The mysteries of agents

Writing and attempting to publish a novel is certainly an education. Sometimes you just don't know what's really up, even when you are sure you do. I've had mystifying reactions from agents over the years, but none so mystifying as the one I received from one New York agent in recent months. Last spring, I worked quite closely with this man and his agency as we moved through the usual writer-agent introductions and on to a regular, sustained back and forth about my Van Gogh novel. Some background: Based on my original query letter, the head of the agency called me at home one night early in 2011 and we had a great conversation. He's an older gentleman; a world traveler; quite dignified; and quite a pleasure to talk to. He asked me to send him the entire manuscript of Days On Fire (then called Yellow). Soon after our conversation, I mailed the agent my manuscript, and his office began a careful scrutiny of its contents. The agent eventually wrote me to say that they were impressed with the novel but would like to see a vigorous rewrite, and he sent along a list of specific suggestions. The suggestions seemed reasonable, and so I conducted a substantial revision, more or less staying faithful to their wishes. I mailed the agent the new version, which he and his staff scrutinized just as carefully as they had the first one. As a result, they pronounced it closer but not quite there yet. They asked for additional rewrites, again listing specific concerns. I threw myself into the next revision and tried to make it as exactingly perfect as possible. I have to say that over the course of months of working with this agency I felt the book getting tighter and better; I felt certain this last revision would be the one to put it "over the top." No other agency had expressed such sincere interest in the novel; and I had never engaged in such an ongoing, cooperative, mutually respectful relationship with an agent before. That alone was significant and satisfying, but more significant and satisfying is the benefit it had for my book, which is finally all that matters. Near the end of May, I mailed to them what I hope would be the "final" version of the book, at least the final version before they agreed to represent it to publishers. I felt good about the whole project and about the relationship. My writer friends agreed that the fact the agency kept wanting to see the book and wanting me to work on it suggested a strong interest on their part. After this third manuscript made its way to the agency's office, I received a warm email from the dignified older gentleman--the one whose name is on the agency--saying how glad he was to receive the latest version, and while it would take them "several weeks" to review it and respond, he was looking forward to doing so. So far so good.

The summer passed. I taught a class. I went to the pool some. I took a vacation. I began writing new short stories. Fall came. The semester started at the University of Central Arkansas, where I teach. Students began turning in assignments. I became involved with all the usual teacherly busyness. It took me until the beginning of October to realize that the "several weeks" had become a rather significant period of time. Four months to be exact. I decided to send a polite, brief email to the agent to see how the review of Days on Fire was going and to ask if perhaps I had missed some communication from them. I sent the email from my office at school. I got up, walked across the whole to my wife's office (yes, she's on the same floor) and said something like, "Well, now at least I'll find out what's going on." I had some business in another building, business that would take an hour or so. So I headed off, looking forward to my return, when I would open up my email and find out where matters stood for my novel. (Up to this point, when I had emailed the agent I always received a reply within an hour--sometimes faster. And their examinations of the novel typically took five weeks or so.) Well, when I next checked my email there was no reply from the agent. Hmmm. I gave it a couple weeks, emailed him again from a secondary email address I use, but again I received no reply.

At this point, I was completely befuddled. If they were still reviewing the book, why not just tell me? Or if they were ready to say "no," why not tell me "no"? If they had in fact already said no, and I just missed the message, why not tell me that? No uncomplicated answer to my questions presented itself, but one thing seemed obvious: No one ignores emails from a person they want to have an ongoing business (or personal) relationship with. Apparently, they had decided not to represent the book but also apparently had decided not to tell me. Some writers I've talked to reject this notion as cock-eyed. "They wouldn't reject your book and not tell you," the writers say to me. No, of course, you wouldn't expect any agent to do that, especially not an agent with a fine reputation and storied career as this one has had. (You'll just have to trust me on that characterization.) But, considering all the facts, and applying Ockham's Razor, that's the only answer I can come to. For the heck of it, in December I sent the agent a Happy Holidays message, along with a reminder that I had not heard from him yet about the book. I didn't expect any result from the message, and I got none. So things remain as muddled as ever.

