Books I Read This Month: March 2023
Jessamine Chan • Sarah Weinman • Susan Jacoby • Lauren Oyler • Janet Malcolm • Danielle Evans • Stephen Kinzer • Ludvík Vaculík
The School for Good Mothers (Jessamine Chan)
There aren’t many feminist novels that would be at home on the bookshelf of a cultural conservative, but Jessamine Chan’s assured 2022 debut is the rare volume that can be numbered among them. While the author explores the desire to control the female body, an unremitting right-wing goal in America, she also uses the tools of modern liberal ideology—the so-called nanny state, cancel culture, wokeness, etc.—tweaking and turbocharging them, to create a dystopia where the ethos and vernacular of modern progressivism are employed to guilt, entrap and imprison women. The writer’s creative decision is not to have these reformist reflexes co-opted by neocons and misused but rather to extrapolate them to an extreme conclusion, a dead end. Maybe this is intended as social commentary or maybe not, but it’s a central building block of the narrative. Folding together these polar political forces, Chan melds the seemingly immiscible deeply, painfully.
Jilted and exhausted Philadelphia single mother Frida Liu had a “bad day,” messed up, the way all parents mess up at one point or another. Forlorn, frazzled and seriously sleep-deprived, she left her beloved eighteen-month-old Harriet alone at home for more than two hours while making a coffee run and retrieving some files from her hybrid editorial job at Wharton. While she was away, something happened. Maybe Harriet cried loudly and alarmed those within earshot? Maybe her tight-knit neighbors just don’t like the New York City transplant of Chinese ancestry and took the opportunity to harass her? She’s faced bigotry before in her life, so it’s possible. Whatever it was, Child Protection Services was summoned and the baby removed. When Frida arrives at her doorstep, she is crossing into a brave new world, a fever dream, a complete nightmare.
Even prior to this world-rocking incident, 39-year-old Frida feared not living up to the standards of other women, despite being attractive and intelligent and doing her level best. She’s admonished for her laissez-faire attitude at the playground by other moms, helicopter parents of the Black Hawk variety. During her last trimester, she discovered her husband, Gust, was having an affair with a younger, well-to-do Pilates instructor, which brought about the dissolution of their marriage. Even her own beautiful child, whom she loves dearly, seems somehow beyond her grasp much of the time. The alien invasion is how she remembers a male friend describing her pregnancy. The creature, he called the growing human inside. It would be funny, but he’s not completely wrong, not where Frida’s fraught connection to the world is concerned. All these suspicions and rejections mirror the disquiet she feels within, confirming her self-doubt, and while questioning oneself is a survival instinct, it also can be a double-edged sword. “She always feels like she’s fucking up, but now there’s evidence,” we’re told.
Adding to the litany of females who make Frida feel small are the young, toned and efficient social workers she encounters who seem to her a new and better species, completely at ease with their technological accouterments and in their athleisure, lulus of unyielding bureaucracy clad in lululemon. You might expect the mother to be assigned parenting classes by Family Court and be subject to visits from CPS for a while, but as Frida soon finds out, the rules have recently changed. In a moment of moral panic, the state now defines its job as to “eliminate human error” by any means necessary, to improve nurturing at all costs. That means souped-up surveillance and “reeducation,” and it’s positively draconian. Charged with neglect and abandonment, the Family Court judge gives her no options but these: permanently surrender her parental rights and never see Harriet again or spend a year at an institute designed to improve mothering. It’s not a prison, she assures herself, despite the electrified fences. Frida hasn’t been traduced, exactly, but punished beyond all reason.
The remedial mothering school is a high-tech hellhole where political correctness is highly valued. Each mom is “gifted” the latest in robotics—a talking, humanoid child who resembles their offspring in superficial ways. They’re expected to teach their android babies the latest in liberal platitudes as they are constantly graded and degraded. The dolls record all they “see” and “hear,” the information relayed to a central system. Likewise gathering info are the omnipresent cameras and microphones, and, oh, the brain scans, we mustn’t forget the brain scans. The rules are arbitrary and seem aimed at obliterating self-esteem, the tormentors more women whom Frida can never please, and please them she must if she’s to ever again have a relationship with her daughter.
Much of what occurs in these pages contains all the hallmarks of psychological horror, with Frida, in her consistently hypnagogic state, encountering all manner of surreal situations, experiencing endless paranoia. Chan could have blurred the line between what her central character is perceiving and what’s actually occurring, but that’s not the course she chose. Instead she created a realistic portrait of an anti-utopia that may be slightly futuristic or perhaps is happening currently in a counterfactual, and she largely handles it very well.
The story does have its weaknesses. In creating her totalitarian world, Chan elides the inconvenient. If you’re wondering why, say, the Philadelphia Inquirer wouldn’t be up in arms over this gross mistreatment of citizens, keep wondering. In the school, the mothers hope one of their own who’s escaped has alerted the outside world about what is transpiring. Except so much of what has egregiously happened to these women has occurred in public hearings in courthouses. So Chan’s world is one not completely developed and won’t withstand too many questions; you just have to accept her vision. Also the characters beyond Frida are mostly narrowly drawn stereotypes, from her ex-husband to the other mothers in the reform school to her bureaucratic tormentors, almost all just broad indicators of race, ethnicity, sexual identity and class. In the macro, however, this is a potent work, one that deftly manages a scenario which could easily have been exploitation.
