n+1 senior writer Elif Batuman 

joins Keith Gessen to discuss her new book, 

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read Them

at

McNally Jackson Books! 

Monday March 15, 2010 

7:00 - 8:00 pm

Free! Don't miss it!

Ken Burns
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Charles Petersen

To vacation like a king, in a land no king can own, is nonetheless to expose the poverty of everyday democratic life. A trip to the parks becomes a Cinderella tale with no prince but rather a long drive home at the end. As one of Burns' favorite rangers declares, "Transcendent experience is commonplace in Yosemite … And where else can you get an experience like that?" 

Rebecca Solnit
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Nikil Saval

For a book so concerned with empathy and altruism, A Paradise Built in Hell is filled with enemies. They appear most often in the form of spectral masses, which, like the "extraordinary communities" in disasters, suddenly emerge to defend the status quo: congealed privilege and hypercapitalist exploitation. What Solnit admires is what we might call "the people," as in the Spanish pueblo or Mandarin renmin—those authentically popular but hitherto disenfranchised groups in whose name the revolution will be made—while the phantom bad groups are "the media, public opinion, and the bureaucrats and politicians," who show up on cue to disrupt the "people's" carnivalesque utopia.

Stieg Larsson
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Ian MacDougall

There are so many corrupt men who hate women in every corner of Larsson's Sweden that to present them all in a concise manner would be impossible. They range from editors of major dailies to the members of Scandinavia's ubiquitous biker gangs to police to lawyers to medical doctors to criminal masterminds right out of a Roger Moore-era James Bond film. The one thing that unites this mélange of women-hating crooks is that the welfare state sponsors or at least supports their crimes. The state itself is the greatest villain.

Norwegian Novels
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Silje Bekeng

There are a few obvious reasons why rural society (or lack of society) takes up so much space in our literature. The literary magazine Avsagd Hagle once did a tongue-in-cheek analysis of contemporary Norwegian poetry and found a surprisingly high frequency of the words "hand,""bird," and "tree." The reason, the editors argued, must be that poets are sitting at their desks, alternately staring at their own hands, the trees outside their windows, and the birds in the trees.

"I have gone to the forest."
—Knut Hamsun

"Many people think they can take the welfare state with them in the suitcase when they leave home. … We are not a travel agency or an insurance company."
—Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway's Foreign Minister

Norwegians are said to be born with skis on their feet—ready from birth for a life in harmony with the inhospitable Nordic nature.

Maybe my mother was lacking some important vitamin during the pregnancy. No skis accompanied me into this world. Instead of seeking the woods and mountains like a true Norwegian—"There is no bad weather, only poor clothing!" as we say—I came to prefer asphalt under my feet, the safety of skyscrapers, and the soft breeze from passing subway cars, deep underground. I am allergic to trees.

But I didn't miss out on the other thing Norwegians are born with: citizenship in the world's most generous and equitable welfare state.

This is about what happens when rich, well-traveled, and well-educated children from a tiny Viking country covered in forest grow up and try to write fiction.

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Norway is still a little piece of secluded coastal land with forests and mountains and a weather-beaten fisherman or farmer hidden here and there. Modesty, hard work, and egalitarian values are held high. We have a highly functional social democracy (a prime minister who loves to ski) and boast about literary heroes such as Ibsen and Hamsun. It's a country with a proud tradition of social realism, often characterized by stories about people's close relationship to nature.

In 1962, the American Phillips Petroleum Company started looking into the possibility of drilling for oil under the Norwegian Sea. The decision was up to the King (no, really) and I can only assume that he gave his silent nod; a few years later the first big reserves were found.

"The Oil Adventure" changed everything. Norway now has one of the world's most advanced social welfare systems, and the population of 4.8 million enjoys higher living standards than ever. A semester at university costs about $100. There are state-subsidized scholarships for everyone, so students take out only small loans to cover their living expenses. Working parents receive a year's paid maternity or paternity leave and universal health care assures that no one pays more than around $400 per year in medical expenses. The United Nations keep placing us at the top of their Human Development Index. When the Labor Party's ski-loving Jens Stoltenberg was reelected prime minister last September, Norway's stock market was rising and the unemployment rate hovered at 3 percent.

Younger Norwegians have unprecedented opportunities to study and travel without subjecting themselves to significant risks, financial or otherwise. Exploring the world is regarded as almost mandatory for the young and the restless. So we head off with our Purell bottles, portable health insurance, and multilingual skills; we want to study in Jerusalem, do photography in New York, pick fruit in Argentina. We want mosquito bites and abrasions and then to return home. Always to return home.

We have been told that we can do anything, be anything. This is a cliché young people are fed in most Western countries. Norway's wealth, and its equitable distribution of that wealth, just makes it a little more true here. This puts us in a curious position that one would think would be reflected in the books being written by young writers. But many choose to return to safer, more traditional themes.

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The Norwegian publishing world is not big but we have a few of what we consider to be large houses and several small ones. Together they offer a wide range of fiction, some of it quite good for a country with a population the size of Alabama's. It's difficult to say what kind of books are predominant at the moment without resorting to generalizations.

I will therefore resort to generalizations. One character keeps showing up in our books: the young man having a breakdown in the woods. The plot goes something like this: the young man has never left his hometown, or has returned (because of the death of a parent) after an unsuccessful attempt at life in the big, unruly world. He has some problems communicating. Sometimes the reader is left to wonder if he might be mentally retarded.

He might meet a traditional animal, like a dog or an elk, that plays a significant role in the novel.

He listens to the silence, falls apart. The story mostly stays within the tradition of realism, though it sometimes flirts with surrealist tendencies. How crazy is he really? Would he ever hurt himself—or someone else? Toward the end, he might seem about to regain his composure. He will probably decide to remain in the countryside. Norwegians resemble Americans in this respect: we know that truth is something people find while walking in golden fields of wheat, that small-town life is more real than city life, and that real people are those who grow up with dirt under their fingernails. 

Here, for example, are excerpts from the jacket copy of novels published by young(ish) writers in recent years:

A young woman returns to her childhood home, an island up north, fifteen years after his father killed her mother and himself. (Gøhril Gabrielsen, Unevnelige hendelser)

Finn travels back to the little village where he grew up. His brother has found their mother dead. (Joachim Førsund, Jeg kunne funnet veien hjem i søvne)

Fjodor grows up in Aabothnes. Most of the time the farm lies in the shade. He works on a locomotive in the barn. … Little Brother is deaf, but he has a magical way with birds. (Geir Olav Jørgensen, Mono)

Doppler has just lost his father. One day when he is out cycling in the woods, he falls off his bike. Semi-conscious, he notices that his head has been emptied … and filled with the silence of the forest. … He moves to the woods and lives in a tent. Doppler … kills a she-elk—but that leaves him with a calf. … Gradually they become friends. (Erlend Loe, Doppler)

Marius and Marcus are the same age, and have grown up in a little village. At a party, Marcus shoots himself in the head. Marius is the only person to hear the shot. He has a strong feeling that their lives are falling apart. The book describes a little society in a village … (Heine T. Bakkeid, Uten puls)

Some of these books are good. Doppler, in particular, presents a critique of modern society, set in the woods. But you see my point: a lot of men, villages, dogs. This is known territory, mental and geographical landscapes that are well-established in our literary tradition. But between the trees, some stories are missing: stories of a modern, urban, globally connected Norway. Novels that draw on contemporary experience and make you think—that's exactly how it is now.

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There are a few obvious reasons why rural society (or lack of society) takes up so much space in our literature. The literary magazine Avsagd Hagle once did a tongue-in-cheek analysis of contemporary Norwegian poetry and found a surprisingly high frequency of the words "hand,""bird," and "tree." The reason, the editors argued, must be that poets are sitting at their desks, alternately staring at their own hands, the trees outside their windows, and the birds in the trees.

Nature always had a marked influence on Norwegian literature; we have a proud tradition of social realism, characterized by stories about people close to nature and isolated from each other.

One of our literary heroes (as well as a Nazi-supporting national traitor), Knut Hamsun, was one of those who could not stand city life. In Hunger the main character wanders around the grim city, feeling like shit. Hamsun's work is littered with appeals to nature: "There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it." And: "You are welcome to your intellectual pastimes and books and art and newspapers; welcome, too, to your bars and your whiskey that only makes me ill. Here am I in the forest, quite content."

Sigbjørn Obstfelder is another Norwegian who wrote about being angsty in modern society. "I must have come to the wrong planet! Here is so strange …" he wrote in his most famous poem. We all analyzed that poem in school and all came to the same conclusion: city life is alienating. Henrik Ibsen wrote Peer Gynt as a satire of the Norwegian personality. While taking us through the majestic, beautiful, ancient landscapes of the countryside, blending in folkloric elements, Ibsen criticized his countrymen's "narrowness and self-sufficiency." Knut Hamsun got the Nobel Prize in Literature for Growth of the Soil, about the importance of man's close and direct relationship to nature, to dirt and soil.

The self-confined, self-examining tendency in newer fiction might be a global one, but the isolated and awkward countryman is almost a folk hero in Scandinavia. He's a survivor. He gets the work done and keeps his head down. He follows the unofficial Scandinavian Jante Law. The concept stems from Danish-Norwegian Aksel Sandemose's novel A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks (1933), and is well known to all Scandinavians. The book is about the typical small town of Jante where no one is anonymous and anyone who violates the law is discredited. The Jante Law consists of ten commandments, all variations on the same rule: One should not think that one is something. Rule 1: Do not think that you are special. Rule 4: Do not fancy yourself better than us. Rule 7: Do not think that you are good at anything. It's quite the opposite of the thought that we can be anything we want. Somehow these two ideas manage to operate side by side in Norway, not without conflict, but in a relationship of mutual mockery.

The Jante Law is commonly used to describe how provincial and intolerant other Norwegians are. Typically, when a self-assured artist receives criticism, he or she might reject it by saying: "There's just so much Jante Law in this country." Meaning: "I'm misunderstood by these narrow-minded, small-town people. You should see how Paris greets me." The Jante Law isn't considered a positive standard, yet the ghost of Jante haunts the Scandinavian mind. Any form of bragging or self-congratulation is looked at with suspicion or disregard. The custom of engraving contributors' names into, say, the front of a museum doesn't work very well here.

The Jante Law can be used to look down on other people's work, but it's also about a lack of belief in one's own. It encourages you to keep your head down, to be brave only in the quietest way. Maybe it also encourages a literature that's sometimes too quiet for its own good.

