"I have gone to the forest."
—Knut Hamsun

"Many people think they can take the welfare state with them in the suitcase when they leave home. … We are not a travel agency or an insurance company."
—Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway's Foreign Minister

Norwegians are said to be born with skis on their feet—ready from birth for a life in harmony with the inhospitable Nordic nature.

Maybe my mother was lacking some important vitamin during the pregnancy. No skis accompanied me into this world. Instead of seeking the woods and mountains like a true Norwegian—"There is no bad weather, only poor clothing!" as we say—I came to prefer asphalt under my feet, the safety of skyscrapers, and the soft breeze from passing subway cars, deep underground. I am allergic to trees.

But I didn't miss out on the other thing Norwegians are born with: citizenship in the world's most generous and equitable welfare state.

This is about what happens when rich, well-traveled, and well-educated children from a tiny Viking country covered in forest grow up and try to write fiction.

Rebecca Solnit. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Viking. August 2009.

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West,surely one of the best books of the past decade, was, on the face ofit, a biography of a photographer. Muybridge famously proved, with theuse of multiple cameras and sensitive electrical triggers, that horsesin full gallop at times have all four feet off the ground. Hissequenced, detailed equestrian photographs, along with his equallyimportant work on men and women walking and performing ordinary tasksand his panoramas of San Francisco, effected a virtual sea-change inhuman perception. Not until Muybridge could people see what they lookedlike as beings in continuous action, and it was for this reason that hehas repeatedly been seen as a prefiguration of the cinema.

Solnit’s genius was to see Muybridge not only as aseminal photographer, but as a confluence of all the lurching,multidirectional motions of the United States in the late 19th century.Muybridge, Solnit told us, hailed from the epicenter of fin-de-sieclemodernity, which was not, as one might expect, New York or Paris, butCalifornia. Wherever the old world was giving way to the new, Muybridgewas there: he lived in boomtown San Francisco; he photographed YosemiteValley and the US war against the indigenous Modoc people; LelandStanford, railroad magnate and founder of the university bearing hisname, owned the horse whose gallop Muybridge made famous. Solnitfollowed the trails of information with deliberate guilelessness, andthe book that resulted is one that seems to be recreating the verybirth of modern life. Railroads were annihilating time and space, whilenature photographs testified to the landscapes they plowed over; oldrelationships to land and local space were forcibly overturned by newrelations of property and class. Marx and Engels’ rich ambivalence intheir paean to bourgeois modernity in the Manifesto (“all thatis solid melts into air”) was not only the attitude behind the book,but its aesthetics as well: much like Marx and Engels, Solnit has anincantatory style of prose, one that involves repetition of key phrasesand long, swiftly unfurling sentences intended to recapture what theemergence of modernity felt like. Read More

Stieg Larsson. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (Trans. Reg Keeland.) Knopf. September 2008.

Stieg Larsson. The Girl Who Played with Fire. (Trans. Reg Keeland.) Knopf. July 2009.

Stieg Larsson. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. (Trans. Reg Keeland.) Knopf. May 2010.

To read the 1,802 pages of the Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy is to be told that, for all their perceived virtue, the institutions of social democracy are a farce. In Larsson's books, American readers will find the Sweden they expect: the welfare-state comforts, Volvo security, and Ikea practicality for which the country is known. But they will also find a country they didn't expect. In this Sweden, the country's well-polished façade belies a broken apparatus of government whose rusty flywheels are little more than the playthings of crooks. The doctors are crooked. The bureaucrats are crooked. The newspapermen are crooked. The industrialists and businessmen, laid bare by merciless transparency laws, are nevertheless crooked. The police and the prosecutors are crooked. And the criminals, of course, are crooked, though not always: it's often the case that criminal acts committed by do-gooders in the name of justice—from petty larceny to massive bank fraud—are the only means by which to overcome the comprehensive failure of the world's most comprehensive welfare system.

In Larsson's trilogy it's also the case that most, if not all, of these crooks hate women. The first volume's Swedish title is Män Som Hatar Kvinnor—in English, Men Who Hate Women—a title international publishers chose to tone down. (The French put the problem in the past tense, Men Who Didn't Love Women.) Sweden may have attained heights of gender equality only dreamed of in other parts of the world but, if we're to believe Larsson, that apparent moral superiority is merely cosmetic, concealing pervasive misogyny at every level of society.

These are Larsson's twin themes: the failure of the welfare state to do right by its people and the failure of men to do right by women.

Ken Burns. The National Parks: America's Best Idea. PBS. October 2009.

Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan. The National Parks: America's Best Idea, An Illustrated History. Knopf. October 2009. 

The first thing that struck me when opening the massive coffee table book that Ken Burns compiled to accompany his most recent documentary—this one about the national parks, the latest entry in America's Greatest Hits—was not the sheer size but rather the comparative puniness of the park system. The expectation in the American West, when looking at a map of public and private lands, is one of apparent socialism: the closest this country gets, at least on paper, to the appropriation of property by the people. The numbers are well known: 85 percent of Nevada is owned by the federal government, 57 percent of Utah, 50 percent of Idaho, even 45 percent of California. The national parks, outside of Alaska, where they play a fundamentally different role, comprise only six percent of federal lands. This seems to make sense: the parks are supposed to be "exceptional." But for a system that Burns considers an extension of the claim that "all men are created equal," the question remains—an exception to what? Read More

Cristina Nehring. A Vindication of Love: Reinventing Romance for the 21^st Century. Harper. June 2009.

Julie Metz. Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal. Hyperion VOICE. June 2009.

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"What is love?"

