Books I Read This Month: August 2024
Taffy Brodesser-Akner • Yuval Noah Harari • Cristina Rivera Garza
Long Island Compromise (Taffy Brodesser-Akner)
Before birthing the modern Zionist movement at the end of the 19th century and encouraging Jewish people to relocate to Palestine and establish their own state inside of what was already an established state, Theodor Herzl had a different proposition. The writer and political activist thought it might be good if every last Jewish person converted en masse to Christianity and let their former religion and culture go poof into thin air. He was so thoroughly panicked by the spike of anti-Semitism in the latter stages of the Victorian Era that he felt extreme measures might be the most prudent path forward. But what if there was another way, a middle way, and what if that road ran through the United States of America? In the ensuing century, before and after the Holocaust became the worst possible realization of Herzl’s fears, millions of Jewish people neither went all in on the institution of an ethnic state nor made their heritage disappear completely. Reform Judaism in the U.S.A. seemed a safe bet.
Such a Jewish family is at the heart of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s sweeping, multi-generational 2024 novel Long Island Compromise, an excellent and piquant second act after her 2019 debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble. At the midpoint of this narrative about a wealthy, troubled clan from Lawn Guy Land, there’s a brisk and bountiful 12-page origin story about the tawny town of Middle Rock and one of the burg’s wealthiest families, the Fletchers, whose patriarch, Zelig, barely escaped Poland during the Holocaust, arriving impoverished in America in 1942 and eventually thriving as a polystyrene magnate. It’s a gripping tale of close calls, unbridled generosity, and pertinacity, though some key elements are complete horseshit, as we learn later on. In reality, Zelig did the awful things necessary to survive and build a new world for himself and his descendants, refusing to judge himself too harshly when a gas chamber was behind door number 2.
When Zelig dies decades after emigrating, his 21-year-old son, Carl, is summoned home from college to assume leadership of the Styrofoam factory. He succeeds magnificently in the role, and the Fletchers live comfortably on a sprawling Middle Rock estate in a picturesque suburban community. (Why shtetl for less?) Money helps them assimilate quite well, as does their indifference to most traditions—feh to all that. “We’re Jews who eat bacon,” one of Carl’s children reminds another. Sure, they have bar mitzvahs, sit shiva, etc., Jewishness isn’t incidental to their lives, but it’s not the main thing about them. What matters most is that they’re wonderfully wealthy Americans who never know the fear of falling. They’re living the dream.
The bubble of protection is pricked permanently one brisk spring morning in 1980 when Carl steps out of his stately home and has a hood pulled over his head by two, maybe three, assailants who force him into a car. (The novel is inspired by a real-life Long Island kidnapping.) The abductors deposit the businessman in a basement where he’s beaten, tortured, pissed on, and tormented with anti-Semitic epithets by his abductors as they await the delivery of ransom money. (They claim to be committing a politically motivated crime, but it seems like an inside job from the jump.) The FBI swarms the family home, as Carl’s frantic wife, Ruth, tries to keep it together while dutifully delivering $250,000 to the drop-off spot. The cash is collected, and the businessman is released, but he’s a prisoner to dark forces evermore. “This happened to your body,” his mother, Phyllis, instructs him. “This did not happen to you. Don’t let it in.” But his body is him, and it already made its way inside. The blessed man, who never had to worry about a thing, now knows the harsh truth his European ancestors learned: No one is safe, and security is always provisional. He lives the rest of his days in a reduced state, becoming a “husband who might as well have been a sofa cushion,” swallowing a raft of medications to try to keep the ghosts, the dybbuks, at a distance.
Subtlety is not Akner’s gift. A lack of subtlety, however, *is* her gift.
