Casting about for a Friday Front subject came to an end almost as soon as it began when I came across Michael Tomasky’s review of Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal. I can see you yawning from here: you already know what Mr Krugman has to say, and what Mr Tomasky has to say about it.

But, no: you don’t. I chose Mr Tomasky’s review because it was, against all likelihood, a surprise. I’m used to being on the same wavelength as Mr Krugman, but I didn’t know that the wavelength was quite so far-reaching.

¶ Michael Tomasky on Paul Krugman, in the New York Review of Books.

MP3     RSS

I hope that you’ll listen, because this PodCast inaugurates the embellishment of what in broadcasting are called an “intro” and an “outro.” Over the sound of Emmanuel Chabrier’s “Idylle” you’ll hear the clear and beautiful voice of this site’s principal booster, my dear Kathleen.

How did that happen? A few new titles hopped into the pile on the bedside table. Three are recommendations from friends. The problem with recommendations from friends is that, if the titles are at all plausible, I feel compelled (and not by the friends) to buy the book right away – lest I forget, I suppose. These new books are: This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel J Levitin (Nom de Plume), Sailing From Byzantium, by Colin Wells (George), and Tomorrow They Will Kiss, by Eduardo Santiago (1904). Also new is the novel that I’m suddenly in the middle of, Edmund White’s “New York novel,” Hotel de Dream. I haven’t read one of Mr White’s novels since – well, almost since he started writing them (I prefer his memoirs). So far, Hotel de Dream is an entertainment for the erudite – Henry James and Joseph Conrad have made decidedly distinctive appearances; we shall see if there is more to this novel about the dying Stephen Crane and his disinterested recollections of New York’s “painted boys” than that.

During daylight hours, I’m conscientiously enjoying (no oxymoron!) Tim Blanning’s The Pursuit of Glory. About the countless ambiguities of his subject (Europe 1648-1815, or, in other words, the ancien régime), Prof Blaning is wonderfully unambiguous.

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Tour de France.

Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life – A Story of Race and Family Secrets, is a very easy read – deceptively easy. While you read it, wheels at the base of your brain will be turning, momentously. If you believe that the differences in character between “white” people and “black” people is as intellectually shallow and infertile as the differences posited by traditionalists between men and women, you will emerge from the reading, I expect, tremendously refreshed. If not, then perhaps you’ll have the feeling of “scales falling from the eyes.” Either way, One Drop is pure revelation. 

¶ “Race” and the Broyard Muddle.

MP3    RSS

A useful little book that you ought to try to borrow from a friend – you can hardly do your friends a bigger favor than by making them feel guilty for not owning the interesting books that you want to read – is Giles’s Morgan’s The Holy Grail. It’s an introductory handbook to the legend that Dan Brown and Peter Jackson have done so much to put back in the public eye, but unlike their entertainments, The Holy Grail is a summary catalogue of the stories, books and artifacts that Grail lore has inspired over the centuries. And it is very clear about one thing: the tale of Jesus’s chalice has grown in directions quite contrary to the religion institutionalized in his name.

¶ The Holy Grail.

Catching up with magazines this week, I came across two pieces that, while no longer strictly current, seem worthwhile to look at together. One is Jim Holt’s essay, “It’s the Oil, Stupid,” in the next-most-recent – current on this side of the Atlantic – issue of the London Review of Books. The other, which appears in September’s issue of The Atlantic (I can’t find October’s anywhere, but I’ve got the big fat sesquicentennial issue*), is Matthew Scully’s outing of his fellow Bush-regime speechwriter, Michael Gerson, as a credit hog (“Present at the Creation“).

¶ Jim Holt and Matthew Scully on the American Press – Indirectly, in the London Review of Books and The Atlantic.

* Am I crazy to think that the only people who are truly comfortable with the word “sesquicentennial” were childhood philatelists?

MP3   RSS

What I’m reading now: in addition to Blanning on Europe and Doidge on the Brain, and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, I find a few new titles in my bedside pile. There are two books that Miss G brought to me on the eve of my surgery (actually, she brought me the Doidge as well) that happened to be published or authored by a friend, Marissa Walsh. Then there is another brain book, Daniel J Levitan’s This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, a book about which a friend of mine has waxed extremely enthusiastic; a short book about God and the West, Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God; and the new Tom Perrotta, The Abstinence Teacher. I wish I didn’t know which one I’ll finish first.

