Don't Go Away

Blogging may be sparse at the moment, but I'll be writing in this space for another month, so I hope you'll keep checking in. For now, though, I'll send you off to other places: To the latest issue of the Atlantic, where you'll find a provocative excerpt from Robert Wright's next book (thick with claims I hope to argue with at some point), as well as Hanna Rosin on breast-feeding, T.C. Boyle on California wildfires, Josh Green on the Harvard of pot schools, James Parker on slasher films, and much, much more; to the latest TNR, for David Nirenberg's fascinating review essay on Paula Fredriksen's Augustine and the Jews; and to the latest New Yorker, for D.T. Max's engaging profile of Tony Gilroy.

Going Galt

Speaking of Aynworld, I enjoyed this Will Wilkinson riff:

By the way, Atlas buffs, the point of Atlas Shrugged is not that you are John Galt. The point is that you are not John Galt. The point is that you are, at your best, Eddie Willers. You're smart, hardworking, productive, and true. But you're no creative genius and you take innovation -- John Galt -- for granted. You don't even know who he is! And this eventually leaves you weeping on abandoned train tracks. 

I think Obama's policies will be bad for innovation, but not because higher marginal tax rates will lead our best and brightest to retire from the field of endeavor. I'm rather more worried that our best and brightest will follow the incentives and go Robert Stadler. I'm worried that our money, which might otherwise have gone to capitalize real innovation, will be confiscated in order to finance government directed "investment" instead. Our economy can readily absorb a passel of drop-out Willerses (though Eddie never quits!). It's the misdirected capital embodied by the Stadlers and their Project Xes that really hurts.

The Case For Reading Ayn Rand

I liked this post, from Megan:

... I look to Atlas Shrugged more for conveniently totable beach reading than an economic blueprint. What's interesting to me, though, is how many details Rand did get right--like the markets in "unfreezing" Ukrainian bank deposits, so similar to the frozen railroad bonds of Atlas Shrugged. Or the cascading and unanticipated failures, with government officials racing to slap another fix on to fix the last failing solution. If only the people in her novels had acted remotely like actual people, rather than comic book characters, I, too, would be rereading the thing now.

She was able to describe these things so well, of course, because she'd seen what an economy looked like while it was being wrecked. All of Rand's writing is dominated by the fact that she lived through the birth pangs of Soviet Russia, and saw her family's business destroyed by Lenin's ideology, and extraordinarily incompetent economic management.  Her philosophy does not work, at least if by work we mean generate a framework by which a person or society can order itself. But she was actually a really very gifted observer, and she had a quite subtle understanding of how all the interconnected elements of an industrial economy fit together. It's a pity she didn't quite get how human beings worked, especially herself.

I've no doubt said this before, but Atlas Shrugged is well worth your time even if you aren't interested in the half-baked, Nietzsche-for-capitalists philosophizing. As far as pop-fiction apocalypses go, Rand's portrait of an industrial America buckling under the weight of worldwide socialism is up there with Stephen King's The Stand - it's mad, doomy and often riveting, with atmosphere to burn. (Just flip forty pages or so ahead when you reach John Galt's speech ...) Rand wasn't much on interiority, as Megan suggests, but her caricatured characters reveal an eye for certain American types, and her prose, however awful in patches, occasionally achieves the kind of grinding momentum that you get from bad-yet-somehow-good writers like Theodore Dreiser. Great literature it isn't, but if you start in you'll almost certainly get sucked in, which is more than you can say for quite a few thousand-page efforts.

(The less said about The Fountainhead, on the other hand, the better ...)

Darwin, the Fall, and Christian Fantasy

Now this is my kind of reader:

Further to your post, I wonder if you've ever read any of Tolkien's later philosophical musings about his mythology, in particular the essays and drafts collected in the volume Morgoth's Ring. Tolkien says that Morgoth -- the original Satanic figure responsible for the fall of the elves and (implicitly and off camera) the fall of humans -- imbued the physical world with a large part of his evil essence: "Just as Sauron concentrated his power in the One Ring, Morgoth dispersed his power into the very matter of Arda, thus 'the whole of Middle-Earth was Morgoth's Ring'". This explains why, from the elvish point of view, death is the "gift of men" because it gives them a ticket out of the fallen, Morgoth-tainted world. The problem with this from a orthodox Christian perspective is that death is supposed to be the punishment for the Fall and not part of the solution for the Fall.  Tolkien was very much troubled by this deviation from orthodoxy and justified it by saying his mythology was just the elves' imperfect understanding about how things worked. But I find Tolkien's mythology/theology to make more sense and it certainly fits better with the idea that evolution "red in tooth and claw" is part of the residue of the Fall.

I think there's arguably an intimation in Genesis of the idea of death as a gift as well as a punishment - not a solution to the Fall, exactly, but perhaps a mitigation of it. After Adam and Eve have taken the forbidden fruit, God declares that Man is to be banished from Eden "lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever," which could be read as a suggestion that the only thing worse than a life corrupted by sin is an eternal life corrupted by sin. C.S. Lewis, Tolkien's fellow Christian fantasist, developed this theme in The Magician's Nephew, by having Jadis, Queen of Charn (and the future White Witch) consume the Narnian equivalent of the fruit of the tree of life, which comes equipped with the warning that anyone who eats of it under the wrong circumstances "will find their heart's desire and find despair." When Aslan is asked, later on, about the fruit's effect, he answers: "She has won her heart's desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery...."

Man Gave Names To All The Animals

This Telegraph story is headlined "words associated with Christianity and British history taken out of children's dictionary," but the purge of animal names from the (admittedly only 10,000-word) Oxford Junior Dictionary seems just as disquieting as the disappearance of words like minister, monastery, monk, and nun. Here's some of what's out:

adder, ass, beaver, boar, budgerigar, bullock, cheetah, colt, corgi, cygnet, doe, drake, ferret, gerbil, goldfish, guinea pig, hamster, heron, herring, kingfisher, lark, leopard, lobster, magpie, minnow, mussel, newt, otter, ox, oyster, panther, pelican, piglet, plaice, poodle, porcupine, porpoise, raven, spaniel, starling, stoat, stork, terrapin, thrush, weasel, wren.

And here's some of what's in:

Blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, attachment, database, export, chatroom, bullet point, cut and paste, analogue

Celebrity, tolerant, vandalism, negotiate, interdependent, creep, citizenship, childhood, conflict, common sense, debate, EU, drought, brainy, boisterous, cautionary tale, bilingual, bungee jumping, committee, compulsory, cope, democratic, allergic, biodegradable, emotion, dyslexic, donate, endangered, Euro

Apparatus, food chain, incisor, square number, trapezium, alliteration, colloquial, idiom, curriculum, classify, chronological, block graph

I mean, fair enough about "budgerigar" and "boisterous." But there's something awfully depressing about the idea that the word "database" is more relevant to your average British ten-year-old than the word "guinea pig."

Great Power, Great Responsibility

Last week, both Ta-Nehisi and Megan had posts on the dubiousness of the search for villains in our current economic mess, when the fault may lie less with specific nefarious actors - whether on Wall Street or in Washington - than with ourselves as a people, and with the desires and impulses and stupidities of a mass capitalist society. Henry Blodget makes a related argument in the just-out December issue of our magazine, arguing that "the interaction of human psychology with a market economy practically ensures that [bubbles] will form," and that the mass pursuit of rational self-interest is the only real culprit for our present woes.

In one sense, I agree with these arguments, and indeed I've made similarly-themed arguments myself. But it's also worth noting that saying "we're all to blame" for what's happened doesn't exclude the possibility that some people, and some kinds of people, are more to blame than others - because some people have greater responsibilities than others, and all mistakes are not created equal.

Blodget, for instance, runs through a typical housing bubble scenario - somebody buys a house late in the game and loses his shirt - and argues that almost everybody involved, from the homebuyer to the real-estate agent to the mortgage broker to the people on Wall Street and Washington who enabled the whole thing were making the same kind of mistakes, and indeed, were acting "just the way you would expect them to act under the circumstances." Now in a sense, this is convincing. But at a same time, our hypothetical homebuyer had very different responsibilities than a hypothetical Wall Street banker. His decision to buy at the height of the bubble put him at risk to lose, say, tens of thousands of dollars and perhaps the roof over his head. Those are high stakes, obviously, but they're high stakes for him and for his family. Whereas the risky decisions being made the people running, say, Citibank had serious consequences for millions of people, in America and around the world. And this distinction ought to matter, both to how people should be expected to behave, and how they should be judged.

So yes, the mistakes made at the top of the American economic and political pyramid might have been the same kind of mistakes made by people in the middle and the bottom, and might have been motivated by the same logic, and the same psychology. But they were made by people who had a far, far larger responsibility than the average American to be careful, and risk-averse and, dare one say it, wise ... by people who, for the most part, came from the upper rungs of the meritocracy, with advantages arguably unparalleled in the history of the world ... and thus by people whose risk-taking mistakes were worse than those made by the average homeowner or investor, because it should have been their business to be safer.

