Paul Theroux on Blindness in "Blinding Light"

(Originally published in the Denver Post, July 2005)

By Dylan Foley

In his 24th novel, “Blinding Light,” Paul Theroux writes about Slade Steadman, a travel writer who published one great book about sneaking across borders 20 years ago, but has not written any books since. The book “Trespassing” made Steadman fabulously wealthy through a clothing line, but has done nothing for his brutal writer’s block. He travels down to Ecuador to find a cure, takes a psychotropic and becomes a visionary, but also goes blind.

Theroux is written an incredibly witty, sensual novel about blindness, hubris, trespassing over borders and transgressions against the people. Theroux also writes a major cameo for Chappaqua’s most famous resident: Bill Clinton, who Theroux considers to be one of the great modern tragic figures.

The inspiration for Theroux’s latest novel came when he almost lost his own sight. “I had a double cataract operation in 1999,” said Theroux, at a New York hotel during the start of his book tour. “It was traumatic because I wasn’t that old. It made me really think about blindness. I wondered if there was a drug that could make you blind.”

At 64, Theroux is tan and robust, fresh from a recent trip to India. He says that the book took him six years to write. Along the way, Theroux explored the inability to write. “The book is also about writer’s block, for even writers like myself with 40 books can have writer’s block,” he says. But it is also the American condition of being a one-hit wonder. In other countries, we don’t have that problem. You can write on book and become celebrated. Here it becomes a serious problem.”

Theroux reels off a list of the great one-hit wonders: “Ralph Ellison and ‘The Invisible Man.’ Harper Lee and “To Kill a Mockingbird.’ And J.D. Salinger, who really only had the one great novel, ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’”

Theroux went down to Ecuador in 2000 on a psychotropic drug tour to try ayahuasca, a hallucenogen used by native South Americans. “I got sick and threw up,” he says, “and I had auditory sensations of insight, lights shining and visions of snakes and animals.” Theroux was also offered datura, a stronger drug that has harsh side effects. “I didn’t try datura because I didn’t want to go blind.”

Theroux has Steadman try datura and he becomes addicted to it. Steadman goes temporarily blind. He sees into people’s souls and even rescues a child who is drowning. Using his doctor girlfriend Ava as an assistant, he writes what he believes will be the greatest American novel ever. They begin to carry out complicated sexual fantasies, acting out the carnal experiences of Steadman’s youth.

“Steadman doesn’t have omnipotence, so much as prescience and second sight,” says Theroux. “He becomes a seer, for a lot of seers are blind.”

Theroux himself has been one of the most famous travel writers of the past 30 years, with his classic books “Riding the Iron Rooster” and “The Great Railway Bazaar.” At the beginning of the new novel, Theroux indulges in a satire of the yuppie travel world.

While in Ecuador, Steadman encounters a tour of four wealthy tourists. They spend huge sums of money to go to the most remote places in the world--Tibet, Rwanda and now a South American jungle drug tour. The group is blind to their own arrogance, greed and infidelity. Steadman, with his drug-enhanced senses, gives them their comeuppance.

Theroux, like other professional travelers before him, laments the overtouristed parts of the world. “When I was traveling Africa in the 1960s, there were still wonderful places to see,” he says. “Now even the remote places have been trashed.”

Instead of going to far-flung places where everybody else goes, Theroux urges intrepid travelers to go deep. “Travel isn’t about going to remote places anymore,” he says. “It is about going deep. There is always a place that has been misunderstood, but can be penetrated or understood by traveling there in a different way. A travel editor boasted to me that he’d been to Tibet. I said, ‘I would have been more impressed if you had gone to a remote part of Jackson, Mississippi, to an inner city ghetto.’ There is all kind of activity there, good, bad and ugly.”

Bill Clinton’s several extended cameos in the novel are hysterical. Theroux’s portrait of the brilliant and needy ex-president are dead on. The time is 1997, right on the cusp of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Steadman and Clinton meet at a big fundraiser on Martha’s Vineyard. Clinton embraces the blind Steadman as a new friend and talisman. Steadman winds up visiting the White House and senses the corruption of the people at a state dinner and the moral rot in the walls of the building itself.

It was Theroux’s leisure reading of a particular government document that brought Clinton into the novel. “What interested me a lot was the Starr Report,” says Theroux, of the massive report prying into Clinton’s personal indiscretions. “A lot of people haven’t read it. I can tell you it is pretty interesting. It is a total invasion of privacy on the level of going into someone’s house who you barely knew, opening all the drawers and looked at letters, money, devices and secrets. Not big secrets, but appalling secrets. Steadman meets Clinton and thinks that he’s got a secret, that there’s something rumbling in the background.”

For Theroux, Clinton is not only a tragic character in the Greek sense, where a man’s flaws bring about his downfall, but he’s almost a fictional figure. “People have written about Clinton, but it is the Clinton metaphor that interests me,” says Theroux. “It is almost like Clinton is a fictional character. The tragedy with Clinton was that everyone saw into the most intimate aspects of his life. No one wants that. Where does it happen? Only in novels, where the omniscient narrator peers into the crevices of a man’s life. That’s why Clinton is a fictional character to me.”

With 40 books under his belt, including novels, travel books and memoirs, Theroux said that one of the challenges is not to repeat himself, to do something new. “I wanted this book to be an erotic novel, which is one of the things I really haven’t written before,” he says. “It is a great area, to plumb a character’s personal, sexual fantasies. Writing about sex is very difficult to do and very easy to mock. People are very conflicted in reading about sex. There is very little in prose fiction nowadays. Once there was a lot of it.”

Steadman’s visionary blindness eventually makes him insufferable, until he finds that he is permanently blind. “The magic potion has cast a spell on him,” says Theroux. “Steadman is arrogant and hubristic, but he’s in for a mighty fall. He thinks he can control his blindness like Dr. Jekyll thinks he can control Mr. Hyde. The arrogance is punished when he loses control over going blind.”

The subtext of “Blinding Light” may be the general idea of the writing life. Living with Steadman for the past six years, Theroux says he has insights into his character and maybe that of all writers. “A writer who spends all his time at home is pretty unbalanced,” he says. “Steadman wouldn’t be a writer in the first place unless he was unbalanced.

“One of the things about writing about a writer is you are writing about an eccentric person,” says Theroux. “Where do you find a warm and fuzzy writer? They almost don’t exist.”

Dylan Foley is a writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Caroline Moorehead on the Masses of Refugees Worldwide in “Human Cargo”

(Originally published in the Denver Post, June 2005)

By Dylan Foley

There are an estimated 20 million refugees scattered around the world, forced out of their home countries by ethnic strife, civil wars and religious persecution. Some are survivors from wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone that chased them over the border into Guinea, others are Palestinians pushed out of Israel in 1948 and there are victims of political violence from the former Soviet Union, desperately seeking asylum in London.

The acclaimed British biographer and journalist Caroline Moorehead investigates the plight of these and other world refugees in her new book “Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees” (Holt, $26). Moorehead’s refugee project started when she went to Cairo four years ago to meet with Liberian asylum seekers hoping to resettle in the West.

“When I got there, it was clear that the asylum situation was chaotic,” said Moorehead, from her publisher’s office in New York. “We put together a system of taking refugee testimonies. Their stories became their passports. I went back to England and helped raise money for a legal office in Cairo.”

Moorehead’s Cairo trip started her own odyssey, with journeys to Guinea to look at the refugee camps and to Australia where Iranian Christians are kept in a desert gulag, helplessly watching their children go insane.

She went to Sicily to see how Liberian refugees fare after incredibly dangerous boat journeys, to San Diego to see how the U.S. border is crossed and to London and smaller English cities to meet with refugees warehoused in hostels, waiting in depression and anxiety for asylum.

Moorehead is no stranger to human right journalism. “In 1980, I was a feature writer at the Times of London,” she said. “My editors asked me if I’d like to do a column on this new sort of thought, these ‘prisoners of conscience,’ the Amnesty International idea. I wrote pieces about human rights and became involved in the human rights movement.”

The interview is interrupted by Moorehead’s cell phone. After a quick, animated conversation, Moorehead said sheepishly, “I feel like I am a human rights groupie.” She came to New York to meet with one of the Liberian men she mentored in Cairo, who has gained asylum in the U.S. and now drives a cab.

The 60 year-old Moorehead’s cultured manner doesn’t hide her steely determination. After her New York visit, she planned to jet up to Montreal, to find a human rights lawyer to help obtain a Canadian humanitarian visa for another Liberian refugee who is working as a virtual slave in a cement factory in Israel.

The personal involvement in the book came as a surprise. “When I first started, I never realized to what extent that I would become involved,” she said. “I think of a lot of these young men as friends, because I have a proper relationship with them. For many of these asylum seekers, they’d never really told their story to anyone. When they began talking, the conversation became important in itself.”

To write the book, Moorehead took nine journeys of her own in 18 months, including a trip to a harsh refugee camp in Guinea, where refugees from strife in Liberia and Sierra Leone wind up. Moorehead shows the dignity of a mother trying to care for her children in destitute
conditions.

“It was the first time that I had ever seen a big refugee camp,” she said. “What I felt was the utter poverty. None of us in the West literally have the experience of having nothing. There are very few words to describe nothing. In the West, we go into a restaurant and eat what we want. These refugees, year after year, eat bulgur and a few greens. There is no milk, no meat, no dairy products, no coffee, no sugar, no tea. It is extraordinary what nothing means. And the hardships the children experienced, I found that very hard to take.”

Throughout the book, Moorhead puts a human face on dozens of refugees. There is one young Liberian man who dreams of a philosophy degree while he washes dishes, and there is Mary from the Sudan, who watched family members murdered and is now in the strange safety of Finland. In a humane, touching chronicle, Moorehead reveals the great determination of the refugees to survive and explores their few shreds of hope.

Turning her gaze homeward to her native England, Moorehead found the condition of asylum seekers to be quite bleak. “There was much desperation,” said Moorehead. “One of the insane rules in Britain is they can’t work, so they’ve got not money or self worth. Because they are treated as non people, all the horrors they’ve fled are magnified. They arrive in the West and they are treated as spongers. They are anxious and terrified, and all they have are their memories.”

Moorehead noted that a better foreign policy might prevent the creation of new refugees. “We are making refugees by selling arms and by unfair trade practices,” she said. “Western countries could stop countries from producing refugees if we put more money into improving conditions (in the refugees’ home countries), so they stayed home and did not become refugees in the first place. The notion of an ethical foreign policy is very attractive, but who is practicing it?”

In Cairo, Moorehead found the 57 Liberian men and women she mentored hungry for education, despite their uncertain futures. They rented a flat and held classes. “It was so terribly touching when we asked them at the beginning what they wanted to learn,” she said. “They wrote down nuclear physics, philosophy, biology and dentistry, as if they were possibilities.”

The Egyptian police had other ideas. “Egypt is a police state,” she said. “Eventually, the authorities started picking up and questioning our students on what we were teaching them and it became too dangerous. We closed down the school, but moved the classes to American University in Cairo.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Khaled Hosseini Returns to Afghanistan in “A Thousand Splendid Suns”

(Originally published in the Denver Post, July 2007)

By Dylan Foley

In 2003, the Afghan-American writer Khaled Hosseini exploded on the
literary scene with his novel “The Kite Runner,” about a friendship
between two boy in war-torn Afghanistan. The book sold more than four
million copies. His engrossing, new novel, “A Thousand Splendid Suns”(Riverhead, $26), has also shot to the top of the national bestseller lists. In the new book, Hosseini covers 35 years in Afghanistan’s turbulent, tragic history through the eyes of Mariam and Laila, the two abused wives of a Kabul shoemaker.

Mariam is the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy man. After her
mother’s suicide in the mid-1970s, the 15-year-old girl is married to
Rasheed, a man 30 years older who starts beating her after they find
she cannot bear children. For 19 years, she lives alone with Rasheed, forced to wear the burkha, the head-to-toe covering, and suffers his abuse as Afghanistan undergoes Soviet occupation and genocidal civil war.

In 1992, Rasheed marries the war orphan Laila, also 15 years-old. The
two women are at first adversaries, but then find a bond against their
hateful husband. As the country descends into the hell of endless war
and the Taliban, the women’s affection for each other grows, as they raise two children. Out of the grim environment of war and domestic abuse, they are able to pull out a common joy in each other’s company.

For Husseini, the story of two women trapped in an abusive marriage to
the same man came from his 2003 visit to Afghanistan.

"When I went to Kabul, the things I heard were really
astonishing," said the 42-year-old Hosseini in an interview at a New
York City hotel. "Women had seen their children starve to death. A
woman’s sister had been raped and killed herself. There were women
living in abject poverty who were beggars."

Then there was the grim execution video. "It is a rather famous video
out of Afghanistan," he said. “It is a grainy shot of a woman wearing a
burkha being led to a spot in a soccer stadium. The Taliban guy behind
her shoots her in the head rather casually. She collapses. It disturbed
me, but the writer in me thought, ‘What was her crime? Who was she?
What kind of dreams did she have? What was she like as a child?’”

Mariam and Laila come from vastly different experiences. "The key word with Mariam is that she is isolated in every sense of
the word,” said Hosseini. “She is a woman who is detached from the day-to-day norms of human existence. Really, she just wants connection with another human being. Until Laila comes along, you hasn’t found these things. Laila had much higher aspirations. She had a much more fulfilling relationship with her father, her girlfriends and her childhood friend
Tariq. She expected to finish school and is looking for personal
fulfillment. These are two very different, representative kinds of
women."



Throwing the women together in his novel, Hosseini expected some
friction, but his women found kinship in adversity, despite beatings and emotional cruelty from Rasheed. "Mariam had been there for 19 years, and she would feel her territory infringed upon," said Hosseini, whose family emigrated to the United States in 1980. "What the women found out is they shared a common hardship, namely an abusive, psychologically imposing man. Mariam finally finds a person to connect with, and because she is childless, Laila becomes her
daughter for all practical purposes. Laila finds a friend and a doting alternative mother."

In Hosseini's deft hands, the abusive husband Rasheed is a multilayered
person. "Rasheed's the embodiment of the patriarchal, tribal
character. In writing him, I didn’t want to write him as an
irredeemable villain. He is a reprehensible person, but there are
moments of humanity, such as his love for his son."

To keep centered with Rasheed, Hosseini kept remembering an experience
he had in Afghanistan four years ago. "I had dinner with a man who had a very sweet, subservient wife. He said to me slyly, 'She doesn’t know this
yet, but I have another one coming.' He meant he was getting a second
wife. I would go back to that to put more meat on Rasheed’s bones."

During the four decades that the novel covers, Afghanistan and the
condition of its women become more horrible with each passing year. Despite slaughtering a million people in the countryside, the Soviets had a liberal policy towards Afghani women. Mariam and Leila observe this horrible collapse.

"Once the Soviets left and the international community lost interest in
Afghanistan, Afghanistan fell into the hands of the mujahideen
factions," said Hosseini. "These folks had identical ideas about women
as the Taliban had, but were too busy killing each other to implement
them. When the Taliban came in, they severely restricted women’s access
to jobs and healthcare. Women became invisible to society."

Even with the abusive conditions at home and the cruelty of endless war
and the Taliban, Mariam and Leila find contentment with each other.
"The women find joy in their day-to-day lives, from the children, to
doing chores together and the cup of tea they have at the end of a hard
day," said Hosseini. “People find meaning and redemption in the most
unusual human connections.

Like Sidney Carton in Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities,' Mariam
chooses death to save Leila and her two children, but goes to her
execution with dignity. "Mariam really matured by the end of this novel," said Hosseini "She had found what
she wanted in life, a companion. She had found love and acceptance, and
a home. It was with peace that she could walk to her death. She did
what every mother does, which is to put the well-being of her child
first."

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer from Brooklyn, N.Y.

David Mamet on the Eternal Scams of Hollywood in "Bambi vs. Godzilla"

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger in March 2007)

In the mid-1970s, David Mamet became one of America’s most prominent playwrights, with the cracking, harsh dialogue in “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” and “American Buffalo.” In the late 1980s, he started writing screenplays and directing films. His acclaimed film work includes “House of Games” “Homicide,” and the more recent “State and Main.”

In his new book “Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business” (Pantheon, $22), Mamet hits the Hollywood film world head on, bashing sequels, the death of good screenplays and how Tinseltown is packed with legions of executives who dodge responsibility. Mamet loves Hollywood, but he gives his shots, mocking film schools, predicting the demise of movie studios and indicating that screenwriting is often a whore’s game, where the aspiring screenwriter will do “anything” to get his work produced. While exploring why Hollywood movies can be so bad, Mamet offers a primer in the classics-- going through his love love of film noir and dusting off the oldies that must be seen, like director William Wyler’s 1936 “Dodsworth” and the 1973 Robert Mitchum vehicle, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle.”

Mamet, 59, was raised in Chicago and educated at Goddard College in Vermont. He is the author of more than 20 plays and 18 screenplays, and has written nonfiction books and novels. He lives in Vermont and Hollywood with the actress Rebecca Pidgeon and their two children. Mamet met with freelance writer Dylan Foley at an exclusive hotel in Manhattan.

Q. You’ve written a witty and at times scathing commentary on the Hollywood filmmaking system. What motivated you to do this?

A. I love Hollywood, I really do. I don’t think this book is a critique. It’s my attempt to make a unified field guide of what goes on in Hollywood. It’s an attempt, for want of a better word, to describe the Marxian dialectic between the workers and capital in the movie industry.

Q. Could you describe the Hollywood movie culture?

A. It’s a company town. The business just happens to be the entertainment industry. It’s no different than Detroit. Detroit’s auto industry got taken down by the Japanese automakers. The Japanese said, “Are they crazy? What are they doing with all that mid-level management, with this outdated infrastructure? We can do better.”

Q. But American movies having amazing box office grosses around the world. No one is going to take down Hollywood like Detroit.

A. No, but eventually the studios are going to fall apart. Someone with a better idea is going to come along and supplant the studios. It’s not going to be someone from another country. Whether the idea is organization of technology, it happens all the time, like YouTube, the Internet or the Weinstein brothers. Just like the Japanese, the Weinsteins looked at Hollywood. They’re great businessmen. “Why are American movies so bad?” they asked. “Because you have to spend too much money to promote them. All the studios are involved in the air war. How can I buy the opening weekend?” The Weinsteins looked at it and said, “To a certain extent, you need the promotion.” Then they said, “Wait a minute, why do I also have to spend $100 million to make the stupid movie?” If I have to promote the movies, to get the critics to see it, I can still make the movie cheaply.” Maybe you’ll even make a better movie cheaply. Or you can buy them for no money from Bulgaria.

Q. It appears that Hollywood is going through a period of bad movies. Do you agree?

A. They’re making some good movies and they are making some less good movies. I think “Crash” was spectacular. It came out of nowhere and they made it for no money. Are Hollywood movies worse? The answer is yeah. Then you have to ask, but then what? What are you going to about it? Nothing. What is happening to the studios is playing itself out.

In the 1950s, the studios were making 10 times the amount of films. The actual percentage of good films is probably the same. Nowadays, the absolute number of good films made is less because less films are made.

Q. One of your most interesting essays is about how screenplays have gotten so bad, with the studios looking for last year’s hit. What is the studio mindset?

A. It’s the bureaucratic mentality (of the executives). The entrepreneur says, “I’ve got an idea that nobody has seen before.” The bureaucrat says, “I’ve got to keep my head down. I’m not going to support anything that hasn’t been seen before That’s not what we do.” The bureaucrat sees their loyalty as correctly linked to the studio, not to the public that goes to the movies.

