White Noise by Don DeLillo

Disclaimer: I am very much a product of go-go 80s Reaganaut commercialism. I owned the Rainbow Brite dolls created by Hallmark. I nagged my mom to get whichever sugary cereal had the best cartoon mascot. I drank the Kool-Aid--literally!

So maybe that's part of why White Noise, the latest Jacob-Katy book club selection, didn't reach me as deeply as it should have. As a criticism of America's hysterical consumer culture, the book feels like familiar territory. What must have seemed novel to DeLillo and his readers in the early 1980s (pre-internet, pre-cable, pre-Oprah) now feels kinda stale. We know we're surrounded by a hum of constant radiation--we just don't seem to care anymore. Being alarmed about it seems almost quaint and Cold War-ish, like Yakov Smirnoff.

DeLillo chooses to do a sendup of a "normal" family by making his protagonists as wacky as possible: Jack, the Hitler-scholar father; pill-popping fourth wife who reads erotic poetry aloud; ex-wives who all happen to be spies; and an assortment of kids who do super-precocious things like research prescription drugs and have glib opinions about consumerism. They're a boisterous, name-brand-buying crew that functions pretty normally until there's a chemical spill in town, and all the suburban "white noise" overwhelms them. In the resulting panic there's a lot of "I told you so" going on, from the teenage son and Jack's smug fellow professor, who studies Elvis Americana and looks down on suburbia.

By the time the cloud hits, any chance at literary subtlety goes out the window. If DeLillo let the reader infer anything, the book would be more enjoyable. But alas, he does not. Want to parody society's obsession with death? Have two characters argue over who's more afraid to die. Of course. I'm down with absudity, but it's done so self-consciously here. There's no challenge to figuring anything out, because there's always a character doing it for you.

DeLillo's writing is technically fine, and he has some really great descriptive stuff going on. Like Jacob, I just found it hard to connect with any of it. Maybe I should take some Prozac for my apathy, and wash it down with some refreshing Diet Coke.

Sloane Crosley Redux

So continuing our new hobby of Timely Literary Jaunts, SPG and I caught a reading by Sloane Crosley (whom you may remember from last week, or, umm, right below, if this is still on the main blog page). She and Keith Gessen were speaking at Court Books in Brooklyn, in support of their respective first books.

It didn't do much to dispel the theory that we could totally be writing and promoting books like these ourselves as twentysomething editors. But unfounded bitterness aside, it was fun. The whole thing had a fun publishing insider vibe: tiny venue, book publicist/editor authors, young crowd. In fact, the crowd was SO young that the first question came from an actual six-year-old: "How did you make your book?" Good question, kid. She saved us all from having to ask the same thing, even though she was clearly a plant by her Gessen-editor father. Very shrewd!

The next big author event should be a little less intimate and more chaotic: David Sedaris at Union Square. (Yay!)

I Was Told There'd Be Cake by Sloane Crosley

I put a lot of thought into various "what-if" scenarios--especially morbid, what-happens-if-I'm-hit-by-a-bus-today ones. (Not that this stops me from leaving my bed unmade some mornings, or stuffing yet another bag of junk in my closet.) I like to think it's part of my unique charm. So imagine the intrigue when I started reading Sloane Crosley's new collection of essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, and was greeted with the following sentences:

Back in the apartment I never should have left, the bed has gone unmade and the dishes unwashed. The day I get shot in a bodega (buying cigarettes, naturally) will in all likelihood be the day before laundry Sunday and the day after I decided to clean out my closet, got bored halfway through, and opted to watch sitcoms in my prom dress instead.

I was hit by three simultaneous thoughts:

1. I could have written this.
2. I did not write this. Curse you, procrastination!
3. Sloane Crosley and I should probably be neurotic BFFs.

Every so often, a book or magazine piece comes along and reminds me that I spent a lot of money on a quasi MFA, and haven't written anything since. But on the bright side, someone's keeping it real for all the urban twentysomething navel-gazers. Crosley's book is a hilarious collection of suburban childhood trauma (or what passes for trauma in happy Westchester kids) and highlights of Generation Y adulthood.

A giant blurb on the front cover has Jonathan Lethem proclaiming that Crosley is from the "realm of Sedaris and Vowell." And while that's technically true, it gives everyone involved some short shrift. Crosley is witty like Sedaris. Except female. And straight. And young. The overlap with Vowell is even more narrow: both are female and funny. Picking the two most popular humor essayists may be a good sales hook, but it's getting old. Why not just throw in Augusten Burroughs, too, for the memoir trifecta?

