Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” is heartening and gratifying in a general sense, rather than incredibly or specifically edifying. Still, it’s very good, largely due to Gladwell being an accomplished teller of interesting tales rather than a purveyor of startling new theories backed with uniquely, creatively crunched, extensively and exhaustively gathered data. Sure, the hockey player birthday patterns are a bit of an eye-opener, but the snippets of data and trends are not what end up captivating in this book.

Coincidences of birth and being in the right place at the right time might give gifted people an initial and sometimes extraordinary headstart in professional sports, business and industry, arts and popular culture and other walks of life. However, Gladwell contends that those fortuitous elements alone don’t automatically create a Bill Gates, a Lennon and McCartney, a John D. Rockefeller, a Carlos Slim and so on.  A seeming outlier or someone representing by the dictionary definition “an extreme deviation from the mean” in their field of expertise can only become so through hard, hard, ongoing work – at least 10,000 hours of it. (Yes, Gladwell posits the pure embodiment of the old joke, “Pardon me sir, how do I get to Carnegie Hall?”)

But it isn’t just “practice, practice, practice” that completes the formula. Where Gladwell’s book shines and inspires is in its tributes to the sheer, unalloyed passion of the so-called outliers for their so-called work. They were all having so much fun pursuing their love of computer programming or playing the guitar or whatever that the 10,000 plus hours to master their respective crafts probably just flew by, and all of a sudden they were Microsoft and the Beatles and so on.

Gladwell’s forays into cultural aspects that feed into failure or success seem like a distraction from his main thesis, however fascinating. (In fact, the discussion of cultural differences affecting how airplanes pilots do or do not communicate with each other – and the consequences – is riveting.) When Gladwell concludes the book with the heartfelt recounting of his own mother’s story of hard work capitalizing on the particular opportunities that came her family’s way, the real if not intended message of the book emerges. Anyone can be the outlier or the presumed deviation of the norm, by seizing and making the most of the opportunities presented him or her … and everyone can be an outlier if we all work as a society to ensure everyone has opportunities.

I enjoyed – yes, genuinely enjoyed reading this book much, much more than I’d anticipated. I’ve always admired Linden MacIntyre as a journalist and assumed he would have an ideally balanced perspective, of both compassion and acuity, for such controversial subject matter as the sexual abuse scandals associated with the Catholic church. That admiration and confidence in the author’s vision still didn’t give me the stomach, though, for a story so closely ripped from the headlines, with the news of more allegations against another Catholic priest hitting right around the time “The Bishop’s Man” was longlisted, then shortlisted for the coveted Giller Prize. Long past the time that the book won the prize, I’ve finally read it, and am glad I did.

The voice of Father Duncan MacAskill is dry at first, blandly and reticently stating the facts of his acknowledged work within the Catholic church, among parishes in the Maritimes, as something of a fixer for the bishop. His more benign moniker is “The Bishop’s Man”, but many of his fellow priests refer to him as the “Exorcist” for his behind-the-scenes work defusing situations and relocating men of the cloth who have strayed into various forms of scandal. He questions his role and his own faith as the job entails not only covering up unsavoury situations, but also increasingly includes running interference with communities, families, the police and media.

Father MacAskill’s words and observations may be spare at first, but they are not unaffecting. As he joins a new parish close to his birthplace and slowly establishes new connections and re-establishes dormant family connections, his is not the voice of someone who doesn’t care, but that of someone who has cared much too much and is shell shocked by what he has seen and experienced. As he gets thrust more and more reluctantly into situations that test his conscience, he learns harshly that things are not what they seem, in what unfolds dramatically before him in the present, but also in pivotal chapters of his own past life.

In the end, the bishop’s man realizes with some relief and humility that he is just a man, but also beholden to neither the bishop and what the bishop represents, nor to anyone else. That realization leaves much unknown for MacAskill at the end of the book, but leaves the reader glad to have seen him along his journey.

