Tao Lin. (Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)

True, his characters are young people living in Brooklyn.  And he writes about the Internet. But we should stop calling Tao Lin the voice of his generation. Taipei, his new novel, has less to do with his generation than with the literary tradition of Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Musil.

Mr. Lin was first thought to be "generational" because he was very young and had a big online following.  But even in 2005 Mr. Lin cited throwback influences like Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, and Joy Williams—somewhat unfashionable choices, indicating Mr. Lin's highly individual taste for understatement, quirkiness, and what has been called K-Mart realism.

His breakout book, Shoplifting from American Apparel, opened with a Gchat:

“You know those people that get up every day, and do things,” said Luis.

“I'm going to eat cereal even though I'm not hungry,” said Sam.

“And are real proactive,” said Luis.  “And like are getting things done, and never quit their jobs.  Those people suck.”

Mr. Lin made rigor seem like laziness.  His blunt, notational realism seemed like spit in your eye if you didn't happen to relate to a life spent lying fetal on a mattress, "looking at the internet" on a sideways Macbook. The bleakness of his characters could seem a little forced coming from an author with such a willful prose style. Talk about Mr. Lin's lost generation gave cover to critics who, perhaps, didn't see the funny side.

His new novel, Taipei, has a different emotional footprint. Mr. Lin is writing with longer sentences.  Some of them have to be read twice: he's making the reader work harder than in American Apparel or in his last book, Richard Yates. But he's also giving more.  Mr. Lin said in an interview that he spent 140 hours revising Taipei after the book was in galleys—that is, after most authors aren't hardly allowed to make changes. His edits were apparently so extensive that I was sent not a galley, but a printout of the revised pdfs. This isn't just a matter of perfectionism.  It's a new style for Mr. Lin, one that confesses the urgency of his ambition.  If you thought his previous novels were stunts, read this one.

About those long sentences. I cheerfully wrote "Proust" in the margin early on—because the hero, a young writer named Paul, takes such a meta attitude toward his own memories. He can step back and watch thoughts blossom. At the beginning of Chapter 2 he wakes up and—because of "something staticky and paranormally ventilated about the air"—decides he is still a young child, waking up to winter break in Florida. Then he remembers he left Florida and went to school at NYU.  And then:

After a deadpan pause, during which the new information was accepted by default as recent, he casually believed it was autumn and he was in college, and as he felt that period's particular gloominess he sensed a concurrent assembling, at a specific distance inside himself, of dozens of once-intimate images, people, places, situations.  With a sensation of easily and entirely abandoning a prior context, of having no memory, he focused, as an intrigued observer, on this assembling and was surprised by an urge, which he immediately knew he hadn't felt in months, or maybe years—to physically involve himself—by going outside and living each day patiently—in the ongoing, concrete occurrence of what he was passively, slowly remembering. [. . . until] he realized, with some confusion and an oddly instinctual reluctance, blinking and discerning his new room, which after two months could still seem unfamiliar, that he was somewhere else, as a different person, in a much later year.

These sentences are not euphonious. They have a staccato honesty, an almost ironic slavishness to spontaneous thought. They don't do the syntactic flexion of a David Foster Wallace sentence, but they charm on a similar basis, disarming us in their helpless verbose breach of style as they race after articulations. Mr. Lin avoids Wallace's frequent demonstrations of good faith. He's more self-centered. He gropes—that "staticky" and "ventilated" air—after the right word, often an adverb, and the more awkward the better. Having steeled himself in flip minimalism, Mr. Lin becomes the most unapologetic maximalist.

Of course, the book is not very long. It has, though, the thickness of a classic brain-sprawl like On the Road: the book crosses from New York to Taipei a few times, also visits Baltimore, Las Vegas, and Ohio, among domestic destinations, and brings young New York to life as few books (or TV shows) can. I would like to see Franco Moretti, the great mapper of novels, chart all of Taipei's block-circling and bar-revisiting in Williamsburg. The book is not without scaffolding—looking ahead to his autumn book tour Paul draws up a calendar on page 36—but in terms of feel this is a modernist, one-thing-after-another novel, a slurry of evenings and all-nighters dammed and channeled according to whatever Paul's relationship status is. Mr. Lin makes a few strong structural choices: after a break-up at the novel's beginning, Paul visits his parents in Taipei; at the novel's end he returns to Taipei, this time with Erin, a fellow writer whom Paul has married.  Paul's movements have the haunting eloquence of Jake Barnes' in The Sun Also Rises: when Jake Barnes goes swimming we feel both that he is wasting his life, and that he is going through something noble and sad.

Mr. Lin has said that this novel is much more autobiographical than any of his previous works. Paul uses lots of drugs.  It's Adderal, more than madeleines, that gets him stroking the texture of his own abstractions. Abstraction is a major theme—as in distraction, preoccupation. He and Erin "had bonded over feeling alienated by people who focused on visuals, instead of people, while on hallucinogens."  But by novel's end Paul has decided, while on shrooms, that he is dead, and Erin is a projection: "He briefly discerned her movement as incremental—not continuous, but in frames per second."  This sounds like the beginning of The Man Without Qualities.  Redemption is more mental than soulful: "They hugged a little, near the center of the room, then he turned around and moved toward the kitchen—dimly aware of the existence of other places, on Earth, where he could go."

Right before his Vegas wedding, Paul calls Erin's attention to "an eerie building far in the distance, thin and black, like a cursor on the screen of a computer that had become unresponsive.  He imagined building-size letters suddenly appearing, left to right, in a rush—wpkjgijfhtetiukgcnlm—across the desert."

