Condimentary History (Salt: A World History – Mark Kurlansky)

Few materials have undergone a transformation as dramatic as salt’s. For thousands of years, it was a precious commodity and a vital nutrient. At times it was even used as currency. Today it is usually the cheapest item by weight in a grocery store. It is demonized for its possible unhealthiness. The long, rich evolution of salt is chronicled in Mark Kurlansky’s Salt: A World History. Though not flawless, Salt is an enjoyable and enlightening exploration of the way this common rock has shaped human life through history.

A word of caution to my fellow history nerds: Salt is not a nitty-gritty work of economic history. If you yearn, as I half-did, for a complex analysis of the technical means used to produce, distribute, and consume salt throughout the ages, prepare for disappointment. When it suits him, Kurlansky can produce clear, detailed passages of political or economic history. His explanations of the fundamentals of the 18^th century Atlantic salt trade or how the French Revolution was influenced by the gabelle, the hated salt tax, were satisfying, but Kurlansky is happiest citing medieval cookbooks to show how Eastern European housewives used salt to pickle cabbages.

That quibble aside, Salt does a great job of using the title substance to illuminate the past. Salt’s versatility gives Kurlansky license to explore an assortment of diverse areas. He deals with basics, like the use of salt as a condiment and in food preservation, but he also discusses the Basque salted cod industry (and the intriguing question of whether wandering Basque fishermen reached the New World before the Vikings), a Roman sauce of fermented fish guts known as garum, and the relationship between salt mining and the petroleum industry.

Salt also delights by giving the reader concrete insight into the past. I poked fun at picked cabbage recipes earlier, but those sort of sources show how people actually lived (even if they are a bit fluffy for “serious” history.) The author uses numerous primary sources to illustrate the reality of many of the abstract facts he relates. No prose discourse can convey the importance of salt in everyday life as well as Confederate newspaper articles trying to provide ways for desperate Southern homes to function without salt.

When it reaches the modern day, the book loses some of its luster. Part of the problem is that salt is mostly used as a straight condiment, no longer to preserve foods or in curious sauces. Also, salt, now cheap and readily available, has lost much of its former mystique. Even so, I would have liked to see Kurlansky give a greater explanation of how the salt industry works in the present day and how exactly it got that way. More discussion of the health issues surrounding the substance would also have been welcome.

Salt has its weak points, but it also has a strong heart in its exploration of salt’s heyday, the time when sodium chloride was vital to human health, food preservation, and cuisine. To a modern reader, such a time is completely foreign, but Kurlansky brings it to life. This feat more than makes up for the book’s failings and leaves the reader with a fun, illuminating historical experience.

Meditations and Brief Thrills (Alice Walker – Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart)

It’s exciting to see the giants updating their output. Salman Rushdie has a new terrorism-centric novel; John Updike’s protagonists are aging into the twenty-first century, if to mixed reviews; and Alice Walker has given us Now Is The Time To Open Your Heart, where we can see her sensibilities applied to the modern world.

Now Is The Time’s cultural criticism is unsurprising in its wisdom and boldness; the American government is persistently decried, as are aspects of contemporary entertainment, with a despair that is more constructive and refined than is commonplace in the counterculture. Her characters, too, show flashes of the descriptive brilliance that keeps The Color Purple so close to our hearts. Unfortunately, these individually successful aspects of the novel are rarely combined.

The book often reads as a journal: dialogue seems a stage for aphorism, and the nature descriptions and episodes are more often connected on a metaphorical level than for the sake of a plot. When the characters interacting for their own sakes, the results are splendid — the protagonist, Kate, and her lover Yolo share some of the best scenes when they’re negotiating and growing in their relationship. I would have loved to read more such scenes, and meet more characters developed more than for the sake of a single incident or moral.

The longing is greatest when I read about Saartjie, who is imprisoned and frequently raped, and who commits a defensive murder. The fragments of her backstory are gripping, and in her dialogue with Kate a lovable and engaging character briefly emerges. Ultimately, though, we are left with a few symbols introduced through her and some commentary on Jet magazine. The result is excellent for what it is, but readers of novels want more.

I’m grateful to have read Now Is The Time; moving through its two hundred generously spaced pages is like handling a smooth jewel. But when I reread Walker, I won’t think twice before reaching instead for The Color Purple, where the ambition is higher, characters more robust, and effect greater.

Protagonist Ex Machina (Ascent – Jed Mercurio)

What if there was a man with exceptional gifts driven by a fierce desire to be a legend? Any reader of the Iliad will recognize that this question is as old as Western literature. Any reader of Jed Mercurio’s Ascent will find that a novel needs more than a heroic protagonist to succeed.

