The After-Dinner Payback

Salon has a fascinating interview with Barbara J. King, author of the new book Evolving God.

Q: So where does this whole evolutionary history leave us in today’s scientific age? What are the implications for how we can talk about religion?

A: I’m part of the camp of people who thinks it’s perfectly possible to see religion and science as compatible areas of thought and inquiry. In my book, I lay out three choices. You can say you’ve got to choose one. You can believe in science or you can have faith in God—the Richard Dawkins school of thought. Or you can say there are “non-overlapping magisteria”—the famous Stephen Jay Gould answer that religion will help us with meaning, and science will tell us about other things. I’m actually in a third place. If you can avoid being a biblical literalist, and if you can avoid being an arrogant scientist who tells everyone else what to think, you can think on multiple levels at once. There’s a lot of beauty in seeing that religion and science are really about the same things. They can be perfectly compatible.

With echoes of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a kind of coming-of-age story for nerds. Sixteen-year-old Blue van Meer is ridiculously smart—she can recite pi out to sixty-five decimal places and prefers to spend her days reading philosophy and memorizing poetry with her father—but when she arrives at St. Gallway, her naiveté becomes painfully evident: human nature, it seems, can’t be reduced to aphorisms and philosphical one-liners. People are a bit more complex than that.

But it’s her very naiveté that makes Blue such a compelling character. Though it’s told in the matter-of-fact tone of a professor giving a lecture, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is anything but dry. Pessl sprinkles her novel with amusing metaphors and little facts, which adds to the book’s overall charm. And then there’s the reading curriculum: each chapter corresponds to a classic of Western literature, from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (which features some of Blue’s sketches) to James Dickey’s Deliverance (which tells of Blue’s fateful camping trip with her friends) to Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (which describes Blue’s hospital stay). (At one point, when Blue is throwing books at her father, he asks her, “Are you finished bombarding your father with the Western canon?”)

Though the novel touches on heavy subject matter—murder, suicide, underage sex—Pessl’s style is light-hearted throughout, which takes the edge off the overall darkness of the story. Like her father, Blue isn’t given to sentimentality or emotional examination. People are frequently reduced to funny nicknames—”June Bugs” for the love-lorn women her father likes to date, “Stern Brow” for one of her nurses after being admitted to the hospital—and serious situations are given levity through Blue’s amusing and erudite comparisons.

One of the most impressive aspects of the book is Pessl’s patience in telling the story. Rather ricocheting from one unexpected revelation to another, the novel unfolds slowly, with Blue calmly guiding readers through her investigation into Hannah Schneider’s death. The plot can be tricky at times, but strong characterization and Blue’s confident, unpretentious voice ensures that readers won’t get lost in the shuffle.

Mary Ann Gwinn, book editor for the Seattle Times, describes what it’s like to pick the nominees for the National Book Critics Circle Awards.

The “vote” couldn’t be simpler. Anyone could talk (and did), but only committee members could vote in each category. We wrote down our five preferred titles in each category on little white sheets of paper, folded them up and gave them to the book editor of the Chicago Tribune (I kept thinking of student-council-president elections). She and the NBCC president took the little pieces of paper away and tallied the vote. Invariably one or two books would get a lot of votes.

It was fascinating to see how a good argument could sway the vote. In nonfiction, there were several splendid books that could be categorized as science writing, and one of the board members, a science writer, spoke to just how good these authors were at making something difficult (translating science for the layman) look easy. One of those books, [Michael Pollan's] The Omnivore’s Dilemma, made the finalist list, and one, [D.T. Max's] The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, was a near miss.

It was also a reminder of the subjectivity of criticism. I was gratified to discover that the book editor of the Chicago Tribune agreed with me about one book’s limitations. I was non-plussed to learn that the TIME magazine book critic thought we had missed the point.

The combustible politics of our time complicated things. We are a politically diverse group, and we had to work hard to fairly evaluate the reporting, the writing and the organization of books about Iraq and the Middle East, even though we might not agree with the author’s conclusions.

I’m actually a bit disappointed. I’d always imagined any book award nomination process would involve a bunch of craggy old men, dressed in tweed jackets, sitting at a long table in a dark room, smoking Cuban cigars and carefully reading by candlelight.

I don’t have anything of substance today—I’ve been off reading Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics—but, while digging around for something to litblog about, I found this short, fun book quiz.

You’re Ulysses by James Joyce.

