[the background] must flatter. More, it must lend permanence to the life of the sitter, no matter how brief his actual existence may turn out to be … a picture must be composed so that no part of it is ‘dead,’ so that, wherever the eye wanders, there is interest, whether it is in the detail on the hilt of the sword or a minutely rendered rowing boat on a distant Arcadian shore.

In discussing the relationship between foreground and background, Tremain isn’t just speaking of painting; she’s also talking about the historical novel. We read historical novels, after all, not just to experience the actual or imagined existence of their characters, but to see how these characters grow out of—and, in interesting ways, depart from—their particular historical moments. In other words, it’s not just that we have interest in the “detail on the hilt of the sword”; these details are part of the reason that we read historical novels in the first place. Hence the complaints of anachronism that have plagued the genre since the time of Walter Scott: “Jacobite hilts weren’t like that at all!” 

These issues have been in my mind due to James Wood’s review of Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies in last week’s New Yorker. In the midst of his glowing review of the follow up to Wolf Hall, Wood takes some swipes at the historical novel as a genre:

Both this new book and its predecessor, “Wolf Hall,” are mysteriously successful historical novels, a somewhat gimcrack genre not exactly jammed with greatness. One of the reasons for this literary success is that Mantel seems to have written a very good modern novel, then changed all her fictional names to English historical figures of the fifteen-twenties and thirties.

Wood goes on to explain how Mantel avoids the dangers of working in such a “gimcrack genre” (my italics):

Where much historical fiction gets entangled in the simulation of historical authenticity, Mantel bypasses those knots of concoction, and proceeds as if authenticity were magic rather than a science. She knows that what gives fiction its vitality is not the accurate detail but the animate one, and that novelists are creators, not coroners, of the human case.

Any sensitive reader would have to agree with Wood’s statements here. When we read historical fiction, we’re not looking for some positivist sense of authenticity but rather for a felt sense of authenticity. We’re looking, in other words, not for factual accuracy but for aesthetic rightness.

But are Wood’s “knots of concoction” unique to historical fiction? Of course not. Think of all the works of realist fiction that provide plenty of “accurate detail” but not the “animate one.” (Wood himself has skewered many such efforts.) Or think of the works of science fiction that wow you with their descriptions of future technology but lack the moral and intellectual force of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. Yes, there are lots of bad historical novels, but there are also lots of bad realist novels, and lots of bad science fiction, and lots of bad lyric poetry. By Wood’s standard, every genre is gimcrack, and every successful achievement in a given genre only succeeds insofar as it departs from that genre.

And to a certain extent this is true: Ursula Le Guin is a great writer precisely because she isn’t like other, lesser sf writers. But that isn’t what Wood is saying in relation to Mantel. To say, as Wood does, that Mantel achieves greatness not by transcending her genre but in spite of her genre is to misunderstand what writing within a particular genre gives both author and reader. It gives a sense of boundedness and order that enables the free play of the aesthetic; it provides a living system within which a detail can become animate. To return to Tremain’s quotation, details are of “interest” in part because of the background out of which they arise and, for literature, this background involves the history and development of generic conventions.

Wood obviously doesn’t think that Mantel wrote a modern novel and then put the historical bits in, but to suggest that she might have underestimates just how important, how delightful, convention and constraint can be in literature. I haven’t yet read Bring Up the Bodies, but if it’s as good as Wood says, I suspect that it will be because it’s both a great novel and because it’s a great historical novel, not one or the other.

The tension, that arising from Alexey’s forced need to open his inmost grief over his wife’s infidelity to a lawyer beneath him in station, works itself out in a peculiar snapping up of moths and a telling dance of the eyes. The lawyer precedes his discussion with Alexy by surprising him with an adroit capturing of a moth: The lawyer, with a swiftness that could never have been expected of him, opened his hands, caught the moth, At the end of the interview, in the one moment we have access to the lawyer’s inner thoughts, he says to himself that he gives up catching moths, finally deciding that next winter he must have the furniture covered with velvet, like Sigonin’s. His abandonment of one sort of predatory delight is occasioned by that of another: the lawyer, we gather, anticipates the size of the fees that he will capture from having Alexy Alexandrovich in his hands, in a reversal of positions of authority. Moths seems particularly suitable images here: they threaten domestic fabric, their harm comes by expectation, the change to velvet upholstery (financed by the expected fees) will obviate the need to be vigilant.

The capture of moths brackets a technique everywhere evident in Tolstoy: the revelations of the face and eyes, that is the communication that occurs without words in conversations and this chiefly mediated through the eyes. As I was reading this, I happened to see an episode of Charlie Rose’s show that focused on the brain, in particular the psychology, neurophysiology and the genetics of autism. In the course of the discussions, the researchers gathered around Rose’s table agreed that the chief manifestation of autism is the inability of one so affected to create a mental map, a theory of mind, for those with whom they have relationships. Quite simply those with autism do not look in the eyes of another person and cannot anticipate the path or greater map along which a conversation might go. Hence they remain disconnected, isolated, not able to enter properly into dialogue.

Almost as a complete reverse of this is the technique so effectively used in this scene by Tolstoy. Consider the following excerpts:

Alexey Alexandrovitch, following the lawyer’s movements with wondering eyes . . .

Alexey Alexandrovitch glanced at his face, and saw that the shrewd, gray eyes were laughing, and seemed to know all about it already

The lawyer’s gray eyes tried not to laugh, but they were dancing with irrepressible glee, and Alexey Alexandrovitch saw that it was not simply the delight of a man who has just got a profitable job: there was triumph and joy, there was a gleam like the malignant gleam he saw in his wife’s eyes.

