This Revolution Was Tweeted

Last year Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in The New Yorker about the role of social media in generating protest movements. He argued they have always emerged without anything like the contemporary forms of social networking. The revolution will not be tweeted was the way he put it.

As is his wont, he provided an example or two in support of his argument, those that emerged well before the Facebooks and Twitters of modern day networking. Most of his discussion centered on the civil rights movement in the South that depended on well organized, well planned protests by a group of friends.

Glawell asserted these and other pre-Internet revolutions occurred “without e-mail, texting, Facebook or Twitter.” He goes on to say that, “What mattered more was an applicants degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement.” Here he is following the views of the Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam whose research suggested that strong ties among the activists are critical to the success of any protest movement.

In contrast, Gladwell argued that social networks are characterized by weak ties. “Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch.” He believes that such weak ties do not give rise to high-risk activism.

Here, as in his other works, Gladwell over-generalizes from one or two cases to a much larger population of other ones. In this respect, he ignores counter examples, ignores the fact that not all revolutions, or activist movements occur for the same reasons.

He also does not take into account that today’s world is not the world of the sixties or revolutionary France where different factors played a role and where other reasons motivated individual behavior. Martin Luther King did not need what the people of Egypt needed and he didn’t have the tools the protesters have in Egypt either. Every social protest movement is different. In this respect, they are the same as any other natural phenomena.

What is the evidence about the events in Egypt? Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was recently imprisoned there for twelve days credits Facebook for starting the revolution that resulted in the resignation of Hosni Mubarak. It was Ghonim who created a Facebook page in honor of Khaled Said, who was allegedly tortured and killed in 2010 by Egyptian policemen in Alexandria.

A comprehensive article about recent events in the Arab world by David Kirkpatrick and David Sanger in the February 13th issue of the Times takes issue with Gladwell’s claims about limits of social networks. They write that Facebook groups were “part of a remarkable two-year collaboration that has given birth to a new force in the Arab world.” The evidence they review leaves little doubt that Egyptian revolution was a well-organized, well-planned movement that took advantage of the enormous power of social networks. They were by no means limited by their purported weak ties.

We know that thousands of Egyptians were galvanized by it to join the revolt. As James Glanz and John Markoof put it in Wednesday’s Times, “Epitaphs for the Mubarak government all note the mobilizing power of the Internet was one of the Egyptian opposition’s most potent weapons.” We know that the movement did not spring de novo from a few people on the street, that there was a small group or organizers who were instrumental in planning and organizing the protest in Tahrir Square and elsewhere now in Yemen, Bahrain, Iran and Libya.

We also know that shutting down the Internet and access to Twitter and Facebook was one of the first steps taken by the Egyptian government to quash the revolt. And we know that similar steps are now being undertaken in other Arab countries where the protests are gathering momentum.

In the light of recent events in the Middle East I thought that Gladwell would at least qualify his views. No, he hasn’t. Earlier this month he reaffirmed them in a short note at the New Yorker online News Desk saying that “the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.”

Ah, the wonders of the confirmation bias.

To be sure individuals who have for years experienced oppression and whose rights have been abrogated will find ways to communicate with one another. But that rarely leads them to revolt. The tools that make revolutions possible are just as necessary as the reasons that motivate them. In fact, the tools of social networking may, in the final analysis, lead to the restoration of human rights at a much greater pace that has historically been the case.

Note: On Wednesday’s Fresh Air, Terry Gross interviewed Biz Stone, the co-founder of Twitter. He spoke about the role the online service played in the Egyptian protest and how its leaders had been using Twitter as early as 2008.

The Imperfectionists

How do you decide what to read? This is a question that is largely ignored among the literati. Yet in reviewing my own books and commonplace book entries, I realize the degree to which the collected passages are determined by the books I select, books that reflect the same themes year after year.

They are not mysteries, romance novels, rarely biographies or memoirs. Instead, they are primarily philosophical novels, novels that raise difficult questions or issues, posed by interesting characters who occupy an appealing place and time. If they tell a good story along the way, all the better.

The Imperfectionist by Tom Rachman is not a philosophical novel. And yet I read it and thought it was a lot of fun. But what did I come away with? No grand ideas, nothing in the way of a remarkable person or unforgettable story, let alone any aesthetic pleasure. However, I finished it and even managed to collect a few amusing passages.

Rachman’s novel, his first, can be described very simply. It is the tale of group of individuals who guided and wrote for a small, never-named English Language newspaper in Rome with a dwindling daily circulation that never measured more that 10,000 copies. The novel consists of short-snappy chapters about eleven of these individuals. They include Herman Cohen, the newspaper corrections editor who one day noticed that Tony Blair was listed among recently deceased Japanese dignitaries.

Or Craig Menzies, the news editor, who was informed that everyone on the staff had received a photo of his young girl friend laying naked in bed with another man. Or the newspaper’s financial officer, Abbey Pinnola, who, on a transatlantic flight to its corporate headquarters finds herself sitting next to the man she just fired.

And we learn a little about the American industrialist Cyrus Ott who founded the paper for reasons that only become clear at the very end after he has died. Finally, we don’t want to learn anything about his air-head son, who takes over the paper briefly to pronounce its closing before the staff with a crudeness and insensitivity that must have always been his defining style.

And so it goes, one kooky character and situation after another in which Rachman offers up snapshots of characters, without ever developing any single one. This can be tedious, but Rachman makes most of them a little quirky or atypical and writes about them amusingly and sometimes surprisingly.

The paper and its slow decline is the only thing that binds them together. The newspaper is long gone, the writers have departed on their not-so-merry ways, and Tom Rachman has a tough act to follow. However, I will be on the lookout for his next novel. So will Christopher Buckley who said he had to read the novel twice to figure out how the young, 35 year-old Rachman pulled it off. He confesses he wasn’t able to figure it out.

After the novel concludes, there is an interesting exchange, between Malcolm Gladwell and Tom Rachman where they discuss the novel tangentially and the nature of writing more seriously. Gladwell asks Rachman, “If reading fiction civilizes us, does writing fiction civilize us even more?”

Rachman replies, “I want to say, “Yes!” But I don’t know that I can. The biographies of writers are so full of misbehavior that it would be hard to correlate writing and morality. What is remarkable is how often writers and other artists produce works of moral depth, yet are accused of having been monstrous in private.”

This leads Gladwell to respond, “Yes, there is no necessary connection between the sensitivity that is required of the writer in his craft and whatever grace and sensitivity that he or she may possess in person.”

Well, now we have something to think about.

Eros is Everywhere

Romance was among the most frequent themes recorded in a recent statistical analysis of those collected in my commonplace book. From a much larger number, I have selected the following to post on this auspicious day.

Eros is everywhere. It is what binds. John Updike

Love feels more and more like the only subject. Salman Rushdie

Talking about love is like dancing about architecture. From Playing By Heart (film)

There was always an inbalance 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. Frederick Tuten, The Green Hour.

In the ten years since the car crash took her from him, he had cherished her more than while she was alive. Julius sometimes heaved with despair when he thought of how his lush contentment with Miriam, the true idyllic soaring moments of life, had come and gone with his fully grasping them….He knew also that no other woman would ever really matter to him. Irving Yalom, The Schopenhauer Cure.

