2010-03-08 15:55:19

THE PURPLE INTERVIEW: Novelist James Hynes Talks Aliens, Autobiography, God and Horror

Filed under: Books, Featured, James Hynes, James Hynes, The Purple Interview
Posted by: John

Tomorrow is the publication day for the long-awaited new novel by James Hynes. The book is called Next, and it’s ostensibly a story about a guy looking for a job and a woman on a hot day in Austin, Texas, but that’s like saying that Loch Ness is a lake in Scotland. There’s other, wilder, stranger stuff swimming in the depths.

Rather than try to describe it any further, I thought I’d throw out a few of the early reviews, which are ecstatic.

Book Slut, always a lady in my opinion, had this to say: “Hynes is a rare writer. He is brilliant and humane, and he’s created a novel that’s as involving as it is dark, as compassionate as it is sad. It’s a shocking, original masterpiece, and it is deeply, painfully American, in every sense of the word — whatever that word has come to mean. Next is the kind of novel that leaves you reeling, almost speechless, frightened, scared to consider what it all means.”

Here’s Publishers Weekly, which made the book a Pick of the Week: “In this funny, surprising, and sobering novel, Hynes (Kings of Infinite Space) follows Kevin Quinn, who has flown to Austin, Tex., for a job interview at the height of a terrorism scare. Kevin, an editor at the University of Michigan, has grown as frustrated by academic politics as he is by his relationship with his shallow girlfriend. On the flight, he sits next to Kelly, a beautiful and enigmatic young woman who reminds him of a great lost love of his youth. With time to kill before his interview, Kevin spends the first half of the novel surreptitiously following Kelly around Austin while reminiscing about his misspent youth and failed relationships. The casual but persistent self-absorption of Kevin’s reveries is both funny and off-putting, and when contrasted with the threat of terrorism and his shadowing of the young woman, gives the novel a creepy energy…”

And finally, Book Page says simply: “Next may be Hynes’ best book—and one that reveals his gifts as a serious novelist.”

Jim’s an old friend, and last summer, I spoke to him about the new book, his adopted home of Austin, religion, horror and just about everything else in one of our first Purple Interviews.

For those who don’t know his previous novels, they’re not what you would call a well kept secret. Readers find them. As the name of his blog suggests, he’s a cult writer, but that doesn’t do him justice. His books go down like Snickers bars, but afterwards you feel irradiated. They are funny, scary and psychologically acute.

In Publish and Perish, a man goes to war with his girlfriend’s cat, and a smug cultural anthropologist finds himself in a community that doesn’t really want to be studied. In The Lecturer’s Tale, a freakish accident gives a struggling scholar a frightening power, and in Kings Of Infinite Space, a man gets a job in a place where his co-workers tend to disappear.

His first novel was a riveting thriller about the Irish Republican Army, The Wild Colonial Boy, published by Holiday House in 1990. Upon publication, that book promptly made the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Picador published the next three.

In form, Next is a bit of a departure from his earlier work, but I’ve read it, and it strikes me as a classic of terror and romance very much in a league of its own. Rather than yammer on, let me just recommend his blog Cultwriter, and with that, it’s on to the interview.

Since this is ostensibly a blog about religion and skepticism, let’s start out with a really broad philosophical question. You’ve described yourself to me both as a stone-cold atheist and a small-town Calvinist. I’ve always been intrigued by the combination. One would think it impossible, but you do appear to embody the contradiction. So what do you mean by that, and how exactly does it work?

I don’t think it’s all that much of a contradiction. When I say I’m a small-town Calvinist, all I mean by it is that I’m culturally and morally a Calvinist, simply because I grew up in that culture and was imprinted very early on with that small-town, Jimmy Stewart sense of fairness, right and wrong, and propriety. Some of it I still believe–that you should tell the truth, work hard, not cheat, etc. I certainly don’t mean that I’m a Calvinist in any doctrinal sense (whatever that would be, and I have no idea). I guess I mean it more colloquially than anything else.

