Hello all! Of course I produce an edition on Christmas Eve! Sneak in some prose during some lulls in holiday celebration! I’ve actually got four whole reviews, finally clearing my backlog. Most of them weren’t great, and I’m told people enjoy it when I don’t like books, so have fun! There’s also an Observed Life. Get to it, and Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Waite, Vanguard of Nazism
Corey, Leviathan Falls
Cusk, Outline
Stephenson, Termination Shock
Lagniappe
The Observed Life, with Peter: Deer Friends
REVIEWS
Robert Waite, “Vanguard of Nazism: the Free Corps Movement in Germany 1918-1923” (1969) - This one is an early stab at the history of the Freikorps, the right-wing paramilitary formations that arose in Germany after its defeat in World War One. As the title indicates, the Nazis recognized the Freikorps as crucial forebears (didn’t stop them from killing numerous Freikorps big shots in the Night of the Long Knives, but that’s fascism for you) in important regards, both practical and inspirational. The whole gist of Nazism — basically, mass violence to instantiate imagined past glories that the previous, duly constituted protectors of the values of bygone days were supposedly too ineffectual to regain — was indeed prefigured by the Freikorps.
In the book’s best chapters, Waite — a WWII veteran, longtime beloved teacher at Williams College, and guy who eventually tried to psychoanalyze Hitler decades after Hitler’s death — traces how the Freikorps ethos came directly from elite formations in the WWI-era German army. Units of “stormtroopers” deployed to stealthily and violently overtake enemy trenches developed their own culture, separate from the German army traditions of obedience to duly appointed authority, rational planning, strict hierarchy, etc. It’d be wrong to say the stormtroopers, and the Freikorps after them, exactly subverted these ideas- they just reapplied, and in some circumstances super-charged them, to fit the extreme circumstances of the trenches (or, later, collapsed post-defeat Germany). So they were still quite obedient and hierarchical, just to the baddest dudes in their little group, not to graybeards on the general staff, eager to fight but for “the German spirit” and increasingly for the sake of the violence and not (just) because they were told, etc. The similarities between the culture of these elite troops and those of certain other elite military formations (who also failed to win their war despite their big reputations) suggest themselves readily.
So far, so cultural, and it’s worth noting that other factors, like the pan-Germanist movement, helped prepare German right-wingers for the idea that while hierarchy is always a great good, extant hierarchy might not be the most legitimate. When Waite gets into the Freikorps’ practical effects, stuff gets interesting in a different way. Put bluntly (and I finished this a while ago and am trying to clear a backlog so blunt it shall be), Waite is a Cold War liberal and a guy who believes in totalitarianism School notions, so tries to thread the needle between “the Freikorps are obviously bad” and “well, SOMEONE had to restore order in Berlin!” You can tell he has a certain affection for Gustav Noske, the Social Democrat who first called on the Freikorps, in many respects created them along with the Army generals (though I’d bet something like them would come about anyway) and sicced them on the SPD’s rivals to their left. Waite seems to see Noske, a former army sergeant himself with, errr, a substantial respect for order, as a tragic figure. If only he’d have had the foresight to reign them in somehow! Isn’t it sad how they clubbed Rosa Luxemburg to death! But, you know, there was looting, and you just can’t have that, and they did a general strike after the Freikorps tried to overthrow the SDP’s asses, that was cool, right? He cites the memoirs of Freikorps leaders sometimes as sole sources when talking about revolutionary conduct, like revolutionary sailors supposedly taking random women and children hostage when faced with the army in Berlin. It gets pretty bad in some places.
I’m used to the way a certain kind of liberal — Peter Gay did this too — lionized the Weimar Republic, the “good Germany,” the experimental Germany, trapped between Nazis and Communists, etc. The KPD made plenty of mistakes (that tends to happen when you systematically murder the best leaders in a group) but the equivalency is just wrong and I don’t think I need to belabor that point here. At least those old liberals felt the need to show their work more than contemporary ones do, and maybe meant their hemming and hawing more, meant their disgust with the right, than a lot of liberals do now when they tut tut before handing arms to the Right Sector or shaking hands with whichever ghoulish politician. So you get chapter and verse, as best as you were going to get with the available sources not so long after it happened (about the distance the late seventies is to us now), about the many, many extralegal murders the Freikorps did. When they stormed cities held by workers and soldiers councils, they just massacred people, hundreds of people per city. In cities without ongoing uprisings, they routinely murdered union organizers, politicians, and poor random people who “knew too much” throughout the years Waite covers. Nobody did anything. Almost none of them went to jail, and fewer still for serious time. The SDP, who had militia of its own, never really took the fight to the right, and by the time the KPD got big enough, the Freikorps had metastasized into the Nazi Party, a mass movement with support from elites. It’s grim.
