this must be the place

The Literary Darwinists

2005-11-12T16:12:00.000Z

From the New York Times
November 6, 2005

By D. T. MAX

Jane Austen first published "Pride and Prejudice" in 1813. She had misgivings about the book, complaining in a letter to her sister that it was "rather too light, and bright, and sparkling." But these qualities may be what make it the most popular of her novels. It tells the story of Elizabeth Bennet, a young woman from a shabby genteel family, who meets Mr. Darcy, an aristocrat. At first, the two dislike each other. Mr. Darcy is arrogant; Elizabeth, clever and cutting. But through a series of encounters that show one to the other in a more appealing light - as well as Mr. Darcy's intervention when an officer named Wickham runs away with Elizabeth's younger sister Lydia (Darcy bribes the cad to marry Lydia) - Elizabeth and Darcy come to love each other, to marry and, it is strongly suggested at book's end, to live happily ever after.

For the common reader, "Pride and Prejudice" is a romantic comedy. His or her pleasure comes from the vividness of Austen's characters and how familiar they still seem: it's as if we know Elizabeth and Darcy. On a more literary level, we enjoy Austen's pointed dialogue and admire her expert way with humor. For similar reasons, critics have long called "Pride and Prejudic" a classic - their ultimate (if not well defined) expression of approval.

But for an emerging school of literary criticism known as Literary Darwinism, the novel is significant for different reasons. Just as Charles Darwin studied animals to discover the patterns behind their development, Literary Darwinists read books in search of innate patterns of human behavior: child bearing and rearing, efforts to acquire resources (money, property, influence) and competition and cooperation within families and communities. They say that it's impossible to fully appreciate and understand a literary text unless you keep in mind that humans behave in certain universal ways and do so because those behaviors are hard-wired into us. For them, the most effective and truest works of literature are those that reference or exemplify these basic facts.

From the first words of the first chapter ("It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife") to the first words of the last ("Happy for all her maternal feelings was the day on which Mrs. Bennet got rid of her two most deserving daughters"), the novel is stocked with the sort of life's-passage moments that resonate with meaning for Literary Darwinists. (One calls the novel their "fruit fly.") The women in the book mostly compete to marry high-status men, consistent with the Darwinian idea that females try to find mates whose status will assure the success of their offspring. At the same time, the men are typically competing to marry the most attractive women, consistent with the Darwinian idea that males look for youth and beauty in females as signs of reproductive fitness. Darcy and Elizabeth's flips and flops illustrate the effort mammals put into distinguishing between short-term appeal (a pert step, a handsome coxcomb) and long-term appropriateness (stability, commitment, wealth, underlying good health). Meanwhile, Wickham - the penniless officer who tries to make off first with Darcy's sister and then carries off Lydia - serves as an example of the mating behavior evolutionary biologists call (I'm using a milder euphemism than they do) "the sneaky fornicator theory."

Humans beyond reproductive age also have a part to play in the Literary Darwinist paradigm. Consider Mrs. Bennet, Elizabeth's mother. Jane Austen calls her "invariably silly," and most critics over nearly two centuries have agreed. But for Literary Darwinists, her marriage obsession makes sense, because she also has a stake in what is going on. If one of her daughters has a child, Mrs. Bennet will have further passed on her genetic material, fulfilling the ultimate aim of living things according to some evolutionary theorists: the replication of one's genes. (J.B.S. Haldane, a British biologist, was once asked if he would trade his life for his brother's and replied no, but that he would trade it for two brothers or eight cousins.)

It is useful to know a bit about current literary criticism to understand how different the Darwinist approach to literature is. Current literary theory tends to look at a text as the product of particular social conditions or, less often, as a network of references to other texts. (Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, famously observed that there was "nothing outside the text.") It often focuses on how the writer's and the reader's identities - straight, gay, female, male, black, white, colonizer or colonized - shape a particular narrative or its interpretation. Theorists sometimes regard science as simply another form of language or suspect that when scientists claim to speak for nature, they are disguising their own assertion of power. Literary Darwinism breaks with these tendencies. First, its goal is to study literature through biology - not politics or semiotics. Second, it takes as a given not that literature possesses its own truth or many truths but that it derives its truth from laws of nature.

"The Literary Animal," the first scholarly anthology dedicated to Literary Darwinism, is to be published next month. It draws from the various fields that figure in Darwinian evolutionary studies, including contributions from evolutionary psychologists and biologists as well as literature professors. The essays consider the importance of the male-male bond in epics and romances, the battle of the sexes in Shakespeare and the motif in both Japanese and Western literature of men rejecting children whom their wives have conceived in adultery. "The Literary Animal" spans centuries and individual cultures with bravura, if not bravado. "There is no work of literature written anywhere in the world, at any time, by any author, that is outside the scope of Darwinian analysis," Joseph Carroll, a professor of English at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, writes in an essay in "The Literary Animal." Why bring literature into what is essentially a social science? Jonathan Gotschall, an editor of "The Literary Animal," offers an answer: "One thing literature offers is data. Fast, inexhaustible, cross-cultural and cheap."

There is a circularity to an argument that uses texts about people to prove that people behave in human ways. (I'm reminded of the Robert Frost line: "Earth's the right place for love:/I don't know where it's likely to go better.") But Literary Darwinism has a second focus too. It also investigates why we read and write fiction. At the core of Literary Darwinism is the idea that we inherit many of the predispositions we deem to be cultural through our genes. How we behave has been subjected to the same fitness test as our bodies: if a bit of behavior has no purpose, then evolution - given enough time - may well dispense with it. So why, Literary Darwinists ask, do we make room for this strange exercise of the imagination? What are reading and writing fiction good for? In her essay "Reverse-Engineering Narrative," Michelle Scalise Sugiyama tries to simplify the question by picking stories apart, breaking them down into characters, settings, causalities and time frames ("the cognitive widgets and sprockets of storytelling") and asking what purpose each serves: how do they make us more adaptive, more capable of passing on our genes?

or the moment, Literary Darwinism is a club that may grow into a crowd; there are only about 30 or so declared adherents in all of academia. (The wider field of biopoetics - which relates music and the visual arts to Darwin as well - can claim another handful.) But it has captured the imagination of a number of academics who grew up with other literary critical techniques and became dissatisfied. Brian Boyd, for instance, a well-known scholar of Vladimir Nabokov and professor at the University of New Zealand in Auckland, changed his focus in his 40's to Literary Darwinism, gripped by what he calls its "one very simple and powerful idea."

It may seem strange that English professors in search of inspiration would turn to evolutionary biology, but you should never underestimate the appeal of the worldview Darwin formulated. It has a way of capturing people's attention. While not everyone enjoys being reminded that humans descend from monkeys (or even worse, from prokaryotic bacteria), many of us like the subtle reassurance that Darwinism offers. Despite its theory that unceasing change is the essence of life, it can be perceived as a reassuring philosophy, one that believes there are answers. And a philosophy that implies "survival of the fittest" pays a great compliment to all of us who are here to read about it. So it is little surprise that evolutionary biology has come to be invoked not merely as a theory about changes in the physical makeups of living beings but also as an explanatory tool that appeals to both academics and to everyone's inner pop psychologist. (Jack Nicholson explaining his bad-boy behavior to an interviewer for The New York Times in 2002: "I have a sweet spot for what's attractive to me. It's not just psychological. It's also glandular and has to do with mindlessly continuing the species.")

Literary Darwinism - like many offshoots of Darwinism - tends to find favor with those looking for universal explanations. Like Freudianism and Marxism, it has large-scale ambitions: to explain not just the workings of a particular text or author but of texts and authors over time and across cultures as well. It may also allow English professors to grab back some of the influence - and money - that the sciences, in the Darwinian fight for university resources, have taken from the humanities for the past century. But for now, to march under the Literary Darwinist banner you had better be independent and unafraid. "The most effective and easiest form of repudiation is to ignore us," Carroll says.

Literary Darwinists give off a cultlike vibe. When they talk about like-minded academics who won't acknowledge their beliefs in public, they sometimes call them "closeted." The 56-year-old Carroll's own conversion to the discipline took place when, as a young, tenured but disgruntled professor of English at the University of Missouri at St. Louis in the early 90's, he picked up "The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man" and had an "intuitive conviction" that he had found the master keys to literature. Carroll had always liked big ideas; he'd had a "big Hegel phase" when he was 21. "The basic conception crystallized for me in a matter of weeks," he remembers, and the notes he began taking "at high intensity" formed themselves into the founding text in the field, "Evolution and Literary Theory," published in 1995.

Jonathan Gottschall, a 33-year-old editor of "The Literary Animal," began his graduate studies in English at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1994 and was surprised at how little his professors cared about linking literature with "the big, Delphic project of seeking the nature of human nature. They didn't believe in knowledge. In fact they could only render the word in quotes." When he found a copy of the zoologist Desmond Morris's 1967 book, "The Naked Ape," in a used bookstore, Morris's observations on the overlap between primate and human behavior spoke to him. (Animals often play a role in these conversion narratives: Ellen Dissanayake, the author of "What Is Art For?" and a biopoeticist at the University of Washington, was primed for her conversion in part by watching the behavior of wild animals - her husband at the time was a director at the National Zoo in Washington - and comparing them to her young children.)

Soon after reading "The Naked Ape," Gottschall reread the "Iliad," one of his favorite books: "As always," he writes in the introduction to "The Literary Animal," "Homer made my bones flex and ache under the weight of all the terror and beauty of the human condition. But this time around I also experienced the 'Iliad' as a drama of naked apes - strutting, preening, fighting, tattooing their chests and bellowing their power in fierce competition for social dominance, desirable mates and material resources." He brought his ideas to class. "When I would say things like 'sociobiology' and 'evolutionary biology' in class," Gottschall remembers, "my classmates would hear things like 'eugenics' and 'Hitler.' It was a measure of how toxic the material was."

His interest in Literary Darwinism does not seem to have helped Gottschall's career - "The Literary Animal" was rejected by more than a dozen publishers before Northwestern University Press agreed to take it on. And Gottschall himself remains unemployed (though that is a condition familiar to many English Ph.D.'s). Literary Darwinists claim that no acknowledged member of their troupe has ever received tenure in this country. "Most of my closest friends ended up at the Ivies or their equivalents," Joseph Carroll says, while he is at "a branch campus in a state university system."

The alpha male of Literary Darwinism is the 76-year-old Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson. "There's no one we owe so much," Gottschall says. Wilson contributed a foreword to "The Literary Animal" in which he writes that if Literary Darwinism succeeds and "not only human nature but its outermost literary productions can be solidly connected to biological roots, it will be one of the great events of intellectual history. Science and the humanities united!" Wilson has been working for 30 years to prepare the way for such a moment. In 1975, he began the expansion of modern evolutionary biology to human behavior in his book "Sociobiology: The New Synthesis." In the last chapter, he tried to show that evolutionary pressures play a big role not just in animal societies but also in human culture. "Many scientists and others believed it would have been better if I had stopped at chimpanzees," Wilson would remember later, "but the challenge and the excitement I felt were too much to resist."

In "On Human Nature," published three years later, Wilson revisited the question with new energy. The field that emerged in part out of his work, evolutionary psychology, asserts that many of our mental activities and the behaviors that come from them - language, altruism, promiscuity - can be traced to preferences that were encoded in us in prehistoric times when they helped us to survive. According to evolutionary psychologists, everything from seasonal affective disorder to singing to lifesaving is - or at least might be - hard-wired. Evolutionary psychologists also try to demystify the nature of consciousness itself, positing, for example, that the brain is a collection of separate modules evolved to serve mental operations, more like a Swiss Army knife than a soul. A controversial implication of their theories is that evolution may be responsible for some inequalities among groups. One has only to recall the trouble that Lawrence Summers, Harvard's president, brought on himself earlier this year when he speculated that evolution might have left women less capable than men of outstanding performance in engineering and science to see how the notion continues to roil us.

All the same, today we speak casually of innate preferences, adaptive behavior and fitness strategies. Consider how evolutionary psychology has displaced Freud. Who, upon discovering that a remote tribe had an incest taboo, would ascribe it to unconscious repression on the part of the sons of their sexual attraction to their mothers? Instead, we would likely cite an evolutionary biology principle that states that we have evolved an innate repulsion to inbreeding because it creates birth defects and birth defects are a barrier to survival.

In a recent telephone conversation, I asked Wilson to assess the state of the revolution he helped touch off. How far had sociologists and psychologists gone in folding evolutionary principles into their work? Wilson laughed and said silkily, "Not far enough, in my opinion." Nonetheless, he looks forward to seeing sociobiology dust the wings of the arts - especially literature - with its magic. "Confusion is what we have now in the realm of literary criticism," Wilson writes in his foreword to "The Literary Animal." He amplified the point on the phone: "They just go on presenting it, teaching it, explaining it as best they can." He saw in literary criticism, especially the school led by Derrida, a "form of unrooted free association and an attempt to build rules of analysis on just idiosyncratic perceptions of how the world works, how the mind works. I could not see anything that was truly coherent." Predicting my objection, he went on: "We're not talking about reducing, corroding, dehumanizing. We're talking about adding deep history, deep genetic history, to art criticism."

Literary Darwinists use this "deep history" to explain the power of books and poems that might otherwise confuse us, thus hoping to add satisfaction to our reading of them. Take for instance "Hamlet." Through the Literary Darwinist lens, Shakespeare's play becomes the story of a young man's dilemma choosing between his personal self-interest (taking over the kingdom by killing his uncle, his mother's new husband) and his genetic self-interest (if his mother has children with his uncle, he may get new siblings who carry three-eighths of his genes). No wonder the prince of Denmark cannot make up his mind.

Or look at Jonathan Gottschall's study of the "Iliad," which emphasizes how the fighting over women in the epic is not the substitute for the fight over territory, as commentators usually assume, but the central subject of the poem, occasioned by an ancient sex-ratio imbalance, a fact he unearthed in part from studies of the archaeological records of contemporary grave sites.

One of the central beliefs of evolutionary psychology is that pleasure is adaptive, so it is meaningful that Literary Darwinism is enjoyable to practice. But while its observations on individual books can be fun and memorable, they also feel flimsy. As David Sloan Wilson, an editor of "The Literary Animal" and a professor of biology and anthropology at SUNY-Binghamton, puts it, "Tasty slice, but where's the rest of the pie?"

And Literary Darwinism is not equally good at explaining everything. It is best on big social novels, on people behaving in groups. As the British novelist Ian McEwan notes in his contribution to "The Literary Animal," "If one reads accounts of . . . troops of bonobo . . . one sees rehearsed all the major themes of the English 19th-century novel." But I don't think even by stretching one's imagination primates evoke "The Waste Land" or "Finnegans Wake." Tone, point of view, reliability of the narrator - these are literary tropes that often elude Literary Darwinists, an interpretive limitation that can be traced to Darwin himself; his son once complained that "it often astonished us what trash he would tolerate in the way of novels. The chief requisites were a pretty girl and a good ending." Darwin was drawn to books that were Darwinian. Similarly, Literary Darwinists are better on Émile Zola and John Steinbeck than, say, Henry James or Gustave Flaubert. I would read their take on Shakespeare's histories before the tragedies and the tragedies before the comedies, and in "The Tempest" I'd be curious about their observations on the Prospero, Miranda and Fernando triad but not on Caliban or Ariel. I don't care if there are selection pressures on mooncalfs and sprites.

Ultimately, Literary Darwinism may teach us less about individual books than about the point of literature. But what can the purpose of literature be, assuming it is not just a harmless oddity? At first glance, reading is a waste of time, turning us all into versions of Don Quixote, too befuddled by our imaginations to tell windmills from giants. We would be better off spending the time mating or farming. Darwinists have an answer - or more accurately, many possible answers. (Literary Darwinists like multiple answers, convinced the best idea will win out.) One idea is that literature is a defense reaction to the expansion of our mental life that took place as we began to acquire the basics of higher intelligence around 40,000 years ago. At that time, the world suddenly appeared to homo sapiens in all its frightening complexity. But by taking imaginative but orderly voyages within our minds, we gained the confidence to interpret this new vastly denser reality. Another theory is that reading literature is a form of fitness training, an exercise in "what if" thinking. If you could imagine the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans, then if you ever found yourself in a street fight, you would have a better chance of winning. A third theory sees writing as a sex-display trait. Certainly writers often seem to be preening when they write, with an eye toward attracting a desirable mate. In "The Ghost Writer," Philip Roth's narrator informs another writer that "no one with seven books in New York City settles for" just one woman. "That's what you get for a couplet."

Yet another theory is that the main function of literature is to integrate us all into one culture; evolutionary psychologists believe shared imaginings or myths produce social cohesion, which in turn confers a survival advantage. And a fifth idea is that literature began as religion or wish fulfillment: we ensure our success in the next hunt by recounting the triumph of the last one. Finally, it may be precisely writing's uselessness that makes it attractive to the opposite sex; it could be that, like the male peacock's exuberant tail, literature's very unnecessariness speaks to the underlying good health of its practitioner. He or she has resources to burn.

Generally, Literary Darwinism positions literature not as a luxury or as an add-on but as connected with our deepest selves. There is a grandeur to this view, and also a good deal of conjecture. That is because evolutionary biology is unusual among the sciences in asking not just "how" things work but also "why" - and not the why of local explanations (Why does water freeze at 32 degrees?) but the why of deeper ones, why something exists (Why did we evolve lungs? Why do we feel love?). There is no lab protocol to solve these sorts of mysteries, which the inductive techniques of science are poorly designed to answer, and so in the end, evolutionary biologists' conclusions can far outrun their research.

