Shallow | Center

Snap Judgment

Even After Much Reflection, 'Blink' Is a Disappointment

TWO THIRDS of the way through Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, the follow-up to his massively successful and influential bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell writes:

As Wilson puts it, what happens is that we come up with a plausible-sounding reason for why we might like or dislike something, and then we adjust our true preference to be in line with that plausible-sounding reason.

Gladwell is writing about strawberry jam and why people prefer some brands over others, but the passage above could easily be applied to all of Blink. In trying to persuade the reader that instantaneous judgments are not only reliable and trustworthy but also more effective than those made after considerable analysis, he undermines his argument time and time again with examples of negative consequences of actions based on first impressions. Gladwell seems to wish to have it both ways: to advocate unequivocally for following one's gut (see, for example, the book's subtitle) while also warning of that tactic's dangers. For all of its research, the book feels cobbled together and too skittish, as if Gladwell, knowing he shouldn't be as glib about unthinking reactions as the marketplace would like him to be, can't help acknowledging his reporting pedigree by slipping in a cautionary tale to balance out every instance of a successful blink.

Rating: **1/2 (of 5)

The Book That Changed My Life

BIRD BY Bird, Anne Lamott's 1994 book, carries as its subtitle "Some Instructions on Writing and Life," and if you think this is far too ambitious an effort for a work that doesn't even crack 250 pages, you are dead wrong, friend. I'd been looking to jump-start my own writing for a while, and so when I saw Bird by Bird on a buy-two, get-the-third-free table at Barnes & Noble a couple of years back, I picked it up. After finishing it last fall, I tried like hell to figure out whether it would impact me more as a writer or as a person. I'm still not sure yet.

Elementary Education

THE TRULY gifted writers have the effect of making me glance at my own prose and suddenly feel the desire to close my laptop forever and take up needlepoint. Michael Chabon, with his combination of sublime, perspective insight and dirty-hands, real-world immersion, is a prime example. Chabon, who also brings to the table the admirable regular-guy attributes of husband, dad, comic-book geek, and baseball fan, has reached the stage in his estimable career at which he can write just about whatever he wants. If that happens to be a slim homage to Arthur Conan Doyle, so be it.

Between the Bars

A Searing Look at Booze, Depression, and the Desire to Be Famous

IT WASN'T until I had finished A Fan's Notes that I surfed over to Wikipedia to check out the entry on its author. What I found there were many similarities between Frederick Exley and the narrator of his fictional memoir. Alcoholism, mental illness, a destructive yearning for the applause of the masses -- Exley is not the only writer to be set on by these demons, but few have written about their attacks with such perception. He empties his soul in A Fan's Notes, offering his reader an unsparing self-examination that is thoughtful, hilarious, and, ultimately, sad without being maudlin. Exley's book is a gift to the would-be writer, a cautionary tale of the danger of writing to please others. The book's timeline meanders along from his boyhood to the time of his putting words to paper; the bulk of it, though, is set against the backdrop of Exley's love of a football team, the New York Giants of the late 1950s into '60s, and his admiration for a player, Frank Gifford (yes, that Frank Gifford), whose talent and achievements garner him the kind of mass approval that Exley can only dream of. While Exley (the character, as well as, presumably, the author) skitters from job to job, from career to career, from institutionalization to institutionalization, all the while soaked in booze and self-loathing, Gifford is actually doing things. Surely there's some cosmic irony in the fact that when Exley finally did something himself, producing a stunning, whirling novel of piercing insight, it was the critics he wowed, not the book-buying public. I hope that wherever he is in the afterlife right now, Hemingway and Fitzgerald are buying him a drink and telling him how much they loved his book.

