A recurring gag on "The Daily Show" involves a series of short clips of appearances by various advocates of the Bush administration on assorted news programs; the joke is that they all use the same buzzwords -- "cut-and-run" is the latest example -- with a robotic uniformity. The laughter this routine gets comes partly from the way it makes the conservatives seem like automatons, and partly from the sheer obviousness of the ploy. What makes them think we're so dumb? George Lakoff, a University of California at Berkeley linguistics professor who has lately taken to advising the left on how to better convey its political message, would probably reply, "What makes you think you're so smart?"
Lakoff's latest book, "Whose Freedom? The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea," doesn't offer a material advance on his earlier works on political culture, "Moral Politics" (1996) and the how-to manual "Don't Think of an Elephant," which became a bestseller in 2004. "Whose Freedom?" focuses on the one key concept in its title and elaborates on all the ways that progressives can reclaim the idea of freedom from the right and present their political approach as more true to traditional American ideals of liberty. Conservatives, Lakoff argues, have used the media to imprint their version of "freedom" in the public's mind -- literally in the circuits of our brains -- using a canny understanding of how political language shapes political beliefs and the very same numbing repetition that "The Daily Show" mocks.
People on the left tend to regard Lakoff either as a prophet preaching the way out of the wilderness or as a psychobabble-spouting ivory towerist who caters to the self-help mind-set of cloistered liberals instead of advocating roll-up-your-sleeves organizing. The truth is probably in the middle, because Lakoff is right when he observes that American political behavior seldom follows the directives of rational self-interest and that a lot of our thinking transpires unconsciously. The dopey repetition that we chuckle over watching "The Daily Show" uses the same technique employed by the show's advertisers, a litany that sneaks into our heads despite our knowing skepticism. (And what skeptics could be more knowing than Jon Stewart fans?) It works. Otherwise, the corporate advertisers -- no fools -- wouldn't be paying so much for it.
The strength of "Whose Freedom?" is that it attributes the left's current foundering not just to a failure of strategy but to a failure of self-knowledge. Progressives, he argues, don't really understand what they believe or, just as important, how they believe it. "Freedom and liberty are progressive ideas -- our ideas," he writes. "It is time for progressives to fully integrate them into our everyday thinking and into our language." Furthermore, the progressive notion of freedom is identical to "traditional American freedom," which "still reigns in the American mind." Progressives really are in tune with what many average Americans believe, Lakoff insists, but conservatives are so good at hijacking the language to peddle their own radical redefinition of "freedom" that the other side can't get its message across.
Lakoff's political thinking turns on several ideas gleaned from his background in cognitive science. First, rooted in his early work in linguistics, is the idea that most thought is metaphorical. We understand abstract concepts by "mapping" them onto concrete, physical experiences. The language we use to describe freedom (or the lack of it) is grounded in metaphors of bodily movement and of coercion and restraint: groups are "held back," the press is "gagged," people gain "access" to higher office, etc. That's why, Lakoff writes, our feelings about freedom are "visceral," because they're based on our animal desire to move about as we please. These feelings, like most feelings, are essential to the judgments we make about what we do, but they aren't strictly rational.
More important to Lakoff's political influence is the idea of "frames," the underlying structures of abstract concepts. A concept like freedom has an "uncontested core" -- a central nugget of ideas that almost everyone can agree on -- while different people can harbor radically different notions about the form the concept takes in real life. For example, the left and right in America may both agree that freedom is good, but while the left sees poverty relief programs as offering the poor freedom from want and fear, the right usually sees them as fostering a dependency on the government that lessens their freedom.
In Lakoff's scheme, there are deep frames -- larger structures that define how someone understands a whole range of questions -- and surface frames, which determine how they view specific issues. Probably the most resonant of Lakoff's ideas contrasts conservative and progressive beliefs about how governments relate to their people. These frames are metaphors based on family models. Conservatives, as he sees it, subscribe to a "strict father" ideal, a model in which the leader leads with a moral authority that "must not be seriously challenged," protecting the family from the very real evils of the outside world. He teaches the children using a demanding system of laws and punishments, instilling in them the self-discipline to succeed in a ruthlessly competitive and morally dangerous world. They learn that if they don't play by the rules, they will lose out, and deserve it.
Progressives, by contrast, subscribe to the "nurturant parent" model. This concept seems somewhat foggier, "authoritative without being authoritarian," based on mutual respect and the idea that discussion and explanation, rather than simple decree and force, are the best way to set rules. Adhering to key principles like fairness or kindness according to the situation is more important than following the letter of the law in every circumstance. The reward for behaving well is affection, togetherness and help when you need it. It holds that the "citizens care about their community and each other and act responsibly toward their community and each other." The nurturant-parent model puts its emphasis on the carrot, while the strict-father model is all about the stick.
Lakoff wants his progressive readers to understand that when conservatives like George W. Bush talk about "protecting our freedoms" by, say, trying to eliminate Social Security, they aren't being simply hypocritical, cynical or "mean"; within their own moral framework, what they are saying is true. It's just that their concept of freedom is "so alien to progressives that many progressives cannot even understand it, much less defend against it." There is no single, shared definition of what "freedom" looks like because it's a contested concept. And in the past 30 years or so, when it comes to running America, the right has been winning the contest.
In the strict-father model, discipline and morality are the same thing, and the free market is the ideal, natural forum in which they can prove their worth. People become rich and powerful because they are disciplined and therefore moral; people become poor and weak because they are undisciplined and therefore immoral. To "reward" the poor for this by giving them resources taken from the rich is immoral. Because the free market supposedly rewards morality and discipline, it's immoral to interfere with its operation. For some conservatives, all of this has been ordained by the ultimate in strict fathers, God, and to suggest that it should be done otherwise amounts to blasphemy.
Many Americans, however, are what Lakoff calls "biconceptual." In some parts of their lives -- at home, say -- they behave according to the nurturant-parent model, while in others -- perhaps the workplace -- they're more strict-father. The point is, they swing both ways, although in recent years, conservatives have done a much better job at persuading them to the strict-father view of things. This has happened, Lakoff believes, because conservatives really worked at it. Finding themselves out of power in the '60s and '70s, they did some serious soul-searching and consolidated their moral view of American political life. They invested heavily in the think tanks, educational institutions and media outlets that figured out how to hone their message so that it penetrated to the very heart of the American political imagination.
