the Remains of the Day

This book, Kazuo Ishiguro's many-prize-winning novel about, as my dad (who is not a literary critic) put it, actually quite aptly, "a boring butler who realises he's lived a boring life and gets sad", is an immediate contender for the best novel I've read all year.
   Straight to it!
   Mr Stevens is the butler of Darlington Hall and has been for several decades. He takes immense pride in his work, having learned from one of the best; his father, a butler of truly great standing in that profession, the key and elusive characteristic to which being 'dignity'. (Extensive sections of the novel are, admittedly, about being a great butler. However, unlike those gratuitous portions of Moby Dick that are just about how to identify, capture and dismember sperm whales, these are both [a] enjoyable to read thanks to the amusingly impervious politeness of Mr Stevens's narration, and [b] essential in building up our understanding of Stevens's identity as a butler, which is precisely what begins to slip in the novel's more poignant parts). In July 1956, he receives a letter from Mrs Benn, formerly Ms Kenton, who was the housekeeper at Darlington Hall for many years until leaving for marriage long ago. Stevens, on pretense of 'trying to persuade her to retake her position' following a troublesome staff plan, decides to visit her in Cornwall - having been more or less told by his American-nouveau-riche employer Mr Farraday to take some time off for a holiday, something Stevens has basically never had. So, our dignified narrator drives from Darlington Hall to Cornwall, rekindling along his way aspects of a humanity that he had, for the sake of professionalism as a butler, kept buried for most of his life. He begins to learn how to interact with strangers, converse in a non-servile manner, how to properly enjoy things for their own sake without quite so much concern for their organisation or efficiency.
   And, most importantly, he reflects on previous times in his life where he had failed to embrace these aspects of his personhood. A considerable bulk of the novel is comprised of flashbacks upon Stevens's life and career as a butler: the grandiose and perhaps-questionable political orchestrations of Lord Darlington (his late employer, the original owner of Darlington Hall); the professional glaze lent to any and every relationship rendering it stilted; previous times in which he was deeply proud of his work and other deep disappointments; the loss of his father; occasional odd little anecdotes; and the unpicked fruits of a possible friendship (or more) in his working relationship with Ms Kenton. It is in the jumps between these remembrances and Stevens's slowly shifting perspective in his present adventure that we see him begin to realise, with dawning immensity of regret, how much he has missed in his life by being too devoted to being a butler. Here he is, a decade or two from death's door, the best of his career behind him, few friends, no family, and nothing to show for himself but a lifetime of impeccably good service to gentlemen and their guests in stately homes.
   What is left for Stevens and people like him? 'The remains of the day', all the time we have left after we decide to start making the most of life outside our work, is all that we can make the most of, and so we should embrace that. Of course, that's not to say we shouldn't take pride in our work - Stevens's life is meaningful to him precisely because he has achieved so well within the spheres of butlerdom - but we cannot be confined to that. Ultimately this novel is a parable of how we enjoy our lives by living them, including our work, but never letting work dominate us such that it becomes an irremovable identity, locking us out of so much else that is special, as being a butler did to Stevens.
   There is also a fair deal of thought-provoking content about a variety of topics; class identity and how it changed in Britain between the '20s and the '50s (quite a bit), the boundaries between gentlemen and persons worthy of political decision-making, what it means to take pride in something, the ubiquity of etiquette, and what we choose to place our identity in and how that can hurt if misplaced.
   I may have made it sound deep but it's a relatively easy read. Extremely moving in parts, bubbling with restrained humour in others (one part fully gave me the giggles; Stevens's awkward endeavour to relay a certain piece of unexpected news to Mr Reginald Cardinal - you'll have to read it to find out), and throughout narrated by Mr Stevens's perfectly-pitched English propriety. It's a truly delightful book, although as noted by my dad one that has far much more character and emotion than it does plot, which personally I adore in a novel but lots of people find boring - if you're one of those people who does find that boring in a novel you probably shouldn't be reading this blog. In fact, no, I'm outright banning you. Read this novel and love it or get out.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid

This book by Jeff Kinney was 'alright'. It's my younger brother's. I was invited back to my family's house for tea but when I got here three hours ago they'd forgotten and were all out, so, naturally, I let myself in and found something to do, which in this case was unexpectedly enjoy (yes, I'm a snob, I often expect books, children's or not, that have had immediate commercial success and get turned into movies, to be rubbish) a novel written for people half my age. The book's about a weak, unpopular, socially awkward kid called Greg Heffley, who struggles with - whfff, everything. He's a typical post-childhood pre-pubescent boy, in that he's basically just despicable; he spends his whole life avoiding bullies, vaguely longing after unattainable girls, hungering for artificial screen-based entertainment, inexplicably irritating his parents, and politically planning incremental progression of his own popularity. He has one friend, a dude called Rowley who actually seems to have it more or less together. The diary charts his day-to-day failures at these and other goals, across the time frame of a year. He illustrates his diary with cartoons that help narrate the specific events in which he fails to not get beaten up, fails to make cool friends, fails to do that well in school, fails to conduct a functional respectful relationship with his family or friends. I'm making it sound pretty bleak, aren't I? Greg Heffley's life and diary perfectly encapsulates that weird pre-young-adult bleakness, where one is on the verge of adolescence but hasn't yet left childhood behind, and finds oneself unable to do anything properly. Props to Jeff Kinney for so ably replicating what it feels like during the two or three years that boys spend in that pit before they emerge as marginally-less-weird teenagers - and despite how dark I've been in this post, be assured that the book is a very non-existential wholeheartedly-if-sardonically-amusing read, perfectly appropriate for young readers. I found the realistic presentation of that 12-year-old mindset funny to read, especially given the overall quite 'nice' plot, but then on reflection realising that that's what 12-year-old boys are pretty much actually like, and how depressing is that. Anyway, I wrote this in a massive rush as like I said I'm at home and am writing this on my phone on the toilet and my poo finished ages ago and I heard my family come home about ten minutes ago but they don't know I'm here so I really want to end this post, go downstairs and have the tea that I came here to have. If this were a fantastic and thought-provoking book, I would edit this post later and do a much more thorough treatment, but it wasn't, it was just a fairly funny and disproportionately well-selling (told you I was a snob) children's novel in which the defining climax was that someone eats mouldy cheese. Should you read this book? Meh. Like I said, it surpassed my expectations, but it's just not what I would've wanted to read when I was the age that the people who are expected to read this book are. Boys who are Greg Heffley's age don't want to read about themselves, they want adventure, mystery, excitement, intrigue, magic, horror. It's like Adrian Mole but for kids, and that takes most of the fun out of it, albeit leaving most of the bleakness in. It'd be an alright present for a selfish socially-awkward 12-year-old, but then, it might just be too close to home and depress them. Dunno. There are definitely better ways to spend three hours. Aaaaaaaaaaand, paragraph.

   Flush.

