— Rick Moody

RM: I want to start with the hypothesis that there is a sociological basis for thinking that one should not be sad. This surely comes from the notion that capitalism can quench our thirst with the application of product. It is un-American to be sad, therefore, or at best, sadness is simply something to be treated with antidepressant meds and otherwise need not be spoken of. However, all the emotions are grand, and if sadness is among them, then I embrace sadness. This also reminds me of a great sentence from Foucault, from his introduction to “Anti-Oedipus”: “Do not think that because you are a revolutionary you must be sad.” Does sadness, for you, relate to sexuality in any way?

MG: A friend, in an e-mail, quoted from an essay by Robert Warshaw (“The Gangster as Tragic Hero”) on this subject of sadness, and he broadened it to include systems other than capitalism: “Modern egalitarian societies … whether democratic or authoritarian in their political forms, always base themselves on the claim that they are making life happier.” And so public displays of unhappiness and failure are seen as disloyal. I’d say, that is, that public displays of unhappiness and failure that are not reducible to supposedly soluble social problems — to some category like “poverty” or “mental illness” — are considered disloyal, or at least incomprehensible.

My suspicion is that this is an unavoidable human dilemma, that people will always want to avoid pain, to avoid those who are in pain, and so will be vulnerable to anyone or anything that seems to promise permanent avoidance. At the same time, I think people know that pain is part of our nature, that it cannot be avoided and that it should not be avoided. But capitalism in this country is focused on the idea 1) that life can and should be absolutely beautiful; 2) that beauty can be defined according to an ironclad objective standard; 3) that beauty can be held onto forever if only you do the right things perfectly enough; and 4) that it can be purchased. I don’t only mean physical, personal beauty, but that is a good enough example and metaphor. You look at a fashion magazine, or really any glossy magazine, and you see flawlessly beautiful women in fantasy lives of utter beauty and excitement, sometimes mixed in with a little cruelty. It appeals to what I think of as the upper layer, the part of us that wants that perfection so much because it is static; it pretends that life can be captured, controlled by us forever without the endless slippage of organic life, in which we are a mere piece of vegetable matter in a system that is as much about disintegration and decay as anything else — a system in which our personalities and egos do not matter, let alone whether or not we are pretty.

The fantasy pictures are never-never land, and yet you can feel a certain desperation in the way they deny everything that isn’t utterly beautiful, utterly light; paradoxically, the insistence on occupying that realm evokes all the more ungainly, “ugly” things that are being denied. People know there is something wrong with this denial, even if they want to buy into it, so “darkness” asserts itself in increasingly distorted forms, like anorexia, cutting, all kinds of emotional violence. Light and dark become so polarized that it is terrifying, and something like sadness can come to seem grotesque — and in fact become grotesque, like you see in somebody like [writer] Elizabeth Wurtzel, who I believe is desperately unhappy in part because she has absolutely bought into the idea that she should not be unhappy.

About your question of sexuality and sadness: I think they have a natural connection for everybody, which is why (and I know I’m talking out my ass here) I think people on antidepressants often lose sexual feelings. I don’t mean that I think sex is only about sadness; it is obviously about joy and vitality and birth as well. But I think it is our root link to the deepest part of ourselves, the part that goes beyond personality or even human identity. It goes down into a pit we can’t see into, and people tend to be scared of what they can’t see.

I don’t think “sadness” alone is in that pit; I think everything is in it, too much for us, in our human incarnation, to bear — so that a fully expressed sexuality does have that dark, earthen element that is profoundly sad, at least in human terms. I think it is in part about death, and is what menopausal women sometimes feel, an extraordinary despair that is about the breaking down of procreation and identity — which is now controllable by hormones so nobody has to feel anything icky. This is a part of sexuality that never shows up in advertisements, that rarely shows up in pop music, but everybody knows it’s there. And in our trying, maybe unconsciously, to find it, it gets expressed in some distorted forms.

RM: I’m pretty interested in this idea that the legendary side effect of Prozac, viz. diminished sexual appetite, is about the repression of sadness. It’s a fascinating hypothesis. I suppose for me the whole notion of sexuality is about triumphing over dissatisfaction with further dissatisfaction. I suppose I’m wondering if for you this connects, in some way, to the “death instinct,” which both Freud and Jung flirted with briefly, or at least with the complex formulations of Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” If so, this is surely the market to which capital cannot market, as it does not want to be placated. And maybe there’s a paradox to the Prozac fad, in that if happiness is nonsexual, then by marketing a particular product, a pill that purports to provide contentment, capital loses sexuality as a marketing idiom. No one would buy a car because it had a model in the commercial if they no longer cared terribly much about sexuality. But this is probably naive.

My other thought, from reading your note, was about the idea in continental philosophy that identity is not fixed, as in American ego psychology, but rather a system of tendencies or performances. Capitalism, in the realm of sexuality, I figure, thinks that we behave in specific ways, like a breast is always going to produce a hard-on for some product, whereas the truth is that sexuality is always a continuum, which can be characterized by reversals.

If capitalism really wanted to sell sexuality, it would have to have a talking head of someone saying, “Sometimes nothing gets me off at all, so I could hardly give a shit about this perfume or that car. In fact, I’m more interested in breaking things, and treating the people I love badly. Sometimes it’s just like this, and nothing helps for a while.” Then the General Motors logo underneath. It would be a rare example of credibility in advertising. Would your analysis of the sex industry be consistent with the above, that sexuality devoid of darker hues is contradictory?

