Excuses, Excuses

I've had deadlines stacked up like planes over O'Hare this week, so I'm behind in my postings. But hey, I've gotta pay the bills. Will try to do better next week.

Twice Upon a Time

This review ran today in the San Jose Mercury News:

THE COMMONER
By John Burnham Schwartz
Talese/Doubleday, 351 pp., $24.95

They lived happily ever after, all those Disney princesses swept off to the castle by their golden coaches and flying carpets. But real-world princesses are not always so happy. One word: Diana.

The ill-fated princess of Wales was probably on John Burnham Schwartz’s mind as he wrote his terrific new novel, “The Commoner,” but uppermost on it were two other princesses: the one who became the current empress of Japan, the former Michiko Shoda, and her daughter-in-law, the current crown princess, who was born Masako Owada. In the novel, which is transparently based on their lives, the former is named Haruko Endo, the latter Keiko Mori.

Like the real Empress Michiko, Haruko is the daughter of a wealthy businessman. An intelligent, pretty, athletic young woman, educated at Sacred Heart University, she is invited to play tennis with the crown prince. People are shocked when she doesn’t let him win. They are more shocked when he falls in love with her and proposes marriage. Haruko has misgivings: She would have to leave her friends and family behind forever. She would give up any hope of independence. She would be forced into a regimented, ritualistic life at a time when Japanese women – the marriage takes place in 1959 – are beginning to discover their freedoms.

But she accepts his proposal, and becomes the first commoner to marry into the imperial line. Her one and only task is to produce an heir, which she does. She loves the boy, Yasuhito, but as Mrs. Oshima, her chief lady-in-waiting (and spy for the empress), icily reminds her, “He may be yours, but he does not belong to you.” And as the full knowledge of the hopeless emptiness of her life bears down on her, Haruko sinks into a clinical depression that robs her of speech.

Haruko recovers, only to see her own story recapitulated when Yasuhito grows up and falls in love with Keiko, a brilliantly accomplished woman with a promising career as a diplomat. Keiko has known more of the world than Haruko was privileged to know, and she turns down Yasuhito’s proposal. But Haruko herself persuades Keiko to accept – and then endures the pain of guilt when Keiko’s fate proves even more crushing than her own. For Keiko is unable to produce an heir. And she, too, falls into depression and withdraws from public view.

The secrets of the Japanese royal family are fiercely guarded, and Schwartz has based his novel on what little has leaked out from the imperial palace: that the Empress Michiko did in fact go mute for a while when she was crown princess, and that Crown Princess Masako has disappeared from sight after giving birth to a girl – reportedly conceived in vitro. But this is no tawdry, tattling roman à clef. It’s a subtle, finely wrought fiction that evokes Jane Austen.

The novel’s milieu, like that of Austen’s novels, is an island of custom and ritual in the middle of a world in change; after all, Austen’s country houses and their decorum-conscious residents existed in the eye of a hurricane: the Napoleonic wars. It’s the young – attracted to change, subjected to tradition – who must wager a choice between the burden of the past and the temptation of the future.

Some of the characters in “The Commoner” would have been at home in the Jane Austen world. The vaguely ineffective Emperor, modeled on the impotent postwar Hirohito, evokes the passive-aggressive fathers in her novels, such as Mr. Bennet and Mr. Woodhouse. Even some of the dialogue in “The Commoner” could have come, with only minor changes, from an Austen novel, such as this exchange between Haruko and the Empress:

“ ‘That must of course be right,’ I said. ‘But it’s rather confusing how nearly every time one picks up a newspaper of late one finds oneself reading the opinion that Japan has entered the age of progress and technology and must not, cannot, turn back. I wonder what one is to make of such statements.’

“ ‘You should consider reading less,’ my mother-in-law said.”

Schwartz has followed up his highly praised novel “Reservation Road” with a tour de force; the creation of a wholly convincing Japanese heroine by a male American writer reflects the triumph of imagination over experience. But it’s more than that, for the stories of Haruko and Keiko embody an essential and perdurable tragedy: the stifling of a human being’s potential.

