Gerald Everett Jones's Blog: Gerald Everett Jones - Author, page 25
January 10, 2024
Book Review: Lessons in Chemistry – A Satire on Sexual Politics
I reviewed this book here a year ago. Interest seems renewed now that it’s a streaming series on Apple TV+.
The book categories Amazon has assigned to the bestselling novel Lessons in Chemistry are “Mothers & Children Fiction,” “Humorous Fiction,” and “Literary Fiction.” All are apt, up to a point. It’s about an unwed mother who is raising an only female child. The plot is suffused with humor and oddball antics. And, yes, the prose in this first novel from Bonnie Garmus is masterful.
Lessons in Chemistry. A frivolous entertainment it’s not.
But the most fitting category, I think, would be something like, “Bitterly Satiric Feminist Fiction.” Main character Elizabeth Zott is a research scientist in the 1950s who is misunderstood and maligned in every conceivable way. When her career in molecular research is blunted and blocked by arrogant males, she steps into the role of daytime TV star, almost by chance. She hosts an afternoon live cooking show – and she decides to use every one of her recipes as a lesson in chemistry – both physical (as in, elements and reagents) and political (advice to housewives who lack self-confidence).
As to comedy, many situations are indeed humorous, but most have a sardonic edge. And some readers may be surprised that Elizabeth’s misfortunes include rape, sudden death of her beloved partner (one of only a few men in the book who act nobly), abusive employment, emotional battering, vicious gossip and character assassination, theft of her scholarly work, and multiple instances of deception and fraud.
Ultimately, funny it’s not meant to be.
Setting the plot in the past – in the consumer-crazed postwar era in America – serves to heighten contrast – in fact, the lack of significant differences – with today’s state of affairs.
Zott’s daughter Madeleine – Mad, for short – is a precocious kid who could read adult-themed novels before she started elementary school.
This book might be an answer to such a child’s question today, “Mommy, who was Gloria Steinem?”
ANOTHER PAPERBACK GIVEAWAY! Click here to win a copy of Harry Harambee’s Kenyan Sundowner along with a small truckload of other binge-worthy novels in the “Second-Chance Romance” category. Be sure to mark the checkbox indicating you want books by Gerald Everett Jones. Contest ends January 17, 2024.
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. You’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
And if you’re already subscribed…
January 5, 2024
Book Review: Silverview by John le Carré
Silverview is the last novel John le Carré (David Cornwell) completed before his death in December of 2020. It was released in the US by Viking Penguin in hardcover and Kindle in October of 2021, then in paperback last July. The book includes an Afterword by the author’s son Nick Cornwell, who is a writer himself using the name Nick Harkaway.
I reviewed the book on my blog when it came out in hardcover. Now I’ve returned to it for another reading, inspired by my recent attention to The Pigeon Tunnel, both the memoir and the recent author interview with Errol Morris by the same title.
In Nick Cornwell’s Afterword, he explains why he hesitated to edit and then publish the book until after his father’s death.
The son opines that his father was reluctant to release his last novel because it might have been perceived as a betrayal of his promise to himself never to disclose the actual business of the Service, to the extent he ever knew it.
I’d have a different opinion. The plot culminates in the funeral of an intelligence officer whose operational life was at all times deeply secretive. Just prior to her passing, this character discloses that not only had she been married for years to a double agent, but she was also his handler and fully aware of his sympathies and betrayals, a fact that she did not withhold from her own supervisors.
Nick Cornwell admits that the manuscript had languished in his father’s desk. The son assumed this was because the manuscript was still in work. Instead, on finally reading it, Nick realized all it needed was a light copyedit.
Here’s my thought: Because fiction authors draw material from their own life experiences, however disguised and modified, we worry that our fanciful plots might be predictive as well as historical. Indeed, some of my plots have foreshadowed turnings in my own life.
I think le Carré didn’t want this story about the last days of an old spy to be a self-fulfilling prophesy: He feared it would be his last.
As my friends and fans know, I’m a longtime admirer of le Carré, and I believe that, to rate him as “The premier spy novelist of our time. Perhaps of all time” (Time), is an underestimation. In his novels, the spy story is a metaphor and a model for not only the geopolitical strife between nations but also for the loyalties and betrayals between human beings – in their most intimate and personal transactions. I’d say William Boyd’s comment in The New Statesman comes closer: “We should see him as our contemporary Dickens.”