Q. You criticized test audiences that can change a film’s ending. Why?

A. The only thing wrong with this is they don’t work. There is no correlation between testing and movies grosses. You can’t quantify the audience’s reaction. It’s an interesting illusion. If they like x last year, they are going to like x+1 this year. A lot of people put a lot of time and money into trying to second guess The audience. You can’t do that. I’ve been in the entertainment business for 40 years. It’s all I think about everyday. What does the audience need? People are attracted to novelty. They want to go, “Ooh!” It’s like dating. You can’t know what people are going to fall in love with. When we go to the movies, we fall in love with an idea. It’s new and it hasn’t been seen before.

Q. How do you view graduate film schools?

A. Of course it’s a scam. It’s complete b.s. In general, I don’t know what they teach you. Here’s the thing—it doesn’t count ‘til the meter is running. The meter ain’t running until you are trying the please the audience. It’s not about regurgitating theory. You have to think, how I am I going to tell the story to an audience? As my great friend (film editor) Barbara Tulliver said about the movies, “There are no rules. And there is just one law: Don’t be boring.”

Karen Abbott on White Slavery Madness

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger in August 2007)

In her gripping and wry book, “Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys and the Battle for America’s Soul”(Random House, $26), the journalist Karen Abbott tackles prostitution and white slavery hysteria in Chicago during the first decade of the 20th century. The book centers on the infamous madams Minna and Ada Everleigh, two Southern sisters whose Everleigh Club was the most classy and exclusive brothel in North America.

The action of the book takes place in the Levee, Chicago’s red light district, segregated from the rest of the city to protect the morals of pure, young women. With corrupt aldermen and Democratic politicians like Bathhouse John Coughlin and Hinky Dink Kenna on the take, brothels abounded, with 5,000 women and girls working in them. The Everleigh sisters created a spectacular 50-room whorehouse, with a gold room, fountains of perfume and the the most beautiful girls. They were so famous that “to be Everleighed” became its own verb, inspiring its shorter, modern equivalent. With stories of kidnapped and abused young girls hitting the newspapers, a frenzy over white slavery heats up and the reformers leap in. A crusading cleric, Rev. Ernest Bell, vowed to shut down the Everleigh Club and an ambitious young State’s attorney named Clifford Roe fought to lock up the pimps and panderers who traffic in girls. Legendary characters abound, from Congressman James Mann of Mann Act fame to the Chinese courtesan Suzy Poon Tang (whose name became a bawdy noun). Abbott’s research is extensive and her narrative is witty, relentless and intriguing, covering the rise and fall of the Everleigh sisters and the Levee.

Abbott, 34, was raised in Norristown, Pennsylvania and educated at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. She was a staff writer at Philadelphia magazine and has written for salon.com. She presently lives in Atlanta with her husband. Abbott spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from Chicago.

Q. How did the story of the Everleigh sisters and their Everleigh Club come to you?

A. It came from a bit of family lore. My great-grandmother and her sister emigrated from Slovenia to the United States in 1905. The sister went to Chicago and disappeared. She was never heard from again. I wanted to investigate the circumstance that could have led to her disappearance. I started looking at Chicago in 1905 and came across the shooting death of Marshall Field Jr. shooting pretty quickly. That led me to the Everleigh sisters, and then I didn’t really care at all what happened to my relative.

Q. How did the Everleigh sisters create their identity?

A. When I started looking into the Everleighs, they very expertly created these myths about themselves that was perpetuated through decades. They presented themselves as Southern debutantes, women of social standing and grace. Their personas were as important to them as the decor of their parlors and the beauty of their girls They had some pretty tragic and heartbreaking pasts. Their family lost their fortune after the Civil War. Their grandniece said that their father forced them into prostitution.

Q. Why did you expand the book from the Everleigh sisters to cover corruption, immigration and white slavery madness?


A. At the beginning, I thought it was an interesting story about two women, but then it occurred to me that it was a larger story about America at the time and America’s identity crisis. Immigration was exploding and urbanization was speeding up and people were changing their ideas about sex. There were thousands of white slave narratives, “P@rn for Puritans,” as I call them, were reflecting concerns about shifting mores and values. The country was terrified. The government was really expert at manipulating the fear. It was kind of like their Progressive-era terror alerts.

Q. What was the swirling scene at the Everleigh Club like?

A. The Everleigh Club was the place to be. Prince Henry, the Kaiser’s brother, shows up in New York. The press corps is all bored, asking questions like, “What do you want to see? The Statue of Liberty?” He says, “No, I want to go to the Everleigh Club.” For Prince Henry, they put on an elaborate production of the murder of Zeus’ son, complete with a cloth bull and fake blood.

For young women at the time, they’d be lucky to get a job as a typist. a clerk or a domestic at six dollars a week. If you went to a lesser whorehouse, a girl could get a job for $50 a week. At the Everleigh Club, a girl could make $100 a week.

In the book, I talk about all the fun, fabulous things that happened at the- club, but there was an undercurrent of tragedy. Some girls showed up at the club because they were abandoned by their husbands and had children to care for. Others met with tragedy. One committed suicide. Another was found murdered in a New Orleans alley with her hands cut off to steal her rings.

Q. With characters like Ike Bloom, Hinky Dink Kenna and several dead Chicago millionaires, how did you keep the narrative moving?

A. I’m really lucky. I have a great writing group They’re novelists. I’d spent days reading these dry academic papers on white slavery and would be at risk for writing like that, they would write things in the margin like “Boring!” They were helpful in keeping the narrative focused.

Q. Did you find any evidence that the hysteria over forced prostitution had any basis in fact?

A. The academics are still debating this. The unfortunately named Maurice Van Bever and (brothel owner) Big Jim Colosimo did play a role in some coercion, but I don’t think it was to the extent that the reformers were saying, that 60,000 girls were dying every year in brothels. The backlash against the furor was insightful. The former mayor of Toledo said that the white slavery narratives were the sort of pornography used to satisfy the American sense of news.

Q. Two of your main reformers--Rev. Ernest Bell and State’s attorney Clifford Roe come off as sympathetic characters. How did you write them?

A. If they weren’t sympathetic characters, the reader would dismiss them as a viable enemy to the Everleigh sisters. Ernest Bell was probably the most interesting person to research. He kept everything, from his diaries and his doodles, to pamphlets of men with faces eaten away by syphilis. He even left his personal effects. I felt like I was going through his pants pockets.

Nathan Englander on “The Ministry of Special Cases”

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger in May 2007)

In 1999, the writer Nathan Englander burst onto the American literary
scene with his masterful and satirical story collection “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” chronicling the Jewish communities in New York Jerusalem and Europe. Eight years later, Englander is back with his debut novel “The Ministry of Special Cases”(Knopf, $25), which is the story of the Poznan family during the Argentine “Dirty War” in the mid-1970s after their only son is “disappeared” by the military. The novel moves deftly from the black comedy of one family to the unmitigated horror of parents realizing that their child will never been seen again.

Kaddish Poznan is a hijo de puta, son of a whore, born in a Buenos Aires brothel where his Jewish immigrant mother worked. For his entire life, Kaddish has been an outcast from the Argentine Jewish community. Nearing 50, Kaddish has a lucrative job going into the section of the Jewish cemetery reserved for prostitutes and pimps, obliterating the names on the gravestones for the occupants’ now-respectable children. Kaddish and his wife Lillian have a 20-year-old son named Pato, a college student dreaming of revolution and smoking a lot of pot. Pato is taken by unidentified military men. The parents plunge into a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, where Lillian waits at a government office with other desperate parents looking for their children, while Kaddish goes into the underworld he knows well. He finds out the grim reality, that the military has dropped thousands of drugged, naked young people out of airplanes into the hungry River Plate. Lillian refuses to believe her son is dead. Kaddish has the
unimaginable burden: how to mourn for his son where there is no body? Englander, has created a beautiful novel that is both witty and brutal. In the swirling terror he has created, Englander addresses issues of identity, community and the destruction of a civil society.

Englander, 37, was raised on Long Island and educated at SUNY Binghamton and the Iowa Writers Workshop. “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges” won the Pen/Malamud Award. Englander lives in New York City and
poke with freelance writer Dylan Foley at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, a cafe near his home.

Q. How did you get involved with writing about the “Dirty War” and
Buenos Aires?

A.. With a book that you’ve spent a decade on, it is so strange to explain where it came from. In a sense, the book became my life. If somebody asked me, “Why is Kaddish this way?” I would have to say, “How else could he be?” I had meet some older Argentine guys when I lived in Israel whose lives had been so completely shaped by the politics of the 1970s. I had
also been to Buenos Aires for a friend’s wedding in 1991 and loved it there. Honestly, for me, it is the ideas that I have been obsessed, like identity, community and injustice, and the idea of bodies. Argentina became the right setting for it It’s not like a chose a setting and came up with the story. These big ideas were banging around in my head.

Q. There is an hysterical section about the Jewish pimps and whores of
Buenos Aires, and Kaddish’s family history, with tough guys like Hezzi Two-Blades
and Talmud Harry who formed their own synagogue called the Society of the
Benevolent Self. Did you invent this all?

For me, research works backwards. I like to dream. There was an actual
society of pimps and whores. People ask me, “What is your research? I
laugh. I don’t read Spanish, but I may have looked in a Spanish book
and have seen a picture. The picture was all I needed. In other books I used, I may have just read a paragraph. I read about a cemetery (for pimps and prostitutes). I could have spent 10,000 pages on the Jewish whorehouses. In the end, I wrote 150 pages, and I got it down to the 10 or 12 pages that it is now. That world in itself was fun to write. It took a while for me to figure out that this book was not about that world that Kaddish was born into, but the legacy of that world.

Q. Where did the Ministry of Special Cases come from?

A. Living in Israel, you learn that Kafka is not made up. People ask me how I would have imagined such a bureaucracy. Just try to get a parking permit in Jerusalem. You shall know the horrors.

Q. Why didn’t you go back to Buenos Aires while writing the book?

Last year, my editor and agent were each holding me by the arm. “You will cost us another decade if you go near that city,” they said. It made me realize that this novel is my own world. If I dream something, if I invent a Ministry of Special Cases, it exists and is true because it is central to my world.

Q. Kaddish believes that his son is dead. Lillian fervently believes he is alive. These positions shreds their marriage. How did you create their scenes together?

A. In terms of spending all this time in the book, for me to write these two characters, I had to treat them with absolute respect. That they can be in the same house during this nightmare and have opposing views on their son, it is not for me or the narrator to judge them.

Q. Under curfews, military killers drive around in green Falcons rounding up kids, torturing and killing them. Neighbors pretend to be blind to these atrocities. Is this the collapse of civil society?

A. Part of civil society is a politeness that allows for things like this to happen. A woman’s relative disappears and she is told not to help to look for him. The idea is that a neighbor disappears and you don’ mention it for fear of dying. It allows for a surface to form. It’s a world upside down. I feel like it is politeness flipped into terror.

Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Noir on Frozen Tundra

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger in May 2007)

Michael Chabon’s wonderful new novel “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union”(HarperCollins, $27) opens with Meyer Landsman, a Jewish police detective in Sitka, Alaska, being awakened from his drunken downward spiral in his flophouse hotel room. His downstairs neighbor, a heroin addict and chess hustler, has been shot dead. The grim reality surfaces that the murdered man was the missing son of Alaska’s most powerful rabbi and may have been the Messiah, according to Jewish legend.

Using alternative history, Chabon has settled the Jews of Europe in Alaska after World War II. The Zionists in Palestine were pushed into the Mediterranean in 1948, so Sitka is home to three million Jews. Chabon’s imaginary community is a freezing hybrid of Yiddish, American and Native Alaskan cultures, an incredibly witty Jewish “Blade Runner” of ethnic clashes. Landsman and his half-Indian Orthodox Jewish partner Berko must track down the dead man’s killer, plunging them into the murky world of the fictional Verbovers, an ultra-Orthodox sect with direct links to organized crime. It is six decades after Alaska was settled by Jews in the 1940s, but they bleakly await their possible expulsion through “Reversion,” the policy where the United States will reclaim its territory. Paying a brilliant homage to Raymond Chandler and film noir grittiness, Chabon has peopled a universe with Yiddish-speaking gangsters and cops, and extremist American Jews and Christian who dream of the apocalypse.

Chabon, 43, was raised in Maryland and educated at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of California Irvine. Chabon is the author of “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” and Summerland,” and his novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their four children. Chabon met with freelance writer Dylan Foley at a New York City hotel.

Q. How did you decide to set a Jewish community in Alaska?

A. At some point, I picked up this piece of trivia that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had proposed resettling the European Jews in Alaska. It’s one of these random bits of Jewish American lore that I knew. I thought of this again when I was writing an essay on the phrasebook “Say It in Yiddish: A Phrasebook for Travelers” for the now-defunct Civilization magazine. The book was written in 1958, after the Holocaust and after Yiddish had gone into decline. Where would you go with the book, where would you travel? In passing in the essay, I wondered what it would have been like if the Jews settled in Alaska, and you had as cold, Yiddish-speaking North American country. I was playing with a counter-Israel,an alternative Israel, where everything is inverted. Yet after you are done inverting everything, you are still left with some core similarities. That is what interested me.

Q. What was your own Jewish background and your relationship with Yiddish?

A. I was raised in Columbia, Maryland, in this independent congregation called the Columbia Jewish Congregation. I had a bar mitzvah. We went to synagogue on the High Holidays. We went to the synagogue on Friday night, not always, but sometimes. We lit candles, not always, but sometimes. I heard a lot of Yiddish growing up My mother’s father, my mother’s mother and my great aunt spoke Yiddish with each other all the time. They used it when they didn’t want the kids to understand.

In using Yiddish in the novel, I really proceeded as much as possible by ear, what sounded right and appropriate to me. I tried to stick to the fundamental rule that I would only use a Yiddish word in the text if it was being used in a way that was not readily translatable or being used in a slang manner. A word like shammes literally means a sextant, but it has the association with seamus. It felt like the right slang word for cop or detective. Other things I did a lot was translate Yiddish expressions, like “banging me a tea kettle,” which means to pester someone.

Q. Where does your hero Meyer Landsman come from?

A. He partly comes out of the hard-boiled detective genre. Normally, they are private eyes, but my guy is not. They are very isolated, solitary figures. Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe lives by himself in a cheap apartment. It has this template of a lonely guy. in the course of writing this book, I realized that my story was overtly and implicitly concerned with redemption, and redemption of the world. This redemption was something that Meyer Landsman was going to need, too.

Q. But the book opens with the redeemer, a possible Messiah, dead in his hotel room with a bullet hole in the back of his head. Why?

A. As I started the second draft of the novel, I was pretty immersed in Jewish folklore and Hasidic folklore I had all this stuff in my mind, and at the same time I was reading Raymond Chandler’s short stories. What I noticed was that he had a lot of hotel dicks, hotel detectives. I love hotels. There was something appealing about a guy who lives in the hotel where the trouble takes place. Because I was plunged into the lore of the Messiah, I had this image of the Messiah lying dead in an hotel room. That image became very haunting. I realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t the Messiah, but someone who had been considered a possible Messiah. This man, Mendel, is my favorite character. I have a lot of pity for him, partially because he has so much pity for others, though ultimately he is the most deserving of pity.

Q. What interested you in the “Reversion,” where the Jews may be expelled from Alaska, as their territory is returned to the United States?

A. That is our history. That is all that has ever happened to the Jews, up until 1948, one expulsion after another. I was raised with this sense, like every Jew, that everything was different after 1948, that history was altered. Now there was a new template for being Jewish, never having to undergo expulsion again. It’s incredibly shortsighted and a typical modern perspective that now we have arrived at the end of history. It’s foolish to assume that the way things are now are the way they always will be. I am very aware of the fragility of everything as Jews in America and Israel’s position in the world.

John McGahern’s Last Literary Effort in "All Will Be Well"

(Originally published in the Denver Post in April 2006)

By Dylan Foley

“Writing this memoir, I discovered how treacherous the memory is,” said the great Irish novelist John McGahern two weeks before his death on March 30th. “We tend to telescope things that actually took place over a long period of time.”

In one of his last interviews by telephone from his farmhouse in County Leitrim, Ireland, McGahern discussed his powerful and moving autobiography “All Will Be Well” (Knopf, $25), which chronicles his mother’s death from cancer in the 1940s when he was nine and his survival in the house of his abusive police sergeant father.

Like his novels “The Barracks” and “By the Lake,” McGahern’s memoir is a lyrical telling of a lost rural Ireland. The book opens with the intense bond between the writer and his schoolteacher mother Susan, and her battle with cancer. Her death is inevitable and she is all that protects her seven children from the violent rages of her husband Frank.

The author of six novels and three short story collections, McGahern was known as one of Ireland’s most beautiful prose stylists. He wrote about bleak family relationships and the endings in the novels, all set in the Irish countryside, were not usually happy.

McGahern had a bout with colon cancer, but battled it into remission in 2002. The disease came back with a vengeance this year. McGahern had to cancel his American book tour in early March. “My bags were packed, but the doctors told me it was not a good idea to go,” he said.

Despite his terminal illness, the 71-year-old McGahern was an engaging and witty interview subject, reflecting on life with his mother and father from sixty years ago.

“My father was very attractive and handsome, like a movie star,” said McGahern. “In the marriage, he started behaving badly even before I was born. My mother was very religious. She was committed to one man and would think that was her duty.”

The memoir is a clear-eyed account of the abuse in the McGahern family and how the children survived. It is told without melodrama or self pity. Outside his immediate family, Frank McGahern could be a charming figure. At home, he beat his children often without provocation. “He hated when we were at peace or getting along well,” said McGahern. “He had to cause some incident or violence to break up that happiness. The violence was to direct the attention back at himself.”

One of the father’s cruelest acts was to neglect the mother in the last months of her life. The mother and father were living in separate villages 20 miles away, but he rarely visited. The title of the book comes from a bizarre letter that the father sent the dying mother, telling her that all will be well if she put her faith in god.

Three days before Susan McGahern died, her husband sent men to take the children away and to strip her house of all its furniture, except for the room she was dying in. McGahern was forever haunted by the moment that he ran out of her room for the last time.

“It was extraordinary just to leave one room furnished in the whole house,” said McGahern. “All the furniture was taken out. I can still hear those iron beds being banged apart.”

The children were also banned from the funeral. “My father wouldn’t let me go because he wanted to be the lone star of the funeral,” he said.

In a magnificently written, wrenching scene, at the same time that his mother’s funeral begins, the nine-year-old McGahern runs out to the neighboring fields with a clock, following the rituals of the mass minute by minute as his heart breaks.

“It wasn’t very hard to write because it was so vivid,” said McGahern. “It was as vivid as yesterday.”

It was the memory of his loving and nurturing mother that enabled McGahern and his siblings to live through violent and unstable conditions. “We certainly wouldn’t have survived if we didn’t have the years we had with her,” he said.

McGahern and his five sisters and one brother banded together to subvert their father. “We became a small army to ourselves,” he said. “We organized ourselves against our father. Anyone who tried to curry favor with him would be punished by us. He became isolated in his own home, even when we were just 14 or 15.”

The McGahern children would parody the father’s whining and complaining that he had such ungrateful sons and daughters. “We would have these jazz sessions, where we would imitate him,” said McGahern. Imitating someone is like mastery. We used to laugh at him.”

Despite the abuse at home, all seven McGahern children eventually escaped the father. Several of the sisters became nurses in England and others became civil servants in Ireland. The human toll on the children was heavy, especially on the youngest Frank. “Frank did very well in life,” said McGahern. “He was the financial comptroller of the BBC in London, but he never really recovered. He eventually drank himself to death.”

In the memoir, McGahern explores the roots of his life as a writer. His mother’s burning desire was that he become a priest and say Mass for her. He had the epiphany that he would rather be a writer, to be a god of his own fictional world.

