The Great Influenza
by John M. Barry

The recent hullabaloo both in America and abroad about H1N1 (“swine flu”) last year brought influenza back into the zeitgeist in a way it has not been for many years—more years, likely, than the last couple of generations largely ignorant of just how serious influenza was and could potentially be in the future. About 14,000 deaths were caused by the swine flu worldwide to-date. Compare that figure to the estimates for mortality in the 1918 flu pandemic, which range from 20 million deaths on the low end to 120 million deaths on the high end.

The Great Influenza is what Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone should have been about instead of an Ebola threat that was, well, never actually a threat.

Oddly, the outbreak of influenza doesn’t occur until nearly halfway through Barry’s book; in some ways, the outbreak itself is treated as an afterthought, but Barry’s approach to the narrative makes a bit more sense when you read his epilogue. You see, The Great Influenza is peripherally about virology, yes: you will learn about viruses and bacteria and how they infect the body. But more than that, The Great Influenza is a cultural study of how people, governments, and scientists reacted to one of the most deadly events of the 20th century.

To understand how all of this unfolded, you must first understand the state of medical knowledge at the fin de siècle. The world was in the throes of a scientific revolution which was transforming how people lived—e.g. plumbing, electricity, and medicine—the old guard was still very much in force. Barry notes that shortly before 1900, most states required licensure for dentistry and pharmacy, but virtually anyone could be a physician, and so the state of scientific medical knowledge (materia medica) was dismal at best. The first hero whom Barry introduces will not, in fact, play any direct role during the pandemic aside from contracting the flu himself: William Henry Welch, though no extraordinary medical researcher himself, was more or less the godfather of the modern medical establishment, instrumental in the founding of the first “real” medical school (the Johns Hopkins) and the gradual systematization of medical knowledge and rejection of homeopathy, venisection (“bleeding”), and other quackeries like the miasma theory of disease.

By the time the outbreak hits in 1918, there has been significant progress made, but the number of competent doctors and nurses in the nation is still minimal, and of course the state of the art would seem primitive to us today. The galvanizing knowledge is that of the immune system: researchers had by that time just begun peeling the corners away from its mystery—enough to begin fighting such things as malaria and yellow fever with a forward-looking armament of medical weapons.

1918 was also, of course, the middle of the United States’ involvement in The Great War (or World War I), with president Woodrow Wilson at the helm. Though our popular notions of war propaganda tend to be the gung-ho slogans and posters of World War II, the culture of this war was chilling indeed, and it’s remarkable how much we’ve forgotten what an incredible bastard Woodrow Wilson was. Like John Adams, he managed to poke the nation in its eye with the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, two legislative examples of a general political, cultural, legal and martial malaise that effectively chilled the Bill of Rights. It also had the effect of suppressing not just outright dissent, but suppressing simple truth as well, and giving birth to a nation of idiots addled by patriotic stupor—the latter evidenced by, e.g., the story of a crowd lynching a man for refusing to by a war bond.

The former item, however, becomes more important from a public health standpoint. The 1918 strain of Influenza A (H1N1) went through several waves, the first of which was not very lethal, and therefore passed largely unnoticed. It was the second wave which caused so much destruction, and much of that destruction came from the generalized response by politicians, newspaper editors, army officials, and city burghers to the problem. Either due to sheer obstinacy, ignorance, callousness, or fear of being reported as subversive, the response of most of the men in charge (pick your city) was to tell everyone the following, in order:

1. There’s no influenza outbreak.
2. There’s an influenza outbreak, but it’s not dangerous.
3. There’s a dangerous influenza outbreak, but it’s peaked, and on its way out.
4. Okay, we’re screwed.

Though no one knows for sure where the 1918 influenza originated, Barry surmises that the most likely scenario is some sort of pig/poultry-to-human transfer happened in Haskell County, Kansas, was taken to Fort Riley in a wave of new draftees in the war, and from there was spread not just across the United States, but to France, the rest of Europe, and eventually the rest of the world. I bring this up not because it matters particularly that the viruses likely originated in the United States, but because in that scenario, it is likely the virus’ spread and ultimately its lethality was due almost entirely to the machinations of war. Further, the military officers in charge of logistics, even when warned that failure to quarantine military bases would likely kill hundreds of thousands of people, insisted that any failure to ship fresh troops to Germans might embolden the enemy and cost the Allies the war.

