LES MISÉRABLES

Les Misérables - the film - opened yesterday, and David and I were in back row center (my favorite seats) for the six o'clock showing. This was not because we are big fans of Les Miz. David had neither read it nor seen it, and though I saw the stage musical twice in London (the second time because my boss, with whom I was traveling, insisted), I wasn't crazy about it. But hey, it was Christmas Day, we needed to do something while digesting dinner, and it would have been too ironic to celebrate the birthday of the Prince of Peace by going to see Jack Reacher.

Our teenaged granddaughters wanted to know what we thought of Les Miz. Though we made a game attempt, a 2-hour-and-37-minute film is hard to review in text messages, so here are my extended observations.

The story. Quite faithful to Victor Hugo's sprawling novel (1779 pages in one French edition, and no, I haven't read it), this is a set-up, if not for the Oscars, at least for Christianity Today's annual list of most redeeming films. It won't be a spoiler for you to know that the hero, Jean Valjean, is a repentant thief who spends his life selflessly helping people. This is a story that reeks of moral uplift. And that's good: in an age that celebrates ruthless individualism, it is both shocking and inspiring to watch this reminder of the power of forgiveness and self-sacrifice.

The problem with the story. Despite his repeated willingness - if inability - to die for others, Valjean (like his creator, Hugo) supports an armed band of young insurrectionists who hope to overthrow the government. If you believe that peace is created by angry men who shoot the people with whom they disagree, you will find no inconsistency in this aspect of the story.

The historical background. Do read at least a couple of Wikipedia articles before going to see the movie. The one on the June Rebellion is a good place to start. Later you might want to read Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist, if you haven't already, or watch Oliver, the musical that reportedly inspired the French librettist of Les Miz. Oliver Twist was published 24 years before Les Misérables (it takes awhile to write 1779 pages), but the two books deal with the same general time period, and the lives of the poor were just as miserable in England as in France. It helps to realize that there's not much exaggeration in Les Miz, except of course that the poor were unlikely to be as gorgeous as Anne Hathaway.

The opera. Be aware that Les Miz is not just a musical. It's grand opera: "a genre of 19th-century opera ... characterised by large-scale casts and orchestras, and (in their original productions) lavish and spectacular design and stage effects, normally with plots based on or around dramatic historic events." The characters are much more likely to sing than to speak. There are recitatives and arias, rousing choruses, and even a sextet where the conflicting characters lay out their differences in counterpoint and set the audience up for the dénouement.

So what did I think of Les Miz? I liked the lavish spectacle. I thoroughly enjoyed the rowdy song "Master of the House" featuring Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter. In fact, I enjoyed every scene featuring the evil duo. The sextet and chorus, "One Day More," is quite glorious. David, old romantic that he is, liked "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables."

The other 2 hours and 20 minutes, however, often left me thinking, in the oft repeated words of archvillain Javert, "Shoot me now."

At one point I whispered to David, "There are only two things I don't like about this opera: the words and the music." Apart from a few stellar numbers, the music ranges from insipid to tedious. One or two leitmotifs are endlessly repeated. Worse, a lot of the recitatives are simply drawn-out scales. If you can't come up with actual music, I wanted to scream, just let the characters talk, for Pete's sake.

The words are even worse. When I was a teenager, a particularly bad amateur poet came often to our church and read his supposedly inspirational poetry at us. I kept awake by playing a game: after he declaimed one line, I tried to guess the word he would use to make the next line rhyme. It was amazingly easy. I recommend, dear granddaughters, that you play this game while watching Les Miz. 

The librettist dips into his large sack of easy masculine rhymes (be/me, done/run, know/go, chill/kill) and scatters them prodigally about. He is particularly taken with the near-rhyme Jean Valjean with "on" and "gone." Never does he play with words like Alan Jay Lerner in, say,  Camelot ("You'll never find a virtue / Unstatussing my quo / Or making my Beelzebubble burst ...") or Stephen Sondheim in West Side Story ("I like the isle of Manhattan, / Smoke on your pipe and put that in!") Except for the bawdy tavern song, all the songs in Les Miz are so earnest, so sentimental, so predictable.

