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I have book reviews, but first I want to talk SV fic. I just reread Lanning's excellent Agenda. I love the Identical series, I love Eli (though I doubt he'd call a man a yenta as he did Jonathan, but maybe that's just the way my family uses the term), I love the twists and turns and the way Lionel loves Lex, after his fashion. Yet I discovered that I have a characterization issue, with a character who isn't even present. When I was thinking about the story, and the characterization it shares with many others, I labelled it the "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" problem.
Lillian.
If she was that good, what the fuck was she doing with Lionel? Now, Eli is easy to read as an unreliable narrator with respect to Lillian and therefore Lionel, but I don't get any alternate version of Lillian from Pamela or Lex in "Agenda," and thus it's hard to imagine Eli being wrong about Lillian. So why would she marry such a man? Was she just stupid? I think that's actually possible; Lex must get his hopeless romanticism from somewhere, so I could accept a Lillian who deliberately blinded herself to her husband's flaws (more flaw than husband, I'd say), though I'd still want to know why she fell in love in the first place.
Alternatively, since Eli tells us she wasn't stupid, she wasn't the angel of the house that Lex remembers. She stayed with Lionel for reasons other than love, maybe even married him for reasons other than love. That Napoleon watch was not the gift of a Harriet Nelson to her good son. If she was not like Lionel, it was only a matter of degree, not kind – a little more than kin, and less than kind, you might say – and Lex is deluding himself, understandably, when he thinks otherwise. Maybe she got in over her head; maybe she thought Lionel was only a little bent, like her. But any plausible Lillian has to be somewhere between calculating and miscalculating.
In the case of "Agenda," that means I judge Lillian Edouard more harshly than Eli, Lex, and possibly Lanning do. There's some suggestion in the story that she was running from some nebulous threat when she cast her lot with Lionel. Okay, but why did she need a man to save her? Then, when illness forcibly took her from her son, freeing Lionel to do his worst to Lex, why was she so insistent that Lex retain his "birthright"? Was the money that important? Or, if it was the principle of the thing, why was the principle more important than the prince? Certainly in light of the events of the Identical series it would have been better for Eli and Pamela to disregard her wishes and whisk Lex away. Lillian made a big mistake with Lionel, and Lex is the consequence of that mistake. Don't get me wrong – I'm glad he's the fucked-up danger-bunny he is, but Lex has a legitimate beef with her if he'd only see it.
So, with "Agenda" at least, my dissatisfaction is not truly about characterization, but about the fact that none of the characters are willing to mar Lillian's sacred memory, even though her ethics were clearly incompatible with Clark's insistence on making one's own destiny. If Clark is right, Lillian was wrong, and neither "Eduoard" nor "Luthor" should be conjuring words for Lex. (My own view is that both Clark and Lillian have points in their favor, but then I'm a Marxist that way.)
My Lillian was something of a bitch, with enough larceny in her heart to love Lionel at the same time as she hated his infidelities. If she'd survived, she wouldn't have indulged Lex's self-pity nearly as much as Lex thinks. She cried and threw things and was frightened of dying and, to her great embarrassment, once wore white pants to a garden party the day she got her period. I don't see enough of her in fan fiction. Lex2Excess's Blind Prophecy comes closest to what I want. I shouldn’t like this story; it’s nearly too cute. But the beginning especially has a very good tone and it actually lets Lex be angry at his sainted mother, which is unusual – in fact, I’m not sure I’ve seen it done anywhere else – and very right. There are other strong Lillian stories, though I can't think of any others that also have a good role for Lex. Recommendations?
Nonfiction of many kinds, next
Christopher Buckley, Washington Schlepped Here: A walking tour of tourist Washington, DC, this short book has Buckley's standard biting tongue. His conservatism was hanging out too far for me at points (as when he tossed off a line about the Ninth Circuit banning the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools – no, in fact, the issue is the "under God" part, a latecomer to the Pledge, and there is no defense of "under God" that doesn't either depend on the US being a Christian nation or denigrate expressions of religious faith as ritualized and empty of meaning – but I digress). And for personal reasons, a sort-of tourist guide to DC that has not a word about the Washington Metro, America's Subway, is unsatisfying to me. The concept of writers doing short books about their haunts is a cute one; the series of which this is a part also includes/promises books by Edwidge Danticat, James McPherson, Chuck Palahniuk, Alex Kotlowitz, Laura Esquivel, and Kinky Friedman, among others. Still, this is a book to flip through in the bookstore unless you have a section of your library reserved for books about DC. (In case you're interested, that section in our library is Library of Congress classification F 192 and thereabouts. Picture here.)
Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind: I didn't see the movie and don't plan to, but this biography of the mathematician John Nash is one of the better biographies I've read. I don't know that biography is all that useful a genre in general; does it matter in a broad sense that Nash had affairs with men and women, went crazy and then recovered in time to accept his Nobel Prize in mathematics? Perhaps this biography matters if it helps increase understanding of schizophrenia, and it does contain interesting speculation on the nature of genius, as well as a sensitive description of how irritating it can be to be in the presence of said genius, whether actively schizophrenic or not. I wished Nasar spent more time explaining the math – a lot of times I felt as if I were being told "this was an important problem in the field" but given only enough information to be confused – but I don't know that I could have understood even with more depth. The manipulations behind the scenes of the Nobel committee, involving the "hard" scientists' distrust of the prize for economics, are fascinating though connected only serendipitously to Nash's life – the year he won was a year in which the economics prize was almost eliminated, and ended up being changed to encompass the social sciences more generally, because many in the Academy thought that the dismal science was no science at all. Nash's status as mathematician didn't help much, since he was not actually an economist. Anyone interested in academic politics could get a lot of enjoyment out of the Nobel chapters of Nasar's book.
Michael Meyerson, Political Numeracy: Mathematical Perspectives on Our Chaotic Constitution: Perhaps not coincidentally, Meyerson's book includes discussion of game theory problems, including Nash equilibria, applying the insights of mathematics to constitutional structure as justification for the separation of powers, judicial review, the Electoral College, and so on. I found nothing new here, but if you wanted a quick primer on big ideas in statistics, game theory, and chaos as applied to real-world situations, you could do a lot worse than Meyerson, who is a clear writer and chooses his examples and quotes with real flair:
The last chapter, reminding us of the limits of mathematics using a selection from E.B. White, is particularly nice: "'Sam, if a man can walk 3 miles in 1 hour, how many miles can he walk in 4 hours?'" School taught us the answer, but Sam knows better: "'It would depend on how tired he got after the first hour,' replied Sam."
Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: Another movie I'm not going to see. This book didn't grab me anywhere near as much as Black Hawk Down or Into Thin Air, the other real-life disaster stories that came out around the same time. In part, this is inevitable: unlike the details of events in Mogadishu and on Everest, the details of the fate of the Andrea Gail are unknown because there were no survivors. Junger has to speculate, and this necessarily weakens the tale. But the descriptions of commercial swordfishing, and of the harshness of storms at sea, are interesting. My favorite line comes early on, and is actually someone else's: "The scientific name for swordfish is Xiphias gladius; the first word means 'sword' in Greek and the second word means 'sword' in Latin. 'The scientist who named it was evidently impressed by the fact that it had a sword,' as one guidebook says."
Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited: Hamlet is, as far as I'm concerned, the apotheosis of English literature. I have never seen a production, no matter how bad, that didn't teach me something. I have never read the same play twice. Oddly, then, Bloom's paean left me cold. It's a short book, broken into very short essay-pieces on various aspects of the play. Perhaps the pieces were too short for me to get swept up into Bloom's love, or perhaps my love is just too different from his. Or, possibly, Hamlet is so rich and wondrous as to make any exegesis, however admittedly partial, fall short of illumination.
Frank W. Abagnale, Catch Me If You Can: Hmm, perhaps the theme of this installment is books with short essay-like pieces on a topic (DC, math and law, Hamlet) interlaced with books that have been made into movies. Anyhow, here we move from apotheosis to atrocity in one fell swoop. I liked the movie, but couldn't get more than a few chapters into the book. Abagnale's writing is hideous to the point of absurdity:
The sad thing is, he's totally serious. Bestiality aside, that last sentence is actually the best I found until I had to stop reading. I never stop reading before I'm 50 pages in, but I did this time.
Next time on "Books I've read," pop culture and corpses.
Lillian.