As the novel progresses tensely to its finale, two outcomes are possible for Frida: She defeats the soul-killing system and wins back her child or she doesn’t. Either conclusion could work and Chan manages the choice she makes with aplomb. Down to the final paragraphs, the novelist plays on the understandable fear that technology is permitting the state to gain too much control, to become a maze dotted with prisons, making sure her main character looks warily to both the left and right for traps that may await her.•
Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free (Sarah Weinman)
A forerunner to the more infamous violent vedette Jack Henry Abbott, convicted killer Edgar Smith became a cause célèbre while in prison in the 1960s, eventually winning release in 1971 with the help of a cadre of influential media figures, despite being pretty obviously guilty for the brutal slaying of a 15-year-old New Jersey girl, whose skull was caved in with a baseball bat and rocks. Primarily responsible for helping Smith rise from his electric chair was the resolute advocacy of William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative éminence grise and Apartheid apologist not normally known for his bleeding heart.
The controversial case is the subject of Sarah Weinman’s 2022 nonfiction account, which is a sensational piece of work, but one that doesn’t further sensationalize the painful chapter. Making easy reading of the tortuous intricacies of a murder trial and more than a decade of appeals is no mean feat, and the author renders it all very lucid. She previously penned The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, an Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece, another title about a victimized young girl ending up a footnote in the story of powerful people, and in both cases asks the right questions, conducts probing research and presents convincing answers. There’s no lurid entertainment, no titillation, as you often encounter in lesser books about notorious crimes. Her aim is true, the work deeply humane.
Despite Buckley’s depiction of Smith as possessing a stolid disposition, the 23-year-old Jersey man had left a trail of disturbing crimes by 1957 when he murdered 15-year-old Victoria Zielinsky, whose lifeless body was discovered in a Bergen County sand pit. Clothes stained with her blood were retrieved by police from the Mahwah trailer Smith shared with his wife and infant daughter, and an admission of guilt followed the pre-Miranda interrogation. The killer quickly recanted his confession, saying that while he gave Zielinsky a lift, argued with her and struck her, he left the girl alive.
In court, his lawyer told a fanciful tale of the events and named the “real murderer” to no avail. It took the jury not even two hours to convict. After coming close to execution numerous times, his case was taken up with avidity by Buckley after they began a correspondence at the outset of the 1960s, the talking head initiating the relationship after seeing a local newspaper report in which Smith identified himself as a dedicated reader of Buckley’s National Review. (In a bit of unintentional gallows humor, the magazine editor enthusiastically offered the death-row inmate a free lifetime subscription.)
The tough-on-crime Buckley aggressively supported the then-doomed convict by penning an Esquire article is his defense, the aristocratic on-air personality foolishly referring to the raffish barfly Smith’s writing as “Victorian” and groundlessly describing the teenage victim as “flirtatious”; he subsequently used the paycheck from the piece to establish a legal-defense fund for Smith. Buckley also bolstered the condemned man by appearing on The Tonight Show and Today to make arguments for Smith’s innocence in his distinctive speaking voice—Weinman describes it as “mid-Atlantic,” but it sounded more like an odd mélange of sozzled Southern plantation owner and bumptious British patrician.
Even beyond the support granted by the National Review, Smith found allies in numerous TV, magazine and publishing players, especially Alfred A. Knopf editor Sophie Wilkins, who midwifed his written-behind-bars book about the case into existence as the two engaged in a platonic but passionate affair of sorts, flirting and fighting their way through a series of tumultuous edits, like the Liz and Dick of death row. It was a business deal that became an epistolary romance (with numerous non-conjugal visits added in) that became mostly a mess, with Smith manipulating Wilkins in much the same manner he had Buckley, though the literary collaboration was a big success.
Esquire and the New York Times Book Review saw fit to engage in some penitentiary chic, providing a platform for the fledgling jailhouse writer to pen auto-interviews from his cell (“Does being in prison have any advantages for a writer?” he asked himself), and Playboy hired Smith to review a book about the penal system. He was a felon and a freelancer. When Smith was freed from the Trenton prison in 1971 after his conviction was overturned, he was immediately whisked by limo to NYC to record a special two-hour edition of Firing Line.
The sociopath steadfastly lied throughout that TV appearance, and soon enough to publishers, journalists, passersby, pretty much anyone within earshot. But even as he was enjoying his post-release whirlwind of publicity, schmoozing in studios with Merv and Barbara, it was practically fait accompli he would once again act out violently. There were so many warning signs. His relationships, even the one with Buckley, became strained as he grew increasingly erratic and angry, his behavior exacerbated as his fame ebbed and money problems reached high tide. Five years after his release, Smith, now broke and desperate and living in San Diego with his new wife, kidnapped at knife point 33-year-old Lefteriya “Lisa” Ozbun with the intention of robbing her. When the woman struggled as she tried to escape from his car, he stabbed her in the chest. She survived, but Smith’s friendship with Buckley had finally expired. When the felon reached out to the pundit for further assistance while he was on the lam in Las Vegas, Buckley quickly placed a call to the FBI.
It was during the Ozbun trial that Smith confessed once more and finally to the Zielinsky slaying. He argued that he shouldn’t be held accountable for the girl’s murder or his latest crime because his sexual compulsion was uncontrollable, leading him to make rash decisions. It was a gambit aimed at securing a lesser sentence through a loophole in California law, and an odd one at that since the motive of his latest crime was clearly theft. The maneuver failed, landing him in prison for the rest of his days, every attempt at parole rejected. Unlike his teenage victim, Smith lived to a ripe old age despite six heart bypass surgeries, dying in a prison hospital at 83.
For his part, Buckley kind of owned up, still insisting he’d acted properly based on the information at hand at the time while acknowledging he was misled by Smith. Most of his fury was not self-directed as it should have been but reserved for members of the chattering classes eager to say “I told you so.” It was a non-apology apology, as it’s become to be called in our wired age’s constant flow of lesser media outrages and compulsory crisis management. The student of political science and history had somehow missed Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s aphorism, “Never ruin an apology with an excuse.”
