Still Life by Louise Penny

I'm not sure what made me want to read this book now - Louise Penny has been hanging out on the edges of my consciousness for some time.  I'm so glad I got around to reading it; I love it.

What I appreciate about this novel is the wide variety of topics Penny touches on in the course of the story.  One is the shifting emotional dynamic of a marriage; another is Quebecois separatism; another is art and antiques; another is the difficulty of coming out as a teenager discovers his homosexuality; another is the difficulty of mentoring a young know-it-all.

I have a friend who loves this series and says that she loves Inspector Gamache.  It's interesting; there are never any detective series about detectives who put their careers above finding the correct answer. Inspector Gamache is no exception to this rule; at one point he refuses to arrest a man whom he thinks is innocent and is forced to accept a suspension as a result.

The acknowledgments that Penny, a journalist, prefaced her novel with are perhaps more interesting than the book itself:  as she thanks her husband and her friends she's quite candid about how her single-minded focus and need for support might have made her a selfish friend, or at least a needy one.  And, she explains that she had won an award from other authors for her unpublished manuscript which made the eventual publication of Still Life possible.

8/30/15

I saw Louise Penny interviewed by Terry Tazioli on Well Read, an author interview show on PBS (produced in Seattle), about a month ago.  Penny said several things I found very interesting.  One was that when she was working on Still Life, she anticipated writing a series and figured, since she was going to spend so much time with her lead character, Inspector Gamache, she thought she should make him someone she would enjoy.  Later she realized that Inspector Gamache was a lot like her husband.

She also told Tazioli that her aim in writing Still Life was to show that there was still good in the world.  I thought that was so surprising, in a way, because revealing the murderer shows the reality of evil, doesn't it?  I may not understand.  But a quality that Still Life has is that it celebrates friendship and connection.

The Next Always and Key of Light by Nora Roberts

Well, I thought I ought to finally get around to reading Nora Roberts, and I finally did.  I picked up Key of Light at a garage sale and The Next Always at the library.

I started Key of Light (2003) first and finished The Next Always first; as I began both novels I was very disappointed to see that they both had supernatural elements.

Key of Light is about some attractive, thoroughly modern mortals who rescue some trapped Celtic goddesses (I guess you have to be there) and The Next Always is about a bookstore owner and Iraq widow falling in love with the guy who had a crush on her all through high school and is now directing the renovation of a local, historical inn that is haunted.

What surprised me most is that they are so well-written.  I expected nothing but romance, but found that Roberts was skilled at description, setting and dialogue.

Some of her dialogue really snaps and is truly witty.  Some of it, especially in The Next Always, is a surprisingly accurate portrait of how folks really talk.  I greatly admire writers who can capture true speech; it's one of the things I admire about Lee Smith.

And, I was surprised that, in my non-linear way, I gradually became interested in and enjoyed reading both novels (I'd originally planned to just read a little, just to get the flavor).  Honestly, I didn't read all of The Next Always -- I read the first few chapters and then, picking it up in the middle, read all the way to the end.

Something else I find interesting is that both novels feature a group of three women who get together and go into business for themselves.  In Key of Light, it's a combination bookstore, art gallery, hair salon; in The Next Always, it's a gift shop at the Inn.

A writer named Lauren Collins wrote an interesting and judicious profile of Nora Roberts that appeared in the New Yorker in 2009.  I read it when it appeared.

What I read most from the profile is the following passage:

At dinner with Roberts and Wilder one night, I mentioned a scene in her novel "Birthright," in which the heroine, Callie Dunbrook, receives a coffee-table book about Pompeii from a man who may or may not be her father, who confesses to once having made the mistake of selecting an automotive accessory as an anniversary gift for his wife.


"You'll never live it down," Roberts said to Wilder, who was engrossed in a large platter of eggplant parmigiana.
She turned to me. "He doesn't even know what I'm talking about!"
Roberts continued, "First Christmas! What did you give me our first Christmas?"
"I don't remember," Wilder replied.
"I do. Car mats."

What I'm reading now

I've just finished Wallflower at the Orgy by Nora Ephron; I'm reading the Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas, Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie, & Nora Roberts' Key to Light.

Bet Me and Faking It by Jennifer Crusie

Just finished Bet Me (2004, I think).  I'd read Faking It a few years ago.

Both books feature outlandish plots, witty dialogue and lots of pop culture references.  This seems to have been a bigger feature in Faking It, filled with references both known and obscure, to '50's hits, than in Bet Me.  In Bet Me I was not surprised, then, to encounter Elvis and learn that Min was a huge fan.  But when Elvis Costello was mentioned I was really surprised to find myself grounded in the late 20th century.  The outlandish plots do make a reader feel ungrounded.

In Bet Me, the heroine falls in love with a guy who takes her out to win a bet (and she knows this).  She falls in love but most unwillingly. (The convention that folks fall in love despite themselves, their other plans, the machinations, wishes and expectations of others is fulfilled here; the love interest's ex-girlfriend is a psychologist and still wanting him, uses her expert knowledge to attempt to manipulate him).  Crusie shows a sympathetic understanding of female psychology.  Something I enjoyed greatly is that Crusie developed the supporting characters - the friends of the tormented couple and her sister.

