Category Archives: Books

Life: oddball university edition

June 8, 2008 By in Books, Life Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

“It’s a rite that must have arisen in the old days of the college, when Princeton was a men’s institution and mass nudity was an expression of the male prerogative, like pissing upright or waging war.”

—Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, The Rule of Four

(It’s amazing how sometimes otherwise indifferent books can hit a real zinger of a sentence; these authors do it about once a chapter. Another example: “Somehow these rituals were then transmitted intact down to the present, profiting from that immunity to time and fortune which the university, like an ancient tar pit, confers on everything that lumbers unwittingly into it and dies.”)

Science Fiction, literature, and the haters

June 5, 2008 By in Books, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 26 Comments

Why does so little science fiction rise to the standards of literary fiction?

This question arose from two overlapping events. The first came from reading Day of the Triffids (link goes to my post); although I don’t remember how I came to the book, someone must’ve recommended it on a blog or newspaper in compelling enough terms for me to buy it. Its weaknesses, as discussed in the post, brought up science fiction and its relation to the larger book world.

The second event arose from a science fiction novel I wrote called Pearle Transit that I’ve been submitting to agents. It’s based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—think, on a superficial level, “Heart of Darkness in space.” Two replies stand out: one came from an agent who said he found the idea intriguing but that science fiction novels must be at least 100,000 words long and have sequels already started. “Wow,” I thought. How many great literary novels have enough narrative force and character drive for sequels? The answer that came immediately to mind was “zero,” and after reflection and consultation with friends I still can’t find any. Most novels expend all their ideas at once, and to keep going would be like wearing a shirt that fades from too many washes. Even in science fiction, very few if any series maintain their momentum over time; think of how awful the Dune books rapidly became, or Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama series. A few novels can make it as multiple-part works, but most of those were conceived of and executed as a single work, like Dan Simmons’ Hyperion or Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (more on those later).

The minimum word count bothers me too. It’s not possible for Pearle Transit to be stretched beyond its present size without destroying what makes it coherent and, I hope, good. By its nature it is supposed to be taunt, and much as a 120-pound person cannot be safely made into a 240-pound person, Pearle Transit can’t be engorged without making it like the bloated star that sets its opening scene. If the market reality is that such books can’t or won’t sell, I begin to tie the quality of the science fiction I’ve read together with the system that produces it. Heart of Darkness—forerunner to modernism and one of the deepest and most mysterious novels I’ve read—had only about 40,000 words. In those 40,000 words, it contains more than the vast majority of novels I’ve read with four times as many. The Great Gatsby isn’t very long either—60,000 words, perhaps?—and yet by the standards of contemporary science fiction, apparently neither would be publishable. If this is true, then the production system for science fiction might be harming the ability of writers to produce fiction at the highest possible level.

The other rejection came from an agent who read the entire manuscript. He said he liked it and thought the writing was sharp—an adjective I’ve seen before in rejection letters—but that it was “too literary” and shouldn’t be as “complex.” It can’t bode well for science fiction in general if its gatekeepers are allergic to the idea of literariness, that ineffable quality that haunts this post even as I don’t or can’t define it. To be sure, it’s possible that the agent who called Pearle Transit “too literary” was being nice or using a euphemism and really saying he thought it was boring, or stuffy, or something to that effect, but even if he was, I still think his word choice is illustrative.

The two rejection letters and the literary quality of Day of the Triffids show specific examples of a general phenomenon regarding science fiction. It’s unfortunate that the entire genre gets tarred as junk by some critics and readers when in reality it’s not entirely junk—if it were, I wouldn’t write a long essay describing it. I have a theory as to why science fiction often gets labeled as junk: it values other qualities than aesthetic novelty/skill and deep characterization. It’s more concerned with ideas rather than how ideas are expressed, while the greatest literary fiction sees ideas and their expression as inextricably linked. At the same time, though, I think that science fiction’s defenders might bring on the literary snobs’ ire by doing things like calling them literary snobs when many aren’t actually snobs, but just have standards that science fiction too infrequently reaches in part for the reason I just stated. This is also why, I suspect, science fiction has trouble achieving the critical and academic recognition it should probably have, especially given its larger impact on the culture. I’m one of the defenders of good writing being good writing regardless of where it comes from, but the more science fiction I read, the more I realize so much of it just doesn’t have the skill in narrative, detail, character, sympathy and complexity, language, and dialog that readers of literary fiction demand. I still like a lot of science fiction, but most of it now causes me to roll my eyes and skip pages: characters have no life, the books have no lifeness, clichés abound, and strong setups devolve into variations on cowboys and indians.

There are very significant exceptions, as I said regarding Day of the Triffids:

The only science fiction novels I’m aware of that could stand on their own as a literary achievement is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Some others are serviceable and worthwhile, like Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Walter Michael Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Philip K. Dick’s better novels. But none are great novels, though Gibson comes closest, and while I don’t think the genre is incapable of housing real greatness, the relative lack of literary merit gives me pause when I continue searching for satisfying science fiction.

Jason Fisher of Lingwë – Musings of a Fish wrote an e-mail pointing out that Brave New World, 1984, and Fahrenheit 451 probably belong in the “exception” category too. I agree, as long as they’re fully included in the science fiction umbrealla—while Orwell and Huxley were kind of writing science fiction, their books were much closer to the traditions of allegory and satire, even if they happened to use some of science fiction’s trappings. Someone like Stanislaw Lem or Le Guin, on the other hand, produced genuine science fiction. Bradbury I’d forgotten about, but it’s been too long since I read his books to judge them. Granted, this argument might turn into boundary dispute regarding what’s science fiction and what isn’t, but I think there is something to be said for the science fiction that’s grounded solidly in the “science” as in the technological future world, whereas I see Orwell, especially, and Huxley, to a lesser extent, as being closer to something like Gulliver’s Travels.

Typing “Top science fiction novels” in Google reveals lists like these: the top 50 science fiction novels, the top fifteen great science fiction books, and the top 100 sci-fi books (never mind that some science fiction writers and readers hate the term sci-fi for reasons that are still unclear to me). Most of the novels on those lists don’t meet conventional—an inappropriate word, given that great literature is by definition unconventional—literary standards, with the exceptions already mentioned. Dan Simmons’ Hyperion gets close—very close—but still has that “not quite” feeling.

