The Autograph Man, by Zadie Smith

The Autograph Man (TAM) is Zadie Smith's second novel. I am going to tell you a little bit about it.

As I recall the reviews, TAM was regarded as the Difficult Second Album that we had to endure before Smith entered her mature period. But what good are reviews? Murder on the Orient Express - 5 stars; War and Peace - also 5 stars: you see the problem. Even those comments along the lines of "007 meets Harry Potter - with a dash of PG Wodehouse!" are more useful: at least that gives you some idea of what to expect from the book. 

For what it is worth, I thought that TAM was pretty good (at least until its later stages). But I can do better than that. Below the break, I set out some comments that I hope will give you a better idea of what the book is like, and then a postscript about London prompted by some comments in the book.

Oh, to see ourselves as others see us seeing ourselves!

This is a little piece by an American singing the praises of a number of British TV police dramas that I haven't seen. The author tells us what is striking about British cop shows compared with American ones. There is the issue of guns, of course, but his first point was this:

"... in the British shows, closed-circuit television surveillance is everywhere ... Crime shows set in Britain may offer the best way—apart from actually moving there—to appreciate how much the nation has become a quasi-benevolent surveillance state. If the police need to determine someone’s whereabouts at a particular hour on a particular night, they will dutifully interview witnesses, check phone records, and otherwise establish alibis much as they would in the United States. But they will also—as any fan of these shows can readily attest—check the CCTV. (According to the BBC, Britain has one CCTV camera for every 11 inhabitants.) That’s true even on Shetland, which follows Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez (Douglas Henshall) as he and his team bring justice to the tiny sub-Arctic islands (population 23,000), more than 100 miles north of the Scottish mainland. Those distant hamlets and lonely roads sit under the watchful eye of CCTV, too. ... The awareness of supervision lends British series a greater sense of control, of order, relative to the urban chaos that prevails on American television. Crime is experienced as a deviation from the norm—something that fell into the cracks between the cameras—rather than the norm itself."

My own experience is that CCTV is pretty useless if you ever need it, but we are talking about fiction. The writers of these police dramas put CCTV into their dramas in the same way that Conan Doyle and Christie put guns into theirs: they are something you would plausibly find hanging around without needing to install clunky plot machinery. Wouldn't you like to see a Chinese police drama, just for these kinds of incidental detail? 

The time portal opens again

For reasons I cannot explain, a page from what a book that says it is an "Introduction to Western Politics in the 21st Century" has come into my possession. It says this:

"... a one-term President who struggled to make the transition from a successful career in business and light entertainment to politics. Although he made immigration reform the central plank of his policy platform, his efforts to enact his legislative agenda in that area were thwarted by an obstructive Congress. Nonetheless, he achieved significant policy success both domestically (by delivering a strong economy, thanks in part to some well-timed tax cuts that he championed) and, most notably, in foreign policy. In the latter field, his valiant attempts to bring peace to the Korean peninsular were the most successful of such initiatives prior to the First War of the Nine-Dash Line, while his achievements in reducing tensions in the Middle East and expanding the number of majority-Muslim countries recognising Israel are the basis upon which the lasting peace settlement reached under the Tucker Administration is founded. However, in the period before the First War of the Nine-Dash Line, foreign policy success was not rewarded at the ballot box in most Western countries and the US was no exception. Instead, his Presidency was mostly ended by a pandemic for which he was not responsible and which, as President of a federal system, he had little power to combat. In an ironic twist, that disease, as we now know ..."  

I am afraid that is all there is. It is in rather large print and, of course, I have had to have it translated.

Some links to chew on

I include some samples partly so that you can see what you are getting, but also because links are rather unreliable at the moment and so you can google the quotations if required.

1. This piece needs to come with trigger warnings for those concerned about grammar and punctuation marks: the author would not get the full SPAG marks in an English school test. It could also do with a fair bit of pruning. Nonetheless, it is really quite interesting and refreshing. Give it a go and see what you think. Sample: "During the last election Matthew Yglesias claimed a Trump victory would lead to roving mobs of trump supporters beating up Jews at random, a major celebrity said Donald Trump winning was like a second 9/11 and got a lot of retweets saying so on twitter. I took a bet with someone very intelligent and reasonable that Donald Trump would not nuke anyone, start a random war, cause international crisis, or crash the economy in his first year or anything of such magnitude. This was a normal thing people claimed Trump would do if he won, in fact many people were certain of it and this was central to their argument for who to vote for in 2016. People seemed very sure Donald Trump would be the worst president in American history and were equally sure there was no way he could win."

2. This is Glenn Greenwald's resignation from the Intercept, which he co-founded. Sample: "The final, precipitating cause is that The Intercept’s editors, in violation of my contractual right of editorial freedom, censored an article I wrote this week, refusing to publish it unless I remove all sections critical of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, the candidate vehemently supported by all New-York-based Intercept editors involved in this effort at suppression. // The censored article, based on recently revealed emails and witness testimony, raised critical questions about Biden’s conduct. Not content to simply prevent publication of this article at the media outlet I co-founded, these Intercept editors also demanded that I refrain from exercising a separate contractual right to publish this article with any other publication." And here is the article he was not permitted to publish on the Intercept. Sample question he put to the Biden campaign: "how Biden could justify expending so much energy as Vice President demanding that the Ukrainian General Prosecutor be fired, and why the replacement — Yuriy Lutsenko, someone who had no experience in law; was a crony of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko; and himself had a history of corruption allegations — was acceptable if Biden’s goal really was to fight corruption in Ukraine rather than benefit Burisma or control Ukrainian internal affairs for some other objective."

