The Other Man

I am currently reading Flights of Love, a collection of short stories by Bernhard Schlink, the author of The Reader. And while I am reading the third story, The Other Man, I am wondering if I have read this before. I am certain I haven’t. Yet it seems so familiar.

The story describes a marriage between a man, whose name we never learn, and his wife, Lisa, who is dying of cancer. After her death, a letter arrives for Lisa from a man called Rolf. It is brief, he reads it and discovers it is from her former lover. Later he discovers a batch of letters written by Lisa and her lover over the long years of their affair

The letters unnerve the man. He thought Lisa was happy with him, happy in their marriage. “But now nothing was self-evident any longer.” He had believed everything was fine with his family but now he realizes he had probably only been deluding himself.

He begins to reply to the other man’s letters as if Lisa was still alive and for a while he, as Lisa, and Rolf carry on the exchange this way. Eventually he decides to visit the other man’s town and in due course tracks him down. They begin to meet in a café where they play chess and become friends of a sort.

He discovers the other man lives in a decrepit basement hovel and is really nothing but an impoverished braggadocio, a pretentious dandy, who lives on the generosity of others. He now understands why there was nothing left of Lisa’s inheritance. How could Lisa have preferred “this loser to him?"

Eventually he identifies himself as Lisa’s husband. The other man begins borrowing money from him. A letter arrives indicating Lisa will be visiting his town with the orchestra in which she plays first violin. The other man plans a reception for her but soon thereafter learns that she has died.

Nevertheless, he holds the reception anyway and delivers an eloquent speech praising Lisa’s performance of a Haydn’s string quartet. Her husband realizes that “the beauty he praised contained within it not only a higher truth, but a robust one.”

It was not that Lisa had been happy with the other man while being unhappy with him, nor had she been happier with the other man than with him. Lisa had shared her happiness in a variety of ways, had both happily received and happily given to others. The happiness she had given was not a lesser one, it was exactly the happiness to which his ponderous and peevish heart could open. She had held nothing back from him. She had given everything he had been capable of taking.

The story ends as the husband gets back on the train home. He would wake up, see the sun, hear the birds, feel the breeze, and it would all come back to him and it would be all right.

And then suddenly, as the story comes to an end, it dawns on me. With a few modern variations, this is the same tale enacted in the movie The Other Man that I saw on a DVD a few months ago. The film is clearly adapted from Schlink’s short story. What took me so long to recognize the relationship?

The movie featured Liam Neeson, now a computer software wizard, as the husband, Laura Linney, now a designer of elegant shoes, as Lisa and Antonio Banderas, still the same con artist, as the other man. They are all fine actors. Yet the movie is scarcely known with only a few reviews on the Web. It was never shown in my hometown but then it isn’t really a great film town anyway. I don’t know if it was shown anywhere for that matter. And Roger Ebert, who I always look to for cinema insights, had nothing to say about this one.

No matter, cordial thanks to Netflix and Bernhard Schlink and to the staff at The Paperback Exchange in Florence who very kindly brought me these versions of the story and its elemental truth.

Role of Place in Literature

In Florence I begin to wonder about the role of place in literature. So many writers have come to this city--Montaigne, Shelly, Byron, Elizabeth and Robert Browning, Henry James, George Eliot, Goethe, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, and Dostoevsky.

Some settled here for long periods, others stayed for only a short time during their travels, and many have returned time and time again. More often than not they come to Italy and to this city in Tuscany to escape the cold, damp areas of the North and for some hoping that its sun and warmth will cure them of some ailment, primarily tuberculosis. However, once winter arrives in Tuscany they very quickly learn it can be as bitterly cold and damp here as it is in the North

How has living in Florence affected their writing? Would they have written differently had they remained in the city they left? If being here influences their work, does that depend on how long they stay?

Lawrence Durrell wrote, “What makes a “big book” is surely as much to do with their site as their characters and incidents." Eudora Welty agreed that, “fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?”

We know that Florence has been the setting of the many of the writers who have come here. One need only think of Forster’s A Room With a View:

“It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room, with a floor of red tiles which look clean though they are not, with a painted ceiling…It was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine, with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite, and close below, the Arno, gurgling against the embankment of the road.” Yes, very pleasant!

But what we really want to know is whether or not being here shaped their style or turned them in a new direction or solved a writerly problem they were facing. In general, is being here a source of literary inspiration?

Albeit a single example, I think the clearest answer to this question is provided by Dostoevsky, who came to Florence for the second time in 1868, then to escape the “damp and cold of Milan, where he and his wife [Anna] had been living for two months.”

In her Reminiscences Anna records how thrilled Dostoevsky was to be in Florence and that he was working productively on The Idiot. Yet, it did not take him long to realize there is more to writing than being in this benign place. He soon began to miss his friends or any form of congenial company. Anna writes in Reminiscences:

We did not know a single soul in Florence with whom we could talk, argue, joke, exchange reactions. Around us all were strangers, and sometimes hostile ones; and this total isolation from people was sometimes difficult to bear.

And in a letter to his niece, Dostoevsky wrote: I cannot write here. For that I must be in Russia without fail, must see, hear and take a direct part in Russian life; where’s here I am losing even the possibility of writing, since I lack both the essential material, namely Russian reality…and the Russian people.

Then the summer arrived and he and Anna found it almost unbearable to deal with ever increasing heat of this city. Some people seem to thrive in hot weather. Apparently Dostoevsky was not one of them for he found it almost impossible to write under such “hellish” conditions.

At other times he felt differently. When the sun shines, it is almost Paradise. Impossible to imagine anywhere more beautiful than this sky, this air, this light.

In A Literary Companion to Florence, a rich source of information for this post, Francis King claims that Dostoevsky not only completed The Idiot in Florence, “but also began the gestation of The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov.”

Let us just say, then, that being here in this Tuscan town can offer some writers a comfortable place to work and sometimes give spark to their work. But that these sparks can occur just about anywhere, regardless of place and climate.

The life that Dostoyevsky led in Russia gave him a subject matter that ultimately led to his masterpieces. However, he did not have to be there to write them, at least, not all of the time. Eventually, he needed to return to the source of his tales. And while he did not write novels about the people or places he knew in Florence, he was able to write well while he was here, but only if it wasn’t too hot.

In answer to the general question about the role of place in literature, let us conclude that, as with all general literary questions, there are no general answers. Place has a role, but its role is highly variable and dependent on so many other factors that is impossible to disentangle its effects from all the others that influence a writer.

Live from Florence

In these years he most often planned to go to Italy. He would look forward to the time when he had finished a book or a group of stories and he would be free. These plans were so much a part of his existence that he forgot them, changed them, remade them without consultation or hesitation. —Colm Toibin, The Master

I am staying now in the Oltrarno (other side of the Arno) area of Florence that according to one commentator is the most florentine and greenest parts of the historical center and where the real old and new florentines live, shop, eat and have fun.

Stretching from the Ponte Vecchio to the equally well-known Palazzo Pitti and adjacent Boboli Gardens, this neighborhood is among the most beautiful in Florence. It is also the hippest and most alive, especially around the Piazza Santo Spirito (a block from my apartment) encircled by cafes, “bars,” restaurants, shops, and where so many of the artisans in this city live.

Most of the following “pictures” are selected from my Italian Fragments published in Issue One, Travel Fragments at FragLit.