That Michael Crichton gets on any lists is a bad sign: the best review I’ve seen of his wildly popular and equally wildly uneven, and usually bad, work is in Martin Amis’ The War Against Cliché, when he praises Crichton at his best as “a blend of Stephen Jay Gould and Agatha Christie” and then discusses what’s wrong in the context of The Lost World, but it could be transposed to most of his Crichton’s novels:

The job of characterization has been delegated to two or three thrashed and downtrodden adverbs. ‘Dodgson shook his head irritably’; ‘ “Handle what?” Dodgson said irritably.’ So Dodgson is irritable. But ‘ “I tell you it’s fine,” Levine said irritably.’ ‘Levine got up irritably.’ So Levine is irritable too. ‘Malcolm stared forward gloomily.’ ‘ “We shouldn’t have the kids here,” said Malcolm gloomily.’ Malcolm seems to own ‘gloomily’; but then you irritably notice that Rossiter is behaving ‘gloomily’ too, and gloomily discover that Malcolm is behaving ‘irritably.’ Forget about ‘tensely’ and ‘grimly’ for now. And don’t get me started on ‘thoughtfully.’

So many science fiction novels suffer from the same problems: adverbs that proliferate like triffids, characters who are more alive silent than when they speak, and descriptions that deserve the Amis treatment, above.

Even Philip K. Dick, who aspired to be a literary writer prior to turning to science fiction, gets mixed notices, which Adam Gopnik explores in the New Yorker:

As an adult reader coming back to Dick, you start off in a state of renewed wonder and then find yourself thumbing ahead to see how much farther you are going to have to go. At the end of a Dick marathon, you end up admiring every one of his conceits and not a single one of his sentences. His facility is amazing. He once wrote eleven novels in a twenty-four-month stretch. But one thing you have to have done in order to write eleven novels in two years is not to have written any of them twice.

That’s probably why Dick’s reputation as a serious writer, like Poe’s, has always been higher in France, where the sentences aren’t read as they were written. And his paint-by-numbers prose is ideally suited for the movies. The last monologue in “Blade Runner” (“All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die”), improvised by Rutger Hauer on the set that day, has a pathos that the book achieves only in design, intellectually, because the movie speech is spoken by a recognizable person, dressed up as a robot, where Dick’s characters tend to be robots dressed up as people.

Gopnik is right. Dick himself wrote How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, which Jason sent me. It’s a wonderful essay more about ideas and coherency than skill in conveying ideas through words. It’s hard to imagine him writing something like Kundera’s The Art of the Novel or E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. Maybe Aspects of the Science Fiction Novel, but that cordons science fiction from the greater literary sphere. I dislike the cordon, and yet the more I realize regarding what science fiction seems to value and what literary fiction seems to value, the more I wonder if it’s really undesirable. In his essay, Dick is ready to join literary writers when he says: “The problem is simply this: What does a science fiction writer know about? On what topic is he an authority?” I read much bemoaning of what place, if any, the author has in times of national strife, like 9/11. The answer seemed to be, “not much.” So Dick has something in common with literary authors. In his essay, however, Dick proceeds on a metaphysical binge rather than the deeper realms of what makes great fiction, as James Wood does in How Fiction Works, or Jane Smiley does in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, or Francine Prose does in Reading like a Writer. He writes with great verve and depth about the nature of reality, our place in it, and societal problems—but he doesn’t handle aesthetic problems or people as manifestations of those problems well. Characters come off as manifestations of problems instead of people, which is another way of saying what Gopnik did.

Other writers, like Roger Zelazny in the first section of The Great Book of Amber, is more bad than good, and his writing is frequently irritating for its James Bond tone in passages like this:

I forced my mind back to the accident, dwelled upon it till my head hurt. It was no accident. I had that impression, though I didn’t know why. I would find out, and someone would pay. Very, very much would they pay. An anger, a terrible one, flared within the middle of my body.

The lack of a conjunction between “accident” and “dwelled” doesn’t work here and is jarring, along with the running together of the sounds “it” and “till,” especially when followed by the alliteration of “head hurt.” Finally, the endlessly repeated action-hero trope of “someone would pay,” is expressed exactly the same as it has been thousands if not millions of times before. Occasionally Zelazny wanders in the land of exquisite, terse writing, almost by accident, as when he says: “The night was bargaining weakly with the sun.”

I’ve discussed a few of the novels that appear on those top science fiction lists and I’ve read most of them, although some, I admit, not recently. I like many though love few and suspect I would like far fewer had I not read them in that formative period where novelty is much easier to achieve simply because you haven’t read all that much relative to how much you will. I think there is also something in the modern adolescent temperament that science fiction and fantasy appeals to: the idea that you’re being held back and oppressed and that with time you will acquire devices or skills that lend you great power to overcome forces that seem to be evil. Later, unfortunately, you discover that those forces are not so much malicious as incompetent and lazy and that the structure of the world is very hard to change; what those novels often don’t show is how the heroic quest is symbolic in the real world not of battling demons but of study, thought, and work. As Paul Graham says:

But if a kid asks you “Is there a God?” or “What’s a prostitute?” you’ll probably say “Ask your parents.”

Since we all agree [about lies to tell kids and forbidden questions], kids see few cracks in the view of the world presented to them. The biggest disagreements are between parents and schools, but even those are small. Schools are careful what they say about controversial topics, and if they do contradict what parents want their kids to believe, parents either pressure the school into keeping quiet or move their kids to a new school.

The conspiracy is so thorough that most kids who discover it do so only by discovering internal contradictions in what they’re told. It can be traumatic for the ones who wake up during the operation.

[…]

I remember that feeling. By 15 I was convinced the world was corrupt from end to end. That’s why movies like The Matrix have such resonance. Every kid grows up in a fake world. In a way it would be easier if the forces behind it were as clearly differentiated as a bunch of evil machines, and one could make a clean break just by taking a pill.

And when you’re 15, you also have a lower threshold for art because, at least in the United States, most 15-year-olds aren’t all that well-formed and haven’t experience much; hell, I’m 24 and still don’t feel all that well-formed. Still, if you get someone with plots about breaking through the surface world into some other world underneath, you’re going to speak, in many cases, much more convincingly to 15-year-olds than you are to disgruntled adults who have the freedom to seek whatever they think the truth of the world is and choose not to exercise it, or who are responsible for keeping those 15-year-old dreamers fed and going to school on time. I’ve left out a small but very important group of adults who are still dreaming of greatness and trying to pierce the veil of reality, but I suspect they are entirely too small a group, and those who might join it are often invested in ideologies or systems or other simplifiers of what is a world too complex to explain through simple chants, or what Alain Badiou calls simulacrum and betrayal in his book Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil.

