The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences recently announced their intention to increase the number of nominees in the category of Best Picture, from five nominees to ten. This, no doubt, pleased the producers of Public Enemies. With the expanded nomination process, this slickly produced, well directed but uneven drama will probably snag a coveted Best Picture nod.

The Best Picture field is not new to Michael Mann, Public Enemies’ director and producer. His masterpiece, 1999’s The Insider, walked away empty handed, as did his well-crafted follow up, Collateral. Fans of those films will recognize immediately that this is Mann’s work. He uses his handheld camera often and to great affect, something that most directors working with his budget wouldn’t dare to try. Mann’s expert camera work creates scenes that are both graphically violent and cartoonish, moving quickly, leaving the audience to wonder what hit them.

Where many films are cursed with a lack of good ideas, Public Enemies is stuffed with too many. The film starts in 1933 and follows the FBI, specifically Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale) and J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) pursuit of bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp, handsome as ever) and his gang. Bullets fly at regular intervals as the Feds chase Dillinger and Co. across the Midwest before famously getting their man outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater. What the movie never makes clear is why the audience should care about any of this.

When the film opens with an enraged Hoover ordering his publicist to leak information about Congress to Walter Winchell while Dillinger receives a hero’s welcome en route to an Indiana prison, it seems that Mann is maybe making a film about the nature of celebrity. However, the point is dropped, and we never see Depp’s Dillinger received this way again.

At times, the film seems poised to be a cog in the machine of Dillinger’s legend, portraying him as a depression-era Robin Hood. At one robbery about 40 minutes in, he refuses a bank customer’s change, claiming he’s only after the bank’s money. But once again, this focus is dropped, another facet of the character we do not see again.

The film seems to find its focus as a cat and mouse thriller in the last hour, as the audience can see the noose tightening around Dillinger and his crew. But at this point, one hour and forty minutes have ticked by, and we’re lost. We could have been watching Bale’s cat chase Depp’s mouse, but instead we were stuck watching a cat chase its tale.

The production design, by Nathan Crowley, and the costumes, by the always dependable Colleen Atwood, are marvelous, making Public Enemies beautiful to look at. Depp and Bale square off nicely against each other and Jason Clarke, as one of Dillinger’s most trusted men, is excellent. Marion Cotillard is onscreen too briefly but manages to make an impression in the throwaway role of Billie Frechette, Dillinger’s lady love. Billy Crudup, underused as always, is spectacular as J. Edgar Hoover but occasionally seems to be in a different movie, a movie I might have liked better. Note to producers: Just because Crudup has leading man looks, don’t be afraid to make him a character.

Watching Public Enemies felt like a chore, something I don’t think a movie should ever feel like. At 2 hours and 40 minutes, the film is too long, considering the best moments were in the trailer. Part of the frustration is that there is a great film buried in Michael Mann’s generally mediocre effort.

The Bottom Line: The exquisite production deserves to be seen on a big screen but no one will blame you if you sit this one out.

–Sarah Hudson

Look for Sarah Hudson’s movie reviews every Friday on the Open Letters Blog

When handsome young football star (former star, actually, since getting his knee blown out) Cody Laredo’s ex-girlfriend Clara disappears, Cody figures he has a duty to go and investigate. He certainly has nothing to hold him back: once his dreams of an NFL future evaporated, he saw little reason to stay in high school and dropped out.

Cody doesn’t believe that Clara was lost on a routine riding excursion (the story being put about by the local police), and when he reaches the town in question, he’s immediately confronted by a cast of potentially shady characters that would do a Hardy Boys book proud. But it’s the differences between Peter Abrahams’ Reality Check and the usual run of teen-hero mysteries that make this book so gripping, so smart, and so completely worthwhile.

You haven’t been reading two dozen pages before you notice those differences piling up. For one thing, Cody isn’t some sweater-vested suburban scholarship student – he’s big and tough, and he knows his way around fighting, as in fight scene between him and Clara’s current boyfriend:

Townes was strong –– maybe not as strong as Junior, but much quicker. Cody didn’t even see the second punch, left-handed, which caught him flush on the jaw. A bell-ringer; but Cody had had his bell rung before, more than once, on the football field. The important thing was not to panic.

And for another, Cody’s not all that smart (as he himself admits), at least in the formal, academic sense. Eight years of President Bush may have given American readers a bad reaction to characters real or imagined (to say nothing of presidents, who are both) who think with their ‘gut,’ but nevertheless, that kind of character has a long and fairly noble history in American literature –– and certainly in American mystery fiction; Cody’s in some fine company. And he has one thing in common with his Hardy Boys predecessors, the most important thing:

Cody gave up trying to see the future. He chose the truth, maybe because it seemed easier, or maybe – he got a sudden glimpse inside himself – because that was his default setting.

Abrahams’ book is fast-paced and engrossingly told, with lots of very sharp dialogue and a hero worth cheering whether he’s on the football field or engaged in murkier contests. Here’s hoping Reality Check is the first in a long line of amiable young Cody’s adventures.

—Leah Lambrusco

“Familiarity doesn’t dull me to the wonder of birds,” writes Esther Woolfson at one point in her beguiling book Corvus, which mainly concerns the rook she takes into her home and names Chicken:

…what they are and what they do. Chicken becomes more mysterious, more miraculous the more I learn, the more I observe. I spread her wings in my hand. She grunts and, briefly, objects. Before she tugs it back under her own control, I look at the lovely arc of it; feel the fine bones under my fingers, feathers all in their symmetrical and asymmetrical orders.

There are other birds than Chicken in this avian memoir – there are starlings and parrots and magpies, all taken into Woolfson’s home for varying lengths of time, all watched with her lively curiosity and observed (and often sketched – the book is delightfully illustrated) in intimate detail, by a bird-enthusiast so ardent she feels only sympathy even for the much-maligned Lord Byron when she reads a passage in his journal where he laments that “some fool” trod on his pet crow’s foot. “I salute the man,” she says. “I am unmoved by Lady Caroline Lamb’s famously designation of him, because nothing can alter the fact that it speaks well of a man when he cares about his pet crow’s toe.”

In Corvus, Counterpoint has published a book sure to become a classic of the bird-book genre, something to put on the same shelf as Owl by William Service or That Quail Robert by Margaret Stanger, and the reason is the same: like those authors, Woolfson has done more than simply take a bird into her home – she’s paid scrupulous attention to the person her guest quickly becomes, and she’s done it in graceful, affecting prose: “On a late-November afternoon, I see a hawk flying against a cold, silvered sky, the half flap, half smooth glide, the silhouette that can reduce a safe, protected indoor bird to shrieking terror.”

Bird aficionados won’t want to miss Corvus, but it has a much greater appeal than that. Anybody who’s ever shared their life with another species will find a wonderful, insightful sympathy in these pages, a book to recommend and pass along.

–Honoria St. Cyr

Our June photograph (the eerie womb of a hotel room on our main page) came to us from Chris Marstall, creator of Tourfilter.com and friend of Open Letters. We had some questions about his photographic work and he was kind enough to share his thoughts.

