“Trumpusconi” — Frank Bruni’s coinage — ought to be the word of the hour, for however many hours it takes to determine the damage that television has done to the voting public. The Italians have been through this already, and perhaps they have inoculated themselves against a recurrence. Why not vote for the egomaniacal dork who rattles on about possessing the longest this or the priciest that, whose sex life is a string of superlatives? Maybe you honestly admire him, because he’s one of you, only with longer and pricier. Maybe you want to flip the bird to the tired and corrupt institutions that ought to be running the country. Maybe it’s enough that belly-floppers make the biggest splash.

I’ve read that the Huffington Post has relegated Trump news to the entertainment section, as if this comment to its readers has a correlative in the population at large. Italy showed us that voters are capable of folding entertainment and politics into one section.

Timur Vermes’s satire, Look Who’s Back (Er ist wieder da), comes to mind all the time now. In the satire, a rematerialized Hitler promptly becomes a media star, getting top ratings on his own show. The brunt of the satire is the complacency of today’s Germany, which is too fond of thinking that it’s Hitler-proof, but Look Who’s Back also suggests that Hitler’s rise to power was a media event as well. The media were different, and the chemistry was different (you have to attend a rally to get really excited by it), but by the time Hitler took power, he was the most popular political figure. The question of his experience in government meant nothing to most Germans. To have had no experience was closer to the ideal.

Hitler did teach us that applauding an obsessive crank with big ideas about Lebensraum can lead to very uncool outputs. Better to back the guy who’s deranged about more personal assets.

If Trump’s bubble pops in the next couple of weeks, as Nick Cohn predicts, precisely because it is a “media-driven” bubble, then we can all sigh with relief, and I’ll limit my remarks about television’s utter ghastliness, it’s essential emptiness. Otherwise…

***

Granta — to read, or not to read? That is the question, at least for this 67 year-old reader. I flip through the new issue when it arrives. Most names are unfamiliar. The photography is unappealing — deadening, really. I’ve given up on poetry that isn’t written in blank verse. (And I still can’t make up my mind about Emily Dickinson: is she healthy?) The fiction is as likely as not to be tedious. Drawn by the fancy title, I’ll admit, I gave Greg Jackson’s “Epithalamium” a try. I had to stop on the third page, when “Dueva had proceeded to call Hara a — . (I was already having plenty of trouble with the nomenclature; there’s also a character called “Lyric.”) This is the kind of writing that usually — only time will tell — has the shelf life of fresh fish, and I have retired from taking the trouble to discern the few exceptions. You read it.

Partly because this quarter’s issue, Possession, has a fascinating image on its cover (by Julie Cockburn), I put it where it would be sure to be read, if you know what I mean, and I came across Marc Bojanowski’s “This Is New.” “Shortly after I lost my job teaching,” it began, “I began taking my daughter on walks through the rural cemetery near the housing tract where we lived.” I continued to read, non-committally, prepared to put it down at the first sign of tiresomeness. Teaching and housing tracts are no longer of much interest to me. There might have been a hook in the mention of a cemetery; looking back, I can see that, if I were teaching a writing course (!), I’d hail it as a masterstroke. For one thing: the cemetery is the only open space in the neighborhood; what does that tell you about this sorry land? For another: the richness of this question all but demands that the image of the cemetery be dropped, as as a way of suggesting that there is nothing more to be said about the national bankruptcy. But this mandarin analysis had nothing to do with my first encounter with “This Is New.”

A few dozen words later:

And in her toddler’s voice I would momentarily forget that I’d lost my job and shamed myself and humiliated our family; I would forget that I’d become a stay-at-home dad and that my wife was supporting us financially.

Usually, men who have shamed themselves and humiliated their families do not go on to become stay-at-home dads. Isn’t that your experience, too? In fiction, I mean. So, now I was really curious.

“This Is New” feels shorter than it is, because it is packed with occluded clichés. I mean that to be complimentary. An occluded cliché is, obviously, one that you can’t see. It is concealed by being suggested but not mentioned. In this case, the cliché is a string of familiar images: the community college, the underemployed teacher, the unsophisticated students, the community of tract houses, the precarious personal finances. These are all mentioned without comment; we fill in the tiresome clichés ourselves, or watch them unpack themselves all over the reading room of our minds — but Bojanowski has moved on. He gives us just enough not-enough-time to savor his details, only some of which involve the shameful act that cost the narrator his job.

The paragraph that begins with the passage quoted above ends with this: “… I would forget that none of this would have happened if I’d just taken a deep breath, suppressed my emotions and said to the young woman, “Leave. Now.” What happened?

What happened was that the narrator, overwhelmed by the irritation caused by a student — a nineteen year-old black woman, who, having  been rude, and then insulting, to the teacher, proceeded to engage with her cellphone during the showing of a documentary in class, and, further, refused to put it away — smacked the phone out of her hand (while she was filming him). That was the shameful act.

I’m not sure that I understand the title, but my impression is that it refers to the inescapability of notoriety wrought by the Internet. You can’t move to another state where nobody knows what you’ve done, or where it will take a long time for your past to catch up with you. I also believe that the story launches a complaint: what the teacher did was not shameful. It was the student who was behaving shamefully, or shamelessly.

I’m curious to know whether “This Is New” was written before or after last summer’s outbreak of protesting violence in Ferguson — an event that for one reason or another tipped the scales, inspiring many Americans — most, it’s to be hoped — to cry out, Enough! Black Lives Matter! Stop Killing Us! Let us finally recognize the persistence of racism and resolve to put an end to it. Let us try to undo the wickedness of Richard Nixon’s foulest deed, which had nothing to do with Watergate or Vietnam or even Chile: the “Southern Strategy.” A strategy for Republican Party victories that was found to be quite useful in other parts of the United States as well. Let us put the WASP dream of white ascendancy firmly in the past.

But, the same token, let us also stop permitting members of minority groups to exploit past oppression to excuse civil misbehavior. In the middle of a class, the young black woman student addresses the white male teacher as “white boy.” Surely that is as unacceptable as her misuse of the phone.

If it is not, there is no point to keeping our schools open.

Shall I tell you about the mouse?

Or is it mice? If it’s mice, it’s now mice minus one. That’s to say that a mouse was removed from the apartment — alive.

Before she left the office last night, Kathleen told me that she wanted to order Chinese — she has become fond of the neighborhood restaurant’s Kung Pao Chicken. So, when she came home, I was reading in the bedroom, and not fixing dinner. We chatted for a moment, and I excused myself for a moment to refill a tumbler of wine. The light was off in the dusky kitchen. Standing at the fridge, I heard something. I was pretty sure that I knew what it was, and I was right: there was a mouse crawling around in the recycled Fairway bag of refuse. I gently detached the bag’s handles from the hook, well off the floor, from which I hang garbage bags, and managed to tie them in a knot even as I was coursing toward the front door. By now, I could see the mouse through the plastic bag. It was very small. It was squeezing itself along the inside of the bag. My hope was to reach the garbage chute before the mouse chewed its way out. I wasn’t running, but I was moving much faster than I normally do, even to catch a train. From the old apartment, the garbage chute was almost across the corridor. It’s more of a hike from here.

We never had mice in the old apartment.

I can’t remember just when we first saw a mouse down here, but it was well after we settled in. A long time passed before the second sighting. Recently, however, I’d been seeing a mouse, or catching its darting out of the corner of my eye, just about every other day, and I was steeling myself to say something to the management office about it. Why, you might ask, was I hanging garbage from a hook, however “well off the floor”? Did I not understand anything about mice? Had I forgotten “Hickory Dickory Dock”? And how to square the rather disappointing answer to these questions with the precautions that I had been taking, such as emptying shopping bags as soon as I got home from the store, whether anything actually needed to be put away (in the fridge, say) or not? I am forced to conclude that it was curiosity. The mouse was, first of all, not a rat. It was small and brown and not repellent, and aside from a gnawed piece of cheese (this led to the prompt emptying of shopping bags), it left no traces. If I hadn’t seen it, I shouldn’t have known it was there.

I was learning its route. Its destination, of course, was the kitchen. Several times, my walking in from the living room triggered a dash across the floor and under the dishwasher. I was fairly certain that the space beneath the dishwasher was a dead end for the mouse, because I never saw it scurry in the other way. It would wait until things got quiet, and then work its way back to the point of entry, which, from a series of observations, I concluded must be through one of Kathleen’s two closets. I also concluded that it did not live or linger in that closet, because Kathleen never encountered it there.

Every time I saw the mouse, I was a little bit upset — there really ought not to be mice in the apartment — but the upset was always outweighed by curiosity. Let’s see what happens next.

Now you know why I was in trouble all the time as a child.

(Speaking of curiosity, I did think about buying a cat. I rejected the idea every time — Kathleen wouldn’t have it; the upholstery would be scratched to shreds; kitty litter — but it kept popping back up. I thought about mousetraps, too, and the trip to the emergency room that would inevitably follow trying to set one.)

Moving almost as determinedly as the mouse, I reached the garbage chute, opened it, and pushed the bag through. I doubt very much that the fall of four floors hurt the mouse, although it’s always possible that the bag landed on shards of glass. In any case, I don’t expect that particular mouse to return. All in all, I’m quite pleased at the way things worked out, quite literally tied up with a bow.

Nevertheless, returning to the apartment from the garbage chute, I worried about having a heart attack. The spigot of adrenaline had unquestionably been opened. Carrying a living, squirming thing in a tied-up bag was very disconcerting. What if it burst through the bag and bit my hand in a fit of pique? I was reminded of the lobster, the lobster that wasn’t dead yet.

I don’t know how many times I’ve read that killing a lobster with a chef’s knife is easy. Even Julia Child says so. (Or maybe what she says is that “French chefs get used to it.”) You hold the lobster on the counter with one hand, while you plunge the sharp knife into the interstice between the shell on the head and the shell on the thorax. This, you are assured, kills the lobster “instantly.” Well, maybe. But the one time I tried it, when I flipped over the lobster to cut off the tail, the tail flipped, with a great deal of energy, and it’s a good thing that no one else was in the kitchen, because who knows where the chef’s knife flew. I had been sufficiently macho to plunge the knife into the lobster’s neck, but only on the understanding that this brutal act would put an immediate stop to all signs of life. The idea that a lobster that I was trying to kill might fight back did not bear processing.

I have since learned that, if you need to start a recipe with dead but uncooked lobster, you can cheat: a few minutes in boiling water will kill the thing without doing much cooking. I have also learned that uncooked lobster meat clings to the shell. As if glued on! I haven’t found out how French chefs deal with that.

The moral of the story is: now you know why I always say that my idea of “roughing it” is staying at home.

Don’t let it ever be said that I’m nostalgic for the Cold War. It was a bleak and stupid conflict, and it made millions of lives wretched. But it did have one virtue: it focused the attention of élites everywhere on a handful of issues. As a global, zero-sum game, it got everyone’s attention. The enormous pressure of its risks kept everything organized. Every action was designed to counter the opponent, no matter how ultimately self-defeating. (Consider widespread American support of Third-World tyrants.) Everybody’s to-do list was harmonized.

All that came to an end with the Cold War’s. The stupidity of Cold War “thinking” floated free. “We won!” crowed the Americans.

Ha.

Ha.

Did you see Kingsman: The Secret Service, when it came out last year? Probably not. Supposedly a larky variation on the James Bond theme, Kingsman is in fact not very entertaining. The first half meanders uncertainly between satire and danger: you don’t know whether to laugh or to close your eyes. The second half is stuffed with action and adventure, but the horrors are occasionally too kinky for genre expectations. As I recall, Kingsman was a disappointment for its producers.

However understandable, this is a shame. Kingsman is another kind of movie altogether: the Object Lesson. It makes you think, and the things that it makes you think about are not presented as cool or fun. There’s an element of science fiction, but it’s too grimly plausible to be dazzling. (And then, just when you’ve got used to this unpleasantness, the movie dazzles — with truly astonishing inappropriateness.) I was disturbed by Kingsman for days after seeing it. Seeing it a second time, I was even more disturbed, but by something else in the movie.

The story is simply told. (And, to keep it simple, I’m going to omit the actors’ names, which can easily be found at IMDb.) The bad guy, Valentine, is a telecom tycoon who has dreamed up a solution to overpopulation. He will give away mobile phones with free cellular service. When everybody’s got one, he’ll beam a signal that will make everybody crazy: totally hostile and totally unsympathetic. Everybody will kill everybody else! For some reason that wasn’t very clear to me, Valentine wants to get the élites of the world behind his scheme. (It’s not as though they could stop him.) The holdouts, people like the Princess of Sweden (or maybe it’s Denmark) who are disgusted by Valentine’s proposed “cull,” are imprisoned. The supporters are implanted with devices, located at the base of their brains, that will explode if they ever try to betray the plot.

Which of course the Kingsmen, a secret service in Britain that appears to act independently of any sovereignty (just like Valentine), must foil. But we’re not going to talk about the heroes, appealing as in this film they are.

The idea of drastically reducing the population of the earth has appealed to Western élites since the time of Malthus. One dreadful legacy of the Enlightenment was the almost automatic division of humanity into two classes: those who could understand and implement the Enlightenment program, and those who, for whatever reason, couldn’t or wouldn’t. This was, it turned out, a far more categorical division than the one that had distinguished, in the ancien régime, hereditary nobles from peasants and burghers. The new line is easier to cross, certainly — but this seems to intensify the contempt of those who crossed it for those who didn’t.

This contempt is the product of a failure of imagination that always besets élites when they feel existentially threatened. The challenge must be dealt with — eliminated — at once. In our time, it is not easy to encounter an essay about our environmental future that is truly innocent of the hope that some terrible disease will solve the overpopulation problem for us. The rich will inoculate and quarantine themselves whilst the plague ranges round. After a time, there will be no more unnecessary people.

Kingsman stamps a comic-book glossiness on this terrible fantasy.

After days of feeling almost sick about the nightmare of violently cruel solutions to global problems, I calmed down and realized that our population problem is just like every other environmental problem that we have: one that can solved only over generations, by humane planning that seeks to persuade, without binding, our grandchildren and their grandchildren and so on. Planning that alters as circumstances alter, but that always proceed toward sustainable population levels without denying anyone a genuinely satisfying life (no doping). We’ll talk about such plans some other time.

After seeing the film a second time, it was the élites themselves who got my attention. Valentine, in the best evil-genius tradition, operates a mountain fastness. Here he keeps his imprisoned critics; here he entertains his willing supporters, who are given enough notice of the coming cull to make their way to his remote caves, where they live it up in a sort of disco nightclub. This cheesy setting is of course intended to be an implicit criticism of the rich people who hang out there, and for that reason, it ought to strike a false note, because rich people wouldn’t be caught dead in such a place. They take their fashion cues from Monocle! But: rich people do take fashion cues — in fact, they live by them. Élites have enough money to throw everything away and replace it with the latest accoutrements. If Monocle were to endorse disco clubs, Davos would be remodeled into a mineshaft.