I don't often plug my first book, Privilege, but I think it's worth mentioning here because when you read about how the American leadership class acquitted itself at Citibank, or on Wall Street in general, I think you can see the dark side of meritocracy at work - the same dark side that shadows an instititution like Harvard, where a job in investment banking became, for a time, the summum bonum of meritocratic life. The mistakes that our elites made, and that led us to this pass, have their roots in flaws common to all elites, in all times and places - hubris, arrogance, insulation from the costs of their decisions, and so forth. But they also have their roots in flaws that I think are somewhat more particular to this elite, and this time and place. Flaws like an overweening faith in technology's capacity to master contingency, a widespread assumption that the future doesn't have much to learn from the past, and above all a peculiar combination of smartest-guys-in-the-room entitlement (don't worry, we deserve to be moving millions of dollars around on the basis of totally speculative models, because we got really high SAT scores) and ferocious, grasping competitiveness (because making ten million dollars isn't enough if somebody else from your Ivy League class is making more!). It's a combination, at its worst, that marries the kind of vaulting, religion-of-success ambitions (and attendant status anxieties) that you'd expect from a self-made man to the obnoxious entitlement you'd expect from a to-the-manor-born elite - without the sense of proportion and limits, of the possibility of tragedy and the inevitability of human fallibility, that a real self-made man would presumably gain from starting life at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder (as opposed to the upper-middle class, where most meritocrats starts) ... and without, as well, the sense of history, duty, self-restraint, noblesse oblige and so forth that the old aristocrats were supposed to aspire to.

Now every elite has its own unique flaws, obviously, and every elite has the capacity to steer the country it leads into some sort of disaster or another. Those old aristocrats were discredited, finally and forever, by the slaughter of World War I, a debacle that makes our current economic meltdown look like a stroll in the Tuileries, and that owed a great deal to a poisonous intersection of chivalric fantasies and gross stupidity - a confluence of qualities to which our meritocratic elite, one assumes, is relatively immune.  And it may be that cultivating your elite through meritocracy is like government by, for and of the people - the worst possible sort of system, except for all the others.

But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't pause a moment, amid the current wreckage, to ponder what went wrong with this elite, here and now, and how its particular sins helped produced this particular crisis. This elite, which is also my elite, and whose vices are very much my own as well: I'm just fortunate than in journalism, as opposed to finance, the fate of the world's economy doesn't usually ride on your decisions. (Though if it did, I suppose we'd have more of a chance at that bailout ...)

Michael Crichton, RIP

He died yesterday, and like C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley - both of whom entered the next life on November 22, 1963 - his passing was overshadowed by larger events. Not that he was in Lewis's or Huxley's league, obviously: Peter Suderman's observation that most of his novels "were blockbuster scripts written in choppy prose" is pretty much on the mark. (Not coincidentally, Crichton was a prolific screenwriter and producer as well.) But one of them - I mean Jurassic Park, of course -  transcended its wooden characters and workmanlike prose to achieve something like a platonic ideal of a certain kind of thriller. It's almost impossible to imagine a better marriage of sci-fi and page-turning potboiler than what Crichton came up with in that novel - and while the Spielberg adaptation obviously adds a certain amount of, ah, visual stimulus to the equation, I still think the book is better. Read it, if you haven't, and may its author rest in peace.

Gopnik on Chesterton, Yet Again

Sorry, I'm not quite done with the topic yet: I haven't said anything substantial about Gopnik's critique of Chesterton's approach to Catholic apologetics:

In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis's intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas's pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts to Catholicism are relieved not to have to defend Henry VIII's divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts timeservers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you're new to mail.

Of course it's a truism that the zeal of a convert can be irritating and over-the-top at times, and the realism of a cradle Catholic is sometimes the better part of wisdom. And it's no surprise that a liberal ironist like Gopnik wouldn't be much taken with a convert's enthusiasm for his adopted faith. But it's not as if Chesterton's approach to apologetics represent some radical break with the rest of his oeuvre: He applied to the Church precisely the same romantic spirit he brought to everything else as well, which encouraged his readers to see the wonder of the world through fresh eyes - the eyes of a convert, yes, or the eyes of a child. Here, for instance, is a characteristic passage from Orthodoxy:

Just as we all like love tales because there is an instinct of sex, we all like astonishing tales because they touch the nerve of the ancient instinct of astonishment. This is proved by the fact that when we are very young children we do not need fairy tales: we only need tales. Mere life is interesting enough. A child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon. But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door. Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales -- because they find them romantic. In fact, a baby is about the only person, I should think, to whom a modern realistic novel could be read without boring him. This proves that even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

Elsewhere in his essay, Gopnik seems to praise this tendency, calling it "the romance of everyday existence," and noting aptly that "Chesterton's mysticism always resolves in the close at hand: in a signal light at Paddington station, not in a sunrise over a beach in Tahiti." It's only when Chesterton applies it to Catholicism that Gopnik turns snide, complaining that his subject is "overglamorizing" what is, after all, just "a normally bureaucratic human institution" - a post office with incense and fancier vestments. But Gopnik himself has just allowed that the appeal of Chesterton is precisely his willingness to take even an institution like the post office and find the glamor buried in it, the wonder that routine and familiarity often blind us to. There are writers enough to catalogue the failings of the USPS; you turn to Chesterton to be reminded that there's something miraculous about it even so, something worthy of the "leap of interest and amazement" that a child might feel when confronted for the first time by fruit trees and running water.

And if this reminder is important where the post office is concerned, how much more important is it when you're dealing with an institution like the Church of Rome, where something rather more important is at stake than the swift delivery of mail? Gopnik isn't convinced by Catholicism's truth claims; fair enough. But it's rather obtuse to admire Chesterton for emphasizing the romance inherent in Paddington Station while criticizing him for emphasizing the romance inherent in an institution that Chesterton believes to have been founded by God for the salvation of souls. Especially since nobody doubts that we need a railway system or a postal system, whereas there are many people - Gopnik among them - who actively doubt the "necessity" of the Catholic faith, seeing it as superfluous at best, malignant at worst. Of course not all of these doubters will be moved by Chesterton's style of apologetics, which asks them to approach Catholicism like a man from, say, 1355 entering a FedEx store for the first time - that is, as though they'd never even conceived that an institution like the Church might be possible, let alone an enduring player in human affairs. And perhaps some would be convinced by the more jaundiced, world-weary, "it's horribly flawed but it gets the job done" approach to apologetics that it seems as though Gopnik might prefer. But you don't turn to Chesterton for jaundiced world-weariness, and complaining that his enthusiasm for the Church is akin to a child's enthusiasm for a post office or a railway station is like complaining that Schopenhauer is too pessimistic, or Waugh too savage: If you don't like childlike enthusiasm, you don't have any business liking Chesterton.
 

Gopnik on Chesterton (II)

If Gopnik is somewhat unpersuasive in his discussion of G.K. Chesterton's anti-Semitism, he is likewise unconvincing when he tries to argue that Chesterton's political ideals were fulfilled in Franco's Spain:

... he dreamed of an anti-capitalist agricultural state overseen by the Catholic Church and governed by a military for whom medieval ideas of honor still resonated, a place where Jews would not be persecuted or killed, certainly, but hived off and always marked as foreigners. All anti-utopians cherish a secret utopia, an Eden of their own, and his, ironically, was achieved: his ideal order was ascendant over the whole Iberian Peninsula for half a century. And a bleak place it was, too, with a fearful ruling class running a frightened population in an atmosphere of poverty-stricken uniformity and terrified stasis -- a lot more like the actual medieval condition than like the Victorian fantasy.

Here I'm with Commonweal's Matthew Boudway, who writes:

There are many good ways to interpret Chesterton's distributism, and there are good ways to criticize it. But this is not one of them. It is a very long way from the Napoleon of Notting Hill to Alcázar. Chesterton was, as Gopnik insists, a localist, but there was really nothing localist about Franco's regime, which was characterized by strict centralization, cultural uniformity, and militarism -- things Chesterton always opposed. (Ask a Catalonian about Franco's tolerance of localism.) Chesterton's main criticism of "Prussianism," and later of Nazi Germany, was not, as Gopnik says, that it resembled Judaism in its belief in a chosen people, but that it was essentially militarist and autocratic. Despite Chesterton's "medievalism," it is not at all obvious what sort of modern political mechanisms would have best embodied his distributist theory, which is arguably the theory's greatest weakness. What is clear is that distributism was as different from Franco's brutal politics as it was from Bernard Shaw's socialism. Gopnik is impatient with such theoretical distinctions. For him, it is all about tendencies: all radical critiques of capitalism tend toward Communism, which has failed, or toward some kind of anti-Semitic authoritarianism. One is allowed to have a few mild reservations about capitalism, of course, and even to look down at the pitiless people who seem to have fewer reservations (i.e., Republicans), but any less mild opposition to our political economy, whatever its name or origin, is headed toward trouble: if not the Gulag or the gas chamber, then the Inquisition.

Tellingly, that the word "distributism" doesn't even appear in Gopnik's essay. There are plenty of things to be said against Chesterton's vision of political economy - for instance, that like other attempts to forge an agrarian third way it's unmoored from the structure of modern economies and from contemporary politics as it's actually practiced. (I wouldn't go quite that far myself: I think there are real insights to be gleaned from distributism - some of which found their way into Grand New Party - even if its adherents have a habit of falling back on Middle Earth when asked for real-world example of their ideal society in action.) But whatever you think of distributism's merits, surely a politics whose chief weakness is that it's so impractical as to have (almost) never been tried ought to be immune from the sort of lazy reductio ad fascism that Gopnik's employing here.

