November 22, 1963 - November22,2005

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Lynne Truss

Photo of Lynne Truss by Jillian Lochner November 20, 2005 Lynne Truss Has Another Gripe With You By DEBORAH SOLOMON "To some people, the fact that I am not married, or don't have children, would be the reason I have written a book on punctuation," Lynne Truss remarked on a recent afternoon in her gravelly British voice. She was sitting in her living room in Brighton, the seaside resort on the southern coast of England, where she inhabits a realm far removed from the vacationing families who stroll the Palace Pier, eating fried cod, lifting pinwheels into the breeze and gazing out toward the tip of France. Inside her stucco town house, the curtains were drawn and stillness prevailed. "That is why it is very painful to be interviewed or profiled," Truss continued. "Because you think when you read the piece, Oh, that is how I come across, as someone who is too interested in stationery, or as someone who doesn't know how to spend money." Two years ago, Truss was vaulted into unexpected celebrity when, after a long and quiet career as a novelist and critic, she published a short, witty book on punctuation. Initially brought out in London with a hopeful first printing of 15,000 books, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" went on to sell some three million copies in hardcover. It fared well even in foreign languages, including Japanese and Swedish, the go-to grammar book for those studying English as a second language. In America, the book easily held its own against "Harry Potter," diet books and the plethora of pre-election screeds, remaining on the New York Times best-seller list for 44 weeks. The book's title, by the way, refers to a joke about a panda that walks into a cafe. He eats a sandwich, fires a pistol into the air and then leaves. On his way out, he tosses a wildlife handbook at a bewildered waiter, who understands everything when he turns to the section marked "panda" and notices a grievously misplaced comma: "Eats, shoots and leaves." Truss, a self-described stickler, a woman incensed by the gratuitous apostrophes in grocery-store signs that say "Apple's for Sale" or "We Have Lemon's and Lime's and Video's," had achieved the not inconsiderable feat of making punctuation hot. She turned the apostrophe into a form of mass entertainment. No one seemed able to explain it. As publishers tried to capitalize on the phenomenon by rushing out new grammar rule books (or republishing old ones, like the campus classic "The Elements of Style," which has just been released with deeply charming illustrations by Maira Kalman), high-school English teachers ecstatically considered the possibility that people everywhere possess a long-suppressed passion for grammar. "O, to be an English teacher in the Age of Truss," the teacher-turned-novelist Frank McCourt noted adoringly in his foreword to the American edition of the book. Asked if he had any insight into the book's popularity, Andrew Franklin, whose tiny company, Profile Books, published it in Britain, appeared to give the question extended thought. "I have a theory," he finally said. "It's very sophisticated. My theory is that it sold well because lots of people bought it." Truss has just published her latest effort, and it, too, taps into the retro appeal of strict rules. The title offers its own mini-sermon: "Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door." The book's basic contention is that people in public places no longer bother to treat one another with even a semblance of Old World courtesy or respect. Writing in a tone of comic hyperbole, Truss claims that the "politeness words" - her term for "please," "thank you" and "excuse me" - have dwindled to the point of near extinction. Is there a scintilla of truth to her findings? Possibly not. In her book, Truss acknowledges the research of the British social anthropologist Kate Fox, who has conducted field experiments on politeness, like bumping into random pedestrians to see how many would say "Sorry." As it turned out, 80 percent apologized, and Fox concluded that manners have not declined. But Truss remains unconvinced, and in her book she adopts an isolationist policy; instead of proposing a new code of social diplomacy, she laments the violation of her personal space. The offenders, as she sees it, include smokers, graffiti artists, moviegoers who chat in theaters, bicyclists who ignore red lights and children on skateboards and the "breeders" who created them. She is nearly always "shocked," except when she is "incensed," and at times she aims her ire at such seemingly innocuous subjects as waiters who say "There you go" when they put a plate a food in front of her. Rudeness follows her like an unwanted companion even when she is up in the sky. "Air travelers on long-haul flights change into pajamas in the lavatories," she notes with typical disapproval, leading you to wonder if it would be better if they changed in the aisles. Truss probably exercises her satirical gifts to their best advantage in her analysis of automated phone systems, in which nonhuman operators have come to represent the last defenders of courtesy and decorum. Isn't it confusing, she asks in one passage, "that our biggest experience of formal politeness comes from the recorded voices on automated switchboards - who patently don't mean it? 'We are sorry we cannot connect you at this time,' says the voice. But does it sound sorry? No, it doesn't. It is just saying the politeness words in as many different combinations as it can think of. 'Please hold. Thank you for holding. We are sorry you are having to hold. We are sorry to say please. Excuse us for saying sorry."' The book, which lacks an index and is padded with anecdotes and sociological asides, makes no pretense of being exhaustive. It is not intended as a book of etiquette, and it is not instructive in the way that her book on punctuation is. Thus, if "Talk to the Hand" is to appeal to readers and become the mass sensation that its publishers assume it will be - in New York, Gotham Books, a division of Penguin, is running a first printing of 417,000 - it must do so as a comedic performance. And Truss, as a writer, does cast herself into a dramatic role, that of the moral scold, ill-tempered and loud-tongued, holding a high opinion of little besides her own opinions. It is hardly a new female type. You can take it back at least as far as Shakespeare's Kate, the tantrum-throwing, suitor-rejecting heroine of "The Taming of the Shrew," although Kate is probably too nuanced and sensitive a character to pass muster with her contemporary descendants. Lately, the archetype has enjoyed a resurgence, particularly on television, where game shows and news programs starring high-paid shrews can be described as either a new branch of entertainment or a deviant branch of feminism. There is Nancy Grace, hectoring her guests on CNN's "Headline News," or Anne Robinson, the host of the BBC's "Weakest Link," who interrogates hapless contestants with reform-school severity before beating up on the class dunce. Or Ann Coulter, the right-wing bully who seems too loud even when you mute the television. The scold is an innately comic figure, and Truss's achievement has been to elevate it into classically unfunny and fussy realms, namely that of punctuation and manners. o write a book on manners is to risk presenting yourself as an unattractive person, a sourpuss, a spirit-crusher, a crank at odds with the contemporary world. Truss is aware of this; she knows that her new book is not likely to endear her to a generation of adolescents who consider it the height of fashion to allow their underwear to peek out above the low-slung waistlines of their jeans. "It does, however, have to be admitted that the outrage reflex ('Oh, that's so RUDE!') presents itself in most people at just about the same time as their elbow skin starts to give out," Truss writes with typical informality. "Check your own elbow skin. If it snaps back into position after bending, you probably should not be reading this book." To be sure, most people, regardless of the precise elasticity of their flesh, would like to live in a world where everyone respects one another. Yet Americans have always harbored a suspicion of manners, which evoke visions of English history at its most hierarchical and hoity-toity - of dukes, earls, lords and viscounts tripping over one another in phony displays of deference and veneration. Who would want to live with all that kneeling and curtsying, all that monarchy-mandated fawning? Not the American revolutionaries, who believed that a fluid class democracy should subscribe instead to "republican manners" and promptly did away with titles. In our own time, the belief that manners reinforce social inequalities was key to the upheavals of the 60's, when the shaggy-haired counterculture broke every rule in Emily Post's book of etiquette. In the years since, American culture has become more tolerant of individual desires and differences, and