It somehow took me a really long time to get through this. I’m not sure what that was exactly — if it’s that the book is just way too ambient, sinking into the background like drone rock, or if it’s that I’m just not ready to face what the book is saying, that what characterizes my generation is a total lassitude, an inability to perk up and face the world.

The book — as everybody who’s written on it has noticed — is embedded within a very particular time and place, in kind of Late Millennial New York, in which the characters have an overpowering habit to name every product, and every institution that they come across (to read this, you are expected to know exactly what it means to have a piece in n+1 or what the cultural markers are of continuing to subscribe to it), but its real affinity seems to be with end-of-the-century Vienna, with writers like Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal and the presumption of decadence, the belief that the engine of the whole civilization is very soon about to run down out of sheer torpor. (The title I assume to be a reference to Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, which reviews the same sort of material from a slightly wider vantage-point.)

This is where Gasda is really strong — in these carefully compressed aperçus on the withered state of millennial life. Mariko and Dan, in their going-bad relationship, are “two little creatures exchanging the last of their love.” Or for another look at the same idea, “They had gradually built this enclosure around themselves, an enclosure so complete that neither could see what was on the other side of it.” Or, for another, “A relationship was a cult of two.” Or, for another, Dan “had accepted their détente as a permanent condition of existence.” Or, if you’re not quite tired of this idea, there’s the verdict on Eliza that “she was destined to fall into the massive pool of young people who were artistic but not particularly artists” and on Dan that, as Mariko informs him, “I wanted to be handled, Dan, and you didn’t know how to handle me.”

In the book’s most moving scene, Dan and Mariko meet after they’ve broken up, and Dan is in disgrace, and Dan asks — as anybody might — what the ‘best case’ for the two of them was. “I just want to feel that there were other trails in the garden of forking paths that didn’t lead us where we are now,” he says. But Mariko isn’t really built for this sort of introspection, and is in a posh, too-cool-for-school state of mind at the moment, and she simply says, “What I see are two lonely, aging Millennials who couldn’t figure out how to enjoy the consumption lifestyle together” — which, as horrid, like Biblical, curses go isn’t so primeval but is about as depressing as it gets. There is no other option except to be able to float with the lifestyle, and keep one’s job, and keep one’s apartment, and if you can’t manage to do that — Dan foolishly putting himself in position to be summarily MeToo’d — then the only way to go is down. “How thin he looked, like she imagined characters in Russian literature. He’d become a monk of sorts, a recluse,” Mariko thinks of Dan, which is the last glimpse of him we get before his suicide — his suicide here being a kind of inevitability, the thing that just happens to men of a certain generation and past a certain age if they don’t have a family and tenure.

Gasda is much better at aphorisms, at generational observation and the occasional poignant exchange, than he is with the broader armature of a novel. There are all kinds of tools that aren’t exactly in the toolbox — psychological stability, economy, clean plotting. There’s a bizarre way in which significant characters will just pop into the narrative — Akari, Mariko’s sister, showing up in New York to lend her critical acumen to the narrative, just as Akari’s girlfriend Suzanne then lends hers, like in a snide hipster game of Telephone; while even the prime movers of the plot, Dan’s student Eliza or Mariko’s former teacher Xavier, will just suddenly lob an e-mail or DM into the heart of the narrative as part of a two-step tango to ruining their interlocutor’s life. I think the point here is that we’re in a dream, and the ancillary characters enter the way people do in a dream, but less forgivable is the weirdly marionettish psychological instability that the characters constantly have. “This isn’t very fun,” Dan says out loud to Mariko, only a moment after inwardly steeling himself “to heal everything.” Mariko claims that she is “feeling cruel” very, very soon after having a surge of attraction for Dan and then just before enjoying her pity at how “chastened” he is. And the entire character of Eliza is an extension of this — a little sexpot who can just as easily switch to puritanical inquisitorial mode and who seems to have no internal moorings whatsoever. At a stretch this can be excused as social satire — an entire cast of characters inhabiting their dreamspace, without any clear morals, and just swinging back and forth between various unmet needs and frustrated desires — but what is more likely, I suspect, is that the novel is basically made up of a lot of small, pointed observations and Gasda wasn’t entirely sure how to thread them all together.

But these criticisms are less important. Gasda is a writer and it’s nice to have a writer around. He is interested in important subject matter, and in trying to connect his observations of contemporary New York to a great tradition of Central European literature, and in trying to extract real meaning from the never-advancing, never-ending relationships that so many millennials are in, and the atomistic way that everybody seems to find themselves living. If it can feel rough sometimes, it’s because we’ve stopped writing this way — starting with the emotional heart and then working our way out to find a form that fits.

VINCENZO LATRONICO’s Perfection (2022)

I think that you’re not allowed to do this — it’s like some kind of a diorama of millennial life disguised as a novel — and reading it is a bit like watching someone shoplift from a compliant store. Perfection arrives with a great deal of fanfare behind it. It’s meant to be a serious, generational book, with an attractively European pedigree, and written often in gorgeous prose. If it’s a bit on the light side, well, that’s supposed to be ok from real artists especially if they’re explicitly working in a Roland Barthes-understated kind of mode. But, actually, there’s nothing really here. Not only is there not exactly a story but there aren’t even really characters. We are introduced to Tom and Anna, and we follow them from their roots in “a large but peripheral southern European city” to Berlin and then to Portugal and then on an unsatisfying vacation to Sicily and then back to Berlin and then to the “farmhouse in a coastal region” that they just so happen to inherit from a dying uncle, but they’re never entirely to be mistaken for people. They’re figures inscribed in their milieu. They identity themselves with the kind of vagueness that talking diorama figures might if allowed to speak — they do something in graphic design, even if they’re not exactly sure what; they note gradually that the filtered photographs on their Instagram seem to have more reality than their more frayed and inchoate IRL lives. And so the story, if there is one, is their relationship with Berlin, and then, one step over, their relationship with their own Instagram feed — it’s probably one of the world’s first ‘boy meets girl, boy and girl get an Instagram account’ novel — and maybe I’m old fashioned but I do think the rules of engagement for a novel, for something advertised and then widely praised as a novel, is that it has to be about the characters’ relationship with each other. And there was a moment towards the end when I perked up, when after a very long description of everything that’s lacking in the characters’ vacation in Sicily, and how real Sicily doesn’t match up to the fantasy version (“the little bars around the main piazza weren’t patronized by old people playing cards but by groups of teenagers with ripped bodies and blaring mopeds”), the curdling of the whole millennial laptop life, and maybe advancing age, does start to get to the characters in an emotional way. “They started to bicker,” writes Latronico, in the simplest and best sentence of the whole book. But just as soon as the narrative shows signs of moving inward, Latronico stops himself, and the novel returns back to the elegiac farewell to Berlin and the great sorrow of rising real estate prices and of the couple’s party friends not really turning into friend friends.

Oh what’s the harm really, we may think as we finish this. So it’s not exactly a novel? So it’s really more of a glorified guidebook? But maybe that’s a viable form in its own right — Latronico, in the acknowledgments gives credit to Georges Perec’s Things: A Story of the Sixties and claims that he’s trying to do for the 2010s what Perec did for Paris in the ‘60s. And I guess that’s kind of cool — I found myself nodding in recognition to the way that different world events intersected with the characters’ lives — but, to be honest, I didn’t really need Vincenzo Latronico to tell me that the migrant crisis was a thing or that the photo of the drowned Syrian boy had ramifications even in far-off Berlin. In general, what a text like this is is it’s part of the hollowing out of the novel. Nobody wants to read long things so we give them short work. Nobody can keep plots straight so we give them the equivalent of a photo reel with some recognizable tags. If this were a 19th century novel, everything published here would probably be the long preface — that kind of throat-clearing that writers in an earlier age, more relaxed in the power of the novel, would do to set the world of the story before moving on to the actual action. But we are deep into the era of “wan little husks of auto fiction” and a compact, tasteful little guidebook like this one comes across like a teacher’s pet congratulating us warmly on a mediocre lesson and trying to convince us that everything is actually alright and the novel can move forward even in this anemic form.

I was impressed with Latronico’s prose. I didn’t have the kind of howling-at-the-page experience that I get with a lot of the contemporary novels I read. It’s maybe a familiar sensation, but it’s nicely enhanced with the sonorousness of elegant prose when Latronico writes of web surfing, “But on closer inspection, this jumping from screen to screen and from window to window was actually more of a flaw state”; and it really does capture the mood of the moment when he writes of the Berliners’ reaction to the Syria crisis, “They were driven by the feeling that something was taking place around them that they didn’t want to miss, an outstanding rendezvous with history.” The question is if this is enough. When Latronico writes of Tom and Anna’s appraisal of some casual partygoers in Portugal, “They didn’t delude themselves that those acquaintances would develop into friendships, which they weren’t even convinced they wanted, so what did they want?” this is a perfectly valid observation of a perfectly likely-to-happen scene at the end of youth, with people losing their direction in life and just collapsing back into a vague anomie and disgruntlement. For a lot of writers out there — Gasda, for that matter, is often like this — it’s that moment of directionless and torpor that is the truth, the place to really live in with their writing. For my money, that’s a cop-out. Things aren’t quite as bad as all that. We aren’t exactly the airbrushed cartoon cartoons living entirely for our social media feeds that we often seem to be. We do have agency and idiosyncrasy and interpersonal dynamics. For novels to just give up on all of this, and to take the entirely photoshopped view — and to be lauded for doing so — is a bad sign of where the form is going.

I’m sharing a pair of book reviews. I have a piece on Rob Reiner up at Persuasion.

Best,

Sam

ERIN SOMERS’ The Ten Year Affair (2025)

If this is the apex of literature in my generation — and The Ten Year Affair is widely touted as being that — then we’re in trouble. There’s nothing exactly wrong with the novel — the story is interesting enough, Somers has a very plain style but I don’t particularly mind that — but everything in it just feels so, so timid, like the whole thing is a meditation on what in the digital, pandemic era, we have been reduced to, and the characters constantly ask themselves that question of why everything feels so bloodless, although, typically enough, they manage to ask it in the most timid way possible.

The book has gotten enough of a build-up that I felt myself writing it in my head before I read it, and I was pretty intrigued! — the idea of an affair elongated long past the usual timeframe, so that it becomes the primary substance of the participants’ life and then is superimposed across the whole story of a generation. It’s an arresting conceit, inherently lyrical, and then with a dose of smoldering passion.

But it becomes clear very quickly that this is not that. The setting is so studiously banal — Hudson Valley, “the last middle class town” — that nothing really passionate can happen. The star-crossed lovers Cora and Sam meet at a baby group. They are united against “broccoli mom,” the overbearing mother in the group who tries to force-feed vegetables to her infant, but really, as Cora and Sam deeply suspect, they actually aren’t so different. They work in deeply boring, depressing jobs — Cora does something third-tier in media, Sam writes copy for a glitchy mortgage app — their affair wends through such romantic settings as the PTA meeting, children’s playdates, an office goodbye party. What becomes quickly clear as well is that Sam and Cora’s husband, Eliot, are almost entirely unchangeable, both underearning, underbaked men, slightly overpowered by their wives and aligned with each other in what Somers calls “millennial soft masculinity.” And when Cora embarks on an affair with Sam in her imagination — the twinning strains of the two ‘realities’ are a major theme of the novel — the fantasy somehow manages to be just as banal as her real life. She and Sam meet in a depressing, anonymous hotel. They bicker, they get bored of each other, she gets an abortion (could she be the first person to get an abortion in her fantasy life?).

This is all clearly supposed to be the point of the novel, a kind of slow, sad Irish dirge for the American dream — everybody settling down into a shapeless middle, their lives less interesting and dramatic than their parents’, and so much so that all the color goes out from their dreams. “Modern history’s most shafted generation” is Somers’ term for her subjects.

Somers isn’t the first writer to try exactly this approach — to bring the passion of a love affair down to the level of the suburbs. It’s what Madame Bovary is and that demarcated the central tension of the modern novel. John Cheever and Richard Yates work with almost identical material, Yates in pretty much exactly the same plot of land where Somers finds herself. But there is a difference. In Yates, the dramatic tension is that the characters really are dreaming big — in Revolutionary Road, Frank Wheeler is fantasizing about Paris, April very much wants to be an actress. For both of them, Madame Bovary is somewhere off on the horizon. For Somers, Yates is off on the horizon. Even aspiration seems like a distant possibility. The characters work in “jobs for people who did not know what else to do” — being a corporate lawyer, as Jules (Cora’s rival) is, is presented as the height of sophistication. No one else has anywhere they want to move to — although there is the possibility of drifting away. And no one has anything really to offer each other — Cora understands very quickly that Sam is, if anything, a bit lesser than Eliot, although she keeps him in her fantasy life as a kind of placeholder of ambition and desire. When the pandemic hits, everybody’s lives seem to shrink to nothing at all, like a car that had been inching forward finally running out of gas. That was the main thought I had as I was reading The Ten Year Affair — that we can’t just be this. Vegetating in front of devices. Dreaming of corporate jobs and the chain hotel as the height of passion.

That seems to be, with the sound of a balloon popping, what Somers’ characters are also asking themselves, and the novel keeps moving from the domain of dramatic action to, more, social query. Cora is very much embedded in the sensibilities of her class — of a kind of corporatized feminism — and I don’t think she has a single distinct, original thought throughout the entirety of The Ten Year Affair, but even she finds herself wondering if something has gone wrong somewhere in the feminism experiment. “So in a way, victory? Yet up close it was disconcerting,” Cora reflects on Sam’s sinking to stay-at-home dad status. “Jules’ cheating on him should not have made him seem weak,” she thinks in another unwelcome spasm of traditionalism. “It should not have changed Cora’s perception of him. He was a victim, she reminded herself. And yet.” The general impression of the novel is of a referendum on millennials and millennial life, resulting in a resounding down vote, although the reasons for what might have gone wrong are never really explored. Cora, lashing out at her mother, says something about her mother’s generation driving up property values, which is about as far as we get.

Somers’ writing is not entirely without merit. She writes simply and unshowily with, occasionally, a nice turn of phrase. She’s at her best in a kind of fizzy drinks mode of intentionally understating the thing she’s talking about. She describes Cora coming home to the “harder workday where irrational people threw tantrums and demanded snacks.” Eliot is “smart but dumb or not even dumb but pure…he was gazing down on earth from on high and couldn’t make out many details.” Jules, in her homicidal mood towards Sam, “had had some ideation.”

But in terms of novelistic technique, there’s a lot to work on. We keep being told that Cora is such good company, and that everybody likes her, but we never exactly see that, and we hardly ever get enough of a glimpse of her true interiority — certainly not enough to warrant our caring for her across the length of an entire novel. Character traits never seem to emerge within the organic flow of the books, and so we suddenly get informed that Jules drinks before bed or that Sam weirdly has a gas station tattoo. Plot points seem to just come up at us out of nowhere — Jules and Sam suddenly moving or a flirtation between the children of the two couples that never leads to anything. And when she’s looking for humor or color, Somers often leans on some very simple constructions: “Cora’s mom had envisioned her as a nonsense lady. It had hurt her to realize that Cora was, in fact, nonsense.” Or: “The gin and tonics were so weak you could barely taste the booze. They were tonics and tonics.”

This is, for the most part, the level of the humor. All in all, it’s maybe not a bad reflection of the world of the novel — people in lifelong torpor, with their brittle friendships and half-hearted love affairs and personal qualities that are really just mildly adorable quirks — but I can’t shake, and I can tell that Somers can’t shake, the feeling that there really should be something more than this. If life has reduced millennials to bougie creature comforts in forgettable exurbs, it’s up to the novel, and novelists, to hunt for meaning. That’s what the project is, not this sketchily rendered slice of contemporary life.

W. DAVID MARX’s Blank Space: A Cultural History of the 21st Century (2025)

Hm. This feels like two completely separate books grafted onto one another. The beginning and end are a stirring call for artistic purity paired with incisive analysis of how the culture atrophied in our era. The ‘blank space’ of the title stands, as Marx tells us right at the end, for the “conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be.” And Marx does offer a compelling organizing principle to explain the flotsam and jetsam that filled the creative void. Basically, it’s capitalism, he claims. The pure hedonic capitalism of the ‘90s served as an acid that eventually dissolved the old aesthetic categories. Cultural hierarchies and even genre divisions vanished, a ‘poptimist’ sensibility prevailed where anything that was popular became its own self-fulfilling loop and any artistic squeamishness around ‘selling out’ disappeared, replaced by an enthusiastic pursuit of as much capital as possible. That poptimism eventually bled out of entertainment, taking over the society as a whole, as in the rise of Trump.

That’s one book. The other book is the one sandwiched in the middle, which is like an encyclopedia of every meme-worthy and viral event that happened in the period 2000-2025, although ‘dog’s breakfast’ might be a better term. Marx feels himself duty-bound to record everything that happened in politics, sports, business, above all entertainment, so long as it was shocking and reverberated around the culture. The result ends up being one of these old MTV paparazzi-style montages or the music video of “Video Games,’” of events suddenly cascading into public consciousness, of everybody behaving outrageously and of the players summarily melting down before the next titillating event comets across the night sky.

You kind of can’t help but be impressed that Marx put this all together, and I shudder to think of what the research process for Blank Space was like — a journey that required Marx to rewatch old episodes of The Simple Life and American Idol or to be able to cite Season 6 Episode 7 of Keeping Up With The Kardashians (focusing on a family intervention around Kris Jenner’s pee stains) as a totemic event in shifting the relationship between pop culture and entrepreneurship. But none of this is exactly in service of the thesis that Marx claims to espouse in the introduction and conclusion. The feeling is like being at an AA meeting where the speaker regales the audience with tales of all the fun they had when they were drunk and high before muttering something about Christ’s love as they leave the lectern. I find myself being less than convinced that what Marx actually cares about is “restoring cultural invention” when he seems to take such evident delight in each turn of the wheel of the dueling rap dynasties or exactly how reality TV superstars converted their fame into brand sponsorships. There is, for instance, no discussion at all of high culture in Blank Space — Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace do not rate a mention — and the clear implication is that Marx is following the same market logic that he claims to bemoan.

So if the book is not really what it claims to be about — not a cri de coeur against “resignation,” in the face of cultural philistinism, then what is it exactly? What it kind of feels like is a mismatch of tools, of using an anvil to swat a fly or of King Cnut commanding the tide to stop. Marx wants to contain the cultural history of an era in a single book, but the cultural history, as he himself would be the first to point out, is so sprawling and inchoate that it constantly seems to resist this sort of categorization. The more promising path for what Marx is doing would seem to be a more structural approach — following the lines laid down by Marshal McLuhan, Neil Postman, and Martin Gurri. What Marx is describing is, in so many words, the collision of the internet with the traditional architecture of culture and with the internet sweeping all before it. The book is at its best in documenting the unexpected origin points of different memes entering into the culture — did you know that ‘grind’ emerged out of a motivational video for the 2012 Texas Christian baseball team? or, for that matter, that ‘woke’ rose to prominence in a 2008 Erykah Badu song? But Marx seems committed to a slightly older understanding of culture that puts aesthetic trends first. So he feels obligated to begin his history of 21st century culture with the Terry Richardson/Strokes/Vice early 2000s downtown scene before acknowledging that that was a “false start” and keeps looking for the founders of different trends, with Kelefa Sanneh getting credit for “poptimism” and the Neptunes for blurring musical genre lines. But this sort of attribution constantly breaks down when the logic of the internet, and of crowd-sourcing and disaggregation, makes a mockery of the notion of a handful of recognizable cultural figures driving trends.

What Blank Space flirts with being, instead, is more of a business book — of the smart guys in offices harnessing the power of the web and finding ways to channel the flow of web traffic into profitability. The real tale of 21st culture, Marx often posits, is a handful of new market strategies — of Hollywood turning retro, shying away from new content and simply repurposing preexisting intellectual property; of celebrities and their canny handlers riding the waves of publicity so that they always emerged on top (Paris Hilton and the Kardashians are viewed as the pioneers here with Taylor Swift as the alpha and omega of the form); of platforms consolidating control of mass culture without much interest in what the underlying content was. “The real money on the internet didn’t depend on marquee brands,” Marx writes at one point. “It thrived on aggregating mid-tier advertisers at scale. This shift eroded another avenue for non–tech elites to shape culture.” An unthrilling statement like that probably is closest to the real point of Blank Space — of how corporate culture responded to disruptive technology with a few brilliantly cynical strategies, maximizing eyeballs, clicks, and ad revenue and marginalizing innovation or creativity. “The ‘mainstream’ market was now all-inclusive and boundaryless, containing seemingly every possible genre. In the omnivore monoculture, artists were free to draw from any genre, provided the end result was glossy, marketable pop (with clever digital promotion),” Marx writes of what the end-point of what 21st century ‘culture’ turned out to be.

But Marx’s project is broader than trying to follow the blow-by-blows of a few decisive business decisions. He really does want to record it all, and in being comprehensive to try to divine the aesthetic patterns undergirding the culture. And here, I think, he’s guilty of a category error. What he’s not quite recognizing is the extent to which the ‘culture’ really did serve as entertainment and distraction, rather than as an expression of people’s actual lives. When he sifts through the detritus of pop culture and identifies ‘millennial pink,’ the ‘millennial whoop,’ and the ‘millennial pause’ as being something like the signature or beating heart of a generation, he seems to confuse a surface, pop culture manifestation with how people actually lived. (I managed to get through my entire life as a millennial without hearing of any of those.) The ‘culture’ that he is looking at is really a vast form of manipulation — much of it successful — as opposed to the real emotional heart of the era. It would sort of be like telling the history of the ‘50s only looking at magazine ads and listening to radio jingles and passing over things like Rebel Without A Cause or the Beats or early rock ’n’ roll, which, as it turned out, were far more reflective of the ‘deep song’ of the culture.

Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part. I read most of Blank Space being deeply depressed. Essentially, everything that I would have wanted in the culture and society — and the period covered in Blank Space overlaps almost perfectly with my own consciousness — did not come to pass. Everything that I thought was a passing trend turned out to have staying power and to swallow up the culture. If I had been allowed to invest in cultural futures in the year 2000, what I would have tried to invest in was a greater interest in high-brow art, greater democratization of forms like film and music; greater liberalism in politics; and an ethos of egalitarianism in the culture at large. And what won instead was corporate behemoths, “royal houses in the pop aristocracy,” short-form clickbait, computer nerds turned into tech titans, and dizzying inequality with cultural victory based above all on monetizing outrageousness. Which goes to show that I may not be the best person to talk to in predicting, or analyzing, cultural trends. On the other hand, Marx’s tale of poptimism ascendant invites two contrasting interpretations — both of which Marx indulges in at different points in Blank Space. One is that this just is human nature, and the internet freed people to be their truest, lamest selves — “giving people the things they wouldn’t admit they wanted,” as Ben Smith wrote of Gawker. The other interpretation is that somewhere in here was a a failure of nerve. “We asked the question: what happens when we greet the tidal wave of postmodernism — the dreaded cultural logic of late capitalism — with open arms and put up no resistance?” Marx asks at the end of Blank Space. The implication is that we could have put up resistance, that somewhere or other in the tale of Blank Space was an alternative for the culture that would have been less lame and less vapid. It’s hard to see exactly where that might have happened, but I am with Marx in the note of wishful thinking that he ends the book on: we were fooled once, now the question is whether we let ourselves get fooled again.

This book, to be honest, arrives five years too late. Its highest purpose would have been as a reality check and voice-of-reason against the swirling fanaticisms of 2020 and the Woke era. Now that the storm has broken, it feels like a light, if elegant, recap.

What there is to be grateful for is the way that the battle for the memory of this time is starting to land on something like a moderate center. The progressive activists of the 2010s were sure, above all else, that history would bail them out — that they would be seen as acting in the direction of social justice even if the specific means were sometimes wildly out-of-whack with the purported ends — and a book like Williams’, together with Nellie Bowles’ Morning After the Revolution and Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera’s The Big Fail, help to disabuse progressives of that faint hope. What really happened of course was the country was really in a pretty good place in the early 2010s. Obama was a perfect consensus figure between the liberal and progressive wings of the Democratic Party. Instead of being broadly accepting of the direction the country was headed in, the progressives decided to go on a suicide mission — not only to attack Obama from the left but to question the entire legitimacy of the American political project, which led inevitably to clashes with the right and at a moment when the right was looking for excuses to go into its own delusional spiral and vacate any kind of centrist consensus as well. It’s very important to tell this story much in the way that Williams tells it, with his head on his shoulders and an acute understanding of the insanity of this time unaccompanied by any self-vindicating ideology.

Williams zeroes in on a handful of different episodes, all reflective of the same underlying dynamics. There’s Obama’s intervention in the Trayvon Martin killing and with that the collapse of the vision of the post-racial presidency. There’s the pernicious demagoguery of Ta-Nehisi Coates. The chaotic story of Kyle Rittenhouse’s shooting of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber in Kenosha. And then the ever-unfolding spiral of insanity, including the new-to-me story of how the heads of the Poetry Foundation were forced to resign for a statement of support for the “Black community” that was deemed insufficiently sincere. (Their call for poetry that “has the strength and power to uplift in terms of despair” apparently downplayed the ongoing “genocide against Black people.”)

Coates is, in a way, the heart of Williams’ narrative. In the mid-2010s, Coates was in an extraordinarily privileged position — “the first blue-chip black writer so throughly ensconced in the establishment,” as Williams puts it — and he used that position to profoundly undercut what Obama was doing and to generate an ideological rupture with liberalism. “Coates’ message put to rest the heroic idealism of Obama‘s grand vision,” Williams writes. “His message was brutal, irresponsible, and decisively victorious.” Against the vision of the bridge to the “post-racial future,” in which America’s focus would be on the sorts of technocratic questions that seemed to preoccupy the Obama administration, Coates and co succeeded in imposing a different narrative — “a sense of futility that was both derivative and utterly infectious” and that viewed racism as “permeating every facet of American life.”

Once that “irresponsible” turn had been taken, there was virtually no stopping it. Williams comes down very hard on Obama in a way that I think is excessive — I don’t actually recall Obama’s statement on the Trayvon Martin shooting as being “catastrophic,” as Williams describes it — but he probably is right that ambivalences Obama had towards the notion of ‘post-racialism’ played out across the body politic as a whole. And from there on, absurdity started to pile on absurdity. By the time we get to Kenosha, racism became the left’s single all-encompassing narrative. “What had happened among four white men could not be understood as unfortunate or tragic or even simply illegal; it had to be understood as racist,” Williams writes of the way in which the two white men killed by Rittenhouse were “elevated posthumously to the status of Black Lives Matter activists.”

And that pretty much is where Williams leaves things — there’s the “comedown” from the euphoria of Obama’s election, the period of irresponsibility by progressive activists and critics during Obama’s second term, and then conformity and trendiness doing the rest. “There is something deeply wrong in our society, and there has been for some time now,” Williams concludes, which is unfortunately just the kind of airy fatalism that he decries in a figure like Coates. A deeper study of the “foundational ideas and actions that produced 2020,” which is how Williams advertises this book, would likely have spent a great deal more time on communications theory and the way that the rise of social media changed the discourse. The really decisive factor seems not to be a few utterances of Obama’s, or the stance of a single influential Atlantic writer, but the way in which social media virality became the critical currency in political exchange. In his interventions in the Henry Louis Gates and then Trayvon Martin episodes, Obama clearly was expecting things to play out the way they do in a TV-driven landscape. Obama would find the right soundbite — as he very effectively had during the 2008 Jeremiah Wright controversy — and then the story would be dropped, with the “beer summit” that Obama called for during the Gates incident giving all the appearances of doing the trick. But as political discourse moved online throughout the Obama presidency, and with zealots rather than professionals at the helm, certain stories just never seemed to die out — and stories that were in any way connected to race had the longest tail of all. Black Lives Matter was, of course, far more of a phenomenon of social media than anything having to do with The Atlantic, but the establishment media was used to having a monopoly of the public conversation and faced with this change in political discourse, they reacted … badly. They tended to assume that the progressives, even if they weren’t making a great deal of sense at the moment, must be on the right side of history and platformed progressive voices often at the expense of their own institutional values, as was clearly the case with the Floyd protests and Kenosha and CNN’s “mostly peaceful protests” chyron.

