Political Assassination For Dummies And Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction, At Least Until An Editor Can Wrap Up The Loose Ends

It was my turn to pick a book for book club, which, truth be told, is not something I look forward to. Don't get me wrong, I can usually rise to the occasion, but the more my already narrow world has been restricted to poop diapers and copy editing (not always terrible) travel writing, the fewer ideas I have in general. I'm not sure, for example, that the entire group wants to read Sheryl Sandberg's new treatise, no matter how cute it is (or that I think that it is) that when I tell Master not to "lean in" to the dirty pail I say, "Quit it, Sandberg!"

If you dislike the idea of book clubs, mostly because you don't want to be saddled with either having to read The Kite Runner or feeling guilty about not having read The Kite Runner, then our system might be something to keep in mind: Whichever member it is who has to pick that month is responsible for three choices, which the attending members hash out and chew over before deciding what the next pick will ultimately be. It's consensus building, something Walt Whitman might write a poem about, or even "a fucking poem about," if you're feeling exuberant. (Of course you can game the system: the one month I really wanted to read Mötley Crüe's excellent The Dirt I also meekly offered Ross Douthat's Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class and, yes, Khaled Hossein's The Kite Runner. Hahahahahahahahahahahaha! It was (perhaps literally) a no-brainer.)

Over time we've seen that the three-pick semi-final becomes an incentive to amp up your game, as it were, and not only make excellent choices but also come up with an excellent theme for each of the excellent choices. This doesn't sound as Type A as you'd assume — for me it tends to focus my hunt for a book, and not always at the expense of shoehorning something into a theme.

This past month I was working around Kevin Powers' The Yellow Birds, which was one of Jen's holiday gifts to me, a book that I'm pretty sure she got for me because she takes me for some sniveling yellowbelly cocksucker who never fought in a war. And I guess because it's supposed to be good.

But it did get me thinking: there seem to be two places in particular where "people" or "audiences" place a special premium on personal experience — one is politics and the other is novels. In the case of the former, it makes sense: you can't possibly understand what it means to have lobbyists write legislation for you if you haven't run your own company, served in active duty or operated on people; that much is clear. With writing, however, it just seems facile — and I think literally ironic, or at least literally absurd: you can't be trusted to weave a fictional tale if you haven't actually lived what you're making up.

By way of a huge digression, maybe what we really want is for people to "Irish things up" a little, or even a lot, with their storytelling, and maybe "fictionalized" or "thinly veiled fiction" is the way to give cover to that. I don't totally understand how we square getting miffed at David Sedaris while gleefully trying to discern which parts of The Devil Wears Prada are real.

At any rate, and by way of a hugely disingenuous blanket generalization, what seems to be kind of lacking these days are stories that are fully sourced from one's own imagination — as opposed to a summer job or internship, ex-girlfriend or traumatic family secret. Because what I suspect is going on is that it's not "interesting" enough to simply create a story about, say, a high schooler shooting up a school — you need to have actually birthed that child in order to create a fictionalized account about him. And what does that say about us, as a society, when we start encouraging our youth to actualize latent psychopathic tendencies? It looks pretty bad, I'll tell you that much — bad enough to make the founding fathers rethink much of the Bill of Rights, probably.

Anyway, as I was saying, I got caught up in this idea. Not necessarily of parlaying your own experience as currency to get a book published but rather the obsession in all of us for "authenticity," whether it's a noodle shop, artisan or even an author telling what is presumably a made-up story.

If an author can combine some kind of authentic experience with a no-go zone — whether its a battlefield, drug-infested neighborhood, bad school, kitchen nightmare, rape house or whatever — then they've got even more on the rest of us.

Which isn't to get on Kevin Powers — not at all. Although I still haven't read the book, I'm sure it's going to be good. What I'm really after is this position we're in where we — "we" — don't trust experiences or expressions that aren't somehow "authentic" — whether it's "we" the book industry or "we" meaning literally "us," I'm assuming it's probably our own goddamn fault (but clearly this is an area that needs further research, or beer). I guess if I sat here long enough I'm sure I could figure out a way to blame Anthony Bourdain somehow.