OL: How often do you take pictures, Chris? Is it a part of your daily life, or something you save for unique occasions and excursions? and what kind of equipment are you swinging around?

Chris: These days, very occasionally. What is the point? I sometimes ask myself. So many pictures have already been taken of anything i might want to photograph. If I am dating someone, I will take a thousand pictures of her in every kind of place.

I don’t have a film camera now. I have a slim Sony Cybershot T7 digital camera but I lost the charger; so if i take photos these days, and it’s rare, i will buy a disposable camera. Sometimes the results are amazing. I bought one on a recent trip to South America and it malfunctioned, leaving all of the photos looking instantly ancient, and not in a good way.

OL:Where was the hotel room picture taken? What’s the story there?

Chris: Cairo. it was my first night of a 6 week trip to the Middle East in 2003. I was scared of what might happen to me, an American, in the Middle East, so I gave my worrying mind an unusual luxury and reserved a room at the Nile Hilton for the first three nights of my stay. It’s the grandest, coolest, old-schoolest hotel in Cairo, right on the river. I thought my room was beautiful so i took a picture of it.

OL: What drew you to the Middle East? What did you see?

Chris: I went to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel for 6 weeks in 2003. I wanted to see this place which I was suddenly being told was our enemy, a new USSR. I also had visions of classic North African romance from movies like Casablanca and Lawrence of Arabia. As it turns out those classic places are rare in Cairo and have become tourist museums, for the most part. There are a lot of new rebar concrete towers, etc. However it was still a dense, multilayered place and there were lots of beautiful things to look at and peer into. Everything was new to me. I tried to capture some cultural things and photograph people I encountered. Like the young men who invited me into their home (which was scary at first) and smoked me out. Or the clueless Italian tourist in a short skirt who fell asleep at the port and flashed her panties at 200 Palestinians on a religious pilgrimage.

OL:For a time you were keeping a sort of photo journal online. Do you think it changed you as a photographer? What kind of feedback did you generate? How did you decide which pictures to post?

Chris: A few years ago I got this amazing camera, a Sony Cybershot U30. It was about the size of half a pack of cigarettes and charged through its USB port. I could carry it everywhere and it was a minimal hassle to get photos onto my PC. I told myself I would take a photo every day and have an evening ritual where I chose one and uploaded it to my photoblog. I kept it up for a year or two and at one point about 80 people were viewing each photo. It was an exciting time in my life because my best friend and his family were living with me and I had a new girlfriend and a new job, so there was lots to take pictures of. i would love to have that camera back and get back into the habit. I really appreciate your featuring my photo and it inspires me.

I used to make personal videos — much in the same way i described my photography process: taking a compact video camera with me everywhere and becoming known as someone who would and could whip out a video camera in any unexpected occasion. I edited together several 5-20 minute short diary films. i was living in San Francisco and everything around me was so exotic and beautiful. At that time i developed a brutal approach to choosing what clips to keep and what clips to toss. Basically, i kept only clips that worked on every level. technical, visual, emotional, etc. if i caught myself saying “oh but that was such an amazing night i have to put something from that in there” i would say no, only good stuff goes in. I use the same approach with photos; nothing matters except whether it’s a good photo.

I enjoy writing captions for photos and I think they can add a lot. i was inspired by Bill Owen’s Suburbia and Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, among others. I admire their neutral, minimal, yet piercingly personal approach to caption writing. They focus on the reportorial four W’s, yet in a way that makes you love, understand and admire the people in the photo. I think the best photography takes you inside.

OL:The hotel room shot is an exception, since the balance of your best shots frame your subject off-center. The way you do it often conveys motion — these things were seen in passing — but you’re also interested in depth: there is usually either a brightness or a darkness that the image plunges into (the doorway of the bookshop, the street beyond the arch, the darkness around the wall). What catches your eye when you’re out with your camera?

Chris: My ideas about composition are pretty basic and instinctive. Get close to the subject, but not so close that you don’t get a sense of their setting. Look for strong lighting. Hunt around in the frame for visual balance. Take pictures of beautiful, interesting things.

I try to take myself out of the moment and ask if someone would find an image interesting, not knowing any of the context, or knowing only minimal information, like what you would put into a caption.

OL: What kind of shots do you throw away?

Chris: I throw away almost everything I shoot. If a photo is bad, or if it makes the subject appear unattractive, there’s no reason to keep it, even if it’s a picture of someone or something you love.

In 1938, just weeks after the Anschluss that united Germany and Austria, successful and respected Dr. Lothar Furth, who operated one of the most prestigious obstetric clinics in Vienna, wrote to an acquaintance of his in England, asking of if his acquaintance could offer work –- even menial work –- to him and his wife, since he was certain he would soon be losing his job under the rapidly-expanding Nazi regime. The friend in England wasted no time in contacting the German Jewish Aid Committee in an attempt to expedite the Furths’ emigration, only to learn that a mob had dragged the doctor and his wife out of their clinic and forced them to clean the sidewalk with toothbrushes. The following day, the two killed themselves.

The despair of the Furths was shared by thousands of German Jews who realized their initial optimism in the face of Hitler’s rise to power was gravely wrong. The Furths never got a chance to flee that new power, but the doctor’s desperate letter, the heartbreaking certainty that they hoped to flee, brings them squarely into the focus of Flight From the Reich, the masterful and horrifically riveting new book by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan Van Pelt. As Dwork and Van Pelt point out, that initial optimism wasn’t purely fantasy. “On average,” they write, “governments after 1918 had lasted less than nine months and no one had any reason to think this one would be any different.” Even when the darker reality began to assert itself, those with the means to flee did so in the explicit expectation of return. Berlin Alxeanderplatz author Alfred Doblin speaks for many such:

It would just be a brief trip abroad. You’ll let the storm pass over you, just three or four months, someone will have dealt with the Nazis by then … I left the house with one small suitcase, alone.

The fate of the six million Jews who fell victim to the Nazis is exhaustively documented; the fate of those who fled or were displaced is less so, mainly because it comprised many many thousands of different fates. Drawing a coherent picture on such a vast canvas is a task Dwork and Van Pelt prosecute with enormous energy and commendable spirit. Flight from the Reich may be dark in its subject matter, but it’s a bright shining accomplishment in Holocaust studies. Its authors begin with the clearest possible assertion that Holocaust studies is exactly what they’re doing:

All European Jews who came under the control of Germany and its allies were targeted for death. Some six million were killed. The remaining three million survived camps, endured life in hiding, “passed” as a gentile, fled to safety, or experienced some combination of these. All were victims of the Holocaust. Had Jews not hidden or passed, they too would have been deported. Had they not sought asylum elsewhere, they too would have been caught in the machinery of death.

Fleeing does not write refugees out of the story; it simply takes the story elsewhere. Indeed: it takes it everywhere. The history of refugee Jews during and after the Nazi era is literally, from the Latin centrifugal, to flee the center.