Gopnik on Chesterton (I)

I've been meaning to say something for a while about Adam Gopnik's recent New Yorker essay (not online, unfortunately) on G.K. Chesterton, which I didn't find nearly as excellent as Rod Dreher did. Gopnik is of course a brilliant writer in his way, but his way tends, as Rick Brookhiser aptly put it, to make his own sensibility the measure of all things. He's a classic example of the cosmopolitan as provincial: He has something clever to say about everything under the sun, but where something more than cleverness is called for he's often at a loss, or else inappropriately facile. His breadth is astonishing, his depth considerably less so; he's a liberal ironist who often seems unable to imagine how anyone could have ever been anything else. This means that he's precisely the right man to explain, say, a Parisian restaurant war to an American audience, or to gently mock the over-enthusiastic reception that greeted the Gospel of Judas. And it makes him a fine guide to G.K. Chesterton the literary stylist, where both his praise and his criticisms seem to me judicious and on point. Where other aspects of Chesterton are concerned, though ... well, not so much.

I'll start with his lengthy attack on Chesterton's "Jew-hating," which culminates in this peculiar passage:

The insistence that Chesterton's anti-Semitism needs to be understood "in the context of his time" defines the problem, because his time-from the end of the Great War to the mid-thirties-was the time that led to the extermination of the European Jews. In that context, his jocose stuff is even more sinister than his serious stuff. He claims that he can tolerate Jews in England, but only if they are compelled to wear "Arab" clothing, to show that they are an alien nation. Hitler made a simpler demand for Jewish dress, but the idea was the same. Of course, there were, tragically and ironically, points of contact between Chesterton and Zionism. He went to Jerusalem in 1920 and reported back on what he found among the nascent Zionists, whom he liked: he wanted them out of Europe and so did they; he wanted Jews to be turned from rootless cosmopolitans into rooted yeomen, and so did they.

Chesterton wasn't a fascist, and he certainly wasn't in favor of genocide, but that is about the best that can be said for him-and is surely less of a moral accomplishment than his admirers would like. He did speak out, toward the end of his life, against the persecution in Nazi Germany, writing that he was "appalled by the Hitlerite atrocities," that "they have absolutely no reason or logic behind them," that "I am quite ready to believe now that Belloc and I will die defending the last Jew in Europe." Yet he insisted, "I still think there is a Jewish problem," and he denounced Hitler in the context of a wacky argument that Nazism is really a form of "Prussianism," which is really a form of Judaism; that is, a belief in a chosen, specially exalted people.

But the whole point of the "in the context of his times" argument is precisely that by the standards of the '20s and '30s, it was morally impressive for a political writer to reject both fascism and communism, to praise Zionism, and to speak out forcefully against Nazi anti-Semitism - and not in its eliminationist phase, but in its very earliest stages. (Chesterton died in 1936.) This does not excuse Chesterton's anti-Semitism by any means, but it makes him an odd target, out of all the writers and thinkers of that period, to single out for particular opprobrium. Here I think Gopnik is indulging the chauvinism of hindsight: The assumption that everyone who partook of the attitudes that helped make the Holocaust possible should be judged and condemned on the basis of what we know now, rather than what they knew then. It's the Goldhagen approach to assigning culpability, in which even people who opposed Hitler - even people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who died fighting him - are to be judged, and harshly, if they failed to live up the standards that Western society only adopted after the Holocaust provided a terrible example of where these thoughts and impulses can lead.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, it's worth pointing out that a great many opponents of slavery in the United States, Abraham Lincoln included, were racists in much the same way that Chesterton was an anti-Semite - possessed of ideas about black inferiority, the necessity of the separation of the races, and so on and so forth, that look morally abominable to us today. But it would be at least mildly peculiar to attack Lincoln, let alone the more strident abolitionists of that era, on the grounds that by saying that their racism needs to be understood in the context of their times we're just "defining the problem," because their time was the time when slavery was at its zenith. It was, sure - and they were the ones opposing it! Now of course Hitler had many critics purer than G.K. Chesterton, and Zionism had champions less bigoted - but not so many, in that dark time, that we can deny Chesterton at least a modicum of credit for getting certain big things right.

As for Chesterton's parallel between "Prussianism" and the conception of the Jews as a chosen race - well, Gopnik can call it "wacky" if he likes, but the notion that Nazi racial theories, and especially the half-baked attempt to forge an "Aryan Christianity" purged of Judaic elements, were rooted in jealousy and imitation of the Jews as well as hatred strikes me as a subtle and important point. (In George Steiner's instantly-controversial novella The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H., he places exactly this argument in Adolf Hitler's mouth - and not, I think, merely in an attempt to dismiss it.) Indeed, I think the parallel is useful for understanding not only the Nazis but a wide variety of contemporary race-based theologies - from black liberation theology, to take a much-in-the-news example, to the more Arabist strains within Islam - that seek to claim for their ethnicity the particular favor that God has bestowed upon the Jews. Obvious, this sort of argument is outside Gopnik's intellectual comfort zone. But that's a problem with his narrow frame of reference, not the argument itself.

Hooper Goes Hollywood

What a comfort it is to learn that the makers of the new Brideshead Revisited tried to ignore the famous mini-series and "return to the book" for inspiration. This act of fidelity to what Waugh wrote would be slightly more impressive if they had actually decided to adapt what they found in its pages, rather than ... well, I'll let the filmmakers tell it:

As much as it is a story about a lost period of English history — a final shining moment before everything changed forever — “Brideshead” is a novel about the inexorable pull of Catholicism. The issues it raises are particularly relevant now, Mr. Brock said, though viewers may interpret what they see differently depending on the role of faith in their own lives ...

“In that tug between individual freedom and fundamentalist religion, there’s a story that’s apposite for our time,” Mr. Brock said. “In the modern age that’s something we’re all dealing with.”

...

An important divergence in tone from Waugh’s novel, Mr. Jarrold said, comes in the closing scene, when Charles — now back at Brideshead during World War II — talks to Lieutenant Hooper, a fellow soldier who has a rough accent and the forthright views of a modern man unimpressed by the aristocracy. How to portray him led to long discussions about the way that Waugh “is sometimes profoundly undemocratic” and disdainful of Hooper and what he represents, Mr. Jerrold said.

In the book Hooper is “described as a traveling salesman with a wet handshake,” he said. “But he’s the future of England, and the hope of the 1945 generation, and we’ve put a positive spin on him.”

We’ve put a positive spin on him ... I love it! And so would Waugh, I suspect, since the two men sound, frankly, less like real-life Hollywood boobs than like Wavian caricatures of the same. Catholicism is wicked and fundamentalist, Hooper is the hope of the future - but of course they're being very faithful to the book!

The Shock Doctrine

Speaking of the perfidious Chait, his essay on Naomi Klein in the latest TNR is pretty damn good.

The Case of the Hundred-Dollar Paperback

Mick Sussman has a really interesting (to me, at least) post at the Times's Paper Cuts blog about the phenomenon of used books that seem to be vastly overpriced on Amazon - a post prompted by his attempt to purchase Rick Perlstein's unjustly out-of-print Before the Storm, which is currently priced at $131.09 for a paperback, and (oddly) only $89 for a hardcover. I bought Perlstein's book used myself, a couple years back, but at the point, if memory serves, it was going for a much more reasonable price. (This was before Nixonland came out, of course.) I had a similar experience to Sussman, though, when I needed a copy of Kevin Phillips' The Emerging Republican Majority; I don't remember exactly how much I spent, but it was something far more obscene than the $47.86 that it currently takes to get a copy.

In the spirit of authorial solidarity, incidentally, I urge anyone who wants to read Before The Storm - which is well worth your time, as I'm sure I've mentioned before - to wait until next summer, when Nation Books plans to bring it back into print. No matter how high the price of a used copy rises, the writer himself doesn't see a dime of it.

Debating GNP

Reihan and I will be discussing Grand New Party with a group of highly intelligent people this week at TPMCafe, so check it out if you dare ...

Credit Where Credit Is Due

Grand New Party draws very heavily on secondary sources, which means not only studies and reports but also books, magazine articles, newspaper columns, and so forth, and as a result we attempted to give nods throughout not only to the direct sources for data, policy ideas, anecdotes, etc., but also to the writers who called them to our attention in the first place. And so I should apologize to Steve Sailer, who correctly suggests that a passage about the UK's crime and illegitimacy rates, which appears on page 161 of GNP, draws on data points that I first encountered in an April 2005 column he wrote about the British working class. I should add that failing to credit Steve for calling the data in question to our attention was entirely my oversight, and not Reihan's; if there's another edition of the book at some point, I'll make sure that the oversight is corrected.

GNP Update

For those who live in Washington and can't get enough Grand New Party (and how could you?), Reihan and I will be doing an AEI event tomorrow at 2 PM, with David Frum and Ruy Teixeira as our interlocutors. (Translation: We'll get grilled.)

Also, since Bill Bennett was kind enough to have us on his show this morning, let me add my voice to the chorus promoting a McCain-Bennett ticket ...

The President's Unconscious

My morning session here at Aspen featured David Brooks talking about the subject of his next book, which will focus on the brain, neuroscience, sociology, politics, and the intersection thereof. He cautioned at the beginning that he's only a quarter of the way through the book, and the talk reflected that fact: It was more a diffuse collection of observations, anecdotes and arguments than a tightly-focused narrative. But even in inchoate form, the morning left me with the distinct impression that this book has the potential to catapult Brooks into Thomas Friedman or Malcolm Gladwell territory - except that unlike, say, Blink it'll actually be good as well. (And yes, I'm feeling pretty favorably disposed toward Brooks right now, so take my sentiment with however much salt you'd like.)

