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The Illusionist
By D.T. MAX
DANGEROUS LAUGHTER
Thirteen Stories.
By Steven Millhauser.
244 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.
Steven Millhauser doesn’t traffic in emotional upheaval or interpersonal conflict. Most fiction writers try to make characters seem like real people, but Millhauser flattens them, giving his books the paradoxical effect of seeming realer than reality. For him, meticulous observation does the work of psychology. Millhauser is also our foremost animist: in his stories, mannequins walk out of department store windows and figures in paintings knock hats off innocent bystanders. His vehicles for these effects are the parable and the confession. There is a disquieting quiet to every Millhauser sentence that makes it immediately recognizable, a feeling that each was recorded for posterity by the last man living.
The 13 terrific stories in “Dangerous Laughter” reintroduce us to this strange realm, last glimpsed five years ago in Millhauser’s previous collection, “The King in the Tree.” After one story described as an “Opening Cartoon,” he divides the rest into three sections: “Vanishing Acts,” “Impossible Architectures” and “Heretical Histories.” (You can recombine the adjectives and nouns at will.) Together, they present the typical Millhauser gallery of obsessed miniaturists, bookish adolescent boys in thrall to mysterious evanescent girls and reports from a dystopian near-future told with ill-considered confidence by town leaders. But over the years Millhauser’s elegant midcentury prose has only gotten stronger, and here he moves his chosen themes forward with additional confidence and power.
In the section called “Vanishing Acts,” Millhauser presents people who in one way or another cease to be. The book’s title story features an ordinary high school girl whose talent for orgasmic laughter allows her to enjoy a surge in popularity when a hilarity epidemic sweeps through a town’s teenage crowd one summer — only to result in her death after her classmates drop her to take up communal weeping.
The adolescent narrator of “The Room in the Attic” befriends Wolf, a hip new classmate whose sister is beset by an unspecified illness that has kept her out of school. These two, Isabel and Dave, conduct a relationship for months in her darkened room, knowing each other entirely by voice and occasional touches. Dave grows quietly obsessed, but at the climactic moment, when Isabel is about to throw open the curtains, he flees. When he comes back, a few days later, she’s gone — sent, according to her mother, to live with an aunt in Maine. “She loved games, all sorts of games,” Dave realizes early on. Now he begins to wonder whether Isabel wasn’t his own game, more dream than reality.
The slippery self is also the theme of “The Disappearance of Elaine Coleman,” in which an ordinary woman returns to her rented apartment one evening but never emerges. The police investigate and find no sign of a crime — and no sign of Elaine Coleman. The door was locked, the windows shut, the key left inside, along with the woman’s wallet. “Is it true that whatever has once been seen is in the mind forever?” the narrator asks, only to recognize that this is not so. Elaine Coleman, he concludes, unloved, gradually disappeared, “fading, fixed ... in the long habit of not being noticed.”
The section called “Heretical Histories” contains a set of alternate recent pasts. Harlan Crane, the subject of “A Precursor of the Cinema,” is a “minor illustrator” in New York during the “seductive prehistory” of the film industry, when “a host of brilliant toys, spectacles and entertainments ... produced vivid and startling illusions of motion.” Crane’s paintings, displayed at his Phantoptic Theater, are so lifelike that many observers insist they can see them move. The illusion (perhaps “a shared hallucination,” the newspapers speculate) leads to riots and the death of a spectator. The city closes the Phantoptic before this potentially remarkable bridge to the inanimate world can be confirmed.
Thomas Edison dominates “The Wizard of West Orange,” working on an invention called the Haptograph, a machine that, once perfected, will give its users the illusion of having been touched. But at the last minute a more remunerative pursuit — an ore separator — captures Edison’s interest. The “microscope of touch” is shelved and with it the potential for “new shapes, new touches: a world concealed,” a device, the agitated narrator believes, that would have made the phonograph seem like “nothing but a clever toy.”
