Alden Mudge

Social Science

Not with a bang but with a whisper

Review by Alden Mudge

Maybe you lack the instinct for self-promotion. Maybe you can’t muster your employer’s rah-rah-rah-sis-boom-bah attitude. Maybe you’d rather stay home and read a novel instead of going out to the party of the year. So? Something’s the matter with you, and you should feel ashamed, right?

Wrong, says Susan Cain, author of Quiet, a vigorous, brainy and highly engaging defense of introversion. A self-proclaimed introvert herself, Cain examines in the first part of her book how our one-time “Culture of Character,” which gave roughly balanced respect to the positive characteristics of both introverts and extroverts, shifted to our contemporary “Culture of Personality,” a culture of marketing and self-marketing that almost exclusively (and to our peril) favors the risk-takers, the quick-decision-makers: in short, the extroverts.

Drawing on cultural histories and fascinating recent research in psychology and brain-function science, Cain challenges such misconceptions as “the myth of charismatic leadership,” the utility of group brainstorming and the idea that introversion is the result of bad parenting instead of an innate personality characteristic. “Probably the most common—and damaging— misunderstanding about personality types is that introverts are antisocial and extroverts are pro-social,” she writes. “But as we’ve seen, neither formulation is correct; introverts and extroverts are differently social.” In the final section of her book, she offers sensible advice on strategies that introverts can use to succeed in a society that operates within a value system she calls the “Extrovert Ideal”—without betraying their essential selves.

Cain enlivens her discussion with road trips and case studies. She skeptically enrolls in a seminar given by Tony Robbins, who is probably the extrovert ideal incarnate. She visits students and professors at Harvard Business School and Asian-American students in Silicon Valley. She cites the experiences of Rosa Parks and Mohandas Gandhi. She interviews husbands and wives, parents and children.

Cain says her “primary concern is the age-old dichotomy between the ‘man of action’ and the ‘man of contemplation,’ and how we could improve the world if only there was a greater balance of power between the two types.” Hers is surely an argument worth talking about.

Maybe you lack the instinct for self-promotion. Maybe you can’t muster your employer’s rah-rah-rah-sis-boom-bah attitude. Maybe you’d rather stay home and read a novel instead of going out to the party of the year. So? Something’s the matter with you, and you should feel ashamed,…

NonfictionHistory

Four journeys into the unknown

Review by Alden Mudge

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Most of us know that. But few of us know that Columbus made three additional voyages to what he believed until the end of his life was an outpost of India, a gateway to China. These subsequent voyages were, as Laurence Bergreen writes, “each more adventurous and tragic than those preceding it.” Columbus’ final voyage, made between 1502 and 1504 when he was crippled by arthritis and other infirmities, is an astonishing tale of shipwreck and rebellion, and because of its hardships it was the journey, Bergreen says, that was Columbus’ favorite.

Bergreen has written highly praised books about other explorers—Over the Edge, about Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, and Marco Polo. That background allows him to provide both historical and psychological context in his portrait of Columbus. For example, knowing that Columbus was shaped by his youth in Genoa, at the time a fascinating but rapacious city-state that practiced slavery, casts his appalling enslavement of the native populations of the Caribbean in a somewhat different light. And Bergreen helps us understand the revolutionary nature of Columbus’ accomplishments, despite the fact that Columbus himself never quite grasped where he really was.

The Columbus who emerges here is an ambitious, adventurous, often autocratic man who has a “penchant for self-dramatization.” Deeply mystical, he believed he was on a mission from God, and through his knowledge of navigation he sometimes tricked his crews and the native populations into believing that too. On his third voyage he seemed delusional. “An aura of chaos hovers over his entire life and adventures,” Bergreen writes. In fact, one of the biggest surprises in Columbus: The Four Voyages is the discovery that Columbus was just as vilified in his own day as he has become in some quarters today.

In the end it is possible to respect but hard to admire Columbus. But it is easy to admire Bergreen’s account of Columbus’ life and his four voyages to the New World.

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Most of us know that. But few of us know that Columbus made three additional voyages to what he believed until the end of his life was an outpost of India, a gateway to China. These subsequent voyages…

NonfictionHistory

The voices of World War I

Review by Alden Mudge

Peter Englund is “an academic historian by training” and the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which each year awards the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his compelling “intimate history” of the First World War, The Beauty and the Sorrow, Englund purposefully bends toward the literary and away from the academic to focus on the “everyday aspect of the war” and “depict the war as an individual experience.”

