When the readers of Paul Beatty’s “Tuff” first encounter its hero, he’s picking his dazed and possibly bullet-riddled self off the floor of a Brooklyn, N.Y., drug den. This is Winston Foshay, aka Tuffy, a threatening, mountainous young brother whose job, in theory, is to act as a sort of one-man deterrent against the threat of unwanted intrusions. At the first sign of trouble, though, Tuffy’s massive legs have turned to jelly and the big fella has passed out on the spot. Good thing, too; if he hadn’t, he would have resembled his less-fortunate partners in crime, “three other ghetto phenotypes, soulless young outlaws posed stock-still, mouths agape, eyes open, like figurines in a wax museum’s rogues’ gallery.”
Not that Tuffy is an outlaw, really. At 19 years old and a cool 320 pounds, he just looks like one. In truth, Tuffy comes across as part Fat Albert, part hip-hop superman. Around his Spanish Harlem neighborhood, Tuffy has developed a considerable rep as a force to be reckoned with. Everyone defers to him, especially his main man, a clubfooted ghetto intellectual known as Smush, and the other members of Smush’s ragtag crew. Everyone, that is, except for Tuffy’s wife, Yolanda, a righteous sister (and the mother of his 11-month-old son, Jordy) who quotes liberally from Ebony and Chocolate Singles magazines and fortifies her near-daily diatribes with selected passages from such self-help bibles as “The Good Black Man: Some Assembly Required” and “Sisters Doing It for Themselves — How to Masturbate to an African Orgasm.”
Despite his formidable standing in the ‘hood and his implacable posture of been-there, done-that cool, Tuffy is a man in search of himself. Convinced that the answers aren’t likely to come from his Black Panther beatnik-poet father or from Ms. Nomura, the unreconstructed Marxist revolutionary who raised him, Tuffy turns to the Big Brothers program for guidance. Its organizers respond with Spencer Throckmorton, an African-American rabbi who wears clogs and listens to Harry Chapin and “Bread’s Greatest Hits” on his car stereo. But the good rabbi doesn’t seem to have what it takes to help Tuffy find his niche in life, either.
Up to this point, Beatty’s (sometimes) hilarious narrative is exaggerated only slightly for satirical effect. But when a poster of Eugene V. Debs inspires Tuffy to make a run for city council, the comic strokes become broader and more surreal. Unfortunately, Tuffy’s approach to political campaigning is as laid-back and haphazard as his approach to the rest of his life. And though the campaign supplies the book with a certain amount of suspense and a logical endgame, it doesn’t provide much in the way of direction either to the life of the protagonist or the novel that chronicles it. As the story progresses, its hold on our attention grows weaker instead of stronger.
“Tuff” is Beatty’s follow-up to his justly acclaimed debut, “The White Boy Shuffle,” and his gift for dazzling linguistic flights are as awe-inspiring here as they were there. He’s a born word-spinner, but while his prose retains the same electric pop and sizzle, the new book lacks the diversity and authenticity that made that initial outing so impressive. This time, the events seem to tumble out one after another without ever coming fully to life or building any dramatic momentum. Some of them — such as Tuffy’s brief encounter with sumo wrestling and his one campaign debate — are virtuosic set pieces full of telling gesture and detail. An equal number, though, fall flat or merely provide the author with another occasion to put his technical brilliance on display.
What’s lacking is any sort of moral or philosophical center. It may be all right for Tuffy to flail around without direction, but for the author to come across as equally rudderless is another matter. The book is full of ideas, not to mention a wide range of opinions on such pressing issues in the black community as drug use, the death penalty and teenage pregnancy, but rhetorical posturing isn’t the same thing as a worldview. For all his talent, Beatty can’t seem to cut to the heart of what he wants to say about Tuffy or the world he lives in. Instead he settles for a glib and empty nihilism. If, as seems likely, he sees his novel as a coming-of-age story, it fails at the most fundamental level: Tuffy’s rite of passage is a dead-end trip, the nowhere ride of a nowhere man.