I'll try to post some video later (we're hoping to splice together highlights of these panels), but for now I'd just like to pluck out one politically-salient observation he made. Brooks talked a lot about the unconscious, likening the mind to a boy riding an elephant - the boy is your conscious mind, the elephant is everything else, and you need to really understand elephants to know what's going on. This point segued, among many other digressions, into a discussion of how unconscious mental structures affect politicians, and here Brooks brought up President Bush, and remarked that in all of his conversations with the President he'd always been struck by the extent to which Bush seemed (unconsciously, in ways he'd never articulate if pressed) to think of decisions in terms of fifty-year time horizons - almost as if he couldn't conceive of political action except in long-run terms. I'm paraphrasing a bit here, and this might not be exactly what Brooks meant, but I think it's an interesting way to think about what's gone wrong - and occasionally right - in the Bush Presidency, and especially the extent to which Bush's actions have been influenced, unconsciously or consciously, by the long-running American narrative of What Makes Presidents Great, often to the detriment of his day-to-day execution of the job.

Brooks also noted, echoing Yuval Levin's argument about honor politics, that McCain's unconscious structures are essentially pre-Christian - and not just, he added, because McCain is older than Jesus Christ. The crack, inevitably, prompted an objection from an outraged seventysomething attendee, who wanted to make it clear that she wasn't older than Jesus. Good times ...

Blogging GNP

The nice thing about having a co-author is that he can help shoulder the load of responding to comments on your book - and with that in mind, here's Reihan responding to Ezra Klein, to Ramesh, to Norm Ornstein (by way of Jonah Goldberg), and of course to Rush Limbaugh.

More GNP

You can listen to me chatting about the book with John Miller here, on his wonderful Between the Covers podcast series. Meanwhile, if the following doesn't convince you to purchase Grand New Party, then nothing will:

The complete, marginally-more-substantive Bloggingheads is here.

Grand New Party

You may have heard that Reihan and I have co-authored a book. You may not, however, have heard that Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class And Save The American Dream is actually available for purchase as of today, both in your local bookstore and over the internet. If you really, really enjoy this blog, you'll probably enjoy the book, so you strongly consider buying it. Likewise, if you really, really hate this blog, and keeping coming back just to see what horrifying thing I'll say next, you should probably consider buying it as well: It'll be two hundred and fifty pages of pure hathetic joy (and you should feel free, of course, to scribble imprecations in the margins).

I don't think I'm going to manage Jonah Goldberg's achievement of replying to almost every reviewer (here are two early reviews, if you're interested), but there will probably be a fair amount of Grand New Party-related chatter around these parts for the next couple weeks - so if this post hasn't persuaded you to buy the book, rest assured that I'll be back to try again soon enough. Also, Reihan and I will be on NPR's On Point this morning at 11 AM, and we'll also be talking about the book tomorrow night at the Borders at 18th and L Street in Washington, so if you're in the neighborhood feel free to stop by and hurl tomatoes, or whatever fruit or vegetable you prefer.

Indwelling of the Nerds

For those who like this sort of thing, this thread is the sort of thing they might like.

A History of Theodicy

Inspired by James Wood's latest litany of eloquent complaints against the God in whom he doesn't believe, here's something I'd like to see: A history of popular theodicy, tracing the influence of the "argument from the existence of evil" against belief in God (or the Christian God, at least) throughout the course of Western history. It's my impression - and it's only an impression, which is why I'd like to see someone do the necessary intellectual spadework to refute it or back it up - that this argument has gained increasing currency even as our material conditions have dramatically improved; which is to say, the less suffering a particular population experiences, the more likely the suffering it does experience will be cited as evidence against the existence of a benevolent deity. (Or put another way, you're more likely to hear New Yorker writers wax indignant about how the existence of human misery precludes their believing in God than you are to hear the same argument from people in slightly less comfortable positions.)

I can think of various reasons why this might be so. There's the correlation-causation possibility: Atheism in general has become more prevalent as material conditions have improved in the West and science has demystified large swathes of the natural world, and since the problem of evil is one of the stronger arguments for atheism, you'd expect it to be cited more often in a more atheistic age. (Wood gestures at this notion in his essay when he remarks that "nowadays, theodicy always has a wary eye on the theological exit: this makes no sense, therefore I will have to reject the idea of God. But there was no such exit before about 1700, at the very earliest.") Or it could have something to do with mass media and instantaneous communication, which expand (and emphasize, since if it bleeds it leads) the range of tragedies that educated people are exposed to on a daily basis. (Wood opens his essay, tellingly, by reading off a roll of tragic headlines from a single copy of the New York Times.) It could have something to do with the scale of inhumanity that modern technology makes possible: Thus the reasonably-convincing argument, for instance, that the experience of two world wars and the Holocaust has been a crucial factor in Europe's abandonment of God. Or it could reflect something inherent in our psychology, which makes suffering seem like more of an absolute injustice the less we actually experience it.

I don't know the answer, or even if the thesis is correct - but I'd love to see someone investigate the question.

Remembering Robert Jordan

Last summer I recommended an essay by Mark Oppenheimer on the virtues of the "medium town," which appeared in a journal he'd co-founded called the New Haven Review of Books - a "medium town" answer to the decline of book reviewing, consisting of literary essays by Elm City natives. Now I'm pleased to recommend the second issue as well, not least because they asked me - a New Havenite in exile - to contribute a piece on the late fantasy author Robert Jordan, who was once upon a time my favorite living novelist.

While I'm at it, I should also recommend the NHRB website, where every Monday they're trying to publish a short review of an unfairly neglected book - as well as this profile of the review and its founders, which appeared in my (former) hometown rag.

Pinker vs. Humanism

Alan Jacobs picks up on another odd feature of that Pinker essay - its apparent horror at the notion that the humanities, and particularly literature, might have any bearing on contemporary bioethics debates.

Talking Nixonland

In a rare encounter between reviewer and author, I taped a chat with Rick Perlstein of Nixonland fame a couple weeks ago, and since today is the book's release date - and it just got front-cover treatment in the NYT Book Review, courtesy of George Will - now seemed like a good time to unleash our conversation on the world.

As always, our podcasts are all available for download from iTunes as well.

Heads in the Sand

In which the Atlantic and yours truly find ourselves incorporated into the promotional machinery for Matt's book.

Looking For the Black Swan

Riffing on Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, Rod Dreher writes:

Taleb's discussion of the role of randomness in our lives, and how we cannot anticipate freak events (all we can know for sure is that they'll happen, sooner or later) makes me reflect on how I've never really gotten over watching 9/11 unfold right before my eyes. The anger is gone, mostly, but the sense of dread and unease isn't. I saw -- we all saw, but I saw it and heard it and smelled it, and I couldn't get away from it for a long time, because you always smelled it when you went outside for months afterward -- that our entire world could change radically in the course of a morning. Taleb talks about how his native Lebanon had lived in relative communal piece for centuries, such that nobody there could imagine the civil war that came upon them in the 1980s. And when it did happen, everybody assumed it would end quickly, because, well, it had to. But it didn't, and it was terrible.

I wonder if in some small way, I have a touch of the dread that people who went through the Depression (a far more traumatic event, cumulatively, than 9/11) do. My dad and mom have different attitudes toward money. He was a child of the Depression; she was born just after it ended. Neither had much money growing up, but my father is far more cautious with it, as if he feared the Thing coming back. Taleb makes me wonder to what extent much of my own intellectual preoccupations these days, and for the past few years, grow out of a general fear that everything around us that seems solid is really not, and that all this could be revealed to us in a terrible Black Swan moment. And that most of my work is done in light of preparing for the next Black Swan moment, such that whatever it is, we are as prepared to deal with it and prevail over it, no matter what it is.

What I find interesting about this is that I share Rod’s premise – the assumption that various inherently unpredictable disasters are lurking ahead of us – without sharing his tendency to scan the headlines looking for harbingers of the apocalypse. If anything, I lean in the opposite direction, and tend to be dismissive of the various doom-and-destruction scenarios that make their way into print these days. I think Rod and I draw similar political conclusions from the “black swan” premise, in the sense that both his “crunchy” politics and my Sam’s Club politics are dedicated to shoring up the sort of habits and institutions that are especially useful in times of dislocation and upheaval, and cultivating what Reihan has termed, in conversation if not in print, the “resilient society.” (Though of course Rod and I would often disagree on what that cultivation and shoring up ought entail.) But when it comes to specific scenarios for dislocation and upheaval, my default instinct tends to be that precisely because “black swan” events are by their nature wildly unpredictable, there’s little to be gained by trying to predict which one – peak oil? avian flu? the next Great Depression? – will actually end up throwing our society for a loop. Better to pursue a politics geared toward all eventualities, in other words, than to play a guessing game that’s only likely to cost you precious resources, and still more precious sleep.

Of course, this approach has its own set of problems: Some calamities are predictable, some unpredictable ones are dire enough to militate for action even when the odds are that the action in question will prove unnecessary, and I worry that my instincts may incline me toward an unwarranted panglossianism about a variety of problems, from global warming to the current economic situation. Somewhere between Rod’s approach and mine, then, lies the happy medium that policymakers ought to strive – so they should read us both, and split the difference.