Two years after the FBI nabbed Smith in Vegas, inmate Jack Henry Abbott wrote to Norman Mailer, beginning a correspondence, jump-starting the same cycle. It was Jimmy Breslin who warned his pal and former running mate that he was headed for a world of trouble when he championed the In the Belly of the Beast writer. It turned out just as awfully as the tabloid journalist prophesied, with the pugnacious novelist experiencing a rare moment of humility after his myopic reformer’s zeal led to even more tragedy. His mea culpa in the aftermath was more full-throated than Buckley’s, though it hardly mattered to Richard Adan, the 22-year-old waiter Abbott impulsively stabbed to death.
Why did the world witness two boldfaced figures who should have known better make such terrible errors of judgment with convicts who displayed some degree of native literary talent? In her introduction, Weinman quotes a National Review correspondent explaining how Buckley and the whole lot of them fell for the conman’s bullshit. “We were taken in, I suspect, by our unwillingness to believe that anyone who loved NR could be a savage killer.” It seems impossible it could be that simple, but hubris can cause people to look with their egos instead of their eyes, especially if they’re used to being lionized. That’s a truth that cuts across political lines, as much as Buckley’s weakness for a convicted child murderer may have shocked at the time. Then again, maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising that someone who had room in his heart for P.W. Botha and Joseph McCarthy could will himself to be blind to the crimes of a monster.•
The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought (Susan Jacoby)
In 1888, when Theodore Roosevelt derided Revolutionary War hero Thomas Paine as a “filthy little atheist,” the brazenly heretical Robert Green Ingersoll was already a dozen years deep into a whirlwind speaking tour of America that would occupy him until his life’s end. While the agnostic lawyer stood atop podia furiously working to return to prominence the deist author of The Age of Reason, he also made a massive name for himself, even among his most devoutly religious enemies, as an orator of national repute, delivering a string of blasphemous stem-winders in support of evolution, suffrage, Abolition and the separation of church and state.
While the infidel Paine had fallen out of favor with the public by the time of his death in 1809, the freethinker Ingersoll has fallen pretty much entirely off the map. Susan Jacoby’s stirring 2013 nonfiction account tries to rescue him as he once rescued Paine. We meet a gifted speaker of little formal schooling who could be witty, irreverent or solemn and likely would have enjoyed a prominent political career if only he’d have coyly avoided the topic of religion at key moments the way Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant often did. But Ingersoll was compelled to speak on the matter. He didn’t say anything particularly novel, but he said the truth aloud when most stayed mum, and he said it really well and sometimes really outrageously.
As Jacoby notes, there were a pair of divergent paths forward once lessons from the HMS Beagle had washed over the Earth: the heartless ultra-Libertarian views of Social Darwinism and the radical humanism that saw the world as naturally unfair and encouraged us to try to balance the scales. Ingersoll was solidly in the latter camp, pushing for free public education for all, urging for the end of slavery, opposing eugenics at every turn, and supporting women in not only attaining the vote but the freedom to divorce as well. He also never scapegoated or denigrated immigrants and people of color, as some otherwise stellar figures of his age, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were known to do.
Ingersoll was especially lauded for being able to “reach across the aisle” to successfully speak to rural and working class people who strenuously disagreed with him on his fervor for fully secular governance, doing so in a relatable manner often absent from seasoned politicians of his day (and ours). He was “preeminently the teacher of the masses,” wrote Herman E. Kittredge, his 1911 biographer. An enthusiastic explainer to farmers, mechanics and laborers, he’d somehow win their respect while turning their sacred cows into hamburger, encouraging them with his Whitmanesque “Happiness Creed.”
The author’s research is enlightening, but I don’t think she arrives at the correct conclusion when assessing why her subject has been so utterly wiped from the American consciousness. The main theory Jacoby proffers is that it was mostly his irreligious manner that doomed Ingersoll to the dustbin of history. I remain unconvinced. What’s missing from his oeuvre is a signature work or moment that could have enabled the pre-Radio Days figure to snake his way into the Internet Age. Even an ardent admirer such as Jacoby managed only 131 pages in his defense, if you include the introduction. It wasn’t that no one tried to keep his name alive. Ingersoll’s brother-in-law published a posthumous 12-volume collection of his writing, but by the time Clarence Darrow, who’d studied and eulogized Ingersoll, argued for reason over faith the Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, the great orator’s voice had already been reduced to a whisper.
It was a similar arc experienced by the equally famous but very religious Billy Sunday, “the Baseball Preacher” who vociferously denied evolution and was probably the most famous evangelist in America in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century. A regular at the White House and a man who made national news whenever he opened his mouth (which was always), Sunday is likewise all but lost to history, having lived long enough to have seen, in the wake of WWI, his medium of public speaking eclipsed by the emergence of radio and motion pictures. Some people are amazing messengers with no compelling original thought, and their fame is particularly prone to cultural and media shifts.
Ingersoll died on the eve of the twentieth century, in 1899, optimistic about the decline of superstition. “Let the ghosts go,” he wrote. “We will worship them no more.” He believed reason would soon make us whole and deliver world peace and other utopic dreams. It was naive, as WWI and WWII would ferociously remind. Reason is a great tool, but irrational faith isn’t the sole cause of all our ills. You certainly can’t blame religion for the millions murdered by Joseph Stalin, who, according to my records, did not keep the Sabbath. It’s wise to not confuse the weapon and the assailant. Humans would be capable of any manner of atrocity with or without sacred texts and steepled churches. We’re as crafty as we are flawed, and we’d find a way.
