At fifteen, I was obsessed with East of Eden. Like Ethan Frome, The Great Gatsby, and A Farewell to Arms, the book was a gift from my mom. I’m convinced she passed it along in part so we could pass time stuck in traffic by identifying similarities between my father and Steinbeck’s feral sociopath, Cathy Ames. Steinbeck is so out . . .
In the case of Ted Haggard, my mother’s definition of “heterosexual” has been adopted.
The books coverage at The New Leader was often smart, and sometimes provocative, so I was sad to see the 82-year-old magazine cease publication last year. Now it’s been revived online — although someone really needs to learn html — and a correspondent points me to Brooke Allen’s dismissal of the latest Pynchon and Mailer as “late-period self-indulgence.” (Page 15.) . . .
Dispirited by the world of Second Life, Jenny Diski hopes “our alternative selves, in at least some of those infinite parallel worlds the quantum physicists tell of, are doing better.” (Thanks, Xian.)