Book Review: The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

You know you're in for a strange turn in The Strange Library before you read a single word.  The "art direction and design" by Chip Kidd, for which he is credited on the back cover, would be better credited as a co-author.  The front cover bears cartoonish eyes above a distorted face where the nose (mouth?) is a circle labelled "107" and the title and author's name appear to be features of that face.  A strip along the left-hand side tells us the book is "FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY," a designation (along with the number 107) which figures prominently in the story.  Red dominates the front cover.  The bottom half of the cover folds up from the back cover, laying an attacking, fanged snout below the cartoonish eyes, a masterpiece of juxtaposition.  The reverse cover features an emblem that seems a cross between a mandala, a decoder ring, and an air force badge.

But each of these design elements gives way to the first page, the inside front cover (the story springs right upon you, with the copyright page tucked away at the back, though one senses that Chip Kidd would rather do away with copyright pages and bar codes entirely).  That first page is filled with a startlingly open eye, an animal eye with an oblong iris, surrounded by bristly fur.

The image itself has no direct bearing on the story (perhaps), but sets the tone - this tale will be something of a nightmare vision, a dream from which you struggle to awake, similar to Miyazaki's Spirited Away, where confusingly malignant forces imprison the naive.  This story will stare back at you as you stare at it.  That gaze will make you uncomfortable, and a little frightened.

Chip Kidd's design work has long enthralled me, and his book, Go: A Kidd's Guide to Graphic Design guides my teaching on design in my gifted classes, and as much as I was enthralled by Murakami's mysterious, disturbing story, Kidd's freewheeling, exuberant design drew me into the book - by which I mean the book itself, as an object, a thing you hold in your hand, whose pages you turn and whose words and pictures design and build a world much like our own yet entirely different.  You can feel the designer's joy as he searched old Japanese catalogs and children's books (and who knows what else) to crib and crop images that link to the story, that tell the story.  One of my favorites is, after a boy is led through a labyrinth to a reading room / prison cell below the public library (yes, the story is that strange; refer back to title) on the verso page, the recto (right-hand side) page shows an unsolvable maze pattern, red on sepia, with the image of an eye and eyebrow floating up on the edge.  Turn the page and the verso continues that design with the same maze and the other eye, with text reappearing on the recto.  The design imparts a sense of the character's feeling of entrapment, that cry of, Hey, get me out of here!

The book bears all the markings of a children's book - a young protagonist, the large print and short length - but it is more a moral fable, a troubling fairy tale for grown-ups.  What's the moral of the story?  Perhaps this: the world is a dangerous place, and the imagination much more so.

Book Notes: What I've Been Reading Lately

So, after a two month hiatus to welcome our baby into the world (thank you very much), "Head of the Class" is back, but with something different this week.

It only makes sense to write reviews of new books, but lately I've been reading some older titles, some only from last year, others decades old, and this week I'll pass those recommendations on to you.

I named our new boy Cormac Aran McGrath, which derived from and sent me back to two literary sources.

First was Cormac McCarthy.  Previously I had only read Blood Meridian, The Road, and All the Pretty Horses.  Returning to him now, many years later, I started by rereading Pretty Horses and then completing the Border Trilogy with The Crossing and Cities of the Plain.  It's a strange sort of trilogy, where the second book has no character or plot connection to the first, and then the second pairs up the main characters from the first two books - more like a triptych than a trilogy, but one in which the story arc climbs higher throughout all thousand pages of the works.  The overarching theme could be summarized as "what fools these mortals be."  And then they die in a pool of blood.

No Country for Old Men fell within this same genre and feel.  At times, you'd think this story was happening just down the road from John Grady's familial hacienda.  No Country, however, seems more written for the movies, with an unsympathetic bad guy and more of a thriller plot line, slightly unoriginal (unsuspecting dude comes across a cache of drug money and keeps it, prompting the bad guys to pursue).  It says a lot that you might as well just watch the movie for that one, whereas the movie of Pretty Horses is a complete waste of time and does no justice to the book.

Lastly, I added Child of God to my McCarthy roster as well, a shorter, more deliberately violent work, and honestly an earlier, immature work where the violence is less thematic and more ramped up for shock value, a sort of proto-Silence of the Lambs.  You won't be missing much to miss this one.