She loved him unconditionally, and there is nothing more sustaining than that. Eliot Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity

Love never dies, he said. James Salter, Last Night (A short story)

Love…like food or air, is necessary but insufficient; it can’t do for us what we must do for ourselves. Certainly, it can no longer act as an organizing principle. Romantic love now seems a yearning to dive down into feeling and come up magically changed, when what is required for the making of a self is the deliberate pursuit of consciousness. Vivian Gornick The End of the Novel of Love

Everything else passes away; that which you love remains. She had to believe this, even if she wasn’t sure it was true. Brian Morton Starting Out in the Evening

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy, ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of my life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it next, because it relieves loneliness, the terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss… Bertrand Russell What I Have Lived For

…he found her again, like something he never knew was missing, like a song he had memorized in his youth and had then forgotten. Suddenly, clearly, he could see her, the way he had been able to see her at twenty, not her physical self at twenty, because in every sense she was more beautiful to him now, but he felt that old sensation, the leaving in his heart, the reckless flush of desire…Without these particular circumstances, this specific and horrible place, he might never have realized that the only true love of his life was his wife. Ann Patchett Bell Canto

Our culture, Prose asserts, has too narrowly defined the parameters of what we call love and drastically foreshortened the continuum along which each individual passionate affair or painfully repressed romance…is located… Christina Nehring Eros Unseated, The American Scholar, #71, 2002

Falling in love is the nearest most of us come to glimpsing utopia in our lifetimes. Rebecca Mead on Laura Kipnis’s, Against Love, The New Yorker, August 11, 2003

Loving is so much truer when sympathy and not desire makes the match; for it leaves no wounds. Lawrence Durrell Justine

Is it possible for a person to love without wanting love back? Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing by rain. Alan Lightman Reunion

It was typical of his life with Elise, when he’d had a life with Elise, that he would like her one minute and dislike her the next, that he would find her heartbreaking and lovable and then turn around moments later and find her repellent. Frederick Barthelme Two Against One

…and he looked at her for the last and final time with yes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in a half century of shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “Only God knows how much I loved you.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez Pentecost Sunday (A short story)

Ideas I Like

Literature and Freedom Does literature enhance freedom? Peter Bieri, the pen name of Pascal Mercier whose philosophical novel, Night Train to Lisbon, (among my favorites) has given considerable thought to this question. His reasoning is original and cogent.

“The overall idea: Freedom is the ability to shape one’s will according to one’s judgement about the desirable life. This ability presupposes a profound understanding of oneself: of one’s beliefs, memories, wishes, emotions. A crucial step in obtaining this understanding is knowledge of one’s imagination. Literature is one important source of such knowledge, both in the mode of reading and in the mode of writing. Therefore, literature, by acquainting us with our imagination, enhances our self-understanding and, through it, our freedom.”

The Reader’s Experience
In most critical discussions of literature, the experience of the reader is virtually ignored, as literary scholars tend to dwell on the meaning of the text from various theoretical or cultural frameworks. Instead, in my own reflections on literature I have been trying to focus on the experience of the reader, how literature enters their life, and possibly changes them. This view is rarely heard in academia. David Miall of the University of Alberta is an exception. In Literary Reading he wrote:

“I find it odd that almost none of the theorists in the debate about the fate of literature have considered examining the experiences of actual readers; several have remarked that such experiences are too idiosyncratic to be worth considering. But is that really so? " And later he asks, "What are readers doing when they read a literary text?"

Self-Forgetting
In his blog, Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp discusses one of the ways literature takes us away from ourself (for a change) after chancing upon a student reading one of the Harry Potter novels during recess one day.

“An Asian girl sat on a wall by the playground equipment in what I recognized as a reader’s reverie. In her lap was a fat volume I knew from thirty paces – the fourth Harry Potter. My three sons have read them all, often more than once, and have watched the movies repeatedly. The fourth-grader was on her third pass through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I sensed her irritation at the interruption -- recess is short and returning to class gets in the way of the important thing, and here’s yet another distraction – but she was polite and articulate: “When I read them it’s like I’m really there. I forget about everything else.

Every dedicated reader knows – or remembers – the sensation of self-forgetting triggered by a book. When the girl realized I knew something about books, if not Harry Potter, and that I was not condescending to her as grownups do, she asked: “Do you know how I can write a letter to J.K. Rowling? Does she have e-mail? Do you think she’ll write back?” I suggested she write care of Rowling’s publisher and showed her in the book where she could find the address.”

Books as Bombs

“Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. In later life we admire, we are entertained, we may modify some views…but we are more likely to find in books merely a confirmation of what is in our minds already.” Graham Greene

We sometimes hear of books that have exerted a major influence on someone's life or a large group of individuals. Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther is perhaps the foremost example of the powerful impact of the reading experience. It led so many young individuals into acts of imitative suicide that it was banned in several countries soon after it was published.

The San Francisco bookstore, A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, used to have a page on its website that invited readers to "name the book that changed your life." One contributor responded: "The Harry Potter books changed my life. I used to hate reading. Now I am the best reader in the class. Those books changed my imagination. I wasn't too much of a dreamer. Now, I love to imagine things. I just hope that they change someone else's life like they did mine."

The Autodidactic Press once offered a similar invitation on the "Books that Changed Lives" page on its website. In citing The Autobiography of Malcolm X, one individual wrote: "I first read the book as a sixth grader. The book was so searing that I vowed to become like that unusual man. Today I am a Muslim as a direct result of Malcolm's autobiography."

Recently a student of literature wrote to me: “James is mirroring my reality. It is the only thing keeping me afloat, knowing that some other mind experienced these complexities. Art is a world separate from the social, a refuge.” Her experience is similar to the one Shirley Hazzard described in a recent interview when she declared that poetry “literally and figuratively saved my life and enabled me to live inwardly.”

Book can sometimes lead to political and social change across a wide population of individuals. In 1906 Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a book that had a profound impact on me and almost everyone else who has ever read it. Sinclair’s novel documented the horrible conditions, the filth, the corruption, and the total disregard for the workers that existed in the meatpacking industry. It was the driving force that led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and general expansion of regulatory control of the food industry.

While rare, Louis Menand reminds us in a recent New Yorker essay, “Books as Bombs” that other books have had a similar widespread influence. Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities has had a major impact on urban planning in this country and elsewhere. Rachel Carson’s now classic Silent Spring is often said to have given birth to the Environmental Movement and led directly to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Michael Harrington’s The Other America is credited with shaping Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. And many automotive safety regulations were a direct result of Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed.

In his essay Menand reviews Stephanie Coontz’s A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. He writes, “…an enormous number of women recognized themselves in its pages [The Feminine Mystique], and many wrote Friedan grateful letters describing the book’s effect on them: “I feel today, as though I had been filled with helium and turned loose!” “Like light bulbs going off again and again.” “I understood what I was feeling and felt validated!!”

Coontz is somewhat more restrained in describing the impact of Friedan’s book. “Books don’t become best sellers because they are ahead of the time. But people like to be able to point to a book as the cause for a new frame of mind.” And as Menand notes, in the 60s books were bombs. In my view there is no reason to believe they are any less explosive today.

