Bianca Steele

Neoconservatism and Biography

There’s a new book out, called Exit Right, that looks interesting if you’re interested in the political or intellectual history of the middle and end of the twentieth century. It’s a new history of men who started out on the far left and then moved to the far right: Chambers, Burnham, Reagan, Podhoretz, Horowitz, and Hitchens. There are new reviews by Sam Tanenhaus in The Atlantic and Alan Wolfe in The New Republic.

Near the beginning of Wolfe’s review, he discusses his personal encounters with David Horowitz. One is related by Daniel Oppenheimer in the book under review:

before Horowitz came to this realization [the loss of faith in revolution], he “participated in a small seminar at Berkeley, on the topic of ‘Marxism and Post-Marxism,’ with a number of his fellow New Left veterans.” I was one of those participants; the seminar helped me rethink my radicalism to emerge as more of a liberal than a leftist. It was not so much the books we discussed—I can barely remember what they were—so much as our attitudes toward Cuba and the Soviet Union, neither of which, to most of us, held out any hope for progressive change.

Wolfe says no more about this fascinating fact. Who else was part of that seminar at Berkeley? How many of them left the movement around the same time? What was the nature of Wolfe’s own change (to, as TNR readers know, a form of consensus liberalism), and why? We find out something about the passions and concerns that led his former friend Horowitz to drastically change, but little about the historical context in which he did so.

We seem to know so little about the people who were involved in political debate and action over the past hundred years. We know about the people who left Communism, and we know about the people who became neoconservatives, and that’s about it. And we know even less about people who are younger. Most historians of the 1960s and the New Left have written histories of their contemporaries but almost nothing about themselves (there are scattered exceptions, like Mark Rudd, who’ve written memoirs). Younger writers, like P.J. O’Roarke, those socially but not especially politically inclined, have written of their move from a libertarian liberalism to more of a right-wing conservatism, driven apparently largely by their rejection of drug use. Even younger writers have often written narratives of addiction and recovery (culminating in the notorious case of James Frey), implicitly assimilating “growing up” itself to a certain vision of sobriety. There’s the occasional spiritual journey, like that of Elizabeth Gilbert, and perhaps, not much more. Perhaps there’s little space for other stories in the accepted and expected narratives. Why that’s the case isn’t entirely clear.

Good News for Framingham Library Users

On Tuesday, Framingham’s new McAuliffe branch library will be officially open. (There was an open house yesterday.) This is big news for Framingham, especially for those residents who rarely venture south of route nine (the north part is the nice part, you know—probably going back to Puritan days, as well as being the location of our local Levittown).

The old McAuliffe branch was in Saxonville, and it’s been around for a long time. It’s also about the size of my house, maybe even just the first floor of my house. It’s a metal-shed looking building with no function rooms and no lobby to speak of. It had its advantages. The percentage of kids’ books on the shelves that were something we might want to borrow was higher than at the main library, probably in part because older books were culled more frequently, and because fewer people used it, the shelves were less frequently picked over. A couple of weeks ago, most of the books were packed up, so the branch has been out of commission for a little while, but by now they’ve been moved to the new library, which is quite a bit larger and more functional.

And this is especially good news, because Framingham has been having library issues for a while. Infrastructure work has made Saxonville hard to get to, as one bridge and then another has been closed for two years or more each. The latest one has been the bridge over the falls closest to the library, which means you can’t go straight through the Saxonville intersection to get there. Not a big deal, I guess, unless you’re already in Saxonville, or when you get stuck at a light.

Normally, there is the main library, which is about the same distance from my house, and which I usually go to anyway. But the main library is closed now, too. While doing renovations on the building, an electrical fire was accidentally started, burning some workers and forcing the building to shut down until the fixes are made. Tutoring and elder services have been moved to other organizations’ buildings; concerts have been moved around, as well; a bunch of kids’ activities have been canceled or moved. A pop-up library has opened around the corner, with a teeny-tiny collection of books. (I don’t know where the turtle is.) Reserves and requests can be picked up only at the McAuliffe.

This happens only a year after the new entrance and parking lot were opened. A couple of years ago, the three-level parking garage was declared unsafe, and was torn down. This took place just ten years after the previous time the garage had been declared unsafe and closed for two years. Now it’s been replaced with an outdoor lot, with a new entrance, pretty landscaping, an outdoor seating area, bus shelter, and improved access ramp. But the library itself is closed to the public, until—hopefully—April.

The new branch is near Nobscot, and probably closer to my house than the old one, though I expect it’ll take longer to get there, because it has some of the worst traffic in town. Both areas could use a little revitalizing; the shopping center across the street from the old location is largely empty; I had heard a few years ago that Nobscot had the same problem, but from the street it looks relatively bustling to me.

The 2016 Election and the (Bad) Uses of Social Science

Suppose we say that some percentage of a society holds the belief system that elites are in charge, the media plays a mediating role, education is part of the process of elite formation, and so on. Some percentage of the society holds a different belief system, maybe that the will of the people is important. Maybe some smaller or larger third percentage, making up the rest of the population, holds neither one.

What can we conclude from this about the makeup and relative power of the two groups, about which of these is closer to reality, about what kind of mobility is possible between groups, or what kind of lives are possible within groups or for those who attempt to move or communicate between them?

My answer: We can conclude nothing at all.

We don’t even know that within each group, there aren’t divergences significant enough to overwhelm the similarities.

We certainly don’t know whether movement between the groups is considered impermissible, difficult but possible, or even mandatory.

We don’t know whether everybody knows that there are three basic kinds of belief systems in this society, or whether they don’t. We don’t know how the disclosure of this information will be understood.

If there’s a general practice among some people of movement from one sphere to another, we don’t know, from this barebones account, how it’s carried out. We don’t know whether some children are selected for education from the start into a different group’s belief system, whether they’re expected to make a kind of conversion later on, whether they’re expected to see that their beliefs had always already been the same, or what.

Social scientists can use this general kind of form of analysis to organize facts about a society, to understand what’s going on. They can say that in the West in the twenty-first century, only a few combinations are possible. They can use this kind of category to structure an examination of some specific place and time in a way that will make sense. They can even draw conclusions from the general forms of the statement.

But what I say above is a basic truth of epistemology and the scientific worldview. Someone (a layperson, non-expert like yourself, not a social scientist, someone not associated with an institution that backs up their knowledge and makes it important or interesting for you to know) who tells you that this kind of abstract, mathematical (almost) analysis tells you substantive truths about the world—in my experience—is either a member of a group like Marxism who thinks you’re going to intuit that you can find your way to your local socialist party group, or ask the socialist of your nearest acquaintance what advice he has for you—or else an autodidact without much academic exposure to social science or the humanities, who believes he’s intuited a factual meaning from the theoretical statement and whose metaphysical assumptions lead him to expect you to draw the same conclusions.

Matthew Yglesias doesn’t fall into either of those categories. He knows that it simply does not follow, from an abstract analysis like the above, that the world is any particular way. But he was educated to believe that only one or two, at most a handful, of particular ways, are relevant for us, here, now. He knows perfectly well that most of his readers didn’t go to Harvard and didn’t learn what he did, but still he believes, apparently, that what he was taught is true. That there could be more than one interpretation of that kind of analysis—he has never seemed to understand this.

So he seems shocked, and almost bitter, that the 2016 presidential election would seem very much to be refuting the kinds of home truths he’s been “explaining” to the world since he got his first blog.

(Of course, I don't know what he thinks about reality refuting the conventional wisdom, since all he does is list a bunch of factual assertions.)

The Magicians, Betrayal, and Friendship

(Delay in posting due to snow days, etc., may or may not persist.)

The Magicians, the book, the first one in the series, presents itself as a story about the friendship between Quentin and Julia, though in an attenuated way. Julia appears at the beginning of the story, as one of Quentin’s two cooler friends, along with James, who she may or may not be dating (I can’t remember whether this is stated in the book). She disappears almost immediately. Quentin goes to his Princeton interview (not Yale) with James, who’s also interviewing there, and immediately afterward is transported to Brakebills, cutting short his senior year in high school to start college early. Julia doesn’t reappear until his next vacation at home, when she confronts him and reveals that she resents the fact they didn’t choose her, too. (James never reappears at all.) Around that time, Quentin’s family moves from New York City to a suburban New England town much like Lexington.

