"A Reminder to Look Up" Let the Great World Spin

The book club for March is memorable: not only was the selection a solid 10, but our hostess and her house were way above par. A good time was had by all, even though several admitted they hadn't finished or that they disliked Corrigan, one of the story's central characters.

I finished the book sometime in February and ordered my own copy, lent it out to a fellow clubber, and skimmed it again the night before our meeting to bring back to mind what I liked most about the book. First of all, like my distraction with TC Boyle as a native New Yorker, I want to also meet Colum McCann who teaches creative writing in NYC and who I hope will one day venture north to speak at our Writers' Institute. Let me further extol the book by saying it will remain on my short list, along with All the King's Men, of candidates for the Great American Novel. This is a novel that reads better each time: it can be read for nostalgia, for admiring McCann's clever structure and parallel characters, for the best sense of NYC being a "small town" and folks interconnected, for inspiration.

McCann like Boyle favors puns and poetic phrases that both seduce the reader and flourish the characters. Speaking of the folk who populate the story, I don't think I'd ever want any of them as best friends. But all are strikingly real and ultimately likable. McCann, like Corrigan, cannot help but see and portray the best in everyone. Pain is consoled by community; forgiveness abounds; generosity permeates a city know for being cold and aloof.

Written in 2009, it is a wonderful tribute to the World Trade Centers, especially for us older folk who remember working and eating there and being always anxious to visit. They were more than inspirational because they were alive, not designed as a city's signature visitors center. Although unnamed in the novel, Petit becomes the icon of work as personal fulfillment. His dedication, determination and training contrast with his judge and with Corrigan's chosen careers.

The plot investigates what it means to inspire and to connect with one's fellowmen. It is idealistic and inspirational, American ... written by an Irishman about a Frenchman. I hope I have time to peruse it every now and then. I guess it belongs on my coffee table and not in the bookcase upstairs.

Tempted by Newly Published: Coming Apart

Right out of the gate, let me say I am one of those few people who like Charles Murray's thesis in The Bell Curve. That book was scholarly, statistical, but echoed with common sense and universal observations. When the New York Times gave a miserable review to his latest, Coming Apart, The State of White America, 1960-2010, I knew I had to read it as another counter blind liberalism treatise. I did not enjoy the book as much as The Bell Curve; I suppose the rancor Murray was exposed to has somewhat tempered either his own writing style of spurred his editors to modify his arguments to be more centrist.

Like Gaul, the book is divided into three parts: the formation of a new upper class, of a new lower class and why it matters. I only started dog-earring pages once I got to part three. Murray's premises and observations which he lays out in multiple graphs and through the comparison of two hypothetical towns of Belmont and Fishtown do not seem as scholastically rigorous as the data he employed in The Bell Curve. Maybe he had to argue more exhaustively about phenomena that are not readily observable, to wit, people's mental capacities. Here is mathematically backing up trends that are much more observable where people live, what work they do (or can't do), how they educate their children, what their social networks are like (if they still have any).

But the third section is strong. Murray quotes deTocqueville, and as any Slacker blog reader knows, I'm a sucker for writers who stand on Alexis' shoulders Murray cites four founding virtues as being the attributes that made America different and great marriage, industriousness, honesty, and religiosity. Over the last fifty years, he finds Americans at the lower end of the economic curve to have devalued these social principles almost to the point of lacking critical mass to recoup and bend the slope upwards. In many ways, Murray is also standing on the shoulders of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Although Murray avoids also racial comparisons, once burnt, twice shy, he writes about white women not marrying, white men claiming disability so as to avoid working to support a family and about "bowling alone," with the decline of participation in civic and religious groups.

I guess it is my Yankee upbringing that stresses industriousness above all. (After all, there always are hidden scarlet letters and folks can be facetious about how they spend their Sunday mornings.) But to support your lifestyle and facades you need to make some money. Trade, and here I am leaking into Pinker's premises, underlies democracy and comity. Work confers pride, status, and a tolerance for reciprocity. Idleness promotes aloof dependency and drives a demand for "Big Daddy/Big Government." Or as Murray writes: "But when families become dysfunctional, or cease to form altogether, growing numbers of children suffer in ways that have little to do with the lack of money. When communities are no longer bound by their members' web of mutual obligations, the continuing human needs must be handed over to bureaucracies -- the bluntest, clumsiest of all tools for getting people the kind of help they need."

