Too Soon?

     Last week brother Miguel and I agreed to stop watching a horror movie after half an hour, for different reasons. I found the dialogue somewhat mannered, the atmosphere minimal, a minor role overacted. It plods. No soundtrack, either, or at least one that made any sort of impression—a shame, since in most cases I prefer them over the horror movies themselves. Miguel’s contention: “Too soon.” He was referring to the setting: lockdown during the worst days of the coronavirus. I suppose I haven’t been hungering for works of art that reflect on the period, which, despite what can seem like the willed amnesia of the outside world—too late!—we haven’t entirely left behind, and seeing it rendered as drama onscreen was rather jarring. It’s not that the subject is too touchy, or too weirdly fresh, to explore. What seemed too soon to me, given when the movie was released, was putting out anything other than the latest scientific information or the first draft of history from healthcare workers, essential workers, or journalists, processing and creating without distance on the subject. But I’m more inclined to think it’s a matter of quality rather than timing. Rushed artistic works that rely heavily on the tumultuous moment to garner interest aren’t welcome. Quality always is. During the same week it so happens I was also thinking about who the best essayists alive might be. With this question in mind, I considered those I didn’t know well enough to rank and one of the first names that came up was Zadie Smith.

I read her debut novel White Teeth back in college, published when she wasn’t much older than I was at the time. I didn’t warm to it, her youth showing in ways I didn’t find appealing. Today her name is mentioned everywhere I go to sniff out books when she isn’t being interviewed and published in some of those places. Having read a recent piece of hers about Charles Dickens and her latest novel, I felt fairly safe that she’d be a writer with style, a defibrillator aiding me in my recovery from those without. I didn’t check the reviews or even a summary before choosing to stick with the older Smith and ordering a collection entitled Intimations (2020).  Turns out we were reading Marcus Aurelius at the same time and that Smith, in this book of six essays, is responding to the start of the pandemic: “There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytical, political, as well as comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those—the year isn’t halfway done.” The subject was processed and the book expressly created without distance.

The first essay of the collection, “Peonies,” begins with an image likely to resonate with many who survived our plague, the writer clutching iron bars. We learn that Smith is strict in her scheduling: 45 minute blocks, with two minutes in between reserved for “free time.” A charming series of sentences:

 

In those days, the sharp end of my spade was primed against chatty baristas, overly friendly mothers, needy students, curious readers—anyone I considered a threat to the program. Oh, I was very well defended. But this was a sneak attack…by horticulture. Tulips.

 

Eventually I came to think of it as somewhat risky for an opening essay. I started going over my notes and expanding on them and referring back to it as soon as I finished, which amounted to a second reading, simply because the form she chooses makes it tough to follow, unlike the rest of her essays. One association leads to another and another and another: the bars, Nabokov’s tale about the origin of Lolita (she doesn’t buy it), a Freudian analysis of the image of a middle-aged woman peering at a flower, the cage of gender…. The torrent of experience overwhelms Smith. Our first disagreement: I enjoy getting carried away, trusting that I’ll have quiet, solitary hours to retrieve memories to fondle or laugh about. (Although it’s easier for me to preserve my solitude than a mother/wife/professor.) The method of the essay I’m most used to is orderly, thesis and support, problem and possible answer, struggle and resolution. Here, Smith rejects it, instead pulling the reader into the convolutions of her struggle: “If only it were possible to simply state these feelings without insisting on them, without making an argument or a dogma out of them!” What I hear is: the writer is going to present thoughts that aren’t properly worked out or omitted as facile before being committed to the page, that their importance lies in merely having been thought. And, right on cue, she presents one that’s shaky and disputable. The reader could argue with her but she ends the essay by saying that all these thoughts could be nonsense anyway. So why bother? Let’s say it works best as an introduction to the mind of Zadie Smith.

