September 4, 2019--You're In the Army Now

With John Allan we were having breakfast at the Bristol Diner and as so often happens a thought out of seemingly nowhere came up and off we went in a gyrating free association.

"How does one get admitted to West Point," I wondered.

"You can look it up later," John said. We had been talking about Ernest Hemingway and his alter ego Nick Adams. I have been on a tear recently, gobbling down as much Hemingway as possible. I hadn't read anything of his for at least 30 years and was enjoying the reconnection. I felt his best work was holding up better than I thought it might. His minimalist style still felt fresh and exciting.

And John had been reading John Updike's Beck books, Beck also is an alter ego and John and I had been comparing Updike's to Philip Roth's novels where there are also numerous alter egos. Especially the recurrent, ever agitating Nathan Zuckerman. 

Rona was reading Edward Hoagland, at John's recommendation, and though there are no alter egos apparent in his wonderful work, she was quite interested in the alter ego conversation. "Not many women alter egos that I can point to," she said, "It feels like a bit of a man's thing."

"Why is that?" John mused.

"Maybe you guys are not comfortable talking directly about your feelings and inner lives and so turn to alter egos to do so for you."

"What does this have to do with getting into West Point?" I said, tugging on us to turn to that.

"Maybe," Rona said, winking at John, "because it's boring compared to the book talk."

"Let him be," John came to my defense. "We'll get back to books."

"Back in your day," Rona said, "centuries ago--as a Jew growing up in Brooklyn, you were thinking Brooklyn College and dental school. Not West Point."

"True, not West Point but I was thinking Columbia and med school. Though I wound up as a Lit major. Go figure."

"I was just teasing you," Rona said. I knew I was sounding defensive.

"So how does a WASP from Texas get admitted to West Point?" John asked. "I too never thought about this. And I was a WASP from New Jersey but thought of myself as too intellectual to give any thought to going to college to learn how to operate a tank."

"But if either of us thought about trying to get into West Point," I asked, "how would that work? Actually, how does it work now? All the service academies are diverse these days. There are plenty of minorities and even women."

"Even women?" I knew that would not get by Rona.

"Actually, I think it's great that there is all that diversity."

"I do too," John and I said simultaneously.

"Look it up when you get home," John said, "Between us we probably know almost nothing about how the admission process works."

"One thing I think I remember is that you have to be recommended by a member of Congress."

John and Rona nodded and with that we turned back to book chat. This time to talk about Jean Shephard's In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. Rona knew very little about Shephard and John, who was and is a fan, has been telling her about him and last week passed along his battered copy of the book for her to read.

"I also remember Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside!" I was all excited. 

"Huh?" Rona said.

"'Doc' Blanchard and Glen Davis. All American football players on the Army team. West Point. One ran through the line--Mr. Inside--and the other around the ends--Mr. Outside. The 1940s. I was a kid."

I was feeling very good about myself. John and Rona took to ignoring me and went back to talking about Jean Shepherd and storytelling.

Back at the house I did some googling.

Yes, one does need a nomination by a member of Congress or the Secretary of Defense, Vice President, or President. And one needs to take the SATs and do very well on the and in high school. Also, one has to submit a written application much the same as applicants do to any selective institution. And service academies such as the Naval Academy (and all operate the same way) require candidates to be interviewed. Also, athletics counts. It doesn't hurt to be a talented running back.

It is a very competitive process and is attractive to many because graduates earn bachelor of science degrees and there are no fees or tuition. Cadets in effect get a free ride but must agree to serve in the military for at least three years after graduating.

When I reported what I learned to Rona she said, "This sounds terrible."

"Really?"

"Do you think this is the best way for West Point and the others to select our further military leaders?"

"Sounds pretty rigorous to me."

"You trust members of Congress to make these decisions? To pay off local supporters by nominating their kids for West Point or the Air Force Academy? I think it a recipe for all sorts of corruption and malfeasance."

"You're probably right. I never thought about it this way. Sounds a little scary."

"Maybe this helps explain why we've been making such a mess around the world. We're not recruiting the best people for these essential roles."

