Voss - Patrick White

Voss is a remarkable book. White's language here is at its simplest and most direct, his story is brutal and wrenching. Set in the mid-nineteenth century White relates the story of Voss, a German who sets out to cross the Australian continent. With a ragtag group he sets out on his ill-advised adventure organized and supported by the wealthy Sydney resident Edmund Bonner. The counterpart to the story of Voss' journey is that of Laura Trevelyan, the Bonner's orphaned niece.


Laura and Voss are soulmates, realizing only after Voss has finally set off that they belong to each other. Voss proposes in a letter, and Laura waits for him. It is a heartbreaking romance, the two strong-willed individuals, both outsiders, binding their fates together. An unlikely romance, it is haunting and touching. To add to its scope Laura also gets a child, sweet Mercy, in one of White's elegant plot twists.
The story is remarkable, and remarkably well-told. Neater than many of White's novels, the story unfolds with subtle perfection. It is finely crafted, perfectly structured, despairingly eloquent. It is a beautiful romance.
White's common leaps of time are less bothersome here than elsewhere in his fiction. It is a weighty book -- long, occasionally ponderous -- and it requires some patience. That said: it is near-perfect, and highly recommended to one and to all.

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Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Lolita, light of so many lives, fire of so many loins, has become so much more than merely the book Nabokov wrote. The story of the young nymphet, Dolores (Lolita) Haze, and her seducer, Humbert Humbert, lives beyond the confines of the novel. In all the fuss about the story (and the films and Lolita-variations that keep appearing) Nabokov's novel is sometimes forgotten. This is unfortunate, because Nabokov's novel is a remarkable work of artistry, among the finest written in English in the second half of the twentieth century.
The story is well-known: Humbert Humbert has a thing for young lasses, "nymphets" as he calls them, certain maidens "between the age limits of nine and fourteen" whose allure certain "bewitched travelers" can succumb to. Succumb he does, marrying Dolores Haze's mother, becoming the girl's sole guardian, travelling across the country with her, losing her.


It is a tragic love story, a paean to America, a sordid tale humanized, a work of comic genius. Most of all it is Nabokov's writing: artfully crafted the book is a delight to read (and re-read -- as is necessary to uncover some of its secrets).
What happens in the book is terrible -- and its focus, which is, after all, around a man of about forty engaging in sexual relations with a barely pubescent girl, is particularly nasty -- but Nabokov humanizes his characters, and though what Humbert does is unforgivable the reader is entranced by the story. It is a peculiar thing that Nabokov has wrought here, but it is brilliant. Few novels are both as sad and as amusing as this one, with Nabokov mixing and managing both tragedy and comedy perfectly.

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"The Crazy School" - Cornelia Read

Cornelia Read's The Crazy School opens in 1989. Twenty-six year old Madeline Dare is a history teacher at the Santangelo Academy in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. The academy's pupils are disturbed teenagers, many of whom have been released from psychiatric hospitals and are currently taking medication to keep them on an even keel. Although Madeline cares about her students, the stress of the job is getting to her. The kids curse and throw things, make suggestive remarks, and show little respect for themselves, let alone authority figures. Nor does Madeline enjoy the twice weekly sessions that every teacher must attend under the direction of Sookie, a therapist who is well-meaning but incredibly cloying. In addition, since cigarettes and caffeine are banned on campus, Madeline sneaks around to grab some smokes and guzzle caffeinated beverages with her pal and fellow teacher, Lulu. Although Madeline is sorely tempted to quit, her husband is out of work, and they need her salary to keep them afloat.


On the plus side, Madeline's class size is tiny. Using language that teenagers understand, she tries to convey her knowledge about such topics as World War II, the United Nations, the McCarthy era, and the "flower power" of the sixties (which she experienced firsthand as the child of hippies). What passes for calm in the school is suddenly shattered when a student violently pushes his hand through a window and shortly thereafter confides to Madeline that his girlfriend is pregnant. Things go from bad to worse when the two are found dead after drinking punch spiked with poison. Could they have taken their own lives in a fit of despair? Madeline has reason to believe that this is a case of homicide, not suicide, and she turns sleuth in order to bring the killer to justice. Her mission becomes even more urgent when the police supsect that she may have had a hand in the tragedy.

The first half of the novel is funny and sharp, with bright and intelligent dialogue that is both sardonic and witty. The author scores points satirizing phonies who make money peddling bogus therapies to gullible clients. The colorful characters include: Dhumavati, the sympathetic dean of students; Mindy, an obnoxious teacher whose deep loathing of Madeline is fully reciprocated; Sookie, the aforementioned therapist, who is like "a golden retriever--big-pawed, blonde, and brimming with indiscriminate affection;" Santangelo, an egotistical bully who runs his school with an iron hand and uses arbitrary rules to keep everyone in line; and Wiesner, a young man who can be charming when he isn't blowing something up or threatening a teacher with a carving knife.