Nixonland

My review is in the May Atlantic, and it just went up online. On the off-chance it isn't clear from the piece, I think the book is very, very good: Obviously Rick Perlstein and I have slight, slight ideological differences, but If you think that American history in the second half of the twentieth is relatively boring by world-historical standards - as I often did, sitting through U.S. history classes in high school - then Perlstein is the historian for you. (Though if for some crazy reason you haven't read Before The Storm, that's the place to start.)

Clarke and Minghella, RIP

Over on the Current, Reihan ponders the science-fiction giant's views on religion, and I lavish praise on the late director's adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley.

The Democrats And God

Russell Arben Fox, in the course of a characteristically thoughtful post on the book and the issues it raises, wonders why more people aren't discussing and debating Amy Sullivan's The Party Faithful. I suspect that the book would be getting more attention if the Democratic race weren't so dominated by debates over race and gender, which are temporarily swamping even hot-button topics like religion. But if you're looking for a break from the debate over Geraldine Ferraro's racism (or lack thereof), both Amy's book and E.J. Dionne's similarly-themed Souled Out make for thought-provoking reading - as the transcript and clips from this panel discussion (which happens to include yours truly) hopefully suggest.

I Like Sam Anderson

And here's why.

A Million Little Fabulists

Having spent some time now on the outskirts of both the book business and the fact-checking business, my first inclination when someone asks - as Rod does today, of the latest critically-acclaimed, basically fraudulent personal history to hit shelves and then get pulled from them - how a publisher could have possibly allowed themselves to be taken in by one of the seemingly endless slew of memoirist-cum-fabulists, my first instinct is to sympathize with the publisher in question. People usually assume that books are held to a higher standard of accuracy than, say, magazine pieces - after all, they're longer, more detail-rich, and more expensive to produce and market, so you'd think they'd be subjected to more scrutiny as well. But in reality, precisely because books are so much longer and more detailed than magazine articles, fact-checking becomes a luxury that your typical cash-strapped, time-strapped publishing house can't afford. The Atlantic, for instance, probably fact-checks about 50-75,000 words per issue, or about 600,000 words a year; to match our rigor, Simon and Schuster (to pick a publisher at random) would have to fact-check around half a million words for the first half of March alone. Which means that publishing-house editors are more or less at the mercy of their writers' honesty, particularly in a genre where the line between fact and quasi-fiction is always going to be at least slightly blurry. If they can't sniff out a gifted faker through some sort of sixth sense, they don't have anybody else to do it for them - until, that is, the book comes out and the wisdom of crowds (or angry sisters) takes over the fact-checking job for them.

As I said, that's my first instinct. But Rod's right: The list of fabulists has grown too long, and as resource-strapped as today's publishers may be, if you can't do just a little due diligence on a memoir whose subject matter - a white girl growing up among black gangs in South Central L.A. - sounds like it was, well, invented to sucker a publishing house, you deserve all the ignominy that's about to be heaped on the saps at Riverhead Books.

Liberal Fascism And Its Critics

Here is some free advice for liberals who don't care much for Jonah Goldberg or his (bestselling) new volume: Either confine yourself to dismissive snark, of the sort perfected by my colleague Matt, or buckle down and actually read the damn thing. The "definitive critiques" by people who admit that they haven't yet cracked the covers are not helpful to your cause.

And yes, I'll have something to say about the book myself, I promise - but only once I've finished reading it.

Jeffrey Rosen Versus Clarence Thomas

What Alan Jacobs said. I am by no means in the "Clarence Thomas, Real American Hero" camp, and much of Rosen's analysis seems to me astute. But I am persistently puzzled by the unwillingness of white male journalists, in particular - for whom a meritocracy-plus-affirmation action system of advancement provides constant validation, and constant confirmation that they're getting ahead on innate talent and hard work alone - to generate sympathy for a figure like Thomas, who feels, for not-incomprehensible reasons, that his successes have been won (as Jacobs puts it, quoting, Stanley Fish) "in such a way as to render them bitter to the taste." You don't have to like him or agree with him to understand, better than Rosen seems to, where his anger might be coming from.

I would also add, to Rosen's remark that "it is no more possible to feel pity for [Thomas] than for Britney Spears," that the comparison is ridiculous (persecution by the paparazzi is by no means comparable to the combination of segregationist racism, affirmative-action condescension and Uncle-Tom vitriol that has made Thomas the angry man he is today) and that even if it weren't I do feel pity for Britney Spears, and I'm a little puzzled by anyone who doesn't.

Pullman Versus Tolkien

From an interview with the Dark Materials author:

His story is a rival to the narratives put forward by two earlier Oxford writers, J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" and C.S. Lewis's "The Chronicles of Narnia". Pullman loathes the way the children in Narnia are killed in a car-crash. "I dislike his Narnia books because of the solution he offers to the great questions of human life: is there a God, what is the purpose, all that stuff, which he really does engage with pretty deeply, unlike Tolkien who doesn't touch it at all. ‘The Lord of the Rings' is essentially trivial. Narnia is essentially serious, though I don't like the answer Lewis comes up with. If I was doing it at all, I was arguing with Narnia. Tolkien is not worth arguing with."

It’s true that Lewis and Tolkien are engaged in very different projects, and the former is more didactic than the latter; that Pullman would see this as a reason to dismiss the Rings saga as “trivial” tells you a great deal about where his own fantasy saga went wrong. Being a Christian, I’m favorably inclined to Lewis’ polemical intentions, but even I can see that they sometimes step on the toes of his storytelling. Which is to say that I can see why Pullman-the-atheist would find them deeply irritating. But an appropriate response to this irritation would have been to write an “atheist’s Narnia” in which the polemic is less abrasive – and therefore more effective, perhaps – than Lewis’s Christian sallies sometimes are. More myth, in other words, and less message; more Middle-Earth, perhaps, and less Narnia. Instead, Pullman seems to have set out to take the things he hated about Lewis’ writing and recreate them, but at a heightened, more hectoring pitch. The world-building that makes The Golden Compass so compelling and fun – the panzerbjorn and the witches, the Jules Verne-meets-Tolkien landscape – is thus gradually abandoned as His Dark Materials progresses, no doubt on the grounds of its inherent “triviality,” in favor of a thudding polemic that passes well beyond Lewis and approaches the didacticism of Ayn Rand.

I also liked this bit:

Pullman says that people who are tempted to take offence should first see the film or read the books. "They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence. It's very hard to disagree with those. But people will.”

Indeed. This is Atlas Shrugged in a nutshell: A style of literature-as-polemic that seeks to persuade the reader of its argument by associating those characters who share the author’s point of view with every possible virtue, and those who don’t with every possible vice. The result is a self-contained world – where Christians are all Nazis, say, or successful capitalists are all saints and geniuses – that’s persuasive so long as the reader stays immersed in it, but that can’t survive any contact or contrast with reality.

What's Wrong With His Dark Materials

It isn't that Philip Pullman's trilogy is anti-Christian (though obviously that doesn't make me favorably disposed to it). Nor is it that the saga is badly-written; Pullman is, of course, an immensely talented writer, as anyone who read The Ruby in the Smoke could have told you even before The Golden Compass made him world-famous. No, the problem is that the wheels come rattling off the storytelling wagon in the third volume (The Amber Spyglass, that is), thanks to a combination of preachiness and terrible, terrible plotting. In his great essay on the series, Alan Jacobs blames this squarely on Pullman’s atheism, suggesting that "powerful alternative versions of the biblical narrative can only be told by people who are themselves passionately theological." I was persuaded by this argument, but I didn’t realize how persuasive it really is until I read this critique (via Jeffrey Overstreet) by the fantasy writer John C. Wright, which lays out, piece by piece, how the story Pullman should have been telling, and seemingly set out to tell, was undone by the message he was trying to push. An excerpt follows below the fold:

Continue reading "What's Wrong With His Dark Materials" »

American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia

I'm not sure whether it's possible to say something intelligent about a thousand-page book in less than two thousand words, but I make the attempt in the latest Intercollegiate Review.

Mailer, RIP

I'm with Rick Brookhiser more than Roger Kimball. From what I've read of him, Mailer seems to belong - despite their wildly divergent styles and personae - to the same class of writers as Tom Wolfe: Immensely talented and creative wordsmiths who wasted far too much time (Wolfe, late in his career; Mailer, throughout) trying to be Great American Novelists, a task neither was really up to, instead of conducting the experiments in essays and narrative nonfiction that both will be remembered for.

However, I haven't made my way through Harlot's Ghost, which many people whose literary judgment I trust (including Christopher Hitchens) have suggested is the place where Mailer came closet to achieve his GAN ambition, and I should probably reserve judgment until I've blocked out a few weeks to read it.

The Regnery Affair, Cont.

A publishing-industry insider emails:

From what I’ve read of the lawsuit online, at least one of the main points made by the authors is silly; another, misleading.

The silly one is the implicit claim that the authors would be deprived of their ordinary royalties only because of the sweetheart deal between Regnery’s publishing division and book club. In fact, every reputable trade publisher distinguishes between royalties offered to authors for ordinary sales and those that apply to books that must be heavily discounted to clubs and elsewhere. To give one example, authors routinely make only 50% of their ordinary royalty on sales to channels where the publisher has to offer outlandish discounts to the vendor. These include any book clubs (owned by the publisher or not) as well as deals that persuade Barnes & Noble and other major chains to put the books on their New Release tables. (Does anyone really think they do that just because a buyer somewhere closely read the bound galley and wept with pleasure? It’s all about co-op dollars.) In many such cases, the publisher is losing money on every book sold. It’s hardly an injustice that the royalty for those units would go down.

