At the Existentialist Cafe

 At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell is a terrific read. Bakewell charts the lives and works of many of the twentieth-century's greatest philosophers. Her explicit intention is to elevate the biographies of her subjects as much as their ideas, because in her mind their lived experiences are just as interesting as their theories. She's right. I can't think of a better introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heideggar, Albert Camus, and many others. The text was fast-paced but thorough, academic but readable. Drawing his name in the family gift exchange, I think I'll get it for my brother-in-law for Christmas this year. It's the type of book that you want to badger others to read, just so that you can talk to someone about it. 

Bakewell interjects her opinions sparingly, but they're always welcome. She can't pretend to be an impartial observer of the philosophers as they flirt with Maoism or Nazism, for example. But she also seriously considers their brands of existentialism or phenomenology and the unusual and sometimes contradictory ways that it impacted their personal lives and politics. Baker isn't afraid to rate the validity of the ideas, and their implications. If one could locate a thesis from this wide-ranging text, it's that the freedom found in existentialism should prompt us to lives full of meaning, full of action. 

The Sportswriter

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford is an engaging, complicated, and troubling novel. I read it ambivalently, navigating a strange landmine field each page. The good: it's about a suburban divorcee in a post-Cheever Northeast muddling through a midlife crisis, all in the course of one sad weekend. I love existential crap like that. The themes were poignant; the longing was real. The best part was the dialogue. Ford has a real knack for realistic conversations that turn on unexpected revelations. There were a handful of discussions in this book that were truly shocking, and I enjoyed every thoughtful encounter. None of the dialogue was expected, and I found myself loving each conversation as they unfolded, knowing that I would learn something meaningful about the narrator and his companions.

The bad: I have trouble calling a book racist. A lot of great literature has problematic racial perspectives. The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, some Flannery O'Connor . . . many works I think are great are saddled with racist descriptions that I have to condemn for my students. My own belief is that we all have subconscious racial bias--some more than others--and that we are all guilty of problematic racial perspectives at times. That said, it isn't helpful to judge literature morally, especially if the aim of the text transcends the author's blind spots. I instruct my students to identify racism; we acknowledge the shortcomings, search for better terms, and then we move on. But The Sportswriter may be a few bridges too far. 

It seemed like every few pages--literally every three pages or so--there was a cringe-inducing description of a Black person. The narrator might go to his girlfriend's family's for Easter dinner, and the NBA game on TV would show how "two giant Negros start to shuffle for a loose ball, and a vicious fight breaks out almost instantly." A few pages later, and the narrator looks up from dinner as "the black players look fierce, and the white boys, pale and thin-armed, seem to want to be peacemakers." Driving through cities, turning on the TV, sitting at a bar, the narrator had many chances to gaze at Black people and offer some brief, often awful, remark. In fact, in one of the only conversations he actually had with a Black person, the taxi driver offered him a hundred-dollar whore. This sort of throwaway description might happen once or twice in a Bellow or Cheever novel, and it would be wrong then. Cheever or Bellow, however, would transcend the momentary ignorance with a great novel about something else. But The Sportswriter, over the course of the novel, never shakes its bias. It's worse than Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, or any other troubling early-to-mid twentieth century text, and the descriptions do nothing to elevate the character or the themes. Astonishingly, it was written in 1986. And here, I think, I've found the place where the otherwise masterful elements are submerged by the moral failures of the text. 

The Dispossessed

 The Dispossessed by Ursula LeGuin is a fine science fiction novel that thinks deeply about long-term implications of political trends. Written a few years after the upheavals of the 1960s, The Dispossessed contrasts a capitalist democracy, an authoritarian communist country, and most specifically (and most interestingly) an anarchist world built several generations after a hippie revolution of a sort. Pacifist, egalitarian, collaborative, and rooted in personal freedom, the anarchist planet eschews family structures and private property. The results are creative and fascinating, but not perfect. It's thrilling to read of an "ambiguous utopia" as LeGuin describes her world. I was engaged throughout. 

Because it was written by LeGuin, The Dispossessed grapples with more than just politics. It's concerned with linguistics as well--how ideology shapes language. The novel also explores sexual mores, economics, educational philosophies, fashion, space travel, and, predominately, theoretical physics. There's a huge subplot involving the dual views of time, characterized as linear and circular, and it took me a while to get that LeGuin shaped her chapters to reinforce this point. There was a lot going on in this book, and while the characters were fleshed out and believable, some of the dialogue was a bit forced, preoccupied with the larger ideas at play. Still, The Dispossessed is a great achievement, another trophy in the case for LeGuin, one of the best writers the last century.

Brilliant Orange

 Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer by David Winner is a celebration, a joyous salve for these miserable times. As I'm writing this, wildfires have rendered the air quality in my town past the "hazardous" indicator for over 24 hours, and we've stuffed wet towels at the base of our doors to keep smoke particles out of our air-conditioned little two-bedroom. That, of course, is added to the Pandemic, the balkanizan of social media, the election, the weirdo internet militias descending in my state's largest city. The start of online school. The isolation. The malaise. David Winner's book, written 20 years ago, is a fine escape.