And then there are those implants. The movie’s implants are fictional, in that they have not been implanted in our fearless leaders. But, reading Paul Krugman’s column in today’s Times, it was very hard to resist the suspicion that Europe’s leaders have at the very least been complicit in a program of voluntary brainwashing. In his latest piece about the Greek migraine, he writes about the introduction of the Euro.

The only big mistake of the euroskeptics was underestimating just how much damage the single currency would do.

The point is that it wasn’t at all hard to see, right from the beginning, that currency union without political union was a very dubious project. So why did Europe go ahead with it?

Mainly, I’d say, because the idea of the euro sounded so good. That is, it sounded forward-looking, European-minded, exactly the kind of thing that appeals to the kind of people who give speeches at Davos. Such people didn’t want nerdy economists telling them that their glamorous vision was a bad idea.

Indeed, within Europe’s elite it quickly became very hard to raise objections to the currency project. I remember the atmosphere of the early 1990s very well: anyone who questioned the desirability of the euro was effectively shut out of the discussion. Furthermore, if you were an American expressing doubts you were invariably accused of ulterior motives — of being hostile to Europe, or wanting to preserve the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege.”

And his final comment makes something like those implants seem to be the only explanation for ongoing idiocy.

But we’re not having a clear discussion of these options, because European discourse is still dominated by ideas the continent’s elite would like to be true, but aren’t. And Europe is paying a terrible price for this monstrous self-indulgence.

The good thing about the Cold War, I’m sorry to say, is that there was no room for monstrous self-indulgence. But there is now.

Writer’s block is not something that I’m familiar with, but I seem to be having a taste of it this morning. It’s very quiet, and it promises to be a quiet day — although I may have lunch with Fossil Darling, Ray Soleil, and Ms NOLA. That wasn’t on the schedule until just now. Loose talk about hanging out at the Museum and seeing the Sargent show coalesced into a plan to gather at lunch, followed by a tour of the exhibition. Fossil and Ray have a concert at seven, so what “hanging out at the Museum” on a Friday afternoon usually means (cocktails on the roof or elsewhere, with a bit of art thrown in if absolutely necessary) is not on offer. Kathleen had thought of joining us — her contribution to the loose talk — but this morning she wondered if she could get away from work before a late dinner. I haven’t made up my mind about anything, but I’m inclined to pass on lunch, because, as I say, it’s quiet, and I’m enjoying the quiet.

But I tremble at the thought of writing about it. Surely there could be no more immediate invitation to bring on more chaos and upheaval.

Signs that I may no longer be capable of managing our personal finances have followed last week’s false alarm about massively overdue rent. Yes, that was a false alarm; the building’s accountants had deposited our rent in an account tied to our old apartment. It was all quickly corrected. But I had menacing robocalls from the mobile phone providers (AT&T for regular phones; Verizon for MiFi) and the cable company, all regarding overdue bills. For the life of me, I couldn’t see that the AT&T bill was overdue, but I paid it by credit over the phone, which means that next months bills will be the higher for it. I had to do the same with the other two accounts, which really were overdue. As sometimes happens, I never received a June bill for the cable, and had not yet got round to paying this month’s bill. (Yes, it’s a bit late in the month to be doing that, but I’ve got excuses as long as my legs.) I haven’t yet figured out what was wrong with the MiFi bill, but I must have missed one a while back, and not noticed it. Sure enough, when I opened the envelope, I discovered that I owed somewhat more that I thought — although not the amount on the statement. It was all a harrying muddle, and I must take full responsibility — mitigated, privately, by that long list of excuses.

Part of the muddle is just me — I was not put on earth to be an accountant. But a greater part, I think, is my search for computer assistance, which, so far as paying bills goes, has tied me to Quicken for over twenty years. In the early days, I liked Quicken a lot; it did just what I wanted it to do, and very little else. Over time, the part of Quicken that is useful to me — printing checks — seemed more and more marginal to the software. Then, last November, there was a horrible snafu, in which six weeks’ worth of data was erased. This was not Quicken’s fault. Rather it was one of those disasters that have become not uncommon in our automated world, in which sooner or later a hitherto unsuspected weak spot in one’s backup procedures is pressed at the wrong time, and gives way. Ordinarily, you learn from the mistake and move on, improving security. But by last November, I was sick to death of Quicken. I also suspected that it lulled me into thinking that it was taking care of things, when of course it knew nothing but what I fed it.

(I ought to point out here that Kathleen has retained serious accountants to prepare our tax returns for years. I don’t have anything to do with the complicated stuff.)

So I began keeping records in Evernote, even though Evernote won’t, so far as I know, add up a column of figures and tell me how much I’ve spent on books or groceries this month. The figures are there, but you have to add them yourself. Well, I thought, that might not be a bad idea. It would engage me more fully in keeping track of our expenses. Of course, I had no habits for being engaged, on a weekdaily basis, with grubby money matters, and I still don’t have very effective ones, but I think I’m on the way. Meanwhile, however, muddle.

The other day, I discovered that you can make checklists with Evernote: a lightbulb moment. Yesterday afternoon, I designed a template for the monthly bills — one with two checkboxes for every account. I check the first box when the bill is received, and I make a note of the amount. I check the second box when the check is written. Since I do this on Evernote, I can manage the list at my household office in the dining ell, and then write checks pursuant to the checklist in the bookroom, where the printer is, without dragging any of the bills or other paperwork from one place to another.

I’m still using Quicken to print checks. I’m looking into Moneydance, but reserving any decision on that until the new way of doing things has established itself, and unexpected phone calls are a thing of the past.

This might seem incredibly trivial, I know, but to me it expresses an important — really rather vitally important, when you get down to it — cognitive problem. I believe that how you work and where you work determines the quality of what you do. There are many people who might disagree. Kathleen, who can work anywhere and under any conditions, is at the same time a crisis worker, almost incapable of dealing with a project unless there is a deadline, and, in the case of personal matters, a past-due deadline. Hating crisis as I do, I’ve always tried to integrate the boring parts into the fun parts, and also to make the boring parts less boring and possibly even fun. There isn’t a lot of practical wisdom out there on this problem, and perhaps there can’t be, because everyone’s integration is going to be unique. I have learned a few things, though.

The reason for my taking personal finance out of the bookroom and into the dining ell, where I sit right next to the kitchen — an arrangement not possible in the old apartment, where there was no dining area, and hence no table near the kitchen — is that personal finance is more like cooking than writing. I don’t mean to suggest that writing is a crisis sort of thing when I way that it does require freedom from distraction. Everybody knows this. It’s not so much the writing that requires it as the thinking behind the writing. Another thing that seems to be well understood is that libraries provide good environments for writing, especially if they’re private and you’re alone in them. Writing in a library encourages a range of broadening and enriching extensions, from the consultation of authorities to the indulgence of literary whims. My conclusion is there ought not to be anything in a writing room that is not conducive to writing.

Personal finance is like keeping the refrigerator in order: it’s much less off-putting if you manage to do a little of it at a time. Avoiding crisis is the secret. Never having too much of it to do at any one time is a blessing. What successful housekeeping comes down to is the clever stage-managing of distractions, where all the distractions are elements of housework. Having just emptied the dishwasher, why not sit down at the table with a cup of tea and open the one or two bills that arrived in the day’s mail, marking them down on a checklist and tucking them in a drawer (always the same drawer, a drawer used for nothing else). Then, sit back and ruminate on menus. Remember to order a 25-pound bag of flour.

Last night, after a long afternoon of paperwork, I made fried chicken, even though I thought I was too tired. I wanted to make it last night because the woman who cleans our bathrooms and the kitchen every other week was due this morning. So, even though fried chicken isn’t the messy production that it used to be, there are spatters, and the routine of wiping down the counters removes the afterodors of frying. (In the event, Sonja was unable to come.) I had bought six pieces of chicken at Agata & Valentina after lunch, and soaked them in buttermilk during the afternoon. Shortly before Kathleen left the office, I dredged the chicken in corn meal, cornstarch, flour, salt, and cayenne pepper (which I’d added to the buttermilk as well). The chicken went into the fridge for about forty minutes, during the latter part of which I heated up a bottle of peanut oil. Peanut oil is the secret of frying. Its fragrance is the lightest, and it does not break down (as canola oil does) at high temperatures.

I fried the chicken for two minutes on a side over high heat. Then for four minutes on one side over moderate heat, and two-and-a-half minutes on the other side. Finally, I left the chicken to cook over low heat for three minutes.

It was delicious. Sometimes, it’s more delicious, but it’s always delicious. Applesauce, cucumber salad, and cobs of corn completed the plates. For dessert, we tucked into a raspberry-lemon tart, also from Agata. We each ate two pieces of chicken, and could not have touched a third, not with the prospect of the tart.

After all that paperwork, cooking was fun.

Bon weekend à tous!

Ray Soleil just this minute sent me a link, with the following note: “What worries me is that Hitler was also thought a “priceless boob” by the elite of Germany, and look what happened….” Ray and I are on the same page about a lot of things, so I wasn’t surprised when the link took me to a piece of Donald Trump propaganda. (At Daily Kos, of course.) I suppose it could be a hoax, but I am sure that Trump will disavow it as such. Somebody goofed. Some bright young intern was tasked with finding an archival image of World War II-era soldiers, and he did what he was told, only the soldiers are Wehrmacht, not GIs. (The actual stock photo that was used suggests to me that there are Wehrmacht re-enactors.) I don’t know where Ray got the “priceless boob” line — it doesn’t crop up on the Daily Kos page, but it certainly fits, and, yes, it worries me, too — although it’s difficult to deny that the Donald has been a member of the American élite since he was a kid.

I’m not worried about another Hitler. There will never be another Hitler — Timur Vermes’s hilarious and almost plausible satire notwithstanding. Every political malefactor in Western history has developed his or her own brand of poison, to which everyone at the time was susceptible. The next “Hitler” won’t look or act anything like our Adolf.

But there will always be élites. What worries me — and I’m not saying this for the first time; it’s pretty much the fundamental anxiety of this writer — is the difficulty that élites have when it comes to understanding everybody else. The élite of the ancien régime in France, of course, failed to see the need to understand anybody else, and that’s why the ancien régime ended at the guillotine. Since then, it has become clear that one of the problems of democracy is that there are still élites. Democracy does not level the field. It is arguable that the citizens of a democracy don’t even want it to — Americans are particularly resistant to “class warfare.” Democracies still require the services of governors and capitalists. Most people, it turns out, aren’t all that interested in public affairs. All they ask is that things be “okay.”

It is very hard, if you live among the élite, to know what “okay” means. The problem is that few members of the élite are willing to try to find out — as if the French ancien régime had not ended as it did.

Benefits and burdens are distributed unequally in our modern democracies. (Totalitarian attempts to even things out have failed dismally.) I believe, however, that it makes sense to assume that they are distributed isostatically. What I mean by this is that everyone gets roughly the same amount of both. Big piles of benefits for the élite, yes; but also big piles of burdens. Now, here is a structural problem with élites: they use their benefits to offload the burdens. (This is what Trump did when he hired some doofus to create a banner.) They pay other people to do the things that they don’t want to do — the burdens. But determining what hoi polloi mean by “okay” is a non-delegable duty. You have to think for yourself. You can’t hire a consultancy that it is in the business of telling you what you want to hear.

The oldest problem with democracy, the one that ruled it out as a viable political form for the thinkers of classical antiquity, is its vulnerability to demagogues. Demagogues — and Donald Trump has always been one — stoke grievances. Anger can be very clarifying when it comes time to take political action. Trump appeals to non-élite white men who play golf, and to women who devote themselves to taking care of and enduring such men. Not to mention the men who would play golf if they could afford it. I can’t explain the link between golf and Trump, but it might have something to do with the elegant simplicity of the game — just a serious of strokes. You do the same thing over and over again, making minor adjustments for circumstances. Very minor adjustments.

Trump does the same thing over and over. Unlike the other Republican Party hopefuls, he does not wallow in policy. He doesn’t have a coherent program, a strategy for “starving the beast” or clearing the American stables of the “takers'” 47%. He says: America used to be great. Let’s be great again. He means: the United States won World War II, but it rewarded its soldiers with a unilateral and highly unpopular expansion of “civil rights.” Let’s undo that.

Trump is not proposing to chop off the heads of businessmen who sent our manufacturing jobs out of the country in order to maximize profits, incidentally keeping the number of golfers low. His intended audience wouldn’t listen. Contrary to everything that the Chicago School of economics insists upon, voters are nowhere near as interested in money as they are in pride. Their toes got stepped on in the Sixties and Seventies, and they’re sore about never having been offered an apology.

The Civil Rights movement is understood by too many progressives as a good thing that was long overdue — period. They don’t ask why it happened when it did. That’s to say that they don’t see it as a campaign in the Cold War. In the postwar world, the United States was richer and mightier than any other land — but this only made the spectacle of Jim Crow more embarrassing. All the other countries, of whatever political stripe, could say, “Yes, America is rich and powerful. But look at the South!” And now that the formerly isolationist United States stood tall in the global eye, it had to confront what it had managed to ignore, the denial of full citizenship (and, worse, of civil decency) to African Americans, former slaves who even now had not attained freedom. There had always been American opposition to Jim Crow, but Dixiecrats in Congress managed to marginalize it. Lyndon Johnson, who ought to have been one of them, upended the Dixiecrats’ hegemony. Johnson fought hard to reduce the influence of bigots in national affairs so that the United States would be as respectable as it was mighty.

Like so many Cold War initiatives, however — like the Cold War initiative that crippled Johnson’s effectiveness as a “Great Society” leader, the misadventure in Vietnam — the Civil Rights reforms were misguided. They shared, as so many Cold War policies did, the totalitarian preference for top-down edicts. They were ultimatums. The virtues of their objectives were occluded by the obnoxiousness of their enforcement. And Richard Nixon, who followed Johnson in the White House, knew just how to exploit the ensuing resentment, without appearing to backtrack on Civil Rights at all!

Am I afraid of Donald Trump in the White House? Not until I find out who his running mate is, if it comes to that. Meanwhile, progressives ought to be asking why Trump is so popular, and answering the question without resorting to variations on the word “stupid.”

“New forms!” wails Konstantin. Doesn’t he? It’s just about all I remember from The Seagull. (I am not a fan of Chekhov — there, I said it.) Among other things, I find Konstantin unspeakably tedious, and, until yesterday, his call for new artistic forms expressed nothing more than the emotional acne of adolescence.

I still don’t think much of Konstantin, but I do see that we are very much in the middle of developing new forms. There’s no need to wish for them; they’re taking shape as we write.

