Book Review: Too Much Happiness

Too Much Happiness by Alice Murno

Alice Munro has been one of my favorite writers since first reading The Beggar Maid. There is always an ease in her style that is balanced with a dryness and a distance that spotlights the isolation of her characters. Her writing has always struck me as very mature, as writing for grown ups. There is nothing flashy in Munro’s work. What she does is almost always just exactly what is required. Just what the story deserves.

Too Much Happiness, another short story collection, does not disappoint—for the most part. It is as pleasant as you would expect of Munro, until you get to the title story. Like View from Castle Rock, “Too Much Happiness” tries to establish relationships that span generations and continents. It goes so far beyond the simple, direct relations that surround someone to the histories that preceded them. The story is disjointed, too filled with facts and information to bring the reader in, make us feel close to the characters.

While I doubt that Alice Munro would publish a book that I wouldn’t read, I wouldn’t recommend a novice to her work begin with this, her latest collection. Her books are so full of excellent work that nearly any other other book on the shelf might be better.

Industry Optimists, an epidemic

At an industry conference I recently attended in Orlando, just down the road from that magic kingdom, there were no mouse ears in sight, but with all of the optimism on the stage one would have expected to see some cartoon characters. Granted that my industry went through a healthy downturn, begun by industry-specific events and then acerbated by the global financial crisis, so maybe the outlook from here looks pretty darn good. I’m just beginning to believe that optimism in business is an epidemic.

We can’t all be as pessimistic as Nouriel Roubini, or as prescient, but it is practically a requirement for people in business, particularly people representing publicly-traded companies, to be optimistic about the future. In the eternal efforts to boost stock prices CEOs have little to say about the future that isn’t rosy. Oh, they might caution. They might even revise earnings estimates (conveniently just one week before earnings are released). But by the time they have the earnings call, it will have been forgotten. Everyone just wants to hear how great the next quarter or the next year will be. It was the CEO of a company who gave the first presentation of the conference. All smiles when revealing the last slide with the dramatic chart, with the bars going sharply up and to the right.

But it’s not just company management; it’s the analysts as well. The people who we trust to be watching things closely, churning through 10-Ks to decipher the truth, to give us an accurate view on the health of the company, and to give us guidance on whether it’s worthwhile to invest our hard-earned money in the company’s stock. The analysts share the same sickness. By the time of the earnings release, the last quarter is the past—irrelevant. Tell me about the future. It’s all about the sequential growth, the year-over-year growth. As long as things are pointing in the right direction, the analysts will forgive all errors.

This previously-mentioned CEO was responsible for a $150 million capital investment that was cancelled--$150 million sunk, but did the analysts take the CEO to task? Did the stock get downgraded for management’s poor decision making? No. In fact, the stock went up after the announcement because the future was clear and understandable. The project was poorly timed and would have cost the company plenty if continued to completion. Good for them to call it quits, but the analysts never questioned the company’s judgment for wanting to do the project in the first place.

Maybe it’s personal. I was burned going into this downturn, predicting that things would not be as bad as some of the numbers were showing. Certainly, I didn’t foresee the way that the global meltdown would put a freeze on markets. Now I’m a little reluctant to think that recovery will be swift and hardy. My own analysis of the industry also produces a chart going up and to the right, just maybe not so steeply. Things within the industry are pointing in the right direction to keep the CEOs and the analysts smiling, but externally we still have plenty of unknowns. I don’t think I’ll be putting on a pair of mouse ears anytime soon.

Book Review: Lush Life

Lush Life by Richard Price


I have never been to the NY's Lower East Side, except for a quick dip into Chinatown, and I had no idea of the upheaval taking place there. No knowledge of the history and the current mix of cultures there. Richard Price, though, tells us all about it, immerses us in it, and makes us feel like we've been there. As I breezed through Lush Life, it was like an immersion course or a travelogue. I read in an interview that Price threw out 300 pages, and I'd have to say that I wouldn't mind seeing them.


Let's be clear, though. As much as I enjoyed the novel, it is no masterpiece. It is good, and the praise Price gets for his dialogue is well deserved, but the book does drag at times. Not that it slows down, but it's more like the author didn't know where it was going. Indeed, some of the plot developments later in the novel happen by chance, instead of something that was at least subconsciously expected.

Price does make an attempt, though, to get into the minds of his characters. It's just that it only goes so far. The emotions are on the surface, very evident. The complexities in them are slight.

These flaws don't take away from the enjoyment of the novel. Sometimes you need to read a novel that does just what Lush Life does.

Book Review: The Story of Lucy Gault

The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor

The premise of William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault is compellingly tragic, and I had hoped that the overall novel would share this same sense of tragedy. When parents leave behind a child who has runaway and been injured, believing her to have been drowned, the disappear from their previous life. Their daughter is left behind to live with the servants and with the guilt of the misery she has put her parents through. Her parents also suffer with the guilt of their daughter’s death, the result of a hasty decision to leave their home because of the danger and political strife in their region of Ireland without consulting with her or helping her to understand. This state of misplaced guilt and misunderstanding, though, rules the novel. As the years then proceed, the characters are locked into this state, the parents in exile in Italy, the daughter awaiting word from them, and no one moving forward.

When change finally comes, and the widowed father returns home to find his adult daughter alive, their inability to communicate or to try to start fresh drives everyone into a state of melancholy that overtakes the remaining novel.

I am often a fan of tragedy, guilt, and melancholy, but it all takes place here without resolve. There is little progress or development. No one is awakened; there is no epiphany. These things aren’t always necessary, but the payoff for the reader comes in these sorts of changes. Even when the possibility of love enters the novel, drawn though it was with intuition and understanding, it is a dead end.