They don’t live happily ever after. Maybe they never did.

Apropos of Absolutely Nothing

A classic:

The Stars Are Out

One of my friends got a robocall from Scarlett Johansson for Obama. Another heard from Chris Rock. And I got Jack Nicholson for Hillary.

Vote as You Please, But Please Vote

My friend Fran Smith, a Hillary supporter, and I, a late convert to Obamaism, recently had an e-mail debate that to my mind encapsulates the dilemma that many of us face today. Fran has kindly given me permission to reprint our dialogue.

Fran: I actually don't know what kind of leader Obama would be. All I know is what kind of a speaker he is. What am I missing? Besides a drink of the Kool Aid...

Me: Good point, and I don't have an answer -- that Kool Aid is mighty tasty. I guess it really comes down to my sense that I know what kind of leader Hillary would be: Enormously competent but freighted with sixteen years of history. Obama promises at least initially to give us a break from that history. If it were just Hillary, I'd be more enthusiastic. But I'm just not sure I want to put up with four to eight years more of Bill Clinton, who will be there no matter what she can do to control him.

Fran: Yes, I get that about Bill and Hill and the baggage. But a lot of the "divisiveness" and "polarization" of Bill's administration that I keep reading about came from the mad-dog right-wing smear machine. Yes, the Clintons provided plenty of ammunition, but none of their sins comes close to what we've witnessed and endured and pretty quietly put up with these past eight years. Monica vs. Iraq? Hillary's clumsy health care efforts vs. torture, White House secrecy and the war on civil liberties? I think it's revisionist history -- and a delusion -- to think that the attacks and divisions were about the Clintons, and not first and foremost about the Republicans, and that Obama could somehow float above the partisan nastiness. If the Dems win, it may take the Republicans a while to regroup, and that would be an excellent thing. But if and when they do, they will go after whoever holds that office, with the cynical, vicious, deceitful win-at-any-cost tactics that are their M.O. At least with Hill, we know we have a fighter and survivor.

Me: You get no argument from me on the basic point that Republican nastiness (and incompetence and lust for power and so on) is to blame for what we've endured. Or that it won't resurface whatever Democrat is in the White House. But given a choice between two competent and attractive candidates (Hillary and Obama), I have to go with the one who has the better chance of giving us at least a brief respite from the brutality of right-wing attacks. The Republican Party is in disarray right now, but I fear that nominating Hillary will give them a point to rally around. Nor do I see any sign that Obama is any less capable of fighting and surviving whatever the right-wing attack machine may throw at him. He's already had to deal with the "Barack Hussein Osama" nonsense and the e-mails about his being a covert Muslim and so on. It's the enthusiasm I sense from younger voters and his ability to inspire -- even if it's only rhetoric, which can only take you so far -- that I think will help him along. It's why people remember JFK so fondly, even though he really wasn't a very good president. You felt something at the time that gave you a sense of promise. I feel it with Obama. With Hillary, I just feel the tug back into the Clintonian past -- and even though that past was better than the Bush years, I just don't much want to go back there.

Fran: You get no argument from me on your basic points, either. We agree on pretty much everything except which way to vote today! Kind of like Clinton and Obama....

Me: And may whoever it is win, and win big, in November.

What to Read Next

Critical Mass, the National Book Critics Circle's blog, has a regular feature it calls Good Reads. It surveys the membership as well as some eminent authors to come up with a list of top choices in fiction, nonfiction and poetry among the current books. Their current picks are these:

Fiction

1. Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar Straus & Giroux)
2. Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead)
3. J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (Viking)
4. Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book (Viking)
5. Steve Erickson, Zeroville (Europa)

Nonfiction

1. The Rest Is Noise, by Alex Ross (FSG)
2. Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf)
3. In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan (Penguin Press)
4. Musicophilia, by Oliver Sacks (Knopf)*
5. The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein (Metropolitan)*

Poetry

1. Elegy, by Mary Jo Bang (Graywolf)
2. Time and Materials, by Robert Hass (Ecco)*
3. Gulf Music, by Robert Pinsky (FSG)*
4. The Collected Poems, 1956–1998, by Zbigniew Herbert (Ecco)
5. Sharp Teeth, by Toby Barlow (Harper)

*There was a tie for fourth in nonfiction, and for second in poetry

I can endorse the list, even though I've read only one of the titles (Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food). My own choices, which didn't make the final cut, were:

Fiction
The Commoner, by John Burnham Schwartz (Talese/Doubleday) -- My review of this fine novel should be up next weekend.