It’s a salutary exercise to wrest the narrative back, for books like this to appear that are grounded in common sense and thoughtful reportage, but I do wish that Williams had gone a layer deeper and tried to work out what the communicative and ideological structures were that so drastically altered the discourse, as opposed to staying in the domain of their surface symptoms.

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I’m sharing a book review. I have a piece out in on the end of DOGE. Please do consider joining the salon tomorrow where I’ll be speaking with the wonderful on the ‘American literary world of today’ and, I’m sure, on .

Best,

Sam

MICHAEL McFAUL’s Autocrats vs. Democrats (2025)

I’ve been aware of Michael McFaul since the early 2010s. He was Obama’s cool policy wonk on Russia — part of the ‘best and brightest club’ that Obama was building around himself and that now seems like it was a lifetime ago. What McFaul didn’t quite realize as he was going to take up his new assignment as ambassador to Russia in 2012 was that the mission was doomed from the beginning. When he arrived in Moscow, he found himself, as he recalls, on the receiving end of “a myth that Obama had sent me to organize a revolution against Putin’s government” — and what was supposed to be a ‘reset,’ worked out between the like-minded Obama and Medvedev, was in fact already finished, with Putin biding his time as prime minister and then returning to full power in 2012 and with a far more revanchist and hardcore philosophy than he had displayed in his first period in the presidency.

It was clearly a scarring experience and it puts McFaul in an interesting and unique position to write his magnum opus about the state of the world in the 2020s — what he describes as a blueprint for a new “grand strategy,” and which is based in a hard-nosed approach to both Russia and China, with every expectation that great power rivalries will only continue to intensify.

The underlying view that McFaul has is a 1984-ish take of Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia (i.e. the U.S., Russia, and China) locked in permanent rivalry like tops spinning forever around each other. The Cold War distraction of ‘capitalism v. communism’ helpfully goes out the window and we are closer to pure geopolitics, and, actually, in many regards the U.S. finds itself in a more disadvantageous geopolitical position than it was at that time. The Sino-Soviet split — constantly underestimated in the West — really was a big deal, and now China and Russia are more united through shared interests and brand sentiment than they were during the Cold War. As a brand, liberal democracy has somewhat curdled — it hits hard to read Wang Qishan’s quiet statement to Hank Paulson in 2008 that “we aren’t sure we should be learning from you anymore.” And the sense is of the U.S. slipping and needing a real pick-me-up in order to stay ahead on the multiple fronts.

As in his From Cold War to Hot Peace — his memoir of his embattled ambassadorship — McFaul strikes me as a honest broker, a bright and basically pleasant person fond of long-distance running and with the occasional injection of dad humor. And so it’s a bit of a surprise when we finally get past all the historical back story and to his prescriptions for what ‘liberal internationalism’ actually entails. First up is nukes. “A successful deterrence strategy begins with the modernization of our nuclear arsenal to maintain mutually assured destruction,” McFaul somewhat bloodcurdlingly writes. What that means, really, is more nukes given that the threat is now doubled with both Russia and China capable of offensive action. After having invested in ships and submarines and a “much higher volume of missiles,” the U.S. needs to invest as well in unmanned weapons platforms, with the assumption being that a “large number of small things” (i.e. drones and autonomous weapons) will tip the tactical balance in the war of the future. Then the U.S. should “forward-deploy” more soldiers in both Europe and Asia. And be ready to fight in space. And be ready to defend against Chinese bioweapons. And initiate PATO — the Pacific Alliance Treaty Organization — that would be the Pacific Rim corollary to NATO.

If that all sounds pretty Reaganite, if not Strangelovian, it is, but McFaul isn’t crazy. If Autocrats vs. Democrats is — if nothing else — a glimpse of the world as the leadership class sees it, it’s also not so easy to argue with McFaul’s underlying assumptions. “The only way to prevent great power wars is to be ready to fight them,” McFaul sternly writes. Since he is not actually Dr. Merkwürdigliebe / Strangelove, McFaul is aware of some of the paradoxes of what he’s espousing. As he writes:

Ethically, there is also something unsettling for me about advocating for more defense spending. I would rather the US government spent more on scholarships than weapons. I am also scared to death of wars fought with unmanned, AI-enhanced autonomous drones. A better strategy would be for great power leaders to sign treaties limiting the use cases of these weapons. However, these diplomatic opportunities are not available at the moment, so the United States must keep investing in its deterrent in every dimension of warfare.

If this sounds a little bit like the Bolivian drug dealer in Barry espousing a lot of New Age principles before concluding that the only thing to do in a given situation is to to kill Barry along with his entire family, well, it is. It is a glimpse of what a ‘grand strategy’ probably does to some extent have to look like — it’s hard to argue with the necessity of mutually assured destruction, which does also mean maintaining and updating the nuclear weapons arsenal, which does also mean keeping pace on biologics, space warfare, drones, and all the other horrors of the 21st century, which does also mean playing hardball with Russian and Chinese expansionism, which does necessarily mean upping conventional weaponry as well.

If that means that the U.S. goes screaming into an arms race, with its credit limits all blown and with money that it doesn’t really have being spent on defense, well, it is possible to see how, from the perspective of grand strategy, there is nothing else that is more important. Wars with either Russia or China would of course be far more expensive than maintaining deterrence.

If McFaul isn’t totally crazy, the harder question, though, is if he’s delusional. This kind of coordinated ramp-up in military and foreign aid spending obviously isn’t going to happen while Trump, or anybody from the America First camp, is in power, but McFaul, again, isn’t as nuts as he might sometimes seem. “If Trump’s approach to foreign policy and national security fails to produce lasting benefits for the American people, there will be a window of opportunity for new ideas,” he writes — and this is a very real possibility, that Trump melts down, or the Democrats simply retake power, and an internationalist approach has its moment to carry the day. In that respect, Autocrats vs. Democrats is an impressive policy paper written from the political wilderness. How to get back to internationalism is a separate question — buried in McFaul’s long laundry list for reforms is for America to “get our own house in order,” as well as to “strengthen the U.S. economic model.” But basically, as Wernher von Braun put it, “that’s not my department.” The political will for internationalism will have to have to come from elsewhere, but, from McFaul’s point of view, the clock really is ticking, and the U.S. will have to invest heavily in order to stay ahead or, in some cases, to catch up. Probably the real sticking-point for McFaul’s vision is whether the U.S. procurement system can update itself. What he’s describing isn’t necessarily so expensive if the defense industry can wean itself off its addiction to billion-dollar fighters, and that’s a more tactical problem than McFaul wants to deal with in a book like this — what he has in mind is the somewhat leaner defense strategies of the Eisenhower/Kennedy administrations where nukes are actually seen as a cost-saving measure, helping to create a more vertically-oriented command system as opposed to each branch of the military generating its own budget boondoggles. Whether that’s achievable or not would depend on a lot — but what would have to happen at a minimum would be a commander-in-chief with real intelligence and authority, who is capable of seeing the world at a ‘grand strategy’ level and then implementing reforms through the defense infrastructure.

But it’s not all nukes and drones. A great deal of Autocrats v. Democrats is dedicated to extolling the benefits of multilateralism and to building up the alliances that Trump has neglected, while also pursuing innovative strategies like an “International Platform for Freedom,” a kind of crowdsourced CIA for promoting democracy movements worldwide and competing with Russia and China’s parallel projects. And McFaul is less doom-and-gloom than the the book sometimes seems to suggest. Actually, the U.S. is still doing well on a number of fronts — most of all, McFaul argues, ideologically. If the U.S.’ brand is a bit weakened, it’s important to remember, he argues, that “when people take to the streets to protest for political change, they never call for the creation of the Chinese or Russian model.” And if China is a formidable adversary, the Cold War analogy has its limits. China’s territorial ambitions seem to be limited to Asia. It is well behind the U.S. in bases and alliances. And China’s integration into the global economy has no parallel to the Cold War. If the global economy is largely dependent on Chinese manufacturing, China is also dependent on the global economy — it’s a two-way street that would likely make China a less-volatile and unilateral actor than, say, Russia was in its 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia or 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. What McFaul proposes — and this puts real daylight between him and the ‘China hawks’ — is “selective decoupling,” trying to on-shore manufacturing components needed for defense without breaking the ties of economic mutual interdependence. That’s a “goldilocks strategy of containment” that requires a delicate balancing act and requires, of course, having people like Obama and for that matter McFaul in positions of power.

With Russia, McFaul’s approach is a bit blunter and is clearly influenced by his ambassadorial experience. If it’s somewhat easy at the moment to overestimate China, Russia’s struggles in Ukraine mean that there’s a tendency to overlook Russia’s “ideological threat.” Putinism really does represent a different view of statecraft that has its appeal on a surprisingly wide radius — in India, in Central Africa, in El Salvador, in Hungary and Slovakia, and in the U.S. Republican Party. From the liberal international outlook, Russia’s expansionism means tough old school containment, as well as an effort to counter Putin’s soft power and disinformation operations around the world, which is a zone where the internationalists are falling behind. But the question that poses itself here is how much of the Russian threat really is just Putin. The story that McFaul tells of his ambassadorial experience is of many of the structural essentials pointing in the direction of a ‘reset’ but with all of that undermined by Putin’s personal paranoia and somewhat idiosyncratic view of Russia’s unique path. If there’s no Putin — and one day or another, there won’t be — then what happens to McFaul’s assessments and his fairly ironclad view of the U.S., Russia, and China in permanent rivalry? What he would likely say is that that would be a good problem to have and the kind of thing we would deal with if we get there, but also that there is something clarifying in seeing Russia’s behavior stripped of Marxist-Leninism. Once we have the global stage, we are likely to always have dynamics that look like this — the U.S. v. Russia v. China, with Russia and China tending to be more aligned and with Russia, based on its geographic position, always having a temptation towards expansion. That means, certainly, that the Cold War can’t be thought of as an aberration based around ideological divergence but as a reflection of deeper geopolitical structures, and that means that military readiness and geopolitical maneuverings on the global scale are always going to be called for. That means that, as McFaul puts it, the “post-Cold War honeymoon” really is over, and we are going to be locked into this posture of mutual suspicion, if not hostility, for a long time to come.

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I’m sharing write-ups on a couple of new books — one fiction, one non-fiction.

Best,

Sam

EMILY ADRIAN, Seduction Theory (2025)

Jesus, this is well written.

Based on the description of it, it’s probably something close to the very last book you would ever want to read. More than anything else I’ve read — and I’ve read a lot of things immersed in MFA-world — this is really immersed in MFA-world, far past the point of claustrophobia. The social pyramid of the world of the novel has its apex in Simone and Ethan, the It-couple of the Edwards University MFA program. Simone is like the face-mash version of Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Hardwick, Merve Emre, et al — with a mother who was the long-time editor of The New York Times Book Review and whose death Simone duly mined for her bestselling, reputation-cementing memoir. And Ethan, the kind of tall, handsome teacher whom a middle school girl might doodle to life in the back of a classroom, is — it almost goes without saying — equally beloved by his students, with the gift for making “everyone believe he liked them a little more than he did,” willing to share in the occasional off-color joke with his class, and permanently overshadowed by his more famous wife (whose life story he in turn pilfered for his own well-received novel that did not, nonetheless, have the full back cover portrait or fawning coverage that Simone’s did). Get the picture? The fact that, as the narrator Robbie gradually suspects, Simone and Ethan are living in a fool’s paradise, childless (and almost having forgotten to consider the possibility of children), all-but-virginal (Ethan being the only person Simone has slept with), playing dinky little power games with their students, Robbie included, and, in the final analysis, fundamentally lightweight people, bothers them, and everyone else, virtually not at all. As Simone lightly — and accurately — remarks about herself, “Half of my students are in love with me and I don’t hate it.” In this myopic world, Ethan’s one-off fling with his secretary is an earth-shattering event — the hinge for everything else in the novel. And nobody seems to have any higher ambition than to “win at writing workshop” — except, of course, for somebody like Simone or Ethan to recommend them to their agent.

This is the unpromising stew that Adrian sets herself to work with. It’s not just that everybody else who has passed through an MFA program has been tempted (or, usually, given in to the temptation) to write a very similar book, poring over every microscopic detail of graduate school romance and faculty preferment, it’s that every other character in Seduction Theory seems to be tempted to write about the same configuration of personalities whom Robbie is obsessed with — and (Spoiler!) Seduction Theory at a certain point flips into the full meta and becomes, yes, a novel about a writer writing a novel exactly like this one. But, as the saying goes, you can either be first or you can be best, and Adrian sets herself very assiduously and — for my money, totally succeeds — in writing something like the Alpha and Omega of MFA novels, the summa of the form that (fingers crossed) will convince every other MFA writer to not even bother trying and instead to get, like, a job on a whaling boat and do something else with their lives and close up this dusty genre for good.

Adrian’s prose style is like MFA-max. There’s nothing particularly baroque in the writing, but it’s what very usefully calls “laminated.” The prose is spare and economical but you are also meant to admire it on a word-by-word level — you are meant, really, to prefer it to all the other ‘emerging writers’ telling the exact same story. Abigail, the much condescended-to secretary and the femme fatale of the novel, is described succinctly, perfectly, as having a “hardscrabble maternity.” Abigail, at an alluring moment, is “pretty and rumpled, like a chair a cat would sleep on” — and it’s very easy to imagine all the exclamation marks resounding in the margins when that clause is submitted for workshop. After realizing that she had neglected to lock a door, “Simone scolded reality,” which is exactly the right verb for a state of mind that everybody is familiar with. The much-graffitied table of a campus bar is described as being “etched with 20th century student couplings,” which is something you are likely to remember (and maybe even pass off as your own joke) the next time you find yourself in a bar exactly like that one. And, like she’s entered herself into that Hemingway contest of trying to tell a story in as few words a possible, Adrian takes a great pride in a karate-like economy of form. Calling another workshop member “flash-fiction Larry” kind of tells you everything you need to know about the guy. Simone thinking of Robbie “whenever she wanted to fast-track an orgasm” is similarly the kind of phrase that I can imagine slipping into universal use.

But it’s not just that. If Adrian seems like somebody who’s used to “winning at workshop,” she also writes with a far-side-of-adulthood grace and cynicism. “Like all knockouts Simone was ambivalent about her sex appeal” is the kind of sentence that, I think, really could only have been written by somebody who has been around a lot of knockouts. Same goes for the slightly twisted sex drive of Ethan, who finds himself admitting that “in general the suffering of women struck him as deeply erotic.” Or the Aristotelian verdict on how sex evolves over the course of a person’s life: “When you’re young you think you’re having sex when really sex is having you. Middle age is when you have sex for the first time. Sex is now action.”

But it’s not just that either. As much as Seduction Theory is in the muck and mire of grad school, Adrian — and, to some extent, her stand-in Robbie — is able to step through the looking glass and to condemn, really, a whole way of life, with the characters themselves only dimly aware that they might be lacking in anything. If Seduction Theory is particularly in dialogue with any other text, it would be Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf — the smokescreen of the departmental machinations and love affairs as the surface content of the story and then, just beyond that, the great unspoken wound of the child that George and Martha neglected to have. “Where was their daughter? What had they done?” Ethan suddenly thinks when a tawdry campus drama strips away the veil from their oh-so-perfect marriage. And were Ethan and Simone more self-aware people, they might have been able to follow that chain of thoughts down to the existential dread at its base — to see “the artifice of [the] marriage for what it was: a scandalous shtick, a sexy performance piece.”

But Ethan and Simone aren’t really — in spite of their abundant credentials for it — very self-aware people, and they aren’t the real heroes of the story. They make up, of course — they reach a “narrative by which they agree to move forward,” is Adrian’s typically wry way of putting it — they settle into a new phase of their relationship, “imperfect, flawed like everybody else’s.” Simone drops the idea of her hit-the-podcast-circuit-ready book on nonmonogamy, a topic which, she finally understands, she really knows nothing about — and the understanding is that she will never write seriously again, she will continue to teach her classes and be beloved by her students and look really great on all the panels that she’s invited to. But Robbie — as beset as she is by Simone’s little flirtatious games and the general claustrophobia of Edwards — is able to punch through the wall. She writes a novel — which is the same book as the book we are reading — that tells all the secrets, that airs out all the dirty laundry, that speaks to the real hypocritical truth of a program like Edwards’ and a marriage like Ethan and Simone’s. As she drops the frothy little MFA stories that usually secure her social promotion in a workshop, and writes from her gut and her truth, she finds her relationship to writing changing at the molecular level: “Until now, writing had been a project akin to assembling furniture….But this particular story kept me company at traffic lights and in the shower and in the warm, frictionless haze between lucidity and sleep. It was no fun. It was a compulsion.” And when she really gets into it, and burns all her bridges with her program and her peer group, when she has left behind the whole arch, involved, sanctimonious morality of her world, she finds herself reflecting — in, I think, my favorite line of any contemporary fiction I’ve read — “Opening the laptop day after day I realized it had happened: I was who I wanted to be when I grew up.”

Seduction Theory arrives at a very interesting moment in time, where it’s like people almost can’t even remember what it’s like to have children or even to want to have children, where people usually order their drinks ironically (even though they know that that was so ten years ago), and where just about every polished, professional story you read is a Xerox of every other polished, professional story. Adrian, a very serious, very earnest writer, is asking whether it really is possible to forget about all of that, and to bring intensity back into our lives. And that’s closely accompanied by the question of whether art, in a culture soaked in the derivative and superficial, can have that similar pitch of intensity. For everybody in the world of the novel, what “art” really means is a “career.” Adele, a one-time flame of Ethan’s and something of a foil to Robbie, has essentially dedicated the entirety of her life to proving to her doubting professors that she can be published and go on book tour. Simone, in the rawest moment she has, says — protesting at Robbie’s unvarnished treatment of her life — “there are actual things at stake here. Careers. A marriage.” The bet-on-zero that Robbie, and Adrian through Robbie, is making is that art can be something very different — for one thing, it can make or destroy lives, virtually at its own whim; but, for another, it really can be all-encompassing, it really is larger than we, our social selves, are. Robbie describes herself, à propos of the very book we are reading, as a “once in a generation talent,” and we can feel the collective shudder of any former classmate or professor Adrian might have had — that’s the kind of thing you’re really not supposed to say. But Adrian couldn’t care less. For her, the stakes are too high for half-measures, or for the kinds of polite little novels that professors might describe as “promising” and then show to their agents if they happen to be in the mood. Art, to exist, has to be uncompromising, furious, and dangerous. It has to be done at the top of one’s lungs, or not at all.

JAKE TAPPER and ALEX THOMPSON, Original Sin (2025)

This has a real claim to being the most depressing book of the millennium. The story of the moment is that the republic really had withstood the worst of Trump — he was out, the Dems were in charge, there was every reason to expect a smooth transition —and the Dems blew it completely, and now we really are looking at the darkest timeline.

The story that Tapper and Thompson tell is vanishingly petty and simple. It’s an old man, never the sharpest tool in the shed, who somehow convinced himself that he wasn’t aging; that he had a unique rapport with the American people that nobody else could replicate; that — as he put it in one jaw-dropping meeting where he finally lost his congressional support — “on national security nobody has been a better president than I have been”; and that all that really mattered was his own wishes and dignity, and this at one of the hinge moments of American history. And as he sank into senility, it was this self-serving, delusional core that held on the longest. Biden had enablers, of course, but in the Tapper/Thompson account, everybody aside from Biden gets something of a marginal pass. Biden selected for loyalty, and anybody who worked for him was there because they had been with him forever and they would never cross the boss, pretty much no matter what. In other words, they were all in the positions they were in because of their mediocrity and lack of strong character, and in the critical moment they absolutely delivered on why they were hired in the first place. At every single pivotal moment, that group — Ron Klain, Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, Anita Dunn, Annie Tomasini, Anthony Bernal, Jill Biden — acted always and every time in their own narrow interests and in the best practices of the flunky, and seemed to do so with perfect non-self-awareness. Mike Donilon, who probably was the leader of the wretched group, paid himself $4 million for the duration of the campaign and his defining moment, after a delegation of US Senators visited him in the aftermath of the debate to beg Biden to withdraw, was to simply neglect to pass the message along to his boss. Deputy Press Secretary Anthony Bates set something like an Olympic record for sycophancy by tweeting, after a press conference where Biden confused Donald Trump with Kamala Harris, “No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs. He’s just that fucking good.” And Anita Dunn gave a farewell party where she claimed that the art of political communications is “revenge is a dish best served cold.” These, my friends, are the people who lost America.

The next circle out is of course the Democratic Party apparatus. Tapper and Thompson go relatively light on them. The argument is that, once the Biden Palace Guard set itself up, it was impenetrable even to the party, and the sense you get from the book is that much of the political brass was in the exact same position as the American people, seeing a handful of interactions and trying to infer what Biden’s real cognitive state was. It’s this dimension of things where Tapper and Thompson come in for the heaviest criticism — that they pass over the vast forest of enablers and dissemblers. The great sin here is the rigging of the primary — the very deliberate exclusion of Dean Phillips and the other outsider candidates — and there’s certainly more to the story than what Tapper and Thompson cover. My understanding is that the Biden inner circle worked very hard throughout 2023 to forestall any prospective challengers, and then the media was guilty of something very much like malpractice in failing to acknowledge the insurgent candidacies or to raise the questions about Biden’s fitness in the period when another challenger could have emerged. Tapper and Thompson make the case that this was the one arena where the Palace Guard really had some effectiveness — in playing very nasty hardball and squelching dissent within the ranks of the liberal establishment. “The goal was to shame journalists and create a disincentive structure for those curious about the president’s condition,” the two write. That did its part — “if you said anything you got your head chopped off,” one donor recalled — and there is some exoneration to be had for the journalists and pundits and party operatives who were stonewalled by the inner circle and didn’t have enough information to really force the issue.

But not really. What comes across more than anything else from this account is just this miasma of bullshit that runs through every facet of how the Democratic Party does business. The job of everybody involved in national politics was spin and packaging and media massaging, and, under the surface of the Tapper/Thompson account, is a certain glee that the inner circle at least seems to have had in how well they were doing their job. The choreography they employed — “the teleprompters and cue cards that became lifelines,” the stage managed paths on and off stages and up airplane steps — was really a lot of work and they seem to have done their jobs with real dedication. As far as I can tell, it never occurred to anyone in this line of work to think of the higher interest of the nation or even the party but simply of their own point-scoring in whatever the news cycle of the way was. The only acid capable of dissolving the lie was the sheer extent of Biden’s senility, and in Original Sin we are treated to innumerable accounts of emperor-has-no-clothes-ism that would be hilarious if they hadn’t brought the republic down with them. There is Biden sabotaging a complicated cover-up over the classified documents story by opening a tape recording saying, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” There is Biden, in the midst of a tough phone call, being handed a paper by aides saying, “Stay positive, you are sounding defensive” — which he then proceeded to read out loud. There is Biden facing his high-stakes meeting with Robert Hur and rambling for two hours about office furniture and a trip he once took to Mongolia. It’s all just so petty and cringey, like the West Wing remade for morons, and it was all so eminently preventable. “What utter and total hubris not to step aside when he said he would,” said one White House official summing up the whole book. And, in the end, getting rid of Biden turned out to be almost comically easy. In this account, it was Chuck Schumer marching into the Oval Office on July 13, 2024, being the first person to actually confront Biden about the need for him to step down, and then Biden putting his hands on Schumer’s shoulders and saying, “You have bigger balls than anyone I’ve ever met.” I actually tend to doubt this story — it’s too pat and the Biden outlined in the rest of the book likely wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to say that — but since it’s the best account we currently have it seems that we have to stick with it, and what it illustrates is painfully obvious: that nobody else in the Democratic establishment, none of the king’s horsemen or the king’s men, had the very basic courage to say to the president what, at that time, every single person in the country was thinking.

And so here we are, deep into the dystopia of Trump II, but however bad it gets — however many norms are violated, however much we may lose our democracy to Trump, Vance, Bannon, Vought, and co — we can’t forget the ugly truth at the origin of it: that the Dems did it to themselves.

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I’m sharing a piece related to a new philosophically-themed novel I’ve finished. This is a habit I’m developing — to offload some of the research I’ve done for the novel in the form of a post; and to whet your appetite if I can ever figure out the right outlet for long-form work.

I have a piece out at UnHerd analyzing Trump from a media studies perspective and trying to understand why the Democrats have been so slow to adapt.

Best,

Sam

SARAH BAKEWELL’S AT THE EXISTENTIALIST CAFE

My mother had a shelf of 20th century philosophy books and, of everything in my parents’ library growing up, these books were the most perplexing to me. The earlier philosophers were at least sortable into distinct movements — Idealists, empiricists, and so on — but for the 20th century philosophers I couldn’t figure out an access point. They seemed all to be in the middle of a conversation with each other.

When I discovered Sarah Bakewell a couple of years ago, it was the immensely satisfying experience of finding a key that fits into a long-neglected look. Bakewell — an astonishingly clear writer and lucid popularizer — managed to draw up coherent schema of this whole fractious, complicated world, and to do so by putting the philosophers simultaneously in social and intellectual relationship to each other.

For Bakewell, the key to all of this is phenomenology — which goes a long way towards explaining why it’s so difficult to find any kind of access point. The phenomenologists are all but unreadable, they seemed to relish making things difficult. But at the same time the phenomenologists — led by Edmund Husserl — found an intellectual technique that seemed to ever-proliferate. Everything became available to philosophy. The trick was the époché — i.e. bracketing — which made every object, every moment, its own domain of philosophic inquiry. If the circle around Husserl tended towards obscurity, the technique opened up startling possibilities for other intellectuals. Proust and Nicholson Baker are, fundamentally, phenomenological writers. More immediately, word of Husserl’s techniques reached Paris at the turn of the 1930s where Jean-Paul Sartre, then a frustrated teacher, seemed to be losing interest in philosophy. Bakewell writes of the key conversation between Sartre and his John the Baptist, Raymond Aron. “You see mon petit camarade,” Aron said, pointing to the apricot cocktail between them, “if you are a phenomenologist you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it.”

The effect of all of this was electric. “Thinking has come to life again,” crowed Hannah Arendt in reference to Heidegger’s parallel inspiration. Sartre, for his part, blanched at what Aron said, and then, as soon as he was out of sight, raced to the nearest bookstore, asked for everything they had on phenomenology — which turned out to be Emmanuel Levinas’ extraordinarily dense The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, which Sartre, not waiting for a paperknife, tore open with his heads and read walking down the street. That excitement, just by itself, speaks volumes. There really is a startling contrast between the anemic philosophy of the early part of the 20th century (John Dewey and so on) and the philosophy of its middle section, which became as cool as literature or jazz music.

I’ve read very little of Sartre and he seems to exist as a curious sort of ellipsis in our high culture. We know that Sartre was important, but we can’t reconstruct why, and he has largely been moved off into the Gallic sub-section of the history of ideas — there’s an assumption that French people probably understand Sartre but that he’s likely one of these overly elegant Frenchmen whose ideas always seem to fold back on themselves.

But that turns out not to be right, and Sartre, actually, does have a Big Idea. It’s that choice is the fundamental activity. “Existence precedes essence,” he put it, meaning that we are defined by the decisions we make more so than who we are, i.e. by any sort of identity. It follows from there that — as if in the polar opposite of determinism — we are making decisions, choosing our being, every moment of our existence. And it follows from there as well that, even if so many of our choices have precious little impact on the world around us, that that doesn’t make any of them less real. Our inner lives, and our constant choices, have as much power to them as anything in the ostensibly material reality. “To wrest oneself from moist, gastric intimacy and fly out there to what is not oneself” was how Sartre — euphorically if a bit disgustingly — wrote of the goals of existentialism.

And that emphasis on interiority, as well as creativity, produces a certain pathos with it. As Simone de Beauvoir put it towards the end of her life:

I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed, and that will be no more. All the music, all the culture, so many places; and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any real nourishment.

The explanation for why Sartre has faded in importance is, largely, that he was so undisciplined. Everything came together for him, and the existentialists, in the year of years, 1945. As Dada and Expressionism spoke to Europe after World War I, existentialism spoke in particular to France’s experience of World War II — these endless, almost incalculable inner choices that people made on the axes of survival, collaboration, and resistance that seemed, whether they made any difference or not, to speak to essential character. No philosopher before or since has had his acclaim or centrality to the culture — Boris Vian, who had a way of getting to the heart of things, depicted Sartre arriving at a lecture on an elephant.

