Dragon Ladies

    Women rulers generally get a bad press. There is Athaliah, Queen of Judah, who had all of her husband’s family executed in order to seize sole power. Irina, the only ruling Byzantine empress (797-802), blinded her own son. China also had one reigning empress, Wu Zetian (690-705). She expanded the Chinese Empire but is said to have killed two of her children, among other atrocities. Historians of China are especially prone to attribute any evil actions that occur during a reign to powerful women: witness the demonization both of Chiang Kai-Shek’s wife Soong Mei-Ling and Mao’s wife Jiang Qing. Not that the stereotypes were necessarily without truth — in these patriarchal empires, a woman probably had to be twice as ruthless and cruel as a man if she were to obtain and keep power.

     The last “dragon lady” to rule China died a century ago, but historians still cannot decide if she was a villain or a heroine, or (more likely) something in between. Cixi, the Dowager Empress, entered the Forbidden City as a 16-year-old semi-literate concubine in 1851. When her husband died in 1861, she seized power with the help of the (childless) official empress Zhun, and held it for 47 years. Her own son, Tongzhi, was 5 at the time. He died at 19 in 1875, and Cixi appointed her 3-year-old nephew Guangxu. Cixi was suspected of engineering Tongzhi’s death, and certainly poisoned Guangxu a few days before her own death in 1908.

     Jung Chang, whose Wild Swans, about the lives of her grandmother and mother, is probably the most widely read Chinese memoir in the West, has now published a new biography, Empress Dowager Cixi: the Concubine who Launched Modern China. As the title makes clear, Chang comes down strongly on the heroine side. She does this by attributing very nearly every good thing that happened in China during this long reign to Cixi, and the many bad things to other people. Giving Cixi such unmixed credit requires Chang to downplay the efforts of those around her. This book is probably the only account of 19th century China in which Li Hongzhang (called “China’s Bismarck” by admiring Europeans) gets only a few passing mentions.

     Chang’s last book was a massive biography of Mao, written with her husband Jon Halliday. The Columbia China expert Andrew Nathan aroused a storm when he accused Chang and Halliday (in The London Review of Books) of “[failing] to give readers any information to help them to evaluate their sources’ reliability … It is clear that many of Chang and Halliday’s claims are based on distorted, misleading or far-fetched use of evidence.” 

     Chang is not a trained historian, but she has clearly done a great deal of research for both of these biographies. Nevertheless these works are not history, and they serve as an interesting object lesson in what responsible history (as opposed to popularization) requires. Why aren’t they history? They certainly look like history, with huge bibliographies and lots of footnotes. Though I am not a trained historian myself, I would venture two rules. First, research done with the aim of proving a pre-existing thesis must inevitably give distorted results. Secondly, fairness both to the reader and to other historians requires some discussion of competing interpretations and their basis in the evidence. This second rule is, I think, especially important in a work written for a general audience that may not have the background to evaluate evidence for themselves.

     Chang violates both of these rules. In her view, Cixi was an open-minded, tolerant, foward-looking ruler who desired only the prosperity and independence of China. She was adored by her people, even by the two brothers-in-law whose power she usurped. (They could not have succeeded to the throne, but would have been the natural regents). I was curious to see how Chang would handle the events of 1898, and the subsequent Boxer Rebellion. In 1898, two reformers, Kang Youwei and Liang Qiqiang, attempted to gain the ear of the young emperor Guangxu and institute some sort of constitutional monarchy. The coup ended with the flight of the reformers, and the imprisonment of Guangxu until his murder in 1908. Chang handles this by demonzing Kang Youwei, generally regarded as a brilliant (if erratic and egocentric) thinker. She notes that his enemies gave him the nickname “Wild Fox,” and thereafter refers to him only as “Wild Fox Kang,” or “The Wild Fox.” It is rather as if an anti-Obama historian should note that his enemies called him a socialist, and thereafter refer only to “Socialist Obama,” or “The Socialist.” If any of Kang Youwei’s heirs are still alive, they should sue for libel.

     In the case of the Boxer Rebellion, Chang has to admit that Cixi’s support of the rebels, based partly on her superstitious belief in their claims to be impervious to bullets, was disastrous for China. But, says Chang, Cixi admitted her faults and thereafter tried her best to return to the modernization program and win western hearts. (She also implied she was sorry for dumping Guangxu’s favorite concubine in a well as she fled the Forbidden City — tourists are still shown the well).

     At first it might seem that Chang was motivated by the common desire among feminist writers to rescue maligned or neglected women from the ashcan of history. But I think her view of Cixi arises from more personal, and political aims. In both Wild Swans and her Mao biography she makes clear her (quite understandable) bitterness toward the Chinese Communist regime, and her unwillingness to allow even the slightest benefit to China from the twentieth century revolutions. In this book she has nothing good to say even about Sun Yat-Sen, a remarkable stance for a Chinese historian. On the other hand, she is uncommonly ready to forgive westerners for their part in China’s sufferings, and to point out (sometimes justly) overlooked mercies such as the United States’ dedication of its Boxer indeminities to finance Chinese education abroad. (Of course, she attributes such successes to Cixi’s artful diplomacy). She sees Chiang Kai-Shek as the true heir to Cixi, another conclusion that would certainly surprise most readers (although Chiang, like Cixi, is now receiving a second look even in Mainland China).

