Alice Neel (1900–1984) was the most independent-minded painter in New York, “a grande, if often rude, dame” who turned her back on the art world to plant her flag in the neglected genre of portraiture. By the time her career took off in the 1960s, this ultimate bohemian had worked for the WPA, lived on welfare, had many lovers and four children—one died, one was confiscated by her in-laws—and never ceased painting with uncanny psychological insight. Her wordy, misspelling-ridden bio needed a much better edit than it got. Still, Neel’s fascinatingly contradictory, gloriously stubborn character shines through.

From The Village Voice, “The Best Books of 2010.”

Has the sexual revolution, on balance, been a good thing? Rather than freeing us, sexual liberation seems to have subjected our sex lives to the laws of the consumer economy: unequally distributed resources, cycles of feast and famine, competitiveness, acquisitiveness (are other people getting more?). Is sex on the free market really what we wanted? Who’s getting rich under this system, and who’s becoming poor?

Keith, for one, the main character in Martin Amis’s clever, satirical, only partly successful new novel, “The Pregnant Widow.” Keith was born in the same year as Amis, 1949, and resembles him in other ways, too, such as his sensitivity about his height. (Like Amis he occupies “that much-disputed territory between five-foot-six and five-foot-seven”). This leads us to believe that all the power of Amis’s surely considerable experience with sex is going into this tale. He must know what he’s saying when he tells us, on page one, that Keith, a foot soldier in the sexual revolution, is about to become a casualty, that he will suffer a pleasurable “trauma” that will “ruin him for twenty-five years.”

It’s the summer of 1970. Keith is twenty years old and sleeping with a fellow student, Lily, whom he thinks he loves. At Lily’s invitation, he has come to Italy, that place of literary sexual awakening, to spend the summer at a castle belonging to the mother of her best friend. Keith, of course, promptly falls in love, or at any rate lust, with the tall, topless-sunbathing best friend, whose name is Scheherazade.

Scheherazade has fabulous breasts, which Keith goes on about at some length. In fact, all Amis’s characters talk a lot about bodies. The assembled group includes a worldly-wise homosexual, a woman with a rich boyfriend and a large backside named Gloria Beautyman, a four-foot-ten-inch lothario, an orphaned, pregnant 12-year-old, and Rita, a redhead whose sexual aggressiveness is the stuff of legend. They all comment on each other’s physical attributes and what’s attractive to whom. Even when he’s reading Jane Austen, Keith finds remarks about bodies. The heroine of “Northanger Abbey” “has big tits. Austen more or less tells you that,” Keith explains to Lily. “When Catherine’s growing up she gets plumper and her figure gains consequence. Consequence—that’s code for big tits.”

Keith is studying English, so in between all this talk about bodies, he’s also reading his way through the English literary canon. He concludes that, from Richardson to the Brontës to Thomas Hardy, the plot always turns on forbidden love and the chastity of women. “It sometimes seemed to Keith that the English novel, at least in its first two or three centuries, asked only one question. Will she fall?…What’ll they write about, he wondered, when all women fall? Well, there’ll be new ways of falling…”

So along with his sharp wit and brilliant social satire, Amis is armed with an entire history of English hormones. And then…nothing happens. For 300 pages, Keith sleeps with Lily and lusts after Scheherazade, and never in all that time does Amis manage to give this theoretically sexy situation an erotic charge.

Nor does he persuade us to care about Keith’s soul. We’re told that Keith is a romantic who is shocked by the new freedom, or at least startled: “Where were the hinderers, the wet blankets,…where was the police?” But in fact, the few shreds of decency Keith has, he seems happy enough to discard. To be honest, Keith is the kind of guy who, if he met me at a party, would blow me off faster than you can say five-foot-eleven. Why should I give him 470 pages’ worth of my sympathy?

Amis seems to be trying to say something serious, rather than just do his usual trick of scoring one-liners at his characters’ expense. We hear a lot of stories about sex occurring elsewhere, and conclusions about society’s future are drawn. “It was already obvious that every hard and demanding adaptation would be falling to the girls,” Keith thinks. “The boys could just go on being boys. It was the girls who had to choose.”

And Lily remarks thoughtfully, about a girl named Pansy who went to bed with Keith because she thought she should, “People doing it when it’s not in their nature. When they don’t want to. It’s worse, isn’t it, than people not doing it when they do.”

