Gorky park
Smith, Martin Cruz
delivery unless the legislature comes up with funds to improve prison conditions. But one wonders whether judges, not all of whom are experienced politicians, are really better fitted than elected...
...Gorky Park is odd too, but gorgeous: a detective thriller carefully researched for a Moscow setting and a Soviet backdrop...
...Smith's first truly good novel...
...Since World War II the real cost and complexity of first-line combat aircraft have been increasing at a phenomenal rate, such that the mili tary will be buying only 250 this year as opposed to an annual average of nearly 3,000 in the 1950s...
...Suddenly it's become almost chic to view the Soviet Union through lenses untinted by indulgent Western rationalism...
...The $10 million dollar verdict handed down by a jury, full of a philanthropic desire to do some thing nice for a victim so long as it can be done with somebody else's money, really makes no sense: It is much more than is needed to cover the medical expenses and lost earnings of even a paraplegic, and no amount of dollars can really make up for blindness or life in a wheelchair...
...Smith is "currently at work on a novel about New Mexico...
...stopped writing after producing the well-nigh perfect Canticle for Leibowitz...
...Three bodies are uncovered in Moscow's Gorky Park, buried together under the ice beneath the snow...
...Sample this trope: The walls wept...
...if you're no explorer but merely into, cultural geography, you may as well wade through James A. Michener...
...I don't see much hope in "uniform federal legislation setting forth a standard of care" for manufacturers: It is hard to imagine the draftsmen producing anything much more precise than the common law's "reasonable care in the circumstances," and there would probably be just as much argument and just as many jury questions as there are today...
...Lieberman is almost certainly right in suggesting that the size of liability insurance premiums is usually even greater than is justified by the risk...
...Like borsch with unexpected pinches of cornstarch, the plot thickens without quite getting pasty, and in Moscow Arkady's painstaking work dislodges a number of ironic surprises which combine to earn him a lengthy round of ascetic molding at a KGB interrogation center isolated amid the peat fields outside Shatura...
...The information is chunky, but never obtrusive, always blended with purpose into an exquisitely tangled plot, with an often lyrical expression of setting and mood and character...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981...
...Congress could constitutionally curb the powers of federal judges, as it has done at least twice in the past when (as in the case of injunctions against strikes and peaceful picketing) it thought those powers were being abused...
...that Moscow's older buildings must be checked "A thoughtful and often cheeky monthly" whose "champion is Pope John Paul II...
...We are a new and unique monthly opinion magazine, the kind that Catholics have been searching for - in many cases - for decades...
...Smith's dramatic stitching is astonishingly plausible-neatly tailored to the grim reflections of Solzhenitsyn and to the grimly hilarious observations of Voinovich...
...Odd booksof-the-hour, all of them-useful, no doubt, for their unsentimental views of Russia's socialist experiment and possibly of interest to future cultural historians, but eminently forget table to future literary historians...
...But Mr...
...F119, 163-09 Depot Flushing, NY 11358 NOVELS by J. lnchardi $11 each Lines On The Death Of A Fisherman Three Jews In A Tub Dreamship Yurros A Paper Toy Intercurse Jehovah Mafioso Saturn Maru Order by mail from Sinus Books, P.O...
...People whose suits are truly frivolous, brought mainly to harass or blackmail the defendant (though such suits are not very common), ought to be made to pay at- least his counsel fees...
...Descriptions of the frightful conditions in some prisons and mental hospitals make me sympathize with judges who stretch their powers to correct them...
...Maneuverability, when combined with tactics and pilot skill, often proved to be more important in air-to-air combat than maximum speed or ceiling...
...In Mr...
...The Spike, Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss's odd roman a clef about Soviet disinformation, is now selling briskly in paperback after lingering for months on the New York Times bestseller list...
...that an urka is a professional criminal...
...Amid the usual potboilers that turn on corporate fraud, CIA turpitude, and neo-Nazi recidivism, a handful of bookstore biggies have pursued themes of Soviet intransigence, KGB perfidy, and Western insouciance about Soviet intentions...
...or $8.50 (elsewhere) for a one-year subscription, starting with the current issue...
...My money's on Martin Cruz Smith...
...funds) O One-year student or retired person's sub...
...Finley...
...TravLtiPs , Dept...