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A few young writers have found ways to use classic themes to reflect on the era they're writing themselves into. The works of widely-hailed talents Johan Harstad and Agnar Lirus (both born in 1978) are heavy with cultural and political references, subplots, and allegories. They're not afraid of moving the whole plot across decades and international borders. Often using the outsider to look at society, they stress our relationship to the broader world by pointing to our distance from it.

Harstad published his first collection of stories when he was 21. Several books later, he has established himself as one of the most important writers of his generation. His grandest contribution, the 630-page novel Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You in All the Confusion, has been sold to eleven countries, including the United States. A movie is under production in Norway.

You'll be surprised to learn this book is also about a man having a breakdown in a rural area.

The modest gardener Mattias goes to the remote Faeroe Islands (between Iceland and the Shetland Islands) and falls apart after a  breakup with his longtime girlfriend. The desolate landscape is the backdrop for his struggles, but the Faeroe Island also becomes a character itself, as lost and detached as the people. Before the breakdown, Mattias was comfortable, jolly, content with his lack of ambition. He has always been fascinated by astronauts and especially Buzz Aldrin—the second man on the moon, consigned to live forever in the shadow of Neil Armstrong. First came the great leap and then came Buzz Aldrin. Leaping along, silently.

All Mattias wants is to be "a well-functioning wheel in the world." He'd like to stick to the static of his own comfort zone. "If I could get a single wish fulfilled," he says, "I have been thinking that I would prefer nothing to change."

In Agnar Lirhus's debut novel The Forest is Green, we meet the young Philip Randén, a man who "could have been anything." He used to study philosophy—Wittgenstein—at the university in Oslo, but the abstract nature of his studies left him feeling that everything is false and meaningless. Attempting to attack philosophy from another angle, he leaves the university and becomes a bus driver. Self-proletarianization might seem like a radical thing to do but, like Mattias, Philip is reluctant about change: "It wasn't like he wanted to break with the life he was living. No, most of all, he wanted to get through the problems and resurrect on the other side, the same."

Harstad and Lirhus's characters don't want to be in control, they don't want choices or power. At the intersection of the internalized and by now kind of comforting mantra of the Jante Law—don't be anyone—and the contemporary expectation to be everything, they are left with no desires except to be left alone. The only miracle Mattias and Philip could wish for might be to stop time. But in a culture of privilege and excess, to decline the opportunities one is handed, to want less, is considered an insult to the world; it has become synonymous with rejecting society altogether.

One could perhaps call it a national blend of apathy and comfort, of taking things for granted. All the resources that we have been given aren't encouraging brave, bold writing, but rather inviting us to go back into our cozy cabin, shut the door, and write about trees. What a society tries to avoid should be the subject of its best literature. Hiding is what Harstad and Lirhus's characters want to do too, but their novels consider this impulse and what it means. Quietly told as these novels might be, they are brazen enough to try to examine a particle of our own condition from more places than the woods and the countryside.

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Matias Faldbakken's novels have been said to capture something vital about contemporary urban Scandinavia. The artist/writer (born in 1973) published his Scandinavian Misanthropy trilogy under the pseudonym Abo Rasul. The three works—The Cocka Hola Company, Macht Und Rebel, Unfun—draw the reader into a dark, twisted Scandinavia. Only sex and violence seem to evoke any pulse in his nihilistic characters. As one of them says in Unfun: "I don't care about anything, but I don't express it—I am not the kind that doesn't care in an eager way." In his latest book, Cold Product, Faldbakken tells an alternate version of Ibsen's A Doll's House, in which Nora is the master of the house and also a commercial lawyer. At the end, to keep her freedom, she kills her newborn.

Faldbakken's Scandinavia is eerie, cruel, and surreal, an alternate version of reality. As the critic Kjetil Strømme has said, Faldbakken's works "challenge our conception of reality, and our notion of where that something called ‘realism' in literature starts and stops." Strømme argues that among writers who pose critiques of contemporary Norwegian society, those "who launch the fiercest attack on the realistic-psychological novel are the most intriguing." Faldbakken is not the only one. I could mention writers like Anders Bortne, Gunnhild Øyehaug and Jon Øistein Flink, who move toward surrealism in their efforts to paint dark portraits of our lives.

One can ask whether the traditional notion of realism seems outdated and boring because it has yet to be properly applied to new critical conundrums. Everyone is still figuring out how to convey the myriad of new and very tangible predicaments. Several writers are attempting to more thoroughly explore urban settings and themes. One could mention the metropolitan-minded Edy Poppy's dark, decadent love story Anatomy. Monotony., Gunnhild Øyehaug's neurotic academics and movie buffs in Wait, Blink, Simon Stranger's comprehensive masterpiece Mnem, about the decay of a grand city constructed for perfection. Like the writers themselves, the characters in these books are immersed in modern culture and first-world worries. They travel and get lost in foreign cities, construct grand ideas, and sometimes fail miserably.

These books prove that there are more things to write about than hands, birds, trees, and total anarchy, even in Norway. Maybe some young writers live in the countryside and really love their birds, but the fact is eight of ten Norwegians live in what are considered tettbygde strøk—"closely built areas." Oslo has been called the heroin capital of Europe. We have people here who seriously worry that Muslims are taking over the country, we have teenagers who starve themselves to death, we abort almost every fetus with Down's syndrome, and 13 percent of our men have had sex with prostitutes. We're sending soldiers to war.

I hadn't tried skiing for years until this winter. I choose not only to live in a city, but in a foreign city, and in the most severely metropolitan one I could find. I suppose I am rejecting a part of my national heritage by doing so. But I still believe my mother when she assures me that I'll develop more enthusiasm for hiking and skiing in the woods as I get older. That's just how it goes. Two years after I moved to New York, my mother changed her general advice from "Go see the world!" to "Come home!" And I will. I'm Norwegian. We always return home—before our travel insurance expires.

Rebecca Solnit. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Viking. August 2009.

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West,surely one of the best books of the past decade, was, on the face ofit, a biography of a photographer. Muybridge famously proved, with theuse of multiple cameras and sensitive electrical triggers, that horsesin full gallop at times have all four feet off the ground. Hissequenced, detailed equestrian photographs, along with his equallyimportant work on men and women walking and performing ordinary tasksand his panoramas of San Francisco, effected a virtual sea-change inhuman perception. Not until Muybridge could people see what they lookedlike as beings in continuous action, and it was for this reason that hehas repeatedly been seen as a prefiguration of the cinema.

Solnit’s genius was to see Muybridge not only as aseminal photographer, but as a confluence of all the lurching,multidirectional motions of the United States in the late 19th century.Muybridge, Solnit told us, hailed from the epicenter of fin-de-sieclemodernity, which was not, as one might expect, New York or Paris, butCalifornia. Wherever the old world was giving way to the new, Muybridgewas there: he lived in boomtown San Francisco; he photographed YosemiteValley and the US war against the indigenous Modoc people; LelandStanford, railroad magnate and founder of the university bearing hisname, owned the horse whose gallop Muybridge made famous. Solnitfollowed the trails of information with deliberate guilelessness, andthe book that resulted is one that seems to be recreating the verybirth of modern life. Railroads were annihilating time and space, whilenature photographs testified to the landscapes they plowed over; oldrelationships to land and local space were forcibly overturned by newrelations of property and class. Marx and Engels’ rich ambivalence intheir paean to bourgeois modernity in the Manifesto (“all thatis solid melts into air”) was not only the attitude behind the book,but its aesthetics as well: much like Marx and Engels, Solnit has anincantatory style of prose, one that involves repetition of key phrasesand long, swiftly unfurling sentences intended to recapture what theemergence of modernity felt like.

Marx was in many ways the principal spirit animating River of Shadows, but despite the frequent references to the Manifesto in the book, it was the later Marx—the coolly brilliant analyst of Capital,rather than the young, optimistic, prediction-sowing polemicist. Solnitviewed Muybridge’s output in terms of an almost classicalbase-superstructure relationship: the violence of rapid capitalaccumulation in the West gave birth to photographs that celebrated thelocal, the eternal, and the immutable, lending ideological legitimacyto the process. People would see in these photographs and films whatthey had already lost in reality. At the same time, there was anundeniable kinship between Muybridge’s time series shots of motion inprogress and the rationalization of Taylorized assembly line production.

When, at the end of the book, Solnit found herself onSand Hill Road near Stanford University, marveling at the endless rowof venture capital firms nestled in the classic landscape of Californiaoaks, she had explained something of where we had come from, and didn’tventure to saywhere we should be going. Though her other work quicklygave her political game away—a blend of anti-imperialism andanarchism, with a strong ecological bent—you could read River of Shadowswithout necessarily discerning anything in the way of a particularcommitment. If the whole exercise depended on a strong, idiosyncraticinterpretation of historical change, it read more like an impartial explanation for those changes—one that, despite its clearly materialist sympathies, didn’t promote a particular politics.

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A Paradise Built in Hell is different. Here,Solnit brings to public light the findings of academic socialscientists, who have discovered that in periods of disaster people moreoften than not behave with altruism and empathy towards each other,rather than, as conventional understanding has it, violently andselfishly. This discovery alone is fascinating and unexpected, but in ParadiseSolnit wants more: she would have us believe that the temporarysocieties that arise in disaster are revelations of a fundamentalutopian impulse in human nature, which everyday (capitalist) lifemystifies. Their dependence on disaster conditions makes these enclavesfleeting, but it is in their image that our own society—inherentlyself-destructive as it is—might be redeemed. Far beyond theexplanatory debunking that her social science, which at least inprinciple strives for value neutrality, already provides, Solnit givesus a pamphleteering, partisan vision of utopia.

Solnit loosely organizes the book as a series of casestudies, lightly researched or even more lightly reported, beginningwith the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, moving through the Halifaxexplosion of 1917, the Managua earthquake of 1972 and the Mexico Cityearthquake of 1985, and, finally, September 11th and New Orleans afterHurricane Katrina. Other disasters come up along the way, including theArgentinian default in 2002 and the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami in2004, not to mention modernity’s “ur-disaster,” the Lisbon earthquakeof 1755. In each instance, Solnit sees the same basic phenomenon: thefailure of government to provide for its citizens, and the rise ofself-regulating communities as a matter of necessity. Certain itemsessential to commercial life lose their value, such as money andproperty. People frequently engage in what some see as “looting,” whichSolnit usefully recasts as “requisitioning”: the taking of goods foruse, rather than as mere theft. Altruistic help for others emergesspontaneously and is widespread. Only rarely does one find the violent,survivalist narratives of disaster of The War of the Worlds or The Road.

