October 2008: The Man Who Loved China

The Man Who Loved China
by Simon Winchester

"Behind the Wall"
by Alida Becker
June 8, 2008
The New York Times Book Review

On a winter evening in 1938, Joseph Needham, one of Cambridge University’s most brilliant scientists — and one of its most avid skirt-chasers — lay in bed with a Chinese microbiologist who was also a colleague of Needham’s extremely tolerant wife. Enjoying a post-coital cigarette, he asked her how its name might be rendered in Chinese. His diary records that she obliged by guiding him through the ideogram for “fragrant smoke.” Charmed, he instantly resolved to learn this fascinating language. It was the first step in a project that would absorb Needham until his death in 1995, turning him into one of the foremost Western authorities on China, dedicated to reminding the world that the Middle Kingdom’s decline into backwardness and turmoil had been preceded by centuries of extraordinary creativity — including crucial inventions like gunpowder, printing and the compass, all mistakenly thought to have originated elsewhere. The vehicle for these and countless other revelations was to be a work “addressed,” as Needham put it, “to all educated people.” The first volume of “Science and Civilisation in China,” published in 1954, has never gone out of print. Eighteen volumes were released during Needham’s lifetime; there are now 24, with more still to come.

Despite its hyperbolic new subtitle (apparently the original, “Joseph Needham and the Making of a Masterpiece,” was considered too tame), Simon Winchester’s biography, “The Man Who Loved China,” presents a low-key, often beguiling view of a man who hardly beguiled the postwar American authorities — or, for a time, his own countrymen. A committed socialist and Communist sympathizer, Needham lent his authority to a dubiously documented investigation whose report, issued in 1952, concluded that the United States had used biological weapons in Manchuria and North Korea. Blacklisted by the Americans well into the 1970s and denounced for his political naïveté by the British establishment, Needham retreated into the scholarly realm, where his accomplishments did much to restore his good name.

Cambridge had saved him once before, offering escape from the “spectacularly disastrous Edwardian marriage” of Needham’s parents: a red-headed Irish spendthrift, fond of spiritualism and plate-throwing tantrums, and a solemn London doctor, who used the boy as an operating-room assistant. Noël Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, called Noël by his father and Terence by his mother, took care to sign letters to each of his warring parents by the name they preferred. But at Cambridge this shy, introspective only child became someone else entirely — the outgoing and seductive polymath Joseph. As Winchester demonstrated in his best-selling earlier book, “The Professor and the Madman,” he is fascinated by the quirks of genius. And Needham had plenty of quirks, both minor (breakfast toast must be burned black) and major (an ardent advocacy of nudism). “Handsome, in a studious way,” Needham spoke with “a silkiness, almost a lisp” and left few women free from his attentions. For almost 50 years, he kept both his wife and his Chinese mistress content, not only with him but with each other, even as he continued to play the field.

Winchester has spent a good deal of his career as a journalist in East Asia, so it’s not surprising that the liveliest stretch of his narrative presents Needham’s first encounter with the country whose language he had mastered from afar. Early in 1943, Needham was sent to China by the British Foreign Office, charged with organizing aid for Chinese scholars and scientists in flight from the Japanese invasion, who were attempting to re-establish their universities in the inner provinces. His travels over the next few years took him from the jungles of the Burmese border to the Gobi Desert and the seacoast of Fujian, on 11 expeditions that covered roughly 30,000 miles. He lived a life of grand adventure in wartime China, and Winchester presents its dangers and pleasures with panache. Whether Needham is donkey racing near ancient Buddhist caves or packed into a train full of refugees speeding across a soon-to-be-bombed railway bridge, the exhilaration of this part of his life is immediately engaging. And so are the colorful characters who come his way.

But if Winchester’s account of these excursions seems faithful to Needham’s character, some careless aspects of the narrative are less so. Do we need to be told twice within the space of three pages that Needham demanded a British boycott of the 1936 Berlin Olympics? Or reminded three times of his father’s dictum “No knowledge is ever wasted or to be despised?” Isn’t it odd that a map of China accompanying the World War II section should include as-yet-unborn nations like Pakistan, Bangladesh and North and South Korea? It’s hard to imagine Needham, renowned for his photographic memory, countenancing such slips. Especially if you credit the story his wife used to tell about the period just before the publication of his three-volume treatise on chemical embryology: “She recalled watching him lying awake in bed, mentally visualizing the book’s page proofs, and then correcting in a notebook any errors or infelicities. Once this activity became too humdrum for him, she said, he further occupied himself by translating the selfsame pages from English into French, also in his head, and then correcting any errors that he fancied he could also see in this new translated text.”

