Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine

Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine

Gail Honeyman (2017; Penguin, 2018)

      I was raised with this lesson in perspective, presented as a model of the three persons of the nominative case: “She is neurotic; You are tetchy; I am perfectly all right, thank you very much.” That’s what I expected from the title, and this novel delivers. Eleanor Oliphant (Ms.), is judgmental and persnickety, and a thoroughly unreliable narrator. This can mainly be blamed on her mother, who was pretty damned unreliable herself, but also a fount of snobbish views and advice.

     The effect is comic, on the whole, especially when the contradiction pays off immediately. Eleanor is obviously the weirdest person in her office, but that fact is not part of her world view. “Their laughter seemed to have turned into low whispering now. It never ceases to amaze me, the things they find interesting, amusing or unusual. I can only assume they’ve led very sheltered lives.” Well, that’s as may be, but it’s pretty rich coming from someone who has never had a guest in her flat, or gone out to a pub with a friend.

     The story unfolds very deliberately, so I’m wary of spoilers, but there are some dark flashes right from the start. Her employment history, for instance: “Bob, the owner, took me on not long after the office opened. I suppose he felt sorry for me. I had a degree in Classics and no work experience to speak of, and I turned up for the interview with a black eye, a couple of missing teeth and a broken arm.” Wait, what? That’s a different kind of rom com.

      Yet Eleanor is having something of a revitalization moment, a handsome local singer having caught her eye. She goes so far as to buy a home computer in order to cyber-stalk him. She’s not really focusing on how unlikely it is that such a one will choose a twenty-nine-year-old spinster with ancient scars on her face, even supposing she can arrange a chance meeting. It’s also rather unlikely that he is as charming as he is handsome, though time will tell.

     Meanwhile, Raymond, the new IT guy at work, has gotten Eleanor involved with a stranger, a man they called an ambulance for when he collapsed in the street. Raymond has the helpful instincts, and the cell phone, that she lacks; somehow he coaches her through hospital visits, and the social overtures the man’s family makes. She’s still muttering to herself about his wearing trainers all the time, and his casual texting habits, but she really needs a friend, and she accidentally finds a great one.

      Eleanor Oliphant, for all her quirks, is a sympathetic character. I think we can relate to her suspicion of the unknown, and her pleasure at softening to it. She has a friend in Raymond partly because he’s good at friendship, but also because she’s so peculiarly herself. Really, it gives me hope.

 

 

 

 

Any Good Books, August 2025

 

The Shakespeare Wars

 

Any Good Books, July 2025

The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascos, Palace Coups

Ron Rosenbaum (2006, Random House Paperback 2008)

        In 1970, Ron Rosenbaum was a young journalist, somewhat by accident. He had intended to get a graduate degree in English Literature from Yale, but was put off by the prevailing academic preference for abstraction, to the point of meaninglessness. He didn’t know much about Shakespeare, or have a theory about how it should be played, but he chanced to visit Stratford on Avon, and see the Peter Brook staging of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I count it one of the greatest blessings of [my] life to have been there for that moment. I’d never experienced anything of such radiant clarity. To say it was ‘electrifying’ does not capture the effect; it was more like being struck by lightning.”

     William Shakespeare stands head and shoulders above the rest of English literature in the sheer amount that has been written about him and his work, especially in comparison to how little is actually known. (The Bible surpasses him, no doubt, but I can’t think of anything else.) We don’t know, and probably can’t, which edition comes closest to what he actually wrote. We have the canonical first Folio, published in 1623, when Shakespeare had been dead for seven years. There are also two Quarto versions, of which the second, from 1604, is considered the ‘good’ one. In the case of Hamlet, “while the Good Quarto has some 3,700 lines, the Bad Quarto has just 2,200 lines, many of them sounding like bad imitations of Shakespeare.”

     By what evidence, on what grounds, would you decide which Hamlet was the ‘real Hamlet’, the most genuinely Shakespearean? Is the flesh in Hamlet’s soliloquy “too, too ‘sullied’, or ‘solid’?” Or perhaps ‘sallied’? That’s a relatively well-known example, but they go on and on, and choices must be made. The number of man-years devoted to comparative editions is staggering, whether they are printed on facing pages, or enfolded, so that you can choose your own edition as you tiptoe through the variants. In case this isn’t complicated enough, the late-20th century Everyman edition undoes the prevailing modernization of spelling, uncovering more gems in the process.

     All this, before you ever get to what is seen on the stage, or, for that matter, the screen. “Drop everything, race to your video store and pick up a VHS or a DVD of Olivier’s Richard III.” (I shouldn’t joke about that – it’s not his fault I’m reading the book fifteen years late.) What you lose in reducing a play to the small screen, you gain in the closeups, and in the chance to see some of the greats doing great work.