In the remarkable “Here at the Historical Society,” an unnamed narrator defends his small-town society’s decision to supplement its exhibits — the typical old muskets and “hand-carved flint arrowheads” of the “Setaucus Indians” — with the ephemera of what he calls the “New Past,” “samples of every stop sign, fire hydrant and telephone pole in our town ... every Monopoly piece and badminton racket.” There are, he brags, “assistants who count the needles of every fir tree and the specks of mica in every roof shingle.” The narrator argues that “the sun glinting on a piece of cellophane lying in a patch of roadside weeds speaks more eloquently than the history of Rome” and concludes that the present — here he offers the passkey to Millhauser’s fictional universe — is “the only past we’ll ever know.”
Stories of near-future societies in thrall to technological progress are brought together under the heading of “Impossible Architectures.” In “The Dome,” a few individuals, then whole towns and finally a nation are covered with progressively larger domes, first manufactured out of Viviglas, then Splendimax and finally the supernal Celestilux. The community at the center of “The Other Town” draws its sense of reality from an identical adjoining town in which its every detail, down to the Langleys’ yard with its “red-handled jump rope,” has been recreated, with changes updated nearly in real time by “master replicators.” And the city in “The Tower” lives in the shadow of an ever-growing edifice, an embodiment of its ambition to free itself from mortality and physicality that, in the final moments of the story, comes crashing down.
This last story has overtones of both the Bible and, of course, 9/11. “The Other Town” seems a comment on our TV-dominated lives, and “The Dome,” with its assertion that “under the regime of the Dome, the country has become not a mall but an immense hall of entertainment,” makes one suspect that Millhauser’s real subject is contemporary America. But in his postmodern world, meanings are never unpacked. These are fables, not allegories, and their hermetic quality discourages us from wandering outside the text. It is for this reason that Millhauser seems less a descendant of Jorge Luis Borges, to whom he is sometimes compared, than of, say, Shirley Jackson or even “The Twilight Zone.” These stories are offered for your consideration, nothing more.
Millhauser began his unusual voyage in 1972 with the parody biography “Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954,” supposedly written by Mullhouse’s precocious contemporary Jeffrey Cartwright. All the themes Millhauser would work in later years can be found in that first book: the unstable self, the knife’s-edge difference between reality and dreams, the power of hysterical young people. The way Millhauser conveyed a suburban world where the quiet slippage of the self was a greater threat than violence hardly fit that era. His characters didn’t turn on or tune in. They lived under the indifferent Connecticut sky, moored to reality by their thoughts and their books. Since then, although the heightened visual awareness that has always been his trademark has grown even more extraordinary and its possessor has achieved some fame, little has changed for Millhauser. Not so for us: more than 30 years later, with lived life everywhere giving way to the Internet and “reality” TV, Millhauser’s chronicles of our semi-inhabited landscape seem not just brilliant but prescient.
D. T. Max is the author of “The Family That Couldn’t Sleep: A Medical Mystery.”
Monday, March 3, 2008
The Illusionist, DANGEROUS LAUGHTER Review by By D.T. MAX
Dreams and Shadows, By ROBIN WRIGHT
DREAMS AND SHADOWS
The Future of the Middle East.
By Robin Wright.
464 pp. The Penguin Press. $26.95.
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The End of Jihad
Reviewed by PATRICK COCKBURN
When the United States invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003 it destabilized the whole Middle East. The American military had taken over the one Arab state with plenty of oil and a large population. Washington threatened to overthrow the governments of Iran and Syria. The first Shiite government to hold power in the Arab world in 800 years was soon installed in Baghdad. The entire region was engulfed by a tidal wave of anti-Americanism.
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Egyptian riot police closed off voting stations in districts contested by the Muslim Brotherhood in elections in November 2005.
The reaction to the invasion in the wider Middle East should have led to a greater focus on what Egyptians, Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese and Iranians were thinking. Long established autocratic regimes were discredited, less by any shining example of democracy being established in Baghdad than by their own inability to cope with the crisis. “Arab Majesties, Excellencies and Highnesses, We Spit on You” read a banner carried by protesters during a demonstration in Cairo in 2006.