Two recurring themes in le Carré are that humans almost always betray their loved ones, and skilled spies (like readers) must be obsessively attentive close observers. By strewing hints, clues, and foreshadowing in narratives rich in dazzling but often extraneous detail, he teaches you how spies think as well as how to read with critical intelligence, especially between the lines.
I’ll risk asserting that fans of le Carré will find nothing new in Silverview. But consider this a feature and not a flaw. If you’ve read and paid close attention to his other novels, you will be quick to recognize the suspicious cover stories, the simple and seemingly innocent methods of exchanging word codes and documents, and – at the core of all of it – the ways double agents double back on their professed loyalties, at the same time serving and betraying their countries, while twisting their personal lives and loves inside out.
As I say, recognizing these plot elements on first appearance may give you the satisfaction that you’ve aced the course at Sarratt, the Circus spy academy. Perhaps then you are ready to recognize, face up to, and deal with the loyalties and betrayals in your own life. I guarantee you will pay closer attention to what other authors are trying to express, if not what your intimates are trying to tell you.
All this said, it will come as no surprise that I respectfully disagree with Nick Cornwell’s assessment of this book:
“… Silverview does something that no other le Carré novel ever has. It shows a service fragmented: filled with its own political factions, not always kind to those it should cherish, not always very effective or alert, and ultimately not sure, any more, that it can justify itself.”
I beg to differ. The close observer knows that John le Carré has been saying this all along.
And he may have expired wishing he’d given us just one more.
PAPERBACK GIVEAWAY! Click here to win a copy of Bonfire of the Vanderbilts along with a small truckload of other binge-worthy novels. Be sure to mark the checkbox indicating you want books by Gerald Everett Jones. Contest ends January 10, 2024.
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. You’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
And if you’re already subscribed…
December 29, 2023
Preacher Stalls the Second Coming - Preview
Devout Christians may think amateur sleuth Reverend Evan Wycliff is an agnostic. He has an obsessively curious, questioning mind. Is this therefore not Christian literature? Was the Book of Revelation a divinely inspired vision or a crazed hallucination?
Here’s the text of Chapter 1 …“Reverend Wycliff, much of what you believe in your Christian faith is true, but not for the reasons you believe.”
The grizzled old man at my door was muttering in heavily accented English, but his message was unmistakable. It didn’t help my perception that I was severely hung over, having spent most of the night alternately guzzling cheap bourbon and praying.
It was a spring morning, only slightly chilly, promising a day that might be perfectly fine. I was clad in my habitual sweatsuit, which might well have reeked by now, but I’d grown so accustomed to my own stink I wouldn’t know. I worried he did, even though his outward appearance was no more respectable than mine. He was dressed in a black business suit, but it wasn’t his size and looked rumpled and dirty, as if he’d been sleeping in doorways.
I’d finally managed to drop off to sleep just moments before there came the polite knock on my door, and I was having trouble keeping my eyes open.
“You’ve made coffee?” he asked with an approving sniff. It wasn’t so much a question as an insistent hint. When I had prepared with undue optimism last night to crawl into bed, I’d set the automatic drip machine for precisely this hour.
It seems I have no choice but to invite him in.
I still hadn’t greeted him or said a word yet. I simply opened the door to my humble cube-sized trailer home and waved an arm toward its shabby interior.
On the narrow counter where I undertake food preparations often no more complex than opening a can, I could only find one mug and that one encrusted with my own leavings. As he jostled behind me and sat in the only chair, I rummaged in the wall-mounted crate that houses dinnerware, condiments, and pharmaceuticals. I was delighted to find a second cup, this one emblazoned with the logo of the Twin Dragons Casino. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d needed to use it, but it looked reasonably clean.
I filled both cups from the steaming carafe, turned to offer him his, and before I could finally manage to speak to ask his preferences, he blurted what sounded like, “Kine krim, kine sook. Trying to quit zucker.”
German, I realized. Or perhaps his accent was of some other Eastern European extraction, and he was telling me he’d be more comfortable if I shared his other common language.
I sat down on my cot and blew out a puff of exhaustion, doubly fatigued after my long, dark night of the soul and the presumably unpleasant surprise of this intrusion on my unenviable privacy.
We both sipped, reverently it seemed.
He smacked his lips before he sighed and said, “I took long time finding you. Fortunately, your neighbors are shameless gossips.”
I took another restorative sip, cleared my throat, and asked gruffly, “To what do I owe the pleasure, Mister—?”
