S. T. Karnick at The American Culture ably responds to Malcolm Gladwell’s recent attack on To Kill a Mockingbird.
Gladwell’s notion that To Kill a Mockingbird, first published in 1960, is insufficiently hateful toward white Southerners and is unsophisticated in failing to embrace radical politics is a truly breathtaking instance of ignorant bigotry. It is also not original, and it is wrong.
Our friend Dale Nelson sent me a link to this New York Times column by Ross Douthat, all about why many “literary” authors are turning to writing historical novels, rather than setting their stories in contemporary settings. His interesting conclusion is that modern culture just doesn’t present the kind of conflicts that made the family sagas of old work so well:
You can write an interesting contemporary novel based on the “Anna Karenina” template in which the heroine gets a divorce, marries her modern-day Vronsky, and they both discover that they’re unhappy with the choices they’ve made — but the last act just isn’t going to be quite as gripping as Tolstoy’s original. You can turn the Jane Austen template to entertaining modern purposes, as Hollywood did in “Clueless” and “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” but the social and economic stakes are never going to be as high for a modern-day Elizabeth Bennet as they were for the Regency-era version.
I think he’s got something there. If you want to write a novel about, say, an unwed mother, you can suggest that your plucky heroine’s Neanderthal, Bible-thumping parents don’t want her to have an abortion, but there’s really nothing they can do to stop her. The only other problem her romantic passions are likely to get her into is that of sexually transmitted diseases. In that case, she either takes medication to get better, or she’s stuck with the problem for life. There’s little scope for her to heroically defy convention and shame the small minds; there is no convention to defy.
P. G. Wodehouse wrote stories about couples being kept apart by unsympathetic fathers and guardians, well past the point in history when such parental figures had “sunk to the level of a third rate power” (to quote “Uncle Fred Flits By”). He was able to get away with it because his stories were light confections, not intended to reflect real life in any serious way. If he’d been forced to be realistic, the fun would drained out like water from a lion-footed bathtub.
Is it an indictment of modern society to say that it doesn’t offer scope to certain forms of fiction? Probably not.
But I often think of the popularity of Amish stories in the Romance genre, as I’ve mentioned here before. I don’t think it’s unrelated to highbrow authors writing historical novels. I think there’s a hunger out there to be able to live in a society where people care enough about you to tell you when they think you’re messing up your life.
The autonomous life, in the end, is a pretty lonely one.
Reviews are starting to come in for Mark Bertrand’s Back on Murder.
When did artists first begin to chafe with their audiences and feel irritated at the idea that their creations should be styled in a limited way so as to gain popularity? John Updike in 1985 wrote about this history, what happened to Herman Melville, and what a modern artist might do with this tension. He said:
By authentic I mean actual and concrete. For the creative imagination, in my sense of it, is wholly parasitic upon the real world, what used to be called Creation. Creative excitement, and a sense of useful work, have invariably and only come to me when I felt I was transferring, with a lively accuracy, some piece of experienced reality to the printed page.
How many times have you read verses like this and thought little of them?
“To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul.”
Those are the opening words of Psalm 25:1, not even the whole verse. I usually think of words like these as the Psalmist saying hello, but look at what Charles Spurgeon wrote about these words. Read more on cbmc.com.
I’ve got a meeting tonight, so I’m in haste, but here’s a couple links worth reading.
An editorial in the Houston Chronicle examines how the Texas Education Agency could deem thousands of students to have passed a test on which they got not a single answer right. Strange times we live in. Tip: Grim’s Hall.
The unspeakable Hunter Baker (don’t buy his book) shares a puerile review of a biography of Time Magazine founder Henry Luce.
Have a good weekend! I’ll be in Minnehaha Park, Minneapolis, on Sunday, doing the Viking thing at Norway Day.
The Sun Chronicle hasn’t appreciated reader feedback recently and has now guarded its article comments with a 99 cent fee. So you can fill out the order form, pay almost a dollar, and comment freely thereafter. I don’t know if that system will apply to only this Massachusetts paper or also to the other two papers the D’Arconte company owns.
From the previously linked article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (they should lengthen their name, don’t you think? How about Atlanta News Journal-Democrat Constitution Dispatch Herald?), here’s a bit common language abuse. Bobby Williams of Smoothie King is quoted.
“McDonald’s is the 900-pound gorilla in the room,” he said. “Whenever they roll with something, it creates a halo effect.”
Burger King of Canada and USA will begin selling Seattle’s Best Coffee in their restaurants this fall. The Canadians will get the deal a month or so before the Americans will, because, let’s face it, Canadians need a stimulus that will rouse them out of the years of malaise that has been dragging their country down. Their coffee is terrible. I’ve never tasted it myself, because it’s terrible.
So Burger King has looked across the street at McDonald’s McCafe, which has been offering Newman’s Own Coffee for a few years, hears the rattling whistle of the espresso being made, and believes it needs to expand its beverage line. This reminds me of a Consumer Reports test that ranked McDonald’s coffee over Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, and Burger King. Did anyone go to Burger King for good tasting coffee back then? Now, they may have that option and be able to choose from unique flavors like Grease Fried Bean, The King’s Flamer, and Whopper Cafe Grande.
BTW, Burger King wanted to punish their customers for their loyalty and brand devotion, so they took the Whopper off the menu for a couple days. Naturally, they recorded the reactions.
Gourmet coffee companies may have lesson to learn from the fast food giants’ coffee decision, that their brew is a bit too pricey. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports McDonald’s has taken marketshare away from specialty coffee stores by offering less expensive drinks.
Will BK gain ground in the fast food market from McDonald’s with their new coffee options? Maybe. In the meantime, McDonald’s will begin offering fruit smoothies.
Dark Light is another installment in Randy Wayne White’s Doc Ford series. I was quite pleased with it. The author has positioned this series so as to let his marine biologist/covert ops agent hero play around in both the international thriller and the mystery genres. This one’s a mystery, with the intriguing addition of a (possibly) supernatural element.
In the wake of a devastating hurricane that wreaked havoc on the economy and ecology of his Sanibel Island, Florida home, Ford gets drawn into a dispute between an acquaintance—an old fisherman he doesn’t even like a whole lot—and a property developer. The developer, as it turns out, is not only a crooked businessman but a serial rapist and killer. Ford and his friends end up competing with the developer and his henchmen in the exploration and salvage of a World War II wreck. This attracts the interest of an enigmatic neighbor, an beautiful old woman who sometimes doesn’t seem old at all, but is disturbingly seductive either way.
The supernatural element was what intrigued me most, fantasist that I am. Is the old woman the goddaughter of a famous beauty supposed to have drowned in the shipwreck, as she claims, or is she the woman herself, some sort of ghost?
Doc Ford and his friend Tomlinson are like the extreme poles famously described by Chesterton—one doesn’t believe in God; the other believes in anything. Ford’s unsettling experience with the mystery woman can be satisfactorily explained in purely materialistic terms. And yet, even Doc himself doesn’t entirely believe that.
You used to see this sort of story more than you do now, I think. Stories framed as realistic, but with the door left open just a crack for other possibilities. I like such stories.
Dark Light was an engaging mystery, with a pleasant aftertaste. Cautions for language and adult situations.