Another essay takes on a classic subject, “why I write” or “why write?” In response to the numerous attempts she views as inaccurate or dishonest, she attempts to get at the real reason and what she produces is one of the least convincing I’ve come across on this theme. The real reason she claims to write is to fill time: “There is no great difference between novels and [baking] banana bread. They are both just something to do.” One can read this as suicidal: a warning that there’s no life or urgency whatsoever behind what you write. And, ugh! banana bread! My admittedly scant knowledge of Smith’s work won’t let me accept that interpretation. As I puzzled over an alternative, she does what I seek the essayist to do: she interrogates that thought, allowing that there are writers who take another approach without sacrificing authenticity. Ultimately Smith finds solace in all those who are also, due to the pandemic, searching for ways of filling time. But why fill your time with writing when there are so many less complicated, low-impact ways of doing that? One could: play video games, bingewatch shows, browse around on the internet, lie around in bed, masturbate. All narcotizing diversions that would make for a comfortable life completely devoid of the pains of deep thinking and reflection and the careful weighing of words. It must be because, for a writer of any sort of merit, there’s more to it than mere time-filling. I wouldn’t go so far as to call “Something to Do” nonsense but one measure of the best essayists is how well the writer probes the subject at hand, which partly involves anticipating the sensible objections of those readers who are particularly keen to test durability. These two essays have their cracks.

And there are a few more throughout. Otherwise I appreciate everything about Intimations. It’s a slim book but nonetheless she views the pandemic from a satisfying number of angles. In her collection of “screengrabs,” we step outside her head as she observes, in a series of short pieces, various people in her life and how they seem to be coping. One quality I imagine serves her well as a novelist is her special attention to people, the feeling she conveys that she’s looking just a little closer, to better individualize someone. Smith on her masseur:

 

His head and face is optimistic in construction. He looks like optimism. Both his skull and his face are ideally round, he is always smiling, and he makes baldness look like an achievement, like something to be perfected. His skin is the color of old paperback pages.

 

She does some admirable self-questioning of her privilege and her degree of suffering. She’s cool as opposed to heated, even when she’s writing about power structures and the contempt displayed by those in power, refreshingly free of stridency and dogma, the standard mode for many. She’s vulnerable, candid. Compared to her, I gradually felt myself to be—rough! Like an expanse of dry skin before it’s magically transformed by a drop of lotion (in commercials). Lately I’ve been meditating on the word “acerbic.” The other day I was looking in the mirror, thinking about the book and brushing my teeth, when my jaw dropped: “Acerbic”? Gwog? Smith provides, through humble example, the gentlest inducement to productive self-questioning.

Once I started Intimations, I didn’t think about whether it was too soon or not. After the last piece, a list of people she’s thankful for, with commentary, I realized that I’d formed, pixel by unobtrusive pixel, from her reading tastes to her opinions to her routine to her background, a vivid image of the book’s affable main character, Zadie Smith, who enters a clothing store and leaves with a personalized t-shirt that reads: “Black Nerd.” 

Just the Facts

     With a shudder I look back on the worst professor I had in college, who, among other things, castigated the study of literature and defended the study of trash because, as she explained resentfully to some persistent students, the facts, the facts. I disagree that facts should be enough to satisfy a reader or that any book containing them is above criticism. And it’s frustrating to take a chance on a writer who does seem to think facts alone make the book. My curiosity may be strong enough to carry me to the end. Yet this obstinate neglect of a number of options for enhancement, I’m constantly reminding myself as I struggle to reach it, can undermine the most engrossing material. I don’t demand that anything I read meet the highest aesthetic standard. There is a minimum, though. It’s the difference between a smooth ride through a scenic land with a pleasant (or at least tolerable) guide and a bumpy ride through a barren land with a difficult (or intolerable) guide.

With Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (2023), the reader is going on a road trip that’s even longer than the book’s 600-plus pages suggest. The question of whether the ride will be smooth or bumpy is answered within paragraph one. We begin with a lurch, the first of roughly 600. At least Harris alerts you inadvertently up front: this is how it’s going to be, leave now if you don’t think you can withstand the journey. I, for one, was able to partly because Harris’s language tends mostly toward flavorless informality that’s only mildly stifling. He makes use of curse words (nothing so imaginative as the title of an earlier book of his, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit) and schoolyard insults and conspiratorial italics. Still, I was never sure I’d be able to, regularly distracted and taken out of the book at every turn by ill-constructed paragraphs and lines on the order of: “Planters premised produce production on premium prices, so they were vulnerable to market fluctuations.”

Palo Alto is a massive history, an attempted synthesis of subjects that could, on their own, be the basis for tomes,  the kind of book that can least afford a lack of structure. And yet it does. It unfolds chronologically, more or less, but his subjects tend to mash into each other in lengthy chapters that nearly lose their function, from, say, the iPhone, to China, to Russia, back to China, to Palo Alto, to Facebook, alternating in tone between lecture and riff and whatever this is:

 

Silicon Valley’s biggest winners are the slack-limbed puppets who have nailed their hands to these historical forces. Butterflies pinning themselves to the most opportune spots in the glass display box. Not the Wozniaks or even the Bezoses but the Airbnbozos whose defining feature is an eagerness to unleash forces they don’t understand onto as many people as they can, as fast as possible. Mickey Mouse surfs the waves in his stolen wizard hat, flashing a four-finger hang ten.