We’re told that this horrific crime not only brings Carl’s happiness to a halt, turning his wife and mother into permanent caretakers, but that his three children, Bernard (Beamer), Nathan, and Jenny, have the trajectory of their lives altered by the shocking event. It’s the least convincing aspect of the book, a theme we’re supposed to accept because the author tells us to. In three sections, we see what the kids made of their lives as they approach or have passed 40. Beamer is a drugged-up Hollywood co-screenwriter of a series of Taken-like movies that always feature a kidnapping or multiple kidnappings. He has a shiksa wife and kids but spends a good deal of time scoring pills and powders and paying sex workers in plastic bras to tie him up, demean him, and insert a variety of objects up his ass. Maybe Beamer is recreating his father’s degradation or perhaps he’s just fucked up because he was sexualized too early, making his way at age 13 into a brothel above a Long Island dentist’s office, eager to begin filling cavities. Akner insists it’s more the former.
Nathan is an aggressively risk-averse, milquetoast land-use lawyer who lives like a mouse and uses the most neutral, non-objectionable verbiage possible, never really saying what he means. He seems a hostage to his many fears. Jenny, born right after the kidnapping, is a genius who has so many doors open to her, way too many. She could have been a physicist or an economist or an art historian, but she’s blessed/cursed with a high level of discernment, able to see the downside in all those fields—in everything. She doesn’t seem fucked up by anything but her vast potential and how she never figures out quite how to use it. That she winds up a New Haven union organizer who lives on family wealth is an absurdity lost only on her.
It would have been interesting if these scions were laboring under a delusion that their father’s kidnapping had rerouted the course of their lives when they’d just screwed up things themselves, like a communal lie once shared and always believed, until an awakening. The author makes it clear that this isn’t the case, however. She does stress that in addition to the kidnapping, having too much money is part of the siblings’ problem. This theme she pulls off spectacularly. When a private equity deal involving the factory surprisingly and suddenly cuts off the hefty dividends the adult children receive quarterly at a moment when each has squandered all of their savings, they may be forced to be independent for the first time in their lives. Seeing these children of wealth squirm is a sort of Marxist revenge porn, scenes of their frustration and foolishness often played for cruel humor, simultaneously funny and sad.
The narrator makes it clear that being rich and delusional is the only way to live in America (provided you never lose your riches or delusions).
What’s best about Long Island Compromise (the title is a term referring to, among other things, straight teens having anal sex to avoid pregnancy) is the layered nature of the novel and how new information continually upends what we’ve come to believe. The worm keeps turning, and the reader’s investment continues paying off. Subtlety is not Akner’s gift. A lack of subtlety, however, is her gift. She’s been criticized for going over the top, for being too much. But urging her to stop having fun with stereotypes or sometimes groan-inducing wordplay is like telling Angela Carter not to play with fairy tales or Groucho Marx to cut out arching his eyebrows. It’s missing the point. She’s the granddaughter of Philp Roth and a sibling to Jonathan Franzen, but she’s also someone brilliant and funny and filthy in a way that’s uniquely her own.
Her many gifts deliver a rich social novel about security, risk management, what we call “late capitalism”—funny how the sun never seems to set—and Jewish assimilation in America. “Do you want to hear a story with a terrible ending?” the narrator asks us at the outset. What follows is a narrative that inverts Dickens, one about children enjoying all they want, never needing to beg for more. The narrator makes it clear that being rich and delusional, which may be mentally unhealthy, is the only way to live in the U.S. (provided you never lose your riches and delusions). This novel isn’t an ode to American capitalism but a horror story about its rapaciousness. Being wealthy and clueless is terrible, but it’s better than the alternative. Thinking about the postwar security enjoyed by Jewish families like the Fletchers in America, Akner writes that this arrangement “worked until it didn’t,” tacitly referring to recent news headlines about tiki torches and shul shootings. The same might be said of the American economic system. It worked until it didn’t.•
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (Yuval Noah Harari)
“Flood the zone with shit” was the profane strategy devised by degenerate political adviser Steve Bannon in 2016 while endeavoring to keep the capsizing campaign of a loathsome, lawless Presidential candidate afloat. It was a plan meant to encourage obfuscation by multiplication. If the Reality TV despot Donald Trump was guilty of everything, was he guilty of anything? Who could keep score when all his public statements were awash in “alternative facts”? Capitalizing on the power of Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites, the campaign piled lies and outrages on top of lies and outrages and gleefully watched as legacy media tried to trap a million scurrying rats. It worked wonderfully well and didn’t end on Election Day or even after Bannon was cashiered by his boss seven months into the Administration. Trump, a pathological liar by nature, was a human disinformation campaign that continued to push propaganda into the decentralized media ecosystem.
