Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Thursday November 25, 2010
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DECISION POINTS
George W. Bush
Crown
ISBN 978 0 307 59061 9
497 pages
$35
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post's book critic. He can be reached at yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com.
All is sweet reason in "Decision Points," George W. Bush's account of his eight-year presidency and some of the events -- quitting drinking, serving as governor of Texas -- that preceded it. To be sure there are a few hints of the pugnacity Americans came to know so well -- barbs directed at the press, the professoriate, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a few other sitting ducks -- but Bush as he presents himself here is calm, deliberative, reasonable, open-minded, God-fearing, loyal, trustworthy, patriotic.
This should come as no surprise. The presidential memoir as it has evolved, especially in the wake of recent presidencies, is not a memoir as the term is commonly understood -- an attempt to examine and interpret the writer's life -- but an attempt to write history before the historians get their hands on it. Yes, from time to time mistakes must be acknowledged -- on the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, for instance, "I had sent American troops into combat based in large part on intelligence that proved false," or on Katrina, "The problem was not that I made the wrong decisions. It was that I took too long to decide" -- but the clear purpose of these non-apologies is to humanize the person making them, and to make us like him better for making them.
The presidential memoir is a creature of relatively recent invention, a product of the post-World War II era and one that has, to all intents and purposes, no older precedent. Only two memoirs by former presidents are worth reading today. The first, Ulysses S. Grant's two-volume "Personal Memoirs" (1885-86), is almost entirely about his military career and makes only passing reference to his two terms in the White House. The second is Harry S. Truman's memoirs, also two volumes: "Year of Decisions" (1955) and "Years of Trial and Hope" (1956).
Both of these books were written in hopes of rescuing their authors from dire financial circumstances (both succeeded in that regard, though the beneficiary of Grant's hefty sales was his widow, Julia), and both were actually written by the former presidents. They had research assistance, but the hand holding the pen was the president's own. Both memoirs, it also should be added, are works of genuine distinction, Grant's most particularly.
Of the postwar presidents who lived long enough to assemble their autobiographies, not a single one produced a book of any real merit. It's not so much that they're bad books as that they're dull ones, reducing flesh-and-blood presidents -- all of them interesting men, no matter how one may feel about them politically or ideologically -- to cardboard figures representing Virtue in various forms, described in prose that for the most part appears to have been put together by committee, or a computer on autopilot. "Decision Points" is no exception. It's competent, readable and flat. The voice in which it is written is occasionally recognizable as that of George W. Bush -- informal, homespun, jokey -- but more often it's the voice of a state paper, impersonal and dutiful.
As anyone who reads The Washington Post in print or online is fully aware by now, "Decision Points" contains no "news" of any real significance. Going to war over the WMDs that Iraq didn't have was a blunder, but that has been acknowledged for a long time by many veterans of the Bush administration, all of whom continue to insist, as does Bush himself, that "the world was undoubtedly safer with Saddam gone," a claim that, in light of Middle Eastern events post-"shock and awe," certainly merits challenge. The shipboard display of triumphalism under the "Mission Accomplished" banner was "a big mistake," to put it mildly. So, Dick Cheney volunteered to withdraw from the ticket in 2004. Doesn't just about every vice president do that, as a pro-forma courtesy? As for Hurricane Katrina, it was handled clumsily at best, but we all knew that.
And so forth. Bush is smart enough to understand that a memoir asserting nothing except achievements and victories would have serious credibility problems -- especially a memoir dealing with a presidency as polarizing as that of Bush II, though of course he doesn't give the subject anything approximating the attention it deserves. When he does raise the subject, it is with a mixture of candor and self-delusion. He is absolutely right to say that "the breakdown in bipartisanship was bad for my administration and bad for the country, too," and doubtless it's true that some Democrats "never got over the 2000 election and were determined not to cooperate with me," but saying that "no doubt I bear some of the responsibility as well" doesn't begin to tell the tale.