Coincidentally in the week following Menand’s review, The New Yorker published a new Alice Munro short story, “Axis,” about the relationship of two women that illustrates the kind of force The Feminine Mystique and other feminine best-sellers of 60s had on women:

“When the great switch came in women’s lives—when wives and mothers who had seemed content suddenly announced that is was not so, when they all started sitting on the floor instead of on sofas, and took university courses and wrote poetry and fell in love with their professors or their psychiatrists or their chiropractors, and began to say “shit” and “fuck” instead of “darn” and “heck”…

Creating a Mood

Somewhere is the title of the recent film written and directed by Sofia Coppola, who also wrote and directed Lost in Translation. In many ways the two films are similar. In both most of the scenes are filmed in hotel settings, take place in cities with a particular emotional climate (Los Angeles and Tokyo), and concern directionless individuals who convey a sense of dislocation, ennui, and isolation.

But whereas Lost in Translation accomplishes this with an ongoing dialogue of clever banter, there is very little talk in Somewhere. Instead the story is told with images, many of which remain on the screen for long periods and moods, also conveyed visually, of the characters and the situations where they find themselves. It is this simplicity that is the real strength of Somewhere in spite of its unsympathetic character who could have anything (and anyone) in the world at the asking.

The film opens with a long fixed scene of a desert someplace. Eventually we hear the roar of a car go by and in a flash it is gone. The car has that purring sound of a Ferrari punctuated with its familiar downshifts. We hear the car for a while and then it fades away. We realize it is going around a track. The Ferrari comes into view again and disappears. This goes on for perhaps five minutes. Is there something wrong with the projector? No. The car is going round and round nowhere.

The scene shifts to a suite at the Chateau Marmont, that legendary hotel and sometime residence of generations of movie stars. Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is lying in bed watching a pair of twin pole dancers, eyes drooping until he falls asleep. Johnny is in between films that have brought him fame. It means nothing to him. Nothing does.

He languishes in the suite for days. He watches the pole dancers again, he is seduced by one woman after another, but feels no pleasure. He is not depressed, he simply doesn’t feel anything. Is this what fame brings to stars? This is what it brings to Johnny Marco.

You don’t have to be a genius to know how often beauty, fame and riches do not lead to a life of fulfillment. Periods of boredom and angst can come to anyone at any time in their life. Coppola remarks, “The film is really about an existential crisis that anyone can relate to, even though it’s set in an exotic world.”

Johnny is only alive when Cleo, his eleven-year old daughter, played by the remarkably expressive and graceful Elle Fanning visits him. Because of an unclear crisis in his marriage, Cleo visits for a longer stay and then permanently as her mother departs for Europe.

They play the guitar together, lounge by the pool, have a tea-time swim game under water (classic scene) and he takes her with him on his round of press conferences. She cooks meals for him, orders ingredients from room service, and one morning prepares, in almost slow motion elegance, as in a dance sequence, a meal of eggs Benedict.

At a press conference he is asked, “Who is Johnny Marco?” He is silent. Cleo and Johnny fly together to Milan where he receives a meaningless award. He is asked in Italian how he likes Italy. He says he just arrived. Together they fly back to the Chateau Marmont the next day. And so it goes, from one almost silent scene to the next. Johnny’s devotion to Cleo is his only redeeming feature.

In an interview Sophia Coppola said she wanted to find ways to tell a story that was simple and how “little details can express motions—more like in life…I wanted to think of visuals to explain the character and the state he’s in.” In both respects, she has succeeded. Somewhere is a distinctive film with a mood and feeling that remains with you for days.

The film is also about Los Angeles, the special feeling that this city often engenders, a feeling that is well known to me since days of my youth. There is its diffuse and muted light, there is the cinema culture with its fame and celebrity madness, and there is the driving, the driving everywhere, up Mulholland drive to the hills above the city, the long, straight desert road to Las Vegas, the 101 Freeway heading North.

The film ends on the road, quite literally. Johnny gets in his Ferrari, drives out Sunset Boulevard to a desert road someplace, stops the car on the side of the road, turns the engine off, leaves the keys in the car, opens the door, gets out and starts walking.

The Little Virtues

Natalia Ginzburg was an Italian novelist and essayist whose work I have long admired. She lived both before and after the Fascist years in Italy. Her first husband, Leone Ginzburg, was tortured and executed in 1944 for his anti-fascist activities; her second, Gabrielle Baldini, was a professor of English and is described in several of the essays in her collection, The Little Virtues.

This collection is divided into two parts, written a various times during these two marriages that on my recent reading seem to account for their different styles and moods. Whereas the first set is composed of short, lively, upbeat paragraphs, the second consist of long, monotonous opinionated ones. In “My Vocation” about her life as a writer, she says:

“But whether we are happy or unhappy leads us to write one way or another. When we are happy our imagination is stronger; when we are unhappy our memory works with greater vitality. Suffering makes the imagination weak and lazy…it is difficult for us to turn our eyes away from our own life and our own state, from the thirst and restlessness that pervade us.”

Perhaps the most widely anthologized of her essays included in this volume is “He and I” that I first read in Philip Lopate’s classic collection The Art of the Personal Essay. The following excerpt is the way she describes her long relationship with her second husband.

“He always feels hot, I always feel cold….He speaks several languages well; I do not speak any well…He has an excellent sense of direction, I have none at all…He loves museums, and I will go if I am forced to but with an unpleasant sense of effort and duty. He loves libraries and I hate them…He loves traveling, unfamiliar foreign cities, restaurants. I would like to stay at home all the time and never move…He is not shy; I am shy…I don’t know how to dance and he does. I don’t know how to type and he does….I don’t know how to sing and he does.”

Each time I read this and other such comparisons in “He and I,” I am reminded of a similar comparison Woody Allen made of his relationship with Mia Farrow that I've mentioned before. “She doesn't like the city and I adore it. She loves the country and I don't like it. She doesn't like sports at all and I love sports. She loves to eat in, early -- 5:30, 6 -- and I love to eat out, late. She likes simple, unpretentious restaurants; I like fancy places…. She would love to take a boat down the Amazon or go up to Mount Kilimanjaro; I never want to go near those places. … She has raised nine children now with no trauma and has never owned a thermometer. I take my temperature every two hours in the course of the day."

But at the end of “He and I” Ginzburg describes a walk she and Baldini took before they were married that casts another light upon their differences.

“If I remind him of that walk along the Via Nazionale he says he remembers it, but I know he is lying and that he remembers nothing; and I sometimes ask myself if it was us, these two people, almost twenty years ago on the Via Nazionale; two people who conversed so politely, so urbanely, as the sun was setting; who chatted a little about everything perhaps and about nothing; two friends talking, two young intellectuals out for a walk; so young, so educated, so uninvolved, so ready to judge one another with kind impartiality; so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever, as the sun set, at the corner of the street.”

Viva le differenze!

At a glance you can tell her essays are moody, some reflecting periods of a suffering that can never be overcome no matter how many years go by. She says she will never get over the war years in Italy. And yet some of her essays depict days of sunshine, cherished friends, and “a certain climate in which feelings, instincts and thoughts can flourish.

This was the spirit conveyed in her first essay “Winter in the Abruzzi,” written when, together with their children, she and her first husband were exiled to this remote section of Italy away from books, friends, the cinema and the many events that filled their days, including their anti-fascist activities. “There are only two seasons in the Abruzzi: summer and winter. The spring is snowy and windy like the winter, and the autumn is hot and clear like the summer.”