     He’s persuaded by the movement to go back to treating the five-foot iambic line as the essential unit, and pausing between them, always; of course this only works if the pause is treated as the jumping off point for the next line, as though the actor is figuring out what to say next. One thing’s certain: if the actors don’t really understand what they’re saying, the audience won’t either.

     Rosenbaum treats all this as much more than a reporting job; I like a book in which the author is so soaked in his material. I could wish he’d had a more aggressive copy editor, and occasionally I got to his point before he did; no matter, they were generally interesting points in the end. I’m sure I’ll remember this book the next time Olivier’s Richard III gets to Turner Classic Movies.

Recitatif

Recitatif: A Story

Toni Morrison (1983. Knopf edition, with a forward by Zadie Smith, 2022.)

Toni Morrison’s only short story is the story of two girls, misplaced in an orphanage when they are eight years old. “We didn’t like each other all that much at first, but nobody else wanted to play with us because we weren’t real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky. We were dumped.” Roberta’s mother is sick, and our narrator Twyla’s mother dances all night. So they’re put in a room together, and St. Bonny’s generally ignores them, with a little light bullying thrown in.

They are also outsiders because one is white and one is black. Morrison is deliberate about not saying which is which. She can reasonably assume that an American reader will immediately start looking for clues. (Zadie Smith’s introduction cites a study which shows that we all expect Twyla to be of our own race, at least at first.) This aspect of the story tends to become an abyss: the more we look into it, the more it looks back.

Morrison knows very well where the signifiers lie. She’s artful about their hair, their clothing, their taste in food. Which child is more likely illiterate? Which one gets excited about pink scallops on her Easter socks? What will happen when the sick mother and the dancing mother both come for Easter? Roberta’s mother brings a big lunch, and Twyla’s can’t manage it–is either of those situations racially marked?

The St. Bonny’s sojourn is just about four months for each of them, but they will meet again. When they’re about twenty, Twyla is a waitress at a Howard Johnson on the New York Thruway, and Roberta is on her way to see Hendrix. That’s too big a chasm to cross, but a dozen years later, their next meeting will lead to commiseration over coffee.

Roberta recognizes Twyla this time, in a grocery store in Newburgh. Roberta has married a rich man, while Twyla’s married to a fireman. Now they’ve come far enough to remember being dumped together in a safely distant way: “Maybe it was the thing itself. Just being there, together. Two little girls who knew what nobody else in the world knew–how not to ask questions. How to believe what had to be believed.” Does this make them friends? I think that’s another open question. Could it? Should it?

 

Email, Any Good Books, June 2025

 

Ricordo’s Dream

 

Ricordo’s Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray

Nat Dyer (2025, Bristol University Press)

      In my second year of college, I spent considerable time in the company of economics students. One day I asked one of them to give me the ten-minute version of the introductory course. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Day one, Markets. Assume perfect information, and perfectly rational actors.’ ‘Okay,’ said I, ‘does it make any difference that neither of those things exists in real life?’ ‘Not really,’ he said, ‘we're just modeling.’ As it turns out, I was right to be suspicious. An awful lot of academic and professional economics rests on premises as illusory as those, and it makes a difference.

       In 1817, David Ricardo published a seminal work of economic theory, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. Only Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, from forty years earlier, held anything like its influence on the next several decades of economic thinking. For thirty years, Ricardo had been a brilliant stock broker on London's exchange, before retiring to theorize in rural comfort. His friends included thinkers like Thomas Malthus and James Mill, whose son, John Stuart Mill, would build on Ricardo's work.

       The first four chapters of Ricardo's Dream delve into a famous theory of his, still cited today. In essays about international trade, he put forward the idea of 'comparative advantage', on a simplified model of two countries (England and Portugal) and two commodities (wine and cloth.) Using hypothetical man-hour numbers and some algebraic sleight of hand, Ricardo proved (so to speak) that England should produce cloth and ship it to Portugal. The Portuguese, in turn, should concentrate on wine-making, notwithstanding that they could likely produce their own cloth more cheaply. The example was salient because of the Methuen Treaty of 1703, which had formalized just such a relationship, so that England began consuming port instead of French wine, and the mills of northern England found a reliable market in Portugal.

      There’s quite an interesting story behind that story. First, the numbers in the equation were completely invented by Ricardo, as he freely admitted. Second, using man-hours only, without reference to wages or other costs of production, very likely introduced other errors; imagine a model that used miles per gallon as the sole factor in the cost of car ownership. Third, it’s a bad example of free trade in the global economy, because Portugal was not actually on an equal footing with England, for military and political reasons having to do with England’s long-running contest with France.

       Fourth, to consider only those two nations is to miss a major piece of the story: what were the Portuguese doing with all that cloth? They were trading it on the west coast of Africa for slaves, who were sent to Brazil to work in gold mines. The gold they produced made its way to England, to make up the trade balance between wine and cloth, amounting to many millions of pounds over the eighteenth century. All this is omitted from Ricardo’s deft little straw-man equation.