…Stoned rant that reminds you to find someone else to smoke with? One of the words he leans on most heavily is “recall,” as in recall this or that piece of information among numberless others encountered previously. It’s a clunky means of establishing links across the book that, due to how he organizes the material, or because he chooses not to, don’t naturally form on their own.

The rainbow dust jacket is misleading: despite how much story one would think there’d be, given the scope, this is a monochromatic book, missing almost every element of storytelling. Though Harris considers it a history-as-memoir, it’s largely impersonal, since he isn’t delving into, say, distant family history. He doesn’t do images, scenes, dialogue. Choice anecdotes are few. As for the lack of characters, Harris appears to be suspicious of the very notion of pursuing one, treating such figures as Leland Stanford and Bill Gates as personifications of “forces”—quotidian human details aren’t worth bothering with because if not them, some other men would have played the same role. Instead what he has are villainous names on a page. There’s some warmth of esteem in his discussion of certain radicals and labor leaders, in the first two-thirds of the book, before such figures cease to be mentioned. He pays them tribute but they’re heroes, hardly more fleshed out. And while he doesn’t find much amusing in almost 200 years of human history, in rare moments of levity he ventures a corny crowd silencer: “[Herbert] Hoover was like a vacuum, sucking up precious metals from around the world and depositing a hefty share back into Palo Alto’s giant tax shelter,” “Cyber cafes offered internet access by the minute, and the web itself was built on java.”

So ambition far exceeds verbal skill and what we’re left with are the facts, artlessly presented. And all of them are worth knowing as a citizen of our country, to better understand the brutal way our system has operated and what has and hasn’t changed over time. As someone born and raised in California, I can attest to this about my public school education: there are aspects of the formation of the state, with its reputation as among the bluest of the country, that aren’t nearly inculcated enough. To begin with: settler enslavement and murder of the native population, already cut down by disease spread by the Mexicans and the Spanish, was official policy. The first governor of the state, Peter Burnett, in a speech called for—his words—“a war of extermination.” One who answered the call would eventually become California’s first US senator, John C. Frémont. The Bay Area includes a city called Fremont. I checked to confirm on the city’s website and it is in fact named after the same murderous Frémont. Or as the website puts it: “Referred to by historians as ‘The Great Pathfinder,’ John C. Frémont, our City’s namesake, mapped a trail through Mission Pass, providing American settlers access to the southeastern San Francisco Bay Area.” Which historians? That’s the biographical note in its entirety.

Some of what the rest of Palo Alto covers: further episodes of violence, racial exclusion policies, environmental degradation, worker protests and crackdowns. The monopolistic power of the railroads. Bionomics, the theory behind eugenics. Stanford university, founded by a rich scam artist, molded to align with the vision of a man, David Starr Jordan, who appears to have been an accomplice in the murder of the founder’s wife and got away with it. A university that produced, among others, a rich scam artist who eventually became President of the United States, Herbert Hoover, more influential than I’d been previously led to believe. The university’s profitable role in developing advanced technology, including the weapons of war. The scam underlying private housing and redlining. The Black Panthers. The horrors of US foreign policy. Ronald Reagan, rightwing governor of the state and later President of the United States. Silicon Valley, the rise of the PC, the monopolistic power of the tech industry, and its attacks on workers. The surveillance state. The decline of unions and the general worsening of inequality up to the present day.

The capitalist always dreams of the grotesquely enormous payout at the expense of labor. Labor will never settle for anything less than fair pay and various other reasonable protections to ensure a stable, safer life that likely don’t permit grotesquely enormous payouts to a few individuals. Conflict between the two is inevitable. Democracy is supposed to stand in the middle, mediating, which really means civilizing the capitalists. The facts suggest it has failed in its role for most of the country’s history. This is where those who care about finding a solution should start. (One can look to two modern examples set by Hollywood and the auto workers, who’ve had success with a tried-and-true solution.) But speaking as both reader and essential worker, sloppiness doesn’t inspire me or rouse me to action. It just makes grasping what matters that much harder.