Reasons to Live by Amy Hempel

After the dog's cremation, I lie in my husband's bed and watch the Academy Awards for animals. That is not the name of the show, but they give prizes to animals for Outstanding Performance in a movie, on television, or in a commercial. Last year the Schlitz Malt Liquor bull won. The time before that, it was Fred the Cockatoo. Fred won for draining a tinky bottle of "liquor" and then reeling and falling over drunk. It is the best thing on television in what my husband, Flea, said.

With Flea gone, I watch out of habit.

My favorite story, I think, in Amy Hempel's collection Reasons to Live is "Nashville Gone to Ashes," about a woman whose veterinarian husband has died and left her with all the animals. The narrator, who came to the work of a vet reluctantly, is left with the parts of her life with Flea (his name is really F. Lee) that she hadn't chosen, and none of what she did. "I think it was that love that I loved," she writes of Flea's attention to his charges. "That kind of involvement was reassuring; I felt it would extent to me, as well. That it did not or that it did, but only as much and no more, was confusing at first. My love is so good, why isn't it calling the same thing back?" I was touched by this story, and the simple grief of what gets left behind. At the end, the narrator finds herself giving money to a homeless man begging for help for his dog, and turning around and seeing a man without a dog, begging for himself. Do we value animals too much? Or do we value them because they serve, unable to talk--except for Flea's mynah--as repositories of our own loves and passions?

Many of the stories in Reasons to Live focus on grief and dying. There's a lot of hospitals. There's one, for instance, in "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," a story that comes up a lot when people talk about stories they love. The narrator, sitting at chemotherapy with an old friend, plies her with fun facts that are almost always wrong. (For instance--Bob Dylan's mother invented Wite-Out.) These facts come to stand in for something else, or nothing else, or the impossibility of finding something to give ground to a relationship that has lasted so long. But for me I preferred "Going," a slim little three-pager from the perspective of a reckless young daredevil who has miraculously survived a car accident while driving with his binoculars. The longer stories here feel no more "complete" or round than the flash stories; I often felt that Hempel offers only snapshots into stories--vivid and in bright detail, but only snapshots nonetheless. I thought this worked well in a pair of stories about fathers trying to keep their precocious children from experiencing a vague kind of familial unease that grips them: "Back to Celia" and "Today Will Be a Quiet Day." Other stories felt difficult to penetrate, too wispy or impossible to grasp.

John Adams by David McCullough

So much had happened in John Adams's life--he had done so much, taken such risks, given so much of himself heart and soul in the cause of his country--that he seems not to have viewed the presidency as an ultimate career objective or crowning life achievement. He was not one given to seeing life as a climb to the top of a ladder or a mountain, but more as a journey or adventure, even a "kind of romance, which a little embellished with fiction or exaggeration or only poetical ornament, would equal anything in the days of chivalry or knight errantry," as once he confided to Abigail. If anything, he was inclined to look back upon the long struggle for independence as the proud defining chapter.

OK--I guess we're doing this, huh. After reading Alexis Coe's biography of George Washington, here we are reading David McCullough's biography of John Adams. It's the second McCullough book I've read this year, after his book on the Johnstown Flood, and it shows the popular historian in full form: a big honking tome, well-written. John Adams can take credit for a renewed interest in the second president, who McCullough clearly suggests is underappreciated relative to his predecessor and successor, and resulted in the HBO miniseries starring Paul Giamatti. But McCullough's position is, I would argue, not just that Adams is underappreciated when set amidst larger personalities, but that there is a political valence to that underappreciation--that our historiography has been shaped by Jacksonian Democrats whose rhetoric of "liberty" and "states' rights" have prevented us from fully appreciating Adams as an advocate for a strong central government and opponent of slavery.