Emptiness and randomness constitute the beauty of their Vegas marriage. We don't hear their vows.  Their dawning seriousness will be evident as the novel goes forward—but true to Mr. Lin's "minimalist" roots, it will be left unspoken. Indeed, right after the Vegas ceremony, we read that:

Paul ran suddenly away, onto the parking lot, in a wide arc that curved eventually toward the rental car in a centripetal force, accelerating to a speed that was, at this point in his life, unfamiliarly fast, but not near the maximum, before slowing, as he neared the passenger door—and, knowing he would not collide with the door, briefly aware of the dream-like amount of control he had over his body—to a stop.

This awkward sentence demonstrates an urgency that for all of its tentativeness can only be interpreted as wanting to express happiness.  It's not exactly what I expected from Tao Lin's masterpiece.  Which reminds me why I hadn't necessarily expected there to be one.

Benjamin Lytal's first novel, A Map of Tulsa, was published this spring.

editorial@observer.com

George Packer.

Around the turn of page 266 of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, when I was about to be late for my day job, I had an unusually vivid daydream. I was at some literary event significant enough to draw A-list bylines outside the known skirt-chasing demographic, flailing past the hour mark of the world’s most comically Sartre-esque conversation with its author, the New Yorker writer George Packer.

Vainly (in the dream) I kept blaming myself: for my being overly misanthropic and/or overly magnanimous, insufficiently lucid and yet insufficiently drunk, for wearing heels; then finally and belatedly for having skipped the Prologue of Mr. Packer’s book, which crams more dealbreakingly masturbatory declarations into The Unwinding’s first 400 words than Ezra Klein commits across all of his platforms in an entire day:

-"No one can say when the unwinding began."
-"The unwinding is nothing new."
-"The unwinding brings freedom, more than the world has ever granted."
-"There have been unwindings every generation or two."
-"Like any great change, the unwinding began at countless times, in countless ways, and at some point the country—always the same country—crossed a line of history and became irretrievably different."

When a hack is willing to submit the above sort of flatulence to his highbrow publishing house editors, there is really no telling what he might inflict upon an underemployed younger woman in the presence of an open bar; the unwinding of such an encounter can seem in the moment almost as mysterious and impenetrable as Mr. Packer apparently finds American institutional decay…

But then: a game changer! Malcolm Gladwell appears, stone cold sober; the flight home from keynoting the annual Grupo Salinas Ciudad de las Ideas Thinkers’ Forum was delayed.

“I’m still not sure what you mean by ‘the unwinding,’ Packster, but you actually can pin down when most trends ‘began’ if you study them analytically. I wrote a book about this, in fact; although I was admittedly less interested in the moment big trends actually began—which is typically random—than the inflection point at which they take on that self-perpetuating aura of inexorability that denotes ‘critical mass’ because, you know, I wanted to sell books…”

In Mr. Packer's defense, his latest is not a book that seems designed to sell. Stylistically it is no 50 Shades of Grey, with the exception of nine two-page sections culled from a random assortment of headlines, pull quotes and song lyrics from a given year of recent history, in a “device” Mr. Packer borrowed from John Dos Passos but which the reader will recognize from Twitter. Content-wise it’s a sustained onslaught of misery, depression, radiation, chemo, cost-cutting, paradise paving, ponzi scheming, union avoidance, pharma lobbying, bank lobbying, astroturf lobbying, etc. It is punctuated by what passes for brain activity among the oblivious plutocrats “critics inevitably accuse” of reaping the spoils of this Real American rot, namely the billionaire cartoon Randian Peter Thiel. Mr. Thiel's magnitude of assaultive boringness is matched only by the space Mr. Packer lavishes on his every dinner party declaration/interior design decision/childhood freaking memory.

In summary: depressing, depressing, depressing, despicable, depressing, annoying, depressing; repeat 8x. No one's optioning this movie, much less broadcasting the wisdom of the $11.04 ebook purchase to his friends and followers. There are no hackneyed but memorable conclusions, actionable investment ideas, unified self improvement strategies or misc. “takeaways” lending it social media currency--because there are no generalizations/conclusions/ideas/takeaways, period.

Ten years ago I might have been conned into finding Mr. Packer’s narrative “restraint” to be, if not quite admirable, at least aspirational along the lines of a Condé Nast contract. Five years ago I would probably just have considered it dated—which is to say, still an outgrowth of a fundamentally aesthetic sensibility that just happened to imbue most intellectual publishing. But at some point over the past few years the understanding crystallized among a small but critical mass of my generation that the industrial output of the nation’s reigning prose cartel has at its very essence mendacity. This essence is mostly obscured in The Unwinding by liberal quantities of the highest quality verisimilitude the Condé Nast travel/transcribing budget can buy, which only heightens the unnerving sensation that accompanies the occasional detour into full-on lying, like the one Packer parenthetically takes in a mini chapter on Bob Rubin:

(Citigroup, the world's largest financial services company, had been created the year before from the merger of Citicorp and Travelers, a deal that would not have survived under Glass Steagall, but Glass Steagall no longer existed, though [Robert] Rubin had nothing directly to do with its repeal and no one could justifiably accuse him of being paid back handsomely by Citigroup, though critics inevitably did.)

Seriously, dude? With apologies to Mr. Dos Passos, an abridged Nexis highlight reel from April 1998:

BANKING ON FINANCIAL REVOLUTION: TRAVELERS-CITICORP MERGER IS CURRENTLY ILLEGAL, BUT…
Citicorp and Travelers Group are gambling that they can use their political muscle and the sheer weight of the marketplace to break down the longstanding barriers...Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve chairman, and Robert Rubin, treasury secretary, gave their blessing. Finally, the night before the deal was announced to the markets, Weill and Reed telephoned President Clinton.

