Freud and Hamlet

When I read Hamlet, I can't help but think of Sigmund Freud -- probably not for the reasons you're thinking, though.

I don't care much for Oedipal interpretations of the play; there's nothing in it, in my reading, that lends credence to the notion that Hamlet wants to get with Gertrude himself, that that is why he hesitates in his quest for revenge -- nor does it make sense that an admixture of rage (for his father's murder) and jealousy (because he himself wanted to be the one to supplant his father) would give him pause -- rather, all the more reason to kill the dirty bastard who stands in his way. There are plenty of other explanations for Hamlet's pause -- the conflict between the warrior's desire for revenge and the Christian's desire for mercy and God's judgment; the uncertainty over the true nature of the ghost; the fact that Claudius appears to be praying when Hamlet comes upon him, ready to do the deed, and Hamlet's understanding that revenge at such a moment, were Claudius really praying, might send his enemy directly to heaven while his murdered father languishes in purgatory -- all of this in addition to the primary fact that Hamlet is himself a man of thought, not a man of action, and that for him "the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."

Rather, Freud serves other purposes in relation to Hamlet. It may seem easy these days to dismiss Freud as a misguided, coke-snorting fantasist from a by-gone era, but to do so would be to overlook the powerful impact that he made on modern consciousness -- and his take on modern consciousness certainly involves that earliest of moderns: Hamlet, who is, as Harold Bloom puts it, Shakespeare's "least archaic" character.

Once you strip away the fancy details of Freud's theories, you're left with two essential ideas. One is that human consciousness is fragmented. More than anyone else, Freud, who trafficked in the language of myths, is responsible for destroying that falsest of myths: that the mind is a single, unified entity. Descartes' mind-body duality is the predecessor for this idea, but also a dead end in its inability to fully understand the relationship between mind and body. Freud's understanding of the fractured mind is the true mark of the modern; Freud may not have invented this notion, but he popularized it. Of the Renaissance writers I know, only Montaigne and Shakespeare seem to articulate a notion on par with the modern view of the fragmented consciousness. With Montaigne, such an understanding quietly underscores the whole of his essays. With Shakespeare, this understanding is the prominent characteristic of his most famous hero. Shakespeare and Freud both understood that it is very much a human quality of mind to hold simultaneously multiple conflicting desires -- to want to do something and not want to do it, to wish for something and know that we shouldn't have it, to weigh both sides of a matter and feel compelling qualities on either -- to feel ourselves ripped to shreds by the centrifugal forces of our own minds. The specifics of id, ego, and superego are less relevant than the fact that there are varied aspects of the mind representing various influences. We take such an understanding for granted now -- the ambiguity of character, the complexity of mind -- but this is the revolutionary quality that Hamlet stood for, a quality that Freud explicated most successfully in prose. Such an understanding of the complexity of character gives the lie to Polonius' stoical maxim that if you are true "to thine own self ... Thou canst not then be false to any man." To which self must one be true? Hamlet is perhaps the first character in all of literature to be so untethered to any solid notion of self. He's a free agent of thought. When stoical maxims fall short, as they do in his famous soliloquy on suicide, Hamlet ranges off into undiscovered territories of thought. He cannot be true to himself, because he has no central core to which he might be true. His only self is limitless thought, and in this context the idea that "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" takes on not only a proto-Romantic aspect but also a vertiginous quality as well, the quality of existential nausea. (I may be riffing off of A. D. Nuttall here; he introduced me to the notion of stoicism in Hamlet in Shakespeare the Thinker.)

