Tommy Gunn's School Daze

Laurie R. King, Lockdown: a Novel of Suspense

Career day at Guadalupe Middle School will make or break Principal Linda McDonald. After turning a failing school around, Linda has managed to corral enough community members to remind her students they have a future. For one day, they’ll forget their personal dramas, the pains festering at home, and the two criminal investigations lingering at the margins, and celebrate their potentials. Too bad somebody’s coming to school with a gun.

The dust-flap synopsis on Laurie R. King’s newest standalone novel is slightly misleading. Though the story promises a violent schoolyard confrontation, the anticipated explosion doesn’t actually arrive for over 300 pages. Rather, King places the emphasis on the buildup, the suspense as a school of over seven hundred students simmers. We know something’s coming. We’re left to wonder not what, but who, and why. Because King offers multiple suspects.

Principal McDonald has shepherded her school through several powerful conflicts in her first year. A well-liked, but possibly abused, student has disappeared, leaving behind a best friend pitching conspiracy theories pinched from Doctor Who. A high-school gangland murder drags the middle school in because the only witness was one of McDonald’s students. And that’s just the problems McDonald can see. She has multiple cauldrons waiting to boil over.

There’s the kid harboring a nasty grudge and carrying something in his backpack so powerful, he can’t bring himself to think about it directly. The beautiful but damaged teen desperate to escape the stultifying strictures her political refugee parents place upon her. The principal’s husband, always fleeing his personal demons. The wannabe gang-banger desperate to prove his chops. And the janitor, known only as Tío, carrying a bloody secret.

Guadalupe MS, in the (fictional) agricultural community of San Felipe, California, has dozens of conflicting forces pushing on its students. They come from a mix of economic, racial, and cultural backgrounds: poor Hispanic migrant workers and software developers send their children to one school. Also fugitives fleeing poorly defined threats, and working families hoping to shield their children from gangs. Add heat, and watch the chaotic combination boil.

Laurie R. King

Our story unfolds, minute by minute. King offers us glimpses into different viewpoint characters’ heads, so we see the same events from multiple contexts. What one character considers a flippant comment, another perceives as an insufferable slight. Principal McDonald has at least two opportunities to deflect the looming violence, but misses them because she can’t read students’ minds. Characters live in their own brains, never knowing how close they miss.

This, King implies, is the theme of life in public society: everyone thinks their personal dramas are unique. Especially in middle school, with the simmering pressures of looming adulthood, every character sees their own conflicts, and doesn’t realize others have the same. King only addresses this indirectly, as when her wannabe gangster thinks the beautiful girls have life easy. But it’s constantly present: everyone has problems nobody else sees.

The front cover calls this “A Novel of Suspense,” which isn’t inaccurate: we know something catastrophic will happen, changing characters’ lives forever. But this isn’t like bog-standard procedurals or action potboilers. King offers an overlapping matrix of character dramas, inviting us to tease out secrets and layers. The suspense comes from wondering which of the many private controversies will eventually spill over into public violence.

King is most famous for writing novels starring Mary Russell and an obscure supporting character named Sherlock Holmes. The publisher bills this as King’s first standalone novel in over a decade. But even that isn’t entirely accurate, since there’s a brief chapter linking this novel to King’s lesser-known series protagonist, SFPD detective Kate Martinelli. It’s a fun teaser, but one needn’t know King’s prior works to appreciate this story.

If this novel suffers one shortcoming, King introduces so many characters, with their own private plotlines, that she can’t possibly defuse them all. We know, with the bloody climax coming, that King can’t resolve both the miscommunication between the clique of insecure pretty girls, and Tío’s attempt to save the gangbanger from his myths. King starts multiple interesting stories which remain unfinished. Maybe she’s saving something for the sequel.

Nevertheless, she does a remarkable job displaying not only the causes of life-changing violence, but the lives that will be changed. Middle school is a crucible, even when literal blood doesn’t spill, a dark and brooding place where everyone thinks they suffer alone. And, as we read, we realize: maybe we aren’t so different from these kids ourselves. Which is actually a liberating thought.