I still like Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, and I still appreciate some of the criticisms he directed at judgmental society. But if I read him for the first time today, I would’ve already encountered his ideas, and there wouldn’t be the depth of characterization or the skill in writing to carry me through. Then, it seemed original, and I wasn’t old enough to perceive Stranger’s paper-thin chatter masquerading as philosophy. Even Brave New World, for all its virtues, has some of those problems, as when the savage discusses Shakespeare.

This essay discusses science fiction, but its sister, fantasy, suffers from some of the same problems, which I alluded to in my review of The Name of the Wind and The Daughter of the Empire. In contrast to those writers, Tolkien gets deeper and stronger as you get older and more sophisticated, and I suspect Lord of the Rings is a well that will never run dry. First-rate fantasy seems to pop up more often than science fiction—here I’m thinking of Le Guin with Earthsea, or Philip Pullman with His Dark Materials. Even then, it’s still common for writers to churn out elements in different configurations instead of trying, like Paul Muad’Dib in Dune, to break the nature of the genre publishing system itself. How ironic that a genre dedicated to transcending the scrim of reality relies on endless repetition of its core language and features.

After almost 3,000 words, I’ve described a problem, diagnosed some of its causes, shown some ways it operates, but not come to any conclusions. I’m not sure any exist, given the marketplace and reader incentives involved with both the production and consumption of science fiction. And if there is a solution, I hope readers of this are looking for it, and that I can be a part.

EDIT: A follow-up post deals with some of the issues raised in the comments and via e-mail.

June links: libraries edition

June 4, 2008 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

* Bowker says that “276,649 new titles and editions” appeared in the U.S. in 2007, up slightly from the year before. So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, anyone? (Note: I haven’t actually read Gabriel Zaid’s book yet). And where’s the space for mine? Perhaps being taken up by Tolkien reprints, leading to the next item…

* Nick Owchar reports on still more efforts to wring cash out of J.R.R. Tolkien. The good news, however, is that the publication of Tales from the Perilous Realm will “gather […] several of the master’s shorter works–“Farmer Giles of Ham,” “Leaf by Niggle,” “Smith of Wootton Major” and “Roverandom”–as well as a book of poems, “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.”” In other words, this will make it far easier for those of us who study Tolkien and avoid perhaps the foul smell of Children of Húrin.

* My dream, achieved by someone else. He has 30,000, and I only 260 – 270. It’s not the size, but how you use it, right?

(Hat tip ALN.)

* More personal library reflections from the Wall Street Journal:

I still possess a great many books. I’m not a book collector, though, not at all — and much less a bibliophile. The discreet charms of the first edition have always eluded me, although I can appreciate a nicely bound volume — as a consequence I own many second and third printings, which generally cost about 95% less. When I have a choice I go for interesting jackets, elegant typefaces, acid-free paper, but above all I prize compactness. Whenever possible I go for omnibus editions. The more books can fit in a single volume, the happier I am. And I mourn the passing of the pocket-sized paperback, which was once allowed to contain all sorts of material and is now strictly reserved for the kinds of books that inspire gold-embossed titles and peekaboo die-cuts. I like to carry books in my pockets, and trade paperbacks are an awkward fit, except in the dead of winter.

Anyway, I like the entire variety of books: thin little plaquettes, 16-volume histories, drugstore potboilers, privately printed crank pamphlets, ancient volumes in unknown languages, sleek new art editions with lots of white on the pages, forgotten doctoral dissertations from German universities in the 1880s, pornography bought by sailors in Tijuana, technical publications with wildly recondite diagrams… I remember a cartoon I saw as a child in which the books jumped off the shelves and had themselves a party in the bookstore in the middle of the night.

* XKCD strikes with this comic.

Day of the Triffids — John Wyndham

June 2, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids is another early post apocalyptic novels that’s more interesting as a historical curiosity than for aesthetic merit. It suffers from many of science fiction’s deficiencies in terms of writing quality and characterization. These problems might stem in part from science fiction’s focus on novelty in plot, technology, and world, rather than in linguistic or cultural achievement; perhaps fiction is innovative either in what it says or how it says only seldom both. The only science fiction novels I’m aware of that could stand on their own as a literary achievement is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Some others are serviceable and worthwhile, like Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Walter Michael Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, and Philip K. Dick’s better novels. But none are great novels, though Gibson comes closest, and while I don’t think the genre is incapable of housing real greatness, the relative lack of literary worth gives me pause when I continue searching for satisfying science fiction.

This long introduction is designed to put The Day of the Triffids in a context it doesn’t transcend. The plot begins with a fantastic meteor shower that strikes all who watch it blind combined with the invasion of an insidious species known as triffids, which kill anyone within a few feet via a stinging lash. These walking carnivorous plants become symbolic repositories for our fears and our collective inability to see what’s in front of our faces; as Bill Masen, the overly prim and competent protagonist observes, ” ‘There’s a kind of conspiracy not to believe things about triffids.’ ” There is, and I felt some horror as I learned more about them, but it was an overly familiar feeling from all those end-of-the-world stories: George Stewart’s Earth Abides, which predates The Day of the Triffids by two years, the aforementioned A Canticle for Leibowitz, Larry Niven’s Lucifer’s Hammer, and even Stephen King’s The Stand. Except for A Canticle for Leibowitz, they all share the same styles, themes, and motifs concerning humanity’s capacity for darkness and ignorance (“Horrible alien things which some of us had somehow created, and which the rest of us, in our careless greed, had cultured all over the world,” we learn in The Day of the Triffids. Notice the lack of subject or article at the beginning of the sentence, where it seems that one or both should appear). I just wish there were more originality in this, although to be fair Earth Abides and The Day of the Triffids are forerunners to the later developments in the sub-genre of apocalyptic stories.