The subtler deceit at the heart of all this is the notion that Mr. Packer is, as his publicists’ obligatory superlative “of his generation” sentences insist, a “journalist.” Check that prologue again: does it sound like the opening line of a writer with much experience running out to collect the proverbial five Ws for the late edition? Virtually every member of the vast menagerie populating The Unwinding--an articulate, informed mess of activists, journalists and disillusioned corruptionists play starring roles—has been profoundly changed by specific events of the sort that not long ago were made real by the newspapers that covered them. But in scrapbooking all their testimonials without ever even indirectly connecting one fate with another’s, or effect with cause, The Unwinding commits something like the opposite of journalism, the literary embodiment of the status quo. On some level this is Mr. Packer's point: rudderless, disconnected America needs a rudderless, disoriented book. Whatever; he’s a hack.

Add Mr. Gladwell and one of his winsome epidemiologists to this deathscape, however, and you've got a dangerous book. Whatever Faustian arrangements propelled him to his own gig over there, Mr. Gladwell at least wrote some basic pattern recognition privileges into his contract when he left his job as a Washington Post reporter to become The New Yorker’s resident consumer behavior expert.

A literal epidemic that surfaces as an unacknowledged subplot of The Unwinding, for example, is prescription painkiller addiction. Two of the book’s four main human characters suffer from, inter alia, parents who have become hopeless junkies since their doctors prescribed oxycodone for some chronic pain or another. The fifth main character is the city of Tampa, Fl, where one secondary character nearly dies from a painkiller overdose and yet another, Matt Weidner, happens to have worked as one of the state’s leading painkiller lobbyists before getting creeped out of lobbying altogether in 2001:

The moment of truth came with the handshake, when Weidner would lock eyes with the state rep and pull the envelope stuffed with checks from his pocket, and the state rep would palm it, feel its thickness, determine how much time Weidner had to explain why it was important to defeat a law requiring patients to visit a doctor every time they refilled their hydrocodone prescription because moms wouldn’t be able to get cough syrup for their kids—then Weidner would be cut off midsentence, time to move on. Over time these events made him physically sick. He would leave the room thinking, “I want to get into an honest profession, like the fucking practice of law.”

Prescription painkiller consumption and overdose deaths have both increased more than tenfold since then. In Florida, the heroin industry has been decimated over the same period by the hundreds of barely-legal stripmall “pain clinics” that annually draw hundreds of thousands of narcotics tourists to the state thanks to the strenuous check writing efforts of Mr. Weidner’s successors in the Tallahassee pain pill lobby. If you weren’t aware of this—and Mr. Packer doesn’t mention it—you’d probably just assume Mr. Weidner was being his well-intentioned though “hysterical” crank self. The nature of the seven years war with the shadowy Mortgage Electronic Registration System that transformed this former Boy Scout from a partisan Republican who “devoutly believed in God and country” to an anti-bank crusader with “apocalyptic views” about America is barely explored.

“There’s a Peruvian economist named Hernando de Soto who wrote this book The Mystery of Capital that explains how public records of property ownership are the bedrock of the whole capitalist system,” Mr. Weidner explained a couple weeks ago when I called him. Essentially, MERS “threw this centuries-old tradition out the door” and replaced it with nothing. “But no judge wants to be the one who actually acknowledges this reality.”

Appropriately, Mr. De Soto is, like so many modern public intellectuals, a longtime right wing think tank shill whose ideas have been primarily financed by/circulated into the consensusphere to advance the cause of the very banksters who concocted MERS. But The Mystery of Capital was published in 2000, when Mr. Weidner was still a Republican opiate lobbyist and Mr. Packer was a middling novelist who had just published a second memoir. (The first memoir covered a stint in the Peace Corps, the second observed the death of “liberalism” through his family history and includes such insights as: “The cause of organized labor has not turned out to be the cause of humanity.”) Today Mr. De Soto is dismissed as an “alarmist” for the blasphemous realities he’s publicized since discovering MERS and Mr. Packer belongs to the thriving population of forgettable “liberals” who propagandized in favor of liberating Iraq and against the “cri de coeur; stylish, media-distracted” memepunk fad that, as Mr. Packer concluded in last month’s New Yorker, “in the end” Occupy Wall Street “turned out” to be.

There’s a sentence on page 363 of The Unwinding, deliberately signifying I am pretty sure nothing, wherein a woman shows up at Zuccotti Park “day after day” to silently hold up a copy of Confidence Men, Ron Suskind’s nauseating 2011 account of the zombie bank lobby’s flawless occupation of the Obama White House. Mr. Packer has made cursory name-dropping references to the book in the New Yorker on multiple occasions, but his version of the past three and thirty years’ (non)events is so immaculately unsullied by those of his more linearly-inclined contemporaries that it’s hard to imagine he read past Suskind’s index. The most radical text Mr. Packer appears to have consumed is The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, the contents of which (largely stripped of their historical context) are liberally scattered throughout The Unwinding in an expansion of a profile Mr. Packer published in October of its author, the former lobbyist Jeff Connaughton.

The week that story ran, Mr. Connaughton came to town and we had dinner with an investigative journalist who is a mutual friend. “Was there anything in that piece that wasn’t in his book?” he asked incredulously when we were alone. I listed a few comically unimportant new details and agreed it had struck me as almost implausibly lazy. What we’d all missed in hindsight was the subtle but total pasteurizing effect of the presence of a New Yorker narrator in a room, the “coördinated” attack on the senses that transpires when the death of the empire is reduced to the Talk of the Town...No, what I’d really forgotten was all the magazine hacks I was a research assistant for in college before I landed a newspaper gig: the legion of writers so fundamentally incurious they literally outsource their Googling to the interns.