Alida Becker is an editor at the Book Review.

July 2008: A Dirty Job: A Novel

by Christopher Moore

"Dipping a Toe in Supernatural Waters"
by Janet Maslin
The New York Times Book Review
March 20, 2006

No one will ever accuse Christopher Moore of gravitas. Mr. Moore can impose gallows hilarity on virtually any subject, and has already inflicted his brand of good-time ghoulishness upon whales ("Fluke"), the Gospel ("Lamb") and Santa Claus ("The Stupidest Angel"). A giant Micronesian fruit bat in tiny Ray-Bans remains one of his books' most emblematic images.

But his latest and wobbliest story, "A Dirty Job," suggests that Mr. Moore's gonzo irreverence has its limits. This novel makes light of hellhounds, demons and outlandishly costumed squirrel cadavers (which are inspired by real dead-animal dolls sculptured by an acquaintance of the author's). Though it works hard to wring wildly improbable humor from all of the above, it's very much a book written in the shadow of death.

Charlie Asher and his wife, Rachel Goldstein, have just had a baby girl named Sophie as "A Dirty Job" begins. Charlie has yet to become accustomed to the word Daddy. "He had once asked Rachel, 'Who's your daddy?' during sex, to which she had replied, 'Saul Goldstein,' thus rendering him impotent for a week and raising all kinds of issues that he didn't really like to think about," Mr. Moore writes. But the book has barely gotten off this witticism before Charlie realizes that he has become a widower.

As Mr. Moore acknowledges in an author's note, this part of the book is grounded in reality: the deaths of several loved ones helped to send him down this novel's puzzling, convoluted trail. But reality, grim or otherwise, is still not a big factor here. Once Charlie spots a tall, thin black man in a green suit near Rachel's bedside, the story takes its first tentatively supernatural turn.

The stranger is named Minty Fresh. That is not one of Mr. Moore's funnier monikers, nor is it a promise of smart plotting to come. Somehow, Charlie becomes the recipient of an all-about-the-afterlife instruction book that sounds like something for children ("The Great Big Book of Death"). And then he winds up joining Minty as a death merchant, brokering macabre deals between souls and the earthly vessels that the souls inhabit. The vessels can be anything, the odder the better. Still, they quickly lose their novelty, as the book harps and harps on their way of giving off a strange reddish glow.

If this isn't theology, neither is it really humor: the book's funniest sight gag has to do with a stripper who has no idea that her breast implants hold the essence of her everlasting spirit. Mr. Moore must find a way to kill her off, leave the implant idea lighthearted and somehow keep a larger, more elaborate plot in motion. Tall order: no wonder the book winds up filling the sewers of San Francisco with Charlie-baiting harpies and letting those harpies sometimes materialize as giant crows. If you are lost by this point, you needn't feel alone. Mr. Moore is temporarily lost too.

But he is a writer whose irreverence generates immense reserves of good will, if only for the fearlessly nutty range of his imagination. Soon "A Dirty Job" has thrown in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Irish goddess of Death, assorted other mythological creatures, the cynical Goth teen who works at Charlie's secondhand clothing store, and the contrast between alpha and beta male personalities.

As evidence of both Charlie's beta qualities and perhaps his own, Mr. Moore writes: "He makes a great house sitter, especially if you aren't especially attached to your house pets. A Beta Male is trustworthy: your girlfriend is generally in safe hands with a Beta Male friend, unless, of course, she is a complete slut." Fortunately, Charlie's beta-ness makes him just passive enough to accept the book's nonsensical extremes. An alpha would be demanding an explanation of how the book apprehends death — and, on the evidence displayed, probably not getting a very good one.

Even when seriously off-kilter, Mr. Moore is always worth reading. His books always have inspired moments, no matter how scattered those moments happen to be. A running gag in "A Dirty Job" concerns the so-called "great powers of Asia": Mrs. Ling and Mrs. Korjev, immigrant housekeepers who reach a Sino-Russian accord over the raising of Sophie, who remains a blithe spirit throughout the book despite her mother's death. "Daddy's sorry he made you a shiksa," Charlie tells his half-Jewish daughter, using a phrase that is comically misinterpreted through the rest of the story.

