The New York Times covers New York Jets strength and conditioning coach Sal Alosi’s bizarre intentional tripping of Miami Dolphins cornerback Nolan Carroll.
I suppose these things are to be expected from a team that just lost their previous game 45-3 and ended up losing to the Dolphins 10-6 as well.
New York Tim
es columnist Thomas Friedman can be forgiven for getting a little repetitive at times. (After all, there are only so many ways you can mention China without accidentally saying the same things over again.)
But he seems to have taken things a little too far with his latest column published on December 11, titled “Reality Check.” In the article, which revolves around the American role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Friedman argues: “You can’t want peace more than the parties themselves, and that is exactly where America is today. The people running Israel and Palestine have other priorities. It is time we left them alone to pursue them — and to live with the consequences.”
He may have a point, but it appears that he stole the idea from another article written a year earlier…by himself. In his column from November 7, 2009, “Call White House, Ask for Barack,” Friedman boldly declares: “This peace process movie is not going to end differently just because we keep playing the same reel. It is time for a radically new approach. And I mean radical. I mean something no U.S. administration has ever dared to do: Take down our “Peace-Processing-Is-Us” sign and just go home.”
The op-ed section has never been The New York Times’ strongest department, and such lazy writing will only serve to drive this point home. As for Thomas Friedman, who is almost as obsessed with “clean energy” as he is with China (a paradox of sorts in and of itself), at least give the man credit for consistency: he’s so green-friendly, he recycles his own columns.
“Islam is not just a belief; it is a way of life, a violent way of life. Islam is imbued with violence, and it encourages violence.”
These words were written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her memoir, Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations. Ali is an ex-Muslim, a Somalian-born intellectual who has also lived in Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Ethiopia, and, lastly, the Netherlands, before emigrating to the United States. Her bellicosity with regard to Islam has made her a marked woman, a status that is less figurative (her sharp rhetoric is a rarity in Western academia) than literal (she employs round-the-clock security as a result of death threats by fundamentalist Muslims).
Unlike most of her scholarly peers on both sides of the Atlantic, Ali has experienced firsthand the consequences of draconian Islamist laws, resulting punishments for non-adherence, and stringent sexual mores. As a woman, she also possesses an acute sense of the added burden imposed on her gender by radical Islam, a condition she unequivocally deems “the biggest obstacle to the integration and progress of Muslim communities in the West.” The daughter of verbally and physically abusive parents, sister of a violent brother, victim of genital mutilation, and escapee from an arranged marriage with a man whom she barely knew, Ali is uniquely positioned to editorialize on Islam, both its quotidian and extraordinary features, and the challenges it poses for modernized nations.
Why, then, has her critical reception been so muted? During interviews for positions with American think tanks, Ali’s interlocutors were “effusively polite, but…their support for me and my ideas was tentative;” one interviewer “seemed overly concerned with the possibility that I might offend Arab Muslims.” Prior to this, “when [she] began speaking out in Holland against genital mutilation…[she] was constantly told that immigrants to Europe knew that this practice was against the law in Europe, so it just didn’t happen to children once they got to Holland” (emphasis hers). New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, in an uncharacteristically fierce tone, wrote of Nomad: “Now Hirsi Ali is working on antagonizing even more people in yet another memoir,” and in a later paragraph, he followed this up with the truly appalling observation that “perhaps Hirsi Ali’s family is dysfunctional simply because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another: ‘I love you.'” Ultimately, he patronizingly conceded that Ali would make “a terrific conversationalist at a dinner party.”
To be sure, Ali is not one to mince words. Nomad is dotted with unflattering portraits of Islam’s lesser-known practices; and her condemnations, stated without qualification, would evoke stammers and blushes among the well-bred liberal intelligentsia in her sphere. (Although she now works at the American Enterprise Institute, Ali expresses a nebulous wish “to alter [the status quo], radically” in an attempt to disabuse her detractors from branding her an American-style conservative.) “Can you be a Muslim and an American patriot?” she asks, in a chapter on American Muslims. “You can if you don’t care very much about being a Muslim.” Elsewhere, she berates the “closet Islamist” scholar Tariq Ramadan for his book, In the Footsteps of the Prophet, calling it “a badly written piece of proselytism” and claiming that “he doesn’t deserve the title of professor or a university chair from which to propagate his program of medieval brainwashing.”
