What I'm Reading

Notes on The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder

It amazes me that I haven't read this book before, considering that I once thought Thornton Wilder was the greatest living writer. (That was when he was living, and I was 16.) Like everybody else's, my high school put on a production of Our Town. I was in it, playing three parts: Professor Willard (who comes out in the first act and gives a boring little monologue about the geological, historical, and ethnographic features of Grover's Corners), Si Crowell (the newsboy who exchanges a few words with the milkman at the beginning of act two) and, in the cemetery scene in the third act, the Second Dead Man (who has one line, "A star's mighty good company," from which I tried to milk all manner of profundity until the director made me stop).

I fell in love with the play, and went on to read The Skin of Our Teeth and The Matchmaker. (The latter was musicalized into Hello, Dolly! but it's a pretty good play on its own. There's a charming film version of it, made in 1958, with Shirley Booth, Anthony Perkins, Shirley MacLaine, Paul Ford and Robert Morse.) Wilder's theatrical trick is to break the fourth wall: In each of his plays, someone comes out to talk directly to the audience -- the Stage Manager in Our Town, Sabina in The Skin of Our Teeth, Dolly in The Matchmaker. Somehow Wilder manages to make keep this from becoming over-didactic, but I think it betrays something essential about his craft: He thought of himself as more novelist (who manipulates the point of view) than playwright (who is forced to make the point of view that of the audience).

Which is a little sad, because if Wilder is known at all today, it's for his plays. He wrote seven novels, of which The Bridge of San Luis Rey is the second and still the best-known. It won him a Pulitzer Prize (as did Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, making him the only person to win Pulitzers for both fiction and drama) and it was No. 1 on the bestseller list, making him a rich man. (Okay, pause here to reflect on how different the bestseller list must have been in 1928 from what it is in 2009. From The Bridge of San Luis Rey, a subtle, sly work with roots in classical French and Spanish literature, to The Lost Symbol.)

Even if you've never read The Bridge of San Luis Rey, you probably know its setup, which is announced in the novel's opening sentence: "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." The novel then tells the stories of the five travelers, leading up to their fatal fall, and of Brother Juniper, who witnesses the accident and decides to examine these lives to discern what God's plan might have been in bringing about their simultaneous end.

Wilder tells the stories of the five people himself, rather than through what Brother Juniper discovers about them. Or rather, an omniscient narrator (not necessarily to be identified as Wilder, because the prose style of the narrative is faintly antique) tells their stories. Brother Juniper learns, "The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed." The surviving acquaintances of the deceased are reticent or unreliable: "Those who know most in this realm, venture least." And Brother Juniper comes only to the most banal of conclusions: "He thought he saw in the same accident the wicked visited by destruction and the good called early to Heaven." We, who have seen these lives in their full complexity and contradictions, are incapable of making such a conclusion.

Even so, for Brother Juniper, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, partly because he commits the heresy of using Enlightenment methods to acquire it.

It seemed to Brother Juniper that it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences and he had long intended putting it there. ... [T]his collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey was a sheer Act of God. It afforded a perfect laboratory. Here at last one could surprise His intentions in a pure state.

But then most readers will come to the account of the travelers on the bridge with similar expectations of finding a moral in the story. After all, one perennial nonfiction bestseller is When Bad Things Happen to Good People. We want to know what it means when catastrophe befalls the innocent. After the collapse of the bridge, Wilder writes, "People wandered about in a trance-like state, muttering; they had the hallucination of seeing themselves falling into a gulf." And who of us didn't feel like that on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001?

That's why the last sentence of the book feels forced to me: "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." I think Wilder set himself too large a task: to reflect upon the propensity to try justifying the ways of God to humankind. But fiction forces closure upon itself, and "the bridge is love" feels trite and sentimental. Moreover, it contradicts what Wilder himself wrote to a former student in a letter: "The book is not supposed to solve. ... Chekhov said, 'The business of literature is not to answer questions, but to state them fairly.'"

I think what kept Wilder from being one of the greats, like his contemporaries Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald, was that he started with the idea and tried to find a story to go with it. Theodicy in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, the place of ordinary people in the cosmos in Our Town, the arc of history in The Skin of Our Teeth -- big ideas all, threatening to smother the human element in a blanket of intellectualism. Of course, even the greats made that mistake -- think of Faulkner's A Fable or Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, works undermined by too much brooding on the cosmic, too much willingness to let symbolism supplant the simple elements of fiction: character and plot.