McCullough is a great writer, so in saying I was persuaded, perhaps I am saying that his style worked on me. But I do actually think McCullough's case is compelling. Firstly, he depicts Adams as the "voice" of the Declaration of Independence, advocating stormily for its passage during the Continental Congress during a time when loyalists reluctant to shake the wrath of Great Britain might still have won the day. As a diplomat, Adams secured loans and treaties from European powers in the face of powerful contempt. As president, Adams has the benefit of being a staunch opponent of slavery when every other president of his era, outside of his son John Quincy, either supported the institution's expansion or waffled on it hypocritically, as Washington and Jefferson did. (A nice detail here is that, by inviting a representative of Haiti's Toussaint to the White House, Adams was the first president to host a Black guest.)

I had a vague sense of all that before reading the book, but what I did not realize is that Adams successfully managed the "Quasi-War" with Napoleon's France and kept it from blowing up into a full-blown war of the kind that saw the White House burned just a decade later. This gained Adams no friends, because his own Federalist party (like Hamilton, who comes off here as an absolute conniving piece of shit that everyone hates) was drumming the beat for war and accused Adams of being cowardly, whereas the Jeffersonian Republicans were Francophiles who failed to see the extent of French provocations. This is sort of a key to understanding McCullough's vision of Adams, who successfully navigated both sides of the political arena, which kept the country safe and thriving but made him personally unpopular.

Adams was, it seems, kind of annoying on a personal level. His chief sin, in his own words, was "vanity," though one might add stubbornness, a short temper, and a rusticness inappropriate to the grand courts of Europe. But one person adored him--his wife Abigail, whose eloquence and intelligence set her apart among the First Ladies of the first American century, if not beyond. Adams is unique in that we have a huge trove of his writings, including the letters he and Abigail sent each other, giving us a sense of Adams' own perspectives and thought processes we don't have for other presidents. I was charmed by the thread of Abigail's love for this weird little man that most people seemed to have found unlovable, and it is one of two personal threads that undergird the book, the other being the close friendship with Jefferson that was sundered by their political differences, then stitched back together after both were out of office.

If John Adams has a flaw, it's that the book doesn't seriously deal with the Alien and Sedition Acts, an affront to the right of free speech that marked the low period of Adams's presidency. McCullough explains it away as a kind of product of the political pressures of the time, and shows that Adams later regretted it, but it's not clear exactly what those pressures were, nor why Adams, who seems to have such an iron spine when it came to doing unpopular things, embraced it. And yet, despite this, I came away with a renewed respect for the forgotten second president, "His Rotundity."

Transit by Anna Seghers

And yet although all this transit whispering made me feel miserable, it was amazing to think that even though thousands, no, hundreds of thousands, had died in the flames of the air raids and the furious attacks of the Blitzkrieg, there were many more who were born quite without being noticed by the consuls. They hadn't asked for letters of transit, hadn't applied for visas; they were not under the jurisdiction of this place. And what if some of these poor souls, still bleeding physically and spiritually, had fled to this house, what harm could it do to a giant nation if a few of these saved souls, worthy, half-worthy, or unworthy, were to join them in their country--how could it possibly harm such a big country?

Anna Seghers' Transit is set in the city of Marseille during the upheaval of World War II, where people from all over a Europe in turmoil converge, each trying to set sail for somewhere else. This makes Marseille a kind of continental waiting room where people linger for months, waiting for their visa to arrive, for their refugee status to be approved, making a temporary life for God knows how long in a place they have no intention to stay. That is, except for the +narrator, who arrives at Marseille wanting the one thing the authorities will not allow--to stay for good. Through a convoluted series of events I will try to outline here, he ends up using an assumed name: a friend sends him with a letter to a stranger, a semi-famous novelist who turns out to be dead. While trying to return the dead stranger's items to his wife at the consulate, the narrator is mistakenly identified as him, a misidentification he seizes upon in order to gain the transit visa that will allow him, ironically, to stay in Marseille for a time. This is all complicated when he meets the dead man's wife, Marie, with whom he falls in love.