Which is to say, my theme began as one-upmanship. Or something like that. So then I got to thinking about other no-go zones: The drug world popped into mind, which made me think about the border states of Mexico, where it seems about fifty times more dangerous than Iraq. I was curious about whether there was good literary fiction about the drug cartels or something like that. There is apparently a good non-fiction book about the drug cartels, but we've been reading a lot of non-fiction lately, so I wanted a fiction book. I settled on The Plaza by Guillermo Paxton, which I was also interested in because it was published by a small and interesting sounding independent publisher. It's funny, but I'm not worried about the "quality" of the writing in a small press release (or even something self-released) — we ended up not reading The Plaza, so I don't actually know about how well it's written, but part of me thought that it can't be worse than a lot of new fiction we'd read, which, despite being prominently featured on NPR and adapted into HBO series or whatever, were actually infantilizing twee pieces of shit.

So then I thought about the theme some more and realized that, hey, I know like not at all what it's like to be a terrorist, so is there any first-person fiction from the point of view of a terrorist? And after reading no fewer than three Times pieces on this very topic (1, 2 and 3) I learned that it turns out that there really isn't!

I should back up a second: There is literary fiction about terrorism from the first-person point of view of the terrorist except that it was written by John Updike when he was well into his 80s and the great author supposedly used Islam for Dummies for background. I mean, I guess that's what I'm talking about, but I'm intrigued like not at all about that book.

But that's where Joseph Conrad comes in. Already a big fan of his highly fluid and accessible prose from such classics as Heart of Darkness and . . . uh, Heart of Darkness, which, if my math is correct, I've spent more of my life having read than not having read, I had no idea that he wrote about terrorism, too (in fact, he did!). And not only that, but Conrad's The Secret Agent was Ted Kaczynski's favorite book.

It turns out that The Secret Agent is also apparently a little hokey, with characters that verge on caricatures, so between the two we settled on Under Western Eyes. It's not a first-person account, but it does get you in the head of a terrorist at least somewhat, without a Dummies book.

(And to circle back to something I mentioned before, when I say "we," I'm not being majestically plural — literally, "we" at book club were hashing out what to read.)

All of the above is to say that Under Western Eyes is pretty great.

It seems like it should be hard to spoil the ending of something written over 100 years ago, but I will do just that in this paragraph. Eyes is set in pre-Revolutionary Russia. The story begins in St. Petersburg with an assassination. Razumov, the main character, is surprised to find that the assassin, a fellow student, has come to him for help to escape, assuming that Razumov's allegiances were similar. In a tyrannical and paranoid regime, the assassin's mere presence in Razumov's room has screwed up things permanently for Razumov — they presume more guilt by association, unlike, say, in 24. Razumov decides to turn in the assassin. The assassin is summarily executed by morning. The next part of the book switches to Geneva, where the assassin's mother and sister have moved to. Once the news comes out, the two are treated as, er, royalty among the dissident diaspora. Meanwhile, the two have always suspected that something went wrong and that there was more to the story — their son and brother was idealistic but not suicidal. Razumov appears in Geneva and of course the sister wants to meet her brother's closest confidant. It becomes clear that Razumov has been recruited, seemingly mostly against his will, to spy on behalf of Russia, so as a secret agent, Razumov is really in Geneva to ingratiate himself with the dissidents. Overtired and ornery, he is actually a terrible spy . . . it goes on from there . . . he does eventually connect with the assassin's sister . . . suffice it to say, the ending does not turn out well.

