Brisingr (Christopher Paolini): A Book Review

Brisingr (Knopf, September 2008) is the just-released third book in the Inheritance cycle by Christopher Paolini. Readers should be forewarned that Inheritance, previously billed as a trilogy, has been expanded into a cycle. In other words, if you're looking for resolution in this book, you won't find it. There is a fourth and allegedly final book coming.

While avid fans may be pleased to see the series extended, this was not welcome news to me. I began reading the book with the impression that this was the third and final book of a trilogy. As a result, throughout the whole book, I wondered when Eragon, the Dragon Rider, and Saphira, his dragon, were going to finally confront archvillain Galbatorix. I was greatly displeased when they never did. I only learned that the series had been expanded into four books when I came to the explanatory note at the end of the book, after the unsatisfying conclusion. This experience probably negatively influences my review.

For those who have not read any of the books in the Inheritance series, this is a fantasy series concerning a warrior, Eragon, the last of the Dragon Riders, and his long and meandering journey toward what we can probably assume will be a final confrontation with archvillain and evil dictator Galbatorix. The first book, Eragon, was begun by Paolini when he was 15 years old and self-published, before becoming so popular that it was picked up by a major publisher. That story was what first caught my interest, and I have been following the saga ever since.

Though occasionally inventive and certainly interesting enough to more or less hold my attention through three lengthy volumes, the series has always had its problems, many of which seem to be exacerbated in this most recent installment.

Perhaps the most obvious problem is that the whole series is quite transparently derivative of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Forgetting for a moment the slight variation of having a friendly dragon the hero gets to ride on, the story is essentially about an alliance of men, elves, and dwarves going up against an unseen foe --- an evil magician and dictator seeking to expand his empire over the formerly peaceful lands. Only our hero will be able to defeat the villain. Sound familiar?

To quote one of the dwarf clan leaders, Íorûnn,

“If Galbatorix emerges triumphant from this war, not even the Beor Mountains will protect us from his wrath. If our realm is to survive, we must see Galbatorix overthrown. Moreover, it strikes me that hiding in caves and tunnels while others decide the fate of Alagaësia is unbecoming for a race as old and powerful as ours. When the chronicles of this age are written, shall they say we fought alongside the humans and the elves, as the heroes of old, or that we sat cowering in our halls like frightened peasants while a battle raged outside our doors?”

The Urgals, who initially sound remarkably like Orcs, eventually join the good side in another slight variation on the theme. If that weren’t enough, go ahead and guess the name of Eragon’s elfin love interest. If you guessed Arwen, close enough. It’s Arya. The hero’s name sounds remarkably like Aragorn, making the pair’s names painfully close to the names of Tolkien’s human-elf couple. All of this sometimes makes the Inheritance cycle read more like Tolkien fan-fiction than anything else.

Paolini, however, seems more concerned with nuanced morality than many fantasy writers, including Tolkien. A strong sensitivity to nature is complemented by a respect for life that makes his hero question the violence he must engage in. There is also an awareness of racism that comes into play when some of the characters question their automatic dislike of the Urgals. Altogether, these factors account for more subtle shadings of morality in these books than the black-and-white good versus evil morality of many a fantasy series.

Because so much of his world and general cast of characters is almost lifted from Tolkien's Middle Earth, it's difficult not to compare the two. Like Sauron, Paolini's villain Galbatorix is unseen and a menace to the entire known world. But Galbatorix, though we know he's a tyrant who enslaves his people, remains unfrightening. He abuses power, yes, but somehow Paolini fails to make these abuses more than a theoretical description. Intellectually, we know he's bad, but there is not the visceral, skin-crawling horror of Tolkien's descriptions of the darkness and stench of Mordor, the poison spreading across Middle Earth.

Eragon, too, often seems to be going through the motions. He’s undecided, it seems at times, even about whether he will oppose Galbatorix. Though Eragon has his own inner turmoil, especially about the killing he must do, it hardly compares to Frodo's grim determination to risk everything to destroy the evil ring he is beginning to covet as it slowly drives him mad.

