Extra, extra, ambition trumps revolution

Book: The New Republic

Author: Lionel Shriver

Published: 2012 (HarperCollins)

Pages: 369

Let's talk about motivation. Specifically, what motivates a lawyer to chuck it and become a journalist?

According to Lionel Shriver, it's a lifelong yearning to get out of perpetual second place. It's an urge to get in the middle of things, to be the person everyone else goes to and values for once. It's a way to be a front-runner instead of part of the pack. Edgar's been trying to pull into first place since high school, and when he gets a foreign correspondent spot on a national newspaper, he finally feels vindicated.

Of course, he only got that spot because of a good word from the golden boy high school friend Edgar's always trying to outrun. And he only gets the job because the revered, literally larger than life journalist who started the stringer has disappeared. Edgar's hired to find him and maybe write a little about what's going on around there while he's at it in the middle of a revolution.

When he gets there, he eventually, through many, many struggles with himself and the absent journalist's legacy, discovers the old guy's secret and starts using it for his own gain. Edgar has enough morals sketched out to plausibly battle his personal ambition (SO MUCH ambition, guys) to do the right thing. Which he does, eventually, but not before exploiting the old guy's ways until he accidentally kills someone.

This is one of Shriver's more balanced story lines; unusual with quasi-metaphysical touches and characters impossible to mistake for "normal," but still thoroughly imaginable. When the group of foreign correspondents get together at their watering hole and argue about the true nature of terrorism, their dialogue gets a little lecture-y (oh gee, I wonder what Shriver feels about the efficiency of terrorists blowing up their own homeland...), but that doesn't come close to taking up significant space.

The whole thing is deep and nuanced and saved from sinking in its own gravitas by its wicked sense of humor. I feel like that could describe all of Shriver's fiction.

And it's worth noting that she wrote this in about 1998, but her publisher is just now putting it out. All of the newspaper business is a throwback to the days of influential physical print.

Scandal!

Book: Smile Pretty and Say Jesus: The Last Great Days of PTL

Author: Hunter James

Published: 1993 (University of Georgia Press)

Pages: 210

On the surface, this is a tale of greed and denial and hypocrisy channeled through one of the biggest evangelical Christian empires this side of the Rocky Mountains. Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker start their ministry with coins rattling in their collection cigar box, got on TV through a masterful puppet show that evolved into a gi-fucking-normous media/theme park thing that made them enough money to burn through with Cadillacs and makeup and Kmart shopping sprees until their financial mismanagement and Jim's sexual eccentricities were exposed. Then Jerry Faulwell took over, trip over some of the exact same problems of his own (although on a smaller scale), and the whole shebang ended on a half-finished luxury hotel taken over by Native Americans who now owned the land on which it was getting built. 

I'm pretty sure everybody knows the surface bit of the story, or can at least trace its familiar tropes. That makes it no less enjoyable to read about. Not with a malicious anti-religious smugness, but with a wonder at exactly how much people can trust their leaders and how much these leaders can built on shaky grounds before everything just goes SMASH.

But take a closer look into this, and you'll get the equally interesting and far more worrying glimpse of a newspaper man driven insane by his job.

Late nights, early mornings, no distinguishes between the two, camping out for hours to grab two seconds of a subject's time, chasing phone calls, editors spitting profanity like sparks from blowtorches--these are all pretty standard for an old-school paper journalist. James, who eventually reveals that he's over fifty during his coverage of this scandal, should be used to it if maybe getting tired of all the abuse. Instead, he drops in these stream-of-consciousness lines, even a whole chapter, that drop psychological hints about how much he hates all of this. He misses deadlines, drinks and takes downers, doesn't seem to know how to get out of all of his misery. He doesn't enjoy any of the chase.


And based on his continual failure to get close enough to any of the major people in this to fill out 500-word articles, I really wonder how he managed that for full book.

Somehow he manages to forge a great connection between his personal downfall and the one he's supposed to be covering. It does make me wonder about his career after this, though. Was it his last stand as well as the Bakkers' and Faulwell's? He never says. I hope he retired into one of those "old guy" desk jobs he was talking about by the end. 

Which is sort of a horrible thing to wish on a reporter. But dude was worn OUT. 

No big surprises

Book: Feminism in the News: Representatives of the Women's Movement Since the 1960s

Author: Kaitlynn Mendes

Published: 2011 (Palgrave Macmillian)

Pages: 165 (not counting endnotes)

Headline: Feminism Not Taken All That Seriously by Male-Dominated News Industry Unless It Concerns a Court Case or Something Like That.

No big surprises here, except at how fast it read as an academic study. I was thinking it'd take at least a week to slog through, but the newspaper and feminism terminology were both explained clearly enough to not necessitate a lot of paging back to re-read definitions.

The most interesting bits were when she compared British newspaper coverage to American, which revealed both the differences in journalism and the difference in the women's movements in each country. In America, the women's movement was a lot more centralized and media-ready, so it got covered as a sort of institution. In England, where the movement didn't have that kind of bureacratic cohesion, it got covered as an individual issue. Both countries used more of a "soft news" approach to coverage, which while regulating the women's movement largely to what journalists considered a less serious genre, also allowed room for more in-depth analysis of the movement in longer feature stories rather than the tight space regulations of breaking and hard news sections.

Bored yet? Don't be! Come back into the folds of autodidacts! I have 11-year-old British girls talking about how all they want is to be wives and mothers! Black feminists starting their own movements because they don't feel like they belong in the white, middle-class majority of the mainstream movement! Lipstick and miniskirts as expressions of feminism!

Ah well. It's an interesting topic, but the findings didn't surprise me so much as make me extremely glad that I was born after most of this had settled into at least nominal equality.