Intriguing premise, but it meanders in some places, is overwrought or heavy-handed in others, and doesn’t really satisfy in the end, methinks. However, there are sufficient flashes of brilliance that I might seek this first-time novelist out again.

I can’t decide if this is just a story about an emotionally dishonest person, or this is an emotionally dishonest story about an emotionally dishonest person. Awake by Elizabeth Graver starts out as the book equivalent of a well-intentioned and relatively well-made disease-of-the-week TV movie. It’s told from the point of view of Anna, married mother of two boys, the youngest of whom is afflicted with a rare illness that is essentially a severe, potentially fatal allergy to natural light. Overly telegraphed plot developments early on suggest that someone has a penchant for the dramatic, but throughout the book, I tussled with whether this was Anna or Graver herself.

The story of a mother and a family coping with a sick child – including how all of the relationships within the family are affected, not to mention household routines – gets railroaded fairly quickly. Anna finds a summer camp designed especially to accommodate sufferers of her child’s disease and their families. The family’s first visit ostensibly gives all of them new freedoms they have never experienced before. We really only follow Anna’s personal pursuit of freedom, however. It would be acceptable to realize that this was really a story about Anna only and how she’s been affected and what she’s sacrificed and compromised and all the rest, but it all happens too quickly, both in the framework of the book and in presumed calendar time, to emotionally and realistically buy into it and accept the shift in focus. Essentially, the children and husband seemed to be dropped pretty precipitously and remorselessly.

To try to be sympathetic, perhaps Anna has become a bore *because* she has sacrificed so much for her family. But it still just makes for a tedious account of a person rationalizing her selfish, self-absorbed secretiveness, as her current behaviours morph into transgressions. However, when she starts to confess that she’s had a somewhat furtive and untrustworthy track record all along – and therefore her current family situation is not what is driving her to be dishonest for the first time – all sympathy goes out the tinted window.

At least Anna’s comeuppance has a bit of a twist to it. Sadly, that’s not enough to redeem the book or the character. I’ll try to give Graver some credit that she does think what her main character has done is irresponsible. However, it also feels like she cuts her a bit too much slack, lets her rationalize too much, and throws in a few convenient external excuses for her behaviour in the book’s rather perfunctory wrap-up.

Maybe Anna is really just ill-suited for the life of a mother and wife, and she should have stayed on the rootless artist path she seems to yearn for. Or maybe there is a more clinical explanation for at least her more recent personal inconsistencies and inconstancy – she’s just suffering from a variation of seasonal affective disorder, as she avoids the light almost as much as her afflicted child. But it doesn’t explain away some of her earlier duplicity, and ultimately doesn’t make for a sympathetic connection with the character and the book.

Before The Museum of Innocence, the only other Pamuk I’d read was Istanbul, his wistful and somewhat depressing memoir and cultural history of the city. I appreciated the craft of Istanbul, but it was ponderous going at times. There are definitely connections between Istanbul and The Museum of Innocence, and not just in the detailed portrait of the colourful and exotic city. At several points throughout the book, I was ready to conclude that The Museum of Innocence just might be the wistfulness and inwardness of Pamuk’s memoir taken to a verging-on-satirical extreme. Long after leaving the last page of this book, and probably when I revisit and re-read it, I suspect I’ll still be debating how satirical and self-absorbed versus heartfelt this book’s protagonist is meant to be.

Wealthy thirtysomething Kemal Basmaci is engaged to an accomplished woman his age. They are both members of prominent Istanbul families and travel in Westernized society circles. By chance, Kemal encounters a beautiful young shopgirl, Fusun, who is both a distant relative and at 18, at an almost Lolitaesque distance from him in age. He pursues her, they embark on a brief but passionate affair, and when they part, Kemal remains and in fact grows increasingly obsessed with and depressed about losing the young woman. After trying half-heartedly to reconcile with his fiance, he decides to abandon her and his high society life to attempt an unusual and protracted wooing of Fusun, venturing into her lower middle class neighbourhood and life and becoming intimately entangled in but also welcomed into her family’s day-to-day life.

