The Myth of You & Me by Leah Stewart

All right kids, this is it: I am in full flush after just finishing a new novel. This book wasn't even on my bookshelf!

Yesterday I was browsing at the Brookline Booksmith and the red cover caught my eye. The book jacket blurb went something like"blah blah blah captures the intensity of a friendship as well as the real sense of loss that lingers after the end of one blah blah etc." I bought it. And a little shy of 24 hours later, I have turned the last page.

These characters are my age and might as well be my reflection in terms of experience. The tale is simply told and captures the beautiful angst of frienships forsaken (and reforged?). What a delicous read--especially if you too used to have big hair shellacked with AquaNet and then grew up together with your college friends. Read it. And beware: I may be forced to send this book via Amazon to you and then compel you to read it too....

The Myth of You & Me by Leah Stewart

Her website is: http://www.leahstewart.com/

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

I picked up a copy of Robinson's novel Gilead after it was recommended to me by a literary agent at the Grub Street conference. The agent had read a sample of my novel and suggested Robinson's work as an author I could learn from. As I made my way through the text I noted her flawless prose and use of details. I also read to notice how Robinson makes use of a first person narrator. My own work is currently told from the first person and I find that I need more writerly tools to make the most of his point-of-view.

Gilead is a ponderous novel. It is an epistolary novel written by a 76 year-old pastor in 1956 Iowa to his seven-year-old son. The pastor is near death and wants to write to his son who will not remember him after his death.

I finished the novel a few weeks ago and only today picked up my copy to give it more thought. As I paged through and reread sections, I was impressed more deeply by the language and the ideas in the novel. So please forgive the extensive excerpts. (I actually left out sections that were noteworthy!)

Memorable Quotes

(hardcover first edition, 2004)

I told you last night that I might be gone sometime, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old. And you put your hand in my hand and you said, You aren’t very old, as if that settled it. I told you might have a very different life from mine, and from the life you’ve had with me, and that would be a wonderful thing, there are many ways to live a good life. And you said, Mama already told me that. And then you said, Don’t laugh! because you thought I was laughing at you. You reached up and put your fingers on my lips and gave me that look I never in my life saw on any other face besides your mother’s. It’s a kind of furious pride, very passionate and stern. I’m always a little surprised to find my eyebrows unsinged after I’ve suffered one of those looks. I will miss them. (Opening paragraph)

You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension. (p 7)

There is a reality in blessing, which I take baptism to be, primarily. It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. (p 23)

That was the first time in my life I ever knew what it was to love another human being. Not that I hadn’t loved people before. But I hadn’t realized what it meant to love them before. (p 55)

I was always amazed, watching grownups, at the way they seemed to know what was to be done in any situation, to know what was the decent thing. (p 95)

So you must not judge what I know by what I find words for. (p 114)

There is something in her face I have always felt I must be sufficient to, as if there is a truth in it that tests the meaning of what I say. (p 137)

But I believe that the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object. (p 139)

And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer. (p 154)

Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense. (p 177)

My custom has always been to ponder grief; that is, to follow it through ventricle and aorta to find out its lurking places. (p 179)

The tact was audible. (p 186)

I don’t know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone else’s virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it. (p 188)

One interesting aspect of the whole experience was that I simply could not be honest with myself, and I couldn’t deceive myself, either. (p 203)

. . . that was the first time in my life I ever felt I could be snatched out of my character, my calling, my reputation, as if they could just fall away like a dry husk. (p 205)

Love is holy because it is like grace—the worthiness of its object is never really what matters. (p 209)

There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence? (p 238)

There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient. (p 243)

It seems to me that when something really ought to be true then it has a very powerful truth, which starts me thinking again about heaven. (p 244)

A Few Good Words

susurrus: etymology: Latin, hum, whisper; a whispering or rustling sound

crepuscular: of, relating to, or resembling twilight OR active in the twilight

Model sentences

Here I am trying to be wise, the way a father should be, the way an old pastor certainly should be. (p 56)

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens it eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. (p 57)

In any case, it felt so necessary to me to walk up the road. . . . (74)

I was standing there, taking it in, trying to decide what to do, when the old man wheeled around and planted that stare on me. (p 98)

I conceal my motives from myself pretty effectively sometimes. (p 147)

Your mother looked at me, so I knew I must have sounded upset. I was upset. (p 152)

Useful Links

NPR Terry Gross Interview with Marilynne Robinson on Gilead
(I highly recommend this interview--very thoughtful)

Saturday by Ian McEwan

I recently finished Saturday, by Ian McEwan. I consider his book, Atonement, one of my favorite novels. So I was intrigued to read another piece of his work.