In Faking It, the plot is even more outlandish.  The heroine meets the man of her dreams in a closet, early in the novel.  And they kiss, before page 30.  (Kissing is very big in Crusie's books and there is a little sex.)  A major impediment to their romance, despite their brief acquaintance, is that they are both engaged in illegal activities which leads to having a lot of secrets, misunderstandings and hesitations - why, just the very elements that make up a great romance story.

I think Bet Me could make a cute film.  I don't know if its cliched elements make it more or less filmable.  I think the "nutty" outlandish elements might be tricky but given the reliance on convention in this genre, it seems a shame to lose them - they're outlandish but original in an environment that's more predictable than a Holiday Inn.

China To Me by Emily Hahn

I can't do this book justice, which is a pity, because I'm in such a rush.

Emily Hahn was an American writer who accompanied her sister to Shanghai in the early '30's, on her way to Africa (which she loved).  She fell in love with Shanghai and couldn't bring herself to leave.  Shanghai in the thirties was full of foreigners and had an intriguing cafe society that mixed folks of many nationalities and classes.  I can see why she found that a heady and fascinating mix.

After several years in Shanghai, she traveled to Chiangking (sp?) to write a biography of the Soong Sisters (Mrs. Sun Yat-Sen (sp?), Madame Chang Kai-shek, and Madame Kung, three sister married to the most important politicians in China at that time).  Through her contacts she knew an amazing number of people. 

Then she traveled to Hong Kong, planning to return to Shanghai shortly thereafter .. but her plans changed and she ending up staying in Hong Kong much longer than she intended and was there when the Japanese took the city. 

Emily Hahn had a fascinating love life, which she touches on glancingly here.  As much as I might have liked details (okay, I longed for them, and explanations, too), I think that she took care to tread a fine line between honestly and openness .. after all, she had a child by the time she wrote this account, shortly after returning to America in 1944.

In Hong Kong, there was an amazing diverse population as well.   Her account of the Japanese occupation is fascinating, as well.

Hahn's fascinating life seems to have grown out of her fascinating character.  She was described, on the back of my paperback copy of China to Me, as a "citizen of the world," and I think that must be true.  She got on with an amazingly diverse group of people and I think part of this must have been a writer's fascinating with observation.  To my view, she was far ahead of her time and a great adventuress, and this story reads like an adventure story, full of event.  She's a wonderful storyteller, and if you like tales of wartime hardship or adventuresome lasses, I recommend this book to you.

The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

I enjoyed The Eyre Affair.  It centers on Thursday Next, a war veteran and police officer who investigates the loss of a time/fiction travel machine, the "prose portal," and the kidnapping of Jane Eyre from the novel of the same name.

This is fantasy, obviously, and alternative history - here, the authorship of Shakespeare's plays is hotly debated, Richard III is an interactive event like singing along to the Sound of Music, the Crimean War has been dragging on for 131 years, Winston Churchill never survived to adulthood, and literature is so popular its popularity would rival a combination of reality TV, NASCAR, and pop music - if that were possible.  Jane Eyre ends with Jane resignedly marrying St. John Rivers and taking off to Africa.  The novel's passionate admirers admit, when forced to do so, that the ending is unsatisfying.

Did I mention that there are vampires in this world?  And, almost everyone has an interesting name.

Thursday is another in a long line of detectives with personal problems. Her character's assertion, bravado, and independence reminded me a little of Sara Paretsky's V.I. Warshawski.  Unlike many detectives, while she is lonely, and lovelorn, really, she's far from alone:  she has her pet dodo, her ex-fiancee, both parents, an aunt and uncle, and even a brother.

Thursday is a veteran of the Crimean War and of a pivotal battle in which her brother was killed.  She's been traumatized by the war, and her life has been on hold since she broke up with her fiancee, also a veteran of her unit in the Crimea.

Her uncle Mycroft is an eccentric, a brilliant inventor who has devised a machine called the "Prose Portal."  To test the machine, he sends his wife, Polly, to the poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," but has trouble bringing her back.

Her father is a fugitive ChronoGuard operative who is looking into the death of Nelson; he fears history has been rewritten by the French revisionists.  Meanwhile, Thursday's mother is convinced that her father is having an affair with Emma Hamilton.

There is a lot of exposition in this novel:  we also get to meet Joffy, Thursday's brother and another improbably named relation.  I found myself feeling that the plot didn't really get rolling until around page 250 and still didn't display any sense of urgency.

In Thursday's work she encounters many frustrating bureaucratic problems, but the worst is Jack Schitt of the Goliath Corporation.  The Goliath Corporation has its fingers in many pies; one of them is a 24-hour news network.

The ending was very satisfying, however, so I'd say it was worth the wait.  This is yet another book for lovers of literature; the novel Jane Eyre doesn't appear much until the last quarter of the book. But those readers who love the romance of Rochester and Jane will enjoy the ending hugely.

Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Burrows

This is a fun and fascinating book, as its mixed-up title suggests, full of contrasting elements.

It appeals to me because it's set on Guernsey, a place about which I know little.  It has an interesting history.  It came to England as a Norman possession with William the Conqueror.  When England lost its French territories, it chose to remain with England even those it's quite close to the French coast and closer to it than to England.

Not surprisingly, Churchill felt he could not spare the resources to defend it from the Germans and so it was occupied from the fall of France to the end of the war.

