Steinbeck – The Winter of Our Discontent

Winter of our Discontent 300x300

 How to Become a Rich Bastard

Steinbeck, John. (1961). The Winter of our Discontent. New York: Penguin

In this 1961 novel, main character Ethan is a middle-aged grocery clerk in a small New England coastal town. He used to own the store he works in but went bankrupt from poor business decisions and now works for an Italian immigrant boss. Ethan’s family was once prominent in the town but the family lost its place. Still, Ethan accepts his history, is content, happy with his loving wife and two children, unambitious, and good-humored. He talks, sings, and quotes poetry to the canned goods in the store.

His wife and kids are unhappy living on a grocery clerk’s salary however, especially knowing the family was once prominent. They urge Ethan to do something. One day, for no reason, in a bizarre, unmotivated and unjustified reversal of character, he decides to rob the bank. He makes a plan and rehearses it.

Meanwhile, town council members use their political power to benefit their personal business interests. The whole town is rotten, but apparently that’s how things have  always been done. The banker urges Ethan to become a player by investing his wife’s nest egg in a new airport the council has voted on, if only they can acquire the perfect property for it, property owned by Ethan’s lifelong friend Danny, who became a drunk after the war.

Ethan offers Danny a thousand dollars for the land; Danny uses the money to drink himself to death as Ethan knew he would; Ethan becomes a major player in town and does not have to rob the bank after all.

Ethan’s financial problems are solved and his family is restored to aristocratic status, but he took ethical decisions he worries about.  He took advantage of Danny’s weakness; He decided to rob a bank, even though he didn’t actually do it; He took kickbacks from a grocery supplier; He anonymously turned in his boss to the Immigration Service; He took advantage of city council insider information. Ethan ruminates about whether he sold his soul to become member of the elite. Or did he behave like any normal, ambitious American who is determined to change his fate?

Ethan’s ethical breast-beating seems overwrought today, although it makes stark contrast with the blasé attitude of entitlement among the monied class, blind to the disrespect of the ordinary people who are exploited to sustain a higher status. Ethan is not blind to that human failing, and in the end, his self-awareness prevents him from interpreting his financial success as personal and class entitlement.  In that sense he provides a morality lesson as relevant today as it was a half-century ago (and just about as inert, I suspect).

As a morality tale, I think the novel is successful, if obvious. Characters and settings are stereotypical, Ethan’s motivation is murky at best, and his personality unlikeable. The writing is light and frothy, a pleasant diversion, with excellent observations of small town life, and of course, it is Steinbeck. You could do worse.

Greene – The Third Man

Third ManCue the Zithers!

Greene, Graham (1950). The Third Man. New York: Viking.

The theme music on zither is prominent and memorable in the mid-century film starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. This novella was a treatment for that movie, generally regarded as a classic. Take the book out from the shadow or the halo of the movie and you have a slightly above average mystery set in occupied Vienna at the end of WWII.

Rollo Martins, a well-known writer of American Westerns, has been summoned to Vienna by his dear old friend and schoolmate, Harry Lime. He arrives just in time for Harry’s funeral. He learns that Harry was killed in an accident when he stepped out in front of a truck. Witnesses say two men carried him from the street, dead.  However, for reasons that were not clear, Martins believes it could not have been an accident, and begins sleuthing about Vienna looking for foul play. Eventually he interviews a man who saw the whole thing from his apartment window and claims there was a third man at the scene. Martins tries to discover the identity of this alleged third man, but the witness is murdered before he can talk to him again.

The plot is serviceable, though as mysteries go, there isn’t much at stake until very late in the story when we learn Lime might have been a racketeer, but even then, black-market racketeering was routine in post-war Vienna, as the police chief says. We discover that Lime was worse than a heartless profiteer, an amoral villain selling watered down or adulterated penicillin.  In a memorable speech, Lime defends himself by noting that so many millions died pointlessly in the war, it makes no difference if a few more anonymous lives are counted as well, in order to make him wealthy. The final chase through the sewers is perhaps a metaphor for how human life had been so devalued by the end of the war. 