I touched yesterday on the problem of fiction and nonfiction. What is the difference, anyway? It seems to depend on the context. In a New York Times news story, we expect that every statement refers to a documented actuality: this happened here, and that person said or did that. An incidental indicator of a news story’s veracity is its clunkiness. It takes a while for all the actualities that are involved whenever something happens to sort themselves out. And the process by which they do sort themselves out — a process that takes place in our minds — is the same process that enables novelists to create their fictions. A magazine article about an event, written weeks or months later, with plenty of time for reflection and consideration, is already halfway to fiction.

History is the story that we tell ourselves about what happened, and the story changes over time. Most people don’t read enough history, over a long period of time, to realize that history has its fashions just like everything else. History has its own history. Now, the vernacular view of shifts in historical accounts is that history written today is better than older histories; historians are always working hard to get things right. So today’s history is true, it is nonfiction. But this is a short-sighted simplification. It is true that historians endeavor to stick to actualities. But the weight that they assign to different actualities, the emphasis that they place on certain parts of the story, does not reflect an actuality. It cannot. The most important kind of statement that history makes — this is more important than that — is an actuality only in the sense that the judgment took place in someone’s mind.

(An interesting difference between history and fiction occurs to me. In a novel, a character might suddenly realize that he has fallen in love. The historian will confine himself to the time and place of the wedding — with perhaps a word or two about the bride.)

The tension between fact and fiction is mirrored in another avenue of literature. Along this avenue, as we might say, the fronts of the houses present those rational judgments about the world to which we give the names criticism and autobiography, while the more relaxed rear ends deal in feelings and memoir. Until very recently, each end had a strong gender association, which I hope I don’t need to spell out. These days, a lot of street-fronts are being remodeled to look more like memoirs. It used to be absolutely forbidden for a critic to interject a note of personal feeling. Feelings were thought to be an unmanly weakness, and an impertinence as well. Nobody was interested in anybody else’s feelings! But now we understand that feelings are where everything begins with us.

We also understand — see my entry on World Theory — that nothing in the world is permanent without us. The Japanese rebuild the temple at Nara at regular intervals, and regard it as over a thousand years old. The Tour Eiffel and the Empire State Building look like they’re built to last forever, but neither would survive a century of absolute neglect. The mere existence of the greatest book in the world, whatever you think that might be, depends on its readers’ ability to convince other people to read it. For some reason, a lot of men have trouble accepting this contingency. They want to believe that, once a thing is made, whether it’s a skyscraper or a novel, it’s “out there in the world,” leading its own life, forever. This might tell us why such men would make terrible mothers, but I still can’t quite explain it. Why do some men seem happiest when they’re done with something?

Feelings are no longer irrelevant or impertinent. “Objectivity” is a fairy tale. The value of a piece of criticism doesn’t lie as much in the rigor of its logical analysis as it does in the emotional responses that inspired it. I don’t want to read criticism that hides this essential information; I want to know how the critic feels. Criticism must therefore be infused with memoir.

For example, I don’t think that I should have engaged so deeply with Edward Mendelson’s views on the work and character of William Maxwell if I had not rather sloppily mistaken him for Daniel Mendelsohn. I admire Daniel Mendelsohn, although I never fully agree with him. I read and enjoy his pieces knowing that I am not going to agree with a lot of what he says. So it was not alarming to find that I disagreed with much of what Edward Mendelson had to say. And it made perfect sense that Mendelson held Maxwell’s fables in high esteem; I should expect Mendelsohn to do the same. I used to do the same thing myself. (I still love the fables, but I don’t want to write about them until I’ve read them all, re-reading the ones that I love in the process.)

It did surprise me that the tone of Mendelson’s piece was unkind — until I woke up to the fact that it wasn’t by Mendelsohn.

***

In the last two or three years, I have ever more consciously striven to write entries that blend memoir and criticism as seamlessly as I can. This means that many entries are too teachy-preachy for readers who like stories, while others are too ephemeral for readers who are discomfited by the personal. It’s a good thing that I’m used to feeling like Edith Wharton — too fashionable for Boston, too intellectual for New York.

I don’t expect to change readers’ minds, but I do hope to leave behind an example.

It seems to have started with Kate Bolick’s Spinster, which I read in late April. Bolick prompted me to look into Maeve Brennan, the New Yorker‘s Long-Winded Lady. At about the same time, Thomas Kunkel’s biography of Joseph Mitchell, Man in Profile, came out.

It was that conjunction, that accidental pairing of two New Yorker writers (who formed a sort of pair in real life) that made the magazine, and not any particular writer, my new center of gravity. I read Kunkel’s earlier biography of Harold Ross, the magazine’s founding editor, and from this I learned the measure of Ross’s industry, his devotion to The New Yorker as expressed in hours reading proofs and launching queries that, sometimes, reflected a good deal of sophisticated knowledgeability. I explored Wolcott Gibbs and A J Liebling, who were no longer writing for The New Yorker when I began to read it, but whose prose styles are still recognizable as templates for today’s magazine. I read Gardner Botsford’s memoir, and want to read it again. I dug up a copy of Here at The New Yorker, only to find that I am still as allergic to Brendan Gill’s chatty complacency as I was when it came out. Turning in the other direction, I decided to re-read The Château, and I have been lost in the work of William Maxwell ever since.

Which brings me to Barbara Burkhardt’s William Maxwell: A Literary Life. Burkhardt struck up a friendship with Maxwell while she was writing her dissertation on his novels, and he chose her to help organize his papers and shepherd them to the University of Illinois, the school they had in common. Her book is solid and I daresay reliable, but it is also somewhat academic, given to repeating key words and prone to slightly fatuous claims, such as that each of Maxwell’s books constituted an important step in his development. I’d withhold my complaints altogether if there were another book about Maxwell, more focused on his life and on his career as a New Yorker editor, but,  if there is, I don’t know about it.

The ground for my renewed interest in Maxwell — I had something of a crush on him in college, and sometimes that’s fatal, not because you outgrow a writer but because you don’t know that you’ve grown up, that he or she is no longer the same writer who appealed to your youth; for years, I wrongly thought that I “knew” Maxwell — was prepared by Philippa Beauman’s biography of Elizabeth Taylor, when I had a crush on her, a few years ago. Beauman quoted many letters between Taylor and Maxwell, who was almost her only editor; her stories were published in The New Yorker or they weren’t published at all. I began to see Maxwell in a different light, and I’d like to see more. But Maxwell’s career as an editor is not really in Burkhardt’s brief. You can learn more about Maxwell’s life from the Chronology that editor Christopher Carduff has appended to the Library of America volumes. It’s from that source that I learned the answer to two questions that I couldn’t stop itching: where, exactly, on East 86th Street did Maxwell and his family live (544); and whether the Maxwell girls, Kate and Brookie went to the Brearley (they did — or at least Kate started out at Kindergarten there). Christopher Carduff, by the way, has brought all of Maeve Brennan’s stories back into print. Hats off!

I’ve even been roaming The New Yorker archives, fishing out two stories that Carduff declined to include in the LoA books. The first one, “Never To Hear Silence,” was published in 1937. It is brief but painful: a young scientist whose work has been invalidated by an innocent error has to listen to his wife’s nonstop advice about what to do about it. The young man’s problems clearly surpass his troubles at the lab: he has married the wrong woman, and cemented his mistake with two children. There is a slightness about the story, relative to Maxwell’s other stories, that explains Carduff’s decision; but I’d have included it anyway, because it attracted the interest of Louise Bogan, the poetry editor at The New Yorker, and she became one of the several mentors who helped William Maxwell become himself. The story is also quite short.

My other catch is more doubtful, and has no place in the LoA. When it appeared, in 1964, it was signed “Gifford Brown,” a pseudonym that Maxwell used whenever he was writing about his older brother, or some other person who might take offense. Edward Mendelson mentions it in the NYRB essay that I touched on yesterday.

One omitted story, “The News of the Week in Review” (1964), is an acid portrait of a neighbor in Westchester, where Maxwell had a country house. He published the story under the name Gifford Brown, a pseudonym he used when he didn’t want neighbors or relatives to notice the unpleasant things he was writing about them. The secular saint portrayed by Maxwell’s friends could never have written it, but the real Maxwell did.

I don’t know what Maxwell is up to here. I’m not entirely sure that I can attach the “acid portrait” to the right character. Is it Reinhold, the garrulous neighbor who asks to have the narrator’s Sunday Times if he’s done with it, or Weidler, an off-stage figure with whom Reinhold is engaged in a dispute about the posting of roadside mailboxes? This mailbox imbroglio reminded me of many such trivial crises during my time on Candlewood Lake, but I can’t see choking a story out of it, unless it’s to point out how trivial rural crises can be. (The story betrays many signs of the animosity between country people and encroaching suburbanites.) Nor could I discern the feelings of the narrator about any of this. Of course, I read the story contentiously myself, aiming not to enjoy it but to determine if Mendelson is making any sense, and I’m not sure that he is. It’s all a muddle. Clouding the whole business is Maxwell’s use of the pseudonym, which indicates that even he took it all too seriously.

Whether, when I’ve gone through all of Maxwell (whether or not that means re-reading They Came Like Swallows and The Folded Leaf), I’ll continue this New Yorker thread is hard to say. With Maxwell, the atmosphere is quiet, not effervescent with intoxicated anecdotes. Maxwell does not inspire questions about who slept with whom. That sort of gossip is never interesting for very long, and without some altogether new tidbit it is simply unappetizing. Maxwell’s questions take the opposite direction. What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction — that sort of thing.

During the Cold War, the line between fiction and nonfiction was closely policed. That’s part of why books like In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song were thought to be so challenging when they were published. What they challenged was that line. The line has been effaced, but not the widespread feeling that it ought to be there. Children of the scientific revolution, we like to know  whether what we’re being told is actual or hypothetical. This does not, however, capture the difference between what we mean by “true” and “false,” which are much bigger, more complicated words. The vulgar association of truth with actuality is a failing that springs from the natural hostility of the commercial mind to the unbridled imagination.

In our spoken dealings with each other, it is probably best to be frank about what we know to be the case. Writing, however, requires more testing. Almost everything that is written down is a kind of history, a claim that something did or didn’t happen. What thinking minds have discovered in recent years is that the fictional can be true. Middlemarch is true in a way that no history of England at the time of the Reform Bill could possibly be. We have come to see the virtues of touching up accounts of actual occurrences with fictional devices, some of them as innocent as the stitching together into one speech of internally consistent remarks made by one person on two occasions, some of them a lot more inventive. One of the purposes of education is to provide readers with the ability to gauge how close the alignment of actuality and truth ought to be in any given case.

William Maxwell’s work teaches us that truth and falsity are not philosophical absolutes, at least not for the likes of us mortals. They will help us to distinguish what happened from what didn’t only indirectly, by calling on things that we know that are not part of the story. Why else should I find that what Maxwell says happened in Lincoln, Illnois in the winter of 1918-19 is interesting? There are still people who believe that fiction is a waste of time because it’s “just made up.” But made up of what? Great literature is made up of truth. In that regard, it all really happened.

Which way is up?

Over the weekend, which I devoted just about exclusively to reading William Maxwell (or reading about him), I discovered an essay from The New York Review of Books that I missed when it appeared, in 2010. Edward Mendelson writes à propos of the Library of America publication, in two volumes, of the bulk of Maxwell’s fiction — the very books that I have been leafing through. Less than attentive, I confused Mendelson with Daniel Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn is a classicist who writes about popular entertainment as well, and I was piqued to find that he was taking a look at Maxwell, who wouldn’t seem to fit beneath any of his rubrics (a third being the problem of the gay artist). Except he wasn’t: it was Edward Mendelson, without the second ‘s’ but also without the ‘h,’ who was going after Maxwell.

The NYRB essay, entitled “The Perils of His Magic Circle,” provides an occasion for Mendelson to discredit literature that refuses to take moral stands. Maxwell is made out to be something other than the “saintly” mentor who glows forth from every page of what can only be called a tribute album, A William Maxwell Portrait: Memories and Appreciations, edited by Charles Baxter, Michael Collier, and Edward Hirsch. Here, Maxwell is a magus, a high priest of “low church” modernism whose highly autobiographical fiction paints an unflattering self-portrait, but whose friends were too charmed by his manner to realize that he was exploiting them. Mendelson quotes a passage from the story, “Over By the River,” which I was going to write about anyway. Maxwell’s stand-in, George Carrington, looks at himself in the mirror while shaving.

There was a fatal flaw in his character: Nobody was ever as real to him as he was to himself. If people knew how little he cared whether they lived or died, they wouldn’t want to have anything to do with him.

To Mendelson, this is the self-indictment of moral depravity. But I don’t read it that way at all. It is not a confession, a positive admission of social bankruptcy. It is a feeling, sentimentally unsentimental, that, Edward Mendelson aside, we all have, whenever we’re confronted with the absolutely isolated doom of our bodies. (That George should think this while shaving makes perfect sense to me: what could be more Sisyphean than beginning every day with a razor?) There is a part of us that couldn’t care more whether other people live or die if it wanted to, because it simply doesn’t see them. It doesn’t hear, feel, or smell them, either. It is lodged deep in the gut and it feeds on weariness. That’s not all there is to us, of course, but it’s there, always.

“Over By the River,” a story that it took Maxwell many years to write, or, rather, I should say, many years to arrange to his satisfaction, is a nosegay of vignettes. Some of the blossoms show off the two little Carrington girls, who are prone to nightmares (the younger one especially) and to everlasting colds. Their parents, Iris and George, are comically perplexed by parenthood: no one is as responsible for their daughters’ welfare as they are, but no one is less equipped to take care of them. There is always an expert — a doctor, a teacher, perhaps even Jimmy, the elevator man — who knows more about how to make the Carringtons’ world work than the Carringtons do themselves. You might say that they don’t even know how to be grown-ups. In one odd, almost misfit scene, George finds himself at a penthouse cocktail party, helplessly tossed between the tedious and the tantalizing possibilities of casual chit-chat.

The story’s setting is the Carrington’s Upper East Side apartment and the neighborhood in which it sits. The Carrington’s address is 1 Gracie Square, a few blocks from where I’m writing. Its immediate neighborhood, which stretches along the East River from Gracie Mansion, at 88th Street, to the Brearley School, at 83rd, comprises Carl Schurz Park, Finley Walk, and the East End Avenue remainder of the old Henderson Place. Regular readers will have seen many photographs of this neighborhood over the years. I can think of no piece of fiction more densely packed with details that are personally familiar to me.

And that’s what “Over By the River” is, a collection of details before which states of mind are fanned out. There is no plot. Maxwell’s disdain for plots is, for Mendelson, another sign of moral deficiency. He writes,

All of Maxwell’s novels have a story but no plot. A plot is the means by which fiction portrays the consequences of actions, but it is not like a pool table; one event never mechanically causes another. In a plot each event provokes other events by making it possible for them to happen—possible but not inevitable, because human beings are always free to choose their response to provocation. Maxwell succumbed to an error common among writers who, as he did, organize their work for the finest possible rhythms and textures: the error of thinking of plot as mechanical and therefore trivial. As he explained to John Updike: “Plot, shmot.”