Those are the people who still make a decent living in this business. Them and Mr. Gladwell, whose forthcoming book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants the Connaughtons and Weidners and out of work Occupiers might as well pre-order.

editorial@observer.com

Elliott Holt. (Photo by Rebecca Zeller)

There’s a kind of childhood friendship that’s a more-intense first love. Not everyone had one, but if you did, you’ll recognize the relationship that organizes Elliott Holt’s debut, a literary thriller about losing the first person who ever knew you.

You Are One of Them takes place in Moscow in 1996, where Sarah Zuckerman has come to solve the mystery surrounding her best friend’s death in a plane crash 10 years earlier. Sarah’s investigation quickly melts into a coming-of-age story, as Phoebe O’Connor’s search for her sister in Jennifer Egan’s The Invisible Circus became a search for her own adulthood. No matter what we say we’re looking for, we’re usually looking for ourselves.

Sarah’s best friend was a magnetic and annoying idealist named Jenny Jones, and it should be said up front that the circumstances of her death are so cloyingly implausible they could only be based on fact, which they are. In 1983, a beautiful 11-year-old named Samantha Smith wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov, then president of the Soviet Union, asking him why he wanted “to conquer the world and destroy our country.” Sensing a P.R. opportunity, Andropov replied in Pravda, inviting Ms. Smith to visit the U.S.S.R. There was a TV special, Times coverage and a book. There was also a tragic ending: three years after her trip, Ms. Smith died in a twin-engine plane crash off the Maine coast. This story is at best irrelevant; it’s like an ad between episodes of history. By the time of her death, Ms. Smith had already started to seem like a younger Rachel Corrie, naïve and overprivileged, with good intentions but no clue.

Ms. Holt changes Samantha’s name to Jenny Jones but keeps the rest intact. It is a bizarre choice, to place a precious anecdote at the center of a politically inclined novel, and Jenny’s letter, reprinted in full as an epilogue, is so slight it practically blows off the page:

My mother says that after a nuclear bomb, everything will be dark. She says there will be no sun, so it will get really dark and cold. She says that there will be ashes everywhere, so the world will be gray. Colors will be erased. Everything will die.

Yuck. It’s the written equivalent of taking a bath in dissolved Splenda, so the odds are stacked against Ms. Holt using it cleverly. A little shockingly, she does. Intuiting the connection between the tone of Jenny’s writing and the language of propaganda and Western advertising, Ms. Holt connects a kind of false American optimism to the seedy capitalist texture of post-Soviet Moscow. We’re not supposed to like Jenny. We’re supposed to watch Sarah outgrow her.

When the novel opens, Sarah is a timid student finishing college and nourishing suspicions about the plane crash. Did it really go down by accident? Is there anything to the conspiracy theories about KGB involvement? Before long, a letter arrives from Moscow: “I can tell you many things about Jennifer,” says a woman named Svetlana. “Please write to me.” It’s the kind of invitation you don’t turn down. For the rest of the novel, we trail Sarah through Moscow, intermittently reminded that we’re supposed to care what happened to Jenny (and, often, caring).

You Are One of Them is much more interesting than its kitschy source material in part because Ms. Holt has chosen to render Sarah’s identity formation through the lens of a search for meaningful language, an escape from the kind of cliché that trapped Jenny. “You can reinvent yourself with a different alphabet,” Sarah says, and she believes it. “It had never before occurred to me ... that somewhere out in the world people were arranging entirely different shapes into words.” She’s in need of reinvention; she wants to drop the shyness and invisibility that shadowed her back home. Her dream is that new words might make a new self.

Ms. Holt gives Sarah a good ear for the intricacies of Russian syntax, the idiom and the funny errors of translation; for readers, these details are a pleasure. Sarah reports that Russians call American girlfriends “pillow dictionaries,” that they pronounce Hollywood “Gollywood,” that “my God” has “an anguish in Russian that just doesn’t translate.” Sarah senses in Russia the promise of a new and confident self; her question is not so much, “What kind of person do I want to be?” as it is “How do I want to speak?” When she enrolls in Russian classes, we understand exactly why.

 Meanwhile, Svetlana, author of the mysterious invitation to Moscow, pursues the opposite project: using language for insincerity and profit—i.e., for advertising. (Ms. Holt, a graduate of Brooklyn College’s MFA program, also worked for a time as a copywriter.) Svetlana writes tags that will sell Russians on the pleasures of Western capitalism. Lucky Strikes are “the American dream,” she tells Sarah. “USA is brand.” Her colleagues repeat Pepsi slogans and rank American companies by their date of entry into Russia. It’s impossible to confront “the American dream” without thinking of Jenny, who had an absurd belief in it. Maybe, the reader thinks, Jenny was an export like sodas and cigarettes. Sarah seems to realize it too: right after the Lucky Strike scene, she starts spending time with more expats, gets irreversibly diverted from her fact-finding, meets a guy, and learns the truth.

It’s a small irony that the novel, so creative when considering language, should be somehow conventional in its prose. Ms. Holt slips frequently into a style that could be described as “Nice Writing,” readable but overly well behaved. Suburban streets are “oak-canopied,” loneliness “metastasize[s],” angry people “fire” words, snow and light “soften” landscapes, color “drains” from evening skies, New Yorkers are “fast and unwavering,” this or that is always like a “kaleidoscope,” people describe old photographs, characters comprise cute traits (“When we played Monopoly, she was always the shoe”).  The reader’s questions are provided for her: when we’re supposed to wonder what happened to Jenny, Ms. Holt makes Sarah think, “Where was she? How could she disappear without a trace?”