Nonfiction
Coal River, by Michael Shnayerson (Farrar, Straus) -- See here for my review.

Sadly, like most people, I know nothing about contemporary poetry.

Old King Coal

The following review ran today (in a version very nicely edited for space) in the Dallas Morning News. This is the unedited version.

COAL RIVER
By Michael Shnayerson
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 321 pp., $25

Court cases thread through Michael Shnayerson’s new book like veins of coal through an Appalachian hillside. In discussing one of them, he observes that that the judge made “a small point, like a caveat buried near the end of a book review.”

So let’s not bury our caveats, the most important one being: “Coal River” will make you angry.

It will make you angry especially if you’re disturbed by the Bush administration’s radically pro-business approach to energy policy and the environment. Of course, if you’re an admirer and a beneficiary of those policies, Mr. Shnayerson’s evident bias against them will also make you angry.

For while his book is billed as the story of a handful of people in the hills of West Virginia who protested the damage being done by a coal company to the mountains where they and their ancestors had lived, Mr. Shnayerson has turned it into an indictment of government policy, of power-hungry politicians and businesspeople, of bureaucratic inertia, of Wall Street’s obsession with fattening the bottom line, and of the callousness with which the poor have been treated for generations. The people of West Virginia, he writes, “are for the most part too poor and too cowed after a century of harsh treatment by King Coal to think they can stop their world from being blasted away.”

He means “blasted away” literally. “Coal River” focuses on the practice of mountaintop removal – the blasting away of the tops of mountains to get at the rich veins of coal beneath. It is a practice that became more common after Don Blankenship became chairman, president and CEO of Massey Energy, a company whose ruthlessness was a byword in the state. It was a ruthlessness that went unchecked, Mr. Shnayerson asserts, “The coal companies could set those blasts as close to homes as they liked, damaging foundations and walls, ruining wells. No law governed them in that regard.”

The result was visible and lasting damage to the environment. After the blasting began, one woman “was astonished to see the hollow’s entire animal population come foraging right by her house in the valley: bobcats and bears, squirrels and possums. … When she fed them, they hung around for more, pets whether she wanted them or not.” And environmentalists argued that the burning of coal, however obtained, “was the single greatest cause” of the looming calamities of global warming.

Those who protested mountaintop removal, who argued for laws and regulations, often found themselves outcasts in their own communities, where people who had jobs feared losing them – or that Massey would retaliate against friends and relatives who worked there. The mountain culture is “libertarian,” as Mr. Shnayerson puts it – distrustful of outsiders and collective efforts. And after years of being worn down, they simply doubted that anything could or would be done. As one of the protesters put it, “The way they’ve done it is by dehumanizing us, so that the rest of America doesn’t care about us. That’s how they got away with slavery for so long. When they say, ‘Don’t go to West Virginia or Kentucky, those people are ignorant and inbred,’ then who cares if my grandson is sleeping nights in his clothes because he’s worried there’ll be a flood or mudslide?”

Mr. Shnayerson has found an easy villain for his book in Don Blankenship, who would seem on the face of it to be the very emblem of corporate greed, a man who received “roughly $27 million in pay and perks for 2006 – despite a 30 percent decline in the company’s stock for the year.” But Mr. Shnayerson humanizes Blankenship, describing his hardscrabble childhood in the hills he was now blasting away. “Coal River” is not a simple diatribe, but rather a carefully reported and compellingly written account of a complex and intricate economic, political, social and environmental problem with no easy solutions or quick fixes.