Though Barry expended a considerable number of pages explaining the (relative) improvement of scientific medicine by 1918, it would come to pass that the scientific establishment had no real answer or cure for the influenza outbreak. He certainly has an all-star cast (whom I won’t bother listing individually) working feverishly (no pun intended) on the problem all along, but ultimately the influenza pandemic describes a bell curve, and so after a ridiculous 6 weeks more closely resembling a scene of hell, the number of new contractions of the disease fall precipitously off. It would be difficult to overstate the apparent brutality of the vurus. Barry’s history centers on America, but I imagine the story is similar everyone. Whole villages struck down; families so sick and weak that they die on the floor where they fall; fear and paranoia paralyzing formerly-close communities. The only communities unaffected were those which enforced a strict quarantine.

Strangely, Barry continues past the practical end of the infection and talks for some time about scientific researchers; one is relatively important—Oswald Avery, who ultimately discovered the role that DNA plays in genetics, topically the virus involved in the flu—and the other providing virtually no contribution to the field at all—Paul Lewis, a promising researcher who produced nothing of importance and died of Yellow Fever in Brazil. It’s an odd sort of denouement, and I’m not convinced it fits Barry’s narrative well.

There are a couple of important scientific points to take away from Barry’s book. The first is the general topic of virology, and I’ll take it for granted that you know generally how a virus differs from a bacterium. The second is that even the particularly deadly strain of influenza that ravaged the globe in 1918 often didn’t directly kill its victims: as often as the virus itself caused death via acute respiratory distress, it also left the weakened immune system vulnerable to secondary infection, usually in the form of bacterial pneumonia. Ironically, the best prescription for the flu, then as now, is bed rest and fluids. The third would be the terrible confluence of war and pandemic, and at least in this case they are largely one and the same. The fourth and final is the most humbling: as great as our medical science is, and as much as we may learn and prepare (even though we aren’t prepared) for a pandemic, humanity can and possibly will be brought to its knees again someday by an organism so small it requires an electronic microscope to view.

The Great Influenza is an expansive treatment of the topic; it’s doubtless an excellent treatment of the topic. But as I warned earlier, the book is less a medical thriller or morbid history than it is a cultural study, or a work of epidemiology. If the thought of waiting 200 pages for the outbreak to start annoys you, The Great Influenza may not be for you. On the other hand, those with sufficient patience will be pleasantly surprised by Barry’s work.

The Forever War
by Joe Haldeman

In a sort of theme of futuristic sci-fi war dystopias (see Ender’s Game and Old Man’s War), I’ve decided to read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. It’s a famous book, and over 35 years old at this point. It’s most commonly compared to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, but that’s a rather facile comparison, especially today when we all know better.

Last year, the movie District 9 came out to great acclaim; the most common complaint was that its symbolism (hint: it’s an allegory for apartheid) was too ham-fisted and obvious. The Forever War is a little like that, except instead of apartheid, the book is an allegory for the Vietnam War, and most particularly the reacclimation of those who fought in it to post-war civilian life.

The story follows William Mandella, an exceptionally bright physics major who is conscripted into service in the United Nations Exploratory Force, a space-going organization turned war machine when a mysterious alien race they call the Taurans attacks several human vessels. After a rigorous basic training in icy Minnesota, Mandella and the rest of the first round of recruits is further trained on a planet called Charon, where a good portion of them are killed in the dangerous terrain.

What comes next is the narrative crux of the mission: Mandella and his fellow soldiers are sent via collapsars to distant parts of the galaxy; the benefit of the collapsars is that they are able to transport people at almost c, the speed of light. The downside is that traveling at such a speed generates relativistic effects, and by the time Mandella returns home after the battle (in which the humans obliterated a confused and spastic Tauran “army”), a decade has passed on earth, even though it’s been a mere two years from Mandella’s perspective. Imagine his surprise to find that the world no longer exists as he remembers it: after a number of political upheavals, famines, and other nasty business, homosexuality is officially encouraged by the government in order to reduce overpopulation, universal currency is now food (or a kind of “food allowance” that can be traded, etc.), and all sorts of small but important cultural reference points have shifted.

By now, it should be obvious what Haldeman is doing; namely, he’s drawing parallels between the alienation of returning Vietnam vets after a year or two away and the alienation of these future soldiers after a more damning ten years away. I must admit, it’s a rather clever narrative device, not least of which because time dilation is a fascinating concept (and critically underexplored/underexplained in the novel, might I add). I first saw it used in Dafydd ab Hugh’s Endgame, and it’s a ready-made way to introduce technological conflict into any story that includes near-c space travel.

