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John Updike's "Lifeguard"

February 15, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

John Updike’s “Lifeguard” is too deep a story to be so clever and too clever to be so deep. In it, an unnamed lifeguard and theology student beautifully conflates his two worlds, living in one nine months of the year and the other for that last quarter around the sun, to paraphrase the narrator. In sitting on the chair, he surveys the beach as one might imagine God surveying the Earth, with the power to save lives. The distance of the guard from his patrons and the slightly patronizing air he must assume to protect them from themselves is in part the image of God in the lifeguard, raised up and looking down, just as the narrator’s perspective takes on the heady quality of one above the fray. Maybe he just hasn’t joined it: “Someday my alertness will bear fruit; from near the horizon there will arise, delicious, translucent, like a green bell above the water, the call for help, the call, a call, it saddens me to confess, that I have yet to hear.”

Is there any point in summarizing the short story? It’s five pages, and in explicating its beauty I destroy it, like stepping on the flower I mean to pick. “Lifeguard” might answer that “Swimming offers a parable. We struggle and thrash, and drown; we succumb, even in despair, and float, and are saved.” We thrash to describe what we experience, too, and like the student, we’re lost in metaphoric clouds, and yet aware:

You are offended that a divinity student lusts? What prigs the unchurched are! Are not our assaults on the supernatural lascivious, a kind of indecency? If only you knew what de Sadian degradations, what frightful psychological spelunking, our gentle transcendentalist professors set us to, as preparation for our work, which is to shine in darkness.

I feel that my lust makes me glow; I grow cold in my chair, like a torch of ice, as I study beauty. I have studied much of it, wearing all styles of bathing suit and facial expression, and have come to this conclusion:

But to read the conclusion, you’ll have to read the story. It’s not a conclusion that, I suspect, many are likely to agree with, but it’s oddly appropriate, like a recipe mixing cocoa and chili that nonetheless works. And notice the little binaries and paradoxes Updike sets: the lust in the student of God, the “torch of ice,” the shining in darkness not thanks to goodness, but thanks to that lust. Updike would probably chastise me for confusing divinity and theology students, if there is some difference between the two I’m unaware of it. But I am aware of how astonishing this story is, even to me, the person who usually doesn’t like short stories because they end just as I’m finally getting into them.

In another, the eponymous lifeguard thinks that “I wake at odd hours and in the shuddering darkness and silence and feel my death rushing toward me like an express train” It shows a bit of the Northeastern character of the story, since California, Arizona, or Florida, the first two being places I’ve lived, wouldn’t have express trains—they’d have cars, and you’d be crushed by an SUV rather than an express train. “Lifeguard,” published in 1961, came to me by way of the New Yorker’s “Picked-Up Pieces: Moments from a half century of Updike.” In 2006, “My Father’s Tears” was published, and it included this paragraph:

We did not foresee, that moment on the platform as the signal bells a half mile down the tracks warned of my train’s approach, that within a decade passenger service to Philadelphia would stop, and that eventually the station, like stations all across the East, would be padlocked and boarded up. It stood on its empty acre of asphalt parking space like an oversized mausoleum. All the life it had once contained was sealed into silence, and for most of the rest of the century it ignominiously waited, in this city where progress was slow, to be razed.

Perhaps Updike was aware of the anachronistic train metaphor when he used it. Or perhaps he wanted us to place “Lifeguard” in an earlier era, one where religion was more likely to be taken seriously by serious people instead of being usurped by the unbelievers like me or the foolish Sarah Palins of the world. Or Updike recalled his own youth in “Lifeguard,” standing with his father on the soon-to-be-closed platform. Regardless of its temporal meaning, that sentence—“I wake at odd hours and in the shuddering darkness and silence and feel my death rushing toward me like an express train”—could so easily be a cliche, and yet in the context it’s not. “Lifeguard” is a short story that makes me suddenly appreciate the short story and perceive the potential of the form, and it makes me want to read more short stories and more Updike in the search for other works as profound and clever. I’ve not read much Updike—friends keep recommending the Rabbit novels and The Witches of Eastwick, which I keep delaying for no articulated reason beyond the lengthening of my “to read” pile, which grows faster than the time in which those books are to be read. Updike, however, might now have taken a shortcut to the top.

John Updike’s “Lifeguard”

February 15, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

John Updike’s “Lifeguard” is too deep a story to be so clever and too clever to be so deep. In it, an unnamed lifeguard and theology student beautifully conflates his two worlds, living in one nine months of the year and the other for that last quarter around the sun, to paraphrase the narrator. In sitting on the chair, he surveys the beach as one might imagine God surveying the Earth, with the power to save lives. The distance of the guard from his patrons and the slightly patronizing air he must assume to protect them from themselves is in part the image of God in the lifeguard, raised up and looking down, just as the narrator’s perspective takes on the heady quality of one above the fray. Maybe he just hasn’t joined it: “Someday my alertness will bear fruit; from near the horizon there will arise, delicious, translucent, like a green bell above the water, the call for help, the call, a call, it saddens me to confess, that I have yet to hear.”

Is there any point in summarizing the short story? It’s five pages, and in explicating its beauty I destroy it, like stepping on the flower I mean to pick. “Lifeguard” might answer that “Swimming offers a parable. We struggle and thrash, and drown; we succumb, even in despair, and float, and are saved.” We thrash to describe what we experience, too, and like the student, we’re lost in metaphoric clouds, and yet aware:

You are offended that a divinity student lusts? What prigs the unchurched are! Are not our assaults on the supernatural lascivious, a kind of indecency? If only you knew what de Sadian degradations, what frightful psychological spelunking, our gentle transcendentalist professors set us to, as preparation for our work, which is to shine in darkness.

I feel that my lust makes me glow; I grow cold in my chair, like a torch of ice, as I study beauty. I have studied much of it, wearing all styles of bathing suit and facial expression, and have come to this conclusion:

But to read the conclusion, you’ll have to read the story. It’s not a conclusion that, I suspect, many are likely to agree with, but it’s oddly appropriate, like a recipe mixing cocoa and chili that nonetheless works. And notice the little binaries and paradoxes Updike sets: the lust in the student of God, the “torch of ice,” the shining in darkness not thanks to goodness, but thanks to that lust. Updike would probably chastise me for confusing divinity and theology students, if there is some difference between the two I’m unaware of it. But I am aware of how astonishing this story is, even to me, the person who usually doesn’t like short stories because they end just as I’m finally getting into them.

