Philip Roth: Goodbye, Columbus

Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness are my closest friends.

--Philip Roth

This week's novella for class discussion is Philip Roth's first, Goodbye, Columbus, which is still published with five short stories. It was first published in 1959 and won the National Book Award the following year. Other than this work, I have previously read "Sabbath's Theater" (1995) and I still have "The Plot Against America" (2004) on my bookshelf--a Christmas present I am still wading my way toward.

Here is a summary of the novel provided by enotes.com:

‘Goodbye, Columbus’’ is narrated from the point of view of Neil Klugman, a twenty-three-year-old Jewish man who lives with his aunt and uncle in a lower-middle-class neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey, and works at a public library. It concerns his relationship over the course of one summer with Brenda Patimkin, an upper-middle-class Jewish college student staying with her family in the suburbs. Their relationship is characterized by the stark contrast of their socioeconomic differences, despite the fact that they are both Jewish. The summer ends with Brenda's brother Ron's wedding, after which Brenda returns to Radcliffe College in Massachusetts. When the two arrange to meet at a hotel over the Jewish holidays, she tells him that her parents have discovered her diaphragm and have both written her letters expressing their dismay and their disdain for Neil as a result. As Brenda feels she can no longer continue the relationship, Neil leaves the hotel, ultimately achieving a new sense of self-knowledge, which is expressed by the dawning of the Jewish New Year as he arrives back in Newark.

Here is the New York Times May 17, 1959 Review of the novel:

By William Peden

Some years ago, in the vanguard of the Southern literary renascence, Ellen Glasgow commented that what the South needed was "blood and irony." The same might be said of some recent writers who have concerned themselves with depicting the role of the Jew in American society, which is the subject of Philip Roth's collection of short stories and a novella. An English instructor at the University of Chicago, 26-year-old Mr. Roth has published fiction in Harper's, The Paris Review, The New Yorker and other periodicals. "Goodbye, Columbus," a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award, is his first book, and an impressive one. There is blood here and vigor, love and hate, irony and compassion.
Mr. Roth's novella is a somewhat incongruous mingling of conventional boy-meets-girl material and portrait-of-the- intellectual-as-a-young-man, narrated with an occasional fondness for clinical detail reminiscent of Edmund Wilson's "The Princess With the Golden Hair." Young Neil Klugman ("Whenever anyone asks me where I went to school I come right out with it: Newark Colleges of Rutgers University") meets beautiful, wealthy Brenda Patimkin, a Radcliffe undergraduate. Neil pursues Brenda with the determination of a well-trained bird dog, and soon catches her. After a summer love affair, he rejects Brenda and the nouveau-riche Patimkins with the smug self-righteousness of Joyce's Stephen Dedalus.
Such a summary, however, does justice neither to the author nor to his people; out of such hackneyed materials Mr. Roth has written a perceptive, often witty and frequently moving piece of fiction. He is a good story-teller, a shrewd appraiser of character and a keen recorder of an indecisive generation. Although Brenda's family has "moved up" from Newark economically by virtue of Mr. Patimkin's Kitchen-and-Bathroom-Sinks Enterprise, and Neil has made the "migration" intellectually, they are all of them refugees haunted by echoes from a not-to-be-buried past, unsatisfied by the too-tasty viands of a sterile hedonism, and confused by the uncertainties of the future. Characteristically, at the wedding of Brenda's brother, Neil and Brenda are further apart than ever, and in the gray confusion of early morning Neil sees some of the Patimkins "from the back, round-shouldered, burdened, child- carrying--like people fleeing a captured city."
Most of Mr. Roth's protagonists are, like Neil Klugman, adrift in a limbo between past and present. The author seems to know his people inside and out, whether he writes of a boy arguing the Virgin Birth with an exasperated rabbi, ("The Conversion of the Jews"), or, in "Eli, the Fanatic," of a young Jewish lawyer trying to explain suburban mores to the leader of a rabbinical orphanage, or, in "Epstein," of the ludicrous yet pitiable aftermath of an aging man's search for love. These stories, though concerned with universal, archetypal experiences, are somewhat transmuted into that which is at once strange and familiar. "I'm a Jew," one character says. "I am different. Better, maybe not. But different."

It seems that there is little I can say about the author only because there are legions out there in the literary world who are making their living doing just that.

Check out a few of these links:

The Philip Roth Society

CNN/TIME: America's Best Novelist

New York Times Featured Author: Philip Roth
(needs free registration with New York Times)

Vocabulary and Great Lines from Goodbye, Columbus:

dithyrambs
1 : a usually short poem in an inspired wild irregular strain
2 : a statement or writing in an exalted or enthusiastic vein
- dith·y·ram·bic /"di-thi-'ram-bik/ adjective
- dith·y·ram·bi·cal·ly /-bi-k(&-)lE/ adverb

"Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them -- at least I didn't; to phrase them was to invent them and own them."