one probably understudied side effect has been the blurring of private space and public space, of domestic life and street life. Activities once reserved for the privacy of your home (playing loud music, cursing, eating, wearing underwear as outerwear) now routinely occur on sidewalks. Some people see this as liberating; others denounce it as a pandemic of impoliteness. But bad manners are not necessarily all bad. In 1996, in an essay titled "Seduced by Civility," the critic Benjamin DeMott defended rudeness not only as a basic right but also as a necessary inducement to change and social progress. Indeed, who wouldn't rather live with incivility - with the curse words in rap songs and the excessive chatting in movie theaters - than with inequality? In her new book, Truss remains mostly silent on the subject, forgoing social analysis in favor of groaning about the status quo. Asked why she would be moved to write a book of manners in the first place, she said: "I always think of myself as a traditional liberal lefty, but I've just written a book about manners, so I do obviously have reactionary tendencies. I am shocked by the world." That comment was made on the afternoon we first met, at her home in Brighton, where she settled about a decade ago. She lives on a street closely packed with stucco houses, at the top of a steep hill, away from the rocky beach and the barefoot, libertine atmosphere that draws tourists to this old resort town. "What I have always liked about Brighton is its impersonality," she said, somewhat cryptically. "Since the 18th century, people have come, used the place and gone home again." Truss is a tall, large-boned woman of 50 with a helmet of blond hair and a booming voice, and on this August afternoon she was sunk into the enveloping fiber of a jumbo yellow chair, one of her two elderly cats, Buster, perched on the headrest. "He's a good boy, and he is my darling," she cooed. The interior of the house seems at once bookish and girlish, the sort of place where serious fiction and literary biographies share the shelves and table tops with a collection of bric-a-brac that includes miniature bottles of French perfume and a sculpture of two cats entwined in a kiss. Truss insists that her day-to-day life has remained basically unchanged since "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" lavished her with substantial income and attention. She still writes in a cluttered home office without the companionship of a secretary or an assistant, and on a typical night she eats her supper on a tray in front of the television. "My favorite thing in the world is a quiz show, 'University Challenge,"' she remarked with a straight face, "so you can see what kind of sad person I am." Nonetheless, as if eager to furnish evidence of a budding talent for hedonism, she went on to list the material pleasures to which she has lately succumbed. In the past year, trying to burn through her book royalties, she renovated the top floor of her house and purchased a Volkswagen convertible. In the real-estate department, she has paid off her mortgage ($240,000) and her mother's mortgage ($40,000) and rented a furnished pied-à-terre behind the British Museum in London, for $5,000 a month, in the hope of venturing out more. "I suppose it is playing with identity," she said of the apartment. "I want to be someone who doesn't spend all her time sitting home watching 'The Simpsons' on the telly. It is on between 7 and 8, and I watched it every night." An hour or so into our meeting, she remembered that she had hoped to prepare tea. Hurrying into the kitchen, she turned on an electric kettle and took out two PG Tips tea bags from a bulk-size box of 240. I was trying to calculate the number of months the box was likely to last when I realized that there is no table in her kitchen and no dining room in her three-story town house. Asked where she seats her dinner guests, she replied: "I don't have any guests. When I redesigned the kitchen, I thought a table just would have taken up too much space." Her solitary life, it became apparent, is one she has actively chosen. When I mentioned at one point that I was traveling with my family, she frowned with marked displeasure. "I don't know how you put up with it, your kids and all that," she remarked. "I don't think I have ever felt that I was with the person I wanted to marry. I am not against marriage. I lived with someone for 11 years. But we weren't in love, and I thought that was quite important. I am probably not very good at compromise, and I am bound to get worse." As the afternoon wore on, it was hard not to wonder how a woman who, by her own admission, eschews engagements of both the social and the emotional sort could claim to be an expert on human behavior, could find fault, as she writes in her book, with "a generation of people who seem, more than ever, not to know how to interact." On the other hand, there is no law that says a writer of a book deploring public rudeness must be gracious and thoughtful herself, anymore than a restaurant chef is obliged to prepare gourmet meals in his off hours at home or an internist is required to have annual checkups. Or so I thought, as Truss turned on the television during my visit and began watching a cricket match. "I was never into cricket particularly," she said by way of explanation, "but this is a very important test series." Truss does venture out from time to time, and invitations arrive steadily from people eager to have a cultural personage in their midst. Last year, she was summoned to a private garden party given by Queen Elizabeth II. It seemed like a great honor, until she arrived at Buckingham Palace, where she was one of some 8,000 guests to be offered a cup of tea and a sliver of cake as the queen lingered in the far distance. "Why would we queue up just to get a look at her?" Truss said. She has fared better with Tony and Cherie Blair, whom she recently met for the first time. On the morning of July 7, Truss was waiting to board a plane at Gatwick Airport when she heard the awful news about the rush-hour bombings. Undeterred, she continued on to Gleneagles, Scotland, where Cherie Blair was giving a dinner that night for the wives of the G-8 leaders. Despite the terrorist attack, the dinner proceeded as scheduled. According to Truss, she was seated beside Jenna Bush, who raved over "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" and insisted that reading is one of her great passions. Born in 1955, the second of two daughters, Truss grew up in a working-class household in Richmond, just west of London. She speaks of her childhood as if it were an unpleasant obligation from which she tried to extricate herself as soon as opportunity permitted. Her family lived in a so-called council house, a red-brick row house owned by the government, and her mother worked as a maid. "My parents weren't terribly happy," Truss told me matter-of-factly. "They weren't particularly fond of one another, and they just had arguments and things. My mother was very disappointed in my father, who was a negative person. He didn't expect to have a great career. When I was about 15, he started an egg route and went around and sold eggs from a van. But he didn't keep it up. By the time people were getting them, they were very old eggs." Perhaps the anecdote says less about her father's passivity than about her own determination, her industry and self-reliance, her lack of debt, her refusal to own a kitchen table at which to while away the empty hours swilling tea. Asked if her parents pushed her to succeed, she shook her head and said: "No. My achievement thing is more about rejecting my family and going out there and doing it for its own sake." She studied at University College London, which, as someone once pointed out, could use a comma in its name. After graduation, she went into journalism, working as a literary editor at the Listener, as a television critic for The Times of London and even as a sports columnist at the same paper. "It was an interesting phase of my life," she said of her four years covering sports, "but it did throw me off course. I was concerned that watching sports might produce testosterone. I really did worry about turning into a bloke. I noticed that I was leaving towels on the floor." In 2000, she quit her job at The Times and turned her attention to radio, composing both original monologues narrated by actors and humor pieces she narrated herself for Radio 4, the BBC arts station. "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" was initially conceived as a spinoff from a five-part radio program on punctuation, "Cutting a Dash," and her new book, too, began life on the airwaves. There were also three comic novels, which were published in London in the 90's and have just been released in this country for the first time, in a bulky paperback titled "The Lynne Truss Treasury." Although her fiction has sold "nothing," as she says, it is solid and assured in its cleverness, and at times it can put you in mind of the verbal exuberance of P.G. Wodehouse. I was