“Doctor Gropius. Hans Gropius. Forgive the similarity in name to the famous historical person, but no relation. The surname not my choice, of course. But people assume I must be from family of architects.” He sipped again, this time long and noisily, then added with a chuckle, “Although I stand in awe of the grand design.”
Somehow I caught the hint. My brain was waking up. There had to be a reason this fellow had taken pains to seek me out. So I asked, “Design? Physical or spiritual?”
He chuckled again, “Insight, you have! I knew I was in the right place. I simply toss out phrase that suggests scheme of Creation, and you jump on it. Clever fellow. We are going to be friends, I am sure of it.”
I cautioned him by displaying the upraised palms of my hands. It occurred to me he might think I was intending to show him stigmata or perhaps pre-Parkinson’s tremor, neither of which I think I have and might seem crazy, but based on his behavior so far, I had no reason to expect he was sane either. “When you talk about what I believe, I don’t know how you’d know. I will say I’m not an agnostic, although certainly I’ve been accused of such. I insist I am a man of faith, but faith in what mostly defies definition, depends on the day and my mood.”
He smiled, explaining. “I was faithful listener to your broadcasts. I was saddened when you went off the air. Then news of your resignation from your ministry was also upsetting.”
“I didn’t resign. I was kicked out, but the result is the same. I suppose my tumble downhill began when my wife left me. Turns out being a minister’s wife is an even heavier cross to bear than being a pastor. And as for my show, I tried to speak truth to power one too many times.”
“Do you believe in afterlife?” he asked quietly.
At that moment, I wished the coffee were bourbon and I could stiffen myself with a shot. I began to worry he might be a journalist or some emissary from church leadership sent to chastise me. But I decided I might as well answer as honestly as I could. “I don’t believe in resurrection of the body—as a living, breathing, human body. But, reincarnation? Transference of consciousness from one being—or state of being—to another? I won’t say it’s impossible. I worry it’s not, but because I have an obsessively curious intellect, I worry a lot.”
“My dear Evan,” he began, then stopped himself to ask, “May I address you so? I feel I know you so well, you see.”
His manner was amusing, endearing. “Go ahead,” I allowed. “Please tell me more about myself than I know, and I’ll gift you another cup of coffee.”
He loved this. Grinning broadly he teased, “You are, of course, aware of virtual reality?”
“Sure,” I said. “But can’t say I’ve indulged. Not games for kids anymore, I understand. Frankly, it’s scary.”
“And you know work of physicist Nick Bostrum?”
“I do,” I admitted. “Not in depth but I believe he’s famous for speculating we don’t live in what’s termed base reality.”
“Just so,” the visitor said approvingly. “We say now we live in post-information age. Soon we live in post-reality. Dreaming, waking—who can know the difference?”
“What are you trying to tell me, Hans?”
“Evan, you are a man of faith. You believe what you cannot see. We scientists, we say seeing is believing. I’m here to tell you, seeing means nothing anymore.”
Release date of the fourth book, Preacher Stalls the Second Coming, will be announced. The first three are available now in paperback, Kindle, and EPUB. The first novel, Preacher Finds a Corpse, is also available as an audiobook from Audible and other distributors worldwide.
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. You’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
And if you’re already subscribed…
December 23, 2023
Do Men Want Books as Gifts?
Surely Papa didn't mean it. Certainly, he must have been speaking of mankind, individuals of the human race, and not deliberately or dismissively excluding the fairer sex from his huge generalization about what makes for good storytelling.
Dear Papa Hemingway wanted his prose and his bourbon served the same way—straight. I recently commented on his questionable gifts to authors here. (Photo credit: Notable.quotes.com)
But maybe he meant it just exactly the way it comes across today. More than any author before him, and as stridently as any of his imitators since, Hemingway identified the profession of writing as man's work. And his entire life away from the typewriter seemed to be a celebration of masculinity - shooting wild animals on safari, fighting bulls in the ring, and habitually wearing that military-style safari jacket with the epaulets and all those pockets - which became the very badge of the latter-day cigarillo-chomping, proudly male novelist, including Norman Mailer, James Jones, and Hunter S. Thompson.
