Bianca Steele

Silly Novels Interviews by Lady Novelists, by George Eliot Katie Roiphe

Claire Messud’s latest novel, The Woman Upstairs sounds interesting, certainly more so than her previous one, The Emperor’s Children (oh no, another novel about young people obsessed with David Foster Wallace!).  The title makes me think of Hilary Mantel’s early novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, which is one of my favorites, an Orwellian gaslight mystery set behind the walls of purdah, but it could also fit well into my next “Boston-area novels” series, if there ever is one.  But on the Internet, there’s been much brouhaha over the interview Messud did with Publisher’s Weekly, part of which, presumably edited down from something a bit longer, they published online.  As the interview presented, the interviewer, a woman, asks Messud, “What are we to make of Nora Eldridge, [the protagonist]?  Because she is angry, really angry.”  Messud answers at length, talking about the kind of novel she intended to write.  The follow-up question is, “I wouldn’t want to be friends with Nora, would you?”  To this, Messud replies, in essence, that the question is a mistaken one.

Writing a brief piece in Salon, David Daley characterizes Messud’s response as a statement that the interviewer’s question was sexist.  Let’s leave aside the definition of “sexist.”  Obviously what is meant is that the question wouldn’t have been asked of a male novelist, and that it’s wrong to have different standards for women and for men.  Messud alludes to this question herself, earlier in the interview: she explicitly says that she had decided she wanted to see a book about a woman who has characteristics she only sees in novels (which she thinks are very good, and in fact loves) that are written by men about men.  In other words, she recognizes that there’s a kind of novel that’s generally written only by men.  She also explains that she doesn’t believe that fact equates to a prescription that has to apply to her.

At this point in the interview (as it was published), the interviewer suggested that she thinks characters in fiction ought to be likable, and that Messud’s character isn’t.  Messud responded by objecting to the question.  She listed, again, some of the same novels she’d mentioned earlier: those she’d already identified as the kind only men, and not women, are thought to be able to write.  There are two ways of taking this.  First, she could be saying, “Surely you think Sabbath’s Theater is great?  Then why do you criticize me?  It must be because I'm a woman.”  Or, she could be saying, “You must think Sabbath's Theater is bad, too, and it isn't.”  I think it’s more likely she intended to say the second of those, which is a common enough sentiment.  But it was actually Messud who’d brought up the question of gender in the first place, and it’s not that surprising if people took her to be saying the first.

But then Katie Roiphe chimed in, linking to Daley’s piece.  Where Daley had mildly noted that Messud implicitly criticized the reviewer’s question for being sexist (Daley mentions Laura Miller’s review of the novel in his own publication, though he doesn’t link to it[1]), Katie Roiphe attacks Messud for implicitly criticizing the reviewer’s question for being sexist.  It’s worth noting that Roiphe doesn’t only attack Messud for the accusation of sexism, Roiphe actually goes on to attack Messud for being insubordinate towards the interviewer.

([1] For that matter, it’s odd that Slate has a column called “Double X,” which is written by Roiphe, and a blog called “XX Factor,” which is written by a slate of four women.)

And as is usual for Roiphe, she gives a whole pseudo-Freudian explication of why Messud might do that and why it’s wrong.  What she says about Claire Messud is, in short, this: that she displays a “tendency to blame the world for a blanket, raging sexism that only partly exists,” that she unfairly “devour[s] her interviewer with her superior, more sophisticated literary approach,” that she throws a tantrum at the injustice of being subjected by a journalist to “indignities, like being asked if you would be friends with your character.”  This is vaguely less insufferable, actually, than Roiphe’s columns so often are.  Here, at least, she’s attributing to Messud attitudes that other writers have laid claim to, in similar situations.  She simply describes those attitudes in a one-sided way that makes them and Messud all look like whiny adolescents—that misunderstands the situation entirely (as if the idea that novelists might know more about literature than book-journalists do, for instance, was entirely novel)—and sets Roiphe up, if only for the amount of time it takes the reader to finish her column, as a voice of reason, almost as a saint.  No one will ever blame Katie Roiphe for seeing sexism where it doesn’t exist, especially if she accuses every other woman of that failing first (though you’d think she’d already secured herself on that point by now).  The most infuriating among Roiphe’s columns, at least for me, are those where she attacks women she simply doesn’t like, for some reason she doesn’t bother to articulate, but has something to do with some domestic task they do and she doesn’t herself think is necessary.  Then, she tars them with the “probably a man-hating feminist” brush, not to mention the (I am not making this up) “probably watches TV with her husband instead of having sex with him, which is a thing I’d never do” brush.  This one is just barely normal enough that many readers, following the link from other mentions of the column, won’t know why Roiphe’s name arouses such outrage.

The really bizarre thing in this case is that Roiphe goes on to give Messud publishing advice.  I suppose what’s going through her mind is, “She’s a writer (a little like me), I have a newspaper column, maybe she would like to someday have a newspaper column, so I’ll tell her what she would need to change if she’d like someday to be me.”  And the advice that Roiphe gives Messud, who’s just published her fifth novel (and is two years older than Roiphe is), is based on Roiphe’s experience with her first book of nonfiction, which she published when she was twenty-five.  Roiphe made such and such mistakes, she says, she learned some lessons in such and such a way, and made such and such changes, and she’s sure Messud can profit from making exactly the same changes.  What it comes across as, however—at best—is tribalistic defense of a journalist (the Publishers’ Weekly interviewer) against a perceived attack from an outsider.

Scott Esposito and D.G. Myers have literary responses to the fracas.  Myers’ is colored by the fact that he habitually defends exactly the kind of novel Messud would seem to be defending in the interview, as here, in a discussion of Roth’s The Human Stain, which happens to be just about at the point in Roth’s career where I started questioning my ability to go along with what he seemed to be up to. -via  For that matter, so does Mr. Claire Messud, James “hysterical realism” Wood.

A Blast from the Past, To Cure Grumpiness

I’ve been in a bad mood for a little over a week.  I think it’s because I’ve still got a copy of Backlash in the house.  Every so often I feel compelled to give it another chance.  I pick it up and flip through it.  Oh, the Republican Party decided it wasn’t so much in favor of abortion rights, equal rights and equal pay for women, or NOW, after all.  I can see how that would be disappointing, especially since it made future legislation more difficult.  But is that evidence that US culture is now “backlash culture,” really?  Or: Oh, in the late 1980s there were very few woman attorneys.  But is that evidence that the number of woman attorneys was actually not increasing, or that by 2000 or 2010 we could still expect to see almost no more women working as attorneys than we saw in 1970?  Or: Oh, here are a small handful of self-help books, summarized at length, that tell women how to attract men who want to marry them; and the writers think being a feminist or speaking your mind won’t do it.  But are they so very different from the self-help books of any other decade?  Are they even typical of the 1980s?  Are they evidence that the feminist-inclined young woman of the 1980s is internally conflicted, demonstrating by her actions and beliefs that she’s under pressure to be less independent and more childlike than she feels is right?  And what’s this “feminist psychotherapy” that the author keeps mentioning but doesn't specify?  And: Why does she mention Moonlighting to talk about media coverage of on-set politics between the director and the stars, but doesn’t discuss the show itself, when (though it was awfully entertaining) it would be a better example of backlash culture than any she’s included?  And how could anyone draw political conclusions from the data point, “male fashion designers aren’t very sympathetic to feminist ideas about fashion”?

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system . . .  I’ll just mention that the second time I picked the book up, someone had said I should read it again, suggesting that there would be some payoff if I read it as evidence for a Marxian or quasi-Hegelian narrative.  And I’ll just say that I tried all the permutations, but none of them worked for me.

I’ve also been grumpy about the bombings at the Marathon.  I live a couple of miles from the marathon route, a couple more miles from the starting line, and like a lot of writers from Hopkinton, where the race starts, it feels irrationally like it hit especially close to home.  Friday seemed quiet, though there couldn’t have been that much of a drop-off in commuter traffic, and apparently traffic on the main roads was still pretty heavy.  Ungraciously, it occurred to me that if Boston and Newton weren’t opened up, people would have to come here to Framingham if they wanted a semblance of night life, and it would be even harder to drive anywhere or get a restaurant table.  And as with the Newtown shootings, and the rape case from India right after it, I haven’t been able to put on NPR the way I like do at lunchtime.

So here are two clips of dances by Mark Morris.  The first, “Dad’s Charts,” is of a solo performance by the choreographer from 1980.  The second, from the Met production of John Adams’ opera Nixon in China, is “The Red Detachment of Women.”  Both are pretty cool.

Don't Leave Your Laptop on Your Bed

Half of Framingham State’s new dorm sustained severe water damage after a fire that started when a student left a laptop on, sitting on top of a comforter.

Talk Radio Deplores the Need of People in Basements to Comment on the News

WGBH’s Boston Public Radio (a new program that’s been on the air for a few months, with a rotating cast of announcer/hosts, replacing Emily Rooney’s and Callie Crossley’s shows) did a segment yesterday on how horrible Internet commenters are, and it’s pretty interesting.  Two points, though:

First: This is a call-in show.  That isn’t a dig: I have a running argument with my husband over whether a call-in show that’s on NPR, like On Point (which is on WGBH’s rival station, WBUR), and like most of the daytime newsmagazine programs, is somehow on a higher moral plain plane than something like Rush Limbaugh.  He says it’s not.  I disagree, but he does have a point.

Second: Unless I heard this wrong, the hosts were suggesting that Yelp should get rid of user comments.  Isn’t that just what Yelp is?  Is there anything to it except user comments?

But please don’t take this as a negative attack.

Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace

I’d been putting off buying Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, D.T. Max’s biography of the recently late David Foster Wallace.  But also I was nearly obsessively returning to the Amazon page to reconsider it.  Eventually, needing something nonfiction to read, I gave in.  At one point, I’d seek out and read anything Wallace wrote, but eventually gave that up—the nonfiction first, a lot of which I haven’t read (in this, I’m the opposite of many of Wallace’s fans, especially among journalists, who really adore the nonfiction, and especially the pieces I tend to like least), and eventually the fiction, too—Oblivion doesn’t fall into the category of books I’m going to borrow from the library enough times that I really ought to buy them[1], though actually there are only three stories in the collection that I don’t already have in magazine form.  I’d gone through the same nearly obsessive process with The Pale King, which, similarly, I eventually broke down and read.

It’s not too surprising that the biography itself raises the question whether it really needed to be published, and whether anyone really needs to read it.  The book ends with what for many readers, most probably, will be the starting point from which they decided to pick it up: Wallace’s suicide and what led up to it; and what he had in mind for The Pale King, the unpublished and uncompleted manuscript that would be his final novel.  Most of this material appeared already in Max’s 2009 New Yorker piece. 

The penultimate and antepenultimate chapters, similarly, cover material that is already somewhat familiar to many readers: Wallace’s publications after his blockbuster (in literary terms), Infinite Jest, and the editing process and publicity tour for that novel.  Max actually has little to say about the many stories and magazine articles Wallace wrote after Infinite Jest.  The origin of the Harper’s pieces, which it’s known were much longer in manuscript—and as later published in collection—than as printed in the magazine, if they ever appeared at all—is described; but the editing process is not.  The origin of Wallace’s Dostoevsky piece, a review of a biography by Joseph Frank, is dealt with in some detail, but not the fact that it never appeared in print in any magazine (nor the rumors that it was included in a galley version of Wallace’s first nonfiction collection, which appeared in 1997, and circulated in quasi-samizdat form among some insider fans, but was removed before that book went to press—in fact, no rumors at all of this kind make an appearance in this book[2]).  It’s with the publication of Infinite Jest that the “accepted” biography of David Foster Wallace begins.  As far as what comes after that goes, we know all this, or think we do, and there’s not much a biographer can add.  Max recounts a lot of correspondence between author and agent, or agent and editor, all of it pretty much the same as all the rest.

Wallace’s worldview was pretty much set by that point.  What’s more interesting, or was for me, at any rate (and maybe also for the biographer, who counts The Broom of the System, written while Wallace was still in college and published before he got his MFA, as his favorite book), is what comes before.  Max devotes lots of space to the genesis of Wallace’s early stories and nonfiction articles, and to the interactions with university programs and fellow writers they grew out of, as well as to (in passing) debunking certain myths.

Maybe we really didn’t need to know these things, and so didn’t really need a biography of David Foster Wallace.  His life isn’t really history; it took place very recently, so a book about him is inevitably going to fall into the category of journalism, even of publicity hype.  Looking at it feels a little prurient, like wanting to satisfy our curiosity about any individual person, who deserves their privacy.  We don’t have to satisfy our curiosity about where the novelists writing now are coming from, what they studied at school, who mentored them, or what obstacles they encountered, any more than about their political ideas or whether they consumed illegal substances.  But then again, we really don’t need novels, either.

As far as David Foster Wallace’s early life, influences, and development go, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story is a good, basic biography that gives you all the facts (for the most part).  Wallace was born in New York State and moved to rural Illinois as a small child.  He grew up in a university town and attended public high schools where only some of the students were, like him, faculty kids.  He played competitive tennis.  He watched a lot of TV.  He read a lot.  He drank and smoked pot.  His father, a philosophy professor[3], taught him about philosophy.  He had a complicated relationship with his younger sister, his only sibling.  His mother, a teacher of college composition, really was very insistent on good grammar, and really did cough at the dinner table every time one of her children made a grammatical mistake.  He really did go to Amherst College, and considered going to Oberlin (viz. The Broom of the System, in which a girl rejects Amherst’s sister college for Oberlin after visiting her elder sister there).  He really was in recovery.  He was really hospitalized for depression.  He did take a dual summa in English literature and philosophy.  He did know Mary Karr and Elizabeth Wurtzel.  He went to Yaddo twice.  “E Unibus Pluram” was commissioned by Harper’s but not published by them.  He wrote a good number of book reviews early in his career.  Etc. 

There’s some attempt to place David Foster Wallace as a writer, but Max isn’t a literary critic, and there’s blessedly not too much of it.  There’s no attempt to diagnose him or to subject him to commentary.  Only once does the biographer allow himself to wonder whether a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, rather than depression—which would have necessitated, presumably, a drug different from the Nardil he was prescribed—had been called for, and the question whether Wallace was in therapy for most of his adult life, and if not, how he was getting his prescriptions refilled, is not considered.  The book is sympathetic to the twelve-step movement, in a vague kind of way, and respectful of Wallace’s and his friends’ privacy.

The genesis and development of each of the stories that went into Girl With Curious Hair is described to a significant level of detail.  So is the kind of work that was expected at Amherst and at the University of Arizona.  The classes Wallace took at both places are described, and the kind of work Wallace turned in for them.  His struggles with the curriculum, when it pulled against his intuitions, is described, as well.  Every one of his emotional collapses (as an earlier age would have termed them) is narrated, in its genesis, phemonenology, and eventual resolution.  All of this leads up to the completion of the magnum opus, Infinite Jest, and the apotheosis (whatever his feelings about it) of David Foster Wallace as a teaching writer, albeit an occasionally blocked one, with complex feelings about that blockedness.

Where the book is also useful is in debunking (assuming you think that kind of thing is necessary, or desirable) some of the rumors that swirled around Wallace’s persona—what he called “the statue”—while he was alive.

The “standard, accepted” biography of David Foster Wallace during the time of his greatest fame included the following “facts”: that he had never held a teaching job until after around the time Infinite Jest was published, that everything he wrote about AA was based on research and he was not himself in recovery, that he was a cradle Catholic; that the manuscript of The Broom of the System was accepted at Amherst as a thesis in the department of philosophy, as a text about Ludwig Wittgenstein.  Max’s biography shows all these “facts” to be, in fact, false, and it’s helpful for other areas, too, that simply were never very clear.  On the other hand, other questions, such as the pseudonyms mentioned above, aren’t addressed at all.

On the literary side, the following additional facts, I think, were generally largely accepted: that Wallace’s understanding of literary theory (Derrida, De Man, and so on) was one that had been inculcated in him in the standard undergraduate English literature sequence (and not in philosophy classes, which tend to take a different tack); that he had rejected philosophy for literature and that, if he hadn’t done so, he had certainly rejected technical formal logic and Anglo-American analysis in favor of a more literary and subjective philosophical style; that the beliefs held by the faculty of the University of Arizona writing program were his own (in fact he disagreed with them vehemently and was somewhat miserable there); that the best parts of his early published fiction were written by an author who despised Mark Leyner (in fact, he was a fan, and only turned against Leyner’s kind of writing a bit later).  Some might feel that knowing whether these “facts” were true or false is important for understanding what Wallace wrote.  To my mind, Max’s biography casts them in doubt (even for readers who didn’t already doubt them, as a consequence of having read the texts themselves).   To be fair, Wallace did change his mind (or at least nuance it) about, especially, the purpose of fiction and the best way of writing it; but it is not obvious that he made a complete about-face and came to fully embrace the writing preferred by the MFA program that he attended.  And to my mind, it’s an important fact that for Wallace, unlike many of his peers who came out of English-literature programs, De Man belonged to philosophy and not to literature.

It would be too much to say that this book is going to give ambivalent (or even mourning) readers closure about Wallace and the manner of his death.  It did help me come to grips with the earlier stories, again, after I’d become frustrated with his later ones and with the way he’d become given to speaking about them.  It helped me better appreciate The Broom of the System, which never was one of my favorites.  And it helped to explain why there were parts even of his best work—Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, in particular—that eventually came to rub me the wrong way, and why the parts I liked best were so often the parts that Wallace himself seemed to disown.

 

[1] Now that I have an e-book reader, though, the criterion has moved from “don’t really really have to have it, but am about to borrow for the third time,” to “would consider borrowing again just for reference, because it looks pretty interesting.”

[2] This is reasonable, actually.  The book is about the writer, not about his readers.  But all except the bare facts of the publication histories of many of the stories that would be collected in Oblivion is excluded here.  And even that’s an exaggeration, unless the fact that some of them appeared under pseudonyms is excluded from the category of “bare fact.”  For instance, “Mr. Squishy,” one of the best stories in the collection, first appeared as the work of “Elizabeth Klemm,” but the name “Klemm,” like the words “pen name” and “pseudonym,” appear nowhere in the book.

[3] If it were my book, I’d have mentioned the fact that one of James D. Wallace’s books (on open stacks in the Boston Public Library in Copley Square) is about the philosophical implications of fiction.  Maybe also the fact that another of his books is on virtue ethics. But it’s not.

Should Framingham Still Be a Town? There's Time to Sign the Petition.

The town I live in Framingham, Massachusetts, is incorporated as a town.  This means it's governed by an elected Board of Selectmen and a Town Meeting (as well as a Town Manager, hired by the Selectmen, and various elected and appointed boards, such as the Board of Health and the School Committee).  While many smaller towns in the area still have a Town Meeting that's literally open to anyone who wants to show up and speak, Framingham (with a population of close to 70,000) has an elected town meeting, in which each precinct elects a slate of meeting members.

There's been agitation for a few years to turn Framingham into a city, with an elected mayor and full-time city council.  I don't know all the arguments the advocates are giving, though I've heard suggestions that it would improve efficiency and accountability.  Marlboro, with slightly over half Framingham's size, has always been a city.  I don't know whether it's felt to work well there or not.

