→ November 14, 2011
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It Can’t Happen Here.

Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.

Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here is the best-known of his works after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930 (making him the first American author so honored, although they resumed their habit of giving the award to western Europeans the following year). It’s a protest novel, less purely literary than his classic novels of the 1920s (led by Arrowsmith, Babbitt, and Main Street), while angrier and livelier and a faster read.

It Can’t Happen Here melds two protests into one. Lewis depicts a United States leading up to and in the first few years after the 1936 election, where the nation seems to wilfully ignore the tyranny and pending genocide happening in Europe, and is also ripe for the rise of a demagogue of its own, a role filled by Berzelius “Buzz” Wintrip. Wintrip, a blowhard right-wing senator who spouts populist nonsense aimed at propelling himself to the White House, is backed up by Lee Sarason, the brains of the operation to elect Wintrip and a man who similarly desires power but does so for different ends. Wintrip’s ascension to President and establishment of his own dictatorship comes despite the claims of several characters early in the book that what happened in Germany and Italy “can’t happen here.”

Doremus Jessup, a liberal newspaper editor in a small town in Vermont, stands as one of the few voices of reason before Wintrip’s election, stating quite clearly that it can. He is the book’s great moral center despite a lack of moralizing; his goals are fundamental and based not on orthodoxy or theology, but on simple concepts of basic human rights and dignity. He also knows a charlatan when he sees one, and fears Wintrip’s rise because he recognizes that human nature will push him into office and then will allow the same people who voted for him to be ruled by his iron fist.

Jessup’s observations and Lewis’ simultaneous use of broad and fine strokes to define his setting give the book such tremendous staying power, so that even seventy-five years after its publication, Jessup’s observations (these before the election) still seem so familiar today:

“Remember our war hysteria, when we called sauerkraut ‘Liberty cabbage‘ and somebody actually proposed calling German measles ‘Liberty measles?’ And wartime censorship of honest papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the – well, the feet of Billy Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimee McPherson, who swam from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy? … Remember our Red scares and our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning against Al Smith told the Carolina moutnaineers that if Al won the Pope would illegitimatize their Children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon? Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution? … Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people have gone to enjoy lynchings? (…) Why, where in all history has there ever been a people so ripe for dictatorship as ours!”

I don’t remember those incidents, and a few of the names were completely unfamiliar to me, but I remember Freedom fries, and I remember the Kansas evolution hearings, and I remember a whisper campaign about the religion of a major party Presidential candidate, and I remember hearing a crowd cheer the governor who mentioned the 234 executions during his tenure, and I don’t really think anything is all that different today from the nation Sinclair described 75 years ago. We have more money and better toys and the tremendous degree of freedom afforded by the Internet, but we are still the same people subject to the same forces of persuasion.

The downside of Lewis’ anger is that he spends so much time setting up his alternate history and having the narrator and/or Jessup verbally knock it down that the personal part of the plot comes in fits and starts. Wintrip is elected and within hours declares martial law and begins a Khmer Rouge-like process of rolling back the clock on progress while rounding up enemies, real and potential, a process that accelerates as time passes and leads to the introduction of concentration camps. Jessup joins the opposition, supported by a government-in-exile based out of Canada, as do several members of his family and his circle of friends and business associates (with a few turncoat exceptions, including his son), with largely predictable results. There’s some narrative greed from the macro storyline as unrest begins to build locally and nationally, and more from the government’s reactions to Jessup’s treason, but the two storylines aren’t well-blended. When I was fifteen, I would have been riveted by things like descriptions of how Wintrip abolished the states and established new subdivisions to the country, but now I find them boring.

The other problem with It Can’t Happen Here is inherent to the genre of protest/dystopian novels – you know where they’re going. The individual rebels, ends up arrested, some people close to him will suffer or be killed, he’ll get out of prison, and so on. 1984, written thirteen years later, follows a similar structure but spends far less time on the political storyline and far more on Winston Smith himself. The timeless nature of Lewis’ observations on human nature and American culture balance out these flaws, but you have to be ready for a little preaching, as in these (very reasonable) lines from Jessup:

“I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them forever.”