But I certainly don’t think you need to believe in god to be a good person. I come from a long line of Midwestern skeptics: my grandfather, a Michigan farmer, stopped attending church after he saw one of the lay preachers–a real fire-and-brimstone teetotaler–sharing a flask out behind the barn with a bunch of other church members one Sunday evening. My dad went even further and walked away from religion entirely, majoring in philosophy on the GI Bill at Michigan State University. Now, I didn’t know my grandfather well (he died when I was 7 or 8), but the way my dad told that story about him, the point was he hated the hypocrisy of his fellow church members, so he stopped going. My father was more or less an atheist (or at least a hard agnostic) for his entire adult life, and he was also one of the most decent men I ever knew, and in the sense I talked about above, he was even more of a Calvinist than I am. Some things were just wrong, as far as he was concerned, and I feel the same way (though we probably don’t think the same things are wrong). But, at the same time, the other thing we have in common is that, as atheists, we don’t think the good are rewarded or that the bad are punished.

I would describe your new novel, Next, as Miss Dalloway in the age of sacred terror, or something along those lines, by which I mean that it has a sort of literary pedigree in modernism, but it is definitely of its own time and place. What can you tell us about it?

It’s a tricky book to talk about, because not much happens in it, but everything does, if you catch my drift. I’ve also described it as being like Mrs. Dalloway, only funnier–though given that Virginia Woolf wasn’t much of a laffmeister, that may not be saying much. I also think of it as my midlife crisis book. Or maybe the book itself actually is my midlife crisis, in which case I gypped myself. Where’s my sports car? My hair plugs? My leggy supermodel?

Part of the inspiration for the book seems to lie in your love affair with the city of Austin. Or is it love-hate? Can you tell us a bit about your feelings for the city? Also, best meal there?

It’s mostly love, though I’ve lived here long enough by now to be one of those dreary, aging Boomers who doesn’t like the way the city is changing. All the enormous condo towers sprouting up downtown have changed the skyline so much since I finished Next that it will be a historical novel by the time it comes out. Suffice it to say I don’t like all the traffic, or the ugly, bunkerish McMansions with windows like gunslits sprouting up in my neighborhood, or the unsavory element drawn by the condo towers and the McMansions, namely, rich, heedless young people with too much money and no real appreciation of aging midlist novelists. But I still love the Hike and Bike trail and the movie culture here and all the great restaurants. I used to say that I’d finally gotten used to the heat, but this summer we’ve already had 30 days over 100 degrees, and it’s not even August yet, so I’m backpedaling on that.

Best meal? I’d say the Sunday brunch at Fonda San Miguel, except that’s what everybody says, so I’ll say it’s a combination of the tacos al pastor at Maria’s Taco Xpress, the masman curry at Madam Mam’s, and the cheeseburgers at the Burger Tex on Guadalupe. Oh, and the salads at Central Market Café, since I’m trying to lose 20 pounds.

Your novel is really a tale of two cities, isn’t it? There’s another city looming behind Austin, and that’s Ann Arbor. How autobiographical is the story, as a whole?

As a whole, not very. Probably a little more than I’m willing to admit, but certainly much less than people are liable to think. I once wrote a short story about a kid whose older brother had died in the Vietnam War, and a number of people told me they were surprised to know I’d had an older brother, only to be really annoyed when I told them that I never had an older brother, and that I never personally knew anyone who died in Vietnam. I suppose I should have taken it as a compliment to my artistic powers, but ever since then I’ve always resisted the idea of fiction as autobiography, and not just my fiction, but anybody else’s. I think it’s the least interesting way to read a novel.

It’s true that in Next I have a lot in common with my main character, Kevin–we’re roughly the same age, we’re both from Michigan, he’s held a job for many years that I once had for a year and a half, etc. But even when I’ve given Kevin experiences or memories from my own life, I’ve lifted them out of their original context and put them in an entirely new one, with the result that they mean something entirely different in Kevin’s life than they do in mine. And the impulse behind using them is not me wanting to reveal parts of my life to the world so much as it’s just laziness, a craftsman using the parts within easy reach to put together the finished product. Borges once said that if you put all the works of an artist together, you get a portrait of his face, and while I think that’s true, in the sense that we all reveal more than we think we do in our work, anybody who reads Next thinking they’re getting my life story is badly mistaken.

If it’s not giving away too much, your central character, Kevin, has at least three major preoccupations in the course of the book. Finding a job, meeting a woman, and terrorism. Is that safe to say? It seems to me that somewhere in the nexus of those three preoccupations, you found the universal core of a lot of heterosexual men in America. Can you talk at all about the effort to bring this guy to life on the page?

