Salon.com > Pam Rosenthal

“The Forgetting” by David Shenk

Thu, 30 Aug 2001 00:42:00 +0000

"Senile dementia," the doctor told us. Hospital tests had revealed no abnormalities; my mother-in-law's growing tendency to repeat a story several times in an hour was merely a regrettable, predictable aspect of aging. We shrugged: too bad she'd had to endure an MRI just to be told that she was getting older.

"Well, at least we know it's not Alzheimer's," my husband concluded. His mother was still living independently; we'd simply have to make frequent cross-country visits to help out and keep tabs on her condition.

The Family Leave Act entitles me to eight days a year paid sick time to care for an in-law. Writing "senile dementia" on the application, I rather enjoyed the words' archaic cadence, their lowercase modesty. No, it's not Alzheimer's, I told my boss. She's got a condition, not a disease.

What I've learned since then is that a physician who's still using the outmoded term "senile dementia" probably doesn't know much about Alzheimer's.

My mother-in-law's situation worsened. We spent an anxious, ill-informed year before finally receiving an Alzheimer's diagnosis -- from a facility specializing in the aging brain -- and then some fraught weeks trying to learn what the diagnosis might mean. But this time we lucked out; one evening my husband, a bookseller, brought home a prepublication copy of "The Forgetting," David Shenk's compelling new book on Alzheimer's disease.

“Plowing the Dark” by Richard Powers

Thu, 25 May 2000 01:54:00 +0000

Fiction

Plowing the Dark

By Richard Powers

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 415 pages

Do you remember virtual reality? No, not just recent movies like href="/ent/movies/review/1999/04/23/existenz/index.html">"Existenz" and
href="/ent/movies/reviews/1999/04/02reviewa.html">"The Matrix" -- I mean
do you
remember a decade back when virtual reality was the next big thing?

In the early '90s, VR technology had produced only some fuzzy prototypes.
But the primitive
state of the art didn't embarrass its promoters, who were heralding the
advent of full-fledged
computer-generated immersion environments to be generally available "around
the turn of the
century." According to the hype, computer users would no longer peer into
the monitor like the
Little Match Girl. Virtual reality promised to dissolve the interface
between "user" and "world."
When we booted up a VR system, developers promised, screen and desktop would
dissolve and
we'd seem to be there ourselves.

Marilyn from within

Tue, 18 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

"What she has," said one of Marilyn Monroe's acting teachers, "this presence, this luminosity, this flickering intelligence ... [is] so fragile and subtle, it can only be caught by the camera. It's like a hummingbird in flight -- only the camera can freeze the poetry of it."

And indeed, hummingbirds dart through the pages of "Blonde" like tiny emblems of the imperceptible. Joyce Carol Oates' scary and rhapsodic novel about the life of Marilyn Monroe is saturated with the mysteries of eye and camera -- time, motion and stasis, light and dark -- as well as the mystery of Monroe's presence on-screen.

The still camera was always Monroe's friend. But perhaps because she understood it so well, the motion picture camera terrified her. Moviemaking was an agony for her and became so for everybody she worked with. She'd hide in her dressing room for hours: The love scene in "Some Like It Hot" required 51 takes; one conversation in "Bus Stop" took six days to film. And yet the directness and naturalness she achieved during these harrowing sessions consistently astonished everyone who'd been on the set.

“Blue Angel” by Francine Prose

Fri, 07 Apr 2000 16:00:00 +0000

Ted Swenson has an enviable life as writer in residence at beautiful, bucolic Euston College. His teaching load is obscenely low: one two-hour session a week with a class of nine aspiring undergraduate writers. He has tenure, a witty, sexy wife and ample time to work on his next novel.

Only his novel stinks and his most closely guarded secret is that he hasn't worked on it in years. His other two books are out of print and he's approaching 50. In other words, the hero of Francine Prose's 11th novel, "Blue Angel," is in hell. And when he starts obsessing over the work of a talented and enigmatically seductive student -- soon after the dean's warning to the faculty about the growing threat of sexual harassment litigation -- we know that life in hell is going to get a lot worse.

Prose has taught writing at numerous colleges and is clearly appalled by the puritanical mood on campus today. Yet her dissection of the chilly campus climate goes way beyond simple p.c.-bashing. Things weren't so good in the old, pre-feminist days, either; Swenson's wife, Sherrie, the college nurse, has seen enough students "destroyed by faculty Romeos." But nowadays the students seem oddly childish and fearful. At the heart of the malaise lies an odd sense of entitlement -- the students' insistence that they don't have to hear anything they might find disturbing or that might make them feel "unsafe."

“Seeing Mary Plain: A Life of Mary McCarthy” by Frances Kiernan

Wed, 08 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

The world of the novel, Mary McCarthy wrote, is the world according to the village gossip. Try it with your own favorites:

"Well, I always thought old Karamazov had it coming."
"Hey, is the Caulfields' second kid giving them trouble again?"
"Sweetie, you've got to get a look at the gorgeous man who rented Charlotte Haze's spare bedroom."
Or --

"Did you hear that Dottie got a diaphragm? At the Margaret Sanger Clinic? And she used her own name."
You may not understand the last example, because Mary McCarthy is not much read these days; it's from her 1963 novel, "The Group." Wickedly compounded of its characters' youthful cluelessness and haute-bourgeois snobbery and its author's touching, fragile faith in human progress, "The Group" speaks its gossip in the composite voice of Vassar 1933, channeled through its most famous graduate.
Continue Reading...

Forced crossing

Thu, 24 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

When my son was about 2, he had a beloved doll he called Clozer, one of those basic cheapies whose best trick (hence the name) was opening and closing its eyes. Wondering whether we should have sprung for something more anatomically correct, I asked him one day whether Clozer was a girl or boy.

"A boy," he said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because," he explained, obviously surprised that I didn't already know, "he's got a penis."

The "penis" he showed me was the little pee-hole between the doll's legs. Not much of a penis -- it wouldn't have been much of a vagina either -- but it served its signifying purpose admirably, allowing my son to impose a desired meaning on the matter at hand.

Gender is always a meeting of meaning and matter, and sometimes that meeting is fraught. Do we impose meanings on the matter of bodies -- or is it, in Judith Butler's phrase, the bodies that matter? The title "As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl" certainly makes the case for the primacy of nature -- matter -- as, ultimately, the book itself does. But author John Colapinto tells the story with enough richness to ensure that gender remains a complexly meaning-laden issue throughout.

“Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette” by Judith Thurman

Wed, 20 Oct 1999 16:00:00 +0000

"Like all those who never use their strength to the limit," Colette wrote, "I am hostile to those who let life burn them out." Fiercely disciplined, hugely productive, the author of "Gigi" and "Chiri" lived 80 years and produced nearly 80 volumes of fiction, memoirs, journalism and drama. She married three times, had male and female lovers and for a time supported herself as a mime, dancing semi-nude in music halls throughout France. When she died in 1954, she received the first state funeral the French Republic had ever given a woman. And she created the subtlest, most sustained literary examination of love and sex that we have.

An initial reading can be perplexing, though. Colette is a strikingly elusive writer. Packing her books with delicious clothes and furniture and ravishingly attractive people, she delivers pleasures that most "women's writers" only promise. But her prose is rarely straightforward or transparent, and her characters -- captured at the height of their beauty or in beauty's humiliating decline -- maintain a mocking, self-protective reticence.