I don’t mean to sound dismissive of Haldeman’s symbolism: remember that The Forever War was written in 1974, when the folly of our treatment of vets wasn’t the foregone conclusion that it is to readers a quarter century later. It was somewhat ballsy, and not a little prescient, considering that veterans in just about every era (including those of our current war in the Persian Gulf) face these psychological problems, but it’s even more difficult with a war (or “conflict”) as poorly-understood and fractious as our incursion into southeast Asia. In reality, Haldeman’s treatment of the subject was well done, as was his technological base. Even early on, I was impressed by the care the author showed for getting his science right, or at least plausible: in Mandella’s early training on Charon, a constant danger was falling in one’s suit, since any contact of the heat radiator fins of the suit with the prevalent liquid hydrogen would cause a large explosion. Haldeman’s attention to detail in explaining this phenomenon—and likewise to other science topics, like the time dilation—was satisfying to a fan of hard science fiction like myself.

The book doesn’t end with Mandella’s first return to earth after 10 years; in fact, Mandella’s stint with UNEF lasts for close to a thousand years from the perspective of Earth, which is not only a little mind-boggling from a personal perspective, but must be a bear to coordinate logistically. By this point, the “time dilation qua shell-shock” point would be exaggerated, but by the end of the book, Haldeman avoids belaboring such a point, instead wrapping up the plot with a somewhat predictable but decent ending that’s both satisfying and a little melancholy. It is a bit reminiscent of Ender’s Game (or vice-versa, actually, since The Forever War was published first), but less hawkish, ultimately more concerned with the ethics of technology than the ethics of warfare. It becomes clear as the novel progresses that the war it describes is a peripheral narrative: though it commands the attention of UNEF for a millennium, readers will become aware that its folly is self-evident. Far more interesting are the speculative changes wrought by another thousand years of human progression, which I won’t spoil by divulging here. Needless to say, I think Haldeman’s eye for culture is what engenders—or what should engender—the frequent and cloying comparisons to Starship Troopers.

Transparent is a common word; I’ve known it since I was a child. Slightly less well known is “translucent,” which has largely the same meaning, although the latter usually indicates a lesser degree of transparency.

With a bit of familiarity with Latin roots, its easy to see what these two words have in common: trans indicates “across” or “over,” which leads to such modern English words as “transmit”, “transport”, “transaction”, “transcontinental” and others. But what about the second part of each word: could that tell us how they are different?

The suffix “lucent” comes from the Latin lucere (“to shine”); literally, then “translucent” effectively means “to allow light to shine through/across”. The various forms of the Latin luceo can be seen in words such as “lantern” (weakly), as the modern “light” (→ L. lux → PIE *leuk-).

The parens suffix of “transparent” comes from another Latin root, appareo, which means “to become visible” or “to appear”. We can see its influence in such words as “appear” (a direct lineage of appareo) as well as “apparition”. Also, if you’re wondering, our modern English “parent” does come from this same root. The pareo root can also mean “I submit” or “I am obedient to”, which led to the verb parere (to breed or bring forth), and you can probably guess the rest from there. In fact, the PIE root *per-, which means “to bring forth”, is really applicable in all the words here. In the context of your progenitors, they brought you forth from their loins; in the context of transparent materials, they allow light to come forth in a manner of speaking.

Juliet, Naked
by Nick Hornby

Like a lot of readers, my impression of Nick Hornby is most influenced by High Fidelity, which is still widely considered his best novel. I can’t say for certain, but I suspect that the book’s popularity has not a little to do with its treatment of minutiae: the plot itself is somewhat tepid romantic comedy fare, but the tangents about pop records are delivered with such a characteristic force that one can’t help but pay attention.

Juliet, Naked attempts to recapture some of that juju. It’s the story of Tucker Crowe, a somewhat obscure indie musician from the 70s and 80s who very suddenly left the music scene (and any sort of public persona) after a mysterious incident in the bathroom of a Minnesota nightclub. For the next twenty years, a gaggle of his most devoted fans have speculated about his life, the cause of his exit, the merits of his music, and theories about his current whereabouts. To readers somewhat familiar with the indie rock scene, that kind of underground obsession is a familiar phenomenon—the tendency of the fanatical is to impose genius upon the mysterious. Hornby’s status as a cognoscente of the pop music scene gives the story a certain sense of slick verisimilitude that works well.

