James E Hartley

Why the Praise for Mediocre Books?

Reading book reviews is an exercise of learning to read between the lines. There are good book reviewers out there and they write interesting and thoughtful reviews. But, the majority of reviews are the equivalent of the publisher’s blurbs on the back of books.

The first rule of book reviewing tends to be Praise the Book as path-breaking and timely and wonderful. The exception is books written by people the reviewer doesn’t like, the hit review, in which the book is eviscerated as violating some sacrosanct principles.

Consider Khaled Hosseini’s novel And the Mountains Echoed. Unless you have been living under a rock, you know Hosseini is from Afghanistan and burst onto the scene with The Kite Runner and followed that up with A Thousand Splendid Suns. Timing is everything and Hossein benefited from his first novel coming out in 2003, when events you might have heard about were happening in Afghanistan.

So, Hosseini is a celebrity author and this third novel was awaited with anticipation. When the book was published, predictably gushing reviews followed. After all, who is going to trash a novel by the famous author from Afghanistan?

How good is the novel? Therein lies the first major problem. This is not a novel at all. It is a collection of short stories. So, why does everyone call it a novel? Do novels sell better than short stories? There is some attempt to pretend that this is a set of interweaving short stories, but they really aren’t interrelated at all. You could rip out any one of these chapters and read it as a stand-alone story and not miss a thing. There are some characters who show up in multiple stories, but you don’t have to read the earlier story with a character in it to understand the later story with the character in it. The sole possible exception (and it is only a possible exception) is the second chapter which tells the story of a brother and sister and the very last chapter in which the same brother and sister meet again when they are old. Maybe the second story hinges on the first, but it isn’t really clear even in this case that is does. But, I imagine this let many a reviewer breathe a sigh of relief that they could now pretend the whole book is interweaving stories or even a novel.

The stories themselves are fine. The book wasn’t torture to read or anything, but other than a couple of events here and there, the stories are mostly forgettable. You might care about a character or two in the book, but whichever character you care about is really only around for a single short story.

So, if you were imagining what the review of this book should say, they would note it is a collection of short stories, and the reviewer would tell you about the stories that worked particularly well or not. Then the reviewer would tell you whether the good stories were worth reading and, even more importantly, made reading the book as a whole worth your time.

What do the reviews actually say?

The New York Times review (by Michiko Kakutani) begins: “Khaled Hosseini’s new novel, And the Mountains Echoed, may have the most awkward title in his body of work, but it’s his most assured and emotionally gripping story yet, more fluent and ambitious than The Kite Runner (2003), more narratively complex than A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007).” That sounds really impressive. If you read either of his earlier books, you now want to read this one, right? A couple paragraphs later, we read that while the earlier novels were a bit “sappy” and “melodramatic,” this one: “Mr. Hosseini’s narrative gifts have deepened over the years, enabling him to anchor firmly the more maudlin aspects of his tale in genuine emotion and fine-grained details.” Must be a good book, right? Ah, but then at the end of the review, we discover:

In recounting these tales, Mr. Hosseini shamelessly uses contrivance and cheesy melodrama to press every sentimental button he can….In the hands of most writers, such narrative manipulations would result in some truly cringe-making moments. That Mr. Hosseini manages (for the most part, at least) not only to avoid this but also to actually succeed in spinning his characters’ lives into a deeply affecting choral work is a testament both to his intimate knowledge of their inner lives, and to his power as an old-fashioned storyteller.

Gotta love that “for the most part, at least.” Here is the question: how can a book that “uses contrivance and cheesy melodrama” simultaneously be a “deeply affecting choral work”? Well, it can’t. The reviewer is accurately saying the book is cheesy, but then wants to conclude with a positive sounding review.

Or consider NPR (Maria Russo). There we get a fairly early note, “If at times some threads of the story don’t quite match the heft of the rest, the effect of the whole is both unsettling and moving.” Indeed, the fact that the first and last stories have the same characters is “what holds the novel together.” But, there is a “wave of something” that lingers. That sounds like praise, doesn’t it? But, it is a bit, well, vague.

One final example, The Guardian (Alexander Linklater): This is the closing paragraph:

And the Mountains Echoed charges its readers for the emotional particles they are, giving them what they want with a narrative facility as great as any blockbusting author alive. Perhaps there is some hokey emotional chemistry at work here, but, in the process, Hosseini is communicating to millions of people a supple, conflicted and complex picture of his origin country, Afghanistan.

