Closing Time

Last Night at the Lobster is a small book that tells a small story. The Red Lobster restaurant located next to a somewhat shabby mall in suburban Connecticut is about to close. Despite the best efforts of manager Manny DeLeon, the restaurant has been under performing and corporate headquarters has decided to shut it down. It is five days before Christmas and Manny and his employees must serve one last lunch and dinner. Five of them, including Manny, have been offered jobs at the Olive Garden in the next town, but the rest will be laid off. So it's up to Manny to cajole his disgruntled crew to rise to the occasion one last time and serve their customers. He also is struggling to deal with the ex-girlfriend waitress he's still in love with, and the selection of a Christmas gift for his pregnant current girlfriend.

Author Stewart O'Nan has been called “the bard of the working class” and this book displays his empathy for the struggles of the restaurant crew, especially Manny. The story follows Manny's last day from the moment he pulls into the parking lot behind the restaurant to the moment he drives out of the mall in a snowstorm that night. His devotion to his job and to the restaurant itself is touching. We can sense his fondness for everything from the Frialators to the fiberglass marlin. And he is devoted to his family of employees as well. He tries to inspire them even as he senses their resentment of their jobs and maybe even of him. He wants to please his customers, even though there's no hope for return business. He knows how foolish he seems but he can't help himself. Just as he can't help his continued longing for his former girlfriend Jacquie. Even as a blizzard blows in and his employees walk out in the middle of their shifts, Manny refuses to close early and holds out hope for a few more customers.

O'Nan's descriptions of the ebb and flow of the restaurant life ring true. The hectic activity as food is prepared, tables are served, dishes are washed seems to occur in real-time. There's even some humor in the description of an oblivious mother and her obnoxious toddler. But his greatest talent is in his honest, sympathetic portrayal of a decent man struggling to do his job and to offer kindness to the people around him. I hope the people at the Olive Garden will appreciate him.

In the Blink of an Eye

What do these have in common:

- Male CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are as a group 3 inches taller than the average American male.

- Two-officer police cars provide no more safety to the officers than one-officer cars – and 2-officer teams are more likely to have complaints filed against them than an officer on his own.

- There are about 3,000 different meaningful facial expressions.

- There are really only 4 factors that are meaningful to an ER doctor in assessing a patient with chest pain for a heart attack.

- Since audition screens were introduced 30 years ago, the number of women in the top US orchestras has increased five-fold.

Answer: These are all examples discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s book blink The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Gladwell is probably better known for his book The Tipping Point. If the latter can be said to have dealt with the external, then blink is about the internal – what Gladwell calls “thin-slicing” or the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behavior based on very narrow slices of experience. It’s the “unconscious” part that makes this book so frightening.

Gladwell has set himself 3 tasks: to convince us that “decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately”; to help us determine when we can trust our instincts and when we should be wary of them; and thirdly, to convince us that “our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled.”

One of the most shocking and memorable examples to which Gladwell returns often is an actual war game staged by the Pentagon in August 2002 called Millennium Challenge ’02. It makes the subsequent events in Iraq even more understandable and more tragic. The premise of the game is that a rogue military commander has broken away from his government somewhere in the Persian Gulf and is threatening to engulf the entire region in war. This commander, virulently anti-American, has a considerable power base from strong religious and ethnic loyalties and is harboring and sponsoring four different terrorist organizations. Sound familiar? If you read nothing else, read Chapter Four – and weep for what was lost.

There are also explanations for the killing of Amadou Diallo and the beating of Rodney King that you probably didn’t read in the media of the time – at least I didn’t.

I was surprised by the ending of the book – it seemed so abrupt. I was still waiting for the “how to”. Gladwell convinced me that there are subtle forces at work altering, undermining and biasing my unconscious; but I am less confident about my ability to control those forces.

Ulysses S. Grant

I really appreciate NPR's Writer's Almanac. Though the daily entries may not always "speak" to me, I learn and appreciate so many nuggets about writers, contemporary or historical. One recent "gem" was about Ulysses S. Grant, the great Civil War Union General and two term president of the United States.  After his presidency and travels, he joined an investment banking company with his son, which experienced a boom for several years. Then it was discovered that a partner was embezzling funds and he found himself several million dollars in debt, broke less than 10 years after leaving the presidency. He had been repeatedly approached about writing his memoirs and declined previous requests. Now, deeply in debt, he also discovered he had throat cancer and not long to live. Mark Twain offered him a generous contract (75% of the profits) so he wrote through great pain during much of that time. He wrote and revised his work diligently, finished his memoirs in July 1885 and died four days later.   

His publishers sold 300,00 copies of his memoirs by subscription, using young men in Union soldier's uniforms as the sales force. His royalty of $450,000 was the largest of his time. Everyone was surprised by his very strong writing skills and one comment indicates that his clear prose "was a model of autobiographical writing."   His book, Personal Memoirs is one of the very few books written by a U.S. president that is also regarded as great literature.

For anyone interested in historical accounts and the Civil War, this sounds like a very strong contender.

Solitude and Reminiscence

This month our book club read “Out Stealing Horses” which was written by Per Petterson and translated from Norwegian by Anne Born. It was the winner of the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and it is a very special book, one that is written so eloquently that the reader does not want the book to end. Everyone loved the beautiful descriptions of nature, the sparse writing and the stunning imagery.

“Out Stealing Horses” is the story of Trond, a sixty six year old Norwegian man who has left his life behind, after his wife dies, and has gone to live in a secluded cabin in the forests of Norway. Here he looks back on his life and tries to understand the succession of events that evolved over the last summer he spent with his father in a remote village during the German occupation of Norway. As we discussed the story we examined the incidents that happened to try to understand the clues the writer gives us. Was the kiss that Trond witnessed that summer between his friend Jon’s mother and Trond’s father a goodbye kiss? Why didn’t Trond’s father tell him about the resistance activities? When the letter came to Trond’s family from his father, saying goodbye, Why didn’t Trond tell his mother about his father’s affair with Jon‘s mother? Trond was stoic and reticent. But, Why didn’t Trond ever attempt to find his father? He seemed to shut down, yet he states, “I have been lucky.“ (in my life).

The phrase “Out Stealing Horses” was a double euphemism for the dangerous game Trond played with his friend Jon and for the dangerous resistance activities that his father and Jon’s mother were involved in during the German occupation. Tragedy visits Jon’s family that summer and precipitates the ruptures that fracture both families. Trond, his father and Jon all subsequently leave their families. But, many years later in the remote forest where Trond has settled he meets Lars, Jon’s brother. The two old men finally recognize each other but true to form they do not speak about the things that happened so long ago during that summer. Trond states, “I did not have the courage to ask the question. Did you take the place [with my father] that was rightfully mine”?

In the solitude of his life Trond has read “David Copperfield” and like David Copperfield he asks the question, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.” And,this is the theme of the novel------Did Trond finally become the hero of his life?

Our book group really enjoyed this novel and had a very good discussion. Another blog on the beautiful imagery of this novel was written by Babbett. So much from one novel!