But “The Pregnant Widow” only really gets interesting in the last 70 pages, after Keith returns to London. Over the next twenty years, he struggles to reconcile his new-found sexual cool with the realities of love, desire, and marriage—a problem that’s infinitely more interesting than the tale of his Italian summer. There’s also a subplot about his sister Violet, a self-destructive alcoholic addicted to sex with strangers. This is another point where the novel draws from life: Violet is based closely on Amis’s younger sister Sally, who died in 2000 at the age of 46.

In some ways I suspect that Violet is the real story, and that the proper theme of “The Pregnant Widow” is not the sexual revolution at all. The novel fails because Amis himself is still too aloof, too addicted to his generation’s hard-hearted stance, to write about all the non-profit-motive factors that persist in interfering with our liberalized sexual economy—factors like families, marriage, little sisters, and love.

Trouw, September 25, 2010. Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010).

Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel begins in the year 1929, on a tropical island off the coast of Mexico. There, an American boy swims through an underwater cave to find himself in a secret pool in the jungle. There’s a ruined temple there, and in the pool lie the bones of human sacrifice. The underwater passage, he’s told, is called a “lacuna”: “an opening, like a mouth, that swallows things.… It goes into the belly of the world.” It’s a site of death, but also of buried treasure and escape. It is a hole in history.

History, and especially the gaps in the historical record, is the central theme of “The Lacuna.” Like other successful novels in recent years, this brilliantly constructed narrative includes both fictional characters and real people, in this case the colorful Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and their controversial guest, the exiled Communist leader Leon Trotsky.

There to observe them is the American boy, Harrison Shepherd. The shy, bookish son of an American father and a gold-digging Mexican mother, he discovers, as a teenager in Mexico City, Diego Rivera’s murals depicting the history of Mexico. He becomes so fascinated by Rivera and everything he represents—national identity, socialist politics, the power of art—that he takes a job in the artist’s household as a cook. When Trotsky comes, at Rivera’s invitation, to seek asylum in Mexico, Shepherd goes to work for him as a typist.

The story is told in several different voices, pieced together from letters, newspaper articles, the recollections of Shepherd’s own loyal secretary, and especially Shepherd’s diaries. Shepherd hopes that the lies and errors of the public record—the Mexican press claim Rivera eats human flesh, while Trotsky is cast by both the Americans and the Russians as a Communist villain—can be countered, by his private account. He writes “so when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went.”

Shepherd has a lacuna in his own history as well: he is gay, and keeps his desires painfully hidden. Kahlo sympathizes with his need for secrecy. Lifting her long skirt to reveal her withered, polio-damaged leg, she tells him, “The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.” Later he himself adds, “The most important part of any story is the missing piece.”

Frida urges Shepherd to “crack open the mute culture” and write a “true history of Mexico.” After Trotsky’s murder in 1940, he does, moving to America and penning two best-selling historical novels about the Aztecs and the Spanish Conquest. His secretary, Violet, warns him to watch out: Americans “don’t like to see ourselves joined hard to the past. We’d as soon take the scissors and cut every ribbon of that.” Eventually, when Shepherd is subjected to investigation for Communist activity, he too becomes a human sacrifice, his career and life offered up to Americans’ sense of security.
Kingsolver plays masterfully with the recurring themes of unknown truths, modernity versus tradition, dual nationality, the liberating potential of artistic expression. She also comments sharply on current events, as when she has Trotsky remark that people “want to believe in heroes…And villains. Especially when very frightened. It’s less taxing than the truth.”

While “The Lacuna” is thematically rich, it’s at times narratively flat. Like many novelists diving into the historical record, Kingsolver comes back loaded down with too much detail. (“The Lacuna” strongly resembles Michael Chabon’s “Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” in its time period, political concerns, naïve, gay central character, and excessive length.) Besides, the lonely, improbably innocent Shepherd is too much of a lacuna himself to carry the book emotionally. To turn upsetting, enraging real events into thoughtful, skillfully constructed fiction, Kingsolver has deliberately taken a step back from her material. My feeling is that she’s stepped back a little too far.

Trouw, July 24, 2010. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (New York: Harper, 2009).

Sara Maitland doesn’t grow her own vegetables; she doesn’t knit; she wouldn’t want to do without central heating. She smokes. She spent all her life to the age of 50 talking, first as a member of a large and noisy family, then as a writer, lecturer, and activist living in London. She’s not the sort of person you’d expect to go in for radical solitude.