"Sitting there in the park, I felt a deep knowledge of Newark, an attachment so rooted that it could not help but branch out into affection."

muscleless devotion

slashing my face with a smile

"His breath smelled of hair oil and his hair of breath and when he spoke, spittle cobwebbed the corners of his mouth."

sententiously
1 a : given to or abounding in aphoristic expression b : given to or abounding in excessive moralizing
2 : terse, aphoristic, or moralistic in expression : PITHY, EPIGRAMMATIC
- sen·ten·tious·ly adverb
- sen·ten·tious·ness noun

"By the light of the window behind him I could see the hundreds of spaces between the hundreds of tiny black corkscrews that were his hair."

At the wedding:
"I stayed behind, mesmerized almost by the dissection, analysis, reconsideration, and finally, the embracing of the trivial."

I smiled as collusively as I knew how.
: secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose
- col·lu·sive /-'lü-siv, -ziv/ adjective
- col·lu·sive·ly adverb
". . . and I did not say a word, afraid what a word, any word, might do."

"I was getting no answers, but I went on. If we meet You at all, God, it's that we're carnal, and aquisitive, and thereby partake of You. I am carnal, and I know You approve, I just know it. But how carnal can I get? I am acquisitive. Where do I turn now in my acquisitiveness? Where do we meet? Which prize is You?"

". . .with just a little body-english"

"And then he exploded into silence."

"I looked, but the outside of me gave up little information about the inside of me."

"What was it inside of me that had turned pursuit and clutching into love, and then turned it inside out again? What was it that had turned winning into losing, and losing -- who knows -- into winning? I was sure I had loved Brenda, though standing there, I knew I couldn't any longer."

Boston Symphony Orchestra

Tonight we will finally make our first trip (at least my first trip) to the Boston Symphony. Here is the Boston Globe review that convinced me to get my act together:

Passion rules the night in BSO's 'Gurrelieder'

By Richard Dyer, Globe Staff | February 24, 2006

Many in the audience were on their feet, applauding, before intermission of last night's performance of Arnold Schoenberg's ''Gurrelieder" by James Levine the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and by the end of the concert the response was unanimous.

''Gurrelieder" is one of the composer's early masterpieces, composed mostly in 1901 and 1902, although Schoenberg didn't complete the orchestration for another decade. The work is a series of narrative songs that recount the old Danish legend of King Waldemar, his beloved Tove, and his jealous Queen who engineers Tove's death. The King mocks God and is condemned to ride nightly from dusk to dawn for eternity, but the King finds Tove again in the splendor of the natural world.

In the music, as the work progresses, you can hear the 19th century pass into the 20th, and Schoenberg evolve from the world of Brahms, Mahler, and Richard Strauss into the world that he both perceived and helped to create.

The work always stirs an audience but it is seldom performed because of its size, cost, and difficulty. Last night the orchestra assembled a world-class team of soloists. It took tenor Johan Botha and charismatic soprano Karita Mattila awhile to warm up and ride their voices over the orchestra in the songs for Waldemar and Tove, but both came through in the later songs which Schoenberg scored more considerately -- Mattila did seem swept away by passion, and rose thrillingly to the great climax of her last song. Botha, who looks like a cross between a scholar and a bounty hunter, surmounted the most strenuous passages with impressive security and he never forced. Given the opportunity, he can also deliver text with sensitivity. The rolling bass-baritone of Albert Dohmen was luxury casting as a peasant; tenor Paul Groves achieved a convincing physical and musical characterization of the fool/jester without quite meeting every vocal demand.

The veteran Viennese tenor Waldemar Kmentt has sung three roles in this work in the course of his 56-year career. As the narrator, he delivered the speech/song with musicality, insight and instinct, occasionally coloring a word with his fondly remembered singing voice. Lorraine Hunt Lieberson was magnificent in the tragic narrative of the Wood-Dove who sings of Tove's death. Wearing a period dress in dove gray, her hair done in feathery style, Lieberson sang with flaring, all-giving tone; tragic splendor; and soul-sharing communication.

The huge orchestra -- 8 flutes, 10 horns -- covered itself with glory throughout. It also covered the men of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus too much of the time, but the full TFC sounded like a sunburst at the end. Levine has probably conducted more performances of ''Gurrelieder" than anyone in the work's history; he helped the performers deliver every dimension of the piece -- its roots in tradition and its modernity; its peculiarities and its reassurances; its particularity and its universality.

James Levine, conductor Karita Mattila, soprano (Tove) Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, mezzo-soprano, (Wood Dove) Johan Botha, tenor (Waldemar) Paul Groves, tenor (Klaus Narr) Albert Dohmen, baritone (Peasant) Waldemar Kmentt, tenor (Speaker)

American Life in Poetry: Boys Are Born To Wander

American Life in Poetry: Column 048

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Every parent can tell a score of tales about the difficulties
of raising children, and then of the difficulties in letting
go of them. Here the Texas poet, Walt McDonald, shares
just such a story.



Some Boys are Born to Wander

From Michigan our son writes, How many elk?
How many big horn sheep? It's spring,
and soon they'll be gone above timberline,

climbing to tundra by summer. Some boys
are born to wander, my wife says, but rocky slopes
with spruce and Douglas fir are home.

