Author George Saunders

A few weeks back, the author George Saunders, who is blond, with the shaggy beard of someone who has better things to think about than his appearance, was sitting in a Murray Hill hotel with The Observer, playing Jishaku, a Japanese strategy game involving magnets. Several rounds in, he abruptly announced that he would have to stop playing. He was “too competitive,” he said, and couldn’t “concentrate on winning and talking” at the same time.

Putting down his magnets, he launched into an explanation of his parodic use of idiomatic language in his fiction.

The concept had gestated during his years as a geophysical engineer and technical writer for Radian International, an environmental engineering company. There was a lot of on-the-job jargon.

“I got the idea that technical language isn’t necessarily nonpoetic language,” said Mr. Saunders, 54, whose sixth book, the story collection Tenth of December, came out last week from Random House. Eventually, he left Radian to pursue an M.A. in creative writing at Syracuse University. “I’d understand it,” he said of his Radian-speak (though he could have also been telling of his fiction), “but to the outside world it would sound like this nonsense language.”

Nearly every piece of fiction Mr. Saunders has written—in his collections CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, In Persuasion Nation and the novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil—exists in its own self-contained world. The elements of his dystopic landscapes have aged well. The Verisimilitude Inspector, from CivilWarLand still feels wonderfully original. And the Chill ’n’ Pray cooler—it projects a hologram of saints as it cools your beverage—from the story “The 400-pound CEO” will doubtless endure.

These images tell us about as much about Mr. Saunders’s characters as the characters themselves. With their ICANSPEAK!™ baby masks and carnival-barker lingo, his antiheroes describe their lives in a self-reflexive doublespeak, which turns reading into a game of context-Clue. Then there’s Mr. Saunders’s fondness for manipulating syntax, in which he plays quite dirty indeed. The longest story in the new collection, “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” is narrated through journal entries by a hapless family man, which contain virtually no articles. The style is based on extreme shorthand from Mr. Saunders’s own former journals. Hard to read? Yes, but it’s even more difficult to write.

“You’re taking kind of a gamble with that tactic,” Mr. Saunders said. “If you get it, it brings us that much closer as reader and writer. We are kind of in a simulation of a relationship, and I’m trying to be respectful and intimate. So the more I suggest intuitively, the more you’re going to bond with me, if I do it correctly. I use a lot of omission, a lot of implication.”

That relationship with the reader is paramount. “I don’t care about the thematics, or the characters, the syntax, or the intellectual content. But I have a sense when writing of a reader that is out there, and I really want them to get me. I want them to feel respected. Those other parts are all secondary characteristics to the larger end: to try to get the reader to take notice and feel respected by the writer in some deep way. To feel that we are in a relationship.”

And so Mr. Saunders works slowly. By his count, he writes two stories a year.

Talking about his path from geophysical engineer to MacArthur Fellow, he came across as lucky. Not everyone has had the benefit of growing up in a Chicago suburb as a Reagan-supporting, Ayn Rand-reading Objectivist, or of experiencing a revelation while working in a Sumatra oil field, as he did on an exploration with a geophysics crew.

Most protagonists in a Saunders story are what Regina Marler once described in this paper as “a sad sack with a humiliating job (often involving a costume), a hot-to-trot wife, a sick child and the threat of a pink slip looming.” In Murray Hill, Mr. Saunders described those characters as stand-ins for himself “on a slightly worse day.”

Tenth of December can feel at times like a collection of slightly different drafts of earlier work. In the new story “Escape From Spiderhead,” the protagonist, Jeff, is a teenager kept in a corporate lab/facility where he is perpetually stoned on drips of synthetic drugs like BlissTime™ and Verbalace. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the titular character in “Jon” from the earlier collection In Persuasion Nation (he also appears in The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil) is a teenager kept in a corporate lab/facility where he is perpetually stoned on a drip of synthetic drugs like Aurabon©.

In contrast, Mr. Saunders’s journalistic work is wide-ranging and invariably out of left field. His essay collection, The Braindead Megaphone, published in 2007, has subjects ranging from Esther Forbes to Huck Finn. Since that book, though, he has more or less given up journalism, which is probably for the best. He doesn’t like the part where you get in trouble or people yell at you. It makes him feel like a bad person.

In a piece included in The Braindead Megaphone, Mr. Saunders writes about a religious leader who had once been a pimp. He had stabbed a man’s eye out, but turned his life around. He was a good guy with a nice wife, kids and a respectable home, and also, now, Jesus. Mr. Saunders thought: what a great story. But when he called the pastor to fact-check, the reformed criminal begged him not to include any gory details.

“He knew he had been on record, but said that he had forgotten, that he had gotten carried away,” Mr. Saunders said. “He was like, ‘You can’t print this, my family will read this, it will ruin my life.’” So Mr. Saunders cut out that part of the history. “I know that I could have included it ... that ethically, I should have. But I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I would have regretted it.”

“I think I can tell my truth much better in fiction,” he added. “There aren’t those moral or ethical issues.”
Morality is a tricky subject in his stories. The defining trait of his protagonists is a total lack of self-awareness. They stumble onto the profound as if it were a banana peel. He pointed to the Chekhov quote, “Art doesn’t solve problems, it only formulates them correctly.”

The notion that art should be truthful rather than corrective became particularly important when, in the late ’90s, Ben Stiller’s film production company bought the rights to CivilWarLand. Mr. Saunders wrote a script—but it never saw light of day. In a recent New Yorker article about Mr. Stiller, Mr. Saunders said, “I would have absolutely sold out to get the movie made—added a car chase, a puppy cluster, whatever—and Ben always insisted on returning to the darkest, oldest version of the story.”

In Murray Hill, he said he had been “being facetious. I would have changed the story, but only to do service to the film’s reality.”

For Mr. Stiller, Mr. Saunders only had the highest praise. “Ben taught me that movies are not about purple or beautiful language,” he said. “It’s about structures.”

Speaking of which, he would like to try his hand at a novel. But the “trying” part is complicated. “I found from bitter experiences that if I decide to do something and do it, the thing doesn’t agree to be done. But if I wait, if I’m patient ...”

Dave Hill: comedian, musician, writer, pedicab driver (Beowulf Sheehan)

On the first warm Friday in May, The Observer was sitting in a secret backroom of Tavern on Jane with comedian Dave Hill, who had promised to show us the best toilet experience of all time.

“It will change your life,” said the first-time author, whose collection of essays, Tasteful Nudes, came out last week from St. Martins’ Press. Outside of his regular contributions to “This American Life,” the soft-spoken Mr. Hill is probably best known around the indie comedy circuit for his combination of cerebral humor, aw-shucks demeanor and a faux-metal bravado. During a recent book release party for Tasteful Nudes at The Bell House in Brooklyn, Mr. Hill sang with his band Valley Lodge, got into a wrestling/kissing match with a wine-drunk John Hodgman, dodged a moonwalking Michael Jackson-impersonating dwarf and fielded questions that voice actor H. Jon Benjamin had lifted from the pages of the booty magazine Straight Stuntin’. (“What’re your measurements?”)

These men—and women, Janeane Garofalo did a short set—are Mr. Hill’s contemporaries and, like theirs, his jokes are less about punchlines and more about stories.

Like the time he had a two liter bottle of urine thrown on him by a homeless man hiding behind a trash receptacle on a subway platform.

“Think about how much urine that would take,” Mr. Hill told the packed house on Tuesday. “People don't really pee all that much at one time. And consider that homeless people are generally dehydrated ... that was probably months’ worth of accumulated pee.”

Not that there isn’t a punchline to his storytelling, and the tale of the thrown urine bottle eventually wound its way to one: “That guy wet my pants,” Mr. Hill deadpanned.

Call it potty-humor light: David Sedaris, minus the cynicism, but plus an obsession with bodily functions. This type of monologing is likely why the Cleveland native has found success in radio, both on NPR and on his own podcast, “The Dave Hill Explosion.” It is also what makes Tasteful Nudes such an engaging read.

But back to Tavern on Jane, and the promised best toilet experience of all time. Mr. Hill had in mind what he called a “magic bathroom” in the Japanese restaurant Takashi on Hudson Street. He extols on the virtues of Japanese combination bidet/commodes in his new book, in the chapter where his band tours Japan and he ends up spending hours on the one in his hotel room. “After forty-five minutes of this, I was drenched in sweat and slowly fading in and out of consciousness,” he writes. “After about two hours of this, I felt as if I were floating over my own body as I looked down on it. I’m also pretty sure I saw that bright light that people who’ve had near-death experiences always talk about.”

