Burnt Shadows

Kamila Shamsie, Burnt Shadows (New York: Picador, 2009). 370 pp. $14.00.

Kamila Shamsie’s fifth novel ought to be called The Politically Correct Guide to Third World Grievances of the Last Sixty-Five Years. It crawls—that’s a comment on its narrative pace, by the way, and not a fancy verb—it crawls from the dropping of “Fat Man” on Nagasaki in August 1945 through the end of British colonial rule in India and the country’s partition in August 1947, the mujahideen’s resistance to Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the early ’eighties, 9/11, the toppling of the Taliban, the rounding up of enemy combatants, the specter of Guantánamo Bay, and the mass suspicion of Americans toward the Muslims in their midst. Oh, wait. That last thing doesn’t belong to history, you say? Well, who are you to say? Whose history?

Aside from its political sanctimony (“I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second nuclear bomb”), Burnt Shadows is held together, you’ll excuse the expression, by the character Hiroko Tanaka. A 21-year-old teacher living in Nagasaki and in love with a German refugee when the bomb falls, Hiroko survives the blast. But she is left with a permanent scar, “three charcoal-coloured bird-shaped burns on her back,” from the images on a silk kimono that were seared into her flesh. “It’s always there,” she says many years later, living in Karachi with her Muslim husband who had fled Delhi at the time of partition—always there, just like the scar on Sethe’s back in Beloved. “I’ve never seen it and never will,” Sethe says, but she was told it what it looks like: “A chokecherry tree. Trunk, branches, and even leaves. Tiny little chokecherry leaves. But that was eighteen years ago. Could have cherries too now for all I know.” She received it when she was whipped by a white boy. “It grows there still,” she says.

Hiroko’s bird-shaped scars give Burnt Shadows its title, and serve as the novel’s central and brutally obvious symbol of loss. But perhaps I should let an Afghani mujahid, the comrade-in-arms of Hiroko’s Pakistani-born son Raza, explain:

Your mother lost her family and home to war; your father was torn away from the city whose poetry and history had nurtured his family for generations; your second father was shot dead in Afghanistan; the CIA thinks you’re a terrorist; you’ve travelled in the hold of a ship, knowing that if you died no one would ever know; home is something you remember, not some place you live. . . .Shamsie’s lament for the victims of American war and British imperialism would be more affecting if its characters were not merely assemblages of political gestures, and if its politics were not merely what Orwell once described as “the one-eyed pacifism that is peculiar to sheltered countries with strong navies”:War is like disease. Until you’ve had it, you don’t know it. But no. That’s a bad comparison. At least with disease everyone thinks it might happen to them one day. You have a pain here, swelling there, a cold which stays and stays. You start to think maybe this is something really bad. But war—countries like yours [the United States] they always fight wars, but always somewhere else. The disease always happens somewhere else. It’s why you fight more wars than anyone else; because you understand war least of all. You need to understand it better.The novel also would have benefitted from a plot, or even a story, to take the place of its slide-show political attitudinizing. And it wouldn’t hurt if Shamsie were a better prose writer:The desire to sit down on the ground and weep was strong, but instead Hiroko stepped on to the verandah, and into another world. Everything was colour, and the twittering of birds. It was like walking into the imagination of someone who has no other form of escape. So beautiful, and yet so bounded in.Perhaps the passive voice might be defended as appropriate to Shamsie’s politics, in which the people of the Third World are the objects of great powers’ actions. The lack of drama, though—to say nothing of the limp hyperbole and the vague metaphor—is sadly characteristic of her style. By coincidence, I happen just to have started Delta Wedding, because the Amateur Reader recommended it as “a summer novel, a real August novel.” Laura rides the Yellow Dog to the Delta to visit her cousins:Thoughts went out of her head and the landscape filled it. In the Delta, most of the world seemed sky. The clouds were large—larger than horses or houses, larger than boats or churches or gins. . . . The land was perfectly flat and level but it shimmered like the wing of a lighted dragonfly. It seemed strummed, as though it were an instrument and something had touched it.Okay, okay. It is unfair to compare any other writer to Eudora Welty. But the point is this. If you have not yet read Delta Wedding, or have not reread it in a while, why would you waste your time with Burnt Shadows?

Good books, not new ones

Mark Athitakis reflects profitably on the changing relationship between blogging and criticism, the profit deriving in large measure from his spending almost no time developing any distinction between “first wave” and “second wave” bloggers. He observes that “who belongs in what wave” is perhaps “the dullest insider-baseball conversation imaginable.” Exactly. His interest in the subject is not abstract. In his comment to my post on blogging-as-essay-writing, Athitakis says that he wants to raise the economic question of book-blogging.

Perhaps the place to start is to look back upon the economic function of newspaper’s book pages, which are disappearing faster than Chrysler dealerships. And here the truth must be told. Book pages were unpaid advertising for the publishing industry. Why else would books be assigned for review, and the reviews written, before the books were even published? The book pages covered books that existed only in uncorrected proofs. (I still have the proof of the first book that I ever reviewed—Philip Applebaum’s Shame the Devil, which I wrote up for New York Newsday twenty-eight years ago. A press release from Crown Publishers was slipped into the pages. A contact name and number were provided, and a helpful plot summary and author bio were included. For someone who came to book reviewing from trade journalism, the entire package was familiar. I was used to writing up new product announcements.) The aim was to whip up interest in a book before its shelf life, estimated by Maugham to be no more than thirty days, came to an end.

Maugham’s estimate of a new book’s shelf life is a testament to the literary quality of most new books. Almost universally they deserve to be forgotten, and as quickly as possible. Even of award-winning books this is true. Last December, irritated by the chatter about the best books of 2008, I compiled a list of the year’s best books from a decade earlier. With few exceptions, they have dropped unprotestingly into oblivion. No surprise, really: Cyril Connolly once said that a book had achieved immortality if it was still being read ten years later. What this suggests, though, is that reviewers are wasting their own and their readers’ time to concentrate upon the books of the last thirty seconds. Perhaps they would perform a more essential service to readers if they rescued books that do not deserve to be forgotten.

In an earlier post, Athitakis glances at Gordon Hutner’s What America Read: Taste, Class and the Novel 1920–1960. “It’s a veritable Who’s Who of writers I’ve never heard of,” Athitakis says: “The female writers alone include Margaret Barnes, Josephine Lawrence, Margaret Culkin Banning, Caroline Slade, Maritta Wolff, and Margaret Halsey.” Hutner says ruefully that a junior scholar would have been discouraged from writing a book like his, on writers few have heard of. This is not a tragedy: most literary scholars have little of value to say to general readers. Book reviewers, however, might perhaps make it their business to bring attention to such writers.

There is no economic reason that book bloggers cannot write about any book or writer they want to. Nor is there any economic reason, except to line the pockets of Amazon and the publishers, to herd readers into the Newly Published aisles. Barnes & Noble and Abebooks.com make it possible to roam desultorily through the collections of thousands of used booksellers. Why shouldn’t the “new wave” reviewers—that is, book bloggers—drum up business for them? The aim should be to promote reading, not publishing; and to push good books, not new ones.

Responsibility and accountability

Not so long ago, sitting in on a doctoral exam, I was struck by a distinction that I’d never given much thought to. I asked the candidate—a school principal who was earning an Ed.D. in educational administration—“To whom are you responsible?” Immediately she replied with the names of the upper administrators in her school district. “Not in a bureaucratic sense,” I interrupted, “but, you know”—I trailed off, waving my hands—“like, ultimately.” “The children,” she quickly said; “they are the ones I must answer to.”

I approved of her reply, but not her reason. She seemed to conceive responsibility as accountability—being answerable—and though this is the ordinary conception, I left the exam wondering whether responsibility and accountability are the same; and whether we do damage in assuming they are the same.