Juliet Ashton is a writer touring England, and tiring of touring, to promote her new book.  Her new book is a collection of comic essays she wrote during the war, meant to humorize the hardships and privations of the war years.  As she wraps up her tour, she writes to her publisher that she is concerned about what she'll write next.  She's looking for ideas.  And, she's eager to turn her back on Izzy Bickerstaff, her nom de plume when she wrote her wartime pieces.

Out of the blue, she receives a letter from the island of Guernsey, from a pig farmer no less, who is writing her because he found a book, second-hand, with her name on the flyleaf.  He writes her because he wants more books, something of which there's a shortage in Guernsey after the war.  In particular, he wants a biography of a writer he's grown to greatly admire, Charles Lamb.  Ashton shares his interest in Lamb and is intrigued.  She comes to correspond with him and other natives of Guernsey.  She soon decides that her next book will be about Guernsey during the war years, and she decides to visit the island.

The novel contains many comic and cozy elements:  a close-knit community of eccentrics, a romance, an orphan child being cared for by a community.

It also contains very dark elements:  starvation, internment in labor camps, execution.

It is a story told in letters, a form I particularly love.  Letters are a particularly fine and economical way to convey comic vignettes, of which there are many in this novel.

The plotting is eventful, if predictable.  Predictability, however, is what many readers want.  The think the fact that this book has been a big best-seller around the world and is a book club favorite proves that.  Winningly, it's not too long, either.

I found the style to be accomplished, but the characterization to be uneven.  Somewhere after the one-third mark I found myself enjoying it less.

A word about the literary society:  early on in the book, one character talks about his great interest in Charles Lamb.  I had not thought about Charles Lamb since taking "Romantic Poets" in school.  Lamb's own life story is poignant, and I found it to be an agreeable element in the novel.

This is a good book for folks who like cozy communities, eccentric characters, stories about literature, stories about writers, stories about World War II and stories set in exotic locales.

Maeve Binchy

Ms. Binchy died on July 30, I believe, and of course, I was very sad.  Selfishly, I minded that I would not be able to read any more of her books (except for Minding Frankie and one or two others I hadn't gotten around to reading yet - Quentin's, I think).  I also mind knowing that now that she has passed, her work will likely be quickly forgotten.

In a way, it is what it is and can't be helped:  part of what made her work exciting to me was the casual but profound way in which her fiction reflected some of the enormous social change going on in Ireland over the last 4 or 5 decades.  The very timeliness and currency of her books mean that in ten years they may seem very dated.

It will not seem shocking but quaint to read a woman's dilemma when her shiftless, alcoholic husband who had deserted her years before appears on her doorstep and asks her to care for him in his final illness.  Social convention in the past would have robbed her of her choice; if shame didn't compel to take her wayward husband in, her priest would.  Today, women have choices but that doesn't mean that they're easy to make.

Maeve Binchy's cheerful grasp as a storyteller was pretty darn big - full of chiches, melodrama, self-help bromides, and breathless run-on sentences that captured the flavor of conversation.  But her books created joy:  her stories made you laugh and cry and you consumed them at a breakneck speed, dying to know what was going to happen.

While some novels, like Tara Road, had an ending that was entirely too neat, other novels like Glass Lake, Circle of Friends, and Scarlet Feather had elements that reflected the complexity and complication of real life.

I noticed one reviewer mentioned that Glass Lake and Evening Class were her favorite novels; they were mine, also.  In Glass Lake, it seemed to me that she took on her most audacious question:  is there ever a time when a mother may be forgiven for abandoning her child?  I think the ending was hard for her and I would have preferred a stronger one but it was bold and brave to write that novel.

I can't really tell you why I loved Evening Class.  Perhaps it was merely that while I have taken many evening classes that did not result in friendship or friendships, the nourishment these friends take from each other is nourishing, cozy and completely wish-fulfilling.  Is that wrong?  Can it be wrong?

I recall that the heroine of Scarlet Feather was married to the master's son; her mother was that family's longtime housekeeper.  Her resentment of her mother's status and treatment was so greatly present in her mind that I could not wonder if that, as well as her career (and her husband's) contributed to the breakup of that marriage.  I've always wondered what Binchy was saying there:  Was she saying that we should not marry outside of our class?  (Surely not!)  Was she simply creating a good story, knowing that many of her readers would identify with the heroine's nose-pressed-against-the-glass feeling?  I wonder.  This character was strong, independent, hard-working, ambitious and truly competent.  Perhaps this little unresolved complexity was another intriguing element of Binchy's work.

I loved reading her books, I greatly admired her combination of gratifying plots and profound reflection on women's choices, I will miss her and someday I hope I'll write something that was inspired by her.  

What I'm reading now

I'm reading Emily Hahn's China to Me, Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair, and the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Burrows.

Escape from Camp 14 by Blaine Harden

This nonfiction book is an account of the life of Shin Dong-Hyuk, a North Korean man who has the distinction of being the only North Korean born into servitude in a North Korean concentration camp who escaped to the West (or the east, depending on your point of view).

Camp 14 is a very large concentration camp located in the mountains of North Korea.  The North Korean government denies the existence of these camps, but their existence has been verified through satellite photographs.

There are a few former North Koreans who have given accounts of these camps; Shin Dong-Hyuk has the distinction of having escaped from North Korea with very little knowledge of North Korea as a country or of the propaganda surrounding its ruling dynasty and the ruling party.