I said that Juliet, Naked is the story of Tucker Crowe, but it’s as much the story of Annie and Duncan, two middle-aged Brits in a loveless relationship in a small seaside town outside of London filled mostly with geriatrics. Duncan is one of those obsessive fans that I alluded to earlier; his 20-year obsession with Crowe, both pre- and especially post-disappearance is a source of eye-rolling dismissal from Annie, who is mostly with Duncan out of sheer laziness or inertia. She wants a child; Duncan doesn’t, and at 45, Annie is feeling her latitude slipping away.

Things begin to fall apart (or come together….. [said with a rising inflection]) when Duncan receives in the mail a new album called Juliet, Naked, a collection of rough acoustic demos of the songs from Crowe’s final album, Juliet. While Annie is underwhelmed by the new album (she is, while not a Tucker Crowe enthusiast, could be considered a Tucker Crowe fan), Duncan finds it brilliant, and their differing opinions (not to mention Duncan’s subtely dismissive rejection of hers) shine a light on the hairline cracks in their relationship. When Annie—heretofore largely unengaged in writing—writes a review and posts it to the Tucker Crowe website which Duncan frequents, it elicits a clandestine email from none other than Tucker Crowe himself.

I have to admit that I find the character drama of Juliet, Naked a little less engaging than that of High Fidelity, but that’s perhaps because I have more in common with a relatively young music store owner than I do with a 45-year-old doofus from Britain But while the two books are compared, and quite rightly, their narrative characters are actually substantially different: they are both, at heart, about a couple or couples struggling to find themselves, but while his earlier novel’s characters were indefatigably hip despite themselves, the characters of Juliet, Naked are all irreparably broken, sagging creatures, fighting against the physical and psychological ravages of age and their own, considerably less hip, dysfunction.

Like most romances of this sort, the relationships which eventually form or disband are predictable, though this has never stopped such stories from being popular or interesting. The meaning and impact tends to filter through preconceptions of the readers; as High Fidelity was to vinyl lovers and post-collegiate sad sacks in the throes of existential crises, so Juliet, Naked is to depressive middle-agers and pathetic indie scene kids and obstinate men clinging to their youthful obsessions. You could call the ending “happy” if you don’t mind vilifying (perhaps unnecessarily) a number of its characters, and you don’t mind seeing it coming from quarter of the way into the book. Hornby’s writing so heavily telegraphs itself that it obviates the actual reading of the book; the narrative progression is a function of nothing more than time–it seems as though it will labor to its conclusion regardless of our emotional investment or the growth of its characters or events of any particular interest. I begin to wonder if the book requires no more to read than it apparently took Hornby to write it. I see what he was trying to do, but I can’t escape the suspicious that he phoned this one in.

Previously, I’ve casually benchmarked the Javascript speeds of 64-bit browsers v. their 32-bit counterparts (here); more recently, I benchmarked a 64-bit compile of FLAC against several other 32-bit compiles of the same version (here).

This time, I decided to test various and sundry file compression utilities—more specifically, those which offer both 32- and 64-bit versions of themselves. This benchmark did not exhaustively test all potential combinations of compression options (if you’re interested in that, see Werner Bergman’s excellent Maximum Compression and Matt Mahoney’s Data Compression Programs), nor will it compare various compressors to each other; neither will it even list how well the programs actually compressed, since that’s not really a consideration here. The sole purpose of the benchmark was to compare the execution time of a 32-bit program with its 64-bit version.

The corpus in this case was enwiki9, compressed to a RAM disk to minimize the potential effects of write latency. I wanted the corpus to be sufficiently large to better tease out significant differences in these compressors over a large dataset.

The results for each compressor are listed on their own page, as well as an explanation of the compressor, its origin, and any additional notes. One notable exception to this list is WinRK, which is available in a 64-bit version but contains no command-line interface.

K-Pax
by Gene Brewer

Like most people (I imagine), I was first introduced to K-Pax via the 2001 film of the same name starring Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges. I hadn’t even realized until some time later that it was based upon a 1995 novel by Gene Brewer. Though I generally hate comparing books and movies, I will do so to a limited extent here because I think that the movie highlights some of the book’s failings.

