The Queen of Versailles - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst watches a reality based documentary

The Queen of Versailles is a documentary about a wealthy couple's intent to build the largest dwelling under one roof in the United States.  The house - named Versailles - is being built in a suburb of Orlando on a lake where a number of other luxurious homes have been built.  At the beginning of the movie, in 2008, the economy is humming along, and so is Jackie and David Siegal's business, Westgate resorts, a business that involves selling timeshares to people.  Money is readily available, and their clientele, who appear to be lower middle class folks, are given a hard sell after a free meal - David affectionately refers to them as moochers - and they use credit to buy a week or two a year to vacation at one of the Westgate resorts - the crown jewel of which is in Las Vegas.  Rather than staying in a cramped hotel room on the strip, a family of four can have a suite that allows for separate bedrooms, dining area, and a place to prepare food.  David says that we all want to live like we are rich, and he allows people to do that for two weeks out of the year.

In the beginning of the film, David and Jackie live like they are rich all the time because they are very wealthy.  He is a self made billionaire.  Jackie is his third wife, David is Jackie's second husband.  They met when they were both recently divorced and Jackie was Mrs. Florida.  David was smitten by her, and Jackie enjoyed his adoration.  Thirty years older than she, and buried in his work, he seems initially simply benignly disinterested in his six children and the extra kid, a niece, who is part of the family.  Jackie said that she only intended to have two children, but that was before she knew about live-in Nannies who would provide care for children.  Once she discovered this, there was no end to the number of children she could have.  And with a staff of eighteen at the house, there is also no end to the amount of stuff they can buy, pets they can have, and the number of parties they can throw, without really being on top of much of anything.  The stuff has piled up all over the place, so they need a bigger place.  The dogs, which get stuffed when they die, aren't housebroken - the staff cleans up after them.  And David is mildly surprised when all fifty of the Miss America candidates (one of the charities he supports) show up at his house, when last year only 35 of them did - he just thought his staircase, where they are always photographed, had gotten smaller.

The Siegel's have hired the father of one their kid's little league teammates to be their chauffeur.  Some of the other little league parents are intimidated by their money and power - David comments that his contributions may have made George W. Bush president so he notes with just a hint of concern that the Iraq war may be in part his responsibility before moving on to other topics - but the chauffeur is really attached to them and happy to take them in the stretch limo to McDonald's to pick up chicken McNuggets when they get a hankering for a snack.

All of this conspicuous consumption is a bit off-putting - slightly sickening even - but it becomes more problematic when the wheels fall off the economy.  The family fortune is suddenly in peril as the time share owners start to default on their loans.  They fly a commercial flight for the first time and one of the children asks what all the other people are doing on their plane.  Jackie rents a car from Hertz, and is surprised when it doesn't come with a driver.  This is mildly amusing.  But it becomes more disturbing when the children's pets start dying because their staff is not there to care for them - and some of the kids don't even know that particular pets existed.  Most disturbing to me is a conversation about education.  As their fortunes decline, Jackie bemoans the fact that the kids may have to earn a living and therefore will have to go to college, a fate that she thought they could be spared by virtue of their fortune.

The robber barons of the 19th century lived opulent life styles.  But the Vanderbilt's built a University, one that became one of our truly fine institutions.  It was built in Tennessee as part of reconstruction - it was money that came from the north and money that supported not just physical reconstruction, but moral and intellectual reconstruction.  They also built a number of large homes, including the Biltmore - a home that features a world class library.  Thomas Jefferson, a wealthy man of the previous century, almost bankrupted himself buying books, a habit he had trouble breaking.  The point is not even that earlier generations were intellectuals or had intellectual pursuits, though they did and I obviously value that.  The deeper concern is that this family is less interested in how they can put their tremendous resources to work to make the world a better place, that is, how they can utilize themselves - they are more interested in what can be done for them - how much they can be coddled - as if being cared for - as if being passive recipients of good stuff - were the road to happiness.

Warren Buffet, a wealthy man from our era who appears to have different values, asserts that, "I want to leave my children enough money that they feel they can do anything, and not so much money that they will do nothing."  David and Jackie, or perhaps more accurately, Jackie, seem to worship the idea of doing nothing - they see it as a goal state that they can offer their children.  David's older son, from his first marriage, works for David.  They have a business relationship, but not a personal one.  David is driven by work and wants to accomplish things, but as the economy dives, his inner rage becomes more and more apparent.  He is resentful that the easy money that has built his empire is being taken away from him, and he pouts and threatens to destroy the whole thing to get back at his creditors.  In the aftermath of the movie, he sues his son for giving the film crew access to the business after the economy has gone south.

The most disturbing part of the movie, then, is not what it has to say about a particular family, but what it has to say about us as a society.  As we have become bloated by our wealth, by our easy access to money, a class of Americans has emerged who have made money (and there are many of us who have not) that has allowed us to accumulate stuff, stuff that we may well be addicted to.  One of the kids in the movie comments after a particularly stuff laden Christmas (the stuff is purchased at Wal-Mart - it is after the downturn), that the stuff just creates a hole - a desire for more stuff.  It doesn't really satisfy the desire that it is intended to address.  And yet, we continue to pursue it.  We believe that happiness will come as the result of being cared for, not caring.  We believe that more stuff will make us happy.  One psychoanalytic perspective on this is that it is a regressive experience.  And David calls Jackie another one of his children, not a true partner or companion.  And yet he has chosen her and groomed her dependence.  He does not give her information that would allow her to be a partner.  Instead he, too, is in a regressed state - king of all he surveys - the kid who does well and is cared for in return - he is the king of the castle - the infante terrible cared for by the queen who is really just a baby herself.

So, what about Versailles?  What about the house?  90,000 square feet that will contain a banquet kitchen and 10 additional satellite kitchens.  A floor plan built around a central ballroom - someday it will look like a sumptuous hotel and will host the kind of events that would be at a hotel - with swimming pools and spas and all the comforts of luxury.  Well, the construction on the house grinds to a halt as the economy does.  The Siegal's put it up for sale in its half constructed state only because the creditors insist that they do.  It is, frankly, ugly.  It looms, waiting for a marble coat and for an interior that will, you just know, look tacky as only the opulent wealth of a Vegas casino can look tacky - but in its current state it looks decayed - without ever having been complete.  The pool, just a big cement space, is filled with rainwater.  It looms as large and empty as the stomaches of the children on Christmas morning after they have opened the umpteenth game intended to amuse - with parents who don't know how to play them.  The house comes to symbolize the unrealized dreams that mindless consumption affords.

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Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads about Trauma

Kurt Vonnegut begins this book with an autobiographical story, one that he told in more detail in the novel Slaughterhouse 5.  It is the story of his imprisonment as a captured US private in Dresden during the allied firebombing of this formerly untouched city during WWII - an act of retribution and atrocity that he, who had to help clean up the aftermath, found incomprehensible, reprehensible, and that created, in many ways, I think, the mindset that became the voice of his novels.  And the voice of his novels is a cynical one.

