THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk (Doubleday, 260 pp., $24.95). In Palahniuk’s stories, there usually seem to be two kinds of people: suckers who believe in widely...
...Writing a newspaper column means following a formula—you just can't write that frequently without one...
...The basic story involves Carl Streator, an ethically challenged journalist investigating Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, who discovers the cause for a string of crib deaths...
...In the nurseries of several SIDS victims, he finds a copy of a book called Poems and Rhymes from Around the World, each one opened to the same song...
...In Lullaby, the author of Fight Club and Choke has constructed a horror tale—on the foundation of a wish-fantasy that the spoken word regains the power it has lost ever since it came under siege from mass media...
...Rather quickly the temptation to kill proves irresistable for Streator...
...Reading Will in large doses offers a reminder that conservatism can be vigorous without succumbing to sophomoric ranting...
...Someone's always spraying the air with their mood...
...Lee Bockhorn...
...You can't think...
...offer proof of something a past reviewer noted about George Will: He actually improves when he is angry— when his skill as a polemicist is fortified by a gut-level intensity...
...He combines erudition with logic and wit, and a loving use of the English language with a talent for applying history and philosophy to the everyday glories and absurdities of America...
...Dead people laughing...
...Two decades ago, Will wrote that column-writing "is not hard for someone blessed with a Tory temperament and sentenced to live in this stimulating era...
...Notable in this respect are his withering pieces on partial-birth abortion and infanticide, his sparkling commentaries on the "Lewinsky Parenthesis" in America's political conversation, and an entire chapter's worth of columns demolishing campaign finance reform...
...His latest effort is therefore a pleasant surprise, his first novel not to leave one wondering whether there’s any Pepto-Bismol in the house...
...You can't concentrate...
...To use a metaphor from Will's beloved pastime of baseball: When presented with a fat pitch over the plate, some of today's more notorious scribes seem to prefer ignoring the pitch in favor of sprinting to the mound to bludgeon the pitcher...
...Perhaps they should crack open this book to see how a veteran craftsman raps pitch after pitch into the bleachers...
...Yet, what sets him apart from those happier nihilists is his desire to return to conventional morality...
...David Skinner With a Happy Eye But...: America and the World, 1997-2002 by George F. Will (Free Press, 367 pp., $27...
...He struggles to control himself, and even sets out to destroy all existing copies of the book, but he soons finds himself in moral territory more familiar to Palah-niuk's earlier heroes...
...And yet, Will's conservatism is permeated by his understanding that politics, while essential, is not the most important thing in life...
...Singers shouting...
...Some columnists focus on shoe-leather reporting (Robert Novak, William Safire), others on particular areas of interest (Robert Samuelson on economics, Thomas Friedman on foreign affairs), while others indulge in more glittering or unctuous prose (Maureen Dowd, Anna Quindlen...
...The narrator repeatedly complains about our noisy, talky culture, of constantly blaring radios and television sets: "Anymore, no one's mind is their own...
...In some ancient cultures," Streator explains, "they sang it to children during famines or droughts, anytime the tribe had outgrown its land...
...The columns, speeches, and book reviews collected in With a Happy Eye But...
...There's always some noise worming in...
...Actors crying...
...Despite its playful slaying, Lullaby marks a striking departure from the assaultive gloom and bodily preoccupations of Fight Club and Choke and thus offers those not familiar with Palahniuk a less punishing taste of his often-rewarding work...
...All these little doses of emotion...
...In Palahniuk’s stories, there usually seem to be two kinds of people: suckers who believe in widely accepted moral codes, and anti-social rebels asserting their own idiosyncratic philosophies...
...George Will has become the most consequential columnist of his generation by following his own formula...
...It's a lullaby that instantly kills whoever hears it...
Vol. 8 • October 2002 • No. 5