If you aren’t familiar with the plot from either medium, K-Pax is the story of “prot” (pronounced “prOHt” and spelled all lowercase), a patient at the Manhattan Psychiatric Institute, under the care of a doctor with the same name as the author (though it’s “Mark Powell” in the film). Prot (hereinafter capitalized for ease of recognition) believes he is from the planet K-Pax, in the constellation Lyra. He is a short, quiet man who has the ability to see ultraviolet light (which normal humans cannot do), which he attributes to the peculiar light conditions on his planet (which is in a perpetual state of twilight). He is also a genius, having an incredible knowledge of astrophysics, which he attributes to mere familiarity with his part of the solar system.

Gene Brewer believes that Prot is a convincing case of MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder), and eventually comes to believe that Prot is the currently-dominant personality inside one Robert Porter, a man whose wife and daughter were killed five years ago, and was presumed dead after vanishing into a river. Many of the clues point to this scenario, though there are the outlying data about Prot that makes Dr. Brewer (and, by extension, the reader) wondering: there is the genius-level intellect, for instance, and the opthamological curiosity of his ability to see ultraviolet light.

When I saw the movie several years ago, it seemed as though it walked a fine line between making either scenario—Prot as psychologically-disturbed man or Prot as bona fide alien—a foregone conclusion. Though our logical minds inevitably agree with Dr. Brewer/Powell’s diagnosis, and his hesitant rejection of the idea that Robert Porter is somehow hosting the persona of a real space alien, we take a particular delight in the ambiguity, and the sliver of possibility that Prot and K-PAX are real. I didn’t get that some sense from the book, in which the doctor seemed more confident of his diagnosis, less conflicted than Jeff Bridges, and there were fewer odd, unexplainable events attached to Prot/Robert’s time in the facility. It seems like a small change, but it makes a lot of difference, as the first is a pseudo-science-fictional story about a psychiatric patient who may be an alien, and the second is a story about an ill man’s time in a psychiatric ward. See the difference?

Psychologically-speaking, the locus of Brewer’s construction of Prot is his descriptions of his home planet, as well as its societal structure. It is a sort of egalitarian paradise, with no class conflict or hierarchies or proletariats. It is also home to virtually no familial structures; after birth, a K-Paxian is raised communally, drifting from place to place, and without the benefit of institutions of learning as we would know them. If Prot really is Robert Porter, K-Pax would seem to offer the antithesis of his life on earth, namely one marked by familial obligation and an inescapable role in a stratified culture. And, if Prot’s family was indeed the victim of a terrible crime, it makes a twisted sort of sense that on K-PAX, there is not only no murder or violence, but there would be no punishment is such a crime hypothetically occurred.

I admit to being curious how Brewer managed to write sequels (there are another three), but I found the original somewhat underwhelming in book form; this was a story that simply required the acting talents of Spacey and Bridges to make it come alive. Otherwise, the book sort of limps along, hampered by less-than-wonderful characters and a story that makes a more interesting thought experiment than a novel.

Shades of Grey
by Jasper Fforde

Jasper Fforde has accomplish a lot in a relatively short period of time. His first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001, and in the 9 years since, he has published an additional seven novels, with announced plans for 4 more. I liked The Eyre Affair when I read it three years ago, and at the time I criticized it for being a bit short on plot and long on context. With the benefit of hindsight, I realize that Fforde writes series more than he writes books, and that the world-building in Book #1 always pays dividends later on.

I should have been smarter, then, in my initial disappointment with Shades of Grey—not with the plot, which was fascinating, but with the ending, which was frustrating in the extreme; it was only after I finished and fumed a bit did I do some research and find out that Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron is only the first in a planned trilogy. This makes me feel better, though I am now emotionally-invested enough in the characters to be required to (wait for and) read the forthcoming sequels.

The world of Shades of Grey is, without a doubt, a dystopia, though no character ever seems to come to that conclusion. The parallels with 1984 are so obvious as to preclude the need for explanation, but for those that haven’t read it, the situation is this: after a disastrous “Something That Happened,” a human-like civilization either far in our future or more likely in an alternate history is divided into distinct social castes based upon what part of the visible spectrum they can see. The Greys, a menial servant class, is entirely colorblind. Reds can see varying degrees of red, Yellows can see yellow, and so on up the scale, with Purples being the most prestigious and Ultraviolets being superlative class which is rarely mentioned. In Fforde’s invented universe, genetics function similar to additive color, so that a Purple who find themselves too high on blue and low on red will want to marry and procreate with a strong Red in order to produce a solidly Purple offspring. Much energy, attention, and time is spent on this caste system, since its various implications form the basis for several plots and subplots. It reminds me most of India’s caste system, and with the Greys of Fforde’s version acting as the “untouchable” (Dalits) class; but there are also other groups, including the apocryphal persons (more on this later) as will as the “riffraff,” who are feral humans who live outside of populated areas.