Colum McCann, a contemporary writer who has written about such things as the 9/11 bombings, is cited in a recent New York Times Sunday Magazine article (6/2/13) as predicting about the kids and teachers who survived the Sandy Hook shootings that their struggle against cynicism would be a struggle they would carry on for the rest of their lives.

Vonnegut enters into this struggle armed with two things - things that he names in another book, Cat's Cradle, a Grand Falloon and a dupras.  He said something like "To understand the nature of a Grand Falloon (and here I am quoting from 40 something year old memory so please forgive errors) take the skin off a toy balloon."  That is, that all groupings of people - he used the example of Hoosiers in Cat's Cradle though here and elsewhere he is talking about Nazis and Allies - are essentially arbitrary.  We are not different - but alike - including in our being fallible and even evil, especially when we create arbitrary distinctions and act on them to harm others.  The antidote that he proposes, somewhat feebly, is the dupras - a romantic love that is so intense that the two people become fused - the lines between them fall away and they function as one person.

So the novel Mother Night is about a writer - a kind of hack, sappy romantic writer - certainly someone who could be a cynical version of the author - who has American citizenship but is born and raised in Germany, writes some plays, and chooses to stay there during the war.  Recruited to be a spy, he sends messages that he does not understand by coughing at prescribed times during hate filled vindictive racist rants that he concocts and transmits on short wave radio in English as part of the German attempt to indoctrinate the English and Americans to join the Nazi world view.  The premise of the novel is that he has been captured as a war criminal (for the second time - his functioning as a spy led him to be able to escape the first capture and move to New York), and he is writing his memoirs in Israel immediately before his trial.

What intrigues me about the novel is Vonnegut's simultaneous acknowledgement and disavowal of the power of the writer.  He, in the voice of the playwright/spy/propagandist dismisses his rants as lies - and disavows the pain they may have caused others because he, the author, creator and deliverer, did not believe them.  And yet he also castigates himself and believes that he should be punished for what he has done.  He makes fun of those who would trade in hatred - lampooning them as internally inconsistent laughable dimwits who come to the aid of the writer because he is their hero.  This masterful and very funny playing, however, does not ring true.  What Vonnegut would have us join him in cynically laughing at is someone - or something - that is much more powerful than he is comfortable with - the power of words to destroy lives - even entire cities of people - because they are different, or because they held responsible for our ills, even if they, in fact, have nothing to do with them.

Vonnegut sees - I think painfully - how he is not different than Hitler - or the Allied high command who ordered the Dresden bombings, bombings of a  city untouched by war because it had no tactical value and bombed purely as retribution - in that he offers ideas - and these ideas may have consequences that he cannot foresee.  So he emasculates his ideas, blunts them, making them laughable, and his characters laughable, because to appreciate their evilness - his own evilness - directly would be unbearable.

To make matters worse, the hero's dupras turns out to have unforeseen complications that undermine the premise of romantic love as a safe haven.  The hero is left with no haven, and really feels no compelling reason to live.  He, like the existentialists, does not apparently see meaning in living.  I think, however, it is the cynicism that gives the author away.  I think that he is, in fact, deeply and terribly in love with living.  He is as sensually gratified by life as by the beautiful woman who is his enthusiastic duprastic partner.  And he turns away from it because he is angry at how disappointing it has turned out to be.  Instead of discovering Forrest Gump's box of chocolates, Vonnegut found thousands of charred bodies that need to be disposed of.  The terrible destruction - the very real consequence of wielding power, has left him to turn out a series of books that capture the imaginations of teenage boys - or at least the teenage boy that this man used to be.

My own disappointments with authority, writ much smaller on a stage much less traumatic, found a sympathetic ear in Vonnegut's stories.  Somehow I never read Night Mother until now.  And at this stage in my life I find myself resonating with Colum McCann, acknowledging that it is a hard struggle to avoid cynicism, and, while I do not fault Vonnegut - he faced more horror than I can imagine - I am saddened that he lost the fight against cynicism.  I think his powerful voice - one that is filled with wit, precision, and that can be poignant, was blunted by his fear of identifying with those who had wreaked havoc in so many ways with their power.  He cautions us not to believe in anything - neither the power of the herd, nor the power of intimacy - to protect us from disappointment and despair.

While his position helped me build a useful teenage armor against the vagaries of the world (OK, truth be told, I did not get the cautions against the dupras and continued to imagine that romantic love could, if not conquering all, at least save my soul), it did not lead me forward towards an engagement that would have to be complex because it was with a complex, but also deeply interesting, enriching and rewarding world.  I suppose I end up being as disappointed in Vonnegut as he was in Hitler, Eisenhower, and the rest of the powers that be because he, like they, did not use his powers for as much good as he might have.  He cautions us against living because it is futile to try to escape an existence that harms others - in this book he notes that all the insight in the world does not prevent the hero from tragically wreaking havoc - but he does not leave much room for hope that even in our necessarily blinded state we might, through plumbing and harnessing our power and directing it as best we are able, do good.  Instead he urges us to turn away from the world; to join him in his distancing disdain, something that will doom us to live in a world that we will not make better.

Post Script:  After thinking about this post for a few days, I am aware of my own cynicism towards Mr. Vonnegut - something that surprises me given my earlier reverence for him.  I read the on line commencement address attributed to him, and found an actual address that he had given.  It was not as concise or witty or even in his style as the one that had, through urban legend, become his.  Instead, he seemed a little uptight, overly tied to his script and even clumsy in his delivery (he did reference the "wear sunscreen"  address at the beginning of his own address).  That said, the message he was delivering was a very positive, supportive one and he was encouraging the graduates to make use of what they had learned while they went forth and engaged with the world.  I think the tone I took in the blog above is related to at least two factors - I think that my cynicism towards the author mirrored his cynicism towards the world.  I think I also wanted to distance myself from the disappointment I felt as I discovered some of the mud on the shoes on one of my early heroes - and channelled his means of managing such a disappointment, using his own weapon aganst him.

So it goes...


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Blogging about blogging - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Navel Gazes

I have been blogging for two years.  I started on a whim.  The reluctant wife and I had watched a DVD and I thought I had something to say about it, and so wrote a brief essay about that and explored how to put the essay up as a blog.  I was curious about whether this would be something that I would stick with and whether it would be something that people had an interest in.  Two years later, this will be my sixty fourth blog - so I have written, on average, more than three blogs a month.  But my production has not been that steady.  I tend to write more in the summer - last summer, when involved in two retreats, I was writing a blog a day.  More often than not I am writing about every two weeks - generally a book or a movie will contain something that seems worth writing about - something that I think I have something to say about - at about that rate.

Blogging has provided an outlet for something that has been bottled up in me - the analyst would say inhibited - for a very long time.  My own analysis (all analysts have to undergo their own analysis - something that I knew about for a long time and I have wondered whether I maneuvered myself into this profession to justify getting my own analysis without appearing as self-indulgent as analysis appeared to me) was a difficult undertaking.  I was terrified on a daily basis of what I would talk about.  I became quite a student of my dreams - both because they were interesting in ways I had never imagined - but also because they created a text for me to take into the analysis.  I would have something to talk about and, I think this is important, something that would be of interest to my analyst.