Rating: ****1/2 (of 5)

Above and Beyond

With 'The Planets,' Dava Sobel Again Leavens Her Science with Considerable Humanity

IF MORE SCIENCE WRITERS practiced their crafts as sublimely as Dava Sobel, America might not be as clueless as it is when it comes to discerning how the universe works. In two pristinely written books, Sobel explored the search for a way to determine east-west position on the globe (Longitude) and the intersection of religion and science (Galileo's Daughter). In her most recent work, The Planets, she takes her inquisitiveness, her narrative gift, her exculpatory skills, and her childlike wonder and turns them heavenward, to the bodies of the Solar System. The result is no less enchanting than her previous works.

Mind Over Matter

Spenser, Sunny Randall, Robert B. Parker, and the Meaning of Life

ROBERT B. PARKER HAS always been a thinking person's crime novelist. His best-known protagonist, the private investigator Spenser, is a literate, introspective soul given to quoting poetry and deconstructing his motives after being forced to shoot someone. Throw in a psychologist girlfriend and you have a decades-long series of books whose explorations of human behavior have raised them a cut above the generic detective novels crowding America's mass-market bestseller lists. And while the last several years have seen Parker fall into some sloppy rote writing, a pair of recent books marked a return to his more thoughtful works of yore.

Farrell of Laughs

Kyle Smith's Debut Novel is a Sharp-Eyed Look at Modern Men and Dating

Go ahead and tell your coworkers that you're reading a book called Love Monkey, and see the reaction you get. Raised eyebrows, perhaps? Outright snickers? No matter -- stick with it. Kyle Smith's tremendously enjoyable novel is worth whatever abuse you get.

Law and Disorder

Cormac McCarthy Returns with a Devastating and Compelling Novel

There's spare prose, and then there's Cormac McCarthy's latest novel. No Country for Old Men is a stripped-down book packed to the rafters with laconic officers of the law, contract killers, and everymen, and McCarthy's writing does them complete justice. With simple, straightforward sentences and a completely bare minimum of punctuation marks -- I don't think there's an apostrophe or a quotation mark in the whole work -- he manages to convey an enormous amount of information and feeling. What on the surface appears to be a standard, plot-driven thriller swiftly reveals itself to be a moving meditation on justice, fate, and redemption.

Set in 1980, the book tells the story of three characters: Moss, a 36-year-old welder who stumbles upon the aftermath of a busted drug deal along the Texas border and makes off with 2.4 million bucks; Chigurh, a remorseless mercenary in pursuit of the money; and Bell, an aging sheriff who has spent decades uneasily watching his world change around him, while still wrestling with a choice he made as a young and scared soldier stationed in Germany during World War II.

No County for Old Men is filled with jarring violence, and McCarthy raises several significant and necessary questions without offering easy answers to any of them. You don't finish the book feeling especially good about much of anything. Don't let that dissuade you from his terrific, shattering stomach punch of a novel. This is American fiction writing at its finest.

Rating: **** (of 5)

Pop-Ups

The daily minutiae of the baseball season has kept me from writing long reflections on recent movies, books, and television I've taken in, so below you'll find some quick thoughts.

Layer Cake

Daniel Craig's nameless protagonist is a midlevel drug dealer who is much more businessman than thug. His sole desire is one last big score before leaving the game for good, but of course these things never work out quite so easily. Craig's charismatic, unforced performance anchor the movie, a charming and competently made entry in the recent spate of lighthearted British gangster films. (***1/2)