Shiksa is mistaken to mean Shih Tzu, which is most definitely not the huge, menacing breed of dog that keeps Sophie safe while her father makes his forays into the spirit world. Meanwhile, in similarly blissful ignorance, Charlie pretends to know more than he actually does about the religious realms in which he now dabbles. Charlie's knowledge of Eastern religions is not deep. It consists of "just Discovery Channel stuff — you know, Buddha, Shiva, Gandalf — the biggies."

For all its tumultuous lunacy, "A Dirty Job" requires the occasional level-headed individual to provide a semblance of focus. The police inspector assigned to Charlie is one of them. "Rivera had once been a by-the-book kind of cop," Mr. More writes late in the story. "That was before the demons, the giant owls, the bankruptcy, the polar bears, the vampires, the divorce, and the saber-clawed woman-thing that turned into a bird. Now, not so much." If the cop is baffled, who can blame him?

May 2008: The Corrections

"American Gothic"
by David Gates
September 9, 2001
The New York Times Book Review

Jonathan Franzen's marvelous new novel, ''The Corrections,'' starts out as discouragingly as any marvelous new novel you'll ever read. The very first page devotes a full paragraph to overextending the metaphor of an ''alarm bell of anxiety'' ringing in a suburban house, in a community heavy-handedly called St. Jude. Then, when a septuagenarian Parkinson's sufferer named Alfred Lambert goes into demented exile in that house's basement, Franzen set off my alarm bell of anxiety by warning that some larger significance might be about to hit me over the head: ''And so in the house of the Lamberts, as in St. Jude, as in the country as a whole, life came to be lived underground.'' Next we meet Chip Lambert, the black-sheep son -- hey, I didn't name these people Lambert -- who had to leave his teaching job because he (yawn) had an affair with a student and is now writing a screenplay, based on the (yawn) Lewinsky scandal, and beginning it with a parodically preposterous monologue on ''anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama.'' Even though Franzen spares us the monologue itself, I was all set to bail on him, despite the microfelicities (ants ''storming'' a dead opossum; ''assassin-like chauffeurs'' holding up signs at La Guardia) that showed he could actually write. Did I need several hundred more pages of standard-issue smarty-pants high jinks? Or, worse yet, of suburban angst speaking, in large caps, boldface and italics, to our condition? Cripes, why not just call the book ''American Something-or-other''? You know, truth in packaging.

You could read ''The Corrections'' as a conventional realist saga of multigenerational family dynamics -- that's how the publisher spins it -- and love's mutating mysteries, with just enough novel-of-paranoia touches so Oprah won't assign it and ruin Franzen's street cred. Or you could read it as a trickier and trendier sort of work, which flawlessly mimics old-school plottiness, readability and character development in order to seduce you into realms of bottomless geopolitical-spiritual disquiet. Damned if I know. But I know what made me decide to stick with the thing long enough to tell I liked it. It was Chip's cockamamie justification for the obviously suicidal beginning of his own magnum opus: '' 'My idea,' Chip said, 'was to have this ''hump'' that the moviegoer has to get over. Putting something off-putting at the beginning, it's a classic modernist strategy. There's a lot of rich suspense toward the end.' '' Aha. Was this Franzen's own way of hinting that he himself had a bunch of goodies up his sleeve that he meant to hold back awhile longer out of sheer modernist cussedness? And that I'd miss out if I didn't pull up my socks and soldier on?

Well, sure enough, just a few pages later the book started getting better. First Chip's apparently sane sister, Denise, arrives and immediately makes herself the reader's ally. ''If I grant that these are interesting issues,'' she asks Chip, who is delivering a too-familiar aria about antidepressants as an adjunct to consumerism, ''will you stop talking about them?'' Next comes a flashback in which one of Chip's students (she's splendidly hostile and relentlessly seductive) lays siege to his virtue and gives him a mysterious drug, an antidepressant-aphrodisiac in golden caplets she calls ''Mexican A'' -- and which we somehow sense (and if we don't, I'm telling you) that we'll learn much, much more about. And suddenly we were rocking: I only put the book down again when my life needed tending to. Mind you, I'm still not convinced that Franzen actually meant his first 30 pages to be such a slog, but it's an awfully funny coincidence.

