Half Empty by David Rakoff

Four years ago, I read David Rakoff’s Don’t Get Too Comfortable, a book of collected essays. Rakoff, an out gay man, reads like a more curmudgeonly and hyperliterate version of David Sedaris, like the bastard love-child of Sedaris and Chuck Klosterman. Years later, Rakoff’s next book, Half Empty, capitalizes on his dark worldview by offering a series of loosely-connected essays in defense of the notion that pessimism is not all bad.

Half Empty doesn’t offer any central thesis, per se; there’s no stated hypothesis. I assumed, in fact, that it was simply a small collection of previously-written essays which all simply captured the dour, comic voice of a middle-aged, openly-gay Jewish cancer survivor. Oy! The book begins by noting Julie Norem’s The Positive Power of Negative Thinking, a 2002 book that defends pessimism as a natural—indeed, smart—defense mechanism, by preparing for the worst and causing its practitioners to analyze circumstances and events more carefully than their bubbly, optimistic peers. Rakoff said in an interview on The Daily Show, however, that Half Empty was, in fact, an engineered defense of pessimism. It is “essentially about pessimism and melancholy. All the other less than pleasant to feel emotions that because they are less than pleasant to feel have been more or less stricken from the public discourse but in fact have their uses and even a certain beauty to them”, according to an interview with The Daily Californian.

One important thing to note about Rakoff is that his writing style is, despite his frequent comparison to David Sedaris, far more literate and intellectual. Consider this passage (a single paragraph) from a section about Salt Lake City, Utah:

It’s a paradoxical feeling to have in the City of the Saints, since the streets of Salt Lake City are a steppe-like 132 feet wide. This breadth was decreed by Brigham Young so that a team of oxen and a covered wagon might be able to turn around in a full circle unimpeded. (An almost identical pronouncement was attributed to Cecil Rhodes when he was overseeing the layout of the city of Bulawayo in Rhodesia. Is this bit of hypertrophic urban planning just a standard issue paleo-Trumpism? One of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Nineteenth-Century Men with Big Ideas?) The avenues yawn open, human proximity is vanquished, and the nearest people seem alienatingly distant. Such space between souls, such an uninterrupted vista of sky must imbue a populace with a sense of possibility—lebensraum and all that jazz. And yet, walking back to the car from the Castle of Chaos, I think of these teenagers, and they couldn’t look more fettered—a world away from the crowds at the Gatewall Mall, a bi-level outdoor shopping center constructed to look like an Umbrian hill town (if Umbrian hill towns had California Pizza Kitchens). If landscape shapes character, then it is never more clear than here, where I encountered the closest thing resembling a crowd in Salt Lake City. People, many of them in Halloween costumes, stroll eight abreast like one of Brigham Young’s mythic team of oxen, never moving faster than the speed of cold honey. I have never been in a public space in America where a sense of how to walk among others was so completely and confoundingly absent. People stop abruptly, cut across lanes, and generally meander as blissfully unaware as cows in Delhi.

Look at the key components of this paragraph: invocation of a “paradox”; a reference to a short-lived African state and its magnate founder; a sarcastic invocation of a pop-psychology idea with a popular historical reference; a hyphenated neologism skewering a modern businessman; a pretentious and controversial use of a German phrase; an invocation of an underrecognized geographical region of Italy; a reference to historical/mythical Mormon culture; and a reference to the protected status of bovine mammals in Hindu India. That’s a lot of references for a single paragraph, and yet it’s not a rare occurrence for Rakoff, who likes to couch so much of his relatively mundane subject matter with references and allusions to things which are—in fairness—much more interesting.

Still... bitchin' beard

In a turn of events so twistedly appropriate it could not have been planned, Rakoff—a survivor of Hodkins lymphoma in his 20s—was diagnosed with a malignant in his neck during the writing of the book. This revelation and its aftermath comprises the lengthy ending segment at the end of Half Empty, and ultimately one could disregard the entirety of the book except the opening chapter (wherein Rakoff introduces the pessimism-as-defense-mechanism hypothesis) and the last, and the resulting questions to the reader are positively delicious.

First, is it any more appropriate for a author promoting pessimism to be diagnosed with cancer while writing it? Never mind that the actual diagnosis of a malignant tumor (a very slight chance, according to his doctor, who assured him it was likely benign) seems to validate Rakoff’s downcast worldview; imagine for a moment that Rakoff was not already a cancer survivor, and that he had considered his symptoms (pain in the arm, which he noticed after working out) a mild and minor ailment rather than the possible harbinger of a potentially-fatal ailment? Would he still be alive at the time of this writing? And how does a dominantly-negative worldview affect the treatment and recovery of a two-time cancer patient, in a medicinal niche all-too-often dominated by a tired clutch of slogans about “hope”? I’ve talked about this notion before with a friend (in particular, a friend whose father has since been diagnosed with multiple myeloma) who disparages the emphasis on “hope” as a shortcut which avoids the necessary long and hard slog through invasive and terrible treatment, and which undercuts the pragmatism necessary for making decisions which afflicted with a potentially-fatal ailment.

