The Classroom Conservative

Ab Uno Disce Omnes

"The schoolroom clock was worn raw by stares; and you couldn't look up at the bg puritanical face of it and not feel the countless years of young eyes reflected in it, urging it onwards" (124).  -- Tod Wodicka, All Shall Be Well

Ab Uno Disce Omnes

"... Jed would be asked numerous times what it meant, in his eyes, to be an artist. He would find nothing very interesting or original to say, except one thing, which he would consequently repeat in each interview: to be an artist, in his view, was above all to be someone submissive. Someone who submitted himself to mysterious, unpredictable messages, that you would be led, for want of a better word and in the absence of any religious belief, to describe as intuitions, messages which nonetheless commanded you in an imperious and categorical manner, without leaving the slightest possibility of escape -- except by losing any notion of integrity and self-respect" (63). -- Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory

Wayne Johnston, A World Elsewhere

Margaret Atwood deserves the Nobel Prize.

I want to endorse an idea that I have heard frequently so that I may say something I have not elsewhere heard: I believe Wayne Johnson to be the best writer working in Canada today.

The Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998) and The Navigator of New York (2002), the sweeping, historical epics for which he is best known, truly are the cornerstones of his achievement, and with The Custodian of Paradise (2006) he demonstrated that he could sustain threads of the former and cultivate them to achieve a similar effect.  He loves grand scales in his historical fiction, ennobling St. John’s by juxtaposing it with grand cities of the United States or the stunning magnificence of the natural world.  With his earlier novels, like The Time of Their Lives (1987), Johnston crafted intricate stories of human interaction, exercises that served him well when he expanded the worlds of his novels.

A World Elsewhere tries, in its brief three hundred pages, to combine elements of both approaches.  The story deals with the dishonored, outcast Landish Druken, sent down from Princeton to his native St. John’s for helping his aristocratic friend cheat on his assignments.  His father, a famous sealing captain, has disowned him for going back on his promise to embrace the family business.  Landish is between worlds, shambolic, adrift, and living inside his own head.  This is manifest in the constant punning that defines Landish’s thoughts, a conceit that begins by grating on the reader but comes, miraculously, to charm.  This creative dexterity finds an appropriate outlet when he ends up with responsibility for Deacon Carson Druken, the sickly, orphaned son of the sealer killed by the hard-heartedness of Landish’s father.  His command of words enchants the young man, and Johnston endows Landish with the gift to heighten his gift of gab to mythological heights.  “The murk” is that early time in a child’s life remembered but fuzzily; “just mist” is the world of possibilities that never was.  It is in the murk that Deacon knows his birth mother and in just mist that he imagines a life outside the abject poverty he shares with Landish.

Johnston must move his story along, and because the relationship between these two is forged in a rented attic space on Dark Marsh Road, St. John’s is less a character than it has been in earlier works.  It might be by now too easy for Johnston to conjure up the Newfoundland capital at the turn of the last century, but the quick flashes of the Old City here are no less magical for that.  It, again, is a highly-structured society, the whole world in miniature, but it is not one in which Landish can engage fully.  He makes the stunning decision to seek the charity of the classmate he rejected with resentment, and he leaves Newfoundland for the United States, a world elsewhere that his cheating relegated to just mist.  His classmate is no ordinary blue blood; he is Padgett Vanderluyden, known as Van, the fictional manifestation of George Washington Vanderbilt II.  It is, perhaps, because Van is such a fiend that Johnston decides this once to coat his story with a thin veneer.  Landish and Druken move through New York, fleetingly, to Vanderland (not Biltmore), the Xanadu in North Carolina in which Landish could have been a prince but where he is doomed, now, to be no more than an English tutor.

