Books I Read This Month: February 2023
George Schuyler • Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher • Kazuo Ishiguro • Fran Ross • James Baldwin • Cormac McCarthy • Thomas McGuane
Black No More (George Schuyler)
What to make of Schuyler, a Harlem Renaissance socialist who became a Rhadamanthine ultraconservative, an outspoken opponent of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, a Libertarian, a contributor to John Birch Society periodicals, and a Goldwater voter? Maybe he was buzzing with the sort of restless intellect that caused him to take flight once again, willy-nilly, after landing on any -ism. Or perhaps he was just a talented misanthrope with contrarian impulses who couldn’t tolerate anyone, including himself, including people who reminded him of himself. By the mid-1920s, Schuyler’s journalism, criticism and essays were being lauded by H.L. Mencken, who had a coiled snake for a heart, who never met a man he didn’t dislike. It was no accident.
Schuyler’s acute cynicism is on full display in this audacious, often brilliant, satirical 1931 novel that is a sort of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” of race, about science remaking the “natural order” of things. It’s a take-no-prisoners tale of Dr. Junius Crookman, a Black scientist who’s figured out how to whitewash the nation, developing a blanching process that can turn Black people Caucasian in 72 hours. It’s not a pleasant medical procedure, but America’s abundant bigotry provokes citizens across the country to rush in a breakneck manner to take the three-day “cure” for dark skin, a crash course in whole-body vitiligo, seeking a “chromatic emancipation.” Patient No. 1 is Max Disher, a struggling Harlem insurance salesman who’s smarting from the rejection of a white Atlanta woman visiting New York, whose rebuff came with an N-word exclamation point. “It looked as though science was to succeed where the Civil War failed,” Max says, though he’s soon renamed himself Matthew Fisher and is using his newfound pigmentation to become a power broker for a Klan-like organization in Georgia, endeavoring to get its gutter-level leader elected President of the United States. To be fair, he’s willing to work for or against either party if it profits him materially. He’s an ardent amoralist whose only concerns are absolute power and filthy lucre.
If Max/Matthew utilized his newly alabaster identity to scam and steal, no problem. But EVERYONE in this novel is a selfish hustler of some sort, no one actually cares about anything but the bottom line, which undermines the satire because satire begins with truth, and that’s a lie. It coldly and derisively dismisses all the Americans who earnestly worked to improve the plight of Black Americans, who risked their lives and sometimes lost them. You can argue about the efficacy of any particular policy espoused by W. E. B. Du Bois or Marcus Garvey, both of whom are parodied in these pages, but the impetus for their work was sincere. They were responding as best they knew to an arrant emergency.
The novel is astute, however, in many ways. White Americans react angrily to the Black-No-More process undergone soon enough by millions of citizens, realizing that their so-called exceptionalism rests on the existence of those who are “lesser.” They fight desperately, legally and politically, to preserve the existence of Black people, whom they don’t like and don’t want near them, to maintain their societal advantage. Erasing the color line would mean, more or less, their own erasure.
Politicians are also at a loss when needing someone to pillory in election season to scare up votes. A Red Menace is good, sure, but nothing comes in handier than the fear of a Black Planet. You could also read this book as a prescient analogy for how one-way integration would ultimately attenuate Black society, with businesses and banks drawn down to nothing. In an especially clever twist by Schuyler, Black business owners who offer hair straightening and sell skin-lightening cosmetics, who hawk the “dream” of whiteness, are outraged by their customers achieving that end beyond belief, causing their livelihoods to vanish.
At the book’s absolute best, however, is the merciless skewering of the ludicrous and ever-shifting idea of race itself, mocking the folly of its true believers, with a brutal climax and devastating denouement. (SPOILER ALERT: We’re all mutts.) In these passages, Schuyler is a sort of Depression Era Voltaire, gleefully vicious in exposing the deceptions on which we’ve based our lives. But even Candide still had, you know, Candide, a foolishly optimistic naif who had to learn the hard way but who also possessed an innate decency. Black No More presents no such noble characters, none. Innocence can make us a fool, but the complete absence of it can cause us to curdle.