Blaine Harden, the journalist who wrote this book, presents a narrative that is short, incredibly easy to read, and one in which he seems to strain to be objective.  I think he himself does not know exactly what to make of Shin Dong-Hyuk. Harden resists shaping the narrative.  I admire his integrity and restraint; I found myself feeling a little confused.

Harden clearly feels that Shin Dong-Hyuk may have a credibility problem in the eyes of some readers and goes to great pains to talk about any corroboration our current knowledge of North Korean labor camps gives Dong-Hyuk's report.

As a journalist, he may also be troubled about the difficulty of simply corroborating most of Dong-Hyuk's story, something that would normally not only be relatively easy but not nearly as important.  As it is, Harden and the reader are forced to acknowledge that it's difficult to know if Dong-Hyuk is telling the truth.

On the one hand, the story of his escape is both far-fetched and gruesome.  Its horror seems unlikely.  It's so horrifying that it seems natural to me that some readers would question its veracity.

On the other hand, Dong-Hyuk's account includes admissions so shameful that they support the idea that this is an honest account.  Dong-Hyuk was ignorant of the kind of knowledge of his world that we take for granted.  Nevertheless, he sometimes succeeded in manipulating camp officials to his own personal benefit, so he did not seem innocent.

This book does offer a view of a chaotic society roiled by starvation.  Oddly, I think that had I been asked to guess whether widespread starvation would lead to the collapse of the state, I would have said yes.  North Korea has not collapsed.  (Clearly, I would have been wrong.  Had someone else been present, I'm sure they would have said something like, "You're a very poor student of Irish history," and I would have had to agree.)  I have been wondering, "What's the secret of this dictatorship's success?"  Perhaps it is the combination of manipulation of information and communication so effective it would make Stalin blush, poverty, and lack of education.

Harden asserts that North Korean authorities have at times, during these recent years of famine, permitted black market trading, and even a porous border with China,  He argues that the government's granting of this level of freedom may have been a "safety valve" tactics that removed some of the motivation for unifying against the government.

Harden seems to have become interested in the story of Shin Dong-Hyuk because of the scarcity of any information about North Korea.  Ironically, as Harden points out several times in this account, Dong-Hyuk knew next to nothing about the world outside his labor camp before he escaped and is therefore not in a position to offer much insight about his country or its government.

Remembering Dong-Hyuk's escape I am astounded at his success in undertaking a cross-country journey and crossing the border without being caught and without having much help.  I am astounded at how well and quickly he adapted to life in northeast China (which has a large ethnic Korean population).

This book reminded me of Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird and Elie Wiesel's Night.  It also reminded of Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage, which I think was based on a nonfiction account of a doctor to attempted raise a boy who had been found living in the woods as an animal, without human contact.  My recollection is that in real life, the child died before reaching adulthood.

I cannot offer an unbiased opinion of this book myself, however.  I do not enjoy books that recount traumatic events.  In fact, I do not understand their appeal.

Gretchen Rubin talked a little bit about "catastrophe memoirs" in her book, The Happiness Project.  I believe that she viewed them as having a salutary effect and the power to give the reader a greater sense of perspective, as the saying goes, and an appreciation for the comforts and joys of his or her own life.  Interestingly, some of the memoirs she mentioned were memoirs of divorce.

This is a memoir of murder, abuse, corruption, starvation, theft and moral degradation.  Perhaps it could not be termed a "catastrophe memoir".  

In the Garden of the Beasts by Erik Larson

This is a wonderfully readable and entertaining book. A caveat: Before you start reading it, look up Goebbels and Goring in Wikipedia. Having some sense of them as individuals may make it possible for you to keep them straight while you're reading the book. I'm pretty good at keeping the cast of characters straight in almost anything I read (I didn't struggle with 100 Years of Solitude, for instance) but I was pretty confused here. It's the story of a University of Chicago history professor who became FDR's ambassador to Berlin (a job no one else wanted, it seemed) and that of his daughter, a "free spirit". A few oddities. This is the story of a father and his daughter, though their relationship is not the story told in this book. Mom and Junior don't really figure much in this history. The first year of the Dodds' residency in Berlin is recounted in great detail; the rest of their story is barely summarized. The Dodds are real American characters in both the best and worst ways, I would say. To me, I would say that his ambassadorship gave him an opportunity to do something heroic which ended his career as an ambassador but which he would never had had an opportunity to do had he stayed in Chicago. And, that are many episodes in this book that are chilling. So it's not for everyone. Also, I personally thought that the first two chapters' exposition dragged. Oddly, for all that exposition, I thought that Larson should have offered some definition of the term "Jeffersonian democrat" and considered the question of whether Dodds' work as an ambassador was affected by his self-image.

The Wagon by Martin Preib

I greatly admire Martin Preib's writing. I enjoy the tension between his working life as a police officer and his mental life as an observer and writer.

I found out about it because a friend took a course at the Newberry Library where it, along with City on the Make by Nelson Algren, was one of the assigned texts. This book is a rumination on Preib's work as a Chicago cop, and primarily his work running the "wagon," the vehicle that is called to take dead bodies to the morgue. In Preib's writing he combines a practical account of the work of being a cop with his own emotional inner life, his relation to the city of his birth and his own unanswered questions about some of the choices he's made and places them in the larger context of our literary tradition. I think he perceives a greater need for ceremony and connection.

Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen

I've been dipping into, in a non-linear way, Elizabeth Bowen's Eva Trout. I can't quite get a fix on these characters - are they nice? They seem so prickly. No one seems to like each other - And really, who is Eva? Is she unfeeling because she's surrounded by odd, careless, and unconventional people?

