Antonin Scalia, The Essential Scalia ****

Justice Scalia has a reputation as an excellent and sometimes funny writer. Of course, he is also known for his conservative views and his enjoyment of bantering with the other side. I'm always interested in having smart articulate people attempt to persuade me to their positions, and I'm always interested in good writers.

Scalia is indeed an excellent and sometimes funny writer. Justice Elena Kagan's forward ("I envy the reader who has picked up this book") builds anticipation. The editors chose and organized the selections so that they present Scalia's fundamental principles clearly. Scalia makes his arguments forcefully, mostly without legal argle-bargle although legalese does drift in (fittingly) to the pieces in the final section on administrative law.

I wish the collection could somehow incorporate a contrasting perspective. For example, Scalia says "originalism is the only game in town –– the only real, verifiable criterion that can prevent judges from making the Constitution say whatever they think it should say." This is patently false, and I wish there was some way to include a critic to explain why, something like the Philosophers and Their Critics books. Scalia liked to be challenged.

I found Scalia's articles about method to be mostly convincing, the articles and opinions about specific cases less so. It's like I always say about libertarianism: the principles are very attractive, but they quickly lead to crazy-sounding results when applied to real-life situations.

Adam Ross, Mr Peanut ***

A re-read that didn't hold up for me.

As I noted in my earlier review, the marketing of Mr Peanut emphasizes its post-modern trickery. For the first 90 pages, though, it is a straightforward murder mystery that hinges on the complicated dynamics of a married couple's relationship. David Pepin, the dead woman's husband, has realistically mixed feelings about his wife and her needs. He loves her and supports her in her failed efforts to lose weight, but often finds the effort exhausting. But did he kill her?

The narrative tricks start abruptly on page 90, when the detective on the case receives a copy of David's novel-in-progress, and its first lines match the first lines of Mr Peanut. Then it turns out that one of the detectives is Sam Sheppard, the real-life doctor convicted then exonerated for murdering his wife.

I appreciate the main theme of the story, which is that marriages are fulfilling but hard. However, there are two things that consistently frustrated me about Mr Peanut:

• It's too long. At every level of organization (book, section, scene, paragraph), Ross includes extraneous material. Over 200 pages in the middle recounts Sam Sheppard's story; when a minor character goes golfing, we hear about nine holes; a fireworks show includes an explanation of how fireworks function. Call the editor!
  
  
• The female characters are universally inscrutable, demanding, and uncommunicative. Alice repeatedly tells David she won't say what he's doing wrong; Detective Haskell's wife retires to her bed for unspecified reasons; Marilyn Sheppard insists that Sam just not talk with her. There's a meta-narrative reason for this recurring attitude toward women, but I found it unpleasant and misogynistic.

Annie Dillard, The Abundance *** 1/2

The Abundance is a collection of pieces from Dillard's non-fiction works, covering the breadth of her career. I picked it up as a fan of Dillard's novel The Living.

Annie Dillard's prose is like poetry –– not in the sense of having a lyrical cadence or figurative language, but by having vivid, expressive images surrounded by abstruse metaphysical pondering. Dillard looks to achieve ecstatic states through deep attention to the everyday world. For example, she'll spend a page describing the spider web in a corner behind the toilet and the insect "corpses" in it, which leads to a story about a moth that flew into a candle and began to act as a wick.

Her close attention pays off in beautiful and distinctive images, not to mention that it encourages similar attention from me. However, a perplexing abstract idea is rarely far behind. A couple of examples:

• She awakes to find that her cat has walked across her and left her "covered with paw prints in blood; it looked as though I'd been painted with roses." She also says "my twisted summer sleep still hung about me like sea kelp." Nice, distinctive, concrete. Then: "What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain."
• She makes her leisurely way to an island in the middle of Tinker Creek, straddles a sycamore log, and settles in to read. "I'm drawn to this spot. I come to it as an oracle: I return to it as a man years later will seek out the battlefield where he lost a leg or an arm."

To quote Eudora Welty from her review of a Dillard book: "I honestly do not know what she is talking about."

Ultimately I'm willing to tolerate the abstraction to luxuriate in the lovely, relaxing, and though-provoking imagery. I may seek out Dillard's one other foray into fiction, The Maytrees.

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist ***

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a bit of a misnomer for this short novel in which a Pakistani man tells the tale of how he abandoned his successful life in America in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The title is misleading because the narrator has a political awakening, not a religious one. His awakening comes not from the 9/11 attacks themselves, or from the treatment of Muslims in their aftermath, but from the United States' policies in Pakistan and India.

The book presents a revealing portrait of an immigrant's complex feelings about being an American and a Pakistani. Two events stand out in particular. In the first, Changez is in the Philippines as part of an elite group of American financiers and sees a jeepney driver staring at him hostilely. Changez identifies with both his colleagues and the driver. In the second, a man compares Changez to a janissary who had been raised and trained in the conquering army and "fought to erase their own civilization, so they had nothing else to turn to."

There is a lot to like in The Reluctant Fundamentalist –– for example, the scene-setting in Lahore is strong –– but my enjoyment was tempered by two distracting gimmicks. 

• Changez narrates his story as a monologue with asides directed at the man he's speaking to ("I observe, sir, that you are watching me with a rather peculiar expression").  This format had me focusing on the theatrical artifice rather than the subtle themes of the story. 
• In the United States, Changez falls in love with Erica, a woman who obsesses about a former lover. Erica did not come across as a real person but as a symbolic plot device.