Mary Gordon and Jodi Picoult, on Mothers and Daughters

Once in a while I take a stab at reading an author I don't know, or know mostly by reputation. These exercises, as you might suppose, lead to one of three places: amazing discovery, so-so indifference, or are you kidding? I ventured into this territory twice recently, going from the sublime, as they say, to the ridiculous.

Try as I might, I can't seem to feel much for Mary Gordon beyond the acknowledgement that, yep, she's definitely talented. I can see that she is, but her whole tone suggests that she prizes that talent a lot more than any reader ever could. I looked and looked for her last book, "Circling My Mother," and finally had to order it from Amazon. I admire the project - telling the story of her mother from different angles, through friendships, family, work, religion, even her body (she was disabled from childhood polio). But throughout, Gordon's language is so solemnly pretentious and at times so vengeful that it's hard to view this as book for us. Mostly, I think, it's a book for her, where she gets to settle scores and announce verdicts. History belongs, as we know, to the one who records it for posterity. And Gordon revels in her role.

Then there's Jodi Picoult. Somebody recommended her books to me, and seeing them displayed, one after another, in a place of honor in my local used bookstore (whose owner I trust utterly with my reading life), I decided to give one a try. Yes - I kind of knew they were all of the topical, Woman's Day variety, but one of them had a particularly evocative cover (two kids wrapped in a red blanket in a swirling snowstorm), so I picked it up.

This book - "The Tenth Circle" - is one of the silliest, most unlikely books I've ever read. Teenage girl gets dumped by boyfriend, determinedly chases boyfriend, claims later to have been raped by boyfriend, then - doing what all girls do in such trying situations - hops a truck bound for Alaska, there to find we never learn what. In the meantime, boyfriend dies mysteriously, and Dad, a comic book illustrator who draws avenging superheroes, is implicated. Maybe I'm not making this sound as bad as it truly is. This plot, one would think, might after all be made to work, in capable hands. But these hands are not those hands. Yuk.

Ayn Rand, Gen. Petraeus and Other Random Thoughts

Mike Barnicle, who used to write for the Boston Globe, would occasionally devote a column to a list of quick observations. If I remember correctly, the columns were always titled "Not That It Matters, But ..."

For your consideration, my own "Not That It Matters, But...":

1. Ayn Rand, whose "Atlas Shrugged" was published 50 years ago this week, was a pain in the butt. She may have given literary voice to her charmless philosophy of greed, and may have been influential in capitalist circles (as though the profit motive has ever really needed philosophical buttressing) but the ideas she expressed are now commonplace. Furthermore, carried out a few decimal places, they quickly become reprehensible. Yes, Ayn, let's kill all the handicapped people, since they sap society's strength and keep all us productive people from giving ourselves singlemindedly to the pursuit of pleasure and profit. Sometimes, it matters whether an object of veneration was actually a decent person or not. She wasn't. (Check out the 1957 NY Times review of "Atlas," which was brutal.)




2. This morning, walking on the treadmill at the gym, I flipped back and forth between three Sunday morning news shows: Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and Fox's whatever-they-call-it. Each, predictably, featured panels of politicians talking about Iraq. John Kerry made some reasonable points; John McCain sounded cornered and defensive; Bill Kristol and Juan Williams got testy with one another; and all the Fox moderator wanted to do was make the liberals on his panel admit that MoveOn.org was wrong (read: unpatriotic) to call Gen. Petraeus "General Betray Us." And everybody sounded like they'd enjoy talking about something else for a change, because they know as well as anybody that in a time of war, the President will get what he wants, and all their speechifying about it is boring, inconclusive and ineffectual.




3. Bush shouldn't get what he wants, but like the pope, he seems to view himself as infallible, and apparently that's what counts right now. And that's despite what the rest of the country may think or believe or even ardently desire. So, this, we must acknowledge, is democracy.
   
   


4. It's apple-picking time in New Hampshire, and the orchards are crowded with people giving their little kids the chance to see where fruit really comes from. My part of New Hampshire is so heavily covered with apple trees that the new upscale houses cropping up on every hillside are really just sitting on lawns cut into old orchards. Quaint theme-parks, really, and requiring something only the rich could afford: lawn service companies that specialize in tending trees, picking up fallen apples, and mowing around dozens of precisely spaced, gnarled trunks.

The Really Strange Story of Joyce Hatto

Now here's a fascinating and sadly human tale: the story of Joyce Hatto (right), a middling concert pianist who, with her music publisher husband, fabricated a brilliant career for herself by literally passing off other musicians' recordings as her own. What's weird is 1) the couple wanted to do it at all, 2) that they thought they could get away with it, and 3) that they did get away with it for several years, fooling the world's classical music aficionados into believing Joyce Hatto was a genius whose talents, up til then, had simply and strangely gone unrecognized. The story's wonderfully told in this month's New Yorker, but it appears in other places as well.

