Recently in Reading Category

I've just started reading Simon Schama's latest book, The American Future: A History, which arrived today from amazon.co.uk. I got interested in the book when a friend sent me this a link to a review of the book by Niall Ferguson in the Financial Times.

The book seems to offer an argument for American exceptionalism, contending that the "American difference" lies in part in the nation's ability to renew itself in moments of calamity -- such as the present moment. Indeed, Schama begins the book by identifying Barack Obama's victory in the Iowa caucuses last January as the moment "when American democracy came back from the dead."

The book was just published in the U.K. by the Bodley Head, but for reasons that I have yet to determine, it will not be published by Ecco in the United States until May 19, 2009 (or so amazon.com informs me). Is Schama planning to revise the book for the American edition based on the results of the presidential election? Was it published earlier in the U.K. to give puzzled Britons a sense of what's going in in this year's wacky race? And why is the Canadian edition slated for release in late December?

If you've been reading my recent posts, you know that I agree with Schama about the promise that Obama represents, and I'm hoping that the book will be helpful to me as I do work on a new revision of my "Bush-League America" manuscript, which I'm trying to "secularize" as they say in the book trade (i.e. make suitable for a "general" reader). The new working title, courtesy of my wife: "Whose Game Is It Anyway?: Baseball and Politics from Bush to Barack." Should the unthinkable happen on November 4, I'll keep the old title but add a new subtitle: "A Baseball Fan's Lament."

Meanwhile, a review in the Economist offers this caveat about Schama's book: "One final note of caution: do not be deceived by the words on the dust jacket. Although the book's publishers are obviously keen to cash in on the presidential election, and despite the fact that Mr Schama leads off with a little hymn of praise to Mr Obama's ability to bring American democracy 'back from the dead,' this book really is not about the contest in November or what might come after it. What it is, however, is a fabulous jumble-sale, full of old treasures and recent acquisitions. Anyone interested in America will find in it something to their fancy."

I'll report my own findings at some point in the near future. Meanwhile, if you want to read it yourself, use the amazon.co.uk link above.

As I complete the revisions to my manuscript on emergent literatures for NYU Press, I've been rereading Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s critique of multiculturalism, The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, originally published in 1992 and now in a second, revised edition (1998). Schlesinger criticizes what he refers to as the "cult of ethnicity," the idea that "America is not a nation of individuals at all but a nation of groups, that ethnicity is the defining experience for Americans, that ethnic ties are permanent and indelible, and that division into ethnic communities establishes the basic structure of American society and the basic meaning of American history" (20-21)

There's a lot to like in Schlesinger's book -- and a lot to critique as well -- and I'll be including a brief discussion of it in my emergent literatures book. One of the things that feels dated about the book is its preoccupation with Afrocentrism, a movement that has receded in importance in the ten years since the last edition of Schlesinger's book. His remark that twelve percent of American are black, and the felt pressure to correct injustices of past scholarship comes mostly on their behalf" becomes the subject of Nathan Glazer's We Are All Multiculturalists Now (1998), which argues that multiculturalism as an educational movement owes its power to the interest that African American intellectuals and educators have taken in it as a way of addressing the social and educational problems that blacks in America still face.

Schlesinger is no apologist for white resentment: although he believes firmly in the importance of "America" as an ideal, he also believes that the diversity of the United States is one of its chief characteristics and greatest strengths. He just doesn't want diversity to become fetishized in a way that prevents Americans from thinking of themselves as Americans first and representatives of some other group -- racial, ethnic, sexual, religious, or whatever -- second.

One remark in particular caught my eye: Schlesinger described the election of an "Irish Catholic" -- John F. Kennedy -- to the presidency of the United States in 1960 as "a signal of ultimate acceptance that relieved Irish-Americans of the need for ethnic cheerleading" (62).

Unfortunately, Schlesinger passed away in February of last year: he didn't live to see Barack Obama become the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency. I wonder what he would have thought about the meaning of Barack's candidacy. Is it possible that the election of Barack would have a similar effect on the self-esteem of Africans Americans that the election of Kennedy had on Catholics? Or is the matter of race too important and divisive to make the cases similar? The "Catholics" that Schlesinger seems to have on his mind in the book are white Catholics.

Only time will tell, but it's worth pondering.

My wife says that jinxing works in only one direction because bad fortune is simply more frequent and more powerful than good fortune.

The writer Shalom Auslander has a different explanation. In his recently published memoir Foreskin's Lament (2007), Auslander attributes bad fortune not to chance but rather to the machinations of "an abusive, belligerent god, a god who awoke millennia ago on the wrong side of the firmament and still hasn't cheered up" (7). 

I decided to read Foreskin's Lament because I thought it would cheer me up during my convalescence. After all, it had my wife actually snorting with glee when she was reading it the week before my surgery. And I'd read the excerpt from the memoir that Auslander had published in The New Yorker last year (Personal History, "Playoffs," The New Yorker, January 15, 2007, p. 38), a hilarious recounting of Auslander's attempts to keep the Sabbath during the New York Rangers' 1994 Stanley Cup run. My friend Dick Horwich had urged me to read the piece, knowing the story of my own supposed dealings with God during the 1986 World Series (recounted here in my post "The Crypto-History of the Historic Collapse of the New York Mets.")