Saturday is set in London post 9/11 and just before the war with Iraq. The events take place on one Saturday and are told from a neurosurgeon's point-of-view. Henry Perowne is happily married with two artistic children--a poet and a blues musician. His cherished Saturday begins early when he awakens and views a burning plane make an emergency landing. We follow him as he interacts with his children and wife, plays a mean (and long) game of squash, shops for dinner, and cooks a fish stew for a family dinner. (Yes, he even cooks.) This typical Saturday is laced with conflict brought about by a random encounter with a less-fortunate street guy--a tough guy whose Huntington’s Disease the neurosurgeon readily diagnoses in the middle of road rage in the streets of London.

I admit that I was not immediately hooked by the story. The characters, however, and the choreography are finely drawn. And I did feel my pulse race as McEwan built tension and suspense into the narrative. Any book that elevates my heart rate is doing something right.

This book made the New York Times top ten books of 2005. Indeed it does capture modern life and a thoroughly recognizable attempt to "make sense" of a world on the brink of war.

Memorable Quotes
(page numbers from paperback First Anchor Books Edition, April 2006)

The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. ( p 17)

She remained in silent contact with an imaginary intimate. (p 48)

Happiness seemed like a betrayal of principle, but happiness was unavoidable. (p 49)

This reading list persuaded Perowne that the supernatural was the recourse of an insufficient imagination, a dereliction of duty, a childish evasion of the difficulties and wonders of the real, of the demanding re-enactment of the plausible. (p 66)

Work that you cannot begin to imagine achieving yourself, that displays a ruthless, nearly inhuman element of self-enclosed perfection—this is his idea of genius. This notion of Daisy’s, that people can’t “live” without stories, is simply not true. He is living proof.

There is much in human affairs that can be accounted for at the level of the complex molecule. Who could eve reckon up the damage done to love and friendship and all hopes of happiness by a surfeit or depletion of this or that neurotransmitter? And who will ever find a morality, an ethics down among the enzymes and amino acids when the general taste is for looking in the other direction? (p 92)

There are so many ways a brain can let you down. Like an expensive car, it’s intricate, but mass-produced nevertheless, with more than six billion in circulation. (p 99)

A race of extraterrestrial grown-ups is needed to set right the general disorder, then put everyone to bed for an early night. God was once supposed to be a grown-up, but in disputes He childishly took sides. Then sending us an actual child, one of His own—the last thing we needed. A spinning rock already swarming with orphans. . . (p 122)

It isn’t rationalism that will overcome the religious zealots, but ordinary shopping and all it entails—jobs for a start, and peace, and some commitment to realizable pleasures, the promise of appetites sated in this world, not the next. Rather shop than pray. (p 127)

Unlike in Daisy’s novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretation are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simple fade. People don’t remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place. (p 159)

There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they’ve ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. (p 176)

When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply an interesting diversion. (p 198)

Useful Link

Ian McEwan's Website: Saturday
(Includes a reading guide, reviews of the book AND a recipe for the Fish Stew)

Free Books! Gutenberg Project

I learned today about the Project Gutenberg, a 35-year-old nonprofit based in Illinois. They have a mission to "break down the walls of ignorance and illiteracy." To aid in this fight they are launching an effort to make thousands of classic books available for free in downloadable form.

Volunteers began typing and scanning books into a database thirty-five years ago, decades before the Internet and the ability to distribute texts electronically became a reality. Now those efforts are bearing fruit as the project plans to host the World eBook Fair. Between July 4 and August 4 over 300,000 books will be available for free download. The fair will be repeated annually.