As in many such works, Bill Masen is little more advanced emotionally and intellectually than the nameless narrator of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. A curious mixture of competence, chivalry, and sexism, Bill Masen wants to protect his women and while keeping them, you know, in their role. Still, to his credit he thinks about a ten-year-old, “[…] the world in which she was going to grow up would have little use for the overniceties and euphemisms that I had learned as a child […]” Still, he’s not perceptive enough to think that perhaps those “niceties” aren’t of use in the current world, as Paul Graham cogently argues. “[His] quest was personal,” although that quest is just to find a girl he randomly encountered, and even then it feels not so much personal as generic and something expected by a certain type of society. I sometimes feel the same way when closing time approaches at a bar. Augie March is on a personal quest, but Bill Masen, alas, is not.

Elsewhere, he almost verges on something vaguely resembling insight when he says that, “There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another.” Maybe so, but even here the awkwardness of the writing, with the disjointedness created by the first comma in both sentences, weakens the sense of flow and as a result the sentiment that is being expressed. And yet his fundamental argument about the resilience of humanity is not a bad one, even if it is not expressed well, and I would’ve liked for more on the subject.

As I said, The Day of the Triffids is most interesting as a historical document: Cold War symbolism abounds, and as disaster befalls England one girl “[…] had an utterly unshakeable conviction that nothing serious could have happened to America, and that it was only a matter of holding out for a while until the Americans arrived to put everything in order.” Contrast this belief with what Fareed Zakaria persuasively argues about the views of America abroad in The Post-American World. In Day of the Triffids, this exchange takes place a few pages after the first quote:

“Try to imagine a world in which there aren’t any Americans—can you do that?”
The girl stared at him.
“But there must be,” she said.
[…]
“There won’t always be those stores. The way I see it, we’ve been given a flying start in a new kind of world.”

Although the girl who believes in America is presented as a fool, it’s still nice to imagine that this sentiment was reasonably widespread during the Cold War. I remain hopeful and perhaps even confident, like Zakaria in The Post-American World, that it will be again in the near future. In the meantime, Day of the Triffids remains dead history rather than living fiction that still speaks loudly to us today, as great literature does.

Doctor Faustus

June 1, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , 1 Comment

I tried to read and like Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus—I really did—but quit after perhaps 80 leaden pages. It wasn’t a bad novel, to be sure, but just one that never seemed to unshackle itself from the page. Alex Ross brought it to my immediate attention through his allusions to Doctor Faustus in The Rest is Noise, but that initial enthusiasm didn’t prove sustaining. High school travesties like Ethan Frome came to mind, as an endless bowl of unsweetened oatmeal becomes dreary, no matter its healthfulness.

That image of the endless bowl is apt given how many sentences in Doctor Faustus were long and tedious, without the sustaining beauty in Swann’s Way. From the start of chapter VIII, a page I flipped to at random: “But [Kretzschmar] had early felt the pull back to the Old World, from where his grandparents had once emigrated and where both his own roots and those of his art were to be found; and in the course of a nomadic life, whose stations and stopovers seldom lasted longer than one or two years, he had come to Kaisersaschern as our organist—it was only one episode that had been preceded by others (for he had previously been employed as a conductor at small municipal theaters in the German Reich and Switzerland) and would be followed by others.” Two words shy of 100, and all of it, so far as I can tell, irrelevant to understanding the character of Kretzschmar or Adrian Leverkühn or anything else. Sometimes digressive novels work fabulously well, as Cryptonomicon did, but in Doctor Faustus there’s so much artistry that I’m being stifled.

Another annoyance that starts small and grows: the constant tendency of the narrator to discuss how he tells the story. At the start of chapter IX, he says: “I shall not glance back—far be it from me to count how many pages have piled up between the last Roman numeral and the one I just wrote. A mishap—a totally unexpected mishap, to be sure—has occurred, and it would be pointless to indulge in self-accusation and apologies on its account.” Good: then don’t indulge in either, and don’t tell us about it. I will count how many pages have passed: 25, and in those 25 I skipped larger and larger blocks of text as I looked for something, anything, to happen. But nothing does, except for telling us how the story will be told and about the early life of a great composer. I never got to a point where I said, “Ah ha! This is where I would’ve started the novel.”

If you want to see a morally compromised figure interested music, try Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, where the surgeon Adam Staunton is also an amateur pianist whose music is associated with madness or otherworldliness. Its many pages flow like corrupt money through Willie Stark’s machine, and to me is a stronger work that begins with movement and never stops. What made All the King’s Men go and Doctor Faustus not is a topic I’ve been pondering; James Wood comes at it from the angle of character when he contemplates “[…] how to push out? How to animate the static portrait?” in How Fiction Works. Like him, I can’t formulate rules so strong that novels can’t wriggle out of them, and so I feel forced to observe what I can’t explain, like astronomers and dark matter. Yet, just as Supreme Court Justice Stewart said regarding pornography, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced . . . [b]ut I know it when I see it,” so too I know problematic novels when I see them. Still, I’ve also learned to be wary of decisive conclusions on novels that have superseded their times and are still widely regarded as good, and so I’m keeping Doctor Faustus in anticipation of revisiting it sometime in the distant future, and I hope I don’t look back ruefully on this essay.

The Post-American World

May 29, 2008 By in Books, Culture, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World is almost superfluous: its arguments about the rise of other nations and how the United States should respond can be found, implicitly and explicitly, in The Atlantic, The Economist, Foreign Affairs, and other magazines. Most of its analysis is not particularly deep and didn’t reorient my worldview. But at the same time, I’ve not seen the whole package regarding how the world is changing through the growth of non-Western countries from a single source before, and if nothing else The Post-American World is a handy to have as a pointer—don’t follow my argument regarding the importance of international humility? Read The Post-American World!

Many of the book’s subsidiary claims are disputable—is geography really responsible for the imbalances of world power? How much of China’s lagging after the 17th century is due to its government?—but The Post-American World‘s central thesis concerning the almost inevitable rise of other countries in the political, economic, and social spheres is accurate and worth pondering, especially by the very politicians who seem most likely to ignore it. Indeed, its discussion of the problems of current U.S. politics is coherent and useful, and I observe some small manifestations of those problems on Grant Writing Confidential.

Zakaria stays admirably focused on the big themes, even as he tries to put the fear of Islamic-inspired terror in its place, which is a much smaller one than it currently occupies. He even cites James Fallows’ “Declaring Victory” on this subject. He also effectively ties together two seemingly opposite trends, one toward globalization, heterogeneity, and internationalism, and the other towards renewed nationalism: “But while economics, information, and even culture might have become globalized, formal political power remains firmly tethered to the nation-state, even as the nation-state has become less able to solve most of these problems unilaterally.” To what extent this reflects a minor and odd issue and to what extent it is a damning, fundamental problem is unclear, but raising it as an issue is worth doing and will perhaps curtail it.