And then, concentrating this point somewhat,

He was incapable of thinking about erotic and moral choices for the same reason he was contemptuous about plot: he cared about art and the past, not about choices that might shape the future.

William Maxwell was certainly a fatalist. We are brought into this world without being aware of it, and we are subjected to Hamlet’s slings and arrows. We grow up to have personalities that seem little less determined than our skeletal peculiarities. Stuff happens, much of it awful. And yet Mendelson overlooks, in this condemnation of Maxwell’s lack of vision, the very choice that he damns elsewhere: Maxwell’s pursuit of a literary career.

Maxwell’s friends make vague, veiled allusions to the emotional price his wife and daughters paid for his ascetic devotion to art.

Maxwell was always thinking about choices that might shape the future. They just weren’t Mendelson’s choices.

Which way is up? Reading Maxwell is always agreeable: the man writes very well, and his judgment is sound. But where is he taking me? Through the pages of his little hobby, yet another History of Logan County, Illinois? To the corner of an overfurnished room in which we listen, as in Proust, for the sound of a beloved mother’s voice, and the delicious rustle of her skirts? Into the mind of an affable young man in need of psychoanalysis? And what about this suggestion of Mendelson’s, that Maxwell was not really a good man?

And is it important to answer any of these questions?

There’s no denying that I’ve become a lousy neighbor on the Web. Writing a thousand words or more every weekday, I read almost nothing. There is a pile-up of entangled explanations; what cannot be said is that I simply “got out of the habit” of reading other people’s blogs (such as remain). One of those explanations has to do with a very particular cause of Web fatigue.

I call it nailbiting, because it’s that unattractive — and pointless. Here is a précis of the idle complaint that I have read Enough, Already!

OMG, I can’t read anymore, can’t pay attention to a book, I’m always checking my email and Twitter and Instagram and don’t get me started on the YouTubes. The other day, I was so distracted texting that I walked into a cop. Assaulting an officer, he said! I know I should stop, but I can’t, I can’t! Now I’ve got a deadline for a ten-thousand word piece that will be universally TL/DR’d. Why go on?

For a long time, I responded to these lamentations with sardonic snorts. I get very little interesting email. (I have two Gmail accounts, one of them very successfully limited to long-form correspondents — people who respond at length. A week can go by without anything at all showing up in this account’s inbox.) I gave up on Twitter almost as soon as I signed up — I simply don’t understand it. Facebook can be fun; I rarely update, but I like to make snappy comments. Facebook is also vital for family connections. But it does not take very much time. I turn to it more or less the way I turn to FreeCell — to unwind, or to pass a small fragment of time. As for my phone, it does not ring very often; some days, it does not ring at all. I use the phone to check out the weather, to send the odd where-are-you-now text, and to set a timer for the laundry. An alarm rings at 9:45 every morning to remind me to take my pills.

I used to think, the quiet life is so lovely, so easy, so — quiet. What’s the matter with these young people?

For a clever guy, I can be pretty dumb. I am always urging people to remember the role of luck in our lives, and to resist taking 100% credit for successes, but that apparently didn’t stop me from feeling gratified about finally figuring out how to live a well-ordered life, even if I am at death’s door, more or less. (Everybody my age is.) In fact, I didn’t figure anything out. I did what I’ve always done: I followed my body. My body, now ancient and no longer restless, likes a quiet life.

It’s true that I myself have always wanted a quiet life — that’s why I’m feeling so “successful.” But my younger body had other plans. It wanted to go out at night. It found bars to be exciting, even interesting places (!). It was morbidly convinced that something tremendously memorable was happening somewhere else. The parts of my younger brain that were responsible for speech were not well integrated, leading to remarks that ought to have been catastrophic.

Now my younger body has become my older body, and I enjoy peace and quiet at last.

The moral of this story is:

(a) Stop with the nailbiting. Stop complaining about your addiction to social media. It’s normal! In his column today, David Brooks writes, “Being online is like being a part of the greatest cocktail party ever and it is going on all the time.” Yes! That’s the way it is! I shudder to think what I’d have made of myself if this cocktail party had been going on in the days of my younger body. We are living in an age of speakeasies, and to know the address is to know the password. Just remember: You’ll grow out of it. Well, your body will.

(b) Bear in mind that youth=unripeness=immaturity, age=ripeness=maturity. Do not struggle for maturity when you are only thirty. Strive to build good habits by all means, but do not imagine that you have achieved maturity prematurely! You really shouldn’t want to: premature maturity is often pretty sad. Maturity comes only with experience. Experience is not fun; it is not the same thing as “experiences.” It involves a wearying passage of time. But you’ll find that out for yourself. What I’m really saying is this: try to stay alive so that you can enjoy the best part.

(c) The best part is also the worst part. You will be, after all, at death’s door. Your body will be falling apart and giving you a lot of grief. You will spend an itself-sickening amount of time with doctors. All that aside, it is still the best part.

(d) Ergo, take it from me!

Bon weekend à tous!

For a few days, I pray, it is going to be very quiet around here. Kathleen has flown up to Maine for her annual vacation/bucolic spa retreat/collapse. She stays with old friends; they were camp counselors together, back in the early Seventies. (They were all campers together before that.) Two of them have houses on a nearby lake (it’s called a “pond”); a third alumna has a house right across the much bigger lake from the old camp. Now that they’re all respectable matrons, they find themselves roped in for an afternoon, or even a full day, of volunteer housekeeping; last year, they squared away the meeting house and museum. The owner of the camp, a grandson of the man who ran it when they were girls, is a little bit afraid of them; it seems that Kathleen’s cohort is unique in keeping watch from a nearby vantage.

I always wonder what the current campers make of them, although I’m sure that it involves the usual reactions: a bit of shuddering, and a determination never to “look like that.” Plus, how weird is it that the old broads know all the songs. Could they really have been young once, too? Meanwhile, Kathleen and her friends laugh over old scrapes and near-scandals that the youngsters, to hear them, would turn pale as the high moon.

But the important thing is that Kathleen is allowed to sleep unconscionably late, and to take naps before meals — to the preparation of which she is called upon to contribute nothing.

Kathleen almost always packs for a trip after dinner. If it’s a short business trip, or a weekend with her father in North Carolina, the packing takes a few hours. If it’s for a longer trip, and she has just, say, changed the place of her employment, and her brain is fully occupied churning out a manic stock ticker full of unfamiliar symbols, packing takes longer, and is somewhat frenetic. I didn’t complain or say anything, but I was a nervous wreck by the time she crawled into bed. I myself am a very organized packer: I know where everything is; I always take the same things and proceed in the same order, and I am always done much sooner than I expect to be. But that’s because I used to be like Kathleen, or perhaps much worse, and had to reform or die. When Kathleen packs the way she did last night, I’m clawed back to the bad old days, as if by the ghost of Christmas Missed. It’s too awful.

As further proof that my blameless way of life is no protection, this morning, shortly after Kathleen called to say that she had landed safely and so on, the house phone rang. I don’t like it when the house phone rings, unless I’m waiting for Chinese delivery or a case of Absolut. I have nothing to fear from the FBI or the KGB, but I’m a fervent dreader of the Wrong Man scenario — the nightmare of which is always heralded by an unexpected doorbell — in our case, the doorman calling on the house phone. The doorman on duty is new, and I haven’t worked out his accent yet (it’s not Latino), so I didn’t fully understand him, but I gathered that a Mrs Somebody from “our office” wanted to come up to the apartment. In thirty-five years’ residence in this building, no one from”the office” has ever visited our apartment. Within seconds, I was little more than a gaggle of chattering bones. In the middle of writing a letter, I found that I could not type, I was shaking so badly. Mrs Somebody kept failing to ring the doorbell, giving me more than enough time to make the bed — really, too much more.

Then Kathleen called again. Trying to tell her what was going on, while trembling all the more with gratitude for having her at the other end of the phone, I was barely more comprehensible than Leporello announcing the Stone Guest. She kept insisting that it would be all right, but I recognized this as yet another herald of the Wrong Man scenario.

The house phone rang once more. This time, it was Mrs Somebody herself. Her voice was vaguely familiar. I asked what the trouble was, and she said that she didn’t like to discuss it in the lobby — because, of course, you can’t use the house phone from the office, you have to go out to the doorman’s desk — but she did let on that the problem was “our account.” Could I come downstairs and talk about it? I said I’d be right down. I grabbed a blank check and a Post-It and headed for the elevator.

A few months ago, while I was paying the bills, I noticed that an inexplicable “past due” figure, in the amount of $7000, was appearing at the bottom of our rent bill. What could that mean? And why weren’t we being hounded about it? In the old days — but then, Helmsley Spear did know what they were doing — a shaming notice would have been slipped under our door by the twentieth of the month. I asked Kathleen to talk to the office about it (because I’m a chickenshit when it comes to the office, as my paroxyms of shaking betrayed), but she had too many other things on her mind.

But our problem wasn’t the $7000. The nice woman who keeps the office humming directed me to a glassed-in conference room, where I was joined by another nice woman, the one who showed us the apartments that we might take in the lieu of the one that we should have to leave. So this was Mrs Somebody! Perhaps she had remarried. We sat down and I asked what the problem was. She showed me a piece of paper with a table on it. I didn’t really understand the table until it was no longer necessary, but she told me that we had not paid rent in April, May, or June. When I said, basically, What?, she scrunched her face and said, “I know, it’s so weird, you’re always so punctual.”

I wrote out the check for the July rent, which I had intended to hand in tomorrow, and assured Mrs S that I would produce copies of the canceled checks for April, May, and June, which I had written and mailed and which I’d ticked off a list in conference with Kathleen, who, every couple of days, reviews our banking situation. The checks had all cleared; somebody other than us had that money. As I explained this (because we are so punctual &c), the pressure dropped to normal. There was no longer an emergency, with eviction notices and sheriff’s tape lurking in the background. I went back upstairs quite relieved. I called Kathleen to tell her how things had worked out, and she agreed to contact the bank later this afternoon.

When I hung up, I realized that I’d forgotten to make a note of the rent payment’s check number — that’s why I had taken the Post-It. Too dizzy to think of anything else to do, I went back downstairs to the office. After a minute, Mrs S came forward and told me the number. I thanked her and left. Then, out in the hallway, as I was about to press the elevator button, she called me back. “You don’t have to do anything,” she said. “They were crediting the money to your old apartment.”

She’s a nice lady. She didn’t apologize for the misunderstanding, but this is New York. Her smile made me whole.

And, now, can we please be quiet for a few days?

A friend has sent me a recent law review article on the subject of same-sex marriage. My friend, who is married to another man, with whom he is the father of two children, tells me that many of his gay friends find the article offensive, although he does not. I look forward to reading it this weekend. I really do, too, because the very first footnote, which I couldn’t help glancing at, mentions the old Consistory Court, an English body that dates back to the Middle Ages, when the church (later the Church of England) had its own court system, and was deferred to by the civil courts in the determination of essentially ecclesiastical matters.

Just seeing the word got my fountain of youth burbling. A long time ago and far away, I spent a good part of my days with folios dating from the end of the Seventeenth Century, and smaller books even older than that, in my study of the medieval handling of the question of bastardy.

All my materials are somewhere in storage, so I can’t quote from the old books (lucky you), which were written in Law French anyway. Every so often, it is pleasant to think how very, very, very different legal practices were in the days of Edward II (1307-1327) — and yet perfectly recognizable as English.

Given that land was the most valuable thing under the sun, most lawsuits contested the ownership of real estate; and since real estate was owned by rich people, property law was complicated. We’re not going to go into that, though; we’re simply going to consider the report of a case. You probably won’t be surprised to find that it is not headed, Smith v Jones. What you might find surprising is that the report ends without telling you who won, Smith or Jones. It is not that the outcome of the case was of no earthly interest to the lawyers, but simply that the outcome was determined by the pleadings — which you can read in the report.

The report is in fact nothing but a dialogue between various named persons. Over time, the student of these materials learns which persons are the lawyers and which the judges. (Over time, some lawyers become judges — it’s practically Rumpole.) The dialogue is an argument that constitutes the pleadings. Now, pleadings in today’s world are thickish documents full of the allegations stating the grounds for a lawsuit. They will be proved or disproved at trial. In the old days, pleadings were an argument about how to frame a question. In medieval practice, this question, which would be asked of a jury (what we today call witnesses), pretty much determined how the actual trial would be run, and sometimes where. The lawyers, arguing in Westminster Hall at the beginning of the proceedings, tried to get one another to slip up and say something that would settle the question to be asked. Contentions about bastards provide an illuminating example.

The common law of England and the teachings of the Church differed on the matter of bastardy. Originally, Christian leaders did not acknowledge the stain of bastardy at all, which certainly does seem to be a “Christian” way of refusing to judge children by the sins of their parents. But in the Eleventh Century, it was seen that something must be done about priests who were leaving their parishes to their sons. (Yes!) Since a priest wasn’t supposed to get married, he could not have legitimate children, and if only legitimate children were allowed to enter the priesthood, then the undesirable practice would be stopped, albeit by a circuitous route. By the Fourteenth Century, ecclesiastical jurists in England agreed with their civil brothers that children born out of wedlock were bastards, illegitimate, whatever. But. The Church held that bastardy could be cured by the subsequent marriage of the parents. And why not? If the point of the exercise was to keep the sons of priests out of the priesthood, and a priest could never get married, then a cure was perfectly reasonable — desirable, in fact.

The common law still doesn’t agree, however. Its thinking on this point is still governed by considerations of honour. Just ask the Hon Benjamin George Lascelles, cousin to Her Majesty the Queen. When he was born, at Bath in 1978, his parents were not married. They did get married the following year, and in 1980 they had a second son, Alexander Edgar Lascelles. It is Alexander, not his older brother, who is in line to become the next Earl of Harewood.

Let’s say that Benjamin took possession of the family seat. Alexander would come into court and claim that possession ought to be his. Benjamin’s lawyers would argue that he was the eldest son of the previous tenant. Alexander’s would counter that his parents were married after the birth of Benjamin: puis né. That would be the Gotcha moment. The judge would instruct the clerk to issue a summons. Jurors — men of local importance presumed to know what was what — would swear to answer the question truthfully. In this case, they would agree that Benjamin’s parents were married after he was born, and the estate would go to Alexander.

Observe that what we call lawyers and what we call witnesses never intersected. The lawyers were in London. The witnesses were everywhere else.