That’s it. All of the rest comes up only in the second book, where it’s told in flashback, as an explanation of how Julia had become the difficult, unhappy woman Quentin later meets in Fillory, and of how she managed to get there in the first place. The TV series sets the two stories more in parallel, so they’re both at similar points in their education at the same time. But with this episode, the friendship between Quentin and Julia seems to be replaced by two new friendships that don’t really have a place in the books: between Quentin and Penny, at Brakebills, and between Julia and Marina, in Brooklyn. (There’s no character corresponding to Marina in the books in even the slightest of particulars, except that Julia does meet a bunch of independent magic-adepts, and some of them are women.) And that’s fine.

In the third and fourth episodes, Julia and Quentin interact, in ways that show Julia and her friends messing with the Brakebills crowd. First, they steal a book from Quentin’s house, something for which he and his housemates are going to be held responsible (Brakebills is apparently the only institution in the world that’s permitted to have books of magic, and from the novel we know they have a hair trigger when it comes to expulsion), and which leads to a physical confrontation. Next, Julia takes revenge on Quentin by (under Marina’s guidance) putting him under a spell that causes him to black out after a party and dream that he’s been committed to an institution after trying to kill his father. So, in the series, instead, it’s suggested that Quentin is going along happily in his grad-school career, when Julia somehow derails him at a distance.

As a result of this, we see that Quentin is learning to trust and respect Penny. Penny knows how to help Quentin because he can read Quentin’s mind and tell him how to get out of his own web. Quentin’s shaping up as a sort of mediocre kind of magician, so far, and Penny (though, to the dismay of his roommate, he’s not white, not upper class, and not nerdy looking in the right way) is a better one.

While this is going on, Marina is serving a similar role for Julia. But while Julia has understood Marina, so far, as an outsider like her, someone who’s gotten where she is by grit and hard work, Marina all along has thought of herself as a rightful graduate of Brakebills, whom fate has separated from what’s rightfully hers. She kicks Julia out of the gang for betraying her, after she uses Julia’s connection with Quentin to get access to the Brakebills grounds herself, and after reacquiring the knowledge Brakebills was withholding from her, removes Julia’s ability to use anything she’s learned.

Needless to say, none of this is in the book. In the novel, there’s a sense that Quentin feels at fault for Julia’s unhappiness to the extent that he was her friend and he failed to think about her, and that he tries to make it up to her. It isn’t suggested that his going to Brakebills has anything to do with her, or that the path she chose has anything to do with him. By moving up Julia’s storyline, the series creates a feeling that the same thing might be happening to the two of them in different ways.

Spheres of Justice, Ch. 1: Dominance and Monopoly of Goods, and Two Kinds of Equality

Dominance and Monopoly (and Ideology)

In the next section, Walzer presents two new concepts, to go along with the discussion of goods and social meanings in the beginning of the chapter: dominance and monopoly. A dominant good is one that will get its possessor some other, unrelated goods. If you have money, you can buy food, but it doesn’t work the other way around, because money is the dominant good in a market society. And it is often—in fact, usually—the case that one group of people has a monopoly over that good. Thus, when land ownership was the dominant good in Europe, those who owned land tended also to have political power, office, religious honors, and so on, and this was the class of aristocrats. When ownership of capital or financial wealth became the dominant good, the society’s other goods shifted to them, as well, and to the new moneyed middle classes. Thus, societies can be classified and characterized by identifying the good dominant in each, and the class that tends to hold that good.

This is a framework for understanding and categorizing societies, not a full explanation. The shift of other goods to the newly dominant class wasn’t immediate, and in some cases may never have been complete. I’m sure Walzer would agree that the framework isn’t the be-all and end-all. And it’s a useful analysis, but it does appear to blur into dogmatism: In every society, one good is dominant over all others. In every society, one group monopolizes the dominant good and thus dominates over all realms of activity. To suggest that the dominant good might be more equally or fairly distributed is to propose the revolutionary (and perhaps futile) idea that monopoly is unjust and should be abolished. To suggest that non-dominant goods should be distributed more independently of the dominant good is to propose the revolutionary (and perhaps futile) idea that dominance is unjust and should be abolished. To suggest that a different good ought perhaps to be dominant is to propose Marxism, and is in any case not interesting because it basically accepts the status quo.

It isn’t easy to take this seriously. To suggest that party loyalty, religious affiliation, or moral rectitude be a requisite for holding political office may not be wise, but it is hardly Marxist. Similarly, to suggest that it not be a requisite for holding office, if it is, one does not have to agree that it is irrational or unjust to suggest that there be other requirements in other situations. Surely, to suggest a reform, one does not have to agree that the whole idea of society is unjust.

The ideal of complex equality and pluralism of goods is attractive but unpersuasive.

In the next section, Walzer presents what he calls simple equality as equality of the dominant good. In our society, this would be money: Suppose everyone had the same amount of money. Then other goods would also be distributed equally (because money still dominates). He follows a fairly well-worn narrative to show how this might go. First, the government would have to intervene to make sure no one accumulates too much, over time. Then, some people might start to monopolize education, just because they cared about it. And because education is important, it would become the dominant good and the bad kind of meritocracy would develop, so that educated people and their families would begin to monopolize office and political power, and eventually even money. So, something like Rawls’s theory of justice would have to be imposed to ensure that they don’t take over too much. This is not the only critique of commercial society that could be made, but it’s a pretty common one, especially among those who object to the dominance of money and of the rich over society in both its traditionally public and private aspects.

Complex equality, then (the topic of the section after that), is instead the removal of the dominance of money, and in fact the removal of every kind of dominance. Because there are so many different kinds of goods, they will all be distributed evenly enough, around the population, that no one person or group will accumulate too many goods for themselves. Because each good is self-policing, or rather policed within its own sphere, there will be no need for coercive government intervention. Instead, each good will be policed by those who are agreed by everyone involved to be the right person to do it.

That there’s no narrative, here, of how it might go wrong, might suggest an important asymmetry in Walzer’s exposition. Moreover, the dogmatism of the preceding section reappears here, in the glib mention, in passing, of the assumption that there will still be monopoly within each individual sphere. The problem of ideology goes unmentioned in this section, as well (even though it’s considered elsewhere in the chapter). Are the goings-on within each sphere simply immune to criticism? Walzer doesn’t say. The idea of complex equality is attractive but unpersuasive. Yet Walzer proceeds without appearing to have recognized this. These question are raised for the reader but the book shows no hint of how they should be resolved.

Pluralism of goods, again.

At the end of the section titled “A theory of goods,” just before the pages discussed in this post, Walzer had listed some criteria for such a theory. Working backwards, the last of these are: Goods must be understood on their own terms; the criteria for one good must not determine the distribution of a different and independent good. Goods are historically determined (so Bernard Williams, and by extension British analytical philosophy as a whole, is wrong, and there is no natural criterion for evaluating the distribution of a given good). Goods are distributed according to social meaning, not material meaning.

This approach rules out a bit. It rules out a scientific approach, wishing to distribute goods according to a natural or material significance or need. It rules out a market approach, treating everything as having its monetary price. On its face, it rules out a lot more: democracy, power politics in general, localism, and tradition—in fact, any extrinsic approach, any approach that doesn’t engage with the goods’ social meanings. Though, in practice, these extrinsic meanings may be incorporated into the social meanings themselves. More specifically, although the terms employed are somewhat broader than what’s strictly needed for this purpose, what’s ruled out is the criticism of one good on grounds appropriate to a different good: suggesting, perhaps, that simony or nepotism is really okay, because money ought to be dominant over all other considerations. Or, even more specifically, what’s ruled out is the assignment of some good or power to a person who is recognized to merit only a different good or power.

It isn’t clear how this fails to risk relativism, however. It would seem that any action, any criticism or suggestion, is potentially subject to the unanswerable objection that (as Stanley Fish put it) “that isn’t the way we do things here.” And Walzer must support that objection. To be very blunt, a society that sincerely believed math could be done only by white men, or that granted university professorship a social meaning, stemming back to the days of the medieval church, which required mathematicians to be morally conforming men from the dominant culture and race, would have to be recognized by this theory as, really, OK. This is clearly not what Walzer intended, but he would appear to have disarmed himself, and others, against those kinds of claims (at least to the extent that he believes his own side must take the claims made by this book seriously, which I think a reader will in most cases take to be true). All he can offer women, people of color, and members of religious minorities, it would appear (barring a thoroughgoing revolution), is something like, “Let the white man have the math professorships, at least they can’t make us starve and they can’t take away our votes.”