Probably the strangest bit of the story involves Hatto's husband, a lonely London suburbanite who, even after her death from cancer, still maintains that the recordings are hers (well, essentially; he acknowledges a little digital tweaking on his part during the publishing process). And this even though he himself brazenly stole copies of other musician's performances, cobbled together CDs, sent them out to friends and correspondents under his wife's name, and happily watched the internet buzz grow. And it is stranger still that despite the audacity of his lies, he remains a sympathetic figure. That's the human part. He and his wife wanted success so badly that together they were willing to risk humiliation and scandal to get it, even though they had to know it would all catch up with them.

I suppose there's a chance that the hoax wasn't born of some pathetic longing to be something they weren't; perhaps it was just a lark that got out of hand, a little joke that grew and grew until they couldn't find a way out of it. Since he still can't tell the truth - can't or won't - we'll never know.

Tony, George and Me, Kissing the Old Days Goodbye

President Bush on what he'll do after his term is over: "I'll give some speeches to replenish the ol' coffers."

Press Secretary Tony Snow, whose salary of $170,000 is apparently forcing an early departure: “I’m not going to be able to go the distance, but that’s primarily for financial reasons. I’ve told people when my money runs out, then I’ve got to go.”

I'd like to take this opportunity to announce that, like President Bush and Tony Snow, I too will be leaving my job to ... well, cash in. Frankly, it's been hard making ends meet all these years, but I've never complained because this job has been an honor and a privilege, as both my dog and my son know. They've meant a lot to me, but when it's time, it's time.

These years of grueling public service have been a blessing, though nobody could say there weren't moments of challenge. That time when Flopsy threw up in the kitchen and I slipped in it and landed on my back, dropping the Mexican bake casserole I was taking out of the oven and giving myself second-degree burns - we can't exactly call that a good time, can we?

And the afternoons picking up the kids at soccer practice, only to have my son and his friend Buddy hold flatulence contests in the back seat? A certain yuck factor, I'll grant you.

But those days are gone, and we can all look back now and smile. For me, it's time to kick back and let the moolah roll in. What exactly will I do, you ask?

Lecture circuit. Memoir. You know how it goes. I've frankly got some memories others might find interesting, and some advice I might not mind sharing. For a fee, of course. I can't just give all this stuff away for free.

It's a Fat World, er, Country, But Don't Blame Us

This week, Gina Kolata of The Times continues her mission to assure us that if we're overweight, it's Not Our Fault.

It's not! Truly!

Don't even start with that nonsense about diet and exercise. Moderate exercise makes very little difference, she says, because our brains want us to be a particular weight and will make sure that we stay at or about it. And crappy calorie-packed food isn't the problem because American never ate all that well, when you think about it. So while diet and exercise matter somewhat, it's really a lot more complicated than that.

For instance:

According to several animal studies, conditions during pregnancy, including the mother’s diet, may determine how fat the offspring are as adults. Human studies have shown that women who eat little in pregnancy, surprisingly, more often have children who grow into fat adults. More than a dozen studies have found that children are more likely to be fat if their mothers smoke during pregnancy.

The research is just beginning, true, but already it has upended some hoary myths about dieting. The body establishes its optimal weight early on, perhaps even before birth, and defends it vigorously through adulthood. As a result, weight control is difficult for most of us. And obesity, the terrible new epidemic of the developed world, is almost impossible to cure.

OK, stop. I've had enough of this. While acknowledging that, hey, she's the science writer and I'm not, I'd like to ask a simple clarifying question.

Even given that everything she says is true, and I have no reason to believe that it's not, why is it that people in other cultures are thinner, and that Americans in earlier decades were thinner? Surely we modern-day Americans aren't so unlucky as to be walking around with post-modern, fitness-sabotaging brains, while everybody else gets the regular old brains that somehow allow them to stay within normal weight ranges? Same goes for pregnancy and any other biological factors that supposedly tip the scales, so to speak, against us. These factors aren't new, and aren't specific to our very fat American society. Something changed somewhere, and it seems pretty obvious what it is.

What I wonder is why Kolata, who's written a whole book on why we should accept our fatness instead of trying to fight it, is so interested in letting us all off the hook.

Forgetting 9/11, or Never Knowing at All

Another turn of the calendar, and it's 9/11 again. Despite the fact that we keep on talking, none of us, I think, really has anything left to say about it. The fearful residue of that day remains, of course, and it's a cliche to say that no one who lived through that time will ever forget it.