Take, for example, the human fear of snakes. According to Edward Wilson, this fear had its beginning in prehistoric times, when many of our ancestors were killed by snake bites. Those who feared snakes survived in greater numbers than those who didn't. This was the period when the human brain was becoming hard-wired, so our fear, rooted now in our genetic makeup, outlived its usefulness. Even after snakes stopped killing us very often, we remembered how we felt when they did. Over time, because they had traumatized us when we were most impressionable, snakes took a central role in our imaginative lives, becoming a center of our religion and art - whence the protection of the kings of ancient Egypt by the cobra goddess Wadjet; Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec serpent god of death and resurrection; and the fascination D.H. Lawrence felt when an uninvited guest slithered "his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied" down to his water trough.

It is a nice story backed by some evidence. Children have a readiness to fear snakes that needs only an encounter or two to set it off. Their fear remains even after they outgrow ordinary childhood fears. And many primates, our nearest relatives, also have a readiness - an easily evoked potential - to be afraid of snakes. But we need to know a great deal before asserting that our snake obsession is an example of the sort of "gene-culture co-evolution," in Wilson's words, that evolutionary psychology - and literary Darwinism - depend on. For one thing, if there is a module in the brain that contains the predisposition to fear snakes, it has not yet been found. Nor do we really know how many snake deaths there were in prehistoric times. Nor whether that number was sufficient to create a phobia, which, moreover, for some reason would have had to remain fixed until the present day in the human mind instead of dropping out through further evolutionary selection, as you might expect a useless phobia to do. Today it might be people who love snakes who outreproduce the ophidophobes, since some snakes make good eating and their skins can be sold for money, yet we have no evidence of this pattern. At the same time, we must ask why there are equivalent or greater dangers our ancestors withstood that do not seem to have led to phobias - for instance, fire.

When you try to evaluate the importance of snakes to myths and the arts, you have to make several more assumptions. First, are snakes any more prominent in our imaginations than, say, eagles, which have never preyed on us? And if they are, does it not seem as likely that our fascination with them comes from there being something special (module-activating, if you like) about the snake's motion or its shape - its resemblance to a stick, or pace Freud, to the penis? Or about the fact that it kills with poison rather than through lethal wounding, as most wild animals do? Why trace our fear of them only back to their supposed role as a prehistoric killer of our ancestors?

ometimes evolutionary psychological theory feels like a start toward a science rather than a science itself. Consider, for instance, the larger question of the human imagination's role in evolution. Let's assume the capacity for imagination is inherited. Then most evolutionary psychologists would assume that human imagination was favored by natural selection and that it helps us to survive. But imagination could just as well not be an adaptation to (imagined) survival pressures but an accidental byproduct of such an adaptation. Maybe evolutionary pressures favored a related mental process like, say, curiosity, and because the higher brain, where such mental activities reside, is a sort of huge pool of neurons, it also produced the capacity for imagination. And, as Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard psychology professor, notes, "Whether any of this was itself the target of natural selection is anybody's guess."

To be fair, evolutionary psychologists deserve credit for asking whether complex human behavior can be transmitted through a genetic-cultural link even if they cannot yet show that it is. Theirs remains an alluring approach. What they need in order to overcome their problems is the equivalent of the early-20th-century elaboration of the function of genes - or at least more and better hard science to support their conclusions.

A similar focus would help Literary Darwinists. They would benefit from studying writers and readers in the laboratory to see what parts of the brain our taste for literature comes out of and what the implications are. Such experiments could reveal quite remarkable things. For instance, we know that a structure in the brain called the hippocampus has a key role in long-term memory formulation. Scanning readers using functional M.R.I.'s - M.R.I.'s set to track blood flow to different areas of the brain - we can also see how different works activate their readers' hippocampuses. Those words that light up the hippocampus the most are the ones people wind up remembering best. So functional M.R.I.'s of the hippocampus could provide the beginning of a biological basis for the hoary assumption that "Pride and Prejudice" is a classic and maybe even a justification for the rest of the literary canon.

Even more interesting, brain scanning might one day help to explain the act of reading itself. "Reading is a funny kind of brain state," says Norman Holland, a professor who teaches a course on brain science and literature at the University of Florida in Gainesville. "If you're engrossed in a story, you're no longer aware of your body; you're no longer aware of your environment. You feel real emotions toward the characters." What is going on in our heads? Are we in a dream? A heightened reality? A trance?

Edward Wilson told me that he is confident neurobiology can help confirm many of evolutionary psychology's insights about the humanities, commending the work to "any ambitious young neurobiologist, psychologist or scholar in the humanities." They could be the "Columbus of neurobiology," he said, adding that if "you gave me a million dollars to do it, I would get immediately into brain imaging." In fact, you won't always need a million dollars for the work, as the cost of M.R.I. technology goes down. "Five years from now, every psychology department will have a scanner in the basement," says Steven Pinker, a Harvard cognitive psychologist. With the help of those scanners, Wilson says that science and the study of literature will join in "a mutualistic symbiosis," with science providing literary criticism with the "foundational principles" for analysis it lacks.

David Sloan Wilson, the co-editor of "The Literary Animal" (and the son of the novelist Sloan Wilson), sees the potential of that embrace differently. "Literature," he says, "is the natural history of our species," and its diversity proves us diverse. No one in "Pride and Prejudice" takes exception when, at the book's opening, Elizabeth Bennet's father's cousin comes to propose to her. In Daniel Defoe's "Moll Flanders," the title character can, at the same time, consider her incest with her brother "the most nauseous thing to me in the world" and say she "had not great concern about it in point of conscience" because she had not known they were related. Humans are complex, and the best books about them are too. So rather than narrowing literature, David Wilson says that Literary Darwinism may broaden evolutionary psychology.

It may, in fact, have already done so. Think about evolutionary psychology. It is seductive and metaphoric, alluring and imagistic. It is fun to riff on. It takes bits of information and from them builds a worldview. It convinces us that we understand why things happen the way they happen. When it succeeds, evolutionary psychology impresses us with the elegance and economy of that vision and, when it fails, gives us a sense of waste and unthriftiness on the author's part. It may be true or it may just have some truth in it, and once you have encountered it, you can never see things quite the same way again: it works a kind of conversion in you. Isn't it, then, already a lot like literature?

D.T. Max, a frequent contributor to the magazine, is working on "The Dark Eye," a cultural and scientific history of mad cow and other prion diseases.

What's a Modern Girl to Do?

2005-11-01T12:00:00.000Z

October 30, 2005

By MAUREEN DOWD

When I entered college in 1969, women were bursting out of their 50's chrysalis, shedding girdles, padded bras and conventions. The Jazz Age spirit flared in the Age of Aquarius. Women were once again imitating men and acting all independent: smoking, drinking, wanting to earn money and thinking they had the right to be sexual, this time protected by the pill. I didn't fit in with the brazen new world of hard-charging feminists. I was more of a fun-loving (if chaste) type who would decades later come to life in Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw. I hated the grubby, unisex jeans and no-makeup look and drugs that zoned you out, and I couldn't understand the appeal of dances that didn't involve touching your partner. In the universe of Eros, I longed for style and wit. I loved the Art Deco glamour of 30's movies. I wanted to dance the Continental like Fred and Ginger in white hotel suites; drink martinis like Myrna Loy and William Powell; live the life of a screwball heroine like Katharine Hepburn, wearing a gold lamé gown cut on the bias, cavorting with Cary Grant, strolling along Fifth Avenue with my pet leopard.

My mom would just shake her head and tell me that my idea of the 30's was wildly romanticized. "We were poor," she'd say. "We didn't dance around in white hotel suites." I took the idealism and passion of the 60's for granted, simply assuming we were sailing toward perfect equality with men, a utopian world at home and at work. I didn't listen to her when she cautioned me about the chimera of equality.

On my 31st birthday, she sent me a bankbook with a modest nest egg she had saved for me. "I always felt that the girls in a family should get a little more than the boys even though all are equally loved," she wrote in a letter. "They need a little cushion to fall back on. Women can stand on the Empire State Building and scream to the heavens that they are equal to men and liberated, but until they have the same anatomy, it's a lie. It's more of a man's world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries."

I thought she was just being Old World, like my favorite jade, Dorothy Parker, when she wrote:

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

I thought the struggle for egalitarianism was a cinch, so I could leave it to my earnest sisters in black turtlenecks and Birkenstocks. I figured there was plenty of time for me to get serious later, that America would always be full of passionate and full-throated debate about the big stuff - social issues, sexual equality, civil rights. Little did I realize that the feminist revolution would have the unexpected consequence of intensifying the confusion between the sexes, leaving women in a tangle of dependence and independence as they entered the 21st century.

Maybe we should have known that the story of women's progress would be more of a zigzag than a superhighway, that the triumph of feminism would last a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years.

Despite the best efforts of philosophers, politicians, historians, novelists, screenwriters, linguists, therapists, anthropologists and facilitators, men and women are still in a muddle in the boardroom, the bedroom and the Situation Room.

Courtship

My mom gave me three essential books on the subject of men. The first, when I was 13, was "On Becoming a Woman." The second, when I was 21, was "365 Ways to Cook Hamburger." The third, when I was 25, was "How to Catch and Hold a Man," by Yvonne Antelle. ("Keep thinking of yourself as a soft, mysterious cat.. . .Men are fascinated by bright, shiny objects, by lots of curls, lots of hair on the head . . . by bows, ribbons, ruffles and bright colors.. . .Sarcasm is dangerous. Avoid it altogether.")

Because I received "How to Catch and Hold a Man" at a time when we were entering the Age of Equality, I put it aside as an anachronism. After all, sometime in the 1960's flirting went out of fashion, as did ironing boards, makeup and the idea that men needed to be "trapped" or "landed." The way to approach men, we reasoned, was forthrightly and without games, artifice or frills. Unfortunately, history has shown this to be a misguided notion.

I knew it even before the 1995 publication of "The Rules," a dating bible that encouraged women to return to prefeminist mind games by playing hard to get. ("Don't stay on the phone for more than 10 minutes.. . .Even if you are the head of your own company. . .when you're with a man you like, be quiet and mysterious, act ladylike, cross your legs and smile.. . .Wear black sheer pantyhose and hike up your skirt to entice the opposite sex!")

I knew this before fashion magazines became crowded with crinolines, bows, ruffles, leopard-skin scarves, 50's party dresses and other sartorial equivalents of flirting and with articles like "The Return of Hard to Get." ("I think it behooves us to stop offering each other these pearls of feminism, to stop saying, 'So, why don't you call him?"' a writer lectured in Mademoiselle. "Some men must have the thrill of the chase.")

I knew things were changing because a succession of my single girlfriends had called, sounding sheepish, to ask if they could borrow my out-of-print copy of "How to Catch and Hold a Man."

Decades after the feminist movement promised equality with men, it was becoming increasingly apparent that many women would have to brush up on the venerable tricks of the trade: an absurdly charming little laugh, a pert toss of the head, an air of saucy triumph, dewy eyes and a full knowledge of music, drawing, elegant note writing and geography. It would once more be considered captivating to lie on a chaise longue, pass a lacy handkerchief across the eyelids and complain of a case of springtime giddiness.

Today, women have gone back to hunting their quarry - in person and in cyberspace - with elaborate schemes designed to allow the deluded creatures to think they are the hunters. "Men like hunting, and we shouldn't deprive them of their chance to do their hunting and mating rituals," my 26-year-old friend Julie Bosman, a New York Times reporter, says. "As my mom says, Men don't like to be chased." Or as the Marvelettes sang, "The hunter gets captured by the game."

These days the key to staying cool in the courtship rituals is B. & I., girls say - Busy and Important. "As much as you're waiting for that little envelope to appear on your screen," says Carrie Foster, a 29-year-old publicist in Washington, "you happen to have a lot of stuff to do anyway." If a guy rejects you or turns out to be the essence of evil, you can ratchet up from B. & I. to C.B.B., Can't Be Bothered. In the T.M.I. - Too Much Information - digital age, there can be infinite technological foreplay.

Helen Fisher, a Rutgers anthropologist, concurs with Julie: "What our grandmothers told us about playing hard to get is true. The whole point of the game is to impress and capture. It's not about honesty. Many men and women, when they're playing the courtship game, deceive so they can win. Novelty, excitement and danger drive up dopamine in the brain. And both sexes brag."

Women might dye their hair, apply makeup and spend hours finding a hip-slimming dress, she said, while men may drive a nice car or wear a fancy suit that makes them seem richer than they are. In this retro world, a woman must play hard to get but stay soft as a kitten. And avoid sarcasm. Altogether.

Money

In those faraway, long-ago days of feminism, there was talk about equal pay for equal work. Now there's talk about "girl money."

A friend of mine in her 30's says it is a term she hears bandied about the New York dating scene. She also notes a shift in the type of gifts given at wedding showers around town, a reversion to 50's-style offerings: soup ladles and those frilly little aprons from Anthropologie and vintage stores are being unwrapped along with see-through nighties and push-up bras.

"What I find most disturbing about the 1950's-ification and retrogression of women's lives is that it has seeped into the corporate and social culture, where it can do real damage," she complains. "Otherwise intelligent men, who know women still earn less than men as a rule, say things like: 'I'll get the check. You only have girl money."'

Throughout the long, dark ages of undisputed patriarchy, women connived to trade beauty and sex for affluence and status. In the first flush of feminism, women offered to pay half the check with "woman money" as a way to show that these crass calculations - that a woman's worth in society was determined by her looks, that she was an ornament up for sale to the highest bidder - no longer applied.

Now dating etiquette has reverted. Young women no longer care about using the check to assert their equality. They care about using it to assess their sexuality. Going Dutch is an archaic feminist relic. Young women talk about it with disbelief and disdain. "It's a scuzzy 70's thing, like platform shoes on men," one told me.

"Feminists in the 70's went overboard," Anne Schroeder, a 26-year-old magazine editor in Washington, agrees. "Paying is like opening a car door. It's nice. I appreciate it. But he doesn't have to."

Unless he wants another date.

Women in their 20's think old-school feminists looked for equality in all the wrong places, that instead of fighting battles about whether women should pay for dinner or wear padded bras they should have focused only on big economic issues.

After Googling and Bikramming to get ready for a first dinner date, a modern girl will end the evening with the Offering, an insincere bid to help pay the check. "They make like they are heading into their bag after a meal, but it is a dodge," Marc Santora, a 30-year-old Metro reporter for The Times, says. "They know you will stop them before a credit card can be drawn. If you don't, they hold it against you."

One of my girlfriends, a TV producer in New York, told me much the same thing: "If you offer, and they accept, then it's over."

Jurassic feminists shudder at the retro implication of a quid profiterole. But it doesn't matter if the woman is making as much money as the man, or more, she expects him to pay, both to prove her desirability and as a way of signaling romance - something that's more confusing in a dating culture rife with casual hookups and group activities. (Once beyond the initial testing phase and settled in a relationship, of course, she can pony up more.)

"There are plenty of ways for me to find out if he's going to see me as an equal without disturbing the dating ritual," one young woman says. "Disturbing the dating ritual leads to chaos. Everybody knows that."

When I asked a young man at my gym how he and his lawyer girlfriend were going to divide the costs on a California vacation, he looked askance. "She never offers," he replied. "And I like paying for her." It is, as one guy said, "one of the few remaining ways we can demonstrate our manhood."

Power Dynamics

At a party for the Broadway opening of "Sweet Smell of Success," a top New York producer gave me a lecture on the price of female success that was anything but sweet. He confessed that he had wanted to ask me out on a date when he was between marriages but nixed the idea because my job as a Times columnist made me too intimidating. Men, he explained, prefer women who seem malleable and awed. He predicted that I would never find a mate because if there's one thing men fear, it's a woman who uses her critical faculties. Will she be critical of absolutely everything, even his manhood?

He had hit on a primal fear of single successful women: that the aroma of male power is an aphrodisiac for women, but the perfume of female power is a turnoff for men. It took women a few decades to realize that everything they were doing to advance themselves in the boardroom could be sabotaging their chances in the bedroom, that evolution was lagging behind equality.

A few years ago at a White House correspondents' dinner, I met a very beautiful and successful actress. Within minutes, she blurted out: "I can't believe I'm 46 and not married. Men only want to marry their personal assistants or P.R. women."

I'd been noticing a trend along these lines, as famous and powerful men took up with young women whose job it was was to care for them and nurture them in some way: their secretaries, assistants, nannies, caterers, flight attendants, researchers and fact-checkers.

John Schwartz of The New York Times made the trend official in 2004 when he reported: "Men would rather marry their secretaries than their bosses, and evolution may be to blame." A study by psychology researchers at the University of Michigan, using college undergraduates, suggested that men going for long-term relationships would rather marry women in subordinate jobs than women who are supervisors. Men think that women with important jobs are more likely to cheat on them. There it is, right in the DNA: women get penalized by insecure men for being too independent.

"The hypothesis," Dr. Stephanie Brown, the lead author of the study, theorized, "is that there are evolutionary pressures on males to take steps to minimize the risk of raising offspring that are not their own." Women, by contrast, did not show a marked difference between their attraction to men who might work above them and their attraction to men who might work below them.

So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? Do women get less desirable as they get more successful?

After I first wrote on this subject, a Times reader named Ray Lewis e-mailed me. While we had assumed that making ourselves more professionally accomplished would make us more fascinating, it turned out, as Lewis put it, that smart women were "draining at times."

Or as Bill Maher more crudely but usefully summed it up to Craig Ferguson on the "Late Late Show" on CBS: "Women get in relationships because they want somebody to talk to. Men want women to shut up."

Women moving up still strive to marry up. Men moving up still tend to marry down. The two sexes' going in opposite directions has led to an epidemic of professional women missing out on husbands and kids.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and the author of "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," a book published in 2002, conducted a survey and found that 55 percent of 35-year-old career women were childless. And among corporate executives who earn $100,000 or more, she said, 49 percent of the women did not have children, compared with only 19 percent of the men.