He let his eyes rest on Alexey Alexandrovitch’s feet, feeling that he might offend his client by the sight of his irrepressible amusement. ,

he went on, stealing a glance now and then at Alexey Alexandrovitch’s face, which was growing red in patches.

“It may be obtained if you give me complete liberty of action,” said the lawyer, not answering his question. “When can I reckon on receiving information from you?” he asked, moving towards the door, his eyes and his varnished boots shining.

The force of the power struggle and the defeat of Alexey Alexandrovitch is expressed not so much in the dialogue but in the recognition of the meaning of the look or the gaze. In this the whole hierarchy of class structure, the sense of humiliation and of triumph, and the vulnerability of Alexy Alexandrovitch are revealed. The latter’s attitude towards his wife is conditioned by the eyes. He sees Ana as the lawyer sees him. The two characters have clear mental maps and theories of mind that allow them to understand each other beyond words. And then the dancing moth of domestic destruction can go on flying, and its processes work to their tragic conclusion.

The letter is after the jump. A couple other observations first: mine is one of four letters published in response to Badinter’s article. The first and longest is, appropriately, from a La Leche League leader, pointing out some things Badinter got flat wrong about the organization. The fourth is from someone who thinks Badinter’s piece was “excellent” but didn’t go far enough. And the second makes half of a point I read several places, including the comments on my post, in response to the article. I say “half of a point” because the letter begins, “Badinter neglects to mention that the infant-formula industry stands to lose much of its $8 billion in global annual profits if women abandon the bottle for breast milk.” True enough. But the reason this is particularly relevant to Badinter’s piece is that—as commenter Sarah Blain noted here—“The author is an advertising billionaire, heir to and partner in Publicis, Nestlé’s advertising agency.” The letter Harper’s published did not point that out, at least not as edited. I confess to finding that slightly fishy, since they must have received at least one other letter making that connection (if women like Blain followed through on their promises), and there was no shortage of comment elsewhere on the conflict of interest behind The Conflict.

That connection did not initially strike me as something Harper’s should have felt obliged to disclose when they published the essay – there are a couple degrees of separation between Badinter and the infant-formula industry, and it’s not as though she needed that connection to motivate her to write some contrarian claptrap about mothering. The financial benefit, after all, is pretty direct: underinformed prattling about breastfeeding might sell formula, but it definitely sells books. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a relevant point. It certainly helps me understand how Badinter came to approach the subject of breastfeeding from the angle she did. (As Blain put it: “There are so many interesting things to say about mothering infants, but when Bandinter talks, all I hear is ‘buy Enfamil.’”) One of the odd things about the essay was that she wrote as if it were established that bottle-feeding is the normal way to nourish a kid, and breastfeeding was some weird thing a bunch of women invented in the ’50s to make mothering harder. Her perspective is very much that of the aggrieved formula manufacturer: “It seems to make little difference,” she sniffs, “that there is now a wide variety of formula available, that it is more and more like breast milk…” Well, it does make a difference for her argument, in that it demonstrates that even formula companies now admit that “breast is best” and that breast milk should be given priority as a matter of health, not just parenting style.

And then there was that bizarre quotation from “AlternaMoms.com.” As I wrote in my blog post, I had never heard of or seen that website when I read the essay. I did finally look it up, and it’s not exactly the Huffington Post. It is, as you might expect from the name, very low-tech and low-profile. Why would Badinter ever have found it in the first place? Perhaps it has something to do with the “I boycott Nestle. Ask me why” button featured on the homepage? (That button, by the way, leads to a broken Geocities link. Yes, Ms. Badinter, you really have your journalistic finger on the pulse of modern motherhood.)

Anyway, as I said, my letter is below (first as published, and then as written). The magazine world and the blogosphere have moved on, because Time, ever classy, is marking Mother’s Day with an even more provocative and totally clueless cover story about breastfeeding. I will send you over to my sister’s blog to read more on that, since this is really her beat. I love her suggestion for an article that might actually be worth reading: “WHY CAN’T WE GET OVER OUR BREASTFEEDING HANGUPS, WHICH ARE TRUTHFULLY FAR CREEPIER THAN BREASTFEEDING?” Word.

My letter as published in Harper’s:

Badinter dismisses LLL’s recommendation that working mothers use breast pumps, calling it “only a partial solution to the difficulties working mothers face, not least because many women find pumping repulsive.” The argument that pumping might “repulse” a woman who has already given birth and nursed a newborn is unconvincing. Perhaps Badinter’s issues is not with breast-feeding at all but with the inconvenient fact that infants need someone to take care of them.

And here’s the letter I sent:

To the Editors:

As a working and nursing mother, I found Elisabeth Badinter’s “The Tyranny of Breast-feeding” oddly off-base. As a reader, I found it shoddily argued and emptily provocative—an article-length exercise in begging the question.

There are plenty of fair criticisms one could make of the breast-feeding-advocacy movement in general and La Leche League in particular. As the health benefits of breast-feeding have become more commonly acknowledged, it has become harder to distinguish between support for new mothers who decide to breast-feed and pressure on them to do so. An article exploring that dynamic thoughtfully is one I’d be glad to read. But Badinter’s argument is abstract and tendentious, and takes for granted what she wants to show; namely, that LLL is out to hold women back. The league has “declared war…implicitly” on working mothers, she says, citing “the 1981 edition of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding.” Imagine, a book that didn’t support mothers’ returning to work in 1981! Today LLL assists those mothers in juggling baby-care and careers, but not, in Badinter’s telling, because it has been responsive to the experiences of its members over the past three decades. Rather the change was a political maneuver by the league “to maintain its influence.”