For the most part, Crosley lives up to the blurb. The essays are self-deprecating and merciless. She moves pretty smoothly between the childish (summer camp) and adult (wanting to have a one-night stand because it always seemed so glamorous), so that it's all one big post-adolescent blur.

So rather than grumble about someone else writing the book I was too lazy to write, I suppose I should show some love for the many parts I liked:

"Suburbia is too close to the country to have anything real to do and too close to the city to admit you have nothing real to do. Its purpose is to make it so you can identify with everything. We obviously grew up identifying with nothing. Then one day you look in the rearview mirror of your existence and realize that you can see clear down the hill-less and curveless and bridgeless road of your life, straight to the maternity ward where you were born. And then you go to college. Where your bland past meekly follows, sluggishly scraping its feet on the floor."

"I'm not exactly sure how the ponies happened. Though I have an inkling: 'Can I get you anything?' I'll say, getting up from a dinner table, 'Coffee, tea, a pony?' People rarely laugh at this, especially if they've heard it before. 'This party's supposed to be fun,' a friend will say. 'Really?' I'll respond, 'Will there be pony rides?' It's a nervous tic and a cheap joke, cheapened further by the frequency with which I use it. For that same reason, it's hard to weed out of my speech--most of the time I don't even realize I'm saying it. There are little elements in a person's life, minor fibers that become unintentionally tangled with our personality. Sometimes it's a patent phrase, sometimes it's a perfume, sometimes it's a wristwatch. For me, it is the constant referencing of ponies.

I don't even like ponies."

Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri writes about Indian-Americans. It's a fact. And a lot of critics (as well as one audience member at her Strand reading two weeks ago) take issue with it. Such a lovely writer...why restrict herself to a small subset of people and circumstances? But what they all seem to overlook is that she uses Bengalis in the way Faulkner uses residents of Yoknapatawpha County--the repetition of geography and particular ethnic themes building a very specific sense of space. That's a big part of why her latest collection of stories, Unaccustomed Earth, is her best work yet.

I loved Interpreter of Maladies and enjoyed The Namesake, and wasn't sure how Unaccustomed Earth would stack up. But as I read, I found myself feeling reluctant to put it down, even though I dreaded finishing the book. Rather than being a rehash of old stories (after all, why mess with a Pulitzer-winning formula?), every story built upon the base. Having already broached the themes of Indian emigration and arranged marriages in the earlier books, Lahiri's free now to reflect on the deeper mechanics of relationships.

In a way, Lahiri moves her previous characters into a post-immigration era. Her new set of characters is almost all second-generation Indian-Americans, with parents who've long since assimilated into Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, etc. One of the most common threads of the book is the transference of anxiety from the parents to the children, who worry not about fitting in with Americans, but with their parents. White spouses, American food, and zero interest in Calcutta-based customs--those are the rebellions. But the rejections of heritage, no matter how small, cause the various protagonists to second-guess their lives, their lovers, and their own legacies. Nearly all of the relationships in the book are marked by this anxiety, tinged with a deeper melancholy than Lahiri's other stuff.

Perhaps the biggest difference in this book --and the most evidence of a maturing perspective--is the examination of marriage. Maybe it's because Lahiri is now married herself and has kids, but she seems especially interested in the ongoing conversation and evolution between two people who've committed to one another. One story features a couple attending the wedding of the husband's old friend/infatuation. Lahiri doesn't take the expected route, the "he still has feelings for the ex" one. Instead, she looks at the protagonist's complex feelings about his wife in general. There's no artificial choice between the old love and the current one.

The book's centerpiece is a trio of stories about Hema and Kaushik, whose lives cross several times. The first story is Hema recalling how Kaushik and his family, friends of her parents, came to stay with them for a month when the kids were teenagers. Hema uses the second person, clearly talking to Kaushik, saying the kind of intimate things you can't tell someone when he's sitting on the couch a foot away from you. The next story is Kashiuk's, and although Hema isn't actually present at all, it's his turn to use the private "you." Their final story, third person, details the most significant intersection of their lives. He's an itinerant photojournalist, and she's a professor about to give in and marry an arranged husband. This was by far my favorite story in the book. "Going Ashore" is such a perfect meeting of plot development, realism, and lush language that it has an extra sparkle. The last few paragraphs actually made me tear up because they were so unexpected--definitely not a common occurrence for me ever, but especially not when reading.