As for the middle chapters of the book, they constitute typical Rakoff fare: they are excellent self-contained pieces, though their inclusion as stepping stones in a book governed by an “organizing principle” (Rakoff’s phrase) isn’t necessarily so much a body of argument as it is a typical body of work by Rakoff. This isn’t surprising: how does one justify one’s own worldview via journalism without, essentially, sounding as one normally does? It is impossible for familiar readers of Rakoff separate argument from author.

For all that, of course, Rakoff remains an impressive journalist, whose breadth of knowledge—and the balls to invoke such knowledge in his work—seems to surpass that of the aforementioned Chuck Klosterman, and without the sniveling pop-culture apologism. Rakoff is an old-school cynic, just old enough to be curmudgeonly and old-fashioned without going Andy Rooney on us. It’s a niche too often unfulfilled between the aged network journalism group and the up-and-coming MTV generation of cultural descriptivists that dominate journalism today.

Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee

Hoarding recently got a representative–for better or worse–in pop culture with the arrival of TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive; I’ll leave it to your own judgment if this is a good or bad thing, or just how “pop culture” TLC is, but in any case, it goes to show the tabloid power of psychological problems. Everyone gapes and gawks at home filled to the ceilings with piles of accumulated junk and wonders how these squirrely people can live their lives this way.

Stuff is an attempt by a noted academic and active therapist in the field (Randy Frost, along with a coauthor who is rarely mentioned by name) to summarize the state of scientific knowledge about hoarding, where it comes from, why it doesn’t easily conform to stereotypes, and how at least some of these people can be successfully treated.

The book begins with the tale of the Langley and Homer Collyer, two idle rich brothers who, it turns out, were severe hoarders; at least Langley was, whereas Homer was a blind invalid who either endorsed or at least acquiesced to Homer’s oddities. When Homer died in 1947 and details about the state of the Collyer’s brownstone in Harlem leaked to the press, the popular mind got its first real, publicized taste of a peculiar disorder that would become more common—or rather, likely, more visible—in the years to come, and culminating so far in the sort of insipid, voyeuristic dreck that TLC is so fond of airing.

The first modern-day hoarder we read about it is Irene, a severe hoarder whose husband has recently left her for obvious reasons, and who stands to lose her children in the upcoming divorce (this last event being common with hoarders). To Randy and Gail, she represents a perfect prototype from which to cover their various illustrative stories about hoarders: though she fits some hoarder characteristics to a T, she flouts other common stereotypes. She is amiable, outgoing, and sociable; she is intelligent and well-educated. She also displays characteristics of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, though Frost (who, beside being an expert on hoarding, is also active in the OCD field) notes that thinking about hoarding as a sister disease to OCD is misleading, despite the correlation—Irene maintains careful notions of “clean” and “dirty” items, which can be contaminated merely by someone bumping into them and sterilized with a moist towelette.

At its most fundamental, hoarding is about the perceived value we attach to objects; from the expensive red pumps we buy because they make our ass look good, to the ratty heirlooms we keep because they were our nanna’s, or the books or magazines we collect because one day we’ll get around to reading them, we swear, humans attach arbitrary notions to worth to stuff. For most, value works along a sliding scale, and we can prioritize what we buy and what we keep around based upon common sense and our monetary or spatial limitations. We are also capable of feeling more or less attached to things depending on their nature. To most hoarders, everything is important, or has the potential to be important. In prototypical Irene’s case, she has newspapers, magazines, and miscellaneous scraps of information all laying around because they might contain things that might be useful or important someday; alternatively, a seemingly useless object might have sentimental value even if it represents something unremarkable. To many hoarders, throwing away anything is like throwing away part of themselves.

Though hoarding is not necessarily an easy mold to fit, Frost’s exploration of its causes are unsurprising: like many mental health issues, there seems to be a connection between hoarding and psychological trauma. Sudden and tragic loss, or violation may cause a person to feel steerless and out of control; a fetishization of objects is a form of coping with that psychological trauma: it “affords many of its sufferers the illusion of control and replaces fear with a feeling of safety” (93). The recoil of the mind against trauma blurs the distinctions between normal and excessive, appropriate and inappropriate, healthy and harmful; the sense of proportion that imbues every decision we make is warped. In many cases the perceived difficulty of relinquishing an item is worse than the actual; or, the actual trauma is short-lived. So it seemed to be with many of the hoarders that Frost and his colleagues were able to help, though admittedly there were also a great many who made little progress or refused help entirely; as Frost insists, a hoarder has to want to recognize the illness (obliviousness is relatively rare) in order to get better, and of course it’s a long and difficult process.

Each chapter tells a different story or set of stories in the grand tradition of Oliver Sack’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, illustrating some new aspect of the disorder: animal hoarders, garbage-hoarders, city-mandated cleanouts, hoarder relationships, and genetic influence. The good news is that recent work in the field (including Frost’s) has made the treatment of hoarders more successful, as more psychiatrists and public health official understand the disorder as something specific and distinct, and more effective treatment plans have been developed.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

My interest in Drive was piqued by a presentation that Pink gave during a TED talk. The idea itself is interesting, but it also dovetails nicely with my general focus of study during my MBA coursework , namely intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. That might sound a little like jargon; it gets easier.

