Regular readers of this column may recall that each week I choose one book to recommend from among several titles in the same category; if I seldom mention the runners-up, it's because most of the time they're not especially relevant. Looking at fiction this week, however, it seemed as though every book I cracked was about a man run aground on the shoals of midlife, trying to figure out if it's worth carrying on in the face of a daily litany of humiliation and loss.
Some readers react with knee-jerk scorn to this theme — reminded, I think, of that time in the mid- to late 20th century when a generation of celebrated male novelists produced novel after novel about aging goats (usually college professors) finding redemption in the arms of young babes (usually college students). But times have changed, and manhood is an even trickier proposition than it used to be; only Philip Roth still believes in the ol' saved-by-the-booty formula anymore. Younger writers know that won't wash, and as a result the literature of the masculine midlife crisis feels at once richer and riskier than ever before.
Knowing, self-deprecating humor is the default approach these days. Take Sam Lipsyte's satire about a failed artist turned academic fundraiser, "The Ask," a novel so caustic you might want slip on a pair of safety gloves before turning its pages. Milo Burke, Lipsyte's narrator, is emasculated both at home and abroad, from the wife who withholds sex and casually cheats on him to the third-rate university that keeps him on only at the insistence of an old friend turned philanthropist intent on jerking his chain. Lipsyte's second novel, "Home Land," also featured a perpetually bullied (though younger) narrator, and there are readers who find his well-turned prose and grotesque scenarios hilarious. I am not, alas, among them. The hammering, ground-in nastiness of "The Ask" strikes me as overly grim — Neil LaBute meets Martin Amis — but if your idea of fun is the kind of novel where male co-workers routinely greet each other with questions like, "What's the matter, your pussy hurt?" then by all means, have at it.
Chances are I'd be recommending James Hynes "Next" to you this week, if not for a frustrating conflict of interest: Hynes (whom I've never met), blurbed my own book. Suffice to say that this novel about another put-upon, midlevel university administrative worker is more fully rounded and less claustrophobic than "Ask," with a wallop of an ending that has been justly praised by those reviewers who lack the good fortune to be encumbered by Hynes' generosity.
Which brings us to this week's choice, Thomas Kennedy's "In the Company of Angels," definitely not a satire. The gravely injured 50-something man at the center of this novel has infinitely better reasons for losing faith than Lipsyte's and Hynes' narrators do. His name is Bernardo "Nardo" Greene, once a teacher of literature in his native Chile, who, as a result of discussing the work of a radical poet with his students, was imprisoned and tortured by the Pinochet regime. The novel takes place in Copenhagen, where Nardo has sought asylum and receives treatment from a psychiatrist who narrates some of the chapters. Other chapters are told from the point of view of Michela, a Danish woman who frequents the same cafe as Nardo, as well as Michela's dying father and her callow boyfriend.
The style of "In the Company of Angels" is, like its somewhat unfortunate title, so earnest as to seem almost artless; by the standards of contemporary literary fiction, it's often hopelessly on-the-nose and unsubtle in describing its characters' inner lives. Yet this in no way detracts from the novel's power or its tractor-beam-like ability to lock the reader into the unfolding drama of Nardo's recovery, a fragile structure that's always on the verge of disintegrating into despair.
What this novel reminds me of, surprisingly enough, is Stephen King — though not King's supernatural apparatus or breakneck action, and certainly not his slangy, strip-mall prose. What King and Kennedy (an American who lives in Denmark) share is an interest in the idea of violence as an occupational hazard of masculinity. For this reason, there is a seeping dread that crawls through the lives of the characters in "In the Company of Angels," much like the demonic forces that infiltrate the suburban idylls of King's novels, an apprehension that cruelty and domination might be contagious and that even victims are capable of unwittingly spreading the infection. Eventually, Nardo's therapist comes to believe that he can hear his patient's chief torturer whispering taunts to him when he's at home with his wife and kids, polluting the sanctum of family life with a knowledge of human evil at its most extreme.