Continue reading "The Regnery Affair, Cont." »

The Regnery Racket

So you may have heard about this right-wing mini-scandal, in which outraged authors are suing Regnery for selling their books through its own sister companies (like the Conservative Book Club) and paying them a pittance, rather than the higher royalties they're entitled to when books get sold through bookstores. What's interesting to me about the whole mess is that I had always understood the whole Conservative Book Club angle to be part of the appeal of signing a book deal with Regnery. I've had several in-the-know D.C. types explain to me over the years that if you're writing a conservative political book for the money, rather than the prestige (or the careful editing), you should do it through Regnery because their book club links - as well as their connections to the talk radio outlets that can help pump up a right-wing book's sales - enable them to more or less create best-sellers at will, in a way that other conservative imprints just can't match. But of course it rather defeats the purpose of picking a publisher for the money if their method of making you a best-seller doesn't net you very much, um, money. And you would think that someone would have picked up on this before now ...

Dumbledore Is Gay (II)

Of my remark, in response to J.K. Rowling's "by the way, Dumbledore's gay" announcement, that "a writer confident in her powers wouldn't feel the need to announce details like this," Neil Gaiman - yes, that Neil Gaiman - writes:

All that tells us is that Ross Douthat doesn't write fiction.

(Ouch.)

You always wind up knowing more about your characters than you can get onto the page. Pages are finite, and the story isn't about giving you all the information about everyone in it any more than life is. Things the author knows about characters (or at least, strongly suspects -- it's never really real until it hits the page, because the process of writing is also a process of discovery) that don't make it onto the page could include the characters' backstory, what they like to eat, the toothpaste they use, what happens to them after the story is over or before it began, and what they do in bed. That something didn't turn up in the books just means it didn't make it onto the page or wasn't relevant to the story. (Or even, it made it in and the author cut that scene out because it didn't work. One of my favourite scenes in Anansi Boys went because it made the chapter work better when it was gone.)

(I remember being astonished when I learned a few years ago, from an obituary, that two teachers I'd had as a child were a same-sex couple. Mostly astonished because at the age where they taught me, I didn't imagine that teachers had romantic lives, or were even entirely human; and learning that they were a pair reconfigured everything I knew about them, which wasn't very much.)

Neverwhere has two gay characters who are Out, as far as the book is concerned, and one major character who is gay but it isn't mentioned, simply because that character was one of many people in that book who don't have any sexual or romantic entanglements during the story. So it's irrelevant.

... And, truth to tell, sexuality tends to be such a minor thing, if you have several hundred characters running around in your head. You know more than you've written. One of the characters in Wall in Stardust, for example, is not what he is pretending to be in a way that has nothing at all to do with sex, although the clues are all there in the book, but if I don't do another story set in Wall you'll never find out who he is, or even why he's interesting.

I think the crucial question here is whether Dumbledore being gay is just a "a minor thing," just one of many quirks that the reader doesn't need to know while reading the books but might be interested to discover after the fact - or, as with Gaiman's two lesbian teachers, whether it's something that "reconfigures" everything we thought we knew about the Hogwarts Headmaster. I would submit that it's closer to the latter than to the former, given the role Dumbledore plays in the saga and the significance of his varied relationships to all the other players in the story; it isn't quite the equivalent of Rowling never giving the reader any clue that Snape was in love with Lily Potter, only to mention it in passing at a public appearance in 2009, but it's closer to that sort of thing than to, say, a piece of interesting trivia about how Minerva McGonagall once dated a guy from Slytherin. I'm not saying that every piece of information about every character needs to be spilled out on the page; I'm not even saying that one should be able to know, from reading the books, that Dumbledore is homosexual. I'm just saying that a writer with confidence in her powers would write that sort of important detail into the story in such a way, whether explicit or implicit, that she didn't feel the need to explain it after the books came out. (I'm trying to picture Melville patiently explaining to the Illustrated London News that yes, Claggart did have a thing for Billy Budd - or Proust telling a Paris audience: "Don't you get it? The narrator's gay! Albertine's a guy!")

Continue reading "Dumbledore Is Gay (II)" »

The Perils of Book Reviewing

In which Mom wasn't stuffed in a freezer, after all.

Dumbledore Is Gay

I don't think there's much to say about this, except that it seems like a case of J.K. Rowling trying to retroactively bestow a level of adult complexity on her characters that they don't possess on the printed page. A writer confident in her powers wouldn't feel the need to announce details like this after the fact, and a writer who understood the strengths and limitations of her creation would recognize that trying to smuggle this level of psychological realism into the Potter series is a fool's errand that can only diminish her achievement - by reminding adult readers of what it isn't (a serious work of realistic fiction, I mean), rather than letting them enjoy it for the gripping, inventive children's fantasy it is.

Update: My response to Neil Gaiman's remarks is here.

Christians and the Constitution

Andrew, in the midst of an engaging Cato Unbound dialogue with Mark Lilla, Philip Jenkins, and Damon Linker:

America is substantively and experientially a deeply religious country, and its political discourse has always been saturated with religious rhetoric and imagery ... It is a country whose politics is experientially creedal. It doesn't incubate the kind of high Tory pragmatism that I admire in the English experience; or even the kind of atheist secularism that helped spawn socialism in other developed countries in the twentieth century. But the power of that religious presence — I call it “Christianism” and describe it at length in The Conservative Soul — is in many ways a testament to the strength of the secular constitution that resists it. In fact, I think that without the kind of secularism that Mark detects in the founding documents and Constitution, America would long since have succumbed to some version of theocracy or another.

Mark's basic point is that this is the natural and historical state for humankind. The achievement of keeping God at arm's length in the ordering structure of a polity is very, very rare. Very few countries have achieved it in the history of the world. America's genius is to have sustained it, even while fostering an intensely religious, roiling, and often apocalyptic culture. So Damon is right to worry about theology's political claims — especially in the last few years, and during various spasms of the past. But he is wrong in thinking, I believe, that this will lead to a collapse of the American system as such. It could lead to disastrous social policies, civil dissension, social conflict, and what we have come to call a "culture war." But even then, the impulse to junk the Constitution as a whole, and the ability even to amend it, is limited. In fact, it is remarkable how modest many Christian fundamentalists have been in addressing the Constitution's core secularism. Whether out of national pride or simply denial, it remains a fact that the main policy goals of Christianists in American history has been in amending the Constitution or bypassing it, rather than attacking it frontally.

I think the sheer diversity of religious belief and institutions in the U.S. would make the possibility of an American theocracy pretty remote, whatever our constitution looked like - particularly given that the number of theocracies instituted in the nation-states of the modern West as a whole is close to zero. (It's pretty close to zero for the pre-modern West, for that matter.) It’s possible to imagine a much more politically fragmented North America producing some localized theocracies, along the lines of Deseret and Puritan New England, but on a national level .. not so much.

I'm more sympathetic to the rest of Andrew's comments here, but it's precisely the aspects of American political history that he gets right - particularly the resilience of the constitutional order in spite (or because!) of the persistence of God-infused political activity - that makes his promiscuous use of scare-terms like “Christianist” so silly. The fact that religious conservatives, with the occasional exception, share the same commitment to the Constitution as liberal believers and secularists – and that much of the culture war, from abortion to school prayer to gay marriage, boils down an argument between two perfectly lucid, un-theocratic readings of said Constitution – and that if anything, the religious right tends to be more committed to upholding the actual text of the Constitution than their more secular foes – well, all of these points suggest, at the very least, that constantly slinging around terms that effectively equate James Dobson with a shari’a-happy Islamist might not be the most accurate way to analyze the intersection of religion and politics in the contemporary United States.

Also, you should definitely read Jonathan Rowe's critique of the Lilla thesis, which is helpfully linked from the Cato Unbound page. I'll try to say something more about the issues it raises later on.

Robert Jordan, RIP

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow.

Let the Dragon ride again on the winds of time.

Robert Jordan was, for about four years during my adolescence, easily my favorite writer in the world. The first five books of his Wheel of Time saga are among the best popular fantasy novels of the last few decades, with only George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire and Tad Williams' Memory, Sorrow and Thorn providing serious competition. Now he is dead, still young at 58, with his saga still unfinished. It went on too long - eleven books, with at least two more projected - and when it is completed (as I assume it will be, with his family or other writers filling in the blanks), it will be less than it could have been. But at its best, it was remarkable indeed: Few writers have given me such pleasure, and few, I suspect, ever will. It's hard to imagine loving any books more than the books that you love when you're fifteen years old.

Jordan was a pen name; his real name was James Oliver Rigney, Jr. He was a South Carolinian, a Citadel graduate, a Vietnam veteran, a devout Episcopalian. He is survived by his wife, Harriet. Requiescat in pacem.

The Canon Wars

Rachel Donadio, on Allan Bloom:

Today it’s generally agreed that the multiculturalists won the canon wars. Reading lists were broadened to include more works by women and minority writers, and most scholars consider that a positive development. Yet 20 years later, there’s a more complicated sense of the costs and benefits of those transformations. Here, the lines aren’t drawn between right and left in the traditional political sense, but between those who defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should master and those who focus more on modes of inquiry and interpretation.

