Such a Dog?

Michiko Kakutani in this morning's Times reviewed a new novel titled The Dog by Joseph O’Neill, poor fellow. She found nothing in it to like, nothing at all. The story she found static and shallow, unconcerned with large issues, and without emotional power. The narration was suffocating and the main character generic. “None of this,” she wrote, “is remotely interesting to the reader.”

Why then did she write the review? And why did the Times put it on the front of The Arts section—or indeed anywhere in the paper? Why did they think readers would be interested in a book she found so totally boring? Aren’t most boring books ignored and left to die of neglect?

If the Times reviewed it because O’Neill’s previous book Netherland had been warmly received in 2008, was it necessary to torpedo his new one so thoroughly and leave the landscape littered with its wreckage? It makes one wonder about motives. At least, that might explain why some authors do not read reviews.

Now comes the Sunday Book Review section on August 7 with its front page devoted to a review of the same book, The Dog, but written by novelist Lawrence Osborne who quite liked it.

He found the narrator “wrapped up in an erudite and deliciously comic game of cat and mouse with a world that will never reward him or even treat him fairly.” He found the “mad lingo...exquisite and wonderfully overcooked....Perhaps,” he added, “it’s well beyond the ken of your average New York lawyer.”  (Or book critic?)

“With a consummate elegance,” Osborne concluded, “The Dog turns in on itself in imitation of the dreadful circling and futility of consciousness itself. Its subplots go nowhere, as in life. But, unlike life, its wit and brio keep us temporarily more alive than we usually allow ourselves to be.”

Contrast that concluding sentence of Osborne’s with Kakutani’s last sentence:

“Alas, in The Dog, the narrator barely budges from his unhappy little cocoon, and there are no captivating characters...to alleviate his spiral of self-pity—or the reader’s boredom.”

So, there you have it: The Dog is either elegant and witty or unbearably awful.  

Telling the Painful Part

In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Bob Timberg and I worked together in The Baltimore Sun’s Washington Bureau. He covered the White House, arguably the most challenging and visible of the bureau’s regular assignments, and became one of the most respected reporters in town.

That was remarkable only because of his unique burden. Bob’s face and hands had been painfully disfigured by burn scars that often caused strangers to look away. His friends knew he’d hit a land mine in Vietnam, but neither he nor we talked about it. The war had been over for fifteen years and Bob, it seemed, had put it behind him without anger or bitterness. An amiable, thoughtful, and energetic colleague, he devoted himself to uncovering stories no one else had, including many connected to the Iran-Contra scandal.  

In quiet moments, though, I confess I wondered what rage must simmer behind that mask, what he felt about the war and his contemporaries who had refused to go and felt righteous about it. And I wondered how he had overcome the physical and psychic scars of his war to build such a successful career.

Now, twenty-four years later, he has told us in a gutsy and brutally honest memoir titled Blue-Eyed Boy.

Timberg, a handsome Naval Academy graduate, was a Marine first lieutenant delivering a payroll near Da Nang in January 1967 when the track vehicle he was riding on suddenly threw him up on a cloud of flame that wiped out his future.

He wrote about it reluctantly, he says in the Prologue, “to remember how I decided not to die. Not to let my future die.”  He has published three other highly regarded books, posted a successful 30-year career in newspapers, and edited a prestigious military journal, but he calls the decision to reclaim his future his “most significant achievement.”

In his very personal telling I found this long and arduous journey, the rebuilding of his life, his face, and his earning capacity, an emotionally difficult tale to read but one impossible to put aside. He endured thirty-five surgeries—one on his eyelids without anesthesia—a monstrous depression, and the stares of children and adults, then returned to a culture that hated his war and disdained and abused those who fought it.

But there’s neither self-pity nor self-praise here. He frankly describes his role in destroying marriages to two loving and loyal women and the anger he felt toward those contemporaries who “relied on world-class duplicity to avoid duty in Vietnam. And then claimed the moral high ground.”

The voice is authentic Timberg. You can hear it in the Prologue:

“ ‘Reclaimed my future’ has a bullshit, self-help-book sound that I hate,” he writes. “Don’t worry, I won’t resort to it again, at least I don’t think I will. But I know there is something true here, something real and fragile...something essentially human about what I fought my way through.”

We’re all the richer for his having the courage and generosity to share it. Everyone with a stake in war—and that’s all of us, whether Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or the next one—should read Blue-Eyed Boy. 

Land of Easy Living

This osprey appeared on our neighbor's dock one fine morning looking like the conductor of an all-gull orchestra. Eventually the gulls left, but he stayed for seven and a half hours. He didn't leave until, as we walked toward him in the late afternoon to see if he had been wounded, he peacefully went home to the green light at the end of the dock.

The Moon is Written

In the much-too-long time since last I reported, I have not only finished the first draft of the novel, but completed three major revisions, some of them with the help of very perceptive readers. Was it necessary to abandon the blog to finish the novel? It seems that, for me at least, it was. In any event, that is the way it worked, and I don’t believe I could have done it otherwise. My apologies to those who hoped for more regular postings, but there’s good news. Now that the manuscript is finished there’s time to blog, and blog I will—about what happened in the intervening time (was it really two years?) and what’s happening now.