To understand where Pink is coming from, you first have to understand his simple (but, I think, generally accurate) summary of human cultural development. In the earliest stages of society, Man was motivated by a desire (1) to not get killed and (2) to have sex and reproduce; these rather Darwinian impetuses comprises what pink refers to as “Motivation 1.0″ beginning an extended software metaphor that is admittedly rather contrived and sickly. By the time we had figured out industry, and Frederick Taylor had begun to realize that managing employees could be approached as a science, our motivational scheme had advanced to “Motivation 2.0″: specifically, you reward behavior you want more of (carrot) and punish behavior you want less of (stick).

This scheme has survived ever since, and is the predominant way that businesses are run. Standard practice says that if you offer a higher salary, you get higher-caliber employees (think CEOs); similarly, you can get employees to work harder, faster, and better by offering them bonuses and raises. Everyone more or less assumes this to be true, but the premise of both Pink’s TED video and this book is that the theories behind “Motivation 2.0″ only work for a narrow band of work.

It turns out that for at least 30 or 40 years, behavioral scientists and IO psychologists have known that when it comes to creative work, or work that involves problem-solving, monetary inducements actually decrease performance. Pink illustrates this on a small scale with Sam Glucksberg’s use of the Candle Problem, but it’s more or less been validated by experiments from every major school of economics and business in the world. His prominent real-world examples include a comparison of the volunteer-driven Wikipedia (the world’s largest encyclopedia) and the Microsoft-financed Encarta (which folded in 2008), as well as the open source movement worldwide.

Throughout, Pink says he’s talking about the difference between “what Science knows and what Business does”; why, he wants to know, do so many businesses still persist in the “carrot and stick” model of management when there’s all this data that undermines it? We as readers are likely to agree; by the end we are asking ourselves, with just a hint of froth, why such a thing should be. As with so many books which proclaim to shake the very foundations of something, they rarely offer a careful, reasoned account of conflicted opinions. The obvious answer is that there are certain businesses that can make these principles work—Pink notes Google and Atlassian specifically—but there are still a lot of them that can’t. Whenever we talk about globalization and the flight of jobs from the U.S., we invariably say that industrial jobs and low-level white collar work (call centers, for instance) are moving to developing countries like India, but they’re being replaced by knowledge-based and creative jobs that require more that rote work. I agree this is true, but we’re still a long, long way from that being the norm: not every institution has the leisure of employing only creative, honest people who like their jobs. Pink assessment of Motivation 3.0 is correct, but not yet widespread.

To his credit, I think Pink understands that, despite his Paul Revere act—”Intrinsic motivation is coming! Intrinsic motivation is coming!” The transition from the old Frederick Taylor method of incentive and management is happening, but it’s happening slowly, and we’ll never entirely get away from a business world where money and pseudo-monetary perks are still heavily used to incent good performance and behavior. As if to help, the last third of Pink’s book is a “Motivation 3.0 Toolkit”, which seemed to me a lot like filler: when simplifying intrinsic motivators to the level of popular science, you can only talk for so long before you begin to repeat yourself (Pink is guilty of this). So how do you round out your book to an even 256 pages? Why, recommend a lot of books that bolster your argument, and reiterate all of your points in blurb form, as though a Powerpoint presentation for managers.

Pink has genuinely interesting things to say, but I can’t help but feel like his TED talk was much more compelling in its brevity and delivery; by contrast, Drive felt a little turgid.

Let it not be said that I am discomfited or alarmed by new forms of media; that I’m posting this to a blog after finding the article on Facebook, cross-posted from Twitter itself, may say something about my attitude toward the new and the popular. At the same time, I am extraordinarily distrustful of smiling cretins who like to whitewash the tendency of pop-culture to both reflect and encourage those things about ourselves which are ultimately damaging—the execrable Everything Bad is Good For You is a good example of just how facile such attempts can be.

A Rejection of Summaries

Pinker addresses the metonymized arguments that Powerpoint and Twitter (and media of that nature) stultify our discourse and represent an insidious verbal rot that (ostensibly) takes perfectly intellectual people and stupefies them into a torpid hulk. One gets the feeling that his implied opponents view humanity as a sort of real-life Flowers for Algernon, arising out of savagery by the power of the printed word and the reward of intellectual acumen; only to sink slowly and inexorably into monosyllables and dismayed puzzlement. Of course, these two forms of media merely represent the logical evolution of their predecessors—namely, notecards and text messages, respectively. In fact, though I have some sympathy for those linguistic and academic conservatives who are weeping and rending their garments over the Titanic (read: majestic, yet ill-fated) that is modern cultural intelligence, I am nonetheless inclined to agree with Pinker that panic is undue. But here’s his segue:

But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously.

Immediately, Pinker makes what I feel is a completely unfair comparison. Comic books may be, in many cases, rather paltry intellectual fare if in no other regard than exercising verbal skills, but their real controversy was in their subject matter. As David Hadju notes in his excellent The Ten-Cent Plague, comics’ ostensible lack of intellectual depth paled in comparison to their subject matter, which included sex, violence, rebellion, drugs, more violence, and all the other neat things that developing kids like to consume. The glorification of these things, it was said, was corrosive to moral fibre, and would invariably lead to a generation of deviants, criminals, and probably Communists, too. A virtually identical argument is made against video games (notably modern ones such as the notorious Grand Theft Auto series), occasionally bolstered by studies which show some correlation between violent video games and aggressive behavior immediately after playing.

