Worrying With The Best Of Them

In "It Sounds Like You're Feeling," from Suzanne Rivecca's Death Is Not An Option: Stories, when the going gets tough, the tough catastrophize. Her character is a social worker who's been sent to a visually impaired therapist, Colin, to brush up on her empathy:

You are seized by a clinging, insistent hunch that your sudden teariness is entirely due to the fact that you're in a room with a dog and a blind person. Because it's unexpected, you tell yourself: the double vulnerability of them, their twinned soft mildness, how you can't stop wondering what they'd do if the dog got cataracts: would another, smaller creature be assigned to it, something with excellent eyesight, a trained raptor maybe, that would lead the way with the dog behind it and Colin behind the dog, the caravan growing and growing as they all aged and deteriorated, on and on like a series of Russian nesting dolls?

Photo by James Gavin

Book Ends

Remembering the attempted boycott of Nixon's memoirs.

A Searing Account

Long before becoming an attorney and a writer of bestselling legal thrillers, John Grisham had his fill of briefs:

I applied for a job at a Sears store in a mall. The only opening was in men’s underwear. It was humiliating. I tried to quit, but I was given a raise. Evidently, the position was difficult to fill. I asked to be transferred to toys, then to appliances. My bosses said no and gave me another raise.

I became abrupt with customers. Sears has the nicest customers in the world, but I didn’t care. I was rude and surly and I was occasionally watched by spies hired by the company to pose as shoppers. One asked to try on a pair of boxers. I said no, that it was obvious they were much too small for his rather ample rear end. I handed him an extra-large pair. I got written up.

Would you believe I published a novel on the same day, thanks to the same editor and publisher, as Grisham's first book, A Time To Kill? Some details here.

Just Don't Call Him Barry

What the president's been reading.

An Almost Perfect Love

Binnie Kirshenbaum's novel An Almost Perfect Moment acts a little ADD as it careens from character to character -- four ladies in 1970s Brooklyn, New York playing Mahjong and gnoshing every week, two lonely schoolteachers who try but fail to make a connection, and especially 15-year-old Valentine Kessler, a beautiful Jewish girl who's fixated on the Virgin Mary.

Sometimes the narrator stays with a character for only a sentence or two before bouncing somewhere else. The happiest place is the Mahjong circle, which is centered on Valentine's lonely mother, Miriam. When crisis strikes, her friends rally impressively. We all should have such friends. Meanwhile the unrelieved loneliness of Joanne and John, the high school teachers, plays out almost sadistically. Their revulsion at their burdensome parents makes Miriam's friends' devotion to her, and hers to Valentine, seem especially precious.

At the beginning of the book, Kirshenbaum, perhaps mindful of Valentine's never-fully-explained progression into her Marian obsession, presents a quotation from the gnostic "Gospel of Philip": "Is it permitted to utter a mystery?" You can tell the narrator is keeping secrets about all these characters, but if one thing is perfectly clear, is that's the lesson of the story is that if we don't love our parents, children, and friends, no one will, and that such love can be practiced and mastered:

It occurred to Miriam how often she done this, watched Valentine sleep, how she did so without thinking, the way ritual evolves into a part of being....Miriam, as she always did whenever she looked at Valentine, filled with love and then more love came, a flood of love, and Miriam began to fear it, so overwhelming the love was.

Glad He Was Mad

In The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester tells the story of W. C. Minor (left), a military physician who seems to have been severely traumatized by the Battle of the Wilderness during the Civil War and was sent to an English mental institution after killing a man in London after the war -- only to become a principal contributor to the mammoth Oxford English Dictionary. James Murray, its editor, built a network of volunteer readers by distributing fliers via booksellers. One of these found its way to Dr. Minor, who became a vital cog in Murray's apparatus long before the editor realized that his most brilliant and dependable volunteer was confined to the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane.

Winchester speculates that Minor suffered from schizophrenia, which, today, would be substantially relieved by drugs and other therapies. Since like many troubled geniuses, Minor was obsessive about his creative work, we're left to wonder about the extent to which the advance of civilization -- not just the creation of great dictionaries -- depends on untreated or rampant pathologies:

One must feel a sense of strange gratitude, then, that [Minor's] treatment was never good enough to divert him from his work. The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit for all time. He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomfiting to dwell.

The Deaths Of Journalism

Mary Cassatt's Children Playing on the Beach, or a painting much like it, stars in Daniel Silva's riveting thriller Moscow Rules, about a Russian oligarch whose promiscuous weapons sales put him in bed with al-Qaeda. The deal with the devils is uncovered by a brave editor in Moscow.

A former UPI foreign correspondent who's married to NBC's Jamie Gangel, Silva, in his author's notes, reminds us that while journalism appears to be dying in the U.S., elsewhere it's the journalists:

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 47 reporters, editors, cameramen, and photographers have been killed in Russia since 1992, making it the third-deadliest country in the world in which to practice the craft of journalism, after Iraq and Algeria. Fourteen of those deaths occurred during the rule of Russian president [now PM] Vladimir Putin, who undertook a systematic crack-down on press freedom and political dissent after coming to power in 1999. Virtually all the murders were contract killings, and few have been solved or prosecuted.

Silva also thanks Jean Becker, "amazing" chief of staff to former President and Barbara Bush (Mrs. Bush was transferred out of ICU today after her ulcer surgery, thanks be to God). Hear hear! Jean has also extended many kindnesses to the Nixon family and Foundation over the years.