     None of this keeps the story from being gripping. Chang is a good writer, and how could the story of this 16-year-old concubine and her rise to power not be fascinating? She is a woman who grew and learned throughout her life, and unlike Irina or Wu Zetian, she is close enough to our own time that we can know something of her psychology, her daily habits, her clothes and pets and gardens. 

     It is only a pity that polemic popular history of this sort must inevitably steamroll genuinely inquisitive study of the evidence. Many more people will read Jung Chang’s book than will read “real history.” Soon her interpretation will become something “everyone knows,” just as “everyone knows” that Richard III was innocent of his nephews’ murder because Josephine Tey said so; and “everyone knows” that Philippe Aries proved that medieval people did not understand a child was different from an adult.

     It is a pity because reality is so much more complex and, yes, more interesting. But I suppose it’s better for readers to know something about history than nothing. There is always the chance that their curiosity will be awakened, that they’ll try to learn more. 

Grow Old Along With Me

Grow Old Along With Me

     Baby boomers can’t do anything without becoming the center of attention. It’s not their fault, of course; there are just so many of them. So now that they’re approaching old age (the vanguard just hit sixty-seven), we can expect a lot more literature on aging. Those of us who are a  bit older may resent all the attention they’re getting. We also went to college, got married, gave birth, had midlife crises, and didn’t do so much whining about it all. But that’s why we got called the Silent Generation, and never managed to produce even one measly president.

     Lynne Segal’s Out of Time is not so much a book on “the pleasures and perils of getting old” (jacket copy), as the biography of a generation. And it’s not my generation. Moreover, Segal represents a subset of that cohort, those for whom “feminist” is an automatic assumption, and “radical” is synonymous with “good person.” I’m not so comfortable at that particular lunch table either.

     The narrowness of Segal’s horizons appears early. She sums up the history of attitudes toward aging in three pages, a sketch that opens in 500 B.C. Athens and closes in 18th century England. It’s hard not to wonder how she can approach such a topic without even a glance at Asia, where (as everyone has learned) Confucius taught veneration for age. Although Chinese does have a word, laobusi, which means “old, but just won’t die,” expressing the exasperation of those venerating heirs toward the venerable who hang around. It’s a sentiment most unfilial westerners would blush to acknowledge.

     One of the most vivid old women in literature is the “Old Lady” of the 18th century Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber (or Story of the Stone). Matriarch of a large and wealthy family, she wields such authority that her irresponsible sons tremble at her wrath. But what she loves is hanging (the only verb that seems to fit) with her many granddaughters, and she is the first to suggest a feast, a picnic, a riddle game. On occasion she reminisces about her youth and the reader knows exactly the fun-loving, flirtatious girl she must once have been.

     The Chinese “Old Lady” illustrates one of Segal’s major themes — in Doris Lessing’s words, “Your body changes but you don’t change at all.” The title, Out of Time, suggests that paradox. Whereas time has brought us to this age, and one of our fears is that time is running out, our unchanging sense of self exists beyond that chronological framework. “In a dream,” as Anne Sexton said, “you are never eighty.” The eyes of a lover who knew us in youth can allow us to maintain that image until his death or desertion catapults us into reality. Lifelong friends may also see the girl or boy behind that wrinkled face, and those of us who have them (or who recover them) are blessed.

     Thus also the recurring image of the mirror. What we see in the mirror is not what we expect to see: we see a parent or grandparent, or a monster, or a caricature. Or (I have noticed) we block out the whole picture and concentrate on the one aspect we need to fix, the hair or the lipstick. Here is the Russian poet Vladislav Khodasevich in a poem entitled “Mirror:”

     I, I, I — what a wild word!

     Can that thing there be — I?

     Can that thing be what Mama loved,

     Grayish yellow, with graying hair,

     And omniscient, like a serpent?

     Indeed, once you start thinking about literature on aging you realize that even before the baby boomers started writing about what lies before them, the subject was everywhere. (We just didn’t want to read about it before we faced it ourselves). Besides Sexton and Lessing, Segal quotes Frost, Auden and Yeats, and provides lengthy discussions of Philip Roth, Colm Toibin, Roland Barthes, and others. The first author she mentions however, and her true model for this book, is Simone de Beauvoir.

     Beauvoir’s La Vieillesse, translated as The Coming of Age, is far less famous than The Second Sex. My copy of The Second Sex disintegrated from repeated reading. All I really remember from The Coming of Age is my shock on encountering a poem that seemed familiar but somehow altered — and realizing the the translator had rendered Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium back into English from Beauvoir’s French, apparently not recognizing the Irish poem. A second shock ensued when I learned that the translator was Patrick O’Brien, whose Aubrey-Maturin novels I love. But then, as we now know, O’Brien lied about being an Irishman anyway.

