Cheap, sexist and nerdy? Check, check and check. But the original Kirk and Spock offered an erotic, Apollonian beacon of hope amid the darkness of '70s culture.
Courtesy Paramount Home Entertainment
Images from “The Best of Star Trek: The Original Series.”
In perhaps the most famous “Star Trek” episode of them all, Capt. James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and Cmdr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) stand in their stretchy mock-turtle uniform shirts, lady-pleasin’ tight pants and pointy-toed Beatle boots on one of those studio-lot sets designed to evoke a prewar American city. People shuffle past in shabby clothes, and a black automobile with large, curved fenders crawls down the street. “I’ve seen photographs of this period,” says Kirk. “An economic upheaval had occurred.”
“It was called ‘Depression,’” says Spock, raising one painted eyebrow in archetypal distaste. “Circa 1930. Quite barbaric.”
As many of you will have spotted already, this is from “City on the Edge of Forever,” a time-paradox yarn written by science-fiction legend Harlan Ellison (who has feuded with the show’s producers and their copyright heirs ever since). In it, Kirk falls in love with a kittenish Salvation Army type, played by Joan Collins, who envisions a future of space travel and peaceful global cooperation, and wants to rescue the world from the threat of impending war. Kirk comes from that future, of course. Not only can he not tell her that, he must also allow her to be run down by a bus to avoid a fatal disordering of the space-time continuum that would result in Hitler conquering the world and the Starship Enterprise never existing at all.
In its narrative ambition, its talky, theatrical density, its high-minded moral tone and its nerdy philosophizing, that episode captures a great deal about what made “Star Trek” such a potent cultural force. I guess that’s why it’s included, along with three other episodes, on “The Best of Star Trek: The Original Series,”
Watching “Star Trek” in 1970s syndication was such an important part of my childhood and adolescence — I’ve seen every episode at least five or six times, and some many more than that — that I’m not capable of assessing the show’s uneven, low-budget craftsmanship with any degree of detachment. For me, “Star Trek” and the Rolling Stones, as much as they might appear to be polar opposites — one supremely American and the other English, one Apollonian and optimistic, the other Dionysian and pessimistic — were the cultural phenomena that made the pre-punk-rock early ’70s tolerable. A person interested in those things was, prima facie, not interested in Donny Osmond or “Happy Days,” had conceivably read a book not required by teachers and furthermore could plausibly have access to decent weed.
Even if some of its flaws look more glaring 30-odd years later, I think the original “Star Trek” still has a passion and vitality that partly stem from its cheapness; the threadbare sets and effects created a coherent, suggestive atmosphere, and forced your attention onto the storytelling and the characters. It stands out, even after all this time, as something unique in television history. Of course “Star Trek” can never be the cultural lodestone it once was. Having spawned four official follow-up series, 11 feature films (and counting) and countless non-canonical works — if you haven’t heard about K/S porn or the immense and disputatious fanfic universe, I’m not helping you — and inspired an entire genre of serial intergalactic futurism from “Space: 1999″ to “Babylon 5″ to “Battlestar Galactica,” the novelty of Gene Roddenberry’s creation has pretty well worn off.
In the middle of the Cold War, Roddenberry imagined a radical-progressive, Enlightenment-fueled vision of the human future, one in which the conflict between capitalism and communism had been long transcended, along with other earthbound forms of racial, ethnic or religious strife. Strikingly, there is no religious or mystical dimension to the “Star Trek” universe at all, at least until much later in its development. (Roddenberry regarded himself as an “agnostic atheist,” and banned any religious references from the show.) It was based around the chronic tension between reason and emotion, represented of course by the tension between Spock and Kirk and the actors who played them, the immeasurably gifted Nimoy and the hambone, cocksure Shatner (a second-rate Canadian Shakespearean, before his “Star Trek” celebrity).