I'm not sure any contemporary writer conveys the love/loss duality like Jhumpa Lahiri does. And if she wants to keep doing it with Bengali characters who live in Boston, fine by me. I'll line up every time and hand over my money.

So much of the writing is beautiful, but there were some standouts:

"These women, with their rich, loose tangles of hair, their sunglasses concealing no wrinkles, were younger than Hema, but she felt inexperienced in their company, innocent of the responsibilities of rearing children and running a household. She had grown used to this feeling over the years with Julian--her position as the other woman, which had felt so sophisticated when their affair began, was actually a holding pen that kept her from growing up. She had denied herself the pleasure of openly sharing a life with the person she loved."

"And wasn't it terrible, how much he looked forward to those moments, so much so that sometimes even a ride by himself on the subway was the best part of the day? Wasn't it terrible that after all the work one put into finding a person to spend one's life with...that solitude was what one relished most, the only thing that, even in fleeting, diminished doses, kept one sane?"

"Kaushik never fully trusted the places he'd lived, never turned to them for refuge. From childhood, he realized now, he was always happiest to be outside, away from the private detritus of life."

The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

This morning, I watched Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia do the book publicity song-and-dance on Tim Russert's show. He took questions about his judicial philosophy, and tried hard to behave himself. It felt strange. As a kid, all I knew of the Court was what I saw in snippets on the nightly news: confirmation hearings, swearings-in, and stock footage of Anita Hill. Never any selling or cajoling, which is the point of any Sunday morning talk show appearance.

This "better know a justice" phenomenon seems to be a direct byproduct of both the Rehnquist era and the hard work of Supreme Court groupies--er, journalists--like Jeffrey Toobin. His book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court has all the personality tidbits you could ever want, while laying out many of the significant decisions and issues of the past 25 years. And for someone who's paid attention mostly to anecdotal Court stuff over the years, it's a great narrative of the Rehnquist regime.

The book does have its flaws. Like the adherence to the same handful of issues we hear about over and over in the coverage of the Court. In fact, about fifty pages in, I was afraid the whole book would be about abortion cases (it wasn't, thankfully). Toobin does much better when he gets off the Roe v. Wade path, and talks about the justices' personalities.

Also, Toobin doesn't do much to disguise his own loyalties to the justices. He totally hearts Sandy Day O'Connor. Either she gave the most extensive interviews, or his mother was a WASP-y blonde dynamo. And his dislikes are equally obvious. Calling Justice Thomas "the nation's most famous beneficiary of affirmative action" who opposes the policy for everyone else probably won't get Toobin a seat at the next Thomas dinner party.

All the same, each justice gets his or her share of quirk. Ginsburg and Scalia spend New Year's together, despite bitter philosophical fights. Thomas kept photos on his desk of his clerk's lesbian partner. Breyer can't conduct conversations at a normal decibel. O'Connor made her clerks exercise with her. Rehnquist wrote a song about the Miranda case. Stevens defies all odds by sticking around and holding out for a Democratic president. Kennedy is a Republican who cares what the international community thinks. And Souter is a woodsman who pretends to be Justice Breyer at Massachusetts rest stops.** Souter actually gets some of the funniest moments in the book. Like when O'Connor, the "Yenta of Paradise Valley," tries to fix up the hermit bachelor on awkward dates.

I also enjoyed the insight into Clinton's justice-selection process (we came dangerously close to having to listen to Alfonse D'Amato trying to out-New York Scalia), and the shout-outs to some of my favorite recent cases. Kelo v. New London got a page or two, and even Bong Hits 4 Jesus scored a mention (I believe this is one of Scott's favorites as well, at least until the Court has to rule on the constitutionality of fogcutters).

There's also some heartache mixed in. Turns out I still can't read about Bush v. Gore without a physical tug of revulsion. Knowing that O'Connor came to despise Bush isn't much comfort after her very partisan swing vote put him into office. And I'm more terrified than ever that Stevens will drop dead before November, despite his best efforts to the contrary.

But fears and political ulcers aside, the book is fast-paced and witty. I'm pretty sure there aren't many jurisprudential books that would be compelling enough to make me drag them on the subway.

Some of the favorite parts:

"Meanwhile, Scalia wrote his own dissent, which surpassed even his own high standards for invective and hysteria."