When Hamlet does find himself -- or rather creates himself -- it is after his encounter with a Player who teaches him to act out an emotion and another encounter with a rival prince who teaches him how to act out a deed. In the meantime, Hamlet talks, and here we see the precursor of Freud's other significant idea: that it is in talk that we discover ourselves. The Freudian notion is of course famous in caricature for enacting several generations of New Yorker cartoon characters who take to the long leather couch to speak to their shrink. Psychoanalysis has been writ on a larger mass-market scale, though, for more up-to-date audiences. First the talking cure graduated (via the middle school of Phil Donahue) to the Oprah Winfrey Show: instead of taking it to your shrink, you could take it to a television audience of millions. Now, we can take it to our blogs, as well -- no reservations for the production studio required. Hamlet didn't have the Viennese doctor -- nor Oprah, nor the entire membership directory of Facebook -- to hear him; instead, he had us -- that audience whom he addresses so directly in his final speech, but whom he has really been talking to all along in his many famous soliloquys. The art of the soliloquy is the art of self discovery and self-invention, and is that not what Freud wanted his patients to do? To lie down on the couch and soliloquize, to invent their own tragic personas ....

And in the case of Hamlet, the talking cure works. In Act V, he is ready to face his destiny, whatever that may be: "the readiness is all." It may well be that Hamlet didn't have a destiny until he had talked it all out.

I'm sure that many lives have been needlessly complicated by the bombasticism of primitive psychoanalysis. But who could resist the lure of seeing themselves cast as Elektra, as Oedipus ... as Hamlet?

Obama in Berlin

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C07EED9123DF934A15754C0A96E9C8B63&scp=1&sq=marc%20charney%20obama%20berlin&st=cse

Conspicuously absent from Marc D. Charney's list of "echoes" in Barack Obama's Berlin speech is any reference to John F. Kennedy's 1963 speech delivered there. Obama did, however, allude to Kennedy when at the end of his speech he described the "aspirations shared by all people ... [to] live free from fear and free from want," claiming "It is because of these aspirations that all free people--everywhere--became citizens of Berlin."

Who made them citizens of Berlin? It was Kennedy, who said--as an introduction to his famous closing line--that "All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin."

Wisely perhaps, Obama chose to allude to the less-famous intro to the statement "Ich bin ein Berliner" rather than risk seeming presumptuous by quoting Kennedy's use of the German. In doing so, Obama successfully updated Kennedy's notion for our times. The kind of sentiment expressed here is fully consistent with Obama's particular political genius--his inclusiveness--and helps to explain why the junior senator from Illinois was able to draw a crowd of 200,000 in a foreign city.

Keats' Tombstone

Image of Keats' tombstone from http://englishhistory.net/keats/grave.html
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"Here lies one whose name was writ on water."

This was the inscription that John Keats, who died at age 26 of tuberculosis, asked to have written on his tombstone--no name, just a line of verse prophesying what he thought would be his own pending anonymity. There is a historical irony here--that the verse in stone would prove part of the poetic apparatus that ultimately insured his name was not written merely on water.

Though not a line of strict iambic pentameter, there are a lot of consecutive iambs in this inscription--after the initial stressed syllable, four of them in a row. Instead of the initial iamb, we have a single, short, dramatically stressed syllable--"Here"--a declarative and fittingly pronounced beginning. The rhythm proceeds in iambs till the end, when we check a final unstressed note at the end of "water." Thus we have a ten syllable line, a stress followed by four iambs and ending abruptly with a syllable that is so weak that it simply seems to disappear. The effect of the final unstressed syllable is to stretch out the line a little and to provide a different tone at the end by hinting at the unstated, at implications, instead of offering certainty. The verse begins with emphasis and lingers at the end, pondering and thoughtful, trailing off into speculation and denying the sense of dramatic conclusion that we might expect at the end of such an important line as an epitaph. Even the first syllable of "water," where we expect something with significant declamatory power, is not stressed so heavily as we think it should be, certainly not as much as the other stressed syllables in the line, and that is part of the effect as well. To further emphasize the weakness of the ending, consider an alternative statement: "Here lies one whose name was writ in stone." "Stone" has a powerful finality to it that fits with the intended meaning. The way Keats has it, though, the ending invites us to meditate upon the legacy of his work.

He was a poet to the very end.