Quibble as I might with the course of events in the novel and the development of characters, what makes it all worse is the dryness of the writing. Other than the pained love of a minor character, and the growing mental illness of another, the world painted in the novel is plain and without light.

When a Novel Begins to Write Itself

I thought I was writing a simple book. Straight-forward with a single point of view, taking place over a single afternoon and evening. Yet, as I brainstormed last night about what was left to happen in the novel, it became apparent that the book wants to be more than this.

The premise off which I was writing was this: When a man learns that his neighbors are having an affair, it shakes his own idea of marriage and of himself. But after last night, maybe it’s more like this: When a couple learns of cheating neighbors, their marriage is shaken, identity is questioned, and pasts haunt the present. Something like that.

The current narration is so close to the husband, Darren (though I’m reserving the right to change it; men’s names are so difficult to choose), that we can only know the wife through his eyes. Her character, though, is begging me for a chance to rebut. She is more than he thinks she is, her troubles more complex.

While Darren’s narration is extremely close, nearly stream of consciousness with plenty of questioning and jumping from one topic to another, the wife’s (Nicole) would have to be different. It would need to be as detached in a way as she is, trying to occupy herself in the domesticity of her daily life. Her past, though, pesters her and deserves some time on the page as well. Instead of flashbacks through memory (my standard way of revealing scenes from the past), whole sections taking place in the past may be more effective.

Darren’s issues are more with the present, who he’s become, his feelings of anonymity. He is waking up to his feelings of unhappiness. Part of it, obviously, has to do with his marriage. Another part comes from his not turning out as he had hoped. There is also, for him, a large issue of morality which also comes into question after learning of this affair between neighbors.

It is to be a suburban novel, with the influence of Richard Yates, John Cheever, and John Updike, but it is also about identity and existence, with the required hints of Sartre and Camus. It is not meant to skewer suburban life, or ridicule or demean suburbanites, but it should examine how one maintains, loses, or finds identity in the anonymous suburbs. It is in this line of thinking last night that I may have also settled on a title: Another Blade of Grass. It’ll work for now.

My recent reading of William Faulkner’s Light in August has opened my eyes some to what is possible in a novel. It is not necessary to get locked into anything during the writing process, not a single point of view or a particular course of action. As I sit here now, trying to do other work, the new possibilities fill my mind and the story gets richer by the moment.

Book Review: Light In August

Light in August by William Faulkner

It is beginning to amaze me that we push exposure to the writing of William Faulkner through The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying. My first real exposure (outside of “A Rose for Emily”, which is a topic for another discussion) came through As I Lay Dying. I found it dry and dreary, and not very illuminating--except for seeing the word slough in print repeatedly. Then came The Sound and the Fury, which I found much more vibrant and dramatic, but it didn’t get to me. Years later, on a second read, I liked it even more.

It wasn’t until graduate school that I learned to really like Faulkner, while reading If I Forget Thee Jerusalem: The Wild Palms. The sentences in that book went on and on, with texture and color. They were like winding vines, dark green and gripping. But it wasn’t just the sentences, it was also Faulkner’s tone, how he described the flood waters, how he let us see into Henry’s heart. I think I was the only one in that class to like the book.

Beginning with pregnant Lena on the road in search of her baby’s father, Light in August reminded me of the influence Faulkner has over Cormac McCarthy. I could see how Outer Dark came out of some of the elements of Light in August. Lena is dull and determined and I was disappointed that the narrative dropped her in favor of Joe Christmas and Rev. Hightower, or the other characters that appear, complete with generational back stories, and take over for a time. The character of Joe Christmas and his assumed mixed heritage made for a good mystery, despite despicable and violent he is. Rev. Hightower's story is considerably more sad and though there's no purposeful mystery, much about what makes him so maniacal and delusional remains unknown.

Though the novel wanders down tangents at times that felt like distractions, including a new character who takes over the novel's ending, it was addictive. The tone and setting invited immersion. I took every opportunity to read the book, coming close to picking it up while waiting at red lights.

Noting the influence of Faulkner on other writers I enjoy reading, tells me that I need to keep reading his work. Light in August is a Faulkner novel that cannot be missed.

Barnes County Query Letter Sent

Three years after starting the novel, and a year after finishing it, I sent out the first query letter for Barnes County to an agent. As much as I know that writing is a business, and that the only way to get published is to submit, there is still so much anxiety tangled up in that process. It is not simply the business-end of an artistic process; it is the act of throwing the work out into the world for criticism and comment. Though that may be the point of writing, expression, there is always so much to worry about.

I've certainly sent my share of short story submissions (not enough, certainly), but this was my first query letter. I didn't realize just how hard it would be to distill 90,000 words into something short and coherent. Especially Barnes County with its many points of view and interwoven stories. Here, though are the central paragraphs of the query:

When Terry Stegman, a beloved female sheriff’s deputy of rural Barnes County, Missouri, is killed by a meth dealer, the men around her must find a way to go forward, to adjust, and set a new course.

Though Terry’s killer is injured and jailed, Sam Summers, a big-city transplant, friend, and fellow deputy whose feelings for Terry may have been something stronger than friendship, is on the hunt for why the killer murdered two others that day. Aging Barnes County Sheriff Bill Wallis is suffering through the break-up of his marriage, the changes taking place in the county, and the growing distance from his teenage son. Terry’s hired man and close companion after her husband’s death, Franklin Redbird quickly falls into drinking and trouble. Logan Wallis, the sheriff’s misfit son, outcast because of his public profile and rebellious appearance, meets a romantic interest, but when she winds up in trouble, he seeks a violent vengeance. A recent immigrant to the county, Harlan Lustig quickly falls in with a dangerous meth cook and, after learning the trade himself, seeks to usurp him. Their stories meet, mix, mingle, and collide among the back roads and abandoned farmhouses of the fictional Barnes County in Southern Missouri.