McGahern touches on the early scandals of his 1965 second novel “The Dark,” which includes scene of a father sexually molesting his son. The book got him fired from his job as a schoolteacher by the Archbishop of Dublin. “The Archbishop of Dublin was obsessed with impure books and movies,” said McGahern, laughing at the 40-year-old memory. “He didn’t want a writer of impure books in his school.”

“All Will Be Well” has sold 70,000 hardbacks in Ireland. For his only memoir, McGahern resisted embellishment. “The fiction writer’s instinct is to improve and reinvent, but of course you can’t do that,” he said.

Though John McGahern’s death is a loss to the world literary community, he has given readers his final gift, a starkly beautiful memoir of a boy surviving a harsh childhood to become a world-class writer. “McGahern’s “All Will Be Well” has set a high standard to meet for the memoirs that follow.

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Nora Ephron on her essays in "I Feel Bad About My Neck"

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger in August 2006)

In her first book of new essays in 25 years titled “I Feel Bad About My Neck, And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman”(Knopf, $20), writer, screenwriter and film director Nora Ephron tackles the comic indignities of growing older and women’s attempts to stop the aging process.

Starting with the idea that a woman’s neck usually collapses at the age of 43, Ephron moves on to an essay called “I Hate My Purse,” which chronicles the insanity of purses stuffed with the wreckage of life. Using sharp self-parody, Ephron covers her addiction to hair coloring, her brutal beauty maintenance regimen, her 20-year romance with a cheap rental apartment in Manhattan and a mirthful list of things she should have known, including “The last four years of psychoanalysis are a waste of money.” Beneath the comedy, Ephron addresses such serious topics as finding true romance in her forties. Her last essay, “Considering the Alternative,” is a moving take on death and friends lost.

Ephron, 65, was born in New York City, raised in Beverly Hills and educated at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She started as a newspaper reporter at the New York Post, became a prominent writer for Esquire, wrote the bestselling books “Crazy Salad” and “Heartburn,” crafted the screenplays for the modern classics “Silkwood” and “When Harry Met Sally,” and directed “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Bewitched.” Ephron lives in New York City with her husband, the writer Nicholas Pileggi, and spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley at her publisher’s office in Manhattan.


Q. Why did you start the book with the essay on your neck?

A. Why did I start the book with the neck? It’s the title of the book. You start with the title, don’t you think? It’s kind of like organizing a CD. Do you put the strongest piece first or second? This is one of the mysteries of life. I thought I’d lead with my neck. I went from the most trivial to superficial thing to the something that is not superficial.

Q. Do you think the book is about the absurdity of growing older and fighting the aging process?

A. The whole impulse for the book was to write about something people don’t talk about. I am completely fascinated that people my age think that if they don’t tell people how old they are, no one will know. If everyone can pretend that old age is some kind of blessing, and god knows it is compared to dying, they think no one will catch on to the idea that it is a very complicated period of your life. It began to irritate me that no one was telling the truth about growing older, that there was this impulse to make it all seem so cheerful. The good news is, you are much wiser, but what about the rest of it? When I first got the idea of writing about my neck.

Q. You write that there are no white-haired women in Manhattan. When did you have this epiphany?

A. We were having a dinner at Le Cirque for Jean Harris (the headmistress who shot the Scarsdale Diet doctor). She was the only woman there who had white hair. She had just gotten out of prison. That was the epiphany. There is no question that in places where people have money, they do more to stop the aging process than in places like Iowa. In places like Iowa, where I have been, you see a lot of women with gray hair in their 30s. They just let it go.

Q. You write this bittersweet essay about losing your rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan after more than two decades. What is the purpose of the piece?

A. That is not really a piece about rent control. That is about confusing your home with a love object. It’s not really a piece about New york either. The confusion of real estate with who you are and what you want to say about yourself, that’s a universal thing. The essay is also about moving on and downsizing at a certain point in life.

Q. It’s been 25 years since your last book of essays, “Scribble, Scribble.” Why did you return to the essay form?

A. The truth is after I wrote the essay about the neck and the purse, I said, “I think I can do a book circling this question of age.” I made a list of things that might go into the book and then I wrote most of them--the apartment piece, the maintenance piece. I started writing a list of things I’d wished I’d known, then I knew that I had to write a piece on death

I wish I’d written about those people in their 60s and 70s who are still noodling over something that happened to them in high school, or something that their parents did to them, their parents having been dead now for 50 years. It is time to give it up. GIVE IT UP. There are a huge number of people who still think they can get off the hook for their actions because of what their parents did to them.

Q. In your career, you've moved from newspaper writer to magazine essayist, to novelist and screenwriter, and finally film director. Did you see a natural progression in your career?

A. What I have been lucky about is that every seven to 10 years, I have been able to learn something new to do. Every X number of years, things came along that refreshed my work or gave me an unbelievably steep learning curve. It keeps you absolutely awake. Even the blogging I am doing for the Huffington Post is a completely different way of writing than these essays. If you spend too much time writing them, you are not doing them right.

I’ve always had a theory that one of the things that women don’t quite admit when they are complaining about the injustices of life is that one of the things women get to do is to switch careers. There is more fluidity for women than there is for men.

Jane Smiley’s Take on War, Sex and Hollywood in "Ten Days in the Hills"

(Originally published in the Denver Post in June 2007)

By Dylan Foley

Jane Smiley’s new novel “Ten Days in the Hills”(Knopf, $26) takes place during the opening days of the Iraq War in 2003, where a has-been movie director named Max entertains his family, friends and some unwanted house guests in his isolated mansion in the hills overlooking Hollywood. Inspired by Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th century stories in “The Decameron,” the participants fight about the war, have sex, discuss movies and tell stories.

With two of her novels, “A Thousand Acres” and “The Secret Lives of Dentists,” having been turned into films, Smiley has her own views on Hollywood. “My experience is that you get screwed one way or the other in Hollywood,” said Smiley, in an interview at a New York hotel, “but there are variations on getting screwed.”

Bringing this experience to bear on the new novel, Smiley has created a witty, talkie fiction about the Hollywood culture, where not much happens. Ten complex characters reveal their angst, humor and fixations, discussing their failed careers and successes while picking a voluntary quarantine in the lap of luxury while a war rages in a distant land.

For Smiley, the origins of the new novel come from her long-burning desire to write a sex novel set in Hollywood. In 2002, the plot developed when she started reading the “The Decameron,” about citizens of Florence trying to escape the Black Death.

“I read ‘The Decameron’ at the same time of the anthrax scare,” said Smiley. “Our press was full of panic over a dozen anthrax cases. In Florence in the 14th century, 50 to 70 percent of the city was dying of the plague. Plagues were on my mind.”

Smiley assembled a motley crew of guests in her novel. There is Max’s girlfriend Elena, an ardent lefty; Zoe Cunningham, Max’s movie star ex-wife; Paul, Zoe’s New Age boyfriend; Isabel, Max’s daughter, who is secretly sleeping with his agent Stoney, Charlie, a depressed country club Republican friend of Max’s, and assorted others.

Like “The Decameron,” the book is divided into 10 parts, each marking a day in America’s newest war. Smiley writes explicitly about sex, often using street terms for the various parts involved. The desire to write honestly about sex, she noted, comes from Hollywood’s failures.

“I saw ‘Meet Joe Black,’ a movie about love, and when the characters had sex,” said Smiley, “the cameras focused on their faces. How would you portray lovemaking? It’s very difficult.

“I think people talk explicitly when the make love,” she said, “especially when they are sexually satisfied. Zoe and Paul are sexually satisfied, though they can’t make their relationship work any other way.”

In Max’s house, the amicable, dysfunctional family starts to crack after some arguments over the war. The occupants retreat into discussing movies, sex and older horrors, like the Nazi death camps, the Crusades and the Rwandan genocide. Life goes on, despite the war. People eat, people discuss old family conflicts as the war becomes a faraway news event. “It had to be in a house far way from the center of things, like ‘The Decameron,’” she said.

“If you’ve seen my pieces on the Huffington Post,” said Smiley, referring to the opinion web site, “you’ll know that I am a fiery polemicist against George Bush and the war. My editor and I felt that to go on and on about the war was really boring. We decided to get to the war by talking about the other dislocations of history.”

In Max’s house, there is a sexual betrayal, then the residents continue eating healthy, expensive organic food. They watch and discuss movies, from “Sunset Boulevard” to “The Ten Commandments.” “I also had to get the Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal’ in there because it deals with the Black Death,” said Smiley, in a nod to “The Decameron.”

The complacency of the people in the house is further shaken when they are invited to stay with a Russian billionaire who wants Max to remake an old Yul Brynner Cossack film “Taras Bulba,” based on a novel by Nikolai Gogol. All 10 members of the hodgepodge family move to the Russian’s house in Bel Air, a fantasy mansion full of stolen Vermeers and Rembrandts.

The Russians offer Max anything he could ever want to make their film. In the megamansion, two maids try to sleep with the guests. The novel shifts into what is almost a fantasy sequence, a fable.

“As soon as you have wretched excess in Hollywood, you have wretched excess on a high level,” said Smiley. “As soon as you have Russian billionaires, you have more wretched excess. The Russian house appears to be a dream that will disappear.”

Even in the fantasy mansion, the occupants are left with the turbulent realities of America’s future. For most of us in America, life goes on,” said Smiley. “For Isabel, there is a feeling that her prospects, despite her privilege, are much darker than Max’s were at his age. Though she finally admits she loves Stoney, her lover, that doesn’t make them safe, or that that the prospects for their children are good.”

Smiley’s own trials as a novelist in Hollywood were mixed. “For ‘A Thousand Acres,’” the book that won Smiley a Pulitzer, “they treated me great, had me on the set and made a dull, earnest movie,” said Smiley. “For ‘The Secret Lives of Dentists,’ they treated me like I was dead, I had trouble getting paid and I had to buy my own ticket to see the movie. I thought the movie was fabulous, so I forgave them for being such [creeps]. Wouldn’t it be nice if they could be good to you and still make good movies?”

Smiley is about to take her third expedition into Hollywood. “I’m in the midst of taking the plunge with my last novel, ‘Horse Heaven’,” she said “It’s not such a crime, because now I’m prepared.

“My advice to any novelist involved with movies is to keep writing novels,” she said. “Hollywood will tickle you under the chin and make you feel great, but they are not reliable.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer from Brooklyn, N.Y.

Mailer Writes Hitler Novel with Devils

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger in January 2006)

By Dylan Foley

“I can say that I’ve been obsessed with Hitler since I was nine years old,” said the novelist Norman Mailer, from his Provincetown, Massachusetts home. “My mother only had a high school education, but she was a highly intelligent woman. In the early 1930s, she said, ‘This man is going to kill half the Jews.’ She took him seriously long before anyone else did.”

Mailer has turned his obsession into a new novel, “The Castle in the Forest” (Random House, $27), where he imagines the tortured, incestuous history of Adolf Hitler and his father Alois Sr. in late 19th century Austria. The book is narrated by Dieter, the urbane mid-level management devil who is trying to corrupt the young Adolf.

“To me, Hitler has always been very real to me and frightening,” said Mailer in a recent interview from his majestic living room overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, as he referred to his Jewish upbringing in New York City. “There is a part of me that has concentrated on Hitler my whole life. I wasn’t that surprised when I started writing about him.”

The book is narrated by Dieter after World War II, where he served as an SS officer. As a demon, Dieter’s history with the Hitler family starts 80 years before the war, where he follows the career of Alois Sr. as he climbs out of poverty to become a customs official in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Alois Sr. is a brutal sexual predator, and an abusive husband and father. His third wife is Klara, a woman who in Mailer’s fictionalized tale is almost certainly his own daughter. She gives birth to Adolf. The demonic Dieter uses not pitchforks and claws, but subtle manipulation, otherworldly spies, human agents and implanted thoughts to sculpt Adolf to have the potential for great evil. Battling the angels who try to protect the boy’s soul, Dieter helps crush Adolf’s fragile dreams. At the same time, Alois teaches his son cruelty and bitterness.

Mailer turns 84 this week. Though his knees are shot, forcing him to walk with two canes, the old literary lion’s mind and wit are still very sharp. In the interview, he meditated on Hitler, God and the Devil.

“It occurred to me that there was a bureaucracy to Satanism,” said Mailer. “The devils are working all the time. God’s angels, the Cudgels, are working all the time. That’s where people see my novel as a farce.”

Mailer has been a public literary figure and target since “The Naked and the Dead,” his World War II novel, was published six decades ago in 1948. He has written 35 works of fiction and nonfiction since then, but Mailer ignores the labels that people put on his books.

“I don’t care about the names that people put on things,” he said. “What I try to20do in a book is to get the people as real as possible I don’t see people the way that others do. I’m interested in the double aspect of people.”

Working with his research assistants, Mailer went through more than 400 books about Hitler and related subjects in the four years it took to write the novel. Using novelistic license, he wrote an incest plot. “There were hints all over in Hitler’s family history of incest,” said Mailer. “At this point, you have to grab the nettles, bite the bullet. We need more than a simple explanation of Hitler. As a novelist, I had to make choices.”

Mailer’s gripping and intriguing rewrite of the Hitler family with devils asks dark questions about the human soul and the forces of good and evil.

Mailer’s Dieter is an overworked functionary who takes pride in his work. “For me, it was natural to have the Devil in the book,” he said. “Dieter is the perfect gentleman. I’ve believed that the devil has existed for a long time. My notion is that God is a creator, not a law giver. I’ve always seen God as existential, a God who may succeed or fail. God is doing the best that he or she can do. The Devil is doing his best to overthrow God. That’s the battleground.”

Alois and Klara have a turbulent marriage, with Alois’ violence and infidelity. “I didn’t see their marriage as that terrible,” said Mailer , who lives with his sixth wife, the painter Norris Church Mailer. “Having been married six times, so marriage is a theme for me. I’m very interested in the nature of marriage, what’s good about it, what’s contradictory about it?”

It was Hitler’s father that intrigued Mailer. “I found Alois to be a fascinating character,” he said. “He’s a man who’s had a hard life, and he’s tough and vulnerable, like so many other people. People who are macho are macho here and vulnerable there. People have a tendency to say, ‘What is Mailer up to?’ I can say no more than these are people as well as I understand them.

“How could a man have a life like Alois, without having a great deal of cruelty?” asked Mailer. “I am not a moralist. Moralism is often the first strength of a mediocre mind. In other words, people tend to be moral because it gives them a sense of security that they haven’t earned.”

For Mailer, the life of Adolf Hitler and the crimes that he committed are still beyond human comprehension.

“Hitler is so beyond the pale that, humanly speaking, one can’t understand him,” he said. “If Jesus was born as God’s son, I would go so far as to say that Hitler was born as the Devil’s son. Hitler is the ghost of the 20th century. Speaking as a Jew, Hitler did tremendous damage to the Jews after his death, so that they can’t think of Hitler without becoming paralyzed.”

As the novel progresses, it shifts from Alois Sr. to Adolf. Adolf becomes hardened by the death of his baby brother Edmund, after Adolf intentionally infects him with the measles. “After the death of Edmund, there is a serious change in Adolf,” said Mailer. “There is a huge guilt that he thinks he might have killed Edmund, and he may well have. It poisoned something in him and he began to go through bad years, not only the bad years in school, but the bad years later in Vienna. He was pursued by a profound guilt that he could not accept. I don’t get into it in this book, but maybe we’ll get into in another book. I’m almost 84. I’m not going to make predictions about what books I am going to do.”

In the twilight years of his formidable life, Mailer admitted he thinks a lot more about God and the Devil. “I haven’t spent my life thinking, ‘God’s with me,’ or ‘The Devil’s with me,” said Mailer, “but as I get older, I think about these things.”

Mailer mused that it may have been divine intervention that forced him to remain a novelist. “There were years in my life when I wanted to be anything but a novelist,” said Mailer, referring to his attempts to be a boxer, a playwright and even to be Mayor of New York. “If I had a guardian angel, he would h ave been saying to me, “Don’t think you can be a boxer, you’ll get clobbered. Don’t think you’re the world’s greatest sex object, because you are not.’ This guardian angel kept pushing me back into the novel, whether I wanted it or not.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Mark Danielewski’s Second Wild Ride in "Only Revolutions"

(Originally published in the Denver Post, August 2006)

By Dylan Foley

In 2000, Mark Z. Danielewski published his debut novel “House of Leaves,” a spoof of a horror story about a house that was one-quarter inch larger on the inside than the outside, and the fatal expedition to explore the caverns underneath. Filled with footnotes, fake graduate school dissertations and documentary film commentary, the novel segues into a grim tale of the brutality of human existence as told through the eyes of former battered child Johnny Truant. Backed by a committed group of Internet-savvy uber-fans, the book has sold 300,000 copies worldwide.

Now Danielewski is back with his sophomore effort, an equally demanding and swirling novel called “Only Revolutions ”(Pantheon, $26), the story of Sam and Hailey, two discarded teenagers who blaze across the United States in souped up automobiles, traveling from 1863 to 2063. Like he did in “House of Leaves” by standing the horror story on its head, Danielewski has now used his brilliance to hijack the classic American road trip by turning it into a mythical journey with two storytellers. For his efforts on the new book, Danielewski has been nominated for the prestigious National Book Award, to be decided on November 14th.

The 360-page novel is narrated by both Sam and Hailey. Sam’s story travels from 1863 to 1963, when John Kennedy was assassinated. Hailey chronicles the same events,=2 0but they take place from 1963 to 2063. The reader has to flip the book over every eight pages to read their different versions of events. Like “House of Leaves,” the layout and even the fonts used are crucial to the story. Each page is broken into four quadrants, with 360 words on the page, the number of degrees in a circle There are 90 words of Sam’s side, 90 words of Hailey’s side, and each has a “ticker tape” of history in a sidebar, listing famines, wars and more mundane things.

The book revels in an over-the-top “he said, she said” conflict where Sam’s glowing views of his heroism are contradicted by Hailey’s more pragmatic views. Sam’s transcendent sexual experiences with Hailey are in her eyes much less fun.

Danielewski’s work, told all in free verse, calls to mind the work of Walt Whitman in its celebration, denunciation and chronicle of America. It also pays homage to John Dos Passos’ epic “U.S.A. Trilogy.”

“Only Revolutions” is a vastly different novel than the writer’s debut work. “I looked at the moment,” said Danielewski, in a recent interview, of the success of his first novel. “I realized I could write a sequel to ‘House of Leaves,’ some riff on Johnny Truant, but that would be to support my lifestyle. Or I could take a different path and write a novel that I really believed in. That is what I ultimately did. ”

For Danielewski, “Only Revolutions” began with an image of urban grittiness, that he pulled from things he’d seen in New York City or Los Angeles, where he lives. “The book started for me with two kids who were homeless, asking for change on the corner,” said Danielewski, from a battered tea shop in New York City. “They had each other. If the law cared enough about them, it was only to move them along.

“I always knew the book was going to be a road trip,” he said. “I always like doing genres. As they are tearing across the country, they are withering the world around them. I love road trips, their energy, their malice and romanticism.”

Moving through two hundred years, America’s past, present and future, Sam and Hailey don’t age. Their speech changes, from the archaic vocabulary of the Civil War era, to the Roaring Twenties and the earnest phrases of the Kennedy era. “I realized that for Sam and Hailey, what came out of poverty was the richness of language,” said Danielewski “For me, I ended up finding the language of teenagers. It’s an outcast vocabulary. Your normal Webster doesn’t have most of these terms.”

Sam and Hailey start in a Civil War battlefield in the East. They then move through the Jim Crow South, and wind up in New Orleans in 1929, right before the stock market crash. It is a time of decadence.

