Ross Macdonald, The Way Some People Die ****

The first book I've read from the third member of the holy trinity of detective novels (Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald), purchased at BookPeople in Austin TX. It is one of Macdonald's earlier works (1951), and it reads very much like a Raymond Chandler story. His detective, Lew Archer, has a more explicit moral sense than Chandler's Marlowe, but otherwise the story has similar locales, similar plotting, and similar characters. Which is a good thing on the whole — although I did figure out the basics of the final resolution fairly early.

So, if you like Raymond Chandler you'll almost certainly like Ross Macdonald. And he wrote more novels than Hammett and Chandler combined! For my next Macdonald book, I'll choose one of his later ones from the 1970s.

Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian **** 1/2

The subtitle of this excellent book is "John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West." It tells the story of Powell's famous trip down the Colorado River and the consequences that flowed from it. Major Powell and his team learned a lot about the realities of the West, especially about "the Plateau Province" that spans Colorado and Utah, and Powell spent the rest of his life trying to get the rest of the country to recognize the realities instead of acting on naive fantasies. In particular, he demonstrated that homesteaders were doomed to failure without irrigation, no matter how hard they worked.

The first half of the book combines equal parts of adventure, geography, science, history, and politics. History and politics take over in the second half, giving an interesting new perspective on the period of westward expansion after the Civil War. I was surprised to learn how the seemingly neutral topic of topographical mapping ended up at the center of a battle over the proper role of (federal) government. The introduction by Bernard DeVoto gives a very accurate summary of the book's argument; it is possibly the best preface I've ever read.

I have only two criticisms of the book. The latter chapters lack the adventure and the interesting discoveries of the earlier chapters. It's hard to fault Stegner for that, since it's just a fact about the history and Powell's life story.     Second, Stegner often seems like a Powell apologist, unquestioningly taking the Major's side in every argument without considering the merit of the other side.

Gillian Flynn, Dark Places ****

Dark Places is a very good thriller that falls just short of literary excellence. The characters are compelling (albeit unheroic), the Midwestern setting is well painted, and the story kept me guessing until the very end. Flynn's writing is a cut above most pulp writers: I was interested enough in Libby's character that I would almost read her story without the thriller plot.

When Libby Day was seven years old, her family was murdered in their Kansas home. Her testimony helped convict her older brother of the crime. Twenty-five years later, Libby still suffers from the effects of the horrific crime. She needs money, so she agrees to re-investigate the crime — for a fee from a club that believes her brother is innocent. The story alternates between the present-day investigation and the days leading up to the murders.

I appreciated Libby's cynical motivations and the realistic stresses that her family endured before the crime. The only thing I didn't care for was the surfeit of major plot developments that all happened on the day of the murder. One of the present-day characters even mentions it:

Doesn't this all seem too weird, like we are missing something obvious? A girl tells a lie, a farm goes under, a gambler's bets are called in by a, jeez, by a Devil-worshiping bookie. All on the same day. (p 283)

It's a typical problem with this sort of book — the author needs to provide several possible motives to keep the reader guessing — but it stuck out particularly because Dark Places is otherwise so credible.

Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology *** 1/2

The expression "historical ontology" refers to the study of (abstract) objects that come into existence or go out of existence over time. Consider, for example, "child abuse." Certainly there have always been acts of violence toward children, but the idea that these acts fall into a category we call "child abuse" began around 1960 (p 69). Did child abuse exist before we started calling it that? Did we discover a category that already existed, or did we create something new? Is the concept part of "the furniture of the universe," to borrow a phrase from Richard Rorty?

In this book, Hacking explores the question of realism versus nominalism. Realism is the view that our words and concepts correspond to aspects of the real objective world; nominalism is the view that our words and concepts create the categories they name, which would not exist without our naming. Over the years I have become convinced that nominalism is correct for most of the categories that really matter to our lives, but it is definitely the counterintuitive view and I recognize the difficulties it presents in a strong form. That's why I am interested in books that explore where the truth lies between the two extremes.

Simplifying quite a bit, I'll say that Hacking is a realist with respect to the categories and concepts of natural science and a nominalist with respect to the categories and concepts of human and social sciences. The key difference between the natural sciences and social sciences is that the former has engaged more intimately with "recalcitrant experience," to borrow an expression from Quine. He suggests that we need to investigate "thick" concepts in the social sciences, in the manner of Michel Foucault (the hero of this book).

"Tired old cultural relativism in morality has been with us (it feels) forever. No jejune relativism had comparable currency among those well acquainted with a natural science. Then Kuhn came bounding in... Compare the abstract topic headings of metaphysics and ethics. We have reality, truth, fact, ... on the one hand, and right, good, justice,... on the other. In the natural sciences we have been taking a look at the material circumstances under which truth, reality, and fact are constructed from case to case (with no obligation to tell the same story in every case). This meant investigating not truth, reality, and fact, but truths, real things, and facts. In ethics, especially in English, there has been too much fixation on the abstract, one the good, the right, and the just. ... Moralists [need] to examine 'thick' concepts rather than abstract notions." (p 66 - 67)

Hacking suggests that we can avoid "jejune relativism" by recognizing that objectivity flows from our styles of reasoning. That is, the characteristics that define objectivity are constructed (if you will) from the ways we reason about things. Kant said that all experience takes place in space and time because these concepts are built into our understanding of experience; Hacking says that our concepts are objective because objectivity is built into our modes of reasoning. Or something like that.

Hacking also suggests (around page 32) that we can escape from nominalism by focusing not on how we think about categories but on how we interact with them. I am intrigued by this glimmer of an idea, because it ties together well with two other parts of my worldview: the pragmatic view of truth and with the idea of basic levels in categorization.