 I've read another Elizabeth Bowen novel, The Death of the Heart, and Eva Trout reminds me of it in some ways. If you go to her Wikipedia entry, you'll find that that author finds Bowen's work to be frequently concerned with the difference between appearances and the underlying, behind-closed-doors reality.

I think that I don't understand Eva Trout and perhaps, without starting the book at the beginning, reading it all the way to the end, and not leaving anything out, I never shall. Above all, I find it elegaic if the grievers were distracted by traffic and a bad odor coming from an unknown source.

My Modern British Literature professor told me once that he had seen Elizabeth Bowen read (probably at Columbia, where he was a student).  He said that she had a terrible stutter.  "Poor Elizabeth Bowen," he said.

For the first time I have learned that Elizabeth Bowen struggled mightily to make enough money from writing and giving readings to avoid having to sell her father's house.  To me, this is quite a gripping story.  Was it pride that caused her to do everything she could to avoid selling?  Or was it loyalty to him?  How I long to know.  To me, it's quite as thrilling as the Olympics.  

The Last Girls by Lee Smith

This is a charming book by Lee Smith, who was a teacher of Haven Kimmel.

I've also read Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies, set in the Appalachians and reflecting Smith's interest in and talent for rendering dialectal speech.

This novel tells the story of five women (and one husband) who decide to recreate a river raft trip, inspired by reading Twain's Huckleberry Finn, down the Mississippi that they took in college.  This permits them to reflect on the 30 or so years that have passed since then, and allows us to reflect on the diversity of their life stories which reveal some of the profound changes that have taken place in the lives of women in this country since the fifties.

The edition I read was a book club edition (I love these things) with an interview with Smith and book club discussion questions.  In her interview, Smith says that while the new freedom that women of her generation enjoyed gave women much greater freedom and enjoyment of their lives it also placed a certain kind of burden on them:  given more freedom, they were forced to make choices and accept more responsibility for their lives. They lost a certain comfort zone of polite conduct and restraint that their mothers had enjoyed and did not anticipate all of the changes that they would encounter.

Smith is the author of one of my favorite short stories, "Intensive Care," which perfectly captures the language and the changes of how we live now.

The Big Short by Michael Lewis

I've finally just finished the first chapter, dealing with Steve Eisman, in Michael Lewis' The Big Short.

It's an interesting counterpoint to both Margin Call, which explicitly deals with some of the same issues as those raised by Steve Eisman (the tradition of selling in the financial markets, the contradictory ideas that gave rise to the subprime mortgage debacle, the notion that for the first time, in the securities back by subprime mortgages, you are selling something that has no or very little value), and to Steve Jobs.

At this particular moment, I'm reflecting that some of the charm of this chapter is that Steve Eisman is such an outlier himself:  someone who's abrasive and without manners.  And I'm very interested in him.  Why is it that I find Steve Eisman interesting, and Steve Jobs a fraud?  If I'm honest, I'd have to say that it's hype.  That hype is a powerful tool, and that's why we use it.  But it can have a backlash - that at the same time that it's so persuasive to so many people, there will always be some people who just won't get it, or more accurately, just won't feel it, and will first marvel and then recoil at the enthusiasm of others.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

I haven't finished this book yet; in fact, I've just started the chapter called "Restoration," (a great title and absolutely the one I would have chosen for this chapter).

But at this moment I feel moved to make a comment.  I imagined that this book would help to explain why Jobs  was so admired by so many people.  So far, I wouldn't say that the book is really explaining that to me; instead, I find myself wondering why so many people around Jobs allowed themselves to be manipulated by him.

In the place in the book I'm at right now, Gil Amelio has decided to bring Jobs back into the company by buying NeXT.  The reason he did that was because he wanted Apple's software.  But I find that I'm astounded by that decision.  For one thing, I find myself feeling that he should have foreseen that Jobs would want to take over the company and that Jobs' desire to take over the company would create destructive conflict.  It would have been more efficient to simply offer Jobs the title of CEO from the outset if Amelio didn't mind Jobs taking control of Apple.  If he didn't want Jobs to take control of Apple, it seems to me that he should at least have tried to structure the deal differently.

I'm puzzled by how startling the "warts and all" view of Steve Jobs presented here is, given the reverence and real sense of loss when he died.

Trying to make sense of it all, I started to look around at reviews on the web.  Sue Halpern's piece reflects my concerns and I think her answer is correct:  We have such high regard for people who are successful in business:   http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jan/12/who-was-steve-jobs/?pagination=false

I think that Isaacson's account emphasizes event and what Jobs has to say about the events of his life and especially his business career.  I'd say that I personally feel a little whipsawed between Jobs' assessment and that of others.  At times Isaacson does address the question of why Jobs is idolized and or identified with - that is, why he's a popstar himself.  Isaacson points out that Jobs saw himself as a rebel and that this idea was the centerpiece of the "1984" ad for the Macintosh.  As I write this, I find myself wondering if my lack of identification with the concept and Jobs' persona is more remarkable than his success.