That could refer to battles today over stem cell research or vaccination, or to the murder of Hypatia sixteen centuries ago. I’d give Lewis a 50 for storyline, but a 60 for his incisive take on the baser side of our nature.

Next up: A change of pace to some non-fiction – Donal O’Shea’s The Poincare Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe, the story of the history and solution to another one of mathematics’ most famous problems, which lay unsolved for a hundred years (despite many attempts) until an eccentric Russian came up with a proof, only to decline the accolades that came with it. It’s a “bargain book” right now on Amazon at $6.38 new.

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→ March 31, 2010
→ By

Island.

About to leave Arizona, but my parting shot was an appearance on Bill Simmons’ B.S. Report podcast today, talking about the upcoming season, some interesting rookies and young starts, and why RBIs and pitcher wins suck.

—

Island was Aldous Huxley’s last novel, his own counterpoint to his most famous novel (#72 on the Klaw 100) Brave New World. The latter was a classic dystopian novel, while Island follows the model of utopian novels by laying out its author’s personal philosophies for a greater, more progressive society in the most stilted, boring way possible.

In Island, journalist Will Faranby is part of a conspiracy that revolves around a coup on the peaceful island of Pala, where a utopian society has grown over the previous 100 years with little interference from the outside world. Faranby ends up on the island by accident, and ends up in the Palanese medical system, meeting most of the local leaders, and learning about their classless society, their community-based economy (socialistic, but not purely socialist), their Buddhist-influenced spirituality, and their use of the psychedelic drug moshka (the book’s analog for LSD, which Huxley used in his later years and promoted for its “mind-expansion” benefits). Along the way, Faranby compares and contrasts what he finds in Pala to what he remembers of Britain, and Huxley is unsparing in his criticism of all aspects of modern British life, such as its system of education:

“You never saw anybody dying, and you never saw anybody having a baby. How did you get to know things?”
“In the school I went to,” he said, “we never got to know things, we only got to know words.”

Utopian novels are, as a rule, difficult reads because they’re so busy describing their utopias that they dispense with plot, and Island is no different, as there is virtually no story and absolutely no tension. Huxley set up the coup story but largely drops it until the last five pages of the novel, which read as an afterthought added because he had to end the book somehow. If you’re interested in a 350-page sermon on Huxley’s idea of a paradisiacal society, I would recommend Island, but I found the book a chore, and for the rest of you I’d recommend Brave New World instead.

Next up: James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Tales of the South Pacific, later adapted into a famous musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , ,
→ December 19, 2009
→ By

The Human Factor.

“And yet I’d always believed that one day I would see him again … and then I would be able to thank him for saving Sarah. Now he’s dead and gone without a word of thanks from me.”
“All you’ve done for us has been a kind of thanks. He will have understood that. You don’t have to feel any regret.”
“No? One can’t reason away regret – it’s a bit like falling in love, falling into regret.”

Graham Greene’s The Human Factor is a spy novel that, as the title implies, focuses heavily on the human cost of espionage, particularly the psychological cost, as it follows MI6 agent Maurice Castle through his own reexamination of his motives and loyalties to an amoral institution that might be more dangerous than the people they’re allegedly fighting.

Castle is a British-born agent who, during a lengthy field op in South Africa, fell in love with a black woman and thus also fell afoul of the laws against interracial relationships during that country’s apartheid era. That woman, the Sarah of the quote above, escaped South Africa with the help of a prominent Communist and now lives with Maurice and her son (his stepson) in a quiet London suburb. Castle’s simple existence is compromised by a spiritual bankruptcy that becomes clearer to Castle as an investigation into a leak from his small department leads to unforeseen consequences and forces him to make a life-altering choice.

Greene’s view of spy games was that they were more mundane than typical spy novels and movies would imply, and the novel has very little violence and nothing you could call action, instead focusing on the individual characters, from the complex Castle to the true believer Percival to the unregenerate South African partisan Muller, and how they view and react to the possibility of a leak. Castle’s position is precarious by definition, as he’s one of only three or four potential leaks in the department, and he has a known connection to the communist faction in South Africa, whose white-led regime was at the time a battleground for the Cold War powers. He’s aware of the investigation, but when he sees how far Percival might go to protect the agency, regardless of the moral or legal implications of his action, he’s forced to act.