Though the Middle East may be shaking under the impact of the war in Iraq, most countries have been getting less rather than more attention from Western news media and governments. Almost all the focus has been on Iraq. Newspapers and television companies strained their budgets to maintain large bureaus in Baghdad. Extraordinary events, like the victory of Hamas over Fatah in the Palestinian elections of 2006, were dutifully covered, but were overshadowed by America’s ever deeper troubles in Iraq. Countries like Egypt and Morocco largely disappeared off the media map.
It is one of the chief values of “Dreams and Shadows,” Robin Wright’s fluent and intelligent book about the future of the Middle East, that it is not solely concerned with the war in Iraq and its consequences. In describing the struggles of people from Morocco to Iran to reform or replace existing regimes she draws on three decades of experience in covering the region for The Washington Post and other newspapers.
Opening on an optimistic note, Wright describes how in 1983 she stood across the street from the ruins of the United States Embassy in Beirut after more than 60 Americans had been killed by a suicide bomber. At that time, she recalls, it seemed that Islamic fundamentalists had the initiative and were shaping the future of the region. “Yet a generation later,” she writes, “Islamic extremism is no longer the most important, interesting or dynamic force in the Middle East.”
It would be good if this were true, but in general the stories Wright relates of brave reformers battling for human and civil rights show them as having had depressingly small influence. She claims there is “a budding culture of change” represented by “defiant judges in Cairo, rebel clerics in Tehran, satellite television station owners in Dubai, imaginative feminists in Rabat and the first female candidates in Kuwait, young techies in Jeddah, daring journalists in Beirut and Casablanca, and brave writers and businessmen in Damascus.” Sadly, her own research largely contradicts this thesis. Of the many opponents of the status quo she writes about, the only ones to have achieved a measure of success are religious movements: Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank and Hezbollah in Lebanon. She does not cover Pakistan, but the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Rawalpindi in December shows that suicide bombers retain their deadly ability to shape events.
Why have moderate reformers failed so uniformly across the Middle East? Not because of lack of courage. Wright describes how in Syria, Riad al Turk, first arrested for opposing a military government in 1952, spent almost 18 years in solitary confinement in an underground cell the length of his body. He kept himself sane by making pictures on the floor out of thousands of hard and inedible grains he had taken out of the prison soup during his years of confinement. Wright also writes of heroes and heroines in a more minor, but still impressive, key, like Noha al Zeiny, a leading official in the prosecutor’s office of the Egyptian Ministry of Justice, who was so disgusted by blatant official ballot rigging in an election she was supervising that she publicly denounced it in one of the few Cairo newspapers that dared to print her testimony.
Autocratic regimes in the Middle East may be sclerotic, corrupt and detested by their own people, but they are very difficult to remove. Governments in Egypt, Syria and Libya that came to power by military coups in the distant past have learned how to protect themselves against their own armies and security forces. In each of those countries the Mubarak, Assad and Qaddafi families are establishing new political dynasties. President Hosni Mubarak, jokingly known to Egyptians as the last pharaoh, has, according to Wright, now held power longer than all but two other leaders in Egypt’s 6,000-year history, and is grooming his son Gamal to replace him. Political reforms have been purely cosmetic. Osama Harb, the editor of a moderate foreign policy journal, International Affairs, denounced Egypt’s supposed reform efforts as a sham but found he could not withdraw from the government’s inner circle without endangering himself. “It should be easy to resign, to say no,” he observed. “But not here. This is Egypt.”
Just one long-established regime in the Arab world has been kicked out by voters in a closely monitored election. It happened on Jan. 25, 2006, when Hamas won a victory over Fatah, Yasir Arafat’s very corrupt nationalist movement. It was the first time, Wright says, that an Arab electorate ousted an autocratic leadership in a free and fair election — a message that resonated throughout the region. The immediate response of the international community was to boycott Hamas. “The United States is like the prince in search of Cinderella,” the Hamas leader Osama Hamdan told Wright. “The Americans have the shoe, and they want to find the kind of people who fit the shoe. If the people who are elected don’t fit into the American shoe, then the Americans will reject them for democracy.” Fatah was encouraged by the United States, Israel and the Western Europeans to ignore the results of the election and build up its military strength. An armed clash became inevitable, leading to the takeover of Gaza by Hamas gunmen in June 2007.