The decision to expand the series into four books is ironic, considering that one of the major problems is already overwriting that reduces the force of the story greatly. It turns what should be an urgent drive to defeat a powerful and evil foe into a meandering meditation on things like nature, dragons, dwarf society, elf society, magic, homesickness, evil, justice, politics, power, and oh yeah, at some point we may just get around to taking on that evil Galbatorix, but there's certainly no rush about it. It's not as if he's enslaving and killing thousands of people. Oh wait. Actually, he is, but maybe we'll go talk about dwarf politics for another hundred or so pages while we avoid dealing with that.

If Paolini had concentrated on the advice often given to writers to cut out any scene that doesn't move your story forward, he could probably have reduced these first three lengthy books into no more than two. I'm sure fans of his work will argue that this wordiness allows him to enrich and embellish the details of the world he's created (or largely copied from Tolkien), but what suffers is the ability of his writing to compel the reader to care about his characters and fear his villain.

Even at the end of this third book, Galbatorix remains an unfrightening, unseen bad guy who seems too cowardly to leave his castle. Galbatorix lacks Sauron's creeping horror precisely because all the bad things he does are interspersed with so many episodes of trivial but mildly interesting tangential adventures on the part of the heroes. The horror dissipates and fails to build. Galbatorix never shows himself, so we assume he's frightened to come out, especially since Eragon and the rebel Varden don't seem especially driven to confront him. They'll get around to it whenever. Let's go learn some more elf lore for a while.

Sympathy for the characters also suffers, since people who had really faced all the hardships endured by these characters might seem a tad more eager for revenge. Paolini, of course, tells us over and over how much they want their revenge, but it would be nice if he'd show us by having them cut to the chase.

To be sure, there are many interesting ideas and beautifully drawn scenes in these books, but in this grand attempt to create a sweeping fantasy world of complex beauty, the story gets utterly lost. The first book, Eragon, took such a meandering path that I wondered when Eragon would get around to the revenge he had sworn on Galbatorix’s servants, the Ra’zac. In fact, not until this third book, as it turns out.

The second book, Eldest, was better, and I was beginning to think the author had found his stride as he skillfully wove together the twin strands of the stories of Eragon and his cousin Roran. Now, once again, it seems we are stuck in the mire of too many details about inconsequential matters. Dragons and their Riders may live forever, but we mere mortals expect stories to come to a satisfying conclusion at some point. It remains to be seen whether Paolini will pull that off in his fourth book.

One final note: hyphen-worded-dragon-thought is certainly-annoying.

 

 

Book Review: Unaccustomed Earth (Jhumpa Lahiri)

In her collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth (Alfred A. Knopf, April 2008), Jhumpa Lahiri tells earthbound tales of ordinary Bengalis leading very ordinary (and very Western) lives as immigrants to America. Unaccustomed Earth features five short stories and one novella, "Hema and Kaushik," which, at just over 100 pages, is one third of the book.

The stories are written with clarity and insight, giving us an intimate look into the psyches of her characters. The characters themselves could be our neighbors or friends; they are people with everyday concerns, problems, and failures to communicate, which seem so familiar that they often remind me of people I know.

Though most of her characters come from India, the struggles they face in their lives could be anyone's. They occasionally wear Indian clothes, eat Indian foods, and sometimes retain Indian customs, but for the most part they seem entirely American, like they have already been absorbed by a culture with which they still occasionally feel at odds. These are normal people living normal lives.

This, for me, was the problem. I don't think I'm Jhumpa Lahiri's ideal reader. It's true that I have long had an interest in India and its cultures, but I like a good dose of mythology, magic, adventure, and the supernatural with my fiction. I'm quite sure that my failure to appreciate these stories is entirely mine.

I know very well that people sometimes fail to communicate, that family members fail to live up to each other’s expectations, and that marriages are often anything but romantic. Alienation and lack of effective communication are frequent themes throughout all the stories of Unaccustomed Earth. Though heartfelt and well-described, to me, these themes are just so banal.

I must confess, I read fiction to escape from a world of ordinary struggles, ordinary pain. It is not my wish, generally, to be immersed in commonplace hardships that might be happening in any house in any city in America, when I read. But that might be just me.