The last half of the book is divorced from the Gilded Age settings through which Johnston has made his name.  Vanderland is, itself, a surreal world elsewhere drawn in great detail but in utter detachment from anywhere else, including Newfoundland.  As a result, the book comes to rely more and more on the connection between characters, and Johnston is successful in drawing his as complex, complicated beings.  Just when one is ready to dismiss Landish as a failure, he asserts his physical presence (too often conveniently underplayed to descriptions of his poverty) and his sharp mind.  Van is a monster, but piteous in his monstrosity.  I enjoyed “The Blokes,” the eunuch tutors with whom Landish and Deacon board at Vanderland.  Once again, Johnston distinguishes himself in drawing women: he does not pretend to understand fully their experience, as he never asserted in giving us Sheilagh Fielding, his greatest character, but they are both fully-realized and stunningly mysterious, the “other” at the heart of Johnston’s writing.  It is perhaps because Johnston’s women are filtered through the perception of the men that they achieve this careful, tantalizing balance.  The appear underdeveloped only in the most minor characters, like in Landish’s love interest here, who is little more than a beguiling physical being.  The most straightforward character in A World Elsewhere  is the cherubic Deacon, the object, inevitably, of so much affection, the obsession that sends us hurtling towards our conclusion.

Johnston reaches some considerable heights here.  He once again gives us vivid characters that we are unlikely soon to forget.  One finishes the book wondering what happened next to them all.  (This, incidentally, is one of the things I always look for in fiction.)  There are different kinds of worlds drawn sharply, and the reader can imagine inhabiting any number of them.  Other reviews quibble with this or with that, but my only hesitation is with a conclusion that seems hurried.  It is as if, in creating tension, Johnston mistakes this with heightened pace.  His recent books, so long, so engrossing, so leisurely, in a sense, provide him with the time to develop a tension that seems, to me, tacked on here.  I cannot imagine that Landish’s next world warrants its own story, but rather than ending this one Johnston seems to have been building towards an epilogue imagined and not realized.

Listening To The New Yorker Poets

A few weeks ago, I saw one of my retired colleagues in the local bookstore.

“Do you know what I miss about the university?  The only thing?” he asked me.  “I miss reading poetry aloud to people.”

I had to admit that the ability to speak in rhyme in front of people is a unique feature of professing literature.  There are not too many other jobs in which this is permitted, let alone encouraged.  I do not suggest that you try it, say, on a sales call.

The importance of hearing poetry was reinforced for me, once more, as I explored my New Yorker iPad app.  Recently, I wrote in this space about how canny is Conde Nast by including a digital subscription as part of its packages.  Simultaneous subscriptions will help wean me off paper where weaning is absolutely necessary.

But, as many of you will know, the digital New Yorker includes some very interesting additional content, including audio files of contemporary poets reading their poems.  As I read and played the poems, listening or following along, I enjoyed the poems more and, I feel, got more from them.  After all, as my retired colleague would attest, hearing a poem is how the work should be encountered.  This takes us back to the roots of the oral tradition in literature.

Again, I have described my approach to technology as “conservative,” in the sense that ideally it should help us recapture something that we have, for various reasons, lost along the way.  I have no interest in having things read to me so that I can put less effort into concentrating on them – like those condensed books-on-tape marketed to executives who are, supposedly, too busy to read but must have content to drop into polite conversation.  But I acknowledge fully that we have lost the ability to sit around reading poetry to each other – outside the classroom, at least – and so I take some solace in my digital subscription as I hear, in delicious accent, how things are meant to be spoken.

The Old Curiosity Shop

I was in Halifax recently, very briefly, to attend to some sad family business, but I was able to take an afternoon to explore the downtown, a place that reminds me so vividly of life’s successes and life’s failures, a place that, itself, is struggling to reinvent itself one more time.

Its business plan, as far as I can tell, is designed to sell coffee to tourists.  The results are mixed.  The area around Pier 21, once a concrete wasteland that would have been threatening if encountered in any other city in North America, is now bustling and pleasant, at least when a tour ship is in.  On Barrington Street, many places are shuttered, and even the ghost of Sam the Record Man has been banished through a partial renovation of a whole city block that has left untouched only the facade of that once-great location.

