Michael Lewis launched his successful career as an author with his book Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, which is both a youthful memoir and a journalistic look at the inner workings of Salomon Brothers, a Wall Street firm that grew fat trading bonds and then crashed and burned. The book takes place, roughly, between the years 1984 and 1987, and so I wasn’t surprised that the book reminded me of the movie Wall Street – just replace Gordon Gecko with Salomon’s head John Gutfreund. At the beginning of the book, Lewis has just been hired, quite unexpectedly, by Salomon, and he takes us through his trajectory at the company, from the cut-throat training process to his days as a bond trader in London. From this vantage point, Lewis was able to watch the company, emboldened by spectacular success in the 1980s, become a symbol of corporate gluttony. Along the way, Lewis profiles many of the company’s outsized personalities. He also delves into the intricacies of the bond market in such a way that the arcane becomes pretty readable. The book is also filled with anecdotes about the conspicuous consumption of those times and the raucous, inelegant trading floor, filled with foul-mouthed traders who threw phones and insults and reveled in their gluttony. Lewis’ revelation was that the company (and its competitors) made profits at the expense of its customers, and, while the period that Lewis chronicles is interesting in its own right, its impact is somewhat diminished by the many corporate scandals and Wall Street improprieties that have occurred since the book was first published. Against this backdrop, Liar’s Poker is no longer an exceptional story that defined an era, it is merely another moment in the cycle of Wall Street corruption and ensuing retribution that continues today.
Review: Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis
What Steve Bannon Saw: On Joshua Green’s ‘Devil’s Bargain’
Mostly, the Voice: A Review of Edward P. Jones’ All Aunt Hagar’s Children
What is the source of Edward P. Jones’ magic? If you had asked me a month ago, I might have mentioned: plot, social importance, sweep. These were the Tolstoyan qualities I admired so much in 2003’s The Known World, surely one of the finest first novels published by an American in the last half century. “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” the first story in Jones’ new collection, Aunt Hagar’s Children seemed to confirm my intuitions, with its finely-etched rotogravure of African-American urbanization in the late 19th century. But, having just reached the end of the book, I am forced to reconsider. Some of Jones’ finest stories are as contemporary, elliptical, and personal as anything Alice Munro or my beloved Deborah Eisenberg has done. And, like Munro and Eisenberg, the man has taken the venerable short-story form and somehow made it his own. I mean he is a master. The source of his magic? A mystery. Well, no, that’s not quite accurate. What this book does share with The Known World is the Voice. That Edward P. Jones Omniscient Voice, detached yet curiously intimate, plainspoken, quiet, given to sudden, lurching glimpses forward and backward in time. Less James Earl Jones than Jeffrey Wright. The Voice wraps itself around characters, good guys, bad guys, men, women, and children, and loves those characters, and makes them live.Wyatt Mason has pointed out, in Harper’s, the way the characters in All Aunt Hagar’s Children gesture back to Jones’ first collection, Lost in the City (though one need not have read one to enjoy the other). They are grandchildren, cousins, neighbors of those characters; sometimes they are even the same characters. In lesser hands, this pattern could easily decay into a schematic, but Jones uses these connections as keyholes into his characters’ souls. For him, history is destiny.Take “Old Boys, Old Girls,” for example. Here Caesar Matthews, of the earlier story “Young Lions,” has landed in prison (where he was headed when last we saw him). Jones’ depiction of the social dynamics of prisons is as wrenching as it is understated. But Caesar’s past – his love life, his family – more than his experiences “on the yard,” shape his future. We are given the details in quick strokes:He was not insane, but he was three doors from it, which was how an old girlfriend, Yvonne Miller, would now and again playfully refer to his behavior. Who the fuck is this Antwoine bitch? Caesar sometimes thought during the trial. And where is Percy? It was only after the judge sentenced him to seven years in Lorton, D.C.’s prison in Virginia, that matters became somewhat clear again, and in those last moments before they took him away, he saw Antwoine spread out on the ground outside the Prime Property nightclub, blood spurting out of his chest like oil from a