To that end, Englund draws from the memoirs, letters and diaries of 20 individuals who wrote about their experiences during the war. These include a former American opera star married to a Polish aristocrat, a 12-year-old German schoolgirl, an Australian ambulance driver in the Serbian army and soldiers and sailors from every theater of the war. Although several of the memoirists were prominent in their day—a Belgian flying ace, a French writer and civil servant—none of the people are well known today, a fact that not only burnishes the book’s luster of authenticity but also allows the details of ordinary lives lived in extraordinary times to surprise and even shock a reader.

In weaving his almost day-by-day narrative, Englund more often summarizes than directly quotes from his sources. The downside of this is that a reader is sometimes uncertain whether the opinions being expressed belong to him or his characters. But this approach enables Englund to create a coherent story and, more importantly, to suffuse that story with the always interesting results of his exacting research. And he manages to do this without obscuring the hearts and souls of his main characters.

Most of these individuals were enthusiastic about the war at the outset, certain of the justice of their cause and confident of victory. By the end, after years of hardship and privation, most were completely disillusioned, both with the war and with those who brought them into the conflict. One German sailor, for instance, a super-patriot at the beginning, joined a widespread rebellion near the end, furious at the arrogance and incompetence of the aristocratic military leadership. Thus The Beauty and the Sorrow begins as a narrative of war as experienced on the battlefield and on the home front, and ends as a remarkable chronicle of the physical and psychic collapse of the Old Order.

Peter Englund is “an academic historian by training” and the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which each year awards the Nobel Prize in Literature. In his compelling “intimate history” of the First World War, The Beauty and the Sorrow, Englund purposefully bends toward the…

NonfictionMedicineHistory

The dark side of a wonder drug

Review by Alden Mudge

When Sigmund Freud and William Halsted began experimenting on themselves with cocaine in the 1880s, “addiction” was not yet a medical diagnosis. Yes, people knew about the ravages of “Demon Alcohol” and saw a downside to widely prescribed opiates. But an understanding of the commonalities of something known as “addiction” was not yet documented. Cocaine, a newly popular ingredient in elixirs like Coca-Cola, was promoted as having astonishing medical properties.

In An Anatomy of Addiction, University of Michigan medical historian Howard Markel explores the impact of cocaine use on two of the period’s most prominent medical pioneers. It’s a story that has never before been told in such depth or in so readable a form. Markel, the author of the award-winning Quarantine! and When Germs Travel, has an unrivaled knack for research and narrative. So he is able to paint compelling and nuanced portraits of Freud and Halsted, the foremost surgeon of his day, and to convey the excitement and physical and psychological risk of an era of remarkable medical advances.

Halsted began exploring cocaine’s potential as anesthesia in major surgery by injecting the drug under his skin. A leading exponent of now-discredited forms of radical surgery and a highly influential leader in the adoption of sterile operating procedures, Halsted became addicted. After a number of hospitalizations he was rescued by a colleague and became leading professor at John Hopkins Medical School, which soon became the most influential medical institution in the world. Halsted remained an addict all his life, though a high-performing one, and Markel provocatively suggests that cocaine may have “given rise to the greatest school in surgery this country has ever seen,” though it also grievously stunted Halsted’s personal life.

Sigmund Freud began his self-experimentations with the drug in the dual hope of curing a friend of morphine dependency and writing a groundbreaking research article that would launch his career (and provide him the financial stability he needed to marry his long-enduring fiancée). The influence of cocaine on his early career is more difficult to precisely document, but here, too, based on his research, Markel is wonderfully suggestive.

Yet Freud managed to overcome his drug dependency. How? Markel says that Freud’s driving intellectual ambition demanded the predictable routines and accountability that “served as the ideal therapeutic program.” Soon thereafter, Freud entered the period “when he became one of the greatest intellectuals of his generation and provided a modern language for understanding the unconscious mind.”

“One only wishes,” Markel writes, “that [Freud had] had similar fortitude to put down his addictive and cancer-producing cigars, which, beginning in 1923 . . . robbed him of an intact, functioning mouth and forced him to undergo multiple painful surgeries and wear ill-fitting prostheses.” That addiction finally cost Freud his life.