In passing, Hacking mentions that "language" is a historically recent term and not a natural kind. What does this mean about the search for the biological basis of language? Or about linguistics in general?

"Life, labor, and language are concepts formed... in the nineteenth century as the material of biology, economics, and linguistics. These sciences have objects that don't correspond with or map onto their predecessors of natural history, the theory of wealth, or general grammar. Those fields of inquiry, in turn, have no parallel in the Renaissance, says Foucault. Such non-mappings result not so much from new discoveries as from the coming into being of new objects of thought for which new truths and falsehoods are to be uttered." (p 78)

I am intrigued by the questions that Hacking addresses in this book and in the other book of his that I read, The Social Construction of What? The book is littered with interesting insights. I agree with him that the most interesting work in this area is detailed historical analysis of individual concepts. In fact, my main complaint is that the book does not include enough of that analysis; it talks about it instead of doing it.

Patrick O'Brian, H.M.S. Surprise ****

The third book in the Aubrey-Maturin series has all the strengths and weaknesses of the first two books.

On the plus side, the books are unparalleled in their ability to conjure up a time and place (just after 1800 on a British naval vessel). In addition to O'Brian's vaunted attention to detail, the secret is how even the narrator's voice stays true to the milieu: the text never goes out of its way to explain the odd terminology or practices for a modern audience. If you miss a reference, so be it. The characters are well drawn, especially the two principals, and the action sequences are exciting. No matter how many naval engagements happen, I always learn something new about war strategy in the age of sail.

On the down side, I imagine that many readers would find the quotidian details about sailing and life aboard the ship to be dull. The long heart of this book is a comparatively uneventful trip from England to Bombay. I relished the time O'Brian took to describe the trip, just as I loved the sequence in the first book (Master and Commander) when Jack Aubrey learns about his ship and trains his crew. But less geeky readers might find it interminable. Less forgiving readers might also complain about the lack of a compelling, overarching narrative: the books have the unstructured feel of real life rather than a clear beginning or end.

The first few chapters of H.M.S. Surprise seemed comparatively rushed to me, as if O'Brian was impatient with the plot details necessary to send the ship on its way to India. Even the dramatic rescue of Stephen Maturin from a French prison felt that way.

You can be sure that I will read the next novel in the series soon!

Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea ***

In the early 1990s, Greg Mortenson got lost on his descent after an attempt on K2. The people in the small Pakistani village where he ended up took such great care of him that he promised to come back and build them a school. With luck and persistence, he was able to fulfill this promise, and he went on to build many other schools in northern Pakistan and Afghanistan. The moral is that one person can make a significant difference.

The first half of the book tells the story of Mortenson's dawning vocation in vivid, novelistic fashion. (In the third person, surprisingly, given that Mortenson is listed as the primary author.) It is a strong story about a guileless, naive, and somewhat passive protagonist learning about the difficulties of his chosen quest. Once he has completed the first school, the book takes on a more journalistic tone. It is a less strong story that paints Mortenson as a saint who gets things done. Everyone Mortenson meets, from US Congressmembers to Taliban leaders, declares him remarkable and donates to his cause.

I think Mortenson's life provides fantastic material for a finely shaded character study. This book opts for hagiography instead.  He clearly has a magnetic personality that leads people to like him instantly. I suspect his clumsy naivete makes people want to care for him. I can't deny the success he has had, but I believe that the reasons for it are different from the reasons he believes they are.

I would be interested in a biography of Mortenson that explored his talents and faults in equal measure, and thought about how they work together to account for his successes and failures. I think there is a story along the lines of All the King's Men there. I sense some corruption and incompetence even through the positive spin. For example, after Mortenson's foundation gets a huge influx of cash, he uses it to provide a scholarship for one of his lieutenant's daughters. More generally, it seems like Mortenson uses his personal preferences to determine where money is spent, and he takes unnecessary risks to preserve his self-image.

Roberto Bolano, 2666 ** 1/2

Roberto Bolano is a very talented writer who deserves all of the critical attention he has received since The Savage Detectives was translated into English. As it says on the back cover, "With 2666, Bolano joins the ambitious overachievers of the twentieth-century novel...deploying encyclopediac knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic, summation of their culture and the novelist's place in it." In other words, 2666 is akin to Ulysses, Gravity's Rainbow, or the recently reviewed Life: A User's Guide, and as with these other masterworks, I found more to admire than to love in 2666. I often found myself slogging through its 893 pages.

The book is divided into five major sections, linked by common characters, locales, and motifs. The best, and longest, and arguably the most draining section is the fourth, which concerns a decade-long series of killings in the Mexican city of Santa Teresa. The shared theme of all five sections — and of The Savage Detectives, if I think back to it — seemed to be how people organize their lives around absences: the absent author Archimboldi, the absent wife of Amalfitano, and so on. There are also multiple artists confined to mental institutions, suggesting a message about the role of the artist.

For me, Bolano's best feature as a writer is his way with sensory metaphors. For example:

They dug up the barbecue, and a smell of meat and hot earth spread over the patio in a thin curtain of smoke that enveloped them all like the fog that drifts before a murder, and vanished mysteriously as the women carried the plates to the table, leaving clothing and skin impregnated with its aroma. (p 130)

 When the visitors returned to the surface... they were divided into two groups: those who were pale when they emerged, as if they had glimpsed something momentous down below, and those who appeared with a half smile sketched on their faces, as if they had just been reapprised of the naivete of the human race. (p 680)