If anyone turns out to be responsible for the violencethat popular imagination characteristically associates with disaster,it is the authorities designated to help the victims. From the armycaptains stationed in San Francisco during the Great Earthquake to theNational Guard under Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco’s “shoot tokill” order—or, more recently, the US military in Haiti—the people incharge often cause the most pain during a disaster, out of the usuallyunfounded fear that insurrectionary mobs could rise up and cause aneven greater social disaster. Moreover, these authorities oftenprotect property over human life: thus, the wealthy whites of SanFrancisco had guards, while the poor Chinese, unprotected, were subjectto racist violence. Such behavior on the part of authorities (Solnit’spreferred term is “elites”) often means that disasters become the spurfor great social changes or even revolutions, because ruling groupslose their legitimacy the more they betray their appointment asprotectors of the common good: two of Solnit’s best examples are theSomoza dictatorship in Nicaragua (after the 1972 quake) and the morefamiliar example of the Bush administration after Katrina.

Where Marx was the bearded prophet presiding over River of Shadows, Peter Kropotkin, the “Anarchist Prince,” steps into that role for A Paradise Built in Hell.Kropotkin, the Russian naturalist turned social thinker, gavephilosophical anarchism one of its most significant concepts, “mutualaid”: the idea that in natural and social evolution, the struggle forsurvival was characterized as much by communities of assistance andunselfishness as by competition. Solnit sees the disaster societies asvindications of Kropotkin:

Most of the disaster sociologists have delineated aworldview in which civil society triumphs and existing institutionsoften fail during disaster. They quietly endorse much of whatanarchists like Kropotkin have long claimed, though they do so from astudiedly neutral position buttressed by quantities of statistics andcarefully avoid prescriptions and conclusions about the larger socialorder. And yet, they are clear enough that in disaster we need an opensociety based on trust in which people are free to exercise theircapacities for improvisation, altruism, and solidarity. In fact, weneed it all the time, only most urgently in disaster.

Here, as elsewhere, Solnit’s move mirrors that ofKropotkin himself. She moves from a mere description of putativelynatural processes to a declaration, based on that description, of howwe are to build our societies and the principles that must guide ourdaily lives.

Because her purpose in A Paradise Built in Hell isso essentially prescriptive, it seems almost inevitable that Solnitwould conjure up a villain, whose opposing and retrograde ideology shecan overturn. But rather than Herbert Spencer or one of other theSocial Darwinists—Kropotkin’s actual opponents—we get Thomas Hobbes,who plays here much the same part that, say, the long-dead John Lockeand his “tabula rasa” play for Steven Pinker: a symbol of a timeless,and timelessly stupid, philosophical idea, rather than a philosopherwho lived and breathed in the world, subject to the constraints of histime. And so the textbook Hobbes, who told us about the violence of manin a state of nature and the consequent necessity of giving upindividual freedoms for the formation of a commonwealth, is trottedout, not without some cost to the intellectual complexity of Solnit’sbook. “Men in his [Hobbes’] view,” Solnit writes, are like those “inthat of many other European writers of the period … stark,blank, mechanical creatures, windup soldiers social only by strategyand not by nature.” In fact, this “mechanical” man was  peculiar toHobbes, whose conception of man drew on recent discoveries in thenatural sciences—it was a perspective that was in fact radical andidiosyncratic, not conservative and typical. In her animosity towardsHobbes, Solnit goes so far as to repeat the caricature of themisanthropic and “solitary” figure, putting him in contrast to theradical Diggers of the English Civil War. Yet Hobbes was as radical asthe Diggers. What he did intellectually was reconstitute the legitimacyof a monarchical state in a country that was shedding its belief in adivine source for rule. For the first time, one could speak of theState without speaking of God. But Solnit, it turns out, does not wantto speak of the State at all, and so Hobbes—one of its greattheorists—must be dispatched.

The cursory treatment of Hobbes signals a larger problem with Paradise:for a book so concerned with empathy and altruism, it is filled withenemies. Some of these these are journalists and intellectual figureswho you’d think would be on her side. One is Naomi Klein, whose book The Shock Doctrine(2007)—itself something of a parade of cartoon villains, such asMilton “Doctor Shock” Friedman—comes under criticism for repeating allthe old cliches about how people behave under disaster, resulting inwhat Solnit laments is a “a surprisingly disempowering portrait fromthe Left.” More often, though, Solnit’s enemies appear in the form ofspectral masses, which, like the “extraordinary communities” indisasters, suddenly emerge to defend the status quo: congealedprivilege and hypercapitalist exploitation. What Solnit admires is whatwe might call “the people,” as in the Spanish pueblo or Mandarin renmin—thoseauthentically popular but hitherto disenfranchised groups in whose namethe revolution will be made—while the phantom bad groups are “themedia, public opinion, and the bureaucrats and politicians,” who showup on cue to disrupt the “people’s” carnivalesque utopia. 

This sort of rhetoric is fine for a pamphlet or a short polemical article. In a work as long as Paradise,which purports to be both history and analysis, such politics isessentially paranoid—all the worse because as a style of thought itends up voiding the specific content of the disaster sociologists onwhose insights Solnit draws extensively. For example, one of herrecurring ideas is the phenomenon of “elite panic,” a situation inwhich the ruling class of a given disaster area perceives a threat totheir property or continuing domination, and therefore enlists theavailable media and police to suppress the potential insurrection. Theterm “elite panic”—an interesting and plausible idea—was coined bythe sociologist Lee Clarke, and developed by her colleague KathleenTierney, but you wouldn’t know from Solnit’s book that Clarke admittedher concept to be “controversial, and tenuous,” or that, far from therebeing a tremendous distinction between “elites” and the “people,”“elites panic just as non-elites do.” Nor would you know that, forClarke, “elite” is a “relational” concept rather than—as it is in Paradise—pure reification, a concept deployed to designate the enemy, rather than explain a phenomenon.

The impression that Solnit is using her disaster cases touphold some very old ideas of the anarchist Left becomes most evidentwhen she chooses to bring up that most mythologized of Latin Americangroups, the Zapatistas. Out of what disaster did they arise?“It is hard to say what the disaster was,” she admits, before tryingout a few ideas: “It was the 501 years of colonialism, extermination,and discrimination against the indigenous people of the Americas. Itwas the long decades of impoverishment and repression under theP[artido] R[evolucionario] I[nstitucional] … And it was the newthreat posed … by the North American Free Trade Agreement.” That noneof these are disasters in the punctual sense employed throughout thebook seems not to matter. Solnit wants us to believe not in somefundamental idea of human nature revealed by disasters, but in theprojects of communal living that certain groups of the Left have triedout sporadically over the last century. The disasters are incidental.She uses some of the experimental camps that sprung up in the LowerNinth Ward after Katrina as an excuse to begin talking about theRainbow Gatherings, in which thousands of people congregate to realizea completely informal, self-sustaining social structure. “I have beento a regional Rainbow Gathering,” Solnit writes, “and my response wasmixed … but I saw the desire and partial realization of a goal ofcreating a mutual-aid gift-economy society and an impressive and movingatmosphere of sweetness, openness, and generosity … as far outsidethe monetary economy as possible.” These lovely emotions, according toSolnit, are characteristics only of the Left, as she reveals in herdescription of the protests against the Iraq war in 2003:

During the buildup to the beginning of the war on Iraq in2003, huge crowds assembled to march in opposition to it. I joined—andthough this was about a particular political stance, the expression onpeople’s faces wasn’t partisan. The crowd—one march I joined had twohundred thousand participants, on a weekend when people marched anddemonstrated on all seven continents of the earth…radiated ebullienceand exhilaration.

Here, as elsewhere, Solnit uses an example of collectiveaction to celebrate a desire for public life in aworld she sees as tending towards privatization. No doubt, publicprotests can be a good and necessary thing. But the analogy between ananti-war march or a Rainbow Gathering and the public sphere isimperfect. Where protests often center on a particular project—whichaccounts for the sense of ebullient solidarity among protesters, a moodvisible in demonstrators across the political spectrum—actions inordinary public life can’t sustain for long the single-mindedness orsolidarity of the protest or self-recruiting festival. Ordinary public life,not only in our own society but in any we can imagine, is characterizedby much more compromise, sheer complacency, and arguing amongopponents. A diversity of issues is always at play. A protest march—ora disaster community—acknowledges some of these issues, but it is notcompelled, as any complex and durable society would be, to accommodateall of them one way or another.

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In its emphasis on temporary communities furnishing theimage of a more just society, Solnit’s book is really the trueinheritor of a philosophical work she does not mention, Hannah Arendt’sOn Revolution, a somewhat free-associative essay on the Americanand French revolutions. Like Solnit, Arendt meant to convince us of acertain idea about what political life should look like by a selectiveanalysis of a historical subject. And like Solnit, Arendt saw a “losttreasure” as the key to the future: the political “councils” thatspring up around revolutions, where participation and judgment becomecontinuous requirements, rather than occasional obligations, of civiclife. Arendt took her notion of politics from an idealized view of theGreek polis; it so happened that the councils aroundrevolutions offered, at least in outline, a modern instance of thatnotion. Arendt wasn’t interested in historical reality so much as herbracing vision of increased political participation and judgment. In atypical historian’s response, Eric Hobsbawm complained that Arendt’sunwillingness even to entertain the facts about her material left itwithout interest to those who wanted to know something about thesociology or history of the revolutions under study, even if many ofher insights, liberated from academic scholarship, flashed out withcharacteristic brilliance.

Solnit is not so cavalier, but neither is her politicaltheory as original as Arendt’s. Her traditionally anarchist preferencefor bottom-up, people’s organizations over top-down government leavesher open to the charge that a corporate solution might have been justas useful when disaster struck. After all, not only did volunteers stepup where government failed in New Orleans; as Fortune was happyto report in the days following Katrina, big business did as well. Onthis account, every bit Solnit’s rival, we have Home Depot and Wal-Martto thank for delivering goods to the displaced of the Gulf as much aswe have the small groups that sprouted up en masse in the LowerNinth Ward. Indeed Solnit’s utopian sketch of an “open society based ontrust in which people are free to exercise their capacities forimprovisation, altruism, and solidarity” closely resembles many aneoliberal’s account of contemporary capitalism. In an acute crisis, wemay be able to rely on each other and, for that matter, on Wal-Mart forhelp. But where are either the neighbors or the Fortune 500 whenisolated individuals suffer, as they do every day, the deprivations ofunemployment, homelessness, unequal oportunity, and so on? The answersuggests there may be something to be said for the automatic and evenapathetic solidarity of the faceless government bureaucracy that mailsout unemployment relief and prints food stamps.