It was also accepted that civil courts ought to leave ecclesiastic issues to the ecclesiastical courts. The mention of certain words would trigger an automatic change of venue, from civil to ecclesiastical courts. “Bastard” was such a word. In the case of Benjamin and Alexander, the one thing that Alexander’s lawyer must never do would be to state that Benjamin was a bastard. If he did, the case would be sent to the priests, who of course would decide, in accord with Church teachings, that Benjamin was not a bastard, because his parents did get married eventually. Benjamin would remain in possession.

Alexander would be happy to learn that the jurisdiction of today’s Consistory Court is limiting to the disciplining of clerics.

Boys don’t need much of an excuse to get on well together, if they get on at all.

William Maxwell drops this observation into the third chapter of his final novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow. When I read it for the first time, just last week, this was where I took a break, so that it was the last thing I read and then the first. What does it mean? Or, rather, how did it fit my own life? It wasn’t that I didn’t get on at all. But I did seem to need some sort of excuse to carry things further, to the point of getting on well — friendship. My lack of friends was, of course, thought to be a bad thing by everyone. One must have friends! But I needed something else more than I needed friends, or, rather, something that I had to have before I could have friends. I could never have said, at the time, what this was. Now I can, and quite easily. What I needed before I could have friends was adulthood, or at any rate my own version of it. I needed my way of thinking, my familiarity with history and the arts. I needed to know where we all were. Once I had that, I was ready to make friends with anyone who saw things from a similar perspective.

What I’ve just written is the result of a week’s puzzling. A week of noticing Maxwell’s observation as it flitted in and out of consciousness. A few other things came to mind as well, including two childhood connections that might or might not merit the name of friendship. One of them lasted a lot longer than the other, which I doubt lasted a year. They overlapped in 1958 or 1959, when my family lived on Hathaway Road in Bronxville PO, technically Eastchester.

***

Tony Frascati was the older son, and oldest child, of Dr Frascati, a short, round, gentle but frequently exasperated Italian-American. The exasperation was often caused by Tony, who, unlike his little brother and sister, took after his mother: he was tall and trim and brilliantly handsome. Mrs Frascati was just plain Italian, but that was the only plain thing about her. She was a war bride. I’m quite sure that, in Italian terms, she was a perfectly respectable girl. But she was also a beautiful woman. I see that now. At the time, she was the weirdest human being I had ever met. Aside from a very dreary string of Russian building superintendants and dour German cleaning ladies, she was my first European, and she was vibrantly alive to a degree that my mother, and ladies like her, would never have permitted.

She thought I was pretty weird, too, I think. I remember her looking at me with a kindly squint. I liked to read too much. Well, everyone said that, but, coming from her, it was more of a question. She was the only person who seemed potentially interested in finding out why I read so much. (In my experience, the answer to this question, where children under the age of ten or eleven are concerned, is always the same: escape. My years of reading for pleasure lay in the future.) For a big boy, I sat too quietly and tried too hard to be polite — unlike Tony, who was a noisy shining prince. Efforts at politeness were most severely taxed whenever my visits intersected with mealtime. It would be years before olive oil and garlic and artichokes and salamis that would never be found at Gristede’s would cease to be as exotically unappetizing as, say, popping a writhing little octopus into my mouth. Mrs Frascati, wearing something between a housecoat and a peignoir, her blondish hair pinned up in an improvisation, would walk around the table, putting dishes in front of us while we sat. Mangia, she would urge. I knew what this meant, because I had just started taking French lessons.

There was nothing cosmopolitan about my encounters with Mrs Frascati. She and her kitchen and her dishes were all fascinating, certainly, but they also made me uncomfortable. They were simply too unusual. I might, in a few years, be complaining about the homogeneity of life in the Holy Square Mile, but as a boy I was acclimatized, and all but addicted, to it. For her part, Mrs Frascati was untroubled about being unusual: she was simply being Italian. Her house might be in America, but, inside it, she could behave normally — as an Italian woman who was married to a doctor and the mother of three children, and only just the littlest bit plump. I can imagine, now, what she made of us, Americans, but all I remember is a  slightly challenging disapproval.

The only thing that I recall clearly about Mrs Frascati, the only non-reducible memory that penetrates the haze of impressions  is the Italian lesson. As it happened, Dr Frascati, like my father, was a member of the New York Athletic Club, which operated a sprawling outpost at a place called Traverse Island, on Long Island Sound. It was here that I saw Tony in the last days of our friendship. My family had moved to the house on Paddington Circle that put us, finally, in just plain Bronxville. I had hooked up with a sullen, “intellectual” cluster of disaffected kids, much too brainy and tragic for anything like friendship. Tony, meanwhile, was zooming along on the hormonal highway that bore him aloft even before the visible onset of puberty. He was crazy about the girls, and the girls were crazy about him — although this mutual attraction was confined to terms of mockery and abuse. All that remained of our friendship were two extinct volcanoes, on which we had both turned our backs.

I decided to teach myself Italian. I bought a book (because books are all that there were), and the book taught me that the word for “I” was io. Being too clever by half, I decided that the “i” in io functioned as a “y,” or as a “j” would, if Italian had that letter. One afternoon, finding myself standing by the Olympic salt-water pool at Traverse Island while Tony showed off on the high diving board, I announced to Mrs Frascati, who was lounging on a nearby deck chair, that I was learning her language. Oh yes? Say something. Instead of saying something useful or interesting, I went for clever. “Yo!” I said. What is that? What is that supposed to mean? I explained. Mrs Frascati’s exasperation with Americans finally blew its lid. “Eeeee-aw. Eeeee-aw. Don’t give me Spanish! You don’t know anything about Italy!”

It took a while to understand that Mrs Frascati had, in that outburst, taught me all about it.

***

Jimmy Chapman was a lanky but athletic boy who happened to be almost as fond of talking (when adults weren’t around) as I was. While Tony was a year older, Jimmy was a year younger, and we all went to different schools. And while I remember meeting Tony for the first time, playing in the street between our houses, I don’t remember not knowing Jimmy. The Chapmans and my parents were friends. Perhaps it would be better to say that my parents really liked Jimmy’s father, Roy Chapman, a lot, and put up with his mother, Jeanne Chapman, when they had to. Even though I have invented names for the Frascatis and the Chapmans, I still hesitate to say that Jeanne Chapman had a drinking problem. That isn’t how it was put. It wasn’t put; but I have an obstinate recollection of hearing one of my parents mutter, with no little disgust, that Jeanne Chapman was a drunk.

My mother, who was not keen on Italians, decided that I would be improved by a friendship with Jimmy Chapman, and a series of playdates and sleepovers was arranged. I don’t remember having a bad time with Jimmy — we had a lot of fun, as kids still did in those days, abusing the telephone. Jimmy knew a lot of dirty jokes, and I remember three of them, although one of them I never quite understood (and, when understanding began to dawn, I pulled down the shade). He would draw a picture of a light bulb and then tell me that it was his teacher, bending over to put on her girdle. It did not take forever for our fountains of loquacity to dry up, but we had fun while it lasted. I always had the impression that Jimmy would much rather have been playing baseball. Looking back, I think that he would have been happier had we been tossing a baseball back and forth while we joked, with maybe some pointless running around. I’ve never been able to decide whether my inability to catch a ball was an inborn ineptitude or the result of an absolute lack of interest.

Whenever Jimmy and I got together for a sleepover — a highly domesticated form of camping out for one child at a time — we prattled like monkeys into the small hours. I don’t remember being reprimanded at my house; perhaps I was a better enforcer of whispering. At Jimmy’s, however, we made such a racket one night that Roy Chapman got pissed off and stormed down the hall to tell us to shut the hell up. It wasn’t what he said that shocked me.

The middle-aged men that I knew — from such places as the locker room at Traverse Island — never ever ever looked like the Greek statues in museums, and not just because they were no longer young. These were prosperous executives, avid golfers perhaps but, at a time when gyms were patronized by cultish bodybuilders only, always pudgy around the middle. (Tennis players, in contrast, were too skinny to be mistaken for those statues.) But Roy Chapman, appearing suddenly in the doorway to Jimmy’s room, stark naked, furred chest only faintly grizzled, hands gripping the jambs, was a god, all six-six-plus of him. I couldn’t have made the comparison at the time, and Roy Chapman didn’t have a beard, but he was the very image of a bronze Poseidon, dredged from the Mediterranean, only livelier. His nakedness, far from suggesting vulnerability, blazed with the threat of terrible powers that he might unleash upon us.

Having barked, he disappeared. We quieted down.

This apparition might have been even more upsetting had it occurred in a normal Bronxville house. The Chapman’s house was not normal. There was nothing Colonial or Tudor about it. It didn’t seem to have any style at all, because it was hidden away behind a forest of rhododendrons. There was a small circular gravel driveway, where Roy Chapman parked his 1954 Buick. Owning a 1954 Buick in 1958 or 1959 was not normal, either. My father bought a new car every other year, and after he inherited his mother’s Dodge and we became a two-car family, there was a new car in the garage every year. That was normal. Roy Chapman, much ribbed about his ancient jalopy, claimed that he could not fit his giant’s frame into newer cars. And I’m sure that, when he did so, he spoke with enough Neptunian vigor to put a stop to the comments. Beyond the car, there were steps to a porch and the front door — all that could be seen from the street.

I usually came in through the kitchen, at the back of the house. I remember two things about the kitchen. There was a KitchenAid stand mixer on a counter. I had never seen such an impressive piece of equipment in a kitchen before, and I would have immediately pegged my family as less prosperous if it had not been for the other thing, which was a palpable neglect. Was the kitchen dirty? Probably not — but I wasn’t disposed to look too closely. Whether or not Jeanne Chapman ever made us a sandwich, my recollection of her kitchen is the negative of Mrs Frascati’s. I don’t even recall a table, much less sitting down to a lot of food. I must have been busy not remembering.

If you entered the Chapman’s house by the front door, there was a living room to the right. We were not allowed to enter it, which, since it led nowhere, was no inconvenience. From time to time, Jeanne Chapman’s French mother, who was called something like “Woo-Hoo,” and who was also, if not demented, then permanently out to lunch, would drift in and out; and there was one time when Jeanne Chapman sat down at the grand piano and played a song that I had never heard of: “Mood Indigo.” She asked me if I liked the song, but let’s face it: “Mood Indigo” is so sophisticated that I wasn’t even aware of a melody. What on earth did “mood indigo” even mean? It wasn’t a song; it was a state of mind.

If you turned from the hallway to the left, you could walk through to an octagonal room with window seats all round (except for the sides that abutted the rest of the house). While the living room was furnished with something approaching elegance (but still dogged by neglect), the octagonal room, which may have been called the TV room or the tower room (above the master bedroom overhead, there rose a squat Victorian turret), was not decorated at all. There were ratty upholstered chairs, and a sofa no doubt, along with other playroom bric-à-brac, and the television. The television was always tuned in to a game of some kind. Roy Chapman was spoken of as an athlete by my parents, and he had a keen interest in sports. So did Jimmy. I’d have been bored to death, but I was saved, transported, redeemed by a wonderful discovery on the window seat — and a discovery it was, because my parents were little old ladies from Dubuque who had no interest in subscribing to the magazine.

The New Yorker Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Album.

So there it was, in a house that might have been drawn by Charles Addams, whose heavy-lidded mistress might have stepped out of a cartoon by Richard Taylor, whose master’s casual nudity would have been right at home in the work of artists ranging from Peter Arno to William Steig, that I page by page woke up to the world.

There are times when, like everyone else, I wish I had my life to live over again — aided, of course, by the wisdom that I’ve acquired on the first go-round. In my case, these fantasies involve academic careers that I should have pursued in fields that even now don’t exist. The imaginary specialty that I have been thinking of most recently won’t have a name, will it, until I give it one. Here goes.

World Theory. Yes — the longer I look at it, the more I like it. It makes such an entertainingly ridiculous first impression. “World Theory” would be a theory about everything, right? Wrong — the second attraction. You must always give your theory a name that will trip up the uninitiated; otherwise, it’s not properly academic. World Theory (I’m being serious now, class) seeks to explain how certain man-made things acquire the very rare permanence that makes them meaningful to successive generations. How is it that we are still listening to Mozart and reading Jane Austen? World Theory would also seek to explain how this permanence, which is by no means to be confused with immortality, may be lost. How is it that we are no longer listening to Cherubini, nor reading Sir Walter Scott? Just what kind of cultural loss was entailed by the demolition of Pennsylvania Station? The destruction of the World Trade Center?

“The World,” according to World Theory, is made up exclusively of such permanent things. The vernacular word for these things is “classics,” but it throws no light on what World Theory wants to know, which is how and why some things get to be classics. Also, World Theory needs to explain who is doing the listening and the reading — the appreciating of classics. Appreciation is the principal Worldly activity of human beings. There is a vital secondary activity, known familiarly as “scholarship.” Scholars keep track of Worldly Things; they know the names and dates, they prepare editions and repair paintings with one objective that never changes with fashion: to preserve whatever it is that has been appreciated. World Theory itself is another secondary activity. The main Worldly activity, as I say, is appreciating things.

To begin at the beginning, let’s have a look at what academics calls “the Classics,” or “Classical Studies.” These are things — poems, statues, ruins — that were made, for the most part, by people who spoke Greek and Latin and who lived (to cast the net very wide) between 800 BCE and 400 CE. Scholars, as I say, oversee the care and clarification of these things. They authenticate the statues, and they prepare Loeb editions of the poems. To this extent, their work is a specialty of history. Classics scholars are often motivated by something besides academic curiosity, however. They are quite often impassioned appreciators of the things they study. Their relationship with these things is marked by love and reverence (even if the reverence often hides behind a taste for the carnal longing of Catullus or the rudeness of Juvenal). Insofar as they appreciate what they study, classicists are Worldly.

According to World Theory, the point of a liberal education is to instill in students the desire and the ability to appreciate the World. Where the modern research university has gone off the rails is in its attempt to transform students into scholars — into academics. Much of what passes for higher education is merely the ritual simulation of scholarly activity that bypasses the development of appreciative skills entirely. There are sorry explanations for this mistake, but we shan’t go into them now. We shall merely remind ourselves that the modern research university was concocted when entrepreneurs were harnessing what we now call “the scientific revolution” to drive what we now call “the industrial revolution.” In those days, quantities and regularities were the measures of success, and, as such, extremely important kinds of scores.

It is an axiom of World Theory that new things cannot be appreciated until they are no longer new. The vulgar term, “contemporary classic,” is meaningless. It is in the nature of new things to attract admiration. When something continues to attract admiration after losing its novelty, it may be on the way to becoming a Worldly Thing. Time will tell. Admiration becomes appreciation as novelty gives way to personal satisfaction. There is a monotony to admiration, because there is so little understanding in it: we are dazzled by the new in the same way. Over time, however, we appreciate things in very different ways; and yet there is a communicability of these different personal appreciations that produces the thick and rich texture of Worldliness.