That flight from the center landed refugees in thousands of far-flung and improbable destinations, and Dwork and Van Pelt follow them everywhere. The shame of the niggardly welcome extended by England and the United States is well known; the tales of other destinations will be less familiar to readers. As their civil rights were systematically curtailed and then erased, German Jews grew more and more frantic to find a way out of the trap closing on them … even if that way out led to places none of them had ever thought about before, except perhaps as a name on a map, such as Shanghai:

Panic-stricken German and Austrian Jews continued to buy tickets issued by Nord Deutsche Lloyd, Lloyd Trieste, and Nippon Yusen Kaisya, knowing that upon arrival they would have to fend for themselves in an utterly strange metropolis that promised nothing but the most destitute and temporary refuge from persecution -– a squalid waiting room for better times. Abandoning the idea that learning a trade would help them earn a living and giving up on acquiring the local language, Jews clutched at hope and set sail. By the outbreak of the war, seventeen thousand Jews had arrived in the city, without a future, but safe from the Germans.

Flight from the Reich, almost by definition, has a sister-subject living alongside its main one, because as Dwork and Van Pelt follow the exodus of their subjects, they must also chart the slowly growing and changing awareness of the Holocaust in other countries. This picture is usually not pretty, but our authors don’t flinch from reporting the worst, even though Americans who’ve learned their history from Hollywood movies just might (as when General Patton repeatedly refers to Jews as a “sub-human species”). But no matter: this is a great and powerful book, a fitting bookend for Richard Evans’ recently completed trilogy on the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and a masterpiece in its own right.

–Steve Donoghue

Think of Michael Jackson’s mind as a funhouse, and look at some of the exhibits on display: P. T. Barnum, maestro of wonders and humbuggery; Walt Disney, who invented the world’s mightiest fantasy technology complex; Peter Pan (”He escaped from being human when he was seven days old”); a haggard Edgar Allan Poe (he was the only character besides Peter Pan that Michael Jackson planned to play in a movie); the romping, ever-combustible Three Stooges; a friendly chimpanzee named Bubbles who has his own wardrobe of clothes; and a python lying coiled between white llamas.

Jefferson recalls watching the pre-teen Jackson thrust and roll on the Motown stage at exactly the point in his life (as in any boy’s life) when he was half man and child, half androgyne. He was also a high-pitched, non-threatening sex symbol for women, many of them white women. Because he was a charming boy, he was an innocent (think “I’ll Be There“). Because he grew up on the Motown stage, surrounded by screaming girls in the front of the house and burlesque acts in the back, he was never innocent.

So he was a beautiful freak, a dangerous innocent, an aggressively masculine drag act. He was wonderful. And, of course, we’re free to remember him that way, now.

For the past few years, fans of his music have felt a little ashamed. I’ve been one of them. I jog to “Billy Jean.” I always play “Bad” on the Jukebox. But it had that rare whiff of the verboten that didn’t make it feel extra fun or extra good. It felt a little awful. I felt a little awful for enjoying it.

Andrew Sullivan wrote that Michael Jackson “died years ago.” It’s a good line but it’s hardly half true. I was shocked to hear the news, like everybody was, and I came home and found some of the dance scenes from The Wiz on You Tube and thought about his trademark breathlessness—his moves were nervous. I thought, like we always do, about phenomenal success, and how “the rich don’t have friends, they only have butlers.” Elvis also had a posse that kept him hopped up, and let him keep acting like an asshole.

But they’re playing “Smooth Criminal” and “Blood on the Dance Floor” today—which I always want them to do and which they never do—and of course both the songs and the videos are really good. (You know what else is good? “We’ve Had Enough” from The Ultimate Collection. Really.) Oh and “P.Y.T.” too.  And “This Place Hotel.” And “Dirty Diana.” Am I missing any?

We can go back over it all now. We can remember him (ironically? with relief?) at his best.

— John Cotter

now we enter a new phase. Passing trillion-dollar legislation on, for example, health care reform, in which, by law, revenues have to equal outlays, is considerably harder than passing a stimulus bill on which no such demands were made (and even passing that legislation, as we saw, wasn’t easy). Big legislation makes walking the tightrope far more difficult, because “in legislation,” as one person told me, “there are winners and losers.” So now opposition will come not only from Republicans, but also from some Democrats. The next six months—especially with regard to health care, climate change, and the disposition of the Guantánamo issue—may go a long way toward determining the President’s fate.

Tomasky’s article is an excellent primer on the difficulties and implications of passing these bills (some of which are winding their way through Congressional committees right now). And what if they make it to the President’s desk?

Passing bills on health care and climate change and nailing down a deal to close Guantánamo would surely make for an impressive rookie year. But, to go back to where we started, would they herald Democratic dominance? No. The reforms, once passed, have to work.

And what then? Even if Obama’s (to the extent that they’re his; any bill ready for his signature will be a compromise) reforms work, will that usher in an age of Democratic Party dominance?

I don’t think so, at least not for any amount of time you could call an “age.” Suppose America adopts a reasonably successful system of universal healthcare. Suppose Obama and the Democrats get the credit for it. Entitlements are the “third rail” of American politics. If the system is popular, Republicans will be forces to adapt, as they were forced to do with Social Security.

If Obama’s reforms work, there probably wouldn’t be any long-term political realignment. But there would be an evolution. Party positions change but party names do not. In America, popular reforms drag Republicans and Democrats along with them. Demographics, on the other hand, are another story. Republicans are growing older and whiter, and that should scare them.

-Greg Waldmann

The best-known and best-selling satirical novel in the Persian language is My Uncle Napoleon, by Iraj Pezeshkzad, which describes the ridiculous and eventually hateful existence of a family member who subscribes to the “Brit Plot” theory of Iranian history. The novel was published in 1973 and later made into a fabulously popular Iranian TV series. Both the printed and televised versions were promptly banned by the ayatollahs after 1979 but survive in samizdat form. Since then, one of the leading clerics of the so-called Guardian Council, Ahmad Jannati, has announced in a nationwide broadcast that the bombings in London on July 7, 2005, were the “creation” of the British government itself.

Hitchens goes on to recommend that we all get our own copy of My Uncle Napoleon, to which Open Letters can only agree. Recently, Bryn Haworth reviewed the book with an eye to the pre-election-crisis troubles in Iran, and found much to admire on both artistic and political levels:

The beauty of My Uncle Napoleon is that it is blissfully funny. Though it has the slapstick mayhem of many Egyptian comedies, it is more than pure farce. And although it has debts to European literature – My Uncle is very much like Don Quixote, or Sterne’s Uncle Toby (he even has his own Corporal Trim) - it is not a plagiarizing tribute to the classic comic novel. This is a book that manages to create memorable and believable characters while shamelessly sending them up, loading them with catchphrases and putting them in bizarre situations. Behind all its tomfoolery lie the serious issues of love, sexuality and, most importantly, paranoia on a grand scale.

Go here to read the rest of Haworth’s examination of a book given such abrupt and urgent relevance—and then, by all means, get a copy for yourself!

British historian and biographer Frank McLynn has written many very good books. His 1066: The Year of the Three Battles is the best book on the oft-chronicled Norman Invasion; his biographies of Carl Jung and Napoleon are among the strongest ever written on either subject; his life of Robert Louis Stevenson is a towering achievement; his dual study of Richard I and King John is history at its thrilling best. His writing combines ironclad research with an accessibility that looks effortless.