I also circled back around to Stones of Aran, a two-work meditation on nature and history (both human and geological) by Tim Robinson.  The first book, Pilgrimage, details his musings as he walks the perimeter of the largest of the three islands, Inishmor.  For the second tome, Robinson turns inland and walks the Labyrinth of stone walls that define this tiny, harsh land.  His writing bears that perfect balance of the scientific storyteller, and reading these books is like going on a trip.  By the way, if I ever have the choice or chance, I would trade in my Savannah digs for a seaside cottage on Aran, a place I have never been but which Robinson taught me to love.

Besides my baby's namesakes, I read Jamie Quatro's collection of short stories, I Want to Show You More, a recommendation which came from, of all places, Runner's World magazine.  She is a runner, you see, and has one story in this collection about running, a surreal tale that reads like a cross between a moral fable and a nightmare vision.  Most or almost all the stories have character connections - the narrator of one story is the husband of another story's narrator, who appears as a passing minor character in yet another story, and so on.  At first I found these connections enchanting, but about two-thirds through the book they grew annoying and frustrating, and I felt like I would have to read the book twice through for earlier stories to make complete sense - keep in mind that some of the stories (I think?) had no connection to the others.  Overall, though, Quatro is a masterly writer, and I look forward to reading her in the future.

One of my favorite books of all time, Danny the Champion of the World, we are reading now in my fourth grade gifted class, which prompted me to pick up another book of Dahl's somewhat randomly, The Story of Henry Sugar and Six More.  I read this one backwards, starting with the essay called "Lucky Break: How I Became a Writer," in which Dahl touches on his youth, schooling, and service in the RAF during WWII.  The stories in this book, by the way, appear written for a younger audience, but only just so.  Some are definitely for young adults or older adults.  Anyway, the essay (which my students will read when we finish Danny) guided me to Dahl's two autobiographical works, Boy and Going Solo, which were quick, delightful reads.  He did more by the end of his twenties than I'll probably do in my whole life.  I've always admired Dahl as a writer, but add to that now a personal admiration.

Book Review: California by Edan Lepucki and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

If anything distinguishes this era in literature, in the way that ennui amidst opulence marks the works of the Jazz Age or restless rambling marks the Beat Generation, it would be the fear of the collapse of civilization.  This fear has spent the last several decades permeating all of popular media, bleeding over from the front page of the newspaper to our books, our movies, and our television.  Can you still call it entertainment when what we read and watch stokes the fires of fear within us?

I have days when I think that we are really done for - that climate change (or war, or disease, or whatever) will hit a tipping point and then right and wrong, right and left, and even science and politics, will no longer matter, just the floods, the fires, and the famines.  Then I think, Pshaw, we'll figure it out before all that happens.  Then I think, But what if we don't.

Perhaps the best realization of these fears in literature and popular culture are the zombies, who are essentially us killing us to stop us from killing us.  Colson Whitehead's Zone One captured this fear perfectly, and somewhat humorously, in his depiction of a last-ditch effort to contain the evil we create within ourselves, an evil that gradually externalizes and envelopes humanity in death.  But sometimes the zombies aren't zombies, though they engage in that darkest taboo, cannibalism, as in Cormac McCarthy's The Road.  If humanity makes it long enough to look back on this era, we will look back and herald McCarthy as the one who gave us a singularly unsurpassable portrait of post-apocalyptic survival and what it means to those who figure themselves (as we all do) the "good guys."

Two recent novels, California by Edan Lepucki and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, carry that dark fire onward.  The works bear some striking parallels: both switch back and forth between the survival and pre-apocalyptic periods, both are more about what happens to relationships under strain than simple survival methodologies (two traits they share with The Road, and in which they differ from other popular stories in the genre).  Both feature prophet figures (unlike The Road).  And both hold up moral ambivalence to the light, turning it about in the hand like an object picked up on the shore, some strange object one tries to identify and comprehend.

