"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 of it, a biography of a photographer. Muybridge famously proved, with the use of multiple cameras and sensitive electrical triggers, that horses in full gallop at times have all four feet off the ground. His sequenced, detailed equestrian photographs, along with his equally important work on men and women walking and performing ordinary tasks and his panoramas of San Francisco, effected a virtual sea-change in human perception. Not until Muybridge could people see what they looked like as beings in continuous action, and it was for this reason that he has repeatedly been seen as a prefiguration of the cinema.

Solnit’s genius was to see Muybridge not only as a seminal 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-siecle modernity, which was not, as one might expect, New York or Paris, but California. Wherever the old world was giving way to the new, Muybridge was there: he lived in boomtown San Francisco; he photographed Yosemite Valley and the US war against the indigenous Modoc people; Leland Stanford, railroad magnate and founder of the university bearing his name, owned the horse whose gallop Muybridge made famous. Solnit followed the trails of information with deliberate guilelessness, and the book that resulted is one that seems to be recreating the very birth of modern life. Railroads were annihilating time and space, while nature photographs testified to the landscapes they plowed over; old relationships to land and local space were forcibly overturned by new relations of property and class. Marx and Engels’ rich ambivalence in their paean to bourgeois modernity in the Manifesto (“all that is solid melts into air”) was not only the attitude behind the book, but its aesthetics as well: much like Marx and Engels, Solnit has an incantatory style of prose, one that involves repetition of key phrases and long, swiftly unfurling sentences intended to recapture what the emergence 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

 

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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Cătălin Avramescu. An Intellectual History of Cannibalism. Translated from the Romanian by Alistair Ian Blyth. Princeton University Press. April 2009.

In July 2008, while travelling on a Greyhound bus between Edmonton and Winnipeg, Vincent Li beheaded his sleeping seatmate, a man he had never met, with a butcher knife. Li held up the head in crazed triumph as the bus screeched to a halt and the other passengers rushed out. He then began to pace back and forth along the aisle, witnesses report, tearing off the ears, gouging out the eyes, pulling out the tongue, and eating them. 

This event, as well as Li's recently concluded trial—not guilty by reason of insanity—might serve as an opportunity to take measure of the present state of cannibalism studies, mostly a minor academic industry, though one not without its star performances and its polarizing debates. For a long time, the field was dominated by a curious variety of négationnisme, most famously spelled out by William Arens in his 1980 book The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. According to Arens, cannibalism is nothing more than a projection of fear-induced fantasies upon unknown others, and in the past 500 years this projection has served as part of the ideological soundtrack to the European conquest of the rest of the world. As the incident on the Greyhound reminds us, however, sometimes people really do eat people. Read More

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

Matthew Crawford. Shop Class as Soulcraft. Penguin Press. May 2009.

Near the beginning of A Fan's Notes, Frederick Exley reflects upon why, with his life at loose ends around him, he feels organized only as a fan of the New York Giants: "Why did football bring me so to life? I can't say precisely. Part of it was my feeling that football was an island of directness in a world of circumspection. In football a man was asked to do a difficult and brutal job, and he either did it or got out. There was nothing rhetorical or vague about it…. It smacked of something old, something traditional, something unclouded by legerdemain and subterfuge."

What succor Exley found in football—age, tradition, directness, honest brutality, and the men who embody these virtues—Matthew Crawford finds in what he calls "the trades." Crawford's book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, describes the emotional and cerebral satisfactions of skilled manual labor; it is an attempt to restore dignity to, and propose renewed pedagogical emphasis on, such work in the softer, more circumspect era of the "knowledge economy." Crawford has worked as an electrician intermittently throughout his life, and now owns a motorcycle-repair shop. His reflections on the pleasures and demands of manual labor are thoughtful and, frequently, inspiring. But where the Exley of A Fan's Notes was an alcoholic washup, Crawford has a doctorate in political philosophy from the University of Chicago, was a postdoctoral fellow on Chicago's Committee on Social Thought, and is currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. His book is not only an encomium to manual work but a "cultural polemic" in the tradition of Christopher Lasch's Culture of Narcissism, Philip Rieff's Triumph of the Therapeutic, and Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. Crawford's suggestion is that our growing preference for the legerdemain of knowledge work over what he is tempted to call "real" work might help us understand what is amiss in the culture. Read More