And Schuyler surely spoiled. He came to believe that Civil Liberties were more important than Civil Rights, somehow convincing himself the two could be uncoupled. In his characters’ willingness to do business with anyone regardless of how it impacted those in great peril, it appears Schuyler was subconsciously seeing his own future. There certainly seems to be a lot of projection going on, considering he ended up a willing tool of the wack-job racist Birchers and those happy to peddle prejudice as they aimed for the White House.•
The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future (Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher)
It was in 2004 during the early days of Google when Wired’s Kevin Kelly, in his own recollection, was at a party and soberly approached company co-founder Larry Page, whom he considered a brilliant young mind, to broach a topic that had been nagging at him. Why, he wanted to know, would Page focus his enviable wetware on something he believed to be as mundane as a search engine, a sector better left to Yahoo!, if not yahoos? Why not use his formidable brain to dream the biggest technological dreams? “Oh, we’re really making an AI,” Page calmly explained, cluing his elder into the actual nature of the enterprise.
No, Page and his partner Sergey Brin did not establish Google primarily to help you locate the nearest lo mein. It was always intended as an Artificial Intelligence company. So much the better that the human-made algorithms that supplied the search giant with its gazillions in ad revenue were simultaneously collecting information that could be used in the creation of machine intelligence—or so the company hoped. The moonshots were many: driverless cars, Google Glass, brain chips that would expand knowledge and memory (“Eventually you’ll get the implant,” Page promised/threatened Steven Levy). Even bringing about immortality through the company’s Calico division was on the agenda. “Can Google Solve Death?” asked the dunderheads with fancy educations at Time a decade ago. No, of course it couldn’t, but machine intelligence that could radically improve medicine was part of the plan.
Other companies dreamed the same dreams, though. When Microsoft’s ChatGPT zoomed into consciousness late last year, responding in “human-like” paragraphs to just about any query and ushering (sometimes incredulous) journalists into the uncanny valley, it threatened to instantly usurp Google’s long-held search superiority and make Bing, of all godforsaken things, the sector’s leader. Page and his co-founder Brin, who’d both stepped away from the company, were hastily summoned back to the fold to fix whatever it is that’s broken. This budding new Silicon Valley hot war refocused attention once again on the rise of the machines, an evergreen that’s been bandied about periodically ever since Norbert Wiener predicted in 1949 that either the “Reds” or the robots would soon be the end of us, the Soviet Union or the “electronic brains” proving victorious. That conversation about silicon superiority continues in earnest long after Khrushchev’s establishment of a corn institute in Ukraine has largely been forgotten.
Most science-fiction fantasies focus on machines becoming conscious, but AI doesn’t have to be sentient to be game-changing. The advent of Deep Learning supercharged the development of machines that are able to have a profound impact but can also sometimes prove disquieting, especially when they’re able to mimic human behavior. Late in 2021, in those halcyon days before Kevin Roose believed a very, very sexy AI called Sydney was flirting with him, this book on the topic of Artificial Intelligence, its promise and perils, was published by Schmidt, the former Google CEO whose father was an economist in the Nixon Treasury Department, and his co-authors, the esteemed war criminal Kissinger, and the MIT computer scientist Huttenlocher.
The book’s most admirable quality is that it’s not breathless techno-optimism à la Ray Kurzweil (whom Page personally recruited to Google) nor speculative nonfiction fretting about machines suddenly twitching into consciousness. (The persistent cultural fixation on computational machines becoming sentient is perplexing; certainly human consciousness is no mere exercise in computation.) Instead the authors soberly assess the potential good and bad applications of our ever-more-powerful AI tools, and as a basic primer on the topic, though one that isn’t rife with new insight, it works fine, I suppose. The section on Global Network Platforms isn’t exactly beach reading, but overall the volume provides a fairly lucid and accurate lay of the land, and the early section tracing the history of human knowledge gathering from the Roman Empire to Silicon Valley is nimble enough, even stopping to impart why computer operations are more like Wittgenstein than Plato. There are certainly some the tone-deaf passages. A book co-written by Henry Fucking Kissinger has the temerity to wonder abut the moral implications of cyberwar with this sentence: “Conventional and nuclear weapons were targetable with relative precision, and moral and legal imperatives direct that they target military forces and installations.” (Cambodia would like a word with you, Hank.)