In another, the eponymous lifeguard thinks that “I wake at odd hours and in the shuddering darkness and silence and feel my death rushing toward me like an express train” It shows a bit of the Northeastern character of the story, since California, Arizona, or Florida, the first two being places I’ve lived, wouldn’t have express trains—they’d have cars, and you’d be crushed by an SUV rather than an express train. “Lifeguard,” published in 1961, came to me by way of the New Yorker’s “Picked-Up Pieces: Moments from a half century of Updike.” In 2006, “My Father’s Tears” was published, and it included this paragraph:

We did not foresee, that moment on the platform as the signal bells a half mile down the tracks warned of my train’s approach, that within a decade passenger service to Philadelphia would stop, and that eventually the station, like stations all across the East, would be padlocked and boarded up. It stood on its empty acre of asphalt parking space like an oversized mausoleum. All the life it had once contained was sealed into silence, and for most of the rest of the century it ignominiously waited, in this city where progress was slow, to be razed.

Perhaps Updike was aware of the anachronistic train metaphor when he used it. Or perhaps he wanted us to place “Lifeguard” in an earlier era, one where religion was more likely to be taken seriously by serious people instead of being usurped by the unbelievers like me or the foolish Sarah Palins of the world. Or Updike recalled his own youth in “Lifeguard,” standing with his father on the soon-to-be-closed platform. Regardless of its temporal meaning, that sentence—“I wake at odd hours and in the shuddering darkness and silence and feel my death rushing toward me like an express train”—could so easily be a cliche, and yet in the context it’s not. “Lifeguard” is a short story that makes me suddenly appreciate the short story and perceive the potential of the form, and it makes me want to read more short stories and more Updike in the search for other works as profound and clever. I’ve not read much Updike—friends keep recommending the Rabbit novels and The Witches of Eastwick, which I keep delaying for no articulated reason beyond the lengthening of my “to read” pile, which grows faster than the time in which those books are to be read. Updike, however, might now have taken a shortcut to the top.

The Sot-Weed Factor — John Barth

February 9, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, a small, abstract decision to remain “innocent”—whatever that means—propels would-be poet Ebenezer Cooke to flee London for colonial Maryland, largely because he refuses to “swive” a prostitute thanks to his sudden love for her and then refuses to pay for her time, causing her pimp and maybe boyfriend (except for his lack of, um, ability, as we later learn), to threaten him. In turn, Burlingame—who formerly tutored Ebenezer and his twin, Anna—miraculously reappears in a variety of guises. Identities are constantly mistaken, and the shifting desires of characters revolve around Ebenezer like planets around the sun, and yet Ebenezer’s attempts not to be part of what he first sees as degraded life that causes him much pain and us much mirth.

There is something about vast, extraordinary novels like The Sot-Weed Factor that makes it hard to begin writing about them, for, if done poorly, a warning is sufficient, but if done well, they contain such multitudes that to dwell on only one seems foolish, like describing only the Northeastern cities of the United States as representing the whole country. To write about The Sot-Weed Factor as a whole would take a book half as long again as the 750-page book already in hand. The Sot-Weed Factor almost defies summarization by casting a mocking eye on the ability to simplify a hopelessly entangled world. Ebenezer’s hopeless attempts at stability certainly to fall apart:

“The world can alter a man entirely, Eben, or he can alter himself, down to his very essence.  Did you now by your own testimony resolve, not that you were, but you’d be a virgin and poet from that moment hence?  Nay, a man must alter willy-nilly in’s flight to the grave; he is a river running seawards, that is ne’er the same from hour to hour. What is there in the Maryland Laureate of the boy I fetched from Magdalene 
College?”

“The less the better!” Ebenzer replied. “Yet I am still Eben Cooke, though haply not the same Eben Cooke […]”

Is he? He seems quite a different Eben Cooke at the end, doubting not only the beliefs of the earlier Eben Cooke but doubting beliefs altogether, indicating that the world has quite altered the man or vice-versa. It’s probably not a coincidence that one chapter title says Ebenezer “reflects a reflection,” and one character tells him to “Speak literally, an’t please you, if only for a sentence, and lay open plainly what is signified by all this talk of death and midwives and the rest of the allegory.” Eben can’t, naturally, and calls of “contrivance!” and “S’heart!” He chastises his servant, Bertrand, for Bertrand’s unusual take on morality that’s worth quoting in full to give some flavor of the novel:

“The fact is, sir, my Betsy, who is a hot-blooded, affectionate lass, hath the bad luck to be married, and that to a lackluster chilly fellow whose only passions are ambition and miserliness, and who, though he’d like a sturdy son to bring home extra wages, is as sparing with caresses as with coins. Such a money-grubber is he that, after a day’s work as a clerk’s apprentice in the Customs-House, he labors half the night as a fiddler in Locket’s to put by an extra crown, with the excuse ’tis a nest egg against the day she finds herself with child. But ‘sblood, ’tis such a tax on his time that he scarce sees her from one day to the next and on his strength that he hath not the wherewithal to roger what time he’s with her! It seemed a sinful waste to me to see, on the one hand, poor Betsy alone and all a-fidget for want of husbanding, and on the other her husband Ralph a-hoarding money to no purpose, and so like a proper Samaritan I did what I could for the both of ’em: Ralph fiddled and I diddled.”

“How’s that, you rascal? The both of ’em! Small favor to the husband, to bless him with horns! What a villainy!”

“Ah, on the contrary, sir, if I may say so, ’twas a double boon I did him, for not only did I plow his field, which else had lain fallow, but seeded it as well, and from every sign ’twill be a bumper crop come fall.”

Bertrand, the novel implies, might be more right than Ebenezer in the topsy-turvy morality that life tends to inspire. Notice within that passage the clever echoes and doublings within: the alliteration of “tax” and time,” the repeated “l” sound in “lackluster chilly fellow,” and the “sturdy son.” Rhymes play a role too: “Ralph fiddled and I diddled!” Doubling (and tripling) plays a role throughout the novel: Anna’s dedication both inspires and causes great trouble, while Burlingame switches sides so many times that one ceases to know which “side” is which.

“Miraculous” should appear in any attempt at describing The Sot-Weed Factor, as coincidences abound enough to make crossing the suspension bridge of disbelief as perilous as that the ocean in a colonial ship. For Ebenezer, the ship crossings certainly are perilous. Oh, and all this happens in the late 1600s, a time more given to delicate evasions of savagery, lust, lasciviousness, and violence in Barth’s reading than any other I know. Seldom have more attributes more normally found in tragedy employed in comedy comedy. The “French Pox,” also known more recently as the clap and many other nicknames besides, is extraordinarily amusing, even in a time when it more commonly led to death and disfigurement. And the heroic explorers of the “New World,” turn out about as heroic in many circumstances as Ebenezer is a poet. At the same time, the taboo attraction between Ebenezer and Anna might not be as dark as one expects it to be, and the only so caught up in sibling relationships I’ve found is John Irving’s The Hotel New Hampshire.

A vast and improbable web forms between characters, like the web so well described in All the King’s Men:

Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time he learned that the world is all of one piece. He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether you meant to brush the web of things. Your happy foot or your gay wing may have brushed it ever so lightly, but what happens always happens and there is the spider, bearded black and with his great faceted eyes glittering like mirrors in the sun, or like God’s eye, and the fangs dripping.