The main problem with the book is that its main character’s traits are often assumed rather than developed. Yeremin, the protagonist rising through the Soviet Air Force and later the space program, is a great pilot because Mercurio says he is. He wants to be a hero so badly because of a cursory childhood scene and because the author says so. Rather than being a real person for us to commiserate with or puzzle over, Yeremin is a golem animated by the properties Mercurio has written into him. However unusual or eccentric he may be, he lacks the spark of life.

Hampered by its inscrutable characters, Ascent becomes a boring litany of events: “Yeremin is a good pilot. Watch him fly really well. Yeremin really wants to be a hero. Look at all the sacrifices he makes.” It doesn’t help that the key space scenes read like a Russian rewrite of Apollo 13. Ex-doctor, ex-pilot Mercurio tries to pull us deeper into Yeremin’s world with technical jargon and biological detail but only succeeds in making the book confusing and gross by turns. (Though if there were an award for Most Gratuitous Use of the Word Rectum, Ascent would be a shoo-in.)

At a few shining moments, the book does convey some of the hero’s deep inner passion: “He has not risen so far to emulate the achievements of other men, to choose a glory amortized by repetition; his destiny must be the perfect mission, the unique mission….” These few moments salvage some meaning for the otherwise bland novel. In the end, however, Ascent cannot make up for its lack of a meaningfully human protagonist.

The Book Itself (Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace)

If David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest endures as it deserves to, future literary historians should find both humor and frustration in the fact that so much contemporary discussion of the book is in fact meta-discussion, with discourse on the text either absent or limited to whether or not the author believes the novel is in fact cohesive and/or gimmicky and/or masturbatory.

We’re doing ourselves a disservice. We should talk about Wallace’s innovation, and not just the footnoted endnotes. It is said that James Joyce characterized by using an omniscient narrator yet using the sorts of descriptions that the character himself would think of; Wallace expands on this technique in a way I’ve never seen before. There is a full spectrum of narrative position, from first-person through a third-person semiobjective narrator closely tied to one or another’s “brain voice” (as Wallace has described it) to more objective narrators in many gradations of distance from those brain voices. Therefore Wallace could choose, in each of Infinite Jest’s 1079 pages, not only among his dozens of engaging characters but among many more points of view than one is accustomed to experiencing in a single book. The effect is that of a top-shelf, high-budget adventure movie.

Also lost in the furor over whether Wallace is a social critic or postmodern flagbearer or just a verbal trickster is just how accurate his social insights are. Infinite Jest captures post-9/11 America uniquely well, and it was written before 9/11; Wallace is that attuned to the characteristic desires and emptinesses and needs and motives that 9/11 foregrounded.

When I read Infinite Jest I puzzled over the footnotes and squinted at the playful neologisms, but I also read stunning stories of loss and redemption and vivid descriptions of everything from woods to sports arenas. The emotional punches varied, and all were potent, but constant was Wallace’s peerless sense of detail: for example, some freak political occurrences lead to the election as President of a hypochondriac lounge singer who is “the first American President to use boss as an adjective.” It is reasonable for some to be turned off by Wallace’s style, but not for us to let his skills go uncelebrated.

A Long March (The Road – Cormac McCarthy)

The genre of the postapocalyptic has spawned a wide assortment of works: classics like A Canticle for Leibowitz, garbage like Battlefield Earth, and most of Phillip K. Dick’s catalog. Mainstream literature, though, has tended to avoid the device, probably because of its science-fictiony associations. That’s unfortunate, because the clean canvas of world without civilization and the strong emotions of desperate survivors can nourish great stories and characters. Cormac McCarthy demonstrates this in his latest novel The Road, which follows a father and son in their travels across the nuclear wasteland that the US has become.

McCarthy’s characteristically ornate prose contrasts powerfully with the brutal simplicity of the dialogue between the man and the boy. Of all the endless words the two might be saying about the world around them, they chose only to use a bare handful. Language thus serves as a metaphor for the decline of civilization.

Some commentators report shock at the gruesome violence the characters encounter. I was more disturbed by the way the post-apocalyptic society had warped the father-son relationship. Organized cannibalism may be appalling, but I found the real horror in the man’s frequent musings about whether it was time to kill his son to spare him further agonies.