The Past
I am engulfed by history in Florence. Something extraordinary happened here during the Renaissance. How did it happen? Leonardo, Michelangelo, Galileo, Brunelleschi, Machiavelli, the Medicis—all working together, sometimes across the street from one another.

Buildings
Many of the buildings date from the Renaissance and before. Some are beautiful palazzos or civic buildings, meticulously preserved and thoroughly modernized within. Others are still quite shabby and in need of repair. At first, I am put off by this. But then I am actually back in time, several hundred years. Wandering about the commune then, not now. In the country, the homes and public buildings are painted the most delightful shades of orange, yellow and pink. There are no gray buildings in Tuscany.

Neighborhoods
On every street there are many small shops, each selling only a few items. The pattern is repeated in the next block, as well as on the next street over. So everything you need—bread, fruit and vegetables, a book, hardware, an espresso—is close to where you live. You go from place to place, as I do with the florentines, gathering the things you need. And along the way, you exchange a few and sometimes many words with the people you know—that is, if they are not already chatting with someone else.

Piazza
In every town there is a central square and many smaller ones. They vibrate with talk and music and the activity of the surrounding banks, restaurants, bookshops, churches, artisans and whoever else is fortunate enough to be there. The piazza is the heart of an Italian town and brings a sense of community to those who live there. It is the place to go and to be seen. For many it is their “Third Place.”

Solitude
Here in Italy I am thrown back upon myself like nowhere else. There is no one to talk to. No one I can understand. No one tries to talk with me. The phone never rings. I think this is what it must be like in paradise. There are people everywhere. But you cannot speak to any of them.

Smoking & Talking
Not everyone smokes, but far more do in Italy than in the USA. And as you walk down the streets, you are struck by the large number of men and women of all ages puffing away. Or babbling on their cell phones which are also more prevalent in public areas than in the USA. People engage in animated conversations on the streets, in restaurants, in hotel elevators--everywhere. Yesterday I saw a man with a cell phone in each hand, talking alternatively with the two callers and moments later a woman came speeding by on her Vespa, trying to steer with one hand, while the other was gripping her cell phone as she was fully engaged in a conversation.

Language
It is not surprising that Italians are so musical. It comes with the language. When Italians speak to one another they virtually sing, with a rhythm and gesture that is slightly operatic. Soon the words echo in your mind, although you haven't the vaguest idea what they mean. I doubt it would be difficult to learn Italian. It was not long before I found myself quite unexpectedly speaking an Italian word or phrase in a perfectly appropriate way. When most Italians talk, their hands are usually waving wildly, as if they were conducting an overture. I suspect that if you tied up their hands, they would simply be unable to utter a word.

Scale
Where did we go wrong? Where did we go wrong in America? I think it is the scale of things. You see that so clearly here in Florence, where everything is so much smaller than in the USA. The buildings are only a few stories high, at most. The stores are often nothing more than living room size. They sell only a few products and are ubiquitous throughout the commune. It is interesting that Florence has always been known as the commune, the community. It is really a community of small neighborhoods. The streets are very narrow, often barely wide enough for a small car. There are no broad highways crisscrossing Florence. I think that has made an enormous difference. Traffic is forbidden now in the central areas. The ancient cities were not designed for anything like the automobile. At times there is simply not enough room on the street for both car and pedestrian. Indeed, there is often a little fight for survival when the two meet. In a word, this city was designed to be lived in by human beings. I don't know who the cities in our country were designed for.

On the Language
Robert Penn Warren once said that he liked to write in a foreign country “where the language is not your own and you are forced into yourself in a special way.” A Paris Review interviewer asked Tobias Wolff: You’re just back from seven months in Rome. Why were you there?

Wolff replies: I had immediate reason for going. It wasn’t to do research. I speak some Italian, but living in a country where I can’t be completely aware of what people are saying around me puts this sort of bubble around the head, in which, for a time, not indefinitely, I find I’m able to work with more than the usual concentration and joy. I like not having a car, living in the center of a city where you can walk everywhere. All the errands that seem to consume one’s life become very few and you find yourself with great stretches of time for reading, wandering, and yes, working…it takes the rust off.

Nuggets on the Web

Wolfram Alpha
The quest for new search engines continues. Have a look at the recently developed Wolfram Alpha computational search engine. It provides results that are radically different than the standard search engines. An introductory video will make it clear what it can and can’t do. Testing it for a while both surprised and disappointed me.

Peaceful Coexistence
Are you thinking of buying a Kindle, an iPad, a Nook or any of the other e-readers that are about to make the scene? Does the temptation to buy one of these gadgets keep you awake at night? Or are you content to stay with the good, old-fashioned printed page? Anuradha Raja will help you to resolve this dilemma.

Traveling Books
If people are not going to the library or bookstore anymore, why not bring the books to them? In Argentina, a tank has been converted to a traveling bookmobile and in Chicago a generous soul travels around the city in his Book Bike giving books away to local book lovers. Bookmobiles are not exactly new but they do change the “business models.”

To Prove or Disprove?
Is it better to seek evidence that supports your views or contradicts them? I was raised by Karl Popper to believe that being wrong is the better method. So has Kathryn Schulz whose book Being Wrong is on my list to read. If you are only reading romance novels this summer, you can see her talk about the book or write about it at the Boston Globe.

Updike's Last Collection

I am sure John Updike, who died last year at the age of 76, never stopped writing until his last breadth. In his final volume of short stories, My Father’s Tears and Other Stories, he does what every person his age does—reminiscences and ruminates about all those days “back then,” the process of growing old, and its miseries, if you will.

Updike always wrote ambivalently about the marriages and affairs of the people and places where he lived—rural Pennsylvania and suburban Massachusetts. Here they are viewed with a certain resignation and an increasing awareness of the imminence of death. If I can read this strange old guy’s mind right, he’s drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned. The world is being tended to, I can let go of it, it doesn’t need me.

Most of the stories in his last collection begin with the circumstances of his protagonist’s current life, a life when he is no longer young and frisky and then gradually slide into a recollection of some long-past event or person.

In Personal Archeology, the second in the collection, Craig Martin, finding himself idle on several acres of his Massachusetts land, begins to wonder about the traces left by its prior owners. Soon he begins to ponder his … increasing isolation—elderly golfing buddies dead or dying, his old business contacts fraying, no office to go to, his wife always off at her bridge or committees, his children as busy and preoccupied as he himself had been in middle age…

The realization that he is rarely invited anywhere now transports him back to the lively weekend parties that often led him astray: There were in fact two simultaneous parties, two layers of party—the overt layer, where they discussed, as adults, local politics, national issues (usually involving Richard Nixon), their automobiles and schools for their children, zoning boards and home renovations, and the covert layer, where men and women communicated with eye-glance and whisper, hand-squeeze and excessive hilarity.

Updike then returns Martin to his current marriage and the conversations that sometimes shook its foundations. I’d give anything not to have married you,” Grace sometimes said, when angry or soulful…”I shouldn’t tell you this, but at times I think I hate you.”… That’s what we’ve become, a show. All our married life, we’ve been a show.

But now viewing these exchanges from some distance Martin saluted the utterance as honest, gouged with effort from the compacted accumulation of daily pretence and accommodation. He reflects, As well as love one another we hate one another, and even ourselves.