But to Maitland, as she explains in her intelligent and engaging “A Book of Silence,” solitude is not primarily an escape from the hectic pace of modern life. It’s an adventure and a challenge: how far can she go? “It was not peace and contentment that I craved,” she writes. Instead, she was after “that awed response to certain phenomena of the ‘natural’ world in which words, and even normal emotional reactions, fail or rather step away from the experience and there is a silence that is powerful, harsh and essentially inhumane. […] I discovered in myself a longing for the sublime.”

Maitland (1950) is a well-known British writer whose books include novels, short stories, an oral history of the 1960s, and works of feminist theology. Born into a wealthy family and raised in London and Scotland, she studied at Oxford, where one of her fellow students, the later American president Bill Clinton, introduced her to feminism when he took her to hear Germaine Greer. She married an Anglican vicar and had two children.

In the early 1990s, Maitland’s life began to change. Her children left home. Her marriage broke up. She began having trouble writing fiction. She moved from London to a village in the country; she converted to Catholicism. Living alone for the first time, she found herself becoming more interested in the act of prayer. She began to perform a kind of contemplative meditation that she saw as a way of “trying to empty one’s mind of its egotistical concerns in an attempt to align oneself with reality.” She felt that silence was helping her to see things as they were.

Being alone was such a revelation to her that she decided to see what would happen if she spent less time with other people, unplugged the phone and Internet connection (at least a day or two a week), and began actively to seek solitude. A friend, playing devil’s advocate, wrote her that silence is “the place of death, of nothingness. […] All silence is waiting to be broken.” But Maitland did not experience silence as a negative condition. Instead, she discovered “a stillness of heart and mind which is not a void but a rich space.”

She decided to try spending a longer period of time on her own. She rented a cottage on the Isle of Skye and spent 40 days and 40 nights there alone, walking, reading, writing and listening for the silence. She found that her senses became intensified, her emotions more powerful. She thought she heard people singing in the sound of the wind. She felt joy, exultation, contentment, and sometimes an “exhilarating sense of peril” that had to do with being close to the emotional edge.

Later, in her own house, she had an enforced experience with silence when a March snowstorm took the phone lines down and trapped her indoors for ten days. Aside from fearing that she would run out of cigarettes, she found herself unnerved. She feared that “the silence was hollowing me out and leaving me empty and naked.” She devotes one chapter in “A Book of Silence” to the dangers of solitude, which include madness and suicide. She reminds us that solitary confinement is also a form of torture.

The book is not all about Maitland’s own experience: she prefers to study other people’s writing on silence, and to offer her erudite observations on various aspects of solitude. She cites polar explorers, solo round-the-world sailors, and idealistic young Chris McCandless, who went alone into the Alaskan wilderness and died. She writes about the Christian hermits who lived on isolated Irish islands in the seventh and eighth centuries. She spares a thought for the loneliness of lighthouse keepers.

She discusses Genesis, in which God creates by speaking, and questions this view of “silence as a lack, something that needs to be broken in order to let in life and meaning.” And why do we call it the “Big Bang,” she wonders, when there was nothing to make a sound?

Eventually, because the asceticism of the early Christian hermits was so important to the development of the Church, she tries spending a week in the Sinai Desert. The trip is surprisingly easy to arrange: she just books a desert meditation package tour. But she’s too much a northerner: the desert is just not her landscape. Nor does she take to Zen meditation or the Quaker custom of silent worship. Instead her search leads her to everyday sorts of contemplation, like birdwatching, which she describes as “paying attention to nothing in the hope that it would at any moment become a bird.”

One disadvantage of silence is that it’s bad for Maitland’s fiction: she can’t pray and come up with stories at the same time. She notes that there’s another kind of silence, too, one embraced by the English Romantic poets: a solitude whose aim was not losing oneself but expressing oneself, strengthening one’s creative individuality. When the two kinds of silence come into conflict, Maitland can’t choose. Nor does she choose complete stillness. At the book’s end, she moves to a lonely house in Scotland, but one with room for guests.

What’s interesting in all these accounts of silence, positive and negative, is how hard it is for humans to go for long periods without speaking to each other. Apparently our brains are built for interaction with others of our species, so much so that only unusual people, under special circumstances, can stand to be alone for any length of time. Maitland doesn’t manage to convince me that the lonely wilderness would be my cup of tea. Still, I enjoyed her dryly humorous description of her attempts at expanding the mind through solitude. “A Book of Silence” is like travel writing for the mental landscape: you can read it with pleasure and interest even if you never plan to visit the country it describes.

