Dave Badtke’s Blog

Sherman Alexie

Grammar’s important to good writing in the same way appropriate dress and personal hygiene are important to interpersonal relationships: if someone is oddly dressed or in need of a wash, it may be hard to penetrate the facade to find the person. Similarly, if grammar is off, it may be difficult to understand what is being written.

But good grammar without good ideas is not worth anyone’s time, which is why I’m always happy when good writing is shown by science to be chock full of good ideas.

While Shakespeare lacked the math to calculate a Lorentzian coordinate transformation, he would have felt right at home with Einstein’s relativistic understanding of  how space and time are linked, an idea that Rosalind explains to Orlando in As You Like It, Act 3, Scene 2, when she tells him how time varies in the forest: “. . . Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I’ll tell you who Time ambles / withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops / and who he stands still withal.”

And now we have confirmation in The New York Times, 2/15/2011, that Sherman Alexie captured essential truths about bullies in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The best friend of Arnold Spirit, Jr., the narrator and hero of this memoir-novel, is Rowdy, a bully who beats up everyone, including Junior. But when Junior leaves the reservation to attend Reardan High School, he’s ridiculed by a group of bullies led by Roger, “the Giant” (64).

Since Junior has already instructed us in the 11 Spokane Indian Rules of Fisticuffs (61-62), we know that a fight is inevitable when Roger says to Junior the most racist thing that Junior has ever heard in his life. So Junior knocks Roger on his ass.

“‘You punched me,’ Roger said. His voice was thick with blood. ‘I can’t believe you punched me’” (65).

But then Roger surprises Junior by not retaliating, thus violating the Spokane Indian rules, which is surprising even though Roger is white.

As Roger walks away, Junior calls out in confusion:

“Wait,” I called after Roger.

“What do you want?” Roger asked.

“What are the rules?”

“What rules?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood there red and mute like a stop sign. Roger and his friends disappeared.

I felt like somebody had shoved me into a rocket ship and blasted me to a new planet. I was freaky alien and there was absolutely no way to get home.

According to the article by Tara Parker-Pope in The NY Times that reports on research done at UC Davis, Roger is following  rules that specify how bullying is used to increase status to a point but shouldn’t be taken too far lest the bully lose status, the reasoning being that if one is already at the top, as Roger is, one has less to prove. Rowdy, on the other hand, is at the bottom of the status pyramid and has nothing to lose by taking his bullying too far:

Highly publicized cases of bullying typically involve chronic harassment of socially isolated students, but the latest studies suggest that various forms of teenage aggression and victimization occur throughout the social ranks as students jockey to improve their status.

The findings contradict the notion of the school bully as maladjusted or aggressive by nature. Instead, the authors argue that when it comes to mean behavior, the role of individual traits is “overstated,” and much of it comes down to concern about status.

“Most victimization is occurring in the middle to upper ranges of status,” said the study’s author, Robert Faris, an assistant professor of sociology at U.C. Davis. “What we think often is going on is that this is part of the way kids strive for status. Rather than going after the kids on the margins, they might be targeting kids who are rivals.”

Educators and parents are often unaware of the daily stress and aggression with which even socially well-adjusted students must cope.

. . .

The researchers used . . . data to construct complex social maps of the schools, tracking groups of friends and identifying the students who were consistently at the hub of social life. “It’s not simply the number of friends the kid has, it’s who their friends are,” Dr. Faris said. “The kids we’re talking about are right in the middle of things.”

Using the maps, the researchers tracked the students most often accused of aggressive behavior. They found that increases in social status were associated with subsequent increases in aggression. But notably, aggressive behavior peaked at the 98th percentile of popularity and then dropped.

“At the very top you start to see a reversal — the kids in the top 2 percent are less likely to be aggressive,” Dr. Faris said. “The interpretation I favor is that they no longer need to be aggressive because they’re at the top, and further aggression could be counterproductive, signaling insecurity with their social position.

I’m looking forward to receiving Martha Nussbaum’s new book, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, which I’ll read after the semester ends. In the meantime the Times Literary Supplement included the opening pages as “Skills for Life” in their April 30th issue. I’ve included a few quotes below, but encourage you to read the entire article.

On the need for reflection:

Socrates proclaimed that “the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.”

