The Warmth of Other Suns

A while back I started Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, but never finished it.  It wasn't that I thought Wilkerson was wrong or explaining herself poorly or anything.  I just found that the book didn't have that much new to offer.  Because of course America has a system of hereditary privilege.  It is certainly not a perfectly static system, and we could even argue about how well it maintains itself today relative to other times and other places, but it is surely there for anyone with eyes to see. I tend to think of it above all as an economic system, and I could give plenty of reasons why I think this description provides the best lens for analysis and action.  However it is certainly also a system with a racial component, and indeed, it's often impossible to treat these two as separate variables.  If you'd like to call their correlation over time (in certain cases) a "caste system", I guess that's fine, but what exactly have you offered with this word?  Economic -- which is after all the usual terms in which people pose this question now -- Success tends to mate with Success and beget more Success, and vice versa for Failure.  The logic of this feedback loop clearly leads to a stratified society.  But is this usefully considered a "caste system" when it produces only two castes -- rich people and poor people?  And does the manifest current instability of the racial correlations in this system not make it seem pretty distant from the the Indian system the name references?  

Anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of the US knows that just about every new 'non-white' group is discriminated against upon their arrival (or in the case of Native Americans, upon the arrival of whites).  Irish and Italians and Poles and the many flavors of Asians and Latinos have all occupied this unenviable niche for longer or shorter stretches of time.  The story of these groups is distinct, and they arrive into distinct Americas.  But these stories also tend to have a similar arc.  The discrimination against the group (among other factors) at first forces them to interact mainly internally with one another, and tends to reinforce their difference from the rest of the society and cement their place at the bottom rung of the economic ladder.  Gradually, however, what seems like it should be an endlessly self-reinforcing mechanism nevertheless starts to fade.  This happens pretty quickly with the Irish and Italians, and much more slowly with Asians and Latinos.  But even with Asians, who have seen a century of discrimination, I think this process has largely run its course by now.  I don't mean that racism towards Asians has disappeared altogether, but if we look at statistical measures like median wages or the percentage of people who oppose interracial marriage, it's hard to see Asians as an oppressed minority locked into perpetuating the bottom-rung of a caste system because they can't reproduce with anyone else.  In fact, we might look at the present status of Asian-Americans as evidence that American society is not capable of enforcing a stable caste system over even a century, much less over the millennia this system has existed in India. 

However, before we start congratulating ourselves on how progressive we are, we should consider the history of black Americans.  They've been here for as long as white Americans, and yet this process of assimilation and intermixing has certainly not resulted in their gradual equalization with the rest of society.  It's enough to consider the same charts I just referred to and note that 63% of non-blacks thought that it was a bad idea to marry a black person even as recently as 1990!  Perhaps this doesn't constitute a perfect caste system -- I think it's both inaccurate and disempowering not to see that black Americans are relatively better off than they were in 1619 -- but the fact that these intertwined racial and economic attitudes have been preserved intact for hundreds of years obviously illustrates what Wilkerson was getting at.  So while American society in general is more usefully described as a capitalist rather than a caste system, black history specifically is analogous to the Indian system.  

Which brings us, finally, to The Warmth of Other Suns.  This is the book that won Wilkerson a Pulitzer Prize long before she wrote Caste.  And this book is a lot more interesting.  Instead of a broad-brush political philosophy of dubious generalizations, Wilkerson gives us an intimately detailed and specific piece of the history that helps explain how America managed to maintain its white-black caste system for so long.  We all know this history begins with slavery and continues with Jim Crow.  But while these explanations are undoubtedly central, they leave it fundamentally mysterious how this caste system endured so long after Civil Rights formally ended segregation.  The missing link is, as the subtitle goes, "The Epic Story of America's Great Migration".  It's the story of how millions of blacks moved from the rural South to the urban North and West between 1915 and 1970. I think it's this particular history that accounts for the unique durability of anti-Black racism up to the present moment, and not some generalized American Caste System.  To make a long story short (too late), I wish I'd read this book first because it puts Caste in its proper context. 

The fact that the writing in The Warmth of Other Suns is a real pleasure partially makes up for all the deeply disturbing stuff we have to read about.  As one might expect, roughly half the story takes place in the South and shows us the conditions that drove the desperate hopefulness of the migration.  Wilkerson unfolds this history in novelistic detail, focusing on the personal stories of three representative characters.  The oral history format brings us face to face with the reign of terror that was the Jim Crow South.  But it also brings us face to face with the frustrations and problems of arriving in Northern cities that (usually) dispense with the terror but retain most of the racism.  And because the emigrants arrive in such astounding numbers in concentrated areas, the backlash they provoke in Chicago and New York and Los Angeles sets the stage for the ghettoization that has troubled a lot of black history ever since.  For me, reframing the era that leads up to the civil rights struggle as a type of refugee crisis, where literally half the black population flees the country called South for the one labeled North, supplies a key missing piece of the puzzle.  Throughout the time period of this long migration there is still quite clearly a white-black caste system in the entirety of the US, one that cements itself in economic terms for generations to come because of the enforced concentration of the black caste in the migration's destination cities.  Packing all the immigrants into a ghetto has always been a key aspect of keeping them down.  This is how what is on one level certainly a triumph and step forward for our three heroes -- escaping the terror of the South -- nevertheless doesn't create the promised land of freedom and intermixing one might have hoped for.  Though some fare better than others and the migration is clearly the central event in weakening a caste system that has lasted for hundreds of years, it is not yet the end of that system, but more a kind of mutation in it.  It's heartbreaking to think of how many generations have seen their freedom deferred in one way or another.  Naturally, this is the most touching aspect of the book.  Wilkerson paints these lives with an epic grandeur that befits their everyday struggle, regardless of how much ground they won or loss in the great sweep of history. 

