It’s the “my” in that sentence that gives the word its particular curdling quality.

We should love liberty—the word, I mean. Growing up I spent a lot of time hanging out at the Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers, and everyone understood, because we were from Massachusetts, that the name referred to the famous Boston Liberty Tree around which American patriots rallied before the Revolution, just as we understood that Patriots Day commemorated Paul Revere’s Ride and the Battle of Lexington and Concord. We were used to thinking of our state as the birthplace of American liberty.

Few who use the word liberty these days would associate it with Massachusetts. Liberty is not about same-sex marriage or universal health care. Indeed liberty seems mostly opposed to both, unless you catch a particular brand of libertarian who would reject the second but accept the first on the grounds that the state should stay out of marriage altogether.

Liberty, in its current usage, has a troubled relationship with the word freedom. It entirely lops off the second half of FDR’s four freedoms—freedom from want and freedom from fear—and is fitfully suspicious of the first two—freedom of speech and freedom of worship. (If you don’t believe me, try building a mosque in liberty’s neighborhood.) But then, you know, that’s FDR, from whose tyrannical legacy the liberty-lovers have long sought to be liberated.

Perhaps FDR was trying, as Obama still tries, to put the “our” in freedom, to remind us that we cannot separate the terms in the phrase “a free society.” The reach of that “our” is what liberty seeks to limit. For this reason, liberty, even in its American Revolutionary sense, is not in and of itself a good. The two brothers who attacked Boston on Patriots Day may have had more claim to the word liberty than the people they harmed. Incoherently, pointlessly, savagely, they were striking a blow for the liberation of Chechnya from Russia’s hegemonic power or Muslims from Westerners, as we did with Britain, as the South strove to do for the North, as latter-day patriots seek to do with the tyrannical power of the federal government. Liberty, in this sense, has no obvious inherent value. It might be a good, it might not.

What matters is what happens after liberty. What matters is freedom. Who believes that the South would have been a freer place if it had managed to secure its independence from the North? Who believes that America would be a freer place if our Minnesota radio host got his way? Freedom is a project and a difficult one. It requires many hands. Perhaps the Tsarnaev brothers inadvertently left us with an image of liberty and freedom: the isolated blow for liberty followed by the many-handed multitude working together to protect and secure their freedom.

You can still, of course, buy it as an e-book for your Kindle or Nook. The Kindle app allows you to read e-books on your tablet, smartphone, or laptop. (I know I’m supposed to like real books best [and I do, I do!], but as a new iPhone owner I’ve lately discovered the convenience of reading books on my phone on the subway.) The book is also available at Smashwords in various formats, including a PDF file.

I’ll also be at the Rainbow Book Fair on Saturday, April 13th. I’ll have some copies of the print edition on sale, and I’ll be reading a short excerpt from the novel, at about 12:30. Come by and see me!

But really.

Douthat has taken upon himself to understand the tragedy for us. Turns out it’s a matter of evil and suffering. Which are mysteries. He cites The Brothers Karamazov (a novel which, you’ll be glad to learn, is “famous”). He thinks that Ivan Karamazov might actually have a point when he accepts “that the Christian story of free will leading to suffering and then eventually redemption might be true, but rejects its Author anyway, on the grounds that the price of our freedom is too high.” (The price of freedom, in this case, seems to be 20 dead children.) He reminds us, at this festive season, that behind the Christmas story lie “[t]he rage of Herod” and “the slaughtered innocents of Bethlehem, and the myrrh that prepares bodies for the grave. The cross looms behind the stable — the shadow of violence, agony and death.” And these great and awful mysteries, he’s willing to allow, test our faith.

The last time I took issue with Douthat, I noted the “circularity” of his mind-set, the way “a certain type of mind veers helplessly towards systems—self-enclosed, self-perpetuating systems.” And the system is on full display here. He seems quite pleased that he has come to this understanding for us, that he has been able to construct from the horror his tone poem on the mystery of evil.

And I’m willing to believe the thing is mysterious. It’s occurred to me more than once today that we should understand these tragedies better by now. The pattern is familiar. We should have some way of analyzing it, of being able to name the pathologies that produce these acts if not to prevent them from happening. But, no matter how many times they happen, something about them remains opaque.

So, yes, there are mysteries here, but cosmic they’re not.

Because there are facts. The rate of gun deaths per 100,000 people in the U.S. (9.0) makes us twelfth in the world, ahead of South Africa but behind Montenegro. Our murder rate (4.2) is comfortably small compared to Brazil (21.0) or, God forbid, Honduras (91.6). But it’s several times the rate of other developed democracies: France (1.1), Italy (0.9), Japan (0.3). We’re also behind Morocco (1.4), Lebanon (2.2), and Afghanistan (2.4).

