Review: ON THE ROAD by Jack Kerouac

Written in the early 1950s and published in 1957, On the Road is often considered a defining work of the postwar "Beat Generation" that was inspired by jazz, poetry, and drug experiences. The novel is purportedly a largely autobiographical work that was based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. Its rambling style is said to be intended to reflect the improvisational fluidity of jazz.

Read more than 60 years after the events it portrays, the book has an other worldly quality as its characters crisscross a pre-interstate America by hitchhiking, hopping freight trains and scraping pennies together for bus tickets. The characters are suspended in time between the depression-era hobos (who were on the road because they had no choice) and the hippies of the sixties and beyond (who possessed, I would argue, a more articulated critique of the "establishment"). Kerouac and his friends are above all hedonists, high on the seeming freedom of the open road and a life lived without commitments. Despite all their frantic bonhomie, a sense of melancholy and loneliness pervades their travels. The world is not a particularly friendly or forgiving place, and neither sex nor drugs nor jazz (no rock-and-roll yet) ultimately satisfies their search for meaning.

Review: TROPIC OF CANCER by Henry Miller

I ran into a number of references to Henry Miller in my wanderings this spring and decided to turn to his TROPIC OF CANCER from my alternates list. It is a meaty book, very graphic in sexual language, to be sure, but quite matter-of-fact in its sexual content and less titillating overall than many a prime time offering on cable these days. Of greater interest is Miller's use of words: a queer combination of unrestrained rhetoric and dry Yankee humor with which he records grotesque doings in dirty bedrooms and communicates feverishly moods of despair and disgust. Miller discourses on his life and lowlife in Paris, fashioning his experiences, reflections, orgasms and philosophizing into a shambling narrative. Is it misogynous? Yes, but misandrous as well; no one comes off well in this lurid world pervaded by a sense of hopelessness.

Review: MRS. DALLOWAY by Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway is one of those modern classics (published in 1925) that I somehow managed to bypass in the course of my reading. I actually started it once before but became bogged down after only 20 pages or so. This time, I found myself caught up in the story’s unfolding through the thoughts and memories of the heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, over the course of a single June day in London. She is preparing for an important party that evening. The novel travels forward and back in time and in and out of the various characters’ minds, constructing an image of Mrs. Dalloway’s life and the social milieu of post-Great War England. A complementary character is Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shock veteran who has retreated into a private world and ends the day by committing suicide. Mrs. Dalloway and he never meet, but their lives are connected by external events and news of his death is casually mentioned at Clarissa’s party. Richly observed, it is a story that stays with you.

Review: BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER by Amy Chua

It’s been hard to miss this book in the month or so its release. Several days before it came out, The Wall Street Journal ran an article about it under the headline “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior: Can a regimen of no play dates, no TV, no computer games and hours of music practice create happy kids?” At once, it seemed, Tiger Mom and her views on parenting became the subject du jour in the media, as the book cruised to number 2 on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

I decided it was worth a listen. In hearing Chua read her own book for Penguin Audio, one gets a sense for her intensity. The memoir itself is not nearly so confrontational as the media storm would have you believe. Yes, she advocates a child rearing style that accepts “nothing but the best” from children and refrains on principle from saturating them with praise. Yes, she takes to that philosophy to an extreme, e.g., “the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child.” Yet there is an underlying wistfulness to her account of applying these methods to her own daughters. Despite years of playing the manipulative bully “for the sake of the children’s future,” Chua ends up meeting her match in the forcefulness of her younger daughter’s teenage rebelliousness.

As father of a sixteen year old myself, I am sympathetic to the pressure parents feel these days to ensure our kid’s futures in what often feels like a downwardly mobile society. From offering the best possible education to over-scheduling “free” time to early specialization in sports, the seemingly rational response to making one’s way in a meritocracy can create a sort of collective cultural madness. What distinguishes my friends and I from the Tiger Mother is more a matter of degree than of kind.

Review: DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA by Alexis de Tocqueville

I felt a rare virtue slogging through the 834 pages of Tocqueville’s classic account on the democratic system of the United States, originally published in two volumes, the first in 1835 and the second in 1840. I was motivated to take the work on by my recent reading of Parrot and Olivier in America, a novel by Peter Carey which entertainingly imagines an American tour during the same historic period by a Tocqueville-like French aristocrat and his hardscrabble English sidekick. To my disappointment, Tocqueville’s work lacks the sort of anecdotal detail suggested by Carey’s book. Clearly reasoned, it is nevertheless quite dry.

Democracy in America is essentially a political science treatise, analyzing why republican representative democracy has succeeded in the then 50 year old United States while failing in so many other places. He is particular concerned to compare the functional aspects of American democracy with what he sees as the failings of democracy in his native France. Tocqueville speculates on the future of democracy in the United States, discussing possible threats to democracy and possible dangers of democracy. These include his belief that democracy has a tendency to degenerate into "soft despotism" as well as the despotism of public opinion, the tyranny of the majority, conformity for the sake of material security, the absence of intellectual freedom—which he saw to degrade administration and bring statesmanship, learning, and literature to the level of the lowest. Democracy in America predicted the violence of party spirit and the judgment of the wise subordinated to the prejudices of the ignorant.

Tocqueville observes that the strong role religion played in the United States was due to its separation from the government, a separation all parties found agreeable. In contrast, he perceived there to be an unhealthy antagonism between democrats and the religious in France, which he relates to the connection between church and state.

Review: The Help by Kathryn Stockett

Stockett's novel (her first) tells the engaging story of a young white woman in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi who convinces two black maids to share secretly their stories about raising white children. Narrated by these three distinctive voices, The Help alternates between humor, outrage and pathos as it explores the complex dynamics between white women in the Mad Men-era South and the black women who raised their children. The characters are well-rounded and believable without becoming cliched. I listened to the Penguin Audiobooks version, whose vocal characterizations of the three narrators were very well done indeed.

Review: The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

British author Jacobson won last year’s Booker Prize for this novel. Reviewers have compared his work to Jane Austen (a novel of manners) and Philip Roth (exploring male-female relations, the dark spaces of the male psyche and the dilemmas of Judaism—all with a biting wit). It is an easy and highly enjoyable read even as Jacobson probes many sides of polarizing issues such as modern day anti-Semitism, Zionism and self-loathing Jews.

Story highlights from audible.com: “Julian Treslove is an unspectacular television producer of arts programs and a celebrity impersonator, with two failed marriages behind him and two distant, resentful sons. A gentile convinced that a Jewish identity would offer asylum from his identity crisis, Treslove is acutely envious of his old school friend Sam Finkler, now a highly successful author of glib pop-philosophy best sellers with titles like “The Existentialist in the Kitchen”. For Treslove, Finkler comes to represent Jewish identity: The ‘Jewish question’ (in all its loaded historical ambivalence) becomes the Finkler question, at once sanitized and personalized. Both men regularly meet with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik, a colorful Mittel-European transplant who serves as the book’s heart…He is crotchety, funny, and touching in his devotion to his dead wife, even while on hilariously awkward dates. Jacobson has great fun in pitting his characters’ different approaches to Jewishness against each other…There is a sense that the three male leads are facets of one personality with a schismatic approach to Jewishness.”