What’s striking about this book, though, is how few useful answers it has for the threats posed by what it accurately describes as the “mundane and the revolutionary” nature of AI, offering only obvious or unlikely solutions to the vast dangers of the new machines, which can stem from malice or cascading error. For instance, when it comes to AI increasingly administrating nuclear weapons, the book states that it will be important for adversarial nations to maintain a continual dialogue the way the Soviets and Americans did during the Cold War. I could have told you that, and I never even kneeled and prayed with Nixon. The book further asserts that “individuals and societies will have to make up their minds [as to] which aspects of life to reserve for human intelligence,” making it all sound so simple and optional. That’s not how AI or people work.
Competing people, companies and states will propel each other ever-further into this society-sized machine we’re building for ourselves, and there’s really no turning back, no plug to be pulled when things get buggy. (Even if there were, yanking it from the wall at that point would mean turning off our life-support system, the death of us.) AI isn’t conscious and may never be, but in a metaphorical sense it has a mind of its own, changing and growing in fits and starts, often in surprising directions. Just six years ago Microsoft’s chatbot Tay was quickly turned into a virtual Nazi after interacting with racist jackasses online. Now the company is at the forefront of chat, much to the chagrin of Page and his fellow Googlers. AI is as messy as the people who work in the field, so while generative neural networks will cure diseases and do numerous other good deeds, many of the downsides (hyper-surveillance states, autonomous weapons, misinformation agents, etc.) may become large-scale, even existential, threats. There are no easy, orderly answers, despite what this book would have you believe.•
Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro)
It would be facile to refer to this 2021 novel as simply Remains of the Day with robots, but there’s some truth in that coinage as applied to two stories about servants programmed for undying loyalty who ultimately try to make sense of their stints of often-thankless service. In this case, instead of an especially obsequious British butler, the household help at the heart of the narrative is Klara, a solar-powered humanoid, an AF (Artificial Friend). She’s been purchased by a parent from a department store and assigned to Josie, a lonely teenager whose health has been seriously compromised by genetic engineering, a practice common but not perfected in Ishiguro’s not-so-distant future. Delivered into a tense single-parent household in a time a lot like ours but made far more complicated by the exponential growth of AI, Klara, who’s attempted to learn deeply about humans while courting consumers in the shop, works hard at processing her new home’s rules of engagement. And the complications are multiple: a Mother shattered by another child’s death, a father who’s joined an anti-tech counterrevolutionary commune, a very sick child who needs not only comfort but a cure, etc. Making matters more complex still is Klara’s ever-developing but still far-from-complete understanding of the world, assimilating the seemingly endless reams of often contradictory information. In that sense, she’s a lot like you and me.
As he did in Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro works comfortably here in science fiction, but, of course, he’s no mere genre writer but instead a humanist with a profound capacity for empathy. He inverts the expected trope of a robot run amok and instead makes Kara the anti-HAL, the being responsible for remedying the failings of humans who aren’t evil but just…human. Whereas George Saunders’ haunting 2012 short story “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” which shared some similar terrain, used robotics to investigate the inhumanity of outsourcing to faceless sweatshop labor, Ishiguro sustains this longer work with a more nebulous and complex meaning that can be read in numerous ways. It’s clear, though, in mid-career that one of the grand themes running through much of his output, whether focusing on butlers or robots or unwilling organ donors, is the lopsided relationship between servants and masters, the grossly unfair sacrifices society expects of some and how time and what passes for progress never seems to even the playing field.