Part three often reads like very well thought out and written Sunday editorials, but Murray is a cut above the typical blather:

"... People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned ... and they only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing. People need intimate relationships with others, but intimate relationships that are rich and fulfilling next context, and that context is supplied only when humans are engaged in interactions that have consequences ... Responsibility for the consequences of our actions is not the price of freedom, but one of its rewards."

Murray sees signs that the new upper class is weakening, or at least moving towards the European model of entitled happiness and ease. He quotes from the McGuffey Readers as the conveyance of the code for males. He says that code of behavior has collapsed. "In today's new upper class ... the code that has taken its place is a set of mushy injunctions to be nice. Call it the code of ecumenical niceness ... The new upper class still does a good job of practicing some of the virtues, but it no longer preaches them. It has lost self-confidence in the rightness of its own customs and values, and preaches nonjudgmentalism instead ... The members of the new upper class are industrious to the point of obsession, but there are no derogatory labels for adults who are not industrious. The young women of the new upper class hardly ever have babies out of wedlock, but it is impermissible to use a derogatory label for nonmarital births ... When you get down to it, it is not acceptable in the new upper class to use derogatory labels for anyone, with three exceptions: people with differing political views, fundamentalist Christians, and rural working-class whites." Ah-yuh, have you all noticed this in the media and presidential campaign?

Speaking of candidates, think of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum against this observation: "The most powerful and successful members of their class increasingly trade on the perks of their privileged positions without regard to the seemliness of that behavior. The members of the new upper class are active politically, but when it comes to using their positions to help sustain the republic in day-to-day life, they are AWOL."

Finally, Murray exposes the underlying foundations of a welfare state. As opposed to the founding fathers four principles, today's policy makers believe that people are equal not just in the ways that the Declaration of Independence meant equal in the eyes of God and before the law) but equal, or nearly so, in their latent abilities and characteristics. The corollary to this is that human nature can be changed. The second belief paraphrases liberal political party platforms: "... at bottom, human beings re not really responsible for the things they do. People who do well do not deserve what they have gotten -- they got it because they were born into the right social stratum. Or if they did well despite being poor and disadvantaged, it was because the luck of the draw gave them personal qualities that enabled them to succeed. People who do badly do not deserve it either. They were born into the wrong social stratum ... Thus it is morally appropriated to require the economically successful to hand over most of what they have earned to the state ..."

But he is not a Debbie Downer. Murray believes that America is ripe to move beyond its current moral stagnation and enter a new age. Unfortunately, Murray attests that this is his last book; we will not have his insight to assess any improvement, or woe is us, deterioration.

Your Number is Up: The Lottery

I have never been a big fan of short stories. When younger son took a course in American short stories in college (simply because they matched his interest span), I discovered that Alexie Sherman excelled in this genre. A couple other stories in his anthology also convinced me that it is almost like writing a haiku to pack so much into so few pages.

Shirley Jackson is a good short story writer. The Lottery runs all of 32 pages ... it seemed a waste of effort to bind and print it separate from a larger collection, but things were different in 1983 with small publishing houses. The suburban library branch that sent the book over to my branch also categorizes The Lottery as young adult (when will I escape this nomenclature?). What a dour theme to put before high school students? Jackson creates a friendly small town, populated with neighbors who enjoy their annual community event. But while depicting this Eden, Jackson lays enough atmospherics down on paper to foretell that all will not end well.

My next couple of reviews venture into reading Charles Murray and Steve Pinker so I am looking at Jackson's story both from a sociological class struggle and from an incidence in violence perspective. Why is this sacrifice condoned? Who benefits? Have cultural habits overtaken thought? Will this tradition go on forever? Won't the town die out? Why doesn't anyone want to leave? Can't the populace calculate risk?