In spite of the sadness that took hold of them there, their lives unfolded much as before, with new friends who offered them protection and the resources they needed to live relatively comfortably. In spite of the isolation and hardships they endured during their three years in the Abruzzi, she concludes,

“But that was the best time of my life and only now that has gone from me forever—only now do I realize it.”

Literary Memories

Do you sometimes recall when and where you were when you read one of your favorite books? Perhaps a book that you read when you were young that you’ll never forget? Or one that made you realize how good and how much fun reading is? Or that turned your life in a new direction? Here are a few of my literary memories:

Camille
Alexander Dumas' Camille was the first novel I read from start to finish in less than a day. I think I was about 14 or 15--about the time I was in high school. As I recall the situation, the 1937 movie with Greta Garbo as Camille had been reissued and for reasons that completely baffle me now, I decided that I wanted to see it. I am fairly certain my mother suggested I should read the book first and that she had purchased a copy for me.

And so, after breakfast early one weekend morning, I went back to bed to begin reading the novel. Going back to bed after breakfast was not something I ever did. That day was the exception and other than when I have been ill, I've never done it again. Reading Camille during the day in bed seemed like such a lark, thoroughly in tune with the spirit of the story. Everything seemed to fall into place then on what was no doubt a sunny Saturday in Los Angeles sometime during the early fifties.

I returned to bed after lunch and continued reading until I had finished by mid-afternoon, in plenty of time to see the film that evening. It was showing at a nearby art house and I know that I went alone. Now, more than fifty years later, tales of ill-fated romances and their screen adaptations continue to exert a powerful hold on me. What draws me to these literary works, as well as many so other forms of literary fiction?

Jack Randa Hotel
I can't recall when I first started reading The New Yorker. But I do recall there was always a copy around the house. And I know that once I started to read the magazine, I've never stopped. This is a tale told by most dedicated readers including its current editor, David Remnick, who, upon assuming the post, remarked, "I was raised on this magazine."

There were more short stories in each issue when I first began reading the magazine, sometimes two or three. Sometimes one of them filled up most of the issue. Who would not want to re-read those that moved you the first time around? Cheever's "The Country Husband," Salinger's "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," William Maxwell's "What He Was Like" or one those unforgettable stories by Alice Munro.

I will never forget the first time I read Munro's "The Jack Randa Hotel," her tale of a fractured marriage and runaway husband. It was late in the afternoon, the day was warm, and I was in Italy, on the rooftop terrace of the hotel in Florence where I was staying then. It was a perfect moment. I read her story slowly. Very slowly, as I knew the moment would not last long or be repeated soon, if ever, again.

Alexandria Quartet
One summer when I was a graduate student at Berkeley, I spent most of my time reading Laurence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. I should have been studying psychology, preparing for my exams. But I wasn’t. Nor was a friend of mine, another graduate student who was not entirely content with psychology either. So together we read in sequence Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea and spent our summer afternoons talking about the Quartet

Each of the four novels describes the same events in Alexandria just before the start of World War II but from a different perspective, the perspective of the individual in the volume’s title. It is a multi-layered series that takes into account the history, politics, intrigues and philosophies of that time and place and the intersecting lives of four closely-knit individuals. The experience of reading about them, their relationships, and their exotic ideas, lives and loves was exhilarating.

Recently, I started to re-read the Quartet, beginning with Justine. But it wasn’t the same. The allure and mystery was gone. That puzzled me. But I am a different person now, with a long reading history and a long ago departure from psychology. Perhaps that was the difference. I can read all the literature I want to now, whereas in graduate school I could not. The Alexandria Quartet then was an escape, a flight to a wildly different world from psychology, an act of resistance to its demands and limitations.

Questioning Frame of Mind

“All our knowledge results from questions, which is another way of saying that questioning is our most important intellectual tool.” Neil Postman

In addition to the role of question in works of fiction, I have noticed it is also a feature in the way individuals talk with one another. Some ask a great many questions, while others might ask one or two and, more commonly, none at all. I sense that questioning as a mode of conversation, indeed, as a way of thinking, may be a central personality dimension.

My hunch is that it is strongly associated with a philosophical turn of mind, a general skepticism about most beliefs and assertions, at least, a continuing effort to look more deeply into the claims of others whether they are expressed in conversation or the printed page.

Katherine Mansfield was another writer who championed Chekhov precisely because he had no answers to the existential questions he poses. In a letter she sent to Virginia Woolf about Chekhov in 1919, she writes: “What the writer does is not so much solve the question but…put the question.” From the Introduction to Anton Chekhov’s About Love and Other Stories by Rosamund Bartlett

In contrast, other individuals seem more accepting of whatever it is they hear or read and tend to comment, if they say anything at all, with a “That is really interesting” or “It reminds me of this or that” or simply change the subject altogether. They are unlikely to express any doubts or seek clarification or evidence especially contrary evidence, relevant to the matter at hand.

Those of the questioning frame of mind use an approach not unlike that of a Socratic dialogue where conversation becomes a progression of questions designed to arrive at a conclusion beyond the originally stated position. Some people feel very comfortable with this kind of discussion. For them it becomes a truly joint exchange with the implicit goal of clarifying thinking and sharpening beliefs and perhaps even learning something along the way. In contrast, those of the accepting frame of mind do not fall naturally into this conversational mode and may find it difficult to talk with someone who does.

Questioning is also a critical element of the Jewish tradition. The Talmud, for example, is structured around a set of questions that are in turn answered by fresh questions. Responding to a question with another question is also a well-known Jewish practice.

“Asking questions is both the secret of science and the essence of the Talmud, the dialectic forming character of the Jewish people.” “The act of learning is the central pillar or backbone of Judaism.” Rabbi Adin Steinsalz

When questions are posed in a work of fiction, they are rarely answered, nor do they really have any clear-cut answers. But what the author does intentionally or not, is lead the reader to consider the questions and begin wondering about them. At least that’s what happens to me.

And when it does, I become more engaged with the text and begin to make all the associations that come with my experience and previous knowledge of the subject. I don’t rewrite the story, but may embellish it a bit. In a way, I join with the author who, with his questions, invites me to participate with him in telling the story. It is a highly desired reading experience.

“I tend to like questions that go unanswered in general because they invite me to think. And since there is no answer provided by the “expert” there is also no completely right or completely wrong response which gives me room to really think and possibly be wildly creative about it. That’s much more fun than being fenced in by someone else’s answers and then spending all my thinking time figuring out those answers don’t work for me…” Stefanie Hollmichel http://somanybooksblog.com

Questioning in Fiction

After reading Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon I began to think more seriously about how writers use questions in fiction. Mercier’s novel has an enormous number of questions woven into the narrative that echo both the nature of its story and characters. In part that is probably because Peter Bieri (Pascal Mercier is his pen name) also conducts research and teaches philosophy in Germany.

“How are we to be happy without curiosity, without questions, doubt and arguments? Without joy in thinking?” Pascal Mercier Night Train to Lisbon

J. M. Coetzee is another writer whose fictional characters are frequent question-askers. Coetzee’s abundant use of questions in Youth, for example, is not only rhetorical, it is meant to amuse and entertain the reader. At least, that’s the way I reacted to their frequent appearance in a novel that is one of my recent favorites. They literally cascade page after page from the unnamed character’s musings.