Roddenberry’s vision of what “Star Trek” could and should be, even if it was indifferently realized, was pretty close to Richard Wagner’s conception of the “Gesamtkunstwerk,” a work of art that would incorporate drama, poetry, philosophy and music. He worked with the best writers he could get, despite his borderline-tyrannical reputation and various controversies surrounding his handling of royalties. Ellison wrote “City on the Edge of Forever,” and Theodore Sturgeon, another big-name sci-fi author, wrote “Amok Time” (also included here), the famous episode in which Spock goes into some kind of Vulcan estrus and must return to his home planet in order to mate. (The principle that Spock has no emotional life is something like the edict in Greek mythology that no living human can enter the underworld; it must be flouted at every opportunity.)
In the arid landscape of late-1960s television, largely devoted to quasi-realistic forms like the family sitcom or the police procedural, “Star Trek” was new and startling in several different ways: a science-fiction series that was literary and imaginative and heavily allegorical, that ladled out historical and political messages by the quart and that delivered a distinctive undertone of adult sexuality.
OK, yes, it might be better described as a swaggering, Hefneresque and profoundly sexist version of semi-adult, semi-repressed sexuality. Preening Kirk, arguably the most sexualized male character in TV history, tomcats from one interstellar honey to the next. In Season 1, beehive-haired Yeoman Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) seems to serve as his personal concubine, but for that matter there’s something haremlike about the female personnel aboard the Enterprise in toto. They all apparently departed on a five-year space mission directly from their other jobs as go-go dancers behind Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.
Nurse Chapel (Majel Barrett, later Roddenberry’s wife) moons pathetically for the chaste and logical Spock, who is himself locked in a sub-rosa competition with the bitchy and sexually ambiguous “Bones” McCoy (DeForest Kelley) for Kirk’s attention. Spock pretends not to notice Chapel, but behaves like an outrageous tease; in “Amok Time,” he strokes her tear-stained cheek and murmurs, “It would be illogical for us to protest against our natures.”
But hey, this stew of delightful and appalling ingredients produced the first black-white kiss in the history of American narrative television, the aliens-made-them-do-it snog between Kirk and Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) in the 1968 episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.” (Contrary to legend, that smokin’-hot moment did not produce widespread outrage in the American South. Widespread arousal, certainly.) In the same scene, Chapel finally gets to kiss Spock, while protesting the whole time that she really, really didn’t want it to happen like this.
One could lazily argue that the breakthrough of “Star Trek,” which was first a cult show and then a mass phenomenon, led to the much bigger breakthrough of “Star Wars” a few years later. Beyond a loose, generic connection, I see much more opposition than similarity between the two. George Lucas’ space dramas are a bastardized mishmash of 1950s serials, classic quest mythology, film history and J.R.R. Tolkien, all elements pretty much absent from “Star Trek.” Of course there’s some crossover, but the two things appeal to different generations and different sensibilities
If Lucas is defiantly pop-cultural in orientation, delivering archetypal structure and fast-paced action rather than plot and conversation, Roddenberry skews much closer to traditional high or middlebrow culture. Despite the speculative-fiction surroundings, he’s really an old-fashioned tale-spinner, with roots in the short story and the theatrical stage. In the second season, Roddenberry introduces a Russian navigator named Chekov, and as distant as “Star Trek” may seem from “The Cherry Orchard,” I don’t think the name was picked out of a hat. His near-namesake Anton Chekhov was a master of the sudden reversal, the ironic sting in the tail — devices Roddenberry’s writers use over and over.
In an effort to make the original “Star Trek” relevant to contemporary viewers, whatever that’s supposed to mean, CBS/Paramount has rejiggered some of the cheesy effects, remastered the whole series in disconcertingly brilliant high-definition, and made them available on Blu-ray, iTunes, XBox Live and no doubt other platforms yet to be devised. I don’t object to such things, and the four episodes on this disc (the one I haven’t mentioned is the lamentable “Trouble With Tribbles”) look amazing, even if the increased resolution exposes the thick makeup on Shatner and Nimoy, making them look even more like drag queens out of uniform than they did before.