Ali’s presence, then, in post-9/11 America comes at a uniquely discomfiting moment for political and religious scholars here. It is impossible to dismiss her outrage as right-wing demagoguery aimed at undermining the current political milieu in Washington; and yet, her no-holds-barred rhetoric on the subversive attributes of Muslim indoctrination feels wholly out of place in an arena largely populated by cautious (and occasionally self-loathing) multiculturalists. (For this last group she has no patience: “the culture of the Western Enlightenment is better,” she writes [emphasis hers].) What has emerged from the fallout, then, is a tacit buffer zone wedged by gun-shy scholars — what she terms “the emotional equivalent of patting my hand” — that leaves Ayaan Hirsi Ali out in the cold, defensive and smarting from a mild form of academic blacklisting.
Of course, Ali is not without her admirers. Paul Berman, in his indignant book The Flight of the Intellectuals, laments that “the campaign in the intellectual press against Hirsi Ali seems to me unprecedented — at least since the days when lonely dissident refugees from Stalin’s Soviet Union used to find themselves slandered in the Western pro-communist press.” Christopher Hitchens, likewise, has condemned her negative treatment in the Netherlands as “a supposedly liberal society collaborating in its own destruction.”
And yet these and other endorsements of Ali serve only to complicate her stature. Anti-Muslim hysteria has swirled relentlessly in recent months. The vitriolic debate over the “Ground Zero mosque” seems to have uncovered nearly a decade’s worth of barely concealed animosity among some conservatives towards adherents of Islam. During this same period, the standard liberal stance has been to dutifully emphasize the sheer minuteness of radicalism within the enormous sphere of global Islam. American attitudes toward Muslims appear to be approaching a watershed moment as both sides have steadily entrenched their positions. Where the left perceives bigotry, the right decries political correctness, which the left maintains is simply the protection of constitutional rights, which the right then argues must be understood in the context of a war on terror. Never have the bookends of the political spectrum been more repulsed by each other.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali stands somewhere in the rapidly vanishing middle ground. Despite her tumultuous journey out of Islam, she does not exhibit the utter forfeiture of rationality that plagues those with far less cause. Principal among this latter group are the ubiquitous talking heads, but also some pundits from traditionally more respected media outlets. In one particularly disturbing editorial last month, New Republic editor-in-chief Marty Peretz notably declared that “Muslim life is cheap” and added, “I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.”
In contrast to the tactics employed by the most successful American shock jocks, Ali anchors her anti-Islamic message with the authority befitting one who speaks from experience. This does nothing to placate her leftist critics, who have all but fallen all over themselves acknowledging her personal fortitude while disavowing themselves of her conclusions. Armed with her impeccably authentic travails as an ex-Muslim woman, Ali embodies the ultimate headache for today’s Western liberal narrative, one in which cultural sensitivity is seen as an end unto itself.
However, while her presence causes complications among certain political factions, these unsympathetic commentators are not entirely self-serving either. In decrying Islamic tyranny, for example, Ali fails to acknowledge the relative successes of Turkey (99% Muslim), Indonesia (86% Muslim, and one of the world’s most populous democracies), and even Malaysia (60% Muslim). To lambaste a religion as the cause of many ills (in mostly smaller nations) while ignoring its more positive implementations (often in very large nations) is clearly not an oversight. It is a deliberate omission.