Hewlett quantified, yet again, that men have an unfair advantage. "Nowadays," she said, "the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful the woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child. For men, the reverse is true."

A 2005 report by researchers at four British universities indicated that a high I.Q. hampers a woman's chance to marry, while it is a plus for men. The prospect for marriage increased by 35 percent for guys for each 16-point increase in I.Q.; for women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point rise.

On a "60 Minutes" report on the Hewlett book, Lesley Stahl talked to two young women who went to Harvard Business School. They agreed that while they were the perfect age to start families, they didn't find it easy to meet the right mates.

Men, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women. The girls said they hid the fact that they went to Harvard from guys they met because it was the kiss of death. "The H-bomb," they dubbed it. "As soon as you say Harvard Business School . . . that's the end of the conversation," Ani Vartanian said. "As soon as the guys say, 'Oh, I go to Harvard Business School,' all the girls start falling into them."

Hewlett thinks that the 2005 American workplace is more macho than ever. "It's actually much more difficult now than 10 years ago to have a career and raise a family," she told me. "The trend lines continue that highly educated women in many countries are increasingly dealing with this creeping nonchoice and end up on this path of delaying finding a mate and delaying childbearing. Whether you're looking at Italy, Russia or the U.S., all of that is true." Many women continue to fear that the more they accomplish, the more they may have to sacrifice. They worry that men still veer away from "challenging" women because of a male atavistic desire to be the superior force in a relationship.

"With men and women, it's always all about control issues, isn't it?" says a guy I know, talking about his bitter divorce.

Or, as Craig Bierko, a musical comedy star and actor who played one of Carrie's boyfriends on "Sex and the City," told me, "Deep down, beneath the bluster and machismo, men are simply afraid to say that what they're truly looking for in a woman is an intelligent, confident and dependable partner in life whom they can devote themselves to unconditionally until she's 40."

Ms. Versus Mrs.

"Ms." was supposed to neutralize the stature of women, so they weren't publicly defined by their marital status. When The Times finally agreed to switch to Ms. in its news pages in 1986, after much hectoring by feminists, Gloria Steinem sent flowers to the executive editor, Abe Rosenthal. But nowadays most young brides want to take their husbands' names and brag on the moniker Mrs., a brand that proclaims you belong to him. T-shirts with "MRS." emblazoned in sequins or sparkly beads are popular wedding-shower gifts.

A Harvard economics professor, Claudia Goldin, did a study last year that found that 44 percent of women in the Harvard class of 1980 who married within 10 years of graduation kept their birth names, while in the class of '90 it was down to 32 percent. In 1990, 23 percent of college-educated women kept their own names after marriage, while a decade later the number had fallen to 17 percent.

Time magazine reported that an informal poll in the spring of 2005 by the Knot, a wedding Web site, showed similar results: 81 percent of respondents took their spouse's last name, an increase from 71 percent in 2000. The number of women with hyphenated surnames fell from 21 percent to 8 percent.

"It's a return to romance, a desire to make marriage work," Goldin told one interviewer, adding that young women might feel that by keeping their own names they were aligning themselves with tedious old-fashioned feminists, and this might be a turnoff to them.

The professor, who married in 1979 and kept her name, undertook the study after her niece, a lawyer, changed hers. "She felt that her generation of women didn't have to do the same things mine did, because of what we had already achieved," Goldin told Time.

Many women now do not think of domestic life as a "comfortable concentration camp," as Betty Friedan wrote in "The Feminine Mystique," where they are losing their identities and turning into "anonymous biological robots in a docile mass." Now they want to be Mrs. Anonymous Biological Robot in a Docile Mass. They dream of being rescued - to flirt, to shop, to stay home and be taken care of. They shop for "Stepford Fashions" - matching shoes and ladylike bags and the 50's-style satin, lace and chiffon party dresses featured in InStyle layouts - and spend their days at the gym trying for Wisteria Lane waistlines.

The Times recently ran a front-page article about young women attending Ivy League colleges, women who are being groomed to take their places in the professional and political elite, who are planning to reject careers in favor of playing traditional roles, staying home and raising children.

"My mother always told me you can't be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time," the brainy, accomplished Cynthia Liu told Louise Story, explaining why she hoped to be a stay-at-home mom a few years after she goes to law school. "You always have to choose one over the other."

Kate White, the editor of Cosmopolitan, told me that she sees a distinct shift in what her readers want these days. "Women now don't want to be in the grind," she said. "The baby boomers made the grind seem unappealing."

Cynthia Russett, a professor of American history at Yale, told Story that women today are simply more "realistic," having seen the dashed utopia of those who assumed it wouldn't be so hard to combine full-time work and child rearing.

To the extent that young women are rejecting the old idea of copying men and reshaping the world around their desires, it's exhilarating progress. But to the extent that a pampered class of females is walking away from the problem and just planning to marry rich enough to cosset themselves in a narrow world of dependence on men, it's an irritating setback. If the new ethos is "a woman needs a career like a fish needs a bicycle," it won't be healthy.

Movies

In all those Tracy-Hepburn movies more than a half-century ago, it was the snap and crackle of a romance between equals that was so exciting. You still see it onscreen occasionally - the incendiary chemistry of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie playing married assassins aiming for mutually assured orgasms and destruction in "Mr. and Mrs. Smith." Interestingly, that movie was described as retro because of its salty battle of wits between two peppery lovers. Moviemakers these days are more interested in exploring what Steve Martin, in his novel "Shopgirl," calls the "calm cushion" of romances between unequals.

In James Brooks's movie "Spanglish," Adam Sandler, playing a sensitive Los Angeles chef, falls for his hot Mexican maid, just as in "Maid in Manhattan," Ralph Fiennes, playing a sensitive New York pol, falls for the hot Latino maid at his hotel, played by Jennifer Lopez. Sandler's maid, who cleans up for him without being able to speak English, is presented as the ideal woman, in looks and character. His wife, played by Téa Leoni, is repellent: a jangly, yakking, overachieving, overexercised, unfaithful, shallow she-monster who has just lost her job with a commercial design firm and fears she has lost her identity.

In 2003, we had "Girl With a Pearl Earring," in which Colin Firth's Vermeer erotically paints Scarlett Johansson's Dutch maid, and Richard Curtis's "Love Actually," about the attraction of unequals. The witty and sophisticated British prime minister, played by Hugh Grant, falls for the chubby girl who wheels the tea and scones into his office. A businessman married to the substantial Emma Thompson, the sister of the prime minister, falls for his sultry secretary. A novelist played by Colin Firth falls for his maid, who speaks only Portuguese.

Art is imitating life, turning women who seek equality into selfish narcissists and objects of rejection rather than of affection.

It's funny. I come from a family of Irish domestics - statuesque, 6-foot-tall women who cooked, kept house and acted as nannies for some of America's first families. I was always so proud of achieving more - succeeding in a high-powered career that would have been closed to my great-aunts. How odd, then, to find out now that being a maid would have enhanced my chances with men.

An upstairs maid, of course.

Women's Magazines

Cosmo is still the best-selling magazine on college campuses, as it was when I was in college, and the best-selling monthly magazine on the newsstand. The June 2005 issue, with Jessica Simpson on the cover, her cleavage spilling out of an orange crocheted halter dress, could have been June 1970. The headlines are familiar: "How to turn him on in 10 words or less," "Do You Make Men M-E-L-T? Take our quiz," "Bridal Special," Cosmo's stud search and "Cosmo's Most Famous Sex Tips; the Legendary Tricks That Have Brought Countless Guys to Their Knees." (Sex Trick 4: "Place a glazed doughnut around your man's member, then gently nibble the pastry and lick the icing . . . as well as his manhood." Another favorite Cosmo trick is to yell out during sex which of your girlfriends thinks your man is hot.)

At any newsstand, you'll see the original Cosmo girl's man-crazy, sex-obsessed image endlessly, tiresomely replicated, even for the teen set. On the cover of Elle Girl: "267 Ways to Look Hot."

"There has been lots of copying - look at Glamour," Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmo's founding editor told me and sighed. "I used to have all the sex to myself."

Before it curdled into a collection of stereotypes, feminism had fleetingly held out a promise that there would be some precincts of womanly life that were not all about men. But it never quite materialized.

It took only a few decades to create a brazen new world where the highest ideal is to acknowledge your inner slut. I am woman; see me strip. Instead of peaceful havens of girl things and boy things, we have a society where women of all ages are striving to become self-actualized sex kittens. Hollywood actresses now work out by taking pole-dancing classes.

Female sexuality has been a confusing corkscrew path, not a serene progressive arc. We had decades of Victorian prudery, when women were not supposed to like sex. Then we had the pill and zipless encounters, when women were supposed to have the same animalistic drive as men. Then it was discovered - shock, horror! - that men and women are not alike in their desires. But zipless morphed into hookups, and the more one-night stands the girls on "Sex and the City" had, the grumpier they got.

Oddly enough, Felix Dennis, who created the top-selling Maxim, said he stole his "us against the world" lad-magazine attitude from women's magazines like Cosmo. Just as women didn't mind losing Cosmo's prestigious fiction as the magazine got raunchier, plenty of guys were happy to lose the literary pretensions of venerable men's magazines and embrace simple-minded gender stereotypes, like the Maxim manifesto instructing women, "If we see you in the morning and night, why call us at work?"

Jessica Simpson and Eva Longoria move seamlessly from showing their curves on the covers of Cosmo and Glamour to Maxim, which dubbed Simpson "America's favorite ball and chain!" In the summer of 2005, both British GQ and FHM featured Pamela Anderson busting out of their covers. ("I think of my breasts as props," she told FHM.)

A lot of women now want to be Maxim babes as much as men want Maxim babes. So women have moved from fighting objectification to seeking it. "I have been surprised," Maxim's editor, Ed Needham, confessed to me, "to find that a lot of women would want to be somehow validated as a Maxim girl type, that they'd like to be thought of as hot and would like their boyfriends to take pictures of them or make comments about them that mirror the Maxim representation of a woman, the Pamela Anderson sort of brand. That, to me, is kind of extraordinary."

The luscious babes on the cover of Maxim were supposed to be men's fantasy guilty pleasures, after all, not their real life-affirming girlfriends.

Beauty

While I never related to the unstyled look of the early feminists and I tangled with boyfriends who did not want me to wear makeup and heels, I always assumed that one positive result of the feminist movement would be a more flexible and capacious notion of female beauty, a release from the tyranny of the girdled, primped ideal of the 50's.

I was wrong. Forty years after the dawn of feminism, the ideal of feminine beauty is more rigid and unnatural than ever.

When Gloria Steinem wrote that "all women are Bunnies," she did not mean it as a compliment; it was a feminist call to arms. Decades later, it's just an aesthetic fact, as more and more women embrace Botox and implants and stretch and protrude to extreme proportions to satisfy male desires. Now that technology is biology, all women can look like inflatable dolls. It's clear that American narcissism has trumped American feminism.

It was naïve and misguided for the early feminists to tendentiously demonize Barbie and Cosmo girl, to disdain such female proclivities as shopping, applying makeup and hunting for sexy shoes and cute boyfriends and to prognosticate a world where men and women dressed alike and worked alike in navy suits and were equal in every way.

But it is equally naïve and misguided for young women now to fritter away all their time shopping for boudoirish clothes and text-messaging about guys while they disdainfully ignore gender politics and the seismic shifts on the Supreme Court that will affect women's rights for a generation.

What I didn't like at the start of the feminist movement was that young women were dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. They were supposed to be liberated, but it just seemed like stifling conformity.

What I don't like now is that the young women rejecting the feminist movement are dressing alike, looking alike and thinking alike. The plumage is more colorful, the shapes are more curvy, the look is more plastic, the message is diametrically opposite - before it was don't be a sex object; now it's be a sex object - but the conformity is just as stifling.

And the Future . . .

Having boomeranged once, will women do it again in a couple of decades? If we flash forward to 2030, will we see all those young women who thought trying to Have It All was a pointless slog, now middle-aged and stranded in suburbia, popping Ativan, struggling with rebellious teenagers, deserted by husbands for younger babes, unable to get back into a work force they never tried to be part of?

It's easy to picture a surreally familiar scene when women realize they bought into a raw deal and old trap. With no power or money or independence, they'll be mere domestic robots, lasering their legs and waxing their floors - or vice versa - and desperately seeking a new Betty Friedan.

Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times. This essay is adapted from "Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide," to be published next month by G.P. Putnam's Sons.

2005-09-11T07:40:00.000+01:00

September 11, 2005

Among the Believers

By A.O. SCOTT

Benjamin Kunkel's first novel, "Indecision," published last month, concerns a young man living in Manhattan and trying, as the title suggests, to figure out what to do with his life. He has a B.A. in philosophy and an active, if confusing, romantic life; he gets by on a combination of office work and parental subsidy. In his author's affectionate estimation, offered over a beer on a recent evening at a Brooklyn bar, this young man, whose name is Dwight Wilmerding, is "kind of an idiot." Perhaps, but he may also be - the critical response to "Indecision" suggests as much - an especially representative kind of idiot. His plight, after all, is - for people of his age and background - a familiar one: an alienation from his own experience brought about by too much knowledge, too many easy, inconsequential choices, too much self-consciousness. Bred in a culture consecrated to the entitled primacy of the individual, he discovers that he lacks a self, a coherent identity, maybe a soul. He feels that he could be anyone. "It wasn't very unusual for me to lie awake at night," he confesses, "feeling like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world. But knowing the clichés are clichés doesn't help you to escape them. You still have to go on experiencing your experience as if no one else has ever done it."

Of course, one aspect of that experience is the impulse to rebel against it - the desire to rescue thought, feeling and ambition from the quotation marks that seem perpetually affixed to them, to recover the possibility of earnest emotion, ethical commitment and serious thought. That desire can find any number of outlets, one of which might be - why not? - starting a literary journal, a small magazine.

"You'd better mean something enough to live by it," Kunkel told me, echoing both his fictional creation and, as it happens, one of his comrades in another literary enterprise. On the last page of the first issue of n+1, a little magazine that made its debut last year, the reader learns that "it is time to say what you mean." The author of that declaration, a forceful variation on some of Dwight Wilmerding's more tentative complaints, is Keith Gessen, who edits n+1 along with Kunkel, Mark Greif and Marco Roth. All four editors are around Dwight's age - he's 28 when the main action in the book takes place; they're 30 or a little older. Like him, they often glance anxiously and a bit nostalgically backward to a pre-9/11, pre-Florida-recount moment that seems freer and more irresponsible than the present. You wouldn't, however, call any of them any kind of idiot. Nor, based on their pointed, closely argued and often brilliantly original critiques of contemporary life and letters, would you accuse them of indecision, though they do sometimes display a certain pained 21st-century ambivalence about the culture they inhabit.

N+1 is not the first small magazine to come out of this ambivalence or the first to have its mission encapsulated by a memoiristic account of the attempt to figure out one's life. Consider the following scrap of dialogue from Dave Eggers's "Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," famously hailed as the manifesto of a slightly earlier generational moment:

"And how will you do this?" she wants to know. "A political party? A march? A revolution? A coup?"

"A magazine."

Eggers is talking about an old (in fact, a defunct) magazine called Might, but never mind. Even with a bit of historical distance - five years after the book's publication, a decade and more after the events it describes - these lines capture both a moment and the general spirit of the magazine-starting enterprise. A bunch of ambitious, like-minded young friends get together to assemble pictures and words into a sensibility - a voice, a look, an attitude - that they hope will resonate beyond their immediate circle. Eventually, as in most versions of this kind of story, they run out of money and energy and move on to other things. In Eggers's case, those other things included other magazines, as Might begat McSweeney's, a typographically adventurous literary quarterly, which in turn begat The Believer, an illustrated monthly whose design was conceived by Eggers and that is edited by Vendela Vida (to whom he is married), Heidi Julavits and Ed Park.

At a time when older forms of media are supposedly being swallowed up by newer ones, the impulse to start the kind of magazine Partisan Review was in the late 1930's or The Paris Review was in the 50's might look contrarian, even reactionary. If you are an overeducated (or at least a semi-overeducated) youngish person with a sleep disorder and a surfeit of opinions, the thing to do, after all, is to start a blog. There are no printing costs, no mailing lists, and the medium offers instant membership in a welcoming herd of independent minds who will put you in their links columns if you put them in yours. Blogs embody and perpetuate a discourse based on speed, topicality, cleverness and contention - all qualities very much ascendant in American media culture these days. To start a little magazine, then - to commit yourself to making an immutable, finite set of perfect-bound pages that will appear, typos and all, every month or two, or six, or whenever, even if you are also, and of necessity, maintaining an affiliated Web site, to say nothing of holding down a day job or sweating over a dissertation - is, at least in part, to lodge a protest against the tyranny of timeliness. It is to opt for slowness, for rumination, for patience and for length. It is to defend the possibility of seriousness against the glibness and superficiality of the age - and also, of course, against other magazines.

These, at least, seem to be among the ambitions driving The Believer and n+1. Their editors are young, and their circulations are not large. (It may, indeed, be hard to find these publications outside of independent bookstores in larger cities and college towns.) The names of the writers who contribute to them are, for the most part, not well known: first- or second-time novelists, graduate students and moonlighting academic mavericks, with an occasional celebrity professor or foreign writer thrown in for good measure. Modest though the magazines are in scale and appearance, there is nonetheless something stirringly immodest - something "authentic and delirious," as e.e. cummings once wrote - about what they are trying to do, which is to organize a generational struggle against laziness and cynicism, to raise once again the banners of creative enthusiasm and intellectual engagement.