It shouldn't interfere with anybody's rich suspense to report that all the mighty bulk of ''The Corrections'' turns on a single, definingly American question: Will Mom be able to get the whole family home for one last Christmas? Franzen tucks the more momentous questions into a branching system of subplots, starring each of the main characters in turn and making each one equally sympathetic. Will Alfred (a) be put in a nursing home, (b) enter a radical new treatment plan that proposes to restructure his brain or (c) deliver himself with that Hemingway-evoking shotgun in the basement? Will Denise, who cooks at a nouveller-than-thou restaurant, end up in bed with (a) her financial backer, (b) his wife or (c) both? Will Chip get (a) rich off that screenplay, (b) his married girlfriend back or (c) himself killed during a coup in Lithuania, where he goes as an aide to a politician turned con man? Will Gary, the banker who's the oldest of the Lamberts' offspring, (a) make a killing in biotech stocks, (b) stand up to his crafty wife and mocking children or (c) just keep drinking? Finally, will Enid, the materfamilias, ever get a grip?

And those are just a few of the balls Franzen keeps in the air. What will a drug, trade-named Aslan after the Christly lion in C. S. Lewis's Narnia books, do to his characters (if they end up hooked on it) and to society as a whole (if the stuff ever gets F.D.A. approval)? ''Mexican A'' is only one variety of Aslan; another is a revolutionary Parkinson's medication called Corecktall. What does the upcoming execution of a brutal killer have to do with it all? Can Corecktall also detangle the criminal brain? What's the connection between a long-forgotten patent held by Alfred and the schemes of a gurulike neurobiologist? Unless I missed something, Franzen ultimately lets this ball drop, and I wasn't sorry to see the last of it. Psychotropic drugs and their supposedly problematic effects on human autonomy and identity is a topic as old as ''Brave New World'' and as new as Peter D. Kramer's ''Listening to Prozac'' -- which is no longer all that new. In his own recent novel, ''Spectacular Happiness,'' Kramer himself seems bored with the topic.

Sure, I guess it's a no-no to put stuff in your book that doesn't pay off, but I can't scrape together much outrage when I'm basically having a good time. Anyhow, you have to expect a degree of indeterminacy in an ambitious novel these days; an intricately, perfectly paranoid book like Pynchon's ''Crying of Lot 49,'' in which everything seems to have some sinister relation to everything else, now seems as quaintly formalist as ''The Waste Land.'' Franzen coyly tips his hat to several forebears along the way: he gives us a Web address called gaddisfly.com (Franzen's title, of course, echoes that of William Gaddis's novel ''The Recognitions''), a magician named Alain Gregarius, a ''brainy-looking'' cruise-ship passenger named Roth, a slasher movie called ''Moody Fruit,'' even a city park with the same name (Waindell) as the college where Nabokov's Pnin teaches. And some of the white noise in Alfred's head -- cirruslike clusterings of very high frequencies off in deep stratosphere behind his ears'' -- must derive from Don DeLillo. These shadow presences announce that Franzen likes his fiction smart and larky, with glimpses of scary depths and a flirtatious, on-and-off relationship with realism. But you already knew that. And the success of David Foster Wallace's epic, minutely interconnected, ultimately unresolved ''Infinite Jest'' has made a novel like ''The Corrections'' -- a far less dense and demanding read -- seem part of a new mainstream, in which either teasing hints of formalism dress up the randomness or irruptions of randomness juice up the formalism. (Choose one. Or not.) Whether or not this is a good idea is a matter of taste -- and a debate dating back to the Dionysians versus the Apollonians.

In ''The Corrections,'' though, Franzen maintains a scrupulous neutrality on questions of order versus energy, control versus license, tradition versus innovation, old stick-in-the-muds versus their unmoored children. Lamberts versus lions. Alfred is an open-and-shut case of anality and sexual repression (and I guess I should admit that the R. Crumb-like talking feces he hallucinates may not be the book's subtlest moment), yet he's silently self-sacrificing, and admirable in his rigorous work ethic and fidelity. Enid is silly, obsessive and manipulative, yet loving and blessed with an unsuspected capacity for acceptance and self-reinvention. Franzen doesn't caricature either Gary's desperate embrace of family values or Denise's addled sexual adventurism; and he soon shows us Chip as far more than a cartoon of breast-fixation and arty self-delusion. The end of the novel has the same ambivalence Kafka achieves at the end of ''The Metamorphosis'': we're glad that one character has been released from an oppressive bond, yet we also suspect that a nobler soul has been undervalued. If you don't end up liking each one of Franzen's people, you probably just don't like people. And by the way, assuming the book really does speak to our condition, it doesn't pretend to know more about it than we do.