For Ebenezer, that web is infested with voracious and lascivious spiders, and in his attempts to stay off the web Ebenezer only becomes more trapped in it. He touches those strands, sending vibrations ricocheting outwards even when he doesn’t mean to. There can be no onlookers in life and stories, only players, and trying to sit out is itself a play, as Ebenezer discovers to his displeasure and our glee.

Summary Judgment: The Island of the Day Before, The Salterton Trilogy, and The Brief History of the Dead

February 1, 2009 By in Books, Briefly Noted, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“Summary Judgment” is a new and occasional feature not unlike the “Books Briefly Noted” section in the New Yorker.

* The more I read of Eco, the more I think of him as an author of extremes in terms of accomplishment: his great books have the shock, astonishment, inevitably, and beauty that make them great, while his weaker ones can descend into bland self-parody or simple boredom. The Island of the Day Before rests firmly in the latter camp. Like Robert Penn Warren or Melville, Eco’s best novels, like The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, more than excuse The Island of the Day Before. In this case, Amazon’s 448 used copies of the hardcover edition are available starting at $0.01 for a very good reason.

The unnamed “I” narrating the Island of the Day Before says that Roberto, a man cast on a dream-like abandoned ship in the mid-seventeenth century; Roberto is about to explore the dream ship, and on the verge of his exploration we are interrupted:

Or, rather, he does not set out at once. I must crave indulgence, but it is Roberto who, in telling this to the Lady, contradicts himself—an indication that he does not tell in complete detail what has happened to him, but instead tries to construct his letter like a story or, more, like a sketch for what could become both letter and story, and he writes without deciding what things he will select later; he drafts, so to speak, the pieces of his chessboard without immediately establishing which to move and how to deploy them.

Eco is describing the author’s troubles here, but its self-consciousness is more irritating than enlightening: save such disquisitions for literary essays rather than literature, where action should propel the reader to care before metaphysical blathering lulls him to sleep. It’s an intensely annoying affectation that continues throughout at least the first hundred pages. Who is the Lady ostentatiously mentioned? By midway through the novel, when I gave up, we hadn’t learned, and she remained a cloying illusive presence. Some novels use the layered story structure well—including The Name of the Rose, Heart of Darkness, William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, and some of John Barth’s novels—but The Island of the Day Before among them.

You can find good explanations of what Eco is attempting in Barth’s The Friday Book and Further Fridays, and when the explanation is better than the specific work of art manifesting a phenomenon, you know that work of art—in this case a novel—has failed its greatest test: to make you feel. If the ghost ship interruptions had been removed and the sections about Roberto streamlined into something more conventional but, for this material, probably more appropriate, I think The Island of the Day Before would’ve worked much better.

* I re-read Robert Davies’ The Salterton Trilogy, which tended to reinforce my initial impression of it being the least of his works, though still quite good. He doesn’t really find his legs until the second half of A Mixture of Frailties, the novel in which provincial Canadian Monica Gall ends up in England, discovering what art she had and how to free herself through music. She’s the most developed character in the trilogy, and if she is at times more passive than she should be, it’s at least forgivable.

The other two novels are mixed: the first, Tempest-Tost, is clever but has a tendency to interrupt the main story too often for elaborate backstory on characters, and this kind of thing is much more organic in The Deptford Trilogy. With Tempest-Tost, a community theater—er, excuse me, theatre—is performing The Tempest, which unleashes mini teapot tempests among many members of its conniving cast, most notably the floppy, self-satisfied math teacher Hector Mackilwraith, a man who is about forty but, as one character, says: “Spiritually—if one may use the word of Hector—he’s been seventy for years.” For that reason he’s one of the more interesting characters, a study in premature maturity. That he doesn’t realize it makes him officious, hilarious and pathetic at the same time. There’s a great speech about Mackilwraith that’s somewhat misplaced and also indicative of the novel’s problems:

I think it’s [I leave the “it” blank intentionally] the logical outcome of his education and the sort of life he has led. He’s vulgar. I don’t mean just that he wears awful suits and probably eats awful food: I mean that he has a crass soul. He thinks that when his belly is full and his safe, he’s got the world by the tail. He has never found out anything about himself, so how can he know anything about other people. The condition of the vulgarian is that he never expects anything good or bad that happens to him to be the result of his own personality; he always thinks it’s Fate, especially if it’s bad. The only people who make any sense in the world are those who know that whatever happens to them has its roots in what they are.

All of that is true, but it’s also somewhat awkward to have long, play-like soliloquies spout from characters in novels like . If this were an isolated example, one could let it pass, but the whole The Salterton Trilogy is filled with them. Davies’ later work has similar long commentaries, but they’re better integrated with the characters’ personalities and with the plot. This one is particularly noticeable because the sentiment expressed is interesting, but it’s easy to pass it as the scene it’s embedded in goes from person to person, each of whom diagnoses Mackilwraith’s psychological problems. Still, The Salterton Trilogy is fun, but read The Deptford Trilogy and the Cornish Trilogy first, both of which show Davies’ powers at their zenith.

* Kevin Brockmeier’s The Brief History of the Dead isn’t so much a narrative as a series of vignettes about two worlds: that of the living, which has been swept by a plague that’s a convenient but not overly ostentatious metaphor for corporate greed (“The ice cap was already melting, after all, pouring into the ocean by the tankerload, and the corporation might as well take advantage of it while they still could”) and zombification, while the other follows an almost pastoral city world or holding chamber for those heading from one zone—life—to another, which is left to the reader’s imagination.

It’s a clever set up, but one narrative thread should have predominated over the other; the switchbacks make it feel too dead, too abstract, like the world of the dead who are stuck in their strange city. Although there’s space for anti-corporate screeds in novels, this one is particularly blatant. Coca Cola is, if not the bad guy, then at least a vector for the bad guy, implying that Coca Cola executives are, if not evil in and of themselves, are at least the somewhat witting agents of evil. Save it for your alt-weekly column and give us more story and less ideology.

* Mordechai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman remains mostly confusion around page 100, but it doesn’t have quite the amusement needed to propel me to read on. The novel lacks a discernible backbone running through, while the tedium of continuing to track what, if anything, is happening outweighs the pleasure of occasional jokes. It’ll remain shelved next to Barney’s Version because it feels like it might have buried promise that I’ve yet to unearth.

The Gift — Lewis Hyde

January 27, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Essays, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

Lewis Hyde’s The Gift is one of these frustrating books whose last chapter is vastly better than any other and whose main point is somehow true even as the support for that point is weak, nonexistent, or wrong. He argues, reasonably enough, that contemporary Western capitalist societies tend to undervalue creativity in the arts, particularly when said creativity doesn’t sell. But in trying to make his point, he too pretends that a firewall exists between the creative, “gift” economies and the exchange/contract economies. At the end he decides the two can be reconciled, but that occurs after a series of irritating pronouncements with unsubtle jabs the exchange/contract economy. Nonetheless, The Gift made me think differently about the world by the time I finished with it, which few books do. I’ll swing back to that at the end, because The Gift also deserves plenty of criticism.