Most people are convinced that you don’t make any sense, but compared to what else you could say, what you’re saying now makes tons of sense. What people do understand about you is your vulgarity, which has convinced people that you are at once brilliant and repugnant. Meanwhile, you are content to wander around aimlessly, taking in the sights and sounds of the city. What you see is vast, almost limitless, and brings you additional fame. When no one is looking, you dream of being a Greek folk hero.

That’s strangely accurate, though I wouldn’t agree with the “brilliant” aspect.

If you’re a straight guy, two women making out is pretty hot shit, right?

Okay, maybe it’s not so hot if Madonna and Britney Spears happen to be the ones making out. But I’m already bored with this topic. Impress me. Bisexuality is so fashionable that it’s lost any edge it once had; now, it seems every woman under the age of thirty is a quasi-lesbian. Even after reading Nerve’s boring interview with Jennifer Baumgardner, author of the new book Look Both Ways, I still don’t understand the mystique surrounding bisexual women. Maybe that’s because it was never there in the first place. Sex is sex is … you get the idea.

Q: In the book, your discussion of women being with women is very bound up in feminism. Do you worry about presenting lesbian relationships as a political statement, rather than as sexy and hot?

A: I certainly don’t believe that love and sex should be a political strategy. There was a certain vein of political lesbianism in the seventies that I’m critiquing, though I am sympathetic to it. I think that the idea of women being better than men is actually very anti-woman at its core. I don’t believe in the idea that you should be with women to simplify things and avoid messiness and not deal with your own problems.

Ivan Goncharov may not be particularly well-known, but as Joseph Frank argues, his contributions to Russian literature and culture are just as important as those of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy.

Goncharov was by no means a prolific writer, publishing only three novels. His first, A Common Story, in 1847, was written without much difficulty, and aroused the enthusiasm of the important critic [Vissarion] Belinsky, as well as the praise of Tolstoy, who was just beginning his literary career. A chapter of Oblomov, the famous dream of his childhood, appeared in a collection of new writing published in 1849, but the novel itself was not completed until ten years later, in a burst of inspiration that surprised Goncharov himself. As for The Precipice, his letters contain endless complaints about the lack of a similar inspiration, though it was finally finished at the urging of the editor of an important journal. To be sure, Goncharov’s obligations as bureaucrat and censor gave him less time than others to devote to literary composition; but his notion of “realism” also proved a hindrance to the seemingly effortless productivity that he so obviously envied in his presumed imitator, the perfidious [Ivan] Turgenev.

Goncharov’s understanding of “realism” is expressed in an exchange of letters with Dostoyevsky, one of the contributors to an anthology of well-known writers that he was putting together in 1874. A famine had raged a year earlier in the province of Samara and the proceeds from this volume were to be used for famine relief. Dostoyevsky sent in a series of “little sketches,” one of which contained the depiction of a priest whose behavior indicated a certain influence of the fashionable Nihilism of the radicals. Goncharov found this portrait unconvincing and expressed his opinion to Dostoyevsky, who replied that priests of this kind did exist: his sketch had been taken from life; such a type was beginning to be known. Goncharov retorted that a type is formed only “when it has been repeated many times, or been noticed many times, has become customary and is well-known to all.”

Dostoyevsky’s sketch of this burgeoning type was deleted from his contribution, but it is easy to see how the creator of Raskolnikov would be especially alert to social and cultural phenomena of this kind. Goncharov’s own literary horizon, by contrast, was limited by his preconception of “the typical.” Its advantage was that it allowed him to endow a character such as Oblomov with an almost mythical stature. In 1859, a resounding article titled “What Is Oblomovshchina?” by the radical critic Nikolay Dobrolyubov, hailed the central figure of the novel as the epitome of all those “superfluous men”—beginning with [Alexander] Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and continuing in works by [Alexander] Herzen and Turgenev (the term comes from Turgenev’s story “The Diary of a Superfluous Man”)—that formed a sub-genre of the Russian novel up through the 1860s and beyond. Dostoyevsky’s Nikolay Stavrogin, in The Devils, may be considered an effort to provide this type with a religious-metaphysical foundation that was beyond Goncharov’s range.

For fuck’s sake, lighten up.

The reinvention of the “boys’ own adventure” genre for the twenty-first century seems to have taken the media by storm. It has the hazy glow of nostalgia for a simpler world, a world where everyone knew their place in the white, male playground. Problem is, that world no longer exists, if it ever did, and in reinventing the ripping yarn genre (whose most enduring example is Biggles), some of the problems of the original have reappeared. Beneath the surface are racial tension and xenophobia, cultural traits that were institutionalized during the colonial era.

