Kurt Andersen

By far the strongest piece of the case against Rupert Mudoch owning the Wall Street Journal are his dealings with China. During the last decade various News Corp. media entitites, in order to remain on the good side of Beijing regime, have tended to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative when it comes to the regime. Therefore, the very plausible argument goes, Murdoch ownership might well compromise the Journal’s reporting on China. That was the thrust of Joseph Kahn’s big piece in Tuesday’s Times, for instance.

But among the scads of coverage, why has no one — like, say, the News Corp. spokesman Gary Ginsberg — mentioned 24? During the last two seasons of the series, the Chinese government has been the heavy — they shanghaied and tortured both Jack Bauer and his girlfriend, conspired with Jack’s murderous father, and almost caused Russia to attack the U.S. If Murdoch were really as determined to kowtow as he’s been portrayed, why would he let one of his most successful shows consistently and grandly libel his Chinese pals?

This doesn’t, of course, prove that his Journal would cover China aggressively, but it does seem relevant to the discussion.

Having been on the road book-touring, I missed several episodes of 24. So after a DVR catch-up marathon the other night (by the way: Separated At Birth: Powers Boothe, who plays the right-wing vice-president on 24, and Kevin McCarthy), I had counterterrorist-torture on my mind.

But I would’ve found last week’s New York Times story, “3 Suspects Talk After Iraqi Soldiers Do Dirty Work” deeply provocative in any case.

The conventional wisdom among U.S. military and intelligence experts, as it’s been reported since the beginning of the Iraq war, is that torture is ineffective – that seriously hurting and terrifying people doesn’t make them give up useful secrets, the M.O. of Jack Bauer and his colleagues on 24 notwithstanding. That was the gist of Jane Mayer’s piece about 24 in The New Yorker two months ago, which I wrote about here.

Yet this Times story shows unambiguously that at least among Iraqi insurgents (as opposed to hardened Al Qaeda fanatics, one imagines) torture can indeed do the trick, and probably save American lives.

An Iraqi army captain in Baghdad had his soldiers whip a suspected insurgent on the back with electrical cables. “I prepared him for the Americans and let them take his confession,” the officer told the Times reporter. “I don’t beat them that much, but enough so he feels the pain and it makes him desperate.”

Handed over to the Iraqis’ U.S. Army partners — who apparently learned of the beating only afterward, from the Times reporter – the man led them to an insurgent safe house. There the Americans found bomb detonators, coils of blasting wire, explosives, two large antiaircraft guns, and an oxygen tank “partly cut in preparation for being turned into a huge bomb, probably similar to the one that killed four [American] soldiers in [the] regiment a month earlier.”

It was nice to think that torture is never an effective means to a desirable end. This conventional wisdom let us entirely off the hook – we didn’t need to face the end-justifying-the-means moral questions, we thought, because the means never achieved the desired end. But it turns out we were misinformed.

It’s telling that this story hasn’t become a big subject of national discussion during the last week. A few gung-ho pro-war ideologues have written about it, because it seems to justify the balls-out viciousness they want to believe could still win the war in Iraq. And a few reflexive antiwar left-wingers have written about it, because it seems to justify their morally simple view of the war. But for the rest of us it is a complicating, deeply unsettling new fact as we wonder how we should extract ourselves from this complicated, deeply unsettling war.

Like lots of actual 19th century novels, most notably Charles Dickens’s, Heyday contains a few coincidences. OK, more than a few.

Dickens’s friend John Forster, a writer and editor himself, put it perfectly: “On the coincidences, resemblances, and surprises of life, Dickens liked especially to dwell, and few things moved his fancy so pleasantly. The world, he would say, was so much smaller than we thought; we were all so connected by fate without knowing it; people supposed to be far apart were so constantly elbowing each other; and to-morrow bore so close a resemblance to nothing half so much as yesterday.”

Since Carl Jung, we’ve called such meaningful real-life coincidences “synchronicity.” And just as Alfred Hitchcock famously said that movies are real life with the boring bits removed, movies and novels (and for that matter, pretty much all art) can also be real life with the boring bits removed and the extraordinary bits, including coincidence, emphasized.

Which is all a preface to my present book-tour visit to San Francisco. Here in the city where several of my novel’s major characters wind up, I received an email from someone I don’t know — a descendant of Nathaniel Prime, who had borrowed Heyday from her public library. Prime was a Wall Street banker in the first half of the 19th century, one of the richest men in New York. He and one of his sons are characters in my novel. His real-life descendant wrote wondering about my depiction of her great-great-great grandfather — was he truly a “scoundrel”? (Not so far as I know, I told her; in his case, since he is so little known today, I used extreme literary license.)

Most of what she told me about Nathaniel Prime I already knew from my research. What I certainly didn’t know was that he was “one of the most valuable acquaintances of Alexis de Tocqueville and [his partner] Gustave de Beaumont during their travels in the United States” in the 1830s, that he “entertained them in his home in Hell Gate” in present-day Queens, nor that his firm, Prime, Ward and King had “served their banking needs and forwarded their mail all over the country.”

Yet one of Heyday’s main characters, an entirely fictional Brit named Ben Knowles, has a cousin who is married to Tocqueville. And Prime, Ward and King serves as an American banker and mail-forwarder for Ben.

The moral of the story: existence is so thick with coincidence, only a small portion of which we get to glimpse, that even the most coincidence-riddled fiction probably understates its presence in real life.

