I wrote a novel about my family. What could go wrong?

All writers are thieves but when it comes to stealing from your own flesh and blood — that way danger lies writes Francesca Jakobi in The Financial Times


In the wedding photograph my grandmother is not quite smiling. She is wearing white from top to toe — the only one to do so; the bride wore turquoise — and clutching a small glass of wine. 

The snapshot was taken on the day my parents married in 1964. Gerdi was the mother of the groom. It was a bright summer’s day and London was swinging, but my grandmother looks guarded and anxious. 

It must have been hard for her, surrounded by her ex-husband’s relatives. She had had an affair during the second world war and lost custody of my father as a consequence. Their relationship never fully recovered, though it was plain to see that she adored him. She rang him most nights in the middle of supper, throughout my childhood. We’d chorus: “I wonder who that could be?” 

I’ve always been fascinated by my German Jewish grandmother. She was someone I loved deeply but never quite understood. I’d grown up hearing one side of the story: that she was weak and selfish, and had paid a heavy price for it. I wanted to know what might have led to the decisions she made. How could a loving mother walk out on her son? 

I used the black-and-white photograph as the basis of a story, imagining the wedding day from her point of view. The voice I wrote in was feisty and spiky, a million miles away from my shy, awkward grandmother. But it felt good to examine things from her perspective. It felt like I was giving her a hearing. 

It was only months later, as it grew into a novel, that I started to worry I’d been reckless. What I’d written was fiction, yet the story behind it was real. I was scared that it might expose my family when my instinct is always to protect them. The dirty linen one mustn’t wash in public was strewn across 300 pages. 

All writers are thieves. They steal material wherever they can find it: a grumpy exchange overheard on the bus, the spotty shoulders of a long-ago boyfriend. But stealing stories from your nearest and dearest — that way danger lies. The road is littered with feuds and disinheritances. If you loved your family, why would you risk it? 

My shelves are packed with books by writers who have taken that gamble, from AA Milne to Andrea Levy, Hanif Kureishi and Isabel Allende. Some reimagined a relative’s life, others used their offspring as a springboard to a whole new world. There’s an emotional truth at the heart of these books that attracts me. 

I have always wanted to write a novel. I had my first go when I was nine. It was four sheets of paper sewn together with crooked stitches. The title: When the Dead Cock Crowed. I don’t recall that much about the plot (it had something to do with time travel and poultry) but I remember the excitement of filling the pages with words, my vice-like grip on the felt-tip pen as I wrote in giant capitals “THE END”. 

That was the feeling I sought to recapture aged 25, when I tried to write “chick-lit”. It was 1997 and Bridget Jones was all the rage. I’d just come back from teaching English in Turkey and was unsure what to do with my life. It seemed I’d found the answer as I tapped away on my Canon Starwriter. Research? Who needs it. Plot? Just keep writing. I was propelled by the arrogance of youth. 

I hit 50,000 words before I ran out of steam. When I read the manuscript back, I was horrified by what I’d produced. First drafts are supposed to be rough, but this one was truly a stinker. I thank God that Turkish Delight never made it to the bookshops. 

The experience taught me just how difficult it is to write a novel and that making characters and events sound plausible is harder still. If I was going to devote that time and effort again, it had to be for something I believed in. 

I wanted an authentic tale, one that I felt qualified to tell. It took me until my late thirties to find what I was looking for. 

Right from the start my novel Bitter was a murky mix of fact and fiction. The protagonist had my grandmother’s name and the same loveless childhood in Germany. She lived in the same smart Swiss Cottage flat I remembered from countless visits. Her favourite restaurant, Luigi’s off Finchley Road, was one I had been to with Gerdi. 

But as I began to write, I realised I knew very little beyond the headline facts. My grandmother had been dead for almost a decade. In life, she rarely talked about the past and my father had been tucked away at boarding school. 

At first it felt strange to be making things up — it reminded me of playing with Barbie dolls — but the more imaginative leaps I made, the more natural it became. I wrote instinctively, mixing anecdotes with half-truths. I changed the protagonist’s name to Gilda (it had to have the same feeling as Gerdi) and that one small change was like cutting a tether; she took on a life of her own. 