[...]

This is a scary and thrilling time to be male and I can’t help but think we are short-changing our sons. The new millennium has seen the unravelling of old, obsolete male values, and good riddance to them, too. Men have come to realize that we need new ways of being male if we are to negotiate the contemporary world of globalization. Why do we feel the need to inflict our own nostalgia and wishful thinking on our children? Such stories offer no advice on how to survive and thrive in our increasing complex and accelerating culture, while fostering an unhealthy fear of otherness.

I fail to see how “inflicting” boys’ own adventure novels on teenage boys is nostalgic and “wishful thinking.” Is Tom Kelly implying that parents who let their kids read Biggles novels, in all their xenophobic, chest-beating glory, are longing for a return to colonialism and racial segregation? In any case, I think he’s taking these novels a bit too seriously (not mention sounding as though he thinks books should be doing a large part of parents’ jobs). No kid is thinking about how to “negotiate the contemporary world of globalization”; that’s asking too much. Kids care about escapism, which is all the boys’ own adventure novels really are. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island doesn’t teach kids about how to survive in the contemporary world—should they be banned from reading it? (I hope not—that was one of my favorite books as a kid.) And what about J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan? It’s not the most politically correct book, yet kids have been reading it for over a century without turning into little racists. The fact is, books do very little to teach kids certain attitudes; more often than not, they learn their attitudes from their parents.

Maybe we’re really short-changing our sons by not letting them be kids, by expecting them to understand and care about adult concepts like “globalization” and “accelerating culture.” The great thing about being a kid is that you don’t have to worry about the real world.

For years, women have told me, “I want a man with a good sense of humor.” My response has usually been, “Well, you’re certainly high-maintenance. I don’t think this is going to work.” No wonder I’m still single. Or maybe I just need to keep my irony in check and learn to smile a bit more.

Existentialism is said to be all about “the death of God,” the meaninglessness of human life, and the anxiety those provoke. It is in the face of such anxiety that one needs the courage to make meanings, to be oneself. The theme gets dutifully traced back to Søren Kierkegaard and [Friedrich] Nietzsche, and forward through Martin Heidegger, [Albert] Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Tillich, and Viktor Frankl, always with a touch of heroism but surrounded by the darkness of despair and ultimate meaninglessness.

In the early years of existentialism in postwar Europe, the emphasis was indeed on gloom and hopelessness. The books and articles that made the biggest splash—William Barrett’s Irrational Man, for instance—were those that bemoaned the death of God and the despair and meaninglessness that are implied by that cosmic absence. That was challenged in the sixties by the celebrations of hipness in the United States at the hands of Norman Mailer, in Advertisements for Myself, and some of the Beats. The heady optimism that ruled America in those years leavened the Old World gloom and turned meaninglessness into a challenge, recasting the death of God into a sense of liberation. Even in Europe, existentialism came to present itself as a positive philosophy, a philosophy of hope, in works like Camus’s essay “The Rebel” and Sartre’s lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism.”

Colin Miner talks with Norman Mailer.

On the inspiration for his new novel The Castle in the Forest:

Mr. Mailer, who was nine in 1932, says that the work of one man deserves credit above and beyond for spurring him on: Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler.

“The book,” Mr. Mailer said, “stimulated the hell out of me, absolutely knocked me out when I read it. My mind began to race with all the possibilities about Hitler and at a certain point, I finally realized I had a lot to say about Hitler.”

On reading good authors:

“I almost don’t read anyone anymore,” he said. “The older I get, the more sensitive I’ve become to good writing. It stimulates me immensely and then I go off in all sorts of directions thinking about how I would’ve done it. And my mind races and it distracts me from my own work. And so I rarely read a good writer anymore.”

On George W. Bush:

… Mr. Mailer does not have kind words, referring to him as “nasty and stupid.”

Mailer also said that Mr. Bush, whom he believes is “not deep enough to be evil,” is a “social phenomenon,” the product of a shopping, marketing-oriented society.

“People believe that buying things is one of the most significant acts they can take and that is the handmaiden to stupidity. The country has become more and more stupid over the past fifteen to twenty years and George Bush is the fruit, the flower, of that tendency.”

Here’s an oldie: Steve Allen interviewing Jack Kerouac in 1959. It’s a funny clip, in a charming way, but it made me long for the days when authors were true celebrities, when writing a novel was just as cool as recording a rock album.