Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers - Tim's Review

I recently read an an interesting comparison between two dominant strands of how we approach reading a book, particularly for reviewing -- the journalistic approach and the literary criticism approach. While I don't necessarily agree with all the observations, it does fairly define those approaches and, as this review demonstrates, I find myself largely in the journalistic view.

Why is that? Because the journalistic approach is based on the individual reader's response to a book. And that directly influences my view of Richard Powers' most recent novel, Generosity: An Enhancement. Put simply, I don't care for metafiction. So, it's not surprising that the fact it appears in the first paragraph affects my view of the book, although I can't honestly say to what extent.

Granted, the book is not full of passages telling you this is, in part, a story about someone writing a story. Yet the device is used enough to distract me and, more importantly, undercut the more interesting social issues the book presents. But for the metafictional elements, I have fairly high praise for Generosity, which made a number of "best of" lists when initially released last year and is now out in a trade paper edition.

Powers uses a two-track approach to the main story. (Or is it? Is metafiction about the story you think you're reading or the statements and suggestions of the fictional (?) author writing the fictional story?) One track is built around Russell Stone, a writer who basically quit writing when he learned how his first published articles affected the people who were the subjects. He now lives in a small Chicago apartment, editing the stories submitted for the entirely subscriber-generated content of a self-improvement magazine and, as the novel opens, is beginning a job teaching a creative nonfiction night class at a small nondescript college in downtown Chicago. Among his students is Thassadit Amzwar, an Algerian Berber refugee from the county's civil wars and political unrest. Despite the strife that marked her life, Amzwar seems immeasurably happy, ebullient to the point she even has a positive effect on her fellow students and people she encounters on the street. Enthralled by her disposition, Stone becomes concerned whether she has hypomania, one aspect of bipolar disorder, or if she is the rare hyperthermic, a person who is always happy and positive. He even consults a clinical psychologist with the school's counseling center, Candace Weld, who bears a striking resemblance to the lost love of Stone's life and also becomes drawn in by Amzwar's ubiquitous euphoria.

The other track centers on Tonia Schiff, the host of a cable television science show, who is preparing a episode about the potential benefits and ramifications of genomics and genetic engineering. The main subject of the program is Thomas Kurton, whose biotech companies are seeking ways to improve life through genetic engineering. When the two tracks cross, testing done on Amzwar by Kurton's company gives rise to a belief that the potential exists to create a "happiness gene" based on her genetic structure. Once Amzwar's identity leaks out after the publication of the journal article on the testing, her life changes dramatically.

Akin to how Powers' National Book Award-winning The Echo Maker examined aspects of neuropsychology, Generosity considers the implications of programming the genes of fetuses, creating drugs tailor-made for an individual's genetic code or extending life far beyond today's life expectancies -- and the profits to be made from patenting genetic information. Kurton see this as creating a wonderful new world. Stone and Schiff are more leery, In fact, after trying to grasp the journal article, Stone concludes:

Homo sapiens has already divided itself, if not into the Eloi and the Morlocks, then into demigods and dispossessed, those who can tame living chemistry and those who are mere downstream products. A tiny elite is assembling knowledge more magical than anything in Futopia, ... learning how a million proteins interact to assemble body and soul. Meanwhile, Stone and his 99.9 percent of the race can only sit by, helplessly illiterate, simply praying that the story will spare them.

Powers also takes Generosity beyond the ethical and social issues of the concept that happiness is simply a function of genetics. The characters also confront the more basic questions of how we define happiness or contentment, how we achieve -- or lose -- it, and how each of us views our lives and our world. As a result, it is not as deep an exploration into the science and tends to be more character driven than The Echo Maker.

Powers does have the ability to quickly capture characters. For example, saying one of the students in Stone's class is "a small, hard woman who must run with both wolves and scissors" does as much to establish that character as a couple paragraphs of description. At the same time, the main characters don't seem to be plumbed too much. Weld, for example, never really feels fully fleshed out and rarely comes across as much more than a convenient bridge between Stone's world and Kurton's. Moreover, every time the omniscient author interjects himself and reminds us the characters are his creation, their development and our ability to invest in them is undermined.

Setting aside my admitted distaste for metafiction, Generosity is more engaging than The Echo Maker. Particularly with its flaws, that doesn't make it a national award winning book. But if all we read were books that won awards, we would miss a lot of interesting works. Even for readers who may have my predilection toward metafiction, the flaws in Generosity are offset by the book's ideas and the way Powers approaches them. As such, it not only is worth reading, it may be a more accessible introduction to his style and approach for newcomers to his work.