There are plot points too convenient and occasional dialogue that seems antithetical to character, but overall this is a moving work that reminds that no matter how far we may advance into science that feels like fiction, as long as one of us still breathes, human problems will remain.•
Oreo (Fran Ross)
A raucous, hilarious 1974 picaresque powered by remarkable wordplay, Ross’ only novel follows a brilliant Black-Jewish Philadelphia girl of 14, precocious with the language and creator of a brand new form of martial arts, as she decamps to NYC to search for the father she never knew. What follows is a relentlessly clever, feminist re-imagining of the Six Labours of Theseus, with the wrestling match between Cercyon and the son of Aegeus, in particular, parodied in the most WTF manner imaginable, as Oreo employs her wits (and mitts) to ward off all manner of peril while heading ever deeper into a city overrun by urban decay. It’s as smart, funny and fun as all get-out.
No offense to all the fine and patriotic postbellum Americans who sedulously peddled the Lost Cause, but history is usually written by the victors. The same, though, is true of literature. Some people were sore that Philip Roth, wildly compensated in many ways for his life’s work, much of it very good, was never awarded the Nobel Prize, didn’t go to the great beyond with one more medal pinned to his ass. The far bigger injustice is that Ross, his contemporary and as smart and talented a writer as him or any of her male counterparts, got bupkes. (Did I mention her use of Yiddish and German and other languages, some of her own invention, is endlessly ingenious?) The book didn’t sell and was quickly forgotten. This story is so heady and satire can be such a hard sell in novel form that I’m not suggesting it would have been a bestseller had it not been written by a Black woman, but anything brimming with this much brilliance and brio would have found champions, its author receiving numerous chances at mainstream success, if it had been penned at the time by a white man.
Instead Ross never got the opportunity to compose a second major work and died from lung cancer at age 50, her one scintillating book, eventually posthumously rediscovered, taking its place on an often-overlooked shelf of Black American literary satirists, alongside the work of William Melvin Kelley, Charles Wright, Percival Everett and Paul Beatty, to name a few. Race, gender and an assortment of accidents and incidents shape what passes for our finest literature, so it’s important to remember that victories aren’t necessarily strictly based on merit. Ross could have been a contender, and the ones crowned champions never faced a fair fight.•
The Evidence of Things Not Seen (James Baldwin)
Human beings, masters of acclimation, can become inured to almost anything, no atrocity or depravity beyond our ability to shift expectations and reorient ourselves, especially if we’re talking about the pain of others. That may explain, in part, the persistence of prejudice that regularly results in tragedy. In James Baldwin’s final book, published in 1981, he was enticed by his editor at Playboy to travel from his home in France to Georgia and write about just such a moral disaster, the maddening Atlanta Child Murders case and its aftermath. “We live in an age the horror of which can scarcely, if at all, be described,” he wrote, acknowledging the limits of his pen to assimilate the shocking rash of slayings and the dicey legal proceedings that supposedly delivered justice.
In 1979, the bodies of murdered children and a couple of adults began to be discovered in Atlanta. It was bad timing for a city endeavoring to identify itself as the capital of the New South, a place “too busy to hate,” as its enticing, entrepreneurial motto promised. Initially, America being America, the murder of numerous Black citizens was ignored. It was only when Camille Bell, the mother of one of the young victims started the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders and began to agitate, that attention was finally paid. Then the circus really came to town.
There was a well-intentioned if awkward benefit concert Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra headlined at the Omni to help defray the cost of the expensive ongoing, shambolic investigation. The police requested a psychic who was appropriately from Nutley, New Jersey, to use her “powers” to find the killer. And Dick Gregory, veteran conspiracy theorist, interjected himself into the morass with proto-Q hokum, further obfuscating the turbid and urgent case. (In one of the book’s few missteps, Baldwin tries to rationalize the comic/activist’s irresponsible behavior, using the specter of the disgraceful Tuskegee Experiment to forgive Gregory’s thoughtless showboating.)