And apparently, this magical fountain for the posterior was mere moments away, just down the block, really. We agreed to go, and let it be said, without getting too graphic, that the Super Toilet (that’s the actual name for this type of high-tech machine, the most advanced version being the Washlet G, which comes with its own blow dryer, heated seat and oscillating water pressure for front and back) was wonderfully refreshing, as was the sake we had moved on to. And Mr. Hill began to open up about his life, and his book.

“I didn’t want it to be in order, because it’s not a memoir,” Mr. Hill said in his trademark faux-SoCal drawl. He doesn’t pepper the ends of his sentences with “Right?” or “You Know?” but one always has the feeling that a rhetorical question mark is waiting in the wings of his speech. “I wanted it to leap-frog around.”

Absent in the book are descriptions of his years doing comedy. He didn’t, he said, want to write about any “showbizzy stuff.”

“I never thought about being a comedian, really. I maybe thought it would be cool in some abstract way, but I guess I just like acting like an idiot.”

Before he started writing for television shows and doing stand-up full-time, he made his living as a journalist, but found that he always wanted to slip in a few jokes. “The piece would be 750 words, but I’d only care about those two sentences, if they’d make it in.”

But journalism is only one of the pre-comedy pursuits he writes about in Nudes. The 38-year-old has had a dazzling variety of jobs. He was a pedicab driver for two days, though he imagined at the time it would be a much longer stint. “My hair would be salt-and-pepper gray and the lines in my face would tell a story, the story of a guy who is so awesome at driving a pedicab it’s not even funny,” he writes. He was also a rock star several times over: in 1995 his band The Sons of Elvis enjoyed brief success, getting their videos on MTV and opening for Slash; he played guitar for heavy-metal band Diamondsnake, along with Walter Schreifels and Moby; another of his bands, Valley Lodge, became, unironically, huge in Japan. Mr. Hill was a program aide at a homeless shelter, where he spent his postcollege days changing men’s diapers and, on one occasion, accidentally letting a crackhead run away with 300 pounds of meat. He’s written for The New York Times and Salon, for HBO and Sundance, and had a short run as a TV star on Mojo’s King of Miami.

There’s more: he has posed as a cop and investigated a break-in. He’s done stand-up for lifers at Sing Sing—and they loved him. He lived in the Chelsea Hotel, back when it was still owned by the Bard family. He once reached out to “The Hottest Naked Chick on the Internet” (objectively, of course) and got her to meet him for coffee, (She turned out to be an escort; they've remained friends.) He counts among his other acquaintances Dick Cavett and Malcolm Gladwell, who both appear in the web trailer for his book. Really there is only one question for Dave Hill: Is there anything he can’t do?

“I guess I’m not playing hockey anymore,” he said, sounding a bit melancholic. A die-hard fan of the sport in his youth—he is one quarter Canadian—his enthusiasm for it has dimmed. These days, he gets his exercise running—just don’t look him in the eye if you pass him on the street, please.

Tasteful Nudes is by no means all quirk and no depth. With the same wit and dry humor he uses to describe being peer-pressured by old ladies to take it all off on a clothing-optional cruise, Mr. Hill spends a chapter meditating on a period of depression that lasted several years and required him to move back in with his parents. Early in the book, he writes of his difficulties staying in shape, but it is only in the final chapter that we learn that the efforts at exercise were his way of coping with his mother’s death. Exposed and cultivated, Tasteful Nudes is everything its title promises. And it’s also pretty funny.

Hitchens hadn’t even finished reading Brightness Falls—it was late afternoon and he was de-icing the silver cocktail shaker preparatory to some old-fashioned, feet-up literary immersion—when his telephone trilled its urgent summons. A brisk voice inquired in a friendly but more than just inquisitive tone what precisely he meant by “profiling” Jay McInerney and what, in any case, he meant by reviewing a novel before its official publication date. This was Hitchens’ first ever call from Gary Fisketjon—he knew of people who had waited in vain for such a call from such a one—and the emotions of flattery and curiosity contended for mastery in his finely but oddly chiseled features. Cupping the mouthpiece, he whispered to the languid presence of Carol Azul, the exquisite screen-writer and Angeleña tour guide who had recently enhanced his happiness and undergirded his waning bicoastal appeal by consenting to become his bride, “Angel, it’s Fisketjon.” “Sometimes, pussy,” she purred, “you do say the strangest things. And don’t get me wrong, but isn’t it the teensiest bit early for that martini?”

Girls, of course, often didn’t understand. Ruled as they were by tides and zodiacs, they found the filiations of power and influence and networking to be obscure and even tedious. (They also failed to see the fuel-bearing character and possibility of gin and vermouth.) This was going to be man’s work. Stalling the power call from Manhattan—Fisketjon cared so little for the nation’s capital that he had allowed McInerney to describe the New York-Washington shuttle as operating from Dulles airport instead of National: a typical piece of Empire State solipsism—Hitchens dialed Julian Barnes in his London snooker speakeasy. The trans-Atlantic static gave place to the gruff, authoritative tones which had, to the wonder of many, infused the playful lightness of Flaubert’s Parrot. “Call me collect one more time, Hitch,” he quipped, “and I’ll break your arm.”

“Listen, Jules, I need a soundbite. Your mate McInerny seems to have a lot of protection. His Roman is very good, but it’s not as much à clef as I’d been told. Please advise.”

“The thing to notice,” said Barnes, “is that Jay’s literary development is completely disconnected from his social curve. I think the real curve—the writing curve—goes steadily upward. Whereas in terms of the literary-social melodrama, he’s seen as someone with a terrific early success who then wrote two dogs.”

Random Location

Abandoning his drink-sodden attempt at a pastiche, Hitchens decided to give the thing a straight review. “Early success,” of course, puts one in mind of Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote a haunting passage by that name in which he said that those who had experienced it were touched by a unique grace, and would never quite lose the idea that somewhere there was “a great carnival by the sea.” Mr. McInerney’s critical interest in Fitzgerald is now quite highly developed, and his new novel revolves around a doomed Scott and Zelda pair who strive for different kinds of happiness during the pseudo-gilded age that was the moral squalor of the Reagan era.

Russell and Corinne are a sort of coalminer’s canary couple. People watch them, in other words, as if they were a gauge or register of how the career and marriage mixture is working. Russell’s place of work is described as being “located in one of those interstitial regions of the city which until recently had been nameless . . . south of midtown but not properly downtown.”

“Haphazard might be a word for this placement. “Random” might, perhaps, be another. Julian Barnes may be right in decoupling Mr. McInerney’s fiction from his life, but anyone who knows the publishing racket is still going to be spotting the members of the real-world literary bestiary. There is what could be a misprint in my copy, where a reference is made to the industry of “Proesy and pose.” Mistake or not, it ought to stay in. Here we meet cynical ex-radicals on the make, Jewish paranoid belletrists who spend a Borgesian life-time constructing unreadable fictional labyrinths and cool black dudes who lend cred, absorb the diss and split the diff. Also, since this is set in the age of the arbitrage casino and the reign of funny money, there are some lycanthropic Bonfire ingredients lying combustibly about the place.

The public clef therefore organizes itself around the general rancid hubris of the 1980’s, with a rather stilted nod or obeisance to matters like the Tompkins Square homeless and the parallel immiseration of whatever we agree to call “the less fortunate.” Corinne, Russell’s wife, is the one who cares about all this while working on Wallstrasse, so it takes a while for us to realize that she is a venomous pain in the ass: “Corinne was getting so tired of parties: dinner parties, birthday parties, publication parties, housewarming parties; holiday and theme parties . . . ”

This, with its semiconscious echo of Nina in Vile Bodies, makes us wonder what may come to be the point of the divine Corinne. She likes to kvetch about how Russell is too pooped to screw, but she also wants to make murmurous noises about motherhood. This parallel narrative, with its awful acuity about what happens when, as Shakespeare has it, you may discern a hot friend cooling, is the major rather than minor clef in the story. In other words, private miseries in obscure places—a desperate friend’s room is described by Mr. McInerney as looking “like a campground that has been worked over by bears”—play out much better than public faces in public places.