Ali’s shortsightedness compels her to ignore other encouraging signs of progress in the Muslim world as well. In a September 26 New York Times article titled “The Female Factor: A Path to Financial Equality in Malaysia,” Liz Gooch reports that “the number of female faces [in the Islamic finance sector] is multiplying.” One female Malaysian scholar noted that three-quarters of her university students are female. The author notes that “the roll call of female high achievers in this Southeast Asian nation cuts across almost all aspects of the [financial] sector.”
Perhaps the most aggravating aspect of Ali’s writing is her naivete in regards to both the West and the history of Christianity — which, despite her atheism, she sees as a force for good in the culture clash with Islam. In her frequent comparisons of the two faiths, it becomes increasingly obvious that Ali has sacrificed nuance for pathos. She continuously emphasizes the compatibility of Christianity with Enlightenment philosophy, and uses this marriage to illuminate the discordant relationship Islam shares with education and the sciences. Throughout her polemic, however, Ali fails to comprehend the parallels between contemporary events and religious history, and thus a possible road to a peaceful Islamic future: the ideological trajectory pioneered by Christianity centuries ago had its origins in an anti-intellectual era that very much resembles that of the Muslim world today. Just as the Christian faith has not always been as accepting as it is today (especially as depicted in Ali’s overly sympathetic portrayal), Islam has not always been, nor need always be, as insular and defensive as it is now.
In fact, Ali appears to observe this when she writes, “Christianity too once made a magical totem of female virginity. Girls were confined, deprived of education, married off as property. And yet Christian societies today are largely free of this habit of mind. Cultures shift, often very rapidly.” And yet somehow she is incapable of imagining the portability of this concept to another monotheistic religion. The result is a particularly deplorable quandary: the West has indeed found an authoritative voice that cuts between the dual extremism of the vitriolic right and the self-flagellating left. In other (perhaps less polarizing) times, this splitting of differences would be called a compromise. Here, it only adds to the confusion.
Others have already called Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland a masterpiece, summoning specters of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and even “[providing] a resonant meditation on the American Dream” (so enthuses the New York Times‘ vaunted book reviewer Michiko Kakutani).
I will not be doing that. I hesitate not out of disagreement but due to some innate reluctance to place contemporary books amidst the pantheon of Great Literature. I’m not well-read enough in either area to be sure I’m connecting the right dots in the right way. And yet one can’t help but get the feeling, while devouring O’Neill’s magnetic writing, that he has managed to capture the American zeitgeist in a way few others have.
O’Neill zeroes in on post-9/11 New York, but with the unique perspective afforded to an outsider. For Hans van den Broek, a Dutch-born equities analyst who had previously lived in London, home is Manhattan, even as childhood memories of The Hague and frequent dashes to and from London create a sort of love rectangle, with each city vying for his attention. To Holland belongs his nostalgia, but it is London, where his increasingly estranged British wife and adoring son have retreated following the Twin Towers’ collapse, to which Hans continues to return, both in mind and in body.
New York is just where he lives. And yet therein lies the secret to O’Neill’s subtle ode to the city: he neither waxes poetical nor transforms New York into the gritty metropolis so ubiquitous in crime dramas. Yes, he revels in the occasional admiring glance. (Of Times Square, Hans concedes that “I always regarded these shimmers and vapors as one might the neck feathers of certain of the city’s pigeons — as natural, humble sources of iridescence.”) But O’Neill’s focus, and thus that of Hans, is drawn instead to its myriad characters, most notably that of Chuck Ramkissoon.
Chuck is a Trinidadian who, and here we can echo reviewers worldwide by drawing parallels to Jay Gatsby, dreams of leveraging his love of cricket into a burgeoning business empire, dedicated equal parts to revenue generation and also to a bizarre strand of ecumenism. “I’m saying that people…are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket,” Chuck declares to Hans one day, in a characteristic burst of grandiloquence. “What’s the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral angle. I really believe this.”