Mr. 3000

"When a recently discovered scorer's error reveals he's three hits shy of 3,000, Stan Ross returns to the Milwaukee Brewers after nine years of retirement to collect his hits and ensure his spot in the Hall of Fame." No, it's not an amiable Disney vehicle for Bruce Willis. Ross, you see, is a Grade A prick, a hugely self-centered and unlikable player who discovers that the game found it far easier to forget him and move on than he ever would have thought. Bernie Mac plays Stan with just the right amount of fading bravado, and the movie, though trifling, earns points for offering us such a flawed lead, for trying to add depth to the kind of character that's usually paper-thin, and for its outstanding, realistic baseball scenes. (***)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The Charlie Kaufman arsenal is well stocked here: maladjusted male lead, free-spirited female lead, fantastical delvings into the characters' thought processes, pitch-perfect supporting players. But whereas Being John Malkovich and Adaptation played things for laughs, Eternal Sunshine has a far more wistful and evocative quality, as if Kaufman has finally grown up. Jim Carrey delivers another deft dramatic performance as a guy so burned by his last relationship that he undergoes a procedure to eradicate all memory of it. Kate Winslet, sparkling as usual, is the ex he's trying to forget, and there are great supplementing turns by Kirsten Dunst, Tom Wilkinson, Mark Ruffalo, and Elijah Wood. (****)

The Tipping Point

Among the many fascinating tangents Malcolm Gladwell gleefully wanders off on in his immensely intriguing and thought-provoking book is a defense of the Band-Aid. Gladwell's thesis is that sweeping, important changes can be effected by seemingly insignificant causes. The Band-Aid, derided as a cheap and temporary solution, is a model worth emulating, he argues: inexpensive, easy to use, and very effective. Gladwell relies too much on seemingly intuitive opinions instead of peer-reviewed research, but his persuasive concluding chapter make a strong case for his views. (****)

Lost

ABC advertised the season finale of its freshman hit as the episode that would finally answer everyone's questions, but about the only substantive thing revealed was what Claire named her baby (Aaron, if you're interested). The various cliffhangers and unanswered questions are completely understandable, of course -- a rescue wouldn't leave much to say in Season 2, after all. As the castaways' various backgrounds -- told adroitly in entertaining flashbacks -- become clearer, we're left wondering just why these people lives have converged in such a perilous way, and just what the hell is up with this very strange, creepy, and dangerous island. Sophomore year should be fun. (Season finale: ***; season: ****)

Vowell Sounds

Any hack can do a respectable job ruminating on Lincoln, but it takes a gifted writer to make the long-forgotten James Garfield and William McKinley come alive. All three Presidents were fatally shot while in office, and in her hugely compelling new book, Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell takes readers on a brisk, thorough tour of the victims, their killers, the places related to both groups of men, and the issues of the day that led to and illuminated each crime.

Vowell’s prose -- snappy, witty, stylish, eminently readable -- energizes the typically arid details of presidential history. Cardboard cutouts become flesh and blood, as interesting and as lively as any novelist’s creation. Traveling throughout the country to assassination-related locales -- some well known (Ford’s Theater), others obscure (the Florida Keys prison in which Booth conspirator Samuel Mudd was incarcerated) -- Vowell delivers an off-the-beaten-path history lesson laced with what may be termed essential trivia, minutiae that enlightens even as it amuses.

Vowell is no historian; she’s an essayist and a critic, and excels at each. The NPR darling as well as the perfectly cast voice of Violet Parr in the delightful The Incredibles, Vowell takes her time telling a story; in her writing you can hear the same nerdy, slightly lispy voice that makes her This American Life musings so entertaining and so much fun to listen to. Nowhere but here, for example, did I ever learn that Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the slain President, was present either at or within seconds of the murders of his father, Garfield, and McKinley. Vowell, ghoulish wag that she is, calls him “some kind of jinxed Zelig of doom” as well as “a presidential death magnet.”

Assassination Vacation often veers off into several such tangents of political opinion, pop culture, and reflections on the lives of those connected with the shootings. With exquisite timing, she knows just when to pull back and return to the main narrative, the detour having allowed Vowell to insert a spot-on observation along the road less traveled. Her viewpoint is unabashedly liberal, but with a ferocity that rejects once and for all the notion held by some that those who don’t march in lockstep with the current administration are somehow unpatriotic. Balancing nimbly on the line between commentary and history, Assassination Vacation is a breezy and unexpectedly moving rumination on the American experience.

Rating: ****1/2 (of 5)