Review of Don DeLillo's "Cosmopolis"

Don DeLillo, bless his heart. He certainly does try, but he just strikes me as one of those writers that I can admire but not quite bring myself to like. Then again, when you’re a writer who insists upon writing what he sees and experiences (and this is the best kind of writer, no doubt), and you live in a world of relentless corporate capitalism where ideas and even people can be bought and sold, the books you write are going to be far from attractive. They will tell you an unvarnished truth, certainly … but sometimes I like the novels I read to whisper a sweet lie into my ear.

As far as I can tell, Don DeLillo’s fictional concerns have been much the same for the last generation – at least since “White Noise.” To me, who admittedly has read only three or four of his books in a very nonsystematic way over a period of about a decade, this can result in an overall impression that the books are much the same, with only the characters really being changed out. The same themes continue: technology and the ways that it eerily impinges on personal privacy; how enormous wealth flattens the world and turns everything into an object for buying or selling, what life is like in a Miltonic vision of greed, chaos, and soul-squandering. You know, the usual.

In DeLillo’s defense, his prose style has been carefully and meticulously honed to do precisely what he wants – to flatten the reader’s sense of abhorrence or shock or glee, to any human emotion, and to make us unaffected. While no one would ever accuse DeLillo of being a “funny” writer, this does occasionally result in some jarringly humorous results, or what John Updike appropriately calls “lobotomized” examples of dialogue at the beginning of the novel when Eric Packer, the protagonist, tells his chief of security that he needs a haircut: “I want a haircut.” “The President’s in town.” “We don’t care. We need a haircut. We need to go crosstown.” “You will hit traffic that peaks in quarter inches.” “Just so I know. Which President are we talking about?” Dialogue like this would almost be funny if it weren’t so purposefully stilted and plastic.

The style isn’t the only thing that makes this novel difficult. Eric Packer makes it even more so. He has the gross self-satisfaction of a rich, brainy international investment banker who would just as easily crash the yen as save it. All in a day’s work, right? Obviously, we’re not meant to engage with Packer – that would, after all, work at counterpurposes with DeLillo’s overarching goal - and that’s one of the things that makes reading about him difficult. He’s a cipher, a stand-in for certain values and traits. Instead of a person, he’s the gigantic hot mess you get when you combine the hubristic confidence in the ability of man’s ability to overcome his own limitations with technology crossed with a clear sense of entitlement and airs of immortality. In short, as I said above, he’s not the most inviting human being in the history of literature; in fact, if anything, what kept me reading was my pure revulsion at how someone’s life about could mediated so much by the quiet hum of abstract technology, and so little by the feelings and concerns of others.

DeLillo might be our Weeping Jeremiah, one of the great American writers living today who can so presciently see where our technology-obsessed world is carrying us. But at least for me, that doesn’t make his writing enjoyable or engaging. But then again, he already knows this.

Review of Paul Monette's "Becoming a Man: Half a Life's Story"

Paul Monette’s early life is marked by both the astounding conformity and pent-up rage that one might expect to find in the Bildungsroman of a young gay man growing up in mid-century America. His ability to “pass” for straight comes at a cost – to wit, the inability of ever having to admit to anyone that he’s not. From the time that he’s a small child, Paul seems tragically torn, more so than even many other figures in well-known gay-memoirs who came of age at about the same time in American history (I’m thinking of Edmund White’s “The Beautiful Room is Empty” and others). Whereas White’s memoirs explore sexual openness and the life of the mind, Monette can only begin to feel comfortable with the latter, and never seems to approach the former until he is well into adulthood. He was already one to get “straight A’s,” but whose courage balked when it came to admitting his sexuality to a close friend or family member. 

Beneath that Yale- and Andover-educated genteel exterior is the heart of an enraged activist who, if he had a problem with admitting his homosexuality, certainly had fewer problems with hyperbole. He blithely claims within the first few pages of “Becoming a Man” that “genocide is still the national sport of straight men.” He goes on to clarify that Stephen Kolzak, one of his former lovers, “died of homophobia, murdered by barbaric priests and petty bureaucrats.” I would never be the first to suggest that the national response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in its initial years was rapid or proportionate to need, but Monette’s moralizing is certainly a momentous task in blame-shifting. One review, whose overall impression of the book was much less favorable than mine, nevertheless mentioned something very striking about the man who wrote it: he seems to consist of two different personalities, neither of which have reconciled themselves to one another.

Nor does he self-consciously explore his balkanized personality; he seems supremely unhappy in being unable to be open about his sexuality to most people, but does nothing to change this. And this repressed self sits right there, silently, next to the one that rails against America with clenched fist about committing “genocide” against those with HIV/AIDS. It’s a perplexing picture, but strikingly human one, a poignant one.

I’ve noted before in my reviews of memoirs that I don’t read many of them, and that I somehow have to be struck by the life of the author before I’ll pick one up. Monette was gay; Edmund White’s homosexuality and love of ideas were two big invitations for me as a much younger reader when I stumbled across “The Beautiful Room is Empty.” I found this book, my first experience reading Monette, honest and forthright in Monette’s “trying to give a true account of one’s self” – perhaps the hardest thing you can ever ask someone to do. Perhaps I’m grateful for his rage and his furor, discombobulated as it was. It allowed, decades on, for people like me to not have to re-wage the battles that he already fought.

Review of Richard J. Evans' "The Coming of the Third Reich"

Richard Evans cites some fascinating numbers in the introductory book of his trilogy on the rise and fall of Nazi power in Germany: the continued output of accounts of Germany’s part in World War II has been nonstop. We can quibble over the technicalities of what might be meant by “well-understood history,” but most historians would say that we more or less understand the dynamics of the breakdown of Weimar democracy and the rise of the Nazism; some more speculative observers might even suggest that we can definitively account for the rise of a Hitler-like demagogue. Why, then, the constant deluge of historical accounting and recounting? 