Although The Gift is a book, it feels like a long magazine article might have been the more appropriate form for it. Do we really need more than 50 pages about American Indian gift exchange cultures? And the chapters on Ezra Pound seems particularly worthless, and the one on Whitman interesting but overlong—a microcosm for The Gift as a whole. Some of its metaphors strain credulity and seem almost deliberately narrow, as when Hyde writes:

Gifts of peace have the same synthetic character. Gifts have always constituted peace overtures among tribal groups and they still signify the close of war in the modern world, as when the United States helped Japan to rebuild after the Second World War. A gift is often the first step toward normalized relations. (To take a negative example, the United States did not offer aid to Vietnam after the war. […])

The United States didn’t rebuilt Japan in hopes of joining hands and singing about world harmony—the goal was to build Japan as a bulwark against Communism in Asia. The “gifts” were probably closer to bribes. At the same time, the United States didn’t win in Vietnam, which might explain why no foreign aid money went to the country; if the North had been overrun and destroyed, then it might have been rebuilt with American dollars. Likewise, the United States’ proxy war in Afghanistan resulted in little subsequent aid, as discussed at the end of George Crile’s Charlie Wilson’s War.

I’m not sure this shows anything other than Hyde failed in this example, but he does in many others too. In a footnote, he says:

There is no technology, no time-saving device that can alter the rhythms of creative labor. When the worth of labor is expressed in terms of exchange value, therefore, creativity is automatically devalued every time there is an advance in the technology of work.

Time-saving devices can free up more time for creative labor: there are more writers and artists today than there were in, say, 1800, in part because most people aren’t engaged in backbreaking farming or 15-hour days in factories. Education levels have risen enormously, in part thanks largely to time-saving devices that give us more time to study and more wealth to devote to schools, libraries, and the like. Furthermore, labor expressed in exchange value does not automatically devalue creativity—establishing things like copyright, which allowed writers and others to derive an independent income from their work, if anything increased the worth of creative labor for people like writers. And creativity is not limited to what we think of as traditional arts—for example, computer programming is often enormously creative, and those who tend to be maximally creative also tend to be better compensated than those who aren’t. If Hyde were going to say that “When the worth of labor is expressed in terms of exchange value, creativity can be devalued,” I would agree: the number of poets whose contribution can be measured monetarily is small. As Gabriel Zaid says in So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance, “[…] the conversation continues, unheeded by television, which will never report: ‘Yesterday, a student read Socrates’ Apology and felt free.’ ”

Such problems occur throughout the book, although they’re alleviated in the conclusion, where Hyde retreats on many of his more ridiculous assertions. He says:

[…] my own ideas underwent a bit of a re-formation. I began to understand that the permission to usure is also a permission to trade between two spheres [the commercial and gift economies]. The boundary can be permeable. Gift-increase (unreckoned, positive reciprocity) may be converted into market-increase (reckoned, negative reciprocity). And vice versa: the interest that a stranger pays on a loan may be brought into the center and converted into gifts. Put more generally, within certain limits what has been given us as a gift may be sold in the marketplace and what has been earned in the marketplace may be given as a gift.

Damn: if only that line of reasonable thinking had informed the entire book. It didn’t, which render sections of The Gift reminiscent of freshman-year manifestos written by tipsy students who just finished Marx. Despite those problems, some sections early fascinate, like the chapter on “The Gift Community,” where Hyde says:

Is is a rare society that can be sustained by bonds of affection alone; most, and particularly mass societies, must have as well those unions which are sanctioned and enforced by law that is detached from feeling. But just as the Roman saw the familia divided into res and personae, the modern world has seen the extension of law further and further into what was earlier the exclusive realm of the heart.

The more one tries to regulate the affairs of the heart, the less those affairs seem like they are of the heart. Dan Ariely and Tim Harford make similar observations, backed up by experiments, in Predictably Irrational and The Logic of Life, respectively. And institutions are fond of exploiting the gift economy by masquerading their exchange/commercial actions. For example, Division I American college sports piggyback on the gift economy: although to football, basketball and baseball players are essentially professionals, high-caliber universities pretend that tuition is a “gift” even as the same universities extract millions of dollars in television and merchandising revenue from such players. The idea that Division I players are amateurs has become increasingly absurd, much as the Olympics have been professionalized. In Beer and Circus: How Big-Time Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education, Murray Sperber even argues that the sports mentality harms students.

Yet I can’t help but imagine places where gift economies don’t apply at all, and they’re often not very pleasant. As I write this, I sit in a Tucson airpot bar. Airports have everything wrong with them: they are transitional, one-off spaces filled with strangers, the “restaurants” they offer consist of pre-made food with character slightly above a TV dinner, and for some reason we as a society have decided that Constitution rights and privacy don’t apply here. People I don’t know can stop me at will, and merely flying requires that I submit to security theater that is simultaneously ineffective and invasive. Everything is exorbitantly expensive but not of particularly high quality. Menus don’t have beer prices on them.

The airport, in short, is designed to extract money from a captive audience; this might be in part why I don’t care much for sports stadiums, Disneyland, and other areas where I feel vaguely captive. In Great American Cities (to use Jane Jacob’s phrase), something is always happening, there is always another place down the street, and you can decide to be as invested or anonymous in society as you like. In contrast, airpots feel like a trap: you can’t choose to avoid them, at least not without enormous costs in terms of time, money, and concentration. Maybe I wrote about college sports above because a few basketball games are playing around me, along with facile, noisy political news that’s more like a talk show than newspaper. If there were a bar in the Tucson airport without this ceaseless parade of visual noise, I would go to it. I’m trapped in an extreme form of the market economy, where no reciprocity exists and the gift is hidden and completely subservient to commerce. I might not have the gift, but regardless of whether I do, I’m frustrated here, where the food is more fuel more pleasure, as if choosing between burritos and pasta is like choosing between octane grades. Good chefs are artists, and maybe none could work in the security of an airport. I only wish that I had somewhere quiet and comfortable to sit. Neither kind of place exists in airports, unless you pay for it, and, again, I have no choice but to participate. At least with the most market, you have a choice.

In short, there are few better places to instill sympathy to the arguments of a book like The Gift, which, for all its problems in expression, nonetheless drives at a serious problem in market economies that seem unlikely to depart. They are not as serious as Hyde makes them out to be—I too would like it if more people read Saul Bellow and fewer watched Flavor of Love, a show I’ve never seen but have heard allusions to at least three times in the last week—and the market has a habit of self-correction, but that doesn’t mean they do not exist. And The Gift gives one a better way for analyzing the world and believing in creative acts that don’t necessary have immediate financial gain.