The Crazy School loses steam when it becomes a conventional murder mystery culminating in an implausible and silly denouement laced with cartoonish violence. Startling and long-winded revelations reveal the rot at the school's core. When the author keeps things light and breezy, her book is entertaining and refreshing. However, the dour and improbable conclusion is jarring and detracts from the story's considerable entertainment value.

* Amazon readers rating: 4,5/5 from 9 reviews

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The Illusionist

Steven Millhauser doesn’t traffic in emotional upheaval or interpersonal conflict. Most fiction writers try to make characters seem like real people, but Millhauser flattens them, giving his books the paradoxical effect of seeming realer than reality. For him, meticulous observation does the work of psychology. Millhauser is also our foremost animist: in his stories, mannequins walk out of department store windows and figures in paintings knock hats off innocent bystanders. His vehicles for these effects are the parable and the confession. There is a disquieting quiet to every Millhauser sentence that makes it immediately recognizable, a feeling that each was recorded for posterity by the last man living.


The 13 terrific stories in “Dangerous Laughter” reintroduce us to this strange realm, last glimpsed five years ago in Millhauser’s previous collection, “The King in the Tree.” After one story described as an “Opening Cartoon,” he divides the rest into three sections: “Vanishing Acts,” “Impossible Architectures” and “Heretical Histories.” (You can recombine the adjectives and nouns at will.) Together, they present the typical Millhauser gallery of obsessed miniaturists, bookish adolescent boys in thrall to mysterious evanescent girls and reports from a dystopian near-future told with ill-considered confidence by town leaders. But over the years Millhauser’s elegant midcentury prose has only gotten stronger, and here he moves his chosen themes forward with additional confidence and power.

In the section called “Vanishing Acts,” Millhauser presents people who in one way or another cease to be. The book’s title story features an ordinary high school girl whose talent for orgasmic laughter allows her to enjoy a surge in popularity when a hilarity epidemic sweeps through a town’s teenage crowd one summer — only to result in her death after her classmates drop her to take up communal weeping.

The adolescent narrator of “The Room in the Attic” befriends Wolf, a hip new classmate whose sister is beset by an unspecified illness that has kept her out of school. These two, Isabel and Dave, conduct a relationship for months in her darkened room, knowing each other entirely by voice and occasional touches. Dave grows quietly obsessed, but at the climactic moment, when Isabel is about to throw open the curtains, he flees. When he comes back, a few days later, she’s gone — sent, according to her mother, to live with an aunt in Maine. “She loved games, all sorts of games,” Dave realizes early on. Now he begins to wonder whether Isabel wasn’t his own game, more dream than reality.

The slippery self is also the theme of “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman,” in which an ordinary woman returns to her rented apartment one evening but never emerges. The police investigate and find no sign of a crime — and no sign of Elaine Coleman. The door was locked, the windows shut, the key left inside, along with the woman’s wallet. “Is it true that whatever has once been seen is in the mind forever?” the narrator asks, only to recognize that this is not so. Elaine Coleman, he concludes, unloved, gradually disappeared, “fading, fixed ... in the long habit of not being noticed.”

The section called “Heretical Histories” contains a set of alternate recent pasts. Harlan Crane, the subject of “A Precursor of the Cinema,” is a “minor illustrator” in New York during the “seductive prehistory” of the film industry, when “a host of brilliant toys, spectacles and entertainments ... produced vivid and startling illusions of motion.” Crane’s paintings, displayed at his Phantoptic Theater, are so lifelike that many observers insist they can see them move. The illusion (perhaps “a shared hallucination,” the newspapers speculate) leads to riots and the death of a spectator. The city closes the Phantoptic before this potentially remarkable bridge to the inanimate world can be confirmed.

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Everybody’s An Expert

Prediction is one of the pleasures of life. Conversation would wither without it. “It won’t last. She’ll dump him in a month.” If you’re wrong, no one will call you on it, because being right or wrong isn’t really the point. The point is that you think he’s not worthy of her, and the prediction is just a way of enhancing your judgment with a pleasant prevision of doom. Unless you’re putting money on it, nothing is at stake except your reputation for wisdom in matters of the heart. If a month goes by and they’re still together, the deadline can be extended without penalty. “She’ll leave him, trust me. It’s only a matter of time.” They get married: “Funny things happen. You never know.” You still weren’t wrong. Either the marriage is a bad one—you erred in the right direction—or you got beaten by a low-probability outcome.

It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones.