Ambition is a peculiar thing: mine seemed to grow along with my word count. When I finally got to the end of the first draft, I thought I had something that could work. But along with that came my first serious doubts. I’d distorted the facts beyond recognition. My protagonist was an unlikeable woman with a life spinning out of control. Yet aspects of the story still belonged to my grandmother. I shuddered to think what she’d have made of it. 

I wasn’t the only one struggling to distinguish the truth. Shortly after I’d shown her the first draft, my mother recounted an anecdote about Gerdi and I realised it had come from the book. I told her I had made the story up, but she insisted it had actually happened. Perhaps it did. Perhaps I’d heard it at some point. Neither of us has any way of knowing. 

I returned to the manuscript and deleted several sections of it. I wrote the word “compassion” on a Post-it note and stuck it to my screen. The second draft was kinder, the characters more nuanced, the ending more hopeful. I added another layer of plot to push it further into fiction. 

As I set about the long process of trying to find an agent, I wondered whether to mention the family link. In the end I did. I wanted to show why I was the right person to write this particular story. And also, if I’m honest, I hoped it might be a selling point. 

When Lionel Shriver wrote her fifth novel, A Perfectly Good Family, she thought it might cause “a little aggro”. In fact, her brother refused to speak to her for two years. Writing more than a decade after the book’s publication, she warned: “Anyone considering writing fiction or a memoir that brushes even slightly against real-life family should take heed: think twice.” 

This is good advice, clearly. Even the most sensitive writers can cause unintended harm. AA Milne’s son Christopher was badly bullied at boarding school for his role in Winnie-the-Pooh. Isabel Allende’s relatives didn’t speak to her for several years after recognising themselves in her debut House of the Spirits. 

Some authors see such repercussions as part of the job description. Hanif Kureishi, whose 2003 film The Mother caused a serious rift with his sister, says his only regrets “are to do with quality”. Rachel Cusk, who was vilified for writing about motherhood and the breakdown of her marriage, has said “If you really care what people think of you . . . you’re never going to be a writer.” 

Yet most of the authors I know agonise about the possibility of hurting loved ones. A friend scrapped an entire manuscript because she was worried what her children would one day make of it. Another changed a crucial death scene because it was too close to what had happened to a relative. 

Andrea Levy shows that family stories need not be a source of conflict. Her novel Small Island came out of her father’s emigration to Britain from Jamaica on the Empire Windrush and her mother’s arrival six months later. The two main characters, Gilbert and Hortense, are named after her parents. In a piece for The Guardian, she said: “Small Island was a joy to write and those characters will stay with me forever. It became a work of fiction, but for me it still remains something of a family history too.” 

I asked my parents’ permission to write about Gerdi early on and both were supportive. When I speak to my mother now, she says she wasn’t worried at all. As a retired psychoanalyst, she knows the importance of telling stories. She trusted that I was writing from a place of love. I wasn’t trying to settle any scores. 

In fact, she rather wished that I was writing about her parents. She saw it as a way to somehow bring them back to life. I understand that. For a while it did feel like Gerdi was more present. I thought about her a great deal. We talked about her often at the dinner table. 

My father, it seemed to me, was not hugely interested. His childhood years were unhappy and he had no wish to return to them. But, aged 80, he had just completed a Masters in creative writing and I thought he understood where I was coming from. I spoke to him a bit about his mum. Neither of us expected my novel would be published. I showed him some passages along the way but he didn’t want to read it until it was a “proper book”. 

When I spoke to him for this article, he admits he’d had concerns about what I was doing. “I knew you didn’t know enough to write a decent memoir and I was worried you were going down the Hilary Mantel ‘faction’ route. I didn’t like the idea of you making things up to fill the gaps.”

Could I have written Bitter without my parents’ permission? Honestly, I don’t think so. It wasn’t just my grandmother’s archives I raided. The book is stuffed with family memories: my mother’s school dinners in the 1950s, my brother as a child learning chess with my dad, my nephew running as fast as he can through the autumn leaves, me hobbling across the stones to paddle in the sea at Brighton. 