For example, in the first three chapters (all relatively short) there are 16, 16, and 19 questions respectively. Each one or each sequence generally takes the following form:

“What are his true thoughts anyway? Some days he feels happy, even privileged, to be living with a beautiful woman…Other days he feels differently. Is the truth the happiness, the unhappiness, or the average of the two?

Is that what one has to do to become a professor of English: read the established authors and write a lecture on each? How many years of one’s life does that eat up? What does it do to one’s spirit?

If one is to be an artist, must one love women indiscriminately? Does an artist’s life entail sleeping with anyone and everyone, in the name of life? If one is finicky about sex is one rejecting life?” J. M. Coetzee Youth

While novels embedded with questions are bound to appeal to me, questioning is not a critical feature of those I like most. I may enjoy that style of writing and tend to think that way myself, but it probably plays little if any role in my reading preferences.

Henry Perowne, the central character in Ian McEwan’s Saturday, a novel that is among my recent favorites, is depicted as a deeply reflective man who spends a good part of that day at least, wondering about a wide range of topics. But his reflections are rarely formulated as questions.

“Questions, ordinary inquisitiveness did not suit her at all. She never insisted on the answer to a question. She might ask once, and if there was no reply, then she would match the silence. There was a pleasing depth to her silence.” Ian McEwan The Child in Time

It would be interesting to compare writers on this dimension. Do some employ questioning more than others and if so, what might be responsible for their practice? Do they come from a particular tradition or are they, like Peter Bieri, involved in a discipline where questioning is a common practice? Regardless, it reflects a style of writing that is one of probing and wrestling with ideas.

“She communicates largely by asking questions, not personal questions about his life or past history but questions about his opinions on topics ranging from the weather to the state of the world.” Paul Auster Sunset Park

Freud in China

“They don’t realize we are bringing them the plague.” Freud upon arriving in NY

I did most of my graduate work in the experimental psychology of learning and motivation, where I sought to test Freudian hypotheses in the laboratory. Like many beginning psychology students, Freud's analysis of mental processes appealed to me, as did the importance of early experience in his accounts of adult behavior.

Anxiety also played a central role in his theory of the neuroses and because I was young and beset with all the anxieties of youth, I was often preoccupied with the strenuous and usually unsuccessful effort to deal with it. What an excellent topic to study, I thought.

So, in the manner of a clinician, I set about to try to find a way to conquer anxiety. However, my dissertation was carried out in the laboratory, rather than the clinic. The research employed an animal model of human anxiety, an approach that was highly regarded at the time. In those days there was a good deal of interest on the part of clinicians in applying findings derived from animal models in therapeutic settings, a practice that has all but disappeared today.

It was against this background that I read Evan Osnos’ recent essay in The New Yorker on the introduction of psychoanalysis to China. While Freudian psychoanalytic theory and practice no longer exerts the influence it once did in this country, it seems to have become increasingly popular among the Chinese.

Apparently this is largely the result of the psychiatrist Elsie Snyder who according to Osnos, “…fell in love with the world of Sigmund Freud at a public library in the Bronx when she was fourteen….An hour of excavating the unconscious to her was like a string quartet, in which, as she put it recently, “one could hear all four instruments and all four melodies and how they fit together.”

While most therapists in this country have rejected the majority of psychoanalytic tenets, they still ring true to Snyder who, together with other American analysts, has been conducting psychoanalysis both in China and over the Web and Skype. Snyder says, “They’re [Chinese] are in love with psychoanalysis the way people my age were in love with it in New York in the fifties and sixties.” This makes perfect sense to me and may very well still be true for many young people when they are first introduced to Freud.

While the Chinese may find the concept of talking about their private troubles a refreshing alternative to “eating bitterness,” this approach is not without its detractors. Osnos cites the remarks of Frederic Crews:

“We have had a bad habit of dumping disapproved or dangerous materials—cigarettes, chloroflurocarbons, toxic components of old computers—on less developed countries without regard for the consequences. Will this be another instance, in the realm of psychological treatment.”….“Troubled people in China are entitled to get the best Western knowledge about their conditions.”

But what is the best Western knowledge about the practice of psychotherapy? A large number of well-controlled studies have indicated that almost all therapies have similar effects with very little difference between them. In addition, the effects are not large and sometimes indistinguishable from those of a placebo treatment.

We know that insight about a person’s problems, one of the fundamental Freudian assumptions, does little to overcome them. It may give a reasonable explanation of their origins but is only one of many steps required to eliminate them. And whatever effects such knowledge has, can also be achieved with other therapeutic approaches.

Therapies work because they establish a connection with another person, a connection that provides an opportunity to talk about conflicts and anxieties, worries and emotions. And it does so in a benign, accepting setting with someone who listens with concern and doesn’t take issue with what you say.

Psychoanalysis is one many situations like this and while it is reasonable to question its value, it does give a person, including those who live in China, a vocabulary for discussing whatever it is that ails them in a setting that, at least for now, may not otherwise be available.

The Unnamed

I am trying to imagine what Joshua Ferris had in mind when he decided to write his second novel, The Unnamed. I know I shouldn’t think about this, but still I wonder. The novel is about a man, Tim Farnsworth, who has what might be called a walking disorder. He is compelled to go on extremely long walks on desolate roads, unpredictably and uncontrollably.

The walks can occur any time, in the dead of a bitter winter for example, when he ends up exhausted in a park somewhere or by the doorstep of a suburban house far from his own home or office in New York. Eventually he calls his wife, Jane, who gets in the car and drives out to bring him back.

The compulsion has no name, no medical history, no one understands what produces it or how to treat it. One physician calls it, “benign idiopathic peramulation.” That doesn’t help much, does it?

Yet there was no precedent for what he suffered, and no proof of what qualified as a disease among the physicians and clinical investigators: a toxin, a pathogen, a genetic disorder. No evidence of any physical cause. No evidence, no precedent—and the experts could give no positive testimony.

Regardless, physical or mental or some random combination, Tim suffers from it as does his marriage, his relationship with his daughter and his job as a partner in a “high voltage” Manhattan law firm from which he is eventually forced to leave.

There are times when I am reading a novel when I fall into its mood and its words and the way they are put together, and when I begin to think and talk like the people in the story do. I mimic them in both spirit and tone. I think about my life from their perspective and take on their way of being. This happened to me while reading The Unnamed and I did nothing to push it away.

It is how I am sometimes affected by the characters in a film. I come out of the theater and I am one of them. It is a strange experience and while it never lasts long after a film, it tends to last quite a bit longer while reading a book, especially a lengthy one. Is this how we are influenced by the arts? Do their effects linger even when we aren’t aware of them? Perhaps we become the people in the book or the film in ways that are subtle and beyond our comprehension.

Tim’s walks during the winter are brutal. Night after night he is out in the cold, sometimes sleeping in the snow. He develops frostbite, loses a few toes and then some of his fingers. If he has lost or thrown away his cell phone, Jane has no idea where he is. Eventually, he is picked up by the police and taken to the emergency room of the nearest hospital.

Soon thereafter he stops calling Jane and surrenders to the compulsion to keep walking, once across the country, sleeping wherever he can. It is heartbreaking to see him fall from the peak of his profession to the depths of his sleeping bag in the snow.

