Hey all- another light week. What can I say? I feel fine but have a lot on my plate and have not been clearing out my review queue as quickly as I can. You got two reviews and a Mithra pic to tide you over, though!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude
Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions
Lagniappe
Mithra Pic: Mithra Cuddles Part ???
REVIEWS
Jonathan Lethem, “The Fortress of Solitude” (2003) - I read this for my Birthday Lecture, which this year is going to be about the literature and generational identity of Generation X. I didn’t expect to like it. I had read one of Lethem’s other books, “Motherless Brooklyn,” and did not enjoy it. Moreover, research for birthday lectures is the reading category that, along with my readings on the right, most reliably fills the bottom rungs of my year’s reading in terms of quality. This year has been no exception- Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, Jim Goad, other Gen X scribblers are all near the bottom of the list (I keep lists) and I expect a few more to join them. But “The Fortress of Solitude” turned out to be very good.
This is mainly the story of Dylan Ebdus, child of first-wave gentrifiers in a part of Brooklyn variously called Gowanus (after a smelly canal, pre-gentrification) or Boerum Hill (after an old Dutch patroon who barely touched this distinctly flat part of westernmost Long Island, after gentrification took). Lethem — and his fictional analog, Dylan — will also tell you that it’s the story of Dean Street, the block where his artist parents deposit themselves and their neurotic, diffident paleface only child. Fighting trainers tell you to look at a bewildering variety of body parts to figure out what your opponent will do next: I’ve heard center-of-chest, shoulders, hips, feet, hands, and eyes. Trusting what an author says about their own work reminds me of trying to figure out an opponent’s intentions by looking at their eyes: it can tell you something, but it’s also an obvious place to fake, and even when the other isn’t faking, there’s all kinds of cultural filters around what eyes are saying. All that is to say, “The Fortress of Solitude” is kind of about the street, but really about one kid’s interactions with it.
Dylan’s parents are a reclusive painter and a sort of general hippie gadabout lady type, the latter of whom runs away from home when Dylan is about ten, sending the occasional cryptic postcard. Gowanus is mostly black and Puerto Rican kids, not the poorest by any stretch, not quite rich or “respectable” enough to be middle class. There’s a weird old WASP-y lady who haunts the neighborhood, dreaming of rich whites “retaking” “Boerum Hill” (Lethem dramatizing the way real estate people – not necessarily revanchist biddies, but hey, it’s fiction – dug through archives for nicer-sounding names for the neighborhoods they were upselling), but it’s only well after her death that gentrification truly takes hold. So little Dylan plays stickball and whatnot, then becomes a mark for “yoking” – a sort of more-polite variant on mugging – by mostly black peers, along with another white nerd in the neighborhood.
Not the least of Lethem’s accomplishments here are looking at this racial dynamic without quailing, catastrophizing, excuse-making, or other obfuscations. Dylan isn’t an underdog hero, he doesn’t “have it coming,” he’s just a kid, who, like most kids, is trapped in dynamics he can’t control. He’s not in especially serious danger, and this form of bullying has a sort of resigned quality to it that other forms don’t; it sucks, but adolescence (and it's on-ramp, and it's off) usually does. Dylan’s best friend is black (and Dylan, who may be a nerd but isn’t completely stupid when it comes to social stuff, knows better than to name-check his black friend to his black yokers), Mingus Rude, son of a declining soul singer. The basis of their friendship are shared, private adventures- buying and reading comic books, getting into graffiti, etc. Together, they see a mythic city the others don’t, complete with comic book-style superheroes. They come to believe – Lethem tells us – that they get a ring from a homeless guy that lets them fly. This seems like the kind of thing that knocked them dead in 2003 but I’ve decided that it’s mostly just a mediocre metaphor. It’s not enough to ruin the book, by a long shot.
Others might disagree, but to me the central action in this long, sprawling novel is Dylan’s negotiation of, and eventually creation of, various worlds with other people, and the problems of living in multiple, sometimes intersecting, worlds. Dylan and Mingus (one thing I don’t love about this book is the names of characters) have their shared world. Dylan shares a world of boredom with another white nerd in the neighborhood, Arthur, and resents it when Arthur starts to move into the world with him and Mingus. Dylan has the hermetic world of his home with his Dad, who’s been shut up painting onto celluloid film for decades and doesn’t look likely to stop (he eventually starts painting covers for scifi novels he despises but which Dylan eats up- more worlds). Eventually, Dylan escapes Dean Street for a magnet arts high school in Manhattan, starts dabbling in nerdish, punk, and New Wave stuff with rich white kids, and plays a sort of cultural arbitrage between both. He winds up at a Bennington-manque, like Lethem did in real life (classmates with Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis!), which, even as he only stays there the one year or so, seals his transition away from Dean Street and into...
And here, there’s a lacuna, not the finely-detailed descriptions we got of Dylan’s youth (among other things, the book would be super-long if it kept up that level of detail). We see Dylan in then-contemporary early-aughts California. He’s a pedantic music scribbler, obsessed with black culture, up to having a black girlfriend who sees through his shit. He’s able to do this, but Mingus is in jail for a variety of mostly minor crimes. Lethem does not pretend that their worlds are equivalent, even if they grew up creating and sharing one together. Dylan did just as much stupid stuff as Mingus did, but could get out. Mingus did not have the same escape venues.
