My one quibble with The Price of Everying: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do, Eduardo Porter’s wonderfully readable survey of the function of pricing, is that he didn’t put his last chapter, “When Prices Fail,” at the beginning of his book; I also wish that he had dealt a little more aggressively with the toxic strain of Chicago thinking exemplified by Eugene Fama. Mr Fama says that talk of economic bubbles “drives me nuts”; it’s his Panglossian belief in efficient markets that drives me nuts. The first thing to learn about prices is that they are often wrong, and wrong for the very reason the existence of which thinkers of Mr Fama’s persuasion deny: neither buyers nor sellers have enough information to set a correct price. Market prices, moreover, are always somewhat arbitrary, in that they’re spot prices, reflecting the needs of the moment. There is no way for the buyer and seller of a barrel of oil to develop an agreeable estimate of the environmental cost of the use of that oil, whether as fuel or otherwise. Environmental costs are necessarily determined outside the market. We are still pricing oil as if they did not exist — as if the twenty metric tons of carbon dioxide that the average American produces every year were not a problem. 

There is no reason to expect us to be any better at setting environmental prices than we are. Until three or four hundred years ago, the long-term consequences of human activity were limited to the supply of fertile soil. We could, as the Mayas did, run out of the resources needed to support civilization, but exhausting the environment was a temporary thing. It is only with the large-scale industrial and engineering projects of the Nineteenth Century that we began to test the limits of the natural world’s recuperative powers, and we were understandably slow to assess our impact. Blake’s dark Satanic mills were objectionable for their human costs; nobody seems to have thought what caused those famous London fogs until the town ceased to belch tons of coal soot into the air every day. Anyone who foresaw what the proliferation of vehicular traffic would do to air quality in Los Angeles or Denver would have been dismissed as a crank. 

As Porter shows us, Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, has been dealt a more polite version of crank-dismissal by William Nordhaus, a Yale professor who does not doubt that we’ve got to do something to reverse course on climate change, but who questions the importance of preventing damages set to accrue after the year 2800. These are early days indeed for the economics of stewardship. 

The recommendations to combat climate change in the Stern Review stand uncomfortably alongside this principle of social justice. If income per person were to grow by 1 percent a year over the next two centuries, less than half the pace of growth of the last century, peeople in the year 2200 would be 6.3 times as rich as they are today. Why should the poorer people of the present scrimp and save in order to protect the environment for their richer descendants, who could afford more environmental investments than we can?

It’s the asking of questions like this that highlights the importance of The Price of Everything. The important thing to do right now is not to stop carbon emissions — important as that certainly is. Before embarking on any ambitious schemes to curtail this environmental damage or to encourage that environmental boon, we need to match our anxieties about the future with an awareness of the past, the history of which has only begun to be written. How did we get here? What were we thinking? In “The Price of Work,” Porter analyzes the worker-friendly policies of bygone giants such as AT & T and Eastman Kodak. Today’s corporations, he writes, 

can no longer afford the generosity of the corporate leviathans of the early twenieth century, which relied on a unique feature of American capitalism of the time: monopoly profits. As a dominant company in a new industry with high barriers to entry, Eastman Kodak haad a near monopoly over photographic film. Ford also enjoyed fat profits unheard of in the cutthroat competitive environment of today. 

Monopolies can be good, in other words, for workers. That they may not be optimal for consumers is a consideration that has to be balanced on the recognition that consumers are workers, too. In what circumstances might monopolies serve consumers as well as they do workers and (of course) investors? It may be time for a fresh inquiry. (It’s my view that the facilities for delivering power and water to consumers ought to be municipal monopolies maintained at public expense, and geared to local demands. What’s also needed, if this is to happen, is an improved model of political accountability, one that deftly blends the virtues of transparency with the operational baffles that protect administrators from the whims and caprices of popular enthusiasm.) Everything that a person of my age was taught in school is probably wrong forty-odd years on. Just like every other aspect of human affairs, economic conditions change over time. Searching the marketplace for scientific principles with the eternal applicability of Newtonian physics is misguided, simplistic, and childish.   

Readers who aren’t much interested in the dismal science will find an incredibly interesting extension of the very idea of pricing in “The Price of Faith.” In Porter’s hands, religion looks a lot like a luxury brand that becomes more appealing as it becomes more expensive, not less. Why should that be? Because “more expensive” means “more exclusive,” naturally enough. A religion that imposes personal sacrifice and ritual burden on its members is more likely to hold onto them — as the Catholic Church found out after Vatican II, a loosening — price reduction — that went too far for some communicants but not far enough for others. The history of the Roman church also shows that it is never a good idea to substitute money prices for those sacrifices and burdens — a very undogmatic development that triggered the heart of the Protestant disaffection. 

The Price of Everything is an intelligent book that, for all its surprising nuggets of information, avoids the contrarian and the counterintuitive. But it is  enormously provocative, because it encourages the reader to approach the prices in every aspect of life, and to recognize that money only one way of making payment. The most common alternative to money is time, and the more you have of the one, the more willing you’ll be to spend it for the other.  

The game with time begins right away, although it is subtly played at first. The first paragraph of the first tale begins with an episode of what would be shoplifting if a store were the victim, and not a woman in a toilet stall who has left her purse imprudently outside it. It ends, this paragraph, with Sasha, the thief, describing her feelings  about lifting the woman’s wallet to her therapist. Wo we have a foreground present in the therapist’s office, and midway present, an evening not long before the time in the therapists office, and, in the background, several planes of increasing vagueness, the nearest of which is a summary of Sasha’s treatment and her relationship with the doctor, called Coz. Behind this, an inscrutable past — Sasha’s first days in New York, glimpsed at in a list of edifying things to do that she taped to a wall; at the very back, the disappearance of Sasha’s father when she was six. Somewhere in that dark lies an explanation, presumably, for Sasha’s pathology. But we’re not going to look for explanations. What good would it do to know why stealing things invigorates Sasha. It’s enough to keep “wrong and bad and exactly right” in mind.

The episode of stealing ends well: Sasha manages to return the wallet discreetly while confessing to the owner that “It’s a problem I have.” The other woman is so relieved to have her wallet back that she agrees to keep it “between us.” Then Sasha returns to her date, Alex. Until the theft, Sasha and Alex were bored by one another; while she was stealing the wallet, Alex was settling the bill, ready to move on to something else, probably without Sasha. The theft, and then the restoration of the wallet — a sequence of hot maneuvers that Egan manages adroitly — change the date’s temperature, and Alex returns to Sasha’s apartment, where all the things that she has stolen over the years are laid out on two tables. Alex’s attention is caught by the bathtub in the kitchen — a New York arrangement that he has heard about but never seen — but eventually his eyes find the loot.

What’s all this?” Alex asked. 

He’d discovered the tables now and was staring at the pile. It looked like the work of a miniaturist beaver: a heap of objects that was illegible yet clearly not random. To Sasha’s eyes, it almost shook under its load of embarrassments and close shaves and little  riumphs and moments of pure exhilaration. It contained years of her life compressed. The screwdriver was at the outer edge. Sasha moved closer to Alex, drawn to the sight of him taking everything in.

“And how did you feel, standing with Alex in front of all those things you’d stolen?” Coz asked.

Sasha turned her face into the blue couch because her cheeks were heating up and she hated that. She didn’t want to explain to Coz the mix of feelings she’d had, standing there with Alex: the pride she took in these objects, a tenderness that was only heightened by the shame of their acquisition. She’d risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life. Watching Alex move his eyes over the pile of objects stirred something in Sasha. She put her arms around him from behind, and he turned, surprised, but willing.

The tast for me is to relate to this pathology. Not to understand it, much less explain it, but relate to it. The temptation to heave the door shut on Sasha is as overwhelming as is her itch to steal other people’s stuff. That I can fairly grasp. it’s the excitement and the triumph that elude me. I did a lot of small-time rotten things when I was a kid, and they never made me feel anything but desperately ashamed. Each petty crime was its own Fall; until I pulled the chair out from the sixth-grade classmate as she was sitting down, I had no idea just how awful a thing it was to do; the memory, quite vivid fifty years later, still makes me shudder. I was driven by curiosity, but the bits of knowledge turned out to be wildly expensive, and I always wished that I hadn’t wanted to know. With Sasha it seems to be different. I cannot imagine constructing that miniaturist pile. 

But I’m as exciting about trying to get close to this as Sasha was by the woman’s wallet.

How supremely piquant it was to read, in one swallow, Douglas Coupland’s book, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! (the subtitle comes from a line spoken by McLuhan himself in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall), on the day when Borders’ bankruptcy, long anticipated, was finally announced. Way back when Borders was taking off, expanding nationally, buying WaldenBooks, hadn’t anybody read The Gutenberg Galaxy?

I’m not going to pretend that I read it, not the whole thing. Like everyone else, I thought, at the time, that Marshall McLuhan was hostile to the high culture of the West, and that he relished its immolation in staticky, low-resolution images of bad television. I thought that he welcomed the End of Civilization As We Knew It. I also thought that he was impossible to read. I regarded McLuhan as a mad Canadian, driven by the boredom of the prairies to predict a human cataclysm. But I sensed that he was right about books, somehow or other.