During his White House years, Bush liked to characterize himself as "the decider," a self-portrait that he continues to paint (hence its title) in "Decision Points." A lesson he "took from (Theodore) Roosevelt and Reagan," he writes here, "was to lead the public, not chase the opinion polls. ... As I told my advisors, 'I didn't take this job to play small ball.'" Whether this is the real person or a calculated persona is impossible to say, at least for anyone outside Bush's inner circle, but in presidential practice it took the form of a pugnacity toward the opposition -- especially as engineered by Cheney in the vice president's office and Karl Rove in the White House -- that virtually asked for a breakdown in bipartisanship.
Surely the transformation of George W. Bush from a genuinely bipartisan governor of Texas to a fiercely partisan president of the United States has more than a little to do with the kind of advice he got when he rose to the higher office. There are hints here of the president he could have been if he had paid closer attention to the example of his father and less to the bellicose neoconservatives whose voices he heeded so often and to such unhappy effect. As governor of Texas he had personal knowledge of the need for immigration reform and free-trade treaties, and he tried hard to pursue both as president, against much opposition within his own party as well as among Democrats. What he says on the matter is important:
"The failure of immigration reform points out larger concerns about the direction of our politics. The blend of isolationism, protectionism, and nativism that affected the immigration debate also led Congress to block free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. I recognize the genuine anxiety that people feel about foreign competition. But our economy, our security, and our culture would all be weakened by an attempt to wall ourselves off from the world. Americans should never fear competition. Our country has always thrived when we've engaged the world with confidence in our values and ourselves."
He's right, as he is when he says a bit later: "Free and fair trade benefits the United States by creating new buyers for our products, along with more choices and better prices for our consumers. Trade is also the surest way to help people in the developing world grow their economies and lift themselves out of poverty. According to one study, the benefits of trade are forty times more effective in reducing poverty than foreign aid." This has been especially true in recent years in Latin America, a part of the world to which Bush, to his great credit, gave considerably more attention than most presidents. It will not be surprising if, when the passions of the present day have faded and history has a chance to examine the Bush presidency, his efforts to improve immigration laws and cut through trade barriers are recognized as among its most laudable aspects.
These are, to me, the most interesting and appealing parts of "Decision Points," but unfortunately they are very brief. Bush wants to clean up the record on Iraq, Afghanistan, stem-cell research, Katrina and all the other major controversies that shaped, and bedeviled, his administration. This is understandable. No one who has been at the very epicenter of world affairs for a full eight years wants to be judged unkindly by history, to which in the end every president turns his attention and his hopes. It's a pity, though, that in the process of presenting himself before the bar of history he didn't make a good book out of it. In the light of precedent, that was to be expected.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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I REMEMBER NOTHING: And Other Reflections
Nora Ephron
Knopf
ISBN 978 0 307 59560 7
137 pages
$22.95
Reviewed by Carolyn See, who reviews books every Friday for The Washington Post
It was in Esquire, in the 1970s, that I first learned Nora Ephron's recipe for borscht -- certainly an editorial first for that manly magazine. And I read with high emotion Ephron's tales of watching her philandering husband asleep in their marriage bed, and how she longed to hit him with a skillet. And I read about the squabble Ephron and her three sisters got into about which one of them would inherit their mother's fur coat -- as their mother lay dying with such impeccable manners, making sure to introduce each visitor to every other visitor.
It's only been later, though, through almost half a century of writing, during which the author moved from mundane to fabulous and sometimes back again, that I realized her mother was, by that time, a full-on alcoholic, dying of liver disease. Now, in this collection, her mother gets mentioned often, but the tone is burnished, matter-or-fact. "She was a cut above the other mothers. ... None of them had careers and children. ... Also, she served delicious food, which was another way she liked to rub it in. And she could keep help. What's more, she dressed beautifully. ... And then she ruined the narrative by becoming a crazy drunk." All this is from her new book, "I Remember Nothing," a collection of essays, which, like the rest of her career, moves from mundane to fabulous and sometimes back again.
Her films have usually been madly popular and wittily romantic comedies such as "When Harry Met Sally ...," "You've Got Mail" and "Sleepless in Seattle." After she and Carl Bernstein broke up, she wrote "Heartburn," an acerbic, comedic book that also became a successful film.