curious about the scale of her literary ambition, wondering if she sees herself as an essayist and humorist who has lately been blessed with commercial success, or rather as an unfulfilled novelist, an artist who still dreams of adding an object of beauty to the world. She has not received much acclaim in literary circles. When "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" was published in this country, Louis Menand lambasted it in The New Yorker as a sloppy work riddled with errors. In her new book on manners, Truss mentions The New Yorker review, claiming that she never read it and quoting her London publisher, who describes Menand as a "tosser," tosser being one of those British pejoratives whose meaning seems destined to elude Americans. "You have to take yourself very seriously to get the respect of certain people," Truss said, reflecting on her reputation among the literary elite, "and I do not take myself all that seriously. I undermine myself constantly. I write so many different things." Of all her books and essays, Truss described her 1996 novel, "Tennyson's Gift," as "the best thing I have ever done." Set in 1864, on the Isle of Wight, it sends up various eminent and artistically inclined Victorians, particularly the poet laureate of its title, an unrepentant egomaniac who recites his own verses to his furniture as his invalid wife hides his bad reviews in teapots or buries them in the garden. Getting up from her chair, Truss opened a cabinet where she keeps extra copies of her own books. Out came a paperback. Might she sign it for her visitor? She obliged, then chuckled as she closed the book. "This is terrible," she said, presumably referring to her inscription. "I'll do another one for you when I know you better." Who could have guessed that that book would inspire an act of rebellion less than an hour later? eaving her house around 6, I headed along a steeply sloping street that ran down to the waterfront, to the large white hotels and lacy cast-iron balconies that overlook the sea. By a pleasant coincidence, I had just stepped into the lobby of my hotel when I spotted someone I knew bounding toward the entrance, a novelist who lives in Manhattan, a tall, tautly muscled man with a shock of bleached hair. Michael Cunningham, as it turned out, was making the rounds in England to promote his new novel, the ambitious, Whitman-inspired "Specimen Days," and had stopped in Brighton for all of one night to read at a local library. And what twist of fate had brought me to Brighton? he asked, as he lighted a cigarette. I told him about my visit to the house up the hill, showing him the novel I happened to be holding. He leafed through a few pages until his gaze fell on the inscription. This is what it said in a large, bouncy script: "With all best wishes, Lynne Truss." It seemed harmless enough, but what followed was nearly unbelievable. He ripped the page from its spine, crumpled it into a ball and popped it into his mouth. He stood there chewing it, as if it were a piece of tough meat, perhaps realizing for the first time that paper is not easily pulverized. "I don't know what came over me," he said a few moments later, after he had removed the page from his mouth. "The inscription was so bland and generic, all I could think of to do is rip it out. She had just talked to someone for four hours, someone who had come from another continent. Writing is her business. She can come up with something a little more exciting." Perhaps there was something about being in England that had encouraged him to act out the role of the lawless American, to be free and incorrigible in a country that runs toward the rule-bound and civil (even if British civility exists nowhere more brilliantly than it does as a fantasy in the minds of Americans). Or perhaps the notion of a book on grammar had elicited in him a shiver of memory so sharp that he had momentarily felt himself slip back in time, a schoolboy enraged by the constraints of authority. But probably it was nothing as complicated as a clash between cultures or generations. This wasn't literature, it was merely life, and the truth is, he is a vivid person with a restless mind that chews up everything in sight. The next day, meeting with Truss again, I told her about my encounter with Cunningham and the torn-out page, curious to hear how she would assess this gross breach of etiquette. "Now why would he do an odd thing like that?" she asked cautiously. He is a wild spirit, I replied, a runaway horse. "Well," she concluded, "he obviously can't be that wild if he agreed to go on a book tour!" At the time, we were in her Volkswagen convertible. The day was bright and cloudless, and we were zipping through the verdant countryside toward Charleston, a remote 18th-century farmhouse enshrined in Bloomsbury lore. In the years following World War I, Vanessa Bell lived in the house amid predictable bohemian chaos, sharing the premises with her children and Duncan Grant, her fellow artist and occasional lover. Every inch of the house bears the imprint of its former occupants, who covered the walls with fantastic murals and obsessively painted the doors, fireplaces and furniture as well, slathering pigment on virtually everything except their pets. When Truss and I pulled up outside the stone farmhouse, a group of black-spotted cows were grazing. There was no one in sight, and the parking lot was nearly empty. Truss groaned when she saw a sign announcing the hours of operation. Although she had recently been invited to join the board of Charleston, she had forgotten that it is closed on Tuesdays. Sitting down on a wood-slatted bench overlooking the lily pond, in the warm late-summer sun, she wondered what we should do. As if to compensate for the disappointment of not being able to see any paintings, she eventually decided we should go somewhere else; the idea was to pay a spontaneous visit to two friends of hers who own an antiquarian bookshop. Within an hour, we were in the medieval village of Alfriston, walking along the old cobblestones of High Street, with its thatched cottages and ivy-laden ruins and weathered beauty. When we reached Much Ado Books, Truss gently pushed on the black-painted wooden door. It failed to swing open. Realizing that her friends had closed up early, she suggested that we walk to their house, a few blocks away. Again, no one answered. Driving back to Brighton late that afternoon, she chuckled over our futile outing. Three places, all of them closed. It had been a day of bolted doors and darkened windows, of shadows and silence. Yet in some ways, the experience - in itself a repudiation of experience, a temporary estrangement from the consolations of paintings and books and friends - seemed entirely apt, affirming the supposed British tendency to remain closed off and shut down to any display of feeling. For what are manners, anyhow, but a distancing device, a mechanism for widening the spaces between people? As Truss writes in her new book, citing the research of the sociolinguists P. Brown and S.C. Levinson, "One of the great principles of manners, especially in Britain, is respecting someone else's right to be left alone, unmolested, undisturbed." Now, as she sped along the winding road back toward Brighton, the wind flapping in her hair, Truss said: "I think the British are much ruder than Americans. Someone once said that British politeness is about keeping people at arm's length and American politeness is genuinely about wanting to be friendly. I think I've written about manners from the British point of view. "We aren't direct," Truss went on in a vexed tone. "We are known for not saying what we mean, for being ironic, and we use the word 'ironic' to cover anything. We are always covering ourselves, and then we wonder why people don't understand what we are saying. It is a fault in the British people." Even now, as she critiqued the British penchant for indirectness, it was unclear if she was being fully direct. Was she in fact speaking for the entire population of Britain, as she claimed, or rather referring, in a reflexively veiled and oblique way, to the limitations of her own ironic self? Perhaps she felt a twinge of remorse, regretted her careful life, the fixation on good punctuation and good manners, the compulsion to correct, to mock those around her. Was she sorry she had faced the world shielded in an armor of humor? Posed the question, she reflected in silence, as if preparing to bare her soul. But in fact she did no such thing. "While I was writing the book, I hardly went out," she said in her usual droll tone. "It was quite interesting, because when I did go out, people would be courteous, and I would think: For goodness sake, I'm only out for half an hour. Be rude to me! I've got to get material! I met any number of very charming and helpful assistants in shops. It was kind of galling to be presented with so much counterevidence." Deborah Solomon, a contributing writer for the magazine, is completing a book on Norman Rockwell. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