(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie.)

The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vásquez - Tim's Review

If someone mentions South America and Nazis, what comes to mind? For many, it's the seemingly ubiquitous idea of Nazis escaping there after the war. While the concept has at least a few kernels of truth, it ignores or pushes aside events that swept up Latin America during the war.

South American writers, though, recognize that even if their nations were not combatants, they were not immune from the effects of Nazism and World War II. Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, in fact, created a fictional encyclopedia of ultra right-wing writers in North, Central and South America with his Nazi Literature in the Americas. More directly addressing the topic is The Informers, the first novel of Colombian author Juan Gabriel Vásquez translated into English.

The Informers is inspired by a woman of German-Jewish origin Vásquez met in late 1999 who emigrated to Colombia with her family as a teenager in 1938. In Vásquez's hands, she becomes Sara Guterman, the subject of a book written by Gabriel Santoro, a young Bogotá writer whose father of the same name is a nationally recognized and honored professor of rhetoric. Like her real life counterpart, Guterman's family moves to Colombia in the 1930s as her German Jewish parents fled Nazism. She becomes a lifelong friend of the senior Santoro.

In telling Guterman's story, Santoro fils also examines the impact of the "Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals," a list announced by the U.S. Government of some 1,800 individuals and entities in Latin American "deemed to be acting for the benefit of Germany and Italy." That list became the basis of blacklists in Colombia, with people informing on others, usually with German or Jewish backgrounds, for real or unfounded suspicion or out of self-interest. Many end up in internment camps in Colombia and, in fact, a number of Latin Americans were sent to the United States for internment. The senior Santoro tells his students there were "thousands of people who accused, who denounced, who informed." He teaches that "the system of blacklists gave power to the weak, and the weak are a majority. That was life during those years: a dictatorship of weakness. The dictatorship of resentment[.]"

Despite those comments and the fact he also teaches lawyers and judges, Santoro père disparages his son's book in a published review. Not only does he downplay its discussion of the blacklist years, he calls the book a "failure" and says listing its shortcomings "would be as futile as it would be exhausting." Father and son do not speak for three years after that.

The senior Santoro breaks the silence when he contacts his son to tell him he is facing a life-threatening health condition. The two begin to reconcile and when father survives the health scare, he views it as a new chance at life. While he at some point apologizes for the review, he never truly explains his reasons for it. After several months, though, the senior Santoro dies in a car accident. Before and after his father's death, with information provided by Guterman and his father's girlfriend (his own informers), Santoro begins to peel away layers of silence, misdirection and falsity to reveal a secret his father hid for decades and that explain his hostility to the book.

Anne McLean translates Vásquez's generally artful prose, with the latter being an author who doesn't indulge in trite metaphor. To the contrary, Santoro senior's "breathing whistled like a paper kite" and "the notion of his past bothered him like a raspberry seed stuck in his teeth." While the younger Santoro narrates the book, Vásquez is not tied to a single traditional narrative style. One part of The Informers is the first chapter of Sanotoro's book about Guterman. Other parts are almost transcript-like versions of interviews and yet another is basically a recording of a conversation between the younger Santoro and Guterman, consisting of lengthy passages of Guterman's recollection of events before and during the blacklist era. Some readers may see the changing formats format extending a slowly unfolding structure that is already intricate but it does not become a major distraction. Perhaps more noticeable is that the younger Santoro seems strangely aloof, as if viewing himself as a journalist requires him to approach the events and revelations that impact his life in that role.

The Informers, first published in translation in the U.S. in 2009 and now in a trade paper edition, doesn't limit itself to Colombia's World War II history. Electoral politics, internal armed conflict and terrorism, and the power of the drug cartels also come into play as Vásquez takes his story through some half century of Colombian history. Those items play a role in the author's own life, as the violence and unrest caused by guerrilla movements and the drug lords led him to Europe, where he now lives and writes in Barcelona. (Interestingly, Bolaño lived on the Mediterranean coast in Spain less than 50 miles from Barcelona when he wrote most of his novels.)

With The Informers, Vásquez provides another example of how literary fiction and many of its most common themes can illuminate seemingly forgotten history and its consequences. Not only do these themes help animate the story, they help engage the reader. The fact the themes explored in The Informers, such as the relationship of father and son, family secrets and betrayal, are age-old doesn't keep it from helping unfold 20th Century history.

