Making a mountain out of an anthill

Thank you, Diane Rehm.

When Edward Wilson wrote his opus, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, in the 1990's, I bought a copy. The material was clearly striking and slightly controversial, and I was going to read it. I have not yet read it.

This morning, however, E. O. Wilson was featured on the Diane Rehm show for a new book, Anthill: A Novel. Wilson has followed in Darwin's footsteps and focused on tiny creatures. Where Darwin studied worms (see this book
), Wilson has studied ants. He now presents a naturalistic fiction with a dual human-hymenoptera plot.

I haven't read this book yet either. Hopefully I will when the library copy is available, and then I can tell you what I think. This review, from the L.A. Times, merited mentioning regardless.

It's strange to feel more compassion for an ant grub than a person, but that's all part of the book's topsy-turvy sympathies. Wilson may not think humans have free will, but he clearly wishes, even hopes, that the ants have something better. This yearning provides fertile soil for biological determinism — even if it's inhospitable to novel-writing.

From the book itself, this excerpt:

In contrast, the father of all her children was programmed to die almost immediately after the mating. The only thing that he had ever done was accept meals regurgitated to him by his sisters, as if he were a nestling bird, and wait, and wait some more, and finally take the one short flight from his home, followed by five minutes of copulation. In other words, the male was no more than a guided missile loaded with sperm, his life’s work a single ejaculation. Afterward, he was left with only one instruction, to be enforced if necessary by his sisters: Don’t come back. He had been issued a one-way ticket. He had no chance at all of survival. A delicate creature, he could not find food, or feed himself if he stumbled across some. He would die by dehydration, or crushed in the beak of a bird, or chopped into pieces by the jaws of an enemy ant, or, less quickly, pierced by the bloodsucking proboscis of an assassin bug.

The Finkler Question

As a general rule, I finish books that I start.

Can you tell that this book is going to be an exception?

I pulled this book off the Kindle bestseller list. It won the Man Booker prize. According to Amazon, it is a "wry, devastating novel"; it is also a "scorching story of friendship and loss, exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity." The Guardian calls it a "dazzling novel".

Maybe they finished the book. I can't convince myself that I should.

Admittedly, the prose is limpid. And it is darkly and determinedly lugubrious. Unfortunately, the combination of those two features results in a text that I can only describe as flaccid and, having discovered the perfect appropriateness of that word, I am left without motivation or ability to reopen my Kindle copy of this book.

Jacobson's prose really is incredible and beautiful. He fills his pages with evocative descriptions. The protagonist's wingmen "were somehow warmed by their submersion in a heated past." His women, "resembled one another a bit, soliciting his pity by their neurasthenic paleness..." But the high-strung phrases fail to rescue the dithering obsession with a weak personality drowning in a drone of sorrows and perpetual confusion. I find myself somewhat sad that this weak "Finklerism" represents the euphemism for "the Jewish question," especially after the power of Potock and Bashevis Singer.

So I'm finished with the book. I struggled through page after electronic page of limpid, flaccid sorrow bracketed by phrase jewels, and my time is more important than finishing the book. So is avoiding insanity. If you really disagree, please tell me. Maybe the book improves after Treslove finally reveals the true Jewish question to his wingmen. Or after his women commiserate over the operatic names of his bastard sons. But I'm exhausted, and finished.

Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory

Graham Greene is a terrible author. I've intermittently been unfortunate enough to run across his novels and have never emerged better for the experience. His plots are pale shadows of half-formed tales. His tone is depressing and his view of the world is twisted and, despite the genteel confines of his English settings, subliminally brutal. Unlike Nabokov, whose oft-bewildering tales of despair, sorrow or loss shine and cut like fragile-looking jewels, Greene seems to be determined to bluntly gut any meaning or cohesiveness from the world.

The Power and the Glory is different from Greene's usual fare. Certainly, it's sad. Its Mexican setting is twisted, gory and perverse, much like Hemingway's war world. In this book, however Greene presents us with an actual plot. Even more, he includes a sub-plot, character development (or perhaps it's revelation) and symbolic substitution. Shockingly, Greene's subplot -- a tale of a recalcitrant, rebellious boy named Luis -- introduces hope.

The Mexican priest Greene chooses as his unwitting hero represents human confusion as he models the struggle between self-preservation and sanctification. The burdens of sin, guilt and persistent confusion that dog Greene's heroes are clarified through the priest's internal monologues. The priest wanders the Mexican landscape, avoiding capture by the dominant Redshirts and bringing death in his wake. Despite his desire for self-preservation, he repeatedly follows perceived duty into situations that prevent true escape. By the end of the book, it becomes clear that the priest's tortuous burden of guilt cannot overcome his sense of duty and mercy. His inevitable betrayal and death represent both the obvious Christological reference and the death of a martyr.

Do I recommend reading this book? If you have to read something by Graham Greene, this is the book to read. It's as appropriate in its setting as Crane's The Red Badge of Courage or Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. If you detest Graham Greene's other works, this book illuminates Greene's dedication to internal struggles of conscience in a comprehensible, interpretable plot. As the book ends, Greene reviews the reaction of the priest's significant hosts or enemies. Each of them has somehow been affected, somehow pushed to consider life. I suspect that each reader will also be pushed to reflect, to think.

Neuroscience and Henry Ford

Two new free books! The last one I posted went from free to normal in a matter of hours, so who knows who long these will last...

First, for the neuroscientifically-minded:


And second, for the student of history, cars or bunk, a piece on Henry Ford:

Up-and-coming! Purves on the Brain

This is currently free on Amazon.com for Kindle -- Dale Purves was head of the neurobiology department at Duke, then the cognitive neuroscience department -- and I expect this will be informative. So as a tip before reading, I recommend pulling this one into your Kindle library!

Something for the Pain

Paul Austin’s Something for the Pain seemed like a good starting point. I read it last year during a spate of reading-books-about-doctors’-lives. I’ll try to post some of the others in the future, but this is the one that really stood out. It was honest and gripping, and Austin’s engaging style left me feeling that I could vicariously experience the challenges and rewards of being an ED physician. Austin’s struggles with shift work and home life rang true. I’m looking forward to reading his next book, which I hear will describe his life with his daughter, who has Down’s syndrome.