'Memories of My Melancholy Whores'

Caleb Bach/Knopf Gabriel García Márquez November 22, 2005 Books of The Times | 'Memories of My Melancholy Whores' He Wants to Die Alone, but First . . . By MICHIKO KAKUTANI "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" is ballyhooed by its publishers as the first work of fiction by Gabriel García Márquez in 10 years. It turns out not to have been worth the wait. After the author's magical portrait of his own youth and apprenticeship in a classic memoir ("Living to Tell the Tale," 2003), this very slight novella - a longish short story, really - plays like a halfhearted exercise in storytelling, published simply to mark time. Like the entries in his 1993 collection "Strange Pilgrims," this tale demonstrates that the shorter form of the story does not lend itself to Mr. García Márquez's talents: his penchant for huge, looping, elliptical narratives that move back and forth in time is cramped in this format, as is his desire to map the panoramic vistas of an individual's entire life. The fertile inventiveness that animated his masterpiece "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is decidedly muted in these pages, and the reverence for the mundane realities of ordinary life, showcased in more recent works, seems attenuated as well. As a result, "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" feels like a brittle little fable composed on automatic pilot. For some time now Mr. García Márquez has been interested in writing from the vantage point of old age, and this story takes that impulse to an extreme. Its narrator, a former scholar known by his students as Prof. Gloomy Hills, is turning 90 and decides to celebrate his birthday by having sex with a young virgin. He places a call to the madam of his favorite brothel and makes arrangements to spend the night with a 14-year-old girl. In the course of recounting the relationship he develops with this girl, whom he calls Delgadina, the old man also ruminates about "the miseries" of his "misguided life." Prof. Gloomy Hills, we learn, lives in his parents' house, proposing "to die alone, in the same bed in which I was born and on a day that I hope will be distant and painless." In addition to having taught Spanish and Latin grammar, he served for 40 years as the cable editor at El Diario de La Paz, a job that involved "reconstructing and completing in indigenous prose the news of the world that we caught as it flew through sidereal space on shortwaves or in Morse code." He now scrapes by on his pension "from that extinct profession," combined with the even more meager sums he earns writing a weekly column. In his nine decades of life, the narrator has never had any close friends or intimate relationships. "I have never gone to bed with a woman I didn't pay," he says, "and the few who weren't in the profession I persuaded, by argument or by force, to take money even if they threw it in the trash. When I was 20 I began to keep a record listing name, age, place, and a brief notation on the circumstances and style of lovemaking. By the time I was fifty there were 514 women with whom I had been at least once. I stopped making the list when my body no longer allowed me to have so many and I could keep track of them without paper." Such passages read like a sad parody of Mr. García Márquez's radiant 1988 novel "Love in the Time of Cholera," which chronicled love (not just sex) in all its myriad varieties. Worse, we receive no insight into why the narrator has led such a libertine but lonely existence, no insight into why he has never examined his inner life. All this changes, we are asked to believe, when Prof. Gloomy Hills meets Delgadina and, for the first time in his life, falls in love. He does not touch her that first night, nor the next night, nor the one after. Instead, he simply watches as she sleeps next to him on the bed - exhausted from her day job at a factory, and overcome by the valerian potion the madam has given her to calm her nerves. As the narrator becomes increasingly obsessed with this innocent young woman - who, truth be told, does little ever but doze in his presence - fantasy and dreamlike hallucinations begin to take over. After one imagined exchange with her, he says: "From then on I had her in my memory with so much clarity that I could do what I wanted with her. I changed the color of her eyes according to my state of mind: the color of water when she woke, the color of syrup when she laughed, the color of light when she was annoyed. I dressed her according to the age and condition that suited my changes of mood: a novice in love at 20, a parlor whore at 40, the queen of Babylon at 70, a saint at 100." The narrator imagines that Delgadina has been to his house and prepared him breakfast. Later he flies into a jealous rage, convinced - with hardly any evidence - that she has been sleeping with other men. He assiduously courts her with flowers and presents, and reads books like "The Little Prince" to her as she sleeps. "We continued," he says, "with Perrault's Tales, Sacred History, the Arabian Nights in a version sanitized for children, and because of the differences among them I realized that her sleep had various levels of profundity depending on her interest in the readings." The relationship between the narrator and his virgin is really a relationship that exists inside the narrator's head, and since Mr. García Márquez makes little effort to make this man remotely interesting - as either an individual or a representative figure - it's hard for the reader to care really about what happens. Moreover, the trajectory of this narrative turns out to be highly predictable, leading to a banal ending to a banal story that's quite unworthy of the great Gabriel García Márquez's prodigious talents. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top