The writing is interesting, especially having the main narrator be not Martins, but the British police captain. Nevertheless Greene alternates among first-person reporting, second person addresses to the reader, and omniscient third person narration, creating some problems in following the story, but mainly it was jarring because we just don’t write that way anymore today. The voice seemed archaic.

There are some wonderful images and turns of phrase. My favorite was “a silence deeper than absence.”  The dark, gritty, mysterious and dangerous atmosphere of postwar Vienna is well-described, although specific settings are less detailed, such as bars, cars, and hotel rooms.  The characters are under-motivated but generally interesting and not stereotypes. There is some mild humor, hardly to be mentioned. See the movie, skip the book.

Edelman – Computing the Mind

Computing the Mind-PicWay Off Base

Adams, W. A. (2009, April 22). Mind = Computation. [Review of the book, Computing the Mind: How the Mind Really Works]. PsycCRITIQUES – Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 54 (Release 16, Article 4). Retrieved April 22, 2009 from the PsycCritiques database.

Shimon Edelman’s book is a unique blend of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and philosophy. He argues that the mind is a computational system that can be understood and could be implemented in silicon just as well as in biological tissue.

That idea is now widely accepted in cognitive and evolutionary psychology and in artificial intelligence. The key point is that the computation itself is the consciousness. It doesn’t matter what hardware is used to accomplish the computation, whether a digital computer, a brain, or a system of ping-pong balls and beer cans, as long as the output is mental content, such as language and thought.

But Edelman goes a step farther. He says that the brain, as a computational device, generates the mind. But that’s not what the computational hypothesis says. Even on a computer, we would never say that the hardware “generates” the software. How could a hardware device generate its own software?  Wouldn’t it need software to do that? 

I don’t accept the computational hypothesis. I am quite sure that consciousness is not a computation, and that the mind is not computable. But Edelman’s book is based on a misunderstanding of the computational hypothesis, with an error so fundamental that the book’s main idea doesn’t even make sense.  

Coetzee – Waiting For the Barbarians

Waiting for barbariansWho is the Barbarian?

Coetzee, J.M. (1980). Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin.

This short novel (180 pages) is the first-person account of an unnamed, aging magistrate, administrator of a military fort on a remote frontier of “The Empire.” No exact time and place are specified so the story can stand as a universal parable. Some readers assume, because of Coetzee’s heritage, that the tale is “about” the injustices of the apartheid regime in South Africa. That may have been a source for him, but it is a myopic reading to assume the novel is about South Africa. The time, based on technology mentioned could be anywhere from the 1800’s to the rural 1950’s. Transportation is by horse and wooden carts, communication is by voice and flags, but there are rifles. The place could be any country in the world that has a central government with an army, and a wild frontier.

There are nomads and fishing groups camped outside the walls of the town, but farther out are the feared “barbarians.”  The townspeople lose the occasional sheep to a barbarian raid, but in general there is a stable status quo. Then a contingent of soldiers from “The Empire,” arrives to subdue the barbarians. The soldiers round up several of them, bring them to the town and torture them brutally. The magistrate takes note, argues there is no need for it, but otherwise watches, squeamishly, without intervention. “The jackal rips out the hare’s bowels but the world rolls on,” he remarks (p. 25).

When the army goes afield again to get more barbarians, the magistrate discovers a young barbarian beggar in town. Her father was killed in front of her eyes, she has been tortured herself, and is now blind and hobbled. He ministers to her in his quarters. Why he does this is not clear, either to the reader, or to himself.

Over time, he develops a relationship with the girl which develops into bodily intimacy, but not sexual intercourse. He claims he is too old for that, but he is conflicted and confused about sexuality, his own, and what sex means in general. We can surmise he might be subconsciously trying to atone for the cruelty of the soldiers, but his motivation seems more complex. The girl acquiesces, but is unresponsive. That lack of response drives him nuts and he wonders if it is a characteristic of being a barbarian.

Parallel themes emerge. One is, what is a barbarian? Or its converse, what does it mean to be civilized? That puzzle continues for the rest of the book. The second central theme is, what is the nature of human sexuality, specifically, what is sexual desire?  This theme also continues for the rest of the book.

