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Reviews of three new books.
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The
Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope
by Andrew
Delbanco
(Harvard
University Press, 160 pages, $14)
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OK, let's cut to the chase: We're doomed. We are all going
to die. Sooner or later, everything we do will be erased by
time. So why bother? How come we don't just collapse in despair
the minute we understand the terrible emptiness of our situation?
Starbucks isn't much of a reason to get out of bed in the
morning--but these days, it's all we have.
We're in what Andrew Delbanco has identified as the third
phase of the history of hope in America--or rather, the
history of hope's disintegration. In phase one, faith in
God gave meaning to people's lives. Then came the Enlightenment,
and people discovered their power over nature. So long,
humble faith. "What it left in its wake," Delbanco writes,
"was unquenched spiritual longing."
In phase two, that spiritual longing was filled by a holy
patriotism: "The American self discovered it had no boundaries
and could consume the world." But Delbanco maintains that
faith in the state was stymied by racism. "Hope," he writes,
"stopped at the color line."
So God is dead and patriotism is for morons. What now?
Americans, Delbanco says, have lost any sense of a common
destiny. We have nothing larger than ourselves to worship.
We're surrounded by vapid New Age symbols and cheap corporate
logos.
"We live in an age of unprecedented wealth," he writes,
"but in the realm of narrative and symbol, we are deprived.
The ache for meaning goes unrelieved."
Unlike William Bennett and his ilk, Delbanco hasn't written
a prescription for spiritual renewal. He simply charts the
path to our current post-modern holding pattern: waiting
for the next big idea, hoping for the return of hope. He
might not have the answer for us, but his voice provides
a quiet comfort in the empty darkness. Becky Ohlsen
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A
Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as a Grotesque,
Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations
by Cintra
Wilson
(Viking,
228 pages, $23.95)
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There are cultural analysts, bespectacled and respectable
quasi-sociologists who seek a researched answer to Why We
Are Who We Are. But then there are cultural critics, alternately
flashy or frumpy sofa pundits who couldn't care less about
serious cause-and-effect issues and instead fret more about
the question of Why Does Our Music (Film, TV, Literature,
etc.) Suck Worse Than a Toothless, Octogenarian Porn Star?
This is the role Salon columnist Cintra Wilson adopts,
and it's one she slips into with all the zeal of a cheetah
prowling around the watering hole. In A Massive Swelling,
Wilson sinks her bloodthirsty verbal fangs into the Cult
of Fame, devouring mouthfuls of sacred cows at every turn.
Celine Dion is "one of the most freakishly mutated creatures...ever
coughed out into society." Elvis was "an unhappy fat Southerner,
spaced out on Demerol, working overmuch to musically emote
like an ouzo-stricken Greek uncle at a wedding reception."
Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson are "pussy-sick men [with]
a wobbly look in their eyes, a kind of overpermissiveness
with themselves that after fifty just starts to look like
a kind of omnipresent leer." Sure, she's harsh. But don't
you just love it? These allegedly beloved freaks of fame
are everywhere, like bacteria, and they need a good thrashing
every now and then. Wilson's clearly thrilled to chew them
up, and she does it with such invention and intelligence
you forget A Massive Swelling is little more than
a hilarious, extended diatribe about the dildo-screwing
our celebrity-obsessed culture is giving Real Artists these
days. John Graham
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The
Name of the World
by Denis
Johnson
(HarperCollins,
129 pages, $22)
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Denis Johnson's latest book is a comic novella set in a
small Midwestern college town. It fits well into the literary
tradition, including Nabokov's Pnin, Don DeLillo's
White Noise and Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, that
parodies the pod that is academic life. It's a world where
smart, emotionally handicapped people attend afternoon teas,
screw their students and light up basement bars with the
occasional flash of brilliance. They drink themselves to
oblivion, bound by a submerged despair. "Small, polite terror"
is how Mike Reed, the narrator-professor, puts it. Reed
guides us through the story, grief-stricken by the loss
of his family in a car crash for which he blames himself.
Like characters in other Johnson books --Fiskadoro,
Angels, Jesus' Son--Reed is looking for redemption.
He lets himself play the fool in the eyes of others, keeping
his best insights and his wittiest rejoinders to himself.
In Johnson's fiction, inner monologues are a secret pleasure,
an act of revenge. Johnson has a way of letting you in on
alienation, making it feel, without diminishing its power,
like a group experience. For his characters, repetitive
thoughts are parceled out like dope or drags on cigarettes.
Reed's grief is also his great comfort; it's protracted
and endless. Getting pummeled in a fistfight seems like
a good idea to him, if only to get the blood flowing. Release
from numbness also comes as a stab to the heart by a grad
student named Flower Cannon. "I wouldn't say I was infatuated.
I had noticeable but manageable feelings for her, helpless,
lustful feelings and fatherly feelings, and the mild resentful
envy of someone no longer young for someone so full of vitality."
In one strange scene, Reed follows her to an Anabaptist
church. Unfortunately, here the book spins out of control
until its unsatisfying end. Messages, signs and scraps of
paper stored in boxes reverberate with meaning but only
serve to mystify. The novella veers toward the dopey and
the cheeseball. But Johnson's writing is so precise in places
that his loss of control is forgiven, even though it should
be beyond redemption. Michaela Lowthian
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