Everything is based upon color. The towns are named after colors: East Carmine, Jade-Under-Lime, High Saffron; the people are named after colors: Eddie Russet’s father replaces East Carmine’s old doctor, Robin Ochre. The most prized job is with a pseudo-governmental entity known as Nation Color, which is responsible for producing fake color—the distinction between a natural green, which a Red like Eddie cannot see, and a fake green, various shades of which are used as a painkiller, is never quite made clear, and I don’t know if Fforde simply won’t flesh out the technological context of his world, or if he’s saving it for later books. Perhaps you were confused when I said that shades of green are used as painkillers; remember that everything is based upon color, and the relation of the eyeballs to the brain is very different to the people of the novel; green shades are narcotic, a certain unnamed color will induce ovulation, and others have the potential to help or harm in varying measures.

On the political side, the story more closely resembles typical dystopias: after some sort of societal collapse five centuries before the book takes place, a historical figure named Munsell apparently creates a New World Order which lives by his specific, innumerable, and inviolable Rules, which are enforced by a rigid hierarchy which begins at Head Office, runs to individual towns and their prefects, and then down through the chromatic hierarchy. The rules specify everything from the typically moral (no sex before marriage) to the chromatic (complimentary colors marrying would carry approximately the same moral opprobrium as incest) to the logistical (everyone must eat at least one meal per day in the communal mess hall) to the hierarchical (the chromatic hierarchy must be obeyed at all times) to the jingoistic (Munsell’s motto is “Apart we are together”). Fforde’s dystopia, in other words, is less frightening and offensive that Orwell’s, but in many ways just as onerous, since it reaches so far and attempts to regulate and control so much; the Two-Minute Hate has given way to the Great Leap(s) Back, which are occasional decrees from Head Office that such-and-such a piece of technology has been outlawed. Since Ford Flatheads were outlawed, for instance, people may only drive Model T’s on the rare occasions that they drive anywhere. On the other hand, there are remnants of very advanced technology left from before the Something That Happened, including a semi-intelligent organic polymer roadway that is smart enough to clear any debris which lands on it. The technology is so mixed that it’s difficult to get a bead on where Fforde’s universe would lay in comparison to our own, and I spent perhaps more time than was necessary trying to understand it—ultimately, I think it’s an arbitrary collection of the bits that the author found interesting, and would elude any attempts to systematize it.

As with most tales of dystopias, the main character is a somewhat feckless hero who begins to distrust the system. In Eddie’s case, it’s spurred by his early meeting with a Grey named Jane, who has the prettiest nose in the village and threatens to break his jaw (the impudence of which is, technically, a very serious matter), and with whom Eddie falls in love immediately, despite his semi-betrothal to conceited daughter of a rich Red string magnate and her apparent loathing for both him and the ridiculous society of which he is a part. This is the juncture of the political satire which brings 1984 to mind and the social satire which reminds us of India’s jātis, and for the most part, Fforde does a good job with it. Some of it is kind of predictable, such the reader’s ironic knowledge that the foundation of this new society and the forces which sustain it must necessarily differ from the accepted knowledge about it (i.e. something is rotten in the state of Denmark). Occasionally, Fforde’s treatment of the color-caste goes to ridiculous lengths, and I feel as though I’m watching an episode of The Flintstones, but instead of working “rock” or “stone” into everything, it’s now “hue” or “chrom-”; the chromogentsia rather than the intelligentsia; a swatchman instead of a corpsman (a town doctor, basically). The point seems a little belabored in order for the reader to appreciate how deeply color is embedded into society, which I suppose we can’t blame Fforde for.

Small flaws aside, Fforde has created a fascinating universe here, which engaged me quickly and completely. The proof of the story’s quality will be in how he completes the series; Shades of Grey has a lot of potential, but so did The Matrix, and the Wachowskis managed to screw that one up by the end, so I’m not holding my breath.

I am wont to using this word a lot, in part because it’s a neat word and in part because it’s so useful: three forms, all the same. The only downfall is that people who don’t know any better tend to think I’m saying “want” (even when you open the throat and do the short ‘o’ like ‘pot’), which is often close enough to get the meaning across, but a far cry from correct.