MG: I don’t know if I was referring to the death instinct for sure because I haven’t yet read Freud, but the idea of a death instinct always made sense to me. I also realized that something in my last message wasn’t right, that death and pain as part of sexuality “never show up in advertising” — actually, they do, especially in cigarette ads. Back in the days of subliminal advertising, death images were routinely built into ads for cigarettes and liquor, maybe into other stuff too. I don’t know if that technique is still practiced, but I have certainly seen cigarette ads that were almost ghoulish in their imagery, just blatantly Goth, to use the pop term. It is probably arguable that advertising in some way addresses everything present in the psyche, in its own strange language.

However, and this is what I don’t know how to articulate, I still think that even if that “dark” part is there in advertising, the way it’s there is still static and obsessional and therefore superficial, in the way, speaking of the sex industry, that porn is. It still won’t go down into that “pit” I was talking about, the place I think actual sexuality gets to — it’ll just scare you with quick pictures of the pit. This static and obsessional thing — I don’t know if it’s about the death instinct or if it’s something else altogether. I am fascinated by obsession, but I don’t understand it; I don’t think anyone does. You’re right in saying that it does not want to be placated, but I don’t think that means it can’t be marketed to.

I think advertising and the world created in the fashion magazines are about desire, ever-inflating, ever-more-florid desire, and desire is the opposite of satisfaction. It’s like rubbing, rubbing, rubbing and never having an orgasm. It’s ideally meant for people who don’t know how to be satisfied. My thoughts about the porn industry are similar; in a way, everything gets addressed in porn — love, hate, contempt, neediness, violence, tenderness, you name it, it’s probably in there someplace. But it has that same repetitive, numb, obsessive quality that ads do. Even when the porn is very dark, there’s a way that it doesn’t get into that pit. I think the hilarious imaginary ad you came up with (“Sometimes nothing gets me off at all”) is closer, just because it accepts bad things without trying to fix them, and that’s why it wouldn’t run as an ad. Though if somebody did run an ad like that, they’d have the media talking about their ad and their product for several years.

Just in case I didn’t go on enough, I realized I didn’t say anything about what you found interesting, the idea of Prozac a) increasing happiness, b) decreasing sexual feelings. I have no idea what the connection really is between the two. I just had the thought because a few years ago I was on Zoloft for three days (which was as long as I could tolerate it). I went on it because people had told me it helped insomnia, which it did not do it my case. In fact, it did the reverse. But it was the strangest thing. It did make me feel happier, but in a way that was blatantly induced. I would just lie awake all night feeling these happy feelings coursing through me, very aware that they had nothing to do with me. I had this weird sensation of being floated up to the surface of myself, which was kind of fun, but unmoored feeling, uprooted.

I remember thinking, no wonder people aren’t interested in sex on this stuff; sex is root based. But I also think even if everybody were on Prozac, and it did decrease their urge for sex, sex would still be effective in advertising, because I think sexuality and sexual attractiveness have become anxiety-driven goals as much as anything. People think they’re supposed to be sexy, whether they feel it or not. (Maybe this has always been true of boys. Maybe the new thing is it’s now also true of girls.) I was once with this girl (on Prozac, incidentally) who was supposedly so horny, wanted sex so much, and yet when we got our clothes off, her body was telling me she couldn’t care less. In fact her body was saying “Don’t touch me,” but it was desperately important to her to feel that she was “sexy,” so much so that the natural drive, or lack thereof, had become buried. Have you had that kind of experience? What do you think about it?

RM: I felt, initially, that you were defending porn above, and I suppose that I agreed with the defense in spirit. My own tendency is to fault porn for content, not for form. I don’t particularly have a problem with the sexually explicit, or even the blatantly calculating, appeal to the masturbatory impulse, because I think this is a practical acknowledgment of how (male) sexuality is practiced in the actual world, but I find a lot of porn cynical, which bothers me, and I imagine that this goes with the market-oriented aspect of the whole thing.

If porn were free, that is, it would be a lot more interesting, and that’s why, for example, “amateur” porn has more going for it than another 10,000 reels of Ron Jeremy and his hairy back banging away at some junky girl who’s not getting paid enough. So I imagine that this conjunction of sex and capital is also suspect, though, like you, I am more fond of it than I am of sexuality in advertising, as it tries to get closer to some idea of sexuality as it really happens. But maybe this is simply a male talking. You tell me.

As for sex and antidepressants, I have less experience of it than you, I figure, because I have been drug-free since before the existence of the Prozac family of medications. After my experience with major depression, which was mainly alcohol induced in my case, I was on an earlier antidepressant, a tricyclic, I think, called Norpramin. It didn’t make me happy at all, though in its maw I didn’t want to be dead, and that was an improvement. It had little or no effect on me sexually, but maybe that was because it didn’t elevate my mood but simply lopped off my extremes. However, I did experience something like what you describe when I was a practicing alcoholic. I would feel these surges of vast romantic and sexual need, and then, upon being naked, I would be completely useless. I feel like this condition gets very close to a sort of important American capitalist moment: yearning and nonsexual at the same time.

MG: My feeling about porn is pretty neutral. It’s a hard thing to be against somehow, even if the way it’s made is damaging to people. (I once saw a documentary about teenage-boy porn from the Eastern bloc that was really sickening. It actually showed a movie getting made and the way this bullying sadist was hectoring these guys to fuck and get fucked — it was really like he was making them into dolls or something.)

I guess I think it’s one of those things that will always be with us, no matter what. The marketing aspect is another thing … I wonder if the paying for it is part of the experience for some people? Because it creates a feeling of white noise or space around the fantasy that might be necessary for masturbators? I think masturbating is to sex like dreaming is to real life — it’s not worse, just a different category of experience.