     Beauvoir’s influence determines the form of Segal’s book, which falls somewhere between an academic monograph with lots of citations and footnotes, and a personal essay with autobiographical asides. I prefer the latter form, which is why I found two other books on aging (both of which Segal mentions) more enjoyable. One is Carolyn Heilbrun’s The Last Gift of Time, and the other Diana Athill’s Somewhere Near the End. Both are collections of essays rather than unitary texts. (Carolyn Heilbrun, who had long expressed her intention of committing suicide when she turned seventy, eventually did so at seventy-seven — another topic perhaps, for a book on aging).

     I seem to have spent most of this blog criticizing Segal for writing the book she wanted to write, rather than the one I wanted to read. But for those who can disregard (or perhaps admire) the taken-for-granted politics, there are some real insights here. I was particularly struck by her insistence on how shame and humiliation haunt the experience of age — whether in revealing one’s altered and distasteful body, in seeking intimacy, or just in seeking human contact. Here Segal hits on one of those sore spots we’d just like to forget, but cannot.

     Better to go down in your pride

     With boughten friendship at your side

     Than none at all — provide, provide!

Smart Kids

School wars never end, and most of us have skin in the game for a good part of our lives. My own school days -- the boredom, the shame, the misery! -- were fresh in my mind when I was fighting the school board for my children’s sake. And now I’m revisiting the battles (though they’ve shifted a bit) with my grandchildren.

Ask Americans what should be done to fix the schools and most will offer one pet remedy. Here are some of the more popular:

Smaller classes!

Better pay for teachers!

Less testing!

Stricter teacher evaluation!

Less homework!

More homework!

More diversity!

Special classes (i.e., less diversity)!

Individualization!

More parental choice!

More parental involvement (and better parents)!

More (or fewer) charter schools!

Put an end to poverty!

I’m sure you’ll be able to think of a few more. Of course it’s obvious that any really useful reform requires more than one change, but we all tend to fasten on a single cause.

It hasn’t escaped the attention of Americans that some countries do better. I have to say right off that it’s hard to have much hope America can learn from other countries in any way at all: pretty much every single country in the world manages health care better, but do we pay attention? But let’s try, anyway.

Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest Kids in the World, and How They Got that Way singles out three countries: Finland (everyone’s darling), Korea, and Poland. She has chosen these three not only because they top the lists on a test designed to measure critical thinking, the PISA test, but because they have not always had such good results. They have managed to improve their schools, and within a relatively short period of time. Maybe we could do it too?

(This is, by the way, not the first time Americans have looked longingly at another country’s schools. When my children were young it was England, open classrooms, Summerhill... well, that was then).

It must be said right off that Ripley’s book raises more questions than it answers. She is a journalist and not a scholar; her use of statistics is sometimes dubious at best.  The book is quite short (less than 200 pages of text), and in those few pages Ripley attempts to introduce not only the history, sociology, and educational systems of three very different countries, but also to show us their schools through the eyes of three American exchange students, while describing their schools, hometowns, and families. 

Finland’s schools sound like nirvana to frustrated Americans: warm, welcoming, filled with high achieving teachers. Students don’t get huge amounts of homework and enjoy plenty of freedom. Korean schools are the opposite. Stressed adolescents stay at school from early morning until evening and then go to late night cram schools; no one is surprised when they sleep at their desks on specially designed pillows that slip over their arms.

But wait, these countries are homogeneous societies and welfare states, right? That’s why they do so much better! Ripley tells us, though, that child poverty is higher in Poland than in the United States, and introduces us to a class in Helsinki with many immigrant children. (The issue of race, however, is not addressed -- and immigrants, by definition, are self-selected strivers). The question of whether disparate societies account for the different results is just too massive for a book of this size. Ripley mentions, for example, that children in neighboring Norway test way below the Finns, though Norway is in fact a richer country and just as generous to its citizens. Why? She does not even suggest an answer.

Best instead to look at the ways in which all of these countries differ from the United States. And here Ripley’s findings are truly valuable -- and would be useful, if we could use them. Here is the list.

1. These schools are hard. Students are expected to learn things that are difficult for them, and to fail if they fail. All three countries (yes, even friendly Finland) require a long and difficult test at graduation. These tests are high-stakes and go far to determine the child’s future. The students know it; the parents know it; the teachers know it. “Why do you guys care so much?” asks the bewildered American. Her Finnish friends, astonished, reply, “How can you not care?”

2. All children are expected to achieve. Poverty, second-language learning, family dysfunction, are not excuses. Extra help goes to those who need it most (and extra funding goes to poorer students). All of these countries do have vocational high schools, but here too the standards are high. It’s become a cliché that even blue-collar workers require high level skills in a global economy, but clichés can be true.

3. Math. All three Americans say, “Well, I’m just not good at math.” That’s ok in American schools. Not in other countries. Required in a global economy, see above.