Sorry I brought the whole thing up, I said, "So next time let's talk about Hemingway and Jean Shephard."

"Works for me," Rona said.

December 12, 2018--Murray Dinerstein 1923-2018

Friday evenings in Tannersville the women and children of the Mooney extended family would gather on the front porch that faced Route 23A to log in the arriving husbands who, after a scorching week of work in the city, dodging miles of stop-and-go traffic, would finally made it to the modest country summer house in the Catskills all members of the family chipped in to pay for in order to secure a refuge for the children from the scourge of Polio, thought to be extra contagious in steaming, densely populated Brooklyn, and for the adults a place to breathe dry air.

Uncle Bob would be first--he owned his own business, a gas station, and could arrange to get away early--bearing shopping bags full of the sugary foods and drinks we were normally not allowed to eat the rest of the year. He would unload boxes of donuts and quart after quart of Hoffman's cherry soda and ginger ale, Dr, Brown's Cel Ray Tonic, and most weeks sweating bottles of Coca Cola, while the women looked on, sensing the suspension of the state of healthy discipline they had imposed during the week on my cousins and me. I suspected that Uncle Bob's wife, Aunt Gussie, believed that drinking carbonated soda made one vulnerable to Scarlet Fever if not Polio itself.

Typically, Uncle Eli was next. Back in the city he was in the meat processing business and thus had access to prime cuts of veal, lamb, and beef and so out of his car's trunk came steaks and chops and mounds of ground meat and sausages that he, on Saturday afternoons, would sear on the backyard charcoal grill.

And then there was my father whose place of business, a parking garage in Park Slope, co-owned with his Uncle Louis, who, we would say today, was "mobbed up," was close to an Ebingers bakery and so from my father's Lincoln Continental would emerge a stack of memorable cakes. My favorite, the coffee cake pecan ring. He always remembered to bring at least one of those and made sure, in the rush to eat, that a bi slice of one was secured for me.

Finally came Cousin Murray. Fifteen years my senior, World War II veteran, and thus because of his age, military service (he was the only member of the family to have been in the army), and stature--he was the first born of my cousins--was a looming presence among the younger, especially male cousins, who idolized his can-do energy, athletic prowess, and raw, self-confident maleness. He was aware of this and made successful efforts to carry this responsibility off with graceful aplomb.

Rather than food treats he typically brought records, books, and magazines which he passed around to the eager younger cousins, winking and whispering one memorable Friday to Cousin Chuck (next in line in male seniority) when he gave him a tattered copy of Irving Shulman's Amboy Dukes, "Make sure you look at page 44," he said privately to Chuck. And when later I had my turn with it, skipping the rest, prompted by Chuck, I went right to the steamy chapter. No book, I confess after having read thousands, including everything by Philip Roth, ever thrilled me more. 

Savoring its boldness, I also couldn't help but notice that the novel had been written by a Jew. To this day I think that was one reason Cousin Murray gave us a copy--to demonstrate that even over-pampered and inhibited Jewish mamas' boys could learn to transgress.

Then on another memorable Friday, Murray arrived in a brand new car--a kelly green Plymouth . . . convertible. Transfixed, Chuck and I especially couldn't take out eyes or hands off it.

The next morning Cousin Murray asked if we wanted to join him in taking it out for a spin. Eagerly, nearly trampling each other, we piled in. 

Murray said, "Let's head down the Rip Van Winkle Drive toward Palenville. I read in the News that they're opening a new section of the Thruway. There's a stretch of about ten miles that I think they are allowing people to drive on. Straight as an arrow, let's see how fast we can get this baby to go." Tenderly, he patted the wooden steering wheel.

There was an entrance to the gleaming highway and remarkably we were the only car in sight. "Let's floor it!" Murray said. Which he proceeded to do. I was seated in the passenger seat and watched the speedometer dial quiver as the car leapt ahead.

50, 60, 70 miles an hour. The top was down and the wind ripped through our hair. I had never been in a convertible before and was as exhilarated. We were flying! It felt as if the car was about to take off, lift itself from the road. Literally fly.

