A STORY ON THE WEB
This is a profile of Barack Obama from the May 7 New Yorker, and just hold it right there—you do too want to read another piece about the freakishly self-possessed Democratic contender. Especially when it’s written by the wise and graceful profilist Larissa MacFarquhar. Sample passage: “Innocence, freedom, individualism, mobility—the belief that you can leave a constricting or violent history behind and remake yourself in a new form of your choosing—all are part of the American dream of moving west, first from the old country to America, then from the crowded cities of the East Coast to the open central plains and on to the Pacific. But this dream, to Obama, seems credulous and shallow, a destructive craving for weightlessness.” See? Wise, graceful. –Scott Dickensheets
A BOOK
Writing in an Age of Silence, by Sara Paretsky (Verso, $22.95) Sara Paretsky shouldn’t be a writer. “In Kansas during the fifties,” the best-selling mystery novelist writes of her home state, “in a society where everyone had a defined place, where everyone knew right from wrong, and what happened when you forgot, girls often saw limited horizons in their future.”
Writing in an Age of Silence is the story of how Paretsky overcame these burdens. It’s a brief but affecting memoir, full of typical writer-becoming stories—the magazine job that she failed at, the early love affair with Raymond Chandler’s work—but notable for the feminist angle with which she approaches her family history.
Paretsky’s parents worked hard to reinforce the conservative values of the 1950s at home. Her brothers were sent away to college. She was told she had to pay her own way and couldn’t leave Kansas. Nowhere, according to Paretsky, was the reaction to the women’s, civil rights or antiwar movements as violent as it was in her hometown of Lawrence.
Growing up bookish and dreamy in this environment, wracked later by her mother’s drinking and her father’s menacing three-day sulks, Paretsky associated writing with resistance and breaking silence: “My own sense of voicelessness also led me to see and feel the anguish of the powerless,” writes Paretsky, who created the V.I. Warshawksi series. “I wanted to create a woman who would turn the tables on the dominant views of women in fiction and society.” –John Freeman
A MAGAZINE ARTICLE
“The YouTube Election,” in the June Vanity Fair. Columnist James Wolcott deftly examines the way citizen propagandists and even professional electioneers use the unfiltered power of the web—primarily YouTube—to support candidates, mock them, catch them in contradictions ... or sometimes, as in the case of Newt Gingrich, to simply show the politicians being themselves, which is often mockery enough. –SD