The majority of books are no longer protected by copyright. For a small percentage of the books, copyright permission was granted for their inclusion. There will even be a limited number of classical music files as well.

Free books. This enterprise is legal. And my Dad always said there was no such thing as a free lunch. Just think: schools could download copies of The Odyssey for free!

For more information read
the Boston Globe's article by David Mehegan:
Free chapter added to saga of e-books

Download free books (to your laptop, ipod, etc.) at the World eBook Fair: http://worldebookfair.com/

Learn about Project Gutenberg AND download free books now:
http://www.gutenberg.org/
(about 20,000 titles ready for download)

Curtis Sittenfeld: Prep and The Man of My Dreams

This evening I attended a reading by Curtis Sittenfeld. Her first novel, Prep, was a runaway best seller and was chosen by the New York Times as one of the top ten novels of 2005. (See the link in the sidebar.) The narrator, Lee, in Prep is an angst riddled teen who convinces her parents to let her move out of South Bend to attend a boarding school out East. Being from South Bend (sort of), I was attracted to the story line. The novel was smart and just dark enough for my tastes to make it stand out from a crowd of novels with young female characters.

I was also attracted to Sittenfeld as an author. She was teaching ninth grade English at a private high school for boys at the time the novel reached publication. After the novel hit the charts, I read one (or two?) essays by her describing her experience writing, getting published, and being marketed. She seemed smart and witty, but not in a snarky way. She was articulate and insightful.

Tonight she read from her latest novel, Man of My Dreams. The narrator is also a young woman, Hannah, but Sittenfeld insists that she is quite distinct from Lee. Lee's story was told during her high school years. Hannah's story spans fourteen years and she gets to mature into her late twenties. Lee said not-so-nice things because she was filled with bile. Hannah also gets verbally callous, but her roughness comes more from naiveté instead of nastiness. These are Sittenfeld's descriptions, as I have yet to read her new work.

Sittenfeld is tall. Tonight she wore black slacks paired with a black v-necked top. Her shoes: black. She looked cool. She looked like she writes: forthright, natural, and comfortable. Hhhhmmm...not sure those are the best adjectives. Alas. Or perhaps I should avoid any connection whatsoever between her writing style and her fashion style?

Sittenfeld shared with us her pleasure to be a guest author of Brookline Booksmith, where she used to shop when she lived nearby seven years ago. After a few opening remarks, she read several pages from the new book, and then took questions.

One person asked her about her readership: men, women, girls? Sittenfeld receives letters from readers of every ilk, but she surmised that many of her readers are women. She laughingly remarked that her audience consists of her family, her high school advisor, and a few strangers. Sure enough, she took questions from "Aunt Nancy" and "Aunt Sue."

The reading was held at the Coolridge Corner Theater, where sounds from surrounding theaters occassionly provided a soundtrack for the reading. After the Q & A we were all invited to the book store for a signing. This time I decided to pass. Not sure why. I suppose that the reality of packing all my books for the move back to South Bend is growing more present in my mind. I have accrued boxes of books already. My copy of Prep is back in South Bend and I wasn't quite ready to buy her latest. I will keep it in mind, however, as a future read.

Useful Links

Curtis Sittenfeld Official Website

May 22nd Time Article by Lev Grossman
Prepping for Love:
With The Man of My Dreams, novelist Curtis Sittenfeld
puts the literature back in chick lit.

A Kiss from Maddalena

I recently attended a weekend conference for writers sponsored by Grub Street. It was the fifth annual “Muse and the Marketplace” event at which roughly half of the sessions were muse related, i.e. craft related, while the other sessions were concerned with publishing.

After hearing an agent rave about a book fallen in love with and signed the author, I picked it up on the book table. A Kiss from Maddalenais the first book of Christopher Castellani, who is the artistic director at Grub. I even snagged his signature for my book between sessions.

