Science stories

It strikes me as particularly wonderful fun to be a writer with a solid enough reputation for a publisher to enable him to travel the world interviewing scientists and visiting museums and parks of interest over the course of several years, as Bill Bryson must have been when he set off to write A Short History of Nearly Everything (2006). It doesn't seem to have been based on any particular aptitude or knowledge of the field, either. By his own proud account, Bryson knew almost nothing at all about any field of science, let alone all of them, before he started this book about nearly all of what he thought was most interesting of the history of science in a few different fields: astronomy, geology, chemistry and biology, mostly. 

It's a bit of a traveling freak show approach to scientific exposition: come see the amazing, the horrifying, the terrifying 'world of science' shack. This way has its pluses. I was greatly disturbed but also titillated to read about ancient eight-foot-long millipedes, raccoons the sizes of cars and rhinoceroses the size of suburban mansions. Apparently, were so big because in the days when mammals were just beginning their reign of the earth, our atmosphere was more highly oxygenated than it is now, and more oxygen means things grow bigger). I especially like -- in a frightened sort of way -- thinking about these raccoons etc because it lends a new aura of plausibility to some fantasy movie animals (I won't get into the specific television show that I had in mind; my excessive consumption of bad tv can wait for another day). Bryson also spends a lot of time informing the uninformed of all the many ways in which we might (all) die, and the many ways in which the universe is a more disquieting if not more downright terrifying surrounding than we'd imagined. This makes the book quite fun. But there's a lot of it that is silly: as an intro to cellular activity, Bryson takes you into the cell only to tell you that it is a "nightmareish" place because things move around so fast that if a human being were shrunk and put inside the cell, it would get pushed around a lot. Is that really relevant to anything?

Bryson declares very happily in the introduction that five or six years before the publication of this book, he knew almost nothing about the physical sciences: "I didn't know what a proton was, or a protein, didn't know a quark from a quasar..." and so on, which he seems to think is actually a reason for him to be the writer of this book. Indeed, his profession of ignorance is reproduced, in large letters, on the back of the book. But why should knowing nothing make you the person for the job? He seems to imply that it's because the books by scientists that he encountered when he was a kid were boring, though he does acknowledge that once he started looking into it, he found several wonderful popularizers of science already out there. Bryson doesn't inspire confidence as a purveyor of information. How can a man who knew nothing two years earlier suddenly have become an expert on what he describes as "nearly everything"?

One habit in particular that I find annoying is how complacent he is about current scientific facts. He has a very enjoyable way of showing how stupid and mistaken about nearly everything scientists of various orders were in the past, and he'll tell you when something is still "unknown", but if the scientists say it's so, then Bryson is glad to agree with them. So, you get a frequent recurrence of phrases such as "we now know." It feels very strange to hear someone talking expansively about all the absolutely ridiculous false consensuses scientists arrived at in the past, before reverting to a happy, facile view of "the facts." In addition to the "we now knows"s, there are quite a number of "it will be some time before we understand"s. It would have been helpful to this book if Bryson had read some Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos, along with his geneticists and geologists, to stop some of his delusions about the onward march of science.

Am I just harping on the lack of rigorousness for something that was never meant to be rigorous? But some of it really annoys me. Bryson at some point calls Stephen Jay Gould "ever scrupulous" as though this were an insult -- something to the effect of, one whose over-cautiousness leads to the dashing of cute but apocryphal anecdotes.

And even though it is impressive that he managed, in so short a time, to get enough of an understanding of such a variety of subjects as to be able to write about them, every so often he makes statements that, to be blunt, seem idiotic. For example:

The nineteenth century was already a chilly time. For two hundred years Europe and North America in particular had experienced a Little Ice Age, as it has become known, which permitted all kinds of wintry events -- frost fairs on the Thames, ice-skating races along Dutch canals -- that are mostly impossible now. It was a period, in other words, when frigidity was much on people's minds. So we may perhaps excuse nineteenth-century geologists for being slow to realize that the world they lived in was in fact balmy compared with former epochs, and that much of the land around them had been shaped by crushing glaciers and cold that would wreck even a frost fair.

Why, Bill, would the fact of the temperature being colder than it would be a hundred years later make it harder for someone to imagine that at some point in the past, things had been colder still? I could as easily imagine a journalist a hundred years from now hypothesizing that because the 20th century was comparatively cold, it was easy for scientists to imagine ancient Ice Ages. It's a bit of a throwaway and it isn't central to his explanations, but it and its many brothers in this book irk me.

Bryson's cutesy style is sometimes enjoyable: I liked the description of my head as "one big oil bon-bon" for the thousands of mites living in my pillow. And he finds useful ways of describing things such as the fact that for the average pillow, which is apparently six years old (if this is a nation- or culture-specific average, it is not told to us), about one-tenth of its weight is from dead skin, mites living and dead, and mite dung. But when I say finds I mean finds, not creates -- this was someone else's example first. And despite my many irritations, it is a pleasant, if superficial, read about a bunch of different branches of science.

