Book Report February 2023

Dream Logic

We did sleep training this month, probably the most significant development in our lives since Patrick was born last summer. Everything has been a dream with him—he’s a very easygoing, good-spirited, happy boy—except sleep. For the first five months, sleep was constant drama. He could not stay asleep more than two hours at night basically and this was killing us, particularly Liz. And we hadn’t managed to get him out of his swaddle yet—supposedly you can at 12 weeks whoops—because having his arms free just seemed to make it easier for him to wake himself up and scratch his beautiful face. 

So we approached the prospect of teaching him to fall asleep on his own with more than a little trepidation. Luckily we were armed with the book The Happy Sleeper: The Science-Backed Guide To Helping Your Baby Get a Good Night’s Sleep, which is simply the greatest book ever written. Sorry to War and Peace and The Bible, you may contain the most vivid characters in all of literature and the timeless wisdom of the ancient world but you don’t contain instructions for the Sleep Wave. 

We had one rough night. Teaching a baby to sleep inevitably means leaving them awake and trusting them to figure it out. The Happy Sleeper technique is to go in every five minutes for a quick check-in so they never feel abandoned or scared. After 40 minutes of crying Patrick put himself to sleep. The book says you’ll probably have to go through that sort of process for three or four nights before it sticks and gets easier. Patrick had it down after just one. Because he knows how to put himself to sleep he also knows how to keep himself asleep, vastly reducing his number of nighttime wake-ups. And he mastered it in only a couple days for naps as well, which can potentially take weeks. 

I can’t overstate what a difference this has made for all of us. He’s happier than ever and we’re so much better rested. We also have so much more free time because putting him to sleep isn’t an hourslong timesuck anymore. It’s been such a dramatic change for all of us and all for the better. Any new or soon-to-be parents out there reading this, take it from me and buy The Happy Sleeper, it’ll change your life. 

As always thanks for reading, here’s what I’ve been reading.

The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1971

George Orr’s dreams can alter reality. Terrified of his power he has tried everything to suppress his dreams, culminating in a run-in with the police and being placed in “voluntary” therapy. Unfortunately he’s put under the care of the grandiose but vacuous Dr. Haber, who sees only an opportunity to change the world to his liking by using hypnotic suggestion to shape George’s dreams. At a slim 170 pages, this book is relentless and efficient—by page 60 we’ve moved from Haber using George’s ability for a job promotion to solving the overpopulation problem, which is to say, committing genocide by dreaming up a plague thirty years prior and retroactively killing off six of the seven billion people on earth. 

Orr’s humility and Haber’s arrogance create a familiar Le Guin dynamic. Haber thinks of himself as a benevolent god but he’s distant and disengaged, unable to conceive of the scale of his actions. With every revision he makes, he consigns billions to life or death, moving them around like pieces of a board game. He tells himself it’s his greatness of spirit that makes him capable of these things but it’s quite the opposite. Naturally the world he makes is appalling, fascist and gray. Orr, who initially appears weak and passive to a fault, reveals a deeper sort of a morality. In his steadfast insistence that there is a world outside of himself he resists solipsism. He has a center. He knows innately he has no right to impose himself and the vast dark of his unconscious mind on the world, that the world and the mind are fundamentally different substances, and to substitute one for the other is to trap oneself in a hell of one’s own making. It’s a theme echoed in The Dispossessed and in Earthsea: freedom is meaningless in a vacuum—only by binding ourselves to limits and principles do our actions have content and moral value.

If I have a complaint about the book it’s that it’s rather claustrophobic. There’s a third main character, Heather, who is rather thinly drawn, and no others. Part of me wishes the book were longer and we saw a bit more of each successive reality before George overwrites it again. But those are small quibbles in what’s foremost a story of ideas and one of characters second. Le Guin advances the situation so rapidly chapter to chapter that the vertiginous climb to the end excludes more languid pacing. 

There’s one detail so grim you have to laugh. Global warming is one of the chief problems in this vision of the future. It’s also the only problem Haber never manages to solve. Even with the unrestricted power of an omnipotent mind, he literally can’t dream of an unwarmed planet. 

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, Franz Kafka

What is there to say about uncut genius? This volume contains the stories Kafka deemed fit for publication during his lifetime, including besides The Metamorphosis: Conversation With the Supplicant, Meditation, The Judgment, A Country Doctor, In The Penal Colony, and A Hunger Artist. Even the weakest of these contain such a strong coherence, are clearly sprung from a total vision, that I’m left reeling. 

I don’t want to dwell too much on The Metamorphosis but I’ll say that on this read I found it greater than ever and almost unbearably disturbing. Gregor Samsa wakes up from a night of uneasy dreams to find himself changed into a great insect and his first thought is of being late for the train. Then he worries that he’ll be fired for being late to work. Then he worries about his family’s finances. He never confronts the fact of his transformation, never dwells on what’s obvious to the reader: his life is over. In any meaningful sense, Gregor’s life has been taken from him in the first sentence of the story. He thinks around this fact through to the end. It just destroyed me. 