But then Sartre seemed to unravel in a frenzy of overwriting and overthinking. As Bakewell describes his work habits in the 1950s:

Sartre’s fear of underproducing often drove him over the edge. “There’s no time!” he would cry. One by one, he gave up his greatest pleasures: the cinema, theatre, novels. He wanted only to write, write, write. This was when he convinced himself that literary quality control was bourgeois self- indulgence; only the cause mattered, and it was a sin to revise or even to reread.

This frenzy went in unfortunate directions. As Bakewell writes, “He was led to believe that he must reconcile his existentialism with Marxism. That was an impossible and destructive task: the two just were incompatible.”

Bakewell had started her book expecting to despise Sartre — he has come down to us as a pompous apologist for Stalinism and his abundant affairs with Beauvoir’s knowledge and assistance are now being recast as grooming and procurement — but she found herself, she writes, being surprisingly drawn to him, and I had something of the same experience. He wasn’t a charlatan or hack. He really was a seeker and he really loved to write — cranking out something like 20 pages a day and endlessly submitting prefaces, etc, almost always for no pay. Most of all, he seems like somebody who really needed Substack, who always got bogged down in these 1000-page-long manuscripts and would have been better suited just with a steady output of material.

“He is good,” Merleau-Ponty said in his assessment of Sartre, and this simple verdict, surprising for a figure like Sartre, is Bakewell’s verdict as well. His fame notwithstanding, Sartre lived all his life with his mother. He was France’s most famous intellectual but he was chronically short of money — his habits of leaving immensely large tips and splurging on wine caught up with him — and he had to pick up endless random writing commissions to make ends meet. What comes through, above all, with Sartre and his crew is that they had no institutional affiliation. They really were an alternative culture and, in a sense, created the whole idea of counterculture. They were interested in truth and creativity — those really were the highest ideals. Far more than their own fortunes, they were invested in discovering what it truly meant to be free.

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I’m sharing a discussion of two new-ish novels.

Best,

Sam

KAVEH AKBAR’s Martyr! (2024)

I enjoyed this.

Almost everything about the structure would  seem to be unpromising. It takes all the much-traveled narrative paths of our era — the identity politics novel, the immigration novel, the recovery novel, the polyvocal novel — and sort of mashes them together. The gist of it is that Cyrus is ludicrously stuck in Indiana — no longer suffering from addiction but wallowing in self-pity — and then travels to New York to see a sort of Marina Abramović-plus show, in which the artist not only sits in an empty studio and talks to museum visitors but has terminal cancer. There’s a twist — which is far-from-convincing — but the experience allows Cyrus to get past his sense of himself as a victim and to become a productive artist.

The tropes are all there, but Martyr! is ahead of the curve through a sense of absolute hopelessness — of Cyrus facing a really pervasive, debilitating lack of meaning and coming face to face with an unremitting nihilism.

That comes through most strongly in the early chapters and it illuminates what’s behind so many immigrant novels — the idea that other cultures have a gnarled realism that is almost perfectly incompatible with American consumerism. This is what Martyr! at first seems to be about — the easy fun that Cyrus has as a medical actor tormenting the cheery, corporate med students with his histrionic complaints; and the absolute inability he has to translate the suffering in his background, the death of his mother in the USS Vincennes’ shoot down of Iran Air Flight 655, the trauma of his uncle in the Iran-Iraq War, the stolid minimum wage work of his father in an Indiana chicken farm to anything comprehensible to the bro-y, hipster-y culture of college town Indiana.

The inability to link up these experiences drives Cyrus into addiction, into a profound victim complex, and into a desperate desire to square the circle somehow, to extract meaning from meaningless — maybe through art or, when he gets stuck, through the half-baked idea of “living his poems.” As Cyrus says, thinking about his mother in a moment of deep depression, “My whole life I’ve thought about my mom on that flight, how meaningless her death was. Truly literally like, meaningless. Without meaning.”

Like with Erpenbeck below, I read much of Martyr! thinking I’d come across something really special — a novel exploring an absolutely unbridgeable cultural and philosophical divide and constantly doing so with a bright wit. Akbar writes of an exchange with a med student that “the red light on the camera was blinking on and off like a firefly mocking the proceedings” and of a coffee shop patron that “he was typing furiously into his laptop, like a movie hacker trying to crack into the Pentagon.”

But then Akbar seems not quite to know what to do with Cyrus. Cyrus reads an article in the newspaper about an exhibit in New York, and our whole painstakingly-constructed Indiana setup is forgotten. Suddenly, Cyrus remembers that he has money — making his earlier struggles with abject poverty suddenly moot. To pad out Cyrus’ journey to New York, Akbar shifts to polyvocal mode, and we hear from Cyrus’ mother and uncle and mother’s girlfriend in 1980s Iran — none of which ever feels as lived-in as Cyrus’ story. Meanwhile, the twist so completely obviates the whole stated premise of the novel that Akbar has to really stretch to come up with a new meaning.

What Akbar hits on isn’t bad. It’s basically that Cyrus is being a big baby, that he needs to get past his sense of ineluctable tragedy and to adapt to what he describes as a more “pulverizingly mundane” idea of reality. The way it’s described to him by an older, wiser character is that you spend a long time dealing with your traumas and then there is a moment where you have to say to yourself “I am not the patient” and make way for others.

It’s a simple life lesson but elegantly stated by Akbar. It’s a nice-enough resolution of Cyrus’ mid-20s angst — and could have been achieved with a far-less-baroque plot. Martyr! is a case of a talented, engaging writer letting his plot get out ahead of the story he really wants to tell.

JENNY ERPENBECK’s Kairos (2021)

There was a book that I thought I was reading for much of the time that I was reading Kairos — and the book I thought I was reading I liked a great deal.

That book is a book for grown ups. It has no particular morality — it takes the spring-and-autumn affair between Katharina and Hans for granted as being something that can never really work, that is destructive for both of them, but is primary for both of them, the real heart of themselves. That book uses the expanse of time elegantly, with the unfolding of time revealing, very naturally, the truth of the relationship — Hans beginning to face old age and losing his attractiveness, Katharina going through her sexual exploration with boys her own age. That book is neatly balanced in perspective between Hans and Katharina but its real character is the shared cultural matter between them — the books and music they like, the way that everything they read or listen to has its own essence and unfolds in different ways for the two of them, so that “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” for instance, is the music they listen to and then becomes a favorite of Katharina and then becomes unbearable for Hans to listen to once Katharina admits that she played it, guilelessly, for a different boyfriend. And that book is all about shaving away layer after layer, getting to the real truth of things — the attraction of the early relationship leading, in due course, to boundless, unremitting jealousy; time and old age doing their work on the love affair; and the atrophy of the relationship mirroring the decay of East Germany, the way that the entire culture of it gets swapped out, in a matter of weeks in 1989, for the consumerism of the West; the way that the smooth, placid surface of life hides informing and the relentless scrutiny of everybody by everybody else.

I was a bit in awe of that book. It seemed to be tougher and flintier than anything that it was possible to produce from a Western country, and it had as well an unapologetically high-brow sensibility that seemed to revive a continuity stretching back to writers like Thomas Mann and to balmier days for haute culture.

But, unfortunately, that’s not really what Kairos is. There are a few possible theories for why Kairos loses its shape, why it collapses into broad generalities and into some very lazy, historical-themed writing —like a diorama in a history museum.

One theory is that it’s very lightly fictionalized memoir, that Erpenbeck is describing some youthful affair she had and got into the unfortunate zone where she’s sketching away at memories that meant a great deal to her but can’t really be transmitted to anyone else. It doesn’t come through at all, for instance, what she found so attractive about Hans — and the sense is that the actual dynamics of their relationship are completely lost to memory, that what she’s able to provide is only the outline.

Another theory is that there’s something cold and hopelessly remote in Erpenbeck’s sensibility. The feeling, throughout Kairos, is of attending some very severe art installation. There are all these portentous lines — “Everything’s just papier-mâché facade and there’s nothing behind it”; “Hell is now a stable structure based on four sturdy pillars”; “Suddenly time is a steel corset” — but they seem completely out of proportion to the slight fading of attraction between Katharina and Hans, to their quotidian and far-from-terrible lives. And Erpenbeck has a tendency never to give us the actual flesh-and-blood of what Hans and Katharina are like and how they spend time together, but instead, like in a movie with moody shots and a classical soundtrack, to instead try to achieve her effects through an assortment of ancillary details. So when Hans — seemingly out of nowhere — puts a pause in their relationship, we don’t see either of their faces or hear their inner monologues or get the chain of events that led to Hans’ decision. Instead, at this pivotal moment, we get: “The train is in Frankfurt for ten minutes, during which time the locomotive is uncoupled at the front, and another locomotive is coupled at the back, and then suddenly front is back and back is front, and the train, whose final destination  was Frankfurt an Der Oder, because the Oder marks the border to Poland, sets off back to Berlin.”

Another theory is that the underlying problem is simple pretentiousness. This comes through most of all in the sections dealing with Hans’ writing career. Hans seems not really to care very much about writing — we have no sense actually of what is in any of his fiction. Being a writer here is an attribute, just a status marker. It’s what makes Katharina attracted to him — that and the fact that people she encounters seem invariably to have read his books. And his status as a writer gives Erpenbeck the opportunity for some choice name-dropping. It turns out that Hans is friends with Christa Wolf! There’s a mention of the fact that “Heiner is coming to dinner,” only to clarify that Heiner is Heiner Muller! So what we’re left with is two not very remarkable people — Hans seems just to be a careerist; the culmination of Katharina’s character arc is that after the Wall comes down she turns into a congenital shoplifter — who don’t seem to enjoy each other’s company very much, but are united through a shared snobbishness, a certain ability to name-check and to listen moodily to classical music.

Well. Oh well. In the end, a great deal of what’s annoying about present-day Europe seems to be distilled in Kairos — the self-seriousness, the reverence for class markers, the tendency to immediately amberify all artwork. But somewhere beneath that is another, more intriguing novel — in which a love affair takes on a life completely of its own, outside of history and social relations, in which the participants of the affair share a language of aesthetics and of associations that is comprehensible only to them.

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I am sharing a screed. I have a piece up in Persuasion on a pair of recent Supreme Court rulings.

Best,

Sam

THE TROLL SCHOOL OF LITERATURE

In retrospect, I think I really took it easy in my review the other week of Honor Levy’s My First Book and I’ve been kicking myself about that since then.

I reviewed My First Book kind of the way I would review anybody else’s book — as a good faith attempt at art that didn’t really work out. But, as I was posting and reading through some of the other reviews of Levy (I read reviews only after I’ve written my own text), I started to get a more canny understanding of what was really going on. This piece in The Face has most of the grisly story and some of the rest of it is figure-out-able from this much-reviled profile in New York Magazine.

Levy, you see, isn’t really a writer. What she is is a publicist’s creation. When she was 19, she connected with Kaitlin Phillips, a sort of gonzo publicist of no particular credentials or accomplishments, who saw her at a party, liked her attitude, and immediately set her up with an editor. Through Phillips, she had her path into publishing without having written anything — or, as it turned out, being capable of writing anything. Levy had a piece accepted to the New Yorker when she was 21, and the piece was ok — what you might expect of a smart student, showing some talent, but more important hitting the right lifestyle mark, as a coolish young woman espousing reactionary views.

From there, Levy already had her book deal in place, but there was the small problem that she couldn’t do it. She had no life experience — outside of the interesting experience of the guys on the roof that made up her New Yorker story — nothing to say and no capacity whatsoever to exist in fictional landscapes. No matter. She took some Adderall, opened her laptop, wrote My First Book on the title page — a plea to any future reviewers to take it easy on her — and started typing.

I have no problem with writing that’s spontaneous and uninhibited, but somewhere in there it does have to be good. That’s very clearly not the case with My First Book, but, once again — and here’s the real point — that does not matter. What matters is to create something that for whatever reason has buzz. In this case, the buzz comes from Levy’s youth, from her slightly reactionary sensibility, from the premise that the book is a glimpse into the pixelated soul of Gen Z, but most of all the buzz is just a self-fulfilling loop. Once an off-kilter profile appears in New York Magazine — “Honor is one of the great minds” — then that becomes the discourse, something that everybody is talking about even if, or especially if, they hate the book. And then here’s the other critical point, and what makes this the Troll School of Literature: the hatred isn’t a problem, the fact that it’s a bad book isn’t a problem and is actually a benefit. The hatred for the book helps to stir the pot — it gets people talking, and in the end that contributes to sales, and for the publishing industry sales are the only thing that matters.

The parallel to Trump is obvious — the idea that your only task in the public sphere is to generate attention and then that attention becomes its loop that propels you forward and which you can also react to if that suits you tactically — but, recently, I’ve been reading about 19th century Mormonism and something about that made the penny drop. What’s so effective about what the Troll School of Literature is up to is that — as with religion — they are operating in a sphere in which good intentions are genuinely assumed, in which it’s hard to imagine people dedicating their entire careers simply to stirring up mischief, and in which therefore everyone is that much easier to dupe. What would have stopped something like My First Book from wreaking the degree of havoc that it has is if reputable reviewers had put their foot down and called the book out for what it obviously is. That actually worked with Lauren Oyler, a somewhat similar figure to Levy who became a past master of the Troll School. In a review in Book Forum, Ann Manov wrote what anybody who read Oyler’s No Judgment had to be thinking — that these were extraordinary insubstantial cutesy, scene-y pieces dressed up as if they were somehow viable cultural criticism. Book Forum, tellingly enough, tried to bury Manov’s essay — the most searing piece of writing they’ve had in memory — but it got through anyway and deservedly became what people will remember when they’ve long forgotten Oyler’s book. But, more often than not, the reviewers miss the moment — as was the case with the suspicious but nonetheless somewhat reverential treatment of My First Book. The truth is that newspaper reviewing is downstream from the publishing industry — they take it as a given that the publishing industry knows what it’s doing and that permits the practical joke of something like My First Book: even very reputable reviewers can’t help but view it as a genuine harbinger of whatever the Next Thing is.

In thinking about this, I find myself being more and more like an Old Testament prophet hurling down denunciations on some fairly random people. But here’s the thing. I actually — like a lot of people on this platform — view writing and literature as a sacred activity. Sacred in the sense that when done well or even just done honestly it represents the attempt of the soul to access itself — and, by sharing that effort, it aims to ennoble the public discourse, to make people better than they are or at the very least to feel a little less alone. I regard that as a far more holy and immediate activity than whatever most churches are supposed to do.

But the calculation of the Troll School of Literature is very different. It’s that, fundamentally, no one likes to read — and so putting in the energy to actually be good, which usually means developing emotional maturity, reading very widely, putting in one’s 10,000 hours, etc, is as much a sucker’s game, from the perspective of the Troll School, as genuine religious devotion is from that of the grifter’s. It’s far easier to just generate a soap bubble of buzz, have that be the discourse, and then laugh all the way to the bank. And, since reading is tedious, and writing torturous, and shortcuts like these abound, the Troll School gets its way with credulous readers and supine reviewers. To stop it, those who know better have to speak up.

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The time has come for a post on the ethics of a pan. Theoretically speaking, the pan should not exist. I spend a great deal of time on this Substack arguing that all expression is of value, that all writing should be treated with tremendous sympathy — and if a book doesn’t come together, well, it’s better to just not write anything about it. A pan, then, isn’t really about the book; it’s about the industry. Sometimes, or very often, the industry gets misled — or chooses to mislead — and then, in an era of sycophantic, follow-the-leader reviews, it’s important to call a spade a spade and to say what all honest readers, somewhere inside themselves, must be thinking.

It goes almost without saying that My First Book is awful. For the most part, that shouldn’t matter. Levy is 26. She has her moments. I learned some things from reading My First Book — it does distill into digestible form the Gen Z, endlessly-online mindset. But the book is being intensely promoted as something very different from what it is — as “what it must have been like to read Ann Beattie on her generation in the early 1970s,” according to Dwight Garner in The New York Times, as “the undisputable arrival of a truly talented stylist,” according to The Cleveland Review of Books. Levy, from long before the publication of this book, was being treated as the voice of a generation, somewhat similarly to what Lena Dunham was at the same age. Even Compact Magazine, which is normally more ill-tempered than this, was taken in and wrote, “I was surprised to find the book inventive, beautifully written, and worthy of the attention it has garnered.”

Au contraire. There’s so much wrong with My First Book that it’s hard even know where to begin. Not only is it not stories, as advertised, but it shows no ability to exist in imaginary space. It’s like several steps short of autofiction, training wheels for autofiction — Levy entirely as a creature of ‘discourse,’ showing off her facility with the terms of discourse and trying out different voices through which the discourse might most appreciate her.

The overall feeling is like an exploratory campaign for a very minor office, in which we watch Levy attempt to build her constituency. She’s a Gen Zer and several ‘chapters’ are dedicated to proving her bona fides to her base — she is at ease in its lingo, she is as a matter of course addicted to adderall. But she can good-naturedly tease her generation and its self-importance — she makes rape jokes! she enjoys getting manspalained! She is positioning herself as a Bret Easton Ellis or Tao Lin — or, as she would put it, an ‘edgelord,’ chronicling the dark side of her generation so that her elders may understand them. Which leads into the real purpose of the book — the spoiled, zany, aware-of-her-own-messes-just-enough-to-laugh-at-them-but-not-clean-them-up privileged young woman looking for, once again, the pat on the head, the reassurance that yes she is (if for no particular reason) special.

But in building that constituency there is no sense of an actual thinking, feeling person behind the voices — it’s just ventriloquism, seeing how she can best get a rise out of her audience — and I found myself reading this a bit differently than I’ve read anything before, as a kind of Petri dish of everything awry in the buzzy, “scene-y” literary discourse, and, instead of reading for plot or character or anything like that, reading more like a prosecutor, looking to identify the various influences that had so corrupted young Honor’s writing.

Going line by line, here are some of the accusations I would make:

• “At my college on the hill above the factory, above the river, above the town, we have clean water and emotional support rodents.” — I blame Nathaniel Rich and the New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs section, the guileless baby voice as a way of being unaccountable for everything else in the writing.

• “Before Louis XIV was the Sun King with a hall full of mirrors, he was a little boy and there was a civil war.” — I blame McSweeney’s and the twee school of American writing, the premise that all the world’s knowledge is a Wikipedia click away and accessible for one’s fiction but only if you make an inner promise to not take any of it seriously.

• “Everyone told her good job. I wonder if anyone said that to Thomas’ mom.” — I blame Lidia Yuknavitch, the idea that endless digital solipsism can be redeemed by a sudden burst of earnest social consideration.

• “He’s so sick of performing masculinity. He wants to be absolutely annihilated.” — I blame a combination of New York Magazine and Gawker, the notion that everybody can be distilled down into their little micro-demographics, and the more surgical you are about types the more cutting your writing will be.

• “I’m eleven. I’m on Safari on a safari on the internet after school in my bedroom on my computer.”— I blame Rachel Cusk, and the idea that serious contemporary writing means vacuuming all the flavor out of life and giving only the atomized husk.

• “My Dance Dance Revolution lost. Like all hope for an anticapitalist revolution after 1970.” — I blame Jonathan Safran Foer (among many others) and the premise that all possible taste in writing should be sacrificed to the mildly amusing.

• “It’s quirked up. You’re Nicholas Cage. The best and the worst.” — I blame Russell Simmons and slam poetry’s idea that you can short-circuit art with a word salad of pop culture references.

• “But I’ve been called special a thousand times. My dad thinks I’m special.” — I blame Zooey Deschanel and the premise that being self-importantly daffy is somehow endearing.

• “In me he saw refracted everything wrong with the world.” — I blame Phoebe Waller-Bridge and the idea that the self-combusting of the spoiled young woman is actually a world-historical event and deserving of the most far-reaching hyperbole.

• “We all want to be Dachau liberation day—skinny for spring break on Little Saint James.” — I blame Honor Levy. This is a whole new level for me, everything brought to the level of a meme and with the premise that the more randomly offensive you are the cuter it is.

In the end, I suppose I really blame Dwight Garner. Garner, who clearly was as appalled by the book as I was, limited himself to a mild “she was encouraged to publish too soon.” This was what Levy’s publishing team was clearly banking on: that the reputable critics would go easy on her given her age and it might be possible to create a phenomenon of the Voice-of-GenZ — a marketing gimmick that Levy then wrote into. It’s very cheap stuff and it’s predicated on reviewers playing along and not saying what’s completely obvious.

ALEXANDRE LEFEBVRE’s Liberalism as a Way of Life (2024)

This is a special book in somewhat unattractive wrapping.

There are a few things that are off-putting. One is that Lefebvre has clearly spent too much time delivering university lectures — and has the lecturer’s habit of dropping in as many pop culture references as possible to let the students know he’s not as fusty as they might think. Another is that Lefebvre is so smitten with John Rawls — and particularly with Rawls’ first book A Theory of Justice — that much of Liberalism as a Way of Life reads like an almost sentence-by-sentence gloss on Rawls. And another is that Lefebvre wants also to write self-help for the practicing liberal and loads his text down with, unexpectedly, a series of practical exercises for cultivating a liberal cast of mind.

But all of that should be pushed through because Lefebvre is a rare entity — a philosopher with heart. He genuinely loves liberalism, is genuinely upset by its bastardized iteration (“liberaldom”) which passes for a liberal way of life, and is determined to rescue it from its false practitioners. Given how famously slippery a term liberalism is, Lefebvre also comes surprisingly close to establishing a working theory of it.

His liberalism is, above all, a positive way of being in the world. It is not just the everybody-do-their-own-thing tolerance that is associated with John Stuart Mill and the somewhat standoffish theory of political liberalism. He is speaking for people who are “liberals all the way down” — and who are looking to establish liberalism as an all-encompassing ethical theory. What he is really looking to do (although he tiptoes around the word) is to establish the credo of a religion and to have it be a worthy secular successor to the theological systems.

For Lefebvre, liberalism is, first, to be understood as the product of a particular place and time — the Enlightenment era with religions and autocracies in recession across the Western world. Liberalism emerged as a kind of miracle — a social contract based on a societally-pervasive spirit of reciprocity. For Lefebvre, the time this took to set in only proves his point: once the principle is there it sweeps through the society with a quiet inevitability. Or as he puts it, “Reciprocity for all is the moral adventure of liberalism and has profound psychological effects.” In one of the book’s more arresting modules, Lefebvre traces out the history of swearing in America and concludes that a paradigmatic change occurred around the civil rights era in which cursing based on the sacred/profane (“holy shit”) lost its ability to shock while slurs based on cruelty (“retard,” etc) became the psychically charged terrain.

What was happening, Lefebvre contends, was a vast transition from an ethical system worried about offending the touchy Man in the Sky to a sort of Jainist ethics based on an abhorrence of cruelty and injustice. As Lefebvre writes, “When morality sheds (or just plain forgets) its vertical dimension, being a good person means not harming others. That’s all there is to it.”

This slow transition was codified in John Rawls’ 1971 work A Theory of Justice and it was predicated on the society that had emerged under liberalism’s aegis — “the well-ordered society,” in which the principles of reciprocity were inculcated so deeply in social relations that the practice of liberalism could come to depend above all on the ethical choices of individuals. This iteration of Rawls’ thought is referred to as “The Cathedral” and Lefebvre spends a great deal of effort celebrating its various votaries, Leslie Knope, Mike Psenicska in Borat, etc, who, under sometimes trying conditions, maintain civility and a glistening liberal worldview.

There are two challenges to Lefebvre’s vision. One is that Rawls himself largely stopped believing in it — or, as Lefebvre writes, he “drew a bright line” between comprehensive philosophical systems and political structures. And some of what Lefebvre is up to is rear guard action, saving Rawls from himself. He tries to get back into the spirit of A Theory of Justice, contending that even if liberalism lacks the ability to be coercive on those who do not accept its premises it is still possible for those of a liberal disposition to create something like the well-ordered society through ethical right action and an internalized spirit of justice. Hence the ethical exercises Lefebvre gives. The other challenge is that liberalism itself all too often disintegrates into what Lefebvre calls “liberaldom,” the self-righteous hypocritical derivation that has the same relationship to liberalism as Christendom does to true Christianity. Tocqueville in the 1830s had noticed to what extent liberalism seemed to produce a tendency towards mediocrity, and a cold individualism — and Lefebvre, with real anger, spends considerable time addressing the “meritocracy trap,” the latter-day iteration of what Tocqueville noticed, in which many ostensible liberals are in fact trying to break out of the social contract and create a self-perpetuating elite. For Lefebvre, the antidote once again lies in self-growth — in developing what Rawls calls an “aristocracy for all,” in which individuals within themselves abjure the tendency towards mediocrity but have the capacity as well to not be coercive, to encourage the full self-fulfillment of others.

The problem — as Lefebvre seems to be aware — is that he is resting too much on individual agency as opposed to institutions and collective action. It’s a lot to ask for everybody in a society to all adopt liberal values together and then to forbearingly disregard anyone illiberal who happens to come across their path — as Borat’s various interlocutors are able, ultimately, to laugh him off. Illiberalism has a stronger power than that, and the ways that so many societies recently have slid into illiberalism indicate that liberalism is not sustainable alone through right action by its practitioners. Since liberalism, by definition, lacks the ability to impose itself on those who do not accept its principles, liberalism is always in a vulnerable position to those who wish to subvert it. For liberalism to survive, then, rests on a series of robust institutions that the entire society can agree to (a government, a security system, a judicial process, etc), all of which when you really get into it have force and coercion at the heart of them — the system functioning through fear rather than generous reciprocity. Where liberalism is on firmer ground is in property relations, and as Lefebvre knows but doesn’t particularly address, liberalism’s emergence in the Enlightenment era was concurrent with the rise of a bourgeoisie that relied on social contract theory above all as a means of maintaining property and a smoothly-flowing market. Liberalism seems to work very well in that domain where engaging in reciprocal relations rebounds to the individual benefit of all engaged in them. It seems to work less well when it’s contingent on far-ranging compliance amongst multifarious actors. As far as I can tell, Lefebvre’s notion of liberalism keeps returning to enthusiastically paying one’s fair share of taxes. That’s all good and well in a well-ordered society, but in a society where everybody is taking all available deductions (like ours) paying full freight is a way of being a dupe; while if the social infrastructure starts to break down, or even if tax revenues are wildly misspent on the military (as is currently the case for us), then it becomes somewhat harder to see how the enthusiastic payment of taxes is really the heart of the well-functioning liberal society as opposed to the improvement of central institutions.

So in the end, I guess, I am very tempted but not quite sold. It would be nice to join the choir of the liberal cathedral, but I find myself being a bit more Hobbesian than that. I do feel that power relations are the underpinning of the society more than reciprocal social contracts, and if that’s the case than The Cathedral, magnificent as it is, turns out to be built on a less-than-solid foundation.

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This book is such a misfire on so many levels that it seems important to disentangle them somehow. My sense is that what’s gone wrong here encapsulates much of what’s gone wrong in literary culture in general.

For one thing, it’s not really a novel at all — it’s autofiction, thinly and incoherently disguised. Why is Cornel West named but Jeremiah Wright — whom we can all recognize — given a pseudonym? Hard to say. Since it doesn’t do what a novel does — doesn’t tell a story, doesn’t have an economy of form — Cunningham seems to panic and compensate by making it florid and ‘literary.’ The spring is rendered as “that pregnant time when the city’s deep, salty musk begins to rise and its colors start to fizz” and in which “there were huge, lividly fertile tree roots bursting sexually through the concrete and, overhead, the trees’ branches hosannaed.” Emails with an invitation to an event aren’t just replied to — “RSVPs darkened my inbox, arriving minutes apart, in clusters of six or seven, like a blanket of locusts from the sky.” With the literary box thus checked, Cunningham still has the problem of coherence — of trying to make us understand why we should care about anything in the narrative, and here there is an even less satisfactory solution. We get very stray perambulations of the narrator’s mind. We hear, at great length, about his identification with Paul Pierce, about the time David Blaine visited his church, about how he likes to sing, about how he sometimes hung out in the projects as a teenager. None of this, Cunningham seems to suspect, is particularly interesting — we’re never completely sure what’s in it for us in hearing about this well-liked but somewhat affected and somewhat feckless young man. The solution, then, is to throw as much glitz at us as possible: the-times-I-met-Obama stories that are the book’s selling point, but also the glamorous fundraisers, the idea being that we are getting a rare point of entry into the place where politics and money criss-cross. What really animates the writing, though — and I can certainly sympathize with this state of mind — is a panic, a feeling that this is the writer’s one opportunity to give the full version of themselves to an audience, and so they find themselves ladling in everything they can think of, every stray thought, every impression of Pierce’s play.

