peteg's blog - noise - books

Kindle. Inevitable after watching Tina Satter's Reality (2023) which put the FBI's transcript of Ms Winner's arrest to movement. More true crime.

Ms Winner is famous for having been handed the longest sentence under the U.S. Espionage Act (which she has now served) despite the relative triviality of her crime, which was to leak an NSA document to The Intercept that illustrated some connections between Russia and Trump's campaign in 2016. The Intercept massively compounded her lack of opsec by more-or-less telling the FBI whodunit.

The first half of this book is interesting: she does a good job at describing her upbringing in south Texas and is especially strong on her complex and valuable relationship with her father. (The vibe is that her mother is relentlessly supportive and therefore the relationship is simpler but undervalued. Which is depressingly common.) She's obviously gifted with languages (I would've liked some more depth here). It is unfortunate that she did not learn more during her military training; perhaps they could've taught her more useful opsec/self-care at intelligence school. The latter half is mostly a gaol/prison log and things go (at repetitive length) about how you might expect. We don't find out what college classes she took in prison.

Ms Winner owns to having OCD, anger management issues, an eating disorder and so on that she manages with a disciplined and epic exercise regime and diet. (Some of that put me in mind of David Pocock.) She gets very frustrated when she can't control the things that help her manage her mental health, which is of course most of the time while she's incarcerated. Apparently it also helps if she can broadcast her achievements via Instagram, etc.

Beyond that there's not much to the story. She became a political football (of course) which means that most of the commentary about her is valueless. She makes it clear that she lacks judgement and often behaves impetuously. I wish she'd gotten better career advice and been more grounded in her longer term goals; she often seems to be insufficiently skeptical, even inexplicably naive. I did not understand what she meant when she said she loves her country and she does not present any reasons for converting to Judaism. The Rosenbergs got a mention. She gives a beautiful acknowledgement of Daniel Ellsberg's support (Secrets (2002)).

Nicolas Niarchos at the New York Times. Goodreads: so much vulnerability, so much trauma and pain, brave to put herself out there, raw and perhaps unlikeable. A recent (2025-09-11) interview on NPR.

Kindle. Lennon has written several articles for the New York Review of Books (and many other venues) from the uncommon perspective of a presently-incarcerated man so I wondered what he would say at book length. True crime is not a genre I read much of, excepting perhaps decision making in wars and associated lawering.

It's very New York: Lennon assumes you know the geography of NYC and the character of the localities (Hells Kitchen, the Port Authority, etc.). He namechecks many famous prisons like Sing Sing and Attica. The book consists of portraits, not prurient, of himself and three others in an interlaced structure that amplifies themes at the cost of narrative. He offers a barebones sketch of his own crime (the murder of a friend/peer drug dealer, his two pleas of not guilty) but does not linger on his motives beyond a desire to present as tough while living "the life" — which amounts to nothing you won't find in any number of gangsta movies and songs from long ago. (Lennon is now tough enough to be vulnerable.) Two of the others are similarly lacking in motivation, bringing environmental factors such as fatherlessness and poverty to the fore, the general decay of society. The third, Michael Shane Hale, more clearly committed a crime of passion as a result of trauma and abuse. On Lennon's take none of the four are psychotic, at least not before gaol.

Why these prisoners were selected for profiling is never made clear. Robert Chambers is so opaque (permanently high, evasive, morally incompetent) that we don't learn much beyond what's on the extensive public record; his activities in gaol (helping deaf prisoners with their paperwork, etc.) add colour but no insight. Milton E. Jones grew up in poverty in Buffalo, N.Y. and seems to have been too easily led. We're told he converted to Islam but it's unclear how this helped him; he undergoes a long slide into mental illness that nobody can arrest. Lennon asserts that as a youth he was "intellectually disabled, mental illness likely broaching" but it's difficult to square the first part with his obtaining a Masters degree in theology. The accounts are all incomplete, perhaps necessarily so.