Reading these works, I have to keep reminding myself that they are actually about how we are now, rather than how we will be in some poorly defined future (the apocalypse in Station Eleven comes by the "Georgia flu," which we need to know is highly contagious and incurable, and remains - again, as in The Road - unspecified in California).  Not in the future, but now we are killing each other for convenience.  Not after the apocalypse, but now we are simply surviving without really living.  Not someday, but now we are destroying relationships with the people closest to us.

So all the zombie-slaying fun in popular culture misleads us, these works reveal.  The apocalypse is now.  The apocalypse will be televised.  But it's not the Launcelotish romp with machete and rifle of a century hence we imagine, rather, it's the Quixotic foolishness of today.  Looking at how these works end provides several insights as to whether we should hold out any hope for humanity.  Whitehead finishes with imminent destruction; McCarthy with a small kindling of promise for those who "carry the fire."  Station Eleven provides minor revelation and a slow shuffling on.  But perhaps California is truest to human nature.  Its heroes end up selling out, compromising themselves to death, a sort of carbon credit-trading of the soul.  Is that where we're headed as a species?  Maybe.  But Lepucki is not so much concerned with that landscape.  She's saying that we are already there now.

Book Review: 100 Sideways Miles by Andrew Smith

     100 Sideways Miles revels in all the stock characters and plot elements of the contemporary young adult novel the way politicians are sure to promise better schools and more jobs.   In this election season, it gets to the point where you'd love to hear a candidate admit that his policies will have little effect on the economy, and that market forces are beyond the control of any one person or set of regulations.  Similarly, I'd love to read a young adult novel that isn't The Fault In Our Stars Yet Again.
      We have it all here: the main character who is perfectly ordinary, because we know, in our hearts, that we are perfect only in our ordinariness.  However, we wish to be pitied, so the main character has some tragedy hampering his soul.  That helps us feel misunderstood in our ordinariness (they just don't know how extraordinary I am).  All you need then is a situation which thrusts the young person toward the fulfillment of his wishes.  Oh, and he should get the girl and have an awesome best bud, because we'd like those things, too.
     I could be describing anything from Star Wars to Harry Potter to The Hunger Games to TFIOS to this little YA outfit.  At least two of those have redeeming qualities - J. K. Rowling, in particular, thrives on squeezing herself into a genre (witness her recent forays into pulp detective procedurals) and bursting out like that Mentos and Diet Coke thing.
     So our mini-hero here is named Finn, and he is plain.  He distinguishes himself in no way and is passionate about nothing.  But, his mother was killed by a horse that fell off a train from a bridge and landed on their boat (really), an accident which also left him emotionally damaged and epileptic.  He obsesses over the distance earth travels in space in its evolutions around the sun, and the relation of that distance to time as experienced on earth, which comes off as a heavy-handed and tiresome metaphor for, eh, um, something, I think.  But all the parts of this pendulous clockwork are in place.  Godlike best friend - check.  Gets the girl.  Loses the girl.  Does something heroic.  Gets the girl back.  Check, check, check, and check.
     100 Sideways Miles has some deeper elements which drove me to finish all 273 pages of its otherwise vapid drivel.  The main character, Finn (not Huckleberry, by the way), has a dad who wrote an classic sci-fi novel loosely based on Finn's heterochromatic eyes and spinal scars, and Finn forever feels trapped in his father's book.  That's a fascinating theme - the idea of a son feeling confined by his father's creation (which is, in a way, himself) - but the author is too busy dropping f-bombs, getting his characters drunk and explosively vomiting, and detailing their adolescent sexual misadventures (one of which is utterly ridiculous and even offensive - a German exchange student who lives to provide the godlike best friend with one-way gratification on a daily basis), much too busy with this mush to develop the one interesting thread in the book.
     Then again, this book is merely indicative of what is wrong with YA fiction nowadays, and perhaps even of what is wrong with some (yes, some, only some) young adults: the distinctly modern self-centeredness that resembles living as if one were on a reality show.  Some defects of adolescence are ingrained in our DNA, such as the foolhardy sense of invulnerability, but today's young adults - and the stories crafted for their demographic - reveal not only a staggering navel-gazing that permeates the culture, but also an awareness of this narcissism, which is shrugged off.  Why bother caring about anything but your own desires?  I suppose that's a question for us all.