The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court

Tell someone that you just finished reading The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin, and see what kind of reaction you get. You can explain to them that the book is a profile of recent and current members of the Supreme Court and of the events and movements that have shaped their judicial philosophies. Tell them that the author has cracked the facade of that most illustrious of judicial institutions--one that is historically very private--to gain an insider's perspective on the inner workings of the Court. Your partner in conversation will likely be very impressed at your literary accomplishment. You can leave the conversation with a smile at a bit of insider's information of your own, because after having read The Nine you know how imminently readable a book it is. All you have to do is crack open the spine, and from that point on the book pretty much reads itself. No law degree required.

Toobin writes for the New Yorker, and the book is the product of years of covering the Supreme Court for that magazine--and for its literate but popular audience. It is unfortunate that, in ways, the book has been outdated since it hit the shelf--such is the nature of change in today's Court that decisions of the last couple of months might either enhance or defy some of the conclusions Toobin made for his book. But ultimately that is of no matter. The Court that Toobin profiles is one with a significant back-story that goes back decades, and any portrait of the Supreme Court is bound to end in a freeze-frame snapshot of an institution about to change. Indeed, the future of the Court, as the mixed messages of its recent session indicates, is far from settled, but the outcome of the next presidential election will certainly decide whether the Court remains divided almost evenly along ideological lines (with swing voter Anthony Kennedy siding with the Court's conservative faction about 60% of the time). Given the election of John McCain, the Court would be likely to develop a solid right-wing majority the next time a justice is replaced. (Justice John Paul Stevens is eighty-eight. One can imagine abortion opponents hypocritically praying for his death before Bush's term of office comes to a close.)

One thing that you can say about Supreme Court justices as a whole is that they are certainly an idiosyncratic bunch, despite the fact that so many of them at present march in lock-step with each other along ideological lines.

David Souter in many ways stands out. Appointed by George H.W. Bush, Souter was looked at by those on the right as a potential key player in their hope to establish a conservative majority on the Court--one capable of overturning Roe v. Wade--but since his appointment Souter has veered decidedly to the left. Reportedly, Souter does not have a cell phone or an e-mail account, and it is said of him that someone once gave him a television but that he never plugged it in. Toobin also reports that when Souter joined the Court in the late 80s he had never before heard of a popular beverage that some of his colleagues enjoyed--Diet Coke. He seems to have lived in his own professional bubble, aloof to the goings-on around him. There is something fascinating and, in a way, very admirable about Souter's quaint rejection of modern life. While one could argue that a justice should be in touch with the pace of contemporary thinking, one could also say that a justice should be tuned in to the timeless truths of rationality and the law and that the rest is irrelevant.

Clarence Thomas is another stand out, though for very different reasons. I am not the first to speculate that there is a certain degree of self-loathing at the core of Thomas' being. He is, by his own account, a bitterly angry man, and a great deal of his anger is directed at affirmative action, the policy by which he himself was accepted to Yale Law School as well as appointed to the Supreme Court--ironically, as a replacement for Thurgood Marshall. If Thomas displays so much public distaste and bitterness for the policies that made him the man he is today, how must he feel about himself?

I knew this much already about Thomas before reading The Nine. What I did not know, though, was how much Thomas is liked by virtually everyone around him, from his opponents on the Court to cafeteria employees there to the strangers he befriends at NASCAR events and on RV campgrounds. Suddenly, the portrait had become more complex--if anything, more puzzling.

Since the death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist in 2005 and his subsequent replacement by John Roberts, the Court has moved to the far right in a majority of its decisions. This is in a way surprising, since Rehnquist himself was staunchly conservative through most of his career. Despite his continued adherence to conservative ideals, Rehnquist did not pursue them as doggedly once he was appointed Chief Justice. Toobin posits a solid rationale for the softening of Rehnquist's position in recent years, but Rehnquist was not the only one whose stance changed. Others have changed more dramatically--not just David Souter but also John Paul Stevens. In a recent interview for the New York Times Magazine, Stevens, a Ford appointee, said that he still considers himself a Republican and a conservative despite his reliable affiliation with the liberal faction of the court. Perhaps what Stevens does--unlike some of his colleagues--is to isolate his personal political views from his jurisprudence, but it is also possible that his view of "conservatism" was defined in a different era, when it meant something different than what it means now. Only two justices--Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Bryer--of the current nine were appointed by a Democratic president (both by Clinton); Souter and Stevens are the two who, mavericks in their own way, have kept liberal principles at play in the Court.