If you like stories that are windows into the everyday private lives of others, I imagine you will love Unaccustomed Earth. My mother, a professor of literature, who can certainly claim more expertise about the subject than I, loved the book and gave it a rave review over the phone to me. I wish I could share her enthusiasm. I found the book depressing, though that in itself is not a real criticism, depression being a legitimately human state.

Even I must admit that Lahiri's stories ring true on every page, her characters and situations having the vividness to evoke real life. I cannot fault her there. Her writing is thoughtful. Her characters somehow find convincing life and breath between her words on the page.

My favorite quote in the book seems to sum up what most of her stories are about:

"... of the fledgling family that had cracked open that morning, as typical and terrifying as any other."

To be fair, not all of the relationships in her stories crack open. Some of them mend, as relationships often do over time.

To give brief summaries of the stories here:

In the title story, "Unaccustomed Earth," a father visits his daughter in Seattle. She is pregnant with her second child. He is retired and makes frequent trips to Europe. His daughter believes it is her duty, now that her father is a widower, to invite him to live with her family. Both are living in places that are strange to them, yet they are also strange to each other, failing to communicate their expectations, which the other can't fulfill.

In "Hell-Heaven," an immigrant Bengali family adopts a Bengali student as an "uncle." The mother of the family falls in love with him, but eventually he marries an American woman, straining their relationship.

In "Choice of Accommodation," a couple makes a weekend getaway to a hotel, using a friend's wedding as an excuse. The story is a study in contrast between romantic hopes and the reality of marriage.

In "Only Goodness," a family deals with a son's alcoholism. His sister, who introduced him to alcohol as a teenager, worries that she is to blame.

In "Nobody's Business," a college boy has a crush on his Indian housemate, whose boyfriend is cheating on her. Her housemate finds out before she does, and wonders what to do about it.

In the novella "Hema and Kaushik," a girl and a boy meet when his family moves back to America, after having spent some years back in India, and temporarily lives with her family. She develops a crush on the older boy, and grows to love his mother, but soon finds out his mother is dying of breast cancer. Many years after his mother's death, the young man and woman meet again.

Of all the pieces in the book, I enjoyed the longest one, "Hema and Kaushik," the most. I think perhaps it was necessary for me to read more than a short vignette before I would begin to care about her characters. The story also possesses a symbolic dimension, with allusions to mythology the others lack, creating a depth of meaning not present elsewhere in the book, in my opinion.

For example, a sense of fatal foreboding arises after Hema loses a gold bangle given to her by her grandmother, which in the course of the story has come to signify her relationship with Kaushik:

"And yet she felt she had left a piece of her body behind. She had grown up hearing from her mother that losing gold was inauspicious, and as the plane began to climb, in those moments she was still aware of it moving, a dark thought passed through her, that it would crash or be blasted apart in the sky."

Lahiri is also the author of The Namesake, which was made into a movie by director Mira Nair. I found the movie similarly well done, but also slightly tedious, though I must admit I didn't read the book.

Several of the stories in Unaccustomed Earth appeared previously in The New Yorker.

Unaccustomed Earth is currently available in hardcover and audio CD from the major online booksellers, as well as bookstores. There is also a version available for the Amazon Kindle.

 

 

Book review: Making Money (Terry Pratchett)

If laughter is, as they say, the best medicine, then I think the doctor might prescribe a Terry Pratchett book from time to time, at least if the doctor is a cynic who thinks it particularly healthy to laugh at the foibles of this world through the lens of a snarky imaginary one. Unfortunately, doctors today are too busy prescribing expensive patented pharmaceuticals, guaranteed effective by the salesman who takes them golfing.

Pratchett's Discworld is a carnival fun house mirror image of our own, but with fairytale creatures like dwarves, golems, and Igors (yes, that's plural) thrown in for good measure.