Well, given that it’s mostly autobiographical, it was like rolling off a log. Whoops! Kidding! Not autobiography! But I will say this: since the book is set in the city where I live, the research was really easy. I wasn’t working a day job for most of the time I worked on it, so I’d just roll out of bed, basically, and go walk the part of the city that Kevin was at in the story, and whatever I happened to see or come across that day on that stretch of Sixth Street or South Lamar, that’s what I put in the book. Then I just applied the principle of WWKD (What Would Kevin Do?) and put whatever I’d seen or experienced that day through his microprocessor. I realize this doesn’t really answer your thematic question, but I really don’t think that way when I’m writing. I just basically concoct a character and turn him loose in a world, and see what happens, and then I write it down. I’m usually not thinking of anything more abstract than that; I just let him put one foot in front of the other and see where he goes.

Before this book, you wrote three fantastic satires about modern American life, two of them set in academe, one in the workplace. But there was an added twist. They are each, in their own way, horror novels. Can you talk at all about your early influences in that genre? What did you read or see that made an impression on you? And at the satirical end of the spectrum, any clear and obvious influences?

The horror influences are pretty obvious. I started reading anthologies of ghost stories at an early age, and I ended up reading most, if not all, of the supernatural fiction of a lot of late Victorian/Edwardian/early 20th century writers like M. R. James, Algernon Blackwood, and H. P. Lovecraft. I always like to make the point that writers too often speak as if their only influences are literary, and that not enough credit is given to the movies, television, comic books, pop music, etc., but in the case of horror movies, I didn’t see a lot of them as a kid, since I grew up in the mid-60s in a small, mid-Michigan town, long before the VCR or cable TV. It was only when I got to college that I started seeing films on a regular basis, but by that time, I think my horror sensibility was already fixed.

It’s different with satire, though. My main influences there are probably Mad magazine, National Lampoon, Monty Python, and the music of Randy Newman, all of which I was exposed to before I graduated from high school. Along the way I also read Catch-22 and Waugh’s The Loved One, among others, and when you and I were grad students at Iowa, I read a couple of David Lodge’s academic satires, years before I ever considered writing my own. But most of my satirical influences are probably non or extra-literary.

Inspiration is a funny thing, but can you talk at all about how you came to splice together the horror with the satirical element. It’s a highly original and completely successful combination, so you must have had a moment when you leaned back and said to yourself: hey, this works!

Actually, it was more a feeling of relief, as in, “Hey, this doesn’t suck!” It was an accident, anyway: I’d set out originally, with the novellas in Publish and Perish, to write straight horror, but the academic stuff just kind of crept in unbidden, probably because I was pissed off at the way my academic career was going at the time, i.e., straight to the bottom with all hands. Plus, I’d always known I could be funny on paper, but my first novel, The Wild Colonial Boy, was much more serious, with the result that when Publish and Perish came out, some friends of mine said it sounded more like me than my first book did.

Your first two satires, Publish and Perish and The Lecturer’s Tale are classics of the academic satire genre. What do you hear from the academic world about them? Are people offended or do they enjoy the send-up? Has much changed in that world, existentially or ideologically, since you wrote those books?

Back when I used to Google myself (which I don’t do anymore, believe it or not) (seriously, I really don’t), I used to come across a fair number of references to the books in academic discussions. As for people contacting me personally, that’s hardly ever happened. I could probably count the instances on one hand, and at least a couple of them were people looking for my help getting their own academic satires published. As for people being offended, who knows? I’ve never been able to get a permanent academic job, despite all my academic friends telling me that everybody they know loves my books. But it may be one thing to enjoy a satirist’s work, but it’s another thing to have him hanging around the faculty lounge listening to your conversations.

As for what’s changed in academia, I’m the wrong guy to ask. Like I said, I’ve never gotten a permanent job in a university. I’ve been in the working world now for almost 35 years, and out of that time, I was only ever employed as an academic for six and a half years. I don’t keep up with it much anymore, and to the extent that I do, it seems to me that academics are like everybody else these days: they’re just trying to hang onto their jobs and pensions. Given everything else we have to worry about these days, the academic culture wars seem pretty silly now.

The last of three, The Kings Of Infinite Space, seems prescient of our current moment, a cross between H. G. Wells and the latest jobs report.