On the need for the development of Socratic critical-thought skills:

The idea that one will take responsibility for one’s own reasoning and exchange ideas with others in an atmosphere of mutual respect for reason, is essential to the peaceful resolution of differences, both within a nation and in a world increasingly polarized by ethnic and religious conflict.

On the need for art in education:

Dewey insisted that what is important for children is not some contemplative exercise in which children learn to ‘appreciate’ works of art as things cut off from the real world; nor should they be taught to believe that imagination is pertinent only in the domain of the unreal or imaginary. Instead, they need to see an imaginative dimension in all their interactions, and to see works of art as just one domain in which imagination is cultivated.

Anton Chekhov in 1902

—- Chekovian Gravity: In a letter to his older brother Alexander, Anton Chekhov, shown here in a photograph from 1902, said the key to characterization is action and interaction:

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations! Be sure not to discuss your hero’s state of mind. Make it clear from his actions. Nor is it necessary to portray many main characters. Let two people be the center of gravity in your story: he and she. (Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886, from Dana Gioia’s website.)

A character’s state of mind shouldn’t be sad; his actions should be. A character’s hatred or love for another should be expressed through action, not through feelings that are hung on him like a suit of poor-fitting clothes.

When I discuss this concept with my students, I have the habit of asking one of them to join hands with me in front of the class. We circle about our center-of-mass in a crude dance intended to give phyiscal action to Chekhov’s concept. This makes the student who volunteers nervous, of course, and the class titters at our awkward display.

Chekhov's Birth Home in Taganrog Russia

Like all analogies, this one is imperfect because Chekhov is talking about dramatic action, the emotional dialectical synthesis (see diagram below) that provides the force that is his gravity, not physical action.

But gravity is also a poor metaphor for the tremendous force exerted by emotions, the psychological energy generated by the struggle between needs and impediments that effects turning points and resolutions. The gravitational force is, after all, some 10^36 times weaker than the atomic force that holds us together as human beings. It’s because of the weakness of gravity that distances are so vast in our solar system, Milky Way and universe; it’s because of the strength of the emotional force that the distance between us can become so small if it’s attractive, so destructive if it’s repulsive: Love can make one from many; hate can destroy all.

—- RSVP + U: In reflecting on Chekhov’s insight and in struggling to help my students understand how litterary tragedy can create hope – we’re reading Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” as well as Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” — I have once again concluded that the moral accountability at the heart of both these authors’ works may seem elusive without a grounding in ethics.

In my English 1 class, ethics is introduced as Rules, Sympathy, Virtue, and Piety, RSVP, with utilitarianism, U, added when RSVP offers insufficient guidance.

RULES (R): Rules are derived from Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative:

. . .a moral law that is unconditional or absolute for all agents, the validity or claim of which does not depend on any ulterior motive or end. “Thou shalt not steal,” for example, is categorical as distinct from the hypothetical imperatives associated with desire, such as “Do not steal if you want to be popular.” For Kant there was only one such categorical imperative, which he formulated in various ways. “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” is a purely formal or logical statement and expresses the condition of the rationality of conduct rather than that of its morality, which is expressed in another Kantian formula: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in another, always as an end, and never as only a means.” (Encyclopedia Britannica)

His categorical imperative requires that moral laws, based on reason, be universal, without ulterior motive, and that they treat people as ends, never only as means. Since Kant’s restriction that there be no ulterior motive can be problematic, I include as well John Rawls’s veil of ignorance, requiring that one blind oneself to one’s own situation when formulating rules.

SYMPATHY (S): Rules applied without consideration of extenuating circumstances will ultimately lead to unethical results. This is why our legal system conducts trials with judges and, in some cases, juries, people who can apply the rules while taking into account special situations. Here empathy is important, the need to understand points of view other than one’s own, so that appropriate emotional actions can be taken such as sympathy or antipathy. Sympathy stands in for this range of emotional reactions. It is because of sympathy that the commandment not to kill is understood to be relative, not absolute. Indeed, if acting in self-defense, killing may be justified.

PIETY (P): Piety is a recognition that because our sympathies are strongest with those closest to us and because we are born into a world of customs, ceremonies and relationships that existed before us and that will continue to exist after we’re gone, we must consider piety when making ethical decisions.

