Considering these three exceptional authors and their exceptional books, I am reminded of the famous Armory Show of 1913, which introduced to an American audience the avant garde art of men like Picasso and Matisse, and especially Marcell Duchamp, whose “Nude Descending a Staircase” was explosively controversial. One viewer, who like most of the others was shocked and surprised, nevertheless saw the writing on the wall. He was James Stillman, a financier who was president of the National City Bank (now Citibank), and as he walked slowly through the exhibits he was prompted to say (as he later put in writing): “Something is wrong with the world. These men know.” Incidentally, even though he disliked them, he bought several paintings that when they were included in his estate were valued at several million dollars.
Something is wrong with the world. These three authors know.
CARL HIAASEN
1953–
Novels
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. This definitely applies to me when I’m working, but I don’t work all the time and there are books that I read just for the fun of it. For example, any novel by Carl Hiaasen, who was born in 1953 near Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He graduated from the University of Florida in 1974 with a degree in journalism and not long after went to work for the Miami Herald, first as a reporter but later as a columnist, which he remains till this day. His columns are one of the few good reasons to read the Herald, which I did faithfully during the time when we owned a little Conch house in Key West.
Our first visit to Key West occurred in 1973, I think. We bought the house two years later. I remember going into the bookstore in 1986 and asking if there was anything Floridian I should read. “Have you tried Carl Hiaasen?” the woman asked. “No.” “Well, you’re missing something.” She was right.
That was the year when he published his first Florida novel, Tourist Season. It’s a wild and wooly tale involving all Hiaasen’s “regular” characters: shady businessmen, corrupt politicians, dumb blondes, sunburned tourists, and apathetic retirees. In his hands it is a rich mix that he churns this way and that, all the time making you guffaw at the dialogue. I have never laughed so hard and so continuously at any other books, unless maybe Rabelais’s.
The next year we read Strip Tease, which may be his best, although Lucky You, about people who share a winning lotto ticket, is probably just as good. His latest novel, Nature Girl (2007), is more sardonic than humorous, which may mean he is losing his touch or that he has given up on Florida—which wouldn’t surprise me.
MICHAEL POLLAN
1955–
The Botany of Desire
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Michael Pollan was born in 1955 and received a B.A. from Bennington, continued with graduate studies at Oxford, and received an M.A. from Columbia in 1981. For some years he and his wife and their son Isaac summered in the town where I live in Connecticut. But there was no way we could keep his genius with us, and he moved to California as a Professor of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley and is head of an institute that studies environmental journalism, of which he is one of the most important practitioners in the country.
He has written many articles and two very good books—not just good, but astounding. The first, The Botany of Desire, was published in 2001. It is about the concept of what he calls co-evolution, in this case between mankind and four plants—apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato. They are all important products in human life (and pleasure, too), and Pollan carefully describes the history of mankind’s relation between each of them. It is a sad story in each case, particularly that of the apple and the potato. Now, after two hundred years of striving, almost every commercially grown apple is a relative, more or less close, of the apple called “Delicious,” which unfortunately is very hardy and disease-free and almost always dominant when it is grafted onto other apple stocks. The result is that the great, tasty, and succulent apples of my childhood (and no doubt of yours if you are over fifty)—for instance, Baldwins and Northern Spies—are now rare. And when it comes to the potato, the discoveries about how to maximize production of the vegetable have led to the exhaustion and in fact desecration of fields all over the Middle and Upper West. We eat the same potatoes, whatever their names, and have learned to accept and not to desire the kind of potatoes we used to enjoy in our youth.
That is all very well, but the story gets worse, as Pollan shows us in his second book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2007). Humans are omnivores; that is, we can eat and thrive on almost anything from meat to vegetables to fruit to insects if needed (and desired in some cultures). But if we could choose, what would be the best kind of food to eat? Pollan describes three different food chains: industrial, organic, and hunter-gatherer, following each of them all the way to the table. He finds a “fundamental tension between the logic of nature and the logic of human industry.” What we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world, and he warns that modern agribiz is a destructive, precarious agricultural system that has wrought havoc on the diet, nutrition, and well-being of Americans as well as the inhabitants of the other developed countries of the Earth.
In the end he advises us, when we are confronted by the “bewildering and treacherous landscape of the supermarket,” to choose no food that “would not have been recognized as food by our grandmothers” and to avoid any food item that has a list of ingredients longer than three items, if that. Good advice, I think, but hard to follow in today’s world.
Read Pollan, but don’t think he will bore or castigate you. He can be very funny as well as very persuasive, and since, after all, it is your own life that is at stake, it makes sense to take a chance.
PATRICK O’BRIAN
1914–2000
The Aubrey-Maturin Series
Patrick O’Brian was born in 1914, which places him well out of chronological order, but several of the books in this series were published in the 1990s, which allows me to put him here.
For years O’Brian was a kind of “mystery man”; for example, he allowed it to be thought that he had been born in Ireland when in fact he was born in England. Nor was his birthname Patrick O’Brian, but instead Richard Patrick Russ; he legally changed his name to O’Brian in 1945, the year when he married Mary Tolstoy (née Wicksteed), the divorced wife of Count Dmitri Tolstoy. He wrote all his books in longhand, and Mary retyped them “pretty,” as he said, for his publishers. In many ways, in fact, she played the same role for him that Count Leo Tolstoy’s faithful and patient wife had played for him a century before. When she died in 1998, he became “lonesome, tortured, and nearly paranoid” and died a little more than a year later, on January 2, 2000, the second day of a new millennium. Ever since 1949 they, and finally he, had lived in Collioure, a Catalan-speaking village near Perpignan. It was the kind of place the character Stephen Maturin could have come from.