(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie.)

Tim's 2009 Wrap Up Post

My goal for the challenge was six books and I reached that at the beginning of August. Read and reviewed for the challenge were:

• This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust. (Review):


• The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu (Review);
  


• Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories by Steven Millhauser. (Review);
  


• A Free Life by Ha Jin. (Review);
  


• Breath by Tim Winton. (Review); and,
  


• The Challenge: How a Maverick Navy Officer and a Young Law Professor Risked Their Careers to Defend the Constitution--and Won by Jonathan Mahler. (Review)
  

I'm guessing I read others in the last quarter of the year but was am too lazy to go back and look. It wasn't hard to see why the six listed books were considered notable. I enjoyed each in their own way. I would be hard-pressed to pick a favorite given their wide variety and range.

The quality of the books leads me to continue the challenge this year, again at the six book level. Part of the reason I'm staying with six is that, like Wendy, I read several from the latest lists before the lists were released. They include, with links to reviews on my blog:

• Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath by Michael and Elizabeth Norman. (Christian Science Monitor Best Books - Nonfiction) (Review);
  
  
• The Good Soldiers by David Finkel. (Christian Science Monitor Best Books - Nonfiction, NYT Most Notable, PW's Best Books of 2009);
  
  
• American Rust by Phillipp Meyer. (NYT Most Notable - Fiction);
  
  
• Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon. (NYT Most Notable - Fiction, 2010 Tournament of Books; PW's Best Books of 2009);
  
  
• Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, translated by Michael Hofmann (NYT Most Notable - Fiction) (Review);
  
  
• Invisible by Paul Auster (NYT Most Notable - Fiction) (Review);
  
  
• The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood (NYT Most Notable - Fiction, 2010 Tournament of Books) (Review);
  
  
• Columbine by Dave Cullen (NYT Most Notable - Nonfiction, PW's Best Books of 2009);
  
  
• Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town by Nick Reding (NYT Most Notable - Nonfiction);
  
  
• The City & The City by China Mieville (2010 Tournament of Books, PW's Best Books of 2009);
  
  
• Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America by Barbara Ehrenreich (PW's Best Books of 2009) (Review);
  
  
• Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer (PW's Best Books of 2009)

While I could probably just point to those dozen and call it good, I figure challenging myself to another six simply means I'll find additional worthy books I might not otherwise have read.

The Challenge, Jonathan Mahler

Writing a book about a case that works its way to the U.S. Supreme Court poses inherent problems for an author. Perhaps the most difficult is putting the story in terms the average reader can understand while not bungling or giving too short shrift to legal complexities. This is especially so when the author is not law-trained and the case involves a variety of procedural machinations and areas of law with which most lawyers have little familiarity.

In what he calls "primarily a book of reporting," Jonathan Mahler masters that fine line in The Challenge: How a Maverick Navy Officer and a Young Law Professor Risked Their Careers to Defend the Constitution--and Won. Mahler, a journalist, gives us an inside look at Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the decision that found the military commissions established by the Bush Administration to try Guantanamo Bay detainees were illegal. Given that it explores a civil lawsuit from beginning to end, it isn't the type of narrative that keeps readers on the edge of their seat. Yet Mahler creates a highly readable exploration of a landmark decision on presidential powers and the rule of law. In addition, the paperback edition released this week contains a new epilogue that brings readers up to date on what transpired after the Supreme Court's ruling.

The story begins, of course, with Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who was recruited to jihad. Mahler gives the impression that Hamdan saw being a jihadist more as steady employment than a political or religious mandate. He did, though, end up being Osama bin Laden's driver in Pakistan, where he was captured by local militia after the U.S. invasion. After being turned over to the U.S. military, he was held at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan and a prison in Pakistan before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2002. Although we get glimpses of Hamdan's life at Guantanamo and his claims of abuse, the story is told more from the legal perspective and the two lawyers who led the legal efforts on his behalf.

Charlie Swift, a member of the Navy Judge Advocate General's Corp (JAG), was assigned to the Office of Military Commissions in 2003. His job was to assist and defend detainees who would be tried in front of military commissions created by the Bush Administration for that purpose. Shortly after being assigned and before Hamdan became his client, Swift questioned the wisdom and legality of the commissions. Yet any challenge to them presented its own problems. How likely are military commissions to declare themselves illegal? But could a JAG officer sue the nation's commander in chief?