A rather old-fashioned agency in many good ways, this agency is also old-fashioned in that it has no web presence to speak of, and does not even advertise a phone number. Email is their preferred method of communication. So in case you are wondering why I don't just pick up the phone and call, that's why. Clearly, the time has come to start fresh with new agents. This isn't really a problem. As a writer you have to do that any time you get a rejection from an agency. But what stings this time is that as of last May no rejection seemed to have been imminent--and then none was ever sent. Exactly nothing was ever sent. A colleague of mine, who will publish his book of short stories with a British press next year tells me I should just give up on American publishers and turn my attention to England. While I haven't "given up" on American publishers (no American publisher has even seen the book yet!) I probably will follow my friend's advice, not because of his success, but because I had been thinking the same thing myself for some weeks and even years now. My wife has just published her study of university creative writing programs with a British press, and she has nothing but good things to say about the experience. [Stephanie Vanderslice, Rethinking Creative Writing, Professional and Higher, 2011]. Yes, I'll move on--both to other American agents and to British ones--but as I do so I know I'll recall my relationship with this agent with wistfulness and regret. Not for his (implicit) rejection--rejection is to be expected in the writing life--but for the confounded mystery of it all.

Fast and loose?

My latest creative project, which for last several weeks has seen me involved in drastic, medically necessary line editing, is a series of stories half in historical in nature and half not. I've mentioned this in a couple blogs since last summer. What binds the stories is the

setting--Nantucket Island, Massachusetts--but I've found some similar themes evolving across the stories, whether they are contemporary or historical. I guess this isn't surprising since all the stories arise out of the same imagination.

The earliest story, chronologically, takes place in 1795. (Interestingly, this was the last story to be drafted.) The catalyst for the story was reading about an actual, and rather significant, event from that year: the robbing of the new Nantucket Bank by a group of off-islanders during the Nantucket's June sheep-shearing festival. No robbery is good for those victimized, but this crime proved particularly divisive, as accusations began flying wildly (cunningly?), especially from the mouth of the bank's president, one Joseph Chase. Islanders very quickly took sides in laying blame. On one side were the Quakers, who tended to be Jeffersonian Democrats; on the other side were the Congregationalists, who tended to be Federalists. Each side thought they had an explanation for the crime and were sticking to their guns, despite evidence to the contrary. This is especially true in the case of the Quakers. (Chase was part of their ranks.) At one point, William Coffin, a Congregationalist and Federalist--and someone suspected of being involved with the robbery--had to carry out his own investigation on the mainland, because the mostly Quaker, Democratic bank directors refused to look into, or didn't want to believe, clues and rumors that pointed to culprits from there. After months of searching off-island, Chase actually brought back to Nantucket two men from New York who admitted to the crime. But the bank directors, too busy trying to pin the crime on Coffin and his Federalist allies, never took the suspects seriously, and the two men were later permitted to escape. It proved a disastrously acrimonious episde for the island, and in the years following Nantucketers tended to look back on the pre-1795 years as a period of prelapsarian grace.

The Nantucket Bank robbery is a fascinating story--with even more complications that I've suggested above--so I couldn't resist approaching the event fictionally. It's probably worthy of a novel, but for now I've merely written a long short story. While I've stayed true to several facts about the case, I've also changed many facts, left others out, and am ignorant of still more. My characters, while based on real participants, are given new names and identities, and revised personal backgrounds. Also, in trying to shape the robbery into a coherent story, I've conflated the timeline and eliminated certain events and people that were significant to the historical account. Whether it works as a story is my main concern, not whether it works as history. Right now I can't tell because I'm still very close to it. My main worry for now, actually, is that because it's based on a real case I encountered in a history book (Nathaniel Philbrick's wonderful Away Off-Shore), I'm trying for too much historical perspective. But I have a feeling that historians, and perhaps Philbrick himself, would say that I'm playing way too fast and far too loose with the facts.