Making Money (Harper, October 2007) is typical Discworld fare in which Moist von Lipwig, "an honest soul with a fine criminal mind," follows on his success with reinvigorating the Post Office (in Going Postal), becomes the head of the Royal Mint and invents paper money. He also inherits the guardianship of the Chairman of the Royal Bank of Ankh-Morpork, and takes him for walkies every day (the Chairman is a dog).

Anyone in control of the money supply is naturally a bit of a target, so it must come as no surprise that complications ensue. Among other threats, the board of the bank is composed of a hereditarily wealthy family, the Lavishes, who are not exactly pleasant sorts.

The family's default leader seems to be Cosmo Lavish, who, like many of those born into the upper classes, has been trained by the Assassin's Guild. He also has an unhealthy admiration for Ankh-Morpork's ruthless, but sometimes beneficent dictator, Lord Vetinari. The chief cashier of the bank, Mr. Bent, is forbidding, ominous, and dull, and there may be something quite unnatural about him. It seems some sort of plot is afoot against von Lipwig and the Chairman.

A year ago, before this was published, I might have questioned the timely relevance of a satire about taking a banking system off the gold standard. That was a done deal long ago, and would seem to be mostly uncontroversial. With recent scares within the banking industry, however, an examination of the value on which our money is based, if any, seems timely. It's also much more palatable with tongue firmly planted in cheek, and preferably stuck there with toffee. It may even be fair to say, as Pratchett does, that "whole new theories of money were growing here like mushrooms, in the dark and based on bullshit."

Crazy as Pratchett's Discworld might be, it does ring frighteningly true. I ask you, who hasn't encountered a banker much like Moist von Lipwig?

" 'Well, I'm going to do my best to get my hands on your money!' he promised.

This got a cheer. Moist wasn't surprised. Tell someone you were going to rob them and all that happened was that you got a reputation as a truthful man."

If you haven't yet encountered Pratchett's Discworld series, I recommend it as light, enjoyable reading that will sometimes make you laugh out loud. I wouldn't rate Making Money as one of his best, but it's possible that's because I've now read several of his books and maybe the humor doesn't seem quite as fresh to me now. It must be extremely difficult to keep writing novels that deliver laughs on every page.

His earlier Witches Abroad, a delightful send-up of fairytales, which proposes that perhaps it's not always good for the heroine to marry the prince, is one of my favorites in the series. (The Discworld series does not need to be read in any particular order.)

Making Money is still well worth reading if you want a good chuckle at just how shaky the financial industry really is, or if you want to laugh in the face of possibly losing your shirt. With the economy seeming more uncertain every day, at least we can find some humor in it.

Making Money is currently available in hardcover from bookstores and all of the major online booksellers. It is due to come out in a mass-market paperback edition in October, and that can be pre-ordered now.

Sad note: In the course of writing this review, I discovered that Mr. Pratchett has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. You can read his speech to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust Conference in the UK here. I hope that if you like his books, you’ll consider a donation to the Alzheimer’s Association, to help fund Alzheimer’s research.

Book Review: Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician

In case the outdated word Negro in the title of Daniel Wallace's novel is as jarring to anyone else as it was to me, I'll start by saying that he's writing about the 1950s, when this word was in common use. Mr. Sebastian and Negro Magician starts out as if it were a story about racial prejudice and hate crime. The "Negro magician" of the title, Henry Walker, is an inept illusionist in a traveling circus. His white rural 1950s audiences love him because his amateurish show reinforces their own delusions of racial superiority.

"For a magician was nothing, really, the same way a cow was nothing. But a Negro magician or, say, a two-headed cow --- now, that was something... Jeremiah felt that Henry's inability to do anything truly amazing... might actually work in his favor, at least with the crowds of the small Southern towns where Jeremiah made his living."

The circus proprietor's calculation turns out to be correct, and Henry packs the crowds into his tent every night, at least until three racist white teens take him on a forced car ride he might not survive.

That's when the first of a long series of unexpected plot twists hits you. Like a masterful magic show, whenever you start to believe you know what's going on in this story, Wallace waves his magic wand and transforms it into something very different.

I had to read through to the very end before I could've told you what I think the book's main themes are. One of them is certainly illusion, "to seem but not to be." Wallace's magical misdirection leads the reader to believe the story is something other than what it is, again and again.