If you can figure out what that means, I am impressed.

What intrigues me about these reviews of a book I just read is that they are all obvious attempts to sell a book that quite honestly nobody will be reading in 20 years. Indeed, there is really no reason anybody should bother with this book in the next 5 years. It’s not terrible, it passes the time, but I honestly have a hard time imagining anyone has read this book and would genuinely recommend it to another actual person. I can imagine not telling people to avoid it, but I suspect the following has never been uttered: “You know what you should really read? And the Mountains Echoed! You will love it.” Yet, the reviews of the book are over-the-top in sounding positive, despite the fact that they all have the discordant notes in them that leave you suspecting the reviewer really didn’t like the book all that much.

Be Like Batgirl

Is it fun to be a Superhero? Having Superpowers is obviously fun; if you could run faster than sound or climb walls or fly, that would be great.

But, would it be fun to put on your costume and go out at night and fight villains?

Most Superheroes get some satisfaction about their crime fighting ways. But, one of them seems to really enjoy everything about it. Batgirl. In the early pages of Batgirl: A Celebration of 50 Years, the stories are pure fun. Here we have Barbara Gordon with a Can-Do spirit, setting off with obvious joy and zeal to make things right in the world. She is not a grim warrior or a person possessed of an overwhelming sense of duty. She fights injustice because, well, it is fun to fight injustice. She dresses up like Batgirl, runs for Congress, and works at the library, all with that same gusto.

Back in the 1960s, she even fights sexism and a patronizing attitude toward women. Batman and Robin are, to put it mildly, initially dismissive of this girl superhero. Sorry to report, a story from 1967, shows that they are right to have such disdain. Poor Batgirl was quite concerned about messing up her hair and the run in her tights and getting her make-up just right…and the bad guys get away. She realizes she needs to stop worrying about such things, and next thing you know she is impressing Batman with her ability to capture the villains. Yeah, it’s corny, loaded with stereotypes, but it is all done in a spirit of zest and joy and let’s show everyone that women can be every bit as good a men at this crime fighting gig.

Batgirl, in other words was fun. Well, until she met Alan Moore. In 1988, Alan Moore got the go-ahead to write a story which would rock the DC Universe. Joker shows up one day and…well, it’s horrific. End result, Barbara Gordon is left wheelchair bound, unable to walk.

Until reading this Batgirl collection, I had never realized just how brutal The Killing Joke was. I mean it was obviously brutal, but it is even worse when you saw what Batgirl was like before. It is not just that Joker paralyzed Barbara Gordon. He paralyzed the most chipper, upbeat, fun-loving, wholesome superhero out there. Comics are grimmer since the late-1980s (which is not entirely bad). I assumed it was Frank Miller who brought the Grim. But, The Killing Joke may actually be the break point.

There are a couple of comics in this collection which are the immediate aftermath of The Killing Joke, and they are as good as anything that precedes them. Barbara Gordon, dealing with rather obvious trauma, rebuilds her life. But, what do you do when you are an ex-Superhero? It’s a curious problem, which gets investigated every now and then in the “Let’s imagine Superhero X has retired” genre. But, Batgirl didn’t retire; she was paralyzed. And, fascinatingly, they did not have a “Well, she was paralyzed but wow, look, she got better” story arc. (Cf: Superman dies, but look, he is better! Batman has his back broken, but look he is better!)

Instead, Barbra Gordon goes from being Batgirl to being the Oracle; the computer hub who lives her life plugged into the network. The Oracle is not as chipper as Batgirl, to put it mildly. But, it gives Barbara purpose as she rebuilds a life. OK, this is not the most psychologically deep exploration of overcoming trauma and loss (shocking, I know), but it is curious to see this sort of thing happening in a Superhero Comic book.

What happens to Batgirl? Well, here is where DC gets it wrong (shocking). Rather than retire the title, they try out some new Batgirls, none of who are in the least bit interesting. Then in the New 52, suddenly Barbara Gordon is back, but it all feels like a cheat—after spending time recasting her life as Oracle, suddenly, Barbara is rebooted back to her younger, pre-paralyzation years when she can go back to being Batgirl? DC is a failing company; the signs are everywhere.

But, let us not end on a dismal note. Batgirl, the real Batgirl, the pre-Moore Batgirl, was fun. She loved what she was doing. You want a role model? You could do a lot worse than someone who exudes joy all the time at her work, both her paid day job and her after hours Batgirl work. Barbara Gordon has a vocation, and she loves it. Be like Batgirl.