Notably missing, so far and in the chapter headings, are any of the goods normally associated with democracy and equal respect. Walzer says nothing about equality in that sense. He is discussing, purely, equality in the holding of some goods and in access to certain other goods. There is no place in this theory for a criticism of some social practice on the grounds that it fails to treat people with equal respect. (Arguably, “equal respect” might possibly be recharacterized as some kind of good.) There is no place in the theory for a criticism of a given social meaning. It might be suggested that space is left for such critiques outside the theory. But the argument here has already preempted any outside criticism, by showing that such criticism is invariably radical: revolutionary or even childish.

This has aged badly.

This approach outlined in these sections runs into the difficulty that it combines the empirical and the theoretical in a slightly awkward way. The empirical part is the description of the actual dominant good, the actual monopolizing class, the actual other goods that are dominated or allowed to follow their course. The theoretical part is the explanation of why a society sustains itself, and why it may be resistant to change (as well as how a scholar can usefully conceptualize it).

Is any given proposal revolutionary? Does it correspond adequately to the social meanings prevalent in the society in question? These aren’t questions that can be answered solely through ivory-tower speculations. If it’s customary and accepted that a good G will dominate over a good H, then it may be revolutionary to suggest that H should be considered as autonomous; if it’s customary that H should be autonomous, then it may be revolutionary to suggest that G should dominate over it. Thus, given a situation in which someone who has G is trying to claim a good H, and a second someone is complaining about it, an observer can’t simply assume either that the holder of G is right and the second person is being naïve or presumptuous, or that the second person is right and the holder of G is claiming an antiquated, premodern, and now non-existent quasi-right.

This does come up. The established, humanist art critic will maintain that the values of art are autonomous. The up-and-coming young essayist, echoing the sociology of art courses she was required to attend in school, will counter that the art world is dominated by the moneyed classes, etc., as is the case all through the world. They cannot both be right; and so we have the usual hysteria about “postmodernism,” which in most cases is not what is at issue, at all.

For the argument outlined here to have been helpful for critique, in the years since 1983, it would have to have been possible to understand the theory as descriptive, and only descriptive. But theory, it would seem, has instead become an explanation of why things are always, everywhere conservative, why every transaction or interaction must always increase the power of the dominant class, why every analysis of a good must always be couched in terms of the dominating good. (Or—for the right—why things are always “liberal,” because they think the dominant class is a liberal one.) There are understandings of this kind of critique that assign it a different meaning; but those would seem to have little to no real currency.

For some ideologies with a historical component, like Marxism or Christianity, perhaps this isn’t a problem. One can understand historical change as something that happens through some other, esoteric means. One can carve out a niche in which to live in a satisfactory way while rejecting the possibility of public criticism of existing norms. Not all have resigned themselves to that, however.

It seems to me that Walzer lowers his sights somewhat in the rest of the book, and confines himself to specific proposals and specific historical-anthropological case studies. These more modest arguments will presumably be easily detachable from the stronger arguments made in the first part of chapter one.

Two Kind of Essays

A week or two ago, the New York Times’ “Bookends” section asked Rivka Galchen and Benjamin Moser to write short essays on the question, “Is there an unforgivable literary sin?” (Whether or not this has anything to do with The New Republic’s publishing a complaint by the notoriously William Giraldi’s against false memoirs and novels, titled “The Unforgivable Half Truths of Memoir,” is unknown.) As happens fairly often, the writers both punt on the question that seems to have been asked, but come up with something worth reading, anyway. In this case, both write disquisitions on sin and forgiveness.

I really liked Galchen’s essay, which explores her discomfort with the whole concept of something being “unforgivable.” She relates a bunch of episodes from her own life, and her experience with other people’s religions, to illustrate what the word actually means to her. You don’t really find an essay like this much anymore. It reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s way of working. Woolf is an essayist who uses an almost novelistic or fiction-based form to explore her own ideas and to explore the way the world feels to her. What Woolf does in her essays is interweave speculation with very precisely imagined descriptions of scenes, so that the whole creates a very clear argument in the reader’s mind. Galchen does something like the same thing, inviting the reader to follow along with her thought processes and come to her own conclusions.

Moser, on the other hand, takes a more academic approach. He begins by describing Confucius’ understanding of what the writer should do, and develops some ideas about this, arguing that the writer really does have to be honest, to represent the world truly. But he doesn’t proceed in a strictly logical manner, rather in a way that remains “essayistic.” The connections between his ideas are not always obvious. He builds the piece in somewhat the same way Galchen does, but using facts from history and scholarship as his “data points,” instead of personal experience and observed narrative. He works in terms of generalizations or abstractions, and historical accounts of what past writers have taught. He draws a kind of gravitas from his form and from his sources, which Galchen can’t match. But for my tastes, this gravitas feels a little forced, by comparison with what I’d expect to find in more formally logically developed piece.

The New Seasons of The X-Files and The Magicians, So Far

The X-Files: I had been a fan of The X-Files till the bitter end. I didn’t start watching it from the beginning. I had really loved VR5 (someone please get this out on DVD or Blu-Ray!), which had starred Lori Singer—costarring Louise Fletcher, as her now mostly catatonic mother, and Anthony Heald, as one of her quasi-mentors—as a young woman trying to find answers about her past and her missing father and twin sister, working her way into a virtual-reality network that she charmingly jacked into by way of an old-fashioned acoustic-coupling modem. It was often visually stunning and never the same twice, but it was canceled after a single season.

The X-Files was on after VR5, or just before it, or something, and I kept the TV on once, or maybe there was a delay from preemption, and saw most of the episode on the Norwegian oil rig, but never bothered to watch it regularly until VR5 had gone away. What pulled me in was the chemistry between Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny as Scully and Mulder, and the way the show overall evoked a feeling from my childhood adolescence, which I connected with science fiction movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Wargames, and which I’d felt I’d long outgrown (especially in its less than equal vision of gender relations—I’d somehow never noticed that Ally Sheedy actually doesn’t really get to do anything cool). I stuck it out to, I think, even the second movie (not sure about that), but I started to lose faith in the show around the time Scully’s cancer was hinted to be metaphysical in significance, and the showrunners didn’t really seem to know how it ought to end.

So I watched the first hour, so far, of the new series mostly out of curiosity. It is interesting, I suppose, that it puts Mulder’s paranoia in a larger context than it ever did before, showing the connections to rightwing lunacy that might have been there all along. I’m not sure how much the visual sense the show had was based on its not being broadcast in digital HD, and on its being the first and only story of its kind. Even in its having a certain kind of continuing storyline, it was groundbreaking in its day but has now arguably been surpassed. I, for one, would have loved to see an in-depth exploration of Mulder or Scully as a character, something more like what you’d later see in The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, but that’s what you never quite got from The X-Files. Six hours isn’t a very big investment, and I’ll probably keep watching it, but I feel like the credit lost from the way the previous run ended is going to be difficult to earn back.

The Magicians: So, I’ve watched the second hour of this, and there’s a pretty good chance I’ll watch more. I really don’t watch much TV these days. I’ll watch some prestige drama if my husband wants to see it—the last series I watched on my own was The Tudors, which I loved for the political intrigue, but we don’t get Showtime anymore—or we’ll stream something like The Hour, but I find it hard to focus on TV. It’s rarely as visually compelling as film is. I used to be able to knit or work out while I watched, but fifteen or twenty years ago I trained myself to try to pay attention to the visuals, and now I can’t do that, but I don’t feel I’m getting much from it. If it’s talky, you can’t slow it down and think about it, like you can do with a book, and the dialogue usually isn’t that good anyway. I’m a lot less likely to just have random stuff on the TV now that I have a child, and anyway the last time I regularly watched was Thursdays on NBC, when I stopped in part because I got tired of 30 Rock and in part because my husband joined a sports league that met that night, and I didn’t want to watch alone. Now that I’ve got hundreds of channels I tend to scan the listings looking for movies, and ignore everything else.

I’ve tried a couple of times to watch the new science fiction shows on SyFy or BBC, and haven’t been able to. I mostly don’t find the look or the writing or the acting, the whole mise-en-scène of the twenty-first century TV SF show, especially compelling. And it’s still television, intelligent or not. And clearly this isn’t a show I’m going to be able to knit during—I’m going to want to keep my eyes on the screen.

But. It is definitely not bad. It’s definitely not the novel. What Julia’s story is going to become, is becoming more clear; and it seems to have very little whatsoever to do with the way it happened in the books. Which is fine. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can get on with the way the showrunners want to tell it.