Her essays, which maintain a separate life from the screenplays, come from a unique niche in American letters. Like many women, Ephron wrote about the stuff of family life: her apartment, cooking (a recipe for bread pudding takes the borscht position in this collection), her longings, her friends, her pastimes, her career. What makes this unique, though, is that Ephron's life has been -- from its beginning -- steeped in privilege and casual fame.
All women (and some men) may relate to the author feeling bad about her neck in her last collection, or -- in this new one -- her "Aruba," which turns out to be "the little bare space" on the back of her head. After a certain age, we probably all have one, and to discover it does not come as good news: "What is true is that I am older than I look, and my Aruba is a sign." Yes, we tend to have one, and we can sympathize.
But this fame-and-privilege thing is something most of us don't have. Ephron's mother, a successful screenwriter, had a famous run-in with Lillian Ross, the venerated New Yorker writer, and kicked her out of the house. The essay about this here is called "The Legend," and it's hard to know if "the legend" is the kicking-out business, or Lillian Ross, or Nora's own mother. Probably all three.
Some decades later, in another, masterly essay, "Pentimento," Ephron remembers her own relationship with a different Lillian, Lillian Hellman, distinguished playwright, Dashiell Hammett's longtime girlfriend and sometime plagiarist. For quite a while it's been fashionable to talk trash about Hellman, and the reader hasn't a clue, until the end, what the author's take is going to be on this curmudgeonly literary monument. The rest of us would be hard-pressed to have even one Lillian to kick around.
The other night I was lucky to attend the 100th birthday party of the Chinese artist Tyrus Wong. In heavily accent English -- he's only been in this country for 91 years -- Wong said that the success of his joyous career came from "good luck and hard work." The same can be said of Ephron. Luck is certainly a big part of her body of work. She was in absolutely the right places at the right time. She was on assignment at "The Ed Sullivan Show" the night the Beatles appeared. And she remembers (vaguely) the march on Washington in 1967 to protest the Vietnam War: "I went with a lawyer I was dating. We spent most of the day in a hotel room having sex." People she met but can "remember nothing about" include Justice Hugo Black, Ethel Merman and Jimmy Stewart, and they're just the first three. How many of us are lucky enough to meet -- or forget -- such people?
The hard work part of her life can be seen in her lengthy bibliography and especially in the essay "My Life as an Heiress," which turns out to be a cousin to that fur coat piece from so long ago. The privilege-and-fame aspect of things can't be accurately measured, but it's evident, through and through.
What you can finally say about Ephron is that she's a tremendously talented woman from a significant American period. Yes, she has some trouble making up her mind. She'll come horrifyingly close to self-denigration (in the divorce essay, for example), but then, just in case you might go along with that gag, she'll dazzle you in the next pages with strings of perfect prose. Luck, hard work, privilege, yes, yes, yes. But tremendous talent is her forte, her strong suit, her fiendish trump card.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE FALSE FRIEND
Myla Goldberg
Doubleday
ISBN 978 0 385 52721 7
253 pages
$25.95
Reviewed by Mameve Medwed, the author of five novels, most recently "Of Men and Their Mothers "
So besieged are we by movies, books, news reports, psychological studies, talk shows and calls for legislation dealing with the cult of mean girls and bullying that Myla Goldberg's "The False Friend" seems ripped from the headlines. Nevertheless, Goldberg (of "Bee Season" fame) uses her circling, stop-and-start narrative to approach this subject in ways that are both fascinating and fresh.
Life is not junior high, we tell ourselves. We grow up and away from middle school. But Celia Durst, now 32, can't move forward from a childhood tragedy that took place when she was 11. To find out what really happened, she returns home, thus triggering repressed memories of her own abusing role.
A VW bug on the streets of Chicago is the madeleine that conjures up Djuna Pearson from two decades ago and a friendship "of an intensity that summoned hangers-on." Three years after they met, Celia's best friend disappeared into the woods of their Upstate New York hometown. At the time, Celia told her parents and the police that Djuna had gone into a stranger's car. Now she wants to return home to set the record straight, to confess that she'd seen Djuna fall down a well and that, because they'd been fighting, Celia had done nothing to save her friend.