Capitalism, Christianity, and the Great Books

For those of you who like podcasts, I recently joined the moderators of The Open Door to talk about a recent article I wrote for Public Discourse.

You can listen to the podcast here

And, the article which was the basis for the discussion is here

Collapsing Communities

There is you and there is the city, state, and country in which you live. We could discuss either one of those levels of aggregation. If we talk about you, the individual, we could discuss your ideas or personality or hopes and dreams. If we talk about the city or state or country, we inevitably end up talking about politics.

But what about the space in between you and the city, state, country? What about your community? What does your community look like? Who is in your community?

Timothy Carney’s Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive and Others Collapse is all about community. It is one of those recent type of political books which are always about twice as long as the point being made really takes, so while interesting, reading it is a bit of a repetitive chore. The general thesis is trying to explain the Trump supporters—the people who voted for Trump in the Republican primaries. Carney is desperately trying to explain to the non-Trump supporters why Trump had resonance. If you like reading about current politics, this book is worth a look.

However, at the core of this book is a really interesting discussion about communities which transcends the politics of the moment. Carney wanders around his central premise, but finally on page 255, he states it crisply:

But what if what the working class—white, black, Hispanic, etc.—needs most isn’t a check from the government but inclusion in community? And what if the most accessible form of community—the church—is under constant assault by both culture and the government? And finally, what if the elites frowning upon the deplorable poor won’t include them in their community, citing their deplorability?

Community is a fascinating entity, much neglected in discussions of the Good Life. It is far more common to hear discussions of the need for individual autonomy, freedom, sense of purpose, and so on or the need for the proper level of government involvement in society than it is to hear about the importance of community. All too often, discussion of community centers on how the government should best provide for support for people. But that is not what community is at all.

Carney points towards geographic areas where community has collapsed. There are still people living there and there is still government, but people are alienated, they have no set of people with whom they regularly meet and share a sense of common purpose. As Carney notes, churches are obvious places of community, but church attendance is down. Things like the Lions Club or the Elks Club or the Masons or the Knights of Columbus collapsed decades ago. Bowling Leagues?—see Putman. Indeed, much of Carney’s argument is really just Bowling Alone 2.0.

What if as the other forms of communities have collapsed, your last remaining community is where you work? You still have a community, at least. You still have people you regularly see and maybe you even go out with some of them after work. But, then what happens when your employer moves out of town and you are left unemployed? Suddenly, you have no community at all.

What happens to people with no community? Not good. They withdraw and become depressed. Want an interesting case study? What happens to people if they are forced to stay home for months on end and they never actually interact in meaningful way with any real people in a real space?

How do you create a community? It is harder than it seems like it should be:

Bad economics can help kill a community, but good economics cannot, alone, rebuild one. And if you’re not building community, you’re not getting close to fixing what ails us. Analogously, even if public policy and international trade helped kill factory jobs in the United States, reversing those policies and choking off international trade won’t restore the factory jobs.

The deep point which Carney is making in this book is troubling, to say the least. If he is right that alienation is becoming a central feature of society, that the collapse of community is doing great harm, what is the solution? Carney gamely tries to write a concluding chapter giving some reason for optimism, but concluding everyone should just go back to church is not going to get very far. After all, if the reason you are going to church is simply to have a community, it will not be long before you notice that churches have this weird tendency to be, you know, religious. If you don’t agree with the theology of the church community, you are going to feel alienated at church. Carney, a Roman Catholic, should have realized this; what would happen if Carney tried to find community in a mosque or synagogue? How long would he last at services routinely asking him to announce that Mohammad is the Prophet?

The problem is: we can’t really just go build a community. Communities arise organically. Once people become alienated, they are, by definition, unlikely to join a community. Not a cheery conclusion, but one well worth considering the next time you think about that person you know who has little community. Maybe a kind word or two is in order; it won’t reverse the problem, but it is a step in the right direction.

Shop Local

One of the curiosities of any Age is the things that people assume are New. A generation arises and discovers phenomena that surely nobody before had ever seen. Those with a bit of knowledge of history know that there really is nothing new under the sun, but the shocked indignation or rejoicing at discovery about things which were ever thus continues apace.