the Meaning of Marriage

This book is an excellent extended series of explorations in the Christian concept of marriage by Timothy and Kathy Keller. I've been meaning to read it for a while, because my liberal-to-begin-with views on gender have broadened considerably over the last year or so and are increasingly at odds with much of what most other christians seem to think. While aware that some attempts to present a 'christian' position on gender are abysmal, I'm realising that my views are starting to risk conflict with the actual biblical basis of it all, and so, having trusted and massively grown thanks to his expositional guidance on work and justice, I turned to Tim Keller's book on marriage. Kathy, his wife, had a significant collaborative role in writing it, and she herself wrote the chapter and appendix on gender roles, so even further seeming like a legitimate source of argument on untangling the matter. I've had to be quite careful reading this book, as I'm sure any young single christian will be able to empathise with; as if anyone saw me reading it I would undoubtedly suffer a brief and awkward inquisition as to "oooh are you planning to marry someone sometime soon Isaac?" [no]. I also might have to be quite careful having read this book, as I'm mildly concerned that someone, upon seeing this blog post (or any of my other posts that discuss gender), may subject me to a disciplinary explanation of the real biblical case for complementarianism and why 'overly' egalitarian demands contradict God's plan for men and women. It was only my deep, habitual respect for this blog that drove me to write this post at all - and, since if anyone who's going to read it is going to be exposed to my honest exposition of my own views on the matter, I may as well try my best to make and justify my points of thought on the matter in full. As such, this will be a very long post, and quite a lot of it won't be about the book. In fact, I may as well get that out of the way early on.
   Kathy and Tim Keller have here written an extremely well-presented, strongly grounded in scripture, and persuasive account of the biblical notion of marriage. Chapter one explores the symbolic nature of it, with human union a physical imitation of God's interpersonal trinitarian love, an image fulfilled and perfected in Christ's marriage to the church as he unites it to himself and brings all those 'in him' into God. Chapter two explores how dependence not on each other but as a twosome on God through his Holy Spirit drives and helps sustain an ideal marriage. Chapter three explores the problem of marriage as a covenant bond of love, given the changeable nature of romantic feelings that we think of as necessary to 'love'; and how in changing our concept of what love is and how we can enact it, this failure of passion can be overcome by willpower. Chapter four explores the point of marriage as a worldly institution, and how it functions best when grounded on firm friendship. Chapter five explores what is entailed in getting to know, to a very full and deep extent, one's spouse, and having seen their best and worst, being able to consistently love them. Chapter six (and the appendix which is relevant to this chapter) explores how spouses can overcome the division of gender, loving and serving one another across it while recognising the social and theological constraint that it poses (more on this later). Chapter seven explores how marriage is actually not necessary for a human life; and how single people are to think about it and act accordingly. Chapter eight explores the purpose of sex as an aspect of human life in God's intention, and how and why it fits in with marriage in the ways that christians conventionally argue. It's all very readable and reasonable, laying out marriage's theological background and how the implications of this can be best practiced, with much food for thought throughout. I'd strongly recommend this book to any Christian, single or married.
   Right (if you were only reading this to find out about the book, you can stop now; from here onwards this post will be my attempt to explain how I've reconciled what has felt like a major inner conflict within my expanded worldview).
   So.
   I have saved, paused, and returned to the published-but-unfinished draft of this post so many times that it's now over a fortnight [make that a month] since I actually finished the book - I just can't bring myself to commence this explanatory bit. Please accept this apologetic placeholder until my motivation to justify my position coincides with a suitably long time in which I can sit and write it all. These posts, especially this post, can take a while, and I do have to do other things like eat and work and talk to people sometimes. If you really are itching for some of my liberal-Christian-feminist perspectives on gender to be aired, you're gonna have to wait. Sorry.
   [Finally getting round to tackling this, even though it shouldn't take too long. I'm leaving the placeholder in so that posterity can laugh at what a haphazardly procrastinatory blogger I am.]
   Basically, I believe that gender should be largely abolished. This is because it is responsible for upholding, and therefore perpetuating, deep-rooted inequalities and injustices. Susan Moller Okin convinced me of the moral/political points to this effect; my only qualms were that Christianity traditionally holds a fairly conservative view of gender that would not take kindly to a suggestion like this, and also, I wasn't convinced that gender was entirely normative. Cordelia Fine later persuaded me of the latter; she puts forward a pretty robust case that psychological sex differences are broadly unsupported by actual scientific findings, and instead makes compelling arguments for how socially normative constructs, such as gender, affect individuals in such an insidious way as to seem real and propagate themselves.
   Following conversations with Christian friends who seem naturally suspicious of 'feminism', I was repeatedly brought back to the idea of complementarianism. This is the theological view that men and women are created equal, but with differing roles, that complement each other in a relational sense as a man and woman together emulate the marriage-as-God's-love image that Tim and Kathy discuss in this book. The central part of this view is the man's headship; much as the Father is the most active agent of the trinity, the husband is to be the most active agent of a married couple. I still feel uncomfortable about this idea but the biblical case for it is quite clear. However. Kathy and Tim also explain, at great length, that the within-marriage dynamics of love absolutely should not be a power dynamic comparable to any human relationship that we are used to observing. If emulating trinitarian love, then both the wife and the husband should be constantly seeking to serve the other's best interests as reasonably and humbly as they can. This detooths all proper interpretations of complementarianism from excusing exploitation; the man's headship isn't to be seen as a heavenly justification of male dominance (and anyone who says or implies that it is should be outright challenged) but a trump card bestowed almost arbitrarily by God upon one of the genders so that individuals within a marriage have something to turn to if they ever come to an immovable standstill between their working out conflicts of loving each other in the best possible way. Of course, real humans are sinful, so we need to take such allowance of headship with a large pinch of salt and a much larger pinch of feminism-inspired church accountability. But headship in this very minimal final sense, something not supportive of inequality but demanding Christlikeness and self-giving, ultimately something that has only a theological component and is not intrinsic to the moral worth of either gender, is something with too strong a biblical case to ignore, and that I think can be included into a workable model of Christian feminist social justice in promoting equal rights and opportunities.
   The other thing I think should be kept, as it were, is the physical component; i.e. the direct correlation between sex and gender. I realise that when expounded even slightly within the Christian framework of marriage, this is literally homophobic, biphobic and transphobic - and that makes me very uncomfortable. Scripture is very clear on these points, and while my views on social policy are strongly pro-LGBT+ rights, my theological/philosophical view on the matter can't ignore the full weight of scripture, no matter how much I wished it weren't so. But anyway, the binary distinction between men and women in sexual partnership is another aspect of gender's theological basis that I feel has too strong a biblical case to disregard. Note however - this distinction is purely physical; any psychological, socioeconomic, cultural or otherwise normal personal variation in what one can reliably assume about a person's preferences and capabilities should be completely emptied out (thanks Cordelia). It's crucial to stress that the Christian view on gender need not be pegged to traditional views on gender; in fact I think the inegalitarian tendencies of those conservative views demand that with justice in mind Christians should move toward a more 'gender neutral' (in the cultural sense) position. Women having the same level of autonomy, in all social spheres, as men, is not an affront to God.
   So I'm left with a very minimal form of complementarianism, in which the entirety of gender can roughly summated in two points (each with hefty caveats):

• Theological component: male headship (though its assignment to 'him' is arbitrary between the genders, and in the context of proper Christlike love, as those within any Christian relationship but especially between members of a marriage should already by emulating, will also be invoked rarely and prayerfully and solely for the couple's good as a tool of lovingly jumping impasses in collective decision-making)
• Physical component: male and female partnership ('complementarianism' then is more or less reducible to heterosexuality and basic sex-related physical differences [i.e. cis-genderedness], as all other aspects of gender that one may expect here are normative and should have been abolished, by which I mean should not exist as restrictive forces on any male or female individual)

   What would this look like in practice? Hopefully a thoroughly fair co-incidence of Christian theology of sex and feminist social criticism. I'm sure, dear reader, you'll excuse me if I don't feel the need to draw a detailed picture of such a world, and let me finally finish this post, which, fortunately, I can now direct people to via hyperlink if ever I need to explain my views on gender, and therefore avoid having to ever think much about it again. Good night.

the Lovely Bones

This book, a bestselling novel by Alice Sebold, was, in hindsight, a fairly compelling read but not overly memorable or thought-provoking. I ploughed through it during the eighteen-ish hour coach journey back to Sheffield from Holland, selecting this as I thought it would be a nice easy read, which it mostly was, but for the solid punch of the first chapter, which I should have expected given that the central premise is that its narrator, Susie Salmon, has been murdered by a paedophile called Mr Harvey.