I still haven't finished the book, but I can't help feeling that a theme, intended or not, is that of failure.  The Lisa was a failure, the Macintosh had many serious problems that prevented it from being as successful as it could have been (lack of storage and lack of processing power), NeXT lost its hardware division and was headed toward bankruptcy or dissolution before it was sold to Apple.  The oft-mentioned "reality distortion field," was clearly helpful in some instances and clearly not in others.  Finally, one thing that I feel that the Macintosh episode showed was that Jobs was clearly interested in the intersection of aesthetics and technology but not as interested as he ought to be in whether and how things worked.  I can't help if he learned the lesson of Detroit auto culture from his father too well, in a sense.  In a world in which there are many brands of a product that work, essentially, equally well, brand differentiation through design, color, and features may seem like everything but it isn't.  The question of how well something meets the needs of the consumer is important, too.

Andrew Sullivan argues that Steve Jobs is important because he fuses the counterculture with what he calls the "counter-counter culture" (presumably, today's young people):

The reason he strikes such a huge chord with an entire generation lies, it seems to me, beyond his immense technical and business and design skills. It was because he became the bridge between the 1960s and the 1980s, the counter-culture and the counter-counter-culture. He was the hippie capitalist. He was the fusion of two great American forces - personal actualization and a free market. 

All I can say is that right now, I'm still not feeling it.

Reading now

I've just read/skimmed Border Crossing by Pat Barker.  This is the wonderful serendipity of having remaindered and withdrawn books around .. at some point, I find myself surprised by joy or wonder.  I couldn't really recommend this novel because reading it isn't really a good time.  It's about a very dark subject, and the very fact that the protoganist is getting divorced while the action of the novel takes place is no coincidence:  he's struggling with everything including loneliness and disappointment.  His wife moves her furniture out and now his voice is in an empty room.

But I think this book is sublime.  It's beautifully written, and is the reflection, I feel, of a novelist who is deeply thoughtful and deeply curious about the essential nature of things and how that is reflected in how we live now.  Love her.  Simply love her.  (Pat Barker is, of course, the author of the Regeneration trilogy and I highly, highly recommend Regeneration.)

I'm still reading around in Tomalin's Pepys, and I haven't made any progress on Steve Jobs and I know I won't today ..

A week or two ago I began reading True Grit by Charles Portis.  I think this is a wonderful novel.  I think Portis is a masterful realistic novelist, on the basis of the few pages I've read.  More so than almost all of the writers I've read in the past two years, he convincing paints a portrait of a real person in the first few pages.
What's real about her?  She interrupts herself in the middle of telling her tragic, life-changing story to digress and tell the story of an acquaintance that includes a brief summary of his life story and her thoughts about his interesting name.  I would never interrupt a story about my father to tell any other story -- but she would.  That feels real to me.

However, as much as I admire Portis' skill as a novelist, I'm almost certain that I will never care enough about this novel to finish it before it has to go back to the library.  Why?  I don't know .. perhaps if I didn't have to take it back to the library I would eventually finish it.

I am, of course, beginning the Big Short which I enjoy so much, I think, because Lewis' own personality comes through the pages and I find it entertaining and, because, for some reason this is the kind of book I like now.

Margin Call

I really enjoyed this movie, and the core of why it was good was the acting.  It was a wonderful cast (Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, and the story seemed so real:  it seemed like these were the perfect actors to play these roles.  Something that helped was that the story seemed "ripped from the headlines."  It seemed to be about a company like Lehman Brothers, whose failure caused a lot of losses for a lot of people - because a lot of people held the worthless securities, based on high-risk mortgages, that Lehman and many others held and sold.  The film explored the ethics - or absence thereof - of selling securities that were secured by so little of real value.

I think it's the acting that makes something like this .. that is why Downton Abbey is so successful even though the same territory has been covered before, not only in Gosford Park but in the Shooting Party and the Forsyte Saga, and, most famously, Upstairs Downstairs.

The screenwriter was also the director, and his screenplay won a nomination in the best original screenplay category in this year's Oscar nominations.

There's a scene in which Simon Baker is reading Zachary Quinto's resume, and says, a tone that is more contempt than marveling admiration, "So you're a rocket scientist."  Perfect.

This film seems especially timely in light of the Chase losses.

Moneyball

I saw Moneyball earlier this week on DVD.  (Thank you, Library.)

I want to start out my description of this film with some passionate outburst, to convey enthusiasm and to be persuasive, but my feelings about this film are kind of subdued.

I haven't read the book so I can't say how the screenplay differs from the book.  I have begun reading The Big Short, with which I am already deeply in love, so I'm inclined to think that a) I would probably enjoy Moneyball, too, were I to read it, and that b) Aaron Sorkin's screenplay is probably somewhat faithful to the book.

I guess what I really enjoyed about this film was that Brad Pitt's character, Ben Beame (if that's his name; I'm not sure) was really passionate about winning but he didn't always show his passion; he wasn't given a girlfriend in the screenplay (although he did have a daughter who worried about him and said irreverent things to him).  The drama of the screenplay was chiefly about whether he would succeed using an alternative strategy with has since changed baseball (for the better, I think, but I can't really comment but I'm not really a fan as an adult).

I think Jonah Hill's performance has been praised and it was good.  I felt that it was missing something:  variety, intensity, something.  I do think that an actor has to play the music he's been given and that the role didn't give much scope for the expression of a range of emotions.