Perhaps most refreshingly, Zakaria tries and succeeds at remaining neutral as he discusses the positive, negative, and descriptive attributes of the big three: China, India, and the United States. For example, although the United States comes under justifiable criticism for a wide array of offenses and blunders, including Iraq, Zakaria also points out that “For all its abuses of power, the United States has been the creator and sustainer of the current order of open trade and democratic government—an order that has been benign and beneficial for the vast majority of human kind.” Reconciling these two features—abuse like Abu Ghraib—with the overall positive effect—an increase in worldwide liberty—is too often lost in partisan debate, with the left focuses on abuse and the right on a rah-rah America orientation. It’s also worth noting that a book like this probably couldn’t be published in China.

This is particularly important because one point Zakaria makes and doesn’t emphasize as much as he perhaps should have is that, to a steadily larger extent, the new world demands “the growth of new narratives.” His is one. He also sees cable news stations and other outlets that focus on narrower market segments as examples of this, and to me this profusion of new frameworks for looking at the world, which vary by country, region, and individual, are a powerful subject that is hard to comprehend. Still, American business seems better at responding than government, As Zakaria says, American companies have done better in adapting to the new world than American politicians. To him, “Washington, which faces no market test, has not yet figured out that diplomatic imperialism is a luxury that the United States can no longer afford.”

Still, an examination of new narratives might be an entire book in and of itself just for one country; in China, for instance, the number of new narratives just over the course of the 20th Century seems staggering in how radical the breaks appear to an outsider and non-expert like me, ranging from the imperial domination of others in the early part of the century to Communism beginning in 1949 to the ironically named Great Leap Forward that destroyed much of China’s professional classes to the capitalist reorientation that began in 1979, and those are just examples at the broadest levels. And understanding China and India is going to become more important as time goes on; as Zakaria says, “China operates on so large a scale that it can’t help changing the nature of the game,” much as the United States changed the nature of the European game beginning in the early 20th Century.

So what can be done, or, to put it in less confrontational terms, how should America respond to this world? Zakaria argues that we should focus on our strengths in openness and education. He draws parallels between Britain and the U.S., saying that wealthier countries can lose their competitive edge in technology: “A wealthier Britain was losing its focus on practical education. Science and geography were subordinated to literature and philosophy.” But he doesn’t give convincing, non-anecdotal evidence to support this assertion, and I’m not sure its true, though it is certainly plausible. What he does convincingly show, however, is that immigrants have fueled America’s cultural and scientific achievements, and immigrants continue to be major players in post-graduate degrees, especially in science. “If America can keep the people it educates in the country, the innovation will happen here. If they go back home, the innovation will travel with them.” This problem is real and has been observed elsewhere, but Zakaria underlines how poor a job we’ve done evaluating trade-offs. In a similar area, “The visa system, which has become restrictive and forbidding, will get more so every time one thug is let in. None of these procedures is designed with any consideration of striking a balance between the need for security and the need for openness and hospitality.” Once again, terrorism unhinges us and a do-something syndrome sets in. Getting this issue wrong isn’t as spectacular as terrorist attacks, and yet in the long term might do far more damage to the United States than 9/11. But that hidden damage isn’t easy to cover by TV news and so goes mostly unheeded. Zakaria says that “[The United States] needs to stop cowering in fear. It is fear that has created a climate or paranoia and panic in the United States and fear that has enabled our strategic missteps.”

When friends ask why I don’t feel any affinity for either major American political party, I now have a good recommendation for an explanation other Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, a book that studies the inherent problems with power seekers and their minions. Zakaria argues that today “A ‘can-do’ country is now saddled with a ‘do-nothing’ political process, designed for partisan battle rather than problem solving.” Still, I’m not sure this is any different from normal politics, and Zakaria’s evidence isn’t enough to prove his point. Yet I can’t help but agreeing with his larger thesis regarding the United States’ dysfunctional politics, and I’m not optimistic that a fix will be forthcoming, or, if it is, that it won’t be worse than the disease. At least a do-nothing government will first do no harm, which seems like an improvement on the last eight years, but for the next eighty, we need something better, and someone is at least framing the issues in a positive way.

More on-line sanctioned ignorance: in defense of Tom Wolfe and others

May 27, 2008 By in Books, Life, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

James Wood wrote a typically fascinating piece to Nigel Beale defending “lifeness,” or sophisticated realism. As mentioned in my recent link post, it’s worth reading in full. I have to quote at length to set up my response:

It is perfectly possible to agree with Roland Barthes that realism is a set of codes and conventions (for all writing is a set of such codes, after all) and still try to defend that element in fiction — what I call “lifeness” — that eludes the nerveless grip of code. This is a defence both of that evanescence called ‘reality’ and of the artifice that makes it — and makes it up — and there is no contradiction in this doubleness: we read fiction with two eyes, as it were, one world-directed and one text-directed.

The review I just wrote about Joseph O’Neill’s superb novel,”Netherland,” in “The New Yorker,” praises the novel both for its deep and wise interest in life and lives, and for its high degree of artifice and style. That doubleness is entirely in keeping with my attacks on people like Tom Wolfe, John Irving, the more formulaic elements of John Updike, and so on, and in keeping with my praise, in essays and reviews, of writers like Cormac McCarthy (when he is not trying to write a genre thriller like “No Country for Old Men”), Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolano, Muriel Spark, Jose Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Philip Roth, Alan Hollinghurst, Milan Kundera, Norman Rush, V.S. Naipaul, Edward P. Jones, Michel Houellebecq, Anne Enright, David Means, Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee, Bohumil Hrabal, Harold Brodkey (I was an early and pretty isolated English champion of Brodkey’s), not to mention earlier writers like Henry Green, Italo Svevo, Giovanni Verga, Knut Hamsun, J.F. Powers, and many others.

(Link added by me).