It's this latter debate that's crucial to understanding what's wrong with the contemporary university. In a better world, the multiculturalists and the canonists should have been able to meet halfway - preserving the idea of a canon, while expanding it to include more works from outside the circle of Dead White Males. Such a compromise would have ended up cluttering syllabi with more politically-correct junk than a reactionary like myself might like, but it would have preserved the essential liberal-arts notion that there are great books, and that one of the missions of the university should be to expose its students to as many of them as possible.

This did happen to some extent: As Donadio writes, "In 1965, the authors most frequently assigned in English classes were Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Dryden, Pope and T. S. Eliot, according to a survey by the National Association of Scholars ... In 1998, they were Shakespeare, Chaucer, Jane Austen, Milton, Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison." Obviously, having Morrison and to a lesser extent Woolf in that group is somewhat depressing, but it wouldn't be all that objectionable if most students at top-flight colleges were being required to read this group of authors; a week wasted on Sula seems a small price to pay for a student body that's acquainted with Shakespeare's tragedies. The trouble is that they aren't. Instead of keeping requirements in place but compromising on their content, too many colleges - my alma mater included - rushed to embrace the "modes of inquiry" (or in Harvard-ese, "approaches to knowledge") view of education, and then breathed a sigh of relief that they'd set aside the messy debates over whether there's a Proust of the Papuans, while freeing their overspecialized young professors from the burdens of teaching survey courses. And that was how the canon wars ended - they made a desert, and called it peace.

Paul Krugman Explains It All

At the end of his contribution to the great Chait debate, Krugman writes:

I’m surprised that Jon doesn’t talk at all about the key political role of race in the political shift in this country. Reagan didn’t start as a supply-sider: he started as the enemy of welfare queens in their welfare Cadillacs. And what I’ve learned from Larry Bartels, Tom Schaller, and other political scientists is that race is really central to the whole thing. Here’s a preview quote from my own book:

“The overwhelming importance of the Southern switch suggests an almost embarrassingly simple story about the political success of movement conservatism. It goes like this: thanks to their organization, the interlocking institutions that constitute the reality of the vast right-wing conspiracy, movement conservatives were able to take over the Republican Party, and move its domestic policies sharply to the right. In most of the country, this rightward shift alienated voters, who gradually moved toward the Democrats. But Republicans were nonetheless able to win presidential elections, and eventually gain control of Congress, because they were able to exploit the race issue to win political dominance of the South. End of story.”

Really? That's it - that's the whole story? The Cold War, the crime wave, the sexual revolution and Roe v. Wade, the tax revolts, and about sixty other smaller things that I can think of were all trumped by the race issue? What an utterly ridiculous interesting idea.

You can find some of my earlier thoughts on this question here and here; I also think this Yglesias post (written in response to a previous Krugman foray on this topic) makes a great deal of sense. More generally, I would suggest that anyone who tells you that there's "an almost embarrassingly simple story" that explains thirty years of American politics (and happens to prove that their political opponents are evil bigots, and bigot-enablers) probably needs to do a little bit more reading on the subject.

Clubbing

I'm joining a bunch of people who've forgotten more about economics than I'll ever know (plus some guy named Krugman) at a TPMCafe Book Club on Jon Chait's The Big Con. Jon's first post is up, and while you wait for the rest of us to pile on, here's some prebuttal action from Megan and a Free Exchange blogger who seems to agree with Will Wilkinson an awful lot.

An Acceptable Time

There are invisible strings, hundreds and thousands of them, that run back deep into our childhoods - Lincoln's "mystic chords of memory," if you will - and often you don't know that one exists until something happens to pluck it. Madeleine L'Engle is dead, at eighty-eight: I never got very deep into anything she wrote except the Time trilogy and its companion volume, Many Waters, but those books I probably read six times each at least, and the string her death plucked has been vibrating in my mind all day - for Charles Wallace and Meg Murray and Calvin O'Keefe and Mrs. Whatsit, but also for the child I was when I encountered her books, the near-yet-faraway past in which I read and then re-read them. For John Podhoretz, whose building she lived in when he was a boy, the chord is thicker, the note stronger. If you loved her books, go read his tribute.

On Cormac McCarthy

Speaking of the author of No Country For Old Men, the Atlantic just took B.R. Myers' classic "Reader's Manifesto" - in which Myers goes after McCarthy with hammer and tongs - out from behind the firewall. And by coincidence, I'm just now reading All The Pretty Horses for the first time, and recently came upon this passage:

[They] walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever heard before. In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool.

I thought I remembered encountering these images before, and sure enough, Myers uses this particular paragraph as an example of McCarthy's literary sins, writing:

As a fan of movie westerns, I refuse to quibble with the myth that a wild landscape can bestow epic significance on the lives of its inhabitants. But novels tolerate epic language only in moderation. To record with the same somber majesty every aspect of a cowboy's life, from a knife fight to his lunchtime burrito, is to create what can only be described as kitsch. Here we learn that out west even a hangover is something special ...

It is a rare passage that can make you look up, wherever you may be, and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank. I can just go along with the idea that horses might mistake human retching for the call of wild animals. But "wild animals" isn't epic enough: McCarthy must blow smoke about some rude provisional species, as if your average quadruped had impeccable table manners and a pension plan. Then he switches from the horses' perspective to the narrator's, though just what something imperfect and malformed refers to is unclear. The last half sentence only deepens the confusion. Is the thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace the same thing that is lodged in the heart of being? And what is a gorgon doing in a pool? Or is it peering into it? And why an autumn pool? I doubt if McCarthy can explain any of this; he probably just likes the way it sounds.

My (limited) experience with McCarthy bears out this critique, but it seems an insufficient reason to dismiss him. McCarthy's novels cry out for a line editor with a strong sense of the ridiculous (the above paragraph, for instance, could have turned out fine with the final two sentences sliced off), but there's much more to his writing than its excesses. Which is why I prefer James Wood's more nuanced take, from a TNR review of The Road, which is reproduced at length below:

Continue reading "On Cormac McCarthy" »

War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning

Via Julian Sanchez, I came upon a quote from Christopher Hitchens that I hadn't encountered before. It runs:

In order to get my own emotions out of the way, I should say briefly that on that day I shared the general register of feeling, from disgust to rage, but was also aware of something that would not quite disclose itself. It only became fully evident quite late that evening. And to my surprise (and pleasure), it was exhilaration. I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials. And because it is so interesting.

This reminds me of nothing so much as the passage early in Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, when the protagonist, Guy Crouchback, feels similar stirrings (albeit with vastly different political motivations) upon hearing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact:

The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle.

Continue reading "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" »

Harry Potter and the Progressive Scolds

Shorter Dana Goldstein: Because J.K. Rowling, in the course of writing a fantasy saga that takes as a central theme the evils of racism, chauvinism and sexism, and the importance of treating all sentient creatures with respect, did not also suggest that heredity and family lineage are completely meaningless, that women and men are completely identical in every respect, and that there are no ingrained cultural differences between different intelligent species, such as humans and goblins, she is a Tool of the Patriarchy.

The Deathly Hallows

There have always been two critical camps on the Harry Potter phenomenon – the small band of haters, which includes Harold Bloom, A.S. Byatt, and lesser lights like Ron Charles, and the host of apologists, which includes more or less everybody else. I'm a card-carrying member of the latter group; I’m not a Potter obsessive by any stretch, having read each book only once, but I am a great admirer of Rowling’s work, and I’ve always thought that that her skill as a storyteller and world-builder outweighs her literary weaknesses. Reviewing The Half-Blood Prince for NR, I put the pro-Rowling case this way:

… the Potter saga succeeds as few fictions do, and proves, in the process, that there's more to writing than felicitous prose or perfect psychological realism. As with James Fenimore Cooper, or H. P. Lovecraft, or any of the host of novelists whose stories linger long after their stylistic blunderings are forgotten, it's in that mysterious more that Harry Potter's success resides: not in the telling, but in the tale.

I would still stand by this assessment overall – but Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I’m sorry to say, is grist for the haters. (Obviously, spoilers follow below.)

Continue reading "The Deathly Hallows" »

Potterdamerung

I've finished the book, but my thoughts will take a little while to sort themselves into proper criticism; for now, if you don't mind spoilers, start with Russell Arben Fox and Eve Tushnet and work your way deeper into the internets from there.

Update: It doesn't deal with Deathly Hallows, but I quite liked Megan McArdle's piece on the economics of Harry Potter, or "Why are the Weasleys poor?"

Political Fictions

It's not the Harry Potter reaction you all (okay, maybe just a few of you) are waiting for, but you can find my review of Sammy's House, by Kristin Gore, in this Sunday's Times.

Your Potter Roundup

Jonathan Last has all the predictions you'll need. Megan McArdle and Kieran Healy, meanwhile, remind me why Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - where the Lost-style "everybody acts like idiots" phenomenon they identify was at its worst - was far and away the most irritating book in the saga. Meanwhile, this old John Holbo post identifies the pastiche (actually, one of several pastiches) that's at the heart of the Potter mystique.

As for me, just like with The Sopranos finale, I'm going to be behind the pop-culture times: I'll be occupied all weekend and won't even get to start reading the book till Sunday night at the earliest. So expect blogging to be light till then, since I'll be on something of a media fast.

A Modest Proposal

Via Larison, here's Jim Pinkerton:

... with all due respect to former Vice President Al Gore, we might as well just say it bluntly: Muslims with atomic weapons are a greater threat to America than global warming.

When kids see "Harry Potter," they should be thinking first about defending their country, and their civilization, against evildoers wielding weapons of mass destruction. After that's taken care of, they can then worry more about carbon dioxide.

