Whoever reads true-crime books tends not to boast much about it. Mystery novels occupy a famously large shelf in the libraries of academics, intellectuals and even former presidents — Bill Clinton relaxes with Walter Mosley, JFK adored Ian Fleming and even Woodrow Wilson was said to enjoy the occasional whodunit between attempts to improve the world. But except for brief incursions by sophisticates like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer and historians like Patricia Cline Cohen and Karen Halttunen, the true-crime genre trundles stubbornly along in a haze of screamer titles, red-and-black covers and flavor-of-the-month atrocities (Satanism! Child murder! Satanic child murder!). It’s the ghetto most writers struggle their way out of.
The reasons for this ostracism lie deeper than simple questions of taste; something chilling resides not far from the surface of the genre. While most mystery novels reassure us that all’s right with the world, true crime imbues us with a yawning auto-accident sense of unease. Humans have butchered one another on the thinnest of pretexts before, and doubtless they’ll do such again. Each bloodletting and subsequent conviction a true-crime writer recounts may testify to justice done, but that same account can’t help recognizing everyone’s limitless bad potential.
But true crime could also be called our most venerable genre, beginning with the story of Cain slaying Abel and continuing through the 17th century Colonial fad for execution sermons, in which members of the clergy described and denounced the condemned man’s crimes in order to demonstrate God’s absolute and inescapable justice. As time wore on, however, and God exerted measurably less pressure on the consciences of sinners and readers, an exorbitant, garishly sensationalistic new literature, or quasi-literature, arose, balanced uneasily between salvation and sin. Imagine, for prudish 19th century bourgeoisie, the thrill of bosoms a-heave and adultery lightly cloaked — with the comfort of finding the whole sordid mess dressed up as a cautionary tale.
The purveyors of the first modern incarnations of true crime were devoted amateurs for whom the field offered ripe aesthetic pickings. These writers teach you more about daily life than a pile of history books; as stylists they reveal that grisly subject matter doesn’t demand ham-fisted prose. The result can be intoxicating — a mixture of inspired dilettantism, class condescension, philosophical speculation and a measure of Schadenfreude. The murders they wrote about were picturesque, piquant, worth savoring over a glass of port at fireside. (Liquor metaphors have remained surprisingly common in British Isles true crime. As spy novelist Eric Ambler wrote in his own collection of lectures on the subject, “Scottish murder has always had a special full-bodied flavor of its own; burgundy to the English claret.”) Probably the finest of these chroniclers was, as Ambler might have predicted, a Scot himself, lawyer William Roughead, who wrote in the early years of the 20th century. Luc Sante’s introduction to the welcome reprint of Roughead’s “Classic Crimes” rightfully describes him as “the Henry James of crime,” alert to the tiny social nuances by which murderers might tip their hands and the cruel exigencies of inheritance among the almost rich.
Without ever straining to please, Roughead writes wonderful page-turning stuff, crammed with archaisms and play; he’s an energetic connoisseur of wrongdoing who measures his shocks with care, teasing the reader with the hoariest conventions for better effect. “The next we see of Mary Patterson — you note that I have discreetly refrained from drawing back the bed-curtains — is upon the table in Dr. Knox’s dissecting room,” he winks. Gracing his recitations with zesty aphorisms drawn from visits to the wrong side of the tracks — “there are few things better worth having in this world than a good reputation,” and the surpassingly wonderful “I have often wondered that no philosopher has considered the strange affinity between crime and whiskers” — he follows up each trail of evidence, and each argument in court, with a clarity and attention to detail worthy of Perry Mason.
Moreover, Roughead treats these cases, some of which provided the raw materials of literature, with such grace that their fictional versions feel almost gratuitous. (Edinburgh’s own Deacon Brodie — peerless cabinetmaker and pillar of society by day, enthusiastic thief by night — furnished Roughead’s countryman Robert Louis Stevenson with the rudiments of Dr. Jekyll’s nightly transformation, and grave robbers William Burke and William Hare with grist for “The Body Snatcher.”) Invention seems a waste of time when set against Roughead’s joy in the infinite variety of humanity.