I think that I have always questioned the value of what I have to offer to others.  I am sometimes quite wide of the mark in my understanding of a text - I went to a college where we engaged in discussions of multiple texts - and I was far from the most astute reader.  More fundamentally though, I think that I have wanted to make sense of things from a very early age.  I know, this doesn't distinguish me.  We all want to be up on what's new, to not be out of step, to not be blindsided.  And I have this anxiety and belongingness wish in spades.  But I think there is also a wish to have a conceptual and, particularly apt for the blogging aspect, a narrative understanding - a cogent story or script that holds things together and that makes them make sense.  Blogging offers an opportunity to do just that.  And I can offer it without imposing it -people can make use of it if they will.  But I can offer it - for though I have questioned the value of what I have to offer - I also believe that I do have something to offer.  One of the things that became clear in my own analysis was the wish - almost a truism of the psychotherapeutic professions - to make others happy.  I think what prepared me to be an analyst, and a professor, is the wish to do that by making sense of things (including the experience of people I cared about).

It also, and here I beg the indulgence of my readers, offers the opportunity to get the ideas out there without having to get them into perfect shape.  I don't have to submit them to a magazine or a journal and have an editor think about whether what I have to offer is useful - and to pore over my work and do multiple rewrites as it slogs towards publication.  I generally read through the blogs three or four times, making changes each time, before posting.  Sometimes a blog requires major revisions and I start it over from scratch, but this is rare.  It generally feels, as I am writing them, that I do have a narrative thread that makes sense.  I am not always able to fully exploit that.  I often become frustrated in arriving at a conclusion that would pull multiple threads together.  And on rereading a few months later, I am sometimes not able to see the threads as clearly as when I was originally working - and am able to see redundancies in language and poor grammar that eluded me the first time through.

That said, I am generally reasonably pleased with the product.  One of my mentors complained that I "clearly cannot write, and my concern is that may indicate an inability to think."  My writing has improved as the result of lots of close attention from multiple editors over the years, including him, though I could have done without the attack.  It is still far from compelling - indeed it can be clunky - but I believe that it serves to get some messages across.

What do I wish to get across and why?  I am a reluctant psychoanalyst because I wish there were a model of the mind that was simpler, that was more user friendly, and one that wasn't so difficult to become conversant with.  I want to convey some of the beauty - some of the power - of the analytic perspective to make sense of the world without becoming too preachy.  I would like to invite others to consider how the analytic perspective can inform - can open up new and worthy perspectives on the human condition.  I would like to clarify why, reluctant as I am, I continue to work from this perspective - caught in it and by it despite its complexities, its internal inconsistencies and its intermittent opaqueness.  Because sometimes it does illuminate things clearly.

I think I am also a reluctant psychoanalyst because of the public persona of psychoanalysis.  I think there has been a huge emphasis on psychoanalytic content - what we "know" about the deeper, unconscious aspects of the mind.  Terms like anal retentive - which is based on a theory about early development that does not carry much, if any, weight with contemporary psychoanalysts, is so firmly entrenched in our culture that I doubt it will disappear, in part because it does resonate with some "deeper" truth - the relationship between our fascination with our own messes - with our feces - and our wish to keep things neat and orderly - as a way of simultaneously denying and engaging in contact with chaos.  But these are exactly the kinds of statements that I found off-putting when made by psychoanalysts.  While I indulge in them (as I just did), I think part of what I want to do is to emphasize the process of analysis - the discovery that is part and parcel of every analytic engagement and that is filled with unpredictability - with a sense of the unknown - rather than with "knowing" what is "really" going on inside the other.  It is this sense of the openness of psychoanalysis that I would like to share with others, even if I fail to do that regularly.

I also want to record my experience.  To leave a legacy of my lived experience.  What I have been reading, viewing and experiencing, and how I have thought and felt about it.  Whether there is a God, it is truly remarkable that this complex, beautiful universe has been able to create sentient beings who can appreciate and divine that complexity.  And, not surprisingly, those critters are themselves complex and intriguing.  And for some reason I believe that my perspective on that is worthy of my putting it out there - of having an audience for it.  And that, in turn, is part of what makes blogging attractive - someone may come across this and read it.  And that is exciting.

To date, more than 2,000 hits have been recorded on the blog.  Most are from the US; Russia, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia also figure heavily.  But people from India, China, and places like Venezuela also have searched for things on the internet and come across the blog. (Note: less than two years later (4/1/16 , more than 30,000 pageviews have been recorded, though the distribution is about the same; by 8/20/18 there are 130,000 views).

People rarely reply to the blog.  I do have friends and family who read it and may comment on this posting or that.  Sometimes I will bring a post to the attention of someone and they will respond directly to me about their experience of reading it, but there is a weird sense that lots of people have had some exposure to what I have written and not responded - sort of what an author must feel who writes a book that is bought - perhaps reviewed (or blogged about, I guess) and sits on shelves in people's homes and in libraries being read by - whom?  Freud was astounded, on his one trip to the United States, to discover that the cabin boy was reading his dream book.  That was when he concretely realized just how widespread his ideas had become.

In my own analysis, it was sometimes frustrating to not know what my analyst was thinking.  Sometimes I did know, and sometimes he and I were very much on the same page.  He might say something that I was in the process of forming - or was just about to say or even, and this is more speculative - to think.  At other times he was wide of the mark.  He misunderstood me  - in a variety of ways.  He might have misheard something - or his ideas may have taken him in a direction that seemed tangential.  He was also, at times, way ahead of me and I could not yet make sense of what he was saying.  I don't think I ever got a complete sense of his ambivalence about me.  About the ways that he appreciated me - but also the sense of the limits that he recognized in me and the feelings that he had about that.  Part of what makes an analysis different from being parented is just that - not to know the wishes and dreams that our analyst has for us - and the ways in which we have disappointed our analyst by not achieving his or her dreams.  It is hard enough to know ourselves from within - and the point of an analysis is not really to know, objectively, what another thinks about us - but it sure does make me curious to know what a person that I have spent all that time telling my thoughts - someone who is thoughtful himself - thinks about what I have had to say.  That said, a couple of times he said complementary things, and I quickly minimized them.

When I started blogging, I was curious about whether I would continue to have new things to say about the things that I observed - or whether I would become a drudge - saying the same thing about lots of different subjects.  I think that the psychoanalytic perspective - the psychoanalytic tent - is broad enough that I continue to be surprised by all that it contains, and I hope that I am able to bring some of those many perspectives to bear on topics in ways that are fresh - that the reader can find different analytic ideas in the different blogs across time.  I hope that I have not bored my reader, just as I hope that I did not bore my analyst.  I hope that, while both blogging and analysis are self indulgent, that they have also proven to be, in some palpable measure, productive.  That the investment of time and money in understanding the human condition - and more particularly one person's condition - generalizes in ways that are useful to others.

