Ups and Downs

If this blog has been a little quiet lately, it's partially because I've been catching up on some reading. I finished Bonfire of the Vanities, which held my interest from start to finish. In retrospect, I think I liked Bonfire so much because it reminded me of the best work of my favourite author, Richard Russo. (His Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls will premiere as an HBO movie in the next few weeks.) There are few writers producing today whose books gather momentum as they go on, rushing you to the finish, even though you'd rather stop and savour the story. Russo's strength is in writing deeply compelling characters, using their quirks to propel the story further. His novels are cinematic (he also wrote Nobody's Fool, which eventually starred Paul Newman), full of wide, sweeping scenes and the detailed minutiae that makes writing magical.

I got through Jonathan Safran Foer's highly-anticipated Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the follow-up to his superb Everything is Illuminated, and I loved it. The story is that of Oskar Schell, New York's most intelligent and imaginative nine-year-old, the son of a victim of the September 11th attacks. The book is about Oskar's touching quest to unlock a secret he thinks his father has left for him; it takes him all across the five boroughs, using his charm and inspiring wit to make friends and get closer to his father before he can let him slip away. Foer, who is about my age, is a marvelous writer, using word and image to tell a haunting and gorgeous tale. Books like these make life beautiful.

More recently, I finished the three parts of Elizabeth Kolbert's New Yorker essay on climate change. Kolbert, whose 2001 article "Ice Memory" remains one of my favourites, tells the harrowing tale that is the story of Earth in the twenty-first century. Her piece touches on science, archaeology, environmental forecasting and politics, and stresses some important points. First, the "debate" about climate change is nothing more than partisan hackery. It is accepted science that human beings are contributing to the greenhouse effect and climate change, and that we can do something to prevent the worst-case scenario. Second, there's no time to act like the present. If we don't get our act together and slow the course of global warming, we're fucked. Global warming is basically impossible for humans to reverse; its effects serve up a perverse side dish: they speed up the process. Ten more years and all could be lost. The fact that we might not suffer the consequences of our actions today for another hundred years, like the U.S. deficit, is a crime against future generations. Finally, the U.S. government is complicit, if not an eager spectator, in the unnecessary damage being done to our planet. Kolbert's third installment lays out our options: B.A.U. (business as usual) or some combination of fourteen enviro-technological "wedges" that would impede climate change. The Bush administration, in walking away from Kyoto, heaping its scorn on its own scientists and pathetically insisting that developing nations clean up first, has the ball, but it won't run with it. Kolbert concludes: "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing."

Read "The Climate of Man" - I urge you. Part one. Part two. Part three.

Next up: Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, which seems to be abook about ideas and knowledge among ruling Americans. Antidote.