The most prescient thing about it was that it features zombies! These days, zombies are all the rage in pop fiction, and there I was, five years ahead of the curve. The funny thing is, it’s the one title I get the most comments about from readers, but according to my royalty statements, nobody ever bought it, so either everybody took it out of the library, or one guy bought a copy and passed it around to thousands of his friends. At any rate, I’m a little bitter at all the zombies-come-lately who are cashing in on my pioneering work without giving me any credit. It makes me mad enough to want to eat brains.

As anyone who reads your blog, Cultwriter, knows, you are an avid and well-versed consumer of movies and television, as well as books. You and I have talked before about the Golden Age of Television, beginning sometime around the first episodes of The Sopranos and ending–when? Are we still in it? If not, when did it end? If you had to pick three series that exemplify the best of the Golden Age, what would they be?

Actually, I think the Golden Age started long before The Sopranos; I’d go as far back as Hill Street Blues and thirtysomething. And I don’t think it’s over yet: every time one of my favorite shows ends, and I think I have my life back, I get hooked on something new like Mad Men or Damages, both of which are really, really good. I hear Breaking Bad is pretty terrific, too, and I will probably catch up to it on DVD, the way I did with Mad Men.

The greatest three? That’s tough, because there really is an embarrassment of riches, but if you were holding a gun to my head, I’d say The Wire, Buffy, and Battlestar Galactica. No surprises there, in other words; I sound like every other TV critic in America.

You were the first person to tip me off to the immense pleasures of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and also the first to urge me to watch The Wire. On the surface, the two shows couldn’t be more different. But do they share certain fundamental qualities?

I’m tempted to work up a point-for-point comparision–Spike is the Omar of Buffy (which is another way of saying that Omar is the Fonz of The Wire)–but I think the only, really meaningful comparison is that both shows are the product of a single sensibility. Yeah, I know, the auteur theory is pretty much shot in film these days, when even big name directors are basically making corporate amusement park rides, but I think it still holds true in TV. Certainly you have to credit the contributions of all the other writers on each show, as well as the actors and production staff, but in the end, Buffy is Joss Whedon, and The Wire is David Simon and Ed Burns (I’m counting them as a single auteur). Plus each of these shows has a very distinct worldview. They represent personal visions, and say what you want about the corporate, collaborative nature of Hollywood, or even the hive mind of YouTube and the blogosphere, in the end, art is all about one individual consciousness communicating with another.

But enough about television, what about the state of good books? Is great fiction still being written? How much harder is it now to publish ambitious work than, say, twenty years ago? Is there ever an ideal moment to be an ambitious writer of fiction?

Publishing good work has always been hard, and except for maybe the mid-19th century, I don’t think there’s ever been ideal moment to be a good writer. Most of the kvetching about the current state of publishing (which, I’ll admit, is pretty dire) and about the fate of literature in the digital age doesn’t take into account the historical context: namely that fiction has been a minority art form ever since, say, Birth of a Nation. Fiction may have been at the center of the zeitgeist in the mid-19th century, but ever since the movies became a mass medium, it’s lost its primacy in the culture. So, looked at in that context, things aren’t that much worse than they’ve ever been. Hardly any of us makes a living off of writing fiction, but when did we ever? Doesn’t anybody read New Grub Street anymore?

Of course great fiction is still being written, but if you want to know what it is, I am, again, probably the wrong person to ask. I’m a slow reader with a short attention span, and most of my reading these days is taken up with research for a historical novel I’ve started. Plus, I’m about to turn 54, and the sad truth is, I’m like an old junkie who needs purer and purer stuff to get a high. I wasn’t always a slow reader, and I’ve read a lot of fiction in my day, and it’s harder to surprise me or thrill me or engage me than it used to be. When I do read fiction, I tend to go back to books I already know I like, or to canonical classics I never got to when I was younger. The older I get, the less interested I am in what’s new, and the more interested I am in what endures.

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2010-03-07 14:04:01

GAME CHANGE IN FAT CITY: Why A Bestselling Work Of Impeccable Journalism Made Me Despair Of My Profession

Filed under: Barack Obama, Books, Featured, John Heilemann, John McCain, Leonard Gardner, Mark Halperin, Sarah Palin, politics
Posted by: John

by JOHN MARKS

In September 2008, in the midst of the most momentous presidential race in modern American history, the people of the United States came under the spell of a powerful, near intoxicating illusion. For a brief political second, the fate of the country appeared to hang on the fortunes of four politicians. Those four, as if anyone needed to know, were Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John McCain and Sarah Palin.