As for the league’s assistance and advice for mothers who use a breast pump while working, Badinter sees through that ruse. “This is only a partial solution to the difficulties working mothers face, not least because many women find pumping repulsive.” There are a great many reasons pumping can be an unsatisfactory option, but surely the possibility that it might “repulse” a woman—one who has given birth and nursed her newborn—is the least of those reasons. A better discussion would consider socioeconomic factors (for example, breast pumps can be expensive, and not all workplaces accommodate their use) that never complicate Badinter’s ideas about modern society. “More important,” she goes on, pumping “does not resolve the essential problem of child care.” No, but—neither does bottle-feeding. Are we still exposing the tyranny of breast-feeding, or is Badinter’s real problem the inconvenient fact that infants, once born, need someone to take care of them?

When Badinter wants an example of how oppressively mainstream the breastfeeding message has gone, she turns to a list of “dictates…from AlternaMoms.com.” Looking for extremism on the Internet is a cheap way to make an argument. But in this case it’s also fatal to the argument itself: when you’re cherry-picking from a low-profile website that describes itself as the opposite of mainstream, you can’t conclude that the views expressed there amount to social tyranny. The truth is, if the pressure to breast-feed were so oppressive as to be irresistible, LLL—which is, after all, a support group—would not need to exist. Nevertheless, Badinter states that “La Leche League has certainly won the ideological battle,” but wonders, “have mothers themselves been persuaded…?” She can’t seem to settle on an answer. Where (as in the United States) statistics suggest that many mothers still fall short of LLL ideals, she concludes that women clearly aren’t that into breast-feeding. But where statistics indicate that breast-feeding is a nearly universal practice (as in Scandinavia), the lesson she draws is that LLL has succeeded in pressuring women to surrender against their will. Why are only some women’s choices legitimate?

If there’s one generalization that fairly describes modern moms, it’s that our buttons are too easy to push. But surely the challenges of feminism and motherhood deserve more thoughtful treatment than this. What Badinter doesn’t seem to want to confront is that lactating is not a choice. When a woman gives birth, her body starts producing milk. Why shouldn’t any woman who becomes a mother want to take advantage of that biological fact? If breast-feeding moms find it difficult to lead satisfying, well-rounded lives or pursue careers, is the feminist response to stop encouraging mothers to breast-feed so they can keep getting along on society’s terms? Not so long ago, ignoring the universal rhythm of childbirth and lactation was the standard in the West. Women were expected to let their milk dry up (painfully) and feed their babies from a can. If there’s an antifeminist approach to infant care, why isn’t that it?

Sincerely,
Mollie Wilson O’Reilly

My reading life will suffer a real loss now that there will be no more of Kurt. The complexity of his character, developed over so many books, his unsparingly revealed weaknesses, and strengths, and the dense family web of relationships in which Wallender operates push the genre into serious fiction. Renewing his acquaintance (Almost ten years separate this Wallender title from its predecessor.) brought home just what good company Mankell provides.

The plot of The Troubled Man centers on a missing persons inquiry; Haken von Enke, who is to be the father-in-law of Wallender’s daughter, disappears. Haken has had a long, apparently distinguished naval career, and just before his disappearance confesses to Kurt, in most ambiguous terms, a fear for his life just as he is about to conclude an investigation into espionage that had occurred some twenty or more years before. The disappearance leads to the suspicious death of Haken’s wife, lengthy interviews with Haken’s former naval associates, a trip to Berlin and an interview with a former CIA operative. All this results in a deviously complex story of spying and counter-spying, one that ends in surprising – and bloody – revelations. As is every “who-done-it,” the energy of the plot comes from the procedural, the clues sorted, the interrogations made, the puzzle pieces to be fitted, but this novel is as much a meditation on mortality and life’s significance as it is about deceit and betrayal.

Wallender is troubled: he suffers from lapses of memory, from acute diabetes that sends him into shock. The great love of his life, Baiba, makes a last, surprise visit to him, announcing her own imminent death, The single assurance in these grim days appears in his granddaughter and his increasingly strong relationship with his daughter Linda. But here too, his former wife, Mona, intrudes as she collapses more and more under the weight of her addiction to alcohol. Without giving the climactic scenes away, I can say that the story’s conclusion is a decision about a life’s achievement, the accounting for what one has done and failed to do, in the time allotted.  Again, the burden of discovery and concealment falls on Wallender, who struggles, despite his successes, with the larger failure of his bodily frame.

There is a grimness in the final few pages; the valediction is an assertion of privacy, almost a warning to the reader that any more novels about Wallender would constitute a breach in confidentiality. Leave him alone, Mankell says. He refuses to offer any more to a demanding public, and he makes an assertion about the integrity of his own creation. There is in this something entirely understandable and something that points to other burdens, particularly the art of writing fiction. It appears to Mankell as a god-like power to create life, sustain it, and then, at will, end it.  These final paragraphs stamp the Wallender series and lift it to a consideration of the limits of realism and the nature of artistic creation. We are forced to ask in the largest sense, “Who done it?”

Mozart wrote the opera in 1771 for the ordination to priesthood of his patron, Sigismond, Count Schrattenbach, but poor Siggie died before he could be ordained. Mozart then offered it for the installation of Archbishop Colloredo, but it apparently wasn’t accepted. (Imagine such entertainment today, let’s say, for the celebration of Cardinal Dolan’s elevation to the College of Cardinals.) The world premiere of “Il sogno di Scipione” was in Salzburg in — get this — 1979! It was wonderful to see so many young artists so accomplished as singers and actors. Ironic when the operatic audience here and elsewhere is generally so old. Is that supposed to cheer us up or fill us with envy?

