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.