This week I definitely felt my inadequacy as a reader. First, the finalists for the National Book Award came out--and I haven't read any of them, in any of the categories! And I read a lot!
Then I read a couple of very good books that I struggled with for various reasons.
Talking to Strangers
Malcolm Gladwell has such a genius for synthesizing cases and research that I always feel somewhat dense when I read his work. His new book, Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know, started with concern about the Sandra Bland case. In case you don't remember, Bland was the African American woman who was stopped for a minor traffic offense, was arrested after her interaction with an overzealous police officer escalated, and committed suicide in her jail cell a few days later. Something I had not known about her was that she had a history of depression and had recently suffered a grievous loss.
Gladwell's interest in the case led him to ask: Why do we so often go wrong in our interactions with people we don't know? This is not the question I would have asked if I were looking into the case--mine would have been more focused on how we can improve policing. But it's an interesting question, and Gladwell brings a large variety of cases to bear on the question, from a Cuban spy who goes undetected in the Defense Intelligence Agency for years, to Bernie Madoff, Friends, Amanda Knox, the creators of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, Sylvia Plath, judges who grant bail, convicted sex abusers Jerry Sandusky and Larry Nasser, stop and frisk (or pretextual police stops), and more. From his examination of these cases and related research, he teases out three explanations for why we are so bad at understanding strangers:
--In general, we default to truth--that is, we tend to believe people are telling the truth.
--People are not transparent--their exterior does not always match their thoughts. Even so-called experts in reading facial expressions are often wrong. This problem can be exacerbated by cultural differences.
--People's actions are often closely coupled with place/context (e.g., suicides in Britain went way down when the way in which gas was delivered to homes changed, indicating that people's suicidality was tied to the availability of a particular method).
His analysis clearly indicates that people continue to cling to their misconceptions even in the face of evidence (this is in line with brain/learning research that we have known about in education for some time). He also points out that much of police training is based on misconceptions.
It's when Gladwell brings everything together to apply it to the Sandra Bland case that I don't follow, as it seems in this case many of the above general rules don't really have a lot of explanatory power. And he doesn't deal at all with the question that plagues society with respect to the many tragic police-citizen interactions in the past few years: racism. In the end, he sums up the police officer's mistake in dealing with Ms. Bland as "blaming the other person." Sorry, that seems to me to abandon all that has come before--but I respect Gladwell enough to wonder if I've somehow missed the point.
The Dutch House
I like Ann Patchett's work, and I particularly appreciated her prior novel Commonwealth, which was an autobiographical work based on Patchett's own complicated family. The Dutch House continues some of the themes from that work--children abandoned by their mothers, the cobbling together of family, memory and how it shapes people. The Dutch House is less complicated, however--two children are at the core: Danny, the narrator, and his older sister/surrogate mother Maeve. The title refers to the huge house that their father Cyril, a real estate developer and landlord, bought for their mother, a woman who was planning to be a nun before she met and married Cyril. Unsurprisingly, she hates the house and eventually abandons it and her family to serve the poor in India.
The children (3 and 10 at the time) are devastated, particularly Maeve, who has no one to be a substitute mother. She longs for her mother while Danny, over the years, becomes increasingly angry at her abandonment. When their father marries a younger woman with two daughters, the ultimate result is the children's banishment from the house, which haunts them as they become adults. Over the years, they spend a lot of their time together parked in a car outside the house reminiscing. In the end, redemption, forgiveness, and (so the ending is not entirely happy and fluffy) grief.
The characters in this book are not as deeply drawn as in some other Patchett works and I think that relates to my feelings of inadequacy. I heard Patchett being interviewed on NPR (can't remember who was interviewing her), and she said The Dutch House was Maeve's story as told by Danny. But as a reader, I didn't see that at all--to me, it was Danny's story, often Danny's story of being manipulated by Maeve. Now I know this doesn't really matter, especially in reader response theory, but when you hear the author say the book is one thing and you can't figure out what she was thinking, you don't feel really insightful.
I liked The Dutch House, even though I don't think it was Maeve's story, but I have liked other Patchett works more.
Favorite passage:
But we overlay the present onto the past. We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we're not seeing it as the people we were, we're seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.
Ann Patchett, The Dutch House
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