As you read The Nine, you encounter not only the big personalities but also the big questions at the heart of any analysis of the Supreme Court. First of all, what is the relationship between the judicial branch and the legislative branch, and to what extent does the Court have power to create--rather than merely explicate--the law? (The traditional answer is that the Supreme Court only interprets the law, but in reality that is simply not the case.) Also, what role should political ideology play in the Court? Regardless of what is proper for the supposedly blind procedures of justice, there is a disturbing degree of ideological bias in the current Court, and this bias will be a factor in the goings-on of the Court most likely for decades to come.

Another question involves the role of precedent in Supreme Court decisions. For generations of Supreme Court justices, respect for precedent has been standard operating procedure. At present, however, the increasingly conservative body in the Court threatens to tear apart decades of precedent on issues such as abortion and affirmative action that even Rehnquist was reluctant to dismantle.

A final major question involves the conflict between, on the one hand, judicial originalism and, on the other, the notion of a living constitution. Originalism is the notion that the preceise meaning of the Constitution was established by the framers at the time of its composition and that any interpretation of the Constitution that strays from the original meaning is invalid. As Toobin informs us, this approach to interpreting the Constitution is historically a pretty new one that emerged in the 1980s, and it is represented for those of us who lived through the tail end of the Reagan era by Robert Bork, whose appointment to the Supreme Court was denied by Congress. Appointees who could be described as roughly Borkian in attitude (Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito) sooner or later made their way into the ranks of the nine, and originalism might be said to be the defining force behind the Court's recent overthrow of the Washington, DC, handgun ban. That said, the more one scrutinizes the philosophy of originalism, the more impractical and even foolish it seems.

There is a reason that the Court has not stuck strictly to the framers' intents in a variety of domains: the framers lived in a society that is fundamentally different from our own. At what point does a necessary respect for the foundations of the Constitution become a crippling burden to those of us living in the twenty-first century?

Toobin, who on occasion betrays a mild moderate to liberal bias, hints pretty clearly his belief that the alternative to this notion of originalism, that of a "living Constitution," is really the only sensible way of making the Constitution a document that continues to serve the people. Furthermore, it makes sense in context of the bigger picture. The framers were at the core of a revolutionary generation who acted on the principle that if your government does not work for you, you should replace it. The government has to have some flexibility built into it. It is therefore sensible to think that the framers might intend for the document to change over time to accommodate the needs of a changing society.

It must be said that Toobin keeps his editorializing to a minimum, that he is able to praise both conservative and liberal members of the Court, and that he expands into his own commentary only once the necessary details have been relayed.

Above all, the effect of reading The Nine is to come to a true understanding of the relevance of this judicial body. Although Presidents select members of the Court, the Court in a way has more authority in defining what counts for law than the President does. Although the Supreme Court is a fully fallible institution, Toobin makes his readers understand that the system of checks and balances usually works--that power is thereby distributed to more than just the President and a handful of influential members of Congress. The judicial branch is sometimes referred to as the "Third Branch"--a name that indicates its status as the aspect of government that is easy to forget (in part, perhaps, because we think of it as being so localized; we see the court in action on regional issues and when we get speeding tickets, and we forget that there is more to it than that). What Toobin does with The Nine is to get us to realize that the Supreme Court is a truly powerful body, and that those in the know value the President's right to nominate members as more than just a perk of office.

Justice personified is depicted as being blind, but in truth it is not blind at all and never has been. Toobin gives us a chance to see what the eyes of justice see. The image is sometimes baffling, sometimes illuminating, and always fascinating.

Why You Should Listen to The Pernice Brothers

They don't have any new albums out, just some old ones that have kept growing on me over the years. For what my opinion is worth, I think they're one of the most underappreciated bands around.