Is Kemal heroically and self-effacingly devoted to Fusun, or unnaturally obsessed with some crazed notion of her as a romantic ideal? Is he passionately in love with the real Fusun, or is he just mired in a form of self-absorption in which Fusun is some wildly distorted romantic icon? Is his increasingly compulsive hoarding of any and all objects associated with his beloved a creative and all-encompassing tribute, or a warped form of romantic kleptomania?

The painstaking detail with which Kemal catalogues his devotion/obsession makes this over 500-page novel engrossing at times, wearying at other times. However, in its last scenes, Pamuk skillfully pulls the book together with an elucidating and validating refocus on Kemal’s obsession, along with a charming switch in voice.

The apotheosis of Kemal’s love for Fusun takes the form of a museum. To further inspire and inform his mission, Kemal wanders the world visiting and researching museums of every shape, size and subject matter, from the sublime to the ridiculous, perhaps skewed to the ridiculous. However, in even the most obscure and overwrought collections and forms of tribute, Kemal finds justification for his passion, and the account of his travels and explorations is surprisingly moving. When he gets to Sir John Soane’s Museum in London, England, I was convinced, having recently had the privilege to view firsthand a place in which obsession, obsessive collecting and curating, and uncommon passions are made so memorably and claustrophically real.

Perhaps the following is a spoiler … At the very end, Orhan Pamuk inserts himself in witty fashion as a character in the book. The change in voice is a bit of a relief after such a long, emotional journey with the protagonist, and allows the reader to step back with some measure of objectivity from this feverish story.

“One could gather up anything and everything, with wit and acumen, out of a positive need to collect all objects connecting us to our most beloved, every aspect of their being, and even in the absence of a house, a proper museum, the poetry of our collection would be home enough for its objects.”

See also:

April 29, 2012
Turkish Writer Opens Museum Based on Novel
by J. Michael Kennedy
New York Times

The arrogant, unreliable narrator is a bit off-putting initially, but I found the whole cast of colourful, quirky characters – especially the charming and literally self-effacing Concorde – really drew me in as the story unfolded. The book is a fascinating examination of fidelity and love and how it can turn into obsession, but also how love can just grow and endure.

The most riveting, stunning, compelling tour de force of an opening scene in a book – absolutely bar none, and utterly more stunning than anything that could be rendered cinematically, because it is rendered in horrifying detail in the reader’s mind. Amazing!

After such an explosive opening, no book could (or perhaps should) sustain that power for its entirety – it would be unbearable. The book is not exactly disappointing after that, but it does become a somewhat thorny read for the balance. It ventures into other types of intensity, but in a more clinical fashion, as contradictory as that might sound. But interestingly, that thorniness perhaps exemplifies the multiple meanings of “enduring love”.

Early on in this hefty tome, I found myself enjoying it immensely. The approach is more thematic than chronological, so I wouldn’t recommend this as a first introduction to the life of Edith Wharton – the RWB Lewis biography is still probably best for that. But this is still an engrossing new examination of Wharton as an artist, person and influencer. This book also has some of the best insights I’ve found so far into the complex relationship between Wharton, Henry James and his circle.

Once I finished the book, rather wishing it did not have to end, I concluded that likely no one will ever have the complete picture of this complex woman and artist, in part because she destroyed some of her correspondence along the way. As well, her closest relationships were with two equally enigmatic individuals – Walter Berry and Morton Fullerton. As challenging as this book has been, though, I’m glad I stuck with it because I think it is the fullest, most precise and most respectful portrait of the incomparable Mrs. Wharton. It also provides concise yet incisive analyses of all of her major works, including The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth.

An infectious, compelling read … Interestingly, I thought the characters were vibrant and very believable, but the plot premise was rather improbable. At the same time, it was kind of a cliffhanger to see how it would all resolve.