The most obvious reason for this is the unrestricted availability of guns. There are more than 200 million privately owned guns in America, and many of them are capable of such rapid, repeated deadly force as most of us, short of an alien invasion, will never need. So that’s part of it. And maybe, too, we should consider the political climate of the past several years in which the collectivist impulse was consistently construed as something the other guy was trying to take from you. Along with your guns.

But whatever. All those things can be discussed. Indeed they need to be discussed. And to shrug Friday’s tragedy off as part of God’s unfathomable ways is, to quote myself again, “another example of what [religion] can sometimes do to your moral sense.”

On the back of the flyer, in cramped blue writing, is the first draft of the scene which introduces Antonio in Chapter 6. I don’t have any memory of actually writing it. I don’t even know if I wrote it in Venice or in Vienna, where I spent Easter. Romantically, I’d like to think I wrote it in a café on some hidden campo, a quarto of wine in front of me and the April sun picking out the blue ink on the blue page. But who knows.

In the part I cropped for the photo (click on the thumbnail to see it), you can more or less make out a scene that, in the published version, reads like this:

Taking out a pack of cigarettes, he offers me one.

He shrugs. “When the Americans drop their bombs, I think it will not matter.” He offers Philip a cigarette, is refused, then lights one up himself. “Allora, what do we eat?” And he begins to explain the menu to us.

“A girl you are traveling with…” he murmurs. “Bene.”

Again the brief sarcastic smile. “Because I speak English too well. Ah, here is your friend.”

What strikes me now is how close this is to the scene I originally sketched. It’s present tense, not past, Richard’s name has been changed, and Antonio’s English is a little worse. The dialogue, particularly around the cigarettes, is handled more fluidly. But otherwise my first take on the scene matches the final one.

This isn’t true throughout the novel. For a long time the first line of the novel was “My sister Judith is a scientist.” Now it’s “Snow sifts by my bedroom window.” And this was part of a fairly extensive rewrite of the opening scenes. (Every revision entails some loss. I miss the way the old first line signaled that Judith would be central to the novel despite her disappearance for large stretches of it.) Most of the final third of the novel went through pretty drastic rewrites, and not much in between escaped rethinking, revision, cutting, expansion, reimagining. If such things interest you, here is a handout I prepared for a creative writing class I taught, which shows three versions of the scene between Mark and his father in Chapter 1.

So if there’s any lesson to be taken from the Antonio scene, it’s not “first thoughts, best thoughts.” Like most writers, I’d be pretty horrified if some of my first thoughts saw the light of day. But, also like most writers, I know the experience of getting it right the first time. (I hope we agree I got it right.) Maybe it’s a mystery, how you can sit down at a café, on a train, in a hotel room, and scribble out a scene that will remain intact while everything around it changes and changes again, even, as in this case, when the stuff around it didn’t exist at the time you were writing.

Or maybe it’s more straightforward than that. The scene, after all, is fairly utilitarian. It introduces one of the novel’s central characters, and what you mostly want to do—instinctively want to do—is make the reader want to know more about that character. So you add intrigue. There’s intrigue in Antonio’s mix of rudeness and hospitality (clearer in the rest of the scene) and, of course, in his line about knowing English too well. You can worry about the logic of this. Would Antonio really drop such a big hint about his personal troubles to a stranger? Is he being so approach-avoidance with Mark because he’s already, within a few minutes of meeting him, attracted? But these things are less important than the psychic snapshot you get. From these sketched outlines the character of Antonio expands. He’s written here in small.

Or maybe it’s love. It’s a dirty secret of writers that sometimes we love our characters. It’s not always predictable which characters you will love, though it probably helps to love a love interest. As I say, I don’t remember writing the scene, but it’s quite possible that, in that moment, a character who was until then somewhat notional—the young Italian love interest—suddenly sprang into confounding (Mark’s word) life. Such moments you preserve.

Smashwords offers the book in various formats. You can download it for your Kindle, Nook, or iPad, or if you’re like my many friends who have so far resisted e-readers, you can download it in Epub format, download Adobe Digital Editions for free, and read the book right on your computer.

At all events, I hope you do buy the book and enjoy it. Feel free to let me know what you think. And if you really like it, write an Amazon review!

This is Bruce Goldstone’s lovely, funny, and alluring cover for my novel The Traveler’s Companion. And I suppose we have to say “cover,” in quotes, since e-books don’t really have covers, per se. But if all goes according to plan you’ll be able to click on this image on Amazon or Smashwords and purchase a copy in less than two weeks.

Stay tuned!

In a speech before Congress on September 8, 2011, Barack Obama outlined what the Times called a “robust and far-reaching” plan for action on jobs and the economy. And you could almost hear the Republicans thinking, “But if we do that, the economy might get better, and we’ll lose the election.”