Still, there are some good period and contemporary insights. I clapped my little flippers together and exclaimed in praise when one of the characters observed that: “If figures of speech based on sport and fornication were suddenly banned, American corporate communication would be reduced to pure mathematics.” In general, though, the epochal context is mannered, and plays to what people already believe themselves to know. Bernie Melman, the fat, vulgar shark and LBO artist, is a no-sweat portrait to anyone who has gone so far as to see Danny DeVito in Other People’s Money. The depiction of little-mindedness in male-female and husband-wife teasing and nagging, however, belongs to all ages.

These two tracks of the story never quite converge well enough (except insofar as spouses are famously jealous of the loved one’s work life) and have some trouble finding their resolution. The phony Jewish “novelist” is merely killed off after the joke about his circular productivity has worn thin. A tremendously charged French babe is introduced, shoes high promise of giving Russell a hard time, and disappears. On some sun-drenched Caribbean hell-spot where they go for running repairs, Corinne promises Russell some quality time and the blowjob of a lifetime and then apparently forgets all about the idea. I myself—do you ever feel like this?—have a tendency to resent plot-teasing of this sort.

In its public dimension, the story is building toward the Big Crash of junk money, and the parallel or related eclipse of the epicene “mutual friend” Jeff, who has the faculty of being adored by men and loved by women but who has a better idea, namely chemical and narcotic self-destruction. Again, the end of poor old Jeff is more affecting by far than the stripping bare of the poor old asset market. And let’s hope for everybody’s sake that the scenes from rehab life are not drawn from anything but the literary imagination.

‘Perfect Pitch’

“Notice,” said Julian Barnes, “how Jay has perfect pitch. His ear is almost infallible.” Especially in the mature repartee this is true, and in the in-your-face exchanges between Washington Lee and both his white-boy friends and homeboy critics hilariously true. Mr. McInerney knows that gross expectations lead to gross encounters, and he can let the characters trip over the fact themselves without too much rib-nudgings. I understand that he once gravely disappointed a wife of his, and if this is so then I am impressed by the way in which he can write from the wounded female’s point of view. Now that does make a call upon one’s pitch, to say nothing of one’s perfection . . .

Ignoring, or perhaps better say resisting, a heavy-lidded glance from Carol Azul, Hitchens gave the silver shaker a gelid twirl. Encouraging sloshing noises proceeded from within (from within the shaker, that is). “Look here,” he said grandly to Fisketjon, “I can’t believe you’re holding this book until June. I bet it’s in the stores before then. But if you do have time, let me save you from a blunder. Victor Propp the fraud is described as being in his 60’s and also as having a father who claimed descent from Isaac babel. Now if Babel had lived he could still technically be alive, so if you’re going to make not one but two learned references to Russian Jewish letter, you had better . . . Hullo? Hullo? Hullo . . . operator?

Giuseppe Garibaldi, formerly of Staten Island. (Photo: nndb.com)

In November 1853, a 46-year-old candle-maker set sail from Staten Island for Europe, where he had been one of the most famous soldiers since the fall of Napoleon 40 years before. Giuseppe Garibaldi was already one-half on his way to becoming “the Hero of Two Worlds” of legend, as he had the previous decade fought for Uruguayan independence in South America. His fighting on behalf of his native soil, however, had not gone so spectacularly.

Garibaldi, who was born in Nice when it was still part of the proto-Italian kingdom of Piedmont, had been one of the top leaders of the Roman Republic of 1849, the result of the residents of the city and surrounding areas rebelling against the temporal rule of the archconservative Pope Pius IX (aptly translated from Pio Nono) and the French, Austrian and Neapolitan troops propping him up. The republic lasted a few months; it collapsed after a siege by those same foreign troops; Pio Nono safely returned to rule another 20 years; and Garibaldi split Europe, eventually ending up casting candles on Staten Island (the cottage where he lived is still there as a museum).

It is what happened before and after his swaggering run in Rome that matters most to the story of Italy told commandingly by British history writer David Gilmour in his The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions and Their Peoples (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 447 pages; $30). Garibaldi had returned to Europe from South America in the revolutionary year of 1848; and “had led without distinction a volunteer force against the Austrians in the foothills of the Alps. Surprised to find that the local population was unwilling to join his irregular troops, he had been outmaneuvered by the enemy and forced to take refuge in Switzerland.” And after his later defeat in Rome, some of the happiest people to see him go were Italian politicians from his native Piedmont.

That Garibaldi could not rally Italians against the Austrians before Rome, and that many of those same Italians were happy to see him high-tail it to New York after the republic's fall encapsulates Mr. Gilmour’s argument: Just as is the case today, while there were plenty of people on the peninsula 150 years ago who may have identified themselves ethnically as Italians, there were not that many who were keen on identifying themselves so politically. This went for the people who, largely by accident, formed the Italian state.

There was the bellicose King Victor Emanuel II of Piedmont, squat and mustachioed, fond of medals but not of the fighting to earn them; Cavour, his canny lieutenant who as prime minister sought the expansion of Piedmont but not necessarily the birth of the Kingdom of Italy until the two became one in the same; and other players like Mazzini, the dreamer (think of him as the Italian equivalent of Thomas Paine), stoking nationalist fire (though, like the king, Mazzini was no fan of actual fighting). And then there was Garibaldi, Italy’s George Washington, a farmer inimitable as a soldier but uncomfortable as a leader (ironically enough, after his role in uniting Italy, he would take a steamer called “Washington” back to his farm in northern Sardinia, having refused honors from Victor Emanuel).

Garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily in May 1860 with a volunteer army culled mostly from northern Italian states like Piedmont, Lombardy and Tuscany—and with the backing of the British navy—commenced one of the more brilliant military campaigns of the 19th century. Within a year it was all over: Garibaldi’s “Thousand” had routed the Neapolitan government, a wing of the Spanish monarchy, and its Austrian allies; captured the capital Naples; and basically met Cavour’s expansionist Piedmont army in the middle of the peninsula, where together they swept away Pio Nono’s domains all the way to the gates of Rome. The Romantic revolutionary—literally, in this case—coming from the south had joined with the pragmatic politicians coming from the north. Italy was born. (Rome, the last piece of the puzzle, would be fitted in after the French troops protecting the pope dashed out in September 1870 to fight the new German empire.)

But then what?

Mr. Gilmour shows that as is often the case with accidents people get hurt. Cavour died suddenly in 1861, and Garibaldi the same year shuffled nobly off the stage. Victor Emanuel—who, tellingly, kept the “II” after his name as if continuing to rule as the king of Piedmont rather than as the first king of Italy—was not much of an administrator; and he left his new country at the whim of northern politicians who saw the south as inferior and perhaps hopelessly so. “The Piedmontese who came uninvited in 1860 felt they had arrived in another country but in another continent.” A racist joke circulated in Victor Emanuel’s court that Garibaldi had not united Italy but had split Africa.

And, despite the northerners’ “sprees of statue-making and street-christening in homage to the heroic four” of the king, Garibaldi, Cavour and Mazzini, southerners rebelled, sometimes in large numbers, against what many considered a foreign occupation. Indeed, Mr. Gilmour guesses that long-forgotten uprisings in the former Kingdom of Naples could have cost as many as 60,000 lives in the 1860s. The northerners dismissed the fighting as “brigandage,” with Victor Emanuel authorizing brutal reprisals against southern peasants who hadn’t gotten the memo re: the unification of Italy; that it was clean and foreordained, and most certainly did not involve conquest.

So, instead of economic development for the south or political reforms across the board to welcome disparate former states into the new kingdom (Venice, an independent republic for hundreds of years, was as discontented as Naples—maybe more so—at being dragooned into Italy), the king’s governments chose a succession of ill-fated wars to … to what, really? To show that Italians could be as militant and imperialistic as Germans or Englishmen, one guesses. Revenue that could have been steered toward road and railroad building, education and trade, was instead spent on colonial conquests in Africa, including in Libya, and on fighting on the (barely) winning side in World War I. In that conflagration, the Italians were soundly and routinely beaten by the Germans and Austrians, time and again having to be rescued by the French and British.