When Sigmund Freud and William Halsted began experimenting on themselves with cocaine in the 1880s, “addiction” was not yet a medical diagnosis. Yes, people knew about the ravages of “Demon Alcohol” and saw a downside to widely prescribed opiates. But an understanding of the commonalities…

NonfictionHistory

A brutally honest depiction of war

Review by Alden Mudge

Last year Karl Marlantes published Matterhorn, the best novel to date about American soldiers’ experience of combat in Vietnam. Gritty, gripping and remarkably soulful, it offered readers a profoundly moving picture of what it was like to go to war.

Now Marlantes has written a sparklingly provocative nonfiction book called What It Is Like to Go to War. In it, readers will discover the outlines of some of the events he heightened and fictionalized in Matterhorn. Marlantes is an exceptional writer and his depictions here are vivid. But his purposes in this book are quite different from the purposes of his novel.

Here Marlantes uses his personal experiences as illustrations of the psychological, philosophical and spiritual dilemmas that combat soldiers face—in the field and upon returning home. He reflects with crackling insight on such topics as killing, guilt, lying, loyalty, heroism. He warns of the perils to a culture’s psyche in fighting war at a remove, as we now do with unmanned drones. And he writes of his own experiences with searing honesty, rejecting what he calls “jingoistic clap trap.” In one passage, for example, Marlantes says, “The least acknowledged aspect of war, at least these days, is how exhilarating it is.”

This will be off-putting to some, but Marlantes is not a warmonger. He is a realist. Part of his argument is that, since we will continue to fight wars, we risk damaging both the young warriors and the society that sends them to war if we avoid integrating those experiences into our collective psyche. At its simplest, his idea is that we must create rituals and reflective spaces in which frontline soldiers (usually in their teens and 20s) can care for their spiritual and psychological health. To do so one must be truthful about the full experience of combat, including what Marlantes, borrowing from Carl Jung, calls its shadow side.

Marlantes, a Yale graduate, left a Rhodes scholarship to join a Marine combat unit in Vietnam as a second lieutenant. He won the Navy Cross, two Purple Hearts and numerous other medals. He knows whereof he speaks. What It Is Like to Go to War, Marlantes says, is the product of 30 years of reading, writing and thinking about the meaning of his combat experiences. His reading has been wide, and his thinking deep. In his final chapter, he offers advice on how our society can improve its relationship with the gods of war. It’s advice worth heeding.

Last year Karl Marlantes published Matterhorn, the best novel to date about American soldiers’ experience of combat in Vietnam. Gritty, gripping and remarkably soulful, it offered readers a profoundly moving picture of what it was like to go to war.

Now Marlantes has written a…

Nonfiction

Our brains see the glass half-full

Review by Alden Mudge

Most of us know that eyewitness testimony is often inaccurate. But what about our own memories? Especially our recollections of emotionally charged events—so-called “flashbulb memories”? We’re pretty sure that they’re vividly accurate, even when they aren’t.

Why that is is just one of a complex of psychological phenomena Tali Sharot explores in her illuminating and vastly entertaining first book, The Optimism Bias. Sharot, a researcher in neuropsychology at the Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging at University College London, makes two major claims here: Most of us are optimistic, and we are optimistic because our brains have evolved to make us so. Why? Because the optimistic belief that we are all slightly better than the average “makes health and progress more likely,” and that set of mild illusions has helped humans to survive and progress. “Optimism,” Sharot writes, “may be so essential to our survival that it is hardwired into our most complex organ, the brain.”

Such observations could smack of psychobabble, except for the fact that Sharot and colleagues have produced fascinating brain imaging experiments and data that support her assertions. You can’t read this book and disagree that, as Sharot writes, “the human brain . . . is extremely efficient at turning lead into gold.”

Sharot subtitles her book “A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain.” “Tour” is a good description, as she explores facets of our ability to delude ourselves, taking us on a magical mystery tour of our perceptions, rather than making a step-by-step argument. “Tour” also evokes the pleasure Sharot gives us in her surprising, research-based observations (“Political stability is one of the nine strongest indicators of a nation’s well-being, and human rights is one of the two strongest.”), her use of contemporary examples (“from the dark skies of Sham el-Sheikh to the crowded lockers of the Los Angeles Lakers”) and her pleasing sense of humor (discussing experiments with mice, for example, she acknowledges that humans are quite different but notes “like humans, however, these mammals are frequently found in the kitchen in the middle of the night, searching for leftovers”).

Sharot also acknowledges that optimism, at least extreme optimism, has its downside—sometimes leading to risky, life-threatening behavior. So while she doesn’t directly say it, her book certainly suggests that we need a little humility to accompany our certainties. A little—but not too much.