While there are elements in the novel of mystery and suspense, Barnes County, at 90,000 words, is a story of people in flux, how they struggle to find the right way, and how some fail at it.


While I don't know that this really gets to all of it, all of the conflict and tension, all of the psychological inquiry, I think this might get someone interested.


Dropping the envelope into the box was a relief. I'm happy to have done it and have it out there. Now comes the anxiety about how it will be received.

Book Review: The Humbling

The Humbling by Philip Roth

If Simon Axler's loss of confidence in his acting ability is meant as a projection of Philip Roth's loss of confidence in his writing ability, then The Humbling should stand as an excellent example of it. The novel comes off more as a sketch of book, as if he'd written it as an outline of a more developed novel that was still to come.

This is a novel of man in crisis, and though we spend a fair number of pages in the thin book dealing directly with the subject, the book wanders into Axler's new relationship. This relationship, with the lesbian daughter of old friends, is at times cruel and superficial. Their scenes together, when not involving sex, are cursory. One scene, the parents' confrontation with the daughter, is simply told in dialogue from the daughter to Axler. Where the reader may have benefited from actually being there in what may end being a pivotal scene, Roth treats it as unimportant. And so when things change in the novel, we don't have a reason to care.

This is a disappointing novel by one of America's great novelists. Maybe Roth is writing too much these days. A book a year might be a pace that doesn't make for good novels.

Poetry Resurrection

I miss poetry.

Last week, I stopped in the downtown Tattered Cover Bookstore to look at some poetry. Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency

Destroy yourself, if you don’t know!

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over.

Inspired by AMC’s Mad Men to take a closer look. But standing there, reading the words, the poems jagged edges pleasing to my eye, I realized how much I miss poetry.

For the last two years, there’s been no time for poetry. Barely any time for fiction. And even before that, I’d neglected it. There was a time when I read a lot of poetry, devoured it, wrote it, read it at poetry readings, published it. I turned them into songs. I even used to send out a poem each week to a long list of email contacts. I haven’t written a new poem in probably ten years. Even in the MFA program, I stuck with the fiction writers. You kinda got the feeling you’d better not go trying to play in the poets’ sandbox.

So now, writing again after two years off in the EMBA program, I feel it might be time to reconnect with poetry. I really want to shake up my use of language, to be inspired to take chances, to not go for the obvious word choice, to seek out unique metaphor, to see things again from a poets perspective. So I pulled down from my shelves Carolyn Forché

You recognize strangers,
think you lived through destruction.
You can’t explain this night, my face, your memory.

You want to know what I know?
Your own hands are lying.
“Taking Off My Clothes”

Sylvia Plath

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.
“The Moon and the Yew Tree”

Not the poets I know well. I went to the library, checked out Theodore Roethke

Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain,
And found out all I could of all desire;
I weep for what I’m like when I’m alone
In the deep center of the voice and fire.

I know the motion of the deepest stone.
Each one’s himself, yet each one’s everyone.
“The Sententious Man”

Denise Levertov

From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
alone and more than alone
at the bottom
of the well where the moon lives
“Everything that Acts Is Actual”

Li-Young Lee

And one day, when I need
to tell myself something intelligent
about love,

I’ll close my eyes
and recall this room and everything in it:
My body is estrangement.
This desire, perfection.
Your closed eyes my extinction.
“This Room and Everything in It”

We all should more poetry in our lives. At least I know I should.

Another Dissent of the FOMC Statement?

With the meeting of the FOMC starting today, there seems to be a great deal of uncertainty about what the Fed statement will say. I’m pretty certain that there will be no change in the target rate (with the “extended period” statement remaining), the comments about the economy will be dour (but not likely strong enough to drive the market dramatically downward), and they will reiterate that they are prepared to take whatever measures are necessary as conditions warrant. The real question for me is whether Kansas City Fed Chief Thomas Hoenig will continue to dissent. For the last year or more of Fed statements, Hoenig has insisted that the Fed should be raising the target rate in order stave off inflation or the creation of another housing bubble. The facts, though, continue to point away from his fears. In fact, many are now suggesting that there is a greater risk of deflation than inflation in the near term.

I would like to see him drop his dissent. Bernanke runs a more democratic Fed and is willing to support the differences of opinion, but a dissent now will only add to the uncertainty. Investors, not just fed-watchers, are looking for something definitive out of the FOMC. They’re not likely to get it, but a dissent now, at this inflection point, would leave them questioning the statement in its entirety. It’s not a matter of differences of opinion on how to chart the course of recovery; the concern now is slipping backwards. Saying that we need to raise rates in the face of the current economic conditions isn’t going to add any much-needed stability.

Book Review: A Gate at the Stairs

A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore

Sometimes I like a novel that spends much of its time wandering through the mind of its protagonist. A Gate at the Stairs is, in fact, very good at doing that, making simple scenes stretch long as each bit of dialogue or slight action sets the main character off on a new tangent of thought. Plot, itself, shouldn't suffer. And it does here, with surprises that arrive without set up, with dead ends and changes of pace that doom the novel.

Centered around a college student who takes a job caring for the newly adopted part-African-American baby of a flighty restaurant owner and her absent husband, the novel carries us close to the mind of Tassie Keltjin, the narrator. Tassie is from the country and out of place in the college town, not a bumpkin but naive. She makes a good narrator because everything she sees in new, and as she gets swept up in this new family we want to urge her to be careful.

