The Brooklyn Follies by Paul Auster

When Nathan Glass returns from the suburbs of New York City to the neighborhood of his birth in Brooklyn, he tells us that he's doing it to die quietly--his lung cancer is in remission but his life is in shambles, having been isolated by both his ex-wife and his daughter. Of course, any member of Oprah's Book Club will understand that this is only setup, and men like Nathan--weary, and ready to call it quits--are inevitably going to perk up through the rousing medicine of a good woman, a strong community, a loyal family, or a small child.

In the case of The Brooklyn Follies, it's pretty much all four. Nathan's renaissance begins when he discovers his once-promising nephew Tom slaving away miserably in a Park Slope bookstore. Tom's academic career has been derailed and his love life stalled indefinitely, and on top of that he hasn't heard from his sister Aurora since she asked him to walk her down the aisle months and months ago. Eventually, these two talkative sad sacks have their lives kickstarted by the appearance of Lucy, Aurora's daughter, who for some reason has decided to stop speaking.

And wouldn't you know it, the lovable scamp gives them a reason to survive? Nathan turns out to be a capable surrogate parent; no wonder, he seems to do very little wrong in this book which is ostensibly titled for his failures. Nathan is writing a book, in fact, that details his own follies as well as stories he has heard from life and history; yet Auster makes his character so sympathetic that surely his ex-wife and daughter must be terrible monsters for hating him.

What bothers me most about The Brooklyn Follies is its un-reflectiveness--it's a paean, a bucolic to a certain white-collar liberal lifestyle that treasures tolerance, diversity, and thoughtfulness. Of course, those are strong values, but I am not sure that Auster is aware of how self-congratulating his book seems. Take for instance, Aurora, whom Nathan eventually tracks down living with her husband in Winston-Salem, a religious fanatic and Christian cultist who has trapped her in her own room for months. It is impossible to receive Park Slope as the ur-Eden that Auster intends it without recognizing North Carolina its antithesis: As Nathan and Tom love their homosexual friends and jab incessantly at the religious right, so Aurora's husband and his community personify intolerance and oppression; Nathan prides himself in having "rescued her from North Carolina," but Auster makes it clear that North Carolina is a surrogate for particular worldviews and attitudes.

I am reminded of Noah Baumbach's movie The Squid and the Whale, which takes place in the same neighborhood as The Brooklyn Follies. I couldn't help but remember Jeff Daniels' character, a man who loves his family very much but can't help his own egotism and pomposity. Their attitudes and styles--even their addresses--are near identical, but only one of them seems to understand what it is to deal with folly. No, Nathan Glass is a white knight, and Park Slope is his kingdom.

It isn't that particular worldview I take objection to. It's that a novel that uses the same tactics with the area codes reversed--a novel about the preservation of simple country living, loving your neighbor, and Southern faithfulness at the expense of cosmopolitanism and liberalism--might make a best-seller but would be rightfully denounced by critics as smug and self-satisfied. (And let's admit, there are hundreds of those novels in print.) As a Brooklyner, I love Park Slope as much as the next man, but I'm not sure I've ever been to the idylls of Auster's novel.

And then there's the matter of the end:

It was eight o'clock when I stepped out onto the street, eight o'clock on the morning of September 11, 2001--just forty-six minutes before the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Just two hours after that, the smoke of three thousand incinerated bodies would drift over toward Brooklyn and come pouring down on us in a white cloud of ashes and death.

But for now it was still eight o'clock, and as I walked along the avenue under that brilliant blue sky, I was happy, my friends, as happy as any man who had ever lived.

What's the point? That Nathan's hard-earned happiness, his revitalization, is all about to come crashing down with the World Trade Center? That's too grim for such a saccharine novel, and without suggesting that Nathan knows someone in the tower, out of proportion. No, I think that Auster is suggesting here that September 11th dealt a serious blow to the Park Slope worldview he champions. After all, the book's backdrop is the contested election of 2000, and Auster and his characters frequently stop to note their grim displeasure with George W. Bush and the Republican machine. The Brooklyn Follies posits Nathan and his community as antithetical to ideas which Bush and the Christian cult in Winston-Salem embody; it seems likely that this puzzling ending is meant to represent an impending victory for the forces of intolerance.