Most of all, the book is a remarkable piece of the sort of investigative journalism that has grown sadly more rare as newspapers retrench and reshape themselves. Mr. Shnayerson is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, where much of the material in the book originally appeared. It’s a fine irony that a publication known for its celebration of glitz and glamour, fattened with ads for luxury goods, should also be the source of such an incisive and sympathetic portrait of the exploited poor.

Talkin' 'bout My Generation

The Mercury News today had one of those perfectly obvious "news" stories on its front page, about how Obama, Clinton/Romney, and McCain represent three generations: Gen-X, the Baby Boomers, and the Silent Generation. My first reaction was, Well, duh. But my second was to feel my old gray hackles rise at the labeling of my own cohort as the "Silent Generation."

The article defines the "Silent Generation" as those people born between 1925 and 1942, and claims that it "was overshadowed by the 'GI Generation' that preceded them and fought World War II, and the baby boomers who came after them."

Well, first of all, a lot of people born in 1925 and 1926 also fought in World War II and Korea. And the baby boom is usually dated from 1946, when GIs came home and started raising families.

But even taking the article on its own terms, the inappropriateness of the label "Silent Generation" is obvious. There's a chart that goes with the story (the Merc loves charts) headed "Generations compared" that lists, among other things, "Prominent contemporaries" for each of the generations. And the prominent contemporaries of the "Silent Generation" include Martin Luther King Jr. and Bob Dylan. If those guys were "overshadowed" by anyone in either the preceding or following generations, I'd like to know who.

I suspect that the "Silent Generation" label was coined by a baby boomer, a member of a generation that loves to celebrate itself. Baby boomers seem to believe that they changed the world, when most of the work was done for them by the generations that preceded theirs.

Take for example the famous baby boom triad of "sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll." That there was a sexual revolution there can be no doubt. But the groundwork for it was laid by Alfred Kinsey -- who was born in 1894. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was published in 1948, and the followup on human females in 1953. It was the Silent Generation that made them bestsellers. As for drugs, it was Timothy Leary (born 1923) and Richard Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass, born 1931), who ushered in the psychedelic era.

Oh, and where to start with rock 'n' roll? The article has already spotted us Bob Dylan (1941), but there would have been no good rockin' tonight without Chuck Berry (1926), Fats Domino (1928), Ray Charles (1930), Little Richard (1932), James Brown (1933), Elvis Presley (1935), Jerry Lee Lewis (1935), and Buddy Holly (1936). Not to mention a couple of Brits: John Lennon (1940) and Paul McCartney (1942).

In fact, almost everything the boomers claim as their own has its origins in the previous generation.

Feminism? Gloria Steinem (1934) and Germaine Greer (1939) built on the work of members of the generations before them, such as Betty Friedan (1921) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908).

Anti-war protest? Not one of the Chicago Seven was a baby boomer. Abbie Hoffman was born in 1936, Jerry Rubin in 1938, Tom Hayden in 1939, and so on.

Civil rights? Think Martin Luther King Jr. (1929) and Malcolm X (1925), James Meredith (1935), Eldridge Cleaver (1935), John Lewis (1940) and Julian Bond (1940). Rosa Parks was born in 1913.

Campus protest? Mario Savio of the Berkeley Free Speech movement was born in 1942.

The Merc article lists as the baby boom's "prominent contemporaries" George W. Bush, Madonna and Bill Gates. I think I'll stick with my contemporaries.

And Then There Were Two

A friend of mine who supports Obama, and who is quite knowledgeable about the Clintons, had this to say recently: "I have a problem with Bill as the spouse of the nominee. I think he's capable of doing something, unconsciously or simply carelessly, to sabotage Hillary." That was, in fact, written before the South Carolina primary, and before Bill did exactly that in his attacks on Obama. And now the media are making much of The Snub -- the supposed cold shoulder that Obama gave Hillary at the State of the Union. Of course Maureen Dowd wrote one of her calumniating columns about The Snub, and today I turned on MSNBC too early -- before "Countdown" came on -- and heard my ineffable namesake yapping away about it, too. It seems that Bill Clinton is capable of sabotaging everybody. (Most of all, himself.)