“In New Orlea ns, it is the Roaring Twenties,” said Danielewski. “People were taking baths in Dom Perignon. Wall Street sneezed and the rest of the world caught pneumonia. Hailey sneezes that sneeze. As Sam and Hailey crash, the world crashes.”

Other mythical historical parallels abound. “Hailey winds up being taken to the hospital and being taken care of by a doctor in a wheelchair,” he said, shades of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal.

The adrenaline pulses through the book as they travel out West. “The first time you read it, I would say you should read it fast,” said Danielewski. “Otherwise, you might begin to sink into it.”

Sam and Hailey’s physical descriptions prove elusive. Are they white, are they black? It is not clear. “You couldn’t film this book, for they all races,” said Danielewski. “At one point, there is an indication they may be two screaming queens,” meaning two gay men.

As Sam and Hailey go on a collision course through the book from opposite ends, they begin to fall in love. “On the simplest level, I wanted to use the book to describe their relationship,” said Danielewski. “They start far apart, then move closer and closer until at the very middle they see each other accurately, then they move to a greater distance.”

At the end of the book, Sam and Hailey wind up on a snow-covered mountain, both having to make their own heartbre aking choices. For Danielewski, the end of the road has important symbolic value. “In many ways, we are talking about an epic journey,” he said. “It is about the death of adolescence.”

After Sam and Hailey’s wild ride across the country, Danielewski extends this idea to America. “We are at a place in our cultural history,” he said, “where it is time for the United States to mature. The time has come for a greater sense of awareness of the rest of the world.”

Dylan Foley is a writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Alice Sebold on Matricide, Grief and Freedom in "The Almost Moon"

By Dylan Foley

In the first paragraph of Alice Sebold’s new novel “The Almost Moon”(Little Brown, $24.95), Helen Knightly admits that she has killed her mother. “When all was said and done,” says Helen, “killing my mother came easily.” After two decades of caring for her cruel, mentally ill mother, Helen is now free. As her life unravels in the following 24-hour period, Helen botches hiding the body and muses on the love, anger and the hatred she has felt for her mother.

“I always start with obsessions in my writing,” said Sebold in a telephone interview from her home in San Francisco. “For me, it is always an obsession in the culture that greatly affects the culture. Now it’s the phenomenon that people are living longer and longer lives, and the caregiver, usually a she, is living longer and longer under the auspices of being a caregiver.

“There’s really no kind of roadmap of how you can gain your freedom while you’re being a caregiver up into your seventies,” said Sebold. “I kept thinking about that, and the basic idea of freedom and identity from one’s parents.”

Helen’s mother Claire, once a lingerie model, is an agoraphobic shut-in. At 18, Helen escapes her dead-end Pennsylvania town to college and then a doomed marriage to her art professor. Sh e returns to the small town with her young daughters, and after her father’s suicide, takes care of her mother for the next 22 years, locked in a brutal codependency.

At 86, the mother has entered an end stage of obscenity-laced dementia. Following a harsh exchange, Helen smothers her with a bath towel. After the unpremeditated murder, the 49-year-old Helen seduces her best friend’s son, drives around aimlessly and through flashbacks contemplates her shattered family life as the police close in.

“All bets are off in the 24 hours after the murder,” said Sebold. “Helen does need human warmth right after the murder. She goes looking for her friend Natalie, but finds Natalie’s 30-year-old son Hamish and sleeps with him. She’s been brought back to the living. I was interested in what happens when you go so far and kill your mother. It’s not like you’d go home and have an espresso and mow the lawn.”

Helen’s ex-husband Jake flies in from California to support her after the killing. A neighbor finds her mother’s body and Helen becomes a suspect. In a flashback, Helen remembers how Jake accused her of making her own prison with her mother.

“In Helen’s case, the prison can be a more comfortable place than the enlightening reality of freedom,” said Sebold. “You know the prison, you know the warden, and there are comforts within. If you do literal transference with the character, you c an fight Helen and say, ‘She could have gotten out.’ Some people could have and some people would have, but many don’t and many people wouldn’t have. Helen’s lack of ambition brings her back to the prison rather than going into the scary outside.”

Like Sebold’s earlier work, “Lucky,” a memoir of her own 1981 rape, and her bestselling novel “The Lucky Bones,” narrated by a murdered child, “The Almost Moon” is a dark tale, but it incorporates wit and compassion in telling Helen’s story of duty, breakdown, grief and freedom.

In Helen’s decades of caring for her mother, the line between duty and love have become blurred and murky. “One’s mother, one’s parent, is one’s responsibility,” said Sebold. “Even if that person is very difficult to deal with, they are your responsibility. We are obligated to fulfill this duty, even if you see it is hurting you, other members of your family or the person themselves. Then there is this love, which is hard to see sometimes. Young children who are actively being abused by their mothers still want to be with them.”

One macabre mother-daughter story jumps out at Sebold. “I always think of the mystery writer Patricia Highsmith, whose mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine,” she said. “Highsmith supported her mother her whole life by writing these deeply misanthropic novels. She was locked in to caretaking for this woman who had literally tried to kill her. To me, that is an endlessly fascinating relationship.”

Society’s view on mother-daughter relationships is a bit too candy-coated for Sebold’s tastes. “We live in a society that makes the mother-daughter baby thing so sweet, puffy and pink,” she said. “I distrust that and I think it’s not the experience that most people have.”

At the end of the novel, Helen sleeps with Hamish a second time to borrow a getaway car from him. He bitterly notes that Helen can be very harsh and judgmental, like her own mother.

“You are in training, like ‘Grasshopper, here is a pointed barb. This is what you use when you weigh half the weight of your opponents,’” said Sebold with an infectious laugh. “In her mother’s case, this is what she used when she was trapped in the house. Helen learned this, but her mother used the weapons against her. Your teacher is your first opponent.”

Despite the fact that Helen feels little remorse over killing her mother, Sebold has written a horribly human character, sympathetic in her tortured own way. It was, however, a hard road to get to Helen.

“I wrote a lot of drafts,” said Sebold. “I started with other points of view because I didn’t have Helen. I had a woman with two grown up kids who had a very difficult relationship with her mother. I w rote a draft from her ex-husband Jake’s point of view. It was a lot of struggling in the dark.”

After three years, Helen came to her. “It was much more challenging to write a first-person story by the woman who does the killing and the 24-hour period afterward,” said Sebold. “As a writer, I got closer and closer to the ledge, then I just jumped off.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Michael Sallah on "Tiger Force" and the Horror of the Vietnam War

(Originally Published in the Denver Post in August 2006)

The Atrocities of War, as Explored by Two Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalists

By Dylan Foley

In 1967, Tiger Force, am elite commando unit from the Army’s 101st Airborne Divisionwent on a seven-month rampage through the Central Highlands of Vietnam, burning down peasant villages and killing men, women and children. A report issued by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division in 1974 implicated individual soldiers in the atrocities. The report accused the unit’s commanders of turning a blind eye to rampant atrocities that killed hundreds of civilians. In 1975, the Defense Department under Secretary Donald Rumsfeld covered up the report.

In 2002, reporters Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss of the Toledo Blade, received a box of still-classified Army documents revealing the Tiger Force atrocities. In a series that ran in the Blade, Sallah and Weiss interviewed dozens of former Tiger Force soldiers and Vietnamese survivors for a three-part series that won them the 2004 Pulitzer Prize.

In their riveting new book, “Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War”(Little, Brown, $26), Sallah and Weiss detail a 40-man unit descending into the heart of darkness. Led by an incompetent captain and egged on by their commanders, the commandos destroy ed villages, shot anything that moved and made necklaces out of human ears. The book details the hellish atrocities, but then moves on the fascinating detective story of one Army criminal investigator, Warrant Officer Gus Aspey, who was determined to bring the killers to justice. Finally, the book is a powerful exploration of why fighting men unravel in combat.

In a recent interview in New York City, Sallah sat down to discuss one of the darkest chapters in America’s war in Vietnam. The war crimes investigation, he said, started with the murder of a baby.

“The investigation started in 1971,” said 50-year-old Sallah. “Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) agents were investigating another company. They ran across a sergeant named Gary Coy. He mentioned the story of a baby’s head being cut off by a soldier named Sam in the Central Highlands. They realized the soldier was in Tiger Force.”

Using numerous interviews and quoting government reports, the two reporters write a vivid story of a unit operating without supervision, where the killing of civilians became routine, and men who initially refused to kill civilians were pulled into heinous atrocities. In late 1960s, it was a time of “free fire zones,” where civilians were fair game and the Army inflated body counts.

The Tiger Force was an experimental unit used to beat the Viet Cong at their own game. “Tiger Force was a ‘recondo’ unit, both reconnaissance and co mmando unit,” said Sallah. “They were set up in 1965 to ‘out-guerilla the guerillas.’ This was the kind of war where soldiers were fighting in underground tunnels and dealing with ambushes and booby traps. Tiger force members wore their own tiger-strip fatigues, grew beards and carried their own side arms. The Army would screen the enlistees: ‘What is your willingness to kill? Can you kill close up? Can you slit a person’s throat without flinching?’ They wanted bad@sses.”

As evidence mounts that U.S. Marines angered over the death of a comrade shot and killed 24 men, women and children in Haditha, Iraq, last November, the Tiger Force story gains a grim relevance. Why do atrocities occur in war? How can they be stopped, or at least how can the killers be brought to justice?

Tiger Force’s murderous rampage started in April 1967. “They got a new commander named Captain James Hawkins, a yahoo who was not a very good soldier,” said Sallah. “Tiger Force was sent to the Central Highlands to clean out the farmers of the Song Ve Valley. The Tigers were used as terrorists to get the civilians out. The Army commanders said, ‘Send the Tigers in. They are the mop up. They are the fist.’ They were the commanders’ kill squad.”

Almost as soon as they are sent into the Song Ve Valley, Hawkins murdered an elderly farmer. He orders 10 more farmers mowed down. Squad leaders William Doyle and=2 0James Barnett forced reluctant soldiers to kill civilians. The most vicious killer, Sam Ybarra, who kills the infant, took scalps and ears of civilians he has murdered.

“All of these guys dehumanized the enemy, that the Vietnamese were less than human,” said Sallah. “You could kill any of them. It didn’t matter if they were older or younger, or farmers in the field begging for their lives. Tiger Force soldiers would watch women and children run into bomb shelters. They would unclip their grenades and throw them in, turning the shelters into mass graves.”

There was, however, the heroism of the men who refused to kill civilians. “Some of the men who refused to cross the line, who risked their lives to save prisoners and civilians, were Donald Wood, Gerald Bruner and Manny Sanchez,” said Sallah. “Look at their backgrounds--they were deeply religious. They refused to go along with the plan. At one point Bruner lifted up his rifle to another soldier. He said, ‘If you grease that kid, I am going to grease you.’”

Sallah and Weiss dug up extensive evidence that military brass knew what was going on.

“Men in the unit went above their officers and told the commanders,” said Sallah. “They did nothing. The unit commander, Lt. Col. Gerald Morse, had access to the battle records. He knew that Tiger Force was supposedly killing Viet Cong but no weapons were seized. In one 11-day person, 50 ‘ V.C.’ were killed, but not one weapon was seized. The commanders should have known. The battalion surgeon said, ‘We knew all these body mutilations and war crimes were going on in the field, but we didn’t want to know much more.’”

Instead of stopping the massacres, Morse pushed his men for higher body counts. “Morse had the radio code name ‘Ghost Rider,’” said Sallah. “Soldiers heard a man named Ghost Rider say over the radio, “You’re the 327th Infantry. I want 327 kills.’”

It was the Austrian-born Army investigator Gus Aspey who brought the Tiger Force atrocities to light through a four-year investigation that sent 100 investigators to 63 U.S. military bases around the world. “The investigation was hell for him,” said Sallah. “He was undermined at the bottom and the top in the CID. He was unrelenting. He was a pitbull.”

Despite the extensive evidence of atrocities, no charges were filed. The final Tiger Force report was buried for three decades and a shocked Aspey was banished to a CID office in Seoul, Korea. “It was November 1975, the same month that Donald Rumsfeld took over as President Gerald Ford’s Secretary of Defense,” said Sallah. “Dick Cheney was Ford’s chief of staff. The war was over. Rumsfeld wanted to get beyond Vietnam. We had lost. You didn’t want something like this coming out. It was another My Lai.”

After covering the Tiger Force story, Sallah blames the commanders for the ongoing killings. “The story of Tiger Force is a breakdown in leadership,’ said Sallah. “I don’t blame the men. I blame the leadership that could of stopped the atrocities.”

Sallah raised the bleak specter that the U.S. military hasn’t learned any lessons from Vietnam. “[Tiger Force] is a classic case study on how soldiers break down during counterinsurgency guerilla warfare,” said Sallah. “The Tiger Force story could help with the safeguards and training that all soldiers need in battle. We can learn from this today, but the Army doesn’t recognize these things. You are going to find things like Tiger Force happening in Iraq.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in New York City

Salman Rushdie on Terrorism and Bloody Kashmir in "Shalimar the Clown"

By Dylan Foley

Early in Salman Rushdie’s ninth novel “Shalimar the Clown”(Random House, $26) a retired American diplomat named Max Ophuls has his throat cut by his driver on his daughter’s doorstep in Los Angeles. Though the killer Shalimar is a trained terrorist, the murder is solely to avenge the theft of his wife 25 years before. Rushdie has crafted an eloquent and engrossing novel about terrorism, lust, revenge and the death of tolerance in our time.

The central action in the novel takes place in the small hamlet of Pachigam in Kashmir, territory fought over by India and Pakistan. Pachigam is an integrated village famed for its traditional Indian theater. The Muslim Shalimar is a clown and his wife Boonyi is a Hindu dancer. Boonyi is seduced by Max, who is the U.S. ambassador to India, and flees their village. A brokenhearted Shalimar joins the Muslim insurgency, vowing to kill his unfaithful wife, her lover and their illegitimate child. Using the destruction of Kashmir as his backdrop, Rushdie explores the dark roots of terrorism. In his vivid prose, the novel moves from the Holocaust in France, to the jihadi training camps in Kashmir and the secret wars of the American government, going through the dark areas of world history.

Rushdie examines the nuances of terrorism through the voices of his characters. “This is everybody’s subject no wadays,” says Rushdie from Manhattan’s exclusive Soho House, a refuge for British expatriates in New York City. The author is dressed in all black and looking fit and healthy for a photo shoot later in the day for Esquire. “Like everyone else, I am trying to make sense of this new world where such rage is unleashed.”

For Rushdie, writing about Kashmir was returning to his family history. “My family was from there originally and because it was the place that I’d been going to for all my life and I cared about,” he says. “The real explosion came in Kashmir in 1989. That was the year where the trouble with 'The Satanic Verses’ started. I got distracted for a while.”

The trouble Rushdie is referring to is the fatwa, or religious edict, that the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran put on the writer’s head, ordering faithful Muslims to kill him. For nine years, Rushdie was the world’s most famous writer and terror target. Under intense international pressure, Iran lifted the fatwa against Rushdie in 1998.

“People join insurgencies for a whole range of reasons and only some of them are ideological,” says Rushdie. “In Kashmir, a lot of people joined up because they needed a paycheck. People sometimes join for banal reasons and sometimes for personal deformations in their lives. Shalimar the Clown’s heart is broken and that triggers something in him.”

The 58-year-old Rushdie8 0s most impressive feat in the novel is keeping the unhinged Shalimar, who likes to kill with a knife, as a surprisingly sympathetic, flesh-and-blood character.

“I like him,” says Rushdie. “That’s the amazing thing, to like him, but writers fall in love with all kinds of creations. If I didn’t really retain the feeling of sympathy, he would quickly become a cartoon.”

Shalimar’s pride forces him to kill his unfaithful wife. “It has a lot to do with the culture of honor and shame,” says Rushdie. “There is no doubt in my mind that Shalimar still loves Boonyi, but it is a code that he cannot break out of. He is going to kill the woman he loves, and that is a dreadful calamity to the soul.”

In Pachigam, Muslims and Hindus live in a grumpy coexistence. The slow strangulation of the community by the Indian military on one side and the jihadis on the other turns the village’s story into a fable of the death of tolerance.

“I’m old enough to remember a better time and places such as Beirut that were open, sophisticated, cosmopolitan cities as recently as the 1960s,” says Rushdie. “It is well within everyone’s living memory. The global decay of tolerance is the real tragedy of our time.”

Though “Shalimar the Clown” is a tragic story, Rushdie injects moments of levity, from the sexually frustrated Indian army commander Turtle Colonel to20the Iron Mullah, a fire-breathing Muslim cleric made literally out of tank parts.

“The genesis of the image of the Iron Mullah is the one piece of straightforward allegory in the book,” says Rushdie. “The Indian army came first and repressed people, making it possible for Islamic radicalism to be born out of the detritus of the Indian army. The Iron Mullah became idiosyncratic and attractive to me in ways that I hadn’t suspected. I wanted to use him more.”

In one scene in the novel, a group of jihadis in Kashmir prepare to kill a group of unveiled Muslim women. In Rushdie’s view, the roots of Muslim terrorism seem to stem from a fear of women. “I think it is all about sex,” he says, his voice rising. “The great fear of Islamic radicalism is also the fear of the sensual life, as expressed through women and the freedom of women. That ideology goes to enormous lengths to circumscribe, to limit and deny women their sexuality and their freedom.”

When the inexorable rape and pillage of Pachigam occurs, Rushdie found the writing of that chapter excruciating. “It was a horrible scene to write, unbearable,” he says of the massacre of some of his favorite characters by the Indian army. “I woke up in the morning, wishing that I didn’t have to write it. I tormented myself by thinking that maybe I didn’t have to do it, maybe I could find some plot twist that gets them out of it. Those were all the ways of delaying the inevitable.”

As an observer of world affairs, Rushdie admits to ambivalence over the state response to terrorism. “I am depressed about the U.S. in Iraq,” says Rushdie, “but there is the question that arises, ‘How would one do better? What would you do differently?’ That’s a hard question to answer. We may have strong views about mistakes, but here we are. The only thing that tempers my criticism of Bush and Blair is not being sure if I was in sitting in their chairs that I would do much differently.”

Rushdie sees the need for a Muslim groundswell against terrorism, but sadly believes it won’t happen soon. “The point at which the Muslim world will bring terrorism to their knees is the point at which the Muslims become sick of being defined by terrorism,” says Rushdie. “That may take a while. If communism start to finish took 70 years, this might be 70 years.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn.

Didion’s Raw Meditation on Grief in "The Year of Magical Thinking"

(Originally published in the Denver Post, October 2005)

By Dylan Foley

In December 2003, Quintana Roo Dunne, the daughter of writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, walked into a New York City hospital emergency room complaining of flu symptoms, then suddenly went into septic shock and a coma. Three days later, after visiting the still-unconscious Quintana at the hospital, John Gregory Dunne died a massive heart attack while talking to Didion at their Manhattan home.

In her memoir of the aftermath of her husband’s death, “The Year of Magical Thinking” (Knopf, $24), Didion has written a sharply focused chronicle of her grief and how she dealt with her daughter’s illness. In their 39-year marriage, Didion and Dunne became America’s most prominent literary couple, producing a dozen novels and memoirs apiece and writing screenplays for “True Confessions” and “A Star is Born.” In lucid and clear prose, Didion details her need to function and take care of her daughter, delaying the grieving process. Didion’s short memoir is raw and full of dread, and is destined to become a literary classic on grief and death.

“What happened over the course of the year was the feeling that anything horrible could happen,” said the 70-year-old Didion from her book-lined apartment. “I kept expecting a catastrophe. Crossing the street, I expected to be hit by a taxi. It became hard to move around."