The Enlightenment dream of mass readerships turns out not to have been psychologically acute. For most people, reading is an escapist, not an instructive pastime. Few people read to learn if they’re not required to do so. The vast run of retail history books, for example, is hardly more scholarly than the romance fiction and knitting manuals that “history buffs” look down their noses at on their wives’ and girlfriends’ nightstands; weighty tomes as they may be, the books simply massage pre-existing accumulations of facts relating to this or that war. Reading, ironically, is not a visual activity; it puts our ocular apparatus to an unintended use. (Nothing is more natural than unintended uses.) Most people would rather sit back and watch something. For a century and a half or so, beginning in 1800, a combination of civic virtue — democracies have been thought to depend upon literate electorates —and the absence of alternative entertainments conspired to create the illusion of a vast reading public. Well, there may actually have been a vast reading public, for a while. But it was not a willing one, and when technology advanced after World War II, and authority retreated, books were replaced by screens.

Coupland’s biography, of course, is merely an extended essay, blending stories from McLuhan’s life with glancing meditations on the vastness of Canada, academic pettifoggery, and the Internet — something that McLuhan would have loved to hate, according to the author. This is the kind of book that we like to read now: brisk, knowing, and personal. Of course a biography ought to be personal, you might say, but I mean personal with respect to the writer, who is something of a cultural groundbreaker himself. (Coupland coined the term “Generation X.”)  It will not replace the serious studies by Marchand and Gordon that are mentioned at the outset (but identified only in the notes), but who would read those now save students of intellectual history? You Know Nothing of My Work! links the mad scientist to the mad world that he foresaw. If it fails to deliver a plausible account of the transformation of a Renaissance scholar into a media guru for whom that very term had to be invented, it does a fine job of suggesting why nobody — not McLuhan, not the businessmen who retained him, not even Pierre Trudeau — was able to mine any practical advantage from his work. If McLuhan sensed the outlines of a coming era, he was nevertheless unable to speed the coming. Much of the time, he comes across as a more successful John Forbes Nash, possessed of a beautiful mind that was better attuned to perceptible patterns.

At the end of the book, Coupland tells us that he was inspired to write it by the history of his own Canadian family, and he evokes the life of his cement-salesman grandfather in a passage that’s worthy of Alice Munro.

What thoughts would fill the mind of Arthur Lemuel Campbell? Did he hate the past? Did he want to drive into the future, and, if so, where did he perceive the future as being — to the west? To the east? Above his head? All that driving and all that flatness, all thoses Sundays and rooming house meals with pursed lips and ham hock dinners with creamed corn and the fear of God. Our Father, who are in heaven. And always the family left behind — High River; Regina; Edmonton; Swift Current — family gone crazy, family gone religious, family dying young. Don’t complain and don’t explain. Cut your losses. Cut your family before they cut you. Be weak. Be crazy. Be insane. Be humble. Bow before God. Pretend you’re something you’re not. Rise above your station and pay the price. Keep you opinions to yourself. Die alone, even when surrounded by others. You will be judged. There will never be peace. There will never be sanctuary, because there will always be something lurking on the other side of the horizon that will be a threat to you. Pay cash. Credit is the devil.

Indeed.

Of all the bookstores that I’ve ever visited, Borders was easily the most decadent, the most intoxicated by the idea that books are precious objects that radiate their contents in glimmering auras; there can’t be any need to read books if you’re surrounded by so many excellent titles. (The only thing missing was a line of fragrances named after beloved classics and redolent of the freshest sawdust.) I detected nothing cynical about this projection; the good people at Borders were good people. But there were far too many of them. A proper bookshop ought to be a bit creaky, inconvenient, and forbidding — just a bit. Borders was entirely too dreamy.

Brian Christian’s feature article in the current issue of The Atlantic, “Mind vs Machines,” is billed on the cover as “Why Machines Will Never Beat the Human Mind,” which nicely captures the distance between what the magazine’s editors think will sell and Christian’s rather different point, reflected in the title of his forthcoming book, from which the piece was adapted: The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive. You can win an award for being “the most human human,” as Christian himself has done, if you participate in the Loebner Prize, an annual event that recreates the Turing Test, and snatch victory from the jaws of artificial-intelligence engineers more frequently than the other human  contestants. The crux of Christian’s report is that what makes the Turing Test compelling is the insight that it generates into human complexity. The funhouse aspect of the exercise — trying to fool judges into thinking that they’re talking to people when they’re in fact talking to machines — makes for good headlines, but if Brian Christian is correct, we can expect a jockeying back and forth between man and motherboard in which human beings, regularly losing the title to ever-smarter computers, just as regularly figure out how to win it back. 

Christian reminds us of Alan Turing’s brilliant condensation of the thorny question that emerged after World War II: would the new computing machines ever be capable of thought?

Instead of debating this question on purely theoretical grounds, Turing proposed an experiment. Several judges each pose questions, via computer terminal, to several pairs of unseen correspondents, one a human “confederate,” the other a computer program, and attempt to discover which is which. The dialogue can range from small talk to trivia questions, from celebrity gossip to heavy-duty philosophy — the whole gamut of human conversation. Turing predicted that by the year 2000 computers would be able to fool 30 percent of human judges after five minutes of conversation, and that as a result, one would “be able to speak of machines as thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” 

The millennium turned without smiling on Turing’s forecast, but, in 2008, a computer program came within a hair of winning the Loebner Prize.  This inspired Christian to participate in 2009 — and not only that, but to go for the “most human human” award while he was at it. There was nothing frivolous about his undertaking; it’s quite clear that he didn’t sign up for the test so that he could write a breezy article about it. He was motivated by the fear that human beings were giving up too easily — weren’t, in fact, trying to win. While the AI teams poured boundless time and effort into the design of their simulators, the human confederates were being advised, fatuously, to “just be yourself.” As Christian says, it’s hard to tell whether this pap reflected an exaggerated conception of human intelligence or an attempt to fix the fight in the machines’ favor. 

To the extent that “just be yourself” means anything, it is better expressed in one word: “Relax.” That’s what coaches always seem to be telling their athletes before the big fight, and for highly-trained minds and bodies, it’s probably sound. You can’t show your stuff to true advantage if you’re worrying about what you’ve got. But ordinary people — this is what “ordinary” means — don’t have any stuff to show. What “just be yourself” says to them is “don’t sweat it.” So, on one side, we have ardent engineers, with their brilliant insights and excruciating attention to detail — and probably some serious funding. On the other, “don’t sweat it.” Rocket scientists versus slackers — not much of a contest. 

Christian doesn’t follow this peculiar asymmetry (not in The Atlantic, anyway), but what’s at work here is the same decayed snobbishness with which the Educational Testing Service insists that special preparatory courses and other preliminary efforts are irrelevant to success on its examinations. This is patently untrue, but the cachet of the ETS achievement and aptitude tests remains bound up in the idea that success in life does not require specialized training. This was the lesson taught to us by the great English gentleman of Victorian fact and fiction, men who, by following their whims as far as fortune allowed, acquired skills and insights of almost universal application. Boy Scouts varied this theme by straining to remain semper paratus while carrying the lightest backback. Executive suites are still stuffed with affable generalists who have learned what they know about life from playing golf. In this clubby atmosphere, study and preparation, “boning up” of any kind, looks like a kind of cheating. 

Even Christian is blown sideways by the gale force of this prejudice; he sounds crashingly unsportsmanlike. 

And so another piece of my confederate strategy fell into place. I would treat the Turing Test’s strange and unfamiliar textual medium more like spoken English, and less like the written language. I would attempt to disrupt the turn-taking “wait and parse” pattern that computers understand, and create a single, flowing chart of verbal behavior, emphasizing timing. If computers understand little about verbal “harmony,” they understand even less about rhythm. 

If nothing was happening on my screen, whether or not it was my turn, I’d elaborate a little on my answer, or add a parenthetical, or throw a question back at the judge — just as we offer and/or fill audible silence when we talk out loud. If the judge too too long corresponding to the next question, I’d keep talking. I would be the one (unlike the bot) with something to prove. If I knew what the judge was about to write, I’d spare him the keystrokes and jump in.

It’s almost funny, how shot through this passage is with the air of deception. All these conscious little tricks, all designed to “fool,” you almost think, the judge into regarding Christian as exactly what he is: a real person.  

“Mind vs Machine” shares some invaluable observations about vernacular discourse. In heated exchanges, for example, people respond more and more exclusively to whatever has just been said, and less and less to the overall tenor of the argument. Researcher (and three-time winner of the “most human computer” prize) Richard Wallace has discovered that “most casual conversation is ‘state-less,’ that is, each reply depends only on the current query, without any knowledge of the history of the conversation required to formulate the reply.” This is a windfall for programmers, because a sudden lurch into ill-tempered language is all too convincing evidence of a human-ature tantrum, and very easy for a machine to fake. Christian draws a very practical lesson: 

Aware of the stateless, knee-jerk character of the terse remark I want to blurt out, I recognize that that remark has more to do with a reflex reaction to the very last sentence of the conversation than with either the issue at hand or the person I’m talking to. All of a sudden, the absurdity and ridiculousness of this kind of escalation become quantitatively clear, and, contemptuously unwilling to act like a bot, I steer myself toward a more “stateful” response: better living through science. 