A national inferiority complex set in. Millions on the peninsula simply threw up their hands and emigrated away from the grinding poverty and the anemic social mobility (including this writer’s grandparents). Of the four million, mostly southern Italians who emigrated from the late 19th century through the 1920s, most settled in the U.S., and the vast majority passed through New York City on their ways.

Italy’s more recent history will be familiar to many, though Mr. Gilmour gives Mussolini and the corruption-infused march to modernity since World War II, all the way through Berlusconi, their thorough due (as he does Italy's history from antiquity to the early 19th century). But it's those years of unification upon which he hinges his argument—the Italian state was an accident, though one that need not have been so damaging.

"It was a very different Italy which I spent my life dreaming of," Garibaldi wrote shortly before his death in 1882, "not the impoverished and humiliated country which we now see ruled by the dregs of the nation."

tacitelli@observer.com  ::  Follow on Twitter @tacitelli

It took Alex Shakar 10 years to complete his second novel, Luminarium (Soho Press, 448 pages, $25.00), and he had to take up Zen meditation to do it. “I knew I wanted to write about spirituality,” Mr. Shakar said during a recent phone interview. “But it took me a while to figure out that I really didn’t understand it.”

His spiritual exploration began, unwittingly, on the evening of Sept. 10, 2001, when he was moved to offer a prayer before going to sleep in his parents’ Brooklyn home. Mr. Shakar wasn’t religious, but he had just returned from a memorial service for his editor, Robert Jones, whose death from cancer at age 47 had come as a shock. Mr. Shakar’s debut novel, The Savage Girl, would be published in a week’s time, and he felt nervous about bringing it into the world without Mr. Jones.

At the same time, Mr. Shakar felt lucky. At 33 years old, he was being treated by his publisher like the next big thing, getting sent on photo shoots and being prepped for television interviews. His agent, young superstar Bill Clegg, had secured him a six-figure advance—a far cry from the $100 Mr. Shakar had received for his previous book, City in Love, a collection of short stories. For the first time in his life, Mr. Shakar didn’t have to worry about having enough money or being published.

“The prayer wasn’t to ask for anything,” Mr. Shakar wrote via email. “I just said to the empty room that I’d been given so much that if harder times were to come, I could take it.”

Harder times came. The next morning, Mr. Shakar was scheduled to fly back to Chicago, where he was a doctoral candidate in creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Instead he stood on the roof of his parents’ building and watched the twin towers burn. As Mr. Shakar described in a recent essay for The Millions.com, a year that began with the promise of literary stardom ended with his having to defend The Savage Girl against critics who deemed its humor “irrelevant” in an earnest, post-9/11 age.

The truth is that the book may have hit too close to home. Mr. Shakar’s novel, about a group of young trend spotters living in a disaster-prone metropolis called Middle City, was predictive of many things, including a dark age of “post-irony.” Even more damning, the novel was critical of the way decadent, marketing-centered culture conflates abstract values like beauty and love with products and fashions.

It was a satire with a heart of gold, but it wasn’t the kind of book anyone wanted to read while the president was urging Americans to exercise their freedom by heading to the shopping mall. Although Janet Maslin of The New York Times praised The Savage Girl’s sharp intelligence, she also called it “a relic of the recent past” and compared it unfavorably to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, which was published Sept. 1, 2001, and was also a time capsule of times gone by. Mr. Franzen’s more traditional family saga, Ms. Maslin suggested, “will have no trouble finding its place in a newly irony-free atmosphere.”

The comparison to Mr. Franzen did not come out of the blue. The novelist was a friend of Mr. Shakar’s and provided a blurb for The Savage Girl that is now featured prominently on paperback editions of the book. The two writers first met in 1996, at a reading at the KGB bar when Mr. Shakar was promoting City in Love.

“I was struck, first of all, by his radiant niceness as a person,” Mr. Franzen wrote to The Observer via email, “and then, in his reading, by his commitment to letting formal experimentation and human emotion inform one another, rather than oppose or cancel one another.”

Mr. Franzen and Mr. Shakar kept in touch over the years, especially during the aftermath of 9/11, when both were faced with the task of selling a book during a time of national mourning. Ms. Maslin’s prediction turned out to be correct: Mr. Franzen’s book sold well, while The Savage Girl floundered. Mr. Shakar’s publisher, HarperCollins, scaled back publicity for the novel. Meanwhile, Mr. Shakar’s agent, Mr. Clegg, fell off the map, succumbing to a crack addiction he would eventually write about in his 2010 memoir, Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man. But at the time, Mr. Shakar didn’t know anything of Mr. Clegg’s habit.

Mr. Shakar returned to Chicago, where he defended The Savage Girl as his dissertation. He began working on a second novel, which he envisioned as “a simple, spare book set in Chicago” that would explore the intersection of neurology, spirituality and technology. His jumping-off point was an article he’d read about a Canadian researcher who gave subjects “the feeling of God” by directing electromagnetic impulses into the brain.

The neurological research came easily to Mr. Shakar, but as he delved into the spiritual aspects of the narrative, he hit a wall. Although his mother was a master of Reiki, the Japanese stress reduction and healing technique, Mr. Shakar was skeptical of spiritual thought and had trouble getting inside the material. At the same time, his book was becoming more personal. Instead of setting it in Chicago, where he lived, Mr. Shakar found he wanted to write about New York City, where he’d grown up. But it was impossible to write about contemporary New York without writing about 9/11, and he was wary of approaching such politicized material.

“It took me a while to figure out I was more interested in showing the ways people were trying to adapt, rather than their initial reactions,” he said. “I decided to set it in 2006, because that seemed to be a time when 9/11 was passing from present reality into history. I was interested in the transition.”

Mr. Shakar also began to incorporate autobiographical elements. He created a protagonist whose materialist viewpoint roughly mirrored his own, and whose parents, a Reiki-master mother and actor father, were similar to his own. When a friend’s software company, a virtual world for children, was subcontracted by the military and transformed into a virtual training ground for soldiers, he used that, too. Finally, Mr. Shakar began practicing Zen meditation. At first he was reluctant to meditate because he associated it with a kind of contentment that would be antithetical to creativity, but after immersing himself in the work of mystic writers, his curiosity got the better of him. Once he started meditating, the book came into focus, and his themes began to overlap in new ways.

“As I wrote the book and was meditating and doing research and seeing how the story played out,” he said, “it struck me that, for all the loud argumentation on either side of this secular religious divide that really exploded in the post-9/11 period, the people who are really exploring the issue from the inside, the neuroscientists on the one hand, the monks and mediators of the major religions on the other, are oddly in agreement when it comes to the issue of the self—that it’s yet another belief system that may not be as real as we think it is.”

By 2007, he had a completed manuscript called Avatara, a word borrowed from Hindu cosmology. His new agent, whom he had acquired while Mr. Clegg was recovering from his addiction, sent the book out with high hopes, but when weeks without bidding dragged into months, Mr. Shakar was demoralized. The Savage Girl had been sold over a long weekend; it was his first time dealing with such prolonged rejection.

Desperate, Mr. Shakar called Mr. Clegg, who had recovered from his addiction and was once again taking clients. He asked his old friend to read the manuscript and give an honest assessment. Mr. Clegg agreed. “It was one of the better things a human being has done for me,” Mr. Shakar said.

Mr. Clegg didn’t think the book was working. “There was something missing, something that grounded the plot emotionally,” Mr. Clegg told The Observer. Mr. Shakar had to decide whether to scrap the book or to rewrite it. To make the decision even more difficult, Mr. Shakar was an untenured professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and he needed to secure publication of a second novel before his tenure came up for review.

Mr. Shakar found himself returning to the prayer he’d made on the eve of 9/11. Although he was embarrassed to admit it, for fear of sounding solipsistic, the moment had stuck with him over the years. He felt as if he’d entered into a contract, and that to fulfill it, he would have to rewrite his book. Returning to an idea he’d had early on in the writing process, Mr. Shakar gave his skeptical protagonist an idealistic twin whose cancer-induced coma compels him to embark on a spiritual journey. With that one change, all the esoteric pieces of his story clicked into place.

Two years later, he had a new book whose title, Luminarium, refers to a neurologically induced state in which subjects have “the feeling of God”—his initial inspiration. Luminarium is the opposite of the simple, spare book he had originally intended to write. Instead, it is a novel of interwoven metaphors for the mind that toggles between a Manhattan research hospital, the streets of New York, a virtual world called Urth and Orlando, Fla., where the “military-entertainment complex” has taken hold. At the heart of the book is a love story.