But “Star Trek” worked just as well, and maybe better, on a black-and-white secondhand TV pulling in signals from two cities away through an untwisted coat hanger. To those of us watching that way, with a couple of friends and some lukewarm Hamm’s beer, it offered a tiny oasis of imaginative escape. It wasn’t an escape into a mythical realm of impossibly perfect heroes and implacably evil villains, but into a future of global techno-humanist harmony. It seems ludicrous now, yes, but in that simultaneously chaotic and innocent time it hovered just over the horizon as a distant possibility. A future where we would all agree that war and poverty and economic depression were barbaric, and where the girls would all wear miniskirts and nylons.
Robert Harris’ sci-fi thriller, ripped from the business headlines
A hedge fund's efforts to generate huge profits backfires in Robert Harris' "The Fear Index." Wait, this is fiction
(Credit: Dr. Jost Hindersmann)
Most thrillers do not send me hustling off to Wikipedia for a refresher course in the Stoic philosophy of the first century A.D. Greek sage Epictetus. But that’s where I found myself before commencing this review of “The Fear Index,” by Robert Harris. I wanted to be sure I was properly grounded before straying into treacherous territory: the nature of being in our phantasmagorical high-finance, high-tech era.
I certainly had no time to brush up while actually reading the novel. “The Fear Index” is a perfect exemplar of the species “taut thriller.” It’s a book whose pages cannot be turned fast enough; a mystery with just a dash of science fiction and plot twists ripped from the business news headlines of the past year. Beware taking this book to bed with you, because you will stay up too late. (And your dreams will be queasy.)
But in the haste to turn those pages lies a danger: the chance that you might miss how surprisingly profound “The Fear Index” is, in its contemplation of modern financial markets and the “digitalization” of modern life. With his previous novelistic excursions to ancient Rome (“Pompeii,” “Imperium”), and reimaginings of history (“Fatherland” — set in a Germany where Hitler won World War II), Robert Harris long ago proved himself capable of mixing high intelligence with action and a swiftly moving movie-script-ready plot. “The Fear Index” takes his game to the next level: It is a riveting meditation on the reality of now, complete with a trail of bodies and streaks of madness — both algorithmic and human.
Which brings us back to Epictetus. The heart of “The Fear Index” is the story of how a hedge fund’s attempts to generate unprecedentedly huge financial returns from stock market bets executed by a super-smart computer program go horribly wrong. (Sound familiar? Didn’t we just live through that?) The program is the brainchild of physicist Alexander Hoffmann, and the key to its successful operation is its ability to sniff out traces of fear in the markets. Where there’s fear, there’s volatility, and where’s there volatility, there is the opportunity to cash in.
About a third of the way through the novel, Hoffmann explains to a group of prospective investors (the 1 percent of the global 1 percent!) that the times are ripe for a trading strategy based on fear, because contemporary society has never been so fearful, a fact for which we can blame our online, networked lives.
“Our conclusion is that digitalization itself is creating an epidemic of fear, and that Epictetus had it right: we live in a world not of real things but of opinion and fantasy. The rise in market volatility, in our opinion, is a function of digitalization, which is exaggerating human mood swings by the unprecedented dissemination of information via the Internet.”
Epictetus nailed it. The mood-swingingness of our universe is a truth apparent to anyone who follows the zigs and zags of modern financial markets (or the Republican primary race, for that matter). Computer-driven trading strategies are not reacting to fundamental economic realities; they’re bouncing out buy and sell orders every nanosecond based on price shifts that are themselves generated by emotional reactions to news headlines. A German foreign minister says something nasty about Greece, and markets plunge as London, New York and Shanghai all freak out. Moments later, a soothing press from a central banker sends prices skyrocketing again.
It’s a crazy way to run an economy. And it’s not fiction. Harris underlines this point by interpolating into the plot actual testimony before Congress by current Securities Exchange Commission Chairwoman Mary Schapiro explaining the notorious “Flash Crash” of May 2010. On May 6, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 1,000 points in a matter of minutes before suddenly rebounding. Computers were largely to blame. More such shenanigans are on the way! It’s a sign of how murky our digitally mediated markets are now, how inscrutable to human understanding, that science fiction offers just about as good an explanation of what is going on at the New York Stock Exchange as do the most highly paid market analysts.
Epictetus had it easy. We are no longer capable of understanding what we have wrought. That’s a job only the algorithm can do.