But as Samantha Smith’s mother said of her daughter’s critics, “You get bad reactions to even a good piece of cake.”

editorial@observer.com

“I stopped coffee,” Mr. Obrist said. He was speaking with the speed of an over-caffeinated teenager, his arms jittery and cutting the air for emphasis. He sleeps four or five hours a night. He wanted to meet at 7 a.m. I told him I didn’t think that was possible. Even this early, I was guzzling a succession of cups of black coffee to jolt myself into something resembling consciousness. Mr. Obrist gets by on “the excitement and the curiosity. And I drink a lot of green tea, a lot of things for the immune system–vitamins and stuff. Because I travel a lot and I always get these colds.”

“No coffee,” he added, as if he might really miss it.
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James Goodale. (Photo By Don MacLeod)

James C. Goodale, the so-called “father of reporters' privilege” and the author of a new book called Fighting for the Press (CUNY Journalism Press, 255 pp., $20), was in his office at the Debevoise & Plimpton law firm, where he’s a partner, comparing Barack Obama to Richard M. Nixon.

“Nixon and Agnew were like listening to a Fox News program all day long, every day,” he said. “In their eyes, the Eastern establishment press were against them and they were against it and they were going to destroy it as best they can.” But, he said, “Obama has all these things that he’s done to the press on national security matters that Nixon never did.”

Mr. Goodale, 79, was the general counsel of The New York Times during the 1971 Pentagon Papers case, when President Nixon ordered the old grey lady to cease publication of excerpts from a 7,000-page document, which detailed America's involvement in Vietnam over the course of three decades. The Times published the first excerpt on June 13, 1971. By June 26, the case had reached the Supreme Court. Over the course of a few days, the justices ruled in a 6-3 decision that the U.S. government could not censor the Times. Nixon then convened a grand jury to indict the Times for conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act—"which really doesn't mean anything," Mr. Goodale said, rubbing his forehead in distress—but the case quickly fell apart. Fighting for the Press reads like a political thriller, with Nixon providing some dark comic relief. The guy was not exactly subtle: "As far as the Times is concerned," he said to John Mitchell, the U.S. Attorney General, "hell they're our enemies."

Now, the man who successfully fought Nixon says President Obama has an even more troubling record. He has indicted six leakers to Nixon's one, and just this week came word that federal investigators had seized two months of AP phone records without notice. Mr. Goodale believes that a grand jury has secretly indicted Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks and the publisher of the Afghan War Logs, one of the more substantial leaks since the Pentagon Papers. The father of reporter's privilege is doing everything in his power to make sure the case does not go forward.

“We’re going in a circle,” Mr. Goodale said. “When I talk to journalists about Assange—Jesus. They really don’t like him. They say, ‘He’s not one of us. We don’t care what happens to him.’ So I’m saying, ‘Wake up!’ If the government goes after him and gets him, that’s bad for everybody down the line. I'm way out on a limb in this book because it's three years after the grand jury was convened and it hasn't done anything. But I am quite confident the grand jury is alive. And I am confident that it has indicted Assange in secret. In any event, until the government tells us it's gone away, I feel like we have to speak out against it. This will set a standard. And I can’t seem to get through.”

The life of a First Amendment lawyer, and a general ally to journalists, is far different now than it was in 1971, when Mr. Goodale was still a young man. He's very much a holdover from a different era. For one thing, the days are long gone when a person simply read one reputable morning newspaper and then went on with the rest of their day. The proliferation of writing on the Internet has both increased the amount of libel that is published and desensitized the public to it, Mr. Goodale says.

“Privacy was something that everyone worried about, that they thought would blow up in their face,” he said. “We have a generational change with respect to privacy. The new generation really doesn't value privacy in the same way as the preceding generation. There was no Paris Hilton in the print days. Can you imagine The Observer printing a picture of Paris Hilton fornicating?”

(No comment here from the Transom, other than to say that Mr. Goodale raised his eyebrows in utter disbelief.)

When he represented the Times, the paper of record was in danger of going bankrupt. He helped found The New York Observer, offering a cautionary voice about its economic viability. He was George Plimpton's personal attorney when The Paris Review, by his account, "was four people around a desk in a basement that was dank and mushrooms were growing in it."

It was a decidedly fancier scene when the Review threw Mr. Goodale a party at their new offices in Chelsea last Wednesday. Lorin Stein, the Review's editor, praised Mr. Goodale's "irascible eye." Mr. Goodale offered a firsthand glimpse at it

"I wanted to reach a conclusion that would inform President Obama with respect to his actions on the relationship of national security to the press," he told the room, a mix of old lawyers and young writers. "He’s not been very good on it. But the idea was the national security claims do not hold up in the long run and the First Amendment protects journalists." He paused. "So don’t get involved in that mess!"

mmiller@observer.com

Saul Bellow. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

Born in 1915, Saul Bellow published his first novel, Dangling Man, in 1944. He would go on to write 18 books of fiction (14 novels, four story collections) which between them would win him the Pulitzer Prize (Humboldt’s Gift, 1975), a record-setting three National Book Awards (The Adventures of Augie March, 1953; Herzog, 1964; Mr. Sammler’s Planet, 1970), the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature and countless other accolades besides, not the least of which was mainstream commercial success. He died in 2005, 89 years old and on his fifth wife—a former student exactly half his age.

Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir is by Greg Bellow, Mr. Bellow’s oldest son by his first wife (Anita Goshkin). Greg was born the same year that Dangling Man was published. After a long and apparently successful career as a “psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist,” Greg—himself a man of some 70 years now—has, “despite my doubts about writing publicly … determined to learn more about my father, to reassess my patrimony as a writer’s son, and to have my say.” Bellow fils describes his discomfort over the many public laments for and lionizations of Bellow père that appeared after the latter’s death.