Still, it's often the microfelicities that keep you barreling through ''The Corrections'' toward its larger satisfactions. Wordplay worthy of Nabokov: a few pages after a discussion of a museum of transportation, Alfred and Enid slip into their marital bed, ''the museum of antique transports.'' Tiny, revelatory gestures: the fastidious Gary sniffing his mother's dish towel before drying his hands on it. Magically precise images: a sandwich opened to ''a slice of bologna on which the texture of bread was lithographed in yellow mustard.'' Knowing one-liners: ''Police in ski masks,'' Chip says at a particularly bad moment in his Lithuanian adventure. ''I'm struggling to put a positive construction on this.'' Franzen writes with convincing authority about the minutiae of railroads, clothing, medicine, economics, industry, cuisine and Eastern European politics, and he knows just when to push his conceits over the top -- like his Lithuanian city built of radioactive cinder blocks from Belarus. But he also knows his way around more intimate territory. Enid painfully contrasts her current married life not only with ''the loving-kindness of other couples,'' but with the days when Alfred had ''been mad for her and had looked into her eyes.''

No one book, of course, can provide everything we want in a novel. But a book as strong as ''The Corrections'' seems ruled only by its own self-generated aesthetic: it creates the illusion of giving a complete account of a world, and while we're under its enchantment it temporarily eclipses whatever else we may have read. But I guess that is everything we want in a novel -- except, when it's rocking along, for it never to be over. In that respect, ''The Corrections'' ends as disappointingly as it began. And in that respect only.

David Gates's most recent book is ''The Wonders of the Invisible World,'' a collection of stories.

* * *

When The Corrections was chosen for Oprah's Book Club, Franzen made a public stink about his discomfort with "logo of corporate ownership" on the book's jacket. He later issued a public mea culpa; the story is here from USA Today.

April 2008: The Laments

The Laments
by George Hagen

"Black Comedy, White Family"
by Jonathan Wilson
The New York Times Book Review
August 22, 2004

THE family story has been a durable mainstay of the novel for more than a century. If the family is British or German, watch out; you could be stuck for months with the plodding affairs of the dreary Forsytes or the door-stopping Buddenbrookses. The contemporary American version, which generally weighs in on the high hundred-page scale, has at its heart a corrosive narcissism: perhaps that's why Oprah stopped inflicting it on her book club audience and switched to ''classics.'' George Hagen's first novel, ''The Laments,'' is a lively corrective to the subgenre, a family story on speed, with a jolt of black comedy that makes it a close relative to that greatest of all American family stories, ''The Simpsons.''

We follow the eponymous Laments -- Julia, Howard and their three children, Will, Marcus and Julius -- as they travel from South Africa and the Rhodesias to England and on to their final touchdown in the New Jersey suburbs. We begin in the ignorant 1950's and conclude in the enlightened 70's, and all along the way there are somber times. But the tragedies and difficulties that afflict the Laments -- a dead baby, a son with a severed hand, a suicidal out-of-work father and worse -- are carried carefully in a basket of bitter humor; any apparent invitation to either characters or readers to fall into a sentimental slump is quickly withdrawn. The only other novel I can think of that creates this effect with equal success is John Irving's ''World According to Garp.''

The first 30 pages or so of ''The Laments'' are a thrill ride: bleak, deep and hilarious. We begin with a baby switch and an adoption. A deranged new mother in Salisbury's appropriately named Mercy Hospital (almost every place and person in ''The Laments'' is appropriately named), Mary Boyd, finds the Laments' new addition more attractive than her own and steals off with their baby. Almost immediately she, her estranged husband, and the purloined baby are killed in a horrendous car crash. Not long later Mercy's head of obstretics, Dr. Samuel Underberg, an ahead-of-his-time antiracist liberal/genius/wacko soon to die in a nasty accident himself, persuades the Laments to adopt Mary's baby, whom they name Will.