That having been said, this recent book of his, Heroes & Villains, is easily the most frustrating book he’s ever written. It may well be the most frustrating book any professional historian has written in the last fifty years. It’s one thing to finish a work like this – it’s a comparative study of six great ‘warriors’: Spartacus, Attila, Richard I, Cortes, Shogun Tokugawa, and Napoleon Bonaparte – and wonder about some of the questions the book raises; it’s quite another to close it and say (out loud, plaintively, to one’s sleeping basset hound) “What the Hell did any of that MEAN?”

The book’s subtitle (for which McLynn may not be explicitly responsible, although the sentiment is echoed plentifully throughout his book) promises a look inside the minds of the greatest warriors in history – and then it fails to deliver, on both the points of that subtitle. Not only are the six men on display here only very arguably the greatest warriors in history (we’ll come back to that), but at no point do we get a good look inside the minds of any of them – even though three of the six left behind windy memoirs, for Pete’s sake.

The heart of the frustration here comes from the fact that McLynn is such a damn fine writer, such a gifted sifter of fact and anecdote, that he could windify on practically any historical subject and still be topographically fascinating even when he’s engaging in what’s referred to in Brooklyn as talking out his ass.

To put it mildly, a strong suspicion of exactly that activity hangs around Heroes & Villains, which steps right away into the deep end of the quagmire from which you keep expecting it to extricate itself. McLynn writes, “A leading scholar of Chinese language and history once told me he could never become interested in the Mongols, as their main contribution to the story of mankind was a mountain of skulls.” How can the reader take that statement other than as McLynn’s implication that his sextet somehow do more than create a mountain of skulls? What “contribution to the story of mankind” did Spartacus make? Or Attila? It’s faintly tenable to say Richard I and Shogun Tokugawa made such a contribution, but in both cases it was an enormously negative one, respectively exacerbating Christian-Moslem antipathy and mindless Japanese militarism. Cortes’ flag, riches, and empire vanished almost before his body was cold, and McLynn must surely be aware of the sheer number of historians to declare Bonaparte an essentially pointless historical anomaly.

But there is no questioning the mountains of skulls. Firm figures for Spartacus and Attila are impossible to find (mainly due to the exaggerations upward by Romans who always had to have the very worst, fiercest adversaries), but at the very least they were responsible for the deaths of their thousands of followers. At Sekigahara, Tokugawa was responsible for probably 50,000 deaths; at the great city of Cholula, Cortes and his allies slaughtered probably 180,000 civilians; and Napoleon eclipses them all – his wars caused a conservatively estimated 4 million deaths (100,000 at the Battle of Borodino alone). Once he reached the Holy Land, Richard lept into the killing with a very personal enthusiasm that McLynn finds entirely charming, as at one of the battles of Jaffa:

Even in a military career full of superlatives, this was the Lionheart’s finest hour. Throughout the day the issue was on a knife-edge, but the king’s energy, acumen, and bravery won the day. At one point he was completely surrounded and seemed certain to be captured but fought so ferociously that the Saracen ranks finally parted and gave him a wide berth; he emerged from the fray covered in arrows. After Jaffa even the Saracens concluded that he was no ordinary man but rather a creature of legend.

The narrative here is so breakneck that it seems almost boring to point out that a) the Saracens certainly thought no such thing, and b) the king wasn’t exactly alone when he was doing all that surrounded fighting, although you’d never know that from our author’s starry-eyed summary. And yet, even in the midst of such jingoism (it’s much stronger with Richard than with any of the others, tellingly), McLynn is endlessly fascinating – readers picking up this book who are new to military history will find it deeply compelling, and even those who know enough about the events McLynn’s narrating to question his conclusions will enjoy his technique, his wonderfully assured voice. “The great warrior,” he tells us,

…must be a master of strategy and tactics, have high military talents, boldness, cunning, self-belief, be lucky, fight in the right circumstances and against an almost equally matched foe. On these criteria Napoleon and Ieyasu would emerge at the top of the heap, while Cortes and Spartacus, because of the second-rate opposition they faced, would rank lower down. Despite his ultimate failure, one would be inclined to rate Attila ahead of them, if only because he had to contend with at least three first-rate figures who ought-fought him: Marcian, Aetius and Geiseric. Richard the Lionheart defeated the best the western and Middle Eastern world could throw against him, but just misses the first rank because of his showmanship and the gallery touch.

And that last-minute dismissal of Richard I (for his “gallery touch”?) brings us back to the question of whether or not this book even knows its own subject. “The greatest warriors in history”? Attila but not Belisarius? Cortes but not Rodrigo Diaz (‘el Cid’)? Richard I but not his mightier father, Henry II? Bonaparte but not Wellington or Nelson, the men who beat him? No Genghis Khan? No Boadicea? No Trajan? No Elizabeth I? No Marlborough? No Patton? No Hitler, for all that? Spartacus? What the Hell did any of that MEAN?

The basset hound is silent.

-Steve Donoghue

If you’re going to inflict such a creaky and ham-handed thing as extended religious allegory on the long-suffering modern world, you’d bloody well better be as good a writer as John Bunyan.

Creepy pseudo-messianic religious fiction author Ted Dekker is no John Bunyan, and his new book, BoneMan’s Daughters

• gods of earth and heaven mp3 download

, is no Pilgrim’s Progress. It barely qualifies as Pilgrim’s Regress. And as if reading a breathless, predictable narrative filled with paper-thin caricatures and megaphoned emphases weren’t bad enough, the experience is constantly given an extra-gummy sheen by carrying a freight of Biblical and quasi-Biblical double meanings. Reading it is like listening to that annoying co-worker who’s constantly making sexual double-entendres, except without the guilty pleasure.

Difficult to know what pleasures BoneMan’s Daughters could impart, even though Dekker’s numberless fans (call them legion?) will no doubt claim it’s a masterpiece. The story concerns intelligence officer Ryan Evans, whose teenaged daughter Bethany falls into the clutches of the serial killer Alvin Finch, called BoneMan, who’s intent on horrifically killing young women until he finds his perfect daughter. BoneMan exercises a certain allure over poor confused Bethany, whose relationship with Evans has been troubled. And all of that might have worked as a simple straight-up thriller (Dekker has some glimmerings of talent in that direction). But in BoneMan’s Daughters it all gets served up so heavily slathered in encoded religious double-speak that every single passage – like this climactic confrontation between hero and villain – feels like some queasily hysterical Sunday morning revivalist melodrama:

“So you admit you’re not really even her father.” [said BoneMan]

“Yes.”

His answer seemed to confuse the man. This was the kind of reason and control that would give them hope, he realized. And although BoneMan knew how to hate with more passion than most men, real love would confuse him.

“I admit, I’m not her father, not really,” Ryan said. “But that’s changing now.”

“Now that you’re in my house.”

“Now that I’m pursuing her love.”

The words seemed to take Alvin Finch off guard. He was a man of exceptional control but now he blinked; he began to sweat.

“She hates you,” BoneMan said.