By that measuring stick, Chuck doesn’t play enough cricket himself. As Hans finds himself increasingly drawn into the sport that marked his youth, Chuck wedges his way in too, serving as Hans’ instructor, ostensibly preparing him for his impending driving test. In reality, Hans soon learns of Chuck’s ulterior motives. “It gave Chuck a measure of cover, maybe even prestige, to have a respectable-looking white man chauffeuring him while he ran around collecting bets all over Brooklyn.”
Chuck’s unsavory business dealings soon leave Hans with a sour taste in his mouth, one that fades only with geographical distance as Hans finally bids New York adieu in search of reigniting a future with his wife, Rachel. Soon after the World Trade Center attacks, Rachel had coldly expressed to Hans her intention to take Jake, their son, with her to London. “It’s safer,” she reasoned. For his part, Hans bitterly noted that “all lives…eventually funnel into the advice columns of women’s magazines.” Now, with weeks and months of separation accumulating with ever-decreasing notice, Hans returns to the United Kingdom to salvage the wreckage of what was once a marriage.
In a sense, Hans truly is the Nick Carraway of Netherland, narrating from the sidelines, an objective third party to people, places, and events that intimately affect his own life, from his wife to the cities through which he passes. He may leave the dreaming to Chuck, but Hans van den Broek’s observations virtually force readers to close their eyes and open their imaginations.
Philip Pullman’s provocatively titled The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ is but one member of a collection of books known as The Myths Series. According to the blurb at the back of the book, this compilation “brings together some of the world’s finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way.” Pullman is the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, which includes Northern Lights, also known as The Golden Compass or the atheist rebuttal to The Chronicles of Narnia. I’m not sure whether this qualifies him as a card-carrying member of the World’s Finest Writers Club; but if The New York Times can laud John Grisham as “about as good a storyteller as we’ve got in the United States these days,” I suppose it is only fair for Pullman to have his moment in the sun too.
Of course, he earns his adulation a bit differently than the author of legal thrillers. Where Grisham imbues his characters with deeply held notions, often religiously invoked, of justice and individual responsibility, Pullman veers instead towards iconoclasm, tolerating Jesus the human while lamenting the Christianity he spawned. If you’re looking for groundbreaking material, you’ve come to the wrong place; this idea has been raised countless times before, not least of all in the thought-provoking (if a bit repetitive) biography Pilgrims of Christ on the Muslim Road, by the estimable clergyman Paul-Gordon Chandler.
It is admittedly a bit rarer to find this emotional juxtaposition expressed in such unabashedly heretical terms. Jesus and Christ as twin brothers? In Pullman’s deftly weaved universe, the former was a natural-born rebel from childhood, “getting into mischief, stealing fruit, shouting out rude names and running away, picking fights, throwing stones, daubing mud on house walls, [and] catching sparrows;” Christ, meanwhile, “clung to his mother’s skirts and spent hours in reading and prayer.”
As he approaches adulthood, Pullman’s Jesus gradually takes the comforting form familiar to Sunday school conceptualizations. However, Christ, who — at the urging of a mysterious Greek stranger — takes on the thankless role of Jesus’ stenographer, soon finds some aspects of Christ’s teachings troubling and others pedestrian. To remedy the first ailment, Christ resorts to historical revisionism, heeding the Orwellian words of his Greek mentor: “History belongs to time, but truth belongs to what is beyond time. In writing of things as they should have been, you are letting truth into history.”
The second problem was a bit thornier. Recognizing the value of organization, Christ attempts to persuade his brother to embrace something resembling a formal movement. Jesus rebuffs him, however, preferring his spontaneous charisma to what he perceives as the stolidity of an intellectual bureaucracy. Fortuitously, the approval of Christ’s enigmatic tutor allows for a bit of creative license. Thus, when Jesus scolds Peter for his belief in him as the Messiah, Christ writes instead that “Jesus had praised [Peter] for seeing something that only his Father in heaven could have revealed, and that he had gone on to make a pun on Peter’s name, saying that he was the rock on which Jesus would build his church.” (The Catholic Church should be duly horrified.)