But anyway, I think it's worth airing the issues, and the advocates of charter reform have been trying to get signatures to put the question on the ballot this April.  If it passed (the ballot question, not the petition), a charter reform committee would study the question.  According to this article in the Metrowest Daily News, they have until Feb. 5 to get 5,544 signatures, a little over ten times as many as they already have.  If you want to sign and haven't yet, I suppose, you can contact them, or go find the guy who stands in front of Stop & Shop.

The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman

Here is the final installment of “Summer Boston Books,” a semi-review of The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman.  I’ve already written a little about The Cookbook Collector here and here.

As I mentioned in those posts, The Cookbook Collector is an overstuffed novel of a type that could be called a “social novel” (though see below), or, about equally well, a “women’s novel.”  The central plot strands revolve around two sisters, now living in Berkeley and Silicon Valley, but originally from Massachusetts.  Jessamine, or Jess, is a graduate student in philosophy, struggling to keep on top of her school work, her relationships, and her job at an antiquarian bookshop.  Emily, her older sister, is the CEO of a software startup.  Both women are marked by the death of their mother, so early that Jess has hardly any memories of her.

Emily’s fiancé is also a software executive, at a company in Cambridge, founded by friends of his from graduate school at MIT, on the basis of a project they began there.  They’re tenuously carrying on a long-distance relationship.  Jess has recently begun dating a celebrity in the world of environmentalism, and trying to fit into his way of life.  Her boss, George, doesn’t approve of him—or of her, much of the time, though he finds her paradoxically charming.  George was once a sort of hippie, then a graduate student and ultimately Ph.D. in physics, then a Microsoft employee and ultimately millionaire, and now an independently wealthy bachelor with eighteenth-century tastes.  (The reader might be reminded of Douglas Coupland’s novel, Microserfs, in which a similar life arc is taken by much younger characters.)  In politics, he tends libertarian.  In culture, he prefers the tried and true, especially the eighteenth century.  In lifestyle, he prefers the expensive.

The plot’s set in motion when Jess needs a few thousand dollars to invest in the “sure thing” represented by the Friends and Family program for the impending public stock offering of her sister’s company.  She ends up going to her neighbor’s rabbi for a loan.  The Bialystokers are an outside-looking group apparently modeled on the Lubavitch.  Eventually, unable to pay the money back, she’ll feel compelled to keep visiting the Bialystokers, if only out of politeness.  At about the same time, George is approached by a woman with a large collection of antique books on cookery.  He’s initially wary, but eventually is drawn in.

If you’ve guessed the ending already, you’re probably right.  But the journey there is enjoyable and the included side trips are worth the fare.

The software-startup strands of the plot are forward-looking.  George, on the other hand—computer guy that he is—is entirely backward looking.  He has renovated his house, which is an architecturally significant example of the Arts and Crafts style, so that everything but the kitchen is appropriate to the time at which it was built.  He collects old books and counts himself a connoisseur of the best things of the past.  He’s a recognizable type: someone who’s made a lot of money in technology and uses it to finance a lifestyle that’s as close as possible as he could come to a fairly traditional one (a privileged version of a traditional lifestyle, that is).

(There are MINOR SPOILERS below this point.)

The writing style is elegant, but fairly dry (a welcome change from the British novels I’ve been reading, which tend toward the extreme of the strictures set out by writing-instruction books, heavy on concrete images and shy of the more leisurely kinds of prose).  Thus, in so far as there’s a love story embedded in this novel, there end up being two ways of reading that love story.  In other words, some readers will feel that the characters who get together are pretty amazing, that they’re essentially made for each other, and that it’s totally understandable why they fell; but others may feel that they’re acting on a whim or another irrational emotion, and that things will never work out.  In this way, The Cookbook Collector is like the Jane Austen novels that George loves.  Can a modern reader really believe that Mr. Darcy (in Pride and Prejudice) or Mr. Knightley (in Emma) is such a good catch?  Are we simply used to thinking of a marriage as the happy ending to this kind of story, or can we show that Darcy and Knightley are, as depicted by their author, really good?  (There’s an interesting connection here to Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, which begins with Madeleine’s student preoccupation with this traditional novel form, which she’s been taught is nowadays impossible.)

The novel builds to the economic problems that began, in high-tech industries, in 2000.  Some characters get out of that crisis okay, some more than okay.  Some end up in something close to dire straits.  Whether or not this was the novelist’s intention, it’s difficult not to see the causes of these different ultimate fates in their differing individual choices.  The Cookbook Collector is not a “social” novel in the sense of telling us about society.  Goodman doesn’t detail elements of the software industry that link it up with the wider society (with minor exceptions like the East Coast MIT-venture capital link), or the elements in that wider society that impact on the people who work in the industry (again with exceptions like global terrorism and yuppiedom).  The novelist is concerned, rather, with the human factors—virtues and vices, greed, pride, lust—that affect their ability to cope, to work together, and generally to live their lives, without unbearable angst.

I would have liked to see the business elements of the novel placed in some kind of context, though.  We start the book in medias res, with two of the major characters already highly placed in different software startups on different coasts, in 1999.  We end it in 2002, when the principals’ dreams of outrageous fortunes have become a little less rosy.  What we don’t see is the recession.  Noticing that the rest of the economy is missing brings to the foreground the fact that the rest of the high-tech industry is missing too.  The novel focuses on what’s interesting or “sexy.”  That means the rich and fabulous, on the one hand, and what’s in the news, on the other.  Goodman seems to want to make large statements about what it’s like to work in that economy, however, and the missing pieces make for a misleading whole.

The overall effect is to connect the characters’ reversals of fortune to their personal failings alone.  A focus on individuals and their personal growth into (or out of) the environment that surrounds them is appropriate to the traditional social novel.  On the other hand, the attempt to convey a larger message, which is also present here, is undercut.  And there were plenty of people who were also in dire straits by 2002, merely because they had associated themselves with companies that later failed, and not through any vices of their own.  Those people are missing, and to the extent one assumes that they’re present implicitly, the implications are more than a little insulting to them.

Nor does Goodman manage to avoid—entirely—the literary cliché by means of which science and engineering types (or those who inadvisedly associate themselves with such) are rescued from the commercial world, either through art or through their recognition of the horror that world seems to them to entail.

At first, Goodman’s novel seemed to make a refreshing change from books like Diane Johnson’s L’Affaire or Ellen Ullman’s The Bug (the latter by a former programmer herself, the former by a literature professor).  Both of those are framed as events that have already happened, to a protagonist who has already abandoned the field for less specialized pursuits.  Johnson sets her character’s newly found (American) wealth against the context of the mostly European, mostly leisure-based society in which she’s beginning to move.  In Ullman’s novel, the pressures of the commercial-industrial world compel the narrator’s break with that world, to preserve her own sanity.  The Cookbook Collector, a little more novelistically, externalizes that kind of conflict by displacing it from within the protagonists’ psyches to inter-sibling conflict within a family.  Yet by the end of the novel, more than one of the characters (pretty much all the sympathetic ones) has similarly left in disgust.

I like this novel and would recommend it without reservation.  I think the questions Gabriel Brownstein raised about why The Cookbook Collector was not generally discussed as on a level with Freedom and The Marriage Plot are valid.  That it left me wishing for more is not necessarily a bad thing.

Two Stories About Property Rights

First, David Koch (the Koch brothers’ other brother) has asked the government for a land swap that would grant him some lands that are currently public.  The swap would apparently take a corridor of land that has been used as a path into the mountains for more than a hundred years, making the land the path lies along into private property.  Some locals are trying to have the swap blocked.  I’m not a lawyer, but I would have thought that rights-of-way would have some influence in this case.  Yet these aren’t mentioned in the Times story.  Maybe things haven’t gotten to that stage yet.  The controversy seems to revolve solely over ownership. 

The second case, on the other hand, in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, appears to involve deeded rights of access to the beach.  Some neighbors whose land is attached to such rights have built walls that block access for the others.  (In one case, according to the Globe’s reporting, a new deed appears to have been filed that includes more access to the beach than the seller had the right to transfer.)  People who bought beach houses believed they had acquired, with those houses, rights of access to a particular shared section of the beach.  These rights were enumerated in their deeds.  Now, a few of the people who bought houses in the same area seem to have decided they should be able to build on, and to block off from their neighbors as if it were individually owned private property, the part of the beach that was next to their own land. 

From a Really, Really Big Picture point of view, this case might seem to be very similar to the various historical enclosures of various commons, mostly in England.  These took land which all people had a right to use in common, for instance to graze livestock, fenced it, and made it private property.  This process represented an enormous change in the way the economy of England (and the whole of the West) would end up operating.  I suppose it’s arguable that there was no stopping it.  So, from this Really, Really Big Picture point of view, perhaps the Falmouth case is the same.  A rich person took some land that used to be held in common by a group of people, and now it belongs to the rich person: that’s the end of that. 

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem quite legal.  The neighbors, presumably, wouldn’t themselves own Falmouth beach houses unless they were also fairly well off (and judging from what the Globe has reported happening so far, they seem to have the resources to fight this thing).  They’re not exactly peasants, with no written-down property rights and no formal connection to the government, who by virtue of the solely oral nature of their connection to society can have taken away what little they’re—temporarily, an opponent might argue—currently making use of.  It might be difficult for farmers in Colorado, for example, to see themselves making common cause with a bunch of people who are trying to regain beach rights (and I don’t know whether they are also fighting for public rights, such as between the lines of low and high tide, if those were traditionally granted in the area in question either).  But it seems to me that the issues are the same. 

At Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram has written a couple of times about John Rawls’ idea of a property-owning democracy.  Obviously, a property-owning democracy only works if each property owner can defend his own rights against encroachment by their fellow members of the society.  If the society operates under the rule of law, in other words.  A few years ago, a discussion at the same blog of a book by Steven Teles, called The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, was eye-opening, for me, about the difference between what I supposed was the openness of the law to use by ordinary people, and what is now the case.  This seems to be relevant too.  