He tried the navy, the marines, but even the army
wouldn't take him, not with a foot like that.
Maybe it's in the genes. I think of wild-eyed years

till I was twenty, and cringe. I loved motorcycles,
too dumb to say no to our son—too many switchbacks
in mountains, too many icy spots in spring.

Doctors stitched back his scalp, hoisted him in traction
like a twisted frame. I sold the motorbike to a junkyard,
but half his foot was gone. Last month, he cashed

his paycheck at the Harley house, roared off
with nothing but a backpack, waving his headband,
leaning into a downhill curve and gone.

First published in "New Letters," Vol. 69, 2002, and
reprinted from "A Thousand Miles of Stars," 2004, by
permission of the author and Texas Tech University
Press. Copyright © 2002 by Walt McDonald.
This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation,
The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not
accept unsolicited poetry.

Poetry: Odes

This week I will attempt to write an ode for my poetry class at Grub Street. Here is the assignment provided by our instructor, Morgan Frank:

According to The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms (Ron Padgett), Edmund Gosse defined the ode as "enthusiastic and lyrical verse, directed to a fixed purpose and dealing progressively with one dignified theme." While you might find it useful to explore the classical history of the ode, which dates back to the fifth century B.C., the former definition suits our purposes, albeit with a little modification to give you focus. For this assignment, you are going to choose as your subject an object you encounter in your everyday life. Neruda's elemental odes addressed such things as watermelons, maize, and wine, and Robert Pinsky takes on such everyday objects as the shirt and the television as focus for meditation. How might meditation on the thing itself let you unfold larger themes and intentions, and keep you away from sweeping statements and abstractions?

While I will most likely stick to an object, the following poem by Robert Pinksy is an amazing example of a modern ode to a idea, in this case "meaning."

Link to the poem: http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/pinsky/meaning.html

Ode to Meaning
by Robert Pinksy

Dire one and desired one,
Savior, sentencer--

In an old allegory you would carry
A chained alphabet of tokens:

Ankh Badge Cross.
Dragon,
Engraved figure guarding a hallowed intaglio,
Jasper kinema of legendary Mind,
Naked omphalos pierced
By quills of rhyme or sense, torah-like: unborn
Vein of will, xenophile
Yearning out of Zero.

Untrusting I court you. Wavering
I seek your face, I read
That Crusoe's knife
Reeked of you, that to defile you
The soldier makes the rabbi spit on the torah.
"I'll drown my book" says Shakespeare.

Drowned walker, revenant.
After my mother fell on her head, she became
More than ever your sworn enemy. She spoke
Sometimes like a poet or critic of forty years later.
Or she spoke of the world as Thersites spoke of the heroes,
"I think they have swallowed one another. I
Would laugh at that miracle."

You also in the laughter, warrior angel:
Your helmet the zodiac, rocket-plumed
Your spear the beggar's finger pointing to the mouth
Your heel planted on the serpent Formulation
Your face a vapor, the wreath of cigarette smoke crowning
Bogart as he winces through it.

You not in the words, not even
Between the words, but a torsion,
A cleavage, a stirring.

You stirring even in the arctic ice,
Even at the dark ocean floor, even
In the cellular flesh of a stone.
Gas. Gossamer. My poker friends
Question your presence
In a poem by me, passing the magazine
One to another.

Not the stone and not the words, you
Like a veil over Arthur's headstone,
The passage from Proverbs he chose
While he was too ill to teach
And still well enough to read, I was
Beside the master craftsman
Delighting him day after day, ever
At play in his presence--you

A soothing veil of distraction playing over
Dying Arthur playing in the hospital,
Thumbing the Bible, fuzzy from medication,
Ever courting your presence,
And you the prognosis,
You in the cough.

Gesturer, when is your spur, your cloud?
You in the airport rituals of greeting and parting.
Indicter, who is your claimant?
Bell at the gate. Spiderweb iron bridge.
Cloak, video, aroma, rue, what is your
Elected silence, where was your seed?

What is Imagination
But your lost child born to give birth to you?

Dire one. Desired one.
Savior, sentencer--

Absence,
Or presence ever at play:
Let those scorn you who never
Starved in your dearth. If I
Dare to disparage
Your harp of shadows I taste
Wormwood and motor oil, I pour
Ashes on my head. You are the wound. You
Be the medicine.

Roddy Doyle: The Woman Who Walked Into Doors

I am reading a number of short novels this semester for a novel writing class at Emerson College. This week we discussed the Irish author Roddy Doyle's amazing work of voice and dialogue, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1997). Although I had seen the 1991 movie adaptation of Doyle's The Commitments, I had no idea it was an adaptation at the time and since then had not run into any of his extensive work. Among other notable works, he won the Booker Prize in 1993 for a novel called Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, which is written from the perspective of a ten-year-old boy.