But that's just my guess. The truth is, the ending defies anything but the slightest interpretation, and as a result actually seems more gratuitous. What right does this man have, whose idea of folly is so comic and self-assurance so unflinching, to stitch his own story to that one?

The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind

If the Western world was really going to make a pretense of a higher moral departure point — of greater sympathy and understanding for the human being as God made him, as expressed not only in himself but in the things he had wrought and cared about — then it had to learn to fight its wars morally as well as militarily, or not fight them at all; for moral principles were a part of its strength. Shorn of this strength, it was no longer itself; its victories were not real victories; and the best it would accomplish in the long run would be to pull down the temple over its own head.
-- George Kennan looking out over war-torn Germany after World War II

Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Suskind trains his sharp, analytical eyes on the War on Terror. His previous book, The Price of Loyalty, focus on the early years and of the Bush administration, revealing that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was in the works long before the World Trade Center attacks. The One Percent Doctrine picks up roughly where Loyalty left off. It is the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey would say.

The "One Percent Doctrine" is often referred to as the "Cheney Doctrine" since he was the one to articulate it, and ensure that those in the administration as well as those in government agencies adhered to it. It its core, the doctrine is this: When assessing terrorist threats, if there is a one percent chance that the intel is correct, then the US acts as if the evidence is rock solid. Leave no stone unturned. It seems fairly easy to see the the problems that an approach such as this would cause. But after the 9/11 attacks, Cheney and the president held action in high regard. They didn't prize thinkers, people who could see that international issues are multifaceted. They wanted to surround themselves with doers, people who acted on instincts and suppositions, never mind that they weren't always right. Cheney's "One Percent Doctrine" was the framework under which these actions took place., and it fundamentally informs the way the US is fighting the War on Terror.

I am not going to attempt to get into the details of this book -- too much is covered. But I will say that this is not simply an attack on the Bush administration. It is a critique of US intelligence and of the way that our nation is waging this global war on terror. Suskind spoke with a host of government officials at the state and federal level -- some from the White House. The conclusion that he draws is that in its no-holds-barred pursuit of its enemies, the US has killed thousands of innocent people, alienated many of our allies, trampled the civil liberties of its citizens, and astonishingly caught very few terrorists.

Suskind ends the book by citing a text foundational to both Christianity and Islam. Deuteronomy 16:20: Justice, justice shalt thou follow, that thou mayest live, and inherit the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee. He states that most Hebrew scholars agree that the word "justice" is not simply repeated for emphasis, but that it is said once for the ends and once for the means.

The Jesus Machine by Dan Gilgoff

The full title of this books is The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture War. The title sums up the book quite nicely. I had this professor who referred to titles as contracts with the reader. Well, Dan Gilgoff's book would pass this stupid little test.

Gilgoff is not concerned with what can be done to combat the increase of the political power of Evangelicals, as I thought he would be. Instead, he just describes how the Evangelical movement has changed in the last forty years. While the book is ostensibly about James Dobson and Focus on the Family, Gilgoff is careful to place both Dobson and Focus in the proper context. He charts the rise of the Christian Right, beginning with Moral Majority, and then Christian Coalition, and then what is commonly referred to as the New Right, of which he sees Dobson as the unofficial leader.

Gilgoff asserts that Dobson filled the void left as the political influence of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson declined, and that what makes Dobson's rise to political prominence so interesting is that Focus on the Family was intended to be apolitical. But, in 2004 Dobson actively campaigned for Republican candidates whose values aligned with his. According to Gilgoff, Dobson's increased involvement in politics is what sealed the 2004 election for Bush.

I was surprised at the understanding that Gilgoff had of conservative Christians. Later I found out that he minored in religion at George Washington University, and regularly writes about the intersection of politics and religion for US News & World Report. He writes well, and had a clear understanding of his subject matter. More importantly, Gilgoff was able to show how influential the Christian Right has become in the political arena.