4. Self-esteem. This is the excuse American schools (and parents) use for praising and rewarding mediocre results. It does not enter into the thinking of Polish, Korean, or Finnish parents. You might think Americans just cannot bear for their children to suffer pain or rejection, were it not for the next item.

5. Sports. Here American parents are quite willing -- even proud and eager -- for their children to suffer. We may pity the Korean child who goes without sleep to study math, but we admire the American child who is at the hockey rink at 5 A.M. High schools in Korea, Poland, and Finland do not offer sports at all. Sports, they say, have nothing to do with school. You are welcome to play pick-up soccer in an empty lot, if you choose. 

Ripley notes, correctly, that wealth has long insulated this country from any need to improve our schools. Once, decent jobs awaited those students who graduated with mediocre grades from lackadaisical high schools (and even high school dropouts could scrape a living). That is simply no longer the case in a world where jobs can easily move to other countries. She does not point out that immigration, too, once insulated Americans from the consequences of lazy education. We cannot count on that, now that opportunities may abound in other countries, and our laws make it hard for talented people to settle here.

Many people know this. But will anything change? Will Americans demand that their children  learn to work hard at academics, not just sports? Even less likely, will they separate schooling from athletics? Will they tolerate failure? Will they change the way schools select teachers? No, I don’t think so. Not in my lifetime. Not in my grandchildren’s lifetime. 

But I hope I’m wrong.

Palestinians

Palestinians

       Looking for Palestine is Najla Said’s story of an uncomfortable childhood in Morningside Heights. Said’s father was academic superstar Edward Said, author of Orientalism, founder of post-colonial studies, member of the Palestinian National Council, pianist and musicologist, best friend of Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim.

       I knew Edward Said very slightly. In 1963, as young instructors at Columbia, he and my husband shared an office. “He’s a Christian Arab, born in Cairo,” my husband told me.

       Oh, that was all right then. I didn’t have to be afraid of my husband’s officemate.

       Ten years later, when they met again at Harvard, Ed admitted that he hadn’t told the entire truth. He was actually born in Jerusalem, but he had wanted to avoid controversy and get on with his chosen profession of scholarship in English literature. But after the Six-Day War and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, he felt obligated to acknowledge his true origins.

       Najla Said probably does not know this story about her father, since she never mentions it   when she recalls her own efforts to conceal her origins. “It got to the point that whenever anyone would ask where my parents were from, what kind of name I had, or what my brother’s name was, I would reply with one stock answer, ‘I don’t know.’” Of course she knew very well; she had spent summers with her loving maternal family in Lebanon (even as bombs fell from time to time), and she spoke Arabic at home.

       On a shortlist of neighborhoods in the United States where being “other” should not be a problem, Morningside Heights has star billing (along with Cambridge and Berkeley). Said describes the families in her nursery school, and in her Columbia-owned apartment house, their strange first names and the many languages they spoke. But being Arab (not to mention Palestinian) was far more fraught than any other identiy, even then carrying a whiff of terrorist connections -- just as Najla’s father had feared, a decade before she was born.

       Unfortunately, the author buries this unusual and revealing childhood experience beneath layers of far more conventional early angst. Sent to the upper-crust East Side girls’ school, Chapin, she felt stigmatized by her West Side address and the second-rank bus that took her there. She was taller than her classmates and felt (though this was almost certainly not true) that she was the only one without blond hair. The reader feels sympathy for these early pains, but also impatience with digressions from the main theme.

       “There was something about being a native upper West Side family that made us all seem partly Jewish.” Najla was greatly affected by a Holocaust memoir she read in fourth grade and felt a guilt to which she could not put a name. She grew up with close Jewish friends, sometimes terrified that they would find out she was an Arab. Later she tasted the true upper West Side complexity of Jewish friends who were Zionists with some sympathy for the Palestinian cause; as well as Jewish boyfriends who all made some comment about making peace in the Middle East when they kissed her.

       Ultimately, as the first intifada gave way to the failed Oslo peace agreements, and later the second intifada, Edward Said’s position as a proponent of Paletinian national rights grew more and more controversial. And indeed, although he was the gentlest and most tolerant of men, there is no denying that his positions were in some cases more defiant than those of many Palestinian intellectuals. Nevertheless, he was always a supporter of the Jewish right to a national home in part of pre-1949 Palestine. 

       Another Columbia University academic was accused of denying that right. Edward Said had died of leukemia four years before the battle over Nadia Abu El-Haj’s Facts on the Ground. This controversy has been exhaustively described and analyzed by Jane Kramer in the New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/14/080414fa_fact_kramer

      

       Nadia Abu El-Haj (raised on Long Island, daughter of a Palestinian father and a Protestant American mother) was an assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard College, applying for tenure. Her book (originally her dissertation) had been published six years earlier by the University of Chicago Press, without arousing any great controversy either in the United States or in Israel. It is a study of how archaeology has been used, both consciously and unconsciously, as a tool of nation-building or, as Abu El-Haj puts if, of “self-fashioning” in Israel. Of course, such analyses of the uses of archaeology (and history) have become standard in recent decades, and do not raise eyebrows when applied to the archaeology of any other country. And it may be questioned whether an author without an Arabic surname would have provoked the same outrage.