Also relevant is the status of the common law.  Somehow—probably largely from watching The Paper Chase—I’d gotten the idea that the common law was very important in the United States.  But checking more recently, for example, in reference books, I read lots of things that suggested I’d been under a misapprehension.  And regardless of the status of the common law in, for example, federal law, I don’t know how Colorado ranchers would view it.  Is the common law, for them, a bulwark against the tyranny of government?  Or, is it “federal” interference with their local rights?

36 Arguments For the Existence of God, a novel by Rebecca Goldstein

This will be another post about Boston-based novels that I read over this past summer (more here and here): about 36 Arguments For the Existence of God, the most recent book by the novel and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein.

36 Arguments For the Existence of God has a single main protagonist, Cass Seltzer.  He’s a professor of psychology at a university west of Boston, obviously modeled on Brandeis (the school’s Jewish foundation and the details of the town it resides in, based on Waltham, give it away).  The plot meanders back and forth through time, exploring Seltzer’s career and the important people in his life.  These are depicted sharply, as are the minor characters.  First is Lucinda Mandelbaum, a fellow psychology professor and a famous game-theoretician.  Lucinda is in the vein of Goldberg’s cold, rationalist female philosophy professors, like Eva Mueller in The Late-Summer Passion of a Woman of Mind, but with greater passion and taste for luxury.  While she’s away at a conference, Cass receives an offer from Harvard.  He’s already been scheduled for a debate on the existence of God at Harvard’s Memorial Hall.  And he receives a visit from his first graduate-school girlfriend, Roz Margolis.  In between negotiating with the Frankfurter University president over what to do about the better offer he received, he recollects his past: what brought him to the study of psychology of religion and to the writing of his now notorious book, The Varieties of Religious Illusion.

Cass had been pre-med, at Columbia, until he took a single, fatal lecture course with the charismatic professor of literature, Jonah Elijah Klapper: whereupon he applied to graduate school and followed the great man to Boston.  Also moving to Boston were every one of Klapper’s graduate students: among them, Gideon Raven, who’d already been working on his Ph.D under Klapper for more than a decade, and eventually Cass’s mentor and friend.

Cass’s mother had been born in a Hasidic community in upstate New York, named New Walden, and had returned only occasionally, to allow Cass and his brother to get to know his grandmother.  When Jonas Elijah Klapper discovers Cass’s heritage, he insists on an invitation to visit New Walden in Cass and Roz’s company.  This triggers a crisis in Klapper’s career, and consequently in the careers of the graduate students.  Cass switches his subject to the psychology of religion and eventually writes the book against God that, by the beginning of this one, has made his reputation.

The novel circles around the question whether religion is important to human happiness, or whether it is inherently ridiculous, and possibly pernicious.  Its answer is equivocal.  Roz is a humanist who wants to find the cure for death.  Lucinda is a rationalist who bases her most personal decisions on the cold calculations of logic, game theory, and ego.  The Valdener Hasidim stake everything on the hope that their way of life will never, ever change in any essential feature.  Klapper and Gideon are—if not overtly religious—susceptible to its call, and vehemently opposed—if not to science itself—to “much of what passes for science” (including Darwinism).  Yet Cass, Klapper’s newest disciple, is a science major who’s never before thought about these questions very much.  The plot itself, to the extent it’s centered on the history of his connection to his earliest academic advisor, circles around his bewilderment at what he seems to have gotten himself mixed up in.

It seems necessary to mention that large dollops of the depiction of Jonas Elijah Klapper seem drawn from what’s known publicly of the persona of Yale professor Harold Bloom.  The eventual fascination with Kabbalah would have settled it, if nothing else did.  Nobody who knows even a little about Bloom will be able to read this book and not think of him.  On the other hand, nothing essential about the character depends on his being based on Bloom.  He’s simply an exaggerated version of a professor of a certain kind, whose traits could have been drawn from any number of different people.

The ending of the novel invites comparison with the author’s earlier novel Mazel.  It also invites a reinterpretation of that novel, because each book ends in the protagonist’s apparent reconciliation with traditional Judaism.  Yet sometime between the writing of that novel and the writing of this one, apparently, the novelist left Orthodoxy and identified herself (if I understood correctly) as a nonbeliever.  I don’t think it’s necessary to have a taste for gossip to wonder whether Goldstein’s previous book, a biography of Spinoza, was written before or after the switch; a biography of Spinoza, an apostate and involuntary excommunicate, by an Orthodox Jewish woman, surely is a very different thing than a biography by someone who herself has left the fold.  (Harold Bloom reviewed the biography for the New York Times Book Review, for what that’s worth.)

For me, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God is not among Rebecca Goldstein’s very best books.  Those, I think, are Mazel and Properties of Light (about a physicist with ideas similar to those of David Bohm.  Goldstein has never settled into a single form for her novels; each one is different, depending, presumably, on the needs of the content.  Unfortunately, though, the result is sometimes a book that seems too long or ununified to hold the attention of someone reading mostly for the story.  36 Arguments is brief enough, and close enough in form to a typical mainstream novel, for this not to be an issue, but at times—the inclusion of what feels like the entire debate over the existence of God is one, the unusual chronology is another—the philosophical elements bog things down in a way that didn’t seem satisfying.

Someone who’s very interested in arguments for atheism or for the existence of God will probably find that debate, between Cass and a noted religious apologist, worth the effort.  Readers who aren’t interested as much in ideas may very well skip it, without appearing to miss too much.  Those looking for a campus novel about disillusionment with advisors may find the novel amusing (I don’t know enough to say whether it’s dead-on or unfair).  Goldstein’s characters, especially her women characters, are sharply and wickedly drawn: types, but types I’ve never seen “done” elsewhere.  The unusual structure of the book, on the other hand (together with the longish digressions into academic subjects), will probably make it unsatisfying for many readers who are looking for a straightforward romantic story.  It has such a story embedded in it, but the reader has to think a bit to see how the romance and the ideas link up together.

I said in an earlier post that 36 Arguments is a “woman’s novel,” and that’s true, in part.  The novel is mostly about relationships: Cass’s with the women in his life (Lucinda, his ex-wife Pascale Puissant, and Roz), and with his mother and grandmother.  The bulk of the plot revolves around these women, with how his work affects his relationships with them, and with what they think about it.  On the other hand, most of the interest is focused on the evolution of Cass’s ideas, and significant space is given to his relationships with his graduate school mentors, Jonas Elijah Klapper and Gilbert Gideon Raven.

It’s a bit difficult to get at one of the book’s other major themes without giving away the ending, but it could be labeled “the question of genius.”  If you’re familiar with The Chosen, which I mentioned in the post in which I mentioned this book earlier, you’ll have some idea what I mean.  Moreover, Jonas Elijah Klapper is entirely obsessed by the question of genius (in a much cruder way than the way in which Harold Bloom, with his ideas of the “strong poet,” might be said to concern himself with the topic): how to interpret the genius of others, and ultimately the question of his own.  It’s possible to do this theme very badly, and Goldstein avoids these problems adroitly, but the topic itself seems to me to be of questionable interest.  After finishing the novel, I still didn’t understand how “genius” fit in among the novels other themes, or why it was included.

The book (like Cass Seltzer’s best-seller) ends with a lengthy appendix, detailing thirty-six actual arguments, given by recent or historical figures, purporting to prove that God exists, along with thirty-six refutations.  It’s implied, though not stated outright, that this appendix is taken in some form from the fictional Cass Seltzer’s fictionally notorious book.  These may be interesting in themselves for some readers, especially the probably very many readers who’ve never encountered these arguments before.

Is The Cookbook Collector Literary, or "Only Mainstream"?

I mentioned in an earlier post that during the summer I had read both The Cookbook Collector, by Allegra Goodman, and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, by Rebecca Goldstein, and that I would have more to say about these.  (I noticed I still haven’t given even capsule plot summaries of the kind I wrote, in my previous post, for the other books I mentioned.  I’ll include these in a later post.)

In the same post, I noted that the novels that were by men, among those I’d read over the summer, pretty consistently were more narrowly focused than those by women.  They concentrated on the personal journey of a single character, and paid little attention to social context, whether “social” is taken to mean the interactions within a group of people, or the operations of the larger society.  Their plot was simple and straightforward, and minimal by comparison with the number of pages it took up.  They seemed to find it difficult to pay close attention to a second character within the pages of the same novel, let alone more than two.  But on the other hand, they did find room for ideas, sometimes in the form of allegory, but as often in the form of abstract discussion.

In part, this seemed to be because those novels happened to be genre novels, namely science fiction or fantasy, and thus to appeal to a specialized audience, who in many cases don’t read “mainstream” novels at all.  Goodman’s and Goldstein’s books, though novels of ideas, were resolutely “mainstream,” and thus followed the patterns expected from most reasonably accomplished long fictions.

However, it’s not by any means the case that “mainstream” or “literary” novels have to be dialogue-heavy, plot-heavy “social” novels with lots of characters.  In fact, most “literary” novels by men, especially (though also novels by women that are more “literary” and less intended for a general audience), are to some degree more similar to the genre or mainstream-genre hybrid novels I read over the summer: as narrowly focused as they are on a single character, with a relatively simple plot that tracks that one character’s education—maybe two, at an absolute maximum three.  In fact, “women’s” or “social” novels, like The Cookbook Collector in particular, are considered not only old-fashioned, in literary circles, but outright unfashionable, associated with popular novels, more like The Help, and with the formally staid, a kind of novel that hasn’t advanced much in the past hundred and fifty years.