Book Review: Hold the Dark by William Giraldi

     Reading Hold the Dark is like taking a trip back through your seventh-grade literature class, when you first discovered the mechanics of fiction.  We have the gripping first line: "The wolves came down from the hills and took the children of Keelut."  We have the heavy symbolism of wolves for all the evil inside us:

          "They have the spirits of the damned."
          "They're hungry wolves, hungry animals.  Nothing more."
          "I don't mean wolves."
          "I'll go now," he said.
          "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly
     they are ravening wolves."
          "That's the Gospel of Matthew."

And so on.  Also, Giraldi treats us to the classic Man vs. Nature theme which, in the spirit of Jack London, that seminal lover of the cold and stark setting, morphs into a Man vs. Man which in turn transfigures into that most human of conflicts, Man vs. Himself.
     That brutal landscape (again, in the fashion of classic literature) expands into a character, a presence, a mysterious god whose force unleashes the primal violence and desire seated deep in our seemingly-civilized souls.  The village itself is unbelievably named for a terrifying mythical demon dog.  Besides the three children taken by wolves in the first paragraph, we have the story of a "girl mashed inside the digestive tract" of a wolf, the revenge killing of a wolf, and this surprisingly cheery, poetic description of wartime violence all within the first few pages:

     When the .50-caliber rounds hit them they tore off limbs or else left dark blue holes the size of plums.  He fired into those on the fuel-damp sand and those still crammed inside the truck's flattened cab.  Their blood burst in the wind as wisps of orange and red.  Curious how orange, how radiant blood looks beneath a desert non, in the dull even tinge of its light.

And the body count and blood flow does not abate through the succeeding chapters.  Giraldi appears to want to position himself as the Cormac McCarthy of the tundra, another sparse landscape and lawless terrain where the distinction between man and beast blurs in a stain of blood and brilliant sunsets.
     The book turns on two unexpected plot twists, one regarding the supposedly wolf-taken boy from the first line, and a second involving the nature of the relationship between the boy's parents.  That first twist is beautifully gruesome and breathtaking, but the second, coming in the final pages of the novel, is disappointingly corny and needless.  It was a shame for Giraldi to end the story with a plot twist straight out of soap operas, after successfully painting such a lovely, stark image of love, evil, revenge, and desire.  It would be as if "To Build a Fire" ended with the writer revealing that the main character had dreamed the entire story, or if 1984 had ended with Orwell explaining that Winston and Big Brother were actually brothers (a lá the ridiculous familial revelations in Star Wars).
     However, Hold the Dark redeems itself in the person of Vernon Slone, a man's man who simultaneously attracts and repels us.  Upon encountering one of his army buddies in the middle of raping an Afghan girl, Slone saves the girl.  Such a hero, eh?  Ah, but he does so by stabbing the soldier through the ear, a grisly salvation Giraldi depicts with his characteristic staid horror:

     He stabbed this soldier through the right ear.  A centimeter of the knife's tip poked through his left temple and Slone felt the body go limp on the blade.  He held the man's drooped form upright with the knife so he would not topple on the girl.  He then thrust him quickly back and yanked free the blade in the same even motion.  The serrated side of the knife was crammed now with bone and brain.

Yikes.  The book, and Slone, rolls on in this manner, with stretches of snowy tension punctuated by storms of extreme violence.  I found myself in the end, however, wanting to love this story as much as I loved those gems of seventh-grade literature - "The Necklace," "The Call of the Wild," "The Gift of the Magi" - but sadly, could not.  I just wish some editor had talked Giraldi into polishing up the ending.  Then his book, too, might have become assigned reading in schools, though likely not for seventh-graders.

Book Review: The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein

     I’ll be honest: now is not the best of times to be a teacher.  When I see the inane dictates foisted upon the profession from the local, state, and federal level, or hear the vitriolic blame-gaming that passes for educational discourse in this country, it’s as if I’m underwater, holding my breath until a long storm above passes and it’s safe to surface.

In a strange way, then, Dana Goldstein’s book The Teacher Wars offers some comfort, cold though it may be.  The book reassures us that insanity and inanity have long served as the guiding forces in American education.