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...The bodies are preserved by the freeze, but the fingertips are sheared off and the faces neatly flayed: a professional job, evidently, but who did it...
...We strongly support the Polish Pope's valiant efforts to protect Poland from the Soviet imperialists and to enhance social justice, both in Poland and throughout the world...
...15 (regularly $24) Make check payable to "American church union" and mail to: NAME (Please print or type) STREET ADDRESS New Oxford Revlew Room 104 6013 Lawton Ave...
...Beyond the conceptual problem lies a bureaucratic one of persuading Francis Fukuyama is on the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State...
...It takes quite an imaginative leap, but, given the suppleness of the human spirit and the imbecility of the police state, a character like Chief Investigator Arkady Renko follows...
...The favorite technique is to set a very low threshold of medical expenses, in New Jersey only $200, above which the accident victim retains his good old common law remedy, including "pain and suffering...
...I have found some of the best rendering of Catholic teaching and tradition in your Review - and not in Catholic periodicals of like format, where one would normally expect to find it...
...and if you care to risk learning a little about everything (without, that is, any risk whatever to your sense of style), a well-wrought detective/ad- CITY STATE ZIP CODE PAYMENT MUST ACCOMPANY ORDER venture novel is a good start, and we L ----, ~~ ~--~ Yes, that's the New Oxford Review...
...We address a variety of religious and secular topics, and various viewpoints are aired...
...So read it and enjoy it and place your bets...
...Money back if not pleased...
...a few more surprises persuade Arkady's KGB tormentors to send him to New York City, where he discovers that...
...NATIONAL DEFENSE James Fallow$ / Random House / $12.95 Francis Fukuyama SAVE YOUR GAS...
...1 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SPECIAL DISCOUNT RATES FOR FIRST-TIME SUBSCRIBERS fl One-year subscription...
...Oakland,'CA 94618 I THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 33 annually for bricks loosened by the winter cold...
...10001 The writer may believe it, and his writing may consequently go to hell...
...The Quantity-Quality debate is by now an old one in the Air Force...
...Obviously the Tennessee legislature, dominated by the country politicians, was not going to reform itself: Only the Court could intervene...
...ly, dealing with all aspects of language...
...that in Russia the only legal use of gold is to restore ikons for the tourist trade...
...But the stamps on Arkady'$ Party card seem always to show him a few months behind on his dues, and Arkady professes Communism with the intensity of a George Smiley ingsley Amis once remarked that a critic should resist the temptation to call a fine writer a ''creative artist.'' you'll love VERBATIM, The Language Quarter...
...The Air Force was not a little embarrassed to discover at Red Flag that in engagements involving more than two airplanes a relatively simple F-5 costing approximately $5 million would often "shoot down" sophisticated F-15s costing $25 million...
...34 St., New York, N.Y...
...and so forth...
...that the best lapis lazuli is found in Siberia...
...defense policy designed for the general reader...
...But the major feat is the characterization of Arkady Renko-whose misty entanglement with Irina, a dissident Mosfilm actress, is no less futile than his early tortured efforts at salvaging his paper marriage to Zoya, an unloving would-be Party apparatchik-and who runs into a different order of trouble in New York City, where, even without his principal conflicts, his energies are half drained by sheer cultural anomie: The houses are too roomy, the cars too mottled, the roads too paved, the lights too many, the people too starched and perfumy, and his detective counterparts in the NYPD: They're so damned independent...
...But one wonders whether judges, not all of whom are experienced politicians, are really better fitted than elected officials to set priorities for the expenditure of what is, after all, a limited amount of public revenue...
...Roam the world 1st class by freighter or cruise ship at tremendous savings...
...This is, however, very strong medicine, not lightly to be prescribed...
...that Russian racists (which is to say most of Soviet officialdom in Moscow) hate Africans, Jews, and Orientals more or less on the sly, but are oddly candid about their feelings of superiority over Arabs...
...and now a splendidly scrupulous talent by the name of Martin Cruz Smith...
...The Third World War, Sir John Hackett's odd 1977 mix of pseudo-documentary narrative and weapons-manual jargon, hit the top twenty in paperback after the Soviet- invasion of Afghanistan...
...In this debate Fallow$ comes down on the side of the so-called "Fighter Mafia" in the Pentagon-men like John Boyd and Pierre Sprey who have consistently argued that such cost increases have been driven by excessively abstract and demanding performance criteria which are mostly irrelevant to real-world combat requirements...