One might also wonder if an effective government-basedemergency relief system might have nearly obviated the need, in theaftermath of Katrina, for both corporate charity and spontaneoussolidarity. Solnit inadvertently seems to uphold this idea when shesingles out Cuba for praise in handling disaster relief. During the2008 hurricane season in the Caribbean, the Cuban government—throughits Committees for the Defense of the Revolution—moved over twomillion people to safety, with four people dying in the storm. Texastried to do the same ahead of Hurricane Rita, with one millionpeople—and over a hundred died in the evacuation. Does this prove thatCuba has a “mutual-aid society” in which civil society spontaneouslysteps up to create a utopian model of altruism? Or does it prove theexact opposite: that an authoritarian, one-party government, virtuallywithout the input of its people, has managed to institute the bestsystem to handle disasters? Neither, of course. But we are left, then,with a historical problem, not a utopian solution.

Solnit’s study of disasters admirably brings to lighthuman capacities for solidarity. The capacities should always berecalled in discussions not just of alternative political orders, butthe ones we still have. Yet the ability of human beings to unite in themidst of catastrophe around a single project—survival—should not bemistaken for the multiplicity of desires and choices that characterizepublic life: in other words, the collective is not the public.A modern understanding of the latter would likely involve someconception of the State, which Solnit, tempted by a doctrinaireanarchism, is too eager to throw out with the bathwater of Somoza andBush. There is a real question about whether flowerings of anarchistmutual aid can prolong themselves—as a society has to—overgenerations. The inertness of established institutions is at oncewhat’s inhuman about them, and sometimes a mark of their superiorhumanity, in much the same way that calling the fire department in theevent of a blaze is much more reassuring, though also less inspiring,than assembling a neighborhood fire brigade. This suggests that theState has a role to play, one that is not merely repressive—not onlyin the world we desire, but also, as Solnit seems to imply with herexample of Cuba, the world we have inherited. And if we are to behonest in facing our future, in which disasters of all kinds seem moreand more likely, what we may need more than consoling visions ofcommunal life are better explanations of our past problems,explanations which are no less useful the more inconvenient they provefor our most dearly held political convictions.

 

“I hope they like each other,” someone says behind me.

“They’ll like each other by the end,” says another.

“They’d better, or there won’t be a repeat.” says the first.

We get away from the commenters and walk around the couple, whose kiss now seems to aspire to Rodinesque duration as well as composition, towards the great white ramp, heading up. All walking in the Guggenheim is walking around. Before we mount, I steal another look at the lovers to see if they still have their clothes on. At the top of the first level, an elfin-looking child who we later realize reminds us of Haley Joel Osmont in AI, as much for his voice as for his perfectly unwasted motion, runs up to us and introduces himself cheerfully.

“I’m Finn.”

We introduce ourselves and shake hands. He looks a little surprised, as though our names should be irrelevant, and stumbles for a beat.

“This is a work by Tino Sehgal,” he says, “Will you follow me?”

“With pleasure.”

He runs up some steps into an empty, clam-shaped gallery recessed from the ramp. He takes up a position ahead of us, leaning against one of the arch’s bases.

“Can I ask you a question?” he asks.

“Sure.”

“What is Progress?”

And so it begins, our progress through progress, up each stage of the long ramp.

“It’s the 64 billion dollar question.” I say, smiling and wondering where my mind dredges up the clichés used on me by older generations. Has anyone my age or younger even seen the "64 Thousand dollar question?" It’s 12.30 on Sunday morning and I’m hung over and a little sleepy, not in a mood to ponder the imponderables with a middle-schooler.

“There’s no wrong answer,” Finn says, cheerily, looking up at me with beatific blue eyes as I mull over my response a little too long for his liking.

“Well, some people say progress is only the progress of technology. Like going to the moon is progress.” It seems easier to start there, with something I can’t possibly believe. He seems almost satisfied with this, but begins darting up the ramp, sprite-like, eager to get somewhere, and we follow him up.

“Progress is when we're able to look back at the ruins of our own efforts,” my companion says, as we reach the bend and columns marking the empty museum’s next level. A young woman or older girl, in jeans, t-shirt and vest, comes out from somewhere and meets us on the ramp. “This is Abby,” Finn says, to us, then, to her, as if imparting a lesson: “I’ve learned that progress is technology, or transportation, or…regarding the failures of others…”

“Um, reaching a point where you regard your own efforts as ruins.”

“Right!” Finn glides away behind the column, offstage, and Abby takes a firm, contentious tone.

“Progress is failure? really?”

”Progress is the recognition of failure.” My companion says. She’s from a former Communist country and has a taste, born of experience, for such dialectical paradoxes.

Things discussed as Abby takes us up the next two rotations of the ramp: the poet Yeats’s theory of history as cyclical repetitions, a systole and diastole of interwoven order and disorder, represented by two cones, nested within each other, which he calls gyres, the resemblance of the Guggenheim to a gyre, whether you need a sense of an ending to have progress, or whether, like the Aztecs, a belief in one’s own civilizational doom brings about the inevitable sooner rather than later, whether the American idea of progress without end is sustainable.

I’ve had this conversation before, at other times, spontaneously, or in classrooms. Suffice to say that the question interests me but I haven’t made up my mind about it. I’m not about to start walking backwards, pretending to be Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” although I’m tempted. I realize we’re bound to go around in circles here, even if the circles are concentric and mounting towards some end point. Progress is time, which does not go backward, at least for individual human lives. I want to talk about the museum stripped of its paintings, its sculptures, turned into the performance space we now are part of.

Abby hands us off to another woman, with the maturer phrase “we were talking about…” Dressed in sleek business suit, sensible flats but adorned with a glittering silver necklace, she takes up our musings on the museum’s nakedness. “You know,” she says, “when the colonists came to America and they saw these naked Indians, they thought they couldn’t possibly be human beings because they didn’t have clothes…”

“So is a naked museum still a museum? Is that where we’re going?” I think, without saying anything aloud, it seems pointless to say too much aloud, for I’ve also just realized what’s going on here: we’re progressing through the ages of man, or woman! Our guides keep getting older. Maybe I say this or something like this, because our guide or interlocutor is now talking about the problem of representing time in art and in space.

I look over the side, momentarily distracted, in the eye of the vortex, the couple are still visible, still at their unending foreplay, still dressed, always, always shall they kiss, at least in this space. There are some kinds of progress, but the living Grecian urn is just as much a progress of substitution as an “advancement.”

Nearing the top now, with only a twist and a half to go, we are met by a vigorous, silvery-haired woman with tortoise-shell reading glasses and a warm, knowing smile. Again we introduce ourselves, but she actually takes this in and asks what we do. This conversation feels more like something one might have at an actual party, and this woman tells us her “real” occupation and then tells us she’s not supposed to tell us that. It’s the first of many “asides” she’ll make, as she also engages my companion in a discussion of architecture and the possibility of making a giant skateboarding ramp of the Guggenheim. We climb towards the visible and promised end, our steps slow and heavy as the movement of the couple below as though we want to stretch out the time. We contrive ways to pause her, to get her to tell us stories about other people she’s talked to on the way. I linger at the edge, peering down into the vertiginous abyss, watching other groups make their literal “progress” along the ramp, feeling like some character inside a medieval painting of heaven or hell, or part of a democratic “mass ornament” that is simultaneously an “individualist” ornament, which still allows individuals to become distinct, even as, from above, we see them all “individualizing” in similar ways. We watch a woman in a wheelchair pushing herself up the ramp with powerful strokes of her muscled arms meeting her adult guide, a woman we’ll later learn is Guggenheim curator Nancy Spector, taking her regular shift just like the rest.

“Have there been any catastrophic incidents?” I ask, “anyone standing in the way of progress?”

“Not so far,” our latest and last Virgil says, “the walking seems to keep people pretty focused and in a good mood. But I really shouldn’t be telling you this. I’ll get a reprimand,” she grins wickedly, the merry transgressor. It’s hard to know at this point whether this, too, isn’t part of the performance, that we’ve progressed to the “meta” level, the conversation about conversation, the moment when the illusion begins to crack and reveal itself as an illusion, as performance, Prospero laying down his staff, or if this has been the inexorable but personal path of our own “enlightenment,” our progress. At the top, there’s a sadness in letting go, in saying goodbye, as when you’ve been through a particularly good session with a psychoanalyst and you realize that you cannot keep this person talking to you for hours, that there’s a routine, a system, that you will see her disappear down the firestairs “staff only” exit and reemerge, a few tiers down, at her station, ready to lead another group up the path.

Later, lingering at the top, we run into a friend who’s involved in the show. She reports one of the guests saying to her, “So you too will abandon me,” whether in half-facetious flirtation or genuine reproach, we’ll never know. As much as Tino Sehgal has managed to stage a classically harmonious meditation on the various senses of progress, his work also produces situations like these, for as much as it is a work of highly “conceptual art,” it is also theater and so comes under the psychological conventions of theater.

It’s unclear, in fact, whether the performance succeeds more as theater than as intellectual discussion. The accidental questions and observations that came to mind as we walked through mattered as much the enframing “theme” of enlightenment, or progress. “The blocking is great!” I thought, when Finn hopped up onto the impromptu proscenium, while also wondering how I talk to children, teens, equal grownups, and older adults. What would have happened if a few of the grownups were not as well-dressed as the others? What if some actually looked like homeless people? What if some had disturbing scars? What do all those French tourists make of it? Do they recognize the gallery of New Yorker types each of these ages also represent: the precocious child, the “know-it-all” teen, the busy, successful career woman, the witty and wise elders of the tribe? This catalog of “urbane” types is unchanged since Plato first began to blur the distinctions between theater, philosophy, and art, dialogue and dialectic.

A problem for Tino Sehgal as much as it was a problem for Plato is that performed conversation is still performance as much as it’s conversation. It’s one thing to perceive the stark whiteness and vertiginous openness of the Guggenheim as an ideal contemporary representation of the Athenian “agora,” and another to allow “the art of conversation” to take place unimpeded. Socrates and friends had the world all before them, at least until the master’s trial and death. The outcome of the historical Socrates’s actual dialogues were uncertain, but Plato’s readers are always being driven, guided, taken in hand, “You are quite right, Socrates!” A too-close simulation of the real thing, as with the aestheticized foreplay between the “living sculptures” in the atrium, tends to haunt us with a sense of the gap between real and representation, in a way, for instance, that going to theater does not, where the barrier of the stage curiously liberates our emotions as it keeps our self-regarding anxieties at a remove. With the barrier gone, we risk getting bogged down in an existential quagmire wondering whether all sex isn’t “simulated sex” or all conversation isn’t simply a series of “theatrical” gestures meant to showcase something different from the actual words used, solving a problem by means of our own rhetorical power instead of through mutual investigation and open-ended exploration.