But maybe to see amateur porn (which I have never seen) is too personal for some people — unless they felt they were seeing genuine shame or some other real stripping away of personality, which I think sex is in some sense. I once went out with a guy who was into porn, and he said he only liked the stuff that conveyed a sense of shame or ambivalence in the actors’ faces. He wanted to see the calculated, formula porn with the stock characters, a sort of generic foundation on which to hang his fantasy, and then the one real human feeling, shame, to come popping out in wet, red letters, isolated from all other feelings. That’s a difference between porn and advertising — in porn a bit of humanity just might appear and in advertising it really won’t. It’s there, but it’s all coded and coated with some kind of flexible metal.

Yearning and nonsexual seem like an apt way to describe the marketing part of America. When I read the phrase I pictured a pretty little girl clasping her hands and looking upward in a soulful way. Meanwhile, there is a squared-off lockbox in her crotch filled with worms — which she is totally unaware of except in certain semiconscious moments! I also picture this advertisement for Diesel jeans featuring an airliner filled with gross, sexual, rich older women waving dollar bills at gross Chippendale stewards while two cute, pre-sexual young girls held hands and looked longingly out the window.

How do you think marketing affects American literature?

RM: I suppose the way I’d answer your question about marketing and literature is to say that the model for all marketing is the marketing of pornography. All advertising aspires to the condition of porn, where the maximum pleasure is promised by the product — orgasm — and yet the minimum — bad production values, faked orgasms, prosthetic penises, etc. — is actually delivered. The intent is no different in any marketing situation, only the degree of deceitfulness. And the degree is not so different either. The push of marketing, as a practice in multinational capitalism, is always toward a semblance to the porn ideal, and this is the case in books as much as elsewhere.

In a way, Elizabeth Wurtzel, by posing en dishabillie on [the cover of her book] “Bitch,” is just an obvious example. But my theory, in recent remarks about sex and capitalism for one of the women’s magazines, was that the best example was Madonna’s book “Sex.” It was marketed as a limited edition, high-end coffee-table book, with an inflated list price for the time, I think $45 or so, and it promised all the secrets of Madonna’s sexuality.

The marketing was so aggressive that the book went right onto the bestseller list, but the fact was that the book itself was deeply cynical, as all porn is, having none of the shame that your friend liked in porn (and I would express a related appreciation in porn: joy; I only like it when the actors seem to be expressing joy, which is extremely rare in porn, as the guys are usually attempting to keep it up, and the women are faking), and all of the fascist imagery of fashion photography. I would say, in the aftermath of “Sex,” that all bookselling is about attempting to duplicate this merchandising success. Even in literature, which would seem, on the surface, to oppose all of this, the marketing arms of large publishers are arrayed in the usual way, so that the image deployed by a book is at variance with what’s in the pages. The original paperback of one of my novels was along these lines: It had lovely, comely faces on the cover that had nothing at all to do with the middle-class despair in the book. Looked like Natalie Wood and Elvis Presley on the jacket. My gloomy reply here leads me to wonder if the intention of literature can survive all this marketing.

MG: I don’t know if I agree that the model for all marketing is the marketing of pornography, mostly because I don’t a) know enough about marketing, b) know enough about the marketing of porn in particular. It doesn’t seem to me that advertising aspires to the condition of porn simply because porn is so heavily freighted with people’s feelings about sex — and that is a dark, heavy, tangled weight — as well as being strictly limited to a very narrow way of experiencing sex.

Advertisers don’t have that weight or that particular stricture within which they must operate. They can appeal to the allegedly higher levels of desire — to provide for your family, to make your world beautiful, to make a complex social statement about yourself, to attract a mate. From what I understand, advertisers now aspire to the condition of postmodern art; they often are art school grads with very sophisticated, socially complex points of view, and the prestige ads are often ironic, clever messages that sell by acknowledging to the viewer that selling is bullshit and that the advertisers know the viewer is smart enough to understand this.

Like this ad Nike ran a few years ago: Spike Lee appears holding a shoe to his face. He says: “You can buy this.” Michael Jordan (I think) is shown making an incredible dunk. Spike’s voice-over: “You can’t do that.” The ad is overtly stating that they know that you know that it’s stupid to sell a shoe by pretending that it will make you like Michael Jordan — yet the connection to Michael is there. Also, the connection is there to a kind of knowingness that is extended to the viewer, that he or she is living in a world of brightly colored bullshit that we know how to negotiate like Michael making his high-speed jump. I personally think it’s worse than porn, which as we’ve discussed is pretty odious. The only connection I would make between porn and advertising is that both refer to and play off deep needs, which are then translated into an extremely bland and superficial mass language where no depth is allowed — thus in a way violating the humanity of the need.

I’m not sure how all this applies to literature. I think it’s hard to market writing (regardless of its quality) in the way most things are marketed because it doesn’t offer the same high-voltage charge that other media do, like music. You have to be alone to read, it’s slow and it penetrates you slowly. Because of its nature, it’s hard to translate into that superficial mass language — even if it is superficial writing. The “advertising” is mostly in the way a particular spin is put on the book through publicity and reviewers, and that is not entirely in the control of the publisher, let alone the writer.

I too have had the experience of being presented in a way that had little to do with my work. My last publisher insisted on putting a large screwlike object on the hardcover of my book, right under the title “Because They Wanted To,” making a) a very funny joke, b) sure that the reader would think it must be all about sex. I’m sure a great many people were disappointed in the book as a result.

