Intuition

Author: Allegra Goodman
Year: 2006
Genre: Literary fiction

Intuition is the story of an academic controversy in which one graduate student accuses another of falsifying results. There's a lot of talk in the book about how science is a search for "truth," while I've always understood it to be a search for "facts." In this case, truth is hard to come by: not only the scientific truth of the results of the experiment in question, but even the more mundane truth about what happened in the laboratory.

Goodman draws up her characters masterfully. What I liked most about it is that there are no clear good guys and bad guys. Instead, you sympathize first with one character, then with another. I really wanted to take sides one way or the other, but I couldn't do it; the characters were too complex.

The Road

Author: Cormac McCarthy
Year: 2006
Genre: Novel

Some years following an unnamed cataclysmic event, a father and son wander through the desolate wasteland that was once America. They hide from bandits and cannibals, living on hidden caches of canned goods and other forgotten products of the earlier world. It's pretty bleak.

I read the story as a thought-experiment in morality. The boy and his father constantly reassure themselves that they are "good guys," still "carrying the fire." If the earth can no longer support life, though, then everyone is doomed. What does it mean to be a "good guy" in such a world? When faced with a choice between hoarding a week's worth of food, or sharing with a stranger and running out in six days, what is the right thing to do?

Although he's grown up almost entirely in the post-cataclysmic world, the son has somehow acquired a very highly developed moral sense. Not only are murder and robbery out of the question, but even taking advantage of a windfall — for instance, the untouched survivalist bunker that they find by chance — must be explained and rationalized, its original owners supposed to be dead or otherwise past caring.

The father's morality, on the other hand, has shrunk around the figure of his son, who now takes up the entire universe. What helps the son to survive is good. While the son cares about "other people" in general, the father's concern is with this one specific other person (which may be McCarthy's comment on parenthood).

There's an arresting passage near the end where an old man steals the father and son's few belongings. The father tracks him down and takes everything from him: not just the food and blankets that were not his to begin with, but down to the clothes on his back. The father later says of it, "At least we didn't kill him," to which the son replies, "But we did kill him." This highlights the two characters' different worldviews: the son's feeling of responsibility to all humanity, the father's protectiveness of his remaining flesh and blood.

I initially considered the book's extreme setting to be a place where morality must be reconsidered. The world has basically ended; what consequences can our actions have? The more I read, though, the more I found McCarthy's post-cataclysmic morality to be just as applicable to the real world. After all, nuclear winter or not, all of us are going to die one day, and our every act of selflessness is simply a postponement of someone else's inevitable end.

So what does McCarthy leave us with? He considers different aspects of moral obligation, and vividly describes the horrors of a world where those obligations have not been fulfilled, but provides few clear answers in the end. The book's final image, of a stream with fish swimming in it, does remind us of the fragile beauties of our world, but The Road is not environmentalist polemic. Rather, this image signals the end of our journey into hell; we return, like Dante, "to see the stars again," but changed by the persistent memories of what we have witnessed.

The Feast of Love

Author: Charles Baxter
Year: 2000
Genre: Literary fiction

The concept of The Feast of Love is that a lot of different people are telling their personal love stories to the character Charlie Baxter. The stories, which intersect, deal with mostly ill-fated love for spouses, partners, children. I originally took the "author as narrator" thing to be a standard post-modern gimmick, but my fellow book club members convinced me that it does serve a purpose: it gives all the characters a reason to tell their story, leading the various narrators to be characters as well, each with their own motivation and point of view.

For the most part, I thought the characters were interesting and believable; I liked some of them, and disliked the ones I was supposed to dislike. The one exception was the teenage character, whose voice I found to be exaggerated and unconvincing. I thought this was something I could talk about with some authority, being a high school teacher, but my fellow book club members disagreed.

The love stories, as I said above, are ill-fated, but that's really what makes a story. Baxter deals with this fact specifically. As one character says after having found true love:

We do what you do in tandem when you belong together ... We fit together. (I avoid saying these things in public; people hate to hear it, as if I'd forced them to eat raw sugar.) There's nothing to talk about to strangers anymore, if you know what I mean. Everything I want to say, I want to say to her. Life has turned into what I once imagined it was supposed to be, as complacent and awful as that sounds. In fact, I don't really want to talk about this anymore. As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories.

I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.

The Sportswriter

Author: Richard Ford
Year: 1986
Genre: Literary fiction

I recently realized two things: I've lately been splitting my reading attention between serious nonfiction and escapist fiction, and I need more things to do after work. I picked up The Sportswriter because it's the next book club pick for a bookstore in my neighborhood, and thereby supplies me with both a serious novel and a Wednesday-night outing. The club hasn't met yet, so if I gain any new insights on the book, I'll post an update.

This story of a man drifting through life as he tries to find meaning in his comfortable existence struck me as a Fight Club for the '80s (and, I'll admit, I'm talking about the movie because I've never read the book). Ford's Frank Bascombe, like the nameless narrator played by Edward Norton, begins his downward spiral with a feeling that his hard-won materialistic cocoon no longer provides him any solace, acts odd around his girlfriend, breaks off connections with old friends, and ultimately attempts to abandon life-as-he-knew-it altogether.

Where Fight Club's Tyler Durden & Co. take "hitting bottom" as something of a mission statement, though, Bascombe drifts downward slowly, gently, and in a state of complete denial. He doesn't blow up his fellow suburbanites; on the contrary, he swears that suburbia is wonderful, the perfect life for him, all the while failing to find anything fulfilling or meaningful in it. Having been rejected from law school and failed at serious writing, he works half-heartedly at his third-choice job, but tells us over and over that he couldn't imagine anything better. His friends, his girlfriend (Vicki, short for "Victory," whom he can flirt with but never really win), his relationship with his ex-wife: it's the same story over and over, of low expectations masking a crushing disappointment just out of sight.

The style of narration completes the portrait. As a storyteller, Bascombe is continually distracted from his narrative to fill in backstory (though he claims that the past isn't important to him), to protest that his life really is glorious, or simply to make excuses for himself. It's no wonder that, the more serious he gets, the less seriously Vicki takes him.

As a stand-in for modern masculinity, Frank Bascombe is not extreme like Tyler Durden, but perhaps more realistic for that. Many of us might entertain fantasies of mayhem, but in the end, most settle for what Arthur Miller called "quiet desperation" -- and perhaps, like Bascombe, they only survive because they don't realize how desperate they are.