       But provoke it she did. One Barnard alumna living in the West Bank started an inflammatory blog comparing Abu El-Haj to Ahmadinejad. Kramer, whose account of the whole extraordinary sequence of events is cool and gripping, notes that the legacy of Edward Said has made Columbia a special target of groups that monitor “pro-Muslim” views in the classroom. Moreover, a significant number of Columbia and Barnard students have attended small Jewish day schools where they may never have heard any dissenting views on Israel, and “they are often alarmed by the shock of free speech that is not their own.”

       Abu El-Haj got her tenure. Her second book, The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology, once again examining how science can be used for political ends, could have aroused more controversy -- but didn’t. Nevertheless, passions have not completely died down. A Barnard alumna of my acquaintance says she will never again contribute to her alma mater, “since they gave tenure to that woman who claims Jews have no right to live in Israel.” Abu El-Haj, of course, wrote nothing of the sort. Yet this highly intelligent woman believes unshakably that she did.

       Najla Said’s book is diffuse and poorly written. Edward Said’s own autobiography, Out of Place, is graceful and eloquent but, like the man himself, somewhat reserved and mysterious. Nadia Abu El-Haj’s work is dense and scholarly, not an easy read for the nonprofessional. Yet taken together they tell a poignant story. The quest for understanding and acceptance that made Najla’s girlhood so uncomfortable would not be any easier today. To be a Palestinian in Morningside Heights, or anywhere else in this country, still means to face prejudice and demonization. In fact (as in so many other aspects of American life) the chasms have widened and the inability to hear one another deepened. It is a sorrow.

Apples and Oranges: Andrew Solomon's "Far from the Tree"

This book is an elephant. Here’s the bad news: 1452 pages. And the good: nearly 700 of those pages are notes and bibliography, so 764 pages will get you through the text. Those notes are substantive, though, so if you’re a completist you either have to read the book with one finger stuck in the back, or skim through them afterwards. I didn’t have the energy to get that far.

Granted, Solomon’s subject is vast and interesting enough to merit great length. Children are very often not what their parents had in mind. Anyone who has been a parent, or perhaps anyone who’s had a parent, will have noticed this. Beginning with his own experience as a gay male child and ending with his own experience as a gay male parent, Solomon explores how families live with some of the most difficult challenges: deaf children, dwarf children, Down’s Syndrome, autistic, schizophrenic children, children with “multiple severe disorders” (those who will never walk, talk, or feed themselves), prodigies, children of rape, children who become criminals, transgender sons or daughters. 

Wait -- prodigies? Some of these things are not like the others. Solomon defends his rather diffuse collection by writing that he wanted to explore the spectrum of difference. He notes that he interviewed families with many other challenging situations, such as irreligious parents of fundamentalist children, or parents of obese, blind, or limbless children, or supermodels, or bullies, but did not include their stories. The interviews and research he does publish are so engrossing that I hope he will go on to tell us what he learned about these other families -- and yet, the heterogeneity of the families he did write about is so great that the reader may lose her grasp of the many interesting arguments Solomon raises.

For example, he presents a convincing contrast between vertical identity -- what you inherit from your ancestors, usually including race, language, physical traits, cultural background, and probably religion; and the horizontal identity you share not with your parents, but with those like you -- gay identity, deaf culture, dwarf identity, and so on. However, this sharp difference does not exist for many of Solomon’s categories: the children with multiple severe disorders have no forged or shared identities; children of rape are not in a position to seek one; prodigies (Solomon restricts himself to musical prodigies) probably don’t have the time to bother. 

In our age of identity politics, the question of identity can become highly acrimonious. Many deaf people view their culture as a precious commodity under threat from the outside world. They go so far as to seek out other deaf people to marry so that their children will have a good chance of being deaf. They may also suggest that hearing people should surrender their deaf children to be raised by deaf parents, so that their first language can be sign. And they see the implantation of cochlear implants that will enable deaf infants to receive some aural signals, as nothing short of genocide.

“Genocide,” or the possibility that advances in surgery, treatment, or prenatal diagnosis, will cause some differences to disappear, is a contentious topic. While some deaf or dwarf parents may use prenatal diagnosis to select for children like themselves, the more likely outcome of such a diagnosis is termination of the pregnancy. Although there is a waiting list to adopt Down’s Syndrome children, for example, it is still the case that 70% of DS children identified by amniocentesis are aborted. And although educated liberal parents (the likely readership for this book) would no longer regard having a gay child as a disaster, Solomon is probably right that if amniocentesis could detect homosexuality, a lot of parents would still chose termination.

The issues of horizontal identity and pregnancy termination only apply for a few of the situations explored in this book, and the question of whether to ameliorate a condition medically probably only concerns the deaf and the dwarfs (so far). Few parents of musical prodigies would choose to abort for that reason, although maybe they would if they really knew what awaited them. But the musical prodigy is in any case not simply the result of genetics. Without the active (and perhaps overactive) involvement of a parent, he would never receive the necessary training.