That said, The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a storehouse of memorable characters and wonderful writing. Wilder acknowledged that he hadn't been to Peru, and that his sources were mostly French, not Spanish. And yet there are times when he seems to be anticipating the work of the great Latin American writers, such as Borges or García Márquez. Take this passage about the Marquesa de Montemayor, for example:

She combed the city for wise old women and poured into her letters the whole folkwisdom of the New World. She fell into the most abominable superstition. She practiced a degrading system of taboos for her child's protection. She refused to allow a knot in the house. The maids were forbidden to tie up their hair and she concealed upon her person ridiculous symbols of a happy delivery. On the stairs the even steps were marked with red chalk and a maid who accidentally stepped upon an even step was driven from the house with tears and screams.

Wilder has a way of slipping in breathtaking bits of detail, as in this description of the long-at-sea Captain Alvarado:

He was blackened and cured by all weathers. He stood in the Square with feet apart as though they were planted on a shifting deck. His eyes were strange, unaccustomed to the shorter range, too used to seizing the appearances of a constellation between a cloud and a cloud, and the outline of a cape in rain.

Or this:

There was something in Lima that was wrapped up in yards of violet satin from which protruded a great dropsical head and two fat pearly hands; and that was its archbishop.

Or this:

It was the hour when bats fly low and the smaller animals play recklessly underfoot.

Now, I ask you: In what contemporary bestseller would you find writing like that?

Noise of the Day

Joe Conason on the ACORN controversy.

To claim that the stupid behavior of a half-dozen employees should discredit a national group with offices in more than 75 cities staffed by many thousands of employees and volunteers is like saying that Mark Sanford or John Ensign have discredited every Republican governor or senator. Indeed, the indignation of the congressional Republicans screaming about ACORN and the phony streetwalker is diluted by the presence of at least two confirmed prostitution clients -- Rep. Ken Calvert and Sen. David Vitter -- in their midst. Neither of those right-wing johns has been even mildly chastised by their moralistic peers. Nobody is cutting off their federal funding.

Rachel Maddow and Cleve Jones on the threat of political violence.

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

Noise of the Day

Ta-Nehisi Coates on how Obama is uncovering racism on the right.

For black people, the clear benefit of Obama is that he is quietly exposing an ancient hatred that has simmered in this country for decades. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of us grew tired of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, mostly because they presented easy foils for Limbaugh-land. Moreover, again rightly or wrongly, they were used to define all of us.

Andy Kroll on how lobbyists still run Washington.

For all the talk of the flood of small, individual donations to Obama's historic 2008 election campaign, its coffers overflowed with money from financial powerhouses like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase and corporations like General Electric, Google and Microsoft. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Obama still ranks near the top among all recipients when it comes to contributions from the health, defense, financial and energy industries.

Noise of the Day

Jonathan Chait on Ayn Rand and her acolytes.

In reality, as a study earlier this year by the Brookings Institution and Pew Charitable Trusts reported, the United States ranks near the bottom of advanced countries in its economic mobility. The study found that family background exerts a stronger influence on a person’s income than even his education level. And its most striking finding revealed that you are more likely to make your way into the highest-earning one-fifth of the population if you were born into the top fifth and did not attain a college degree than if you were born into the bottom fifth and did. In other words, if you regard a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence or hard work, then you are economically better off to be born rich, dumb, and lazy than poor, smart, and industrious.

James Surowiecki on financial reform.

The idea of learned helplessness, which was introduced in the late nineteen-sixties by the psychologist Martin Seligman as a result of experiments with dogs, is that when people are subjected to repeated negative events that they have no control over, it’s easy for them to become convinced that they’re permanently helpless, and that there’s no point in trying to change things, because all such efforts are doomed to failure. Certainly Wall Street has subjected the U.S. economy to repeated disasters over the past thirty years, and the fact that we haven’t done anything to change this meaningfully may make it seem that we can’t do anything to change this. But what was doesn’t have to be what will be.

E.J. Dionne on health care for illegal immigrants.