      Economics did become a more practical affair between the mid-nineteenth century and the Second World War. The middle chapters of the book name a few economists who were not averse to building theories on actual evidence; sometimes they even included the role of the government in business and economic life.

       Regrettably, I think, the past fifty years have seen a pronounced swing in the other direction, toward mathematical models that have taken on a life of their own. In particular, modern financial markets operate on the assumption that “market prices reflect instantly all available present and future information about the assets traded, allowing calculating traders to allocate money to the best and most efficient purposes. The only genuinely new information is that which cannot be predicted and is, therefore, by definition random, leading to limited price fluctuations.” Wouldn’t that be a nice safe world? It’s just not the one we live in, as nineteen-year-old me suspected.

        There’s an awful lot of dumb economic news these days. I found this book an entertaining way to get some perspective on it, even when it’s alarming to think about. If all we do–if all we can do–is extrapolate from what has come before, our predictive powers will never be that great.

 

 

Any Good Books, April/May 2025

 

Jackson, 1964

Jackson, 1964: And Other Dispatches from Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America

Calvin Trillin (Random House, 2016)

        Calvin Trillin spent his late twenties on the ‘seg beat’; first for Time’s Atlanta Bureau in 1960-61, then for the New Yorker, “in the days when race and the South were thought of as basically the same story by national magazines.” He covered sit-in movements, school desegregation in all sorts of places, voting drives and Freedom Rides. This collection of his New Yorker pieces brings them back as he originally wrote them, give or take a few redundancies.

       The South, of course, is not the only place with racial tensions: he also reports from Seattle, Newark, and Oshkosh. In New Orleans, there’s the black Mardi Gras parade, featuring King Zulu in a grass skirt, black-and-white face, and coconuts, though perhaps fewer stops at taverns than had one been the norm. Whether this is tradition, parody, good clean fun, or heinous racism, seems to be in the eye of the beholder.

       New Orleans is of particular interest because it has so many gradations of race. A piece from 1986 goes into the story of a woman who discovered that her birth certificate listed both of her parents as ‘colored.’ It’s not the sort of error, if such it was, that the responsible bureaucrat was willing to remedy with the stroke of a pen. Jack Westholz represented the vital records office, where “it was taken for granted that certain families had a traceable amount of black blood, and that it was up to the vital-records office to tell them apart. When it came to tracing traceable amounts, nobody ever accused the vital-records office of bureaucratic lethargy.” This is characteristically dry Trillin prose: the strain of the ridiculous is allowed to speak for itself. The matter didn’t make it to the United States Supreme Court, but not for lack of trying.

      When it comes to weird racial math, Boston holds up its end. The parking garage for the John Hancock tower had an awkwardly large restaurant space on its ground floor, which in 1976 was a discotheque known as Whimsey’s. Black people were not exactly barred from going to Whimsey’s, but they sometimes had trouble getting in – does anyone actually have three photo IDs? (When someone actually showed up with three, the bemused doorman let her in.) The Boston Licensing Board heard from enough unrelated complainants to suspend Whimsey’s license for a few days, which surely made absolutely no difference in the grand scheme of Boston’s racial troubles in the nineteen seventies.

      The title essay goes deep into the Mississippi Summer Project, as it’s coordinated by the Council of Federated Organizations. “As it happens, COFO is, for all practical purposes, a project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ...so the style-setters are the staff members of SNCC, which may once have been a coat-and-tie organization but is no longer.” By 1964, it’s an overalls-and-blue-workshirts organization, befitting its efforts in the poorest, most rural parts of the state; this also reflects the fact that coats and ties are not good for sleeping on the floor, when needs must. Trillin is following James Forman, the executive secretary of SNCC, and Robert Moses, who directs the Summer Project; they’re working on literacy education and voter registration, but somehow, much more than that. Moses says, “People say, ‘Why are you doing this? or ‘Why are you starting with this aspect? or ‘Where can this approach ever get you?’And we say, ‘What else would you have us do?’”

      From the state side, public school desegregation is seen as inevitable, “and about all that the last session of the legislature could think of to do about it was to provide tuition grants for those who wanted to attend private segregated schools.” How’s that! for an offhand remark with a very long tail. In 1995, he wrote about the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission’s trove of records, and the lawsuits trying to open them up. The lawsuits themselves pried loose some colorful secrets: “It is now known, for instance, that an early black applicant to the University of Southern Mississippi who was convicted of several crimes and thrown into prison was framed; an alternative plan was to murder him.”

      Calvin Trillin has produced many light-hearted books on eating, presidential foibles, and his late beloved wife, Alice. I would happily read him writing the phone book, so to speak; but on a subject so subtle and so complex, so tragic and so nonsensical, as race in America, his powers are at their best. 

 

Any Good Books, March 2025 by email