What I'm Reading

The long assignment drought has ended: I have three reviews in the works. So for the time being I will spare you my thoughts on what's next on my leisure-time reading list, namely Thornton Wilder's The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

"The Gift of Obviousness"

Rachel Maddow and Sen. Bernie Sanders do a bang-up job of explaining why health care reform is urgent and how it might be achieved.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Killing the Mood

Everybody who's taken a foreign language has encountered the dread subjunctive mood. We anglophones can pretty much dodge it -- we get tripped up by it only in forms of the verb to be. I learned the rule as "condition contrary to fact" -- you write, "If I were king" instead of "If I was king," unless at one time in your past you really ruled the land. As Jan Freeman observes, “ 'I drove fast' and 'If I drove fast' use the same verb, and we have no trouble telling indicative from subjunctive." But as Jan shows in her latest column, it's not always easy to decide whether you want to write "was" or "were." And then she goes on to spread the good news -- it really, really doesn't matter which you write. Or at least it won't for much longer. The subjunctive is on its way out, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief. (Now if they'd only get rid of "whom," I'd be happy.)

Eke and Eye

John McIntyre on the cliche beat:

Two articles in this morning’s Baltimore Sun reach for the same cliche with reference to the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy:

BOSTON — In an extraordinary outpouring of public emotion, thousands of people in Massachusetts solemnly lined highways, overpasses and city streets Thursday to pay their last respects to Sen. Edward Kennedy, the last patriarch of America’s most storied political dynasty.

And:

And with the loss of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and his storied ability to eke out bipartisan compromises, lawmakers are eyeing those consensus proposals. ...

The advice sometimes given to aspiring writers that they should avoid adjectives is like a fad diet — Atkins or South Beach — that rules out a whole class of foods. But it is true that some adjectives are empty calories, and storied is surely one of them. Like prestigious and legendary, two other adjectives that crop up in the work of unimaginative writers, it says merely, “I’m writing an important story about somebody you should have heard of.”

Of course, the first example is constructed almost completely from prefabricated material. Extraordinary outpouring of public emotion turns up whenever a crowd gathers, especially if they are outdoors to pay their last respects. And if this storied figure is also a patriarch, then he must be part of a dynasty.

It pretty much writes itself.

The other article — after revealing that Mr. Kennedy was a Democrat from Massachusetts — refers to his storied ability to eke out compromises. The phrasal verb to eke out, which originally meant to supplement by meager increments or to stretch out a small supply, has come to mean to accomplish with great difficulty, and no one has any business insisting on the older sense. But I thought that compromises were hammered out in the smithy of the Congress.

Sometimes the writer reaches for the wrong cliche. But eyeing, at least, is pure journalese.

Why I Worry So Much

Have we forgotten the schoolchildren who cheered when they heard that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated? Or maybe you never knew about that; after all, it was two generations ago -- people now in their mid-40s were infants in 1963. It's us old farts who remember the climate of hatred back then.

But then the hatred seemed to be localized primarily in the South. Now, there are pockets of it everywhere. And the reason, I think, is that we now have media devoted to ginning it up -- talk radio and Fox News. There are people all over the country credulously hanging on every word spewed by Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, and the increasingly loony Glenn Beck.

Here's Beck's latest, as reported by Steve Benen:

The good news is, nearly four-dozen advertisers have now pulled their sponsorship of Glenn Beck's deranged Fox News program. The bad news is, Beck's ratings have gone up, in part because he's acting like an even bigger lunatic than usual, and clowns doing funny dances tend to draw a crowd.

Yesterday was especially astounding. He argued on the air, for example, that President Obama intends to create a "civilian national security force," which will be similar to Hitler's SS and Saddam Hussein. Apparently, this has something to do with AmeriCorps, which Beck initially said has a $500 billion budget. (He corrected himself later in the show, though his guest didn't blink when he originally made the claim.)

Towards the end of the show, after scrawling on a variety of boards and pieces of paper, Beck summarized his key observation. On a chalkboard, Beck had written the words, "Obama," "Left Internationalist," "Graft," "ACORN Style Organizations," "Revolution," and "Hidden Agenda." If you circle some of the first letters of these important words, Beck says, it spells "OLIGARH." Beck told his viewers there's only one letter missing. If you're thinking that letter is "c," you're not medicated enough to understand Beck's show.