I find it most ironic, and probably was Jackson's intent, that the story is named The Lottery. I am surrounded by fellow employees who pool money for every mega-millions drawing; large pay outs are the talk of the elevators. These folk have the same blind faith in their numbers coming up for the good as Jackson's characters do expecting to dodge a more dire fate. I want to tie this theme of acceding into blind luck rather than self-determination into those ideas explored in The Phantom Toll Booth and A Wrinkle in Time, both of which stress an individual's capacity to make their own world and excel in it. The people in The Lottery might as well be those under the domain of IT, without self-determination and worshiping the wheel of fortune.

A book that was interesting but only because of its serendipitous placement against the other books I've read the past few weeks.

Another Young Adult Book: A Classic Must-Read Wrinkle in Time

Why was I only reading Nancy Drew as a "young adult?" Did I realize that this habit would mark me for life as a murder mystery junkie? Did anyone ever mention The Phantom Toll Booth or this one, A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, another book recently celebrating its 50th anniversary since being published? It's a Newberry award winner, for heavens sake!

Like Toll Booth, I ordered my own copy of Wrinkle after I read it. You can never start stashing away books to read to your grandchildren so they don't realize when they arrive at late middle age that there are significant holes in their literary experience.

Adding to the fact that this is another "juvenile" book is its overlay of science fiction, a genre that never really caught me despite my love of Stranger in a Strange Land. L'Engle herself believes the story was poorly received because the hero of the story was a GIRL, something completely "alien" to sci fi at that time. Meg Murry, our intrepid heroine, is a brilliant underachiever, unsure of her intelligence easily when interacting with her Einstein like younger brother Charles Wallace. She is also struggling with pre-teen angst of having a beautiful, intellectual scientist mother who often makes dinner over Bunsen burners rather than leaving her lab for the kitchen, and of not having her father at home. Alas, the story predates all the dysfunctional family youth literature of today: Meg's father works for NASA and seems to have disappeared while on secret assignment.

Like Milo venturing into imaginary warring worlds of numbers and words, Meg teleports with Charles and the hunky misfit athlete scholar from school to find her father. It is a wonderful coming of age story, one to help children learn to love their different strengths and to avoid a society of commonality and uniformity. It too describes the faults of group think and demigod mind control.

Slightly shorter than TPTB at 211 pages, I found myself not dog-earring pages of clever writing. L'Engle writes more of a piece. Even though her characters, IT and the three witch/angels, are memorable, it is for their personae and not their turn of phrase. The story is maybe a tad more adventurous and the moral more singular. But planning ahead, it is still something I want in my guest room book case for night time stories to read to my next generation of brilliant kiddies.

Been Reading, Not Reviewing: Catch Up -- Though the Toll Booth

Sorry, Slackers' followers. I have not been up to writing reviews of all the books that have piled up waiting to be returned to the library. Let's take them in order of preference, rather than trying to reconstruct what I read when.

I was almost grabbing absolute strangers on the street and telling them they had to read The Phantom Toll Booth by Norton Juster. Older son hasn't (and it's almost impossible to find something he hasn't perused) but his new darling wife had it in her collection of books from school. I hope it reads it soon because this should be on every sophomore and junior high school students' summer reading list. I touted it to my new boss, left him my copy, and he ended up ordering it for his Kindle. I bought my own 50th anniversary edition.

Yes, it is marked 'juvenile" or young adult in the library stacks, but it needs a certain maturity to get all the puns. Adults reading it will be tempted to find their fellow workers and neighbors in the characters that Milo meets during his adventures in Dictionopolis and Digitopolis. The book is only 256 pages long; most pages have fabulous illustrations by Jules Feiffer (for all you youngsters, Feiffer used to draw many of the cartoons in Playboy ... you know some people really did read the magazine for other reasons). I dog-earred over 20 pages so it will be difficult to select those vignettes I loved the most, but here goes.