     Take one of my favorite policies to hate: merit-based pay.  A mere thirty years ago, within memory of today’s policymakers yet oddly forgotten, the seminal A Nation at Risk report created a sense of panic which spawned some idiotic and fortunately short-lived educational reforms, including merit-based pay.  And here we are - in the galvanized 21st Century - seeing this corpse of failure resuscitated.  Goldstein notes that, back in the 80s:

Twenty-four states claimed to have implemented some sort of “career ladder” rewarding teachers with merit pay, but by the end of the decade, almost all of those ladders had collapsed, weighed down by low budgets and lack of teacher buy-in (174).

Our own school district this year rolled out a merit-pay plan that offered an impressive-sounding (yet truly paltry) million dollars to be paid not to all teachers who hit a pre-defined educational target, but rather just to the top couple hundred (based on evaluations and test scores).  So teachers can have near-perfect evaluations and lead all their students in passing the state test … and get nothing.  Haven’t we learned?  Back in the 80’s, this type of system undermined morale more than it raised test scores.

There were several merit pay plans that were popular with teachers, and they had one major feature in common: Bonuses were available to every high-performing teacher in a school district, regardless of the grade level or subject they taught … [whereas] just 15 percent of teachers in Tennessee under Governor Lamar Alexander’s widely celebrated plan, and 10 percent of teachers in Florida [received bonuses] (176).

Assuming for a moment what is not true - that bonus money can buy you test scores - why on earth would you only buy a random percentage of teachers off instead of every one who could make the grade?  Well, I guess because money is expensive.

     Always in such things, when you have politicians (some of the deservedly least popular people in the country) determining what happens in classrooms, the law of unintended consequences kicks in and makes a mess of things.  And this cause and effect, Goldstein has found, rules the currents of American educational history and reform.  In the 1830s, reformers brought more women into the profession to, eh, save money, because, eh, women work for less than men.  We male teachers (and our sisters-in-arms) are just beginning to peel off the hair shirt of this legacy.  As Goldstein recounts the influence:

Yet during an era of deep bias against women’s intellectual and professional capabilities, the feminization of teaching of teaching wrought by the common schoolers carried an enormous cost: Teaching became understood less as a career than as a philanthropic vocation or romantic calling (31).

Even efforts we all support, such as integration, can wreak havoc for those meant to benefit from it.

Half the southern states passed laws revoking the teaching license of anyone who joined an organization that supported school integration, including the NAACP. …  Then, during the frustrated decade after Brown, desegregation was the law, but not the reality (112-113).

At least with desegregation, there was a cause worth suffering for.  But how about the race effects in recent and today’s reforms, where corporatizing efforts in the 1980s are being repeated today, with the same ill results?

This painful episode in American education history has generally gone unacknowledged by today’s accountability reformers, as they pursue policies, such as neighborhood school closings and school “reconstituitions” as charter or magnet schools, that lead disproportionately to the loss of teaching jobs held by African Americans. … When the [Chicago school] district reconstituted ten schools in 2012, 51 percent of the teachers dismissed were black, although black teachers make up only 28 percent of teachers citywide (122).

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) could easily be crowned King of unintended consequences.  The law meant to remove any opportunity for making excuses for failing students, but ended up harming exactly those it most intended to assist.

Teachers showered attention on so-called “bubble kids,” those right beneath the proficiency threshold, while ignoring the needs of high-ability students who would pass the tests no matter what, or low-ability ones who had little chance of rising to the proficiency bar (187).

And it wasn’t only teachers gaming the system during the troubled reign of NCLB.  States and school districts, too, played the numbers game like Fast Eddie Felson:

As a result [of a lack of the means to manage underperforming schools], many states followed the letter but not the spirit of the law and made their new tests absurdly easy for kids to pass.  In Texas a student who scored 13 percent was declared proficient (186).

One more example.  The biggest buzzword in the corporatizing of education today is “value-added,” which basically posits that a good teacher can be identified by measuring the value added to her students.  What it comes down to is using standardized test scores to evaluate the worth of teachers.  And how’s that working out?  Goldstein tells us.