It is the ordinary conception. J. R. Lucas begins his philosophical study of Responsibility (1993) by observing that

Etymologically, to be responsible is to be answerable—it comes from the Latin respondeo, I answer, or the French repondre, as in RSVP. I can equally well say I am responsible for an action or accountable for it. And if I am to answer, I must answer a question; the question is, “Why did you do it?” and in answering that question, I give an account . . . of my action. So the central core of the concept of responsibility is that I can be asked the question “Why did you do it?” and be obliged to give an answer.I suspect, however, that this is false. Responsibility can be distinguished from accountability in terms of priority and relationship. If I do something to you—if you greet me publicly, for instance, and I cut you—I am accountable for my behavior. Were you to demand an explanation, I owe you one. And, indeed, you would describe it as irresponsible of me not to account for my actions.

But am I not responsible to you even before I am accountable to you? When you greet me, I must respond. I don’t mean must in the sense of ethical obligation. I mean that it is impossible not to respond. By cutting you I have responded to you, although perhaps in a manner intended to shirk responsibility. (If I don’t see you or hear you, that’s a different story. Then I am not accountable. If you ask, “Why did you ignore me?” I can reply truthfully that I didn’t see you or hear you. If I intended to cut you, though, and nevertheless answer in this way, my lie measures the extent of my irresponsibility.) If I see you and turn away from you, I have responded to you, but I have not responded in kind. I have shamed you, made you aware of your estrangement from me, and so I have refused to accept responsibility for not doing these things to you. Responsibility is prior to accountability.

But wait. There’s more. The question of whom I am accountable to is not the same as whom I am responsible to. Only some people can fairly demand an explanation from me. I do not have to give an account of myself to clerks and strangers, but only to those with whom I have already established a relationship. And in fact, I might speculate that a relationship is brought sharply to an end by the refusal of one person to give an account of himself to the other.

Yet I am responsible to you even if you are a stranger to me. Again, if you greet me I cannot not respond. Not to respond is to respond by not responding. And if you are in need—if you trip on the sidewalk and fall at my feet—my failure to respond is clearly a moral failure. Nor is what you want an account of my actions, except perhaps later; what you want is an immediate response of a certain kind. Thus I reveal my sense of responsibility toward you in how I respond to you. And responsiveness, then (to use Lucas’s language), is “the central core of the concept of responsibility.”

My etymological analysis differs from Lucas’s. “Responsibility” derives from the verb “to respond,” re- + spondere (to promise solemnly, to bind, engage, or pledge oneself). Now if a promise is an assurance to another with respect to the future, then a response is a reassurance, the restoration of faith and removal of shame. And unresponsiveness, then—the withdrawal into silence or refusal to help—is the lack, the defect state, of promising. Not to respond is not to pledge oneself. It is unreassuring; it does not restore faith nor remove shame. It leaves the defect state intact. It fails to answer to human need. In the face of damage it shrugs, “Not my responsibility.”

Accountability is what we owe to those with whom we are intimate. Responsibility is what we owe to the widow, the orphan, the stranger—in addition to our intimates. Thus responsibility is prior to accountability, but is not based upon a prior relationship. It is simply the basis of all further human relations.

Although he uses only one of the two terms, James seems to depend upon some such distinction between responsibility and accountability in The Portrait of a Lady. Isabel Archer reflects upon her decision to reject Lord Warburton’s marriage proposal:What she felt was not a great responsibility, a great difficulty of choice; it appeared to her there had been no choice in the question. She couldn’t marry Lord Warburton; the idea failed to support any enlightened prejudice in favour of the free exploration of life that she had hitherto entertained or was now capable of entertaining. She must write this to him, she must convince him, and that duty was comparatively simple.Accountability—explaining herself in a letter to Lord Warburton—is comparatively simple as compared to the “great responsibility” that she would feel if a proposal were more tempting—if she were tempted to enter into marriage that supported the free exploration of life.

The next time the word responsibility appears—in the same phrase, “great responsibility,” as luck would have it—Isabel has inherited a fortune from Daniel Touchett. She asks her cousin Ralph whether he thinks it is good for her to be suddenly so rich. He answers with a summa of his moral code:Don’t ask yourself so much whether this or that is good for you. Don’t question your conscience so much—it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions. Don’t try so much to form your character—it’s like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best, and your character will take care of itself. Most things are good for you; the exceptions are very rare, and a comfortable income’s not one of them. . . . You’ve too much power of thought—above all too much conscience. . . . It’s out of all reason, the number of things you think wrong. Put back your watch. Diet your fever. Spread your wings; rise above the ground. It’s never wrong to do that.Isabel can only reply by saying: “I wonder if you appreciate what you say. If you do, you take a great responsibility.”

She does not know how right she is. If anyone must answer for making her rich, Ralph is he. Although she is unaware of the fact at the time, Ralph persuaded his father to bequeath a fortune to Isabel—precisely so that she could indulge the free exploration of life. The trouble is that his moral example is as stimulating as the comfortable income. Isabel ends by imitating Ralph. She marries Gilbert Osmond so that her money might enable him to satisfy the requirements of his imagination.

But Osmond is a monster, and her marriage nearly destroys her. On his deathbed, Ralph is prepared to take responsibility for her unhappiness. “Is it true,” Isabel asks at last—“is it true?” “True that you’ve been stupid [to marry Osmond]? Oh no,” Ralph says in a weak attempt at wit. “That you made me rich,” Isabel presses him—“that all I have is yours?” In a flush of guilt, Ralph wails: “I believe I ruined you.” “He married me for the money,” she admits. In owning finally to being the agent of her fortune (and misfortune), Ralph is being accountable at long last.

His responsibility lies elsewhere. Thus Ralph seeks also to absolve Isabel of any guilt: “I don’t believe that such a generous mistake as yours can hurt you for more than a little.” But Isabel is not comfortable with absolution. After Ralph’s death, she takes the extraordinary step of returning to her husband—in order to protect her stepdaughter Pansy from him. Isabel could never be justifiably called to account for Osmond’s coercion of Pansy, but she can take responsibility for her. Another kind of woman would look first to save herself. But Ralph has taught her that pain is “not the deepest thing; there’s something deeper.” The deepest thing, the most profound exercise of human freedom, is responsibility.

And great fiction is great—not all of it, but much of it—because it greatly clarifies (by greatly exemplifying) such moral distinctions as this.

To blog is to essay

If there is a less interesting distinction than that between “first wave” “litblogs” and “second wave” “book blogs,” I don’t know what it is. (Perhaps the distinction between English professors and the Left.) Nevertheless, Andrew Seal finds the subject absorbing enough to go on and on for sixteen hundred words. (His conclusion? “[M]aking a distinction between two kinds of blogs can quickly turn into making a distinction between two kinds of bloggers.”) The various distinctions that have been proposed, including Daniel Green’s between “litblogs” and “critblogs,” are worthless. The only meaningful distinction is between those blogs that are well-written and those that are not.

Few are. The “five open supersecrets” about bloggers, as Lee Siegel says in Against the Machine (quoted in Benjamin Kunkel’s review at N1BR), are:

1. Not everyone has something valuable to say.
2. Few people have anything original to say.
3. Only a handful of people know how to write well.
4. Most people will do almost anything to be liked.
5. “Customers” are always right, but “people” aren’t.I am not sure how these five secrets distinguish bloggers from anyone else, including those who write books. They are worth remembering, though.

The important distinction is between the blog as a literary genre and other kinds of writing. It is true that much blog-writing is careless and off-the-top-of-the-head. But again: so what else is new? It does not follow, as Kunkel quotes Naomi Baron as saying, that “The proliferation of writing, often done in a hurry, may be driving out the opportunity and motivation for creating carefully honed text.” Over a century ago, Henry James fretted that “the diffusion of penmanship and opportunity” would prove fatal to literature. But literature has survived even the rise of creative-writing programs, although poetry seems not to have. Blogging may offer the gratification of instant publication, but the motivation for creating carefully honed text, which might perhaps include phrases that are sharper than “carefully honed,” must come from where it has always come—the writer’s self-imposition of standards.