On the day of Denver Post interview with Didion, the author was battling a cold. Tragedy has also not left Didion alone. After 20 months of life-threatening medical conditions, Quintana died of acute pancreatitis on August 29th at the age of 39. Didion’s famous high-cheekboned face is lined and tired. Despite being a newly grieving mother, Didion locked onto the freelance reporter with her liquid brown eyes and an intense interview began.

Ten months after her husband’s death, Didion started the groundwork for the new memoir. “I had no intention of writing a book,” she said. After Quintana got out of the hospital in July 2004, however, Didion started fixating on her husband’s death.

Writing a book that captured the the temporary insanity and the harshness of grief appealed to her. “Grief is an experience that everybody goes through sooner or later,” she said. “I’ve been reading an awful lot of literature at the level of which it happens. Usually it’s after the fact and people write about their grief long after the fact. I thought there would be some value in reading a raw account.”

Didion chronicles her irrational thoughts, like refusing to throw out her husband’s shoes in case he might need them again. She doesn’t move Dunne’s magazines and books he was reading before he died. She creates rituals, a kind of “magical thinking,” the term that forms the title, as if she co uld undo his death.

“Magical thinking is a phrase I first came across reading anthropology,” she explained. “Tribal thinking is magical, and if we do certain things, we can affect events and the crops will come in. Children think that way. ‘If I do such and such, my parents won’t get divorced.’ It becomes very pronounced when you are grieving.”

Didion also explores the literature on death and grieving. One hundred years ago, Americans died in their homes. Now they die in sterile hospitals and hospices. Since the 1930s, she writes, stoicism in grief has become the norm.

“(Grief) has become medicalized,” she said. “Death has been medicalized. It happens offstage. There is a contemporary emphasis on being happy and providing happiness to others. People avoid manifesting grief. It is a strange thing, because you have to deal with it sooner or later.”

Didion had to put her own grief on hold to tend to her daughter. “It was quite an unstable time for me because of Quintana,” she said. “She was in such a grave condition. I had to pretend that John’s death hadn’t happened. I couldn’t deal with them both at the same time. I was crazy but I managed to take care of what needed to be done vis-a-vis Quintana.”

Didion’s memoir is a unadorned tribute to her four-decade marriage to Dunne, where the two writers usually spent 24-hours-a day together, an impossible feat for most married couples. With rueful frankness, she also writes about their fights, including her then-shocking column in Life magazine in 1969 where she wrote they chose going to Hawaii over getting a divorce.

“There wouldn’t be any reason to do the memoir unless it was going to be straightforward,” said Didion. “The sense in which our marriage was a good marriage was in its length. When someone dies, it is very much on your mind the time that you’ve wasted fighting.”

Throughout the book, Didion returns to the moments of Dunne’s death, then mixes in other memories, like the time in 1966 the couple first took their three-day-old adopted daughter home from the hospital or their last trip to Paris. Reviewing the death scene becomes a riveting, recurring moment in the book.

“I didn’t know how to structure the book at first, then I realized the way to do it was to repeat the experience (of the death) for that is the experience of the person who is left,” she said. “You try to recreate what happened. Every time you go back to it, you think of details that you didn’t think of as important. Everything comes into focus.”

Even with Quintana’s death, Didion has no plans to rewrite the memoir. “It was already printed, but going beyond it, it was something I did,” she said. “It’s like revisiting any work. It’s finished. I am not going back to something that is finished.”

In December 2004, a year after Dunne’s death, the magical thinking started to lift and Didion realized she was heading into acceptance of his permanent absence.

“People say that it happens after a year,” said Didion. “There is something in the first year where everything is a reminder of the same day a year before (when the person was alive). It is another reason why you obsessively notice the calendar: “On this day a year ago...’ When the days stop being that long, you realize you are letting go, which is not a good feeling, but it is necessary.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY.

Jane Fonda on her memoir "My Life So Far"

(Originally published in the Denver Post on April 17, 2005)

Actress recounts troubles with men and myths of Vietnam

By Dylan Foley
Special to The Denver Post

In her epic autobiography "My Life So Far" (Random House, $27), actress Jane Fonda covers a career that spanned 50 movies, from "Barbarella" to "The China Syndrome," to a prominent role as an activist against the Vietnam War and as the entrepreneur who helped launch the aerobics and home-video revolutions with her "Jane Fonda Workout."

"I have become a lightning rod for so many things," said Fonda in an interview from a New York hotel room, going over America's ambivalent relationship with her. "It's complicated. People see me as Henry Fonda's privileged daughter. I was Barbarella. I was a pinup poster girl."

The memoir starts with the horrific suicide of her socialite mother when Fonda was 12 and the cold distance of her movie-legend father. Fonda writes that the destruction of her childhood self-esteem led to a three-decade battle with bulimia and three marriages to powerful and self-centered husbands - French director Roger Vadim, anti-war activist Tom Hayden, and media mogul Ted Turner, whom Fonda divorced in 1991.

In the book, there is fascinating material about making such movies as "Klute" and the closure of filming "On Golden Pond" with her father and Katharine Hepburn. Fonda also addresses her role in the GI anti-war movement and her 1972 trip to Hanoi, where she was photographed on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun.

For the interview, Fonda, 67, was immaculately attired in a white terry-cloth tracksuit and thick-rimmed glasses. The beauty that made her a '60s sex symbol is still intact. The memoir started, she said, as her marriage to Turner was ending.

"When I was preparing to turn 60, I realized that it was the third act of my life," said Fonda. "I was in my last act, and it wasn't a dress rehearsal. I had to go back and see what the first two acts were like. What were the patterns, what were the themes? If I could write about my life clearly and honestly, then I could help other people. I happen to be a celebrity, but it is not a celebrity bio. This is part pedagogic, part social commentary."

Fonda's relationship with her father was very painful. "My father was an icon. He was Tom Joad, Clarence Darrow and Mr. Young Abe Lincoln. At the same time, he was a remote person, who at least for a long period of time was in a great deal of pain, unable to express love or open his heart. As a child, I knew on a nonverbal level that to be loved I had to be perfect. He told me I was fat, that I should wear bigger bathing suits. It took me many decades to recover from that."

Her mother's depression framed her childhood. "My mother was a victim of childhood sexual abuse," she said. "That was key. It informed my mother's life and consequently mine."

Throughout the memoir, Fonda writes honestly about her horrible body image. "In some senses, I was an icon of physicality, sexuality and strength, and all these things," said Fonda. "What does matter is what is going on inside your head."

Fonda's anti-war activism makes for riveting reading. She worked with active-duty GIs who were against the fighting in Vietnam for two years before she went to Hanoi. "This part of history has been written out of the history books," said Fonda. "There was a vast, vibrant movement in the military ranks against the war. Many of the Vietnam veterans were against the war. (President) Nixon said that he was going to end the war, but he was lying to us."

Also cut out from the history books is Fonda's reasons for going to Hanoi. The U.S. government was bombing vital dikes on the Red River Delta. American analysts had projected that 200,000 Vietnamese civilians would drown if the dikes were destroyed.

"I wouldn't have known the importance of the dikes being bombed if it wasn't for the Pentagon Papers," said Fonda, referring to the secret government study of decision-making in the Vietnam War. "(President) Johnson, to his credit, had a chance to bomb the same dikes, but didn't. We were hearing from French and Swedish journalists that we were bombing the dikes. I thought people would notice if I went."

Fonda recounted the controversial photo op as if it were yesterday. "On the last day, I went out to the gun emplacement," she said. "The soldiers sang this song, and the words were translated for me as, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident,' from our Declaration of Independence. I was blown away, and was laughing and crying. I sang a song back. People were laughing and clapping. I was escorted over to the anti-aircraft gun, and I sat down. We were still laughing and clapping. Cameras were clicking. It wasn't until I was walking away that I realized, 'My God, this image is going to look like I was trying to shoot down American planes."'

She shrugs off the excuse that she was roped into a propaganda trick by the North Vietnamese. "I have to take responsibility for this," she said. "I was a grown-up. The image conveyed nothing of who I was, what I was thinking or doing as an individual, but I have to live with it for the rest of my life."

As the memoir starts to climb the best-seller lists, the Internet has been flooded with old stories that Fonda's Hanoi visit led to American POWs being killed by their captors. The stories are false, but they still are circulated.

Fonda is sanguine about the myths. "With Vietnam, the photo was real," she said. "I have to own it, but the 'betrayal' was not real. There are ideologues who need me and this myth of betrayal to promote a right-wing view of the war and the world."

Though Fonda looks great and is in good health, she faces a hip replacement after her book tour.

"It's not from the 'Jane Fonda Workout'!" she said, holding up a mock admonishing finger. "A hip replacement is not my self-image, but it is no big deal nowadays."

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Richard McCann on his autobiographical stories in "Mother of Sorrows"

(Originally published in the Denver Post, October 2005)

By Dylan Foley

In 1986, Richard McCann’s short story “My Mother’s Clothes: The School of Beauty and Shame” appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, detailing a prepubescent boy’s cross dressing out of his mother’s closet. The story caused a literary stir, and gained McCann, then an unknown poet, a book contract.

Almost 20 years later, McCann’s slim collection of linked stories “Mother of Sorrows” (Pantheon, $20) has finally been published. McCann has created a gorgeous work of autobiographical fiction about growing up gay among the prosperity and bomb shelters of 1950s and ‘60s suburban America. The young narrator’s melodramatic and over-the-top mother holds him under her spell, and the family is plunged into shock when the father dies, beginning the brother’s two-decade downward spiral.

“It’s only been 18 years--I delivered the final manuscript in 2004,” said McCann with mock indignation from a New York City coffee shop. “I’d been writing poetry and I was trying my hand at prose. I was writing what I thought was nonfiction.

“I sent ‘My Mother’s Clothes’ to the New Yorker nonfiction editor. He wrote back and said, “You’ve sent it to the wrong editor. I’ve forwarded it to the fiction editor.”

The contract became a heavy burden. “After the Atlantic, I got a contract for a novel, which I said might be a memoir,” said the 55-year-old writer. “It was a curse initially. I had never written prose, and suddenly people were expecting things. My original idea was to write about 1950s and 1960s suburban life. I was still finding out things about myself as a writer, to what extent could I write big?”

Right after McCann got his book contract, his life was wracked by a series of tragedies. “In 1986, my ex-partner had been living with HIV for two years. My daily life was saturated with AIDS. A lot of my friends were dying and I had a sick partner. The contract was a curse, for I could never decide where my attention should be. At the same time, my mother was going into a nursing home and my stepfather was dying.”

Then McCann’s own life took an almost-fatal turn. “I was diagnosed with Hepatitis C,” he said. “I spent a year waiting for a liver transplant, then another year recovering so I could go to a job. I have not recovered, but like the rest of the people in this coffee shop, I am still here.”

McCann’s real-life mother was a larger-than-life dramatic character. “She was a little too close and a little too distant from her children in certain ways,” he said. “Closeness and distance was constantly going from one extreme to another. As I wrote in the book, my mother seemed to be, in the small stage of the house, getting to enact al l the major parts. The rest were all subsidiary parts.

To capture the mother in the stories, he turned back to his Irish Catholic upbringing. “It was being a writer, trying to capture what it felt like to imagine the mother through the eyes of a child,” he said. “I grew up in a home where both parents were very strong Catholics, where there were a lot of shrines.”

For McCann, that meant making relics. “My aim was to get my mother as you often get people in religious terms--through a strong focus on the fetish objects. There is a powerful Catholic sense that if you want to capture somebody, you have to get a little bit of their reality, a shard of bone from the saint has to go in the alter. You start with my mother’s facts--her jewelry, the clothes in her dresser drawers, her padded brassieres. She wore Cherries in the Snow, a popular red lipstick in the 1950s.

“My mother had a lot of sorrows, she really did. I was very aware of her loyalty to the past, which can take you out of the present in a very painful way.”

In the middle of the story collection, the focus shifts to a fictionalized version of his brother. “My brother was a year older than me and we were both gay. I thought that I would have him until the end of my life. His death was a huge event for me. A parent is your past. A brother is your future. I felt that my future had been wiped out.”

Thou gh McCann had planned to end the stories in the 1960s, he felt the need to address the AIDS epidemic, the AIDS epidemic, which almost wiped out a whole generation of gay men. “[AIDS] became life,” McCann said of the losses he suffered in the 1980s and ‘90s. In the stories, the narrator focuses on a lover’s beautiful hair as the man slips into dementia, or a sweet Filipino man dying alone in a attic apartment in Paris.

Struggling with his own losses, the narrator tries to handle them differently than his mother. “I am very aware that the mother is grieving at the beginning of the book and kind of absent. The narrator is grieving at the end, but trying to figure out how to remain present.”

McCann has compared “Mother of Sorrows” to his own version of “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Eugene O’Neill’s epic ode to tortured Irish families.

“It is sort of a joke, but sort of not,” said McCann. “It was my mother’s favorite play. She’d say, “This is what it means to be us,” as an Irish Catholic person. There’s that connection, with Irish Catholicism, where you’re living in the past, but have an ability to live in the present, as well.”

Like “Long Day’s Journey,” McCann’s real and fictional mother's shadow his stories. “Even when the mother is absent, they are still listening to the sounds when she is banging around upstairs,” said McCann. “In some ways, you are even more aware of her offstage than on.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Hampton Sides on How the West Was Really Won

"Blood and Thunder" is the Epic of How the United States Took New Mexico, Arizona and California from Mexico, and How Kit Carson almost Wiped Out The Navajo Indians

(Originally published in the Denver Post, October 2006)

By Dylan Foley

In his glorious new book, “Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West”(Doubleday, $27), journalist Hampton Sides tells a two-decade tragicomic story of how the West was truly won, from the United States’ annexation of New Mexico and California in 1847 and the brutal suppression of the Navajo Indian tribes in 1863-4. With the legendary trapper-solder Kit Carson carrying most of the tale on his squat body, Sides writes history in its most vivid, gripping form, unveiling heroism, cold-blooded murder and folly.

“Blood and Thunder” starts with the three hundred years of warfare between the Spanish and the Indians. Then Sides moves onto Carson, a short, ugly trapper from Missouri, who was a legendary fighter and killing machine. In the mid-1840s, with President James
Polk pursuing an aggressive policy of Manifest Destiny, Carson becomes the scout that helps the U.S. Army in its often comic campaign to conquer the Northern Mexican territories of New Mexico and California.

The tragedy of the book comes during the brutal suppression of the Navajo Indians, where Carson carries out the U.S. Army’s scorched earth policy, burning crops and starving the semi-nomadic Navajos into submission.

In 2001, Sides had a major bestseller with “Ghost Soldiers,” an account of American POWs held by the Japanese during World War II. He was casting about for his next book project when he came across the Navajo’s “Long Walk,” where the vanquished Native Americans were forcibly resettled by the U.S. Army to a reservation.

“The story of a siege, a surrender and a long march sounded very familiar to me,” said Sides, in a telephone interview from his home in Taos, New Mexico, referring to the parallels with the Bataan Death March in his previous book. “It was going to be almost the identical
time frame, but then I asked the question, Kit Carson rounded up the Navajo and who was Kit Carson? That question took three years and many thousands of miles to answer.”

The life of Kit Carson becomes the dramatic center of the book. Using extensive historical documents, including Carson’s own memoirs and contemporary accounts, Sides plunges into his biography and character. Carson came from hardy Scotch-Irish stock and his father was
killed when he was seven. Carson’s fondest memories may be of the time when he was living with his first wife, an Arapaho Indian, and trapping in what is now Colorado and Utah. Despite adopting Indian customs and buckskins, and living with various tribes, Carson participates in occasional massacres of Indians as retribution for murdered friends.

Carson was a tactical genius, but was illiterate. His insecurities about his lack of schooling may have made him pliable in the hands of men from higher classes, including the colorful explorer John Fremont, who pushed the American campaign in California, and the generals of the U.S. Army. “Carson had a deference to men that were better-educated than him,” said Sides. “It was also the realities of the U.S. Army of the day--you were given orders, and you carried them out.”

As the book evolved, so did Hampton’s view towards Carson. “I started with the belief that Carson was a genocidal maniac,” said Sides, referring to the campaign against the Navajo, where a third of the Navajo nation was wiped out due to starvation, forced march and four-year resettlement on a reservation that was more like a concentration camp. “At the end of the book, my view of him was much more nuanced and multidimensional. I came to view him like a Mafia character, someone who would be interesting to meet, a colorful personality, but a man with a code that I didn’t fully understand.”

As the bloody battles of the Mexican-American War are raging in Mexico proper, a small group of American dragoons under General Stephen Kearney were conquering New Mexico. Heroism, valor and foolishness sat side by side at the long-forgotten Battle of San Pasqual, where the courageous Americans were almost decimated by Mexican horsemen armed with lariats and lances. Carson’s quick thinking and deadly aim stops a total slaughter .

Sides’ swirling history includes a segment on the westernmost battle of the Civil War, where Confederate troops captured Albuquerque, New Mexico. The rebel troops were routed in part by Union volunteers from Denver, which included the fearsome Major John Milton Chivington, nicknamed the Fighting Parson, who marched 400 miles to stop the rebel advance through combat on the Santa Fe Trail. At the battle, the commander of the Colorado volunteers, Col. John Slough, was so despised that his troops tried to kill him by firing a howitzer at him.

Sides presents an evenhanded view of the relationships between the Navajo Indians and settlers. There are atrocities and scalping by both sides. Each side raids the other for slaves.

After the U.S. Army has wrested New Mexico and California from the Mexicans, the Navajos continue raiding both Mexican and American settlers. Under the direction of General James Carlton, Kit Carson is ordered to subdue the Navajos in New Mexico through destroying crops and starvation, forcing them to move from their ancestral lands to a distant, inhospitable reservation on the Pecos River.

“It was horrible,” said Sides. “The campaign was thought to be be one of the first modern, premeditated and concerted scorched earth policies. Though destroying people's crops and villages is as old as warfare, this was the first example of a written U.S. Army policy.”

“As horrible as it was, it worked. Carson did in a year what the Spanish couldn’t do in 300 years, which was t o force some kind of surrender. It was a tragic thing, hard to write and probably hard to read.”

After writing two brilliantly received books about death marches and mass killings. Hampton admitted that he’s ready to move on to other subjects.

“For the next book, I’ d like to interview people for it,” said Sides. "The people in this book were really, really dead. I also want to do a book where there is no dysentery, no massacres and no beheadings. I am done with killings for a while.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Dylan Foley
175 Eastern Parkway #3D
Brooklyn, NY 11238
dylanfoley@aol.com
www.dylanmfoley.blogspot.com

Ian Jackman on the Quest for Regional Food in "Eat This!"

(Originally published in the Denver Post on August 4, 2007)

Food's "Blue Highways"

Regional Cuisine Journey Down the Road Less Traveled

By Dylan Foley
Special to The Denver Post

For the past 30 years, eating on the major highways has become a grim affair with fast-food restaurants like McDonald's, Burger King and Denny's killing local diners and even pushing regional cuisines off the main roads. The malls outside America's cities are no better, with cookie-cutter food courts packed with franchise eateries, where quantity reigns over quality.

Well, the counterattack against homogenous corporate food has a new hero in Ian Jackman and his new book "Eat This! 1001 Things to Eat Before You Diet." The New York-based British writer's guidebook and travelogue of America's regional cuisine and fresh produce extols the virtues of chiles in Santa Fe, barbecue shacks in North Carolina and exquisite Japanese sushi in Los Angeles.

In Jackman's enthusiastic account of America's most interesting regional cuisines, he takes a decidedly middlebrow approach, visiting Corky's Barbecue in Memphis, Tenn., and Yonah Schimmel Knishes in New York City, whose interior looks like it has been blown up by a bomb.

"I don't think of myself as a foodie," said the 43-year-old Jackman, in a New York cafe known for its Hungarian pastries. "I just enjoy eating. I am not interested in which famous chef is opening a new restaurant. I like context, history and place."