As soon as Saul died, his lawyer, Walter Pozen, set the tone for what was to come. Instead of calling the family, Walter phoned the public media. I learned of my father’s death on my car radio. The chosen speakers at Saul’s funeral were Martin Amis, the literary “son,” and Ruth Wisse, the dutiful Jewish “daughter.” Though no family members were asked to speak, I rose to praise Saul’s widow, Janis, for her devotion during my father’s last years. Strangely silent was another literary heir, Philip Roth, who, like a kind of brooding Hamlet, wandered the edges of the funeral in deep thought.

Greg Bellow’s anger and disgust are palpable (the chapter from which the quote is drawn is titled “Awakened by a Grave Robbery”), though they do not always arise in the places one might expect. Indeed, Greg is capable of showing great sympathy and reserve of judgment when discussing Saul, who required exorbitant portions of both—and often demanded more still. Here, for example, is Greg on Saul’s infidelity to Anita: “Saul was now well able to construct rationales to justify his sexual behavior. But his feelings toward women were grounded, I believe, in deeply maternal forms of love like that I find in the selfless, protective love of Grandma Lescha.”

It is an emblematic passage. Greg uses his professional experience (and its attendant lexicon and tone) as a way of accessing and attempting to understand—if rarely to justify—a father who was somehow always, as the man himself put it in More Die of Heartbreak, “knee-deep in the garbage of a personal life.” The pervasive calm is admirable, if a little bit strange, especially considered in light of the moments when the tranquility is broken and true, raw rage shines through.

The literary agent Andrew Wylie’s name alone, for example, is enough to send Greg around the bend. He quotes a memoir by Harriet Wasserman, his father’s longtime pre-Wylie agent, in which Ms. Wasserman claims that Mr. Wylie boasted he would turn Bellow “from a cash cow into a cash bull.” Mr. Bellow cites this as proof that his father’s legacy “was now clearly in the grip of the Philistines, people who emphasized money rather than culture, about whom he had complained for decades.” Well, maybe. On the other hand, if one is going to quote Ms. Wasserman’s memoir, it seems only fair to note that her book, Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow, was written and published as payback to Saul for firing her. (It ends with a likening of Bellow to King Lear and Wasserman, by extension, to Cordelia.) Whatever one thinks of Mr. Wylie and his aggressive courtship of aging authors with posterity on their minds (not for nothing is his nickname “The Jackal”), it is only reasonable to take Ms. Wasserman’s testimony with a grain of salt. Besides all of which, status and money were always on Saul Bellow’s mind.

Every Bellow novel of consequence takes the conflict between material and—presumably—nobler concerns as a central theme, but the result is typically inconclusive; the conflict never quite resolves. And status—in the old-school sense of being a public figure, but still—is consistently envisioned in Bellow’s work as a virtue in and of itself. More to the point, it is a prerequisite for being a protagonist in a Saul Bellow story. Charlie Citrine in Humboldt’s Gift questions whether he has compromised his artistic vision to achieve commercial success, but he never regrets the social capital that his achievements have granted him. He returns obsessively throughout the book to memories of dining at the White House and riding in a helicopter with Bobby Kennedy. Albert Corde in The Dean’s December is the head of a university journalism program; his career got a running start when, as a young man, he secured a spot covering the Yalta conference. Abe Ravelstein in Ravelstein, Eugene Henderson in Henderson the Rain King, Uncle Benn in More Die of Heartbreak (introduced to the reader as “B. Crader, the well-known botanist”); the list goes on. And nowhere in Bellow—anywhere, ever—does one encounter a character who abandons a social or economic position for the sake of a higher ideal (or for any other reason). George Eliot he wasn’t.

However much Saul Bellow’s death and public memorials (there were several of them, in New York and Chicago) may have upset Greg Bellow, it was probably no less than his father expected, anticipated, hoped for. Indeed, the son learning of the father’s death on the radio is a perfectly Bellovian detail, with the difference being that a proper Bellow narrator would have had his grief allayed by the thrill of being personally connected to a boldface name. 

editorial@observer.com

André Aciman would seem a prototypical ambassador of learned neither-here-nor-thereness, an Alexandrian Jew whose output as a novelist of nostalgia rivals his stature as a scholar of Proust. But if his well-received 1994 memoir Out of Egypt stood apart as a personal-political lament, Harvard Square, a semiautobiographical work of fiction, deals with an altogether different sort of longing.

 The exile at hand is hardly geopolitical—the furtive loneliness of a Harvard doctoral student in literature easing his monasticism with a magnum of Beefeater purloined from a department function. He doses daily from the bottle, drinking and sunning himself as he reads for his comprehensive exams. Our unnamed narrator, fearful of failing the tests a second and final time, is equally estranged from worlds  near (friendly yet unattainable neighbors whose cries of passion he hears at night) and far (not his coastal Alexandria, to which return is unthinkable, but Paris, the aspirational lodestar of his youth).

 It is an arid solitude, and Monsieur Kalashnikov punctures it in a chance Cambridge café encounter. He’s Kalaj, a Tunisian cab driver whose bottomless invective against civilization and its ersatz is more culture schlock than culture shock. Nobody is spared: “NATO, UNESCO, Nabisco, Ceausescu, Tabasco, Lambrusco, you name it ...” But Kalaj is a false radical whose rants have the affect of a cafe Casanova, and we see an intriguing and ultimately ill-fated summer friendship develop between the two men.

It’s a thoughtful mise-en-scène, though the pregnant symbolism may prove too distracting for some readers—including the Times, whose review stumbles on the book’s sly opening, “Cambridge was a desert,” dimly offering that the “hero is himself, like the author, familiar with the desert.” A less ersatz reading, however, reveals a delicately poignant interplay of desire and memory, and is Mr. Aciman at his greatest.