The literary question is what blogging permits a writer to do that other kinds do not. Here is one example. Patrick Kurp, whose Anecdotal Evidence fits none of Andrew Seal’s muscle-bound categories (and so Seal ignores him), has been working his way through Our Savage Art, William Logan’s fifth collection of criticism on poetry; and the criticism led him to return to Logan’s own poetry. The effect is that of a serial review. Instead of a book review that satisfies the publisher’s (and author’s) thirst for publicity—a book review that delivers a finished verdict—you have the adventure of a mind as it inches toward conclusions.

The subject need not be a new book. The Amateur Reader has similarly been making steady progress through Hawthorne (after celebrating Golem Week last month). (And by the way, I shall not allow any discussion of the Amateur Reader to lead me into an even deeper circle in which bloggers obsess over dead-end questions like “When it is it OK to ‘out’ anonymous bloggers?”)

Kurp and the Amateur Reader have made a virtue of the “hurried” pace of blogging. What they have really done, of course, is to return the essay to its original meaning. Rather than seeking a perfectly finished product, they are more interesting in trying out a subject and point of view. Writing “done in a hurry” is not the reverse image of “carefully honed text,” although it belongs to a different world from pimple-squeezing reflections on the difference between litblogs and book blogs.

Holocaust and Israel

The Holocaust is back in the news. President Obama has fallen into the vulgar historical error of justifying the state of Israel as reparation for the Holocaust. “[T]he aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied,” he said in Cairo. “Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust.”

But the historical relationship is exactly the reverse. The Jewish state was not made possible by the Holocaust. The Holocaust was possible only because there was no Jewish state. What is more, Hitler’s victims understood this to be the case at the time events were unfolding.

Consider, for example, Em habanim sameyaḥ (1943), a Zionist polemic addressed to the ultra-Orthodox, which has become a classic of modern Hebrew literature. It was written by Yissakhar Shlomo Teichtal, a Hasidic rabbi in the resort town of Piestany in Slovakia who fled to Budapest ahead of the National Socialists. Most of the Eastern European ḥaredi were bitterly opposed to political Zionism as a solu­tion to the problem of Jewish existence in Europe, but Teichtal had come to believe that the “object of the Jewish tragedy” was “so that [the people] Israel will ask to return to Eretz Israel [the land of Israel].”[1]

According to Teichtal, the Holocaust is not the reason for emigration to Palestine; to motivate emigration to Palestine is the (divine) reason for the Holocaust. The land of Israel, and the longing to return there, had to be firmly established in the Jewish imagination—had to be commonplaces of Jewish thought—for Teichtal even to advance such an argument. He was not writing out of what David Ben-Gurion would later the “hospital mentality”; he did conceive the land of Israel as a convalescent ward. It was, in the language of Shakespearean tragedy, the “promised end” of the Jewish people. The Holocaust would not be the last word.

Teichtal’s faith in a divine plan is displeasing to modern secularists, who express their displeasure by objecting to the very name of the Holocaust. “[T]o name the Nazi genocide ‘the Holo­caust,’ ” the phi­los­opher Gillian Rose warned, “is already to over-unify it and to sacralize it, to see it as provi­dential pur­pose—for in the Hebrew scriptures, a holocaust refers to a burnt sacrifice which is offered in its entirety to God without any part of it being consumed.”[2] Not in the Hebrew scrip­tures exactly: holokaustoma is the Greek Septuagint’s word for the Hebrew עלה [olah], the sacrifice that is burnt whole. But Holocaust is the exact word, because the Jews who experienced the Nazi genocide first hand experienced it as divine providence.

Thus Teichtal opens Em habanim sameyaḥ by appealing to the common experience, and in terms that would be likely to gain assent from ultra-Orthodox readers who would otherwise be unlikely to heed his call for emigration to Palestine:

We must endure these misfortunes with love, these difficult decrees and pogroms which have befallen us at this time. We must brave them with all our strength, since they are as important to us as if they were a whole burnt offer­ing [olah].[3]The religious language served as a constant reminder of the proper order to events. First God’s promise of the land; then the planting of Israel in the land; then disgrace, retreat, plunder, which may shake Israel’s faith but does nothing to alter the promise; and then the return. Even secular Jews conceived Jewish history in these terms.

The name of the Holocaust, with the sense it has now, was first writ­ten in English in Israel’s Declara­tion of Indepen­dence, which was translated anonymously in the New York Times on May 15, 1948:The Nazi holocaust which engulfed millions of Jews in Europe proved anew the urgency of the re-establishment of the Jewish state, which would solve the problem of Jewish homelessness by opening the gates to all Jews and lift­ing the Jewish people to equality in the family of nations.[4]The political case was merely renewed by the Nazi holocaust. It was not created by it.

Nor did the name come out of nowhere. The Hebrew term translated as holocaust here is שואה [shoah], a word used twelve times in the Hebrew bible for devas­ta­tion, ruin, waste. And though it was not partic­ularly common in Jewish literature to describe a recent his­torical cata­strophe as a shoah, the usage was also not without precedent. In fact, shoah was merely a substitute for a more common term, which was widely used by Jews during the Holocaust itself to describe what was happening to them. The more common word is חרבן [Hebrew, ḥurban; Yiddish, khurbn], a stock expression in post-bibli­cal Jewish writing for the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple—both its burning at Babylonian hands in 586 BCE and the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The double ḥurban became a something of a cliché in medieval Jewish lit­erature, the central and predom­inant archetype for Jewish catastrophe.

Religious Jews, speak­ing in Yid­dish, com­monly referred to the Holo­caust as der driter khurbn, the third destruction. The name rose so quickly to Jewish lips that it struck those who reflected upon it as painfully inadequate. In March 1943, for example, Herman Kruk wrote in his notebook in the Vilna ghetto:Years ago I happened to read S. Anski’s book The Destruction of Poland, Galicia, and Bukovina [Yiddish, Khurbn Galitsye]. I remember, as if it were now, how much pain and grief I experienced as I leafed through those volumes. . . . The book is full of horrible events—race hatred, antisemitism, pogroms, victims, and such. But when I compare what is now going on around us with what I have just read, I can’t figure it out: if that was destruction [khurbn], what is this now? . . . I want to find a definition—if that was destruction [khurbn], what is this? There is really no comparison![5]When the Hebrew writers of Israel’s Declara­tion of Inde­pendence substituted the name shoah five years later, their reasons were similar to Kruk’s. They hoped to break the old Jewish habit of calling every catastrophe a ḥurban; they wanted to shatter the medieval archetype. By giving the Holo­caust a dif­ferent name, they emphasized its uniqueness; and yet by giving it a name from the Bible, they also accentu­ated its continuity with Jewish history. Their motives were nearly as literary, then, as they were political. The Holocaust did not justify a Jewish state.[6] What it justified was a new way of talking about the Jewish tragedy. For Hitler was mistaken: die End­lösung der Juden­frage (“the final solu­tion of the Jewish ques­tion”) was not the murder of six million European Jews, but the establishment of a Jewish state.
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[1] Yissakhar Shlomo Teichtal, Restoration of Zion as a Response during the Holocaust [Em habanim sameyaḥ—“A Happy Mother of Children”], ed. and trans. Pesach Schindler (Hoboken: Ktav, 1999), p. 204. Teichtal was born in 1885 in Nagyhalálsz, a town in northeastern Hungary. In 1921, he became the rabbi of Piestany, where he estab­lished a yeshiva. The Nazis invaded Czecho­slovakia in 1939 and began deporting the Jews in 1942. Teichtal and his family escaped deporta­tion first by hiding in the attic of the local synagogue—where he conceived the plan of his book—and then by fleeing to Nitra and from there to Hungary. When Germany invaded Hungary in 1944, Teichtal returned to Slovakia, falsely assuming that the National Socialists had finished their efforts to “cleanse” the area of Jews. He was captured and imprisoned in Auschwitz. He died on January 24, 1945, in a train bound for Mauthausen as the National Socialists evacuated Auschwitz.