“The Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers, they’re no Freikorps!” I can hear some of you say. Well, take what comfort in that you can. They clearly want to be- they dream what the Freikorps did. If you told a German of 1913 vintage that clubs of demobilized soldiers and their college student groupies were going to kill thousands of civilians in Germany proper in a few years, they wouldn’t believe it, either. All it took was the right crisis. I intend to keep our local fascists in a place where they can’t take best advantage of the crises we know are coming down the pike. Let’s keep them wannabes. ****
James S.A. Corey, “Leviathan Falls” (2021) (read by Jefferson Mays) - Well, at long last, here we are! At the end of The Expanse! What a long, strange trip it’s been… well, a long trip, anyway. As you know, I’m behind on reviews and trying to catch up. That is a problem, because this book is deeply unremarkable and I remember little about it. And it’s sad, because I do think the Coreys (it’s a house name for two guys) tried to do something ambitious here. Humanity, in its hour of need, “groks a rock” (a giant alien data storage device) and learns the history of the universe! In honestly pretty bad pseudo-dreamlike prose. Jellyfish-neuron-people figured out space, also figured out how to use alternate-universe-energy, built gates between stars, and then got iced by the alternate-universe beings. Now those alternate universe beings are mad that humans are using the juice again. Also, the (former, sort of) dictator of humanity decides to try to hive mind us up, like the jellyfish folk, on the idea we’d be both more able to cope with the universe, and happier.
It’s not terrible but not great, not so much bad in and of itself and more dispiriting that this is the best we can do. Among other things, I’m not saying that the Coreys need to hop on “team hive mind” but pretty much everyone right away rejects it, even after former-dictator guy tries the soft sell (he soon goes hard, natch). Certainly the characters do, because, after all, they are Characters, with Feelings and Development and Subplots, so no go. But wouldn’t the extras maybe kinda like being part of a larger whole and forgetting their egos? I’m pretty egotistical and even I can see the appeal. Arguably the most dispiriting part was when characters, in their internal monologues, would list off the things humanity would “lose” if we became an all-powerful, strife-free hive mind. If I remember right, these things we stood to lose include “prayers,” “jokes,” “first dates,” etc. There they go, tempting us with a good time!
Eventually, perspective dullard Jim Holden apotheosizes and saves the galaxy, but at a cost. Heart o’ gold zombified thug Amos gets to live on and on, various other characters that I guess I’m supposed to have feelings about, after spending thousands of pages with them, go their various ways. Fine, fine. I guess this is what people want. I’m just kind of baffled. It all seems… mismatched. The ambitions of space, the familiarity of every dynamic they threw up there, the sheer size of the work and how little gets done with it. I guess people want… same-same, repeated at nauseum, and in settings you’d think would reward creativity? That last part… is it spite? Probably not. People just like variety, is probably the simpler answer. I don’t know. The end. ***
Rachel Cusk, “Outline” (2014) (narrated by Kate Reading) - Other than some stuff I read as part of my efforts to understand the far right, this highly-acclaimed literary novel was probably the least pleasant reading (in this case, listening, but there was nothing wrong with the reader or the audiobook production) experience I had this year. That’s not to say it’s the worst book I read this year (barring chud bullshit), though it is pretty bad. There were just a number of features in this one that made it particularly hard to put up with for its quite limited duration.
One feature is good press. I get that publishers had almost no reason not to praise anything they release in anything less than fulsome terms. I also get that critics, when they like something, also, increasingly, have no reason (other than a professional pride they haven’t seem to got) not to do the same. But there’s praise and praise. Fellow crappy contemporary scribblers Lauren Oyler and Charles Yu are praised in terms that are probably honestly meant but, if you squint, you can see them as being a bit backhanded- they express “their times” or “the experience of being” X, Y, or Z (for Oyler, a woman, notionally smart, or a millennial, for Yu, being Asian-American). Rachel Cusk, on the other hand, gets critics to call her no less than a major force shaping and advancing literature today. While her work is also definitely seen as expressing the experience of being a woman, she is also depicted as making major formal contributions to contemporary literature, in a way critics depict few writers.