I finished the book after two readathons (due in part to rainy weather in Boston). It has been a while since I had such a yummy read. By the end, my heart was a-flutter, I swear. It is a classic love story set in World War II Italy. Village girl in love with local boy. Village girl gets “flower picked” by a rich Italian back from America looking for a bride. She is forced to consider the fast talking rich guy. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination. It is not a new story, but it is all in the telling. And I was swept away.

Of course I heart all cosi italiani. Having lived a year in the shadow of the Pantheon, who can blame me?

A girl needs a good Italian love story now and again.

Check out Christopher Castellani’s website,
where you can take a
virtual tour of the village of Santa Cecelia
where the story unfolds
www.christophercastellani.com

Penguin Reading Guide

The Innocence Project

Recently I started to think about the death penalty. It had been a while since I had given serious attention to capital punishment. In particular I wanted to know more about those who are exonerated from death row. Although I do remember cases of convicts released after DNA tests excluded them from the crime, I had do idea about the scope of the phenomenon.

I checked out and have just finished reading Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong and How to Make it Right by Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld and Jim Dwyer. Scheck and Neufeld founded The Innocence Project in New York to provide legal aid to the wrongfully convicted. The provide counsel free of charge and work tirelessly for the inmates who become invisible behind prison walls.

Violent crime happens.A five-year-old is raped and murdered. An eyewitness is one hundred and ten perfect sure that Jim X did it. The system rushes toward justice and throws away the key. We breathe easier. We condemn the inmate and we walk freely down the streets.

Justice has been served. Or has it? Scheck et. al. shows that underpaid/overworked defense attorneys, shoddy science, racial discrimination, and eyewitnesses who tell compelling narratives add up to blind justice. Literally blind. And not in the fair and impartial way.

We tacitly endorse a system that is efficient and “hard on crime” even at the cost of truth. Modern DNA analysis has shed light on the ranks of the wrongfully convicted and the ways our judicial system failed and continues to fail.

Scheck found that in 130 DNA exonerations, 101 were cases involved mistake identifications. In other words, the eyewitnesses fingered the wrong person. How can this be?

It turns out that eyewitnesses are notoriously bad at recalling their attackers. After the attack when the tension mounts to name the criminal, the victim has incredible pressure both internally and externally to produce a narrative of the attack.

The brain takes data from before and after the attack to form a narrative that explains the events and helps the victim process the experience.

It turns out the brain is much more interested in healing itself by means of a coherent narrative than it is about facts.

Scheck does not go deeply into pyschology in his book, but the problem of eyewitness accounts dovetails nicely with the subject matter of another book I am reading, Strangers to Ourselves by Timothy D. Wilson.

Although I have only just started to page through another book, I can already recommend Surviving Justice: America's Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated. While Sheck's book is a compelling third-person narrative, this collection is a rich and disturbiing collection of oral histories edited by Lola Vollen and Dave Eggers. (Yes, that Dave Eggers. What a man.)

While you may not have time to read Scheck or Eggers, at least visit the website for The Innocence Project to get a better idea of what is at stake for the wrongfully convicted.

Freakonomics: Success

Experts are made and practice matters, but birthdays do too

By Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt | May 7, 2006

If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in next month's World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: Elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the first six months of the year than in the later months.

If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this quirk to be even more pronounced.

On recent English teams, for instance, half of the elite teenage soccer players were born in January, February or March, with the other half spread out over the remaining nine months. In Germany, 52 elite youth players were born in the first three months of the year, with just four players born in the last three.

What might account for this? Here are a few guesses: a) certain astrological signs confer superior soccer skills; b) babies born in winter tend to have higher oxygen capacity, which increases soccer stamina; c) soccer-mad parents are more likely to conceive children in springtime, at the annual peak of soccer mania; d) none of the above.

Anders Ericsson, a 58-year-old psychology professor at Florida State University, says he believes strongly in ''none of the above."

He is the ringleader of what might be called the Expert Performance Movement, a loose coalition of scholars trying to answer an important and seemingly primordial question: When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that makes him good?