However, I wonder aloud--and am wondering in this post--if by giving my characters invented names and (mostly) invented identities, I have opened up exactly that "fast and loose" space for myself. I guess that's why I did it. (I say "I guess" because it was an intuitive choice. I didn't labor over it; I just did it.) Unlike my Van Gogh novel, I am not using real names. (Altough I am using a real event and a real island.) In my novel, I can fairly be charged, if in just a few spots, of creating an "alternative history." In completely abandoning real names and identities does the fiction become more or less alternative? Can a writer be criticized for not sticking to the "known facts" about a character if that character is fictional? What if the fictional character is in some vital ways drawn from a real person? Does this create a meaningful distinction or a distinction without a difference? Oh, the entangled mental waters one wades into when one starts blending history and fiction. But, then again, that's the fun of it, right?

Dancing with historical fiction

Happy new year, everyone, wherever you are in the world. It's been a while since I've posted, so I figure it's time to get cracking! And that's good, because a subject came up in one of my classes last semester that I've been wanting to write to you all about. As I've mentioned on this blog before, one of the courses I teach at the University of Central Arkansas is called Forms of Fiction. It's not a literature course, but we certainly do read plenty of short stories as we survey some of the genres contemporary fiction writers work in. One of those genres (of course) is historical fiction; and I was pleased to see that this past semester more of my students took up the challenge of turning the research I assigned into finished historical fictions. One of the more interesting of these fictions was based on the Dancing Plague of 1518, a truly bizarre episode that occurred in Strausborg, France and resulted in hundreds of people dancing involuntarily for days on end, perhaps as many as a hundred of whom finally succumbed to stroke, heart attack, or exhaustion. The Plague started with one inflicted woman, known as Frau Troffea, who began dancing a jig in a street in Strausborg. Others joined her and within a month's time up to four hundred people were dancing and, here's the rub, they seemed unable to stop despite their apparent desire to stop. Contemporary accounts refer to looks of "fear and desperation" on the faces of the dancers. Strangely (well, is anything not strange about medicine in the 16th century?) the best answer medical practitioners could come up with was to encourage the dancers to dance more! They cleared fields and opened dance halls; they hired musicians to play. Apparently the thought was that in this way the illness would work itself out. All that happened, however, was that more people danced and many people died.

In my student's story, Frau Troffea occupies a fittingly prominent position. She is set to dancing by St. Vitus, whom she has unwittingly offended. (According to an old Catholic superstition, crossing St. Vitus can lead to compulsive dancing.) It was a promising, if somewhat rushed story, but whatever the story's deficiencies I am grateful to its author for introducing me to this fascinating case. Turns out that British historian John Waller has written a recent book about it, called The Dancing Plague: The Strange, True Story of an Extraordinary Illness (2009). Of course, the question anyone must ask is, Why did the people dance? There are various modern explanations, medical in nature, for the phenomenon, none of which completely satisfy. Waller's best guess is mass psychogenic illness resulting from several years of extreme psychological stress, malnutrition, and disease. I'm not sure that explanation completely satisfies either, but unless you want, like my student, to blame it on St. Vitus, that's what you're left with. In any case, it's a fascinating subject and well worth looking into. Thanks to Karen Cochrum for my introduction to this Weird But True tale.