I expect that some people are searching for this blog because they have essays to write of their own, perhaps as school assignments, and they are looking for what others have written about what they must write on.  Certainly I frequently check Wikipedia and other reviews - especially to keep the narrative of a movie straight in my head - as well as the names of characters, something that is very difficult for me to track.  But I hope that it is the psychoanalytic perspective that is attracting hits.  That people really are interested in what a psychoanalyst would have to say about this or that.  That there is still curiosity about this perspective and that, like Freud's cabin boy, people from all over are still interested in how the unconscious is constructed and what looking from that perspective might do to our understanding of the world that we live in.  And I hope that this blog does not disappoint.  That despite its lack of polish - and despite its sometimes wandering narrative - that it can illuminate a text, a movie, or an aspect of our experience in ways that seem novel and yet vibrant - unexpected and yet somehow true.  That this thing called analysis, despite our ambivalence about it, is useful to us.

Postscript:  It is now two years later and a lot more hits have occurred - The blog is approaching 20,000 hits.  I am in the process of going back through the posts and editing out some of the more egregious scanning problems and making the posts more cogent.  I am also adding links and pictures to them, where relevant.  All of this is part of an effort to create a narrative index - and later a more bare bones index or two - to the site.  I guess, in the context of this post, I am trying to organize the mess.  One thing that is apparent to me now in a way that was not then is that my writing style is more psychoanalytic than I knew.  It is free associative.  A movie or a book or an experience interests me and I think a bit about it, have a general outline for how I will articulate my experience, but mostly write what comes to mind and see how that resolves.  Tom Ogden's Creative Readings has helped me realize that this is what is happening as he has written about how to read psychoanalytic writing (someday I will blog about this book, for now I have included a link to another's review of it).

Postpostscript:  It is now four years later (2018) and I have blogged again about blogging, though this time it is more about issues of numbers and net neutrality - and the question of whether adding ads - something that will detract from the experience of being on the blog imo - will increase traffic.


To access the narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.     For a subject based index, link here.

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Andre Agassi's Open - The reluctant Psychoanalyst Ponders The Ability to Communicate

Know Thyself.  Easier said than done.  And Andre Agassi is incredibly open about how little he has known himself across the course of his life.  There's an irony here, because he seems to know about everything that is going on around him and to remember it with incredible clarity.  There is another irony in that he was an iconic figure in our culture - one whom we, in my generation, know - one with whom we feel familiar - whether from his play, from his packaging, first with Nike and then with Canon, or from his star studded relationships, first with Brooke Shields and later with Steffi (or, as she prefers, Stephanie) Graf.  How can someone who is so well known not be known to himself?  And, as he gains self knowledge, how far has he come?  These are questions that we ask with our analysands all the time.  They are also questions that we should know will contain a great deal of uncertainty in their answers.  Some of the uncertainty will come from not knowing how much of the memoir is Agassi's, it is a collaborative effort with a Pulitzer Prize winning writer - but mostly it will come because we are not collaboratively engaged, ourselves, with this person, despite his implicit promise to be open. That said, the form of the writing appears to be somewhat psychoanalytic in that the first step in the writing was for Agassi and his co-author to engage in long taped conversations about his life and to transcribe them.  They then worked and reworked them to become the book, but it still retains the feeling of narrative - of a tale told to a confidante.  We are able to listen in - even if we can't engage, analytically, in the dialogue.

Before delving into analysis, let me first say that the narrator of this story is an incredibly likable guy.  He tells his story well and I would find it entertaining even if I had no idea who Brooke Shields was and hadn't seen him playing tennis on TV for over a decade.  This guy comes across as someone who would be fun to hang out with.  In part this is because he doesn't "know" himself.  He's not filled with the kind of self-love that is off-putting.  The voice of this memoir is very similar to the voice of Bill Clinton in his memoir "My Life".  There is an aw-shucks quality of "Can you believe that this happened to me?"  And I think for Andre, more than for Bill, though it is a bit the case for both of them, it comes from a place of being the golden child - not through effort - though both displayed a lot of effort (almost against his will Agassi hit a million - such a big number - a million tennis balls a year for almost thirty years), but through disowned effort.  The central revelation in this book, something that Agassi "lied" about in interviews throughout his career, is that he hates tennis.  The activity that most defines him - the one that has brought him fortune and fame - the thing that he is most "known" for - we now "know" is something that he does not identify with.  It is something that he does - as it were - against his will.

So it is interesting that this man does not mention his second major packaging slogan - Rebel, though the first, "Image is Everything" is disowned as a Madison Avenue ploy.  But rebel he does - but also, I believe, does not.

Agassi is born to a highly demanding immigrant from Iran - a youthful boxer and apparently the lone tennis player in Tehran (he hit balls against a wall?) who escaped to build a better life in the United States.  Here he met and wooed a woman - a Clevelander - who was taken by his charm - they eloped to California and ultimately landed in Las Vegas where he worked as a pit boss - and she learned how much grit she had as she withstood his harsh diatribes and crazy pursuit of having one of his children become the next number one tennis player in the world.  The father bought a place far enough out in the desert that he could afford it and have enough land that he could build a tennis court on it, which he did, even though he knew nothing about construction.  Then he built a crazy dragon of a ball delivery machine to fire balls at his four children who wielded rackets to fend them off.  His youngest, Andre, was particularly adept - particularly quick, and he was being shown off by his father and hauled to tournaments all over the west at a very young age.

Andre went along with this - mostly, he maintains, because he got caught up in winning, which he liked and, at least as importantly, because he imagined his father liked it, and because he hated to lose.  When Andre meets Brooke, she comments that they are so much alike (and like her friend Michael Jackson, whom Andre finds a bit bizarre) because they had no childhood.  Brooke had a mother who pushed her into modeling and acting from a very early age - but more importantly, from a psychoanalytic perspective, used her as a tool to achieve her own goals.  This use of another as a narcissistic extension, or in plain English, an extension of oneself, is an important component of all parenting.  Who hasn't cringed when their child makes a mistake in public - as if it were we who were making the mistake?  Who hasn't cheered when their child has done well - and felt as proud, or even prouder, than if we, ourselves, had done that thing?  And what child hasn't work hard to achieve the adulation of his or her parent?  And what child hasn't experienced, to a lesser extent than Andre, who was sent away from his parents' love to a tennis "academy" that felt more like a prison, the irony of winning their parents attention only to be disappointed by being in the limelight, or having greater demands put on them, or achieving some other unintended consequence?

And who hasn't been a fan of Agassi, or Graf, or Sampras because we see something in their character - something in their grit or stamina or ability that we admire and identify with - or want to identify with - that we want to own, and that we borrow by becoming their fan - their big brother or sister, or mother or father - so that they have, instead of just their nuclear family on the sidelines, a big family - a stadium full of appreciative fans using them as narcissistic extensions - as self extensions.  And is it any wonder that, in the midst of being so many things to so many people they lose a sense of who it is that they are to themselves?  Especially given that even the most grounded amongst us - those blessed with parents who are frequently able to see us for who we are and might be - and less frequently for who they fear or hope we are and might be - who amongst us with this "healthier" foundation knows themselves?

