Tyler Bridges, Five Laterals and a Trombone *** 1/2

I have a personal connection to "The Play," the wild ending to the 1982 Big Game referenced by this book's title. I was a Cal student at the time and I had money riding on the game through a bet with my brother. We were listening to the game on the radio outside of the shopping mall, and Jim confidently went back inside after Stanford scored their late field goal. I heard the mayhem of the final play on the radio, then excitedly rushed back inside to taunt my brother and collect on the bet.

That explains why my parents gave me Five Laterals and a Trombone for Christmas.

Despite the sensationalist title and the madcap climax, Five Laterals and a Trombone is a thoughtful piece of sports journalism. It covers quite a bit of ground in providing context for The Play: there are chapters about the Cal-Stanford rivalry (since 1892), the coaches, the Axe, the bands, the major players (especially John Elway), the season leading up to the Big Game, and of course the exciting game itself. It provides surprisingly clear, concise explanations of college football strategy for a book that builds to a desperate, completely improvised finish.

The author is a political journalist rather than a sports writer, but he nails the flat, merely serviceable prose of the genre. (His connection to the story is that he was a trombone player at Stanford who graduated the year before the game.) The narrative is disjointed because it pauses to provide background for the players and makes room for unusual perspectives such as the Memorial Stadium maintenance worker in position to collect the goal post pads at the end of the game.

Would the touchdown have counted in these days of replay review? Hard to say. To me the only question is whether the third recipient Dwight Garner was down before he tossed the ball, but we don't have the footage to know for sure.

Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance ****

A Clearing in the Distance is a biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, best remembered today as the designer of Central Park and Boston's Emerald Necklace but also known in his day as the author of a series of books about the antebellum South. The most notable thing is how varied his interests were and how long he lived before discovering his life's work. He doesn't start working in earnest as a landscape architect until he was 43, until page 269 of a 400-page book.

I feel myself becoming impatient with Olmsted. Why can't he just get on with it? We expect the lives of people -- especially people who achieve great things -- to follow a grand design... Following Olmsted's life is more like putting together a picture puzzle. All sorts of odd shapes are lying on the table... It's not yet clear how these fragments come together. Some pieces don't seem to fit anywhere.

As a young man, he took up scientific farming, journalism, health administration, mine management,  and social advocacy. He moved from area to area haphazardly; even his introduction to Central Park was the result of a chance meeting. One fortunate consequence of his wanderings is that it allows his biographer to comment on many different aspects of life in mid-19th century America as he puts the puzzle together. 

Rybczynski manages to suggest how many of the pieces fit together without seeming to promote an agenda. In particular, he shows how Olmsted's writing about the South relates to his landscape work as part of a larger vision of civilization. He is solicitous toward Olmsted, but the prickly parts of Olmsted's personality show through especially in his later years. I appreciated that he occasionally jumped forward to the present day to describe how some of Olmsted's works today compare to their original conception. 

I first read this book many years ago. I was thinking that I bought it from the gift shop at Olmsted's home and office in Brookline MA, but that's a confabulation. We visited Fairsted in 1992 while the book was copyrighted is 1999. I still think I bought it at one of Olmsted's places, but who knows.

Andrea Barrett, Servants of the Map **** 1/2

Andrea Barrett has a new story collection (Natural History), as I discovered while browsing at Barnes and Noble recently. I wasn't in the mood that day to buy a hardcover, but I was inspired to return to the book that introduced me to Barrett. I discovered Servants of the Map while browsing at Powell's many years ago, and it was unlike anything I'd read before.

The protagonists in Barrett's stories are scientists, often women and often from the 19th century, experiencing intellectual awakenings interwoven with emotional ones. I'd call her work "science fiction" if that term weren't already claimed. In a manner that seems unique to her, Barrett shows how thinking and feeling are inextricable, with curiosity and attraction reinforcing each other. The stories leave me with an optimistic focus on the wonders of life.

I was hooked immediately by the title story, which is about a young British surveyor in the Himalaya in 1863. He writes to his wife about his adventures and his loneliness while slowly recognizing his calling as an explorer.

Barrett likes to link her stories through shared characters. For example, the narrator of "Theories of Rain" has a long-lost brother who turns up as a major character in "Two Rivers." While these connections are mostly subtle, they occasionally interfere with the unity of the story. The final story, "The Cure," brings together characters from several other Barrett stories (in this book and others) and seems designed to provide fan-service updates about the characters rather than working as a standalone story.  

Brian Phillips, Impossible Owls ****

The essays in this collection cover familiar, even hackneyed, subjects (e.g. the Iditarod, Roswell, Route 66, the British royal family), but Phillips has a distinctive take on every one of them. He recognizes, for example, that the most compelling sports journalism addresses the experience of fans (cf. Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch, David Foster Wallace's pieces about tennis). His essay on the Iditarod is more about the loneliness of the Alaskan outback than the race; the most vivid section of the sumo wrestling piece is about the arena ("bottle openers attached to railings with string, so fans can open beer...seat cushions resting on elevated platforms, so fans can slide their shoes underneath"). Similarly, the essay about visiting an Indian tiger preserve captures the mundane details of the rest stops alongside the wonder of the wildlife.

Phillips varies his writing style to suit his subjects. The essay about Queen Elizabeth begins with a lovely poetic vision of London in the late summer.

Every essay in the collection includes an owl, usually it's as tangential as a pair of stone owls at the top of a staircase. I only noticed the glancing references because of the book title. Do they mean something? And what makes them impossible?

Jussi Adler-Olsen, The Keeper of Lost Causes ***

The Keeper of Lost Causes is the first book in a series of Danish detective novels featuring Carl Mørck and "Department Q," which handles cold cases. You can tell it's the first book in a series by the number of peripheral characters who are introduced but don't really impact the story, such as Carl's ex-wife and his lodger.

The police investigation and the character development are well-executed. Our hero is cantankerous without becoming too eccentric. The author skirts but avoids the many pitfalls of detective novels, resisting the urge to make Carl a genius or the criminal a mastermind, not giving characters long speeches of exposition, and keeping separate investigations separate instead of revealing that they all tie together. The only trope Adler-Olsen does indulge in is describing all female characters in terms of how attractive they are.

...Until around page 300 (of 395) when the perpetrator is revealed and he explains his motives and methods in the manner of movie villains everywhere. And what a plot it is! He's not content to kill his victim but has to implement an implausibly elaborate scheme to punish her. It involves a pressure chamber, not because that makes any sense but because it provides a creative method of murder. The bad guy also declines to shoot our hero before demanding an explanation of how the detective found him. 

Colm Tóibín, Homage to Barcelona ** 1/2

One final souvenir from our trip to Spain, purchased in Barcelona at the Llibreria Anglesa. The Irish author Tóibín lived in Barcelona at the end of the Franco years, and Homage to Barcelona promised a portrait of the city emerging from dictatorship.

I was expecting the novelist Tóibín to provide insights into the unique spirit of Barcelona and the distinctive style of the artists who lived there (Gaudí, Picasso, Miró, Dalí). What distinguishes Barcelona from other cities? I hoped Tóibín would identify subtle attitudes that would elucidate aspects of our personal experience there.

Instead the book is largely a stick-to-the-facts summary of 20th-century Catalon history, devoid of a personalized perspective. The Modernisme style incorporates Gothic elements; art is inextricably tied to Catalan nationalism; Spaniards don't like to talk about the Civil War –– yeah, yeah, tell me something I don't know from Rick Steves.

I learned that Picasso painted his "blue period" works just off La Rambla, but this information doesn't enhance my appreciation of his work or the location. Tóibín mentions that Picasso and Federico Garcia Lorca were both from Andalusia rather than Catalonia, but he declines to explain the significance of the regional differences (even though Lorca gave a talk on the very subject!).

Felipe Romero, The Second Son of the Silk Merchant ***

One way in which I attempt to prolong the glow of an overseas vacation is to read their local literature. During our trip to Spain, I picked up The Second Son of the Silk Merchant, a novel that takes place in Granada just after the Catholic conquest. Much of the working class population is still Muslim, known as Moriscos. Church builders discover a collection of manuscripts purportedly from the early centuries A.D.  indicating that the local population was Arabic-speaking Christians (true story). The books enhance the status of Granada until they are exposed as forgeries and inspire the Inquisition to deport all Muslims from Spain.

The author takes great pains to describe life in Granada at the turn of the 17th century. Unfortunately, the narrator sounds like he's reciting lightly narrativized dialogue from a museum exhibit.

In this Venice my father lived from the age of nineteen until forty. There was where all the wealth of the world flowed, where everything from black pepper, cinnamon, ginger, blue and red French and Catalan wool, velvet and Damask brocade, lace from Bruges, muslin from Monsul, gauze from Gaza, Brazil wood, cedar from Lebanon, cloth from Flanders to emeralds from the New World, diamonds from Africa and pearls from the Asiatic seas were hoarded. ... All this wealth flowed from the seven maritime routes, seven maritime routes that served many enormous, robust merchant galleys...