Watching Lust, Part Two

In my last entry, I discussed some of my reactions to the 1956 movie Lust for Life, an adaptation of the 1934 Irving Stone novel of the same name. I ended on a note about the film's bloodless interpretation of Theo, Vincent's brother. How the film depicts Paul Gauguin is far more interesting and far more successful. Played with a fierce, commanding self-composure by Anthony Quinn, Quinn's Gauguin is arrogant, commanding, and clear-eyed, an obvious foil to Kirk Douglas's more emotional and, toward the end of film, even raging Vincent. The different depictions of the two men certainly do point to real differences in their personalities. Vincent indeed was a far more emotionally based individual than Paul Gauguin, who could fairly be called calculating, even scheming. Gauguin should also be called a liar and a weasel, an aspect of his personality that the movie doesn't quite explore. Arguably, in the standoff between the two Yellow House roommates, in the vortex of their deteriorating relationship, the film suggests that Gauguin is the sane and reliable, even if he is also rather cold personally. (The film also suggests that Van Gogh was the much heavier drinker of the two men. Nothing factual points to that conclusion. Nothing factual even points to a great fondness for absinthe on Vincent's part, despite his reputation to the contrary. And Gauguin was the more frequent visitor to brothels--an aspect of 19th century male life, and Van Gogh's life too, that the movie simply declines to explore.)

The real Gauguin certainly was sane and cold, but never reliable. There's every indication that his famous account of Vincent's 1888 breakdown--when Vincent cut his ear off--is a network of self-serving lies, none of them verified by any other source. Unfortunately, the movie seems to rely on Gauguin's account for its lurid depiction of the event. The myth of the Tragically Mad Vincent, something I've complained about in other posts, is fully on display. But it gets only worse when the movie moves on to Vincent's last months in the quiet northern village of Auvers-sur-Oise. Without question, these were not happy months in Vincent's life. He had come to the realization that he would never be truly cured. The power of his painting had self-evidently diminished. The predicted friendship with Paul Gachet--a physician in the village who was both an art lover and had an interest in mental illness--a friendship Theo was counting on to provide support and counsel for Vincent in Auvers, turned sour rather quickly. So it is no great surprise, really, that Vincent would have decided his life and energy was all but spent, that there was no reason for him to continue on. All that said, the movie tries to portray him as not depressed but deranged. In one striking scene, a band plays in the street outside of a bar where Vincent sits desperately clinging to a drink. The music literally drives Vincent crazy as he winces and wiggles and clutches his ears trying to keep out the sound. It is the kind of scene that was likely deeply affecting to audiences when the film was released but which seems pathetically overdone now.

There is more of this Tragically Mad mythmaking in the movie's final minutes. Vincent is painting in a field, at work on what is widely--and erroneously--called his "final painting": Wheat Field with Crows. While Wheat Field with Crows is one of his last paintings, by no means was it his absolute last. In fact, art historians date it as having been completed weeks before Van Gogh died. Viewers of the painting simply would like to believe it was his last because of the strong note of foreboding in it: the threatening blue-black sky and the low-hanging bodies of crows that look like harbingers of death. Of course, people think, just before he died he painted a painting about death. It's too poetically perfect not to believe; but it's also simply wrong. The movie goes one step further. In the movie, this isn't merely Vincent's last painting but Vincent kills himself while painting it. He tries to work, but is struck by another fit similar to what is shown in the bar scene. In the anxiety of the moment, he pulls out a gun and shoots himself. "Now where would he have gotten the gun?" my sister smartly commented. Well, in fact, plenty of frenchmen owned guns in the 19th century, but Vincent was not in the habit of carrying one when he went painting. If, as is commonly held, Vincent shot himself in a field on July 27, 1890--a new biography disputes this notion and claims he was accidentally shot by someone else--he surely took the gun out with him just for this purpose. And by no means was he in the middle of painting Wheat Field with Crows, a controlled and striking painting. This shooting scene is nothing more than melodramatic Hollywood blather.

But to be fair, it's no less blather than most films of the day would have shown you. Or that most films show you now. Is Lust for Life worth watching? Yes, it still is. But please don't think that it transmits an accurate, or even sensitive, interpretation of the life of the artist. The real Van Gogh was far more complicated than the writhing, raging, movie cut up. The real Van Gogh was both more lucid and, for those who knew him best, more maddening a man.