80, 90. The entire car began to vibrate violently as we approached 90 mph. I feared it was in danger of coming apart. That the hood and fenders would fly off.

"Let's see if she can make it to 100," Murray shouted as the end of the newly-paved section about a mile north came into view.

The speedometer needle now appeared to be stalled on about 95. "Come on baby," Murray said softly, seductively, and she responded. 

"One hundred!" he shouted and simultaneously began to let up on the gas pedal and feather the breaks so we wouldn't crash into the barrier at the end of the run. My heart was thumping and I thought I was about to pass out from excitement or a heart attack.

When we were safely back on 23A, Cousin Murray said, "Let's stop for a soda. There's a nice place in Saugerties. We can unwind from all the excitement."

There was a roadside ice-cream stand with picnic benches. "Order anything you like," he said. "On me. It's not every day one gets to go 100 on a regular road and not in a race car." His hands too were trembling with excitement. 

All along, Cousin Chuck, who usually bubbled with stories and anecdotes, had been uncharacteristically quiet.

He finally said, as if a non sequitur, "I've always dreamed about becoming a bull fighter."

"A bull fighter?" I shrieked, "You a bull fighter? That's the craziest thing I ever heard."

Murray touched my arm and said, "No, no. Let him talk about this. Life is not only about doing the safe thing. The point about life is to figure out who you are and what you want to do with yourself." 

Chuck nodded, smiling knowingly.

"What about you?" Cousin Murray turned to me, "Who are you and what do you want to do with yourself?"

"I don't know," I said shyly. "No one very asked me that. Not that way."

"Well, the point is not to wait for people to ask you but to figure out what to ask yourself." He looked as me as if giving me sanction to dream about the person I wanted to become.

Four years later Cousin Chuck left his parents and their safe and comfortable Brooklyn life and spent a year in Mexico where he went to bullfighting school.

About me? That's another story for another time. Suffice it to say, that whoever I have become, whatever I am owes a great debt to Cousin Murray who died Monday night, with his sons nearby, a few months past his 95th birthday.

May 24, 2018--Philip Roth

He knew me better than I know myself. 

February 25, 2016--Jose the Fanatic

Of the many startling things about Donald TRUMP's decisive victory in Wednesday's Nevada caucuses, beyond the fact that there was an historic turnout and he garnered more votes that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio combined, was the fact that he also won easily among Latinos.

So much of both parties' campaigns is challenging conventional wisdom--that to win one needs a powerful, big-data-directed ground game (TRUMP has won three of four primaries and caucuses with hardly any ground game at all); that it's all about who can raise the most money (Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz did and look what happened to them--TRUMP raised hardly any, spent even less, and look who's leading); that Americans won't vote for a socialist (Bernie Sanders take note); and Latino voters overwhelmingly vote for Latino candidates (ask Rubio and Cruz about that) the same way blacks tend to vote for blacks, Jews for Jews, and so on.

In Nevada, TRUMP ran away with 45 percent of the Hispanic vote. Note, in 2000, George W. Bush was elected largely as the result of appealing successfully to Latino voters--he got an historic 40 percent nationally.

So TRUMP, who pretty much everyone having access to a microphone said would be lucky to get 10 percent of the Hispanic-American vote considering how he castigated illegal immigrants (mainly, to him, Mexicans) defaming them by labeling them "murderers" and "rapists" and promising that he would deport 12 million, that Donald TRUMP thus far, especially with the Latino-rich voters of Nevada, has run the table. How it might translate to the general election is for the moment another matter.

But his "appeal" to Hispanic voters is worth some thought. Why would any vote for him?

For insight I am reminded of one of my favorite Philip Roth stories--"Eli the Fanatic."

It is also one of his most overlooked, perhaps because of the direct way in which it deals with and excoriates secularized, seemingly-assimilated Jews.