Artists over the last three decades, borrowing from theater and even, increasingly, from literature, have plunged eagerly into the deconstruction and disassembling of the barriers between spectator and work, as well as the barriers between “Art” and other Arts. Going to a museum of contemporary art is now a bit like being present at a tacit contest in which "the art world" attempts to do everything but what was once called "art," in order to assert its continued dominion over all the arts. Sometimes, however, the barriers vengefully reassert themselves, in unexpected ways. What happens when dialogue is framed within a place meant to house the finished works of the past and an 18 dollar admission fee? The historical pessimist does not see this as an unequivocal liberation of the museum. Rather, it appears as the museumification of a form of life once engaged in outside the museum—one more disturbing sign of a decline of that form. The fascination exerted by Tino Sehgal’s piece shares something with the interest in glacier tourism and the growing rage for exhibitions of books as “objects” to be observed rather than read. On certain days, at certain hours, one’s guide through the last stage of progress might even be the author of a recent book on the history of conversation. And yet, Sehgal’s fidelity to certain classical harmonies, a real German tradition of engagement, enlightenment, and Romantic dialogue, even amidst the most extreme avant-gardism, shows that old forms of art and ways of life sometimes retreat into museums to grow again in the minds of those who’ve witnessed it. One day, we may all have world enough and time for an ongoing inter-generational conversation about the meaning of progress. For now, you can get a good simulation of one, but only for six more days.

Stieg Larsson. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. (Trans. Reg Keeland.) Knopf. September 2008.

Stieg Larsson. The Girl Who Played with Fire. (Trans. Reg Keeland.) Knopf. July 2009.

Stieg Larsson. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. (Trans. Reg Keeland.) Knopf. May 2010.

To read the 1,802 pages of the Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy is to be told that, for all their perceived virtue, the institutions of social democracy are a farce. In Larsson's books, American readers will find the Sweden they expect: the welfare-state comforts, Volvo security, and Ikea practicality for which the country is known. But they will also find a country they didn't expect. In this Sweden, the country's well-polished façade belies a broken apparatus of government whose rusty flywheels are little more than the playthings of crooks. The doctors are crooked. The bureaucrats are crooked. The newspapermen are crooked. The industrialists and businessmen, laid bare by merciless transparency laws, are nevertheless crooked. The police and the prosecutors are crooked. And the criminals, of course, are crooked, though not always: it's often the case that criminal acts committed by do-gooders in the name of justice—from petty larceny to massive bank fraud—are the only means by which to overcome the comprehensive failure of the world's most comprehensive welfare system.

In Larsson's trilogy it's also the case that most, if not all, of these crooks hate women. The first volume's Swedish title is Män Som Hatar Kvinnor—in English, Men Who Hate Women—a title international publishers chose to tone down. (The French put the problem in the past tense, Men Who Didn't Love Women.) Sweden may have attained heights of gender equality only dreamed of in other parts of the world but, if we're to believe Larsson, that apparent moral superiority is merely cosmetic, concealing pervasive misogyny at every level of society.

These are Larsson's twin themes: the failure of the welfare state to do right by its people and the failure of men to do right by women.

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For even the most casual reader of Swedish crime fiction, Larsson's themes will come as no surprise. Swedish crime fiction—and in our historical moment, Sweden is the crime fiction capital of the world, with growing suburbs in Denmark and Norway—owes its greatest debt to its British forebear, whose plots it cheerfully rips off. But the Swedish model distinguishes itself by infusing these plots with a social and political consciousness. Agatha Christie, the paradigmatic British crime novelist, was more likely to deploy ethnic stereotypes than to interrogate or denounce them. If Swedish crime fiction also owes a certain debt to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the great chroniclers of New Deal America, who certainly did try for something of a social consciousness, the Swedes show how Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe might have faired under the sunny gaze of a full-size welfare state. The Americans, studying the decay of cloudless Depression California, grew hard-boiled; their Swedish counterparts, pale-skinned but with Bergman-sized consciences, practically fry.

The Swedish crime novelist par excellence is Henning Mankell. His Inspector Kurt Wallander novels of the 1990s are widely credited with setting off the current wave of Swedish crime fiction, a geo-literary subgenre so distinctive the Germans have given it a neologism: Schwedenkrimi. Mankell has dominated the genre ever since, and he and his heirs are no strangers to novels that tackle moral issues. Mankell addressed misogyny in The Fifth Woman, and his literary progeny—not to mention earlier Swedish crime novelists, notably the husband-wife team of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö—are also well-known for critiques of Western socialism. As Slavoj Žižek notes in a recent essay in the London Review of Books, the leitmotif of Mankell's crime fiction oeuvre has always been "the long and painful decay of the Swedish welfare state." Like the stench of decomposing trash, murder mysteries seem to radiate from the welfare state as it rots in the Scandinavian snow.

Together with the quaint aesthetics of the Scandinavian countryside, this socialist backdrop is precisely what makes the genre work. It's shocking enough when a bloated corpse turns up floating in Stockholm's pristine, well-managed waterways or when a serial killer disrupts the huddles of little red cottages that dot the Swedish countryside. The lingonberry jam on the detective's afternoon waffles looks a darker shade of red; the friendly smile of the average Jens on the street twists into a sinister grin. But the complicity of the welfare state heightens the tension. The system has a hand in all aspects of Swedish life. If you can't trust the system, what can you trust? In the best Swedish crime novels, including Larsson's, the cradle-to-grave welfare system takes care of its wards. But you start to wonder just which meaning of "to take care of" that phrase refers to and whether the all-too-visible hand of the state isn't rocking the cradle over an open grave.

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Larsson died suddenly and unexpectedly in 2004. Heart failure, age 50, and, as romantic critics like to remind us, just before his first novel was published and just after he handed in the draft of his third. If Larrson hadn't died, he might have dethroned Mankell as the reigning Kaiser of Schwedenkrimi. While adhering strictly to the classic plot structures—the locked-room mystery, the police procedural, the courtroom drama—the Millennium trilogy masterfully produces the tension that sets the Swedish subgenre apart. Just before one of Larsson's protagonists is raped by her state-appointed guardian, Larsson notes that the man's apartment is furnished with "light-colored furniture" of "birch and beechwood." Writing within this familiar framework, Larsson managed nevertheless to distinguish himself from his crime-minded countrymen.

In the most superficial sense, he did this by becoming a global publishing phenomenon. In 2008, Larsson was the bestselling author in Europe and the second bestselling author in the world—this despite the fact that the trilogy's final volume had yet to hit most European bookstores. In the US, the first volume had only been available for three months.

Larsson's ascent is all the more remarkable because he tackled fairly sophisticated subject matter—from minute problems distinct to the Swedish welfare state to European sex trafficking to the global problem of misogyny—and resisted the urge to prescribe hasty or cliché cures for the social ills he described. Larsson's sentences, well-preserved by Reg Keeland's English translation, possess all the elegance of a grocery-store thriller. (In a warehouse showdown with a dangerous villain, a character finds herself "locked inside an area of about a thousand square meters with a murderous robot from hell.") But at the level of narrative, his books are hardly the stuff of pulp paperbacks.

More importantly, Larsson has distinguished himself by refusing to stand in Mankell's shadow, no small feat for a Swedish crime writer. The Millennium trilogy never conforms to the sullen-eyed worldviews and depressive, introspective detectives that characterize the genre. His protagonists—the beleaguered lefty journalist Mikael Blomkvist and the tortured punk hacker Lisbeth Salander (of dragon tattoo fame)—aren't beaten down by the unjust world they encounter. They're outraged by it. And their outrage is justified by the fact that Larsson brings the ostensibly protective welfare state to the fore, making it not just a backdrop but a central force and, in a way, a villain. A different kind of villain calls for a different kind of protagonist, and it's no coincidence that Larsson gave his lead roles to a journalist and a hacker rather than a detective and a femme fatale. Blomkvist and Salander both observe like classic detectives, but unlike them, Blomkvist and Salander make their observations public. Blomkvist shouts his findings from the old soapbox of print media while Salander broadcasts hers anonymously over the internet. The whodunit becomes the exposé.

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In Larsson's three novels, Blomkvist and Salander expose not only a vast host of Volvo-driving, H&M-clad villains—bad guys large and small, government officials and petty criminals—that apparently scheme at all levels of Swedish society, but also the institutions that allow those villains to operate. Institutions are important to Larsson's villains. Mankell critiqued the welfare state indirectly, using the crimes in his novels to touch on issues related to the failure of the system. Larsson's critiques, however, are anything but glancing. His villains are, more often than not, agents or at least deft manipulators of the Swedish welfare state.

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the state successfully but erroneously prosecutes Blomkvist for libeling, in the eponymous Millennium magazine he runs, a corrupt Swedish businessman. Meanwhile, Salander gets raped by her state-appointed legal guardian. As a teenager, she was declared non compos mentis, which in Sweden means that even as an adult she's forbidden to handle her own affairs; her guardian knows she has no means of recourse. Later, Salander and Blomkvist wind up—more or less by coincidence, a technique Larsson is a little too fond of—working together to solve the cold-case disappearance of a Swedish industrialist's niece. The investigation reveals that even, or perhaps especially, in the egalitarian welfare state, money permits wealthy male woman-haters to enact their impulses in the most abhorrent and violent ways.

In each of the sequels, the number of villains multiplies, their ties to the welfare state growing increasingly proximate. The Girl Who Played with Fire finds a freelance journalist and his girlfriend, an academic, murdered just before the publication of a report on Eastern European sex-trafficking that promises to name names in the upper echelons of the Swedish state. Salander's guardian is found murdered not long thereafter. The police determine that a gun with Salander's prints on it is the murder weapon in all three killings and she becomes the focus of a nationwide manhunt. Blomkvist, believing her innocent, sets out to clear her name. His investigation reveals an underworld network of sex-traffickers tied to a mysterious Keyser Söze figure called Zala. Zala turns out to be the cruel and disfigured Russian ex-spy Alexander Zalachenko, a coldwar turncoat who's one of the Swedish intelligence community's best-kept secrets and, incidentally, Salander's estranged, alcoholic, wife-beating father.

The final volume, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, introduces a shadowy syndicate of Swedish police and intelligence officers that goes to great lengths to protect Zalachenko. (His existence, if revealed, we're told, would bring about the largest scandal in Swedish political history.) The group manipulates the welfare system to cover its tracks. Most notably, it uses Sweden's guardianship laws to control the entirely competent—if antisocial—Salander, who, in her youth, tried to kill her misogynistic father after he nearly beat her mother to death. The novel focuses on Blomkvist and Salander's attempts to expose the men who have kept her down, particularly the sadistic government psychiatrist who initially arranged to have her declared socially incompetent.