Her plan is to find the other members of their circle -- Becky, Josie and Leanne, who were also on that wooded road that day -- and to solicit their memories. She hopes to examine police records, retrace her steps and make amends. Before she can get on with her adult life, she must first discover what happened when she was a child. Her live-in boyfriend, Huck, wants marriage and a family, but Celia can't commit.
Back home, little is changed. Although the skin on her father's jaw is looser, her mother's waist thicker, their repetitive meals and matching recliners confirm that they continue to occupy the place that time forgot. In such familiar rooms, their daughter regresses. "Celia's teenaged self," Goldberg writes, "felt like an ugly shirt she had tucked into the back of her drawer but had yet to outgrow. Whenever she came back home, her mind resumed all its worst habits." Since, to her family, frank words are "the vocal equivalents of public frontal nudity," her parents deflect Celia's tentative attempts to confess. As she tracks down the other girls in the clique, they, too, refuse to believe her. They all saw Djuna enter the stranger's car. It was brown. There was no sign of a well that Djuna might have fallen into. Their separate testimonies reinforce those psychological studies of unreliable witnesses and the selective way people see and remember things.
What Celia does learn from her investigation is how cruelly she had acted. In the school bus, that petri dish for breeding social humiliation, she'd wielded power, determining who sat where and who was friend or foe. The three-abreast seats enforced "a much stricter pecking order than any lunchroom table." She pictures Leanne, who had trailed their group, begging to join them. Sporting the wrong hairdo and "bell-bottom corduroys that should have been straight leg," Leanne was convicted of being "not like us." Celia and Djuna doled out punishment. They set constantly changing dress codes, instigated inspections -- was she wearing a ponytail? Was her nail polish chipped? -- all designed to earn negative points for noncompliance. Celia acknowledges that "their collective behavior had felt natural, Leanne the rodent to their parliament of owls." But a grown-up Celia now understands "she had abused Leanne simply because she could."
Goldberg does a crackerjack job of showing a former factory town on the wane; a family, like the town, that hasn't moved forward; and a character, also stagnating, trying to discover an elusive truth. Celia asks questions to which there are no answers: What really happened? How much of the child forms the adult self? What is the role of memory?
Though Celia is not always likable -- the reader's sympathies for her shift as fast as teen allegiances -- she is consistently real. Less so is Huck, who seems too good to be true -- why does he love the often unlovable Celia? Occasionally, the writing turns self-consciously precious, the metaphors overwrought and distracting. But the author is a master of ambiguity. The hole at the heart of Celia's mystery waits to be filled in. With psychological shrewdness, generosity and a sure hand, Goldberg circles her way to an ending that is both satisfying and unsatisfying. Like life.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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WORLD AND TOWN
Gish Jen
Knopf
ISBN 978 0 307 27219 5
384 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Ron Charles, The Washington Post's fiction editor. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com.
What a pleasure to read this smart, warm novel from Gish Jen. It's another in a small but growing collection of books about getting older -- not getting decrepit or sick or depressed, but just getting older, with all the perspective such maturity can endow. If you've already enjoyed Anne Tyler's "Digging to America" and Helen Simonson's "Major Pettigrew's Last Stand," you have some idea of the tenor of "World and Town." Jen's fourth novel manages, in its amiable, unhurried way, to consider the challenges of immigration, the limits of scientific rationalism and the sins of fundamentalism. Yes, it's a heavy load for such a buoyant story to carry, but, like Allegra Goodman, Jen knows how to create thoughtful characters who can talk and think about complex issues without making us take notes.