Wright has long been one of the best-informed American journalists covering the Middle East, and her reputation is borne out here. She is refreshingly skeptical of conventional wisdom about what is happening in the region, and her book will be essential reading for anybody who wants to know where it is heading.
She is particularly good on the moribund nature of the regimes that now hold power and know they are too unpopular to allow any open expression of popular will (though some innovations, like satellite television and the Internet, have prized open their control of information). Both the Algerian election in 1992 and the Palestinian poll in 2006 showed that the West will not accept an election won by its enemies. But since the invasion of Iraq it is difficult to imagine a fair poll having any other result.
The Shock Doctrine, Review by Joseph Stiglitz
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Bleakonomics, by Joseph E. Stiglitz
There are no accidents in the world as seen by Naomi Klein. The destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina expelled many poor black residents and allowed most of the city’s public schools to be replaced by privately run charter schools. The torture and killings under Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile and during Argentina’s military dictatorship were a way of breaking down resistance to the free market. The instability in Poland and Russia after the collapse of Communism and in Bolivia after the hyperinflation of the 1980s allowed the governments there to foist unpopular economic “shock therapy” on a resistant population. And then there is “Washington’s game plan for Iraq”: “Shock and terrorize the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, then make it all O.K. with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food,” not to mention a strong stock market and private sector.
“The Shock Doctrine” is Klein’s ambitious look at the economic history of the last 50 years and the rise of free-market fundamentalism around the world. “Disaster capitalism,” as she calls it, is a violent system that sometimes requires terror to do its job. Like Pol Pot proclaiming that Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge was in Year Zero, extreme capitalism loves a blank slate, often finding its opening after crises or “shocks.” For example, Klein argues, the Asian crisis of 1997 paved the way for the International Monetary Fund to establish programs in the region and for a sell-off of many state-owned enterprises to Western banks and multinationals. The 2004 tsunami enabled the government of Sri Lanka to force the fishermen off beachfront property so it could be sold to hotel developers. The destruction of 9/11 allowed George W. Bush to launch a war aimed at producing a free-market Iraq.
In an early chapter, Klein compares radical capitalist economic policy to shock therapy administered by psychiatrists. She interviews Gail Kastner, a victim of covert C.I.A. experiments in interrogation techniques that were carried out by the scientist Ewen Cameron in the 1950s. His idea was to use electroshock therapy to break down patients. Once “complete depatterning” had been achieved, the patients could be reprogrammed. But after breaking down his “patients,” Cameron was never able to build them back up again. The connection with a rogue C.I.A. scientist is overdramatic and unconvincing, but for Klein the larger lessons are clear: “Countries are shocked — by wars, terror attacks, coups d’état and natural disasters.” Then “they are shocked again — by corporations and politicians who exploit the fear and disorientation of this first shock to push through economic shock therapy.” People who “dare to resist” are shocked for a third time, “by police, soldiers and prison interrogators.”
In another introductory chapter, Klein offers an account of Milton Friedman — she calls him “the other doctor shock” — and his battle for the hearts and minds of Latin American economists and economies. In the 1950s, as Cameron was conducting his experiments, the Chicago School was developing the ideas that would eclipse the theories of Raul Prebisch, an advocate of what today would be called the third way, and of other economists fashionable in Latin America at the time. She quotes the Chilean economist Orlando Letelier on the “inner harmony” between the terror of the Pinochet regime and its free-market policies. Letelier said that Milton Friedman shared responsibility for the regime’s crimes, rejecting his argument that he was only offering “technical” advice. Letelier was killed in 1976 by a car bomb planted in Washington by Pinochet’s secret police. For Klein, he was another victim of the “Chicago Boys” who wanted to impose free-market capitalism on the region. “In the Southern Cone, where contemporary capitalism was born, the ‘war on terror’ was a war against all obstacles to the new order,” she writes.