The question is if that’s ok. I’ve just recently finished railing against stories and the need to be coherent in fiction. In principle, I have nothing against autofiction, and what Cunningham is up to here does match the somewhat inchoate sensibilities of the era he depicts. ‘Great Expectations’ is a good title for the book and gets at the sense of promise of being in one’s early 20s at the time of the Obama campaign — the idea is that everything really might change, who knows in what direction and by what rules, but that some utopia really might be possible. And for all the RSVPs arriving in the narrator’s inbox like locusts, there also are passages of genuine eloquence. The field operation of the Obama campaign is organized with “a basically insane disregard for the limits of the human capacity for work.” A night in LA has a turn when “the party had entered a new and more urgent phase.”

But to write without a clear novelistic structure, you also need to have an idea and this is where Cunningham comes up short. He plays around with a cynical rendition of the Obama campaign — “the longer I worked on this campaign the more I became aware of how much was hidden from me” — but this isn’t really convincing: he likes the campaign and is buoyed along by its optimism. He takes a stab at an identification with the candidate, with his fictional stand-in even copying Obama’s posture — “Proximity to the Senator made me feel slightly shabby. Unconsciously, I straightened out too.” — but this doesn’t go very far either. Obama’s sotto voce asides to David at the start of some fundraising event are still Obama in character, Obama having a bit of wry backslapping with the staff before moving on to hearty backslapping with the donors. There just isn’t a sense of how the experience ultimately shaped the narrator — did it turn him off politics? did it convince him that he wanted to be a writer? — and so we are left with just these anecdotes from Cunningham’s youth and these glimpses of Obama from fairly early in his campaign.

The reason I wanted to read Great Expectations is that I was very close to the experiences Cunningham describes: went to some of the same schools, was in some of the same places at the same time, and I have wrestled with how to depict this very heady period — to try to figure out what it all meant. And in a sense it meant less than it seemed at the time. Obama certainly wasn’t some sort of grifter or con artist. He was the real deal as a statesman, but the change that he somewhat over-optimistically promised couldn’t quite be delivered. Even with Obama in office, it was politics as usual — and, for those who were caught up in the hoopla of the campaign, there was inevitably some growing-up to do. The passages that ring the truest for me in Great Expectations are the depictions of the stink of supporter housing; the acquaintance with deadbeats, with people who are pretty much at suicide’s door and who join up with the campaign because it’s “kinda saving my life”; the discovery of the inevitability of drunk-driving in a place like Manchester, New Hampshire, and the sense of euphoria in not being pulled over. In other words, it was a moment when privileged people come into contact with the gnarly realities of underbelly America and, for the most part, beat a hasty exit once they had. Obama, I guess, was the revolution that wasn’t. There was a belief in an egalitarian, progressive vision which was nonetheless compatible with pragmatic politics. The coalition that was based on fractured very soon after that. The underbelly went for Trump. The revolution did take place, but it involved fairly small, radical progressive groups insisting on ideological purity and focusing on cultural hot-topics rather than coalition-building. And 2008, for people like Cunningham and myself, is a precious, hard-to-place memory, something we badly want to communicate but that seems to have little relevance to, even, how the rest of our lives played out.

HUGH WILFORD’s The CIA: An Imperial History (2024)

A workmanlike, surprisingly comprehensive history of the CIA — although somehow undernourishing.

Why do I keep reading these things? I guess I’m trying to work out the shape of American power and it seems important to me to bring the CIA, and intelligence, out of the domain of legend and conspiracy and to resituate it within the broader context of great power operations. As Bill Haydon says towards the end of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, “I still believe the secret services are the only real expression of a nation’s character.”

Hugh Wilford’s history — one of, I think, very few one-volume matter-of-fact accounts of the Agency — is an important chip in putting together that understanding. It functions in the usual way of these things — which is to have one organizing hypothesis and then to ruthlessly discount everybody else’s theories. In Wilford’s case, that’s that the CIA needs to be understood as an imperial organization, and a fairly direct hand-off from the British and French empires at the moment when the U.S. was taking over their global positions.

The Soviet Union features far less in this account than one might expect — if only because Wilford may well have felt that this history was covered elsewhere. Instead, the premise is that the situation with the Soviet Union was fairly locked into place by the time of the CIA’s creation and so the sphere of action became the Global South, with CIA officers often, as Wilford drily puts it, moving into the same houses that their colonial forebears had lived in and engaging in much the same imperial skullduggery.

The somewhat mysterious ebbs and flows of CIA fortune through the later 20th century are interpreted, then, as extensions of the American public’s appetite for engaging in imperialism. In the 1950s, the American public either didn’t know what was going on or chose to look the other way — in an evocative image, the CIA covert action chief Frank Wisner referred to the media as the “Mighty Wurlitzer” (as in the organs that accompanied silent movies) and believed that the media could be played exactly as a skilled organist might do. When the CIA toppled over, surprisingly easily, in the 1970s, it was really just the result of bad press — a string of negative stories either by enterprising journalists or CIA defectors which allowed an “anti-imperial mindset” to prevail for a time in Washington. A similar turn of the wheel is supposed to be happening now, with the black ops of the George W. Bush era giving way to a more jaundiced perspective towards American imperial reach.

In Wilford’s account, there are basically two threads. One is the derring-do of officers in tropical climes who, in many cases, were largely contriving their own policy. Wilford focuses in on a few of the legendary early CIA officers — especially Kermit Roosevelt and Edward Lansdale, who altered the entire geopolitical history of, respectively, Iran and the Philippines. Roosevelt ignored a cable to stand down, instead initiating (and funding) the street protests that led to Mossadegh’s overthrow. Lansdale became an advisor and best friend to Filipino president Ramon Magsaysay, succeeding in remaking the Filipino army and political administration more or less in his own image, launching a doctrine of counter-insurgency that, in the case of the Philippines, worked astonishingly well, starving the ongoing Huk rebellion of much of its popular support and gradually transitioning the Philippines to a pro-U.S. regime. To Wilford, US officers in places like Iran and the Philippines were inflected with a largely-British sense of colonial romance. They were trying to channel T. E. Lawrence and Rudyard Kipling’s Kim in particular, and they found themselves part of an “imperial brotherhood” of intelligence that seemed to have a more pro-Western, colonial sensibility than to be even recognizably a part of American foreign policy. Wilford documents, within that atmosphere, a critical turn — the Americans coming under the spell of more veteran British intelligence operatives and reneging on some of their own democratic values. Somewhat surprisingly, many of the American officers who had been deployed to the Third World in the 1940s were at first highly sympathetic to national movements, and it was the British, Wilford claims, who more or less convinced the Agency to shift to a more imperialistic attitude. Wilford’s thesis does help to explain why the CIA often seemed at such a remove from the rest of American society. Just as it was an astonishingly small number of colonial officers who administered the British Empire — a mere 1,200 officers in India — so the CIA old guard came to pride themselves on being a class apart, seeing the world in terms of intricate geopolitics and using their influence to alter national destinies (often, it seemed, as if on a whim) and with precious little input from the American democratic process.

The other thread is publicity. And, here, Wilford seems to really feel for the dilemma of CIA officers, who, given the restraints of professional secrecy, couldn’t speak for themselves and instead had to designate proxies and manipulate public opinion in order to advance preferred messages. Part of the mystery of the CIA is why so much effort went into efforts like literary magazines and student groups. Once these were exposed — Ramparts Magazine in 1967 revealing the US National Student Association to be a CIA front; magazines like Encounter and Paris Review proving also to be CIA-run — it generated immense confusion. On the one hand, the CIA seemed to be everywhere — ‘penetrating’ almost all imaginable aspects of civic life, both in the United States and abroad. And then, on the other, the CIA seemed to be more fuddy-duddy and tepid than its fearsome reputation would suggest. CIA cultural operations continued to drift towards Modernist poetry, for instance, and to somewhat arbitrarily support the “Non-Communist Left” — with those on the right, at the time of the Ramparts revelations, bitterly complaining about why in the world American pinkos were receiving CIA largesse. That circle gets squared a bit once you understand the personalities of the CIA officers most behind the domestic operations — James Angleton and Cord Meyer — who were a bit of a different era, who had their own tastes, and who placed significant resources in a handful of highly-targeted operations. Ultimately, then, the CIA was both pervasive and not-as-strong-as-it-seemed. CIA operatives, for instance, flooded southern Florida in the 1960s as part of organizing for a planned invasion of Cuba — “transforming the face” of the entire region, as one journalist put it. And the CIA worked very deeply with Vietnamese, Iranian, and Central American immigrant communities in the ‘70s and ‘80s — but with all of that work occurring in the context of ‘targeted operations.’ The widely-believed story that the crack cocaine epidemic was the result of a CIA plan seems, according to Wilford, to have had only a very mild basis in fact.

Taken all together, the CIA is, let’s say, less fun than it appears in the more conspiratorial accounts of, for instance, Jefferson Morley or David Talbot. Wilford brackets the more famous conspiracy theories — CIA involvement in Watergate, CIA use of mind-control techniques à la The Manchurian Candidate, CIA participation in the JFK assassination. He doesn’t try to refute them but he also doesn’t give them particular credence. His CIA is a bit smaller and lonelier. There were the famous coups — Iran and Guatemala — but not more than that in the ‘50s, at the apparent height of the CIA’s ascendancy. CIA domestic spying did extend to a vast letter-opening operation, to front groups, influence-peddling, etc, but it was piecemeal and reactive and not some wholesale effort to control American civic life. The CIA seems to have been completely outmaneuvered in Cuba and Vietnam — settings that would seem to have been ideally suited to its set of skills. And when the curtain was pulled away, and the CIA old guard exposed to harsh public light in the 1970s, they were less prepossessing than might have been expected. Angleton had very clearly gone mad. Meyer — the former golden boy — had become a tiresome, stereotypical Cold Warrior

In the end, though, I suspect that the real history of the CIA can’t be contained in one volume like this, as Wilford somewhat over-ambitiously tries to do. There is very little sense of the real, animating psychology of the figures he documents — Angleton and Dulles come across as far paler figures than they do, for instance, in Morley and Talbot’s accounts. Wilford seems to be dependent on documented history and, in order to create a tidy narrative, keeps returning to his ‘imperialism’ master thesis. But the sense is that a lot more was going on. Much of the deep history of the CIA has to do with clashes of personality and with profound inner divisions — as in the crackup of figures like Wisner and Angleton. There were so many different operations, so many different wings, so many conflicting directives and initiatives — and many of them, it seems fair to suspect, never made it into a written record. It may be completely impossible to get a history of all this in a single volume and Wilford’s book, impressive as it is, isn’t the place to look for that. It probably is true that the CIA contains something essential about the American character, that understanding its operations is the key to comprehending the United States at the height of its imperial power, but it takes more work than one magisterial volume to get what that was really all about. Even after reading a book like Wilford’s, the CIA, as much as ever, seems to reside in the realm of myth.

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This book to me is a cautionary tale.

There’s a certain kind of cultural critic who is always encouraging novelists to get out of the coffee shops and join the people, and Waldman — who earned her novelistic stripes in 2013 with the excellent and very coffee shop-based The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P — actually did it, working for six months with the unloading team at a big-box store in the Catskills. As a microcosm of the American dystopia, it was a good choice — hard physical work, a soulless corporation, a diverse, representative team. Waldman clearly developed immense compassion for her colleagues — Help Wanted is full of the back stories of the warehouse workers whom her characters were based on.

So, well-researched, well-meaning, well-conceived, and the result is …. clunky, uninspired, unlived-in. Honestly, I don’t think it’s exactly Waldman’s fault. It’s more that the armature of the contemporary middle-brow novel isn’t equipped to take in the sort of raw, workforce data that Waldman supplies. And the class divide isn’t really breachable. For all their diversity — the Honduran immigrant, the guy recently out of prison, the ‘old guys’ switching off their hearing aids to work the line, the former Atlantic City maid who can’t read but knows the entirety of the warehouse from memory — all the workers are of a world. They live in their parents’ basements. They have kids but they are usually not together with their partners. Various drugs are floating around. They watch UFC whenever they can afford pay-per-view. Waldman’s capsule depictions of them, her iterations of their hard-a-knock stories, feel far more like an anthropologist’s field reports than genuine experience.

It’s not totally impossible to cover this sector of the American workforce. Chloé Zhao got it in Nomadland, Annie Baker in The Flick, Joshua Ferris for a slightly different demographic in Then We Came To The End. Zhao focused in a single character finding herself in a different socioeconomic station than she might have expected. Baker sank herself into the tedium of service industry work (all the sweeping scenes that drove Off-Broadway theater audiences up the wall). Ferris tapped into the high-strung, panicky collective unconscious of white-collar workers facing layoffs. Waldman could have gone a few different routes. She could have zeroed in on a single character, as opposed to the ensemble presentation. Best, probably, would have been to have chosen a hybrid form — documenting her own time at the big-box store, dealing with her differences from the other workers, chronicling how she came to understand what she did about their lives. (Her journalism on this is impassioned and interesting.) But instead Waldman opted for a traditional story, the heart-thumping tale of how the workers in logistics attempt to elevate their own loathed Executive Manager to Store Manager by lying to corporate in their interviews — only to have that be sabotaged when corporate sees through it and goes with another candidate.

As a storyline, it’s not very interesting or consequential, and it seems mostly to be a device for Waldman to bring everybody together and connect the dots on the unwieldy source material. The sense is of Waldman feeling overwhelmed. Normally a strong sentence-to-sentence writer with a good sense of humor — “his expression turned somber like that of a television news reporter interviewing a hurricane victim,” “Val was a funny combination of childish and practical, a daydreamer, but also the kind of person who’d be good at evacuating people during a mass casualty event” — Waldman, here, has a bad case of telling-not-showing and a habit of having people’s thoughts provide exposition or advance the plot. So we get: “The money would enable her and Liz to give their son so much.” And: “There was another reason she put off applying, although she didn’t like to admit it even to herself. Deep down she was scared.”

There is the sense too of flailing, of Waldman just not being sure of what she wants to cover. There’s a diversion on the subject of ‘game’ — “It was a funny thing, game, Travis and Diego both had it, Raymond didn’t” — and one on the struggle of the ex-con character to adapt to the corporate-speak workforce — “he thought he’d be like one of the bad contestants on a reality show, the ones who said they were there to win, not make friends.” And underneath the narrative of attempting-to-subvert-Meredith-by-elevating-her is, like in an x-ray, the more interesting material of how everybody scrapes by: how people walk to work at 3 in the morning, too proud to ask for a ride or to say that their phone has been turned off; how people lend each other $20 to get them through to the next payday; how the pervading corporate-speech of management isn’t particularly cruel or even dehumanizing so much as just a giant evasion of the actual circumstances of work: “people reacted with horror to minor technical violations of the rules while not saying anything about the things that really mattered, the things that hurt,” one character muses.

The question becomes whether fiction can do justice to any of this, and the answer, probably, is yes, but not in a well-meaning book club-type book. These are very deep socioeconomic divides. Light sympathy doesn’t really bring us into Travis’ weed-dealing versus minimum-wage-job dilemma or into Ruby’s struggle to survive in the workforce without knowing how to read. For that, I don’t think it’s exactly necessary to come from the same class as one’s characters do, but it is necessary to be less constrained by politeness and to make bolder creative choices, to let imagination bridge a very difficult cultural gap.

GLENN LOURY’s Late Admissions (2024)

A thought-provoking, unusually honest memoir.

I’m trying to remember when I first became aware of Loury — I think it was this profile from 2020 that seemed sort of to be in awe of the fact that Loury hadn’t been canceled. He was guilty of a whole rap sheet of conservative wrong think and he had a pair of very public scandals behind him — an arrest for hitting his mistress in 1987 and another for possession of crack a few months later — and yet Loury kept on teaching, at Brown no less, and in public kept saying whatever he thought, no matter how far afield of the prevailing orthodoxies.

To be honest, I often find Loury a bit extreme — he seems to be a born contrarian, and he’s such a veteran of the culture wars that he gets excited only when advancing the kind of position that nobody else is willing to hold — but part of what’s refreshing about Late Admissions is that he has no interest in persuading the reader of one viewpoint or another: the book really is a ‘confession’ and Loury is invested in getting under the hood and understanding how his psyche works. In terms of the politics, Loury’s shifts can feel a bit dizzying: the radicalism of the South Side, then his ‘coming out’ as a conservative in the early ‘80s, then his repudiation of his conservative cohort in the ‘90s, then his shift back in the 2010s. But the sense is that Loury is never exactly looking for viewpoint consistency; what he is interested in is seeing what it means to be a free man and that means, often, confounding everyone else.

The main adversary Loury keeps coming up against is what he calls The Enemy Within — the part of himself that is egoic, self-destructive, and almost endlessly hedonistic. It would be possible to organize Late Admissions in reference to three books, each of which inordinately influenced Loury until he backed away from its philosophy. In the first section — The Hustler — Loury is a clever kid from the South Side, good at pool and chess, a mentee of his uncle Alfred who will go on to father 22 children by four different women, and then in a sort of sepia-toned economics fantasia, he’s “tearing it up in the seminar room” at Northwestern. “There are Players and there are suckers, I knew which one I wanted to be,” Loury writes of his worldview at this time in his life.

That phase comes to an end in the early 1980s when Loury, with a tenured position at Harvard, abruptly chokes and starts drifting away from original work in economics. Surprisingly little introspection goes into what happened here but it seems to be a combination of academic overextension and a shift towards Loury’s new lodestar — Bonfire of the Vanities. On cue with the ‘80s, Loury gives himself over pretty much entirely to hedonism — a phase that comes to an unfortunate end in 1987 when Loury is arrested for crack possession and enters into the cycle of recovery and halfway houses.

The third phase is Born Again, as in Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries, and Loury credits faith with saving his life. But even that doesn’t endure. As Loury writes: “I am the enemy within.” No straightforward narrative would be able to entirely rescue Loury from himself.

If there is a single theme that binds Loury’s life, it’s doubling — the sense that there are always at least “two Glenns” operating at any given moment, and often in deep tension with one another. There’s Loury as a star student at Northwestern even as he has three children on the South Side. There’s Loury as a popular professor at Harvard even as he’s spending nights cadging crack. And there’s Loury speaking publicly and widely on family values and the breakdown of the black family, even as he almost entirely fails to acknowledge his out-of-wedlock son. “I'll be in touch, I told him. And I meant it,” Loury writes of his belated reunion with his son Alden. “And yet, years would go by before I exchanged words with him again.”

I found myself thinking of the Denzel Washington character in Flight and the Jeffrey Wright character in American Fiction — the idea that to be a successful black man in America (maybe this is true of everyone but it seems especially so of black men) requires maintenance of this constant sense of doubling: code-switching and performance and the art of constant deception. “In truth I cannot tell of all the affairs and all of the deceptions because there were simply too many to list,” Loury writes as a kind of round-up of his confession.

It is much to Loury’s credit that he doesn’t try to reconcile all the different threads of himself or to explain away his cognitive dissonance. In his account, he simply didn’t think very much about Alden until two of his other (neglected) children pushed him into a reconciliation. He didn’t pay very much attention to his much-forbearing wife Linda, and the first inkling he has of how much she suffered is when, after her death, he comes across a self-help book on forgiveness in her study and finds passage after passage thickly underlined. He has very little defense of himself either for moral hypocrisy or for an at-times unchecked narcissism. The sense, simply, is that he was under unendurable internal pressure. Late in life he encounters his uncle Alfred, he of the 22 children, who tells him, “We could only send one of us out to MIT and Harvard to that world. We sent you” — which gives a sense of the kinds of inner voices Loury would have been up against. Much of how he behaved is clearly indefensible, and Loury makes no effort to justify it. What he is interested in is something else — what it means to live as a free person, following one’s own winding path — and part of that means knowing that no one else will ever fully understand you.

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I’m sharing a pair of book reviews/discussions — one fiction, one non-fiction.

Best,

Sam

EMMA CLINE’s The Guest (2023)

To me, Emma Cline is a very hopeful indication that, in spite of everything, the publishing industry is actually in a good place and the literary market knows what it’s doing. Cline is an enormous talent and she was instantly recognized as such — auctioning her first novel for $2 million. As far as I’m concerned, she’s worth every penny. She has the spiky, let’s-look-inside-the-medicine-cabinet intelligence of so many precocious female writers (I’m thinking of Sally Rooney, Lena Dunham, Françoise Sagan) and her prose is like a miracle of third-person limited narration, packing whole worldviews into crisp, apparently straightforward short sentences.

Reading The Guest, I found myself copying out line after line of prose, most of it Alex’s highly-attuned analyses of intricate social dynamics.

• “Alex spent hours being chased from room to room by silent, industrious Patricia, who took in Alex’s presence with the same moving expression she took in any mess.”

• “Everyone said it was beautiful out here. How many times could this sentiment be repeated? It was the polite consensus to return to, the bookend to every conversation — a slogan that united everyone in their shared luck.”

• “People, it turned out, were mostly fine with being victimized in small doses. In fact, they seemed to expect a certain amount of deception, allowed for a tolerable margin of manipulation in their relationships.”

• “He took her in with a bemused air. Like someone watching a movie they’d already seen.”

The plot of The Guest is sort of optimized for Cline to show off her abilities. The novel’s world is all social dynamics, pure neo-Gilded Age in which wealth and class categories are entirely fixed, in which behavior is like some sort of logarithmic function of one’s precise socioeconomic status, and in which Alex almost alone of anyone in the world surrounding her has the ability to swerve between classes, to apprehend what’s around her. In The Guest, status is almost exactly inversely proportional to perception. Those who are downstairs — the housekeepers, bartenders, etc — know exactly what’s going on. Those who are upstairs — the effortlessly wealthy, endlessly exercised and cosmetologized — float past in perfect non-awareness of social dynamics. But those who are downstairs get by through a willed blindness, and perfect discretion, towards the inequality saturating their existence. Alex, however, out of necessity, finds herself needing to break through the class demarcations. She opens the novel having made one effortless leap — making herself the live-in girlfriend to wealthy Simon, who seems not to have picked up on quite how mercantile their arrangement really is. But once she dents Simon’s car and he sends her back to the city, she needs to carry out a more acrobatic series of class maneuvers. She has to pretend to the housekeepers and house managers, who are very difficult to fool, that she is some stray member of the family. She sort of remembers that she is, after all, 22 and can maybe blend in with the rich kids spending the weekend in the Hamptons. And then, from there, it’s possible to blend in with the high schoolers and their absentee fathers, who are course less attentive than the housekeepers.

Everything about this is brilliant — like Catcher in the Rye if Holden were a hooker on painkillers — and it seems to point towards an underutilized genre in American fiction: towards the sort of expressionism that shows up in Nathanael West or James Ensor. No redemptive or upwardly mobile narratives are possible. The society is in a state of terminal decadence and the job of the novelist is to offer up a parade of the legions of all the damned.

That being said, though, The Guest is somehow far less than the sum of its parts. The ending doesn’t come together — it starts being apparent that it’s not going to work from about ten pages out — and that, actually, undermines much of the rest of the book. In retrospect, it turns out that none of the macro-plotlines hold together. I don’t know if I really believe that any of this is happening. That Alex is keeping her old number if she is so terrified of drug dealer Dom. That Alex has truly burnt through every one of her options and can’t return to New York City. That Alex is as composed and precise when she needs to be and then abruptly combusts whenever it seems time for the plot to move forward. And, as a character, Alex seems more the product of careful research than lived-in experience or imagination. She is rendered as a few checked boxes — small town, hinted-at trauma, no education, a drug problem — but just enough so as to drop her into a socioeconomic notch where she is pretty enough to pass as a rich man’s girlfriend but will never entirely belong.

It’s really a disappointment when the ending doesn’t cohere and much of what seems to be a careful novelistic architecture crumbles away. What’s left, then, is Cline as stylist and Cline hinting at an interesting direction for writing about the decadence of our era, but the novel is almost so much more than that.

NELLIE BOWLES’ Morning After The Revolution: Dispatches From The Wrong Side of History (2024)

A valuable, surprisingly emotional book.

By now, we’ve gotten used to the woke/anti-woke polemic, and it sort of seems like an unsettled, unfortunate bit of cultural history. The institutions are finding their sea legs again. The pandemic and the social upheaval of 2020 can, with broader perspective, be largely attributed to Trump’s hollowing out of some core integrity at the center of the society. As Bowles writes in her conclusion:

The years I spent reporting this book—the early 2020s—happened to be the start of the revolution. The first phase was ending as I wrapped this. The movement leaders were sneaking off with funds gathered in the height of rage, settling into pretty canyons. The rallying cries were being deleted from websites and memories. (No one ever said abolish the police, I’ve been told recently.) The word woke had gotten exhausting. It sounded dated.

But, as Bowles knows and reminds us, this wasn’t just Twitter fun-and-games. This really was a social revolution, bathed in good intentions but ultimately devouring itself. And it had far-reaching real-world consequences.

Bowles is best known as the sort of amiable sidekick to Bari Weiss. They left The New York Times and founded The Free Press together. Weiss was always the belligerent, public-facing side of the partnership. Bowles was far less provocative but clearly shared Weiss’ mission and she posted a very funny weekly round-up (and send-up) of the news.

The Morning After the Revolution (the title is a pun by the way) shows Bowles’ reportorial chops. The majority of the book is an incredulous, John McPhee-esque tour of the woke cultural landscape with Bowles trying to keep a straight face through all of it. She enrolls in a white fragility seminar. She visits autonomous zones and safe-injection spaces in Seattle and San Francisco. She chronicles San Francisco’s descent into what she calls “progressive-libertarian nihilism.” She charts out the self-eating cancellation chains.

Having lived through this, I thought I knew the most extreme excesses of wokeism. But no. And there is something really stunning in seeing it all laid out:

• The facilitator at the white fragility seminar saying, “Whiteness is like an octopus. It has its tentacles in everything.”

• The protestors/looters in Portland — completely unchecked by law enforcement — chanting “You’ll never sleep tight / We do this every night.”

• The medical journal The Lancet in their effort to avoid transphobic language referring to women as “bodies with a vagina.”

• The homeless activist in Los Angeles showing up to rallies in his BMW X5 (and then encouraging the homeless not to give in to the city’s offer of housing).

Amazingly enough, I had missed the story of  CHAZ — the collective that carved out an autonomous zone in Seattle in 2020, that organized its own security and from which city police as well as emergency services (fire trucks and ambulances) were excluded — and which was the scene of steadily-escalating looting and several shootings until the city finally stepped in. Although maybe it’s not so surprising. Having ceded the underlying prerogatives of any government — the monopolization of violence and the right to maintain order — Seattle’s mayor simply refused to see any problem even as the evidence of looting and property destruction accumulated. “It has a block-party atmosphere,” she said. And, with a really startling abrogation of responsibility, the mainstream media declined to cover the story at all. This was the start of Bowles’ shift out of the orthodoxy (and, ultimately, The Times). An editor pulled her aside when she wanted to report on CHAZ and told her that she was ruining her career by writing on it.

I thought I knew, also, the most egregious instance of institutional Pilatism — “mostly peaceful protests,” that kind of thing — but seeing them all laid out is, once again, startling:

• David Remnick concluding his New Yorker piece on the 2020 protests by calling looting “catharsis.”

• A New York Post éxposé on the $1.4 million home purchase by a Black Lives Matter leader getting blocked on Facebook for “violating community standards.”

• San Francisco’s city government refusing to allow reporters to view safe injection sites. As Bowles witheringly writes, “It’s an intimate private moment — on public ground — between the city and the addict….The city government said it was trying to help. But from the outside, what it looked like was young people being eased to death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches.”