I hope that Christian’s book will make that final point more clearly and happily than his article does. I was deeply put off by a passage that I read before I knew what Christian was up to, when, that is, it seemed that he was doing nothing more interesting than moaning about the possibility that we might some day be overtaken by our mechanical creations. 

The story of the 21st century will be, in part, the story of the drawing and redrawing of those battle lines, the story of Homo spaiens trying to stake a claim on shifting ground, flanked by beast and machine, pinned between meat and math.  

That’s pungent prose, but the metaphor of military conflict could hardly be less welcome — or less apposite to Christian’s far more gracious point, which is that computers, instead of supplanting us, can show us how to be better at what we already are. 

***

If you believe that human beings are the Lords of Creation, then there is nothing to worry about when you sit down to dinner; but if you believe rather that we’re just one species among many, then eating becomes tragic, because it requires us to kill. My own view is that only the only way to draw a line between eating flesh and eating anything at all is to subscribe to a variant of the pathetic fallacy, according to which animals, being more like us than plants, merit kinder treatment — so it’s okay to finish your vegetables. We have to wonder what the editors of The Atlanticwere thinking when they assigned a passel of recent “foodie” books to BR Myers, the Green and vegan professor of North Korean literature. Oh, they were probably hoping for exactly what he delivered, a steaming denunciation of the lot. It’s easy to see why the prim Myers would dislike the louche Anthony Bourdain or the spiritual Kim Severson. But Michael Pollan? 

The moral logic in Pollan’s hugely successful book now informs all food writing: the refined palate rejects the taaste of factory-farmed meat, of the corn-syrupy junk food that sickens the poor, of frozen fruits and vegetables transported wastefully across oceans — from which it follows that to serve one’s palate is to do right by small farmers, factory-abused cows, Earth itself. This affectation of piety does not keep foodies from vaunting their penchant for obscenely priced meals, for gorging themselves, even for dining on endangered animals — but only rarely is public attention drawn to the contradiction. 

If you can find a passage in which Michael Pollan endorses any of the crimes enumerated in the second sentence, please write to Myers to thank him for the tip. Otherwise — and I’m fairly confident that it will have to be “otherwise” — you must still deal with Myers’ attack on everyone else mentioned in his review. I feel none of Myers’s hostility to today’s chic food writers, but I have lost interest in what they have to say, partly because they don’t begin to be honest about the economic elitism that underpins their outlook — those simple, slow-food pleasures are luxury goods, and always will be — and partly because, without getting excited about it, I do agree with Livy (referenced by Myers), that “the glorification of chefs” is probably unhealthy. Writing about food ought to be modest — that’s one of the appeals of Julia Child’s books. Child agreed with the fundamental French precept that there is one (1) right way to do everything, and she sought to convey the rules as clearly as possible to heterodox Americans; but she never raised her voice or succumbed to rapture. Today’s foodies haven’t got Child’s good manners.

The more lives sacrificed for a dinner, the more impressive the eater. Dana Goodyear: “Thirty duck hearts in curry — The ethos of this kind of cooking is undeniably macho.” Amorality as ethos, callousness as bravery, queenly self-absorption as machismo; no small perversion of language is needed to spin heroism out of an evening spent in a chair. 

Well, I couldn’t put it down.  

***

In his favorable review of Sean McMeekin’s The Berlin-Baghdad Expresss: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, Christopher Hitchens identifies the people who ought to read this book (which would include me): 

If asked to discuss some of the events of that period that shaped our world and the world of Osama, many educated people could cite T E Lawrence’s Arab Revolt, the secret Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement portioning out the post-war Middle East, and the Balfour Declaration, which prefigured the coming of the Jewish state. But who can speak with confidence of Max von Oppenheim, the godfather of German “Orientalism” and a sponsor of holy war? An understanding of this conjuncture is essential. It helps supply a key to the collapse of the Islamic caliphate — bin Laden’s most enduring cause of rage — and to the extermination of the Armenians, the swift success of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the relative independence of modern Iran, as well as the continuing divorce between Sunni and Shia Muslims. 

Check!

“It was wrong and bad and exactly right.” This sentence appears in “Sacred  Heart,” the second story in Jennifer Egan’s collection, Emerald City — also her first book. The narrator, Sarah, a fourteen year-old schoolgirl, is on the verge of befriending an oddly attractive classmate named Amanda.

She wore silver bracelets embedded with chunks of turquoise, and would cross her legs and stare into space in a way that suggested she lived a dark and troubled life. We were the same, I thought, though Amanda didn’t know it.

Sarah comes upon Amanda in the girls’ lavatory one day. Amanda is trying to cut herself, but she doesn’t have anything sharp enough. Sarah offers a pin that she is wearing. the pin was a gift from her step-father, whom she dislikes, but without real conviction, “as if my not like him had been decided beforehand by somebody else, and I were following orders.” 

The offer of the pin is not enough; Amanda asks Sarah to do the cutting.  Convinced that Amanda will never be her friend otherwise, Sarah overcomes her revulsion and complies. But Amanda does not quite become her friend. If she and Sarah are “the same,” then Amanda still doesn’t know it. When Sarah confesses that, if she had only one wish in the world, it would be to be Amanda, Amanda pulls away with incredulous laughter: she’s not even going to try to understand Sarah. 

Later, Amanda runs off with her brother (to Hawaii, it turns out), leaving Sarah in despair at having been left behind: her school now becomes the place that Amanda has rejected. This is a theme that runs through Egan’s fiction: home is the place that you leave because you have so literally outgrown it, like a shell that must be sloughed off, that it simply ceases to exist. What’s left is a dull but irritating simulacrum that must be escaped. 

One night, Sarah cuts her arm deeply with a razor blade. It is something between an accident and a suicide; it’s as though she’s offering herself as a sacrifice to Jesus (whom she imagines Amanda’s brother to resemble). The ecstasy is too fast and frightening. She summons her stepfather, who rushes her to the hospital. They make peace. Later, she encounters Amanda, who is now selling shoes in a department store. After a brief, almost desultory conversation, Amanda walks Sarah to the door of the store and gives her a kiss. Sarah treasures the scent of Amanda, only gradually realizing that what she smells is herself. 

You feel that Sarah has negotiated a tricky passage in her life, but you can’t be sure.

In Look at Me, the escapes are recursive. The principal character, Charlotte Swenson, leads a life of escapes that, finally, she escapes once and for all. A rough schematic of her career would have her escaping her childhood home, Rockford, Illinois, at the earliest possible moment, for a life of modelling in New York, where she is happily married for a few years only to find, on assignment in Paris, that she must escape that life. She continues to be a successful model, but she escapes New York at last, on an impromptu road trip with a mysterious foreigner whom she hardly knows. Their destination? Rockport! The foreigner wants to see the heartland. But the road trip turns into something that Charlotte has to escape — which she very nearly kills herself doing. After a long  recuperation (and this is where the novel begins), Charlotte returns to New York to try to resurrect her career, but her reconstructed face is not what it was, and she winds up participating in a bizarre docu-drama about her own (failed) life. In the act of playing herself, Charlotte finally finds resolution — by selling her identity to an Internet outfit that has weirdly prefigures the social network. 

The three other important characters, Charlotte Hauser, her uncle, “Moose” Metcalf,  and the mysterious foreigner, are also engaged in escapes. What is omitted is the reason, the cause, the emergency, the whatever-it-is that makes Egan’s characters believe that they must escape. But it would not be wrong to say that their maneuvers often begin with something that feels wrong and bad and exactly right.

Reading A Visit From the Goon Squad last year was a revelation, but it remains one that I don’t quite understand, and in a series of entries here I want to come to terms with that. I have read Look at Me and The Keep twice; I shall re-read Visit as I work on this project. I don’t mean to slight The Invisible Circus, Egan’s first novel; it’s a great read, not least because it contains the most sustained (but not prolonged) incidents of sexual surrender that I’ve encountered between the covers of a novel. But it did not leave me with the unsettling uncertainty with which I came to the end of the two middle novels, both of which are virtuoso performances as well as ripping yarns. 

David Mendelsohn launches his fond disparagement of Mad Men as an odious comparison to such shows as The Wire, The Sopranos, and Friday Night Lights. 

With these standouts (and there are many more), Mad Men shares virtually no significant qualities except its design. The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish.

Once you’ve read this, you know that Jon Hamm is going to get hammered; the only question is, how soon. Mendelsohn takes his time: the bomb drops toward the end of his essay’s second section. 

The acting itself is remarkably vacant, for the most part—none more so than the performance of Jon Hamm as Don. There is a long tradition of American actors who excel at suggesting the  unconventional and sometimes unpleasant currents coursing beneath their appealing all-American looks: James Stewart was one, Matt Damon is another now. By contrast, you sometimes have the impression that Hamm was hired because he looks like the guy in the old Arrow Shirt ads: a foursquare, square-jawed fellow whose tormented interior we are constantly told about but never really feel. With rare exceptions (notably Robert Morse in an amusing cameo as the eccentric Japanophile partner Bert Cooper), the actors in this show are “acting the atmosphere,” as directors like to say: they’re playing “Sixties people,” rather than inhabiting this or that character, making him or her specific. A lot of Mad Men is like that.