The missing letter is "y," because the word he hoped to spell is "OLIGARHY." No, that word doesn't exist in the English language, but that's probably because the dictionary was written by some communist community organizer who wants to keep Glenn Beck and his viewers down.

The quote of the day, however, came towards the end: "I'm tired of being a sheep. I'm tired of being a victim. I'm tired of being pushed around. You know what? The gloves come off."

Glenn Beck is a "victim"? Why is it that disturbed right-wing nuts always feel sorry for themselves? Beck is very well paid to say crazy things on television.

What's more, his minions take his insane tirades seriously. Whatever Beck says on Monday gets repeated by unhinged crazies on Wednesday.

Beck is getting worse. I can't help but worry that it's only a matter of time before he hurts someone.

Actually, I think it's more likely that the "unhinged crazies" who follow him, and Limbaugh and Savage and Hannity and their ilk, crassly spewing all manner of ideological filth, will hurt someone. They've already hurt political discourse in this country, turning a major political party into a rabble of know-nothings. Physical violence is the next logical consequence.

Why Barney Frank Is One of My Heroes

It's not just his putdown of the wingnut who asked why he was for "Nazi" health care.

The Man of Steel vs. Michael Steele?

(Click to enlarge)

Thanks to Oliver Willis.

Three Thrillers by Dan Fesperman

The following review ran today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

THE ARMS MAKER OF BERLIN

By Dan Fesperman

Knopf, 384 pp., $24.95

“Intelligent thriller” is almost an oxymoron, given that the whole purpose of the genre is to ... well, you know, thrill. I mean, nobody reads Dan Brown for serious insight into the history of Christianity and the politics of the Roman Catholic church. (Well, they shouldn't, anyway.) All that ingenious plot-twisting and hair's-breadth-escaping from deadly intrigue tends to annihilate anything like thought.

Which may be why novels like Dan Fesperman's are so rare – or at any rate not as popular as Brown's, or James Patterson's, or any number of other masters of the nonstop page-turner. Fesperman just can't help drawing on his experience as a journalist covering foreign conflicts, most recently for the Baltimore Sun. And that experience puts the meat on the intricate bone structure of his thriller plots. You come away from a Fesperman novel not only abuzz with the exhilaration of the chase, but also aware that you've absorbed something of the complexity of the world's conflicts, grown more keenly aware that they're are a lot more complicated than politicians and ideologues make them out to be.

Fesperman's “The Prisoner of Guantánamo,” for example, gave the reader a glimpse of the culture of that notorious place of incarceration, more vivid and subtle than anything you'd find in news reports, and it did so in the guise of a murder mystery and a spy chase. “The Amateur Spy” took us to a crossroads of Middle Eastern terrorist intrigue and discovered something that's easy to forget: Human beings with the essential traits of being human – hopes, ideals, needs, desires, as well as cruelty and weakness and fallibility -- dwell there.

The typical Fesperman hero is a guy with a certain amount of expertise and often a shadowed past who finds that experience and expertise aren't always quite enough to keep him out of trouble. Usually, as in any good thriller, there's a beautiful woman involved, one who is almost certainly not what she seems. So it is with with “The Arms Maker of Berlin”: Nat Turnbull, mild-mannered history professor, finds himself in cahoots (and bed) with a mysterious and alluring German woman, Berta Heinkel, as they try to locate some documents that may have led to the death of Turnbull's mentor, a retired, alcoholic and recently disgraced historian.

These documents are not just a Hitchcockian McGuffin, the gimmick that drives the plot, but they're also a portal into the history of Germany in the twentieth century. They have to do with the dark past of Kurt Bauer, a German industrialist best known to the public as a manufacturer of household appliances but also ... well, the title kind of gives it away. And what puts Turnbull into thriller-style jeopardy is not only that Bauer, described by one character as “a man whose little black book could help someone build the next nuclear weapon,” may be aiding and abetting some bad guys (i.e., Iranians), but also that the United States intelligence agencies have a pretty strong interest in not letting the truth about Bauer be known. As a historian, Turnbull is dedicated to uncovering the truth, but the FBI, which hires him to lead them to the documents, would just as soon keep it covered, alternately abetting and thwarting Turnbull's search.