I see this in part as a facet of the long-running debate between whether one should understand the exterior world as reflective of the interior or whether the interior is perpetually hidden and most revealed through its own, psychological terms. This tension manifests itself in literary periods: the exterior world was more popular in the 18th Century with writers like Pope and Swift, and naturally lends itself to satire, while the Romantics brought acute focus back to the interior world through their poetry, while many of the modernists tried to reflect this shift to the inside through the shape of their prose itself. Some contemporary novelists think they’re doing one when they’re actually doing the other; although I hadn’t realized this at the time I wrote my review, it’s a malady Bridge of Sighs suffers from. And the greatest novels can go one way (Ulysses, I would argue, is radically interior) or find a middle path, as I think Bellow often does, but even he often veers interior, as in Henderson and Herzog, as opposed to the exterior-focused world of The Adventures of Augie March; I’m not sure where Ravelstein fits, but I take that subject up again later.

To be sure, some of these generalizations are overly broad, as they almost must be when describing grant literary trends. But some writers—like Tom Wolfe—can subvert the code they appear to be hewing to, and at his best in The Bonfire of the Vanities Wolfe accomplishes this and is a more sophisticated and better writer than many critics assume through his use of examining how the exterior reflects the interior. Being just slightly off makes him misfire completely: I Am Charlotte Simmons is a bad novel that parodies itself, and Wolfe’s symbolic and social purposes are utterly transparent, some of his details are wrong, and the whole effect falls apart. Wolfe has more lifeness than Wood credits him with, though perhaps not so much as some of the later writers on his list.

One way of avoiding the interior and exterior problem is to have a narrator observing someone else, thus allowing one to see the interiority of the narrator and the exteriority of the person being observed. I want to write a dissertation on what I call the nominal object or nominal subject, in which you have a first-person narrator observing another person who is the nominal object or subject of the story: think Ishmael and Ahab in Moby Dick, Carraway and Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, or Jack Burden and Willie Stark in All the King’s Men. All three novels exhibit what I think Wood means by “lifeness,” and although they don’t achieve exclusively that effect through this technique, it can, when used well, give a sense of interiority from the narrator and exteriority in the object. Ravelstein has the same technique, alone as far as I know in Bellow’s novels.

Which is right, the interior or exterior focus? I haven’t the slightest idea and suspect the answer is “neither,” but the debate’s terms are so often manifested in specific examples but not often stated in more general form. To me, novels that elude codes, ideologies, formulas, and other kinds of algorithmic writing—the ones that are truly novel—are the ones most worth reading, provided that they don’t try to evade codes merely to evade codes, but rather as a way of advancing the story, expanding our understanding of reality, and the like. This is the distinction I draw between someone like Bellow and someone like Alain Robbe-Grillet, who seemed interested in difference only for the sake of being different.

Henderson the Rain King

May 23, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Henderson the Rain King is not my favorite Bellow novel: Henderson’s sojourn in Africa is unconvincing and borders on Orientalism, the novel’s symbolism is heavy, and some disjointed sections feel superfluous, as when Henderson writes letters to his wife, Lily, in Chapter 19, or when he discusses the lion hunts with King Dahfu. Still, even Bellow batting below average scores more hits than most writers at their best, and in rereading Henderson I remember why I like Bellow so much—he’s so alive, and his characters ceaselessly try to expand their own lives and learn to encompass this big thing we call life. Granted, they’re always unsuccessful at the latter, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it’s an impossible quest just to understand life—especially humanity in all its varieties—let alone encompassing it, is probably impossible.

This might feed into what Bellow, like some other great novelists, so disliked about academic research and writing, as academics by definition try to define and elucidate, while so much of Bellow’s writing shows why some major factors of life simply can’t be elucidated. Therefore, academics and critics like me are ourselves going on a futile quest in our attempts to comprehend Bellow, who wrote novels like Henderson that show why the explaining isn’t possible; as Sam Tanenhaus wrote regarding the Library of America edition of Bellow, “It may be heretical, or just foolish, for a book review editor to admit it, but there are times when criticism is beside the point.” Indeed, and it makes me wary in writing this. No wonder Bellow liked Blake’s poetry, as I see some of the same defiance of full explanation in Blake, especially his later work. Henderson is a particularly strong example of this tendency, with the protagonist’s constant drive toward something he can’t seem to articulate beyond “I want, I want,” forming a base for the unnameable: what does Henderson want? Life? Experience? Knowledge? Something else?

Much of Henderson is, I think, intended as comic, given its outlandish events. Still, those events, like the lion hunt or the moving of the statue, are too symbolically endowed for my taste. They seem more like a statement of Henderson’s character than necessary events to the novel. Such scenes also parallel to too great a degree Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. That book came out in 1949 and Henderson in 1959, and during the period between them Bellow might have read or at least heard about Hero. Many of its elements show in farcical ways: the call to adventure is through narcissistic desire that leads to departure from the United States for Africa; failure in the blown-up water cistern; initiation in the form of moving a statute; and eventual success, after a fashion. Henderson is more concerned with himself than anyone or thing else, however, and rather than reconciling himself with his society he thinks that, “this is the payoff of a lifetime of action without thought” when he’s forced to imitate a jungle beast. As he says elsewhere, noting the ridiculousness of his own situation, “If I had to shoot at that cat, if I had to blow up frogs, if I had to pick up Mummah without realizing what I was getting myself into, it was not out of line to crouch on all fours and roar and act the lion.”

Yet in Henderson those comic aspects are also a critique of the quest narrative, as Henderson can’t find wholeness or completion. He searches for an abstraction layer not available through travel, even when elements of home—the United States—follow him: “It was just my luck to think I had found the conditions of life simplified so I could deal with them—finally!—and then to end up in a ramshackle palace reading these advanced medical texts.” The issues keep coming: “And though I’m no expert I guess he’s [King Dahfu] thinking of mankind as a whole, which is tired of itself and needs a short in the arm from animal nature.” If that weren’t enough, he continues: “Anyway, I begin to ask (or perhaps it was more a plea than a question), why is it always near me—why! Why can’t I get away from it awhile? Why, why!” Why indeed: it’s a question religion doesn’t answer, or at least not satisfactorily anymore, and that philosophy seems to have failed at answering despite its numerous and increasingly verbose attempts, and that novels pose and don’t seem to answer. In the mythology Campbell discusses, you come back from your quest whole and ready to take your place in the adult community or you die and uphold the standards of that community or you transcend life; in Henderson and later, ironic texts, your quest is forever incomplete, because like Henderson, you can’t answer that pivotal question that becomes an exclamation: “Why, why!”