In his hands, these villains come alive not just in their capacity for cruelty but also in their sometimes astounding ability to win and keep love, to earn trust. Like his friend James, Roughhead takes more delight in surveying a situation from every available vantage point than in tracing simple machinations of plot — an almost metaphysical devotion to the fullest knowledge possible, no matter what the context. “A bad boy, I grant you,” he concludes of Deacon Brodie, with “a fine contempt for the conventional virtues. [Yet] he was a devoted son and brother; a kind and affectionate parent to his irregular offspring.” As much a work of literature as one of true crime or history (all three, really), “Classic Crimes” deserves a place on every reader’s shelf.
Very much in Roughead’s mode, American Edmund Lester Pearson aims as much at posterity as at the contemporary market for scandal. Writing in the 1920s, he revisits a series of forgotten cases with wit and energy. But read him for his extended (nearly half the book) treatment of the still-famous Lizzie Borden, whose case he probes with an amusingly cranky detachment that covers everything from the immediate blandness of her native Fall River (the visitor “looks around him, shudders, and hurries on”) to the muddledness of common sense (“in the opinion of the man in the street … it is, of course, a destructive thing to say of another man that he has a ‘theory’”).
Interested as much in the art of murder as in its social setting, Pearson ponders the aesthetic aspects of the Borden family’s alarmingly hearty breakfast that fateful morning. Mutton broth, mutton, johnnycakes, cookies and coffee, he judges, furnished a meal “well adapted to set the stage for tragedy. One trembles at the thought of beginning a day in August with mutton soup.” Borden herself emerges as a scarily detached sourpuss whose most famous quoted remark (she did not testify at her trial) was the stubborn motto “I do not do things in a hurry.”
Despite gaping holes in her story, Borden was acquitted, in barely an hour, of killing her mother and father with an ax. Rumors abounded that the jury had stayed out that long only to avoid the appearance of undue haste. Combing through reports near and far, Pearson sketches a sobering portrait of a late-Victorian mind-set seemingly more concerned with reestablishing a ruptured social order than with actually solving the murders. For all of his elitist’s sniping at the atrocious lack of intelligence among the population at large, Pearson does not throw in his lot with the decidedly unpopular Lizzie Borden; he maintains a sense of moral outrage at a verdict delivered out of a desire for expediency rather than for justice. He does not judge her reasons for the murders, nor does he presume to take a lesson from the case. But he does admit that the Borden case will remain — as it has — one of the great revelations of the American soul, an apparently motiveless brutality hinting at the bleak lesson that even the quietest suburban refuge (in 1892!) cannot shield anyone.
In that sense, Pearson provides a clear precursor for Ann Rule, contemporary America’s most successful purveyor of true crime; both chronicle the purposeless violence that this country has lionized since its origins. (American heroes, D.H. Lawrence once wrote, have always been killers.) Rule, it must be said, poses no immediate danger to Roughead’s mantle. The author, most famously, of “The Stranger Beside Me,” a saga of the pursuit of a serial killer who turned out to be, scarily enough, Ted Bundy, her friend and co-worker at a Seattle crisis center, Rule typically commits sentences that suggest Joe Friday after a one-evening writers workshop: “The Thanksgiving holiday, 1998, was no different from any other holiday, although Thursday, the day itself, was fairly quiet.” On the other hand, when she does try to get literary, the resulting crimes against common sense are probably worse: “The whole apartment had that lifeless feeling, like a place out of a William Faulkner story.” (I don’t know which story, either.)
For the most part, however, Rule churns onward, stolidly cataloging the routine crunching out of solutions by investigators. (Which makes perfect sense: As a former policewoman who got her start writing up the close friend who walked her to her car every night, Rule didn’t have the luxury of distance.) Rather than surveying the depths with Roughead’s (slightly off-putting) Olympian detachment, Rule tosses an Oprah-esque arm around the shoulders of her victims; she wants us to empathize with the hopes that were snuffed out: men who put their lives back together after a history of failed marriages, nice young college women destined to be sweet-talked in mall parking lots by vile-minded monsters — you know, regular people embraced by evil. The effect returns us to the very origins of “sentimental” fiction, in that it’s designed purely to play on one’s emotions and arouse the senses. This could have been me, you’re supposed to think.