The basic story, as I understand it, is that wokeism originated above all in universities and small private colleges. It found its cause célèbre in 2014 with the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson — and Black Lives Matter’s protest of police brutality. By the late 2010s, it had ossified into a progressive orthodoxy that subsumed liberal-minded late millennials and Gen Z. The liberal institutions — the major media outlets, schools, and local governments — didn’t quite know what to make of wokeism but assumed that it represented progress, and figured that at the worst it was a harmless display of youthful enthusiasm. The idea that woke initiatives were interesting or cute — whether the autonomous zones in West Coast cities, ‘abolish the police,’ white fragility workshops, trans-affirming language, etc — is the guiding thread in the institutions’ response. And then only belatedly did the institutions notice the moral traps they had built for themselves — with dissent, asking the wrong questions or pursuing the wrong stories, grounds for professional cancellation.

What most enabled the woke madness was the persistent belief that none of it was very serious — so much of it seemed to be happening on social media; or in colleges; or already-progressive enclaves in major cities. And it really did take a long time to pick up on the damage done to civic life by out-of-control protests or to the society-as-a-whole by the ever-present possibility of cancellation. And Bowles suffers a bit from the same problem — as a naturally funny person, she seems to keep having to remind herself that the whole thing is not a joke. Of a word-salad delivered by a law professor trying to explain police abolition, she writes, “Akbar launches into a sort of spoken-word academic poetry about what abolition means.” Of a scion of the Kennedy and Cuomo clans holding a press conference to announce that she was queer, by which she actually meant ‘demisexual,’ Bowles writes, “Michaela threw a coming out party to tell the world that she only wanted to date people she liked.” Of her experience on the giving end of a cancellation, she writes, “To do a cancellation is a very warm, social thing. It has the energy of a potluck.”

But what ultimately sets Morning After The Revolution apart is Bowles’ warm heart and empathy. She really was a believer in the progressive orthodoxies. It was the community she was in and the air she breathed. She knows (in a way that most of the conservative polemicists do not) that the woke warriors tend to be coming from a good place — “Even as I reported on the issues, I was constantly struck by the movement’s beauty,” she writes. “They see real problems, real pain. So many of the solutions should work. If only people behaved.” She writes with genuine sorrow about having dedicated so much of her youth to the progressive moment — and describes leaving it as an excruciating sort of growing up. “I think about the parts I loved at the start of the fragile, hopeful movement that really did bring new ideas into the world. Ideas around fairness, around language, around our bodies,” she writes. “I don’t think I’ll be around a group so optimistic again in my life.”

As Bowles fully notes, the woke progressives were right on a great many points. Systemic racism is real and is deeper and more unconscious than liberals had a tendency to admit. Marginalized communities were so often overlooked and brushed aside — and progressives worked assiduously to try to hear from people outside the cultural mainstream. Bowles, in her white fragility workshop, sheds very genuine tears when a facilitator says, “These black bodies were not immigrants, they were enslaved.” She is there to witness a member of a homeless camp saying, “They call us Invisible People, like we don’t exist. But if something happened, if they needed help, we’d be the first ones to help them because we’re representing God.”

But revolutions, social ones included, have their own destructive logic, and the woke revolution succumbed to those bitter paradoxes more quickly and disastrously than most. The cancellations became circular, the demands more unhinged, the corruption of progressive leaders more visible, the damage done by the movement more difficult to laugh off or excuse.

The tide definitely turned. The institutions, to some extent, developed a new backbone. New expressive outlets emerged — Substack most prominently — that were beyond the ambit of cancellations. The cycle of cancellations and ritual apologies seemed to taper off. Weiss and Bowles themselves were able to ride off into the sunset and start their own very successful publication.

But, as Bowles notes, it’s not quite as simple as the tide turning or the fever breaking, the world getting back to normal. It was a highly-successful, deep-seated cultural revolution. Bowles writes:

Did the quieter streets mean it was done? Hardly. The ideas became the operating principle of big business, the tech company handbook, the head of HR, the statement you have to write to get a job in a university. The movement fell apart because of how fully it succeeded. It didn’t need to announce itself so loudly anymore. We didn’t need to notice it anymore.

We will be living with the consequences of it for a long time to come.

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I’m sharing a couple of reviews/discussions of recent non-fiction books. For an excerpt of Technofeudalism, see here. At the partner site , writes on the brass tacks of writer economics.

Best,

Sam

YANIS VAROUFAKIS’ Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023)

This is an interesting, substantial book.

Varoufakis is one of these unicorns of the global intellectual space — an avowedly Marxist, former Finance Minister of Greece, who is able to write fluently and non-dogmatically (often for slightly right-leaning websites) and to reach original, unexpected conclusions. I always kind of perk up whenever I see a piece of his, and it’s nice to engage with him in a fuller way.

The argument of Technofeudalism is that capitalism — believe it or not — is sort of getting to the end of its lifespan and is being replaced by another system, which Varoufakis variously labels ‘cloud capitalism’ or ‘technofeudalism.’ Products and markets — the engines of capitalism — have become secondary to another economic system in which monopolistic tech companies have control over online spaces and then charge rent for access to them.

The near-ubiquitous use of the word ‘fiefdom’ in talking about online spaces is more accurate even than we tend to realize. If capital’s ascendance over the agricultural feudal system was based, first of all, on enclosures, we are undergoing a parallel transformation — with vital online commercial space taken over by major tech companies in a series of new enclosures and then rent extracted from everyone who uses them. Varoufakis writes:

We have seen how with the enclosure of the internet commons, cloud capital arose, and how it differs from other kinds of capital in its ability to reproduce itself at no expense to its owner, turning all of us into cloud serfs. We have seen how with the shift online, Amazon now operates as a cloud fief, with traditional business paying Jeff Bezos to operate as his vassals.

Varoufakis is at pains to emphasize that it’s not as if one system utterly supplants the other. The idea is that, as capital was parasitic on the feudal agricultural system (the feudal system produced the goods — i.e. food — needed to survive, but capital introduced a new and distinct source of wealth), so technofeudalism is parasitic on capitalism. Products, and capitalist activity, are there, but the real source of wealth is this rent extraction in online space — with the tech lords needing, once their systems are set up, barely to lift a finger anymore than feudal lords could rely on the serfs passing their rents up the hierarchical chain.

Varoufakis makes such a point of emphasizing these differences of terms most of all as a sort of coalition-building. He is a man of the left but wishes to save the left from its ever-losing battle against capitalism by focusing on a new and even more malignant form of capital — the internet “which killed capitalism but replaced it with something far worse” — and, on the other hand, he creates cover in discussion with avowed capitalists by arguing that the current iteration of ‘cloud capital’ isn’t capitalism at all but is its parasite. It’s an ingenious the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend bit of political strategizing and a healthy way of dealing with the new leviathan. The tech platforms are viewed — not as they are now — as a peculiar 21st century manifestation of business-as-usual and instead as the negation of ordinary capitalism. The onus is placed on governments to establish regulatory regimes, to break the hold of the tech giants, and at the very least to eliminate their rent-holding monopolies and encourage more widespread competition. And one step before that is that liberals are encouraged to retrain their sights from their old adversary — overzealous governments — towards a more crucial foe, giant corporations, and to allow government to carry out its exercise of power. “Is it not delectably shocking how, in the end, a global superhighway to serfdom has been constructed not because Western states were too powerful but because they were too weak?” Varoufakis writes.

Varoufakis is one of these people who’s a little too smart for his own good, and he can’t help himself but take a survey through a great deal of 20th and 21st century financial history — all of it interesting, not all of it so germane to his overall point. The history he tells is of the establishment of the Bretton Woods system in the aftermath of World War II, of the United States creating a global currency union, based on fixed exchange rates to the American dollar. The US unilaterally pulled out of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, with the “Nixon Shock,” engendering what Varoufakis calls “a new and truly dismal phase in capitalism’s evolution.” Now, European and Japanese currency were unanchored to fixed exchange but nonetheless the dollar emerged as “the only safe harbor courtesy of its exorbitant privilege” — with international business continuing to be conducted in dollars and with all roads loading back to Wall Street.

Varoufakis calls this the “Global Minotaur” phase of capitalism. It was neatly encapsulated in Paul Volcker’s line from 1978 that “a controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate objective for the 1980s.” That meant, as Varoufakis writes, the replacement of “the most stable globalist system ever” with “the most unstable international system possible, founded on ceaselessly ballooning deficits, debts and gambles.”

Critical to it was what Varoufakis calls “the dark deal” — the United States via its trade deficit keeping demand for Chinese products high while China reinvested its profits in American finance, insurance, and real estate sectors. That deal floated elites in both China and the US but at the expense of ordinary people in both countries — with the US manufacturing sector hollowed out and with China undergoing the Dickensian pains of overinvestment and a rapid-fire industrial revolution — and, meanwhile, with the Global South finding itself short on dollars and borrowing constantly from Wall Street with the IMF as enforcers of the debt.

Of its period of ascendancy, Varoufakis writes, “Our Minotaur will, in the end, be remembered as a sad, boisterous beast whose thirty-year reign created, and then destroyed, the illusion that capitalism can be stable, greed a virtue and finance productive.”

But, for Varoufakis, the real crime of the Minotaur was in finally neglecting capitalism altogether. The twin shocks of the 2008 recession and the 2020 pandemic resulted in a system in which companies and banks no longer invested in products but rather bought back their own shares, inflating their stock prices.

Varoufakis describes a dramatic moment in which he stared at his computer during the 2020 pandemic and, upon seeing that the London Stock Exchange had jumped by 2.3% in response to the news of the UK’s national income falling by 20%, announced to his father, “The age of cloud capital has just begun. The world of money has finally decoupled from the capitalist world.”

What that meant was that the old minotaurs were replaced by a new leviathan — the world of money that no longer connected to anything recognizably capitalist; and then a world of tech, handsomely supported by Wall Street, that carved out its new technofeudal space, charging rents, accepting content-delivered-for-free by regular people, and producing nothing of value itself.

For Varoufakis, there is a blessing-in-disguise somewhere in this. The turn from capitalism to the new system at least means the end of the uphill fight against capital and opportunities for individuals and communities to fight for their freedoms on new terms. Although, as Varoufakis writes, “How likely is it that we take advantage of it? I am damned if I know.” As usual, though, the framing helps. There is no need to be complacent about existing inequalities or existing economic systems. The economic systems themselves are changing more dramatically than we probably realize. That means that we — and we do get say in this — are able to articulate what we really want.

BENN STEIL’s The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century (2024)

It is very rare to read to a 500-page, meticulously detailed biography of a long-forgotten figure, in which the author so openly and utterly detests his subject.

The answer to why that has happened here is to be found in the opening lines of the acknowledgments, in which Benn Steil gives full credit to John Lewis Gaddis for the book. Gaddis, the preeminent ‘realpolitik’ scholar of the Cold War, has been running a sort of rearguard action, protecting American 20th century foreign policy from left-wing critique, and this biography of Henry Wallace is clearly part of that effort.

Wallace represents one of the most fascinating what-ifs in American history — a genuinely progressive figure coming achingly close to the presidency and exactly at the moment when the American ‘security state’ and post-war imperialism could, conceivably, have gone in a completely different direction. He was a highly unlikely figure to have ended up as Vice President and could be understood as part of the New Deal euphoria — a plant geneticist who had become Secretary of Agriculture at the right time and who presided over the Agriculture Adjustment Act, turning into the nation’s farm sector “overnight into a federal protectorate,” as Steil puts it. Roosevelt liked Wallace and in 1940 preferred him on the ticket to the reactionary John Nance Gardner, but, by 1944, when the stakes of the vice presidency had heightened, Wallace was clearly an odd fit to run one of the greatest war machines in the history of the world.

David McCullough describes him as “too intellectual, a mystic who spoke Russian and played with a boomerang and reportedly consulted with the spirit of a dead Sioux Indian chief....When not presiding over the Senate, he would often shut himself in his office and study Spanish.” He was close to a pacifist, highly critical of British imperialism, openly supportive of the Soviet Union, and had been a believing Theosophist — in the 1930s, while in the Cabinet, he was, in a word, part of a cult surrounding the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich, his wife Helena, and their ‘hidden master’ Morya, and a set of highly embarrassing letters were surfacing in tranches in which Wallace wrote to the Roerichs as “Guru,” they wrote to him as “Galahad,” and in which he endeavored to tilt American foreign policy in Morya’s preferred directions, above all towards friendlier relations with Japan. “May the Glory of the flaming Chalices shine even as the Star of the Hero,” was a somewhat typical line from his letters to the Roerichs.

But Wallace was also, literally, seconds away from becoming president. In 1944, he was popular, had widespread support with liberals and the unions, and although a crowd of advisers close to Roosevelt was determined to junk Wallace, Roosevelt seemed to be only half-persuaded. As a member of Roosevelt’s White House staff put it, Roosevelt “never pursued a more Byzantine course than in his handling of [his likely succession.” There was a smoke-filled room — or at least a meeting on a muggy summer evening in which everyone wore shirtsleeves — and the party bosses persuaded Roosevelt to indicate his support for Truman instead. But it was still up to the Democratic convention to decide — and with Roosevelt keeping himself notably aloof. The unions organized a stampede of support for Wallace. With the convention hall deafening in support of Wallace, a liberal Senator, Claude Pepper, sprinted to the stage to place Wallace’s name in nomination and to call for a vote on the spot. But the convention chairman, acting on behalf of the junk-Wallace cabal, pretended not to see Pepper and adjourned for the day. By the next day, the party bosses had a tighter hold over the convention’s gates and were able to choreograph Truman’s nomination.

That maneuver turned out — as party insiders well knew — to have seismic consequences. Roosevelt’s doctor had given him less than a year to live — a prognosis that was to prove accurate. Had Wallace rather than Truman succeeded Roosevelt in early 1945, it’s still likely that the atomic bomb would have been dropped — Wallace would not have had the authority to so drastically change US military policy — but almost everything else would have been different. The US military buildup in the late 1940s would not have occurred, nor would the Truman Doctrine or the Marshall Plan or the doctrine of “containment.” For Oliver Stone and critics of American empire, a Wallace presidency would, simply, have meant no Cold War. The rhetoric from the White House would have been utterly different, with Wallace stressing a vision of “economic democracy” that he believed united the “common man” between the US and USSR.

It’s Stone’s starry-eyed vision that Steil is most eager to disprove. His argument is that Wallace — “too innocent and idealistic for this world,” as Roald Dahl put it at the time — simply failed to see that the Soviet Union wasn’t interested in economic democracy or world peace and that Stalin was bent on an expansionist course regardless of any gestures of goodwill that the US extended towards him. Wallace himself drastically reversed course when North Korea, with Soviet support, invaded the South in 1950 and he became something of a standard-issue Cold War warrior. In later life, he himself seemed to recognize the limits either to his vision or to his ability to execute it. “I was done a very great favor when I was not named in ’44,” he later said.

But that second-guessing would come afterwards. Had he become president in 1945 — likely taking office with a wave of popularity, just as Truman did — he would have had a free hand to push any number of policies extending on the New Deal and on the period of post-war goodwill. America has “always been a progressive country underneath,” he would say in an interview, and that meant stakeholder boards in “basic industries” and nationalization of “scarcity-driven” industries, such as coal and railways. In foreign policy, that would have meant a profound step back from overseas intervention: “the United States has no business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe,” Wallace would say in a speech in 1946, in direct opposition to the policies of the Truman administration in which he served as Secretary of Commerce. That would have meant an attempt to reposition the geopolitical axis of the world, away from the British, whom Wallace disliked — he criticized those in the Truman administration who were “trying to build an Anglo-Saxon bloc that is decidedly hostile towards the Slavic world” — and towards the Soviet Union, which Wallace credited for doing the bulk of the fighting in World War II and which he found to be more philosophically simpatico. “There are only two great powers in the world, the USSR and the USA, and the well-being and fate of all mankind is dependent on good relations between them,” he said in a 1945 meeting with Soviet official Anatoly Gromov.

All of this is, to say the least, intriguing. Wallace was certainly right that the Truman administration marked, in economic terms, a repudiation of much of the New Deal. It’s not unimaginable that Wallace, pushing from the left wing of the Democratic Party, could have instituted a sort of stakeholder capitalism in the US that would have withstood the Friedmanian shareholder capitalism that was to come. It’s in foreign policy that the implications of a Wallace presidency are even more dizzying. Had he maintained control over his administration, Wallace would have reversed the interventionist tendencies of Roosevelt: he certainly would not have opposed the Soviet Blockade of Berlin. He might well have allowed West Germany to fall under the Soviet sphere of influence. And the US military might not have been in position to oppose the North Korean invasion of 1950. Steil takes it for granted that a Wallace presidency would not actually have resulted in greater harmony between the US and the Communist world. It would have meant a “delayed Cold War” with the US in a far weaker position to oppose advances by the Communist Bloc. But another interpretation is possible — that the US would not have been pulled into far-flung alliances at the outermost limit of its military power. No intervention in Korea likely would have meant no intervention in Vietnam. The US military establishment was unlikely to roll over completely, Wallace or no, but it’s possible that the Wallace administration would have — at the expense of Berlin, South Korea, South Vietnam, maybe Iran — achieved a more manageable defensive line.

Some of that analysis turns, though, on what one makes of Wallace, and Steil, really, has nothing good to say about him. To Steil, he was self-important, pompous, arrogant; (“he was only interested in two topics, plant genetics and himself”), insincere in his idealism (“he loved humankind but was mostly vexed or bored by humans”); a habitual backstabber (Roosevelt finally turned on him over his incessant in-fighting for control of the Bureau of Economic Warfare); utterly credulous in his attitude towards Stalin (not only was he feeding Gromov, a KGB operative, high-level intelligence but he seems to have allowed Stalin personally to edit an important public address of his); a dilettante in his work ethic; and an undertipper.

Steil’s thesis is that the US dodged a major bullet when the 1944 Democratic convention chair averted his eyes from the charging Claude Pepper, and, given Wallace’s abundant character failings, it’s a bit hard to argue with Steil. But the contrafactual with Wallace is deeper than that. It’s about whether the US could at some point have gone in a progressive or, let’s say, social democratic direction. Wallace, for a brief moment, offered an inside track to that route, which never really materialized again in presidential politics. For those on the left, there is much to take heart from in Wallace. It really could have happened. Actually, it wasn’t more than a few seconds away.

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I’m sharing a review/discussion on a pair of recent non-fiction books.

Best,

Sam

ALEXANDER WARD’s The Internationalists (2024)

A dutiful, serviceable account of Biden’s international team during the first, chaotic year of the administration.

I’ve been wanting to read something like this. My sense is that, because the Biden presidency isn’t a particularly charismatic administration, it’s destined to be largely forgotten — like Rutherford B. Hayes or something — which is too bad since the administration was dealing with very high-stakes, consequential decisions, and (to my mind anyway) has on the international front done very well.

Ward is a veteran Politico writer. He gets good access to the foreign policy team but nothing special — we really end up with very little image in our minds of Jake Sullivan, Anthony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, etc. We don’t get the expressions on their faces at pivotal moments. We don’t learn anything about their personal lives. I’ve been getting increasingly fascinated with Jake Sullivan. But less so after this. Sullivan just comes across as a figure of the Washington Blob — a bit grey, a bit colorless, carrying out a technocratic function. Of his chairmanship of NSC meetings, Ward writes, “He rarely if ever let his true feelings be known.”

Although I guess that is sort of what I find interesting about Sullivan and the Biden administration. The idea that, from the perspective of the United States and US interests, there usually is a right decision — and governance is largely about winnowing down options, looking at the hand one is dealt and then choosing the optimal solution. That it’s meant to be a bit colorless.

I’ve had the sense that, on the foreign policy front, the Biden team really has been an remarkably effective steward of American interests. They were able to thread the needle on Ukraine, keeping Ukraine alive, avoiding a direct confrontation with Russia, and regaining much of the US’ moral stature. They recognized the need for a pivot away from unfettered globalization and back towards a consolidation of defense and industrial capacities. They supported Israel when Israel needed it — and then started to push when Israel overstepped in Gaza. And even the Afghanistan withdrawal may, ultimately, have been the right decision and carried out at the right time — early in the administration when there was time to recover from it.

But that sense of the high-optimizing, smooth-flowing foreign policy team only comes in later in the story. For most of 2021, it’s a mess, and as sympathetic as Ward is to Sullivan and co, it’s clear that the administration gets very much overtaken by events.

Ward’s narrative is that Biden came into power aiming for a “foreign policy for the middle class” — that utterly nebulous idea that Sullivan, and NatSec Action, concocted in the political wilderness — and for a general retrenchment and heightened modesty, but that the events of 2021-2022 compelled the Biden Administration to be more internationalist than they ever intended. “Bidenism in action” is described as the US being “more humble about what it could achieve.” That meant the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and ending of the Forever Wars, which Biden hoped would be his primary legacy — a decision that threaded back to Biden’s position during the Obama administration when he had been the leading advocate for withdrawal and felt that Obama had been boxed in by the military. “Biden would not make the same mistake. He would not back down, because he had been right before,” Ward writes. In one of the very few stirring moments in The Internationalists, he tells a skeptical Mike Milley that the withdrawal really will happen — and it becomes abundantly clear that Biden views it above all in moral terms. “The easier call is just to punt. I didn’t become president to do the easy thing,” he said.

And that sense of withdrawal and modesty extended to China, where the incoming administration “found merit” in Trump’s policies and continued the premise of on-shoring industrial and defensive capacity; and to Russia where, initially, the Biden Administration was conciliatory to Putin, even to the point of “mistreating” and betraying Ukraine with a series of diplomatic snubs and then by giving the go-ahead to Nord Stream 2.

But there was, as one official told Ward, “an arrogance in the humility” of the Biden people. They were so determined to wind down Afghanistan, and to do it on something like a predetermined schedule, that they were slow to react to events on the ground: they didn’t expect the Afghan army to melt away at the rate it did, they had a tendency to disregard military advice, and their decisions, as one advocate working closely with the administration at the time observed, were “scattershot.”

The disaster of the Afghanistan withdrawal (it probably always was going to be a disaster no matter when it happened, but there was no question that the administration botched its execution) was an existential crisis for the White House. In one of the very few revealingly human moments in The Internationalists, a friend of Sullivan’s says, “That wasn’t the Jake we knew — he was rocked.” And Sullivan — the master debater, the consummate technocrat, always smooth, always confident — seemed for the first time in his life to really be overmatched.

The question that’s been in the back of my mind for the last couple of years is whether the Afghanistan withdrawal really was the trigger for the Ukraine invasion — and that’s dealt with surprisingly directly in The Internationalists. Ward writes:

A key theme arose as US and European officials spoke to each other [in late 2021]. Putin was planning to invade not only because he hated Ukraine’s existence but also because he sensed Western weakness. Putin, the ultimate geopolitical shark, sensed blood in the water.

If that’s the case — and it seems like it was — it’s a serious indictment of Biden administration policy in 2021. Biden tried to do the “hard thing,” but — as Obama had sensed in the 2010s — that was a geopolitical miscue, and would result in aggressive action by the US’ superpower adversaries. The greater consensus that comes through The Internationalists’, though, is that Putin really was “unhinged” and operating from an irrational place. That was Sullivan’s strong belief, and Ward reports on a series of calls between Biden and Putin, in which Putin was entirely focused on historical wrongs and, in Biden’s view, not making sense.

The inside baseball here (which I had somewhat missed) is that Putin did offer a way out in demanding a Western commitment that Ukraine, together with Georgia, would not be admitted to NATO. This made German Chancellor Olaf Scholz buckle — telling reporters that it wasn’t worth risking World War III for the sake of NATO’s “Open Door” admissions policy. But, for the US team, that was never really an option — the Open Door policy was at the heart of NATO and couldn’t be revoked at the barrel of a gun.

If 2021 had been a case of acute growing pains, 2022 really was masterful foreign policy. It was, as one official said, “the ultimate land of bad options” — how to protect a highly-vulnerable ally that wasn’t contained within NATO alliance guarantees — and the administration seemed to make one right move after another. Arms flowed to Ukraine but without crossing Russia’s red lines. The European coalition held together. The Ukrainian military turned out to be far more robust than anyone suspected. From here, Ward seems to have less hands-on reporting and to be drifting more into hagiography. But his basic premise is that it was as it seemed: Putin really had stepped out of the realm of the rational; the Sullivan-led national security team found its sea legs and proved itself an effective leader of a new, Ukraine-inclusive, shotgunned alliance.

For Ward, it was an adaptation to a shifted reality — Russia could no longer be counted upon to abide by the international order; and the United States had to hold the line against great-power aggression — but it was a deviation from what the Biden administration really hoped to achieve. That vision — which ran through Afghanistan, CHIPS, and was articulated publicly by Sullivan in his 2023 Brookings speech — was, as Ward puts it:

the need to return to fundamentals: a healthy middle class powered by a humming industrial base, a humility about what the US military alone can accomplish, a solid cadre of allies, attention to the most existential threats, and a refresh of the tenets that sustain American democracy.

In foreign policy terms, there’s more in there that’s aligned with the Trump administration than one might expect — a shared consensus about China; a focus on superpower competition as opposed to ever-more-entangled commitments around the world — but it’s also a walk back from the Bush and to, some extent, Obama years. The idea is that the US can only do so much. That the alliances are critical. And that United States foreign policy is only as good as the options placed in front of it.

JONATHAN HAIDT’s The Anxious Generation (2024)

One of these slightly finger-wagging books that’s clearly right about almost everything.

Haidt’s point is that the rise of cell phones, and social media, can’t really be understood as technological advance or normal generational permutation; it’s decimating to our basic psychological structure. And that becomes bracingly clear when you zoom in on the data and focus only on children who grew up saturated in digital media. Isolation, self-harm, anxiety, depression are all way up — and the data is very clear that those trends are experienced all over the western world and can only be attributed, really, to the smart phones.

But Haidt’s critique is somehow even deeper than that. It’s that the normal developmental process for human mammals has been stunted in unprecedented ways by two separate but converging trends — the rise in “safetyism,” starting around the 1980s, with the focus on removing all possible harms from childhood at the expense of independent play; and then the onslaught of the phones starting around 2010. The overall trend line is from a “play-based” to a “phone-based” childhood and the result is “the anxious generation,” a “rewiring” of the grounding of our experience from boredom to anxiety. Present-day western children are simply not maturing as they need to; they are not engaging in physical space around them, they are not socializing through face-to-face interactions, they are not taking risks and learning their limits; they are facing a flattening of experience as occurs in digital space; and they are receiving copious outputs that the physical world around them is full of harms and needs to be avoided.

As Haidt writes:

This is the world that Gen Z grew up in. It was a world in which adults, schools, and other institutions worked together to teach children that the world is dangerous and to prevent them from experiencing the risks, conflicts, and thrills that their experience-expectant brains needed to overcome anxiety and set their default mental state to discover mode.

I agree with everything Haidt says. It hits home and strikes deep. I did have this odd padded-walls sense about my own childhood. My parents were anxious to counteract that, to ensure that there was time outdoors, to avoid coddling. But it somehow was impossible. Even in New York City, things were somehow very safe — there was a surprising paucity of risk-taking, of formative experiences. And what was striking about it was that it wasn’t the fault of any one thing exactly. Haidt probably hits close to the mark when he says that there was “a breakdown in adult solidarity.” Adults felt — whether because of moral panics or the atomized structures of modern life — that they couldn’t trust one another to keep an eye on free-roaming kids. Childhood became the responsibility of nuclear families and with parents socially incentivized to take ever-greater, more active roles in their kids’ upbringings. This came at the expense of socialization with other kids, at the expense of the vital interplay of boredom-and-creativity, at the expense of normal processes of growth and initiation into a wider community. Childhood became a cocooned, cordoned-off zone that fringe adults and older kids were not permitted to intervene in.

Then the smart phones came in and produced the worst of all worlds. They made a mockery of the principles of safetyism — the adults were still actively reducing harms in physical space but their kids were finding all sorts of non-age appropriate experiences on the internet. Haidt cites a bracing essay by Isabel Hogben, who describes her attentive, helicopterish mom busying herself with giving her daughter “nine differently colored fruits and vegetables on the daily,” while Isabel, at 10 years old, was meanwhile discovering hardcore porn in the next room. And then the phobias about the physical world were still there but exacerbated by the addiction to screens — it became the path of least resistance for parents to just let their kids be on devices all day, while the kids became less and less engaged with the actual physical world, until the kids developed anxiety and depression at which point the parents responded with an extra dose of coddling.