Set in suburban America, it concerns a non-observant Jew, lawyer Eli Peck, who is hired by his Jewish neighbors to convince a recently-arirved group of orthodox Jews to close the yeshiva they established in their midst. The other Jews in town are embarrassed by the visible presence of these Hasids, fearing they will call attention to them and thereby interfere with their desire to blend in among the largely gentile residents of Woodenton.

To make a short story short, Eli fails in his attempts to get the ultra-orthodox to back off, including abandoning their traditional ways of dressing, and, after an epiphany of his own, gives up his normal wardrobe and appears before his stunned and outraged Jewish neighbors in Hasid garb, thereby exposing the ethnic roots of all of them.

Could it be that TRUMP's appeal to a large and growing percentage of Latino voters is because increasing numbers counter-intuitively support his views about illegal immigrants--that many favor building the wall and deporting those here without proper documents?

As in Roth's Woodenton, those Hispanics in the United States for decades and for others in the Southwest for many centuries, from even before Europeans landed at Plymouth Rock, for Latino citizens, for Hispanics who are comfortably "Americanized," having so many other Hispanics here illegally threatens their sense of relatively unobtrusive assimilation.

For Roth's secularized, well-educated, and affluent Jews, having Hasids in their midst, they feared, exposed them to their Christian neighbors who would not distinguish between them and the ultra-orthodox. Seeing them both in the same light and thus out of step with American culture, still rooted in Eastern European beliefs and superstitions, and wanting to live and cling together in self-imposed ghettos.

Perhaps the United States' most successful and assimilated Latinos, who are not self-hating, have some of the same kinds of feelings and support TRUMP as one way of declaring loyalty to the great American immigrant narrative, not wanting their place in society to be confused and conflated with those who came here illegally and live insufficiently in the shadows.

Philip Roth

February 18, 2015--Bibi, the Fanatic

"Eli, the Fanatic," one of Philip Roth's wonderful short stories, is also one of his most overlooked. Perhaps because of the direct way in which it deals with and excoriates secularized, seemingly-assimilated Jews.

Set in suburban America, the story concerns a non-observant Jew, Eli Peck, who is hired by his Jewish neighbors to convince a recently-arirved group of orthodox Jews to close the yeshiva they established in their midst. The other Jews in town are embarrassed by the visible presence of these Hasids, fearing they will call attention to them and thereby interfere with their desire to blend in among the largely gentile residents of Woodenton.

To make a short story short, Eli fails in his attempts to get the ultra-orthodox to back off, including abandoning their traditional way of dressing, and, after an epiphany of his own, gives up his normal wardrobe and appears before his stunned and outraged Jewish neighbors in Hasid garb. The last thing they want is to be identified as Jews. And, thus, they became what some call self-hating Jews.

It is worth reading these days when throughout the Middle East and the West a fierce new religious war has broken out with people being attacked, tortured, enslaved, and killed just for being who they are--the wrong kind of Muslim, Christian, or Jew. It's a from of back to the Middle Ages.

The latest outrages, just over the past few days, are the shootings in Copenhagen, the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians by ISIS in Libya ("We will conquer Rome, by God's permission"), and of course the murder of three Muslin university students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

As evidence that fanaticism is not just confined to ISIS and other Muslim extremists, pay attention to what Benjamin Netanyahu is calling for. As after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, this week following the murders in Denmark, Netanyahu again called for all European Jews, by "mass immigration," to give up their countries and European roots and emigrate to Israel where, he claims without evidence, that they will be safe from religious extremists of all stripes.

He makes no mention of Hezbollah fighters in the north of Israel nor rockets fired into Israel from Gaza. And, of course, the real possibility that Israel, under Netanyahu, will preemptively wage war against Iran.

In Bibi's own words--

Jews have been murdered again on European soil only because they were Jews. Of course, Jews deserve protection in every country, but we say to Jews, to our brothers and sisters: Israel is your home.

This call is hardwired into the consciousness of many Jews who remember the Holocaust when millions of Jews, on European soil, were slaughtered for just the fact of being Jews. Since then, there has been pressure on Jews living in more than 100 countries to "make Aliya," which literally means to "ascend," to "return" to Israel and for Israel to call for the "in-gathering" of Jews living in the Diaspora, in "exile."