All Music Guide, Pitchfork, and just about everyone else have all compared Joe Pernice's voice to that of Colin Blunstone of The Zombies. (Usually the word "smoky" is used.) The comparison is inevitable and apt. The similarity owes less to imitation, I would like to think, than to natural ability. Both singers possess voices that sound more fragile than they really are. Their vocals are whispery but not breathy: these guys are actually singing. It's the kind of sound that won't often work for the heavy stuff--It's worth noting that 2006's Live a Little includes a song about The Clash, but The Pernice Brothers seem unlikely to be able to actually pull off a Clash cover. There's a bit of that that Clash influence there, but for the most part The Pernice Brothers' specialty is intelligent pop music for a literate adult audience--music that is geared for the kind of listener who has been around the block a few times and is perhaps sadder but wiser for it.

Joe Pernice's lyrics prove that he possesses a great ear for the sound of words, and for the most part he avoids cliches and goes instead for more original figures of speech and, quite frequently, clever, sardonic wordplay. Pernice is also also a writer of short stories, and his gift for character sketch translates into his lyrics, as in this example from "Cruelty to Animals":

She won't mind if the place we stand is marked by ash. She believes what
doesn't kill her only takes more time to kill her. Then she smiles as she
paints her lips and does her lashes. Stunning as a taxidermy victim in a
silver cage.

The images and clever turns, startlingly good for pop music, continue: "Stuck in dumn amazement like a dog who's told to levitate." "... spinning glue back into horses."

It's true that musically there is nothing revolutionary or bold about his songs, and in fact some of them in tone and sentiment even border on what we might vilify as "light rock" or "adult contemporary." Don't let that easy tone fool you, though. There is admirable craftsmanship in every track the Pernice Brothers have released, and their work is all the more remarkable considering that it's all indie label material. Thirty years ago, one would think, these guys would have been all over the radio. Video really did kill these would-be radio stars.

So, what the Pernice Brothers offer is exquisitely crafted pop songs: shimmering, incandescent, approaching the sublime sometimes in the way that the best power-pop (The Beatles, Big Star, those Neko Case harmonies on certain New Pornographers tracks) can do. There's a bit of the Zombies, a bit of Elvis Costello, that distant hint of Joe Strummer, even some Squeeze and Joe Jackson, perhaps. The Elvis Costello similarity comes across not in the sound of the vocals but in the phrasing; listen to the way Pernice stretches out words sometimes at the ends of his verses, as in "Somerville," his ode to coming home with your tail tucked between your legs after not making a go of it in the city.

My favorite Pernice Brothers album is 2003's Yours, Mine, and Ours. At a first listen, this album seems a little too slick, perhaps. This is partly due to the opening track, "The Weakest Shade of Blue," which is so well put-together that it seems like something only a machine could produce. You learn to live with its over-perfection, though. For a Pernice Brothers song, "Weakest Shade" has moments that are brimming with optimism. You shouldn't get used to that, because the next track, "Water Ban," and most of the rest of the songs that follow strike more troubled notes. The melancholy tone persists to the end of the album and almost drags it down a little in the end; my only complaint about this set is that it needs another track (in addition to the exquisite "Sometimes I Remember") with a little more drive in it to hold up the last few songs. Nevertheless, the songs are in and of themselves pitch-perfect. This is an imminently listenable collection of songs. "One Foot in the Grave"--despite its ominous title--strikes the perfect balance between up and down; this is what power-pop is supposed to do. "Blinded by the Stars" and "Waiting for the Universe" are other stand-outs. Although this is the most heavily rotated album on my iPod, I am still waiting to get tired of listening to it.

My next favoriate Pernice Brothers album, 2006's Live a Little, does not quite, to my mind, achieve the same level of the sublime, but it's still a great album by any measure. Thematically, the songs focus mostly once again on mature perspectives on adult relationships. It does boast my favorite Pernice Brothers song, "Lightheaded," a song about celebrity, fame, and all that glitter and flash that have eluded Pernice. If this is the result of obscurity, though, he comes off all the better for it.