I was nervous when I finally handed Dad a hardback copy. At first he said he was enjoying it. But Mum told me later that he was finding it quite upsetting. She thought chapters that touched on his early life had reminded him of a time he would rather forget. 

I rang him and he said it had captured something about his mother. It wasn’t Gerdi and yet somehow it was her — not the words, perhaps, but the underlying sadness. It was unsettling to see this period through the eyes of his daughter. I said he should stop reading it and he has. 

He’s since explained that he could never quite see it as fiction. To him Gilda is an imposter, pretending to be his mum. When he heard the actress in the audio version had a German accent, his response was immediate. “No. That’s wrong. Mum lost most of her accent.” 

I don’t doubt how proud he is, though. He took me out to lunch on publication day. As I got up to go to the ladies room, I saw him lean over to the strangers at the table next to us. Pointing in my direction, he said: “That’s my clever daughter.” 

Both my parents came to the launch party and my father thoroughly enjoyed himself. One of my friends mentioned a scene from the book that revolved around a small boy and some coffee cups. Dad told her: “That was me, you know.”

‘Writing is very lonely but it’s not nearly as painful as dance’

Carlos Acosta: ‘Writing is very lonely but it’s not nearly as painful as dance’

Carlos Acosta is one of the best and most famous dancers in the world. So why did he write his first novel?

Carlos Acosta photographed at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden Photo: Ken Rake/Camera Press

By Jane Shilling

7:00AM BST 26 Oct 2013

Comment

‘My baby!” cries Carlos Acosta, swooping down on my copy of his first novel, Pig’s Foot, and giving it – mwah! – a smacking kiss. He is glowing with pride, as well he might be. He’s just read a rave review that compares the book with Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum.

“Did you like it?” he asks. Yes, I did. “What did you like about it?” You might suspect another writer of fishing for compliments, but not Acosta. He has spent three of his four decades in rehearsal rooms, analysing every step. The habit of taking something apart – a gesture, a novel – so as to put it together again, refined and improved, comes as naturally to him as breathing.

One thing I like about his novel, I say, is that it has a distinctive voice: pungent, original and funny. His narrator, Oscar Kortico, is the sole survivor of four generations of a Cuban family, originally – like Acosta’s father’s family – of slave origin. The novel opens in midstream of consciousness, with Oscar recalling “the day I came home from primary school dragging a dead cat by the scruff of the neck”, and continues in similar trenchant vein. “I’m the narrator and anyone who doesn’t like it can f--- off.”

Episodes of savage violence and almost equally savage sex are punctuated with tender depictions of family life. Acosta is the father of an 18-month-old daughter, Aila, and the novel’s sweetly comic mixture of scatology and transcendent love perfectly captures new fatherhood.

Offstage, Acosta has the potent charisma of someone who doesn’t know what it is like not to be superlative at what he does, an oddly egoless quality of absolute confidence. He is slighter than he seems on stage, and he speaks with the incantatory phrasing and repetitions of a born storyteller.

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We already knew he could write. His 2007 autobiography, No Way Home, was praised for its lyrical descriptions of his difficult childhood, growing up in a family of 11 children in a poor suburb of Havana. The book took Acosta 10 years to complete.

“In my house we were not cultured people,” he tells me. “There were no books, and I was a very bad student as well. I never read anything. The whole process of writing, I didn’t know how to do it. But when I was in Cuba, there were often power cuts when we were in school, and there were not many distractions. So we used to gather around and tell stories and jokes, and I was very good at that. Unconsciously, I always liked storytelling, without knowing that I could write anything.

“When I arrived here in Britain, I met somebody who introduced me to all these books and I began reading: The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, Notes from Underground, which I really liked. I would analyse with a critical eye, until I got a sense of what makes a book a classic.

“I want more to life than just dancing, I want to experience more, live more. I try to evolve and discover and stretch myself. So when my autobiography was quite well received, that gave me the confidence to say, well, I can write a little bit, and I like telling a story. As the next challenge, what if I came up with a world of my own?”

