So Much to Read...

I'm taking it easy today, trying to relax the last vestiges of a nasty cold out of my system, so I've been holed up in the living room with a stack of magazines and the weekend papers...first of all, though it's outside my usual literary purview, I strongly encourage you to read Sy Hersh's latest article for the New Yorker, which digs into the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American troops.

I came across that story because I'd just read last week's New Yorker for the new Edward P. Jones short story, "Old Boys, Old Girls," which picks up the story of Caesar Matthrews, one of the characters from Jones' first collection of short stories, in and out of prison--and is, though the sample is admittedly small, the best short story I've read this year:

Caesar went to Cathedral’s cell one day in mid-December, six months before they freed him. He found his friend sitting on the bottom bunk, his hands clamped over his knees. He was still outside the cell when Cathedral said, “Caes, you tell me why God would be so stupid to create mosquitoes. I mean, what good are the damn things? What’s their function?” Caesar laughed, thinking it was a joke, and he had started to offer something when Cathedral looked over at him with a devastatingly serious gaze and said, “What we need is a new God. Somebody who knows what the fuck he’s doing.” Cathedral was not smiling. He returned to staring at the wall across from him. “What’s with creatin bats? I mean, yes, they eat insects, but why create those insects to begin with? You see what I mean? Creatin a problem and then havin to create somethin to take care of the problem. And then comin up with somethin for that second problem. Man oh man!” Caesar slowly began moving away from Cathedral’s cell. He had seen this many times before. It could not be cured even by great love. It sometimes pulled down a loved one. “And roaches. Every human bein in the world would have the sense not to create roaches. What’s their function, Caes? I tell you, we need a new God, and I’m ready to cast my vote right now. Roaches and rats and chinches. God was out of his fuckin mind that week. Six wasted days, cept for the human part and some of the animals. And then partyin on the seventh day like he done us a big favor. The nerve of that motherfucker. And all your pigeons and squirrels. Don’t forget them. I mean really.”

In addition to the short story, the website also has an exclusive interview with Jones, in which he discusses his ongoing desire to write about people living in Washington, D.C., and considers the process of writing The Known World, the novel that's won the Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle awards.

I skimmed through the NYTBR, mostly pleased, although I was a bit surprised when I got to Laura Miller's piece on the Lauren Slater controversy, which begins, "It's sad to see an interesting writer go off the rails, but last month that is what seemed to have happened to Lauren Slater." Yet the bulk of the article is, in fact, more about what people are saying about Slater than about any evidence of "off the rails" behavior she may have committed in response to those charges, unless Miller refers to the stylistic traits evident in Opening Skinner's Box...but writing that book isn't something Slater did last month. What she did do last month is defend herself on this very website, though Miller makes no note of it. In the end, though, what she has to say about Slater--

She is not above manipulating her readers, while technically avoiding inaccuracy, if it will make the tale more potent. This recklessness is both the kernel of her talent and her nemesis; she is forever threatening to cross the line. She steps over it in writing about B. F. Skinner's daughter Deborah. Contrary to some earlier reports, Slater doesn't endorse the urban legend that Deborah was raised in one of her father's animal-conditioning boxes. But she does spin a bogus miasma of mystery around Deborah's fate, implying that she is hard to find and possibly unstable, though Deborah herself denies it.

--isn't that much different from the conclusion I reached last month:

Putting aside all the other problems other people mentioned in the book have with Slater's portrayal of them, I'm willing to accept the possibility that she really did mean to debunk the legend and that all this fuss stems from poorly written attempts to jack up the melodrama in an otherwise fairly prosaic story of basic journalistic research by inserting a phony aura of ambiguity surrounding a lurid falsehood.

Switching over to the Sunday magazine, Deborah Solomon interviews Samuel P. Huntington and, as usual, goes straight for the jugular:

Your new book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity, suggests that Hispanic immigrants are undermining the greatness of the United States.

I'm not a particular fan of Solomon's interviewing technique--too often, I think she confuses being snide with being penetrating--but this exchange is fairly interesting, and Huntington puts up what is probably his best defense against the charges of cultural imperialism he's faced since the book came out. (I happen to think his idea that America is what it is because of English Protestants grossly oversimplifies matters, but historians of colonial America could refute him much more thoroughly than I.)