bountiful well.Note the characteristic way Jones stitches a single, anchoring present – the trial – to the past (a girlfriend, a murder) and the future (“those last moments before they took him away”) Note the sublime contrast between the fuzzy “somewhat clear” and the precise image of the bloody well. Every element of this passage will take on an added resonance in the story’s haunting denouement. Like “In the Blink of God’s Eye,” “Old Boys, Old Girls” is one of the best stories in the book. Also noteworthy are “Bad Neighbors,” “A Rich Man,” “Tapestry,” and “Common Law.” As with Lost in the City, we come to know the streets of Washington D.C. as if they were the streets of our own city and their residents as if they were our own neighbors.One senses that some of Jones’ mid-90s efforts have found their way into this collection, too, and they seem to be lumped together in the book’s middle section. “Resurrecting Methuselah,” “A Poor Guatemalan Dreams of Downtown Peru,” “Root Worker,” and “The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia River” find the author struggling with problems of diction, syntax, and plot we know he solved in “The Known World.” The latter three handle the supernatural less assuredly and vividly than Jones usually does, and traces of sentimentalism have not been entirely expunged from this quartet. Whether or not these stories are indeed products of Jones’ literary apprenticeship, the collection might have been just as strong without them.Still, it is difficult to find fault with All Aunt Hagar’s Children; at 400 pages, it is a massive and mature accomplishment. Claudia, the heroine of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, once chastised her community for confusing aggression with strength, license with freedom, politeness with compassion, comportment with virtue. Edward P. Jones’ omniscient narrators rarely render such judgments, but throughout All Aunt Hagar’s Children, we can feel him leading by example. This is writing that is not only beautiful, but strong, compassionate, good, and free. Which is what we mean when we use the term “literature” – or anyway, should be.
After the Violence, Life: Alan Heathcock’s Volt
How Far He Had Fallen: Christos Tsiolkas’s Barracuda
It’s a tricky thing, success. How do you write a book to follow your own breakout novel, a title that leapt off shelves and became a phenomenon? That’s a good problem to have, but a challenge nonetheless.
It was the challenge for Christos Tsiolkas after his fourth book, The Slap. It came out in 2008 (2010 in the U.S.), a doorstopper of a novel that told of the fallout from a backyard barbecue where a man slaps someone else’s child. Winning critical acclaim, it sold 1.2 million copies worldwide and made the author a household name in his own country, Australia. Asked if he saw that coming, Tsiolkas has said, “Fuck no…I’d have been happy if it had been 10,000 copies.”
Tsiolkas’s answer to his quandary was to confront the potential for failure head-on. He did that by making it the theme of his fifth and latest novel. Thus we get Barracuda, released this month in the U.S. It’s the story of Danny Kelly, the son of working class Scots-Irish and Greek parents and a promising swimmer at a public school in Melbourne. His talent gets him a free ride at a school he dubs “Cunts College” (it’s all prefects, grand stone buildings, and kids from leafy suburbs). And his talent could take him much further, to golden boy status and the Olympic Games. Except things don’t go according to plan, and failure in the pool is only the beginning of a spectacular fall from grace.
This is a truly fine novel, for reasons I’ll come to shortly. It’s also a great page-turner, drawing a reader in as it alternates between the schoolboy Danny and his older self, an ex-con who lives with the shame of unspeakable past acts. Older Danny (now “Dan”) doesn’t like to swim; he won’t even tell his lover, a Glaswegian named Clyde, that he was a swimmer once. Exactly what has happened Tsiolkas withholds, although he scatters clues like crumbs: “How the very word — swimmer — could lacerate, could remind him of how far he had fallen.”
Young Danny trains like mad and asserts himself by winning. He becomes inseparable from Martin, his waspy rival-come-friend. After winning at nationals (in the under-16s freestyle), he gets a standing ovation from the same schoolboys who initially despised him. Then it’s on to victory in the men’s butterfly. Next up, it’s the Pan Pacific Games in Fukuoka, Japan. Danny is there revealed as an Icarus figure: unaware of his own hubris, he crashes and burns. Later he sinks to the savage act that is the fulcrum of the story and only afterward perceives that his task is to become — quoting David Copperfield, a novel he reads in prison — “the hero of my own life”.