What does it all mean? Does it have any kind of meaning? It certainly isn’t anything Tim Farnsworth or his creator talk much about. Reviewers are the only ones allowed to play the metaphor game. One suggests it is a metaphor for addiction, “for any compulsion that drives a man or a woman to leave family and community and health behind.” Perhaps so.

But I also see its meaning in terms of control, the uncontrollability of Tim’s affliction and a fair amount of what most of us are forced to deal with at some point in our life. Ferris writes, “So much of who he was was involuntary.” He is helpless to do anything about it. And it is relentless,

After traveling the world in search of a cure, a treatment, plausible or not, spending hours visiting physicians, therapists, researchers, and crackpots, Tim eventually gives up. He surrenders to his walking compulsion. Giving up is what most people eventually do when faced with uncontrollable, unpredictable events in their life.

The Unnamed is also about his marriage and how it crumbles under the weight of the walking compulsion. In my mind, it raises the same questions that I saw in the film Rabbit Hole. What is called for when two people who love one another are confronted by an illness, a tragedy, or misfortune? Do they come together or grow apart or is there anything that can be done about it?

Scribbling in Books

I am reading. I come across a sentence or a phrase that stops me in my tracks. I read it again. Something about it hits me—a question, conjecture, a bit of truth, sometimes a truth about myself. I put a parenthesis around it and note the page number on the inside back cover of the book. And when I finish the book, I copy all the saved passages into a Word document and add them to my Commonplace Book.

The passage is part of the story. But that isn’t why I mark it. I do that because it is relevant to me that may or may not have any relevance to the tale. Another reader might also mark the passage but for entirely different reasons. Or not mark it at all. Instead she marks other passages that I quickly pass by.

Recently I bumped into Fluther, a question and answer website with a social twist. Twitter recently purchased the company that runs it. I must have found it by doing a search for underlining or highlighting passages since it was the subject of the question that appeared on my screen: Do you underline passages in books when you are reading them?

To date fifty-three individuals have described the way they do or do not write in the books they are reading. One person answered, As I read a book, I often underline or highlight passages that I find interesting, things that I can relate to, or words that are really insightful. When I re-read some books, I often reconnect with these passages instantly, but sometimes I find them odd, and wonder what state of mind or stage in life I was at when I first underlined them.

Another person confessed, I’ve always felt that it was wrong to write in books. I know lots of people do it, and many great authors and thinkers have done it, but I just can’t bring myself to write in my books, whether textbooks, novels, or non-fiction, I just can’t do it.

One reported she often bought an extra copy of a book that she had marked up, if it was one she really liked. However, no one said they took the extra step of saving their highlighted passages in electronic form, as I do.

I often ask myself why have I been saving the passages that I mark in books. Is it simply a mindless habit? Yes, I return to them now and then. However, rarely if ever do I return to a single passage and write about it. Nor do I organize a set of passages from various books that deal with a single theme. It would be good to that.

And whenever I return to the collection of passages in my Commonplace Book and open it to a randomly selected page, I am amazed at how provocative many of them are and it is almost a crime to leave them there without some kind of additional commentary or review.

Sometimes saving these passages helps me to remember the book and think once again about its story and themes. So in this way, saving them becomes a memory aid. There’s no other way I could possibly remember the books I read or the ideas in them, without saving them electronically and then printing the collection at the end of each year.

Recently Patrick Kurp wrote on his blog, Anecdotal Evidence: For years I’ve kept notebooks in which I transcribe notable passages from my reading. These commonplace books used to be almost random, organized only by chronology, but they grew unwieldy because I never found time to devise useful indexes. They were diverting to browse but almost worthless if I sought a specific passage or topic.

The fact that saving the passages electronically permits such a search is one of the major reasons I spend the extra time copying them. It is a highly effectively way to create the kind of index that Kurp seeks. He also experiences the same thing I do when I return to read some of the passages I’ve been saving all these years. It is sometimes rather startling.

At some point I started dedicating discrete notebooks to large subjects – Trees, Birds, I’ve leafed through it the last several days, marveling at the amount of insight and first-rate writing devoted to the subject, the central event in our history, the one we’re still contesting. For a sobering insight, compare the mass of words inspired by the Vietnam War. Michael Herr? Tim O’Brien

Rabbit Hole

Can you imagine a more shattering experience than the death of your child? When you lose a child, you become a different person. There is no going back to the way you were before. It is a wound that no one ever recovers from. This is the subject of Rabbit Hole a film currently showing in the theaters.

Before it became a move, it was a Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway play. It was also the subject of the 2007 French Film, Apres Lui. And before then it was treated in the highly praised Ian McEwan novel, The Child in Time. Like the couple in Rabbit Hole, the couple in McEwan’s novel, whose child disappears one day, grow apart following their loss.

Mc Ewan writes, The loss had driven them to the extremes of their personalities. Now there was no mutual consolation, no touching, no love. Their old intimacy, their habitual assumption that they were on the same side, was dead. They remained huddled over their separate losses, and unspoken resentments began to grow.

It is the way the couples diverge in response to the loss of their child, the kind of loss that makes normal life impossible, that captured my greatest sympathies in the film. Normally, you would expect them to come together. But in both fictional accounts, they don’t.

Six months ago Danny, the four-year old son of Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aron Eckhart) in Rabbit Hole, was killed by a car as he was rushing into the street to retrieve his ball. Becca is trying to forget Danny, to erase all vestiges of his life, while Howie continues to grieve.

He does not want to get rid of Danny’s clothes or toys or postings on the refrigerator door as Becca does. He continues to attend a support group; Becca stays home. The disagreements, sometimes violent, continue to escalate. There is no coming together, no shared grief, only further and further drifting apart.

How can one understand this? Is there some reason why both McEwan and David Linday-Abaire, the author of the theatrical Rabbit Hole, chose to depict the loss of a child this way? Yes, it is almost impossible to ever recover from such an event. But why in this divergent fashion? Does it reflect a fundamental difference in their personalities, a difference that existed well before their marriage?

It is easier to understand the connection sought in both Apres Lui and Rabbit Hole when the women begin to stalk the person who was responsible, albeit both accidental, for the death of their son. In Apres Lui, the divorced Camille (Catherine Deneuve), searches for her son’s friend who was driving the car when he was killed in an accident. She hires him to work in her bookshop, cooks meals for him, and arranges to pay for his college tuition.

In Rabbit Hole, Becca follows the school bus that brings her teenage son’s friend home from school each day. Eventually they begin meeting at a park bench. One day he brings her a graphic novel that he had made. Together they try to recover from an experience from which there is no recovery. When Howie learns of their meetings, he becomes enraged which serves only to increase the distance between them,

People react differently to the same event, to a story they are reading or to a tragedy they experience. Sometimes a tragedy as devastating as the death of your child can create a gap that can never be closed. While the marriages did not collapse in Rabbit Hole or The Child in Time, we know they will never be the same.

Stoner: Revisited

“The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print -- the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly." John Williams

Until a few years ago I had never heard of the novel Stoner or its author, John Williams. My introduction to the novel occurred while reading a blog where it was given the kind of praise normally reserved for a masterpiece. It was also said to be a tragic tale of a college professor of literature.

Within minutes I left to buy a copy of the novel and not long after had one of the highpoints of my reading days. Early last year I wrote a short review of it and began to read whatever else I could find about the book and its author. Every now and then I chance upon another person’s discovery of the novel and how they were as overwhelmed by it as everyone else is.