Addiction is a minor theme: AA works for Lennon, at least most of the time. He doesn't touch on his own religious beliefs or lack thereof, or spill too many words on gangs or affiliations. Clearly he hates being incarcerated. Apparently he has enough money for all the ameliorations. We're told that rape in prison is out of fashion but I wonder if the same is true of the Federal prison system. He doesn't really set out what he thinks prisons are for these days, or what the length of his own spell was intended to achieve. It feels a bit transactional. I was more hoping for more analysis, more big picture; the whiplash of changing policy (much of it arbitrary and capricious) is felt everywhere now.

The prose gets rambly at times, which is unsurprising given the restrictions imposed on the writing and editing processes. But even so it could have used another round or two of editing and thinning.

Pamela Collof for the New York Times. Marin Cogan at the Washington Post. I'm not sure these men are all that complicated. Goodreads.

Kindle. Who wants to read about Robert S. McNamara in 2025? — especially an account that focuses so myopically on the American side of the Việt Nam war when so many far superior and timely books have been available for decades now: David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest (1972), Fred Kaplan's Wizards of Armageddon (1983), and even McNamara's own memoir In Retrospect (1995) and Errol Morris's interview with him The Fog of War (2003). And so on. This journalistic take is such a letdown after reading David G. Marr's excellent history. If the enduring lesson is that the U.S. establishment cannot learn to avoid quagmires then surely it is far more interesting to study organisations that can, such as the structure of the wartime Vietnamese forces. I am probably discounting the pleasure some take in eternal kulturkrieg.

I was disappointed by how shallow and selective this book is as a biography of McNamara. You won't learn what he did at Ford (OK, he wasn't at war then) but not enough is said about his time with Curtis LeMay during World War II (fire bombing Tokyo) and the World Bank (at war with global poverty). Did he make any academic contributions? (Daniel Ellsberg, for instance, contributed to game theory alongside his famous interjections.) The focus is mostly on his relationships with the powerful (consigliere to the Kennedys and LBJ), his womanising, the forbearing wife, the poor parenting of his children, his domineering management style incongruous with his social ease.

There were a few things that stuck, none of any real importance. McNamara was clearly an authoritarian (Chapter 12: "'the more important the issue the fewer people who should be involved,' he had once said at the Pentagon."). He claims to have never read the Pentagon Papers (!) which is weird as he commissioned them as an input to reviewing the decision processes, a task he reckoned with himself from the late 1980s onwards. (Chapter 13 reviews the previous biographies, autobiographies, conferences in Việt Nam etc. of this period in a pile of reductive absolutionist blah.) It is insinuated that McNamara participated in the relaxed sexual (a)morality of Washington during his stint as Secretary of Defence (think JFK).

There is not enough Kissinger here, something I would have doubted was ever possible. Specifically we're told about Kissinger's attempts (?) to open peace talks from 1966/67 (dates are often vague) but not what McNamara thought about his (reputed) sabotaging of them for personal gain; sure, McNamara was gone by the 1968 election but even so.

There are some clangers. As always it is claimed that JFK would have ended the war in his second term (in direct contradiction with LBJ's expansion in 1965) but the provided evidence is thin. (Chomsky has been dismissive of these claims of dovishness for decades.) The authors do not understand mutually-assured destruction (MAD); from Chapter 13:

Neither McNamara himself, nor Kennedy, he insisted at Hawk's Cay, 'ever thought that we would launch a first-strike under any circumstances. Putting moral issues aside,' he continued, 'there was no reasonable chance that we could get away with a first strike unscathed.' To admit that publicly would destroy deterrence, so they 'didn’t tell the military,' and 'the Soviets, of course, had no way of knowing this.'

Nuclear deterrence ala MAD is about having a reliably lethal response to a nuclear attack; it has nothing to do with who shot first. I doubt there were reasonable expectations of escaping blowback since about 1949, even allowing for the famous missile gap. (As canvassed by Fred Kaplan and others, this first-strike ambiguity was how the US and Europe mitigated the superiority in conventional forces that the Soviets had at the time. Then as now it was about the resourcing and not the ethics.)