...Published 10 times a year by AngloCatholics, the New Oxford Review believes the battle for Christian truth is being fought inside all denominations and communions...
...But the KGB stands back, watchful, even as Arkady gathers evidence that puts the murder case far outside his usual investigative area (drunken family hatchet murders and the like...
...Hence, we maintain strong links to Evangelicals, Pentecostalists, the Eastern Orthodox, and others...
...Box 177 Freeport, Maine 04032 James Fallow$, a former Carter speechwriter who had the sense to leave the administration early, has written a short book of U.S...
...Kurt Vonnegut, Jr...
...But it's surely a scary time for the writer, when he produces something like Gorky Park, an eight-year labor that wavers beyond a consistently expert craftsmanship toward genuine art...
...that by American law Russian mink cannot be imported into the U.S., but Russian sable can...
...This led the Navy to establish its Top Gun and the Air Force its Red Flag program designed to give pilots realistic combat training...
...Allow 6 weeks...
...It is not true that "the common law itself developed through the antics of the tiny class of aristocrats...
...It may have to do with the fact that the conscientious novelist, always obsessed with detail, does his research in order to "get it straight," whereas even the conscientious professional scholar, usually attuned to controversy, often conducts his research in order to prove a point (or, euphemistically speaking, to "examine a hypothesis"-and if you think I overstate the case, read David Hackett Fischer's Historians' Fallacies...
...Lieberman has done a commendable job of describing and documenting a serious problem of which most of us were vaguely aware, but whose details and dimensions we didn't know...
...Moreover, we unabashedly champion the Pope in his struggle tosave Christian orthodoxy from Hans Kung and all the other questionable theologians who have had a field day undermining the faith and morals of a generation of Catholics...
...Cameron, Francis Canavan S.J., Robert Coles, Joseph Fessio S.J., Carl F.H...
...John R. Dunlap teaches English at the University of Santa Clara...
...In Moscow half of Arkady'$ energies (and many of Gorky Park's most spell-binding ironies) are taken up by his intricate, sometimes comic maneuvers in, out, and around the ritual frauds of bureaucratic busybodies and the murderous shenanigans of KGB goons...
...Our editor is Dale Vree...
...A vote in rural Moore County had been worth nineteen in urban Hamilton County...
...Please allow 2 to 8 weeks for delivery of first issue...
...O GORKY PARK Martin Cruz Smith 1 Random House 1$13.95 John R. Dunlap Over the past half decade, something odd has taken place in bestsellerdom...
...Gorky Park invites more than one reading, and reads as if there's more and maybe even better to come...
...Limits could be placed on damage awards, especially for "pain and suffering," often a term of art meaning "counsel fees," . which is frequently the largest component of an award...
...Struck by the professional quality of the murders and dogged ineptly by an underling whom he knows to be...
...The Railroad Brotherhoods have managed to beat it off, and to retain their common-law tort remedy, for three quarters of a century...
...Our hero, the Moscow militia's Chief Homicide Investigator Arkady Yaailevich Renko -a tall, dark-haired Ukrainian, thin but somewhat paunched in his early middle age-chain-smokes through an elaborate investigation of a triple murder...
...A good example of how Fallow$ mixes sensible ideas with confused ones is his discussion of aircraft procurement...
...have the work of such luminaries as Dorothy Sayers, John D. MacDonald, Daphne DuMaurier, John le Carrc, Alistair Maclean...
...O professing Sunday-morning Anglicanism: a .professional sleuth, mildly cynical, vulnerable under the calluses, utterly competent at his work -and utterly bewildered by the universe outside his work...
...Today the first effort of counsel for an injured worker is to look for some third party-say the manufacturer of the machine which hurt the employee-to sue at common law...
...And why is Arkady allowed so much latitude in his investigation...
...I wish that other Catholic magazines (one of which I first subscribed to some 33 years ago) had exhibited such courage...
...And, bless him, America's resident Cassandra, Allen Drury, has lately come out with the odd Hill of Summer, ' which extrapolates a complicated series of determined Soviet maneuvers and fatuous Western blunders issuing in a Soviet strategic checkmate against the United States...
...6 (regularly $9) E One-year Canadian or foreign subscription...