No. No, she couldn’t possibly hate him. Maybe on a hot afternoon when harsh words about who she was dating were exchanged, but not now when they were both fighting for her life.

Alvin Finch was so devoid of love that he didn’t know how to recognize it. He was indeed the Satan in the mix, bent upon winning the heart of his victim, though no one could possibly love him. His victims might show him a mirror of love to win his kindness, but they would never be able to return real love any more than he could receive it.

BoneMan’s Daughters contains hundreds of passages like this, stretches that make you feel like there’s a second conversation being whispered just underneath the first one. In the audible portion, the motions of an ordinary serial killer novel are being enacted. In the inaudible portion, prophesies and revelations are being canted for the faithful. Readers sane enough to be terrified of eternal truths should consider themselves forewarned.

Get thee behind me, John Bunyan.

–Steve Donoghue

Merely glancing at the title of Helen Hackett’s new book Shakespeare and Elizabeth, how can a reader help but remember the single most thrilling moment at the climax of that merry little movie Shakespeare in Love, in which Judi Dench’s massive, imperious Elizabeth I reveals herself from the audience of the premiere of “Romeo and Juliet”? Smiling at the memory, those same readers may fear they’ve found in Hackett a stiff killjoy, since she writes:

Many mythologizers have loved to imagine Elizabeth attending a Shakespeare play at a playhouse, usually the Globe. The scenario has many attractions: it depicts Elizabeth mingling democratically with her subjects and sharing their pleasures; and it presents in one neatly encapsulated scene the essential ingredients of the so called Elizabethan golden age; Gloriana, Shakespeare and his characters, and the vivacious and rumbustious people of Tudor England, all dressed in colorful and picturesque period costume. Yet this event is not only undocumented but also highly unlikely.

I can assure you that Shakespeare and Elizabeth never carries through on this threat -– although it makes the threat with curious insistence, almost as though Hackett feels she has to provide an ongoing caution against the inherent fun of her subject matter. A quick passage from the book’s conclusion makes you wonder if academics actually want to scare away potential readers:

As well as continuing generic hybridity, cultural fusions are likely to play a part in future representations of Shakespeare and Elizabeth. This book has emphasized the importance of the doubt myth for Anglophone culture, and this culture extends, of course, in differing degrees to many of the nations which were formerly part of the British Empire, where Shakespeare’s words and Elizabethan history were part of the colonial educational syllabus.

Luckily, in the hybridity which governs this book, the fun always wins out. Hackett covers every permutation of her dual subject matter, from performance history to parodies (like Julius Sneezer, Much Ado about the Merchant of Venice, and the great, forgotten Hamlet and Egglet), sonnet-analysis to, of course, the tangled mass of the Shakespeare authorship controversy, most pointedly the Baconian and quasi-Baconian rantings that posit Shakespeare as the secret son of Elizabeth:

Also underlying it [the aforementioned rantings], of course, was snobbery. Some nineteenth-century Shakespeareans accentuated Shakespeare’s humble origins in order to emphasize his miraculous genius, but this could have an opposite effect, encouraging some to find it incredible that a mere provincial, grammar-school-educated glover’s son could have penned the immortal words of the great Bard. In many Baconian writings Elizabeth was vituperated as a bad mother, yet at the same time as a royal mother she was the means of elevating Bacon/Shakespeare to a more appropriate social station.

The quietly prodigious learning of Shakespeare and Elizabeth (its ungallant title notwithstanding) takes in everything from Doctor Johnson to Doctor Who, and naturally Mark Twain makes an appearance, lampooning the veneration of all things Shakespearean in his hilarious sketch 1601 and thundering into the authorship controversy in 1909’s Is Shakespeare Dead? Hackett deals with Twains obstreperousness just as even-handedly as she deals with the poor souls who maintain Elizabeth actually was Shakespeare and wrote all his plays the free moments when she wasn’t repelling the Spanish Armada. There’s quite a lot of material packed into this slim volume, and despite Hackett’s occasional lapses into academy-speak, the unpacking is well worth the price of admission.

“Shakespear’s pow’r is sacred as a King’s,” Dryden once wrote. “Sacred as a Queen’s” would be more like it.

–Garrett Handley

We can’t know what Ahmadinejad and the Ayatollah expected to happen, but it certainly wasn’t this – protests blanketing the country, hundreds of thousands (perhaps millions) marching in Tehran. Moussavi’s opposition has been joined by former presidents Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, along with several important members of the clerical establishment. They’ve been saavy in keeping the protests largely non-violent, and in portraying themselves as the true inheritors of 1979’s Islamic revolution. Marchers chant “Allahu akbar” as a rebuke to their government. Their goal is the removal of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, nothing less than the overthrow of the current government.

Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have been slow to respond. A few days ago they banned foreign media coverage of the protests, and today the Ayatollah made an ominous and threatening speech at Friday prayers. All this seems preparation for a confrontation, as the demonstrations gain momentum.

As far as I can tell, the best place to go for info is Andrew Sullivan, who’s been posting dozens of updates a day every day for the last week. This is, as he has said, “the central event in modern history right now.” This is the same Iran that many want to bomb or invade for their nuclear program. If America had done that – bombed and invaded a country primed for a mass democratic movement – Ahmadinejad wouldn’t have needed to rig the votes.

-Greg Waldmann

There’s a good reason why Jed DeLanda, the quick-brained and foul-mouthed main character in Brian D’Amato’s fantastic, fast-paced sci-fi epic In the Courts of the Sun, has to ride the brain of his 7th century Mayan host like a sentient kind of encephalitis –- there’s no other way to get there from here:

The sad fact is that time travel is impossible. Into the past, that is. If you want to go faster into the future you can just freeze yourself. But going backward is absolutely, unequivocally, and forever unworkable, for a number of well-known reasons. One is the grandfather paradox, meaning you could always go back in time and kill your grandfather, and then you’d presumably never have existed in the fist place. Another is that even if you went back and did nothing, you’d almost certainly have some of the same molecules your younger self had been using incorporated into your body. And so the same molecule would be in two different places at once. And that can’t happen. The third reason is just a mechanical problem. The only way into the past that anyone knows of is the famous wormhole route, through a naked singularity. But putting matter through a singularity is like putting a Meissen vase through a pasta machine. Anything going through it is going to com out the other end crushed and scrambled and no good for anything.

The trick here isn’t how to send the data but where to send it, as DeLanda explains early in the book. “Of course, the next problem is that there has to be a receiver and storage on the other end. And in the era we were interested in, there weren’t any radar dishes or disk drives or silicon chips or IF antennas or even a crystal radio. Circa 664 there was only one existing object that could receive and store that much information. A brain.”