What Quentin’s story is going to become, I still don’t know. It seems to me the first two hours compressed a lot of pages into what seems like a couple of weeks, though I don’t have a copy of the first book handy and can’t say for sure. It seems to me these first two episodes have a feeling of having disposed of something that might have lingered a little longer in the books, but I can’t say what that is, or how it might affect the story going forward. It’s true that this part of the book had a sometimes plodding, going through the years one by one, month by month, sort of feel, but also that most of what we learned about Quentin’s friends, and about what the school ultimately means to them, came from this section. We really aren’t finding out much about those friends yet at all.

It still feels like it’s moving a little quickly. I don’t always know what’s going on, sometimes until I remember how it worked out in the original, sometimes not at all. I’m not sure I’m happy about the way the “different worlds” thing is being foregrounded, so far, in the series, as it was not (that I recall) in the books. I’m hoping we’ll see more of Julia’s storyline, because so far that seems to be the more interesting and eventful one. I can live with the fact that the creators of the TV show have a different vision of the story than the novel has, I think. What worries me a little is that, going forward, a certain kind of reader or viewer may take this to be an actual comment on the novel, when to my mind it’s shaping up to be something different altogether. There’s a certain idea, in some SF circles, that there’s a kind of globally shared Zeitgeist that all works of SF or fantasy comment on, and I think that could be misleading here. What we’re shown of the way magic is connected with the outside world is, here, quite different from what we’re shown in Lev Grossman’s books. I’d like to leave open the possibilities that Grossman did, not take Sera Gamble’s interpretations (however admirable and interesting in themselves) as limiting his.

Spheres of Justice, Ch. 1: Pluralism of Goods, and Social Constructionism

Chapter One is titled “Complex Equality” and begins with sections titled “Pluralism” and “A Theory of Goods.” Each of these first two sections contains a kind of analysis of a small number of concepts from political theory. As a non-scholar, I feel I have to know how these should be taken. Are these Walzer’s proposals, or are they Walzer’s summaries of the scholarly consensus?

Distributive Justice

Walzer describes “distributive justice” as a theory about the distribution of everything within a society, even things that aren’t normally transferable, and so on. This sounds like a good idea, and almost obvious. How else could philosophers and other thinkers evaluate the justice of a society, other than by characterizing the distribution of various bad or good things among its members? Why should questions of the distribution of one thing be discussed in different terms than the distribution of others? Moreover, as will be seen in the following pages, Walzer is responding to A Theory of Justice, a far-reaching theory published about a decade earlier by John Rawls. It’s not unreasonable to expect that Rawls is interested in justice as it applies to everything that might be shared either justly or unjustly.

However, this is not what Rawls was doing. (At least, it’s not what he’s taken to have been doing, from the vantage point of today. It would be interested to learn whether he addressed this question somewhere in the very long text of his book, but for me, that’s a research project for another day.) Moreover, it’s not what philosophers mean by “distributive justice.” Distributive justice is pretty much about economics, and economics-like things. It doesn’t expand the concern with distribution until everything that might fall under a discussion of justice is rephrased in distributive terms. Rather—although it sometimes generalizes its concerns from money to “happiness” or “utility,” or something along those lines—it narrows the concern with justice to what can in fact be measured and in some way seen as distributed.

Walzer offers some criticism of Rawls in this introductory chapter, and in this he seems to me to approach the issues along the same lines as Michael Sandel (in Liberalism and the Limits of Justice) does. I don’t fully understand Sandel, either, but he seems to take Rawls to be attempting to encompass the entire social world in something of the same way Walzer does here. His objection to Rawls is that Rawls asks people to consider things that are important to their sense of being who they are as, instead, something they could alienate from themselves, whether to engage in the reasoning of the original position or to accept the results of its reasoning as binding on themselves. I think a better way of putting this is expressed by Martha Nussbaum and Charles Larmore as that Rawls pays insufficient attention to the fact that people in modern society in fact disagree about what “the good life” is (to use the terms traditionally taken from Plato and Aristotle), and that modern philosophers on the whole reject the idea that a consideration of what the good life might be is essential to doing philosophy at all.

Pluralism

“Pluralism,” here, means pluralism of goods. There isn’t just one kind of good, like pleasure, happiness, or money (as there is in certain kinds of utilitarianism). There are other goods, like honor and divine grace. “Pluralism” does not mean, however, pluralism of different groups: that every group should be able to do as it likes (see the previous post on this topic). More about this will become clear in the next section (which I’ll discuss in a future post).

Here, I’ll just say that pluralism in this sense feels very plausible. It seems to be in line with what liberals of a few decades earlier had called “minority living”: the ability to pursue tastes and values that aren’t shared by the rest of the population. It seems to be in line with a sense that society as it’s currently constituted is leaving some important things out of consideration.

From a philosophical view, part of his argument might seem to fit fairly well with that of Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre would hold that arguments about, say, divine grace, can only be made within the limits set by previous discussions about divine grace. People educated in those existing discussions have no real reason to listen to outsiders who criticize the distribution that results from the insiders’ ideas, unless they are given a reason to do so. So this might seem to be the upshot of Walzer’s discussions of how different societies have understood such a thing. But it isn’t immediately obvious that Walzer’s purpose in bringing up all these different kinds of goods is to argue that people who find them important, today, have to be listened to. “Divine grace” and “membership” may turn out to be very different types of goods, with very different levels of importance.

So “pluralism” for Walzer might seem to be more philosophical or even methodological: a reluctance to reduce all possible goods to the same scale, to be measured and compared using the same tools. It seems connected to the suspicion that people from different backgrounds will be insufficiently convinced that the comparisons offered by the majority are correct ones.

Social Construction

Walzer insists that all goods are both distributed and given meaning by society. By “society” he means, not some kind of structure (of the sort that was presumably being discussed a lot at the time he wrote the book), but the society’s members taken individually and collectively. He states explicitly that money has no actual meaning unless society decides to give it one. The same is true of individual attributes like talent or divine grace.

On the one hand, this appears to be an argument about the importance of society and institutions for any individual endeavor—something like what was simplified into “you didn’t build that.” On the other, it sounds like the argument John Searle makes in The Construction of Social Reality to show how money does acquire its meaning and significance from social arrangements. But it seems overstated. For one thing, there’s a difference between saying that society or culture determines the meaning of something like talent, why talent matters, what will count as talent, and so on (as well as that the way in which talent is recognized and developed depends on social arrangements), and saying that a person only has talent because other people agree to grant them talent. The second version suggests not only that it might be possible to take a vote as to whether a person should be talented, but that something like a vote does actually happen, and would be seen to have happened if the situation were correctly understood.

But even more than that, the argument is a very extreme version of the social constructionism hypothesis, which has in the intervening time been pretty thoroughly discredited, in its strong form (see Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What?). Richard Rorty (in Contingency, Irony, Solidarity) shows how something like Walzer’s statements here can be true but have less strong consequences than might appear on a naïve reading like the one that’s natural to me, as a non-expert, and his is the interpretation I prefer. This may or may not turn out to be incompatible with what Walzer actually says. On the weaker reading, all Walzer’s saying here is that the distribution and meaning of personal traits are mediated by culture and by the institutions that structure social interactions. On the stronger reading, he’s providing fuel for something like Steven Pinker’s attacks on what he views as a social-science consensus—something actual social scientists deny. This seems to leave Walzer here arguing for something without real support.

It also leads him into a kind of misguided nonbeliever’s defense of religion that can actually come across as insulting, as when he insists that actual, existing religions find the spiritual meaning of “bread” to be so much more important than the material meaning that they might conceivably—deliberately—let people starve—and that they would be right to do so. Walzer allows no room at all for anything, even food, to have a sheerly material significance. This seems, again, overstated. Surely, in anthropology and literary criticism, it’s important to recognize that a social (or as a believer would say, spiritual) meaning has a place. That’s not to insist that everybody must deny the existence of everything else. Saying it is displays a severe misunderstanding of religious discourse, not a decent respect for believers in religions.

Why you should read The Magicians, instead of watching the TV show

Since writing my last post, I’ve watched the first hour of The Magicians, which has been available on-demand for a few weeks—it’s the first half of the pilot, which will be shown in full tonight. It looks like the changes are drastic enough to change things I’d felt were essential to the way the books worked, and only some of the time interesting enough to suggest an alternative vision of the series’ own. Some of the things I liked best about the novels are obviously going to be missing from the television show.