Brilliant Orange is the obsessive ramblings of an English soccer fan about the Dutch. Yes, he describes their soccer--an innovative system called "Total Football"--but his aims are bigger. Winner attempts to link the style of play (of the Dutch National Team and of Ajax, Amsterdam's big team) to the unique Dutch national character. He spends a lot of time on Dutch art, engineering, architecture, history, politics, and culture. Most of his thesis makes sense, and the parts that don't are entertaining enough. Winner admits in his introduction that his book is more about subjective ideas than reality, and then he gives himself freedom to play with his musings. As someone who knows very little about the Netherlands, I learned an enormous amount and enjoyed every page. 

Summer

 Summer by Karl Ove Knausgaard is the last in his "seasons" tetralogy, a strange collection that probably works best as examples of aestheticism. Ostensibly, the collection is a series of letters to his daughter. Autumn and Winter are both essay collections, as if introducing her to the world in three-page vignettes about mostly random objects. Spring is a strange memoir; Summer is a sprawling combination of essay, diary, and memoir, with a novella embedded somewhere in there as well. It's weird. It's pretty, too, and at this point I read Knausgaard more for his voice than anything else. He's a dour European atheist that can't help but plumb, relentlessly, the semidivine beauty all around him. It also helps that each of these books are physically beautiful: a different modern painter contributes several pieces to each work. 

Summer isn't perfect. After hundreds of pages, his essays get a little formulaic. The last essay would be more powerful if he didn't relate the exact same story in My Struggle: 6. And no one's buying at the end of Summer that this collection had anything to do with his daughter. I get the feeling that his publisher wanted him to crank out a series after My Struggle, and that at the end, he was just messing around. And yet. Knausgaard is still easily one of the best writers in the world. His thoughts, which have always explored the banal, are still so eloquent that I'll pick up whatever he writes. As a bonus, the "seasons" series is the most accessible of all of his works: most of my friends aren't as riled up as I am to read thousands of pages of My Struggle but I've yet to share an essay from this collection that didn't land well, whether it was a family member or a high school sophomore. 

The Overstory

The Overstory by Richard Powers is a big, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about humanity's relationship to nature. Specifically, it's about trees. In one respect, the novel is a huge achievement. I look at trees, as I walk through my neighborhood, with a greater sense of wonder. Powers vividly described their interconnectedness; their myriad, animal traits; their place in time--much more patient than humans can comprehend. For this, The Overstory was a worthwhile read, changing the way I experience the natural world.

I wonder if a novel was the right medium for this message, as some literary elements were clunky (plot), some were unbelievable (dialogue), and some were ridiculous (character). Reading The Overstory was a strange experience, then, as I deeply enjoyed the science but cringed, often, at the fiction. The beginning was auspicious: each of the many main characters inhabited their pages believably and colorful trees bloomed in the background. But a third of the way through, the characters all coalesced into desperate environmental activists.* Their actions and speech morphed into didactic ranting. The women were beautiful and motherly; the men simple and loyal to the women. None of them had a sense of humor. They made wild life changes on whims or feelings. Driven hard by plot, the novel propelled these characters to dramatic gestures of awareness and compassion that, we are led to believe, the rest of the world was too selfish to understand.

Apparently, this characterization problem has dogged Powers's fiction. In a remarkable passage, Powers actually addresses it--a man reads great novels and complains that the literary element character seems to be "all that matters in the end," that "no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people." This meta, Postmodern self-awareness was perhaps the most interesting device in the text. But the statement is incorrect. Many fine novels are centered on theme, not character. And they don't need to sacrifice realistic dialogue or character motivation to explore the idea. Writing about politics is uniquely difficult, but not impossible. Joyce Carol Oates's A Book of American Martyrs is a brilliant, theme-driven novel--about abortion--that absolutely held up. I was invested in the characters and believed in their decisions, however extreme, however misguided. If I were passing out Pulitzer Prizes, A Book of American Martyrs would have won long before The Overstory.

*As the son of an Oregon logger, I was struck that there was no room in this huge book for people in the Timber Industry. When they did appear, they were uncritical yokels that developed a grudging respect for the costumed hippies putting them out of work. It was an absurd characterization, one that made me want to go back to Ken Kesey's masterpiece Sometimes a Great Notion.

Soul

Soul by Andrey Platonov is a strange, beautiful, politically driven collection. There's the novella that shares the title of the book, then seven short stories. All take place in the USSR in the early 20th Century, all are sympathetic to communism in a complicated way, and all contain bizarre characters making surprising actions. A protagonist might marry a woman he just met, only to fall in love with her daughter, and then abandon them both, all in the span of three pages. In a way, he's like Flannery O'Connor, but in the Soviet Union, and with communism standing in for Catholicism. On balance, I liked the collection. It was interesting. I may never read as much about Uzbekistan, and the text spanned issues as wide-ranging as Zoroastrianism or the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The collection was, for lack of a better term, somnolent. Characters were constantly falling asleep, or otherwise exhausted, and the whole thing felt hazy and dreamy. I'm thinking through the effect that had on the themes of the text, and it's escaping me now. But I will say that reading Soul, after nights of poor sleep tending an infant, during a repetitive quarantine period, lulled me as much as anything I've ever read to sleep, where'd I'd dream of Uzbek camels, peasant farmers, and big trains heading east through dark forests. 

