Stories of dignity and complexity

Called by some—and I wouldn’t disagree—one of the greatest living writers of short stories, Alice Munro, who is 81, keeps producing fiction of the highest quality.

Dear Life (Knopf, 2012, $26.95), the Canadian writer’s 13^th story collection, includes 14 stories, though the last four, she writes, introducing a section called “Finale,” “form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.”

Yet even these last four each have a structure, a pace and an epiphany that make them good stories, even Munro stories, despite her comments in “Dear Life,” the final story, that “this is not a story, only life,” and, “It wouldn’t do in fiction.”

As I and others have noted, Munro’s stories have the feel of novels. They often encompass a character’s lifespan. And while they develop through a series of scenes played out in both physical and psychological detail, she suddenly will often move the narrative forward or backward several years or even decades.

For example, in “Train,” one of the book’s better stories, though it’s difficult to rank one higher than another, after following Jackson and Belle through many years of living together in a nonsexual relationship, he abandons her, and we’ve moved years ahead. Then we suddenly go back several decades to when Jackson was in high school. We’re in a different, though related narrative that provides insight into the one we were reading. Then we return to the present, and the entire story now makes better sense.

Munro often uses trains in her stories, including three here. Trains involve movement, provide means of escape and often lead to encounters with strangers.

In “To Reach Japan,” a woman leaves her husband in Vancouver and gets on a train with her daughter to go to Toronto, where she hopes to find a man she met at a party. She sends a message to the newspaper where he works that reads, “Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle—and hoping it will reach Japan.”

In “Leaving Maverley,” another of the better stories, Ray, a night watchman, is asked to walk a girl home from the movie theater where works on Saturday nights as a ticket taker. These two end up leaving the town of Maverley for different reasons. Leah, the girl, runs off with the minister’s son, a saxophone player. Years pass, and scandal follows Leah, who leaves the minister’s son for a minister, who eventually leaves her for another minister. Meanwhile, Ray marries and, years later, goes to visit his wife in a hospital, where she lies in a coma. When she dies, he carries with him “something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.”

Many of the stories are set in the 1950s, while often spilling forward into the 1970s or beyond. And Munro punctuates the stories with comments from the narrators about how things were back then. Greta, in “To Reach Japan,” notes that “feminism was not even a word people used.” And in “Amundsen,” the narrator mentions butter and comments that “it was called butter but it was really orange-streaked margarine, colored in the kitchen as was the only legal way in those days.”

Her women characters often face a world in which their options for work are limited to housewife, office worker, teacher or nurse, but they tend to find ways of fighting these limitations.

Munro’s language is so accessible and engrossing that it disguises the complexity of her stories. She also captures characters with apt descriptions. In describing Greta and her husband, Peter, she writes: “She avoided anything useful like the plague. It seemed he did the opposite.” And later: “His opinions were something like his complexion,” which was light-colored, never flushed.

In “Pride,” a story about two sad, lonely people who move into a sad, lonely old age, the unnamed narrator, a man with a harelip who has cut himself off from friendship, describes Oneida: “She was laughing almost soundlessly, a laugh that might even indicate that she was in pain.”

We as readers are sure that these two will end up together, but in the end his pride keeps them apart. Munro wrests the story from being depressing by ending with an arresting image of baby skunks playing in a birdbath in the backyard. Oneida says, “Have you ever seen such a sight?” The narrator says, “Never. I thought she might say another thing, and spoil it, but no, neither of us did. We were as glad as we could be.” 

This is what Munro does in all her stories. She takes us into characters’ lives so that they feel real. She takes them through various experiences that don’t usually go where we expect. And while she refuses to concoct happy endings, her characters often come to places of deeper understanding that also bring readers a greater sense of the complexity and dignity of people’s lives.

Torture doesn't work, in spite of what movies say

For years it’s been common knowledge that the CIA practices torture but won’t admit to it. Officials in the George W. Bush administration, notably Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA director Michael Hayden, have defended the use of torture in investigation of terrorists.

Then, on Dec. 13, 2012, the Senate Intelligence Committee approved a report concluding that “harsh interrogation measures used by the CIA did not produce significant intelligence breakthroughs,” writes Greg Miller in the Washington Post (Dec. 14, 2012).