Eyes may be obvious, or maybe you'll find yourself waiting to see revealed what you assume will eventually happen, but it is still a great, tight book. And this is true even in spite of the heavy, laden imagery and allegory — all of which are accoutrements that distract only slightly from the story (as for the allegory, sure — granted, political turmoil affects everyone, regardless of their beliefs or how much they would like to avoid it). Writing-wise, Conrad certainly never makes it easy. Is his grammar precise and correct? Yes, but I'll never understand why there has to be so much of it. Take the first line of the book — it's no best-of-times-worst-of-times kind of opening line. Instead you struggle with wrapping your head around this:

To begin with I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create for the reader the personality of the man who called himself, after the Russian custom, Cyril son of Isidor — Kirylo Sidorovitch — Razumov.

Which you can also write as: "To begin with, I can't make up a character like Razumov." But that's just Joe Conrad for you: Looking back, it's not that that line is particularly complicated but rather reading line after line after line like that has a cumulative effect of making you zone out. I remember my high school English teacher calling Heart of Darkness "impressionistic," which I think is a euphemism for something along the lines of what you're left with when you zone out while you read long stretches of noun-age and passive voice — an "impression" of what the fuck is going on.

Oh, as for the title and the general premise that this complicated country is inaccessible to "western" thought — we get it! I can't tell you how many times Conrad's narrator repeats this. I will acknowledge — and this is where I find the book to be awesome — that I think (or at least try to make a case for the idea that) Conrad is purposely writing this way, in this clunky style, for this character in particular precisely because this character is a disengaged observer. The other actors in the book also seem to speak more directly, or are more men and women of action. It's a smart and seemingly self-aware touch. At book club Alexis mentioned that her impression is that where Heart and Eyes are slog-like — because both subjects are heavy slogs — Joe's maritime books are more "energetic." I'm happy to take her word for it.

Also, Razumov is a great character. As the assassin's supposed friend, he's immediately welcomed by the Geneva revolutionaries. And even though his specific mission is to spy on these guys, he couldn't be any less cooperative and bitchy and sarcastic around them. And, like the pick-up artists in that Neil Strauss book, we learn that negging is the best approach — the more sarcastic Razumov is, the more he seems to be accepted — or at least no one really cares how much of a jerk he is. It's a great psychological touch on Conrad's part.

Under Western Eyes works in a way that a modern book about terrorism can't because Conrad finds the perfect scenario for the story and you are pulled into "understanding" both sides. The assassin's act also took the lives of innocent people, so Razumov's actions (I think) come off as justified. At the same time, the tyranny of the Russian system seems attack worthy, so you feel sympathetic to the revolutionaries Razumov is sent to infiltrate. Meanwhile, no one is particularly "good" or blameless. Conrad's author note calls this "impartial," but I think it's more deft than that — "impartial" is what you'd call a wire report or a debate commission or a jury: Conrad's characters rise to a higher level than simple "impartiality."

At some point, as many people writing in the Times in fact did after 9/11, you might choose to use Eyes as a, er, lens to view storytelling about modern terrorism. And no matter how "sympathetic" writers make terrorists, I think it's going to continue to be an uphill climb. A few more years of drone strikes might change the equation, of course, but I don't know how relatable 72 virgins in heaven will ever seem to a western reader. Which is to say, modern terrorists are using way too much tuna (although after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, can anything be construed as too much tuna?). (If you're wondering what was up with that last parenthetical, I can double down: Dropping atomic bombs on civilian populations may have been absolutely necessary to save 1 million U.S. lives, but it came at the expense of somewhere around 200,000 Japanese lives; the whole calculus seems pretty brutal, and deserves more awe or even shock than the hushed tones of American history books tend to give the event — or at least my memory thereof.)

Modern-wise, Homeland I think comes the closest to putting the viewer/reader into the head of a terrorist, but without giving much away, it doesn't go far enough. I would love to see Eyes adapted for today: At points during the book you might find yourself substituting one setting for another and the effect is supertight and chilling (even "dazzling", whatever that means).