As the passel of reviews I am trying to post and catch up on will indicate, I have been reading more "thoughtful" books lately, either poetic (like Fleurs du Mal) or philosophical, and even a couple of almost sociological tracts, despite that course being an anathema to me in college. So within this recent context to connect themes, I loved Dictionopolis where words mean more than their placement in a sentence. Milo, lost in a place called Expectations asks the "Whether" man what kind of place it is: "Expectations is the place you must always go to before you get to where you're going. Of course, some people never go beyond Expectations, but my job is to hurry them along whether they like it or not." (For each of the selected quotes, I will illustrate my own personal embodiment of the underlying thesis: here's the first. At work, not only are we physically moving to another location, but several people are in line for promotions. All employees are up in arms: the expect to be chosen for advancement and they expect their new office space will be better than what they've had for years. None of them regards themselves as prime movers; they expect to be taken care of, not to make their own success. Lesson One for "Everyman"Milo.) People who live in Expectations must be first cousins to the Lethargarians who live in the Doldrums.

Anyone who has had to edit office memorandum will identify with Faintly Macabre, the Which/Witch who cautions Milo: " ... people today use as many words as they cn and think themselves very wise for doing so. For always remember that while it is wrong to use too few, it is often worse to use too many."

The plot, if there is one in this allegory, centers around the king of Dictionopolis, Azaz, and his counterpart in Digitopolis, the Mathemagician, and how they came to ignore the wisdom of the princesses Rhyme and Reason who opined that words and numbers were of equal value and who as a result were exiled to the Castle in the Air. While en route to rescue and release the princesses, Milo attends Azaz's banquet where the king boasts: " ... my cabinet members can do all sorts of things. The duke here can make mountains out of molehills. The minister splits hairs. The count makes hay while the sun shines. The earl leaves no stone unturned. And the undersecretary hangs by a thread." (Are all you students picking up on these no-nos as you write the essay portion of your SAT exam?)

Although in my next review I will write about the fun of tesseracting, here in TPTB, the most novel means of transportation is depicted as follows: Tock, Milo's dog asks Canby where they are: "... To be sure ... you're on the Island of Conclusions ... But how did we get here ... You jumped, of course ... That's the way most everyone gets here. It's really quite simple -- every time you decide something without having a good reason, you jump to Conclusions ... It's such an easy trip to make that I've been here hundreds of times."

Milo moves on to Digitopolis, whose exiles seem to reside on the 13th floor of a certain office building in a northeast state capital. It's inhabitants posit: "... did you know that if a beaver two feet long with a tail a foot and a half long can build a dam twelve feet high and six feet wide in two days, all you would need to build Boulder Dam is a beaver sixty-eight feet long with a fifty-one-foot tail ... That's absurd ... That may be true ... but it's completely accurate, and as long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?" Why do I spend days and days finding the answer to the wrong question?

And to give my former discipline its just definition, Juster includes the best description of budgeting that I've ever heard: "The more you want, the less you get, and the less you get, the more you have. Simple arithmetic." And Juster also seems to know how to write up civil service job specifications: "But why do only unimportant things? ... Think of all the trouble it saves ... If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you'll never have to worry about the important ones which are so difficult. You just won't have the time. For there's always something to do to keep you from what you really should be doing ..." (Actually, I think I'll blow this quote up and frame it and hang it in our new office space.)

The assignment I've been working on most recently is to review interview questions that will be used when selecting a candidate for my former boss' job. Why do I presume one of them will answer like the Gelatinous Giant: "... I mean, why not leave well enough alone? That is, it'll never work. I wouldn't take the chance. In other words, let's keep things as they are -- changes are so frightening ..."

Finally, because it is budget season and the powers that be in the Legislature are negotiating as I type with the Governor's staff, let me introduce the easily recognizable Triple Demons of Compromise: "... one tall and thin, one short and fat, and the third exactly like the other two . As always, they moved in ominous circles, for if one said "here," the other said "there," and the third agreed perfectly with both of them. And since they always settled their difference by doing what none of them really wanted, they rarely got anywhere at all ..." Does anyone hear the words "dysfunctional" or "redistricting" in the wind?

This book is the penultimate "bucket" list book for 2012. How did I miss this 50 years ago? Did the nuns think it too provocative for the Feiffer cartoons? Was it perceived as too cynical? Heck no, it is the Gulliver's Travels or Alice in Wonderland of the 20th Century. Read on.