Every character in "In the Company of Angels" is battling that evil in one way or another, and none of them is entirely free of it himself. "You will never again be a man to a woman," the chief torturer told Nardo, and although he was speaking of physical damage, it is the experience of utter helplessness and degradation that has wounded this once-respected teacher most deeply. Such impotence is utterly incompatible with his previous understanding of manhood; therefore, he must be unmanned. The urge to cancel out a shaming weakness with some act of force is a temptation that all the men in Kennedy's novel face. If they succumb, they will only perpetuate the contagion, but to transcend violence requires an imaginative courage difficult to muster.
Trauma isn't an unusual subject in contemporary fiction, but more often than not, it's handled in a sentimental, even precious fashion (Chris Cleave's "Little Bee," Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close") through characters who are children or have a charming, childlike naivete and an uncomplicated relationship to their own suffering. Kennedy, who worked for a Copenhagen rehabilitation center for torture victims for several years, is much more convincing in rendering the aftereffects of unthinkable ordeals. "In the Company of Angels" is a novel about grown-ups, people battered and dinged by life, painfully aware of their own responsibility, whose understanding of their past never stops evolving. It's the dignity of their adulthood — the elusive prize at stake in any midlife crisis — that makes them so admirable and, above all, so moving.
If there was a Mount Rushmore for women country musicians, Tammy Wynette would have to be on it. Along with Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn, Wynette practically defined the role of the female country singer in the 1960s and 1970s, sporting an enormous blond bouffant while belting out jukebox staples like "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" and "I Don't Wanna Play House." By the time she died, caught in the grips of a bad marriage and a painkiller addiction, Wynette had racked up 17 No. 1 hits and became the first country musician to go platinum. Today, most remember Wynette for her signature ballad, "Stand By Your Man."
Of course, as Jimmy McDonough writes in the new biography "Tammy Wynette: Tragic Country Queen," Wynette didn't exactly follow her own song's advice, at least with the same man. In his book, McDonough tracks the tumults of Wynette's rocky love life -- five marriages and an affair with Burt Reynolds -- that made her the queen of tabloids in the 1970s, especially during her divorce with husband No. 3, Wynette's idol and duet partner, George Jones. But most of all, McDonough's book is about "a singer who lived her songs," a musician whose melancholy breakup ballads were inseparable from the heartbreak, addiction and pain in her own life. "I want you to feel this woman's presence as deeply as I feel her songs," McDonough implores. "I want you to stand by Tammy Wynette."
Salon wrote to McDonough to ask about Wynette's life -- everything from her bizarre kidnapping to her predilection for lime-green pantsuits -- feminism in country music, and why George Jones ended up the hero of this story.
You say that in the country pantheon, Tammy Wynette "gets taken for granted." Why do you think that is?
Shall we generalize, just for fun? I think Patsy, Loretta, Dolly -- all of whom are, of course, quite obviously great -- are easier to digest than Tammy. She's a throw-yourself-off-the-cliff romantic. There's a severity to Tammy and her point of view that gets your lumpy, cat-hair-covered NPR types to grinding their teeth. Now, your retro characters -- who tend to be the most rigid of all -- are put off by the baroque '70s production and the gloominess of it all. No standup bass, no Owen Bradley, no rockabilly '50s garb. Tammy falls into her own slot and you have to take her on her own terms.
The other thing is, you don't hear music like Tammy's anymore. Human feeling's been AutoTuned out of everything, nobody plays live, the tracks are overdubbed to death. I'm afraid Tammy might not have a place in our chilly times.
Wynette has a reputation -- based mostly on "Stand by Your Man" -- for being an anti-feminist mouthpiece, but she obviously paved the way for a lot of women in country. Do you think it's fair to call her anti-feminist?
I think that's horribly reductive. Tammy wore lime-green pantsuits! Proudly! Hmmm, feminist or anti-feminist? She's a little too complex for such simplistic labels. When I hear such talk I immediately tune out. I see chickens dancing on hot plates, dwarves shooting muskets in the air. I notice that people who think in such terms often have terrible taste in music. Some folks just can't take country straight, no chaser, there has to be those greasy rock additives.
You mention that "if there's a hero in this book, it is George Jones," but his relationship with Wynette was pretty fraught. Could you explain that a little more?
First of all, Jones is alive. That alone deserves an entry from Ripley's. And George remains true to the music. Jones figured out a way to survive without sacrificing who he was. Not an easy trick. When Tammy died, it was Jones -- a man who hates hospitals, funerals or anything of the sort -- who accompanied her daughters to the funeral home. No doubt Tammy is smiling down from somewhere above when it comes to Jones.