...evidently exhausted his talent with Slaughterhouse-Five and should have stopped, as Walter M. Miller, Jr...
...On the other hand, Balzac kept writing after Le Dernier Chouan, and the dustcover tells us that Mr...
...We feature a regular column by James Hitchcock giving a running commentary on the continuing battle between the Holy Father and the modernists, and our Rome Correspondent files dispatches from inside the Vatican...
...If it were, there would surely be a helpful reduction in the caseload of the federal courts...
...Suffice it, then, that Gorky Park is, by his own approximate count, Martin Cruz Smith's thirty-first novel-and, by his own evaluation, Mr...
...9 (regularly $11) (Payment must be drawn in U.S...
...In a totalist police state, the ordinary policeman is no less oppressed than the hapless citizen, and one of the minor feats of Gorky Park is that it exposes-incidentally and therefore powerfully-the very core of the totalitarian social order: a system that tacitly encourages its captive people to hate each other...
...Our writers include such diverse and exciting people as Peter L. Berger, J.M...
...Workers' compensation, under which employees are compensated without regard to the employer's negligence, but also without damages for pain and suffering, certainly cut the cost of paying the victims of job-related accidents, but it is probably today not really popular with labor...
...With every precise question of detection he formulates, Arkady aches vaguely with the cosmic "Why...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 my connections to the Soviet hierarchy...
...sorry, you'll have to read it...
...And at one point or another in this vigorously compassionate novel, just about every characterwhether downright evil or merely tormented-literally or figuratively wants to kill Arkady Renko...
...New authors welcomed...
...The pattern is familiar: Hack writer hones skill into craft and then, maybe, transcends craft with art...
...2.50 O Three-year subscription...
...And yes, we are cheeky - but then, we believe that with John Paul lion the throne of Peter, orthodox Catholics no longer have an excuse to hide their light under a bushel...
...But the best is yet to come, for Michael Novak judges us "a cutting edge in American religious thought," and the Library Journal has solemnly announced that "this fine journal will doubtless command increasing attention...
...Or if you want to know what the Old West was really like, you should read Louis L'Amour...
...a KGB informer, Arkady Renko can't understand why the KGB doesn't take the case off his hands-and he hopes at first to wash his and the militia's hands of the grisly business by finding evidence that would require him to turn the case over to State Security...
...At any rate, if you want to nibble on the roots of Western culture and haven't the time nor the inclination to acquire Greek and Latin, you'd do better to dip into the novels of Mary Renault, Lawrence Durrell, or Robert Graves than you would to spelunk in the cavernous abodes of WilamowitzMoellendorff, Michael Rostovtzeff, or M.l...
...Fallow$ admits that he is not a professional defense specialist and, like many Carterites, was of the generation opposed to the Vietnam war and things military in general...
...Henry, Thomas Howard, Erazim Kohak, Arthur F. McGovern S.J., Richard John Neuhaus, John T. Noonan Jr., Paul Ramsey, James V. Schall S.J., Paul Seabury, Sheldon Vanauken, and Robert E. Webber...
...The plaintiff and defendant in Weaver v. Ward (1617) were members of the London trainbands who were skirmishing with loaded muskets...
...Although modern fighters are individually far If You Love Words, superior to their predecessors, it is quite legitimate to ask whether we would not be better off acquiring substantially larger numbers of more austere aircraft...
...Beale (1699), which laid down a basic principle of the law of damages, were topers who got into a tavern brawl...
...No-fault legislation could do much to reduce the cost of litigating fault (most of your liability insurance premium goes to the lawyers), but in all but one or two states the American College of Trial Lawyers and similar organizations (very powerful lobbies, for lawyers are grossly overrepresented in most legislatures) have managed either to defeat or emasculate such bills...
...And in Mr...
...Newsweek Gorky Park triggers a generalization which, for some years now, my reading experience has evidently been tamping into the muzzle of my unconscious: ''Popular novelists make the best researchers.'' It's a thunderous generalization-rather like "Women are emotionally stronger than men"-a cheeky inference: semantically idiosyncratic, logically preposterous, empirically unverifiable-and probably true: On the whole, popular novelists probably do make the best researchers...
...Lieberman, who does not ignore these evils, that too much litigation is better than too little redress for innocent victims of automobiles, drugs, and all the risks inevitably created by modern technology...
...Sometimes in winter half the basements in Moscow cried...