Shortly after the defense unit was set up, Neal Katyal, then a law professor at Georgetown University, emailed the head of the unit. Katyal, the son of Indian immigrants, had co-authored a law review article on the presidential order establishing the commissions. He urged they be challenged in federal court and volunteered his assistance. After they met, Swift realized Katyal had knowledge, skills and tools he lacked to adequately and fully pursue a court challenge on his own.

The Challenge details the twists and turns in and roadblocks to the litigation. To begin with, because Guantanamo was in Cuba, there was serious question whether Hamdan could sue in the U.S. Once that hurdle was surmounted, there were questions about whether the courts should abstain until the commissions had actually heard cases and the extent of their power to review what a president has done in a time of war. While Swift continued to protect Hamdan's interests on the military commission end, he and Katyal, with assistance from the Seattle law firm of Perkins Coie, filed suit in federal court in April 2004. They won at the trial court level in a ruling that exceeded their hopes. But in July 2005, a three-judge federal court of appeals panel reversed the decision. One of those judges was John Roberts. Four days after the ruling, Roberts was nominated by President Bush to become chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Getting the Supreme Court to hear a case is difficult any time. But the Hamdan case had even more roadblocks put in its path as Congress enacted legislation that sought to abolish jurisdiction over the proceeding. That forced Katyal to also wage a battle on the Congressional front. And perhaps demonstrating the government's attitude toward detainees like Hamdan, when the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan's favor and Katyal and Swift went to meet with him at Guantanamo, they were told they couldn't bring in a copy of the decision because the rules forbid bringing in outside information. It took 30 minutes of argument and a request to see a superior officer before Hamdan could actually see the written opinion in his own court case.

Mahler's recounting of the road from Pakistan to the Supreme Court relies on hundreds of hours of interviews with Swift and Katyal (he was not permitted to interview Hamdan). The reader is not only taken inside their strategy but the differences of opinion on strategy, their personality and their personal lives. Yet Mahler avoids a simple dry recounting. We learn that due to a lawsuit after Katyal's father lost his job, his parents had "a visceral hatred of lawyers." Although the front man in the media, Swift is not portrayed as a Navy officer in shining armor but a man with an ego as well as attention deficit disorder. The Challenge also often reflects the differences between not only trial and appellate lawyers but also between legal academia and the real world. Thus, after Katyal enlisted some law students to help him draft the initial filing, Perkins Coie wanted it drastically rewritten because "it read more like a law review article than a legal action." This would be a common theme as the case proceeded.

While the Supreme court decision established that military commissions must apply appropriate constitutional and legal procedures, it did not mean Hamdan was free. And while the initial book closes with Swift leaving the service because he was passed over for promotion twice while representing Hamdan (Katyal was named deputy solicitor general by President Obama in January 2009), the epilogue brings us up to date on Hamdan's case. It details his trial in July and August 2008 before a military commission created by Congress that applied rules and procedures the Bush commissions did not. Although convicted, the military jury gave him a sentence only five and a half months longer than he had already been detained. Thus, in November 2008, Hamdan was put on a military plane and flown back to Yemen, where he served the last month of his sentence.

Thus, some seven years after being detained, Hamdan returned home. None of us will probably ever know the nature and extent of his involvement in al-Qaeda. What we do know is that the case that bears his name confirms what Swift told the Senate Judiciary Committee before it even reached the Supreme Court, the way we search for accountability "says as much about the society that holds the trial, as it does about the individual before it."

---

"The rule of law is what I fight for," [the Marine colonel] told Swift. "Don't stop."

Jonathan Mahler, The Challenge

Breath by Tim Winton

You could summarize Tim Winton's Breath by saying it's a novel about a two Australian teenagers who perfect their surfing skills under the tutelage of a reclusive mentor. Of course, that would be like saying Fight Club is a novel about young men in an illicit fighting club.

Breath may be built around surfing but the story, told from the viewpoint of Bruce "Pikelet" Pike, is about what the title says -- breath, both as a life sustainer and as a metaphor. Pike's story focuses on his relationship with his best friend, Ivan "Loonie" Loon, and how Bill "Sando" Sanderson, a star surfer, takes them under his wing and becomes their guru to the dismay and resigned acceptance of Sanderson's wife, Eva. Breath serves to illustrate the routine of life and how the desire to challenge that routine can be, at the same time, exhilarating and dangerous to the point of deadly.