This call for Jews to in-gather is about much more than safety. It has deep religious roots.

For the orthodox, to foster conditions that will call forth the Messiah (for Jews, of course, Jesus is not the Messiah) and lead ultimately to the End Times and Last Judgement, all Jews in the Diaspora must return to what messianic Jews refer to as Eretz Israel, the Land of Israel, which to many means Greater Israel.

There is dispute about what is biblically-defined to be that Land, especially Greater Israel. With the latter it is a geopolitically dangerous view of national boundaries, because to those Jews literally right now awaiting the appearance of the Mashiach, Greater Israel stretches from the Nile River in western Sinai all the way to the shores of the Euphrates. In other words, from land belonging to Egypt to territory that is a large part of current-day Iraq. Settling the West Bank is a part of this strategy.

So these are not just eschatological ideas but political ones. And dangerous ones at that.

Thus, the seemingly empathetic, welcoming call by Prime Minister Netanyahu to Jews in so-called exile to emigrate to Israel resonates much more deeply that a simple reminder and offer to descendants of those who died in the Holocaust. It also serves a larger purpose--to have Jews return to ancestral lands and thereby help flesh out the boundaries of Eretz Israel and to contribute to the circumstances that will lead to messianic times.

As an American of Jewish descent I resent and reject these fanatical notions. I am not Philip Roth's Eli.

Though assimilation is never easy--even in polyglot America--I do not consider myself as living in anything resembling a diaspora. Any more than Americans of Italian descent consider themselves living in an Italian diaspora. Israel is not my home. No matter what might happen here (and there have been waves of dangerous anti-Semitism in America) this is my home, my land, my America.

October 15, 2014--Nobels

It is chauvinistic to worry about this year's spectrum of Nobel Prize winners?

For example, remember when Americans thought that though the Japanese economy was booming it was because they were assembling products for us and the rest of the West using our scientific and technological discoveries? That they were good at copying but not inventing?

For example, for decades TVs were manufactured almost exclusively in the U.S. but by the 1960s nearly all came to be manufactured in Japan. But, we were told and believed, the Japanese discovered and invented nothing having to do with television, from transistors (a Bell Lab invention) to the picture tubes themselves (developed by RCA and Western Electric). All the result of American research, ingenuity, and, unspoken, superiority.

So should we be upset that this year, of the 13 awarded, more Nobels were won by Japanese than Americans--three to one?

The three Japanese laureates are physicists who did important work on the development of blue, low-wattage LED light which is already revolutionizing lighting in resource-poor countries worldwide.

Even the Norwegians won more prizes than we--two to neuroscientists who did pioneering work on how the brain computes spacial memory. I imagine, why we don't bump into things. Though I do at night when staggering to the bathroom.

The coveted Peace Prize went to Malala Yousafzai, an inspired and courageous Pakistani advocate for girls' education, and Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian children's rights activist.

There is a Brit (John O'Keefe, physiology) and a Romanian-born German (Stefan Hell, who shared his prize in chemistry with the one American--W.E. Moerner) and then, as if to rub it in, there are two French winners--

In economics, Jean Tirole, whose award continues the Nobel's recent support for work that challenges the Chicago School's free-market orthodoxy. Tirole's work, in contrast, see markets as "imperfect."

So, not only didn't we as usual win an economics prize, but the one that was awarded attacks mainstream economic theory effectively made in America!

Finally, my personal favorite, literature.

The winner this year was Patrick Modiano. His Italian-sounding name not withstanding, he was born and raised in France.

Once again, no Philip Roth. As they say in my old Brooklyn neighborhood--Wait til next year.

July 28, 2014--Booked

I was surprised to read that John Cheever's house is for sale. The Chekhov of the Suburbs' house in the suburbs. But that should not be much of a surprise. He died in 1982 and his widow this past April. Now their writer-daughter Susan, who lives elsewhere, has it on the market. Nothing unusual about that  either except the asking price--the New York Times reports it is listed at only $525,000.