I haven’t seen either The Wire or Friday Night Lights, and, on the basis of the few episodes that I watched, I found the world of The Sopranos to be distasteful — distasteful for the very reason why I’ve enjoyed Mad Men. Mad Men comes closer than any show that I’ve seen to portraying the world that I grew up in. I like to think that I’ve outgrown that world, but there are things about it that I haven’t put behind me, and one of them is a sniffy disdain for Italian-Americans with dodgy connections who live in New Jersey or on Long Island. I’ll watch a good movie about mobsters — Goodfellas has been a fave since the first time I saw it — but two hours is enough; I can’t take an interest in those people that brings me to the television set week after week. In short, I’m in no position to argue with Mendelsohn about the comparative merits of other TV shows. I have a hard enough time watching Mad Men, because it really is the only television that I watch (aside from not-enough TV5, the French-language channel), and I’m not in the habit of showing up for something on time in my own home. 

I do watch Mad Men, though, but not for the interesting reasons that Mendelsohn proposes. In his view, the popularity of Mad Men reflects the grave curiosity of the children in the show, whose real-world counterparts have grown up to form the bulk of its audience. As one of the oldest baby boomers, I’m a bit older than that; I started working at a summer job on Wall Street in 1964, a period that lay in the future when Mad Men began but that has since been left behind. And I’m here to tell you that Mad Men captures not only what that world looked like, but what it felt like as well. And what it felt like was a zizzing nothing, an anxious emptiness.

I watch Mad Men because it makes me feel lucky: I outlived that barren time! Although I disagree with Daniel Mendelsohn’s conclusions about the quality of Mad Men, I agree with many of his observations, only I apply them the United States of 1960, not to Matthew Weiner’s “soap opera.” “Remarkably vacant” is how I would describe the lives of the adults I saw in our prosperous Westchester suburb. We inhabited an atmosphere of phoney optimism that was sustained by overlooking and forgetting the facts of life. It was a time of deliberate inattentiveness to anything beyond the fetishistic palette of appearances, and oblivion about the past. People make silly exaggerated claims about the impact of the Internet on daily life now, but the late Fifties and early Sixties were ensorcelled by a pious devotion to the idea that baroque automobiles and domestic appliances would regenerate human nature. 

Mendelsohn speaks admiringly of the “darkly glinting, almost Aeschylean moral textures” of The Wire and The Sopranos. I can’t imagine anything that would be more out of place in a show about the advertising executives of fifty years ago than tragic necessity. He complains about the inconsequence of many of the narrative threads. I recall a period when just about the only dependable causal relationship was the one between showing up at work and getting paid. Everything else was variable: sometimes interesting but mostly boring — boring and small. You can recreate this world by following a jiffy recipe from one of the period’s many breezy cookbooks: you will wonder why you took the trouble to produce a dish with so little flavor. Insipid edibles were made appealing by exotic serving vessels — fondue pots, clever platters and bowls for dips for Jell-O salads, and outdoor grills. (That these are all still with us doesn’t mean that we need them as we used to do.) The world was painted in saturated pastels that spoke of summer on Mars. Grown men and women talked about nothing: golf and bridge and vacation and novelty. Earnestness of any kind was shunned: the ideal was a “fun” person, someone with a macaroni backbone. The adults of the Western World had annihilated themselves in the final paroxysm of the French Revolution, and seniority devolved upon adolescent postwar Americans who mistook their zealous careerism for maturity. (Even motherhood was a career.) 

I watch Mad Men with the satisfaction that you might feel passing by the marked grave of serial murderer who claimed a victim from your family: I like being sure that it’s really dead. And I mean it literally when I say that Jon Hamm’s impersonation of Don Draper is divine: he not only looks like a god but his eyes crinkle with the pained wisdom of Wotan: alone of his tribe, he knows that not even gods are immortal. He has the grace to avoid the tragic implications of his role; fretting would be bad style. He is a resistance fighter without a cause, a man doing his best to find interest in a wilfully uninteresting world. Jon Hamm is just about perfect as the existentialist hero of an alienated time. I like to think, for his sake, that he’s acting.

Yesterday at Crawford Doyle, I was moved by an unforeseen whim to pick up Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room, one of the many Man Booker 2010 finalists that I did not read last year. From Maria Russo’s review in the Times I got the impression — read in by me, I’m afraid — that the narrator of the book’s three linked novella was a bit of a masochist who couldn’t be comfortable with comfort. Now I can’t remember what made me change my mind. Nor can I remember what made me pick the book up last night, instead of the dozens of others that I’m in the middle of. It seems that the experience of reading In a Strange Room has blotted out the traces that led me to it. Reading the first story, “The Follower,” was certainly a surprising experience, for the last thing I expected was that I’d be laughing out loud, wishing that I could read out some of the more pungent bits to friends.

Two men, a German and a South African, meet on a road in Greece, heading in opposite directions. The next thing you know, the German has changed course, and the two men are visiting a ruin together. Reiner, the German, retails the story of Agamemnon’s bloody welcome-home after the Trojan War. Then, like a boy who has tired of a plaything, he claims not to take much interest in myths, and proposes a climb up the neighboring mountain. Why, asks Damon, the South African.

Because, he says. He is smiling again, there is a peculiar glint in his eye, some kind of challenge has been issued that it would be failure to refuse.

They start to climb. On the lower slope there is a ploughed field they walk carefully around, then the mountain goes up steeply, they pick their way through undergrowth and pull themselves through branches. The higher they go the more jumbled and dangerous the rocks become. After an hour or so they have come out on a lower shoulder of the mountain with its tall peak looming overhead, but he [Damon] doesn’t want to go further than this. Here, he says. Here, Reiner says, looking up, have you had enough. Yes. There is a moment before the answer comes, okay, and when they settle themselves on a rock the German has a strange sardonic look on his face.

Reiner explains to his new friend that he’s taking a trip in order to think through whether he ought to get married. Damon replies that he is simply trying to forget someone, and that this someone is not a woman.

Reiner makes a gesture on the air, as if he is throwing something away. A man or a woman, he says, it makes no difference to me.

And it doesn’t, because it isn’t sex that draws Reiner to Damon. And let it be noted that the follower here is Reiner. It is Reiner who changes his plans at the beginning, and Reiner who flies to South Africa so that he and Damon can go hiking there. Damon’s desire for Reiner does not really seem to be any clearer. In comparison to Damon’s “thin and pale and edible” body, Reiner’s is “brown and hard, perfectly proportioned.

He knows that he is beautiful and somehow this makes him ugly.

Of course it does, because in fact you cannot know that you are beautiful; you can know only that your appearance gives you power over other people. To add the consciousness of this power to your beauty is to turn it into a weapon.

Galgut’s understatement about a man’s desire for another man would be irritating if he did not exploit it to demonstrate how, when two men decide to engage with one another beyond the conventions of friendly mutual cooperation, their relationship, whether eroticized or not, will be clouded by claims of power and priority, both real and imagined. As Reiner and Damon push themselves rather pointlessly through the unwelcoming landscape of Lesotho, the childishness of their power struggle manages, in Galgut’s laconic prose, to seem more inadvertently funny than exasperating.

Over the top of the ridge on the right there is a steep drop, halfway down is a cave larger than the one they slept in last night. Reiner wants to climb to it. But it’s a long way down. So what. So we have to climb back up again. So what. There is another moment of unspoken conflict, the sardonic mockery in the dark eyes of the one man wins over the reluctance of the weaker man, they pick their way down between boulders and aloes, loose pebbles scattering under their feet.

But is Damon the weaker man? It suits him to say so — just as it suits him to strike the note of “sardonic mockery.” In fact, Damon’s one moment of weakness comes when he loses it after a storm, and pours forth a denunciation of his companion, whereupon he abandons their trek. Not following Reiner — that is the weakness. Later, when both men are in Pretoria, still interested in one another but too vain to meet, Damon realizes that Reiner is telling people a version of the story in which he, Damon, is the bad friend. “The two stories push against each other, they will never be reconciled, he wants to argue and explain till the other story disappears.” That’s what I mean by “both real and imagined.” Reiner really indulges in power plays, but that’s not to say that Damon’s understanding of them is not somewhat  imaginary. There is no objective reality here, only a bristling competition of motives, both between the men and within each of them. 

I don’t think that I’ve ever seen the hopeless combination of manly moodiness, caprice, and mortal one-upsmanship presented so starkly and unsentimentally, not even in film. Galgut doesn’t give his characters the chance to kid us with the pretense of grown-up feelings. We’re taught that maturity follows puberty because puberty teaches us that other people feel things as deeply as we do. And maybe it does. But Galgut’s two followers are proof that puberty doesn’t necessarily make us care.

In a Strange Room is not billed as a novel, and that’s just as well, because the “three journeys” of its subtitle are very different trips, and the third story, while highly dramatic in itself, does not serve as any kind of climax to the foregoing two. If anything, it stands for the proposition that climaxes occurring in later life, while more harrowing, carry less significance. What’s very interesting and character-forming for a twentysomething is likely to be blankly catastrophic for someone over fifty, while, from the observer’s standpoint, the amusingly quirky behavior of callow youth is likely or ought to be smoothed out almost to blandness by middle age.  