Monks, Explorers, and Solo Sailors

“A Book of Silence” mentions a number of people who have spent long periods of time in silence. They include:

Saint Anthony, third-century founder of Christian monasticism, famous for his long isolation in the desert and temptation by demons, often in the form of sexy dancing girls.

Saint Cuthbert, seventh-century English monk who used to “pray all night standing up to his neck in the frigid waters of the North Sea.” When he emerged, “otters would come and warm him with their tongues and fur.”

Thomas Merton, American Trappist, theologian, writer and poet who found in silence a “happiness that is so pure because it is simply not of one’s own making but sheer mercy and gift.”

Augustine Courtauld, a wealthy British adventurer who spent six months in a tent on Greenland in 1930-31.

Bernard Moitessier, French solo sailor who was on course to win a round-the-world competition in 1969 but enjoyed the peace of the sea so much that he gave up the race. Another racer was driven by the solitude to commit suicide.

Tenzin Palmo, a British Buddhist nun who spent three years in silence in the Himalayas. Her only comment was, “Well, it wasn’t boring.”

Trouw, 20 March 2010.

In Atwood’s funniest novel in ages, two women have survived a pandemic, one barricaded in a beauty salon, the other sequestered in an endangered-species-themed strip club. In flashbacks, we learn they’re both members of an environmentalist group called “God’s Gardeners,” which doubles as an ecoterrorist cell. Always a brilliant social satirist, Atwood lovingly parodies Christian idealism—or does she embrace it?—while offering a sneaky feminist take on dystopia: The Road as hen party.

From The Village Voice, “The Best Books of 2009.”

Pink Makes Such Terrible Camouflage

It’s occurred to me to wonder what Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel “The Road” would be like if the two survivors were not a father and son but a mother and daughter. I picture the mother plodding through the ashy landscape, coughing, wishing she had some Kleenex. The daughter sulks and dreams about that cute boy at school. They pause to shoot a marauder. They raid a drugstore for tampons. They trudge on.

There are echoes of my fantasy in Margaret Atwood’s new novel “The Year of the Flood.” Where would women go to escape a genetically engineered global pandemic? The stern and lonely Toby has barricaded herself into a day spa called AnooYoo, where women once came for the latest rejuvenation and beauty modification treatments. Young Ren hides in her former workplace, a strip club called “Scales and Tails” where the performers dress up as exotic fish and birds. Both women happen to know a thing or two about survival. They are members of God’s Gardeners, a hippie religious group and sometime ecoterrorist cell.

Atwood’s book, like McCarthy’s, is dystopian fiction: it uses an imaginary future to represent or criticize the present. It’s the kind of science fiction that’s considered safe for literary writers. Orwell, Huxley, and Doris Lessing all tried it out, as have Kazuo Ishiguro (in “Never Let Me Go”), José Saramago (“Blindness”), and Jeanette Winterson (“The Stone Gods”). Atwood too, over her long and impressively varied career, has dabbled in dystopia, notably in her 1985 “The Handmaid’s Tale,” in which women are enslaved as child-bearers under a Christian fundamentalist regime.

“The Year of the Flood” is a sequel to Atwood’s 2003 novel “Oryx and Crake,” which predicted the end of the world through environmental catastrophe. In “Oryx and Crake,” the earth is becoming a depleted wasteland. The old species are rapidly disappearing, while medical corporations have begun manipulating genetic patterns to create new ones. In order to save the earth, Crake, a cynical young mad scientist, develops and releases a virus to wipe out the human race. His plan is to replace Homo Sapiens with a less destructive, more aesthetically pleasing species of his own design.

“The Year of the Flood” is a much livelier, more original, and in its own way more cheerful book. For one thing, it’s told by women, and so deals with the material, tampon-and-Kleenex conditions of female lives. It’s no surprise Toby and Ren find refuge in a beauty salon and a brothel: Atwood, a great satirist, is always amazed at what women are given to work with. (On a rescue mission dressed in one of the spa’s coveralls, Toby sighs that pink is a “terrible choice for camouflage.”) And while “Oryx and Crake” took aim at some obvious targets, including corporate greed, agribusiness, and genetic modification, the new book offers an unexpected, playful philosophy for change.