Wont comes from the Old English wunian—”to dwell, be accustomed”—which itself from the Proto-Germanic *wun- (“to be content, to rejoice”); in other words, the rallying call of homebodies and armchair tourists everywhere. You can still see it in the Germanic languages: the Germans have wohnen and the Dutch have wonen. For a while (the late 19th century is the last period from which I can find examples—e.g. Sir Richard Burton), the word was also in American English as “won” and “wone.”

Want, by contrast comes to us from the Nordic vant (“wanting, deficient”) in a fairly straightforward transformation. Interestingly, this word is related to our verb “to wane” via the Old English wanian (“to diminish”) and Middle English wanen. The prefix wan- in Germanic language tends to act as a pejorative. The Dutch waan, for instance, which is similar to the Middle Dutch and Old English wan-, and all of which were ultimately from the Proto-German *wan[o]- and Proto-Indo-European *we-no-, both of which indicating a lacking, absence, or deficit.

These two words, therefore, mean very different (and in some cases opposite) things. The first indicates habit or contentment, and the second indicates a dearth or desire. I suppose one could technically be wont to want—that is, accustomed to being without—but that’s not a phrase I hear very often.

The Unnamed
by Joshua Ferris

I was suitably impressed with Joshua Ferris’ debut novel, And Then We Came to the End, which was something of a black comedy. Its sometimes-serious contents were often overshadowed by the possibilities for humor or darksome whimsy when writing about an office environment, a subject which probably gained its cultural penchant for public mockery with the rise of the Dilbert comic strip.

I was surprised—though I clearly should not have been—how much Ferris’ sophomore effort, The Unnamed differed. Stripped of the inherently satirical context, Ferris’ writing is actually quite bleak—in fact, I don’t believe it is an exaggeration to say that this new book is one of the saddest and most depressing pieces of literature I have read in recent memory.

The protagonist is Tim Farnsworth, a workaholic partner at a prestigious law firm, who suffers from an unknown and unnamed affliction which enters its third occurrence at the beginning of the novel. Tim, during these spans, is seized by the need to walk; it comes without warning, and he is unable to stop himself or even divert long enough to grab his coat. He will walk out of meetings, or out of restaurants, out of his house—out into the coldest of winters, inappropriately tired, and walk until his body physically gives out and he collapses into an exhausted sleep.

A slew of doctors can’t figure out what’s wrong with him, and though Tim maintains stubbornly that the affliction is purely physical and not a product of mental illness, no remedies seem to work. Like cancer—which, incidentally, his wife Jane suffers from sporadically—the affliction can go into remission, sometimes for years. The usual tactic is to strap Tim into a bed, rub lotion on his bedsores, and not let him up until the affliction has subsided… as many as 27 months later. The alternative is losing fingers from frostbite, walking into busy traffic, and being molested during exhausted sleep by nefarious characters. In either case, Tim’s professional life suffers and his personal life is strained to the breaking point.

Don’t hold your breath to find out some revelation about Tim’s disease: I can tell you without spoiling much that it is not forthcoming, as you might intuit from Ferris’ choice of title. Then, too, it becomes increasingly obvious that despite Tim’s protestations, the disease appears to be entirely psychological, and as the book progresses the readers inevitably come to one conclusion: either Tim is already mad, or the disease makes him so. The devolution is apparent not just in the descriptions of Tim, but Ferris’ language, which becomes near to a frenzy of stream-of-consciousness at times, kind of like The Stones of Summer.

Tim’s madness, affliction, or plight is merely mechanical, however. At most, the nature of the disease—impulse walking away—is a tenuous metaphor for the workaholic man who fails to make appropriate time for his wife and daughter. More interesting is Tim’s relationship with said wife and daughter (Jane and Becka, respectively), whose various dedication and scorn, as well as Tim’s reciprocal insouciance or sadness, form the primary conflict of the book. Though Tim may struggle internally with the vagaries of a disease he cannot control and does not understand, he is conflicted far more by his ambiguous relationship with his family, which Ferris implies was not particularly wholesome even before the disease struck. The theme which Ferris is trying to explore is the tendency or latent desire to eschew responsibility: in this case, literally walks away from everything he knows, protesting all along that it must be his damned legs—that he’s helpless against the forces which take him away. The readers, awash in dramatic irony, know that this isn’t so. Tim succumbs metaphorically to the ravages of a strange psychological disorder, but on a more mundane level he succumbs to a practiced and effective ignorance, turning entirely inward and regressing to a state of disorder more closely resembling that of Fight Club.