It's easy to consider Joe Pernice--voice, lyrics, melodies--as the sole architect of this band's sound, but that would be a mistake. As important as he is, all of this would fall a little flat if it weren't for the music that holds that wispy voice aloft. What really makes the Pernice Brothers such a spectacular band is the band. These aren't stripped down acoustic numbers that we're listening to, and as much as the craft of songwriting is in evidence here, I wouldn't want to listen to these songs presented in a bare-bones singer-songwriter fasion. That's not what they're designed for, though it's true that an acoustic guitar track is put to good use at the heart of most Pernice Brothers songs. The arrangements are pretty lush for indie music--especially given the strings on Live a Little--but they're never over-produced. The songs really achieve definition from Peyton Pinkerton's guitar lines, which never quite jangle, exactly, though they do parse out the contours of Pernice's melodies to great effect. On YM+O, the keyboards--at first almost unnoticeable, a mix of organ and spacey-sounding synthesizer--also add flourishes that would be sorely missed were they not present, and LAL features some steady piano work. I've started to appreciate the drums, too, lately--not just the precision of a well-kept beat but also the fills on "One Foot in the Grave," for instance, or at the end of "Automaton," which serve as a reminder that, despite the subtlety of the music, this is a rock band we're hearing.

What happens to a band like The Pernice Brothers? They have a sizeable following for a band that releases on its own label, but mainstream commercial success in today's music industry climate seems well-nigh impossible. At this point, I imagine, every record sale counts, so my recommendation is to get out there and buy a Pernice Brothers record first chance you get.

The Assistant

Unassuming and tacked down to a hard and unromantic urban setting, Bernard Malamud's The Assistant is surprising for the force and power of its lyricism. Perhaps, accustomed as we are to an either/or that so typically presents the hyper-examined lives of the well-taught and well-to-do or the naturalistic squalor of the deprived, we don't expect such yearning, such depth of feeling, in characters so restrained by poverty, by disadvantage, by a want of education that is so consciously felt by the primary characters themselves: when you are grappling with how to pay the bills, who has the clarity of mind to think and feel with any depth? (Viz. Raskolnikov here--an extreme version of this syndrome: a man of great sensitivity whose judgment is so clouded by his poverty that he commits murder.) Malamud never grants a single sentimnetal word in his descriptions of his characters, but throughout the novel, with Dostoyevsky-like precision, he pries into their minds, setting out in plain terms every least doubt and each glimmering of hope. The result is that these people are real as daylight, sympathetic despite their sometimes coldness, and eminently there, on the page and in the reader's mind.

The Assistant begins with Morris Bober, a down-on-his-luck emigrant Jewish grocer who has set up shop in a hapless Brooklyn neighborhood with a primarily gentile population. We soon meet his wife, Ida, whose nagging and browbeating don't seem like stereotype until you back away from the novel to put things in perspective; in the novel, she comes across as a realized character, and the constant verbal put-downs she directs at her sad-sack husband seem like a logical response to the meanness of their livelihood and the decades of barely scraping by they have faced. Morris and Ida have a daughter, Helen, who is bookish and aspiring and whose beauty and quiet melancholy suffuse the book with an elegiac quality; Helen is only in her early twenties, but her life already seems like a look back on opportunity that never quite developed. Lurking somewhere in the background is a dead son, Ephraim, who passed long ago and is by this point little more than an occasional memory, another reminder of a past that, rather than providing a romanticized counterpoint to the present, only makes the present seem part of the same hollowness. To this family dynamic enters Frank Alpino, a drifter who wants to make something of himself and, through a chain of unlikely events that Malamud somehow makes seem realistic, becomes Morris' assistant at the grocery. Frank, orphaned at age five, might be there to serve as Morris' surrogate son, but if he somehow fulfills this embedded psychic need, Morris himself, numbed as he is to the world around him, seems not to be consciously aware of it.