As always the Vietnamese barely exist, except to say afterwards how wronged they were.

James Santel summarised it for the New York Times. Goodreads: "Too much about Jackie."

Kindle. One of the few pointers provided by Pisani. Conrad's first published novel. He clearly aimed for tragedy but got very bogged in excess colour. The structure is overly complex for so simple and transparent a tale. I waited in vain for a swerve away from the generic romance and back to the mountains of gold in the interior of Borneo. Most of it was eye-glazingly boring.

Goodreads: Conrad is never an easy read.

Kindle. Probably eventually inevitable after reading her The Wisdom of Whores (2008) fifteen years ago. Prompted by a recent column by Duncan Graham.

This is a polemical piece of travel writing, light on the anthropology and freed of her focus on public health though some of her professional interests do leak through. She leans into a "Bad Boyfriend" motif of about 25 years standing. The general avoidance of commentary on the more populous areas, tourist Meccas (she acknowledges leaning on the restorative powers of Bali and so forth but does not detail how) and "tourist objects" (beaches, volcanoes, etc.) makes stretches of it seem like hard and thankless slog: days on boats with barely room to sit out of the sun and rain, jaunts into degraded rainforests on motorcycles with people she doesn't know, unskilled hard yakka.

Pisani obviously has deep connections with Indonesian culture, very strong language skills and a bravery I once may have envied. I wonder how much of the ready Indonesian hospitality she encounters is due to this. Many of her experiences seem inaccessible to a man (and in counterpoint I guess she missed out on the men-only things — but it is possible that there aren't any.) She doesn't dwell too much on foody things; memorable but unenticing are the sugary drinks and the omnipresent Padang restaurants. She must have guts made of iron. Some stories just tail off.

Keeping it light, the book is thin on the literature. She updates Koch (1965/1978) on how wayang is very different now. I wanted to know more about land tenure and property rights in general, given all the upheaval and disposition of various groups over the decades; did Indonesia go through a redistribution like Việt Nam (disastrously in the 1950s)? Where are the lines drawn between personal and clan property?

Pisani recounts some great yarns but with enough cracks to make me suspect that the best bits were unpublishable.

Goodreads. Wikipedia.

Kindle. Is this satire or Kaplan's best dream life?

It's the present day (any time you like from about 1950 to 2025) in a Washington D.C. where all the ladies are powerful and foxy. A minor jape threatens to ignite World War 3 and it is up to the flawed decision makers to get it right for all the wrong reasons. We are fortunate that they receive so much competent help from the ladies and our leading man, especially in spite of his business model being to speak out of both sides of his mouth. Apparently it is not yet too late to find something to believe in, especially if you're the man the moment has called forth.

Kaplan knows from his deep, lengthy research that nuclear war cannot be limited; this precludes him from sharing the delusions of Ackerman and Stavridis (and others) about the coming apocalypse. He's less interested in the global view (India does not feature, of course China is America's foe, the Russians are abidingly relevant) but similarly emphasises that personal links dominate the institutional ones. (I expect all three would concur that today's institutions are incapable of meeting our actual historical moment.)

The characters mostly speak with flattened voices, excepting a New England Defence Secretary. The occasional genuinely funny bit is interspersed with some clunky exposition, but we're not here for high literature. The best bit of didacticism comes late in the form of a warning from the Chinese back channel: if the US backs down from a conventional war then the chances of later, worse conflict increase.

Lawrence D. Freedman at Foreign Affairs: it coulda been autofic. Bill Thompson: game theory gone bonkers. Goodreads: expectations not met?

Kindle. Somewhat better than the last thing I read from Ackerman and kinda fun. Clearly he's aiming for a Bourne- or Jack Reacher-like franchise, a series of books and maybe a movie deal, something that might interest Tom Cruise while economising on the creative labour.