   Its opening scene then throws a lot at you quite heavily - the depiction of sexual threat and violence is gut-wrenchingly brutal, as are its echoes throughout. The rest of the novel then follows two plot threads: Susie's thoughts, reflections and memories, while she's looking down from her vantage point in heaven; and the continuing developments in the lives of her parents, siblings, schoolfriends, and murderer. The second of these dominates the bulk of the content, which I'm grateful for, as the first, though a nice concept for providing a stand for the narrator, I feel went too far in the posthumous world it tried to build, and risked toppling over the line between sentimental fiction and hashed-out fantasy. Sebold has woven an excellent cast of characters in the main story though; Susie's father and mother, sister Lindsey, brother Buckley, Ray and Ruana Singh, Sam and Hal Heckler, Ruth Connors, Len Fenerman; the people are believable and different, and as we follow them throughout the years after Susie's murder, it is the present of their lives that dominates, not the tragedy at the novel's beginning, and though even when at the close they have all fully moved past grief Susie is not forgotten - but the focus on the living is special, I think, as the life of the novel is held there. The emotional threads binding these characters are described extremely well, and the depth of sadness and relief in places is palpable. Even Mr Harvey is not sketched merely as a classic two-bit villain, but has his youth fleshed out enough for us to begin to see how someone might possibly become so irreparably immorally twisted - his deceptive encounters with the police also reflect a much more well-rounded side to evil men than I was expecting. One negative comment would be that some scenes (I'm thinking of the whole Susie's-adventures-in-heaven thread, but also in particular Mr Harvey's final appearance and a frankly weird encounter between Susie, Ray and Ruth toward the end) simply feel a bit silly; if the book was more determinedly supernatural in tone then fair enough, but it doesn't seem to make much effort to let these elements direct or influence the path of the story in any way, and just seem like an add-on that can justify what are otherwise blatant mushy cop-outs plot-wise. If this seems very specifically harsh, read chapter 22 (pfft, spoilers) and tell me it doesn't come across as daft.

   I'd recommend this book if you like prolonged emotional journeys filled with sparks of hope. The characters are well-drawn, the scenes and feelings elegantly crafted, the plot not particularly interesting and the themes not particularly deep but the people at the core of the novel make it somewhat compelling. An easy (although at more times upsetting than it is uplifting) read, with a rewarding finish despite what I felt were one or two major floppy aspects to the story.