When value-added is calculated for a teacher using just a single year’s worth of test score data, the error rate is 35 percent - meaning more than one in three teachers who are average will be misclassified as excellent or ineffective, and one in three teachers who excel or are terrible will be called average.  Even with three years of data, one in four teachers will be misclassified.  It is difficult, if not impossible, to compute an accurate value-added score for teachers who work in teams within a single classroom … or for the two-thirds of teachers who teach grades or classes not subject to standardized tests (206-207).

Goldstein is the first I’ve read to point out something I have long griped about - what if we fired all the low-scoring teachers?  Who is lining up to take their places?  “Good” teachers?

Even if test scores were a flawless reflection of student learning and teacher quality, there is no evidence that the new teachers who replace the bad teachers will be any better … (230).

The upshot is teachers, students, parents, and administrators with whiplash as reform after reform fails, and the new thing is ushered in as the, well, as the new thing (better than the old thing).  Meanwhile, generations of students pass through schools without any attention to what actually could be done to better their educations and life chances.

     So what is the ever-elusive fix?  Goldstein finds that, too, buried in the past, in the words of an unheeded social scientist of the 60s.

[Sociologist James] Coleman’s message was that although family income might be the biggest factor in student achievement, teachers and schools also mattered, especially for poor kids (121).

This whole-child approach echoes those espoused by Diane Ravitch and other independent reformers of today, who have no theory or party or politics in the game but only, genuinely, want to see America’s children receive the best possible education.  We have to fix poverty, health care, and … um … everything, kind of.  Yet even this realization is nothing new.  Witness Goldstein’s account of Johnson’s war on poverty as applied to schools in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act:

[President Johnson] signed ESEA in his hometown of Johnson City, Texas, with his own elementary school teacher at his side.  “By passing this bill, we bridge the gap between helplessness and hope for more than 5 million educationally deprived children,” he said.  “And we rekindle the revolution - the revolution of the spirit against the tyranny of ignorance (114).

The path to real and effective and lasting reform may be tricky and even treacherous, but the way is mapped out for us.  Teacher preparation programs, for instance, have historically been more a part of the problem than the solution.

Today only half of teacher candidates undergo supervised student teaching in a real classroom, and most teacher education programs have no mechanism for making sure mentor teachers are themselves successful or trained in how to coach an adult peer (248).

And what is the plan to better prepare teachers for the realities of the classroom?  Apparently, plenty of “blah, blah, blah,” but nothing significant.  And the wheel of history goes round and round.

     That repeating chorus of failure throughout the history of American education sounds at the heart of Goldstein’s book.  She maintains a professorial tone, but the occasional cracks in her journalistic veneer let shine through a witty light well worth waiting for.

The hope that collecting more test scores will raise student achievement is like the hope that buying a scale while result in losing weight (232).

Ultimately, Goldstein holds out hope that we can get our act together and see American education live up to its promise.  And, fortunately, she does see who will lead the way:

Effective teachers can narrow, but not close, achievement and employment gaps that reflect broader income, wealth, and racial inequalities in American society (208).

She also has gleaned, as in this quote from Larry Cuban of the Cardozo Project, how exactly teachers can turn the ship.

Simply stated, effective teaching is intimately related to how well a teacher knows who his charges are and the nature of their surroundings.  If he doesn’t, his perceptions will continue to be shaped by TV, newspaper, social science formulas, and fear - not by first-hand experience (128).

The book does - wisely - stop short of prescribing any cure-alls.  After all, Goldstein is a writer, not an educational expert.  (Though such lack of credentials fails to stop Bill Gates and even dabblers like M. Night Shyamalan from diagnosing and meddling in reform as far as their riches allow, which for Gates is pretty darn far.)  Reading this reform-minded history of American education, however, will inform your mind for the educational debate sure to accompany the next presidential race.  God help us.

Book Review: The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim

We own little real estate in the small towns of our psychologies but two central ironies of modern life, like the post office and police station in our minds.

