Staff Shelf: Robison, Holmes, de Botton

[A post for "Staff Shelf," wherein SLM editors write about what we're reading]

One D.O.A., One On the Way, by Mary Robison (Counterpoint, March 2009, 176 pages)

Even with an ending that let me down, this slim, peculiar novel still holds my respect as it held my interest -- it seems to be just what it damn wants to be. Robison's narrator, an under-scheduled film location scout named Eve in post-Katrina New Orleans, narrates what passes for a story in 225 very short passages. The scenes are unified less by a natural plot progression and more by the narrator's desert-dry tone -- knowing, flip, often funny. "I'm an alcoholic," Eve's lover -- and brother-in-law -- tells her at one point. "I accept this from him with a nod," she writes, "but say, 'Doesn't mean you have to always act like one." The novel has not a single great moment -- the pages seem intentionally starved, and it's hard to care for anyone -- but it's stuck with me, several months after reading it. 

•

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes (Pantheon Books, July 2009, 576 pgs, $40)

A terrific, substantial history of curious, committed British minds -- astronomers, chemists, voyagers, balloonists -- between the late-18th and early 19th centuries, arriving at new knowledge that immediately expanded what could be understood about the universe. (Wait -- balloonists? "The first mapping overview of the earth, with drawings made from the balloon basket, revealed the patterns of towns and countryside, the growth of roads, the meandering of rivers, in a new way... It had been imagined that [ballooning] would reveal the secrets of the heavens above, but in fact it showed the secrets of the world beneath.") The author of several well-reviewed volumes, Holmes clearly loves his subject here. While that means he can occasionally push on too long -- Chapter 6, for example, is 70 pages and split into 12 sections -- the readerly effort's worth it. One of the book's pleasures is hearing Holmes tell us both about the significant moments -- a single paper transforming astronomy from a mathematical science to a cosmological one -- and the minor ones. I love this long example of the latter, from the chapter "Mungo Park in Africa":  

Shortly after, the cruelty of the Moors was strangely set aside by an act of unexpected kindness and hospitality. At dusk Park was greeted by a Negro woman who had been labouring in the fields near the river. She invited him back to her hut, lit a lamp, spread a mat and made him supper of fish baked over a charcoal fire. Evidently Park half-expected some kind of sexual overture. But instead the woman invited into the hut various female members of her family, and they all quietly sat round him in the firelight, spinning cotton and singing him to sleep. Park suddenly realized the song was extempore, and the subject was himself. He was amazed when he began to understand the words: 'It was sung by one of the young women, the rest joining in a sort of chorus. The air was sweet and plaintive, and the words literally translated, were these:--"The winds roared, and the rain fell. The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree. He has no mother to bring him milk; no wife to grind his corn. Chorus: Let us pity the poor white man, no mother has he... "

The women reversed all Park's assumptions about his travels in Africa. He realized that it was he -- the heroic white man -- who was in reality the lonely, ignorant, pitiable, motherless and unloved outcast. It was he who came and sat under their tree, and drank at their river. He found it hard to sleep that night, and in the morning he gave the woman four brass buttons from his coat before he left, a genuinely precious gift."

•

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton (Pantheon Books, June 2009, 326 pages)

My favorite book of the year so far -- smart, witty, thought-provoking, consistently enjoyable. Across 10 chapters, de Botton spends time with 10 types of workers, from cargo shipmen to career counselors, rocket scientists to accountants, and both reports and reflects, with care and with purpose. How do we spend our work days? What existential paralysis or anxiety are we (quite justifiably) avoiding by focusing on tiny tasks or even launching giant rockets?

De Botton's prose is crisp and precise without every feeling dry, and his observational powers are impressive without ever feeling showy. The book's on-the-ground photographs, by Richard Baker, are invaluable additions, for the reader but also for the author, as they help stave off any concern that de Botton's aim is to even lightly mock the biscuit manufacturer, the deodorant inventor, the accountant. Even, for example, when he starts a passage with what appears to be an epic backhanded compliment:

More impressively, [these accountants] seem to have no desire to undertake the kind of work which makes any claim to leave a lasting legacy. They have the inner freedom to exercise their intelligence in the way that taxi drivers will practise their navigational skills: they will go wherever their clients direct them to. They may be asked to deal with the financing of an oil rig one week, the tax liability of a supermarket or fibre-optic cable plant the next -- without being detained by pressing internal projects and the pathologies and suffering these entail. They have no ambition to become known to strangers or to record their insights for an unimpressed and ephemeral future. They are well adjusted enough to have made their peace with oblivion. They have accepted with grace the paucity of opportunities for immortality in audit.

-- Stephen Schenkenberg