I really liked Brad Pitt's performance and liked it so much because it was naturalistic, and so believable.  I like highly realistic movies.  There's a wonderful scene where Pitt, as Beame, lays out the new strategy to the assembled scouts who are giving him their recommendations for new, untried talent with a lot of potential.  I'm guessing that the scouts were not actors but scouts.  But, if they were actors, they sure were good.

Between Men by Fiona Lewis

This novel was published in 1995, and I discovered it because it has an attractive cover which reminded me of Matisse.  (It was a Matisse; it's annoying how sleepy I am, sometimes.)

Alice Wilder is the novel's protagonist, and as she herself would admit, she's in flight from her past, which includes a failed marriage. As a result, she doesn't have much direction or focus and I think this is part of how she comes to find herself, or to see herself as being, "between men." Alice is strangely passive, and torn, in the face of her lovers' behavior; but she sees clearly how unsuitable they both are.

One reviewer complained that the character of the two men is not fleshed out enough; true, but the novel is a tale told from Alice's point of view, and to her I believe both men are rather opaque.

I think it's this novel is a strange-but-understandable hybrid .. a meditation/burlesque on Alice's life and lifestyle.  

When Alice arrives in Los Angeles, she sees herself in flight from her failed marriage.  Her new job at a newspaper as a tremendous gift she's only able to obtain through her father's connections, but one she views  nevertheless as a distraction.  By the end of the novel, she's still very distracted and it seems that the busy surface of her life will prevent her from ever making the art she dreams of .. but, of course, it's in your hand.

The reviewers I read seemed feel this novel was dated or perhaps didn't live up to their expecations for what was, admittedly, only a first novel.  I felt that I perceived a sophisticated comic sensibility underneath the surface of a novel that seemed to be only about how a marginal member of our community lives now.  I'm saddened that Fiona Lewis hasn't written any more novels.  While the world neither needs more novels nor more comics .. wait, I think I'm wrong! -- I think we do need more comic novelists and I think I see potential here.  A girl who can't say no?  You don't think that's funny?  I do.  Wait, didn't they write a song about that or something? ..

Life Itself by Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was a small town boy who made good in the big city. He's had a very interesting life, and that gives him plenty of material to write about.

I was very interested in the chapters on Ingmar Bergman, Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog. Ebert visited Cannes every year, for his job as a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and has fun anecdotes to relate about that experience.

Possibly my favorite chapter is his chapter on Robert Mitchum. I'm sure this is partly because, like Ebert, I'm impressed by Mitchum. I'm impressed by Mitchum's charisma; Ebert is impressed by his lack of pretense. Ebert recounts a couple of visits to Mitchum on location, one in the Dingle Peninsula of County Kerry, in western Ireland, while Mitchum was filming Ryan's Daughter. Another visit was to a set in Pittsburgh; Ebert accompanied Mitchum on a drive to the set during which Mitchum's driver became badly lost. Not coping well with being either late or lost, I'm impressed by Mitchum's sang froid as he hums "76 Trombones" under his breath.

Ebert loves London, and reports that he visited London at least once a year (if not more often) for many years. His account of Jermyn Street, and especially 22 Eyrie Mansion, is funny and engaging. He has a newspaperman's eye for characters and the telling anecdote or detail.

This book is clearly a collection of blog posts. One of the reasons that Ebert is so prolific, I think, is that it is fairly easy for him to continue writing despite the lasting effects of his surgeries, and writing is something that he connects him to the outside world. I'm guessing that continuing to be connected with readers and new fans helps to sustain him. As this book shows, his life before illness was busy and full of work, relationships, travel and socializing.

He talks about going to an annual conference in Boulder, a conference he attended each year for many years. It sounds fun. He acknowledges at the end of this chapter that, as the conference is really a forum for people to talk to each other, he won't go again.

In many ways, this book is a summing up of a full life. It's mostly about the joy of knowing interesting people and telling fun stories about them. In fact, that is what the word "memoir" means to me: a collection of stories about people one has known. But he does reflect on what he's learned and his conclusion is that life is mostly about creating happiness for others and by doing so, for oneself. I think that's a sentiment that Gretchen Rubin would endorse.

One of my favorite bits of this book is when Ebert is working for Russ Meyer, writing the script of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, an X-rated film. Ebert and Meyer are working in a suite of offices:

"We fell into a routine. At nights we would dine like trenchermen, Russ insisting on large cuts of beef to keep my strength up. On yellow legal pads we made up the story day by day. I would write from ten to six. Russ kept all the office doors open. He equated writing with typing. When my typewriter fell silent, he would call, "What's wrong?" One day, at about page 122 of the screenplay, an inspiration struck. I entered Russ's office dramatically.

"I've got news for you," I said. "Z-Man is a woman. He's been a woman all along."

"I like it," Meyer said.

Before I close, I must share with you what Ebert shared with his readers: the secret of his speed as a writer is not that he writes more quickly than others but that he spends less time not writing than others. I think some of the writers I know would warmly endorse this bit of good advice; I know I always struggle over my beginnings and often cut them by two thirds or rewrite them entirely. A journalist he worked with on the Champaign News-Gazette told Ebert not to waste time working over his lead before he wrote the story: after all, he said, how do you know what the story's about until you get to the end? So write your story or your paper and then go back and rewrite the beginning to make it one that matches your ending.

Reading Now

I've read the Steve Jobs biography up to his founding of NEXT; I think I wanted to put it aside, a little bit, because on a certain level I felt a need to digest the notion of his having succeeded, and failed, and been fired from his own company, all by the age of 30.

