Farther Away

Consumer-technology products, of course, would never do anything this unattractive, because they’re not people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery. And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability, the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

The second perennial question is: What time of day do you work, and what do you write on? This must seem, to the people who ask it, like the safest and politest of questions. I suspect that it’s the question people ask a writer when they can’t think of anything else to ask. And yet to me it’s the most disturbingly personal and invasive of questions. It forces me to picture myself sitting down at my computer every morning at eight o’clock: to see objectively the person who, as he sits down at his computer in the morning, wants only to be a pure, invisible subjectivity. When I’m working, I don’t want anybody else in the room, including myself.

One of the great irritations of modern technology is that when some new development has made my life palpably worse and is continuing to find new and different ways to bedevil it, I’m still allowed to complain for only a year or two before the peddlers of coolness start telling me to get over it already, Grampaw—this is just the way life is now.

I’m not opposed to technological developments. Digital voice mail and caller ID, which together destroyed the tyranny of the ringing telephone, seem to me two of the truly great inventions of the late twentieth century. And how I love my BlackBerry, which lets me deal with lengthy, unwelcome e-mails in a few breathless telegraphic lines for which the recipient is nevertheless obliged to feel grateful, because I did it with my thumbs.

And my noise-canceling headphones, on which I can blast frequency-shifted white noise that drowns out even the most determined woofing of a neighbor’s television set. And the whole wonderful world of DVD technology and high-definition screens, which have already spared me from so many sticky theater floors, so many rudely whispering cinemagoers, so many openmouthed crunchers of popcorn.

Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It’s about sparing me from the intrusion of other people’s personal lives.

If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don’t see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page, or if you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest Gesamtkunstwerk since Wagner, I’m very happy for you, as long as you keep it to yourself.

the final push into a new hemisphere came two years ago, shortly after Ji was named a Model Citizen. Because of China’s population policy, one thing a Model Citizen really can’t do is have more than one child. Ji already had a boy from a previous marriage, and his wife had a daughter from her previous marriage. They were now expecting their first child as a couple, which would be Ji’s second. One night, when his wife was six months pregnant, the two of them decided that she should go to Canada to have the baby. Their child was born in Vancouver three months later; and Ji was able to remain a Model Citizen.

“The weather was abominable,” the authors inform us on the first page of The Laughing Policeman; and abominable it remains thereafter. The floors at police headquarters are “dirtied” by men “irritable and clammy with sweat and rain.” One chapter is set on a “repulsive Wednesday.” Another begins: “Monday. Snow. Wind. Bitter cold.” As with the weather, so with society as a whole. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s negativity toward postwar Sweden—a theme in all ten of their books—reaches its delirious apex in The Laughing Policeman. Not only does the Swedish winter weather inevitably suck, but the Swedish journalists are inevitably sensationalist and stupid, the Swedish landladies inevitably racist and rapacious, the Swedish police administrators inevitably self-serving, the Swedish upper class inevitably decadent or vicious, the Swedish antiwar demonstrators inevitably persecuted, the Swedish ashtrays inevitably overflowing, the Swedish sex inevitably sordid or unappetizingly blatant, the Swedish streets at Christmastime inevitably nightmarish. When Detective Lennart Kollberg finally gets an evening off and pours himself a nice big glass of akvavit, you can be sure that his phone is about to ring with urgent business. Stockholm in the late sixties probably really did have more than its share of ugliness and frustrations, but the perfect ugliness and perfect frustration depicted in the novel are clearly comic exaggerations.

But who is Alice Munro? She is the remote provider of intensely pleasurable private experiences.