To what end, however, is another matter. Neither a lefty pop sociologist (poverty and racism did this!) nor a righty slavering for law and order (bad people did this!), Rule is almost pre-ideological; she’s a true-crime writer, so she tells you about crimes. Creepily, she has constructed a franchise from her proximity to evil: Now available is the 20th-anniversary edition of “The Stranger Beside Me,” featuring Bundy’s fingerprints, booking sheet and even his handwriting in a personal letter. Still, she’s good at it. Rule expertly conjures menace from the most mundane situations — the yuppie shifting next to you on the bus, or that innocuous teenager, might just seize this opportunity to vent his grudge against the world. Her books nudge us into limitless paranoia.
Unlike Roughead’s greedy inheritors and frustrated lovers, Rule’s crimes “make no sense” much of the time. Vacant, meaningless anomie erupts into vacant, meaningless rage, leaving us none the wiser when it subsides. A man walks calmly up to the front of a bus, shoots the driver, then himself, leaving the bus to crash off a bridge. A teenager spies on a schoolteacher from the woods, then breaks into her house and rapes and murders her; he is caught when a police search reveals that, while lurking in wait, he decided to take advantage of the free long distance and phone a relative. “Christopher Wilder was born in 1944 in Sydney, Australia. Early on, the blue-eyed, blond-haired boy demonstrated signs of sexual aberrance,” begins one case, and things never make much more sense from then on.
Though surely she doesn’t intend it, Rule creates a sort of blank-verse ode to contemporary crime. Her killers can’t be romanticized, nor do they clue us in to those unspoken urges that tantalized Stevenson to translate the true-crime legends of his day into a resonant metaphor for Victorian hypocrisy. Here, beyond such ageless cautions as “Don’t go into the woods (or the park, or the mall) at night,” the proper métier is the movie of the week — a quick, meaningless peril bereft of context, past or future. Which may well be the way things are these days, but reading example after example of senseless aggression, who wouldn’t rather swirl the brandy in its snifter, settle back into the armchair and enjoy mayhem among the lesser nobility? That way, at least, everything made a kind of sense.
In 1994, prominent South African justice Richard Goldstone was picked to head the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Before hearing even a single case, he discovered that not every leader shared his vision of justice. Former British Prime Minister Edward Heath asked him, “Why did you accept such a ridiculous job?” If people wished to murder one another, Heath bluntly informed Goldstone, it was no concern of his so long as they consented to do so outside the British Isles.
The 1990s began with spiraling hopes unleashed by an unfrozen Cold War — “watching the world wake up from history,” one pop song had it as teenagers danced atop the dismantled Berlin Wall. The future seemed to promise an explosion of harmony and peace. Instead, set free from the rigors of great-power politics, world citizens set about murdering one another with enthusiasm and a wide variety of implements, from helicopter gunships in Chechnya to rifles in Bosnia. Americans learned terms like “ethnic cleansing” and discovered that age-old hatreds could turn neighbors into snipers picking one another off from the hills as children crept out to forage for water and food.
If such world-devouring brutality has tempted Heath and others to throw up their hands, people like Goldstone have done their best to underline fragile notions like “justice” and “truth,” holding fast to what can often seem like pointless abstractions. But have Goldstone and his peers made any difference? Or have the murderers won?
In some ways, the answers lie all around us — consider the still-unpunished Slobodan Milosevic, the horrific civil war in Sierra Leone, the precarious stability of countries like Somalia. Princeton political scientist Gary Jonathan Bass summarizes the situation in “Stay the Hand of Vengeance: The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals,” an exhaustive and magisterial survey that chronicles the complexities of such proceedings from Napoleon through Rwanda: “Do war crimes tribunals work? … No, war crimes tribunals do not work particularly well. But they have clear potential to work, and to work much better than anything else diplomats have come up with at the end of a war.”
In that more limited sense, today’s war crimes trials can lay renewed claim to truth and justice, even if they cannot put either one into practice. (Leaders may be tried and found guilty in absentia, which offers no guarantee that justice will ever be done them but does stamp them with international disgrace.) In the conclusion to his brief memoir, “For Humanity: Reflections of a War Crimes Investigator,” Goldstone holds out the tenuous promise that the U.N.’s punishment of lower-level Serbian killers “has sent out a message to would-be war criminals that the international community is no longer prepared to allow serious war crimes … without the threat of retribution.”