So Andre has presented this book as a chronicle of who he has been - unbeknownst to himself - but also who it is that he has become - how it is that he has become better known to himself.  And he has made great progress in this.  His first marriage, even though Brooke reflected aspects of himself to himself, was an empty one - at least as it is related here.  Though my hunch is that is was not as empty as he portrays it (more on this in a moment).  He and Brooke began their love match by courting via fax machine when she was shooting a movie on location in Africa.  They found solace in each other - a similar perspective on the world, but they were also very different people.  He - intensely private and competitive, she very public and affable - if somewhat - well vacuous would be cruel, and naive would disavow considerable worldliness, but perhaps shallow in the sense of seeking whatever it is that she is looking for in this interaction at this moment, and being satisfied by it (and not, like Andre, bearing a grudge against an opponent who cheated when they were young teenagers and feeling vindicated when he destroys him in a professional tournament, but also not like Andre with clear likes and dislikes - with a comfortable sense of what he wants to eat in this restaurant, and no particular interest in trying new things on the menu).  She characterizes her openness to new experience as a virtue, and derides his stubbornness as a failing.  And this book is presented, in part, as Andre's overcoming this failing - becoming a new person, a more open person.

The resolution of Andre's character, and his evolution as a person, he pins to his becoming generative.  He tips the valet parking guy more than his nemesis, Sampras, does.  And he, the kid who drops out of school at 14 (his Mom took the correspondence courses for him), starts an academy - there is some irony in this word as it was the place he was sent off to - for urban kids in Las Vegas.  He has been transformed from anti-school to pro-school.  At least for others... What we don't hear about are his own scholarly pursuits.

I am not nitpicking here.  I don't think or expect that Andre should go from being the best on the court to getting a MacArthur genius grant.  But what I mean to suggest is that there is a bit of hollowness to the coming of age portion of this memoir.  Mr. Agassi has matured.  He has decided to start a family with Stephanie.  He is less open about his relationship with Stephanie than he was about the relationship with Brooke.  Partly that makes sense - she is s a private person and they have an ongoing relationship that deserves to be protected.  But it also seems to me that this relationship may be more about supporting Andre - he may be more like his father than he can recognize - perhaps especially because, on the surface, he has changed directions so completely - neither he nor Stephanie want their children to become tennis players.  He is not involved in the development of his children as extensions of himself.  And he is proud of that.  Are they serving the same purpose by NOT being pushed into a career in tennis?  This seems to be a trap - he is damned either way.  And my sense is not that it is through his children -about whom we learn very little - that we will discover the transformation - or lack thereof, but elsewhere.

Agassi has always been competitive.  What drove him, from his perspective, was not his love of tennis, but his love of winning.  I think that, underneath that, what may have made his character so compelling - and may have helped him engage so deeply in his tennis career - was actually his ambivalence.  This is a man who deeply loves - and hates - his family of origin.  He craves closeness with his parents - and does come to see and respect them in ways that are admirable - he appears to achieve a three dimensional picture of them and to get a sense of what drove them to do the things that he hated - no mean feat.  He built a world of friends - the press described it as an entourage - who supported him, and to whom he was deeply attached and whom he supported financially, but more importantly emotionally and spiritually, when they were confronted by terrible life situations.  He is both deeply invested in himself and in the people near him about whom he deeply cares.

What he does not acknowledge in the book is that his openness is partial.  He says that he hates tennis - when in fact, I believe that he also loves it.  He portrays his relationship with Brooke as vapid and states that when it was finally over, it was over.  And yet she is listed as one of the people who reads the manuscript before it is published.  In one of their early breakups, Andre smashes his trophies - and then tells Brooke about having done that.  I think he is trying to articulate a deeply felt desire to be married to her not as they have been - but as they could be, though he cannot imagine how they would get from here to there.  He hates her as she is - he hates the relationship as it is - and yet he has derived great satisfaction from it and from her - from the idea of her and from the idea that she is present in his life - a fan of his - even if that has been convoluted.

This is an enthralling tale of the development of an enfant terrible.  The kid who, before our eyes morphed from one persona to the next, perhaps most incredibly into mature tennis star who became dedicated to the sport he hated as his career peaked and ended.  This book gives us access to the internal experience that accompanied the roller coaster ups and downs that saw him get to that point.  And it is, as the title promises, an open rendition of that experience - surprisingly and charmingly so.  It also, and here I would say of necessity, comes up short of some types of openness, because I think they are just out of reach of the author.  We can, and here I have, opined about what may lay beyond that reach - but we won't know until he goes there.  This book, which on the one hand seems so complete - it is presented as the definitive take on his life - almost cries out (in my mind) for a sequel.  After he steps out of the limelight; after he writes his memoir; after he settles down with the woman who seems right for him and raises his children, who does this man become?  Can he continue to develop the amazing capacity for openness that he has shown here?  As he becomes everyman, will he continue to be able to articulate that experience?  Will this man of the many personae (and hairstyles) continue to develop?  For his, and his wife's, and his kids' sakes, we can hope so.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.     For a subject based index, link here.

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Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads A Pulitzer Prize Winner about North Korea

The Pulitzer Prize for fiction “has been awarded for distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life.”  Adam Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son is a glorious coming of age novel about a fictional child in North Korea who climbs from obscurity to the pinnacle of power – something that would, in fact, be quite far-fetched – so far-fetched, the narrative maintains, that it takes people by surprise, and the audacity of the character and his life makes what he accomplishes possible.  So this rags to riches tale is American in form, but, I think, more deeply related to American life, and the reason to award this prize, which has gone to such books as To Kill A Mockingbird and American Pastoral, has to do with what I believe the judges took to be the essentially American perspective of the book, one that I will try to address from a psychoanalytic perspective.

The narrative in this book is organized into two sections: “The Biography of Jun Do,” and “The Confessions of Commander Ga.”  In fact, the characters who are highlighted in each section are one and the same person.  Jun Do is the orphan master’s son, a boy whose mother has died, who grows up in an orphanage with his parental relationship to the orphan master obscured so that he is not perceived to be privileged compared to the others in the orphanage, kids who take on the lowest and most dangerous work and that frequently leads to their death or maiming, with only the slim hope that they will be adopted – though this turns out to be a false hope as the adoptions are frequently by state agencies who use the orphans as slaves in various dangerous industries, and orphans can never marry and have children because they don't have a family to represent them, so being saved by this kind of adoption. not to a real family that would support their becoming capable of having a family of their own, is an empty fantasy.

Jun Do's name is an orphan name - meaning he is named for one of the 118 heroes of the war of American aggression.  His particular hero's quality is one of loyalty.  And, while the name highlights a virtue - indeed Jun Do's virtue - it is also a brand, one that makes him immediately recognizable as an orphan.  When the orphanage falls apart and he loses his father, Jun Do goes into the military to be trained in an adaptation of Taekwondo: he learns special techniques to fight in the dark so that he can defend the tunnels that pass under the DMZ into South Korea.  He then becomes a translator of English so that he can listen to military communication from a fishing boat and report on what he hears.  On the boat, when it is boarded by the US Navy, he becomes a North Korean National hero – through subterfuge.  The boarders see the shabby shape the boat is in – it has no fire extinguisher and no life boat.  Both are absent because they are expensive, but the life boat is also not there to prevent defection.  So, of course, when the fishing boat goes out on its next trip equipped with a life boat, one of the sailors steals the life boat and sets out to defect.