The argument against new forms of social media are not the hysterical bleatings—”Won’t somebody please think of the children?“—of moral decay, but rather the fear that the diminishing requirements for dialogue are lowering the intellectual bar. The latter, even if you don’t agree, is a rather more plaintive and reasonable argument; no, Twitter will not turn today’s children into slavering nitwits, but it does draw converts from other sorts of media that may have once asked its users to expound upon something, rather than simply abbreviate it. I started this blog in 2004, and though I make no particular case for the quality of its entries, one of the reasons I have continued to update it long after blogs passed their peak is that it forces me to explain, transcribe whole series of thought into words, and construct something potentially readable by others. When I started, the same sorts of people who now use Twitter all gamboled around Xanga and Blogspot and tried their hand—however unsuccessfully—at extended forms of communication.

A Confusion of Tongues

Of course, there’s the argument to be made that Twitter itself isn’t really even a form of dialogue so much as an electronic series of handshakes and nodding of heads; I mentioned that I first learned of Pinker’s article via Facebook, and ultimately Twitter, and in that sense these media acted as little more than conduits in order to reach the meatier medium of the website article—a medium not capped at 140 characters. As a filter or aggregation of information, Twitter and its ilk succeed as well as can be expected; I frequent the software-oriented DZone for much the same reason. Perhaps Pinker is aware of a collective sigh of woe regarding the use of social media as a way to share information external to these services, but the chorus of criticism of which I am aware has little to do with that and more to do with diminishing the faculties of communication by sheer atrophy.

It can’t be said that using social media is somehow poisonous to these faculties; I know of innumerable people who manage to participate in such terse or thin media and manage to retain their verbal skills without any apparent effort. But it would be sheer folly to assume that our preferred or popular modes of discourse have no peripheral effect on how we act otherwise. But Pinker seems to think so:

The effects of consuming electronic media are also likely to be far more limited than the panic implies. Media critics write as if the brain takes on the qualities of whatever it consumes, the informational equivalent of “you are what you eat.” As with primitive peoples who believe that eating fierce animals will make them fierce, they assume that watching quick cuts in rock videos turns your mental life into quick cuts or that reading bullet points and Twitter postings turns your thoughts into bullet points and Twitter postings.

He seems to obliquely reference his prior examples of comics and video games, dismissing the common assumption that, e.g., watching violent media necessarily make one a violent person. The topical parallel suggests that similarly, reading 140-character tweets does not truncate one’s internal monologues at 140 characters as well. But might communicating in 140-character tweets have such an effect? I can’t say one way or the other, but I can say with relatively authority that the longer I go between writing entries on my blog, the more difficult it is to resume doing so. As with most tasks both physical and mental, practice is the key to ongoing success; the doomsday scenario implied by these media’s harshest critics is a motley group of teens whose communicative and contemplative faculties are entirely destroyed by the diminishing trend of online dialogue. At the same time Pinker denies this absorptive effect, he also stresses the need to remove oneself from said media—”develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life”—which would seem to indicate that he believes even the lovely and novel can ultimately be detrimental if they demand too much of our time and attention. A great many users of such media—one might even say the vast majority—manage a separation of concerns; what worries the worriers, of course, is the remaining portion for whom these media have the described deleterious effect: I have known classmates who, because they relied on Powerpoints, did not in four years of university develop even a passable acuity for speaking in front of groups.

A Disparity of Objects

Speaking of universities:

It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.

With this single paragraph, it seems as though Pinker has not understood at all the very criticisms he has been deflecting. I would of course agree that institutions of higher education, along with the continued exercise of the intellect, are necessary for said “deep reflection”. Of course, the “analysis, criticism, and debate” to which he refers are the very items on the cultural chopping block—Twitter, for all its many merits, does not have the proper facilities for an organized or reasoned conversation, and while perhaps we’d like to think of each tweet as a doorway to something more interesting, we all know that a great many are the more sickly and pallid tabloid variety.

Perhaps the crux of my disagreement comes down to how Pinker sees the very nature of social media: “efficient access to information on the Internet” and “Facebook” or “Twitter” are synonymous only in the most crudely general of ways. No one expects that without glib and carefree media of this sort we’d all turn into lexicographers and physicists with tweed jackets, but neither is it fair to say that media which is a product of our own glib and voyeuristic tendencies, and which conducts itself as such, is equivalent to real collaborative effort or collected knowledge: in other words, Twitter may point you to a Wikipedia entry, but in that case only the Wikipedia entry itself constitutes any real form of information aside from (maybe) the tweeter’s succinct binary opinion. As a method of collating or evaluating full-text information, therefore, social media has some function, but at the cost of indulging those of our impulses which aren’t interested in the “constant upkeep” of our contemplative faculties.

In other words, I’m not sure what idealized technologies Pinker has been looking at, but those I’m aware of aren’t nearly so pure. The arguments he cites against Twitter and Powerpoint remain largely unanswered, neatly sidestepped in favor of defending some utopian vision of electronic media in general as a necessary filter which allows us to comfortably engage the widening gyre of global information—not to mention a glib, hapless shrug at the notion that radically changing primary means of communication will somehow have an effect on individuals and culture as a whole. It is oddly delinquent of Pinker, from whom I’ve come to expect so much better.