If progressives would only do the same thing -- get a better grasp on the moral frames that unite them and concentrate on how to express those frames properly -- Lakoff believes they could arouse the nurturant-parent models that lie dormant in the minds of most Americans. And they wouldn't have to betray their ideals or pander to centrists by "skewing right." They can win back the public (or at least the biconceptuals) "honestly, using framings, both deep and surface, that we really believe and that reveal the truth about our social, economic and political realities." That's why much of "Why Freedom?" is devoted to explaining how classic progressive issues like social welfare, universal healthcare, improved public education, fair trade, labor unionization and a less warlike foreign policy can be articulated as forms of freedom.
Instead of allowing conservatives to define, for example, taxes as a restriction on a person's economic freedom, progressives should seize the initiative and characterize taxes as each citizen's contribution to a commonwealth that provides more freedoms than most of us could afford on our own. Government regulations don't limit the freedom of business, they free citizens from threats to the commonwealth like pollution or defective products. They liberate citizens from unfair discrimination that would otherwise prevent them from freely realizing their dreams and potential.
Instead of doing this, progressives insist on making what Lakoff calls "the rationalist mistake." This is the "myth," born of the Enlightenment, that people behave rationally, according to universal principles of reason, in their self-interest and according to the facts. As Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas?" memorably pointed out, this just isn't the case, at least in America.
What progressives fail to understand, Lakoff maintains, is that unless facts can be accommodated in the frames that people use to understand a situation, they'll just ignore them. And conservatives have been winning the frame game for three decades, mostly because they're clever enough to understand that it's the only game in town. They know that American voters prefer to select candidates (or, more precisely, presidents) on the basis of how they feel about them as people. "It is not that positions on issues don't matter," Lakoff writes. "They do. But they tend to be symbolic of values, identity, and character, rather than being of primary import in themselves."
A lot of this makes a lot of sense, and it's easy to start imagining ways that pressing issues could be recast according to Lakoff's formula. Progressives could demand that the wealthy pay their "fair share" to enjoy the "freedoms" guaranteed by such government-funded infrastructure as the highway system, the Internet, the court system, the banking system and so on. (Lakoff points out that the rich tend to use more of these resources than others do.) Instead of allowing themselves to be portrayed as anti-business, progressives should say that they want to protect citizens from the sway of big corporations -- like HMOs and oil companies -- which, unlike an elected government, have no accountability to the public.
Research has long shown that the American electorate may listen to negative campaigning, but when it votes, it wants to vote for something, not just against something else. If progressives continue, as they have in recent decades, to see their main role as the critics of the powerful, they'll continue to eliminate themselves as a positive choice. But what kind of political system do progressives actually advocate? Is it socialism? The vast majority of Americans, including many progressives, see that ideology as practically discredited. (As a well-meaning but somewhat muddled friend of mine once protested, "I think it can be good for some people. Not for me, though.")
Most progressives probably support some form of social democracy, but that term is faintly tinged with socialism and associated with old-line European states. Lakoff's interesting innovation is to try to reframe progressivism as deeply in tune with traditional American values rather than as a critique of them. Instead of saying,` "Let's be like the Swedes!" he wants progressives to say, "Let's be like..." well, that's not entirely clear, but a good approximation might be an idealized small American town where people still believe in public service, civic responsibility and helping out fellow townsfolk who are down on their luck. Most important, "Whose Freedom?" is really a call for the left to synthesize its current random assortment of positions and theories into a single, powerful and unambiguously American vision.
The problem with this prescription, though, is that it's not clear how many would sign on to the progressive vision once it was clarified. Lakoff implies that the natural home of this vision is in the Democratic Party, but how much of the Democratic leadership is really willing to cut its ties to corporate power and money? He uses Bill Clinton as an exemplar of a more progressive approach to foreign policy, but Clinton presided over the North American Free Trade Agreement, a treaty that Lakoff never names but surely must deplore for undermining labor rights and environmentalism. And Clinton also initiated massive welfare reforms, whose ambiguous results suggest that caring for the chronically poor might really be a more complicated matter than simple cutting them a check.
Progressives would also have to find ways to counter arguments that large public aid programs tend to turn into inefficient, self-perpetuating bureaucracies; that labor unions have been prone to corruption; that identity politics often divides groups in need of unification. Those are all legitimate criticisms (coming from both right and left) of past progressive positions, and they are grounded in real experience, not just strict-father frames.
Some critics have pointed out that while many progressives see themselves as helping the poor and disenfranchised, they don't actually belong to those classes or want to have much to do with them, which in turn alienates the very people whose interests are supposedly being served. Others note that the leftist intelligentsia seems most deeply invested in seeing itself as cooler and more sophisticated than the American mainstream, which makes the goal of finding common ground with that mainstream an anathema.
When it comes to the Democrats, it's probably more than just lame leadership that prevents the party from clearly articulating what it stands for. If it did that, chances are a good portion of the loose conglomeration of interests that compose the party would split off in protest. (It's happened before.) Lakoff is right in insisting that ideas are crucial to political success. Every effective movement needs ideas and a vision that move people emotionally, bring them together and reach down to the very fiber of their identity. If progressives, the left, the Democrats -- whoever -- want to gain power, they'll have to do the hard work of figuring out how to show the rest of America that it shares their beliefs, and to do that, they'll have to figure out exactly what those beliefs are. But most of all, they'll need to make sure they really and truly believe them.
When the editors of the trade publication Publisher's Weekly announced their list of the 10 best books of the year on Monday, outrage flared across the Internet: Not a single book by a woman made the cut. Comments on P.W.'s Web site likened the list to "a flier tacked to the wall at a men's club," and the fledging feminist literary organization WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts) set up a wiki page inviting visitors to add titles to a list of "great books by women" published in 2009.