Evans suggests that, aside from the consumption of World War II historical as pulp with no properly historical academic value, accounts of it are often riddled with the subjective moralizing of its authors. For Evans, this tends to get in the way of the proper obeisance to history that all historians should pay. In a way, he also wrote the book for the mind-bogglingly stupid “historian” David Irving who claimed during a trial for libel (that he lost) that there was “no general history of Nazi Germany” he [Irving] could recommend - which is of course not to say that a book of clear-minded history has ever disabused a mindless ideologue of his willful abuse of history and disgraceful rape of the public record.

The scope of the book is gigantic, covering pre-Weimar Germany through the beginning of 1933, so it covers approximately fifteen years of German history – culture, art, politics and political opinions and society. In the introductory chapter, Evans attempts to trace certain trends back to the end of the nineteenth century. While it two generations of history doesn’t sound like a tremendous amount, it makes for awfully portentous reading especially when that history, despite the avidity of the historians trying forever anew to revisit it, seems raw and fresh. In tackling so much, however, Evans does a uniquely good job in abbreviating the national “German character” of the time – if such a thing can be imagined divorced from the Nazis’ sense of the term. 

While this volume does not cover the gas chambers or the labor camps that the Nazis built, it does show the careful way in which they destroyed the few legal protections that the Weimar Republic had put in place for all citizens. They then used their combined power of both the police state and their mass media/propaganda machine to destroy long-time political friendships and bonds. Over time, social life in the public sphere consisted of fewer and fewer activities that we not explicitly affiliated with the National Socialist Party. Evans also covers the complicated history of the Church’s role (Protestant and Catholic) in sharing Nazi sympathies.

It would be easy for a book like this to turn into simply a critical biography of Hitler’s rise to power, but to its credit it is so much more than that. It presents, in a word, a “zeitgeist” – not necessarily the only one that could have built up to World War II, but one that allowed history to run the course that it did. Is there a lot of new unearthed information here? No. Is it particularly brilliantly written or historically insightful? I didn’t find it to be either. In fact, it highly resembles many other histories of the time period in subject matter, form, and tone. This doesn’t, however, I think detract from its value as an authoritative, exhaustive historical account by an established scholar with impeccable credentials who has made it his job to fight against the ideological bigotry and hatred of willed historical blindness that can be the only causes of Holocaust denial.

Review of Alfred W. Crosby's "The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250-1600"

W. H. Auden once said that we live societies “to which the study of that which can be weighed and measured is a consuming love” – but that hasn’t always been the case. The science of Aristotle, arguably the biggest influence on post-Hellenic science west of the Levant, was thoroughly qualitative. Only later, after the rediscovery of the Plato whose fascination with numbers and ratios bordered on worship, did science begin to take on a properly quantitative quality. As the subtitle of the book hints, this begins to happen sometime in the mid-thirteenth century, and this is precisely the set of stories that Crosby seeks to elucidate for the general reader. He wants to retrace the steps that took us from a world of “emotional attachment to perception and experience, to a visualizing and quantifiable approach to reality,” to “comprehending reality as composed of quanta.” 

Because of what Crosby is trying to do, much of the book reads like a survey of medieval and Renaissance math and science. In a few hundred years, the West went from the Dark Ages (I’ve always despised that term since it’s so wrong and inappropriate, but if fits anywhere it’s true of the quantitative sciences) to the bourgeoning of an array of common things and ideas that would have been impossible without better economizers; just a few of these things include military maneuvering, increasing calendrical accuracy (i.e., the transition from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar), cartography, time-keeping devices, grammar and alphabetization, geometric perspective in painting, astronomy and currency and bookkeeping. The invention of polyphonic music, perhaps the greatest innovation of the medieval West, would have been impossible without the modern musical notation that replaced neumatic notation (commonly, though questionably, attributed to Guido of Arezzo during the early eleventh century).

His chapter on the development of music from 600 to around 1500 traces its development from the earliest Gregorian chant to the acme of Flemish polyphony, stating that the importance of music can be traced to its unique place in the quadrivium as “the only one of the four members in which measurement had immediate practical application.” Similarly, as the medieval visual art gently bleeds into the masterpieces of the Renaissance, we see a growing fascination with naturalism in painting that would have been impossible without new insights into optics, illusion, perspective, and depth – all quantifiable and “mathematizable.” Those familiar with the Renaissance greats will readily recognize that Leonardo, Masaccio, and Raphael are just as much about mystical Platonic ratios as they are about older, medieval considerations. Crosby ends his historical journey in a place that conveniently ties up several loose knots that would interest other kinds of historians, including those interested in the development of capitalism and the mercantile economy – namely, the advent of double-entry bookkeeping. While the mechanical clock “enabled them to measure time, double entry bookkeeping enabled them to stop it - on paper, at least.” 

While Crosby does little to actually make new discoveries in the fields he considers, he goes far in recasting and repurposing the information he has readily available. It seems incontrovertibly true that his central argument is true. How well does his evidence explain or support this argument? This seems shakier to me. As I noted above, taken as a whole, the book can come across as a history of medieval math, medieval science, medieval astronomy, etc. But his voice is quick-witted and engaging, sometimes even chatty – probably not what you were expecting given the title of the book. And rather than fully “accounting” for the rise of the particular phenomenon he is trying to explain, this book at the very least rediscovers some of the important philosophical fundamentals that undergird his concerns. However, he fails at answering the all-important “why?” Perhaps this question is better-suited to cliometricians and psychohistorians than historians of science.

A Reading of Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room"