The forces of avenging good and outrageous, gluttonous evil square off again in Carl Hiaasen’s mordantly funny seventh novel, “Sick Puppy.” This preposterous political farce takes place in the swampy wonderland of south Florida, which has provided a vivid backdrop for nearly all of the author’s hyperbolic adventures; since 1985, it’s also been the stomping grounds he’s covered as a columnist and reporter for the Miami Herald. This time, Hiaasen’s hero is Twilly Spree, heir to a vast real estate fortune and self-made eco-terrorist, who spends most of his time trolling the highways and byways of his state in search of insensitive citizens who commit crimes against the environment.
These sins may be profound, or they may be piggy and small; in either case, action is required. Twilly’s uncle, a banker who loaned a rock-mining company $14 million to blast craters in the Amazon River basin, is guilty of a larger offense, so Twilly blows up one of his branch banks — on the weekend, mind you, when no one will be around to get hurt. On the other hand, when Twilly first spies Palmer Stoat, the high-powered lobbyist and wheeler-dealer who shares top billing in the novel, the man is merely emptying the trash from his fast-food lunch onto the turnpike. Twilly responds by dumping the entire contents of a garbage truck into Palmer’s Beemer convertible.
Littering turns out to be a minor entry on Palmer’s extensive rap sheet. His major transgression is the orchestration of all the under-the-table payoffs, bribes and kickbacks it takes to complete the desecration of a pristine tract of wilderness on the gulf, near the mouth of the Suwannee River, known as Shearwater Island. As Hiaasen has demonstrated in masterly fashion in his previous novels, political corruption in south Florida has a character all its own. Perhaps it’s the proximity of the Everglades, with its oversized lizards, but there’s nothing self-effacing about these crooks.
Consider, for example, dope-smuggler-turned-land-developer Robert Clapley. The Shearwater Island project is Clapley’s brainchild, but during his off hours he chases another dream. As the only brother to four older sisters, he developed a childhood fascination with Barbie dolls, and as his fortunes have grown, so have his obsessions. Now he shares his Palm Beach condo with Katya and Tish, two Slavic imigris who are in the process of being transformed, with the aid of some gifted plastic surgeons, into identical twins: Barbie One and Barbie Two.
But it isn’t just the bad dogs in Hiaasen’s kennel who live up to the book’s title. (Actually, the sanest member of the cast is Boodle, aka McGuinn, a gigantic but extremely hospitable black Labrador.) Not only is Twilly prone to uncontrollable fits of rage, but at the beginning of the story he is also incapable of dreaming. Perhaps the biggest sicko of all, though, is a six-foot-six, one-eyed hermit who dresses in a kilt made out of a checkered racing flag, wears his silvery beard in a pair of intricately braided tendrils tied off with a vulture’s beak and refers to himself simply as Skink. He is really Clinton Tyree, the legendary former governor who made his first appearance in Hiaasen’s 1987 novel, “Double Whammy.” Though he doesn’t make his entrance until the book’s second half, Skink quickly claims his place as the story’s dominant personality. And as Twilly’s sidekick in the battle against the established forces of greed, he helps catapult the action into the giddy stratosphere of political satire.
What appears in Hiaasen’s fiction to be political farce, though, turns out to be well-grounded in political fact. The difference between the improbable events Hiaasen depicts in his novels and the real-life issues he discusses in “Kick Ass” is only a matter of degree. As you read this collection of lively and well-reported pieces written since 1985 for the Miami Herald, it quickly becomes evident that the author has been able to find most of the raw material for his fiction right in his own backyard.
Illuminated by all the wit and keen descriptive powers of his fiction, these columns — which deal with subjects ranging from the sacrificial preferences of Afro-Cubans in northwest Dade County to the epidemic of crime against tourists in Miami — not only demonstrate the depth and diversity of Hiaasen’s talents as a journalist but also establish him, in the words of the book’s editor, Diane Stevenson, as “an advocate for realistic growth and decent government in Florida.” Taken together with his novels, they create a colorful profile of place and a one-of-a-kind literary achievement.
| In the preface to his collection “The Devil Problem and Other True Stories,” David Remnick writes: “Reporters are interested above all … in stories.” If so, then Remnick has lived a charmed life. In terms of sheer drama and significance, no story in our collective lifetime compares to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which Remnick covered for the Washington Post and used as the basis of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Lenin’s Tomb.” With his latest book, “King of the World,” the author’s subject is not only the most heroic sports figure of the 20th century, but also, as Remnick puts it, “one of the most compelling and electric American figures of the age.”