The Wild Things by Dave Eggers

Everyone does or should know about Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, a seminal children’s book that has brought joy to (dare I say?) millions of childrens and adults alike—perhaps even more by adults than by children. It’s a simple story of a naughty young boy who flees to his imagination and back again, but of course much ink has been expended to justify it, parse it, explain it, and praise it, and it’s been built into more of a cultural phenomenon than a book.

Since it was already an opera and a cartoon, it was only a matter of time before it became a movie in 2009. Everyone knew that Spike Jonze (he of Adaption fame, as well as other Charlie Kaufman scripts) directed it, but what I didn’t know until well after the initial spate of movie trailers is that Dave Eggers—the writer, publisher, and philanthropist—had done the screenplay. And it wasn’t until even later that I realized he also did a novelization, which brings us to The Wild Things.

It is perhaps telling that the title is not Where the Wild Things Are: the novel but is rather a whole different idea which lay at right angles to the original work. There is, after all, only so much you can expand a children’s book without resorting to invention. Eggers fleshes out the character and story of Max: in the original book, he’s simply a naughty boy in a wolf costume; in the novel, he’s the second of two children of an overworked divorced mother, and his older sister has recently passed the point in age where she suddenly wants nothing to do with her stupid little brother. This part is more or less a transcription of the sense of alienation we’ve all felt at some point as children; I remember vividly my desire to be thought of as cool by my older sister’s friend, when only a few years prior she had been playing directly with my brother and I.

Eggers has gotten very good at this transcription of real life. The book for which is mostly known (AHBWOSG) is mostly biographically, but the rhetorical style is so excessive that it feels more like creative fiction. In this new spate of books—What is the What; Zeitoun—Eggers seems to have found his niche dramatizing the interesting lives of others. Even The Wild Things fits into this trend, I think, because writing it seems more like dramatizing a person than creating a new fiction; Max is already the offspring of Sendak, and he’s grown up with a generation of readers. Now Eggers is telling more of Max’s story, just like Abdulrahman Zeitoun or Valentino Achak Deng.

It is not long—though after some context-building which may at first disorient fans of the original—before Max, resplendent in his wolf costume, is sailing across an imaginary sea and comes across a fantastic island, populated by the Wild Things, a various assortment of strange-looking beasts. When he comes across them, they are the process of destroying their own houses; Max, who loves a good round of destruction, joins in with fire, teaching the Things how to raze the structures to the ground. It is not until afterward that the beasts go from being impressed by his skill at destruction to perturbation that they have destroyed their houses. If you’re unfamiliar with The Wild Things, you may now begin to see their chimerical nature. Despite being homeless, the beasts—who have mostly normal names like Ira and Karen, and who speak in perfect English—decide against eating Max outright and instead elect him the king of the island.

I need not summarize itinerary of games, fights, and arguments which ensue prior to Max’s returning home. I will point out that while Sendak modeled the physical appearance of the Wild Things after his extended family, it becomes clear that when Eggers creates personalities for the Wild Things, he creates them as facets of Max’s own personality or that of his family. Rather than simply “rumpus” and finally send the Things to bed without supper, Max engages in a tricky series of political maneuverings, attempting to keep the Things happy, despite the fact that they don’t seem to get along with one another or even necessarily with him. Carol, the male leader, is the most charismatic and most dangerous of the things, at the crests of his relationship with Max are rivaled only by the potentially deadly troughs. The most willing to resort to destruction for fun, Carol is also surprisingly creative, but easily frustrated. His nemesis is Karen—whom I read as a proxy for Max’s mother—who is somewhat aloof and deliberate, but very kind. The other beasts lie somewhere in between, with the exception of Alexander, who dislikes and distrusts Max from start to finish. The apparent metaphor here is that these disparate Wild Things, taken as caricatures of Max’s psychological forces, make Max himself both joyfully creatives and willfully destructive. Though Max likes the beasts, he is constantly afraid of them because of their arbitrary nature, and some of them see his aloofness as proof that he isn’t such a great person. After all, one says, if you really care about Carol you’d let him eat you if he wanted to.

It’s not much of a secret what Eggers is doing: I wouldn’t go so far as to call it allegorical, as I don’t think he had a precise mapping in mind when he assigned these characteristics, but I like to think I have the right idea. Sendak himself said the book was about a child learning about anger, after all: Max’s own family members find it hard to trust him due to his arbitrary nature (the line between “joyful boy” and “wild thing” is fine indeed); this experience, surely, is a psychological table-turning for Max, who must now learn to live with himself qua a motley collection of dangerous beasts.

One danger of taking a fanciful work like Where the Wild Things Are and making it a novel like this is having to pay more attention to practical considerations. Eggers’ Max spends a lot more time worrying about his physical safety, or his growing hunger, or his strategy for winning the Things’ trust and beneficence. Eggers deals with such things skillfully, however, by acknowledging and then largely eliding them. Max (who spends perhaps or a week, maybe more, on this imaginary island) gets very hungry indeed, but while a typical character would be bound by this limitation, Eggers simply has Max recognize his hunger for human food and then fail to suffer any ill effects from the lack of it. In other words, the more realistic (if you can call it that) tone of the novel should not and ultimately does not interfere with the fantasy itself, and Eggers is a smart enough guy and sufficiently talented writer to appreciate this.