Tsiolkas has crafted a faultless voice for Danny. It’s tersely unpretentious but not without flights of beauty. This makes for taut, sensuous prose, as when Danny disregards his coach’s advice to focus on butterfly, not freestyle: “He knew he could conquer both strokes, it was inside him, it was a revelation written inside him, inked over his muscles, imprinted in his brain, etched into his soul.”
Where The Slap had an ensemble cast and Tolstoy-esque ambitions — it sought to render the whole milieu of the multiethnic, suburban Melbourne that is Tsiolkas’s heartland — Barracuda trains its sights firmly on Danny Kelly. Even so, all the characters are vividly drawn. Especially so Danny’s parents, the rockabilly hairdresser mother who shaves her son’s body hair and the truck-driver father with a social conscience. (“This fucking country,” he says. “There’s no money for health and education, nothing for the arts, but we shovel a shitload to sports.”) The set pieces sparkle with a dangerous brilliance: the weekend at Martin’s Portsea beach house where Danny faces off against a tyrannous, rich grandmother; the opening night of the Sydney Olympics when he tries to avoid the broadcast and the jingoistic hype but ends up glued to the window of a television store.
It’s worth mentioning the sex as there’s a fair dose in the book — Danny’s awakening in prison, then his relationship with Clyde. This is nothing new for Tsiolkas; a passage of Dead Europe, his third novel, was once shortlisted for The Guardian’s bad sex award. Actually, in Barracuda, the sex is worlds better than it was in The Slap, which had a racy tone that at times felt almost lewd, rather like the pervy bits in a Jonathan Franzen novel. (To give an example, Aisha’s dalliance at a conference abroad was as confected as anything in a bodice-ripper.) Barracuda feels truer and, well, tenderer, even when Danny philosophizes on “getting fucked up the arse.” Witness his description of his lover’s skin as being like “the tint of the last days of a leaf in autumn, the dark of ground just touched by rain.”
In the end, it’s not sex but class that gives Danny the greater trouble. Sexuality matters here, but Tsiolkas doesn’t spell out how. That he largely leaves aside questions of coming out is a mark of self-assurance in how he tells this story (he has said that in writing Barracuda he was coming to terms with his own class treachery). This confidence and ease is evident everywhere in the novel; Tsiolkas does not over-explain. We might or might not know that the “stinky TWU t-shirt” worn by Danny’s dad marks him as a member of the transport workers’ union. It might or might not register that the extravagant birthday gift for Martin’s grandmother is a painting by Joy Hester, an Australian modernist. It won’t matter because we feel we know these people.
Of course, Tsiolkas has made this book intensely Australian. The fact that he puts Danny at the Pan Pacifics — the games that mark the peak of his swimming career — brings to mind those different Pan Pacifics once conjured by Baz Luhrmann, in his first film, Strictly Ballroom (1992). There, the sport was ballroom dancing and working class Scott Hastings (Paul Mercurio) shook things up by dancing the pasodoble with a girl from a Spanish family. Tsiolkas’s Pan Pacific reference could be a nod to Luhrmann or it could be no such thing, but, like the film, Barracuda combines sharp social portraiture with that rare ingredient, a story that speaks to the human condition.
In writing this review, I read the book a second time. I had first read it at Christmas, tearing through it in two days; the novel came out late last year in Australia. Precisely because it is so gripping, it is possible on first reading not to notice just how skillful it is, how intricate the plot and the successive revelations, how deft the handling of point of view and tense.
I am glad I read it again and noticed all these things and more. The experience convinced me of what I had felt initially: this is not only Tsiolkas’s best novel so far, it is the work of a writer at the top of his game. That’s no small success for a book about failure.