Within a moment of a newborn's first "rude shock of respiration," breathing becomes so routine we rarely give it another thought unless and until it is threatened. Thus, Pike wonders over the years whether the risks he took with Loonie, Sando and Eva "were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath." While an adult might deplore risks they took when young, as a youth the sense is "that life renders you powerless by dragging you back to it, breath upon breath upon breath in an endless capitulation to biological routine, and that the human will to control is as much about asserting power over your own body as exercising it on others."

This portrayal of breath appears at the outset of the novel, years after the main events. It is also a focus of Pikelet and the appropriately nicknamed Loonie as they rebel against the mundaneness of their life in a small town in relatively remote western Australia. It starts with challenging each other to see who can dive and hold their breath for the longest period of time, often pushing themselves to the point of blacking out. Their feats produce exhilaration even though fraught with disaster.

Pike and Loonie also become enthralled with surfing and come to meet and know Sando, a former world class surfer who, with his wife, has become essentially a hippie recluse. Sando sees in them a capacity to take on surfing challenges above and beyond ordinary mortals. Thus, not only does he take these barely teenaged boys to surf in shark-haunted waters, he teaches them how to analyze where storms will produce the biggest swells and takes them miles into the ocean to challenge huge waves only he has surfed.

Loonie and Pikelet encounter similar as well as differing coming of age challenges, some of which they will exult over, others of which will scar them for life. Throughout the book, there is an undercurrent of walking the line between acceptable risk and disaster. Breath doesn't try to tell us where to find the appropriate ground among routine, challenge and jeopardy. Instead, breath becomes a vehicle by which to reflect upon adventure and addiction, courage and self-destruction.

A Free Life, Ha Jin

Some contend that the term literary fiction is so overused and broad, it now amounts to little more than a name for a recent genre. And if you're an illiterati like me, you might consider literary fiction to be like pornography -- I can't define it but "I know it when I see it." Applying that standard to A Free Life, the most recent novel by award-winning Chinese-American author Ha Jin, erases any doubt it qualifies as literary fiction.

At its most simple, A Free Life traces the story of Nan and Pingping Wu, Chinese immigrants chasing the American dream. Yet while a tale of immigrants in modern America, it also reveals a core commonality. The Wus are dealing with the day to day events of work and life, events that so often seem routine and constant but which ultimately add up to goals realized and dreams unfulfilled. And like life, A Free Life unfolds and reveals itself slowly, consuming some 650 pages in its new trade paper edition. There are ups and downs but it isn't a roller coaster ride.

A purposeful sameness is actually what the Wus want. "'I hope we just live a life similar to others' here, making some money and having our own home, so that every day will be the same as the previous one," Pingping tells Nan. Despite the fact we are observing ordinary lives -- at least ordinary for modern immigrants -- Jin's style not only keeps us reading but generally wanting to press forward to see how the Wus will live and how their lives will turn out. To a certain extent, A Free Life seems almost an invitation to savor our own life experiences as much as we are induced to appreciate the Wus'. Still, even significant events, such as a miscarriage or a brief visit to China, are relayed in the same easy style, even though the reader may want more than a continually even keel.

Nan and Pingping aren't the happiest couple. Even though Pingping loves Nan deeply, he still pines after his first love, something Pingping knows. As the novel opens, they are awaiting in the arrival of their six-year-old son Taotao. They left him with relatives in China when they first came to the U.S., where Nan was a graduate student in political science in Boston. The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 convince Nan to not only stay in the United States but to abandon his studies. Despite being college-educated and long dreaming of being a poet, Nan takes on a variety of low-paying jobs such as night watchman and dishwasher to provide food and shelter for his family.

Ultimately, the save enough money to make a down payment on a Chinese restaurant in the Atlanta suburbs. Working 14 hours a day, Nan and Pingping first make sure they have the business paid for so no one can take it from them. Then, each bank deposit goes toward paying for the house they've found. Even as their relationship grows stronger, Nan still desires to be a poet, a dream he defers because of the obligations of work and family, or so he tells himself.

Jin, an immigrant himself, explores the contradictions and ironies of the immigrant experience in a variety of ways. For example, shortly after his arrival Taotao is puzzled by a fortune cookie they receive with a Chinese meal. Born and raised in China, he's never seen this American creation before. Years later, when Nan, now the accomplished owner and cook in a Chinese restaurant returns to China to visit his family, he finds the food wanting.