A third theme also emerges, the most obvious one: What is a person’s moral responsibility when they realize that they are a member of a cruel, unjust, authoritarian regime? Does one go along, or stand against? The theme emerges when the magistrate is arrested for consorting with the enemy, imprisoned, and tortured.

While the dilemma of the magistrate’s moral stance on torture is raised, the more cogent question is what constitutes civilization? Is torture not barbarism? The magistrate never forms that question explicitly but the reader certainly does.

None of these questions is resolved for the magistrate. The novel ends with him as confused as he was in the beginning. That is a disappointment, for we are deprived of an opportunity to consider Coetzee’s answers to the questions he has so skillfully and memorably raised. Is it enough in an artistic project to raise deep questions about the human condition, or should the artist at least attempt some answers?

Strout – Olive Kitteridge

olive_kitteridgeFine Short Stories

Strout, Elizabeth (2008). Olive Kitteridge. New York: Random House.

This Pulitzer prize-winner is offered as a novel, but it is actually a collection of thirteen short stories. What they have in common is that their characters all live in a small town in Maine. Some characters, especially Olive, a retired schoolteacher, appear in several stories, but the only sense in which the set constitutes a novel is that by the end, you have some sense of what it’s like to live in this particular small town. The stories just barely hang together as a whole.

Each story offers a slice-of-life situation for one or two main characters, during which their motivation, hopes, and doubts are revealed by interactions with others. Olive, the character who appears most often, is a blunt, unsentimental, angry, fearful, and un-self-aware person who nevertheless shows moments of kindness and human connectedness. She’s an interesting, though not likeable character.

The characters in these stories are typically not self-aware, which sets up the author’s technique of letting the reader “discover” their psychology from their behavior. It’s a proper method in fiction, but in this collection, the obviousness of the manipulation grows tedious. Reading about small-minded characters, doing and saying dim-witted things in a tradition-bound society, grates on one’s tolerance, so when a character actually does something, like make a decision, it stands out as the dramatic highlight of the story.

The stories are extremely well-crafted, however, and enjoyable for that. All are third-person-close, and Strout always starts a story with the narrator speaking omnisciently, usually in formidable descriptive sentences, then she manages to insert the narrator’s close voice very subtly. For example, describing Olive’s husband, Henry, she opens with a past-tense narrative description.

“For many years Henry Kitteridge was a pharmacist in the next town over, driving every morning on snowy roads, or rainy roads, or summertime roads, when the wild raspberries shot their new growth in brambles along the last section of town before he turned off to where the wider road led to the pharmacy.”

Strout opens almost every story with description of the scenery, which works because the description is always emotionally connected to a character. She’s not simply telling about the road and the raspberries, which would be boring. Rather, she’s explaining through Henry’s eyes, how he sees it as he drives to work. Connecting description to the character’s experience makes it live, and Strout is a master of the technique.

She continues in the very next sentence with a remarkable bit of sorcery:

“Retired now, he still wakes early and remembers how mornings used to be his favorite, as though  the world were his secret, tires rumbling softly beneath him and the light emerging through the early fog, the brief sight of the bay off to his right, then the pines, tall and slender, and almost always he rode with the window partly open because he loved the smell of the pines and the heavy salt air, and the in the winter he loved the smell of the cold.”

The shift from past to present tense at the start of the second sentence is the narrator’s nod to the reader that we’re moving in close now: “Retired now, he still wakes early…”  If that little tense change weren’t there, you would have the impression that the story was being told by nobody in particular; that it was some kind of a self-telling story. The tense change creates an aside, a brief break from narrative description for a parenthetical, intimate comment to the reader, as if to say: “Henry was a pharmacist for many years, but, you know, he’s retired now…”  So you immediately feel trust and intimacy with the narrator, which pulls you into the world of the story.