(I will not hassle you again about record stores.  I get it: you do not care.  You do not want to buy an import copy of Pat Metheny’s soundtrack to The Falcon and the Snowman in order to secure David Bowie’s “This is Not America” because you can download the song from iTunes.  Strike that.  You do not know David Bowie, thinking “Under Pressure” is only the intro to a Vanilla Ice single.  Wait: you do not remember Vanilla Ice, thinking popular music is the fifteen-second sample that is the soundtrack to your life, unearthed through your iPod shuffle.  I despair, but privately.)

Anyone who can run a French press and buy Costco cookies thinks it is easy to run a coffee shop, and it shows.  You could spend an evening drifting from one location to the next, looking for a table for six that is not tied up by one pimply teenager checking Facebook through rented wifi (and stolen electricity) on the pretence of nursing a single cup of hot liquid.  Where you cannot find a good coffee shop is Spring Garden Road, ironically, where the jewel of the street has been taken over by a pet shop, a store so ridiculous in its relative incongruity that it almost distracts you from its neighbouring bookshop.  Bookmark is delightfully reliable, but it is Halifax’s used book stores that get all the attention, and it is in these establishments that I found most frustration.

On the flight from Calgary to Halifax – fly direct, if you can – Air Canada offered a documentary on the Greeley Expedition, 1881-84.  Having watched the program, I was interested in buying a book about the explorer Adolphus Greeley.  (Odd, I know: television was not enough; I needed the printed page.)  Setting foot in what is probably Barrington Street’s most famous used book store, I was struck – again – by the sense that the stock had exploded all over the store.  I love the thrill of exploring such a space, but in this case – with a specific topic to search, if not a specific title – I was frustrated by the double-shelved volumes, the covers strewn about the floor.  Businesses are brought to their knees by overhead: imagine what happens when the overhead is underfoot?  I had a leg up at the second location, a store in which I have spent many, many hours over the years.  Abebooks.com told me that they had a copy of a book about the expedition.  On my first, brief visit, I had a conundrum: “nautical” book or “Canadian history”?  Canadian history was organized well, but this subject fit poorly amongst the few subheadings by which the shelves were divided.  Nautical books had volumes that were similar, but I had no time to search over the shelves and the floor.

On my second visit, I had time to ask the clerk.  I wondered if, because the book was listed in its stock on the internet, it might be at hand.  He could see it online, could confirm that it was selling for $11.50, but he did not know where it was.  The owner drifted over, confirmed that it was “nautical,” but could tell me only that it had a black spine.  After a little rummaging on the shelf behind a first row of competing books, we found it: priced at $20.  I have written, before, about the foolishness of Chapters competing with itself online, but I do understand that they have two businesses.  Not so with the alternate distribution offered used bookstores by Canada Post and the internet.  The difference between the internet price and the price in the store, it was explained to me, had to do with the original price put on this book when it was first acquired – in 2002!  But rather than honouring the internet quote and getting rid of something that had been sitting around for nearly a decade, the store wished me to pay a premium of almost double that price.  I declined.  That evening, I bought the same book from a store in the United States for $7, including shipping.

I also poked around a used goods shop in Halifax that day.  It was described by its owner as an old-fashioned “curiosity shop.”  It was indeed not all furniture, though it had a little.  It had lots of bric-a-brac, but much of it was usefully organized.  If you wanted something for your desk, there it was; if you wanted an old pipe, there was a display of them.  I was struck by the similarly between this establishment and my beloved used book store.  Both seem quaint, but neither is particularly practical.  If you happen to come across something of interest, at either, you should grab it: for only at the curiosity shop are you likely to locate, satisfactorily, a specific item that you have set out to find.

Professor X, In The Basement Of The Ivory Tower

Those of us who have spent time as adjunct instructors, and those of us who hire and work with adjunct instructors today, might be forgiven for expecting In The Basement Of The Ivory Tower to be a very different book.  A great deal of post-secondary instruction in North America is done by part-time staff, an arrangement whose challenges deserve to be examined from the inside out.  The wages are poor, and the benefits can be modest; instructors must, by necessity, do a range of uncompensated tasks to complement teaching, tasks that are core, paid duties for tenured professors; it is difficult, and perhaps unfair, for part-timers to engage with their institutions in the full range of ways from which students would derive benefit.