And then there are the women, the wives and mistresses that often played such a central role in Updike’s fiction who are brought back to life once again in these stories. In The Full Glass a retired insurance salesman recalls a stolen day-off from work when he was with a woman who was not his wife. With his characteristic descriptive detail, Updike writes: Being with this woman made my blood feel carbonated. She wore a broad-shouldered tweedy fall outfit I had never seen before; its warm brown color, flecked with pimento red, set off her thick auburn hair, done up loosely in a twist behind--in my memory, when she turned her head to look through the windshield with me, whole loops of it had escaped the tortoiseshell hair clip.

This is soon followed by, …what I remember is being with her in the interior of the car, proudly conscious of the wealth of her hair and the width of her smile and the breadth of her hips…

These two stories reflect the themes that are reprised in many of the eighteen stories in this collection. There is a present, a once was, and then an understanding that comes with age.

Even though he was nearing eighty, Updike still had his touch. While admitting it’s all downhill at his age and seeing each day in the mirror his multiplying white hairs, his deepening wrinkles, and feel his shortness of breath after exertion, his stiffness after sitting too long in a chair or a car, there is nothing in these stories that strikes me as much different than those he wrote when he was on the upward slope, during a time that he thought the world owed me happiness.

For anyone close to Updike’s age these stories ring true. We brood about the past, experiences unexpectedly come to mind that unsettle us for days, we recall individuals who we have forgotten about for decades. Whatever happened to X? Is he still as clever as he was then? Is Y still as lovely as I found her then? Are S and A still married? Who would have guessed all this was coming?

Ciao from Italy

Florence is “earthly” heaven to me because I experience it, and long for it, more fully than I do any other place. David Leavitt

After a lapse of several years I have come to Florence once again. This time I have returned for a break and to recharge the muse if she will still have me. Of course, I have come back for the sun and for the warmth and quite simply just to be here, here in this place that never is without a surprise—an undiscovered piazza, a chanced upon gallery, a trattoria that I never knew was just around the block

It an article in the Times several years ago Susan Jacoby wrote of the same feeling I have each time I return.

But Florence feels like home, or rather, like what might have been home had I chosen a very different life when I was young. I know Florence well enough to know where to buy paper towels and cheap flowers, well enough to face a dental emergency with equanimity, well enough to be greeted with recognition (or feigned recognition, which amounts to the same thing) by certain shopkeepers and restaurant proprietors. I have never spent an uninteresting day in this city, never experienced small vicissitudes or deeper sorrows that could not be ameliorated by contact with the noble civilization of these stony streets.

I went to my favorite market yesterday to gather a few supplies. The lady who normally greeted me wasn’t there. I wondered if it was here day off or if she had moved on. And the newsstand where I went each morning to get the Herald Tribune had vanished. Things change I guess, even in Florence, where change always seems to be running in slow motion.

However, most everything else seemed to be as it always is. In his book The City of Florence, C. Lewis wrote, We became familiar soon enough with the best-known sites and monuments--….To these returned time and time again, as to old friends always there to be looked up and, as it were, chatted with after a period of absence.

In the Prologue to this volume Lewis expresses many of my own feelings about being here:

All we knew was that we helplessly loved the place, and did not pause to ask why….

Florence was where we were most contentedly living, and where I was working—on something entirely unrelated to Tuscany.

The life and look of Florence were composed of strikingly different elements— differing shapes and styles from historical periods over many centuries—that nonetheless fitted together, lived together, spoke to each other.

It is the city itself—the city understood as a self; as a whole, a miraculously developed design. It is the city as what Italians call an insieme, an all-of-it-together.

I’ve been walking everywhere, out and about in the sun. Previously I had written: Where did we go wrong? Where did we go wrong in America? I think it is the scale of things. You see that so clearly here in Florence, where everything is so much smaller than in the US. The buildings are only a few stories high, at most. The stores are often nothing more than living room size. They sell only a few products and are ubiquitous throughout the commune.

It is interesting that Florence has always been known as the commune, the community. It is really a community of small neighborhoods. The streets are very narrow. There are no broad highways crisscrossing Florence. I think that has made an enormous difference. The ancient cities were not designed for anything like the automobile. At times there is simply not enough room on the street for both car and pedestrian. Indeed, there is often a little fight for survival when the two meet. In a word, this city was designed to be lived in by human beings. I don't know who the cities in our country were designed for.

David Leavitt in In Maremma, co-authored with Mark Mitchell, wrote, After living in the Italian countryside, Florence seems more “the city” than any other metropolitan place in the world: more than New York, more than Rome, more than Hong Kong. Paradoxically, it seems this way because it is made to the measure of man—one can walk there.

Kindle in the Classroom

How do eReaders affect the reading experience? In particular, do they improve reading comprehension? Do they enhance student learning in the classroom? Given the increasing cost of textbooks, the enormous amount of paper they use, to say nothing of their weight, these questions are especially relevant to students and faculty in academic settings.

Reed College, where I taught for many years, was recently one of seven schools selected to investigate the effect of Amazon’s Kindle DX on teaching and learning in higher education. Reed is a usual undergraduate institution, well known for its quirky, bright students with a traditional academic program that is among the most rigorous in the country. In terms of the percentage of its graduates who obtain the Ph.D. the College has consistently been among the highest ranking institutions in all disciplines. I felt extraordinarily fortunate to be able to teach there.

The study involved 43 students enrolled in three upper-level undergraduate courses--Seminar in English Literature, Seminar in French Literature and a Political Science course on nuclear politics--taught as is customary at Reed in relatively small conferences where students are expected to support their claims with specific textual citations and where, to keep the discussion moving forward, everyone needs to be able to locate in their own documents the passages cited by others.

The $489 Kindle DX was given to each student (they could keep them after the course was over) and they were asked to participate in the study on a voluntary basis but could obtain the course materials in printed form if they chose not to participate. Roughly 95% of the students signed up for the project.

Aside from issues of legibility (fair), battery life (good), paper savings (excellent), images, color features and graphs (poor), content availability (limited), etc. what interested me most was the evidence on comprehension of the reading materials. Both the students and faculty felt that their grasp of the material suffered greatly, largely because of the difficulty students had in highlighting and note taking.

One faculty member reported that “after a few weeks of trying to take notes by hand (or on their laptops, a number of students abandoned the Kindle DX” and chose to read the course materials in printed form. There was also uniform agreement that for an eReader to be of any use in an academic setting, it will have to be improved by easing note taking, highlighting and making comments in the margin.

In terms of referring to materials in class and switching back and forth between different pages in a document or multiple texts, the Kindle DX failed significantly on both accounts. Students missed thumbing through the pages, searching for notes they had made, and moving through the pages as quickly as they were used to with printed pages.

The evaluation concluded by noting that while students and faculty felt the Kindle DX “…in its current incarnation was unable to meet their academic needs, many felt that once technical and other issues have been addressed, eReaders will play a significant, possible a transformative, role in higher education.” The basis for this prediction eludes me for I see no evidence in the report to justify this belief. Perhaps they were thinking of the iPad, to be similarly tested next year by students and faculty at Reed.

I recognize the sample at Reed was small, that the academic conditions there are not representative of most colleges and that it was a very informal study of advanced classes without a comparison group that read the same materials in paper versions. Nevertheless, the findings at Reed are consistent with those reported by other colleges and universities that have tested the Kindle DX. They are also in agreement with a good many critics who have described their own experiences in reading non-academic materials with an eReader.