In some ways, The Believer and n +1 represent sensibilities as distinct as their names. The Believer, which was going to be called The Optimist, puts out a welcome mat for pluralism and wide-eyed curiosity, while n+1 surveys contemporary culture through eyes narrowed by skepticism. Nonetheless, there is much that they share, notably a pointedly cosmopolitan frame of reference and an eclectic internationalism that embraces - or, rather, defiantly refuses to disown - European thinkers (the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, the Slovenian mischief-maker Slavoj Zizek) and novelists (the scandalous Michel Houellebecq, whose recent study of H.P. Lovecraft was published by The Believer's nascent book imprint, and the Spaniard Javier Marias, who publishes a monthly column called "La Zona Fantasma" in the magazine). The magazines themselves feel decidedly youthful, not only in their characteristic generational concerns - the habit of nonchalantly blending pop culture, literary esoterica and academic theory, for instance, or the unnerving ability to appear at once mocking and sincere - but also in the sense of bravado and grievance that ripples through their pages.

In addition to interviews with philosophers, writers, filmmakers, indie-rock musicians, a professional ninja and anyone else willing to sit down for a long, meandering conversation, The Believer publishes page-long appreciations of books, children, motels, light bulbs and power tools and two-page schematics devoted to things like singing drummers and fictional presidents. Mostly, though, it publishes long essays with enigmatic titles, each one prefaced by a list enumerating matters to be "discussed." For example, from the August 2005 issue, an article by Tony Perrottet called "The Semen of Hercules" promises discussion of, among other things, "The Kentucky Derby, Philostratus. . .Pharmaceutical Use of Squeezed Mustard-Rocket Leaf, Guaranteed Sexual Attractiveness. . .and Ancient Fad Diets."

The lists suggest digression, surprise and a willingness to explore tangents and not be bound by strictly linear presentation. The typical Believer essay - to the extent that such a thing can exist, given the magazine's commitment to the idiosyncrasy and multiplicity of voices - ranges and explores, collecting curiosities and offhand insights on its way to an argument and taking as much time, and as many words, as it needs. This formal elasticity is central to The Believer's critique of other magazines and the speeded-up, superficial culture of reading they sustain.

"It would be easier to say what we saw didn't exist than to say what we wanted to exist," Heidi Julavits told me recently. "As a writer and a reader, it felt like topic, topic, topic, topic was this constant refrain. You could never get away from the topic."

And the topic often seemed to be the same. "The vast majority of magazines in the United States tell you exactly the same thing at the same time," Vendela Vida said not long ago by telephone from San Francisco, where she lives and where The Believer is published (though two of its editors, Park and Julavits, live most of the time in New York). "We'd all apparently entered into this agreement that every month we'd be interested in the same thing" - the upcoming movies, novels, recordings and television shows.

But, of course, in spite of an elaborate machinery devoted to synchronizing and standardizing cultural consumption - of which magazines are an important part - most people's habits remain blessedly out of synch. We buy battered paperbacks at yard sales, stumble across movies on cable late at night and hear strange music on our friends' mix tapes (an experience apotheosized by Rick Moody's article about a Christian indie-rock group, the Danielson Famile, in the recent music issue). Part of The Believer's mission is to capture this aesthetic of mixing and matching, swapping and rediscovering. The message of a given issue seems to be, Hey, look at all this neat stuff - or, as Julavits puts it, "Isn't this amazing?" Philosophers and musicians, the M.L.A., the W.N.B.A., the U.L.A. (that's Underground Literary Alliance), Tintin and a strange 19th-century Southern novel called "The Story of Don Miff" all receive generous, thoughtful scrutiny, for their own sakes and for their interconnections.

"There has to be an element that reflects how we live and how we read," Vida told me. "We don't just run out and buy the new novel or start thinking about Darwinism just because George Bush happened to say something about it." And so The Believer's content is often as pointedly untimely as its approach is digressive. Some of its best articles dust off the reputations of half-forgotten writers and historical characters - Charles Portis, John Hawkes, Ignatius Donnelly - and the interviews, with the very, the semi-and the narrowly famous, range far beyond the usual plugging of the latest projects. "In October we have David Sedaris talking mostly about monkeys," Vida said. "What makes it timely is its untimeliness."

The Believer grew out of the blending of two different ideas - an interview magazine Vida and Eggers were discussing and a book review Julavits was interested in starting. The magazine, which made its debut in March 2003 and has just published its 27th issue, is older than n+1, which is on its third. It is also larger, both in trim size (an eccentric, pleasing-to-hold 8ð by 10 inches, compared with n+1's more orthodox and bookish 7 by 10) and in circulation. The Believer prints around 15,000 copies of its regular issues, and more of its special issues devoted to music and visual art, while n+1, having sold out its 2,000-copy first issue, has increased its run with every subsequent issue. Though The Believer pays its writers - the going rate is $500 for a long essay - and its managing editor, Andrew Leland, everyone else associated with each of the publications essentially works for free.

Vida, Julavits and Park all knew one another in the mid-90's at Columbia, where they all received M.F.A.'s in creative writing. Vida published "Girls on the Verge," a journalistic look at female coming-of-age rituals, and then turned to fiction with her second book, "And Now You Can Go." Julavits has published two novels, "The Mineral Palace" and "The Effect of Living Backwards," while Park, in addition to his Believer duties, is a senior editor (and occasional film reviewer) at The Village Voice.

The four editors of n+1 are also connected by shared sensibilities and school ties. Kunkel, who grew up in Colorado, went from Deep Springs College, a tiny, all-male school in the California desert devoted to the classical ideal of rigorous study in a pastoral setting, to Harvard, where he met Greif, though not Gessen, who was also there at the time. (Actually, they later discovered that they did have one brief encounter as undergraduates, about which Kunkel would say only that at least one of them was drunk and that one suggested the other should get a lobotomy.) Gessen, who lived in the Soviet Union until he was 6, was a football player at Harvard and went on to get an M.F.A. in fiction from Syracuse. Greif entered the Ph.D. program in American studies at Yale, where he met Roth, who had arrived via Oberlin and Columbia to pursue his doctorate in comparative literature. After talking about it for years - another friend from Harvard, Chad Harbach, who edits the n+1 Web site, thought of the name back in 1998 - they decided the moment was right to put their ideas and aspirations into print.

One afternoon in July, I wandered over to n+1's offices - that is, to the apartment near the Brooklyn Museum that Keith Gessen shares with two roommates - to watch Allison Lorentzen, the managing editor, assorted staff members, friends and interns coax the third issue toward production. As the editors entered data into their subscription lists, pausing now and then to munch on a baby carrot or a morsel of rugelach, we chatted about a variety of topics, many of which happened to be other, older little magazines - Politics, Partisan Review, Dissent - and the legendary figures who wrote for them. The air was so thick with Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Hannah Arendt and Dwight Macdonald that Gessen later sent me an e-mail message hoping to correct the impression that all he and his colleagues ever talked about were the public intellectuals of the past. "Left to our own devices, we also talk about rock 'n' roll music," he said.

Well, yes, of course. Mark Greif's essay on Radiohead in the new issue - subtitled "The Philosophy of Pop" - certainly proves as much. Still, their own enterprise is steeped in an awareness of what past journals and small magazines have been and failed to be - not only ancient specimens like T.S. Eliot's Criterion, which was the subject of Gessen's honors thesis at Harvard, but also newer models.

A few days later, in a Lower East Side cafe on an afternoon so hot that only a true intellectual would think to order a pot of tea, Greif laid out the immediate prehistory of n+1 - what a certain kind of historian might call its conditions of possibility. "In order to start this thing you have to feel there's a kind of historical necessity," he said. The history of small magazines has been, to some extent, a history of grand intellectual, artistic and political movements, for which even the tiniest publications have served as incubators and laboratories. They have sometimes functioned as a vanguard (as Irving Kristol's Public Interest did with the disgruntled liberalism that would blossom into neoconservatism) and sometimes as a way of keeping unfashionable ideas alive in difficult times (as Dissent, which started at the vanguard of democratic socialism in the 1950's, has done pretty much ever since). Partisan Review, whose demise Gessen cites, only semi-facetiously, as a pretext for the founding of n+1, is everyone's favorite example of both. After freeing itself from the Communist Party in the mid-1930's, it took up the banner of the anti-Stalinist left, a flag which, after World War II, took on the colors of international literary modernism. Though it published some of the postwar period's most eminent novelists and poets, Partisan Review is best remembered as a vehicle for a kind of cultural criticism that was, at its best, politically engaged without being narrowly ideological and discriminating without being precious or snobbish.

The need for this kind of writing never goes away, even though its extinction always seems imminent. "Coming out of college, it felt like there were people who were really going to be there for you," Greif said, referring to the journals and Webzines that seemed to be flourishing in the late 90's, including The Baffler, McSweeney's, Lingua Franca and Feed. "Then three things happened. The Internet economy burst" - taking with it some of the most interesting Web-based publications - "and you discovered that these things, which had been the intellectual hope of a generation, were based on venture capital. Then Lingua Franca" - the "review of academic life" that existed from 1990 to 2001 - "went bust." McSweeney's, though it survived, turned out to be, in Greif's opinion, a bit of a letdown, because of its mannered quirkiness and what he calls its "orientation to childhood."

From each of these disappointments, he said, a lesson could be drawn. The first was that "it doesn't matter if you have money, and you're better off without it." (N+1 was started with small sums from the pockets of its editors. It sells a few pages of advertisements in each issue and recently received a modest infusion of cash - some $8,000 from a fund-raiser.) The second lesson was "take what you can from the academy," but without getting bogged down in pedantry or academic politics. (Thus n+1's frequent and unapologetic references to literary theory and continental philosophy, presented in language free of jargon and ideological posturing.) Finally, there was a renewed belief in the importance of debate, a desire, as Grief put it, "to convince people that arguing about things could be impersonal, because it advances thought."

And n+1 is explicitly and without embarrassment devoted to the idea that thought can advance. "The idea of progress is not uncomfortable to us," they declare in the "preamble" to their inaugural issue. "Who will drive progress? To every tradition, and every art, and aspect of culture, and line of thought, a step is added. This dream of advance in every human endeavor, in line with what we need, not just what we're capable of, is futurism humanized. It is wanted in a time of repetition. It is needed whenever authorities declare an end to history. It is desperate when the future we are offered is the outcome of technology."

Somewhat more mundanely, the magazine exists to present work by its editors - and by like-minded writers who discover n+1through word of mouth or Web browsing - that might not have a chance of appearing elsewhere. Gessen regularly reviews books for New York magazine, and both he and Kunkel have published in The New York Review of Books. Greif remains on the masthead at The American Prospect, where he worked for a year. But, Kunkel said, "the most exciting pieces that have been published in the magazine" - he cites Greif's "Against Exercise," Roth's "Last Cigarettes," and a forthcoming short (and unsigned) article about dating - "could not have appeared anywhere else. For generic reasons, and for their untimeliness. There's a tendency to ghettoize things that are important to us - there's fiction, there's essays and criticism, there's politics - and you can go and find journals about each of these things, but you can't go and find journals about all of those things."

Gessen said much the same thing to me on yet another hot afternoon, in a falafel joint in another part of Brooklyn: "Here I am with all this fiction no one would want to publish, and here's Mark with these essays no one's going to publish, and after a while we felt like we had this critical mass of stuff that nobody would want to publish." Until, that is, they did so themselves, after which things changed - a little. Harper's reprinted "Against Exercise," which was also selected for "Best American Essays 2005," and Marco Roth's "Derrida: An Autothanatography," first published on the n+1 Web site, was reprinted in The Boston Globe. (Kunkel, meanwhile, has become the hot young white male writer of the moment, a position once held by Dave Eggers. Now is probably the time to disclose that Kunkel's literary agent, who was once Eggers's, is also mine.)

"Against Exercise," written in the lofty, epigrammatic and mischievously funny style that is Greif's hallmark (and that does not usually find favor with dissertation committees), interrogates the bizarre, soul-emptying mixture of hedonism and self-punishment that characterizes rituals of fitness. Roth's valediction to the French philosopher who was, for decades, both a hero and a scapegoat in American intellectual life, is a mixture of homage, memoir and iconoclasm, as good an account as any of the seductions and the limitations of theory. Those articles hint at some key aspects of the magazine's identity. They show, first of all, a willingness to scramble conventional ideas of genre, mixing criticism, personal essay, fiction and philosophical argument and applying the resulting hybrid to matters both mundane (dating, going to the gym, smoking) and lofty (the meaning of life, the nature of war). Other essays achieve similar blendings of voice, style and genre. Elif Batuman's "Babel in California," the longest article in the second issue, is an inquiry into the tragic, enigmatic life of the great Russian-Jewish writer Isaac Babel wrapped in a comic novel of academic manners - using real names, no less - that would make Mary McCarthy proud (and also jealous). Gessen's short story "The Vice President's Daughter" is as much an essay on the delusions and smashed hopes of Clinton-era college students as it is a work of fiction. Kunkel's "Diana Abbott: A Lesson," for its part, is an essay on the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee in the form of a fictional narrative about a young book reviewer's struggle to come to terms with his work.

Such eclecticism is not an end in itself, and the experimental brio of the writing coexists with a regard for aesthetic distinctions, intellectual standards and even cultural hierarchies that can look downright conservative. "I love it when we're mistaken for a conservative journal of opinion," Mark Greif said - though the actual political views presented in n+1 tend to range from mildly to ardently left-wing. Their youthful gusto is accompanied by a sense of weary impatience - with the mindless celebration of popular culture, with the coyness of some of their literary peers and rivals and with ignorance of history and tradition on the part of those who should know better. William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review, perhaps the most influential magazine of the past half-century, famously defined a conservative as someone who "stands athwart history, yelling Stop," a description curiously echoed in the last words on the last page of the first issue of n+1: "We've begun by saying, No. Enough."

And it does often seem that way. The reader of n+1 discovers what the magazine is for by grasping what it is against, which is not only exercise but also, in no small part, other magazines - including, as it happens, The Believer. In the first issue, in a section they proudly and cheekily call "The Intellectual Situation" (the intellectual in question being a footloose, self-ironizing composite of Greif, Gessen, Kunkel and Roth), the editors comb through the mail, tossing The Believer onto a pile with The New Republic and The Weekly Standard. Expressing the ambivalence about Dave Eggers and "the Eggersards" that may be the defining trait of this latest generation (it is, at this point, almost impossible to distinguish hero worship from backlash), they note that The Believer "presents their version of thinking - as an antidote to mainstream criticism, which they call snarkiness." N+1 responds: "Mere belief is hostile to the whole idea of thinking. To wear credulity as one's badge of intellect is not to be a thinker as such."

That is well put, but also a bit wide of the mark, and it overstates the differences between the two magazines. The Believer, in spite of its commitment to enthusiasm, is about something more than "mere belief," and n+1, for its part, fiercely broadcasts its own faith - in transcendence, in literature and in a curiously disembodied activity called "thought." In the latest installment of "The Intellectual Situation," a short essay called "The Reading Crisis" examines some of the oft-diagnosed symptoms of literature's ill health, from slumping book sales to the cancellation of Oprah's Book Club, and finds many of the proposed remedies - including Believerish hostility to hostile reviews - to be worse than the disease. And yet they also have, in the past, expressed their own reservations about negativity, scolding The New Republic's James Wood for his uncharitable reviews of modern novelists and suppressing a withering addendum to "The Reading Crisis" dealing with Jonathan Safran Foer. Their ringing, programmatic insistence on progress - "to those who insist the series is at an end, we say: n+1" - can sound an awful lot like The Believer's defiant optimism. And Gessen's declaration, on the last page of the first issue, that "it is time to say what you mean," chimes with The Believer's stance against what Julavits calls "high irony."

The Believer, after all, came into being in opposition to what Eggers and Julavits perceived as the snide, vituperative state of book reviewing, a disorder diagnosed by Julavits, in the first-issue article that served more or less as a manifesto, as "snark." It was a wide-ranging complaint against the superficiality and dismissiveness that she and her friends believed was undermining literary discussion. "We were tired of seeing the same thing every month" was how Vendela Vida put it to me. "Reviews of the big new book that all say the same thing: don't read it."

Julavits made a similar point a few weeks ago. We were sitting in her skylighted living room on an unusually hot day in a part of Maine where it sometimes seems that you can't swing a dead lobster without hitting a rusticating writer of one kind or another. Like Mark Greif, she responded to the heat with hot tea. "I really saw 'the end of the book' as originating in the way books are talked about now in our culture and especially in the most esteemed venues for book criticism. It seemed as though their irrelevance was a foregone conclusion, and we were just practicing this quaint exercise of pretending something mattered when of course everyone knew it didn't."

Her frustration, it seems, is not so much with book reviewing as such but with everything that conspires to trivialize literary discourse and to prevent books - and not only books but also music, movies, opinions, utopian dreams - from being taken seriously. Like the editors of n+1, she and her colleagues speak a language that is not only literary but unapologetically highbrow, less in its choice of objects than in the way it perceives them. The Believer is happy to write about pop songs or reality television, to make jokes and indulge in whimsy, but it tends to disdain the nonchalant, knowing sarcasm that has become, elsewhere, the dominant form of cleverness.

In the end, this may be the common ground n+1 and The Believer occupy: a demand for seriousness that cuts against ingrained generational habits of flippancy and prankishness. Their differences are differences of emphasis and style - and the failings that each may find in the other (or that even a sympathetic reader may find in both) come from their deep investments in voice, stance and attitude rather than in a particular set of ideas or positions. For The Believer, the way to take things seriously is to care about them - "to endow something with importance," in Julavits's words, "by treating it as an emotional experience." And this can lead, at times, to the credulous, seemingly disingenuous naïveté that Greif finds infantile. For n+1, the index of seriousness is thought for its own sake, which can sanction an especially highhanded form of intellectual arrogance. But, of course, this distinction, between a party of ardor and a party of rigor, is itself too schematic, since The Believer, at its best, is nothing if not thoughtful, and n+1 frequently wears its passions on its sleeve.