Also in the pile is Ian Bradley’s indispensable Oxford Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan. That’s not its official title, which is why I haven’t italicized it; rather, it’s close to what I call the book: “the Oxford G and S.” I’ve had this out because Kathleen and I have been listening to The Mikado a lot. Just now, this feast of absurdity has seemed to make a lot of sense to us. Although I cannot hear Katisha wail, “May not a cheated maiden die?” without actually sympathizing with her romantic disappointment. How ridiculous is that? Why do we need Bradley, you ask, when the insides of our eyelids are less familiar than The Mikado? Because neither of us can ever remember that what sounds like “all of her” is actually “all aver,” as in Pish-Tush’s

She’ll toddle off, as all aver,
With the Lord High Executioner.

It’s not one of Gilbert’s strongest lines. As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Century’s Playlist.

One of Alan Bennett’s knacks, among many, is the ability to turn out short works of fiction that really do seem to deserve separate printing, in slim little books that slip easily into pockets. What might seem a scam with other writers is perfectly unobjectionable in Mr Bennett’s case. I hope that he is not laughing at us for thinking so.

¶ The Uncommon Reader.

MP3    RSS

Has anything in the world changed more in the past quarter century than China? And yet one wonders: has China changed at all? John Feffer’s review of six recent books about China and what it’s up to is better, I suspect, than any of the books themselves.

¶ John Feffer on China’s Next Move.

MP3      RSS

After a few short and piquant fictions (The Uncommon Reader, What’s for Dinner?), I resolved to sink my teeth into something that would keep me for a while, Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, as newly translated by Maureen Freely. One does not rush through Mr Pamuk’s rich, semi-Dostoevskyan novels, even when their autobiographical aspects are familiar from other books (Istanbul, for example). I’m also working my way through Tim Blanning’s The Pursuit of Glory, which so far is solidly pedestrian (although very well-written). Finally (for the moment), there’s Alice Munro’s collection of old family stories, with the missing bits filled in by the author’s imagination. Meta-nonfiction? Fiction, schmiction. The View from Castle Rock reads like the vintage Munro that it is.

As for this week’s Book Review, there are lots of Yeses, and more Noes than Maybes. Among the Noes is Alice Sebold’s second novel, which, appropriately enough given its plot, is currently being dismembered by a school of barracuda critics who deplored the success of The Lovely Bones. Ms Sebold will be lucky to have her work appear in the fifteenth Library of America collection of crime fiction, when it appears in fifty years.

¶ True Believers.

Alexander Waugh has written two books, Time and God, and, now, a third, about material that’s considerably less remote and abstract. Every review of his “autobiography of a family” – reconstructed largely from family letters – has outlined an irresistibly strange story, beginning with “the Brute” and going on to describe one of the odder cases of paternal devotion. And that’s before we even get to the most famous Waugh of all – a character who, as he did in his family, spends his youth on the margins, as a Not Very Important Person. It is a sign of Mr Waugh’s accomplishment that his book is utterly free of “setting the record straight.” (Nor does he pretend to let it “speak for itself.”) Books like this are usually epiphenomena, trivially traveling in the wake of more important work. But Fathers and Sons would be a great book even if the author’s grandfather were no better known than his great-grandfather. If anything, readers curious to know more about the best comic novelist of the Twentieth Century may be in for a disappointment; this book does not hang on a dead writer’s fame. It promises, rather, great things for that of a living writer, namely, the author.

¶ Fathers and Sons.

MP3 RSS

Bob Herbert’s  column on Tuesday was unusually inspiring. As a rule, I agree with his commentary on the plight of Afro-Americans so completely and with so much sadness that I glance over it quickly, nodding uselessly, but this time my mind quickly filled up with all the important things that, for perfectly good reasons of his own, the columnist was glossing over as not, for the moment, directly relevant.