The theater that sustained this illusion , as chronicled by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann in their all-conquering bestseller Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, reached its fever pitch and arguably its turning point in the last week of that month. By October, two candidates would be headed inexorably for the White House, two for concession in a hotel lobby in Arizona.

The drama within the drama erupted in New York City on September 15, 2008, when Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., one of the country’s most prestigious investment banks, filed a petition in the United States Bankruptcy Court of the Southern District of New York, “seeking relief under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code”. It was the filing felt round the world. Within hours, talk of the meltdown of the world’s financial system went viral.

For the presidential candidates, right from the start, it was the moment of truth.

Obama knew about Lehman before the public did. Having already been debriefed by UBS Americas Chairman Robert Wolf, one of his fundraisers, and by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, with whom he was in touch, Obama showed up for a strategy meeting with David Axelrod and began to talk economics. At the meeting, Halperin and Heilemann write, “Obama revealed nothing specific about what he was hearing. But he told the room that en event might be coming overnight that would change the political landscape dramatically, turning the final two months of the campaign into an all-economics-all-the-time affair.”

That’s exactly what happened. Everything changed. One minute, Sarah Palin mattered and was an asset. The next, she didn’t and became a burden.

On the morning of September 15, MCain in Jacksonville, Florida uttered the words that would become his political doom. “The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” he told the crowd, “but these are very, very difficult times”.

Upon hearing the statement, Obama knew instantly the import. It wasn’t just an utterance that ran counter to all evidence. It was an insight into the mind of a foe who didn’t fully grasp the implications of the Lehman filing. “Why did he say that?” Obama asked Axelrod. A few days later he would give a friend his own answer to the question: “No fucking discipline.”

Reading about the moment through the eyes of insiders in Game Change is a bracing experience. The book’s success is built upon a wealth of solidly grounded, beautifully executed detail. With little fuss and no pretension, with hardly a trace of partisanship, Heilemann and Halperin go about the business of reconstructing events still fresh in the public mind, yet receding quickly against the reality of the Great Recession.

Their accomplishment reminds me of Joachim Pheonix playing Johnny Cash in the biopic Walk The Line. The movie, released two years after Cash’ death, could have been a laughable failure, but the actor captured something of the singer’s essence, something maybe the public had missed, or maybe he merely channelled his own demons. One way or another, against the odds, it worked.

Game Change works the same magic. A reader who followed every step of that race will still feverishly turn the pages. For me, it was also a matter of some pride to see two excellent practitioners of the much maligned trade of journalism pulling it off, using time-honored tools of the trade to accurately and relentlessly report the “first draft of history”. I admired and, yes, envied Heilemann and Halperin, and yet by the end, and here’s the rub, I also despaired for them, and for the profession they practiced, and the once great, lost ethos reflected in the book’s ambition.

I can’t name the page when the despair began, but it started somewhere around the chapter on September of 2008. From that moment on, with every page and at an accelerating pace, I began to sense a black hole forming at the heart of the enterprise. By the end of the book, the hole gaped, and everything else spilled into it; every good impulse and observation, every single facet of the work, was sucked into the gravitational pull of profound reportorial error.

Before I try to explain, let me show the appropriate gratitude. In an age of catastrophe for journalism and its practitioners, the success of Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and The Race of a Lifetime should be seen as good news. Despite early warning signs that Heilemann and Halperin’s account might be nothing more than rank gossip to feed a couple of 24-hour news cycles, lo and behold, the muckraking work turned out to be solid, the overall architecture sound.

The authors explain their methodology in the introduction. Three hundred interviews with more than two hundred people, they tell us, and the depth of research shows. “In most every scene in the book, we have included only material about which disagreements among the players were either nonexistent or trivial,” they write. “With regard to the few exceptions, we brought to bear deliberate professional consideration and judgment.”

Rereading the introduction, I posed myself the obvious question, and I’m asking it again as I write. What’s missing? What is the nature of the black hole? I’ve finally come up with a single word. Stockton. That’s what was missing. Stockton, California, in the Year of Our Lord 2008. Think I’m crazy?