What with one thing and another, it has been difficult to settle into a pattern of reading. I seem to have regressed as a reader; either I’m consumed by a book and drop everything else while I finish it, or I’m not consumed, and the book may never get read past the first thirty pages. If I weren’t aware of my own delusional tendencies, I’d say that I’ve been good lately about buying books, ie not buying them. And perhaps I’ve slowed down a bit. But I could go without buying another book this year and never get near the bottom of my pile.

This morning, more in desperation than anything else, I fished out a slim volume from the more recent strata of acquisitions, Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Not only did it promise to be a quick read, but Dot McCleary, who recommended it to me at Crawford Doyle, has asked me at least once what I thought of it, and I’ve been embarrassed to admit that I haven’t gotten to it. Pullman’s conceit is that Mary gave birth to twins, one of whom grew up to be Jesus, the radical preacher and example of virtue, while the other became the Christ, the founder of the insitutional church that Pullman abominartes, as does his Jesus, whose prayers in Gethsemane implore the Lord God, if He exists, to prevent the rise of precisely the sort of organization that came to be headquartered at the Vatican. Christ is not really a scoundrel; but he believes more in justice than in mercy, and he eagerly colludes with an angel’s request to write down Jesus’s words as they ought to have been, not as they really were.  This gives Pullman an opportunity to “correct” a number of famous parables and anecdotes — most shockingly, the story of Mary and Martha. I can’t wait to finish the book, which I’d be doing right now if I weren’t writing about it here, which gives you some idea of my warped priorities.

Alice Munro had a story in last week’s New Yorker, but I didn’t get to it until last night, when I saved it for bedtime. Which was perfect, because when I finished it, I didn’t want to read anything else; I was ready to turn out the lights and let my mind drift among the four young people, two of whom appear in middle age at the end. Although there is nothing in the least bit ornate about the story, I couldn’t help thinking of a courtly dance, or at least a pas de quatre in a grand ballet, in which the lovers are mismatched.

In the early summer, Royce got on  a bus and went to visit Grace on her parents’ farm. The bus had to pass the down where Avie lived, and by chance from his window he saw Avie, standing on the sidewalk of the main street, talking to somebody. She as full of animation, whipping her hair back wen the wind blew it in her face. He remembered that she had quit college just before her exams. Hugo had graduated and got a job teaching high school in some northern town, where she was to join him and marry him.

Grace had told Royce that Avie had had a bad scare, and it had caused her to come to this decision. Then it had turned out to be all right — she wasn’t pregnant — but she had decided she might as well go ahead anyway.

Avie didn’t look like anybody trapped by a scare. She looked carefree, and in in immensely good spirits — prettier, more vivid, than he ever remembered seeing her.

He had an urge to get off the bus and not get on again. But, of course, that would land him in more trouble than even he could contemplatge. Avie was sashaying across the street in front of the bus now anyway, disappearing into a store.

Getting off the bus, as the story works out, would have landed Royce and Avie in what, in retrospect, certainly looks like a better chance at happiness. But that is how Munro holds us: she makes us feel those might-have-been blues as poignantly as if the missed chance had been our own. 

I wish that I liked Matthew Gallaway’s new novel better. The Metropolis Case is imaginative — to a fault, but that’s not what put me off — intelligent, and often enormously moving. The characters are fully realized and quite likeable — even the difficult Maria Sheehan, who sings like a goddess but who has a punk mouth on her. The novel’s areas of interest, so to speak, are opera (with a major in Wagner) and New York City — what’s not to love. The plot ingeniously weaves together narrative and symbolic strands from several masterpieces of the lyric stage, and it delivers, in its way, on its title reference, which is to an opera by Leos Janaček, Več Makropulos (The Makropulos Case). I am not going to unpack any of these references; it’s enough to say that Gallaway handles them sensitively. He knows what he is doing.

If only, I wished, he knew how he was writing. Well, no doubt he did and does. But his choice of tone was both grating and disappointing. The richly brooding quality of his stories called to mind some of the greatest contemporary writers, Joseph O’Neill, Andrew Holleran, and Colm Tóibín. This is a book that fearlessly confronts the tragic side of love — the loss of it, the impossibility of it — on both the parental and companionate scales. Like Darren Aronofksy’s Black Swan, The Metropolis Case recreates and re-imagines works that its characters are engaged in performing. The dark moments in the book are well-composed; they wouldn’t be moving, otherwise. It’s what fills up the book in between those moments that’s annoying and mistaken. Instead of fixing on a tone of suggestive restraint, Gallaway is prodigal with scenic details, and his default setting is “novel of manners.” This essentially comic voice is what grates. It’s not that the book is funny; it’s not (although there are a few good laughs). But it is very much a novel of daylight. In a book that breathes the heavy aura of Tristan und Isolde, daylight is the last thing that’s wanted.

About two thirds of the way through, I imagined a frightful conversation between the author and some of his friends, in which they cautioned him that a book about opera that takes place partly in Nineteenth Century Paris and Vienna would be lacking in hanger appeal. Maybe nobody mentioned another opera, Hansel and Gretel, but that’s what I thought of: like the witch, Gallaway compensated for the récherché nature of his material by piling on loads of name checks, related with a chatty-Cathy determination to put the reader in the picture.

Having addressed the needs of his new charge, Martin sliced himself two pieces of French sourdough; on one he spread his favorite Pierre Robert Camembert and on the other placed several slices of prosciutto di Parma and a sweet sopressata. These he took back to his study, along with a bottle of Shiraz he cradled in the nook of his elbow; a large wineglass, and an opener he carried in the fingers of his left hand, which in the course of the past hour or so had again started to ache. Dante, apparently full — although he did not say so, to Martin’s slight disappointment — sat quietly on the corner of the rug. “Good job,” he patenrally addressed the cat, who looked through him with an utter lack of acknowledgment that Martin did not fail to appreciate, for it seemed to reinforce his expectation that dante was not the sort who planned to run around breaking things, or even needed to be told otherwise.

I’d have preferred to jump into Gallaway’s imaginative brick oven without such enticements. Dante, the cat in the foregoing paragraph, is soon joined by Beatrice, whose eventual death is lovingly, almost climactically, retold at the end. (It could not be clearer that this is a passage taken straight from the life.) The fact that Beatrice meets her sad end at the Animal Medical Center, a facility a few blocks south of where I receive quarterly infusions of Remicade, did not exactly conduce to a transfiguring literary experience. But that’s just me.

The worst thing about such a profusion of details is that one or two inevitably clatter to the floor and break — because they’re wrong. In a comedy, who cares? On a walk with love and death such as this book takes us on, the racket is jarring. The first accident that I noticed occured on page 33, where we’re told that Lucien Marchand’s father has been “awarded a life tenancy for providing the beleaguered emperor with a cure for what in polite society was called la condition infernale…” The problem is that this entry is dated — each chapter begins with a date-stamp — Paris, 1846. To the best of my knowledge, there was only one emperor on earth at that time, Asian potentates and the Tsar aside, and, living in Vienna as he did, the Kaiser was unlikely to have the gift of life tenancies on the Ile St-Louis. Louis Napoleon would not preside over the Second Empire for a few years yet. This error could have been fixed at a stroke; France had a king at the time, and kings are no less familiar with impotence than emperors. If you’re going to name a monarch, you’d better name him correctly. The last error that I caught was even sloppier: Lucien addressed his first male lover, in his death-throes, as “mon chère.”

I hate coming away from a book disappointed; I feel that I haven’t done it justice. I can at least say that wishing that I’d like it more is honest: I did like it, often very much. More and more as it went on — as it went on, the narrative got thicker and richer. But oh, I wish that Matthew Gallaway had trusted more in what Tristan and Isolde have to say about Nacht and Tag.

How can a collection of letters between two middle-aged women, writing in the 1950s, be monumental? It’s taking a while to sort that out. What’s not in doubt is that As Always, Julia: Food, Friendship & the Making of a Masterpiece is a monument. The letters running back and forth between Julia Child and Avis DeVoto are a great read, but the book itself is a commemorative object,  preserving the record of something important. The ‘something important’ isn’t the back-story to Mastering the Art of French Cooking  or the How-Julia-Got-Famous legend. What I mean is the testament to exceptional humanity that exudes from the correspondence. (Never has an exchange of letters more ardently lived up to that term!) My talk of monuments and exceptional humanity might conjure expectations of heroism and bravado that the book will disappoint, but I’ll take that risk and venture to propose other expectations: what we find in these letters is the ready ability to make truly interesting writing out of everyday whole cloth, and perhaps because I am in late middle age myself I find ordinary life more challenging than emergencies, precisely because the challenge of the ordinary, unlike that of an emergency, can be disregarded with impunity. You can just look the other way while your life courses through the neck of the hourglass. People do it all the time. (How else to explain television?) Avis and Julia were fortunate women, and they knew it; and we know it because their letters are imbued with a gratitude that takes the form of attentive appreciation of the world before them. The letters, no less than the great cookbook, repay good fortune by opening it up to us. 