Greene was among the best practicioners of the spy novel for his very reluctance to rely on action sequences and overt violence, both of which are crutches for a novelist in any genre outside of hard-boiled detective fiction. Setting that restriction on his writing meant Greene had to spend more time on character development and crafting realistic dialogue and actions for his characters, whether he was writing a farce or, as in this novel, a serious commentary. He paints a bleak picture of intelligence services as bureaucracies filled with men who either have no moral compasses or are willing suppress them for the good of the agency, and in a secondary theme takes more than his share of shots at the apartheid policy of South Africa that was still in effect for sixteen years after The Human Factor‘s publication. But while Greene fleshes Castle out fully – not that he’s all that sympathetic, and it is his spiritual bankruptcy more than anyone’s that defines the book’s lack of a fixed morality – most of his secondary characters get secondary treatment. We see, for example, glimpses of the lonely career man Daintry, but his subplot has no start or finish and he appears in some ways to have wandered on to the wrong set. Cynthia, the primary secretary for Castle’s group, plays a key role in the investigation portion of the plot, but as a prop, not as a defined character. The Human Factor is thus more a story of bureaucratic decay in the intelligence service in pursuit of questionable means aimed at dubious ends than a story of its characters, even though the climax and denuoement are very much about Castle himself.

Next up: V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, which appears on both the Modern Library and TIME 100 lists and is one of two books that seem to be at the head of the Nobel Prize-winner’s canon.

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→ December 15, 2009
→ By

Run.

My analysis of the Halladay/Lee series of deals is up on ESPN.com. I’ll be on Sirius 210/XM 175 at 8:35 pm EST tonight.

—

Ann Patchett’s Run, the long-awaited followup to her masterpiece, Bel Canto, is, like its predecessor, a beautifully written and sensitive book, one that moves quickly despite its slow treatment of time, with most of the book’s action occurring in a 24-hour period. Unfortunately, it’s also lightweight and sentimental as Patchett overplays her political theme at the expense of any conflict in the story itself.

Run covers the Doyle family, comprising the father Bernard, an Irish-American former mayor of Boston; his two adopted African-American sons, Teddy and Tip; the unseen older biological son, Sullivan; and, for the opening chapter, the mother, Bernadette, who is dead when the story opens. Bernard, Teddy, and Tip are attending a lecture given by Jesse Jackson at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on a snowy Boston evening, after which a traffic accident turns their insular world upside down when one of them is hurt and a bystander is critically injured.

Where Bel Canto had complex three-dimensional characters, Run has simple, entirely sympathetic ones. Tip, Teddy, and the young African-American girl Kenya who witnesses the accident are all thinly drawn; they are all runners (how stereotypical) and Tip and Teddy are each monomaniacal in their personal interests. Sullivan eventually appears, and his backstory is typical and excuses just about everything in his itinerant lifestyle, even the reason why he had to flee Africa to return to Boston unannounced. The closest we get to a complex character is Tennessee Moser, the woman injured in the traffic accident, whose conversation with her dead friend – Patchett wisely leaves the question of whether this is a religious experience, a dream, or a hallucination up to the reader – was, for me, the only truly compelling passage in the book, like a brilliant short story around which Patchett built a novel.

Patchett herself says in a Q&A at the end of the paperback edition that the story is primarily about politics, not family, and in a second note she fawns a little over the then-candidate Barack Obama. Kenya is the blatantly obvious Obama symbol, from her name to her sudden appearance on the scene to the way the plot unfolds where she is the person the Doyle family has been waiting for since the death of the mother (John Kennedy, perhaps?) almost twenty years earlier to the way she spurs Tip and Teddy to greater personal heights and even helps Sullivan straighten himself out … it’s too much, another example of the completely unrealistic expectations heaped on President Obama, who could turn out to be our greatest President ever and still fall short of the hyperbole. It’s ham-handed and a little condescending, and Patchett seems to have worked so hard to craft and protect this savior-character Kenya that she left virtually no conflict in the book – there is no unsympathetic character, no one working against the protagonists, little question of where we’re ultimately going. She offers one plot twist, but it turns out to have little effect on the plot, just some symbolic value that I won’t mention here for fear of spoiling it. I’m fine with books that are full of metaphor and symbolism, but give me plot and depth, too. The result here is a quick read and a warm one, but it’s a little maudlin and lacked the richness of the soaring epic of Bel Canto.