Everybody's Gonna Move Their Feet, Everybody's Gonna Leave Their Seat

Of all the characters in Charlie LeDuff's Detroit: An American Autopsy, Detroit City Councilmember Monica Conyers is one of the best. LeDuff, who grew up in Detroit and returned to be a reporter for the Detroit News, features her throughout the book, as a sort of catch-all symbol of gross political negligence and tin-ear stupidity.

Conyers made a national name for herself after a verbal altercation with the city council president during a council meeting in which she called him "Shrek." I'm assuming it was based on his looks and not his character, because the character of Shrek actually seems like a pretty decent guy.

LeDuff then set up a meeting with Councilmember Monica Conyers and some eighth graders in a sort of public post-mortem about her calling the president of the Detroit city council "Shrek." The subtext is clear: When adults act like children, let's let children take the adults to task. It's funny, a stunt, and also something more at home on the Daily Show, which is kind of LeDuff's style, just minus the satire. Also, how does a newspaper get away with this? The video is here. You can see pertinent part of the video here. I can't embed it because they disabled the embedding feature. I'm not totally sure why.

One of the students does indeed take Conyers to task and Conyers, because she is apparently incapable of good political sense, proceeds to take the child to task. Suffice it to say, Conyers comes off like a huge moron. You can read about the event here, except that it's a Wall Street Journal link, so if you click it from here, you'll hit a paywall. If you Google the title, however, you should be able to access the story, which is titled "Detroit Politician Gets Lesson In Civility From a 13-Year-Old." I'm not totally sure I understand why it's somehow better for the Wall Street Journal to have people access stories behind a paywall via a search engine versus through, say, someone's email, but that's what they do.

Newspapers do a lot of stuff that is understandable only to people who work in newspapers. And with that, I just sort of effortlessly rolled out with the kind of knowing, faux-folksy aphorism that Charlie LeDuff likes to indulge in. I mean, I guess I understand the value of a soft paywall — maybe old people won't bother with Googling stuff and will just pay the subscription — but that kind of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other balance just gets in the way of a good story.

Which is kind of what I circle back to when I think about this particular incident: LeDuff agrees to meet Conyers at a cocktail lounge off of Eight Mile Road (you might remember "Eight Mile" from Eminem) because Conyers apparently can't prevent herself from repeating the negative. On the way he decides to stop off and visit the 13-year-old and her family. It's a great detail in a story, but it's too perfect. And it's too perfect in part because your gut tells you that he wanted to stop off on the way mostly because it's a detail that would make a good story. I can similarly see Aaron Sorkin "swinging by" the Lincoln Monument or, I don't know, Buzz Bissinger "happening upon" a high school football game: The detail flows seamlessly from head to steering wheel to eye to head to word processing program. And that's when writers become slightly sociopathic.

(As an aside, in the genre of non-fiction about dead or dying cities, Bissinger wrote his own about Philadelphia in the early 1990s, focusing on the achievements of Mayor Ed Rendell. This perspective makes Bissinger's A Prayer For the City seem much more hopeful. But there doesn't seem to be an Ed Rendell on the horizon for Detroit, and as Jen points out, Philadelphia always had advantages Detroit lacks: It's connected on the I-95 corridor with New York and DC, it has many universities, etc. Maybe it's the era — post-Iraq, post-whatever, people just think the world sucks shit — but Detroit — the book, not necessarily the city — is just a downer through and through.)

It's a small detail but it's something that for whatever reason I glommed onto. There's something about people who navigate their way through the world knowing that whatever they're doing would make for a good story. This of course happens all the time — if you're friendly with people who like to write, you'll hear them say it. And not just "this is good fodder" (look up the dictionary definition of "fodder" — it's illuminating), but making life decisions based on the output of said fodder (which, according to the definition would be the excrement of domesticated animals). I'm sure The Devil Wears Prada isn't the most egregious example of this but it feels like a watershed one that begat hundreds, if not thousands, of stupid fucking notions about what could become a book.