First, we think better of ourselves than we should.  That's an understatement, perhaps.  Second, we think we know ourselves, but we don't.  Donald Antrim's stories play on these ironies like a San Francisco busker on an two-stringed erhu, sawing away at the awkward and self-defeating behaviors that resonate from our overestimation and ignorance of self.
Sometimes the effect is comic, as in this description of the genesis of an ill-fated outing in "Pond, With Mud."

     He had taken the afternoon off from his job at the printing press and gone with the boy in tow to catch the two o'clock train to the zoo that had recently opened on the outskirts of town, on marshlands that had been home to a chemical-solvent extraction plant that had burned to the ground.  Immediately following the zoo's inaugural ribbon-cutting ceremony - or relatively soon after, to be more precise - strange things had begun to happen to the more esoteric wild animals. Why was it that the rare and endangered species, the ones you'd never heard of, all seemed to have compromised immune systems? At any rate, it had been reported in the papers that the board of governors and the director of the zoo were soon to come under indictment for cruelty to animals and for various misappropriations of municipal funds. The zoo's future was in question. The time for a visit was now.

Now, the faulty logic at the paragraph's end does give us a chuckle, but it also gives us pause when we recall that the man will be visiting the zoo "with the boy in tow."  Yet the details Antrim assembles generate an air of exaggeration that accentuates the humor: the incinerated chemical plant, animal cruelty at a zoo, embezzlement.  Antrim's stories stand out from the trend among modern fiction writers to torture their poor creations precisely because he grants them some lightness to accompany the characters' unbearable being.  The situations - grim, somewhat shocking - seem not so dark because of the dark humor Antrim wraps the plot in, like organ meat in clean butcher's paper.

In "Another Manhattan," the simple act of bringing flowers for his girlfriend at a restaurant date creates such abominable little tragedies that we feel for the poor sap who thinks flowers can fix relationships.

     He parted the curtains.  "Pardon me," he said to the people seated near the entrance.  Long- and short-stemmed flowers alike had snagged on the drapes. ... Jim spun left then right, enshrouding himself - and the bouquet - within the folds of drapery fabric.  There followed a flurry of petals.  The rose thorns came loose; the bouquet's topmost stems sprung free. ... "You're bleeding," Lorenzo told him.  Jim saw the blood spotting Lorenzo's handkerchief.  Lorenzo said, "You have a lot of scratches.  You look like you've been in a fight with some squirrels or something." ... He explained to Lorenzo that the flowers were a gift for Kate ... He clutched the vase.  His pants were wet from water that had sloshed over the rim.  Water stained his shoes.  He could see tiny snags marking the sleeves of his overcoat and the front of his suit.  How frustrating, after having labored so hard to avoid the thorns.  His clothes would have to go to a reweaver, he thought.  Then his thinking disintegrated into bitter resignation.  Everything he touched was ruined.  The flowers were almost destroyed.

The scene plays like something out of Chaplin - indeed, most of Antrim's antiheroes smack of the Little Tramp, drained of any sentimentality.  The antagonist in each story is none other than the man himself, the woman herself, and they all end up sounding like the Apostle Paul:  "I do not understand what I do.  For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do."

Antrim is also a master of the storytelling craft. specifically in his use of details that make an entire world real for his readers.  In the title story, the main character starts out his debacle with a simple garbage run:

     ... he was on his way to the dump to throw out the drawings and paintings that Julia had made in the months when she was sneaking off to sleep with the man she finally left him to marry, along with the comic-book collection - it wasn't a collection so much as a big box stuffed with comics - that he'd kept since he was a boy.  He had long ago forgotten his old comics; and then, a few days before, he'd come across them on a dusty shelf at the back of the garage, while looking for a carton of ammo.

How perfect a string of beads: the artwork, the infidelity, the comic books, a collection that is actually a pile, a forgotten childhood, a dusty search, a box of bullets.  In two complex but ordinary sentences, we see deeper inside this man than he sees into himself.

And that, ultimately, is the hypothesis of these stories: if we comprehend these people better than they know themselves, are we the same way?  Do the people we know see through our masks?  Are we all a bit like the emperor who was so sure not only of his clothing, but of his superior intelligence, while the children stand by laughing at our ridiculous bareness and barrenness?  Can we not see beyond our noses because of that shimmering emerald light in the air?