The Glory Game

The Glory Game by Hunter Davies tells of the 1971-72 season of our beloved Tottenham Hotspur. It's a fun read. The team was good that year, and they played all over Europe, and they were in the transitional period of professional sports from its origins to the ruthless corporate world we see today. Some of the era is worthy of celebration (the outfits, the ruggedness, the success of Spurs) and some is best left in the past (all the players were white and British, and the provincialism shows). Davies had good access to the club, in the locker room and pitchside, and the best parts of The Glory Game are the funny details on game day. We witness manager speeches, player scapegoating, superstitions, and silly celebrations. Much of the book was probably groundbreaking at the time, though it feels dated in our era of 30 for 30 documentaries and social media.    

In recent years, I've become taken with Tottenham, and Premier League football in general. It's a great league. The structure is perfect: 20 teams playing 38 games (home and away against everyone), with no playoffs. As a Dodger fan, bedeviled by playoff vagaries in recent years, I appreciate the weight on the regular season. Even though a champion is often crowned before the end, there are enough other things to play for (avoiding relegation, European places, pride) that each game is tense and exciting. And the season lasts for 10 months! Games also air early Saturday morning, which happens to be the only time I can sit down and watch any live sporting event for longer than 20 minutes. Pre-coronavirus lockdown, it was a real source of joy for me. My love for English soccer, then, buoyed the more pedestrian parts of The Glory Game.

The Hidden History of Burma

The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century by Thant Myint-U is interesting and troubling. The book charts the deeply complicated history of Burma (the name "Myanmar" is quickly eschewed as nativist). Myint-U is a member of several UN peacekeeping operations and his perspective is personal and valuable. A large portion of the text serves to explain how Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's de-facto leader, went from a Nobel Peace Prize recipient to essentially condoning a genocide of Rohingya Muslims. According to Myint-U, she didn't change: the West just never understood Burma in its oversimplified quest for "democracy." It's a fascinating read.

The book isn't perfect, though. Some of the writing is hasty or clunky. We are given explanations for major historical periods in a paragraph or two. Myint-U has a strong personal bias, that he is honest about, but that colors the explanation of events. The Rohingya Genocide, something the book leads up to for 230 pages, is explained in only a short chapter, and I wanted to learn more about this still-evolving crisis. Still, Thant Myint-U knows infinitely more about Southeast Asia than I ever will, and I learned quite a bit from his flawed, but perceptive, narrative. 

Coventry

Coventry by Rachel Cusk is a great collection of essays, at times rivaling Joan Didion's The White Album in pure literary achievement. The writing is as precise and thoughtful as her Outline trilogy, but the nonfiction subject matter is especially thrilling. Here, we get an report on Cusk's interior life--her marriages, children, parents, literally her interior decorating--and it's both refreshing and ballsy in its unflinching honesty. The first six essays are, sentence-by-sentence, perfect. They're white-hot captivating, surprising, revealing, unapologetic, and illuminating.  I will reread those again and again. If the book drops off in its second half it's only because the first half was so good. The second section is a collection of literary reviews and cultural observations which, while good, are simply not as mesmerizing. They read like introductions to other books--which in some cases they are--and they're fine.

But those first essays! "Driving as Metaphor," the opener, is exactly that, a coolly detached explanation of the banalities of driving English country roads. It's weighted with remarkable symbolism and subtext. The title essay explains the concept of being sent to "Coventry," which has to do with being excluded and cut-off socially, and the surprising advantages of alienation. "Aftermath" is a searing divorce memoir. "Lions on Leashes" is perhaps the most honest account of parenting (or otherwise attempting to control) teenagers that I've ever read. Based on what we read, Rachel Cusk in real life seems inflexible, blunt, and fiercely independent. She's also self-aware and intelligent enough to reveal this and reflect on it in powerful, original ways. 

Biased

Biased by Jennifer Eberhardt, PhD, is a fascinating examination of a troubling topic. Dr. Eberhardt, who is black, has spent her career documenting the unconscious biases--mostly racial--that guide American behavior. She's an inviting author: she begins her book with a story of how she couldn't recognize her new peers when she switched from a mostly black middle school to a mostly white one. Beginning with this benign anecdote, Biased becomes increasingly more serious and alarming, highlighting everything from police traffic stops to death row convictions to the measurable benefits of "whitening" resumes. It's a terrific read. The information is well-documented, relevant, and sad, and understanding collective bias is a crucial first step towards any kind of meaningful change.

Dr. Eberhardt is all about change. She celebrates instances of organizations--the app Nextdoor, the Oakland Police Department--recognizing their own biases and taking measurable, institutional steps to mitigate it. Rather than denying bias or pretending to be colorblind, these organizations had the humility to acknowledge the problem and the moral courage to change their practices. While much of Biased is depressing, it is not hopeless. As a schoolteacher, I was challenged to acknowledge my own blind spots and prejudices. While I still have much to learn, I think differently about how I engage my students, and I'm better for it.