I think another way of marketing highly “literary” books is more old-fashioned snob appeal: making the reader think that reading this book makes him or her a serious person dealing with serious issues or a deep person or a clever person. And it isn’t my observation that literature is at all opposed to this. I recently read a review in the New York Review of Books, which, though generally glowing, spent a paragraph fussing over the fact that the author of the book in question had once allowed a magazine to print an attractive photograph of her next to her short story. The reviewer concluded that the story survived the presence of the picture, that it was a good story even if the photo was a grave mistake. It seems to me that the message of the paragraph was: “This is a literary book for literary people who do not sully the purity of literature with vulgar, attractive pictures. Liking this book will make you a serious and high-minded person — like I am.”

What do you think about television as an influence on literature? Or do you think it is one?

RM: I don’t know what to do with television at all. It just seems like an incredibly wasteful and stupid medium, the art equivalent of vinyl siding or plastic covers for furniture. It does nothing for the culture, or very little, and the people who work in it, I have found, have a tendency to be breathtakingly dismissive of their audiences.

But I have no television, really, just a monitor for videotapes, so I sample its charms only when traveling. Most of all, television feels left behind now. It’s rail travel in the jet age, because of how fast things are happening on the Internet. And here there are, assuredly, parallels with what we’re discussing, because a) a major portion of Web sites are given over to pornography (and not free pornography, but profit-oriented, commercial American porn), and b) the Internet is hurtling toward centralization of our Western national discourses at an alarming rate, mainly funded by the inflated price-earnings ratios of Internet stocks.

So capital, here again, is driving us toward an instant-gratification model on the Web (with some carefully ghettoized political dissent) that will soon be downloadable on our television stations. Not surprisingly, many of the entrees on this particular bill of fare are pornographic. The Web, largely, is either pornography or advertising: slick, beautifully created pages for large corporations and seat-of-the-pants sites devoted to every paraphilia under the sun.

The question is where literature fits into this diet. As you say, it is best savored slowly and in silence, in retirement from all the promises of consumer economy. I have great faith in what written language can do, if you just allow it, if you just get out of its way. While the anxiety model of advertising (that you will buy this product out of a desire to avoid not having this product, because not having it would cause anxiety) is a kind of infantile desire, which, as [Jacques] Lacan said, always exceeds the object.

Where does it leave us writers but outside the homogeneity of all this centralization, like hungry kids of the village watching pies cool on the sills of the powerful, though the thing we make, as writers, is a major revenue stream for these very large multinational entertainment providers?

MG: I do own a tube, but since I don’t have cable I rarely watch TV shows; I didn’t watch at all from the age of about 16 to 36, when I finally got one so I could rent movies. But I asked because I recently watched a few episodes of “thirtysomething” as research (don’t ask) and was really perturbed.

I often am perturbed when I watch popular programs like “The Simpsons” or the one I just mentioned, and it is hard to put my finger on why I am perturbed. It’s like it creates a world where one can’t really do anything but take a stance of some kind — a lovable stance, a defiant stance, a feminist stance, a frustrated woman stance, a manly guy stance. Even though “The Simpsons” was really clever, it was still this world where everything was summed up and disposed of very fast, “signifed,” and everybody was always in this pissed-off, desperate stance. I feel that this has affected writing to some extent, or at least the way people read it.

I find that when I assign students older books, like Saul Bellow or other things from that era, they have a very hard time with them and complain that the characters are depressing; I suspect it’s because they are developed characters instead of stances, and that the weight of those characters feels too heavy to them because they are no longer used to it. I’m not sure TV is responsible for this; I don’t know what is. I’m not even sure I’m noticing anything new; I’m sure there have always been superficial and silly readers. But it seems that what passes for intelligence now is often mere knowingness or an ability to jump to a conclusion about something without really looking at it, and that is the kind of mind-set typical of TV.

I have faith in what written language can do also, which is why I think it will always be around in some form. It can simply achieve things that can’t be achieved on TV or movies or the Internet, just as those forms can achieve things that writing can’t. I think reading may become less popular (I think fiction may become like poetry, even in our lifetime), because it is less complimentary to the hyped-up way people live and think now, but it will always have its fans. It’s so great to read something really old, something like Ovid, and have it make you get up and pace around the room muttering to yourself, and then think of this person writing it all that time ago … I think that’s really dreamy.

I should admit, though, that I have had periods in the last five years where I did watch ghastly made-for-TV movies, mostly about crazy, violent middle-aged women going nuts and stalking people, and that I really enjoyed them. I especially enjoyed imagining the women of America watching them and inwardly exulting while outwardly deploring.

Continental Drift by Russell Banks
The intersecting stories of a struggling blue-collar worker desperate for a better life and a poor Haitian woman desperate to come to America, this is about powerless people chewed up by social forces. It is also about something deeper and more difficult to put into words. Banks writes about tragedy in a way that is uplifting and strangely calming. He evokes primal mystery, the forces that we, in our lives and deaths, embody without knowing how or why. The senseless deaths depicted here are unjust, but Banks’ acceptance of the fact of death gives his characters great dignity. This book, in its profound acknowledgment of suffering, is an instrument of healing as well as a work of art.

The Ordinary Seaman by Francisco Goldman

A handful of Central American men in need of work are tricked into traveling to a harbor in New York City where they become virtual slaves, trapped on a worthless ship, working for an unscrupulous American dilettante. This book is also about powerless people who are victimized by social forces, and it brilliantly depicts the various ways they cope with it, in their actions and their inner lives. This becomes a portrayal of the ingenious complexity and resilience of human nature in its most essential form. It is rendered with tremendous vitality, intelligence and sweetness. That combination alone makes it rare in modern American letters.