Then over the remainder of that second sentence, Strout imperceptibly moves the narrator back to  past tense, retreating her into the background so we can focus on Henry.  She does it by describing, at first in present tense, what Henry remembers, “…how mornings used to be…” which is brilliant, because all memory is past tense, so you don’t notice the shift. By the end of that sentence, the narrator has switched fully back to past tense description, beginning with the conjunctive second clause, “…and almost always he rode with the window partly open…” The transition is seamless.  When I see writing that skillful, I want to clap my hands and shout, “Bravo!”

And there’s a lot more where that came from. Often the characterizations are exquisitely subtle, with the surface description telling another, subterranean tale.

“Olive had refused to go to church the day before and Henry, uncharacteristically, had spoken to her sharply. ‘Is it too much to ask,’ he had found himself saying, as he stood in the kitchen in his undershorts, ironing his trousers. ‘A man’s wife accompanying him to church?’ Going without her seemed a public exposure of familial failure. ‘Yes it most certainly is too goddamn much to ask!’ Olive had almost spit, her fury’s door flung open.”

It’s a scene about loneliness and alienation while maintaining social persona. The narrator explains why Henry is upset, because Henry himself doesn’t quite know why. It seemed like “…a public exposure of familial failure.”

And notice how Henry, who is very mild-mannered, doesn’t actually say his piece. He “found himself saying…” as if he were dissociated from his own thoughts and actions, which is a fair description of his unreflective personality.

The whole book is like that, a coruscation of writerly  brilliance. So despite my disdain for the stories themselves, the quality of the writing easily redeems the book for me.

Brockmole – The Visual World in Memory

VWIM Cover2Exact Science or Intuitive Feel? 

Adams, W.A. (2009).  Studying visual imagery with cognitive science: Benefits and drawbacks. [Review of the book, The Visual World in Memory]. PsycCRITIQUES – Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, September 2, 2009, Vol. 54, Release 35, Article 6].

According to some contributors to this edited volume, the study of mental imagery no longer wears the shameful scarlet letter of introspection. Ingenious neurological and behavioral techniques now let us study mental images scientifically.  For example, consider the question of whether mental images are really pictures in the head, or merely descriptive representations that use the language of visual perception.  Reviewing brain imaging studies, one group of authors finds that there is a 90% overlap in the areas of the brain activated in visual perception and in visual imagination.  That is fairly strong evidence that mental images really are pictures in the head, and that is a remarkable thing to be able to say scientifically.

However, science comes at a price.  Everything must be defined operationally, exactly, in terms of physical measurements.  There is no common sense meaning attached to terms like imagery, consciousness, mind, picture, imagination, recognition, or anything else.  Consequently, the reader is never sure if the findings of these studies can be interpreted in ordinary terms.  This is a problem of external validity: the scientific operations are so controlled and the definitions so artificially contrived, you no longer know what the study is actually about.  Is it a fair trade to sacrifice intuitive understanding to get scientific findings?  That is the question this book leaves.

Ondaatje – Coming Through Slaughter

Coming Through SlaughterA Poetic Puzzle

Ondaatje, Michael (1996/1976). Coming Through Slaughter. New York: Vintage.

This is an experimental historical novel based loosely on the true story of Jazz musician Buddy Bolden, a giant of early New Orleans music. He flourished at the beginning of the 20th century, and was one of the inventors of jazz. Hardly anything is known of his life. He rose to fame, disappeared for two years, returned briefly to glory, then went insane. The novel transmits the flavor of that time and place, but there is only one passage (a good one) that actually describes the music.  Instead, Ondaatje’s poetic language and the novel’s fragmented structure convey the sense of that early music and those times in an artistic way.

Short descriptions, dialogs, and narratives make up a pointillistic picture of Bolden’s life and  the Big Easy at that time. Documents and photographs are included to fill in the overall picture.  It’s a snapshot of a time, a place, and a man.  Bolden’s descent into madness is horrifying, believable, and realistic.

Nominally, this is a detective story. Bolden’s best friend, Webb, is searching for Buddy after he disappeared one night. The POV shifts from Webb to Bolden, and often to other characters, without flags, so sometimes it takes a few sentences to understand whose head you’re in. The narration changes unexpectedly among first-person, third-close, and epistolary.