***

Now: what brought that up? Whom do we thank for the latest little treatise? It seems almost unfair to point to William Maxwell. The preceding paragraphs would probably make him shudder, possibly break out in an allergic reaction. But that’s by the way. What I’m trying to understand is this: will Maxwell’s 1961 novel, The Château, become a Worldly Thing? Is it one already? How can we tell?

World Theory would explain it all, but, sadly, World Theory is not in working order at the moment. The scholars of World Theory have not been trained. This is what I would do if I had my life to live over: I would become the first scholar of World Theory.

Probably the first rule that I would hit on would derive from the axiom of novelty: it is not possible to estimate the Worldliness of a thing created in one’s lifetime.

When people ask me to name my favorite novelists, I draw a blank after Austen, Eliot, and James. Proust? I love Proust, but I don’t know how to re-read him. I’ve gone through the great novel sequence twice in my lifetime, and even embarked on a French crossing. But the work is so immense that it requires a pilgrimage, and one does not spend one’s life on pilgrimages. Is there a way to re-read Proust as one re-reads novels of normal scale? If there is, I’d like to know about it. (Note that the appreciation of a novel begins with the first re-reading. That’s why one essential course in a true liberal arts curriculum would revisit, in the final semester, works read during the first two years of college. With a very light-handed sort of guidance, students would compile their own reading lists from the books, not chosen by them, read earlier.)

Lately, I hit on the idea of keeping all the novels that I’ve read recently and really liked on one shelf. The shelf is only so capacious, and no book can be added to it without the subtraction of another. Who’s on the shelf now? Edward St Aubyn, Alan Hollinghurst, Ben Lerner, Greg Baxter, J K Rowling (The Casual Vacancy), Helen DeWitt (Lightning Rods), plus a few novels by writers who have their own sections in the fiction bookcase (Colm Tóibín, Kazuo Ishiguro, Peter Cameron). And let’s not forget Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy! (The Penelopes, as one friend referred to this winter’s passion for Fitzgerald and Lively, have their own little bookcase.)

William Maxwell has always had his own corner, shared for a long time (I can’t think why) with Barbara Pym. Pym has moved to the fiction shelf, and now Maxwell abuts all the Europa Editions. I’m waiting anxiously for delivery of the Early volume of the Library of America edition, edited by Christopher Carduff, because the spine on the (signed) Godine edition of Time Will Darken It has broken, leaving the book in two pieces. I was afraid that this would happen, but not while I was reading it. The sooner the LoA book arrives, the safer the Godine will be, because I have been unable to stop reading it.

I have always admired William Maxwell. (Even Worldly Things are novelties at first, centuries-old though they may be.) I have even declared a love for the fables gathered, in 1966, in The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Stories. But I have only appreciated him since reading The Château, ten or twenty years ago. The Château recounts the adventures of a young American couple, Henry and Barbara Rhodes, at a big house just out of sight of the Loire, as the paying guests of a once wealthy and vaguely aristocratic family. The Rhodes fall in love with France at once (Henry, turning forty, has never been to Europe before), and their fondness is amplified by one of those lucky good times that one sometimes has, in this case at an inn at Pontorson. They love everyone at the inn, and everyone at the inn seems to love them back. This is not the case at the château. What the Rhodeses encounter at the château makes the home lives of the Bellegardes, the cursed grandees in Henry James’s Traviata of a novel, The American, seem Midwestern by comparison. Poor Henry is exasperated by the unintelligibility of Mme Viénot’s treatment, but he keeps coming back for more; and, on his last day in Paris, Henry runs around like a man about to die, lamenting self-piteously that the Luxembourg Gardens will go on without him. William Maxwell completely captures the doomed yearning of earnest and well-educated young Americans to be taken for French, or at least to accepted as civilized equals. The glory of the novel is his demonstration, accomplished without fanfare, that if the Rhodeses are never quite accepted as peers, they do in fact deserve to be. The trick of the novel is that this demonstration makes you like the French even more. For The Château speaks to those Americans who believe that their own country would be a finer place if people were more demanding — especially of themselves.

As far as I’m concerned, The Château is a Worldly Thing. But it’s too soon to tell. All I can do is cast a baleful eye on the novels that hogged all the buzz when it was published. What’s become of them? Alas, I’m not the scholar to answer.

For a few days, I’ve been gazing every now and then on the twelve-panel drawing from an old New Yorker, collected in the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Album, one of the books that introduced me to my life. The black-and-white sparkle of the panels suggests Gardner Rea or Gluyas Williams, two exponents of the elegant, understated aesthetic developed for the magazine by Rea Irvin, the creator of Eustace Tilley. This cartoon, “A Day at the Office,” is signed “Frueh,” presumably Alfred Frueh, another artist of the early days. I took a photo just now to serve as a thumbnail: to appreciate it fully, you’ll have to find a better copy.

The panels relate a simple narrative. A limousine pulls up in front of a handsome, neoclassical building — New York’s City Hall, in fact, one of its loveliest buildings but not, I think, a widely known one. Frueh takes pains to capture the building’s rectilinear grace, as if he were preparing an architectural rendering for a client. This is not mere diligence: it frames the glorious silliness to follow. No sooner does the little man who gets out of the limousine and climbs the steps to the main door enter the building than it begins to convulse. First, it deflates, as if beset by an identity crisis. The cupola lists at a 45º angle; the pillars of the portico are entwined in confusion. Soon, City Hall is devoid of straight lines. Then, after lunch presumably, the building suffers the opposite distortion. It begins to swell like a balloon. First the central block lurches upward, then the wings. Then the eaves lift like flaps, emitting gusts of steam that suggest an imminent explosion. Finally, as the little man emerges, City Hall relaxes. As the limousine pulls away, it stands restored to it beaux-arts rectitude — only to await the same ordeal tomorrow.

I’d love to know how I came to understand what this cartoon is about. Who is the little man? Did I grasp it all at once, because someone explained it to me? Or did I put it together slowly, as I put so many things together in that factitious suburb where I grew up? I’m sure that I liked the cartoon enormously even without being in on the joke. A lot of the joke is, after all, explicit. With the help of the caption, it’s fairly clear that the building symbolizes “business as usual,” and that the little man is a force for disruption. This disruption, represented by contortions that no real building could survive, is great fun to watch — slapstick, really. But the sliest part of the joke is that the disruption is temporary.

I can’t believe that I always recognized City Hall — but it’s just possible. I’m sure that I had to be told that the little man was Fiorello LaGuardia, New York’s mayor from 1934 to 1945, and arguably the most progressive man ever to lead the city. Half-Italian, half-Jewish, he represented the city’s population, not its élite. He talked with his hands. He threw tantrums. He was even — a Republican! I would have known the name from fairly early on, thanks not only to the airport but also to a musical, Fiorello!, that ran for a while.

It is a truism of humane architecture that our sense of possibility is shaped by the structures that we inhabit. Frueh’s drawing is a daydream about the converse. What if the possibilities of structures were shaped by the human beings inhabiting them — in this case, presiding over what went on inside? What would happen if a civic monument to modest affluence got roaring drunk? (As Frank Gehry’s creations suggest to me, these meditations are best conducted in two dimensions.) What makes “A Day at the Office” sublime is the detail with which Frueh follows the upheaval. He draws it all in the painstaking manner of the first panel. None of the architectural details registered at the start is neglected, and each is recognizable even at its most twisted. I could not possibly pick a funniest.

The exuberance of Frueh’s drawing does not obscure the elegance of the compositional scheme, even if awareness remains subliminal. The outer pairs of drawings show LaGuardia coming and going. This leaves two inner quartets, the first collapsing, the second bursting. There is nothing chaotic about this presentation of chaos. However bewildering the experience is for poor old City Hall, the viewer enjoys a completely satisfying day at the office.

***

A long time ago, Robert Benchley wrote a parody of a scientific news report entitled, “What Is Humor — a Joke?” When I read this piece for the first time, in tenth grade homeroom at Bronxville High School, I had to be asked to stop laughing. I wasn’t just laughing. I was almost as crumpled as Alfred Frueh’s City Hall. I had to close the book, lean over the desk, and gasp for air. Tears blinded my eyes and gummed my cheeks. To say that I created a disturbance is an understatement: I was an irresistible and annoying center of attention. It wasn’t that Benchley was so funny. It was that I’d had no idea that such funniness existed. It was really quite like the surprise of my first sexual encounter. But even greater, because I had heard that sex was a big deal. I hadn’t heard that about laughter. I didn’t know that laughter could open the door to a new physical experience — a new dimension, to use a cliché popular at the time. I can still remember the shock of Benchley’s ridiculously-named “Mergenthaler Laugh Detector.” My storm of laughter was the relief of a very serious person who has just been assured that institutional pomposity need not be taken seriously — indeed, that it ought not. There was a thick seam of Allez, courage! in Benchley’s “joke.”

The essay is no longer very funny. I don’t even find it amusing. Benchley’s style is too scattershot. Whether this is because he was a drunk or a depressive doesn’t matter; for one reason or another, he surrendered to a stylistic opportunism that put equal weight on very unequal gags. And a great deal of the humor is dated, because society has changed, and has been in no small part changed by old jokes. The society dragons that Margaret Dumont played for the Marx Brothers no longer exist — not in the United States, anyway. We laugh at her as a clown, not as the representative of a class of rich widows. Humor is an awfully delicate thing, even in the life of one person. That so many cartoons in the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Album are still so funny — but are they? Are they still funny to teenagers who open the book for the first time? I don’t mean to teenagers at large, but to the thin band of clever young people like the boy I used to be. Can “A Day at the Office” still make anyone under twenty laugh?

I hope so.

Bon weekend de fête à tous!

Well, that’s over. Kathleen doesn’t know her new phone number, and she hasn’t met any of the support staff, but she has seen her new office and enjoyed a partners’ lunch. The move to Kaye Scholer takes her a few blocks across town, to Fifty-Fifth Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, but this will be closer to home, in time, anyway, when the Q train begins to operate beneath Second Avenue. Four stops and voilà.

It has not been a fun experience, the transition, largely because there were, as there always are, uncertainties, and yet these could absolutely not be discussed. Fewer than ten people in our lives, all of them family or close friends, knew anything about it. We did not discuss it with them, and they were asked not to raise the subject. The curious thing is that by the time Kathleen announced her resignation at one firm while the other issued a press release, we were too exhausted to be excited about telling the world. I posted the press release at Facebook and let it go at that.

We heard the good news on Friday. We were having a very nice lunch at Café d’Alsace — I will never forget the gay sprig of rosemary that garnished the very Mediterranean dish of soft-shelled crabs and pilaf that I ordered instead of my usual fare — when the call came through. The partners at Kaye Scholer had voted, and Kathleen was in. We didn’t really believe it, but, immediately, our emotional pores began to open and release the pent-up pressure of enormous anxiety caused by having Kathleen’s career up in the air. More than any other change, this relocation struck us both as a matter of life and death. I am not going to discuss the reasons. It’s enough to report that Kathleen and her closest partner (in practice, not friendship) managed their adieux without either one’s saying that it had been a pleasure &c. It’s enough to mention Bitcoin. I shall add only that I have begging Kathleen to find a better fit for five years or more.

Over the weekend, which stretched out for about a month, we came back to feeling okay about life. The distension of time was extraordinary. Even now, yesterday seems to have occurred last week. We’ve had the hyperconsciousness of lucky survivors. Is it real? Are we still here?

The role, or the contribution, of age has been interesting. On the one hand, it makes upheavals hugely tiring — and we have had almost a year of upheavals. Last September, I was in the hospital with cellulitis (which can lead to sepsis and death), and no sooner did I stop taking the massive antibiotics that fought the staph infection to the death than we learned that our old lease would not be renewed. How about that for a shock! Presently it emerged that we should have a chance to move within the building, and the happy ending has settled me in the nicest place I’ve ever lived in. But the move was hardly complete when Kathleen sought the counsel of a recruiter. One damned thing after another. And as a faithful, positively glued reader of Jenny Diski’s “cancer diary” in the LRB, I know that more damned things are always a possibility.

On the other hand, age equipped us to endure the uncertainty without falling apart, as I certainly should have done years ago. I’d have let everything go — housekeeping, correspondence, writing here, even reading — to hell. But I didn’t; I didn’t let anything go, not even an inch, netherwards. I observed all of my routines, went through all the motions. And as the ordeal dragged on, everyday discipline became a comfort. And it will not be forgotten that it was during this time that I got to be proficient at making pizzas that Kathleen and I find so satisfying that we shouldn’t dream of having anyone else’s delivered. (Easy-peasy, too.) We had our big party in May, and it went very nicely, demonstrating, as was expected, that this apartment is much better suited to “entertaining” than the old one was.

Mindful of the stream of more damned things, I’m hesitant about drawing a line under the narrative and writing “The End.” Nothing is ever really over, if only because we don’t know one way or the other until so much time has passed that we’ve forgotten all about it. “Remember when we were so worried…?” I’d much rather say that than, “Remember when we didn’t have a care in the world?” I don’t in fact remember not having a care in the world, certainly not when I was a child. But I can remember what so often came of the feeling that things were going well. It does seem unlikely, however, that Kathleen will be thinking of a job change anytime soon. Not impossible but unlikely — unlikely enough for me to say,

— but I’ve already said it once. Saying it twice would be asking for trouble.

But, first:

Greece and Puerto Rico are giving us rich lessons in one of the problems of democracy. All of the debt now coming due was signed on to by duly elected officials, none of whom, however, is currently accountable. They have all been replaced by other duly elected officials. It seems empty to say that the people of Greece and Puerto Rico are responsible, because they are not the same people, either. The stewardship feature of democracy, which counsels today’s voters to consider tomorrow’s (who, after all, will include children, grandchildren, and so on), is barely a notion: the only legacy that politicians ever talk about is that of military greatness, or other demonstrations of power, such as mammoth dams. It appears that nobody has given this problem much thought — more, that is, than merely hoping for the best. What would formulas and procedures for giving future generations a say in today’s decisions look like? In any case, we are learning that democracy cannot flourish in an eternal now — any more than the environment can. Not given the powers of today’s humanity to screw things up on a global scale.

Perhaps lenders will become more cautious. Perhaps they will demand referendums before making their loans. These referendums will vividly describe the weight of future payments (debt service) in terms that any newspaper-reader can easily grasp. At the bottom, there will a be a boxed warning: This obligation may condemn your children and grandchildren to disagreeably austere living conditions. That ought to cut down on long-term debt. Thought might also be given to making politicians personally responsible for the bonds that are issued under their watch. Nobody would expect them to repay the money, of course; but there are other pounds of flesh.