If you saw a woman struck by a car, would you call an ambulance right away? Or would you first ask for her papers to make sure she was not an illegal immigrant? If someone living down the street from you were suffering from the H1N1 flu, wouldn't you want him to get immediate medical help? Would you rather see him in pain and perhaps spread the disease to others in your neighborhood?

Noise of the Day

Glenn Greenwald on how the tea-party protests get it right and wrong at the same time.

The premise of these citizen protests is not wrong: Washington politicians are in thrall to special interests and are, in essence, corruptly stealing the country's economic security in order to provide increasing benefits to a small and undeserving minority. But the "minority" here isn't what Fox News means by that term, but is the tiny sliver of corporate power which literally writes our laws and, in every case, ends up benefiting.

Michael Lind on the racism behind the United States' rejection of social welfare programs.

The original Social Security Act passed only after domestic workers and farmworkers -- the majority of black Americans, in the 1930s -- were left out of its coverage, at the insistence of white Southern politicians. Aid to Families With Dependent Children, a New Deal antipoverty program that became identified in the public mind with nonwhite "welfare queens," was a target of popular resentment for half a century before it was finally abolished by the Republican Congress and President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.

Noise of the Day

Roger Cohen on the real differences between French and American health care.

So beyond all the hectoring, the main French-American difference on health care is not ideological but a question of efficiency. Both countries use a mixture of public and private. France is at a very far remove from “socialism.” The United States has already “socialized” a significant portion of its medicine. (Nothing illustrates right-wing ideological madness in the United States better than calls from some to “keep the government out of my Medicare!”)

Cory Doctorow on Philadelphia's library closing.

Picture an entire city, a modern, wealthy place, in the richest country in the world, in which the vital services provided by libraries are withdrawn due to political brinksmanship and an unwillingness to spare one banker's bonus worth of tax-dollars to sustain an entire region's connection with human culture and knowledge and community. Think of it and ask yourself what the hell has happened to us.

What I'm Watching

Kiki's Delivery Service
A charmer, more linear, less crowded with mysterious detail than other Miyazaki films such as Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. And hence, I guess, more suited for children -- although I certainly wouldn't want to deprive a kid of the wonders of the other films. I wonder, though, at the mittel-Europäisch detail of the streets and architecture of the city in the film (also found in Howl's Moving Castle for that matter), and the absence of Asian people in the crowds on the street. Why are Miyazaki's cities not identifiably Japanese? Is it the Disney influence, the feeling that a "storybook" film has to look like it was written by the Brothers Grimm?

Noise of the Day

Ronald Brownstein on the disaster of Bush's presidency.

On every major measurement, the Census Bureau report shows that the country lost ground during Bush's two terms. While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially.

James Rucker on why fighting back against Glenn Beck is important.

The right wing media machine, of which Beck is now one of the leading members, is the single greatest force standing in the way of change. They have already helped derail the conversation on health care.... And they will do the same to the upcoming debates over clean energy, immigration, and every progressive policy priority. We simply don’t have the luxury of ignoring them. We must challenge them head on, expose their distortions, take away their advertisers, and position their views where they belong: far outside the bounds of any rational political discourse.

Frank Rich on the problems caused by Obama's no-drama style.

Obama’s leadership poll numbers have also suffered from his repeated deference to Congress. Waiting for the pettifogging small-state potentates of both parties in the Senate’s Gang of Six is as farcical as waiting for Godot.

Song for a Friday Night

Noise of the Day

M.J. Rosenberg on what the Garfield assassination can tell us about today's political climate.

The Republicans need to understand that hate cannot be contained in neat little corners or bottled and used as needed. It explodes, whether the haters want a full-blown explosion or not.

Glenn Greenwald puts Joe Wilson's outburst in perspective.

The American Right is indeed dominated by crazed extremists who often seem barely in touch with basic reality and who are at war with core American political values, but Joe Wilson's irreverence is one of the least significant examples of that, if it's one at all.

Joe Conason on the limits of Republican empathy.

Only after her husband began to disappear into the twilight of Alzheimer's disease did Mrs. Reagan perceive the value of the kind of government action they both had spent a lifetime denigrating. Government was the problem, not the solution, according to the Reaganite dogma. But then Nancy realized that federal support for stem-cell research might someday bring relief to patients like her beloved Ronnie, and anguished families like hers. Suddenly, spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on something other than Star Wars wasn't such a terrible idea.