Consider the complaints about Wal-Mart and Home Depot and Amazon destroying all the family businesses in your favorite town. Shop Local signs pop up all over town as people rally to keep the small concerns going while the Faceless Behemoths inexorably destroy the fabric of the community. When did these behemoths start destroying commerce? Well, obviously when Sam Walton began his Imperial Ambitions and Jeff Bezos took over the internet.

Or, maybe it was in 1905.

Everybody who has moved about the world at all knows Ring’s Come-one Come-all Up-to-date Stores. The main office is in New York. Broadway, to be exact, on the left as you go down, just before you get to Park Row, where the newspapers come from. There is another office in Chicago. Others in St. Louis, St. Paul, and across the seas in London, Paris, Berlin, and, in short, everywhere. The peculiar advantage about Ring’s Stores is that you can get anything you happen to want there, from a motor to a macaroon, and rather cheaper than you could get it anywhere else. England had up to the present been ill-supplied with these handy paradises, the one in Piccadilly being the only extant specimen.

Oliver Ring fixed that in 1905. The sleepy town of Wrykyn, notable mostly for the nearby boarding school, was one of the first English towns to witness the arrival of the American chain.

The sensation among the tradesmen caused by the invasion was, as may be imagined, immense and painful. The thing was a public disaster. It resembled the advent of a fox in a fowl-run. For years the tradesmen of Wrykyn had jogged along in their comfortable way, each making his little profits, with no thought of competition or modern hustle. And now the enemy was at their doors. Many were the gloomy looks cast at the gaudy building as it grew like a mushroom. It was finished with incredible speed, and then advertisements began to flood the local papers.

Yes, despite the fact that this could be an NPR story of a small town in 21^st Century, it was written over a century ago by that noted economic reporter, P.G. Wodehouse.

The story “An International Affair” is one of the Wodehouse’s early schoolboy tales. The lads at the boarding school take note of the new improved store and, not surprisingly flock to it. The Hero of our tale, Dunstable, laments this sad state of affairs.

“You see they advertise a special ‘public-school’ tea, as they call it. It sounds jolly good. I don’t know what buckwheat cakes are, but they ought to be decent. I suppose now everybody’ll chuck Cook’s and go there. It’s a beastly shame, considering that Cook’s has been a sort of school shop so long. And they really depend on the school. At least, one never sees anybody else going there. Well, I shall stick to Cook’s. I don’t want any of your beastly Yankee invaders. Support home industries. Be a patriot. The band then played God Save the King, and the meeting dispersed. But, seriously, man, I am rather sick about this. The Cooks are such awfully good sorts, and this is bound to make them lose a tremendous lot. The school’s simply crawling with chaps who’d do anything to get a good tea cheaper than they’re getting now. They’ll simply scrum in to this new place.”

Again, you could take that speech right out of this story, switch “Cook’s” to the name of your local haunt, and use it the next time you want to complain about the Large Retail Establishment de jour.

Dunstable’s friend is stoically resigned to failure. “‘Well, I don’t see what we can do,’ said Linton, ‘except keep on going to Cook’s ourselves. Let’s be going now, by the way. We’ll get as many chaps as we can to promise to stick to them. But we can’t prevent the rest going where they like. Come on.’”

Now you can decide. On the one hand we have Cook’s owned and staffed by wonderful people who provide excellent service with a smile. On the other hand, you have this Giant American Conglomerate, owned by a rapacious individual with no sense of beauty and managed by a cad. If you aren’t convinced, Dunstable tales to the manager, asking if maybe they could leave a bit of business for Cook’s. The reply: “‘One moment, sir,’ said the man from the States. ‘Let me remind you of a little rule which will be useful to you when you butt into the big, cold world. That is, never let sentiment interfere with business. See? Either Ring’s Stores or your friend has got to be on top, and, if I know anything, it’s going to be We.’”

For those of you rooting for Cook’s, fear not. Dunstable is a clever lad. He poisons a bunch of his classmates who dine at Ring’s and the Headmaster then prohibits anyone from the school from ever eating at Ring’s again. The moral? All is fair in love and war? Perhaps it should come with the warning: “Kids, Don’t Try This at Home.”

P.G. Wodehouse is, to put it mildly, a comic genius. But, he was also a keen observer of society, which was one the reasons his comedy hits home so often. Tales of Wrykyn and Elsewhere is a collection of his early stories before he hit his comic stride. If you want a snapshot of the antics of boys plotting against headmasters, there are plenty of quaint stories herein.