War crimes trials work under the assumption that such retribution (most often legal proceedings held by victors at the end of a declared war) can somehow assert a morality at least roughly equivalent to the extraordinary amorality this century has witnessed — as if due process for the commandant of Auschwitz atoned for the lives lost under his brutal care. Short of some Sisyphean eternal sentence, however, these trials do offer one of humanity’s best options: They’re better than forgetting and more equitable than simply lining up and shooting however many enemies you’ve managed to corral; they signal a return of order and a restatement of moral principle. If wrongdoers can hear the evidence against them, have their guilt proved and receive an appropriate sentence through due process, justice — not might — is once more proved right.
Still, the process can sometimes resemble the proverbial attempt to nail jelly to a wall: Ideologues and major perpetrators always seem to wriggle away from judgment, leaving flunkies holding the bag. (In present-day Rwanda, hordes of ordinary men languish in killingly overcrowded jails with scant hope of eventual trial.) The Allies, attempting to hold Nazism itself to account at Nuremberg, had to content themselves with sentencing a mere 3,500 or so out of an estimated 100,000 to 500,000 perpetrators — and those only for wartime aggression rather than the Holocaust. How much of this paid back the victims’ suffering, and how much conveniently and arbitrarily let off hordes of killers in the interest of “moving on”?
Further, war crimes trials provoke knotty political questions. Do they represent merely “victors’ justice,” the opportunity for winning powers to lay any and all blame at the feet of their prostrate enemies? Where does one prosecute wrongdoing, and by whose laws? The Nazis were judged retroactively guilty for acts that were perfectly legal at the time — as if, after the Civil War, the North had punished Thomas Jefferson for holding slaves in 1820. Who gets prosecuted and why? Clearly, justice is neither blind nor exact — how did Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot escape sentencing? And most painful of all, whose hands are clean enough to sit plausibly in judgment? Does the United States, whose training and equipping of right-wing death squads was partially responsible for the murder of thousands of Central Americans in the ’80s alone, retain sufficient moral authority? Of course, no major power can boast much better: Consider the blood on the hands of the British in Northern Ireland, the French in Rwanda and the Russians in Chechnya. Given these cases, who can lay down the law to the Foday Sankohs of the world?
A sensible observer might conclude that when it comes to crimes against humanity, nobody learns anything. In 1915, the British government solemnly vowed to redress the Ottoman Empire’s then-recent massacre of more than 1 million Armenians by trying those responsible at the war’s conclusion: “When the day of reckoning arrives the individuals who have perpetrated or taken any part in these crimes will not be forgotten.” That trial never took place, put off by the Ottomans’ collapse and then put aside in the swap for British prisoners held by Turkish nationalists. As Adolf Hitler famously sneered two decades later, “Who now remembers the Armenians?” Ever since Nuremberg, politicians have pledged repeatedly to remember — “never again” will the international community stand pat in the face of atrocity.
But is it the “never” or the “again” that resounds loudest? Listen: “We … should have been more active in the early stages of the atrocities in Rwanda … and called them what they were — genocide,” Madeleine Albright admitted in late 1997. (During the actual massacres, White House spokesmen deliberately fudged the issue, claiming that “acts of genocide” were taking place but not the thing itself.) “Never again must we be shy in the face of evidence,” President Clinton proclaimed three months later.
In sum, anyone hoping for more than an assertion of moral principle from most war crimes trials is probably dreaming. Until some international body puts teeth into these tribunals, murderers will continue merrily along their way, thumbing their nose in the face of world opinion in the serene confidence that no real retribution will be forthcoming.
If war crimes trials are the mailed fist of international response, truth commissions are its voice of sweet reason — an opportunity for any culture to make a new start, to change the ways its citizens think about and treat one another. Former victims stand up and say, “This happened to me,” and the cumulative weight of their testimony makes evasion infinitely more difficult. “But for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission” in South Africa, Goldstone writes, “there would have been widespread denials of most of the worst manifestations of apartheid, and those denials would have been believed and accepted by the majority of white South Africans. This is no longer possible.”
At best, in South Africa and the former East Germany, truth commissions have forced evil into the light. Whether its voice is collective (as in South Africa) or individual (as in East Germany, where citizens could choose to read their Stasi files), truth telling gives subaltern knowledge the imprint of official truth — a gesture that not only validates what was once folklore (as in the case of America’s syphilis experiments on African-American men) but also forces the privileged, often indirectly oppressive, majority to see the world through the victims’ eyes.