Is it any surprise that the women of the publishing world would retaliate against this unspeakable discrimination? In Hemingway's era, perhaps the most talented female novelist was Edith Wharton, whose baroque prose style rivaled Henry James, her longtime friend. While not singling out Wharton as the enemy, Hemingway railed against baroque style in any form. Clean and simple were his sentences, and the clarity of journalistic prose benefited greatly. But it impoverished artistic prose. To this day, agents, publishers, and the few editors who are left harp on the principles of Hemingway's plain-vanilla style. Frankly, I'm sick of it, but that's a topic for another blog.
Perhaps thanks to Papa Hemingway, the quest for the "great American novel" in the twentieth century was considered by the publishing industry and audiences alike to be a man's game: All those Johns - John O'Hara, John Steinbeck, John Cheever, John Updike. And then there's Philip Roth, who promoted the self-centered maleness of masturbation to high art and never wrote a novel that wasn't about his own dick.
During the reign of these male moguls in the literary sphere, there have been female giants like Joyce Carol Oates and Anne Tyler. Their novels are brilliant but they didn't get anywhere near seriously comparable treatment. Someone should have told them to wear safari jackets.
According to Jason Pinter's piece in Huffington Post, “Why Men Don't Read: How Publishing is Alienating Half the Population,” men can't get a place at the table. Pinter’s article is more than a decade old by now, but I believe it still holds. In its death throes, the publishing industry has favored lower-paid executives and editors - surprise, women! - and guess what? - they don't like male-centered fiction much at all, perhaps rationalizing that, these days, men don't bother to read. (More to the point, men don't buy as many books as women do, and that's been a fact for a long while.)
Undeniably, chick lit is a hugely successful, commercial genre, and that's where female writers have blazed their widest inroads. But, sadly for the sake of feminist sexual politics, chick lit is modeled on an old sexist formula. Both Bridget Jones's Diary and Sex and the City are modeled shamelessly on Jane Austen. The plot engine is about finding Mr. Right in an economic world dominated entirely by men. Certainly, Carrie Bradshaw is a talented free agent who can write her own books and host her own publicity events. But she will never have her own private plane unless Big, the guy with the big bank account and bigger heart, takes her to wife.
Even sorrier for the sake of equity between the sexes is the success of Fifty Shades of Grey. With a plot ripped off from the Story of O, this piece of puke-flavored pulp celebrates the degradation of women. And for reasons that escape me, guess who's buying it?
Okay, men grabbed the literary limelight in the last century. Today, you'd think we can't get a break, and perhaps we deserve it.
No, it won’t be old news in a week. Some of us will be reflecting on whatever did or didn’t just happen in our family relationships. Curious Amazonians go here.
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. You’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
Last-minute gift idea!And if you’re already subscribed…
December 19, 2023
Gray skies? Staying inside?
Why do bad things happen to good people here in this sleepy farm town in Southern Missouri?Clicking the Book Addict diagram is the surprise, grab-bag choice.
What are the unintended consequences of getting what you ask for?The first book in the series is free as Kindle or EPUB. After that, you could be hooked.
What comes after #MeToo? #MeThree?First Kindle/EPUB in the series is free. After that, you’ll have to pay to benefit from Rollo’s lessons learned.
Travel with Harry to East Africa.Moira, what makes you think you can do this? Hint: Mick isn’t sure you can, and Brad secretly hopes you can’t.
Who can that be at the door?The tour operator said there would be hookups and parties.
Can’t decide? Browse the booklist.Past loves and lusts come knocking.
Here’s an idea. Gift a subscription to a kindred thinker who craves thinking about thinking.
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. You’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
December 13, 2023
There's nothing so refreshing as a 'good wheeze'
Like a wise parent who never scolds, Jeeves warns Bertie the consequences of his jokes could be unintended and dire, then dutifully cleans up afterward.
Set in the Roaring ‘Twenties, Right Ho, Jeeves by the British humorist P.G. Wodehouse is a collection of stories about a young wealthy gentleman, Bertie Wooster, and his manservant Jeeves. Bertie is well-meaning, but lazy and not particularly bright. He freely admits Jeeves is the brainy one. Bertie always makes a mess of getting a chum out of romantic or money trouble, and Jeeves always comes up with some cockeyed scheme that saves the day.
Just after World War I, the male population of Europe had been decimated by the war. Bertie’s comic fear of his dowager aunt reflected the reality that much of England’s private wealth was then in the hands of older women. Young men like him who had been infants during the war were so appalled by the state of the world that they coped by acting like bratty little boys who refused to grow up.
