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Rockets' red glare
The author of "Dog Soldiers" picks five great contemporary war novels.
By Robert Stone
[10/11/99]

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"The Remains of River Names" by Matt Briggs
A beautifully sensitive novel looks at hippie-generation parents and the kids they weren't prepared to raise.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[10/11/99]

Ivory Tower
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Women at elite universities may have broken the ivory ceiling, but they're still battling old-fashioned discrimination.
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[10/11/99]

Thin gruel for Vonnegut fans
The film "Breakfast of Champions" misses the point: What "Bokononists" love is Father Kurt's smart anti-intellectualism.
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[10/08/99]

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"Assuming the Position" by Rick Whitaker
A onetime hustler takes a long, hard look at the Life.
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[10/08/99]

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In Eddie's Name: One Family's Triumph over Tragedy By Bryn Freedman and William Knoedelseder Faber and Faber, 256 pages Nonfiction Buy In Eddie's Name: One Family's Triumph over Tragedy by Bryn Freedman and William Knoedelseder Goneboy: A Walkabout By Gregory Gibson Kodansha Books, 273 pages Nonfiction Buy Goneboy: A Walkabout by Gregory Gibson

Yet with Gibson's humanism comes his hesitation to assign responsibility for Galen's murder. He jokingly compares himself to Lee Marvin in "Point Blank," a man on a solitary mission of revenge. Actually, a bit more resemblance to Marvin would have helped. Gibson is well aware of how the craving for revenge could become all consuming and lead him to a state where he would never be at peace with either his son's death or with his wife and his other kids. (He briefly indulges in plans to stake out the house of a kid suspected of aiding Wayne Lo, nose around for dirty laundry on the kid, and then confront him.) But Gibson also extends his understanding to people who simply don't deserve it. As a result he loses the urgency to make the guilty pay.

In a long scene in which Gibson meets with the president of Bard College, "Goneboy" goes off the rails and never quite recovers. (Simon's Rock is a "wholly owned subsidiary" of Bard.) Gibson intends to ask one blunt question: Why does Bernie Rodgers still have a job? It's a good question, an appropriate one, one that cuts right through the crap. What Gibson doesn't anticipate is how much crap president Leon Botstein presents to be cut through:

Condensation cannot do justice to the business of speaking with a man like Leon Botstein. The sequence I am reporting was just the armature on which were hung bewildering thickets of examples, allusions, cross-references, and inspired inclusions that had nothing to do with the matter at hand but which somehow fit. We traveled from the Whitney Museum to nuclear physics to Beethoven's Vienna. His discourse honored the subtlety and complexity of reality by attempting to replicate it. It was necessarily a highly sophisticated, highly intelligent discourse. It also bordered on the incomprehensible.

Which is a nice way of saying that when it comes to spin, academics produce a fancier form of bullshit. Because, of course, Bard, in the person of Botstein, was doing exactly what the city of Philadelphia had done in stonewalling the Polecs: defending itself against a potential lawsuit. When Botstein goes on to suggest that Gibson's grief had blinded him to the bigger picture, to the possibility that Bernie Rodgers had acted out of concern for the life of Simon's Rock College, he's simply spouting a high-toned version of "It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it." The college has become divorced from the students it allegedly exists to teach. Its survival as an institution is paramount.

Gibson doesn't buy it, and he tells Botstein as much. But he's simply too good a humanist not to consider the possibility that he is bent on destroying Bernie Rodgers' career. A few weeks later, he tells us, he concluded, "Botstein had been right. There was no redemption in revenge, no peace." Revenge is an ugly word, and here it's the wrong one. Gibson was intent on punishing Rodgers, which is an entirely different thing. There's a tendency among good, humane people to shrink from the very idea of punishment as if, by definition, it were reactionary and stone-hearted. Gibson does what most people who have been wronged do not do: He attempts to understand the motives and failings of the people who wronged him. But he comes close to confusing explanation with exculpation.

There were doubtless all sorts of good, perfectly understandable human reasons why Rodgers failed to take action to stop Lo. That doesn't make him innocent of criminal negligence. When people are charged with the welfare of others and screw up in ways that plainly could have been avoided, there's nothing reactionary about insisting that they bear the consequences of their actions. That it falls on people who are already suffering to ensure that this happens is horribly unfair. It means getting involved in fights they never wanted to join. But it is also an opportunity to achieve a fitting memorial to the dead and to safeguard the living. You read these books wishing that all victims of crime could find the grace and dignity that seems to be second nature to the Polecs and the Gibsons. They took the high road. In a better world, they wouldn't have to get down in the muck to right the wrongs of their sons' murders.
salon.com | Oct. 12, 1999

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