Part of our problem in talking about “college” is that it has become an umbrella term for a vast array of post-secondary education. A student studying information technology at a land grant Midwestern state university is in college, as is a student studying art history at a small liberal arts college in Iowa. Students enrolled in two-year associate degree programs to become physical therapy assistants are in college, as are students enrolled in four-year business degree programs at Catholic universities in the northeast. Colleges are public and private, residential and commuter, sectarian or non-sectarian, for-profit and not-for-profit. I think this diversity is a great asset, and it makes American higher education unique in the world. Yet we should be clear students who attend these various schools are not looking for the same thing in their “college experience.”

Of the four different educational scenarios I’ve just presented, my guess is that the most difficult one to justify is the student who chooses to study art history at a small liberal arts college. Indeed, if your reason for attending college is to get a “good job” afterwards, spending a significant chunk of your college education studying the Parthenon frieze or the competition for the doors of the Florentine baptistry or the shift from abstract expressionism to pop might seem like a waste of time and money. Given the high cost of college, people need good reasons for choosing a broad liberal arts education. (And here, when I say “broad liberal arts education,” I mean studying English literature or classics or biology or mathematics or history, subjects that are not direct training for a career.)

The best justification I’ve read for such a choice comes from Mark William Roche’s book Why Choose the Liberal Arts? (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). Roche is a former dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame, and he is currently a professor of German and concurrent professor of philosophy there. The book won the 2011 Frederick W. Ness book award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU). The AACU gives the award annually to “the book that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education.” (I should note that Roche is my teacher, mentor, and friend. I read a draft of the book before it was published, and I was his assistant for his sophomore seminar  “Faith, Doubt, and Reason.” He is one of the finest teachers I’ve ever encountered.)

Roche makes three overlapping arguments for choosing to study the liberal arts in college. First, he argues for “its intrinsic value, or the distinction of learning for its own sake”; second, “the cultivation of those intellectual virtues that are requisite for success beyond the academy”; and third, “character formation and the development of a sense of vocation” (10). For readers interested in answering the question “what kind of job can you get with a philosophy major?” Roche’s second argument offers a compelling answer. If readers are interested in answering the question “why would you study philosophy?” Roche’s first argument provides a cogent defense of learning for the sake of learning. And everyone should be much more interested in the deep connection between what you learn and what kind of person you can become because of that learning. Here, Roche’s third argument is particularly important. (Delbanco has made similar arguments; Anthony Kronman, in his fine book Education’s End, also stresses this part of education.)

As befits a book that makes three arguments for the value of a liberal arts education, Roche’s argument blends the philosophical, the factual, and the personal. Roche marshals arguments from Plato and the Bible, from Kant and Hegel, from Max Weber and Felix Frankfurter to paint his picture of the intrinsic value of a liberal arts curriculum.  He cites numerous studies showing that the sorts of skills that employers desire – excellence in oral and written communication, intellectual curiosity, ability to analyze complex problems – are exactly the sorts of virtues that a liberal arts curriculum cultivates. And as an alumnus of Williams College, the University of Tubingen, and Princeton University, and a teacher and scholar at the Ohio State University and the University of Notre Dame, Roche draws on his own experience finding his vocation through the study of liberal arts and helping his students find theirs.

There is far too much heat and not enough light in our discussions of higher education in America. There are real and pressing questions about college costs and affordability, about what students learn and how they spend their time in college, and about the right balance between faculty teaching and research. Yet if, in the name of efficiency and cost cutting, we lose sight of the intrinsic value of learning and how learning forms the character of students, we end up cheating our students of an opportunity to encounter goodness and beauty and truth and shape their lives accordingly. We also cheat them out of moments of grace.

Alex Hoffman, the beleaguered protagonist, is a brilliant computer scientist who develops a program (VIXAL-4), an example of “autonomous machine learning,” that produces a thinking machine that learns and makes decisions on its own – ultimately beyond the control of its creator. Sound familiar?  Harris cues the Frankenstein subtext in an epigraph to one of his chapters. Succeeding epigraphs from Darwin’s Origins of Species and The Descent of Man indicate the evolutionary struggle of the survival of the fittest, now taking the form of organic life against machine intelligence. Alex’s financial program trades on fear and then teaches human beings to fear, computes to maximize profit, and then disposes of the human agents who get in its way, its creator being the foremost. The impossible speed with which it makes calculations lends it a superlative “calculating” intelligence (artificial, but the more ruthless for this reason). The further irony is that it is invariably  effective in making money – the purpose of its creation.

There is an intriguing ironic parallel between Alex, the program’s creator, in his apparent mental imbalance, and the program’s strictly rational and utterly “mad” decisions. Approaching the apocalyptic and fiery conclusion to the novel, I heard echoing from Kubrick’s “2001” past, “Open the pod doors, Hal.” Alas, there is no compliance or grotesque rendering of the “Daisy, Daisy” tune to soften the response.

To be sure there is much more to the book than the complexities of computer trading. Alex faces many “fear factors” including an attack on his life, a conspiracy to steal his electronic identity and the possible loss of his adored and adoring wife, Gabrielle. The assault upon his marriage places Alex in an impossible situation, attempting to explain to Gabrielle betrayals that only he could have authored, but about which he knows nothing. Her defensive reaction has Alex glimpsing his creation’s deleterious effect, poisoning both the idealism of his mathematics and the trust in their relationship; what is most human is at risk from what is most artificial. Alex is victim, strategist, fugitive and misunderstood hero in the course of the novel’s convoluted plotting. He struggles for his life in a knife fight with an “on-line” partner in death, and manages to avoid the programmed machinations of a descending elevator. The plot also offers us, as an alternative perspective, Inspector Leclerc, an aging laconic Swiss detective who attempts to trace the source of the crimes against Alex as well as Alex’s own criminal acts. He witnesses with the reader Alex’s suicidal act (and survival) in the concluding inferno. Leclerc is excluded, finally, from real understanding. Alex’s self-sacrifice, the reader understands, is undercut by the parallel survival of his self-declared nemesis, his creature, VIXAL.