UTILITARIANISM (U): When rules, sympathy and piety don’t enable us to come to an ethical conclusion, doing the most good for the greatest number becomes the final arbiter. If, for example, a pilot knows his plane is going to crash, killing all on board, going down into a residential neighborhood rather than an apartment complex, assuming he has the choice, is the right ethical decision because it will probably minimize death, thus maximize benefit.

VIRTUE (V): A person who practices these ethical principles is virtuous, hence its inclusion in RSVP, which is a mnemonic that helps students remember the concepts.  And it’s the various ways in which virtue succeeds and fails that are at the heart of literature.

—- VIRTUE AS CHEKHOVIAN FORCE: While birth, love, success, failure and death are central to literature, the virtue of characters as they strive to fulfill their needs in spite of impediments is the force that drives them to their turning points. And in reflecting on their resolutions, we use ethics to measure their success or failure.

1. When the man on the train in Grace Paley’s “Samuel” pulls the emergency cord killing the eponymous boy, the man is violating an ethical rule by treating the boys as a means to his self-serving end to teach them a lesson. He is also violating piety because he’s an adult, born before Samuel, who should strive to assess the consequences of his actions before committing to them.
2. When Connie sacrifices herself in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, she understands the importance of family, of piety. Walter Younger realizes the same in “A Raisin in the Sun” whereas his mother realizes that piety can violate rules when she ignores Walter’s need to be an end in himself, a unique individual different from his mother, different from his father.
3. The narrators of Sherman Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” and Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” come to understand the self-defeating nature of stereotypes, which treat others as means, not ends: emotionally, one who is ethical, who is trusted — the girlfriend in Alexie’s story, the blind Robert in Carver’s story — helps us “see” empathetically.
4. Sammy in John Updike’s “A&P” finds himself without a job, on the street, with no girls in sight, because he’s struggling to find a purpose in a stifling retail environment. So he violates our sense of rules, sympathy and piety by walking out on his boss and coworkers.  But we have sympathy for Sammy nonetheless because he’s young and because we know that the cliché “rules are meant to be broken” can be right when our sympathy for his need to find himself overrides Kant’s categorical imperative and the mores of a small northeastern town.
5. And Laurel in ZZ Packer’s “Brownies” discovers the unethical nature of rules in the form of stereotypes that are hypothetical rather than categorical, serving means rather than ends, yet she uses her new knowledge to understand rather than condemn her father.

And so we’re confronted in Flannery O’Connor’s stories with pairs of characters who are the centers of gravity of their respective stories, Hulga and Manley Pointer in “Good Country People” and The Misfit and Grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Maybe O’Connor was thinking of Chekhov. Certainly, she wanted to create characters who would pay a high price for believing in nothing.

If you live today,” we have heard Flannery O’Connor declare, “you breathe in nihilism. In or out of Church, it’s the gas you breathe.” (Ralph C. Wood in Flannery O’Connor and the the Christ-Haunted South, page 179)

What distinguishes O’Connor, making her a “hard read” as one of my students said, is the almost complete lack of sympathy in her characters. Since the characters in these two stories hardly ever express sympathy that derives from empathy rather than narcissism, it can be hard for the reader in return to feel sympathy. In some sense it’s as though O’Connor wanted to create societies in which sympathy plays little role, so her characters must face their conflicts with only means-centered rules and a piety based on hypocritical Christian meanings rather than ethical ends.

Hulga learns from Manley Pointer that to believe in nothing, to believe that RSVP is irrelevant, doesn’t require a Ph.D. in philosophy. We’re left wondering what a “good country person” is in this story only to see a fleeting glimpse of it between the Misfit and Grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

When she finally sees in the Misfit the kind of piety she’s creating — “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” — the grandmother touches The Misfit on the shoulder, at which point he shoots her three times in the chest. Her act is a flash of sympathy that causes The Misfit to recoil in horror, as if “a snake had bitten him” because sympathy is nowhere in his moral calculus.

Thus we see that virtue is the Chekhovian force at the center of stories and plays. In the case of Walter Younger, Connie, Laurel and Bub, it is a constructive force that helps them find purpose. In the case of Hulga and the grandmother, it’s a destructive force. Hulga loses her leg to Manley Pointer and is left with the nothing that is at the heart of her nihilistic philosophy. And the grandmother’s moment of grace when she realizes that The Misfit is a child of her self-serving, racist Christianity is cut short by The Misfit’s bullets.