As Christopher Hitchens notes in his review in The New York Times, Pullman is attempting to make explicit the divorce of Christianity from its roots. But the end result reads a bit like tracing the cause of a marital infidelity back to the couple’s lack of a Foreman grill. Christ, at times, substitutes for the devil, a journalist, and, weirdly, Judas Iscariot; in none of these roles does he truly take on any symbolic meaning. Philip Pullman has found and refashioned his myth of choice, with the primary corollary of further clouding Christ’s position within an already complex historical tradition.
Serves me right for taking the existence of a New York Times book review as an affirmation of the author’s grasp on plot. Or, for that matter, the English language. David Nicholls’ One Day was so clearly written with the inevitable feature-film in mind that I’m genuinely perplexed as to why he didn’t save himself some time and pen it in screenplay format from the start.
Never mind. He already did. It hits theaters next year, with Anne Hathaway starring. But back to the Times review. Liesl Schillinger wrote, “You may want to take care where you lay this book down,” ostensibly to avoid being burglarized, although I can hardly imagine why anyone would risk incarceration for such a microscopic reward.
Nicholls’ style of choice is italics, as in, “…and a silence followed while both of them thought oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God.” In this case the exaggerated emotions were owed to the tingling sensation reverberating down Emma Morley’s spine as Dexter Mayhew rubbed suntan lotion onto her back. Fittingly enough, I was spouting similar mental interjections by the time I reached chapter three of One Day — only in agony, not ecstasy. This overt sexual tension, by the way, is a prominent motif in Nicholls’ novel, which is always a bad sign, as are the expository thought-bubbles muddying the action everywhere. It’s as if the author couldn’t formulate a vehicle for conveying his creations’ intentions without spelling them out in their entirety.
Unfortunately for his readers, Nicholls’ characters do quite a lot of thinking — 435 pages of it, in fact, interspersed with the requisite bursts of campy dialogue. Come to think of it, One Day could spawn some terrific drinking games. For example, take a shot every time you read “Dex and Em, Em and Dex” — a tired literary trope that, according to Google Books, David Nicholls trotted out five times. It’s almost as if he is trying to tell us something, that fox.
On the bright side, one need never fear having neglected to catch some symbolism here or conceit there: One Day hardly traffics in ambiguity. It goes without saying — perhaps the only case in which Nicholls recognizes the value of omission — that Dexter and Emma are meant to be together. Consequently, there is a definite sense that their eventual conjoining is a matter of “when,” and not “if.” Subtlety, in One Day, entails merely implying, instead of actually describing, what takes place once two lovers remove some clothing and climb into bed together. Actually — “his hand was on the base of her spine, his leg slipping between hers,” I read on page 7 — even this is a bit generous.
But first, the requisite false hopes, punctured dreams, and the like. As this is a romantic comedy in book form, both Dexter and Emma must date their fair share of red herrings. And thus Chapter Twelve opens: “Then, without quite knowing how it happened, Dexter finds that he has fallen in love, and suddenly life is one long mini-break.” Her name is Sylvie and, in Dexter’s smitten vocabulary, “she is great, just great, just…amazing! She is beautiful of course, but in a different way from the others…” And here I will spare you the rest, for the sake of brevity and the prevention of mental decay.
Of course, Emma needs a worthwhile distraction to pass the time while Dexter dates his procession of disreputable women. To this end, she meets Ian at the restaurant where she works, Loco Caliente, and is beset with the vague notion that his is “a face that made her think of tractors.” No explanation is supplied or, frankly, possible. Nicholls alternates buoyantly between bountiful exclamations on one page and perplexing similes on another; gradually, all words lose their meaning, buried under a cascade of childlike emotion punctuated by frequent bouts of excessive capitalization.
It is said that movies are almost universally poor representations of the books from which they were adapted. For the sake of future moviegoers everywhere, I sincerely hope David Nicholls is a better screenwriter than novelist.