The story proper doesn't start until page 75, and it's soon interrupted by an idyll in the Andalusian countryside. The narrator Alonso Lomellino is an extremely passive character who drifts through the religious life his father chose for him, eventually becoming a mystic.

So: a vivid but largely static picture of 17th-century Granada which squanders a fascinating real-life controversy and underplays the tragedy of the expulsion of the Muslims. 

Dosde (publisher), Various Spanish souvenir books ****

Shopping in tourist shops during our trip to Spain, I found that the best options for souvenir books always seemed to come from the publisher Dosde. They had the best pictures and the most appropriate level of detail in their explanations. I ended up buying and reading three: Tilework in the Alhambra, The Alhambra of Granada, and Modernisme. I also tried to buy The Royal Alcazar of Seville, but the English edition was out of stock. The books aren't perfect –– the callouts don't always match the illustration and they tend to just drift off near the end –– but they provide me with what I need as a tourist.

I sometimes wish I were the kind of person who wants scholarly books like Reading the Alhambra, but really I just want the pretty pictures.

Javier Marías, A Heart So White ***

For our long-delayed trip to Spain, I chose a novel by Spain's (internationally) most famous contemporary writer. I should have known that a Marías novel was not going to supply any kind of local color to the trip: his plots and digressions deal in universal themes.

A Heart So White is similar in many ways to Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me: a Shakespearean title, a loquacious unreliable narrator, deaths at the beginning and end, long tangents on thematically related but narratively separate subjects. 

I would characterize the book's style as being like a jazz tune. It starts with a pair of impressive episodes that set the melody. The narrator then starts telling other stories that elaborate on some of the themes in those early melodies, riffing on them until the connection seems tenuous. At the end, all the elements come back together to restate the melody more fully. The book also uses a strategy I associate with David Lynch films: when the resolution of a narrative mystery seems imminent, the narrator defers the satisfaction of that resolution by shifting to another thread in the story.

I didn't enjoy A Heart So White as much as I did Tomorrow in the Battle. The beginning and the end are both awesome, but I struggled to care through much of the middle.

Kristen Roupenian, Cat Person and Other Stories ***

The story "Cat Person" was a viral sensation when it appeared in The New Yorker back in 2017. It's the story of a tentative courtship that leads to a bad date or worse depending on your interpretation. The fact that it was published at the height of the #MeToo movement in a magazine whose readership skews older than the protagonists probably accounts for the controversy it engendered.

Most of Roupenian's stories deal with the constant shifting of power in relationships, especially in the early stages where each person is unsure about how to interpret the others' actions and insecure about what they want. She captures this dance beautifully, but I often found the narrative uninteresting. 

My favorite story was "The Matchbox Sign" with its portrayal of a married couple dealing with the wife's unexplained illness.

Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary *** 1/2

Did you like The Martian? If so, then you'll like Project Hail Mary. It has the same nerdy smart-ass narrative voice, the same lone-guy-solving-science-problems plot, and the same concern for accurate hard sci-fi. I really think Weir should have made Project Hail Mary the second book in a series: The Martian's astronaut Mark Watney would make more sense in every way than the junior high-school teacher Ryland Grace.

The scientific challenge is far more consequential than the one in The Martian. The fate of all humanity is at stake. An alien organism is gobbling up energy from the Sun. An international research mission heads to the nearest star that appears to have evaded the organism. Only our intrepid narrator survives the trip, and he is just recovering his memory of the mission's purpose when he encounters an alien spaceship apparently on a similar expedition.

There are three major storylines:

• Research into the existence and properties of the alien organism Astrophage, with the goal of finding a "cure" to eliminate it from our solar system
• Learning to communicate and collaborate with the other intelligent alien species
• Designing the spaceship and planning the mission

I've listed the storylines in order of plausibility, or perhaps I should say ease of suspending disbelief. The success rate for Grace's jerry-rigged experiments is too high, and I felt that he ignored the Astrophage problem for too long while learning to communicate with the alien, but these nits didn't undermine my enjoyment of the story. On the other hand, the flashbacks to mission planning on Earth are entirely unbelievable, starting with the teacher being given a central role in the project over literally every other scientist and astronaut in the world. Project Hail Mary would be far better if Weir found a more realistic way to convey the necessary backstory.

Rachel Aviv, Strangers to Ourselves ***

Strangers to Ourselves presents five case studies of people struggling to cope with mental illness. Aviv is most interested in how people's understanding of their condition affects their sense of identity and the course of their lives. How is your experience different if you attribute your distress to a chemical imbalance versus a spiritual crisis?

The stories identify various potential sources of mental anguish, such as repressed trauma, chemical imbalance, societal pressures, or religious experiences, and shows how they offer at best a partial "explanation" of the person's behavior. However, individuals typically latch on to one or another of these factors to incorporate into their personal identity, and their choice impacts the type of treatment they receive. For example, Naomi comes to believe that "the ruling elite" were targeting undesirable elements of society such as her and her (Black) children, and since racist elements do in fact exist, doctors initially diagnosed her as righteously angry rather than paranoid and psychotic.

The topic is fascinating and important, and Aviv clearly empathizes with her subjects. However, her journalistic writing style is at odds with her desire to present people's experience with mental illness from the inside. She describes her subjects' behavior and reasoning in a flat "just the facts" manner and seems reluctant to make explicit conclusions (perhaps because explicit diagnoses are what cause problems in the case studies). I would have appreciated a more imaginative account of each person's "reasoning" coupled with a more forceful set of arguments for a phenomenological approach to what William James calls the "unclassified residuum" of their experience.

Patrick McCabe, Poguemahone ** 1/2

A 600-page novel in verse by an author known for his intense stories about the Irish underclass. Poguemahone is about a pair of Irish siblings living in a London squat in the 1970s, along with the colorful (and haunted) characters surrounding them.

It's an entertaining enough story, but it is not enhanced by the poetic form. Most of the content is straightforwardly narrative and would work better as prose.

The Guardian pull-quote on the cover compares Poguemahone to Ulysses, presumably because McCabe is an Irish author experimenting with the form of a novel, but a better comparison is Fight Club, which may constitute a spoiler. 

Lewis Menand, The Free World *** 1/2

The subtitle of The Free World is "Art and Thought in the Cold War." The preface suggests a book similar to Postwar but for cultural changes rather than political ones, and therefore centered in the United States rather than Europe. 

This book is about a time when the United States was actively engaged with the rest of the world... the twenty years after the end of the Second World War. ... This is not a book about the "cultural Cold War" (the use of cultural diplomacy as an instrument of foreign policy), and it is not a book about "Cold War culture" (art and ideas as reflections of Cold War ideology and conditions). It is about an exceptionally rapid and exciting period of cultural change...

This description is misleading. First of all, most of the postwar cultural changes got started in the period between the wars, so it feels like the book covers most of the 20th century. Secondly, very few of the changes came about because of the geopolitical situation: American "active engagement" with the rest of the world was not due to the Cold War but more due to the European refugees who came here during the Second World War.

The Free World is filled with unique perspectives on familiar and unfamiliar stories, but comes across as a hodgepodge. It takes effort from the reader to discern the through-line for the subjects covered in each chapter. As Adam Gopnik said in his review, "the reader can never anticipate, beginning a chapter, where it will go."

For example, Chapter 7, "The Human Science," starts with the short section about how "the Cold War and decolonization were coterminous. They are the duck-or-rabbit of postwar world history." The next section covers Claude Lévi-Strauss and the development of structuralism, followed by an account of the Museum of Modern Art's blockbuster photography exhibition The Family of Man (1955), which seques into an introduction of the post-structuralist critic Roland Barthes.

The most prominent theme in Menand's account is the increased insularity of art and ideas. Structuralism interprets human behavior based on contrasts within a conceptual system; existentialism rejects the idea of objective essences; abstract art highlights the possibilities of the medium rather than attempting to connect to the external world; New Criticism and Deconstruction see works of literature as self-contained, self-referential aesthetic objects. At least this is a theme I found -- Menand doesn't explicitly make the connection.

The Free World is a type of book that frustrates me. It contains many insights that I'm likely to absorb into my worldview (e.g. "The purpose of a magazine's editorial content is the same as the purpose of a television show's entertainment content: it is to pick out a demographic for advertisers"), but I'll never be able to find them due to Menand's discursive style.

Iris Murdoch, The Bell ****

A small community of lay people live at an English estate just outside the gates of an abbey of cloistered nuns. A young wife and a matriculating college student visit at an exciting time: the abbey will soon get a new bell, to replace the medieval one that was lost long ago under legendary circumstances. The young visitors stir up turmoil within the apparently tranquil community.