The result is a book that’s strong in its grasp of social forces but also sensitive in attention to human detail. What drew Remnick — who was recently named editor of the New Yorker — to his subject is not difficult to understand. “I wanted to write about the way [Ali had] created himself in the early sixties,” the author writes, “the way a gangly kid from Louisville managed to become … a molder of his age and a reflection of it.”
“King of the World” is a book about a boxer, not a book about boxing. Remnick is most interested in what happens outside the ring. When Remnick begins his story, Muhammad Ali is still Cassius Clay, and must share the stage with two of his most fearsome opponents, Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. Patterson, Remnick writes, was the Good Negro, “an approachable and strangely fearful man, a deferential champion of civil rights, integration, and Christian decency,” while Liston, “a veteran of the penitentiary system before he came to the ring,” reluctantly took on the role of the Bad Negro. Each represented a stereotype Ali would ultimately transcend. “I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man,” Ali tells the author. “I had to show that to the world.”
Remnick’s deft staging and insight make familiar events seem fresh in the retelling. Less well-traveled territory — Ali’s relationship with the Nation of Islam, his friendship with (and ultimate repudiation of) Malcolm X and the transition from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali — is also handled well. Remnick only follows Ali’s story through the champion’s 1967 refusal to enter the armed forces. (“Man,” he famously said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.”) He saves his most impassioned writing for the fight Ali wages against the American military. As a result of his stand, Ali was sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. However, the real cost for his refusal was something like $10 million in purses and endorsements. What was worse, Remnick writes, it also cost him his title. “His title, which he had coveted from the time he was twelve.”
Visiting the 54-year-old Ali on his Michigan farm, Remnick finds that the three-time heavyweight champion of the world thinks about death “all the time now.” Suffering severely from Parkinson’s, Ali has been robbed of his most powerful weapon — his voice. And yet he has not been silenced. Of the few remaining icons of the ’60s, Remnick observes, Ali is by far the most adored. “He hit people for a living, and, yet, by middle age he would be a symbol not merely of courage, but of love, of decency, even a kind of wisdom.” With “King of the World,” David Remnick has written a great book about Muhammad Ali — a book that is worthy of its subject.
In May 1996, Daniel J. Kevles published an extensive article in the New Yorker about Nobel Laureate David Baltimore and a fraud charge brought against him and a colleague by a whistle-blowing scientist at M.I.T. The case against Baltimore, which became one of the more alluring scientific controversies in recent memory, began in 1986 and would stretch out for over a decade. Kevles has now expanded his article into an exhaustive (and exhausting) book. “The Baltimore Case” brings the reader up to date with the final court rulings that ultimately exonerated Baltimore and the other major players, and it provides an intelligent articulation of the issues at play. It’s a gripping story that might have made for a gripping narrative, but with its endless stretches of legalese and scientific minutiae, “The Baltimore Case” simply isn’t that book.
While Baltimore is ostensibly the star of this rigorously reported narrative, he is far from being its primary player. That distinction goes to Thereza Imanishi-Kari, a biomedical scientist whose research into how the body custom-tailors antibodies to fend off disease is at the center of the controversy. During his tenure at M.I.T., Baltimore collaborated with Imanishi-Kari on a series of experiments designed to illuminate this mysterious process. The fruit of these collaborative labors was a paper co-authored by Imanishi-Kari, Baltimore and four other M.I.T. researchers and published in the spring of 1986 in the journal Cell.