I Could Show You Memories to Rival Berlin in the ’30s: Christopher Isherwood and ‘The Berlin Stories’
Returning to Walden
You only need to wade a few steps into Henry David Thoreau’s Walden before tripping over these words: “It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” For an author like Thoreau, an active and outspoken abolitionist, the insensitive aphorism seems like a profound contradiction of his character. In A Fugitive in Walden Woods, author Norman Lock imagines an appropriate response to such a statement, delivered by the novel’s narrator, Samuel: “It is much, much worse, Henry, to be driven by a vicious brute whom law and custom have given charge over one’s life than by an inner demon.”
Lock’s premise is clever: In the summer of 1845, just as Thoreau embarks on his experiment in simplicity on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Walden property, the Virginia slave Samuel Long cuts off his own hand, slips his manacle and — as the law of the day held — steals himself away from his master. He is conducted north via the Underground Railroad to Concord, Massachusetts, where Emerson sets him up in a second cabin in Walden Woods and tasks him with keeping tabs on the hermit-philosopher down the way. During the year he spends in Concord, Samuel finds himself amid a community of famous intellectuals and abolitionists — Emerson, Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and William Lloyd Garrison. The community is sympathetic to Samuel’s struggle, but the contrast between their extreme privilege and Samuel’s hardship often strains their attempts at genuine human connection.
The novel comes as the next installment in Lock’s series of American Novels, each of which engages with seminal nineteenth-century American authors and ideas. In each volume the first-person narrator functions as a kind refractive lens, bending and blending together a generation of texts and ideas within a single mind, and yielding a spectrum of impressions on the development of American culture and identity. But the book does more than parrot various ideological positions. A Fugitive in Walden Woods bursts with intellectual energy, with moral urgency, and with human feeling. Lock’s characters are not reducible to their ideas, but rather animated and complicated by them. In this way the novel achieves the alchemy of good fiction through which philosophy takes on all the flaws and ennoblements of real, embodied life.
As fascinating as it can be to watch the philosophical debates unfold, it’s often an even greater pleasure to witness Samuel yawn while these giants of the American canon pontificate at each other. Their talk is often compared to the buzzing of insects, and once to “a play without an interlude.” Emerson idealizes the soul, Thoreau nature, Hawthorne bemoans sin, but Samuel finds none of these compelling. For Samuel, abstract musing on Nature or Reality is a luxury that can distract from the actual substance (and struggle) of nature and reality. Over and over, the text returns to this question: What function do philosophy and literature serve in the material world, where people suffer constantly and nature endures indifferently?
Though Samuel’s critiques of these writers are many, the novel is far from a transcendentalist takedown. In fact, the narrator calls his work a “eulogy” for Thoreau, who died early from tuberculosis. His tribute is not a counter-Walden but a necessary companion piece, meant to both honor and challenge an old friend. Henry’s frank wisdom and his earnest, observant care for the gifts of the wild world are not missed, but rather contextualized within a restless man attempting to craft from ideas a physical life, a brilliant aphorist whose rhetorical fervor sometimes leads him into self-contradiction.
Samuel, too, is full of contradiction. He does not yet know “how to be,” especially in relation to these men. Part of him values their support and respect; he knows their attitudes are not mere performances. Later in his life, it will be these men who settle Samuel’s absurd self-theft debt with his former master, and thereby legally free him. But, still in Walden Woods, Samuel is beholden to the protection and esteem of well-meaning white men; his fugitive status permits no illusion of independence. What is he to make of self-reliance? He often feels reduced to “the object of other people’s goodness,” his story nothing but a powerful “tool” for the abolitionist cause. So another part of him wants resistance, revolt, it wants broken glass and righteous blood, and wants it now; he can’t suffer the thought of writers carrying out life — theirs, his — on scraps of paper, essays or stories or laws. That he should thank these men is preposterous. “I insist,” he writes, “that I am in debt to no one for restoring what ought to have been mine since birth…What is this impertinence but the self-reliance that Emerson espouses and Thoreau practiced in his lifetime. Like them, I wish to be reliant on no one but myself.”