About halfway through reading The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris, I found myself perusing its review online at the New York Times. Jay McInerney was less than glowing in his evaluation, deeming Ferris’ first novel, Then We Came to the End, a “masterly debut,” before lamenting that “it’s difficult to believe that ‘The Unnamed’ and ‘Then We Came to the End’ come from the same laptop.” The review concludes on a wistful note, with McInerney willing the author to “return to the kind of thing at which he excels.”
So then, perhaps he’d like a sequel? It is true that The Unnamed marks a sharp departure from Then We Came to the End, which was a highly comical yet ultimately shallow plunge into office hijinks and melodrama. (In fact, Ferris’ first book was probably a closer — and slightly older — cousin to Jonathan Tropper’s This Is Where I Leave You, which arrived on bookshelves late last summer, than it is to The Unnamed. Both books awkwardly mingle frivolity with heavier matters of the soul, with many passages leaving readers simultaneously laughing and yet unsure of whether that was an appropriate response to, say, the protagonist sleeping with his brother’s wife. I’ve seen Adam Sandler movies with more emotional verve.) But these differences are hardly a knock on Ferris’ progression as an author. In fact, while I was contemplating buying The Unnamed on Amazon.com, I noticed that the book’s page featured a video conversation between Ferris and David Sedaris. At the time, this meeting of the minds seemed apt, but the congruency disappeared upon completing The Unnamed.
Unlike Jay McInerney, I do not find it unthinkable that Joshua Ferris’ two novels share the same author. In both books he displays his keenness for irony and wit, and in both books his characters seem ever so slightly unbelievable, even while their antics compel you — inevitably and without hesitation — to keep turning the pages. In the case of The Unnamed, the main character is Tim Farnsworth, a partner at a prestigious Manhattan law firm. Farnsworth has a mysterious condition: at times and without warning, he starts walking. And doesn’t stop. Or at least not for several hours, until his body gives way and the enigmatic force propelling him forward suddenly yields its mastery over his limbs. By the time he finally regains control over his forward motion, he is overtaken by an otherworldly slumber and often finds himself in unlikely places, such as crumpled in a heap by the East River, or even somewhere in New Jersey (which, I’ve learned, is so much farther away for a self-respecting Manhattanite than the actual geographical distance traversed).
Tim’s wife, Jane, has been his stalwart ally throughout his ordeals, which, as the story opens, have surfaced for the third time. While desperate for a cure, in his darker moments Tim knows he would almost be content just to find someone else with the same affliction, as vindication, proof that his is a purely physical aberration and not reflective of mental vulnerability. In despair, Tim tells his wife, “I’m the only one, Jane. No one else on record. That’s crazy.” However, the couple’s daughter, Becka, a maladjusted teenager with delicate weight issues, is skeptical of her father’s illness. In one exchange with her mother, she asks, “Have you ever Googled it? Google it and see what comes up.” “Google what?” Jane asks. “Exactly,” Becka replies, and it is immediately clear that Ferris has his finger on the pulse of filial dynamics.
Read simply, The Unnamed is a compelling love story — not in the traditional sense, but in an arguably purer form. There is nothing remotely sexy or alluring about Jane’s tireless efforts to rescue her husband (more from himself than from his illness), nor are Tim’s attempts to break free from his family to prevent their self-destruction at all representative of popular romantic themes. As a family, the Farnsworths are failures in many respects — Tim’s illness persists, Jane succumbs to alcoholism, and even Becka resigns herself to living with the body she has. Disappointment permeates every part of their lives, yet there is always the potential for a miracle, a reversal; and it is this paradox that characterizes their predicament. Joshua Ferris has combined his talent for lively dialogue and quirky characters and infused his narrative with a profound emotional depth and complexity that was simply not present in Then We Came to the End. That earlier novel claimed the hearts of legions of new fans, and The Unnamed has since broken them. Given the ease with which Ferris has already transported us through these two distinct worlds, it seems safe to expect more pleasant surprises down the road.