Well… they’re not wrong. “Outline” condenses much of what makes contemporary literature distinctive into a product of peculiar purity. The novel consists of an unnamed narrator — a successful female British writer, like Cusk herself — relating stories told to her by assorted interlocutors, mostly in travels to Greece and around London. There isn’t a plot. The language isn’t awful but does not shine. And every single interlocutor — I basically refuse to call them characters — speaks in the same voice, that is, the narrator’s voice. They all relate their life stories — and they’re mostly Greek magnates of one degree or another or Anglo writing pedants — in the language and tone of Cusk herself. You can only tell when one is speaking as opposed to the narrator because of the accents the reader puts on!
Honestly, I can somewhat admire the chutzpah. Bret Easton Ellis and similar writers might have explored nihilistic self-absorption, but they were simple-minded enough to think that meant you just present an inner-monologue of a self-insert narrator. How much more self-indulgent is it to take the stories of others, quite dissimilar from the self, and just… rewrite them to sound like you! If it were Cusk just trying to report what people said, she would, accidentally if nothing else, slip into language other than what passes for high-toned contemporary English. But nope! Even when presented as quotes (as opposed to the narrator relating an interlocutor’s story), they sound exactly like her! It was excruciatingly boring — the only thing that could have saved these miserable stories of divorce and upper class anxiety would have been interesting language which Cusk either cannot or will not use — and when combined with both the knowledge that is considered cutting-edge writing, and the sort of dim knowledge that, yep, you know what, the critics are right, or half-right, it’s not brilliant like they say but they’re right that it is the distillation of contemporary literary fiction… yeah, it was a tough listen.
I don’t expect to read a lot of defenses of Cusk here — not unlike my other major category of unpleasant reads, the words of fascists, I read these shitty literary books so you don’t have to — but I figure if I did, what I’d hear is that this is what it’s like to be a woman. You have men just pouring out personal stories to you, on planes and in dinners, and it’s actually a work of subversion to regurgitate them all in your own voice. Well, maybe! That doesn’t make for a good novel. If that interpretation is correct, that just makes “Outline” similar to a lot of modern art- a joke, a stunt, a dumb point that would warrant, maybe, an essay, not a whole novel, written and read because no one involved has anything to really say but still fells compelled to self-expression. Extra half star for stones, though. *’
Neal Stephenson, “Termination Shock” (2021) - I recently had the inspiration to google “Neal Stephenson net worth.” The internet seems to know what every even mildly famous (Stephenson once said he was probably about as famous as the mayor of Des Moines- figure maybe we could bump him up to, I dunno, El Paso mayor status now?) is worth, or at least gives a confident-sounding answer. The answer the Internet gave for Neal Stephenson is eighty-five million dollars. That’s a lot! It makes sense, given that he’s been a bestselling writer for a while, but more so because he is a friend of — and his work is an inspiration to — tech billionaires, including the current biggest of all, Jeff Bezos. Something tells me those nerds probably let slip a few tips to the old beard-monger (he’s not that old or that beardy these days, granted) when they're in their cups, geeking out with the dude who wrote “Snow Crash.”
I’m a materialist, so I’ll just say it: I think Stephenson’s proximity to/immersion in the world of rich tech people has dulled his imagination, blunted his literary ambitions, and (along with what I can only imagine is soft-touch editing) encouraged several of his bad traits as a writer. I’m a dialectical materialist, of sorts, so, naturally, I will complicate this assertion. I don’t think money necessarily leads to bad art. I do think that the mental/cultural/aesthetic space of contemporary rich people ala Bezos is so profoundly anodyne that spending enough time in it will, almost invariably, infect a person with its banality. Moreover, depicting the anodyne space of “bizjets” (as Stephenson invariably calls private jets at this point), high-end hotels, conferences, etc in a way that doesn’t numb the mind… well, my favorite filmmaker, Michael Mann, has to expend all his talent to make settings like that compelling, and he only has to do it over the course of a two hour movie, with frequent dips into more interesting environments (“The Insider” is one of his harder movies to watch in part because of this issue).