Despite my antipathy towards The Gift I occasionally find myself recommending it, albeit with caveats attached. It threads an argument that deserves to be more often heard in a non-sentimental or strident context: that not all worthy forms of creativity are financially remunerated adequately but that they are valuable nonetheless. The Gift is not brilliant, as the jacket copy claims, but art deserves all the defense it can muster, but over the long term, I suspect that art will be its own defense.

Watchmen — Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

January 20, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

I fell for the hype surrounding the movie version of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, a mostly indifferent graphic novel: many if not all of its characters seemed flat, especially Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach, whose fearful misogyny might be typical of equally fearful teenage boys and some highly right-wing politicians, but in the story he came off more as a case of amateur psychoanalysis combined with arrested development masquerading as personality. (For some reason I’m reminded of the New Found Glory song “Something I Call Personality.” This bodes ill for Watchmen.) Others are better, maybe, but still have trouble with platitudes and leaving the realm of the silly—and this in a work with no sense of humor.

To be sure, Watchmen has many intriguing and unusual aspects, chief among them that most of the “superheroes” don’t seem to actually have special powers from an unusual source, as happens in Spiderman or the X-Men; rather, they decide to don costumes and kick ass and learn on the job, rather like 40-year-old office workers who decide to become Olympic-caliber swimmers. Instant skill acquisition is (arguably) less realistic than most superhero stories, as a single person is, more likely than not, going to get his ass kicked by four guys no matter how skillful he is. But realism has never been the genre’s strong point, and I like the postmodern tweaking involved. Still, I also wish that someone had read On Faerie Stories.

Another unusual tactic: the panels in Watchmen are temporally intermixed and sometimes the scenes jump around, so following the action can resemble assembling a Faulkner-esque jigsaw puzzle more than walking the traditional storyline. It’s noirish in places, especially when Rorschach is speaking; Watchmen opens with him thinking that “The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over all the vermin will die.” The next panel says, “The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout ‘save us!’ ” Er, well, maybe, or maybe these notes read like a teenager’s angry musing after being jilted by the girl he wants.

Dr. Atomic suffers from a similar brand of flatness: he’s a blue character of seemingly infinite power whose presence wrecks whatever semblance of balance the book might otherwise have. In The Lord of the Rings, one is ceaselessly aware of limitations on power, and a persistent weakness of many fantasy novels is the tendency for a character to become God-like, at which point conflict disappears—and so does plot. Having one built-in from the beginning, and particularly one who likes to spout low-grade philosophy, seems more a weakness than strength. Likewise some of the awkward history lessons, as when the only female character, Laurie, interacts with virtually anyone. She’s explained away as a ditz, while Rorschach’s darkness gets a movie-of-the-week treatment regarding his past, which includes his mother’s prostitution. The novel’s view of women is not quite so retrograde as it appears at first glance, but nor is it particularly palatable, even by the end.

There’s a bit too much imagining aloud—page 20 of chapter 8 demonstrates it well, with conversations designed chiefly to impart information to the reader, rather than other characters. Watchmen reinforces rather than obviates the somewhat pervasive sense that graphic or graphic novels are lesser forms of art than text novels. This is unfair, of course—one need only look at one of Moore’s later works, like Lost Girls, to see the genre’s potential fulfilled—but a certain snobbishness sneaks up nonetheless. The failure of utopian dreams and the triumph of pragmatism over ideology are promising developments in the story and for the genre, but the expression of those fundamental ideas isn’t sufficiently deep to make the ideas transcend their circumstances, just as the characters never stop being characters and start being people. No matter its technical virtuosity or innovation, a work of narrative that fails that test can’t be truly great.

Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev and The Gift of Asher Lev

January 7, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Read Chaim Potok’s strange yet compelling My Name Is Asher Lev and skip its deracinated sequel, The Gift of Asher Lev.

My Name is Asher Lev concerns a boy divided between the drive for art that possesses him and the Hasidic religion into which he is born, which is somewhat like the Jewish equivalent of fundamentalist Christians. Think of his sect like the Verbovers of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The duality inherent in mixed loyalties is hardly a new topic; the most obvious example I know of is Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund. But it’s done well here, and one feels Asher’s agony as he attempts to tread the artist’s path and the Hasidim’s. Inside, however, the artist predominates, and, as is typical in American fiction, self identity trumps group identity, as it should. Maybe Asher can’t help it. As a young man, he

began to realize that something was happening to my eyes. I looked at my father and saw lines and planes I had never seen before. I could feel with my eyes. […] I could feel texture and color.

The struggle to develop his eye and practice his visual art while remaining faithful to the extreme interpretations and teachings of religion fuels the novel’s conflict. Asher doesn’t give up, and if at times the pompousness of the art talk almost overwhelms, other moments of genuine emotion make up for near bombast. In some criticism of Asher’s art within the novel, one senses the same kind of criticism that might be used against Potok: sentimentality and a rejection of trends in art hobble him. Both novels act as defenses against that charge, and they are mostly successful. In growing up, Asher makes the difficult choices growing up entails. We think he makes the correct trade-offs, but in such a milieu, those trade-offs are grave indeed.

Parts of the novel fail, like a painting askew: a mythic ancestor arrives in Asher’s dreams for no particular point, and many descriptions are flat, especially given all the discussions of how an artist sees. Ones like this appear over and over:

I got off the train and climbed the stairs to the street. It was cold and wet and gray. A bitter wind blew against the tall buildings.

or

The beds were covered with spreads. The refrigerator hummed softly. The apartment was neat and clean and faintly resonant with its own silence.

or

It was a large waiting room with white walls, a single window in the wall to my right, and a heavy wooden door in the wall across from the window. There was a desk beneath the window and chairs along the walls.

Banal description will hardly kill a novel, but if they are sufficiently banal and frequent, why include them? Why describe places that are everyplace and weather that’s as bad as the weather anywhere? There is no reason, and part of the reason I called My Name is Asher Lev strange in the first paragraph is because these descriptive problems are not so enormous that they capsize the novel.

Alas, The Gift of Asher Lev is a disappointment compared to My Name is Asher Lev. One sees no growth, little reconciliation, and no useful understanding for the state of the first two in my list. The world is ambiguous, yes, and that’s pounded into our heads. Many great novels come to no conclusions but better illuminate the confusion of the life—such as Moby Dick—but The Gift of Asher Lev is not among them. Characters like Lev’s boorish, ignorant cousins are comic book foils that contrast with the Rebbe’s wisdom. Devorah has all the character of an empty housewife, despite the references to her existence

Moment of humor are a change, but they’re too few to be a signifiant one. Asher, growing tired of his community’s ceaseless suspicion of his life—it is hard to refer to being an artist as a mere “profession”—responds to one inconsiderate inquiry by saying “That’s why I became an artist. So I wouldn’t have to worry about what other people think. You hit the nail right on the head, Kroner.”