[2] Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cam­bridge University Press, 1996), p. 27.

[3] Teichtal, pp. 62–63.

[4] New York Times, May 15, 1948, p. 2.

[5] Herman Kruk, The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939–1944, trans. Barbara Harshav (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 475.

[6] Or, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech at Bar Ilan University a week after I wrote this post, “The right of the Jewish people to a state in the land of Israel does not derive from the cascade of catastrophes that befell our people.” The Jews’ right to a sovereign state in the land of Israel, he continued, “arises from one simple fact: this is the homeland of the Jewish people, this is where our identity was forged.”

First person in America

Writing of Martin Amis in the Guardian’s book blog, John Sutherland asks, “What are the greatest ‘I’ works in our literature? My list would include: Robinson Crusoe, Tristram Shandy, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Midnight’s Children, Remains of the Day and [Amis’s] Money.”

By “our literature,” I assume that the Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature at University College London means British literature. Otherwise it is difficult to know why he would quote the first sentence of The Rachel Papers, Amis’s first novel (“My name is Charles Highway, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me”), without also quoting the first sentence upon which it depends (“I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent”).

Wouldn’t it be true to suggest that American novelists have relied upon the first person, and have produced more and greater “I” works, than the British? Sutherland had merely to raise the question of “the greatest ‘I’ works” to cause the titles to start tumbling off the shelves. I confine myself to two: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Lolita. With the exception perhaps of Tristram Shandy, does any British novel make the same use, to the same depth of meaning and structural integrity, as Twain’s and Nabokov’s? The moral dilemma at the heart of Huck Finn is possible if and only if an illiterate teenaged Southerner is grappling with it. The limitation of the viewpoint is necessary for the “immorality” of assisting a runaway slave to seem anywhere near as bad as turning him in.

Similarly, Nabokov replies upon the limitations of Humbert Humbert’s moral consciousness to defer—to string out to novel’s length, if you will—the process of Humbert’s atonement. It is the moral drama of that atonement, which must be experienced from within, in the first person, that elevates Lolita to unapproachable greatness.

James “distrusted these fictional ego displays,” Sutherland observes. (James’s own phrase is better: first-person narration encourages a “terrible fluidity of self-revelation.”) Sutherland quotes The Ambassadors without further elaboration; his attention is on Martin Amis, after all. But James’s case against the first person is worth considering.

In a 1902 essay on him, Flaubert is faulted for choosing “limited reflectors and registers”—the very sorts of limited viewpoints that I have just finished praising—because they suggest that the novelist’s “purpose itself” is limited and inferior. Would we really wish to communicate with someone like Huck or Humbert? “A hundred times no,” James replies, “and if [the novelist] himself can communicate with the people shown us as surrounding him this only proves him of their kind.” The first person is a “romantic privilege,” James said in the 1909 Preface to The Ambassadors. The first person is, indeed, “the darkest abyss of romance,” because it is a “form foredoomed to looseness.”

Perhaps the frank elitism of James’s commentary accounts for the American novelist’s democratic liking of the first person. Class distinctions are far less important to Americans than regional distinctions. (Cf. the reaction to Sarah Palin in some quarters.) American men in particular enjoy finding common ground with the workers who come to repair their pipes or trap the opossum in their attic. They do not feel as if they have lowered themselves to experience the moral drama from the viewpoint of someone who belongs to a “lower class.” That is why the best first-person fiction involves just such an invitation to abandon one’s pretensions of superiority.

Mark Harris’s superb baseball novel, The Southpaw, for instance, is written from the viewpoint of a poorly educated athlete whose moral qualities do not inhere in his bad grammar. Binx Bolling, Walker Percy’s Moviegoer, to take an example from the other end of the educational spectrum, is appealing because his “inferiority” is a self-imposed philosophical despair from which the reader is blessedly liberated as long as he remains in Bolling’s company.

And the looseness of the form also appeals to Americans’ preference for informality. The first-person novel is perhaps the most native of American fictional forms. Too many of our best novels have been “I” works to count. We Americans like these novels, not because we identify with our “inferiors,” but because we do not conceive them as such. We do not pretend to live in a classless society—we really do. And our literature has helped to create it and to keep it alive.

Robinson wins Orange Prize

At last a prize jury gets it right. Marilynne Robinson’s Home has captured the 2009 Orange Prize.

Next on the awards calendar is the Miles Franklin prize, which will be announced two weeks from tomorrow.

Meanwhile, the shortlists for the Australian Book Industry Awards have come to light. The awards will be handed out on June 23.

Tim Winton’s Breath has to be a favorite on both dates.

Clearance items

The most powerful critic in America is Cliff’s Notes.

Gildersleeve grumbled about “tenth transmissions of stock observations.”

The thing you must know about generosity: few will recognize it as such. People expect their gifts to show up on schedule, as if by magic or divine grace.

Everywhere you look people are caught up in the fantasy of two persons’ falling in love.

Less perhaps than any other mode of inquiry, criticism is aware of its own past. Like the heirs of certain great American fortunes who pick up and move to a place where the paterfamilias has made no mark, critics are likely to be embarrassed by what they have inherited at the same time that they are dependent upon it, eager to strike out on their own while having every intention of announcing themselves by the family name.

A received idea can make a man forget his own experience.

Antisemites fault the Jews for failing to assimilate—for failing, that is, to abandon their interests. Whenever they have done so, however, the Jews have accepted their weakness and thrown themselves upon the mercy of the state; which all too often has been merely a prelude to state-sponsored antisemitism. Those who detest the state of Israel, then, detest the fact that the Jews have failed to make themselves weak—have failed to expose themselves to the assaults of antisemites.

He was a little magazine—a loose association of literary impulses with no clear-cut identity and irregular appearance.

The price that the Jew paid for entering modernity on an equal basis with Catholics, Protestants, intellectuals, dandies, schemers, and shopkeepers was to raise the question what it means to be a Jew. When his religious exclusivity was not something he could choose to defer, the question did not arise.

Beauty represents the desire to surrender yourself.

Between understanding and acceptance lies a desert that must be crossed.

Much of the confusion in any field of thought is caused by exaggerating distinctions into differences.

To criticize the ballet for not displaying more sexual energy is not merely wrong. It is beside the point.

An entire generation has reached adulthood in a fervor of multiculturalism.

I will agree that it is unimportant to study “the best that has been said and known in the world” if my intellectual opponents will agree that it is equally important to cleanse themselves of parasitical opinion.

Criticizing them, at length and in detail, is the only way to understand some writers.

Getting creative writing wrong

In a review of Mark McGurl’s Program Era (Harvard University Press) in the June 8 issue of the New Yorker, Louis Menand observes that McGurl’s book is “not a history of creative-writing programs.” So he supplies the missing history:

Creative-writing courses did not suddenly spring into being in 1945. A course called Verse Making was available at Iowa in 1897, and from 1906 to 1925 George Pierce Baker taught a drama workshop at Harvard, the first graduate writing course in the country; Thomas Wolfe took it. The term (and the concept) “creative writing” dates from the nineteen-twenties, which is when Middlebury started the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where Robert Frost served as the world’s first writer-in-residence. In 1936, Iowa launched the Writers’ Workshop—officially, the Program in Creative Writing—under the direction of Wilbur Schramm, and began awarding the first M.F.A.s. In 1941, Schramm was replaced by Paul Engle, a prodigious creative-writing proselytizer and cultural Cold Warrior, who made Iowa into a global power in the field. Engle eventually brought writers from seventy countries to study at Iowa.Nearly every word of this is mistaken.