Health Care Crisis

Mike Mergen for The New York Times

A surgeon at Harrisburg Hospital in Pennsylvania, one of a small group of hospitals forging ties with doctors to save money.

November 18, 2005
To Fight Rising Costs, Hospitals Seek Allies in the Operating Room
By REED ABELSON
It is a war on rising hospital costs, being fought one tiny balloon at a time. And as with most wars, some of the tactics are controversial.

Until recently, some cardiologists at the PinnacleHealth System hospital group in Pennsylvania would inflate a new artery-opening balloon each time they inserted a stent into a patient's clogged arteries. Now, if they can, these doctors will use a single balloon throughout a patient's procedure.

That simple step, which the doctors say poses no additional risk to patients, saves at least a couple of hundred dollars a procedure. And - here lies the controversy - the doctors share in any money they save the hospital. While the new approach gives them a financial incentive to be more cost- conscious, it also fundamentally recasts the traditional arm's-length relationship between a hospital and the doctors who practice there.

Without the special approval that PinnacleHealth has received from federal health regulators, such an arrangement would run afoul of longstanding rules meant to prevent hospitals from paying doctors to skimp on care or to steer patients their way. Similar experiments have been allowed at a handful of other hospitals around the country, but regulators are evaluating each plan case by case. HCA, the nation's biggest hospital chain, has proposed its own version of a savings program that has met resistance from some surgeons, and regulators have not yet weighed in.

PinnacleHealth says it saved 5 percent last year in cardiology supplies by conserving on balloons and getting cardiologists to agree, when feasible, to use stents, pacemakers and other cardiac devices that it pays at a negotiated volume discount. Those savings equaled about $1 million, which the hospital split with the participating doctors.

"A lot of it is just common sense," said Dr. Ken May, whose 17-doctor cardiology practice is among the groups involved.

But hospital administrators and consultants say getting doctors to agree to use certain brands or waste fewer supplies can be difficult. The only way to make doctors cost-sensitive, the hospitals say, is to pay them to pay attention.

The experiments are known as gainsharing in the industry, and while no one expects that alone to bring health care inflation to heel, it is gaining momentum. There is talk in Congress of relaxing some of the current prohibitions.

Regulators and others still worry that such programs, if not designed properly, could induce doctors to put money matters ahead of the interests of patients. Representative Pete Stark, a California Democrat, has described Congressional enthusiasm for gainsharing as "not only misguided" but "potentially dangerous."

But many economists and health care experts say something needs to change. The soaring cost of medical devices - and major advances like drug-coated stents designed to keep arteries open better than stents without such coating - is a big reason that hospital care has become the largest component of the nation's nearly $2 trillion annual health bill.

"There's so much pressure to reduce costs across the board in health care, I would be surprised if this doesn't get traction," said Dara A. Corrigan, a former official in the inspector general's office of the federal Department of Health and Human Services. She is now a lawyer representing drug companies and device makers at Arnold & Porter in Washington.

As relations between doctors and hospitals have grown increasingly strained in recent years, many doctors now have closer ties to device makers, who sometimes pay them consulting fees, than to the hospitals, which must purchase the devices and swallow any portion of the price they cannot pass along to patients and insurers.

Often, hospitals say, they cannot negotiate better deals with device makers because too many doctors refuse to switch brands or to consider using anything but the most sophisticated models, even when a less expensive device might work as well. Without new approaches like PinnacleHealth's, the doctors, paid separately for their services, typically have no reason to care about prices.

"There has to be some way a hospital can get physicians involved," said Joane H. Goodroe, a consultant who has worked with all seven of the hospitals that have received regulatory approval to conduct the experiments to share savings. Besides PinnacleHealth Systems, the other hospitals include St. Joseph's Hospital in Atlanta and Sisters of Charity Providence Hospitals in Columbia, S.C.

Gainsharing's critics include device makers, whose profits are threatened if hospitals are able to demand better prices.

"We believe that gainsharing would have an immediate and significant negative effect on public health by encouraging the use of the least expensive option without consideration of long-term effects or overall health economics," said Martin J. Emerson, chief executive of American Medical Systems, a maker of pelvic devices based in Minnetonka, Minn.

He was speaking last month at a Congressional hearing convened by Representative Nancy L. Johnson, a Connecticut Republican. Not persuaded, Ms. Johnson plans to introduce legislation making it easier for hospitals and doctors to cooperate.