Even the title hints of contrasts. Nan and Pingping have more freedom to pursue their dreams than in China. Yet they are almost enslaved by their desire to make their business a success. Nan and Pingping have more freedom to control their lives than in China. Yet despite owning and running a successful business, they can't afford health insurance and dental visits. Nan and Pingping are entirely free to pursue the American dream as they perceive it, although never being totally free of their upbringing. Yet perhaps the ultimate proof that they can become "Americanized" -- at least Nan -- comes as they are realizing their dream.

When a fellow Chinese immigrant frequently praises Nan for having everything -- a beautiful and devoted wife, a son, a home and a business of his own -- it doesn't give Nan succor. Rather, the words leave him wondering why he "didn't feel as content as he should." Likewise, when the Wus finally pay off their home mortgage -- in less than five years -- "a kind of disappointment sank into his heart. .... He should feel successful. But somehow the success didn't mean as much to him as he should." Must the part of Nan that still desires to be a poet always succumb to the dream of success?

It does not take long for Jin's concise language, short chapters and unhurried approach to prove that literary fiction need not be immersed in metaphor or allegory. Without you perhaps quite realizing it, A Free Life wraps you in how an immigrant's history gives unique expression to the American dream and how that dream influences and affects their lives and relationships. Some may claim the book is too dry or too slow. Yet whether in terms of style or content, Jin still accomplishes much.

(Originally posted at Blogcritics and A Progressive on the Prairie.)

Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories by Steven Millhauser

A number of the characters in the short stories that comprise Steven Millhauser's Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories don't look at others straight on or are even hidden in darkness. That seems appropriate. Millhauser's work tends to present a view of parts of life and the human experience that most others don't see or for which they lack the imagination.

This is seen from the outset of the book. Like the movies used to, it begins with a section called "Opening Cartoon." But Millhauser's "Cat 'N' Mouse" story gives a different perspective on the never-ending battle between Tom and Jerry and actually considers what each of them may be thinking. The balance of the collection consists of three themed sections, each with four stories related to or perhaps inspired by the titles of the section, "Vanishing Acts," "Impossible Architectures" and "Heretical Histories." Yet each section still tends to examine people, ideas and life from a somewhat uncommon perspective or one we might overlook.

That is undoubtedly part of the reason The New York Times Book Review named Dangerous Laughter one of its 10 best books of 2008, a fairly heady accomplishment for a collection of short stories. Not only are the stories well written, Millhauser skillfully handles a wide range of styles. Some stories are cast somewhere in a ground between science fiction and fable. Others take aspects of modern society to another level while still others are based in more traditional tales to which Millhauser adds a somewhat different take.

Some of the strongest are those told from the first person, such as "The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman." Its narrator isn't bothered just by the fact the title character disappeared from her apartment. Instead, realizing he went to school with the young woman, he struggles with his own and the community's "failure of memory" and how that may affect being able to find her.

I felt that we were guilty of some crime. For it seemed to me that we who had seen her now and then out of the corner of our eyes, we who had seen her without seeing her, who without malice had failed to give her our full attention, were already preparing her for the fate that overtook her, were already, in a sense not yet clear to me, pushing her in the direction of disappearance.

Thus, although originally cast as a mystery of sorts, the focus is not whether the police solve the case. Instead, it asks why we so easily overlook or ignore people and things.

But Millhauser doesn't rely only upon individuals and individual failings or problems to intrigue the reader. There is a surprisingly broad range of topics and sources for the 13 tales. "The Dome" calls to mind William Kowinski's phrase "the malling of America" as it examines the gradual "doming of America." Meanwhile, "The Tower" goes back further, undoubtedly having its original genesis in the Old Testament tale of the Tower of Babel. "The Other Town" examines voyeurism and reality, as well as our concepts of history, the latter also being a focus of "Here at the Historical Society." Each of the last three carries echoes of the idea that dreams -- and even what we perceive as reality -- may at times be hollow or illusion, a concept explored in Millhauser's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer. Even fashion trends and a fanciful invention abandoned by Thomas Edison serve as vehicles for Millhauser's imagination.

Almost any reader will find something to their taste in Dangerous Laughter. Yet its real strength is that readers will also find jewels they may never have anticipated or expected.

(Crossposted at A Progressive on the Prairie and Blogcritics.)

