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Now I read, on average, at least one book a week. And it’s not like I’m reading boilerplate serializations or harlequin romances. If I look back on the authors and books I’ve read, I’m certainly not embarrassed. Yet around this time each year I once again sense my “illiterati” status.
Wednesday was the latest case in point. The National Book Award finalists were announced. Not only have I not read any of the 10 finalists in the fiction and nonfiction categories, I’ve only really heard of two or three of them.
Maybe I’m just getting too old. Gore Vidal is getting the Natinoal Book Foundation’s 2009 award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The award is given for “a life of service, or a corpus of work.” Vidal is one of my favorite authors and I’ve read nearly a dozen of his novels. Of course, my favorites include ones that many people may never have heard of, let alone read — Messiah, Julian, Burr and Kalki.
Congrats to the finalists — maybe I’ll get one or more of them read some day.
First coffee. Then a bowel movement. Then the muse joins me.
Gore Vidal on his writing routine,
The Paris Review, Fall 1974
Two of Barbara Ehrenreich’s best-selling books are reality journalism, where she put herself in the situations she’s writing about. Thus, in 2001 she released Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a first-hand account of trying to live on the wages of low-paying jobs, such as waitress, hotel maid and Wal-Mart associate. She followed that with Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, in which she examined what it takes to find a white-collar job at a time of downsizing and layoffs.
 With that background, you wonder if and how she is going to get inside the topic of her latest book, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Yet the first chapter is based on as much reality as anyone would want to face. It discusses, as she did in a 2001 article in Harper’s Magazine, her diagnosis of breast cancer and her introduction to a culture which views cheerfulness and positive thinking as almost mandatory. It is a sobering introduction to the subject not only for the reader, but for her. As she puts it, one of the things that accompanied her cancer “was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before — one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.”
While the role of positive thinking in American culture isn’t a reality journalism topic, Ehrenreich also writes of how she encountered it in the business world. Thus, the various job coaches and the like she encountered in Bait and Switch were an additional introduction into the pervasiveness of the subject in modern America. That she found it both in her personal and professional life helps form the approach of Bright-sided.
Ehrenreich examines the history of “the mass delusion that is positive thinking” in the United States in a variety of personal, cultural and economic settings. While positive thinking has some roots in the so-called Protestant ethic — hard work will be rewarded — she explores how it developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Thus, the “New Thought movement” helped give rise to not only religious movements like Christian Science but curing ills like “neurasthenia,” a syndrome marked by fatigue, withdrawal and depression. By the 20th Century, many ideas sparked by the New Though movement found their way into such well-known works as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking.
These concepts pervaded the country and Americans saw them as a way to success and happiness. Over the last 30 years or so, we’ve seen countless books and advisors urging positive thinking as a business motivator and self-help. Thus, we saw not only “positive psychology” and books like The Secret, but what came to be known as the “prosperity gospel,” in which our ability to prosper financially and emotionally hinges on our relationship with God. In fact, Ehrenreich notes, three of the four largest megachurches in the U.S. are based on the prosperity gospel.
Bright-sided is weaker in supporting its proposition that positive thinking has undermined America. The extensively footnoted and sourced book makes clear arguments that the real threat of positive thinking is that it tends to substitute illusion for reality. Perhaps her best example is the recent economic collapse. Brazenly optimistic “experts” were encouraging millions taught by business, church or otherwise of the need for positive thinking in an America in which former U.S. Treasure Secretary Robert Reich observed that “[o]ur willingness to go deep into debt and keep spending is intimately related to our optimism.”
Yet any such failing there, it is redeemed by Ehrenreich’s call for what she terms “post-positive thinking.” She urges that rather than focusing on positive thinking, which is inherently emotional, we must rely upon critical thinking. Seeing things “as they are,” she argues, is the only way to approach the real world — and both the danger and promise it offers.
Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things “as they are,” or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-sided
Short stories and poetry are deceptively difficult literary forms. On the surface, they have the allure of simplicity. After all, they don’t require the detailed arcs or subplots of a novel. Short stories also need not deal with meter or rhyme. Yet these things also make them so difficult. They require far more exactitude than longer works because, as William Faulkner once said, “almost every word has got to be almost exactly right.”
 Thomas A. Hauck’s Public Image: Stories and Poems, takes on both challenges. It collects 24 short stories and 27 poems. Some resonate. Some do not. Yet that should probably be expected in a work with such an array. The variety makes it more likely someone will find something they like and something they don’t.
Perhaps because of his background as a musician in the Boston area — or the knowledge of the fact — a number of the poems feel more like song lyrics. A smaller number are more free form or contain elements or phrasing that, to be fair, are just things I dislike or have never understood about poetry. For devotees or those more attuned to poetry, they may be striking.