An additional incentive: this year I found myself writing letters of recommendation for three -- count 'em, three -- former students who were deciding to pursue doctorates in literature or cultural studies after renouncing the conservative religious traditions in which they had been educated before college (two orthodox Jewish, one Jesuit). I thought that perhaps Auslander's memoir would give me further insights into their intellectual predicaments.

And it did, though I don't think any of my former students are quite as angry as Auslander proves nimself to be across the pages of his book. I found myself snorting with glee, too, as I read passages like this one:

For the People of the Book, words, being the stuff of books, have weight. Words have consequences. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was the name of the Lord, and so the second word they came up with, immediately after the Word, was the word Holy, which described the first Word, which you were now prohibitied from uttering, even though there were only two words in total, effectively cutting the entire language in half. Soon came the words "shan't" and "mustn't" and "stoning" and "kill," and then a whole lot of other words that you were required to say in case the first Word was uttered, words of penance, apology, and promise that you would never utter that Word in vain again, so help you Word. (27)

Late in the book, the anger overwhelms the comedy momentarily, when Auslander describes an episode of self-flagellation that results in testicular torsion and a trip to the emergency room (256). Lenny Bruce had suddenly become Sam Kinison, and I had a moment of thinking I wouldn't finish the book. But the next chapter contained the wonderful Rangers' story, and Auslander had me back.

I wonder how much controversy I would provoke if I included an excerpt from the book on next fall's Con West syllabus! 

Shalom Auslander will be appearing on January 24 at the 92nd Street Y. Unfortunately, the event is already sold out. The front page of his website features pictures a padded cell.

  I've just finished reading Michael Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), which I started a couple of weeks ago because 1) I loved his breakthrough novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) and enjoyed his latest, The Yiddish Policeman's Union (2007); and 2) I was visiting Pittsburgh for the first time, and it seemed like a good thing to be reading.

Most of the people that I met there who had read Chabon's first two novels, which are set in Pittsburgh (the second was Wonder Boys [1995], which was made into a film starring Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire), didn't care for them. They found them a bit sophomoric and precious. And to be sure Mysteries of Pittsburgh is both of those things at times. It is to Kavalier & Clay what F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920) is to The Great Gatsby (1925), a precursor in which the author's talent hasn't yet been fully realized. And yet, there are things to admire in both Fitzgerald's and Chabon's first novels. There's something about the narrator's voice in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh that does indeed capture the simultaneous world-weariness and naivete that are often found in recent college graduates. To quote a colleague of mine, who was reflecting on a piece of writing that he had penned when he was 23: "It reads very much like I was in my early twenties: the sort of heavily crafted sentences and quirky details that all of my undergraduate friends tried so hard to write."

I had Fitzgerald in mind as I was reading the novel, and Chabon, I suppose, would be happy about that. In the afterward that he included in a 2005 paperback reprint, he described the process of writing the novel as a young MFA student in the UC Irvine writing program and noted that it was a rereading of The Great Gatsby that got him jump-started. To which he added a reading of Philip Roth's first book, Goodbye Columbus (1959). One of the crucial observations that the juxtaposition allowed him to make was this: "Roth's book was a hell of a lot funner than Fitzgerald's, which almost isn't funny at all, especially when, as in the famous party-guest catalog, it tries its hardest to amuse."

I'm taking that as a sign. After I finish Wonder Boys (which I ordered at the same time as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh), I'm going to start on a reading project that I've been thinking about lately: reading all of Roth's Zuckerman novels, ending with the new one, Exit Ghost (2007).

I'm glad to find out that The Mysteries of Pittsburgh is being made into a film. The cast looks promising, and it's in post-production. The film's website is http://www.mysteriesofpittsburgh.com/ and you can find the IMDB entry here.

As for The Yiddish Policeman's Union, it's not as "important" a book as Kavalier & Clay (whatever that means), but I love the fact that it is a speculative fiction. (Chabon talks about wanting to impart, as a young writer, the sense of "wonder" that he found in science fiction, without actually wanting to write science fiction). But I enjoyed it, both because of its roots in hard-boiled fiction, and because it struck me as akin to another Roth novel, The Plot Against America, because it offers an alternative history of America and its relation to the Jewish diaspora. Yiddish Policeman's Union isn't as cleverly plotted as Kavalier & Clay, but what's delightful about it is the way in which it sets up its premise, a Jewish state in Sitka, Alaska, about to revert to US control a la Hong Kong, and then imagines what daily life might be like for a down-on-his-luck detective. It's full of wonderful linguistics turns: like latke instead of "flatfoot" and shammes instead of "shamus."

I'd re-read Chaim Potok's The Chosen (1967) the previous fall, which gave me a special appreciation for both the irony and the aptness of Chabon's depiction of orthodox sects -- the "black hats" -- as the gangsters of Sitka. I often think that the power of speculative fiction -- its ability to provoke what Chabon calls "wonder" -- has to do with the larger conceptual frames into which it encourages us to enter. But sometimes the pleasure is in the details of the alternative reality into which we enter. The strength of The Yiddish Policeman's Union is its ability to imagine those details; what it lacks, I think, is the conceptual power that marks the greatest speculative fictions.