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Many people believe the U.S. is in a mess. But the history David Hajdu recounts in his latest book might provide a handy scapegoat: comic books. Stop and think about it. For nearly two decades, the men in the Oval Office -- and even longer for Congress -- have been of the generation that grew up reading comic books, a communication form claimed to amount to little more than "cultural slaughter of the innocents."

The latter phrase is just one of many epithets -- and laws -- thrown at comic books from the 1940s through the mid-1950s, as Hajdu details in The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. Recently released in a paperback edition, the book traces a popular culture battle between two generations, a battle of mores in which rhetoric outweighed fact and that often reflected societal change.

Here's how bad comic books were, according to those who campaigned against them: "I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry." "The old dime novels in which an occasional redskin bit the dust were classic literature compared to the sadistic drivel pouring from the presses today." Comic books are "the greatest intellectual narcotic on the market.... Every hour spent in reading comics an hour in which all inner growth is stopped."

Relying upon extensive interviews with those in the comic book industry and historical records, Hajdu shows the evolution of the war, its ebb and flow and its combatants and victims. The Ten-Cent Plague takes us from the earliest comics, such as the Katzenjammer Kids in the Sunday papers, through the evolution of not only comic books but how they spawned publications like Mad magazine. Once they graduated from booklet reprints of the Sunday funnies, comics relied heavily on crime stories, whether it was a detective, Superman or some other character. But adults began to view these comics not as cautionary tales but ones that undermined the morals of youth.

As early as 1940, one newspaper series accused "these lurid publications" of depending upon "mayhem, murder, torture and abduction." In the years immediately following World War II, these claims found a wider audience among a populous no longer focused on a war (one in which comic book crime fighters helped battle the Axis). With no evidentiary basis, juvenile delinquency was laid at the feet of the crime comics. Communities throughout the country took steps to ban comics containing "objectionable material." The city of Cleveland even assigned two police officers to a permanent comic book detail.

Government wasn't alone. The Catholic Church and other organizations took stands against comics. They encouraged the public to boycott stores that sold comics and encouraged children to bring in comic books perceived as objectionable. The latter frequently led to public burnings of comic books. That, however, provoked a bit of a backlash, with the bonfires perhaps too closely resembling the all too recent book burnings by the Nazis.

Hajdu also shows how the comics industry wised up. In addition to creating a largely ineffective code, "romance" became the new focus. And like much of popular culture, imitation was the standard. At the end of 1947, only one romance comic was being published; three more were added in 1948. With the increasing criticism of crime comics during those years, though, there were 148 romance comics in 1950, issued by 26 different publishers. That didn't necessarily make them any less subversive. At a time when domestic bliss was the mainstream story line, the comics rarely focused on happy couples. Rather, the stories often tended to suggest that domestic life in the suburbs was the equivalent of the "levels of Hell."

But the romance fad, too, began to wane. The new focus became horror and the macabre. By the end of 1952, nearly one-third of all comics were of the horror genre, with more than a dozen publishers churning out 150 horror-oriented titles. And as the blood and gore increased, things got hot again, so hot that Congressional hearings were held across the country in 1953 and 1954, some of which were televised.

This is where The Ten-Cent Plague may be at its best. Hajdu compares and contrasts McCarthyism and the renewed attacks on comics as a cause of juvenile delinquency. "It was a bad time to be weird," one comic book artist told Hajdu. "You were either a Communist or a juvenile delinquent." He examines the lack of foundation for the "scientific" studies of the leading critic of the effect of comic books on youth. The book vividly details the televised hearings in April 1954, particularly the events leading to and the testimony of Bill Gaines, the owner of EC Comics. With one impromptu answer to a question, Gaines unwittingly helped seal the fate of comic books, the enactment of laws throughout the country regulating comic books and the adoption of a comic book code with provisions that, among other things, forbid "disrespect for established authority."

The impact was dramatic. Some 18 months after Gaines' testimony, EC Comics, once one of the major players in the industry, issued its last comic book. The only survivor was Mad, which EC moved to the magazine section of the newsstands. EC wasn't alone. Between 1954 and 1956, more than half the comic books sold on newsstands disappeared and the number of titles dropped by nearly two-thirds. One of the more sobering aspects of the book is an appendix listing more than 800 individuals who were among the "artists, writers, and others who never again worked in comics after the purge of the 1950s."

While The Ten-Cent Plague can tend to drag a bit at times, it seems to gain momentum as it moves toward this climactic moment. Moreover, Hajdu doesn't focus just on the events but gives a feel for the people involved in the profession. And without coming right out and saying so, he leaves us with the conviction that if the country is messed up today, it certainly isn't due to comic books.