Though already a new crop of children is appearing who have forgotten it, or else never knew at all. While at some point such children had to emerge, I somehow didn't expect to meet one for years and years. That's how deeply this event has soaked into our culture.

Yet, just yesterday, I did meet one. Sammi, a 10-year-old who I see once a week as part of the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program, merely furrowed her brow when I mentioned the impending anniversary. I asked if she hadn't heard of this date.

"Uh-uh," she said.

"Not in school, or on the news? Maybe your mother's said something about it," I asked. I could jog her memory by giving her a few clues, I thought. She just forgot for a minute, the way she might forget what a numerator is, or the capital of Montana. She'll get it then feel silly.

But she just shook her head.

Well. I explained, casually, so as not to frighten her, that on that day, six years ago, some people flew planes into two big towers in New York. On purpose.

She looked curious, but nothing more. "Why would anybody do that?" she said.

"Because they were very angry at the United States," I answered.

She shrugged again, and mentioned that she couldn't wait to get home, so she could run across the street and visit a neighbor girl.

But I pressed ahead. Surely a 10-year-old couldn't be quite so historically blank. It was disturbing that she should be. I asked if she heard about the war in Iraq.

At this she nodded vigorously. She knew all about it - a relative of her mother's boyfriend had been there for a very long time, she said, sounding indignant on his behalf.

I told her that we went to war because of the planes on 9/11, though Iraq really didn't have anything to do with that day. But she had lost interest before I even finished my sentence. She began fiddling with the knobs on the radio, looking for a station she liked.

I started to say more, but then stopped. How could this be? How could she not know? And was it a sign of regeneration that she didn't?

More unanswerable questions born of 9/11.

Pedophiles and Polygamists on Parade, All Under the Banner of Heaven

The 'lost boys' - no, not those lost boys, from Sudan, but our homegrown lost boys, thrown out of fundamentalist Mormon families in their mid-teens for committing sins that none of the rest of us consider sins - finally are getting some attention. Now there's a place where some of them can go to get a roof over their heads and some much-needed help finding a place in the world.

Timely that the story describing this neglected group of boys appeared just today in the NY Times. I happen, following my recent perusal of The Book of Mormon, to be reading another book about Mormons, this one a little more convincing and illuminating. It's Under the Banner of Heaven, a truly appalling account of that religion's splinter fanatics and the people they destroy on their happy way to realizing God. Like all religious lunatics, the creepy characters described in Under the Banner of Heaven are earnest, wily, dead set on discovering the actual Truth, and determined to reform their old, inadequate religion (in this case, the Mormon version of Christianity, which is already weird enough) by bringing it back to the Fundamentals. As they see them, of course, and see them selectively and self-servingly.

It turns out the lost boys, hundreds of them, are pushed out of fundamentalist outposts in the deserts of Utah and Arizona - where polygamist communities set up shop after their founders split off from the mainstream Church of Latter-Day Saints - for a very commonsensical reason. Sure, the boys are sinful; some of them even sneak out to movies, or read forbidden magazines, or look at girls and have sexual thoughts. But the sin isn't what really gets them bounced. Since each of these communities is run by a single "prophet" whose word is absolute law, they get bounced because he says they do. They became, by virtue of age and puberty, competition for him. He wants the pretty young teen girls, but the boys presumably want them too, and there simply aren't enough to go around. It's that simple.

Most boys have only a junior-high education when they're pushed out, and of course they don't know a soul on the "outside." Often their own parents weep while packing their bags. But everybody's going to straight to hell, no maybe about it, if the prophet's command isn't followed, so there's nothing to be done. The boys go out into a wider world they know nothing about, with the curse of damnation over their heads.

The child abuse and perverted psycho-sexual dynamics are beyond anybody's ability to describe, but Jon Krakauer tries. His writing isn't particularly elegant, but he's more fair than he probably should be, given that some of the sickos he follows actually end up slitting the throats of their relatives on the direct order of God.

Religion, apparently, will always unleash violence in that small percentage of the population who takes it completely seriously, especially when there are historical strains of violence in that religion that can be turned on and off like a tap, by those who know how. (And in the case of this religion, a scriptural justification for polygamy, introduced by none other than the religion's founding father, who had an astonishing libido and God's convenient instruction that it be satisfied with "plural" marriages.)

Does this cynical, self-justifying use of religion sound familiar? All too, unfortunately.

Shame, shame on the states of Utah and Arizona for not tracking these woman- and child-hating narcissists down and arresting them with anything approaching vigor, and for failing to protect the dozens of children that each of these men father. The group home the states just funded for these bereft, broken boys is a good start, but still a paltry response.