While the story of Turnbull's sleuthing unfolds, Fesperman also flashes back sixty-odd years to the story of young Kurt Bauer, who at 17 falls in love with a pretty girl, Liesl Folkerts, who belongs to an anti-Hitler group known as the White Rose. For Bauer, love trumps politics, and that leads him to do something that has grave consequences, an action recorded in the documents Turnbull is looking for. Both stories – Turnbull's and Bauer's – are deftly told, the fiction underpinned with historical details and populated with real human beings such as the German anti-Hitler theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the American spymaster Allen Dulles. And Fesperman's fictional characters, particularly Kurt Bauer, are smartly imagined and subtly drawn.

But what truly animates the novel is Fesperman's awareness of how the calamitous history of Germany in the twentieth century continues to inform current events. From Turnbull's point of view – and Fesperman's – the “cast of players” is “Modern Germany made flesh, in all its macabre and tragic grandeur.” “The Arms Maker of Berlin” doesn't have quite the breathless immediacy and headlong action of Fesperman's ripped-from-the-headlines terrorism tales, “The Prisoner of Guantánamo” and “The Amateur Spy”, which makes it less successful as a thriller. But on the intelligence side of the “intelligent thriller” conundrum, it's a stronger and subtler, and perhaps more satisfying book.

Since I mentioned "The Prisoner of Guantánamo" and "The Amateur Spy" in the review, I'll append my reviews of them, too:

THE PRISONER OF GUANTÁNAMO

By Dan Fesperman

Knopf, 336 pp., $24

The problem with writing a novel whose story is ripped from the headlines is that the headlines keep coming after the novel is published. Obsolescence sets in.

But Dan Fesperman knows something about headlines: As a foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun he was responsible for quite a few of them. And he knows something about novels: He's one of the best writers of intelligent thrillers based on contemporary events working today.

So even though headlines about Guantánamo keep coming, Fesperman's novel The Prisoner of Guantánamo hasn't lost any of its edge and urgency.

Set in the summer of 2003, before the hubris in the phrase "mission accomplished" was fully evident, the novel centers on Revere Falk, an FBI interrogator whose fluency in Arabic has gotten him assigned to Guantánamo, a place he knows well, having been stationed there as a young Marine. Falk's "pet project" is a young Yemeni, Adnan el-Hamdi, who was captured in Afghanistan. Falk has gradually earned Adnan's trust, and one day the detainee decides to give him a "great gift": the name of a key figure in Adnan's al-Qaeda cell. Falk initially hears the name as "Hussein," but Adnan insists that it's "Hussay" – which confuses Falk, because it's not a common Arabic name. The interview is interrupted before Falk can probe further.

Meanwhile, the Cubans have discovered the body of a soldier stationed at Guantánamo washed up on the shore on their side of the fence. Falk, the son of a Maine lobsterman, is an experienced sailor, and he knows that if the soldier had drowned while swimming, the currents around the bay would make it impossible for the body to drift toward the Cuban side. A boating accident seems equally unlikely. So Falk gets involved in the investigation of the death.

The Arabic-speaking interpreters and interrogators are regarded with suspicion on the base, especially by the rank-and-file soldiers, who "tended to hear from their officers 24/7 that each and every one of the detainees was a hardened killer and an experienced terrorist, who in at least some way shared responsibility for 9/11. It was part of the effort to keep them motivated and boost their morale." So when a translator working for a security contractor at Guantánamo is arrested, and there's a sudden influx of investigators from Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, Falk gets wary. He's also surprised that one of the investigators is an old friend, Ted Bokamper, from the State Department.