Like some of them, I also worry that reading on these devices will become an even more passive process than it already is. Yes, we read for pleasure and for entertainment and when we read for these reasons we don’t usually take notes or mark up the pages. Instead we move rapidly from sentence to sentence, rarely stopping to mull over any single one. However, if you can easily put pen to page, as I do with any book, then reading becomes an occasion to think further about the material, one that is not unlike any educational experience.

All the Lonely People

Is it so that everything we do is done out of fear of loneliness? Pascal Mercier

I’ve always considered loneliness to be due to social isolation, to living alone without a friend or a companion to be with from time to time. In Lonely: A Memoir Emily White takes issue with this conception. She argues that chronic, “genetically programmed” loneliness is qualitatively different from situational loneliness.

In her essay, On Living Alone, Vivian Gornick voiced a similar view, “Loneliness, when it came, came—then and now—like a surge of physical illness.”

White also emphasizes that chronic loneliness is also different from depression and is not merely a symptom of that condition. It is a state entirely of its own, separate and always there, even when you are engaged in a close, intimate relationship. There are medications that lessen the impact of depression; there are none for loneliness.

White writes “…no one’s discovered a vaccine against loneliness; there’s no prayer or charm or safeguard I’ve discovered that can be relied on to keep the state at bay for good.”

Emily White was trained as a lawyer and Lonely is written in the manner of a well-orchestrated legal brief—carefully researched, systematically organized, a bit repetitive, but also personally revealing. “I used to be a lawyer and what I was looking for was evidence.”

Her book is that altogether rare blend of personal experience combined with empirical research. Her evidence is drawn from studies carried out by psychological and medical investigators, the accounts of a fair number of individuals who have responded to her blog and advertisements on Craigslist, as well as her journal record of a lifelong struggle with this affliction.

White’s experience with chronic loneliness began when she was a child, (her parents divorced when she was four and she lived a solitary life as her mother was away at work most of the day), continued through various adult friendships, other causal relationships, and current life with her partner, Danielle whom she met while playing in a lesbian basketball league. Still she notes that her loneliness is still lurking in the background, even though “the state was no longer as intense and all-encompassing as it had been.”

Loneliness, as White often reminds the reader, is a state we don’t often talk about. Few people seem willing to tell others, even their closest friends, that they are often lonely. “Loneliness—especially chronic loneliness—is a state most people work incredibly hard to hide. It is not something alluded to even in intimate conversations.” You might admit you are feeling depressed, but rarely if ever that you are feeling lonely.

White asks, why hide this sometimes severe condition? She argues that loneliness deserves the same attention as any other emotional problem such as anxiety or depression. “There is no need for this silence, no need for the same and self-blame it creates. There’s nothing wrong with loneliness, and we need to start acknowledging this through a wider and more open discussion of the state.” This is precisely what she has done in this volume and, as one who knows well what it means to be lonely I praise her effort to do so.

While she has struggled with loneliness for years and tried every conceivable activity to alleviate it, sociability was rarely a problem for her and she was rarely at a loss for friends. All she yearned for was “the quiet presence of another person.”

“Passive company is something that’s hard to define but easy to recognize. It’s the comfortable, quiet state of cooking as your spouse reads the paper at the kitchen table, or half-listening from the study while your brother takes a call in the living room. Passive company provides us with the chance to simply be with someone else. It’s time, as Glenn Stalker put is, “when nothing much is being said.”

However, White concludes with a remark mystifies me: “…knowing what I do about loneliness—how it can lead to early death, and dementia, and illness, and cognitive changes, and headaches, and stress and threat—I haven’t tried to organize my life in a way that might keep it away.”

Yet I thought that in living with her partner, she had finally found the loneliness cure that she had been seeking all these years.

Epistemology 101

What do we know of another person’s beliefs or intentions? And how can we determine their meaning when we know they are trying to deceive us or even when they know we know they are trying to deceive us?

This is known as an “Expression Game” a term used by Erving Goffman to describe a situation where one individual tries to discover the meaning of information given openly or unwittingly by another or determine the truth of evidence that is intentionally misleading or false.

It is also the problem intelligence agents face in trying to interpret espionage evidence—decoded messages, overheard conversations, or discoveries. Frankly, it isn’t so different from the dilemma those of us who are not spies face in trying to figure out the meaning of what other people do or say.

In the May 10th issue of The New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell treats this issue in a dazzling review of Ben Macintyre’s “brilliant and almost absurdly entertaining Operation Mincemeat.” In 1943 a male corpse was discovered off the coast of southwest Spain; the corpse was dressed in a uniform and was carrying an attaché case fastened to his waist. His papers revealed he was a member of the British Royal Marines. Eventually the contents of the case made their way to German intelligence agents.

The documents revealed the Allied forces were planning a major two-prong invasion from their bases in North Africa to Greece and Sardinia. What to make of this information? To believe it or not? Could it be a deception designed to mislead the Germans about the true location of the invasion? Or could it, in fact, reveal the actual location? Or could it have no relevance at all to the location of the Allied attack?

Various factors went into the way this information was presented to the German commanders, not all them designed in the best interests of the German forces. The hidden agendas of the cast of characters described in Operation Mincemeat is vividly summarized by Gladwell. In the end Hitler and his advisors concluded the documents were believable whereupon they alerted their forces and transferred a Panzer division from France to the Peloponnese.

In fact, the documents were fake, planted by imaginative British intelligence agents to lure the Germans into diverting their troops from Sicily, the eventual location of the invasion of over 160,000 Allied soldiers, thousands of frigates, mine sweepers, heavy guns, tanks in July of 1943. Operation Mincemeat was a total fiction from start to finish. As Gladwell notes, “the Germans had fallen victim to one of the most remarkable deceptions in modern military history.”

(I was amused to learn from Gladwell that Operation Mincemeat was based on a work of fiction that was read another novelist who worked for British intelligence and approved by a committee headed by yet another novelist!)

Why didn’t the Germans examine more critically the evidence? Was it believable, was it true? In retrospect, there were good reasons to believe it was a total fabrication. The doctor who had examined Martin, failed to detect any fish or crab bites that are usually found in a body when it is washed up on shore. Martin’s hair was not brittle, also observed when a body has been submerged for a while. And the same holds for his clothes, which didn’t appear to have been in the water for very long. Apparently none of these “red flags” were taken seriously considered by the Germans.

The issue that Gladwell describes so well is one of interpreting the meaning of espionage evidence like this that is “inherently ambiguous.” It is really no different that interpreting the meaning of anything someone says to you. Are they telling the truth? Are they trying to deceive or mislead you? Do they even know what they believe or if they will continue to believe it tomorrow?

In discussing another espionage case, Gladwell puts it this way, “…Germany’s spies told their superiors that something was true that may indeed have been true, though maybe wasn’t, or maybe was true for a while and not true for a while…Looking at that track record, you have to wonder if Germany would have been better off not having any spies at all.”

Gladwell wonders “…if you cannot know what is true and what is not, how on earth do you run a spy agency?”

And he concludes with sound advice for all of us: “The next time a briefcase washes up onshore, don’t open it.”

Ubiquitous Excesses

Ian McEwan let me down in his latest novel, Solar. After reading Saturday a few years ago, a novel that still percolates in my mind and that I have written about several times here, I thought he could do no wrong. But I found Solar a bit of ordeal and at times thought about giving up on it.