Not only does the plot stumble, but Moore also seems to miss opportunities to make the story richer. There are tensions surrounding the child's race, and there is discussions around it. But just discussions. No conclusions seem to be reached, no revelation or resolve of any sort. Other, secondary story lines, suffer similar fates. Then when the main storyline is interrupted by a surprise, the story just falls apart, finally wandering to conclusion many, many pages later.

It's generally not a good sign, when I want to be done with a novel just to be done with it. That was the case here.

Book Review: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larsson


Now, I must admit that I am not the target audience for Steig Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but with all of the widespread praise the mystery had been receiving, I thought it may be worth my time. Or at least it would be a fun waste of time. It was, instead, a frustrating waste of time.

It's bad hen you come in with pretty low expectations and are still let down. I tend to be annoyed with genre conventions, but that wasn't even the problem here. In fact, it probably would have been a better book if it had tried to adhere to a standard format. Instead, we get what amounts to hundreds of pages of meandering, useless back story, no plot development, and not actual progression. I say all of this without criticizing the line-level quality of the writing (it is dry and dull).

I'd like to summarize the plot, the central storyline, here, but it so convoluted that is not worth the paragraph it would take to write it. There is a mystery that involves two dozen or so family members, and a secondary mystery that sort of bookends the first mystery. Then there are another twenty characters, each with Swedish names that make them hard to distinguish from other characters (Don't miss Nora Ephron's New Yorker piece if you too struggle with this book).

Around two-hundred pages in, after being sufficiently frustrated and confused, the action begins. It is for this action that we're meant to enjoy these sorts of books, right? On a personal level, I enjoyed the concept of Mikael Blomkvist holed up in a spartan guest house in northern Sweden, tasked with chronicling a family history and attempting to solve a murder along the way. I also enjoyed the character of Lisbeth Salander, for all of her supposedly shocking characteristics, but I do think Larsson misunderstands her at times, giving her thoughts and actions (some critical) that are wholly inconsistent.

When the action gets good, when things are building to a climax, though, Larson lets some events happen so matter-of-factly that they fall flat. A couple of key moments in the novel happen without any sort of build up. Its as if the author needed something to happen, and instead of leading us to it, it just happens. When I wanted more of what the genre should have served up, the book let me down.

The action only lasts a few hundred pages, and then we return to the meandering, the other irrelevant characters, and the ancillary mystery (which, like the other, is a let down). The last hundred pages of the book were so frustrating to get through, so indulgent and self-serving. I could not help but wonder where the editor was for this book. This isn't a Stephen King book, where you pretty much let him write whatever he wants to write, slap a cover on it, and wait for the money to pour in. This is a debut novel. Sure, there had been international success before it ever appeared in the U.S., but couldn't we have pulled it into shape first?

Unless you're so inspired by the cover that you have to read this book (it was one key reason I was interested), don't. Wait for the David Fincher film. Or, better yet, see the Swedish film, which is getting good reviews. Though maybe you shouldn't believe the reviews.

Movie Review: Winter's Bone

Movies based on good novels rarely seem to match whatever quality made the book so good in the first place. Winter's Bone, directed by Debra Granik, is one of those rare films that live up to the novel on which it is based. While I found myself questioning some of the plot points and the sequence of events, the movie does well by Daniel Woodrell's novel.

Set in the drug-addled Missouri Ozarks, the movie follows 17-yr-old Reed Dolly as she searches for her missing father. Busted for cooking meth, Jessup Dolly put the house, in which Ree lives with her vacant mother and two younger siblings, up against his bond. If he doesn't show up for his court date, they will lose the house and land.

The film focuses more on this mystery than the book does. (Certainly the marketing--and the hideous movie poster--try to play it up.) In the book, it seems like a lost cause from the beginning. Indeed walks into situatiopns she shouldn't and finds herself in some trouble. Played by Jennifer Lawrence, Ree is steely and hard, determined and stubborn, but the acting never lets us miss the teenager she really is.

Filmed in Missouri's Christian County, the film must have caused quite a stir when the film trucks came to town and borrowed real locations, real people's homes for filming. There some gritty squalour here that should remind us how people live in this country. There are many sides to American life, and this may be one that art film audiences may not have known actually existed.

A big winner at Sundance, Winter's Bone is an excellent, realistic movie that will probably pass largely unnoticed. And it is too bad, too. I can only hope that by the time it goes to DVD, more people will have heard how good it is.

A Solution for Job Creation

I’ve just read former Intel chief Andy Grove’s article “How to Make an American Job” in the July 5-11 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek and I have to quibble. He argues that we ship jobs overseas at our own peril. Not only do we lose the jobs, we also are left out of the next round of development in that industry. To solve the problem, he states, “Long term, we need a job-centric economic theory—and job-centric political leadership—to guide our plans and actions.”

Surely, the US cannot survive on knowledge and service work alone. I would agree. Manufacturing in the US gives the country the flexibility to change and grow and to be a part of new technological revolutions. Pressing the government to get involved in this, in any way, walks us straight into dangerous territory.

Incentives provided by the government for job creation can hardly be effective. I would bet that for every dollar of incentive provided, less than fifty cents pass through in the form of wages. Probably a greater portion goes straight to corporate profits. We cannot forget that profit creation is the greater incentive for companies, coming well before job creation. Wringing the profit out of every dollar is the way things work.

Inefficiencies of government spending or tax breaks aside, other methods to encourage domestic manufacturing are dangerous. Tariffs on imported goods may protect American jobs, but often at a higher cost for American companies. They will pay higher prices on imported raw materials, higher wages, and will likely see import tariffs on their own products overseas. Duties are a bit of an arms race. As long as we have the same amount as our competitor, we are secure. An escalation by either side will be equally met by the other. Grove, though, thinks this okay. “Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars—fight to win.)”