Stay tuned. More to come. 

Santorum's Choice

It was an odd place, historically speaking, for Rick Santorum to make this particular speech. If his campaign did not know the history of it, they are incompetent. If they did know and chose Herrin, Illinois, anyway they should explain.

Herrin was the site of a brutal massacre of strikebreakers in 1922, an event in which 23 men died and which President Harding called a "shocking crime" that "shamed and horrified the country."

Santorum, who has grown fond of presenting his candidacy as one of historic necessity, cites the Constitution and the Civil War as comparable moments of urgency. Yesterday without mentioning Herrin’s bloody history he issued there a ringing call to action.

 Exhorting his crowd to remember the Constitution writers’ pledge of “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor,” he told his audience that “your honor is on the line.” The torch of freedom the patriots passed down could go out, he warned, “if we are not successful in this election...if you walk out of here and not just vote for me, but you actually do the duty of freedom: actually work hard, call your friends, post this up on Facebook, tweet about it, write about it....”

Herrin and Williamson County are not like the rest of Illinois. Paul Angle, in his 1992 book Bloody Williamson, wrote that in this county murder "was no novelty" but an indigenous condition. Historically, dating to before the Civil War, it was a place of blood vendettas, vigilante lawlessness, quick tempers, sudden violence, racist lynching, Klan rule, massacres, kangaroo courts, and corrupt government. 

Here is an account of the massacre, excerpted from my unpublished memoir Murder He Wrote:

On the morning of June 22, 1922, just outside of Herrin an army of 500 striking miners and their sympathizers surrounded the Southern Illinois Coal Company compound on the edge of a new strip mine whose owner had broken a strike agreement.

All night there was shooting as company guards and strikebreakers took cover behind railroad ties and empty coal cars. Two union miners and one of the guards died, and explosions destroyed the mine's water supply. At dawn the besieged strikebreakers sent out a guard with a cook's apron tied to a broomstick offering surrender if they would be allowed to leave safely. A voice replied, "Come on out and we'll get you out of the county." As they were marched down the road toward Herrin's rail station the pro-union mob grew angrier and began shooting prisoners one at a time, starting with the mine superintendent. Someone who arrived in a car at that moment, later identified as a union officer named Hugh Willis, told the mob leaders not to shoot prisoners on the road but to take them into the woods and "kill all you can."

When the mass of prisoners approached a barbed wire fence and tried to climb over one got hung up, someone fired a pistol unleashing a wild volley of more gunfire. In the resulting slaughter nineteen men died. Some were hanged from trees. Some were pursued and executed. Wounded men crying for mercy or water were kicked and shot in the head. Several had their throats cut. Others were urinated upon as they lay dying. A Chicago newspaperman who tried to give water to one victim was threatened with a cocked rifle and a warning: "Keep away, God damn you!"

The horror of the Herrin Massacre galvanized the nation. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called it "the most brutal and horrifying crime that has ever stained the garments of organized labor." In the U.S. Senate it was compared with German atrocities in the recent war. President Harding called it a "shocking crime" that "shamed and horrified the country" and asked for legislation to allow punishment of such "barbarity" in federal instead of state courts.

Thirteen men were indicted and divided into two groups for trial. Eight of them in the Williamson County jail were given fans against the heat, a Victrola and phonograph records for entertainment, and home-cooked dinners. After all thirteen of them were found not guilty in spite of positive identification of the killers, State's Attorney Delos Duty announced he would pursue it no further.

"I tried to convince two juries . . .," he said. "I'm not complaining, but it's a hopeless proposition."

To paraphrase another Rick: Of all the towns, in all the counties, in all the states to make that speech, Santorum chose Herrin, Illinois.

Will No One Step Up?

Mitt Romney, given the opportunity to reject Rush Limbaugh's vulgarity (see previous post), has declined to do so.

"I'll just say this, which is, it's not the language I would have used," Romney said in Cleveland. "I'm focusing on the issues that I think are significant in the country today, and that's why I'm here talking about jobs and Ohio."

It’s not “the langauge” he would have used, but he did not challenge the idea. He too took refuge in the choice of “language.” Doesn’t he know that he’s saying public slander over a difference of opinion is acceptable? Another word for that is intolerance, the characteristic mark of a one-party system.

Will no Republican reject it?

words, words, words

In his effort to extract his foot from his mouth, the radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has given us a perfect example of the nonapology apology fashionable among politicians when they get into mouth trouble. He blamed his choice of words when he chose to slander a Georgetown University law student named Sandra Fluke rather than rebut her opinion.  

The professional word user has blamed the tool of his trade, like a carpenter blaming his hammer. 

What he offered was not an apology, because it does not address the offense. It was not the words that were at fault. It was the idea they expressed. Words have meaning, and we select them to express ideas. The idea must exist in our heads first if the words are to follow. He carefully chose his words and they eloquently expressed his thought. There can be no confusion about that, for he said it several ways.

It’s the idea that was wrong. If there can be an acceptable apology it can only address his vulgar idea, not the words he chose to express it.