It's in a desirable New York bedroom community, Ossining (better know for being the location of Sing Sing Prison and the leaky Indian Point nuclear power plant) and is the place where Saul Bellow and Philip Roth came for dinner. $525K for all that literary history? Well, it abuts the very busy Route 9A. I suppose location, location, location.

As something of a writer and obsessed as I am by books--those I read, collect, and shelve--I was eager to learn what books were in Cheever's bookcases.

Works by Kierkegaard, Ovid, Chaucer, and The Age of Pericles, the Times reported, but also The Backyard Bird Song Guide and How to Live with a Neurotic Dog.

I was happy to learn about the neurotic dog because I worry a lot about the books on display on my bookshelves. If it were necessary to put my places on the market and the broker were to advise my executor to leave them furnished, I worry about what people will think about my reading habits.

I admit this is an attempt from beyond to influence how people regard me; but in a confessional mode, here's how I'm thinking about the books I have on my shelves in Maine--

I'm an American history buff of sorts. Of sorts because there is more on my shelves by popular historian Doris Kearns Goodwin than by the more substantial and literary Gary Wills, though I did read and am proud to display his Inventing America (about the history of the Declaration of Independence); his meditation on the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln at Gettysburg; and, of course, Nixon Agonistes.

But also shelved in my cottage are more presidential biographies by James MacGregor Burns than by Robert Merry, author of the fullest biography of James Polk, my favorite guilty-pleasure president.

There is a lot by Robert Caro--his thus-far four-volume bio of Lyndon Johnson. These are good to have read and on view because they are both page-turners and definitive. I can leave them where they are--right in the middle of my histories--and will thus probably be thought well of. But I should lower some of the Goodwins, maybe leaving No Ordinary Time where it is because I love it no matter what it reveals about my reading habits.

I also have lots or contemporary novels. Since I was in college, I wanted to be in their published company and I still have my hopes; but in the meantime, I am content to have written three non-fiction books and keep up with 25 or more novelists who are recently departed or still producing noteworthy work.

The relatively-recently-departed or retired (Philip Roth) include Graham Greene (especially his Catholic novels--The End of the Affair, The Power and Glory, and The Heart of the Matter), John Updike (the Rabbit books), Stanley Elkin (The Dick Gibson Show), and Saul Bellow (Augie March).

Among the living are Alice Munro ( The Moons of Jupiter and Dear Life), Alison Lurie (The War Between the Tates and Foreign Affairs), and Richard Russo and Richard Ford, good novelists both who can also be considered Maine writers since they spend part of the year here, Ford typing away right across the bay from us. I like to think I can see him at work if I peer hard enough, and this helps inspire me to keep writing even if I am not making the progress I aspire to.

I have read and display other Maine writers to show that I keep up with the local literary scene, though the highly-charged and hilarious work of Charlotte Chute could sustain closer, more serious consideration--she is much more than a regional writer. I love and shelve prominently The Beans of Egypt, Maine and Letourneau's Used Auto Parts. Adjacent to these brilliant and savage Chutes, in one of my bookcases, are works by other Maine writers, Cathie Pelletier among them, whose Funeral Makers is delightful, perfect for a summer day or a chilly November afternoon, and Elizabeth Strout's Pulitzer Prize winning, Olive Kitteridge though I didn't really like it and can't understand why it was so highly regarded. Must be a guy thing.

But you won't catch me reading (publicly) much less having on view anything by by far Maine's most prolific and successful writer ever--Stephen King.

However, I have still more to confess--

We have a very literate niece; and when she comes for a visit, I want her to think well of me or, if not me, at least my books.

In that spirit, I have placed on a prominent shelf a couple of Lydia Davis books (I know she loves Davis)--Can't and Won't and her Collected Stories. Then, to maintain my big-city bona fides, even when tucked away in rural Maine, I have moved to a central location a couple of books by, another niece favorite, Junot Diaz--Drown and his vibrant (another Pulitzer winner) Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Then for her to see and approve there are a few Dan Chaon's short-story collections, Among the Missing and Stay Awake, all what sensitive 25-year-olds are reading.