Of course, no truth commission comes with a money-back guarantee. Even when the results are aired publicly and immediately, a nation may still avert its eyes. Consider the aborted 1995 Smithsonian Enola Gay exhibit, shouted down by Congress and the press for having the temerity to suggest that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated for not entirely admirable reasons. Moreover, the queasy moral arithmetic required of any even moderately complicated commission — can and should it trade amnesty for testimony? Does revelation equal forgiveness? Should it name names or not? — opens innumerable “Oprah”-esque opportunities for wrongdoers to confess all and expect absolution in return. In a culture of victimization, even torturers may point to bad childhoods.
At least at the outset, no truth commission is stronger than the political consensus that gave it birth; such organisms, after all, simultaneously rely on and disturb the fragile equilibrium that made them possible in the first place. In April 1998, after a difficult peace process marred by large-scale grants of amnesty to the military that had committed peasant massacres as a matter of policy for three decades, Guatemalan bishop Juan Gerardi publicly delivered “!Nunca Mas!” (once more the hope, or plea: “Never again!”), a summation of 6,000 interviews that comprehensively documented government atrocities. Two nights later he was bludgeoned to death with a cement block in his garage so brutally that the ring on his finger provided the only means of identifying the corpse. The government, alleging that “personal motives” somehow underlay the attack, reported no progress after a year of investigation.
But the heartening truth is that cleansing dirty laundry can actually strengthen a fragile polity by reestablishing concepts of civic equality and belonging; after surviving atomized and fearful societies wrought by terror, they suggest, citizens can join together to behave fairly and honorably toward one another. As Edward Said put it in the context of the Middle East peace process, “The beginning is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle for coexistence.”
In his 1994 inaugural address, Nelson Mandela envisioned a similar freedom through civility: “As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” Though neither hope has yet come to be, in concert they provide a blueprint for a world in which evil can be, if not exterminated, at least deprived of rocks under which to hide, and in which citizens share moral responsibility rather than shrug it away — a worthy dream, certainly, and one demonstrably closer to realization.
At present, the retrospective accounting fostered by truth commissions seems to offer our best hope. A partial justice, yes. A contingent justice, yes. But given the limitations of great-power maneuvering, the general continuity between one regime and the next and the very real limitations of the human heart, it’s probably the best justice this world can hope to obtain anytime soon.
Walter Mosley hasn’t exactly set himself an easy task. Having apparently charged his work with bearing Ralph Ellison’s unbearable legacy, he diagnoses American racial pathologies so deep-rooted as to seem intractable, then tramples the boundaries of genre in search of solutions. Whether his characters are black or white, whether they turn up in mystery, science fiction or mainstream fiction, they find themselves burdened by three centuries of attraction, oppression and unpredictable kindnesses whose ultimate lesson may simply be that no one among us can survive alone.
But these pathologies have proved themselves famously resistant to diagnosis, and of late Mosley’s work has shown signs of frustration. Last year’s “Blue Light” tossed altogether too many racial metaphors in with muzzy hippie platitudes to produce an unappetizingly fantastic resolution. And until he gathers sufficient momentum two-thirds of the way into his new collection of linked stories, “Walkin’ the Dog,” Mosley seems to have given up literary indirection for agitprop’s simpler consolations.
At times his deliberately coarse prose flirts with pulp (“You’re the only full grown man in the whole store. Outside of you, it’s just women, kids, and kiss asses”). Often it indulges in the post-Hemingway variety of blank macho posturing that Richard Ford, Thomas McGuane and Richard Russo have kneaded to death (“Sometimes it’s only a scared man can do what’s right”). And sometimes Mosley’s billboard pronouncements slap into you with a clumsiness that can’t be intentional (“The ex-con could have been a dark statue placed in the center of that small room by some sculptor who knew that the truth could only be told in secret”).
Yet in the end those flaws feel more like distractions. These stories, which center on ex-con Socrates Fortlow (first introduced in the 1997 “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned”), sneak into your heart and deliver a cumulative shock of complicity. Cocooned inside his jail-hardened muscles and his remorse, Socrates adopts minimalism as a code of conduct, accepting lovelessness and solitude as his lot. His deprivation is so powerfully inhabited, so elemental (four years out of the joint, he’s still saving for his own phone), that it coats even his smallest aspirations with doubt and temporariness. Yet in these pages he also grows, glimpsing the first new inklings of the hope he’d extinguished during his 27 years in prison, getting a promotion, fighting a corporation that tries to steal his squat, even widening the circle of “students” he schools in the world’s home truths: “You got to answer for what you did wrong. That’s what I know.”