The novel draws a sharp distinction between Henry’s and Samuel’s search for self-reliance in Walden Woods — a vast difference in privilege, trauma, and future prospects divides them. However, amid their disparate experiences, Samuel recognizes in Thoreau a kindred question: How am I to be, for myself and for others? In order to stand by the broad democratic implications of an experiment like Walden — the self-reliance and self-sufficiency of each individual — mustn’t he eventually compromise his own aloof simplicity and enter into the complications of human community for the sake of those whose individual rights are denied? “His self-reliance was partly self-delusion, as it must be for any mortal,” Samuel writes of Henry. This is true not only because Thoreau himself received ample support from his community (he was, after all, living on Emerson’s land), but also because the practice of pure self-reliance is a contradiction in a society that privileges only some with freedom. Ultimately, when Thoreau’s character truly does right in the novel’s dramatic final moments, it’s not by anything he writes or says, but by his willingness to “violate his principles” to help preserve Samuel’s freedom.
A reader would be right to be wary of Lock’s narrator — the author is a white man inventing and taking on the voice of a former slave. I hesitate to pass any definitive judgment on this kind of narrative presumption (a word which Lock himself uses to describe his relationship to the narrator), fraught as it is with a whole history of appropriation and exploitation. A reader may, in fact, be justified in rejecting Lock’s narrator and his premise out-of-hand. For my part, I can only affirm fiction as a space where both writer and reader seek honest communion with the lives of others, and say that, as I see it, Lock’s portrayal of Samuel seems as empathetic and complex as one must expect from a writer who knowingly attempts to cross such a gulf of experience.
Throughout the book Lock pays frequent homage to true accounts of slavery and escape by writers like Frederick Douglass, Henry Bibb, Solomon Northup, and Moses Roper, lifting up these accounts rather than trying to overwrite them with his own invention. The novel makes no attempt to compete with such narratives. Instead, it works to interrogate an intellectual tradition that was developing during the same period in a privileged Northern enclave by placing in conversation with those writers a person whose experience is drastically different from their own, and who could pose a worthy challenge to some of their deeply held notions of Nature and God and Soul and self-reliance.
There are occasional moments when the narrator’s voice falters, when the author leans away from the specificity of Samuel’s experience toward the dubious suggestion of some archetypal Slave Narrative in which, as Samuel claims at one point, “the particulars might be different, but the sorrows were the same.” Doubtless, there is much Samuel rightly identifies with in the stories of other former slaves, but in equating one’s experience to the others, the author plays into precisely the erasure of individual identity from which his character is attempting to recover. Samuel’s life, his memory, and his pain are his own, and the narrative is strongest when Lock pays mind to these particulars.
The narrative leap is clearly not one Lock takes lightly, nor does he try to make himself disappear beneath Samuel’s guise. In subtle metafictional moments, the novel foregrounds these issues of empathy and appropriation, consistently calling the reader’s attention back to Lock’s role as author. An epigraph by Thoreau, from Walden, opens the subject: “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else I knew as well.” There’s an implicit irony to such a quote, given that it precedes a piece of profoundly other-focused fiction — and indeed, the novel critiques the idea by demonstrating how literary navel-gazing can gloss over the suffering of others. Several times later on in the novel, Samuel himself claims to speak for the men in his story, and gives his own defense for the presumption:
None can know another’s mind. Nonetheless, we do speak and write of others as if we have known them well. What can Melville have known of Ahab, or Edgar Poe of Usher, or Hawthorne of Dimmesdale? And yet they have written of them in the belief that we possess a common soul. So it is that I have found within me courage to speak of and for various persons met during my stay in Walden Woods as though I had sounded to the bottom of them.
Thoreau’s aphorism is right, of course: there is nobody we know so well as ourselves. But as Samuel indicates, Thoreau is wrong too: we may never truly know each other, but without the willingness to take those first steps of imagination and empathy toward the lives of others, Walden is nothing but a place to hide.