The Girl Who Played with Fire, by Stieg Larrson

Life is too short to spend time with books like this. That probably (likely) sounds a bit snobby. And maybe it is. But what recompense do I get having spent 200+ pages on a book I kept expecting to return to the moody dark suspense that at least attempted, and partially succeeded, to permeate its predecessor, The Girl with Dragon Tattoo, only to find after too much time that this story is a linear, flavorless, mood-less boring tale. Was it even written by the same person? OK. Here’s my problem with the book – it’s a sequence of mostly uninteresting events that happen to mostly poorly developed characters. I’m sure that it gets gruesome and unsettling later in the tale. But that’s not why I read books – ideas, interesting prose and a good tale are what I’m after. If I want gruesome and unsettling, I’ll read the daily paper.

The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson

How many psychopaths do you know? By accounts, you should know a few, or knew a few depending on how and with whom you are spending your time. Maybe between one and three in every 100 people would meet clinical criteria to be diagnosed psychopathic. That is unsettling. Well, perhaps if you told me one to three percent of people were sociopathic, I would agree – don’t we all know those ruthlessly manipulative people who would carve you apart for a promotion at work, your place in the grocery checkout line, your position as town alderman,  coach of your son’s little league team? Carve you apart like a rump roast without thinking twice about it! How much difference is there between sociopaths and psychopaths? Not much according to Wiki http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_difference_between_a_sociopath_and_a_psychopath and they are both lumped clinically in the same category in the DSM IV – if you don’t know about the DSM IV, you can learn all about it by reading Ronson’s romp through the madness industry. It’s a fun read, not a little frightening and will make you the wiser for it. As a physician (non-psychiatrist), I would have preferred some more clinical/scientific “meat” to chew on. Nevertheless, there is much to be appreciated here. I particularly liked the bit about the scientologists and the Oak Ridge program in the 60’s (prisoners and LSD, what’s not to like?) One of the more interesting and scary things about psychopaths is their ability to feign normalcy. So normal, in fact, that you may know them for some time before they do something that gets your hackles up.  And they are charming! It’s a complete fabrication, that charm. Biologically, they seem to lack a critical connection between their amygdala and their frontal cortex (brain structures, for the uninitiated). They know that they are different and the more astute among them are excellent students of human behavior – they model it for our benefit. If you don’t know much about psychopathy you will find much reward in this book. If you are a student of psychopaths or work or live with one, you may find great humor or horror here as well.

The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace

Long stretches of superlative, captivating writing in a non-linear, even more discohesive than normal for Wallace, narrative. The backstory, of course is that Mr. Wallace died before completing this novel and what we have was patched together by his editor (the same one who worked with him on Infinite Jest – see earlier post) and his wife. A major theme of the text is “attention” and “concentration” in the setting of boredom. How navigating the boredom of daily life can lead to a transcendent understanding of one’s existence, or even just a transcendent existence if you recall Drinion levitating on his chair while listening to Meredith Rand wax on about her psychiatric issues. Was Wallace bored himself? He uses, and reportedly researched extensively, the IRS in the mid 1980’s as a platform on which to discuss this idea. Tax return review by the IRS was a manual task at that time. Rooms full of people poring over tax returns to identify which ones should be audited. Sounds like a boring task to me. But who knows? Hell, I look through a microscope for hours every day and generally find that interesting. But the mind tends to wander with repetition and the ability to sustain concentration is a skill, no doubt. The novel reads more like a collection of short stories around a central theme. The characters from one story/chapter are loosely connected, at best, and really only have in common working at the IRS center. But you don’t need a cohesive narrative to enjoy this work – it vibrates with fantastic, humorous and insightful writing.