What's the most bizarre incident you looked into while writing this book?
I'd love to get to the bottom of her bizarre "kidnapping." No ransom, no suspects, no arrests, a story full of unreliable narrators. After she "escaped," Tammy stumbled onto the property of a George and Tammy fan -- one Junette Young. I love the fact that Junette decided "it wasn't the time or place" to inform Tammy she was a fan as she cut off the stocking knotted around Wynette's neck.
What one thing would you ask Tammy if she were alive?
"Can we go get a hot dog, Tammy? I'll buy."
David Shenk's new book, "The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong," is 300 pages long, and more than half of those pages are endnotes. You need to offer up a lot of evidence when your goal is to overturn a concept as commonplace as the idea that genes are the "blueprints" for both our physical bodies and our personalities. Above all, what Shenk wants to communicate is that "the whole concept of genetic giftedness turns out to be wildly off the mark -- tragically kept afloat for decades by a cascade of misunderstandings and misleading metaphors." Instead of acquiescing to the belief that talent is a quality we're either born with or not, he wants us to understand that anyone can aspire to superlative achievement. Hard, persistent and focused work is responsible for greatness, rather than innate ability.
Shenk does have a lot of evidence for this assertion, most of it coming from geneticists and other biological researchers who are perplexed at the way their disciplines get depicted in the media. "Today's popular understanding of genes, heredity and evolution is not just crude, it's profoundly misleading," Shenk writes. While most scientists long ago rejected the idea that nature and nurture are two separate factors competing in a zero-sum game to dominate human behavior, laypeople still cling to the idea that whatever aspect of ourselves isn't caused by our environment must be caused by our genes, and vice versa. In recent decades, heredity has gotten most of the credit; the host of the brainiest NPR talk show in my area inevitably prompts every expert to confirm that whatever they're discussing -- mathematical ability, wanderlust, ambition, mental illness -- is genetically determined.
According to Shenk, and he is persuasive, none of this stuff is genetically determined, if by "determined" you mean exclusively or largely dictated by genes. Instead, "one large group of scientists," a "vanguard" that Shenk has labeled "the interactionists," insists that the old genes-plus-environment model (G+E) must be jettisoned and replaced by a model they call GxE, emphasizing "the dynamic interaction between genes and the environment." They don't discount heredity, as the old blank-slate hypothesis of human nature once did. Instead, they assert that "genes powerfully influence the formation of all traits, from eye color to intelligence, but rarely dictate precisely what those traits will be."
Shenk's particular interest is talent, genius and other instances of extraordinary ability, whether the skills be athletic, artistic or scientific. Musicians and athletes most often get held up as examples of the triumph of innate gifts. According to Shenk, we are erroneously led to believe that stars like Tiger Woods and cellist Yo-yo Ma were born to climb to the top of their fields, when in fact the environments they grew up in are just as responsible (if not more so) for their spectacular feats. To prove this point, he methodically debunks several widely cited examples that supposedly prove the reality of inherited gifts: child prodigies, twin studies and geographical pockets of excellence at particular sports. In all of these cases, he demonstrates, observers have ignored and downplayed the enormous role of environment (especially in early childhood) in favor of touting the preeminence of genetics.
"The Genius in All of Us" strives for clarity -- a difficult standard when you're trying to describe such things as the role of environmental factors in controlling the expression of genes that are in turn susceptible to far more influence from environment than most of us realize in the first place. Or when you're explaining that "heritability" -- a "dreadfully irresponsible" word coined by researchers studying identical twins raised apart from each other -- refers to statistical probabilities in large populations, not to the qualities of particular individuals. A lot of the misunderstandings that Shenk laments seem to arise from the fact that genetics often involves statistical reasoning, while most nonspecialists have a pretty weak grasp of how probability, averages and means work.