More from Hoffmann:
“When Hugo and I started this fund, the data we used was entirely digitalized financial statistics: there was almost nothing else. But over the past couple of years a whole new galaxy of information has come within our reach. Pretty soon all the information in the world — every tiny scrap of knowledge that humans possess, every little thought we’ve ever had that’s been considered worth preserving over thousands of years — all of it will be available digitally. Every road on earth has been mapped. Every building photographed. Everywhere we humans go, whatever we buy, whatever websites we look at, we leave a digital trail as clear as slug slime. And this data can be read, searched, and analyzed by computers and value extracted from it in ways we cannot even begin to conceive.”
The most terrifying part of “The Fear Index” is the sinking sensation, as you turn the last page, that we haven’t seen anything yet. We are incapable of comprehending the totality of the data we produce. We’ll design ever more complex computer programs to do that for us. And they’re going to make a big mess.
Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More Andrew Leonard
A comic take on torture
A new graphic novel depicts a hapless fashionista who gets accused of funding terrorism
In this funny, sometimes sobering tale of the American Dream gone wrong, Boyet Hernandez, a fey-but-straight Filipino fashionista, arrives in the U.S. in 2002 to set his sights on the fashion world. He’s got a fresh degree from FIM, the Fashion Institute of Makati, a sewing machine, and a small stipend from his parents back home. Possessing only the proverbial dollar and a dream, he’s determined to hang his own clothing line on the gilded runway. But due to a combination of naiveté and blind ambition, Hernandez, who was raised Catholic, has the misfortune to accept funding from the wrong patron: the flamboyant and charismatic Ahmed Qureshi — an “angel” investor with some sartorial sense, mysterious millions, and a rather-too-vague global business.
The rest is history, so to speak, recounted from prison, a no man’s land that’s easily parsed as Guantánamo or one of its ugly cousins. As “From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant” unfolds, Boyet, or Boy, as he’s called, is charged with consorting with terrorists, perhaps more. (In the mode that’s become uncomfortably familiar, it’s not really clear what he’s there for or how long he’ll stay.) Mustering his courage and earning a pen and paper for good behavior, he gives us a tour of prison living, recounting the twists of fate that brought him to be charged with being an enemy of America. As an ingénue caught in terrorism’s ugly web, Boyet poses as the friendly, gossipy voice of all that has gone wrong with deportation and detainment.
With flashing but surely sharp scissors, Gilvarry’s plot cuts some strategic holes through the horror of the last decade. And at its best moments the absurdism produces effects as shimmery and strange as the fashion garments that Boy hungers after. We take the ride with the unfortunate kid, whose name reminds us that he could be almost anyone. What would it be like for an ambitious fashion-minded not-quite-grown-up to find himself in some dark island prison? There’s something quite remarkable about this Yves St. Laurent–loving voice narrating its own fall into the grungy uncomfortable cells, and there’s comedy — albeit sad comedy — to be gained from a suspected terrorist spending all of his imprisonment pining after a copy of W magazine. There is, of course, something dangerous, too, about this gambit: It’s simply too airy to match its subject. In the end, when the toll is exacted, Gilvarry’s project feels like a well-crafted velouté that just about evaporates. Fashion is all well and good as a way in to make light, but in the end, torture is a heavy subject for comedy.
I couldn’t help thinking of Camus’s “The Stranger,” a completely different sort of prison narrative, to be sure, and wishing for a little more of its masterful gravitas. That said, is the fact that Gilvarry is brave enough to make fun of torture a sign that our national flirtation with torture is receding or passed? As readers, we may hope so, but a return to innocence on such a subject now seems as unreal as a W photo shoot.
The cruel truth about love
A new novel sheds a depressing light on romance as it explores one couple's inability to connect
Insecurity and uncertainty rule the day in David Szalay’s third novel, “Spring,” which zeroes in on an uneasy, fledgling relationship between two woefully up-in-the-air 30-somethings in present-day London. Canadian-born Szalay, anointed one of the 20 best British novelists under 40 by the Telegraph in 2010, doesn’t shy away from anything, including awkward sex, in his vivisection of this unpromising affair. The result is an intense portrait of the challenging complexity of really connecting with someone. In some ways it’s like a bleak answer to Alain de Botton’s “On Love,” a more playful, whimsical novel about the often painful vicissitudes of romantic relationships.