Creative writing is not the same as verse-writing, and was conceived in fact as a break with the older humanistic tradition that verse-writing represented. George Pierce Baker’s “47 Workshop”—his graduate course in playwrighting—belongs to theatrical history, and was not even the “first graduate course in writing.” (That honor goes to Barrett Wendell, who introduced the practice of the daily theme at Harvard.) The term creative writing was coined by Emerson in “The American Scholar” (1837) and was explicitly adopted by Hughes Mearns, a progressive educator who taught at the Lincoln School, the laboratory school of Teachers College, Columbia University, when he introduced the subject of creative writing into the curriculum for the first time. (Mearns used the term in print for the first time in 1922.) When it was established on the university level—by Norman Foerster, not Wilbur Schramm—creative writing quickly replaced writers’ retreats like Bread Loaf. Writers no longer needed summer writing-stints, because they were paid to write full-time by universities. That development, however, belongs to the postwar period: what McGurl calls the “program era.”

The history of creative writing is set out in my Elephants Teach (University of Chicago Press, 2006). In an exchange of email messages between us, Menand apologizes for not citing the book, but points out that a magazine article did not give him the room to do justice to the full complexity of the history, as I had set it out. (He also disagrees with my conclusions, although a citation, if he had had room for it, would have permitted him to do so directly.) In my original post on his article, I described Menand’s views as “ahistorical rubbish,” which was itself a mistake. That is why I have rewritten and reposted my reaction. Much ahistorical rubbish has been written on creative writing’s history, as I note in the Introduction to The Elephants Teach, and though I believe Menand’s version to be mistaken, I would no longer call it ahistorical. Just not as good as mine, although he is the historian.

Many thanks to Dave Lull for bringing Menand’s review to my attention.

Summer reading

After driving cross-country, Stefan Beck wants nothing more than to settle down to his summer reading. He lists two novels (Pynchon, Aleksandar Hemon), a work of literary criticism, a history, and a food-and-travel book. The whole idea of summer reading is to shed your literary work-clothes, to lighten your usual reading load, to go on vacation from a certain kind of book. Pynchon hardly fits my definition of summer reading, but probably because I belong to a lighter literary weight-class than Beck.

The phrase may have originated with Hazlitt. In his essay “My First Acquaintance with Poets” (1823), he complains about Coleridge’s low opinion of Hume, “for I had just been reading, with infinite relish, that completest of all metaphysical choke-pears, his Treatise on Human Nature, to which the Essays, in point of scholastic subtilty and close reasoning, are mere elegant trifling, light summer reading.” (The phrase’s younger cousin, “beach reading,” was introduced in the New York Times by Charles Poore in 1966; he wondered whether a book were “beach-cabana reading.”)

The summer’s forthcoming fiction is not especially promising, although Mark Athitakis is looking forward to Ward Just’s Exiles in the Garden. Not until August, when Richard Russo’s That Old Cape Magic comes out, does a summer book appeal to me. My summer project is to read the complete fiction of Francine Prose from Judah the Pious (1973), written when she was twenty-four, through Bigfoot Dreams (1986), which Karl Bridges lists among the 100 Great American Novels You’ve (Probably) Never Read, and on to last year’s Goldengrove, which I am excited to be rereading so soon after reviewing it in December.

It is a summer book at least in the respect that its events are confined to summer. Other summer books in this respect include The Great Gatsby, which opens shortly before the summer solstice (“In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year,” Daisy remarks) and ends on a day that is “almost the last, certainly the warmest, of the summer.” Chabon’s Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), which in many ways is intended as a rewriting of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece with the homosexual Arthur Lecomte in the Gatsby role, explicitly adopts the time frame. Its opening words are: “At the beginning of summer.” And it ends with a reflection upon what Chabon’s Carraway figure will remember of “that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer. . . .”

There must be other examples, but Chabon’s prose makes me yawn. I can’t think of any others.

Breath

Tim Winton, Breath (New York: Picador, 2008). 218 pp. $14.00.

Tim Winton is one of the most important and interesting novelists now writing in the English language, but few readers outside of Australia in the U.S. know much about him. Born in Perth in August 1960, the son of a policeman—he is a year younger than Jonathan Franzen and three years older than Michael Chabon—he seems to belong to a different world and time. It is not simply that his fiction is located in Western Australia, at the shoreline of human civilization, full of places (as he writes in Dirt Music) that are “isolated, almost secret, and beyond the reach of the law and the dampening influence of domesticity.” Nor does he seem out of step with other novelists of his generation because his prose is large-framed and uncompromising rather than infatuated and barely under control. Winton is distinctive, and deserves a wider audience outside of Australia, because he writes forcefully (and beautifully) of a world that people would prefer to be meaningless than without forgiveness.

Breath, his ninth novel, released in paperback this month, is an ideal introduction to Winton’s fiction. It is about half the length of Cloudstreet (1991) and Dirt Music (2001), his best-known books. Cloudstreet is a saga stretching from the Second World War to the early ’sixties of two Perth families that end up sharing one roof. Dirt Music traces the reawakening of two lost souls: a fish poacher who has lost his entire family in a rollover accident and an ex-nurse who has lost her calling, her ability to love, and any sense of boundaries in life. Winton is particularly good at gnarled relationships that might as well be nuclear families given their capacity for tenderness, disappointment, terror, instruction, and shame. Breath is little different in that respect, but the relationships sprout up and fan out more quickly than in Winton’s previous books.

The novel opens as Bruce Pike, a fiftyish paramedic, answers an emergency call to find that a seventeen-year-old boy has hanged himself in an act of autoerotic asphyxiation. His crisply uniformed and pony-tailed partner, about the age of his daughters, asks how he knows that the boy’s death was not a suicide. “Maybe another time,” he says. The rest of the novel is an explanation of how he knows. He must turn to his past to explain. A “lone child and solitary by nature,” Pike was befriended many years earlier by Ivan Loon, the publican’s son who thrives on daredevil stunts. Pikelet and Loonie, as they call each other, progress rapidly from daring to see who can remain under water the longest to surfing the “great, heaving waves” of the West Coast with makeshift styrafoam boards lacking fins.

One surfer leads them to wonder:

You’d barely see him for half an hour and then a set would break out wide, like a squall rolling into the bay, and you’d suddenly pick out the white squirt of a wake on the grey-brown crags of a wave big and ugly enough to make you shiver. There he would be, that tiny figure, strangely upright and nonchalant, rising and swooping until he was close enough to be more than just a silhouette. His skill was extraordinary. There was something special about his insouciance and the princely manner in which he cross-stepped along his long, old-timey board, how he stalled and feinted and then surged in spurts of acceleration across the shoaling banks, barely ahead of the growling beast at his back, and when the wave fattened towards the deep channel in the middle of the bay, he’d stand at the very tip of the board with his spine arched and his head thrown back as if he’d just finished singing an anthem that nobody else could hear.The princely surfer turns out to be Billy Sanderson (“Sando,” as the boys call him), a legendary great from Australia’s golden age. Although they do not learn that until much later, Pikelet and Loonie want, naturally enough, to be just like Sando. He takes them under his wing and teaches them the sport of big wave surfing: “Years before people started speaking about extreme sports, we spurned the word extreme as unworthy,” Pikelet recalls. “What we did and what we were after, we told ourselves, was the extraordinary.”