Many scenes are haunting long after the book is finished. The story line is interesting, especially since it is roughly biographical, the writing is lyrical, like prose poetry, and the structure is original. Many pages have only one paragraph on them. Some have song lyrics, lists, hospital forms, or poems. Instead of describing events, Ondaatje lets all these elements form an impression of what happened.

It’s not a mass-market novel. It’s only for people interested in something different. It was written well before The English Patient, when Ondaatje was close to his poetic roots.  It still stands as a masterpiece.

Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs dallowayWriting to Emulate

Woolf, Virginia (1925). Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando, FL: Harcourt.

There is hardly anything to say about this novel that has not already been said. Considered one of Woolf’s finest, it has earned a permanent place in the canon of classics and has been analyzed to death.

Superficially, it is the story of a wealthy, fiftyish matron in 1920’s London who loves to throw fancy lunches, dinners and parties for the grandly wealthy class. We follow the inner thoughts and outer actions of Mrs. Dalloway, and her associates, over a single day as she prepares for an evening party, which is the climax of the book.

Woolf copied the stream-of-consciousness approach pioneered by Joyce (who she knew well), and I thought her version of it was more convincing than Joyce’s. Rather than have consciousness appear as a set of lengthy soliloquys, which is not how the mind goes, she portrays it as something more like waves lapping on a shore.

 “But, thank you, Lucy, oh, thank you,” said Mrs Dalloway, and thank you, thank you, she went on saying (sitting down on the sofa with her dress over her knees, her scissors, her silks), thank you , thank you, she went on saying in gratitude to her servants generally for helping her to be like this, to be what she wanted, gentle, generous-hearted. Her servants liked her. And then this dress of hers – where was the tear? And now her needle to be threaded. This was a favorite dress…

The imagery of thoughts washing like waves recurs often, sometimes explicitly, and I thought it was a good one.

A second innovation was Woolf’s technique of frequent, unmarked changes in point of view, jumping from one character’s head to another, something we are warned, as modern writers, never to do. But Woolf turns the technique into a sort of impressionism that is just as effective as any painting by Monet. Sometimes the POV pivots on the striking of the hour by Big Ben. Sometimes it pivots on a curtain blowing repeatedly on a breeze. But often it is just a naked head-jump: “Mr. Bowley raised his hat and thought xyz… Suddenly Mrs. Coates looked up into the sky…”  Despite this frenetic impressionism, it is to the skill of Woolf that there are only one or two spots in the entire novel where the actual  POV is unclear. She manages it with such amazing skill that the reader is omniscient, even though none of the characters is. Although the narrator is omniscient, there is very little expository writing in the novel, 90% of it being conveyed by successive first-person characters.

The language tends to the lyrical, especially in portrayal of Septimus Smith’s madness, although the language itself is not poetic, because none of the characters is a poet. The diction remains on an ordinary level, but is often highly expressive because of the impressionistic streams-of-consciousness:

They (all day she had been thinking of Burton, of Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. 

I was less fascinated than most other reviewers seem to be, by the personalities of the characters and their relationships. They all seemed ordinary and type-cast to me, all social exterior and hollow or chaotic interiors (proven by their stream-of-consciousness expressions). None of them seemed particularly interesting or attractive. Clearly the novel is a social satire, and there are some acerbically comic descriptions. Yet the novel dwells seriously and deeply on the characters’ precious inner lives, as if they were intrinsically interesting. I found them only mildly so.

The main strength of the novel, for me, was not the story, which is virtually non-existent, and not the characters, which are only mildly interesting, but in the author’s smooth and thoughtful writing, which is worthy of emulation.

Shorter – Before Prozac

Before ProzacDid the FDA Outlaw Perfectly Good Psychiatric Drugs?

Adams, W. A. (2009). Psychopharmacology and Depression.
[Review of the book, Before Prozac]. PsycCRITIQUES – Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, August 5, 2009, Vol. 54, Release 31, Article 4.