Federal officials do remain concerned, though, that doctors might reduce care to increase their own share of the savings. Regulators now carefully evaluate each hospital's plan, and many hospitals shy away from gainsharing because of the legal thicket, even when they think the idea makes sense.

"It's taking money from the manufacturers and giving it to the attorneys and consultants," said Kathleen Killeen, an administrator for HealthEast Care System in St. Paul.

For PinnacleHealth, the experiment is in its second year at the system's flagship, Harrisburg Hospital, in Pennsylvania's state capital. Doctors still have the ability to choose any device, but the hospital has worked with them to focus on a handful of companies that provide the bulk of the products used. The discounts are negotiated with that core group of manufacturers, and any savings from using less expensive devices are shared with doctors.

"We pick out vendors that have very good products and very good history," said Dr. May, the cardiologist. Doctors are still able to try new devices, he said, and because the contracts run for only a year, the physicians can change their minds.

Under its agreements with the device makers, PinnacleHealth cannot disclose which companies it uses or the prices it pays for devices. But the hospital said it was able to negotiate lower prices on many devices, saving about $370 for a pacemaker system, for example.

The eventual goal of these new cooperative programs with doctors is to develop certain standards of care, said Dr. Roger Longenderfer, the chief executive of PinnacleHealth. In one case, he said, doctors were able to identify patients suitable for smaller incisions when inserting a catheter, avoiding the need for a special vascular clamp costing a couple of hundred dollars. The hospital reduced the number of patients getting those devices to 30 percent from 40 percent, Dr. Longenderfer said.

To deter doctors from using cheaper devices simply to improve the overall savings, regulators have required PinnacleHealth and other pilot programs to develop guidelines indicating when more sophisticated and expensive devices are necessary, said Ms. Goodroe, the consultant. Doctors are not paid, for example, if they save money by implanting single-chamber defibrillators in patients who should be getting the costlier dual-chamber models.

And to reduce the likelihood of any one doctor's becoming a cost-cutting zealot to amass large individual savings, the hospitals dispense the payouts to the medical practices - not directly to individual doctors.

Dr. Longenderfer estimates that participating cardiologists earned an additional $10,000 to $15,000 each last year through gainsharing payouts from their group practices, although the practices decided how to allocate the money.

But not all plans are alike. The HCA approach rewards doctors individually, according to documents that outline the program to the orthopedic surgeons who practice at HCA's hospitals.

And unlike the gainsharing plans already approved by regulators, the HCA program strictly limits the doctors' choices to three manufacturers: Stryker, DePuy and Zimmer. "Your surgeon or doctor cannot use what he thinks is best for you," said one surgeon, who spoke on the condition he not be identified because he practices at an HCA hospital. He argued that devices made by other companies might be better for some patients.

But HCA says that its three chosen manufacturers, the largest in the industry, make a full range of devices, and that doctors who are doing repair work on a patient who has already undergone surgery are free to use whatever brand device the task requires. The company says it needs to limit its pool of suppliers to negotiate better prices.

"If you try to go out and contract with all vendors, you're going to get list price" with no discounts, said James A. Fitzgerald, a senior purchasing executive for HCA. Doctors who insist on using another brand can also petition HCA for an exception, he said.

Under the HCA plan, an orthopedic surgeon stands to get 20 percent of any savings, if the doctor had been using a different brand but switched to a preferred device. If the surgeon was already using a preferred device, the doctor earns 15 percent of those savings. A physician who performs 30 hip implants a year, for example, saving $1,200 per surgery, stands to make $7,200 through gainsharing, the documents show.

Such incentives make some surgeons uncomfortable, and the surgeon at the HCA hospital said he would prefer the money go to charity. HCA says it designed its program to motivate doctors but would work with federal regulators if they had concerns. So far, more than 200 surgeons at its hospitals have agreed to participate, and about 40 surgeons have switched brands. (Pending the plan's regulatory approval, HCA will not distribute any of the money to the doctors.)

It is debatable whether doctors can generate enough savings year after year to make it worth continuing gainsharing programs, even if they do catch on. To make sure the payments are only for gainsharing, regulators are requiring that savings be recalculated annually - meaning doctors would need to find new ways to reduce costs each year to generate new money for the hospitals to share.

With costs soaring, savings are fairly easy to achieve in the early going. But Dr. Longenderfer acknowledges that savings at PinnacleHealth are likely to be lower in the second year. He adds, though, that there is still ample opportunity to come up with more efficient ways of practicing medicine. "We're just beginning to scratch the surface," he said.

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The Sexual Revolution Online

You're Only a Newbie Once 

By Regina Lynn

Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,69600,00.html

02:00 AM Nov. 18, 2005 PT

Researching last week's column about adult webcam chat made me nostalgic for the online community I used to belong to. The conversations in the webAffairs book could have taken place in my chat room, and I examined the screenshots closely to see if I recognized any faces or other body parts.

And yet, the most familiar theme in the book was the author's personal experience. She started modestly, became a cybersex diva, then found a balance point between those two extremes. She's still a regular in her community, but spends less time online, and her chat buddies are integrated into her life like any other friends.

Sex Drive

It's almost exactly what happened to me when I delved into adult chat. Some of you can relate, I'm sure.

You're a newbie for about a week. Then you become a "reg" and you spend as much time as you can in the room, bonding with people and flirting and cybering.

And then you level off. Maybe it's that you've slaked the need that brought you there in the first place. But you balance yourself between virtual space and physical space, and you find ways to fit everything and everyone into your life without making yourself crazy.

It might take some people two months and others two years or longer, but eventually, most of us get there. (If you can find your balance before you rip your existing relationship apart, so much the better. Unless of course the relationship is in sore need of ripping. But that's another column.)

My old chat room no longer exists, so I know I literally cannot go back. My life is not where it was back then, either.

Last time, a 12-year relationship was coming to an end. I had just started freelance writing full-time, paying my dues with high-volume, low-profit gigs like writing horoscopes and website descriptions for human-edited search engines.

It wasn't hard to keep IRC open in the bottom right corner of my screen and still produce quality content. (Honestly, having company helped me get through some of the more mind-numbing aspects of the daily word churn.)