Falk owes a lot to Bokamper. When Falk was a Marine stationed at Guantánamo, he was curious about the Cuba just over the fence, so he made an unauthorized trip there while on leave and fell into a trap set by Cuban intelligence, who blackmailed him into passing along information about the base. But Falk had a powerful friend to help him out of this bind. Panicked, he got in touch with Bokamper, whose mentor at State, Saul Endler -- "One part Kissinger and two parts alchemist" -- recognized that it could be useful to know what sort of information the Cubans wanted Falk to provide. Bokamper and Endler helped set up Falk as a double agent. Later, Bokamper helped Falk get a security clearance to join the FBI, which doesn't know that Falk has also been spying for the State Department

So now, along with Adnan's cryptic revelation, the soldier's mysterious drowning and the translator's arrest, Falk gets word that his Cuban contact wants to meet with him. Something's going on, but what? In the course of figuring it out, Falk will learn the wisdom of the adage: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. If, that is, you can tell which is which.

There's some standard thriller plotting here, with the usual shadowy alliances and betrayals, a bit of action and some hide-and-seek chases, and the ending has something of an anticlimactic feeling. But what makes the novel work is the attention to detail, especially Fesperman's evocation of Guantánamo – a.k.a. Gitmo -- itself. He gives us the physical layout -- the 45 square miles of swamp, six square miles of which is habitable; the barracks and the detention facilities; the fences and the sea; the soldiers, American and Cuban, keeping a steady eye on one another – but he's even better at creating the emotional atmosphere, the tedium and the tension, the paranoia and the boredom.

It's the right setting for a thriller, but the trick is not to let the sensations of fiction trivialize the reality. It's pretty clear where Fesperman stands on the controversy over Guantánamo, which he views in the light of Abu Ghraib and the subsequent debate over torture. The novel's principal female character, Pam Cobb, Falk's girlfriend and fellow interrogator, has been successful enough with conventional methods that she has avoided the orders to "attempt to get information from detainees by sexually humiliating them. One of Pam's shapelier but less fortunate roommates ended up stripping to her bra and panties in one such attempt. … The subjects only retreated deeper into anger and silence. The interrogator … locked herself into a restroom for an hour, sobbing in shame."

And Fesperman obviously has no use for neoconservative hawks, "out to save the world one conquest at a time," for the novel hinges on the possibility of another "splendid little war" – as the one in Iraq was thought to be in mid-2003. He's also snarky about the jargon of power-players like the guy from Homeland Security who says things like, "Other than Iraq, Gitmo's the single most important front right now in the GWOT." The more cynical Falk interprets this for another new arrival: "Global War on Terrorism. Gitmo acronym 12-b. You'll know 'em all within forty-eight hours. I'd urge you to start using the word 'robust' within the next twenty-four."

Back in the early '90s, there was some naïve speculation that the end of the Cold War had made the thriller irrelevant, that the moral angst of John Le Carré and the flag-waving technolatry of Tom Clancy would go out of style. But the world remained scary and violent, as Fesperman himself demonstrated in his earlier novels set in Bosnia and Afghanistan. Observant, thoughtful, witty and concerned, he has robustly adapted the thriller to the age of the GWOT.

THE AMATEUR SPY

By Dan Fesperman

Knopf, 384 pp., $23.95

Got plot?

It’s the one thing a thriller writer has to have, and the one thing a reviewer must not reveal very much of. Which makes reviewing thrillers difficult because, frankly, most thrillers don’t have much of anything else.

Dan Fesperman has two good plots in his new novel, “The Amateur Spy.” Here are their setups.

Freeman Lockhart, a retired United Nations aid worker, is blackmailed into spying on an old friend. He doesn’t even know which country he’s spying for, or what his handlers, who seem to be American, hope to find out. He just knows that if he doesn’t do what they tell him to do, he risks the exposure of a secret from his past and that of his Bosnian-born wife, Mila.

Aliyah Rahim, an Arab-American woman, learns that her husband, Abbas, a prominent surgeon in Washington, D.C., is planning to do something terrible. The suspicion and surveillance they’ve experienced since 9/11 has caused him to act more and more erratically, especially after the death of their daughter. Aliyah agrees to help Abbas with his plans, hoping that she can somehow prevent them from taking effect.

The paths of Freeman and Aliyah will cross in Amman, Jordan. But their plot lines won’t entangle until the final pages of the novel, in the usual breathless rush of a thriller’s climax. If plot is all you ask of a thriller, “The Amateur Spy” has plenty of it. In that respect, the novel sometimes feels as formulaic as a cliffhanger like TV’s “24.”