Their arguments are likely to continue, and then, eventually, to cool, as the journals themselves turn into institutions or fade into oblivion. Either way, they will serve as incitements to future projects - whether as lost possibilities in need of revival or missed opportunities in need of correction. In the meantime, what they provide is space - room for the exploration of hunches, experiments, blind alleys and starry-eyed hopes, by readers and writers whose small numbers can be a source of pride. Surveying the political scene in the wake of the last election, Kunkel took some solace in the idea that "our lives remain their own great cause." And if not, then perhaps our magazines will.

A.O. Scott is a film critic at The New York Times.

abulia

2005-08-28T13:54:00.000+01:00

August 28, 2005
'Indecision': Getting It Together
By JAY MCINERNEY

We were discussing a certain wunderkind who'd recently been spanked for his second novel. ''Anyway, who cares,'' said my friend, a celebrated middle-aged novelist. ''Writers in their 20's don't have much to say to me.'' I don't know -- I guess it's possible, as many friends and not a few critics have claimed, that I'm a case of arrested development, but I remain, long after passing 30 myself, strangely interested in the literary effusions of those in their late 20's or early 30's. I devour first novels, particularly coming-of-age novels. In its modern form the American bildungsroman (the novel of formation) descends from ''The Catcher in the Rye'' (1951). Reinvigorated by feminism in the 70's, urbanized and coked-up in the 80's, it was grunged-down and nonfictionalized in the memoir-mad 90's (not necessarily a terrible development since most first novels are quasi memoirs anyway.)

Though often disappointed and frequently bored senseless by the antics of Holden's progeny, I still believe there's a type of cultural news that can be delivered only by those who've recently crossed over from the riotous country of adolescence, as well as a new spin on the literary traditions that have long since become reified in the minds of older writers. There are certain zeitgeist frequencies to which young ears are more attuned.

My strange faith seems confirmed by the arrival of Benjamin Kunkel's ''Indecision,'' which manages to make the whole flailing, postadolescent, prelife crisis feel fresh and funny again, even as it sometimes resembles nothing so much as a self-conscious, postmodern homage/parody of the genre. In the end, though, it might just yearn to be something more daring than that, like, maybe, a post-9/11, postironic novel: a tentative response to David Foster Wallace's call for a new generation of sincere anti-rebels ''who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles.''

If Kunkel ultimately seems to want to move beyond irony and youthful nihilism -- and I'm not ready to concede the point just yet -- he certainly embraces and rides the hell out of them in the beginning, with deeply satisfying results. (For connoisseurs the real reward of the bildungsroman is not eventual wisdom but stylish confusion.) Kunkel is deeply aware of the conventions and clichés of the genre -- in fact, you get the sense that he's probably read everything from Goethe's ''Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship'' to Alix Ohlin's recent novel ''The Missing Person.'' ''Indecision'' seems at times to have been constructed from a kit in which all the ingredients of the modern American bildungsroman have been laid out methodically and chosen after deep deliberation. (Dead-end job? Check. Wanderjahr? Check. Walking eccentrically down street in a bathrobe? Check.)

Kunkel's hero, 28-year-old Dwight Wilmerding, is a likable, self-conscious doofus, contemporary New York WASP hetero version, who realizes even before we do that his life is a slacker cliché circa 1994. Dwight feels ''like a scrap of sociology blown into its designated corner of the world. But knowing the clichés are clichés doesn't help you to escape them. You still have to go on experiencing your experience as if no one else has ever done it.''

Both the author and his protagonist share a kind of reflexive self-awareness. ''What is this way you talk, Dwight?'' his sister asks. ''Everything you say is in quotes.'' To which he responds: ''Everything everybody says.'' So far, so postmodern. What saves this from becoming tedious is Wilmerding's voice, which blends astute and whimsical observation with cerebral gymnastics and tortuously modest, wistful introspection. Kunkel has a masterly ear; Dwight's voice seems at once utterly familiar and weirdly original. ''I didn't pay that much attention to New York. It always seemed weirdly pre-perceived, with other people already on the job. But it really was a nice place, if you looked in the right neighborhood, and imagined people more like yourself and your friends living there.''

Like many of those who have followed in Holden's footsteps, Wilmerding teeters at times right on the edge between lovable and cloying, but in the second, wanderjahr section of the book, Kunkel saves him from cuteness by allowing him to behave like a complete jerk.

When we meet Dwight he's living in a dormlike apartment with several roommates. He is underemployed as a techie in the ''Problem Resolution Center'' at Pfizer, and under-committed to Vaneetha, a currency trader whom he leaves behind shortly after he is fired from his job. His parents have divorced fairly recently and he wonders, with little conviction, if this might not have something to do with his problems. And he is sort of incestuously attracted to his sister, a radical anthropologist who briefly volunteers to be his psychoanalyst until, after he tries to kiss her, she gives him up as a hopeless case.

Wilmerding is aimless and passive in a Oblomovian way that is, we sense, meant to be representative in terms of his chrysalis stage in life and the dictates of the genre. His inability to commit or make a decision is innate and almost pathological. So difficult does he find it to choose between any competing alternatives that he was once paralyzed at a family Thanksgiving dinner with his fork in midair, drooling, unable to decide between the turkey, the stuffing and the cranberry sauce. In other words, Dwight suffers from abulia -- an inability to make decisions. (If character is action, as Fitzgerald proposed, then Dwight would be a cipher, but Kunkel proves that sometimes character is voice, Dwight's being one of the most distinctive in recent fiction.)

One of Dwight's roommates, a medical student, informs him that there is a cure for his condition -- which is apparently more widespread than we might have imagined -- a drug called Abulinix. (Don't ask your doctor about it just yet.) Unfortunately, it takes a week or two to kick in. While he's waiting for this to happen, Dwight flies off to Ecuador in response to a casual invitation from Natasha, an old prep school classmate who seems, suddenly, like she might just possibly be the girl of his dreams, although he hasn't seen her in 10 years.

The object of his affection disappears the day after his arrival in Quito, and Dwight is left to commiserate with her roommate, Brigid, a Belgian anthropologist who spent several months living with a tribe deep in the Amazon before she finally discovered that another anthropologist had preceded her, asking pretty much the same questions in pursuit of pretty much the same thesis topic. Upon meeting her Dwight observes to himself: ''Certainly she would make a welcome addition to any threesome.'' Now he finds himself alone with Brigid, who proves to be an extremely earnest and socially conscious foil to our feckless hero.

''So I am surprised, yes,'' Brigid says about Natasha's disappearing act. ''But also not surprised. You can see?'' Brigid is in many ways a softer, Euro version of Dwight's angry socialist sister. After they decide to travel through the countryside together, Brigid tries to awaken Dwight's dormant social conscience. At this point in the novel, the contrast between Dwight's stubborn passive resistance and Brigid's uptight Euro-intellectual sincerity keeps us in the comic mode.

''In New England with your wealth you also have freedom, relatively speaking, yes?'' she asks as they tromp through the jungle.

''Yeah,'' Dwight replies.

''And yet in South America as you notice the people are quite poor and lack genuine freedom with their economies?''

''Sure,'' he says, before adding: ''She was making me feel like one of those dumb . . . yes-men in Plato's dialogues who just keep on going Yes, Socrates, right Socrates until they've been led unwarily by their own dull answers into serious extremities of contradiction.''

So far, ''Indecision'' is on pretty familiar ground. But something funny, or rather something serious, happens on the way back to Quito. The change of tone is relatively subtle and Kunkel is clever and skillful enough to finesse it under the guise of romance and drugs. Eventually, of course, Brigid and Dwight end up naked, high on some jungle hallucinogen. (''I'm experiencing this really van Gogh sort of eyesight.'') While they are entwining, a secret is revealed and Natasha's disappearance explained. But while romantico-sexual fulfillment (to borrow Dwight's sister's term) is part of the coming-of-age formula, radical political conversion is not. In the traditional bildungsroman, young Torless or Tom Jones is eventually integrated into the traditional social order.

Kunkel reverses the 19th-century convention (as well as Joyce's negation in ''Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,'' where Dedalus renounces the social order for the priestly vocation of art): as a result of his drugged-up romantic consummation, the protagonist becomes socially conscious; that is, alienated from the status quo and politically awakened. While they are playing at Adam and Eve in the Ecuadorian forest, Brigid invites Dwight to envision a fruit which, once eaten, allows you to know the history of every product that comes into your hands -- including the labor and suffering that produced it. Dwight's epiphany plausibly takes place under the influence, but unexpectedly persists and develops into a full-blown social conscience and a budding altruistic vocation. You may ask yourself, as the realization sinks in, Is he kidding? But after two readings I have to say, I don't think he is. And at some point I remembered Foster Wallace's much-discussed essay (''E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction'') on irony and its discontents.

If Kunkel had stopped his novel in midsentence some 20 or 30 pages earlier, he would merely have written the funniest and smartest coming-of-age novel in years. In fact, he seems to be trying to do something more ambitious by somewhat abashedly presenting the birth of a social conscience as a genuinely redemptive moment, albeit one finessed through a psychedelic episode and the comic medium of Dwight's voice, which retains its self-deprecating humor, making fun of his fledgling idealism even as he lays it out for us. The tentativeness with which Kunkel approaches this fairly radical conclusion may just be an indication of the narrowness of our contemporary literary idiom. My pedophobic novelist friend may be rolling her eyes at this point, but it seems to me that Kunkel manages, just barely, to preserve the superb comic tone of the novel, even as he gestures, like some literary voice in the wilderness, toward a hazy new frontier of hip sincerity, of irony subordinated to a higher calling.

Jay McInerney's seventh novel, ''The Good Life,'' will be published in January.

on feeling vindicated and realizing the fragile shibboleth of my opinion

2005-08-07T18:52:00.000+01:00

Filth, blasphemy and big, big stars

Adrian Searle picks his way through the world's largest, most prestigious art show: the Venice Biennale

Adrian Searle
Tuesday June 14, 2005

Guardian

The 51st Venice Biennale opened on Sunday and in the German pavilion the exhibition attendants have broken into a song about it. "Ohhh! This is so contemporary, contemporary, contemporary," they chant, waving their arms. Thomas Scheibitz's sculptures, which share the pavilion, stand mute, oddly geometric and somewhat recalcitrant in the face of this little performance. Orchestrated by Tino Sehgal, the work is joyful as much as ironic or insolent; it's art about art, about the art world, and about Sehgal himself. He's telling us - or getting his actors dressed as attendants to tell us - both how theatrical and how very now it all is. I wonder why visitors don't form a spontaneous conga, spilling out into the Giardini, the other national pavilions, and the medieval naval buildings and docks of the Arsenale, where the biennale continues, still chanting the litany of the moment.

It is always all so contemporary. Except when it is passe, like the vast, classically designed chandelier hung not with Murano glass baubles but with unused tampons at the entrance to the Arsenale. (How many student works, though not quite so well done, has one seen like this?) Or the wrecked and empty Romanian pavilion, a non-work that Daniel Knorr presents, I take it, as a kind of metaphor for the powerlessness of art and of the nation state in the new world order and the new Europe, but that reminds us only of other such non-happenings that have amused, baffled and annoyed visitors over the past decades.

Sehgal and Knorr are not the only artists to have chosen the biennale to examine what it means to show here. In his On Translation: I Giardini, in the Spanish pavilion, Antoni Muntadas questions the continuing relevance of the idea of national representation, and what participation signifies; in one work he lists those many nations, from Algeria to Zimbabwe, not represented. Even the astonishing 17.5m-high mountain of timber and roofing felt that has engulfed the Austrian pavilion, a work by Hans Schabus, is in part a comment on the history and site of the pavilion itself, and what showing here represents for the individual artist, the spectator, and for Austria and Italy, which share the same mountain border. Climbing through the work's Piranesian interior to the mountain's peak - where one can open a little hatch to gaze over the Giardini and, on a clear day, to the distant Alps - one comes to a pinnacle that is Romantic, absurd, all-encompassing and empty. Which is exactly the point.

The Venice Biennale is filled with nullities and profundities, the silly and the serious. Always, there is too much to see, things to forget and things that surprise and confuse. Confusion is good, but there's too much of it, even though this is a smaller, better biennale than the previous two editions. Over and above the national pavilions, with their artists chosen by individual curators and committees, the biennale always appoints an overall director, or on this occasion two: Spanish curators María de Corral and Rosa Martínez, who have organised the biennale's keynote exhibitions in the Italian pavilion and in the Arsenale.

Taking over the Italian pavilion (which some Italians have complained they would quite like back) and several outdoor sites in the Giardini, is De Corral's The Experience of Art. She lists nostalgia, the body, "power, domination and violence", "sociopolitical critique of current events by means of irony", and "the use of images and film and narration of the past as an immense archive" among her preoccupations. She lets the works do the work, which is saying a lot these days, in a show whose installation is respectful and sometimes startling. The interconnecting galleries devoted to Thomas Schütte, Francis Bacon, Philip Guston and Marlene Dumas may seem a tad predictable but at least allow the artists to speak for themselves and to one another. What the conversation entails, in the juxtaposition of a Rachel Whiteread staircase and some blown-up, pixilated photographs by Thomas Ruff, I can't exactly fathom: mediation of reality through the casting process and the electronic manipulation of the image, I'd guess. Schütte's room of his recent iron female figures on their huge tables are coupled with a large suite of etched portraits, and rightly won a Golden Lion. His show might even be seen as an old-fashioned demonstration of sculptural mass, volume and line, but being old-fashioned and conservative it is a sort of disguise for Schütte.

The later works by Bacon nearby look weary and mannered by comparison, though what Bacon inevitably came up against, apart from the trap of his own style, was the fact that figurative sculpture and painting has to deal with mannerism, against which a self-conscious and self-effacing realism can provide no alternative, because it too is a manner, a stance taken in the light of history as well as the things in the world it seeks to depict. This is also evident in the Lucian Freud retrospective at the Museo Correr. A group of the last works of Juan Muñoz, in which 13 figures sit laughing and falling perilously from their raised rows of iron benches, can be taken as a kind of joke about what a sculpted figure can represent and what its presence means - as a form, as a surrogate person, as a mirror of the real. They are laughing at the impossibility of their own existence, and at the expectations we might have of them.

So it is with Bruce Nauman's funny and horrible Shit in Your Hat - Head on a Chair, in which a projected, white-faced mime artist tries to follow Nauman's impossible authoritarian commands, and in Willie Doherty's Non-Specific Threat, in which the camera constantly circles the shaved, magnificently malevolent head of a man. This is accompanied by a lengthy spoken text about how this guy is your worst nightmare. "I am the face of evil," the voice says. "I am beyond reason ... your death is my salvation ... I am your desire." This is done in such a deadpan way as to be convincing while serial-killer-movie implausible. Then again, Barbara Kruger's invocation of George Bush and American hubris on the exterior of the Italian pavilion reminds us that nothing is implausible.

At least we can lighten up with Francesco Vezzoli's hilarious trailer for a remake of the notorious 1979 movie Caligula. Installed with cinema seating and booming acoustics, it leaves the audience open-mouthed as Helen Mirren leads two frisky, bare-bottomed, collared slaves about, and Karen Black, the most promiscuous woman in Rome, dabs her nose with freshly ejaculated spunk. Gore Vidal, who wrote the screenplay for the original, hams it up gloriously, announcing: "Coming soon ... to a theatre near you." With alarming out-takes from the dildo-fellating, bum-lickingly orgiastic 54 minutes censored from the 1979 film, and with appearances by Courtney Love, Glenn Shadix and Benicio del Toro, this is almost the best five minutes in the biennale. It's got the lot: filth, blasphemy, erudite allusions and big, big stars. As the deep-throated film-trailer hyperbole has it: "You can literally feel it coating you in the taboo!" Vezzoli's Caligula puts to shame some of the more respectful, movie-quoting, "from art-house to art installation" film work in Venice, of which there is a very great deal.

In many ways, The Experience of Art is a more satisfying, and at times troubling and moving, show than most of the efforts by the national representations in the Giardini. If Mark Wallinger had been in a position to exhibit the work he has in De Corral's show, when he represented Britain in the 47th biennale, he'd have won best pavilion. This two-hour video record of the 10 days the artist spent wearing a fancy-dress bear suit and living in the empty, glass-walled Mies van der Rohe Nationalgalerie in Berlin, shuffling about, sleeping, gazing at the severities of human architecture, being a bored bear, is genuinely tragic.

There are few killer individual pavilions this time around. Gilbert and George deserve to represent Britain, but there are too many of their new, computer-assisted Gingko Pictures. There's more than a hint of overripe decay and railing against age in there. But G&G are a wonderfully sinister national treasure. And that's what their work, in the end, seems to be about. Age seems to be the subject of Ed Ruscha's 1990s paintings, in the US pavilion, of hard-edged, anonymous industrial buildings in LA, too. He has now repainted these as a second accompanying series. The buildings are still there, but the companies that occupied them have been bought out. The logos have changed and the sky has gone brittle and lurid. There's a sadness, and a nostalgia for what was already brooding and hideous. This is less about changing economics than an older artist watching the world change.