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is told from the point-of-view of a thirty-nine-year-old Irish working class woman who, well, walked into doors (as they say). It is well-crafted and the woman's voice quite believable. It is so well done, in fact, that it is painful to read at times. The story arc gives away much of the climax at the very beginning of the book, a trend in the novels that we have read so far.

We have discussed in class the tell-all approach in terms of craft. Should you build to a climax using suspense to draw your reading into the story world--the "traditional" approach? Or can you spill the beans on the first page and then lead your reader into the finer nuances of truth and psychology behind the facts of the climax? The answer is: of course you can do both! The question is what subject matter or characters will be best served by each approach?

I am toying with using the tell-all approach for my current project. Toying. In fact, I may play out this approach all the way through the first draft of the novel. That way I will know how the story "ends" and then I can go back and craft the arc with a finer chisel.

Alas. Shop talk.

Read Doyle. It is not "light" or "easy" in terms of subject matter. But I did hear that this particular novel is his most bleak. Then let me know what you think. . . .

Useful Links

biography/themes/publications

Review of The Woman Who Walked Into Doors

Roddy Doyle: Audio Reading

Sunday Lunch

Beef Pörkölt
Serves 4

Ingredients
25g/1oz Lard or 2 tbsp Olive Oil and 2 tbsp Butter
3 Onions, chopped
675g/1-1/2lb Stewing Beef, cubed
4 Potatoes, thickly sliced
240ml/8fl.oz. Fresh Beef Stock
240ml/8fl.oz. Sour Cream
2 tbsp Tomato Paste
Salt
Ground Black Pepper
3 Tbsp Paprika
2 Bay Leaves

Instructions
1. Heat the lard (or oil and butter) in a large saucepan, add the onions and meat and fry until the beef is browned on all sides and the onion is softened.

2. Add the remaining ingredients (except sour cream), mix well and bring to the boil then reduce the heat to very low, cover and simmer for at least 1-1/2 to 2 hours, stirring from time to time. Serve hot with sour cream on the side.

Nokedli (noodles)
2 eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup water
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 large pot filled with salted boiling water

Place large pot filled with salted water and bring to boil. Combine eggs, salt, and water, beating well with whisk. Add flour, a little at a time. Add only enough flour to make a soft, sticky dough. Let mixture rest for about 10 mins. Beat mixture again. Using the side of a teaspoon, spoon small amount of dough into boiling water. Dipping the spoon in the hot water will remove the dough from the spoon (if you have a spaetzel maker, that makes is easier as you want very small noodles). The noodles are done when they float to the top. Remove from water with large slotted spoon, and place in colander. Serve immediately or rinse with cold water. You may want to make the dumplings in 2 or 3 batches so they dont overcook. Serve with chicken paprikas (or any dish that has a rich sauce). The dumplings are also nice added to a stew. You can heat the dumplings in a frying pan with melted butter. Do not let the dumplings get too brown or crisp.

Uborka Salata (Cucumber Salad)

1 or 2 large cucumbers
1/2 cup vinegar
1/2 cup water
1 Tbs sugar
1/2 tsp salt
pinch of black pepper
1/4 onion thinly sliced

Slice the cucumbers paper thin. Sprinkle with salt and let stand for at least one hour. Squeeze excess liquid from cucumbers. Mix the vinegar, water, sugar, salt and pepper. Add to cucumbers and let stand for at least an hour and better if left overnight. Garnish with dill or red pepper or paprika when serving.

Cuernavaca, Mexico

L. and I visited Chile last year over the winter holiday. The summer sun was intoxicating. We vowed to head South during the winter months whenever possible. So when L. got an invitation to give a lecture in Cuernavaca, Mexico, we booked our flights. We even used frequent flyer miles.

We left Boston last Wednesday and returned Sunday night, flying in just after the huge blizzard that had shut down the airport for most of the day. Good timing.

While Chile is gorgeous, I found Mexico to be even more interesting. The food, the food, the food. Did I mention how good the food was? We ate well. And the tequila was almost too good to be tequila. Our favorite meal was at a roadside restaurant where we ate handmade tortillas cooked right before our eyes, grilled meats, family-style beans, cheese and salsa. We asked our driver to take us there after we visited the Xochicalco ruins.

Cuernavaca may not have a beach, but our hotel was paradise. The city is filled with beautiful gardens, a stunning cathedral, and there are several worthwhile side trips. Our trip to the ruins was outstanding. We even got a tour deep beneath the ruins inside an ancient observatory. Luckily we had a Spaniard with us who could provide translation.

After just a few days, we headed to Mexico City where we spent Saturday afternoon through Sunday morning. We dropped our bags at the charming La Casona hotel and taxied down to the historic center. There we toured the cathedral and then saw the Diego Rivera murals in the National Palace. We ran into a Hungarian tour group viewing the murals and got to listen in to the descriptions. Small world. As it was Saturday and market day, we also got to stroll through the chaotic and teeming outdoor markets near the main square.

After a nap that evening, we again headed toward the historic center. This time we wanted to eat and then find some dancing. Even though the salsa club we had heard about "did not exist" we pushed on through the eerily empty streets toward the Plaza Garibaldi.