The show seems to shift the story’s genre to a kind of urban fantasy that I guess you see pretty often in this kind of show, from a different kind of religious science fiction/fantasy in which, it seems to me, the connection between the real world and the magical one are somewhat different. The Magicians was often called “Harry Potter for young adults,” but it really owed more to The Chronicles of Narnia. And to my mind the differences between Grossman’s world and Lewis’s are very telling.

C.S. Lewis associated his fantasy realm with the church. This suggests that what happens in Narnia is very important in our own world. Lewis’s society was, after all, a Christian one (Lewis seems to have believed that it wasn’t, really, not quite, but this does not come across). Grossman associates his with the university. This gives Fillory a more “optional” feel than Narnia has. A reader can disbelieve in Fillory without feeling the author would consider him a heretic or a terrible person. That generally isn’t the case with the Narnia books. Disbelieving in Narnia is like being the one person who doesn’t clap, in the theater, when Tinkerbell dies.

Disbelieving in Fillory, on the other hand, is presented as natural. Quentin does not believe in Fillory, which he believes is a fictional world, made up by an English writer decades ago, and published in books only children read, and not all children, at that. None of his friends believe in Fillory. They make fun of the idea that Fillory is real, as much as of the idea that Hogwarts is real. The faculty at Brakebills doesn’t believe that Fillory is real. They are relentlessly hardheaded, practical types who hope their graduates will do something useful in the real world, benefiting ordinary, nonmagical people, or at least support themselves adequately and be reasonably happy.

This is true in the novels, at least. The entire confrontation with the gods of Fillory is something the very young Quentin and his friends deal with on their own, without any help from the grownups. The TV series appears to be setting up a situation in which the head of Brakebills is fully aware of what’s going on, and is, in fact, involved in it.

To me, this feels like it collapses a very interesting fault line through the novels. The Magicians is really a book about a young man encountering the grownup world, and then also a book about a young man learning about evil, and the reality of the ideals and books he’d idolized as a boy. The Magicians ends with a very mundane (if in some way, even more ultimately, redeemed) fall into the everyday world of graduates of elite colleges who don’t know how to make themselves useful. Magic has meant very little to them, because they have to learn how to be human first.

The TV show feels like it’s setting up the confrontation with evil within Fillory as having a very definite effect on the real or mundane, nonmagical world, and as the center of the plot. This probably makes sense in a television series—and probably makes it more like the other series on networks like SyFy and BBC—but elides something I appreciated in the novels.

The biggest change, though, is that it brings forward the Julia storyline into the beginning of the narration. In The Magicians, the first book in the series, Quentin pretty much abandons his friends, Julia and James, when he’s accepted into Brakebills and leaves high school early as a result. We only find out what happened to Julia in the second book, in which she feels like the really central character (it turns out she’s had a breakdown, caused in some way by the Brakebills administration itself); Quentin’s Brakebills girlfriend, Alice (who destroys herself doing too much magic in an attempt to save him and others), similarly feels like a moral center of the third of the books—both suffer somewhat horrific fates, in ways that can’t help (whether they in fact are) feeling connected with their being women. (This feels uncomfortable, and you wonder why Grossman has chosen to make his female characters suffer so much more than his male ones, why they seem unable to achieve success as he imagines them, but in my opinion this is no reason to condemn the books. I’d take these books over something like the unwatchable About Time, which has similar issues.) In the books, then, the story of Julia’s education is told in parallel to a later narrative from Quentin’s life, while in the series it looks like it will more closely parallel the exact same period in Quentin’s life. This could have the effect of making the way Julia learns magic—basically, “on the street,” from other people who didn’t get to go to Brakebills, an experience that warps her psychologically for life—seem more respectable than it does in the books, where we’re made to believe that Brakebills is a legitimate gatekeeper.

(I’m also not expecting to see as much of the Internet as we saw in The Magician King, given, for one thing, that the part where it played a huge role has been rendered moot already by Julia’s weird encounter in the restroom of a bar.)

The other big change is that the characters are made older. In the books, they’re high school seniors when the story begins, and Brakebills is an undergraduate college. In the show, they’re apparently college seniors (though they appear to live like somewhat older people, for the most part), and Brakebills is graduate school. This has the effect of underplaying the coming-of-age aspects of the story. It also pushes aside some mild issues of class that do appear in the books, in which Quentin and his friends are decidedly middle-class, public school students, and exceedingly studious. The emotion in Quentin’s discovery of real magic stems from the fact that he’d only known this kind of thing from books. The heartbreak in what happens to Julia stems from the fact that she goes from “straight-A student” to “rebellious Goth” so quickly. Neither of these things is likely to happen in the TV show, because both of them are from the beginning gorgeous, well-dressed and blow-dried, sophisticated adults. Along the same lines, much of the effect of the books derives from the idea that there is a secret learning that even the graduates of the best mundane schools, such as Princeton and MIT (even those with graduate training!), don’t ever find out about. If Quentin and Julia are depicted as the kind of idealized, beautiful, well-off characters who invariably populate TV (and if the magical world is depicted as much more broadly intertwined with the ordinary one, which I suspect might be shaping up as the case), the idea that magic is an entrée into a truly elite and mysterious world is worn off.

One of my favorite passages in The Magicians describes the mind- and finger-numbing study the students undergo in order to learn what Brakebills has to teach them. Another describes the miraculous moment in which they realize they’re really thinking like another creature. It’s unlikely either of these could be the core image of a television show. Instead, we’re likely to get a battle to the death with the forces of evil, with cool special effects (and a fair amount of onscreen sex). What will be interesting to me is whether we can still catch glimpses of the vision Lev Grossman built into his books.

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How TV and film writers adapt novels

Sonya Saraiya’s review of the new SyFy series, The Magicians, begins as follows:

The smartest thing Syfy’s “The Magicians” does, right from the start, is putting protagonist Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) in a psych ward.

I disagree. At least I’m going to want to use a different definition of “smart.” It’s clever, or something. It’s insightful. And it’s a little disturbing in terms of what it suggests the series is going to do.

Lev Grossman’s description of Brakebills, in the opening chapters of the novel, is very precisely descriptive—and very evocative. It did, in fact, remind me of the opening of Susan Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted, which takes place in a mental hospital. Interestingly, the description of that hospital was written in a way that made it reminiscent of a scene set in a university.

That Grossman, whether deliberately or as a result of some dreamlike unconscious process of thinking about situations and images, created the scene he did, speaks to his skill and to the quality of the book itself.

That the writers of a TV series excavated some “real meaning” of the scene, and decided the story was better if Quentin was mentally disturbed, speaks to their arrogantly deciding that the book is only “material”—but even more than that—to their apparently deciding that they know the meaning of that material better than the person who originally wrote it down.

There are parts of many books—The Magicians among them—that I kind of feel their authors “got wrong” in one way or another. I’m not sure I have any curiosity about the ways the SyFy writers got it wrong.

(One thing I think they got right, in a weird way, is the casting of Penny. As I’ve mentioned, I’m strangely fond of Penny. Quentin and his friends don’t like him, and he returns the favor, but by the end of the novel he’s revealed as the one of them who really needs magic, really needs the structure and purpose integration into the world of magic gives him, and who really has the talent and drive to do something useful with it. He always struck me as lower-middle or working class and ethnic, and in fact I always thought of him as resembling an Asian-American friend of mine, and though the actor cast for the series is taller and a bit more buff, the clips I’ve seen seem right to me.)

A Short Note on Pluralism and Liberalism

There’s a discussion going on at the blog Bleeding Heart Libertarians about a new book by Jacob T. Levy on pluralism. Reading the posts, I noticed that Levy uses the word “pluralism” in a different way than Michael Walzer does. Levy’s use of the word is more like what I’d expect (partly, probably, because I’ve read a lot of things by him and the people he’s in dialogue with, published a lot more recently than Spheres of Justice was). By “pluralism,” Walzer means something like (to put it in more MacIntyrean terms, which are the only ones I know for raising my understanding of it to this level of abstraction) that there are different methods and logics that are appropriate to different realms of inquiry. He doesn’t (that I see) discuss the idea that there are different groups or institutions within society. In fact, he explicitly talks in terms of “society” as a whole. He takes it for granted that anybody in the society can criticize any aspect of it, as long as they do so in appropriate terms. Levy, though, means that there are different groups in society, and some of them should be protected from criticism by the others. I think Walzer would reject this. However, I don’t think Walzer provides much support for fending off Levy’s interpretation. After about thirty years, it seems to me that Spheres of Justice—though it clearly is not offered as an argument in favor of something like what Levy proposes—can fit pretty well, even surprisingly well, alongside Levy’s argument.