The game is that two impoverished special ops veterans take on the task of repossessing an aircraft from parties unknown for parties unknown. Things go OK in a mildly mysterious and vaguely realistic manner until the midsection lays it all out for us and we hurtle to what seems to be a satisfying conclusion for the Western participants. The plot is overly-convoluted and determined, at least if the outcome was in fact the intended one, and not so twisty; most events just serve to move the cast around the world (Uganda, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Marseilles, Kyiv) so that further character development (an Amish man! a dominatrix!) can occur alongside much colour. There's not a lot of action but many cinematic touches and far too many coincidences.

The vibe is a lightweight heist, perhaps like an Oceans instalment complete with the luxe trimmings and class signifiers. A dash of the Atticus Lish post-war blues and some reluctant fundamentalism is served up without conviction. Ackerman's Waiting for Eden (2018) seems as distant now as this is from that timeless tale of wartime graft, Catch-22 (1961).

Goodreads. Rav Grewal-Kök at the New York Times: some parts are (sanitised) autofic. An interview with Celia McGee: "The book is being developed as a streaming series by Tom Hanks’s production company, and Ackerman is at work on a sequel."

Kindle. Unlike Clune's earlier non-academic output (Whiteout (2013), Gamelife (2015)) I didn't get this one, his first novel. Once again we're in the suburbs of Chicago, it's high school, and fifteen-year-old Nick-our-narrator is starting to have panic attacks after the separation of his parents. He readily falls in with a bunch of cool kids via his underdrawn best mate and new girlfriend. The putatively helpful high-culture artefacts (authored or proximate to Oscar Wilde, Giotto, Bach, etc.) aren't described in a way that helped this reader understand how they helped Nick; things are not exactly real but they're not very magical either.

Clune's technique of repeating things in the small is not so effective here; I think it was intended to evoke the process of thinking and perhaps I was spoilt by his and Catherine Lacey's mastery of a decade ago... or maybe it only works a few times. He's far better at the things between people such as the hilarious encounter Nick has with a shrink who only offers proforma treatments. Things get a bit cult-ish (Ian is transparently unhinged and dangerous). The foreshadowing made Nick's character somewhat incoherent; he often wants to just exit (a desire even more dominant these days) but sticks around for reasons unknown. The social circle falls apart for reasons unspecified.

Unsatisfying.

Goodreads. Kaveh Akbar (Martyr! (2024)). Much later, Christian Lorentzen summarised it for the London Review of Books.

Kindle. There is opportunity in the current chaos! But does anyone think that Australia's leadership can grasp it?

Against Mishra he provides a solid, brief bibliography that deserves a scrape. I now wonder if Fred Kaplan gave Des Ball his due (Can Nuclear War Be Controlled?, Adelphi Papers 1981). He does not cite Daniel Ellsberg or his pithy take, that nuclear weapons are used all the time, as threats. On the other hand I'm sure Mishra would argue that the extended peace in Imperial Europe and the Americas up to World War I was underpinned by extreme violence in the colonies.

Excerpted everywhere but there are not many reviews yet. White is extensively touring; for instance he spoke with Allan Behm at the ANU recently.

Kindle. Depressing. Extremely referential, even more so than his previous non-fiction works such as The Age of Anger (2017). These references come so thick and fast, and the hefty bibliography is more intimidating than helpful (quantity having a lack of quality all its own), that I just let it wash over me. This is annoying as he does give the odd intriguing pointer (such as to elements of Muhammad Asad's identity) that may be worth chasing up.

One argument he wants to make is the consanguinity of European colonialism and Nazism, that the lack of German overseas colonies after World War I motivated them to colonise Europe itself. The blowback from that was the construction of Israel by Europeans paid for with Arab lands; that is, yet another colonial project. I don't think he explained how Europe has benefited from this beachhead in Arabia. Things are not connected to the exigencies of the Cold War. I couldn't see the Holocaust as a completely unique Jewish experience given the Australian Government's historical policies towards the Indigenous peoples of this country.

Ultimately his prognosis is bleak and he explores few recognisably novel or optimistic ideas. Deep into the epilogue, when the text is almost exhausted, Mishra says:

As the climate crisis brings forth a world of barbed-wire borders, walls and apartheid, and cruelty in the name of self-preservation receives singularly wide sanction, most recently in Donald Trump’s electoral triumph, Israel will most likely succeed in ethnic-cleansing Gaza, and the West Bank as well.