Or perhaps left and right could agree that children should be brought up to live in fear of neither global warming nor weapons of mass destruction. Would that be too much to ask?

The First Potter Review ...

... is up, courtesy of the Baltimore Sun. And perhaps for fear of various legal repercussions, it says very little in very few words. But I detect a spoilerish tinge to it even so, so read at your own risk. (This means you, Russell Arben Fox!)

Update: They've put up a longer version.

Waiting For Harry

Alan Jacobs - an occasional contributor, I might note, to the new American Scene - gets his Potter on.

Updike on Shlaes Revisited

I just re-read my earlier post and I think I'd like to disassociate myself from my own snarkiness. Sure, Updike's essay wasn't very good at all, but neither was it bad enough to be described as "solipsistic flapdoodle," and I'm not sure why I was so obnoxious about Updike not being a professional historian. (Shlaes isn't one either, technically.) Particularly since with this piece and his earlier Aimee Semple McPherson review, Updike seems to be tackling books that fall outside the usual New Yorker orbit - and even if he ends up giving them the usual New Yorker gloss, it's still a tendency that ought to be encouraged.

Also, it's more interesting to use the review to analyze the psychology of the typical Depression-era voter - which Updike's FDR-voting ancestors assuredly were - than to make fun of Updike's leaps in logic. Here's Daniel Larison's take:

Updike’s story is an interesting portrait of how government-exacerbated crises can work, perversely enough, to instill even greater support for the government: the Depression was so miserable that people became grateful for whatever assistance they could get, even though the very programs they were using were working, on a macro level, to perpetuate their misery.

I basically agree with this, though being somewhat more sympathetic to big gummint than Daniel I would suggest that the relief programs that people were most immediately grateful for - and that were politically necessary, I would submit, if not always economically ideal - weren't usually the ones that did the most damage to the economy. You could have had the unemployment relief and the jobs programs, in other words, without the attempts have the government rig wages and prices - or the WPA without the NRA, the CCC without the AAA, if you follow me. (Ah, the New Deal ...)

Update: Isaac thinks I was right to begin with.

Updike on Shlaes

As a non-historian who aspires to review works of history here and there - and perhaps even write one, who knows? - I don't want to begrudge a non-historian like John Updike the chance to review Amity Shlaes' revisionist history of the Great Depression. But if you're reviewing a book that makes specific historical arguments - helpfully summarized here by Shlaes herself - about whether the New Deal did or did not make the Great Depression worse, you need to do better by way of analysis than this (extended) "rebuttal":

Continue reading "Updike on Shlaes" »

Et Tu, Minerva?

We may not have Lost to kick around for the next nine months, but we do have the last Harry Potter novel coming up - and via the indispensible Jonathan Last comes the best Potter theory I've read in quite some time. It's so crazy, it might just turn out to be true.

Melancholy Elephants

Via a coworker, the case against copyright extension, in the form of a Spider Robinson short story.

The Conservative Mind, Circa 2007

Kathryn Jean Lopez writes:

I just did a quick flip through a Simon & Schuster catalog for the fall. Mary Matalin’s Threshold imprint looks to be really taking off. How can you not be excited by the upcoming John Bolton Surrender Is Not an Option (Amen!)? She’s also got a Lynne Cheney autobiography (our next First Lady!), What’s the Matter with California?, and a book by the Duke lacrosse coach — subtitled: The Untold Story of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case and the Lives It Shattered. One can’t help to be glad that she’s in the book business.

Allow me to torpedo my chances of signing a lucrative book deal with Threshold by suggesting that if I were placed in charge of a right-leaning imprint at a major publisher, I hope I would manage to make it something more than a clearinghouse for Cheney family memoirs, screeds by loudmouthed TV personalities, ghostwritten quickie books, anti-Malcolm Gladwell Malcom Gladwell knockoffs, and polemics by TWA Flight 800/Ron Brown conspiracy theorists.

Free Culture

I would almost be sympathetic to Mark Helprin's argument that copyrights should last forever, and that his great-great grandchildren, rather than the publishers of Barnes & Noble Classics, should profit from Winter's Tale - almost but not quite, both for the reasons Matt proposes and for others - if he were simultaneously arguing for a far more lenient definition of "fair use." This, to my mind, is the real way that copyright and intellectual-property laws stifle creativity - not by preventing five different publishers from bringing out competing editions of the same book, but by preventing other artists from piggybacking on existing works and making something new out of them. (Unless they're willing to confine themselves to parody.) Our language's greatest writer, remember, was a shameless thief, copying themes and plots and characters with abandon to create his plays. Yet if a twenty-first century Shakespeare wanted to take, say, the plot of Star Wars as the jumping-off point for his genius, his Tragedy of Anakin Skywalker would have to sit unpublished on a hard drive for seventy years after George Lucas's death. Copyright law, to my mind, should give an artist control over the work itself, but not the world it summons up: If I want to publish a novel set at Hogwarts or a sequel to Gone With the Wind, J.K. Rowling and the Mitchell estate shouldn't have veto power.

The Hinges of Fate

Speaking of military history, the latest Nation includes a review of what sounds like a fascinating Ian Kershaw book on ten "fateful choices," in 1940 and '41, that determined how the Second World War turned out. (I'm particularly interested in the argument that Hitler was right to declare war on the U.S. after Pearl Harbor - or at least that he didn't have any better options.)

Nobody's Perfect

There isn't a living critic I respect more than James Wood - and I respect him more than most of the dead ones, too. So it's with something approaching horror that I came upon this passage in his review of Cormac McCarthy's The Road:

It is the common weakness of novels such as Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, Doris Lessing's The Memoirs of a Survivor, P.D. James's Children of Men, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, or even Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and Orwell's 1984, that they are all to some extent science-fiction allegories in which the author extrapolates from the present, using hypothetical developments in the future to comment on crises that he or she sees as already imminent in his or her own time. Thus, in the post-nuclear age of A Canticle for Leibowitz, secularism will triumph and religions will die; in Lessing's and Burgess's worlds, juvenile violence and waywardness have spun out of control (these two novels were written in 1961 and 1974, in the two decades of "The Sixties"); in James's Britain of twenty years hence, males have become infertile and immigrants are rounded up by a totalitarian government and put in cages. There is nothing wrong with any of this, except that some essential illusionistic pressure is taken off the novelist, who can then merely describe the life that we know but with a twist, the old world that most of us recognize but that is suddenly more horrid to live in.

It's a characteristically lucid and insightful bit of analysis, except for the fact that his description of James' novel is inaccurate. The immigrants in the cages belong to Alfonso Cuaron's film adaptation, not to the (far superior) book, in which the government is gently authoritarian rather than totalitarian, with an immigration policy (a minor thread in the narrative, not a major one as in Cuaron's movie) that partakes more of "guest workers" than roundups and cages. I assume (and hope!) that Wood isn't pretending to have read Children of Men, and that it's simply a case of the English-speaking world's finest literary critic confusing a novel with its film adaptation. But even that is mildly depressing.

Republicans In Fiction

Earlier this year, Ben Nugent wondered in N+1 why there aren't more novels written by Republicans. Now, via Andrew, comes a good explanation for why there aren't more novels about Republicans:

... the cast of characters in what is arguably the worst administration since Nixon's strikes me as devoid of literary interest. Practically the only enduring contribution of this crew to America's writers is its patented brand of cant ... But behind the words lurk people who have, for seven years, refused to grant room for ambiguity, complexity, and doubt - preconditions for the moral universe in which modern literature is possible. Instead, we get a stilted reduction whose protagonists, depending on who's reading, are either simply Good, or simply Wicked. We get Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint. We get "Stuff Happens" and "Guantanamo" - bracing theatrical experiences, but not dramas per se. A mark of the current administration's moral failure, and perhaps of its artistic triumph, is that it has sterilized many of the avenues for protest against itself. It brings out the worst in us, and has, by its relentless aestheticization of every aspect of American life, made the aesthetic feel insufficient. Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps some artist or press secretary somewhere is even now working up a giant masterwork that illuminates W as a tragic hero caught on the horns of history. Somehow, though, I'm not convinced such a work would ring true. Anyway, I'm not holding my breath.

So wait ... it's the Bushies' fault that all the anti-Bush agitprop of the last six years has been such artistic rubbish? Because the Administration has "made the aesthetic feel insufficient" and "sterilized many of the avenues for protest against itself"? Because its members are "devoid of literary interest?" I'm happy to blame the current Administration for all sorts of sins, but this is just pathetic. If Soviet Communism didn't make "the aesthetic feel insufficient" for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, then I don't want to hear a peep from the poor delicate darlings who think they're too traumatized by the Bush years to write anything that's any good.

Moreover, you don't have to view our current President as a "tragic hero caught on the horns of history" to think that there might be some good drama to be found inside this White House - in, say, the ruin of Paul Wolfowitz's idealistic dreams; or the tangled, rivalrous interplay of Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice; or the peculiar family dynamic between Dubya and his father; or the President's strange, semi-spousal relationships with inner-circle women like Karen Hughes and Harriet Miers ... and that's just to take the first few examples that spring to mind. No, the fact that none of our artists have managed to make something out of this Administration tells us way more about the artists than the Bushies. It suggests that there aren't any interesting Republicans in our fiction not because Republicans aren't interesting, but because our intelligentsia's political prejudices blind them to the possibility that a Republican might be, well, a complicated human being rather than just the sum of every liberal's fears.