Thank all of you who’ve bought Heyday so far: enough of you have done so, I was told last night, that the novel will appear on the New York Times’s bestseller list at #13 a week from Sunday. Which is, I confess, mighty sweet.

Although now I’ve undoubtedly jinxed everything.

At least the ones who attend readings are, judging from the questions asked by the 350-odd people who’ve shown up for the five readings I’ve done so far. (Today’s snowstorm, alas, forced the cancellation of the one at Jabberwocky Bookshop in Newburyport, Massachusetts, alas — but we’re going to try to reschedule.) The curiosity and and intelligence have been staggering. Yes, one lady at the New York event was somewhat intensely interested in how many blacks and Jews lived in Manhattan in 1848, but even she seemed sincerely interested in the sound and shape and feel of America in Heyday’s time.

Seven more to go in the next two weeks. It’s a mega-schlep, but I look forward to hearing America sing some more.

I’m on tour, so will be blogging only intermittently. But here is a brief excerpt from the novel, and an essay about the period in which the story is set.

No, not Bush, and not the war in Iraq — rather, our war in Mexico in 1848. This is what Congressman Abraham Lincoln demanded in a remarkable speech on the floor of the House on January 12th, 1848, concerning the U.S. invasion of Mexico.

President Polk, Lincoln said, must explain his war once and for all, “fully, fairly, and candidly.

“Let him answer with facts, and not with arguments….And if he can show that the soil was ours, where the first blood of the war was shed— that it was not within an inhabited country, then I am with him for his justification.

“But if he can not, or will not do this, then I shall be fully convinced that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong…that originally having some strong motive to involve the two countries in a war, and trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory…he plunged into it, and has swept, on and on, till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where.”

Awesome, no? And that’s a war that we were about to win, after less than two years of fighting.

One reads the reviews of one’s own book with an almost pathologically close scrutiny, of course. But it’s fascinating to discover how much other people apparently just…scan.

Although Heyday is getting overwhelmingly positive notices, I’ve received multiple congratulations on even the main not-so-positive one so far, Janet Maslin’s in Monday’s New York Times. A friend forwarded an email she got about it from an English literature teacher (and book reviewer) she knows: “I thought,” the guy wrote, “that it was a pretty darn good review.” And in fact, I realized, the review could be selectively distilled to seem positive — i.e., to say that Heyday is “meticulously produced,” “conceived on a grand scale,” full of “witty present-day resonance,” “interesting,” and “playful.” Hey, thanks, lady!

The most excellent email reaction I got to the Maslin review was from my friend Seth Mnookin, the writer. “I’m not sure how I would have reacted if you’d gotten a gushing write-up from the woman who called The Da Vinci Code ‘graceful,’ and ‘a riddle-filled, code-breaking, exhilaratingly brainy thriller….[The] word is wow.’”

In any event, happily, the Sunday Times Book Review this weekend is publishing a truly darn good review of Heyday on its cover, by the wonderful and august Geoffrey Wolff, whose Duke of Deception is one of my favorite books ever.

I’m friendly with Howard Stringer (singificant bits of him went into the media-mogul character Harold Mose in my novel Turn of the Century), and today’s long, front-page Wall Street Journal piece about his difficulties running Sony made me sigh sympathetically.

I like Howard because he’s genuinely funny and naturally candid and impolitic, virtues rarely-to-never present in big-time CEOs. His quotes in the Journal piece were true to form.

About the massive recall last year of Sony notebook computer batteries that tended to overheat dangerously, he said the company’s response to the problem “took too long for bizarre Japanese reasons that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life discussing.”

And about complaints by Japanese that he lives in a hotel when he’s there: “I have a home in England and I have a home in New York — I’m already bloody cross-cultural — and I just didn’t want to be in a lonely apartment somewhere in Tokyo even for symbolic reasons.” He should’ve “faked it better — I mean that seriously….I should’ve put the flag up the flagpole and said here’s my residence in downtown Tokyo — I’m here! — even if it’s less practical than living where I live, and much less comfortable and friendly.”

A little more than a decade ago we had lunch, at the Four Seasons in New York, at an interesting crossroads moment in his life. His misguidedly ahead-of-its-time company TeleTV had shut down. He was unemployed, and charmingly at sea. He told me he was thinking about becoming a writer, that he had a sitcom in mind he wanted to develop. I was enthusiastic, in favor of 90-degree career turns on principle.

Not long afterward I was fired from my job as editor-in-chief of New York, and started writing novels. And not many months after that Howard re-enlisted in the executive corps, becoming president of Sony America. I know I made the right decision, and whenever I read about the fresh corporate hells in which Howard finds himself, I always wonder if he thinks he did.

So I found myself chatting with a U.S. Senator not long ago, a Democrat, and asked him about Hillary versus Obama.

He likes them both. But because 2008 is “our year,” he said, he was for Mrs. Clinton — because she’s less likely than he to make campaign blunders.

But if Democrats have such a strong shot, I asked, why not go for it, and use the alignment of the stars to nominate the candidate whom we’d be thrilled (as opposed to content) to elect?

He didn’t really answer. Instead, he said, “In private, Hillary is warm, really different than she comes across in big public situations.”

But that, I said, is exactly what friends of Al Gore said in 2000, and friends of John Kerry in 2004. For all I know friend of Mike Dukakis said the same thing in 1988.

“Oh, John Kerry! Please. He’s one of the biggest assholes in the U.S. Senate!”