As far as I can tell, Jacob Levy’s ideas fit easily alongside a lot of “liberaltarian” type argument that try to assimilate libertarianism to liberalism. They have a lot in common with the right-libertarianism found in many places in contemporary North America. They’re in favor of the free market, though not absolutely opposed to all regulation. They’re in favor of health regulations. They’re opposed to government control of schools. They accept a lot of communitarian or traditionalist arguments in favor of the autonomy of small “local” groups, by which they mean groups that are ethnically and religiously homogeneous, practicing traditional “unliberated” ways of life. They’re in favor of scientific research, including social science, and accept the difference between modern and premodern ways of thought. They accept modern constitutionalism and modern ways of thinking about political theory.

But they generally fall on the right side of the political spectrum. They may support feminism and gay rights in principle, but in practice they support the rights of people who’ve traditionally had power to act in ways liberals consider bigoted. Moreover, they argue that social science research supports (and some of it does appear to do so) their opposition to what they consider excessively accelerated progress.

And parts of their views are accepted, to some extent, by liberals, and by some (mostly communitarian-leaning thinkers) on the left.

The relevant part of the theory seems to go something like this:

We do, in fact, right now, have a bunch of institutions. These include religions, families, and so on. People spend a good amount of their lives in these institutions—for the most part, most people are raised in them—and in fact they operate according to their own rules which are often different from what you’d expect if you started with liberal principles and deduced these institutions from them

We also, in fact, right now, have liberalism, which operates in certain parts of society, such as academia, the learned professions, the marketplace, and so on. People operate in liberal society—sometimes called the public realm, or civil society, or by some other term—as adults, in the workplace, when they participate in national or global or culture, and so on.

The idea seems to be that we don’t have to investigate the two realms farther than that. The liberal parts of society are what they are, and the institutions are what they are, and society works pretty well this way. The libertarian kind of idea Levy proposes holds that, however, liberalism is always trying to criticize the institutions, and that liberalism should change its ways and thereby back off a bit and let institutions make their own decisions. From this point of view, for people to be free and to live in a free society, they have to be rooted some of the time in a less liberal, perhaps less free community. Or, at least, if free people choose to live part of the time in such a community, they have to be allowed to do that. This is held by a number of liberals, not only by libertarians. And so it’s held that nothing really needs to be done in this area. Liberalism can go on criticizing the institutions, but keep its gloves on and recognize that criticism won’t always be taken seriously, and the institutions can keep on doing what they’re doing, and it’s all good.

But, I would object, in a lot of cases, institutions aren’t present in that way. They’re often not present (in the way expected by the theory) where there’s been cultural disruption, as from immigration, or poverty, or slavery, or on the reservation. They’re usually not present where there’s been modernization and urbanization. It is unrealistic in the modern era to assume that religion is mandatory in the way it was in the past. It’s unrealistic to assume that the arguments about the need for premodern institutions hold equally well in a diverse society as in an ethnic monoculture. Those arguments seem to assume that those traditional institutions are always there to fall back on, and are a kind of base of operations for those who aren’t or can’t be fully immersed in the liberal world; and this is often not the case—most obviously, for those who are engaged in child-rearing.

More than that, there’s reason to believe that the parts of society called liberal share more with those institutions than the theory would predict. This has been urged by scholarship increasingly, over the past three or four decades, by thoroughly respectable thinkers who are not extremists or cranks. They are more infused with religion, for example, and not only because they rely on religious institutions to form the personalities of their members. Or their ideas stem from a more narrow slice of history than has usually been recognized.

And so the argument seems itself to be a little abstract: uninterested in the details of what institutions exist, what they’re like, or how they interact with one another and with the liberal aspects of society. Philosophy doesn’t get its hands dirty with details like that, and presumably the points would be raised by a different field of knowledge. But those fields of knowledge are themselves constrained, in what they can argue, by what’s accepted as philosophically correct.

Moreover, the points I’ve raised are relevant to criticisms of liberalism and its attitude toward institutions. There are further objections I’d make with regard to traditional institutions themselves. The argument seems usually to suppose that institutions are unitary and unchanging, without internal conflict. Thus, it seems easily to collapse into the assumption that internal conflict within traditions is caused by external influence (usually from liberalism, or at least from tensions caused by liberalism, for example as a result of globalization). It lends itself to use from within a traditional institution as a mechanism for demonizing all change—or one side of a longstanding conflict—as deserving criticism along the lines of the arguments Levy suggests.

I don’t want to suggest that Jacob Levy would agree with the implications I’ve drawn out from the context I’m trying to set him in. I do think that these points are relevant to my understanding of Spheres of Justice, which was written before some of these argument were drawn out at such length, at a time when the political options on offer were different than they are now.

Anger and The Woman Upstairs

I read The Woman Upstairs, the novel Claire Messud published after The Emperor’s Children, a few years ago, not long after it came out. I was intrigued by the news coverage, and it sounded interesting. It’s about a woman who’s a New England native, an artist, whose life becomes entwined with the family of another, more successful, artist, a South Asian woman married to a Frenchman, and whose own artistic vision is rejuvenated as a result. The novel’s setting is split between the studio Nora shares with the other woman, the public elementary school where she teaches, and her elderly father and aunt who live nearby.

I was right to expect it would be interesting. Nora is a terrific character, and her struggles to find a way to think about how she might fit in, in both the artistic and the domestic worlds, are fascinating. So is the depiction of a somewhat lopsided female friendship. It is absolutely worth seeing how (and how far) this kind of egotistical artist character can be depicted, when the character is a woman instead of a man. It’s very likely that I’ll read this novel again.

I did feel there was something “off” about the depiction of Nora. At this point, I suppose that I’m saying, basically, that I would have written the novel differently, which is a silly kind of criticism to make.

I mean that in both senses, though: I would have written this novel (or at least a novel with this character, with a character who in some essential way is the same character), and I would have written it differently. I’m not only saying, that is, that in some trivial way, Messud has different ideas than I have and came up with a different story about similar situations than I would have. I’m saying that The Woman Upstairs cuts close to the bone in a way that feels, nevertheless, off. These ideas aren’t simply different from mine; I think they’re wrong. This character and this situation are neither foreign to my world, nor good depictions of it—they appear to be descriptions of my world, they appear to have something to say about situations I’ve experienced or witnessed, but in fact, they aren’t and they don’t.

Still, they are fascinating, not least as ways of getting at something I’m interested in. The fact that this “something” can be seen in the way Messud describes is, itself, fascinating to me.

As it happens, the novel and its characters are well-observed. I think many of us have known people like Nora. Messud’s text provokes a shock of recognition. Many of us who’ve known artists and people interested in art have heard the opinions about “the art world” she espouses. And many of us have known people of a similar type, women raised in New England, from privileged but slightly provincial backgrounds, with extremely definite opinions about a lot of things. And many of us have known women who are angry: anger being Nora’s most notable quality. The very first sentence tells us that Nora is angry—that the entire story is fueled by her rage. This would appear to have something to do with her situation: her inability to progress with her art, her alienation from the larger world of contemporary art, her being stuck in an unchallenging job teaching other people’s children. Though, again, she doesn’t, frankly, seem all that angry to me. She seems opinionated and independent-minded. In fact, the way Messud pairs these characteristics with an insistence that Nora thinks of herself as “angry” is puzzling.

Messud clearly has an interest in anger, which plays a significant role in both these two of her novels (the only two of hers I’ve read). Characters in her books tend to be divided into two groups: those who are comfortable and those who are angry. This isn’t a subtle point in The Emperor’s Children: her characters know when they’re angry, and they say so. The actions of the angry characters are driven by their anger. Their writing or their art is driven by their anger. Characters who are not angry do not behave in the same way.

In The Emperor’s Children, Marina is not angry at her father; Danielle is not angry with her mother, and is only momentarily angry when Marina kind of steals a man she’s interested in both personally and professionally; even Julius is not angry with a man who beats him up and leaves him permanently scarred. Murray Thwaite is not angry with the world he criticizes in his lucratively remunerated essay-writing. His wife is not angry with his domestic helplessness or with her underappreciated second shift. The only one who’s angry is poor Bootie Tubb, who didn’t get to go to the Ivy League, and who feels disrespected by his rich relations. In The Woman Upstairs, Bootie’s place is taken by Nora (though in many ways her life has been rather more privileged, actually). In interviews, Messud has suggested that this kind of angry, emotional, unrestrained character is the typical figure of an artist, and she’s compared her characters to Philip Roth’s. But Roth’s angry people are very rarely writers themselves. They are ordinary people whose angry lives the novelist’s stand-in witnesses and transforms for an audience. Roth recognizes that anger is generally somewhat deserving of criticism, and at best comic. Messud, or her narrator, either is unaware of, or determined to ignore, that.