The Bell would be an excellent novel to read in a college English class. It takes place over a short period of time, almost entirely on the grounds of Imber Estate, with a small cast of characters. Its themes and symbols are very near the surface, ripe for discussion. There's the bell, of course, but also birds (starting with one that Dora rescues from the floor of the train) and the literal boundary between the spiritual realm and the secular world (a building in the abbey wall in which one half of each room is outside and the other half inside of the enclosure, with a grille and gauze screen between).

The first chapter, with Dora's train ride to Imber, could stand on its own as a short story while also introducing one of the key conflicts. I loved the descriptions of the Estate and its grounds, except for a few too many "rights" and "lefts"; the setting was peaceful and clearly drawn. Only a few of the characters got proper development, though.

The Bell is the first Iris Murdoch book I've read. It's an early one: her fourth novel. Its story of people in a self-satisfied community struggling with their desires reminded me vaguely of John Updike with a British gloss.

George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain ****

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a textbook of sorts for a college writing workshop. It includes seven stories from 19th-century Russian authors (three Chekhov, two Tolstoy, one each from Turgenev and Gogol), each followed by discussion notes and associated writing exercises. It strikes a perfect balance between literary criticism and writing advice.

Saunders advocates a bottom-up approach to writing, focusing on the details of the language and on individual moments rather than coming to the task with a predefined structure or point to make.

We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he wanted to express, and then he just, you know, expressed it. That is, we buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same.
The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and beautiful and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully.

The very helpful exercises involve constant revision and attention, with the style and characters and themes emerging through the process. Saunders admits at one point that the "moment of supposed triumph [when he discovered his authorial voice] was also sad" because it wasn't like the voices he'd set out to emulate from the masters. In his analysis of the stories, he often imagines the author ending up with a different, fuller story than the one he started to write.

The seven classic stories are... fine. I have to admit that most of them don't speak to me as deeply as they speak to Saunders. He draws many excellent general lessons from his close readings, but I was less than fully engaged with the details.

The one story that did captivate me was Chekhov's "Gooseberries," which just happens to be the story to which the book title refers. Its richness, complexity, and ambiguity landed with me in a way the others didn't. Is it moral to be happy when your happiness depends on others' misfortune?

Saunders suggests that when we read stories –– or even an instructional book like this one ––we pretend to accept the position and views of the author "to see if there might be something in it." At the end, the reader or student "snaps out of it, disavows the [author/]teacher's view, which is starting to feel like a set of bad-fitting clothes anyway, and goes back to her own way of thinking." This view sounds quite similar to my long-proclaimed penchant for "trying on" different worldviews, which like Saunders I consider to be a moral exercise.

Steven Millhauser, Voices in the Night ***

Steven Millhauser has a unique writing style that seamlessly combines traditional realist prose with mildly fantastical premises. He is particularly good at describing small-town American life and how people react to slightly absurd situations such as the discovery of a dead mermaid or the appearance of benign phantoms. Many of the stories in this collection share a common theme: mysterious intimations of something supernatural provoke the residents of a town to ponder the meaning of their lives.

In "Miracle Polish," a man buys a bottle of mirror polish (from a strange door-to-door salesman, of course) that makes his reflection look like "a man who believed in things." In "Phantoms," people occasionally see apparitions who "are not easy to distinguish from ordinary citizens" and look at them before quietly and swiftly withdrawing. "The Place" is a hillside outside of town where people just feel free from the normal pressures of their lives.

I am very fond of the tone and atmosphere of Millhauser's stories –– I've also read We Others, Martin Dressler, and Little Kingdoms –– but they often lack a satisfying conclusion. The stories in the back half of Voices in the Night are rather vague in their details ("it was like an empty room you could put things in") or feel purposeless. 

Gtretchen McCulloch, Because Internet *** 1/2

Gretchen McCulloch is an "internet linguist," which means a linguist who analyzes language on the Internet. The most important purpose of Because Internet is to persuade a general audience that the English language used on Twitter and in text messages is just as rules-bound and complex as any other form of the language. This is a common theme in popular linguistics books, arguing against those who lament the inexorable decline of standards.

I expected the book to primarily discuss semantic and grammatical changes, such as the one illustrated by the title. (In 2014 Childish Gambino released an album called Because the Internet, which already sounded strange to us old folks; six years later we've also lost the!) McCulloch does cover a few of these changes –– for example, LOL starts as an initialism for the IRL action and ends as a conversational softener –– but she spends more time showing how texting practices are creative solutions to the problem of capturing tone of voice and gestures in textual conversations. The Internet has exploded the number of contexts in which we practice informal writing, and we need ways to enhance the social bonding functions of language in those contexts.

In an early chapter McCulloch presents a taxonomy of "internet people" based on when and why they engaged with in Internet. Old Internet People, for example, came online during the period of BBSs and hand-typed URLs; their culture and language practices assume that their cohort have technical proficiencies that Post Internet People likely don't have. The most significant generation gap is "about whether you dismiss the expressive capacity of informal writing or whether you assume it." Personally, I came online near the end of the Old Internet People period, as exemplified by the fact that I occasionally use faux XML tags (</sarcasm>) and capitalize the word Internet.

I appreciated the focus on communicative intent, enjoyed most of the stories, and was persuaded by most of the author's analyses. However, I did find myself wishing that the argumentation was a bit more structured. I thought the chapter on memes was the weakest one, despite the fact that it was apparently based on prior work.

James Morrow, Reality by Other Means **

Reality by Other Means is a short-story collection from the ... sci-fi? fantasy? philosophical? satirical? ... author James Morrow. I picked it up as a pure bookstore impulse buy, based on the inner flap's characterization of the contents as "fictive thought experiments" and the author as worthy of a special issue of the academic journal Studies in World Literary Genres –– an honor bestowed on just one other writer, Ursula K. Le Guin.

When done well, science fiction and satire are both excellent vehicles for providing new perspectives on abstract ideas. When done poorly, though, they can feel like embarrassing attempts to be clever. Morrow sets out to emulate Kurt Vonnegut, with absurd premises illuminating serious ideas, but ends up sounding like a smug college sophomore.

Exhibit 1: In "The War of the Worldviews," the diminutive inhabitants of two Martian moons fight each other in New York City. The casus belli is a philosophical dispute between idealism and realism; the narrator and three mental asylum inmates resolve the conflict by making a convincing argument for one side (chosen by a coin flip).

The title is unimaginative. There is no reason for the battle to be on Earth, and no explanation for how the mental patients understand the aliens' worldviews. The theme and the action have no relationship to each other: the aliens' behavior is not influenced by their philosophy; the plot doesn't hinge on the ideas. We don't learn anything about idealism or realism or hear anything about human conflicts (such as the Crusades) fought for similarly abstract ideals.

Exhibit 2, sampling Morrow's 'humor': "Arms and the Woman" recounts the Trojan War from Helen's point of view. Before taking her to bed, Paris slips on "a sheep-gut condom, the brand with the plumed and helmeted soldier on the box". Later he complains about her aging and suggests that with a combination of ox blood and river silt she can "dye your silver hairs back to auburn. A Grecian formula."

Sally Mann, Hold Still **** 1/2

I was not familiar with the photographer Sally Mann or her work before I picked up this "Memoir with Photographs" from a featured book table at Powell's Books. I was attracted by the way she used photos in the text, commenting on them directly rather than just using them as illustrations. For example, she talks  about (and illustrates) how as a little girl she insisted on running around naked until one day her mother told her she had to wear clothes if she wanted to hang out with the carpenters building a cabin on their property; turn the page and there's a photograph of young Sally with the carpenters, wearing just a pair of underpants.

Mann covers a lot of ground: biographical stories from both sides of her family, descriptions of her working methods, consideration of the complicated legacy of the South, rumination on the meaning of art. Her writing style is conversational, with unpredictable and seemingly casual transitions between subject. Her tone is calmly rational even when discussing lurid or charged subjects such as murder-suicide, the exploitation of photographic models, racial relations, escaped convicts, and decomposition.

I loved the chapter where she described her quest to capture an image of her son Emmett in the river that runs through their property. She wanted to "exorcise the trauma" of a recent accident that had nearly killed him. She tried several approaches before coming to the river. She saw something she liked in each of the first three pictures she took, then started in pursuit of a picture that combined all of those virtues. They spent hours there, with Emmett getting colder and colder. The chapter covers her artistic motivation, her aesthetic search, her tenacious process, and the questionable demands she put on her model (and child).

I was also impressed with the forthright way she addresses the "contradictions" of the South: "the gracious splendor of its lost world founded on a monstrous crime... elucidated in an accent and vernacular that are lyrical like no other." 

Down here, you can't throw a dead cat without hitting an older, well-off white person raised by a black woman, and every damn one of them will earnestly insist that a reciprocal and equal form of love was exchanged between them. ... I am one of those. ... Only now am I wondering about these things. How did she get something as simple as her groceries? She had no car; she worked for us six days a week from eight in the morning to eight at night and her house was on top of grocery-less Diamond Hill. ... What were any of us thinking? Why did we never ask the questions? That's the mystery of it––our blindness and our silence.