It was near 11pm when we arrived and the square was packed with fully decked out mariachi bands. Food stands surrounded the square and smelled divine. People were singing, dancing, eating and having a really good time. We stopped in a club (one of the many surrounding the square) and even did our own special brand of salsa dancing until 2am.

Sunday morning we strolled through the Zona Rosa, near our hotel. It is packed out with a more "refined" crowd and tons of very elegant stores and places to eat. It must have been lively there too Saturday night, but we are glad that we ended up hanging with the mariachi instead.

A few days in Mexico is not enough and I hope to return some day. Preferably during January or February!

A Love Poem

This week I was supposed to write a LOVE poem. A daunting task. Here is the draft I will take to my workshop. I look forward to having it ripped to shreds! But do give me credit for the purposeful lack of heaving breasts and throbbing hearts.

STORM

The downed storm line undid our house that night.

Winds smashed potted plants

while we sat in the tub,

our knees near,

the fear audible.

Our muscles

forgot to breathe. We stared.

Later,

we did not laugh,

or push the tale at dinner parties.

The electric line was restrung.

Pots sat cracked

but became mansions for grateful, lonely spiders.

Poetry: Geology by Bob King

American Life in Poetry

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

We constantly compare one thing with another, or attempt to,
saying, "Well, you know, love is like...it's like...well, YOU
know what it's like." Here Bob King, who lives in Colorado,
takes an original approach and compares love to the formation of
rocks.

Geology

I know the origin of rocks, settling
out of water, hatching crystals
from fire, put under pressure
in various designs I gathered
pretty, picnic after picnic.

And I know about love, a little,
igneous lust, the slow affections
of the sedimentary, the pressure
on earth out of sight to rise up
into material, something solid
you can hold, a whole mountain,
for example, or a loose collection
of pebbles you forgot you were keeping.

Reprinted from the Marlboro Review, Issue 16, 2005, by
permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2005 by Robert King,
whose prose book, "Stepping Twice Into the River: Following
Dakota Waters," appeared in 2005 from The University Press of
Colorado. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry
Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of
English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does
not accept unsolicited poetry.


For more poems, check outWrite Now: Poems: Salty and Sweet

Malcolm Gladwell Fan Club (that's me)

The Gladwell Effect
By Rachel Donadio
Published Feb. 5, 2006 in the New York Times

"PEOPLE are experience rich and theory poor," the writer Malcolm Gladwell said recently. "People who are busy doing things — as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops — don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them." [MP3 audio clip.]

Slight, shoeless and sporting the large head of curly hair that's become his trademark, Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, was sitting at the kitchen table of his apartment in a West Village town house. In tones at once laid-back and precise, he was discussing his best-selling books: "The Tipping Point" argues that small actions can spark "social epidemics" — a term he gives a positive connotation; and "Blink a paean to intuitive thinking, makes a case for "thin-slicing," paring down our information intake so we can tune out the static and make fast, sound decisions. Gladwell said his goal in those two books was simple: In a culture with too much information and not enough time, he offers "organizing structures" for people's lives.

Readers seem grateful. "Blink" has remained on the best-seller list since it first came out in January 2005, with 1.3 million copies in print in North America. It has also been translated into more than 25 languages. That compares with 1.7 million copies of "The Tipping Point," which was originally published in 2000 but returned to the paperback best-seller list when "Blink" first appeared.

Their success has given Gladwell an active, and extremely lucrative, second career as a public speaker. Much in demand, he is paid in the neighborhood of $40,000 per lecture. He's also on the recommended reading list at many companies and business schools, and has spoken at West Point and the National Institutes of Health, among many other institutions. Last year, Time magazine named him one of its "100 most influential people." Fast Company magazine called Gladwell "a rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud." Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter of multiple-thread narrative movies like "Traffic" and "Syriana," is developing a movie based on "Blink." That book is also the subject of a clever sendup, "Blank: The Power of Not Actually Thinking at All," by the pseudonymous Noah Tall, which will be out this month.

Gladwell has become an all-out international phenomenon — and has helped create a highly contagious hybrid genre of nonfiction, one that takes a nonthreatening and counterintuitive look at pop culture and the mysteries of the everyday. In the past year, several other books in the Gladwell vein have appeared. They include the best-selling "Freakonomics," a breezy collection of case studies by Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, and the journalist Stephen Dubner (the pair write an occasional "Freakonomics" column for The Times Magazine); "The Wisdom of Crowds," a business book for thinking people in which the New Yorker writer James Surowiecki argues that groups are collectively smarter and more innovative than individuals; and "Everything Bad Is Good for You," Steven Johnson's case that pop culture is becoming increasingly sophisticated.

But Gladwell has a far wider audience than these other authors. With a writerly verve and strong narrative powers, he leavens serious social science research with zany characters and pithy, easily digestible anecdotes. Gladwell selects his anecdotes from a wide range of sources — the military, business, food, music, romance — and diverse locales, a tactic that broadens his books' appeal.