The ending has some hijinks involving the super-powers, but they’re also a clear way for the author to get Dylan to see things, and others to do things, that would be hard to narratively arrange otherwise, but wouldn’t be impossible… that’s a vague way of saying that it didn’t interfere too much with my enjoyment. Moreover, Dylan tells us the point, as he sees it, in the end- the world-creating possibilities of his time, the worlds that got created and destroyed, leaving only remains – music, art, feelings in people who have been passed by by time – behind. People often dislike that sort of point-making in novels, but I found it worked well. I’m not mentioning all kinds of stuff that happens here – bravura passages, changes of scenery (Vermont, mostly), some funny stuff about the scifi and art scenes through Dylan’s dad – because like I said, it’s a big long book with a lot going on. It’s seldom “cute” the way Lethem could be, especially in “Motherless Brooklyn.” It took itself seriously but not at all humorlessly. I was glad to be wrong about what I thought this would be. *****
Theda Skocpol, “States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China” (1979) - I have some weird background with this book. My first job out of grad school was for a nonprofit that the author started, dedicated to getting social scientists (like herself) to more effectively engage with the policy process. The nonprofit did what they do and my job, which involved trying to hammer into the heads of social scientists that they couldn’t just drop their papers into the laps of elected representatives and expect said politicians to act on the papers’ implications, ended after about ten months. Theda, as they called her in the office, didn’t do much with the day to day but it was understood she was the source of power. We were citizens of the Skocpolis. I only met her briefly. I sometimes wonder if our manager, knowing my socialist leanings and being a somewhat nervous type, thought it wouldn’t be a great idea, the grand old lady of liberal social science, used to decades of Harvard deference, and the red rando who didn’t always know or care about social pecking orders, being in too close proximity…
Anyway! Skocpol was not, in my very limited experience, the compulsive left-puncher that various others trying for influence in the Democratic Party (technically, the group was nonpartisan, but Republicans have their own ways of leveraging their, errrm, thinkers) often turn into. But in this, the monograph that made her reputation in that year of years 1979, she threw ‘bows left and right and mostly left in her effort to define revolution. What makes revolutions? Why do they happen when they do?
Skocpol, she informs us, is no “voluntarist.” It’s structural facets of historical-sociological situations that lead to revolutions! Funny- this is back before Marxists slid into their contemporary reputation as being arch-determinists. Skocpol dings Marxists for attributing too much to the will of revolutionaries, and also for reducing what makes revolution possible to class structure. Class is important! She demurs. But before we get to the “but,” she has to take down her old cohort, the modernization theorists who were well past their expiration date by the late seventies but holding on, as old academics too. You can’t explain revolutions as some automatic process that happens when institutions are insufficiently “modern” for conditions or don’t match public values, or personality types or whatever structural-functionalist voodoo the old modernization guys thought they could do.
“Bringing the state back in” - Skocpol started doing that in the late seventies, and History is such a slow academic field we were still acting like it was a big new deal when I was in grad school thirty years later! It’s actually state structures, and the international scenes in which they are situated, that are what people have been missing about revolutions. Especially Marxists, who “reductively” (shouldn’t “reducing” the chaos of circumstance and making a clear through line be a good thing? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?) dismiss the state as the “organizing committee of the ruling class.” Not so, Skocpol tells us! The state is autonomous! And we need to treat it as such not only to understand how revolutions arose in France, Russia, and China, but also the courses they took towards tyranny etc.
Here’s the thing: I’ve been on organizing committees. The idea that Marx was trying to say that states acting as organizing committees of a class means that their interest and actions could be reduced to what the class they represented wanted or what was best for that class or even just basic ideas of means-end rationality flies in the face of the nature of committees, organizing and otherwise. Yes, states don’t act straightforwardly in class interest, but they still act in class interest. It’s just that circumstances make things less than straightforward, much of the time.
So, it’s something of a straw-Marx and, to a lesser extent because some of them were class reductionists or whatever, straw-Marxists, that Skocpol beats on, here. To her credit, Skocpol does not ignore the class situation in her three case studies. She means it when she says class struggle is a part of these situations. But this book’s reputation rests on an analysis of state policies. The funny thing is… that seems more like a job for history, with its eyes for incident and contingency, than for sociology and political science, even historical sociology. The actions of the state actually seem more incidental than structural, down to some “autonomous” nature of the state that can be turned into a general category of analysis which we can “bring back in” anywhere. But this is social science, liberal social science at that, and ideal types are the name of the game.
Among other things, all three old regimes — the Bourbons, the Romanovs, and in their different ways the old Manchu regime and the Koumintang that followed them — Skocpol deals with had deeply stupid and fucked up priorities when it came to personnel decisions, budgeting, more or less every aspect of governance. Wouldn’t… that seem to imply there’s something about these states that got them to make bad, arguably suicidal, choices? Older “neutral” (read, revolution-skeptic) analysts of these things, from Carlyle on, had answers- the welter of incident and a vague pattern of decay, for the smarter ones, some conspiracy (usually led by, who else, the Jews) for the dumber, meaner, more activist ones. Skocpol punts to the nature of states, to protect and propagate themselves, but… for what? For whom? Might we suggest… a certain… class??
Anyway. This is far from the worst analysis (the non-academically-employed rando said to the two dozen randos who read him out of friendship about one of the most prominent social scientists of her time- and one who has done yeoman service holding back the tide of the quants, to boot, good on her). But the idea that this was, pardon the term, revolutionary social science thinking… well, in an academy where the Marxists themselves tend to be less revolutionary you’d like, maybe, but you know what they say about lands and blind people and one eyed people etc etc. ***
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: Mithra Cuddles Part ???
I know I’ve taken similar pics of when Mithra comes to cuddle on the couch but I love it