An Atwood novel generally starts at the end, then goes back to the beginning, usually her characters’ childhood: her sharpest social criticism often comes from children’s point of view. “The Year of the Flood” begins with Ren and Toby waiting out the plague, then narrates their past in the God’s Gardeners movement. Ren comes to the Gardeners as a child, dragged along in the wake of her mother’s sexual obsession with the mysterious Zeb, known as “Mad Adam.” The older Toby, whose parents have been murdered by a sinister pharmaceutical company, is rescued by the Gardeners from the clutches of a sadistic boss. Through their eyes, we learn about what turns out to be a fairly endearing set of heroes.

God’s Gardeners are a religious sect who believe that humans were put on earth to honor and protect God’s creation. Based in an urban jungle somewhere in what used to be the United States (Atwood, a Canadian, prefers to set her dystopias south of the border), they practice organic rooftop gardening, wear hand-dyed clothing that looks like it’s “been sewn by elves on hash,” eat turnips, steer clear of deodorant. Honoring such holy figures as Saint Maria Sibylla Merian, Saint Dian Fossey, and Saint Jacques Cousteau, they appear to be a “clutch of sweet but delusional eccentrics.” Yet their spiritual leader, Adam One, encourages the Gardeners not only to grow their own food and recycle but to learn survival techniques and maintain “Ararats,” by which he means stores of canned food for in the time of the “Waterless Flood.” The Gardeners have their defenses, too. As the group’s gentle herbalist remarks, “God wouldn’t have made poisonous mushrooms unless He intended us to use them sometimes.”

Adam One’s sermons are an affectionate and deeply funny parody of Christianity’s grappling with science and evolution. Discussing the Fall of Man for his devoutly vegetarian audience, Adam One comments, “Some say that the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was a fig, others prefer a date, yet others a pomegranate. It would have made sense for this foodstuff to be truly evil—a meat object, such as a beefsteak. Why then a Fruit? Because our Ancestors were fruitivores, without a doubt, and only a Fruit would have tempted them.”

Yet at the same time, they’re a semi-serious call to care about the environment, to honor all God’s creation as a reflection of the divine. Their rooftop Eden and bad vegan cooking won’t save the world. Still, Adam One believes they “must be a beacon of hope, because if you tell people there’s nothing they can do, they will do worse than nothing.”

An apocalyptic warning about the depletion of the earth is not what one might expect from Atwood, but she’s already shown herself to be a writer of many talents. Her settings have ranged from the 19th-century Canadian frontier (“Alias Grace”) to a Caribbean island in political turmoil (“Bodily Harm”). Power relations and politics are always themes in her fiction, sometimes in the foreground, sometimes as a backdrop to her favorite subject, strained power relations between men and women, adults and children. Familiar Atwood concerns turn up in “The Year of the Flood”: self-deception, rivalry between women, the bullying of girls by other girls. By the end of the book there are only a handful of people left in the world, yet they can’t let go of such old human habits as wanting to be found attractive. Atwood’s affection for her very human characters adds more layers to the book’s thematic richness.

“The Year of the Flood” has a narrative pattern typical of highly plotted, high-action novels: slow buildup, brief period of feverish action, sudden stop. But if the story is occasionally uneven, It doesn’t matter. This messy work of action-adventure philosophy is the most enjoyable novel Atwood has written in years. A third book is said to be in the works. I wonder what fresh thrills Atwood will get out of the advice to cultivate your garden.

Patron Saint of the Raised Eyebrow
The poet, essayist, and fiction writer Margaret Atwood (Ottawa, 1939) has not, in the past, been a fan of religion. Her 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” in particular portrayed fundamentalist Christianity as an enemy of women’s rights.
Her new novel, however, features heroes who are members of a Christian environmentalist movement and includes a number of their sermons, religious teachings, and amateurish hymns. Atwood’s publicity tour has taken on the atmosphere of a hippie religious revival, with a choir singing the hymns of “God’s Gardeners,” actors reading the parts of the characters, and the writer herself dancing up the aisle.

Does she mean it? In an interview in the Telegraph (UK), she speculated that religion might give humans some evolutionary advantages. ‘‘We seem to be hard-wired to have a belief system of some kind.” An extensive reading list on her website yearoftheflood.com includes such titles as “The Green Bible,” a Bible with all the passages that emphasize God’s care for creation highlighted in green ink. Yet she also seems to be doing all this with one eyebrow slightly raised, suggesting that Atwood the cynic hasn’t entirely converted into Atwood the believer.