Neal Stephenson is, in fact, a major talent, though I wouldn’t say a prose stylist in the way Mann is a cinematic artist. His talent is a cobble of ideas, capable genre chops, ambition, and flaws. You know what doesn’t have cobbles, or if they do, they’ve been artfully arranged by mercenary art school grads for maximum soullessness? The world of billionaires. And that is the world where we live in for most of “Termination Shock,” Stephenson’s go at a climate change novel.
The idea here is that in the near future, a Texas billionaire (who, god help me, I can’t help but imagine as Rod Strickland, Hank’s boss on “King of the Hill”) starts shooting sulfur into the atmosphere to abate climate change. He invites the Queen of the Netherlands — Stephenson likes to introduce her in any given section with her fusillade of names, but mostly, she goes by Saskia — and elites from other low-lying areas to look at his Big Gun for shooting sulfur-shells into the atmosphere and help advance his plans. This puts Saskia, here depicted as just a sensible, self-aware lady trying her best, into a whole political thing. Meanwhile, Canadian Sikh action-guy Laks (Stephenson is a words and ideas guy who loves action-guys, more later) goes to the Punjab to connect with his roots through learning advanced Sikh stick-fighting, and winds up in some weird fighting with the Chinese in the Himalayas. Then these things get connected!
I’m aware of where criticisms of Stephenson usually land- on the politics of his ideas and postures, and sometimes, as an afterthought, on his prose. I’ve been doing this long enough that I accept that his politics won’t be like mine, and I more or less accept his prose, too. The big red flag for most people will, naturally enough, be geoengineering (trying schemes to reverse climate change). I am not a scientist or engineer. Here’s what I know: most people I know with an opinion on geoengineering are firmly against it, and that includes a substantial subset made up of every actual scientist I know and have heard opine on the subject (a substantial minority of science-enthusiast friends are pro-geoengineering); that our system, and especially the individual billionaires involved, probably shouldn’t be in charge of anything more important and dangerous than a pair of soft shoes. So, basically, not too dissimilar to nuclear power, except I could see a situation where nuclear power was key to the future, and even Stephenson seems to only see geoengineering as a temporary measure…
Anyway! Stephenson clearly —likes— geoengineering schemes- why wouldn’t he? He likes big, ambitious technoscientific schemes. But you might be surprised how little he dwells on opposition to geoengineering, especially for a dude who in other novels makes his dislike for critics of ideas he sees as important through turning them into truly obnoxious villains. True, his characters invokes “the Greens” as an ever-present force blocking progress, but that’s mild stuff, for Neal. The politics he’s concerned with is great power stuff and in the end, he treats them all alike- looking out for their interests (except the US, which he treats as something of a basket case that can’t really act in its own interest- fair enough). There’s some China-baiting but by the time the book reaches a denouement, the Chinese are not the problem. By the end of the book, he’s making a decent point, even, not about geoengineering so much as maybe, even if we “need” billionaires and terrible governments to do big important projects, they should also not cowboy around doing whatever without talking to each other. I think most of can agree that communication is good (the most communication I want to make with a billionaire is “hand it over and get in line for your turnips with everyone else” but, you know).
So, no, it’s not the politics that makes this probably the worst Stephenson novel. Rather, the politics is infected by the same anodyne, under-thought but over-elaborated, quality that makes the plot, writing, and characterization bad. Basically, it’s a very dull seven hundred pages. It’s a thriller — Stephenson has clearly long loved airport thrillers ala Grisham but has only indulged in writing them the last decade or so — that seldom thrills. That sucks, because Stephenson has packed big books before with stuff. If it wasn’t discussion of ideas, it was fun incident. But, god help me, the world Saskia inhabits just can’t be interesting no matter how hard Stephenson tries (I don’t know how hard he’s trying). Witnessing the aftermath of climate catastrophes (like a pretty horrifying-sounding beachside mass-drowning in sea foam) having a love life, getting ratfucked by the Chinese and their deepfake schemes, could be interesting, but aren’t. They’re written like so many depictions of flying around in “bizjets” and attending conferences. It is almost determinedly boring, like he’s trying to prove some kind of point.