Also troubling, though less viscerally, was the tension between hope and hopelessness that pervades the novel. Despite their desperate physical situation, the characters have not given in to despair. The very act of traveling down the road implies a hope that what’s over the horizon will be better than what’s before it. The characters’ journey, which begins as a simple migration to find warmer land before winter, becomes a metaphor for their refusal to accept the nightmare the world has become. The father repeatedly reminds his son that they are two of “the good guys,” bearing a torch of decency and goodness that must not be allowed to die. As their horrors and disappointments multiply, this faith and the hope it represents are tested to their breaking points.

At 250 pages rich in white space, The Road is a quick read. I found McCarthy’s complex and often indirect narration easier to follow than in Blood Meridian. Nevertheless, The Road is scarcely light reading. The subject matter is so grim and the book goes so quickly that I had to pause frequently to digest what I had read.

Though its setting is unusual, The Road succeeds brilliantly. McCarthy’s distinctive voice is at home in the bleak wasteland. The result is a unique reading experience that masterfully blends beauty and ugliness, violence and goodness, sadness and fragile hope.

Reading About Everything

They don’t write Books About Everything like they used to. I came of age puzzling through Godel, Escher, Bach’s broad, labrynthine exploration of the varied nature of selfhood. We don’t have a more recent match for GEB. A New Kind Of Science claimed to offer a complete picture of the world through the analysis of networks, but the few who finished it tend not to agree with Wolfram that the book is revolutionary. More readable books aim at breadth but simply abuse the process of metaphor, as James McManus does in his poker chronicle Positively Fifth Street, which is commendable but heavily salted with grand interdisciplinary generalizations.

All along, though, there has been Philosophical Explanations, a 1981 opus from Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. The book draws its title from the fact that Nozick prefers to conduct philosophy as an explanatory, not combative, endeavor. Therefore the tone is grandfatherly, that of a dazzling intellect leading us through subjects from “Understanding and Explaining Free Choices” to “Pluralism and Creativity” to “Ethical Explanation and Self-Subsumption.”

Explanations is everywhere readable and nowhere condescending. He draws from Nietzche and Kant, but also from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The freshness of the discourse is remarkable, in its vivifying examples and its head-spinning thought experiments (don’t miss the one about placebos).

Nozick is so readable that he is less a layman’s philosopher as more a man who finds meaning and interest in every corner of lay existence. He rightly blurs the line between philosophy and non-philosophy. Those looking for a Book About Everything could hardly do better.

Lies My Narrator Told Me (Baudolino – Umberto Eco)

Any postmodernist worth his salt could dash off a quick essay on the importance of myths and legends as interpretive structures. It takes an author like Umberto Eco to make the same point in adventure-novel format. His novel Baudolino, an immersive, easy-to-read exploration of the world of the late twelfth century, accomplishes that feat with grace. Eco probes concepts of lies, truth, meaning, and human understanding in the fresh, playful style that is uniquely his. The result is delightful.

In the first and better part of the book, the roguish Baudolino traipses across Europe. In his travels, he starts many of the myths and legends that thrived in the Middle Ages. In the second half of the story, Baudolino passes through the looking glass into the world of medieval legend. Seeking the kingdom of the legendary Prester John, Baudolino enters through a world populated by the skiapods, people with only one leg; the blemmyae, headless people with faces in their chest; and other fantastical creatures.

One of the best things about this complex novel is that many of its levels are easily accessible. At times, Eco’s novels exhibit an unfortunate obscurity that can mar the reading experience. Baudolino escapes this pitfall, remaining at all times an entertaining adventure story. Many of its themes can be readily understood on a quick reading.

One of the most intriguing and accessible facets is the way Eco explores the way we understand the world. Baudolino experiences life on both sides of legends. In Europe, he constantly makes up tales and lies, at times planting seeds that will change the course of society and at other times simply lying or deceiving to get himself out of a jam. In his Eastern adventures, he encounters all sorts of made-up people and places. Though these people are not real, they have very real lessons to offer. The way the skiapods and the blemmyae don’t realize that they belong to two different physical races, and yet obsess over their minor theological quibbles was particularly intriguing.

Though we pride ourselves on being hard-nosed empiricists, how much of what we believe is a legend, an exaggeration, or even an outright lie? How often do we tell those same tales ourselves, for selfish or altruistic motives? And most importantly, do these falsehoods take us towards or away from the truth? One of the critical ideas in the book is summed up by one character: “I am not asking you to bear witness to what you believe false, which would be a sin, but to testify falsely to what you believe true – which is a virtuous act.”

Many commentators on Baudolino have worried too much about how we can know when the inveterate fibber (who narrates his adventures in a frame story) is telling the truth and when he is lying. To do this misses the point. In a strictly factual sense, the entire book is a lie, because none of its characters did what Eco tells us they did. And on a deep level, the entire book is true, because its lies aim to bring understanding.