The reason for the interest? DeLanda and his colleagues are concerned about the Maya calendar’s prophecy that the world will end in 2012 (if you haven’t yet heard of this little tidbit, don’t worry – you will, until you’re well and truly sick of it; in sheer annoyance factor, it’s going to make Y2K look like a funny little YouTube viral video); DeLanda hopes that his own Mayan ancestry will give him some special insight into literally saving the world. There’s a straightforward adventure-story unfolding in In the Courts of the Sun (the first volume in a projected trilogy), but D’Amato’s caffeinated prose and sharp eye always provide a little more, as when DeLanda deals with the social delicacies of his racial heritage:

“You don’t look Asian. Or Latin American.” She smiled to give it all a flirty spin like she was afraid of seeming racist. But it was true, I don’t really look like much of anything. The Maya tend to be short’ n ‘ chunky, but I was half Ladino, and because of all the calcium I’d gotten in Utah – atypically, I wasn’t lactose–intolerant, and I’d landed on a planet where milk is practically the only approved beverage -– I’d shot up to a towering five nine, more than a head taller than anyone else in my original family. Currently I was around 135 pounds, so I couldn’t really shop in the Husky Department, and that seemed to have thinned my face out. A real Maya usually has a wide face that looks like a hawk from the side and an owl from the front. But I just look vaguely tropical. Sometimes, when people hear my last name, they ask if I’m from the Philippines. Sylvana, that is, my sort of ex, used to say that my long hair made me look like a bad-looking version of Keanu Reeves in Little Buddha. I thought about saying all this to Marena and then decided to chill. Have a little mystery, for God’s sake.

There’s plenty of mystery on hand in D’Amato’s book, and lots of thrills (needless to say, the non-time travel time-travel goes awry almost from the first moment), and a very gratifying number of laughs per page –- and best of all, a hugely satisfying amount of modern and fascinating information about the Maya, how they lived and thought. DeLanda could easily write the world’s most engrossing textbook on the subject.

But not just now! Like most readers of In the Courts of the Sun, I suspect, I want to know how this particular story ends first.

–Khalid Ponte

In his stirring, ambitious, and entirely welcome new book The Wilderness Warrior, Douglas Brinkley fervently makes the case that Theodore Roosevelt, amateur naturalist and the country’s 26th president, was also one of its greatest conservationists. Since such a claim would draw an astounded gasp of incredulity from the assembled ranks of the animal kingdom, Brinkley’s first job is to clarify is terms.

It’s a fairly easy clarification, despite the appearance of incongruity; the country’s first Forest Service chief (and thorn in President Taft’s side) Gifford Pinchot perhaps put it best, saying conservation entailed “the greatest good to the greatest number for the longest time.” That sliding z-axis of time exonerates Roosevelt, who created the country’s first National Parks and set aside its first 51 wildlife refugees – 250 million square miles of pristine land he intended to stay pristine, the single one of his presidential accomplishments of which he was most proud. Newcomers to history who glance only at Roosevelt’s prince-nez may mistake him for a citified dandy, but as Brinkley abundantly and vividly reminds us, TR was as avid an outdoorsman as his crowded public schedule would permit – and he was always thinking about the deeper meaning of what he saw in the wild:

What Roosevelt had learned about nature from the Badlands blizzard was that it could, at a moment’s notice, be unrelentingly harsh. Back in 1856, as Charles Darwin was about to begin The Origin of Species, he scribbled in his journal, “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horribly cruel works of nature!” Roosevelt appreciated this high truth. A few times he had encountered locked antlers on the ground, the result of two bucks getting entangled in a butting duel and unable to free themselves died. Coyotes, Roosevelt knew, were attracted by the noise of locked horns struggling and began to feast on the deer’s flesh once they dropped to the ground in total exhaustion. Rudyard Kipling called it “The law of the jungle” while to Roosevelt it was “The law of the Badlands.”

Brinkley is very good at capturing the ethos of these “ambulating Ivy League-inspired scientists” – he characterizes them all as basically “children of Darwin,” and certainly Roosevelt wouldn’t have disagreed.

No, the only frisson of disagreement here arises from the fact that Roosevelt never met a wild animal he didn’t want to shoot dead. In North America, in South America, epically in Africa, he spent hours, days, and weeks toting rifles and blasting away at everything that moved, racking up ‘bags’ in the dozens and hundreds of spectacular animals who might otherwise have died peacefully in their beds. Despite the glaze-eyed chaw-balled assertions of America’s nutso gun-culture, this is not the face of modern conservation, and it sits awkwardly alongside some of Brinkley’s more saintly claims.

But this is TR we’re talking about, so all is forgiven. He was, as one friend caustically put it during his lifetime, a “juggernaut of good intentions,” and as Brinkley’s fine book makes clear for a new generation, the good he did for the greatest number ended up more than counterbalancing all those mounted heads on the walls of his study.

–Steve Donoghue

‘The thing I fear most is fear.” This was Montaigne, in an early essay, many centuries before Roosevelt. “It exceeds all other disorders in intensity.” He was endorsing an ancient fear of fear, according to which it is a disgrace, and the most formidable enemy of reason, and therefore an impediment to self-control, and to thoughtful action. The mastery of fear, in this tradition, is one of the signs of the attainment of wisdom.

“I am being a little bookish,” he says, “but I heard echoes of this deligitimation of fear in Barack Obama’s speech on national security at the National Archives.” This is in fact the least bookish paragraph in the piece. Wieseltier is a smart and well-read man, and his prose screams it at you like a little child demanding attention. (Incidentally, the sentence he quotes from the early essay “Of Fear” was from a revised section written much later in Montaigne’s life.)

Wieseltier continues:

[Obama] always referred to fear derisively–”all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight”; “we will be ill-served by … fear-mongering” and by words that “are calculated to scare people rather than educate them,” and so on. He warned against “fodder for 30-second commercials” and “direct mail pieces … designed to frighten the population.”

These quotes are devoid of context, and basically serve as fodder for the argument that since the days of FDR, fear has gotten a bad rap. Sometimes fear is good; it describes our attachments and it can be motivating. All well and good and perfectly fair, except that the quotes are devoid of context. Take the first snippet, originally lodged in this paragraph:

Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions. I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.

Obama wasn’t saying (or implying, as Wieseltier implies) that fear is bad. He was saying that allowing fear to cloud your judgement and using it to manipulate people is bad. Hardly controversial.

Snippet number two belonged to this argument about detention policy:

And we will be ill-served by some of the fear-mongering that emerges whenever we discuss this issue. Listening to the recent debate, I’ve heard words that, frankly, are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country.

If you’ve been looking for the argument that fear is bad, you won’t find it. Again, the President is saying (a bit more stiltedly than usual) that using fear to manipulate people is bad. Indeed he was far too polite about it. He could have said that challenging someone’s patriotism and gravely intoning the threat of a mushroom cloud or a terrorist attack for the sake of one’s own political gain is a base and and selfish and cowardly thing to do. In any case, what that paragraph is asking for is informed deliberation, as the word “educate” makes perfectly clear.

Near the end of his essay, high on his horse, Wieseltier proclaims gravely that “It is cruel to shame people for their fears, because their fears are measures of their attachments. A life with nothing to lose is a serene and hollow life.” Deep stuff, but apropos of nothing except the author’s own musings. The moral debate over detention policy, and anti-terrorism policy in general, is a question of protecting life while adhering to our values. It’s a debate motivated entirely by fear – fear of doing one and not the other. This seems obvious. Nevertheless, while the rest of us run around trying to digest the issue in all its complexity, Wieseltier stands solemnly still, staring at a tree.