The penultimate chapter is the astonishing story of the University of Tennessee's Anthropology Research Facility, popularly known as the Body Farm. They lay donated bodies on the property and study how they decompose. It's an interesting subject that also sheds light on Mann's unusual preoccupation with death (inherited from her father).

Larry Niven, Ringworld ***

Ringworld is a hard sci-fi classic from 1970. Aliens known as Pierson's puppeteers discover an immense circular ribbon world and send a four-person cross-species team to investigate it. They end up crash-landing on Ringworld and need to explore it to figure out a way to get back home. It's world-building at its most basic and literal, similar to another book about exploring an object of unknown provenance, Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama.

The story is constructed purely as a scaffolding for imagining how the artificial world would work. The adventure is exciting enough but plays second fiddle to conversations about Klemperer rosettes and hyperdrives. The characters, too, are little more than mouthpieces for scientific theorizing. Each individual, alien or human, gets a single defining trait (Louis is curious, Nessus is cowardly, Speaker is aggressive, Teela is lucky) that completely determines their actions.

The lack of fleshed-out characters is one way you can tell that Ringworld is a genre book from 1970. Another sign of the times is that a motivating concern for the intergalactic action of multiple alien species is overpopulation.

Scott Weidensaul, A World on the Wing **** 1/2

I expected this book about "The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds" to focus primarily on the mysteries of avian navigation, something like We, The Navigators but for birds. However, it takes a far more expansive look at avian biology and ecology.

The author does a beautiful job of balancing between travelogue, science, and advocacy. He provides lovely natural descriptions of his birding expeditions:

The world was precisely equal halves of gray, divided by the flat line of the horizon––the smoky silver of an overcast sky, unmarked and smooth, and the darker, mottled granite and charcoal of a mudflat that stretched to every side, paper-thin sheets of water lying on its surface reflecting the clouds or ruffled by the breeze.

Clear explanations of biological marvels:

Migratory birds can grow and jettison their internal organs on an as-needed basis, bolster their flight performance by juicing on naturally occurring performance-enhancing drugs, and enjoy perfect health despite seasonally exhibiting all the signs of morbid obesity, diabetes, and looming heart disease. A migrating bird can put alternating halves of its brain to sleep while flying for days, weeks, or even months on end ... get[ting] mentally sharper under such conditions.

And practical illustrations of environmental activism:

Land managers knew that some ag[riculture] lands, like rice fields, can provide good habitat for waterbirds, provided they're flooded at the right time and to the proper depth. Looking at eBird data, they also realized that many migrants were only using the Central Valley for a few weeks... Farmers would be paid to keep a few inches of water in their fields in late summer and early autumn, when shorebirds are migrating south through the region.

I appreciated how the book showed interconnections between elements of the ecosystem, such as the so-called "carry-over effects" of conditions in the wintering grounds onto breeding season. Spring is coming earlier in the Arctic but celestial cues in the tropics are unchanged, resulting in birds arriving too late for the caterpillar boom; the fragmentation of forests results in more "edges" and therefore more predators like raccoons, skunks, and crows. I also appreciated that Weidensaul includes success stories to ameliorate the hopelessness of many works of conservational activism.

George Eliot, Middlemarch ****

 Middlemarch is the epitome of what Henry James called a "large, loose, baggy monster": a 900-page 19th-century novel with an expansive number of characters and storylines. I first read it in college at the suggestion of my English professor, who said it was the finest novel of the period. Her recommendation overrode my prejudice against George Eliot, who had annoyed me with the melodramatic ending to The Mill on the Floss, which in my opinion shirked the writer's duty to resolve the central conflicts of the story. 

I re-read Middlemarch now because I found myself telling people that my post-retirement project would be a "Key to All Mythologies," which is a self-deprecating reference to the never-completed work of the ineffectual Mr Casaubon. The fact that no one catches the reference makes it a perfect reflection of Casaubon's work.

The book is too long, with too many subplots unfolding at too leisurely a pace to sustain any narrative drive. Individual scenes, though, are deeply felt and intelligently portrayed. Eliot captures the complexity of interpersonal interactions with great subtlety: characters don't have simple misunderstandings, they interpret each others' actions based on divergent worldviews. The novel is very well constructed, with themes and plot points echoing across storylines: frustrated idealists, questionable marriages, controversial wills, unjust suppositions, mistrusted outsiders, unexpected windfalls.

The prose style is dense in the 19th-century fashion, but with a quotable phrase every fourth or fifth sentence. I feel like Middlemarch has apt quotes most any situation; I wish I had some way to find the appropriate bon mots amidst the wealth of detail!

Of course, men know best about everything, except what women know bettter.

Severity is all very well, but it's a good deal easier when you've got someone to do it for you.

I don't always agree with Henry James (preferring his brother William), but his review of Middlemarch  seems spot on.

Middlemarch is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole. ... [Eliot's] novel is a picture -- vast, swarming, deep-colored, crowded with episodes, with vivid images, with lurking master-strokes, with brilliant passages of expression ... [Dorothea's disappointment] is analyzed with extraordinary penetration, but one may say of it, as of most of the situations in the book, that it is treated with too much refinement and too little breadth. It revolves too constantly on the same pivot.

Benn Steil, The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War *** 1/2

After reading Postwar, I wanted to know more about the Marshall Plan, the apparently innovative and uniquely successful approach to European economic recovery. How did it work exactly; for example, what's the deal with counterpart funds? How was the plan developed? Which aspects of its approach were specific to the post-war situation and which could apply today?

As its subtitle makes clear, The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War spends more of its 400 pages on the realpolitik that shaped the plan than on its macroeconomic details. In Steil's telling, the Marshall Plan was the part of Allied postwar strategy that motivated most of Stalin's actions, such as the takeover of Czechoslovakia and the Berlin blockade. The book describes in exhaustive/exhausting detail the politics between the Allies and within the United States. (The chapter about Congressional debate on the Plan is titled "Sausage" :-). The namesake George Marshall plays a surprisingly small role in the drama.

From an economic point of view, the book captures well the fundamental goals of the Plan –– "the speediest possible reactivation of the European economic machine" by "affording them the space to liberalize and integrate their economies –– and the disputed principles behind its implementation, but I wanted more implementation details. There is one measly paragraph about counterpart funds. In fact, the book skips (Reservoir Dogs-style) past implementation of the Plan straight to a retrospective chapter about its "Success?". It ends with a prescient chapter about Russia's views on NATO expansion, proving that its subject is America's whole Cold War containment strategy and not just the Marshall Plan.

The writing style splits the difference between a popular history and an academic treatise. The prologue plunges straight into names-and-dates prose that presumes you're familiar with the background. (Maybe Steil assumes you've read his previous book about the Bretton Woods conference?) The copious footnotes provide literature references and not much else.

Willy Vlautin, The Night Always Comes ****

A selection from the "Local Authors" rack at Powell's Books. Publisher's Weekly called it "a brilliant synthesis of Raymond Carver and Jim Thompson," which means that it combines the character work of dirty realism with the action of noir fiction. This review captures the mood of the novel better than the back-cover summary which suggests it's about the gentrification of Portland. Housing costs are the MacGuffin that set the plot in motion, but the book is really about overcome past mistakes.

Lynette is working three jobs while caring for her developmentally disabled brother. She has saved enough money for the down payment on the rundown house they've been renting, but at the last minute her mother backs out on getting a loan for the rest. Lynette spends a long, increasingly dangerous night trying to collect all the money she can.

For the most part, the story hews to the conventions of paperback thrillers, as does Vlautin's unadorned writing style. What I appreciated, though, was that the characters' motivations were believable and somewhat sophisticated, unlike the windup toys featured in most thrillers. And despite the dark milieu, there's an underlying hopefulness. Lynette's mother gives a compelling speech about how you have to "just look out for yourself and screw everyone else"... but she does it while tenderly tending to her daughter's injured back.

Jay Parini, Borges and Me *** 1/2

I encountered Borges and Me in the Biography section of Mrs Dalloway's in Berkeley. It purports to be a true story of a week the author spent driving Jorge Luis Borges around the Scottish Highlands in 1970. Ian McEwan provides a rave on the inside cover, calling it "luminous with love of literature and landscape."

Parini's tale is pleasant and enjoyable, though the signs that it might not be strictly factual arrive early. The young Jay is unfamiliar with Borges' work but their trip starts with visits to libraries and labyrinths as Borges practically quotes his greatest hits. The descriptions of Scotland are lovely, and Borges comes across as an intriguing (if somewhat literary) character. 