The Democrats on the committee adopted the 6,000-page document over the objections of the committee’s Republicans (big surprise), even though the CIA’s use of water boarding and other severe interrogation techniques were banned four years ago.

The report is significant, nevertheless, because it is independent and details the agency’s efforts to “break” dozens of detainees through physical and psychological duress.

Some question the relevance of the report because, writes Miller, “the agency abandoned its harshest interrogation methods years before President Obama was elected, and the Justice Department began backing away from memos it had issued that had served as the legal basis for the program.”

Still, the report is important because it confronts a popular perception, predominant in many movies and TV shows, that such torture does produce helpful information. The recent film Zero Dark Thirty is a case in point.

The film chronicles the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6 in May 2011. It shows torture in its graphic horror. Yet it also depicts CIA agents obtaining information from detainees who have been tortured, though the information comes when the detainees are being fed or treated kindly.

Steve Coll in the Feb. 7 issue of The New York Review of Books goes further and calls the film "disturbing" and "misleading." While acknowledging artistic license and the need to condense actual events, he says "the filmmakers cannot, on the one hand, claim authenticity as journalists while, on the other, citing art as an excuse for shoddy reporting about a subject as important as whether torture had a vital part in the search for bin Laden."

Evidence shows that useful information rarely comes from torture. Treating detainees kindly and building trust has been shown to be much more effective in obtaining accurate information. For example, read The Looming Tower: Al-Quaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright (Knopf, 2006), which shows an FBI agent obtaining information after developing a relationship with a prisoner and gaining his trust.

While CIA activities are largely secret, there is evidence from FBI agents present at "black sites" where CIA conducted "enhanced interrogation," i.e., torture, that they found these techniques "counterproductive and morally wrong," writes Coll.

The film also depicts the use of secret prisons around the world where detainees were sent to be interrogated, i.e., tortured. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chair of the committee, issued a written statement that called the decisions to use these secret prisons “terrible mistakes.”

While all but one of the Republicans on the committee opposed the report, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, issued a statement saying the committee’s work shows that “cruel” treatment of prisoners “is not only wrong in principle and a stain on our country’s conscience but also an ineffective and unreliable means of gathering intelligence.”

No one knows when or if the report will be made public. For now, it has been turned over to the Obama administration and the CIA to provide a chance for them to comment, writes Miller.

Miller reports that “earlier this year, the Justice Department closed investigations into alleged abuses, eliminating the prospect that CIA operatives who had gone beyond the approved methods would face criminal charges.”

While any final report may not have much impact on government practice, it could help counter the public perception, based mostly on fictional treatments, that torture is effective.

The deeper truth is that, whether or not torture is effective, it's just plain wrong.

My top 10 films of 2012

It's that time of year again. Each year I develop a top 10 list for MediaMatters, a website I write for, mostly film reviews. My list is limited by being in a market where some major films--I'm thinking Amour--have not yet come to the theater. That film may be like this year's A Separation, too late to appear on this year's list but perhaps appearing on next year's.

There were many good films in 2012. I could easily make a top 20 list. Narrowing it to 10 was not easy. And to decide on a No. 1, I turned to a film that won last year’s Oscar for best foreign film but wasn’t released widely here until well into 2012.

1. A Separation. This outstanding film from Iran tells of a married couple faced with a difficult decision—to improve the life of their daughter by moving to another country or to stay in Iran and look after a deteriorating parent who has Alzheimer’s disease. They decide to separate and put off divorce. Their separation leads to a succession of events that disrupt several lives and show the painful consequences of our decisions.

2. Lincoln. This political drama about President Lincoln’s struggle to get the 13^th Amendment, abolishing slavery, passed before the Confederacy surrendered is one of the best-written films of the year. And Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln heads a stellar cast as he reveals the human Lincoln behind the icon we tend to exalt.

3. Zero Dark Thirty. This riveting film chronicles the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden after the September 2001 attacks and his death at the hands of the Navy S.E.A.L. Team 6 in May 2011. It uses an intelligent script and an outstanding performance by Jessica Chastain to follow the trail of clues and tenacity required to find bin Laden. While its depiction of obtaining information from torture is misleading, it shows its horror.

4. Argo. This film recounts the true story, with white-knuckle suspense added, about a CIA “exfiltration” specialist who concocts a risky plan to free six Americans who take shelter at the home of the Canadian ambassador after Iranians take other U.S. embassy workers hostage in 1979. Director Ben Affleck captures the context of Iranian hatred of the United States for its support of a ruthless dictator.