There are some other crucial differences among these categories. Parents who give birth to Downs Syndrome or multiple disorder babies know the facts at birth or soon after. They may be admired, or receive sympathy as victims of a random genetic lottery. They may mourn the child they expected, who will never be. (A cheery little screed by a Downs Syndrome mother begins, “Welcome to Holland!” You’ve always dreamed of going to Italy but you ended up in Holland instead, and after all, tulips and wooden shoes have their charms too). Schizophrenia, however, strikes in late adolescence, and parents live on to mourn the child they actually had, who has changed or disappeared forever. And the parents of criminals cannot simply blame the genetic lottery -- even if they do not blame themselves for the outcome, other people certainly will. 

For all its length the book is, as I’ve said, engrossing, and I was never tempted to stop reading. The case histories are never superficial. Solomon has followed some of these families for years and some are close friends. There are the expected assertions of the joy to be found in caring for a highly disabled child, but some stories have no happy endings. His research is extensive and if you may feel there are a few too many categories, and a few too many case histories, you will also probably learn more than you really wanted to know about biochemical treatments for schizophrenia, or the history of juvenile courts, or ideas about the future of classical music, to choose just three examples.

Solomon ends the book with the story of how he himself became a parent. This ending is something of an anticlimax. I wish he had ended with his chapter on children who become criminals, because it is there that we meet the parents who really shake all of our assumptions to the ground.

Dylan Klebold was one of the Columbine murderers. Reading about such a child, we flail desperately for some clue as to what produced him. We do this to reassure ourselves that it could not happen to us. He must have been abused, or visibly deranged, or the victim of cold and sadistic parents. He must have suffered such torments that he could finally only strike out in murderous rage. Or he was possessed by the devil. Or his parents were so oblivious, indulgent, neglectful, that they overlooked what was perfectly obvious. We tell ourselves that it could not happen to us, our children, our grandchildren.

But in fact, Dylan’s parents were loving and involved. Solomon avers that of all the families he interviewed for this book, the Klebolds were among those he would most want to join. Dylan himself, in the final video he and his partner made, admitted that his parents were always good to him. He was bullied and humiliated at school, but so are many, many children who do not even go home and kick the cat, much less become mass murderers. 

Like parents of schizophrenics, the Klebolds had to give up the child they thought they knew -- the cuddly baby, the gifted child, the curious, eager second-grader. And they had to deal with the fact that while the world saw him as a monster (and they didn’t blame the world), they still not only mourned him, they loved him. “I know it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born,” says Sue Klebold. “But it would not have been better for me.”

That could have been any one of us. Read it and shiver.

To Be Continued...

To Be Continued:

Jane Gardam and Edward St. Aubyn

Frustrating, but enticing to meet those words when you’re caught up in a book, a television series, or even a movie. Gone are the days when Dickens published his novels chapter by chapter, and crowds of desperate fans in New York waited on the pier for the boat from England that might bring news of whether Little Nell died. But we can feel their pain -- and delicious anticipation -- at the end of each season of Mad Men, Homeland, Game of Thrones. And as that last title tells you, fiction authors haven’t completely lost the knack either.

When Dorothy Dunnett’s two cliffhanging series were coming out, I was among the crowds waiting for the next installment. Airplanes had taken the place of ships, of course. In the 60’s, I ordered each of the Lymond books from Cassell’s in London several months before the American version appeared. (I ordered an extra copy for a friend, so I’d have someone to discuss them with). By the time the Niccolò books were reaching their finale, in the 90’s, an Edinburgh bookshop had undertaken to supply American and Canadian readers the moment the books appeared, and email provided me hundreds of fellow fans for company.

Matters run less smoothly for followers of George R.R. Martin’s Game of  Thrones series. After the first three volumes appeared, production slowed down. Five years, then six passed between books. As the novels grew longer (over 1000 pages each), their author could not resist adding new characters, new plotlines, new countries to his fantasy universe. Now the producers of the HBO series worry that they might catch up before Martin continues the story; many fans wonder if he will ever finish, since he is no longer young; and I myself, a good deal older than Martin, think I am not likely to see the end. Under these circumstances, best just to relax and enjoy the ride (and very enjoyable it is), without fretting too much about the destination.

Not every continuing series, however, involves cliffhangers. I’d like to recommend two multivolume fiction works by English authors, both reaping ecstatic reviews but not enough American readers. The first is Jane Gardam’s Old Filth trilogy. I must confess that, despite the good reviews, I resisted reading it for many years because of the title. But then I learned that it refers not to stomach-churning substances, but to an acronym: Failed in London, try Hong Kong. So that’s all right, then.