But Fesperman’s novel transcends the formulas. He uses suspense to draw you into the world in which his characters live, which unsettlingly happens to be the one we live in. As a foreign news reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Fesperman witnessed his share of the world’s conflicts in Bosnia, Afghanistan and the Middle East. And he has carried his reporter’s techniques and insight into a series of novels – this is his fifth -- set in those lands and elsewhere. His most recent novel, “The Prisoner of Guantánamo,” did more than most mere journalists have done to shine a light on that dark and troubling place.

Every action of “The Amateur Spy” is rooted in a locale, whether it’s Amman or Jerusalem or Athens or Washington. And his characters are acutely sensitive to the place and the moment. Aliyah, for example, arriving in Amman for the first time, “hadn’t expected all the hills, with their crowded, blocky architecture, everything rendered in watercolor shades of tan and off-white. Or so it seemed in the slanting light. The air had a strange smell, which stirred a vague familiarity. It was the dry, smoky character, she supposed, which took her back to distant times she hadn’t revisited in ages.”

But what especially lifts Fesperman’s thriller above the confines of its genre is the author’s empathy for those caught in the crossfire of the world’s conflicts. That he makes his narrator-protagonist a former UN aid worker, a would-be neutral, is no random choice. The operative irony of the novel is that Freeman (whose name is only a couple of consonants and a little anagramming away from “Fesperman”) wants to be a free man – one without a country -- because he has seen what harm can be done by the zeal of patriots and ideologues. But when he arrives in Amman – “a city of loose talk and stealthy listeners” -- he is instantly reminded how difficult the neutral pose can be. When he orders a Coke, the waiter tells him, with “a remark that from him sounded like an admonition,” that the restaurant serves only Pepsi. And then Freeman remembers an old rumor in the Arab world that the Coca-Cola logo said “No Mohammad, No Mecca” if you turned it backward. “I had forgotten what it was like working in a place where even your most innocent choice might be held against you.”

Worse things than a waiter’s scorn happen to Freeman and Aliyah and others in the novel, but the author’s alertness to such smaller tensions makes “The Amateur Spy” come alive. Fesperman has mastered his genre, but he often breaks out of its confines. You can sense him trying to move away from Tom Clancy and John Grisham and toward writers like Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad, writers with a nuanced and ambivalent vision of the world and its conflicts. (Aliyah’s plight is reminiscent of that of Winnie Verloc, the anarchist’s wife in Conrad’s “The Secret Agent,” although Aliyah shrugs off the passivity in which Winnie was trapped.)

Throughout the novel, Fesperman reminds us that the world is a lot more complicated than the TV pundits, politicians and lockstep superpatriots would have us believe. Sometimes he does it with sly wit, as when Freeman hears a group in a hotel bar celebrating their release from the daytime fast of Ramadan: “The revelers began clapping to the beat, drowning out the muezzin, and the band broke into the disco standby ‘I Will Survive.’ Interesting to think of it as some sort of Palestinian anthem.”

And more than once he reminds us of the world’s pain, as when Aliyah reflects that she can’t tell her friend Nancy “that sometimes it gave her comfort to see news footage of American mothers grieving for their lost soldier boys, killed in Iraq. It wasn’t that she took pleasure in the deaths. It was that she thought her country needed this kind of sorrow to keep it humble, because that was how it worked in the rest of the world.”

Things That Make My Blood Boil

One of them is Republican Senators whose heads are not screwed on straight.

Another is lunatic right-wing preachers.
And then there's the stupidity of some in my age cohort.

And egregious liar Betsy McCaughey.

What I'm Reading

Notes on The House of Mirth, Book Two:

Why do we care about Lily Bart? (If you don't, make that "I.") After all, in her own words, she's "a very useless person."

As one character observes of Lily, "sometimes I think ..., at heart, she despises the things she's trying for." Exactly right. But what else has her social milieu given her to try for except a rich husband? Lily learns the flaws of society the hard way. After her betrayal by Bertha Dorset she realizes that even the truth can't save her: "What is truth? Where a woman is concerned it's the story that's easiest to believe. In this case it's a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset's story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and it's convenient to be on good terms with her." The truth is what's convenient -- a Whartonian spin on pragmatism.