For Jackman, the love of place means paying homage to the Original Pantry, a Los Angeles eatery famed for its classic pancake and eggs breakfast menu and for its repeated appearances in the thrillers of Michael Connelly. Not far away, at a Los Angeles farmers market, he found one of the most wonderful apple fritters in America.

The structure of the book is straightforward, covering eating in, which includes fruits, vegetables, breads, meat and fish, and eating out, which covers burgers, stews, barbecue, sandwiches, chili and pizza.

Jackman starts with the local fruits, like Oregon's gooseberries and Washington State's Rainier cherries, and moves around the country. "It stands to reason that something that has been grown locally is going to taste better than something that has been trucked in. If it comes from another part of the country, it is not fresh."

Jackman's two-year odyssey following the great regional food of America was guided by experts. "I called people around the country and asked them if I was coming to their part of the country, what food would they recommend," said Jackman. "I called Ellen Sweets of The Denver Post, and asked her what would I have to have if I was in Denver." (She recommends the Buckhorn Exchange, a steakhouse). "I called Seattle to find out what I should have in Seattle. Food writers were very generous with their time. They said, 'These are the regional specialties.' In Cincinnati, it is the local chili."

Denver and Colorado come in for loving scrutiny because Jackman's brother-in-law lived in Denver. He found himself bewitched by the eccentricity of the Fort restaurant, Sam Arnold's 44-year-old eatery. Arnold had his restaurant built out of 8,045-pound adobe blocks, based on 19th- century drawings of a frontier outpost. Jackman also writes up Sam's No. 3, a quintessential Greek diner in Aurora, and waxes poetic on their massive breakfast burritos.

At the Black Bear Restaurant in Green Mountain Falls, near Colorado Springs, Jackman listens to chef Victor Matthews talk up the local food, from organic mushrooms to the lamb that winds up on menus in Tokyo.

In Manitou Springs, Jackman talks with chef Lawrence Johnson, whose Briarhurst Manor restaurant is located in a 19th-century mansion built by an Englishman who imported an Italian chef. The Italian chef wound up trading supplies with the local Ute Indians. Johnson "prefers the term 'Rocky Mountain cuisine,"' writes Jackman. "He pairs game like deer, bison, elk, snake and trout with indigenous produce grown on the property and from nearby farms."

Jackman takes jaunts down through the South on his way to Florida. He hits the Southwest, going through Arizona and New Mexico. Often he travels with his wife and two young children, balancing his need for wonderful Cuban food in Miami with his son Max's need for a simple hamburger. He has an almost religious experience with the chiles at Tomasita's, a restaurant housed in an old train station in Santa Fe.

"One of my best experiences was eating the green and red chiles in Santa Fe," said Jackman. "I had eaten good, spicy food in other parts of the country, but in Santa Fe, it took on another level of sophistication."

Jackman found surprisingly good cuisine in strange places, such as the great plate of enchiladas he ate in a drugstore restaurant in Albuquerque. In Oklahoma City, he muses over the need to eat lamb fries, which are lamb testicles, lightly battered and fried.

Jackman argues for slowing down and going off the beaten path to find great local establishments. You often don't have to go far from home to find a good restaurant. "You really need to treat your town as if you were a tourist," said Jackman.

Jackman proves to be an enthusiastic eater. He is concerned with great gastronomic experiences, but doesn't worry about hitting the "best" restaurants in the United States, dismissing the label.

"What is the criteria for the best?" asked Jackman. "Is it the best tasting or the best presented? Everybody has different criteria, and the food in the same restaurant changes every day."

"Eat This!" is best sampled by region. It is the kind of book that you should throw in the glove compartment of your car if you are taking a long road trip. The 1,001 restaurants, farms and local produce stands are all well-documented. Jackman is a great guide with a passion for the colorful tangent.

After two years, Jackman estimates that he has sampled more than 500 of the local cuisines in the book. In part, it became a guide for his own future culinary endeavors. "I decided that the book had to be a roadmap for me going forward," said Jackman. "It is a wish list of the places where I want to eat next."

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Mike Davis on Death by Car Bomb

(Originally published in the Denver Post, April 14, 2007)

Historian Traces Murderous Evolution of a Serial Killer

By Dylan Foley
Special to The Denver Post

Mike Davis calls the car bomb the "poor man's air force," delivering the payload of a WWII-era bomber to a target. (Special to The Post)

Historian Mike Davis' grim, entrancing new book, "Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb"(Verso), tracks the murderous life and evolution of the car bomb from the 1920 bombing of Wall Street to the daily multiple suicide car bombs in Iraq that cause death, terror and mayhem.

Davis calls car bombs the "poor man's air force" that can deliver the bomb payload of a World War II-era bomber right to the door of a police station or barracks from Baghdad to Sri Lanka, where collateral damage, otherwise known as civilian deaths, is a given in sowing more terror.

The Buda's wagon of the title was not technically a car - it was a horse-drawn wagon packed with explosives and iron slugs that exploded in front of the headquarters of J.P. Morgan and Co. in Manhattan, parked there by Mike Buda, an anarchist angered by the U.S. government's execution of his friends Sacco and Vanzetti. The bomb killed 40 and injured 200, and was an explosion heard around the world.

Secret passed along

"Buda's Wagon" is relentless, where the bodies mount from IRA car bombs in the 1970s to the Hezbollah suicide attacks against the U.S. Embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, sending reinforced concrete buildings shooting 100 feet in the air and forcing the U.S. to withdraw from Lebanon.

In the 87-year history of car bombs, the state apparatus of terror is never far away. Bill Casey's CIA in the 1980s gave car-bomb technology to the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, which later used the technology to attack the World Trade Center for the first time, in 1993. The Indian Army taught the Tamil rebels of Sri Lanka how to build such bombs, and the rebels later used suicide bombs with zest against the Indian soldiers.

For Davis, the desire to write about car bombs came from witnessing their hypnotic power. "It's an awful subject," Davis said in a telephone interview from his home in San Diego. "I lived in Northern Ireland in 1974-75 (during the height of the Troubles). I witnessed several car bombs. I was horrified by the unbelievable violence of them."

Davis, a 61-year-old history professor at the University of California at Irvine, said the conventional wisdom was that car bombs had started with the IRA, but his reading of history proved otherwise.

Used in the 1940s

Car bombs were used with great effect by the Stern Gang, a Zionist terrorist group that targeted military, civilian and economic targets in 1940s Palestine to derail peace talks between the British and more moderate Zionists. Arab terrorists responded by using car bombs against Jewish settlers. The Viet Cong used car bombs against American targets in Saigon in the 1960s.

The true democratization of the car bombs came with the fertilizer bomb, used by leftist radicals in Madison, Wis. In blowing up the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, a blast that killed a physics researcher, the student bombers used an obscure pamphlet from the Wisconsin Fish and Game Department. "It was how to have fun making new duck ponds by blowing them up with ammonium nitrate fertilizer," said Davis. Now two men with fertilizer, gasoline and shovels could make a very powerful bomb.

Exponential power

"Car bombs are used by state intelligence agencies and groups that have genuine grievances, like the Provisional IRA and the Basques," said Davis. "Car bombs have huge seductive power. It gives the user exponentially more striking power, and the ability to dismantle a part of the economy," like blowing up London's financial district or destroying Indonesia's tourism industry.

"The seduction overpowers any realization of how much moral damage has been done," said Davis, "and how civilian deaths are inescapable. Like (former Defense Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld's 'smart bombs,' there is no way you can use a car bomb precisely."

The middle of the book recaps the horrors of Beirut in the early 1980s. With 52 armed groups vying for control, the CIA, Israel's Mossad, and Syrian, Iranian and Iraqi intelligence agencies all had a hand in financing car bombs. Hezbollah's suicide car bombs upped the ante.

"Hezbollah used suicide bombers to ensure the bombs got up the steps of the buildings," said Davis.

"Buda's Wagon" speeds up as it goes on, with car bombs destroying U.S. Embassies in Africa, a synagogue in Tunisia and Russian targets in Chechnya. Though Davis mostly uses existing sources, he lays out the geopolitical consequences in a clear, brutal manner. Groups like the ISI, Pakistan's secret service and America's alleged ally in the War on Terror, seem to be bankrolling a lot of terrorist groups, from India to Afghanistan and Indonesia.

"The ISI more closely fits the image that the public has about al-Qaeda of centralized terror," said Davis. "Arguably, the ISI has been the most powerful terrorist network in the world, certainly since the war in Afghanistan.

Found on the Internet

"I argue in my book that the state intelligence agencies are the principal vector for spreading car-bomb technology internationally," said Davis. "Now we've come to the point where you can find this information on the Internet. You don't need specialized training anymore."

In Iraq, the car bomb is king. Suicide bombs are the weapon of choice, accelerating from one a week to one every eight hours nationwide. "A lot of the suicide bombs in Iraq are unnecessary," said Davis. "They could use many kinds of sophisticated detonators, but there are a surplus of martyrs."

On why there has not been a flood of car bombs in the United States, Davis has few consoling words. "We've been very lucky," he said. "This is not a situation where you can count the rational probability. Safety depends on an absence of groups of radicals who want to kill hundreds of people.

"The car bomb just seduces people with its cheap, destructive power," he said. "It's a Pandora's box. Once you open it, it is hard to understand how you would close it."

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Taylor Clark on Planet Starbucks

(Originally published in the Denver Post, January 4, 2008)

The ubiquitous coffee shops fill a need the socially starved have for a place to hang out
By Dylan Foley
Special to The Denver Post

In 2004, residents in Portland, Ore., tried to firebomb a new Starbucks store that had opened in the face of intense community opposition. The Molotov cocktail bounced off the reinforced glass, burning harmlessly on the ground. Starbucks, a corporation with a worldwide reach of 14,000 stores from Seattle to Paris, Beijing and Guantanamo Bay, has long fortified itself against local enemies.

Despite the disgruntled neighbors in Portland, the new Starbucks stayed open.

Starting in 1971 as a storefront selling fresh-roasted gourmet coffee beans to coffee fanatics in Seattle, Starbucks has evolved into a major player in the American cultural landscape, making us into caffeine addicts and connoisseurs of expensive coffee. In "Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture," journalist Taylor Clark has written a rollicking account of the social phenomenon of Starbucks, which has become our national meeting place, filling the void left by the churches and marketplaces of the past and giving us a place where we can sit by ourselves in a roomful of coffee drinkers.

Clark's two-year odyssey to crack the Starbucks nut started over a cup of coffee. "I was sitting with some friends in a coffee shop in Portland, Ore.," said the 27-year- old Clark from his Portland home. "From the window, I could see a Starbucks, and then a Tully's, another chain. I was amazed by the number of coffee shops."

Starbucks has become the world corporate monolith of coffee, holding 73 percent of the gourmet coffee market share in the U.S. and making $7.8 billion in annual revenues.

As the company grows exponentially, striving for its goal of 40,000 stores worldwide, Clark writes that consumer feedback indicates that the relentless expansion of its business in America has hurt the quality of its black gold. Coffee fanatics slur Starbucks by saying that the improved McDonald's coffee is better than Starbucks coffee now.

At the center of Clark's witty and evenhanded book is Howard Schultz, a former housewares salesman from the projects of Brooklyn who bought Starbucks in 1987 when the chain had only 11 stores. Schultz comes off as a mass of contradictions. He's a corporate CEO who preaches that employees are family, but then busts their unions, and a visionary who stresses quality while overseeing the mass- marketization of Starbucks.

In meeting with Schultz, Clark gets into the head of Starbucks' billionaire coffee guru, a man whose driving motivation is opening more Starbucks. "Schultz is very image-savvy," said Clark. "He grasped long before other people the importance of having a high-end image."

Stores like Peet's and Starbucks rescued America from the bad coffee of the 1970s. "In the pre-Starbucks, pre-gourmet coffee years, this was the era of Tang and TV dinners," said Clark, "when people thought science was going to improve everything." Science gave us the undrinkable brands, where flavor is chemically added.

While the Starbucks baristas of the 1980s may have seen themselves as coffee artisans, the high-tech espresso machines that Starbucks has used for the last decade make the baristas' occupation into the ultimate semiskilled McJob.

Starbucks, said Clark, tapped into a great American social need for a place to hang out. "Starbucks was really the perfect storm of a few things," he noted. "By the time coffeehouses started moving into mainstream society, there was really no place to hang out. The malt shops were no longer there.

"People were becoming more cloistered, and there was a missing social dynamic," said Clark. "We are social animals and we need to be around people, even if we don't talk to them."

Behind the Starbucks juggernaut was two decades of astute marketing. "Starbucks had its market research," said Clark, "that found that people wanted to be coddled when they were inside the stores."

Much of the genius behind Starbucks is in its real estate. "Starbucks has an incredibly efficient real-estate machine," said Clark, that grabs the key locations in every major city.

"What is interesting about Starbucks is what it says about us," said Clark. "It says that we were feeling alone, that we were stressed. We needed some kind of indulgence. . . . So many people have dropped normal drip coffee for lattes."

Disgruntled ex-baristas told Clark that they often felt Starbucks functioned like some kind of religious cult. "(T)he first employees to don the green apron lived and breathed the Starbucks ethos," writes Clark. "As Dawn Pinaud told me, 'Our blood was brown.' Part of their zeal sprang from the coffee itself: the product is, technically speaking, a psychotropic drug.

"But an equal share of dedication to the company was due to its charismatic leader (Schultz)."

One longtime barista tells Clark, "You were brainwashed. I know people who are still brainwashed. It's like those Grand Poobah meetings, except instead of elk horns, we had green aprons."

The Starbucks' juggernaut continues unabated worldwide, with the company opening as many as six stores a day and serving 40 million customers.

Like McDonald's, Starbucks is reaching its saturation point. The coffee giant's prestige is evaporating. "Starbucks is just going to lose appeal as it grows," pop-culture analyst Robert Thompson tells Clark toward the end of the book. "Anyone can get Starbucks now. There's no exclusivity anymore."

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

(Illustration by Jim Carr, The Denver Post)

Vincent Virga on the Truths and Lies that Maps Tell

(Originally published in the Denver Post, December 26, 2007)

Between the lines of maps Cultural history and hypocrisy, writ large
By Dylan Foley
Special to The Denver Post


In 1966, the CIA completed a map of South Vietnam that showed the country slashed and cut into bits by red lines. Each red line represented a Viet Cong line of control, forming administrative districts for their underground governing of the country they would eventually conquer.

The horrified Joint Chiefs of Staff classified and buried the map, prolonging American involvement in the war for another bloody nine years.

The map of South Vietnam is one of the stars of the legendary photo editor Vincent Virga's "Cartographia: Mapping Civilizations." The book is a gorgeously illustrated history of the world as told through the maps that civilizations make and that are made about them.

Working with the Library of Congress' extensive map collection, Virga starts with Babylonian world map and the Egyptian map of the afterlife, and moves to the carved wooden maps of Africa. He scrutinizes the maps for the exploitation of the New World by the Portuguese, and explores the American soul through a 1930 car map and the polarizing blue state-red state map of the 2004 presidential election. After reading "Cartographia," you will never look at maps the same again.

It turns out that Virga was not a natural to maps. "I didn't like maps. I didn't get maps," said Virga in a telephone interview from his office at the Library of Congress in Washington. "I told this to the library's maps curator Ronald Grim in 1997. 'Oh my God, maps are the story of my life,' he said. 'I'll teach you about maps.' "

This conversation led Virga on a 10-year odyssey, exploring the more than 4.8 million maps in the library's collection.

"Ron taught me how to look at maps as cultural landscapes," said the 65-year-old Virga. "He taught me to look at maps as political statements. Everybody who makes a map wants to tell me something. They want to connive with the images to make me think that what I am looking at is the truth."

As Virga takes the reader on an intriguing guided tour through Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, he argues that maps are metaphors for the countries and cultures they are defining. A racial segregation map from apartheid- era South Africa is "Map as Blueprint for Hardship." A trench warfare map from World War I is "Map as War Butchery." Virga digs out the stories, hidden agendas and national aspirations of 200 of the most fascinating maps in 3,500 years of world history.

Virga's intent was to show how civilizations create and reveal themselves through their maps. "I want to show how the people making the maps are expressing their entire social selves in those maps," said Virga. "In something as basic as the book's first map, a Babylonian clay tablet, you see a people who worked hard and used canals to change their worlds. Each map I chose is expressing the culture that made the map. You should read the maps in the book with an open mind."

The CIA map of South Vietnam was a wonderful example of governments hiding the truth. For Virga, it was an accidental find.

"I literally found the map by going through the Vietnam folders," said Virga. "Ron Grim and I would go downstairs where there were two football fields of maps on Vietnam. We went through folders. All we knew about the map was that it had been classified. I said to Ron, 'This looks like a broken arm.'"

It was a map of South Vietnam crisscrossed by numerous red lines of Viet Cong-controlled areas. "The U.S. government and the Pentagon were fighting a war hither and thither," said Virga. "That's how they planned to fight the war. The people who made the map said, 'You're wrong. We have discovered that the Viet Cong have divided the country up in their own way. This is how they are underground and secretly governing (South Vietnam).' The Joint Chiefs of Staff did not want to accept this because that was not their plan of attack. They put that map on hold and prevented people from seeing it."

In Virga's 40-year career in book publishing, he helped revolutionize the use of photography in nonfiction books. Virga took haphazard photo inserts with stale captions and brought the photography alive.

Narrowing down millions of maps to the 200 used in the new book was an enormous task. There were two tests. "We decided which maps were the most beautiful and which had the best stories," said Virga.

Then Virga dug into each map's history and the country's history. "When I laid the book out, I had to build a narrative," he said. "First, I read the histories of the countries. Then I read the cultural histories. I read psychological histories to understand the Japanese and their psyches. This is why the book took eight years. I tell you how the countries believe in their mythology, and how the countries were born."

Virga felt duty bound to include such horrific historical periods as the trench warfare on the Western Front of World War I and later the evils of Serbian ethnic cleansing of Bosnia.

The Serbian ethnographic map of Bosnia nonchalantly lays out the future terror that destroyed a multiethnic Yugoslavia in the 1990s. "I was fascinated by Bosnia," said Virga. "I found the Serbian map that was a template for ethnic cleansing. I was reading a book on ethnic cleansing; they referenced the map. I went downstairs in the library and they had the map."

The 1915 British trench map looks like a harmless map of France, but it marks where millions of German and Allied soldiers met horrific deaths. "The text for the trench map was the one I had to work very hard on," Virga said of his need to hide his outrage at the senseless slaughter.

"There were 20 drafts of the book. My anger had to be removed. The sections had to be rewritten to find a neutral storyteller tone."

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Feature: Tony Horwitz on America's Lost History

(Originally published in the Denver Post, August 1, 2008)

Finding America's Lost Centuries
Between Columbus and Plymouth Rock hangs a rollicking epic journey
By Dylan Foley
Special to The Denver Post
.

In his new travel-history book "A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World," journalist Tony Horwitz asks the question: What happened between Columbus discovering the New World in 1492 and the Pilgrims landing on Plymouth Rock in 1620?

The answer is: plenty, in terms of the exploration and exploitation of the Americas. Horwitz, using his patented version of "You are there and suffering through this" travel literature, goes around the continental United States, Canada and parts of the Caribbean to track down the explorers, conquistadors and missionaries who discovered what is now America.

Horwitz's epic journey starts at Plymouth Rock, the puny boulder in Massachusetts near where the Pilgrims landed.

"Part of it was personal," said Horwitz, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner, in an interview by phone from Miami. "I always considered myself a history nerd from way back. It was a surprise to find there was such a huge gap in my knowledge of history. Americans are obsessed with the Revolutionary era, but for some reason we don't explore the founding of America that happened hundreds of years before."