What works is when American businesses seize opportunities, finding the right spots to take advantage of things. Here, Grove is onto something. He suggests the promotion of scaling, of moving a product from development and small-run manufacturing to complete large-run, full-scale production. This is a particular pinch-point in the process. US companies have had trouble relying on overseas manufacturers to take a new product to full-scale production because of the normal tweaks to design and production that are necessary. Keeping that work in the US can allow companies to be better tuned to making quick changes, refining processes, and making better products.

But instead of penalizing US companies through taxes or tariffs on overseas production, we need to help them get what they need to keep this scaling in the US: access to capital. A program of government-backed loans available to companies looking to scale up would be exactly what is needed. Let’s face it, shareholders or the bond market are probably unwilling to take this risk and help a company fund the creation of US manufacturing. Why would they when they continue to see the profits that come from displacing American workers for Chinese? Venture capital isn’t interested, as Grove points out. And banks aren’t willing to take the risk without government support. Yet, it is in the country’s interest to create jobs here and to take a little risk in the process. There is no up-front cost to the taxpayer, no taxpayer dollars going to line the pockets of greedy corporate execs or handout-seeking labor. There is market-rate interest to be made by banks and a little downside risk to the government.

The dangers of a US devoid of manufacturing jobs should be apparent. It may provide greater profits to US corporations, their executives, and the smaller base of knowledge workers, but all of their spending cannot support our service and retail sectors. Yes, maybe shipping jobs overseas and rising US unemployment can be severe enough to depress US wages to the level of those of Chinese workers, making it cost efficient to return jobs to the US. Indeed, maybe this is the intent of some. But the US thrives on a diverse workforce. We need not only manufacturing workers, we need the line managers, the division chiefs, and all the other middle managers as well. Maybe with a little government backing (not support, incentives, or protectionism) we can get them back.

Book Review: Rabbit, Run

Rabbit, Run by John Updike


I feel bad for putting this book off for so long. If only someone would have told me how good it was, how sentences would jump off the page, nailing emotions, confusions, context. Not to say the book doesn't have it's faults (it does), but I do wish I'd have read this some time ago.


I had read the first few pages a half-a-dozen times, and despite the sharpness of the writing in the first few paragraphs I always chose another book to read instead. I only had to get past those first few pages, past Rabbit's pick-up basketball game and his run home, to his home and wife and dissatisfaction with both, to the drive and I was hooked.


He drives through the thickening night. The road unravels with infuriating slowness, its black wall wearilessly rising in front of his headlights no matter how they twist. The tar sucks his tires. He realizes that the heat on his cheeks is anger; he has been angry ever since he left that diner full of mermaids. So angry his cheeks feel parched inside his mouth and his notstrils water. He grinds his foot down as if to squash this snake of a road, and nearly loses the car on a curve, as the two right wheels fall captive to the dirt shoulder. He brings them back but keeps the speedometer needle to the right of the legal limit.


He turns off the radio; its music no longer seems a river he is riding down but instead speaks with the voice of the cities and brushes his head with slippery hands. Yet into the silence that results he refuses to let thoughts come. He doesn't want to think, he wants to fall asleep and wake up pillowed by sand. How stupid, how frigging, fucking stupid he was, not to be farther than this. At midnight, the night half gone.


I hadn't expected this. I hadn't expected the run, right in the beginning, with narration so close and free-flowing. And then Rabbit turns out to be so exhasperating and simple. Always doing what he shouldn't do, but with no real good reason for it. Sure, he had been frustrated at home, but his initial flight was on a whim. There was no reason in it, and worse, he turns around and heads back. But does he go home? No. And this is the way it goes for the length of the novel.


Where the novel runs into trouble, besides the meandering, the pick-ups and drop-offs of motivation and reason, is when suddenly we leap from Rabbit's mind to the mind of others. It tends to happen for good reason, but I find it troubling to enter another character's mind halfway through the novel after being firmly established elsewhere. Yet, when Updike does this, he lets nothing fail (another long quote follows--my apologies).


Nelson's face turns up toward the porch and he tries to explain, "Pilly have--Pilly--" But just trying to describe the injustice gives it unbearable force, and as if struck from behind he totters forward and slaps the thief's chest and receives a mild shove that makes him sit on the ground. He rolls on his stomach and spins in the grass, revolved by his own incoherent kicking. Eccles' heart seems to twist with the child's body: he knows so well the propulsive power of a wrong, the way the mind batters against it and each futile blow sucks the air emptier until it seems the whole frame of bone must burst in a universe that can be such a vaccuum.


"The boy's taken his truck," he tells Mrs. Springer.


"Well let him get it himself," she says. "He must learn. I can't be getting up on these legs and running outside every minute; they've been at it like that all afternoon."


"Billy." The boy looks up in surprise toward Eccles' male voice. "Give it back." Billy considers this new evidence and and hesitates indeterminately. "Now, please." Convinced, Billy walks over and pedantically drops the toy on his sobbing playmate's head.


The new pain starts fresh grief in Nelson's throat, but seeing the truck on the grass beside his face chokes him. It takes him a moment to realize that the cause of his anguish is removed and another moment to rein the emotion in his body. His great dry gasps as he rounds these corners seem to heave the sheet of trimmed grass and the sunshine itself. A wasp bumping persistently against the screen dips and the aluminum chair under Eccles threatens to buckle; as if the wide world is participating in Nelson's readjustment.


The brilliance is everwhere in this novel, despite the way it bumps along at times, infuriating in its twists and the impending tragedy. You know that things must truly fall apart for Rabbit, and you know that he may learn nothing from it. And you wish he'd have kept driving south to the beach and avoided all of this.