In "The Tipping Point," he discusses everything from the drop in crime in New York in the early 1990's to the retro return of Hush Puppies, the rise of the Aeron chair in the dot-com era, and how "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" became a best seller through its popularity in small reading groups. His point is that social epidemics can spread with the right context and the pull of certain influential people: "connectors," in touch with different groups of people; "mavens," experts in one area; and "salesmen," who can win customers over.

Similarly, in "Blink," he introduces a range of case studies and experts, including art historians who can tell within seconds that a statue is a fake and a psychologist who can predict whether a couple will get divorced after observing them for only a few minutes. His message is that we should trust first impressions — except when we shouldn't. Gladwell, who is multiracial, said he became interested in first impressions when he grew his hair into an Afro and then was repeatedly pulled over for speeding, and stopped once by the police looking for a rapist with similar hair. In an era of increased specialization and niche thinking, Gladwell himself is the ultimate "connector," bridging disparate universes: the New York literary world and corporate America; liberal and conservative; men and women; high and low.

Without slackening his reporting or losing his New Yorker-writer street cred, Gladwell has risen to the top of the A-list in the vast subculture of gurus brought in to penetrate the isolation chamber of the boardroom, to speak truth to power and tell executives what it's really like in the outside world. Or at least in the West Village.

He's long cultivated the persona of the outsider. Gladwell, 42 though he looks younger, was born in England and grew up in rural Canada. His English father taught mathematics at the University of Waterloo, and his Jamaican mother is a psychotherapist. Gladwell studied history at the University of Toronto and wanted to go into advertising, but said he couldn't find a job and became a journalist instead. After a stint at The American Spectator, a conservative political magazine, he joined The Washington Post in 1987. He covered business and science, and spent three years as New York bureau chief before Tina Brown, then editor of The New Yorker, hired him in 1996.

Gladwell, a self-described "right-winger" as a kid — he had a poster of Ronald Reagan on his wall during college — notes that his politics have changed over the years. When he was growing up, Canada was "essentially a socialist country" so "being a conservative was the kind of fun, radical thing to do," he said. "You couldn't outflank the orthodoxy on the left the way that people traditionally did when they wanted to be rebels. There was only room on the right." Now, he plays the flip side: "I hate to be this reductive, but an awful lot of my ideology, it's just Canadian. Canadians like small, modest things, right? We don't believe in boasting. We think the world is basically a good place. We're pretty optimistic. We think we ought to take care of each other," he said. "And it so happens that to be a Canadian in America is to seem quite radical." [MP3 audio clip.]

On his Web site, Gladwell offers an apologia pro vita sua: "If I could vote (and I can't because I'm Canadian) I would vote Democrat. I am pro-choice and in favor of gay marriage. I believe in God. I think the war in Iraq is a terrible mistake. I am a big believer in free trade. I think, on balance, taxes in America — particularly for rich people — ought to be higher, not lower. I think smoking is a terrible problem and that cigarette manufacturers ought to be subjected to every possible social and political sanction. But I think that filing product liability lawsuits against cigarette manufacturers is absurd. I am opposed to the death penalty. I hate S.U.V.'s. I think many C.E.O.'s are overpaid. I think there is too much sex and violence on television."

While his views may be conventionally liberal, Gladwell takes an unconventional tack in reporting. Omnivorous in his interests and brilliantly attuned to every level of today's conversation, Gladwell is one of the most inventive journalists now writing. In articles on everything from personality tests to ketchup, he doesn't offer a sweeping theory, but rather a counterintuitive way of looking at things.

When Time magazine and other media outlets declared an attention-deficit hyperactivity epidemic in America, Gladwell argued that people were no more distracted than they'd ever been, but that Ritalin had replaced nicotine as a socially acceptable focusing stimulant. While others were vilifying the pharmaceutical companies over the cost of prescription drugs, Gladwell's New Yorker article on the topic mapped out a broader codependency. "It is only by the most spectacular feat of cynicism that our political system's moral negligence has become the fault of the pharmaceutical industry," he wrote. And in an article on intelligence reform published when the country was in a furor over the failings leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, Gladwell proposed that free-market-style competition between the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. might actually be good for intelligence gathering. Lately he's been investigating racial profiling. At first, "I had a reasonably benign attitude toward it. I felt that under certain circumstances it was justifiable — like looking for terrorists. But now I think that's wrong," he said. "I think it's never justifiable. And not on ethical grounds but on pragmatic grounds. I just don't think it works."

For all their resonance and success, Gladwell's books have also been criticized, most often for demonstrating, or encouraging, lazy thinking. In a scathing review in The New Republic, the judge and author Richard Posner found "Blink" full of banalities and contradictions, "written like a book intended for people who do not read books." Some social scientists have also been unimpressed. "I think what he leaves people with is not that scientists are doing some interesting work, but that Malcolm Gladwell has a couple of good ideas," said Thomas Schelling, who shared last year's Nobel in economic science and did pioneering research on the "tipping point," a formulation that originally referred to the point at which white families would leave a neighborhood after black families began moving in.