Although it took me a while to get into it, I really liked The Woman Upstairs in the end. Though it’s much shorter than The Emperor’s Children, I think it’s actually more ambitious, forgoing the wordy descriptions and the huge cast list that go with nineteenth-century, or at latest early modern, realism. The Woman Upstairs allows itself to delve further into the thoughts and feelings of its main character than the earlier novel permits in the case of anyone it depicts. And The Woman Upstairs tells us more about its art, about what its characters do, than the longer novel does. That helps to place things in context, more than décor and gossip can do.

War and Peace on the Hudson--The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud

The Emperor’s Children is a novel about intellectuals that is not a novel of ideas. The three central characters are graduates of Brown from some time in the early 1990s, all English majors, all trying to make it as writers of one kind or another, living in New York in the months after George W. Bush was elected president. (The coyness of that sentence, in its allusions to chronology, are a reflection of the book.) Marina Thwaite is living off her parents’ money and halfheartedly trying to finish a contracted book on children’s fashions through the ages. Julius Clarke is a critic for venues like the Village Voice who makes just enough money to live hand to mouth in a decrepit downtown studio and party with more well-off people. Danielle Rankin is a television producer for a PBS affiliate. The latter two are from the Midwest; Marina was raised in Manhattan, the child of a famous columnist. Additional characters are her father, Murray Thwaite, and her cousin, Frederick (Bootie) Tubb. Bootie dropped out of Oswego after one semester, because he thought it was bullshit—he’d been accepted into Harvard but hid this fact from his family and teachers because he couldn’t afford it—and has decided to try to become educated anyway, somehow.

The Emperor’s Children is an ambitious book, and it fulfills those ambitions well. The story is compelling and the reader keeps turning the pages, not just from a kind of visceral suspense or a desire to see how events from the recent past, things with which the reader is already familiar, will be depicted, but because one begins to care about the characters, hopes their careers will be made and their affairs will turn out well. There’s a lot in it and none of it feels like fluff or filler, none of it feels boring or stupid, dull or pointless. I want to say, though, that it’s an ambitious, well- and literarily executed version of a kind of book I don’t much like to read (and that will appeal to readers who dislike social novels, women’s novels, or “mainstream” novels, generally, even less than to me). I’m happy to read a novel of ideas, or a book about intellectuals. I’m happy to read a well-observed novel of specific social types, of “the way we live now,” or issues of broader concern. The Emperor’s Children is not any of these things. It’s a kind of gossipy, realist novel about a very small slice of very rich or (it has to be said) privileged people, of well known types, focusing on a very narrow slice even of those people’s lives, and rigorously refusing itself the slightest commentary on or reaction to what it describes. The first part of the novel relies so heavily on descriptions of interior decoration for its characterization of its people and milieus that I was astonished. There is in fact a nice mix of dialogue and description—too much description for the reader who needs everything to be dramatized, but pretty much what you’d expect of a nicely traditional sort of novel—and the dialogue carried off well, without dramatization in real time for its own sake, oral infodumps, or questionable cleverness. There are overt allusions to War and Peace and Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities (neither of which I’ve yet read), so it’s quite plausible that The Emperor’s Children is being intentionally old-fashioned. But it feels, at its storytelling core, like an upscale version of a Jennifer Weiner novel, one in which the characters don’t act trashy, don’t talk mean about one another, and don’t obsess (too much) about their shoes—which is to say, like a women’s novel with the fun taken out.

As I mentioned, this is in many ways a novel about what it means to be an intellectual, overlaid on the social-novel narrative of three friends who need in some way or other to change their lives. The younger characters aren’t exactly intellectuals, though, and they aren’t exactly old-fashioned. Julius seems to write mostly about popular culture and music. Marina’s book appears to draw on cultural studies but is basically journalism. Danielle is a straight-up reporter. The sense that they’re intellectuals derives from the fact that they studied English literature at Brown, that they write, think, and talk instead of holding down real jobs, and that they mostly circle around figures of more stature like Marina’s father and Ludovic Seeley, the Australian editor of a supposedly “revolutionary” magazine that’s about to be launched. We don’t know what they think, what they read, what they talk about when they’re talking about ideas instead of each other. Their stories, in the novel, don’t have to do with their intellectual development, but with “growing up” of a fairly mundane kind.

Perhaps because of this, they seem marooned in a vague, abstract world that isn’t fully imagined (or if imagined, couldn’t be described given the page limit—more than four hundred pages in a very large format that likely equals two pages of more normal size). It’s mentioned once that Marina recently broke up with a live-in boyfriend of long standing, which would explain her social attenuation, and that sometime in the past ten years she did a lot of research for her book, which would explain what she does with most of her time, but it does seem implausible that she has no friends but Danielle. She grew up in Manhattan, and she is much more wealthy than Danielle is, so while it’s somewhat plausible that Danielle might have no friends in New York except people from work and her two friends from college, it’s hard to believe that Marina, who loves to shop and has a lot of money to spend and no job to go to during the day, would seem to be doing all that shopping herself. We know Julius sleeps around and knows a lot of people in the arts world, but we don’t see any of them. We don’t know even one detail of what he generally writes about, just as we know absolutely nothing of Danielle’s past projects. We don’t know how they got to where they are in their careers. We know what they, and their apartments, look like, that they like to hang out together and with Marina, and that they’re at a crisis point where their careers, right now, are looking to be stalled.

There’s a kind of moralist—sometimes a fiction writer, sometimes not—who’s almost painfully aware of the most negative aspects of every individual’s personality and life. This kind of person is forever pointing out bad things about people. If a fact about someone’s life is ambiguous, this kind of person chooses the most critical or cynical words to describe it. If there’s an extenuating circumstance, or a way to see things from their point of view, this kind of person leaves it out. Jonathan Franzen is one writer who does this. Claire Messud is another. (Compare both of these with the equally painful efforts Jeffrey Eugenides makes to be charitable to each and every one of his point of view characters, and even to the walk-on parts he assigns to the people they meet in the course of their stories.)

Messud was at the center of a kerfuffle a couple of years ago, when the novel after this one had come out, over the “likability” of literary characters. It’s never been clear to me what’s meant by the word. Danielle, Julius, and Marina are all, in their ways, as real people, likable ones. As characters, though, Messud takes pains to tell the reader that they aren’t. One might conclude—reading between the lines—that these are in fact likable people, but that they have flaws, and these flaws are naturally more interesting than the ideals they inhabit in a vague way but don’t fully live up to. But one doesn’t. The apparent intent is that the author doesn’t want us to like these people: that when later in the novel they make bad choices, we readers can match those errors back to the characteristics she’s already told us about.

It’s easy to see that Messud may have had something else in mind. She’s said as much in interviews, after the fact. But there’s nothing in the book to indicate we should read her in the way she seems to prefer.

But because the novel is so ambitious, and so skillfully executed, describing these aspects of its characters and plot doesn’t exhaust what could be said about it. If its characters don’t say much about ideas, they do say plenty about people who write about ideas. There’s lots of deliciously tart storyline about the world in which intellectuals live and breathe, in public and in private. These young people are deciding how to assert themselves in a world that’s starting to look more complicated than it did in college, and Messud contrives to show that world in many of its aspects. What makes The Emperor’s Children worth reading is its ambition: the way it contains all the things that The Cookbook Collector, for example, leaves out, in the name of brevity and modernism. In fact, The Cookbook Collector has a bit more in the way of ideas and of connections with the world outside that of writing; but The Emperor’s Children takes more risks in terms of developing what it does depict in depth and at length. Which is something we don’t see enough of.

Class Aspiration: The motive power of fiction, or its nemesis?

Phoebe Maltz Bovy has written an essay on class diversity in fiction: namely, the lack of it. She raises a lot of good questions, though her conclusion seems to me to be overly pessimistic.