Also there is George Saunder's Tenth of December--it's featured in one of my bookcases even though, truthfully, I couldn't get through more than a quarter of it. Too post-modern for me. I am hoping my niece won't want to talk too much about him or it.

Davis, Chaon, Diaz, and (in spite of my opinion) Saunders are real writers who appeal across the ages, assuming people come to know about them, which folks of my age, unless they cling to the illusion of late middle-age youthfulness, are unlikely to do. That's what well-read nieces are for.

I can't aspire to Cheever standards (I couldn't get away with ordering up some Ovid) without making myself seem even more pretentious than I already am. But I was pleased to read that when he bought the Ossining house in 1961, he paid all of $37,000 for it. So maybe $525,000 isn't so disappointing. That represents a decent capital gain.

And perhaps the new owners will put up a marker saying:

John Cheever Lived Here--1961-1982

The Chekhov of the Suburbs

Loved Ovid, Backyard Birds, and Neurotic Dogs

July 24, 2014--Groves of Academe

I came to Francine Prose late in life. I have been aware of her but mainly through her essays and book reviews. After hearing her at the recent PEN conference in New York, I thought it was time to take a look at her novels.

From her other writing, I was anticipating that they might be a bit thick and too politically correct for my taste, but the two I've read thus far are anything but. I am only sad I did not begin reading her sooner, but it is exciting to know that there are about a dozen novels altogether and thus I have many months of pleasurable reading awaiting.

Her A Changed Man is about identity and the possibility of self-transformation, even if one has been a neo-Nazi; while Blue Angel is an acerbic satire set on a backwater New England campus where the frustrations of long-term faculty and the self-involvment of their students erupt into a full-scale witch hunt to root out and punish political incorrectness.

While gobbling up Blue Angel I wondered why so many significant authors have set one of more of their novels on college campuses and why most of them are wicked satires, often descending into sarcasm.

The ones I remember from years ago are Mary McCarthy's Groves of Academe and John William's Stoner. Later, I enjoyed Bernard Malamud's New Life, Philip Roth's Human Stain, and Alison Lurie's The War Between the Tates, also Richard Russo's Straight Man and, among the initiators of the genre, Randall Jarrell's 1954 Pictures from an Institution. Biting jeremiads all.

Most of these authors, and many of the dozens of others who have set novels on campuses (David Lodge, Donna Tartt, Jane Smiley), have taught literature and creative writing and, it would seem, for the most part, had miserable experiences among, what to them must have seemed, insecure, petty hypocritical colleagues. Often in settings where male professors pray on the erotic vulnerability of worshipful, cum vindictive, coeds, usually finding themselves hauled before campus vigilante committees seeking to stamp out all signs of transgressive and sexist (and even, often, by distinction, sexual) behavior.

The typical protagonist is a middle-age tenured professor well aware of his declining powers--physical and creative, saddled with debt, culturally isolated, stuck in an unfulfilling marriage, and almost always estranged from his children, children who nearly always include a 20-something daughter just about the age of the students he seduces or allows to seduce him. These obsessive relationships are often presented in parallax perspective--first from the Humbert-Humbert side or, in other cases, Blue Angel among them, with the relationship also viewed by the Lolita-like seductress.

In virtually all the novels, the transgressor has a hard, life-altering fall that is both deserved and, to the transgressor, welcomed since, no matter the public disgrace--often because of it--it is liberating. He shakes off or abandons the comforts that have defined and confined him and this allows him to remake his life, no matter how mean it may seem. In some instances the meaner the better as there is a strong element of expiation required, a fierce price to pay for this liberation.

Again, thinking about why so many meaningful novels are set on college campuses, beyond the obvious--from experiences with which novelists are intimately familiar--they are metaphor-rich environments in which youth and age coexist and clash, where decline is starkly measurable, where things are widely sexualized, where cultural collisions play out naturally and often viscously, and where human nature across its full range is on full flagrant display.

Thus these places are perfect venues to find things to satirize and titilate. All of which writers are incapable of resisting.