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.