Watching Lust, Part One

Recently, I spent a week at my mother's house in Cobb Island, Maryland helping her out as she recovers from a rather serious surgical procedure. One of my sisters, who also lives on Cobb Island, felt it was about time I watch Lust for Life--the 1956 movie based on Irving Stone's bestselling Van Gogh novel--so she ordered it off Netflix for us. As I've mentioned in a past entry, I purposefully avoided Lust for Life, in both its novel and film versions, when I composed my novel Days on Fire. I firmly believed that a 21st century rendition of Van Gogh's life needed to be imagined and crafted independent of an early 20th century one. (Stone's novel appeared in 1934.) But having more or less completed my project, there seemed no point in hesitating any longer, so I watched the film with my mother and sister, quite curious about what aspects of Van Gogh's life and character the moviemakers--including Kirk Douglas, who plays Van Gogh--would choose to emphasize.

It should come as no surprise that Lust for Life the movie is very much a piece of its time. (This is true of just about any work of art, and is surely true too of my own novel. It's just hard to see that when something is both so new and so close to you.) The movie engages in just the kind of bowdlerization and heroic mythmaking that we've come to expect from the 1950s. And of course it takes several shortcuts in order to tell its story in 122 minutes. It completely ignores Vincent's childhood years in Brabant (a rural region of south Holland) as well as the crucially important, formative years as an art dealer in The Hague and in London. (Arguably, everything that came from his life, both good and bad, was a reaction to the disappointments of that time. Certainly, this is when his sarcastic ideas about the art business were formed.) Instead the movie picks up when Vincent is about to go off to the Borinage, a mining region in southern Belgium, where he tried to make a go as a lay preacher. I suppose this is as good of a place to start as any if you want to introduce tension into a movie. And I certainly understand having to cut something out to get your movie down to size. But, still, I felt the inherent absences caused by the moviemaker's choice. Don't get me wrong. Some aspects of the movie I admired but others I chuckled at. Some I thought were ridiculous. There are undeniably lovely scenic shots of Arles and other locations in southern France. And some of the testy artistic debates with which Gauguin and Vincent (repeatedly) engaged is fairly suggested by the movie, which does an admirable job summarizing the contrasting principles upon which each man based his work.

However, a good deal of what is depicted is terribly contorted and finally plain wrong. Sien, the prostitute who Van Gogh met (probably on a street corner) in The Hague and lived with for over a year, enters the movie not in The Hague but in an Amsterdam bar, the very night after Vincent is rejected by his cousin K and her family. While this makes for an efficient segue from one romantic interest to the next, it's a serious distortion of the facts of Van Gogh's life. He met Sien not only in a different city but after several months had passed, months that gave him necessary time to get over his fierce--and blunted--passion for his cousin. Moreover, in the movie Sien is portrayed as a distraught, underemployed cleaning woman, rather than what she really and infamously was.

While such a tidying up of history is to be expected in a 50s movie--or any movie--I was more surprised by how diminished are the roles of Theo and of Vincent's father. Vincent's father, the Reverend Theodorus Van Gogh, appears in exactly one scene, a drastic diminishment of the man who, in both positive and negative ways, was perhaps the most important influence in Vincent's life, at least until he met Gauguin. Theo appears in many more of the movie's scenes, but it's a fairly bloodless, antiseptic interpretation, as Theo's function seems to be simply to tell Vincent what to do--i.e., where to live, whom to meet--without seeming all that engaged in his brother's existence. In the movie, Theo is always smooth and always right. Vincent does what Theo says and thereafter thanks Theo for his advice. In reality, the brothers disagreed often, especially as to where Vincent should move, and what he should do, next. One of the most fascinating aspects of reading the Collected Letters is to watch the push and pull of their relationship, to see not just the affection Vincent felt for Theo but also the bouts of anger and disillusionment. To see Vincent openly bullying Theo or attempting to manipulate him. At the same time, Theo was Vincent's most reliable and informed sounding board on all things artistic. And Theo was hardly the impeccably cool, uninvolved customer. The nearly two years they lived together in Paris severely tested the young brother's patience and almost exhausted him; yet at the same time he was as dependent on Vincent as Vincent was on him. It is no accident that he died shortly after Vincent did.