In 2007, The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl gave a talk at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in which he said that the hosting city was “a great place to be, if you have a particular reason.” He went on to call Chicago one of the “great receptor cities of the world” for all the artistic talent it sends to other places, maybe not realizing he had opened up old wounds inflicted by another New Yorker writer nearly 55 years earlier when the late A.J. Liebling proclaimed Chicago the “Second City,” behind Mr. Liebling’s hometown of New York. The most recent New York media potshot at Chicago was by Rachel Shteir, an ex-New Yorker and current Chicagoan, in a recent New York Times Book Review piece, “Chicago Manuals.” Ms. Shteir, who claimed not to be “some latter-day A.J. Liebling” in her attack on the city she has called home for the last 13 years, pointed out Chicago’s many faults, from rampant gun violence to the nation’s second-highest combined sales tax and the clear lines of segregation that zip through its neighborhoods. (Ms. Shteir's review generated titanic reaction from the media in Chicago, all of it wounded, which pretty much proved her point; she wrote about the experience for the Observer.) I left Chicago over a decade ago, but I still recognize these problems in my beloved hometown. And yet I wondered what city doesn’t have a laundry list of specific failings. 

Thomas Dyja, a Chicago native, doesn’t set out to change the view of contemporary Chicago with his latest book, The Third Coast. Instead, the book charts “When Chicago Built the American Dream” through a detailed look at postwar Chicago and how the Second City changed the course of America for good.

Of all the characters you meet throughout The Third Coast (and there are so many of them it’s hard to keep track), the German-born architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe looms the largest, from the start of his ambitious career to the point at which he “resembled a medieval abbot ... trying to think his way into heaven” in the early 1960s. In a city built on industry and defined by the Democratic political “machine” (every mayor since 1931 has been a Democrat), Mies’s Modernist architectural perfection, which he himself acknowledged was sometimes viewed as “cold and rigid,” fit perfectly into the city’s framework and transformed the way major cities around the world put up buildings. He was the last director of the Bauhaus and “had chosen Chicago for practical reasons,” especially the state’s lax laws for professional education compared with New York or Massachusetts. But he moved to a city with an already rich architectural legacy, taking a position as the director of the Armour Institute (later to be renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology) in 1938. Within two years, the school was “becoming a kind of architectural monastery, producing a brotherhood trained to spread [Mies’s] word.”

Mies pops up throughout The Third Coast, whether directly or as an influence as the city assembles its skyline. Along with him is a mob of people, connected only loosely by geography, that threatens to overstuff an already large book: the author and historian Studs Terkel, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, the avant-garde jazz icon Sun Ra, the outsider artist Henry Darger, the Chess Brothers and Muddy Waters, a host of high-ranking political figures, low-level ward bosses, architects, magazine publishers and too many others to list here. But this unruly throng is the whole point: Chicago is whatever these people made of it—a city full of suckers to exploit, an easy place to make a buck, “that same old place,” as Robert Johnson would have it, a city of migrants blanketed by the façade of Midwestern permanence, a city of underdogs making good.

Mr. Dyja’s book gains heft from the city’s self-made men, like Mayor Richard J. Daley, Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and Ebony publisher John H. Johnson. But its heart is the undercurrent of racial tension that you can feel dripping off nearly every other page. The term “hypersegregation” was created with Chicago in mind. The white population has historically been situated on the city’s north side, with the African-American population pushed to the south. Surprisingly, one of the book’s most endemic chapters takes place in Mississippi: the murder of 14-year-old Chicago resident Emmett Till while he was visiting relatives in Money, an unincorporated community in the Delta, which helped set off the civil rights movement when pictures of Till’s mutilated body were published by Chicago-based African-American newspapers and magazines with the headline “Black America reunited to witness Emmett Till’s body.”

Although Till’s murder took place nearly a thousand miles to the south of Chicago, his funeral was held in the city of his birth, and the story became an American dilemma. It is a perfect example of how a “prairie city with a waterfront,” as Saul Bellow called it, influenced the entire nation. Even the few paragraphs that Mr. Dyja devotes to the condensed version of how Ray Kroc turned one McDonald’s restaurant in suburban Chicago into “a global behemoth that represents to much of the world all that’s bad about America, and all they want,” demonstrates how the city is America in microcosm.

For Bellow, it was “that somber city,” but even he wasn’t “altogether clear” on what it stands for. And so the fact that the literary representative of Mr. Dyja’s Chicago is Nelson Algren, rather than the more famous Bellow, is appropriate. Algren’s life and work are chronicled through his professional disappointments and a doomed affair with Simone de Beauvoir. Although Algren was a brilliant writer and his book The Man With the Golden Arm won him the National Book Award in 1950, he was always coming in second to somebody else: Bellow was more acclaimed, de Beauvoir wouldn’t leave Jean-Paul Sartre for her American lover, and his contemporaries like John Fante and Charles Bukowski used similar formulas with much better results. Algren, like the great city that he grew up in, played second to many. And although Mr. Dyja makes that metaphor very clear throughout The Third Coast, you’re left to wonder why exactly these people are credited with building the American dream, save for the fact that they all called the same flawed and proud city home.

editorial@observer.com

At Paris Photo, which held its first American edition at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles last week, the mood was nothing short of giddy. Walking through the labyrinthine alleys of Paramount was simultaneously familiar and unrecognizable. The giant screen painted like the sky sitting in the parking lot seemed to lift the veil on a few open-air scenes from cinematic history. And the New York back lot—adorned with fake subway kiosks, fake brownstones and fake walk-ups with fake fire escapes—almost made me feel right at home, except that the kiosks didn’t lead to anywhere but a brick wall and the upper floors of the brownstones didn’t exist beyond the building facades. Dealers had settled inside, creating impromptu businesses that made the fair feel like a stroll through an under-construction gallery district.
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Nathaniel Rich. (Photo by Meredith Angelson)

Last Wednesday, U.S. Congressman Joe Barton, speaking before a House subcommittee that aims to fast-track construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, swatted down, with his Bible, any hope that climate change is a man-made phenomenon.