Transit is a funny thing. It takes as its subject a painful stasis, and the book often seems not to be moving forward or toward anything in a way that mirrors this subject. It's hard to figure out the narrator, who is somehow both calculating and reckless. He promises to help Marie get her traveling papers--she has taken up with a handsome doctor who wants to emigrate with her, to make things more complicated--but of course, to do this would mean to take her away from Marseille, so he sort of half-does it and half-doesn't, manipulating her in order to keep her in his presence. Is he a hero, or a scoundrel? It may be that categories like these break down in the great waiting room of Europe. Either way, his voice is unique and magnetic, and he's an interesting character to follow around; a schemer making his way in a world of impenetrable paperwork. In part, it's a satire whose target is the absurd bureaucracy of Europe, whose rubber-stamping seems entirely inadequate to the gravity of world war. More than one person tells the narrator that they have decided to give up and return to the places of their birth, choosing violence and war over red tape.

In fact, it made me think a little of immigration in the United States today, the way, without even the upheaval of world war, we have created a system of perverse and obscure incentives that leaves people with no clear way forward. The strange motionlessness and circularity of Transit made it, for me, a little difficult to really embrace. But I did find it skillful and insightful, and certainly worth reading.

Lies, Inc. by Philip K. Dick

There was silence. And then, by labored, unnaturally retarded degrees, a groaning noise came from the speaker of the television set; the noise at last became intelligible speech, at the proper pitch and rate: his categories of perception had again achieved a functioning parallel with the space-time axis of the image of Omar Jones. Or had the progression of the image resumed as before? Time had stopped or the image had stopped, or perhaps both... or was there such a thing as time at all? He tried to remember, but found himself unable to; the falling off of his capacity for abstract thought--was--what--was--

He did not know.

Something looked at him. With its mouth.

It had eaten most of its own eyes.

Millions of people on an overcrowded planet (population--LOL--seven billion) have already made the journey by teleport to the distant planet known as Whale's Mouth. The problem is, the teleportation only works one way. Rachmael ben Applebaum is one of the few on Earth who don't trust the veracity of the images of idyllic life being beamed back from Whale's Mouth, and he plans on finding out exactly what's going on the old fashioned way, on a seventeen-year trip by spaceship. (It doesn't hurt that Rachmael's transportation business is on its last legs, and might be reinvigorated by the existence of a few million people eager to sign up for a return trip to Earth.) The plan puts him directly in the crosshairs of a battle between the teleportation company, the very funnily-named German company Trails of Hoffmann and the secret police service known as Lies, Inc.

Classic PKD premise, no? Lies, Inc. has a fascinating publication history: originally written as a novella in the 60s, Dick added about 100 pages of new material toward the end of his life that was rejected by his publisher and released only posthumously. The result is a mishmash that doesn't quite work as a novel, but provides a really fascinating study in the contrast between early and late Dick. The early book is quite familiar, down to its obsession with the repetition and extension of World War II-era politics: note the German company and the Jewish hero. (One of the horrors of the seven-billion-strong world is, in fact, that Germany has been reunited once more.) The new material follows Rachmael who has decided (confusingly) to travel through the portal anyway, where he finds himself in a waiting room with a couple dozen other people who are not fit to be released. Each of them suffers from a series of delusional "paraworlds" filled with monsters; periodically they must compare notes on their paraworlds and make sure they're not the same, which would suggest that one is becoming real. That's very Dickian, I think: the proliferation of one premise into several, the carefully orchestrated logic of the sci-fi world dissolving into multiplicities.

But like I said, as a novel, it's a mess, even at the level of basic logic and coherence. It's no wonder that no one wanted to published it like it is, though another pass at editing might have made it into something great. There are several memorable images of the kind that only PKD could write: the monster--actually the head of Lies, Inc. transformed via paraworld--that grows and eats its own eyes; the corporate apparatchik who lives slightly outside of normal time and is kept, like a pre-cog, in a glass room; the book that seems to tell people about their fate, by which I mean it borrows paragraphs from later on in the book. What I love about PKD is that he tosses off these ideas, which for another writer would make up the whole center of the work, by the bucketful. 