Ericsson, who grew up in Sweden, studied nuclear engineering until he realized he would have more opportunity to conduct his own research if he switched to psychology. His first experiment, nearly 30 years ago, involved memory: training a person to hear and then repeat a random series of numbers.

''With the first subject, after about 20 hours of training, his digit span had risen from seven to 20," Ericsson recalls. ''He kept improving, and after about 200 hours of training he had risen to over 80 numbers."

This success, coupled with later research showing that memory is not genetically determined, led Ericsson to conclude that the act of memorizing is more of a cognitive exercise than an intuitive one.

In other words, whatever innate differences two people may exhibit in their abilities to memorize, those differences are swamped by how well each person ''encodes" the information. And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was through a process known as deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task -- playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback, and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.

Ericsson and his colleagues have thus taken to studying expert performers in a wide range of pursuits, including soccer, golf, surgery, piano playing, Scrabble, writing, chess, software design, stock picking, and darts.

They gather all the data they can, not just performance statistics and biographical details but also the results of their own lab experiments with high achievers.

Their work, compiled in the ''Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance," a 900-page academic book that will be published next month, makes a rather startling assertion: The trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated.

Or, put another way, expert performers, whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming, are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect. These may be the sort of cliches that parents are fond of whispering to their children. But these particular cliches just happen to be true.

Ericsson's research suggests a third cliche as well: When it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love, because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good.

Most people naturally don't like to do things they aren't ''good" at. So they often give up, telling themselves they simply don't possess the talent for math or skiing or the violin. But what they really lack is the desire to be good and to undertake the deliberate practice that would make them better.

''I think the most general claim here," Ericsson says of his work, ''is that a lot of people believe there are some inherent limits they were born with. But there is surprisingly little hard evidence that anyone could attain any kind of exceptional performance without spending a lot of time perfecting it."

This is not to say that all people have equal potential. Michael Jordan, even if he hadn't spent countless hours in the gym, would still have been a better basketball player than most of us. But without those hours in the gym, he would never have become the player he was.

Ericsson's conclusions, if accurate, would seem to have broad applications. Students should be taught to follow their interests earlier in their schooling, the better to build their skills and acquire meaningful feedback. Senior citizens should be encouraged to acquire new skills, especially those thought to require ''talents" they previously believed they didn't possess.

And it would probably pay to rethink a great deal of medical training. Ericsson has noted that most doctors actually perform worse the longer they are out of medical school.

Surgeons, however, are an exception. That's because they are constantly exposed to two key elements of deliberate practice: immediate feedback and specific goal-setting.

The same is not true for, say, a mammographer. When a doctor reads a mammogram, she doesn't know for certain whether there is breast cancer. She will be able to know only weeks later, from a biopsy, or years later, when no cancer develops.

Without meaningful feedback, a doctor's ability actually deteriorates over time. Ericsson suggests a new mode of training.

''Imagine a situation where a doctor could diagnose mammograms from old cases and immediately get feedback of the correct diagnosis for each case," he says. ''Working in such a learning environment, a doctor might see more different cancers in one day than in a couple of years of normal practice."

If nothing else, the insights of Ericsson and his Expert Performance compatriots can explain the riddle of why so many elite soccer players are born earlier in the year.

Since youth sports are organized by age bracket, teams inevitably have a cutoff birth date. In the European youth soccer leagues, it's Dec. 31.

So when a coach is assessing two players in the same age bracket, one who happened to have been born in January and the other in December, the player born in January is likely to be bigger, stronger, more mature. Guess which player the coach is more likely to pick?

He may be mistaking maturity for ability, but he is making his selection nonetheless. And once chosen, those January-born players are the ones who, year after year, receive the training, the deliberate practice, and the feedback, to say nothing of the accompanying self-esteem, that will turn them into elites.

This may be bad news if you are a soccer mom or dad whose child was born in the wrong month. But keep practicing: A child conceived on a Sunday in early May would probably be born by next February, giving you a considerably better chance of watching the 2030 World Cup from the family section.

Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of ''Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything."