McEwan’s depiction of Michael Beard, the central character in the novel, was the source of my problem. Beard is overweight, five-times married, a womanizer par excellence, heavy drinking, “monster.” I found him utterly repulsive and, in spite of the fact that he was a Nobel-Prize winning physicist with a sharp and crafty mind, I could not overcome my distaste for his excesses.

Why McEwan endowed him with so many vices mystifies me. Nor could I fathom his depiction of the steady stream of Beard’s clumsy, selfish, idiocies. Beard forgets to go to the bathroom before putting on protective gear on polar visit and risks a horrible fate by trying to relieve himself in the icy open air. This is followed by a mindless act of gluttony before delivering a talk on climate change and, as a result, he is barely able to fend off the rumblings of his digestive system.

McEwan continues in this vein when Beard, after returning home from a conference, fails to call 911 when one of his student-colleagues is fatally impaled as he falls and cracks his head on the edge of a glass table. Beard has just learned that the young man had been sleeping with his wife. In response, he runs off to fetch a hammer that belonged to a workman, also sleeping with his wife, and smears it with blood in order to incriminate the unfortunate fellow.

In this way, the novel takes the reader through one preposterous event after another. It has been said that Solar is a comic novel. I confess the humor completely escaped me as I failed to find anything the least bit humorous or terribly ironic in any of these incidents. Implausible, yes. Ridiculous, yes. Totally absurd, yes. Humorous, no.

And this includes novel’s conclusion, when the falsely accused workman, after completing his prison term, arrives on the scene as Beard is about to launch his grand solar project in the New Mexico desert. He beseeches Beard for a job, it is denied, whereupon he proceeds to shatter all the project’s solar panels.

As the project collapses, all Beard’s previous flings, lies, failures, heedlessness, gluttonies, and a long threatening melanoma also come crashing down upon him. We get what we deserve, don’t we? As James Baldwin noted “…people pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”

The life McEwan created for Beard made it impossible for me to appreciate his effort to approach the topic of climate change. McEwan has said, “I couldn’t quite see how a novel would work without falling flat with a moral intent.” In my view it fell flat even without such intent. Others have felt the same way.

Walter Kirn in the Times said, “…it’s actually quite bad.” Also in the Times Michiko Kakutani wrote, “…its plot machinery soon starts to run out of gas, sputtering and stalling as it makes its way from one comic set piece to another.” and Solar “…is ultimately one of the immensely talented Mr. McEwan’s decidedly lesser efforts.”

On the other hand, Michael Wood writing in the New York Review of Books thought that even its “…slowness works in the novel’s favor” while Stehan Rahmstorf in the Guardian judged Solar to be “…McEwan at his best.” So it goes among the critics.

In order to enjoy a novel, does its central character need to be lovable or likeable or deserve our sympathy? As I think back upon the novels I have most enjoyed they are always peopled with individuals I admire and respect. While Henry Perowne in McEwan’s Saturday is certainly among them, Michael Beard in Solar is definitely not. I don’t know who admires or respects Michael Beard.

I am not entirely sure why McEwan wrote Solar or why he tackled climate change in such an oblique way. But if he hoped to increase public awareness or change many views on this issue without lecturing , I doubt he succeeded in Solar.

Novels of Ideas

What is a novel of ideas? In the March 6th Wall Street Journal Rebecca Goldstein writes briefly about five examples that she admires—Herzog, Middlemarch, The Holy Sinner, The Black Prince and Einstein’s Dreams. How are these novels distinguished from those that are not?

In writing about Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince she says, “Like all the novels of ideas I admire, this one hides its high purpose under well-developed characters and an organic plot.” She notes that Mann’s The Holy Sinner “buries its seriousness beneath the seductions of story telling.” Hides its high purpose? Buries its seriousness? I think she can be more explicit than that, although in fairness I am sure that was not her purpose in compiling this list.

She says Herzog blends “high-mindedness and low farce” and that George Eliot’s Middlemarch is “imprinted with many of Spinoza’s ideas. Finally she notes that Einstein’s Dreams concerns the nature of time “The play of ideas is heady as Alan Lightman wrests irony, pathos and poetry out of the abstractions of physics…”

On my understanding, a novel of ideas is quite simply a work of fiction that treats the issues normally considered by philosophers, e.g. moral, existential, metaphysical, etc. It is a novel of where issues are raised and questions asked. You reflect on the problems it poses, stop in mid-sentence or at the end of a paragraph to ponder something the author has written or you make a note in the margin or discuss the book’s concerns with another individual. And you do all these things and more with a really notable novel of ideas.

Goldstein’s characterization of Lightman’s novel comes closest to this conception. Yet she never frames her discussion of this novel or any of the four others in terms of how the reader might respond to the ideas or questions in the various ways I’ve indicated. Time. What is time? The abstractions of physics. What are they and is there any hope that I can understand them? Where can I learn more out about them?

Ideas and problems abound in Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon and it is why I liked the novel so much. There is very little narrative in this novel and but there are a great many questions, most of them unanswered. In my view this is a novel of ideas at its best and is the heart of the reading experience for me.

In an interview in the latest Paris Review (#192) Ray Bradbury expresses a rather different and to me unusual view. “Science fiction is the fiction of ideas... Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.”

Bradbury wonders why this type of novel is so neglected and he gives an example his Fahrenheit 451, a novel I never read but a story I remember vividly in its film version. In talking about the novel he says:

“Take Fahrenheit 451. You’re dealing with book burning, a very serious subject. You’ve got to be careful you don’t start lecturing people. So you put your story a few years into the future and you invent a fireman who has been burning books instead of putting out fires…and you start him on the adventure of discovery…. He reads his first book. He falls in love. And then you send him out into the world to change his life. It’s a great suspense story, and locked into it is this great truth you want to tell, without pontificating.”

Bradbury’s interview opened my eyes to broader conception of the novel of ideas, one that also includes utopian and dystopian fiction, and to a view of science fiction that I’ve not taken seriously before. In their own way they are just as much novels of ideas as those Goldstein mentions or, indeed, that she writes.

Why Do We Read?

Why do we read? In her recent book, Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, Maureen Corrigan responds that we read“…to set off on a search for authenticity. We want to get closer to the heart of things and sometimes even a few good sentences…can crystallize value feelings, fleeting physical sensations, or sometimes, profound epiphanies.”

Harold Bloom in How to Read and Why concurs. “Ultimately we read—as Bacon, Johnson, and Emerson agree—in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.” Yes, we don’t have an easy time knowing ourselves. Sometimes a good book makes our task a little easier, to say nothing of the multiple pleasures it provides.

We read ourselves into literature without concern, as we are in science, for whether or not it is true for others, and if so, for how many and to what degree. Instead, the truth of any literary expression is immediately true for the reader because it corresponds to his or her experience or provides a language for it in a way that had not been available before.

In a letter to Melvin Tumin published in this week’s New Yorker, Saul Bellow expressed the relationship between literature and science this way, “The work of an artist…sets up the hypotheses and tests them in various ways, and it gives answers but these are not definite. However, they need not be definitive; they sing about the human situation.”

Yes, we might say, that is true for me, true to my own experience. This is my story. I have no idea if it is anyone else’s story. But it is the way the way I felt. Or I had not realized its truth until I saw it on the page. That is what a good book is all about, what I seek in a good book anyway and because they are not hard to find, why I keep reading.