With this in mind, Shenk states his assertions as plainly as he can in the main text of "The Genius in All of Us," then expands on the topic in his notes for those readers who want more information. It's an inspired method, a lot like the print manifestation of a digital article with hyperlinks to other documents illustrating the key points. For the majority of readers who are really only interested in the book's core argument, it's easy enough to extract the gist in a mere three or four hours of reading, but skeptics and advocates are free to lift the hood and see how it all works. While "The Genius in All of Us" isn't an inventive, sensitive piece of writing like Shenk's celebrated book on Alzheimer's disease, "The Forgetting," it isn't meant to be; he has deliberately stripped it down to communicate a handful of insurrectionary ideas as simply and unequivocally as possible.
To boil these ideas down even further, Shenk asserts that intelligence is not fixed but rather highly malleable depending on the demands placed upon it and the resources made available. Much of our capacity to think, perform and create is primed in early childhood, so the importance of creating a stimulating, challenging and supportive (but not coddling) context for young children can't be overstated. And while some of us are born with a slight edge when it comes to aptitude, most people can come pretty close to the highest levels of achievement in our chosen field if we pursue it in the right way. Of course, the intensity of drive and commitment exhibited by top athletes like Ted Williams or scientists like Einstein (who said "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer") is, in itself, extraordinary. But Shenk believes that this, too, can be inculcated, if we so desire.
As someone who has always resisted genetic determinism while still subscribing to the secular mystery religion of talent, I confess that "The Genius in All of Us" has quietly blown my mind. But the book's premise has far more profound implications for social policy. What would education, the workplace and government look like if we behaved as if we truly believed that nobody is born to mediocrity? "Human talent and intelligence are not permanently in short supply like fossil fuel," Shenk writes, "but potentially plentiful like wind power." It's an apt comparison in more ways than one; there are huge vested interests relying on the old attitudes. The determination to turn that around will need to be mighty enough to put even the great Ted Williams to shame.
At the start of Lorraine Adams' new novel, "The Room and the Chair," a mysterious F-16 fighter jet crashes into the Potomac River, causing an explosion heard by guests of the Watergate Hotel. Within minutes, the media has interpreted the event in half a dozen ways. And for the remainder of the book, high-ranking White House officials, with the press's cooperation, will spin it until it blurs, implicating everyone from special operatives in Afghanistan to a teenage prostitute who witnessed the crash.
Adams' follow-up to her 2005 novel, "Harbor,"
Adams' depictions of journalistic hierarchies are especially vivid, as you would expect from a Pulitzer-winning writer who spent 11 years as a reporter for the Washington Post. There's Adam Sanger, the executive editor, whose thirst for fresh news overrides his interest in historical truth. Beneath him is Stanley Belson, the sensitive, beleaguered night editor, weary of seeing the galaxies of human nature shoehorned into a few predictable storylines. And at the bottom is Vera Hastings, the newbie beat reporter and former ballerina, whose passion and ambition are almost comically thwarted at every turn.
Adams recently spoke with Salon over the phone from her apartment in New York City about the death of journalism, why she'll never again write nonfiction, and the massive egos of White House reporters.
You began writing your first novel right after 9/11. Months before that, you'd left the Washington Post newsroom to become a contract writer for the paper. What sort of changes did you notice in the way the news was reported after 9/11?
In the immediate aftermath, the first year, there was a feeling of patriotism that made it difficult to report fairly. The Post says, "We don't report objectively, we report fairly." And I would argue that in any country that's been attacked, the reporters are not going to be able to be fair. If you read the history of war reporting, you can see it, even in the best people. Ernie Pyle's accounts from North Africa are gorgeous pieces of reportage, but they're very pro-American. So I noticed that change. I'm not saying it's wrong. I think it's impossible to be fair in those situations.
You worked as a news journalist, first at the Dallas Morning News, then at the Post for over a decade. Why did you decide to write a novel?
After 20 years of reporting and writing news stories, I was well acquainted with what many call a jaded perspective, or what I call a wised-up perspective. I realized that I could probably find out what happened in many different ways, I just couldn't put it in the newspaper, and there would always be something I couldn't get at because I announced myself as a reporter. That frustration built. By the end, the frustration was so unbearable that novel writing seemed to me the only way to approximate a better truth.
So you'll never go back to writing nonfiction?