As the years passed by — the letters span for nearly a decade, from early 1952 to the spring of 1961 — I was tickled by an idle conundrum: to what extent were these women feminists? From one perspective, neither was interested in what we call women’s issues. They came from relatively lofty backgrounds (Julia especially), were highly educated and well-traveled, and married interesting, good-natured men — whom they loved. They were not unhappy with the prosperous housewife’s calendar of duties, and Avis appears to have been a doting mother. It’s clear that Julia occupied a remarkably unusual position in American culture, in that she practiced a domestic art with professional rigor, keeping her eye on the ball while extending a vaguely maternal welcome. Because no one with a voice like hers had ever appeared regularly on television, she was a sensation in the way that maiden aunts can be sensational: unintentionally funny but wholly endearing. (As the years passed by — the real ones, I mean — we would learn that there was nothing ridiculous about the woman.) Because she had so little to do with the general idea of “femininity,” there was little to antagonize the feminists. There she was, counseling housewives to spend hours over hot stoves, because it was fun.

Whether anyone would listen to her was very much the matter that the publishers disputed. Like the women’s magazines, which consistently refused to print any of the recipes that would go into Mastering the Art, the businessmen at Houghton, Mifflin foresaw the dismay with which “housewife/chauffeurs” would recoil from the book’s exhaustive instructions. William Koshland, at Knopf, in contrast, saw that the instructions would make good cooking easier — because they were clear, lucid, good instructions. Once you familiarize yourself with the method for making a soufflé, and commit a few measurements to memory, making a soufflé is as straightforward as making a ham sandwich, and you never have to look at a cookbook again. This distinction, with some people seeing enlightening complexity where others see alarming complication, does not run on an axis that is easily oriented to arguments for and against feminism. That’s why the conundrum is idle: it doesn’t matter whether Julia and Avis were feminists. They were passionate Democrats!

It did not take long for me to decide that Avis was the more natural writer. Not the better writer, necessarily, but the one more compelled to express herself in prose. (I don’t begin to know enough about her long association with Bread Loaf to understand how it failed to inspire her to have her own career as a writer.) Hers is the greater emotional range, and hers the wider array of registers. She also wrote more — much more, if you discount Julia’s discussions of her book. As the mother of two young men — the book ends, quite sweetly, with her offer to get Harvard Commencement tickets for the Childs; her son, Mark (who turned 71 the other day), was about to graduate — and the wife of a college professor, Avis was in touch with youthful speech patterns, and her tone is often what used to be called ‘smart.’ “Everybody horribly restless because after four-day frightful heat wave a real humdinger of a storm is toying with us…” At the risk of confusing apples with oranges, I’d have to say that Avis’s style is what the French call BCBG — bon chic, bon genre. For all her housewifely devotion, you can imagine Avis rewriting the Cindi Lauper song: “Girls Just Get to Have Fun.” Not that they get to have just fun. In the middle of the book’s time span, Bernard suffers a fatal heart attack in a New York hotel room, and Avis’s devastation is marked mostly by silence. A slightly more distant passing, however, prompts a profoundly memorable letter to Julia:

I wrote you a note from St Petersburg and I hope it reached you. My old pa telephoned Sunday midnight last week to say my mother had just died in the hospital. He was all in pieces and wanted me to come down so I flew down next day and took over. It was a rugged five days, and I thank God is all I can say that it was so quick. Cancer of the breast, and two more weeks in hospital and then all over. She was lucky. So was Dad and he knows it now. The thing I have always dreaded most is having either of them require long nursing, which is so terrible for everybody and would pretty well put me in the soup financially as well. I had to arrange everything, and funerals in the hinterland are something — viewing of the remains and all that. But it all went off rather smoothly, none of the horrors I had expected, and I cleared everything of hers out of the apartment, but quick. Only thing to do. Incredible woman. She saved things like the Collier brothers. Eighteen boxes of notepaper and she used to write me on the backs of old Christmas cards. Unopened boxes of stockings I had sent her. Forty years of medical clippings, some of them yellow with age and quite outdated. And yet when she was sickshe never wanted anybody to know anything about it until it was over, for which I am deeply grateful. Nobody but Dad knew she was in the hospital this time. I never got along with her, but I will hand her this, and it’s a great deal — she never clung, or whined or complained, and she let me live my own life. 

My father is 86, thin and reasonably spry and except for bad eyes, in good health. He seems to be the only Democrat in St Petersburg and we cheered each other up considerably by discussing politics, about which he knows a great deal. He’s a cutie — Scotch and deadpan and full of wry humor. And now an old, old man. St Petersburg is about as non-U a place as there is in this country — dreary beyond measure to me, but he is rather used to it now. And by God they do take care of the old people — everyone exceedingly kind and gentle and friendly. Living is incredibly cheap. Cafeterias are just wonderful. For a dollar and a quarter you can get a big piece of good roast beef and everything that goes with it, good vegetables, fine salads, and superlative apple pie. He does this once a day, and picks up his other two meals in his own little kitchen. Not much appetite at that age, so I left him three bottles of rye with orders to take a little nip in the evening, for his appetite’s sake. He ate lunch and dinner with me at the hotel while I was there and had a drink each time — the first in years. His landlady is one of those wonderful lower middle class types who never read a book in her life, but is pure gold, full of energy and kindness. And he has many friends close by. So I will try not to fret about him. But he knows and I know that the next call from St Petersburg will probably be for me to go down and bury him. Such a nice man. And it’s just hell to be old and have no function in life.

There is nothing like this in Julia’s letters. Nothing quite so personal (about another person), and nothing quite so detailed (about another person’s life). The material is instinctively well-organized, The two paragraphs share an emotional trajectory, beginning with a generalized, social sorrow (the death of a parent; the dreariness of retirement communities), passing into engaging anecdote (the things her mother hoarded; her father’s diet), and concluding on a note of intense but restrained regret (“I never got along with her”; “But he knows and I knows and I know…”).What Avis has fashioned of her grief is nothing less than a pair of fine silhouettes of her parents; one can almost see them hanging on the wall, in matching oval frames. The world of Mastering the Art couldn’t be further away from the atmosphere of cached stockings and cafeteria roast beef — or so you might think. In fact, as this book of letters shows again and again, one of the finest and most useful treatises ever published was brought forth by two American women who were remarkably open to life, and cheerfully rueful about shrugging off its banalities.

Until last night, I hadn’t heard of Karen Owen and her PowerPoint presentation. Ms Owen, an undergraduate at Duke University, decided to treat thirteen college athletes with whom she had sex as “subjects” of a faux-sociological report — which is to say that she rated them with astringent candor. Having read about the presentation in Caitlin Flanagan’s aghast article in The Atlantic, I can see that there’s no need to continue beyond the first couple of slides. 

But the 42 slides of Owen’s report on her “horizontal academics” are so dense with narrative detail, bits of dialogue, descriptions of people and places, and reproduced text-message conversations that they are a chore to read. It’s as though two impulses are at war with one another: the desire to recount her sexual experiences in a hyper-masculine way—marked by locker-room crudeness and PowerPoint efficiency—fighting against the womanly desire to luxuriate in the story of it all.

A chore to read at best. A Calvary, I should think, for her family. If nothing else, it confirms my ancient convinction that, classrooms aside, male and female students ought not to share the same campus. 

Sex education needs a serous re-think: the sexes need to be taught about one anotheer. It would appear the learning the mechanics of the thing is the least of the problem that faces young people. Boys in addition need to learn that gratifying their own desires, whatever these might be, is always less important than respecting the human independence of their partner(s). This principle is right up there with the prohibition of murder and the rules against stealing things. Which brings me to the other Atlantic article that I read last night, Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s pornography update, “Hard Core.” Vargas-Cooper grasps an aspect of sexuality that doesn’t, I think, get enough frank discussion; when it comes up, it’s tarted up as “role-playing.” I’m speaking of power, as in the exercise of — and the tremendous ambivalence that men feel in the face of a partner’s surrender. 

Never was this made plainer to me than during a one-night stand with a man I had actually known for quite a while. A polite, educated fellow with a beautiful Lower East Side apartment invited me to a perfunctory dinner right after his long-term girlfriend had left him. We quickly progressed to his bed, and things did not go well. He couldn’t stay aroused. Over the course of the tryst, I trotted out every parlor trick and sexual persona I knew. I was coquettish then submissive, vocal then silent, aggressive then downright commandeering; in a moment of exasperation, he asked if we could have anal sex. I asked why, seeing as how any straight man who has had experience with anal sex knows that it’s a big production and usually has a lot of false starts and abrupt stops. He answered, almost without thought, “Because that’s the only thing that will make you uncomfortable.” This was, perhaps, the greatest moment of sexual honesty I’ve ever experienced—and without hesitation, I complied. This encounter proves an unpleasant fact that does not fit the feminist script on sexuality: pleasure and displeasure wrap around each other like two snakes.

Although Vargas-Cooper doesn’t seem terribly upset by her encounter with the “polite, educated fellow” — educated in what? — it made me sick that anyone would corrupt an intimate encounter by asking to inflict pain — to introduce an absolute distance. (I hope that you grasp the difference between wanting to make someone else uncomfortable — this fellow’s stated objective — and asking to “try something out” that, while causing some discomfort, might also afford the partner a kinky sexual satisfaction.) I’m not shocked by the desire, but the guy’s bad manners are astonishing. Not that there is anything about Vargas-Cooper’s report that likens him to a rapist. He seems to have remained “polite” in bed (his problem, perhaps?). It’s that hse seems to have believed that his partner could give him permission to make her uncomfortable. 