And it’s true that there are plenty of books that fit this description that are not very good, although they can be entertaining enough.  What allows them to be published, and to sell, is the entertainment value they possess: value that derives from their being heavy on plot and on their failing to surprise most readers very much, either by what they include and what they say, or by how they are put together.  They don’t need the qualities that make a different kind of novel “literary.”  Yet coming back to “mainstream popular” novels after spending a lot of time reading more literary fiction, the novels that are merely entertaining can start to seem a little boring.  It starts to feel as if they are all the same.  They don’t seem interesting enough to read as slowly as I’ve become used to doing, I end up wanting to skim them. 

On the other hand, however, it’s not at all fair to apply this description to The Cookbook Collector or to 36 Arguments for the Existence of God.  I think Allegra Goodman, especially (who doesn't draw sophistication from explicit discussions of philosophy, as Goldstein does) is aiming at something that one might with reason describe as literary.  She’s aiming at a kind of social novel that used to be considered—and arguably in some highly respected quarters still is considered, regardless of how old-fashioned it seems to others—the paradigm case of a novel.  That this is her aim is demonstrated by the accomplished prose, the careful use of secondary characters and settings to indicate a theme, and the unobtrusive, natural-seeming way in which ideas and social questions are introduced into the narrative.  And the themes themselves are quite similar to what, for example, Jonathan Franzen (in The Corrections) and Richard Powers (in Gain) have treated.

What is missing from Goldstein’s and Goodman’s novels is subjectivity: specifically, subjectivity in the language.  The language in these books is flat.  The treatment of ideas is superficial: not in the sense that the ideas are unsophisticated or that they’re treated in unsophisticated or uneducated ways, but, in the sense that there is no depth to them.  Ideas are glanced at, disposed of in one sentence, and abandoned so that novelist and the reader can get on to the next thing.  Nothing appears thought through.  No striking thought makes its presence known behind the text; no striking thinking is laid out within the text itself.  Moreover, the flat absence of anything that serves consistently to distinguish the language and thoughts of one character or narrative point of view from another (more in The Cookbook Collector than in 36 Arguments) overpowers the slight indications of subjectivity that might arise from implied differences in attitude or belief between them.

As it happens, the question of literariness has been raised before, with respect to The Cookbook Collector.  A year and a half ago, at The Millions, an online books, arts, and culture site, Gabriel Brownstein asked why Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom “was sold as ‘The Great American Novel’ (that’s what Esquire called it), while The Cookbook Collector was (I guess) just another good book by Allegra Goodman.”  In part, the answer seems obvious.  Franzen’s writing is “literary”—in the ways outlined above—in a way Goodman’s isn’t.  Literariness is Franzen’s goal, and because The Cookbook Collector lacks some of the obvious markers of most high-literary novels, it doesn’t seem as obviously to be  Goodman’s goal.  Brownstein relates this to “difficulty,” which Franzen has said a lot about, and to “his attempt to wed whacked-out and dark postmodern irony to sympathetic humanist realism.”  And though this is part of it, I don’t see that either of these is really at the root of the difference.  Brownstein also mentions the controversy over why “women’s novels,” supposedly, aren’t taken as seriously, considered for awards as often, and publicized as widely, as are men’s.  I’d suggest that it is, in part, because what they lack, by comparison with novels like Franzen’s, has come to be considered more important than what more typically men’s literary novels (The Corrections and Freedom aren’t actually entirely typical, I think) lack by comparison with the women’s or old-fashioned social novel.

In his essay at The Millions, Brownstein quotes a passage from Freedom to illustrate the difference.  I haven’t read Freedom yet, however, and I’ll quote one from Franzen’s previous novel, The Corrections, which he could as easily have used instead:

“Six days a week several pounds of mail came through the slot in the front door, and since nothing incidental was allowed to pile up downstairs—since the fiction of living in this house was that no one lived here—Enid faced a substantial tactical challenge. She didn't think of herself as a guerrilla, but a guerrilla was what she was. By day she ferried matériel from depot to depot, often just a step ahead of the governing force. By night, beneath a charming but too-dim sconce at a too-small table in the breakfast nook, she staged various actions: paid bills, balanced checkbooks, attempted to decipher Medicare copayment records and make sense of a threatening Third Notice from a medical lab that demanded immediate payment of $0.22 while simultaneously showing an account balance of $0.00 carried forward and thus indicating that she owed nothing and in any case offering no address to which remittance might be made. It would happen that the First and Second Notices were underground somewhere, and because of the constraints under which Enid waged her campaign she had only the dimmest sense of where those other Notices might be on any given evening. She might suspect, perhaps, the family-room closet, but the governing force, in the person of Alfred, would be watching a network newsmagazine at a volume thunderous enough to keep him awake, and he had every light in the family room burning, and there was a non-negligible possibility that if she opened the closet door a cascade of catalogues and House Beautifuls and miscellaneous Merrill Lynch statements would come toppling and sliding out, incurring Alfred's wrath. There was also the possibility that the Notices would not be there, since the governing force staged random raids on her depots, threatening to "pitch" the whole lot of it if she didn't take care of it, but she was too busy dodging these raids to ever quite take care of it, and in the succession of forced migrations and deportations any lingering semblance of order was lost, . . .”

or from Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot:

“Jet lag added to his slight delirium. It was morning by the clock but deepest nighttime in his body. The rising sun forced him to squint. It seemed unkind somehow. And yet, at street level, everything had been arranged to please the eye. The trees were thick with late-summer leaves. They wore iron grilles around their trunks, like aprons. The broadness of the sidewalk accommodated newspaper kiosks, dog walkers, chic ten-year-old girls on their way to the park. A sharp scent of tobacco arose from the curbside, which was the way Mitchell had thought Europe would smell, earthy, sophisticated, and unhealthy, all at once.”

or this, from the same novel:

“The shelves near the fireplace held Alton’s favorites, biographies of American presidents and British prime ministers, memoirs by warmongering secretaries of state, novels about sailing or espionage by William F. Buckley, Jr. Phyllida’s books filled the left side of the bookcases leading up to the parlor, NYRB-reviewed novels and essay collections, as well as coffee-table volumes about English gardens or chinoiserie. Even now, at bed-and-breakfasts or seaside hotels, a shelf full of forlorn books always cried out to Madeleine. She ran her fingers over their salt-spotted covers. She peeled apart pages made tacky by ocean air. She had no sympathy for paperback thrillers and detective stories. It was the abandoned hardback, the jacketless 1931 Dial Press edition ringed with many a coffee cup, that pierced Madeleine’s heart. Her friends might be calling her name on the beach, the clambake already under way, but Madeleine would sit down on the bed and read for a little while to make the sad old book feel better.”

or from Philip Roth’s most recent novel, Nemesis:

“And then he hurled the javelin.  You could see each of his muscles bulging when he released it into the air.  He let out a strangulated yowl of effort (one we all went around imitating for days afterward), a noise expressing the essence of him—the naked battle cry of striving excellence.  The instant the javelin took flight from his hand, he began dancing about to recover his balance and not fall across the foul line he’d etched in the dirt with his cleats.  And all the while he watched the javelin as it made its trajectory in a high, sweeping arc over the field.  None of us had ever before seen an athletic act so beautifully executed right in front of our eyes.  The javelin carried, carried way beyond the fifty-yard line, down to the far side of the opponent’s thirty, and when it descended and landed, the shaft quivered and its pointed metal tip angled sharply into the ground from the sailing force of the flight.”

And here’s a passage from The Cookbook Collector:

“Working at the store, she had become a connoisseur of sorts, someone who knew the difference between a first printing and a latter-day edition.  She had come to appreciate white rag paper and color plates with tissue over them and marbled endpapers and gilt titles.  Once, she had insisted that content was all that mattered.  Now form began to matter too, and her eye delighted in elegant type, and her hand loved thick creamy pages.  She treasured what was old and handmade, and began to enjoy early editions more than new.  George had influenced her this way, not so much by what he said, but by example.  His passion and his knowledge inspired her.  When he acquired a new book, he called her over.  ‘Jess, come quick!’  Sensing her interest, he explained what made the volume scarce and fine.  At those moments, she wished she could work longer hours at Yorick’s.  The trouble was that she had so little time.”

There is nothing in The Cookbook Collector that is like Enid’s emotionally tinged sense that her inability to keep on top of the bills and the less essential mail is the equivalent of waging a war, and that her conflict with her husband over the mess puts her in the position of a guerilla fighter vis-à-vis his Governmental Force; or Madeleine’s irrational feeling that books need her to rescue them; or Mitchell’s experience of Paris as a physical environment that somehow makes him think about how he’s been approaching his life in the wrong way; or Arnold Mesnikoff’s intimations of a deeper reality in the execution of a perfect athletic maneuver.

The more subjective, more obviously literary writers spend a lot of time on minutiae.  They write a lot of words that go over and over the same ground, again and again.  They write descriptions that take up entire long paragraphs that don’t advance the plot in any way at all.  Yet with all those words, they rarely include any that stand above the events as they’re viewed by the character who experiences them; he doesn’t judge them, evaluate them, or set them in any kind of generalized context.

In The Cookbook Collector, on the contrary, there is lots of commentary.  What The Cookbook Collector has, instead of subjective dwelling or brooding on minute observations and the emotions they give rise to, is plot; and its plot is advanced by straight narration and dialogue in alternation.  All the available space is taken up with dialogue, with scenes, and with a large number of characters who need to be characterized, followed for some period of time, and then caught up with after some time has passed.  Given the choice (which I’m assuming here) to make this novel plot-driven and objectively narrated, the only way in which ideas or differences in characterization could find their way into the text is by the author’s stating them outright.  Some people find getting through a novel like Goodman’s (or Goldstein’s) to be quite difficult, I’m sure, and for exactly this reason: they find large passages of straightforward commentary to be boring.  Yet difficulty, in itself, doesn’t push these two novels towards being literary in the same way it does Franzen’s.

