Daily Archives: December 31, 2006

Random reading

December 31, 2006 By in Books, Life

The reading lately has been eclectic: a family member gave me The Rejection Collection, an excellent and hilarious book of frequently contrarian cartoons. I picked up Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising from the library, where it was swiftly returned when I finished it; the style is straight from a poorly written technical manual on human emotion and idiocy in war, but a post on some of the interesting aspects of it 20 years after its first publication will be forthcoming. I can only hope that admitting reading it won’t kill my credibility.

Then there were two melancholy and elegiac Big Fiction works from Britain: The Sea and Atonement, neither of which need much introduction given their fame, prizes and praise.

Finally, I also checked out George Trow’s Within the Context of No Context after reading about it in The New Yorker. The essay itself certainly doesn’t have any context: aside from decrying the depravations of pop culture and lamenting some form of old order, I’m not sure what it was about. If the world doesn’t make sense anymore—a point I’m not about to take sides on—that’s no reason to imitate one’s view of the world in writing.

Oh, and television is bad—very, very bad. That much was evident. What’s good? That wasn’t so evident, but I guess we need context to find it. Perhaps context is good. It might be. It’s hard to tell from this essay. Getting it from the library was also a wise choice.

I’m going on a trip shortly and will probably start Robert Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey after. Reading it is supposed to be an odyssey in and of itself. I hope it’s a worthwhile one.

The Quiet American

December 31, 2006 By in Books

This should be required reading for anyone involved in Iraq—its lessons about the problems of idealism and nation-building continue to go unheeded, as does its larger message about what most people really value. Here’s a clue: it isn’t abstract ideals, but rather the self, perhaps the family, and maybe the tribe. Everything else is at best of secondary importance, except as it relates to and affects those concentric circles.

But let’s back up some: Fowler, a cynical journalist—is there any other kind?—covers the disintegrating country of Vietnam with one hand on the bottle and another on a native girl, whose hands are occupied with the obvious, his wallet, and his opium pipe. Contrasted with him is Pyle, an American convinced he’s found the solution to intractable political and historical problems through the worship of an idea. Implementing the idea and hence solution is the hard part, but with enough fortitude and adherence to the greater good while allowing gritty compromises, Pyle believes he can arrive at the solution. History gives us the answer as to whether Pyle’s beliefs are accurate.

Despite their apparent positions, Fowler’s cynicism prevents him from being co-opted and morally compromised, while Pyle’s idealism and his desire to do good by choosing the right side ultimately makes him complicit in a crime far worse than anything Fowler could have imagined. And yet, like many writers, I fall into the same trap as Pyle in the first sentence of this entry by prescribing solutions based on books of ideas that may or may not have any relevance to the situation I’m trying to apply them to. For me to hold The Quiet Ameican up as an example of what we should be doing isn’t so different from Pyle’s zealous adherence to the fictional York Harding.

The plot itself has its own turns, and combines aspects of hopeless love stories, political thrillers, and buddy novels. Although not explicitly about spy novels, The Quiet American also has all the elements Jerome Weeks identified in his post I Spy: The story of betrayal, of brutalization, and of sacrifice. In a later post he adds the persistence of history. The Quiet American doesn’t explicitly have much of the latter, however much it hangs in the subtext, but I’m sure its about successors about the direct American experience do, and I’m sure whatever literature emerges from Iraq will too.

I’m not the only one who noticed the importance of The Quiet American. Roger Cohen uses it for his lead in “Some Lessons for U.S. in Vietnam and Iraq Parallels”, a Dec. 2, 2006 article only available to subscribers. Frank Rich mentioned it in his September 24, 2006 column. The book is remembered—but evidently not by current decision makers. Too bad. The Quiet American is “about” Vietnam, but it might as well be about Iraq, or any number of other well-meaning failed efforts.