Passing by Nella Larsen

She was caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race. Race! The thing that bound and suffocated her. Whatever steps she took, or if she took none at all, something would be crushed. A person or the race. Clare, herself, or the race. Or, it might be, all three. Nothing, she imagined, was ever more completely sardonic.

I'm going to teach Passing again this year--Song of Solomon, a book I love, turned out to be just too dang long. So I needed to reread it. But this will be a short review, because I don't have all that much to say about it. Unlike The Great Gatsby, a book I don't have any special love for but find something new in each time I re-read it, Larsen's Passing seems to have little in the way of surprises. Which is itself a little surprising, because as a book it is rich with ambiguities: racial, sexual, what have you. But the ambiguities each time are the same.

One thought I did have as I was reading this is that, while Passing has a lot to say to us about modern day ideologies around race, it actually depicts a world that has vanished. Passing, as I understand it, was extremely common in the early 20th century, sometimes in the all-or-nothing way that Clare Kendry passes as white in the novel, and sometimes in the casual way that Irene is seen to be passing at the Drayton Hotel at the beginning of the novel. (In fact, what Irene is doing is so casual in that scene she fails to mention it until she faces the possibility that Clare, who she mistakes for a white stranger, has clocked her, and she'll be thrown out of the hotel.) There simply isn't any analog to that universe today. Which I think actually makes Passing more interesting, because it offers a glimpse into an ecosystem that could only exist under Jim Crow.

It also makes me think that when Clare accuses white people of being stupid--she explains to her novelist friend that a white person could never pass as black, hello Rachel Dolezal, because black people are too savvy for it--they must have been really stupid. Which is to say that race as an idea operates entirely on ignorance, relying on the fact that unstated assumptions remain unstated. If it were ever all dragged into the light, Passing seems to suggest, something would fall apart. "If I could explain" Clare Kendry, Irene's husband Brian says at one point, "I'd know what race is." But who really wants to know?

Nightside the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe

Enlightenment came to Patera Silk on the ball court; nothing could ever be the same after that. When he talked about it afterward, whispering to himself in the silent hours of the night as was his custom--and once when he told Maytera Marble, who was also Maytera Rose--he said that it was as though someone who had always been behind him and standing (as it were) at both his shoulders had, after so many years of pregnant silence, begun to whisper into both his ears.

Patera Silk is a young priest in charge of a manteion, that is, a religious school, in the city of Viron. Like all manteions, it has a sacred window where the pateras and materas pray each day one of the gods will show their faces, but such a thing has not happened in living memory. So when Silk receives "enlightenment" while playing a ballgame with the students of the manteion, it's a big deal--though perhaps not as easily believed as the god showing up at the window. The god that appears to Silk is not one of the "Nine," a pantheon with discrete purviews like the Greek or Norse pantheons, but a minor god known as "the Outsider." What does it want with Silk? Perhaps it has something to do with the terrible news that Silk receives later in the day, that the manteion has been sold by the state to a vicious criminal named Blood. With the help of members of the criminal underworld, Silk breaks into Blood's estate, considering going so far as even killing him, if it might save the manteion--a moral choice that the pious Silk makes with shocking coldness. What actually happens, of course, is that Silk becomes drawn deeper into the criminal world of Viron.

Compared to Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, the Book of the Long Sun series, or this first volume at least, is much more ordinary. It felt much closer to me to typical fantasy fare, though much smarter and better written, and with a few of Wolfe's customary bolts of strangeness. (The pantheon of "the Nine" seems shockingly similar to the mythos of the Game of Thrones series, which I will point out came out three years after this book was published.) The two series are set in the same world, but this one is much earlier; the sun that is dying in the time of the torturer Severian is burning white-hot here, so that night never truly falls anywhere on Earth. It feels smaller in scope: there is no quest here, and the action is all contained within the city of Viron. The stakes--the future of the manteion--seem small, though the intervention of the gods presages perhaps that they will get bigger as the books go forward.