So: agreed on all of it. But, as often with this type of work, the solution falls short of the problem. Haidt’s idea is to dramatically restrict access to phones in childhood —no smart phones before 14; no social media before 16; no phones in schools — and for communities to link together to enforce these standards. It sounds nice. It brings up all kinds of pleasant cultural memories — Charlie Brown and his gang roaming around the suburbs, if not Tom Sawyer and Aunt Polly’s fence. But I just don’t think it’s going to happen.

Haidt claims that he’s gotten tired of transportation metaphors — ‘the ship has sailed,’ ‘the train has left the station.’ He proposes a new one: bringing the plane back to the gate when a safety issue is detected. But, as I think Haidt suspects, the problem is deeper than that. His claim is that the smart phones have been around for only a decade or so, that there’s still time to undo the Great Rewiring. But the Great Rewiring is not occurring only in childhood. It’s what adults are doing and it’s reshaped the entire economy. This may be for better or for worse — it’s probably for worse, but that’s not really the point. It’s just the world that everybody is inhabiting. It doesn’t matter how many wilderness camps kids are sent to, how much unsupervised outdoor playtime they have — they won’t end up like Charlie Brown palling around the suburbs with his friends or Tom Sawyer machinating around Aunt Polly’s fence. Aunt Polly now is sitting in her living room on her phone. And the kids who have the feeling that they’re missing out if they’re not on their phone all the time are right — they are missing out. They are going to have to inhabit a digital world that’s unfamiliar to all of us and for which our guidance is of only limited utility. They sense that their education requires taking in that space — mimicking what people older than them are doing on that space; and then, as they get older, outcompeting the adults on that space. Even more than play or physical risk-taking, that’s the deeper meaning of childhood — the looking-up-to and then gradual supplanting-of the adult world — and, for present-day kids, that can only be in the digital realm.

The diagnoses are all accurate, but there is no cure. Technology has brought us to a dystopia, which is unnatural, inorganic, developmentally-stunting, et al. But there is nothing we can do except to navigate it.

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The last few weeks have been difficult for me with the Substack — and I often have the sense of living in denial. The situation in Israel/Gaza is an epoch-making event. However one positions oneself politically, there is no question that lots of people are dying; that lots of people will die; that the situation is beyond terrible; and that the future of the Middle East is to a great extent hanging in the balance. I don’t write about it very much, because both a) I find it very painful to think about; and b) I fundamentally don’t know that much about it. 

The tendency I have — I guess, as an American — is to imagine that there’s some technocratic solution. That at some level everybody has to draw a deep breath, think less about the history, and deal with what’s at hand: the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza; the negotiations on the return of the hostages; and the question of the role of the Palestinian Authority in Gaza. But more and more, I’m realizing that this is sort of the liberal American fantasy. Everybody in Israel/Palestine talks endlessly about the history. And people there have a greater sense of insuperability — that it is, in so many different ways, an asymmetric conflict; that, simply put, there may not be a solution. And to try to understand it better — I’m reading mainly Palestinian books at the moment —means engaging with genuinely thorny questions from the past. 

A couple of different people have pointed me to Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine as a good primer on Palestinian history, and that’s what I’m treating it as. There’s a lot in it that I just didn’t know, and if I found myself reflexively objecting to many of Khalidi’s conclusions, I’m also not in a position to argue them to the ground. 

Khalidi, from a diplomatic Palestinian family and a professor at Columbia, frames his book as family history just as much as the story of Palestine, and that gives it a sort of cozy, intimate feel. Khalidi presents himself as the bookend to his great-great-great uncle Yusuf Diya, who in 1899 exchanged letters with Theodor Herzl and who, while somewhat personally sympathetic to Herzl, had a “prescient” sense of where the Zionist project was headed. Diya called it “pure folly” and concluded his letter by writing “In the name of God, let Palestine alone.” For Khalidi, everything in the next century-and-a-quarter is more or less contained in this exchange of cosmopolitan intellectuals — in Diya’s intuition of intractable conflict between two very different peoples inhabiting the same finite stretch of land; and, above all, in a contemporaneous diary entry of Herzl’s that alludes to “spiriting” the Arab population “discreetly” outside of its borders. 

This idea of inevitable, unresolvable conflict, as embedded within Zionism, leads Khalidi to his thesis: that there simply can be no reconciliation; that the history of Israel/Palestine in the 20th century is understood as an unremitting war against the overmatched Palestinians. Here is how Khalidi puts it: “The modern history of Palestine can best be understood as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.” 

There is much that is absurd, though, in Khalidi’s formulation, as he gradually admits over the course the book. His discription implies a unity of international actors and a unity of purpose — that the actions of the international community as a whole (!) are directed explicitly and malevolently against the Palestinians. Khalidi’s rogues’ gallery includes the Zionists, of course; the British (the fighting between Zionists and British in the 1940s is dismissed as a brief “falling-out between erstwhile allies”); the Americans; but also the Soviets, who by voting for UN General Assembly Resolution 101 in 1947, participated in a “declaration of war,” “sacrificing the Palestinians for a Jewish state to take their place”; and even actors in the Arab world, who, in the case of the 1982 Lebanon war, may have had an array of tactical objectives but treated the PLO as “a major target.”

Khalidi frequently finds himself backtracking on or qualifying his central claim to the point where it becomes unclear to what extent stands behind it. Very soon after framing the century’s-worth of conflict as “a colonial war waged against the indigenous population,” he concedes that it can be “understood as both a colonial and a national conflict” but then somewhat arbitrarily decides that his concern will be for its “colonial nature, as this aspect has been underappreciated.” By the book’s conclusion, Khalidi has very much blurred his own categories. “No one today would deny that fully developed national identities exist in settler states like the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, despite their origins in colonial wars of extermination,” he writes, and unexpectedly extends that spirit of historical amnesty to Israel. “While the fundamentally colonial nature of the Palestinian-Israeli encounter must be acknowledged, there are now two peoples in Palestine regardless of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other,” Khalidi writes. 

So it’s not really clear where that leaves us. The word ‘colonial’ is used to bludgeon Israel, but Khalidi acknowledges that there are legitimate national considerations to the Israeli state. Palestine is seen as being under assault from the international world, but that gets hard to defend when Syria, Egypt, and various Lebanese militias are lumped in as being among the oppressors.

What is inarguable, though, and what comes through clearly in Khalidi’s account, is the misfortune of the Palestinian people in the 20th and 21st centuries. He describes the Palestinians in the inter-war period as suffering from “a triple bind” — subject to colonial rule by the British, by the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, and by what Khalidi calls a “singular colonial-settler movement.” This sense of a unique situation brings Khalidi somewhat astray from his anti-colonial talking points but (to my mind) is a closer match for discussing the particular plight of the Palestinians. The familiar arc of decolonization — whether from the Ottoman or British Empires — doesn’t fit the case of the Palestinians because they are dealing with a different set of people who are themselves, in large part, refugees and who have no “metropole” to simply return to. Khalidi’s presentation of the 20th century as a concerted international conspiracy to displace the Palestinians from their land strains credulity, but it is harder to challenge him on the argument that the Palestinians, without a state and for a long time without international voice, were subject to unique neglect: “Great powers have repeatedly tried to act in spite of the Palestinians, ignoring them, talking over their heads, or pretending they did not exist,” Khalidi writes. 

The somewhat softer way to lay out Khalidi’s position is that he is contending, above all, with the phenomenon of Greater Israel — the thread that runs from the maverick Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky through David Ben-Gurion, Menachehm Begin, Ariel Sharon, and that may well be ascendent at the moment in Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist government and that is interested in annexation and displacement. Some of the most harrowing passages in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine are his description of being in Lebanon in 1982 and seeing the flares — “floating down in the darkness in complete silence, one after another, for what seemed an eternity” — that the IDF sent up to facilitate the massacres by Phalangist militias in the Sabra and Sbetila refugee camps. At times what Khalidi seems to be saying is that there is a valid Israeli centrist position, with a two-state solution and some sort of harmony, but that it keeps being undercut by the Israeli right.

It is hard to read Khalidi’s description of Plan Dalet, in 1948, of the 1967 War, of Sharon’s operations in Lebanon in 1982 without being somewhat sympathetic to his position — that there is, at the very least, a strain within Israel that is sometimes ascendant that is dedicated to violently displacing Palestinians and to annexing as much land as possible. And I learned a lot from The Hundred Year War Against Palestine. In my sort of standard American Jewish education, the 1982 war was largely skipped over. The 1967 War was depicted as a fight between equals, if not an astonishing piece of luck for the Israelis. Khalidi sees it very differently, as a “long-planned preemptive strike,” with the outcome never in much doubt, and undertaken using the excuse (although I would question this characterization) of “empty threats by certain Arab leaders.” Khalidi also provides some valuable context on why the Oslo Accords proved to be so unpopular with the Palestinians — the sense was that the Palestinian side had simply been out-negotiated; and the timetable for a Palestinian state would be pushed indefinitely into the future. 

But there is a great deal in Khalidi’s account that is clearly very slanted. It is difficult to accept his depiction of the result of the 1948 war as a foregone conclusion or his view of Israel as being almost immediately “a regional superpower” — that would, I think, have come as welcome news to the Israelis at the time who thought they were fighting for their lives as a just-born state at war with seven hostile regimes. It is striking that the 1973 war — which does not fit into Khalidi’s narrative of a super-powerful and hyper-aggresssive Israeli state — merits only a single passing reference. And Khalidi really pushes things when he chooses to describe the airplane hijackings of the “dynamic” PFLP in the 1970s as “external operations, seen as terrorist attacks by much of the rest of the world” or when he draws a puzzling distinction between the assassinations of PLO leaders by Arab states, which are forgiven for being “based on cold, calculating raison d’état,” as opposed to the on-the-surface very similar assassinations carried out by Israel, which are seen as “aimed at destroying the PLO or extinguishing the Palestinian cause.”

Where Khalidi is stronger is in presenting the Palestinians as having, in the 20th century, an impossible history — a people subject along several different matrices. There’s a colonial component (as he notes, the initial Zionist settlement took place during “the high age of colonialism” and the rhetoric of Zionism and colonialism sometimes bled together), a national component, a component of rivalries among Arab states, a component of, as Khalidi acknowledges, poor leadership among the Palestinians. Khalidi, with surprising transparency, gives, in his conclusion, several talking points for how to present the Palestinian case to the world: “the fertile comparison of the case of Palestine to other colonial-settler experiences”; a focus on the imbalance of power between Israel and the Palestinians; and a “foregrounding of the issue of inequality.” But I find it hard to pinpoint Palestinian suffering to any one of those things. It really is on many levels at once a very difficult, very grim history. 

NATHAN THRALL’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama (2023)

I’m not sure what I learned all that much politically from A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, but it is a bracing read — a virtually blow-by-blow description of a horrific school bus accident in Jerusalem and an unsettling portrait of life in the Occupied Territories.

First of all, let’s make clear what this book is not. It’s not an indictment of some heinous act of violence by Israeli forces. The incident in question really was an accident. A school bus, carrying Palestinian children on an excursion, was hit by a semi-trailer speeding the wrong way. The driver of the semi-trailer was Palestinian, and the immediate background to the accident is fairly mundane: an inexperienced  driver inexplicably speeding on a rainy day. Thrall is at pains to exercise the structural inequality of the incident. The bus was old. The bus, due to checkpoints, followed a circuitous route. The Israeli ambulances and firefighters seemed conspicuously slow to reach the scene of the accident. “When Jews are in danger, Israel sends helicopters. But a burning bus full of Palestinian children, and they show up only after every kid has been taken away?” Thrall has one of his characters think to themselves.

But all of this is less than fully convincing. The accident, on the whole, seems like something that could have occurred just about anywhere in the world. The slowness of Israeli emergency services to respond is, in this circumstance, tragic but hardly by itself an indictment of the Israeli state. What is effective about A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is the depiction, through well-researched, indelible details, of life in contemporary Palestine. This is missing from much of the rhetoric around the conflict, and, by describing the love affairs, the home life, of a fairly typical Palestinian family, Thrall gives us a greater deal of empathy than is attainable from reams of political writing. 

The early sections of A Day in the Life are the strongest. There’s the story of Abed and the intra-familial treachery that leads him into marrying first one woman and then another, both of whom are not the love of his life. There’s his experience under incarceration by Israel during the First Intifada, and it’s worth quoting Thrall’s description of his time in detention in 1989:

The tents had no tables or chairs and they flooded when it rained. The barrels used for trash overflowed each day, bringing a terrible stench and an influx of mosquitoes and rats. Many prisoners developed skin diseases. But the real torment came at sunset. Evvery night the Israelis would turn on the speakers and play a heartrending ballad by Umm Kulthum. The anguished prisoners would lie on their beds listening, homesick, some of them crying, others working on the one letter they were allowed to send each month.

What Abed takes away from the prison experience is the sense that all of Palestine just an extension of his time in prison. The color-coded IDs tightly regulate the movements of Palestinians. The Palestinian Authority is in the position of acting as guards. And Abed finds himself, against his better instincts, engaging in a complicated scheme to take a new wife for the sake of her blue ID card. “Abed thought it fitting; every Palestinian was a sort of prisoner, from the youngest child to the PA president, who also needed Israel’s permission to come and go,” Thrall writes.

What does come through is the sense of death by a thousand cuts. A Day in the Life isn’t a story of Israeli atrocities — although Abed is briefly tortured in his time in detention in 1989 — but of daily humiliation: Oslo, instead of generating an autonomous Palestinian political entity, “fractures the West Bank into 165 islands of limited self-government.” The color-coded ID system is demeaning; the delays at the checkpoints crazy-making. And Abed becomes exposed to the nightmare version of it, attempting to race between hospitals but stuck with the wrong papers, subject to bureaucratic obstacles just to see the scorched body of his son.

Abed is, in many ways, a less than fully sympathetic figure, but that doesn’t matter much. What stays with us from a book like this is not at all the personal morality, or even the politics, but just the sense of scratching the surface of a person’s life. There’s Abed’s tragedy of having married the wrong women — his inability to ever find peace after that. And then there’s the eerie story of another child on the bus who had been peculiarly fatalistic about the trip. “Why before? I’ll make it after?” his mother had asked when he was adamant about having zaatar flatbread before the outing. “‘No,’ he had insisted, ‘it has to be before.’”

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I have a piece in Quillette on the Substack content moderation controversy. You are tired of this topic, I am tired of this topic, but it is important. The argument I’m making is that the new modality of content moderation developed out of a sort of moral panic in the 2010s and resulted in the curtailment of a great deal of legitimate speech. Instead of posting that here, I’m sharing a couple of book ‘reviews’ — as usual, splitting between fiction and non-fiction.

Best,

Sam

BENJAMIN LABATUT’s The MANIAC (2023)

Labatut to me represents how, all market forces to the side, publishing can actually do what it’s supposed to do: find an interesting, idiosyncratic writer somewhere in the world and propel him towards the center of the conversation. 

Labatut was raised between Chile and Holland. He made international waves in 2020 with his When We Cease To Understand The World, which seemed to change, at an almost molecular level, the understanding of what a novel could be. I’ve written about it before, claiming that Labatut sort of manifests the solution to a grievance that a number of critics had felt about the state of literature. In 2011, David Shields wrote, “I’m bored by out-and-out fabrication by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters.” Michel Houellebecq in an interview in 2010 complained of what was lacking in the writing he read: “A little reality, man! Show us the real world, anchored in the real lives of people.”

What Shields was getting at was the literalization of our minds in the modern era. The creation of a character, of fictional circumstances, now seems not exactly an enchantment and source of magic — it seems like a half-hearted stage set when the real world, meanwhile, is clamoring with so many strange and unexplored corners. The role of the novelist, then, becomes something a bit different — more impresario than magician, more somebody who can give shape and meaning to what’s all around us instead of confusing us further with some cockeyed campfire story. 

Shields seemed to be not entirely sure what he was advocating for in Reality Hunger (and most of his readers were equally mystified, although impressed by his passion), but Labatut filled in many of the blanks. Much of the enchantment that fiction used to supply could be substituted for by the crevices of history (or, in the case of When We Cease To Understand The World, by the mysteries of higher mathematics). The novelist wouldn’t be some narcissistic progenitor but would — to be reductive — offer up almost Wikipedia-style bites on a topic and would act as a field guide, leading the reader through complicated subject matter and then at suitable moments suggesting their own hypothesis on how it all fit together. This was the ’non-fiction novel’ and it did not really take away from the creativity of the writer. It wasn’t ‘history’ because the writer wasn’t beholden to things the way they actually happened. The writer was in charge, could make up motivations if they wanted, could fabricate entire scenes, could interpose fiction at will. Labatut claimed that his idea with When We Cease to Understand the World was for “the quantity of fiction” to steadily and discreetly grow throughout the book.

When We Ceased to Understand the World was, justifiably, a sensation. The MANIAC is a worthy successor but also highlights some of the kinks in the ‘non-fiction novel.’ The sense with Labatut, often, is of some gleaming-eyed scientist proposing an hypothesis and harnessing everything he can find to fit it. In When We Cease To Understand The World, it was that there is something at the very heart of creation that is destructive, irrational — and that those who approach it (our most brilliant mathematicians and physicists) inevitably go mad from the dark knowledge. In The MANIAC, the hypothesis is very similar — that an alien life-form, hyper-intelligent and utterly inhumane, entered into the consciousness of the human world through science and continues to institute itself in our lives, above all through AI. That entity can even be said to have taken on human shape, as it evidently did with the physicist John von Neumann, who — as Labatut demonstrates with copious examples — was as non-human as he was brilliant, had a stunning intelligence and no trace of normal human morality, and seemed to be the advance sentinel of, as Labatut writes, “a truly malignant influence, both logic-driven and utterly irrational.” 

Glancing at von Neumann’s achievement, it is hard not to be at least somewhat persuaded of Labatut’s theory. Von Neumann wrote the critical equations for the atomic bomb, built one of the very first computers as part of the process of developing the hydrogen bomb, invented game theory, made critical developments in quantum mechanics and in the understanding of cellular reproduction, and predicted with uncanny accuracy the future course of AI.

Virtually everything he did, Labatut claims, was to “slowly work changes in the individual and collective human psyche as a way to prepare us for a future that no one can imagine.” The point is that everything is mathematized. Sentimentality is dropped. Life and death come to seem far less important than the operations of (and beauty of) logic. Labatut writes, “A brain like his indicated the evolution of a superior species.”

I don’t really disagree with Labatut’s hypothesis. The challenge is that I did sort of know it before reading The MANIAC — not the details of Von Neumann’s career, which are interesting in their own right, but the general sense of terror that we have with the ascent of an artificial intelligence that is clearly different from our own and is also, just as clearly, in very many ways superior to ours. The overall effect of The MANIAC is of something like ‘AI Gothic’ — a genre that’s meant a little more to pleasantly terrify us about our mutant future than it is to actually think through the technology’s implications. The novel’s final part, the story of AlphaGo’s defeat of Lee Sedol, seemed like a somewhat uninspired choice — not because it’s not an interesting and salient story (it is) but because I’d already read the Wikipedia article on the event and knew the basic ideas, which Labatut, with some hyperbole, is so eager to emphasize: that it wasn’t just a story of a superior intelligence blowing a human off the board, as seemed to happen with Kasparov in 1997, that it was a peculiar synergy between human and machine (a bit of what von Neumann is interpreted to represent) in which the computer demonstrated an almost childlike plasticity and ability to grow, while the human overcame some of the limitations of his own design and played, at a certain point in the match, with a far-seeing and superhuman intelligence. 

Probably the most interesting moment of Von Neumann’s story and Labatut’s narrative — a moment that really perplexes the choral voices Labatut employs to explicate von Neumann — is von Neumann’s sudden embrace of religious thought near his death. But his religion had nothing to do with the Judeo-Christianity — it was a a kind of pagan revival enacted through science. “We needed to fill the void left by the departure of the gods and the one and only candidate that could achieve this strange, esoteric transformation was technology,” Labatut has von Neumann say. The idea is very close to where Houellebecq gets at the end of Atomized — that the future is based in mitosis, in a superhuman and world-striding intelligence, and that, in some sense, all that humans can do is get out of its way and behold it with religious awe. 

I don’t know that Labatut really believes this anymore than Houellebecq does. My sense is of a writer with tongue-in-cheek sticking to his provocative hypothesis mostly for the sake of narrative coherence. It’s interesting, it’s absorbing, but it is a little scientific, a little one-dimensional. I didn’t get engaged in any of the characters, who have little life of their own except to offer up testimonials of von Neumann’s brilliance from various points in his career. I didn’t feel that I was really under the skin of von Neumann or learning anything that I couldn’t have from some assiduous googling. After some time, I did find myself with a slight longing for “invented plots and invented characters,” for the unrestricted license that traditional fiction, when it’s done well, offers.

JOE NOCERA AND BETHANY MCLEAN’s The Big Fail (2023)

A very valuable attempt to reach a new consensus in how we understand the pandemic. 

What’s become gradually clear — I think even to the sort of NPR crowd — is that the old consensus, which drove and supported governing decisions from 2020-2022, is no longer tenable. That consensus held that government entities and public health institutions were of course acting in good faith; that lockdowns were needed and saved lives; that vaccines were equally needed and were the path out of the pandemic; and that criticism of government intervention tended to be either Trumpian-inflected or just mischievous and deserved to be stamped out of public discourse for the sake of a unified social response. 

There have been so many holes picked apart in that consensus that it’s difficult even to know where to begin, and the general response — even for those who may grudgingly admit that public schools were closed longer than they should have been or that masks weren’t particularly effective — is to just not talk about it. Which has resulted in a strange lacuna in all of our lives. This was the biggest public event in virtually anyone’s memory — in some sense the first truly global event. It affected everyone’s life, it created deep and far-reaching psychic scars, and nobody wants to talk about it. It’s like it never happened. 

A great deal of the reason for that silence is, I suspect, that any conversation at all immediately becomes contentious. ‘Masks’ has become a fighting word, let alone ‘vaccines.’ 

The society (I’m referring specifically to the U.S. here) was ripped apart in ways that nobody foresaw and that we are still healing from (if ‘healing’ is even the word). 

So a book like Nocera and McLean’s The Big Fail is actually of seismic importance. It creates the conditions to have a reasonable, centrist conversation about the pandemic, which takes in the critiques (and acknowledges that some of the prominent ‘dissidents,’ like Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, were right far more often than they were wrong) without dissolving into conspiracy. 

To do that, they leave out some of the really incendiary topics — the question of how the virus originated; the charge that over-the-counter medications like ivermectin had efficacy in treating the virus and were kept out of consumers’ hands; the data pointing to various side-effects of the mRNA vaccine — but they reach a consensus that many rational people could agree to. 

The first point they make is that, to put it simply, mistakes were made. These mistakes included but were not limited to: 

-Failure of initial Covid tests by the CDC;

-Slowness to contact the private sector in manufacturing tests;

-Failure to implement an initial quarantine;

-Depletion of N95 masks during H1N1 without restocking; 

-Decisions to implement one-size-fits-all lockdowns without regard to age or health;

-Inequities of treatment for Covid along class lines;

-Refusal by Fauci and the health authorities to acknowledge uncertainties of science regarding masks;

-SBA loans directed towards wealthy businesses rather than small businesses;

-Overselling by health authorities of the vaccines (glossing completely over their lack of utility in preventing transmission);

-Obsessive control over narratives of Covid response, including ‘cancelation’ of perfectly-credentialed medical dissidents.

But Nocera and McLean’s thesis is that focus on Covid response misses the big picture, which is, in a word, capitalism — a predatory, shareholder-driven capitalism that had the net effect of hollowing out public institutions and offshoring critical manufacturing sectors and which left the country utterly vulnerable for exactly an event like Covid-19. That’s the ‘Big Fail’ of the title — that American society is so broken that most of the subsequent miscues during the pandemic followed from these underlying structural flaws. 

In Nocera and McLean’s telling, the primary villain of the pandemic isn’t Anthony Fauci or Donald Trump or any of the governors, it’s Milton Friedman and Friedman’s bottomline-driven approach to all possible social questions. “The more extreme and insidious idea was that everything in American life was measured by its ability to make money,” Nocera and McLean write of the mindset that followed from Friedman. “If it made money, it was good. If it didn’t make money, it was unworthy.”

That perspective might be defensible (barely) when applied to the larger economy, but not remotely when it came to public health. And much of Nocera and McLean’s account is a chilling, blow-by-blow rendition of all the failures of the health sector during the pandemic, with hospitals entirely unable to turn themselves around from the decades of private-sector rapaciousness. Private equity’s investment in nursing homes meant that nursing homes were operating on skeleton staffs and became the site for the most devastating spread of the virus. The profit motive in health care meant effective care for high-end patients, while lower-income hospitals in the same cities suffered from overcrowding and threadbare treatment. The continuation of business-as-usual for major hospital groups meant nursing strikes and shortages in the midst of the pandemic, while hospital chains still managed to turn profits. 

This is the critique of the pandemic response from the left, and it’s surprising that we didn’t hear more of it — the ways in which the pandemic revealed the fundamental immorality of the United States’ wealth disparity. “COVID-19 didn’t just shine a spotlight on the problems in our health-care system; it stacked multiple inequities on top of each other,” Nocera and McLean write. 

We’ve become more familiar with the critique from the right, and it turns out that there was much to take seriously in that critique as well. If Milton Friedman is the leading culprit in The Big Fail, the British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson comes in second place. Ferguson’s influential model of Covid infections and deaths turned out to be wildly inflated and pushed Western societies towards lockdowns that had no real epidemiological basis to them. “Here’s the odd thing: lockdowns became the default strategy for most of the world,” Nocera and McLean write. “Even though they had never been used before to fight a pandemic; even though their effectiveness had never been studied; and even though they were criticized as authoritarian overreach.” 

In their analysis, Ferguson takes a great deal of the blame for that — with his inflated and terrifying Covid model deliberately pushing governments to lock down, and with Boris Johnson reversing course on his Covid mitigation strategy within a week of the release of Ferguson’s findings. In Ferguson’s worldview, lockdown was viewed as a pleasant surprise — since conventional wisdom had been that democratic societies would never agree to such draconian measures. “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it, and we realized we could,” Ferguson later said. 

In Nocera and McLean’s telling, there is no excuse really either for the decision to implement lockdowns on the scale that Western societies did or to keep them in place for as long as they lasted. That decision is at some level incomprehensible — “Looking back now, one of 2020’s enduring mysteries is why Fauci was such an early and unyielding supporter of lockdowns,” Nocera and McLean write — but the best explanation of it may be that influential pockets of society simply lost the ability to think in terms of trade-offs or of nuanced solutions. “Too many people were unwilling to judge risk rationally,” Nocera and McLean write. 

That includes the teachers’ unions, which rebelled at the idea of returning to classrooms for the 2020-2021 school year, even though the risks of classroom transmission were very low and the entire school year would turn out to be, from a pedagogical point of view, a wash. And it includes the health authorities, who were unable to bring themselves to make any public announcements acknowledging that young, healthy people had completely different risk factors for Covid than the elderly or those with preexisting conditions. 

That disjunction came to a head with the Great Barrington Declaration, orchestrated by Bhattacharya and Kulldorff in late 2020, which called for a far more measured public health approach based on risk factors and which was immediately stamped on by the health authorities. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises,” NIH director Francis Collins wrote by e-mail as soon as the Declaration was published. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff found themselves ostracized — shunned by colleagues in the scientific community; heavily moderated online. In one of his early posts on pandemic response, Kulldorff had laid out a series of principles including that “in public health, open civilized debate is profoundly important” — a principle that came to have a certain irony when LinkedIn took down Kulldorf’s profile for his heretical point of view.