After much futile fumbling, as the body count rose past two dozen, the police finally settled on a suspect in Wayne Williams, an arrogant, odd local man sans a winning personality, who may or may not have committed some of the murders but is very unlikely to have done them all. (There was enough credible suspicion that the Ku Klux Klan carried out some of the slayings that a Superior Court Judge authorized a wiretap on the hate group.) The hallmark of a serial killer is a ritualistic pattern of violence, and there decidedly was not one here. A couple of victims were adult men, most were boys, but some were girls. Murders were committed via strangulation, shootings, head trauma, and other means. Baldwin uses this book to re-litigate what appears to an unfair trial and a whitewashing of the facts but also meditates on race, the country’s thorniest topic, opining on Emmett Till, his own upbringing in Harlem, and the stubborn persistence of inequitable power structures.
I’m grateful this story fell into the responsible hands of Baldwin, instead of, say, Truman Capote or Norman Mailer, who were literary powerhouses at their best, but weren’t above using real-life violence to build suspense, to titillate, as they did with their “nonfiction novels.” Baldwin isn’t interested in entertaining, just illuminating, asking questions that need to be posed, both about the case and the country. One of the most salient points he makes, which seems obvious 40 years on, is that not much changes about a prejudiced system just because you change the skin color of the mayor or police officers or town administrators. A bigoted hierarchy continues apace with fresh faces if it hasn’t been reckoned with in a serious way. This truth was made plain again recently when five Black Memphis cops brutally, needlessly murdered Black motorist Tyre Nichols. It’s still an age of horror and though we may be better at describing it now with our endless stream of words, naming the devil and slaying it are not one and the same.•
The Passenger
Stella Maris (Cormac McCarthy)
A pair of late-career, connected novels about the tortured, brilliant children of a Manhattan Project scientist who played a part in blowing two cities all but off the map, these twin works aren’t the author’s crowning achievement, not nearly, but, as imperfect as they are, there’s too much here to be dismissed even for those who aren’t McCarthy completists.
Bobby Western is an erstwhile math whiz who quit academia for a career racing on the Formula 2 circuit in Europe, a risky vocation that crash-landed him in a coma ten years prior. Now in 1980 he’s a deeply depressed New Orleans-based salvage diver working jobs in the Southern U.S. and the Gulf of Mexico, associating with all manner of colorful riffraff who live on the edge and frequently face-plant over it. The intrigue of the novel revolves around a pair of shadowy badge-carrying officials who harass Bobby at his shabby apartment after he participates in a dive to investigate the wreckage of a submerged jet that recently nosedived in the Gulf killing all nine passengers. Or was it ten? The Feds are very interested in the accident and supposed missing passenger, believing Bobby knows something he’s not telling them. He’s genuinely murky about the mystery, though, and making matters more curious is that there are zero news reports about the downed aircraft, not a word anywhere. Soon Bobby’s under investigation for tax fraud, with his bank account frozen and passport revoked.
Maybe it’s all related to an earlier break-in at his grandparents’ home, when his late father’s scientific papers and personal effects were stolen? Perhaps it’s all a giant conspiracy? Bobby’s father was a brilliant physicist who toiled on the A-bomb under J. Robert Oppenheimer, met his mom who worked in a factory helping to produce said weapons of mass destruction. (They both likely died early from radiation poisoning.) The Pynchonesque paranoia plaguing Bobby is predated by his other main issue: He and his younger sister, Alicia, a math genius beyond belief with psychiatric problems beyond repair, were madly in love with each other—a love of the incestuous, unconsummated variety. I say were because while Bobby was comatose, his sister, suffering from a raft of relentless mental-health issues, including regular harrowing “visits” from a vicious three-foot-tall apparition she’s dubbed the “Thalidomide Kid,” committed suicide after walking away from a Wisconsin psychiatric hospital.