Szalay’s main character, James, is a born entrepreneur and risk taker who has made and lost several fortunes since he decided to skip university at 17 — including, on paper at least, a multimillion-pound killing on an Internet start-up that succumbed to the dot-com bust. Now he’s involved in shady horse racing fixes, though he finds himself no longer yearning for extravagant wealth so much as middle-class stability, even in his personal life. Unfortunately, he’s a poor judge of character. This leads him into business dealings with a stalker; a sleazy, ultra-conservative horse trainer; and a self-destructive misfit schoolmate. It also contributes to his persistent, hopeless pursuit of skittish Katherine Persson, a Cambridge University graduate who is currently working in a posh Park Lane hotel, in a dissatisfying managerial job that’s intellectually beneath her, with vague hopes of someday opening her own resort. Katherine, separated from her philandering photographer husband, Fraser King — whom she met while he was staking out a celebrity in the hotel lobby — is uncertain how she feels about Fraser or James.
James worries constantly “that things are not okay,” his moods fluctuating with Katherine’s willingness to see him. Even when she is brutally honest about her wishy-washy feelings, James somehow fails to recognize that things are neither OK nor destined to be. She dodges his kisses and pares down planned weekends together to “the pathetic rind of Sunday evening.” Worse, she greets his early confession of love with a series of sighs and “several frozen seconds” of silence before responding, “I can’t say the same, James. I can’t say the same.” Szalay captures both the clueless nature of infatuation (love is blind) and a disconnection so profound that nothing transmits between this couple without static and distortion.
Fortunately, flashbacks to Katherine’s initial passion for her husband and James’ high-flying days whizzing around town in a new Aston while checking in on his bankers and tech teams “to make sure everything was okay” let some air into what might otherwise be a suffocating narrative. So, too, do deft switches among the various characters’ perspectives, including that of the morally bankrupt horse trainer, who seems to have wandered in from a Dick Francis novel.
As T. S. Eliot noted in “The Waste Land,” there’s a cruelty to spring, “mixing / Memory and desire.” Szalay turns vernal rejuvenation into a source of further sadness, “the way everything is moving on, starting something new.” Even the changeable spring weather is, like Katherine, “still making up its mind what to do.” This study of frustration and ambivalence — of a woman who worries about passion being a thing of the past for her and a man unable to feel his feelings, never mind express them — is insightful but (sigh) depressing.
The teen mom dilemma
A memoir and a novel both provide fresh, personal takes on the problems of young pregnancy
Eleanor Crowe, the fictional protagonist of Han Nolan’s novel “Pregnant Pause,” the daughter of missionaries, likes smoking, drinking and “base-jumping” (leaping off tall places with a parachute). She has, according to her boyfriend, Lam, “a cute way about her that guys like and girls are jealous of,” not “dumb-pretty” but “smart-pretty, like sexy-lawyer pretty.”
Gaby Rodriguez, the author of the memoir “The Pregnancy Project,” soon to be a Lifetime movie of the same name, lives in Toppenish, Wash., population 9,000, 75 percent Latino, with a casino and a discount movie theater where second-run movies cost $3; where 98 percent of the students at her high school qualify for free lunch and teens compete with their parents for jobs at Dairy Queen and Taco Bell, and in migrant labor.
When Eleanor announces she is pregnant at 16, it is taken for granted that “her future” can’t include a child until well after college and a suitable marriage. When Gaby, the youngest daughter of a woman who has seven children between the ages of 14 and 35, and 31 grandchildren by the time Gaby is in her early teens, does the same, it is greeted as the expected outcome for a girl like her.
Abortion isn’t an option considered by either girl: “[M]y parents would more likely kill me if I had an abortion than if I were just pregnant, because that’s very against their religion,” says Eleanor (emphasis mine). Gaby, who describes herself as “very pro-life” says she “really had no idea what Planned Parenthood did” until she walks into their office at 16; after reading their literature, she decides it is “designed to make girls feel okay about getting abortions.” But while Eleanor’s pregnancy is real, Gaby’s is not: As part of her senior project, she decided to fake a pregnancy, with the help of her boyfriend, Jorge, her mother, the school superintendent, and a belly sculpted from clay and padded with fabric.