Götterdämmerung, the Reader's Digest Version

Daniel Kehlmann, You Should Have Left: a Novel

A successful screenwriter rents an AirBnB in the mountains to write. His studio wants a sequel, and his family needs the money. But secluded on a vacation cabin with his glamorous, bored actress wife and their daughter, the words begin to flow. Until the bad dreams begin. And right angles don’t add up to ninety degrees. And his little girl wakes up speaking prophecies of doom.

Veteran novelist Daniel Kehlmann is a household name in Germany, but remains largely unknown to English-speaking readers. This novella might change that. Mixing elements of Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and Elizabeth Hand, Kehlmann creates the kind of creeping dread that American paperback readers love, channeled through the kind of linguistic mindset that gave us Thomas Mann and Günter Grass.

The story unfolds as our nameless narrator’s journal. On one hand, he jots notes for his screenplay, a John Hughes-like coming-of-age comedy where two “Besties” adjust to an adult friendship. The story provides ironic commentary on events building around him, as his vacation home apparently grows new bedrooms overnight, reveals a massive mountain nobody else can see, and insinuates itself into his marriage. Symbolism abounds.

The story immediately invites comparison to King’s The Shining and Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House. Kehlmann doesn't even pretend to deny such allusions, though he doesn't acknowledge them either. But such comparisons, while accurate, are nevertheless incomplete. Kehlmann doesn't so much present a horror novella, as a novella of what Freud calls “the Uncanny,” the subconscious made manifest in the protagonist's senses.

The house seemingly accentuates its inhabitants’ identities. When the narrator and his wife fight, they fight like feral cats cornered in the same Dumpster. When they agree, they mesh like two hemispheres of the same brain. And when their daughter begins speaking grim, powerful words beyond her ken, they realize, almost without words, that the problem isn't them, it’s the house.

Daniel Kehlmann

Much more happens, of course. But not, I fear, enough. I like this book, and don’t want anybody to ever say I said otherwise, but man, this book is short. The story itself runs under 110 pages, which makes its $18 list price awfully steep. I read the whole thing inside three hours. And though Kehlmann is easily King’s or Jackson’s equal in scene-setting, his conclusion is abrupt, without resolution, leaving only questions.

Horror, after all, is a genre of balance. Writers must reveal enough to keep readers engaged, but withhold enough to maintain suspense. No wonder I mainly write poetry.

So I vacillate on how to review this book. For most of the reading experience, I wanted to lavish praise upon it: though he reuses tropes horror readers have seen before, Kehlmann employs them in ways that create tension and make us care about his characters. Then he just stops. His characters, complex and deeply humane, deserve more explanation at the denouement than he offers. It’s like he just got bored.

Perhaps I’m being overly critical. Kehlmann clearly comes from a literary, rather than genre, background. His emphasis rests on creating nuanced characters and telling details, rather than dawning fear. In that case, rather than Stephen King, his work more closely resembles Brian Evenson or Thomas Ligotti. As with those writers, the why of the situation matters less than its imminence for the characters.

Nevertheless, Kehlmann’s audience reads works like this every day. Veteran readers recognize both the similarities, and the differences, with King’s Jack Torrance or Liz Hand’s Julian Blake. We deserve some explanation of how our nameless narrator finds himself in this situation. Without that, the final four pages appear weirdly disconnected from what came before. Like Kehlmann was writing for a predetermined end, rather than one arising from the situation.

Translator Ross Benjamin has a long history of translating German-language writers into American English. His CV reads like a Who's Who of contemporary German writers, though most will remain unfamiliar to English-speaking audiences. The one readily familiar name also clarifies his qualifications to translate this novella: Benjamin has won awards for translating Franz Kafka.

On balance, I suppose I should recommend this book. Some of my favorite authors, like Joseph Conrad and Salman Rushdie, have difficulty writing resolutions worthy of the novels they’ve crafted. And King himself extols the short form because it exonerates authors from the imperative to explain. My disappointment arises not because this book is weak, but because it's so strong that it sets itself a high bar. This is a good novella. I just wish it was great.

Welcome to Fatland

You’ve probably seen something like this image recently; several versions circulate. Don’t write another article on obesity in America until you explain why fatty, unhealthful foods cost more than their healthy, nutritionally complete equivalents. And I’ve seen several answers back, like: well, if you only eat McDonalds then yeah; or, anything is cheaper deep-fat-fried than prepared in a healthy way. I’d like to offer just one possible explanation.

You’ve probably heard lots about America’s notoriously subsidized agriculture. Because of massive monetary transfusions used to keep farmers working and food affordable, American crops are often cheaper than the dirt they grow in. That’s especially true with today’s inflated land values. When NAFTA lowered trade barriers, subsidized American-grown food hit Mexican markets below the cost of growing, causing rural poverty to hit seventy percent in Mexico.

But those subsidies don’t go just anywhere. Since the Great Depression, America has subsidized just five staple crops: corn, wheat, rice, sorghum, and cotton. These staples all have long shelf lives, which makes their market value very volatile: oversupply can last a long, long time. If farmers overplant lettuce, it’ll rot within a matter of weeks. If farmers overplant corn—and who know’s what’s too much at planting time?—markets could be destabilized for a year.

So, America has decided we owe our planters of cereal grains and natural fibers the dignity of a stable income. After all, an unstable grain market owing to oversupply jeopardizes farmers, but we still need to eat. Grains provide dietary fibers that we all need, and unlike fruit or salad greens, we can ship corn to where it’s needed. Why not, therefore, dedicate public money to ensuring people who grow our corn aren’t rolling the dice on uncertain markets.

Except that hasn’t been the effect. By subsidizing only a few crops, we’ve created cash incentives for farmers to overproduce these grains at massive numbers. Cotton is so cheap now that we use it to make disposable shop rags. According to agricultural journalist George Pyle, American farmers currently produce twenty times as much corn as American consumers can possibly eat. All that oversupply has to go somewhere.

And that “somewhere,” overwhelmingly, is animal feed. American agricultural policy doesn’t directly subsidize livestock agriculture. However, we have Earth’s cheapest meat, because by encouraging oversupply, we indirectly subsidize cattle farming. Cattle raised on grass, like God intended, reach market weight in about two years. Cattle raised on corn, fed to them in confined feedlots, reach market weight in about fourteen months. It’s a cash boon for livestock farmers.

A typical confined animal feeding operation—in this case, a hog pen

Stay with me here. The wheat used in making buns is directly subsidized. The beef slapped between those buns is indirectly subsidized. Even the cheese used to make the burger taste less like dead flesh is subsidized, because dairy oversupply keeps threatening to crash market values; the government buys excess dairy and pours it on the ground to stabilize prices. Does the government want us to eat more burgers?

Of course not. They just don’t want farmers subject to the instabilities of market fluctuations. Readers old enough to remember the “tractorcades” of the 1980s know that farmers are more beholden to market forces than most other producers. As we learned in 2008, housing oversupply is bad for home builders; but builders can store their tools, pull in their claws, and wait. Farmers, to keep their families together, often have to sell their land.

This says nothing about side effects of agricultural policy. Subsidizing only five crops has led to massive monocropping, which overtaxes the soil of certain nutrients. To keep the land producing crops, farmers saturate it with fertilizers derived from hydrocarbons. American farms today produce more greenhouse gases than cars do, not from inefficiency, but because farmers need the five magic crops to show a profit. And nutrient-depleted topsoil washes away whenever it rains.

That seems simple enough. The makings of a burger are directly or indirectly subsidized, while the makings of a salad are not. If the ways we spend our money reflect our cultural values, then apparently we place higher value on maintaining certain food crops than on encouraging Americans to eat well. This approach, though moralistic, isn’t wrong. Maintaining the status quo is cost-efficient, while changing the system, even a system that causes bad health, is scary.

Designing an agricultural policy that would result in more diverse crops, better land management, and healthier foods at more modest prices, will challenge even seasoned legislators. Even in today’s environment of armchair quarterbacking, I don’t dare extend myself this way. But somebody must. Because the meme isn’t wrong: we won’t tackle American obesity until ordinary Americans can afford better-quality food.

Did Chain Restaurants Just Declare Capitalism Dead?

The language couldn’t be more moralistic: “Millennials are killing chains like Buffalo Wild Wings and Applebee’s,” screamed the headline. As if the murder image weren’t clear enough, the tagline continues: “Casual dining is in danger — and millennials are to blame.” I wish I was kidding; had my students written this as fiction, I’d have returned it marked too high-handed to be plausible. But this screen-capture proves my point:

This unsubtle attempt to shift blame for flagging sales off chains that haven’t handled changing times, onto the young customer base they’ve long taken for granted, is stacked with assumptions. By saying customers are “killing chains,” the article makes customers into murderers, and chains into victims. By unambiguously assigning “blame,” it makes the demand side of economics responsible for chains’ fortunes, rather than chains themselves.

But most important, it implies that Millennials, possibly the most poorly defined generational cohort since popular media began naming generations, have the same choices their parents had about spending money. This is, of course, ridiculous to anybody who follows economics. Starting wages are down, housing costs—especially in major cities—are way up, and entry-level jobs frequently require graduate degrees just for consideration. Youth have no remaining money for hot wings out.

Though writer Kate Taylor acknowledges, in her article, that blaming Millennials has become “a trend to the point of cliché,” she ultimately maintains the pattern, squarely hanging responsibility for chains’ fortunes on young, supposedly childless customers. Throughout her diatribe, Taylor implies customers have a moral obligation to create demand for poor, beleaguered chains. Which spits in the eye of that beloved libertarian fetish, the supply-demand curve.

Think back to college economics. You took college economics, right? If statistics hold, you probably didn’t; your last mandatory exposure to economic theory probably happened in high school civics class, sandwiched between a unit on the Constitution and one on the War Powers Resolution of 1973. Therefore, you probably have a glimmering of the supply-demand curve, but nothing concrete. You vaguely remember that when supply equals demand, we know what something is worth.

But Taylor’s article says that demand should rise to meet supply. So-called casual dining chains have grown since around 2000 by oversaturating markets, mostly suburban malls, and maintaining the just-in-time resupply model pioneered by big-box retailers like Walmart. This flood-marketing model has, for years, served to create demand among young families with reliable income and limited expenses. McDonald's and Pizza Hut used the same model in prior generations.

That model demands steady, basically white-collar economic growth. This failing model dominated the 2016 presidential campaign. Hillary Clinton stumped on the same suppositions, while Donald Trump channeled outrage at the disappearance of jobs in manufacturing and extraction. The jobs that haven’t been automated, have largely been shipped overseas. Domestic employment has bifurcated into executive leadership and the service industry. Working Americans now sell each other, well, Buffalo Wild Wings.

Chains, facing slumps because youth would rather eat at home, or cannot afford to eat out, cry foul. Because they think demand should follow supply, not vice versa. Economists call this “induced demand.” I first encountered the concept in models of urban parking: more parking lots cause more driving, largely because putting stores and homes further apart makes walking an unsustainable cost. Gasoline is cheap; walking becomes tedious.

But food doesn’t follow that one-point model. As better grocery stores increasingly offer inexpensive delivery service, and meal-kit marketers like Blue Apron make gourmet home-cooking available to pure amateurs, simply building new stores behind massive parking lots doesn’t induce demand anymore. In short, market forces no longer make dining out a desirable choice, no longer cheap and convenient, especially in relation to youths’ wages.

Libertarian capitalism declares that market forces are sacrosanct. Whatever people willingly pay for, must perforce be good. Don’t interfere with markets. Unless, apparently, markets shift, and a previously successful business model becomes untenable. The underlying core of this article declares that demand exists to serve producers, not vice versa, and customers who don’t want their product are just wrong. Sounds like chain restaurants just basically declared libertarian capitalism dead.

Productive American industries have cut costs, including labor, for three generations. And service providers now whine that customers won’t, or can’t, buy their product. I think they think they’re crying foul, like an entire generation isn’t playing by the supply-side rules. Under that, though, they secretly concede the truth, that they don’t trust customers. Market providers apparently just can’t handle capitalism if it doesn’t serve the capitalists.

Wonder Woman and the True Meaning of No-Man's Land

Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) preparing to go "over the top" into No-Man's Land

You’ve seen the trailer footage: Diana Prince, Wonder Woman, clad in Greco-Roman armor, pausing to stand tall amid a fire-blackened landscape, before charging into overlit tracer bullet fire. The footage doesn’t make entirely clear that she’s just risen from a British trench in the Great War, crossed into No-Man’s Land, and begun to charge the German line. And, when those numerous, fast-moving bullets inevitably pin her down, men crest the trench and follow her lead.