Hernan Diaz, Trust ***

Like Diaz' first novel In the Distance, Trust uses the form and tropes of a traditional genre (in this case, the Gilded Age romance) in a way that simultaneously questions those tropes. The modernist trappings are more overt in Trust with its four unreliable narrators and overt concern about the slipperiness of the truth, and the result is less engaging.

The book consists of four parts: a bestselling novel about a 1920s tycoon and his wife; a draft of the autobiography of the real-life inspiration for the tycoon; a memoir from the tycoon's ghostwriter; and unpublished papers from the tycoon's wife. Each part complicates what we think we know from the previous parts.

My problems with Trust all flow from the initial novel-within-the-novel. It lacks the depth that would make it a believable bestseller, and it's not lurid enough to motivate the vindictiveness of the real-life tycoon. The wife dies in a Swiss sanatorium, but her character is presented sympathetically. Nor does the tycoon come off (to me at least) as evil or incompetent. In fact, I appreciated how the novel captured both characters' love of solitude and their strategies for protecting their privacy ("privacy requires a public facade").

The autobiographical section creates a compelling voice for the tycoon. He confidently states that his personal interests always aligned with the well-being of the country and that his success benefited everyone. On the other hand, it purposely paints an anodyne picture of his wife.

The third section cops to a problem that applies to the whole book:

My strokes were too broad and the stories lacked those little details... often used to bribe readers into believing that what they are reading is true.

This admission applies to the autobiography, which purports to be an early draft, but the most egregious example of missing detail comes from the novel-within-a-novel. As a symptom of the wife's mental illness, she engages in delusional monologues:

She could not stop talking because she could not stop trying to explain her illness––and her desire to understand her illness was, to a large extent, the illness itself. If [the doctor] listened and taught her to listen, they would find that her never-ending rant was full of ciphered instructions.

Sample dialogue please! 

The final section is a diary from the dying wife. Its revelations are unsurprising: People underestimated the woman. It answers some plot mysteries, but frankly I never cared about those mysteries.

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind *** 1/2

I expected The Life of the Mind to present Arendt's late-in-life wisdom about the value of a contemplative life. However, it is a more traditional philosophical treatise on the nature of the human mind and the metaphysical conundrums that arise from it.

Arendt says that the mind comprises three distinct activities, each with its own ego: thinking, willing, and judging. She makes a distinction between thinking, which involves reasoning about abstract concepts, and cognition, which integrates data from our senses and performs "common sense" reasoning about the world of appearances. Cognition is concerned with truth and with knowing, while thinking is concerned with meaning. The book is divided in two, the first part about Thinking and the second about Willing; Arendt died before tackling the third part, Judging.

Arendt takes a traditional approach to philosophy in The Life of the Mind, by which I mean she reflects on her subject in a discursive manner and doesn't pretend to have answers. ("I hope that no reader expects a conclusive summary" [p 197]). I was especially struck by two insights:

• Thinkers throughout the ages have distinguished between the world of (mere) appearance and the world of (true) Being, and philosophical tradition has consistently considered Being as metaphysically prior or supreme. For example, we consider natural laws to be true and the behavior of the world to be an epiphenomenon. "Could it not be that appearances are not there for the sake of the life process but, on the contrary, that the life process is there for the sake of appearances?" The world of appearances is much richer, and is not changed by new discoveries in the world of Being.
  
  I find the idea of flipping the metaphysical hierarchy quite stimulating.
  
  
• Socrates did not offer a particular philosophy. His method was to ask questions that "problematized" people's understanding of everyday assumptions, with the goal of making people as perplexed as he was. Arendt's discussion of Socrates made me want to track down her source, The Philosophy of Socrates, edited by Gregory Vlastos. Actually, I was intrigued by her entire chapter on "Pre-philosophic assumptions of Greek philosophy," especially the idea that the purpose of life was to put on a good show for the gods. (Notice that this idea favors the world of appearances over any sort of inner life.)

I found the "Thinking" section of the book far more stimulating. Frankly, I found the "Willing" section to be a slog. It features far less original thought from Arendt; just looking at the table of contents you can see that nearly every chapter summarizes another philosopher. Furthermore, the subject area is rife with impenetrable terminology: "Note the difference between the sheer isness of beings and the Being of isness itself, the Being of Being."

The edition I read includes a "postface" from the editor, Mary McCarthy. It includes enjoyable tidbits about the difficulty of editing a work of this complexity.

Irene Solà, When I Sing, Mountains Dance ***

Irene Solà is a Catalan poet and writer. When I Sing, Mountains Dance is a novel that takes place near a village high in the Pyrenees, with chapters narrated by storm clouds, mushrooms, ghosts, villagers, and visitors. To the extent that it has a story, it concerns the family of a farmer named Domènec who is killed by lightning in the first chapter.

As advertised on the cover, Solà's prose "emits light, hope, and vitality" even in translation. It celebrates the richness of life even when it's recounting a hunting accident or a tragedy from the Spanish Civil War. The best chapters use this bounty to deepen the emotion of an incident, such as Domènec's tragic demise (told from the lightning's point of view), the grief of his widow Sió, or the peevishness of a hiker who finds the town closed for a funeral. However, many chapters feel aimless, with little insight coming from its unusual perspective. The literal poetry in the one chapter narrated by a poet is rather pedestrian (perhaps the fault of the translation?)

In short, Solà has impressive technique, but it's not in service of much depth. The chapters I mentioned above show what's possible when she combines style and substance.

Benjamin M. Friedman, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism *** 1/2

The central argument of this book is that our ideas about economics and economic policy have long-standing roots in religious thinking. ... The influence of religious thinking bears on how Americans today, along with citizens of other Western countries, think about many of the most highly contested economic policies of our time.

This statement of purpose from the introduction misrepresents the book. The book spends far more time providing a detailed history of (American) Protestant thought on the subject of human agency and destiny than it does on economic theory. It addressed the supposed influence on Americans today only in the last chapter, 29 pages out of 415. Most critically, though, Friedman fails to make the case that religious thinking exerted a decisive influence on economic thinking.

To be sure, most educated people in Adam Smith's time (the mid-eighteenth century) were clergymen, and there was no separation or antagonism between religion and science, seen as a way to "learn about aspects of the divine by studying the world God had created." Debates about predestination and the depravity of man were raging at the same time as Smith's explanation of markets, but rather than direct influence I see two areas of thought reacting to the Enlightenment's law-governed, human-centered Weltanschauung.

Friedman frequently notes how both religious and economic thought in America were influenced by its unique circumstances (a surfeit of land, no pre-established institutions, expanded economic opportunities, confident optimism). Again, I interpret the history as parallel responses to prior conditions. Friedman sometimes seems to agree:

The changes in the conduct of religious life in America were therefore of a piece with the democratic consequences of the Revolution... In one area of the nation's life after another... the authority of established elites eroded while new groups lacking professional training and credentials gained sway.

Luckily, I was interested in the religious history for its own sake. It was interesting to note the correlation between social pessimism and religious fatalism. One doctrine I was pleased to learn about was how our differing circumstances are a blessing from God:

For what other reason, do you suppose, has he given to different countries such different soils and climates and productions, but that they should freely exchange with each other, and thus all be happier and more comfortable? (John McVickar 1837)

It is evidently the will of our Creator, that but few of these objects, every one of which is necessary to the happiness of every individual, should be produced except in particular districts (Francis Wayland 1837)

In passing, I also just noticed the relationship between the words "vice" and "vicious."

Lucia Berlin, Evening in Paradise ****

 Evening in Paradise offers "more stories" from the author of the surprise bestseller Manual for Cleaning Women. Like the earlier collection, Evening in Paradise features quiet stories with clear autobiographical elements. Most of them take place in the southwest or Latin America, with young women carving out a meaningful life with men (miners and musicians) who appear to give them little thought. They take a more personal approach to conventional short-story situations; for example, the story about a bullfight ("Sombra") is more about the people she meets than about the "elegance and brutality" of the sport.

I find Berlin's stories immersive and often moving. Her writing feels casual and rarely draws attention to itself, as if she were a neighbor telling you an anecdote whose well-defined structure isn't obvious until the end.

The book doesn't provide any indication of when the stories were first published. Some of the later stories (running from "The Wives" to "Rainy Day") feel more contrived and self-consciously literary. If we assume the stories are in roughly chronological order, I don't care for this period of Berlin's career.

There are things people just don't talk about. I don’t mean the hard things, like love, but the awkward ones, like how funerals are fun sometimes or how it’s exciting to watch buildings burning.

George Packer, Our Man **** 1/2

Our Man is a biography of Richard Holbrooke, the diplomat most famous for brokering peace in the Balkans war of the 1990s, written by a journalist who knew him personally. The premise of the book is that Holbrooke's "ambition, idealism, and hubris" reflect the United States' own during the post-WWII era.