A footnote: the collection also includes a rather amusing pair of stories from St Asterisk’s mocking Sherlock Holmes. Truth be told, it is surprising that Wodehouse never developed this theme into a full length novel. In the stories Wotsing (who is obviously Watson) is the superior intellect, wryly observing the Holmes stand-in (Burdock Rose), who constantly looks for ridiculously complicated explanations of incredibly simple occurrences. The characters are underdeveloped, and both stories are short. But, if you imagine a story with a larger-than-life Uncle Fred-like figure as Sherlock Holmes, you can see the possibility here.

Escaping The Pit of Despair

Sometimes a story just haunts you and won’t let go. This is not always surprising. If you really enjoyed a story, it makes sense that you will often remember it fondly. I know many people whose life seems to be one long pleasant reminiscence of Jane Austen novels.

But it isn’t these pleasant reminiscences I am discussing here.

There is another category of story which stays in the mind not because it aroused any particular strong emotion. The story lingers because it presented a puzzle, and you just can’t stop trying to solve the puzzle. Not like a “How does the farmer get the fox and the chicken and the bag of grain across the river?” type of puzzle. A puzzle about how to get out of a particularly messy situation.

The story that has haunted me: “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” by Rudyard Kipling. It is a tale of a harrowing place from which there is seemingly no escape. The puzzle: How to escape.

Morrowbie Jukes is an Englishman in India who sets out into the desert and falls into a deep crater. On three sides, the walls are high and steep. When Jukes tries to climb the sand walls, they collapse and he slides back down. In the crater, there is a group of others who have been similarly trapped there. At one point, Jukes discovers that he is not the first Englishman to fall into this pit; the other died, probably murdered.

Now the sand walls are only three sides of the pit. The fourth side is a river. Cross the river and you can go on your merry way. Alas, the river is full of quicksand. But, there is a path across the river; you just have to know the path. Fortunately, this path is known. So, if you tread carefully, you can cross the river. Alas, if you try to cross the river, you find yourself being shot at by someone with a powerful rifle who is down the river a bit, out of sight from the people trapped in the crater.

Now, what do you do? You are trapped in a space with the ragtag and rather eerie group of people who eat crows and have dug narrow holes into the sand wall in which to sleep. So at least you can sleep in one of the holes that someone who died before you used if you are willing to crawl into a small dark space which may still contain a skeleton or two. You are faced with spending the rest of your life in this place unless you can figure some way out.

Morrowbie Jukes tries to find a way out. Over and over. Every new idea fails. Fortunately, in a bit of deus ex machina, his servant finds him without falling in and is able to thrown him a rope and drag him out of the pit of despair. So, Morrowbie lives happily ever after and now we know about this place. (The story is written as if it is true; it is curious that neither you nor I are spending even a second wondering if it is true.)

What haunts me is trying to think of how to get out of that pit. What is weird is that I know I will never actually end up there, but I have this nagging feeling that I really need to figure out how to get out of it.

How bad is this problem? The Long-Suffering Wife of Your Humble Narrator and I went camping out on Cape Cod recently. I had read the story a month earlier. But there I was wandering down the beaches of Cape Cod, which are gorgeous, and staring at the sand dunes wondering how one could climb them if they were steep and high. Indeed, I started wondering how steep a sand wall could get; what is the maximum angle at which the wall will hold? How high would it have to be in order to prevent enough momentum from carrying you to the top? Is there a way to climb that would make it less likely for the cliff to collapse on you? Is this just a matter of percentages, so that if you do it enough times, eventually you will succeed? If you don’t know if it is possible, but think it might be possible, how many times would you try before giving up? A thousand? Ten thousand? If you spent all day every day trying to climb the sand wall, how many attempts would that be?

Yep. I spent a good chunk of time at Cape Cod imaging how to escape from a nonexistent crater in the desert in India. I am a bit concerned that the next time I spend myself wandering by a river, I’ll spend the same amount of time trying to figure out how to cross it if someone is shooting at me while I am trying to navigate a specific path to avoid the quicksand.

I think this means “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” is a rather captivating story. Sure, it could be spun as an allegory for British Rule in India, wondering how England will ever extract itself from its Empire. Sure, it can be spun as a gothic tale of horror meant to alarm readers about the scary things that lie outside your safe civilized realm. Sure it could be spun as a pure adventure story.

But, none of those things are the big takeaway I have. I just want to go read a whole book about the physics of sand dunes.