Of course, there are more personal reasons why we read, reasons that are not always acknowledged and that change over time, especially for those who have read from their youth. A friend has written to me:

“There is no one answer as to why I read. I first read from loneliness. I read from desperation and to fill my empty time. I had no friends, no playmates. Books were like insulation—filling the empty spaces, protecting me from the chill of loneliness.”

Again Harold Bloom has written: “Imaginative literature is otherness and as such alleviates loneliness.” Does reading literature really have this effect? I am dubious. Enjoying the company of my literary friends is not the same as lessening my isolation. Indeed, sometimes great literature makes me feel all the more isolated when I realize that I will never be able to create such a story or think so brilliantly as the author of the book.

A character can startle and provoke me by something he says and I can derive some consolation from our common views. Yet knowing I am not alone in my belief is one thing, loneliness is something else and its reduction bears no necessary relationship to the recognition of shared belief.

My friend continues, “As I got older, I needed an escape, not only from loneliness, but from my limited surroundings. I read to see other places, to meet other people, to become a larger person. Life didn’t seem to be helping me with this goal, so I turned to books. I felt wise, worldly-wise. I knew the thief, the adulterer, the junky. I’ve always felt an urgent need to experience everything. Yet I am timid at reaching for actual experience. Call it what you will—fearful, cowardly, nervous--I prefer to take much of life at second hand. This has led to some odd contrasts in my life—such as the wide knowledge I had of sex before I had experienced so much as a kiss.”

She concludes, “Now, why do I read? I read for all of these reasons and more. I read to find my own unexpressed thoughts. I read to find answers. I read to find questions. A life without answers is an anxious one. A life without questions is a deadly boring one…”

How eloquent. How wonderful to know that there are others who read for the questions not caring so much if they are answered but simply for the pleasure of thinking about them for a while. And how rare to hear someone speak so honestly about why they read.

Why people read is a mystery and why people read what they read is even more mysterious. In the final analysis it is a highly personal thing and I think it is good to ask yourself these questions every once in a while.

A Novel of Ideas

More than one critic has called Frederic Tuten’s The Green Hour a novel of ideas. Yet the reviewers then proceed to describe the story and leave out the ideas. I want to talk about the ideas. Are they to be found in the story itself?

In college Dominique falls in love with the free spirit, political radical Rex. It is a mutual life-time devotion. While Rex wanders the earth, Dominique buckles down and becomes a highly regarded art history professor, spending much of her time in Paris where every once in a while she bumps into Rex and together they resume their romance. Then she meets Eric who courts her with his millions. She is torn between the chaotic, impoverished Rex and the stable, wealthy Eric.

Meanwhile she overcomes a bout of cancer, travels back and forth between Europe and America, and eventually tries to find a life with Eric at the mansion he built for her on Long Island. (“We’ve been fine,” he said, “but I’ve never been in your heart.”) As much as I enjoyed the story, in fact, I enjoyed it immensely as it is a beautifully written romantic fairy tale, it is clear that Dominique’s conflict is without a solution

Are we to understand that this is the central idea Tuten wishes to impart? That maturity requires abandoning idealism and accepting the fact that a life of reflection does not come for free? “Her lofty ideas had taken her where she could live among a painting’s pillars and columns, in a temple where miracles happened, but they could not pay the mortgage on the house or caulk a sinking boat.”

Dominique is writing a book on the French painter Nicolas Poussin that has taken her forever to complete and on more than one occasion has given her an excuse to return to Paris. Throughout the volume Tuten scatters ideas about Goya and Poussin’s paintings (passionate Goya—Rex(?) and calm Poussin—Eric(?).

“…she had moved her area of interest from Spanish painting and Goya in particular to Poussin, for her as an artist of greater formal and intellectual complexity, greater mystery, though lacking in warmth and perhaps wisdom.”

“She was in fact not sure of what Poussin had intended by that light, but in her writing she had matched it to what she considered The Arcadian Shepherds’ theme: the omnipresence of Death in the center of life.”

Most of the ideas I record while reading a book are scattered randomly throughout the text. In the case of The Green Hour, a good many were different than those I recorded when I read it a few years ago. However, the book meant as much to me on second reading as it did the first.

Here are a couple of ideas I made note of the first time around: “The idea was the act. Actions were ideas enacted but, for her, the idea was its fullness and existed sufficiently without need of the act to complete it. As when love, when first born, takes hold and gives body to all activity rushing from it, the conception lasting longer than its temporal manifestations, the conception enduring while the body falls away in repetition, in boredom, in aging, the draining away of everything corporeal.”

“Do you think poetry changes anything, anyone? Auden says no. I know it does. But he’s just protecting the sanctity of his craft, lest he admit that poetry may change us for the worse as well as for the better.”

And at second reading: “How hard, she would say in that future moment of wisdom for the young to understand how time and experience flatten out all pain, how even one’s suffering finds—if not purpose—some balance and redress in experience yet to be had.”

“There was always an imbalance in love—the one who loved and the one who was loved. Most of her life she had denied it, desiring above all a total equality in love. But nothing in her real experience proved her theory—her wish—correct.”

The Green Hour is assuredly a novel of ideas—ideas concerning art, love, and what it takes to live a scholarly life. While I have read other novels far more dense with ideas and wisdom, there is much to admire in this novel and much to recommend to those who have yet to read it.

And for those interested in the tradition and practice of keeping a commonplace book, I pass along once again one more treasure from The Green Hour:

“For some time since her operation, and without publication its goal, she had been jotting down without order or pattern, anecdotes gleaned from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, noting down those matters or events which moved her. One day these notes and fragments of thought might form a coherent mosaic and reveal to her her own spiritual autobiography as well as biography of her time.”

What Great Art Does

A few weeks ago Kevin Hartnett on The Millions asked a question that looms large in my thinking. Quite simply he wonders “…just what is it that great art does.” He prefaces the question by acknowledging that it is one thing to judge the formal properties of a work of literature and quite another to assess its effects.

The question is not unlike the one Sven Birkerts posed in his American Scholar essay on Reading in the Digital Age. For Birkerts the principle criterion of a literary work’s impact is what we recall from reading it. And the best Birkerts can say is that we retain is “a distinct tonal memory…” In contrast, Hartnett confronts the question far more concretely.

One way to think about what a work of art does is to imagine the counterfactual—how would my life have been different had I not spent the last three months reading War and Peace? The answers, I think, tend to group into three categories: The social experiences I had because of the book; the ideas the book incorporated into my life; and the aesthetic moments that were opened to me because of what I was reading.

In his essay Hartnett proceeds to amplify on each of these categories in discussing the various ways Tolstoy’s War and Peace affected him. In terms of the social consequences of reading the book, he starts talking to others who have read it. He learns that his father-in-law read the book in two feverish weeks, that his friend read it while he was serving as a Peace Corp volunteer, and he describes episodes of book to his friends. He claims he almost never tells anyone about the stories from the books he reads yet the vividness and range of experiences described by Tolstoy almost compelled him to describe them to others.

Then there are the intellectual effects of reading this great novel. Hartnett writes, “I have read other novels where the controlling idea of the story came to serve as a lens through which I viewed my days, but never has this happened quite as thoroughly as it did with War and Peace.” What better measure of the effects of fiction than a “lens” for making sense of the increasing complexity of ordinary life? Think of how a lifetime of reading great books can multiply and strengthen the ways we view the world. Those who doubt the impact of literary fiction on one’s life have to confront this widely voiced observation of dedicated readers.