In part this is because—beyond their having different aims than his novels do—they really don’t succeed, I think, even on their own terms.  In The Cookbook Collector, already by the 150-page mark, a large number of strands have been introduced and developed.  True, each of these strands makes its own independent contribution: either developing plot points that either are essential to the main storyline, or illustrating secondary characters in ways that enrich the depiction of the main characters and of the theme.  And the scenes do move the main narrative forward, and each one that is chosen for inclusion is developed fully.  (Incidentally, perhaps, they also distinguish the central “people-centric” narrative from the more peripheral and less fully narrated business and technical stories, indicating what the reader should understand as most important.)  But the full development of so many narrative points, with dialogue included in full and nothing summarized, takes more time than is strictly needed to move the story forward, and isn’t always interesting in its own right.  And this is, in part, because the emotional and psychological depth that might engross the reader, make the text interesting, isn’t there.  Each of the characters is fascinating—I want to see so much of these people—but for each of them we don’t get a whole lot more than a four-page character sketch and the sense that the author believes people like them are important.`

In The Marriage Plot and The Magician King, alike, the reader gets the sense that people are different: that they believe different things, have different goals, and are at times incomprehensible to one another and to themselves.  In The Cookbook Collector, the plot implies this multifariousness of humanity, but the language and the form suggest the opposite: that if we don’t all think the same way now, not at the level of the everyday but at some deeper level of our souls, we should, and someday will.

I’m not sure that, all told, this makes The Cookbook Collector a less worthy novel than those other books (which I admit can be boring themselves in places).  In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino does praise “velocity” as a desirable characteristic for literature, and in refusing to brood or to dwell on events longer than they deserve, Goodman’s novel does achieve this kind of carrying speed.  Yet I think it could have been a 600-page novel that delved more into the subjective and paid more attention to language than this one does; and the longer novel would have been a better one.  I don’t think it needs to have most of its character and plot stripped away to make it “difficult” (that is, unlike the kinds of novels people read for fun), or to have its dialogue replaced or interspersed with authorial commentary on the economy and the state of the world.  I wonder whether a “subjective” novel about the same topics could treat its characters, who are far from typical for a literary novel, with the sensitivity and charity that Goodman allows to them.  On the other hand, while I was reading The Cookbook Collector, I did wish that it could have been more thoughtful, more often.

Boston Area Books

In my last post, I mentioned that I had spent the summer reading novels by people who live in the Boston area.  First, I’d read Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford, to try and keep up with the book seminar at Crooked Timber.  Then, in June, I had picked up Son of a Witch, the first sequel to Wicked.  Then I borrowed Rebecca Goldstein’s 36 Arguments for the Existence of God and Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector.  Both of these had been on my to-read list for a while.

UPDATE: The other posts on "Boston Area Books" are here, here, and here.

I knew Goodman has lived in Cambridge for many years, but I noticed from the book jacket that Gregory Maguire also lives near Boston.  So does Goldstein, who now teaches at Harvard.  So the idea occurred to me of reading more books by writers who are in the area.  I figured I could move on to novels by Dennis Lehane, Gish Jen, and Stephen King.  I could finish On Beauty, which Zadie Smith set outside of Boston and wrote during or after her stay here.  There were the first novels of Richard Powers and Jonathan Franzen, which they wrote when they lived in Boston.  In a pinch I might finally read Rabbit, Run, or re-read The Witches of Eastwick.  Or I could read Norumbega Park, which was set in Massachusetts the Boston suburbs but not written here written in the western part of the state, and which I’d successfully recommended to my husband as vacation reading, picking it off my list, but which I haven’t yet read myself.

I took out World and Town, Gish Jen’s most recent book, after The Cookbook Collector, but decided they were too much alike to read right in a row, and I downloaded The Magician King and The Leftovers instead.  After I’d started the first of these, I remembered that Lev Grossman doesn’t live in Massachusetts anymore.  However, part of the book is set here (in the fictional town of Chesterton, which is either Lexington or Chelmsford, or both, though it hardly matters—the town is a typical New England town, beloved of tourists, and scorned by the right-thinking young man who knows that to swan about old architecture is unseemly).  So whatever; I kept reading it.

Finally, I read a few pages of The Leftovers, but I’ve put it aside until I can finish some blog posts I’ve already started writing.

Quick thoughts on these novels:

Red Plenty:  Somehow this got plugged as a science fiction novel.  It isn’t.  It also isn’t primarily about the technical issues involved in developing linear algebra as a method for industrial planning, or about scientists confronted with those issues.  One character is such a scientist: Leonid Kantorovich, who’s credited with priority in developing linear algebra in this way.  Other characters include Nikita Krushchev, the Soviet premier; a woman scientist and single mother in Akademgorodok, the new “science city” that was built in Siberia, and a couple of young, up-and-coming Commnist Party bureacrats.  It’s structured like a series of linked short stories, in partial chronological order.  The plot is a sympathetic account of the attempt, pursued in different ways by each of the characters, and finally a failure, to develop the Soviet Union so as to equal and then surpass the material comfort enjoyed in the West (the U.S. particularly).  It’s very well written—Spufford has found some clever ways of circumventing the limitations on novel writing that make writing historical fiction and fiction about ideas so difficult to do well—and it’s a good story, with engaging characters.  Of course, if you find it impossible to think of Krushchev sympathetically, you’ll have a difficult time enjoying it.

Son of a Witch isn’t quite as enjoyable or as tightly written as Wicked was.  It’s focused more narrowly, on Liir, who is probably Elphaba’s (the Wicked Witch of the West’s) son, and his quest to find out what happened to Nor, who is probably his half-sister.  It’s a kind of picaresque novel, as Liir encounters various people and groups—the convent where he was most likely born, the two peoples at war in the convent’s environs, Glenda and various bureaucrats within Oz’s government, the inhabitants of an underground prison from which few if any escape, the Army and the peoples of the empire it keeps down, his old Nanny and his mother’s flying monkey companions—who help him to figure out who and what he really is.  And what magic really is, too.  Son of a Witch, though, isn’t as invested in world-building as Wicked was; we’re to take the reality of Oz for granted, perhaps, and see Liir through the lenses it offers, in the humanity he shares with those of us who aren’t from Oz and aren’t Munchkins.  As the kind of thing Wicked is, this book was a little too much Young Adult personal journey for me; and as a Young Adult novel, it was a little too long.

I've liked several of Rebecca Goldstein’s novels over the years.  She’s now primarily a philosophy professor, but she’s been writing fiction for over two decades now.  My favorite among her books is Mazel, which moves back and forth in time over three generations of women, beginning in a small village in Europe and moving from Vilnius to New York to New Jersey.  It’s the one of Goldstein’s books that’s most like an A.S. Byatt novel.  36 Arguments for the Existence of God is one of her better ones, but I didn’t find it as engaging as Mazel.  The characters were fascinating, and I’d like to have seen more of them, but the reader is rushed from one character to the next in order to get on with the plot, and to leave space for plentiful intellectualizing.  Part of the plot seemed strangely to be a reworking of the more sentimental parts of Chaim Potok’s 1967 novel The Chosen, made even more sentimental than they seemed in Potok’s telling.  It’s also, possibly against Goldstein’s intentions, a “women’s novel.”  I’ll probably write more about this in a later post.

The Cookbook Collector is definitely a “women’s novel.”  I haven’t read any of Goodman’s books before, although I’ve given at least one of her earliest books as a present.  This was a very enjoyable multi-threaded novel about two sisters, one a corporate executive and the other a graduate student, and two software companies, one on the East Coast and the other on the West.  The time is the last years of the twentieth century.  The novel is filled with secondary (and tertiary) characters, love interests, ideas, subplots (including, coincidentally, an encounter with Hasidism that’s slightly reminiscent of the one in Goldstein’s novel), and just lots and lots of stuff.  The software industry part is described very closely; I didn’t detect any false notes or condescension, and this is very unusual in a “mainstream” novel about engineers.  It’s a fast-moving novel.  While there are ideas and emotions and all that jazz, things move along.  Compared with something like Wolf Hall, which has twice the pages and a small fraction of the characters, really, the brevity of The Cookbook Collector is actually quite striking.  I think it could have been even better at twice the length, but it would have been a very different kind of novel.  I’ll probably write more about this one later, too.  And I’ll probably read some other books by Allegra Goodman eventually.

The Magician King is a sequel to The Magicians, Lev Grossman’s adult fantasy novel that’s set in a world where the fantasy milieus of C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling are real.  The Magicians was mostly a college novel, or a novel of college and its aftermath, recalling the young literary lions of the 1980s like Donna Tartt and Jay McInerney.  The Magician King follows Quentin, the main character of the earlier book, into his “real life” (King in the fantastic realm of Fillory), interleaving his story with that of his friend from the neighborhood, Julia, whose luck came short of sending her to magicians’ school.  For me, these books are really fascinating.  They’re not as perfectly accomplished as Spufford’s or Goodman’s, but there are things about these books that I really love, images that totally grab me.  There are characters that are terrific (I’m inexplicably fond of Penny).  On the other hand: I don’t like the main character, and I think I’m supposed to.  And—though I’m probably overthinking it—I find it inexplicably annoying that I can’t get a handle on the allegory. 