Trouw, October 3, 2009. Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2009).

In the beginning, before the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe was concentrated in a single point. Qfwfq can tell you about it: He was there. “Naturally, we were all there—where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time, either: What use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?”

Qfwfq has been a mammoth, a dinosaur, and a single cell. He made the first sign in space, and analyzed it, too, getting the drop on Roland Barthes by a few billion years. He remembers…

Read more at The Village Voice

John Adams, the first United States envoy to the Netherlands, could have been the prototype for an American in Europe. When he arrived on the Continent in 1778, two years after the Colonies declared independence from England, the 42-year-old New England farmer, lawyer, and leader of the Revolution had never traveled farther from home than Philadelphia. Devout, straightforward, and plainspoken, he had no experience with diplomacy. A friend remarked that he couldn’t dress, couldn’t dance, wasn’t subtle, was “not qualified by nature or education to shine in courts.”

While Europeans found him unsophisticated, he predictably found them smooth and hypocritical. He loved European culture, particularly the theater, but had the usual American complaints: the English were chilly, the Dutch cheap, and the French didn’t wash. If he and his wife Abigail were alive today, it’s hard not to see them standing on the Dam in white sneakers, holding up a map.

John Adams was one of America’s Founding Fathers, a passionate advocate of revolution and self-governance, one of the architects of the Declaration of Independence. He would go on to become America’s first vice-president and second president. But compared to the tall, patrician war hero George Washington, the Enlightenment intellectual Thomas Jefferson, and the inventor and libertine Ben Franklin, the idealistic, hardworking, monogamous Adams has always seemed a little dull. There are no poems or legends about him. He never got his picture on a coin or bill.

Historian David McCullough, in his best-selling biography “John Adams,” has not only rediscovered Adams, he has brought him back as a politician for our time. The truth is, Americans like to see themselves in white sneakers. Like Adams, they prefer to think of themselves as forthright, practical, not too concerned with appearances. Besides, what better consolation for Americans in the Clinton and Bush years than a thoroughly honest president who never told a lie, had an affair, or otherwise blotted his copybook?

McCullough is the author of several books of what might be called “Dad’s birthday” history, including biographies of presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Harry S Truman. A highly readable writer, he finds in Adams not only a hero but a surprisingly page-turning subject. The book opens with two lonely travelers on horseback in the snow, then goes on in that style, making the most of the adventures the era offered: storms at sea, engagements with the enemy, and passionate debates in the Continental Congress, where Jefferson recalled that Adams, in his final argument for independence, spoke “with a power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats.”

Born in 1735 in Braintree, Massachusetts, near Boston, Adams was a fourth-generation American who deeply felt his connections with his Puritan forebears. (In Holland, he was moved to tears to see the Pilgrims’ church in Leyden.) He was also an ambitious young lawyer with a broad knowledge of Greek, Roman, French, and English philosophy and political thought. That knowledge would help him draw up a constitution for the new State of Massachusetts—a document that became a model for America’s constitution. Idealistic and not without vanity, the young Adams saw the law as a way to fulfill his lofty dreams: “to assist the feeble and friendless, to discountenance the haughty and lawless, to procure redress to wrongs, the advancement of right, to assert and maintain liberty and virtue, to discourage and abolish tyranny and vice.”

At the same time, he had a literary side that he indulged in journals and constant correspondence. This is what makes Adams such a great biography subject: what he lacks in color, he makes up for many times over in openness. He wrote frank, likeable letters to his many friends and colleagues. He wrote more pedantic letters, full of advice, to his four children, including his eldest son, the later president John Quincy.

Most of all he wrote to his wife a remarkable figure in her own right. Abigail Adams was a a sort of Hillary or Michelle avant la lettre, and with her John had a lifelong love affair. While he was away on political business, for months or years at a time, she ran the farm, cheered for the Revolution, and kept up her own correspondence with Adams’s political colleagues. While they were together, she was his most important political adviser.

He was a family man, and when he came to Holland he brought with him his two eldest sons, then 13 and 11. This may have been unwise: while John Quincy thrived as a diplomat brat, Charles Adams was homesick, or perhaps felt he couldn’t live up to his parents’ high expectations. (Charming but feckless, he eventually drank himself into an early grave.) Adams ultimately spent two years in Amsterdam, trying to persuade the States-General to grant political recognition to the United States.