It was the perfect moment for such a scenario since social media networks and automated bots were increasingly driving the culture in a country dotted with news deserts, making it easy to poison the well. A year earlier, just after Trump announced his candidacy, there was a dress rehearsal for what the campaign would become. The Jade Helm 15 conspiracy ridiculously posited that regularly scheduled U.S. military training exercises were part of a sinister plan by President Obama to invade Texas and enable Chinese soldiers to enter the country and disarm Lone State citizens. It was bonkers. Alex Jones may have been the face of the fakakta fiction, but the rumors originated in the Russian government. It was an early attempt by the Kremlin to harness the growing power of social networks and destabilize American society. To those not paying attention, the VHS tapes propagandizing Jade Helm being sold by snail mail made it seem like the sort of outdated, low-fi 20th-century conspiracy spearheaded by Birchers. Those looking closer, however, realized the sick ruse was the handiwork of Russian troll farms gaming social media. When the ploy caused hysteria among some Texans and Governor Greg Abbott ordered the State Guard to monitor what he knew was a non-existent “situation,” the Kremlin realized it was onto something big. Shamelessness may have been Bannon and Trump’s shared superpower, but it was the new information networks that provided them with the chaos agent they needed to turn their shit into gold.
Noah Yuval Harari’s thick 2024 title, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, his latest bookshelf-breaking Big History blockbuster, focuses on the past, present, and future of information networks that can nourish or contaminate, the type Bannon and Trump co-opted and the much more powerful ones that are supplanting them. He divides the volume into two halves: “Part 1: Human Networks” and “Part II: The Inorganic Networks.” The former is a discursive study of the analog means of spreading information (religions, printing presses, constitutions); the latter explores the promise and peril of the new machine-based systems (the Internet, AI, and AR). Focusing on the human propensity for storytelling and the way our narratives are being reshaped by potent new technologies, Nexus blends the themes of Harari’s previous works.
Judging by Nexus, Harari’s emerged from these high-tech lairs sadder, soberer, and more circumspect.
The erstwhile unknown Jerusalem-based medievalist made a giant splash in 2011 with Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, a remarkably lucid account of how our species came to rule the Earth. Harari concluded that the ability to tell and accept stories about nations, currencies, etc., allowed us to conquer all other creatures. It was an oversimplification, of course. There were countless important factors in the rise of Homo sapiens (e.g., Neanderthals’ giant brains required a massive amount of calories and put them at a disadvantage). Next up in 2015 was Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, a puzzling work that was not brief despite the title’s promise. In this tome, the academic explored how AI, Deep Learning, and biotech would supposedly soon allow us to turn ourselves into gods. Harari acknowledged he lacked the technological knowledge underpinning his argument and relied on the industry’s “experts” to guide him—perhaps not the best strategy. Silicon Valley “seers” can be delusional or self-interested and the near-term, post-human society he described felt more like sci-fi than serious thinking.
In the years after Homo Deus, the historian was ushered inside industry sanctums as something of an expert lecturer on a topic where he admittedly is not an expert. Judging by Nexus, he’s emerged from these high-tech lairs sadder, soberer, and more circumspect. It’s a sector overrun by troubling practices and extravagant promises. Open AI CEO Sam Altman asserts that mind-blowing tools will unleash a “shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today.” But anyone telling us that technology is the solution to all our problems is themselves part of the problem. AI will also aid unsavory ends including surveillance states and social credit systems.