Good wheezes guaranteed (Everyman edition)
So – avoid responsibility, romantic entanglements, and financial conundrums. Fear marriage and anyone in uniform. Pursue amusement, particularly if a practical joke will end in what Bertie’s chums call a “good wheeze.” Fraternize with like-minded adult males who, despite their elevated social standing, aspire to remain boys. Encourage food fights, but only with dinner rolls so as not to create a mess for which responsibility would have to be assumed. Coordinate rugby scrums in the clubroom, but only if fragile crockery has first been cleared. Solving real-world problems (such as romantic entanglements) by way of practical jokes and stratagems might not work but it’s always worth a good try.
Our world – like his – is anything but silly these days. But sometimes what Bertie called a “good wheeze” is just the thing to put a chap right.
His misadventures began when he dressed a sex doll up to look like a famous movie star and drove it around town in an open convertible to impress his girlfriend.
December 10, 2023
More Thoughts on Le Carré
… implying that behavior is a set of masks worn to suit the situation and the audience. He further observed that there is no “grand plan” or “masterminds” at the center of human affairs and geopolitics.
Documentarian Errol Morris interviews the late John Le Carré about his memoir, which names many of the real-world models for his fictional characters.
After my recent post containing my book review of The Pigeon Tunnel, a subscriber wrote me this:
I also recently watched the documentary so I especially enjoyed reading your review. I was fascinated by him, but it was unsettling to realize how human and how broken Cornwell seemed. What stood out to me most was how his childhood seemed to make him fragile and yet ruthless. I always thought of our intelligence community as coming from the cream of the crop. Obviously they must be highly intelligent but It was surprising to hear that questionable, shadier characters may be better suited to service than saints.
Thank you for sharing your review with me. Your comments are always interesting, thoughtful and fresh. I also find him an engaging storyteller, frighteningly candid. I appreciated your point that the issue is larger now than any revelation of misbehavior by "Five Eyes" but has evolved into a growing global shadow entity with unlimited and untraceable funding that gives it potentially unknowable influence.
Cornwell was a fascinating person. Broken, yes, but wise from worldly “lessons learned,” as they say in the trade, which are diligently documented and then often simply filed away and ignored. Even though (in the early days, at least) he had to have his manuscripts vetted by his service, he has from the beginning intended to speak truth to power. I’ve had lots of courses in history, and in high school senior year, I took US diplomatic history. But I’ve learned a lot more about geopolitics from his “made-up” stories.
I’m also rewatching The Night Manager, which was originally on ShowTime but is now on Amazon Prime. That is his best book after Tinker Tailor in my view, although I’m obviously drawn to The Constant Gardener because it is set in Kenya. Written years before Covid, that book warns about Big Pharma experimenting on the populations of third-world countries. He researched that book diligently and said the truth was much more chilling.
I hadn’t watched the documentary when I wrote the book review. Now I have, as well as the one with Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known. What stuns me about Errol Morris’s interview with Rumsfeld is that, frank as some of his questions were, he never asked about the reported $2T of DoD transactions that can’t be traced. Rumsfeld made that admission in a press conference on September 10, 2001, and as far as I can tell, no one followed up. Now, that amount of money is not only huge - it was about triple the department’s annual budget at the time. So any reporter who wasn’t asleep and who possessed a grade-school understanding of arithmetic, could have asked the follow-up:
Mr. Secretary, over what period of time can’t these transactions be traced?
Granted, there isn’t a one-for-one correspondence between budget dollars and transactions. For example, allocations and disbursements are separate transactions, representing the ins and outs. But if the divisor is anything less than a few years, getting to $2T would seem impossible, especially when government contract employees must account for their labor hours in 10-minute increments, and budget estimates are supposed to get extra review if they end up being plus or minus 5 percent of actual.
Now, giving the Secretary the benefit of the doubt, the divisor might be the time period since the department began to use computers. That would have been back in the punched-card days of the IBM 360, in the late 1950s. In those days, government auditors had developed no methods for “looking inside” computer processing. The auditors, who were schooled in following paper audit trails, would examine inputs and outputs. Until much later (around 1980), auditors developed “test decks” to pose hypothetical transactions at the limits of acceptability. The term stuck even though the decks were no longer cards and the tests were injected by portable computers (not yet laptops) about the size of a suitcase.
So, to continue thinking about thinking about the $2T puzzle, if indeed the timeframe of Rumsfeld’s analysis spanned roughly 50 years, how did our government manage to “misplace” $40 billion per year? I mean, adjusted for inflation, even $1 Billion back in the day was real money!