It is easy to hold up the stories told in the two Atlantic pieces against nostalgia for the good old days of respectability, which afforded a woman who chose to take advantage of it a great deal of protection from the predations of male sexuality. But that’s a mistake as well as a distraction. It’s a good thing that women can’t “fall” anymore — not even Karen Owen. The question isn’t who gets to have sex with whom. The question is what kind of sex is wrong for everybody. We seem to be on the same page about children and non-consensual sex — verboten. Perhaps those are the only workable general rules. But the idea that “sex is good full stop” is preposterously naive, and if the flower children of the Sixties may be forgiven for their ignorant excesses, no such innocence is available today. 

As an aside, I think that it’s worth thinking whether the uncorseting of the American libido had the side-effect of eliminating shame on the subject of income inequality.

In response to my entry, last week, about Colm Tóibín’s story, “Barcelona, 1975,” my friend Ellen Moody wrote,

The reality is fiction is free: for some writers it’s not limited to states of mind or whatever we as readers like to read about. It may give Toibin great pleasure to re-enact the sex act as it may other readers. I agree with your response but know it’s just one. The story is interesting because in The South the narrator is a painter who goes to Barcelona and creates a life with a man — so there is autobiographical content in South. 

Something about Ellen’s comment — the idea that a a writer might re-enact a sexual encounter by writing about it  — woke me up to something about reading novels and stories, which most people consider a perfectly private thing. I do not. I am never alone when I read fiction. I am quite conscious of reading in a gathering — a gathering of other readers and writers past, present, and future. I may not have any distinct names in mind (although when I read Colm Tóibín’s fiction I always think of Henry James, and I wonder what The Master would think of it), but I am in company. And that’s why I’m a bit squeamish about plumbing — by which I mean not only sexual sensations but gastro-intestinal ones as well. There is something about obtrusive organic processes that breaks down the self, and this diminishment is embarrassing in a crowd. Especially now that we’re all so much more candid about memoir, and can publish just about every fact from our past, I want fiction to capture life not at its most intense but at its most aware. (That is certainly the lesson of The Master!) I have no objection to a blow-by-blow-by-blow account of Tóibín’s erotic life in Barcelona, so long as it’s fact, and includes all the heartbreak that the writer strains from his stories. But when it comes to fiction, I would prefer not to read about anything that Tóibín wouldn’t be doing in my presence.

(What about crime fiction? Perhaps this is what genre means: the simulation, by a quickened pulse, of someone else’s plumbing.)

“The Street,” as I said last week, is another story. The Master might wrinkle his nose here and there, but it would be only fair of him to concede that “The Street” is a masterpiece of feeling intensified by disciplined point of view. It is not so much that we see what Malik, a poor Pakistani migrant worker recently brought to Barcelona, sees as that we touch it through his words. Because Malik’s language has no correlative of “gay” or “lover” or even “romance,” his description of what we would call an affair is altogether free of shorthand. Without handy but hackneyed keywords, Malik’s awareness of his attachment to Abdul (another migrant) is unself-conscious. He knows that it is considered “bad” to have such feelings for another man, but this makes him careful, not guilty. It also makes him confused, doubly: he not only doesn’t know what’s going to happen, but he also has no idea how it ought to happen. It’s as though Tóibín were describing a natural dancer learning his first steps.

The story’s brief moment of “graphic sex” is essential precisely because it is discovered, and the discovery changes everything for the two men, quite badly at first, as you would expect, but then for the better. It is never made clear why the leaders of the Pakistani community decide to grant Malik and Abdul a measure of privacy, but this is world (not unlike the writer’s Ireland) where humane kindness is tempered by the withholding of explanation, tantamount to denial. Malik and Abdul are not to forget that their love is suffered. The story ends on a transfigured note.

But all of that was hours away, the hours after darkness fell. Now it was still bright. And all Malik wanted was for this walk to go on, for him to say nothing more and for Abdul to leave a silence too, for both of them to move slowly by the big strange bronze fish, both of them looking at the tossed sand and the small waves breaking and being pulled out again, out to sea. Both of them were on their afternoon off, away from all the others, away from the street; both of them were slowly walking away from everything as though they could, but not minding too much when they had to turn back and face the city again. Brushing against each other, they both knew that they could do that only once or twice, and only when no one was watching them.

That’s more like it.

If you want to know why Julia Child and Avis DeVoto got to be such good friends long before they actually met, the answer is very simple: both were tireless correspondents. No slouch in this department myself, I feel like a total piker every time I finish one letter and begin the next. These unflagging typists wrote at length! They also wrote very well, and you forget from time to time that they are writing off the tops of their heads, not for publication in the book that you hold in your hand.

But it’s this generosity at the keyboard that cemented their bond, not kindred spirits. I’m not at all sure that they would have become good friends had they started off face-to-face; although generally sympathetic, they were very not on the same track at all. Avis DeVoto was happy to be a devoted wife and mother; Julia wanted to Do Something. There was something of the hipster about Avis, a breeziness that might have sat very poorly with Julia’s good-humored earnestness. Here, for example, is Avis’s retort to Julia’s fondness for pigeonholing people:

I think you are carrying this Upper Middle Brow etc. thing too far, my good girl. I told you I distrust categories and I am pleased that Paul does too. It is too pat and all-inclusive, and if I know anything at all it is that there are no final answers to anything, and the older I get the less I know and the less final the answers are. It’s just possible, you know, that those upper middle class Republicans you distrust may have some answers that are better than we eggheads have. Could be. You can only approximate — and if you can do that occasionally you’re in luck. I condemn all kinds of Republican thinking, but really I know better, because I’m continually being surprised by the good things about these people. And I’ve been living in the pockets of the intellectuals for thirty years and some of them are the awfullest fools. If I could write I would write a book called the “Care and Feeding of Intellectuals.” There aren’t any more final answers about how people’s minds work than there are about how their marriages work. I used to think, in my innocence, that there were some awfully well-adjusted people who got on together like a house afire most of the time. Well, there aren’t. Or if there are I never met them. All you have to do is know them well enough to find out how things really are. In the family I bet on for years and years — four wonderful children, a fine position in the community,  great sympathy between husband and wife — it turns out (and this I might mistake but B. never makes mistakes like that) the husband has got definite strong homosexual tendencies though I doubt if he has faced them, and the wife is a mass of well-concealed panic. They function damn well, but at what a cost. Thoreau was quite right, you know. It turns me into a mush about the human race, I love them all so much. I am quite sure I could never love McCarthy, but I suppose I could love Eisenhower, the poor boob.

As I see it, DeVoto and Child were brought together by the extended correspondence course in one another’s personalities that they conducted for two years before they met, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Speaking of which, there’s an interesting ambiguity in Joan Reardon’s introduction to the second chapter of her edition of the letters, which recounts the women’s meeting, which was nothing at all like the scene in Julie & Julia; the Childs arrived at the DeVotos’ in the middle of a cocktail party.

As Avis recalled in a short unpublished remembrance of Julia, Bernard was trying to finish a book and wanted no part of Avis’s plan to have guests for a week or more. “Benny wasn’t very happy about strangers. But he went up to Julia and he said, ‘What will you have to drink?’ and she looked down at him, because she’s a very tall woman, and said, ‘Well, I think I’ll have one of those martinis I’ve been reading about [in Harper’s].’ Julia drank two or three without turning a hair, although she must have felt them. Bernard admired that enormously, so his attitude toward the Childs’ visit softened a great deal.”

That bracketed referernce to Harper’s — Reardon’s or DeVoto’s? Because it’s clear that Julia had been reading about the martinis in her new friend’s letters. (Among other things, the martinis explain why the DeVotos didn’t — couldn’t — drink much wine. 

***

You can stop here if you’d rather not hear more about The Kindly Ones. Ever since I claimed, a week or so ago, that Max Aue, Jonathan Littell’s hero, is a man like any other, and not a monster, I’ve been nagged by the recollection of Max’s homicidal frenzies. The murders at the heart of the novel are so dire that Max has no recollection of them, even years later, in his quiet postwar life in France. (Since the book is narrated by Max, we don’t witness the murders, but, like the detectives who dog his footsteps right up to the novel’s end, we realize that the killer can only have been he.) In the middle of a long march back to Berlin, behind enemy lines, Max shoots an elderly organist playing Bach in a private chapel on a Pomeranian estate..

The old man finished the piece and turned to me: he wore a onocle and a neatly trimmed little white moustache, and an berstleutnant’s uniform from the other war, with a cross at his neck. “They can destroy everything,” he said to me calmly, “but not this. It is impossible, this will remain forever: it will go on even when I stop playing.” I didn’t say anything and he attacked the next contrapunctus. Thomas was still standing. I got up too. I listened. The music was magnificent, the organ wasn’t very powerful but it echoed in this little family church, the lines of counterpoint met each other, played, danced with each other. But instead of pacifying me, this music only fueled my anger. I found it unbearable. I wasn’t thinking about anything, my head was empty of everything except this music, and the black presence of my rage. I wanted to shout at him to stop, but I let the endd of the piece go by, and the old man started the next one, the fifth. His long aristocratic fingers fluttered over the keys, pulled or pushed the stops. When he slapped them shut at the end of the fugue, I took out my pistol and shot him in the head. He collapsed forward onto the keys, opening half the pipes in a desolate, discordant bleat. I put my pistol away, went over, and pulled him back by the collar; the sound stopped, leaving only the sound of blood dripping from his head onto the flagstones. “You’ve gone completely mad!” Thomas snarled. “What’s the matter with you?” I looked at him coldly. I was livid but my cracked voice didn’t tremble. “It’s because of these corrupt Junkers that Germany is losing the war. National Socialism is collapsing and they’re playing Bach. It should be forbidden.”