Even as God-fearing faith has attenuated in America our time, being non-religious is still a non-starter in national politics, a dynamic at odds with increased secularization. It’s not that the voices of nonbelievers are left completely out of the conversation. We’ve heard ad infinitum from the loud-and-proud, podcast-ready New Atheist choir (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Bill Maher, the late Christopher Hitchens, etc.), but they’re too religious about it, their lack of faith sounding like a new kind of faith, and a smug and unappealing one that’s a huge turnoff even to an atheist like myself. (Jacoby makes clear that Ingersoll could be every bit as acerbic as Dawkins or Harris, but acknowledges he wasn’t nearly as inflexible when dealing with the moderately religious.)
Upon Ingersoll’s death, he was remembered in a postmortem by Edgar G. Howe, a Kansas newspaper editor who wrote that “there will come a time when public men may speak their honest convictions in religion without being maligned by the ignorant and the superstitious, but not yet.” Still not yet, but the day will arrive, the right messenger will appear in the center ring of American politics. Perhaps that person won’t be so easily forgotten.•
Fake Accounts (Lauren Oyler)
There’s more than a hint in Lauren Oyler’s 2021 semi-autobiographical novel, her attempt at a grand The Way We Live Now statement about life during the time of Trump, Tinder, Twitter and trolls, that her main character, based on her physically and biographically, is a sociopath, or at least something pretty close to it. Not just sad or a jerk or bewildered by modern technology and rules of social engagement, but a sui generis wack job with a mile-long malevolent streak.
Oyler is best known as a narcissistic, bomb-throwing book reviewer who’s gone viral more for the maximalist nature of her opinions than for having anything too enlightening to say about literature. She’s made uneasy by some writers (e.g., Jia Tolentino) and recent literary characters (creations of Sheila Heti) striving to be seen as decent, and she’s puzzled about why W.G. Sebald was, you know, considered a good writer. And when I identify Oyler as an egotistical literary critic, I’m not joking, it’s quantifiable. In the aforementioned brave journey (i.e., free European vacation) to figure out why Sebald is so appreciated, she used the word I more times than Sebald, which seems inverse to what their literary merits warrant. She’s also not above starting a review of a book another human being spent years writing with the word I. It’s not something you see when she’s been engaged to provide straightforward criticism, but when she’s allowed more latitude, it’s I, I, I.
The raisonneur of this work, the I at the center of the story, is a nameless young woman much like Oyler: tall, having formerly been employed at someplace like Vice, happy to inform you about the sweep of hair covering her face, an American living abroad in Germany. In any case, we’re told about her romance in Berlin and New York City with a taciturn art-school grad, which takes an odd but conveniently apt 2016 turn when she snoops through his phone and discovers he’s running an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory site. Our hero prepares to split with him over this deal breaker, but you know, after making young Goebbels fancy pancakes with blackberries and hanging out with him for a few more days, as one does. “I cared less that he was a conspiracy theorist than that he was cagey,” she says at one point, which is supposed to make her flawed and fascinating but OMG and WTF. Dude, he seems sort of like a Nazi.
As the Trump inauguration looms, she decides to force herself to decamp to D.C. to halfheartedly attend the 2017 Women’s March, which she feels meh about because the hats and signs are cringe and white women who live in Brooklyn, like her, are awful. After ditching the protest early, she learns her boyfriend has shockingly been killed in a bicycling accident. The balance of the novel you might assume would have her trying to make sense of it all, and I guess she does in her own way, but not really, because even before the whole anti-Semitic thing, she really wasn’t that crazy about him, which is awkward AF but what can you do?
Moving back to Berlin for lack of a better option, she decides to arrange a dozen meet-ups with men on dating apps in which she’ll adopt a different fictional character for each guy (unbeknownst to them) that she creates based on the signs of the zodiac. These encounters, which make up the bulk of the book, are tedious, with one dull bullshit biographical backstory after another, and it’s not aided by Oyler being unable to restrain herself from using this stretch to mock the diaristic writing style of Heti and some other female novelists of the moment. The character claims to be conducting her duplicitous dating adventure because she’s “just bored,” just enjoying a lark to distract her from ennui. But trying to trick strangers she connected with online with different personas sounds like something Ted Bundy would have done if he'd had access to OkCupid. As she works her way through the anti-romantic encounters, “truth bombs” detonate in her hands.
“Worrying about being a bad person is totally self-centered,” she asserts, sounding very much like the novelist herself, though it’s totally not. There’s also this line: “I spent a lot of time around unadmittedly OK writers, and around them self-awareness seemed like the only personality trait that could not be learned.” You’re making this too easy, Lauren. When the character lies, which she does pathologically as you may have deduced, to secure a part-time job caring for a pair of infants, she is soon describing the babies as “dead behind the eyes and warm.” You would hope the kids would run, but alas, no motor skills yet.
A literary character lacking self-awareness is perfectly acceptable, but the novelist creating that character needs to have a clue. You certainly hope for Oyler’s sake that she’s parodying her persona when she declares via the navel-gazing bore at the heart of her book that “this writing is as much an effort to better understand myself, the person I can’t help but feel is the most important person in the narrative.” You could read this statement as witty and winking self-regard, but it’s more likely truth told in jest. The character is surely not kidding in one sense, though: Throughout the book, we learn very little meaningful information about others in the Oyler doppelgänger’s orbit.
As the title suggests, much attention is paid to the false selves people create in our contemporary media arrangement, though it’s actually an ahistorical point. People have forever been willing to fake it until they make it, regardless of what they were making. There have been lies on résumés and dates forever, the advent of the Internet simply allowing for the exponential diffusion of these fictions to people we otherwise would never have “met.” And most people, pre- or post-Internet, never lied to the extent of this character except if they kept a cuckoo clock under their hats.
