Robert Earle's Blog

Why Buddhism is True by Robert Wright hinges on the point of evolutionary psychology as he and others understand it: all life forms seek to perpetuate their DNA, i.e., survive so that they can procreate. This means that human beings in the 21st century carry within them distinct and powerful feelings about their needs for mates, for allies, for food and shelter, for a good reputation…and for children. And these feelings–which Wright proposes drive us more forcefully than our rationality–tend to distort our perceptions, leading to the suffering caused by jealousy, envy, greed, gluttony, fears large and small, and what […]

Elizabeth Bowen’s stories range from the good through the excellent to the superb. The early stories often are character sketches cum anecdote. They’re good, but often end so abruptly that you wonder if there has been a problem with the text. Over time, Bowen preserved her gift of characterization and added to it a more complete sense of form. The stories she wrote through the 1930s are in some ways good examples of the short story genre reaching its conventional apex, promising and delivering tales that are provocative and yet full. The years of WWII prompted Bowen to push and […]

Marcel Proust’s Within a Budding Grove is encyclopedic in its analytic approach, extraordinary in a pictorial sense and superb in characterizations, but there are times when Proust is too Proustian, too insistent on turning psychological studies into philosophical conclusions and too self-indulgent in forcing relationships upon the reader that he himself ends up dismissing as insubstantial as well as ill-fated. And then there is the curious way in which Proust undermines his own massively constructed characters. Marcel is an adolescent boy in Part I of this novel; in Part II, when he is supposedly past adolescence, he remains something of […]

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera is a whimsically ironic fiction that unnecessarily advertises itself as a novel. Its parts are lightly interrelated, as are some of its characters, but each functions well on its own, sometimes lamenting and mocking Czechoslovakia’s fate under communist rule, sometimes doing the same vis-a-vis life in exile from Czechoslovakia, sometimes embracing and renouncing the absurdities of bourgeois morality, especially with regard to sex. Kundera deploys his characters swiftly and then twirls them around, bends them over, takes off their clothes, steals their love letters, gets them drunk, and inhabits their dreams […]

Martha Nussbaum’s Anger and Forgiveness is a philosophical exploration of the life of the emotions that benefits from numerous case studies, personal examples, and historical references. The fundamental point is that anger per se is a losing proposition. Nussbaum gives two major reasons: 1) being angry, and taking revenge, is not going to restore life to a murdered relative; 2) being angry and humiliating the offender so as to lower her status in life won’t raise the status of the person who has been offended except in a relative sense. Nussbaum argues that we should learn to transform anger into […]

            James Salter’s collection of short stories, Last Night, is written in understated style that agrees with the characters therein—they are secondary figures, many of them secondary in their own lives, successful quite some time ago, married for the first few times quite some time ago, only daring to view themselves honestly, with justified irony, at more or less the last minute of their current dilemmas. As a consequence, the poise of these tales makes them more remarkable than their protagonists. They aren’t minimalist, though they are rather spare, and they have the air of knowing exactly what they are aiming […]

Harold Brodkey’s story collection, The World is the Home of Love and Death, begins with a tour de force, The Bullies, that dissects an apparently doomed lesbian seduction from both perspectives, the seducer and the unwilling object of desire. This is a minutely observed, painstakingly detailed account that isn’t easy to read because it offers so many second-by-second twists and turns. After The Bullies, all is downhill. Here is a brilliant writer who unfailingly focuses on the rancid and malignant in life. He is mean-spirited and grudging, conceding little or nothing good about any character or situation. Ultimately this is […]

W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, may be a novel–in which case it isn’t a very good novel, rippling and riffing through the fates of characters and issues we barely know–or it may be an autobiographical account of a walking tour of Suffolk Sebald took after recovering from a serious, mysterious illness–in which case it is a splendid work of slightly fictionalized nonfiction. Let’s assume that this discursive, elegiac work, contoured along the lines of Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial, a 17th century meditation on how we bury the dead, isn’t a novel. It’s too good a piece of wandering reflection, […]

Burning the Days, a memoir by James Salter, can be divided into four parts. In Part I, Salter is the child of a wobbling marriage and follows his wobbling father to West Point, a college that doesn’t make much sense for Salter…but he “falls in” and this leads to Part II, focused on Salter’s life as a pilot, highlighted by his service in the Korean war. Part II is followed by Part III, exploring Salter’s adventures as a scriptwriter, director and producer in the movie business. Part IV rounds things out by sweeping through Salter’s life as a novelist, journalist, […]

The Bosnian Chronicle is a slow moving novel about a slow moving and very unhappy place where consuls from France and Austria are stationed during the Napoleonic era. Bosnia at the time was ruled by Turkey and shared a hostile border with rebellious Christian Serbs, whose patron was Russia. So this is an historical novel about a facet of the Great Game of major powers being played out in the Balkans, but Bosnia is very much an afterthought in that game, a place where Moslems, Jews, and some Christians live unsettled and contentious lives. The weather is bad, the roads […]