By the time we reach the powerful concluding story, “Rogue,” in which Socrates discovers a previously unknown capacity for nonviolent persuasion — toting a billboard listing the crimes of a rogue cop, he becomes an embodiment of the conscience of the Los Angeles poor (and sets off a riot) — Mosley’s rough-cut sentences and indefinite endings coalesce. At last we recognize that we are (and have all along been) moving through the terrain of folk art: stories whispered down through the days as sustenance against bad times, a poetry of truth all the sturdier for its hard-won wisdom.
“I been lookin’ to be free for my whole life,” Socrates tells Darryl, the young knucklehead he first set straight in “Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned.” “An’ when I get it it’s just like a pocket fulla change … That change is just jinglin’ in my pockets but there ain’t nuthin’ I got to buy … I could just pass it on to somebody else now … somebody like you.” In prose that weds slave narrative to gangsta rap, the accents of plantation runaways to those of buppie computer salesmen, Mosley finds his way to a vividly modern preacher’s voice capable of telling us exactly what we need to know about the world today.
In a great historical irony, America has become the center of Holocaust culture. With a particularly American genius, a nation defined by “it can’t happen here” optimism has learned to make what cynics term Shoah Business pay. Americans crowd Holocaust museums, pat themselves on the back for producing important yet commercially successful films and flock to classes that take them step by step down the twisted road to Auschwitz. Is this a good thing? To many of those who have the Holocaust ever in mind, it is: Never again, they reason, will Jews anywhere stand by passively and let night fall. But to others, this fascination bespeaks an unhealthy sense of victimization, a horrific merger of kitsch and death or a club with which to cudgel competitors: You think you’ve suffered?
No one has traced the roots of this complex phenomenon as forcefully as Peter Novick in “The Holocaust in American Life.” In the United States, he argues, “memory of the Holocaust is so banal … precisely because it is so uncontroversial, so unrelated to real divisions in American society.” Although the tangled skeins of contemporary culture lead him in too many directions (so that when he gets to the present day his argument loses some of its shape), Novick escorts us through the past 50 years with compelling clarity and outrage. Treating the Holocaust as a collective memory that has been put to different uses at different times — as opposed to a trauma that was repressed until it could be held back no longer — he makes clear how recent and contingent Holocaust consciousness truly is.
In the 1950s, for instance, the Holocaust had no existence separate from other war-borne horrors. Jewish organizations focused on assimilation, and the Cold War mandated a generalized totalitarianism as the enemy. “It was an inappropriate symbol of the contemporary mood, and that is surely one of the principal reasons that it stayed at the margins,” he writes. Since the 1970s the Holocaust has moved to the center of American culture, and Novick’s fundamental point is that this new position is as appropriate to the contemporary mood as universalizing interpretations of Anne Frank were 40 years ago.
Assailing the most sacred truisms of contemporary Holocaust consciousness will surely win Novick plenty of enemies. For instance, what is there, precisely, to learn from the Holocaust — that the murder of 6 million Jews in the 1940s was bad? Although the duty of future generations to grasp the Holocaust’s transcendent truths is something that gets repeatedly invoked, awareness of the Holocaust has done little to prevent new atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia and elsewhere. Most visitors to Holocaust museums take out with them exactly what they brought in. “Awe and horror when confronting the Holocaust … are surely appropriate, ” Novick concludes acidly. “Yet no matter how broadly we interpret the word ‘lesson,’ that’s not a lesson — certainly not a useful one.”
Many will find this book an outrage, an instance of self-hate, perhaps even a threat to American Judaism; Novick courts such reactions with prose that throws itself in the face of convention. Demolishing the myth that international guilt made the creation of a Jewish state easier, he writes, “It’s likely that [this] notion simply appeals to some people’s moral and aesthetic sensibilities.” At times he closes off debate too easily — he dismisses Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s arguments in “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” in half a paragraph, and the still-debated complexities of the Allies’ failure to bomb Auschwitz don’t get their due. Yet as a whole his research is so formidable, his arguments presented so carefully, that one is hard-pressed to argue back.
