Monthly Archives: August 2008

America America

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My favorite English teacher gave me a copy of Ethan Canin’s Emperor of the Air[1988] when it first came out. Certain details from those short stories have stayed in my mind for years: the golfing fanatic who makes little putting motions with his hands during pauses in conversation; the daughter whose mother is caught shoplifting; the old man who kisses his wife after a long period of parallel living, and “has the feeling of a miracle.” It sits on my shelf beside Richard Yates’ Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, my two favorite short story collections side by side. Both are the work of graceful writers with an unbelievably keen observing eye. What makes Ethan Canin stand out even more is that his collection was published when he was 27 and a medical student. It was his first book, but what a stake in the ground it was.

America America is a jewel that sparkles just as dazzlingly, but testifies as well to the depth and reflectiveness of maturity. His hair, in the photo, has whitened a bit. He teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Worskshop as well as practicing medicine. It was a pleasure to get reacquainted again in the pages of this book, which came out in June.

As its title suggests, this is a double vision of America, full of contrasts – past and present, idealism and pragmatism, optimism and heartbreak. The action, told in retrospect by newspaper editor Corey Sifter, takes place during the Nixon era. It’s pre-Watergate, during the Vietnam War and Nixon’s second bid for the presidency, and a New York senator, a man of “public idealism and personal ruthlessness,” has decided to run for president. Corey, then a high school student, works for the wealthy family backing the senator’s campaign. For a fuller summary of the action, and some good discussion of the novel, check out reviews in the Chicago Tribune and the New York Sun; both are excellent.

The book is intricately plotted, and though it took me awhile to get into it, once I found a groove I couldn’t put it down. It’s suspenseful, thoughtful, and filled with the same sort of gems that made Emporer of the Air such a joy to read. These characters are real people, with their share of eccentricities, all of them unfolded by a writer who has observed people with careful and loving attention and is prepared to celebrate them all: a plumber who becomes a voracious reader at the end of his life; a granite miner who’s lost his voice and has to write everything, misspelled but testifying to a shrewd intelligence; a wealthy man wrestling with his legacy.

This story is fiction, but the action is woven seamlessly into a fabric of real historical events and characters. The point of view spins around between present and past, picking up the story at different points along the continuum, and it’s masterfully done; somehow I always knew where I was being set down. But I never lost my frame of reference in my own present, so I found myself asking how the blows to trust that occurred in the timeframe of this story have shaped us: our politics, education, media, views on wealth and class.

I wish I could do the book justice, but there’s too much to it. I’ll just let the book speak for itself, and conclude with one of many passages that will be running through my mind during this campaign season:

One of the hallmarks of our politics now is that we tend to elect those who can campaign over those who can lead… For a man on the rise in politics, power first comes through character — that combination of station and forcefulness that produces not just intimidation, which is power’s crudest form, but flattery, too, which is one of its more refined. After that, power begins to grow from its own essence, rising no longer exclusively from the man but from the office itself. And this is where some balance must be found between its attainment and its allotment, between the unquenchable desire of any politician to rise, and the often humbling requirement that one’s station must now be used to some benefit. And here, of course, is where corruption begins…

Celebrate the Author: Tasha Tudor

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Tasha Tudor is an author and illustrator I’ve become more aware of as an adult. Her birthday is August 28, 1915, and I chose her for my author this month in the Celebrate the Author Challenge because my daughters and I have checked her books out of the library and thoroughly enjoyed them. Often compared to Beatrix Potter for her illustrative style and citizenship in an earlier era, one key difference between the two authors is that Ms. Tudor’s books are more sentimental and idealized. They’re nostalgia at its best, as far as I’m concerned — the kind that throws a golden haze over the past and makes you indulge in a longing for a more innocent time.

Our favorites (so far) are A Time to Keep, Give Us This Day, and The Dolls’ Christmas. All are illustrated with Ms. Tudor’s warmly lit, detailed watercolors that often frame the text in a delicate visual counterpoint. A Time to Keep is about the holidays of the year, and it recounts the charming celebrations and traditions of the past. It’s a magical place where people make all sorts of beautiful handmade gifts, float birthday cakes down streams with all the candles lit, have fabulous picnics, and the like. Nearly every page is populated with a thriving community of children. Isolation, loneliness, drab industrial settings, broken families — none of these figure into this world. Imagination, joy, cooperation, and harmony between generations prevail. It’s a gorgeous book, and one that equips you to rethink your own traditions and priorities.

Give Us This Day is the text of Lord’s Prayer — William Tyndale’s 16th century translation — embellished with Ms. Tudor’s illustrations. Publishers Weekly complains that it instills a hellfire and damnation conception of God, but it certainly didn’t have that effect on my kids. Children and corgis frolic through the pages, each of which is beautifully bordered. The pictures illustrating parts of the prayer that speak of needing forgiveness or deliverance from evil suggest the darker side of experience, as well they should if religion has anything to do with the real world. But the dominant mode of the book is extremely gentle, and the illustrations make the archaic text accessible.