(Next post: More mythmaking--and Vincent dies!)

Is it really a new Van Gogh?

If you read this blog you probably know that there's a new Van Gogh biography out just now, by authors Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh. Not surprisingly for a book with the blunt, comprehensive title Van Gogh: The Life (not "a" life, but "the" life), the volume spans some 900 pages. (And I thought the previous draft of my novel was long!) If nothing else, the publication of yet another Van Gogh biography demonstrates the continuing cultural fascination with this man who during his life was so ignored, suspected, pitied, or detested. While of course one fears an overload of Van Gogh material on the market, I have to think this demonstration of interest in Van Gogh is a promising sign for the eventual appearance and success of my novel Days On Fire.

Smith and Naifeh's book is grabbing headlines for their contention that Van Gogh did not actually commit suicide but was accidentally shot by two gun-toting, playacting kids. This certainly is a provocative argument, although of course one has to wonder why, if true, these facts were not widely known before. Also, as one BBC reporter notes, by insisting on this interpretation of events, the two authors "pay little heed to the one person who was definitely there - Vincent van Gogh - when he quite clearly said: 'Do not accuse anyone... it is I who wanted to kill myself.'" Truth be told, I did not carefully research Van Gogh's death when I consulted secondary sources for my novel, the reason being that I knew I did not want to take my novel all the way to Van Gogh's death. Instead I wanted to focus the ending of my book on Van Gogh's triumph over his own limitations and his subsequent artistic breakthrough in that crucial, singular summer in Arles. The only contrasting opinion I came across about Van Gogh's death was the opinion put forth by one author that while Van Gogh did shoot himself he did so not with suicide in mind but to punish himself for his failures as a man and a brother. Given Van Gogh's melancholic state of mind near the end, after he realized he would never truly be through with his illness, and given his acute awareness of how much he owed Theo, of how great the burden was he placed upon that man, I can almost accept that author's opinion. But, as I said, not one other source--until now--ever suggested his suicide was anything other than what it looked like.

Some of Smith and Naifeh's other claims interest me even more. For instance, that Vincent's family tried repeatedly to have him installed in an insane asylum before he went there voluntarily on his own in 1889. Also that some in his family suspected Vincent of killing his own father. While I am not familiar with the former claim, I suppose it could be credible, although by the time Vincent moved to Arles--really as soon as he moved to Antwerp from Nuenen (where his father, mother, and sister Wil were living at the time of his father's death)--he was well out of his family's hair, and clearly committed to a life as an artist. As I've repeated to many a soul, and a few times on this blog, Van Gogh's famous mental breakdown in Arles came several years after he had devoted himself to the life of the artist and only after he had created many if not most of his greatest pictures. Up until that point there was every reason for his family to continue their patient--or let's say resigned--acceptance of his eccentricities. I'm simply stunned, however, that anyone, much less a family member, could suspect that Vincent killed his father. Smith and Naifeh will truly have to prove this one to me. There is no doubt Vincent's relationship with his father was an emotinally fraught one, but it was also arguably the most important relationship of his life, even more significant than his relationship with Theo, at least until he formed an obsessive and dangerous friendship with Gauguin late in his life. Vincent's frustration with his father was the flip side of his love and respect for the man. After all, he had once wanted to follow his father's steps into the ministry. And in some crucial ways, albeit after severe doubts, his father--in his fashion--finally supported Vincent's call to painting. Of course, Smith and Naifeh don't say that Vincent actually did kill his father, only that some in the family suspected this. Who the "some" are is a key question. Even so, I have my doubts. Unlike the famous/infamous biopic Lust for Life (more on that movie in a later post)--in which Vincent's father appears in exactly one scene--Theodorus Van Gogh the father is one of the central and most interesting characters in my novel. How sad to think that a family member could not appreciate how intertwined Vincent's life was with his father's, even long after Vincent had rejected his father's profession and way of life. In my opinion, Vincent needed his father even more then--as a whipping boy, as a convex mirror, and as a measuring stick. If it's true that some members of his family could think him capable of ending Theodorus's life, or anyone's life besides his own, that only shows how badly they misunderstood their painterly relative.