5. Beasts of the Southern Wild. This mythic tale is told through the viewpoint of Hushpuppy (6-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis in an amazing performance). She lives with her father, Wink, in the Bathtub, a southern Delta community at the edge of the world. He has a mysterious illness and tries to prepare Hushpuppy with tough love. A storm hits, and the ice caps melt, unleashing an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. Hushpuppy goes in search of her lost mother. Likely you’ve not seen a film like this.

6. Life of Pi. This fable based on the popular, Booker Prize-winning book is about storytelling and belief. It tells the amazing story of a teenage boy surviving a journey across the Pacific on a lifeboat in the company of a 450-pound Bengal tiger. This magical film is one of the most religious released this year.

7. Moonrise Kingdom. This sweet, funny film follows two 12-year-olds who fall in love and run away on an island off New England in 1965. Various factions of the town mobilize to search for them, and the town is turned upside down. Director Wes Anderson has crafted another of his fables, but he includes telling though eccentric detail and shows respect for all his characters.

8. Cloud Atlas. This amazing adaptation of David Mitchell’s intricate novel melds six stories from six different time periods, including two in the future, and shows how the actions of individuals, often against repressive systems, reverberate through time. Despite some miscues, the editing here is often ingenious. Those who haven’t read the book, however, may have trouble following the narrative.

9. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. This gem of a film captures the feelings of Charlie, a high school freshman who is not only an introvert and smart but has lost his best friend to suicide and suffers from a mental illness. Two seniors, step-siblings Sam and Patrick, adopt him into the “wallflowers,” their group of outsiders, and help him adjust to the real world.

10. The Invisible War. This gut-wrenching documentary explores the preponderance of rape in the U.S. military. The film uses interviews of victims of sexual assault with cases going back to the 1960s and up to the present and reveals the unjust military system that provides no accountability to rapists.

Rape in the military

Kirby Dick’ gut-wrenching documentary The Invisible War explores the preponderance of rape in the U.S. military.

The film uses interviews of victims of sexual assault with cases going back to the 1960s and up to the present. While each story has its particular differences, all reflect the double horror of not only being raped but seeing their perpetrators walk away.

In addition, many are injured in the assaults and can’t get proper medical care for the long-term effects of those injuries, physical and psychological.

The film reveals the unjust military system that provides no accountability to rapists. There is no court these victims can appeal to. Instead, each unit is under the authority of a unit commander, who serves as judge and jury in such cases. At times, this person is the perpetrator, and the victim is left with no recourse but to resign, often with a dishonorable discharge.

Those interviewed for the film joined the armed services (whether Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines or Coast Guard) out of a strong patriotism. Many had other family members who had military careers.

The statistics, which, the film notes, all come from the Department of Defense, are alarming:

• more than 20 percent of women in the U.S. military have been sexually assaulted;

• in 1991, over 200,000 had reported sexual assault;

• 80 percent of assaults are not reported;

• 15 percent of recruits have committed rape before entering the military;

• 40 percent of homeless female veterans have been raped;

• women who have been raped have a higher PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) rate than men who have been in combat;

• 1 percent of men (20,000 per year) in the military are sexually assaulted (and not by homosexuals);

• the average sex offender has 300 victims.

The film also interviews military counselors in the film who point out that when there is no accountability for sexual assaults, that is an invitation for sex offenders to do as they wish.

Congress has tried to address this travesty, and each time, spokespeople for the military insist they have a no-tolerance policy. Yet it continues without abate. And since the military is outside the civil court system, victims have no recourse. The courts have ruled that rape is an occupational hazard of the military.

The military does acknowledge some cases. In 2010, it cataloged 3,158 cases of sexual assault, but only a sixth of these came to court-martial, and only 175 men, one in 20 of those charged, did any jail time.

Major General Mary Kay Kellogg, director of the Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, tells the camera that assault victims should petition the Defense Department’s Attorney General. But of the 2,994 cases forwarded to the AG, not one was investigated.

We learn that one woman’s assailant “is still in the Air Force and was awarded Airman of the Year during her rape investigation.” Another assailant “became a supervisor at a major U.S. corporation and sexually assaulted a female employee. He was never charged and lives in Queens, N.Y.”