“I would point out that if you are a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood was an example of climate change,” Mr. Barton explained. “That certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”

Meanwhile, in Kentucky, the state’s Tourism Board has tax-incentivized the construction of a $155 million Noah’s Ark-based theme park. Evangelical Christians offered assurance that the park will feature a “full-size” Biblical Ark, built to specifications. State Democrats promised that the park will produce 900 permanent jobs. A commissioner in rural Grant County, Ky., where the park is under construction, paraphrased both sides: “With every ark there is a rainbow, and at the end of this rainbow is a pot of gold.”

Chalk it up, if you want, to the prolonged Gore-ification of the media conversation over climate change, or the undeniable rise in flood-inducing hurricanes during recent years, from Katrina to Sandy. Last year at the movies, we watched Moonrise Kingdom and Beasts of the Southern Wild gloss the diluvian myth. Countless other films from the last decade—from schlock (2012) to avant-garde (Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark)—aired our national anxiety over ecological catastrophe by featuring floods or arks or both. There have been fewer novels, but Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital depicted a flood that drowns the world under seven miles of water, leaving only a floating hospital filled with sick and dying children in its wake, and Noah, by Swiss author Hugo Loetscher, reimagined the building of the ark as a Keynesian economic project, not unlike the theme park in Kentucky. That neither of these books aims at verisimilitude is part of the point; the onslaught of ecological disaster has been experienced by most of us (outside of New Orleans and Florida) as a media phenomenon. Of course, that’s all changing.

Nathaniel Rich’s entry in the flood-and-ark canon, Odds Against Tomorrow, hinges on a hypothetical conceit: what if New Yorkers lived through the diluvian travails of Hurricane Katrina? Though this is a fair reduction of the book, and an adequately shorthand way of getting friends to read a novel that hits on several salient themes, it is still a reduction. Never mind that Mr. Rich recently relocated from New York, his city of birth, to New Orleans, where the aftermath of the hurricane is a persistent fact of daily life; Odds Against Tomorrow eschews the flaws of speculative fiction mainly by being well researched. It also has the virtue of attempting to do more than recapitulate the national anxiety and shame felt after Hurricane Katrina.

The novel, Mr. Rich’s second, revolves around Mitchell Zukor, a quant nerd educated at the University of Chicago and the son of a Hungarian slumlord. Early on, Zukor’s mathematical gifts and weirdly unexplained talent for predicting devastation help him land a job performing risk analysis in the Department of Equities, Assets, and Derivatives at fictitious New York law firm Fitzsimmons Sherman. It isn’t long before the ambitious Zukor leaves the firm for greener pastures. Late one night he emails the ridiculously named Alec Charnoble of the firm FutureWorld, who, without really vetting him, offers Zukor loads of cash to help him scare corporate executives into retaining his company’s services for $850,000 a year. The entire scheme pivots around a limited liability clause that allows corporations to scapegoat FutureWorld in case of catastrophe.

Charnoble’s villainy is cartoonish (he has a “bony arm” and likes to twist his finger in his palm), but he’s not a far cry from the financiers and cronies who profited from government-sanctioned buck-passing over the last decade. His scheme forms the arc of the novel, and it allows Rich to collect a number of contemporary issues—the financial crisis, regulation, risk and compliance, speculation, big data—into a big, neat literary ball, one that rolls inexorably toward disaster.

Mr. Rich’s prose is detailed yet sterile, measured but unpretty, and thoroughly televised: it scans like a novelization of the film version of The Fountainhead. This may be because Mr. Rich is more interested in ideas than characters; even his minor characters come across as unintentionally allegorical. Zukor’s slumlord father represents being a slumlord. Elsa Bruner, a political and ideological Beatrice with a rare heart condition, eventually fades and vanishes from the novel’s list of concerns, though she is revisited perfunctorily in the book’s worst scene. Even Jane, Zukor’s love interest and the most sympathetic character in Odds Against Tomorrow, serves mostly to play out the link between sex and capital.

Still, Odds Against Tomorrow hits its stride in the middle section, where it becomes, by turns, one of the best rewritings of the ark myth. Flush with cash before he predicts a calamitous flood, Zukor, on a whim, buys a “Psycho Canoe,” which is basically what it sounds like, from a Manhattan art gallery. Later, when the levee breaks, so to speak, Jane and Zukor maneuver their tiny ark around the flooded city:

They were bobbing everywhere, lobster buoys in a Maine cove. And stationary objects – the studded plastic corner of a refrigerator door, a radiator’s white corrugated grill – protruded from the water like unnatural icebergs. On either side of the avenue, the steel beams of traffic lights were rotted trees bending into the river, their roots bundles of severed coppered cables. Where the floodwater reached its highest point it traced, along the sides of buildings, an uneven line of filth that continued the length of the avenue as far as they could see.

This is one of many tantalizing friezes wherein Mr. Rich imagines a waterlogged New York City, and it is here that his novel floats above its belabored, researched prose. It must be deliberate. For all their models and schemes and mathematical certainties, Jane and Zukor are ultimately rescued by a work of art.

editorial@observer.com