Again, I wish I'd have read this sooner. There is so much to learn from the way Updike captures emotion, the way his close third-person narration takes you behind the scenes. You are not a witness to the thoughts of the character, but you experience what he experiences. Makes me wish I'd have really seen the brilliance in the writing workshop staple "A&P" and read more Updike sooner.

Book Review: Last Night

Last Night by James Salter

Sometimes there is nothing quite as liberating as a really good short story collection. The story devoured in one sitting. The new engagement every time you open the cover. Salter's Last Night is an excellent collection. The stories are easy, casual, yet transporting. The writing is so simple and traditional, you'd think it was written in the sixties. References to cell phones and the like were a little jarring.

I also love stumbling on a story I've read before in a collection, especially a story like "Last Night" that is particularly memorable. It is definitely one of those that deserve to be anthologized and studied.

I'd read Salter's A Sport and A Pastime awhile ago and quite enjoyed it. Upon completion I promptly went to the bookstore to see what else I could find by him. I found this collection in the bargain section and picked it up without a moment's contemplation. It took me this long to get around to reading it, but I will be back to the book store looking for more Salter shortly.

Lower E-Reader Prices Make Them More Tempting

I've said this before: I'm a book guy. Good old fashioned paper books, complete with the smell, the weight, the feel. Yet, as the prices for e-readers like the Nook and the Kindle come down to earth, I find them tempting. It's not that I want to toss away my library and clear my bookshelves for knick-knacks, but I like the idea of a library in a slim piece of electronic gadgetry.

I don't think of books as consumables. I don't read books and then dismiss them. I like knowing they still exist on my shelf (in a tangible, physical form) for me to reference. I know that if I want to go back to a particular story in Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, the book is there. E-readers are good for folks who might read a book once and be done with it, but I'm beginning to think that they might be good for reference too. Might not be bad, when I'm sitting down to write several pages tonight, to pull out a Kindle and reread "Car Crash While Hitchhiking." And I think they might be very good for non-fiction, for the important books that come out in hardback and make a stir but you don't necessarily need them on your bookshelf for all of eternity (I still need to get around to Nassim Taleb's Black Swan).

And what about magazines? I am definitely a magazine reader, thought I rarely seem to get through them. Wouldn't an e-reader be the best place for The New Yorker or Business Week?

So, I'm tempted.

I did put my hands on a Nook a couple of weeks ago, and I wasn't impressed. It felt clunky and the model on display at the store was stuck loading a page. The sales person had to power it off and back on to get it working again.

But then I wonder if I would be doing damage to two industries I'm fond of, publishing and bookselling. I'd rather not aid in the demise of either.

I'm not convinced that I'm buying one of these things yet, but with more reasonable pricing it is worth considering.

Book Review: Outer Dark

Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

Another one of McCarthy's wandering books, Outer Dark, doesn't disappoint. It is everything you'd expect from him. Rich descriptions, dialogue that sticks in your head, landscapes, fear, and of course unspeakable violence.

Living in the old, tough South, Culla Holme and his sister have a child together. Culla leaves the child in the woods, telling his sister that the child died, but instead it was found by a wandering tinker. While Culla is out hunting work, his sister sets out to hunt the tinker and her child. Culla then takes of to find his sister. Meanwhile, three true villains are terrorizing the area.

The premise itself is tough, especially for a reader with young children, but it is the wandering, the walking, unknowingly, into danger. And somehow surviving. McCarthy rarely spends any time in a character's mind, so we are left to interpret the emotional struggles through the landscapes, the hot sun, the need for food, water, and rest. I'd thought of filling this review with long excerpts of description or snippets of dialogue just to give you an example of McCarthy's skill, but I'd rather tell you instead to just read the book. It's no Suttree, but it's short and a good intro to Cormac McCarthy.

Winter's Bone, the Movie, Is Coming

From the 2006 Daniel Woodrell book, Winter's Bone, one of the best new books I've read in many years, the movie adaptation is on its way to theaters after a good showing at Sundance. Adaptations always seem to disappoint in one way or another. And, from watching this trailer, I don't remember the book being quite so frightening.

Reviews: NYT, WSJ, LA Times, HuffPost

Mental Illness in Winnie-the-Pooh? Of course.

Mental-health students even explore children's literature for buried psychological themes. Analysts have had a field day in the "Hundred Acre Wood" with A.A. Milne's characters. While the world of Winnie the Pooh seems innocent on the surface, "it is clear to our group of modern neuro-developmentalists that these are in fact stories of seriously troubled individuals, many of whom meet DSM-IV criteria for significant disorders," wrote Sarah E. Shea and colleagues in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2000, referring to the handbook of diagnoses.

Piglet clearly suffers from generalized anxiety disorder, the authors noted. Eeyore has chronic dysthymia (mild depression) and could benefit greatly from an antidepressant. Tigger is hyperactive, impulsive and a risk-taker.

Pooh is a bundle of comorbidities that may include cognitive impairment, as he is often described as a "bear of very little brain."

From the WSJ article, Fiction Stars, Real Problems

Book Review: The Trial

The Trial by Franz Kafka

This book has been on my reading list for a long time. In fact, I've started it many times, but contemplating reading through the frustrations that I knew would ensure hardly encouraged me to continue. Restarting my pleasure reading this summer, I thought it would be a good idea to get through some of the books that I have started and, for some reason, put down. (Rabbit, Run is also on this list.)

I didn't find it nearly as frustrating as all that, though. Neither did I find it terribly compelling. Kafka is good at getting to the existential frustrations of bureaucracy and paranoia, but he's short on the sort of haunting depictions I was looking for. The Trial was more similar to Dostoevsky than to The Metamorphosis. We were part of the delusions and hubris of the protagonist, but I didn't often feel the same confusions and frustrations he seemed to experience.