Translating academic work for a popular audience is "very explicitly" his mission, Gladwell said, though it might not be what readers take away from his books. He said he owed "enormous debts" to academia. [MP3 audio clip.] In an endnote in "The Tipping Point," Gladwell cited Schelling's "Micromotives and Macrobehavior" (1978). In "Blink," he cited "Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious" (2002), a lucid, readable book by the noted psychologist Timothy Wilson, which he called "a real inspiration" and one of his favorite books.

Gladwell has had the most pronounced impact in corporate culture. His "mavens" and "connectors" have become a working vocabulary for marketers desperate to reach consumers though calculated word-of-mouth campaigns. In 2004, he helped Simmons Market Research create consumer surveys based on "The Tipping Point." (He resigned after questions were raised about a conflict of interest with his New Yorker journalism.)

Gladwell, who rose to prominence during the dot-com boom, when the economy became the big story, rhapsodizes about things that intellectuals often dismiss but most people living on earth have to contend with every day. Advertising, for instance. In many ways, his work is reminiscent of that of Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and father of modern public relations, whose 1928 book, "Propaganda," made a positive case for manipulating public opinion through advertising as the operative arm of psychology. "I get genuine delight from ads, if they're clever," Gladwell said. "The idea that you can tell a story in 30 seconds is amazing." He finds the business world "rarefied and fascinating," and said running a company was "just about as interesting a challenge as there is out there."

Small wonder, then, that business executives invite him to speak: he's entranced by their world, and they by his attentiveness and aura. He has spoken at Google, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, among many other companies. He's one of nine people invited to address the World Business Forum, a conference for executives, next fall, where he's expected to share the stage at Radio City Music Hall with Rudolph Giuliani; Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric; and Colin Powell, who Gladwell believes may be a distant cousin on his mother's side.

"I'm simply there to explain my ideas," he said of his public speaking. But he also delivers what he calls "homilies," drawing on his books to urge companies to provide better training and create fertile environments for innovation. Gladwell's 2002 New Yorker takedown of McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm then much in the news for its involvement with Enron, ended with a zinger: "They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing."

Business audiences eat it up. "Thank you for a fantastic speech," someone identified only as the chief executive of a health insurance company wrote in a letter reprinted on the Web site of the Leigh Bureau, which organizes Gladwell's speaking engagements. Moreover, the executive wrote, one colleague, "not faint of heart — indicated that you brought her to tears with the message about how valuable each and every individual is. With a polarized political situation, that's a refreshing message!"

And that is because beneath the social science data, Gladwell is selling something for which there's always a market. "I'm by nature an optimist. I can't remember the last time I wrote a story which could be described as despairing," he said. "I don't believe in character. I believe in the effect of the immediate impact of environment and situation on people's behavior."

Thus, he concludes "The Tipping Point" with the hopeful assertion that "what must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus." In "Blink," Gladwell argues that we pay too much attention to "grand themes" and too little to "fleeting moments." "Making sense of ourselves and our behavior requires that we acknowledge there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis," he writes.

Although pitched as descriptive, Gladwell's books are essentially prescriptive. Trust your instincts! You too may be (or can become) a connector, maven or salesman! Gladwell's dazzling arguments ultimately offer reassurance. Indeed, he seems a contemporary incarnation of a recurring figure in the American experience, one who comes with encouraging news: You can make a difference, you have the capacity to change. Gladwell may be the Dale Carnegie, or perhaps the Norman Vincent Peale, of the iPod generation. But where Carnegie in his 1936 book, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," instructed readers how to understand their customers and flatter people into liking them, and Peale in his 1952 "Power of Positive Thinking" offered watered-down Christian palliatives, Gladwell offers optimism through demystification: to understand how things work is to have control over them.

Or if you can't understand the complexities of today's world, you may still be able to make profitable use of them. Of all the people he's profiled for the New Yorker, Gladwell said he most identified with Nassim Taleb, who ran a hedge fund that traded on rare events, like disasters. Taleb was "doing something about the possibility of disaster as opposed to simply turning a blind eye to it," Gladwell said in our conversation. And that, too, is part of the secret of Gladwell's success: pragmatism over ideology, optimism over pessimism, colorful human-interest anecdotes over gray shades of data. "To be someone who does not believe in the power of the situation is to be a defeatist about the world," he said. "And that I can't abide."

Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.

Good to Hear

"You can't have three people looking over your shoulder, and you have to make sure not to censor yourself. You have to be willing to be wrong and you have to be risky. You have to take a certain amount of abuse, and the reason you're willing to do that is because you love the truth."

-- Grace Paley

Carson McCullers: Reflections in a Golden Eye

I just finished reading my first Carson McCullers novel: Reflections in a Golden Eye. I had never heard of her work before (which, of course, reveals how much I have yet to read). I had absolutely no idea what to expect from this slim little novel.