Last April 14, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta watched the film. Two days later he took the decision to prosecute away from commanders.

It’s something, but it’s not nearly enough. 

Today, The Invisible War received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary. I hope this means more people will see it and that action is taken to address such injustice.

A dystopian thriller--Part 2

While Justin Cronin had published two critically well-received novels, The Summer Guest and Mary and O’Neil, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award, he burst onto the best-seller list in 2010 with The Passage, a blockbuster dystopian novel.

That book told of a girl named Amy who is taken to a facility in Colorado, where a government experiment goes wrong and unleashes an army of deadly creatures that soon engulf America. Amy becomes the world’s best hope for survival.

The Twelve (Ballantine, $28) is the second book of a trilogy. Like The Passage, it recounts events in the present, then jumps 100 years into the future. At the beginning of the apocalyptic catastrophe, we meet three main characters: Lila, a doctor who’s expecting a baby and becomes delusional; Kittridge, a former special-ops soldier who fights the creatures called virals; and April, a teenager trying to protect her younger brother from death and destruction. They encounter one another as they navigate their way through a dangerous landscape across Kansas, Nebraska and into Iowa.

Then the narrative jumps 100 years into the future, where Amy and others try to overcome the power of the twelve original virals or vampires who control the thousands of virals that prey on the dwindling population of survivors. How these are connected to the twelve is complicated and not entirely clear to me.

The fast-paced narrative moves from one set of characters to another, an unsettling experience that nevertheless keeps one reading, longing for everything to tie together. Cronin is adept at building suspense, though with so many characters and plots, it nearly overwhelms the reader.

Of particular note is the presence of strong female characters—not only Amy but Alicia, a fighter extraordinaire, and Sara, a mother who is captured and taken to Fort Powell, Iowa, a horrific place that is like a concentration camp, and who fights to survive and save her daughter.

Cronin has said in interviews that the idea for The Passage Trilogy came from a challenge from his 8-year-old daughter to write the story of “a girl who saves the world.” From that idea he has created a whole other world with many characters and complex narratives.

This world, much of it set in the middle of the country, from Texas up to Iowa, mostly rings true, though at one point he mentions “a grid of cornfields” (not wheatfields) in western Kansas.

Cronin teaches at Rice University, and his fondness for literature comes through often. Kittridge, holed up in Denver, reads books by Faulkner, Hemingway, Twain, Fitzgerald and Melville. Cronin writes: “There was something in the pages of these books that had the power to make him feel better about things, a life raft to cling to before the dark currents of memory washed him downstream again.”

Beyond the pleasures of a well-written thriller with characters that have some complexity, reading The Twelve makes one wonder about the popularity of such dystopian novels. Perhaps it’s a way to face our fears, even when they aren’t realistic. And there’s pleasure in seeing resolution to the struggle against such deadly threats to humanity.

A final resolution, however, will have to wait for the third and final volume in Cronin’s trilogy. I’m hooked enough to want to read it.

Movies (gasp) with female leads

Ever heard of the Bechdel test? Named after the comic-strip artist and memoirist Alison Bechdel, it assesses movies according to a three-step formula. To pass the test, a film “(1) has to have at least two [named] women in it (2) who talk to each other (3) about something besides a man.”

Although a visit to the website bechdeltest.com suggests that things have been improving recently, the test underscores the reality that most films are presented primarily with male protagonists and from a male perspective.

In an article in the New York Times (“Hollywood’s Year of Heroine Worship,” Dec. 6), film critic A.O. Scott points out that 2012 has been not only a good year for movies but “a pretty good year for female heroism.”

He names some movies with female protagonists: Snow White and the Huntsman, Brave, Hunger Games, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Zero Dark Thirty. This can be misleading, though, since the top-selling movies of the year, such as The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, The Amazing Spider Man and Skyfall feature mostly male heroes and are geared to a male (mostly teenage) audience.

And when we get to the Oscar race for best picture, the favorites, among whom may be Argo, Flight, Lincoln and The Master, feature male leads. An exception likely will be Zero Dark Thirty, which, though it features a female lead, is about the hunt for and killing of Osama bin Laden and thus appeals to male audiences.

While there are more Hollywood movies with female leads, these parts often resemble male leads in action films—they fight and kill their enemies.