And of course there was a Twitter hashtag (#fembooks) for those who wanted to express their displeasure in real time. Tweeters pointed out that women buy the majority of books sold in the U.S. and usually make up about half of the authors on any given New York Times Bestseller list. Others complained that classic novels by men get trumpeted as "must reads" while those by women are often pooh-poohed by male readers as "not to my taste." Charlotte Abbott, a literary journalist, floated the idea of an American version of Britain's Orange Prize, which goes to the author of the year's "best full-length novel in English." (American novelists are eligible for the Orange Prize; Marilynne Robinson won it last year for "Home.") That suggestion was greeted with a mixture of enthusiasm and worries about "ghettoization."
What's at issue isn't sales or even access to readers; this is an argument about prestige and critical recognition, an argument best articulated by the novelist and critic Francine Prose in a 1998 article for Harper's magazine. Prose detected a greater reverence for books by men among the nation's literary and critical establishment, which includes reviewers, prize committees and the institutions that bestow grants. She blamed this on a widespread if seldom-stated assumption that "women writers will not write about anything important -- anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise."
Explaining P.W.'s list, editor Louisa Ermelino wrote, "We wanted [it] to reflect what we thought were the top 10 books of the year with no other consideration ... We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz. We gave fair chance to the 'big' books of the year, but made them stand on their own two feet. It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male." Yet, according to Miami Herald blogger Connie Ogle, Ermelino sounded less apologetic when quoted in a press release, characterizing the list as not "the most politically correct."
Anyone who's ever had to compile such a list -- and admittedly, there aren't many of us -- will feel an awkward sympathy for the P.W. team. Two years ago, while settling on Salon's picks for the year's best works of fiction, we wound up with five novels by men. This dilemma precipitated a lot of soul-searching, only partially soothed by the reminder that most years the majority of the books on our fiction list are by women authors. Should we swap out one of the titles by a man for another we liked less, simply because it was by a woman? The WILLA wiki implies that the editors of P.W. simply didn't bother to read books by Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood or Alice Munro when selecting their list, but that's highly unlikely. Chances are that they (like me) didn't think the Lorrie Moore novel and many others posted to the wiki were up to snuff. Something similar happened at Salon when it came to the fiction of 2007. In the end, unable to find books by women that we liked better than those five novels, we opted for honesty, which we consider the critic's first responsibility.
Without tipping our hand, I'll merely say that it's unlikely Salon will suffer the drubbing P.W. has endured when we run our own 10-best list in early December. But every year we do face a ticklish question: Is it the right thing to gerrymander your list in order to counteract real, long-standing cultural biases, even if that means lying to your readers? What is a 10-best list, after all, if not a record of the books we enjoyed most over the past 12 months? If you insist on a list that's ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That's a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.
On the other hand, few things are more subjective than judgments about how "great" any given book is. Those real, long-standing cultural biases mentioned above live in the heart of every critic to one degree or another, and we'd be shirking our duty if we didn't try to account for them. Writing off such qualms as mere "political correctness" is, in its own way, just as dishonest as exaggerating your admiration for a book simply because its author is female, or dark-skinned, or from a far-off nation. I don't doubt that P.W.'s editors are entirely sincere when they say their list reflects their unvarnished preferences. Still, the fact that those preferences can't encompass one woman author among 10 books (fiction or nonfiction) picked from the 50,000-plus titles they claim to have sifted through suggests that their horizons might need a bit of deliberate widening.
Fortunately, most years bring enough good books that we're able to choose from a fairly diverse array of candidates. If we adore two novels (or histories, or biographies) to about the same degree, we do take factors like an author's gender or the size of the book's publisher into account -- the same way we try to maintain a mix of literary tones and moods, from the slim, intensely personal memoir to the majestic and well-footnoted doorstop. The key question remains, is the quality of our final list diminished by those decisions, or enriched by them? We like to think that, like us, most readers appreciate some variety in their literary diets.
During the early fall, publishers release the highest concentration of books by established writers -- many of which, incidentally, turn out to be disappointing, like this year's offerings from John Irving and Philip Roth. As a result, it's easy to miss fine novels by relative newcomers (who are also less tempted than the big names to phone it in). Tobias Hill's impressive "The Hidden," published last month as a paperback original, is a case in point. Hill, a British poet, novelist and short story writer, likes to take subjects conventionally associated with airport thrillers -- murder mysteries, quests for ancient treasure, conspiracies -- and crack them open to probe for more succulent literary meat. "The Hidden," set on an archaeological dig at the site of ancient Sparta, circles around the suspicious activities of some of the dig's team while dissecting the broken inner life of a young man who wants nothing more than to be let in on their secret.
Ben Mercer, an Oxford scholar, comes to Greece to escape a wrecked marriage; his wife describes him as "a danger to her, body and soul," for reasons not immediately revealed. Running low on money, he gets a job at a greasy spoon in an Athens suburb, where barely submerged resentments between native Greeks and Albanian immigrants seem about to brim over into violence. Then Eberhard, a college acquaintance, turns up at one of his tables and mentions working at an excavation in Laconia, otherwise known as Lacedaemonia, the location of the ancient city-state of Sparta. Although Eberhard tries to discourage him, Ben's imagination has been ignited. The severity of Sparta's ethos has always fascinated him, as has the elusiveness of its material remains. Unlike the Athenians, "the Spartans left nothing behind that reflected their greatness. They had become no more than rumors of rumors in the histories of others ... Each outsider contradicting the next, a chain of Mediterranean whispers."
Archaeologists like to dig stuff up, of course, dragging to the surface of the earth things that have lain beneath it for centuries. Some of those things, Hill suggests, might be better left buried. Having finagled his way into a job at the dig, Ben finds his curiosity further inflamed by a clique among the site's workers, three men (including Eberhard) and two women who form a seemingly impenetrable social unit. Deflecting the friendly overtures of other team members, Ben yearns first to be included and later to know just what this little group is hiding up in the hills.
The story of Ben's gradual insinuation into the clique alternates with the notes he's writing "towards" his thesis. The theme of these notes drifts from the enigma of the Spartans, whose refusal to speak for themselves permitted a thousand stories about them to flourish, to ruminations on the connection between love and ruthlessness (exemplified by the unparalleled unity of the Theban Sacred Band, a military force made up of 150 homosexual couples), to, finally, the riddles posed by his new friends. He begins an affair with one of the women and joins the group on a midnight jackal hunt, but never feels as if he's penetrated to the heart of their mystery.