Delusions of Gender

This book, a veritable bombshell by Cordelia Fine, deserves to (and probably will) go down as a classic of both iconoclastic feminism and popular (though highly academic) psychology. It was on the reading list for one of the topics in a philosophy module on feminism that I took last spring, so I borrowed it off a friend (thanks Charlotte) for a couple of references, and got quite taken in by how good it was, so, naturally, I acquired a cheap copy. It has been one of many that I've been breezing through during my current predicament (a family holiday - I've been in a hammock, drinking either tea or beer depending on the time of day, being slowly browned by the Dutch sunshine, working my way down the aforementioned stack of books, and occasionally accepting the prompts of my relatives to join them for some sort of 'compulsory fun', for pretty much the whole last week - absolutely ideal).
   Anyway, you're not here to read about my actual life (at least I don't think you are, like, I have no clue who reads this anyway as even on the best of days it's just my thoughts about random books, so you might well be a bit odd, no offence) - the book.
   It's a thorough, and I mean thorough, debunking of the gender difference psychology. Much popular 'knowledge' about gender differences is that they are innate, ingrained into the very being of men and women; their brains our wired differently which means they think, act, and react in very different ways, with men being more independent, aggressive, assertive, logical, and analytical, and women more empathetic, cooperative, interdependent, supportive, and emotionally savvy. Basically, men are great at being active agents doing whatever they want to do, and women are great at helping them by fulfilling roles of subservient femininity. This is an unavoidable situation based on how men's and women's brains fundamentally operate; it's unfortunate that it means a woman will be way less likely to ever become a president of something or that a man be an impeccable house-husband, but we can't really call this inequality - as it would be psychologically risky to try to encourage similar activity for men and women, given their basically different mental functions. It's better if culturally, we just accept that women are great at fulfilling their subordinate stereotype, and men can do whatever else they want (as long as it doesn't involve too much housework or feelings). This is a harshly straw-manned but not too inaccurate depiction of the position of most of those seeking to justify the status quo gender-wise. Lots of very depressingly well-selling books about gender difference (including this nugget of heretical pseudo-christian drivel), many hailing from the kind-of-reputable field of popular psychology (heard of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus? my A-level English Language teacher said it was, I quote, "pure bollocks", and after reading this I'm inclined to believe him) seek to prop up and confirm pretty much this situation. Gender inequality? It's not as big a problem as feminists would have you think, because men and women's brains are WAY different.
   You can probably tell that I don't buy this, and neither does Cordelia Fine, who just also happens to be an extremely well-reputed neuroscientist. She names this position 'neurosexism', the perpetuation of patriarchy through pretend psychology. I won't be able to even get close to explaining her full arguments or body of evidence (there's 42-pages of highly-scrutinised academic references, so I trust the expanse her scholarship), but as a general gist, neurosexism is bunk and gender is almost entirely normative.
   Part one of the book examines how our minds, being extremely complex things when operating in social contexts, take on board our own and others' presumptions in subconscious and largely unnoticed ways - leading to inadvertent but powerful assumptions about things (i.e. implicit bias - if you've never heard of this take this test and prepare to be terrified at how racist and sexist your subconscious probably is) that may adversely affect our capacity to relate to them. This means that if we're aware of gender stereotypes, we unwittingly become conduits for making ourselves and other people fall into line with them - scary stuff.
   Part two is a blow by blow examination of the core arguments made by neurosexists, the key experiments and data they use to back up their claims, and, calmly, Cordelia rips it all to shreds. The academic procedures of those who propagate neurosexism are appalling, making claims without substantiated evidence; the studies they do cite lack statistical reliability, and even where experiments do seem to imply something significant, there was generally some hefty oversight in the scientific method of setting it up. There is little robust evidence for brain gender differences existing, and masses upon masses of  non-gender-related psychological experimentation that treated men and women in the same way and worked - because, shock - their brains are actually very similar.
   Part three is an examination of the sinister, subversive, subliminal process called socialisation. If gender isn't wired innately into our brains, then how and why do men and women grow up to be different? Very easily, because of the deep-rooted subconscious effects outlined in part one being prevalent throughout a person's childhood. The normative aspects of gender (i.e. ALL expectations or presumptions about someone based on their sex) are extremely widespread and significant in human societies, so children, as they develop and work out how to take their place in the world, learn how to participate in the grand game of gender. Disconcertingly, part of learning the rules entails forgetting that it's a game at all, and entering into a lifelong pretense that the rules one abides by are in fact an irremovable part of who the player is as a woman/man.
   Throughout the course of her book, Cordelia Fine has not only done a no-holds-barred takedown of neurosexism (part 2), she has also built up a convincing case for how gender, as a normative construct rather than an innate psychological reality, can affect people's behaviour so deeply (part 1) and retain its presence across generations (part 3). Let me now place this book into the wider context of my own reading life. A while ago I became convinced (by S. M. Okin's little depth-charge of political philosophy, Justice, Gender and the Family) that gender, as a normative construct, was responsible for perpetuating gross societal inequality and should therefore have steps taken to disarm it as a normative force. My main remaining area of curiousity here then was whether gender was primarily normative, as opposed to being partly innate - and Fine has convinced me of the former, so, I guess, onwards with Okin's abolition of gender!
   What else can I say? Around the general framework of the points I've tried to overview here, there is an abundance of insightful and interesting food for thought on the topic of gender difference, human minds and behaviour, how we operate in societies, and so on. It's a difficult read given the sheer density and intensity of her scientific analysis and discussion, but she has an incredibly easy writing style to follow, making even the very complex points quite accessible. She's also hilarious - her acerbic waspish remarks about neurosexists and their ilk, not to mention the dry absurdity of mock-anecdotes that she uses to illustrate occasional points - I don't think I've laughed out loud at a non-fiction book as much as this one in ages. (Also, the title is a pun on 'delusions of grandeur' - something that I entirely failed to notice until half an hour ago, when my dad laughed at it and said "ah that's a clever title", much to my bafflement. Dunno.) If you're a self-avowed feminist, you should definitely read this book to provide ammunition in arguments with those who accept neurosexism. Conversely, if you're keen on social psychology and aren't entirely convinced one way or the other about gendered brain difference, you should definitely read this book. This probably isn't one for a general reader though, unless you're really interested - I mean, if you are a general reader and you've read all the way to the end of this post, you probably get the gist anyway, but hey, knock yourself out if you like the sound of it.