So what is this crazy story about? Is it about the nature of evil? Perhaps.

"For the real magician here was the devil himself, and this was his trick, his plan, same as it always was: to steal from man all that is lovely in the world, and to have it delivered to him via the hand of man himself."

After Henry disappears, his story is reconstructed from the recollections of his friends in the circus; none have the entire picture. Together, they construct a world where it's so difficult to know what's real that a person trying to navigate that world might lose his own identity.

Wallace is also the author of several other novels, including Big Fish, his debut, which was made into an excellent movie by director Tim Burton. Fans of Big Fish will recognize similar elements here; most of Wallace's characters continue to be unusual folks who live at the margins of society, and the world of folk tales and mythology still creeps into our own. Henry Walker's story at first resembles the legend of Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, who was said to have sold his soul to the devil in return for the ability to play the guitar, for example.

Wallace's prose is direct and plain, using basic vocabulary most readers will understand without a dictionary. He writes beautifully within that common language, which helps reinforce the folksy tone of his stories.

This is the second of his books that I've read, and I'd like to see more from him. I enjoy his inventive imagination.

I liked the book very much, but at times the use of multiple narrators was a bit confusing. The story would be running along nicely, then the narrator would interject their own reaction to the story. It was sometimes hard to remember who “I” referred to in a particular instance. I was momentarily distracted when I had to try to remember who had been speaking before the narrator went on about Henry’s life for many pages. This would have been less confusing if each of the characters had a more distinctive voice, but they all speak like Wallace writes.

My other complaint about this book is that it could have used a bit more attention by a good copy-editor. More than once I found myself scratching my head over the meaning of a sentence that had some grammatical flaw, such as an ambiguous pronoun reference. This didn't occur more than a couple of times, but when it did, it distracted from the flow of the story. I read the book in the hardcover edition, so it's possible that these small mechanical problems were fixed in the new paperback edition, which came out last week.

 

 

Book Review: The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

There is no question that Salman Rushdie is a gifted storyteller. The mysterious fairy tale he weaves in his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, certainly kept my attention right up until the end. The language used here is beautiful and lush. Consider the wonderful image conveyed in the opening passage:

“In the day’s last light the glowing lake below the palace-city looked like a sea of molten gold. A traveler coming this way at sunset – this traveler, coming this way, now, along the lakeshore road – might believe himself to be approaching the throne of a monarch so fabulously wealthy that he could allow a portion of his treasure to be poured into a giant hollow in the earth to dazzle and awe his guests.”

Throughout the book, there is a fascinating structure created by echoes of similar (often magical) events reverberating through time and space. The book consists of stories within stories within stories, and at times seems to be more about the storyteller’s art than anything else.

“All men needed to hear their stories told. He was a man, but if he died without telling the story he would be something less than that, an albino cockroach, a louse.”

That this passage mentions all MEN may be more telling than Rushdie would wish it to be, especially for a novel purporting to center on the story of a woman.

The titular enchantress is a Mughal princess who disappears from her own land and eventually makes her way to Florence, Italy. The story is never truly and directly told from her perspective, however, and the second major focal point is the odd Western man calling himself the Mogor dell’Amore who arrives years later at the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great to tell her story as it concerns him.

Throughout all the multiple layers of story are women, mostly courtesans and prostitutes, who are described mostly from a male perspective and consequently never seem quite real. The author seems to know this, at least subconsciously, since one of these women is actually an imaginary bride the Emperor invents for himself. The women in this novel are male fantasies, for the most part, or in a few cases male nightmares, but not real women. In fact, many of the female characters even carry the names of objects: Skeleton, Mattress, Mirror, and even Palace of Memories.

Rushdie does make an effort to describe a more complex character in a few of the female characters, specifically the “enchantress,” but they remain two-dimensional. They are beautiful and (fill in the blank), but usually only one or two other characteristics.