One of the world’s most famous antiglobalization activists and the author of the best seller “No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies,” Klein provides a rich description of the political machinations required to force unsavory economic policies on resisting countries, and of the human toll. She paints a disturbing portrait of hubris, not only on the part of Friedman but also of those who adopted his doctrines, sometimes to pursue more corporatist objectives. It is striking to be reminded how many of the people involved in the Iraq war were involved earlier in other shameful episodes in United States foreign policy history. She draws a clear line from the torture in Latin America in the 1970s to that at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.
Klein is not an academic and cannot be judged as one. There are many places in her book where she oversimplifies. But Friedman and the other shock therapists were also guilty of oversimplification, basing their belief in the perfection of market economies on models that assumed perfect information, perfect competition, perfect risk markets. Indeed, the case against these policies is even stronger than the one Klein makes. They were never based on solid empirical and theoretical foundations, and even as many of these policies were being pushed, academic economists were explaining the limitations of markets — for instance, whenever information is imperfect, which is to say always.
Klein isn’t an economist but a journalist, and she travels the world to find out firsthand what really happened on the ground during the privatization of Iraq, the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, the continuing Polish transition to capitalism and the years after the African National Congress took power in South Africa, when it failed to pursue the redistributionist policies enshrined in the Freedom Charter, its statement of core principles. These chapters are the least exciting parts of the book, but they are also the most convincing. In the case of South Africa, she interviews activists and others, only to find there is no one answer. Busy trying to stave off civil war in the early years after the end of apartheid, the A.N.C. didn’t fully understand how important economic policy was. Afraid of scaring off foreign investors, it took the advice of the I.M.F. and the World Bank and instituted a policy of privatization, spending cutbacks, labor flexibility and so on. This didn’t stop two of South Africa’s own major companies, South African Breweries and Anglo-American, from relocating their global headquarters to London. The average growth rate has been a disappointing 5 percent (much lower than in countries in East Asia, which followed a different route); unemployment for the black majority is 48 percent; and the number of people living on less than $1 a day has doubled to four million from two million since 1994, the year the A.N.C. took over.
Some readers may see Klein’s findings as evidence of a giant conspiracy, a conclusion she explicitly disavows. It’s not the conspiracies that wreck the world but the series of wrong turns, failed policies, and little and big unfairnesses that add up. Still, those decisions are guided by larger mind-sets. Market fundamentalists never really appreciated the institutions required to make an economy function well, let alone the broader social fabric that civilizations require to prosper and flourish. Klein ends on a hopeful note, describing nongovernmental organizations and activists around the world who are trying to make a difference. After 500 pages of “The Shock Doctrine,” it’s clear they have their work cut out for them.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, a university professor at Columbia, was awarded the Nobel in economic science in 2001. His latest book is “Making Globalization Work.”
New York Times, September 30, 2007
Other Reviews
A Review of The Shock Doctrine: The Face of Fascism in a Global System Heading for Collapse by Juan Santos, The Fourth World, December 30, 2007
Milton's Wet Dream
Suzi Steffen, Eugene Weekly, December 13, 2007
Best of 2007
Lenora Todaro, Village Voice, December 5, 2007
Caution, 'Disaster Capitalism' at Work
Katharine Dunn, The Oregonian, December 2, 2007
Doing Well by Doing Ill
Shashi Tharoor, Washington Post, November 25, 2007
Body Shock: A 40th Anniversary Conversation with Naomi Klein
Greg Grandin, NACLA, November/December 2007
Ms. Magazine Review: The Shock Doctrine
Ronnie Steinberg, Ms Magazine, Fall 2007
The New Road to Serfdom
Christopher Hayes, In These Times, November 9, 2007
War, Terror, Catastrophe: Profiting From 'Disaster Capitalism'
Paul B. Farrell, Dow Jones Business News, October 16, 2007
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