I'll never write nonfiction again. I've thought about it, and talked about it with my agent. I was thinking of writing about the Bam earthquake in Iran a while ago. But there were always difficulties. One, for example, was that the people I wanted to talk to -- about the horrific things that happened because of the ineptitude of the Iranian regime -- these people were afraid to talk to American journalists because that could mean a term in Evin prison. I'm not willing to make people talk to me and risk their facing solitary confinement as a result. I think it's unconscionable.
How do you feel about the ways blogs and alternative news sources have changed the way news is reported and consumed?
In the news business, there's always been a sense of hierarchies of authoritativeness, that a story isn't real until CNN or whoever reports it. I think that's going to change. I think we'll stop privileging news outlets. Especially considering what's been going on lately. When you've got a book on Hiroshima, for example, published by Henry Holt, and you find out that the writer wasn't just duped by one pilot, but there's a whole slew of things that are wrong and they're withdrawing the book. The privileging of the content platform gets called into question. That's what happened with James Frey and Oprah. These privileged outlets aren't checking anything either. So why should they be accorded a certain reverence in terms of truthfulness?
You once said in an interview that the forms of storytelling haven't really changed since the New Journalism era of the '60s. Why do you think so little has changed, especially in newspapers and magazines?
Right now they're in a siege mentality. And when you're in a siege mentality, you hunker down and you do what's tried and true. Although, at this point, it's contributing to their downfall and their lack of readers, but they somehow seem blind to that and I can't see why. As for the New Journalism guys, they were reinventing a form and making journalism into this thing we now call reportage, the kind of stuff in the New Yorker and Granta, which are now dying. In a daily newspaper, they don't want you to write like that. But they think they do!
I remember once writing a magazine article for the Washington Post, and I used the word "refrigerant." And the editors were like, "This is too fucking showy, this is pretentious, fuck you." I had to go to John McPhee's book about Alaska, "Coming Into the Country," and point out that he used the word "refrigerant," and then they let me use it.
In his new book, "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto," David Shields argues that the novel is not as relevant as it once was. Do you think this is true?
Of course it's fashionable to say the novel is irrelevant to the culture or it's dead. And yet the novel miraculously persists. I remember one of the first books I reviewed was a biography of Fanny Burney, a novelist and playwright around the turn of the 19th century. Her father and her brother were both well-known historians. But Burney, for whatever reason, is the one that survived. We don't read those historians at all. You can't say that essays survive the way novels do. Maybe Sam Johnson, but that's fucking rare.
There's Montaigne. And Emerson.
Yeah, we got three there. But I think there are a fuck of a lot more novels that survive, and I don't think the human condition has so radically changed that that won't be the case. I believe that art endures, and I don't believe that commentary does.
Vera Hastings, the young night-cop reporter in the novel, is told by her college guidance counselor that journalism is dead, and yet she goes into it anyway. Did anyone try to dissuade you from a journalism career?
Coming out of graduate school at Columbia, David Remnick was a dear friend. And when I told him I planned to go into journalism, which he was already doing, he said, "No no no, don't go into newspapers. It's all over. You should go into cable television, that's where the future lies." Well, cable TV news today is frantic, crazed, losing audiences.
I would argue: Go where you cannot help but go. Go where you just can't stop yourself from going. All the advice in the world amounts to nothing if you don't have passion for the work.
Much of your new novel has to do with the ways reality is created and warped, not just by the players in Washington, but by the reporters and editors that cover them. Are White House reporters really that megalomaniacal?
Most definitely. Journalists who are considered at the top of their games are assigned to the White House. People like Judith Miller -- who was talking to Scooter Libby, Cheney's chief of staff -- was aligning herself with these men and saying, "I'm as big a deal as they are, I'm one of the actors, not one of the observers." The egos of some of these writers is such that they come to identify with the people they write about. They want to feel that they are as big as their subjects.
What we really need is not more information about the people in power. We need more information about the ways in which decisions are informed by the facts, and how those facts come to be facts.
To most Americans the idea of an arranged marriage sounds not only bizarre, but fundamentally wrong. How could you let someone else decide the person you're going to be spending the rest of your life with? But as Sheena Iyengar describes in her new book, "The Art of Choosing," arranged marriage has been the norm in many parts of the world for 5,000 years -- including in the Sikh community in which her parents were married -- and our opposition to the idea says a great deal about the ways in which culture and history have shaped the way Americans think about personal choice.