To be fair, Professor X does touch on these things in discussing his life teaching nights at “Pembrook,” a four-year private American institution, and “Huron State,” its slightly-down-at-heel rival across town.  But the real thesis of this book is that, just as more and more vocations in North America demand university credentials, fewer and fewer students are prepared adequately to take even introductory classes.  As much as Professor X enjoys teaching, so much so that he takes great pains to conceal his identity from employers who would not appreciate the publicity, he does not think that he and his colleagues enrich students enough to justify anyone assuming student debt.

At its least interesting, In The Basement Of The Ivory Tower is just another cranky indictment of credential inflation, an endorsement of quick, vocational training.  The problem is that Professor X demonstrates the efficacy of the liberal education he seeks to devalue: needing mortgage money, he uses the flexibility of his training to broaden his skills and lease them to an English department.  He spends so much time lamenting the disconnection between basic literacy skills and a first job that he discounts the role of universities in laying the foundation for his students’ long-term careers.  It is true that the compositions he wants his students to write might not be relevant to the entry-level of their vocations, but the semester they spend with him will benefit them in ways Professor X acknowledges when he describes the best parts of his home life, a life enriched by the liberal arts.

Should students know more by the time they emerge from high school?  Yes.  Should it be possible to receive a broad-based liberal arts education without assuming a lifetime of crippling debt?  Absolutely.  But are those self-evident arguments more interesting than Professor X’s story itself, a story obscured by the various techniques necessary to conceal his identity?  (There is no linear narrative; to move towards some climax might tell too much about Pembrook and Huron State.)  I found that I wanted to hear even more about the need for his household to secure three salaries to stay above water in his mortgage; I found that I wanted to hear even more about how he developed as a classroom teacher over a decade of toil out of necessity.  Much has been made about Professor X’s pessimism: his conclusion that he cannot, in three months, teach his students enough fundamentals to undo years of intellectual neglect.  Though too much more “inside baseball” would have scared off a publisher, he has still not convinced me that, for a single tuition, students do not benefit from learning even five or six basic skills.  But what might those things be?  In broadening his story to book length, that kind of analysis fades to the background.

More On James Howard Kunstler, The Witch of Hebron

Author!  Author!  I have, in fact, heard from the writer behind The Witch of Hebron.  It would not be quite fair to suggest that he asked me kindly for some clarification.  Actually, I am not sure that for which I was asked is really a physical possibility.  I am not that “bendy.”  But never mind!  No, no: in all seriousness, it has been a fair reminder of the importance of speaking frankly.  In my business, you impress a university publisher, a few colleagues, sell five hundred copies, and progress in your job; in the cut-throat world of popular novels, you do not want people run off, unduly, from your work.

So, let me be clear.  I believe The Long Emergency to be a tremendously important work of non-fiction.  In assessing how western culture has cornered itself through an addiction to fossil fuels, it is likely yet the most important such book of the twenty-first century.  I consider World Made By Hand an excellent novel, a worthy competitor of the most discussed dystopian works published since The Road.  James Howard Kunstler creates pace without peer: The Witch of Hebron can be recommended simply on how quickly its pages turn.  The novel features the lush descriptions for which its author is known.  Novels might be like children; writers might not be able to choose from amongst them, make distinctions within them.  Not so for readers.  I genuinely believe the dialogue here to be weaker than the exposition.  But that does not mean that I cannot recommend the book.  Indeed, I do not think that Kunstler set out to write a novel for adolescents.  But in that the protagonist is an eleven-year-old boy, the tension is a little less sinister than it was in its predecessor, and the antagonist reminds me of “The Schofield Kid” in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992), the current novel presents another kind of introduction to “The Long Emergency.”  One of JHK’s more persistent critics, whose letters are published under the “Hate Mail” rubric on Clusterfuck Nation, Kunstler’s blog, accuses him of scaring young people with his ideas.  Unintentionally, perhaps, The Witch of Hebron presents one answer to that criticism.

“Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?” Scrooge asks the final ghost in A Christmas Carol.  One wonders this all the time when reading Kunstler.  I have always believed the resolution in Dickens to be a little odd.  Changing his ways may help Scrooge live a better life, but it will not prevent his death, ultimately.  (It does, presumably, spare him accompanying Jacob Marley in the afterlife.)  But whether you believe that, within the decade, we will be scavenging scrap metal and jerry-rigging hydroelectric power, or whether you believe that everyone’s Hummers will be fuelled by used french fry oil, we could all agree that, as Sam Cooke sang so well, a change is gonna come, and this one need not represent progress.  The great strength of JHK’s work, as I say below, is that he sketches out so clearly and with imaginative élan one path to this future.  Though one can acknowledge, intellectually, that there is no way we can afford to maintain the system of highways running across the North American landmass, we cannot know whether the future American capital might be, as is speculated in the “World Made By Hand” series, the upper midwest.   That is why these things are called works of speculative fiction, after all.  Kunstler’s wild-card is disease: by imagining away a large percentage of the population, as not even basic medicine in scalable in “The Long Emergency,” he can draw his canvas however he likes.

So, in that spirit, I would like to speculate about Andrew Pendergast, a character newly introduced, I believe, in The Witch of Hebron.  He is the village polymath, the kind of fellow we might find today in a college or a university.  (He could just as easily be working in a library or as an auto mechanic, I recognize.)  He appears to be a freelance jack-of-all-trades, found at the end of the book to be teaching American sign language.  JHK has explained that as dependant as the post-secondary sector is currently on the discretionary income of our students (and their families) and on government support, we would not do well as things unravel.  Fair enough.  Heck, Niall Ferguson points out that we do poorly weathering lesser storms, like inflation, for example.  But I have to wonder whether any manner of post-apocalyptic society, real or imagined, could not organize itself around the university.  It may very well be a kind of hubris on my part, the scholar’s version of the same kind of self-delusion that leads some to believe in a nascar circuit run on solar power, but I have always positioned our enterprise as helping transition us from the past to the future, protecting traditions while fostering innovation.  In Union Grove, the community can be seen to be developing around the farm, or the church, or the woodshop, for that matter.  If push comes to shove, why not believe in a dystopian centre of learning with its most practical skills taught in the light and with its bigger ideas discussed by candle?

I guess, like Lombardi’s library in The Book of Eli (2010), we would first need to secure a safe location in San Francisco Bay.

James Howard Kunstler, The Witch of Hebron

There has been no shortage of dystopian novels over the past few years, in reaction to our uncertain times.  While Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) may be the best known, other titles like Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse (2007) have also received deserved attention.  Most of these novels are silent on the specific details of the cataclysm that sends western civilization spiraling, as human beings descend into slavery and cannibalism.  This is not the case with James Howard Kunstler’s “World Made By Hand” series.  As he set out in The Long Emergency (2005), his seminal work of non-fiction on the coming of peak oil, Kunstler fears the disorderly unwinding of civilization in the face of widespread energy shortages.  It is to Kunstler’s great credit, however, that his fiction imagines a constructive way forward, as we get used to life without food imports, commercial goods, and electricity.  World Made By Hand (2008) drew for us the community of Union Grove in upstate New York.  The Witch of Hebron is its sequel.

The new novel continues with those things Kunster does best.  He is an expert in describing the details of everyday life; his description of food and its preparation is outstanding.  He brings to the table smells and tastes, so to speak, reminiscent of McCarthy’s authentic description of processes.  Kunstler can see Union Grove clearly, and its geography and its inhabitants jump off the page.  The complex dynamic of friendships, more than any other kinds of adult interactions, are explored with great insight.  Less satisfactory is his ear for dialogue, however; the speech of his characters does sometimes fall flat:

“I knew people like that back in Boston,” Robert said.

“They must have been very disappointed,” the doctor said.

“I miss the electricity,” Barbara said.

“Don’t we all,” Robert said.