A late twist arrives, a jolt that’s supposed to visit comeuppance on our egocentric expat by someone even more damaged than herself. It’s fumbled, though, and anyway turns up too late as we just spent 245 pages, most of them monotonous, on this self-centered nudnik, who’s certainly not trying to be decent but should have at least been interesting. You may find yourself wondering at certain points if Oyler is offering an apology or an apologia for previous critical opinions. Is she sending up herself or others who’ve been targets of her broadsides?
In a 2017 piece for Vice about the Catherine Lacey novel The Answers, she wrote this: “The true focus of Lacey's interest, though, is Mary, which is difficult because she belongs to a recent cohort of female anti-protagonists: Devoid of personality and interests, they are not so much characters as devices through which the author can funnel observations about modern life and thoughtful plots.” Hmm, sounds familiar, like Oyler spent her debut novel doing just that. It could be she’s a hypocrite or maybe she’s trying to satirize what she loathes. Ultimately, though, who cares? It’s just not that compelling to consider.
In a sign of how much literary criticism is currently in distress, and has become a go-along-to-get-long profession, this novel was overpraised to the hilt. The New York Times was “grateful for its provocations.” The Guardian called it “playful.” Zadie Smith loved it so much that she’s quoted on the cover saying that “it made me want to retire from contemporary reality.” Oh Zadie, just retire from blurbing.
The fatal flaw of this book is that the author and her main character share an unshakable faith that they’re far more intriguing than they actually are. It would be hopeful to believe that Oyler realizes she’s thus far misspent her talent and is using this novel as a way to clear the deck, to purge herself of her worst impulses, aiming to move beyond self-absorption and use her writing skills to do something more meaningful going forward. Is it possible? Maybe, but I, I, I don’t think so.•
Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory (Janet Malcolm)
No one wrote like Janet Malcolm because no one thought like her. A journalist whose non-observant Jewish family escaped Nazi-occupied Prague on the eve of World War II, she grew up in New York City the daughter of a neurologist/psychiatrist and a lawyer, ultimately returning after college in Michigan to live in Manhattan during the heyday of Freudian psychoanalysis in the `50s and `60s. (“Nameplates of Freudian analysts adorned the doors of Central Park West and Park Avenue like so many mezuzahs” is how the New York Times recalls the milieu.) Psychoanalysis, journalism, law and art were Malcolm’s main bailiwicks, though she had catholic tastes. Her fellow New Yorker staff writer Lillian Ross, who had a gunboat for a mouth, considered her “pretentious,” which was sometimes true, but it wasn’t a shortcoming that prevented her from fashioning one of the monumental reporting careers of her generation.
A controversialist, Malcolm’s likely still best known for her proclamation of an opening sentence from the contentious 1989 book, The Journalist and the Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows what he does is morally indefensible." It was a grenade tossed into her own foxhole and while it’s not nearly a wholly accurate provocation, she was on to something in considering the complicated reporter/subject dynamic, a struggle over narrative often fought inside a virtual steel cage. In poetic terms, her own gaze could be as blank and pitiless as the sun, which she considered a necessity in the pursuit not only of facts but of integrity itself. You got the feeling on occasion, though, that she’d stared into the abyss for too long. In her own way she was trying to bring about healing, but she left her emotions at the door of the operating room, entering with a scalpel in each fist.
Still Pictures, which possesses great heft despite being the length of an opuscule, has been posthumously published nearly two years after Malcolm’s death, and is presumably the final chapter of her distinctive writing career. It’s a collection of 26 brief sketches describing memories that arose when the reporter examined black-and-white family photographs she’d previously labeled “Old Not Good Photos.” It’s a heterodox method of opaquely telling her life story—or at least a version of it—as she comments on chronologically arranged snapshots, an unconventional memoir culled from a cardboard box.
Family, friends, and acquaintances in the pictures are mostly Czech refugees who exited their homeland just steps ahead of Nazi jackboots. As she describes her own family in image after image, Malcolm reveals how Dadaism had seeped into the fabric of their clan and many émigré clans of the time. She identifies her father as the “absurdist in chief,” reveling in the unofficial kind of chaos that answered the official kind. She recalls herself as a cheeky girl, often cruel, and truth be told this unpleasant quality never completely left her. In “Slečna,” she harshly describes a photo of a heavyset schoolmarm who’d taught her in a Czech-language class, retaining her into her dotage a visceral disgust of the woman, describing the image as the “Arbus-like picture of the grotesque Slečna.” Other descriptions of physical appearances and personalities in the slim volume are similarly mean-spirited. It was an aspect of Malcolm’s personality that was venomous, and no matter how many times a snake molts its skin it’s still a snake.
In “Atlantic City,” Malcolm comments on a drab and “terrible” snapshot of her family on the boardwalk, all of them dressed in baggy and unflattering garb, her father looking like a “vacuum cleaner salesman.” She contrasts this image with one of her parents taken in Prague prior to the Nazis ransacking sanity itself, as they walked in high style in Wenceslas Square, enjoying an age of fur pieces and fedoras. The sweep of history intervened, that moment gone forever, as they essentially became different people in their new context when they arrived in America, far safer but also diminished in some ways.
Malcolm reveals in “Mother” and “More on Mother” her fraught relationship with her mom once she reached adult age and went away to college. The mother wrote her elder daughter pleading letters seeking love and communication, and the author could only answer these pained entreaties with jokes. She was trying to break away from the past while her mother was trying to make the center hold. In “Camp Happyacres,” she once more describes adults who were kind to her in frank, unflattering terms; in this case it’s the married couple who thoughtfully ran the wartime summer camp for girls in New Hampshire she and her sister, Marie, attended. The matron is referred to as short, fat, old, and ripe-smelling. Malcolm remembers her younger self being much more enthralled with blond, beautiful camp counselor Sunny, a “bad girl.” Her fixation on girls and women who are transgressive is a leitmotif that runs throughout this book.