You couldn’t find a better spring-break read than Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, a brief novel — too brief because you want Toibin to tell you more and more — about Eilis Lacey who emigrates from Ireland to New York after World War II.

Being a fan of Henry James and having previously read Toibin’s The Master, which was good, but perhaps only to those who fashion that they can channel Henry James when reading his novels, I found in Brooklyn a novel that reminded me of James’s ability to write from the point of view of a woman. But the novel’s period is later than James’s life, just after WWII, though you won’t find the war here except in scarcity and setting and the ways in which men and women connect. At one point Tony, Eilis’s lover and a voluble Italian-American, becomes somber when Eilis mentions the Jewish corporate-law professor at her college who lost his family during the Holocaust, but that’s about it for the war.

Because of the controlled conversations, the restraint in expressing ideas and emotions –  at one point Eilis thinks to herself that she’s happy that Tony has secrets that she knows nothing about — I frequently found myself stopping to wonder how Eilis and Tony might have been like my mom and dad, who became engaged during the war when my dad was fighting in Europe.

Surely Toibin’s diction and syntax are not Jamesian. Toibin writes cleanly and sparingly. Never did I find myself lost in his sentences. But like James, Toibin presents his protagonist, Eilis Lacey, with such understanding and compassion that you, the reader, will feel sad by the end of the novel that your time with Eilis has come to an end.

While I've labeled this from the point of view of the reader who over time becomes more or less engaged, the POV can be that of a narrator or character. Indeed, once you understand the concept, you may find yourself applying it in the most inappropriate situations.

Key to my approach to teaching reading and writing to my English students, no matter the level or the focus — expository writing, short stories, narrative poetry, drama — is the checkmark story structure that I came across in Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft when I was trying to understand my fiction and MFA creative writing workshops at Mills College. While most English texts and English professors seem to prefer a narrative approach to plot — we English teachers are, after all, comfortable with words — this graph, which has evolved some since Burroway, appealed to my physicist’s need to see everything mathematically — except, of course, true love.

Fundamentally, the graph displays in emotional space-time that if you (or a character) need to get from point A to D, there will be a bump in your road at B that will make you question your ability to get to your destination until you reach C, when all will become clear.

One might say, if one were sitting in one of my classes, reviewing my approach, that I take this checkmark story structure stuff rather seriously. Too seriously, some might say, in that I sometimes apply it in conversation as well, telling someone who just bared his soul that his conflict was in search of a turning point and moral resolution. As you might imagine, this can be a rather abrupt conversation stopper.

Kurt Vonnegut seems to have had a more whimsical view of this versatile structure as evidenced by an article in the Spring 2010 edition of Lapham’s Quarterly. On his abscissa, time starts with the beginning and ends with the end, which seems appropriate. Instead of the ordinate measuring engagement, his axis goes from ill fortune to

good fortune. Indeed, if one shifts the structure to the POV of a character, fortune seems like the right measure. I especially liked his depiction of a boy meeting a girl, which might be true love. And then there’s Kafka’s Metamorphosis, in which a despondent young man turns into a bug. Less understandable is Vonnegut’s take on Hamlet and truth. For this he decides that it’s impossible to know when fortune is ill or good, so the play has nothing about fortune, ill or good. To attempt to understand Vonnegut’s humorous point, you’ll have to read the article.

Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this because I should already have known that I was a Frank O’Hara fan, but life takes sadistic joy in introducing ideas late that should have been known early.

Just the other day I was reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World and discovered that King Edward I in 1290 expelled all Jews from England, two hundred years before they were expelled from Spain (Greenblatt 258). I teach English. I teach Hamlet. So even though I don’t teach The Merchant of Venice, I should have known that when Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice that neither playwright knew Jews in the flesh, but only knew Jews as evil stereotypes in jokes and bedtime stories:

By the time of Marlowe and Shakespeare, three centuries later, the Jewish population of England was ancient history. London had a small population of Spanish and Portuguese converts from Judaism, and some of these may have been Marranos, secretly maintaining Jewish practices. But the Jewish community in England had long vanished, and there were no Jews who openly practiced their religion. Yet in fact the Jews left traces far more difficult to eradicate than people, and the English brooded on these traces — stories circulated, reiterated, and elaborated — continually and virtually obsessively. There were Jewish fables and Jewish jokes and Jewish nightmares: Jews lured little children into their clutches, murdered them, and took their blood to make bread for Passover. Jews were immensely wealthy — even when they looked like paupers — and covertly pulled the strings of an enormous international network of capital and goods. Jews poisoned wells and were responsible for spreading the bubonic plague. Jews secretly plotted an apocalyptic war against the Christians. Jews had a peculiar stink. Jewish men menstruated (Greenblatt 258-9).