“Ever try to set a compound fracture by candlelight?” the doctor said.  “Sorry.  I guess that’s not really table talk.”

“Your boy will come home,” Barbara said. (82)

Through his exposition, Kunster remains a master of pace, though one is not always sure towards what ends we readers hurtle.  Whereas the first book looked at adult relationships at the core of a rebuilt civilization, The Witch of Hebron concerns itself first and foremost with eleven year-old Jasper Copeland, son of Union Grove’s only doctor.  Jasper is the kind of pre-teen who is supposed to represent the turmoil of adolescence.  He overreacts to the death of his dog – which is, we are led to believe, about the worst thing that can happen to a young man once electronics are no longer available – but he can perform abdominal surgery by candle light, having had assisted his father in his office.  Our titular witch is, really, an upscale escort with a knowledge of herbal remedies, but she helps the author continue to explore the potential role of mysticism in an age that has lost most of its science.  To assist him further, Kunstler brings back Brother Jobe and his evangelical order, the rather strident form of religion that threatens to displace the milquetoast Christianity in Union Grove.  But, as was the case in World Made By Hand, Jobe and his kin never quite appear menacing.  The first book’s last pages suggested a wickedness cloaked in faith, but that is not developed further here.  Similarly, we spend a lot of time in the thrall of murderers and rapists without developing real fear of them: there are harsher dystopias, we must conclude, even as Kunstler outlines his images of depravity.  Indeed, the author seems better at creating the suggestion of terror than he is in actually building tension.  This book hints that Stephen Bullock, the wealthy landowner, may work inevitably to transform Union Grove into a feudal state.  What is, essentially, an excellent vehicle for introducing teens to thoughts of the “long emergency” simply defers, in its final analysis, a number of the big ideas James Howard Kunstler has been working through in the years since 9/11.

Some Sympathy For The Gaspereau Press

I have written in this space on many occasions about the commodification of art.  Some of us still buy books and compact discs, physically, and these purchases are about more than simply getting to read the words or hear the music.  We want to have a physical object that we can hold and display and, perhaps, loan to others.  The point is that the relationship between artists and their audience is a complex thing, and in the era about which I study and teach, the modern period (1880-1945), artists often sought actively to question this relationship through a variety of unconventional means.  The most famous example belongs, perhaps, to Marcel Duchamps, an avant-garde artist too radical to be called modernist, who secured found (and even purchased) objects, signed them, and sold them on as “art” to a willing public.  That Duchamps could famously buy and sign a urinal and then display and sell the object brought under scrutiny everything from art’s providence to the value placed on artifacts in the art market.

With this context, I have to admit that I have a little soft spot for the Gaspereau Press down in the valley in Nova Scotia, slowly churning out copies of Johanna Skibsrud’s Giller-Prize-winning novel, The Sentimentalists.  As I understand it, large commercial publishers would take no chance on an unknown Canadian author, and so the enterprising little press brought out her work in a small edition of 800, created on an offset press.  According to The Globe and Mail, the novel sold 400 copies before getting nominated for the Giller.  With the attention of the win, the demand may now reach 80,000.  The problem, of course, is that the Gaspereau can produce only 1,000 copies a week.

The consuming public is outraged.  A work of art towards which it was indifferent is now de rigeur, so how dare Andrew Steeves and Gary Dunfield, the men behind the Gaspereau Press, not permit the same commercial publishers who spurned Ms Skibsrud to rush out 80,000 copies?

I do not know at all the motives of a small publisher tucked away in Kentville.  Perhaps its owners simply have been unable to get an adequate deal out of the Toronto behemoths.  And I do feel for Ms Skibsrud, who we are led to believe is quite frantic to catch lightning in a bottle, to earn for herself not only some measure of financial independence but the creative capital to write whatever she wants in her next three, four, five books and still be assured an audience.  But with the certainty that the author will, eventually, get both her money and her future opportunity, I cannot help but enjoy the thought that the percentage of readers that wants The Sentimentalists only so that their reading groups will have bragging rights over competing reading groups will have to wait a little while for it.  I suspect that the customer that will be “put off” by the delay, as The Globe and Mail lamented in an editorial today, would likely bring the novel to the reading group, unread, and wait for the chit-chat and the biscuits.