(Do I detect a sly echo of  Adorno in that “forbidden”?)

I’m not going to try to square this with a claim for Max’s humanity, much less the far grislier strangulation of an importunate lover in a lavatory, during a disorderly party during the very final days of the Reich. Nor the murders on the last page! I will note that Max’s murders are impassioned; conversely, he cannot bear to take part in the “actions” against the Jews, in which all members of the SS, officers as well as their men, are expected to participate. Max’s squeamishness in this regard is noted by the gimlet eyes of his superiors; at last there is nothing for it but to climb down into a ravine and shoot. 

Men came and went, they shot round after round, almost without stopping. I was petrified, I didn’t know what to do. Grafhorst came over and shook me by the arm. “Obersturmführer!” He pointed his gun at the bodies. “Try to finish off the wounded. “I took out my pistol and headed for a group; a very young man was sobbing in  pain, I aimed my gun at his head and squeezed the trigger, but it didn’t go off, I had forgotten to lift the safety catch. I lifted it and shot him in the forehead, he twitched and was suddenly still. 

Max is genuinely and deeply grieved when his new friend, Leutnant Dr Voss, a linguist attached to the army (not the SS), is killed by peasants who dialect he is
studying. He rushes to the dying man’s bedside and begs the attending doctor to administer morphine even though it is in short supply. “I gently touched Voss’s cheek with the back of my fingers, and went out too.”

In the middle of Colm Tóibín’s new collection of short fiction, The Empty Family, there is a story called “Barcelona, 1975.” Its artistry is considerable. An erotic souvenir of the writer’s youth, it revisits the season in which Francisco Franco died and the city that he most mistrusted came to life. The slice of life that interests the author is, understandably, Barccelona’s gay community — anachronistic as that label would have been — and most of the action is set in a top-floor warren of rooms constituting apartments within an apartment. There is a painter, a literature student, an unspecified partner at an orgy, and then the narrator’s lover. The story sticks to the surface and avoids motivation; the only thing that the narrator discloses about himself is that he was very lonely until he met the painter and the student; prior to that encounter, he wished that he had never left Dublin. The painter and the literature student introduce him to a new world, one in which motivation is obvious, manifest in the form of erect penises. Several of these are seen in action. When the narrator leaves his lover, however, there is no explanation. It is impossible to say what, if anything, “happened.”

I stopped seeing my lover. Six months later, however, when I got a flat around the corner from Plaza Real, I discovered that he had moved to another flat on the same floor of the building where we had met. If he was home, the lights were visible from one of the streets betweeen Escudellers and the Plaza Real. Sometimes when I walked home I would check the light and if I was feeling in the right mood I would call in to him. He would play his old game of talking and listening as though there were no sexual charge between us. And then I would move towards him and touch him, and, just like the first time, he would remain still, in his lovely old trance. This transformation from the social to the sexual, which I could do in a split second, took him time. And then he was ready.

All these years later, I can still take pleasure in the tight, hard shape of him, his tongue, the knob of his dick, the glitter of his eyes, his shy smile. I always knew that if I did not keep him, he would go. Someone else would claim him.

And that’s precisely what happens in the next, and final paragraph of the story.

The second time I read the story, I knew what was coming, and the graphic descriptions of love-making were not as obtrusive. But I still thought that the story would be better without them. (I know that I would feel much the same if the characters were men and women engaging in heterosexual sex.) The art of fiction is concerned with the recreation of states of mind, and nothing punctures the illusion faster than the hard, physical detail that the reader finds unsympathetic or incomprehensible. Or, conversely, arousing. I do not think that the reader whose libido quickens in response to a story is capable of giving it complete attention. In the end, detailing acts of love reduces the lovers to pipes and plungers: so much plumbing. I want to know why the narrator “stopped seeing” his lover. I remain interested in motivations. I haven’t been to Barcelona, and I’d rather hoped that Colm Tóibín would take me, but that’s not something that interests him. 

In the story that concludes the collection, “The Street,” however — but that’s another story for another day.

Trying to fashion a coherent response to The Kindly Ones in the immediate aftermath of its impact is wearying work, given my stunned and deranged state of mind. I’m aware of several objectives that don’t cohere. I’ve just read one of the most austerely monumental books that I’ll encounter in my lifetime, but the experience was occasionally so unpleasant that it feels foolish to press the book on your attention with glowing praise. By “unpleasant,” I don’t refer to the gas chambers and the genocide that are always in the background and occasionally in the foreground. I don’t refer to not infrequent display of fecal inconvenience. This subject-matter unpleasantness is, as one has every right to insist, handled ably by the writer’s prose. What I refer to is the impossibility of regarding Max Aue as a monster. The triumph of this novel is its humanization of a participant in the Final Solution. For many readers, I know, “triumph” is not the word for such an achievement; “disgrace” is more like it. But I am one of those people for whom a tiny but unbridgeable gap stretches between moral mind and committed deed, such that the mind is never captured by and reduced to the size of the deed. 

I’m going to jump in to a moment, about four fifths of the way into this thousand-page novel, that burned with cinematic intensity when I read it and that has lodged in my mind undigested. Forty-odd years ago, the scene might have been dished up by Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller, marinated in absurdist irony. A crazed ghost of raucous laughter still seems to rumble from the far corners of the view — we are standing on one of those ramps where incoming prisoners are “selected” — but therre is none of the distance that makes absurdity funny. 

A bit of background. After his recovery from a gunshot wound that he rather strangely survives, Max casts about for a job in France, but in vain. At the prompting of two shadowy titans of business, Max reluctantly takes on an assignment relating to the concentration camps. Impressed by the pessimism of Albert Speer, who forecasts disaster for the Reich if the production of arms and vehicles is not increased, Max seizes on the hope of putting Germany’s prisoners to work. At first, the bustle of setting up and staffing an office, of arranging meetings and keeping busy, buoys Max up. Not for long, though. What’s alarming about Max’s exhaustive complaints is steady drip of pointlessness that leaks through them. Max imagines that he is running into various obstacles that might, if approached correctly, be moved, but it’s clear to us that all the research into nutrition and the reports on prison populations is simply useless. It’s partial and unreliable going in, and going out, it will have no impact on what anyone actually does. Max’s project is doomed by corruption, indifference, and the rising sense of national emergency. And because Max is trying to save lives, if only in the short term and for the purposes of extracting labor, we’re doubly disheartened: poor Max, poor prisoners. The power of The Kindly Ones rises from Jonathan Littell’s ability to make Max’s workday problems gripping by stretching them out, in lean but comprehensive physical detail, over questions of life and death. If lives, if the future of the Reich were not at stake (contrary goals), then perhaps none of it would be interesting. But since they are, listening to Max is not only fascinating but flabbergasting. After an “action” in Hungary, Max speeds up to Auschwitz, only to find that the rations problem is never going to come up, because most prisoners are immediately dispatched to the crematorium. It’s as though someone in a roomful of people without skills were to call out, “let’s put on a show.”

There wasn’t too much disorder; for a long time I observed the doctors who carried out the selection (Wirths wasn’t there), they spent one or two seconds on each case, at the slightest doubt it was no, they seemed also to refuse many women who looked perfectly able-bodies to me; when I pointed this out to him, Höss told me they were following his instructions, the barracks were overcrowded, there wasn’t any more room to put people in, the factories were making a fuss, weren’t taking these Jews fast enough, and the Jews were piling up, epidemics were beginning again, and since Hungary kept sending them every day, he was forced to make room, he had already carried out several selections among the inmates, he had also tried to liquidate the Gypsy camp, but there had been problems and it had been put off till later, he had asked for permission to empty the Theresienstadt “family camp” and hadn’t yet received it, so in the meantime he could really only select the best,  in any case if he took any more they would soon die of disease. He explained all this to me calmly, his empty blue eyes aimed at the crowd and the ramp, absent. I felt hopeless, it was even more difficult to talk to this man than to Eichmann.

***

All day I surveyed the camp, section by section, barrack after barrack; the men were hardly in better shape than the women. I inspected the registers: no one, of course, had thought to respect the basic rule of warehousing, first in, first out; whereas some arrivals didn’t even spend twenty-four hours in the camp before being sent on, others stagnated there for three weeks, broke down, and often died, which increased the losses even more. But for each problem I pointed out to him, Höss unfailingly found someone else to blame. His mentality, formed by the prewar years, was completely unsuited to the job, that was plain as day; but he wasn’t the only one to blame, it was also the fault of the people who had sent him to replace Liebehenschel, who, from the little I knew of him, would have gone about it completely differently.

This overall picture of ineptitude from which these two extracts are drawn, in a single paragraph that extends for nearly seventeen pages, explodes any idea that of cold German competence. I’m reminded of the ghoulish Chas Addams cartoon in which a patent lawyer aims a baroque weapon out his office window and complains to his would-be client, “Death ray? Fiddlesticks! It doesn’t even slow them down!”