Packer uses literary devices to present Holbrooke as a complex character whose strengths are inseparable from his weaknesses and whose fatal flaw is a lack of self-awareness. Packer is not afraid to question the conventions of the typical biography; Chapter 1, for example, starts like this:

Do you mind if we hurry through the early years? There are no mysteries here that can be unlocked by nursery school.

A little later:

I haven't told you about Holbrooke and women. There's a lot to say, for he was the kind of man who needed women and the need cracked him open, exposing tenderness and vulnerability and bad judgment. Since women were rarely his competitors, he allowed them to see him more clearly than men.

Packer includes excerpts written by Holbrooke himself, including a cringe-worthy rationalization for taking a vacation at a critical moment. Packer comes at familiar situations from less common perspectives, such as his descriptions of life in the colonial villas of Saigon during the Vietnam War: playing tennis and hosting dinner parties during the Tet Offensive. I liked the image of Slobodan Milošević heading over to the Timberland outlet during a break in Balkan War negotiations to buy his wife a pair of shoes. 

The book does a fantastic job of showing how power works at the highest levels of government: the tensions between political and military solutions to foreign policy issues, the competition between the State Department and the National Security Council, the role that personalities play in decisions that ultimately get made.  

It was interesting to read Our Man so soon after The Good American, which was also the biography of a long-time habitué of the American foreign service establishment written by a journalist who knew him personally. Holbrooke and Bob Gersony started their careers in Vietnam, and their contributions came near to intersecting in the Balkans. Holbrooke represents exactly the kind of policy wonk that Gersony (and his biographer Kaplan) despise. Kaplan appears in Our Man when President Clinton reads his book Balkan Ghosts.

As a writer, Packer is more suited to biography than Kaplan is. Kaplan's style is aggressively journalistic, just the facts and concise analysis. Kaplan has the advantage with respect to summarizing political situations; Packer's style is more literary, with more atmospheric descriptions and an emphasis on character. Both authors insert themselves into the story, with Packer handling it more deftly.

Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This ***

I picked up No One is Talking About This because it appeared on several "Best of 2021" lists, described as a novel with a distinctive narrative voice. Lockwood's style reminded me a lot of Jenny Offill's, with this book being especially similar to Weather.

In the first half, Lockwood effectively portrays the modern experience of spending so much time browsing the internet. The random flow of subjects ("pictures of breakfast in Patagonia, a girl applying her foundation with a hard-boiled egg, a shiba inu in Japan leaping from paw to paw to greet its owner..."); the flattening of moral distinctions ("Sometimes the subject as a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole"); the insincerity ("the generation spent most of its time making incredibly bigoted jokes in order to laugh at the idiots who were stupid enough to think they meant it. Except after a while they did mean it, and then somehow at the end of it they were Nazis"); ultimate goal of posting things that are funny ("they were exposed to the mutagenic glowing sludge just long enough to become perfectly, perfectly funny"); the FOMO when you're offline for too long "(For as long as she read the news, line by line and minute by minute, she had some say in what happened, didn't she? She had to have some say in what happened, even if it was only WHAT?").

Unfortunately, Lockwood also succeeds in capturing the fragmentation of the online experience. She regularly has cleverly worded insights, but they are disconnected and don't add up to anything deeper. 

In the second half, our heroine's sister gives birth to a baby with Proteus syndrome. Engaging with the miracle baby, who will never experience connection, drags her into the offline world, celebrating each little achievement and feeling untethered because, per the title, the internet can't tell her how to deal with the situation. This section reminded me of the Lorrie Moore story "People Like That are the Only People Here," which similarly revolves around a critically ill infant.

(What does it mean that I describe my experience of this book with references by other books? Surely it reflects on the Lockwood's theme of mediated vs unmediated experience?)

Robert Kaplan, The Good American ****

The Good American presents itself as a biography of Bob Gersony, a State Department consultant who consistently entered disaster zones to interview refugees and advise governments and NGOs about the truth on the ground. The book does indeed follow Gersony from Central America to Africa and Asia, but it's really a paean to the vanished breed of "realist" government officials who take action based on detailed local knowledge rather than political principle. Gersony encounters such people on every project he works on.

I learned a lot about the humanitarian crises of the past few decades. Kaplan is good at sketching the places and summarizing the political landscape. I appreciated reading the biography of a front-line guy dedicated to hearing from the people affected by government policies.

In Kaplan's telling, Gersony interviews hundreds of ordinary people, asking questions and synthesizing their answers without a hint of ideological bias, then gives extremely detailed briefings to the agencies that hire him. His recommendations emerge from the data. When Gersony successfully influences policy, it's because the officials are practical and data driven; when his suggestions are rejected or ignored, it's because the officials are letting ideological bias drive their decision making.

But of course Gersony has an ideological bias -- everyone does. The bias usually coincides with the bias of the people who hire him for an assignment, and it certainly coincides with Kaplan's. Later in his career, Gersony tackles some explicitly political situations, such as interviewing folks in the Green Zone in Iraq, and his recommendations do no naturally flow from the data he collects. Kaplan relegates most of the controversies about Gersony's reports to the footnotes.

I have on my shelf a biography of Richard Holbrooke, who crosses paths with Gersony in the Balkan conflict and who is exactly the sort of principled character that Kaplan compares unfavorably to practical realists like Gersony. It'll be interesting to hear the other side.

National Gallery of Art, Bellotto: The Königstein Views Reunited *****

During our recent visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., a painting in Gallery 31 grabbed my attention: The Fortress of Königstein by Bernardo Bellotto. 

It was the fortress itself that first caught my eye, with its rugged walls and crumbling facades, but I found intriguing elements wherever I looked. A mine shaft! Shepherd's cabins! Is that rain in the distance? I stood close enough to the nearly eight-foot wide painting that I had to turn my head to look at the view toward the bluffs mirroring the fortress on the right.

I wasn't familiar with the artist or the location. The sense of discovery contributed to this painting overshadowing the Vermeers and Sargents in the gallery, for this visit at least.

Back at our hotel, I learned from the Internet that the painting was part of a set of five and that all five had been exhibited together just last year at the National Gallery in London. An exhibition catalog was available... for $8.50!

Not only did the catalog allow me to see reproductions of the other four views in the series, it also outlined Bellotto's career in a way that captured the life of a court painter in the eighteen century. In fewer than 100 pages, with copious illustrations, the book manages to provide a fascinating explanation of Bellotto's working methods, an historical account of the fortress, and insight into the art market as it tracks the provenance of the paintings.

The painting I saw in Washington is more properly titled The Fortress of Königstein from the North-West, to differentiate it from the other two external views (from the north and south-west). I appreciate that my painting is the one that "locates the fortress in its wider context."

Lauren Wilkinson, American Spy ***

American Spy starts right up with an action sequence:

I unlocked the safe beneath my desk, grabbed my old service automatic, and crept toward my bedroom door, stealthy until I was brought to grief by a Lego Duplo that stung the sole of my foot.

The first chapter effectively establishes Marie's character as a concerned mother and trained law enforcement officer who, as a black woman, is not your typical spy. The rest of the book alternates between describing her childhood and her first big clandestine operation spying on the revolutionary president of Burkina Faso.

American Spy aspires to be more than a spy thriller. A key theme of the childhood chapters is that black Americans are something like spies in their everyday lives: fitting in, trying to escape notice, while having distinct objectives from the society they keep. Wilkinson attempts to deepen the action sequences with philosophical concerns, but she doesn't (yet) have the writing chops to pull it off. The style and plotting are comparable to popular mystery novels. The characters are not well-rounded enough to support the ambiguities Wilkinson hopes to convey. Marie, for instance, seems to toggle between disciplined and naive, and her motivations remain murky. Thomas Sankara, the president of Burkina Faso, is a stereotype of a charismatic leader; Marie's sister Helene is supposed to be mysterious but seemed transparent to me.

I really liked the ideas in American Spy; I wish it had been better executed.

Olivia Laing, The Lonely City ****

The Lonely City blends together personal narrative, art criticism, and psychology to explore the pervasiveness of loneliness and the ways that art can help both the artist and the audience to ameliorate it.

I was stunned and moved by Laing's empathic description of loneliness in the first full chapter, titled "Walls of Glass."  I was particularly struck by the moment when Laing dissolved into tears when she couldn't close the blinds at her sublet apartment:

It seemed too awful, I suppose, the idea that anyone could peer over and get a glimpse of me, eating cereal standing up or combing over emails, my face illuminated by the laptop's glare.

I think of loneliness as 'the exceedingly unpleasant and driving experience connected with inadequate discharge of the need for human intimacy," but Laing expands the concept by noting that lonely people are hyper-attentive to social threats and that a lack of understanding from others is just as causative as a lack of feeling.

Her descriptions of her various New York apartments are vivid and evocative. She makes the lurid scenes in 1970s Times Square and the docks seem life-affirming if not wholesome. 