The rest of the crew would be held responsible when they get back to port, so they concoct a story where the defector was thrown overboard to the sharks by the US Navy who they state reboarded them.  They add that Jun Do jumped into the water to save the crew member, and, to make the story plausible, the fishermen catch sharks and inflict shark wounds (which they then sew up with fishing line) to Jun Do.  After Jun Do tells his tale, he is conscripted into a group that goes to America to argue that the US is routinely engaged in acts of piracy - his is an example - in order that Kim Jong Il can recover a remote sensor of radioactivity the US intercepted on its way to North Korea.  The argument being something like - you routinely steal from us and board our sovereign vessels, so you need to return this thing we own that you have unlawfully taken.

Jun Do is chosen to be the ambassador's truth teller not because the content of his story holds water - this is the Korean means to evaluating the truth of a narrative- but because of the certainty with which he tells the tale - which is what the American's listen for when they hear a story.  What we have access to is the reason this is the case.  Jun Do draws on very real experiences to inform the affect that he brings to a narrative.  The particular facts of the narrative are a fiction, but the emotional tenor of the narrative is true - to the marrow of his bones.  From this perspective, the Orphan Master's Son mirrors The Life of Pi.  The irony of this junket is that everything about it is a sham - and there is more than a little humor in the ways that the Koreans interpret Texan's honest attempts at hospitality (they go to a Senator's home in Texas) as one long series of insults - and are frustrated that their own insults are deflected or received with grace - something that feels, on some level, humiliating to them.

After his return (which did not eventuate in the return of the stolen goods), Jun Do is thrown into a prison - for unclear reasons - apparently this more or less just happens to people - where he mines for uranium.  Commander Ga is the minister of all the prisons in North Korea.  He achieved this standard by winning an international Taekwondo competition bringing great honor to his country.  He was rewarded by becoming a cabinet minister, and was given the most beautiful woman in Korea, the actress Sun Moon, as a bride.  She had been a consort of some sort of Kim Il Jung's.  Kim Il Jong had written all of her movies for her and she was clearly his truly beloved.

Commander Ga, it turns out, is a bully who routinely beats and then sodomizes other men, and then takes a photograph of them after he has disgraced them.  He has also disgraced Kim Jong Il and they are currently experiencing a Cold War.  When Commander Ga visits the prison, he decides to pick on Jun Do in the mines.  Jun Do kicks out the light and soundly defeats him in the dark - likely killing him.  Then Jun Do does the unthinkable - he assumes Commander Ga's persona and convinces first the head of the mine and then Ga's driver that he is Ga.  He returns to Ga's home and then to his office and functions as if he were Ga.  This is understandably confusing to people like Sun Moon - who assumes that this is some sort of test by her husband, whom she assumes to be still alive and cruelly engaged with her.  Jun Do/Ga's salvation is that he publicly apologizes to Kim Il Jung, who publicly accepts the apology and thus cements him into place as being the person he has pretended to be.

So why is this such an American tale?  This spring President Clinton gave a graduation speech at Howard University where he stressed that the privilege the graduates of Howard University (and every other University in the US) enjoy is the opportunity to choose their vocation.  Most people, historically and currently, are forced by economic necessity into work that will feed themselves and their families by whatever means presents itself.  It is only here (and in other developed nations) that many of us are able to follow - sometimes discover and follow - our passions.  (Btw, Bill Clinton included additional good advice - do what you are good at and you will be more likely to be happy).

Jun Do determines what the other orphans will do.  As the orphan master's son, he assigns them to various tasks, including those that will maim and kill them.  He is able to keep himself relatively safe, but must bear the burden of responsibility for other people's fates.  His own fate is determined by outside forces until the transformative moment when he assumes command of Ga.  From this moment forward, he enjoys a certain kind of freedom - but, this being North Korea - it is a limited kind of Freedom.  He falls in love with Sun Moon and her children, and he is aware that they are going to be condemned if they stay in this country.  And we are able to see that as a new character is introduced - a "progressive" member of the interrogation unit of the secret police, he cannot have an open relationship with his parents.  We come to realize, along with Jun Do and the police officer, that old people in North Korea do not, as the propaganda maintains, retire to the coast to frolic in the surf.  Old people die - they are forcibly removed from power, if they have that, and tortured.  If not, they are randomly imprisoned, or sent to the country to pick rice at harvest time, wearing city clothes, and they may or may not find their way back.  This Orwellian world they live in would be unbearable if they could feel the full force of it (and would be unbearable to us as readers if we were exposed in a raw way to it), so things occur passively, not actively.  Events happen.  And we are simply witness to what is happening, including in our own lives.

Jun Do, then, bucks this system.  He does not simply witness his life, but instead inhabits it.  He chooses to assume an identity, and he chooses to exercise his will.  But he cannot escape his fate.  He ends up with the same fate as the hero he is named after - he sacrifices himself because of his feelings of loyalty.

Why is this distinctly American?  On the surface, it is not.  This is not our happy ending of being able to assume a new identity - something that is part of our mythology - but we are not able, in this tale to escape our fate.  So, I think from this perspective, this might be a cautionary tale, as so many other Pulitzer Prize winners have been.  We should be looking for what it is that we become enslaved to in the US; what might we do to help our families escape this slavery?  What news will they send back from the new, better world?  What will that world look like?  The portrait of the US in this book - of Texas, of two women rowing around the world (OK, I left out a lot of subplots - this is a big rich book with lots of good stuff to sink your teeth into), of spies and compassion, is the most admired but also feared country in the world.  It, ultimately, is not a place that Jun Do longs to go to.  He is North Korean.  This is his home.  And, as isolated as it is (and, by extension, as isolated as we are in the US - this is a very strange mirror that is being held up for us to see ourselves in), it is our place.  And what we are doing to others is largely outside of our awareness.  How can we become aware, as Jun Do does?  Do we need the training in pain control that he has received in order to tolerate accurately perceiving the world and our place in it?  I think this text assumes that it will take great strength to be able to directly confront reality - a psychoanalytic truth if there ever was one.  And, even when we do that, we are not going to be able to escape our fate.  We are not, in important - essential - ways free.  We are bound by circumstance, time and fate, and by our own mortality, to a particular place and to a particular end - one that we may not recognize until we arrive at it.  

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.     For a subject based index, link here.

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Jaws - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Watches a Classic for the First Time

Jaws was a cultural phenomena, and I must be one of the few surviving members of my generation who had not seen it.  Apparently it arrived in theaters after a new kind of blitz advertising where the airwaves were saturated the weekend of its release - it didn't matter what kind of viewing or listening you did, you heard about Jaws.  That weekend I happened to be camping in the woods or on some type of unplugged vacation, so not only did I not see the movie, I didn't really get it as a cultural phenomenon.  So my kids determined that my cultural literacy was in peril and insisted that movie night this week should revolve around Jaws.