This is her first sentence: “An army post in peacetime is a dull place.” And then she goes on to disprove this very notion. True, the post is all about routine and drill. But she takes us into the homes of the officers and their wives and into one enlisted man’s head. The horrors are there just behind the picket fence and inside the otherwise stark barracks. The characters fall in love with the wrong people (most often ones to whom they are not married) and take out their inner angst with garden sheers used on their own nipples, in one ghastly example. Those Southerners. Cukoo. McCullers gives every single one of her characters a lobotomy.

The insanity and despair of the characters is made even more compelling by McCullers extremely tight prose style. The sentence structure and diction are militant—no lyrical episodes to take a trip into metaphysics or provide enough words for a soft landing. These characters are doomed to fit into their little sentences.

colorful vocabulary, phrases and some sentences too

sward
the grassy surface of land

mufti
ordinary dress as distinguished from that denoting an occupation or station ; especially : civilian clothes when worn by a person in the armed forces

“He had a sad penchant for becoming enamored of his wife’s lovers.”

slattern
an untidy slovenly woman; also : SLUT, PROSTITUTE

fractious grace

termagant wife
an overbearing or nagging woman : SHREW

grim vivacity

badinage
playful repartee / banter

cerise curtains
a moderate red

merriest malice

cynosure
one that serves to direct or guide / center of atrraction or attention

frippery
something showy, frivolous, or nonessential : LUXURY, TRIFLE

"The sun and firelight were bright in the room."

"Like all very stupid people she had a predilection for the gruesome, which she could indulge in or throw off at will."

"And having given up life, the Captain suddenly began to live."

hauter
arrogance, haughtiness

sluggish grace

repressed agitation

hobbledehoy
an awkward gawky youth

lazy tenderness

velleity
the lowest level of volition / a slight wish or tendency (inclination)

sough
to make a moaning or sighing sound

some useful links

Biography of Carson McCullers

The Carson McCullers Project

Audio Recording of McCullers

The Tragicomic Vision in McCullers (literary criticism)

Dance: Keigwin + Company

I will head out in the rain to do some errands and see this show tonight:

http://www.larrykeigwin.com/company.php

3 Word Lines and at least one question Poem: First Draft

“I love you,”
answers the physicist at sundown near the edge of the back yard in spring.

Tell me, why
is grass greener
twenty steps beyond
our lawn across
the thicket fence?

Let’s see: Yes,

You look down
at our lawn
and see bare
spots of earth.

Yes, let’s see:

You look over
there and see
grass blades tall.

In short, you
see the forest
over there, dear,
and here see
only sparse trees.

In fact, grass
is always greener
where you can’t
see raw earth.

Is it not?

Narrative Poem: First Draft

July 16, 1990: Election Day for Pope Michael I of Kansas

Superman grew up there.
His heavy denim rugged,
his letter jacket torn by sheer
velocity when he took flight, unexpectedly.
He learned the truth about home, and left for the Big Apple.

Kansans tilted chins when he joined the East Coast liberal Media Machine.
After all, he was alien, kryptonite-sissy,
lily livered freak
in blue tights and red speed-o, not to mention
his cape. So long sissy, those New Yorkers need your bleeding-heart ass.

Dorothy risked her curls and Toto’s too,
she faced the Wicked Witch of the East
to get back home there.
Miss Kansas herself wanted two things:
to get home and to love her dog.

The Witch—green tight-lipped, single, magic mistress, femi-nazi—
sizzled at Dorothy’s humble bucket toss.
She desired to extinguish the Eastern Witch,
not kill. And see the thanks she gets
from those who trembled under the witch? Not a penny.
The Ozites sent her home and forgot her, entirely.

Superman’s first home, Dorothy’s Ithaca,
this is the land where John Brown killed to fight slavery,
and Pizza Hut was born.

In Wichita, the “Summer of Mercy” clenched
prairie souls and recruited soldiers for the unborn,
back in ’91. Christian agape flushed the Ar-kansas river banks,
cartoon babies pled from hand-lettered signs along the highways,
Save the Children! Choose Life! Your mother did!

Pope-fearing Catholics
simmered on the hard-scrabble plains,
took flight and turned to home, the Vatican way off in Rome,
for guidance when the protests turned violent.

Some Catholics there, in Kansas, just sneered:
We don’t have super powers or Dorothy’s glass slippers,
wouldn’t click our heels anyway to see the Pope and kiss his fat gold ring.
If we could see the Holy Father, we’d say:
You, all do respect, are a scoundrel and a fraud, a victim
of sociology and hand-holding guitar-strumming new-age professor types.
Latin is God’s tongue.

Pope Michael had reigned already a year,
when civil protests exploded,
but as far as the record goes,
he didn’t have much to say or
no one listened.

Deborah Eisenberg: Twilight of the Superheroes

What I am reading now: Deborah Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes.

This collection of short stories is as "hot" as such a thing can get. I keep hearing/reading about it everywhere I go. So far, it deserves the good press.

Useful link:

'Twilight of the Superheroes' Explores the Senses
NPR Book Review by Alan Cheuse