There in a word is the novel’s theme. The mill town in which they live is “pointless and puny,” and the townspeople they dwell among are “cowed and weak and ordinary,” satisfied with “the monotony of drawing breath.” Sando instructs the boys in a “warrior spirit,” the “implacable need to win the day.” Under his tutelege, they proceed by carefully measured steps from surfing on a great white shark’s reef to catching twenty-foot waves a mile offshore and eventually to the gigantic swells breaking over a submarine rock called the Nautilus five miles from land—“a wave no surfer had seen, let alone ridden.” Pikelet is scared even to talk about it. No shame in that, Sando says:Every day, people face down their own fears. They make calculations, bargains with God, strategic manoeuvres. That’s how we first crossed oceans and learnt to fly and split the atom, how we found the nerve to give up on all the old superstitions. Sando gestured grandly at the books against the wall. That’s mankind for you, he said. Our higher side. We rise to a challenge and set a course. We take a decision. You put your mind to something. Just deciding to do it gets you halfway there. Daring to try.This passage reminds me that Winton is known in Australia as a Christian novelist, and though other critics have struggled a bit to find the Christianity in Breath, it strikes me that Sando is offering an equivalent of Pascal’s wager. Man’s higher side is represented by the Christian, the artist, the adventurer—those who live by faith, the dare to try, instead of secure and predictable proofs:Such endeavors require a kind of egotism, a near-autistic narrowness. Everything conspires against you—the habits of physics, the impulse to flee—and you’re weighed down by every dollop of commonsense ever dished up. Everyone will tell you your goal is impossible, pointless, stupid, wasteful. So you hang tough. You back yourself and only yourself. This idiot resolve is all you have.As the boys take greater and greater risks, Breath builds a feeling of dread that some tragedy is coming. If the catastrophe is something of a letdown—if the explanation for Pikelet’s knowledge of asphixiation is far more ordinary than his surfing, if Winton tries to stuff several years into his ending after the intense few months that Pikelet and Loonie spend in devotion to Sando—that can be chalked up to the novelist’s ambition. In Breath, Winton seeks to capture both the exhilaration of faith and the spirit-exhausting despair of its loss. And to do so, what is more, in around two hundred pages. He can’t quite pull it off.

But the passages on surfing, and the spiritual heights to which the sport lifts the boys and the reader, are more than enough to forgive the postscript-like ending. Few contemporary writers with “serious” ambitions are as comfortable as Winton in letting the story carry the philosophical theme. As I have said before on this blog, Winton most closely resembles Richard Russo among his contemporaries in America. Like Russo’s, Winton’s novels are stories about men and women who are extraordinary in their humanness, and endlessly fascinating. As Pikelet concludes, “People are fools, not monsters.” In Breath, Winton’s people are fools for the extraordinary, and they carry the ordinary reader along.

Update, I: Litlove asks whether “Breath is a kind of contemporary encounter with the sublime.” I would not phrase it like that. Unless the word is used narrowly in the sense in which “Longinus” introduced it in the Peri hypsos, I would use another word. “Longinus” says that the effect of sublimity in language is not persuasion but transport. And something like this is what I was trying to get at in my closing sentence. Breath blows the reader into the waves, and you are transported along with Sando, Pikelet, and Loonie as they try to ride them. A better term for the experience Winton is describing is “state of grace.” Here is Sainte-Beuve from James’s Varieties of Religious Experience:Even from the purely human point of view . . . the phenomenon of grace must still appear sufficiently extraordinary, eminent, and rare [these are precisely the qualities that Pikelet emphasizes], both in its nature and its effects, to deserve a closer study. For the soul arrives thereby at a certain fixed and invincible state, a state which is genuinely heroic, and from out of which the greatest deeds which it ever performs are executed.Say that the novel is sublime in artistic effect, then; representing a state of grace.

Update, II: Winton’s novel was reviewed by Matthew Condon in the Courier Mail, Russell Celyn Jones in the Times of London, Kerryn Goldsworthy in the Weekend Australian, James Bradley in the Age, Andrew Riemer in the Sydney Morning Herald, Adam Lively in the Sunday Times, Helen Gordon in the Observer, Catherine Keenan in the Sydney Sun Herald, Carmen Lawrence in the Australian, Patrick Ness in the Guardian, Eileen Battersby in the Irish Times, Stephen Abell in the Daily Telegraph, Andy Martin in the Independent, Kathryn Crim (who wrongly characterized it as a “coming-of-age tale”) in the Los Angeles Times, Maggie Bell at Blogcritics, Dan Styles at Suite101, Kara Martin at Open House, Guy Somerset at the New Zealand Listener, Jennifer Schuessler in the New York Times Book Review, Cathleen Schine in the New York Review of Books, Robert Wiersema in the Windsor Star, and Helen Falding in the Winnepeg Free Press. “If there’s a movement afoot to get more adult men reading contemporary literature,” Falding writes, “then Tim’s your man.” Then why were so many women assigned to review the novel?

The literary shlimil

Illustrated by the Bard paperback cover of Pnin and starting with Lucky Jim, Mark Sarvas’s list at bookforum.com commends eight “literary losers” (h/t: Books, Inq.). “Today, we call them antiheroes (it’s more polite),” Sarvas says, “but to me, they will always be literature’s losers—tormented, feckless, sometimes lovable, sometimes not, but almost always heartbreaking.”

Another word for such a person, at least when he is a Jew, is shlimil. In her brilliant first book The Schlemiel as Modern Hero (1971)—written before the YIVO standard of transliteration was widely adopted—Ruth R. Wisse shows how the character emerges from Jewish folklore to invade modern prose fiction by Jews, creating a multilingual literary tradition. The shlimil, she says, is the loser who becomes a victor, “the model of endurance, his innocence a shield against corruption, his absolute defenselessness the only guaranteed defense against the brutalizing potential of might.”

For such a turnabout to occur, fiction must take place, as I have argued elsewhere, summarizing the views of David Lewis, in two worlds. In actuality, where success is valued above all else, the shlimil is a loser. In the moral realm of fiction, however, he inverts these values and rises above them. Fiction is thus morally indispensable, in creating a realm where innocence and defenselessness overcome might. As Wisse says, “The schlemiel’s naïve substitution of his illusory world for the real one resembles the mystic’s supernaturalism”—and the novelist’s methods.

Wisse locates “the genesis of the literary schlemiel within the context of Yiddish literature” in a tale circa 1805 by Nahman of Breslov, the Hasidic rabbi who was a contemporary of Jane Austen. Then she traces the typology through Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Sholem Aleichem (Menahem Mendl, “an epistolary novel written between 1892 and 1913”), and then into modern literature.

Perhaps her most daring claim is that “the icy beginnings of the schlemiel in American fiction” can be found in The Sun Also Rises. Robert Cohn is the “foil,” or the fool, who “betrays all the book’s standards, especially the aesthetic.” He is anything but hardboiled. Because Hemingway was not merely an outsider to it but also an antagonist to Jewish tradition, Cohn “remains a schlemiel-manqué,” Wisse argues. Hemingway is unable to see either the humor or the irony in his condition. Cohn is, for Hemingway, merely a sniveler among tough guys.

The shlimil à succès arrives in Dangling Man (1944). Bellow explicitly reverses Hemingway’s aesthetic: “Most serious matters are closed to the hardboiled. They are unpracticed in introspection, and therefore badly equipped to deal with opponents whom they cannot shoot like big game or outdo in daring.” Or, as Wisse puts it (and it is a testament to her abilities as a critic that her prose might be quoted as an alternative to Bellow’s), “The new spokesman for an altered America would be more like Cohn than like Jake Barnes. . . .” Instead of the bullfighter’s “purity of line” there is the “spreading circumference of a pot belly.”

Wisse then follows the career of the literary shlimil as he stumbles through Malamud’s New Life, Bruce Jay Friedman’s Stern, and Bellow’s Herzog. Not until Norman Podhoretz’s autobiography Making It (1967), which eagerly embraces the notion that “it is better to be a success than a failure,” does Jewish literature in American hands undertake “the unmaking of a schlemiel.”

Since the publication of Wisse’s study, successes have outnumbered failures. Not even characters like Roth’s Swede Levov or Coleman Silk could be described as fools or foils, although they do not ring the gong of success in the end. Here are some novels whose main characters are closer to the classic type of the literary shlimil:

• Steven Millhauser, Edwin Mullhouse (1972). How else would you describe a great writer who contrives to die at the age of eleven?

• Adele Wiseman, Crackpot (1976). An obese prostitute finds favor in the eyes of God, if no one else.

• Stanley Elkin, The Franchiser (1976). My second-favorite Elkin. Ben Flesh is a reverse shlimil: a man who thinks he is a success when in reality he is not.