"There, surrounded by many of the most powerful people in the country, Thomas paid tribute to himself for having the courage to agree with them."

"One of his fellow justices once prevailed Souter to take a woman out to dinner, and she reported back that she thought the evening had gone very well--until the end. Souter took her home, told her what a good time he had, then added: 'Let's do this again next year.'"

"At an appearance at a New York synagogue in 2005, Scalia was asked to compare his own judicial philosophy with that of Thomas. 'I am an originalist,' Scalia said, 'but I am not a nut.'"

"At his home in the Naval Observatory, Gore passed the news to his family and watched the coverage on television. At 3:11 p.m., he sent a BlackBerry message to his chief spokesmen, Mark Fabiani and Chris Lehane: 'Please make sure that no one trashes the Supreme Court.'"




**This episode is under dispute by my independent Supreme Court expert. "What's the subset of Massachusetts rest-stop patrons who a) recognize the face of a sitting Justice, b) do not recall the name of said Justice, and c) recall the name of a different, semi-obscure Justice?"

Jhumpa Lahiri at the Strand

Did I say that the Strand was dead to me? I...lied. Sort of. We're still on a break, but I can go when there's a cool event, right? Like a reading by Jhumpa Lahiri, who's been a favorite writer since aught-three.

Having discovered recently that we have the exact same taste in books, Sheryl and I took our book buddy-ness to Union Square after work for the reading. We were way early (it's always so hard to tell when the suffocating literary mob will show up for these things), and after snagging some good seats, we amused ourselves in the children's/YA book sections. Between the old-school books and the fun conversation, good times.

Lahiri's on tour for her new book, Unaccustomed Earth. The reading itself was very professional, if a bit joyless. She read a story that I haven't gotten to yet in the book, but remembered vaguely from The New Yorker a few years ago. Lahiri's public demeanor is interesting. She's not a smiler, and it was hard to tell if she's done this so much that it's boring, or if she's got that jaded Boston-New York thing going on. Anyway, she didn't play up to the crowd, but it worked well with her low-key writing style. And she did thank her editor, which was cute. More people need to thank their editors, and stop squeezing them for money or complaining about deadlines.

Also, she was a good sport about the usual bad Q&A (paraphrased for maximum brutality):

"Clearly, every single one of your Indian-American characters is completely autobiographical. How did you manage to write a character that has a penis? You don't have one."

"Doesn't immigration make you sad?"

"Here's a bad review of your new book that I just read...."

*sigh* People ask the lame questions because they can't ask the ones they really want to know, about the author's personal life. Like, "Do you live closer to Kate or to Sheryl in Brooklyn?"

Anyway, it was a fun night, and I'm looking forward to the next one: David Sedaris!

bookstore breakup

Because I'm still in the midst of a reading binge, I've got a different kind of review for now: bookstore. More specifically, the Strand--home to "18 miles of books," except of course the books you want. The Strand is officially on notice!

It takes a lot for me to denounce (and/or reject) an independent bookstore. But the Strand has failed me repeatedly in the following ways:

1. They never have the books I want. Atonement...Last Exit to Brooklyn...The Sportswriter...and several others. It's dicey to go into a used bookstore with specific titles in mind, but those were hardly rare ones. And in each case, they had every other Ian McEwan book, every other Richard Ford book, etc. They didn't even have Gossip Girl (sorry, Sheryl!), which is not only old at this point, but there are a million copies floating around that people don't want to keep on their bookshelves. Also, neither the main Union Square branch nor the Fulton Street branch had any of the books. This is less the fault of the store than the sellers, but still: disappointing. Their retail books are just as hard to find.

2. They hate short people. When they do have a book I want, it's invariably located on the shelf eight feet above my head. Sometimes, like today, that means going to find a tall, friendly clerk to fetch the book for me. And while I'm usually all for having attractive guys do my manual labor, it's an inconvenience.

3. Manhattan-style space management. For a store that tries so hard to be browser friendly (tables with eclectic picks, lots of cool old books in odd corners), there's no room. The aisles are about two feet wide, which means it's impossible to get around the senior citizen professor browsing the philosophy display, or the hipster girl holding What is the What.

Anyway, it makes me miss my beloved Harvard Book Store something fierce. And it also makes me envious of those who get to visit Powell's in the near future. So in conclusion, Libya is a land of contrasts...and the Strand is dead to me for a little while.