To Marlowe and Shakespeare Jews must have seemed as distant and threatening as the people of sub-Saharan Africa are to many who only “know” the people of the Congo, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Nigeria through stories of Big Man atrocities and ethnic genocide.  So I shouldn’t be surprised that I feel uncomfortable with the comic elements in The Merchant of Venice that come at Shylock’s expense. But I should be surprised that even with this horrible depiction of a people that he didn’t understand, a people on whom ills could be blamed, Shakespeare was capable of seeing Jews with some humanity.

Solarino: Why, I am sure, if he forfeit [his debt], thou wilt not take [Antonio's] flesh: what’s that good for?

Shylock: To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

I should have known this about Shakespeare and Jews, but I didn’t.

And I should have known about Frank O’Hara before reading Zadie Smith’s “Speaking in Tongues,” but I didn’t.

Smith quotes the following passage from “In Memory of My Feelings,” which you can find in full at poetryhunter.com.

“I am a Hittite in love with a horse,” writes Frank O’Hara.

I don’t know what blood’s
in me I feel like an African prince I am a girl walking downstairs
in a red pleated dress with heels I am a champion taking a fall
I am a jockey with a sprained ass-hole I am the light mist
in which a face appears
and it is another face of blonde I am a baboon eating a banana
I am a dictator looking at his wife I am a doctor eating a child
and the child’s mother smiling I am a Chinaman climbing a mountain
I am a child smelling his father’s underwear I am an Indian
sleeping on a scalp
and my pony is stamping in
the birches,
and I’ve just caught sight of the
Niña, the Pinta and the Santa
Maria.
What land is this, so free?

This reminds us that we can only understand those whose skin we wear — an African prince, a girl walking downstairs in a red pleated dress, a jockey with a sprained ass-hole — whose lives we can imagine are like ours because they too bleed and laugh and die.

I should have known this, but sometimes I need reminding.

Above is the title of Emily Wilson’s review in the current, August 3, Times Literary Supplement of two books about Isidore of Seville, “who became patron saint of the internet in 1999.” Unfortunately the books from Cambridge University are expensive, really expensive: Barney et al.’s The Etymologies of Isidore is $150 for 475 pages, and John Henderson’s The Medieval World of Isidore of Seville: Truth from Words is $99 for 244 pages. But these would be fun books to peruse if they were affordable or if the library purchased them.

Isidore’s effort in sixth-century Spain, when it was ruled by the Visigoths, to reestablish the importance of Roman culture through its language, specifically the etymology of Latin, had an impact that was comparable to the Bible’s. Indeed, Isidore’s family “played an important role in the conversion of the Visigothic kings to Roman Catholicism, away from Arianism (a form of Christianity which denied that the Son is co-eternal with the Father).”

While Isidore’s cultural impact was profound, much of what Isidore wrote, much like the internet today, was made up. “Most of Isidore’s supposed etymologies are — by the standards of modern academic philology — complete twaddle.” Take, for example, his entry on beavers:

It may often seem as if Isadore, like a bad search engine, offers little or no control over all this material. Certainly, much of the “information” he provides is (from a modern perspective) blatantly false, albeit entertaining. For instance, we are assured that “Beavers (castor) are so-called from castrating (castrare). Their testicles are useful for medicines, on account of which, when they anticipate a hunter, they castrate themselves and amputate their own genitals with their teeth.”

I’ve certainly hoped that J.K. Rowling’s influence on children will be profound: Because they’ve found books they love, they’ll continue to read more and more, constantly searching for similar reading experiences. But today’s NY Times article by Motoko Rich questions this hope.

Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.

There is no doubt that the books have been a publishing sensation. In the 10 years since the first one, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” was published, the series has sold 325 million copies worldwide, with 121.5 million in print in the United States alone. Before Harry Potter, it was virtually unheard of for kids to queue up for a mere book. Children who had previously read short chapter books were suddenly plowing through more than 700 pages in a matter of days.