The Trial wasn't as difficult to get through as I expected, but it doesn't even rank among the Kafka masterpieces.

The End of the Mercury Brand

This morning I was driving behind a 70's era Grand Marquis, one of those huge hunks of metal that you wouldn't believe could be made in an era of gasoline shortages. But still the Mercury Grand Marquis was just a rebranded Ford LTD. In fact, I don't remember Mercury having its unique model in the modern era. So, it is understandable that it might be time for the brand to go.

I appreciate creative destruction and some serious destruction was necessary in the US auto industry.

I've never really understood the real business reasons for throwing some different chrome or taillights along with a new badge on a car and calling it something else. If the manufacturer sold all of the models under one brand, without all of the changes, the efficiencies would grow and they should be cheaper to make. Instead they make redundant models that sell at different dealers. And good luck convincing someone that they should pay more for a rebranded Ford.

So, despite the sentimental attachment we may have to brands, sometimes it is just time for them to go.

Bag Day at the Book Sale

Nothing better than bag day at the book sale. Another decent, varied haul, in no particular order:

Bullet Park - John Cheever
World's End and Other Stories - Paul Theroux
Henderson the Rain King - Saul Bellow
The Sonnets - William Shakespeare
Stories and Prose Poems - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The Big Laugh - John O'Hara
Elmer Gantry - Sinclair Lewis
Letting Go - Philip Roth
The Plague - Albert Camus
A Mercy - Toni Morrison
The Cave - Robert Penn Warren
Weight - Jeanette Winterson
Goodbye, Columbus - Philip Roth
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight - Alexandra Fuller
Miramar - Naguib Mahfouz
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
The Passion - Jeanette Winterson
100 Selected Poems - e.e. cummings
America America - Ethan Canin
The Emperor's Children - Claire Messud
Peace - Richard Bausch
Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century - John Gerassi
Scenes from American Life - Edited by Joyce Carol Oates
A River Runs Through It - Norman Maclean
Troubled Sleep - Jean-Paul Sartre
The Music of Chance - Paul Auster
Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs - Chuck Klosterman
Fool For Love and Other Plays - Sam Shepard
Dostoevsky - Edited by Rene Weller
Capital, Communism and Coexistence - John Kenneth Gailbraith and Stanislav Menshikov
The World Is Flat - Thomas L. Friedman

MBA Graduation Yesterday

Well, that's it. Finally and officially done with the Executive MBA. It was a bit of a proud moment, I have to say, thinking of all the work that went into it, all of the sacrifices. And of all that I learned and experienced. And there's the people. Sure, there were a handful I didn't care for. Funny, they're also the ones I feel don't really deserve the MBA since they didn't put in nearly the work the rest of us did. But that's a selfish thought. They're not my concern.

One question asked of me yesterday was whether the MBA has changed my outlook, how I view business, capitalism. In many ways the answer is 'no.' I think I had a pretty good sense of business before, and nothing I learned changed my view of the virtues and tragic flaws of capitalism. Where the program has changed my views is in the opportunities out there. The careers, the ways to do business, the opportunities for improvement. The program has also taught me of what I am capable. The intellectual challenges, the time and project management, the reserve of energy and motivation. There was always so much to do, and more that I wanted to get done. And somehow I got most of it done, I found the energy to do what was required. We also blazed through a lot of very valuable material, things that I would have loved to study more in depth. I emerge so much smarter about some things (macroeconomics) and with interest piqued about other things (strategy).

No one has dared to but should someone ask whether it was worth it, the answer is an obvious 'yes.' Though there is no immediate, obvious financial benefit, no dramatic career change or advancement that is imminent now that the degree is in my hand (I would hardly have done it solely for these reasons), I am a better person for having done it. I am a better manager, employee, intellectual, husband, father. And now that I am finished I will have more time and energy to devote to these things.

Where Are the BP Boycotts?

After the Wall Street Journal articles exposing BP's failings and the opening of a criminal probe into the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, I would expect people would be screaming for a boycott of BP. Sometimes we forget our role as consumers in driving the conduct of corporations. Much of the managment and finance talk speaks to the power of the shareholders, and this is why we've seen the sell off in BP stock. But just as the stockholders are a source of financing for BP, the customers are the source of revenue. We need to let BP know that we cannot support their lack of concern for safety and their inability to plan for disaster. The CEO can have his "life back" when he gets fired.

The Future of Books and Bookselling

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent article this morning on the effects of ebooks on books and bookselling, but the tone is particularly negative. The general assumption is that digital books will kill bookstores in the same way that digital music has killed music retailers. I don't think it is quite that simple.

Books are a particularly tangible thing. In music, the CD or vinyl LP was was a medium only--a way to get to the music. For books, though, what we're after is more than just the words. The book experience is key. Holding the book, flipping the pages, dog-earing, underlining, annotating, sharing, and having that physical asset on the bookshelf is all part of what makes up the book experience. I don't think this is only true for book lovers, but I will admit that for those who consume and then dispose the mass market beach read things might be different. It may be these readers who make up the target market for ebooks. The question, then, is what share of the book buying market is made up of these consumers.

Maybe I just want to hold onto the past. Maybe I just want to believe that there is a future in the physical book and bookstore. What share of the market is made up of people like me?

Dallas Fed's Fisher Says Don't Politicize the Federal Reserve

Congress Is Politicizing the Fed

Richard Fisher, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, takes on the nonsense of the threats to not confirm Ben Bernanke.

"A great and powerful economy cannot create the conditions for sustainable noninflationary growth if its central bank is governed by a politicized monetary authority."