Goodreads. Omer Bartov read it alongside other takes. Ben Hubbard attempted a summary for the New York Times. Charlie English, similarly for the Guardian but with more context: where do Hamas and Iran fit in this account? Mishra was at the Adelaide Writers' Week back in March after visiting UNSW in February.

Kindle. I fondly remember reading McCann's This Side of Brightness (1998) about twenty years ago. One big part of that was his excellent use of his research and empathy for the people he encountered in the tunnels of NYC; the result was (as I recall) a powerful mix of history, engineering and present-day precarity. This gave me reason to expect he'd do the same for those who repair the fibre optic cables that now bind the world together.

And he mostly does, excepting an unnecessary binding of his tale to Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) and Apocalypse Now (1979). The style is first-person autofic and I guess (as with life) the author-narrator doesn't quite know what to do with his enigmatic free-diving lead character or even himself, a long-form journalist. I didn't feel he got to the heart of anything much but it was a pleasant read; the writing is great. I wish he had developed his thoughts on Samuel Beckett some more.

Goodreads. Marcel Theroux.

Kindle. Inevitable after chewing through Dashiell Hammett's collected works and rewatching The Long Goodbye (1973). (I have yet to get to the novel for that; it's from 1953.)

Well, what can I say. He started strong with loads of similes and humour (c.f. Sarah Miles as a jazz weekend in The Big Sleep (1975)) but by the third book the rewards are diminished. All are structured like a collation of short stories; vast casts of characters with some overlaps, abundant scenic description, gnarly plots and not exactly satisfying conclusions. (I'm not here for the whodunit aspect; it feels like important details are withheld but perhaps he's fair by the standards of that genre.) Perhaps they function as a snapshot of the Los Angeles/Santa Monica region at the time. It's helped along by the odd bit of abstruse colour, e.g. a reference to Moral Re-Armament which is topical now. Fun.

Kindle. A pointer from Jennifer Szalai's review of Becker's More Everything Forever (2025) which I won't be reading now.

Notionally Becker aims to dispel any lingering belief that the Copenhagen interpretation is a viable account of how quantum mechanics relates to reality. The key difficulty, as Becker admits semi-regularly, is that this interpretation is too ill-defined to wrestle with. That Becker proceeds to do a poor job with the wrestling does not help us understand why so many big-brained physicists let it ride. (Sure, this is a matter for philosophy, not physics, but even so.) Alloyed with too much assertion and insufficient argumentation, the bulk of the text is an attack on strawmen and a championing of the multiverse and pilot waves. The prose often gets bogged in short-order repetition; a hefty edit was in order. I mostly didn't feel like I was thinking. It's never made clear what might count as real. The major historical figures were drawn more incisively by Labatut (2021).

I wasn't impressed with his take on the philosophy of science, especially his sinking the boot into the Vienna Circle; this is particularly tiresome when fecund philosophers like Rudolf Carnap are name-dropped without any discussion of their contributions. Yes, verificationism, logical positivism, whatever are long bankrupt but it's not so easy to dispense with conceptual analysis and Popperian falsification (to me a necessary but not sufficient quality of a scientific theory), especially on the basis that we can never figure out the specific parts of a theory that deserve revision; Ehud Shapiro showed how to operationalise falsificationalism back in the 1980s (see MIS) and of course this problem is most of what training an AI has always been about. Perhaps Becker needed to peruse Chalmers's classic.

Broadly reviewed. James Gleick for the New York Times. Goodreads. Yes, the appendix is the best part of the book. If I'd read Peter Woit's take ahead of time I would've read something else, or maybe put my big-boy pants on and dug into the SEP articles.