The trouble began when Imanishi-Kari offered a postdoctoral fellowship to Margot O’Toole, a Tufts University School of Medicine graduate. For several months, O’Toole tried to duplicate the experiments in the Cell article. When she couldn’t, she blew the whistle. Kevles hints that O’Toole might have been satisfied with a simple correction. But when none was forthcoming, the situation spun wildly out of control. Years of federal investigations ensued, as well as congressional hearings led by a rabid Democratic representative from Michigan named John Dingell, who felt that scientists had been getting a free ride on taxpayer money.
By the time Dingell was through with him, Baltimore was forced to resign his position as president of Rockefeller University. Imanishi-Kari lost her tenure-track position at Tufts and was banned from seeking grants from the National Institutes of Health for a decade. “What Dingell carried out was a public lynching,” says one academic, and Kevles seems to agree with that assessment. Baltimore was found guilty in the court of public opinion, but evidence that he had committed fraud was shaky from the beginning. Indeed, an appeals panel later found his research “as a whole rife with errors of all sorts” but not fraud or fabrication.
No one emerged from this contretemps unscathed, but all have since moved on with their lives. After his exoneration, Baltimore was named president of the California Institute of Technology, and he is in charge of the AIDS vaccine advisory panel for the NIH. Imanishi-Kari’s reputation would also be rejuvenated, although not as completely. Tufts promoted her to associate professor, and she ultimately received an NIH grant. (O’Toole’s whistle-blowing would also be rewarded with numerous citations and awards — among them Humanist of the Year by the Ethical Society of Boston, and the Ethics Award from the American Institute of Chemists.)
With heavyweights like these facing off in such a high-stakes game, Kevles had everything he needed for a real-life potboiler. Unfortunately, the author, an acclaimed scientific historian, is unable to create any narrative momentum or give his characters a human face. His book has gravity, significance and momentous human conflict. What it lacks is the one quality needed to bring everything together — an engaging style. It is, in effect, a kind of contradiction — a good book that is something short of being a good read.
Being a writer of political fiction can’t be easy in 1998. Not only did the
Berlin Wall come down, bringing the Cold War to a screeching halt and
practically wiping out your whole raison d’jtre in one fell swoop, but on
any given news day, the plain truth is not only far stranger than fiction,
it’s downright surreal, driving most writers to the outer limits of their
imagination just to keep up.
On the other hand, Charles McCarry, who with such books as “Shelley’s
Heart” and “The Secret Lovers” has established himself as one of the most
provocative and sharp-edged writers of contemporary political fiction,
seems to have accepted these post-Cold War realities as a challenge, as an
opportunity to entertain his wildest fancies. In his latest novel, “Lucky
Bastard,” he’s done exactly that: thrown caution to the winds and created a
story that is sexy, unpredictable and extravagantly imaginative without
ever losing the ring of recognizable truth.
If in the process McCarry manages to make playful, naughty fun of some of
contemporary American culture’s most sacred myths, then all the better.
What if, McCarry boldly asks, one of our most cherished (and martyred)
ex-presidents, during the course of one of his fabled departures from the
straight-and-narrow, were to have fathered an illegitimate son? And what if
that son — who possesses some of his father’s most famous (and some of his
most notorious) traits — were to seek out for himself a career in
politics, rising first to state attorney general, then lieutenant governor, then
governor, and then … beyond?
His name is Jack Adams — or rather, John Fitzgerald Adams — and, as he
tells it, his mother, who was at the time a member of the Navy Nurse Corps,
met a certain young Navy officer in a San Francisco hospital shortly after
a Japanese destroyer smashed into his PT boat in the Pacific. The window of
opportunity was brief, but the young officer’s injuries were not so severe
that he missed it. Twenty-one years later, the product of that quick tryst
surfaces on history’s radar as a student at Columbia with skills as a
politician that are characterized as a “natural talent, flowing straight
from the unconscious.”