“Old Filth” is the nickname of Sir Edward Feathers, a barrister (or rather, Q.C., which is a step up) who has made a successful career in Hong Kong specializing in construction law. When we meet him, he has retired to a Dorset village, St. Ague (names are important in Gardam) where, coincidentally, he meets several of his former associates. Among them is Terry Veneering, his longtime rival, and sometime lover of his late wife. The second novel, The Man in the Wooden Hat, retells the same story from the point of view of that wife, Betty. That sounds pretty conventional -- Evan S. Connell in Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge also told the story of a marriage from the viewpoints of the two partners. But the third novel, Last Friends, promotes the supporting characters, among them Veneering, to starring roles and uses a touch of magic realism to tie all their fates together, and break down the barriers between lives.

The trilogy has been called a tale of the decline of the British Empire, but I think that is the background rather than the main theme. Most of the characters are indeed what has been termed “orphans of empire” -- children whose parents sent them back to England to boarding school at an early age. “It is such a character-forming thing to be separated from one’s parents. I never saw mine for years. I didn’t miss them at all,” says one character to her daughter. But it is not only empire that separates parents from children. Old Filth’s mother died at his birth in Malaysia and he has been searching ever since for the warmth he felt in the impoverished village where his father left him for years. Veneering’s loving working-class mother sends him to Canada to escape the war. Meanwhile, the childless cling to the children of others.

Children in exile are only one aspect of the loneliness that pervades these novels. Barriers of class and the straitjacket of form separate adults from one another, and the lovers Betty and Veneering spend only one night together. One character, Fiscal-Smith, notes accurately that he has never been loved or wanted by anyone. In old age, those who survive see their friends gradually diminish. But the end of the series (and the ends of each book) are not about defeat, but about the courage to change that can be found in extremis. Perhaps the clearest example is the scene of Feathers, locked out of his house on a snowy Christmas morning, making his way at last to the house of his arch-enemy Veneering for help. Afterwards, the two develop a curious friendship that lasts until their death. Fiscal-Smith’s fate -- on the very last page -- is even more surprising. And the sadness these characters feel is leavened throughout by a light, often very funny, prose that sees through its subjects but never mocks them.

But if Gardam’s prose is witty and stylish, she has nothing on Edward St. Aubyn. And if her children suffer, they would have a long way to go to match the fate of Patrick Melrose, the main character of St. Aubyn’s five-book series (Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk, At Last). These books are apparently autobiographical and if you haven’t learned from reviews what happens to five-year-old Patrick in the first book, I’m not going to tell you. It might keep you from reading them, and that would be a shame. 

It would be a shame because every page is full of piercing insight and corruscating wit. In his New Yorker review, Michael Wood says that Jane Austen would be happy to have written this sentence: “As a guest, Emily Price had three main drawbacks: she was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you, and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions.” I’m just being lazy cribbing Wood’s quote, because there are examples on every page that are as good, or almost as good, or even better.

 “I think my mother’s death is the best thing to happen to me since...well, since my father’s death,” says Patrick in the last book, and no reader will quarrel with him. (“It can’t be that simple,” replies his psychiatrist friend Johnny, “or there would be merry bands of orphans skipping down the street.”) Neither Karl Marx, nor John Osborne, nor Ed Miliband could have anything more damning to say about the British aristocracy than St. Aubyn, one of its scions. But although the books are full of accurately and hilariously pinned down villains, there are a few characters one can admire (like Patrick’s wife, Mary), or feel for (like Patrick himself), or simply marvel at, like his two brilliant and eccentric small sons.

It’s tempting to go on quoting:

It was the presence of None the Wiser on Mary’s bedside table that alerted Patrick to his wife’s laborious romance.

“You couldn’t be reading that book unless you were having an affair with the author,” he guessed through half-closed eyes.

“Believe me, it’s virtually impossible even then.”

But I hope, if you love good writing and gimlet-eyed characterization, and maybe if you are a fan of Jane Austen, you will try these novels for yourself. Yes, there are five of them, but they’re short. The first four have been issued together in paperback (and also for Kindle and Nook). Enjoy!

Kindles, and Other Monsters

Tender memoirs about lifetimes of reading almost invariably end with pious statements of disdain for ebooks. It just isn’t reading if you don’t have the rustle of paper, the heft of the binding, the (imagined) smell of the ink. Publishers, meanwhile, broadcast panicky warnings about how digital books will destroy literature, reduce authors to penniless drudges and, of course, decimate their own profits.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I like my Kindle (and my Nook), even if I don’t exactly love them. But digitalization -- of books, music, and film -- is not going to go away. Both publishers and readers will eventually learn to live with it, as the music business has had to. Herewith, some thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of ebooks, how publishers can use the new technology to their own profit and that of their public, and finally, what we can learn from past upheavals in the delivery of written text. We have been here before.

The attractions of the ebook begin with its size. Anyone who commutes or travels has to love the little machine that slips into your purse. No longer is half the suitcase taken up with books for the journey; you can pick up a new read wherever there’s a wi-fi connection. You don’t have to find space on your shelves for a book you might never read again, and you don’t have to find space in your home for yet another shelf. Ebooks are (or should be) much cheaper to buy than hard copy -- more on that later -- so you can buy more of them. Out of copyright books are usually available free, so you can instantly satisfy that urge to dip into Emma once more. And if you forgot who that character is who pops up again a hundred pages after first mention, no problem. You can do full-text searching and find out in an instant.