Mr. Shakar was convinced that Luminarium was the best work he’d done, but when Mr. Clegg sent the manuscript out, all the major publishers turned it down. At the same time, U.I.U.C. denied Mr. Shakar’s tenure because his book wasn’t yet under contract. His only recourse was to write a letter of appeal, citing positive responses from outside reviewers. In the meantime, Mr. Clegg kept sending out Luminarium.

“In terms of uncertainty, it was the most awful period of my life,” Mr. Shakar said.

Finally, after several months, Mr. Shakar heard first, from U.I.U.C., that the appeal had been decided in his favor and he would be awarded tenure, and then, a couple days later, that Mark Doten, a young editor at Soho Press, had fallen in love with the manuscript.

“It is quite rare as an editor to have a book land on your desk that is anything close to the scale or ambition of Luminarium,” Mr. Doten said. “I got it at the tail end of a period in which I’d been reading a great deal of Dostoevsky, and it came as something of a relief to get something so packed with ideas.” Advance reviews for the novel, which comes out next week, have been effusive. When asked if he is nervous about the book’s reception once it hits the shelves, Mr. Shakar demurred, then mentioned that he had just returned from a summer Zen retreat. “Let’s just say it came at the right time,” he said.

editorial@observer.com

The moral of This Beautiful Life (Harper Collins, 240 pages, $24.99) is the same as that of The Odyssey: If you have a good life in Ithaca, think twice before leaving it behind. Also, watch out for the sirens. Plug your ears with wax, cover your eyes, break your laptop, do whatever it takes to avoid looking at the provocative video sent to you via email. Especially if its star is an underage girl.

In Helen Schulman’s fifth novel, the Ithaca in question is Ithaca, N.Y., where the Bergamot family once lived happily, employed by Cornell University, and which is rich in suburban luxuries like parking, trees and good public schools. But hubris and ambition bring the Bergamots to Manhattan, where Richard Bergamot takes a high-powered job as vice chancellor at “Astor University,” a place that seems to share the same geographical coordinates as Columbia University, as well as its politics. Liz Bergamot, a sometime art historian and professor, leaves her part-time career in Ithaca to become a full-time mother to her two children, 15-year-old Jake and 5-year-old Coco, who is adopted from China.

At the book’s start, it’s the spring of 2003, and the Bergamots are closing in on their first year in Manhattan. For the most part, they have adjusted well: Richard excels at his job, and Jake and Coco are thriving at their new school, a prestigious private academy where they have free admission, thanks to their father’s position. Liz, however, is uneasy in her new role as a stay-at-home-mom and feels out of place among the other “formers”: women who identify themselves as former editors, lawyers, bankers, agents—whatever profession they left behind. Liz’s situation is not, on the surface, that different from her life in Ithaca, but Manhattan is giving her class anxiety: her new cohort is wealthy, while she’s originally from a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx and has misgivings about raising her children in a privileged, fast-paced milieu.

Her fears are, as it turns out, well founded. One night, when Liz is helping chaperone Coco’s sleepover at the Plaza Hotel, Jake is invited to party in Riverdale, where he dons beer goggles and makes out with the party’s host, a precocious eighth grader named Daisy. The next morning, he’s ashamed of his behavior, and his embarrassment is deepened when he opens his email to find that Daisy has sent him a video of herself, performing a graphic striptease. In one impulsive moment, he forwards the video “like a hot potato” to his friend, who forwards it to his friend, and so on, until everyone at his school—not to mention his parents, their friends and hundreds of thousands of strangers—have seen it. Because the video is an email forward, Jake’s name is attached to it, and he is immediately suspended from school. But that’s just the beginning of his troubles.

What follows is part legal drama, part domestic tearjerker, as the Bergamots try to salvage their reputation and keep their family together. They hire a lawyer with “eyes … that emit no light” to take on Jake’s school and defend him against Daisy’s family. The lawyer advises them to leak their version of the story to “some kid reporter … someone ruthless and eager and hunting for blood.” With this directive in mind, the Bergamots contact—who else?—The New York Observer. When The Observer article (“Prep School Pornathon”) comes out, the Bergamots are shocked by the media blitz that follows. The story begins to be tracked not only by tabloids like the New York Post, but by websites like Gawker.com (in 2003, a new addition to the online scene) and UrbanBaby.com as well. Soon, kids are wearing “Free Jake Bergamot” T-shirts. Jake is overwhelmed by his sudden change in status: “In one week, ten days, he and Daisy had become sort of celebrities. Now they were forever linked and pitted against each other, just like divorcing movie stars.”

Unsurprisingly, Liz discovers that she doesn’t have much support among her new friends, who are more interested in dishing dirt about Daisy and her parents than they are in comforting her. Richard also finds that his professional network is thin, and he is forced to take a leave of absence at a crucial moment in his job. Jake, meanwhile, becomes more popular at his school, but he is so consumed with guilt that he can’t enjoy it. Even little Coco feels the strain and acts out at school, dancing lewdly in front of her kindergarten classmates. As the pressure on the Bergamot family mounts, the compromises of Liz and Richard’s marriage, tolerable in a time of peace, become untenable. Liz resents the sacrifices she’s made for her husband’s career, while Richard believes that he has been forced to shoulder too much responsibility and is irritated when his wife becomes depressed. Before Daisy’s video, the Bergamots’ biggest marital problem was difficulty conceiving a second child, but they were able to overcome that with adoption; there is no equivalent solution for Internet defamation.

It doesn’t spoil anything to say that things don’t end well. Like a Jodi Picoult novel, This Beautiful Life is one of those topical horror stories that people read as much to inflame their anxieties as to work through them. In another writer’s hands, it might come out as a cautionary tale, but Ms. Schulman is careful not to paint anyone as villain or victim. Jake is portrayed as a confused, but ultimately well-meaning kid, Liz as an anxious, but ultimately thoughtful mother and Richard as an egotistical, but ultimately responsible husband. Daisy is also portrayed sympathetically, if vaguely. The only glimpses we get into her life occur at the beginning of the novel, when she makes the video, and at the end, when she’s working as an intern at Goldman Sachs—an ambiguous fate, if ever there was one.

Throughout This Beautiful Life, there is the nagging feeling that Daisy and the Bergamots would have been just fine in 1993, but in 2003 they are doomed, caught in the cross hairs of the Internet. This is likely Ms. Schulman’s point, but it’s hard to feel sorry for characters who are undone by technology rather than by any real moral failing or fatal flaw. At times, This Beautiful Life even felt dated—it’s unclear why Ms. Schulman chose to set a novel about sexually explicit material gone viral in a time before YouTube and smartphones, not to mention TwitPics. Then again, it’s worth remembering that one of the most popular video memes of 2003 was “Star Wars Kid,” a video in which an awkward high school boy practices Jedi moves with a golf ball retriever. It was one of the first cases of a video made for private consumption becoming unintentionally public, when the boy’s classmates leaked it as a prank. There was a lawsuit—the boy and his family sued for emotional distress, and won—but nevertheless, today the whole scenario seems pretty innocent.

This Beautiful Life captures some of that innocence, especially when it details Richard Bergamot’s initial reaction to Daisy’s striptease: “For all the video’s dismal raunch, its tawdriness, for all its sexual immaturity and unknowingness, there is something about the way this girl has revealed herself, the way that she has offered herself, that is brave and powerful and potent and ridiculous and self-immolating and completely nuts. It speaks to him. Is he crazy? He feels crazier in this moment than he has ever felt in his life.”

The bewilderment in this passage is recognizable, even in 2011, when we are all a lot more blasé about the things we see online. Ms. Schulman’s ability to unearth such a heartfelt reaction is noteworthy, especially in a novel that seems, at first blush, to be a story about the way the Internet is stripping us of our humanity. Although This Beautiful Life will probably not remain relevant for very many years, for now it’s a good reminder of the complicated ways in which the Internet seeps into our private lives and changes them, for better and for worse.

editorial@observer.com

'The Steal' by Rachel Shteir

Shoplifters may be the only criminals for whom the nightmare of getting caught ends with a blush. The anxiety isn’t that shoplifting is illegal, exactly. It’s that it is not illegal enough. The fleur de mal looks embarrassingly like a daisy. “Stealing household trinkets remains too shameful for words […],” writes Rachel Shteir in The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting (Penguin Press HC, 272 pages, $25.95). “The silent epidemic grows in a medium of silence” [214]. Authorities place the number of American shoplifters at around 30 million, which makes them roughly as pervasive as American depressives. And yet, with the exception of celebrity offenders, we never hear about them. Shoplifting is the epidemic that dares not speak its name.