Though he liked the practical-minded Dutch better than the French or English, getting them to commit was a frustrating exercise: They were already smuggling arms to the Colonies but didn’t want war with England. He succeeded only after the British Army’s dramatic surrender at Yorktown. Adams never knew whether it was his efforts or the British loss that made the difference, but the Dutch recognition, and a line of credit from Dutch banks, changed the course of history. To a friend he wrote, “Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right.”

As president (1797-1801) he was less successful. Back in America, he was now seen as “corrupted” by Europe, particularly in his desire for a strong central government. McCullough praises his political judgment: before anyone else, Adams predicted the French Revolution was going to go sour. As president he managed to avert a war with France, assessing, correctly, that the French threats were not serious. But he served only one term before he was defeated for re-election by the charismatic Jefferson.

Above all else, McCullough’s Adams is a dedicated public servant, the man who wrote, “Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives.” McCullough gives us an old-fashioned study of moral principles, a portrait of the courage and perseverance of a Great Man. He sticks closely to Adams’s own experience, never turning aside for long to examine the people and events in his shadow. One reason the book is such a lively read is that McCullough hardly ever stops to speculate or ask difficult questions.

“John Adams” stands in dramatic contrast to another recent work of history, Annette Gordon-Reed’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.” In that book, Gordon-Reed chronicles the lives of Thomas Jefferson’s slave and life partner Sally Hemings, her family (she was his late wife’s half-sister), and her six children, probably all fathered by Jefferson. Because Sally Hemings lived on the margins of history and left no written record, Gordon-Reed’s book is nothing but shadows and questions.

Yet the two kinds of history—Great Men and little lives—don’t cancel each other out. It’s fascinating to read in “The Hemingses of Monticello” about the figures in the wings, the women and enslaved people who were still waiting for their War of Independence. But the single-minded focus of “John Adams” takes nothing away from McCullough’s achievement.

John Adams Slept Here
David McCullough’s “John Adams” has inspired several new Adams projects since its publication in English in 2001. In 2008, it was made into a 7-part TV miniseries starring Paul Giamatti as John and Laura Linney as his steadfast and politically savvy wife Abigail. Visitors to the Adams home near Boston can watch performers re-enacting the lives of John and Abigail. And in the Netherlands, too, Adams has become easier to trace. Although the first American embassy in the world, on the Fluwelen Burgwal in The Hague, has been demolished, the house Adams rented on Keizersgracht 529 in Amsterdam was marked with a plaque in 2004.

In 2005, the John Adams Institute, Amsterdam’s independent center for American culture, published a small Dutch-language book called “John Adams in Holland.” With essays by Hella S. Haasse and others, it goes into more detail on Adams’s adventures in the Netherlands. Adams had a strong influence on the Dutch Patriots, including his friend Joan Derk van der Capellen, an idiosyncratic champion of equal rights and democracy. In 1782, Adams was invited by the Frisian Patriot movement to celebrate the Fourth of July in the university town of Franeker, with fireworks and parades. Friesland was the first of the Dutch provinces to vote in favor of recognizing the United States, and this would have been one of the world’s first Fourth of July parties. But Adams was too busy to come.

Nothing much ever came of the Dutch democratic movement. Van der Capellen died in 1784. An uprising in 1787, two years before the French Revolution, was suppressed, not by the ineffectual stadtholder Willem V, but by his wife, Princess Wilhelmina, and her brother, the King of Prussia, at the head of the Prussian Army. Eight years later, in 1795, the Dutch Patriots established the short-lived Batavian Republic and invited France to occupy the Netherlands. By 1815, over 20,000 Dutch conscripts had died in Napoleon’s Russian campaign, Napoleon had closed the university at Franeker, the British had gained control of the Dutch settlements in Sri Lanka and South Africa, and the Netherlands had become what it had never been in all its history: a monarchy.

If Adams, who loved astronomy, had gone to Franeker, he would almost certainly have met the patriot and amateur astronomer Eise Eisinga. But he missed his chance.

Published in shorter form in Trouw, April 25, 2009. David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001; Amsterdam: Ambo, 2009). Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008). Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, Hella S. Haasse, and Willebrord Nieuwenhuis, John Adams in Holland 1780-2005 (Amsterdam: John Adams Institute/Cossee, 2005).