What of characters not trapped in the “air-conditioned nightmare” of beige rich life? What about Laks the Sikh stick-fighter? Well, it’s a little more interesting. It sounds absurd at first, that India and China would restrict their wrangling over deglaciated Himalayan real estate along their 1962 ceasefire line by having “volunteers” fight with sticks, rocks, and fists. Stephenson waxes thoughtful on the long history of “performative war,” which wasn’t particularly persuasive on why someone wouldn’t just use a knife or a gun, and why the invariable casualties (rocks can also kill you!) wouldn’t produce the sort of outrage that would escalate the situation… but it is true that not everyone uses every weapon they have. Stephenson relies on the example of nuclear weapons- I thought more about fascist versus antifascist confrontations. Who knows what will happen post-Rittenhouse verdict — and if the fascist right thinks they’d have more than a momentary advantage if things went to the gun, they are wrong, guns are plentiful in this country and they can’t organize for shit — but for now, there are practices that contain the escalation of the violence.
So, in principle, the “Line of Actual Control” storyline passes the sniff test, and the action was more interesting than Saskia flying (herself- you see, she trained as a pilot, so she’s not just some useless scion of unearned wealth, oh, no!) around. But let’s talk about the non-grossly-wealthy characters in “Termination Shock.” These are mostly Laks, who briefly becomes a social media celebrity for leading a crew of Indian stick fighters against Chinese opposite numbers, and Rufus. Rufus is the inevitable standin most Stephenson novels have for the wisdom of the American heartland. This time, the stand-in is, like Nas, “all races combined into one man” instead of being just a white guy, but mostly Stephenson identifies him as a Comanche. He gets involved in the action by rescuing Saskia and the Dutch royal crew from thirty to forty feral pigs when they visit Texas at the start of the book.
Here’s the thing- Rufus’s story, about how he got obsessed with feral pigs after one ate his kid, how he developed state of the art feral pig hunting techniques, how he read Moby-Dick after someone compared him to Captain Ahab, etc etc… it’s both the best part of the book, action wise (and comes to a halt once the Texan geoengineering billionaire hires him to attend to the dry fart of the plot), and the prime symptom of the patronizing ventriloquism Stephenson has long done with working-class characters, and which has gotten worse as time has went on and as Stephenson moves in more rarified social circles. Rufus is a noble savage in a peculiarly old-school mode, not so much Tanto as the sort of Native American imagined by Enlightenment types- simple, noble, formal, thoughtful, rational even if attached to strange cultural norms. He is contrasted to ignoble savages, like (white American) people who try to fight Laks for being Sikh, and, implicitly, the white heartland Americans who have let Stephenson down by supporting Trump and otherwise seceding from consensus reality. As for Laks, he’s Stephenson trying to write his way into the head of a good-hearted, smart but not especially verbal, athletic/mechanically-inclined guy. You get these a lot in Stephenson novels, but they’re usually side characters, and so you don’t see the strings quite as much. Let’s just say Stephenson’s loquacity as a writer and the supposed strong silent types he writes make for some odd contrasts.
One thing you can say for Stephenson’s working class puppets- in the end (and the back quarter is much better than the preceding parts), everyone is a puppet, blown along by forces greater than themselves, even queens and billionaires and people trying to make new countries out of geoengineering-happy low-lying rich countries (and a few impoverished Pacific Island countries fronting for them). Climate change, capitalism, and great power conflicts are so big no one can entirely manage it, even the billionaires or powers like India and China. That’s true enough. But between the lack of much to say about this state of affairs, and the hundreds of pages he makes you spend in beige billionaire hell…between both Stephenson and Kim Stanley Robinson writing climate change novels that are, above all else, failures to imagine radically different ways of arranging things (even when both have imagined precisely that in other works!), it’s not an encouraging picture. **
LAGNIAPPE
The Observed Life, with Peter: Deer Friends
My mom loves the gentler and furrier local wildlife, especially rabbits and deer. There’s been more deer sightings in her town as development proceeds and habitats get smaller. There’s a little patch of woods behind the house where nobody’s going to develop anything, I think, and deer spend a lot of time there. Mom and her husband set up deer licks and stuff. Here’s a group of deer on Christmas Eve! My mom woke me up to see them and I’m glad she did.
My mom also says that Mithra would like to meet the deer. She’s a city girl; she’s not so sure