Iyengar, who grew up in Sikh enclaves in New York and New Jersey, is now a professor of business at Columbia University and one of the country's leading researchers on decision making. In "The Art of Choosing," a broad and fascinating survey of current research on the subject, Iyengar stitches together personal anecdotes, examples from popular culture, and scientific evidence to explain the complex calculus that goes into our everyday choices, from picking our favorite soda to choosing our medical insurance. She also writes about the ways in which her blindness -- Iyengar lost her sight as a teenager -- has given her a unique perspective on the subject.
Salon spoke to Iyengar over the phone about how ballot order cost Al Gore the 2000 election and how a blind researcher learns about color.
Why did you become so interested in researching the way people make choices?
When I was very young, my background as a Sikh-American made me aware of the tensions that underlie choice. Being a Sikh meant having to do what Mom and Dad said, and going to temple, and Mom and Dad choosing who I would marry. But going to an American school taught me that I was the one who’s supposed to make those choices. There was the constant tension between following my duties and giving in to my preferences. I was becoming aware of the fact that different cultures provide different scripts about choice.
What expectations people bring to choice is one of the dominant themes of my research, along with the idea that choice has its limitations: When I was going blind, questions were constantly being thrown at me. Will she be able to go to school by herself? How is she going to survive? What can she do and not do? It constantly reminded me that there are limits to what choice can offer.
In the book, you write that Americans are more attached to choice than people in many other countries. Why is that?
It’s a legacy we were given by the forefathers of this country. Thomas Jefferson and our other forefathers were influenced by the Greeks, the Romans and the Enlightenment period in terms of their ideas about political freedom, along with the Magna Carta, and the recently published "Wealth of Nations."
Political freedom and the free marketplace came together under one nation for the first time in history and then, to that you add the freedom of self-expression, which came about through the transcendental movement of Emerson. In this country, self-expression is primarily exercised through personal choice.
But this isn't the case in places like Japan, where, as you write in the book, children often prefer to follow directions rather than make their own choices.
The way we raise our children is very different, starting from the moment they’re infants. In America we tell our parents to bring their child home and put him or her in a crib; as they get older, children sleep in they own room not in Mom and Dad’s room. What are we training them for? It’s independence, because that’s what being empowered is all about. We give this script verbally and non-verbally.
When they’re learning to speak, we train them to answer questions like, "What kind of cereal do you want to eat?" By the time they’re 5 we ask them, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" We’re telling them that they need to learn to choose. Most children's first word in America isn’t "Mama" or "Papa" like in other countries, it’s "not." My son’s first word when he was two years old was "more."
By contrast, in Japan, you don’t sleep alone until maybe 8 or 9 or 10. You often take a bath with your mom until elementary school, and, as for asking a child what they want to be when they grow up, you wouldn’t think a child would be equipped to answer that question.
Can having too much choice be a bad thing?
There are times when the presence of more choices can make us choose things that are not good for us. For me the clearest example is that the more retirement fund options a person has, the less likely they are to save for their old age. It’s the same thing with Medicare and Part D [the federal program to subsidize medication costs], where the more options people had, the less likely they were to take advantage of the government’s offer. That’s where it becomes clear that this can actually be detrimental.
One significant cultural difference, with regard to choice, is the way people find their spouses. You looked at non-arranged and arranged marriages in the book, and came away surprisingly positive about the latter.
The model is so different that it makes it very tough to compare them. The arranged marriage will lead in theory to less quarrels because you know, for example, what religion you’re going raise your child in. In the case of a love marriage, love is supposed to conquer all, but what do you do when you have different opinions about how to feed your child or save money? What we can learn from the arranged marriage is the importance and value of compatibility. I think what the love marriage can teach is the importance of shared understanding.
When I first moved to the United States from Canada, one of the things that struck me about American medicine was the surprising amount of choice I was given to decide my own treatment. As you write in the book, this is a fairly recent development. Is this a good thing?
You need to give patients some feeling of control during the medical process. They at least have to feel they’re cared for and that their best interests are being accommodated and considered, but I think the file recommendation has to come from that doctor because when you’re sick it’s very difficult for a patient to truly figure out what is the best treatment. To have the person who doesn’t know anything about cancer make the decision about treatment raises a lot of potential problems.