For Esmé - with Love and Squalor [and other stories]

This book, a collection of nine short stories by the late, lovable and enigmatic recluse of 20th-century American literature, J.D. Salinger, is just as (if not more) rewarding on this, my third reading of it. I decided to reread it because a particular adult cartoon, in its typical straddling of the fine line between genius and madness, decided to feature J. D. Salinger as a 'hahaha-I'm-not-dead-after-all-but-work-in-a-bike-shop-and-aspire-to-make-reality-TV' kind of character, and, with my having reread another of his amazing works earlier this year, the reminder stuck.
   Note - many of my overall reflections on the essense, spirit, and specialness of Salinger's writings are much the same, and I already went over a fair few of them in the post on Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: an Introduction, and also, having now begun to indulge my biblio-nostalgic cravings in this general direction and finding myself halfway through his published works again, so with only another two more to reread I will probably do so in the near future, and thus further extents of my thoughts on what makes Salinger's books so damn beautiful will have plenty opportunity to be aired. In light of this, I'll keep things to a rudimentary description of the stories here and fit my reflections surrounding them in later posts (despite my reasonable intention to keep this post shortish, any familiar reader will know this to be a farce).
   Anyway, these nine short stories. To outline their content as I will vaguely do so here is effectually pointless; for Salinger, style and substance are inseparable, and describing what are the actually-not-that-interesting events comprising these (and most of his) writings absurd, as the whole point of reading them at all is not to observe the events plotwise, like some cheap written-down Hollywood, but to glimpse the insights of human character and transcendent meaning in the way the explanations of these events unfold. Nonetheless, given the format and conventions of this blog, I feel you are owed at least a perfunctory synopsis of each:

• A Perfect Day for Bananafish: a woman reassures her mother over the phone from her hotel suite that the impromptu 'second honeymoon' her husband had taken them on was going well, and that despite her parents' continued concerns as to his mental stability, her husband was indeed functioning well and enjoying life. Meanwhile, on the nearby beach, her husband, none other than Seymour Glass (this is the family's first appearance), has a playful conversation with a child, returns to the suite, and ends the short story in an entirely unexpected manner.
• Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut: two old college roommates reconnect in a haphazard visit that becomes prolonged due to bad weather; amidst pleasant and witty conversation, the host's daughter has a bizarre crisis with imaginary friends, and the host is upset by discussing her light-hearted old flame (Walt Glass) who died in the war.
• Just Before the War with the Eskimos: a teenage girl follows her friend home to conclude a dispute over owed taxi-fares accrued following their tennis lessons. While the debtor goes to find her mother to get the money, the temporary guest is startled by the shambolic emergence of her eccentric elder brother, with whom she is subjected to a rather baffling but horizon-broadening (in the "well that was weird" sense) conversation.
• The Laughing Man: our narrator reminisces on his childhood baseball teacher, 'Chief', particularly stories he used to tell about a super-powerful Chinese criminal called the Laughing Man who could talk to animals. Despite both Chief and Laughing Man being pillars of inspiration to the young boys, circumstances that the listeners don't understand dampen the Chief's spirits, and he ends the stories quite unwholesomely.
• Down at the Dinghy: after a short conversation with her housekeeper and a visiting acquaintance reassuring them of her son's wellbeing and known whereabouts, Boo Boo Tannenbaum (nee Glass) ventures down to a small jetty on a nearby lake, where her young son is trying to escape home (again) in a rubber boat of which he has declared himself captain, and she tries to negotiate his return.
• For Esmé - with Love and Squalor: our narrator, who remains anonymous, wanders into a British town near where he is stationed during the war; he visits a local choir, then retreats to a café, where later one of the choirgirls and her family enter. Recognising him as an American soldier, she approaches, introduces herself as Esmé (and her recalcitrant younger brother as Charles) and tries to make intelligent conversation, including requesting he someday write something about squalor when she learns he's also a writer. They part ways. In the second part of the story, our narrator, in the wake of the war ending around him, struggles with post-traumatic stress and the squalor of victory in Bavaria; he then receives a many-times-lost-in-the-post letter from Esmé, which in its delicate sincerity is enough to propel this broken man back into recovery of all his faculties.
• Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes: late at night, a man is subjected to a lengthy phonecall from a friend who has worked himself into a drunken panic about his wife (who is late home again), whose subtle shades of disrespect for him have prompted suspicions as to her fidelity; in an impeccable work of mollifying, the phonecall-receiver calms down his friend enough for the whole thing to blow over nicely.
• De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period: a pretentious but skilled aspiring artist blags his way into a tutorship at an independent Toronto art academy, where he quickly finds himself growing bored and pessimistic about the point of such a job when all of the students whose art he is to provide critical feedback on seem to be incorrigibly awful - all but for one young nun, whose paintings strike him with a beauty self-evident enough that he seeks to himself contact her and urge her on, though his efforts are hindered and he grows only further dispirited.
• Teddy: the eponymous child, on a cruise liner with his aggressively leisure-oriented family returning from Europe (where he has been meeting with philosophers and professors to discuss religion and truth), wanders briefly around the ship, updates his journal, then is talked to by a young man, who is rightly baffled, as most readers probably are, by Teddy's decisive obfuscations of most clear ideas about life and death and such.