Though dirty and unshaven at first, Frank is not without a certain charisma, and much of the appeal of his character (to Morris and to the reader--and eventually to Helen) is his earnest desire for self-improvement, which he is more than ready to put into action as opportunity arises. Frank's admiration for St. Francis of Assissi (presumably his namesake) establishes a blatant but still effective symbolic nod to the life of the saint, who represents a kind of discipline and asceticism that Frank wishes to achieve himself. This kind of discipline is something Frank needs, because just about every move he makes is a misstep; every time he tries to do right, it seems, he ends up doing wrong, and the result is that the more bad he does, paradoxically, the more the reader sympathizes with him. Frank is a liar despite his forthrightness. He is a thief and a peeping-tom, and eventually he does worse, but what defines him as a character is his constant wish to do good. We never doubt that he wants to do right.

Frank pursues Helen, furtively at first, and eventually, through sheer stick-to-it-iveness, establishes something of a relationship with her--initially one-sided, but more and more mutual as she opens up to the notion of his potential. Helen then takes it upon herself to educate Frank on some of the finer works of the Western literary canon. Among these works are Anna Karenina, whose title character provides something of a model for Helen's character, and Crime and Punishment. Malamud's novel benefits nicely from the name dropping, especially regarding Crime and Punishment: both novels are about poverty and suffering, and both take on as their protagonist a criminal who at times challenges our sympathies but never strays far from them. Both novels also resonate with religious meaning, though for Malamud this means not a discovery of Christian themes (St. Francis notwithstanding) but rather an exploration of the cultural and spiritual significance of Judaism, which in The Assistant signifies a way to live despite suffering, a way to endure. Both novels also struggle with Big Ideas of universal import, though Malamud's novel does so in a notably less self-conscious manner than does Dostoyevsky's. In the grand American tradition, Malamud chooses to ground all of his ideas in the hard-scrabble everyday.

In contrast to this groundedness, the lyricism of this novel has much to do with birds. There is only a handful of real birds in the book: notably, when Frank is in the park feeding pigeons and they flock to him, just as they did in the story about St. Francis preaching to the birds, only Frank has bread for them, not spritual convictions. Representations of the avian factor in elsewhere. When Frank crawls up an air shaft to peak through a bathroom window to spy on Helen as she undresses to take a shower, her breasts appear to him "like small birds in flight." Later, dejected and at odds not only with Helen but with himself, in the midst of a confused and confusing love, Frank on a whim carves out of an old pine plank the form of a bird. The symbolism is clear: no one takes flight in the novel, but everyone wants to. Snow and moonlight and flowers also present symbols of nature, and it's not hard to see what these elements mean in a setting that is unlovely and unkind. Ironically, perhaps, it is the nearby park that provides the scene of the novel's most violent and depraved event, reminding us how our attempts to restore a semblance of the natural in the midst of human contrivance often take on a sinister tone.

The Assistant is not an absolutely perfect novel, but it's about as close to one as we could ever hope for. At times, it seems as though the prose dashes along a little haphazardly and the sentences serve just to shove us forward to the next event, but if so perhaps it is only because Malamud and the reader both are anxious to move toward the next phase of the narrative. The conclusion of the novel is a little suspect also; I found myself not entirely believing it, but I appreciated it nonetheless for what it said about the characters, about where they were going, about the continuous potential, never quite realized on the page, of their asserting the meaning of their own lives.

From the window of the delivery room, I could see a construction crew at work on the roof over the entryway to emergency, two floors below. The roof was a curving metal wave, very modern, and it was, in a way, before the contractions got to be too big, kind of comforting to think of the world operating in its usual fashion outside of our little room. Amy was being induced, which is part of the story, as we'll see, and early on things were easy. She was holding my hand and listening to The Flaming Lips on the iPod, rocking out just like it was 1993, before we'd met and before anything like the birth of a child had occurred as any kind of definable reality for either one of us. It seemed easy so far, but this being our second child, we knew better. We knew that this was a peaceful little interlude before things got really heavy.

My wife was being induced because Dr. Awesome--so called by Amy because of her relentlessly sunny disposition--said the sooner, the better. All around, at the Ob-Gyn--the Baby Factory, as we call it, in and out like clockwork--we've gotten better than usual service. Amy's dad is a doctor at the nearby hospital, and there was a precise advantage here to her keeping her maiden name. More than that, though, she has a blood clotting disorder of the kind that will probably never cause her any trouble in her life but which, if care is not taken to avoid conditions favorable to clotting, could result in a serious lawsuit. Nobody wants that. Care was indeed being taken from every angle.