Other photos chart Malcolm’s own personal development: school-age crushes, adulterous affairs, marriage and motherhood. In revealing this much about herself, the author’s last work has been called her most personal, and it would appear so superficially, but really her whole canon was an exploration of the self regardless of what specific person or event her senses were trained on. Her numerous writings on art, another dubious profession to her mind, were informed by her own work as a collagist. Exploring the intersection of journalism and law, as she did with her seminal writing on the Joe McGinniss-Jeffrey MacDonald imbroglio, allowed her to not only meditate on her own profession but also her mother’s legal field. The same is true of one of my favorite of her works, Iphigenia of Forest Hills, published when she was 76, which is a plaintive meditation on the Queens murder trial of a woman charged with the killing of her husband, the culmination of a bitter custody struggle. It contained the added element of profiling an immigrant woman at sea in her new world, something Malcolm had witnessed her mother and other women experience when she was a child. As a former analysand and cerebral scribe, she was a natural to study the conflict between chair and couch, which was the crux of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, a volume which brought her into her father’s realm. Psychoanalysis was likewise the backdrop for a second book, 1984’s In the Freud Archives, which brought considerable complications into her life, as Malcolm was sued by one of her perplexing subjects. She ultimately prevailed in the protracted legal entanglement, but the cost was high, as the case haunted her life and career for a decade.
Still Pictures has far more to say about memory than photography. (In the Afterword written by the author’s daughter, Anne Malcolm, it’s revealed a planned final chapter specifically about photography had to be abandoned when the author’s health began to flag irreversibly.) Malcolm’s recall is often surprisingly porous, demonstrating what she refers to as “memory’s perversity,” which is one reason she remained circumspect about autobiographies, even an eccentric one such as this. She’s further distrustful of bios because to her the inquisitor’s motives are always suspect, even, or perhaps especially, when inquiring about one’s self. If you don’t trust the interlocutor or the subject to tell the truth and you happen to be both, it’s difficult to fully embrace the genre.
In the section called “Daddy,”which pivots off a picture of Malcolm’s beloved father—bald, bespectacled, beaming, carrying a woven Easter basket—she speaks to the fragility of life and the limitations of memorials, providing a postmortem of the journalist herself: “We are each of us an endangered species. When we die, our species disappears with us. Nobody like us will ever exist again.”•
The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories (Danielle Evans)
“People can convince themselves of anything if they want badly enough to believe it,” the main character states in the titular novella, a truism at the heart of Danielle Evans’ second fiction collection, a sharp and generous book that focuses not only on buried secrets long forgotten, be they historical or cultural or personal, but also the uneasy dance of reckoning with what’s plainly known. It’s a meditation on amnesia, collective or otherwise, as well as a willful refusal to accept and acknowledge.
In the novella, Cassie, a tenure-track historian has happily abandoned the vicissitudes of modern academia to accept a post at the Institute for Public History, an initially ambitious government program aimed at correcting the alternative facts, outright distortions and batshit conspiracy theories littering our lives as we’ve become more connected by new technologies that often lack wires but come with strings attached. In Beltway fashion, the department’s mission has been chiseled down considerably by compromise, with Cassie and her cohorts mostly wandering around D.C. placing corrective stickers on public signage with historical errors. If it’s an improvement, it’s a modest one.
Cassie’s work is complicated by the intermittent presence of her childhood friend and former coworker Genevieve. As bougie as possible when she was younger, Genevieve became radicalized about race after her perfectly appointed life and marriage came undone. Pushed out of the department for her hard-line stance on bringing truth to the nation’s less-than-equitable past and present, the embattled woman remains a phantom that haunts its work as she freelances her own historical corrections on occasion. When Cassie is dispatched to Wisconsin to handle a rare far-flung case, one involving a disputed plaque memorializing a racist murder that may or may not have occurred decades earlier, Genevieve appears with her own agenda. Making matters worse, Cassie has attracted the attention of a local white supremacist who doesn’t appreciate her profession. There’s a mystery in regards to racial identity that needs to be solved before Cassie can close the case, but the novella reminds that basically any functional adult should realize that race is a false and ever-shifting construct used to diminish some of us, and that we’re all a mix of many things in many ways.
There are a half-dozen short stories, and the three best achieve transcendence. In “Boys Go to Jupiter,” Evans provides the complicated backstory of a campus controversy about a student photographed wearing a Confederate flag bikini. It’s a rejoinder to modern social-media shitstorms that care little about context but also speaks to the stubbornness of privilege. “Alcatraz” follows an uneasy family reunion at the eponymous prison of a fractured, mixed-race family. In “Anything Can Disappear,” a struggling young Midwestern woman headed to NYC by bus to execute a drug deal and restart her life impulsively “adopts” a toddler abandoned by his mother.
Dotting these narratives are the microaggressions Black Americans regularly endure, constant reminders that the national bargain is not a good deal for everyone. In the opening story, “Happily Ever After,” a young Black woman working at a tourist trap replica of the Titanic is never asked to play the princess when the ship is rented out for tea parties for young girls because, you know, her skin color would make it “historically inaccurate.” In the novella, Cassie realizes she’s been sent to Wisconsin to manage a bad situation around race because she’s “one of the reasonable ones.” It’s just another needless layer of life to manage. Occasionally these ominous signs explode into full-on violence, but their regular presence is at the very least a reminder of unwritten rules.