“Expert Political Judgment” is not a work of media criticism. Tetlock is a psychologist—he teaches at Berkeley—and his conclusions are based on a long-term study that he began twenty years ago. He picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends,” and he started asking them to assess the probability that various things would or would not come to pass, both in the areas of the world in which they specialized and in areas about which they were not expert. Would there be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? Would Canada disintegrate? (Many experts believed that it would, on the ground that Quebec would succeed in seceding.) And so on. By the end of the study, in 2003, the experts had made 82,361 forecasts. Tetlock also asked questions designed to determine how they reached their judgments, how they reacted when their predictions proved to be wrong, how they evaluated new information that did not support their views, and how they assessed the probability that rival theories and predictions were accurate.

Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.

Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable. “We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly,” he reports. “In this age of academic hyperspecialization, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals—distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists, and so on—are any better than journalists or attentive readers of the New York Times in ‘reading’ emerging situations.” And the more famous the forecaster the more overblown the forecasts. “Experts in demand,” Tetlock says, “were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight.”

People who are not experts in the psychology of expertise are likely (I predict) to find Tetlock’s results a surprise and a matter for concern. For psychologists, though, nothing could be less surprising. “Expert Political Judgment” is just one of more than a hundred studies that have pitted experts against statistical or actuarial formulas, and in almost all of those studies the people either do no better than the formulas or do worse. In one study, college counsellors were given information about a group of high-school students and asked to predict their freshman grades in college. The counsellors had access to test scores, grades, the results of personality and vocational tests, and personal statements from the students, whom they were also permitted to interview. Predictions that were produced by a formula using just test scores and grades were more accurate. There are also many studies showing that expertise and experience do not make someone a better reader of the evidence. In one, data from a test used to diagnose brain damage were given to a group of clinical psychologists and their secretaries. The psychologists’ diagnoses were no better than the secretaries’.

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The Appeal - John Grisham

“The Appeal” is John Grisham’s handy primer on a timely subject: how to rig an election. Blow by blow, this not-very-fictitious-sounding novel depicts the tactics by which political candidates either can be propelled or ambushed and their campaigns can be subverted. Since so much of what happens here involves legal maneuvering in Mississippi, as have many of his other books, Mr. Grisham knows just how these games are played. He has sadly little trouble making such dirty tricks sound real.


Building a remarkable degree of suspense into the all too familiar ploys described here, Mr. Grisham delivers his savviest book in years. His extended vacation from hard-hitting fiction is over. However passionately he cared about the nonfiction events he described in “An Innocent Man,” his strong suit remains bluntly manipulative, no-frills storytelling, the kind that brings out his great skill as a puppeteer. It barely matters that the characters in “The Appeal” are essentially stick figures. What works for Mr. Grisham is his patient, lawyerly, inexorable way of dramatizing urgent moral issues.

The jumping-off point for “The Appeal” is that a mom-and-pop law firm wins a big Mississippi verdict, triumphing over a chemical company that has spread carcinogenic pollutants. But this victory could turn out to be hollow, because the deep-pocketed corporate defendant isn’t giving up without a fight. The New York-based Krane Chemical swings into combat mode, first by taking stock of these small-town lawyers. The mom and pop are Wes and Mary Grace Payton: nice people, good parents, nearly broke. Krane’s stealth envoys quickly determine that it wouldn’t take much to push the Paytons over the edge.

But the Paytons themselves are little more than a nuisance to Krane. The precedent created by their case is what matters, and the company’s real objective is to make itself safe from similar attacks in the future. In order to arrange that, Krane needs the Mississippi Supreme Court. Another nuisance: Mississippi Supreme Court justices can’t simply be appointed. They have to be elected.

Now the stakes start to ratchet up. So a corrupt senator puts Krane’s greedy billionaire C.E.O., Carl Trudeau, in contact with Troy-Hogan, a mysterious Boca Raton firm that specializes in elections. There is no Troy. There is no Hogan. There is no record of the nature of the business conducted by this privately owned corporation, which is domiciled in Bermuda. For two separate fees, one acknowledged and the other, larger one delivered quietly to an offshore account, Troy-Hogan will do its magic. “When our clients need help,” says Barry Rinehart, Troy-Hogan’s main power player, who radiates the same expensive sartorial confidence that Trudeau does, “we target a Supreme Court justice who is not particularly friendly, and we take him or her out of the picture.”

This multipart process involves choosing a victim and creating rival candidates from scratch. Soon the stealth saboteurs have trained their sights on a justice named Sheila McCarthy. She is not a liberal ideologue, but she can be made to sound like one (“a feminist who’s soft on crime”).

She’s not an operator or a politician. She is unprepared for a campaign fight. And the only special interest group that ever supported her is suddenly a liability. (Anti-McCarthy mailings will trumpet the question “Why Are the Trial Lawyers Financing Sheila McCarthy?”) As Mr. Grisham points out in one of his book’s many moments of indignation, there’s no need for the architects of a smear campaign to answer such a question. All they have to do is keep on asking it.

