Chris Frantz, Remain in Love *** 1/2

Chris Frantz is the drummer for Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club. Remain in Love is his memoir and a valentine to his wife and bass partner Tina Weymouth. The first sentence of the Preface captures the tone of the book well:

I had the great fortune to not only be a founding member of one of the most unique and exciting rock bands of all time, but to do so alongside the love of my life, Tina Weymouth.

Frantz has a friendly, casual writing style, and favors light anecdotes about people he has met and liked. His stories sound very much like what you would hear if you met him at a dinner party or sat next to him on an airplane. If you told your raconteur friend, "You should write a book!", it might come out like Remain in Love.

He comes across as an affable fellow, with only positive things to say about everyone except for recurring bitter comments about David Byrne. He provides the same enthusiastic introductions for his high school friends as he does for Brian Eno or Lou Reed. He describes the hotels, theaters, bus rides, and dinners more than musical subjects, which contributes to the everyman vibe but frankly makes me wonder about his defensiveness regarding his talent. (He feels obliged to mention every time someone praises him or Tina.)

I wish Frantz had elaborated more about how the various members of Talking Heads contributed to its sound and about the dynamics within the band. Jerry Harrison's perspective was notably absent from Frantz's diatribes against David Byrne. Of course, that would make Remain in Love a different book altogether, a more traditional rock memoir. That more traditional memoir would also be more forthcoming about the darker shadings of Frantz' character, such as his drug problems.

Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle ***

I heard an interview with Whitehead on NPR during which he characterized Harlem Shuffle as a crime story from the point of view of a peripheral character, namely a part-time fence who owns a furniture story. I liked that idea. The interviewer also commented on its sense of place (Harlem in the early 1960s).

Whitehead splits the difference between a pulp thriller and a literary social novel, doing a passable job at each. The prose feels clunky every once in while, as if Whitehead is shoehorning in some color about, for example, the World's Fair.

The most effective aspects of the book happen in the margins. In the early going, we gradually learn about the mismatch between our hero's self-image as a solid citizen and his low-key support of local criminals. Ray Carney grew up in Harlem as the son of a crook, but on a couple of occasions he travels through town with another character and sees a different city hidden in plain sight.

Louise Glück, Poems 1962 - 2012 ****

I don't read much poetry. I'm unable to sustain the necessary concentrated attention. However, Louise Glück won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2020 and has a reputation for "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal" and for frank expressions of sadness and isolation. Sign me up!

I heard that Glück's style varies widely between books, so I purchased this collection rather than a more narrow slice of her work. It's true: each individual book has a distinctive feel, with recurring themes and images appearing in multiple poems.

Her early work didn't speak to me, and so I read it fairly superficially. But then suddenly, most of the poems about her family in the book Ararat engaged me, as did the nature poems of The Wild Iris. My interest tapered off during subsequent books, only to return again for the final book in this collection, A Village Life. 

Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness ***

Incompleteness is from the Great Discoveries series, in which a novelist undertakes to explain a great scientific discovery in literary terms without oversimplifying the technical details. In this case, Goldstein tackles Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

Very little of the book –– only about 20 pages –– actually attempts to explain the theorems. In fact, surprisingly little is about Gödel at all. Goldstein devotes significant time explaining the Vienna Circle, of which Gödel was a member despite apparently disagreeing with their very raison d'etre. As her chapter title puts it, Gödel was "A Platonist among the Positivists."

Goldstein's major thesis is that Gödel felt like an exile among his peers because (a) logical positivism came to dominate Anglo-European philosophy and (b) that dominant group managed to misinterpret his work so that it supported their point of view, which was anathema to him. She makes this case most effectively in the introduction while describing his unlikely friendship with Albert Einstein. In fact, I think you could get most of the value from this book by reading just the introduction.

Intellectually, the most interesting aspect of Incompleteness for me is its compelling argument for Platonism, for an objective realm of abstract things. "Einstein and Gödel's metaconvictions were addressed to the question of whether their respective fields are descriptions of an objective reality––existing independent of our thinking of it––or, rather, are subjective human projections, socially shared intellectual constructs." I personally believe this is a false dichotomy, that science is a subjectively projected organization that we use to understand an objective reality to which we have no access other than through our constructs (which I wouldn't characterize as "socially shared" or "intellectual").

I'm rating Incompleteness with one fewer stars than the first time I read it. During this reading, I felt indignant on Gödel's behalf about how much attention Goldstein paid to Wittgenstein and to formalism in mathematics. It short-changes the proofs themselves and limits Gödel's strange biography to a series of anecdotes in the epilogue.