There are so many corrupt men who hate women in every corner of Larsson's Sweden that to present them all in a concise manner would be impossible. They range from editors of major dailies to the members of Scandinavia's ubiquitous biker gangs to police to lawyers to medical doctors to criminal masterminds right out of a Roger Moore-era James Bond film. The one thing that unites this mélange of women-hating crooks is that the welfare state sponsors or at least supports their crimes. The state itself is the greatest villain.

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Statistics introduce each section of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: "46% of the women in Sweden have been subjected to violence by a man"; "92% of women in Sweden who have been subjected to sexual assault have not reported the most recent violent incident to the police." These entr'actes, with their reliance on hard facts, suggest that the crime novel we're reading is not a work of pure imagination. Even in progressive Sweden, more than a few men don't treat women the way they should, and the elaborate welfare system meant to ensure and enforce Sweden's progressive ideals hasn't been doing its job. Larsson doesn't cite the source of these figures, but we don't have to look much farther than Larsson's life—or, more precisely, his death—to find an anecdote that suggests much the same thing.

At a Vietnam War protest in 1972, 18-year-old Stieg Larsson, fresh from his childhood in northern Sweden, met Eva Gabrielsson. The two hit it off and not long afterward moved into a Stockholm apartment together. Gabrielsson went on to become an architectural historian; Larsson eventually found work at the Swedish newswire TT. A couple of decades passed, and Larsson quit his job to devote his time and energy to Expo, an anti-fascist magazine he founded, and to serve as the Sweden correspondent for its British sister publication, Searchlight. Along the way, Larsson edited science fiction fanzines and a Trotskyist journal called Fjärde Internationalen (The Fourth International). Naturally, none of these jobs was especially lucrative, and for over thirty years Gabrielsson did her share to support her partner.

The couple never married. The reason for this wasn't high-minded or idealistic. Larsson and Gabrielsson didn't reject the institution of marriage nor did they avoid marriage as an unnecessary gesture. Their reason was far more practical than that. In Sweden, married couples are required to register their home address with a state database, which is then searchable online. (In Sweden, even individual tax records are freely available to the public.) Larsson believed that his work with Expo put him at risk, and he had reason to protect his and Gabrielsson's privacy. Expo exists to expose far-right and neo-fascist movements and the people behind them. The consequences for outing such people in Sweden have proved themselves over the years to be very real. One of the best-known cases is the murder of trade unionist Björn Söderberg. In 1999, Söderberg blew the whistle on a man named Robert Vesterlund, a boardmember of a Stockholm chapter of the Swedish Commercial Employees' Union who, without his colleagues' knowledge, also edited a neo-Nazi journal. Vesterlund lost his chair on the board and was forced to leave his job. A month later, three young neo-Nazi thugs turned up at Söderberg's suburban home and shot him seven times.

Normally, the fact that Gabrielsson and Larsson never married wouldn't be noteworthy. Living together and for that matter having children outside of wedlock is common in Sweden, where an institution akin to common law marriage, samboförhållande, dictates the legal relationship of unmarried couples. The problem arose when Larsson died. Showing a remarkable lack of foresight for a middle-aged man whose average day included multiple junk-food runs, sixty cigarettes, and very little sleep, he had failed to execute a will. (In a 1977 will, which was unwitnessed and therefore null and void, Larsson left his estate to a branch of the Communist Workers League.) Under Swedish inheritance law, the rights to Larsson's assets went to his next-of-kin—his reportedly estranged father and brother, Erland and Joakim, who proceeded to cut out Gabrielsson, refusing to grant her any access to Larsson's estate.

The Millennium decology Larsson was planning to write at the time of his death was to finance his and Gabrielsson's retirement. Now worth the kronor equivalent of over 30 million dollars and counting, the trilogy alone would have meant a life of ease. As it is, Gabrielsson has yet to see a krona of the royalties. Instead, she's losing money on a legal battle with Larsson's family, a case the unflinching bureaucracy of the welfare state is unlikely to let her win. To make matters worse, Erland and Joakim have demonstrated their own borderline misogyny. They say they've shut Gabrielsson out because she's mentally unstable, an excuse that smacks of the unsavory Victorian diagnosis of female hysteria, and also bears a distant resemblance to the legal incompetence imposed, in Larsson's fiction, upon Salander. "I mean, she's had to see a therapist and the like just to get back on her feet," Erland told Sweden's national broadcaster SvT. Moreover, the Larssons have tried to polish their public image by repeatedly playing on the stereotypes of the modest, ostensibly progressive Swede that the Millennium trilogy sought to undermine. As they insisted to Swedish media: "We drive the same cars and live in the same houses as before."

In November of this year, the Larssons tried to take care of Gabrielsson in their own way, offering her about 3 million dollars with "no strings attached." They didn't offer it to Gabrielsson directly though; they had the broadsheet Svenska Dagbladet do it for them, with Joakim adding the condition that she must "call and say, ‘Yes, please.'"

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The final volume of the Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, is titled, in Swedish, Luftslottet Som Sprängdes, literally The Castle in the Air That Got Blown Up. The title suggests the point at which Larsson departs from his contemporaries. The typical Swedish detective solves the crime but leaves intact what facilitates it—the broken institutions of the welfare state. The castle in the air, the delusion of a perfect progressive utopia, persists after the case is closed. For Larsson the story's not over until the state's blown up, if only in the reader's mind.

Although there is an obvious analogy to recent American forays into the crime genre, like the HBO series The Wire, this only points to what sets Larsson apart—a particularly Scandinavian optimism that insists it’s never too late to effect real change. Larsson, unlike David Simon, doesn’t see institutional dysfunction as a tragic wheel driven around by some essential human flaw. Larsson the idealist believes that an opposing force, if applied strongly enough, can slow that wheel, if not bring it to a grinding halt.

The hidden conservatism of the Schwedenkrimi (and the hardboiled American crime fiction that inspired the genre) thus takes on a hint of Larsson's youthful Trotskyism. There’s a tendency for the international community—and, if my Swedish friends are to be believed, Swedes themselves—to view countries like Sweden as morally superior, gender-equal socialist paradises. (I live in Norway, and I’ve seen it firsthand here.) But the welfare state, like any utopia, is never finished. For many years now, crime has been on the rise in Sweden. Close to a fifth of the population is unemployed or on long-term sick leave or disability, paid for by the state. Immigrants have been arriving since the 1950s and Sweden's Ministry of Integration and Gender Equality still hasn’t figured out how to assimilate them. The Swedish industrial base has all but crumbled. To believe in the gemütlichkeit of the "people's home"—as the Swede’s call their welfare state—amid all these inadequacies is to give up on the future, to make the perfectable present into a dystopia by accepting its failures along with its successes.

We see the real nature of Larsson's refusal to acquiesce amid Sweden's undeniable achievements in the conclusion to his final novel. The acquittal of the wrongly accused Salander isn't enough. Nor is the arrest of the misogynistic government agents who used the welfare state to frame her. The sign that the novel has begun to draw to a close is the introduction of an investigative series on Sweden's TV4 that promises to expose these agents and the institutions they manipulated. Only when the story's out in the open can the crime even begin to be solved.

Ken Burns. The National Parks: America's Best Idea. PBS. October 2009.

Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan. The National Parks: America's Best Idea, An Illustrated History. Knopf. October 2009. 

The first thing that struck me when opening the massive coffee table book that Ken Burns compiled to accompany his most recent documentary—this one about the national parks, the latest entry in America's Greatest Hits—was not the sheer size but rather the comparative puniness of the park system. The expectation in the American West, when looking at a map of public and private lands, is one of apparent socialism: the closest this country gets, at least on paper, to the appropriation of property by the people. The numbers are well known: 85 percent of Nevada is owned by the federal government, 57 percent of Utah, 50 percent of Idaho, even 45 percent of California. The national parks, outside of Alaska, where they play a fundamentally different role, comprise only six percent of federal lands. This seems to make sense: the parks are supposed to be "exceptional." But for a system that Burns considers an extension of the claim that "all men are created equal," the question remains—an exception to what?

Burns (and when I use the name here, I do so in the corporate sense of the term, because 'Ken Burns' has long since assumed the role of trademark) points to private property. "We were principally drawn to the fact that, for the first time in human history, land—great sections of our natural landscape—was set aside, not for kings or noblemen or the very rich, but for everyone, for all time." This is not quite true. Long before the first American national park, the French Revolution placed all royal, ecclesiastic, and émigré lands in the hands of the people. These lands included the Forest of Fontainebleau, the king's old hunting grounds, later the favorite escape of the French romantics; the forest would be declared a "réserve artistique" in 1861, three years before America's first park, Yosemite, was set aside for equally ambiguous reasons. The bulk of American public lands, more importantly, are today administered by the National Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. If Burns were really interested in land set aside for the people, it's hard to see why he would make a documentary about the national parks.

The US, nonetheless, certainly deserves some responsibility for the system of parks that now dot North America and most of the globe. But these parks have a history, one largely neglected by Burns. The first dream of public wilderness, sometimes attributed to George Catlin, the genteel chronicler of the Plains Indians, who in 1832 proposed a park "containing man and beast," meaning indians and buffalo, goes back at least as far as William Wordsworth, who in 1810 described the Lake District as a "sort of national property in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy." Thus, like almost every other nature movement of the nineteenth century, the parks, with their background in Wordsworth and the Revolution, trace their history to romanticism, a politically radical aesthetic, in some ways democratic, but largely an aesthetic of the exceptional, where only those with "an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy" can claim ownership.

It's no surprise that Burns would ignore this prehistory of the parks: wilderness, the designation of an area as exclusively natural, where people visit but do not belong, owes its existence to the erasure of history. But in the long shadow of romanticism, the alpenglow rhetoric of the parks takes on a different shade. Dayton Duncan, Burns' primary collaborator, breaks out the parks' earliest metaphor to describe his experience: "Here, in what [was once] called the 'Crown of the Continent,' the diadems were freshly polished." Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier—these, we are told again and again, are the "crown jewels" of America. But if the parks constitute a crown, then it is a crown that can be soiled.

When John Muir returned to his beloved Yosemite in 1889, after eight years spent popularizing the park, he found it overrun with plebeians snapping pictures. "His cathedral," Burns tells us, "had been turned into a carnival." Muir's disgust is best elaborated by Clay Jenkinson, a favorite of Burns, whose credentials include a popular radio show, "The Thomas Jefferson Hour," where he impersonates the founding father: "American nature is the guarantor of American constitutional freedom. That if you don't have a genuine link to nature in a serious, even profound way, you can't be an American." This is not the language of the man who declared all men equal. It is, however, the language of a country where some public lands have been declared more equal than others.