Horwitz visits the Vikings sites in Newfoundland and Christopher Columbus' alleged grave in the Dominican Republic, but the book really sings when he hits the heavy-metal conquistadors like Francisco de Coronado, who headed up from Mexico and worked his way through what is now New Mexico, Arizona and Texas, and Hernando de Soto, who came through Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and eastern Texas. The meeting of Native Americans and the Spanish explorers was initially comic, then tragic, with massacres and epidemics.

Horwitz's surprise was that the history was easy to find.

"The history was hiding in plain sight," said Horwitz. "I'd love to say that I went to the archives in Seville, but many of the original accounts have been translated and published in English. Also, I found that the early history of European settlement and discovery is much more thrilling than brave Columbus and the Pilgrims in funny hats."

Hernando de Soto had made his fortune raping and pillaging Peru, but was not content to sit on his laurels in Spain, so he obtained a land grant in the Americas from the Spanish king and went to Florida with 400 men in 1539, determined to find gold and riches.

"The conquistadors were basically armed entrepreneurs," said Horwitz. "They raised their own armies and were in it for themselves. De Soto was a conquistador run amok, with no constraints, leading his men in a 3,000-mile death march through the South.

The Spanish in the Americas had a sense of divine right.

"The Spanish were on the jihad of their era," said Horwitz. "They had just kicked the last Moors out of Spain and they were infused with a sense of might and right. They were almost on a crusade, and they were the best fighters in Europe at the time."

De Soto and his men had swords, primitive firearms, crossbows and horses. Contact with the natives often started with a demand for women, blankets and food. If the natives balked, the massacres started.

In their four-year rampage, De Soto and his men were unstoppable. Forty of his men were ambushed by 3,000 warriors, but then killed most of the natives. They were like 16th-century Special Forces, improvising and living off what they could pillage. When they hit the Mississippi River, they smithed their horseshoes into nails to make rafts.

Traveling through draining heat in armor and wool, they kept going. "A military man I spoke to said that the Navy SEALS, the toughest of the toughest, would be dropping if they went through what these guys went through," said Horwitz. "They were tough hombres."

In the end, de Soto's expedition was a disaster — no gold was found and half his men were dead from combat and disease. "When he dies, de Soto's own men are relieved, not to mention the natives he's been brutalizing for years."

During his travels, Horwitz has comic meetings with park rangers and historical re-enactors at almost-forgotten historical sites, like the French Protestant settlement at Fort Caroline, Fla., where the settlers were slaughtered by the Spanish, and he addresses the mysteries of the disappearance of the Jamestown settlers. He explores the myths and legends of the founding of Florida and America itself.

Like his best seller, "Confederates in the Attic," where he chronicled the bizarre world of Civil War re-enactors, Horwitz strikes the perfect balance between history, black humor and his own odyssey of driving thousands of miles to find the few remaining buffalo or an old Spanish massacre site.

At the end, he goes back to Plymouth, attending a quirky, yearly event where old men eat the bad 17th-century English food and fire off a cannon to celebrate the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth. He finds himself in a discussion with an elderly and venerable Harvard lecturer on myth and history.

"I asked Rev. Jones, 'Why do we remember this late-arriving band of Pilgrims as the beginning of the European experience in America, when the facts don't support it?' " said Horwitz. "He surprised me by saying, 'You are absolutely right, but myth is more important than fact, because history is a random set of facts, and myth is what we choose to remember and perpetuate. In this instance, Plymouth is the story we have and we are sticking to it, whether it is true or not.' "

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Naomi Klein Desecrates Milton Friedman's Grave in SHOCK DOCTRINE

Commentary: I interviewed Naomi Klein on her damning new book "Shock Doctrine," which links the late right-wing economist Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago School of Economics with the shock therapy school of economics used after the 1973 coup in Chile, in Russia in the 1990s and throughout Latin America. It was a great book , a blizzard of statistics and depressing stories. After reading it, I felt like I was reading a 19th century tract on the Masons, ascribing all the world's evil to a small group of men, in this case being the now-dead Friedman and his crew of acolytes.

At the end of our intense 45-minute phone call, I asked the hyper-articulate Klein why she did not mention anywhere in her book that Friedman spent the last 20 years of his career at Stanford University. She froze on the phone and mumbled that she really wanted to focus on Friedman and Chicago. Hmmm...the book began to take on more of a polemical feel after that.--Dylan Foley


(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger in October 2007)

In her new book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”(Metropolitan, $28), Canadian critic Naomi Klein has taken a sledgehammer to the legend of neoconservative economist Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economic theory. In her grim a=but engrossing account, Klein argues that Friedman’s view of the pure free market theory and the shock therapies the grew up around it caused immense hardships, social unrest and misery in countries from Chile to Bolivia, Poland, Russia, Thailand and now Iraq.

The story starts in the University of Chicago in the 1950s, where Friedman advocated a fringe theory of massive privatizations, cuts in government spending and payrolls , and deregulation, including ending tariffs and price controls. The U.S. government recruited South American students to study with Friedman and sent them back to South America. According to Klein, the “Chicago Boys” in Chile worked hand-in-hand with the Pinochet government in his bloody 1973 coup. In the aftermath, Chicago economist applied economic shock therapy to Chile, m,moving unemployment from three percent to 30 percent and destroying local industries. The local populace may have been miserable, but local elites and multinationals made buckets of money.

Over the next 30 years, Friedman’s ideas were used in dozens of countries, causing massive unemployment and reducing millions to complete poverty. The same figures come up constantly--Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, with there massive conflicts of interest, were all Friedman followers. Iraq was supposed to be the shining free trade zone after the invasion. Price controls were lifted, factories and the army were shut down and unemployed men flooded into the Iraqi insurgency, helping the country to descend into hell.

Klein, 37, was born in Canada to American parents, and was educated at the University of Toronto. She is the author of “No Logo,” which was embraced by anti-World Trade Organization demonstrators in 2000. Klein spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by phone from Chicago, where she was on tour.

Q. What was your “Eureka” moment on your thesis on “disaster capitalism”?

A. There were many Eureka moments. I knew about Chile in 1973, but the same names kept coming up. I knew about the Latin American program, but I wasn’t aware of how concerted the U.S. government effort was. We’d all heard about the Chicago Boys, but it was part of U.S. foreign policy.

I was living in Argentina in 2002 and 2003 with my husband, making a documentary. I was living in a country that had just experienced an enormous shock, and I was watching the war unfold in Iraq through the eyes of our Argentine friends.

Q. What is the importance of the “Chicago Boys” and the Chicago School in promoting economic shock therapy around the world?

A. We need to make a distinction between the Chicago Boys and the Chicago School. My book is a history of the Chicago School strain of economics, which is this radical vision of the hollowed-out state, where everything is run for profit You can trace these ideas to the University of Chicago in the 1950s as a counterrevolution against Keynesian economics (ie. Roosevelt’s New Deal). In some cases, the presence of the Chicago Boys was very literal. In other places like Russia, it isn’t graduates of Chicago. By that point, the Chicago School ideas has become the dominant ideology. It’s really how this fringe ideology, through this dissemination process with a lot of help from some of the largest corporations in America supporting the think-tank complex spread these ideas. The IMF and the World Bank are also in the thrall of these ideas.

Q. Economists like Milton Friedman and Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs became like rock stars in Chile and Bolivia, the countries they were shocking. Why?

A. It is very much related to shock therapy, that you have these rock stars. The promise of shock therapy is the quick fix: “You are going to hurt for a while, but you’ll be jolted back to help.” It is a belief in magic to begin with, that you can create this dramatic contraction, everything falls dramatically into place and you then have a healthy economy. It really is voodoo economics.

Q. You attack Friedman’s link between freedom and capitalism. How?

The deeper you study Friedmanism, the more you realize this equation between freedom and capitalism is not really an equation of capitalism and democracy, i.e. political power. What Friedman really believes in the highest expression of democracy is commerce. If democracy threatens this freedom of the market in any way, to hell with democracy. What the Chicago Boys is Chile thought they were doing was building the freest country in the world. The fact it was run by a brutal dictatorship was a mild inconvenience.

Q., After the “structural adjustments” in the Asian economies in the 1990s, 24 million people were unemployed. What are the long-term consequences of shock capitalism?

A. We have this very bloodless view of history. In Russia, there was great reporting on the human hardships of economic shock therapy. In all the other places, there is bloodless reporting on the business pages. By the time the World Health Organization issues reports on how many people have been reduced to abject poverty, the news has moved on. There is a phrase by Rudofo Walsh, who was gunned down during the Argentine junta’ called “planned misery.” The goal of structural adjustments is profit, but misery is the flip side of that profit.

Q. In your book, you point out we’ve had some blowback on economic shock therapy in the United States--privatization of schools after New Orleans, private contractors undermining the readiness of FEMA in New Orleans and private mercenaries to fight in our wars. Could you explain this?

A. This is an interesting phase in capitalism. You have a country going to war to loot itself. Not just the Iraq War, but the whole War on Terror, is the new economy that was deliberately constructed after September 11th. The new economy is about mining the core of government. The 1990s was about the privatization of water, electricity and roads. What’s left is the core of government--border, the way we fight wars and servicing U.S. soldiers. It is a shifting of national wealth through private contracts.

Q. Iraq was supposed to be the most free trade zone in the world. What happened?

A. Plan A in Iraq was a baldly colonial enterprise, riding into the country while it was still burning, seeing the destruction as a cleaning of the slate for a brand-new country. They came in with the idea to make Iraq the most radical version of Friedmanism in the world. When Plan A failed and spiraled into chaos, the New Economy became the war itself. Because the U.S. government didn’t send more troops, the needs for interpreters, security and everything was met by private contractors. You have dramatic, corporate mission creep in the field. U.S. government ordered ill-trained interrogators like pizzas.

Q&A: Mary Gordon Views Her Mother

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger in August 2007)

The novelist Mary Gordon has just published “Circling My Mother”(Pantheon,$24), a superb memoir of life with her alcoholic mother and the harsh, extended family in 1950s working-class New York City that forged both women. Gordon’s memoir is crafted out of love, guilt and anger, with her lush prose chronicling a vanished world where the Catholic Church was the center of Irish American social and cultural life.

The five Italian-Irish Gagliano sisters were beautiful, talented and funny. Mary Gordon’s mother Anna Gagliano Gordon was crippled by polio, but that did not prevent her from becoming a financially independent legal secretary in the 1930s. Her determination, however, did not protect her from the brutality of three of her sisters against her and her daughter. When Mary Gordon’s father died when she was seven, she and her mother moved into her grandmother’s house, a home filled with emotional cruelty. The sisters were jealous of Anna Gordon’s success, cutting her down and bullying her bookish daughter. Anna Gordon is a complex character. With one leg six inches shorter than the other, society threw obstacles in her way, but she persevered. At the same time, she was a self-pitying, drunken burden on her young daughter.

“Circling My Mother” is a vivid companion to Gordon’s 1996 book “The Shadow Man,” a memoir of the father she had lost four decades before. Paul Gordon was a Jewish convert to Catholicism who wrote anti-Semitic articles for journals, spent time in psychiatric hospitals and left behind a web of lies.

Gordon, 57, was raised in New York City and educated at Barnard College and Syracuse University. She is the author of the acclaimed novels “The Company of Women and “Pearl. Gordon lives in New York City, where she spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley from her publisher’s office.


Q. Was it difficult writing about your mother?

A. It was very painful writing this memoir. There was an urgency to tell my mother’s story, because there will never be someone like her again. Polio, thank God, has been eradicated, and the immigrant, European Catholic Church, as a cohesive community organization, doesn’t exist anymore. I wanted to get this down.

Q. Why were your aunts so cruel to you and your mother?

The most charitable way I can say it is my aunts perceived that life was hard, and the way that I was as a dreamy child, they thought life would be harder for me. As working-class women, they saw there was no margin. People assume that if you fall, you’ll go spat on the sidewalk.

My mother loved me, but I knew what it was like to be hated from a young age. Every family event was a minefield. You had to be careful not to know to much. ‘Smart’ was an insult. Some of my relatives rightly perceived that I had my eye on them, that I saw through them. It might have been horrible to be watched by this kid with a gimlet eye. In one way, I understand that hostility., but I don’t understand such cruelty to a child.

Q. The reader’s view of your mother shifts throughout the book-- from defiant handicapped woman, to pioneer professional to emotionally battered alcoholic. How did you construct this?

A. I use the metaphor of a circle to look at my mother,” said Gordon. Every time I thought there was one way of looking at her, I found another point on the circle, another way of looking at my mother that contradicted what I’d said about her. She was really smart, really funny and had great social skills. At the same time, she had enormous self hatred, enormous shame and the bad luck of being severely disabled. The gift and the curse were intertwined with her.

Q. It seems that you and your mother were saved by her close women friendships in the 1950s. How?

A. There was this Catholic retreat movement that took working women seriously. The women were my mother’s friends and treated me tenderly. They were a safe spot for me, and they were a model for me with my own circle of women friends, who became a source of nourishment for me.

Anna Gordon died in 2002 at the age of 94, spending the last decade demented and incontinent in a nursing home. Her daughter writes bluntly of her mother’s misshapen body and the indignities of aging.

Q. You’ve written two memoirs about your very complicated parents. Have these books given you any release?

A. I knew that it was important to look at everything, and to not cover anything up. I found them to be remarkable people and was glad that they were my parents. Their afflictedness, my mother’s handicap and my father’s mental illness, opened me up to a sensitivity to the world. There are a lot of afflicted people in the world that American culture tries to cover up. Affliction is a part of life. It doesn’t make a person inhuman.

I think my parents were funny, smart, passionate and a little wild. In writing these memoirs, I got to recover some of the wonderful parts that brought me to a place of love and gratitude. I think that’s cathartic.

Feature: Russell Banks on Tortured Love and Class Conflict in the Adirondacks

(Originally published in the Denver Post in March 2008)

By Dylan Foley

Russell Banks’ lush new novel “The Reserve”(HarperCollins, $25) is set during the Depression and focuses on Jordan Groves, an uncompromising leftist painter who flies his biplane through the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York where he lives. Groves is torn between the working class that he champions in his art and the wealthy who buy his paintings.

The Hemingwayesque Groves grapples with his political ideals and personal desires against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and the growing specter of fascism in Europe. The egocentric painter, though married, is drawn to the Vanessa Cole, a troubled heiress whose father owns a nearby estate in the Reserve, a vast tract of land restricted for use by its wealthy owners. Passion, lust, adultery and family secrets help force a tragedy that leaves a woman dead and Groves’ marriage in shambles.

Jordan Groves great ambivalence toward the American class system is central to the novel. “I don’t think this ambivalence is peculiar to Jordan Groves,” said the 67-year-old Banks, in an interview from a New York City restaurant. “It occurred to me that of the writers, artists and intellectuals of the 1930s, almost all of them, like John Dos Passos and Edmund Wilson, were radical leftists. They identified with the working class and the oppressed, but their social milieu and their readership were the class that they were opposed to, that their politics were lined up against. It is peculiar to Americans. I don’t think that French or German writers have this kind of divide.

“The American culture’s attitude with regard to art is basically that it is an amusement of the elites,” said Banks. “It is not regarded as a necessity in the lives of ordinary people. That is why I made Groves a painter, dependent on the aristocracy to buy his work.”

Twenty-five years ago, Banks moved up to the Adirondacks. He came across the 1930s leftist painter Rockwell Kent and his complicated past, which formed a model for Jordan Groves.

“I have some of Rockwell Kent’s signed first editions and some of his prints,” said Banks. “He was a famous painter, a philanderer and an egomaniac. He lived his life as if it was the most important thing on the planet.

in the Adirondacks, Banks discovered unparalleled beauty and an awkward class system. “I became entranced by the Adirondacks and its class structure,” said Banks. “It is not unique to the Adirondacks. Every place in America that is physically beautiful has the same structure, whether you are in the Outer Banks of North Carolina or Montana. You have people with a great deal of money building houses and the local people become dependent on them economically.”

The fictional Groves sleeps with women from all cultures, from Manhattan heiresses to the Eskimo women he meets in Alaska. Hypocritically, he hits the roof when he finds out that his wife has had a love affair with an Adirondack guide who tends to the wealthy Cole family.

“I think these men like Groves are out there, even if they are underground,” said Banks. “Women know they are out there. I’ve been finding that women readers tend to be sensitive to this book, and they say, ‘Oh yeah, I know this guy.’ Nowadays, they are not that overt. Among my contemporaries, I know a whole bunch of guys who have these values. It’s like racism. It exists, but you can’t say it openly. What Hemingway could say in print, the racist terms and anti-Semitic writing, no writer could put in print today.”

Banks deftly weaves several important historical elements as plot devices into the novel, including the Spanish Civil War, the Hindenberg and the experimental use of lobotomies.

“Aesthetically, we all have an historical context for our private lives,” said Banks. “Normally, fiction does one or the other: It portrays the personal life as though there were no historical context, or it portrays the historical context as if there were no personal lives lived. I am trying to bring that historical context in in a realistic way.

“Even as the private dramas are unfolding in the novel, there is a historical sequence to which they are connected to,” he said. “Today, you’ve got your personal life, I’ve got my personal life, but there’s a war going on, the economy’s tanking, and there is an incredibly important election is happening. It’s the texture of our life.”

Banks was raised in New Hampshire by a violent father and an emotionally unstable mother. Banks also had his own hard-drinking, bare-knucked youth. He once famously said that if he hadn’t become a writer, he probably “would have been stabbed to death in the parking lot outside a bar in Florida at 24, or something like that.”

Since the early 1980s, he has had best-selling novels like “Continental Drift” and “The Rule of the Bone,” and books like “The Sweet Hereafter” have been made into critically acclaimed movies. He still wears the mantle of success, fame and wealth warily.

“Of course I have conflict over success, or I wouldn’t be able to write this book,” said Banks regarding the eternal battle successful artists have over the class they come from versus the the money that surrounds them.

“At some level, the conflict that Jordan Groves has is one that I share, as does Tony Kushner, E.L. Doctorow and many other successful writers,” said Banks. “I don’t see any resolution of this conflict. There is a truth to this conflict, and the truth is that a writer can’t really belong to any class.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Feature: Alan Alda on his Unsinkable Optimism

(Originally published in the Denver Post, October 2007)

By Dylan Foley

In 2003, the actor Alan Alda almost died of an intestinal blockage in a remote Chilean mountain village. His life was saved through emergency surgery, and in 2005, he went on to be nominated for an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony, and had the bestselling memoir “Never Have Your Dog Stuffed.”

Alda’s vivid awareness of his new lease on life left him with many questions about his own career and choices, and those of others. Alda revisited and reread a series of commencement and memorial speeches he’d made over the past three decades, addressing the sticky question of the meaning of life. Thus was born his second memoir “Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself”(Random House, $24.95), Alda’s witty take on the platitudes of public speaking, his own passion for life and his optimism, and the experiences that backed them up.

“When I realized what I was doing, I found myself leery of confronting the question of the meaning of life,” said Alda from his publishers office in New York City. “A lot of very smart people have been addressing that question for thousands of years. In a way, it is an insolvable question. What saved me was I realized that I was talking about the meaning of my own life.”

The 11 years Alda spent as Hawkeye Pierce on the TV show M*A*S*H from 1972 to 1983 made him one of the most famous actors in America. At 71, Alda’s hair is finally gray and thinning, but he is hale, very charming and ready with a laugh or a joke.

“The talks I gave at the school commencements, I worked on harder than anything else I’ve ever done,” said Alda. “I’ve written for movies, I’ve written for television, but I always had to justify why I was up there speaking.”