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. You’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
And if you’re already a subscriber…
December 6, 2023
Book Review 'The Pigeon Tunnel' by John Le Carré
No question, John Le Carré is an engaging storyteller of the spy-thriller genre. But, in a larger context, he is a master craftsman of literary fiction. He is a thoughtful commentator on geopolitics – and particularly on the power structure President Eisenhower named the “military-industrial complex.” And he is angry, in the tradition of British postwar novelists John Osborne and Kingsley Amis, who saw the political order and its elitist society as fundamentally corrupt.
Le Carré makes his subtle arguments in his fiction. You won’t find any political rants in this collection of autobiographical essays. His worldview is optimistic cynicism. Love, he says (in his novels, not explicitly here), is any close relationship you have not yet betrayed. Emphasis on yet. His optimism creeps in when he encounters rare acts of exceptional kindness. He includes many of those delightful surprises in these essays, including some for which he modestly takes personal responsibility.
It’s a memoir, a cautionary tale. Also - career counseling? (Penguin)
The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life was billed by its publicists as John Le Carré’s first memoir. However, it would be more accurate to say that these are the journal entries of a different person – David Cornwell. Le Carré is Cornwell’s pen name and invented persona. This book is mostly about real-world episodes and people in Cornwell’s life who correspond closely to the stories and characters that the other person – the novelist – ripped off and exploited.
What’s remarkable is the apparent ease with which he has gained access and moved among aristos, politicians, celebrities, journalists, gangsters, and warlords. It’s obvious that he listens more than he talks. His occasional questions of his acquaintances and interview subjects are penetrating and often brash.
He tells us that Oxford don Vivian Green became the model for George Smiley, Yvette Pierpaoli for Tessa Quayle, and Cornwell’s own father, Ronnie, for Rick Pym. A key strategy in Ronnie’s plan for parenting was to send David away to exclusive boarding schools, despite a habitual lack of funds for tuition. One character Cornwell does not own to specifically is timid schoolboy Bill Roach of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Little Cornwell is likely the model for the shy, tubby Roach. Bullied by his peers and cowed by his mentors, “the unpaid Bill” learns he has talents as a “close observer.” And this is Le Carré’s central metaphor. What is a spy but a close observer? George Smiley can recite from memory the license-plate numbers of every car at the curb on the way to his house.
And what is the reader but a close observer? Thank you, Mr. Le Carré, for training me and your fans not only to read closely, but also to pay attention to seemingly mundane details, inflections of voice, nuanced sins of omission, and – most of all – the white space between the lines.
For all its revelations, The Pigeon Tunnel has a notable information gap. As I turned its pages, I was eager to get the scoop on the topic that has inspired the author’s most recent fury. Back in the Cold-War era, he was focused on the power plays between the intelligence agencies of the East and West, along with the hypocrisies of their governments and the incompetence of their bureaucrats. But a new generation of readers regards all that as old news.
What’s new is the globalized shadow government that seems to be taking over. Conspiracy theory? Hardly. Here’s what President Obama had to say about it in his last address to the General Assembly of the United Nations:
Global capital is too often unaccountable — nearly $8 trillion stashed away in tax havens, a shadow banking system that grows beyond the reach of effective oversight.
When you consider that the total world economy at that time was estimated to be something like $80 trillion annually, you begin to see the size of the monster – and it’s growing.
And if you think any politician – whether crooked or straight or bent, in any country – will ever lift a finger to prosecute big-boy money launderers, well, as one of Le Carré’s hapless espiocrats sighs, “You don’t understand anything bad.”
Errol Morris has done several other films on espionage and geopolitics. See especially his interview with Donald Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known.
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. You’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
And if you’re already a subscriber…
December 3, 2023
My Mentor Cheerful Charlie
Dr. Charles Ruggles* was my freshman English teacher in high school. He had been the head of the department, but he decided his seniors were so stupid their skills might be beyond remediation. So he decided he had to be the one to brainwash the newbies, start them on the path to virtuous performance before untended laziness could ruin their chances.
* Disambiguation: Not the famous Hollywood character actor by the same name who paired in a comedy duo with Edward Everett Horton in Trouble in Paradise, perhaps my favorite movie from the pre-code era.