What I thought was most interesting about Nightside the Long Sun is how Wolfe's reputation as a Catholic writer shows up here. I knew that about him, but I think you're hard-pressed to find evidence of Wolfe's religious beliefs in the Book of the New Sun. Nightside the Long Sun is explicitly religious in theme. Silk's piety actually puts him outside the bounds of most of Vironese society; much like our world today, most people pay a kind of lip service to religion but don't really believe. That means that the moral choice that Silk makes--that he will do almost anything, including murder, to save the manteion--is inscrutable to most people, criminal or otherwise. "The Outsider," a sensitive reader quickly understands, is actually the Catholic God, who has been pushed out into a marginal place outside the pantheon. No wonder, then, that Silk's mission takes him to a whorehouse--maybe in the next volume he'll visit a tax collector.

Ultimately, Nightside the Long Sun is hardly comparable to the Book of the New Sun stuff, but then again, The Shadow of the Torturer, the first book in that series, doesn't really capture the heights the series eventually achieves. And I will say that I wanted to keep reading when it was over; so much so that I am thinking of breaking my rule and reading the next one before 2027.

Stories in the Worst Way by Garielle Lutz

Here is a story in the worst way. I have no business being anywhere in it. It comes between me and the life I have coming.

Look: a man who is not me but whose accomplishments are similar (he was the son of some parents, got himself schooled around, circumstanced himself aplenty, placed himself squarely and irreversibly in the employ of somebody who could be counted on to walk all over him, etc.) found a new way to cheat on his wife. This was not the way that everybody else was cheating at the time.

"I hate when it all gets languaged around like this," writes one of the narrator's of Garielle Lutz's collection Stories in the Worst Way. The quality of being "languaged around" is one of my favorite things about Lutz's fiction, starting with the precisely aloof metaphor, the "meteorites of fried chicken" described as "casketed" in their paper box. But I also thought about Jonathan Franzen's recent comments that he puts a book down when he gets to the second cliche. It seems to me that a really great writer has an interest in, pays an attention to cliche, which are little ossifications of shared meaning. Lutz is great at interrogating cliche and wrenching it just out of place, as when one narrator describes their wife as having "given up on me hand and foot," or when another writes: "Then came nights when, lying awake beside my final wife, I would spent too much time putting my finger on what was wrong. I was wearing the finger out." Phrases find themselves wedged into strange new context, sentences that reveal the strange possibilities of grammar: "And here comes what your life will never be the same after which, the same way mine has already never been."

The characters in Lutz's stories are slightly alienated from language, standing just off to the side of it, as they stand slightly outside their own lives. It is entirely possible that each of these stories has the exact same narrator. They go "rivering" around their anonymous suburbs and work in underpaid, underheralded jobs, like adjuncting. They have sex, or don't, and what that adds up to in either case is never all that clear. Some are clearly marked as men or women, but others occupy a kind of indeterminate space, less non-binary than simple non-essential. On gender, Lutz writes: "This much is figured out: the thing about being a girl is that stuff gets stuck inside you--but with a boy, stuff goes away and never comes back. A boy keeps losing himself. A boy just keeps watching himself run out. How much should this explain?" The stories themselves answer not much, because gender here is subject to slippages and indeterminacies that reveal a deeper sense of alienation and ennui. The characters have feelings of isolation and powerlessness that have everything to do with gender, but not their gender, if that makes any sense. A recurring idea is the character who is somehow not in their own story, how whatever "the story" is, is separate from them.