That is one way of putting it. Yet it is misleading. The epidemic may be silent, but it would be inaccurate to put this down to the reticence of its culprits. “I met shoplifters by placing ads on Craigslist […],” Ms. Shteir writes. “Some shoplifters I literally met at dinner parties or while interviewing people at Starbucks.” It turns out that all you have to do is ask. The problem isn’t that shoplifters have been too inhibited to speak. It’s that, until now, no one could be bothered to listen.

The Steal is the fruit of Ms. Shteir’s unprecedented willingness to be bothered. She has interviewed scores of shoplifters, with habits ranging from the occasional to the ruinously chronic, and scads of those whose trade it is to nab them—those whose “pay,” as she memorably puts it, “was based on apprehension.” She has attended meetings for shoplifting addicts, and been a witness to their mantras. She has trailed mall cops on the prowl, and been a witness to their malaise. She has touched down on two coasts; she has traveled the country; she has sought answers in Brooklyn and Des Moines. She has even popped over to London, England, to confer with the eminent psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. And yet, though she has seen much, Ms. Shteir has not seen it all. “I have yet to see anyone catch a shoplifter,” she admits. The red-handed perp is her white whale.

Ms. Shteir has also done her reading, canonical and otherwise. In 1722, Daniel Defoe conjured the perils of petty theft in Moll Flanders, and in 1971 Abbie Hoffman crowed of its pleasures in Steal This Book. Now people write about it annually, in Global Retail Theft Barometer. Ms. Shteir has read all of this, and what feels like every iota of arcana in between. NietzsChe Guevara’s Days of War, Nights of Love: Crimethink for Beginners (2001) has never received a more honorable mention.

Still, in a book filled with the writings of anarchists and amateurs, the truly far-out sentences remain the spoken ones. “The idea, [one shoplifter] said, was to assert ‘the individual’s rights over those of mass culture by making the peas unbuyable.’” “I have a close, personal relationship with shoplifting,” another former shoplifter told Ms. Schteir. “That sounds glib, but it’s true.” What it actually sounds is evangelical. “Filling voids made me feel better,” said another. “I can’t figure me out,” confessed a fourth.

Words heaved into the void of self-incomprehension are one definition of good copy, and when you invite shoplifters to talk about themselves you get them in volume. “How will I satisfy myself? Cooking for him?” asked one shoplifting housewife, referring to her husband. “My accomplishment is to shoplift.” This same woman “didn’t even put gas in the car for fear that she would become too confident, and shoplift.” Laughable, but horrible. For all its moments of comedy, The Steal is not a comedy; the mirth dies away in a deeper queasiness. The epidemic that dares not speak its name is also a farce that we are unsure we are supposed to be laughing at.

“Today we see all three interpretations of shoplifting: crime, disease, protest,” Ms. Shteir writes. Historically, shoplifters have been categorized as criminals, kleptomaniacs, political radicals or some overlapping hybrid of the three. Societies have tended to respond unsympathetically to their crimes, by executing, incarcerating, banishing, maiming or shaming them. It is a more or less complete thesaurus, and it reflects, among other things, the anxiety that none fits the crime. “Is it a serious crime worthy of criminal prosecution,” asks Ms. Shteir, “or … an impulsive, unpredictable act, childish, but deserving of forgiveness?”

Shoplifting is unskilled, low-stakes theft, a form of lawbreaking that is also a form of amateurism. It is trifling by definition. Since stores began keeping track of it, shoplifting has cost the taxpayer around $450 annually, an objectively small sum that is just big enough to gall. The most shoplifted item in the world is the Gillette Mach 3 razor; trailing it, but not by far, are toothbrushes, DVDs, batteries, underwear and raw steak. Socially, what marks shoplifting is tackiness. Almost by definition, shoplifting isn’t worth it. “In reality, your life is not worth a pair of pants, or a steak,” said one loss prevention (LP) agent interviewed by Ms. Shteir.

Most are not so droll. “To those in the field,” Ms. Shteir writes, “shoplifting is a battleground, LP is a spy vs. spy world, and LP agents are soldiers who, though winning the battle, lose the war.” Shoplifting may look like the stuff of Raymond Carver, but it feels, for many, like the stuff of John Le Carré. Some consider themselves the scions of a more august tradition. “Eve was the first shoplifter, a security expert once quipped.” And God was the mall cop in the food court of Good and Evil. Indeed: “‘God is a loss prevention agent,’ I was told in 2005,” Ms. Shteir writes. Few things in modern life are so nakedly bathetic.

There are also few things that have tangled so ingloriously with culture of celebrity. Lindsay Lohan doesn’t come up in The Steal, but Hedy Lamarr, Bess Myerson and Winona Ryder do. Shoplifting is always imprudent, an expression of vanity over need, but when famous people do it, it represents a kind of supernova of common sense. Multimillion-dollar careers have been wrecked for socks. When Ms. Ryder got caught stealing clothing from Saks Fifth Avenue in 2001, the store already had an imprint of her credit card on file. They had taken it earlier that day.

Ms. Shteir claims that the mysteries of the Ryder case were what spurred her to write The Steal. “Along with millions of Americans,” she says, “I wondered why a Hollywood star would shoplift.” If this was the impulse from which the book was born, it must have ebbed as the book grew up. Although it minutely recapitulates the crime, The Steal does not attempt to explain why Ms. Ryder did it. Nor, generally, does it attempt to explain why anybody does it. Ms. Shteir repeats the ideas of others, but doesn’t take the further step of rating those ideas, let alone proposing a few of her own. Her diligence as a gatherer of evidence is matched by her reticence as an analyst of it. “It is no accident that Defoe, the first modern writer to make a living from his craft, chose a shoplifter as his heroine,” she writes. “Then, as now, no one knows exactly what happens when a shoplifter steals or why she is doing it … the details have to be imagined.”

It is one of the most memorable observations in the book. Still, you feel that Ms. Shteir may have misinterpreted it. She has left imagination to the novelists. The result is a work of history that is less than the sum of its parts. There are many pleasures to be had in reading about the bizarre particulars of a subculture, but they are limited pleasures. One looks forward, always, to the emergence of a larger design—a pattern in which the heap of data comes together to illustrate some unexpected, deeper truth. In The Steal, that unexpected truth never arrives. The heap is just a heap. Ms. Shteir concludes the book’s last full chapter by describing shoplifting as a “species of creepy conduct.” Coming from a woman who has spent years studying the subject, the broadness of the epithet may be telling. The anthropologist has not gone native. She still knows what to call a savage.

editorial@observer.com

Photo via flickr user emilyonasunday

Canon formation is a funny thing: the notion of a canon in any given field implies fixity, yet there is always plate tectonics at work, a shifting that makes room for new works and surfaces neglected ones. Artists who struggle for recognition dream of historical vindication, reminding themselves that Vincent Van Gogh supposedly only sold one painting during his lifetime, or that Moby Dick assumed pre-eminence in American fiction 70 years after publication. The inescapable influence of John Cassavetes on recent American independent cinema is directly traceable to his films’ rerelease in 1989-90; the Velvet Underground were a cult band when their records came out and in the years following their breakup, but their adoption by the college-rock wave upon those albums’ 1980’s reissues elevated them to a place in the rock pantheon more or less equal to the Beatles and the Stones.

The critical canon—important reading on a given subject—works the same way, and it’s only a matter of time before a pair of new books, Out of the Vinyl Deeps by Ellen Willis (University of Minnesota; $22.95) and When Movies Mattered by Dave Kehr (University of Chicago; $22.50), come to seem as if they’ve always been part of the conversation on pop culture history and aesthetics.