Ruscha, rumour had it, was set to win the Golden Lion for best pavilion. Instead, Annette Messager won. "Casino" reads the neon sign over the entrance to the French pavilion. A casino is both a gambling hall and a brothel, and this work is both a retelling of the Pinocchio story and a devious play on the life of Casanova. Inevitably, it is a Freudian nightmare. In the first room a little wooden Pinocchio endlessly turns on a cart between piles of bolsters, like a child imagining its cot as a play den, alive with furtive rubbery hands and knife-edged noses. In the second room is an ocean of red silk: it roils about, fills the space and retreats, floods and ebbs. Undersea life glows on and off beneath the silken, bloody sea, and sickbed apparitions ascend and descend from the ceiling. Pinocchio, like Jonah, has been eaten by the whale, or by God, or someone. Messager returns to us a convincing sense of childhood wonder and horror with a work that is difficult to resist.

It's all done with compressed air, and computer-assisted machinery that farts and hisses and, in the final room, throws things about with mad abandon. Soft-toy body parts and dice are hurled around with maniacal glee. I was astonished. But perhaps not quite so astonished as at a performance by John Bock in the Arsenale, where he and an accomplice attack one another with labour-saving kitchen devices and get covered in porridge oats. Unlike Messager's work, Bock's installation is a platform for performance, and without the performance to animate it the whole thing is just a mess.

This was part of Rosa Martinez's show Always a Little Further. It always feels that the further you walk through the cavernous interiors of the Arsenale, the worse the art gets. This year was no exception, although every piece was installed with a certain elegance. Perhaps the Arsenale should be a free-for-all, an antidote to the territorial claims of the national pavilions in the Giardini. The most contentious piece here was in the end censored from the show. Gregor Schneider intended to site a black cube, based on the proportions of the sacred Ka'ba in Mecca, in St Mark's Square. This object was, he said, "an independent body free of all mental associations". But nothing is free of mental associations, ever, not even the most dismal art work. All we are left with is a short video.

My favourite piece was Korean artist Kimsooja's video Needle Woman, in which, on several screens, a woman is seen standing in crowded streets around the world - in Chad, Yemen, Nepal, Havana - as people mill round her. You feel the immensity of the world, mutual incomprehension, curiosity, surprise. She is the still centre, the subject always turned away from us. No, not the subject, but an object; it is the others who are the subjects.

If the Arsenale is a bit of a zoo - replete with a hippopotamus sculpted in mud from the Venice canals, on whose back someone sits, reading a newspaper and blowing on a little whistle - it concludes beautifully in an empty little brick bastion, where we hear a multiple-tracked recording of Louise Bourgeois muttering to herself and singing the half-remembered songs of her childhood. Like Messager's work, this is much more than cute or silly. Bourgeois doesn't care whether she's good or bad, and I'd rather have bad than mediocre, of which there is always a lot at Venice.

One of the most argued-over works is Mandarin Ducks, by Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij, in the Dutch pavilion. This film is in many ways irredeemable, with its stilted acting, mannered staging and its cliches about relationships during a Sunday gathering of friends, whose convivial afternoon degenerates into a minefield of sexual tension, rancour, embitterment and jealousy. The mannerism, to be generous, is a deliberate element of the film, along with the lighting, the screening conditions and the references to art. The shock was that this pair of artists are best known for the cinematic distance, elegance and understatement of their often panoramic earlier works. This, instead, was a brave attempt to turn the camera away from an anonymous reality towards human intimacies and the mess of relationships. Its tensions were all internalised and artificial. But rather than feeling smug about how many arty in-jokes and references the viewer could chalk up, I ended up consumed by the soap-opera-bad acting of it all, which was itself either a hideous mistake, or a conscious reference.

The Mandarin ducks of the title are supposed to be a symbol of fidelity. Maybe what the artists were really talking about was fidelity to their own reputations, and how sometimes it is necessary to move in a new direction. This in itself is not so much contemporary, as Tino Sehgal would have it, as a creative necessity.

· Venice Biennale is at various venues in Venice until November 6. Details: 00 39 041 271 90 20, or www.labiennale.org

some pilfered photos of annette messager's "casino," which left me gaping and floored:

the clock, however, was the one strong false note i felt she struck in the exhibition. the room, with its flowing red fabric and circular time would have much improved without the overly literal reminder of the clock. time is there, one feels it in all its wearying circularity, without its direct representation.

From Book VII of "The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet's Mind: An Autobiographical Poem" by William Wordsworth

2005-06-12T00:47:00.000+01:00

The matter that detains us now may seem,
To many, neither dignified enough
Nor arduous, yet will not be scorned by them,
Who, looking inward, have observed the ties
That bind the perishable hours of life
Each to the other, and the curious props
By which the world of memory and thought
Exists and is sustained.

As copied down by Virginia Woolf in her diary.

for christ's sake, i love jon pareles.

2005-06-07T00:41:00.000+01:00

June 5, 2005
The Case Against Coldplay
By JON PARELES

THERE'S nothing wrong with self-pity. As a spur to songwriting, it's right up there with lust, anger and greed, and probably better than the remaining deadly sins. There's nothing wrong, either, with striving for musical grandeur, using every bit of skill and studio illusion to create a sound large enough to get lost in. Male sensitivity, a quality that's under siege in a pop culture full of unrepentant bullying and machismo, shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, no matter how risible it can be in practice. And building a sound on the lessons of past bands is virtually unavoidable.

But put them all together and they add up to Coldplay, the most insufferable band of the decade.

This week Coldplay releases its painstakingly recorded third album, "X&Y" (Capitol), a virtually surefire blockbuster that has corporate fortunes riding on it. (The stock price plunged for EMI Group, Capitol's parent company, when Coldplay announced that the album's release date would be moved from February to June, as it continued to rework the songs.)

"X&Y" is the work of a band that's acutely conscious of the worldwide popularity it cemented with its 2002 album, "A Rush of Blood to the Head," which has sold three million copies in the United States alone. Along with its 2000 debut album, "Parachutes," Coldplay claims sales of 20 million albums worldwide. "X&Y" makes no secret of grand ambition.

Clearly, Coldplay is beloved: by moony high school girls and their solace-seeking parents, by hip-hop producers who sample its rich instrumental sounds and by emo rockers who admire Chris Martin's heart-on-sleeve lyrics. The band emanates good intentions, from Mr. Martin's political statements to lyrics insisting on its own benevolence. Coldplay is admired by everyone - everyone except me.

It's not for lack of skill. The band proffers melodies as imposing as Romanesque architecture, solid and symmetrical. Mr. Martin on keyboards, Jonny Buckland on guitar, Guy Berryman on bass and Will Champion on drums have mastered all the mechanics of pop songwriting, from the instrumental hook that announces nearly every song they've recorded to the reassurance of a chorus to the revitalizing contrast of a bridge. Their arrangements ascend and surge, measuring out the song's yearning and tension, cresting and easing back and then moving toward a chiming resolution. Coldplay is meticulously unified, and its songs have been rigorously cleared of anything that distracts from the musical drama.

Unfortunately, all that sonic splendor orchestrates Mr. Martin's voice and lyrics. He places his melodies near the top of his range to sound more fragile, so the tunes straddle the break between his radiant tenor voice and his falsetto. As he hops between them - in what may be Coldplay's most annoying tic - he makes a sound somewhere between a yodel and a hiccup. And the lyrics can make me wish I didn't understand English. Coldplay's countless fans seem to take comfort when Mr. Martin sings lines like, "Is there anybody out there who / Is lost and hurt and lonely too," while a strummed acoustic guitar telegraphs his aching sincerity. Me, I hear a passive-aggressive blowhard, immoderately proud as he flaunts humility. "I feel low," he announces in the chorus of "Low," belied by the peak of a crescendo that couldn't be more triumphant about it.

In its early days, Coldplay could easily be summed up as Radiohead minus Radiohead's beat, dissonance or arty subterfuge. Both bands looked to the overarching melodies of 1970's British rock and to the guitar dynamics of U2, and Mr. Martin had clearly heard both Bono's delivery and the way Radiohead's Thom Yorke stretched his voice to the creaking point.

Unlike Radiohead, though, Coldplay had no interest in being oblique or barbed. From the beginning, Coldplay's songs topped majesty with moping: "We're sinking like stones," Mr. Martin proclaimed. Hardly alone among British rock bands as the 1990's ended, Coldplay could have been singing not only about private sorrows but also about the final sunset on the British empire: the old opulence meeting newly shrunken horizons. Coldplay's songs wallowed happily in their unhappiness.

"Am I a part of the cure / Or am I part of the disease," Mr. Martin pondered in "Clocks" on "A Rush of Blood to the Head." Actually, he's contagious. Particularly in its native England, Coldplay has spawned a generation of one-word bands - Athlete, Embrace, Keane, Starsailor, Travis and Aqualung among them - that are more than eager to follow through on Coldplay's tremulous, ringing anthems of insecurity. The emulation is spreading overseas to bands like the Perishers from Sweden and the American band Blue Merle, which tries to be Coldplay unplugged.

A band shouldn't necessarily be blamed for its imitators - ask the Cure or the Grateful Dead. But Coldplay follow-throughs are redundant; from the beginning, Coldplay has verged on self-parody. When he moans his verses, Mr. Martin can sound so sorry for himself that there's hardly room to sympathize for him, and when he's not mixing metaphors, he fearlessly slings clichés. "Are you lost or incomplete," Mr. Martin sings in "Talk," which won't be cited in any rhyming dictionaries. "Do you feel like a puzzle / you can't find your missing piece."

Coldplay reached its musical zenith with the widely sampled piano arpeggios that open "Clocks": a passage that rings gladly and, as it descends the scale and switches from major to minor chords, turns incipiently mournful. Of course, it's followed by plaints: "Tides that I tried to swim against / Brought me down upon my knees."

On "X&Y," Coldplay strives to carry the beauty of "Clocks" across an entire album - not least in its first single, "Speed of Sound," which isn't the only song on the album to borrow the "Clocks" drumbeat. The album is faultless to a fault, with instrumental tracks purged of any glimmer of human frailty. There is not an unconsidered or misplaced note on "X&Y," and every song (except the obligatory acoustic "hidden track" at the end, which is still by no means casual) takes place on a monumental soundstage.

As Coldplay's recording budgets have grown, so have its reverberation times. On "X&Y," it plays as if it can already hear the songs echoing across the world. "Square One," which opens the album, actually begins with guitar notes hinting at the cosmic fanfare of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (and "2001: A Space Odyssey"). Then Mr. Martin, never someone to evade the obvious, sings about "the space in which we're traveling."

As a blockbuster band, Coldplay is now looking over its shoulder at titanic predecessors like U2, Pink Floyd and the Beatles, pilfering freely from all of them. It also looks to an older legacy; in many songs, organ chords resonate in the spaces around Mr. Martin's voice, insisting on churchly reverence.

As Coldplay's music has grown more colossal, its lyrics have quietly made a shift on "X&Y." On previous albums, Mr. Martin sang mostly in the first person, confessing to private vulnerabilities. This time, he sings a lot about "you": a lover, a brother, a random acquaintance. He has a lot of pronouncements and advice for all of them: "You just want somebody listening to what you say," and "Every step that you take could be your biggest mistake," and "Maybe you'll get what you wanted, maybe you'll stumble upon it" and "You don't have to be alone." It's supposed to be compassionate, empathetic, magnanimous, inspirational. But when the music swells up once more with tremolo guitars and chiming keyboards, and Mr. Martin's voice breaks for the umpteenth time, it sounds like hokum to me.

and again.

2005-06-03T02:46:00.000+01:00

"For Bayley, Barthes's confident insistence that 'the fact can only exist linguistically, as a term of discourse' is a sign of madness from the one theorist he regards as even half-way sane. He might have quoted T. E. Hulme in rebuttal: 'Philosophy is about people in clothes, not about the soul of man'. Bayley is good about people in clothes. Wordsworth's poems 'are like one's parents' clothes - always out of fashion'. But our critic, an accomplished poet himself when he was young, has the tools of technical analysis to tell you why Wordsworth will always be current, and why Tennyson deservedly became 'a pop star, one of the most successful and famous ever'. Bayley can tell whether his subject poets have the palpable earth for a launch-pad when they lift off higher realms. That useful emphasis runs out of road only when he gets to John Ashbery. According to his own principles, Bayley ought to be powerfully delighted by the later Ashbery's unflagging determination to blend all of America's vernacular tones into 'the natural voice of the contingent present', a nice way of describing a slow avalanche of verbal hamburger. [...] Finally Bayley believes that all writing should aim to be remembered."

- Clive Bell, "A Fabulous Marketplace:
Who Says that Book Reviews Should Never be Collected in a Book?"
The Times Literary Supplement, 27 May 2005.
Review of John Bayley, The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature.

2005-06-02T01:30:00.000+01:00

"There were books enough; very few French books; but then any one who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, with extravagant enthusiasm."

- Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

nostalgia is a drug in its own right.

2005-04-24T04:18:00.000+01:00

this book, and an unselfconscious comment about a phoenix, made the first boy like me for who i really am.

i've been thinking about the romanticizing of depression and its debilitating consequences a lot lately...

2005-04-24T04:12:00.000+01:00

April 17, 2005

The New York Times

There's Nothing Deep About Depression

By PETER D. KRAMER

hortly after the publication of my book ''Listening to Prozac,'' 12 years ago, I became immersed in depression. Not my own. I was contented enough in the slog through midlife. But mood disorder surrounded me, in my contacts with patients and readers. To my mind, my book was never really about depression. Taking the new antidepressants, some of my patients said they found themselves more confident and decisive. I used these claims as a jumping-off point for speculation: what if future medications had the potential to modify personality traits in people who had never experienced mood disorder? If doctors were given access to such drugs, how should they prescribe them? The inquiry moved from medical ethics to social criticism: what does our culture demand of us, in the way of assertiveness?

It was the medications' extra effects -- on personality, not on the symptoms of depression -- that provoked this line of thought. For centuries, doctors have treated depressed patients, using medication and psychological strategies. Those efforts seemed uncontroversial. But authors do not determine the fate of their work. ''Listening to Prozac'' became a ''best-selling book about depression.'' I found myself speaking -- sometimes about ethics, more often about mood disorders -- with many audiences, in bookstores, at gatherings of the mentally ill and their families and at professional meetings. Invariably, as soon as I had finished my remarks, a hand would shoot up. A hearty, jovial man would rise and ask -- always the same question -- ''What if Prozac had been available in van Gogh's time?''

I understood what was intended, a joke about a pill that makes people blandly chipper. The New Yorker had run cartoons along these lines -- Edgar Allan Poe, on Prozac, making nice to a raven. Below the surface humor were issues I had raised in my own writing. Might a widened use of medication deprive us of insight about our condition? But with repetition, the van Gogh question came to sound strange. Facing a man in great pain, headed for self-mutilation and death, who would withhold a potentially helpful treatment?

It may be that my response was grounded less in the intent of the question than in my own experience. For 20 years, I'd spent my afternoons working with psychiatric outpatients in Providence, R.I. As I wrote more, I let my clinical hours dwindle. One result was that more of my time was filled with especially challenging cases, with patients who were not yet better. The popularity of ''Listening to Prozac'' meant that the most insistent new inquiries were from families with depressed members who had done poorly elsewhere. In my life as a doctor, unremitting depression became an intimate. It is poor company. Depression destroys families. It ruins careers. It ages patients prematurely.

Recent research has made the fight against depression especially compelling. Depression is associated with brain disorganization and nerve-cell atrophy. Depression appears to be progressive -- the longer the episode, the greater the anatomical disorder. To work with depression is to combat a disease that harms patients' nerve pathways day by day.

Nor is the damage merely to mind and brain. Depression has been linked with harm to the heart, to endocrine glands, to bones. Depressives die young -- not only of suicide, but also of heart attacks and strokes. Depression is a multisystem disease, one we would consider dangerous to health even if we lacked the concept ''mental illness.''

As a clinician, I found the what if challenge ever less amusing. And so I began to ask audience members what they had in mind. Most understood van Gogh to have suffered severe depression. His illness, they thought, conferred special vision. In a short story, Poe likens ''an utter depression of soul'' to ''the hideous dropping off of the veil.'' The questioners maintained this 19th-century belief, that depression reveals essence to those brave enough to face it. By this account, depression is more than a disease -- it has a sacred aspect.

Other questioners set aside that van Gogh was actually ill. They took mood disorder to be a heavy dose of the artistic temperament, so that any application of antidepressants is finally cosmetic, remolding personality into a more socially acceptable form. For them, depression was less than a disease.

These attributions stood in contrast to my own belief, that depression is neither more nor less than a disease, but disease simply and altogether.

udiences seemed to be aware of the medical perspective, even to endorse it -- but not to have adopted it as a habit of mind. To underscore this inconsistency, I began to pose a test question: We say that depression is a disease. Does that mean that we want to eradicate it as we have eradicated smallpox, so that no human being need ever suffer depression again? I made it clear that mere sadness was not at issue. Take major depression, however you define it. Are you content to be rid of that condition?

Always, the response was hedged: aren't we meant to be depressed? Are we talking about changing human nature?

I took those protective worries as expressions of what depression is to us. Asked whether we are content to eradicate arthritis, no one says, ''Well, the end-stage deformation, yes, but let's hang on to tennis elbow, housemaid's knee and the early stages of rheumatoid disease.'' Multiple sclerosis, acne, schizophrenia, psoriasis, bulimia, malaria -- there is no other disease we consider preserving. But eradicating depression calls out the caveats.

To this way of thinking, to oppose depression too completely is to be coarse and reductionist -- to miss the inherent tragedy of the human condition. To be depressed, even gravely, is to be in touch with what matters most in life, its finitude and brevity, its absurdity and arbitrariness. To be depressed is to occupy the role of rebel and social critic. Depression, in our culture, is what tuberculosis was 100 years ago: illness that signifies refinement.

Having raised the thought experiment, I should emphasize that in reality, the possibility of eradicating depression is not at hand. If clinicians are better at ameliorating depression than we were 10 years ago -- and I think we may be -- that is because we are more persistent in our efforts, combining treatments and (when they succeed) sticking with them until they have a marked effect. But in terms of the tools available, progress in the campaign against depression has been plodding.