Still, as of this writing, 63% of the top critics (surveyed by Rotten Tomatoes) liked the movie, as did 72% of critics in general and 86% of the audience. That's not shabby. You may like it too, and I won't think less of you for it. Just don't put yourself through it three times. Nobody needs to be that misérable.

Violence : It isn't just about the guns

This is not a blog post about gun control. Everything that can possibly be said about that subject, pro or con, has already been said millions of times since Friday. We are talking too much, too soon. In the words of my rabbi, “Judaism teaches that when there is nothing to say we should say nothing….Sometimes only silence gives voice to what has happened."

We Americans should all be sitting shiva.

But when, next week, we rise from our knees and begin working – together, I hope – to reduce the terrible problem of violence in our country, we must realize that our disorder goes much deeper than simply owning too many guns, and that any effective solution will have to go much deeper too.

When they are distressed, some people clean house or do push-ups  I collect data. All week I have been amassing numbers and arranging them in rows and columns, trying to shed light on the question: Why are some nations violent while others are not?

To answer that question would take a lifetime of research and more wisdom than Solomon’s. The best I could do was to look at the homicide rates of the 34 OECD nations, which are the countries that most resemble the United States in culture and economics, and to compare them with rates in other categories. The best I can offer are correlations, not causes.* Here is what I have learned in the last four days.

1. Despite what liberals like myself would like to believe, the homicide rate does not correlate, either negatively or positively, with the gun-ownership rate per se.** South Korea, for example, has a very low gun-ownership rate but a high homicide rate. Austria, Norway, and Switzerland, on the other hand, have relatively high gun-ownership rates but low homicide rates. Japan has low rates all around – very few guns, very few homicides – while the United States has high rates of both gun ownership and homicide.

2. Despite what some preachers (and atheists) have claimed, the homicide rate does not correlate, either negatively or positively, with religiosity. The United States is highly religious and highly homicidal. Japan is barely religious and has almost no homicides. Most nations, though, are an unpredictable mixture of spirituality and savagery.

3. There appears to be some correlation between high homicide rates and a high degree of economic inequality. This seems particularly evident in Mexico, Estonia, the United States, and Chile, who all have lots of homicides and a great gap between rich and poor.

4. The homicide rate correlates most strikingly with three other rates:

• The higher a nation’s homicide rate, the more likely it is to have a high rate of military expenditures.
• The higher a nation’s homicide rate, the less likely it is to have an effective healthcare system.
• The higher a nation’s homicide rate, the less likely its students are to earn high scores in mathematics.

In other words, if you want to identify homicidal OECD nations, look for the ones with the strongest militaries and the weakest social services. 

In case you’re wondering, of the 34 OECD nations, the United States has the third-highest homicide rate. We also have the highest number of guns per 100 residents and the fourth-highest rate of military expenditures (for what is by far the most expensive military in the world). At the same time we have the third highest income-inequality rate. In healthcare outcomes we are in 24th place, and in mathematical achievement we are tied with Portugal and Ireland for 25th place.

Sixty years ago President Eisenhower warned us about the path we were taking:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. ... Is there no other way the world may live?

Today President Obama announced that Vice-President Biden will "lead an exploration of options" regarding "the renewal of an assault weapons ban, limits on high-capacity ammunition magazines and an end to loopholes allowing gun purchases with no background checks."

Such options, if legislated and enforced, might well decrease our appalling homicide rate. They will not, however, reduce our huge military outlay. They will not make our healthcare and educational systems competitive with those of other nations. And until we prioritize people over power, we are likely to continue down our violent path.

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* This research is about correlation, not causation. Two facts - we'll call them A and B - coexist. A may cause B. On the other hand, B may cause A. Some other fact may cause both A and B. Or A and B may have nothing to do with one another. For example, eating chocolate may cause migraine headaches. On the other hand, an incipient migraine headache may cause a person to crave chocolate. Or possibly some alteration in brain chemistry may cause a person both to crave chocolate and to get a migraine. Or maybe chocolate and migraines are totally unrelated. It takes wisdom, common sense, and often hindsight to sort out how, and if, coexisting facts are causally related.

** I have not studied OECD gun laws, so I do not know what kinds of guns are involved in these countries, who can legally purchase them, or what background checks or training are required before purchase. Nor do I know how laws may have changed over the last couple of decades, or how homicide and gun-ownership rates may have changed in response to changed legislation. Any of those factors could affect their homicide rates.