Save for one story, all the fiction in this collection was published against the backdrop of Donald Trump’s disgraceful rise to political prominence, which began with the hideous hotelier taking an escalator ride down at his faux-opulent namesake Manhattan building, ultimately bringing the whole nation low. It’s not that there weren’t plenty of bigots and ignoramuses among us already, but they were constrained to some extent before Simon Cowell-ish strongman threw a brick threw the Overton window. What followed was Proud Boys becoming even prouder, wild-eyed men in Fred Perry polo shirts protesting the removal of statuary commemorating slave owners and traitors, and grown-ass adults googling their way into rabbit holes about pedophile rings in pizza parlors. It’s been awful, and while insightful short stories won’t be the salve to heal these wounds, what else can we do but sincerely try to seek and speak the truth, which is exactly what Evans does in this searching collection.•
Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (Stephen Kinzer)
On the opening page, Stephen Kinzer refers to his sadistic twentieth-century subject, Sidney Gottlieb, as a “psychic warrior,” which is one way to put it, though euphemisms are not the custom in his painstaking 2019 book that catalogs the horrendous misdeeds of an überevil American figure, a chemist who brought nightmares to life as the CIA author of PROJECT MK-ULTRA, the infamous mind-control program, and many other tortures and poisons too numerous to mention.
It was an initiative born of the atrocities of WWII. Operation Paperclip was most infamous for “bleaching” Wernher von Braun and other Nazi rocketeers, settling them as quietly as possible in Huntsville, Alabama, and giving them whatever they required to land Americans on the moon before Soviet boots could bounce off the craggy surface. It was a king-size Cold War victory laced with the worst kind of compromise. Not as well known was that many of the most heinous of Hitler’s chemical and biological warriors were granted haven at Fort Detrick in Maryland, assigned to use their vast experience in the development of those sectors of America’s war machine. The amount of suffering caused by these endeavors is nearly incalculable.
Two of WWII’s most notorious Axis scientists had such appalling reputations that they were unable to be relocated and could only contribute remotely. They were Nazi scientist Kurt Blome and his Japanese analogue, microbiologist Shirō Ishii, who committed unspeakable acts of torture on prisoners in a furtive Manchurian lab. The Cold War with the U.S.S.R. in the wake of WWII was used to justify these allegiances. Allen Dulles, a potentate in American central intelligence, who had a head full of Jung and other questionable ingredients, was front and center in the CIA’s descent into madness, which included a top-secret 1950 operation in which Navy ships were surreptitiously employed to spray the entire population of San Francisco with a “harmless” bacterium in order to gauge how vulnerable the city would be to a bioweapons attack. Many urinary tract infections and at least one death later, it was confirmed that the bacterium was not so harmless after all.
The program really began in earnest, though, when Gottlieb reported for work on a summer day in July 1951. Dulles urged the chemist to develop special brain-breaking interrogation techniques with the aggressive use of psychoactive drugs, the goal being that prisoners would be compelled to reveal secrets, and could be activated, if need be, to commit assassinations on command. “Mind control could be the decisive weapon of the coming age,” Dulles said, using the specter of communism to pursue the unholy activities that became increasingly leveled up as the department fell ever further under the sway of its own propaganda.
For the role of an indefatigably immoral spymaster, Gottlieb was an ideal choice beyond all of Dulles’ wildest dreams, though he ostensibly seemed an odd candidate. A 1950s proto-hippie, he was a socialist in his college years, and even during the most alarming work he conducted for the agency, he lived with his wife and children in an isolated Virginia cabin where they grew most of their own food. Gottlieb was an environmentalist, meditator, hiker, lively folk dancer despite being born with two clubbed feet, and a very early adopter of solar energy. In his dotage, after exiting the CIA, he was a staunch peacenik, a speech pathologist for children, and, for two years, a volunteer caregiver to leprosy patients in India. Up until that retirement, though, there were renditions, tortures, careless experiments on civilians, poisonings, homicides, etc. LSD was at the heart of the research but no chemical or weapon were off-limits in the effort to break down and reprogram prisoners, including Whitey Bulger. Gottlieb was a menace, a madman, a murderer, and all his abuses were done with the U.S. government’s stamp of approval.
In his effort to erase and control minds, Gottlieb spent exorbitant sums of money assembling not only an official staff of hundreds but also a shadowy freelance cabal of pushers, pimps, ex-cops, murderers, hypnotists and magicians. He would authorize the renting of “safe houses” in cities where his henchmen would throw parties and secretly dose the attendants with acid to record their reactions. If someone OD’d or was damaged for the rest of their life, oh well, it was for the greater good. In stealth interrogation rooms all over the world, Gottlieb disregarded the Nuremberg Code, doing anything and everything to “expendables.” The department’s most famous victim ended up being one of its own, Frank Olson, a chemist with a nagging conscience who became the victim of defenestration at a Manhattan hotel after he appeared ready to speak out against the agency.
By the beginning of the 1960s, after spending a decade shattering minds, Gottlieb acknowledged that MK-ULTRA had been useless, the program an utter failure. For all his efforts, he was unable to master mind control. The program was discontinued and he was named head of the CIA’s Technical Services Division where he spent the next decade creating a catalog of deadly gadgets for the agency: lethal lipsticks, scarves infected with tuberculosis, poison toothpastes. It was a denouement of destruction that lasted until 1973, with the office even becoming entangled in the Watergate break-in, before Gottlieb was finally removed from his post and retired.
One other lesson Gottlieb learned from Blome and Ishii was to eliminate evidence of criminality, so he had his files destroyed prior to his retirement. A small number accidentally escaped the shredder, however, and after a journalist filed a FOIA, Congress had questions, lawsuits were filed, the press circled. Gottlieb, though, was never tried, let alone convicted, for a single one of his crimes.