What's really going on with Eberhard & Co. turns out to be just barely plausible ... well, maybe not quite that, but what Hill does with it and the ancient history it invokes is hypnotic. The policies of the Spartan elite -- who annually declared war against the captive majority of their population (called helots) so that these serflike non-citizens could be murdered at will without any loss of honor -- feeds into questions of modern-day political expedience, extremism and the power of fear. What crimes can be justified in the pursuit of a noble ideal? Odd anecdotes -- about a discarded doll ripped open to reveal a music-box "heart" and a fetal chicken found in a cracked egg -- mirror disturbing discoveries at the site and in a cave, which in turn echo the descent into the underworld made by so many mythical heroes. Do monsters await in the bowels of the earth, or in ourselves?
Novelists have been attempting this sort of thing since John Fowles' "The Magus"; what distinguishes "The Hidden" is both a clarity of purpose (the resolution is not excessively coy or ambiguous) and radiant prose. Hill's style is the opposite of the description-clogged, obscurantist verbiage that most poets produce when turning to fiction. Instead, he brings to this novel the kind of metaphor so good you don't savor it so much as shiver with instantaneous recognition. "There was a delicacy to his sanity he had never acknowledged before," he writes of Ben at one point. "It was as frail as water tension." How is it, I thought after reading this line, that we don't already compare the stability of a fragile mind to the thin skin of water that keeps a teardrop together?
A pity then, that -- no doubt due to the expediencies of paperback publication -- "The Hidden" shows signs of lax editing (the novel could easily lose 30 pages and be strengthened by the cuts) and sloppy copyediting (multiple typos and unconverted British spellings like "realise"). Still, the same criticisms could be leveled at Irving's interminable "Last Night in Twisted River," a book that evidences far less thought and artistry. In a season of high-profile novels, "The Hidden" is in danger of living up to its name, and that would indeed be a crime.
Peter Straub has a lot of alter egos. There's Tim Underhill, a bestselling, jazz-loving novelist born in the Midwestern town of Millhaven (fictional counterpart to Straub's own hometown of Milwaukee), who lives in haunted solitude in a loft in Manhattan's East Village. Then there's the late, not-so-great professor Putney Tyson Ridge, the man Straub might have been if he'd gotten stuck in academia instead of writing such canonical contemporary horror fiction as "Ghost Story" and "Koko" as well as collaborating with Stephen King on "The Talisman" and "The Black House." The latest of Straub's personae is Pete Braust (do the anagram), a blind retired police detective who has appeared occasionally, played by Straub, on ABC's daytime soap "One Life to Live."
What's a little puzzling about these avatars is that being Peter Straub seems pretty darn sweet all on its own. A modest, eminently amiable bear of a man, Straub lives on the Upper West Side with Susan, his wife of 43 years, in a five-story brownstone stuffed with books, art, photographs and the biggest collection of jazz LPs and CDs you're likely to see outside a library or radio station. Tucked into every nook of the place is some memento of an interesting experience, literary passion or brilliant friend, from a set of Raymond Chandler first editions (gifts from Otto Penzler) to a framed photo of Straub and King on the day they decided to collaborate on "The Talisman" to the Boorum & Pease notebooks in which Straub wrote "Lost Boy Lost Girl," "In the Night Room" and other novels -- each decorated with an enigmatic collage reflecting the book's themes. There are awards on the mantel, Palomino pencils on the desk, stacks of poetry volumes by C.P. Cavafy and C.D. Wright in the study, Paul Desmond on the stereo and a sleek, friendly tabby named Hector on the living room sofa. When people fantasize about "being a writer," chances are the life they're imagining looks a lot like Peter Straub's.
Straub's literary specialty, however, is not dreams but nightmares; many people name "Ghost Story" as the scariest book they've ever read. He's particularly adept at the kind of creepy psychological yarn pioneered by Henry James and modernized by Shirley Jackson, two of Straub's writerly touchstones. That's the taste Straub has brought to bear on his latest project, editing the two-volume anthology "American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny," just published by Library of America. (Straub also edited the LOA's H.P. Lovecraft collection.) The project has given him a century-spanning perspective on the art of making readers squirm uneasily in their chairs.
Most of the stories you include in this anthology don't involve a tremendous amount of violence.
No, that's less interesting to me. A lot of books on the horror shelves now, for example, are totally exterior. Take Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter novels. The one I like best is [the first book] "Red Dragon," because it's more interior, and shows you more of what's going on inside someone like that. It's more complex, more nuanced.
A few years back I guest-edited an issue of the literary journal Conjunctions, focusing on what we called the New Wave Fabulists. And I realized that most of the stories people sent me had to do with loss and grief. To me those are the defining emotions of the genre of horror.
When I was working on that issue, I was excited by what Kelly Link, Dan Chaon and a lot of other writers were doing, a somehow unplaceable kind of story that wasn't mainstream, wasn't realistic exactly, that had a fantastic tone like science fiction or fantasy but it wasn't any of those things. It was out there by itself. I liked that definitions of genre that I'd grown up with as a young man seemed to be dissolving. And this is purely pretentious, but I thought I'd done something to help that along. Dan Chaon sent me a high school photo of himself reading "Ghost Story." Take a writer like Brian Evenson, whose work is very serious and smart, with a high literary quality, but definitely, it's horror.
Did you learn any new secrets about scaring readers from going through so many stories for this new anthology?
I'm not sure I can explain exactly how it works. It has to do with creating believable people for whom the reader can feel affection, then putting them in danger of the unnameable and unseen. And it has to be suspended. You can't just pull a gun out and have them get shot. You have to allow the sense of underlying unease to intensify over time. As crucial as fear is dread. Dread is essential.
How would you distinguish the two?
Well, dread leads to fear, to shame and to terror. And before dread comes foreboding.
And foreboding is ...