The good doctor taught me irony, metaphor, symbolism, expository writing, and how to read between the lines, using examples from Dickens and Twain, along with extensive descriptions of how much he loved the chocolate soufflé served at the Drake Hotel in downtown Chicago. He described its artful preparation, its different and sumptuous layers, and the delight of sneering at the disappointed diners who lacked the foresight to order it in advance—as soon as they’d been seated at their carefully reserved table—because it was concocted to order, then needed to rise and crisp in the oven for almost an hour.
If a teacher imparts, stimulates, or simply encourages curiosity, they’ve done their job.
I never dined at that restaurant, and I never saw it on any other menu. But when I was young and dating on the Near North Side (where that hotel is at the apex of the Miracle Mile on Lakeshore Drive), my favorite big-event restaurant was Jacques (French), and they had Grand Marnier soufflé. As with Charlie’s favorite, you had to order it when you sat down because it took so long to bake. I had it a few times, and the experience did match Charlie’s experience in many ways, but the chocolate would no doubt have been thicker and richer.
Oh, and here’s one of his examples of what later I realized was irony: Huckleberry Finn describes the library in a grand house where he spends the night. He is respectfully impressed with all the leather-bound books. These people must be very smart! So refined! And those volumes were arranged so neatly, in an orderly fashion, with a thin patina of dust covering all of them.
Similarly, my mother (also from Missouri) always thought that the most respectable houses had a grand piano or a harp, ideally both, preferably visible from the street behind lit parlor windows. She eventually had both. She played the piano rarely, mostly pressing the chords needed to support hymns, but she never attempted to play that harp.
This special edition of the novel appends my background research whitepaper, "Deconstructing the Scandalous Narrative of The Baptism," which appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of The Journal of Art Crime. (Hardcover gift hint for the art-history geek in your life.)
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. You’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
And if you’re already a subscriber, perhaps…
November 29, 2023
Book Review - 'The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store' by James McBride
A simple definition of literary fiction might be any novel that booksellers don’t know where to shelve. It’s the “all-else” genre, the genre that is not generic. Some might say it’s literary art for the sake of the art rather than primarily for entertainment. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride is undoubtedly literary fiction, having not only won the National Book Award but also not obviously fitting into another genre.
Winner of the National Book Award (Riverhead Books)
But it does share several elements of other literary novels. Although the plot begins with a corpse, it’s not a mystery story. There isn’t a crime to be solved so much as a past event to be revealed—eventually.
The store in the title is a local market and gathering place on Chicken Hill, a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Historically, immigrants gravitated to Pottstown, which grew from a farming settlement to become a grimy but prosperous heavy-industry center.
The centrality of a store, a house, a school, a church, or any gathering place can encompass family and community as literary theme. A store brings people together, and their transactions and interactions trigger conflicts, kicking off the engine of drama.
Racial and cultural divides both oppose and attract in this story. The working-class Jews and the struggling blacks on Chicken Hill find common cause, clashing at times with the poorer blacks in the shanty town of Hemlock Row, who call themselves Lowgods, and, unlike the others, try to exist apart. All of these disadvantaged factions clash with the whites who run Pottsville, most of them transplanted Europeans with a sizable German contingent. The Lowgods of Hemlock Row accuse the Chicken Hill folks of not only catering to the whites but also wanting to be white.
McBride seems to say that corruption and injustice are universal and play out daily in Pottstown. But in America the scramble for resources and advantage is more fluid, mainly because here money, not birth, is the ultimate determiner of status and power. Immigrant families learn quickly how to barter, scheme, and subsist.
Two endearing characters who give of themselves and reach out to their neighbors unselfishly will pull you in. Chona is the kind-hearted Jewish woman who owns the grocery store. Nate is a hardened black man with a prison record who resides on Chicken Hill and hides the fact that he’s changed his name and was born among the Lowgods.
Intrigue surrounds concerted efforts by the Chicken Hill folk to foster an orphaned deaf-mute black boy. They scheme to hide him from authorities who want to shove him away in an infamously brutal state asylum. Once the boy is committed there despite their efforts, the plan to free him twists itself into clever knots that take some resourceful cooperation from the Lowgods to untie.
McBride’s ear for dialogue among all these ethnicities puts you there with them in the store. You may come to think of yourself as a resident of Chicken Hill, sharing their fears, proud of their courage and achievements.
McBride gives us a community saga that is all about the essential heritage of America. As the trope about democracy has it, this country is the worst—except for all the others.
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. You’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
Gerald Everett Jones - Author
- Gerald Everett Jones's profile
- 488 followers