You can't switch a baby like this without engaging some kind of nature-vs.- nurture debate. Mark Twain took on the whole shebang in ''Pudd'nhead Wilson'' by making one baby white and the other white in appearance but the child of a slave. George Hagen is also interested in race, and particularly the legacy carried by the children and grandchildren of old colonial racists, but he wants to complicate (or perhaps simplify) the issue. He is most interested in character as fate, and in names as quirky tests of that fate. ''A child's name is his portal to the world. It had to be right,'' Julia thinks right after the birth of her son. ''If people were named at the end of their lives, we wouldn't have mistakes like selfish children named Charity, and timid ones named Leo,'' she declares. Can the foundling Will will himself out of the Book of Lamentations that is the Laments' family life? Or is he doomed to share their troubled destiny?

Eventually, the novel answers the question in nicely ambiguous fashion, but it's the journey out that catches the imagination. Folded into Will's picaresque adventures are deft skewerings of whatever country and community the Laments happen to be in. Memorial Day in the Jersey burbs gets a great going-over. Julia Lament is warned by her neighbors that she will be shunned if she doesn't decorate her house with a flag. She responds by tacking a four-foot-square Union Jack to her front door. The resulting ''honks of outrage'' from passing cars are, we can imagine, the orchestra warming up for the George Bush years. As a wandering troupe with a hard-to-grasp identity -- white African liberals on the run -- the Laments are also well placed to satirize the elective ethnic affinities of their American friends. '' 'I'm Irish,' said Abby. 'Really?' said Julia. 'Which part of Ireland are you from?' 'Cork,' Abby replied, 'but that was three generations ago.' '' The acquiring of identities and the shrugging them off is, inevitably, part and parcel of nature/nurture. Hagen likes his favorite characters to move before their identities ossify into national stereotypes.

Much of the novel is taken up with Will's schooling across the continents, his teachers and the girls he loves. There are no superfast times at high school in Jersey, but neither is there any dark sarcasm in the classroom, and in this, as elsewhere, Hagen is a delicate observer of the social scene. Such problems as arise in ''The Laments'' are mainly side effects of the stylized Garp-like form. It's never easy to make tragic death real, and it is truly hard when you have ambitiously committed yourself to stand firm against emoting (phony or otherwise). A truly horrible fate does overtake two of the most likable characters, but I found it hard to care. Howard Lament, an engineer by trade, and a specialist in ''the conveyance of liquids through valves of every shape and size,'' eventually comes up with an artificial heart that he then discards in a fit of despair. It seems a suitable moment for a novel in which matters of the heart are so frequently subjects for black comedy.

The novel has other, smaller, defects: some of the Laments' flatter adventures, including an episode in Bahrain, read like memoir dressed up as fiction; and Hagen's ear is not always pitch-perfect, especially in the British and American sections. The recorded dialogue can be jarring: ''I can beatchu up, y'know!'' (England) just didn't sound right to me. Nevertheless, there is an admirable and enviable range and ambition in ''The Laments,'' and something lucidly democratic in the novel's insistence that a wandering life grants perspectives and perceptions that stay-at-homes can't achieve. Julia, bright, long-suffering and staunchly loyal to her family, notes that ''whenever the Laments moved, they lost something'' but more often the reverse seems to be the case. Certainly, the appearance of George Hagen on the literary scene is a gain for readers everywhere.

Jonathan Wilson's most recent novel is ''A Palestine Affair.''

March 2008: Short stories, part 2

I chose a handful of the stories after hearing them on two fabulous short story podcasts, The New Yorker Fiction podcast with Deborah Treasman, the fiction editor, who has current writers choose past published stories and read and talk about them, and Selected Shorts, in which actors read short stories live on stage in New York. The links below are to web-based recordings, but you can also download the podcasts themselves on iTunes. The dates and readers are listed here for The New Yorker and here for Selected Shorts. Because the Selected Shorts ones are read live, there is an audience, and they laugh a lot more than I care for, and the actor reading usually does a little acting. Just a warning.