Laing's main thesis is that loneliness drives the creation of art, and that art can help alleviate loneliness in the audience. During the middle section of the book, she shades into discussing full-blown outsider status, and her advocacy for marginalized communities becomes more typical. She returns to her subject at the end, arguing that art invests objects with feeling and noticing:

... a sense of the potential beauty in a frank declaration that one is human and as such subject to need... What's so shameful about wanting, about desire, about having failed to achieve satisfaction, about experiencing unhappiness? ... We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell.

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi ***

I remember Clarke's previous book, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell, as an impressive feat of world-building: the writing style perfectly mimics Victorian novels, with the addition of magic. I was attracted to Piranesi by the prospect of its "mind-bending fantasy world, a vast labyrinth with infinite rooms and seas that sweep into halls and up staircases with the tides."

The first part of the book explores the "House" and introduces the two people who live in it: our narrator Piranesi and The Other, a well-dressed man who believes the House may provide access to long-lost Great and Secret Knowledge. I found myself thinking about the different attitudes that Piranesi and The Other had toward the mysteries of the House and what that might say about the human condition.

About a third of the way through, the focus shifts from the mysteries of the House to the mystery of the people. Who are Piranesi and The Other, and how did they come to be here? This shift gave the book more narrative drive but made it feel less thematically ambitious.

I have two criticisms.

• The House is said to represent (in part) a world that enters into conversations with humans, but we don't see much of that happening.
• As Piranesi learns about his past and the nature of the House, he doesn't really piece together clues but instead conveniently finds written records that lay it all out.

Mark Lilla, The Shipwrecked Mind ** 1/2

The Shipwrecked Mind considers the political reactionary. As Lilla says in the introduction:

Reactionaries are not conservatives. ... They are, in their way, just as radical as revolutionaries and just as firmly in the grip of historical imaginings. Millennial expectations of a redemptive new social order and rejuvenated human beings inspire the revolutionary; apocalyptic fears of entering a new dark age haunt the reactionary. ...
His story begins with a happy, well-ordered state where people who know their place live in harmony and submit to tradition and their God. Then alien ideas promoted by intellectuals challenge this harmony and ... a false consciousness soon descends on the society as a whole as it willingly, even joyfully, heads for destruction.

The revolutionary imagines a mythical society of the future; the reactionary imagines a mythical society of the past. (A conservative, by contrast, imagines that we have not yet irreversibly abandoned the virtues of the golden age.)

I found the introduction quite stimulating in showing the deep affinities between revolutionaries and reactionaries. The rest of the book considers specific reactionary thinkers, mostly from the early 20th century. These men had different opinions about when things started to go wrong –– the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Socrates(!) –– and different prescriptions for getting back on track, but they all had a theory of history at least as compelling as Hegel's or Marx's.  (They were also all bad writers, if we can trust Lilla's assessment.) These chapters have their insights, but I wasn't really interested in the subjects themselves.

The author's biography identifies Mark Lilla as "a regular essayist for the New York Review of Books" and indeed the chapters of The Shipwrecked Mind all first appeared as standalone essays. The connection between the chapters is tenuous.

Christopher Kemp, Dark and Magical Places **

Dark and Magical Places is a non-fiction book about the neuroscience of navigation, "how the brain helps us to understand and navigate space," as it says on the inner flap. What a fascinating subject! Written by a scientist! With a nicely chosen title!

Kemp admits up front that he has a very poor sense of direction, has difficulty creating a cognitive map. Unfortunately, this shortcoming impairs his ability to help me create a cognitive map of the subject area. He guides us past place cells, head-direction cells, grid cells, the retrospenial cortex, and the parahippocampal place area (PPA), but I would fail the route-integration task of determining how they relate to one another. 

Kemp has the tendency to wander aimlessly between subjects. More problematic, though, is that I don't trust his explanations. He will introduce a topic with an unlikely sounding proclamation (head-direction cells have a firing pattern that correlates with your "absolute direction, independent of location"). After a couple of pages describing the experiment that lead to the discovery, he expands on the topic in ways that don't deepen the simple picture so much as undermine it ("if the postcard was taken from the north-facing wall of the rat's environment and placed on the south-facing wall, a head-direction cell that previously had been tuned to north suddenly only fired when the rat pointed south"). 

The book cries out for illustrations, showing navigational strategies and brain topography. In the first chapter Kemp discusses the schematic map of the London Underground from 1931 and compares it to the "geographically more accurate" previous maps, but we don't see either map.

As a framing device, the book uses the story of Amanda Eller, a hiker who in 2019 got lost "on the northwest slopes of the volcano Haleakalā [in] Maui's rugged interior." In the final chapter, we hear that Eller ended up far outside the search area: "one mile further northwest and she's have hit the Oahu coastline." That is really lost!

Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob ****

Reading The Books of Jacob is a somewhat intimidating proposition. It is a 900+ page historical novel that takes place in eighteenth-century Podolia (then part of Poland, now Ukraine), about a real-life charismatic religious leader who lead his Jewish followers to convert to Christianity. It features hundreds of characters with (hard-for-Americans-to-pronounce) Eastern European names –– and these characters all change their names halfway through the book. Its heft, both literal and literary, supposedly won Tokarczuk her Nobel Prize. 

Especially in its early sections, The Books of Jacob is an immersive experience. Tokarczuk is excellent at describing towns and settlements in a way that captures how their residents experience them.

Nahman sees a little cottage, stooped beneath a cap of straw thatch, with tiny little windows, rotted boards; beyond it looms others with the same stoop, stuck together like the cells of a honeycomb. And he knows that there is a whole network of passages and walkways and nooks and crannies where carts of wood sit, waiting to be unloaded. And there are courtyards bordered by low fences, atop which during the day clay pots heat up in the sun. Beyond that lie passages that lead to other courtyards so small you can barely turn around in them, each faced with three doors that lead to different homes. Higher up are attics linking the tops of those little homes, full of pigeons that mark out time with layers of droppings––living clocks. In gardens the size of an overcoat spread out on the ground cabbage leaves struggle to coil, potatoes swell, carrots cling to their beds. It would be wasteful to devote space to flowers other than hollyhocks, which grow straight up. Now, in December, their naked stalks seem to support the houses. Along the little streets the trash heap extends to the fences, guarded by cats and feral dogs. And so it goes through the whole village, along the streets, through the orchards and the bounds of the fields to the river, where the women busily rinse out all the filth of the settlement.

The religious material is less clear, appropriately since Jacob's theology derives from the mystic Kabbalah. When Moses came down from the mountain to find the Israelites debauching themselves, he destroyed the God-given laws and replaced them with a new set designed to control his people. The remnants of the true law were spread across the monotheistic religions, to be reassembled by a Messiah as the end times approach.

If The Books of Jacob were a film, it would be presented almost entirely in scene-setting medium shots. Tokarczuk rarely favors characters with close-ups; this is not a psychological novel but a social one.

Inevitably, I had to drag myself through certain sections of this very long book. But every section has unexpected insights, perspectives, or turns of phrase. I admired the book more than loved it, but admire it I did.

Donald Hall, A Carnival of Losses ** 1/2

My memory of Hall's Essays After Eighty is its calm bucolic tone, with essays not about aging per se but about living a tranquil solitary live. I was comforted by Hall's routine, especially his continued writing and his idyllic New Hampshire home. He appreciates his life rather than appearing rueful.

I approached A Carnival of Losses as something of a sequel to Essays After Eighty. However, most of the pieces in this book are reminiscences rather than reflections. For example, the middle section has short anecdotes about poets Hall has known ("As I enter the last phase [of my life], I change my subject from poetry to poets"). A Carnival of Losses would be better than Essays After Eighty for folks more interested in Hall as a poet, but it was a bit disappointing to this reader more interested in Hall as an eloquent chronicler of later life.

The final two pieces are appropriately autumnal, covering events up to the last month of his life. Even these last days brought him joy, especially when his granddaughter told him she and her husband would move into Eagle Pond Farm after his passing.

Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World *** 1/2

I was attracted to this book by its title, and hooked by Philip Pullman calling it "the strangest and most original book I've read for years." When We Cease to Understand the World is a Sebaldian hybrid of essay and fiction about scientists who followed their theories to conclusions that reoriented reality in strange ways; quantum mechanics is the paradigm case. In Labatut's world, the radical new worldview drives the scientist to madness.

The book is divided into five independent sections. The first, "Prussian Blue," fulfills all the promise of the premise. It starts with the Allied forces capturing Hermann Göring with Germany's entire supply of the opioid dihydrocodeine and ends with Fritz Haber, the creator of chlorine gas, worrying that "his method of extracting nitrogen from the air had so altered the natural equilibrium" that plants were going to take over the world. In between is a tightly wound meditation on how beneficial and accidental discoveries inevitably come with terrible consequences as well, and how the pursuit of art leads to the machinery of war. At the end of its 24 pages I just said, "Wow."