Ms. Willis, who died in 2006 of lung cancer, was the first pop music critic at The New Yorker and a longtime contributor to The Village Voice. A long-admired figure in rock critic circles, she’s acknowledged as a pioneer of the form alongside Greil Marcus, Robert Christgau and Lester Bangs. In clear, lively pieces originally published between 1968 and 1975, on the latest releases by Bob Dylan, the Who and Janis Joplin, her excitement is palpable. Writing in a style that foregrounded her personal response to the music, she was equally concerned with rock’s relationship to various social and political currents, ever measuring music by its ability to fulfill its potential for countercultural expression—an early piece on Dylan, summarizing his emergence from the folk revival, noted that the “pure folk sound and idiom, in theory the expression of ordinary people, had become the province of middle-class dissidents who identified with the common man but whose attitude toward common men resembled that of White Russian expatriates toward the communized peasants.”

Mr. Kehr, a graceful writer, is an auteurist and aesthete: his close readings of films, which ran in the alt-weekly Chicago Reader between 1974 and 1986, pinpoints the stylistic choices that identify the individual signatures of directors like Terence Malick, John Huston and Martin Scorsese. Mr. Kehr illuminates how cinema works, without devolving into technical or academic jargon, and demonstrates an impressive command (so much more difficult to acquire in the pre-DVD revivalhouse geek era) of Hollywood history, genres and aesthetic lineages. Nearly every review delivers some seemingly casual, compact insight: Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven is “an Old Testament movie without a sense of Old Testament sin”; Isabelle Adjani, in Walter Hill’s The Driver, is “the love interest in a film that has no interest in love.”

Both books do what good collections of criticism should: they make you want to watch and listen to the things Ms. Willis and Mr. Kehr write about, whether familiar works (Janis Joplin’s records) or unheralded classics (the films of the prolific Hollywood studio director Raoul Walsh, whom Mr. Kehr makes sound every bit as rewarding as Howard Hawks).

And yet the appearance of these titles can’t help but strike an elegiac note—their introductions, blurbs, the fact that both books were published by university presses, even Kehr’s characterization of his current position at The New York Times as more historian than critic present them as a mournful recollection of a time when movies and pop music with serious ambition carried a significance that they no longer do.

There is also cultural plate tectonics. The ground has shifted: rock and movies have moved away from the center and no longer constitute the territory upon which the culture expresses itself. Rock fashion, rock attitude and rock energy, which have comprised the pre-eminent force in our culture since Elvis, have evolved to the point where they’re no longer tethered to the music that created them. Rock and roll began as an anti-authoritarian subculture, but it has become so thoroughly absorbed into the mainstream that it’s no longer dangerous or weird; it’s merely a middle-class career option. This has left rock fashion and rock energy free to attach themselves to other things both fringe and mainstream—extreme sports, video games ...

... And food. The Food Network today is what MTV was in the 80’s, creating mainstream pop stars like Mario Batali and Rachel Ray. Genial populists like Guy Fieri, who hosts Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, and the Travel Channel’s Fieri knockoff, Adam Richman, star of Man vs. Food, provide the armchair pleasures and hard-knock chronicles of life on the road that heartland rockers in the Springsteen-Seeger mode once did; high-wire molecular gastronomists like Ferran Adria embody the excitement once supplied by Sonic Youth-style art-rock. The vocabulary and values of Chowhound’s food writers—particularly the valorization of a somewhat problematically constructed “authenticity”—has been assimilated straight from the rock-critical lexicon. If The Villiage Voice’s marquee culture writer was once Robert Christgau, the Dean of Rock Critics, its new one is food critic Robert Sietsema. And it’s no accident that the Pulitzer for criticism in 2007 was awarded to the adventurous Los Angeles alt-weekly food scribe Jonathan Gold (or that both Mr. Gold and Mr. Sietsema used to be rock musicians), and that when Sam Sifton left his post as Culture Editor of The New York Times, he did so to become the paper’s chief food critic.

Meanwhile, see if you can name a film since The Matrix that’s had any kind of influence on global fashion or visual style. Cinema’s position has been taken up by interior design, particularly of hotels, restaurants and public spaces. A new generation of impresarios—people like Andre Balazs, Sean McPherson, Alexander Calderwood—possesses the aura and mystique that formerly surrounded great film directors. These visionaries imbue their establishments with an increasingly sophisticated and cinematic sense of narrativity; to merely set foot in them is to enter an elaborate fantasy. A generation ago, New York hipsters might have patronized fusty places like the Algonquin or the Carlyle out of a sense of retro irony, but today, Mr. Balazs’s Standard and Mr. Calderwood’s Ace Hotel are magnets for the local creative and entrepreneurial elite. These and other places like them have become tastemaking and stylesetting epicenters; it’s no accident that Sofia Coppola is making movies about Los Angeles’s Chateau Marmont, or that the charismatic character Chuck Bass on Gossip Girl owns and operates a sleek Sean McPhersonesque hotel.

Rock and film, meanwhile, now share cultural space with literary fiction; they are niche forms. To say that they were once communal, populist forces with the ability to “change history” may carry false promises—Ms. Willis’s decision to quit rock writing after 1975 was at least partly attributable to her belief that rock had been co-opted by high culture and was no longer an effective vessel for social and political ideas—but they once were the animating forces behind how our world looked and felt.

Today that energy comes from elsewhere. It merely awaits chroniclers as perspicacious and aware as Ms. Willis and Mr. Kehr.

editorial@observer.com

There is a lot of this kind of thing in Incognito. The learned specialist is also a popularizer of impressive gusto, and his book is a barrage of bizarrerie. "Strap in," the author advises us, twice. Our hearts, it turns out, are alliterative: People whose forenames start with the same letter are more likely to marry each other. Davids disproportionately wed Donnas. People are also more likely to establish a home in cities whose names echo their birthdates: "People born on 3/3 are statistically overrepresented in places like Three Forks, Mont., as are people born on 6/6 in places like Six Mile, S.C., and so on." In 2001, Eric Weihenmayer, a blind man, ascended Mt. Everest. He managed this feat by affixing a device to his mouth that enabled him "to see with his tongue while he [climbed]."  

And so we range, from the outré to the recherché to the borderline risqué. "What does this research tell us? It tells us that fiscally concerned strippers should eschew contraception and double up their shifts just before ovulation." The journey to the heart of neurological darkness is also a kind of safari, and we spend a lot time taking in the marvelous birds. 

Incognito proposes a grand new account of the relationship between consciousness and the brain. It is full of dazzling ideas, as it is chockablock with facts and instances, but the big one is unexpected: consciousness is not all that important. Consciousness, Mr. Eagleman writes, "is the smallest player in the operations of the brain." It is like a "stowaway," hitching a ride on a "transatlantic steamship ... without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot." We tend to think that consciousness is the dominant attribute of the mind, and thought the main event of mental life. We are wrong. "To the extent that consciousness is useful, it is useful in small quantities, and for very particular kinds of tasks." You could say the same of cumin.                  

Mr. Eagleman likes to quote Pascal: "Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed." The situation inside our skulls is analogous. Consciousness does not see reality, as it does not see the brain. "What we perceive in the outside world," Mr. Eagleman writes, "is generated by parts of the brain to which we do not have access." With experience, we think we are getting the real thing. This is what we think, but in fact we are getting almost none of it. "When the world is successfully predicted away, awareness is not needed because the brain is doing its job well." By the time consciousness goes to work on the puzzle of new information, most of the pieces of that puzzle are already in place.                   

"Waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what's in front of you," Mr. Eagleman writes. "It's easy to spot a hallucination only when it's bizarre. For all we know, we hallucinate all the time." If we fail to distinguish the influence of the brain on our experiences, it is not because it is too faint. It is because it is too pervasive. "Almost all of our actions--from producing speech to picking up a mug of coffee--are run by alien subroutines." Still, if consciousness can't grasp how it gets where it goes, it usually credits itself for where it ends up. As Mr. Eagleman notes, "We are constantly fabricating and telling stories about the alien processes running under the hood."                   

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," said Joan Didion. Consciousness tells itself stories in order to persuade itself that it controls itself. But consciousness doesn't control itself. These are tall tales, and Mr. Eagleman thinks that it is time for us to take an axe to some of the tallest ones. "Many of us like to believe that all adults possess the same capacity to make sound choices. It's a nice idea, but it's wrong." Incognito is a book about brains, but where it wants to make waves is the courts.                   