In her first paragraph, Bovy equivocates on the meaning of the word “representation.” In discussions of diversity, representation means that people from different groups are represented in the group of people doing something. In art, representation, of course, means something different. Representation means showing people who belong to a certain group, or a certain type. It also refers to the way in which they are shown. Bovy conflates these two meanings in order to suggest that what people who call for diversity of novelists really want is to see people like themselves in fiction or in films, and to allow her to explore the latter question. I do think this question is interesting. I’m not in a hurry, though, to tell people who are asking for, say, more women novelists reviewed in important venues, that they should be satisfied with really good depictions of women by male authors, much less that a meditation on why “representation” is important is something on which they should spend their time.

She next gets to the meat of her argument: the representation of socioeconomic class in fiction. Specifically, she is riffing off recent essays by working-class writers who’ve discussed issues of personal import to themselves. They’ve felt uncomfortable in writing programs, or felt compelled to censor themselves, or they find it difficult to combine their concerns about class with their concerns about race. Bovy rewords their concerns in the following fashion:

When reading both of these essays, though, I wondered whether class is, in this context, just one more box to check, one more injustice to correct. Is it simply a matter of locating structural obstacles and raising awareness?

She is going to combine the political question with the aesthetic one. Representation promises a way of better understanding the way class concerns interact with aesthetic considerations.

The meat of Bovy’s essay begins as follows:

It seems to me that socioeconomic class is a tougher sort of diversity to bring to writing. Unlike the other varieties, it’s at odds with what readers are used to and what they’re likely to want—namely wealthier, more glamorous, or just less drudgery-having versions of themselves. Which is to say: What does aspirational look like? As a rule, I suspect, those of us who aren’t white men don’t dream of becoming white men, (and more to the point, becoming a white guy because they sure seem to have it easier isn’t an option). But rich isn’t an identity, exactly. You get to be yourself, but you can afford a hi-tech Japanese bidet-toilet.

This is certainly true to some extent. People who work in the music industry, say, want to see movies and read books about very talented people in the industry. People with families like entertainment that depicts people with happy families. Of course, this leaves out movies and novels about “problems,” but even in those cases, for the most part, everything else is heightened or improved—and the problem, of course, is resolved by the end. People, generally, like to see pretty people onscreen, healthy people, strong people, happy people, rich people. The typical movie house isn’t a modest ranch, but a roomy split-level, garrison Colonial, or contemporary, with a big yard. The default, especially in film, is the ideal (just as the default bad person is the worst possible: a movie that could have been about a club kid is made about a prostitute instead).

This kind of thing helps readers and filmgoers identify with the characters and with the essential aspect of the story. Freud had a lot to say about this kind of thing. He pointed out that in classical drama, we don’t see stories about ordinary families. Instead, we see family dynamics playing out in a heightened fashion among kings, queens, and princes. Freud believed that this was the best way to get playgoers to experience the feelings that would let them fix their own lives. We don’t write literature about royalty anymore—the novel is the literature of the middle class (though we would now say “upper middle class”)—but Freud’s theory is still influential, in certain circles.

This isn’t the same thing, however, as the idea that people of different types like to see idealized versions of those types onscreen or in the books they read. Freud wasn’t talking about people of different types. He wrote about psychologies he believed were universal. It’s true that people don’t like to see types they identify with made fun of. It’s also true that what constitutes “making fun” differs from person to person and from group to group. Some people might feel that a geek who acts like a geek is being made fun of, while others might feel that a geek who acts like a club kid is disrespectful of actual geeks. Moreover, books and films for a broad audience have to consider what that broad audience will like. If a geek who acts like a geek—or a working-class person who acts like a working-class person—screams “bad” or “weird” to people who aren’t geeks or working-class, it will actually give the message that geeks or working-class people are themselves bad or weird.

And anyway, people who write “mainstream” literature do tend to be fairly well-off, as Bovy and her sources observe. They write what they know, and moreover, they write what will sell. And the audience, too, for that kind of fiction, tends to be well-off, one supposes. They’ve gone from college to grad school to published novelist, in many cases, without having much workday contact with non-writers, except to the extent they themselves have jobs, which tend not to be in the broad middle straddling “barista” and “CEO.” To the extent they’re successful, the non-writers they come in contact with are usually members of a cultural elite that’s itself increasingly an economic elite. If people who fit that description would like to write about ordinary people, they can do research, or write about their childhood and the lives of their less-privileged ancestors, or they can pick up an ideology like Freud’s that tells them it’s actually best to focus on people who are at one extreme, that the best art has the most attenuated connection with the real, everyday or workaday world. And people who don’t fit that description can find themselves wanting to do things that don’t fit the generally accepted patterns.

A few years ago a woman writer, I forget who, said something about the need to realize one’s reading has been aspirational in a bad way, that one has been reading things written for, intended for, only making sense for, the very wealthy. I think it’s possible to go too far in that direction. You run the risk of dismissing all fiction as trivial, fluff, something only for leisured ladies in between rounds of bonbons. You run the risk of allowing the wealthy—rather than the elite of the spirit—to take over the realms belonging to literature. (In the US these have historically been separate.) It’s possible to decide one doesn’t want to read books, any longer, about rich people.

And in one way, this can make sense. At some point in your life, you decide that books about people just out of college who are deciding whether to go to Europe without a job or to Japan are saying less than they could be saying about the things that are important to you. You realize that coming-of-age novels can perhaps be written to appeal to readers from any background, regardless of the milieu in which they’re set, but that novels for older people don’t work as well that way. You just get tired of the same thing, over and over again, and you lose interest in the minutiae of upper-class fashion and its changes from year to year. You find it more difficult, as you mature and the demands you make on books evolve, to find something meaningful in what’s being published.

And this somehow ends up seeming related to the fact that books (maybe increasingly) tend to be set among an economic elite.

It’s too bad.

Arbitrage, the movie

Arbitrage can occur when the value of a good in one place is different from the value of the same good in a different place. Rather than bringing the seller together with a buyer who’s willing to pay a lot, an arbitrageur pays the seller’s low price, then brings the good to the buyer and sells it for a higher one. Arbitrage depends on the seller’s not learning the true market value of the good they have for sale, or if this isn’t the case, on the impossibility of the seller’s making direct contact with the true purchaser of their goods.

Arbitrage is also the practice of bringing buyers and sellers together. It’s the practice depicted in the 1988 movie Working Girl. The intern played by Melanie Griffith puts together a deal that allows one corporation to buy another. The firm she works for acts as a go-between, letting the buyer and seller know that a deal could be made, and provides loans that let the deal go through. She tells them about a possibility they don’t yet know exists (though it’s possible they could if they wanted to, and did the research she performed), and earns a commission on the sale.

“Arbitrage” is also the name of a 2012 movie starring Richard Gere and Brit Marling, as well as Susan Sarandon, Tim Roth, and Nate Parker. Gere plays an incredibly wealthy financier who’s about to sell his firm, at which Marling’s character, his daughter, is an important executive. There’s also some shady business involving his borrowing cash under the table to make it look as if his investment company is properly funded. When—as depicted in the trailer—his mistress is killed in a gruesome late-night accident during which he was driving her car, he perceives the need to create a story that hopefully will keep him out of the clutches of the police. But because there’s no question the death was an accident and the most serious charge he’d face would be manslaughter, he’s more worried about the deal falling through than he is about prison time or the scandal itself. And the buyer, played for some reason by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, is jerking him around.

There’s some attempt to make this into a movie about a basically good guy whose life starts to fall apart around him when he makes a couple of mistakes. (It occurred to me, weirdly, that if he’d done a line of his girlfriend’s coke instead of drinking her scotch, he might not have fallen asleep at the wheel.) But this idea can’t really be sustained. The filmmakers are very careful to let the viewer know that this kind of behavior—the cheating, in both senses—is utterly commonplace among this crowd, and it surprises almost no one. When he involves the son of his former driver, played by Nate Parker, in the crime, the cruelty of what he’s asking the younger man to do is shocking to the viewer, and seems to occur to him not at all.

Arbitrage, the movie, is dark and cold. Thirty years ago, Working Girl depicted a girl from Queens working her way through college to get a job at Wall Street and achieve success, in spite of the fact that her colleagues would surely screw her over. (Well, her female boss screws her over, and she learns that a sexy man can both fall in love with her and engineer her ultimate success.) Arbitrage has no such happy ending. It’s not a fun, commercial movie like Working Girl is. It’s not really even an exceptional indie film. It has a couple of plot holes. It’s a first effort by a new filmmaker, but it’s also interesting, and it had really good performances by Marling, Roth, Sarandon, and a definitely aging but still sexy Gere.