***

Having finished Book 2 of My Struggle, and finding myself in a drifting mood, not quite ready to pick up Book 3, I googled the author for flotsam and jetsam, and helped myself to two servings. The first was a Paris Review interview that Karl Ove Knausgaard had given to James Wood on an Oslo stage — recently, I suppose. The second was a clip from Knausgaard’s appearance on Charlie Rose’s show. I’ve never been a Charlie Rose fan, and now I find him perfectly dreadful — unwatchable, really. He is both rudely insistent and greedy for satisfactions. I flinched, I winced, I felt sorry for Knausgaard, who however did not seem in any way to be a victim. It was pleasant to discover that he speaks English with an accent that I can only call “groomed”; it most certainly doesn’t make him difficult to understand. But that was pretty much all I learned. In both interviews, Knausgaard more or less repeated things that he said toward the end of Book 2, in passages that muse on the nature of literature. What more was there to say?

I saw that Karl Ove is still married to Linda, and that they have four children now; they have had another girl since the period covered by Book 2. Knausgaard finished this book years ago. He underwent all the ordeals of publishing sensation back then. Now he’s dribbling along behind the translations. At some point, Book 6 will have been translated into every important language, or English at any rate, and people will want to talk to him about other things. Did he ever write that book about angels, set in the Seventeenth Century?

Somewhere in those thick disquisitions at the end of Book 2, where he writes about beginning to write My Struggle, Knausgaard complains that all stories occur at the same distance from reality, making them more like each other than they are like any reality. At least, I think he says this. Completely countering this complaint, however, is a passage on page 561.

Language is shared, we grow into it, and the forms we use it in are also shared, so irrespective of how idiosyncratic you and your notions are, in literature you can never free yourself from others. It is the other way round, it is literature that draws us closer together, through its language, which none of us owns and which indeed we can hardly have any influence on, and through its form, which no one can break free of alone, and if anyone should do so, it is only meaningful if it is immediately followed by others. Form draws you out of yourself, distances from yourself, and it is this distance that is the prerequisite for closeness to others.

It’s hard to tell whether Knausgaard means this ingenuously: the passage is presented as the gist of a talk that Knausgaard is going to deliver in Norway. It doesn’t sound like him, to talk about closeness to others as a possibility. Or perhaps he only feels close to others when he is writing, putting himself at a distance from himself. Sometimes, Knausgaard seems like a strange and very cantankerous man, quite beyond understanding; but at other times he captures a fundamental truth about serious writing: it leaves nothing more to say. Having written a book, Knausgaard can only repeat himself when talking to other people about it. Talking to other people about the book that he has written does not bring him closer to other people. On the contrary, it drives him further away, maddening him with the pointlessness of much human contact. He felt close when he was writing, and readers felt close while they were reading. The problem with readers, and the publicists who pander to them, is the delusion that meeting an author and having him sign your book and maybe even shaking his hand brings you closer to him. But the man who signs your book is just a man, he could be anybody. The writer to whom readers want to get close is locked up in the book. Readers must settle for that — they must do better than settling. They must understand and accept that we are brought together when we are writing and when we are reading, when we are, in fact, totally alone.

If meeting an author is more vivid or “meaningful” for you than reading his book, then you are not a serious reader.

***

But: how does he do it? What he says himself in the book suggests that, having found a thread that will lead him through episodes of memory, he thereupon writes down everything that comes him, in a state of demented recollection. (This headlong rush of detail is responsible for the exaggeration made by almost every reviewer, that My Struggle recounts everything that ever happened to Knausgaard.)  Later, there may be some editing; there is certainly a bit of cutting and pasting: every one of the regressions that I mentioned the other day is matched by an eventual restoration. Here in fact, are the page numbers: I made note of them on my phone. I’ve put the earliest episode, the innermost ring as it were, first.

• 187-203 Knausgaard meets Linda at Biskops-Arnö. As the central episode, this is uninterrupted.
• 126-285 This is the plane of Knausgaard’s first days in Stockholm, falling in love with Linda. What might be called Knausgaard in Love begins on page 126, is interrupted on page 187 by the account of his first meeting Linda, some years before, resumes on page 203, and at page 285 is brought to the resumption of the following cluster.
• 105-349 This is the plane of the New Year’s Eve party (lobster and mussels) and Vanja’s birth a few days later.
• 69-536 This is the plane that begins with the Rhythm Time class and the prolonged stay at a café, reading Dostoevsky. It follows the course of several days, ringing the changes on the awfulness of trying to function as an adult while caring for a toddler. The only solution? Have more children.
• 20-543 This is the plane of Stella’s birthday party in Malmö, to which the Knausgaard family of four has moved.
• The outermost plane begins with the family-of-five visit to a decrepit amusement park and ends with Knausgaard, shoulder taped up after a football collison, beginning to write My Struggle.

There are numerous smaller interruptions and flashbacks, as for example when characters are introduced and Knausgaard tells us how he met them and what he thinks about them. (I find it disagreeable to think of these as strict nonfiction.) The theme is Knausgaard’s helpless engagement with other people, from the wife whom he loves on out. All he wants to do, he says again and again, is to be alone, writing. He never quite says why this is impossible — what prevents him from retiring to a hermitage and cutting off contact with the outer world. It has, after all, been done. Why he does saddle himself with a wife and children and dinner parties and so forth remains a mystery.

But that’s what he does. How does he make it so compulsively readable? Suspense, as I said, has something to do with it. You can see from the numbers that Knausgaard quickly passes through several rings of time, reaching the central one at a third of the book’s length, and then working his way back out in a more leisurely fashion. But as I also said, these devices would not carry a book whose whole insistent point is that it has no objective interest, that it is not about anything that you don’t already know.

My preliminary hypothesis, to be tested by the remaining four books, is that Knausgaard deploys a double-barreled verisimilitude. He recounts events that are always totally plausible, especially when they’re unusual, such as the whole business with the Russian madwoman. The narrative is so grounded in everyday details that our skepticism is hypnotised, or, if you prefer, bored to sleep. Who cares if he boils the tagliatelle before cooking the mussels or the other way round? And if you do care, because you, too, are a cook, then the fact that he gets it right is just as lulling. This, together with the regressions from narrative planes that assure us how things are going to work out, create the impression that nothing is going to happen — and what could be more realistic than that? At no point does My Struggle exude the fragrance of Important Book. Not even when Knausgaard rattles on about Dostoevsky. Hey, it’s just a guy…

But what a guy. It’s the other barrel that works the magic. This is the verisimilitude of Knausgaard’s voice. I am not going to try to pin down the qualities of this voice, not now anyway. It’s enough to say that it is the voice of Orpheus. If it does not repel you (as, presumably, it must some readers), you will follow it helplessly, “sequacious of the lyre.” It is not a pretty voice, or an exalting one; the traditional attributes of poetic discourse are largely absent. But it is a passionate voice, a breathing, almost gasping voice, profoundly engaged in its tale — even, however briefly, with the boiling pasta. Your common sense numbed (nothing is going to happen), you follow Knausgaard’s voice with the passivity of a dreamer. And when the voice stops, you experience, as Zadie Smith noted, the pain of withdrawal: all you can think of is your next Knausgaard fix. Or, in my case, worse: flotsam and jetsam.

What will it be liked to re-read the damned thing?

Before I mention the little problem that I’m having with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, I want to say two things. First, I promise to stop calling him Klaus Ove. Lord, how embarrassing! Second (but really first), I don’t think that Knausgaard is in any way a misogynist, or that he regards women as inferior beings. He is simply a traditional European male: Vive la différence! Regarding any problems that he might have “understanding women,” he is inclined to portray himself as the stupid person.

I also want to note something that hadn’t occurred to me before I became aware of this little problem that I’m going to mention: there are no gay people in My Struggle. Perhaps, in passing, there’s a minor character whom I’ve forgotten, but no one in the narrator’s circle is gay. This hardly came up in Book 1, which involved late childhood and adolescence and the memories churned up by the death of the narrator’s father. And which was set almost entirely in Norway. I expect that whenever the young Karl Ove encountered a gay schoolmate who couldn’t manage to remain closeted, he simply looked the other way, as much out of kindness (however misguided) as anything else. I don’t think that Karl Ove Knausgaard is homophobic, either, although I’m not quite so sure of that as I am of his non-misogyny.

I say all of this so that no one sits waiting for me to excoriate either the author or the narrator of My Struggle. This really is a little problem — so far as Knausgaard is concerned.

On page 312 of Book 2, Karl Ove has made a trip with his friend Geir to visit some boxers whom Geir has written about, Paolo Roberto and Osman.

The one called Osman was wearing a T-shirt and even though his biceps were large, perhaps five times larger than mine, they were not disproportionately large but slim. The same was true for the whole of his upper body. He sat there, supple and relaxed, and every time my eyes rested on him it crossed my mind that he could smash me to pulp in seconds without my being able to do anything about it. The feeling it gave me was one of femininity.

Later, on page 491, Karl Ove is talking to Geir about “Whole people.”

Precisely because it’s not something they have given any thought to, they don’t think like that, that they should be good, they just are, and are unaware of it. They take care of their friends, they’re considerate to their partners, they’re good parents, but not in a feminine way, always do a good job, they want whatever is good, and do whatever is good.

In the second passage, it is somewhat disconcerting to discover that “people” does not include women, but that, too, is traditional. IIn calling it “traditional,” I don’t mean to give it a pass. It’s not okay thinking. It’s a bad habit of mind that Karl Ove picked up unreflectively, I suppose, in his Norwegian childhood. Perhaps, by Book 6, he will have outgrown it. I understand, however, why it makes sense to him. He likes women, he wants to be attractive to women — to attractive women, anyway. And he knows “from experience” that attractive women are not drawn to men whose manliness is questionable, or to milquetoasts.

My little problem, of course, is that the opposite of a strong man, an Osman who can beat you to a pulp, is a weak man. It is not a woman.

Perhaps this is a problem of translation — not that I’m picking a bone with Don Bartlett (although I should like to talk to him about “kitchen paper,” on page 350). Perhaps “feminine” in this context sounds, in Norwegian, rather more like our word, “effeminate.”

It was only a few years ago that I realized that effeminate women are as rare as effeminate men. “Effeminate” does not describe the behavior of most women. I have never been reminded by any woman I know of a drag queen. Drag queens are, from head to toe, men. “Effeminate” men are men. To say that they’re behaving like women is a sort of cultural libel.

“Strident” women are sometimes said to be “mannish,” which is bosh of the same kind; but of course weak women are never charged with “masculinity.” To associate strength with masculinity, however, is to propose that biceps are everything, that the essence of strength is the ability to knock someone down. In most cases, ie drunken brawls, the ability to knock someone down is the essence of stupidity.

I don’t care for either word, “feminine” or “masculine.” They strike me as highly artificial; they remind me of vitamin supplements. They are spoken of as aspects of personality that ought to be enhanced. Women and men are told to be, respectively, more feminine or more masculine. It’s a classic border patrol problem, betraying anxieties and insecurities about social stability. It is not Vive la différence! but La différence or else! Its silliness is captured by Gene Wilders’s line in The Producers: “But where do you keep your wallet?”

Perhaps in a happier future, “masculine” and “feminine” will be classifiers for the bad habits to which each gender is prone. Women congregating in a doorway for a chat, or at either end of a stairway or an escalator — with a stroller as a bonus — comes to mind. (Kathleen claims to see men doing this “all the time,” but I still believe that, thanks to the Osmans of this world, men tend to have a sharper sense of where they’re standing in relation to others.) Men, talking among themselves, generalizing about women as idiots, and believing what they’re saying, even if they make exceptions for their mothers.

The demands of human reproduction, and the usually fixed implications of living in a body equipped one way or the other, to one side, the differences between men and women are either ornamental or regrettable. So say I.

It is also to be noted that Karl Ove Knausgaaard, even in his most philosophic transports, never generalizes about men and women. Which is nice, even if I think that the reason is his own anxieties about manliness.

It’s a good thing that I regard this Web site as a sketchpad, a place for first drafts. Otherwise, I’d feel compelled to subject yesterday’s entry, about Book 2 of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, to severe edits. Writing about a novel that I’m not even halfway through is perhaps not the brightest idea, and it turns out that I was surveying the book from a point whose significance I didn’t grasp, whether I ought to have done or not. I was wrong about one thing, a mistake that I might not have made (I’m not sure) if I hadn’t let so much time pass between reading Book 1 and Book 2. As to that, by the time I began reading My Struggle, I had heard the cries of many reviewers, summed up best by Zadie Smith, who felt like addicts in need of a fix while they waited for the translation of the next volume to appear. Now that Book 4 is out in paper, I don’t have to worry.

I didn’t foresee, yesterday, that the steppe of time to which Knausgaard had regressed and to which I had advanced was foundation of the book’s big love story, Knausgaard’s relationship with Linda, his wife and the mother of his children. (I was wrong when I wrote that the narrator was unaware of Linda’s existence when he made his sudden move to Stockholm. Quite wrong!) It is a love story, however, as told to a shrink, a romance without a romantic arc. Linda and Karl Ove have their ups and downs. They have great times (which for the most part the narrator leaves to vague generalizations) and bad times (fights are often described in blow-by-blow detail). I was keenly aware that, if My Struggle were a traditional fiction — a fiction designed to smooth out and make sense of the world — a lot of the couple’s squabbles would signal their relationship’s doom. Surely two people who feel so completely unsympathetic (however momentarily) ought not to be together! But My Struggle is a contemporary fiction: the author is allowed, and even encouraged, to incorporate as much actual experience as he can manage. Complicating the zigs and the zags are (a) Linda’s history of mood disorders and (b) Karl Ove’s pig-headed belief (of which he appears to be unaware) that his Norwegian family, left behind by him in Norway, deserves extra-special sweetness from Linda whenever they all get together.

Some part of Knausgaard’s success must owe to his frank and ultimately engaging — ultimate, not always in the moment — inquiry into the makeup of modern masculinity. It might even be argued that this is the subject of the struggle of the title. Knausgaard comes equipped with a lot of traditional masculine equipment, but most of it is the negative stuff, the clutch of inarticulate habits of mind that allow and encourage men to overlook, ignore, patronize, and just not pay attention to their immediate domestic surroundings. Men whose minds work this way, one has to conclude, would be perfectly happy to live in a large doghouse out in the back yard and have their clothes washed every six months. Like dogs with their doggy interests, these men content themselves with their manny interests, casually, always prepared to move on to the next thing. (They have commitment issues on a microscopic scale.)  Knausgaard, as I say, appears to have grown up with a full complement of these “skills.” Unfortunately for him, and hence the struggle, he is also a curious man. He is — a reader. And not a reader about manny interests only, or even primarily. By the time Karl Ove reaches Stockholm, in his early thirties, he is carrying around inside him a sophisticated man of letters. This is a problem because Karl Ove himself mistrusts sophisticated behavior and has little sympathy with men who like letters. At the same time, he is terrified of being a closeted Marcel Proust. See it from Marcel’s point of view: imagine being trapped in the body (and the local enthusiasms) of Johnny Knoxville.