Most of us know that eyewitness testimony is often inaccurate. But what about our own memories? Especially our recollections of emotionally charged events—so-called “flashbulb memories”? We’re pretty sure that they’re vividly accurate, even when they aren’t.

Why that is is just one of a…

NonfictionMemoir

From Morningside Heights to ‘The Mambo Kings’

Review by Alden Mudge

Oscar Hijuelos ends his appealing memoir Thoughts Without Cigarettes in 1990, shortly after he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. That Hijuelos was the first Latino to win the fiction prize (and only one of two Latino writers to date who have won) made him “feel both proud and, at the same time, oddly singled out for the wrong reason.” And, in light of this memoir, the fact that he was the first is, in the same instant, more strange and more appropriate than he lets on.

In fact, Hijuelos spent much of his young life constructing an Americano identity. Born in upper Manhattan in 1951 to Cuban parents who had immigrated to New York years before the Castro revolution, Hijuelos was a sickly and overly protected child. Following a trip to Cuba when he was four years old, he developed kidney disease and spent a year away from his family in the hospital, losing forever his fluency in Spanish, the only language his mother spoke. Not only that, he and his brother were fair-haired and fair-skinned, leading the pensive child to wonder what about him was Cuban.

Yet after years of confusion and drift, Hijuelos—an accidental writer if ever there was one—found a world open to him with the discovery of Latin American writers. “For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel particularly ashamed of how and what I had come from and, thinking about my father and mother, began to conceive that perhaps, one day, I would be able to write something about them, and without the fear and shame that always entered me,” he writes.

The discovery of a possible identity as a writer who mines his experiences as a Cuban American is more spiritual and cultural than political. Although Hijuelos writes briefly and sharply here about how Latino writers are too often ignored, Thoughts Without Cigarettes is in the main a very personal, often moving, sometimes quite humorous account of his grappling with his divided self. Hijuelos shows flashes of anger at people—writers especially—who have humiliated him. But the spirit of the book is generous. He expresses deep gratitude to writers Donald Barthelme, Susan Sontag and Frederic Tuten, who helped with his fledgling efforts at fiction. And the book brims with a complicated love for the Morningside Heights neighborhood where he grew up and for the difficult and flawed parents who raised him.

Oscar Hijuelos ends his appealing memoir Thoughts Without Cigarettes in 1990, shortly after he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. That Hijuelos was the first Latino to win the fiction prize (and only one…

NonfictionMilitary HistoryHistory

The terrible impact of World War I

Review by Alden Mudge

In To End All Wars, Adam Hochschild pairs an account of British soldiers at war in France during World War I with a report of the efforts of pacifists and war resisters back home in England. The result is a book that is powerful in its detail and that engenders a gut-level understanding of the terrible disruptive impact of war in the field and at home.

The so-called “War to End All Wars” turns out to have been anything but, for in its ending lay the seeds of World War II. The death toll of that second total war was higher than the first but, as Hochschild clearly shows, it was only technologically and morally possible because of the first, whose scale of carnage—futile, needless carnage at that—had simply been unimaginable before.

What makes To End All Wars so moving, so convincing and so readable is that Hochschild, who also wrote King Leopold’s Ghost and Bury the Chains, grounds his narrative in the lives of a fascinating array of historical personalities, ranging from Rudyard Kipling, who glorified the war and lost a son to it, to Emmeline Pankhurst, a feminist and anti-war activist who changed sides and alienated her activist daughter. Among the most interesting and telling of these personalities was anti-war activist Charlotte Despard, who continued to love and support her brother, John French, an ambitious military officer “who was destined to lead the largest army Britain had ever put in the field.”

Near the end of his book, Hochschild notes that “the conflict is usually portrayed as an unmitigated catastrophe,” but recently some historians have begun to argue that the war was necessary. Readers of To End All Wars will surely beg to differ.

In To End All Wars, Adam Hochschild pairs an account of British soldiers at war in France during World War I with a report of the efforts of pacifists and war resisters back home in England. The result is a book that is powerful in…

HistoryAmerican History

The Chinese in America

Review by Alden Mudge

The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was a moral blot that was second only to the stain of slavery on American ideals of liberty and justice for all. The Act was, as Columbia University history professor Mae Ngai writes in her fascinating study, The Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America, “the first—and only—U.S. immigration law to ever name a specific group for exclusion on grounds of its alleged racial unassimilability.”