Kindle. Inevitable after reading his latest. This is a collection of nine short stories, mini-portraits, tenuously linked, of blokes in various states of unsuccess. None go anywhere spectacular or surprising; the devices are entirely Chekhovian, so you know the attractive and not the unattractive ladies are the bit players, the youth tend to vacuous hedonism, a delimited scope of action is just a space for the exhibition of cowardice, the luxe lifestyle models an absence of imagination and creativity, nasty is just an ineffectual stuffed-shirt pose, death nothing but inchoate terror and incomprehension. One focuses on muscle-bound security, prefiguring Anora (2024). The prose is effective and clearly Szalay knows his Europe. Again, all to what end? Man is more than this, even under ironic duress.

Dwight Garner at the time. Szalay is good on the status markers and food. Goodreads. And so on.

Kindle. Prompted by the many positive reviews.

Szalay goes about it with clear intent: this is a portrait of a bloke, just like Small Things Like These, whose interiority is inaccessible to us. Life mostly just happens to him and he is mostly not disappointed, perhaps because it's mostly about sex and he rarely has to ask. He starts out in spartan post-Communist Hungary, living with his mother, where the cracking (and much remarked upon) first chapter reveals his irresistibility and easy facility with violence. (All descriptions are specific, sparing and not especially lurid.) After a bit more scene-setting but no foreshadowing or forethought we're taken to London for what I expect are Szalay's favourite topics: extreme wealth, luxe consumption, brand names, high-end real estate/development deals, art of the kind that is hung on walls, inheritance, shamelessness, blameless rise and fall. He doesn't hold the hands of those of us who don't live this stuff.

Szalay's prose is fine but never achieves the necessity of Atticus Lish's. It is often amusingly reductive. Presenting István purely as a surface works well but less so for the secondary characters such as Helen, the socialite married to a plutocrat; we see her reflected in her son's surprise that she's gone for such a protozoac man and wonder what her besties think. Nobody has a real job or career which means Szalay skips the most time consuming part of life that just maybe undergirds and circumscribes the substance. Despite its relevance to a bloke from Europe BREXIT goes unmentioned. The semi-solitary drinking "parties" ameliorate the COVID lockdowns for Helen. Almost all of it could have happened in the 1980s or, excepting the helicopter commutes between London and country piles and other inessential technological things, the nineteenth century.

But to what end? Is this supposed to be a Martin Amis sort of thing, a social commentary, a time capsule? (It's been too long for me but perhaps Money?)

Dwight Garner. Peter Craven: "No finer novel will be published this year." Keiran Goddard: "Szalay has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat." (Not much?) All bone. Sean O'Beirne: "not one of Szalay’s best books; the best, by far, is All That Man Is." Too much plot (and I concur). Goodreads.

Kindle. The greatest hits of wartime Sài Gòn from the 1930s to the 1970s. Specifically we follow the titular Chinese headmaster Percival Chen as he does little more than whore and gamble in Chợ Lớn while his brotherly lieutenant, fellow Chinese Mak, runs his English school. For whose benefit, we are supposed to ask, but it is always clear that Mak has deep roots in the Vietnamese independence movement that transcend the partition of the country.

As a semi-authentic, sentimental dynastic tale it's fairly engaging. The prose is flabby and needed a good edit; the repetition-in-the-small (paragraphs that repeat the previous paragraph but with a tad more colour) recurs so often, too often. Regularly stuffed in the middle is a tendentious sentence that asserts this is how things went, how things must go, as if the author lacks faith in the persuasiveness of his narrative structures. And of course so much could go other ways and did. The characterisation is generally weak; Percival is a muppet and Mak is underdrawn. The women are just sex objects or madams, all creatures of the demimonde, mostly victims. The dialogue is highly suspect: there's no chance that Chen would identify as Viet Cong to the occupying forces of Sài Gòn. It seems unlikely "Việt Minh" is the right term for Mak's network. Such inaccuracies are just laziness this late in history.

In a broader context, Andrew X. Pham provided a lot more colour and historicity in his recent Twilight Territory. The Chinese perspective is far more valuable than that of the Western journos of, for instance, Koch's Highways to a War (and see also Neil Sheehan's memoir) and I'd be keen to read a better treatment. I vaguely recall Violet Kupersmith mining a similar vein.