The pace of the novel, the elements of suspense and surprise, make it compelling reading. Its premise appears frighteningly familiar in these days volatile markets driven by increasingly powerful (and independent) forms of machine intelligence. Harris leaves the reader waking up on the day after, none the more secure in the belief that “it” is over. Somewhere, not too far in the background, machine “life” computes to its own survival.

Thinking of these afternoons recently, I could not dissociate them from reading Ford Maddox Ford’s tetralogy, now called Parade’s End (1924 – 1928). I found myself opening the work again and compulsively reading it through. At the time, years ago, I offered to myself as mitigating circumstances for the indulgence in novel reading the fact that it was driven by research into life in England between the two wars – roughly the time frame of my topic.  Admiration for Ford’s The Good Soldier and the anecdotes written by and about him pushed my interest. The work’s chief character, Christopher Tietjens, is the second son of a great landed Yorkshire family; Tory by upbringing and conviction, and an immensely gifted mathematician, at the opening of the novel he serves a government department with great skill and with little apparent conceit. Christopher’s relationship with his manipulative and scheming wife, Sylvia, forms one of the major conflicts. The pair seems fated to confound each other. Sylvia’s Catholicism prevents divorce, and her profligacy makes the parentage of their child suspect. All this is further complicated by the unjust suspicions of Mark Tietjens, the elder brother, that Christopher is having an affair with a young woman, Valentine Wannop, who is both suffragette and a socialist in politics. The drama is played out in the years bracketing the Great War. Ford himself served in France; his experiences give eye-witness validity to his account.  Tietjens, superbly competent at organization and supplying of troops with material, copes with the horrors of battle – both with the enemy across No-Man’s-Land and with his wife. The hero is stoically truthful and suffers constantly for his determination to act honorably. His probity makes him at times unbearable even to his friends, just as they allow him to be easily exploited. His Christological significance has often been noted.

The details of plot are myriad, and the characteristic Fordian dialogue obfuscates as much as it reveals. Ford simply excels in dramatizing character through their verbal exchanges; his breadth of range and fluency are impressive, but his style may be an acquired taste. It suggests the maxim, “more is more.” The novel’s forth volume, The Last Post, set after the war, was a disappointment to some. Graham Green refused to include it in his Bodley Head edition but others have praised its interior monologue form.

The BBC has announced that it will be airing a television adaptation of the work done by Sir Tom Stoppard, no more assured way to gain greater currency for the book. It is to be reprinted in a critical edition, and has been available in Modern Library form edited by the late Malcolm Bradbury.

Ford’s role in English letters in the first part of the twentieth century is legendary. He knew and published in his The English Review, a great number of famous authors. His list of publications is enormous, rivaled only by the hyperbole that seems to surround him – in the form of praise and criticism. Perhaps the BBC will bring about a Ford resurgence. In any case, he exists, indelibly, in afternoons of great and happy distraction for me, evoking a past, my own and his.

If You’re an Egalitarian… is a compilation of the Gifford Lectures that Cohen delivered in 1996. The book—part memoir, part intellectual history, part political and economic treatise—is difficult to describe. After a brief examination of the problems raised by the “formation of conviction”—how we come to believe the things that we believe, even when we realize that they lack a rational basis—Cohen moves on to a description of his own upbringing. In the second chapter, Cohen, who died in 2009, remembers a childhood spent “in a working-class communist family in a communist community in the 1940s in Montreal.” He muses on the paradoxes of growing up “both Jewish and antireligious,” speculating on how his own adult commitments were formed by the place, time, and family into which he was born. (Politically, Cohen is a socialist; religiously, he is an agnostic who respects the moral contributions of the Judeo-Christian tradition.)

The autobiographical bits of If You’re an Egalitarian… are beautifully, often humorously done. There are passages, as when Cohen describes lying to his fellow Jewish classmates about having had a bar-mitzvah, that could have come out of a Woody Allen movie. But the real strength of Cohen’s book lies in its more philosophical parts. Or, maybe more accurately, one of the joys of the autobiographical bits is to see just how much philosophical and political ideas can mean in a life.

The majority of If You’re an Egalitarian… considers how three competing traditions treat the problem of inequality. First, Cohen examines Marxism, which sees inequality disappearing as an inevitable result of the historical dialectic: once capitalism has provided such material abundance that competition is unnecessary, the capitalist society will sublate into the communist society. Next, he looks at political liberalism, specifically the strand of contemporary liberalism associated with the late political theorist John Rawls. According to this political philosophy, Cohen writes, “delivering equality is a task not of class struggle (crowned by a future abundance) but of constitution-making”; inequality goes away not because history says that it will, but because political deliberation and the institutions that it builds say that it should. Finally, Cohen trains his eye on Christianity, which argues that “equality requires not mere history and the abundance to which it leads, or mere politics, but a moral revolution, a revolution in the soul.”

Cohen isn’t shy about criticizing each of these systems. Because of its faith in the arc of history, Cohen writes, Marxism displays little interest in moral arguments in favor of equality: equality will arrive anyway, so we don’t really need to think too hard about what it means or why we might want it to arrive in the first place. (Cohen calls this the “obstetric motif” in Marxism—we don’t have to create the good society, just help in its delivery once its arrival is imminent.) Because of its focus on justice as largely a matter of institutions, Rawlsian liberalism tends to elide personal action. As Cohen writes, “personal choices to which the writ of the law is indifferent are fateful for social justice,” and Rawlsian liberalism just isn’t equipped to give an adequate account of these types of personal, non-institutional choices. As for Christianity, Cohen argues that at least a certain strand believes “that all justice is a matter of morally informed personal decision; on this particular Christian view, the rules set by Caesar can achieve little or nothing in the direction of establishing a just society.” The result is, at best, political quietism; at worst, a rejection of all structural attempts to achieve social justice.