McCarthy has a character suggest these boundless hardships may be the result of a family curse being played out on them because of the sins of their father. (I have to suppose the characters of Bobby and Alicia take some degree of inspiration from Oppenheimer’s children, a sensitive daughter who committed suicide and a son who had a flair for engineering but works in the blue-collar, non-science field of carpentry.) The specter of the A-bomb and the horrors it wrought is of a piece with the writer’s earlier works about the destructive nature of our shift into the modern technological world, with Judge Holden (Blood Meridien) and Anton Chigurh (No Country for Old Men) serving as the prime harbingers of doom, and the collapsed civilization of The Road the final result. The author also just often enjoys writing extreme characters and situations, and there’s a WHOLE LOT going on here around the cryptic, cerebral mystery at its core about Bobby being targeted and pursued. It’s often way too much and sometimes doesn’t work, though the riddle of the plane crash and the appeal of the characters remain compelling.
McCarthy has been on a physics-and-math bender at the Santa Fe Institute since the Reagan Era, and in this fatter volume, though not in its slender sibling, the author sometimes forgets he’s a storyteller first and foremost. There’s one 20-or-so-page passage at the center of this book that may go over your head (as it did mine) if you lack knowledge of the latest electroweak theory, Bevatron plates or the motivations of Paul Dirac. He mostly controls that impulse, however. Each chapter is preceded by italicized passages in which the Thalidomide Kid hectors and insults Alicia, and these sections are often varying degrees of tiresome. (Also the repeated descriptions of the Kid clapping his “flippers” isn’t exactly the most sensitive thing.) For all the book’s busyness, I ultimately found myself caring about the fate of Bobby and his NOLA bull-session buddies, each of whom appears headed ass over tea kettle into a dead end. Their stories leave a mark, make an impression.
The prequel, Stella Maris, set in a Wisconsin psychiatric hospital in 1972 when Bobby was comatose after his race-car crack-up, is a book-length dialogue between a therapist and Alicia, with doctor and patient discussing her reasons for not wanting to live, as he tries to keep pace with her outsize intellect, an impossible task. It’s the leaner, far more disciplined work of the duo, and if transposed to the stage—the author wrote a couple of plays earlier in his career—it would make for an interesting two-hander. McCarthy piles upon Alicia talents and troubles a mile high. (Did I mention that in addition to being a godlike math genius and a musical prodigy she’s also drop-dead gorgeous?) You might think her character completely unbelievable, but the author wisely places an earlier segment of her now-derailed academic career in the orbit of real-life French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, whose own biography is so overwhelmingly improbable it makes every word of these outré volumes seem plausible by comparison. It’s a wise gambit to remind that some things, perhaps the most important ones, can be shocking and barely comprehensible. Like math or physics, life can sometimes be difficult to understand.•
Ninety-two in the Shade (Thomas McGuane)
An atmospheric 1973 debut novel about an academic gone AWOL who returns home to Key West and flings himself into the deep end of that island city’s muddy waters, McGuane’s tale introduces three generations of wayward Florida Men, talented but moving through life in the most disgracefully bass-ackwards manner. The youngest, and the central character of the novel, Thomas Skelton, is a boozy runaway from an advanced biology degree who lives in an abandoned airplane fuselage while planning a future as a skiff-based tour guide, finally, he believes, finding his life’s calling.
Matters are complicated not only by the outrageous antics of his larger-than-life relatives (dirty politics, dingy brothels, nervous breakdowns, etc.) but also by the presence of veteran guide/maniac Nichol Dance, who informs Skelton quite explicitly that he’ll brook no new competition, swearing to eliminate the interloper with lethal force if need be. After Dance plays a cruel joke on his younger rival and Skelton answers the parry with an even more provocative act, the pin has been pulled and the explosion just a matter of time.
Dazzling, innovative language propels what plays on one level like a Calvinist fable, predestined as hell, but sometimes the least surprising ending is the wisest one, and McGuane follows through exactly as promised. (I mean, he’s given his main character a surname a syllable short of “skeleton.”) In this case, it’s a matter of how the author gets there, and the narrative progresses with controlled fury, until it can be controlled no more. As the novel careers headlong to its conclusion with an aura as existential as any you’ll find in Camus or Mishima, you may feel frustration at Skelton for clinging to his doomed desires yet be completely understanding of the gravitational pull at work.•