THE BLACK BOX by Michael Connelly

Harry Bosch fans, it's time to pour yourself a Fat Tire (one of Bosch's favorites), put Art Pepper's "Patricia" (Bosch's birthday gift from his 16-year-old daughter, Maddie) on your iPod, and settle down for an engrossing read. If you haven't yet read any of the Harry Bosch books, that's OK too. You can start with this one and pick up the others later.

--from my review of The Black Box, now up on the Books and Culture website.
Click here to read it.

'Tis the season to read something relaxing

Renoir, La lectrice, 1874

Thanksgiving down, Christmas coming. Parties to attend. Christmas greetings to send. Gifts to buy. Travel arrangements to make. Groceries to buy. Meals to cook. Guest rooms to get ready. Decorations to display. Checks to write.

Nerves to calm.

I dedicate this blog post to my friend Karen, and to everyone else who needs to pour a comforting drink, sit down, elevate feet, and read a diverting novel--one that engrosses you, makes you smile, lets you relax, does not leave you with the taste of ashes.

Actually, you may need more than one such novel. So despite my inordinate fondness for one-offs like Sarah Dunn's Secrets to Happiness and Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, I'm going to give you a list of novels any one of which can lead you to four or a hundred similar delectable books.

My rules for series fiction:
1. Start with whatever book grabs your attention. It doesn't have to be the first in the series.
2. If you don't like it, don't bother with the rest of the series unless at least three of your friends have recommended it--in which case, try a second book.
3. If you like either the first or second book reasonably well, read two more books in the same series. By then, you'll either be in love with the series or you'll be ready to try something else.

Here are ten of my favorite authors of series fiction. The links will take you to reviews I've written either on this blog or in magazines.

• Michael Connelly, The Reversal (and others). Detective Harry Bosch is the best in the business. Connelly has written 25 books, 18 about Harry. Newest, The Black Box, came out two days ago. Not a bad place to start. But if you'd rather start with a legal thriller, go for The Lincoln Lawyer.
• Margaret Frazer, The Apostate's Tale. The indomitable nun Dame Frevisse gets involved with a lot of 15th-century mayhem. I like Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael books, but I got even more attached to Dame Frevisse.
• Sue Grafton, V Is for Vengeance. Start with A Is for Alibi. If the fourth sentence doesn't grab you, nothing will: "The day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my mind." W-Z are still to come, but you have 22 books to read before you run out.
• P.D. James, Talking About Detective Fiction. First, read P.D. James's mysteries. They're all good, and you don't have to read them in order. Or just watch the TV adaptations starring Roy Marsden. Talking About Detective Fiction is Dame James's discussion of great mystery writers--dozens of them. Follow her leads and you'll have enough to read until you retire.
• Donna Leon, Death and Judgment. Oh, just start with Death at La Fenice and read all of Leon's Venetian mysteries featuring Commissario Guido Brunetti. He's a lovable cop, and the Italian ambiance is a treat.
• Peter Lovesey, Cop to Corpse. Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond presides grumpily over the Avon and Somerset murder squad. You may not care for him at first--his coworkers certainly don't--but he grows on you.
• Alexander McCall Smith, The Forgotten Affairs of Youth. I find Scottish author McCall Smith more relaxing than a wee dram of single malt. His characters are quirky, funny, and fundamentally good. My review mentions several of his series; fortunately for his fans, he tends to write three books a year.
• Spencer Quinn, To Fetch a Thief. Chet the dog narrates, but these stories are rarely cutesie. They can be pretty darn funny, though--especially to those of us who live with dogs. And there's always an interesting plot.
• C.J. Sansom, Dissolution. Sansom is writing a series of fantastic 16th-century (think Henry VIII) mysteries. These are large books, a bit more serious than some on this list, but utterly engrossing. You can have Wolf Hall and its sequel: I'll take Sansom any day.
• Jennifer Weiner, Good in Bed / Certain Girls. Bright and sassy chick lit. Weiner is a Princeton grad with a rowdy sense of humor. Not to be sexist or anything, but I'm guessing these aren't for guys.