If she was that good, what the fuck was she doing with Lionel? Now, Eli is easy to read as an unreliable narrator with respect to Lillian and therefore Lionel, but I don't get any alternate version of Lillian from Pamela or Lex in "Agenda," and thus it's hard to imagine Eli being wrong about Lillian. So why would she marry such a man? Was she just stupid? I think that's actually possible; Lex must get his hopeless romanticism from somewhere, so I could accept a Lillian who deliberately blinded herself to her husband's flaws (more flaw than husband, I'd say), though I'd still want to know why she fell in love in the first place.
Alternatively, since Eli tells us she wasn't stupid, she wasn't the angel of the house that Lex remembers. She stayed with Lionel for reasons other than love, maybe even married him for reasons other than love. That Napoleon watch was not the gift of a Harriet Nelson to her good son. If she was not like Lionel, it was only a matter of degree, not kind – a little more than kin, and less than kind, you might say – and Lex is deluding himself, understandably, when he thinks otherwise. Maybe she got in over her head; maybe she thought Lionel was only a little bent, like her. But any plausible Lillian has to be somewhere between calculating and miscalculating.
In the case of "Agenda," that means I judge Lillian Edouard more harshly than Eli, Lex, and possibly Lanning do. There's some suggestion in the story that she was running from some nebulous threat when she cast her lot with Lionel. Okay, but why did she need a man to save her? Then, when illness forcibly took her from her son, freeing Lionel to do his worst to Lex, why was she so insistent that Lex retain his "birthright"? Was the money that important? Or, if it was the principle of the thing, why was the principle more important than the prince? Certainly in light of the events of the Identical series it would have been better for Eli and Pamela to disregard her wishes and whisk Lex away. Lillian made a big mistake with Lionel, and Lex is the consequence of that mistake. Don't get me wrong – I'm glad he's the fucked-up danger-bunny he is, but Lex has a legitimate beef with her if he'd only see it.
So, with "Agenda" at least, my dissatisfaction is not truly about characterization, but about the fact that none of the characters are willing to mar Lillian's sacred memory, even though her ethics were clearly incompatible with Clark's insistence on making one's own destiny. If Clark is right, Lillian was wrong, and neither "Eduoard" nor "Luthor" should be conjuring words for Lex. (My own view is that both Clark and Lillian have points in their favor, but then I'm a Marxist that way.)
My Lillian was something of a bitch, with enough larceny in her heart to love Lionel at the same time as she hated his infidelities. If she'd survived, she wouldn't have indulged Lex's self-pity nearly as much as Lex thinks. She cried and threw things and was frightened of dying and, to her great embarrassment, once wore white pants to a garden party the day she got her period. I don't see enough of her in fan fiction. Lex2Excess's Blind Prophecy comes closest to what I want. I shouldn’t like this story; it’s nearly too cute. But the beginning especially has a very good tone and it actually lets Lex be angry at his sainted mother, which is unusual – in fact, I’m not sure I’ve seen it done anywhere else – and very right. There are other strong Lillian stories, though I can't think of any others that also have a good role for Lex. Recommendations?
Nonfiction of many kinds, next
Christopher Buckley, Washington Schlepped Here: A walking tour of tourist Washington, DC, this short book has Buckley's standard biting tongue. His conservatism was hanging out too far for me at points (as when he tossed off a line about the Ninth Circuit banning the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools – no, in fact, the issue is the "under God" part, a latecomer to the Pledge, and there is no defense of "under God" that doesn't either depend on the US being a Christian nation or denigrate expressions of religious faith as ritualized and empty of meaning – but I digress). And for personal reasons, a sort-of tourist guide to DC that has not a word about the Washington Metro, America's Subway, is unsatisfying to me. The concept of writers doing short books about their haunts is a cute one; the series of which this is a part also includes/promises books by Edwidge Danticat, James McPherson, Chuck Palahniuk, Alex Kotlowitz, Laura Esquivel, and Kinky Friedman, among others. Still, this is a book to flip through in the bookstore unless you have a section of your library reserved for books about DC. (In case you're interested, that section in our library is Library of Congress classification F 192 and thereabouts. Picture here.)
Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind: I didn't see the movie and don't plan to, but this biography of the mathematician John Nash is one of the better biographies I've read. I don't know that biography is all that useful a genre in general; does it matter in a broad sense that Nash had affairs with men and women, went crazy and then recovered in time to accept his Nobel Prize in mathematics? Perhaps this biography matters if it helps increase understanding of schizophrenia, and it does contain interesting speculation on the nature of genius, as well as a sensitive description of how irritating it can be to be in the presence of said genius, whether actively schizophrenic or not. I wished Nasar spent more time explaining the math – a lot of times I felt as if I were being told "this was an important problem in the field" but given only enough information to be confused – but I don't know that I could have understood even with more depth. The manipulations behind the scenes of the Nobel committee, involving the "hard" scientists' distrust of the prize for economics, are fascinating though connected only serendipitously to Nash's life – the year he won was a year in which the economics prize was almost eliminated, and ended up being changed to encompass the social sciences more generally, because many in the Academy thought that the dismal science was no science at all. Nash's status as mathematician didn't help much, since he was not actually an economist. Anyone interested in academic politics could get a lot of enjoyment out of the Nobel chapters of Nasar's book.
Michael Meyerson, Political Numeracy: Mathematical Perspectives on Our Chaotic Constitution: Perhaps not coincidentally, Meyerson's book includes discussion of game theory problems, including Nash equilibria, applying the insights of mathematics to constitutional structure as justification for the separation of powers, judicial review, the Electoral College, and so on. I found nothing new here, but if you wanted a quick primer on big ideas in statistics, game theory, and chaos as applied to real-world situations, you could do a lot worse than Meyerson, who is a clear writer and chooses his examples and quotes with real flair:
The concept of a limit is simple. It is the definition that is complex. The concept involves nothing more obscure than the idea of getting closer and closer to something. It suggests the attempt by one human being to approach another, and the inexpungeable thing in love as in mathematics is that however the distance decreases, it often remains what it always was, which is to say, hopelessly poignant because hopelessly infinite. (David Berlinski, A Tour of the Calculus)
The last chapter, reminding us of the limits of mathematics using a selection from E.B. White, is particularly nice: "'Sam, if a man can walk 3 miles in 1 hour, how many miles can he walk in 4 hours?'" School taught us the answer, but Sam knows better: "'It would depend on how tired he got after the first hour,' replied Sam."
Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm: Another movie I'm not going to see. This book didn't grab me anywhere near as much as Black Hawk Down or Into Thin Air, the other real-life disaster stories that came out around the same time. In part, this is inevitable: unlike the details of events in Mogadishu and on Everest, the details of the fate of the Andrea Gail are unknown because there were no survivors. Junger has to speculate, and this necessarily weakens the tale. But the descriptions of commercial swordfishing, and of the harshness of storms at sea, are interesting. My favorite line comes early on, and is actually someone else's: "The scientific name for swordfish is Xiphias gladius; the first word means 'sword' in Greek and the second word means 'sword' in Latin. 'The scientist who named it was evidently impressed by the fact that it had a sword,' as one guidebook says."
Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited: Hamlet is, as far as I'm concerned, the apotheosis of English literature. I have never seen a production, no matter how bad, that didn't teach me something. I have never read the same play twice. Oddly, then, Bloom's paean left me cold. It's a short book, broken into very short essay-pieces on various aspects of the play. Perhaps the pieces were too short for me to get swept up into Bloom's love, or perhaps my love is just too different from his. Or, possibly, Hamlet is so rich and wondrous as to make any exegesis, however admittedly partial, fall short of illumination.
Frank W. Abagnale, Catch Me If You Can: Hmm, perhaps the theme of this installment is books with short essay-like pieces on a topic (DC, math and law, Hamlet) interlaced with books that have been made into movies. Anyhow, here we move from apotheosis to atrocity in one fell swoop. I liked the movie, but couldn't get more than a few chapters into the book. Abagnale's writing is hideous to the point of absurdity:
There are undoubtedly other ages in a man's life when his reasoning power is eclipsed by his libido, but none presses on the prefrontal lobes like the post-puberty years when the thoughts are running and every luscious chick who passes increases the flow. At fifteen I knew about girls, of course. They were built differently than boys. But I didn't know why until I stopped at a red light one day ... and saw this girl looking at me and my car. When she saw she had my attention, she did something with her eyes, jiggled her front and twitched her behind, and suddenly I was drowning in my thoughts. She had ruptured the dam. I don't remember how she got into the car, or where we went after she got in, but I do remember she was all silk, softness, nuzzly, warm, sweet-smelling and absolutely delightful, and I knew I'd found a contact sport that I could really enjoy. She did things to me that would lure a hummingbird from a hibiscus and make a bulldog break his chain.