On the other hand, maybe you do want to consult that book again. Finding it on your Kindle is not as satisfying as taking it down from the shelf and riffling through it. And as everyone knows, you cannot sell or lend your Kindle book. Do you really own it? Sometimes it doesn’t feel that way. Although font choice and appearance have improved, in general the text on an ereader is not a thing of beauty. Far, far worse is the ebook’s inability to reproduce graphics well. Illustrations, tables, graphs all become fuzzy blurs. No point even trying to read a fantasy novel if you can’t consult the map. Reading end notes should, in theory, be much easier with an ereader: just click on the number. But sometimes the number isn’t linked to the end note text. And even if it is, returning to your place in the text is not always straightforward.

Many of these problems can, and probably will, be addressed through better software in the future. But there is a lot publishers can do right now to improve the experience for readers and, incidentally, to find ebook profits that they are now throwing away.

The first rule should be: Don’t treat your customers as enemies! The music business has learned that a surprising number of fans will pay for music, even if it can be pirated. But first they must feel that the price asked is a fair one for what they are getting. And they must believe that the seller is not withholding product arbitrarily, inviting a game of cat and mouse.

Publishers objected to the low prices charged by Amazon, explaining that paper, ink, storage, transport, retail costs, etc., were as nothing to the initial investment in finding and signing authors, editing, and marketing. But it doesn’t take a degree in economics to see that the first set of costs are still substantial, and that once the editing is completed the added cost of producing each e-copy is vanishingly small. (And many will have noticed that editing is an art seldom practiced these days anyway). Moreover, once you’ve bought the ebook, you still can’t sell it or lend it. So a fair price has to be far below the price of the hard-copy book.

So first: keep prices low. And maybe institute dynamic pricing -- a high price for new bestsellers, diminishing gradually with time. And a standard low price for backlists.

Second: figure out a way to allow people to sell or lend the ebooks, and how you can make money from it. For example, how about selling a book with a certain number of lending privileges -- say, four -- and charging for each one. The owner would pay perhaps $4 every time she lent the book out. Or maybe the borrower would pay it. After four loans, the book could not be lent again. But it could be sold. How about 2/3 of the original price, with the publisher pocketing 1/3 of that?

Third: why don’t publishers get into the lending business themselves? Most books people buy are read once. Why shouldn’t customers pay to borrow a book for, say, two weeks, after which it would disappear from their devices? The University of Chicago Press already does this -- $8 for a 30-day loan of an academic book, which is a bargain. But I haven’t found any other publisher following their example.

Fourth: I’m not the first to suggest that purchase of a hard-copy book should come with a free ebook of the title. That way, the disadvantages of hard-copy books for commuting and travel disappear, and there is a greater incentive to spend the higher price.

Finally: Drop the absurd restrictions on international ebook sales. Why do U.S. publishers want to turn away eager buyers from Canada? Why can I order hard-copy books from amazon.co.uk, but not download an ebook from their site? Why? Huh?

Perhaps publishers believe that if ebooks are artificially restricted, priced at absurd levels,  unobtainable on loan even from your own mother, you will be driven to pay $35 for the hard-copy. Not this customer. Public libraries still exist, and I’m willing to wait. And if you escalate the hostilities enough, I’ll have no compunctions about pirating.

We have, as I said, been there before. Until the 2nd or 3rd century, most books were written on scrolls. The codex (books like the ones we use today) supplanted the scroll around 300-400 A.D. No doubt there were readers in those days who lamented that reading the codex just did not have the same tactile pleasure as unrolling a scroll (and perhaps it did not). The sad part of the story is that as the use of scrolls diminished and old ones deteriorated, only texts copied onto codices survived. The fourth century was one in which theology was the main interest of most readers. That is how most of the plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and all but one of Sappho’s poems were lost. I don’t think we can be complacent about our newest changes in technology. Books which are not digitized, and which survive in only one or two copies, may well be lost. Films that have not been digitized have sometimes been lost already, as the old filmstock deteriorates.

Nevertheless, the old media persist alongside the new, though usually for a niche public. Many ardent audiophiles still prefer vinyl, and it is being produced again in greater quantities. Torahs are still read from scrolls, and traditional Chinese painters may still chose handscrolls for panoramic landscapes. Printed books will be produced for the foreseeable future, and even if ebooks take over for most reading, art books and picture books will probably always be far better on paper.

But note that you will seldom hear someone say that you can’t really appreciate Homer if you don’t read his works as he (or they) intended, on scrolls. Or that Confucius can only be truly understood if you read the Analects on thin strips of bamboo tied together with rawhide, since that’s how they were first published. Books will be enjoyed just as much on ereaders as they ever were on paper and maybe, as technology improves, even more.