And that was part of the reason for the early induction, a week and a half before the due date. No one wanted to take any risks. Also, the Little Brother, as we'd taken to calling him, was not gaining weight at the rate predicted, which could be a sign of clotting in the placenta. Better safe than sorry.

When the contractions got to be too much, Amy got up and walked around the room--staggered is more like it, tethered by all sorts of cables to a monitor and IV stand that I had to push along behind her--and sat in a chair for a while. When she got back in the bed, the nurses had trouble with the monitoring equipment. The contractions were getting too strong too quickly. Amy was shaky, quivering. The nurses gave her oxygen. The baby's heartbeat had dropped from the 130s to the 80s. For a while, it disappeared altogether. More nurses came in--four, then five, then six--followed finally by Dr. Awesome, who said something about "another option." One of the nurses handed Amy a form on a clipboard signifying consent to undertake a c-section, and she scribbled something on it that bore a vague resemblance to her signature. Before I knew it, the whole crew was headed down the hall to the operating room. One nurse stayed behind as I started putting on the scrubs she handed me. I ripped the pants while pulling them on.

To get to the operating room, we had to go through construction. The air was clogged with dust from sanded drywall compound, and a big plastic tarp was blue-taped to the end of the corridor. The others had already gone through, and one of the workers was already taping the plastic sheet back to the wall. He took it down again, and I went in following the nurse. I had to wait out in the hall for a few minutes, between the construction area and the operating room. I wasn't sure why I had to wait. I sat down in a plastic chair. A worker came up to re-tape the tarp hanging over the doorway. He saw me sitting there, and he asked me how it was going. He might have thought I was a doctor, or maybe he didn't. I don't know what kind of look I might have had on my face. I don't remember what I said back to him.

In a few minutes, one of the nurses came out and called me into the operating room. There was more talk of another option. I heard pieces of conversation, but I didn't understand most of it. I remember hearing a fragment of a sentence from a nurse I didn't recognize: "All the stuff they've put in her," a fragment that had, in context, the weight of a declaration. I assumed she was referring to Pitocin, the agent that induces contractions. She wasn't referring to any kind of pain medication because Amy hadn't had any. I stood next to the bed holding Amy's hand while Dr. Awesome reached in and manually effaced her cervix the final two centimeters.

"We've got baby's heartbeat again and he's looking just fine, but just in case we're going to stay right here. The anesthesiologist is standing by in case we need to go for another option."

The anesthesiologist came into the room, all matter of fact, but perturbed about something. He spoke to Dr. Awesome for a moment, then came over to Amy, whose contractions were getting stronger. He hovered over her, waiting, while Dr. Awesome waited at the other end of the table. She told Amy to put her right foot up on her shoulder, and I helped hold up the leg and put it into position. Nurses held up the other leg.

The anesthesiologist started asking questions, matter of fact, his tone no different than if he were sitting down in the office and running over a few of the routine preliminaries. He said he knew that she was not in the best frame of mind to be answering questions, but that admissions had failed to go through the required paperwork on the matter (a hint of annoyance there interrupting the facade). He was interrupted by Dr. Awesome before his interrogation had really begun:

"OK, Amy, on your next contraction I need you to bear down."

Instructions were given for breathing and counting. I was to do the counting. The contraction came. The doctor said that Amy was doing a great job: awesome. The nurses gave their praise. The anesthesiologist went back to his questions. Had she ever been given anesthetic before? Amy said that she had, when she'd had her wisdom teeth out. Any problems? Everything was fine. He asked her about allergies, history of illnesses. Bronchitis last fall. OK. Another contraction. The breathing, counting, pushing. The anesthesiologist backed off.

Two more rounds of contractions and the boy was out. He was fine. He sucked in the air and whimpered like a cat. He turned from purple to pink just like that, just like he was supposed to.