The sad thing is, he's totally serious. Bestiality aside, that last sentence is actually the best I found until I had to stop reading. I never stop reading before I'm 50 pages in, but I did this time.
Next time on "Books I've read," pop culture and corpses.
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She may have told herself she wanted protection, but the only thing I find plausible is that Lionel's dangerousness appealed to her -- and perhaps he wasn't as evil when she first fell in love with him. Falling for dangerous guys is not admirable, though it's completely understandable.
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True, she might have found an incredibly wealthy idiot and married him, but then she would have had to take the money and start creating her own infrastructure, which requires time. Also, I wonder if that's not a bit harder than it sounds, even for larger-than-life SV people. I mean, if you're not Desiree Atkins, targeting a rich man and then making him fall in love with you and marry you can be problematical. And, again, take time.
Pretending for a moment that I'm reading a hypothetical volume one, I'd see Lillian in some sort of danger; a crisis is at hand; Lionel already knows and wants her; and he walks into the... hospital room or hideout or nondescript hotel room on the Amalfi Coast that she's taken under an assumed name... and says, "Well, Lillian, things aren't going so well, are they? Here's my proposal..."
Anyway, for me it's not that I can't believe the scenario, it's more that it's a story untold. And I'm willing to accept that there's some permutation that would work for me.
Eli not removing Lex from Lionel's charge after her death is another story -- I have mixed feelings about that. Though I don't discount the sacredness of a sworn promise as a factor. There are people for whom keeping one's word is much more central to their identities than others.
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This is all quite enjoyable speculation. I can certainly see a narrative that makes this story work, but it doesn't leave Lillian the angel Lex and Eli like to remember.
To press, though: Why wasn't Lillian's power enough? The Eduoards have at least one Mossad-quality retainer. I also find it difficult to believe that young Lionel could wield that kind of power; even assuming he was heir to an empire, at the time, Lillian's best bet would have been Lionel's daddy. (Who, by the way, ought to be Gene Hackman as Leo.) And how could she have been in danger so long that she couldn't divorce Lionel or send Lex away when she was dying but Lex has never heard anything about it, or been kidnapped or otherwise harmed by the continuing threat? He's got a "hit me, I like it" sign on his back, as we know, so I'd kind of expect there to have been some sign of continuing crisis if such existed.
But I'll give you an Eduoard downturn, a Luthor juggernaut, and a lack of available alternatives, because they combine to make a good story for why Lillian chose Lionel, and then didn't leave him out of habit, or resolved the threat only as she was dying.
In that case -- was Eli mistaken to say Lillian was ever in love? Or did she love Lionel too? The latter appeals to me more as characterization, but it does make her less admirable to me because it smacks of the bodice-ripper heroine who's attracted to the dangerous man who stalks her. In fact, a loving but eyes-open, multiply motivated Lillian is exactly who I'd like to see, and certainly suggested by Lanning's choices thus far. It's just that pedestal Lex & Eli carry around that bemuses me.
As for Eli, I understand exactly why he kept his word. But Lillian's choice to make him give his word in the first place is to me evidence that she didn't put Lex's well-being first, or perhaps that she defined well-being rather differently than Clark does. And why should Lillian have been All About Lex? She was a person, not the Universal Mother.
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Who wasn't enough to save Lillian's father's life.
I don't think she was still in danger so much as that she was utterly traumatized by the experience of getting kidnapped and having her father murdered as a result. "Agenda" suggests that Lex is very much like Lillian's father -- it's possible that Lillian was attracted to Lionel in part because of his ruthlessness, because she knew he wouldn't take a threat as unseriously as her father had, to his detriment.
My SVFF assignment is "Lillian and Lionel, the early years," so I'm thinking about some of these issues for myself, and I think my idea of Lillian isn't a woman born to wealth, any more than I think Lionel was. But more of that when my story's done...!