I think that goes to the core of the current American healthcare debate. A lot of people are worried that with public healthcare, they’ll lose the ability to make those choices.
It’s a big part of it -- and it’s something that constantly separates the Republicans and Democrats: Are we going to create healthcare which provides equal outcomes for all, giving everybody the same helping hand, or are we going to provide equal opportunity for all, by removing both barriers and aid? Those are two entirely different scripts about what a fair choice is and we hold to them very passionately. We’re convinced the other side either doesn’t see the truth or is naive. When Obama says we have differences of opinion that run deep, this is the difference of opinion: what constitutes a fair choice or a fair distribution of choice.
We seem to be in an era where everybody is showing off their personal choices -- favorite movies, quotes, photos of themselves -- on Facebook. Are these self-defining choices more important than they used to be?
You should watch these videos on YouTube by this 17-year old Asian-Canadian girl named beautycakez. She shows you all the things she bought -- from Armani exchange, for example, or a maroon sweater from French connection -- and you can send her e-mails and ask her questions. Her identity is a compilation of her consumer choices. She’s trying to create an image based on her purchases. That’s what she wants you to know her by and she’s hoping that that's an expression of her identity. It’s a self-validating exercise, and it’s kind of boring to watch it, but people do.
I think we’re definitely more conspicuous about these kinds of choices. I think we believe they play a bigger role than they did before, but I’m not sure if they do. Either way, the link between the person we want to be and the choices we make are now more clearly linked in our mind.
At one point in the book, you write about the ways names shape color preference. How did your blindness affect your ability to research color?
Because I’m blind, I’m not emotionally invested in a particular color or color combination. I’m much more able to discern how invested sighted people are in what looks good and how enormously subjective it is. It was my struggle with color that made me pay so much attention to it. Names of shades of particular colors kept changing -- along with the idea of what color should go with what others.
Sighted people’s emotions are tied not just to what they’re seeing but what they’re feeling while they’re seeing. If you walk up to a sighted person and say that outfit just doesn’t go, or that their makeup is cakey, they'll say, "How can you be so cruel?" It's because you’re commenting on the person's judgment. Now imagine if you're blind, and you don’t have an emotional investment in that. If somebody tells me my makeup is caked, I'll go, "Oh, I'll fix it."
Is it really true that Al Gore would have won the 2000 election if his name had been first on the ballot?
Oh yeah. This is research done by John Krosnick at Stanford. It's estimated that Bush coming first on the ballot cost Gore 2 percent of the vote, which in that election was critical. Why do we vote for the first person? When you open up a menu in a restaurant the first dish serves as your reference point, when you interview people for a job the first person serves as a reference point; it’s just human nature.
Winter, too, has its dog days, when "crisp" feels more like just plain cold, the streets are lined with grimy crusts of snow, and all the interesting holidays are shrinking in the rearview mirror. It's a time of year that calls out for the occasional binge of frivolous reading every bit as much as summer does. "Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History" by Scott Andrew Selby and Greg Campbell, a caper movie in print, complete with European locations and a dash of journalistic scuttlebutt, offers exactly the right blend of diversion and pith. It's a ripping yarn, yes, but a meticulously reported one.
The heist recounted here is the 2003 burglary of a building in Antwerp's storied Diamond District, a neighborhood known for its "in-your-face display of armed, protected and monitored fortifications" that was once deemed "tight as a nun's ass" by a John Gotti henchman. A team of expert Italian thieves, known as the School of Turin, made off with a haul of jewelry, cash, securities, precious metals, gems and, of course, a huge quantity of cut and rough diamonds, the exact value of which could not be determined. At minimum, the job nabbed $100 million in loot, more than any other robbery in history. Four men, out of what Belgian police believe was a minimum of eight conspirators, were ultimately arrested and jailed for the crime.