And it is a cultural piece.  Released in the summer of 1975, it is clear from this vantage point that it was a post Vietnam protest coming-of-age movie for baby boomers.  As they (we) were transitioning from anti war protest and the kind of free love that reliable birth control supported to becoming parents and taking over responsibility for a system of authority that we had been not just opposed to and frequently disdainful of, we needed models of authority that we could identify with.

Enter Roy Schneider as the chief of police of the small island summer resort island of Amity.  He has retreated there with his family, feeling that he can have an impact in a community of a more reasonable size than New York; a nice hippie, back-to-the land sentiment.   And in the person of a cop, no less, just to underscore the authority aspect.   But a cop with a problem - he has chosen to live on an island but is scared of the water.  He is immediately confronted with ethical dilemmas as the shyster mayor insists that the beaches stay open even though a shark has eaten a skinny dipping hippie chic (The not so subliminal message: "OK, boomer kids, its time to grow up and distance yourself from skinny dipping, it'll kill ya!").  Schneider buckles to pressure and doesn't close the beaches and, even though he tries to protect his kids by keeping them in an inlet, he is responsible for the death of a kid and imperiling his own.  This being in charge is complicated stuff.

Enter Richard Dreyfuss as the whiz kid marine biologist, a privileged scientist with his own super modern yacht decked out for shark hunting.  Together he and the police chief clarify that there is a killer shark out there.  Then for obscure reasons that clarify that we have entered the world of allegory, they hire on with the local grizzled shark hunter, played by Robert Shaw. He represents the World War II generation who accomplished so much, but who seem crusty, bitter and ready to give orders.  These three get on Shaw's whaler and head out to get the Great White Shark, who might as well be named Moby Dick.  When Shaw bashes the radio so that we can't call in the coast guard, we know that we are locked into that allegory and that these three men will have to figure out how to defeat this monster - the source of the anxiety about whether life as we know it, filled with commerce and fun, can continue, or whether it (and we) will be destroyed.

The old man (Shaw) turns out to be drawn to shark hunting because he, like the Dreyfuss character, had an earlier traumatic interaction with sharks; in his case because, after he delivered the bomb that would end the war, his ship was sunk and he and three hundred others had to survive a shark attack - something that only about a third of them did.   So he has devoted his life to rectifying this horror, mastering it by killing, over and over, the threatening ones - seeking vengeance, but also mastery over his own sense of very real vulnerability.  His scars are the most harrowing, but all three are scarred, Dreyfuss from his early experiences, and Schneider in ways that are only hinted at.  He, as the hero, bears whatever scars each of us bring to the interaction - made visible in his fear of water, something that he must master on this trip.

This film feels very much like a Hitchcock film.  The framing of the film, but also the sense of "suspense" (verging on terror) is reminiscent of Hitchcock's work.  Hitchcock's father was friends with the local constable - and his father had the young Hitchcock locked up for some minor infraction.  Hitchcock is said to have stated that he wanted to engender in his viewers the feeling of terror that he experienced in the slammer, when he didn't know whether his parents would ever come to get him.  For Spielberg, whose direction of Jaws gives it the feel of a Hitchcock film, the original anxiety that he works to portray and then to manage is the fear that he experienced in the wake of his parent's divorce.  That fear, at least as portrayed here, feels to me like a fear of making one's way as an adult in a world without adequate models - having to figure out how to deal with whatever it is that is trying to bash in the sides of the boat - whatever it is that is threatening to drown you, and, in solving the problem without adequate direction, to use whatever it is that you have at hand to achieve a resolution, now matter how chaotic that means things become.

In the movie, Shaw throws everything but the kitchen sink at the monster, but it is still coming back for more, so he turns to the college kid - Dreyfuss - who enters into hand to hand combat, only to lose his weapon when he is caught by surprise, and, after being pummeled, is forced to hide and wait out the ultimate battle.  It is Schneider, clinging to a sinking ship who, after the shark consumes Shaw (in so far as Shaw is a father figure, what better Oedipal victory can there be than to have him eaten by his nemesis whom you are fighting?), who must confront him with the weapons available to him.  What does he use?  The very things that have almost destroyed him as he has naively tripped around the boat, almost causing them to explode.  Now he uses them to cause the shark to explode, and, at least for me, there is some sense of loss that this great warrior, this great adversary, this thing that Shaw wanted to take to the taxidermist as the trophy of all trophies, is destroyed.  I guess we get attached to the things we fear.

So this movie becomes a rallying point for a generation seeking to manage the fear that authority is corrupt, that it cannot be trusted (Watergate is in the immediate rear view mirror, and it is just the final fatal blow that follows My Lai, the bombing of Cambodia, but also the failures of the antiwar movement).  We are in danger of becoming paralyzed by our fears, or of being drawn into the water because this is, after all, why we have come to the Island, despite the risks.  The movie suggests that we can ally ourselves with those who have come before us, despite their apparent shortcomings, and despite, or maybe because of their scars, we can compare ours and join with them, and then use all that has come before: the hard won wisdom from the school of hard knocks; the fruits of modern technology; and our own, new version of Yankee ingenuity that integrates the new wonders, and we discover that we can step into the breech and perform, protecting ourselves and the world more generally from whatever it is that is knocking down the walls.  Despite the failings of the previous generation, despite their self interest to the detriment of the common good, and despite our fear that we can't do it - that we can't make it across the water - we can.

So, if this movie is an allegory or a dream, it is one that is reassuring because it takes our most primal fears and masters them.  We beat the monster.  My daughter told the story of her high school teacher, who stated that he was afraid to walk across the puddles to get to his car after seeing the film in the theater.  If so, I think he missed the point.  Yes, it is scary that there is stuff out there - could be in the nearest puddle - but Spielberg is telling us (and apparently enacted in the making of the film - the special effects sharks did not act as planned, so he increased the intensity of the experience by referring to the shark only obliquely) that we can handle whatever it is that life will throw at us.  We are capable.  Of course, the only way to get at that is to mobilize our most intense fears.  Doing that and resolving them in only two hours is quite a trick.  Perhaps it is easier to take the high ground watching the film 25+ years after its release.  I can see not just how the movie, but how the cultural moment will play out.  We will take the wheel, and we will navigate some treacherous waters, but will make progress.  If you ask me what will be coming in the next twenty five years, I will not be quite so sanguine and might find a similar, contemporary film more disturbing - not just because the effects would be superior - but because the feelings that would be stirred would be more contemporary.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.     For a subject based index, link here.

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Richard Ford's Canada - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Learns How to Get Away with Murder

This book is about how to get away with murder - or three of them actually.  One is accidental, but two are not.  In one sense, I'm not giving anything away - the murders are mentioned in the second sentence of the book.  That said, they are mentioned in what I believe to be an intentionally misleading, and therefore clarifying way.  Thus a spoiler alert: the rest of this essay will necessarily interfere with a first reading of the book.