China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston
Interwoven stories about the men of an immigrant Chinese family and what they experienced in America. I was surprised to realize, after I’d finished it, that “China Men” is a nonfiction account drawn from Kingston’s own family history. I thought it was a novel employing the first person narrative, not only because it uses storytelling methods common in fiction, but because the world it creates is observed with such extraordinary perception and feeling that it seems magical. What it describes is not always beautiful; Kingston’s ancestors experienced much cruelty and hardship. But her telling of it is beautiful because she goes to the inmost depth of experience, a place she could have reached only with her imagination. She uses nonfiction to do what I have previously seen done only in the best fiction: Through words she expresses a truth that is beyond words.

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
The travails of a homeless, retarded necrophiliac killer roaming the hills of Kentucky. It sounds like a joke, but somehow it’s not. (Though if I were John Waters, I’d option it immediately.) Not only do you take this ghoul seriously, once you’re halfway through the book, you realize you’re on his side. Without psychologizing, or even getting into the protagonist’s completely nonreflective head, McCarthy makes us understand him; what he’s doing makes total sense to him, given what he knows. He comes to seem merely an extreme version of all people — blind, cosmically and comically ignorant, doing what makes sense to us given what we know.

I had read Alice’s stories some years before I met her. I particularly remember the title story of what is still my favorite collection of hers, “Beautiful Girl.” It is about Ardis, a former snotty beauty queen turned deluded alcoholic old bag, courted by a long-ago admirer named Walpole Greene, a hopeless nerd turned hotshot editor. In a cool, sleight-of-hand flashback, we see them in college, where shy, homely Walpole nurses a quiet hatred for Ardis, who always seems to be at a glamorous epicenter, laughing her damn head off. One night, “in a stronger than usual mood of self-pity,” he decides to stay up all night and go out to a strategic spot to watch the sun come up. But when he gets there he finds a party going on nearby. As he grimly sits alone on a bench, Ardis appears, festively drunk:

“You came out here to look at the sunrise?” she slurred, conversationally. “God,
Wopple, that’s wonderful.” Wunnerful.

Tears of hatred sprang to Walpole’s eyes — fortunately invisible. He
choked; in a minute he would hit her, very hard.

Unaware that she was in danger, Ardis got stiffly to her feet; she
bent awkwardly toward him and placed a cool, bourbon-tasting kiss on Walpole’s
mouth. “I love you Wopple,” Ardis said. “I truly and purely do.” The sun came up.

He didn’t hate her anymore — of course he would not hit her. How could he hit a girl who had kissed him and spoken of love? And although after that night nothing between them changed overtly, he now watched her as a lover would. With love.

This tiny moment between Ardis and Walpole is piercing because it appears to be a moment of clarity and grace — and then it is piercing for the opposite reason; although she has in effect changed Walpole’s life, Ardis doesn’t even remember the incident. In very plain, nearly bland language, Alice Adams evoked rude gaiety, privilege and the often sexualized hatred the undesirable can feel for the desired. Within the same very small moment, she evoked delicacy, tenderness and understanding. She used this moment to reveal a deep range of inner experience beheld with simple, mortal wonder — and she did it in a hairpin turn.

The generous intelligence in this story is characteristic of how Alice lived her life. I met her in 1989, shortly after I published my first book. Our friendship was not close, but it was valuable to both of us. We met every few months, usually for dinner. We talked mostly about books; she was one of the most supportive writers I have ever met. She had a subtle quality that is surprisingly rare; even though she was opinionated and could be judgmental, she could also allow her friends to be as they were. We were very different, and I think she sometimes thought I was sort of a nut. But even if this was the case, I always felt free to absolutely be myself in her presence. By this I don’t mean that she didn’t express her disagreement with me. She certainly disagreed with my high opinion of “Crumb,” the film about cartoonist R. Crumb. “He hated women,” she said. “You can tell. Besides, I’ve heard he’s really into anal sex, and I’ve also heard he’s got a big dick. I don’t have any use for him.” I laughed at this, and she laughed too, and then she listened to me say why I liked the movie.

This is what I mean when I describe her as innately elegant and graceful: She had the sharpness, the elegance of perception, to see you as she saw Ardis and Walpole — and what she saw may not have been a pretty sight as far as she was concerned. But she had the grace to stay in her own skin and not get caught up in whether you were thinking or living as she would. She could just let you be. She was able to tolerate a range of contradictory feelings that might suddenly find expression in a small, unlikely moment — the sort of moment most people don’t even notice.

I’ll miss her.

“Under the 82nd Airborne” by Deborah Eisenberg
A deluded Blanche Dubois-esque woman travels to a war zone to visit her daughter, thinking she’s about to have a vacation on a beach. Reading the story, I was reminded of an interesting definition of sin I once heard — that it is first an abandonment of yourself. The heroine, who has abandoned herself before we meet her, is both contemptible and heart-rending, and Eisenberg moves her through a failing, chaotic world described with delicacy and a rare sense of intelligent wonder. The end is a knockout.

“Helping” by Robert Stone
The “Dirty Harry” of short stories, except nobody gets killed. A cranky Vietnam vet sick of his job as a counselor falls off the wagon while his lawyer wife is being hassled by child-abusing bikers. His wife says to hell with it and pours herself a stiff one. The writing is beautiful and masterful. The dialogue is full of ugly charm, and moral boundaries expand and contract with heartbroken, drunken senselessness. When the hero wades out into the snow with a loaded gun, we’re on his side, even though, technically, he’s acting like an asshole.