*

Stockton is the 65th largest city in the United States, slightly smaller in population than Newark, New Jersey, slightly larger than Anchorage, Alaska. Its size stems in part from the fact that it’s one of California’s two inland ports, along with Sacramento, connected to the San Francisco Bay by a 78-mile river channel. It hosts the annual Asparagus Festival and is the home of the University of the Pacific.

Beginning in 1995, as real estate prices in the Bay Area shot up, Stockton, like Sacramento, experienced a population boom. Families who couldn’t afford Menlo Park could find much better deals inland. The cost of living went up, and when the real estate bubble began to expand nationally, Stockton was a logical place for excess. When the bubble burst in 2007, the devastation was immediate. By September 2008, when the presidential race went into its terminal phase, the city was way ahead of the rest of the country in the pace of its decline.

in 2009, Forbes magazine called Stockton the most miserable city in the country. “Home prices more than tripled between 1998 and 2005 and then came crashing down last year,” according to the analysis. “Stockton had the country’s highest foreclosure rate last year at 9.5%, according to RealtyTrac, an online marketer of foreclosed property. Things are not looking much brighter in 2009 as housing prices are expected to fall another 36% on the heels of a 39% drop in 2008. Also, unemployment is expected to jump to 13.3% from 10.4%, according to economic research firm Moody’s Economy.com.”

Despair had returned to Fat City, . Forty years earlier, Leonard Gardner captured the feeling of the place indelibly in one of the great under-appreciated novels in American literature. Fat City tells the story of two middle-weight boxers, Billy Tully and Ernie Munger, the former over the hill, the latter just starting out, and their long battle against age and apathy and economic reality.

The story begins with Tully at the Hotel Coma. He’s a “fry cook in a Main Street lunchroom. His face, a youthful pink, was lined around the mouth.” His world is Stockton. “From his window he looked out on the stunted skyline…a city of eighty thousand surrounded by the sloughs, rivers and fertile fields of the San Joaquin River delta–a view of business buildings, church spires, chimneys, water towers, gas tanks and the low roofs of residences rising among leafless trees between absolutely flat streets. Along the sidewalk under his window, men passed between bars and liquor stores, cafes, secondhand stores and walk-up hotels.”

When Tully isn’t working as fry cook, he’s a day laborer in the fields of the Central Valley. He thins tomatoes and chops onions. “Hand on his back, straightening, he gazed with bleary eyes at all the stooped men inching down the rows, and he felt being white no longer made any difference. His life was being swept in among those countless lives lost hour by captive hour scratching at the miserable earth.”

I read these words right after I finished Game Change, and their import hit me like the full force of the central California sun. There was more of American reality in 2008 in a few sentences of Leonard Gardner’s Fat City, published in 1969, than in the entire 436 pages of Heilemann’s and Halperin’s account of the election. In that sense, obscenely but unmistakably, their book is an impeccably recorded lie, and to borrow a line from Detective Bunk Moreland in Season Five of our own era’s Fat City, The Wire: “The bigger the lie, the more they believe.”

*

I’m not calling the authors liars, mind you, unless they are so by virtue of their place in a journalistic culture that places an ever higher value on insider interviews with powerful people, and rapidly diminishing interest in anything else. In Game Change, the only reality is politics. The rest of American existence, the place that would once have given meaning to the contest, is airbrushed out of the picture, so that we are left with portraits of a class of political operatives and the objects of their labor, projected against a green screen, contending with each other through the medium of television and spot polling, for all the world like Jedi Knights in a Lego Star Wars video game.

In another era, it would be nice to think that these reporters would back away from the depicted events and take sweeping notice of what was really going on. In September 2008, all of America was turning into Stockton, California. That’s why everything happened the way it did. The collapse of Lehman Brothers and the response of the politicians are relatively small and meaningless events in the context of an entire society that had been slipping under the water for the better part of two years, and yet in Game Change, here’s the sole line devoted to an epic of suffering affecting every class, race, creed and gender in the country: “The American economy had been in recession since the end of 2007, driven there by the collapse of the mid-decade housing bubble and the subprime mortgage market.”