This is a yeoman-like book featuring thorough reporting even if Kinzer’s writing is more solid than scintillating. What the volume needs most is what the writer understandably cannot provide: some psychological insight into Gottlieb’s endless capacity to compartmentalize and rationalize. How could the beloved husband and father and community pillar also be an American Mengele? If we could watch every moment of Gottlieb’s life, like a film, perhaps we would know? Or maybe not.
While I have no clue what led to his complete paucity of ethics, if I had to guess what drove this madman so far I would say it was something like what theoretical physicist and Manhattan Project veteran Richard Feynman termed “the pleasure of finding things out,” the feeling of satisfaction when using cleverness to solve a riddle. Sometimes, though, so-called solutions can create bigger problems than the ones they solve. After Gottlieb’s 1999 death—probably by suicide, though the family never shared the cause—CIA psychologist John Gittinger tried to defend his superior: “He was willing to try anything to discover something.” It was meant as a compliment, but a compulsion to experiment combined with the absence of a moral compass can lead to horrors.
“You can never know what he was,” his wife said defensively years after she became a widow, speaking scornfully about the press and its alleged inability to divine the true nature of her husband. But that criticism also doubles as a bleak truth about Gottlieb, who committed atrocities for reasons that remain beyond our knowledge and were likely beyond his. Somehow Gottlieb himself had been brainwashed and unknowingly became his own primary subject in a test to see if a person could be programmed to commit violence under command. Unfortunately, all we can glean from his peculiar case is what we already know: The human mind is capable of amazing and terrifying things.•
The Guinea Pigs (Ludvík Vaculík)
A samizdat scribe who in the Prague Spring of 1968 published the “Two Thousand Words” manifesto which advocated for a new openness in his country, Ludvík Vaculík had the misfortune of being an ink-stained wretch toiling under the heavy boot of an oppressive regime in the Soviet Era Czechoslovakia. Part of his output as a dissident writer was this increasingly sinister 1970 novel about a bank teller and his family adopting guinea pigs, a work which owes debts to Kafka and Poe and Orwell but is also its own twisted, realized allegory.
As narrator Vašek tells us in his avuncular, colloquial manner, there are strange doings at the Prague bank where he’s employed. Every day the tellers pilfer money from the cash drawers in order to supplement their income, and at quitting time the security guards search them and confiscate the appropriated funds. No one is arrested, but the amount returned to the coffers is always more than a little shy. This strange dynamic is repeated with a circadian rhythm, and there are whispers the guards might be entering the bills into some sort of mysterious circulation. This running shortfall has led an ancient, decrepit employee to develop a gnomic theory that the disappearing funds will induce economic collapse and a massive depression. He is quickly awarded a grim, forbidding nickname: “Mr. Maelstrom.” The wizened, weird man is simultaneously confusing and convincing, whether he’s correct or not.
Life at home is likewise headed sideways in some, initially, ineffable way. After consulting with his coworker Karásek who keeps guinea pigs, Vašek gifts his family with one of the rodents at Christmas. It appears to be a kind gesture, and they quickly come to own several more of the domesticated animals. The household facade seems basically normal at a glance, but you don’t have to squint too hard to see there’s something a bit off. The paterfamilias is incessantly short-tempered with his sweet young sons, forever swatting them. When he accidentally comes across one of his boys at a construction site when the child should be in school, he boxes his ears and sends him scrambling. Except it becomes clear that it likely wasn’t one of his sons at all, just a random child he clouted. How could he not know the difference? The banker also quietly fantasizes about tormenting or killing stray animals he encounters by chance in the street. And his dubious feelings toward creatures is also on display when one of the family’s guinea pigs becomes sick. His youngest boy, Pavel, is distraught, but the father isn’t convinced it’s really worth getting veterinarian treatment for such a small and insignificant being. Soon negligence hardens into malice, and he’s performing “experiments” on the family pets.
“Who’s to stop me?” Vašek asks, explaining his rationale as he carries out exercises to create distress or confinement for the creatures, closing them in a cinched paper bag, discombobulating the rodents by placing them on a spinning stereo turntable, or as he sinks further into his cruelty, nearly drowning one in the bathtub. The increased viciousness extends beyond the pets as he begins throwing rocks at his sons when he wants them to leave him alone. He speaks of all his disturbing misdeeds in the most banal manner, but after one senselessly cruel affront his wife fearfully asks aloud: “What are you turning into? A beast?” Vašek’s inability to control himself in all ways only spikes as time passes, including in his stealth pursuit of secrets involving Mr. Maelstrom, a reconnaissance mission he’s been warned, violently, to abandon.
Vašek’s older son, also Vašek, is obsessed with the city’s tunnel system, its piping and hidden nooks, drawing up alternative maps of his neighborhood, using subterranean workarounds and shortcuts to turn up or disappear at surprising moments. His world is one of mazes and labyrinths, of things obscured and not readily seen. It’s a microcosm of both the bewildering nature of Vaculík’s novel and the spooky inscrutability of totalitarian states, where life is at the mercy of secrets, half-truths and absurdities, often punctuated with stunning acts of violence.
This novel was composed by the Czech writer when his famous political tract had laid him low personally, rendering him extremely vulnerable. His proclamation encouraging the liberalization of society, published just two months before the Soviet invasion, was not greeted happily by the powers that be. Impoverished and a pariah, he concocted this eerie work that proceeds slowly at first but ultimately escalates into unmitigated terror. It’s a tale about one father, one family and one bank, but it asserts more widely that in toxic dynamics of any stature everyone plays a role in sustaining a dreadful system. As Vaculík wrote in his manifesto about the plight of his country at what seemed like an inflection point in 1968: “We all bear responsibility for the present state of affairs.”•