In the first section, Harari explains how early information networks enabled both the growth of large-scale democracy and tyranny, each being beyond reach without significant communications apparatuses. The printing press made the rise of literacy possible but also drove Middle Ages witch hunts. (German Catholic priest Heinrich Kramer’s evil, ignorant 1426 treatise, The Hammer of the Witches, led to numerous tortures and executions.) Publishing itself wasn’t sufficient. What was required were self-correcting mechanisms. The Bible, which couldn’t be questioned, lacked such levers. Conversely, the “curation institutions” that developed around science encouraged challenging the status quo, enabling the consistent improvement of knowledge. Communications could be good but guardrails were necessary to prevent the promotion of totalitarianism and superstition.
Harari is missing something obvious which makes it clear that he still hasn’t completely awakened from his Silicon Valley somnambulism.
The book's second section declares that communications in the Internet Age have gone awry, and Artificial Intelligence may make matters worse, much worse. “Novel technology often leads to historical disasters,” the author writes. If AI systems are programmed to create and decide independently, we may have what Harari terms a “Silicon Curtain” between us and how our information is developed and disseminated. New media has already rewritten political rules. Authoritarian regimes have historically feared information beyond their control, while democracies desired a free flow of info. The first part of that equation remains true, as the current governments in Russia and North Korea demonstrate. The latter isn’t so simple in 2024. In the post-print era, endless streams of non-curated information via social media, podcasts, and QAnon have left us knee-deep in horseshit, and you don’t have to be extremely online to feel its influence. Nazis and Nazi bots work in tandem on their anti-democratic project. “Populism views information as a weapon,” Harari says. Karl Popper worried about unfettered free speech in pre-algorithmic times with the “paradox of tolerance.” Freedom of expression, transformed wildly by new media, has become an explosive. It would be no surprise if McKinsey consultants are currently advising authoritarian regimes on the best methods to weaponize free speech.
Harari offers two major prescriptions for this dangerous moment, arguing that the “unprecedented nature of the AI revolution” has put us on the cusp of “digital empires.” He credits the late philosopher Daniel Dennett for the first one: All nations should outlaw bots pretending to be humans. You’ll get pushback from free-speech absolutists in America, but it’s a sound idea. The other suggestion is that we ensure that all information networks, especially those enhanced by AI, are embedded with self-correcting mechanisms. That would be nice, but one of the non-machine examples the author uses of a system able to correct itself is the U.S. Constitution, which can be modified and improved via Amendments. Considering that document has been frayed by a bad actor on the biggest stage who may completely shred it if he regains the White House, it’s not the best argument for self-correcting systems as a panacea. Harari is missing something obvious, which makes it clear he still hasn’t fully awakened from his Silicon Valley somnambulism.
The answer lies not in systems but in humans. The only solution to prevent the worst outcomes is to produce good citizens, ones who seek the truth and develop the critical-thinking skills to do so in a sane manner. The writer believes that Homo sapiens are decent and sees our faults as not lying primarily within ourselves but in the imperfect information conduits feeding our heads. We’ve merely been pointed in the wrong direction by external forces. That’s not an entirely convincing position. None of the current American societal decline was preordained, even with endless outlets for swarms of bots. For most of U.S. history, Trump and Bannon would have been laughed out of the mainstream. Reality TV and social media created crosswinds, but it's the marriage of ignorance and opportunism that nosed down the plane. One other remedy Harari embraces is the common refrain of “keeping humans in the loop,” ensuring that people are always involved jointly with AI in decision-making. That’s the wiser path, but no system will ever be foolproof, especially when so many citizens are foolish or worse.•
The Taiga Syndrome (Cristina Rivera Garza)
Earthy can’t begin to explain the phantasmagoric orgy of images on display in The Taiga Syndrome, Christina Rivera Garza’s slim-but-formidable 2018 grim fairy tale that explicitly references “Hansel and Gretel” and “Little Red Riding Hood” and doubles as an eco-fiction novel. The shocking scenes overflow with human and animal bodily processes, secretions, and smells. Sizes are out of proportion, and behaviors are odd. “It is difficult to describe what is impossible to imagine,” we’re told more than once by the main character, an Ex-Detective lured out of retirement for one more case, when she’s overwhelmed by surprising sights that are challenging to assimilate. Garza, however, regularly pumps out what are seemingly unimaginable scenes, describing them in a stunning, disquieting manner.