It was this closure of public debate, this unwillingness to tolerate dissension, that is, in Nocera and McLean’s view, the most enduring legacy of the pandemic. In the analysis of the late epidemiologist D. A. Henderson — a real hero of this account — effective epidemiological responses could only exist with a cooperative public that trusted in health authorities. A nation like Sweden moved through the pandemic largely unscathed — and with 97% of adults willing to get vaccinated — because, as Bhattacharya puts it, people “trusted the government.” By the time vaccines rolled around in the U.S., conversely, that civic trust had eroded — too many people remembered Fauci’s self-contradiction on masks and there was too great of a sense that health authorities were not forthcoming about the state of their knowledge. By the time of boosters, less than 2% of those eligible got the vaccine in the first month of distribution. 

That lack of trust comes to be the real story of the pandemic. Government and public health authorities come in for their share of criticism. “The reason [Swedes] trusted the government was that officials were honest with what they knew and what they didn’t know,” said Bhattacharya by way of pointed comparison to the U.S. “And they didn’t force people to do things that were outside their capacity to manage.” And the private sector deserves its share of the blame as well — globalization had set up a just-in-time supply system that was a wonder when everything was working well but spelled civic disaster if there were any disturbances. “We’ve completely lost the signal,” said one CEO of the shipping market a couple of years into the pandemic — and everything in American society, from defense to basic goods, suddenly appeared vulnerable. The consensus proferrred by Nocera and McLean is that Covid served as a kind of stress test for the society as a whole, with nearly every element of it found wanting — with neoliberal economics and the medical/scientific establishment and the Fed and both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations deserving of severe criticism but with the collective inability to have civilized debate or to maintain civic standards even more concerning. And in Nocera and McLean’s analysis, much of that damage is likely irreparable. 

Healing is a long process. But reaching a point of consensus is a start. There were some things to be proud of in the pandemic — Nocera and McLean are laudatory about Operation Warp Speed, about the collaboration between the DoD and the private sector. They have a lot of good to say about Steven Mnuchin. But it’s not worth pretending that all the mitigation measures (masks, lockdowns, etc) were necessary, and it’s not worth trying to pin all the initial miscues on Trump (which was the default response of so many liberals). The pandemic was a catastrophe on many fronts. The least we can do is to grapple with that. 

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Vichy was the regime that emerged in the south of France — the ‘Unoccupied Zone’ — as a result of the fall of France in 1940. In his book on Vichy, written in 1972, Robert Paxton documents the prevailing sensibility towards Vichy among the French, which is that it was “four years to strike from our history,” as one book was actually titled. As Paxton himself writes, his in-depth, authoritative work ‘failed’ because it was “too unexpected.” Everybody in post-war France treated Vichy as an aberration — as a desperation resorted to in the chaos of the fall of France and as swiftly dispensed with and disregarded in the aftermath of the Liberation of 1944. But Paxton held onto the shadow of Vichy — and I’m holding onto to sort of the coattails of Paxton — out of a belief that there were important lessons to be accrued from Vichy in much the way that there were unassimilated lessons to be taken from fascism in general. “Fascism has not yet run its course,” Paxton forebodingly writes.

The chief lesson, as Paxton discovered, is that the conventional narrative of Nazi Germany forcing a settlement on France and France being compelled to adapt to it is unavailing. The truer, and stranger, story of Vichy is, as Paxton writes, that “collaboration was a French proposal that Hitler ultimately rejected.” And, in fact, Vichy’s attitude, from 1940 to 1942, was remarkably supine, based on an idea that Germany would ultimately reward France for having proactively adopted a miniature Nazi state. Really, under the auspices of Marshal Pétain’s ‘National Revolution,’ Vichy attempted to inculcate what it took to be a winning Fascist formula in a French context, and if that did not succeed in winning complete collaboration from Nazi Germany, it was solely that Hitler was such a uniquely difficult interlocutor — that Hitler was interested in France for the purposes of revenge and of loot and not at all compelled, despite his own economic interest, in bringing France into a ‘new European order.’

The underlying premise of Vichy was that the Third Republic — convened in 1870 and shakily guiding France up until 1940 — had failed abysmally. Paxton is convincing in describing how French politics, on both left and right, was united in rejecting the Third Republic, long before the advent of German Nazism, and to the point where even the post-war liberation regime made no attempt at all to reconstitute the Third Republic. Instead, argues Paxton, both left and right, for their own reasons, believed the Third Republic to be fundamentally flawed — and that France had been in a state of “incipient civil war in the 1930s” for reasons unconnected to Hitler.

Virtually as soon as the French Army collapsed, Vichy responded. The idea was that the Third Republic had delegitimized itself on the field of battle — the Germans had “deserved to win,” wrote Teilhard de Chardin — and the decision to appeal to Marshal Pétain and for Pétain to then institute a ‘National Revolution’ were both greeted with near-unanimous acceptance by the populace of Unoccupied France.

The institution of Vichy provoked an upsurge in public sentiment that would be swiftly forgotten after the war, but was nonetheless organic and deeply felt. As the French right-wing figure Charles Maurras remarked, the events of 1940 were “a divine surprise.” From a more unexpected quarter, the novelist André Gide argued that the German victory spelled the end of “excessive freedom” and of “the sorry reign of indulgence.”

The extent of Vichy’s sudden popularity led to an onslaught of conspiracy theories, and, to be honest, it seems like there was something to them (at the very least, the OSS — the forerunner of the CIA — took the theories seriously). The gist of the conspiracy theories was that the collapse of France wasn’t entirely unexpected; that a pre-war elite, dominant above all within the armed forces, essentially took France’s defeat as foreordained and attempted to use the opportunity to impose the ‘revolution from above.’ That whole premise became subject to vigorous post-war debate with the general consensus that there hadn’t been an actual conspiracy but that the Vichy political structure, influenced by far-right ideas throughout the 1930s, was awfully quick to put into place a system derived from Fascist ideology. 

Questions of exactly how Vichy came into being are really of interest only to historians. What matters is the basic dynamic — that faith within a democratic structure collapsed internally, long before a battlefield defeat. In an age of ‘illiberalism,’ it’s worth figuring out how that could have happened. Basically — as Paxton would have put it — both left and right failed to agree on an underlying governing structure. The right was more or less in open rebellion from 1934 on (with the poetically redolent date of February 6 as the signal for disenfranchisement with the regime) and with the left more participatory in the republic’s structures but internally divided between liberalism, Communism, and the sort of performatively left politics of the Popular Front. All of this, by now, is probably starting to feel a bit familiar. 

In post-war polemic, blame went to the right for being, essentially, traitorous. It’s hard to argue with that except that, when Pétain came to power, he seemed to be speaking, with startling unanimity, for the center as well: even in the face of Hitler and of defeat, the center recoiled from any association with Communism.

The overriding sense with the establishment of Vichy was of relief; Paxton writes that it met with the same level of near-universal affirmation in 1940 that the Liberation did in 1944. Vichy’s establishment itself wasn’t particularly controversial — assuming that France’s armed forces had lost, some political entity would have had to come into being. But more startling was the vote on July 10 to scrap the entire apparatus of Third Republic constitutionalism and to invest ‘full powers’ in Marshal Pétain. Unfortunately for that programme, Pétain, in his 80s, was nearing senility, and Vichy went on to suffer the usual fate of Fascist regimes: underneath the appearance of unity, quarreling potentates siphoned off wealth and power for their own organizations. The foreign policy — of attempting to be more German than the Germans, to the point of organizing reprisals and of rounding up Jews — ran aground on Hitler’s lack of interest in anything that Vichy was doing. And the careful establishment of zones of sovereignty floundered when the Nazis, at the moment that it was expedient for them in 1942, simply disregarded the promises that they had made and seized all of Vichy territory. As Churchill laconically wrote in The Hinge of Fate of the German advance, “So much for Vichy.”

That evident failure of Vichy policy made it easy to forget how popular the regime had been for two years and how eagerly the principles of autocracy were adopted. There was a period of collaboration in 1940-41 that the Vichyites described as “rose et idyllique.” The National Revolution — with its slogan of ‘Work, Family, Homeland,’ its ubiquitous portraits of Marshal Pétain, its saccharine youth leagues — struck conservatives as exactly the sort of moralistic, family-oriented society that they had been dreaming of throughout the inter-war period. Technocrats eagerly pushed a vision of pan-European prosperity — “the insertion of the future into the present,” as Vichy’s minister of industrial production enthusiastically put it.

And with the apparent successes of Vichy in the ‘rose et idyllique’ period was a surprisingly widespread sense that events had thoroughly repudiated the individualistic society of the early part of the 20th century. “Those very features which had made France so delightful and artistically creative had ill-fitted her for the new harsh age,” wrote Paxton paraphrasing the view of the poet Paul Valéry. The Catholic philosopher Emmanuel Mounier regarded 1940 as “the judgment of history upon a whole liberal, secular, individualist worldview.” The law professor Nesmes-Desmarets wrote, “The National Revolution has done more in a year than the previous regime managed to do in a century.”

What all of this suggests — and Paxton himself seems to have been clearly surprised to uncover everything he did — was that the way we tended to think about totalitarianism was a bit too programmatic, a bit too determined by the single case of Nazi Germany. It wasn’t just the diabolical energy of Hitler that could make liberal democracies fall; it was completely possible, as in the case of 1930s France, for a republic to lose faith in itself, to start longing (near-suicidally) for autocracy and domination. There is a kind of cold shadow cast by the experience of Vichy and which connects to our era. ‘Illiberalism’ isn’t just conniving strong men or jack-booted thugs. Illiberalism emerges when both wings become too fanatical, when the center panics and revolts against the democratic structure (Paxton tries out a definition of Fascism as “hard measures by a frightened middle class”), when there is no one left who believes in the republic. In those circumstances, a republic can fall in plain sight, with no one really noticing or mourning it (as was the case in the vote of July 10). Democracies — as the West discovered in the 1920s and ‘30s — are very fragile institutions. Their survival depends not just on constant ‘vigilance’ against enemies (people seem to be good at doing that) but an unflagging belief in their intrinsic worth even at moments when sentiment across the political spectrum seems to have turned against them. 

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Best,

Sam

KELLY LINK’s White Cat, Black Dog (2023)

Kelly Link is one of these names that’s been around for a long time. Everybody seems to really like her but without her being a part of sort of mainstream literary culture. I got her book with no idea what it would be like — and had a completely enchanted experience reading it, one of these rare moments of coming across not only a special writer but a whole way of writing that you didn’t know existed. 

In a sense, Link’s formula would seem to be simple enough. She takes fairy tales and grafts them onto modern settings — the wicked stepmother archetype, for instance, turning out to be readily applicable to an era of second marriages and corporate largesse; hell easily transposable with suburbia. But Link has, as a friend puts it, “an internal compass that steers her infallibly towards strangeness,” and the real magic of her writing is the sense of, as in a fairytale, being in a world that does have stringent rules but with the rules opaque to everyone except the storyteller. 

The main question I had reading Link was: why doesn’t everyone do this? And, to some extent, Link’s ideas about writing may have infiltrated contemporary literature more than I’ve realized. “I’ve heard others refer to it as the Small Beer aesthetic,” says a friend, speaking of the press that Link and her husband founded in Northampton, as if listening to the sound of a distant echo. More globally, Link is part of a dramatic shift in writing from “realism” to the fantastical, and with fantasy, Link’s stated genre, serving a similar role as sci-fi did in the ‘50s or ‘60s, a sort of underground, sort of disreputable movement that doubles as a workshop for developing the most innovative aesthetic and most trenchant social critique of its era. I’ve been skeptical of the shift towards fantasy — in a writer like George Saunders or in the watercolorish magical realism that’s become the standard New Yorker story — but, with Link, it really works and seems to strike the perfect balance of grounding in the contemporary world with an emancipatory flight of imagination.

But the genre may be harder to pull off than Link makes it look. For one thing. Link is extremely intelligent. She has a jaundiced understanding of human relationships —there’s the sense in White Cat, Black Dog of a great deal of water flowing under the bridge, of Link being able to reduce complicated dynamics to their archetypal absolutes. And she has a real gift for economy, of capturing intricate emotions with throwaway lines. “When Gary gets home, sodden pancakes in their hopeful boxes” is the perfect depiction of a man who has just been jilted at brunch returning to his apartment hoping that everything will be normal. “He puts on Gary’s jacket, too, when Gary insists,” from the same story, is just the right way to capture, in a piece of business, the nagging, needling, loving relationship between Gary and Prince Hat. 

Even with all of Link’s gifts, the sense is that each one of these stories is difficult to pull off, each one runs a real risk of collapsing under its own conceptual structuring. ‘The White Cat’s Divorce’ is a nice starter story, an intro to the collection, but in the end a bit simple — very close to the macabre genre of fairytale it’s riffing off of. ‘The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear’ and ‘The Game of Smash and Recovery’ don’t particularly work for me. ‘The Lady and the Fox’ is a lovely Christmas story but doesn’t quite know how to land itself. 

But there are three stories in here — ‘Prince Hat Underground,’ ‘The White Road,’ and ’Skinder’s Veil’ — that are as good as anything I’ve ever read and that display Link’s ability as well as the abundant resources of her genre. 

‘The White Road’ is something of a messy story, but the basic idea of it is central to what Link is doing. In the fairy tale universe, the ordinary logic of society and morality disappears, but another kind of order takes its place. As the story’s narrator speculates, “There is some other logic to the way that all things work now, and someday we will better understand what has happened to make all things change in such a small space of time, and how we might restore ourselves to the place we once occupied in the world.” In ‘The White Road,’ this set of ideas is expressed in quasi-Christian terms. The rapture has occurred. The saved have all left for other planets. Those on earth are already in hell — but the hell-earth looks, in some respects, not all that different from the earth we know. The theater troupe anchoring the story takes care of accounts, puts on shows, has love affairs, gossips about the towns they pass through. But in this fallen-world, the world deprived of order and structure (in a word of  God), another dispensation prevails, which is the logic of the fairytale. Of spirit, memory, ritual. Of the sort of surrogate reality in which it may be possible to mourn for an actor passionately enough that the night-walkers — the resident demons — believe or half-believe that it is actually a corpse that is being mourned for. Of traumatic, life-altering childhood memories that turn out — on closer inspection — to actually have happened to somebody else. Imagination takes on a heightened role in Link’s universe — with the given circumstances of the story constantly half-created by the story’s protagonists. 

There’s a similar dynamic in ‘Skinder’s Veil,’ the closing story of the collection. The central issue for the protagonist, the statistics grad student Andy, is that he has no imagination. As his roommate, who is not really all that much more imaginative, says of him, “You know how people talk about the unconscious and the id? The attic and the basement? The places you don’t go? If you drew a picture of Andy’s psyche it would be Andy, standing outside of the house where he lives.” But, somewhere in the midst of the hyper-real depictions of Andy’s dissertation travails and roommate dramas, his world starts to enchant. His roommate’s girlfriend — inexplicably drawn to his roommate — turns out to be magnetized to him because she’s hounded by a ghost and he has the handy quality of being “ghost-repellent.” His friend’s summer housesitting gig turns out to be in a very pleasant, very unusual house, constantly visited by fairy tale characters, as well as wild turkeys and bears. None of the stories those characters tell, reports the narrator, “are cheerful — in all of them, someone came to a bad end but there was nothing to be learned from them.” Andy doesn’t really take all that much from his experience — finishes his dissertation, has his career as a statistician, although at critical turns his evaluators are visited in their dreams by a bear who tells them to give him the job or promotion he wants — and then, when he’s much older and his wayward grad school period long behind him, he visits the same house where he spent the summer and finds himself to be a much stranger, more enchanted creature than he would ever have suspected. 

But it’s ‘Prince Hat Underground’ that’s really the masterpiece here. The analogic undergirding of the story is straightforward enough. Gary is married to the devilishly handsome, mysterious Prince Hat. The relationship has its well-grooved habits. “This was Prince Hat’s pattern: to find his way into anyone’s bed. And this was Gary’s: to lure him out again.” And, maybe even more tellingly, to have their Sunday brunch at a restaurant where Gary “always orders the eggs Benedict, Prince Hat whatever his heart desires.” As endlessly indulgent as Gary is, he does sometimes, as the story’s opening line has it, wonder, “And who, exactly, is Prince Hat?” And the rest of the story answers that question — with Gary finding himself a very fussy, unwilling, and yet relentlessly brave visitor to hell (which is also suburbia) determined to save his husband from the worst possible fate, marriage to a waterbed-owning bridezilla, a queen of the cul-de-sac. It’s the tacking between the directly-metaphoric and the wildly-whimsical that really makes ‘Prince Hat Underground’ — the sense that the story is following its fairytale architecture and getting at the heart of Gary and Prince Hat’s relationship and is in a place of incredible freedom, Link creating worlds as she works, Link having so much fun as she does so. 

SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022)

It’s been a nice couple of weeks for me for my fiction reading — two books, both really interesting and good, in genres that I didn’t know existed, in this case Buddhist noir. 

The premise of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is that Maali, “photographer, gambler, slut,” wakes up in the afterlife and discovers it to be pretty much exactly the same thing as the war-torn Sri Lanka he had just been inhabiting. Maali has to solve his own murder — which very much seems to be at the hands of a government death squad — and, most trenchantly, he has to decide whether he wishes to move into The Light, accepting an orderly Buddhistic process of death, or else to stay in the In Between and seek revenge for all the injustices besetting Sri Lanka. 

It’s a smart setting for a novel, and a difficult decision. The great strength of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is the feeling that this, as much as anything, does seem a plausible rendition of the afterlife. The questions aren’t all answered. There’s a new sort of spiritual landscape but no great transformation — as all the characters, with bitterness, observe. “Fool, there is no afterlife, only this shit,” says one of the “garbagemen” of the death squad. Which, really, isn’t bad theology. “Karma failed you. God failed you. On earth as it is up here,” says Sena, Maali’s chief guide to the afterlife — as well as the recruiting officer for a demon army.

And Maali’s confusion really is understandable. Going to The Light comes across, in the midst of Sri Lanka’s civil war and its rampant corruption, like the height of selfishness. But, meanwhile, the impotence even of spirits is beyond frustrating. The primary activity of the spirits is to stand behind those they wish to convey messages to and — although the living may well sense the presence of the beyond — futilely attempt to get through to them. “You whisper, you hiss, you bellow, you shout — and still she does not hear,” Maali observes of a typically unsatisfying encounter. The dead, in general, are bewildered and hapless. Many queue up at an eternal bureaucracy — “a gathering point for those with questions about their death.” Others linger in the place they departed — the traumatized most of all. “Like any gathering of crashing bores talking shop, these suicides are talking about suicide,” says Maali of a convocation of suicides hanging off the ledges of the Hotel Leo. 

In the landscape of the afterlife, which is so much like the landscape of late 1980s Sri Lanka, Sena’s extreme solution makes a great deal of sense — enlist the demon Mahakali, work with a sorcerer, plan out a suicide bombing to strike at the government’s death squad and the government ministers. And, for much of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, that comes across as a nobler approach than anything related to wisdom or forgiveness. “We are the ones who will give justice for all those killed. Who will allow those without graves to find vengeance,” says Sena in his recruiting pitch. 

That’s a strong concept, with ample dramatic tension. As a novel, it does drag a bit, though. The hard-boiled prose, if mostly effective and amusing, can be a bit much (“Follow any turd upstream and it leads to a member of parliament”; “you get that feeling of someone walking over your grave and defecating on it”). I have the sense that the tight plotting of The Seven Moons — and Karunatilaka is really juggling a lot of different plotlines, the story of Maali’s decision and the story of his hunt for the killer and various backstory events involving his war photography work and a search for the incendiary photo negatives he left behind and the cute cosmopolitan story of his relationships with his upper-class boyfriend and with his best female friend — all work at cross-purposes to the real emotional weight of the novel, which is Maali’s anguished decision about whether to try to redeem Sri Lanka or else move on from it. 

The surprise for me — and this, certainly, is the first Sri Lankan novel I’ve read — is how venomous Karunatilaka is towards his country. There is much blame to go around — to colonialism, to the CIA’s torture seminars — but most anger is reserved for Sri Lankans themselves. “How ugly we all are when reduced to meat. How ugly this beautiful land is,” reflects Maali. And his dearest wish — never really redeemed by any surge of patriotism — is to have nothing further to do with it. “Let’s go to San Francisco and let this shit country burn to the ground,” says Maali at a tender moment with his boyfriend. “I’m done with this shithole,” he declares as soon as he’s gotten lucky at cards.

Throughout, The Seven Moons reminded me of Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik, which, Sorokin says, he wrote “as an uninterrupted stream of bile.” But there are differences. There is a more pronounced sense, in The Seven Moons, of the essential powerlessness of the developing world. “Don’t try and look for the good guys ’cause there ain’t none,” writes Maali in a “cheatsheet” for Western journalists — it’s not even a matter of overthrowing a corrupt and despotic elite; the grinding poverty of Sri Lanka makes it so that meaningful reform is not only impossible but virtually inconceivable. As Sena reports of the deferential habits that follow him into the afterlife: “From a young age we are brainwashed into calling mediocre people ‘hamu’ and ‘sir,’” he says. “It is the only way we can enter parts of the city.” And a suicide in a meditative mood — thinking on Sri Lanka’s high suicide rate — speculates that it is because “We have just the right amount of education to understand that the world is cruel and just enough corruption and inequality to feel powerless against it.” 

It really is a very hopeless vision. No solutions, no meaningful reforms — least of all through war photography or through righteous uprisings. All that’s there, really, is the consolations of religion in its purest form — of people helping one another in their small ways, as best as they can, with no anticipation of its leading to anything better. 

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I’m sharing the regular book reviews — these are more wide-ranging discussions of the themes of a work than a standard review.

Best,

Sam

RONAN FARROW’s Catch and Kill (2019)

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Weinstein story recently — just watched the hagiographic She Said, which chronicles The New York Times’ reporting; and, now, read Catch and Kill, which documents The New Yorker’s. The feeling — why I think I’m dwelling on it at the moment — is the sense that this is what my generation decided to do with itself. As Zadie Smith wrote in a review of Tár, “I have this sense that every generation has about two or three great ideas and a dozen or so terrible ones” — and the main idea that my generation had was that we could create clear boundary lines in sexual interactions by, first, using journalism to expose the assaults of workplace predators.

I’d missed much of the blow-by-blow of the initial round of reporting and have found myself thinking more about the follow-up — about people like Junot Díaz, who seems to have been somewhere over the line but significantly short of clear-cut assault; about ‘Diego’ in Elizabeth Weil’s New York story who was effectively canceled by his high school for showing friends a nude picture of his girlfriend; about Mary Gaitskill’s fictional Quin, whom she describes as being one of the many, many guys who is “totally in between” being a sexual predator and a straight arrow and whose conduct is very difficult to categorically assess.

This has turned out to be the trench warfare of MeToo — all these head-scratchers about what exactly the boundaries are in sexual dynamics and where the law and the press should show up. Catch and Kill belongs to a different set of concerns — and, in a way, a different era. This was about the impunity of extremely powerful people — Weinstein, above all, but also Matt Lauer, Trump, and, more in the background, people like NBC head Andy Lack or National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard. As keeps being emphasized by Farrow, what matters just as much as the sexual assaults themselves is the system of extremely professional, well-compensated lawyers, executives, pseudo-journalists, and industrial spies who work together to, as Farrow puts it, “protect predators”; and what matters just as much as that is the industry culture that constantly looks the other way, that constantly defers to power and incessantly prioritizes profit and convenience over doing the right thing.

Catch and Kill is so much in the public consciousness that I thought I knew what it was about — about Weinstein, and patterns of sexual assault in media, and The New Yorker, and spies — and, to my surprise, it turned out mostly to be about….NBC. The majority of the book is about the NBC brass developing cold feet over its Weinstein reporting, then slow-walking it, then submitting it to “corporate review”, then killing the story altogether, then actively attempting to deny that it had ever killed it — until, with the accusations against Matt Lauer following Weinstein, the whole NBC leadership toppled like a house of cards. Farrow typically presents himself as a fairly dispassionate reporter — the vibe is of a naif finding himself in the deep dark woods and scrambling for survival as best he can — but he boils over a couple of times, once when he hears the unvarnished account of the most violent of Weinstein’s rapes (“The memory erupted in ragged sobs. You heard Annabella Sciorra struggle to tell her story once, and it stayed inside you forever.”) and once when the feckless-beyond-all-belief Noah Oppenheim, Farrow’s boss at NBC News, delivers his final plea for mercy, saying that the story had been squashed because of “a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward.” That bit of corporate-speak, in place of an actual human apology or explanation, is the last straw for Farrow. He writes: 

And there it was, at the end of his arguments: an unwillingness not just to take responsibility but to admit that responsibility might, in some place, in someone else’s hands, exist….That anodyne phrase, that language of indifference without ownership, upheld so much silence in so many places. It was a consensus about the organization’s comfort level moving forward that protected Harvey Weinstein and men like him; that yawned and gaped and enveloped law firms and PR shops and executive suites and industries; that swallowed women whole.

After reading Catch and Kill, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could watch NBC, or any of the channels like it, ever again. It wasn’t just that NBC shied away from a cutting piece of journalism — it was that journalism, at a place like it, in the era of corporate overlordship, was impossible. As Farrow puts it, “Oppenheim scrunched his nose and held journalism at arm’s length, afraid it might get on him.” It becomes completely clear that NBC is media-as-entertainment, with a very light patina of ‘journalism,’ that NBCUniversal makes the critical decisions, and that it is owned by people like Weinstein. “You need to get your boy in line,” said Weinstein of Farrow to MSNBC head Phil Griffin, to which Griffin replied dutifully, “Harvey, he’s not running it with us.” The quid pro quo was both casual and explicit — most memorably, with Weinstein sending a bottle of Grey Goose vodka to Oppenheim in thanks for having had the story spiked, but also in the constant exchange of access for favorable press.

One of the quieter storylines of Catch and Kill is Farrow’s gradual disillusionment with television journalism as a whole. After one particularly dispiriting meeting with Oppenheim — during which, Farrow writes, “I tasted battery acid in my mouth and had red parentheses in my palms where I had pressed nails to skin” — he walks into an elevator bank and sees an old poster saying, “NBC is in color now. You can watch it in color. Isn’t it amazing?” and has a moment of thinking: “And it was amazing. It truly was.” But the corruption of the networks in-the-age-of-corporate-overlordship overwhelms the wonders of color. In his first meetings at The New Yorker, after NBC has walked away from the story, Farrow describes himself as “being like those videos where lab animals walk on grass for the first time,” not realizing that he can actually speak freely, that all language won’t be coded in corporate-speak and legalese pushback. By the end, the storyline is of print reclaiming a devotee. David Remnick, the New Yorker’s editor, thinks of Farrow as “a TV guy” and, as the Weinstein reporting is wrapping up, says to him, “You don’t want to keep this forever, do you?,” but Farrow, glancing around The New Yorker’s offices, is surprised to discover that, actually, “I realized I did.”

What emerges from the narrative is the complete failure of institutional culture to hold people like Weinstein — and Lauer and Lack and Howard — accountable. HR, in-house counsel, institutional safeguards, etc, all serve at the behest of the hierarchical structure. As Farrow writes, “With painful frequency, stories of abuse by powerful people are also stories of failures of board culture.” And maybe most chilling to me — of all of the sordid details in Catch and Kill — is the way that Weinstein’s assistants were routinely deployed as pimps and emotional extortionists. One of his victims, Ally Canosa, describes begging off from Weinstein’s advances and heading to her own hotel room only for the “barrage of texts from his assistants to start up: ‘Harvey wants to see you, Harvey wants to see you.’” And, with that, there is an endless appreciation for institutions that do keep it together, that have actual safeguards in place. The New Yorker is a real star of the show in Catch and Kill — with a robust legal team that is willing to stand up to Weinstein’s assorted threats; and a fact-checking department that provides sufficient cover for The New Yorker to go to press with the story without being particularly afraid of a lawsuit. 