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When not busy passing off his favorite impersonators as historical experts, Burns shows a special talent for making real scholars say dumb things. Thus we have William Cronon, perhaps the best environmental historian working today, tell us: "What emerges in the middle of the nineteenth century is this idea that going back to wild nature is restorative." It's a very useful slip for Cronon to make—the romantic worship of nature, of course, originated a century earlier, with Goethe and Rousseau—because dropping a century allows Burns to elevate his favorite American romantics: Emerson, Thoreau, and, most importantly, Muir. Viewed in the grand tradition of romanticism, Muir appears as a farcical final stage. But if the worship of nature dates to Emerson and Thoreau, then Muir can assume the position of a culminating figure, riding the crest of Manifest Destiny—the man who took romanticism from the backwoods of New England to the peaks of the Sierras. Both high priest of American nature and personal founder of several parks, Muir easily becomes the avatar for Burns' entire project.

William Cronon, in his own books, expressed great skepticism about Muir, referring to him as the writer who "best captures [the] late romantic sense of a domesticated sublime." Romanticism, according to Cronon's argument, had lost its edge by the time Muir came upon the scene. The sublime originated in beauty and terror—the fall of the tragic hero, the fearful sheen of Mont Blanc. For Muir the mountains inspired none of the fear found in writers like Goethe, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Thoreau. Rather, "the wilderness was still sacred, but the religious sentiments it evoked were more those of a pleasant parish church than those of a grand cathedral or a harsh desert realm." The sublime, for Muir, had lost its essential terror and become merely beautiful, a version of the pre-romantic pastoral elegy, as seen in this sketch from My First Summer in the Sierras:

No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future. These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God's beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be. Drinking this champagne water is pure pleasure, so is breathing the living air, and every movement of limbs is pleasure, while the body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine.

But Cronon's critique misses part of the danger in Muir's rhetoric. Muir didn't simply turn nature into a domesticated parish church; for him nature became more like a mountain abbey, or as Burns puts it a "temple-home," staffed by dedicated priests, those few called to commune with the clean air and to welcome the penitents and pilgrims. The doors to Muir's temple remain open, but unlike a parish church this refuge can only be found in a few exceptional places.

The strong case against Muir is not that he domesticated romanticism, removing the element of fear, but that he missed the essential lesson at the heart of his American forebearers, Emerson and Thoreau, who worked so hard to democratize the romantic spirit. Instead, Muir imported the worst part of romanticism—its weakness for aristocracy, which led to an aesthetic of the clean and picturesque (think of the carefully constructed "wild" English gardens of the 18th century, rather than the Lake District). Jonathan Raban, in a recent essay titled "The Curse of the Sublime" (published in Playboy of all places—what can I say, I'm a Raban fan), makes this case against Muir better than anyone:

In My First Summer in the Sierra, [Muir] complained of how the Mono Indians polluted the purity of the Yosemite with their "dirty and irregular life" in "this clean wilderness," and went on to remark, "The worst thing about them is their uncleanliness. Nothing truly wild is unclean." …  In A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, he sang the praises of Athens, Georgia, "a remarkably beautiful and aristocratic town." … What impressed him most was the deferential behavior of the blacks he encountered. … There’s a connection here between Muir’s infatuation with a hierarchical, aristocratic society … and his rapturous exultation in the nobility and grandeur of the mountains. … Visit the high places of the West, he promised, and vacation like a king.

Burns notably praises the parks for "the evolution of their clean and stunningly influential ideal" (my italics). Dayton Duncan, Burns' collaborator, suggests that in the Sierras, "where the air is more rarefied and the scale more magnified, [Muir] found unity with a Creator for whom Walden Pond would have been a muddy street puddle." Muir "upped the ante of American Transcendentalism," as Duncan puts it, by turning our greatest symbol of everyday nature into a mud puddle. Muir would never have used those words, but his disciples didn't have to stray far from the path he beat through the rhetoric of wilderness to find them.

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Perhaps, however, the way we approach the parks has changed—and the rhetoric of Burns and Duncan only reveals the last remnants of the parks' early roots in the picturesque. Early on, after all, the parks were run almost as fiefdoms of the railroad companies. The Santa Fe Railway had the Grand Canyon; the Northern Pacific ran past Yellowstone's gate; Glacier was set aside at the behest of the Great Northern, whose lobbyists made sure the park was big enough to include part of the railroad itself. Early visitors had to be relatively well-off, with enough money to purchase transcontinental rail tickets, hire guides and horses to get around, and pay for the few accommodations available. The Grand Hotel–style lodges of Yellowstone, Glacier, and Yosemite date from this era. Later the automobile changed the parks, just as it changed the rest of America. Cars, along with interstates and new mountain roads, ushered in the era of the roadside campsite, where, as the first director of the Park Service put it, "people turned to the national parks as places to live during their vacations." These vacations were accordingly inexpensive, a fact many parents must have been conscious of as they packed their baby-boomer families away for two-week-long tours.

Burns is at his best when he cuts back on the philosophy and simply recounts these stories of how the parks have been used over time. But the larger claim he advances about the way the parks have changed is less tenable. Paul Schullery, a nature writer and former ranger, states Burns' thesis plainly: "The national parks have been managed pretty much by the values of their time." The implicit argument then goes: the aesthetics of the railroad barons and the gilded age were aristocratic—with Muir as their hapless rustic prophet—so the aesthetics of the parks were aristocratic; the aesthetics of the auto-age were democratic, so the aesthetics of the parks, the brute nature upon which we impose both our roads and our ideas of the beautiful, became democratic.

In the last episodes of the documentary, after the parks become overrun with people, we reach the most recent development, what Burns calls the "paradox of preservation versus use," where science and democracy compromise on how best to conserve the parks while making them available to the public. Schullery explains how the aesthetics of the parks subsequently changed:

Even in the early 1900s, it was still spectacle. It was still the simplest version of prettiness. Wild beauty was defined on superficial levels that had very little to do with wildness and how wildness actually works. It was the scientists who helped us see past those superficialities. It's the scientists who had the most to do with redefining beauty. When they discovered the underlying sense of wild landscapes—predation, and fire, and all the dramatic forces that shaped the landscape in the first place—they exposed us to far deeper and more challenging beauties than most people even imagined when we started creating parks.

By this logic the signal events in the recent history of the parks are the 1947 admission of the Everglades, a swamp, rich in wildlife but lacking in views; the cancellation of a plan to pave the only road through Denali National Park in the late 1950s; the 1968 suspension of the nightly Yosemite "firefall," where a bonfire was cascaded off a cliff; the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone in 1995; and the steady discouragement of the feeding of bears over this entire period. The aesthetics of science, by this account, triumphed over the aesthetics of the picturesque, which had been retained even as the parks went from the province of the lucky few to the destination of the democratic masses.

Science, of course, doesn't have an aesthetic—it can only be made to serve an aesthetic that comes from outside. In the national parks, as Schullery makes clear, science serves the aesthetic of "wildness." More specifically, according to the 1963 Leopold Report, which ushered in the age of scientific management, the parks were to produce "a vignette of primitive America." Scientists would help by returning the landscape and ecosystem to that which "prevailed when the area was first visited by the white man." Together with the establishment of designated "primitive" areas on other public lands in 1964, this marked the beginning of wilderness science. Meanwhile, the National Forest Service developed forest science, the study of how to increase timber production; the Bureau of Reclamation pushed forward with its interest in hydrology; and the Bureau of Land Management focused on grazing management. Each agency produced different results, some more sustainable than others—the BLM allowed ranchers to overgraze its land, the National Forest Service lost money on logging permits, some national parks attracted too many visitors to look wild—but none was more "scientific" than the others.

A national park with a scientific aesthetic, if such a thing were possible, would likely resemble a laboratory, an extension of the experimental forests managed by many universities. Instead, science serves "wildness" and "primitivism," concepts that remain romantic (shading into picturesque) no matter how we refine their particulars. This is the deeper paradox inherent in the "paradox of preservation versus use": the difficulty of defining "preservation." Yosemite Valley was first discovered by a band of forty-niners intent on driving out indians; when one of those indians returned decades later, in 1929, at 90, she noted that the valley was much more densely wooded than she remembered—her people, like most natives, had set regular fires to open up meadows and encourage game. When the Blackfoot tribe ceded what now constitutes Glacier National Park, they stipulated that they would retain the right to hunt on their historic sacred lands. This right has been denied since the inception of the park. The only continuously wild herd of bison in the US make their home in Yellowstone National Park; along with local elk, these bison also carry the only remaining concentration of brucellosis in North America, a parasite brought to this continent by European cattle. The bison herd has grown so large, and brucellosis so feared by ranchers, that many bison are slaughtered when they leave the park to graze—a completely natural behavior, since the last place you would expect to find a plains animal like the bison is in the mountains and hot springs of Yellowstone. Meanwhile, invasive plant species such as bluegrass and leafy spurge have become ever more common throughout the parks.

These are the facts to keep in mind as expert after expert, interviewee after interviewee, recites the enchanted words of the American wilderness myth: "pristine," "natural," "changeless." But there can be nothing pristine, in the wilderness sense of a place "where man himself is a visitor who does not remain," about areas inhabited by natives who actively changed the landscape over thousands of years. There can be nothing natural about areas that are managed only as exceptions to the land around them, and in any case breathe the same air and bathe in the same weather patterns as the rest of the world. The claim of changelessness is particularly hard to take, as Burns shows shot after shot of glaciers, alternating between black and white photos and contemporary color footage, while actors read quotes about the "timelessness" of the parks.

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We see the effects of Muir's originary romanticism in the metaphor that runs through Burns' project from beginning to end: the national parks as America's "home." For the fourth installment, in which Congress establishes the parks as a national system, Burns chose the title "Going Home." He means this not in the sense of the return after a restorative vacation, but the trip itself. Shelton Johnson, a particularly voluble ranger, elaborates:

Whenever someone enters a national park, it's like going to another world. It is going to a wonderland. … They feel that sense that they've gone to some place better than what they've left behind. But the irony is that where they've gone is the place where they've always been. It's just now they understand it. Now they see it. Now they feel it. Because parks are like going home.

Johnson gives the positive gloss on an aristocratic version of nature within a democratic world: we go to exceptional places and search out exceptional experiences to reveal what's already present in our everyday, mundane life. It's a neat idea—influenced as much by the literature of self-help retreats as that of romanticism—but it doesn't correspond with how people experience the parks even within Burns' own film.