The Dolls’ Christmas stars two carefully kept dolls with beautiful clothes and a fully equipped home — the mother of all dollhouses! Pumpkin House is as big as the two little girls who play with it, ornately accessorized without a trace of plastic. I never played with dolls growing up, but this book would make me reconsider (or, more likely, would tempt me to become a dollhouse collector, furnishing my dream home on a small scale). I like the way the book teaches children how to play in a more structured way; my girls are energetic players, and this book lays out a more sedate alternative, equally as imaginative as riding in a rodeo through the house, but QUIETER. (Oh, and by the way… it’s a nice story too. :-)

All this talk of the nostalgia, the gentleness, and the sentimentality of Ms. Tudor’s books probably makes it unsurprising that I pictured this author in very stereotypical terms: a grandmotherly woman, smelling of baby powder, practiced in the disciplines of a producer rather than a consumer, who lived a life as idyllic as that depicted in her stories. The photos I’ve seen of this author have cooperated with this view. But in reading about Ms. Tudor, I did find a few facts that surprised me, and began to bring her out of the dusty museum case of a stereotype and into the more multidimensional world of human beings:

  • Her name at birth was Starling Burgess; she changed it to Tasha Tudor
  • Her parents divorced
  • She was herself married and divorced twice
  • She raised her four children in a farmhouse without electricity or running water until her youngest was 5
  • She believed herself to be reincarnated, formerly a wife of a sea captain in the early 1800′s; this is the era she emulated in her own lifestyle
  • She died just a few months short of her 93rd birthday, on June 18 of this year

Some links of interest:

The Doors of the Sea

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David Bentley Hart’s The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? is a short (104 pages), challenging, in many ways satisfying theological discussion of the problem of evil. Recently I’ve read reviews by some bloggers I respect, and I was intrigued enough to buy a copy and read it this week.

The argument itself is satisfying in the sense that it articulates the struggle any thinking person has when we look at the world, see its brutality on a grand, impersonal scale, and try to reconcile it with a good, loving God. I don’t think I’ve ever read such a full-throated description as this from a Christian perspective:

It is as if the entire cosmos were somehow predatory, a single great organism nourishing itself upon the death of everything to which it gives birth, creating and devouring all things with a terrible and impassive majesty. Nature squanders us with such magnificent prodigality that it is hard not to think that something enduringly hideous and abysmal must abide in the depths of life.

One of the reasons we read is for passages like that, which affirm our own feelings but then — as this book does — move us beyond them as a map can help us find our way out of a dead end.

I felt something similar after reading Lewis’s Problem of Pain. It’s not identical, but it covers a fair amount of the same ground, and it’s equally satisying in its acknowledgment that nature as we experience it has never been the ground of religious faith; we’re not supposed to look at pain and suffering as evidence of God’s goodness, or his chosen materials for bringing his purposes to pass. But where Lewis’s book is directed primarily at skeptics (his aim is to “show that the old Christian doctrine of being made ‘perfect through suffering’ is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design”), Hart’s is aimed equally at the careless and often callous arguments of professing Christians. In that sense this book shows itself to be a work of a different age — an age when the Christian mind is under attack on all sides (including the shunning of rationality in some quarters of Christianity itself), and those who can give voice to a Christian worldview in what Nancy Pearcey would call the “public square” are needed both to elucidate and to exhort.

This book is an expansion of a Wall Street Journal article Hart wrote shortly after the tsunami in Asia in 2004. Hart himself is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and teacher, and there’s plenty of instruction packed between the covers of even this short book. I liked the way Hart laid out arguments by atheists against God, by deists as apologists for God, and by professing Christians responding to the tsunami. I liked the way he examined and exposed the fallacies of these arguments. Most of all I liked the way he disentangled the God of Scripture from the various ways he’s been mischaracterized by foggy theology, anthropomorphism, and faulty thinking. I have, I think, a clearer picture of who I’m praying to now; the glass is a little less cloudy. A passage like this gives a whiff of Hart’s final resting place in the argument he’s making, and from me it calls forth an amen. Central to the Gospel, writes Hart, is

the evil of death, its intrinsic falsity, its unjust dominion over the world, its ultimate nullity; the knowledge that God is not pleased or nourished by our deaths, that he is not the secret architect of evil, that he is the conqueror of hell, that he has condemned all these things by the power of the cross; the knowledge that God is life and light and infinite love, and that the path that leads through nature and history to his Kingdom does not simply follow the contours of either nature or history, or obey the logic immanent to them, but is opened to us by way of the natural and historical absurdity — or outrage — of the empty tomb.

The only thing about the book that I haven’t come to terms with yet is its intellectual showiness. Many of the reviews at Amazon complain that the book’s language is so erudite as to be inaccessible. I wouldn’t go quite that far. But Hart’s vocabulary seems needlessly sophisticated — distractingly so. It made me wonder if there’s a subtext of “I am smart” in reaction to the condescension of some of the atheistic pronouncements made in the aftermath of the tsunami.

When it comes to intellect, Christ himself takes the prize. As Dallas Willard points out, Jesus “is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived.” Yet his method was not to dazzle with his erudition. He walked and ate and camped and performed miracles and opened the glories of his Kingdom among uneducated people, working class people, people who certainly had not read Thomas Aquinas or The Brothers Karamazov. My liking for this book is tempered by a mistrust for its intellectual glitter and its tone of (sometimes scornful) impatience. These could very well be traits that mark Hart as a prophetically gifted thinker. But they work against the life-giving quality of some of his insights here, and make the book less palatable to me than if it were narrated in a spirit of humility.

Edited to add: For further reading, here’s an interview with David Bentley Hart.