In the end, Harnett admits he doesn’t read novels so he can talk about them with others or for their ideas, but rather for the “pure aesthetic moment that comes from seeing life perfectly distilled into words.” You are reading a novel and you come across a chapter or a page that moves you deeply, that gives you pause, and prompts you to read it again. The memory lingers and no doubt germinates over time and takes root like any other experience that exerts a powerful effect on your life.

I admired Harnett’s attempt to pinpoint the various ways literature can affect us. Rather that making vague claims about whether it does or doesn’t, he has given us three important markers to measure the consequences of reading. This is the issue that first drew me to literature and it continues to preoccupy me. If I didn’t think reading novels influenced my life and didn’t offer me more than a distraction for a while, I would give up worrying about its effects and might even stop reading altogether.

Re-Reading a Forgotten Book

The other day I chanced upon a volume on my bookshelf that I recall reading a few years ago. It was at the end of the row and so it was more noticeable than the other books on the shelf. It was The Green Hour by Frederic Tuten.

I took it from the shelf, looked at the inside back page, and saw that I had listed several page numbers where the passages I had marked were located. I checked my Commonplace Book to see if I had copied them and yes, they were there and that I had read the book in 2002--a mere eight years ago.

If you had asked me what was the book about, I could not have told you. I would not have been able to tell you the story, the names of the characters, what happened to them or really much of anything about the book. All I remember was that I had liked it and that I thought it was a quite special love story. So I took the book from the shelf and began reading it a few days later.

Nothing about it seemed familiar. Not Paris, Dominique, Rex, Professor Morin, Kenji—nothing. It was if I had just picked it up and started to read de novo. I am still reading it and once again enjoying it immensely. How could I have forgotten it, forgotten virtually all of it except that I liked it enough not to discard it along with so many others in deciding what books to save each time we packed up to move yet again.

A friend writes: Don't you love it when a book you have previous read and enjoyed seems totally new when you read it again? The book is the same but we are different which makes for a delightful and sometimes unsettling reading experience.

What is it that we remember in the books we have read? And if, in fact, we remember very little, how then do the books we’ve read influence us? Could it be that they scarcely affect us at all?

In his recent essay (Reading in a Digital Age) in the American Scholar, Sven Birkerts poses the same questions:

What—I ask again—what has been the point of my reading? One way for me to try to answer is to ask what I do retain. Honest answer? A distinct tonal memory, a conviction of having been inside an author’s own language world, and along with that some hard-to-pinpoint understanding of his or her psyche. Certainly I believe I have gained something important, though to hold that conviction I have to argue that memory access cannot be the sole criterion of impact: that there are other ways that we might possess information, impressions, and even understanding. For I will insist that my reading has done a great deal for me even if I cannot account for most of it.

Here Birkerts argues that what we usually don’t recall anything specific in the books we’ve read. Rather we remember an impression, a “feeling” or a “sensation” and occasionally an idea or a character.

And so whatever influence books have upon us has to be very general, a non-specific effect that we sense but cannot identify with any precision. Learning without awareness. We no doubt learn a great deal but that derives from the cumulative impact of years of reading, book after book, one year after another.

Make a list of the books you’ve read. You might be startled. Now tell me what you recall from each one.

We learn styles, values, points of view, a certain sensitivity about matters of the heart and mind. We hear people voice views that are similar to our own and since we admire or respect them, our views are strengthened. We develop tastes and a way of being, and while we clearly don’t imitate the characters on the page or espouse the same ideas, we do learn to discriminate between ideas we do and don’t believe, between what is true and what isn’t. And what we learn continues to evolve over the course of our reading days so that what was true 40 years ago may very well not be today.

Time Out

Marks in the Margin will be taking an indefinite break in order to devote myself to other projects waiting in the wings. I am most grateful to everyone who has read and commented on the blog during the past two years.

During that time I have come to think of blogging as much like a classroom. In the beginning there were only a few students but gradually the class grew larger and became more interesting, especially to me.

Like any new class, it became a learning experience for the teacher who learned far more about literature than he ever had before. And it was fun, as well as a bit of a test for me, an unschooled student of literature, to try to write a page or so each day about a book or article I had read or about an idea that for one reason or another was important to me.

I also came to know a few of my readers who, I hope, will continue to be my friends during the forthcoming hiatus. And I found other literary bloggers who I now regard as friends who gather together in this strange new place to talk about the books they’ve read and what the experience meant to them.

Throughout much of last year I was ensconced in Honolulu, where I had come for what I had hoped would be the rest of my life. At least, that was the plan, a plan soon discarded as the year went by. And I have wondered to what extent simply living in the benign climate of the tropics, where I felt so utterly relaxed, contributed to the outpouring of words that year.

I had worried that I would succumb to surf boarding and sun bathing. But like most of the worries I have, nothing came of it. Does it matter where a writer lives or what the weather is like there? The life that Dostoyevsky led in Russia gave him a subject matter that ultimately led to his masterpieces. But it did not guarantee he would write them.

Would he have written about something else if he had fled wintery Moscow for the tropics? While I not even close to qualifying for Dostoyevsky’s league or have the slightest idea how to write novels, at least I did not altogether loose my stuff among the waving palms and flowering bougainvillea of Oahu. Indeed, as Jonah Lehrer comments in his recent blog, Mood and Cognition, "sometimes being relaxed “promotes a more freewheeling kind of information processing which leads to more creative insights.”

Just the other day a Facebook Friend sent me a request to join the fray at Sticky Books. The rules of the game go like this: List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you. They should be the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. And then I was supposed to tag 15 Friends who I thought might like to know my favorites. Tagging remains a mystery to me, but I very quickly came up with the following list arranged in no particular order.

Azar Nafisi Reading Lolita in Tehran
Brian Morton Starting Out in the Evening,
David Denby Great Books
Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls
Michael Cunningham The Hours
Elliot Perlman Seven Types of Ambiguity
Michael Ondaatje The English Patient
J. M. Coetzee Youth
Lawrence Durrell The Alexandrian Quartet
Kai Bird & Martin Sherwin American Prometheus
Pascal Mercier Night Train to Lisbon
Philip Roth Exit Ghost
Rachel Cusk Arlington Park
Ian McEwan Saturday
John Williams Stoner

I believe I have blogged about most of these books and in doing so I came to appreciate the extent to which reading and writing are inseparable. They always will be for me, but for now I am going to turn that undertaking in a slightly different direction.

The Science of Melancholy

Louis Menand is a professor of English at Harvard and “Critic at Large” for the New Yorker. He is also knowledgeable across a wide range of disciplines including psychology and psychiatry. In the March 1st of the New Yorker, he writes about current research on depression, therapy, and antidepressants. His discussion centers around six topics:

Depression
Menand claims there is scarcely any agreement on the causes or most effective treatments for depression. Indeed, it may never be known what the source(s) of depression are, largely because it is almost impossible to distinguish a genuine depressive pathology (if there is one) from a sadness or long-lasting melancholy from naturally occurring events.

Diagnosis
There is also considerable disagreement about the definition of depression and a very low agreement among trained psychiatrists in diagnosing a mental patient who appears to be suffering from depression.