The Ex-Detective is done with the vicissitudes of the sleuthing business and has been pseudonymously authoring detective novels while living in a coastal city. Her literary output borrows heavily from the unsolved cases that bedeviled her during her career: the case of the castrated men; the case of the man who lived inside a whale for years; and the case of the woman who gave her hand, literally, without realizing it. If all these mysteries seem heightened and hyperreal, so does the curious older gentleman who implores the Ex-Detective to put her new career on pause and find his second wife, who has run away to the Taiga with another man. “I lost a woman,” he says as if he misplaced his keys. He stresses to the private eye that if she were to know how old he was, she would be astonished, as if his age stretches into the high triple digits or perhaps he is immortal.
The part of the forest biome where the second wife and her new man have fled is unclear to the reader. What we do know is that she has sent her bereft husband a steady stream of telegrams and letters on her way to the Taiga, leaving a trail of white pebbles and breadcrumbs, causing him to believe she wants him to find her and bring her home. After reading the messages, the Ex-Detective reaches the same conclusion. Charmed that the second wife sent communications via an archaic tool like the telegram, she comes out of retirement and accepts the case.
“Had this all happened? Impossible to know for sure. Children are untrustworthy informants.”
Of course, something more than wired messages is pulling our heroine into the forest, something ineffable. Before she departs, her client warns her about the confusing ailment that gives the book its title. “But you must know about the Taiga Syndrome, right? It seems that certain inhabitants of the Taiga begin to suffer terrible anxiety attacks and make suicidal attempts to escape. Impossible to do when you’re surrounded by the same terrain for five thousand kilometers.” Despite the eerie caveat, she remains resolute in her mission.
The Ex-Detective traces the route that the missing woman has taken, using the postmarks from her mail as a guide, and, before entering the Taiga, employs a translator, a college-educated man who has issues with so-called civilization, one who worked for several years as a logger in the Taiga participating in its despoliation. They eventually find their way to the community where the second wife and her man lived for a spell. Wordless villagers point them toward the former home of the fugitive spouse, a hovel made from wood, cardboard, and dry branches. This shack becomes the base from which the investigator and the translator will learn about the strange doings of the runaway couple and try to locate them.
Through drawings and sentence fragments, the translator learns, mostly from a local boy who has a habit of peeping into windows, that the second wife allegedly gave birth to a litter of tiny people after eating bread fed to her by local villagers and engaging in feverish sex with her new man. “Had this all happened?” the Ex-Detective wondered, questioning her ability to understand the translator, her hearing, and the credibility of the eyewitness. “Impossible to know for sure. Children are untrustworthy informants.” The odd visions go from second-hand to first when the Ex-Detective and the translator visit a bar/brothel in the village that serves up all sorts of kinks to loggers working for corporate interests. Lactating sex workers who’ve recently given birth allow patrons to suckle them for a price. Lumberjacks screw barmaids in full view of their fellow patrons. A waiter presents the Lispectoresque and Lynchian pièce de résistance when he reveals a tray holding two six-inch-tall adults who perform like a pair of puny porn stars.
The Ex-Detective and translator hit the road again, gradually closing in on the second wife. But what can be said at this point? What can be retrieved? In addition to the Ex-Detective and the translator, the “mad couple of the Taiga” have other pursuers: a medium-sized wolf, and a feral boy who avoids capture by shimmying up branches with aplomb. The narrator describes the latter character as a creature “that isn’t human, hanging from the treetops.” The boy is the spirit of the forest and the one who ultimately suffers horribly at the hands of the loggers. “The Taiga is a disease, a syndrome,” we’re told, but it would appear that industrialization, which snakes into the Taiga, is the greater illness.•