The same cannot be said of the anthology “The Americanization of the Holocaust.” In her introduction, editor Hilene Flanzbaum accepts with a refreshing lack of dogma the notion that “the imprint of a multicultural but predominantly Gentile America” will inevitably flatten — but also broaden — American Holocaust consciousness. Hence the Christian symbolism in “Schindler’s List” — for example, the title character often backlit or haloed, as the savior of the Jews — can be defended as a means of making that story comprehensible in an American framework. Yet the collection never coheres enough to consider that question at length. Walter Benn Michaels, the eminent literary critic, seizes the occasion to sketch the differences between new historicism and deconstruction. Andrew Furman, after opening with a wide-gauged approach to the topic, focuses his discussion of Holocaust fiction on one little-known writer. Amy Hungerford’s analysis of “Maus” never puts its theoretical reading to wider social use. Far too many of the contributors play in the mass-cultural sandbox in ways that too often devolve into minor academic games; we leave most of the essays feeling that one corner has been sifted exhaustively, but without much sense of how the whole field of study might develop.
The best of these writers seek to discover how Americans talk about the Holocaust by actually going to the people. Particularly strong are Alan Steinweis on teaching the subject to Nebraskans and Henry Greenspan on how we interpret survivor testimony. Contributions by James Young and Jeffrey Shandler should point readers to their own important works on this topic. And Andrew Levy’s persuasive examination of the semiconscious way NikeTown has appropriated Nazi iconography opens some deeply troubling questions about just how banal we have let evil become. But this collection, with its overriding focus on representations, leaves the reader unsatisfied. It feels flimsy and unhelpful in working out how to think about the Holocaust today, especially next to Novick’s commanding wall of social-historical data in “The Holocaust in American Life” — a landmark in the field that will be required reading for anyone considering how this catastrophe came to occupy center stage in American culture.
More frightening than Stephen King, as unrelenting as a bad dream, Josi Saramago’s “Blindness” politely rubs our faces in apocalypse. Its detailed history of an unaccountable epidemic of “white blindness” that inundates the nameless inhabitants of a nameless country makes you fear for your own sight: Have the corners of the pages dimmed ever so slightly? Saramago won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, and at 76 his powers have not dimmed: This fable is so unsettling, so limitlessly allegorical — the Holocaust, AIDS and Bosnia come to mind — that it feels infinite. “The whole world is right here,” one character tells another. Blindness merely amplifies everyone’s fundamental helplessness and interdependence and makes plain the lies they tell themselves to get through the day. As a blind ophthalmologist puts it, his useless expertise an emblem of the surplus with which we all burden ourselves, “Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.”
In Saramago’s view, that truth is what we cannot bear to see. Strip away the power of our eyes, “the windows to the soul” — a metaphor with which the author teases us repeatedly — and what’s left, he suggests, is little more than ravenous beasts mauling their competitors in the fight for survival. “Evil … as everyone knows, has always been the easiest thing to do.” The reasoned calm with which Saramago depicts the unspeakable (as society collapses outside its walls, the main characters, the first to go blind, struggle for survival inside the asylum in which they have been quarantined) makes the reader long for mercy, for some release from the suffering. And even when that release comes, when the inmates escape the asylum to wander a world gone blind, it’s hard to know what to make of it. Are we better off learning to live with our blindness or glorying in what little we can see? And when sight returns, what seems at first to be a happy ending may be anything but.
A metaphor like “white blindness” might easily seem forced or labored, but Saramago makes it live by focusing on the stubbornly literal; his account of a clump of newly blind people trying to find their way to food or to the bathroom provides some surprisingly gripping passages. While this epidemic has a clear symbolic burden, it’s also a real and very inconvenient affliction. Saramago is familiar with this balancing act: he has an affinity for skepticism, and his curling, run-on sentences, some of them lasting several pages, have the dense eventfulness, but rarely the tilt into fantasy, of Gabriel Garcma Marquez’s in “Autumn of the Patriarch.” The result is a minute study of how effortlessly we can be divested of all that we call “humanity,” how fear and selfishness conspire to let us do our worst. “God does not deserve to see,” thinks the doctor at the book’s lowest point, and Saramago’s powerful achievement is to make his readers wonder: What have we wrought by choosing so selectively what we can bear to look in the face?