The classroom scene in Asher’s daughter’s Yeshiva is the book’s fulcrum and chief reason for interest, and it’s reminiscent of Barth’s metaphor of the soft-shell blue crab in The Friday Book, which all interested in the definition and meaning of art should read for that essay alone. In Potok’s rendition, Asher draws a ram in three ways: once poorly, like a child, again realistically, like a photograph, and again with portions exaggerated for effect, like an artist. He asks a class of children rhetorically, “Aren’t all three different ways of seeing the same object?” and as a defense of the subjectivity merging with the individual’s perception it’s wonderful. As a short story, it would be equally good. As a scene in a novel, it’s like an island rising above an otherwise cold sea.

We find too few of those islands, and transcendent pieces of writing are too rare and disconnected from the story. Using a different metaphor, one could say that too many white spaces lack connective tissue and simple are. One other good example of the good in this novel: Asher explains his gift by saying “I don’t hope to accomplish anything. I just do it,” which is as good an artist’s credo as any, albeit one that many, many artists have espoused in various forms at various times. Asher’s wife, Devorah, says at one point that “We hear a song or read a story, and the good feelings we get don’t remain inside us. We are either anticipating them, or we’ve had them and they’re gone. We never experience them as now.” Well, maybe, and she’s describing the specious present that William James wrote about. It’s not a bad thought, but it’s underdeveloped, like most of this novel. My Name is Asher Lev is stronger and less curmudgeonly. On page 104 of The Gift of Asher Lev, he thinks that “The ordinary was king. And the courtiers were popularization, shallowness, doubt, cynicism. The century was exhausted.” Five pages later, a friend says of the art world, “There is too much ersatz work being done now, calculated gestures everywhere, cultural entertainment.” Maybe there is: but so what? And even if the evils of cultural entertainment are upon us, one isn’t obliged to indulge them. How about less complaining and faux existentialism and more work?

You’ll find it, but in My Name is Asher Lev. I will end reiterating the point made in the first paragraph: pretend that My Name is Asher Lev has no sequel. You’ll like it better.

Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev and The Gift of Asher Lev

January 7, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Read Chaim Potok’s strange yet compelling My Name Is Asher Lev and skip its deracinated sequel, The Gift of Asher Lev.

My Name is Asher Lev concerns a boy divided between the drive for art that possesses him and the Hasidic religion into which he is born, which is somewhat like the Jewish equivalent of fundamentalist Christians. Think of his sect like the Verbovers of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The duality inherent in mixed loyalties is hardly a new topic; the most obvious example I know of is Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund. But it’s done well here, and one feels Asher’s agony as he attempts to tread the artist’s path and the Hasidim’s. Inside, however, the artist predominates, and, as is typical in American fiction, self identity trumps group identity, as it should. Maybe Asher can’t help it. As a young man, he

began to realize that something was happening to my eyes. I looked at my father and saw lines and planes I had never seen before. I could feel with my eyes. […] I could feel texture and color.

The struggle to develop his eye and practice his visual art while remaining faithful to the extreme interpretations and teachings of religion fuels the novel’s conflict. Asher doesn’t give up, and if at times the pompousness of the art talk almost overwhelms, other moments of genuine emotion make up for near bombast. In some criticism of Asher’s art within the novel, one senses the same kind of criticism that might be used against Potok: sentimentality and a rejection of trends in art hobble him. Both novels act as defenses against that charge, and they are mostly successful. In growing up, Asher makes the difficult choices growing up entails. We think he makes the correct trade-offs, but in such a milieu, those trade-offs are grave indeed.

Parts of the novel fail, like a painting askew: a mythic ancestor arrives in Asher’s dreams for no particular point, and many descriptions are flat, especially given all the discussions of how an artist sees. Ones like this appear over and over:

I got off the train and climbed the stairs to the street. It was cold and wet and gray. A bitter wind blew against the tall buildings.

or

The beds were covered with spreads. The refrigerator hummed softly. The apartment was neat and clean and faintly resonant with its own silence.

or

It was a large waiting room with white walls, a single window in the wall to my right, and a heavy wooden door in the wall across from the window. There was a desk beneath the window and chairs along the walls.

Banal description will hardly kill a novel, but if they are sufficiently banal and frequent, why include them? Why describe places that are everyplace and weather that’s as bad as the weather anywhere? There is no reason, and part of the reason I called My Name is Asher Lev strange in the first paragraph is because these descriptive problems are not so enormous that they capsize the novel.

Alas, The Gift of Asher Lev is a disappointment compared to My Name is Asher Lev. One sees no growth, little reconciliation, and no useful understanding for the state of the first two in my list. The world is ambiguous, yes, and that’s pounded into our heads. Many great novels come to no conclusions but better illuminate the confusion of the life—such as Moby Dick—but The Gift of Asher Lev is not among them. Characters like Lev’s boorish, ignorant cousins are comic book foils that contrast with the Rebbe’s wisdom. Devorah has all the character of an empty housewife, despite the references to her existence

Moment of humor are a change, but they’re too few to be a signifiant one. Asher, growing tired of his community’s ceaseless suspicion of his life—it is hard to refer to being an artist as a mere “profession”—responds to one inconsiderate inquiry by saying “That’s why I became an artist. So I wouldn’t have to worry about what other people think. You hit the nail right on the head, Kroner.”

The classroom scene in Asher’s daughter’s Yeshiva is the book’s fulcrum and chief reason for interest, and it’s reminiscent of Barth’s metaphor of the soft-shell blue crab in The Friday Book, which all interested in the definition and meaning of art should read for that essay alone. In Potok’s rendition, Asher draws a ram in three ways: once poorly, like a child, again realistically, like a photograph, and again with portions exaggerated for effect, like an artist. He asks a class of children rhetorically, “Aren’t all three different ways of seeing the same object?” and as a defense of the subjectivity merging with the individual’s perception it’s wonderful. As a short story, it would be equally good. As a scene in a novel, it’s like an island rising above an otherwise cold sea.

We find too few of those islands, and transcendent pieces of writing are too rare and disconnected from the story. Using a different metaphor, one could say that too many white spaces lack connective tissue and simple are. One other good example of the good in this novel: Asher explains his gift by saying “I don’t hope to accomplish anything. I just do it,” which is as good an artist’s credo as any, albeit one that many, many artists have espoused in various forms at various times. Asher’s wife, Devorah, says at one point that “We hear a song or read a story, and the good feelings we get don’t remain inside us. We are either anticipating them, or we’ve had them and they’re gone. We never experience them as now.” Well, maybe, and she’s describing the specious present that William James wrote about. It’s not a bad thought, but it’s underdeveloped, like most of this novel. My Name is Asher Lev is stronger and less curmudgeonly. On page 104 of The Gift of Asher Lev, he thinks that “The ordinary was king. And the courtiers were popularization, shallowness, doubt, cynicism. The century was exhausted.” Five pages later, a friend says of the art world, “There is too much ersatz work being done now, calculated gestures everywhere, cultural entertainment.” Maybe there is: but so what? And even if the evils of cultural entertainment are upon us, one isn’t obliged to indulge them. How about less complaining and faux existentialism and more work?