Now, I have writing assignments that challenge me and a relationship that suits me well. I'm active in a dozen online discussion groups -- including the Sex Drive forum -- and I have 100 people on my Trillian contact list, 41 of whom are online right now.

And yet, I really miss the group energy of the chat room. I miss the freedom to say whatever's on my mind, no matter how ridiculous or how sexual. And I wondered whether a new online community could give me those things -- and whether it would be worth the black hole it could become on my time.

I reactivated myself in Second Life to find out. And even as I write this column, I'm dancing with a group of other folks in a virtual saloon in another window. (If I suddenly lose my train of thought and shout "Oh yeah!" you now know why.)

A quick primer for the newbies: Second Life is not so much a game as it is a place, although it has games in it. (Some would argue with me on this; see this explanation.) You represent yourself with a 3-D avatar and can pretty much build yourself a complete life in this online world.

And unlike plain vanilla webcam chat -- or the ancient medium of text chat -- you have lots of things to view, build, buy, sell and otherwise interact with that may or may not involve interacting with other people.

I chose Second Life because it represents the modern incarnation of the chat room I frequented. What you can build visually in Second Life, we created with text and imagination in IRC.

I met a nice woman who gave me cool clothes to keep in my inventory, so I can change outfits whenever I want without going through the hassle of shopping. Another woman gave me a winged horse (a "flyable Pegasus," in Second Life parlance), to make traveling more fun. A few people have added me to their Friends lists, and two have granted me a "positive" rating.

I'm chatting, I'm joking, I'm flirting. And while I have yet to engage in cybersex, I'm having a great time.

What I'm not doing is walking around all stunned by a new realm of possibility, opportunity, novelty. The realities of online community and virtual space are not new to me, although the graphics and individual people are.

What I find in Second Life is that I'm comfortable. I know how to make friends. I enjoy talking with people. I'll slip easily into the adult content when I have time to do it right.

I might even choose to decline a physical world invitation now and then in order to spend time online. But it's not going to take over my life, and it's not going to threaten my relationship.

I can't go back to the innocent times when everything was new. But now I realize that I don't want to.

By now I've not only "been there, done that" in cyberspace, I've folded those experiences into the rest of my life. I'm a better lover, a better friend and a better writer because of it.

Because, of course, the one thing virtual space and physical place have in common are you. And you can't undo an experience, like it or not. What's that old saying -- wherever you go, there you are?

So in that sense, no, I don't think you can go back after you leave adult chat. Just like you can't go back to being a virgin, or to being 17 (thank goodness).

But you can return to adult community with the maturity gained through experience and bring a deeper appreciation -- and hopefully, well-honed skills -- to the new neighborhood. Which, now that this column is written, I'm going to do right now.

Oh yeah.

See you next Friday,

Regina Lynn

Regina Lynn is the author of The Sexual Revolution 2.0. You can e-mail her at ginalynn@gmail.com if you promise to be patient about getting a reply.

Today's Blogs

Searching for Zarqawi
By David Wallace-Wells
Posted Monday, Nov. 21, 2005, at 4:50 PM ET

Bloggers discuss rumors that terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is dead, as well as news that Ariel Sharon is leaving his Likud Party to forge a new, liberal party. At the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington mobilizes anti-Wal-Mart sentiment.

Searching for Zarqawi: The Jerusalem Post reports that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the senior al-Qaida leader in Iraq, might have died in a group suicide Sunday, when eight terrorists surrounded by coalition forces performing a raid purportedly blew themselves up in Mosul. U.S. officials downplayed the possibility, but the military is conducting DNA tests nonetheless.

"I'm not even religious," writes Andy O'Reilly at The World Wide Rant. "But I'm almost willing to pray this is true. … I generally don't wish death upon anyone, but I'll make an exception for al-Zarqawi. Here's hoping it's good riddance."

Conservative Kevin Aylward is also ready to believe. "One fact in support of the theory that al-Zarqawi's luck may have finally run out is the vow from Jordan's King Abdullah II to 'take the fight' to … the Jordanian born al-Zarqawi," he writes at Wizbang. "With active engagement from Jordan's security and intelligence forces it's not hard to believe that al-Zarqawi's location could have been pinpointed."

"It would be great if this rumor turned out to be true, but at this time it remains unconfirmed and it seems that rumors like this are rarely confirmed," cautions conservative homemaker PoliPundit Lorie Byrd. Others harbor more substantive doubts. At the Counterterrorism Blog, Evan Kohlman reports that an al-Qaida supporter, claiming to know the identities of those killed, denies that Zarqawi was among the dead. "Certainly, Al-Qaida doesn't seem to have been at all fazed by the reported Mosul raid," he observes.

Attorney John Hinderaker of conservative coterie Power Line is also skeptical. "The larger point, however, is that this is one more in a long series of successes against the terrorists: eight more of them have bitten the dust, probably based on intelligence received from the local population"

Some on the American left caution against what they see as premature, and overly militaristic, triumphalism. "The death if Zarqawi would be a positive step in fighting terrorism and, one hopes, suppressing the violence in Iraq," suggests prominent contributor Armando at liberal war room Daily Kos. "What it will not be however, is a solution for our troubles in Iraq, whose roots are political in nature," he says. "Zarqawi is not and has not been the source of our troubles in Iraq. It is the intractable political problems of the sectarian power struggle between Shia, Sunni and Kurd."

At Informed Comment, Middle East academic Juan Cole agrees, describing Zarqawi as merely a functionary. "If al-Zarqawi died or were captured, there would be many increasinlgy experienced guerrilla fighters to take his place," he writes. "Guerrilla movements … are social movements, and do not typically depend on one man."

Many bloggers are cheering a related story. Dr. Rusty Shackleford of My Pet Jawa, libertarian Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit, and many more point to heartening news that, in half-page newspaper advertisements Sunday, Zarqawi's family publicly disowned him.

Read more about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Sharon's third way: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced today that he was leaving the ruling Likud Party to establish a new, liberal party dedicated to the pursuit of "peace and tranquility" in the region. Sharon asked Israeli President Moshe Katsov to dissolve Parliament so that new elections could be held.

