Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer ***

A Pulitzer Prize-winning espionage novel, "wrought in electric prose." It was inevitable that I would read The Sympathizer, and probably just as inevitable that I would be disappointed by it. Contrary to reviewers' adjectives like "blistering," "haunting," "audacious," and "darkly comic," I found the narrator's tone detached and his adventures mundane. He is a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist sleeper agent in America, but the extent of his spycraft is writing letters to a fake aunt in France about activities that the Vietnamese could surely follow for themselves.

The final 75 pages are far more intense and force reconsideration of the preceding 306 pages. It turns out the aloof tone was an intentional plot point. For me, though, it was too little too late.

George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 **** 1/2

The title says it all: Nash gives an epic history of the conservative movement from 1945 to 1975, with a postscript from 2006. He focuses on the ideas of conservatism rather than its political successes and failures. His protagonists are the likes of William Buckley, Russell Kirk, and Milton Friedman, not Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.

Nash shows how the movement is a coalition of partially incompatible strands: originally libertarianism, traditionalism, and anti-Communism, joined later by neoconservatism and the religious right. Libertarians disagree with traditionalists about individualism (natural rights versus natural law) and with anti-Communists about foreign policy; traditionalists can be more comfortable with government programs than the other two; and so on. But they all fundamentally disagree with some aspect of the liberal program.

The book explicitly lays out the philosophical underpinnings of each conservative approach, and shows how they reject liberal ideas that are often taken for granted in modern America. Even some conservatives suspect that America is fundamentally a liberal country. The history also illuminates the reason for some conservative obsessions, such as with the South and the Constitution. (Conservatives are drawn to defend the pre-Civil War South and African colonialism for reasons that are separate from the racism that unfortunately comes wrapped up in these subjects.)

Fascinating and thought-provoking, if a little repetitive.

Frederick Exley, A Fan's Notes ** 1/2

I really want to love this book. It is a cult classic among literary types, unknown outside the boundaries of its cult. "Written by a self-pitying autodidact for consumption by self-pitying autodidacts," as Walter Kirn puts it in his review. A mocking narrator, a sui generis story about failure, pretentious literary references, a cover in the classic Vintage Contemporaries style, passionate fans among a tribe I want to belong to - what's not to like?

Alas, it doesn't speak to me. The narrative meanders and repeats itself rather than developing its theme (what happens when you reject bourgeois values but still measure yourself against them). Everything I said the first time I reviewed it still applies, but I'm docking it a star for failing to meet my expectations... in a thoroughly Exley-like fashion.

William James, Pragmatism / The Meaning of Truth ****

I've said it before: If I could have dinner with one historical figure, it would be William James. The first argument in Pragmatism is that people choose a philosophy based on their temperament, and James' temperament (and ergo his philosophy) largely matches mine. Also his prose is clear and enjoyable -- at least in works written after 1904; the articles from the 19th century collected in The Meaning of Truth fall short in both departments.

The back cover promotes Pragmatism as "the most famous single work of American philosophy." Like James' masterpiece The Varieties of Religious Experience, it derives from a series of lectures. He seeks to define the nature of the doctrine and show how it provides a middle way between the dogmatic views of idealists and empiricists. He hopes to defuse some fundamental disagreements between them.

I gained new perspective on several points despite being well acquainted with pragmatism and with William James. I see more clearly how the pragmatic method relates to James' view of evolving reality and how he defines 'truth' as a relation whose details differ in each concrete case. One insight that stands out is a new understanding of Bishop Berkeley's philosophy:

So far from denying the external world which we know, Berkeley corroborated it. It was the scholastic notion of a material substance unapproachable by us, behind the external world, deeper and more real than it, and needed to support it, which Berkeley maintained to be the most effective of all reducers of the external world to unreality. Abolish that substance, he said, believe that God...sends you the sensible world directly... (p 47)

James is not the most rigorous of thinkers, and so the book suffers when he tackles abstruse philosophical disputes. His prose becomes less clear and gains an edge of defensiveness. This happens more frequently in The Meaning of Truth, which unlike the Pragmatism lectures is targeted at professional philosophers. The Meaning of Truth acts like a set of detailed footnotes or essays in a Norton critical edition.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant ***

The Buried Giant is a fairy tale, with ogres, dragons, sprites, and knights. Like all fairy tales, it uses its fantastical elements to make a point about the real world. Unlike many fairy tales, the characters in this one don't live happily ever after.

In the years following the reign of King Arthur, an elderly couple sets off to visit their estranged son. A strange mist has spread amnesia throughout the land, so Axl and Beatrice can't quite remember how to get to their son's village or why they haven't seen him for so long. They meet various characters along the way, including a Saxon warrior and a former Knight of the Round Table, and become entangled in a quest to kill the dragon whose breath is the cause of the mist of forgetfulness.

Ishiguro allows the true story to emerge slowly from the mist. It turns out that the mass amnesia is a mixed blessing, since it causes the Britons and Saxons to forget the horrible deeds they committed against each other during the earlier wars. They've been living together peacefully for years, but what will happen when they remember their former grievances? Is forgetting atrocities enough of a balm, or do they demand retribution? If the cost of forgetting pain is also forgetting happiness, is it worth it?

Paul Theroux, O-Zone ** 1/2

Around 1990, based on the one-two punch of Riding the Iron Rooster and The Mosquito Coast, I went on a Paul Theroux binge. O-Zone is one of his books from that time period, his only stab at science-fiction as far as I know. It didn't stand up too well to re-reading.

The story is a transparent allegory about class. A group of rich New Yorkers spend a weekend in O-Zone, a quarantined wilderness about which they have only heard rumors, and find themselves transformed by their contact with the natives. The characters are less well developed than the setting: except for the awkward young genius who falls in with the "aliens," everyone's personality is defined by a single oversimplified motive. The prose is needlessly repetitive, as if Theroux were expecting us to read each chapter individually.

Stanley Fish, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One ***

I enjoyed this slim volume for the opposite reason than I expected to. I expected to enjoy Fish's appreciation of finely crafted sentences more than his advice about writing, but his writing exercises are actually fun. Replace the nonsense words in Jabberwocky with good English words; transform a simple sentence into a hundred-word monster; pile on clauses to imitate the styles of Henry James, Virginia Woolf, or Philip Roth.

I was less impressed by his chosen example sentences and his literary analysis of them. His taste differs from mine, apparently. (Shouldn't be surprising, I suppose, given that his typical writing style is stereotypically academic.) I did appreciate his analysis of "the additive style," which I associate with Jose Saramago and his endless sentences.

Immediacy, not linear reflection leading to a conclusion, is the goal here, and to reach it [the author] must at once write sentences and somehow defeat the deferral of meaning -- the sense of building toward a completed thought -- that is the very nature of a sentence. Usually a sentence does not deliver its meaning until the end, and only at the end do its components acquire their significance and weight. But what [the author] wants is meaning to be present at every instant, to be always the same in weight and yet different as each word is different.