The older I get, and the longer I look, the more obvious to me it becomes that making America a better place for blacks will make America a better place for everybody else, as well. So I’ll be the first to acknowledge that I write from a position not of high-minded idealism but of enlightened self-interest. No points for me.

MP3      RSS

What I’m reading avidly at the moment, and may even have finished by the time that you read this, is Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life – A story of Race and Family Secrets. As was widely revealed after his death, former Times book critic Anatole Broyard was an Afro-American man, pure and simple, who managed to pass as white. The “family secrets” angle of the book’s subtitle is especially intriguing, because Ms Broyard and her older brother, Todd, soon discovered that, among people who knew Dad well, it was only his family, or at least his children, who didn’t know. I can stare at the jacket photograph every which way without being able to “make out” Broyard’s “black” features, but they were apparently obvious to other blacks.

Ms Broyard wrestles with a problem the tectonics of which have shifted out of recognition. Once upon a time, despite inheriting many of her mother’s Norwegian features, she would have been deemed black at least by Southern Americans. But as the child of educated (relative) affluence who grew up in one of the tonier precincts of Fairfield County, Ms Broyard’s “blackness” is ruthlessly limited to a genetic inheritance of which she was simply unaware until she was in her mid-twenties.

So far, One Drop has merely convinced me that the idea of race is even more meretricious than I thought it was.

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Dangerous Obsession.

Regular readers know that I have no use for unfavorable reviews. What happens, though, when you read a book that, for one reason or another – or for a dozen – doesn’t appeal to you, even though you can not only understand but respect its popularity? My move is to give myself the bad review, to highlight the shortcomings in my imaginative world, or the thousand prejudices that remain in the field even when I’m sure that I’ve just mowed them all down. Then I look for the good things in the book – the things that I wish that the author had made more of, but without complaining that he or she didn’t. As it happens, I suspect that I’d have liked The Thin Place better if I’d read it in one quiet sitting, on a beach, say, interrupted only by meals. The parts of it that put me off certainly didn’t blind me to the fact that it’s an extremely well-made novel. I expect that I’ll recommend it to many friends, without pretending that I was crazy about it. In any case, you can judge the result for yourself, at Portico.

¶ The Thin Place.

    MP3    RSS

Haunting me for the past month has been the 9 September 2007 issue of the New York Times Book Review, which I was to have written up on the afternoon of the tenth, after lunch. “After lunch,” however, was spent sprawled on the bedroom floor, struggling over what seemed like hours to stand up, and finding, when I could stand, that my face was pushed into my chest. Ten days later, I was wheeled into an operating room for an eight-hour procedure that – there is no justice in this world – left me better off than I’d been before. This only made the omission of the “Haitian Fathers” issue of the Book Review the more gnawing.

Why bother? Surely not just post-Catholic guilt. No. At least two regular reviewers, Liesl Schillinger and Walter Kirn, appeared in the issue, and I’m quite taken with the ability to search Portico for either of their names and have returned a comprehensive list of the books that they’ve reviewed for the Times over the past several years.

It turned out to be one of the dullest issues in living memory, with more Noes than ever before. You might for that reason find it amusing. My favorite is the one-sentence dismissal of “an opportunistic bar of soap” that got reviewed solely because Alexander Pope is a character. You know, The Jane Austen Book Club effect….

¶ Haitian Fathers.

Instead of reciting the titles of the three or four book that I am “reading” at the moment, here’s a summary of the pile-up on the dining table, where all the unread and unshelved books in the apartment have finally been gathered. (When Kathleen and I want to eat at the table, I move two of the piles to a TV table, and we dine in the canyon of books.

Fiction (two piles): 36 books. Should I just get rid of The Raw Shark Texts as a mistake? Or is it a mistake?

Current Events/History/General Interest: 12. This number would be a lot higher if I were a bit more rigorous about the “Miscellaneous” piles; see below.

Poetry and Criticism: 9 books. Ditto.

Biography: 10 books, including Francis Bacon’s Life of Henry VII. How precious is that?

Miscellaneous (two piles): 34 books, including Jane Eyre, which even before the midpoint strikes me as age-and gender-inappropriate, and The Upanishads.

Hopeless, isn’t it?

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Social Historian.