And so Lily descends the social ladder, first down a rung to the bohemian set of the Gormers -- "a kind of social Coney Island, where everybody is welcome who can make noise enough and put on airs." She develops a carapace against social misfortune -- "a hard glaze of indifference was fast forming over her delicacies and susceptibilities, and each concession to expediency hardened the surface a little more." (And there's that word "glaze" again.) With the Gormers she travels to Alaska -- an adventure I wish Wharton had given us more of, perhaps as a contrast of the newest part of the New World with the Old World intrigues of Europe -- but Lily realizes that she has become "of no more account among them than an expensive toy in the hands of a spoiled child." The glaze is beginning to crack, admitting some of the "dinginess" that she has been brought up to contemn.

There is still, of course, the possibility of marrying Rosedale. A friend commented to me that he wasn't ready to forgive the anti-Semitism in Wharton's references to Rosedale, but I may have overstated them in my earlier post. Or perhaps Wharton herself was inspired to draw back from them, for she begins to soften Rosedale in the scene in which Lily spies on him playing with a child -- "something in his attitude made him seem a simply and kindly being." And by the end of the book he presents an almost welcome alternative to the desperation into which Lily has plunged. Still, though he is capable of kindness, Rosedale is a man without scruples, and he presents to her the book's key moral choice -- to save herself by revealing the letters between Bertha Dorset and Lawrence Selden.

And so Lily's moral center becomes evident -- she decides not to use the letters to shame Bertha, and she decides to endure hardship so she can pay back the money that Gus Trenor has given her. And to do so, she takes another step down the ladder -- one that once again earns Selden's disapprobation. She enters, as a social secretary, the garish nouveau riche circle of the divorcée Norma Hatch. "Through this atmosphere of torrid splendour moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to concert-hall, from palm-garden to music-room, from 'art exhibit' to dress-maker's opening."

The trouble for the contemporary reader is that it's hard to distinguish this louche stratum of society from the upper-crust layer that Lily is accustomed to -- both seem to us equally empty and frivolous, and its denizens can be similarly poisonous. We have to take it on Wharton's word that, "Compared with the vast gilded void of Mrs. Hatch's existence, the life of Lily's former friends seemed packed with ordered activities." And obviously there is a difference, for Lily takes flight from Mrs. Hatch's set, choosing to plunge into the life of a laborer in the workroom of the milliner Miss Haines.

By the novel's end, it becomes evident that the real villain of the story is not Gus Trenor or Bertha Dorset, but Selden, "an emotional coward" who flees "from an infatuation his reason had conquered." Every time he gets a chance to set things right, for himself and more especially for Lily, he backs off. "He seemed to see her poised on the brink of a chasm, with one graceful foot advanced to assert her unconsciousness that the ground was failing her." Selden sees clearly the meretriciousness of society in which Lily shines forth -- "her grace cheapening the other women's smartness as her finely-discriminated silences made their chatter dull." He scorns "the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dullness of the talk, ... the freedom of speech which never arrived at wit and the freedom of act which never made for romance." But he takes no action to prevent her being a victim of the circle in which she moves. He chooses instead "the sense of relief with which he returned to the conventional view of her."

The trouble with the relationship of Selden and Lily is that each reinforces the other's passivity. Lily has her own emotional cowardice. Rather like Micawber confidently expecting something to turn up, she remains content to "worry along, as she had so often done before, with the hope of some happy change of fortune to sustain her." We learn from Carry Fisher that Lily blew her opportunity to marry a rich Italian prince and in the process caused a scandal: "That's Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic." (The reference to oversleeping is a bitterly ironic anticipation of the novel's ending.)

And so the novel culminates in an epiphany for Lily, perhaps unfortunately sentimentalized in the form of Nettie Struther's baby. Lily realizes "that there had never been a time when she had any real relation to life." It's a didactic moment, revealing that Wharton doesn't yet fully trust her readers to draw their own lessons.

So why do we/I care about Lily Bart? Because Wharton does, of course. The question is whether Wharton cares about Lily as a person or as an idea, a victim of of society's materialism or the embodiment of a moral dilemma. The answer is, naturally, a bit of both, and it's Wharton's ambivalence that weakens the novel -- not fatally, but significantly.