Alda often found himself with tough speaking engagements. “I was always scaring myself. I’d be speaking to the brilliant young minds at Cornell Medical School or a group of psychiatrists,” said Alda. “When I talked to the doctors, I talked to them as a patient. When I talked to the psychiatrists, I talked to them about somebody who had tasted celebrity and the strangeness of celebrity. I called it ‘Celebrity and Its Discontents.’ They were getting a report from the front line, where around celebrities, people lose their balance, lose their syntax.”

In the book, Alda talks about his business manager Marty Bregman, who stopped him from taking a seven-year movie contract that would have hobbled his early career. Marty, he noted, was a tough producer, but couldn’t fire people. “Here I was, with the reputation of being ‘Mr. Nice Guy’ and I was the one who’d have to go in and fire the guy.”

Despite his brilliant success as both an actor and writer in 2005, it was also a year full of loss. Three close friends, the actors Ozzie Davis and Anne Bancroft, and anchorman Peter Jennings all died that year. The memorial speeches Alda gave in his new book are some of his most poignant writing in his new book.

“I was asked to speak at all three memorials,” said Alda. “Looking back to what I said, I talked very little about their professional accomplishments. What interested me was who they were to me. I picked small personal moments. I remembered Peter for the fact that I never left his house with a book, and he gave me a copy of the Constitution to carry around with me. With Anne, I remember her holding beach glass she had collected. With Ozzie, I thought he was going to live forever. I remember his goodness and generosity in little moments. What connected me to them had effect on me, not their accomplishments.”

Alda has been married to the children’s book author Arlene Alda for almost 50 years. They have three daughters and seven grandchildren. In his new memoir, he recounted watching the Indian director Sanyajit Ray’s classic “Panther Panchali,” which involves a tragic father-daughter relationship. Alda realized that he might have been distant with his own children.

“I always expressed a great deal of love to my children,” he said. “I wondered if I could have done it better. I wondered if I used my children as an audience. It’s very easy for an entertainer to do that. It’s much harder to make it a two-way street. I questioned if I could do it better with my grandchildren. I think I listen better now.”

In his speeches to students, Alda urges them to have passion for their work, and expresses a sense of optimism about the value of life.

Alda’s own childhood was turbulent. His mother suffered from schizophrenia and was prone to delusions. His father, the actor Robert Alda, could be emotionally inaccessible. Somehow, Alda developed his own style of relentless optimism. When prodded on the roots of this optimism, Alda had a few ideas where it came from.

“Your constitution is important,” said Alda. “Because of that, some people can tolerate more stress. If you can’t tolerate stress, you get weakened by it. In an effort to block out more stress, you can block out a large part of life.”

“My father and mother also loved me,” he said. “I knew I was loved. There is nothing better than that for a child.”

Some of his optimism came from reading philosophy. “I have a peculiar kind of optimism,” said Alda “It is sometimes hard to explain. My favorite philosophers were the existentialists. They thought that life was meaningless and absurd. What I hooked onto was the next sentence, which said that life was meaningless, unless you gave meaning to it by what you chose to do.”

“I think it is worth looking into the abyss, but don’t make up abysses if they don’t exist,” said Alda. “I don’t think you can be optimistic without knowing what you are being optimistic about.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Q&A: Sarah Manguso's Catastrophic Illness Memoir "Two Kinds of Decay"

(Originally published in the Newark Star-Ledger in June 2008)

The poet Sarah Manguso was attending Harvard University in 1995 when she was struck down by a rare autoimmune disease called CIDP, where the body produces antibodies that destroys the nervous system. Manguso went through 50 plasma replacements and at times suffered almost complete paralysis. The disease went into remission in 1999, but was then followed by five years of severe depression.

In her new memoir “The Two Kinds of Decay”(FSG, $22), Manguso uses stripped down vignettes to create the terror of a disease that may start as numbness in the feet, but will completely incapacitate and even kill it sufferers. This is not a “rah-rah” survivor story, but a brutal tale told with black humor about Manguso’s refusal to capitulate to a devastating disease. It is a story about infected chest tubes, experimental drug protocols, sex as a lifesaving measure and a fierce woman coming back from an absolute physical collapse and steroid-induced depression.

Manguso, 34, was educated at Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is the author of two poetry collections, “Siste Viator” and “The Captain Lands in Paradise,” and has written for McSweeney’s and the Believer. Manguso spoke to freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from Rome, where she is a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Q. What brought you to writing your memoir?

A. It was in the summer of 2006. I was at the MacDowell Colony (in New Hampshire), trying to write a third poetry collection. I wrote an essay about social class that mentioned the tube in my heart. When I wrote the essay, I realized that I needed to write another essay about the tube and contextualize it. I just kept writing. I gave myself the project of writing one vignette a day from those years. It was a pleasant, easy exercise because I wasn’t thinking about it as a book. There was no pressure.

Q. Why do you use short, stark episodes, and are they influenced by your work as a poet?

A. You are on to something when you accuse me of being a poet. I really only had practice writing short texts, very short stories and poems. I was doing what I was comfortable doing. I don’t really like description. It seems like filler.

Q. Why did you get rid of the doctor who expressed pity over your medical condition?

A. It really was a strong instinct. It was a result of several facets of my personality and my surroundings. I was at this strange college and had grown up in New England, where people tend to be reserved. I had some very strong instincts on what would be helpful in my recovery. Not all of them were correct. I refused to talk to psychiatrists when I was still very sick. They kept sending them into my hospital room and I kept sending them out. I thought that if I started feeling anything, it would consume me, and I didn’t have time for that. That is what informed my reaction to my doctor. I know he meant well, but he did not align with the goals I set for myself. I was 21 and I thought I knew everything. I was very hard headed.

Q. At one point you seek “the cure” with your friend Victor, having sex so you can stop the antibodies that are destroying your body. What made you do this?

A. I was young and hadn’t had a lot of opportunities to goof around. I guess I had the young person’s concept of the power of meaningful sexual intercourse. The character I called Victor was really a uniquely generous and almost mythically empathetic person. It just made sense.

Q. Towards the end of the book, you are rather hard on yourself, that the years battling your autoimmune disease damaged your own sense of empathy. How did you address this?

A. I don’t think that I was being hard enough on myself in the book. I’ve really become a very hard person. For a long time, I was unwilling to address that for fear of the self pity and anger I might feel. I went ahead as this hard, not-so-self-aware, not very empathetic person. In 2004, I had this very unstable euphoria. It was a wild time. At the end of that period, I realized I had to change my life and completely breakdown all my hard ideas on how to function and how to treat other people. After 2004, I started handling the things I had refused to address.

Q&A with legendary photographer George Tice on "Ticetown"

Photographing Family History in Black and White

(Originally appeared in the Newark Star-Ledger on August 31, 2008) In more than five decades of work, the photographer George Tice has chronicled his native New Jersey in such now-classic books as “Paterson” and “Urban Landscapes,” recording the factory rustbelts and the small-town Jersey character now almost wiped away by big-box chain stores.

Tice had always assumed that he had no connection to an area once called Ticetown that straddles Monmouth and Middlesex counties, until a foray into his family genealogy showed he was related to a family that settled in what is now Marlboro in 1709, meaning that the photographer is an 11th generation American and a 10th generation New Jerseyan. Out of this discovery, Tice created “Ticetown”(Lodima Press, $60), which explores the Tice family history through glorious black-and-white photography of collapsed farmhouses, fallen apples and a ruined church, mixed with historical photographs and family letters. In the book, Tice focuses on the death of a young boy, Ervin Tice Jr., at the turn of the century, and his mother Dorcas’ inconsolable grief.

Tice, 69, was raised in Newark and as a child worked as a peddler across the United States. He is the author of 17 books, including “Common Momentos,” a monograph of New Jersey photographs also published this year. Tice spoke with freelance writer Dylan Foley by telephone from his home in the Atlantic Highlands area.

Q. How did the work behind “Ticetown” start?

A. After a fellowship in 1991-92 in England, I was determined to research my genealogy. My father knew almost nothing about his family. He knew up to his grandfather. If you know your genealogy, you accept your history. When I got it down that one of my ancestors arrived in New Amsterdam in 1663, that gave me a kind of status.

Q. You chronicle a lost New Jersey of farms. Was it hard to find photographic subjects for the book?

A. I remember when the whole area was undeveloped and just farmland. Now there may be just three farmlands left in the area. If you go to Ticetown, it is pretty much suburbia. I was very limited in my subject matter, but fortunately there was Dorcas Tice’s archive that was still in the attic of a nearby house and there was the churchyard and the church steps. I was wondering if I could really go back into the past. I found out that I could with newspaper clippings from the period and letters. There is a letter from Dorcas where she writes her aunt that she is marrying a man named Ervin Tice. She doesn’t mention that the man is her cousin.

When I photographed the Homestead, the family farmhouse, in 1994, it was so rickety. There was a danger of it collapsing at any time. When I went back there later, a neighbor had said it collapsed during a storm.

Q. Would you say the pastoral “Ticetown” is a much more personal work than your gritty urban books like “Paterson” and “Urban Landscapes”?

A. It is definitely more personal, but it is not a departure from New Jersey. Most of my books are about New Jersey or New Jersey subjects. This book is about the passage of time, the decrepitude of everything, from the broken steps of the church to wedding photographs left in a barn, to the collapse of the family house.

Q. How did you address Dorcas Tice’s lifelong grief over the loss of her son Ervin Tice Jr.?

A. There are happy times, like the wedding photos in the book, then Dorcas’ only son dies at 13, and the mother never got over it. When I found the photo of Ervin Tice Jr., I thought he was the All-American boy. He looked like James Dean. What promise he had, excelling at everything he did. The picture had silvered over. I had to restore the picture by taking automobile rubbing compound with Q-Tips, removing all the oxidized silver.

Q. You’ve had an impressive several years of work, publishing “Paterson II” in 2006, two books this year and are reissuing your book “Seacoast Maine” with revamped photography. Why are you so productive now?

A. I’m approaching 70. At that age, you begin to think of mortality and unfinished business. I had read Somerset Maugham’s “The Summing Up” 30 or 40 years ago. I reread it recently. I’m doing my own kind of summing up. After 55 years of work, I am still ambitious.

(Copies of “Ticetown” may be ordered from the Lodima Press at www.lodimapress.com)

Weehawken’s Glorious Misanthrope: Irene Dische on Her Abominable Grandmother

(Originally published in the Star-Ledger in September 2007)

In Irene Dische’s new autobiographical novel “The Empress of Weehawken”(FSG, $24), the writer channels the memoir of her own grandmother Elizabeth Rother, a proud German woman with an aristocratic background, who saved her Jewish husband from the Nazis, faced down the Gestapo, subscribed to her own anti-Semitic views and wound up as a poor refugee living in New Jersey for five decades after the war.

This incredibly witty, beautifully written novel is narrated by the ever-complicated Elizabeth, whose true infatuation is with her rebellious daughter Renate, a coroner who marries an eccentric German Jewish scientist, and the further adventures of her wild child granddaughter Irene Dische, very closely based on the novelist, who runs away from home, takes a dangerous trip through Turkey and Iran, bums through Europe and winds up living in Berlin. The always critical Elizabeth bickers with her husband Carl, is often rescued by her loyal German housekeeper Liesel and looks down her nose at most everyone. “The Empress of Weehawken” is a potent stew of class, sex and religion, as well as cultural and generational clashes, and Dische crafts a glorious misanthrope in her fictionalized version of her grandmother Elizabeth Rother.

Dische, 55, was born and educated in New York City. She is the author of “Pious Secrets,” “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz” and the story collection “Strange Traffic.” Dische has lived in Berlin since 1980, and also has a house in Rhinebeck, N.Y. She spoke by telephone with freelance writer Dylan Foley from Fort Lee.


Q. Are you calling from the family mansion, where the real Empress of Weehawken lived?

A. Yes. The house is really in Fort Lee. I was going to put it in Hoboken, then it became Weehawken, to protect the innocent, as they say.

Q. How did your autobiographical novel evolve?

A. It's based on the family. Of course there are some lies, but by and large it is true. My youth between the ages of 15 and 19 had been pretty wild. My children had always been bugging me about the stories. I told them I would write it down when they are old enough enough because I didn't want to give them a bad example. At some point, they were old enough, so I started writing. I was making myself heroic and prettying myself up. I needed an independent witness, to write my autobiography. I had had a very difficult relationship with my grandmother, who was very critical of me. She had been dead 20 years, but she said yes. She got pretty carried away with herself, so that is why the book turned out they way it did. The original title was going to be "The Biography of Irene Dische." I was going to try to publish it under my grandmother's name.

Q. Your grandparents were very complex characters. Your Jewish grandfather, as a protected "honorary Aryan" refused to perform sterilizations and got in trouble with the Nazis, and your grandmother routinely faced down the Gestapo, refusing to divorce her Jewish husband before she left Germany in 1939. They both were anti-Semites. Could you describe them?

A. My grandmother was an anti-Semite, but she didn't act like one. She believed all that, but then again she didn't. It didn't rhyme with her Catholicism. She was also very courageous. She was stubborn. She wasn't going to let the Nazis push her around. She was angry that they pushed her husband around and she saw it as a sign of weakness on his part. My grandfather was actually the most difficult person in the family. He was the worst anti-Semite of all. In the book where he said, "The Jews deserved it," I remember him saying that.

Q. Their fall from the high social status they had in Germany made your grandparents bitter. How did this affect their world view?

A. Under the Nazis, they were socially devalued. Even though they had no social rights, they still saw themselves as middle class. When they came to the United States, they were poor. It hurt my grandfather in particular. He came from a lower-class family. He was upwardly mobile and had married an attractive woman. My grandmother had an easier time of it. She already had status. When she lost it, she didn't feel like she was nothing.

Q. How did you wind up expatriating to Germany?

A. As a young woman, I had been in some dangerous situations. I had been to Libya during the revolution in 1969. There was one dangerous place left to me and that was Berlin. I went there in my late 20s. I used to lie about my background. They would ask my why I spoke German. I'd say my parents were German. If you said they left in 1939, they'd know you were Jewish. I'd lie and say they left in the 1950s. I met a man and had children. His family was German bourgeoisie. I'll tell you a little story. My father's mother was murdered by the Nazis in a town called Lemberg (now Lvov), in the Ukraine. My father-in-law had been a defense attorney at the Nuremberg trials. He had made a career out of being the only German lawyer who wasn't in the Nazi Party. It was a big deal. He was the lawyer for Jewish intellectuals and was on various committees for Israel. When he died, we discovered it was a lie. He had been in the Nazi Party. In fact, he was in a division of Nazi soldiers at Lemberg during the exact same period my grandmother was killed. I had always thought there was something wrong with his story.

Q. “The Empress of Weehawken” was a bestseller in Germany last year. What part appealed to the German reader?

A. It sold 500,000 copies, even with the bad title “Granny’s True Stories.” Elizabeth’s honesty appealed to the Germans. They found her funny and it was a relief to them that they found something funny. Probably a lot of people in her generation talked that way. Sixty percent of the people who came to my readings were men between the ages of 45 and 60. They probably knew women like my grandmother.

Feature: Stealing Souls with Charles Baxter

(Originally published in the Denver Post in February 2008)

By Dylan Foley

In Charles Baxter’s superb new novel, “The Soul Thief”(Pantheon, $25), Nathaniel Mason is a young, handsome graduate student in postindustrial Buffalo, New York in the early 1970s. He is in love with a lesbian sculptor named Jamie and is sleeping with Theresa, an evasive, sarcastic beauty. Nathaniel also falls in with Jerome Coolberg, a boy genius intent on stealing Nathaniel’s identity, possessions and even his soul.

In a moving meditation on American identity and soul, Baxter takes Nathaniel through a tortured love quadrangle. His love for Jamie is unrequited, as is Coolberg’s love for Nathaniel. Coolberg begins to appropriate Nathaniel’s clothes and personal history, then with the aid of a local junkie steals most of Nathaniel’s possessions. A series of horrific crimes, including rape and arson, follow and Nathaniel suffers a breakdown.

For Baxter, the soul and identity are distinct spheres. “Somebody asked me last week, how do you differentiate a soul from an identity?” said Baxter from an interview at a New York City coffee shop. “I found myself saying that a soul is what we are to ourselves and an identity is what we are to others. Maybe that’s right. You do find that the sense of who you are can be attacked by other people, who would love to impose another idea of who you are on you. Parents do it, spouses and bosses do it.”

The initial inspiration for the novel came three decades ago, when Baxter encountered his own “soul thief.” “When I was in my thirties and was beginning to publish both fiction and poetry, there was a guy I had known who, unbeknownst to me, was claiming to be Charles Baxter,” he said. “He wanted my life at a point when I didn’t want my life. I found out that he was giving readings under the name Charles Baxter. I confronted him and told him, ‘You have to tell people that I exist and that Charles Baxter is not your pen name.’ He followed me around for a while. Later, I met the poet John Ashbery and he said, ‘Oh, you are the man the so-and-so claimed to be.’”

The man who tried to steal Baxter’s identity moved out to the West Coast and has become prominent on the American book scene. “This man is now a pretty well-known literary figure,” said Baxter. “I’m not going to say his name.”

What truly restarted Baxter’s work on “The Soul Thief” was a visit a few years back to Buffalo, where he had done graduate work in the early 1970s. “Buffalo is the way America used to be, where things manufactured,” said Baxter. “I remembered a trip I made to Los Angeles, where the guy who claimed to be me now lives. I thought, this is the place where images are manufactured, where America is in the business of rethinking souls and identities. It’s where people go to become somebody else.

“I thought of a novel that would start in Buffalo and end in Los Angeles, and would be in some sense about the trading in souls and what happened to identity in America.”

“The Soul Thief” is Baxter’s ninth work of fiction. His bestselling novels include “The Feast of Love” and “Saul and Patsy.”

Coolberg’s unrequited love for Nathaniel becomes dangerous. “I was thinking of the way that unrequited love becomes predatory,” said Baxter. “If you love somebody and the love is not returned, the love becomes obsessive. You try to get back from the person what isn’t coming your way.”

Coolberg’s stripping Nathaniel’s his apartment of almost all of his possessions has a devastating effect. “The things that we have and the rooms we go to are externalization's of our identities,” said Baxter. “What are most precious to me are the people that I have known, loved and lived with, and the rooms that I go to when I use the word home. What if you go back to these rooms and there is nothing, and things that were familial and familiar are gone? It was another way, thematically, to say that Nathaniel is losing everything that he has and everything that he is. There is a way that the story is shifting into nightmare mode.”

What pushes Nathaniel over the edge is Jamie’s brutal beating and rape by young hoodlums, a crime possibly commissioned by Coolberg. Then the soup kitchen where he and Jamie volunteers is burned down in an arson fire. For Baxter, the burning soup kitchen becomes a symbol of the death of the 1960s idealism.

Coolberg seemingly wants to suck the life out of Nathaniel. “Coolberg is a soul vampire,” said Baxter. “There are people around like this. The Buddhists have a phrase for it...’hungry ghosts.’ For some reason, they attach themselves to you and want what you have. When confronted by sociopaths like this, you think, ‘Why me?’”

Thirty years later, after Nathaniel puts his life back together with a wife and two sons in suburban New Jersey, Coolberg reenters the picture. Coolberg is now a famous public radio host in Los Angeles, and wants Nathaniel to meet him out west. Nathaniel, rehashing the painful past that almost killed him, agrees to meet Coolberg in Los Angeles. It is a treacherous meeting.

“The reason Nathaniel goes out there is that for all of us, at a certain point in our life, would like to put the parts of our lives together,” said Baxter. “If you lived through the 1960s and 1970s like I did, that’s quite a chore. We’ve all turned into people that our younger selves would hardly recognize.”

Dylan Foley is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter (Pantheon, $25)