As Isaacson points out, starting NEXT is just the second act of a great three act drama. He mentions that Arthur Rock, an investor and Apple board member, said that getting fired was the greatest thing that ever happened to Jobs. Isaacson goes on to say that that's not exactly true. Instead, he says, starting NEXT was the learning experience that helped Jobs the most: he had in NEXT, Isaacson writes, a kind of laboratory in which he could indulge all his whims and obsessions without restraint and when his ideas flopped, spectacularly, he had a chance to learn. I read the beginning of this chapter twice, and as I read it the second time, I realized that it echoed something Daniel Pink said in his Johnny Bunko book: dare to make spectacular mistakes. I find myself feeling that as readable as Isaacson's book is, it tells the story of very eventful years at a great clip and this is why, I think, I need to put it aside for a while so that I can digest it.

Meanwhile, I'm reading Ebert's book. He's a journalist, and writes in a straightforward style that is not as stylish, perhaps, or as passionate, or even as interesting, as that of some other memoirists I've read in the past twelve months. But he tells stories, and the stories he tells are interesting. I enjoyed reading his chapters on alcoholism, Robert Mitchum, Martin Scorsese, and Zonka (Zonka is no one you've ever heard of before - not a celebrity - and that's part of the charm of this tale: it's just a guy, telling a story about his friend, Zonka; it's like when you're at a bar and someone tells you a story so fine, or so surprising, that you're tempted to say, "You should write a book" but you don't, because you'd better have a pretty good reason to write a book).

What I'm reading now

Over the past few weeks, I've been occasionally picking up and rereading How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill (is that his name? I can't remember). Except for his discussion of Plato, a very readable book. His discussion of St. Augustine reminded me of the fabulous set piece in Flann O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive. Since Sunday, I've been reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, which is an incredibly readable and entertaining book. I've just read about his ouster from Apple, and I think I want to re-read it again. Today I read a little of Left Early, Took My Dog and also a little of Adam Gopnik's From Paris to the Moon. Gopnik's book seems very entertaining. It reminds me that I've just been dipping into Life Itself, Roger Ebert's memoir, which has some fabulous memories of London, Cannes, and some other parts of France. I look forward to returning to it.

Clare Tomalin's Pepys

Reading around in Clare Tomalin's biography of Pepys. I started to read about his early life, before and up to attending St. Paul's school; then the next time I picked up the book I found him at 1684: planning to propose reforms of the Navy and Charles dying, suddenly, of a stroke, and then working with James until his unpopular Catholicism led to William of Orange being invited to take the English throne and Pepys settling into an active retirement. The effect of this is that I've read several references to Elizabeth, and more to her brother, Balty, but haven't actually read about her marriage to Pepys.

Tomalin's book is very readable and engaging; obviously, I don't have the thread or a thread. The Pepys who knows everyone and is everywhere, including court, is here but the Pepys who cared passionately about reforming Naval practices is at the forefront in what I'm reading now. After James departs the scene, Tomalin answers the very question I'd been wondering: why was Pepys so loyal to James? Tomalin says it was because James gave him preferment. It seems a barely adequate explanation, yet I'm sure that it's right.

Two things I admire greatly about this book:  the pictures and the captions, and Tomalin's prose style (OK, that's three things).  Tomalin's prose is so easy; also, it's apparent that she's done so much research but does not feel a need to share it all with us (Thank You - "Clare Tomalin reads the boring bits so you don't have to!").  Finally, she clearly thinks that Pepys' diary is a work on the same level with the most important works in English literature and I guess she's saying that he really invented the genre.  I definitely have seen Pepys as a kind of rubbernecker/groupie extraordinaire, and then, more recently, as a dutiful and pioneering civil servant in a golden age for the contributions of astoundingly gifted albeit middle class men (Milton, Wren, Newton, etc.).  (Although it must be said that he seems to have been part of a group of civil servants who, dismayed by the Stuarts' lassitude, looked upon the Cromwell Interregnum as an era of good and efficient government.)

In fact, the question of social mobility:  what it is and how to get it, is almost a subplot in the story of his life.  Pepys is a great striver.  The ardor of his striving both makes me feel that all of our aspirations are, at the same time, ridiculous and woefully inadequate.  It must be noted that Tomalin is unafraid to point out that Pepys was inconsistent, jealous, vain, very controlling, lecherous, occasionally cold and dishonest.  (It is his coldness I mind most.)

What I love about this book is that I believe that if you picked it up, with no knowledge or interest in either Tomalin herself or Pepys, you would quickly find out that it doesn't matter.  You don't have to share Tomalin's respect for her subject to find her dizzying summary of an insanely busy and well-connected life interesting.

An issue, of course, is that the diary itself is so interesting and that Pepy's life is somewhat lopsided:  his early career offers rising action but the approximately ten years covered by his diary is electrically compelling and, while his career as a civil servant continues until James II's exile in 1688, after that point his career ends and his life is far less interesting.

So Pepys' interest for us is primarily his role as an observer rather than as a doer.  But his naval career did give him an opportunity to play an important role and be a doer and it occurs to me that would be well worth loyalty to a highly flawed manager.

You perhaps know that Tomalin has also written well-received biographies of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens.  I can't help feeling that I would enjoy these, too.  This year is the 200th anniversary of Dickens' birth, and yes, I find myself feeling more respect for him, too.