But paradoxically, Ngai shows, the Act helped engender the Chinese-American middle class by fostering a set of professions—interpreters and “in-between” people—that brokered relationships between Chinese who lived mostly in the Chinatowns of America and mainstream, white America. Her case in point is the story of four generations of the Tape family.

Jeu Dip arrived in San Francisco from China as a young boy on his own in 1864. He had an entrepreneurial spirit, found work on a farm in the outer reaches of San Francisco, far from the Chinese Quarter, and later became the sole agent for Chinese people dealing with the Southern Pacific Railroad. His future wife arrived in San Francisco more traumatically. She had likely been sold by her family to work in domestic servitude in a Chinatown brothel and, later, to be trained as a prostitute. She was rescued by missionaries and raised in a mission home as Mary McGladery. When the pair married in 1875, Jeu Dip changed his name to Joseph Tape. Joseph and Mary raised four children as the Exclusion Act was taking full force. The Lucky Ones follows the family’s fortunes and misfortunes until the Act was repealed in 1943 “to counter Japan’s war propaganda that American immigration laws were racist.”

The Tapes left behind little in the way of personal records or correspondence. But they were involved in two prominent legal proceedings. In the first, daughter Mamie won a landmark constitutional case granting her the right to a public education. Many, many years later, her ne’er-do-well brother Frank was tried, and eventually acquitted, of extorting bribes from Chinese people while employed by U.S. Immigration. The Tapes also left behind a remarkable set of photo albums documenting their middle-class lives in Berkeley. Through these documents and through outstanding sleuthing in public records, Ngai has put together an intriguing chronicle of an exceptional family. Even better, she uses the Tapes’ unusual experiences as early members of the Chinese-American middle class to illuminate the experiences of all Chinese immigrants in the troubled era of the Exclusion Act.

The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was a moral blot that was second only to the stain of slavery on American ideals of liberty and justice for all. The Act was, as Columbia University history professor Mae Ngai writes in her fascinating study, The Lucky Ones: One…

NonfictionBiography

A deeper understanding of Gandhi

Review by Alden Mudge

Mohandas K. Gandhi spent 21 years in South Africa. He arrived in 1893 “as an untested, unknown 23-year-old law clerk brought over from Bombay,” Joseph Lelyveld writes in his fascinating study, Great Soul. By the time he left, “he was well on his way to becoming the Gandhi India would come to revere and, sporadically, follow.”

What did Gandhi learn in Africa? Everything from a theory of nonviolent resistance to ideas about proper nutrition. But Lelyveld’s particular interest is the evolution of Gandhi’s social vision, especially his efforts to overturn India’s caste system and to unite Hindus and Muslims, both of which he began to formulate while he was in Africa.

Lelyveld, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book on apartheid in South Africa, traces the often problematic development of these ideas in Gandhi’s struggles in South Africa and, later, in India. A brilliant analyst, Lelyveld shows not the sainted Gandhi but Gandhi in the making. This is a Gandhi who was constantly renewing himself; who first outdistanced his family and then his followers; and who did not succeed. But, strangely enough, this view of Gandhi does nothing to diminish the man.

Although Great Soul follows Gandhi throughout his adult life right up until his assassination in 1948, this is not a full-fledged biography. Instead, Lelyveld intentionally ignores significant passages in Gandhi’s life—such as the details of the Indian independence movement—to highlight the specific themes he is pursuing. As a result, readers will not put down this book having gleaned a full knowledge of all that Gandhi accomplished. But they will definitely possess a deeper understanding of the complex human being behind those accomplishments.

 

Mohandas K. Gandhi spent 21 years in South Africa. He arrived in 1893 “as an untested, unknown 23-year-old law clerk brought over from Bombay,” Joseph Lelyveld writes in his fascinating study, Great Soul. By the time he left, “he was well on his way to…

HistoryAmerican History

A paean to the Golden Gate

Review by Alden Mudge

Kevin Starr calls the Golden Gate Bridge America’s greatest bridge. It’s a debatable point. There is, for example, the Brooklyn Bridge, which Starr acknowledges has inspired far more great art (but fewer movies) than the bridge he says “embodies a beauty at once useful and transcendent.”

But Starr may be biased. He is a native San Franciscan, the author of the monumental seven-volume history of California collectively called Americans and the California Dream and the foremost public intellectual in the state. He is also a highly regarded scholar, and as a scholar he sees the bridge not just as a remarkably graceful engineering marvel but also as a text to be interpreted and contextualized. He says, for example, that the bridge “announced to the world something important about the American imagination and the American stewardship of the continent, at its best,” and elsewhere compares it to the Parthenon, “Platonic in its perfection.”