The building the team plundered was an office complex called the Diamond Center, which provided its tenants with storage in the supposedly impenetrable vault on its bottom floor. The building itself was located in the ultra-secure inner sanctum of the Diamond District, and was monitored by guards who permitted access only to badge-bearing tenants and their guests. Video cameras surveilled all entrances and hallways, as well as the foyer leading to the vault. The vault door itself was made of foot-thick iron and steel, double-locked using a long-necked key and a combination pad, as well as alarmed by two magnetic plates that would instantly alert an off-site security firm if they were separated during off-hours. The interior of the vault had a motion detector, a light detector and an infrared heat detector designed to go off at the temperature of the human body. A seismic alarm was set to trigger if it picked up the steady vibrations of a drill or saw. And on top of all that, the treasures inside the vault were divided among 189 safe deposit boxes, each one individually and sturdily locked.
The first half of "Flawless" sets up the challenge and the players, a coterie of career criminals most of whom had known each other for years. The man convicted of masterminding the crime, Leonardo Notarbartolo (there's considerable debate over whether he was in fact the leader), began preparing for it a full two years in advance, renting an office in the Diamond Center and posing as a diamantaire, or diamond dealer. He videotaped the premises using a camera concealed in a shoulder bag and observed the staff's security procedures, which turned out to be surprisingly lax despite the complex's reputation. He took whatever information he could gather back to Turin, for further study by team members who specialized in lock picking or alarms and had nicknames like the Wizard of Keys.
Naturally, the comparison to "Ocean's Eleven" is irresistible, and no one -- least of all the press -- has ever seen much reason to resist it. There's a bit of history and diamond lore in "Flawless," but the most fun comes from the parts where you're thinking "How can they ever get past those infrared sensors?" and then the authors proceed to explain the way some clever criminal learned to use a common household product to thwart thousands of dollars worth of high-tech security equipment. Then there was the challenge of getting the stuff out -- of the building, and out of Antwerp; the bag of diamonds alone weighed 44 pounds, "as much as a microwave oven." The theft itself was executed with such meticulous care and precision it's almost awe-inspiring -- until you realize that the dumbest of down-time mistakes is going to wind up blowing the whole thing wide open.
Well, that and a crabby retiree obsessed with preserving a tiny patch of Belgian forest -- but any more disclosures along those lines would constitute spoilage. Just when you think the story is winding down, with Notarbartolo playing sphinx behind bars while three other culprits take advantage of Italian bureaucracy to temporarily dodge the police, the authors serve up a tasty coda. Near the end of his six-year prison term, Notarbartolo offered Joshua Davis, a journalist from Wired magazine, his detailed account of the heist. This was published in a much-applauded article that the authors of "Flawless" thoroughly and persuasively debunk.
The Wired story was all kinds of fishy: Not only do the facts not add up, but before Davis came on the scene, Notarbartolo had been demanding money in exchange for his cooperation from various journalists. Then he suddenly refused to talk to anyone but Davis. Although Wired insists that Davis didn't pay Notarbartolo for his story, Notarbartolo's friends informed the authors of "Flawless" that Davis had "satisfied his commercial needs." It seems likely that those needs extended to the movie deal Notarbartolo and Davis have since signed with J.J. Abrams ("Lost," "Star Trek"). Nevertheless, despite the dicey aspects of the Wired piece, you can compensate for the main shortcoming of "Flawless" -- an insufficiency of illustrations -- by looking at the photos and diagrams accompanying it on Wired's Web site.
As Selby and Campbell point out, what Notarbartolo may need most right now is economic cover. He's out of jail, but closely watched. You see, the loot from the Antwerp job was never recovered; diamonds are famously hard to trace and relatively easy to liquidate. Notarbartolo and his confederates are in the peculiar position of sitting on piles of wealth they can't actually spend without attracting highly undesirable attention from authorities. Being able to point to a Hollywood movie contract comes in handy when you have to justify stuff like the brand-new BMW hatchback Notarbartolo was caught driving recently. (It can't really explain the kilogram of rough and polished diamonds stuffed between the car's seats, but he had another story for that.)
A few key mysteries about the Antwerp diamond heist remain, most notably, how did the thieves get past the combination lock on the vault door and who else was in on the job? Every true crime narrative ought to feature a few unanswered questions. That's one of the pleasures of the form, that little shiver of possibility, of secrets yet to be revealed and primed to be debated for decades; it was much more fun to speculate on who Deep Throat might have been than it is to know. One thing you can be sure of, though, when it comes to the Antwerp caper: Don't believe what you see in the movies.
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