Liking Where the Wild Things Are will not automatically endear the move to you; similarly, The Wild Things will not be an instant hit with all fans of the original, since they really are two very different modes of storytelling. Eggers realizes this (see his Afterword) but hopes/expects that the novel will stand on its own merit. I will confess that I did not like The Wild Things as much as I like What is the What—possibly, Eggers was overly cautious when writing the former—but I maintain that it is still a strong work, and worth your time as a reader.

Perfect Rigor by Masha Gessen

I still remember reading for the first time about Grisha Perelman’s solution to the Poincaré Conjecture on Slashdot back in 2004. I knew nothing about the Poincaré Conjecture other than it was famous—one of those big question marks in mathematics like Fermat’s Last Theorem—and therefore big news.

What generated even more press than the solution to the math itself—which, by most journalistic standards, is a dead end—is the fact that the genius behind the proof is a very odd duck indeed. By the time this review is posted, Grigori “Grisha” Perelman has become a near-total recluse at his apartment in St. Petersberg, Russa, which he shares with his mother. He doesn’t talk to anyone—even his old friends—and has claimed to have left the field of mathematics entirely.

It would be disappointing indeed if Perfect Rigor ended up being a puff piece—the sort of pseudo-journalism that so angered Perelman in the slow rumbling response to his proof. Luckily, Masha Gessen is a much better writer than that. Gessen is perfect for this subject not simply because she is already a good writer, but because she, like Perelman, grew up Jewish in Russia, and from what I can gather from her narrative, she also spent some time in school for advanced mathematics, though obviously she became a writer and not a tormented mathematical genius.

If Perelman were German, or Spanish, or French, Gessen would not need to explain to her readers how mathematical education worked in those countries. Germany and Spain and France, for all their distinctiveness, probably all attack math—indeed, most education—the same way. But Russia is always different, especially when you’re talking about the Soviet era. It therefore becomes necessary for Gessen to expend a great deal of expository verbiage on Perelman’s predecessors and teachers, and how they came to be a part of that system. Perelman was Jewish (or at least had a Jewish name), and so the very strong Soviet culture of anti-Semitism was always working against him, exerted as it was through ridiculous official quotas on the number of Jews who could be admitted to top-tier universities, and the less official quotas on the number of Jewish-sounding kids who could compete in mathematics contests for the Russian teams. Because Perelman was always the brightest student, his teachers and coaches generally conspired to include him, sometimes at the expense of other very bright Jewish kids.

Because of this sometimes treacherous system, Perelman owes as much for his eventual success to his patrons as to his own unquestioned genius. Otherwise, a quiet kid with severe Asperger syndrome might have gotten swallowed up in a world—especially a Soviet one—that doesn’t care if you’re in the autism spectrum unless you’re also a useful prodigy.

Interestingly, Gessen doesn’t even broach the subject of Asperger syndrome until the end of the book, though readers familiar with the syndrome will be thinking about it all along. Perelman’s strict adherence to rules—even if he doesn’t like them, such as mandatory gym class in math school—and his single-minded pursuit of the problems set before him strike both Gessen and myself as textbook Asperger syndrome, though Gessen herself is quick to disclaim that such a diagnosis is impossible without actually talking to Perelman. What bothers me is that while Perelman was both dedicated and successful in his study and practice of mathematics, there was never anything said either by Gessen or those she interviewed about whether doing math actually made Perelman happy. His Asperger syndrome (if, indeed, he has it) seems so severe is to preclude any emotions but angry frustration; and, if his own statements are to be believed, he has now entirely eschewed the study of math to which he devoted the first forty years of his life. What does Perelman want? Gessen’s best guess is that he wants genuine recognition and appreciation for his mathematical achievements—not the million-dollar Clay Institute prize, not “co-authorship” recognition with the two slimy Chinese mathematicians who tried to piggyback on Perelman’s proof, and not the simpering, simplistic kind of recognition he got from the mainstream press (which, in its typical droll fashion, fixated far more on the monetary award than on the importance of the theorem). The mixed reaction to his proof—partly attributable to his refusal to publish via a refereed journal and partly attributable to the bruised egos of other mathematicians who and tried to and even partly succeeded in proving the Poincaré conjecture—was enough to drive the somewhat unstable Perelman into a meltdown of frustration.

Though I’ve painted Perelman as a person who follows a strict set of internal rules, he is not without contradiction. Whereas Grisha the young boy obediently participated in gym class despite his distaste for it because it was an known rule, Grigori the man refused to publish his proof in a refereed math journal, even though this is also a known rule in the academic world. Despite having become a near-recluse by 2006 who would tell interested visitors “I see no reason for us to meet,” he nonetheless granted a rather frank interview with two writers for The New Yorker that year. Gessen notes Perelman’s flouting of some rules but not others, but never offers much of an explanation for it, implicitly committing it to the “Troubled Genius” file in the back of the drawer. I like to think the answer lies in one of Gessen’s first precepts: though he may seem like a Russian robot which cranks out answers to math problems and can’t function in the real world, there is much more to Perelman that is “normal”—that is, occasionally irrational like the rest of us—than we initially expect.