A prescience that something bad is about to happen. You don't know why you don't like that guy, but you just have a bad feeling about him. Dread is when foreboding shows itself to be justified. Something like foreboding is built into all fiction, I think. Even Barbara Pym novels have a point where you think, "Is that altar cloth going to work or not?"
In your novel "Lost Boy Lost Girl," there's a serial killer antagonist, but there's also this other story line about Tim Underhill's desire to rescue the nephew he loves so much from his own brother, who's just crushing the kid's spirit. In its own way, Tim's powerlessness to save that child is as horrifying as the killer's power to hurt him. The way you weave the fantastic threat in with that realistic emotional dimension makes the book especially devastating. The exterior action mirrors this complex interior danger. It emerges from the psychology of the characters, in a way.
I hope so. For Underhill, of course, all of this started with his Vietnam experience. He had post-traumatic stress disorder. I never had that, but I had its little brother [Straub was in a severe car accident at age 7], which is called adjustment reaction, according to my shrink.
Do you think that you have to have that kind history to write the sorts of things you write, or even to read them? I certainly know people who say, "I can't believe you want to read about such unpleasant stuff!"
I have no patience with people like that. They are deliberately not looking at something right in front of them that they should look at. In my novel "The Throat," Tim Underhill says, "The world is half night." You have to appreciate that, and if you do there is a kind of beauty to it all. There's nothing beautiful about violence and savagery, but there is in the human response, that we can feel ourselves deepened by unhappy things that happen to us. Grief is a very painful emotion because it depends on love. It's the price you pay for love. If you live to have actual experiences, you come face to face with real darkness.
Even the more surreal touches in your books do seem to feed back into very real anxieties. Tim Underhill meets a strangely hostile fan/collector in "In the Night Room," and this man tells him that when a book is published, every so often a copy comes off the presses that isn't the book the writer actually wrote but the book that he or she meant to write, sort of the platonic ideal of that book. There are people who collect just these copies, and of course they don't think much of authors because they know just how badly authors mess up their own ideas. Now that's a concept that strikes right at the heart of every writer's fears! You're face to face with this guy who knows what you should have been able to do and totally failed to do. So when you mentioned shame earlier as being part of the progress from foreboding to dread to fear, that really struck me.
It's definitely one of our most powerful, unpleasant emotions.
But shame implies responsibility. If your characters are just these blameless suburban innocents and then bam, something evil pounces on them, it's not the same.
Yes, and after a while I was only interested in the kind of story you're talking about. The external threat only seemed valid to me if there was some connection between the thing and the people perceiving the thing. It's a short hop from there to having everything being a projection from the psyches of the characters.
Do you find that ambiguity more scary?
Probably. Because you have to be really good to make the straightforward supernatural pay off. Stephen King can do it, but I've seen a hundred guys get only halfway there.
So that was the kind of story you were drawn to in putting this new anthology together?
Mostly, although there are some stories in there that are more straightforward. One story, "The Jelly-Fish," is pure pulp about a scientist who shrinks himself to microscopic size and gets eaten by an amoeba. That's just fun. Where I really used my taste is in the last half of the second volume, where story after story is grown-up, complex and surprising. And overall there's a preponderance of stories where everything is implied or ambiguous. It's less obvious and it's more literary.
"Passions run hot when the discussion turns to language," writes Rutgers English professor Jack Lynch in his sprightly new history of the notion of "proper" English, "The Lexicographer's Dilemma." "Friends who can discuss politics, religion and sex with perfect civility are often reduced to red-faced rage when the topic of conversation is the serial comma or an expression like more unique." Ain't it the truth? My favorite call-in radio program regularly invites "word maven" Patricia T. O'Conner to come on and talk about new and old figures of speech. O'Conner clearly prefers to marvel over the language's diversity, but the half-hour is inevitably eaten up by people kvetching about their pet peeves, more often than not some barely detectable error or non-infraction that makes the caller apoplectic -- such as the phrase "gone missing," which is "perfectly standard," according to Lynch. But who am I to mock? I, who have gnashed my teeth countless times over the dangling participles that abound on NPR!
Lynch would like us all to calm down, please, and recognize that "proper" English is a recent and changeable institution. "The Lexicographer's Dilemma" recapitulates the long argument between two schools of thought: the prescriptive -- which holds that the job of language experts is to lay down the law by telling us how to speak and write -- and the descriptive, which holds that compilers of dictionaries and other guides are in the business of describing, not dictating, how the language is used. The latter group includes most professional linguists and lexicographers, but the former -- self-appointed pundits like the late William Safire and Lynne Truss, author of the bestselling rant about punctuation errors, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" -- know that the real money lies in validating the ire of purists.
According to Lynch, the very notion of correct English is only 300 years old; in the days of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the idea that native English speakers could be accused of using their own language improperly would have seemed absurd. The advent of printing -- and, especially, the growth of general literacy -- led to efforts to establish authoritative standards of spelling and usage in the 18th century. Scholars known collectively as "the 18th-century grammarians" have, in some accounts of the language's history, been set up as "dastardly, moustache-twirling villains and mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging morons," who attempted to impose a lot of arbitrary restrictions on English grammar. Their most notorious crime was the prohibition against split infinitives.
Lynch takes a more temperate view of these "bad guys," as he does of most matters discussed in "The Lexicographer's Dilemma." While he leans decidedly toward the descriptivist camp, he believes experts ought to acknowledge the public's need for guidance on how to speak and write standard English -- that is, the lingua franca of official, public and commercial life in the English-speaking world.
Which brings us back to those split infinitives, the most famous of which is spoken by William Shatner in the opening credits of the TV series "Star Trek": "To boldly go where no man has gone before." The infinitive form of any English verb almost always consists of two words: "to go," "to eat," "to walk," etc. The idea that those two words ought to be treated as a single, inseparable unit derives from the fact that in Latin the infinitive is one word. The imposition of Latinate grammar on English -- the edict against ending sentences in a preposition is another example -- is what the 18th-century grammarians have been condemned for by more liberal-minded linguists.