Why, why! indeed, and Bellow keeps setting up the questions through exploration without giving answers. The closest he comes, I think, is in Ravelstein, where Chick marvels at the “creature” that is Ravelstein while also being resigned to accept his fate. Whether this is an improvement on the manic energy of earlier Bellow novels or a depressing acceptance of the end is a matter of perspective on which I have no opinion. But, like the master, I will try to frame the issue, even if the issue has a habit of being larger than that frame. And so the critic struggles with Bellow like Itelo wrestling with Henderson, and even champion critics don’t seem able to win. But this preoccupation with trying to explain Bellow stays with me, and this is not, I suspect, my last word on the subject, even if my attempts are as futile as Henderson’s.

Charlie Wilson’s War

May 14, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Charlie Wilson’s war—the one in which Afghan guerillas fought against the Soviet Union in the 1980s—was filled with bizarre alliances, unusual people, and extraordinary circumstances. Perhaps the biggest of those in terms of height, influence, and unusual bearing was Wilson himself, a Congressman from Texas of no particular repute at the time who directed billions of dollars to Afghan fighters during the 1980s. I learned something about the specifics of Wilson through the eponymous movie, which is based on George Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War, and I’m pleased to say that book and movie stand up well to scrutiny and time.

At first, Charlie Wilson’s War (the book) is gung ho to the point that I kept writing angry notes in the margins saying that much of what Wilson did—arm and train the mujahideen* fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan to wage what they perceived as holy war against the Soviet Union—would backfire on us, as it has. For example, page five says, “It was his [Frank Anderson’s] great good fortune to have been in charge of the South Asian task force in the final years when his men, funneling billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to the mujahideen, had chased the Red Army, tail between its legs, out of Afghanistan.” It’s a bit triumphalist given what would come after 9/11, especially since there’s a non-zero chance of the same thing happening to the United States. The quote also demonstrates another persistent weakness of the book in the form of endless cliches, as here when we hear the original phrasing of something running with its “tail between its legs.” Nonetheless, Crile drops hints of this impending disaster throughout Charlie Wilson’s War but saves the bulk of the reverberation for the epilogue, which is perhaps too short but well-played and an important reminder of the law of unintended consequences.

At the time the proxy war in Afghanistan seemed to be normal business, since we—meaning the CIA, mostly—consorted with numerous rulers or groups who weren’t very nice or acting in our best long term interest, whether the Afghans in the 1980s, the Greek military junta, or the Shah of Iran. Charlie Wilson’s War tends to excuse this realpolitik somewhat, and the odd part is how, despite the book’s frequent notes about how what happened then would echo our current efforts in Afghanistan, it still implies that arming and training the Afghan guerillas to ultimately sow chaos in Afghanistan was fundamentally a good idea. Now we’re still fighting in Afghanistan, chiefly because, as Charlie Wilson’s War states explicitly, it’s not really a country in the way Westerners think of countries—it’s more like a time warp back to a tribal era that hasn’t existed in most of Europe since at least the 19th century and not in the United States since European colonizers showed up.

Still, in making this criticism I have the unfair benefit of hindsight: in the 1980s, a lot of contemporaneous accounts show that the fall of the Soviet Union was far from obvious. Plenty of people who lived then have said that the Soviet Union’s impending demise wasn’t obvious, and so to Wilson and others, the theoretical problem of the United States one day fighting against various ideological and other foes gathered under the cover of militant Islam probably wouldn’t have appeared nearly as compelling as the Soviet Union itself. Nonetheless, Wilson showed questionable judgment and a basic disregard for consequences in other foreign policy areas, as when he supported the Israeli Lavi fighter, even though the technology used in that fighter might have been exported to China since. Oops. But even if the geopolitical situation doesn’t always support Charlie Wilson’s War’s aw-shucks arguments, Wilson was still a hell of a guy to follow, even if he’s another example of a politician who disobeys the idiotic laws relating to drugs that his legislative body created and upholds till today.

What might be most notable about this book is what Crile doesn’t, and can’t, really know: why Wilson did what he did. It was so out-of-character that in a novel it would be almost unbelievable for a boozy, playboy Congressman to get fired up with such ideological and moral fervor, and only a satire could make it work, as in Christopher Buckley’s hilarious and apt Little Green Men or Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. This is nonfiction, however, and for years Wilson passed millions and then hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons to Afghan fighters without anyone in the press noticing. To my eyes, at least, it’s not obvious what moved him beyond the surface reasons given. In addition, I have to ask: why Afghanistan? Why in 1983? The unknowable daunts us and Crile’s ability to explain. This is no slander on him, but rather a meditation on the vagaries of historical causation and what moves people to act in all the strange ways we do.

The book is not without fault. James Fallows wrote:

Here is something that is common knowledge in the publishing business but that few “normal” readers know: that the average article in a good magazine is much, much more carefully edited than almost any book. Yes, books can last forever while magazines go away after a week or month. But in a high-end magazine – like, well, the Atlantic, or the New Yorker, or the New York Review of Books, or one of a dozen others that invest in good copy editors and fact checkers – you’re far less likely to find typos, grammar errors, careless repetitions and contradictions, or simple made-up facts than you’ll find in books.

Those issues are a small but persistent problem in Charlie Wilson’s War. The same lines of Kipling are quoted twice; Gust Avrakotos, Wilson’s CIA insider, is constantly being referred to as a Greek from Aliquippa ; we learn on page 33 that “[Charlie Wilson] now served on a committee that doled out the nation’s money: fifty men appropriating $500 billion a year.” On page 77, Wilson joins the House Appropriations Committee: “That move had made Wilson a player—one of fifty House members with a vote on how the government’s $500 billion annual budget would be spent.” Really? I had no idea. Crile says, “Diplomats are good at sensing which way the political winds are blowing […]” and that if Wilson had pursued traditional legislative means he, “would have been told in no uncertain terms to back off.” Later, we find out that “For all practical purposes, the Mi-24 Hind flying gunship […]” The depressing thing about these cliches is that they could’ve been easily avoided through better editing, and they detract from an otherwise good and worthwhile book that’s about politics and history, as well as the specific life and times of Charlie Wilson.