One good reason to vote for Barack Obama is that nobody should win with a strategy like that.

But a better reason is that nobody since, certainly not Mitt Romney or his running mate, has come up with an alternative plan that’s even remotely plausible.

I think it’s relatively easy to agree on the challenges we face. We have unacceptably high levels of unemployment and a rising deficit adding to a potentially crippling debt. Less mentioned, at least by Republicans, are surging poverty levels, the increasing concentration of wealth at the upper levels of society, and an infrastructure that risks falling behind our competitors both intellectually (education, research) and physically (roads, bridges, high-speed rail, green energy).

The idea that you’re going to fix all that by cutting taxes and slashing spending seems not just unworkable, but suicidal, a recipe for widening the wealth gap and compromising our infrastructure even further. Why would we want to be a third-world country? Even Brazil isn’t Brazil anymore.

It’s been a strange four years. I’m pretty pessimistic about human rationality in general (including my own), but I was still thrown by much of what went on. Half the country seemed to enter a phantasmagoric dream state where the president was born in Kenya no matter what those stupid people in Hawaii said; where end-of-life counseling for the aged and terminally ill amounted to “death panels”; where a lachrymose paranoiac soared Beale-like in the ratings by diagramming ever wilder conspiracy theories on a chalkboard, thus becoming a hero to people who went around in tri-corner hats because apparently the fifties were not far enough back in time to take the country; where a slightly left-of-center, business-friendly president who structured the country’s much-belated healthcare reform around the insurance industry was a socialist. (Not just a socialist but, in the preferred term of the lachrymose paranoiac television personality, a Maoist!) It was as if a nightmare version of America had devoted itself full-time to fantasizing a nightmare version of America.

And all this was before the Dance of the Demagogues, the carnivalesque Republican primary season in which one shameless, reality-challenged, hopelessly unqualified candidate after another shot ahead in the polls.

What were these people thinking? And by these people, I don’t just mean the tri-corner hat types who gave (for instance) a wild-eyed, Muslim-chasing Christian Dominionist with a pray-the-gay-away husband a brief moment as the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. I mean the people who egged them on. The Koch brothers and Fox News and the current Republican nominee.

A long time ago, a friend of mine gave me a book called When Prophecy Fails, on which I eventually based a screenplay. I describe the book elsewhere on this site, but its main thesis is that when a belief is dramatically “disconfirmed” the believers will become only the more convinced. And, in their anxiety to remain convinced, they will aggressively seek out new converts. By the end of 2008, a certain world view—a certain belief system—had taken some devastating hits. There was Iraq. There was Katrina. There was the worldwide financial meltdown. And then, as if to ratify the catastrophic failure of the belief system, some black guy got elected president. Lately I’ve been wondering if much of the craziness of the last few years is the result of a bunch of wealthy, influential people trying not to face up to the fact that they destroyed the livelihoods of millions of people worldwide. Nothing else accounts for the virulence with which they’ve tried to convince everyone that the problem is really the black guy. (Maintaining a death-grip on their influence and wealth probably has something do with it, too.)

I have to say the distortions weren’t limited to the right. On the left, I kept hearing that Obama was a “sell-out.” He “betrayed” us. He was the “disappointer-in-chief.” The result was a bizarre stereophonic dissonance. In one ear you heard “socialist” and in the other “corporate hack.” And, in both cases, I kept feeling that the world being described didn’t actually exist, or at least it was a world from which a great deal of context had been removed.

Obama has made mistakes, but he’s had to make complex political and policy calculations under very difficult circumstances. Among those circumstances has been the same scorched-earth opposition that made the jobs bill such a non-starter. If you or I might have calculated some of his decisions differently, then they’re legitimate occasions for critique, dissent, engaged discussion, but it’s hard for me to imagine anybody else—any specific, electable person—doing much better.

And the “disappointer-in-chief” crowd often elides his actual accomplishments which you can browse freely here.

Obama has been called a transformative figure which, of course, is part of why he’s so threatening to certain elements. But it also gets him in trouble among his supporters, who perhaps mistook the transformation as one promised instead of one ratified. To me, he’s always stood for something we’re becoming, not something he’s making us: a pluralistic, multi-racial, open-minded society able to have adult discussions about complex issues. (Remember the speech on race?) It’s no accident that same-sex marriage achieved majority support during his tenure, and no accident either that his role was not to promote that support but to validate it once it had arrived.

My own vote for Obama was and will be based on a conviction that he represents the country I want to live in. He’s a flawed man (can we just note that that’s a redundancy?) who’s made some mistakes and done some things I disagree with. I’m pretty sure, though, that there hasn’t been a better man occupying the office of president in my lifetime.

Vote for him.

