan's first, and hopefully not last, foray into historical fiction.  (I am excluding All of Gaul, the best-selling comedy from his early "New Orleans" period.  All of Gaul consists of the dispatches of a Roman general to his compatriots in Rome, intended to burnish the general's reputation but in fact revealing him to be a petulant, self-regarding buffoon.  The book makes no pretense to historical accuracy, and should be categorized not as a historical novel but as a farce.)

Residence is a much darker work.  At the beginning of the book, the protagonist, Andrei Solovyov, sails to New York seeking work as a war reporter.  (Solovyov is not to be confused with Andrey Soloviev, a real-life Russian war photographer.)  Solovyov is not so much chasing foreign adventure as fleeing domestic strife:  both his mistress and his wife are pregnant, and his creditors are hounding him for his gambling debts.  Solovyov may also be envious of the attention paid to his younger brother, Anatoly, who fought in Crimea and who is now a respected opinion columnist with a decidedly nationalist bent.

Solovyov's experience in the United States is first sobering and then shattering.  He expects to find an egalitarian utopia, but instead is repelled by the unrefined and avaricious Americans he meets.  He is surprised to find himself nurturing a snobbish disdain for the Americans' lack of culture and their barely-disguised social-climbing, and he wonders if this undignified scramble is the price of democracy, and if so, whether it is worth paying.  However, in a stab of painful introspection, he admits to himself that his family would be better off if he were imbued with some of the American passion for money.

Solovyov briefly mingles with politicians and diplomats in Washington, and is amazed that an ungainly and unpolished rube like Lincoln has been entrusted with the presidency.  But soon Solovyov is on the front lines, filing reports of the major battles in the Western theater and becoming accustomed to a rough and unpredictable way of life.  It is here in the heart of the country that Solovyov will lose himself.

Following the surrender of Vicksburg, the last holdout of the Confederacy on the Mississippi River, Solovyov heads north to follow the Union's Army of the Cumberland, which, under the able leadership of General William Rosecrans, is chasing the Confederates out of Tennessee.  (Coincidentally, Vicksburg's surrender came on the day after the withering Confederate defeat at Gettysburg.  The tide of the war has turned, though much blood remains to be shed before it is through.)  Solovyov's abolitionist, pro-Union sentiments have already made it difficult to file objective reports, and at Chickamauga he goes over the edge.  Responding to cries for help, he finds a Yankee soldier who has taken a shot to the head and who is missing a large piece of his skull.  Union surgeons have made a fateful mark on his coat—according to the cruel dictates of triage, he is to be left for dead, since he is beyond medical help.  But the soldier is a mere boy, and Solovyov cannot ignore his need for water and his desperate fear of being abandoned to the advancing Rebels.  Solovyov cradles his head in his lap, trying to keep the brains from spilling out, and alternately cries and talks to the boy.  Clearly slipping away, the soldier starts slurring his words and becomes incoherent, and finally Solovyov must leave him.  As Union soldiers hustle him away in front of Longstreet's charging Confederates, Solovyov casts his mind back to his parting from his tearful son in Russia, now thoroughly ashamed of his own indifference.  Solovyov is almost literally beside himself, perceiving with terrible clarity the wretchedness and selfishness of his existence.  He finds a kind of purity in his self-abhorrence and in his love for the dying soldier, whose name he never learns.  (Rosecrans, too, is unnerved by the slaughter at Chickamauga, and despite Lincoln's reassurances, he effectively resigns his role as leader of the Army of the Cumberland.)

Abandoning his journalistic pretensions, Solovyov joins the Union army as a nurse and follows General Grant from his ingenious reinforcement of Chattanooga (besieged after the Union's retreat at Chickamauga) through his pursuit of General Lee and the remnants of the Confederate army two years later.  President Lincoln joins Grant in Virginia, where he is thronged by ecstatic freed slaves (freed not just by the Emancipation Proclamation but by the Thirteenth Amendment, recently passed by the House of Representatives and awaiting its inevitable ratification by the states).  Solovyov is ashamed by the shallowness of his original assessment of Lincoln, who is now his idol.  When Lincoln is shot, Solovyov, beset by grief, decides that his time in the United States has come to a close.  It is time to return to Russia to face the music.