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Michael Cunningham "Speciman Days"

It is a struggle to get back into the “normal” flow of things. The rainy weather actually helps. I have hunkered down in one Newbury cafe or other with my shiny new laptop and tinkered away at my work-in-progress. Tuesday morning I took a break from my work to read the Boston Globe. There I saw that Boston University’s Book Store was hosting Michael Cunningham as part of their lecture series. L. was out of town; I was in a blue funk. I decided to kick myself out of the house and endure the rain for the chance to hear Cunningham read from his latest work.

The minute Cunningham entered the small room and approached the lectern, I was impressed. He just moves well. Tall, lean. Casual in jeans and black knit top. He pulled out his glasses and got his cold water bottle in place before he dove into his novel Specimen Days(already out in paperback). He explained that it is difficult to read from because it is a “big whackball of a book” that has three sections: a ghost story, science fiction, and a thriller. The characters move through each genre. And Walt Whitman serves as a kind of Virgil for the reader (I imagine, as right now this is the best book I still haven’t read yet).

His reading voice was bursty—coming in bits and punches, silent pauses while he took tiny gulps from this bottle. It was an urgent voice. In fact, it reminded me of my attempts to read my own work to a crowd. When I read other authors I cradle each word or set them up on pedestals or shoot them off like roman candles, trusting the semantic magic show created by a “real” author. When I read my own stuff, I am a clod. I am deeply worried that I might bore my audience. Or I want to stop and talk about each detail with raptures of joy or angst, depending.

But I digress. I am sure that Cunningham has read hundreds of times. He was probably more bored himself than afraid of boring us.

As he read from one of the sections, he described a burning building. A woman steps onto a window ledge and readies herself to take the awful plunge. I can’t quite recall the exact language, but an image of her with wide skirts billowing in the wind lingers in my imagination. The narrator describes her image up there in the window as precise and fragile.

He ended the section. Wiped his glasses on the bottom of his shirt. He continued to read.

Then it hit me: his prose is just like the woman he described in his story: precise wordsmithing yet fragile enough to resonate with emotion and image.

Does that make sense? His writing is that woman on the ledge, her skirts billowing in the wind. Ready to take the plunge. A slow motion fall toward death, but a death that is revelation to the young boy who watches her. The reader sees the images he creates with photographic precision and is left vulnerable to the wind strong enough to blow her skirts, yet eager enough to feed the flames that kill her.

He is famous for his book The Hours (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulker Award). But it is not that work that I recalled at that moment.

Instead a short story I had read recently and an off-hand remark about Cunnningham’s genius took center stage in my mind. Of course: This is the Michael Cunningham who wrote “White Angel,” a story that sheared off the top of my head and wore out my highlighter when I read it for the first time a few weeks ago.

Then I wanted to know: does he teach? and where?

During the questions and answer session he proved to be both quirky and intelligent. At least, I found him witty and jumped on board with his take on writing. When an audience member asked him why he writes stories that take place across eras, he replied that he wants to get as much time into his work as possible. He remarked that human nature has not changed but that the pace of our lives has dramatically altered. Our right now is deeply infused with historical awareness and a deep longing for the wonders the future will hold. He wants to get this sense of our time-consciousness into his novels.

Another person asked him about his interest in writing science fiction. He said that many people are shocked that he would attempt such a “lowly” art form. But he doesn’t see it that way. For generations other art forms have blended highbrow and lowbrow. Literature, however, is stodgy. He wants to play with the forms. Do the unexpected. See what comes. Yes, he thinks that most science fiction is “crap,” but the good stuff is really, really good. And he wanted to take a shot at it.

He was asked about his use of Walt Whitman in the book. He adores reading poetry, calling himself a “poetry hound.” And he worships Whitman because he was “the least stupid optimist” in American history. I mean he is “Walt ‘fucking’ Whitman,” he said. He was hesitant to use Whitman in this book, however. After all, he had made a bundle on Virginia Woolf. But nevertheless, he is there. It seems Cunningham uses him partly because Whitman, a man of our American past, is still here with us in our American identity. He is past, present, and future. And Cunningham sees that and wants to celebrate the miracle of ideas and objects that survive and endure, and even grow sacred.