“Separating” by John Updike
As he meanders through chores and family functions, a father lets his children know that he and their mother are separating. What is remarkable about this story is the intense sensitivity with which it’s told: The story opens in dozens of petal-like details and moments of feeling. In a very small setting, Updike creates a whole world that is by turns heartless, trivial, abundant, empty, tender, funny and deep. His acknowledgment of every character’s complexity and mystery and his ability to make us feel them give the story great energy and movement even at its most quiet and somber moments.

“The Lower Garden District Free Gravity Mule Blight or Rhoda, a Fable” by Ellen Gilchrist
The story of a materialistic, indiscriminately sexual woman who dreams she’s crushing the skulls of her husband’s sheepdogs while her mother’s sad little face peeps down the stairs. She’s getting divorced and she needs money, so she’s trying to pawn her wedding ring and then collect insurance money on it. She’s also trying to screw the insurance man. She’s irrational and she thinks awful, anti-Semitic thoughts. She’s an absurd jerk and she’s hilarious and she enjoys the physical world to the hilt. She’s human appetite, lovingly regarded in all its buffoonery. I once compared this story to “The Lucy Show” for a disapproving undergraduate class. One of them grandly responded that he didn’t read literature for “The Lucy Show.” How unfortunate for him.

In “Halfway Heaven,” Melanie Thernstrom, a Harvard graduate who also taught there, addresses this mystery with intelligence, tenacity and courage. She appears to have felt the tragedy deeply and to have striven mightily to understand it. Unfortunately, she also strove to resolve it — unfortunately because by the last third of the book her desire for resolution has apparently shriveled her capacity to understand. “Halfway Heaven” starts as a thorough, meaty and humane illumination; it ends as a Hollywood movie about Good and Evil. This ending not only disappointed me, it made me angry. A story like this urgently needs our deepest compassion, for both the perpetrator and the victim, not only for the sake of the dead, but for the rest of us as well. And dramas of Good and Evil simply don’t allow room for much more than a sentimental counterfeit.

Thernstrom would doubtless say that she did have compassion, and truthfully it is clear that she tried very hard. Of course, she didn’t have to try to feel for Trang Ho; anyone would. She escaped Vietnam with her father and older sister in an illegal boat, arriving in America after staying almost a year in an Indonesian refugee camp which Thernstrom describes as “violent and dangerous.” Trang showed great courage and ingenuity in adapting to her new country, excelling in school and supporting her struggling father; the high school teachers interviewed by Thernstrom clearly loved her and were moved by her. She was a natural leader with a nearly overdeveloped sense of responsibility who worked hard at everything, was endlessly cheerful and, it would seem, almost single-handedly held her family together during an ugly divorce. “When someone dies you always portray the victim as so perfect and good,” said a friend, “but with Trang it’s really true — she really was that perfect.”

Although she came from an upper-class family, Sinedu faced difficult circumstances too. She grew up during Ethiopia’s Red Terror, a time of mass murder and atrocities, when corpses were dragged to families’ doorsteps by soldiers who then forced the bereaved to pay for the bullet before giving up the body. As Thernstrom puts it, it was a regime in which “the murderers had the power.” Sinedu’s father was imprisoned by this regime for two years when Sinedu was 7, throwing the family into turmoil. In this deadly atmosphere, Sinedu worked single-mindedly to gain admission to the prestigious International Community School where she graduated a valedictorian and gained a scholarship to Harvard.

But the dream opportunity soon devolved into a nightmare as Sinedu proved completely at a loss to cope with the demands of the new environment. She was unable to keep up academically and she made no friends, not even with the relatives she had in the area. She became so desperately lonely that she sent a letter to dozens of strangers, randomly selected from the phone book, pleading with them to befriend her.

When Thernstrom traveled to Ethiopia to find out who this young woman really was, she couldn’t; Sinedu apparently had no friends there either. Indeed, her family seems never to have known her — or to have wanted to. Thernstrom described Sinedu’s family as rigid and strangely surface-oriented; even their expressions of grief implied a refusal to look at anything beneath the immediate surface. They praised their dead daughter, but almost as though she was a stranger, in terms of her accomplishments. They categorically refused to accept that Sinedu committed murder or suicide; they buried her with the words “While she was studying at Harvard University an unfortunate accident happened.”

The way Thernstrom came to know Sinedu was through her diary. Through it, we see a picture very different from the dull, conscientious, diffident student described by observers — and it is a picture of a soul in unspeakable pain. We see that Sinedu burned in a private hell of loneliness more profound than most of us can imagine; she never felt loved (and it seems likely that she was in fact not loved) and so did not have an ability to feel love or to relate to others in even the most fundamental way. She could not feel her heart and she knew it. As she put it in her hopeless public letter, “I am like a person who can’t swim choking (sic) for life in a river.” Desperately, she tried to school herself in ways to “make people like you,” writing to herself in the third person with instructions like, “Do not show what you really think. Put on a mask,” or listening to inspirational tapes. When these steps failed, she anguished about what she poetically called her “heart-failer thing,” the way she felt “dead and it is hard to warm myself up.” When she met Trang, Sinedu believed that finally she had found someone with whom she could have a genuine relationship. When that failed and Trang rejected her, it was more than she could bear.

Thernstrom is meticulous and empathic in drawing interwoven portraits of the two women. She is compassionate in showing us how much pain the murderer was in, even expressing a degree of respect for her doomed attempts to cope: “She left behind an extraordinary record: that of an intelligent, insightful, strong-willed person using all those capacities to fight as hard as she could for mental health — and losing, day by day, hour by hour.”