To invent or not to invent

The mixed collection of short stories and essays Barrel Fever (1994) is David Sedaris's first published book, which may explain why he hadn't settled yet on a genre. The unevenness of the material may explain why he subsequently settled on the essay as his form, rather than fiction -- though I guess that five volumes later, in 2010, he felt it was safe to return to fiction with Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, which is described as a collection of animal-related humorous short stories, not a description that entices me. The short stories in Barrel Fever almost all revolve around characters who are angry, stupid, violent, delusional and/or grotesque. Especially violent. No reason why these characteristics should make for less good fiction, but the stories are very repetitive; it's a lot about the revenge fantasies and so on of these grotesque morons, whose emotions are unsubtly drawn and whose actions don't tend to go anywhere much beyond just being ugly and mean. After the twelve stories come four essays, which are incredibly funny and interesting. SantaLand Diaries, in which Sedaris describes working as a holiday elf in a department store, is both fucking hilarious and actually revelatory about what people get up to when they work as seasonal in-store entertainment. These essays, in fact, appeal to me a lot more than the other full book of essays that I read of his, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. In Barrel Fever Sedaris is a guy living in weird circumstances and taking weird odd jobs. In When You Are Engulfed he's this well-to-do guy who travels the world first-class and tells you about it.

V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (1987)

This is a fabulous book but not necessarily one I'd recommend to other people. Because it has no plot, very little by way of character, no moral dilemmas. Mostly, it has scenery. Scenery, and a few reflections on the humans that emerge from the scenery. To read it requires a certain diligence, and an appreciation for tininess of detail. That tininess of detail should be a problem may strike you as the idea of a fool and a lover of bad books, but the thing here is that tiny details are almost all you get. Tiny details and big insights: in that way it reminded me of A la recherche. I would guess that smarter & more well-read people have made this comparison, but I'm not going to bother finding out. Other than the scenery and lack of identifiable substance, one thing that reminded me of Proust was the love of linguistic misunderstanding on the part of the little people: one old man tells him something is an "old wise tale," and he loves that; another is a local habit of calling the place where you put dead leaves the refuge instead of refuse (they call all refuse refuge, but it has its most poetic echo when it's the garden refuge). Incidentally, in addition to the lack of plot there is paucity of character -- leaving you with what, you might want to know; as I said, it leaves you with foliage and dirt roads.

In the beginning, there is nothing but the foliage and the roads and the flowers and a garden belonging to someone named Jack, who we are told almost nothing about except that at some point he dies after which his wife moves away and the garden is paved over. After reading about a hundred pages, I wrote the following:

It slows your heartbeat. Or it makes me feel that i must exert control and slow my heart because otherwise I will never be able to keep pace with the writing, will run on ahead and lose the book entirely. And that happens a lot, even though it's not a difficult book, or -- not a book of difficult sentences, but in the description following description of country landscape for forty pages almost nonstop, my eyes glaze over. That makes it sound like a bad book but by some weird trick it manages to avoid being one. I'm not a huge fan of lengthy description ever, and of natural scenery least of all, but here I am drawn in by it, for several reasons: firstly, the heartbeat thing. I can't think of another book that's made me thoughtful of my heartrate and in addition, reading it allows me to calm everything down, almost like a meditation. Secondly, it's completely unlike anything I've read before and might be significantly different than anything ever written. Who the hell writes about scenery for seventy pages? Thirdly, I do feel like he's quite extraordinarily sensitive, our narator. Sometimes it takes him awhile to clue into things and he tells us all about that -- mostly as it relates to farm landscapes and gardens, for instance which flowers grow in which seasons, he only learned that after several years (who cares? and yet!) but he's alive to every detail of his surroundings, including human ones, and reads much significance into a man driving a certain car or a woman tying her shirt into a knot. 

(disliking the aesthetics of block quoting myself, but finding this otherwise to be visually confusing).

In the first section, I thought, it's like he's describing the writer's life with the writing cut out of it. What's left? Long walks in which the village is observed. Then, in the second of the five sections, he introduces the writer as a young man setting off from Trinidad for England, and explains how his character became fractured -- too influenced by colonialist writerly ideals to allow for his own experience to be important, his life and his idea of himself as a writer were at odds, and so he had two parts of himself: his life and his ideas, off in separate directions. So, that seemed like a pretty great novelistic play to me -- first get me to wonder, where is the rest of this man, this writer who seems empty, and then talk about how he became empty. One thing I was uncertain about is that he goes on to say that he became whole again, seemingly prior to the period of his life in which he's walking on these country roads looking at these flowers and trees. Anyhow, I was very taken by the idea and manifestation of this fracture.

The main character exists but almost doesn't exist. He lives somewhere but for the first fifty pages we have no idea why or how he came to be there. Then he reveals that he is a writer, which explains partly, by inference, how his life seems to consist entirely of going for long solitary walks near Stonehenge. We still don't know why he's living there, but given how lost we were before, it feels like a big advance. Also, characters who we know are important from the way he stresses them, get sick and die before the narrator's done more than said a friendly hello when they drive past him on his long solitary walks. So how are they important? This is the suspense born of the strange writing style, which sounds unsuspenseful but hooked me.

With some books it's hard not to think of them as somewhat autobiographical, and I always try to refrain from that. Here, it's almost impossible not to think of this as writing from the author's life. It's another way in which it resembles A la recherche. Partly it is the lack of character exploration -- creating the character appears not to have interested the author, allowing the inference that he doesn't feel interested because he already knows himself so well. In any case, as this unfocused entry must make apparent, the book caused me to reflect at length on many large themes. If you can do that without character or plot, then why employ either of those tired old narrative stratagems? But I hope I've also explained why I would be careful about who I recommend the book to: it's a slow read and nothing happens and the wondrous insight will be missed if the reader doesn't very carefully sift through all the details of garden fences and rose bushes. However, I will read more Naipaul in the near future.