The book is told from the point of view of Dell Parsons, a 15 year old fraternal twin of Berner.   They are the children of Bev and Neeva.  This nuclear family is accidental.  Bev is handsome, blond, and Alabaman.  Neeva is small, Jewish, and the child of immigrants.  They hooked up in a night of passion that created their children and thus, unintentionally, their family.  They became an itinerant Air Force family, reliant on each other as they disdained the military culture and never got connected with the civilian culture because of their constant moves.  I think the unintentional creation of a family that must be self reliant, and one that does not have the resources to sustain the nuclear functioning of that family, is the real crime that is at the heart of the book.  The action, such as there is, revolves around two other crimes both referenced in the first two lines of the book:   "First I'll tell you about the robbery our parents committed.  Then about the murders, which occurred later."

The first two hundred pages of the book is about the robbery, the second two hundred is about the murders, and the final 25 pages are about the rest of Dell's life.  I believe that the robbery and the murder are mirror images of each other - the second is a reworking of the first - a reworking with a "happy" ending - Dell, who is "saved" by his mother's scheme, participates in the second crime, and creates a life that is unremarkable, but stable and consistent; a life that has a better trajectory than Berner's; she who is condemned to a life of four marriages, drug abuse, and barely being able to hang on.  The first crime leads to broader tragedy; the incarcerations of Bev and Neeva, her suicide, and Dell and Berner's being cast to the wind.  The protagonists of the second crime get away with murder without apparent consequence.

The first two lines suggest a book of action, but this book only qualifies as an action novel if you find watching paint dry riveting.  It is about the internal life of Dell, a kid whose mother sees him as being most distinctive in his ability, we learn very late in the book, to engage in "reverse thinking."  This skill, poorly directly defined directly by the author, is perhaps best exemplified by the telling of the book.  The twins throughout the book - Dell and Berne; the US, where the robbery takes place, and Canada, where the murders occur; Bev, who bungles the robbery, and Arthur Remlinger, the American in Canada Dell is shipped to, who gets away with murder (I bet you, like I, if you haven't read the book, thought Bev and Neeva, or maybe Dell, committed the murders); the two police officers who follow and arrest Bev, and the retired cops who suspect Arthur of the first murder, follow him, but are murdered and disposed of by him; etc.

I think the central twinning - the central "reverse thinking" - is the difference in the way that the current time crime is committed in each of the stories.  In the first, Bev considers taking Dell as his accomplice.  He has a well thought out plan, one that involves stealing a car from a ranch house that is currently unoccupied - with a vehicle with the keys in it in front of it, and using this vehicle as the get away car - returning to pick up the Chevy Bel Air that is the family vehicle - from the ranch, and then driving back across the border to the family home in Montana.  Dell is appalled when he learns that this was his father's plan, but also wistful about the possibilities, especially compared to the clear failure of the alternate plan, where his mother drives the family Bel Air as the get away car - a car that stands our in the pickup truck plains states world almost as much as she, a jewish immigrant, does - ultimately being part of what leads to their demise.

Arthur Remlinger is an enigmatic figure.  He is the person that Dell has been entrusted to in a sketchy plot that his mother hatched to keep Dell out of the orphan's home.  So, Arthur, his putative stepfather, emerges as a man who wrote anti union tracts while working for Chrysler at a job that compensated him well enough (thanks to the Unions) to attend Harvard, something that fell apart when he lost his job by arguing with the Union steward  (This mirrors Dell's retirement from the Air Force in part in relation to a sleazy scheme to sell stolen beef to the commissary).  Arthur responds to this setback by bombing what was to have been an empty union hall on the part of the anti union group he is connected to, unintentionally murdering the union official who had gone back to get a forgotten document.  On the lam, he, like Dell, lands in a business of marginal repute, but unlike Dell, he is successful.  Remlinger keeps the books at a sketchy hotel that services laborers, including their needs for bed, bath, and prostitutes, and the seasonal goose hunters who come up from the States.  He keeps the books so well, and scrupulously sends the profits to the owner so that, when the owner dies, the owner wills the hotel to Remlinger, who is able to finance his expensive tastes in clothing and to support himself and his girlfriend, an attractive artist who has had children in a previous marriage, but whose only "child" in this relationship is Dell, whom she looks out for after his arrival.

Dell mucks out the rooms in the hotel and lives in a shack near Remlinger's creepy lackey who sometimes shows up wearing make-up and guides the hunters to the geese.  Dell observes Arthur from afar and their relationship only begins to become real as the police detectives, following the cold trail of the union hall murder twenty years later, begin to bear down on Arthur.  Arthur (like Bev before him) takes Dell for long rides in the country.  He uses him as a wingman, including in the fateful encounter with the ex-cops.

The cops, thinly masquerading as goose hunters, are now barracked in Dell's old shack, after he has moved into a garret in the hotel.  Remlinger pretends - in a pretense that no one seems to buy - that Dell is his son, which of course, he is in this through the looking glass world I believe him to be in.  He is dismissed from the room before the shooting begins, but witnesses it from Remlinger's car and participates in the clean up, being most grossed out not by the blood, but by disposing of the toupee of one of the cops.

And somehow, and this remains a bit of a mystery to me, this second version, this revision, this reworking of the crime, has a better outcome.  The murderer gets away.  Dell is sent to Remlinger's girlfriend's brother's home, where he will be educated, something he has craved throughout the book.  He is cared for and, despite being necessarily derailed by the events - by the bank robbery, by the loss of his family, by witnessing the murders and the disposal of the bodies, and by being relocated again to another family - he is able to achieve something of the stability that he has craved and to have a life, while not worthy of the attention that the two crimes receive, suits him well enough - certainly better than her sister's fate serves her.

I do not understand all that is being portrayed here.  Part of what is delicious about this book, besides the quality of the writing, is that it unfolds in ways that are satisfying precisely because they are messy and intricate and, perhaps, unfathomable.  It seems to me that this is a meditation on guilt and reparation.  I think that Ford may be encouraging us to consider the implications of our decisions to have children.  We are guilty from the moment we conceive, because we are responsible for the most important part of the lives of our children - their childhood.  I think that Bev was guilty not so much for stealing meat, or for robbing a bank, but for not including Dell in his hijinks; for not recognizing that Dell was an essential part of his own life, which was necessarily and integrally linked with Dell and Berner's lives.  To put it slightly differently, Ford may be writing a morality play not as a diatribe against all that Dell stands for and, through that, a condemnation of intermittent and distant parenting, which Remlinger represents; but rather he may be imploring fathers, disconnected though they may be, not to disconnect from their children, nor to underestimate the capacities of their children to appreciate the complexities of life, especially when they are engaged in their own most difficult and even heinous tasks.  If the child is engaged, Ford may be telling us, there will be consequences, but they will leave the child with a sense of being responsible for their own destiny rather than feeling that he or she has been left to the whims of chance. Knowing, quite literally, as Dell does, where the bodies are buried, and who did it, allows a child to develop with a sense of agency.

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