3. John Gray on Bruno Maçães. Sample: "This may be why one can detect a sneaking admiration for Xi’s tyranny among Western progressives. Rightly, they perceive that he is promoting an Enlightenment project; although not the liberal project of John Locke or John Stuart Mill, or the communist utopia of Marx, to be sure. Xi’s dictatorship is more like the enlightened despotism of the early Bentham, who aimed to reconstruct society on the model of a Panopticon – an ideal prison designed to enable total surveillance of the inmates. How curious if, as the 21st century staggers on, a hyper- authoritarian China emerges as the only major state still governed by an Enlightenment faith in progress."

"White on white crime"

I once wrote that I regard decent treatment of Jewish people as a good test for the decency of any gentile society. I stand by what I said there - click the link if you're interested.

This test is one of the reasons that the USA can claim to be a decent society. Of course, these things are relative. I am aware of the former caps on Jewish admittance to Ivy League universities and the anti-semitism of, for example, the KKK. There is no doubt much more of which I am unaware. But, equally, we all know much about the appalling treatment of Jewish people in so many other societies. The Magistrate of History will punish the anti-semitic offences of America with gentle admonishment and a slap on the wrist, before turning her attention to numerous European countries with fury and awful punishments.

So it was with some sadness that I read this piece, entitled "Stop Being Shocked", by Bari Weiss. I recommend it to you. Weiss writes about a worsening in the climate for American Jews and, as her title proposes, suggests that now is the time to accept that there is nothing surprising about that development. 

Weiss' piece lists many unfortunate incidents and I was reading through them with a resigned sense of deja vu - until I came across this: "Jews are flattened into “white people,” our living history obliterated, so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely “white on white crime.”"

"White on white crime"! I had to follow that up. It seems that it is real: indeed, it happened "multiple times", I read at the link that Weiss provides. 

Well, perhaps using the phrase "white on white crime" to refer to the Holocaust is a 'clever' phrase that some undergraduates picked up, used for shock value, and now feel rather embarrassed about. Let's hope so. Let's hope all these straws in the wind are nothing more than straws in the wind.

But one should not be surprised if many people are worried. A society in which educated people speak lightly of the Holocaust is not the kind of society we knew in the West a generation ago. A lot can change in another generation.

In Joseph Roth's book The Radetsky March (recommended), I read that one of the titles of Emperor Franz Joseph was King of Jerusalem, the "highest rank that God had to offer a crowned head". In the book we see the Kaiser taking his duties to his Jewish subjects seriously. And we know (as the author did not - the book was published in 1932) what was to happen to those subjects when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was no more. 

I am not for one moment suggesting that anything remotely similar will happen in America. It is not simply a case of putting a Sousa march in place of the Strauss one. All I am saying is that the history of the Jewish people includes too many instances of societies becoming unwelcoming to them for anyone to read the evidence Weiss marshalls with equanimity.

An apology

Several links that I have posted recently have not worked. I apologise. I am going back to fix them, so far as I can.

Some interesting links

These are meant to be some examples of the importance of balance.

1. Genuinely interesting piece about the Trump administration behind the scenes.

2. Interestingly well-balanced piece from the BBC about the risks of nuclear power. I have noticed a few examples recently of the BBC making a real effort to look at both sides of an issue. They proved with Brexit that they are capable of this, unlike so much of the rest of the media.

3. Car seats as contraception: a third child means a third child seat, and that means a new car, and that means no third child. An example of the need to balance the different effects that government policies can have.

4. A good letter in the LRB: "A bummer, I know, but we have to entertain the possibility that there is no neat lesson from the pandemic". (Also here.)

5. Does it surprise you to hear that "people are more positively disposed toward women than men — the so-called “women-are-wonderful effect” — and research into people’s attitudes toward things as diverse as criminal sentences, academic hiring, essay grading, and research into sex and gender differences bears this out"? I doubt it. The quotation comes from this piece, reviewing Entitled from a left-of-centre perspective (but very aggressively - must have been written by a man), perhaps injecting some balance into a debate. 

6. Well, this, about the potentially culturally-determined experience of emotions, is interesting. "Barrett’s point is that if you understand that “fear” is a cultural concept, a way of overlaying meaning on to high arousal and high unpleasantness, then it’s possible to experience it differently." This is an idea that I independently developed as a child. If you find yourself in a stressful or worrying situation it is (to some extent) possible to re-interpret it to yourself as an exciting or fun one. Think about what happens to you on a rollercoaster. But perhaps one can take it too far: "Barrett tells the story of a date she reluctantly agreed to go on, which took an unexpected turn as her stomach flipped while she was having coffee with the guy. “OK, I realised, I was wrong,” she writes. “I must be attracted to him.” A few hours later she found herself in bed with ... the flu. What had happened over coffee was that her brain had made a prediction of “infatuation” based on sensory information from her gut combined with her culture’s understanding of that emotion and how it is supposed to unfold."

7. The Spectator in defence of 'wokeness'. And quite right too. Gove, with his Gramsci references, would never make the mistake that Leith ascribes to others. 

8. Women don't like to compete ... against men. But against women? A different story. But still, don't extrapolate to the workplace too quickly: "Gender wage gaps appear even in markets where workplace discrimination is impossible or unlikely. Uber driver’s for example are assigned trips using a gender-blind algorithm and earn according to a known formula based on time and distance of trip. Yet, a small but persistent gender gap of about 7% exists ...", it says here, giving reasons for the gender gap (e.g. men drive faster).