This is interesting to a point. But the book is at its absolute best in the middle chapters when Starr steps down from Olympus and gives us the nuts and bolts of the building of the bridge. Starr was once California’s state librarian and knows well the ins and outs of its contentious politics. His account of the turf and money battles surrounding the making of the bridge—and of the fragile or Napoleonic egos of the bridge’s proponents and opponents—is shrewd and gripping. Even better is his compact account of the actual construction.

Starr has seemingly read everything about the bridge and proves himself a master of synthesis and selection. He sprinkles his account with fascinating nuggets of information. Who knew, for example, that the bridge, completed in May 1937, was delayed because the War Department feared it would threaten military navigation? Or that its construction manager established the hard-hat requirement that would become standard in the construction industry—and also provided his men with sauerkraut juice to kill their Monday-morning hangovers (which did not become a standard)? Starr even devotes a chapter to suicides from the bridge, not just because this is part of its renown, but because a suicide barrier is at the center of a very contentious contemporary political fight.

Starr’s occasionally plodding prose does not always equal the grandeur of the bridge he celebrates. But his slender Golden Gate is surely the best compact account of this American icon currently in print.

Kevin Starr calls the Golden Gate Bridge America’s greatest bridge. It’s a debatable point. There is, for example, the Brooklyn Bridge, which Starr acknowledges has inspired far more great art (but fewer movies) than the bridge he says “embodies a beauty at once useful and…

Nonfiction

Edward Gorey

Interview by Alden Mudge

"Don't even ask me about my favorite movies!" Edward Gorey exclaims near the end of our conversation about The Haunted Tea-Cosy, his first major book in nearly 25 years. It's an irresistible invitation. So Edward Gorey rattles off an impressive list that begins with early Alfred Hitchcock ("His later films got so bloated, don't you think?") and ends with Jackie Chan's newest, Rush Hour, which Gorey has seen the night before my call ("Hilarious!" he says, laughing).

Where, I wonder, is the supposedly eccentric recluse of Cape Cod I had been led to expect? True, the writer and illustrator of almost 100 brilliant, darkly funny tales for adults and children has greeted me by announcing, "I have nothing to say." But he quickly launches into an amusingly exaggerated version of how The Haunted Tea-Cosy came to be.

"If the truth were told, and I'm not sure that I want it to be, the New York Times magazine called me up about this time a year ago and said they were going to do a modern version of Dickens's Christmas Carol. They wanted me to be one of five people to illustrate it. I said, 'Okay, send me the manuscript.' A week or so passed, and they called me again and said, 'Everyone here is so thrilled that you want to work on it that they want you to do the whole thing.' I should have realized that everybody else had turned them down, but I said, 'Okay, send me the manuscript.' A few more weeks went by, and they sent me a paperback copy of the Christmas Carol. There was no manuscript. I thought, 'Oh tish tosh.' So I sat down and wrote this dizzy little book. It was published in the magazine. After Christmas, Harcourt Brace called me and said, 'Oh, can we do the book?' and I said 'Okay.' I re-colored the book in a manner which nobody else would know the difference but me, and there you are."

The new book, subtitled "A Dispirited and Distasteful Diversion for Christmas," is not quite the offhanded production Gorey would have us believe it to be. His many fans will find here the same indescribable mix of humor and terror, learned and obscure references, verbal play, and artistry that has enchanted and perplexed us for years.

"I used to spend a lot of time anguishing over these things," Gorey says. "As the years have gone by, I've found I prefer not to suffer when I'm working. Somebody once said that it doesn't much matter whether you're conquering an empire or playing dominoes, it's just another way of passing time. Now I think first ideas are just as good as endless revisions. Of course, most of my drawing is considerably more meticulous."

His drawings, Gorey says, have been heavily influenced by 19th-century illustrations, his sensibility by Jane Austen and 19th-century English novels, among others a partial explanation for why his books seem to carry the aura of distant era. But Gorey is also unreasonably interested in surrealism and Dada. At Harvard in the 1950s, after a stint in the Army on the fringes of World War II in the Utah desert, he roomed with the poet Frank O'Hara and was friends with the poet John Ashbery. "We were all very interested in being avant garde. John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara were especially good at discovering people nobody else would hear about for years."