Applause.

I hadn’t intended to buy the book. I came to get myself out of funk. But I had been swept off my feet. When he signed my book, he exuded warmth. Of course I asked him where he teaches. Brooklyn. Alas.

The Michael Cunningham Website
(with links to a biography, books, interviews, reviews, tour dates, etc.)

Interview with Cunningham about Specimen Days

The Cell, NewburyPort, Sailing on the Charles, and Kenya

Compared to the nuptial weekend, this weekend has been very "slow." The weekend was also "lonely" with just the two of us! I had plenty of time to indulge my honeymoon read: The Cellby Stephen King. The King of Creep. I finished it last night in the dead-dark after midnight. I had goosebumps trying to sneak quietly up the stairs to the bedroom--in my own apartment. People should read a King novel just to get jolted now and again. His writing works on you, you have to admit it. Besides high school kids read him (just like I did when I was in high school) and I want to keep up my cool factor.

We did make it up to Newburyport on Saturday. The first annual literary festival was the draw, but the good weather and a day trip from Boston were also key factors. We managed to hear one author speak.

We heard a local author reading from the second book in a planned trilogy. The Season of Open Water is set in a New England town entangled in the Prohibition-era rum-running trade. The author is Dawn Clifton Tripp. She was a good speaker, very candid and open. The historical material for the novel was culled from interviews she did with residents who either remember that era or remember the stories passed down through the generations.

When she read from her book I was convinced to read it, even though she is a "new" author for me! I refrained from purchasing it just yet. My book shelf is too deep as it is. But I will blog her here in my external memory. (A blog is wonderful way to store information in your virtual brain.)

My favorite parts of Newburyport: the tea house and the jewelry store on the corner. The tea house was brilliant--the world needs more tea houses. (Mark my word.) I loved the jewelry story because I discovered a brilliant sapphire that I can wear. It shines like a diamond, without all the political/metaphorical heaviness. I shall have a sapphire one day.

Today we set off to the North End in Boston to catch a day of free sailing--free boat trips are offered to the public at the start of each sailing season. Just as we went out the door, L. called a friend....who invited us to go sailing with him. We stopped in our tracks. He picked us up five minutes from our front door in his MIT sailboat. We cruised the Charles River. It was my very, very first time in a sailboat. It was brilliant. I could be converted to a life that involves more sailboats.

Tonight ends the week of unofficial honeymooning. I have found the destination for the official honeymoon: Kenya. Il Ngwesi. So start saving your pennies if you want to join us for a night sleeping with the lions!

Schlink: The Reader

Tonight we will discuss Berhard Schlink’s The Readerfor novel writing class. I admit: I read it twice. I will help lead the discussion and wanted to get a firm grasp on what has been called a “moral maze.” (I also had time due to a cancelled class.) The novel’s central love story involves a fifteen-year-old Michael and a much older woman, Hanna.

In the later parts of the novel Michael, a young law student, watches her trial for war crimes committed during the Holocaust. Michael realizes during the trial that Hanna is illiterate and unable to read the charges against her or set up a defense. She admits to her crimes readily. But because she is busy trying to hide her illiteracy, she appears more guilty than her fellow female guards. She is sentenced to life in prison.

Hanna spends eighteen years in jail, where she learns to read and write with the aid of books Michael reads on cassette and sends to her. The rest you will have to read for yourself. It is a post World War II tale that asks its readers to consider life in the aftermath of terrific violence.

Useful Links

Oprah Winfrey Show: discussion excerpts

Reading Discussion Questions

"Reader's Guide To Moral Maze"

Memorable Lines

"When rescue came, it was almost an assault." (4)

"I didn't reveal anything that I should have kept to myself. I kept something to myself that I should have revealed." (74)

"When I think about it now, I think that our eagerness to assimilate the horrors and our desire to make everyone else aware of them was in fact repulsive." (93)

"All survivor literature talks about this numbness, in which life's functions are reduced to a minimum, behavior becomes completely selfish and indifferent to others, and gassing and burning everyday occurrences." (103)