Next up: An “entertainment” from Graham Greene, one of his later spy novels, The Human Factor.

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→ July 20, 2009
→ By

The Grapes of Wrath.

The Grapes of Wrath is an angry, incendiary novel that blends poetic prose and sharp characterization with a severe downward-spiral plot and one-dimensional antagonists to incite a specific reaction in the reader, one of revulsion toward an economic system that, in Steinbeck’s view, was impoverishing an enormous class of Americans while enriching a lucky few. It’s a six-lister, ranking #10 on the Modern Library 100, #3 on the Radcliffe 100, and #54 on The Novel 100, and only missing from the Guardian 100. (I don’t believe any book shows up on all seven of the booklists I use, partly a function of their varying eras – such a novel would have to have been published between 1900 and 1950, in English – and partly a function of the Guardian‘s clear contrarian bent.) According to Daniel Burt’s essay in The Novel 100, it was banned and burned when first published due to its political perspective and controversial closing scene, while literary critics frowned on its preachy dialogue, thin characters, and bombastic plotting, but its reputation appears to have been rehabilitated over time, with the work now widely recognized as an American classic.

The family at the story’s center is the Joads, one of many Oklahoman families who lose their farms and head west toward the promised land of California, where jobs allegedly await these families if they can handle the trek across the southwest. The chapters alternate between those focusing on the Joads’ plight and general scene-setting chapters that provide background for the core plot and give Steinbeck a chance to wax poetically, as on the subject of Route 66:

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.

The Joads reach California but not entirely intact, and end up in a “government camp,” a squatter’s paradise with real buildings, clean sanitary facilities, and a fair but strong system of self-government that enforces cooperative behavior through social pressure and the rarely-used threat of ouster. The system works perfectly, and even an attempted coup by outsiders is quickly thwarted through teamwork. It is the idyllic view of communism common to much literature of the interwar era, although to be fair to Steinbeck, the camp was not a unit or system of economic production but a social safety net for the unfortunates swept aside by capitalist greed during the Depression. The Joads aren’t in the camp for very long, but the idea of a self-enforcing system like this one operating without a whiff of corruption among those in power is incredibly naive. Steinbeck’s commentary isn’t just limited to the scene-setting chapters, and one major criticism of the novel is that he puts his opinions into the dialogue, making characters sometimes seem like mouthpieces for his political views, like Uncle John’s comments on rampant consumerism:

Funny thing, I wanta buy stuff. Stuff I don’t need … Stuff settin’ out there, you jus’ feel like buyin’ it whether you need it or not.

Steinbeck’s prose didn’t seem bombastic to me, nor was I troubled by slightly preachy dialogue; perhaps the 70 years since the book’s publication have seen such widespread degradation in prose writing that what was overbearing in 1939 seems fresh and clever today. Most impressive to me, however, was the book’s pacing. The Joads lose their farm, travel west over sparse land, and end up in a Hardy-esque series of big and small calamities in California that leave the reader afraid to hope for anything, yet Steinbeck focuses on little details like repair work on the family’s car to keep the text moving even when the family isn’t. There’s also a clear faith in the goodness of man – at least, of poor man – encapsulated not just in the jarring final scene but in many small sacrifices made by and for the Joads earlier in the book.

I wondered on Twitter last week if Cormac McCarthy had any of this book in mind when writing The Road, a similarly what-the-hell-can-go-wrong-next story that also focuses on a parent trying to keep a family together against impossible odds. The Joads know the name of their destination on the desolate road, but don’t know what it holds; the Man doesn’t know the name of his destination, but has a similarly vague sense of what might be there to go with the strong sense that he must take the Boy there. Both books show the best and worst of humanity in horrible situations. Both authors put substantial focus on food – not just the search for the next source, but on the consumption of it. And perhaps the father and son in the barn at the end of Grapes inspired McCarthy to build a novel around a boy and his father.

I may have more to say on Grapes of Wrath, since it, like The Road, inspires so much thought after the first reading, but in the meantime, I’ve moved on to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Exploits and Adventures of Brigadier Gerard.

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