These Book Reviews Speak Volumes

While in Pattaya a friend handed me the New York Review of Books. It happened to be the 50th anniversary of its founding, and included was a copy of the original edition. The current issue was good reading, including articles by Martin Scorsese and Paul Volcker. The original was something else. It took me awhile to come to terms with it being one single edition, and not a compilation of the "best of the decade," because, holy crap, any magazine that managed to publish all that was in there in a decade would have serious bragging rights!  But yes indeed, it was one issue.

What was in there? Well, among the more than forty contributors I think these names are, fifty years later, still familiar: W. H. Auden; Jules Feiffer; Paul Goodman; Alfred Kazin; Robert Lowell; Dwight Macdonald; Norman Mailer; Mary McCarthy; Susan Sontag; William Styron; Gore Vidal; and Robert Penn Warren?

Those were the reviewers, but how about these reviews: James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time; Dwight Macdonald reviewing Arthur Schlesinger, Jr's The Politics of Hope ("When he is not confronted with a polemical subject that makes his style taut and forces him to think (which he can do when he has to), Schlesinger likes to slip into something more comfortable. His judgements tend to become official and reverential and to be expressed in the orotundities of the hardened public speaker."); One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich; Mary McCarthy on William Burrough's Naked Lunch; Oscar Gass reviewing four books of Russian (Soviet) economics, and taking down a Harvard professor named Alexander Gershenkron - who seems to have been an apologist for the Soviet system, with this dagger in a velvet sheath: "All this is very good fun, and Professor Gershenkron presents this thesis more persuasively than I have read it elsewhere. But it is a long way from the requirements of sober historiography"; Mailer reviewing a book on the Paris of Fitzgerald and Hemingway; a review (a pan) of Edward Albee in general, and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in particular; a review of Raise High The Roofbeam Carpenters (till now, Salinger's last); reviews of works by Dwight Macdonald, Jules Feiffer, W. H. Auden, John Updike, and Jean Genet; Gore Vidal on John Hersey; the Ring Lardner Reader; Robert Lowell on Robert Frost. I am about to hyperventilate!

If all this were not enough (and there is way more, those were names I chose to drop), there are ads for individual works, and for publishers. Scribner’s has two by Alan Paton including Cry the Beloved Country. The facing page is a full-page ad from Random House, boasting of current books by Paul Goodman, Dwight Macdonald, Edgar Snow, W. H. Auden, John O'Hara, and Truman Capote. W.W. Norton offers the a book by Ruth Jhabvala, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, with a blurb by William Burroughs, "and don't miss The Feminine Mystique ..." Harper, the "publisher of Seven Days in May and the best-selling $10,000 Harper Prize Novel The Sand Pebbles" brings you works by J.B. Priestley, E.B. White and the "literary sensation," Mark Twain's long banned Letters From Earth.  There are also books by John Von Neumann, Doris Lessing, Bruce Jay Friedman, and Eugene Rostow. Even Grove Press has an ad, for John Rechy's City of Night!

All of that was in print in 1963.  Fifty years later and I see on the current list: J.K. Rowling (and Robert Galbraith), James Patterson putting his name on somebody or other's book, Lee Child, Stephen King, 50 Shades of Gray ...

Sorry, I need to go off somewhere and have a good cry.

Gone Girl Reviewed

I just finished Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn. I'd heard it was the best mystery of the past year, which seemed like a good reason to read it. Its mystery, one where telling you anything about it is doing you no favors, it would only spoil the surprises the author has for you. So I'll tell you a story instead.

A year or two back I reconnected with lots of friends from the old days, here on Facebook. Sometimes I say things that are indiscreet, and while reminiscing I wondered if anyone had heard anything about one of the old crowd. I'll call him Brian. I said that Brian had turned out to be a sociopath, and last I heard was doing time in Colorado.

One of the people who read that sent me a private message, asking about it. I was regretting what I had said, because not only was it indiscreet, I was wondering if it was true.

Brian was my brother's age, and for a year or two in grade school they had been best friends. Nearly ten years later - he hadn't gone anywhere, but when they reached junior high they drifted towards other friends - he resurfaced as part of an extended circle of friends. Not long after I started at the cab company Brian was hired as a driver. He wasn't much of a driver, only eighteen or nineteen, and ... he was a junkie. Despite the things you may have heard, not all junkies are instant, pathetic zombies. An article I read recently said that the addiction rate for heroin was around 30%, much worse than coke, even worse than alcohol, but not quite as addictive as tobacco. Seems right. Picture trying to flush something down a drain that doesn't want to go down. Some people try heroin a time or two or even three, and then just give it up. Some sink quickly, and in no time at all are nodding and scratching and ready for skid row. But others get hooked, quit, get hooked again. It's a cycle, and you never know: will they finally go under, or will they make it back, just a phase they went through? Brian was like that. He wasn't the only junkie driving for us back then, and as long as they didn't get high while working, it wasn't a problem. Frankly the pot smokers were the ones I worried about; some of them would get high while driving.

So, he was a junkie, and he borrowed money from time to time, running it up to a few hundred before I stopped loaning him any. I was always a soft touch. But he wasn't the only junkie, and certainly not the only person who owed me money and never paid it back. I was surprised when I heard he was in jail, not the jail part, but because they told me it was armed robbery, and that wasn't his style when I knew him. He was the con man type.

So why did I flippantly tell people he was a sociopath? I think Brian really did want my approval; I think that was sincere. At the same time I was a target to be manipulated, for a loan now and then, and of course, on the weekends, I was his boss, to be gotten around. He was always very friendly, whether telling me how he was too sick to come to work the day before (undoubtedly a lie), or about all of the kinky things he and a chick that roomed with a couple of other drivers did one night after a party. (The details were borderline too good to be true, but just plausible enough to be inspiring.) But there was something about him that tripped my alarm. I would watch him closely while he talked to me, and his face seemed like a mask, a very sincere, warm, friendly mask, but just a little too wide-eyed and open and honest. And it seemed as though behind those wide open friendly eyes there was another Brian studying me to see how I was reacting to the things he was telling me: was I buying it?

That's all pretty flimsy, just my reading of his character, and forty years later I was regretting what I said. If he really had been locked up out west, he still could have had thirty years of being a reformed character, husband, father, upstanding citizen.

The friend who contacted me, wanting to know why I had called Brian a sociopath, was a classmate of my brother's and Brian's, from the same grade school. About the time Brian left the cab company, and I lost track of him, this guy and Brian ran into each other, and were in the process of re-establishing their friendship. Then one day Brian called. He was kind of chuckling, the way you would about a funny thing you saw the night before on Newhart. It seems he and his roommate argued. The argument was trivial: the Bears' chances that season, or whose turn it was to take out the garbage. The word "dissed" hadn't been coined, but if it had Brian might have said: "My roommate dissed me." And because the roommate had dissed him: "What could I do?"

What he did was get up the next morning and fix himself bacon and eggs. Then he went into the roommate's bedroom, where he was sleeping, and poured the hot bacon grease on him.

Anyway, read Gone Girl. I think you will find it memorable.

Gone Girl