One of the strengths of the book is the diversity in the short stories. The subjects and locations range enough that the reader doesn’t feel constrained. Thus, for example, the title story that opens the book is set in a Russian city and tells of a woman whose plan to shoot her abusive husband when he next attacks here is prevented by his death in a way that makes him a hero to the rest of the community. Other stories are set in rural areas, small towns or cities with characters ranging from sympathetic to heroic to a man or woman simply toiling away at their job.
Most of the stories are more focused on how situations affect the people in or perceiving them than the situations themselves. Hauck also tries to expand that occasionally by using multiple perspectives to tell a person’s story without them. “Stella’s Fence,” one of my favorite pieces, consists of interview-like comments from neighbors who have come to dislike their new neighbor, Stella, because she built a fence around her house. This mundane dispute reveals the distrust and rancor that can arise simply from a lack of knowledge or understanding. A similar mechanism is used in “Remembering Bobby Gitteon” to tell of the life of a Marine killed in Iraq. His story is told in pieces with comments from his parents and more than a dozen people who knew him, went to school with him or served with him in the Marines. The same is true of “The Case of Roxanne Wilson,” with explores the mystery of the title character’s disappearance. A variation appears in a commentary of corporate life and infighting in “Spring Green,” which consists of a series of emails starting with one from the president of a multinational corporation and the ensuing reactions in various departments and levels of the company.
Other stories focus simply on the individual character or narrator. The aptly-titled “The Narcissist” takes us inside the thoughts of a wealthy man with a trophy wife attending the funeral of his youngest son. The “E-mail Exchange” is devoted entirely to a woman trying to respond to an e-mail from her brother after the two had a falling out over their father’s funeral. And “Rock Star Dreams” is a humorous account of the night a man decides to impersonate a rock star who’s in town in the hopes of picking up women.
If I have a complaint about the stories it is, as with the poetry, one of personal predilection. Many lack definitive endings. When it comes to short stories, I prefer resolution or closure. In a novel, the characters are sufficiently developed that I can ponder and engage in the possibilities the story creates. While I understand short stories are snippets, it’s that fact that makes my perhaps too unimaginative mind dismayed if it is intentionally left hanging, which Public Image has a tendency to do.
Hauck’s short stories may not rise to the level of a Steven Millhauser and my poetry sense — or lack thereof — may do him a disservice. Yet at least Public Image puts his efforts out there, not confined to note-books or computer discs gathering dust on his bookshelf.
Too much moonshine and crystal meth can take its toll, let me tell you.
Thomas A. Hauck, “Proxima Centauri,” Public Image: Stories and Poems
Blog Headlines of the Week
UK booksellers go nuts, decide not to stock crappy book
Obama Wins Peace Prize, Wingnut Heads Explode
Blog Lines of the Week
Jon Krakauer: “Every single time I write, I ask myself what the fuck I’m doing, why the fuck am I writing.”
Bookish Linkage
Nobel Prize in Literature: German author Herta Müller. Only four of her books have been translated into English. One of those is published by the University of Nebraska Press and, notably, this is the second year in a row it has been a publisher of the Nobel literature laureate.
The Booker Prize: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (and the news certainly is timely given the book is being released in the US this coming Tuesday).
Not The Booker Prize Prize: Solo by Rana Dasgupta.
The Guardian book blog has its second installment on dictator-lit.
The National Book Foundation has named its 5 Under 35, five promising novelists who are, you guessed it, under the age of 35.
Nonbookish Linkage
With all the hubbub about the new FTC rules that will govern bloggers, I think Ed suggested the best response.
If Phish does Born to Run on Halloween, I will be earnestly searching for a boot of it.
Whatever.
Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore
Bob Dylan, “Oh, Sister,” Desire
I think this is called a vicious circle: “Lawyer Says Lawyer Defamed Him in Press Release About Defamation Suit” (Via.)
So much for seeking forgiveness. A convicted sex offender in Raleigh, N.C., was arrested when he tried to attend church because he is not allowed to be present on any property where children are present.
A former Alabama circuit court judge is on trial for having male inmates brought from the jail to a storage room furnished like an office near his chambers and spanking them and forcing them to engage in sexual activity. (Via.)
So being a lawyer is the 18th best job to have. Who’da thunk systems engineer would top the list? (Via.)
But could a systems engineer help do this? Criminal defendant escapes after being mistaken for lawyer.
Hmm, is a “doctor of legal marketing” a good thing?
A man has been declared a “vexatious litigator” and barred from filing any more lawsuits in Hamilton County, Ohio, unless he first gets permission from the presiding judge. The 42-year-old man, who is not a lawyer, has filed 21 lawsuits in Hamilton County courts and 16 complaints in the Ohio Supreme Court since 2007. His reaction to the order? He filed a complaint with the Ohio Supreme Court. (Via.)
I guess there are legal ramifications of tearing off those mattress tags.
I haven’t committed a crime. What I did was fail to comply with the law.
David Dinkins
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