It’s interesting to compare the books by men on this list with the books by women.  The men’s books are less accomplished, for the most part (this doesn’t include The Leftovers, which from what I’ve read so far is entirely “professional,” or other books I’ve discussed on this blog, such as The Marriage Plot).  They seem narrower, less well written, and less thought through.  In part, this is because the men’s books I’ve chosen are “genre” books, and the women’s books are “mainstream.”  If I’d chosen books by Richard Ford or Anthony Giardina (Norumbega Park, mentioned above), my results would likely have been different.  The Magician King is decidedly a genre book, and it’s an excellent example of one.  There’s little here to annoy either a dedicated fantasy-series reader or a reader of “mainstream” fiction.  But it has only some of the other little things that help to make a really good novel, things that can appeal to the usual readers of novels (stereotypically, women—especially women who read women’s novels—and other people who have a strong dislike for “genre”).  Others of these things are missing.

True, to some extent, what science fiction and fantasy readers (and genre readers generally) find appealing is the lack of those elements, which “mainstream” readers have learned to expect.  The need to find room for ideas, and to find a point of view that’s congenial to ideas, may push them out.  But I don’t think the pattern is entirely limited to novels that can be termed “genre.”  Even many “mainstream” or “literary” novels by men under fifty-five or so—though by no means are they “narrow”—can often share some of the traits that in these novels do seem to create a sense of narrowness, like a small cast of characters or a tight focus on the personal growth of a single character without much social context.  It’s more unusual for a novel published by a woman to fit this description.

And the women writers in this list are writing about ideas, as much as the SF and fantasy writers are.  For the most part, though, I think, when a woman writer writes a novel that deals with ideas, she begins by writing a fairly traditional novel first, and puts the ideas second.  They’re doing it a different way.  It could be argued that they’ve thought more than the men have about how to incorporate nontraditional elements, like ideas, into a work of mainstream fiction.  It could also be argued that the men’s novels have something they’re missing.  More on this too, eventually.

The Big P: Elihu Rubin on the creation of Boston’s Prudential Center

This story, which discussed topics like the rebuilding of the city in the 1970s and the gentrification of several of its neighborhoods, was interesting overall.   But what got my attention was the fact that the building of the Pru, with its surrounding plazas and buildings, was tied to work on the Mass. Turnpike, which runs directly beneath it.  This reminded me—probably for no very good reason—of the university in Neal Stephenson’s first novel, The Big U.  The setting is based largely on Boston University, located a short distance from the Prudential Center, which Stephenson was attending when he wrote it.  (Some details of the school seem, however, to be more like a big state college, say the one in Ames, Iowa, where Stephenson’s father taught while he was growing up—and I’m not sure why the novel describes BU's surrounding neighborhood as “a slum.”)  One of the things I liked about The Big U was the way Stephenson reimagined the BU campus.  He took three or four separate parts of the campus: the science and engineering complex and the Nickolodeon movie theater that sat at its base; the Warren Towers complex, a huge freshman dormitory, and the retail stores and takeout places that sat at its base; “Football Field Towers,” a second huge dorm that sat right at the edge of the athletic fields; and the underground infrastructure that lay at the base of all of it; and he mashed them all up together into a single mega-multi-juxtaposition, so that the entire campus was one big complex, or “Plex.”[1]  The bottom layers were the infrastructure; the next-bottommost were science and engineering; then administration; then the towers of the dorms; and just outside the sheer battlements was the freeway.  He captured the sense of isolation and complexity of a big urban campus and of the university itself, with the logistics of bringing in supplies in the morning, and shuttling out waste at night, mirroring the intake of students, and outflow of graduates (or of dropouts).  It would be interesting if the sense of BU’s architecture that Stephenson based this on applied, as well, to the Pru.

[1] Not to be confused with Columbia’s “The Plex,” the oddly lame place that replaced The Pub in the Lion’s Den under John Jay Hall when New York’s drinking age was raised to twenty-one.  In the Pub you could wear jeans and hang out in the dark.  In the Plex, if you were over twenty-one, you could listen to cool music (I guess) and eat pizza in a brightly-lit space, separated by a big glass window from the disco where the youngsters, wearing dresses and suits, could dance to a selection of Latin music.

In This Week's Papers: Copley, March, Mehanna, Bellafante, and Roiphe

My daughter now has a tricycle, a helmet, and summer clothes that will still fit her in September.  She also has a promise that we will plant some flowers in front of the house, something I’ve never actually tried to do (I did plant some bulbs about ten years ago, but only some of them came up).  And being between landscapers, I’ve pruned one of a small number of flowering shrubs (a PJM rhododendron, which grows well in this climate, setting its buds before winter and blooming just after the forsythias do, but which isn’t in the standard plant books).  I have all the tools now, from the little snippers through the lopper and the saw, and I’ve almost become comfortable enough with the pruning to no longer fear I’m going to kill the thing, but not quite.  So finding the flowers will be next.

Copley as a British Painter

This article about John Singleton Copley in the Boston Globe is interesting, because it argues that Copley—who has numerous sites around Boston named for him, as a Revolutionary-era hero, and whose paintings, along with those of Gilbert Stuart, form the backbone of the Boston MFA’s eighteenth-century American collection (which is well worth seeing)—didn’t see himself as “American” at all.  He sided with the British Tories, the Loyalists; hated and feared the revolutionary movement; and moved to England to escape the war, spending the rest of his life painting portraits of members English aristocracy and royalty.

His American paintings, though, have an explicitly (little-r) republican, even a Puritan, air to them.  The backgrounds are simple, usually dark brown.  The men depicted wear plain clothes, the costumes of their everyday working life, and hold the implements of their work (often pens and books).  The women’s dress is also relatively plain, compared with European subjects (especially the English princesses who sat for the painters late works), and behind them Copley painted the branches of flowering trees.

It would be easy to conclude that the artist admired such simplicity.  He could have painted his subjects in the traditional style, in a more ornate fashion that might appeal to the art collectors of Europe.  Benjamin Rush—himself a solid advocate of independence and self-governance, along with the education of women—did, in fact, paint in that style, as when he depicted his wife and child using the form of a Madonna by Raphael.  The simplicity, even drabness, of Copley’s American portraits looks like a statement, but it may have only been a matter of the sitters’ own preferences.

Freedom of Speech and the Study of Other Cultures

A professor of political science at Yale, Andrew March, has an op-ed about the Tarek Mehanna case in today’s New York Times.  Mehanna was sentenced earlier this month for materially supporting a terrorist group, mostly on the basis of his online activities publishing translations of Al Qaeda propaganda and defending Al Qaeda online.  There’s no question, as this article about Mehanna’s behavior at his sentencing hearing shows, that he did intend to give Al Qaeda material support and that he did intend to support their self-declared “war” against the United States.

What concerns March is that there seems to be little difference between what he does professionally and what in Mehanna’s case is considered a crime.  Both engaged in discussion to further the knowledge of a group that the US government has declared a terrorist organization.  There is the matter of intention: March’s for pure knowledge, Mehanna’s for proselytization—and presumably the latter was more intent on insistently promoting sympathetic understanding among his correspondents than March insists on.  However, it remains the case that the case involves an unprecedented criminalization of speech.  In fact, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, in another case, himself held that material support did not encompass speech, unless there were explicit coordination from the group supported, which did not exist in Mehanna’s case.  March seems to worry that studying certain topics might become too dangerous for anyone without a kind of license to do so, in the form of a university post or similar professional position.

Even worse, however, in March’s opinion, is that the prosecutors used even Mehanna’s penchant for hiking as an example of his engaging in terrorist activities.  He had translated an Arabic text describing physical fitness as an alternate means of participating in jihad.  March argues that the intention behind the text is to deflect would be terrorists into peaceful community-building.  Yet the list of activities gave prosecutors an opening to describe Mehanna as spending nearly all his time on “jihad,” even when he was apparently innocently working out or talking about working out.  Imagining that this could happen to you—that somebody could twist all your actions around in order to cast an evil light on them, simply on the basis of an unrelated statement—would be infuriating for anyone.  But in the context of the court case, it doesn’t strike me as so worrying.  Prosecutors most likely engage in overstatement all the time.  Their job is to persuade a jury to vote to convict—not to find ultimate truth or be fair to everybody who might someday exercise.  Nobody’s criminalizing hiking.

Is Katie Roiphe Searching for a Female Midlife Judd Apatow?

There’s a new sexy novel for housewives out, by a woman in England, that is the new hot topic of conversation among feminist journalists and bloggers (or was, before Girls went on the air).  One of these, inevitably, was the ubiquitous Katie Roiphe—as Ginia Bellafante points out in the Sunday New York Times.  There’s always something to criticize in Roiphe’s “what’s the matter with women today?” pieces, and what Bellafante points out in this one is that Roiphe—once again—“suggests that career women . . . long to be sexually dominated” and to break out of the feminism-driven self-controlled, competent lives they’ve come to lead.

What I thought was interesting, and what Bellafante doesn’t ask, is, “why sex?”  She interprets Roiphe as wrongly believing that career women still (as they did in the 1990s) fear associating themselves with the label “feminism,” and she interprets sex fantasies like these as stemming from a feeling that “sexual abjection [is] the penalty the culture exacts on the average-looking woman for the offense of her averageness.”  But the novelist herself thinks the book is popular because most women actually don’t look for ultra-masculine, dominating behavior from a potential husband or boyfriend; they want someone who will help do the dishes, who will pull his own weight around the house.  She is English, of course, and they do things differently over there, but she does have a point.  As much as twelve year olds love Twilight, most twenty- and thirty-somethings are not in mourning for those fantasies, nor even for the fact that they’ve given them up.

So why does Roiphe keep returning to the subject, as Ginia Bellafante complains?  She seems to want to insert sex into every situation.  To me, this seems strange.  True, there is a cultural obsession with sexlessness and with the idea that for certain groups of people, in order to be fully adult, sexlessness is something they have to get over.  So we have bromances and we have movies by Judd Apatow—for teenage boys who apparently wouldn’t know marriage existed unless a movie showed them the world beyond the Playstation, and therefore would necessarily remain eternal children on their parents’ couch, with no interests beyond the Fritos bag and no interest in getting a job.  But why would we expect to see a parallel narrative for women?  Much less for middle-aged women near the peak of their professional careers?