And there are others ... so many others. Laurie R. King is a delight. She's been turning out a lot of books in the Mary Russell (Mrs. Sherlock Holmes) series as well as several stand-alone volumes, but my favorites are her Kate Martinelli books. Jane Langton, who is about to turn 90, wrote a lot of gently humorous New England-based books about ex-cop/current Harvard professor Homer Kelly and his brilliant wife, Mary.

And if you're feeling really, really tired--as I was after open-heart surgery last year--M.C. Beaton's Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth series are silly fun. I read 30 of them while convalescing, and I'm feeling fine, thanks!

Please, readers, add comments (here, and not just on Facebook) about series fiction you've enjoyed...

Black Friday at the pet store

The dog is right - this is the only Black Friday sale I was interested in. In fact, it's the only Black Friday sale I've ever gone to. And the only reason I went to this one is because my scruffy little terrier urgently woke me up at 6:00 this morning. This is the dog who, most mornings, would sleep as late as a teenager if we didn't drag her out from under the covers. I guess she knew about the sale.

So I dragged my protesting carcass to Pet Supplies Plus, vowing to come back home immediately if parking was hard to find - and snagged the space right next to the handicap space by the door.

Inside, a check-out line stretched from the cash register to the west wall of the store, angled right and continued to the premium dog foods on the north wall. A second line heading due north looked equally long. I noticed one shopper in pajamas.

No more shopping carts were available, so customers were using toddler-sized customer-in-training carts, stockroom carts, and dollies. No more of them were available either. Never mind. To save 30%, I was willing to schlep a 26-pound bag of Wellness Core Grain-Free Ocean Formula, a 5.5-pound bag of Orijen Adult Dog Food, a tube of poultry flavored toothpaste, and 2 packets of FrontLine Plus from the back to the front of the store.

The experience restored my faith in human nature.

Nobody was trampled. Nobody shoved. No voices were raised. Even the two dogs in line near me sat patiently - for 50 minutes, which is how long it took to get to the head of the line.

The man in front of me kindly held my place while I went in search of doggy toothpaste.

At 7:45, he commented that the sale was likely to be over before we made it to the cash register. At 7:50, however, an employee distributed cards marked "30%" to all of us in line.

I waved to a friend who was about 10 people ahead of me. After she checked out and unloaded her purchases, she brought her cart back into the store and gave it to me. I then shared it with the man in front of me, whose dog food bag was even bigger than mine.

The check-out clerk was efficient and pleasant. A smiling shopper came up to me as I headed for the parking lot and said, "I'm going to follow you and take your cart when you're done with it." I was happy to give it to her.

Everyone was so helpful and agreeable, in fact, that it felt like the way neighbors bond after a major snowstorm, or survivors after a disaster. Were we all thrilled to have escaped Black Friday unscathed? Or are animal lovers just really nice people?

A JANE AUSTEN EDUCATION by William Deresiewicz

I loved William Deresiewicz's op-ed piece "A Matter of Taste?", a look at how "foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known — in the days of the rising postwar middle class, when Mortimer Adler was peddling the Great Books and Leonard Bernstein was on television — as culture." If you didn't read it, now's a good time.

Be sure to read the author's bio at the end. If you're like me, the next thing you'll do is buy or borrow his 2011 book, A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter.

The book is part memoir, part literary interpretation, part wisdom literature. The three parts aren't seamlessly integrated, and that bothered some reviewers. I enjoy all three genres and appreciated the author's - let's call him Bill - self-deprecating humor, so I wasn't bothered.

Here's the plot: Bill recounts how he moved from disdaining Jane Austen to adoring her and eventually writing his Ph.D. dissertation about her. In the process, he also moved from being a (self-described) dumb 26-year-old with daddy issues and a dismal romantic life, to being a grown-up guy with an apartment, a job, good friends, and a wife.

Jane Austen, it turns out, was his life coach.

If you already like Jane Austen, you'll probably enjoy Bill's ideas about the messages underlying her six novels.

If you read Jane Austen a long time ago - or just saw the movies and TV miniseries -  don't hesitate to pick up this book. Bill gives enough context that you'll know exactly what's going on.

If you don't like Jane Austen (but have to read her for class), or if you've never tried her at all, go ahead and see if Bill can get you interested. His book is at least as much about "the things that really matter" as about Jane.