I did, in fact, mail in my vote for Obama in the California primary, after much waffling among the three of them. But I found myself wishing for a candidate who combined Obama's charisma, Hillary's expertise and John Edwards' passion. I was almost as sorry to see Edwards drop out today as I was delighted and relieved to see Giuliani make his exit. Edwards got a bad deal almost from the moment Obama announced his candidacy, and the vapidity of the media coverage of his candidacy was infuriating. The $400 haircut, for god's sake. (I'm reading Willie Brown's memoir, Basic Brown, for a review. Brown talks about how he never felt any kind of disjunction between wearing $5,000 Brioni suits and fighting for the poor. I wish Edwards had had the same kind of chutzpah. But I'm not sure anyone but Willie Brown could pull it off these days.)

The truth is, I'm suffering from Clinton fatigue. I guess I'll have to get over it, because I still think she'll get the nomination. If she can keep the Big Dog in his kennel, maybe it will be all right.

Mansfield Misfire

Mansfield Park is sometimes called Jane Austen's "problem" novel, the problem being that its moral vision is so very different from ours, and its heroine seems so much less like our contemporary than Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet do. Austen herself admitted that Fanny Price was a heroine that no one but she would like, but she also said Mansfield Park was the favorite of her novels.

Still, it's not so problematic a book that adapting it for the movies or TV should result in such terrible hashes as the two versions I've seen: The 1999 film written and directed by Patricia Rozema and the British TV version that aired on PBS Sunday night. The movie is better: Frances O'Connor is a good choice as Fanny, and the film at least follows something that resembles an outline of the novel. The chief difficulty with the film is that Rozema tries to interpolate into it a contemporary New Historical view of the book, pointing out that its wealthy idlers are wealthy and idle because of the exploitation of slaves in the West Indies. It's an intellectual premise that Rozema fails to translate into dramatic sense.

In this scene from the film, Sir Thomas (Harold Pinter) returns home to interrupt the theatricals. Jonny Lee Miller is Edmund, Embeth Davidtz Mary Crawford and Alessandro Nivola Henry Crawford. The conversation about breeding mulattos is, of course, not in the novel:


But at least the film version provokes you into thinking about something. The TV version allows for no thought. It's as if the adapter, one Maggie Wadey, was embarrassed by Fanny Price -- whom admittedly some readers regard as merely a prude, a prig and a wimp -- and is determined to turn her into a Harlequin romance heroine, with cleavage enough to catch any man's eye. Billie Piper, so wonderful as Rose on "Doctor Who," is miserably miscast in the role. She's made into a boisterous little child-woman, with a mad crush on her cousin Edmund (who is at least attractively embodied by Blake Ritson). She's supposed to be the conscience of the household, but when it comes to the amateur theatricals that are the moral crux of the novel, in the TV version she doesn't hold out against them as obdurately as Austen's Fanny Price did. And with this, the TV version crumbles into pointlessness.

Moreover, Wadey utterly botches one of Austen's greatest characters, the poisonous Mrs. Norris (Maggie O'Neil), reducing her to a figure sitting to one side doing her needlework and making the occasional mildly anti-Fanny remark. So when she gets her final comeuppance -- one of the novel's most satisfying moments -- we hardly even notice. A Mansfield Park without a Mrs. Norris is like a Snow White without a wicked stepmother.

Mary Crawford (Hayley Atwell) is another of Austen's great creations. In the novel, she's the embodiment of cleverness and wit -- an Elizabeth Bennet without a soul. Here, she's only a rather attractive woman twirling a parasol and being mildly snippy about Edmund's plans to be a clergyman.

This version also omits Fanny's journey -- her banishment -- home to Portsmouth: a key episode for the character, who discovers in the squalor of her old home how much she values Mansfield Park and all it represents. It's an essential contrast that no amount of flowery talk about how beautiful Mansfield is can compensate for.

In short, I don't think I've seen a worse travesty of a great novel. (Well ... maybe Demi Moore's version of The Scarlet Letter.)