Gorey now thinks nothing new has happened since 1914. "You could probably push that back to 1885." Still, his unreasonable interest continues to lead him into strange places. "At the moment, I'm reading an absolutely incomprehensible book about visual poetry from 1914 to 1928. I saw it for two dollars in a catalog, and I thought, oh well, I'll give it whirl. Apollinaire and a bunch of Catalonian poets I have never heard of (and I can understand why) were doing these kinds of visual poems. The author, who is from a university in Illinois, has written an endless book analyzing these vaguely visual poems. You know, page after page after page. And I think, oh, surely not!"

So why read it? Gorey says he may soon produce some visual poems of his own. "I've also fiddled around with collages lately. I'd always been afraid to attempt them because I was so stunned by Mr. Ernst's collages. My attempts are all very minor, but they're different from anyone else's. It's something I can count on: no matter what I start out copying, it ends up looking completely different, so that nobody will have the faintest idea where it came from."

For the last 15 years, since giving up his apartment in New York and moving to Cape Cod, he has been also been seriously involved in the theater. "I'm sort of pushy about my theater stuff," he says. "I just did a puppet show this summer. Half of it was a parody of Hamlet; the other half was the plot of Madame Butterfly. I got carried away and had a great time absolutely mangling everything!"

Gorey seems to have read everything. He's in and out of the local bookstores once or twice a day and never leaves empty-handed. (He notes that the carpet in the local chain bookstore seems mainly designed so that it won't show vomit—an observation that will surprise no one familiar with the elaborately patterned backgrounds of his drawings.) His music CDs number in the thousands, replacing thousands of cassettes, which replaced thousands of LPs, he says. If there's one thing he misses about New York ("I always found New York terribly provincial"), it's the live performances. But Gorey's pleasures and enthusiasms recounted with humor and irony seem to sustain him now that he lives far from New York. Moreover, they insinuate themselves into his work in fascinating ways.

So what is the source of the more disquieting aspects of his work? "I don't really like to talk shop," Gorey says. He is self-deprecating about his drawing ability, claiming in fact that he can't draw very well at all. "I don't think I ever knew that I was an artist," he says. "I'm not even sure that I know that I am one now." Suddenly one senses a vast reserve within the man, a private place entirely his own, off limits to others. Maybe this is what people mean when they hint that he is eccentric and difficult.

As it happens, our conversation begins less than 15 minutes after the humiliating broadcast of President Clinton's grand jury videotapes concludes. "About a month ago, I decided I would give up the news the way I gave up smoking," Gorey says. "I have not looked at a newspaper, and I have not watched one second of television news. The whole world could be coming to a complete and utter stop, and I wouldn't have the faintest notion of it."

For some reason, I tell Edward Gorey that there are dozens of Web sites devoted to him and his work on the Internet. "I'm the perfect little cult figure," he says somewhat disconsolately. "I really do feel we're getting so far from reality. I'm getting to the point where I'm hoping we'll go back to something primitive as soon as possible. I find myself wondering at what point a cult becomes a major religion? "

 

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California.

"Don't even ask me about my favorite movies!" Edward Gorey exclaims near the end of our conversation about The Haunted Tea-Cosy, his first major book in nearly 25 years. It's an irresistible invitation. So Edward Gorey rattles off an impressive list that begins with early…

Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Richard North Patterson

Interview by Alden Mudge

Richard North Patterson has grown a bit discontented with the praise heaped upon his recent best-selling novels. "’Better than Grisham’ has no more or less meaning than ‘worse than Updike,’" he says wryly during a phone call to his summer home in Martha’s Vineyard.

"I never set out to be the master of the courtroom thriller. I just happen to think the law is a good vehicle for writing about a lot of things. What has come to annoy me a little is the shorthand description ‘courtroom dramas.’ It reduces what I’m doing to a kind of trick. To the extent that my books work, it’s for the same reason that any book works — because the story, the characters, and the ideas are arresting. What’s gratifying to me about No Safe Place is that it just changes the subject entirely."

That’s right. Richard North Patterson’s arresting new novel — his best novel yet — has little to do with the law and even less to do with courtrooms. No Safe Place is about national politics and political campaigns. "For years I’ve thought about writing a political novel," Patterson says. "The question was always whether I could do the work and have the access that would make it a serious book. I mean a lot of political fiction is awful. Silly stuff. There hasn’t been a really strong novel of national politics since Advise and Consent, and that was more than 40 years ago. It’s a form I like and one that has fallen on hard times, so in 1995 I decided that I had the time and the wherewithal to take on such a book."