Particularly as the care-giving father of toddlers, Karl Ove discovers what it means to be a man whenever he feels that his manliness has been taken from him, as it is in a very funny set piece involving something called Rhythm Time. The first thing to be said about Rhythm Time is that there was nothing like it, and not just in Norway, when Karl Ove was growing up. Karl Ove’s parents never took him to the library for an organized playtime for small children that required mothers (and the occasional fathers) to get into the act. And if there had been such a thing, it would have been presided over by a middle-aged dragon or a sports coach, not a young woman whom Karl Ove calls “attractive” three times in a dozen lines. “She had a light, fresh, spring-like presence.”

What he had was the load of extra weight that he had put on, caring for children.

Away we go, then,” said the attractive woman, pressing the PLAY button. A folk tune poured forth into the room, and I began to follow the others, each step in time to the music. I held Vanja with a hand under each arm, so that she was dangling, close to my chest. Then what I had to do was stamp my foot, swing her around, after which it was back the other way. Lots of the others enjoyed this, there was laughter and even some squeals of delight. When this was over we had to dance alone with our child. I swayed from side to side with Vanja in my arms, thinking that this must be what hell was like, gentle and nice and full of mothers you didn’t know from Eve, with their babies. When this was finished there was a session with a large blue sail, which at first was supposed to be the sea, and we sang a song about waves and everyone swung the sail up and down, making waves, and then it was something the children had to crawl under until we suddenly raised it, this, too, to the accompaniment of our singing.

When at last she thanked us and said goodbye, I hurried out, dressed Vanja without meeting anyone’s eye, just staring down at the floor, while the voices, happier now than before they went in, buzzed around me. I put Vanja in the stroller, strapped her in, and pushed her out as fast as I could without drawing attention to myself. Outside on the street, I felt like shouting till my lungs burst and smashing something. But I had to make do with putting as many meters between me and this hall of shame in the shortest possible time. (78)

All I could think of, while the big sail was making waves, was Vikings. This is what the vikings have come to. You can see why Karl Ove wants to break something. Right in front of really attractive young woman, he was obliged to play the eunuch. Even I’m obliged to say: Rhythm Time needs a re-think. More viking.

Even more baldly than in Book 1, the suspense in Book 2 of My Struggle depends on regressions. Something is about to happen — the author/narrator, Karl Ove Knausgaard, say, is about to find out how his wife feels about his having extended his “time-off” hour at a local café, leaving her to care for the two children and to do everything else around the house, by more than doubling it — but a hinge pivots, and the narrative slips back to an earlier time, suspending the abandoned moment.

The hinge in my for-instance is a Russian woman, a neighbor from hell, whom Knausgaard espies in his apartment building’s elevator as he’s on his way home to face the music. We are on page 105. At this particular moment, Knausgaard is the father of a little girl; the son in the stroller and the little girl who likes to be carried, in Book 2’s opening pages, have not yet been born. We have already had two regressions since then. Now, without so much as clearing his throat, Knausgaard launches a description of his horrid early encounters with the Russian woman, who would get drunk and play Eurodisco at top volume in the middle of the night. At that time, Knausgaard’s wife, Linda, was still pregnant with their first child. That time becomes this time, and there is a leisurely account of an evening that the Knausgaards spend going to the movies, to escape the racket in the building. Well, the Russian woman turns off the music as they’re leaving, but they decide to go out anyway; it will be one of their last changes for a night out alone.

On page 119, a paragraph begins, “Then, in the days before Christmas, all went quiet downstairs.” The narrative stays in the time frame but slips its referents. Christmas festivities are described, and attention gradually focuses on Knausgaard’s Norwegian friend, Geir, a writer who had already established himself in Stockholm when the narrator decided that he, too must leave Norway, and his first marriage with it. Now, on page 130, we drop back to that point in time. Twenty-five pages later, I’m still on that plane. I’m still waiting to find out (a) if the Russian woman continued to persecute the Knausgaards with her disco and (b) what Linda had to say when Knausgaard came home, an hour-and-a-half late, from his time-off in the café, reading, or in any case thinking about, Dostoevsky. I’m not sure that I’ll ever find out.

If Knausgaard were not a very good writer, of course, all the temporal manipulations in the world would do his sprawling epic no good. But they serve a practical purpose. Reading all these episodes from the past, we know, roughly, how things are going to wind up for Knausgaard. We know that he’ll become a family man with a modern family man’s problems. On page 155, Knausgaard has not even met his future wife, but I know she’s there. As are the three children, Vanja, Heidi, and Jon. Thus large-scale suspense, which can have one resolution only (how will it end?), is replaced by multiple small-scale uncertainties (what about the Russian madwoman?) that linger not in the distance behind us, where completed stories lay, slowly fading out of memory, but in the distance ahead, where they sparkle invisibly like so many unopened Christmas presents. It is a bizarre form of opulence.

***

As in Proust, there are reflective set pieces that unspool almost completely outside the adjacent time-line. On his first day in Stockholm, for example, before he has met up with Geir (who is going to put him up for a few days), Karl Ove buys a used copy of Hölderlin’s poems, and kills time by reading them in an alley. This reminds him of his uncle Kjartan, a Communist and something of a saint; when Karl Ove was a boy, he heard Kjartan speak enthusiastically about Hölderlin. After several pages of this further but quite minor regression, there is a break in the text, and then:

Although much had changed in my life since then my attitude to poetry was basically the same. I could read it, but poems never opened themselves to me, and that was because I had no “right” to them; they were not for me. (142)

This is tantamount to admitting, and then describing, a weakness for kinky sex: how can you not be gripped by such a confession, coming as it does from a successful — now, as you hold a translation in your hands, even more successful — novelist? Hey, even he does not get poetry! But we must read more closely. Knausgaard elaborates on the “right” to read poetry, and how to deal with the lack of it (there are three options, sketched in tickling detail), but he does not explain what it means for a poem to open itself. How could he, he might object, when it has never happened? But what might it be like, and how does he know it isn’t happening? These are classic adolescent anxieties that I file under “50% More.” Why? Ascoltami.

A story raged through boarding school like a virus: scientists had discovered that uncircumcised men experienced 50% more pleasure having sex. Yes, 50% more! (This was a time of ever more wonderfully effective cleaners, from detergent to toothpaste.) Most of us were unfamiliar with the pleasures of sex, at least with another person: we had not got that far. We certainly weren’t prepared to interrogate the science behind this electrifying assertion. We were more than prepared to assume that sex with another person that ended in orgasm was 100% pleasant for everybody. Sex was like an automobile, equipped with standard transmission and standard everything else. Because we were Americans born at a certain point in time, almost all of us were circumcised, not just our Jewish classmates. We were dismayed to “learn” that our sexual pleasure had already, prior to any actual enjoyment, been slashed in half. The more mathematical among us would have counseled that it was cut by only a third — great.

The trouble is, much of what we learn in high school is misinformation of this kind. It is neither right nor wrong; it is only simplified to the point of inarguability, and no sooner do we apprehend it than it sinks into the foundations of our becoming-adult worldview. Only later, when we’re in our fifties, do we begin to see that, indeed, everything we learned in school was wrong. It begins, innocently enough, with actual changes in the world: Karachi is suddenly no longer the capital of Pakistan. (When did that happen?) This leads to more penetrating re-evaluations: Why was Bonn of all places ever the capital of West Germany? Finally, assuming that our minds are still working, we get round to questioning the really unhelpful stuff. What precisely does it mean for a poem to open itself to a reader?

There is no point to telling high school students that poetry, literature, everything — that everything in life reflects what you bring to it, because high school students have nothing to bring. All they have is childhood, and the evidence of childhood cannot be destroyed quickly enough. A poem does not open itself to a reader: a reader opens the poem, by listening to it. This can be difficult because life is full of noisy distractions, many of which originate in our busy minds — but that is the only real difficulty. How do you know when you have opened a poem? You know when it gives you pleasure. That is all there is to it.

The easiest, and also the most delightful, way to open a poem is by following a congenial writer’s account of the pleasures that he or she gets from it. This is what Helen Vendler does, academic drag notwithstanding. This is also what Karl Ove Knausgaard does when he complains about life: he is really sharing the pleasures of complaint.

During those Christmas festivities that I mentioned above, Knausgaard inserts a remark made by Geir that acts both as literary criticism of his books and as recognition of his books’ literary reception. “Easy for you to say, that is. You can spend twenty pages describing a trip to the bathroom and hold your readers spellbound.” (124) This is true. What accounts for it? How does he do it? I have a hunch, but I’m keeping it to myself, at least until I finish Book 2.

Hallelujah! Elizabeth Banks has finally made the movie that Seabiscuit promised us, over a decade ago. Since then, Banks has made lots of movies, some of them very good, but none of them as grand — as grand for her — as Seabiscuit was. Her part in that film wasn’t all that big, but it showed her strengths, mainly a smile that took us far beyond the rapture of beauty, all the way to heaven itself: forgiveness, redemption, and a jolly good time.

Love & Mercy is something of a ham-and-cheese sandwich. There are two casts, but, more, there are two approaches to filmmaking. As you no doubt know, Love & Mercy tells the Brian Wilson story in two parts; how well these parts fit together, only time will tell. A gifted pop singer alienates his fellow Beach Boys with elaborate musical ambitions. (“Who are you, Mozart?” one sneers. Well, sort of.) And he goes mad. Director Bill Pohlad treats us to many, many scenes of Paul Dano, his stand-in for Wilson and an actor who has made a specialty of borderline alienation, looking bereft by a swimming pool. Beyond bereft. The irony of the comfortable but hostile California climate is enough to give you a sunburn.

Eventually, the poor fellow takes to his bed. After an implied hiatus, but actually in the first scripted scene — Love & Mercy refrains with Puritan rigor from providing the narrative with helpful timestamps — Wilson is played by John Cusack. This Wilson is the prisoner of one Dr Landy, a predatory psychologist, armed with legal custody (and the right to institutionalize our hero), played with creepily bug-eyed monstrosity by Paul Giamatti. Dano and Cusack do not look violently unalike, but they share little in the way of a resemblance. (Their noses! How hard would it have been to conform noses?) But instead of getting in the way, the particular facial discrepancies of these particular actors do a good job of embodying the utter devastation of Wilson’s early promise. Whereas Dano endlessly circles the drain of adolescent self-pity (nobody understands him!), Cusack has the air of a superannuated raptor, his eyes still clear enough to convey his regret at being unable to sustain ordinary human conversation. He is a prince laboring under a terrible spell. It is Elizabeth Banks’s job to rescue him.

Scenes from these very different segments of Brian Wilson’s life are intercut, making nonsense of any attempt to talk about “the first half” and “the second half.” I would therefore fall back on “the Dano half” and “the Cusack half,” except that the latter is really “the Banks half.” The Dano half of the movie is a rather weedy study of artistic obsession: we’re made to feel almost as bored and irritated as Wilson’s entourage. Plus, the self-pity. The Banks half is entirely different, the smashing update of a stylish Forties cliff-hanger (I Wake Up Screaming, with Betty Grable). Melinda Ledbetter (Banks) sells Cadillacs, and she is as suave as her showroom. Like any successful salesman, she is a very good listener, and, as a Cadillac salesman in her particular part of Los Angeles, she is accustomed to eccentric customers. When the rather shabby but focused middle-aged man asks if the two of them can just sit in the car for a while, and they close the doors and he locks them, she knows just what to say: “Now we know that the automatic doorlock works.” Only when his keeper and associated goons catch up with him does she learn who he is. She is instructed by Dr Landy to get started on the paperwork; Wilson leaves her a card on which he has inscribed a terse plea for help. She agrees to go out on a date with him anyway. She agrees to a second date, even, despite the chaperones who tagged along on the first. Only when they are out on a yacht does Ledbetter realize that Wilson is always under surveillance.

Like Seabiscuit‘s Gary Ross, Bill Pohlad showcases Elizabeth Banks’s strengths, only this time the result is a film-school case of Studio-era stardom. Repeat after me: the camera loves Elizabeth Banks. She is a blonde this time round, a blonde than whom only Kim Basinger is moreso. And she dresses not like a salesman but like a salesman who happens to be a slim, beautiful woman who sells Cadillacs in Beverly Hills or Brentwood. She dresses well. Even her garden apartment is snazzy. Gloria Grahame could be shooting In A Lonely Place in the next building. But Banks is not marmoreal, as the Forties goddesses tended to be; however well put-together, she’s spontaneous. She can think on her feet, by which I do not mean that she can come up with clever things to say. There is no call for cleverness here. What Wilson needs from Ledbetter is kindness, confidence, and a certain wily reserve — the lady knows from the start to keep her voice down. The situation with Dr Landy is so gruesome that Love & Mercy climaxes as something of a thriller, and the silent facedown between Giamatti and Banks is worth the price of ten tickets. This is not a film for men who believe that pretty girls need protection.

During the Dano half of Love & Mercy, I reflected on American popular culture, which erupted into the full daylight of public attention with acts like the Beach Boys — and, although no one but they themselves was conscious of their rivalry at the time, the Beatles — in the early Sixties. In the movie, it is observed, enviously, that Rubber Soul is an album — all of one piece. I remember being electrically aware of this at the time. I remember arguing, as a tyro student of art history, that Rubber Soul marked the Beatles’s passage from Archaic prehistory to Hellenic perfection. (Come on, that’s what college is for.) I remember reading that Brian Wilson was uninterested in stereophonic sound because he was deaf in one ear; I didn’t know that he was deaf in one ear because his father beat the crap out of him and his brothers. I remember grasping — this much more recently — that Wilson was alone among Americans in sharing the British passion for choral richness. And I reflected, as I surveyed the ghastly Sixties milieux that affluent Southern Californians inhabited in those days, that America not only did nothing to support its creatives but, on the contrary, constantly tempted them into deeper lunacy.

Eventually, Paul Dano’s Brian Wilson complains that he cannot go back to writing the kind of songs that made the Beach Boys famous. “We were never surfers, we never played in the sun, we never dated beautiful chicks” — or words to that effect, ie, that the Beach Boys were beautiful fakes. “Fakes” would be a harsh word. I think that they were transfigurations. They captured and represented the exhilarating apotheosis of American mindlessness. They showed why a healthy young man would want to replace his brain with a comb. (My favorite song, in 1963, was “Be True to Your School,” which sublimely drank the blood of its rah-rah vitality.) Love & Mercy does not look into any of this. The party is over before the Dano half begins. Love & Mercy is, so far as an actual band is concerned, a monument to Pet Sounds.

During the Banks half of the movie, I salivated. Oh, not in any coarse, carnal way. (I’m a happily married man!) But my impassioned longing for the cinematic splendor of Elizabeth Banks was gratified so generously that I may, in my senility, confuse Love & Mercy with a singularly memorable meal.