Tessa Hadley’s The Master Bedroom is one of those extraordinarily beautiful novels that defy easy criticism. Ms Hadley’s distinct grasp of the individual’s unique psychology approached the fullness of poetry while avoiding the florid and the opaque. With an almost painful immediacy, her characters recede into the dimness of lost friends even though the outlines of their predicament remains. I should be very happy to have had this novel read aloud to me.

¶ The Master Bedroom.

No sooner do I discover the comfort of writing my Book Review review with the wireless laptop in my cozy bedroom chair than I discover that wireless works better at some times than at others. I don’t understand why, not really, but I expect that it has something to do with a lot of network demand. At least, that’s why I hope it is. I can go for hours without signal interruption most of the time, but early in the evening (to name one egregious time of day) I can hardly hold onto a signal for thirty seconds. Also, I haven’t yet downloaded an HTML text editor onto the laptop. So life remains hard, and I’m sure that you feel very sorry for me.

PS: Late at night, when traffic drops off precipitously, is a great time for reeading everyone else’s blogs. Lookinat photographs, reading longer entries, following comment threads – all stuff that I can hardly bear to do when I’m preoccupied by churning out my own content during the daylight hours.

¶ Stanley, I Presume?

Working my head off, I’m catching up faster than I expected to. It must be the fact that my body is as dry as Moore County. Here’s my review of this week’s Book Review. That leaves just one issue to deal with – the one that I ought to have spent the afternoon writing up, instead of going out on a tout and coming home so that I could break my neck.

¶ Meet the Supremes.

While my neck was broken and then under repair, I read a great deal, although my reading comprehension was occasionally impaired by Dilaudid. The stack of books to write up gets higher every day. Like every book that I’ve read since Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods: the Strange Rise of Modern India, Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer:The Secret History of the End of an Empire presents a territory in which massive inertia inevitably thunders calamitous slippages, and the bloodletting of the summer of 1947 makes celebrated disasters such as the Mutiny of 1857 look like backwoods honor-feuds. Ms von Tunzelmann definitely belongs to the historiographic tradition that holds that different players would probably have yielded different outcomes. Hers is not a book for Gandhi venerators.

I’ve started in on Tim Blanning’s huge The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815. Despite its title, this is a book fond of facts and figures, but it’s readable in moderate doses. I expect it to tell the story of how Europe managed during those two-and-a-half centuries to put itself in the way of the Industrial Revolution. The period also saw the birth of that most noxious of modern inventions, nationalism. (It’s interesting to note, reading Indian Summer, that India “caught” nationalism from the British. What had been benign and constructive on England’s island turned fratricidal in the Subcontinent.

Ms G, who together with Ryan was a perfect angel about visiting me the night before my surgery and packing a bag of very handy items, brought me her copy of a book that she had enthused about at dinner recently: Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science. At the frontiers of brain science, the principal activity seems to be the demolition of long-established but probably erroneous assumptions about how the brain is set up. For all the “stories of personal triumph,” this is not a flightly or sensational book. Now that my drugs and venue are back to normal, I’m getting back into the book, some of which is familiar from other sources and all of which is fascinating.

As for fiction, I’m just in the right mood for Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock.

And as for the Book Review that I wrote over a week ago, with a broken neck,

¶ Lust for Numbers.

Andrew O’Hagan has taken the unseemly involvement of Catholic priests with teenage boys and completely rearranged its contours – and produced a dryly lovely novel in the process. (I should love to know what Colm Tóobín thinks of this novel.)

I’d like to say something like this: “Ordinarily, I write up books during August without posting about them at The Daily Blague,” but that would be nonsense, because I haven’t been blogging long enough for anything to become “ordinary.” This year, of course, I spent the month preoccupied by reapplying the old look and feel (which I rather like) to a new blog. I read a great deal but I didn’t write very much, and now I have a stack of books on my desk and a handful of dimming recollections. I do hate that. I like putting a book down and writing about it straightaway.

¶ Be Near Me.

PS: I fixed the link to my write-up of The Nines, in case you were interested but met with a 404. I apologize for the inconvenience, but I hope that some readers are learning to find things at Portico on their own.