Meanwhile the covert operators create their own man: Ron Fisk, a political newcomer. “They picked Fisk because he was just old enough to cross their low threshold of legal experience, but still young enough to have ambitions,” the book explains. Fisk is also new enough to be wowed by perks like private jets, which allow him to make so many more campaign stops than his rivals can, and by all the new attention lavished on him by his backers. He barely has time to wonder why they find him so appealing or where all those campaign funds are coming from.

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‘The Bush Tragedy’ By JACOB WEISBERG

George Walker Bush is the product of two family traditions, the Bushes and the Walkers. On one side is the familiar patriarch Prescott Bush (1895–1972), the decorous Republican senator from Connecticut, the New England WASP, the pennant-waving Yale man. On the other side of his father’s family stands a lesser-known patriarch, George Herbert Walker (1875–1953), the St. Louis buccaneer and raucous playboy.

The Bushes as we know them today are the product of a combination of — one might say the combustion between — the two very different families arrayed around these two dominant men. Because the family is private to the point of being obsessively secretive, its basic internal struggle has been largely obscured in favor of a familiar cliché: the old American upper class. But this isn’t the story of a happy, unified family. Drilling into the history of the Walkers and the Bushes, one hits layer upon sedimentary layer of conflict among brothers, cousins, uncles, and grandparents. The buried drama and forgotten ancestors are the beginning point for understanding George W. Bush, the roots of whose temperament are not as shallow as they appear.

Superficially, the Walkers and Bushes had much in common when they came together just after the First World War. Both families represented industrial fortunes from the Midwest transplanted into East Coast finance. Both were fanatical about sports and ferociously competitive, sharing a passion for baseball, golf, and tennis. Both came to worship side by side at Christ Church in Greenwich, Connecticut, and at St. Ann’s in Kennebunkport, Maine, where George H. W. Bush’s parents, Prescott Bush and Dorothy Walker (1901–1992), were married in 1921. Endless connections to Yale, Skull and Bones, and the Harriman banking enterprises run through both families.

Yet an enormous amount is papered over by the simplification that George H. W. Bush was raised a Connecticut Yankee. The union of Prescott Bush and Dorothy Walker represented less a merger of equals than a crossing of lines: old fortune and new, Protestant and Catholic, Republican and Democrat. Prescott Bush descended from New England abolitionists. Dorothy Walker came from a Maryland family that owned slaves — a family secret that has been previously reported only in a small paper published in Springfield, Illinois. The more noticeable differences were resolved with relative ease. Both families soon became thoroughly Episcopal and Republican, and money ages quickly in America. But there endured a less visible conflict over attitudes, beliefs, and principles.

To put it simply, the value system of the original patriarch, George W.’s great-grandfather George Herbert Walker, was based on the pursuit of wealth. The one embodied by George W.’s grandfather Prescott Bush was an ethical ideal. The ramifications of this divergence were infinite and insurmountable. The Walkers behaved like the worst nouveaux riches: they were grand, greedy, extravagant, and focused on class distinctions. Prescott Bush’s clan was pointedly modest, frugal, and egalitarian. George Herbert Walker’s world was one of yachts, racehorses, estates, and servants. Prescott Bush couldn’t abide a yacht, was uncomfortable at clubs, and hated formal dinners, preferring the modestly genteel lifestyle of a suburban commuter. His social life was the Whiffenpoofs, the Greenwich town council, and golf.

The Walkers were gamblers; the Bushes conservators. The Walkers pursued winning and success; the Bushes sought to serve and lead. The Walkers viewed wealth as an end; the Bushes as a means. The Bushes embodied the old WASP embarrassment about being rich; they pretended they really weren’t, and treated the help as “family.” As Richard Ben Cramer puts it in What It Takes, whose early chapters contain the most insightful writing about them, the Bushes were known in Greenwich as being “not like that” — not the sort of people who lorded their wealth or station over their social and economic inferiors. Biographers find no shortage of tales of the early George H. W. Bush’s egalitarian decency; how he stood up for a Jewish kid being bullied at Andover, how he bonded with the enlisted men on his boat during World War II, how in Congress he wrote personal letters to crotchety constituents, turning them into devoted friends.

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Kyra by Carol Gilligan

Kyra is an architect who moves between her work at Harvard and her design of a utopian city on a private island. Originally from Cyprus, she fled after her husband's murder and finds her time on the island to be a private refuge. She meets and falls for a Hungarian theater director named Andreas who is putting on a non-traditional staging of Tosca. When his betrayal ends the relationship, Kyra seeks help from a therapist named Greta. In re-enacting her relationship with Andreas, Kyra must deal with the sense of betrayal all over again. This debut novel from Carol Gilligan (who wrote the 1982 nonfiction bestseller In a Different Voice has received mostly positive reviews with the San Francisco Chronicle saying, "With her first novel, she achieves both a closely observed voice and a captivating perspective. Kyra is a rare thing: an engrossing, deeply emotional, thinking person's love story."
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