You’ll find it, but in My Name is Asher Lev. I will end reiterating the point made in the first paragraph: pretend that My Name is Asher Lev has no sequel. You’ll like it better.

Further comments on John Barth’s Further Fridays

December 22, 2008 By in Books, Critics, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

(See my initial laudatory post here.)

John Barth’s Further Fridays continued to delight till the end, and it hovers ceaselessly around literary questions about form, character, ways of telling, and meaning. Do those sound boring? Maybe when I list them, but when they become part of Barth’s stories—and the Further Friday pieces feel more like stories than essays—they come alive like a Maryland Blue Crab. Consider this great big chunk of quote—appropriate, maybe, for someone who often delivers great big chunks of novel—but it also shows some of Barth’s gift at the level of sentence and idea:

I confess to having gotten increasingly this way [as in, insisting for just facts, whatever those are] myself over the years—an occupational side effect, I believe, in the case of those of us for whom the experience of fiction can never be innocent entertainment. We’re forever sizing it up, measuring ourselves against its author, watching to see how the effects are managed and whether all the dramaturgical pistols that were hung on the wall in act one get duly fired in act three. We’re like those musicians who can’t abide background music: They can’t listen except professionally, and if they’re not in the mood to do that, they prefer conversation, street noise, silence—anything but music.

Right: notice the quick metaphor of the dramaturgical pistols—alluding to the idea that a gun seen in an early chapter should be fired in a later one—and the slightly more developed metaphor of the musician. The musician idea is particularly relevant to Barth, who played as a young man—more on that later—but it also expresses one of the central themes in his work: that innocence prolonged is detrimental to the person holding it and that naive readings eventually give way to sophisticated and experienced readings. They show the growth of not just the critic, writer, or reader, but also of the individual, whose early actions and impressions should be tempered by experience. But some attempt to prolong naiveté foolishly, while others forget to try and see the perspective of the innocent or the childlike joy that can lead to great art. So what is one to do? Muddle along as best one can, Barth seems to argue, and learn as much as you can about that imperfect state we call life and the reactions of other smart or wise people to it.

I realize that the above paragraph sounds almost like self-help lite, but it would be a mistake to see Barth that way, and he discusses far more than just the nature of a particular story. Elsewhere, he deals with literary categorization, which has never been among my favorite subjects because it often seems to generate vastly more noise than music, and its combatants often mistaken that cacophony for a symphony. Barth does a reasonably good job—which is to say, as good a job as one can, given the subject matter and persnickety pedants likely to be interested—of not being caught in its brambles. Adding sufficient qualification makes for fewer explosions but greater harmony; as Barth says of Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero

“the whole of literature,” [as Barth quotes Barthes] “from Flaubert to the present day, becomes the problematics of language.” If only he had been content to say that “the problematics of language”—indeed, the problematics of every aspect of the medium of literature, not language alone—becomes one of several prominent field-identification marks of our literature after “Flaubert.” But that kind of reasonable modification, I suppose, de-zings such zingers.

Given the choice of being mostly right and demure or mostly wrong and provocative, Barth takes the mostly right path. Still, he’s not “demure” as in boring, and his essays are filled with unusual zest. Sometimes the footnotes are the best parts; the blockquote above is one, and he sneaks another comment into a footnote, though it’s reiterated elsewhere in the body text: “As for twentieth-century literary Postmodernism, I date it from when many of us stopped worrying about the death of the novel (a Modernist worry) and began worrying about the death of the reader—and of the planet—instead.” The sentiment has its tongue-in-cheek enough not to be taken completely seriously, and yet it’s accurate enough to consider further consideration. Maybe in jokes we tell the greatest truths that could never slide by as bald assertions.

The piece the modernist definition comes from was published in the 1980s, although it reprises arguments from 1968 and 1979, about which one can read more in The Friday Book. But its concerns are still germane: global climate change fears fuel cataclysmic scenarios that aren’t implausible, as do those involving the death of reading. Reading’s demise seems to be greatly exaggerated—what do most of us do online and via e-mail if not read, as Steven Berlin Johnson argues in Dawn of the Digital Natives—but the quality of reading seems to diminish apace online. Still, websites with global reach and many visitors seem fairly literate, and the only well-known, sub-literate blog I can think of is Mark Cuban’s, which I won’t dignify with a link. Then again, Cuban is also sitting on such a giant pile of cash that I doubt he cares about literacy, or Postmodernism.

Like Barth, I seem to have wandered a bit, and also like him, I’d like to circle back round to the main point of this post, which is to emphasize how good Further Fridays is. Sections repeat and reiterate earlier ideas, but I think of the repetitions more as variations in different keys than as irritants, and I think Barth would like that metaphor: he played jazz as a teenager and writes of going to Julliard to discover he had no or too little talent for music (my own musical talent, if I had any to begin with, has probably become undetectable thanks to lack of exercise). Milan Kundera also took up writing after music, and I wonder if other good example of musicians-turned-writers exist aside from Alex Ross, who turned from music to write about music. Barth is as self-referentially modest about his musical abilities as his other points, almost cloaking himself in faux humility when he writes, for instance: “My modest point is that the story of your life might be told as a series of career moves, or love affairs, or intellectual friendships, or houses lived in, or ideologies subscribed to (even magazines subscribed to), or physical afflictions suffered, or what have you, and that every one of those series might be recounted from very different perspectives, to very different effect.” Indeed: and we appreciate that, and the way it implicitly makes the case for reading. He preaches like the native to a religion he nonetheless realizes fewer practice:

If you happen to be a refugee from the Dorchester County tide marshes… as I was and remain, and particularly if you aspire to keep one foot at least ankle deep in your native bog while the other foot traipses through the wider world, it is well to have such an off-the-cart smorgasbord [of reading] under your belt, for ballast.

Incidentally, I’m fascinated with the catastrophic view of reading and its discontents: consider Jonathan Franzen’s introduction to How to Be Alone:

I used to consider it apocalyptically [there’s that end-times terminology again] worrisome that Americans watch a lot of TV and don’t read much Henry James. I used to be the kind of religious nut who convinces himself that, because the world doesn’t share his faith (for me, a faith in literature), we must be living in End Times.