In their defense, Heilemann and Halperin didn’t set out to write a book about the Great Recession. They never claimed to. Their book is about one thing only, “the Race of a Lifetime”, and they had their work cut out for them producing this manuscript in a timely fashion. For the duration of the race, they lived and breathed the inner circle and inner life of American politics, and their book reflects it. When the hell did they have time for Stockton, California, or Baltimore, Maryland, or Fort Myers, Florida? And anyway what the hell do those places have to do with the 2008 election? They’re only communities in major population centers, filled with the voters who watched the ads, believed or didn’t believe the sin, lost their homes, their livelihoods, their families, their ways of life, while the campaign managers worked long hours to secure the Oval Office. I mean, really.

What the hell does Stockton, California have to do with the subject matter of this bestselling work of impeccable journalism?

*

Last month, The Atlantic Monthly ran a sobering piece about the future of the American economy. A few lines from Don Peck’s lengthy piece provide the true backdrop to Game Change.

“The broadest measure of unemployment and underemployment (which includes people who want to work but have stopped actively searching for a job, along with those who want full-time jobs but can find only part-time work) reached 17.4 percent in October, which appears to be the highest figure since the 1930s. And for large swaths of society—young adults, men, minorities—that figure was much higher (among teenagers, for instance, even the narrowest measure of unemployment stood at roughly 27 percent). One recent survey showed that 44 percent of families had experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or a pay cut in the past year.

There is unemployment, a brief and relatively routine transitional state that results from the rise and fall of companies in any economy, and there is unemployment—chronic, all-consuming. The former is a necessary lubricant in any engine of economic growth. The latter is a pestilence that slowly eats away at people, families, and, if it spreads widely enough, the fabric of society. Indeed, history suggests that it is perhaps society’s most noxious ill.

The worst effects of pervasive joblessness—on family, politics, society—take time to incubate, and they show themselves only slowly. But ultimately, they leave deep marks that endure long after boom times have returned. Some of these marks are just now becoming visible, and even if the economy magically and fully recovers tomorrow, new ones will continue to appear. The longer our economic slump lasts, the deeper they’ll be.

If it persists much longer, this era of high joblessness will likely change the life course and character of a generation of young adults—and quite possibly those of the children behind them as well. It will leave an indelible imprint on many blue-collar white men—and on white culture. It could change the nature of modern marriage, and also cripple marriage as an institution in many communities. It may already be plunging many inner cities into a kind of despair and dysfunction not seen for decades. Ultimately, it is likely to warp our politics, our culture, and the character of our society for years.”

The fact that nothing like these lines appears in the pages of that book isn’t just an indictment of the journalists, who bought the thin, unbelievable reality of our current political class hook, line and sinker from the political handlers who appear to be their chief sources. It’s an indictment of an entire worldview shared by journalists, operatives, politicians and the public alike, a view that construes the democratic process as nothing more than a game; hence game change.

Except the election wasn’t the “game change” in Stockton. That happened over the course of the previous decade, worked out in the silent but inexorable form of millions of tiny real estate decisions made by ordinary people who boomed and busted and thereby created the conditions that made the election historic. David Axelrod and Steve Schmidt are not therefore the grand masters of the chess match depicted in the book. They are bit players in a truly astonishing drama that has gone largely unrecorded.

*

In that sense, Game Change is a definitive work. I don’t mean that it will be an enduring account of the 2008 elections. That book remains to be written and will include everything omitted by Halperin and Heilemann’s account. It is, however, the definite journalistic work of its era, as good a summation of the strengths and weaknesses of the profession as it now practiced as we are ever likely to have.

Finally, Game Change marks the passing of an era. Twenty years ago, in the pages of Harpers magazine, Tom Wolfe wrote an infamous essay on the subject of American fiction, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the new social novel”. He caused a stir by suggesting that the era of the inward-looking experimental novel should end. Instead, novelists should become reporters and head out into the country to report and then write big, fat Balzacian fictions about what they had seen.

It was a self-serving argument. Avatars of the New Journalism, like Wolf, had been doing just that for years in the form of non-fiction novels–The Right Stuff and Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song are the oft-cited high points of the genre. Wolf used his manifesto to cement the accomplishment, and in hindsight, the essay looks like one of the two or three most important literary statements of the last two decades.