Lynch does think that English speakers should be taught to avoid splitting infinitives in certain situations, not because splitting them is incorrect, but because other people, people in a position to judge and exclude, have been taught it's incorrect. The ability to speak and write standard English gives students "access to power," he writes. It's a membership card required for participation in the culture's important conversations. But that doesn't mean that standard English is necessarily superior to, say, African-American Vernacular English (AAVE or, to use a more notorious moniker, Ebonics), or that deviations from it constitute the downfall of civilization as we know it, as popular curmudgeons of Safire's ilk like to proclaim.
"Correct" English, as Lynch characterizes it, is basically "the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago." And sure enough, the first guides to English usage promised to teach people to write and speak with greater "elegance" and "politeness," not greater correctness. These manuals, born of an age of increased social mobility, were intended for "a newly self-conscious group of people who were no longer peasants but still were excluded from the traditional aristocracy." The suddenly rich children of merchants and manufacturers needed instructions on the elegant grammar (and manners) of the aristocracy in order to blend in with their social superiors. Tellingly, the 300-year history of fulmination against improper usage is marked by diatribes against those "inferior" and upstart groups supposedly most prone to transgression: women, young people, racial and ethnic minorities and, of course, Americans.
To protests that the language police are only protecting the accuracy, precision and clarity of our tongue, Lynch lifts a skeptical eyebrow. Many of the most roundly deplored "debasements" of English are nevertheless perfectly comprehensible: I didn't confuse you by writing "Ain't it the truth?" in my opening paragraph, did I? The only truly unbreakable rules of grammar and usage are the ones that, when broken, result in a genuine failure to communicate. The rest is a form of covert class warfare, and today's usage reproofs constitute a status-protecting thump on the head delivered by the upper middle class to uppity members of the lower middle.
Thinking of the grammar wars in this light helps explain why they provoke such rage. Much as some people might detest seeing the noun "impact" used as a verb, if a lot of people say it and almost everybody understands it when it's said, then a coup has been effected. The "verbing" of nouns (or the creation of "nerbs") has been a flashpoint for the past four or five decades with the growth of business management lingo. Complaints about this point to a particularly American social fissure: between the cultured sensibility of the liberally educated and the can-do utilitarianism of striving MBAs.
Does it help to know that the foremost Victorian grammar cop regarded "donate" as "utterly abominable" and "inaugurate" as "high-flying nonsense"? It is in the nature of language to change, and while teaching people to use standard English may help get them into a boardroom or cabinet chamber, chances are they'll teach English itself a few new tricks by the time they get out, not necessarily for the worse. For every groaner like "mentee" (i.e., "protégé"), there are awesome coinages like "aerobicized," "blowback" and "crunk" -- all recently added to the "Concise Oxford English Dictionary." Also, I rejoice to learn that "whom" (the objective case of the pronoun "who") may soon vanish from written English just as it has nearly vanished from casual speech, and students will have one less tedious rule to memorize. But dangling participles? Those I'll fight 'til the bitter end.
Last week, BBC Audiobooks America announced that it would sponsor the creation of a story via Twitter feed, using a first sentence written by author Neil Gaiman as the seed and inviting the public to collaborate in completing it, one 140-character passage at a time. The experiment was widely pronounced "cool," as such things usually are, then promptly forgotten by everyone but the participants -- again, as such things usually are.
The several dozen people who contributed to the story seemed to have fun, and perhaps that's all that really matters. A Web 2.0 version of the old surrealist parlor game known as "exquisite corpse," the twittered story was intended as a publicity stunt for BBC Audiobooks America's line of "distinctive single-voiced and full-cast dramatized audiobooks," and surely succeeded at that. Yet BBCAA intends to publish an audio-only version of the story, read by Gaiman himself, which makes this as apt an occasion as any to raise some questions about the creative potential of social networking. How is a good story invented? Is it yet another of those decision-based endeavors that can, according to the technotopian, freakonomical wisdom of our time, be performed better en masse than by the hopelessly antiquated individual? Can fiction be crowdsourced?
Although this is far from the first Twitter-generated story, Gaiman may be the ideal writer to preside over such an undertaking. No popular author better demonstrates how openly borrowed material can be transfigured by the force of a powerful imagination. His work combines elements of fairy tale, folklore, classic British children's fiction, comics, horror and hard-boiled mystery. "Coraline" taps into the tradition of countless stories about bored children who find portals to other worlds, partakes of the evil-stepmother motif from the Brothers Grimm, structures it all into a save-your-parents quest reminiscent of "A Wrinkle in Time," and so on, but Gaiman's limpid style and heady imagery (those button eyes!) also make it indisputably original. The Newbery-medal-winning "The Graveyard Book" performs a similar alchemy by combining Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book" with (improbably enough) the modern-day serial-killer thriller. This method makes Gaiman easy to imitate but -- and here's the rub -- impossible to equal.
Gaiman's kickoff sentence for the the BBCAA story is, "Sam was brushing her hair when the girl in the mirror put down the hairbrush, smiled & said, 'We don't love you anymore.'" What follows, coaxed out of the Twitterverse, is a patchwork of extremely familiar motifs: malicious animated puppets, cuddly talking animal pals, an ominous castle, a sinister music box and spookily chanted rhymes -- all tied to the obligatory chase after objects of obscure magical importance (otherwise known as plot coupons).
The twittered story (which as of this writing has no title) is Gaimanesque, yes, but only really in tone. Much of it is simply lifted -- from "Coraline," from "Alice in Wonderland," from "The Wizard of Oz" and, above all, from the storehouse of shopworn Hollywood clichés -- to form a patchwork that never resolves into anything more that just that, a hodgepodge of random stuff you've seen a zillion times before. The considerably muddled narrative describes the adventures of a girl who is either 1) kidnapped by her mirror reflection and trying to get home or 2) bravely attempting to rescue her little brother from an evil queen, or both (it keeps changing), but Sam's exploits turned out to be far less compelling than the spectacle of their composition. Witnessing this story come together was an object lesson in the trials of collaboration and the limits of the wisdom of crowds.