Right now I’m thinking of an e-book, but even e-books need covers, so I asked Bruce Goldstone to design one for me. Bruce works with Blue Coyote and designed the haunting postcard for PARADISE and the delightful one for NANCE O’NEIL.

Bruce gave me four beautiful sketches to choose from, which made choice difficult since they were all so alluring. But I do believe the one I chose was the best fit for the book and the audience, and when Bruce is done working on it, I’ll share that one, too.

Meanwhile, you can click on the thumbnails to see two of the other sketches.

Oh, and I’ve also been updating my website, so take a look around while you’re here…

One of the problems with binaries is that words have a tendency not to stay put. (“They shuffle, they change,” says Virginia Woolf.) What do you mean by individualism? The Marlboro Man? Lady Gaga? Charles Lindbergh? Mussolini? Each a fair prototype of a different kind of individualism. By collectivism do you have in mind the Politburo? Or Chinese re-education camps? Or the public garden on Avenue B? Or the evangelical church on Avenue A? Or maybe, since individualism is often yoked to the pioneer spirit, the wagon train? Mormons? Here’s the good news: you don’t have to choose. You can (and probably should) mean all these things. But the fact that you don’t have to choose means you have to complicate your thinking.

You, future student, will try to slip this responsibility. When faced with complicating the individualism/collectivism binary you will say, “It’s both.” Or you will say, “You need to strike a balance.” And I will try to force you to describe what that balance might look like or, in the words of one of my colleagues, “what makes striking that balance hard.”

One of the things that can make Obama seem at times ill-suited to his job is that his mind seems instinctively to work that way. He’s interested in complexity. For this he gets accused of being professorial by those who, let’s say, prefer to keep it simple. In particular, he often gets himself in trouble when he tries to describe what the individual/collective balance might look like. In 2008 Joe the Plumber became fleetingly famous objecting to something Obama said about “spreading the wealth around,” though this was not an unreasonable way of addressing the fact that, for the last few decades, the upper percentiles of earners have been claiming a larger and larger share of the nation’s wealth. This year the “I built that” signs at Romney rallies are responding to Obama’s grammatically maladroit but factually correct assertion that no small business owner creates that business entirely on his or her own, without help from the collective. (The fact that Obama gave one of his more eloquent descriptions of the individual/collective dynamic while Paul Ryan sat in the audience looking bitch-slapped is adding some dramatic backstory to the race.)

Now, future student, you will bring your essay into conference with me, feeling very proud of it. And I’ll start raising objections: “You’ve said that this binary is meaningless and useless. But doesn’t that depend on what you mean by meaning and use?” Because of course Ryan’s statement is not actually meaningless. It may not have much meaning for policy prescription, but it has meaning as narrative. The very way it’s phrased, the sense of an epic battle fought for the highest of stakes, reveals its essentially narrative intent.

We’re all cynical handicappers of the horse race these days, and we think we know that word “narrative.” We know the importance of seizing the narrative, creating it, running it. But narratives are important for more than that. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion famously said. Stories create meaning, and that mysterious phrase—to create meaning—is the opposite of cynicism. It even hints at the basis of an ethical system, the task of creating meaning.

This is the reason, I think, that Ryan is often described as, and indeed appears to be, sincere, honorable, likeable, smart. It sets him apart from the Gingriches and the Bachmanns whose narratives ride (and often jump) the shark of opportunism. They don’t create meaning; they trash it. Ryan is, or appears to be, a true believer, and most of our narratives are in some way about belief.

I have a close relative who’s something of a star of the Pentecostal preaching circuit, and if you want to study the relationship between narrative and belief, you could do worse than bone up on Pentecostalism. I believe my relative to be a good man, with a good heart, but he’s also a dangerous man, at least to the extent that any man becomes dangerous at the moment his narrative stops being adequate to the world he encounters.

There’s been a great deal of cynicism and opportunism in the opposition to Obama, of the Mitch McConnell “our goal is to make him a one-term president” stripe. There’s been a lot of what may or may not be racism, but is certainly terror of the difference and change that a black man in the White House represents. But a large part of the problem is that we’re a nation of true believers. If the true believers at times seem to live in a zone that’s not so much information-free as information-impermeable, that has to do with the power of narrative, its oilskin toughness. In 2010, many of those true believers ended up in Congress, where they’ve spent two years failing to recognize that the world they’re encountering renders their narratives inadequate, with disastrous results.

It will be interesting to see what happens to Paul Ryan’s narrative. There are already signs that it’s being reshaped to meet either the reality of the world he’s encountering or the reality of a national campaign. But he actually doesn’t interest me all that much. I’m more interested in you, future student, and maybe I’m more interested in you as future citizen. If you take nothing else away from your four years at college, learn to recognize the moment when your narratives are no longer adequate to the world.