The Great Recession

Periodically, Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Dish, links to a chart comparing unemployment rates for all the recessions since World War Two. The latest update is here. (Unemployment rates are compared in the second chart.) Have a look. Can there be any doubt that the name, "The Great Recession," is well-deserved?

Book Report

So what does one read after The Fountainhead, which is both an earnest self-help manual as well as a fount of misantropy; which manages to raise a paean to the human spirit, and pee on it at the same time?

I'm glad I asked.

When I decided to blog The Fountainhead, I had chosen another book to read, just for my own pleasure; but I hadn't started it. Now was the time to return to Nathaniel West's 1934 novel, A Cool Million. Boy, talk about a palate cleanser! This short novel (or long parable) tells the story of an innocent from the countryside who ventures out into the world and ... is torn to shreds. This is one dark and bloody satire. (It even touches on the political arguments of the time, such as the war between collectivism and libertarianism. Hmm, where have we heard that discussion?) In some ways the story resembles Candide—the protagonist has a Cunégonde-like admirer who is made to suffer greatly. But in West's world, anyone attempting to cultivate their garden would be trampled by common thieves and grasping capitalists. The book is an acid bath, a universal solvent of cynicism.

Now I am halfway through Henry James's 1899 novel, The Awkward Age. At a rented estate in the English countryside, the Duchess has just laid her cards on the table for Mr. Longdon, which revelation promises to drive the action of the remainder of the book. After reading Rand and West, it takes a while to adjust to James's overstuffed prose. It's a shock to the digestion, like suddenly reverting to certain recipes of the 1950's, when everything was prepared with lots of cream and butter.

"Would you," the Duchess said to him the next day, "be for five minutes awfully kind to my poor little niece?" The words were spoken in charming entreaty as he issued from the house late on the Sunday afternoon—the second evening of his stay, which the next morning was to bring to an end—and on his meeting the speaker at one of the extremities of the wide cool terrace. There was at this point a subsidiary flight of steps by which she had just mounted from the grounds, one of her purposes being apparently to testify afresh to that anxious supervision of little Aggie from which she had momentarily suffered herself to be diverted. This young lady, established in the pleasant shade of a sofa of light construction designed for the open air, offered the image of a patience of which it was a questionable kindness to break the spell. It was that beautiful hour when, toward the close of the happiest days of summer, such places as the great terrace at Mertle present to the fancy a recall of the banquet-hall deserted—deserted by the company lately gathered at tea and now dispersed, according to affinities and combinations promptly felt and perhaps quite as promptly criticised, either in quieter chambers where intimacy might deepen or in gardens and under trees where the stillness knew the click of balls and the good-humour of games....

OK, if you say so.

Seriously, I find I have to put my mind into four-wheel drive to take in such passages.

But the pleasure of reading James is his characters. These are people with good and bad tendencies, but their motivations are well worked out; no one is evil purely because the story needs a villain at some point. The conflicts are real (i.e., between real people), not expressions of ideology or cynicism. I'm rooting for Vanderbank and Nanda to get together, but if circumstances take the story elsewhere, it won't be because someone starts behaving out of character or someone else shows up from nowhere to intervene by magic. A true, sensible universe is comforting, and sometimes the reader needs comfort.