• Richard Russo, Nobody’s Fool (1993). Can an Italian-American Catholic write about the type? Sully may be nobody’s fool, but he is the world’s shlimil. His belief in personal autonomy bites him in the ass.

• Robert Cohen, The Here and Now (1996). Sam Karnish, a self-described “half-Jew,” finds himself drawn to Judaism by his fascination for a Hasidic couple. The last section of the novel is entitled, in an ironic tip of the cap to Podhoretz, “Making It.”

• Francine Prose, Blue Angel (2000). Swenson, a novelist and creative writing teacher, falls in love with one of his students, although she is not particularly sexy, and destroys his career and family as a consequence. Art turns out to be more powerful than responsibility—the moral choice of a true shlimil.

• Gary Shteyngart, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002). Explicitly compared by some reviewers to the title character of Lucky Jim, Vladimir Girshkin is a Russian immigrant who relies upon his ignorance of American culture to surmount it.

• Alan Lelchuk, Ziff: A Life? (2003). A mock literary biography makes a Philip Roth figure into a shlimil, who fails in his most important endeavor: namely, preventing a biography of him from being written.

• Richard Price, Samaritan (2003). A thoughtful 400-page police novel on the theme No Good Deed Goes Unpunished. Ray Mitchell, an ex-high school teacher, falls victim to his own foolishness.

The critic takes aim

The Jewish holiday of Shavuot starts this evening, which will keep me from recording more commonplaces but not from finishing Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows and Tim Winton’s Breath, just out this week in paperback. Watch this blog for reviews of both next week.

In the mean time, here is some good criticism by better critics. R.T.’s autobiographical exploration of Wise Blood, a book that he described here as having changed his life, has grown to six parts. Each one is worth reading. Indeed, R.T.’s series is so good that Nige was provoked to start reading O’Connor.

The Mookse and the Gripes calls for a wider appreciation of the Northern Irish novelist David Parks’s Swallowing the Sun.

Genevieve Tucker recommends an Australian story writer who will be unfamiliar to most Americans—Tom Cho, the historian of patchy employment.

Daniel Green concludes that Paul Griffiths’s short novel Let Me Tell You, an account of Ophelia’s life before Hamlet, “has very little claim on our attention” apart from its Shakespearean source.

Philip Lopate’s Notes on Sontag is the first entry in the Princeton University Press series Writers on Writing, and Ron Slate dissects it carefully, saying that his “persistent if respectful antagonism” affords Lopate the “entertaining and profitable opportunity” to consider Sontag’s postmodernist agenda.

At the University of Rochester’s Three Percent, Emily Shannon warns that the Turkish novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar’s Mind at Peace puts in question what you believe about humanism.

Jake Seliger gives a thumb down to George Johnson’s Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics. The analysis is flat or inadequate, and the research is thin. Thus Seliger’s conclusion.

Georges Simenon’s Rules of the Game is the latest book to be rescued from neglect by Brad Bigelow’s irreplaceable Neglected Books Page: “it has something of the attractive bitterness of a glass of Campari,” Bigelow concludes.

Rebecca O’Neal, back from a sixteen-day absence, promises good things to come about Revolutionary Road and Wilfrid Sheed’s Max Jamison, one of the few interesting novels about a critic.

Best of all, of course, is Patrick Kurp, whose delightful account of the Field Guide to the Sedges of the Pacific Northwest published last year by Oregon State University Press is a reminder that criticism can (and should) be written as well as fiction.

Making identity large

Like many others, I was disturbed by the comments of Sonia Sotomayor, the new Associate Justice-designate of the U.S. Supreme Court, in a speech at Berkeley eight years ago:

Justice [Sandra Day] O’Connor has often been cited as saying that a wise old man and wise old woman will reach the same conclusion in deciding cases. I am not so sure Justice O'Connor is the author of that line since Professor [Judith] Resnik attributes that line to Supreme Court Justice Coyle. I am also not so sure that I agree with the statement. First, as Professor Martha Minnow [sic] has noted, there can never be a universal definition of wise. Second, I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.Sotomayor was right to be unsure of the source, although she bungles the correction. Mary Jeanne Coyne (not Coyle), an associate justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court, told students in a panel discussion at the University of Minnesota Law School she disagreed that women justices bring a “woman’s perspective” to the bench, adding: “A wise old man and a wise old woman reach the same conclusion. In the vast majority of cases, it [the judge’s sex] will have no impact whatever” (New York Times, Feb. 22, 1991). Justice O’Connor quoted Coyne eight months later in the annual James Madison Lecture at the New York University Law School, giving rise to the incorrect citation (Washington Post, Nov. 23, 1991).

Of her two objections, Sotomayor’s first is irrelevant, since the wisdom required to decide a case, regardless how universal its definition, will be narrowed to the particulars of the case and the specific law that applies to it. It is her second objection that causes some readers to boggle. The remark is not taken out of context. An attention to sex and ethnicity is swirled through the speech like chocolate in ice cream. Nine years since Ruth Bader Ginsburg was named, “we are waiting for a third appointment of a woman”; ten years since Clarence Thomas, and still no “second minority, male or female, preferably Hispanic, to the Supreme Court.” Sotomayor spends a great deal of time reviewing the percentages of women and Hispanics:As of September 1, 2001, the federal judiciary consisting of Supreme, Circuit and District Court Judges was about 22% women. In 1992, nearly ten years ago, when I was first appointed a District Court Judge, the percentage of women in the total federal judiciary was only 13%. Now, the growth of Latino representation is somewhat less favorable. As of today we have, as I noted earlier, no Supreme Court justices, and we have only 10 out of 147 active Circuit Court judges and 30 out of 587 active district court judges. Those numbers are grossly below our proportion of the population. As recently as 1965, however, the federal bench had only three women serving and only one Latino judge. So changes are happening, although in some areas, very slowly. These figures and appointments are heartwarming. Nevertheless, much still remains to happen.“Less favorable,” “heartwarming”—on what grounds? What is astonishing is that Sotomayor treats the statistical categorization of judges by sex and ethnicity as self-evidently appropriate. And why? Because she conceives of the judiciary as a representative institution.

It must fall to others to explain why (in the words of Brooks Adams) “nothing is so fatal to the principle of order as inequality in the dispensation of justice.” My concern is only with the hypertrophy of identity, of which Sotomayor is herself merely representative.

In his brilliant short essay “Keep Your Identity Small,” the programming language designer Paul Graham holds that “people can never have a fruitful argument about something that’s part of their identity. By definition they’re partisan.” To insist upon determining questions as a “Latina woman” is inevitably to adopt an axiological language (“better conclusion,” “preferably Hispanic”), because it moves personal and social associations and interests ahead of any rational methodology. It may even be true, as Sotomayor quotes Minow (see above) as saying, that “there is no objective stance but only a series of perspectives—no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging.” But it is quite another thing to make a self-conscious virtue out of what may be an inescapable vice attaching to the human condition. Because all human beings put on weight and go soft around the middle as they grow old, I should celebrate fat?

In plain fact, every person faces a decision—whether to exaggerate his identity or (in Graham’s words) to keep it small. As Graham explains, “If people can’t think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.” Clear thought in all disciplines, not just the law, requires the shrinkage and not the expansion of self—and the abandonment of partisanship.

Life-changing books

The Guardian asked twenty-eight British writers to name the book that changed their life. Given my new-found admiration for her, I was badly disappointed by Zoë Heller’s reply: “[T]he only book I can think of that effected a large and immediately felt change was My Secret Life, the Sex Diary of a Victorian Gentleman (author unknown).” The other answers range from the predictable (Catcher in the Rye) to the dubious (example withheld to protect the pretentious).

The book that changed my life was Allen Drury’s Preserve and Protect (1968), the fourth title in a series of political novels that began with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Advise and Consent (1959). I devoured Advise and Consent and then read my way frantically through its two sequels; I did not admit to myself till much later how terrible they were. Preserve and Protect was the worst of the bunch; each title was a falling off from the one before. It was, however, the first new-release hardback that I ever rushed to a bookstore to purchase for myself—a bad habit that I have indulged ever since.