Cohen’s main questions—what is equality and how do we achieve it—are of particular relevance right now. Think of the debates that have arisen over the publication of Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Murray charts many disturbing trends that (he claims) indicate the social and moral decline of the white lower class, such as increasing rates of crime and divorce. He then argues that it is this problem of ethos that is exacerbating inequality. As Nicholas Lehman writes, “What the non-élite need isn’t money, Murray thinks; it’s better values.” Unsurprisingly, this has prompted a backlash from those on the left, who argue that there are structural problems that account for the growing gap between the 1% and the rest of us, and that we must look to structural solutions, like a more progressive tax rate, in order to create a more just and equal society.

So, the question becomes, do we address the problem of inequality at the level of institutions (more just laws, more robust regulation of the market) or do we address it at the level of the individual (more just individual actions)? Is inequality primarily a legal problem, or is it a moral problem? Should we try to reform social structures or individual souls? The answer that Cohen gives in If You’re an Egalitarian…—and it’s one that I agree with—is that we need to change both. Both institutional and individual reforms are necessary, but neither on their own is sufficient. We need moral suasion and institutional reform, more egalitarian people and a more egalitarian economic framework.

There’s a lot more to If You’re an Egalitarian… than what I’ve sketched here. Cohen offers brilliant close readings of Marx and Feuerbach, Engels and Rosa Luxemburg. The pages in which Cohen explicates the Hegelian dialectic are particularly lucid. (Those familiar with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit will know that this is no small feat.) But what remains most important about Cohen’s book is its passionate interest in equality, both as a philosophical concept and as a political project. If You’re an Egalitarian… challenges us to think more critically about equality, and that’s a challenge that those on both the right and the left would do well to take up.

I am posing this question as I try to make some sense of why I, like so many others, find Edward St. Aubyn’s protagonist, Patrick Melrose, so fascinating. With the recent publication of At Last, a five-novel sequence comes to an end. The first four were Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope and Mother’s Milk, the last one a finalist for the Booker Prize. They tell the story of moments in Patrick’s life, as a small child, a befuddled heroin addict, an alcoholic and a middle-aged man struggling with his Mrs. Jellyby-style mother giving away his inheritance to a shady New Age Irishman named Seamus. They take place in a world of social privilege and snobbery, and now in At Last his mother’s funeral provides the context for the faint stirrings of a possible resolution.

Some things about these novels are matchless. The gift for capturing the self-involved chattering of the entirely contingent aristocratic hangers-on is remarkable, though why we should care about them any more than they would care about us is hard to say. Nevertheless, we do, perhaps because St. Aubyn makes them funny, usually despite themselves. He’s also rediscovered the Homeric simile as a stylistic device and works it just short of the point at which it would become tiresome though, of its nature, it is always noticeable. And he is witty in a way that reminds all his commentators of Evelyn Waugh. One suspects, too, that he is as caustic in real life as was Waugh. No reason, except that so much of these novels, including some of the most sordid and distasteful parts, are more autobiographical than we might want to believe.

St. Aubyn gets us into the position where we stay with Patrick through the nightmare of Bad News, by the simple expedient of having first shown us the boy who became this man and the reasons why. Bad News is hard to finish and I cannot imagine anyone picking it up and reading it out of sequence. [Warning: Do NOT read any of these books out of sequence.] But once you are rooting for the hapless child victim of a pedophile, sadistic father you are hooked enough to watch the twenty-year old dope himself to the brink of death. I think I prayed my way through this second book, though not as hard as I might have done if I had bought it when it appeared and not known that there were three to follow. Foreknowledge takes the edge off the drama but keeps you going beyond what is reasonable. No wonder that the earlier books didn’t initially sell well and have been read more since the appearance of Mother’s Milk.

Patrick doesn’t have many friends, but maybe it is befriending him that keeps us going, though we will surely suspect that for most of the novels our outstretched hand would be ignored or abused. The fragility in Patrick that goes back to a childhood of unspeakable brutality makes it easier to like him, though he is not on the whole likeable. The reader is a bit like Johnny, the psychiatrist who is the only real friend Patrick has and has had from childhood. It is to Johnny that he reveals the abuse he suffered at his father’s hands, and Johnny is there at the mother’s funeral, as unjudgmental and genuinely warm as ever. Maybe we even like Patrick a little bit because if Johnny likes him, well, there must be something about him. We also see him through the eyes of his eerily precocious children and we glimpse the capacity for greater humanity in the way he responds to them. But I’m not sure we ever relax with him and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t like us. Or me at least. On the other hand, perhaps his failure to find or give unconditional love is being turned on the reader. Everyone who stays with him through the five books, something I heartily recommend, is another Johnny.

“Horae Canonicae” gets its title from the Church’s canonical hours, and each of the sequence’s seven poems refers to a specific, fixed time of prayer: “Prime,” “Terce,” “Sext,” “Nones,” “Vespers,” “Compline,” and “Lauds.” In Auden’s poems, Christ’s Passion is remembered in a way that can only be called sacramental: the Paschal sacrifice is re-presented, made living and painful and triumphant, once again.

“Prime” begins by representing the joy with which we meet the new day. (Auden throughout the sequence uses the first person—“I” and “we”—to indicate that the narrative he tells is about all people.) Cleansed of our nighttime thoughts, “recalled from the shades to be a seeing being,” we feel free of willfulness and self-consciousness: “The world is present, about, / And I know that I am, here, not alone / But with a world and rejoice.” We are like Adam, seemingly unbesmirched by sin or regret: “Still the day is intact, and I / The Adam sinless in our beginning, / Adam still previous to any act.”