Her heroine is 68-year-old Hattie Kong, a curious, compassionate woman looking somewhat nervously at the next stage of her life. A good liberal, she fought all the right fights -- "Vietnam! Staff firings! Library closings!" -- but "her chief job these days is to reconstitute herself." She recently endured the deaths of her husband and her best friend and then retired from teaching, so she's emerging from the jolting loss of occupation and companionship. "This is an age of flux," Hattie reminds herself, hopefully. "One thing will become another." She loves the peaceful setting of her new home in little Riverlake -- "a town that would have pink cheeks, if a town had cheeks" -- but she clearly has a lot of extra time and energy. Her late husband referred to her as "Miss Combustible."
One of the great charms of "World and Town" is how fluidly Jen mingles the tone and content of Hattie's scattered thoughts with her own third-person narration. As the daughter of a Chinese father and an American missionary mother, Hattie has spent her whole life feeling foreign. The scientist she became has no use for the theology of her American grandparents or the superstitions of her Chinese relatives, who pester her by e-mail with special requests to satisfy the dead. But more recently, the dogmatic tendencies of science have begun to irritate her as well.
These concerns are all brought to life in the novel by the arrival of several new residents. Like Hattie, Carter Hatch has recently retired, lost his spouse (to divorce) and moved to Riverlake, he says, "to force myself off task." Thirty-five years ago, he and Hattie worked in the same laboratory, and seeing him again now for the first time scrapes the hurt (and romantic) feelings they buried long ago. But if Hattie isn't willing to stoke the old flame, why shouldn't other women in town move in on this distinguished scientist who sails and teaches yoga?
While that retiree version of Emma & Mr. Knightley plays out in a series of sharp, witty arguments, the focus of the novel and of Hattie's life turns to a dysfunctional family of Cambodian immigrants who move into a trailer next to her house. Hattie welcomes them to the neighborhood, spies on them shamelessly through her binoculars and befriends their teenage daughter, Sophie, whose abusive father keeps her from school. He's clearly traumatized by the horrors of Pol Pot and incapable of any kind of productive integration into American society.
This is tough material -- sometimes even violent -- but it doesn't feel tough in Jen's tender retelling, and it's shot through with the author's sympathetic understanding of the cruelty that those who have suffered can end up inflicting upon others. All of us, she suggests, are trapped in our own beliefs, a fact that should humble us as we go about passing judgment. Hattie learned that lesson from personal experience and then from neurobiology, studying the ways vision becomes perception. She's interested in "how differently people see. And what we can't see, because of how we see." As Sophie struggles to negotiate her father's superstitions, her mother's Buddhism and a local church's dogma, Hattie wants to be the voice of enlightenment, advising the young woman to rise above others' limited views, but to what extent is Hattie similarly bound by the dimensions of her own beliefs?
You might expect the novel's philosophical and theological concerns to fit awkwardly with its cozy domestic comedy -- as though Fannie Flagg and Marilynne Robinson were passing the book back and forth. But whether talking about salvation through faith or the biases of science or the vanities of women of a certain age at yoga class, Jen blends these various strains with endearing finesse.
What doesn't work so well, though, is the way the plot turns upon the wickedness of a born-again Christian. Particularly in a novel about tolerating and respecting people's beliefs, it's disappointing to be led down the straight and narrow way toward the holy grail of liberal cliches: the hypocritical Christian, clutching her baby Jesus while spouting a doctrine of hate. Late in the novel Jen inserts a whole chapter -- "What Went Wrong" -- to explain how someone might fall into such bitter religious fervor, but to the extent it demonizes fundamentalists, it's fundamentally condescending.
And yet it's that very temptation of condescension that Hattie overcomes by the novel's end, when she finally finds a way to harmonize her own rationalism with what she considers others' nutty superstitions. We need "vision with a small v," Jen suggests. "Something more Inuit-like -- more oriented toward the living. Something more Confucian." As this humane novel shows, that has nothing to do with giving up one's most cherished beliefs, but it requires acknowledging that others hold their beliefs just as firmly and that only active compassion will build a better world and town.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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The ArcaMax family would like to wish your family a very happy Thanksgiving, and a safe and happy start to the holiday season. We will be bringing you more great new content as the holidays get underway, so be sure to keep reading for even more family-friendly news and fun! -- From the ArcaMax editors
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