The 1993 global dance-pop mega-hit never answered the question, substituting instead a weak plea:

Baby, don't hurt me
don't hurt me
no more. 

Cristina Nehring also fails to define the emotional phenomenon she's charged herself with vindicating, but she certainly doesn't beg not to be hurt. Quite the opposite: for Nehring, truly loving means embracing pain.  She disdains Valentine's roses, cozy snuggling, even vibrators—all the sappy rituals and pathetic artifacts our culture has produced to compensate for an epidemic lack of passion. By contrast, Nehring's old-style "love" is "a religion, a high-risk adventure, an act of heroism ... ecstasy and injury, transcendence and danger, altruism and excess." Today's "love" is commodified and ordinary and perpetually available. It can no longer ennoble our souls. Two apparently contradictory forces—the anti-feminist "cult of safe love" and the "man-hating clichés of old-style feminism"—have rendered us timid where we should be fearless. To re-inspire (or, as she might put it, "re-ensoul") us, Nehring has written a polemic in the form of a parade of exemplary lovers from history and literature. Read More

Stephanie Meyer has said that the idea for the Twilight series came to her in a dream, but it may as well have come to her in a graduate seminar. There are, after all, few other contexts where so much cultural baggage comes together under the sign of so many backpacks. 

New Moon, the latest film installment of the colossally popular franchise, opened this past weekend, breaking box office records and putting reviewers everywhere to work. What, everyone is asking, is Twilight "really" about?

Playboy supposedly paid the highest advance in its history for the right to serialize the work. The offer was made sight unseen. One would rather not imagine the long faces when Laura finally lays bare her scant charms.

For thirty years there were whispers about Laura. The manuscript that the dying author in 1977 told his family to destroy was not the Holy Grail, but the final king's chamber in the pyramid of an oeuvre that rises stunningly from the literature of the twentieth century. After decades of hesitation, Nabokov's son Dmitri is about to present the opus posthumum to the public: not a novel, but 138 hand-written, often fragmentary index cards, which form perhaps a third of what can be described at most as the adumbration of a novel. 

The son's hesitation was only too understandable: Nabokov's last will actually left no room for interpretation. The writer was prudish in matters of unfinished manuscripts and didn't want to give people a peek into his workshop. On the other hand: What about his famous predecessors from Virgil to Kafka, whose testamentary instructions were likewise disobeyed, to the benefit of posterity? And hadn't Nabokov once attempted to incinerate Lolita itself, only to be thwarted by his wife? Perhaps in the case of Laura, too, Nabokov would have reconsidered his decision, which might have been made in a similar moment of weakness? And yet: Could one disregard his express wish, in a sense wresting from his hands something unfinished to which he clung? Read More

 

Brooklyn gentrification novelists have always alleged that aesthetics, not class, unite and divide their borough. Not so, Amy Sohn tells us  in her new novel Prospect Park West. What matters is money, and in Park Slope white people have it. Sohn's privileged characters do not pretend otherwise, nor do they deny their status as gentrifiers. At the end of the novel, a successful actress decamps from Brooklyn's Gold Coast to Manhattan; another woman receives her comeuppance when, after putting a down payment on a long-coveted apartment, she discovers that the school district has been rezoned. Her son must attend PS 282, two-thirds black, one-third Hispanic, and "the worst kind of school there was: too bad to be good but too good to be bad."

Sohn, the least self-avowedly serious of Brooklyn writers, is the only one who can afford to be so honest. In a genre that emerged in the 1960s and '70s, when droves of middle-class men and women moved to the borough to restore its Italianate brownstones and Victorian row houses, her more literary peers remain unable to take their eyes off the window-dressing. As Brooklyn has changed, so has the gentrification novel, and today's writers are more likely to romanticize grimy dive bars than cornice moldings. Still, taste continues to be presented as the force that defines city life. In the gentrification novel, questions of wealth and race are rephrased as inquiries into authenticity and what it means to be a true New Yorker. 

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Caleb Crain. The Wreck of the Henry Clay. Self-published. May 2009.

On December 7th, 2006, in a blog entry on "Offprints in the Digital Age," honestly reprinted in its entirety, n+1 friend and frequent contributor Caleb Crain assured his readers, "not even I am so nineteenth-century as to have my essays privately printed." But he has now gone and done just that! Not just his essays but the blog itself, "Steamboats Are Ruining Everything." By doing so, he offers a Quixotic and dandified challenge, a well-mannered provocation to a legion of conventional wisdoms about what I now sadly must call something like "word culture." Why turn your blog back into a printed book when the whole point of blogging and reading blogs was thought to lead to an inexorable emancipation from the bindings of the page, the severe duties of print?

Although that question is never addressed directly, an answer of sorts emerges over 400 pages, spanning six years of blog posts. Hardly a member of the dreaded MSM when he began blogging, Crain was nonetheless an established and highly-regarded freelance journalist for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Nation, a former editor of Lingua Franca, the review of academic life that ceased publication in 2001, and a scholar of 19th century American history and literature. Crain tells us that he started the blog after being offered free software and web-hosting in a trial for Harvard alumni. (It's worth noting how "new media" forms were deliberately marketed via such perks to those positioned to drive change from the top. As we've seen with the Kindle. More recently, Jeff Bezos gifted the device to book publishers and literary agents, thereby enlisting them as footsoldiers in the liquidation—er, future—of their own trade.) In his introduction, Crain admits to diverse motives, some vaguely professional—posting corrections and addenda to published pieces, trying to identify an audience or community of readers who might like his work but not have time to track him through all the various publications he writes for. He is forthright about the fact that he had no need to "break in" to the old media establishment, nor did he imagine he was breaking it down. Read More