That the women in the book seem unreal to the last is a factor that lessened my enjoyment of the story. At times I felt that Rushdie was not just describing sexist cultures of the past, but was in fact being sexist himself. Perhaps, however, the Emperor’s fantasy wife is an indication that Rushdie does not mean these women to be real, but only to describe men’s reactions to women.

I saw a second major flaw in the ending, which I will not describe. I’ll just say it’s problematic. The general nature of the problem is that in a book that has been a magical fantasy all along, the author suddenly gets over-concerned for believability at the end; he creates a “logical” explanation for one of the book’s major mysteries, and the logic simply doesn’t bear much examination. The book would have remained more internally consistent, in my opinion, if the sense of wonder and magic were simply allowed to carry the day.

This book has been getting a lot of attention, with two reviews and one other article in the New York Times alone. Though some other reviewers have also been less than impressed with the book, it’s interesting that there seems to be no consensus on why it doesn’t quite work. The criticisms I have offered here differ greatly from what I read in the New York Times from other reviewers.

David Gates finds that it’s the magical or supernatural aspects themselves that are the problem. After quoting from the opening passage, as I have also done, he states:

“And sure enough, that’s where he began to lose me. I’m probably not Rushdie’s target audience: in literature, at least, I find the marvelous tedious, and the tedious — as rendered by a Beckett or a Raymond Carver or even a Kafka — marvelous.”

I can’t agree with this perspective. I experience quite enough of mundane reality in real life. I want magic in my fiction. I do find that it has to be grounded in reality, however, at least by characters that seem like real people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. For me, it’s not the magical aspects of the book that fail, but those that are supposed to touch base with reality and don’t.

Michiko Katukani calls the construction of the book “conventional” and “academic” and concludes that the book is “devoid of magic.” He also thinks “the novel gains narrative momentum in its final chapters.”

I can’t agree with this, either. I do think the book has a strongly magical quality, but I think it falls apart toward the end.

I can’t truthfully say that I didn’t enjoy reading this book. I just wish it had been better. In spite of its flaws, you may enjoy it, if you want a reading experience that will transport you to exotic locales and a world of magic.

Book Review: The Political Mind

I just finished reading George Lakoff’s new book, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain. Lakoff’s previous books include Don’t Think of an Elephant!, which discussed progressive and conservative mental models of politics and the reasons why progressives lose elections due to ineffective use of language structures called frames.

Don’t Think of an Elephant! made quite a splash in the progressive community by showing that progressives give a huge advantage to conservatives, allowing them to define the cognitive frames that we all use to conceptualize politics. By letting the conservative message machine set the frames used in the media and throughout society, progressives lose. It argued for a more conscious use of language to accurately convey the progressive moral vision.

The Political Mind continues Lakoff’s revelation of research into cognitive linguistics, the brain, and how the brain works when thinking about politics. The information conveyed here is profoundly important and creates a whole new paradigm of how we understand political decision-making based on recent brain research. I cannot overemphasize how important it is that progressives learn and assimilate this information. Our Democracy, our environment, and our ability to effect the kind of changes that are needed to protect them may actually depend on it.

Lakoff’s central argument is that as progressives, our most widely accepted modes of political communication and political theory are incorrectly based on an 18th-Century Enlightenment understanding of how the mind works. He describes the 18th-Century view of reason thus:

“Progressives have accepted an old view of reason, dating back to the Enlightenment, namely, that reason is conscious, literal, logical, universal, unemotional, disembodied, and serves self-interest.”

Lakoff argues that the entirety of this 18th-Century understanding of reason can be proven to be false based on recent discoveries about how the brain actually operates. In fact, he says, thought is mostly unconscious, emotional, and fits into metaphorical structures called frames that group related concepts through neural connections made and strengthened when different parts of the brain are activated simultaneously.

Why does this matter?

It matters because we cannot assume, as progressives usually do, that if you give someone the facts about an issue they will study those facts and make a logical decision that serves their self-interest. Some might, if they have taken the time to research the issues and to create a mental connection between issue positions and their own understanding of those issues. For most voters, however, there is a much more direct way to communicate political concepts, and it is emotional, metaphorical, and based on values.