...Still, there may be things that could be done to mitigate the evils without abolishing the new and fairer system of redress...
...As one professor in Massachusetts wrote us, "Your strong defense of Pope John Paul II in the Hans Kung affair warmed my heart...
...Smith's Gorky Park, for example, we learn that Moscow pay phones operate on two-kopeck pieces...
...And how far can he trust Kirwill, a vengeful New York City detective, fluent in Russian, who comes to Moscow as a tourist and then falls in secretly with Arkady to settle a score for the death of a kid brother, the American murder victim...
...Smith's portrait of the main character, Arkady Renko, we also learn something of what it's like to live in the Soviet Union...
...Despite the general excellence of The Litigious Society there are, inevitably, inaccuracies and exaggerations...
...And who are the mutilated victims...
...And though National Defense is a readable and at times absorbing introduction to certain select defense topics, it unfortunately seems destined to become the gospel of the late-night talk show crowd...
...Take Baker v. Carr, the one-man-one-vote case, in which the Supreme Court ordered Tennessee to reform its allotment of members of the legislature among its counties, so that each county was represented in approximate proportion to its population...
...And here's what others are saying about us: Newsweek praises our "childlike exuberance," National Review pronounces us "first rate," and Pastoral Renewal says we're "sharply written and well-edited...
...The clues lead him soon enough to the identities of the three murder victims (two Siberians, male and female, and one American male) and to his prime suspect, a wealthy and ruthless American furrier with chum 'Doubleday $14.95...
...5 (regularly $7) Sample copy...
...And yet it must be recognized that in some circumstances the courts are justified in stepping in to fill a vacuum left by the legislature...
...But on the whole I am inclined to agree with Mr...
...At any rate, Mr...
...The tidal wave of litigation clearly produces some evils, such as discouraging entrepreneurs from introducing new but perhaps unsafe technology, increasing the cost of medical care, and frustrating the development of new (or even old) sources of energy...
...that in the lexicon of Russian street talk the proper way to express exasperation is by an idiomatically inscrutable expletive ''yob' vashu mat' "which translates as "F--- your mother...
...We wait, then, as I shinny out on a critic's limb to note a scintillating creative flair about Gorky Park: not a single constipated sentence, not a trace of the intrusive artistic temperament, not a page lacking that telltale suggestion of the effortless, which, for the writer, follows only on great effort wed faithfully to minute detail...
...The Chief Investigator is a Communist, of course...
...ESSEXOCT 06426 USA A'" AUTHORS WANTED BY NEW YORK PUBLISHER Leading subsidy book publisher seeks manuscripts of all types: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, scholarly and juvenile works, etc...
...Or sample this deft brushstroke for a psychological portrait of a devious minor character: "A figure of white or black painted by his own winks, supported by the names he dropped...
...Lord Peter could have adjusted easily -not Investigator Arkady, whose routine flashes of brilliance are powerless to illuminate his own angst...
...that Soviet prosecutors represent the state and the defendant-defense lawyers, for those who can get them, are trained in a single specialty: plea-bargaining...
...His book is not polemical and a number of his conclusions are quite sensible, but others are more confused if not downright misleading...
...Lieberman disclaims any intention to write a legal treatise, and such occasional lapses are pardonable, especially when for some of them he can cite the authority of people who do claim to be legal scholars...
...To mention only a few, familiar to every lawyer who remembers his study of the history of the common law, Armory v. Delamirie (1722) involved a chimney sweep who had found a ring and a goldsmith's apprentice who tried to cheat him out of it...
...Recognition of this problem began in Vietnam, where the Navy and Air Force found that hot new planes like the F-4 were getting shot down by Korean-war vintage MiG-17s and -19s...
...V j;j~ fl,f ]. J 1.1 V1...
...Besides surface rivers, ancient underground rivers burrowed through the city, blind and unseen currents with lost directions...
...BEAT INFLATION...
...Likewise, there is very little evidence to support the assertion that there was a time when "no duty of care [was] owed to anyone...
...The protagonists of Fetterv...
...But what could the motive be...
...Send for tree, illustrated 40-page brochure H-80 vantage Press, 516W...
...The dramatis personae of the famous cases of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were often far from the nobility...
...But such assumption of legislative power ought to be used with great restraint...
Vol. 14 • September 1981 • No. 9