And that's hardly news at all.

Babbits and more babbits

Last spring in one of my creative writing classes, a student wrote a curious short story in which she made reference to "babbitry." When the story was workshopped, many of her classmates asked about the phrase, an allusion that none of them caught, and not surprisingly. Prior to this class, I don't think that Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis's 1922 novel--or the book's title character--had come up in any discussion I've ever had in a ficiton writing class. The novel, as famous as it was in its day, simply isn't taught or read anymore. Even I, who caught the reference and explained it to the class, knew the book only by its reputation. I'd read and enjoyed Main Street (1920) a long long time ago; and for several years I've intended to read Arrowsmith (1925), which is actually on my book shelf. But I'd never gotten around to reading Babbitt. Well, as you know if you've followed this blog, I'm a fan of the audiobook. I "read" a lot of things that way, during my morning run. So recently I went to Audible.com to find and download Babbitt. Turns out I had several different audio versions of the novel to choose from. Even more interesting, many of the versions were released only recently. This surprised me--such new life from an old book--but then I realized it made perfect sense. What better statement about our current political doldrums, and what better dunderhead to represent them than George F. Babbit?

I'm about three-quarters of the way through right now, and the book still seems to be an elongated, satiric character sketch. Lewis is not completely without sympathy for his title character, and it's not as if nothing of interest ever happens to the man, but the clear point of the novel is to hold up the Babbitt type for critical scrutiny. And what exactly is the Babbitt type? In short, someone who assumes that any place or anything not American must necessarily be inferior, who sticks doggedly to a low/middlebrow notion of what art means and sees little use for art outside of generating ad copy and cowboy movies, who believes that only businessmen are doing America's business, that fundamentally no one else contributes, who believes that any idea of shared community needs and community interests is akin to socialism, who walks around determined to see himself as kind, civic, progressive in spirit, and even moral while all the while acting dishonestly in his real estate business, attending church purely for appearance's sake, looking to cheat on his wife, and despising every public-concerned political initiative. In short, someone with no self-awareness. An obvious hypocrite, and--as the book goes on to show--a very sad case.

And I wonder why the novel might be ready for a comeback? Indeed, as I listen to it, what strikes me over and over is how relevant the ninety year old story is. Sometimes scarily so. Nothing depresses and infuriates me more than those who see any and all government investment as simply a matter of taking from the deserving and giving to the nondeserving. That idea is so trite, so mean spirited, and so factually wrong that I almost can't believe it survives. Oh, but how it does. In all this Tea Party zealotry about lowering taxes for the rich, and cutting government services to the bone, what gets utterly overlooked is how mutual so many of the concerns are that lie behind the threatened programs. We all benefit from an educated public; we all benefit from a good health care system; we all benefit from a sustainable environment; we all benefit from an active arts culture; we all benefit from a solid infrastructure and a well-supported military and the opportunity for our children to go to college and accurate scientific data on how our planet is changing. How is any of that a matter of taking from the deserving and giving to the none deserving? So many Babbitts flourish today, trying to convince the public, as they've managed to convince themselves, by masking their motivations in civic and/or religious language, that cutting their taxes is all that should matter to anyone, despite the inevitable resulting fallout to our government, our economy, and our society. Despite all that we could lose. (If you doubt my word, just take a gander at the vital federal programs that have already been cut or are likely to be cut soon--and in several cases with only a microscopic effect to the budget deficit. Meanwhile, the one thing that would significantly lower the deficit--a serious tax hike--seems impossible to pass.)

I used to think that we as a people thought greed was a sin; I used to think that our houses of religion preached against it and our systems of government worked against it. I used to be sure of a lot of things, but with the Babbitts in control of the discourse, nothing--certainly not our economy--is certain anymore.