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

 

Pappyland

 

Any Good Books, February 2025

Pappyland: a Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

Wright Thompson (2020, Penguin Press)

 

         If you’re going to write a book about Kentucky, you might as well start at Churchill Downs, preferably during Derby Week, a quintessentially American meetingplace of genteel tradition and upstart gaucherie. “This new-money Derby attracts people who seem desperate for the lifestyle. The Day-trippers wear gangster suits and outlandish patterns and hats inappropriate to the latitude, temperature, or setting. It’s amateur hour. They hold their liquor like ninth graders.” (Ouch!) Behind the Derby where folks go to see and be seen, to gamble and drink, lie rivers of money, most of it new; and deep streams of knowledge about horses and their generations. Bringing in a Derby winner takes art, science, and very good luck.

 

         But Wright Thompson was there to write about bourbon, the other great heritage of old Kentucky. He was meeting up with one Julian P. Van Winkle III, a third-generation purveyor of fine bourbon; this is a generational story about both of them. 

 

         Whiskey’s been around since before Kentucky was a state. “Without modern supply chains, and because they were living on the edge of civilization, the farmers still couldn’t monetize all of their crop before it rotted…Soon whiskey was traded as a currency, avoiding government notes and any taxes associated with them, which is why the IRS has long been obsessed with chasing down moonshiners and bootleggers. To Kentuckians, that is a federal war on working rural families, no matter what it’s called in Washington. That’s corn and wheat, not rye.”

 

              The face of the original Julian Van Winkle appears on bottles of very fine bourbon. Pappy Van Winkle was a pioneer of the business, in a couple of ways: he was on the spot at the close of Prohibition to start producing whiskey as quickly as possible; and he was one of the first producers to use locally grown wheat. (Most bourbon, then as now, contains some rye, which is grown in the cooler climes of Pennsylvania and New York; as long as the mash bill –“the list of grains that get combined to create the mash that is the foundation for whiskey”–is more than fifty percent corn, it’s still bourbon.) 

 

             The result, in Pappy’s case, was legendary, but the next generation hit hard times for the bourbon business. The 1960’s, when the second generation took over, saw vodka and other spirits become dominant. In 1972, the family’s brands wound up being sold to a larger business, and so fell prey to a very common kind of short-term thinking. They didn’t know what they had. But whiskey, like race horses, is not a short-term business. It’s a long-term investment from fermentation, to distillation, to aging and bottling. And it’s never a sure thing.

 

             Julian III is on a mission to make bourbon as good as his grandfather’s, and he’s one of the few people in the world who could do it, because he remembers how it tastes. He has a partner doing the actual distilling, but he’ll get the last word. Thompson accompanies him around the state, into the past, looking into his and his family’s history. Along the way, naturally, a lot of whiskey is drunk, and a lot of stories are shared. It all sounds delicious.

 

                “It’s funny: when you start to learn about bourbon, you imagine it as an art, and the more you learn, the more you discover it’s a science. But there comes a point when even the experts dissemble and shrug and admit they don’t actually know how all those factors work together and interplay, and that’s when you start to see it as art again.”

Nature’s Mutiny

 Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present

Philipp Blom (German original, 2017; English translation by the author, Liveright, 2019)

     “A two-degree [Celsius] drop in annual mean temperature translates into almost three weeks of lost growing time, meaning that crops were very much slower to ripen, and sometimes failed to ripen at all.” From the 1560’s until the end of the following century, a period known as the Little Ice Age, unusual weather disrupted the patterns of agricultural and economic life that had obtained in Europe for the preceding thousand years. Some summers were hot and dry, while others seemed to barely come at all. Some winters were so frigid that the Thames bore thick enough ice to be used as a sort of fairground.

 

      This was a worldwide phenomenon. “There were reports of population collapse due to famine in Ming-period China, as well as murderous winters in North America and paltry harvests in India…” Philipp Blom concentrates on Europe’s history for a few obvious reasons. For one thing, we have the most complete records there, not only from individual diarists, but from business records, like those from vineyards that recorded the dates of the harvests and the amounts of the yields. Second, Blom is at home in German and English, but the contemporary Chinese or South American records would have come to him only heavily mediated.

 

     There’s certainly more than enough to say about Europe! The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe saw profound changes in how people lived. Recurrent crop failures strained local economies, both at the level of the hand-to-mouth peasant, and up the ladder, where the landowner couldn’t raise enough surplus from his tenants to pay his own obligations to the central government. At the same time, the local common space in which a peasant family could keep a cow or pig began to be seized by landowners, who found sheep or cattle easier and more profitable to manage than human beings. The feudal system, in which people were tied to a small geographic area and the social station they were born into, gave way to life in industrial towns or flourishing cities.

 

      To that broadly well-known story, Blom adds some captivating details. You may recall that the Spanish Armada of 1588 failed to invade and conquer Elizabethan England, despite mustering 130 ships and over ten thousand sailors and soldiers. In the English Channel, the Spanish ships were harassed and damaged by the English fleet, and threatened by its fireships, to avoid which many cut their anchors and fled. At last, they headed north, sailing the long way around the British Isles–only to encounter an arctic storm, with hurricane-force winds, on the Atlantic coast of Ireland. Only half of the ships limped back to Spain; the soldiers and crews were weak with illness and starvation.

   

       That military force was the largest seen in centuries, but it would not remain so. Modern weapons and modern tactics were developed together. “A victorious campaign, or even the capacity to deter potential invaders, required not only vast armies and fleets but also experts trained to control the complex logistics, constructions, tactics, supplies, and accounts, as well as vast amounts of treasure. Perhaps war really is the father of all things.” That is, modern warfare necessitated modern economics, in the form of mercantilism: an emerging middle class learned to manage tariffs, trade balances, and colonial administration.

 

     In the late sixteenth century, the Little Ice Age was seen as a religious problem, to be met with prayer, and desperate measures like witch-burning. Voltaire, Descartes, and their contemporaries would turn Europe toward rationality and the Enlightenment; Blom also introduces some other thinkers, largely written out of Enlightenment history, who might offer us alternatives to materialism and mercantilism, in case our current attempts attempts at dominating nature don’t work out so well.

 

    I recommend Nature’s Mutiny, though perhaps not as beach or casual reading; the writing is rich and dense, befitting its origin in German. Even if I don’t start ordering books from the twenty-page bibliography, I think I’ll be chewing on it for a while.

 

Any Good Books, January 2025 by email