This Edenic state, however, cannot last. To move out of bed is to move into the world of will and action, and therefore into the world of sin:

I draw breath; that is of course to wish

No matter what, to be wise,

To be different, to die and the cost,

No matter how, is Paradise

Lost of course and myself owing a death.

As we read “Terce,” corresponding to the 9:00 am prayer, the looming specter of death becomes more real. The hangman sets off for work, confident in his abilities even though he doesn’t “know yet who will be provided / To do the high works of Justice with”; the judge goes to the courtroom, not clear “by what sentence / He will apply on earth the Law that rules the stars,” but knowing that such earthly judgments will be required of him. Though the hangman is uncertain of precisely who will be punished, though the judge doesn’t yet know what legal measures he will find to enforce this punishment, they both know one thing—that punishment will happen:

[Each] knows already that, in fact, our prayers are heard,

That not one of us will slip up,

That the machinery of our world will function

Without a hitch, that today, for once,

There will be no squabbling on Mount Olympus,

No Chthonian mutters of unrest,

But no other miracle, knows that by sundown

We shall have had a good Friday.

Sinful and weak, we demand a sacrifice, and this is what guarantees that we will in fact have a Good Friday. In “Nones,” the 3:00 pm hour devoted to remembering Christ’s death, we will deny our complicity in the murderous sacrifice: “All if challenged would reply / —“It was a monster with one red eye, / A crowd that saw him die, not I.” But we will know that this isn’t so, that we are as guilty as the actual executioners: “The hangman has gone to wash, the soldiers to eat: / We are left alone with our feat.”

Today, the Church looks hopefully towards Easter, when “we, too, may come to the picnic / With nothing to hide, join the dance / As it moves in perichoresis, / Turns about the abiding tree.” At that moment, we will experience “the instant of recollection,” and we will know the “plot” and “meaning” of the sacrifice.

But, Auden says, we are not there yet. What we do today is remember. Today, we remain at Calvary: “Shaken awake, facts are facts, / (And I shall know exactly what happened / Today between noon and three).”

 According to The New York Times, AMC’s head of original programming has promised that the whodunit will be wrapped up—really and truly—at the end of Season 2, which begins this Sunday. Of course, even if we trust his pledge, there remains the fact that “The Killing” has so far been a real downer of a program. Many of its elements—the red-herring clues, the multiple suspects, the sleuth with personal problems, the law-enforcement turf battles—are detective-story standards. But has there ever been a police procedural that focused so intensely on the grief of the victim’s family? In Season 1, scene after scene conveyed the Larsens’ pain: We saw Rosie’s parents suffer as they planned her funeral and suffer as they debated whether to clean out her room and suffer as they fielded detectives’ questions. We saw Rosie’s younger brothers suffer, too, as their pain-deluged parents ignored them. (In one heartbreaking scene, the boys, getting their own breakfast, wondered whether they dared eat some of their dead sibling’s favorite breakfast cereal.)

 The cinematography made the saga even more depressing: Season 1 was shot in blue tones that made each image even more lugubrious than it might have been otherwise. The police headquarters, in particular, might have been dredged up from the bottom of the Slough of Despond. All in all, “The Killing” strays far from the escapist-puzzle mode that is the default option for the mystery genre. And yet….Yes, I admit it. I will watch Season 2. The lingering suspense from Season 1 is just too strong. But listen, AMC: Don’t count on me for any Season 3.

As I mentioned in my review at the time, it’s a bit of a misnomer to call The Pale King Wallace’s “last novel.” More accurately, it’s a collection of writings unified (barely) around a set of themes: boredom and its relation to transcendence, consciousness and its relation to crippling self-doubt. As such, The Pale King is an excellent introduction to Wallace’s work—it’s the one book I would recommend to someone who hasn’t read Wallace before and wants to give him a shot—and the excerpted scene on the Millions is itself an excellent introduction to The Pale King. It gives you a sense of Wallace’s wildly inventive syntax, his ability to add clause upon clause upon clause so as to make sentences that don’t so much build towards a conclusion as uncoil and recoil endlessly; it illustrates Wallace’s abiding interest in the specifics of Midwestern culture and geography (“Peoria and Lake James and Pekin were corn, Decatur and Springfield soybeans for the Japanese”); and, finally, it shows Wallace’s concern, despite his famous stylistic experimentation and intense authorial self-consciousness, for achieving “exacting care and metal-minded clarity and precision.” In fact, it’s one of the many wonders of Wallace’s writing that he is able to achieve such care, clarity, and precision not in spite of his postmodern tricks but through them.

Anyway, the paperback edition of The Pale King is well worth the investment, both for those who don’t own the hardcover and even for those who do.

Yet the extraordinary books I’m privileged to teach have been in front of me the whole time. Right now, my students and I are discussing Soren Kierkegaard’s masterpiece Works of Love, which, I would argue, is one of the most important discussions of love in the western canon. Kierkegaard structures the book as a series of essays that interpret Biblical passages about love. As Lent gives way to the Triduum and Easter, and Christians prepare to celebrate the love of God shown in the death and resurrection of the Son, Kierkegaard’s words are particularly timely.

In the first essay of Works of Love, where Kierkegaard interprets Jesus’s words that each tree is known by its own fruits (Luke 6:44), the Dane remarks:

But the holy works of our text are not spoken to encourage us to get busy judging one another; they are rather spoken warningly to the individual, to you, my reader, and to me, to encourage each one not to let his love become unfruitful but to work so that it is capable of being recognized by others or not. For one is not to work in order that love becomes known by its fruits but to make love capable of being recognized by its fruits. … For the divine authority of the Gospel speaks not to one man about another man, not to you, the reader, about me, or to me about you – no, when the gospel speaks it speaks to the single individual. It does not speak about us men, you and me, but it speaks to us men, you and me, and it speaks about the requirement that love shall be known by its fruits (31).