Still, it is possible to envisage general medical progress that lowers the rate of depression substantially -- and then to think of a society that enjoys that result. What is lost, what gained? Which is also to ask: What stands in the way of our embracing the notion that depression is disease, nothing more?

This question has any number of answers. We idealize depression, associating it with perceptiveness, interpersonal sensitivity and other virtues. Like tuberculosis in its day, depression is a form of vulnerability that even contains a measure of erotic appeal. But the aspect of the romanticization of depression that seems to me to call for special attention is the notion that depression spawns creativity.

Objective evidence for that effect is weak. Older inquiries, the first attempts to examine the overlap of madness and genius, made positive claims for schizophrenia. Recent research has looked at mood disorders. These studies suggest that bipolar disorder may be overrepresented in the arts. (Bipolarity, or manic-depression, is another diagnosis proposed for van Gogh.) But then mania and its lesser cousin hypomania may drive productivity in many fields. One classic study hints at a link between alcoholism and literary work. But the benefits of major depression, taken as a single disease, have been hard to demonstrate. If anything, traits eroded by depression -- like energy and mental flexibility -- show up in contemporary studies of creativity.

How, then, did this link between creativity and depression arise? The belief that mental illness is a form of inspiration extends back beyond written history. Hippocrates was answering some such claim, when, around 400 B.C., he tried to define melancholy -- an excess of ''black bile'' -- as a disease. To Hippocrates, melancholy was a disorder of the humors that caused epileptic seizures when it affected the body and caused dejection when it affected the mind. Melancholy was blamed for hemorrhoids, ulcers, dysentery, skin rashes and diseases of the lungs.

The most influential expression of the contrasting position -- that melancholy confers special virtues -- appears in the ''Problemata Physica,'' or ''Problems,'' a discussion, in question-and-answer form, of scientific conundrums. It was long attributed to Aristotle, but the surviving version, from the second century B.C., is now believed to have been written by his followers. In the 30th book of the ''Problems,'' the author asks why it is that outstanding men -- philosophers, statesmen, poets, artists, educators and heroes -- are so often melancholic. Among the ancients, the strongmen Herakles and Ajax were melancholic; more contemporaneous examples cited in the ''Problems'' include Socrates, Plato and the Spartan general Lysander. The answer given is that too much black bile leads to insanity, while a moderate amount creates men ''superior to the rest of the world in many ways. ''

The Greeks, and the cultures that succeeded them, faced depression poorly armed. Treatment has always been difficult. Depression is common and spans the life cycle. When you add in (as the Greeks did) mania, schizophrenia and epilepsy, not to mention hemorrhoids, you encompass a good deal of what humankind suffers altogether. Such an impasse calls for the elaboration of myth. Over time, ''melancholy '' became a universal metaphor, standing in for sin and innocent suffering, self-indulgence and sacrifice, inferiority and perspicacity.

The great flowering of melancholy occurred during the Renaissance, as humanists rediscovered the ''Problems.'' In the late 15th century, a cult of melancholy flourished in Florence and then was taken back to England by foppish aristocratic travelers who styled themselves artists and scholars and affected the melancholic attitude and dress. Most fashionable of all were ''melancholic malcontents,'' irritable depressives given to political intrigue. One historian, Lawrence Babb, describes them as ''black-suited and disheveled . . . morosely meditative, taciturn yet prone to occasional railing.''

In dozens of stage dramas from the period, the principal character is a discontented melancholic. ''Hamlet'' is the great example. As soon as Hamlet takes the stage, an Elizabethan audience would understand that it is watching a tragedy whose hero's characteristic flaw will be a melancholic trait, in this case, paralysis of action. By the same token, the audience would quickly accept Hamlet's spiritual superiority, his suicidal impulses, his hostility to the established order, his protracted grief, solitary wanderings, erudition, impaired reason, murderousness, role-playing, passivity, rashness, antic disposition, ''dejected haviour of the visage'' and truck with graveyards and visions.

''Hamlet'' is arguably the seminal text of our culture, one that cements our admiration for doubt, paralysis and alienation. But seeing ''Hamlet'' in its social setting, in an era rife with melancholy as an affected posture, might make us wonder how much of the historical association between melancholy and its attractive attributes is artistic conceit.

In literature, the cultural effects of depression may be particularly marked. Writing, more than most callings, can coexist with a relapsing and recurring illness. Composition does not require fixed hours; poems or essays can be set aside and returned to on better days. And depression is an attractive subject. Superficially, mental pain resembles passion, strong emotion that stands in opposition to the corrupt world. Depression can have a picaresque quality -- think of the journey through the Slough of Despond in John Bunyan's ''Pilgrim's Progress.'' Over the centuries, narrative structures were built around the descent into depression and the recovery from it. Lyric poetry, religious memoir, the novel of youthful self-development -- depression is an affliction that inspires not just art but art forms. And art colors values. Where the unacknowledged legislators of mankind are depressives, dark views of the human condition will be accorded special worth.

Through the ''anxiety of influence,'' heroic melancholy cast its shadow far forward, onto romanticism and existentialism. At a certain point, the transformation begun in the Renaissance reaches completion. It is no longer that melancholy leads to heroism. Melancholy is heroism. The challenge is not battle but inner strife. The rumination of the depressive, however solipsistic, is deemed admirable. Repeatedly, melancholy returns to fashion.

As I spoke with audiences about mood disorders, I came to believe that part of what stood between depression and its full status as disease was the tradition of heroic melancholy. Surely, I would be asked when I spoke with college students, surely I saw the value in alienation. One medical philosopher asked what it would mean to prescribe Prozac to Sisyphus, condemned to roll his boulder up the hill.

That variant of the what if question sent me to Albert Camus's essay on Sisyphus, where I confirmed what I thought I had remembered -- that in Camus's reading, Sisyphus, the existential hero, remains upbeat despite the futility of his task. The gods intend for Sisyphus to suffer. His rebellion, his fidelity to self, rests on the refusal to be worn down. Sisyphus exemplifies resilience, in the face of full knowledge of his predicament. Camus says that joy opens our eyes to the absurd -- and to our freedom. It is not only in the downhill steps that Sisyphus triumphs over his punishment: ''The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.''

I came to suspect that it was the automatic pairing of depth and depression that made the medical philosopher propose Sisyphus as a candidate for mood enhancement. We forget that alienation can be paired with elation, that optimism is a form of awareness. I wanted to reclaim Sisyphus, to set his image on the poster for the campaign against depression.

Once we take seriously the notion that depression is a disease like any other, we will want to begin our discussion of alienation by asking diagnostic questions. Perhaps this sense of dislocation signals an apt response to circumstance, but that one points to an episode of an illness. Aware of the extent and effects of mood disorder, we may still value alienation -- and ambivalence and anomie and the other uncomfortable traits that sometimes express perspective and sometimes attach to mental illness. But we are likely to assess them warily, concerned that they may be precursors or residual symptoms of major depression.

How far does our jaundiced view reach? Surely the label ''disease'' does not apply to the melancholic or depressive temperament? And of course, it does not. People can be pessimistic and lethargic, brooding and cautious, without ever falling ill in any way. But still, it seemed to me in my years of immersion that depression casts a long shadow. Though I had never viewed it as pathology, even Woody Allen-style neurosis had now been stripped of some of its charm -- of any implicit claim, say, of superiority. The cachet attaching to tuberculosis diminished as science clarified the cause of the illness, and as treatment became first possible and then routine. Depression may follow the same path. As it does, we may find that heroic melancholy is no more.

In time, I came to think of the van Gogh question in a different light, merging it with the eradication question. What sort of art would be meaningful or moving in a society free of depression? Boldness and humor -- broad or sly -- might gain in status. Or not. A society that could guarantee the resilience of mind and brain might favor operatic art and literature. Freedom from depression would make the world safe for high neurotics, virtuosi of empathy, emotional bungee-jumpers. It would make the world safe for van Gogh.

Depression is not a perspective. It is a disease. Resisting that claim, we may ask: Seeing cruelty, suffering and death -- shouldn't a person be depressed? There are circumstances, like the Holocaust, in which depression might seem justified for every victim or observer. Awareness of the ubiquity of horror is the modern condition, our condition.

But then, depression is not universal, even in terrible times. Though prone to mood disorder, the great Italian writer Primo Levi was not depressed in his months at Auschwitz. I have treated a handful of patients who survived horrors arising from war or political repression. They came to depression years after enduring extreme privation. Typically, such a person will say: ''I don't understand it. I went through -- '' and here he will name one of the shameful events of our time. ''I lived through that, and in all those months, I never felt this.'' This refers to the relentless bleakness of depression, the self as hollow shell. To see the worst things a person can see is one experience; to suffer mood disorder is another. It is depression -- and not resistance to it or recovery from it -- that diminishes the self.

Beset by great evil, a person can be wise, observant and disillusioned and yet not depressed. Resilience confers its own measure of insight. We should have no trouble admiring what we do admire -- depth, complexity, aesthetic brilliance -- and standing foursquare against depression.

Peter D. Kramer is a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown University and the author of ''Listening to Prozac.'' This essay is adapted from his book ''Against Depression,'' which Viking will publish next month.

books i want to read

2005-03-12T03:40:00.000Z

Hamlet in Purgatory by Stephen Greenblatt
The Face of the Naked Lady by Michael Rips

shakespeare sonnet # 73

2005-03-10T00:16:00.000Z

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth steal away,
Death's second self, which seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

this made me feel something i can't really describe.