"Should we only fall silent in revulsion, shame, and guilt?" (104)

"If felt the numbness with which I had followed the horrors of the trial settling over the emotions and thoughts of the past few weeks. . . . But I felt it was right. It allowed me to return to and continue to live my everyday life." (160)

"Pointing at the guilty parties did not free us from shame, but at least it overcome the suffering we went through on account of it." (170)

"You can chase someone away by setting them in a niche." (199)

"The tectonic layers of our lives rest so tightly one on top of the other that we always come up against earlier events in later ones, not as matter that has been fully formed and pushed aside, but absolutely present and alive." (217)

Weekend of Mystery

I spent the past weekend clustered around a conference table with twelve other aspiring mystery writers. Actually I have never aspired to write mystery. In fact, except for a brief affair with Mary Higgins Clark in high school, I have rarely picked mysteries to read (plane rides being exceptions, but even for planes I prefer thrillers).

Yet I have known some teachers who teach mystery reading and writing. High school students love it. I thought: never me. I was just too uncomfortable as a nonreader of mystery. Following an old adage to do the thing that most scares me: I signed up for the weekend seminar at Grub Street to learn all I could about the genre as a teacher, not to mention pick up tips for fiction writing for my own novel-ever-in-progress and short stories.

Here is the class description:

Instructor: Hallie Ephron
2 days, 9AM - 4PM, includes hour for lunch
Fasten your seatbelts for this two-day crash course in mystery writing. Mystery author and Boston Globe crime fiction critic Hallie Ephron will step you through the process of turning a kernel of an idea into an intriguing mystery novel. You'll learn to capitalize on your writing strengths and shore up your weaknesses. The class will address:
* planning, twisting the plot, and constructing a credible surprise ending
* creating a compelling sleuth and a worthy villain
* deceiving and revealing with red herrings and clues
* writing investigation, spine-tingling suspense, and dramatic action
* revising-from sharpening characters, to optimizing pace, to smithing words
* making the reader care
Cost of registration includes a copy of Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel: How to Knock'em Dead with Style.

Ms. Ephron, author of several mysteries (see below), proved to be a dynamic teacher who is both a master of her material and an excellent presenter. We sat there and just absorbed the "bones" of a good mystery. We were given gems of practical tips for writing in the genre (and writing fiction in general), and how to establish oneself in the community.

One of her messages was: writing is not a miracle. It is hard work (massive amounts thereof) coupled with persistence that get published. She encouraged us to believe in our writing. If it is good, it will get published (after much rejection, of course). All in all, she was very positive without being falsely enthusiastic.

I had worried about dedicating an entire weekend to mystery writing. Now I can say that it has given me new ways to see my own novel (for example, how to build good dialogue and suspense). I may also teach mysteries next year armed with my new knowledge and my copy of Ms. Ephron's wonderful craft text: Writing and Selling Your Mystery Novel.

Hallie Ephron Mysteries
(writing as G.H.Ephron)

Amnesia
Addiction
Delusion
Obsessed
Guilt

Visit her website at http://hallieephron.com/

Writerly Quote of the Day

"A thing I have always loved about writing, or even simply intending to write, is that it makes attentiveness a habit of mind."--Marilynne Robinson

Gladwell on Freakonomics

Those who know me, know that I am a Tipping Point/Gladwell fan. I also enjoyed Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner.

Now Gladwell (on his very own BLOG) has commented on Freakonomics, a book he loves but yet has criticisms for as well.

Of course, this is fascinating stuff if you have read Malcolm and Freakonomics (plugging here).

But, even if you have not yet moved Jane Austen to the back burner in favor of a little modern cultural/pyschological/economical analysis. . . .this is still a worthy read.

Malcolm Gladwell's Blog Entry on Freakonomics

Plus, you will get to see a picture of Malcolm.

Eisenberg: Twilight of the Superheroes

I am currently paging my way through this very "hot" collection of short stories by Deborah Eisenberg. It seems it is getting press everywhere all over the place. So far, it deserves all the attention it has garnered.

Link of Note:

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

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."

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

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.

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)

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