Getting To The Point (Best Music Writing 2006)

Writing about music is often molded by that central tension in art criticism: what matters about music is so often exactly what is incommunicable in writing. There are a few standard compensations. Research obsessively until the writing is armored in factual density; focus on cultural context to avoid je ne sais quoi-type issues; punt objectivity and get impressionistic.

Da Capo Press’s Best Music Writing 2006 uses all these techniques effectively. Robert Christgau, whom I like to imagine buying index cards by the thousands, contributes an essay on Billie Holliday; Greil Marcus fascinates with a study of the cultural legacy of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War;” and Miss Amp takes us for a fun, personal ride of an interview with Kevin Blechdom.

These are sharp analyses of the music world, but the collection is deficient in analysis of the music itself. A happy exception comes from Mike McGuirk, who has ten single-paragraph reviews peppered throughout the volume; elsewhere, the best writing correlates uncomfortably with the writing most peripheral to the music. (Two of the best selections are a discussion of domestic abuse in the hip-hop world and a Christian rock festival trip report/personal essay.)

Best Music Writing 2006 is worth reading, or at least picking through. The scope is admirably broad — opera to hip-hop; Beatles to Bloc Party; blog to, well, Robert Christgau — and every so often a writer cracks the shell and gives a clear view of the music (David Marchese’s excellent High On Fire essay has moments of this). Serious music fans, however, might be unsatisfied, or at least left itching to stop reading and get back to listening. For its myriad insights, the compilation is too much canvas and not enough paint.

A Book Whose Time Has Come and Gone (White Noise – Don DeLillo)

I almost never give up on books after I start them. I hate it. But I couldn’t finish White Noise, despite the fact that it is an intellectually engaging, well-written novel.

The major problem with White Noise is that its themes lack the urgency and power they had when the book was released in 1985. The extensive consumerism of American society, the growing absurdity of academia, and the disintegration of the family may have been at the forefront of intellectual life twenty years ago, to a modern reader, they are commonplaces. The fact that the book’s protagonist is a professor of Hitler studies is neither shocking nor absurdly comical. The idea that pollution will kill us all is a subject to read about in Newsweek.

A related problem is that the novel’s technical devices often fall flat. The book tries to develop an atmosphere of unreality, fear, and alienation but more often ends up looking silly. In one scene, several characters go to a supermarket, which the author tries to depict as cold, unsettling, and inhuman. But to the modern reader, the supermarket is no longer the monolithic destroyer of the family food store, but the wholesome alternative to fast food. When one of the characters mentions the mystical sinisterness of automatic doors, I found it hard not to laugh.

A contemporaneous New York Times review says, “There are suspense and an urgent intelligence to Mr. DeLillo’s writing, a sense of the widening gyre and the tight-drawn net.” Though White Noise is palpably intelligent, much of the urgency and suspense that once comprised its soul have vanished for a modern reader. What remains is a jumbled ruin, a sad and ultimately unreadable remnant of a formerly great book.

Looking Back (Joan Didion – Play It As It Lays)

If Joan Didion’s nonfiction overshadows her 1970 novel Play It As It Lays, a nation interested on the gambling world and the mistreatment of women will be depriving itself of a gem. In two hundred short pages, Didion depicts Maria, an actress, fighting the toxic effects of her environments, Hollywood and Las Vegas, and of the men in her life, and she does so with power.

Maria’s life and psychology motivate every line of the economical Play It As It Lays. The primary use of the limited third-person perspective often limits our understanding of the few other characters to their relations with Maria; the settings, while historically faithful, are macroscopic projections of her; and the surgical prose usually keeps the reader’s mind on Maria instead of flashy linguistic devices.

It is a joy to read an author with both control and power, and despite the current popularity of prose full of short sentences and back-and-forth-dialogue, there are not many who can employ the style as effectively as Didion. Despite the occasional distraction in a withheld fact or hyperdriven piece of dialogue, the writing succeeds both macroscopically and as a set of paragraphs so clean that it is no wonder Didion sends writing instructors to their Xerox machines so often. Further good choices permeate the book: the novel’s brevity and limited cast of characters allow a focus that is unrelenting without being tiresome.

Play It As It Lays shines in comparison to the current flood of third-rate Vegas journalism and senseless pop psychology, and it retains its meaning and freshness after almost four decades. It’s nice to be reminded that literary ambition can produce not only vast, heavy books but beautiful short works which will not only delight you as you read but will endure far longer.