2005-03-01T03:43:00.000Z

February 27, 2005
The Rescue Artist

By DEBORAH SOLOMON
I'm not funny,'' Jonathan Safran Foer announced when I walked into his office in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. ''People assume that because my books are funny, I'll be funny in real life. It's the inevitable disappointment of meeting me.''
It is true that our hero might seem a little pale compared with the characters who inhabit his fiction, that charred terrain haunted by the specter of historic calamities. Foer, who just turned 28, is a thin, bespectacled figure with an air of boyish earnestness and a solemn, sometimes shy, expression. When he smiles, he looks even younger, with teeth that seem too white and straight for a person of his depth. On this winter afternoon, he was sitting on a metal folding chair, dressed in jeans and his bedroom slippers, his arms crossed protectively in front of his chest.
''I just watched a documentary about Martin Luther King last night,'' he said. ''I spent all morning getting down about my speaking voice and seeing if I could do a vibrato. When King spoke, he sounded like he was singing. I wish I could offer you something a little more. . . . '' He stopped midsentence to search for a word.
''Baritone?'' I volunteered.
''No, black, essentially,'' he said by way of correction.
As his comment suggests, Foer is given to comic self-invention, to feats of distortion and parody -- some of which are dauntingly literary. He was all of 25 when he emerged out of nowhere, in 2002, with his widely acclaimed first novel, ''Everything Is Illuminated.'' Begun while he was still an undergraduate at Princeton, it tells the story of a young, self-deprecating writer named Jonathan Safran Foer who travels to a vanished shtetl in Ukraine, searching for a woman he believed saved his grandfather from the Nazis. The book has sold more than 100,000 copies in hardcover and another 150,000 in paperback, making it that rare event in the publishing industry, a literary best seller, and proving that a difficult, cerebral novel is not doomed to sell 23 copies, all of them to the author's mother. A film version of the novel, directed by Liev Schreiber, is scheduled to be released in August.
Foer's second novel, ''Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,'' will be published in about a month. It shifts his landscape from the wounded earth of Eastern Europe to a fresher site of devastation. The book's main narrator is Oskar Schell, a 9-year-old schoolboy whose father was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. An aspiring inventor, Oskar consoles himself by thinking up far-fetched creations that could protect people from all sorts of injury. In the process, he becomes a kind of artist, someone whose dreams are so romantic that they are destined to failure. Oskar's creativity is echoed in the design of the novel, a highly experimental affair that draws upon photographs and typographical play in an attempt to blur the old boundaries between image and text. ''It's the kind of book that will look great next to the toilet,'' Foer said jokingly, in response to a compliment about the novel's appearance.
His office occupies a small rented room within walking distance of his home. The place is furnished sparsely, with little besides a long work table, a set of Ikea bookshelves and an oversize canvas dog bed reserved for a female creature named George, apparently a Great Dane mix. A curious object -- a carpenter's hacksaw -- hangs on an otherwise blank wall above the desk. (''You never know when you'll have a bad day,'' Foer explained.) Opposite the door, there is a lovely ink drawing circa 1940, an original self-portrait by Isaac Bashevis Singer, his eyes glinting beneath his pronounced cranium. ''You shouldn't make too much of that,'' Foer told me, not quite convincingly. '''Gimpel the Fool' is probably my favorite short story, but I don't feel any real affinity with Singer. His morality is so 19th century.''
Oddly enough, the room lacks a telephone, a detail that might lead you to envisage the author hunkered down in silent, undisturbed concentration. But the image is a total sham. Foer, as I later learned, didn't compose his new novel in this office, or in any office at all. A kind of poet-wanderer, he does his writing all over town: in public libraries, in coffee shops and even in the homes of friends. The process of writing has traditionally been romanticized by its creators as an act of self-imposed isolation, but Foer redefines it as something more open and oxygenated, an expansive social activity best undertaken amid the clamor of life. Of course, all of this prompts the question of why he needs an office in the first place. ''I need an office,'' he explained, a bit enigmatically, ''so I can have a place where I don't write.''
At first glance, there is nothing in the arc of Foer's biography, no cherished hoard of disappointments or losses, that might help explain the fecundity of his imaginative life. He grew up in Washington, in the opulent shadow of the Reagan White House, a popular student and the valedictorian of his high-school class. Then he headed off to college, where he earned a degree in philosophy. He managed to make his entry into fiction without undergoing the usual rites of first-noveldom. He never wrote a tremblingly sensitive account of his adolescence, a novel featuring toxic mothers and passive, gone-to-sleep fathers, a novel abounding with malls and S.U.V.'s and suburban anomie. Instead, he has found his inspiration in the darkly fragmented masterworks of European modernism (Kafka, Joyce, Bruno Schulz) and nursed a vision that seems inseparable from the destructive underside of history. Foer might be called a European novelist who happens to be writing in America.
''Both the Holocaust and 9/11 were events that demanded retellings,'' Foer said when asked about his preoccupation with seminal tragedies. ''The accepted versions didn't make sense for me. I always write out of a need to read something, rather than a need to write something. With 9/11, in particular, I needed to read something that wasn't politicized or commercialized, something with no message, something human.''
To judge from Foer's fiction, his vision of the human is tethered to the inhuman; his world is one of abrupt and unaccountable shifts between comedy and violence. ''Tragedy primes one for humor,'' Foer said. ''And humor primes one for tragedy. They amplify each other. As a writer, I am trying to express those things that are most scary to me, because I am alone with them. Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.''
Of course, not all conversations are equal, and some are to be actively avoided. Foer, by his own account, frowns upon the seductions of Manhattan-style celebrity, the chance to clink wineglasses and trade drolleries all over town. He'd rather be home in Park Slope, in his three-story limestone town house, curled in his bed by 9 or 10, ''at the latest,'' as he says. All in all, he is loath to be observed or noticed except as the cloaked and baroquely reinvented self he presents to the world through his fiction.
Foer becomes particularly tight-lipped when the subject turns to his career. If you ask him about the size of a book advance, he will try to convince you that he earns neither more nor less than anyone else. It was at just short of gunpoint that his agent, Nicole Aragi, revealed to me that he received a $500,000 advance for his first novel and a $1 million advance for his second, meaning that he is probably the highest-earning literary novelist under 30. ''Jonathan has had to live with so much jealousy, it's had me ripping my hair out,'' she says.
It was also through others that I heard of his penchant for giving money away. Last May, at the 2004 PEN Literary Awards, for instance, Foer shuffled up to the stage to accept a major prize -- a $70,000 fellowship, to be paid out over two years. In his acceptance speech, instead of thanking the usual roster of literary codependents and enablers (agent, editor, high-school English teacher, pet dog), he blurted, a bit awkwardly, ''I have decided to give the money back to PEN.'' A few weeks later, when Foer married -- his wife, Nicole Krauss, is a 30-year-old writer with a novel of her own coming out this spring -- he asked his guests to hold off on the toasters and retro blenders and to instead make donations to PEN. Some $6,500 was raised that way.
Even Foer's close friends seem destined to learn of his worldly attainments only secondhand. There is little in his manner that hints at his rigorous professionalism, the bursts of industry that allowed him, for starters, to complete a draft of his first novel at Princeton and also edit a book of other writers' short stories inspired by the eccentric box maker Joseph Cornell. ''I saw Jonathan right after he sold his first novel,'' recalls his best friend, Sam Messer, 49, a figurative painter and an associate dean of the Yale University School of Art, ''and all he told me was: 'Good news. Someone likes the book.' Then he went out to celebrate by buying a new pair of Converse sneakers.''
Foer's modesty, you might assume, is intended to mask the breadth of his ambition, lest he appear too boastful or striving. But, eventually, in the course of our meetings and voluminous correspondence -- which came to include, in scarcely more than a month, some 150 e-mail messages from Foer, many of them wickedly hilarious, others gravely literary, and running to thousands of words -- I came to view his reticence as rooted more in fear than in pride. As he wrote in an e-mail message one evening: ''Thinking on the ride back from D.C.: Time heals all wounds. But what if time is the wound?''
Foer grew up in a redbrick house in northwest Washington, in a Jewish household where sabbath candles were lighted on most Friday evenings. As a family, the Foers are close-knit, and they can sound nearly Victorian in the abundance of their teary-eyed affection for one another. The author's mother, Esther Safran Foer, is a Polish emigre who works as the president of a public-relations company, FM Strategic Communications. His father, Albert Foer, is a nonpracticing lawyer who ''reads a book every two days,'' as his son says, and is fond of fulminating against the excesses of corporate gigantism. After working for many years as a jeweler, he founded the American Antitrust Institute, a nonprofit policy institute that he runs out of his home.
Jonathan, the middle of three boys, was a born performer who knew early on that his gifts could claim the admiration of the public. ''He was a very flamboyant child,'' recalls his older brother, Franklin, 30, who is a senior editor at The New Republic and the author of a recent book on soccer and globalization. ''He was a big ham. In one play, he was cast as a hunter, and I can still see him taking giant Elmer Fudd steps across a stage. In fifth grade, he was incredibly popular, and he had the makings of being a big-time ladies' man.''
Indeed, in a photograph taken when he was still in grade school, Jonathan looks like a miniature Liberace -- he is dressed gaudily in a plaid jacket and a polka-dot bow tie, with six chunky rings gleaming on as many of his plump fingers. ''Jonathan was colorful,'' recalls his doting mother. ''He was a character almost from the first moment. For his third birthday, he wanted a vest that sparkled. That is not an easy thing to find, and I had my sister-in-law make one for him.
''He was also very sensitive,'' she continues. ''He could look at me and talk to me and reach right down to my core. And he adored his younger brother, Josh. When Josh was less than 2 months old, I went to his crib to look for him one day and he was gone. Jonathan was carrying him around. Josh was Jonathan's lovey, his blanket.'' (Joshua is now 22, a Yale graduate who majored in ecology and evolutionary biology and is working as a freelance journalist.)
The memory of Foer as a child performer, however cherished by his family, is not one that he himself finds particularly revealing. For all his extravagance as a novelist, his love of tangled themes and emotions, the narrative he chooses to impose on his childhood is curiously linear and reductive. Astoundingly, he insists that his development as a writer was shaped less by his parents and by his genetic endowments, less even by the novelists and poets he loves, than by a single event: the Explosion, as he calls it. ''It made me a person,'' he claimed in a lengthy and startling e-mail message he sent one night last month.
It began: ''Firstly, let me say that these are, quite literally, the first words I've ever written about this. Ever. Literally not a single word.'' Foer told me later that he had composed the message at home, at the desk in his cluttered basement workshop, his thin face streaked with tears. The letter recounted, in some detail, the event that split the idyll of his childhood in two: the years before Aug. 12, 1985, and the years after.
That bright Monday morning began innocently enough. Foer, a boy of 8, was attending a summer program at Murch Elementary, a public school not far from his home. The first lesson of the day was a chemistry project, and in an act of nearly unbelievable carelessness, the teacher laid out bowls of combustible materials. The goal was to make sparklers. Foer found the assignment ''boring'' and left the classroom to go to the bathroom. ''I dawdled a bit, drank some water I didn't really want and went back to the room,'' he wrote. He was returning to his table when suddenly there was a deafening bang and the room filled with thick smoke. Screams and pandemonium followed.
Moments later, out in the hall, he found his best friend slumped against a wall. It was hard to look at his bloodied face, but harder not to, Foer recalled. The boy's glasses were crusted over, his skin shredded. ''Being a child, or being in shock, or just being myself, I told him what he looked like and begged him to describe my own face to me,'' Foer said. ''I asked him if the skin was peeling from my face. He said no. I asked him again. He said no. I remember making him promise.''
Four children were injured in the blast, two of them critically. Foer, who was one of the less seriously injured, was taken by ambulance to Children's Hospital with second-degree burns on his hands and his face. The following day, a front-page story in The Washington Post reported that he had ''suffered shock as a result of the violent blast.''
In the days and weeks afterward, his hands remained bundled in gauze. He says that he no longer wanted to leave his house or to play. He wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin. ''I had a very hard time after that, something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years,'' he said. ''I went to the bathroom in my pants a lot. I couldn't really go to school. I developed an intense fear of public speaking.''
As I read his account of the explosion, it suddenly occurred to me that the title of his new novel, ''Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,'' might refer directly to it. The blast had been ''extremely loud,'' and Foer's brush with disfigurement had been ''incredibly close.'' Young Oskar Schell, the scientifically inclined prodigy who narrates most of the novel, is roughly the age Foer was when the incident occurred. And yet the chemistry-class accident is nowhere mentioned in the book.
In writing his novel, Foer, it might be said, combined a personal trauma that occurred in 1985 with the national trauma that befell the country on Sept. 11, 2001. Inside the spaces of his mythologizing imagination, the classroom of his childhood became a metaphor for loss and redemption. In reality, he could not keep the explosion from happening. But he could repair the loss in his art, where he seeks to unmake the past, to unbreak hearts, to get things back to the safe place where they once were.
That, at any rate, is the ambition of Oskar Schell. After the assault on the World Trade Center, he has a kind of nervous collapse: he cries easily, loses interest in school and, by his own account, feels as if he is ''in the middle of a deep black ocean, or in deep space, but not in the fascinating way. It's just that everything was incredibly far away from me.'' His one consolation is his potent imagination. On countless nights, he lies awake in his narrow bed, pitching ideas to himself, ideas for inventions that could keep people secure.
''What about frozen planes,'' Oskar proposes in a typical moment, ''which could be safe from heat-seeking missiles?
''What about subway turnstiles that were also radiation detectors?
''What about incredibly long ambulances that connected every building to a hospital?''
Oskar's narrative is intertwined with forlorn letters from his grandfather Thomas Schell, a German sculptor scarred by his experiences in war-torn Dresden a half-century earlier. He, too, lost someone he loved. Anna, his pregnant lover, died in the war. But unlike young Oskar (who is named after the protagonist of Gunter Grass's ''Tin Drum''), his grandfather is crippled by the past. He stops making sculpture, loses his capacity for speech and becomes so afraid of expressing himself that he basically ceases to be human. He answers the questions that are posed to him in the most condensed style: he raises either his right hand to reveal the word ''no'' tattooed on his palm or his left hand, inked with ''yes.''
It is easy to discern parallels between the fictive Thomas Schell and Foer's actual maternal grandfather, Louis Safran, a Polish Jew who lived through the Holocaust and the extermination of his first wife and young daughter. Safran immigrated to this country after the war, but Foer never met him; he died in 1954, more than two decades before his grandson was born.
''I don't remember how old I was when I learned of the life my grandfather had before the life that led to me,'' Foer recalled one day in a stirring e-mail message. ''There should be a name for those things that one feels one has always known without ever having learned. And a name for those things that are central to one's life without ever being thought about or felt.
''I suppose it was my mother who told me,'' he continued. ''Am I haunted by the story? Of course. The most haunting detail for me is that we don't know the name of the baby that was killed -- my mother's half-sister. Maybe it goes back to Nietzsche's idea that everything we have words for is dead in our hearts. In this case, a dead, nameless child is more alive to me than many living things.''
Foer's belief in the power of the unspoken probably helps explain his fascination with blank pages -- of which there are several in his new novel. He wants to offer us not just a reading experience, but a visual experience as well, as if words alone can no longer be trusted to tell our life stories. Full-page photographs, all in arty black-and-white, are woven into the narrative, and typography is at times deployed toward pictorial ends. Page 26, for example, comes with only one tiny word -- ''Help'' -- marooned in a vast desert of white. At the opposite extreme, Page 284 is so crowded with words printed on top of words that you cannot decipher them, except as a vertical slab of black, a tombstone of type, or perhaps (like the photograph on Page 318) a velvety night sky. The book also includes a dozen or so grainy newslike photographs that risk offense by appropriating the image of a body falling from the towers -- albeit a digitally simulated image -- for artistic gain.
''The moment when I chose to put the photographs in the book,'' Foer said, ''I was browsing around the Internet. I couldn't believe what I was looking at -- beheadings, C-sections, shark attacks, people jumping from planes with broken parachutes. It made me wonder what it must be like to be young right now. Kids are subjected to images that adults aren't because a) their curiosity for the grotesque is greater and b) their ability to access it is greater.''
The photographs in the book, much like the other visual material -- the pages that are blank or half-blank, the paragraphs riddled with deliberate errors, as well as corrections made in blood-red ink -- tend to conceal more than they reveal.
''Every relationship in the book is built around silence and distance,'' Foer said. ''Extremely loud and incredibly close is what no two people are to one another.''
Although Foer has been called a poet of missed connections, the paradox is that it is hard to think of another person who makes such large and heroic efforts to stay in touch. During the weeks I was working on this article, he answered the questions that were put to him and reported on his whereabouts on a nearly daily basis; indeed, sometimes on an hourly basis. A kind of epistolary climax was reached one Sunday earlier this month, when I received a total of 19 e-mail messages from him, all of them uncommonly thoughtful and well written.
At times, he would e-mail to express his regret that he could not e-mail. ''I have lots of time to think here,'' he wrote one morning from San Francisco, ''but not too much to write.'' On a subsequent trip to Italy, where he had gone to deliver a lecture -- it was titled ''Imagination Is the Instrument of Compassion,'' after a line from the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert -- his time was even briefer: ''This will be far too short,'' his message opened, ''as I am writing from a public computer in the hotel in Venice. And I am suffering motion sickness. And the inability to use contractions, as I cannot find the apostrophe. . . . ''
On other occasions, he wrote to warn of an imminent departure from his desk, with all that implied about the unfortunate likelihood of severed lines of communication. ''Off to the park with George for a half an hour or so,'' he cautioned one day, before walking his dog. Another exit, another e-mail message:
"hello from the airport. the only thing better would be 'hello from the airplane' actually, better would be 'hello from the air, without an airplane.'''
To be sure, writing a letter to a journalist and, by implication, to the wide readership of a newspaper, is altogether different from dropping a line to your worried mother. Yet Foer can be surprisingly intimate when he is on the record. His letters, much like his fiction, are conceived ''as an end to loneliness,'' as he once put it in an e-mail message. And while most of the letters in the world -- at least the good ones -- are similarly written to allay our loneliness, Foer seems haunted by an aching awareness of the probability of defeat. What, in the end, can we really know of one another?
''I think it would be nice to meet again,'' he wrote one day. ''It will give me a chance to give you a fuller picture -- even if the fuller picture is not a better picture. . . . It pains me to think that I have not yet given you enough about me, as a person. Two meetings. What if, by chance -- by mood, by weather, by biochemistry -- I grossly misrepresented myself?''
Fair enough. Plans were made to meet outside the main branch of the New York Public Library one Wednesday at noon. That morning, more e-mail messages arrived, the last of which was sent knowingly to an empty desk: ''Writing this from the Kinko's across the street from the Public Library,'' Foer noted. ''It's 11:41 and I've done it again: arrived for a rendezvous more than 15 minutes early. Anyway, I'm assuming you won't read this until after we meet, which leaves these words hanging in some nowhere time. . . . See you soon, hours ago.''
We wound up spending the afternoon in a dreary, near-empty restaurant on Fifth Avenue, on the ground floor of the Empire State Building. For lunch, he ordered a plate of French fries and a glass of pineapple juice -- in other words, his usual. (''French fries are basically just edible spoons for salt,'' he said.) When we sat down, he handed me a gift and admonished me to open it with the utmost care and delicacy. Inside, sandwiched between two stiff pieces of gray cardboard, I found a surprise -- a sheet of typing paper, completely blank and yellowed at the edges. He quickly explained that it had been culled from the desk of the long-dead Isaac Bashevis Singer and was one in a sizable collection of blank papers he has amassed from his fellow writers and artists over the years.
We parted at 4 that afternoon, and the fading daylight lent the moment a veiled, elegiac feeling, an unsettling suggestion of oblivion. Foer had hoped to give me a ''fuller picture of himself,'' as he had written -- and yet here he was, sending me off with a literally blank page.
Perhaps he intended the gesture as a grimly hip postmodern joke, a comment on the futility of texts, on our inevitably doomed efforts to say exactly what we mean and be understood completely. But perhaps he saw the paper as just the opposite: a prayer, an ardent expression of hope, an evocation of all the beautiful ideas and feelings, the compassionate inventions, that remain to be inscribed on that great blank page known as the future. Is that what he intended?
I posed the question by e-mail one morning, and the answer came back within five minutes: ''That's a lot to think about,'' Foer wrote with his usual intensity. ''It would take 1,000 letters just to scratch the surface, and I doubt the scratch would be too deep. I'll give it a shot. It's going to have to be in about 45 minutes, though, as George is at my side, whining to go for a walk. The park is a great place to think, and my afternoon is wide open. When I come back I'll get started with letter #1.''
Deborah Solomon, a contributing writer for the magazine, is completing a book on Norman Rockwell.

Kara Walker

2005-02-23T17:02:00.000Z

silhouettes and slavery.

"Landing in a Pool of Mermaids"

2005-02-21T08:15:00.000Z

Hunter S. Thompson, 65, Author, Commits Suicide
By MICHELLE O'DONNELL
Published: February 21, 2005
New York Times

Hunter S. Thompson, the maverick journalist and author whose savage chronicling of the underbelly of American life and politics embodied a new kind of nonfiction writing he called "gonzo journalism," died yesterday in Colorado. Tricia Louthis, of the Pitkin County Sheriff's Office, said Mr. Thompson had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at his home in Woody Creek, Colo., yesterday afternoon. He was 65.

Mr. Thompson, a magazine and newspaper writer who also wrote almost a dozen books, was perhaps best known for his book, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," which became a Hollywood movie in 1998. But he was better known for his hard-driving lifestyle and acerbic eye for truth which he used in the style of first-person reporting that came to be known as "gonzo" in the 1960's, where the usually-anonymous reporter becomes a central character in the story, a conduit of subjectivity.

"Nobody really knows what it means, but it sounds like an epithet," he said in an interview that, for him, journalism "can be an effective political tool."

Hunter Stockton Thompson was born in Louisville, Ky, on July 18, 1939, the son of an insurance agent. He was educated in the public school system and joined the United States Air Force after high school. There, he was introduced to journalism, covering sports for an Air Force newspaper at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. He was honorably discharged in 1958 and then worked a series of jobs writing for small-town newspapers.

It was in the heat of deadline that gonzo journalism was born while he was writing a story about the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan's magazine, he recounted years later in an interview in Playboy magazine.

"I'd blown my mind, couldn't work," he told Playboy. "So finally I just started jerking pages out of my notebook and numbering them and sending them to the printer. I was sure it was the last article I was ever going to do for anybody."

Instead, he said, the story drew raves and he was inundated with letters and phone calls from people calling it "a breakthrough in journalism," an experience he likened to "falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool of mermaids."

He went on to become a counter cultural hero with books and articles that skewered America's hypocrisy.

"He wrote to provoke, shock, protest and annoy," Timothy Crouse wrote in his book "The Boys on the Bus," about the 1972 presidential campaign.

Mr. Thompson influenced a generation of writers who saw in his pioneering
first-person, at times over-the-top writing style.

As a young man, he was heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac and wholeheartedly followed Kerouac's approach in which the writer revels in his struggles with writing.

Among his books were "Hell's Angels," "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72," "The Great Shark Hunt," "Generation of Swine" and "Songs for the Doomed."

Songs of Innocence

2005-02-20T14:47:00.000Z

Before I morphed into my obsessive musical self: pathological downloading of mp3s from any corner of the internet, reading up on every music blog in existence, subscribing to newsletters of record labels the world over, etc., etc., I went through a period of time where I was safely protected from the influence of musical tastemakers and authorities by my own ignorance. I would find music where I would find it, usually via suggestions by near and dear friends, by chance, listening stands at the music store, etc. Basically, I had no idea that there was this uber-cool indie world OUT there (pitchfork, I'm looking at you) that made this their job. Dissing the hippest for being hip, championing the unknown for being unknown. Now that I know (ah, fatal irrevocable knowledge), I must filter through so much more crap, so many more layers of possible self-deception and influence, to figure out what it is *I* really like. I know, I know, this lamented prelapsarian state of innocence is totally a false construction, a necessary part of my psychological makeup, even, but I do know that there was a period in my life where I was less obsessive about reading up on the new in the world of music. And, thus, truly excellent new music made a lasting, life-changing impact.

I had a deja-vu of that innocence for the briefest of moments today when I surfed onto the All Songs Considered site. I have a very very special place in my heart for that NPR program for many reasons rooted in my insistent web of memories. Most vaguely, because NPR reminds me of New York, when I listened to it in the morning (or, quite often, in the afternoon) while getting ready for my day: putting on makeup, getting dressed while listening to WNYC. (I love love love Brian Lehrer. Leonard Lopate a little less so. And I can't stand the smug, precious musings of John Schaefer. Blargh!) One particular afternoon in my senior year of college. I remember doing my usual thing, looking into the full-length mirror while I applied my mascara while listening to All Songs Considered. This song came on that stopped me in mid-application. I stared at the mirror, but not at myself, aghast at the raw emotion that was pouring out of my shitty Aiwa speakers. That song was "A Waste of Paint" by Bright Eyes, and I was completely stunned to hear something that was so utterly moving, convincing, and true in all its pain. As Bob Boilen did his customary description, etc. I rushed to write down the name, spelling Conor's name totally wrong.

I will always be grateful to All Songs Considered for introducing me to one of my favorite musicians ever. One of my dear friends who was way more plugged into that world than I was, whom I've now lost touch with, happened to read that name on that scrap of paper while in my room, and proceeded to give me Fevers and Mirrors. (Generosity is one of his many strong points.) He also introduced me to Cat Power. Thanks, Jeff.

Anyway, all this to proselytize for the well-deserving All Songs Considered a little more and to share a song that's given me another one of those stop-what-you're-doing-this-is-so-fucking-real songs.

"Ne Me Quitte Pas" by Jacques Brel