Alas, the book gets progressively weaker from there. The second section, "Schwarzschild's Singularity" retains the intensity of "Prussian Blue" but lacks its spiraling structure. The third and fourth sections offer fairly conventional depictions of mathematicians and physicists heading down conceptual rabbit holes and coming away convinced they'd seen stark reality. The final section is a short attempt to tie the other sections together.

It was mathematics––not nuclear weapons, computers, biological warfare or our climate Armageddon––which was changing our world to the point where... we would simply not be ale to grasp what being human meant. ... Even scientists no longer comprehend the world. ... We know how to use it, it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it.

Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters ***

Kingdom of Characters looks at the modernization of China in the 20th century from the perspective of its language. The Chinese language(s) presented a challenge to the country's participation in the rapidly globalizing world whose terms were set by Western powers. For example, how does one send a Chinese telegram when Morse code is based on the Roman alphabet?

The book is full of interesting insights about Chinese languages and their script, but it is poorly organized and fails to make its central argument that there was a "language revolution that made China modern." For instance, the first chapter tells the story of Wang Zhao, a fugitive who sneaks back into China in 1900 with a plan for simplifying the process of learning to read and write. We learn, though, that others had been attempting to provide simplified phonetic scripts for at least 50 years, and Wang's ultimate contribution was directed at a different problem: the proliferation of dialects. (He got Mandarin recognized as the standard dialect.) 

Kingdom of Characters could approach its subject from one of two angles: as a retelling of history that shows the under-appreciated role of language reform in modernization, or as an explanation of the technical challenges of systematizing Chinese characters and the creative solutions. (Amazon files the book under "Programming > Unicode Encoding Standard", so they clearly expected the latter.) 

Tsu does provide a pocket history of 20th century China, from its subjection to Europe and Japan during the Qing Dynasty through the Nationalist and Communist periods, through the side door of language-related developments. However, the political environment provides the context for the language innovation and not vice versa. The language revolution did not make China modern; China's increasing modernity gave it increasing leverage in shaping global communication standards.

R.C. Sherriff, The Fortnight in September **** 1/2

When I first unwrapped this Christmas present from Evelyn, its cover design (pastel colors, New Yorker-style drawing, insouciant font) led me to assume it was a contemporary "beach read" featuring a first romance, a mystery, or both. Then I looked closer: the recommendation on the cover comes from Kazuo Ishiguro rather than Reese's Book Club, and the author was born in... 1896! The paperback is a 90th anniversary edition disguised as light contemporary fiction.

The Fortnight in September follows the Stevens family on their annual two-week vacation at the English seaside town of Bognor Regis. It starts on the evening before their departure, with each family member completing their "Marching Orders" to prepare the house, travels with them through the mingled excitement and anxiety of the train journey, and settles in at Mrs Huggett's increasingly rundown boarding house.

It is quite a relaxing read, perfect for when you're on vacation yourself. The story has no real conflict in it, so it doesn't build any narrative tension. Every concern of the characters gets resolved within a few pages. The men of the family display a stereotypically British status anxiety, but it's nothing a nice walk across the downs can't help. The details are dated and/or British –– no electric lighting on the third floor, blazers for strolling the beach, playing cricket in the sand –– but the concerns are universal. Did we remember to leave the scullery window ajar for the cat? Is the better to return on Saturday, leaving a day at home before work, or Sunday, giving an extra day at the beach?

It turns out the cover was not misleading after all: The Fortnight in September is an excellent beach read! As Kazuo Ishiguro said, "The beautiful dignity to be found in everyday living has rarely been captured more delicately."

Bathsheba Demuth, The Floating Coast *** 1/2

The Floating Coast is billed as "an environmental history of the Bering Strait," which means that the author wants to provide a history of the region that transcends the distinctions between human and natural accounts.

 My expectations were disciplined by an education that explained nature's past ––geology, biology, and ecology––separately from human history, from culture, economics, and politics.

Demuth attempts this synthesis by describing all of the actions of living beings in Beringia as transformations, as conversions of energy from one form to another.

The work of plankton is the ... cumulative transformation of light into starchy tissue [that] fills the sea with energy, the calories that sustain over three hundred species of fatty, swarming zooplankton. ... The work of the whale is to turn this diffused energy into hundred-ton bodies.

Most of what is an arctic fox begins as a lemming.

I am impressed by the idea of considering ecology and sociology as a continuum. It provides an interesting perspective on, say, whaling when you think of it as just another link in the chain of energy transfers that started with the sun striking the ocean. Booms and busts occur in the fox fur market due both to fluctuations in the fox population and to changing enthusiasms in New York and London.

An interesting perspective, but too frequently an abstract one. Most chapters start with a vivid description of an animal or human activity, but the telling details are gone by the end of the first paragraph in favor of overly intellectual language. In the end, I felt as if Demuth was using Beringia as a stock character in a Soviet-style drama, where every character stands for an idea rather than an actual person.

Throughout their migration, walruses stir nutrients into the water column, especially nitrogen, that help photosynthetic organisms bloom. ... In the icy summers of the early 1870s, walruses began transforming into something new: money.

I lost enthusiasm for the book somewhere during the section about mining.

Olga Tokarczuk, Primeval and Other Times ***

To carry me over until the American publication of Tokarczuk's "richest, most sweeping and ambitious novel" The Books of Jacob (scheduled for February), I picked up this earlier novel of hers in a very nice edition from Twisted Spoon Press.

Primeval and Other Times takes place in a Polish village from the beginning of the First World War through 1990 or so. It is divided into four- or five-page vignettes from the point of view of one of the inhabitants, often written in a fairy-tale style. Some of the vignettes come from non-human characters, such as the trees, a guardian angel, or God.

Surely some enterprising literature student has written a thesis about the interaction between Catholic imagery (God, guardian angels, human spirits) and animist imagery in this book. The combination provides a full-bodied portrait of Primeval.

In March, when the ground becomes warm, the orchard begins to vibrate and digs its claw-like, underground paws into the earth's flesh. The trees suck the earth like puppies, and their trunks become warmer. 

Even at this early stage in her career, Tokarczuk provides forceful images that shift the reader's perspective. The book remains anchored to everyday life. We never travel outside of the village and see world-changing events from its limited perspective; for example, Genowefa witnesses the Germans rounding up the Jews as she is washing her laundry in the river. 

The book is more successful at creating a meditative mood than at telling a compelling story. Its fragmentary nature causes it to lack narrative momentum. Periodically the language felt awkward –– such as the misplaced modifier in the sentence below –– but I suspect it's an artifact of translation.

In the spring they found the half decomposed body of Bronek Malak in Wodenica, whom everyone thought had gone to America.

Eula Biss, Having and Being Had ***

Like Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, Having and Being Had inspires me more with its form than with its content. The book consists of short (two to five page) essays about the value system we internalize in a modern capitalist society. Most of them are personal essays or anecdotes that illustrate an idea rather than explain or argue for it. For example, Biss and her husband buy a house in a gentrifying neighborhood, and she alludes to her conflicting feelings about it by describing conversations with her neighbors.

The first several essays really grabbed me and got me excited about the possibilities of the format. Unfortunately, Biss wasn't able to sustain the performance. The later parts of the book include more didactic entries, and her insights become more jejune.

Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven ***

In a college class I attended, Professor Stephen Booth taught us that the task of literary criticism is to explain the ways in which Hamlet is better than a plot summary of Hamlet. I find it difficult to perform this task for The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven because it reads like its own plot summary. The book has all the trappings of an adventure story –– an exotic locale (Svalbard/Spitsbergen in the years from WWI to WWII), colorful characters (Scandinavian miners and trappers), intense incidents (avalanches, bear attacks, wars, murder) –– but dispatches the major events perfunctorily, especially in the first half. The avalanche that disfigures Sven occupies two sentences; the Finnish trapper teaches Sven the skills of his trade whatever they may be; it is eminently unclear how Sven survives alone in the far north. Perhaps the author believes this terseness to be Scandinavian or Hemingway-esque?

I felt the sketchiness most keenly as it applies to Sven's character and his relationship with other characters. We're told, in the early going, that he has a close kinship with his sister Olga, but we don't learn enough about their bond to understand the nature of their falling out or feel the joy of their reconciliation. Sven purports to be something of an intellectual, but we never see him reading. What motivates his years of isolation, since he so clearly values his friends and family?

With one more layer of descriptive detail, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven could be an excellent study of the nature of human experience, the push and pull between depression and joy and between solitude and sociability. In the words of beginning creative writing teachers: More showing and less telling.

The one descriptive detail that stood out:

The first thing I heard was the wind. A very strange sort of wind to someone who has lived the first part of his life among trees and buildings, since up north there are few impermeable surfaces against which the air can whip and abrade itself. The Arctic wind has more of the sound of someone breathing with his throat entirely open.

A vivid and unexpected insight giving a nice sense of the character's experience of place. More of this please!