Lutz is one of those writers who sounds only like themself, which I think is probably the greatest possible achievement a writer can manage. So I found these stories very reminiscent of her later collection Divorcer. The differences are small: the stories in this collection are numerous and shorter; the weakest, I thought, were the flash pieces that pointedly avoid the overbearing nature of subject and narrative. The best stories are those that, being longer, reminded me more of Divorcer, as with "Not the Hand But Where the Hand Has Been," about a narrator whose job is to write the indexes for books. Struggling to understand their daughter, this narrator writes an index for them ("subclothes of," "parents of, constructive potshots taken at"). There are stories about shitting your pants and eating cum. Those, in fact, are the best ones, the ones that root the "languaging around" in the terrible and frightening physical experience of having and being a body. But how much should this explain?

Two Books About U.S. History

Political partisanship, Washington predicted, would reduce the government to a crowd of bickering representatives who were very good at thwarting each other but got very little accomplished for their constituents. And for all his talk of unity, he had come to see people as for or against his administration and had little patience for criticism. Unbridled partisanship was his greatest fear, and his greatest failure was that he became increasingly partisan.

This weekend I visited Fort Necessity National Historic Site, a reproduction of the hastily-assembled for in Western Pennsylvania where a young George Washington fired the shots that started the French and Indian War. It's a strange little quirk of history that it was Washington, still a young officer and not yet the American Cincinnatus, started what some call the first true "World War." It's one of those facts that's so insane you'd think everyone would know it, except that perhaps it doesn't fit in our conception of the man who could not tell a lie and who helped forge, then lead, the American republic.

I read Alexis Coe's You Never Forget Your First in part because I wanted to read something about Washington that wasn't a colossal Ron Chernow-size tome. Incidentally, Coe describes her project in writing about Washington as being in opposite to Chernow and his peers, calling them "Thigh Guys"--because they all seem to marvel at the supposed size of the first president's hams. Coe's account is brief and breezy, punctuated by witty tables and feature boxes. I liked, for example, the way she dispatches the battles of the Revolution into a table of summaries, presuming correctly that if someone wanted that kind of thing, they might go to a thousand other books, including the Thigh Guys'. The compaction helps the reader get a stronger sense of the particular shape of Washington's life, which involve not an obvious march toward greatness but a combination of false starts, missteps, and true achievements. I enjoyed learning about Washington's actual administration as president, which always seems to be shrouded somewhat in the mists of history. While Washington's assumption and transfer of power provided the root of the American system, the administration itself seems to have been dominated by an intransigent cabinet--Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton--whose disagreements marked the birth of the partisan era and who ended up estranged from Washington personally.

I couldn't help but think that, for all its posing as an alternative to the "Thigh Guys," Coe's book has little in the way of an opposing thesis about Washington. Those he enslaved, and his moral vacillation about whether and how to emancipate them, come to play here, but that's hardly new information, and Coe seems reluctant to integrate it into a coherent understanding of Washington. He did good and bad, which I suppose is true.

Most of the people in Johnstown never saw the water coming; they only heard it; and those who lived to tell about it would for years after try to describe the sound of the thing it rushed on them.

It began as a deep, steady rumble, they would say; then it grew louder and louder until it had become an avalanche of sound, "a roar like thunder" was how they generally described it. But one man said he thought the sound was more like the rush of an oncoming train, while another said, "And the sound, I will never forget the sound of that. It sound to me just like a lot of horses grinding oats."

Not far from Fort Necessity is the Johnstown Flood National Memorial, which commemorates and interprets the 1889 flood that wiped out the city of Johnstown, PA, killing over two thousand and immiserating many, many more. David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood--the erstwhile historian's first book--tells the story of the flood in detail, beginning with the adjustments to the Lake Conemaugh dam made by a wealthy sporting club of industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and Henry C. Frick, moving on to the dam's bursting and the gruesome aftermath.

