too many Daves

I’ve delighted in Michael Lewis’ journalism ever since encountering his blunt, funny, observant book about the roadkill candidates of the 1996 presidential election. If he’s written a mediocre book before or since, I haven’t found it. Today, I started Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. There’s so much I’d like to quote, but I’ll limit myself to three passages.

1) “… on top of several thick strata of architecture that should be called Nordic Pragmatic lies a thin layer that will almost certainly one day be known as Asshole Capitalist. The hobbit-size buildings that house the Icelandic government are charming and scaled to the city. The half-built oceanfront glass towers meant to house newly rich financiers and, in the bargain, block everyone else’s view of the white bluffs across the harbor are not.”

2) “To remain in the euro zone, they were meant, in theory, to maintain budget deficits below 3 percent of GDP; in practice, all they had to do was cook the books to show they were hitting the targets. Here, in 2001, entered Goldman Sachs, which engaged in a series of apparently legal but nonetheless repellent deals designed to hide the Greek government’s true level of indebtedness. … The machine that enabled Greece to borrow and spend at will was analogous to the machine created to launder the credit of the American subprime borrower—and the role of the investment banker in the machine was the same. The investment bankers also taught the Greek government officials how to securitize future receipts from the national lottery, highway tolls, airport landing fees, and even funds granted to the country by the European Union. Any future stream of income that could be identified was sold for cash.”

3) “The extent of the cheating—the amount of energy that went into it—was breathtaking. In Athens, I several times had a feeling new to me as a journalist: a complete lack of interest in what was obviously shocking material. I’d sit down with someone who knew the inner workings of the Greek government: a big-time banker, a tax collector, a deputy finance minister, a former MP. I’d take out my notepad and start writing down the stories that spilled out of them. Scandal after scandal poured forth. Twenty minutes into it I’d lose interest. There were simply too many: they could fill libraries, never mind a book. The Greek state was not just corrupt but also corrupting.”

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For background on why I value Lewis’ financial journalism, see this post of mine from back in March.

On Saturday, I praised the Too Many Books In The Kitchen year-end list but left myself the option of stomping back to the Internet and denouncing the list if the second half of The Fates Will Find Their Way turned to crap. The novel finished as strong as it started. So no stomping, no denunciations. I’ve now read two of the five books on the list. Both were terrific.

I’ve been talking up The Fates Will Find Their Way over the last couple of days. When I do, I make sure to tell people that the story is told in the first person plural — “we” and “us” and “our.” Here’s a sample of how novelist Hannah Pittard manages to make “we” and “us” and “our” work:

It was our mothers who broke the spell. One telephone number at a time, the phone tree was resurrected. Mrs. Zblowski called Mrs. Boyd, who called Mrs. Epstein. And our mothers, in turn, called us, dutiful as ever to the prescription of the passage of information.

“Did you see?” they asked.

“See what?” we might have said, determined as ever to feign indifference.

“The paper,” they said, impatient and unbelieving, the click of their nails audible as they struck one by one on their own kitchen tables. “Mr. Lindell.”

“Oh, that,” we might have said, our wives furrowing their brows, wondering the reason for that Sunday’s particular interruption. Perhaps we rolled our eyes at them or shook our heads. Perhaps we made chatty hands at them, suggesting our mothers’ unwillingess to stop talking. Perhaps, but what we did not do was let on, was let slip, let show our absolute concentration on that obituary, its content, and whatever new information our mothers might have called to divulge.

Our backs turned now towards our wives, we moved away from them, towards the foyer or the den or the basement even, and continued our conversation.

Michael Hingston, who writes Too Many Books In the Kitchen, sees this “we” and “us” and “our” differently than I do. He sees a “headstrong choir: it shifts and coalesces into several distinct shapes, each boy given small moments of individual mourning before slowly retreating into the anonymous blob.”

Maybe I’m being too literal, but I can’t accept the idea that this is a story sung by a “headstrong choir.” In a choir, the harmony — or dissonance — would come from one man singing “chatty hands” and another singing “roll my eyes” and another “shake my head.” But that’s not what happens. Instead, it’s an uncertain “Perhaps we rolled our eyes at them or shook our heads. Perhaps we made chatty hands …”

I sense a first-person narrator who simply refuses to show himself, who hides himself so thoroughly in the “we” of his lifelong peers that readers never know whether his mother is Mrs. Zblowski or Mrs. Boyd or Mrs. Epstein or someone else altogether who never gets mentioned in the story. I could be wildly wrong. Regardless, I recommend the novel.

“Grandfather says the first man I sleep with should be over thirty. He also says if sex drive builds up to a particular point, it affects your mental stability.”

“Yes, I heard this from your grandfather.”

“Do you think it’s true?”

“I’m afraid I’m not a biologist.”

“Are you well endowed?”

Answer revealed here. SPOILER ALERT: It’s safe to click the link.