Medical historian Edward Shorter claims that no progress has been made in psychiatric treatment since the 1950’s. The old drugs were far more effective than anything available today, drugs like amphetamines and barbiturates, tranquilizers like Librium and Valium, antidepressants like Marsilid, and antipsychotics such as Thorazine.

Why did all those great drugs disappear?  According to Before Prozac, some went off patent so became unprofitable and were no longer marketed, but many were regulated out of existence by the FDA, leaving, in the author’s view, only Prozac and other virtually useless antidepressants.

Shorter’s thesis is that melancholic depression is a particular biological disorder best treated by electroconvulsive therapy, but everyone has been deluded by the DSM, FDA, and big pharma into thinking that depression is a diffuse category of  disorders for which SSRIs like Prozac are the best treatment, even though they are based on a false theory and no more effective than a placebo.

He does not prove that he is right and everybody else is wrong.  Still, it is an interesting, though not impartial, history of psychopharmacology for mood disorders since 1938.

Before Prozac-2009-4846-1-4   Click the link to see full text of the review.

 

Bellow – Humbolt’s Gift

Humboldt's GiftDrifting Along Some Fine Writing

Bellow, Saul. (1973). Humbolt’s Gift. New York: Penguin.

The story is about the life of a New York City writer who makes it big, but is haunted by the memory of his writing mentor, Humbolt, who taught him everything, then later scorned him for his commercial success. The story is told first-person, past tense, by Charlie Citrine, the young writer. For most of the book he reminisces about his friend Humbolt, and what he taught him, and meant to him. Along the way, he waxes existentially philosophical about life and especially about the artist’s place in modern society. This is done with fine language and often fine humor.

The characters are unique, full of  idiosyncracies. Citrine is detached, someone who was surprised by his sudden success as a playwright but thinks of himself as an established writer, yet really has no serious ideas and no motivation to write anything else. He feels vaguely guilty about that, but not guilty enough to write anything. Does that mean he has “risen above” the commercial compulsion to perform, or does it mean he is mentally bankrupt?

His lackadaisical attitude extends to his relationships. His wife divorces him and wants a fat settlement, which he sees as a minor annoyance; his girlfriend takes advantage of him, which he suspects, but pretends not to; he gets involved with a mobster who wants him to produce a certain play. The reader is always thinking, “Don’t do it, Charlie! Can’t you see the situation is nuts?”  But Charlie doesn’t see anything normally; he’s not quite there. He prefers to withdraw, to ruminate and reminisce, giving the author a chance to pontificate on modern (mid-century) society.

There are some thought-provoking themes to consider. One is about the relationship between a student and a mentor. It can takes a long time to get out from under the shadow of a powerful mentor. Bellow explores this relatively unusual kind of human relationship.

Another theme is the old dichotomy between art for art’s sake, and commercial art.  Citrine makes a lot of money with his writing, but that’s “not his fault,” he says.  By contrast, Humbolt, his mentor, died penniless. Humboldt wanted to raise the esteem of poets and writers in American society, yet he schemed like a Soviet politician to dethrone an English professor at Princeton so he could take his place. Nearly all of Bellow’s characters, including Charlie, are conflicted and disoriented. Maybe that’s what makes them so fascinating.

While the characters are enjoyable, there isn’t much of a story. Nothing really happens in the novel. Near the end, Charlie learns that Humbolt has bequeathed to him the rights to a screenplay they had written together in their youth (the title’s gift), and that leads to some tension, courtroom drama, and humor. Overall though, the plot is weak to non-existent.

Bellow’s (Charlie’s) observations about American life are dated now. Having Charlie take a helicopter across New York with Robert Kennedy doesn’t generate any frisson today. Comments about Adlai Stevenson and about the Soviet Union don’t hold much irony and actually deaden the narrative. That’s a hazard of writing political and topical issues into a novel. Urgent as they seem at the time, they rarely age well.

The book is an enjoyable read just for the fine writing. You read it as you would a prose poem, not as you would a mystery novel, and you go with the drift of the words and enjoy it for what it is. Bellow won the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to have won the National Book Award for Fiction three times.