Goodreads.

Kindle. Thin Brunner is always a risk, as are any of his late-career works; apparently this was his final novel. Here he attempts a zany quest in the mode of Douglas Adams. There's a bit of lightweight social commentary that may've been insightful in the early 1980s. It was hard work to get through.

Goodreads.

Kindle. In an afterword Koch billed this as a "companion novel" to Highways to a War (1995), calling the "double novel" / "diptych" Beware of the Past.

The novel has it that the aristocratic Irish revolutionary Robert Devereux was transported to Bermuda then Van Diemen's Land in 1848. This is his journal through to 1851 when he escaped to the United States. He left behind a bastard son who was the grandfather of Michael Langford from that earlier novel. Koch apparently drew inspiration from the actual Young Ireland movement.

All this we learn in a brief "Editor's Introduction" — Koch again adopts a secret document gambit — and the ensuing journal entries just put somewhat flabby flesh on that skeleton. Somehow he managed to keep me engaged despite the excessive foreshadowing that robbed the events of suspense. (All devices are Chekhovian which makes the diarist conceit completely implausible.) The repetition within each section, often within a paragraph or two, is a grind but I just moved on whenever my eyes glazed over.

Perhaps reflecting the limitations of the journal/diary format, the characterisation is generally weak and there's too much attention paid to the details of clothing and room furnishings, almost as if Koch is writing stage directions for a cinematic adaptation. Perplexingly for a revolutionary there's not much analysis of the colonial politics of the day though many words are spilt on gesturing at the French theorists and random parts of the canon of Western Civilisation; the Tasmania/Antipodes-as-Hades duality/doubling is overworked. This and the prolix prose made me doubt that Devereux was capable of inspiring the Irish people as Koch claims he did.

I couldn't tell if the occasional bout of nonsense was Devereux's or Koch's; for instance the claim that Tasmania was a "still-virginal island" in 1850 was unsustainable at the time given the (observed, diminishing) presence of the Aborigines and the immense suffering of the convicts, and even more so by 1999. Koch probably meant that it had yet to be despoiled wholesale by the (Anglo) profit motive, and he is keen to identify lands with women. (Devereux's violated Kathleen embodies Ireland, somewhat crassly, and only really comes alive in her Wuthering Heights scene.) Devereux is not an unreliable narrator so much as a tendentious one.

The usual Koch preoccupations appear in half-hearted form. Devereux is, of course, doubled ("I am a man of double nature") but to no end. Are fairies and faery lore Irish preoccupations that occlude the actual? Koch asks the same via his French-Jewish survivor/repository of wisdom Lenoir. Bushrangers! The essentialism, the contention that revolution is misguided, that democracy is a sham, a front for mob rule. Could it be that nothing is an improvement on ancient aristocracies, some kind of self-perpetuating ruling class? It would seem that Irish revolutionaries are not, in fact, better in the tropics. The sheer unmentionable irrelevance of science.

Goodreads dug it.

Kindle. Mishra's first novel in twenty years! — and in many ways coextensive with The Romantics of 1999 and his explication of Buddhism of 2004.

Notionally Mishra uses the divergent paths of three low-born blokes who make it into the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi to explore the horrors of the New India and the changing fashions among high end cosmopolitan dynasties, some of whom share his literary aspirations. Much of it looks like hard work for risible returns.

The prose is mostly OK, leaving aside an excess of adjectives that often tip reasonable descriptions into overly-precise incorrectness. And a heavy, deadening referentialism. And the short-order repetition. And the hefty foreshadowing, the selective drip of information. The ambient context is assumed known: temporal anchors are mostly provided by real-world political events.