Thanks to Bill, I'm now rereading - well, listening to an audiobook of - Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen's hilarious send-up of gothic fiction. It's read by one of my favorite narrators, Wanda McCaddon, under the name of Nadia May (she is also widely known as Donada Peters).

Mr. Metz's 5% health-insurance surcharge

I'm having trouble understanding today's news about "Florida based restaurant boss John Metz, who runs approximately 40 Denny's and owns the Hurricane Grill & Wings franchise." According to an article in the U.K.'s Mail Online, Mr. Metz "has decided to offset [the extra cost Obamacare will bring] by adding a five percent surcharge to customers' bills and will reduce his employees' hours."

Here's what scares Mr. Metz: By 2014, Obamacare will require employers (of more than 50 workers) to provide adequate health insurance for full-time employees or risk paying a penalty (you can learn the details at the Kaiser Family Foundation's website).

If he's scared, it must be because his restaurants do not provide adequate health insurance for their full-time workers. Actually, Denny's does provide what their New Employee Enrollment Guide calls "affordable limited benefit medical plans to all eligible employees." (That was from their guide for hourly employees; salaried employees also get health insurance.) Is Mr. Metz ignoring Denny's benefits package? Or does he believe that the insurance is so inadequate that employees will choose to get insurance elsewhere? Or are his workers paid so poorly that they can't possibly afford even the low-cost option? Or does his own chain, Hurricane Grill & Wings, not offer this benefit at all? Because if he's providing decent health insurance that his employees can afford, he will not have any extra charges and so has no reason to add a surcharge to his meals.

So why is he adding a surcharge and downgrading his workers to part-time status?  According to Fox News, "To further offset the costs, Metz, who oversees roughly 1,200 employees as president and CEO of RREMC Restaurants, LLC, said he also will slash most of the staff's time to fewer than 30 hours per week." If Mr. Metz is providing inadequate insurance - or no insurance at all - to his full-time employees, I can understand why he would want to make all jobs part-time. That way he would face no government penalties for his miserable benefits policy. But if by reducing hours (and hurting his workers even more than he's already doing) he manages to escape the penalties, then why is he adding the surcharge?

Mr. Metz seems to be sending the message that he hates Obamacare. He may not realize it, but he's also sending the message (whether true or not) that he's a rotten employer who provides inadequate employee benefits, would rather cut workers' hours than be required to treat them humanely, and then is willing to make diners pay more for supposed additional costs - even though he has managed not to incur them.

I was going to end there, but then I got to thinking: maybe this isn't only about Mr. Metz. Maybe he really can't give his workers adequate pay and benefits and still stay in business. Maybe this is really about us.

We Americans in the upper 53% have relatively inexpensive houses and cars and clothing and groceries and restaurant meals (when compared with the rest of the world). We manage this by sending much of our manufacturing overseas and by paying squat for services

The people who grow our food, process our meat, bring the food to our tables, wash our dishes, clean our offices, and care for our aging parents often do not earn enough to support their families and must rely on tax-supported programs just to survive (in Florida, Mr. Metz's home state, a person working two 24-hour-a-week minimum-wage jobs, 52 weeks a year with no time off, would bring in $19,144 before payroll taxes; in neighboring Georgia, where Mr. Metz has a few restaurants, the minimum-wage two-job worker would make just $12,854).

But we Americans have relatively low taxes - which means that our social safety net has a lot of holes in it.

Did you know, for example, that "Wal-Mart's poverty wages force employees to rely on $2.66 billion in government help every year, or about $420,000 per store[?]. In state after state, Wal-Mart employees are the top recipients of Medicaid. As many as 80 percent of workers in Wal-Mart stores use food stamps" (check it out here).

So what happens to these underpaid workers if we continue to demand lower prices and lower taxes?

Obamacare, though it needs improvement, is an important step toward justice. Mr. Metz's surcharge could be another step in the right direction if it enables him to insure all his employees.

However, if diners reduce their tips by the amount of the surcharge, restaurant workers will end up with even less take-home pay than before. If Americans continue to push for lower taxes, more and more of the working poor will fall through the safety net. And if Mr. Metz goes ahead and reduces the hours of his full-time workers so that they won't qualify for health insurance, the extra 5% will go directly into his pocket.