The Social Network: Baby, You're a Rich Man, Too

The Social Network, a fictionalized account of how the website Facebook was founded and then turned into a social and financial sensation, primarily poses the question whether its founder and creator was a nice person.  But it actually raises some much weirder questions.  The film has two large problems: its creators’ inability to depict a plausible narrative of the creation of something like a website, and its creators’ inability to depict a plausible version of success that involves more than buying a nice house with a pool, throwing wild parties, and getting your name in the paper.  The plot seems to be—oddly—Mark Zuckerberg becomes a Hollywood superstar, very much like the filmmakers themselves; there is almost nothing in the story to mark his success as being of a different kind than theirs.  Everyone knows that the moral of the film is that Mark Zuckerberg is a bad guy who has been living a bad life, but if the story has the fictional Zuckerberg living the life of those who imagined him, what is it that’s supposed to be bad about it?

This is not the story of how Mark Zuckerberg struggled and worked to overcome obstacles that arose as he tried hard to accomplish a difficult goal; this is not Apollo 13, in which people were called to go above and beyond, working extra shifts for no recognition greater than a gift of a new tie from their wives.  This is the story of how Mark Zuckerberg ignored every obstacle that put itself in its path: and all of those obstacles arose from the will of others’ opposing themselves to him (usually by telling him there’s something he should pay closer attention to).  Actually, there are no real obstacles.  He and his friends tell a few friends about “The Facebook,” and they tell a few friends, and so on and so on and so on.  On campus after campus, within a couple of weeks of students’ getting access to the site, it is the biggest thing since pitchers of beer.  The coding goes smoothly, and everything just falls into place.  There are no technical challenges that require hard work and thinking even from a programming genius.  There are no unforeseen hardware failures, no power outages that make prearranged deadlines impossible.  There is nothing Mark Zuckerberg got wrong—except the rule that one should never stomp on the little people on his way up the ladder.

The only problem Zuckerberg has is that he doesn’t know an algorithm to create an absolute ranking of a large group of competitors on the basis of a limited number of real competitions between selected pairs of them.  He has to ask his friend Eduardo Saverin for that information.  We do see him in an Operating Systems class, in which he solves a complex calculation, involving addressing theory, on the spur of the moment (Zuckerberg’s actual Harvard OS professor has written up some of his reminiscences, with reference to The Social Network, here and here).  But there is no sense, in the film, that memorizing theory and doing quick mental math is not enough to create a successful computer application, much less a distributed application.  Admittedly, a focus on technical issues would be boring.  But the filmmakers suggest that Zuckerberg’s accomplishment lay in finding an opportunity and making sure he was the only one who profited from it: the near equivalent of climbing onto a speeding train and pushing those already riding it over the side.

It was not necessary, moreover, to hinge the film on the bizarre personality (as portrayed in the film) of Sean Parker.  (He is described in the film as the founder of Napster, though according to Wikipedia his real involvement is questionable.[1])  Parker, as depicted, and presumably as can be shown through publicly available documentation, is a flake.  He has a history, not only of being unable to work with colleagues, but of fallouts with police, over cocaine use and underage girls.  He appears to be paranoid and (in the words of Saverin in the film) delusional—which is not so surprising if the allegations about cocaine are true.  He does have contacts in the business world that Zuckerberg and Saverin lack.  His intuition that Facebook could have an even bigger impact—on something—than Napster had, on music sales, turned out to be right.  Saverin’s apparent feeling that what they had was just an ordinary dot-com business success turned out to be wrong.  Yet the narrative is set up as Zuckerberg’s choice—between remaining on the East Coast, finishing college, and being ordinary—and breaking into the big time in California, turning himself into a superstar.  Saverin remains committed to the first of those choices, while Parker tempts Zuckerberg towards the second one.

The problem is that the film does not successfully distinguish Parker’s way of life from his business and technical ability.  There is a relentless focus on the way having lots of money gives men the wherewithal to form private all-male clubs and party, to stay out all night drinking and taking drugs and getting hot women to take off their clothes and dance with one another.  At Harvard, this is the province of the final clubs, like the Porcellian, to which Zuckerberg’s nemeses the Winklevoss twins belong.  Mundane fraternities like AEP[2] only have lame-looking mixers, and people like Mark Zuckerberg—because of their aggressively ambitious personalities, the film suggests—will never be accepted into those people’s clubs.  In California, on the contrary, a smart guy with lots of ambition has the chance to become Sean Parker.  You can write code in your rented house and party with college girls at the same time.[3]  You can get hot women who wouldn’t have looked at you twice before you were rich.[4]  There is no real sense of irony in the film’s idea, expressed by the Beatles’ song that plays over the film’s final shot, that Mark Zuckerberg is now “one of the beautiful people.”

And Parker’s personality is certainly typical California.  The drugs, the partying, the contempt for the East Coast as old and stodgy, the idea that nothing of any importance is going on anyplace else.  The identification of expertise with knowing the right people and being willing to play them, of creativity and intelligence with business sense and aggression.  Parker is Zuckerberg’s Paul Simon to Saverin’s Woody Allen (with Mark Zuckerberg, then, as Annie Hall, if rather more successful than she will ever be).  And he behaves, and talks, in a manner more frequently associated with Simon’s and Allen’s generation (or with Sorkin’s) than with that of today’s young people.  There is no apparent irony in this, either.  The idea seems to be that California tech executives and Hollywood stars are the same—and better than everybody else—and, not least, just because they are free enough and rich enough to party.  At least the filmmakers don’t seem to have cared to do some research and find out whether they and their subjects are different.

Which raises the question: Are the filmmakers capable of understanding success as anything deeper than money, fame, and personality, as anything more important than the ability to gain access to a kind of secret society where drugs and free love are the rule?  Is joining a men’s club (a gentlemen’s club in the real meaning of the phrase) what “making it” means?  Are rich people better than the rest of us, really, only because they know how to party?[5]  It’s as strange as if “the music of the night,” promised by the phantom of the opera in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of that name, were only what could be heard from a ladies’ room stall at Studio 54.

(For more, here is an interesting story about Mark Zuckerberg and the origins of Facebook, by Zuckerberg’s Harvard classmate Rebecca Davis O’Brien.)

[1] It’s interesting that the MP3 format used by Napster is, technically, a very poor format.  Its great advantage is its simplicity.  It is easy to program to.  I’ve wondered whether this is an example of technical lock-in as a result of nontechnical path dependence, something that is far from rare (Sony Betamax is widely regarded as superior to VHS), but in this case arose because the only broadly available application for downloadable audio files was created not only by amateurs, but by student amateurs.

[2] At Columbia, for what it’s worth, AEP renamed itself as TEP when it decided to become coed and admit women, not just as “little sisters.”  Does Harvard have any coeducational fraternities?

[3] Was the racist garbage about how perfect Asian women are for Jewish men really necessary?  And while the male characters were cast to resemble more or less plausible college students (as opposed to, say, characters on The Practice), the women looked like Victoria Secret models more than like Boston undergraduates.  There are plenty of good-looking women in Harvard Yard.  Couldn’t a little effort have been made to find out how they dress? 

And what was up with the BU girlfriend, Erica’s, beret?  Did dating Zuckerberg upset her so much she decided to become Orthodox?

[4] Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue, as usual, goes by too quickly, but especially in the first scene, he definitely nails a certain sort of man and the way he talks to women.  Believe me, they are not all geniuses.

[5] Do they think poor people don’t party?

P.S.: It's been pointed out to me--by my husband, who has a Facebook account, which he signed up for initially for distributing baby pictures--that it's ironic I would be writing a post about The Social Network when I don't use Facebook myself (except when he shows me his account, so I can see my relatives' pictures, or updates from female acquaintances of his who cook much fancier than I do). 

Hurricane Irene

We were lucky and lost power only for a few hours on Sunday, plus maybe five short outages of only a couple of minutes each.  Two or three big branches down in the backyard (attracting at least three cardinals to hop among them on Monday morning), a couple of smaller ones in the front, lots of twigs and leaves on the ground.  Some damage to the fence.  We put everything away except the barbecue, but neighbors who left things stacked by the side of their house, or left chairs and tables (I guess fairly heavy) outside, only had a couple things blow over.  The yellowjackets’ nest, unfortunately, wasn’t drowned.

The playground nearest our house was cleaned up very quickly; by Tuesday morning it was free of branches, there was fresh bark under all the play equipment, and even the annoying staircase that's impossible to walk on, unless there is fresh gravel between the railroad ties, had fresh gravel.  And the equipment was very clean.

Around the corner from our house, however, until this morning, the street was closed.  A tree had gone down, taking down some power lines, and knocking out the power.  A local online paper reported that the shopping center just off that road was affected and that the supermarket was running on generator power for a while.  The streets that were closed are pretty heavily used—around here there tend not to be that many streets that aren’t local-only—and traffic was being rerouted all the way to the other end of town and back.  At least some of the houses in the affected area got power back yesterday.  The road farther along is still closed.

In the north part of town, some people don’t expect their electricity to be back on until Saturday.  I was told a tree had gone down and caught fire in the street.  Schools are open, but at least one is on generator power.

The next town over, and there are very many people with no electricity.  It seems to depend in part on which company supplies your power.

At the supermarket, which evidently has power now, but the frozen-food section of which—between renovations and, I guess, people restocking—is a little depleted, I saw a car with two [1] stickers on it: One read “Remember when sex was safe and motorcycles were dangerous?”  Sure.  Must have been back before penicillin.  Curing syphilis by mercury poisoning—oh, the good old days.  The other read “Scott Brown Republican.”

[1] Actually there were many, many stickers on it.