What can you say about this except: holy shit. If anything, McCullough's book convinced me that the flood was much worse than I'd even expected. The lucky, it seems, were killed outright, pummeled by the force of the wave, but for many if not most death came in a horrible and drawn-out way. People were launched down the river on the planks that had formerly been their houses, were caught in debris and crushed or drowned. The most horrifying fact is that the flood was actually stopped by a stone arch in Johnstown that did not give way, leaving people to be smashed within a plug of debris that quickly caught on fire. McCullough tells the story of the flood not just in generalities but in painful detail, describing the experiences of specific named victims and families, each of whom suffered their own ghoulish species of misery. It's a tough read, but I was really impressed by how scrupulously researched the book is. Here, as elsewhere, McCullough shows his eye for the telling detail: the sound of the horse grinding oats, or the unlucky brakeman swept away in his train, having settled down for a nap with his socks in his pockets. The fact that McCullough, writing in the sixties, was able to interview survivors is even more exceptional.

The Johnstown Flood would be a seminal moment in American history if only for the number of people it killed--I think the worst disaster pre-9/11?--but it stands out especially because of what it illuminates about Gilded Age America. Public anger turned toward the wealthy of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club, who had turned a derelict reservoir into a ticking time bomb. I appreciated McCullough's sober evaluation of culpability; it's entirely possible, McCullough notes, that the exceptional rainstorm that filled Lake Conemaugh might have broken the dam even without the adjustments, and besides, no one living had been responsible for them. But, McCullough concludes, the neglect in replacing the original valves meant that no matter what, there had been no way to adjust the water level of the dam--a sin which falls directly at the feet of those who ought to have known better. It's not really fair to compare them, because their scopes and purposes are so different, but reading them back to back I did feel like McCullough succeeded with a strong perspective in a way that Coe struggled to achieve in her book about Washington. In both cases, however, they illuminated a very interesting trip to a part of the United States with deep layers of history.

Measurement by Paul Lockhart

In general, the main task of the geometer is to translate geometric information into algebraic information, and vice versa. This is not so much a technical problem as it is a creative one. The real idea was the dissection of the pentagon into similar triangles. Where does such an idea come from? How can you invent something like that? I don't know. Mathematics is an art, and creative genius a mystery. Of course, technique helps--good painters understand light and shadow, good musicians have a thorough knowledge of functional harmony, and good mathematicians can untangle algebraic information--but a beautiful piece of mathematics is just as hard to make as a beautiful portrait or sonata.

Paul Lockhart's Measurement starts with a triangle. If you connect each of a triangle's vertices to the midpoints of the opposite sides, they all seem to meet right in the middle--but do they? How do you prove it? From this exercise, Lockhart spins out an explanation of the basic premises of most grade school level (and perhaps beyond grade school level, what do I know) mathematics. "Measurement" is the key term here, that in doing mathematics we are measuring things according to other things, breaking down polygons into constituent shapes, measuring the paths of vectors in a space of any number of dimensions, fitting triangles into circles and slicing up cones. It's mostly stuff you might remember from high school, but which, unless you went on to a career in STEM, you have probably mostly forgotten. But it's presented in a way that reinvigorates the material, not as a set of dreary problems, but as a kind of elegant unfolding and shifting, toggling back and forth between different modes to reveal fundamental relationships.

I take that back: there are lots of problems. They just aren't the kind that I remember, which start with "Imagine a ladder ten feet high," or "Two trains leave Pittsburgh at 10:03 a.m." Instead, they sound like these: "How can we measure the length of a helix?" Every curve can be straightened without metric distortion. Is the  same true for surfaces?" "How many corners are on a four-dimensional cube?" Some of these problems are explained, but some you're supposed to take a break and explore on your own. I didn't do this, but I appreciated the invitation all the same. I liked that the problems kept the number to a minimum. Lockhart emphasizes that what this mathematics about is not application, the kind of "real-world" motivation that is vogue in education today, but the imaginary "pure" mathematics that is never exactly reproduced in the messiness of the real world. In this way, Lockhart emphasizes the beauty and the elegance of mathematics. It's a subtle argument not just for a way of looking at math, but a way of teaching math, one that forsakes ladders and trains for the two simple section titles: "Size and Shape" and "Time and Space."