Here's how it worked: Although anyone could tweet a suggested next sentence, an editor at BBCAA selected which ones would be incorporated into the canonical version of the story. (Gaiman's involvement in the creative phase of the operation seems minimal, which didn't keep one participant from grandiosely claiming to be "writing an audiobook with Neil Gaiman" elsewhere on the Web.) Oddly enough, no one was bothered by this "gatekeeping" role, even when the BBCAA editor repeatedly rebuffed a campaign to give a minor character a bigger role in the plot. (He/she later gave in, though.) Anyone who took a good look at the chaotic selection of potential paths forward could see that somebody had to steer. Yet, even with a skipper, much of the time the tale didn't seem to be sailing anywhere but in circles.
It's tempting to attribute this meandering quality to the lack of a master plan. However, contrary to what people often think, improvisation is a vital part of the fiction-writing process. Remarkably few single-person authors outline their plots in advance of writing. Many, like the science-fiction novelist Samuel Delany, report that they start out with a few images and then see where their intuition leads them. "Among those stories that strike us as perfectly plotted, with those astonishing endings both a complete surprise and a total satisfaction," Delaney once wrote, "it is amazing how many of their writers will confess that the marvelous resolution was as much a surprise for them as it was for the reader."
Nor is the problem always a matter of too many people pulling the story in too many directions. True, if you're only going to get one or two of your own sentences into the end product, you're going to want them to be boffo. Consequently, most of the proposed passages represent bids to initiate a pivotal plot development ("Suddenly" has to be the most popular adverb deployed), attempts at high drama ("'No!' The Queen shrieked, 'this will not be allowed! He is mine!'") or articulations of some grand insight or theme ("You have to face her. She's part of you"). Without much in the way of simple scene-setting or nuance, the story lacks texture, atmosphere and the variety in pacing and intensity that makes fiction dramatically effective. Instead, with the emotional volume knob stuck on high, the result is just one damn thing after another.
Still, most of the participants have a pretty firm sense of what the parameters of "a Neil Gaiman story" ought to be, and even the rejected tweets had more in common than you'd expect. There was the occasional marginally literate non sequitur -- "'Sir, do you know what is this egg?' Asked Sam to the badger. 'Of course, lady. This is an Catoblepas eggs.'" (Huh?) Yet even these fell within the same essential thematic register. There were few contributions that came entirely out of left field -- no Mach-5 race cars, say, or sessions of Parliament.
Instead of being bombarded with too many ideas, what the twittered story really suffered from was too few. The handful of contributors who could come up with interesting motifs or turns of phrase had no idea how to constructively inject these into the whole, while the ones who were good at moving the plot forward tended to write exclusively in clichés. The dialogue is particularly lamentable, imported exclusively from the most formulaic of action movies: "'Events are already in motion,' the Prince said. 'We must act'"; "Sam screamed 'Nooooo'" "'Sam! Listen to me!' the Prince shouted, 'You must go, we will hold them off, now RUN!'" I was thinking they'd managed to hit every overplayed note of the blockbuster pulp factory except for the venerable "Don't die on me, damn it!" -- when, sure enough, Sam sobs to the stricken Prince, "No, you can't die!"
The same tired devices turned up over and over again. Any shift in the action always seemed to be accompanied by a mysterious glowing light, and the heroine was forever being "enveloped" or "engulfed" in this glow, if not in darkness or some other featureless miasma, as a way of getting her from one indistinct setting to another. At one point she even finds herself transported to a featureless, solid blue vacancy -- much like the green-screen backdrops used to film connect-the-dots CGI blockbusters.
Despite an endless series of chase scenes, by the fourth day of tweeting with the projected 1,000th-tweet end point approaching, the plot wasn't especially close to a resolution, and key elements remained unexplained. Who was the evil queen (besides a lift from "Coraline," "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and "Snow White"), and what did she want? What promise had Sam broken? Who didn't love her anymore? What exactly had happened to her brother? Why had she been sucked into the mirror? What was her reflection doing back in the real world? She'd collected two sidekicks (a badger and a wisecracking puppet, motivations unclear), as well as a green marble egg that intermittently pulsed (pulsing being almost as commonplace as glowing in this story), a gold key, a blue crystal rose, a music box with an evil talking doll inside and a confusing back story involving royal twins, a puppet maker, a magpie with a magic mirror and several doppelgängers, none of which added up to a coherent explanation of what was going on. A lot was happening, and it was all pretty boring.
Consensus began to break down, despite efforts among the contributors to sort out the loose ends while the BBCAA editor was off getting lunch or a little shut-eye. Occasionally a sentence made an obvious plea for answers ("It was that voice again. That voice that had haunted her the first time she reach the castle. And then she realized ..."), but no one took up the challenge, leaving those ellipses sadly unfulfilled. It's so much easier to just introduce another new development! As @Toujours_Diva, the group's self-appointed heckler, wrote sarcastically, "You know what this story needs? A few more extraneous characters." (Some of the collaborators interpreted that as a sincere suggestion.)
Raymond Chandler once offered this piece of advice to his fellow writers: "When in doubt, have a man with a gun come into the room." Yet even the excitement of an armed intruder wears thin by the time you've got 30 of them milling around for no apparent reason. Well past the purported 1,000-tweet limit, Sam was still reviewing the pieces of the puzzle confronting her and wailing, "I don't know how to put it together!" She was not alone. At one point, BBCAA put up a poll asking participants where Sam should end up after yet another engulfment, and the response was evenly divided among several major alternatives. Then they tried literally smooshing all the characters and plot coupons together (because they're all part of Sam!) in a climax that involved yet more glowing and pulsing. And it still wasn't over. People were confused and, it seems, still dissatisfied. Time for another poll! Even the ol' "It was all a dream/the ravings of a lunatic" finish was seriously contemplated.
At some point, every tale needs to stop expanding so it can begin to contract into a coherent whole. People often ask great storytellers, "Where do you get your ideas?" but the real question is "How do you make sense of your ideas?" Delany believed that good writers read so much that they "internalize" certain "literary models" and thereby acquire an instinctual feel for a story's proper shape. As they build on that evocative first image or scene, while they are still venturing further out into the unknown, an unconscious part of their creative intelligence is figuring out how to knit it all back together again. Writers who never develop that instinct tend to keep dragging new gunmen into the room until the story stalls out, which is why a decent ending is so much harder to write than an enticing beginning. The ability to pull it off is one thing that separates the Neil Gaimans of this world from the rest of us saps.