I wonder too, as this blog probably demonstrates. Still, I’d argue that you can’t avoid keeping one foot in your native bog, regardless of whether that metaphorical bog is the boring suburbs of Bellevue, Washington, as it was for me, or the foothills of the Himalayas, or New York City, so you might as well do so in a way that makes you part of the wider rather than narrower world, so you can reconcile the two as best you can. The most efficient way to do so, it seems to me, is the way Barth recommends: promiscuous and wild reading, and ideally of books as interesting as Further Fridays.

Into Thin Air — Jon Krakauer

December 17, 2008 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

This article and some of the commentary around it inspired me to get Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, which was a blessing and curse; I read the first page, then another, and then found myself still reading six hours later, to the detriment of other responsibilities. It was one of these addictive, incredible books.

Was it worth it shirking the rest of my life? Maybe: but once I began, it was hard to stop. Into Thin Air is probably the kind of book people mean when they say “page-turner,” although that term is usually applied to badly written slop. Qualifying exactly what that means on an individual level eludes me: I look for a place, a word, a sentence, a paragraph that I can reproduce and say, “There! That’s a perfect example of what I’m describing.” But Into Thin Air resists such a reading; the sentences are good but seldom noteworthy. At times there are cliches: “Neal Beidleman […] remains haunted by a death he was unable to prevent,” as we’ve heard from a million melodramatic, sentimental cop books. In the context, however, Krakauer both transcends and reaffirms the cliche: we see that Beidleman, with his heroism and impotence on the face of the mountain, is haunted, perhaps most of all because the death could have been prevented by not climbing the mountain in the first place. But it’s a price for the chance at transcendence, the moment when you’re at 29,028 feet and have achieved a quixotic goal that means nothing and everything. After Into Thin Air, I have a new appreciation for the descriptions of Caradhras and Moria in The Lord of the Rings, where the mountains gain an ominous, almost palpable malevolent darkness.

Krakauer was a journalist and (mostly former) climber who wanted to try Everest, and when he found that Outside magazine would send him, he went. Climbing Everest isn’t a simple task, even for those experienced with high altitudes; it takes at least six weeks of time acclimating as well as north of $50,000 to go. As of 1996, about one of four people who reached the top of Everest died on the way down. Judging from this, the percentage hasn’t changed much, since 881 people died on Everest in the 1990s and 327 did in 2000 and 2001. He went with a “commercial” expedition and was assigned to write about commerce and the mountain.

Instead, he wrote about disaster and the mountain.

At such extreme limits of what the body can accomplish, Krakauer experienced the mind-body problem in what might be its purest form, when he sought the shelter of Camp 4 after summitting. Camp 4 is the last human refuge before the peak, and Krakauer had been fighting Everest for almost two months. In this state he describes himself:

I was so far beyond ordinary exhaustion that I experienced a queer detachment from my body, as if I were observing my descent from a few feet overhead. I imagined that I was dressed in a green cardigan and wingtips. And although the gale was generating a wind-chill in excess of seventy below zero Fahrenheit, I felt strangely, disturbingly warm (193).

I know the sensation from running cross country, but the difference between a half marathon and a near-death experience on Everest gives me only the faintest ability to imagine his circumstance, like comparing a toe stub to cutting off one’s foot. Some of the others are familiar too, but not from climbing; Krakauer writes that the rubber oxygen mask he wore made him “[feel] drugged, disengaged, thoroughly insulated from external stimuli.” Morphine has, in my limited experience, the same effect.

But the greatest lessons from Into Thin Air come from the group mistakes that so often mark human foibles: vanity, competition, status, and monetary incentives combine to push everyone just past the point of safety in a place where the margin is almost non-existence. Bad communication hampers the effort: radios are not where they should be; firm plans for where ropes should be placed aren’t created and follow. I can’t help but think of Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, Why Buildings Fall Down: How Structures Fail and Richard Feynman’s What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character. The last deals with the Challenger disaster, while the other two deal with disaster in other circumstances.

What the three have in common with Into Thin Air is a general algorithm for how disasters tend to happen among well-meaning, otherwise cautious people: signs are missed and safety precautions ignored; communication breaks down; other goals slowly supersede the goal of making sure everyone is safe; and numerous, relatively small problems combine to create a situation that shouldn’t but does become disaster. With Into Thin Air, no one noticed the thunderstorm clouds building below Everest’s peak; the firm turnaround time of 1:00 p.m. (or 2:00 at the latest) was ignored; few of the teams on the mountain knew what others were doing; the rivalry between guided groups grew; one guide made a decision to go up and down the various camps too many times; and all this was exacerbated by the altitude and the way a lack of oxygen impairs cognition. One Sherpa, Lopsang, decides to “tow” a client, which essentially means hauling the client up by rope, like a human boat traveling vertically. To Krakauer, this “didn’t seem like a particularly serious mistake at the time. But it would end up being one of many little things—a slow accrual, compounding steadily and imperceptibly toward critical mass.”

The above paragraph is relatively dry, almost scholarly or lawyerly, and it lacks the visceral impact of some of the book’s telling details: passing bodies on the way up, left or forgotten because they’re so difficult to carry down; the sensation of looming ice towers; the terrible realization that some people won’t make it; the fact that virtually every person going up that mountain was, on some level, implicated in the deaths that occurred. Krakauer has a disarming way of reminding us of climbing’s sacrifices, great and small. On April 29, 2006, the group makes it so high that “for the first time on the expedition the vista was primarily sky rather than earth. Herds of puffy cumulus raced beneath the sun, imprinting the landscape with a shifting matrix of shadow and blinding light.” That’s one of the smaller: the greater have already been mentioned.

This talk of sacrifice raises an obvious question: why climb? The answer is elusive, like asking the meaning of life or what the wind feels like as it caresses your face: you can give an absurdly simple answer or an equally absurdly detailed answer and still never answer. George Mallory’s famous answer concerning why he wanted to climb Everest—because it’s there—is as good as any and as good as anyone is likely to get. Nonetheless, I would speculate that maybe there is something to being utterly, inalienably alone; Krakauer writes about in this book and Into the Wild, while others—ranging from Thoreau in Self-Reliance to innumerable adventure stories preach the virtues of being cut from the societal network that envelops most of the world, and envelops us with particular force in the West. If this aloneness comes at a cost, it’s the cost of knowing that, out there, you’re not five minutes from a hospital and chinese takeout, and that if things turn ill you’ll die. I mentioned Lord of the Rings before and will mention it again here because in that book, the wilderness has the sense of loneliness and danger that few others can impart: the wild truly feels wild and dangerous—and free. I’m tempted to make grandiose generalizations about how “a society where coddling is the norm,” but I can’t, not and stick to the truth, as the way we think of society says as much if not more about us than it does about the society we comment on.

Regardless of the lessons imparted, what stays with me about Into Thin Air is the sense of foreboding and of empathetic terror at impending death. Those things are beyond the ability of words to describe, but Krakauer gets as close as anyone, and that is why, whatever the sins of Into Thin Air‘s writing style, I kept reading.