The narrative drive and sense of play keep one reading through minor problems, and quotes quotes from Charlie and his CIA henchmen Avrakotos liven the narrative with scatological and sexual metaphors. Charlie gets numerous perks and describes himself as getting one because “I’m the only one of the committee who likes women and whiskey, and we need to be represented.” Amen. And that Amen is for honesty over hypocrisy if nothing else. And Wilson had what appears to be honest conviction, something that most politicians, perhaps like their constituents, lack.

*This spelling follows the form of the book.

Charlie Wilson's War

May 14, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Charlie Wilson’s war—the one in which Afghan guerillas fought against the Soviet Union in the 1980s—was filled with bizarre alliances, unusual people, and extraordinary circumstances. Perhaps the biggest of those in terms of height, influence, and unusual bearing was Wilson himself, a Congressman from Texas of no particular repute at the time who directed billions of dollars to Afghan fighters during the 1980s. I learned something about the specifics of Wilson through the eponymous movie, which is based on George Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War, and I’m pleased to say that book and movie stand up well to scrutiny and time.

At first, Charlie Wilson’s War (the book) is gung ho to the point that I kept writing angry notes in the margins saying that much of what Wilson did—arm and train the mujahideen* fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan to wage what they perceived as holy war against the Soviet Union—would backfire on us, as it has. For example, page five says, “It was his [Frank Anderson’s] great good fortune to have been in charge of the South Asian task force in the final years when his men, funneling billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to the mujahideen, had chased the Red Army, tail between its legs, out of Afghanistan.” It’s a bit triumphalist given what would come after 9/11, especially since there’s a non-zero chance of the same thing happening to the United States. The quote also demonstrates another persistent weakness of the book in the form of endless cliches, as here when we hear the original phrasing of something running with its “tail between its legs.” Nonetheless, Crile drops hints of this impending disaster throughout Charlie Wilson’s War but saves the bulk of the reverberation for the epilogue, which is perhaps too short but well-played and an important reminder of the law of unintended consequences.

At the time the proxy war in Afghanistan seemed to be normal business, since we—meaning the CIA, mostly—consorted with numerous rulers or groups who weren’t very nice or acting in our best long term interest, whether the Afghans in the 1980s, the Greek military junta, or the Shah of Iran. Charlie Wilson’s War tends to excuse this realpolitik somewhat, and the odd part is how, despite the book’s frequent notes about how what happened then would echo our current efforts in Afghanistan, it still implies that arming and training the Afghan guerillas to ultimately sow chaos in Afghanistan was fundamentally a good idea. Now we’re still fighting in Afghanistan, chiefly because, as Charlie Wilson’s War states explicitly, it’s not really a country in the way Westerners think of countries—it’s more like a time warp back to a tribal era that hasn’t existed in most of Europe since at least the 19th century and not in the United States since European colonizers showed up.

Still, in making this criticism I have the unfair benefit of hindsight: in the 1980s, a lot of contemporaneous accounts show that the fall of the Soviet Union was far from obvious. Plenty of people who lived then have said that the Soviet Union’s impending demise wasn’t obvious, and so to Wilson and others, the theoretical problem of the United States one day fighting against various ideological and other foes gathered under the cover of militant Islam probably wouldn’t have appeared nearly as compelling as the Soviet Union itself. Nonetheless, Wilson showed questionable judgment and a basic disregard for consequences in other foreign policy areas, as when he supported the Israeli Lavi fighter, even though the technology used in that fighter might have been exported to China since. Oops. But even if the geopolitical situation doesn’t always support Charlie Wilson’s War’s aw-shucks arguments, Wilson was still a hell of a guy to follow, even if he’s another example of a politician who disobeys the idiotic laws relating to drugs that his legislative body created and upholds till today.

What might be most notable about this book is what Crile doesn’t, and can’t, really know: why Wilson did what he did. It was so out-of-character that in a novel it would be almost unbelievable for a boozy, playboy Congressman to get fired up with such ideological and moral fervor, and only a satire could make it work, as in Christopher Buckley’s hilarious and apt Little Green Men or Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. This is nonfiction, however, and for years Wilson passed millions and then hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons to Afghan fighters without anyone in the press noticing. To my eyes, at least, it’s not obvious what moved him beyond the surface reasons given. In addition, I have to ask: why Afghanistan? Why in 1983? The unknowable daunts us and Crile’s ability to explain. This is no slander on him, but rather a meditation on the vagaries of historical causation and what moves people to act in all the strange ways we do.

The book is not without fault. James Fallows wrote:

Here is something that is common knowledge in the publishing business but that few “normal” readers know: that the average article in a good magazine is much, much more carefully edited than almost any book. Yes, books can last forever while magazines go away after a week or month. But in a high-end magazine – like, well, the Atlantic, or the New Yorker, or the New York Review of Books, or one of a dozen others that invest in good copy editors and fact checkers – you’re far less likely to find typos, grammar errors, careless repetitions and contradictions, or simple made-up facts than you’ll find in books.

Those issues are a small but persistent problem in Charlie Wilson’s War. The same lines of Kipling are quoted twice; Gust Avrakotos, Wilson’s CIA insider, is constantly being referred to as a Greek from Aliquippa ; we learn on page 33 that “[Charlie Wilson] now served on a committee that doled out the nation’s money: fifty men appropriating $500 billion a year.” On page 77, Wilson joins the House Appropriations Committee: “That move had made Wilson a player—one of fifty House members with a vote on how the government’s $500 billion annual budget would be spent.” Really? I had no idea. Crile says, “Diplomats are good at sensing which way the political winds are blowing […]” and that if Wilson had pursued traditional legislative means he, “would have been told in no uncertain terms to back off.” Later, we find out that “For all practical purposes, the Mi-24 Hind flying gunship […]” The depressing thing about these cliches is that they could’ve been easily avoided through better editing, and they detract from an otherwise good and worthwhile book that’s about politics and history, as well as the specific life and times of Charlie Wilson.

The narrative drive and sense of play keep one reading through minor problems, and quotes quotes from Charlie and his CIA henchmen Avrakotos liven the narrative with scatological and sexual metaphors. Charlie gets numerous perks and describes himself as getting one because “I’m the only one of the committee who likes women and whiskey, and we need to be represented.” Amen. And that Amen is for honesty over hypocrisy if nothing else. And Wilson had what appears to be honest conviction, something that most politicians, perhaps like their constituents, lack.

*This spelling follows the form of the book.