-Greg Waldmann

But that doesn’t stop the speculation from happening, for the simple reason that the omnipresence of workshops also makes them an obvious culprit for the most prevalent writing sins: conformity, laziness, mimesis. (Many of which our managing editor found on display in the recent New Yorker fiction issue). In the new Bookforum, the reliably excellent Mark Greif has a thought-provoking review of a book called The Program Era, by Mark McGurl. McGurl’s book is an examination of what the custodial presence of the University has done to postwar fiction in America, and Greif pulls out a lot of fascinating ideas from it, such as this discussion of the legendary workshop that involved Wallace Stegner, Larry McMurtry, and Ken Kesey:

McGurl’s case study disenchants the mythology that grew up around one of America’s great “antiestablishment” writers, Ken Kesey. An extraordinary section on One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and its composition for the Stanford University writing program directed by Wallace Stegner (“as the novel’s chapters were drafted, they were submitted for credit to the creative writing workshop classes Kesey was attending while he worked at the [mental] hospital”) suggests that elements of this ivied institution were mixed into Nurse Ratched’s psycho-gulag. The “group” parodied in the novel was simple group therapy, but it also travestied the workshop seminar with Stegner at its head. When Kesey left off writing entirely to decorate a bus for the travels of his Merry Pranksters, McGurl notes that it was a school bus. Equipped with recording equipment (and Tom Wolfe, as willing scribe), the “Furthur” bus became yet another incarnation of the writing project as university workshop. The ’60s were not always about individualism, but also about the desire to live in new collectivities, which put the writing seminar curiously in tune with the times. The exemplary dropout, Kesey, emerged from institutions and reproduced and renovated them in turn.

Greif’s piece is worth reading in full, but God knows it’s not the last word on the debate over workshopping. For an earlier word, I’ll recommend you to an essay I wrote a few years ago for the New York Press that attempted (in a rather more dyspeptic manner, admittedly) to highlight some of the systemic problems built into the MFA program. And as always, feel free to leave your own comments on the subject here, dyspeptic or no.

—Sam Sacks

The siege of Vicksburg is the American Civil War writ small. All the key elements that characterized the four years of conflict are concentrated in the three months during which Federal forces under General Grant alternately pummeled and strangled the key Mississippi stronghold commanded by General Pemberton into submission. There is the overwhelming superiority of the North in men and material; there is the seemingly endless succession of bloody, pointless sorties on both sides; there is the expected gallery of larger-than-life figures, swanning and pirouetting as though they knew this was the last time war would give anybody the chance to do so; there is the doomed but canny valor of the Confederate commander (Pemberton is a cool character who has never received his due), offset by the usual muddled and contradictory instructions issuing from both Richmond and military high command; there is the absolutely vital role of water-power (be it the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, or the Mighty Miss) in shaping the land-actions; and most of all, there is the allure of the might-have-been.

It’s an impossible story to resist, and popular novelist Winston Groom, in Vicksburg 1863, has dived into the details with his trademark gusto. Groom has written half a dozen volumes of military history over the decades, and he’s become a practiced hand at searching archives and assembling facts. His presentation of those facts is unfailingly dramatic -– this is certainly the most engrossingly page-turning book on Vicksburg ever written.

One of the most attractive elements of Groom as a writer is also one of the rarest among even amateur historians: he never loses his sense of humor. It sparkles most in the footnotes that are sprinkled across the bottom of his pages, where he alleviates the grim goings-on of his main tale with colorful details turned up in his researches, things like Confederate president Jefferson Davis’ odd partiality for using camels in Western survey work:

The camels proved something of a mixed benefit for the military surveyors. For one thing, their appearance unsettled herds of cattle, often causing them to stampede, but in general they proved as advertised until the Civil War broke out and surveying expeditions and other western exploits were quickly forgotten. The camels reverted to the wild and their progeny were occasionally seen roaming the southwestern deserts until after the turn of the century. The last sighting of one of the Egyptian camels was reported in 1929.

And Groom might as well be referring to those wandering camels when he elsewhere sums up Davis’ personality – one of the many memorable and spot-on characterizations he doles out in the course of the book:

The episode demonstrates two things about Davis’s personality: that once he decided on something, no matter how large or small, he was tenacious in seeing it through, and, second, he invariably took a direct hand in its implementation. These traits, admirable enough in most people, were to cause trouble when, as president of the Confederacy, he often injected himself directly into the military decision making as the war in the West heated up.

The only persistent flaw of Vicksburg 1863 is, alas, a gigantic one: the author’s novelistic flair for the picturesque too often wallpapers some of the greatest human misery this hemisphere has ever seen. Margaret Mitchellesque passages like this one crop up much too often:

Until the war came Vicksburg and its genteel environs were like a land in a storybook. Passengers aboard steamboats plying the Mississippi could look with awe and envy upon broad lawns and green pastures surrounding the elegant mansions that lined both sides of the river. Beginning in early spring the white blossoms of apple, peach, pear, and citrus trees perfumed the air and by midsummer an ocean of white cotton boles stretched as far as the eye could see. On Sundays, along the great River road, which was shaded by magnolias and moss-draped oaks, fashionable carriages carried families for visits to nearby plantations or other outings, accompanied by men on thoroughbreds dressed in stylish suits with velvet trim and wearing felt or beaver top hats.

If you can spot what’s missing from that astonishing, openly nostalgic picture, you’ll know the central blind spot of this otherwise excellent book. And if you have an ancestor who was starved, whipped, raped, dragged, chained, or beaten to death in the course of building those broad lawns and green pastures and elegant mansions, you may find the omission too hard to forgive.

–Steve Donoghue

Survey Says is a short book of white margins and large type, considering solely of answers provided on The Family Feud (in 2005 and 2008):

I soak my dishes. Bambi. Hamburger. Hamburgers. Camel. Camera. James Bond.

The answers are complete — the author says he didn’t skip any, and we’ll just have to trust him — arranged in alphabetical order by the second letter of each phrase: Sing, Singer, Lingerie, Fingernails. What emerges is something like rhyme, and it carries the sound of the long poem well. Sometimes Austin lucks into the first letter, too “A bra. Abraham Lincoln.” I didn’t notice the pattern being disrupted, though I might have missed it. I didn’t even notice the pattern itself at first because the phrase combinations can be a lot of fun. Hillary and Bill Clinton still manage to wind up next to one another (can nothing sunder their love?), pigs is preceded by nightsticks.

They brush their teeth. They buy groceries. They cash their check. They change their jobs. They change their underwear. They cheat on their spouse. They chew gum. They comb it over. They develop more hair. They don’t like to look pretty. They don’t put on their seatbelt. They don’t take care of their bedroom. They dry flowers — like dried flowers. They dye it. They eat. They fall out of love. They gargle. They go out to dinner. They go to see a Woody Allen Movie. They have kids.

Reading this, I occasionally worry about taking part in a cruel mocking of Middle-America, and middle-of-the-afternoon America. And then, I think, well why shouldn’t I have a laugh at boobs on game shows? They’re not an endangered species or anything. “I’m going to have to go with Ashley Simpson.” Yeah.