The Family That Couldn't Sleep by DT Max

Sleep and I don't have the best relationship. I know we should spend more time together--in fact, we should be hanging out right now. Sometimes it's just so hard to make the schedules work. However, despite our problems, I don't know what I'd do without sleep.

That's what makes the subject of the nonfiction book The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery so horrifying. The titular family is an Italian clan, dating back a single ancestor in the 1700s, whose members have a tendency to develop Fatal Familial Insomnia in middle age. FFI victims have a sudden onset of symptoms: since their brains can't rest, the body deteriorates as well. Organs begin to shut down. The person sweats and hallucinates uncontrollably. Even the ultimate coma is a nightmare of thrashing and agony. Finally, maybe months later, the person dies of total exhaustion. Five years later, his sister develops the signs. Twenty years later, it's his niece and one of his sons. It's the family plague.

While tracing the history of the family from that eighteenth-century Venetian doctor through a Mussolini-era local politician to the present day, science journalist D.T. Max takes a harder look at the science behind the disease. It turns out that FFI isn't caused by run-of-the-mill genetic defects, or an unlucky susceptibility to viruses. It's caused by "prions," or infectious particles derived from protein and almost impossible to eradicate. Nobody's really sure what to do about prion diseases. Since the 1950s, doctors and scientists have known that prions exist, and that they cause devastating (and almost always fatal) diseases like FFI and the similar Crutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (one strain of which is mad cow). But there's virtually no treatment available, and definitely no cure. Accurate diagnoses are rare as well; the Italian family had to fight against doctors who assumed nervous exhaustion and/or alcoholism were to blame for the strange tremors and rapid degeneration. Modern British and American people who have CJD aren't having much more luck--especially older ones, whose symptoms are generally assumed to be Alzheimer's.

The sections talking about the mad cow epizootic/epidemic are the most terrifying parts of the book. The fact that the disease is on an invisible timer ("Happy 45th birthday! Remember those burgers you ate all those years ago?"), and doctors can't predict which people will develop symptoms, is bad enough. But then add that countries like England, Canada, and the U.S. know that this disease is generally transmitted by feeding infected cow proteins to other cows, which are then fed to humans--yet they still can't get up the regulatory wherewithal to pull all the infected cows out of the beef population and ensure that farmers are using the proper precautions. Basically, we're all screwed.

(In completely related news, I don't think my birthday dinner will include the usual steak this year.)

if the subject matter is depressing, at least the storytelling is very good. The most disheartening part of the book (after you're done calculating all the beef you've eaten in your lifetime, and figuring out how much quality sleep you really got last night) may be that there's no real resolution. If the book has a drawback, that's it. A "happy" ending isn't feasible, but there's no ending at all. Just the politics of science, with slow drabbles of genuine scientific advance.

Now: who's up for some veggie burgers, followed by a long, luxuriant nap?

Wakefield Redux

"That's the stupidest story I ever heard, and I've read the entire Sweet Valley High series." -- Moe Szyslak

Sweet Valley High is back! And it's got a Gossip Girl makeover. I'm not really pissed that they're making the Wakefield twins a size thinner, or that the girls will drive a Jeep instead of a Fiat. But I'm ticked that they're upgrading it at all. The series is a fantastic representative of the girl genre in the 80s. It's a time capsule--why not leave the original books as such? Don't fear the past, Random House. What's next: Laura Ingalls Wilder getting a hip job as a prairie au pair and texting her friends about it?

At the same time, I'm super jealous that I don't get to be the editor on the relaunch. That's the job I was born to do, dammit! I read dutifully until #100 or so, when it was time to stop and relinquish the brand to the next group of tweeners. As a kid, I studied all the new SVH covers in B. Dalton books, and had most of them read while my parents did other stuff around the mall. I walked out of the library with stacks of the older, 1983-tastic books. I had the board game (I was always Elizabeth). If pressed, I could probably still talk fluently about plotlines and characters.

I hope they don't change the deeply literary prose: Jessica stared at herself in the full-length mirror and saw a picture of utter heartbreak and despair. But what was actually reflected in the glass was about the most adorable, most dazzling sixteen-year-old girl imaginable.

The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs

Once you've mastered all the knowledge in the world (or at least all the knowledge in the encyclopedia), where do you go from there? Well, if you're AJ Jacobs, Esquire writer and all-around infopreneur, you go for the biggest book of all: the Bible. Jacobs decided to follow up his encyclopedic memoir The Know-It-All with an even more intense test of the academic spirit and his wife's patience: he would live for a year, following every possible rule in the Bible.

Now, that's a lot of rules. And many of them involve things like stoning your fellow citizens--which is, surprisingly enough, not so cool in modern-day New York. But Jacobs makes a pretty good go of it in his latest book, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. As an agnostic, his main connection to Judaism is through purely social stuff and slightly wacky relatives. Curious, he wonders what a person misses by avoiding religion, and whether he's depriving his toddler son of a moral and emotional imperative. Hence the quest. But a writerly review of the Bible would be too easy--so Jacobs has to plunge himself, fully committed, into following every rule, every commandment, every suggestion in every book of The Book. (Well, minus the stoning ones.)

A lot of his journey is personal. He talks about growing out his beard (which Leviticus says can't be groomed) for an entire year. He tries to pray, wondering if his newfound piety will make him feel genuinely spiritual. He struggles with the Biblicality of his wife's fertility treatments (is it unnatural, or is it being fruitful and multiplying?). He risks his wife's constant exasperation with the rule that prohibits him from touching a woman while she's "impure" every month, and from sitting on any surface that might have been touched by an impure woman (good luck with that one on public transportation). He faces family drama by connecting up with his zany former uncle Gil, a wannabe cult leader in Israel. He alienates friends with limited conversations (sarcasm is a no-no, brutal honesty is a must) and many, many dietary restrictions. And it's all done in a funny, frank manner that makes you groan and sympathize with everyone who had to put up with him for a year.

The parts that aren't so intimate, which make it a real book and not just a long humor essay in Esquire, are Jacobs's interactions with real spiritual advisors and actively religious people to provide background. So many tidbits were interesting....Like the Orthodox Jewish man who freelances as a clothing-fiber consultant to make sure that one's clothes don't mix wool and linen. Or the aforementioned Uncle Gil, whose Jerusalem dinner parties are a combination of a 1970s Woody Allen movie and Waco.

One of my favorite informational bits was about the Red Heifer, the animal that must be sacrificed, cremated, mixed with water, and sprinkled on one's head for true purification. But the red heifer must be completely unblemished (not a single non-red hair), and have never plowed a field. No problem--except no such cow exists. Apparently there's an international breeding initiative supported by super-fundamentalist Christians and super-Orthodox Jews, because without the cow and its total purification, no one can build the Third Temple. No temple, no Jewish Messiah and battler of the Antichrist. So basically, everyone wants the cow. It's a fascinating project, and one I'd never heard of before. But while it's easy to categorize it as those loopy zealots doing their thing, there are political implications as well. "It's not just that it's zany...it's that it's potentially dangerous. If the red heifer arrives, it'll be seen by some as divine permission to build a Third Temple. Where would it go? On the Temple Mount, which is currently under the administration of Muslims--home to their sacred Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque. Then it really might be the end of the world." Yikes. Shades of Jesus Camp, which is, to date, the scariest movie I've ever seen.

All around, it's a very entertaining and informative book. Jacobs is really engaging, and isn't shy about making himself look like an idiot to get to some deeper knowledge. I am, however, glad I'm not his (obviously very patient) wife. Remember, kids: never marry a creative nonfictionist. And the next time you see a Moses-y looking guy on public transportation or walking down the street, and you think, "Uh oh, religious nut," be kind. He could have a book deal.

Some of my favorite passages:

"Is half the world suffering from a massive delusion? Or is my blindness to spirituality a huge defect in my personality? What if I'm missing out on part of being human, like a guy who goes through life without ever hearing Beethoven or falling in love?"

"Speaking of dinosaurs, if they were really on the ark, as creationists claim, how did Noah squeeze them all in?

'He put them in when they were younger and smaller. The equivalent of teenagers.'"

"[Gil] talks about his days as a cult leader only occasionally. At one point he grouses about the burden of having forty servants. 'You know what I said every day? "God, get them out of here!" What a pain in the tuchus to have to tell forty people what to do.'

When he finds out that one of the girls speaks American Sign Language, he boasts of the sign language he invented as a cult leader--and how it swept New York in the 1970s.

'I found that a lot of my signs were the same as deaf sign language. Like the word understand.'

Gil puts two of his fingers on his palm.

'You just did the sign for toast,' says the girl. Gil shrugs.

'Well, it wasn't the most important thing that I invented in my life.'"