At 60-some pages The Metamorphosis is the longest continuous story here. Meditation and A Country Doctor are both a series of sketches—little vignettes that made me really think about how narrative action advances in writing. Description becomes movement, waking life slips into dream logic, years pass with each paragraph. A favorite is the title story from A Country Doctor, in which a doctor is summoned to a farm to tend to a dying boy. After securing horses by barging into an abandoned house and inexplicably finding a pair of magnificent carriage horses in perfect readiness, he meets the boy and knows his case is hopeless. Suddenly the horses each poke a head through a window into the boy’s room, as if to tell the doctor it’s time to go. No one reacts to this. Instead more and more characters continue streaming into the room, presenting the doctor with various gifts and favors, filling the space past any reasonable capacity. The whole thing is hallucinatory, contradictory and yet perfectly correct. 

Kafka, like many of the greats, seems these days to have suffered from his success. The caricature of him, of the “kafka-esque,” has diminished him in the public imagination. He seems perhaps rather redundant and facile in a time when our world has caught up to his vision. He’s worth revisiting though because there is an expansiveness to his thought that goes far beyond that shallow image. The strangeness he saw in the world is pervasive and always right at hand, pressing in on the boundaries we erect to define the normal world. His characters and their situations are simple explorations of what lies outside those bounds. The world is getting stranger every day and Kafka is more relevant than ever. 

Jackson’s Dilemma, Iris Murdoch, 1995

What a funny little book this is. Basically a Shakespearean comedy in novel form, it follows a disparate group of English gentry, intellectuals, and artists who are thrown into disarray when the fairy-tale wedding between two of them, Marian and Edward, is ruined by a note from the bride canceling the wedding without explanation before disappearing. Soon the characters are mixing in surprising ways, finding new pairings and revisiting parts of their pasts long buried. Playing a decisive role in resolving the predicament is Jackson, a mysterious vagabond turned butler who might be an actual angel.

I hadn’t heard of Iris Murdoch until quite recently but she seems like quite a character in her own right. Born in 1919 and died in 1999, she spent most of her career as a philosophy professor at Oxford and wrote more than twenty novels, Jackson’s Dilemma being the last. She won the Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea in 1978 and published works of straight philosophy focusing on the existentialists and the Greeks (swoon). 

Runaway Marian and jilted Edward are secondary characters, however. The real main character is Edward’s paternalistic neighbor Benet, who played matchmaker for the two. A lonely bachelor in his 40s, he divides his time between meddling in the affairs of everyone in his social circle and playing at philosopher, composing a book on the life and work of Heidegger. There are some great passages where Benet thinks about Heidegger and where he went wrong, wondering how such a great, sensitive thinker could embrace Nazism. You get to read a page of his book where he explains Heidegger’s punning idea of truth as an unconcealing, which is very fun if you’re me. 

It’s a strange book, both strangely assured and sort of slapdash. As in Shakespeare, once the gears of the plot start turning things work out pretty easily, almost too much so. But I admired how that was balanced by a deep attentiveness to the inner lives of these frivolous people. There is a whole chapter about Edward’s formative loss of his brother, which is rendered in long flashback and is quite gutting, a wild divergence from the fizzy tone of the main story. I expect I’ll read more of her work at some point. 

A FEW GOOD LINKS

Artnet: What’s the Deal With That Essay About How the ‘Waffle House Brawl’ Is Like an Edward Hopper Painting? Here’s My Guess—A fun takedown of a dumb article that will also ruin roughly 90% of writing online. Now that I’ve read his thesis that something’s viral status is usually what’s under discussion rather than the thing itself I’m seeing it everywhere.

New Yorker: The Defiance of Salman Rushdie—Glad this guy is still alive. I gotta read Midnight’s Children at some point.

Indignity: Why Is The New York Times So Obsessed With Trans Kids—I’m just incandescently angry over The Times’ current crusade against trans people. It is an outrage and will go down with their coverage of the AIDS crisis and cheerleading the war in Iraq as a permanent mark of shame unless something changes very soon. 

KIDS CORNER

Alice In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, 1865

I was totally amazed by how awful this was. It is so manic and so tedious, so awkwardly written, so repetitive, so vague, and so violent that we quit halfway through. I couldn’t in good conscience keep reading it to Patrick. It raises the question: is the Disney version of Alice the greatest case of redemption via adaptation? This book stinks!!!

The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, CS Lewis, 1950

Read back to back this really feels like the successful version of what Carroll was going for. It helps that Lewis is just a better writer and crucially has the confidence to slow down and not exhaust the reader by throwing an endless barrage of stupid nonsense at them. 

I still have a lot of issues with it though. Its world feels very thin, without history or character. It lacks motivation. There is never any explanation for why four human siblings are fated to rule Narnia together, or much consideration of what that means when Narnia seems to be just some forest from what we see in the book. Who built their castle by the sea? The story also gets worse and worse as it goes on concurrent with the siblings having less and less agency, eventually just listening to Aslan as he resolves everything. I really resented the way he takes over the second half of the book. 

It’s fine though—Patrick really liked the cover illustration.