Now begin Solovyov's trials.  His family is shocked by his self-proclaimed pacifism, and his brother goads their father into disinheriting him.  (Characteristically, Solovyov refuses to accept the label "pacifist,"  insisting that his standards for just war are simply too high for any actual war, short of the Civil War, to satisfy them.  His father declines to honor this distinction.)  His wife, fearing for the welfare of her children, leaves Andrei for his younger brother.  Andrei tells Anatoly not to get too big a head:  "she comes with the house."

This is unfair.  His wife is actually impressed by his new depth, and where before he was sleek and rakish, he is now lean and hardened.  She has never been so attracted to him.  But she is frightened by his political extremism and strange philosophical meditations, and his spiritual awakening strikes her as a convenient way to deflect her anger over his mistress.  Solovyov sails back to the United States alone, this time for good.

Alan now draws a curtain over Solovyov's life, hereafter revealing only the general shape of things.  The Russian expatriate, head in the clouds, moves to Philadelphia and experiments with Quakerism; after several theological quarrels, he renounces the faith and moves to New York City.  Revealing unexpected talent as a bookseller, he nevertheless lives in borderline poverty because of his tendency to use his money to support any oppressed minority that comes to his attention.  He is particularly concerned with the welfare of freed slaves, and as a result he becomes involved in Republican politics.  Predictably, though, he has a falling-out with his fellow Republicans over an arcane point of political philosophy, and he founds his own political party, which attracts a few dozen members at its peak.

All of this is presented in detached, sketchy prose.  But Alan pulls back the curtain when Solovyov's daughter, now a young woman, arrives to tell him that his wife has left Anatoly and wishes to reconcile.  Solovyov is in turmoil.  He has embraced celibacy and fears the temptations that his wife will bring him.  Mixed with this fear is his shame about his financial condition—he is little better off than he was when he left Russia, and without his estate, he has no way to provide for his family.  Unable to corral his unruly thoughts, he takes his daughter on a trip to visit the battle site of Chickamauga.  There for the first time he tells the story of his life-changing encounter with the injured soldier, and he breaks down.

I'll leave the story there (in fact, Alan doesn't take it much further), and part with a few thoughts.  I'm gratified to find that Alan's immersion in Civil War history has yielded big dividends in the form of immediacy and verisimilitude.  The war is not just a backdrop to the story, it provides the impetus for the big philosophical and spiritual ideas that animate the novel.  I wish more authors would bring this kind of unifying conceptual coherence to their work.

This coherence can also be found in my favorite scene of the book.  Solovyov, seeking refuge from family drama, goes for a ride through the Russian countryside.  Here, he encounters a former serf who begs him to describe his encounters with Lincoln.  (By itself, this is a fascinating set-piece, a serf freed by imperial proclamation, mostly ignorant of the world beyond his village and yet hungry for information about the great American emancipator.)  Solovyov's conversation with the peasant lasts only a few pages, but in capsule form it captures Solovyov's volatile feelings, his grandiosity (almost justified by the subject matter) and his depression (almost appropriate given his idol's tragic end).  We see a man gripped by powerful feelings but unable to navigate them or channel his frantic but sporadic energy, a man with rare moral vision but no means to turn it into anything meaningful.  A waste of human potential, maybe, who recognizes himself in the vast waste that was the Civil War.

Calista's Into the World

Calista's latest effort, Into the World, a novel of manners set at a prestigious American university, seems almost quaint in light of recent campus tensions, but it provides a welcome respite from weightier matters.  Calista owes a clear debt to novels like Lucky Jim, but she updates its madcap aesthetic to take full advantage of the absurdities that abound in modern academia.  I confess I can't get enough of this kind of send-up of the modern university—you might even call me an academia nut!

As the book opens, Peter Goldthwaite, a professor of philosophy, has been accused of selling drugs to undergraduates.  The accusations are not quite true, but the disciplinary committee is unmoved by Goldthwaite's insistence that he never accepted money from the students.  However, Goldthwaite's friend and lawyer, the irrepressible Alain de la Droite, manages to shift the venue to the School of Humanities, which provides more fertile soil for his theory of the case.  There, de la Droite argues that it is spurious to identify present-day Goldthwaite with the individual who distributed the drugs more than a year ago.  Present-Goldthwaite bears no more resemblance to past-Goldthwaite than present-Goldthwaite does to any other professor, de la Droite claims.  But it would be wrong to punish one professor for another professor's actions.  Present-Goldthwaite is an innocent man!  By a narrow margin, Goldthwaite prevails, and the charges are dropped.