Lakoff argues that progressives must learn to communicate their moral vision, which is fundamentally based on empathy, in direct emotional language that strengthens the brain’s empathetic response. In fact, he states that brain research has shown that humans are mentally wired for empathy. A progressive’s job, then, is to present policies and messages that elicit that natural empathetic response.

He also discusses the difference between progressive and conservative thought, in an extension of the nurturant parent vs. strict father model that he presented in his previous work. Just as the progressive moral vision is fundamentally one of empathy, the conservative moral vision is fundamentally one of authoritarianism. These are two distinct modes of thought that are very different, but each of us is capable of using both modes at least some of the time. As Lakoff says,

"Our democracy is presently being threatened by the politics of obedience to authority, the very thing that democracy was invented to counteract. The politics of authority is succeeding because conservatives have been activating their ideas in the brains of the public, while finding ways to inhibit the use of progressive modes of thought."

The conservative spin machine, by working actively to get their frames into the public consciousness, has succeeded over many years in activating the authoritarian mode of thought to a greater degree in our society. Progressives need to learn to use language that explicitly states their moral vision of empathy. Hearing words that evoke an empathetic response repeatedly will strengthen the natural empathetic response in the public.

Lakoff argues that we must replace the 18th-Century Enlightenment view of reason with a New Enlightenment understanding of real reason. The information he reveals is certainly a new paradigm and very important, but one of the weaknesses of his book is that he fails to succinctly define his term “real reason.” It is not clear, at least to me, whether real reason refers to the way people’s minds actually work in regard to language and metaphor and physically embedded associations, or the knowledge of how brains work, which at present is described in technical scientific language that is unavailable to most people. This knowledge can be used by those who understand it to craft more effective policies and messages, but it is a long way from being accepted as popular scientific knowledge. The public would benefit, I think, by learning more about how our brains work with language, for, in Lakoff’s words,

"Language can be used to change minds, which means it can change brains – permanently, for good or ill. It does not merely express emotions, it can change them; not merely arouse or quell them, but change the role of emotion in one’s life and the life of a nation."

Reading these words and those that followed describing the physical changes that can be wrought in the brain through the use of language, I was reminded that ancient cultures often credited the same god who created language, such as Mercury in Roman mythology or Thoth in Egyptian mythology, with the invention of magic. There is great power in words. Understanding how they work protects us from being manipulated.

Ultimately, Lakoff’s book will be read by intellectuals and adopted by some, but for the political workings of the mind as he describes them to be understood by the public, and for the modes of communication that he suggests to come into common usage by the average progressive, someone is going to have to translate this information into precisely the kind of emotional, metaphorical language that Lakoff suggests, but as a scientist, is not very much prone to using himself. In other words, Lakoff does exactly what he accuses Democratic politicians of doing: presenting us with facts that few will be able to immediately understand and asking us to accept his premise based on those facts, while perhaps failing to notice that his arguments do not make an emotional connection in our brains. Indeed, there are whole chapters of this book that seem to be aimed more at his colleagues in cognitive science than at the general reader. (I have not quoted these sections, because their meanings were at best quite difficult to comprehend for the lay person.)

It’s a shame his work is not presented in a more readily accessible fashion for the general reader, because the implications of understanding it are quite astounding. In his Afterword, Lakoff describes how society might change if this research were common knowledge.

"We would understand that our brains evolved for empathy, for cooperation, for connection to each other and to the earth. We cannot exist alone.

We would embrace the fact that empathy is at the heart of American democracy. It is a positive force for human society at large. It is why we care about fundamental human rights... Without such care, there would be no America."

I recommend this book to all progressives who want to learn to communicate more effectively and who are willing to wade through at least some technical language about brain science. I hope that Lakoff will write a shorter book explaining this information and aimed at the general reader, much as he did with Don’t Think of an Elephant!

 

 

July 19, 2008: Edited to shorten quotes and conform to fair use standards.

Book Review: Rare Days in Lost Valley

George Perkins’ new novel, Rare Days in Lost Valley is a pleasant farce where a group of quirky characters come together for a weekend academic conference in the fictional idyllic Midwestern college town of Lost Valley. It is part screwball romantic comedy where several potential couples weave their spells around each other (or frantically unweave them), part criminal heist novel concerning a plot to steal Bellwether University’s antique cigar store Indian, and part tender story of the love between a professor and his dog.