All Fours

My special lady friend suggested that I read Miranda July's wildly popular new novel.  I didn't know anything about July as an artist, filmmaker, or writer, so I assumed at the outset that I was reading a piece of fiction.  Slowly, however, it became obvious that there was a strong element of autobiography to the story.  Obviously, we wouldn't want to confuse our (not so) humble narrator and main character with July herself, but the similarities between the story of a woman's sexual awakening/midlife crisis and July's own life are clear. Normally, I'm not terribly interested in highly autobiographical fiction.  Of course, it's all a matter of degree, since every author unavoidably puts much of themselves in every work in one way or another.  But generally I've found that the closer we come to autobiography, the less interesting the fiction becomes, perhaps simply because people are too close to their own life to really have much useful or broad or wise perspective on it.  Without a deliberate thrust towards universalization on the part of the author, it seems to me that the story often ends up lacking enough imaginative power to fully draw us in.

I think July mostly avoids this trap.  In part this is due to the fact that the story is pretty inventive and unpredictable, and the writing funny and philosophical enough to keep us entertained.   But the larger reason the narrative partially transcends autobiography is because it focuses in an almost sociological way on an experience that more than half of the population will at some point relate to -- menopause.  Now, on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, but loyal readers are doubtless aware that my personal reflections on menopause should be taken with a grain of salt.  Still, it seems to me that the novel is an interesting and honest exploration of what the experience might be like.  And July not only tells her own story, but to some extent tries to weave in the experiences of other women with all the girl-group discussions she details.  

There's a limit to this however, and in the end this limit points to the biggest problem I had with the book.  People who write highly autobiographical fiction tend to take their own life way too seriously, and these people are kinda unpleasant to be around or read about because they're basically just narcissists.  In reading the novel, I couldn't help feeling my compassion for the main character run out time and again for the simple reason that, despite going through menopause, she still doesn't seem to be able to grow up.  She remains incapable of considering the impact her actions are going to have on those around here.  Fundamentally she seems rather neurotic, childish, and self-absorbed.  The novel is all about her 'exploring her desires', in principle a brave and admirable thing, if done in a responsible and adult fashion, rather than as one long train wreck.  In fact, seen from a distance, the relatively happy moral it leads us to is that you can have everything you desire in life ... if only you stop worrying about how much damage your frantic grasping at it has on you and everyone around you.  Which strikes me as whatever the exact inverse of wisdom is. 

This assessment of what was really an enjoyable and interesting book is clearly too harsh.  There are all sorts of ways to work ourselves back towards compassion for the main character, not to mention the distinction between this character and the author. The birth of her child was a major medical and emotional trauma.  We have a tough culture in which to be a successful and sexually independent woman.  And maybe we should look upon menopause itself as a form of trauma.  These all sound like pretty tough things to cope with.  When I criticize something these days, I frequently realize upon further examination that I'm really just saying I wasn't the target audience.  Which in the case of this novel is a pretty obvious observation.  

At the same time, I think it's worth doing a simple thought experiment.  Imagine that All Fours was written by a middle aged man freaked out by the fact that he has a hard time getting it up anymore.  In wrestling with how catastrophic this existential midlife crisis feels, our hypothetical 'hero' goes on a bender with a much younger woman that ends up destroying his marriage.  I submit to you that many such autobiographical novels have in fact been written, and that we wouldn't consider this sort of story new, interesting, bestselling, or anything except the same deplorable one that the "Great Male Narcissists" (as DFW called them) have told so many times.  Of course, something changes when we switch the genders and mix up the sexual orientations.  And we shouldn't ignore the fact that certain people have historically been unfairly locked out of casting themselves as the 'hero' of this story.  But we also shouldn't necessarily think we are reading a fundamentally different, and somehow magically more admirable story.  Something doesn't change when we retell this story.  Indeed, how big a stretch is it between Miranda July's unnamed main character and Ben Turnbull?

Maybe the only thing the reader ends up appreciating about Ben Turnbull is that he's such a broad caricature of an Updike protagonist that he helps us figure out what's been so unpleasant and frustrating about this gifted author's recent characters. It's not that Turnbull is stupid - he can quote Kierkegaard and Pascal on angst and allude to the deaths of Schubert and Mozart and distinguish between a sinistrorse and a dextrorse Polygonum vine, etc. It's that he persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair. And so, it appears, does Mr. Updike — he makes it plain that he views the narrator's impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I'm not especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don't get it. Erect or flaccid, Ben Turnbull's unhappiness is obvious right from the book's first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole.