The Quiet American is a kind of echo of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, in that both are murder mysteries wrapped around questions of good and evil, friendship and betrayal, and how individuals are to live in a society uncomfortable with its place among nations. “It’s a strange poor population God has in his kingdom, frightened, cold, starving…you’d think a great King would do better than that,” Fowler (the Greene stand-in) thinks, only to follow with “it’s always the same wherever one goes,–it’s not the most powerful rulers who have the happiest populations.” [The Quiet American, Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, p. 41). Greene’s book diverges most distinctly from Dostoevsky’s in its spareness, avoiding the profundity that can settle over Karamazov like cream, and in its sudden plunge into full-fledged war reporting. The differences make it an easier, if not as satisfying, read. Fowler is an agnostic, perhaps an atheist, but against his own better judgment not a nihilist, but stands as a fine fictional model of a journalist and the profession’s callous crucible.

The Quiet American infuses Dispatches, Michael Herr’s collection of non-fiction reporting from Vietnam. The same military and government spokespeople telling their lies, only in a different language. The same futile battles winning nothing. The same cultural treacheries. The same bleak search for some kind of meaning. The same helpless rage, on all sides. The Americans are no longer quiet. Some of them are “terrible ones,” Herr tells us.

Greene would not be surprised. He saw it coming, the American response to their ruined idealism. The Quiet American even plays out as part of a meta narrative in Dispatches, the correspondents trying to recreate scenes from the novel, passing around passages of it as though it were a secret Gospel of the place.

Dispatches above all captures the absurdity of war in a way that leaves you forlorn. You love some of Herr’s soldiers, Mayhew and Day Tripper especially. The correspondents he respects are drawn remarkably, especially the photo journalist Sean Flynn. The villain is not the Viet Cong or any other human opponent, just the war itself and the shamefully detached American men, so-called leaders, who theorize about it. Dispatches has none of the glamour and glory of books from World War II like The Longest Day or The Desert Fox. It is a book of crisis, military, personal, existential, filled with swaggering disbelief.

I ended both books shaking my head. But I would recommend both of them without question.

I remember Lawrence’s Piano and Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi and Booth asserting that all poetry is about sex (I still disagree) and his absolute love of language. It also got me to remembering some of the other students in our select class of 12, who spent the year writing papers once a week. I’ve often wondered what happened to the other budding writers in that course. I found one of them, hiding in plain sight, this kid named Alan. It turns out the kid named Alan is Alan Cullison, who has walked a writing path with some similarities to mine. He’s a long-time Wall Street Journal reporter and was a Nieman Fellow. We’re connected now, and I hope that will be a good thing for both of us.

Because nostalgia aside, it strikes me as strange that I did not keep in touch with the other members of the class, draw support as a writer from these others who shared my fascination with the written word.

national laboratories, and its research focus became nuclear energy. While it ended its nuclear program almost 20 years ago, it remains a bastion of Big Science. It runs the world’s 5th fastest supercomputer, MIRA, and in 2018 will get one that can hit 180 peta flops (180 quadrillion floating point operations per second). It has a synchrotron, the Advanced Photon Source, that runs 1.1 km and produces some of the brightest light on the planet. Researchers pedal adult tricycles around it. The tricycles are lined up along the walls. The U.S.’s strategic effort to build a better battery is here, as is one of the country’s five nanomaterials centers. Still, as it nears 70, Argonne needs a project to sustain its legacy, and so does Big Science.

That project, as I reported for The Economist (see The observer corps), might be a National Brain Observatory. Argonne has given space in its original chemistry lab, Building 200, a stolid red-brick building more school house than Prairie School, to a brain observatory that will include a new scanning electron microscope and Bobby Khasturi, Argonne’s first neuroscientist.

The plan is to run this brain observatory like a telescope, only pointed at the vast unknown regions of the brain. The question remains whether the Department of Energy, which runs America’s national labs, has any business operating brain observatories. I went to Argonne thinking I might see the answer get threshed out, and I mostly did. The scientists are in favor of it. Now they must wait for Congress.

So is the color line the problem of the 21st century? I think the line has been partially erased, and that lessens the magnitude of the problem in some ways, but makes it worse in others. I may do more writing on this subject.

She prefaces her collection with a long quote from Walt Whitman about what might imperil America:

For America, if eligible at all to downfall and ruin, is eligible within herself, not without; for I see clearly that the combined foreign world could not beat her down. But these savage, wolfish parties alarm me. Owning no law but their own will, more and more combative, less and less tolerant of the idea of ensemble and of equal brotherhood, the perfect equality of the States, the ever-over-arching American ideas, it behooves you to convey yourself implicitly to no party, nor submit blindly to their dictators, but steadily hold yourself judge and master over all of them.[from Democratic Vistas]

Her own works aid us in this effort to remain independent of mind. Her final two essays, “Who Was Oberlin?” and “Cosmology” should be read by everyone, especially those liberals who have dismissed religion, and those of us prone to scientific reductionism. People serious about their lack of faith and dismissal of religion need to have wrestled with her points, just as people serious about their faith must grapple with atheist critiques old and new.

Robinson points her remarkable intellect at politics, society, science and culture. She makes visible that which is so obvious we often forget it: human nature shapes everything it touches “…Science as surely and profoundly as everything else,” and the reader would be hard-pressed to deny her. She could simply point out the vast number of papers that can’t be replicated, and the dull sameness of most funded research.

She does have some lovely turns of phrase that demand more than just mild appreciation. “Human history is in large part nonsense…” “Market economics….has shown itself very ready to devour what we hold dear…” “There is something about being human that makes us love and crave grand narratives.”

I must confess this book sat on my nightstand for some two years after I recommended my Monday Night Bible study get it and read it. We didn’t make it through more than two essays, and I put it aside for a time.

I think our challenge came from her erudition, which can sometimes make her seem stuffy. She simply knows more about human intellectual and artistic history than most people. She discusses Michael Servetus and John Calvin, John Winthrop and Charles Finney, with easy familiarity. I remember one complaint about Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction being that he seemed to expect people to have read the many novels he references. Robinson’s essays have a similar feel to them. She does her best to help us fathom the depths of her knowledge, but she has absorbed works most of us have never heard of, and can deploy them to make points about modern life that can’t effectively be refuted without something approaching her level of familiarity.

I’m sorry I let my own issues with this learnedness get in my way; the essays are wonderful and rich and worth multiple reads.

Padel’s “The Miser” starts with a quote from Darwin’s Autobiography: “The passion for collecting, which leads a man to be a miser, a virtuoso, or a systematic naturalist, was very strong in me.”

Padel writes,

“Collect yourself: to smother what you feel,

recall to order, summon in one place;

making, like Orpheus, a system against loss.”

As a boy, Darwin prays, and gets answers, though they are convenient. He thinks he’s ugly; at 15 “he dwells in the congealing shell of a giant tortoise.”

The poet writes “His father is the largest man he’ll ever know.” Quite possibly also the meanest, given that Dad once wrote to son, “You care for nothing but shooting, rat-catching and dogs! You’ll be a disgrace to yourself and your family.”

We see his youthful passions, and his pre-Victorian interest in Titian’s “Venus,” as well as his encounters with Paley’s natural theology as he trains at Cambridge to become a minister.

One powerful poem against slavery, “The Thumbscrews of Rio,” is almost entirely from a Darwin letter or diary entry.

“Giant Bugs from the Pampas” puts a chilling cast to Darwin’s encounter with Chinches or Benchuga, the wingless insects that may have given him Chagas’ disease, which some think caused Darwin to go from robust youth to often infirm adult. Darwin holds out his finger and lets it gorge itself on his blood. In exchange giving him

…”The bacteria that will afflict this Charles and his unborn children

are life forms as occult as Kabbalah or that other

secret scripture DNA: a hidden barcode

invisible as a string of fireflies

sleeping on a leaf-edge in the pre-dusk blue of day.”

Padel expertly splices the old words and takes us through Darwin’s courtship and marriage, the births of his children, and wrenching deaths of three of them, his encounters with Wallace, and then the race to get his Origin of Species published before Wallace scoops him (including the recommendation that Darwin make the book one about pigeon breeding, and cut the rest, fortunately ignored by Darwin’s publisher).”Edit. Vomit. Edit.” So goes Padel, reminding us of Darwin’s ongoing illness.

The book perhaps falls short of great poetry, but it is a wonderfully concise and moving biography.

Also cut was a bit at the end where I wrote about my son’s reaction; he was very curious about the car, but once he’d seen it, he thought the whole idea of having one more way for his parents to control his life was a bad idea. My son’s a bit of a Holden Caulfield to begin with, and his comment afterwards was he thought he should put off learning to drive; it was too dangerous.

In the week or so that’s passed since I wrote this, I’ve been less enthusiastic about the idea of getting a report card on his driving. I feel a bit of sympathy for his worries about control, much like the parents in the survey I cite in the story, who didn’t even want to participate in a study about the technology. I initially thought that attitude reflected on when the study was done, in 2009. We live in a much more tech-pervaded world now, and why not use it to make teen driving safer?

But I remembered something that got me thinking. When I was 18 and in my first quarter at college, I went on a chicken run to Leon’s, a hot sauce joint that used to be at 69^th and Stony Island on Chicago’s South Side. I got designated to drive. Bob wanted to come with me, to my dismay. He had been hitting on me since the start of school, and I really didn’t want to deal with his advances on a chicken run.

Bob and I hopped into some crappy Fiat or Ford belonging to one of the guys on our floor, who wanted chicken but didn’t want to stop studying. I had only been driving for a few months, having delayed driver’s ed until after my senior year in high school. I had never driven on anything like Stony Island, which has four lanes each way. To me it felt like a highway, only with occasional stoplights. They interrupted my goggling at the vast glory of Chicago, and it was more annoying that Bob was having to point them out to me.

I kept yokeling along looking at this and that when Bob screamed “look out!” I snapped my head forward to see I was hurtling towards a car stopped at one of those cussed red lights. I slammed on the brakes and yanked the steering wheel to the left. For the first and only time in my life I did a donut. We happened to come to a stop next to the car I had been about to ram. It was filled with young black men. I was hyperventilating from the near miss, but also aware that this neighborhood was not a place white university students were encouraged to go. I glanced over at them.

They were laughing, hysterically. They must have thought I was pulling some stunt in the middle of Stony Island Avenue. My breathing slowed, the light changed, and I kept my interest in the wonders of Chicago in check the rest of the way to Leon’s and the 14 blocks back.

In a gay romance novel, I would’ve kissed Bob, who had probably just saved my life and certainly saved me from wrecking a car that didn’t belong to me, in a neighborhood where the chicken and ribs are served through a slot in a bullet-proof window. All I did was say “thank you” over and over again.

That one would certainly have shown up on my Teen Driver Report Card. I can’t imagine having a constructive conversation about it with my father, though he’s a patient man.

My next car may not have a Teen Driver Report Card. But it will definitely have forward collision alerts.