Michael On Everything

Women often intuitively sense men, whether consciously or subconsciously, trivialize their needs or conspire against them for unfair advantage in the workplace, but leave it to a molecular biologist to be canny enough to come armed with a tape measure — literally. When Nancy Hopkins complained for the umpteenth time about being shorted on supplies, resources, and lab space — she hadn’t yet bolstered the courage to set her sights on salary and tenure — her (male) bosses at MIT told her once again she was “imagining things,” so she spent a few late night hours on her hands and knees doing what scientists always do: collect data to prove a hypothesis (hint: she was right). Her afterhours stunt served as a smashing lede to Kate Zernike’s original article detailing how Hopkins spearheaded an investigation into her university’s systemic gender discrimination problem, but here Zernike builds toward it, highlighting along the way a career’s worth of undervalued contributions and accumulated microaggressions, beginning with her mentor James Watson’s condescending dismissal of Rosalyn Franklin, the first to photograph DNA’s double helix if not the first to recognize its significance. In terms of narrative impact, the two hundred or so pages that set up the main story are crucial: few of the fifteen women who co–signed Hopkins’s initial letter to MIT’s sympathetic dean considered themselves as “political” or “feminist,” instead subscribing, perhaps naively, to the meritocratic hope that the men in charge would esteem their work as highly as their male counterparts, regardless of whether they, say, had the gall to ask for maternity leave or not. The not–so–unpredictable twist? To a woman, not one of Hopkins’s co–signees had ever taken maternity leave — following spoken and unspoken “rules,” they willfully put their personal lives on hold, and in terms of career advancement, it didn’t make a difference. Yet the book ends on a hopeful note — by finally sharing their experiences with each other, the women learn their problems are indicative of larger issues, which in turn opens up paths of communication to their male counterparts, who other than a few foreseeable exceptions are surprisingly open to the truth they might not be as enlightened and liberal as they think. Victories: take them where you can get them. A Grade: A

An addict of "the new unpleasantness" chronicled in Amis's scathing quartet of novels spanning from 1984's Money to 1995's The Information, I staved off reading this much–derided 2003 item for twenty years after chortling at Tibor Fischer's snarky dismissal in The Daily Telegraph, described by Wikipedia as "one of the most quoted statements in a book review of modern times": "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not–knowing–where–to–look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder (not only because of the embargo, but because someone might think I was enjoying what was on the page). It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating." Such heightened polemic responses sometimes suggest a work of great promise, but after Amis's 2000 memoir Experience (and, it should be added, September 11th), both his prose and public persona took a unfathomably dark turn into midlife rancor: misogyny, Islamaphobia, and bottomless contempt for any knuckle–dragging plebe who jerked off to page three of The Daily Mirror rather than Henderson the Rain King. True, you could see hints of what was to come in his earlier novels, and as a return to cynical farce this still has an electricity his later, more "serious" snoozefests House of Meetings and The Zone of Interest do not. Nevertheless, his disdain for humanity was far more attractive when he was younger — like it or not, this kind of reactionary disgust with a modern world perceived to be de–evolving morally and intellectually is the emotional context of right wing pearl clutching. While "horror day," the apocalypse in the 1989 masterpiece London Fields, seemed personal, with Amis's authorial surrogate implicated along with his icky femme fatale and boorish darts champion, here the agent of destruction, a comet hurtling toward Earth, appears to be sent by an angry universe to wipe out sexual depravity, which Amis seems to define as anyone whose erotic proclivities extend beyond three–minute missionary with the missus every other Sunday. Are pedophilia, ephebophilia, incest, anal sex, facials, and gender noncomformity all equally worthy of appoprobation? Amis apparently thinks so, which makes me...suspicious. Granted, sometimes I found myself laughing out loud at this material despite my disgust with the author's puritanism, as when porn starlet Karla White details sodomy's increasing acceptance in "the Industry" to tabloid scuzzball Clint Smoker: "The rallying cry was Pussies are Bullshit...One director said, 'With anal, the actress's personality comes out'" (a warped insight Amis nicked from John "Buttman" Stagliano in a notorious piece he wrote for The Guardian, but never mind). Otherwise, the jokes are forced, the writing overtaxed, and the final forty pages an utter mess. It may be possible to imbue this sort of bleakly taboo subject matter with humor, but Amis isn't the guy to do it. I mean really, anyone who thinks texting shorthand signals the demise of the English language is way too fucking uptight — if I met a woman who used the grapheme neologisms "axiom@ic" and "vener&" and "ezra £" in an iPhone missive, I couldn't send out those eggplant emojis fast enough. B− Grade: B−