And if you’re a word artist looking for non-academic and non-specialized language to manipulate, look no further than game show answers. Quite quickly, I quit reading the poem as a social critique and settled in for the flipping-channels. A nice Robert Ashley-like rhythm develops. The voices almost never come off as individual; a single soul is trying to communicate. Stories emerge:

A nice, comfortable mattress. Knives. In line. Only tell one person your secret. Enquirer. Insomnia. Insult them. Insurance.

O mercy! America’s dark heart. A mirage?

— John Cotter

Open Letters Monthly: In The Boston Globe review of The Family Man, we’re matter-of-factly told, “In a Lipman novel people match, fates meet, and patience is rewarded.” Would you agree, that the world of your novels is essentially a kind one?

Elinor Lipman: 100%; can’t seem to help it.

OLM: The Family Man is set on the Upper West Side and stars a laid-back middle-aged gay man! When in your creative process, while a new novel is percolating, do topographical and casting choices like these ping? When do you become sure what your focus will be?

EL: In this case, location presents itself immediately. Even though I don’t know where the story’s going, I know where it starts, even if all I’m going on is the opening line. Details come as I move ahead, always in linear fashion. Description doesn’t come easily to me, so I have to stop, look around, home in on the salient details. As for focus, I’m working at that in every chapter, pushing the story forward as I go, making decisions, asking myself, “Why is she–often a first-person narrator–telling us this?” If it isn’t to move the story along or help characterize someone, then I cut it.

OLM: There are a couple of choice points scored on the entertainment industry in The Family Man - post traumatic echoes from having your first novel transformed into a movie, or was that experience bearable?

EL: Very bearable, eventually, though I’d given it up for dead more than once. Then She Found Me was optioned in 1989, in manuscript, and came out in 2007. Yes, 19 years. As a result, I’m never sanguine about a movie deal ever reaching fruition. Having said that–I loved the result. Fans of the book complain all the time that Helen Hunt changed the novel. To which I usually say, boo-hoo. I loved it, and it brought the book back to life. The complainers seem to think that the best screenplay would have been the novel, word for word, and it’s very hard to disabuse them of that.

OLM: To put it mildly, the gentle Thackeray-style tone of your novels sets them apart from most of the contemporary fiction in bookstores these days. Why is it, do you suppose, that your characters don’t eat each other’s faces or get high and shiv people?

EL: That’s hard to answer without it sounding like a testimonial to my own big-hearted self. I do grow exceedingly fond of my characters, so I want them to behave, to love and be loved. I don’t set out with that goal, but even the villains–so I’m told–end up being a little menschy. Not Ingrid Berry, though, from The Inn at Lake Devine. I want full credit for her being a nasty piece of anti-Semitic work from beginning to end.

OLM: Care to set up this scene a little for us?

EL: My main character, Henry Archer, has just learned that his boyfriend, Todd a) still lives at home with his mother and b) hasn’t come out to her yet. Over Todd’s initial objections, they are making that first visit. Henry, a lawyer, had a brief, closeted marriage to a woman named Denise who, in fact, has fixed him up with Todd, who works none to proudly in retail at Gracious Home.

Read the chapter here!

We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals

When handsome 20-year-old Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha married Queen Victoria in 1839, his new countrymen (Albert had wept during the ceremony in which he renounced his German nationality and officially became a British citizen) were baffled as to what to make of him. One one level, literally what to make of him: the Prince Consort needed an English rank of his own, but what should it be?

As Gillian Gill writes in her clear-eyed and wonderfully antic new history of the celebrated pair, We Two, the debate over the Prince’s rank was awkwardly complicated by the Prince himself:

For his part, Albert [in 1839] declared that he would never stoop to an English dukedom, since a don of the royal house of Coburg outranked any English peer. In England, where many lords had genealogies as long and estates much larger and richer than Coburg-Gotha, this came off as a piece of pathetic rodomontade from a youth of twenty.

Gill’s account takes readers at a brisk pace through the twenty-year marriage at the heart of her book, tracing the slow, grudging steps by which the ruling elite of Victoria’s realm came to re-evaluate and then appreciate Albert’s many fine qualities. He was a hard worker, a temperate, responsible figure in an extended family of extremely dissolute morons (his family was Victoria’s family – they were first cousins, her mother being sister to his father), and in addition to what Gill calls his “theoretical brilliance,” he held a number of forward-thinking social attitudes, unlike his wife. Gill clearly likes Victoria, so perhaps she’s unaware of what a dithering, clueless portrait she inadvertently paints of the monarch who gave her name to an era:

Queen Victoria saw foreign affairs as an extension of family affairs. She was related in some degree to virtually every royal house in Europe, and in genealogical lore even her husband could not compete with her. Foreign policy for Victoria consisted in no small measure of her writing careful missives in beautiful French (the international language of diplomacy) to her kinfolk. One day she might advise her first cousin’s wife the queen of Portugal to be more careful in choosing her intimate associates. The next she might beg her distant Austrian relation for his own good to be kinder to the Italians and the Poles even if they did show a foolishly rebellious spirit: or her Dutch cousin to stop bothering dearest Uncle Leopold in Belgium; or her French uncle Louis Philippe to drop the idea of marrying one of his sons to the Spanish infanta. When war threatened to break out in any part of Europe, the Queen was stricken with angst. If Uncle France started fighting Uncle Austria over Italy, whose side should she be on?

By the time Albert died (young, overworked at age 42), he had succeeded by sheer strength of personality to carve for himself a position of real power out of what had begun as the greatest of all purely ceremonial appointments. The Queen, at first reflexively possessive of her prerogatives, gradually realized that Albert was never indiscreet, never unprepared on any issue, and perhaps most importantly, virtually never wrong. Not since Lord Burleigh had an English Queen been so well advised, and although Gill is not the first biographer to adjust upwards the dismissive estimates some historians have made of Albert, she just may be the most delicate in her discretion – a quality perfectly capable of handling even the most awkward question about Albert:

Nonetheless, even if it is easy to document that, after the age of five, Albert’s intimate relationships were all with men (except for his love of his wife, the Queen), even if it is possible to argue that the young Albert could have experienced homosexual love, there is not one scrap of hard evidence that he did. This is not surprising. He was a man of great renown, major achievement, and small popularity who died tragically young and had a loyal band of friends and relatives. In the years following his death, the person who assiduously collected and lovingly savored the records of Prince Albert’s boyhood was his wife. Queen Victoria was the last person likely to uncover evidence that her husband had not slept with women because he preferred to sleep with men.

It’s so smoothly done you almost don’t think to re-read it for the whisper-soft suggestion that evidence was destroyed, and that’s as it should be. Despite its famous subjects, We Two is a heart a very Edwardian production: it’s smart but chatty, responsible but slightly purple, and best of all, it expects you to do your own thinking. It would be claiming too much to say Gill has written a book Victoria would have liked – the Queen wasn’t much of a reader. But Albert would have filled this book with his spidery, passionate marginalia, and there’s high praise in that.

-Steve Donoghue