Then these children age. They develop other passions, especially those driven by hormones. They begin moving out of a home where they read books into the larger society of middle and high school where they make friends and begin to deal with social, media and sexual demands that become more important than the world of books.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of federal tests administered every few years to a sample of students in grades 4, 8 and 12, the percentage of kids who said they read for fun almost every day dropped from 43 percent in fourth grade to 19 percent in eighth grade in 1998, the year “Sorcerer’s Stone” was published in the United States. In 2005, when “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth book, was published, the results were identical.

. . .

But creating a habit of reading is a continuous battle with kids who are saturated with other options. During a recent sixth-grade English class at the John W. McCormack Middle School in the Dorchester section of Boston, Aaron Forde, a cherubic 12-year-old, said he loved playing soccer, basketball and football. On top of that, he spends four hours a day chatting with friends on MySpace.com, the social networking site.

Of course it’s a continuous battle, and we shouldn’t lose hope because children go through a period when they read less. My guess is that these same children, when the NY Times checks back with them during college and after, will have matured in their relationships with others and in their own identities, will have begun to figure out what they’re going to do during the next decade or two, and will look back fondly on the Potter series as an introduction to their connection with books and literature.

And while it’s probably true that the emphasis during these middle years should be more on nonfiction than fiction because life’s lessons are more easily understood as fact rather than literature . . .

Some reading experts say that urging kids to read fiction in general might be a misplaced goal. “If you look at what most people need to read for their occupation, it’s zero narrative,” said Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford University. “I don’t want to deny that you should be reading stories and literature. But we’ve overemphasized it,” he said. Instead, children need to learn to read for information, Mr. Kamil said, something they can practice while reading on the Internet, for example.

. . . ultimately there’s a good chance that one who once loved a novel is much more likely later in life to return to that quest for something just as good and something that speaks to that person now as Potter did when he was a child.

Still, there is something about seeing the passion that a novel can inspire that excites those who want to perpetuate a culture of reading. Even as the Harry Potter series draws to a close, there are signs that other books are coming up to take its place.

On a recent afternoon at at Public School 54 on Staten Island, a group of fifth grade boys shouted with enthusiasm for the “Cirque du Freak” series by Darren Shan, about a boy who becomes entangled with a vampire.

“I like the books so much that even when the teacher is teaching a lesson, I still want to read the books,” said Vincent Eng, a wiry 11-year-old. His classmate Thejas Alex said he had stopped reading a Harry Potter book to jump into “Cirque du Freak.”

“While I was reading them,” Thejas said, referring to the “Cirque” books, “I was like, addicted.”

On Chesil Beach is a short book, a novella in four parts with a fifth part, a hurried epilogue driving the implicit moral home, that opens the evening of a couple’s honeymoon during a time in the 50s when some, perhaps many, might discuss much, but not sex. And some 200 short pages later the novel ends this same evening in a heart-rending moment that could have turned out differently, but doesn’t.

While the power of this novel lies in its exquisite exploration of the complex nature of love between two people, what may be most memorable for most readers, myself included, is the story’s focus on a single life-changing moment. That this singularity, this turning down a path not taken or too often taken, makes all the difference in the couple’s life is not new. The plot device of a prideful step taken with insufficient and incorrect information is as necessary for the tragedy of Oedipus as it is for our tragic involvement in Iraq. Yet McEwan manages such a new look at an essential conundrum — each of us in our lifetimes will make decisions we regret — that he may leave you wondering if this might be one of the best novels you’ve read in a long, long time.

Granta’s list of the best young author’s as reported by NPR.org.

This year, the best young American novelists cited by British literary magazine Granta are all 35 or under.

Granta’s list of young authors:

Daniel Alarcon
Kevin Brockmeier
Judy Budnitz
Christopher Coake
Anthony Doerr
Jonathan Safran Foer
Nell Freudenberger
Olga Grushin
Dara Horn
Gabe Hudson
Uzodinma Iweala
Nicole Krauss
Rattawut Lapcharoensap
Yiyun Li
Maile Meloy
ZZ Packer
Jess Row
Karen Russell
Akhil Sharma
Gary Shteyngart
John Wray