Set in the year 2000, No Safe Place follows the dramatic primary campaign of Kerry Kilcannon, a liberal-leaning U.S. Senator from New Jersey who is challenging the heavily favored sitting Vice President, Dick Mason, for the Democratic presidential nomination. The contest comes down to a crucial primary in California, where Kilcannon’s older brother James was assassinated 12 years ago during his own presidential campaign. In the final week of the California campaign, Kilcannon alienates key supporters on issues concerning abortion rights, is stalked by a religious fanatic who has already shot up an abortion clinic on the East Coast, and learns that unknown opponents are peddling damaging allegations about an extramarital affair to the national media.

In less able hands such a plot would yield an overheated potboiler at best. But Patterson’s political portrait is wonderfully laid out, thrilling, intelligent, and nuanced. Senator Kilcannon is an immensely appealing central character who carries a heavy emotional debt to his slain older brother. He struggles to tell the truth and remain authentic but is not afraid to play hardball politics and is certainly not infallible on issues of tactics or morality.

Patterson points to the life of Bobby Kennedy as one influence on his portrait of Kerry Kilcannon. "Obviously Kerry isn’t Bobby Kennedy, and certainly his relationship with his brother isn’t anything like the relationship between President Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. But I’m not sure I would have written Kerry Kilcannon this way if it weren’t for the resonance of Bobby Kennedy. Kennedy’s spontaneity, reaction to direct experience, impatience, and internal war between the practical politician and the Romantic are elements you see working in Kilcannon. Those moments of spontaneity are really engaging because so many politicians are so robotic, are essentially programmed to follow a plan. The notion that you have somebody who is not only incapable of doing that but who realizes that his salvation lies in refusing to do that is very, very interesting."

Much of the book’s suspense depends on the moment-by-moment shifts of campaign strategy as Kilcannon and his staff scramble to deal with threats of scandal. To get these details right, Patterson spent a lot of time with top political strategists from both political parties, including Ron Kaufman and George Stephanopolous. "I explained the story and said ‘Okay, you’re advising Kerry Kilcannon. What do you tell him?’ Essentially we worked out this hypothetical campaign. It was just fascinating."

During his research, Patterson also came to know and admire Secretary of Defense William Cohen and Senator John McCain, "both of whom have an absolute core, an idea of themselves that involves more than looking around a room and seeing how other people feel about them, an idea about themselves that transcends whether they are returned to office or not." Former President George Bush, "a modest man and a real gentleman" taught him about the "incredible focus and competitive drive you need to be President. It’s almost like having an extra chromosome."

Says Patterson, "I came away with the sense that the good politicians are better than we know and better than we have a right to expect, given the corrosive nature of the fundraising system that exists, the demands of the office, the absolute loss of privacy, dignity, and even respect. I mean, we all know the system’s crummy in a lot of ways, and we all know that it tosses forward a lot of people we wouldn’t want to have to dinner, but what we don’t appreciate is how good the good ones really are."

Patterson also manages to seamlessly weave into his dramatic narrative some of the most complicated challenges of American national politics — issues of character, gun violence, abortion, race relations, and the changing role of the media.

In fact the novel, which was completed last October, seems drawn from this morning’s headlines, which comes as no surprise to Patterson. "I have a theory that if you get it right, sooner or later it’s going to happen. Since I completed the book, we’ve had the Lewinsky matter, the Birmingham abortion clinic bombing, numerous occurrences of violence with guns, questions of whether the Secret Service can be called upon to testify on what it knows about a candidate’s life. All of those issues are floating around in my book. I think they are pretty predictable ones. Many of them flow from the kind of meltdown of standards that has occurred when you have so many different media outlets — including such non-traditional ones as the tabloids and Internet gossip columns — competing to define what is and what is not news."

"One of the points I am trying to explore in this book is the basis on which a candidate’s private life is reported and the difference between fact and truth. There are a lot of excuses offered for printing things that are based on assumptions that are either unknowable or an enormous stretch. I’m not suggesting that there aren’t times when personal conduct isn’t a matter of public concern, but I wonder if we haven’t gone too far in looking into every corner of a candidate’s life. In any event, that’s one of the things I really wanted to do with this book — provoke some thought on these very questions."

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California.

Richard North Patterson has grown a bit discontented with the praise heaped upon his recent best-selling novels. "'Better than Grisham' has no more or less meaning than 'worse than Updike,'" he says wryly during a phone call to his summer home in Martha's Vineyard.

"I…

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