And what’s striking, in the sort of B-story of Catch and Kill (that of Black Cube and “the world of espionage and endless action”), is the haplessness of the spies to intercept the reporting either of The New York Times or of The New Yorker. In spite of all the cloak-and-dagger drama, it seems like the spies were never close to killing the story once Farrow left NBC and took it to The New Yorker. The sense, with the whole spy episode (which is not so easy to get one’s mind around), is that this assignment was off-brand for them. The spies didn’t like following a reporter or covering for a rapist and, in short order, they had turned on their employers and were leaking all kinds of things to Farrow. In the end, it’s sort of just an interesting glimpse of tradecraft — a whole world that I didn’t really know existed but seems to be fairly far-flung, in which somebody like the deeply-intriguing Stella Penn Pechanac, a Bosnian-Israeli, is able to find an “ideal compromise” between her acting ambitions and military background, infiltrating all sorts of entities, playing a part all of her life.

As for what matters most, the stories of the women harassed, assaulted, and raped by Weinstein (and by Trump, Lauer, etc, etc), the accounts are maybe even more harrowing than we remember them from the initial, careful reporting. There’s Weinstein’s endlessly-repeated routine of inviting women to professional meetings, shifting the meeting to his hotel room, and then demanding that the women massage him or join him in the shower. There’s Weinstein breaking into Annabella Sciorra’s apartment and forcibly raping her. And then there are the threats and the systematic efforts to destroy the careers of women who refused his advances or complained about what he had done.

The overwhelming sense is that the system that was in place before #MeToo was completely unavailing — the law and the workplace institutions were an insufficient recourse. The dam did have to break and if we’re now in a completely different (and deeply problematic) dispensation, in which charges of harassment and inappropriate behavior are settled over social media, it’s also true that the old system of ‘institutional safeguards’ was never, ever going to protect women from systematic assault in highly-hierarchical companies. To get there really did take incredible courage by Farrow and by The New York Times reporters and by the women who broke their NDAs to share their stories. With all of the different twists and turns of the #MeToo era and its never-ending fallout, that initial courage should never be forgotten. 

ANDREW BACEVICH’s Washington Rules (2010)

I’ve been concerned in my political writing here that I’ve been drifting too far to the center-right. This probably has less to do with underlying beliefs that it does with living in a liberal part of the country and therefore finding liberal perspectives more immediately annoying than conservative ones. I do mean to take in left-wing critiques, and do scan regularly through left-leaning publications. At the moment, I’m finding — and this is my general sense from reading through The Nation, Grist, TomDispatch, etc — that the left is pretty intellectually bankrupt, rallying around a series of feel-good talking points without much regard to the actual movements of power. But there is one domain where I find the left to still have an abidingly trenchant perspective — and that’s in the critique of America’s military spending and of the military-industrial complex in general. 

Colonel Andrew Bacevich, Vietnam veteran, West Point instructor, and unlikely hero of the left, has been making this point for a long time, very cogently, and if I don’t agree with everything in Bacevich’s argument, I do find it important to take it in. As Bacevich writes acidly in Washington Rules, “Call it habit or conditioning or socialization. The citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited any capacity to ask first order questions about the fundamentals of national security policy.”

And, yes, that’s absolutely right. Congress — and, with it, the democratic electorate — seems to have no meaningful oversight over the American Armed Forces and, with that, the extension of American power overseas. As fractious as Congress is, a startlingly bipartisan consensus exists to — as it were — negate Congress’ own authority and to write the Pentagon a blank check every year. At the moment that’s $858 billion, very soon to cross the trillion mark — which is nearly half of all federal discretionary spending. And, incidentally, nobody really knows what that money is spent on — the Pentagon, which has never successfully passed an audit, is only able to account for 39% of its assets. What pops up in the back pages of newspaper and the margins of everybody’s attention is a sequence of foreign wars, in places like Yemen, Niger, Somalia, that have passed through no public debate, that have no discernible purpose, but that contribute to the state of ‘permanent war,’ the war machine cranking ever-forward, and with massive handouts to contractors and the defense industry. 

It’s very hard to argue with Bacevich’s central thesis. Were we in a genuine functioning democracy, our public conversations would be all about this military spending and the ways that it is exercised. Since we never talk about it — the defense department’s allocation never creates a ripple in the national consciousness, and even ‘well-informed’ Americans would be hard-pressed to say where the United States is fighting at any given moment — the inference is obvious that we’re not really a democracy. We’re an empire, passed into the condition of being an empire a long time ago (in the ‘40s and ‘50s), and our entire civic life, with our elections and our party politics, is more or less a sort of bread-and-circuses, while the real work of politics is about quietly maintaining what Bacevich calls ‘Washington rules’ — the quiet consensus within the halls of power that keeps the empire humming, that maintains dominant power globally at all times, and that for deeply opaque reasons is far more willing to cut a check for fixing up Helmand Province in Afghanistan than for “fixing up Cleveland or Detroit.” 

Washington Rules splits into two parts, both (for different reasons) equally compelling and frustrating. The first part is the history of the post-war period and the establishment of the ‘Washington consensus.’ The real trick to understanding it, Bacevich claims, is through the lens of inter-branch rivalry. The early period of the Cold War, under the laissez-faire rule of Eisenhower, featured the twin fiefdoms of Allen Dulles’ CIA and Curtis LeMay’s Air Force (specifically the Strategic Air Command) dueling for supremacy. Bacevich cites the jaw-dropping statistic that, by 1960, the Air Force had 46% of the Pentagon’s budget share. “By the end of the Eisenhower administration all the elements of the Washington rules were firmly in place,” Bacevich writes — the CIA and the Air Force were in their different ways conducting the Cold War pretty much on their own, the Air Force pushing the massive development of nuclear weapons and edging towards confrontation with the Soviet Union, the CIA creating its own empire around the Third World. In Bacevich’s telling, the two entities were really more concerned with each other than they were with any alleged Communist threat — the “CIA saving the world from the SAC,” as longtime CIA officer Ted Shackley saw it, while the SAC viewed itself as “insulating the United States from any backlash triggered by CIA mischief-making.” Meanwhile, civilian leadership had almost completely abdicated any responsibility, with Eisenhower reduced to “ally and enabler,” and, as he articulated it in his “military-industrial complex” Farewell Address, a sort of hostage of his own Armed Forces. 

The ‘60s, in Bacevich’s interpretation, are understood as the Kennedy administration attempting to restore some sort of balance among the various branches but doing so by, at Maxwell Taylor’s instigation, elevating the Army. That, in Bacevich’s view, is what Vietnam really was — the Army catching up to the other branches and the Washington consensus firmly taking hold now with all players at the table (Army, Air Force, CIA, as well as civilian leadership) in sync with one another. Bacevich quotes a 1965 report by National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy advocating for the bombing of North Vietnam by saying, “What we can say is even if this fails the policy will be worth it.” In other words, Bacevich is suggesting, the Vietnam War had nothing really to do with conditions in Vietnam and everything to do with both showing force and creating the inter-agency balance needed to maintain the ‘Washington rules.’ “Somehow, in faraway Southeast Asia, the continued tenability of the Washington consensus was at stake,” Bacevich writes. 

The ‘70s are understood as a disruption of the Washington Consensus, which was then soldered back into place by the late ‘90s with Madeline Albright and William Cohen as the epitome of the Consensus-recalibrated. The real split that came to the fore in Iraq was, Bacevich writes, between a doctrine of conventional warfare advocated for by Colin Powell and practiced in the Persian Gulf War and Donald Rumsfeld’s vaunted ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’ — with tech and information replacing conventional weaponry and with the United States’ edge in technological development at the turn of the millennium perceived to give the U.S. complete global dominance. Like the failures of Vietnam, the Iraq insurgency should have forced a profound reevaluation of the Washington Consensus — as Bacevich writes, “Rumsfeld’s much-hyped formula for military supremacy turned out to be ersatz” — but, instead, and this is the real focus of Washington Rules, the Consensus took a different direction, with the deeply-discredited Vietnam-era principle of counterinsurgency (COIN) applied to Iraq and Afghanistan and with a reform-minded president, Obama, all too easily persuaded to double-down on military operations rather than withdrawing from them. 

If the historical passages of Washington Rules are marred by a somewhat reductionistic tendency (I don’t think it’s fair to assess the Kennedy administration as being simply a tool of the Army), the chapters on the 2000s run the risk of turning into a screed. Bacevich really hates David Petraeus and he never pauses to consider any perspectives that might run counter to his own. It’s taken completely for granted that the United States is the sole superpower and is, in a sense, the only nation with any agency, and it goes similarly unquestioned that the practice of overseas warfare can only result from a sort of bureaucratic self-satisfaction. On the topic of Russia and China, Bacevich writes, “Josef Stalin is long gone, as is the Soviet empire. Red China has simply become China….where promoting exports ranks well above Mao’s teachings.” 

Those lines have not aged well in the intervening decade, and Bacevich’s insistence that any rational, non-militaristic policy would result in the immediate drawdown of U.S. forces around the world doesn’t take into account the counter-argument that there are other powers, that the United States does have adversaries, and that a reduction of imperial energies may not exactly lead to a concert of nations but would simply result in other imperial powers picking up the slack. In one of the most questionable passages in Washington Rules, Bacevich writes: “With the advent of World War II, the tradition of America as exemplar — now widely and erroneously characterized as isolationism — stood discredited.” 

That seems, clearly, what Bacevich would like to return to — a vision of republican virtue, as laid out by George Washington in his Farewell Address and continued up until the 20th century. The issue is that times changed, the world became more global, and America, whether it wanted to or not, did get pulled into international politics. With the outbreak of World War II, the idea of remaining proudly natural was isolationism — I’m not sure how Bacevich manages to quibble with that word. And the result of World War II was that America found itself with various international entanglements. I’m not sure at what point Bacevich would have wanted to retreat into republican virtue — by not participating in Land Lease? by not instigating the Marshall Plan? by not extending protection to a variety of countries, West Germany, Austria, South Korea, Taiwan, that really were at risk of invasion by Communist powers? It seems difficult, as Bacevich seems to want to do, to treat the 1970s as a golden era of U.S. foreign policy — I’m not exactly sure how he interprets OPEC or the Iranian Hostage Crisis. And, of course, I’m not sure how he would spin the present — with Putin on the offensive, with the Soviet empire not exactly looking ‘long gone,’ and with China both militaristic and expansionistic. 

I have to say that the Ukraine War strikes me as speaking to the wisdom of the Washington Consensus. The Pentagon’s bloated budget, the United States’ global presence, did seem ripe for reevaluation through the 2000s and 2010s, but, when Russia invades a sovereign country that has no wish to be part of Russia, it turns out that the sole guarantee of Ukraine’s continued independence is American munitions and American financial support — exactly the exercise of imperial power that Bacevich, writing in 2010, was so contemptuous of. 

But if American support for Ukraine turns out to be that unlikeliest of events, a ‘just war,’ that does not, however, obviate the rest of Bacevich’s argument. He’s right that the Pentagon’s budget and the doctrine of global domination should, at the very least, be questioned as part of the democratic process. He’s right that something different and possibly irrevocable occurred in the 2000s — he blames Petraeus — with the state of ‘permanent readiness’ shifting to a state of ‘permanent war’ and with various dirty wars, under the COIN umbrella, proliferating around the world. “Challenging the Washington Consensus requires first establishing the proposition that viable alternatives to permanent war do exist,” Bacevich writes. And Bacevich, I believe, is right in his basic analysis of the ‘50s, of Vietnam, and of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars — the ostensible enemies didn’t really matter and were ever-shifting. What mattered were the branches of the Armed Forces, the ambitions of specific chiefs, and then the rectifying work of civilian regimes to smooth over disagreements in the Armed Forces usually by making the pie larger and spreading it around more equitably as opposed to seriously engaging with the underlying purpose of one or another conflict. 

It’s really wild that these sorts of conversations are still considered ‘fringe.’ They’re in the public record but not part of mainstream history, and the implications of this mode of thought are almost never discussed in mainstream media. The justice of a conflict like Ukraine aside, this is the conversation that we should be constantly having. I’m not sure that Bacevich’s vision of republican virtue is possible — personally, I’m more of an avowed imperialist — but it is true that the Washington Consensus has almost nothing in common with the United States’ founding values and we really are overdue to have a reckoning with that. 

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I’m sharing the New(ish) Books post of the week - in this case, including one not-new-at-all book.

Best,

Sam

CARL ERIK FISHER’s The Urge: Our History of Addiction (2022)

There’s a book I was hoping to read when I picked up The Urge. That book was something like a philosophical meditation on addiction: to addiction what The Myth of Sisyphus is to suicide. The thesis of it might be something like, addiction is the expression of our society. Whether it’s capitalism, stress, consumerism, we are all fundamentally addicts. That couldn’t be more clear seeing the way people are with their smart phones - and while there might be some disagreement about whether patterns of addiction are a reflection of our era or simply a deep truth about the human psyche cunningly crystallized by contemporary consumerism, what seemed clear was that more conventional addictions (drugs, alcohol) offered some orientation for the rest of us as we navigated the era of full-blown addiction. 

The Urge is not that book. It’s at the same time more sweeping and more modest - a sort of encyclopedia of America’s grapplings with addiction combined with a harrowing account of the author’s own alcoholism, and all of it highly granular, highly resistant to any sweeping conclusions. If there is an overall thesis, it’s that “reductionist” approaches to addiction are never helpful, and that any approach to conceptualizing the problem (the ‘disease model’ or the ‘moral failings model’) inevitably reveals intrinsic shortcomings and gets replaced in yet another turn of fashion. This sort of attunement to complexity, this allergy to generalization, probably comes with the territory for any writer who has really studied a thorny topic closely, but it also makes for a frustrating book. It’s very easy to be overwhelmed by the welter of details in The Urge and not so simple to even say what I learned from it. 

Basically, there have been so many turns of the wheel in the conceptualization and treatment of addiction that, one ends up concluding, everything has been tried before, everything is insufficient. Here’s some of what I learned in reading The Urge. 

• The first great temperance drive was initiated by a Mohegan preacher, Samson Occom, who in 1772 explicitly linked the epidemic of alocholism with exploitation, denouncing alcohol traders “who put their bottles to their neighbors’ mouths to make them drunk.” 

• The temperance movement was surprisingly late to come, even though Americans in the early republic were drinking alcohol at a truly gargantuan rate. Declaration of Independence signee Benjamin Rush struck the first blow for the ‘disease’ model by, in 1791, calling “habitual drunkenness a form of insanity.” But it was as if Rush “passed the torch from medicine to religion” and the ‘moral failing’ school took off when Lyman Beecher, in 1826, delivered his seminal sermons viewing alcoholism as a demonic entity requiring constant vigilance. 

• The AA model exists in surprisingly cogent form in the mid-19th century Washingtonians, an egalitarian group emphasizing fellowship and mutual uplift.

• The Purdue Pharma pattern of pushing out a deeply unsafe product on the marketplace is nothing new - with both morphine and cocaine widely disseminated by the medical profession throughout the 19th century and addiction epidemics for a long time going unnoticed by doctors. 

• As with so much else in social relations, the 1880s emerge as a very dark decade in the conceptualization of addiction - with a more therapeutic approach to addiction generally abandoned and “prohibition on the march.” 

• The great impetus for drug prohibition actually comes from the American occupation of the Philippines, with the missionary bishop Charles Henry Brent pushing for a complete ban on opium and then helping to bring that sensibility to the mainland U.S. 

• The story of AA is a bit more muddled than I’d realized it was. The idea of alcoholism as a ‘disease’ isn’t particularly embedded in AA literature - Bill Wilson viewed it always as a “hybrid condition” - but the language of ‘disease’ spread under the charismatic influence of Marty Mann. Meanwhile, the ‘Minnesota Model’ of rehab advocating interventions and confrontation was a late arrival to AA - and was, to an unseemly degree, influenced by Synanon, the AA group-turned-cult. 

Probably most interesting of all is the story of the ‘heretical data’ of the 1970s, with a series of studies indicating that there were effective alternative approaches to addiction other than the strictly abstinent AA model, and that addiction was often less of a one-way street than was frequently supposed.

This is sort of where Fisher lands - on the slightly more touchy-feely, fluid-treatment side of handling addictions. He inveighs at every chance he can against “reductionist narratives,” against “quick fixes and simplistic stories.” But, as in keeping for such a complex topic, even the case against reductionism is, in a weird way, a sort of reductionism. Part of the challenge with addiction is that it disrupts the normal functioning of the organism and sometimes, as is very clear, extreme solutions and ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches are the most effective means to wrangle with virtually untreatable addictions. Bill Wilson was captivated by a William James passage claiming that “the only radical remedy I know for dipsomania is religomania,” which is certainly an interesting thought - that, with extreme addictions, we move out of the normal band of secular psychology and only faith (if not fanaticism) is equal to the immense challenges of regaining and retaining sobriety. 

And Fisher’s attempts to be utterly fair-minded and anti-reductionist can get absurd when it comes to heroin and cocaine. For him, much of the failures of anti-drug movements have to do with the reductionist divisions between ‘good drugs’ and ‘bad drugs’ and the facile moralism that, for instance, “drove negative stereotypes of heroin users.” But. Look. Either cocaine and heroin are dangerous substances or they’re not. It’s one thing to blame negative and often racist-based stereotypes for tough approaches to heroin and crack, but that’s not the end of the story. Heroin, coke, and crack clearly do disrupt the brain chemistry, and ruin the lives, of many, many users, and whatever the approach is to tackling their abuse, it’s really not sufficient to just blame ‘stereotypes’ and ‘reductionist’ mentalities. 

I can certainly sympathize with Fisher’s difficulty in drawing any clear conclusions from the copious data that he presents to readers. In describing - movingly - his own alcoholism, Fisher writes of one very difficult moment in which he had to decide whether to accept an in-treatment program, “I talked myself in circles. I watched myself spin around and the spinning felt sick.” Fisher describes writing this book as being, in a sense, part of his continued recovery - an attempt to try to sort through the whirlwind of contradictory information about addiction and, more specifically, to find some breathing space for himself outside of the received pieties of the AA model. 

In terms of any conclusion that I would draw, I guess I find myself somewhat aligned with Bill Wilson’s basic premises in the founding of AA. That it gets a bit silly to choose between the ‘disease’ or the ‘problem of the will’ premise, that addiction is a ‘hybrid’ condition, made up of ‘physical, mental, and spiritual’ elements, but that, paradoxically, a complex problem can admit of fairly straightforward solutions. In the case of AA, that was faith, abstinence, and fellowship. None of which is to say that there aren’t other approaches to reining in alcoholism, but that in designing a comprehensive program, simplicity and replicability are virtues.

What’s a bit missing from Fisher’s account are some of the utopian flights of fancy that Wilson and AA get into. The idea isn’t just that AA is fixing the specific problem of addiction. It’s that society itself is in a state of addiction, and that AA, like any religious community, offers a model for harmonious relations that can then be passed on even to those who don’t, narrowly speaking, have problems with alcohol or narcotics. As Fisher writes, somewhat begrudgingly, of his positive experience in the alcohol treatment center, “Like all the other best parts of rehab, it was nothing more than the experience of being around people who understood.” 

In other words, all the medical jargon, and all the emphasis on best-fit solutions, are to some extent missing the point - which is to deal with addiction as an existential issue. The Buddha and St Augustine are mentioned briefly in The Urge - their point, the real basis of both Buddhism and Christianity, would be that everybody exists in a state of ‘craving,’ of ‘attachment,’ and that the path to better living lies precisely in this very deep battle with the root of craving. Baudelaire and Dostoevsky both treat modernity as, essentially, a kind of addiction writ large - the modern condition understood as compulsive behavior and with the form of the compulsion (whether gamboling, narcotics, or capitalist enterprise) understood as being sort of incidental to the underlying ‘urge.’ In any case, the iPhone makes this more than apparent. It becomes hard to talk about addiction either as a failure of the will or as a disease - it’s obvious enough that, in the context of a society-wide addiction, everybody becomes an addict - but the legacy of two centuries of temperance and AA are interesting to draw upon. Addiction itself but may not be a ‘failure of the will,’ but will turns out to be a very useful tool in the path towards health. The understanding is that the wonder drugs - Ozempic, methadone, and, before that, cocaine (!) - take you only so far. The real ‘work’ of addiction is a tough inner battle, a grappling with one’s inner demons and a drive to ask oneself: who do you really want to be? 

PETER BROWN’s The Making of Late Antiquity (1993)

For no very clear reason, I’m going through a Roman history phase at the moment. I suspect the real reason is just that it’s fun and I didn’t know much of it before, but the smart-sounding reason would be that there are certain uncomfortable parallels to our own era in the decline of Roman civilization through the 3rd century CE. 

What’s been on my mind is the sense that the slide from the Republic, and then from the rule of emperors in tandem with the Senate, to blatant autocracy is understood, in the context of that era, less as an aberration than as an inevitability. The politics of the 3rd century is a never-ending succession of palace coups, assassinations, mutinies by soldiers against their emperors, civil wars between claimants for the throne, and ending, finally, in the iron rule of a series of strong emperors, Aurelian, Diocletian, and Constantine. To any Roman of this period, it would have seemed obvious that republican rule was a mirage - a distant memory, deeply outmoded, and kept alive only through a corrupt and ineffectual Senate. 

If modern American history is - in the ways that matter - a turn from a logic of a republic to a logic of empire, we seem to be at a particularly difficult moment. There was a genuine constitutional crisis in January, 2021 - the National Guard and the Capitol Police seemed less-than-nimble in protecting their elected legislators from a mob attack - and it took an intrinsic sense of civics by people like Mike Milley and Mike Pence to keep a very difficult situation from escalating further. Meanwhile, a certain optimistic myth about America’s role in the world seems, rapidly, to be crumbling - and, if American power internationally is none the worse for that, it stands more exposed as imperialism-for-its-own-sake, untethered to any soaring rhetoric about ‘freeing the world’ or ‘making the world safe for democracy.’ 

The 3rd century offers lessons in another sphere as well. What’s most arresting about it, from our vantage-point, is the sense of mentality shifting completely - of, as Peter Brown puts it, a transition from “one dominant lifestyle and forms of expression to another.” I’ve been a bit haunted, ever since I saw the before-and-after of Roman art of the 1st century and Roman art of the 4th century, with the sense that something went wrong - that the technically-masterful verist art of the Augustan period was replaced several centuries later by the rock-hewn slab of, say, the bust of Constantine. Of course, another era, looking at the art of the late 19th century as opposed to the art of the late 20th, might say the same about us - that at some spiritual level, we lost our grip, lost our basic grounding in reality, which, at first blush, doesn’t seem quite fair as a critique, but, then, again, may have something to it.

In a series of lectures in 1976 (published in book-form in 1993), Brown, who was for a long time the foremost scholar of this period, put together a much more sophisticated and granular understanding of the inner life of the 3rd century. For Brown, most of the ready-at-hand binaries - pagan v. Christian, rational v. superstitious, etc - are facile and fail to do justice to the dynamics of what was really happening in the very-dramatic period of transition. His overriding thesis is that the move from Augustus to Constantine wasn’t about becoming more religious or more otherworldly; in both systems, as Brown writes, “religion was taken absolutely for granted and belief in the supernatural occasioned far less excitement than we might at first sight suppose.” What shifted had to do with the dynamics of conceiving of divinity - with “divine power defined with increasing clarity as the opposite of all other forms of power.” 

In the pagan model, divinity was fairly widespread and easygoing. Various communities - and, usually, the notables of communities, through time-honored means (temples, oracles, etc) - had access to the divine. In the period of transition, “a highly privileged area of human behavior and of human relations was demarcated....and Mediterraneans came to accept, in increasing numbers and with increasing enthusiasm, that this divine power was represented on earth by a limited number of human agents.” 

Christianity, in Brown’s analysis, wasn’t some “disturbing visitation” from the outside of the classical world. It ran in parallel to major trends of the classical world of the period and was in many ways its most cogent exponent. As Brown writes, “Christians had a singularly articulate and radical contribution to make to that great debate on the manner in which supernatural power could be exercised in society.” Seen in that way, Constantine’s momentous conversion comes to seem less a radical departure from the pagan world than as the culmination of several centuries’ worth of cultural development towards a more transcendental and revelatory cast of mind. 

The real issue for the classical world with an imposition like Christianity was, claims Brown, that ancient people had a somewhat modest relationship to the divine and an inbuilt suspicion of ‘sorcery’ or ‘demonism.’ There wasn’t so much a rejection of the supernatural in toto - the understanding was that sorcerers or demons were, in fact, in possession of supernatural powers - as a constant questioning about the appropriate applications of supernatural power. As Brown writes, “What was hotly debated was the difference between legitimate and illegitimate forms of supernatural power. This was a boundary which late antique pagans had learned to scan with alert eyes and firm criteria.” The initial difficulty with the claims of the Christians, just as with pagan holy men, was the sort of skepticism that made ‘Doubting Thomas’ have to verify the resurrection; or was, more broadly, a discomfort with the grandiloquence of the Christian view of the supernatural as opposed to the more domestic pagan equivalent. 

The real work, in fusing pagan and Christian world views, seems to have been done in the realm of psychology, as opposed to theological doctrine. Brown is particularly fascinating on the ways in which ‘the supernatural’ becomes encoded in language of this period to evocatively describe what we might think of as ‘psychological’ problems. In the otherwise matter-of-fact divorce document of a fifth century couple, the collapse of a marriage is blamed on “a sinister and wicked demon which attacked us from whence we know not where, with a view to our being separated from each other” - which is as good a description of marital discord as any that the modern vocabulary has to offer. The Desert Fathers engaged in a series of extremely ascetic practices that - if the language were toned down slightly - sound a great deal like anger management: one monk went for three years with a stone in his mouth so that he would learn silence, another was discovered spitting out blood, which, he explained, was the physical incarnation of a cruel word spoken to him by a brother that he had in time digested and was now able to transmute to blood. The ‘guardian angel’ - or ‘higher self’ in the lexicon of contemporary spirituality - makes a decisive appearance around this time, “lodging contact with the divine in the structure of the personality itself,” as Brown writes.

Everything in Brown’s analysis feels right and helps to explain some of the deeply contradictory movements of this period. In the advent of the realpolitik of the 3rd century - which would seem to be a contrary impulse to the shift towards transcendentalism - Brown nonetheless spots a parallel. Civic relations of the 2nd century Antonines, he writes, were built on ‘philotimia,’ an idea of honor or ‘sheer willingness,’ in which citizens of distinction outdid each other in contributing to the commonweal. With the 3rd century, “the ‘sheer willingness’ of philotimia came to wear a more unpleasant face” - the careful balances of elites, a bit like the orchestrated pagan rites, giving way to a new sense of ambition, a desire not just to outshine, but actually to defeat, one other. In politics, a style of greater clarity - “blunt certainty” - emerges. “Diocletian and his advisors appear to have had no hesitation in calling a spade a spade,” Brown writes of the new imperial style that was ascendant by the period’s end.

And if, in Brown’s view, all the many movements of the 3rd century were, in a way, of a piece - the turn towards autocracy and brute force in politics, the acceptance of new doctrines of transcendentalism in religion, the growing ineluctability of Christianity - he is able to explain as well the ongoing pagan resistance to Christianity, which took the form, interestingly, of “deep religious anger” both in anti-Christian persecutions and then in pagan revivals after Christianity was firmly established. 

The pagan objection really had to do with the Christian disparagement of the worldly, the sense that the salvational and transcendental doctrines of Christianity undermined the civic order. The beauty of the pagan system - the interflow between nature and society - was that pagan rites allowed practitioners to “draw upon an ever present reservoir of power, blessing, and inspiration….with the easy-going unity of heaven and earth mirroring the unity and solidarity of the civilization they had inherited.” The advent of Christianity, whatever its virtues and whatever its claim to divinity, meant abandoning that symbiosis. Brown gives the last word of his manuscript to Iamblichus, a pagan philosopher of the period, who wrote forlornly of Christianity, “This doctrine spells the ruin of all holy ritual and all communion between gods and men. For it amounts to saying: the divine is at a distance from the earth and cannot mingle with men, that this lower region is a desert, without gods.” 

It’s a sorrowful elegy for the classical world in the face of Christianity’s ineluctable advance, but it becomes clear how different the classical world really was from our own. The point isn’t a turn from ‘secularism’ to ‘faith.’ The point, actually, is that the world - ‘naturalistically’ conceived of - is full of divinity of all sorts. Transcendentalism - which may be unavoidable in an era of stress and decadence - means, more than anything else, a turning-away from the world-as-it-is, and, with that, a certain contempt for reality. 

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