"It's about time," approves Zionist watchdog J. of Justify This! At Talking Points Memo, discriminating liberal Joshua Micah Marshall calls the developments "tectonic plates moving in Israeli politics…ones that seem likely to have deep repercussions throughout the region and even in the world."

Sharon is apparently hoping to further jettison the settler base he alienated earlier this year with his decision to pull out of Gaza, suggests Patrick al-Kafir, waging war on jihad at Clarity & Resolve. "I think he may win this coming March, and I think this current maneuver is pretty shrewd—ingenious, actually. He's got a vision to settle this Arab/Islamic terror issue once and for all, I think, and I wouldn't be surprised to see him transform that vision into reality." Meryl Yourish, a conservative Jewish teacher and techie living in Richmond, Va., agrees. "It is rather strange to be thinking of Ariel Sharon as a centrist, but the man is an incredibly astute politician. I'm saying right now that he's going to come through this crisis as Prime Minister, again"

Head Heeb Jonathan Edelstein, a lawyer in New York, predicts increasing party clarity as various political interests shuffle themselves out. "Instead of being several parties in one, the Likud will once again be the party of the nationalist right. The next election will see a fairly clear choice between three parties, each representing a different approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," he writes.

Read more about Ariel Sharon and more about the Likud Party.

Arianna vs. Wal-Mart: Hoping to direct readers' attention to the muckraking Wal-Mart movie, The High Cost of Low Price, blogmonger Arianna Huffington has assembled a remarkable coalition of the willing to denounce the corporate giant at Huffington Post.

"Wal-Mart sells itself as the all-American company, but it violates American family values every single day," blogs iconic Sen. Ted Kennedy. Renaissance-man RJ Eskow seconds the charge of corporate hypocrisy. "A population deprived of once-promised opportunities - for income, job security, and benefits - can only afford the least expensive items to make ends meet," he writes. "Wal-Mart lowers your living standards, then sells you the cheap goods that are all you can afford." Byron York of the National Review points out some of the movie's inaccuracies.

Read more about The High Cost of Low Price, more Huffington Post commentary, and more blog posts about the Huffington Post commentary.

Got a question, comment, or suggestion? E-mail todaysblogs@slate.com.

Today's Papers

The China Monologues
By Jay Dixit
Updated Monday, Nov. 21, 2005, at 6:56 AM ET

The New York Times' and Los Angeles Times' leads, the Washington Post's top nonlocal story, and the Wall Street Journal's top world-wide news item all report on President Bush's talks with the president of China, noting that the Chinese government was mostly unresponsive to Bush's appeals for economic and political reforms. USA Today leads with the CIA chief's denial that his agency uses torture.

Bush's trip to China "meets low expectations," snarks the WP headline, although everyone agrees that officials had specifically warned that progress would be slow. The NYT headline emphasizes China's promise to quicken the pace of economic reforms but goes on to talk about China's "quiet resistance" to Bush's requests, quoting an American official who says, "No Chinese leader was going to act immediately under the pressure" from a foreign leader. The WSJ is more skeptical from the outset, focusing on China's unresponsiveness with the headline "Beijing Brushes Off Bush's Plea" and noting that the Chinese president said China would address U.S. concerns "as it saw fit." The WP article emphasizes that the Bush administration had predicted no breakthroughs but is promising that this trip will lay the groundwork for future progress. The LAT article emphasizes questions about how forcefully Bush pushed the "freedom agenda," noting that although administration officials may have had low expectations, human rights advocates had high ones.

Among other things, Bush wants China to crack down on movie and video game piracy and allow the market to set its foreign exchange rate. The Chinese president indicated he was aware of Bush's concerns but said he would tackle them on his own timetable. Bush told reporters that the talks were "good" and "frank" but euphemistically added that America's relationship with China is "complex." China had not released any of the people the U.S. said were unjustly imprisoned and in fact apparently rounded up new political and religious dissidents before Bush arrived specifically so they wouldn't demonstrate during his visit. Bush also attended a Protestant church service near Tiananmen Square and urged Chinese leaders not to "fear Christians who gather to worship openly."

The CIA uses "unique and innovative" methods to extract information but does not torture, said Porter Goss, the agency's director. Goss said that officially, the CIA is neutral on John McCain's proposal to ban the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment but that such methods have been valuable in the past. He said such methods are legal and do not include torture. McCain's proposal would restrict psychological techniques that some Republican representatives believe are necessary, such as isolating a detainee or calling him a coward. The White House has threatened to veto any bill including McCain's measure.

A related NYT front reports on the three Republican senators (including McCain) who are "making trouble for the Bush administration" by supporting the proposal.

The WP reports that money set aside so far for Hurricane Katrina relief is only "a drop in the bucket" compared with what the final tally will be. The money spent so far on removing debris, housing evacuees, and financially assisting victims already equals the money spent on Iraqi reconstruction. But the bulk of the Katrina cost will come when the government rebuilds infrastructure, including "roads, bridges, hospitals, schools, sewers, power lines, ports and levees." Estimates of the total price tag vary wildly, but everyone agrees it will be well over $100 billion.

In related news, USAT reports on post-Katrina donor fatigue, noting that people are feeling tapped out after having donated to Katrina relief. Food banks say they are seeing bare shelves as a "direct result of Katrina." Food donations are down 30 percent in New York and 50 percent in Milwaukee and Denver.

The NYT and LAT front the news that Israeli PM Ariel Sharon will leave the Likud Party to found a new centrist party with which to seek re-election. The NYT's sources are Israeli army radio and a senior Likud member, while the LAT gets a Sharon spokesman. The Israeli president will most likely dissolve the parliament and call for a new election within 90 days. Sharon has been battling dissenters within his own party who opposed his decision to withdraw from the Gaza Strip. But he has received "significant support" from President Bush, and early polls predict that Sharon's new party might win more seats than a Sharon-less Likud would.

Goats story … The LAT reports on the rising popularity of goat, "the other red meat." Demand for goat meat in the U.S. is growing, largely due to the millions of Americans who were born in "goat-eating nations." Even Whole Foods sells it, banking on Muslims, Latinos, and Asians, and on consumers who want to try "new and interesting meat choices."

Newspapers, Google, Bob Woodward

Woodward? Google? A Plague Week