I am led to wonder why we don’t hear more about Stoner? I don’t think I’ve ever met a person who has read it or seen more than a handful of commentators write about. C. P. Snow’s explanation is that “…we live in a peculiarly silly age and it doesn’t fit the triviality of the day.” Earlier he said, “Very few novels in English, or literary productions of any kind, have come anywhere near its level for human wisdom or as a work of art.”

I read about Snow’s appraisal in a recent essay, A Sadness Unto the Bone: John William’s Stoner, by Mel Livatino in the Summer 2010 issue of the Sewanee Review. Livatino feels much the same way as Snow. He has read the novel four times and says that knowing the plot and being so familiar with its pages has not diminished their power. Isn’t that what is said about a classic work of literature? Still he confesses he isn’t sure if he “can endure Stoner’s sorrow again.”

Livatino considers the novel “remarkable” in four ways.

1. Unlike most contemporary novels, Stoner unfolds the life story of an individual from birth to death.

2. “The narrative “runs counter to modernism’s dictum to show, not tell.”

3. The novel reads like a work of poetry, it is deeply moving and “pitch perfect.”

4. He also believes few writers today express the depth of understanding and sympathy of the characters they write about as Williams does in Stoner.

There is something else about Stoner that led me to feel similarly moved. It has nothing to do with its structure or how it was written or the fact that Stoner’s life in the university bore a certain similarity to my own. Rather it was the way in which literature transformed his life, gave him a new life and identity, one that as Livatino notes changed his life from “dumbness to consciousness.”

“His teaching excels not because he is brilliant of creative, or flashing—none of which he is, as the novel shows—but because he is witness to such a consciousness and is dedicated to the literature that has brought it into being and because he demands much of his students.”

"People Need Bookstores"

One night before I moved from Portland, Oregon, I went over the Powell’s, the well-known bookstore just a few blocks from my home. It was the first time I had been there in a long while. I went upstairs to the book holding room. I had ordered a book from their warehouse the day before and here it was the very next day and then came downstairs, where a reading was about to begin, and eventually down another flight to the new book section on the 1st floor. It felt really good to be there, so close to where my home was, even though the night was cold and wet.

The next morning I thought it might be hard to live in a place where Powell’s wasn’t just a couple of blocks down the way. And then I wondered if a bookstore, if Powell’s, could keep a person, keep me, in a town that I found so cold and oppressive most of the year. For me, and so many others, a bookstore, especially one like Powell’s is really the heart of a community.

And yet each day we learn of another bookstore closing. Even the large chain bookstores are beginning to close now. Borders will be shutting down over 200 stores across the country, including its largest store on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. Barnes and Noble is also closing some of their largest stores, including the “megastore” near Lincoln Center in Manhattan. One by one both the large and the small stores are giving up the game. It is not unlike losing one long-time friend after another.

But every once in a while we hear about a really fine bookstore that is still there and may even be doing well. Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, the bookstore owned by the writer Louise Erdrich is an example. In an interview in the latest Paris Review (#195) Erdrich talks about her store as well as bookstores in general. I don’t think I have read anything more compelling than her description of what a bookstore means to a community and to its readers.

She says that while the store is a business, it is far more about the people who work there and the people who come to find books. “But walking into a small bookstore, you immediately feel the presence of the mind that has chosen the books on the shelves. You communicate intellectually with the buyer. Then if you’re lucky, you meet another great reader in person…”

It is silly of me to try to convey Erdrich’s high praise of bookstores. Better that I let her speak for herself.

“People need bookstores and need other readers. We need the intimate communication with others who love books. We don’t really think we do because of the ease that the Internet has introduced, but we still need the physical world more than we know. Little bookstores are community services, not profitable business enterprises. Books are just too inexpensive online and there are too many of them, so a physical bookstore has to offer something different. Perhaps little bookstores will attain nonprofit status. Maybe one fine day the government will subsidize them, so they can thrive as nonprofit entities. Some very clever bookstore, probably not us, is going to manage to do that and become the paradigm of the rest.”

Will we ever see the day that the government, state or federal, subsidizes little bookstores? For the cost of subsidizing General Motors, the government could easily keep alive every small bookstore in this country and open a sizable number of new ones along the way.

In the interview Erdrich also had some very sensible things to say about the future of books. “As for the book as an object, it’s like bread. It is such a perfectly evolved piece of technology that it will be hard to top….the paperback—so low-low tech and high-tech at the same time—it is also a great piece of technology.”

Unlike an electronic book, it can be given to someone else, you can write in it, you can even put it on your bookshelf. “I also like that you can throw books across the room, as people have done with mine….The whole absence of touching and feeling a book would be a loss…”

At the same time, she knows that there are many readers who just want the text so that electronic versions are best viewed as another method of publication. She does not object to them. She says, “I don’t feel the sense of alarm and threat that some other writers seem to feel about e-books.”

I am with her from A to Z on books, bookstores, and the future of reading. And she has said it all so vigorously and so eloquently.

"The Line That Separates Art from Life"

The appeal of Paul Auster’s new novel, Sunset Park, steadily grew on me. I came to know the characters better, the past that brought them to their present situations, and what their future course, if any, is likely to be. And along the way, I came to like each of them more and more.

In a word, I really became immersed in the novel and by the end I didn’t want our friendships to end. Isn’t one of the things every reader is looking for in a novel? One of the characters says: He has never been able to put his finger on the line that separates art from life. That is true of most of the novels that engage me.

We first meet Miles Heller, the central character, who is working perfunctorily “trashing out” foreclosed houses in Florida, getting rid of all the things left behind when the residents are evicted. They always leave their house littered with trash.

“In a collapsing world of economic ruin and relentless, every expanding hardship, trashing out is one of the few thriving businesses in the area…In the beginning, he was stunned by the disarray and the filth, the neglect.”

Miles has come to the end of the line. He has no plans, no ideas, no real hope that his days will improve. Other than trashing out homes he spends his days doing next to nothing—reading, thinking walking, watching films, following the news.

He is haunted by the memory of his stepbrother’s death. It occurred while they were walking together on a country road and arguing about some trivial matter. But their argument got out of hand, leading Miles to shove his angry brother into the road, right in the path of an oncoming car.

“He doesn’t know if Bobby’s death was an accident or if he was secretly trying to kill him. The entire story of his life hinges upon what happened that day…he still can’t be certain if he is guilty of a crime or not.”

Miles flees New York and the home of his father and stepmother, never letting them know where he is or making any contact over the course of the next seven years. Eventually, he is jolted out of his grief by meeting and then falling in love with Pilar whom he first sees in a park reading The Great Gatsby. Pilar is smart, rather a precocious intellectual so it seems. But she is also “underage,” only sixteen.

And while they share an ardent devotion to one another, to avoid arrest for having an affair with an underage minor, Miles eventually returns to New York and takes up residence in an abandoned house with three other people.

We meet each of them, in turn—Bing, his close friend, who runs the Hospital for Broken Things where he repairs broken typewriters, rotary phones, fountain pens, cherished objects from the past. We meet Alice who is working on her Ph.D. dissertation and Ellen who is an artist of sorts who suffers history of mental illness. Each of these lost souls captured my sympathy too.