1. "Kansas" by Antonya Nelson

2. "Why I Live at the P.O." by Eudora Welty (Selected Shorts: Program 2: Week of October 13 - October 19, 2007)

3. "The Gospel According to Mark" by Jorge Luis Borges

4. "A Day" by William Trevor

5. "Half a Grapefruit" by Alice Munro

6. "Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out" by Patricia Highsmith

7. "Fredericka the Beautiful" by Ann Hood (From Seventeen January, 1992)

8. "Sermon in the Guava Tree" by Kiran Desai (Selected Shorts: Program 11: Week of December 15 - December 21, 2007)

February 2008: Water for Elephants

by Sara Gruen

"Trunk Show"
by Elizabeth Judd
The New York Times Book Review
June 4, 2006

On our first date, my husband took me to see Tod Browning's "Freaks," a 1932 horror film with a distinctly Diane Arbus feel that takes a voyeuristic delight in dwarfs, fat ladies and other sideshow improbabilities. Sara Gruen's arresting new novel, "Water for Elephants," explores similar subject matter — the pathetic grandeur of the Depression-era circus. And like Browning, Gruen infuses her audacious material with a surprisingly uplifting strain of sentimentality.

"Water for Elephants" begins violently and then veers into weirder terrain. Jacob Jankowski, a veterinary student at Cornell, discovers that his parents have been killed in a car accident. Aimless and distraught, he climbs aboard a train that happens to be carrying the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth, and inveigles a job as an animal doctor. His responsibilities draw him into the unpredictable orbit of August Rosenbluth, the circus's mercurial menagerie director, and his beautiful wife, Marlena, whose equestrian act attracts enthusiastic crowds.

Jacob immerses himself in the bizarre subculture of acrobats, aerialists, sword swallowers and lion tamers, mastering a vernacular that reflects a rigid caste system. Ringling Brothers is nicknamed "Big Bertha," performers are "kinkers" and members of the audience are always "rubes." When an aged Jacob observes a contemporary circus, he sees children carrying blinking toys: "Bet their parents paid an arm and a leg for them, too. Some things never change. Rubes are still rubes, and you can still tell the performers from the workers."

The troupe crisscrosses the country cannibalizing acts that have gone bankrupt in the Depression-era economy. After Uncle Al, the autocratic ringmaster, purchases Rosie, an elephant with an unquenchable thirst for lemonade and the inability to follow the simplest command, Benzini Brothers looks doomed. How Jacob coaxes Rosie to perform — thereby saving the circus — lies at the heart of the novel.

Gruen, whose first novel was "Riding Lessons," turns horses and other creatures into sympathetic characters. According to an author's note, she studied elephant body language and behavior with a former handler at the Kansas City Zoo. The research pays off. August's mistreatment of Marlena pales beside the visceral wallop of his nonchalant cruelty toward Rosie: "I look up just as he flicks the cigarette. It arcs through the air and lands in Rosie's open mouth, sizzling as it hits her tongue. She roars, panicked, throwing her head and fishing inside her mouth with her trunk. August marches off. I turn back to Rosie. She stares at me, a look of unspeakable sadness on her face. Her amber eyes are filled with tears."

Second-rate and seedy, Benzini Brothers suffers a collective inferiority complex (no one is permitted to utter the word "Ringling" in Uncle Al's presence). When Lovely Lucinda, the 400-pound fat lady, dies suddenly, Uncle Al orchestrates a funeral procession led by 24 black Percherons and an army of mourners competing for the three dollars and bottle of Canadian whiskey promised to whoever puts on the best show. "You've never seen such grief — even the dogs are howling."

Gruen's circus, with its frankly mercantile morality, symbolizes the warped vigor of capitalism. No matter how miserable or oppressed, the performers love the manufacturing of illusion, sewing a new sequined headdress for Rosie or feeding the llamas as men die of starvation in a devastated America. August's paranoid schizophrenia feels emblematic — an indictment of a lifetime spent feigning emotions to make a buck.

At its finest, "Water for Elephants" resembles stealth hits like "The Giant's House," by Elizabeth McCracken, or "The Lovely Bones," by Alice Sebold, books that combine outrageously whimsical premises with crowd-pleasing romanticism. But Gruen's prose is merely serviceable, and she hurtles through cataclysmic events, overstuffing her whiplash narrative with drama (there's an animal stampede, two murders and countless fights). She also asserts a grand passion between Jacob and Marlena that's never convincingly demonstrated.

Black-and-white photographs of real American circus scenes from the first half of the century are interspersed throughout the novel, and they brilliantly evoke the dignified power contained in the quieter moments of this unusual brotherhood. The grainy photos capture the unexpected daintiness of an elephant disembarking from a train, the symmetry of a marching band, a gaggle of plumed showgirls stepping gingerly across a patchy lawn and the haunting solitude of an impeccably dressed cook.