Each girl faces both stereotypes and discrimination: some quite similar, others inflected by each girl’s very different class and cultural expectations. Although Eleanor’s parents work with African AIDS orphans as their life’s work, they see their daughter’s pregnancy as shameful. Eleanor and Lam marry, are given summer jobs at the camp his parents run to force obese children to lose weight, and are paid with lodging in a “one-room cabin heated with wood, with the kitchen up the hill in the main house, and the bathroom a hornet-infested latrine six cabins away” — not exactly comfortable for a pregnant woman who visits the latrine several times a night. As part of the deal, Eleanor has to “pretend I’m twenty (yeah, lying — what a great example), and we have to be married and pretend the marriage came before the baby, so it doesn’t look like I got knocked up by accident or anything.” Another counselor, Jen, mocks her for her perceived stupidity about birth control and alleged sluttiness — though she’s got where she is with one partner and a broken condom — and informs her, “If I had a baby, my dreams would just go down the toilet.”
Although Eleanor herself is seen as damaged goods, her baby — assumed to be that much-sought-after commodity, a white, healthy infant — is much in demand. Lam’s parents, who lost a child in infancy, want to raise the child as their own; her parents would like her to give the baby to “perfectly prim, older sister, Sarah — just hand it over like a sack of potatoes.” After all, says Sarah, “We’re young and we live in a beautiful home.”
Nolan ends her novel with a surprising but very satisfying and believable twist that profoundly underscores the idea that demanding “perfection” in parents or children can be its own fatal flaw, and that sometimes passion, determination and a woman’s connection to her own child can mean more than a perfectly groomed nursery.
While many of Gaby Rodriguez’s friends and family decide her teenage pregnancy is unremarkable — “they’re used to teen moms,” says one classmate to her best friend — it is likewise assumed that she has “ruined her life.” Gaby points out, “Pregnant or not, I was still in school and getting great grades. I was in the top 5 percent of my class, with a 3.8 grade point average. With everything they knew about me, why would they be so quick to write me off as another statistic?… Didn’t they believe in me enough to know that, even if I were pregnant, I’d still find a way to go to college and achieve my dreams for me and my baby?”
Although young mothers are statistically less likely to finish high school and go to college, it may be comparable, she says, to the four-minute mile, which was once thought to be an impossible goal for a runner. But within three years after the first runner came in at four minutes, 16 others did the same. Why not see the academic plans of women like, say, President Obama’s mother — who earned a doctorate and raised two children, one of whom became president — as “the four-minute mile of teen pregnancy”?
Gaby removes her fake stomach at an assembly in front of all her classmates and a single local reporter. By the next morning, her story has spread across the wires, and she’s fielding competing offers from “Good Morning America” and the “Today” show, culminating in a contract for said Lifetime movie and this very memoir, helped along by credited ghostwriter Jenna Glatzer. At the assembly, she writes, there were “about seven girls” who were actually pregnant. “I hoped they would know I wasn’t trying to embarrass them or betray their trust,” she writes, “but that I was honestly trying to give them a voice.”
Gaby Rodriguez is sharp and compassionate; no one could credibly accuse her of naiveté or the desire to exploit teen parents, with whom she is intimately familiar through her family and community. But one can’t help but wonder why outsiders saw her — a teen who could have been pregnant but ultimately was not — as such an extraordinary mouthpiece for understanding teen mothers. Might it have more than a little to do with exactly the kind of prejudice she described in her book? No one was clamoring to interview her when she was one of eight presumed teen mothers at the school. Why did it take revealing she was not a teen mother for her to gain the authority to “give a voice” to those who were?