This doesn’t just create a good visual. After a three-movie streak of stinkers from DC studios, this moment demonstrates what makes superheroes, something Zack Snyder apparently doesn’t appreciate. Heroes represent, not the recourses we’re willing to live with, as with Snyder's Superman, but the aspirations we pursue, the better angels we hope to achieve. We all hope, faced with the nihilism of the Great War, that we’d overcome bureaucratic inertia and face our enemies head-on.

In some ways, this Wonder Woman, directed by relative novice Patty Jenkins, accords with DC’s recent cinematic outings. Diana’s heroism doesn’t stoop to fighting crime, a reflection of cultural changes since the character debuted in 1941. Ordinary criminals, even organized crime, seem remarkably small beer in today’s world. Crime today is often either penny-ante, like common burglars, or too diffuse to punch, like drug cartels. Like the Snyder-helmed movies, this superhero confronts more systemic problems.

But Snyder misses the point, which Jenkins hits. Where Snyder’s superheroes battle alien invaders, like Superman, or pummel the living daylights out of each other, Wonder Woman faces humanity’s greatest weaknesses. The Great War, one of humanity’s lowest moments, represents a break from war’s previous myths of honor. Rather than marching into battle gloriously, Great War soldiers hunkered in trenches for months, soaked and gangrenous, seldom bathing, eating tinned rations out of their own helmets.

Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) strategize their next attack

This shift manifests in two ways. First, though Diana speaks eloquently about her desire to stop Ares, the war-god she believes is masquerading as a German general, this story is driven by something more down-to-earth. General Ludendorff’s research battalion has created an unusually powerful form of mustard gas. The very real-world Ludendorff, who popularized the expression “Total War,” here successfully crafts a means to destroy soldiers and civilians alike. He represents humanity’s worst warlike sentiments.

Second, this Wonder Woman doesn’t wear a stars-and-stripes uniform. Comic book writer William Moulton Marston created Wonder Woman as an essentially female version of Superman’s American values, an expression externalized in her clothing. This theme carried over into Lynda Carter’s TV performance. But this Wonder Woman stays strictly in Europe, fights for high-minded Allied values rather than one country, and apparently retires to curatorship at the Louvre. Her values are unyoked to any specific nation.

Recall, Zack Snyder’s Superman learned from his human father to distrust humankind, and became superheroic only when threatened by Kryptonian war criminals. Diana, conversely, learned to fight for high-minded principles—which she learned through myths which, she eventually discovers, are true without being factual. Snyder’s Superman, in fighting General Zod, showed remarkable disregard for bystanders, his film’s most-repeated criticism. But Diana charges into battle specifically to liberate occupied civilians. The pointed contrast probably isn’t accidental.

Unfortunately, Diana learns, war isn’t about individual battles. She liberates a shell-pocked Belgian village, and celebrates by dancing with Steve Trevor in the streets. But General Ludendorff retaliates by testing his extra-powerful chemical weapons on that village. No matter what piteous stories she hears about displaced, starving individuals, ultimately, her enemy isn’t any particular soldier. It’s a system that rewards anyone willing to stoop lower than everyone else, kill more noncombatants, win at any cost.

This picture doesn't serve my theme; I just really like that it exists (source)

In a tradition somewhat established by the superhero genre, Diana culminates the movie with a half-fight, half-conversation with her antagonist. Ares offers Diana the opportunity to restore Earth’s pre-lapsarian paradise state by simply scourging the planet of humanity. (Though Greek in language, this movie’s mythology reflects its audience’s Judeo-Christian moral expectations.) Diana responds by… well, spoilers. Rather, let’s say she simply resolves that fighting the corrupt system is finally worthwhile, even knowing she cannot win.

Wonder Woman’s moral mythology resonates with audiences, as Superman’s doesn’t, at least in the Snyderverse, because she expresses hope. Watching Diana, we realize it’s easy to become Ludendorff, wanting to not just beat but obliterate our opponents. Yet we desire to emulate Diana, standing fast against human entropy and embodying our best virtues. Diana is a demigod, we eventually learn, and like all good messiahs, she doesn’t just rule humanity, she models humanity’s truest potential.