Scott laments the loss of an earlier era, when Hollywood took “pride in its ‘woman’s pictures,’ a category that embraced many of the immortal romances and melodramas of the studio era and that made actresses like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Ingrid Bergman into powerful industry players as well as adored stars.”

That era also included many intelligent comedies with strong female characters. Such films are rarer today.

One place to broaden one’s exposure to female roles is in foreign films, either through Netflix or other sites. Many French films have strong female leads that aren’t under 30.

And if you look at British TV shows, you often find female leads who are older, not always strikingly beautiful and don’t look anorexic.

Beyond simply finding films with female leads, it is rewarding to find films with interesting characters. In such films, the characters develop and face complex situations beyond merely seeking revenge for some despicable act.

Scott offers some examples from this year. One is Amour, which won Canne’s Palme d’Or last May, tells of a couple in their 80s. Scott writes: “Anne, who is a wife, a mother, a musician and a teacher and whose decline and death, in the company of her faithful husband, Georges, constitute as intensely particular and as grandly universal a story as you could want. Anne is completely (and painfully) human. She is more than the sum of her domestic, artistic and professional roles, even though she bears the traces, in her extraordinary face, of the various roles she has performed.”

Films can serve to show us life and introduce us to new understandings of our life in this world. Portraying that world too exclusively from a male perspective does not serve us. 

Invest in infrastructure now or pay much more later

After every natural disaster, it seems, there is talk about being better prepared for the next one. Yet little usually happens. People often move back to dangerous settings, and U.S. infrastructure continues to deteriorate.

True to form, ideas and promises emerged after Hurricane Sandy devastated much of the East Coast. In his Newsweek article “Everyday Armageddon” (Nov.26/Dec. 3, 2012), David Cay Johnston writes: “If we are to avoid the next major catastrophe—and it will come—then we have to start paying the bill now.”

Johnston notes that “America spends just 2.4 percent of its economy on infrastructure, compared with 5 percent in Europe.”

As New York and New Jersey (among other states) look at rebuilding, their governors and others are calling for a clear strategy. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg says, “You cannot build a skyscraper economy on a foundation designed for a farmhouse; it will collapse under its own weight.”

Johnston points out that if we fail to make sufficient investment in infrastructure, we can expect bursting dams after heavy rains, falling highway and railway bridges, sinkholes, massive electrical outages, more flooding, forest (and urban) fires and commutes disrupted for weeks, maybe months, as rail lines, roads and tunnels are rebuilt.

He goes on to suggest 12 projects “where investing corporate and tax dollars would not only pay off now by creating jobs and making the economy more efficient but would save lives while reducing future costs.”

Here is a summary of his 12 projects:

1. Accelerate replacement of natural gas pipelines. During Sandy, leaking gas fueled hundreds of fires.

2. Stop AT&T and Verizon from shutting down the old copper-wire telephone system, the only telecommunications that work when the electric grid goes down and cellphone-tower batteries run out of juice.

3. Demand that electric utilities replace power poles as they wear out and maintain equipment, especially changing oils in large transformers before they congeal and stick, to reduce long-term costs.

4. Increase tree trimming to prevent downed electrical lines during storms and move more lines underground to make the electric grid more reliable.

5. Promote smaller grids instead of the vast multistate grids now being developed that can throw millions of people into darkness because of one mistake or even one fallen limb.

6. Develop a 10-year plan to tear down, rebuild or strengthen every dam rated risky by the civil-engineering society.

7. Replace within a decade every large water and sewer main past its predicted life, with an emphasis on the largest pipes.

8. Place big warning signs on every highway bridge, advising motorists of when the structure should have been rebuilt or replaced and when, if ever, work is scheduled to begin.

9. Invest in riprap seawalls that extend perpendicular from the shoreline into the sea. These structures capture drifting sand and build up and maintain sand dunes and the vegetation that holds them in place.

10. Replace rail lines running through marshlands with elevated structures. This would limit commuter service disruptions after future storms.

11. Rebuild marshes and other natural barriers, like oyster reefs, that absorb the shock of storms.

12. Require detailed emergency plans by natural-gas, electric, water and telecommunications utilities as a condition of keeping their licenses.

Prevention is cost-effective and the wisest course. But the chances our short-term-thinking leaders will take such a course are slim.