But gather together a hundred people who don't really know how to do this and they're still not going to be able to do it. Even if a handful among them actually do have some aptitude, their efforts will be sabotaged by the well-meaning but misguided inclinations of the rest of the group. Like any art, good fiction requires a combination of talents -- eloquence, inventiveness, pragmatism, decisiveness and taste -- rarely found in a single person, and a prevailing feeling for form that can only be located in a single person.
Most of us do recognize the real thing when we see it in action, but that's another matter. As Delany put it, "While many -- or even most -- people can internalize a range of literary models strongly enough to recognize and enjoy them when they see them in ... new works that they read, very few people internalize them to the extent that they can apply them to new material and use them to create. Lots of people want to. But not many people can." Not many people, and certainly no crowds.
"Elizabeth Taylor" was one of the answers during a high-speed round of the party game Celebrities I played recently. The player had seconds to get his team to guess her name, and the first thing that popped out of his mouth was, "She twittered her heart surgery." The clue worked, but afterward we clucked over it: Not "National Velvet," not "Cleopatra," not "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" but Twitter? Poor Elizabeth Taylor. We were ashamed of ourselves.
According to William J. Mann, Taylor's latest biographer, we probably shouldn't have been. "How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood
Raised in the studio system at a time when stars' images, careers and personal lives were approved and manufactured by potentates like MGM head Louis B. Mayer, Taylor, as Mann sees it, ushered in a new age of candor and independence. The studio had groomed her as an idealized, sensual but sweet beauty, and then she went out and stole Debbie Reynolds' husband, Eddie Fisher, launching a scandal that obsessed the popular press for the better part of the late 1950s. (The infamy of that romantic triangle puts the Aniston-Brangelina soap opera in the shade.) Cast as "cruel and heartless as a black widow spider" (in the words of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, her one-time sponsor and later nemesis), Taylor didn't entirely recover the public's favor until 1960, when she was hospitalized with "Malta fever" in London and reportedly hovered near death.
No sooner had she won back her fans than Taylor shocked them again by jettisoning Fisher and taking up with her married "Cleopatra" costar, Richard Burton, in Rome. This time, rather than lying low, as Taylor had at the beginning of the Fisher affair, she and Burton commenced "flaunting" their adultery on the Via Veneto, "seeming to revel in the headlines and round-the-clock publicity." They received anonymous death threats, and a congresswoman from Georgia tried to have them barred from reentering the United States, but Taylor brazened it out. In a way, it was the beginning of the sexual revolution. "I try not to lie," she told a reporter. "I can't be hypocritical just to protect my public." Long after Taylor and Burton married in 1964, the couple continued to draw mobs of fans and gawkers wherever they went, becoming among the first targets of the paparazzi's new telephoto lenses.
Elizabeth Taylor books abound, and while Mann's eminently yummy entry is pretty much everything you'd want in a Hollywood biography, it's not a whole lot more, either. What does make "How to Be a Movie Star" distinctive is its focus on the changing nature of personal fame as embodied by a woman whose life has consisted of one superlative after another. Married eight times and enduring a string of health crises, Taylor was not only the last classic movie star and the first actress to be paid a million dollars a picture, but at various times regarded as the most beautiful and the most famous woman in the world. Mann has obtained some previously untapped material from the supporting figures in her spectacular life, making particularly good use of Hedda Hopper's files as he casts the columnist as the embodiment of old Hollywood, alternately courting and denouncing "that slut" who defied it.
The most enjoyable chapters in "How to Be a Movie Star" describe the media circus of the Reynolds-Fisher scandal. Debbie Reynolds, working her girl-next-door image for all it was worth, played the abandoned wife and mother to Taylor's shameless homewrecker, capitalizing on the barely submerged domestic anxieties of the 1950s. In reality, Fisher's marriage to Reynolds had been arranged by MGM and had always been loveless. (Their daughter, Carrie Fisher, described the relationship as "basically a press release.") Posing for photographers with diaper pins on her blouse and tears in her eyes, Reynolds gave the performance of a lifetime; as one columnist later observed, "Debbie has more balls than any five guys I've ever known. She pretends to be sweet and demure, but at heart she's as hard as nails." Refusing to submit to the studio's management of the story, Taylor deployed her own press agent to portray her as a devotee of true love. It was the first Hollywood scandal in which dueling versions of the story were presented to the public for vetting, a recipe for endless coverage. Instead of poleaxing the release of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (with Taylor playing a sex-starved hussy in a lacy slip), as the studio had feared, the controversy made it a smash hit.
As a pioneer for the Madonnas and Lindsay Lohans of today, women whose personal lives occupy more of the public imagination than does their creative work, Taylor comes across as remarkably sympathetic and uncomplicated. For all her temperament, narcissism and hedonism, she was never driven or insecure. She didn't seek applause as a balm for deeper wounds, like Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe; her fame was forged by others rather than the object of her own ambition. She didn't much like making movies, though she'd occasionally pull out the stops when the project suited her whims. What she really wanted was to lounge around on yachts and in luxury hotels, chowing down on fried chicken with "lots of gravy" and waking up to a Tiffany's box on her pillow on a fairly regular basis. Acting, fame and a few of her marriages were little more than means to those ends.
It's a truth universally acknowledged that the less someone needs your love, the more lovable they appear, and so it has been with Elizabeth Taylor. The Wife of Bath wrapped in a mink coat, she was foul-mouthed and hard-drinking, addicted to diamonds and drawn to other women's husbands, but she has a good heart, as both her respectful treatment of blue-collar film crew workers and her AIDS activism testify. "I don't pretend to be an ordinary housewife," she once said, mostly because she didn't care enough about what other people thought to pretend anything. Yet, despite the CinemaScope dimensions of her life, in her red-blooded appetites she probably has more in common with the average American woman than many of the celebrities currently being touted as "just like us." Endearingly, she devoted more of her Twitter feed to drumming up support for Kathy Ireland on "Dancing With the Stars" ("beauty in action and grace which is what that lady is all about") than to her own surgery. And, as always, she survived.
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