   Each story has an imponderable mysterious character of its own, and yet each have the same indefinable mingled tinges of awestruck sadness, shrewd curiousity, love and loneliness, sarcastic wit. Generally neurotic but pure at heart. I will try to discuss these elements of Salinger's writing in upcoming posts, whenever I get round to rereading Franny & Zooey and The Catcher in the Rye, which will hopefully be soon. In the meantime, I exhort you to follow me in reading these stories, and with them the other three books published by J. D. Salinger in his lifetime.

Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner?

This book, by Swedish columnist Katrine Marçal, actually took me quite by surprise - first in a bad way, but turning into a good way the further along I read. I was introduced to the book by a seminar on feminist economics that my friend Olivia ran for our campaigning group (I've definitely mentioned this before in other posts I think), which was extremely interesting and important, well attended, and had a brilliant title - the latter she admitted to having borrowed from this book.
   We are brought by this book to question everything that conventional economic wisdom tell us, and fails to tell us. Maybe there are a few theoretical kinks that could be ironed out, maybe there are a few presumptions that need reassessing in the face of actual data, maybe there are a few differences between schools of thought that could, in critical conversation, learn from each others' overlaps. But the main problem of economics is this: its central unshakeable dependence on Economic Man (let's call him Johnson), a hyper-rational utility-maximising agent who knows exactly what to want and do and how. All neoclassical theory is derived from the application of Johnson's character to aggregated decision-making throughout micro and macro systems. The problem? Oh, there are several. Johnson is not trustworthy (because why would he be? there is no room for normative fields like trust, moral obligation, social loyalty, and such, if one's core drive is utility maximisation), and he also, ostensibly, is not female. This second point may sound trivial but listen: our presumptions of economic possibility depend on individual agents being able to conduct their optimal lives with complete autonomy, but in real human history and society, the brute fact is that we don't - people do unpaid work for huge amounts of unseen unrecorded time just to help keep our daily functions ticking over. Hordes of invisible women support the 'autonomous' agency of their Johnsons by keeping their houses and families in order. Even the 'first economist' Adam Smith, who despite being a world-eminent moral philosopher for his theories of sentimental empathy and the importance of helping and caring, was waited on by his mother for his whole life before her death (if you were only reading this out of intrigue at the title, sorry for the spoiler).
   The book lays out pictures of Johnson (note: it does not call him this), and the implications for society and economics on presuming his presence in all persons, and then begins attacking both the unrealistic picture of humanity that Johnson is, both in terms of psychological behaviour and binding to social norms, roles, expectations, and relationships. I came to the book expecting a rigorous blow-by-blow exposé of where economics lacked feminism and how it could be patched up, hence my puzzled disappointment with the first few chapters - but then I realised what Marçal was doing, and it's a work far broader, deeper, more punchy and great. She has got right to the heart of what's wrong with neoclassical economics and in turn its apologism for neoliberal politics; they lack recognition of real human nature, which is not pure utility-maximisation but has many aspects including the need for love, care, and people; and they lack recognition of real human society, which is not composed of autonomous agents (with necessarily invisible women) but is complex and interdependent, with people relying on each other in relationships and bonds that arise from far more than an agreed you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours. I believe in this book, Marçal has shown us the ugliness of presumed selfishness, and how poorly this results in economic theory and policy. She has not written a book about feminist economics, rather it is a feminist means of crawling to the heart of economics so as to plant a bomb that destroys all our conventional understanding of the dismal science; feminism is a crucial part of the wider normative struggle for socioeconomic justice, and she does a superlative job in showing us why these aspects of human reality (especially including, given ongoing inequality, gender) matter to it.
   Her writing style I found it hard to adjust to liking. Though it is very lively and talkative, being aimed at quite a general readership, it seems very clunky and weirdly mismatched in tone - though I think, given how similar this complaint is to another that I had a while ago, maybe it's just hard to translate informal Swedish into comparably-nice English. Like I said, it is written accessibly, with her central narrative of deconstructing Johnson rendering all economic concepts easily intelligible (although don't make the same mistake I did; you should know that this is what she's doing, as a result she writes in ongoing metaphors quite extensively so some academic readers may have to step back a bit from how typical-non-fiction-ish this is).
   If you're looking for a book on feminist economics, this isn't it. But if you're interested in social justice generally, whether from a gender angle or an economic angle, or wherever, this book will help you develop a much closer understanding of the relationship between those issues, and how it all hinges on Johnson; that imaginary friend of economists and policymakers who has, without ever existing, bent their ideas to suit his ends - which, unsurprisingly, turn out to be those of the rich, the well-educated, the heterosexual, the healthy, the white, the unscrupulous, the male. We need to make the world run better for those who are not Johnson, which is in fact basically all of us, and a big part of starting to do this is changing economics by demonstrating that he, unlike Adam Smith's mum, is a fiction.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

This book by Hunter S. Thompson, self-described as 'a savage journey to the heart of the American dream', and gilded with cult status by the film of the same name starring Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro, is one that undergoes much-hyped controversy as a novel. It is also one that I will try not talk about at too great a length, for having only yesterday departed from a festival outside Amsterdam to be picked up by my family and driven to a quiet farmhouse in the rural southeastern Netherlands, I am quite tired, and have done almost nothing today but lounge in a hammock with a sequence of beverages and read this novel in effectively one sitting (or hammocking).