(Also posted at A Progressive on the Prairie and Blogcritics)

This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust

Mind-numbing. That's the only way to describe the casualties from America's Civil War. For example:

• An estimated 620,000 soldiers died between 1861 and 1865, roughly the same number as in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined.


• While three out of four white men of military age in the South became soldiers, one in five did not survive the war, three times the death rate of their Yankee counterparts.


• Following the three-day battle at Gettysburg in July 1863, n estimated six million pounds of human and animal carcasses lay on the battlefield.


• About half of all the soldiers who died ended up "unknown" due to lack of record-keeping, an inability to identify them or even being vaporized.


• So many families lost loved ones that stores and catalogs specialized in mourning apparel.

But numbers never can and do not tell the story. As Drew Gilpin Faust explores in This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, the massive number of deaths embarked America on "a new relationship with death," one that transformed society, culture and politics. By relying heavily on letters and other personal documents of combatants, their families and others, she puts more of an individual prism on the societal and personal effects.

Faust, president of Harvard University and the author of five previous books dealing with the South or the Civil War, starts with the 19th Century concept of death. Nearly 150 years later, it's easy to miss the fact that when the Civil War broke out, most people did not die in hospitals; they died at home with family members in attendance. In part because of that, the concept of a "Good Death" prevailed. This was a death in which an individual not only had time to accept their fate but to ensure their family and friends knew they were looking forward to salvation and to express their last words. By being present, family members could assure themselves that they would all be reunited some day. Yet with thousands of soldiers dying far from home and family and often alone, the Civil War was "an exemplary text on how not to die." This would bring at least one change to our views of "good" deaths that exists today. Dying bravely in service to the country became an avenue of dying well.

Still, the concept of the Good Death led many soldiers to write the families of their deceased comrades, assuring them their husband, son or brother had died a good death. And while the governments attempted to begin keeping records of fatalities during the war, none of the paperwork was used to notify the deceased's family. As a result, absent a letter or information obtained through private relief organizations, families had no idea if their loved one was alive. Even though the war would show the need for gathering accurate information, some families were left wondering for years after the war had ended, helping spur the growth of the spiritualist movement

The thousands of fatalities meant something else -- thousands of bodies. Yet neither the North nor the South had any system in place to deal with the bodies. There were no regular burial details or any graves registration units. Complicating the situation was that battles could last for days and by the time they were over, thousands of bodies lay strewn across the fields. Heat and decomposition merely made the task that much worse. One letter writer said the "mephitic effluvia" of rotting bodies could be smelled for miles. Quoting from that same letter, Faust writes, "Men had become putrefied meat, "not so much killed as slaughtered, with 'nothing to distinguish them from so many animals.'" Although dealing with a charnel house, This Republic of Suffering explores how the development of embalming and undertaking advanced because of such mass slaughter.

Likewise, the massive number of deaths would lead to the creation of our national cemetery system. It was only after the war, though, that a concerted effort was made to locate graves on and near battlefields. Yet even that caused division. The efforts focused exclusively on Union soldiers. Not only were residents of the former Confederate States left to deal with locating and reburying their dead without government help, Faust points out that not only did the Southern funerals and cemetery dedications serve to honor the dead, they become a mechanism and symbol for honoring the principles of the Confederacy. It would prove fertile ground for the coming Jim Crow years.

Faust's well-written analysis of the scope of the impact extends even to literature. Walt Whitman's experience as a hospital volunteer during the war impacted his writing from that point. In addition, Faust keenly observes that while the American public was grasping to comprehend all this death, many of the same questions were crucial to the writing of Ambrose Bierce, Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. These writers, according to Faust, "transformed the need to grapple with the meaning of national conflagration into broad and lasting questions about the foundations of religion and human understanding."

Insight and observations like that placed This Republic of Suffering on many "best of" lists for 2008 and made it a finalist for both the National Book Award and the still to be awarded National Book Critics Circle Book Awards. Near the conclusion of the book, Faust observes a particular dilemma at the core of trying to understand the deaths caused by the war: "how to grasp the significance of a single death and the meaning of hundreds of thousands." That dilemma exists with every armed conflict. But Faust's unique perspective takes us beyond the obvious achievements of the Civil War to see how broadly it impacted our society and culture.

(Also posted at A Progressive on the Prairie and Blogcritics.)