The “home” Marilynne Robinson writes about in her new novel looks at first like an American cliché of contentment: a little Midwestern farm town in the 1950s, and in it the large, comfortable house of the widowed reverend Robert Boughton. In this house in Gilead, Iowa, he and his wife raised their eight children, Boughton’s pride and joy. Yet when we’re told, on the very first page, that “the house embodied for him the general blessedness of his life, which was manifest, really indisputable,” we know Robinson plans to dispute the reverend’s blessings.

Boughton’s children have found homes for themselves elsewhere. They meet at their father’s house for holidays, immersing themselves in nostalgia at the sight of the same books, the same furniture in the same places. But when Glory, at 38 the youngest Boughton child, returns alone, permanently, to care for her dying father, her heart sinks as she crosses the threshold. “The past was a very fine thing, in its place,” Glory thinks. “To have it overrun its bounds and become present and possibly future too—they all knew this was a thing to be regretted.”

The other sibling who comes back in the same summer of 1956 is the prodigal son, the one blight on the Boughtons’ happiness. As a child, Jack Boughton kept to himself. As a teenager, he drank and stole. As a young man, he fathered and deserted an illegitimate infant who later died. This finally broke his father’s heart, and Glory’s. He hasn’t been home since; it’s been 20 years.

“Home” is the second novel Robinson has written about these characters. The first, “Gilead,” describes the same events, but from a different point of view, that of Boughton’s friend and colleague John Ames. Though the two books are very different, they have in common Robinson’s stunningly beautiful writing and wise moral questioning. A practicing Christian and admirer of John Calvin, Robinson takes a calvinist’s pleasure in debating right and wrong. So while Ames appears to be a peaceful country pastor, at every turn Robinson asks us to question his choices—especially on the subject of racism. In “Gilead” we learn that Jack is now married to a black woman, that they have a son, and that he has come home looking for a place where the three of them can live together safely. We already know that Ames will disappoint him.

In “Home,” Reverend Boughton too falls short. Along with her explorations of race and religion, Robinson now turns her eye on that Christian institution, the family. “Home” asks what the members of a family owe each other, and whether or not they can give each other what they need. Boughton loves wayward, troublemaking Jack the best of all his children, and is always ready to forgive him. But he can’t understand him, and what Jack needs most, acceptance, he is too old and stubborn to concede.

Like “Gilead,” “Home” is a slow-moving, contemplative book whose power is in Robinson’s ability to imply longing and promise beneath each word. Everything in and around the house, from the living room chairs to the iris beds in the garden, seems numinous; every conversation feels like the tip of an emotional iceberg. In fact, Robinson keeps her characters under such tight control that it’s a relief when the explosion finally comes.

On the family’s new television set, Jack has been following the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks. When he sees, on the news, images of the police turning fire hoses and dogs on the peaceful protesters, he swears: “Jesus Christ!”

His father, who doesn’t know about Jack’s wife, reprimands Jack for his language, then takes the side of the police. “The Apostle Paul says we should do everything ‘decently and in order.’ You can’t have people running around the streets like that,” he says. Besides, “there’s no reason to let trouble like that upset you. In six months nobody will remember one thing about it.”

Boughton’s complacency about racism—his moral cowardice, even—is one of his faults. Another is his inability to let Jack go. He can’t stop demanding a Boughton family harmony that Jack will never be able to deliver. “It is in family,” he says, “that we most often feel the grace of God, His faithfulness.” And yet this family is much less joyful and secure than its patriarch believes, because it leaves Jack, and lonely Glory too, out in the cold. Robinson seems to echo the classic moral question raised by Dostoyevsky and William James: Suppose a happy and peaceful society (or, in this case, family) could be established whose only price was the torment of just one child? Would you be willing to live there?

Robinson “cheats,” if that’s the word, by setting “Home” in the 1950s, when fathering a child out of wedlock was still a sin and alcoholism a vice rather than a disease. This lets her talk about her characters in moral and Biblical instead of psychological terms. Though Robinson’s descriptions of the wary, aloof, but basically decent Jack are elegant and convincing, he seems at times more like a theological problem than a three-dimensional person. You have to take on faith that Jack can be understood through the stories of Jacob and Esau and the Prodigal Son, and by words such as “faith,” “grace,” and “mystery.”

If you can do this, if you can trust in Robinson’s eye and her prose, you’ll be rewarded with fiction about as beautiful and intelligent as it gets.

Trouw, March 21, 2009. Marilynne Robinson, Home (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008); Thuis (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 2009).

My pick in the Village Voice Best Books of the Year list.