According to the Globe, a successful book is one that “connect[s] with its readers.”  Well, that is certainly a measure of success, and I hope sincerely that 80,000 copies of The Sentimentalists eventually move.  But I think that art can be successful in a variety of ways.  And Ms Skibsrud, through Mr. Steeves and Mr. Dunfield, should also be applauded for making us think about what we value in art and how we consume it.  Should we see artistry as some collaboration between writer and publisher?  Is there any room to consider the craft of the printing process part of the art, a part that might be compromised by mass production?  And are we troubled that the success of this book has been defined, most recently, by the judgment of a small panel of “experts,” that the Globe sees its success measured primarily by sales?  If the novel is good, is it not good on merits that transcend the market?  And while I applaud anyone and anything that makes popular the printed word, that gets people to read, the reaction to this artificial shortage suggests that convenience is something that we value in our art, perhaps above all else.

Jon Krakauer, Where Men Win Glory

I still have in the basement a Sony Playstation game that allows me to play football as Pat Tillman, safety with the Arizona Cardinals.  He was an emerging defensive back when he stopped playing in 2001, having caught the attention of Paul Zimmerman, the football writer whom I most admire.  Whether Tillman would have lived up to the promise many people had begun to see in his professional sporting career is impossible to know, of course: he died in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004.

There are many unanswered questions about Pat Tillman, and untangling intricate threads plays to the strengths of Jon Krakauer, whose brilliant Into the Wild (1996) traced Christopher McCandless’s lonely trek to oblivion in barren Alaska.  Indeed, Krakauer has proven that he can craft fascinating psychological portraits by combining facts with the insights gleaned from diaries and letters.  That Tillman evades Krakauer is undeniable, however; whether this speaks to the complexity of the subject or a flaw in the approach of the author is a little harder to determine.

Pat Tillman believed, after the attacks of 9/11, that he had a duty to the American people and to its military.  He walked away from a lucrative football career just as he had earlier turned down a more generous contract to leave the Cardinals for the St. Louis Rams.  Does “loyalty” explain these decisions?  Where the McCandless family was open to second-guessing and hard characterizations, the Tillman family took a different tack with Krakauer.  We hear from his diaries the anguish of a soldier who has left behind his new wife, but he is spared much of the second-guessing that made Into the Wild such a fascinating book.  You see, Krakauer has a different villain here: the administration of George W. Bush.  As the years after 9/11 roll on, Where Men Win Glory finds no justification for the wars in Afghanistan or in Iraq.  It is a defensible position, of course, and it appears to have eventually been shared by the book’s protagonist.  But pathos is sacrificed to anger, and the author finds himself at odds with his reader, who is expecting something other than a dismantling of American foreign policy.

I do not wish to sound too negative: while the focus is often misplaced, for me, there is no denying Jon Krakauer’s skill.  Tillman was killed by friendly fire, of course, though the American military and the administration tried to conceal this fact.  This book does an excellent job of underlining how the cover-up began and how it unravelled, and – as painful as the description might be – one is forced to re-read the description of Tillman’s death: the prose is powerful.  But is this a book about Islamic radicals?  Is this a book about military operations?  Is it a story of misplaced loyalty?  Is it truly a book about the waste of a self-made life?  I think it actually finds its stride nearer its end, in the shadow of its author’s anger at the Bush White House and its military commanders.  The comments of the pathologist who examined Pat Tillman’s body were just bemused enough to create the uncertainty where conspiracy theories can thrive.  There are people who believe that Tillman was targeted by his jealous comrades, though Krakauer rightly pays this opinion no heed.  What he can explain is where this idea began, and how military obfuscation allowed it to blossom.  If the passions enkindled by Tillman’s death are still too raw to allow us to see our hero clearly, if the position our author takes against the Bush neo-cons leaves no nuance, Where Men Win Glory is still an able depiction of the tragic fog of war.