This talent is part of the luck referred to in the book’s title. But it
goes beyond that to a kind of genius for studying people, for finding out
what they want and “making them believe he was giving it to them even when
he wasn’t.” This uncanny knack for making others like him and trust him is
the prime component of the character’s unfathomable good luck. (It’s a
characteristic he shares with another political Jack — the candidate in
“Primary Colors.”) McCarry also asks us to consider what might happen if
Jack, while clawing his way to the top of the political heap, were to
somehow come to the attention of an agent from Soviet intelligence who sees
the young American as a chance to realize “the ultimate dream of the KGB”
– to see an agent of the Soviet government elected as the president of the
United States. To accomplish this, the agent must take advantage of yet
another aspect of Jack’s personality that he inherited from his father –
“an aura of sexual glamour” matched in intensity only by a voracious sexual
appetite that is both the driving force behind his irresistible charm and,
ultimately, the engine of his undoing.
Clearly, McCarry intends for this last aspect of Jack’s character
to be Kennedy-esque. But this scenario also applies to a more contemporary
political figure who also seems to suffer from a “zipper problem”; someone
who has himself been described both in his politics and his many reported
excesses as the bastard child of JFK. McCarry’s shrewdness and skill are
evident in the way he has orchestrated these character traits so that they
have a sort of double resonance, echoing off the Kennedy legend
while also functioning as a rousing absurdist riff on Clintonian politics.
If, in all this, McCarry is essentially realistic, he is by no means
straight-faced. In this regard, he has more in common with Richard Condon
than with John Le Carri. A keen sense of proportion guides even McCarry’s most
outrageous flights. He may tease the boundaries of plausibility, but never
so much that his wit loses its potency. It’s a cynical, cut-throat world
that he’s created here, a place where no weakness goes unexploited and no
good deed goes unpunished.
Life being famously short, it’s been a while since I last hunkered down with a piece of deep-dish theoretical sociology, but it took only a meager helping of “On Television,” the latest opus from esteemed French scholar Pierre Bourdieu, to remind me why. After grappling with a prose style so eye-stinging and impenetrable that you’re obliged to reread each sentence a minimum of three times, you begin to realize that Bourdieu is the literary equivalent of anthrax — a little goes a very long way.
Of course, all this heavy lifting would be justified if, indeed, Bourdieu were able to do what he set out to do, “reveal the hidden mechanisms” at work upon the “journalistic field” and make visible the invisible. But is it really a revelation to suggest that television news is addicted to the “sensationalistic”? The author of some 30 books, Bourdieu is ranked in his homeland alongside such formidable minds as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Here, though, he comes across as something of a dilettante. He rarely mentions specific programs or broadcasts, or makes note of recent innovations, such as the proliferation of channels brought about by satellite broadcasting and cable, or the rise of around-the-clock news.
Throughout “On Television” he demonstrates how a medium designed to record reality instead creates it. “We are getting closer and closer to the point,” he writes, “where the social world is primarily described — in a sense prescribed — by television.” The accumulation of so much “cultural capital” has created a “de facto monopoly,” causing TV news divisions to become the bullies of the new establishment. “With permanent access to public visibility, broad circulation, and mass diffusion these journalists can impose on the whole of society their vision of the world, their conception of problems, their point of view.”
This creates “censorship,” he warns, though not the usual Orwellian sort. These journalists censor “without actually being aware of it,” by a process of selection that includes for broadcast only those “things capable of ‘interesting’ them, and ‘keeping their attention,’ which means things that fit their categories and mental grid.” But in this and in so many other of Bourdieu’s revelations, there is a sense of his having arrived rather late in the discussion. As long ago as 1985, American educator Neil Postman wrote about the pervasiveness of television’s corrupting influence, warning that television had become “the paradigm for our conception of public information.”
What most upsets Bourdieu is the degree to which television news is dominated by ratings. The profit motive, he asserts, is the prime engine driving all aspects of television production, resulting in a banal, homogeneous product that cannot fail to emphasize “that which is most obvious in the social world.” But what could be more obvious than to point out the medium’s slavish devotion to the almighty franc?
The biggest surprise is that “On Television” not only generated considerable controversy back home in France, it also rang up enough sales to become a bestseller. But perhaps this reveals more about the relative natures of France and the United States than it does about the merits of the book itself. Or, perhaps something really was lost in the translation.