   Firstly I will say that if you happen to come across the illustrated version of the novel, be wary as they are quite horrifying, though their ink-spattered sketchy grotesqueness does perfectly fit the tone of the prose, which in Thompson's true gonzo-journalistic style, is frank, bizarre, meandering, relatively transparent, amusing and discomforting in roughly equal measure.

   In the book, the narrator (a quasi-autobiographical Hunter S. Thompson thinly disguised in the anonymity of fiction) who is a journalist, and his Samoan attorney Dr. Gonzo, have a series of increasingly reckless and ruinous drug-related misadventures, while trying to (and to some extent succeeding to) proceed with their normal actual responsibilities, such as reporting on a dirtbike race, mingling in casinos, and even infiltrating a police narcotics conference. There is kidnap, theft, fraud, hotel-trashing, threatening strangers, scaring a young hitchhiker senseless, botched attempts at interacting with a range of entertainment industries, all spun wilder and darker from the book's driving force: powerful psychoactive drugs. It's hilarious in a deranged kind of way; one will laugh, but to mask fearful apprehension at the sheer outrageous madness of the events depicted and the edge-of-sane-reality teeterings of its two main characters.

   And yet this is not just a mad hallucinogenic romp; this is a truly significant work of American literature. Howandwhy? Oh, many reasons which I'm not enough of an English Literature student to answer, nor do I wish to spend long enough on this post to even begin to elucidate, but there is one of the deeper points from it (that I drew anyway) that I found a compelling provocation to thought - and that is Hunter's damning appraisal of the West's hopes and dreams that had come to a fore in the decade previous. Through the 1960s, strong economies, powerful democratic movements toward ideals of peace and equality, the emergence of popular culture in new forms of publicly accessible music, and yes, the increasing prevalence of and interest in psychoactive substances, all coalesced together to form what I as a child-of-1993 would be dimly aware of only as some kind of glorious hippy revolution. Having been born thirty-three years late, I glean only leftover snippets of its fullness: Volkswagen campervans, the Beatles, LSD, women getting men's jobs, Martin Luther King, protesting the Vietnam war, the Kinks, realising the need for global ecological protection, sandals, weed, tie-die shirts and bandanas, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, free love, a non-ironic and not-yet-nerdy obsession with science fiction, eastern spiritualism and western existentialism smudged together in a wonderfully blurry mess of simple comfort for those who indulged themselves in this kind of Woodstock lifestyle: basically, for fun-loving social-justice-loving friendly folks, it was a superb decade, full of spunk and purpose and hope.
   But despite the zeitgeist momentum of this wondrous counterculture, it did not prevail; inequality, distrust and war won out. Why? I don't know exactly; nor does Hunter's narrator give a scintillating analysis (as one would expect from a gonzo-style stream-of-consciousness in the head of a perpetually-tripping amoral wonk), nor would I care to explain my thoughts on each minor possible hint. A major part is the co-opting by consumer mentality of hallucinogenic drugs, which in counterculture were part of expanding one's empathetic spirituality, connecting with the universe and such - but by the 1971 events of the novel, these now-illegal substances are, being illegal so one may as well abandon all other scruples along with respect for the law in taking them anyway, mere fuel for reckless hedonism. Mad selfish individuals now guzzle these 'heinous chemicals' as part of their wider rejection of anyone's attempt to limit their getting exactly what they want, rather than the hippy notion of seeing one's humbler part in a cohesive vibrant world. At the heart of the 1960s counterculture was the desire to see peace and happiness (embodied in the hippies themselves) drive forth and help establish the American Dream: but established powers have always had other plans, and the American Dream promulgated within the capitalist increasingly-isolationist West instead of this has been one of hedonism, of personal gain with only secondary regard to others and the world. The two main characters fulfil these anti-hippy characteristics ideally, and Las Vegas, with its unapologetic over-commodification of everything, fulfils as a city the culture that most directly dissolves any hippy-esque mindfulness. That drugs therefore are such a prominent part of the novel maybe to show how easy such tools of introspective positivity can be corrupted if used by people who just want to trip balls and steal cars and scare hotel clerks. I rarely include quotes from books in these posts, but at one point, there is a brilliant passage alluding to what I've been trying to lay out my thoughts about.

"...the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run... but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant... History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened... You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning... And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave... So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

   

   Anyway. This blog is called Thoughts on Books, so you have to expect dense paragraphs of near-nonsense thoughts like that sometimes, I'm sorry. I notice that my posts often begin with a grumpy promise that "this post will not be a long one because I'm tired and/or in a rush dammit" but then, ah, look, oh yes, oops, again. But yes, I would recommend this novel to anyone who has a stomach for the grotesquely funny-but-not-funny, and if you want to read deeper into the book than simply two nasty idiots having weird adventures on drugs, then, as I hope I've shown, it's the kind of book whereby you absolutely can.