Considering that Gessen, unlike the two New Yorker writers, never got to interview Perelman personally, I think she’s done a fantastic job at painting a picture of him. Importantly, she’s painted a picture of him, and not simply of the Poincaré conjecture, or the post-proof brouhaha, or Grigori qua unkempt wunderkind. Read the linked New Yorker article to whet your appetite; if you want the full story, context and all, read Perfect Rigor. You won’t regret it.

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

I usually don’t cluster books by the same author together (unless they are a series), and under normal circumstances I would have read Blink so soon after reading Outliers, but I picked the book up for a song and needed a short read during this past week while I was preparing to move.

In short, Blink is a mixed bag.

I’m not the first to observe that Gladwell’s writing tends toward the facile; however, this is pop psychology/sociology, so it’s no surprise that Gladwell’s 320-page book about a particular psychological phenomenon is less a rigorous scholarly work and more of a Bill Nye the Science Guy for book-lovers. That it can be argued Gladwell talks about causation when there is merely correlation can be forgiven, I suppose, by how otherwise interesting his books are.

Blink is a book about instinct; specifically, it’s about the mind’s unconscious ability to draw immediate conclusions that defy conscious explanation. It’s also about the occasional failure of the mind to correctly react under stress: Gladwell’s notable illustration for this phenomenon is the 1999 shooting of Amadou Diallo. If you’re the sort who indicted the officers involved, you may not appreciate Gladwell’s treatment, which is quite sympathetic. Importantly, though, Gladwell cites other studies elsewhere in the book that not only (appear to) confirm a sort of latent racism in most people (himself included, and he’s half-black), and a tendency to associate black skin with violence.

If I were to level a criticism against Gladwell (apart from his slippery tendency to imply causation when it suits him), it would be that his tendency to jump from story to story (or to nest more or more stories within a story), tends to detract from the flow. He also has an irritating habit of trying to develop the people he references as characters. Even a casually mentioned scientist who only sticks around for two pages has to be prefaced with a description of his hair, build, and/or personality. It’s the sort of writing cliché that I would expect him to eschew at this point in his career.

Additionally, Blink did not feel nearly as coherent to me as Outliers, wherein Gladwell had a monolithic point. Here, rather, he spends have the book arguing for something (it’s a little unclear), and then spends the next half arguing against it, and ends on an ambiguous story that doesn’t do a very good job of tying things up.

Eminently readable, to be sure, but certainly not Gladwell’s best book.

Snoop by Sam Gosling

I have a weakness for popular science books, even though that sometimes steers me dangerously close to quacks or shallow popsci frauds (think pretty much all of Oprah’s guests….). I picked up Snoop on the strength of its review on Amazon.

Some of you may be familiar with Room Raiders, a sickly sort of reality television show airing on MTV since 2003. In it, three young men or women have their rooms “raided”—that is, inspected—by a member of the opposite sex; at the end, the inspector’s room is summarily raided by the contestants. Any pictures of the people are covered up: the goal is to surmise as much about the person as possible based on the state, condition, and content of his or her room. It’s actually an interesting premise—as we shall see—ruined in this case by the fact that its stars are about keg stand away from being mentally retarded.

Drawing psychological conclusions—Gosling hesitates to use words like “diagnoses”—from the contents of rooms is the central premise of both Dr. Gosling’s research and therefore of this book. Jay Dixit’s review for the Washington Post began like this:

In 1942, as the United States was entering World War II, the Office of Strategic Services — the precursor to today’s CIA — was scrambling to find promising spies to go behind enemy lines. One of the aptitude exams it developed was the Belongings Test, in which candidates had to draw conclusions about a man based purely on items in his bedroom: clothes, a timetable, a ticket receipt.

This is intriguing; had the book been more historical survey about the history of this kind of research and less a novelization of Room Raiders with a gloss of scientific respectability, I think perhaps I would have been more impressed. But whenever he waxed expository, Gosling tended to work with broad MTV-style brushstrokes. I felt as though it worked hard to appear imbued with an exciting kind of voyeurism, but with the exception of Gosling’s concrete correlative data that he cites from his various studies, much of what’s said is common-sense ideas.

This exception deals with what Gosling refers to as The Big Five, which are five fundamental personality traits. What Gosling found about the correlation between rooms and Big Five scores is tripartite:

1. Some obvious correlations exist, and likewise there are some Big Five factors that are very closely tied to information gleaned in “snooping.”
2. Other observational data becomes a red herring: the conclusion that observers are likely to draw has no apparent correlative basis.
3. Some Big Five traits don’t have observable correlations in the realm of snooping.

As a matter of course, Gosling ends up preferring the “Belgian” model (so named because it is used by Hercule Poirot) of using a variety of smaller clues to piece together a more coherent model.

What ultimately bothered me about Snoop was that I felt Gosling spent too much time farting around with marginal examples and somewhat rambling stories and not nearly enough time moving his point across, if indeed he had a coherent point to begin with. The data being someone scattershot, it seems as though it’s conclusion was little more than “Snooping can tell you a lot about someone. Or not.” This, to me, does not make for a satisfying read.

Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

This post may contain spoilers; most of the data it will disclose are easily predictable within the first quarter of the book, and as such I consider them fair game. If you genuinely do not want to know the book’s plot, please do not read this review.