Therapy
Psychotherapy for depression has highly variable results with outcomes that are often not significantly different than no-treatment or placebo conditions. There is also little evidence that “…supplementing antidepressant medication with talk therapy improves outcomes.” Further, patients often get better over the course of time without clinical interventions

Antidepressants
In spite of the advice--“Take the meds.”--of a number of well known individuals (William Styron in Darkness Visible, Andrew Solomon in The Noonday Demon, etc), there is also little evidence that antidepressants lead to enduring recovery or that they are superior to placebos

Drug Companies
While the understanding of depression languishes in uncertainty, the drug companies are thriving. “Between 1988, the year after Prozac was approved by the F.D.A, and 2000, adult use of antidepressants almost tripled. By 2005, one out of every ten Americans had a prescription for an antidepressant.”

Coping
There is a strain of pharmacological and psychotherapeutic Calvinism in this country that underscores the importance of learning how to cope with adversity. “We think that sucking it up and mastering our fears is a sign of character.” Or that we don’t want to be the kind of person who doesn’t experience sorrow or distress. These are questions beyond the scope of research and, for Menand, will forever remain matters for philosophy and literature to grapple with.

If the confusion and disarray among those who study and treat depression wasn’t already clear to you, it surely will be after reading Menand’s review. I believe it gives an accurate account of the current state of depression research and analysis. There is scarcely any certainty about what to do if you become depressed and if you are in some way professionally qualified, how to go about treating it.

As one who has spent much of my life observing and studying depression, as well as spending many long hours thinking about the depressed people I have known and loved, I wonder if we will ever be able to understand and effectively overcome what has become an increasingly common problem for all too many individuals

Medicine and Literature

John Updike once wrote, “Life is a very strange thing, in a way, compared to life in a novel. People in novels rather rarely eat; their health is not often of concern to them; earning money isn’t nearly as important to them as it is to those of us in the real world.”

Virginia Woolf also expresses this view in her well-known essay “Short of Breath” that has been reprinted as a slim volume On Being Ill. It begins with a memorable paragraph.

“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous, the spiritual change that is brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, …when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed, that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.”

Even though she spent most of her life battling depression and debilitating physical symptoms, she never wrote about them. She wonders why illness has not been as popular a subject for literature as love. Why has the “daily drama of the body” not been recognized by writers?

She admits it might simply be due to the poverty of language. “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.” Her essay was written in 1926; in the eighty-four years since then, much has changed.

Late last year the first Wellcome Trust book prize was awarded for “outstanding works of fiction and non-fiction on the theme of health, illness or medicine.” The winning book was Keeper, Andrea Gillies memoir of caring for a relative with Alzheimer’s that apparently had not been publically reviewed. In writing about this award Chris Powers discusses other works of literature that treat medical themes.

He discusses Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Oliver Sacks The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday. He mentions writers who were trained as doctors—Chekhov, William Carlos Williams, Somerset Maugham, Walker Percy, a topic about which I have previously blogged.

I think of books I’ve read about individuals with Alzheimer’s, a topic that is being written about with increasing frequency these days. There is Still Alice by Lisa Genova a novel that describes the experience from the point of view of an individual diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. Much earlier there was Elegy for Iris, John Bayley’s moving account his wife, Iris Murdock’s, descent into Alzheimer’s.

…Iris’s inability to summon the words she seemed to want. Her delivery had always been slow and thoughtful and a little hesitant, and at first I was not perturbed, sure that she would recover in a few minutes, when she got the feel of the gather. It was hard to say how conscious she was of her own difficulty, but the effect soon became paralyzing, for the listener as well as for her.

Alzheimer’s is, in fact, like an insidious fog, barely noticeable until everything around has disappeared. After that, it is no longer possible to believe that a world outside fog exists. First, we saw our own friendly, harassed GP, who asked Iris who the prime minister was. She had no idea but said to him with a smile that it surely didn’t matter.

More and more fiction and non-fiction books are being written about old age and the infirmities of growing old. I think of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a memoir that documents the author’s struggle to cope with the effects of a massive stroke that left him totally paralyzed with the exception of his left eye-lid that allowed him to communicate. I think David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death about his mother, Susan Sontag that portrays her persistent, but always painful, struggles to overcome three bouts of cancer. And then there are two recent works of Philip Roth, Everyman and Exist Ghost that depict in agonizing detail the “massacre” that is old age.

It is clearly no longer correct to say, as Virginia Woolf and John Updike did, that literature has ignored illness and matters of health. To the contrary, it now appears we are being inundated with more and more volumes of literary works that treat these issues in considerable detail. I sense we have only seen the beginning.

Econ 101

The Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman is growing increasingly pessimistic about the chances for recovery from the current recession. In her March 1st New Yorker profile Larissa MacFarquhar states that Krugman “pulled out of the stock market ten years ago never went back.”

Krugman believes that stocks at their current price earnings ratios are currently overpriced. “They were a good deal when the average price earnings ratio …was thirteen or fourteen, but now, except at the very bottoms of recent swings, its been over twenty.”

The stock market is a fairly reliable, although imperfect, predictor of future economic conditions. So any investor might want to take his views seriously. The same holds for anyone planning a major expenditure based on their current financial condition or that of the economy.

Should I buy a house now? Will interests rates continue to be so low? Are we about to see another bust in the housing market? Krugman also believes that being a highly developed industrial country is no guarantee against the forces that give rise to major economic downturns. “Finland and Sweden…suffered slumps as long as Indonesia’s.” So did Japan the long recession of the 90s.

Yet he is the first to admit he doesn’t always get it right. “The extent of corporate fraud, the financial malfeasance, the sheer viciousness of the political scene—those are all things that, ten years ago, I didn’t see.”

As Krugman has noted over and over again in his column in the New York Times, the Obama administration bailout plan does not go far enough. He believes much more needs to be injected into the economy to produce a sustained, stable return to better economic times and avoid a much more serious recession with the potential to develop into major depression-like crisis. (Reflecting an increasingly heard concern, David Leonhardt, in yesterday’s Times, asks, “Could the economy be at risk of a double-dip?)

Krugman is a busy man. He writes for the Times, teaches at Princeton, has conducted several landmark research studies, and written a good many books, and in collaboration with his wife, Robin Wells, also an economist, an introductory economic textbook.

Krugman also faults Obama for not being as forceful in moving forward on his agenda, particularly on health care. (Perhaps he would think otherwise in light of Obama’s latest proposals.) He believes given the current political makeup of Congress, it is hopeless to expect there will ever be any consensus on the difficult issues that the nation confronts today. Anyone who expects he can “…achieve real change without bitter confrontation is living in a fantasy world.”

It has been many years since he has been able to do the kind of serious research that led to his Nobel Prize. Yet he worries that “I guess doing the really creative academic work does require a state of mind that’s hard to maintain throughout your whole life. When I was younger, when I figured something out there was this sense of the heavens parting and the choirs singing that I don’t get now. And that’s life.”

The increase in financial inequality in the US is one of the problems Krugman would like to look more deeply into now. “…he believes that the increase in inequality in the U.S. since the sixties is a product less of economic factors—the development of technology, say, leading to the greater importance of skills and education—than of political decisions about taxation and unions.”

He is also interested in problems associated with economic geography, why for instance “…were cars produced in Detroit, carpets in Dalton, Georgia, jewelry in Providence, and chips in Silicon Valley.” Chance, history, geography, or something else?

MacFarquhar concludes her profile with a sentence that I think would characterize most, if not all scholars who devote themselves to a life of research and study. “If there is a sadness in him at all, I think it is a tiny core of profound sadness of the kind that the Buddha understood—that we probably can’t use human rationality to make the world all better and it would be really nice if we were able to.”