Circuses showcase human beings at their silliest and most sublime, and many unlikely literary figures have been drawn to their glitzy pageantry, soaring pretensions and metaphorical potential (Marianne Moore leaps to mind). Unsurprisingly, writers seem liberated by imagining a spectacle where no comparison ever seems inflated, no development impossible. For better and for worse, Gruen has fallen under the spell. With a showman's expert timing, she saves a terrific revelation for the final pages, transforming a glimpse of Americana into an enchanting escapist fairy tale.

Elizabeth Judd has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Salon and other publications.

January 2008: A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering American on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Bryson

'A Walk in the Woods': On the Trail, With Wit and Insights
May 21, 1998
New York Times Book Review
by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Short of doing it yourself, the best way of escaping into nature is to read a book like Bill Bryson's latest, "A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail." The only risk is the one posed by all books on nature: a certain monotony.

Or as Bryson describes what he calls "the world on foot": "You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, 'far removed from the seats of strife,' as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge."

A willingness to trudge, in Bryson's case, the full length of the Appalachian Trail, some 2,160 miles, from Springer Mountain, in Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, in Maine. He decided to do it because a little voice in his head said one day: "Sounds neat! Let's do it!"

So the challenge to Bryson -- a writer of travel books ("The Lost Continent," "Notes from a Small Island") and books about language ("The Mother Tongue," "Made in America") -- was to lend variety to his account of trudging. More variety even than the terrain of the 12 states through which the trail passes.

Bryson has met this challenge with zest and considerable humor. He begins by scaring you a little. He tells you of the trail's perils: its dangerous animals, killing diseases, "loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex." And bears that bite.

He tells you of the power of woods to unnerve. "The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a visit to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the core."

He tells you of his hiking partner, Stephen Katz, a childhood friend from Iowa who had been attracted to drugs and alcohol until he was found by the police "in an upended car in a field outside the little town of Mingo, hanging upside down by his seatbelt, still clutching the steering wheel and saying, 'Well, what seems to be the problem, officers?"' Katz is seriously out of shape and given to seizures ever since he took "some contaminated phenylthiamines about 10 years ago." Bryson remarks, "I imagined him bouncing around on the Appalachian Trail like some wind-up toy that had fallen on its back."

When he gets through being scared, Bryson entertains you with the history of the trail, the hell of the early going when he and his partner were not yet conditioned, the quirky characters they met, the geology, biology, ecology of the terrain, and jokes. You turn the pages not knowing what's around the next bend.

Then, after trudging for what seems like forever, he arrives in Gatlinburg, Tenn., and sees a map of the trail "about six inches wide and four feet high." He writes: "I looked at it with polite, almost proprietorial interest -- it was the first time since leaving New Hampshire that I had considered the trail in its entirety -- and then inclined closer, with bigger eyes and slightly parted lips. Of the four feet of trail map before me, reaching approximately from my knees to the top of my head, we had done the bottom two inches."

"My hair had grown more than that."

He concludes: "One thing was obvious. We were never going to walk to Maine."

"A Walk in the Woods" is a funny book, full of dry humor in the native-American grain. It is also a serious book. Nothing really terrible happened to the author, but by playing on our fears, he captures the ambivalence of our feelings about the wild. We revere it but we're also intimidated. We want to protect animals but we also want to kill them. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but they also "choke off views and leave you muddled and without bearings." He continues: "They make you feel small and confused and vulnerable, like a small child lost in a crowd of strange legs."

One other contradiction is also captured in these pages. Americans may be destroying their environment, wiping out species, mismanaging ecology, but our forests remain vast and impressive. "One third of the landscape of the lower 48 states is covered in trees -- 728 million acres in all," Bryson writes. "Maine alone has 10 million uninhabited acres. That's 15,600 square miles, an area considerably bigger than Belgium, without a single resident. Altogether, just 2 percent of the United States is classified as built up."

What's more, in the past century and a half, the woods have reclaimed 40 percent of New England, Bryson writes. The feeling he leaves you with is that despite all our abuse of it, nature may be too powerful to take notice.

Bryson himself was liberated by nature's vastness. The impossibility of walking the whole length of the trail freed him to sample it in stages. All the same, he ended up walking 870 miles of it -- or 39.5 percent of its total -- a distance slightly greater than that from New York to Chicago.

He was often exhausted, his "brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below." The reader, by contrast, is rarely anything but exhilarated. And you don't have to take a step.