Thernstrom is at her best when she examines Harvard’s handling of the catastrophe (and courageous, considering that institution’s influence). The official response was one of complete mystification, but in fact the school had at least one loud, clear warning. One of the people to whom Sinedu sent her pleading letter was acquainted with an administrator at Harvard, and she forwarded it to that acquaintance for obvious reasons — the letter reads like a fire alarm. The administrator sent it to the dorm where Trang and Sinedu lived. The house master read it and filed it. Contrary to what Harvard officials claim, Sinedu sought counseling at the university’s mental health center, and got it — one day a month. (Her therapist is under a gag order from the university.)

Thernstrom builds a case against Harvard by arguing that the university is ill-equipped and even negligent in dealing with students’ mental problems. As part of that argument, she characterizes Sinedu as mentally ill, bringing in a host of psychiatrists — none of whom ever met Sinedu — to make diagnoses based on her diaries. And this is where Thernstrom loses her compassionate voice. Her discussion of Sinedu’s diaries is proscriptive and mechanical; it almost seems as if she’s willfully ignoring the emotional sense Sinedu makes, trying to interpret it according to a definition of sanity that does not brook human extremes or even metaphor.

“Her imagery is bizarre,” says Thernstrom of a diary passage. “She writes that what keeps her from acting out her murderous desires is the feeling of being ‘being hand and leg cuffed to a couch stuck in the ground.’ And then she adds, as if by way of explanation: ‘Sometimes even if a bomb falls beside me, I would be scared at first, and then not even bother to see what happened.’

I don’t understand why Thernstrom finds any of this “bizarre.” It reads to me like an accurate metaphoric expression of exhaustion, entrapment and pain. It is not rational because it is not describing rational feelings. I find Thernstrom’s pedantic, ham-fisted attempt to decode it stranger than anything in the passage itself. Her weirdly literal-minded insertions (“perhaps a therapist’s couch”) would be funny if they were not so soulless and so blind.

Sinedu may in fact have been mentally ill and I don’t mean to argue with any certainty that she was not. But the letter and the diaries presented by Thernstrom don’t convince me that she was. She says extreme, scary things, the most striking of which is her statement that “the bad way out is suicide, the good way killing, savoring their fear and then suicide.” This is an ugly, vicious and desperate thing to say, but human beings can be all of those things without being crazy.

One of the kindest, sanest people I know once told me that when her girlfriend was blatantly conducting an affair with another woman, she often made a point of putting kitchen knives away because she was afraid that if a knife happened to be on the counter at the wrong moment, she would kill her girlfriend. I’ve never had to hide knives, but I have experienced similar impulses, albeit fleetingly. Those impulses may be grotesque, but they are also human; people can feel that way when they are very, very hurt and very, very scared, and I do not believe pain and fear equals illness, even if the pain and fear appear irrational. It’s true that when I had those feelings, I didn’t even come close to acting on them — but I had far greater internal support than Sinedu did. This is because when I was growing up I was given a sense of myself as a loving person who could receive love. If I had not had that, I’m not sure what I would’ve done, and it is clear that Sinedu did not have that.

Thernstrom compares Sinedu’s pain to Trang’s, saying that, unlike Sinedu, the hardship Trang experienced seems to have strengthened her. She fails to see the obvious; Trang was loved. In contrast, Sinedu writes, quite rationally, about how she felt hated and attacked by her mother, how there was no feeling in her family, how they constantly ridiculed her as ugly and “very black.” Thernstrom notes repeatedly that Sinedu’s childhood did not feature unusual abuse. But lack of feeling can be the greatest agony of all, especially for someone with a profoundly emotional nature. What Sinedu describes sounds to me like pure hell.

“While Sinedu’s childhood was clearly not ‘good enough’ for her,” says Thernstrom, “it may well have been good enough for someone with a different biopsychic makeup, and indeed it was apparently adequate for her siblings — none of whom became murderers.” Well, yes, and they didn’t go to Harvard either. They didn’t come out of a cookie cutter mold. Yes, Sinedu’s family may’ve been good enough for others — so what? What does that have to do with her? How does that make her biopsychically ill?

It’s isn’t that I think mental illness doesn’t exist; I know it does. I’m not sure exactly what it is though, nor does it seem to me that many people do. Even if Sinedu was mentally ill, I think if we could have truly looked inside her, we might be shocked to see how like us she really was. This is why I am disturbed by Thernstrom’s eagerness to lock her into standard-issue categories out of a diagnostic manual; she seems to want to put Sinedu in a place of otherness, somewhere far away from us and our normal lives, in the province of doctors, where we can feel sorry for her, then dismiss her.

I fully understand this impulse; I even share it to some extent. Truthfully, I would like to believe that a person who would act as Sinedu did must be insane because it would make life a lot safer if it were so. But reality does not support that belief. The Serb soldiers who raped, tortured and murdered their Muslim neighbors were ordinary citizens, family men who had lived in peace with Muslims for years. The rapists and murderers known as the Klu Klux Klan were average citizens too — people who may have loved their children and had moments of kindness like the rest of us. Does anyone believe that these people would’ve behaved differently if only there had been enough doctors on hand to prescribe medication? Literature, from Dostoevsky to Russell Banks, is full of stories about average people who commit terrible acts, and they are not stories of mental illness. They are stories of human frailty and suffering.

