Siri Hustvedt, The Shaking Woman ** 1/2

I am a fan of Siri Hustvedt, and particularly of her non-fiction. I especially like that she takes it for granted that there is no difference between the physical and mental, the psychological and the neurological, the mind and body.

In The Shaking Woman, or A History of My Nerves, Hustvedt sets out to discover why her body frequently shakes uncontrollably when she speaks in public. This condition first manifests itself when she gives a eulogy for her father, after years of uneventful speaking engagements.

I was expecting the book to have as its backbone Hustvedt's journey to various medical doctors and psychologists. She describes giving a talk at a university program in Narrative Medicine ("attempts to illuminate the universals of the human condition by revealing the particular") -- I was expecting something like that. Instead, she tries to think through the problem herself, through reading and research. The result is frequently vague or off-topic, with little narrative drive.

Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life ***

According to his author biography, Chiang attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop in 1989. The first few stories in this collection are from the first couple of years after that, and they have the generic and derivative quality of a new writer. Chiang really came into his own around the turn of the century; "Story of Your Life," which the movie Arrival was based on, is from 1998, and the strong stories in the second half come from after 2000. His more recent collection Exhalation is even better.

My favorite story in Stories of Your Life is "Hell Is the Absence of God," which takes place in a world where angelic visitations are common and not universally positive occurrences. The original "Story of Your Life" provides a clearer scientific basis for the alien's abilities and a better sense of how humans might be capable of seeing the world from their perspective, but the denouement is still perplexing. It's not that learning their language enables time travel (the impression I got from the movie), but that it enables us to remember the future like we remember the past.

Richard Davies, Extreme Economies ***

Some of the most engaging and informative books I've read have been immersive reports from extreme economies: the slums of Mumbai (Behind the Beautiful Forevers), the Bronx (Random Family), Milwaukee (Evicted). Extreme Economies looks at nine outlier societies that are dealing with forces that promise to impact us all in the future, such as an aging population, increased automation, and economic inequality.

I really appreciate the approach, and each section has thought-provoking tidbits. However, the coverage of each society is superficial, about the depth of a magazine article, and the author frequently chooses to highlight one of the less compelling aspects of the situation. For example, the chapter on Tallinn focuses on the Estonian effort to automate government services, whereas the most interesting part of the story is the economic relationship between native Estonians and the huge numbers of Russians who settled here (or were moved here) during the Soviet era.

Davies quietly makes a case for conservative market-based economics. He never makes the argument explicitly, but most of his stories of failure involve ill-advised government intervention. This bias is most notable in the chapter about Glasgow, where the author exalts the social cohesion in the 19th century tenements then blames much of the city's current trouble on housing policy. One of his key conclusions is that we underestimate the importance of social capital when measuring wealth and setting policy.

Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station ****

Leaving the Atocha Station begins with a pair of set pieces that are simultaneously humorous and insightful. In the first, our narrator sees a man standing in front of a painting in the Prado museum crying; was he having a profound experience of art or experiencing grief he brought into the museum? In the second, his poor Spanish leads him to "form several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords."

I would say that the book is about how we look for profound experiences in both life and art, and try to justify ourselves when we fail to have them. The first part of the book feels brilliant; the latter part seems like a typical story of an insecure artist worrying about his talent, level of engagement, and girls. 

Derek Lundy, Godforsaken Sea ***

The titular Godforsaken Sea is the Southern Ocean, whose challenges Lundy describes through the story of the 1996 Vendée Globe race: a single-handed non-stop sailboat race around the world. Several competitors came to grief in the Southern Ocean that year, including one who vanished without a trace.

Lundy does an excellent job of detailing the numerous factors that contribute to a successful endurance race: boat designs, solicitation of sponsors, training, tactics, food and sleep planning, communication channels, emergency procedures, heavy weather strategy, psychological equanimity.

The inherent drama of a dangerous race should provide a propulsive narrative structure, but Lundy consistently manages to undermine the excitement by reporting on events out of order, stepping away to include interview material about before and after the race, and repeating paeans to heroism in the face of the awesome Southern Ocean.

The rescues at sea were sensational enough to resist Lundy's talent for sapping energy from the story. The friendship that developed between Pete Goss and Raphaël Dinelli is the happy ending.

Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell **

The premise and first few chapters of Fall led me to believe that it would be about what the experience of a disembodied consciousness might be like. Dodge is the ultra-rich founder of a gaming company who falls into a coma due to a mishap during a routine medical procedure. His health care directive insists that his heirs upload his connectome to the cloud. Pre-coma Dodge takes particular note of how his mental model of the world depends on kinesthetic awareness; he ponders the fate of the Ancient Greek shades on the other side of the river Lethe, with only vague memories of their previous lives. Can we even be conscious without our bodies or the stimulation of our senses?

I don't know, because that's not where Stephenson goes with the story. After a few hundred pages of tangential action involving internet hoaxes and increased polarization in the United States, Dodge's niece finally boots him up. The restored consciousness struggles to make sense of the digital chaos around it, but eventually settles into... creating a virtual world like a game designer would.

This doesn't make sense to me. A consciousness in a radically new environment would apply what it knows in order to find patterns in the input, but where is that input coming from? Assuming there is input of a digital sort, how would systems optimized for finding regularities in the real world possibly lend themselves to interpretation of online chaos? If we grant that Dodge is able to impose structure on the input, how is it that subsequently uploaded connectomes share the world Dodge fashioned? Why do avatars like trees, rocks, and mosquitoes act exactly like their stubborn real-world counterparts?

More deadening than my confusion is my indifference. I don't care about any of the undeveloped characters, either in Meatspace or Bitworld. The story develops into a retelling of Paradise Lost (with Dodge in the Satan role, hence the title) followed by a generic quest narrative. Stephenson doesn't even attempt to follow up on any of the knotty issues raised in the beginning, about consciousness, the legal implications of digital immortality, or our increasing dependence on digitally mediated experience.