Firearms, expandable batons, flick knives

Elberry is planning his first visit to America, and has listed Houston as one of his destinations. He wants to see my “arsenal of firearms, expandable batons, flick knives, coshes, brass knuckles, dobermanns, claymore mines, armed vehicles, sharks, etc.” Nobody gets his hands on my weaponry, though. Nobody.

One of the unexpected pleasures of rereading Thomas Williams (see below) was the enjoyment of male things—motorcycles (including an old prewar Indian Pony), hunting rifles, handguns (including a Nambu pistol), and power tools. Why is it that such things enforce solitude rather than “male bonding” or (God forbid) homosociality?

Equally interesting, as I reflect on how to prepare for Elberry’s visit, is how little American novelists say about the guns their characters use on one another. Humbert Humbert, who names everything else, refers to the automatic pistol that kills Quilty as “Chum.” Gatsby’s chauffeur hears the shots that kill his boss, and “a little way off in the grass” the body of the murderer—George Wilson—is found. Nothing is said about the gun, though, until several months later when Nick runs into Tom Buchanan on Fifth Avenue. Tom won’t say what he told Wilson, but explains to Nick: “His hand was on a revolver in his pocket. . . .” What kind of revolver? Are there different kinds? The only time that I can recall a gun’s being differentiated is when Ron Hansen observed, in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, that James carried two guns (“a .44 caliber Smith and Wesson and a Colt .45 in crossed holsters”). Otherwise weapons are largely a blur to American writers.

The Hair of Harold Roux

When Robert Stone’s bring-the-war-home novel Dog Soldiers was awarded half a National Book Award in 1975, the New York Times reported that “Joseph Heller had been expected to cop the fiction award” for Something Happened, but “there wasn’t much grumbling” when Stone won instead. The surprise was that “he had to split it with The Hair of Harold Roux,” a novel that “nobody had read. Nobody.” (Emphasis in the original.) Three decades later the surprise has not abated. Time lists Stone’s as one of the hundred best novels since 1923. Literary scholars treat Dog Soldiers as a canonical work, while a search of the MLA Bibliography for any mention of The Hair of Harold Roux concludes with an error message: “No results were found.”

Yet Williams’s is not only the better novel in every respect (better prose, better plot, better people). It is also less captive to received ideas, and consequently it creates a dimension of moral independence, a ground for determining the right thing to do, that is missing from Stone’s book. The two novels share a common theme. As Williams phrases it in his opening pages, the “world, with perhaps a temporary remission now and then, is departing upon a long slide away from any sort of rational middle, like a psychotic plunging toward his bleak end.” Or, as Stone says early on, “the world of things transformed itself into a single overwhelming act of murder.”

The two books have little else in common. Dog Soldiers is a genuinely apocalyptic novel. Stone holds out little hope for a world that is “capable of composing itself, at any time and without notice, into a massive instrument of agonizing death.” A chase involving heroin smuggled into the U.S. from Vietnam, the novel ends with its only good man trudging through a salt desert, endlessly following a railroad (“In the end, there was only the tracks”), and the final victory of the corrupt drug agent who is after him. “If you stuck with something, faced down every kind of pressure, refused to fold when the going got tough, outplayed all adversaries, and relied on your own determination and fortitude,” the drug agent reflects when he finds the heroin on the corpse of the man he has been chasing, “then the bag of beans at the end of the rainbow might be yours after all.” Thus Stone’s ironic inversion of the work ethic. There is neither God nor intrinsic value to affirm; only the self and its struggle for triumph over others.

The Hair of Harold Roux, by contrast, suggests that fiction might offer a refuge from the apocalypse. Published the same year as My Life As a Man and five years before The Ghost Writer, Williams’s novel anticipates the Zuckerman books in relying upon a novelist-within-a-novel to provide the still center of a revolving circus. At an apocalyptic moment in history, as R. V. Cassill said in his Washington Post review of Williams’s book, the novelist “becomes the conservator of the self-destructing community in which he finds himself.” The novelist puts the world in order—by arranging it into streets and plots of land and people living on them; “people who are not classified, utilized, disposable counters in a game of allegory, political comments, social criticisms, theology, or existential puzzles,” as Williams said in his speech accepting the National Book Award. When the world transforms itself into a single overwhelming act of murder, women and men are reduced to fear and desperation. The novelist’s job is to reexpand them.

The novel’s novelist is Aaron Benham, a middle-aged journeyman who teaches at a New England university. A “professor of sweet reason,” he is on leave, ostensibly to finish a book, but in reality because he is “sick of reason, sick of convincing. The professor is sick to death of explaining.” His best student has disappeared on a drug bender; his best friend, who has put off his doctoral dissertation while lovingly restoring an eighteenth-century farmhouse to a condition in which it has “become important far beyond material considerations,” is on the verge of dismissal; his family has driven south to Boston for his in-laws’ anniversary, which he stupidly forgot. Stranded, unable to help those around him, Aaron retreats into the autobiographical novel he is writing, entitled The Hair of Harold Roux.

Although he worries that it is “all incestuous and even narcissistic,” for “who wants to write about or read about a professor who is a writer who is writing about writing,” the novel-within-a-novel is not merely a verbal matryoshka doll. It is a profound meditation on the place and value of fiction in human life. On a planet that is “the repository of all the pain it has ever been host to,” the novelist believes that “if he might find his way back even a few years, then the volume is by an infinitesimal fraction smaller, a little more manageable perhaps.” So the novelist “must manipulate against the movement of time”—he “must make and dominate”—but in the end he is powerless to prevent the pain from recurring. To revisit the past is to reawaken the pain. What is worse, Aaron learns that his actual life is unintentionally replicating his autobiographical fiction. That in fact may be his motive for writing: he might make and dominate fiction, but not actuality. “He ha[s] no way to repair anything that had been done,” Williams concludes. Not as long as he acknowledges that fiction is distinct from falsity.

In the novel-within-a-novel, Allard Benson is an undergraduate attending a New England college on the GI Bill. A lapsed Protestant with all the convictions of a believing Protestant (“[y]ou did not mindlessly repeat what had been previously said because that was rote, a kind of cheating, the death of reality which was life”), he is engaged to be married to Mary, a devout Catholic girl from a small nearby town, but he is also bedding down with Naomi, a Jewish radical from New York. Rarely has a menage à trois, or more accurately a young man’s brazen attempt to juggle two different lovers, been described so well. Although he and Naomi have only to look at each other for strange things to happen in their middles, Allard prefers Mary. The reason is simple: “What he really wanted to do was to create in Mary Tolliver the perfect receptor of himself.” His self-importance blinds Allard to the harm he is causing, especially to his classmate Harold Roux, who worships Mary. Harold’s efforts to protect her from Allard bring about the catastrophe, in which Allard accidentally tears off Harold’s toupee—his “false hair,” as Mary calls it—the source of the novel’s title and its central image of falsity. Even though Allard did not intend it, his action destroys Harold, the engagement to Mary, the affair with Naomi, and much else besides. Falsehood, the ability to lie to oneself and one’s friends, turns out to be essential to social life, perhaps even to ordinary human life, and fiction is its sworn enemy.

Except: every world contains worlds, in which ancient hurts may be revisited and reawakened, but also contained. Fiction does not repair any worlds, but provides an emergency exit to other worlds, where the pain at least is not actual. The other fiction-within-a-fiction in The Hair of Harold Roux, then, is the remarkable bedtime story that Aaron tells his two children—so remarkable, in fact, that Williams developed it at ful length in Tsuga’s Children (1977), his next novel. “I want to hear about what happens!” his son protests when Aaron breaks off the story for bed. Fiction relieves the human thirst for truth, even at the cost of additional pain.

The Hair of Harold Roux is available in paperback from the University Press of New England.