I don’t remember exactly how I came across Atmospheric Disturbances; it was likely an Amazon recommendation, and I can’t say for sure what inspired me to pick it up other than I found it at the library and it’s premise—namely that a man suddenly decides that his wife has been replaced by an identical imposter—piqued that curiosity which is aroused by such things

This is Galchen’s first novel, and it has been compared by critics to Thomas Pynchon as well as Haruki Murakami and even Paul Auster. I can say with some certainty that’s it’s not really reminiscent of Pynchon unless you’re being extraordinarily generous; I haven’t read any Murakami and can’t compare on that front; the Auster comparison makes more sense to me, though I think it’s only applicable in terms of environment, and not particularly of writing style.

The 50-year-old psychologist narrator of Atmospheric Disturbances, Dr. Leo Liebenstein realizes one day that his much younger wife, Rema, is no longer around; in her place is a woman identical to Rema, who insists that she is Rema, and who our narrator convinces himself is not because of small discrepancies between this woman and the Rema in his mind. This is a type of mental disorder known as a Capgras delusion, part of a family of delusion misidentification syndromes. There is, of course, the brash irony of a psychologist being unaware of such textbook symptoms, but that is the nature of an illness, I suppose. In any case, he forms elaborate conspiracy theories, the fanciful flight of which comprise most of the book.

Here’s where I will spoil the ending for you. Maybe. The narrator really does suffer from Capgras delusion; there is no hidden revelation; there’s no truth to any of his invented conspiracies or weather-controlling organizations. He spends several days in such a delusion, and eventually goes home with Rema, confessing to his readers that he will maintain delusion for the rest of his life.

In other words, there’s no ending to spoil, because Atmospheric Disturbances has no discernible plot; more accurately, the plot it does have has no discernible vector. The narrator goes to Argentina, and Patagonia, and back to the States, but each time does so largely to sit in his room and ruminate on the manifold reasons why this “impostress” can’t possibly be Rema. His thoughts, however unfounded and obviously wrong to readers, are nonetheless of a very psychological bent: this has the twofold effect of being very pedantic but giving the narration a degree of verisimilitude. In other words, we may appreciate the straightforward and proper mechanics but despise the effect all the while.

If there is no plot or vector to speak of, the point of the novel must therefore be its character development. It is true that readers come to understand, slice by slice, the dynamic of Leo and Rema’s relationship. Leo has, it would appear, crippling insecurity issues due to Rema’s beauty and her relative youth. Mostly, they’re a weird sort of couple, prone to fits of melancholy and caprice; while it’s clear that they do genuinely seem to care for each other, there’s nothing about them that makes the reader empathize with their plight or particularly care what happens to them. How appropriate, then, that nothing of interest does happen to them.

The initial mystery and elaborate structure of the novel were such promising starts, but it ultimately was little more than a curio, a writing exercise that went on for too long. It utterly lacks the sort of dynamism that I look for in books, and I can’t with good conscience recommend it to anybody.

Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom

Were you to take seriously Paco Underhill’s forward to Buyology, or the publisher’s jacket press, you’d likely be under the impression that Martin Lindstrom is the second cousin of Jesus in the marketing world. Actually, I can’t dispute or verify that: relatively well-published, Lindstrom very well may be a branding guru among those in the know.

I picked up Buyology because I’m in that kind of mode from my MBA classes, and the premise of the book (buying decisions are largely unconscious) intrigued me. Except for Lindstrom’s penchant for repetition and the “This is going to blow your mind!” hype, I thought it was actually a good book.

The opening of the book tended to repeat itself: Lindstrom would present a typical marketing notion (say, that a logo is an important branding technique) and that promise that what he learned would totally turn the science of marketing on its head. Repeat. It got really aggravating after a while, and had it not finally subsided and given way to decent material, I would have chucked this book with little regret. Let that be a lesson to you writers: less self-serving exposition, more meat and potatoes.

Lindstrom recently headed a scientific study to use FMRI technology to compare people’s conscious responses to marketing inquiry to what’s actually going on inside their heads. Lindstrom’s first example is that of smokers who, though they said that the sometimes-graphic warning labels on cigarettes actually suppressed their desire to smoke, FMRI showed that they actually activated the craving centers of their brains. Their conscious revulsion to the explicit images had nothing at all to do with the way their brain connected the familiar (if disgusted) image to the satisfaction of its chemical addiction.

Much of the book goes on that way, much of it having to do with taking previous notions of successful marketing and branding and turning it on its head. Some of it deals with the FMRI, but I think the majority cited other studies or Lindstrom’s own previous experience. Regardless of book jacket press, he is a bona fide marketer, having worked with a lot of firms, so I have to give him credit in that respect. It was genuinely interested to read about his experience with the Mars Corporation, Nokia, and others.

Though “neuromarketing,” as Lindstrom calls it, is certainly an interest fields, and certainly marks the likely future of marketing research, it is hardly groundbreaking to anybody whose spent any time studying psychology or sociology. Ultimately, it’s the realization that what people say in focus groups doesn’t accurately predict how they will react in a real market situation. In this way, Buyology‘s hype falls a little flat, since it pulls back the velvet curtain on what amounts to a simple magic trick.