Which is all well and good (and with that, I just effortlessly rolled out a meaningless transition meant to soften the barb at the end of the last paragraph), but if you take a second to consider what these people are like in real life, they come off like zombies. If John Howard Griffin came into my store or if Gregory Peck sauntered into my country club, I'd be like, "fuck you." Because that stuff begat the asinine Quiñonesism we are left with today.

And, sure, are we all guilty of in some way wanting to convert personal reminisces to literary gold? If you write on the internet, of course. It's just people need to go back to being embarrassed and fucked up about it. Less Foer and more semen-slurping macaque.

So anyway, I digress (and with that, I just effortlessly rolled out a sorry-ass excuse for going wildly off topic).

I say all this in part because Detroit is good. The book, I mean, not the city. After reading the book, the conclusion you're left with is that Detroit (the city) should be converted to either farmland or a giant national historical park about America's industrial past. Or maybe just left to rot like portions of Auschwitz. LeDuff was on Bill Maher just after the book came out and Maher asked him if Detroit could come back. He said yes. But after reading the book, I'm not sure why.

Indeed (and with that, I just effortlessly rolled out the worst fucking conjunctive adverb in the history of conjunctive adverbs), some books are like that: Writers come up with a really provocative premise and then when they're interviewed about it, immediately back down. What I wanted Maher to follow up with — and he couldn't because part of the idiocy of interviewing anyone about a specific book is that the interview is (often by design) mostly unaware about what the book actually says — was, "Really? Because what other conclusion are you left with besides the city should be converted to either farmland or a giant national historical park about America's industrial past or maybe just left to rot like portions of Auschwitz?"

Look, Detroit is good because LeDuff is a gifted storyteller. But we use a phrase around here a lot with Jen, and that's "Irish It Up," as in, Meatball's default is to take a mostly correct story and make it much more entertaining. It's not just the Irish: Different ethnic groups do this, of course. On NPR they even have a term for it, which is "David Sedaris." The only thing about these stories is that in the back of your mind there's that nagging doubt that the lady on the subway actually yelled "Tequila! Cointreau!" to her unruly children (what, no "Triple Sec"? Let's make it happen!) (actually, I don't doubt this story — it's just all the other times she's Irished It Up that makes me second-guess it, even if just slightly).

And I'm not specifically second-guessing LeDuff, either. It's just that the consistent tone of Detroit is that of a guy sitting next to you at a bar; it's not that I don't believe you that the term "bullpen" comes from single women in Durham flirting with relief pitchers by throwing them Bull Durham Tobacco, it's just that I want to try to remember to Wikipedia it later. In a book it can be a little frustrating.

Sometimes the tone resembles a treatment for the show Hardcore Pawn. Like on page 78, after his meeting with Conyers: "Where the hell was I? . . . The sign outside said 'Detroit City Limits.'" I don't think I'm being a pretentious dickhead to note that it's not exceptional writing. What it is is a great ending to a story someone is telling you — because if LeDuff is sitting across from you, he delivers that line with whatever appropriate inflection, self-deprecation and whatever other tool a storyteller uses to deliver good line. When a reader reads that line, they might hear something different — Jack Webb as Sergeant Joe Friday, Leslie Nielsen, Kevin Bacon in JFK, The Fresh Prince, Garrison Keillor, their boring old Uncle Pete, whatever. I mean, I like that LeDuff writes like he talks. Sometimes it doesn't always translate though.

Ultimately (and with that I just effortlessly rolled out with another really lazy conjunctive adverb), I am in a position now where I must sum up my feelings about having read this book in the form of a conclusion, preferably a smartly written concise ending to what has stretched out for over a thousand words. Something along the lines of, Ultimately, Charlie LeDuff's Detroit: An American Autopsy proves not only can you come home again but you can parley the sad fate of your hometown into a tidy 286-page memoir replete with gritty first-hand accounts of borderline journalistic impropriety, scrotum-caressing politicians, and subprime chicanery, not to mention flirtations with and near-apologies for spousal abuse amidst a backdrop of urban disaster porn where, amazingly, no one has yet quit smoking.