In theological terms, I would take issue with Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the single individual. For Kierkegaard, the practice of Christianity is a solitary enterprise. On my reading of him, there is little room for the Church, understood as the community of believers, to make a contribution to the individual’s discipleship. Kierkegaard famously believes that true Christianity cannot be taught, it can only be witnessed.

My theological reservations aside, I can’t help but agree with the literary picture Kierkegaard draws. The books that lodge themselves in our memory, the books that we discuss, the books that change us, do so because they speak to us rather than about us. Now obviously, the Biblical text and sacred art more generally have no monopoly on speaking to us rather than about us. And yet how often do we keep the art that speaks to us at bay by focusing solely on its historical context or formal characteristics? (To be clear, I certainly think studying historical contexts and formal characteristics can help us recognize how the art speaks to us.) By thinking that great art speaks about someone else in some other context instead of thinking that it speaks to us in our context, we drain it of its power.

Kierkegaard warns us – he warns me – that the dangers of quarantining art are all the more dangerous when we quarantine love. “Christianity says it is a duty to be in debt and thereby says it is an act – not an expression about, not a theoretical conception of love” (182). For Kierkegaard, the fruit of love is our need for love, and the best metaphor for this need is an infinite debt that we cannot and do not want to repay. Our duty to love, he tells us, must be limitless. But even though our duty to love is limitless, the source of love remains hidden, and we can never know if an act is truly an act of love because we cannot see motivation. Indeed, “there must be an eternal vigilance, early and late, so that love never comes to dwell upon itself or to compare itself with love in other men or to compare itself with the deeds it has accomplished” (174, his italics). There is much, much more to say about Works of Love. And, as with every important work, there is much to critique and much to learn. Each time I read the book it hits me like a ton of bricks.

My students tend to be divided on the book, even if they almost universally enjoy reading it. Many think Kierkegaard’s basic picture is right, even if they are not quite ready to change their lives accordingly. (How many of us are?) But a strong minority think Kierkegaard’s picture is simply impossible and that no one is up to the eternal vigilance that Kierkegaard’s views of love require. I also see this divide in their general approach to the books we read. Some see (at least some of) the books we read as speaking to them. Others only see the books as speaking about someone else.

At the end of each term, I give my students a final oral exam. My final question asks them what they take away from the course, what idea or figure sticks with them. During one exam, a student’s eyes lit up when I asked the question. She said the Works of Love was her favorite text. She exclaimed, “Imagine if everyone lived as Kierkegaard says we should!” Imagine that.

Things are altogether different with Aunt Dawn and Uncle Jasper. There, grace is said before every meal, without fail. There, the house is clean and crisp, with “bright sterling spoons and forks, polished dark floors, comforting linen sheets.” There, gender roles are defined quite clearly. Jasper is a doctor, and Dawn is a housewife; he talks, and she listens; “the house was his, the choice of menus his, the radio and television programs his,” while the cleaning and the cooking are hers (with help from a maid named Bernice). At one point, the girl tries to sum up the feel of the household: “‘Haven’ was the word. ‘A woman’s most important job is making a haven for her man.’ Did Aunt Dawn actually say that? I don’t think so. She shied away from statements. I probably read it in one of the housekeeping magazines I found in the house. Such as would have made my mother puke.”

In an essay trumpeting Munro’s brilliance, Jonathan Franzen praised the writer’s “rhetorical restraint” and her “almost pathological empathy for her characters.” Given these gifts, it should come as no surprise that Munro challenges the easy binaries—liberal versus conservative, lively versus stultified—laid out above. We come to see that an orderly house “could be quite agreeable,” even if this agreeableness comes at a cost, and that charitable intentions can unwittingly hurt others. (As the narrator says, “I had not approved of my parents’ going to Africa. I had objected to being dumped—my word for it—with my aunt and uncle. I may even have told them, my long-suffering parents, that their good works were a load of crap.”)

Munro even succeeds in humanizing the bullying Jasper. At one point, after being served a dissatisfying meal, Jasper quietly expresses his disapproval and then makes himself a peanut butter sandwich: “he had eaten [all of the meal] before pronouncing his verdict. So he was propelled not by hunger but by the need to make a statement of pure and mighty disapproval.” This is Jasper at his worst, domineering and uncaring.

But even here, Munro forces us to reconsider the situation: “It occurs to me now that something might have gone wrong at the hospital that day, somebody might have died who wasn’t supposed to—perhaps the problem wasn’t the food at all. But I don’t think that occurred to Aunt Dawn—or, if it did, she didn’t let her suspicion show. She was all contrition.” The conditional—“might have”—is a distinctively Munrovian tense, and “Haven” is shot through with “maybes” and “perhapses.” Munro’s fiction is obsessed with what might have happened, both in the sense of lost opportunity (characters constantly think of how their lives might have turned out differently) and in the sense of the ultimate mystery of other people: we can never know what other people are thinking or feeling, a fact that should lead to sympathy and forgiveness.

This isn’t to say that Munro explains away all wrongdoing. Regardless of why Jasper reacted in the way he did, his actions hurt Dawn, and this is a fact that can’t be ignored. Rather, Munro reminds us that people are more complex—both more culpable and more deserving of forgiveness—than we normally imagine.  This is something that Munro’s stories have been teaching us for a long time. “Haven” is further proof that Alice Munro is one of our best best living writers.