As with all of his documentaries, Burns introduces a pair of representative Americans, Margaret and Edward Gehrke, whose main qualifications appear to be a collection of family albums and journals detailed enough to fully Burns-ify their lives. Nebraska natives, the Gehrkes spend almost every summer visiting park after park. On one of the Gehrke's early trips, Margaret is exhilarated to find, as she writes in her journal, the "spirit of the woods" in Glacier National Park. But when the couple returns to Nebraska, Margaret sighs: "To come home on Edward's birthday was nice, if returning home can ever be said to be pleasant." Burns himself admits to a similar sentiment: "It was hard to leave these protected places and the grief that fell over some of us, as the built world reclaimed its supremacy, was palpable and long lasting."

The most touching expression of the disappointment the parks can engender comes on the return from Margaret's final visit. After a lifetime awaiting each new summer trip, she writes:

Here I am this mid-July afternoon going home. And glad to be going home. Surely I care little about home and never have. Back to Nebraska to the hateful heat of summer, to work day after day, to monotony most would say. But glad! … (Why should I be so near to tears?) The whole trip to Colorado like a dream now. The whole thing drops from my shoulders now like a jeweled coat, and I lay it aside feeling I've never worn it at all.

Amid the tangle of emotions one thread teases itself out—the feeling that the park, the "jeweled coat," lies above Margaret's station. This metaphor can only remind us of George Grinnell's famous line about the "Crown of the Continent." To vacation like a king, in a land no king can own, is nonetheless to expose the poverty of everyday democratic life. A trip to the parks is a Cinderella tale with no prince at the end but rather a long drive home. Shelton Johnson, the ranger who defended the riches of the parks as a way to reveal hidden riches back home, inadvertently admits to the more typical emotion encountered by Margaret and others upon departure: "Transcendent experience is commonplace in Yosemite … And where else can you get an experience like that?"

Nevada Barr, a former ranger and popular writer, well known for a series of mystery novels set in the parks, tells Burns:

I think we require national parks for our psychic stability and sanity. We need national parks because we psychologically need to have a place to go when we can't be "here" anymore. … I want to be able to say, "Go see the falls," and the falls will still be there. The parks are always where I can go home again. I go back to my hometown, and there is a Safeway where I used to play with Silvia Gonzales, and they have turned my old school into a junk shop. But the parks don't do that. So these are places we can always go home.

It would be difficult to invent a better example of how the parks continue to function in contemporary America. Barr can return home to the parks only because they are nothing like her real home—a home so overrun that the parks have taken on the role of a government prescribed antidepressant. Her old school may now be a junk shop, but no matter—Walden was just a muddy street pool anyway, and you can always return to the Sierras. As William Cronon writes, "By imagining that our true home is in the wilderness, we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit."

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Perhaps the greatest promise made by the supporters of the parks is the opportunity to heal the wounds of the outside world. Burns writes:

Rarely does the momentum of things permit repair or reconciliation. But I have found, in places where the narrative of human lives and those of their "brotherly" rocks seem just as important, that some inexpressible something is retained, repairs are made, and we are all, as John Muir so fervently wished, kindred spirits.

Nature has no special ability to reconcile, particularly when burdened with all the weight of the exceptional. Thoreau famously said that we find in the wild only what we bring there ourselves. In my experience, it's much easier to leave behind unreasonable expectations, and bring along only the essentials, when you venture outside of the national parks, whether on the 564 million acres of public lands that dominate the West, or in the state parks that dot the country, or in the parks and gardens of our cities, or along those other great public lands—the sidewalk of the street. There, in the everyday landscapes that surround us, lies the true path of democratic experience, where reconciliation can be found precisely because it is not guaranteed by any higher force than yourself and those who walk beside you.

Yesterday was a special day for hockey fans. Never before in the sport's history had so much talent played on the same day on the same rink. Over twelve hours, the six best hockey teams in the world played three games—Czech Republic vs. Russia, USA vs. Canada, Finland vs. Sweden—each one an arch-rivalry as well as a rematch of the last three gold-medal games.

Russia (4) — Czech Republic (2)

Stereotypes abound in the hockey world. One is that Russians (and Europeans) are supremely talented but dispassionate. Hands soft as clouds, they lack the will to go into the corners and get dirty. Everybody knows Russians (and Europeans) can't handle the rough, straight-line hockey played in North America because they grew up on international-sized ice rinks—15 feet wider than those used in North America and, for the first time, in these Olympic Games. Stereotype says that Russians (and Europeans) prefer a slower, headier, more creative kind of east-west hockey where passing and puck possession are more important than physical play.

For two and a half sloppy periods, this game went stereotypically. The Czechs tried to throttle the Russians, the most offensively talented team in the tournament, by taking away time and space in the defensive half of the rink. Russians, so the stereotype goes, don't want to dump and chase. They want to cherry pick, dangle; each and every one of them, inarticulate and missing teeth, turns into an artiste when he gets the puck. So the Czechs sacrificed offense for defensive responsibility, and the Russians obliged them, sticking stubbornly to an ineffective finesse game. After two ugly periods and three garbage goals, the Russians had a slim 2-1 lead.  
 
Even at 38, Jaromir Jagr is still the Czechs' best forward, truly world class. For twenty years he's been European hockey's avatar: the vision of a watchmaker, speed that's slow yet dreadful, like watching a shark swim from above water. Two years ago he left the NHL for a fatter paycheck in Russia, helping to solidify the stereotype that a Euro is a merc unto the grave. A minute and a half into the third period, Jagr skated the puck out of his defensive zone to lead the Czechs' rush up ice. He's a big man these days, Jagr, 6'2 and 229 pounds, with most of it in his pig-iron thighs. He brought the puck up the right wing looking for the equalizer.


On the ice against him was Alexander Ovechkin's line. Ovechkin is the best forward in the NHL and, probably, the world. Canadians and Americans adore him because he plays nothing like the stereotypical Russian (or European). He flies up and down the ice, chooses force over guile nine times out of ten, and scores goals as often as he demolishes opponents. He's a hyena, razor-backed, bowed by his huge shoulders, tongue lolling out of his mouth, loping on legs that look too-short, cackling.

On this rush, Jagr used his size defensively, cutting back hard against Alex Semin's weak stick check, olé, Semin tumbling to the ice. Taking his time Jagr skated back toward his own goal and then set his legs wide, his balance bovine, and began to glide up center ice. He expected another stickcheck, a typically Russian (and European) attempt at defense which minimizes body contact and maximizes the chance for a breakaway the other way. Jagr approached Ovechkin and deked—and would've breezed past a stickcheck, had Ovechkin not removed his left hand from the top of his stick, the better to lower that shoulder, and driven Jagr head-first to the ice like he was hinged. The Russians collected the loose puck and scored a real masterpiece of a game-winning goal on the ensuing odd-man rush.

Russia remain the tournament favorites.

USA (5) — Canada (3)

Team Canada started Martin Brodeur, by the numbers the greatest goaltender hockey's ever known. Brodeur has three Stanley Cups, an Olympic gold medal (2002), the most wins (655), the most shutouts (118), and, best of all, the most game-winning goals scored by a goalie (1). Yet he stopped only 18 of the 23 American shots, while Ryan Miller was 42 of 45 at the other end.

Martin Brodeur is a kinesthetic genius who plays what's known as a hybrid style—he relies on quickness, agility, and reflex to keep the puck out of the net. He's one of a dying breed. Ryan Miller, like most goalies in the NHL and the Olympics, adheres to a goaltending system called "butterfly style." (Technically, Miller plays a progression of the butterfly called the "profly," where the emphasis is on landing on the inside of your knees and keeping your leg pads perpendicular to the ice in a most contra-biological way. Some think it's going to lead to a lot of hip/groin problems for goalies in the future.) The butterfly's called the butterfly because of the way the practitioner looks when he stops the puck: he drops to his knees, making a wedge with his lower body, his knees touching, and holds his glove (usually the left hand) and his blocker (usually the right) shoulder-high. Altogether, he looks like he's caught in a lepidopterist's frame. (For what it's worth, Russia's goaltender is named Nabokov, but he unfortunately does not play strict butterfly style.)

Butterfly goaltending has supplanted all other styles because it's a system and it's safe. The goalie plays the percentages. Facing shots, he covers the bottom of the net with his legs and forces the shooter to lift the puck and beat him high, which is significantly more difficult to do than beat him low. Against Canada, Ryan Miller was textbook butterfly. He played it safe, positioned himself to stop everything but the lucky and the exceptional, and he did. He was, as always, an unadventurous passer and a mediocre stickman.

Brodeur, on the other hand, can be faulted for each of the goals against him. He's terrific at handling the puck—international play doesn't have the NHL's "Marty Brodeur rule" that limits where a goalie can stickhandle—but free of his shackles he tried to do too much, making three stickhandling gaffes, two of which led directly to goals.

The game-winning goal came on a long-range slapshot on which Brodeur dropped to only one knee—sacrilege to the butterfliers—and—cardinal among their sins—failed to adequately protect the area between his legs, the five-hole, with his stick. The puck skittered off his blade into the net.

Brodeur played well, but he didn't stop a few pucks he should have. He was human. The way Brodeur plays, he can stop any shot. But if he's off his game, even a little, he can be a sieve. This tournament is too short and too important to Canada to allow for temperamental genius. There's a very good chance that Roberto Luongo, the butterfly's monstrous, cybernetic archetype, will play in Canada's next match, an elimination game against Germany. He's doesn't try to handle the puck, and his five-hole is virginal. Martin Brodeur may never start for Canada again.


Sweden (3) — Finland (0)



Pulpy ice, anxious refs, and Sweden dominated this game. Finland couldn't forecheck, couldn't trap, couldn't score on the powerplay. They looked sluggish and old. 

There are just 5 million people in Finland. That they have assembled such competitive teams in the past two decades—two silver medals and two bronze in the intervening Olympics—is practically a miracle, and miracles end. On this Finnish team are two sets of brothers, the Koivus and the Ruutus, and a son, Ville Peltonen, who's represented Finland as many times—four—as his dad Esa.


Finns are famously durable hockey players. Their game is persistence, grit, and agitation. They're the second-shortest team in the tournament, but they have its all-time leading scorer, Teemu Selanne. In his fourth and final Olympics he's playing for the first time with his jaw wired shut.

The Finns don't have much coming down their junior pipeline, and with nations like Switzerland ascendant, they'll likely drop in the world ranking after these Games. But they're still the fourth seed, and there's a lot of hockey left to play. More so than any other nation, theirs is a team. To underestimate them is foolish, and exactly what they want.