The book’s subtitle, The Bellwether University Book of Universal Truths, reminds me that it is very nearly a universal truth that were there a movie made of a book so rich with wry satire, it would almost certainly be populated mainly by British comic actors such as John Cleese and Michael Palin, or perhaps Judy Dench and Colin Firth. Yes, the book reminds me of classic British comedy, though it takes place on an American college campus with mostly American characters.

Langston Tenterfield, a young scholar without a permanent teaching position, has a plan. His plan involves winning back for his friend Broddy the affections of a young woman, Myrtle, whom Broddy met and lost on the Internet. In the process, Langston hopes also to win the affections of his own love interest, Gwendolyn, and gain significantly in his own professional standing. Lang begins his explanation of his plan to Broddy thus:

“Of course, I know you are not feeling your usual self right now,” he began. “I saw the change yesterday when you started with your Myrtle on the monitor and Myrtle on the printout and Myrtle suddenly not on the monitor and Myrtle not on the printout and I fully comprehended your mood. I also noticed how the absence of monitor cheer and printout happiness continued to crease your brow just now when you entered this emporium of caffeine euphoria. Nevertheless, I think you may be mistaken to carry your gloom so heavily.

“You will recall your old friend Tenterfield’s habit of speaking of the future as though it were the present. He confuses some people, he confesses, but it resides in his nature to perceive events in the full glory of mature realization well before the Nature who nurtures us all has found her way clear to enter rejoicing with the sheaves. In place of the wintry frostbite that ravages your cheeks now, I foresee a full blossoming of summer roses. Your feet now drag, but soon will bounce. Whereas the murmurs and whimpers that now cross your parched lips resemble nothing so much as the cries of a trampled sea slug, I see a better time coming, my brother. Soon you will drink deeply of the healing waters of love and raise your voice in glorious hallelujahs.”

“I doubt it,” said Broddy.

The plan it turns out, is not much of a plan, but in the fullness of time and plot it evolves into a full plot into which are woven the threads of other lives and other plots, including an attractive old girlfriend, a handsome and worldly Dean, a weather-obsessed University President, an ugly dog and his devoted caretaker: the monosyllabic head of the Communications and English Literature Department, a reptilian or possibly amphibian villain who reminds me of one of my old bosses, as well as the aforementioned plot to abscond with the University’s prized symbol, Old Huron. Into this mix is thrown the notorious intrigue of an academic conference at a University not very well-known for its abundant expression of mediocrity, and the mystery of a famous critic who never goes anywhere, but just might or might not turn up at Bellwether.

As the several couples, strange characters, schemes, and story lines begin to come together, events become ever crazier and more entertaining. Who knew academia could be this much fun?

Some readers may not have the background to fully appreciate some parts of the book that satirize academic fashions, yet it’s hard to deny the ridiculous charm of this:

The most important Laws of Absence Theory are Absence Creates Significance and Absence Equals Evidence. To deny the importance of absence is to privilege being over non-being. Thus, the absence of references to homosexuality in Jane Austen’s works provides evidence of her obsessional deletions, repressions, etc., thereby affirming Austen’s homosexual tendencies. Same for other interests. Plath’s fascination with Presidential politics and third-world population problems, for example. Hemingway’s unwritten needlepoint essays.

Perkins, a long time professor of American Literature and the co-editor with his wife Barbara of the popular textbook series The American Tradition in Literature, among other works, has an underlying message about the state of higher education in America. He delivers this message with wonderful good humor, delightful twists and turns of the many plot lines, and much fun along the way.

You can purchase Rare Days in Lost Valley, as well as his memoir Stones Stand, Waters Flow: A New England Story from XLibris, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. For those who are interested in reading more before purchasing, there is a longer excerpt on the XLibris web site.

Full disclosure: Among his many other accomplishments, George Perkins is my father. Happy Father’s Day, Dad!