A crux of many criminal trials is intention: did the defendant intend to break the law? The legal term for this is mens rea, which translates as guilty mind; its admission as a concept licenses courts to factor in the "blameworthiness" of criminals in formulating their sentences. Mens rea is not a category that applies to all criminals, though. If a criminal is declared insane, this means that he does not satisfy the preconditions of mens rea--i.e., that he cannot make free conscious choices. His sentence will, accordingly, be mitigated. Most criminals are not so lucky, and receive their sentences as mentally competent before the law.                   

This distresses Mr. Eagleman. He thinks that the representation of a criminal mind as mentally adequate can only mean that the neurological evaluation of it has been inadequate. "The criminal activity itself should be taken as evidence of brain abnormality, regardless of whether measurable problems can be pinpointed." What is important in assessing punishments for crimes isn't culpability. It's modifiability--whether the deviant neurological processes can be corrected. "The one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want," wrote Jonathan Franzen (in, of course, Freedom). According to Mr. Eagleman, this is not true. "Free will may exist--but if it does, it has very little room in which to operate." Even our fuckups are neurochemically choreographed.

Ideas start out unsentimental, but people form sentimental attachments to them, anyway. Free will is an idea to which many people are fiercely attached. It may yet die. Copernicus unseated us from the center of the universe, Milton exposed God as a bore, and Darwin traced our parentage to pond scum. Then Nietzsche killed God. Then Freud told us that all of it, in the end, was about our mothers. These things have happened before. What revolutionary ideas give with one hand, they take away with a pickaxe. "Maybe an unexamined life is not worth living," as Saul Bellow wrote. "But a man's examined life can make him wish he was dead."   Mr. Eagleman is our latest pickaxe-wielding radical. He aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars. "We are not at the center of ourselves," Mr. Eagleman writes, "but instead--like the Earth in the Milky Way, and the Milky Way in the universe--far out on a distant edge, hearing little of what is transpiring." With Incognito, Mr. Eagleman has given us a hearty shove in the direction of that distant edge. Will we leap, or step back?                   

Mr. Eagleman is already several steps ahead of us. In 2009, he published a book of fiction called Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives. In one tale, "Blueprints," he envisions an afterlife in which God has initiated the dead into all the secrets of creation. But it is an ambiguous gift. God thinks that the knowledge will dazzle mankind, but Satan is sure that it will hurt it. Both are in for a letdown. It turns out that "being let into the secrets behind the scenes has little effect on our experience. The secret codes of life--whether presented as a gift or a burden--go totally unappreciated."

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From these disparate parts, the contours of a single idea emerge. Roughly, this is it: "VN's happiness is a singular way of seeing, marveling, and grasping, in other words, of netting the light particles around us." Nabokov, Ms. Zanganeh suggests, invented a style of literary perception that retrieved an exceptional amount of beauty, and therefore happiness, from experience. This held true for all varieties of experience, even the grim stuff. "Even in darkness or demise, Nabokov tells us, things quiver with lambent beauty." How did he do it? "It has to do with the wiles of a new language," she hints. And then later: "A language recombining elements with such astonishing artistry and ardor as to obliterate the very limits of language as we knew it." Answer: Something to do with language.

These claims struggle to come into focus. "All it amounts to (in the end) is a certain way of looking," Ms. Zanganeh writes, 100 pages later. By the end of the book, she has reached this conclusion: "At core, the gift of the Nabokovian novel is this, just this: a call to whom-it-may-concern to capture photon after photon of fleeting life." Readers may be surprised by the literalness of this; photon is the key word. The Enchanter closes with a montage-like tribute to Nabokov's evocations of light: "Tentatively, I stepped over the lawn under the pale star-dusted firmament. And all at once it was summer. A radiant night, satiated with moonlight, as bright as an iridescent Persian poem."

Happiness this may be, but the light show, frankly, kind of makes you miss the peep show.

Nabokovians will be pleased to confirm that the master can still attract passionate disciples, but they may be nonplussed at how little The Enchanter adds to our understanding of him. Ms. Zanganeh has interviewed Nabokov's son, Dimitri, and she has made pilgrimages to various sites sacred to Nabokovians, where she recorded her impressions. That is all she has done. The rest of the material is secondhand. The Enchanter is a book that is mostly about reading other books.

Readers of The Enchanter familiar with Brian Boyd's life of Nabokov or Stacy Schiff's Vera will thus discover that they still remember much from those memorable works. There was the time Nabokov, out butterfly hunting, stepped on a sleeping bear (Mr. Boyd.) Then there was the time that a friend of Nabokov's father, having looked over Vladimir's adolescent love poetry, told him his son would "never, never be a writer." (Mr. Boyd, again.) There was what Vera, Nabokov's wife, said to their son Dimitri when Vladimir died: "Let's rent a plane and crash." (Ms. Schiff.) All of these are wonderful anecdotes, and all appear in The Enchanter. None of them is originally Ms. Zanganeh's. To her credit, Ms. Zanganeh is candid about her indebtedness to Mr. Boyd and Ms. Schiff; but then credit can only extend so far. All the showpieces in this book are out on loan.

What remains is Ms. Zanganeh's thesis on happiness. And it is true, Nabokov does rapture better than just about any other writer, ever. (He does rape, sadism and suicide pretty well, too.) Alas, Nabokovians tend to interact awkwardly with the conventions of literary criticism. Ms. Zanganeh calls her book "the true story of an ecstatic writer blended with the looking-glass fancy of a maniacal reader," and its method creative reading. Creative reading, as she means it, describes the attempt to channel a great writer's authority by imitating him in your writing about his writing. It is a form that is like pastiche, but equally like karaoke. Sometimes, at the micro-level, it is successful. "[T]he last, drawling days of August" is a phrase worthy of Nabokov, and it is all Ms. Zanganeh's. As a way of saying something meaningful about another writer, however, creative reading largely does not succeed. The Enchanter may make you want to read Nabokov, but it lacks insight into him.

This is not really Ms. Zanganeh's fault. Nabokov is a famous writer, but he deserves to be infamous as a disseminator of unhelpful dogmas about writing. His worst ideas, invariably, were about ideas. "Caress the details! The divine details!" Nabokov said. This is sound advice, if a little vague. What is not sound is this, something Nabokov also said: "Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash." Nabokov dismissed Henry James as a "pale porpoise" and Joseph Conrad as a "writer of books for boys."

Nabokov is a towering genius; it is in the nature of Zeus to throw thunderbolts. Still, thunder echoes. Nabokov didn't believe in great ideas, but he did believe in patterns. And so Nabokovians believe in patterns, too. They believe in them messianically. They think the thrill of discerning a subtle pattern is the highest sensation that art, and possibly life itself, affords. Here is Ms. Zanganeh: "To observant men, these Nabokovian patterns, magically, will offer the inkling of an 'otherworld,' the ineffable beauty and concord of which is cause for infinite happiness." The most compelling statement of this position appears in Nabokov's book on Gogol, where he defines art as "the dazzling combination of drab parts." (Adam Thirlwell made this phrase the leitmotif of his excellent recent book The Delighted States.)

This point about drabness tends to get lost. Nabokovians talk about patterns, but what their writing usually suggests is an obsession with décor. Instead of dazzling combinations of drab parts, we get drab combinations of dazzling parts. I lost count of the number of times Ms. Zanganeh used the words "latticed" and "iridescent" and "limpid" and "whisper," and words like them. Here, for example, is Ms. Zanganeh describing Speak, Memory: "Everywhere, it seemed, blossomed sentences so new, yet which one believed to have whispered in a distant fold of time, under some latticed shade." This is beautified writing, not beautiful writing.

But it is also recognizably Nabokovian. "Don't be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov," Geoff Dyer wrote in The Guardian last year. The paradox of an imposing style like Nabokov's is that when it is misfiring, it becomes more imposing. The swankier, crankier and hokier Nabokov's writing got, the more seductive it got. In 1969, in the midst of giving Ada a bad review, John Updike noted, "This deadly style is infectious!" Updike thought Nabokov's style had gone sour; but he was imitating it anyway, helplessly. "We read to reenchant the world," Ms. Zanganeh declares. And so we do. But the unromantic truth may be that successful writing, even if done in the name of creative reading, requires disenchantment. If you are going to cast a spell, you cannot be under one yourself.

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