“The Pregnancy Project,” in this light, brings to mind “Black Like Me,” the 1961 book by John Griffin, a white man who impersonated a black man in order to describe the prejudice he encountered in the South. In part, the revelation comes from seeing how the exact same person can be treated so differently, depending on the circumstances. But at the time, Griffin surely benefited in part from white readers who conferred more authority on a white author. One can’t help but wonder if Rodriguez similarly gained moral authority to talk about a group of women who experience prejudice once it was established she was not a member of the group. In her book, she quotes a teen mother on a message board who writes: “When you get pregnant as a teenager, a lot of people give up on you and treat you like garbage, no matter how smart or nice or hard-working you were before. Nobody wants to ‘encourage teen pregnancy’ so they feel it’s their duty to make you suffer.” That writer remains anonymous.
The making of a con artist
A sublime new thriller follows a young grifter's seduction of two hapless men
Eli Gottlieb’s “The Face Thief” opens with a hurtling descent — a woman falls down a lengthy staircase — and ends with a smooth takeoff as her transatlantic flight leaves New York. We don’t know, until the novel’s denouement, how she fell or whether she was pushed. We are never told where her flight will land. But between these two events, Gottlieb constructs a sublime thriller that might have been subtitled “A portrait of the con artist as a young woman.” On a deeper level (and there are many) “The Face Thief” is also an elegant and profound novel of memory, perception and reinvention.
“The real reason we have faces,” Margot Lassiter observes, “is to hold back what we’re thinking from the world.” Margot’s business is deception, and Gottlieb, appropriately, reveals her life in fragments as he advances the plot in flashbacks, causing time to stutter as it loops back on itself. This is how Margot’s damaged memory returns, gradually and fitfully, as she recovers from her fall in hospital and rehab, under the eye of a besotted cop. Yet Gottlieb never indulges his cleverness. We are not dazzled by his style. We are instead seduced, from the moment that Margot sights the first of two victims, men we come to know intimately as she reels them in and leaves them floundering.
She meets Lawrence Billings at a seminar he leads on “The Physique of Finance: The Art of Face Reading and Body Language for Professional Advantage.” (Gottlieb’s ear for business-inspirational rhetoric is flawless). Billings, 53 and married, has a gift for decoding human behavior. “Even as a boy, he’d understood the commonness of lying. People did it as naturally as singing.” But Margot, a young volunteer from the audience who soon requests private instruction, teaches Billings a new lesson in the old game of seduction and extortion. “She leaned toward him … He was feeling his own thoughts turning slow, syrupy …” Billings will pay, of course, and far more than he imagines.
John Potash is, for Margot, an easier mark. Middle-aged and blissfully remarried in California, he wants to believe that his substantial nest egg will be significantly enhanced when invested in the firm represented by “Janelle Styles.” Greenleaf, after all, is not some hedge fund but “a consortium of forward-seeking investment advisers and analysts from elite business schools who roamed the world seeking the latest cutting-edge sustainable products.”
Gottlieb so deftly directs the parallel dramas of Billings and Potash that each has the compressed urgency of a short story. The textures of his characters’ lives — of even minor characters such as Potash’s mother in the Bronx or the eccentric P.I. he hires — rise off the page with tactile intensity. Potash opens “the heavy vault of the fridge door…” A bedside television flickers and drones on “… for hours without consequence, like a drunk at a bar.” Then there is Margot — one of crime fiction’s most mesmerizing grifters — reinventing herself first as a Smith College student, then as a Manhattan style magazine “editor at large … superalert, usually in heels, and gunning it, hard.” Gottlieb draws us so completely into Margot’s mind and the minds of her prey that the identity of a possible avenger (remember those stairs?) seems almost incidental. But he leaves no loose ends as he smoothly accelerates into the final curve, where deed and consequence silkily merge.
Page 1 of 123 in Fiction
Are Taxes Historically High or Low? 
Stephen King and my dad (Part 1) 
Once Upon A Time, Fostering and Adoption 
Ricky Gervais: My conscience never takes a day off 
Lessons of a very sexy pirate costume 
America’s failed promise of equal opportunity 
Is gay literature over? 
A voice that touched us all 
Whitney Houston dies at 48 
Didn’t she almost have it all? 
Porn’s taboo transsexual stars 
The Internet makes magic disappear 
The case for a global currency 