Finally though, my argument here may be semantic. Whether you call it illness or suffering, Sinedu clearly needed help. It does seem possible that a gifted therapist or pyschiatrist could’ve saved her — and thus saved Trang. I may not like the way Thernstrom discusses mental health, but in fact, if all she wanted was to define Sinedu’s behavior as mentally ill, I wouldn’t be writing this. However, Thernstrom goes farther than that. In an attempt to place the event in a deeper moral context, she blurs Sinedu’s “illness” with evil, almost equating one with the other, creating an artificially profound effect. She doesn’t even do this directly. She takes the equation from other people’s mouths, and then, instead of questioning it, supports it with manipulative descriptions of the two women’s grave sites. Here are the mouths, with Thernstrom’s commentary woven in:

“We can never say why certain patients — rather than other patients with similar or more serious diagnoses — are the ones who actually commit some terrible act,” Dr. Longhurst says. “Sinedu’s diaries are clearly very disturbed, but they are less disturbed than other patients who didn’t commit murder and suicide.” If she wasn’t more disturbed than others all along, then, at some point she crossed over. What caused that crossing? “If you push psychiatrists far enough,” Dr. Longhurst says, “you’ll find most of them believe in evil.”

Thernstrom follows this with a clergyman talking about the evil “out there” as opposed to within, and then checks in with the law:

Assistant District Attorney Martin Murphy says that if Sinedu had lived she would have been charged with first degree premeditated murder. There would’ve been a trial, he says, in which the defense would have argued that she was insane and his office would have argued that she wasn’t and the jury would have made a decision as to which of those two boxes to put her in.

If she wasn’t mentally ill, what was she? What is the second box?”

He flounders momentarily. “Bad,” he says.

A paragraph later, Thernstrom is at Sinedu’s grave in Ethiopia: “On either side of Sinedu were finished graves: long white marble mausoleums, guarded by a cage of iron to keep the marble from being stolen. The head of each mausoleum is inlaid with a small black and white photo of the dead face. Forty days after the burial, Sinedu’s gravestone was to be put in: I pictured the familiar photo of her, glimpsed between bars, caught for all time under a swirl of thick glass.”

On the last page Thernstrom closes with an image of Trang’s grave and a final summation: “I walk for a long time through the labyrinth of plots and flowering hedges, birds calling to each other in every direction, but it’s Trang’s grave I find my way back to. The earth has closed over now, the gravestone inlaid, flat as a jewel. I remember the grave at the funeral, the tear-shaped blossoms sifting slowly down over the onyx casket. I pluck a flower and stand staring down at the grave. The reality of the loss is so overwhelming that all reflection seems to collapse into a sense of inevitability: Sinedu was possessed by spirits or psychosis; Trang was perfected and ready to enter the Pure Land; Harvard couldn’t prevent anything.”

“Collapse” is an appropriate word here; Thernstrom threw away the care with which she painstakingly drew the two women and opted for a cartoon of good and bad in which one smiles down from heaven and the other is consigned to hell, “between bars, caught for all time.” It’s a very easy resolution, and one that many readers will doubtless approve of, and even experience as moving. But think about it: How does Thernstrom dare to comment on other people’s souls?

It’s a heavy way to put it, especially since Thernstrom doesn’t make any such comment directly or use the word “soul.” However what she does is actually trickier because it’s less conscious; it’s emotion-based in the shallowest sense. All the stuff about birds, flower petals and floating blossoms juxtaposed against the “dead face … under a thick swirl of glass” — it goes right under the thought-wire and heads straight for prejudice. To say directly what she aggressively suggests would require that she ask a lot of hard questions, and for whatever reasons, Thernstrom didn’t choose to do that.

And she is not the only one. “Evil,” as some mysterious force beyond the scope of normal people, is invoked with increasing frequency in the media as an explanation for crimes ranging from Jefferey Dahmer’s cannibalism to the terrorism of Timothy McVeigh. We seem to have a hearty appetite for hearing about such crimes, yet we don’t want to think they have anything to do with us. It is true that for a society to feel safe, such mental boundaries around that which seems unthinkable are necessary, to a point. But if we are going to look at such crimes with any real depth, we need to be able to look past those boundaries; to do otherwise constitutes a kind of moral irresponsibility. Many of the reviews of “Halfway Heaven” have lauded its “compassion,” and in the context of the current hellfire mood, it is relatively compassionate. But to me, the compassion in the book seems like a thin, sugary layer. It is not deep enough or tough enough for the subjects it raises — especially the subject of human evil.

It’s one thing to call a person’s behavior evil — and I do call murder evil — but to call someone evil in their entirety is a judgment we as fellow humans are not qualified to make. Most of us will never commit murder. But who of us has not been cruel? Who has not inflicted pain on another, even if just with words or with an expression in the eyes? On a practical human scale, there is a huge difference between murder and verbal cruelty. On a cosmic scale, I’m not sure the difference is as vast as we would like to think. Two of Christianity’s most powerful precepts are that sin felt in the heart is as bad as sin acted upon, and that, without divine grace, we are all equally guilty, even those of us who appear perfect. Even non-Christians secretly feel the truth in this — but it is a hard truth which we find convenient to forget.

On the night I finished “Halfway Heaven,” I lay awake, thinking of Trang and how terrible her last moments must have been. My body grew rigid with fear and when a cat screamed outside my window, I nearly jumped out of my skin. I turned on the light, but the horrible images were still in my mind. I thought, maybe Sinedu really was evil. Then I thought, Sinedu isn’t here. Whatever evil you are feeling is in your own head. That realization was harder to face — and sadder — than my fear.

It is true that we live in a practical world. We can, and should, protect society from people who murder, and that usually means locking them up. But we should never lock these people out of the common humanity, “under a swirl of thick glass.” We should not pretend that they are so different from us, that they can only be understood in terms of diagnosis and illness because when we do that, we lock out a part of ourselves, the part that most needs our guidance and love. We lock ourselves into smugness. We cheat ourselves of the tenderness and humility that comes from allowing ourselves to feel the depths of human fallibility, including our own.