Its argument is relevant than ever, but it rests on at least one assumption that is no longer true. When Wolf published that essay, big daily metros continued to field huge stables of reporters who were paid reasonable salaries and health benefits to cover the “billion-footed beast” of American life. HBO’s The Wire

Blinkered by ideology, limited by resources, encouraged to bad habits by a desperate publishing industry that requires sales above all else, even the best of journalists, the cream of the crop, can no longer see the big picture, and even if they do, most of them have neither the resources nor the public to bring that vision to fruition. Reporters, and I say this as one who proudly practice the trade for twenty years, have ceased to be the great chroniclers of American life. Meanwhile, their replacements are nowhere in sight.

Until they turn up, it might be a good idea for Americans who want to understand their country to start reading novels again. Fat City, forty years old last year, is an excellent place to start.

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2010-03-05 08:10:43

The Village Square: A Special Comment regarding amphibians (and human beings)

Filed under: Featured, Village Square
Posted by: John

BY LIZ JOYNER

As promised, a companion piece to Why Glenn Beck is Stalking Me:

When Keith Olbermann hit the airwaves back in 2003, you could hear a collective sigh of relief among liberal-leaning America, long frustrated by their lack of voice in America’s media.

Conservatives who haven’t passed out reading my first paragraph should know that liberals sincerely believe that the media leans right. Limbaugh’s pinko “government-run media” is to a liberal the “corporate media” and comes with all the baggage and bias the name implies. (Parenthetically, the competing versions of media bias are explained in studies demonstrating a hostile media effect: The same story was simultaneously perceived as biased by both opposing camps, likely because they understood the subtleties of their own position and felt it inadequately represented… as subtleties usually are.)

As a center-left-leaner and a 2004 Howard Dean fan (a man with the nerve to tell us really early on that the Emperor of Iraq was buck naked, early enough to have avoided the whole affair were we listening I might add), I believe that in the years after 9-11 the American marketplace of ideas was pretty broken. Our collective trauma evolved into a very human need to march in lockstep with patriotic sounding bad decision-making.

So Olbermann was a breath of fresh air. I immediately bonded. My friends bonded. Veritable left-leaning lovefest ensues.

We were in. Keith Olbermann is chicken soup for the liberal soul. He was in our tribe.

I can only imagine that this is exactly how conservatives felt with the rise of talk radio inside of a culture that had moved dramatically leftward inside of a decade in the 60’s and mostly stayed there, likely leaving crew-cut heads spinning with culture shock. (University of Virginia professor Jonathan Haidt’s work tells us that conservatives are temperamentally more averse to change than liberals. That makes the 60’s quadruple crazy if you lean right, only double if you’re left.)

Trouble is that once in the Keith Olbermann (or talk radio) chicken soup for the liberal (or conservative) soul, we can barely notice the inevitable result of like-minded amen chorus groupiness. We were frogs in water brought gradually to a boil.

Ironically, Keith Olbermann is a frog too. And – while I’m having to force my fingers to type this measure of charity for a broadcaster I find hateful and factually wrong almost 4 times a sentence – maybe so was Rush Limbaugh? Could they both be victims of the sound of their own echo chambers?

Once in, the slight shifts toward unanimity are barely perceptible. Hyperbole forgiven. Insulting name-calling gets guilty snickers and knowing glances. Quirky family member forgiven. And then you look up a few years later and you can barely believe that someone you know and thought you liked – who might be a conservative “frog” to your liberal one – could see reality so differently than you do. And even if you were too polite to say it (which if you read blog comment threads, growing numbers of us are not), you might have thought that they’re dumb.

Lather, rinse, repeat… and you can see how we’re where we are now.

I admit that I still really like Keith Olbermann. He often makes a lot of sense to me. But my new Village Square center of gravity often leaves me uncomfortably having to forgive a bit more than I’d prefer. And it has me stretching to understand people who aren’t in my tribe. My message isn’t that Olbermann is bad/evil/at fault. It’s that he – like us – is human. As is everyone outside of my tribe for whom I have tended to not offer any forgiveness at all.

Keith Olbermann + a bunch of liberal viewers and liberal guests + 10 or 15 more years might just = right wing talk radio, the liberal edition. And if you think there is something about conservatives that makes them jump the shark when liberals can somehow magically avoid it, I’d like to suggest that you might want to hop out of the water.

I believe it’s getting hotter.

(Photo credit.)

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