My criticism of this approach is that it’s a little too easy to make Tim a gibbering mess; the parallels between the stresses and temptations of family life and Ferris’ constructed disorder are both plainly obvious and slightly askew, to the extent that whatever theme was being explored ended up lost someplace. By the end, The Unnamed has turned into a rhetorically-savvy version of Death of a Salesman, starting bleak and ending even moreso. One could, therefore, apply the same argument to the former that Edith Hamilton applied to the latter: tragedies which merely descend into hopelessness and despair have little to recommend them as literature. This was a problem I encountered last year with The Death of Bunny Munro, which at least had a modicum of comic relief.

This is why I call The Unnamed one of the most depressing books I’ve ever read. There’s no happy ending, no resolution, no revelations, no age-acquired wisdom. It is a darksome list of terrible events which illustrates our physical and psychological frailty, populated with characters whose inner hearts remain foreign to us. It is, for all intents and purposes, a literary car accident: we slow down to gawk as we pass by it, transfixed by the gore and the innate fascination of morbidity, but there is no transcendent beauty to it. Ferris is a writer of beautiful prose, but I can’t help but be confused and disappointed with this new story that he’s created. I don’t have the stomach for it, or I’m perhaps missing some essential component of The Unnamed that makes it a masterpiece; either way, I find it difficult to recommend the book very enthusiastically.

Some highlights:

42. Arianna Huffington

Charges: HuffPo’s health coverage is like a horny chimp with a switch blade: dumb and dangerous. Arrianna’s “Wellness Editor” holds a “PhD” in homeopathy, the fake science of diluting medicine in water to increase its healing power—the higher the dilution, the more potent. In fact, she and other homeopathic quacks sell “medicine,” which is indistinguishable from Evian. Last summer, Arianna’s “internet newspaper” advised people to protect themselves from swine flu with a deep-cleansing enema. Seriously. Every woo-age celebrity with a vaccination conspiracy or snake oil remedy and a laptop is given column space at HuffPo. It hurts to read Dan Akroyd speculate about the existence of ghosts; it’s agonizing to read Deepak Chopra’s shoddy metaphysics, and it may actually kill to publish Bill Maher’s Luddite rants. Apparently, the only thing Huffington won’t let her writers do is get paid.

Exhibit A: “When it comes to health and wellness issues, our goal is to provide a diverse forum for a reasoned discussion of issues of interest and importance to our readers.”

Sentence: AIDS, one of Magic Johnson’s pills, Lake Michigan and a crazy straw.

27. Barack Obama

Charges: At the end of his first year as president, Obama’s major accomplishment is still having been elected in the first place. Since then, it’s all been Reaganesque speechifying, Clintonesque triangulation, and Bushian spin. His cabinet is packed with the deregulation-mad bankers who created our recession and then “fixed” it by heaving palettes of cash at their former employers. His penchant for bipartisanship, once a quaint campaign pretense, has become an agenda-hobbling obsession. He buzzed still-edgy New Yorkers with a few airplanes to snap a $300,000 promo pic any kid could’ve photoshopped in five minutes. Obama campaigned for a “robust public option” and importing cheaper drugs, closing Gitmo, ending no-bid contracts and backroom deals with corporate lobbyists—and he was going to do it on CSPAN. But he’s done none of those things, and his policies on extraordinary rendition, illegal wiretapping and state secrets are pure Bush. Socialist? We should be so lucky.

Exhibit A: “The reforms we seek would bring greater competition, choice, savings and inefficiencies to our health care system.”

Sentence: A second term of crazed right-wing abuse.

1. Glenn Beck

Charges: As the Sybil of cable punditry and graduate of the prestigious University of I Don’t Remember, Beck’s bipolar professor routine is hands down the funniest thing on TV. When he gets out the chalkboard and starts drawing trees and playing misspelled word association games with a comically grave demeanor, Beck makes Stephen Colbert look like a piker. The fact that millions of Americans think he knows what he’s talking about, however, is not funny at all. If this simpering boob, blubbering the same old reds-under-the-bed melodrama from the ’50s with a sophomoric Da Vinci Code twist, is the face of the people’s rebellion, sign us up for the empire.

Exhibit A: “This president has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture… I’m not saying that he doesn’t like white people.”

Sentence: Drowned in crocodile tears; eaten by crocodile.