Dow and Euro-Dollar Forecasts

As an assignment for the first day of a class on Financial Strategy and Valuation, we were asked to forecast what the Dow and the Euro-Dollar exchange rate would be at the end of the year. I wrote my first forecast on Wednesday and, as you will see, subsequent events forced me to revise the forecast. Below is what I wrote:

Dow Jones Industrial Average at the close on March 19, 2010 = 10,560 10,120.08

Fourth quarter earnings and forecasts for 2010 earnings will continue to be optimistic through the rest of earnings season. Companies have managed to cut costs and grow profits despite decreases in revenue. Seeing an economic recovery beginning, companies believe that they can capitalize on new, revitalized cost structures and reap generous profits on the way up. Investors and analysts are likely to believe them.

In the near-term (late-January through early-February), the Dow should continue its climb. Economic reports in February should begin to bring investors back down to Earth. U.S. GDP figures will be revised down (as they were for the third-quarter) and consumer sentiment will continue to be weighed down by jobs numbers that don’t live up to expectations. Even as companies begin to rehire in light of increasing sales and maxed-out productivity, the unemployment rate will not show improvement as those who have dropped off the rolls and stopped looking for work will start again and will be included in the unemployment numbers.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average, because of the industrial components, should see the results of the recovery first, while retail and other consumer-dependant sectors will lag. The Dow has increased 2.9% from 10,428.5 to 10,725.43 at the close on January 19, 2010. The index should continue to climb in the near term and we should see a close above 11,000. After an increase of over 2.5%, the Dow should see a decrease in the neighborhood of 4% from the peak. I am projecting the DJIA will close on March 19, 2010 at 10,560.

UPDATE: After writing the above paragraphs, the Dow lost 552.45 points in three days. The sell-off demonstrates the way that unknowns can influence the market in ways that forecasts cannot predict. The announcement from China that they would look to curb lending in attempt to reduce the impact of inflation, coupled with the announcement by the Obama Administration of proposed rules that would restrict risk taking by U.S. banks, put fear into investors about the limits of recovery—despite positive earnings statements by Dow components.

A loss of more than 5% points in just a few days was not factored into my previous forecast. I cannot see the market falling too much farther within the next several days, but the mood on Wall Street has been seriously dampened. Any boost we would see from positive earnings statements, like the one this morning from GE, will be muted. The fundamentals of what I stated above should still be in play. Good earnings may stabilize the market and provide some price improvement, but economic factors will pull the market back down by the 19th of March. My revised forecast is for the Dow to close on March 19, 2010 at 10,120.08.

Euro-Dollar Exchange Rate on March 19, 2010 = $1.4445

Many counter-acting forces are currently at play in the foreign exchange market. The U.S. recovery is beginning and may soon advance at a higher rate than Europe given the risks for further turmoil, especially in places like Spain. On the other hand, our domestic recovery will be slow, possibly slower than expected. Slow U.S. GDP growth will continue to weigh on the dollar.

From the beginning of the year through January 19, the Euro-Dollar exchange rate has declined only slightly, from $1.4326 to $1.4302. These gains should be wiped away with a weakening dollar as recovery lags expectations. I am projecting a decrease of 1% in the value of the dollar against the Euro between January 20 and March 19, 2010 to $1.4445 to the Euro.

UPDATE: The Dow’s slide since the above forecast was written is not likely to have a great affect on Euro-Dollar during the next quarter. The rate should remain range-bound, despite dipping to the low end of that range this week. The Dow is more volatile than the dollar, certainly against the European currency. I do not see a reason to adjust the above forecast at this time.

Banking Rules, the Dow, Bernanke, Campaign Finance

While I would like to offer some deep thoughts on the following news items, time only allows me to offer this quick bit of off-the-cuff analysis and opinion.

Proposed Banking Rules
Controlling the risks that banks can take when backed by US taxpayers, sounds much more reasonable than the more punitive fee on transactions. Goldman is the only one to really be hurt by the new rules anyway.

The Dow's Slide
The fear over how China's tightening of lending will restrict growth and slow the global recovery is understandable. Financials, though, should not have this great an impact on the broader market.

The Vote on Bernanke
A question for those thinking of voting against Bernanke: Who would you rather have at the Fed? There's no question that he didn't get everything right going into this mess, and he won't raise rates as quickly as the inflation hawks want him to. You can't punish him for Wall Street's failings, though. And I don't think you can find a better guy to see us through this mess.

Corporate Personhood
The Supreme Court's ruling yesterday that did away with McCain-Feingold restrictions on corporate and union money going to political campaigns sets, I think, a dangerous precedent. We ought to be careful about granting rights to companies and organizations that we normally reserve for individuals. Should corporations have the same free-speech privileges as you or I? If so, what other rights of individuals should they have?

Book Review: Dear American Airlines

Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles

I had to insert Dear American Airlines into my lengthy to-be-read list when my wife brought it home from the library. I thought I'd read the first couple of pages to get a taste for it. I'd read good reviews, so I was interested. When I got into it, though, I found it easily digestible. So digestible, in fact, that whatever was next on my list was going to have to weight.

Author Jonathan Miles's Bennie is a self-deprecating narrator with enough nastiness and scepticism to not be entirely likable, but this is no matter. We like Bennie because he's suffering, because things haven't turned out like he wanted. Bennie has more problems than being stuck waiting for the flight (the premise for the book's title is his frustration with the airline). We don't like him enough to feel bad for him, but we understand. Besides, Bennie, through the author, is witty and that makes the book good enough to keep reading.

Maybe I found the book unsurprising, sentimental, and the epiphany too epiphanic. Maybe it was a small book in a summer of big, heavier, more serious books. Maybe I just wasn't that impressed. The book is a good read, but nothing to write an airline about.