But Goldthwaite's nemesis, the sinister Dean Villiers, hatches a plan to take revenge on the arrogant philosopher.  A nontenured philosophy professor, Diane Rothblatt, acting as Villiers's cat's-paw, befriends Goldthwaite and encourages him to delve back into his work.  Eager to forget his trials and reinvigorated by the admiration of the young, attractive Rothblatt, Goldthwaite dusts off some of his old drafts and gets them into shape for publication.  After sending off his final revisions to the galleys, Goldthwaite invites de la Droite and Rothblatt to his house for celebratory champagne, and that night Goldthwaite and Rothblatt consummate their budding love affair.

But Rothblatt is riven by self-loathing, for Goldthwaite's moment of triumph also sets the stage for his destruction.  Later, at the launch party, just as Goldthwaite is preparing to give a few remarks, Villiers storms in with the campus police and escorts Goldthwaite off campus.  The professor stands accused of plagiarizing large passages of his new book from the work of past-Goldthwaite, who has been adjudicated to be a separate legal person.  It's an open-and-shut case:  side-by-side comparisons of the just-published book next to Goldthwaite's prior drafts reveal that entire passages have been copied verbatim.  Rothblatt confesses her duplicity to de la Droite and flees, afraid to face Goldthwaite's disappointment.

De la Droite, calling Goldthwaite's destruction on the rocks of his (de la Droite's) legal strategy "the story of my life," becomes despondent and gives up hope for his good friend.  But Rothblatt returns and startles him from his brandy-soaked self-pity with an audacious suggestion:  Goldthwaite's book is plagiarism only if it fails to credit past-Goldthwaite for his intellectual labor.  But the book simply names "Peter Goldthwaite" as the author.  All they have to do to prevail is to convince the disciplinary committee that the reference of "Peter Goldthwaite" is fixed on past-Goldthwaite, not present-Goldthwaite.  If Villiers had waited a few more minutes before raiding the launch party, present-Goldthwaite would undoubtedly have taken credit for the book, sealing his fate.  But Villiers's impatience has left a small door open, though which de la Droite must steer Rothblatt's intricate argument.

Rothblatt throws herself into the defense.  It is hard going—this is not her area of expertise, and she has never had much patience with arguments about reference.  But the bigger problem is that Goldthwaite's brilliant early work, the work that earned him tenure, involved "problematizing" the theory of reference.  Rothblatt and de la Droite must overcome not only Villiers's ingenious arguments (he has recruited Goldthwaite's many rivals from the philosophy department to develop the prosecution's case) but also Goldthwaite's own philosophical positions.

And so the novel skips cheerfully into 50 pages of dense philosophical argument, leavened by Calista's sharp irony and almost slapstick sensibility.  (You can get a sense of the issues at stake here.)  Calista gets a lot of mileage out of the mismatch between the sophistication of the arguments trotted out by de la Droite and Villiers, on the one hand, and the disciplinary committee's befuddled attempts to follow them, on the other.  I won't reveal Goldthwaite's fate, noting only that Calista has a few philosophical tricks up her sleeve to keep the plot aloft until she sticks the landing.

I hesitate to compare the book to other philosophical works of fiction.  Dave's famous "philosophical mystery novel" Will We Ever Arrive? (inspired by a webcomic of the same name) is simply a reprint of his magisterial tome on artificial intelligence, with a new opening chapter in which Detective Montrose discovers that the murder weapon is a magisterial tome on artificial intelligence, which is then replicated for the reader's edification.  No conclusion to the mystery is provided, a move that Dave justifies on the grounds of "exercising the atrophied American imagination."  Into the World is every bit as erudite as Will We Ever Arrive?, but its ratio of fiction to philosophy is far more satisfying.

But however you categorize Into the World, it provides a welcome escape into the world of ideas and the lighter side of the modern university.  When I finished the book and put it down, I found myself wanting to stay a little while longer in its unpredictable but oddly comforting universe.