The main flaw is weak characterisation. The three undergo a shock-and-awe initiation at IIT. Dalit Virendra Das (the lonely computer science major to the two mechanical engineers) remains shallowly drawn as a generic, cultureless, deracinated Wall St billionaire. Aseem Thakur is marginally more real as an editor of a literary journal of some kind. He's a fan of V.S. Naipaul and an all-in predatory, hedonistic individualist who somehow still feels a duty to improve the country. The author/narrator Arun Dwivedi (with the highest entry rank of the three) retreats to literary translation in the Himalayas after not making it in the Delhi social scene. In shades of David Williamson the latter two are more influenced by an encounter with a literature professor than anything in their degree programs. Indeed Mishra completely avoids engaging with the content of the exact sciences in any form; technology is reduced to brands, finance to insider trading. (If he'd done his research he'd know that everything is securities fraud.)

But all this is just a precursor to a painfully adolescent romance between late-40s pseudo-Brahmin Arun and mid-30s dream girl, Muslim/scion/social media star-not-influencer Alia Omar who has sown her wild oats and is now in need of a serious man. The death of his mother is messier but as conveniently timed as Charlotte Haze's in Nabokov's Lolita. The male insecurities that (inevitably) bring things unstuck put me in mind of Julian Barnes's Before She Met Me. Arun's retreat to a remote Tibetan-Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas was a severe and under-explained overreaction, though I guess his usual stupefacient, fiction, was shown to be ineffective during their London bout.

Mishra wants to examine the beast as a perennial outsider, in contrast to Mohsin Hamid's How to get filthy rich in rising Asia (2013) where the inside view was shown to be more powerful. The ascetic Buddhism portrayed here is not critiqued. The Tibetan situation is sketched but not engaged with. There's nothing in the way of resolution. I wish he'd either stick to his essays and social diagnostics or move past autofiction.

Bharat Tandon. Jonathan Dee hides behind some hefty extracts. Abhrajyoti Chakraborty: "new India, old ideas" — damn straight and ouch-y. At some point the fake is itself the substance. The anxiety of the narrator may be that of an author anxious to be understood. Goodreads: reviews are generally positive, the ratings entirely dire. (krn gives it a good hard working over.) A general flaw of the commentary is that these three blokes are not mates so much as frenemies.

Kindle. I thought El Akkad's last novel What Strange Paradise (2021) was a solid improvement on his first and was hoping for another delta. This is instead a memoir of El Akkad's (remote but nonetheless) heartrending experience of the (ongoing, perpetual) conflict in Gaza, salted with the odd life event. The title is bang on and a sentiment for all times. Unfortunately many of the ensuing, similarly syntactically-tortured sentences with convoluted tenses are not as sound. It struck me that once again he was a couple of steps behind Mohsin Hamid (Exit West, The Last White Man, talks at Georgetown University in April 2024).

I struggled with El Akkad's motivations. Why does he doomscroll the horrors of this conflict? Why did he become a U.S. citizen? He shows no awareness that all of what is troubling him troubled others not so long ago — the iconic photography of the Việt Nam war (presently being relitigated), the drive to bear witness, liberal hypocrisy. The age of anger may've started with the economically disenfranchised but is now thoroughly democratised.

In brief, it struck me that El Akkad had no awareness of Asia. His hopelessness, expressed in sentiments not too distant from George W. Bush's with-us-or-against-us, yields a just-walk-away nihilism that precludes consideration of alternatives — live-and-let-live! — which just might lead to paths out of this mess. If he truly felt that, why write this book? Yes, the abiding humanistic optimism that another generation could always be squeezed in before things went completely tits up has unravelled, but give us an argument for why you still had your child. I wanted to know why he remains in the U.S.A.; Hamid made for unruly Pakistan a while back.

Someone with more awareness of Asia may've made common cause with the concept of tang ping. Another more analytically-minded or less despairing may have dug into the will to ignorance and America's sense of its own morality. Still another would mourn for lessons unlearned and (self-reflectingly) the role of the press in the unwinding ("is it still possible to enlarge cognitive capacity within the dwindling kingdom of Western journalism?"). It felt like reading computer science literature, a blinkered, write-only medium that fills me with dismay.

Fintan O'Toole at the New York Times mostly refers back to El Akkad's American War (2017). A "polemoir, a fusion of polemic and memoir." — please no. Goodreads dug it with spades.