Finally, after several false starts and many imagined reunions, (“…that played out in your head so many times over the years were bound to be richer, fuller, and more emotionally satisfying than the real thing”) he makes contact with his actress stepmother and book publisher father, Morris Heller.

Morris has been scrambling to publish worthwhile books to avoid bankruptcy at Heller Books. Yet, he knows that even if he fails, he will be able to write his memoir with the title, “Forty Years in the Desert: Publishing Literature in a Country Where People Hate Books.”

Even though Miles is warmly reconciled with his parents, Sunset Park ends somberly as he flees New York once again. As he is driving across the Brooklyn Bridge looking at the huge buildings on the other side of the East River, he, like so many others who have viewed this skyline recently, thinks about the,

“…missing buildings, the collapsed and burning building that no longer exist…and he wonders if it is worth hoping for a future when there is no future, and for now he will stop hoping for anything and live only for now, this moment, this passing moment, the now that is here and then not here, the now that is gone forever.”

The Limits of Research

Jonah Lehrer’s dazzling essay, The Decline Effect and the Scientific Method, has been the most frequently e-mailed article from the New Yorker since it was published last month. This pleases me a lot. For Lehrer describes one of the most serious problems associated with research in the social sciences, especially research in psychology and, as he points out, the natural sciences as well.

In a nutshell the problem is the difficulty of replicating experimental findings. A derivative problem is the frequently observed decline in the overall effect of any particular variable(s) with repeated testing. Replication is the heart of scientific research. That is the purpose of making the findings public—so that investigators in other labs can see if they can observe the same outcome. He writes,

“Different scientists in different labs need to repeat the protocols and publish their rests. The test of replicability, as it is know, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community reinforces itself.”

Lehrer cites many examples of the failure to replicate. He notes how often the therapeutic power of a drug wanes on repeated testing and then eventually disappears or turns out on analysis to be largely a function of the placebo effect. He discusses at some length the difficulty of replicating the phenomenon of verbal overshadowing—how the act of describing memories seems or seemed at one time, to interfere with recall.

And he cites the well-known failure to replicate the early studies by Joseph Rhine on extrasensory perception (ESP) that turned out to be a statistical fluke. It was Rhine who first coined the term “the decline effect.”

It has even been observed in a series of studies where the same genetic strains of mice were shipped to three different labs on the same day from the same supplier and raised under identical conditions, including the way they were handled. The investigator who reported the widely different results from each lab concluded that a lot of scientific data are nothing but noise. “The end result is a scientific accident that can take years to unravel.”

What accounts for the fact that so many research studies cannot be replicated? Several factors are at work. Proper control conditions may have been omitted from the original experiments, the samples may not have been randomly selected or consist of a highly uniform, unrepresentative group of individuals, usually college sophomores. Or the results may have occurred because of experimenter biases that inevitably led to evidence supporting the hypothesis. Few experimenters really design studies to disprove, rather than confirm their hypothesis. This is a point Karl Popper emphasized many years ago.

Then there is the publication biases characteristic of most scientific journals. Researchers who do not report positive outcomes cannot get their findings published. According to one study, ninety-seven percent of psychology studies proved their hypothesis. We know this can’t be the case. As one investigator (Richard Palmer, a biologist) noted, “Once I realized that selective reporting is everywhere in science, I got quite depressed.” And he continued:

“We cannot escape the troubling conclusion that some—perhaps many cherished generalities are at best exaggerated in their biological significance and at worst a collective illusion nurtured by strong a-priori believes often repeated.”

Lehrer has written a powerful, persuasive essay on the limits of scientific research. It is the kind of essay I wish I had written, as I have been aware of this for years based on a lifetime of reading research in psychology, as well as my own studies. I have been guilty of looking for data that confirms my hypothesis, interpreting outcomes in a way that will insure their publication, and no doubt biasing (conservatively) the design of my studies without really trying to test (falsify) them.

But I didn’t write the essay and no doubt could never have done so with the skill and breadth that Lehrer has. I commend him for his piece, as well as the New Yorker for publishing it and thereby making possible its wide dissemination.

The Future of Reading

As I look ahead to the future of reading, I do not share the pessimistic concerns voiced by so many commentators. If anything, I see just as many readers as there ever were, they are reading more, in more ways, and for longer periods of time than ever. They are reading on the Internet, with increasing frequency on their e-readers, and yes, they are still reading printed books.

I go to Powell’s Bookstore in Portland and it is jammed. People walk around with a basket full of books to buy, others are reading while sitting on the floor in the row after row of bookshelves that fill this five-story bookstore. Darin Sennett, director of strategic projects at Powell’s says he sees no evidence that books are dying.

“People do love bookstores and they’re an important part of our culture. Print books are not dead. People will continue to want them and love them. But their desires and the way they want to read are evolving. I can see print and e-books living nicely together.”

I see no decline in the quality or depth of writing in the books and documents I read. To be sure, my choices are highly selective. But I have more than enough to read, in fact, I am inundated with materials that I have always been drawn to. I am not concerned about students who are said to read less and less and no longer write critically or reflectively. My experience has demonstrated that students vary widely on both dimensions in about the same proportion as always.

Instead what I see is an increasing concern about the quality of student education and the nature of their reading habits. And I read about more and more innovative programs to promote the literary arts among the young. To be sure students, as well as the rest of us, are tempted by an increasing number of distractions on the Internet. But there is good reason to believe that, if anything, they may actually keep us more alert, keep our minds more active and more engaged with the text, whether it be on the screen or on the page.

However, I do have one concern and it has nothing to do with purported decline in reading and it is really nothing new either. Instead my concern is how we read. For me reading is a slow process and one that is always performed with a pen in hand as it was during the eras when commonplace books flourished. Like readers then, I write in the margins of the books I read, I underline text, I make notes on the inside covers. And then I copy all of this into my commonplace book to be read again and again and sometimes drawn upon in something I write.

I rarely see a person reading with a pen or pencil and I ask myself what are they getting out of this experience. Do they stop to mull over a sentence or a paragraph, do they go back and read a related passage in the book? What kind of a record will they have of the encounter? What will they remember? Of course, they will remember very little or nothing at all. But if they collected some of their thoughts and memorable passages in some kind of a record, their memories will be preserved so they can be reviewed and considered again and again.

It is a matter of how engaged a person is with what they are reading. When you are skimming pages, or reading rather casually, literature cannot possibly have much influence. But when you are reading reflectively, writing things in the book or on a separate pad of paper, reading can become an experience that will stick with you, will become something you’ll be more likely to bring to your life.

I am on the same wavelength as Ann Patchett whose words deserve to be repeated: “I have long refused to participate in the last rites of what is both my passion and my profession. I meet too many people who stay up half the night racing towards a final chapter. We are a hardy bunch, we readers.”

I don’t think there is anyone who is immune from the pleasures of a book that speaks to them, no one who can ignore a startling bit of truth or a beautiful expression.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Again Ann Patchett hit the nail on the head: “Why are more people reading? Because they are either discovering or remembering just how good it can be.”

Hiatus

Marks in the Margin will be taking a break for an indefinite period while I hole up in a grass shack on a remote island in the middle of the ocean to work on some long-delayed projects. Postings during this pause will be intermittent, if that. I'll still be reading, catching up on a long list of books that go back several decades, and training for the next season. Meanwhile, I wish each of you Happy Holidays and many thanks for reading and responding.