I'll probably remember very little of the specifics here, except maybe for the explanation of conic sections as lines in projective space, something I'd never heard about before, and the disturbing fact that there's no way to measure the perimeter of an ellipse algebraically. But I really did appreciate the opportunity to rethink some of the mathematics I learned, and see it in a new way. Lockhart is right when he says that mathematics can be elegant and beautiful. My dad, a professor of physics, unlocked an understanding in me when he told me, when I was a kid, that mathematics is a kind of language. I suppose that, as Lockhart writes, it's a kind of art as well.

The Marvellous Equations of the Dread: A Novel in Bass Riddim by Marcia Douglas

Now that woman, Leenah, she know. I like how she stand up to me. Check her out. She look me in me eyes and she listen me with her heart. Me respect her. Me find meself a tell her things me never tell no other woman. Or man. Jah descend on that dawta and she see me plain--no locs and no guitar; no herb and no mic--just I&I.

In Marcia Douglas' The Marvellous Equations of the Dread, Bob Marley is reincarnated in the body of a "Fall-down Man," that is, a beggar, living at the Half Way Tree clocktower in Kingston. No one recognizes Bob, and when he tries to give away his precious ring, once owned (maybe) by Ras Tafari himself, Haile Selassie--tries to give it away for a couple of patties and a box rink--no one wants it. Only Leenah, a former lover, recognizes Bob in his new guise, but reconnecting is hard, because every time Bob steps out into the street, another five years have passed. As Bob speedruns the future that, in our world, death denied him, he's joined at Half Way Tree by Jamaica's past, visited by the spirits of Edward VII, Marcus Garvey, and his own white father. (Maybe I'm stupid, but I actually didn't know Marley was biracial.) As a kind of nexus where the threads of Jamaica's history are joined, it seems appropriate that Marley, who came to represent the country for so many, ends up here, where once, we're told, a young slave was hanged.

I really enjoyed The Marvellous Equations, and I loved it most when Douglas speaks with Marley's voice, or else in the incredibly evocative language of Rasta Jamaicans. So many Rasta elocutions, some of which are familiar from reggae music, have the rhythm of true poetry: Jah, Zion, Babylon, sufferation. But there's so much more to this expansive novel, which bills itself as being written in "bass riddim," with many harmonies and counterpoints under which the single heaving bassline of Jamaican history can be heard thumping. We expand out into the story of Leenah's family, including a great-uncle who spends his time in heaven hunched over a sewing machine with sky-blue thread. There's an angel whose notebook is recorded, and a number of Jamaican streetfolk who come into contact with Bob-slash-the-Fall-down. We even get the story of Haile Selassie himself, a reluctant and bewildered godhead to the Rastafarians, a representation of the hope of a return to an African "Zion." We see Selassie killed in his chamber by his maid-slash-lover, and that hope extinguished, but as Marley notes to a young runaway he befriends as the Fall-down, Zion is a place inside yourself. Among other things, it seems, The Marvellous Equations is about how the deaths of both Marley and Selassie forced Rastafarianism to turn away from the kind of millenarian idea of an African promised land to something more inward.

But it's about a lot of other things, too, including the nobility of the love between Bob and Leenah (a more noble love, it seems, than the one shared between Bob and Rita Marley, who only makes a few momentary appearances here.) Foremost it's about Jamaica, a place where history and hope converged on one exceptional but flawed--one might even say doomed--man. Part of the reason I picked it up is because I couldn't stomach committing to Marlon James' A Brief History of Seven Killings, a 700-page tome that also has Marley's life as a central thread. Maybe I still will read that one someday, but it's hard to imagine it being more inventive, colorful, or satisfying than this one.

With the addition of Jamaica, my "Countries Read" list is up to 124!