He cites as his fictional influences a formidable list: Camus; Márquez; the Cuban novelist Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, author of the Dirty Havana trilogy; the Mexican Juan Rulfo; Roberto Bolaño; and Haruki Murakami. Not that he sees himself in their league. “I understand my limits. What I want to do is just old-fashioned storytelling, to produce some hours or weeks of escapism from this world. With that I would be very satisfied.”

The idea for his novel began with its title: “I wanted to write a book named Pata de Puerco – Pig’s Foot. I don’t know why, it just came into my head, and I began saying, what if it is a very little hamlet in a very isolated place?” The writing, he says, “was very lonely and everything, but not nearly as painful as dance”. It took him three years, between rehearsals and performing.

“When I have an hour or so I go down to my dressing-room, open the computer and escape into my own world. I wanted to produce two realities – I’ve always liked the two sides of the coin. So there is an argument between the two generations of Cubans – the older generation, who lived through the Battista era and thought that revolution was the best thing that happened to Cuba, and the younger generation, craving freedom and not to live by any ideology.”

A darker duality underpins the book, which is dedicated both to Acosta’s wife, Charlotte, and his daughter, and to his elder sister Berta and aunt Lucia, both victims of schizophrenia. “It is in my family genes,” Acosta says sombrely. He remembers Lucia being taken away to hospital when he was seven. “She was shouting at the window, and the whole neighbourhood was gathered downstairs. It was terrifying.” She killed herself in hospital and Berta also developed suicidal schizophrenia, and died two years ago. “So I try with this book to pay homage to these two people who were so wonderful.”

Costa’s grip on sanity has never faltered – “not that I know of” – but as a young dancer he struggled with being far from home. “I became a foreigner and I hated that.” Does he have sympathy with his troubled former Royal Ballet colleague, Sergei Polunin, who left the company abruptly last year, and abandoned a production of Midnight Express this spring, days before the opening?

“I think probably this kind of reaction is reaching out for a helping hand,” says Acosta. “But it is very hard, because many people tried to help him, but he is a guy who is in no way approachable. If you don’t really have the sense of humility to let yourself be helped, you sink even more. You become lonelier and lonelier and lonelier, and I think that is what happened with him. Which is a big shame.”

Besides madness, there is a great deal of sex in Acosta’s novel, some tender, some peremptory, some blackly comic. “I think sex is a very, very important fact of life in all relationships,” he says. “And I think if you really want to be honest about it, there is nothing wrong with talking about something that is part of our daily life. I like sex, you know.” Yes indeed. His autobiography made that clear. Was there any trouble with disgruntled girlfriends? Not girlfriends, he says. “But my wife found it difficult. She tried to skip through some of the graphic descriptions. Nobody wants to read about what went on before.”

^{The dancer turned novelist: Carlos Acosta in Agon (Alastair Muir)}

Acosta is exploring life beyond classical ballet. Besides his novel, he has a leading role in Days of the Flowers, a film by John Roberts about two Scottish girls who take their father’s ashes to Cuba. It’s a featherlight confection with an honest performance by Acosta, at his best in a scene where he dances with his wallflower girlfriend.

He has said that he wouldn’t dance beyond 40, that he wouldn’t dance Romeo again, that he doesn’t see himself as a choreographer. Yet he turned 40 this summer, his production of Don Quixote for the Royal Ballet drew praise for its choreography, and he is about to dance Romeo in two productions.

Next month he partners the 27-year-old Bolshoi star, Natalia Osipova, in her debut as a principal for the Royal Ballet in Kenneth Macmillan’s Romeo and Juliet, and early next year he will reprise his partnership with Tamara Rojo in Derek Deane’s version for English National Ballet. What does he bring to the role at 40?

“It’s a role I know very well,” he says. “I decided that if I’m going to keep dancing, I don’t want to step back. If I want to stick around for a while, I want to do it all, close to the level that I used to do when I was 25. The challenge is to be able to deliver the essence of Romeo with dignity, and with the experience that is hard to achieve when you are 20.”

Yet he feels the urge to step back. “I want to be able to spend more time with Aila if I can,” he says. He wants to give her a sense of his Cuban roots. “Charlotte speaks to her in English and I speak in Spanish, and the best I could give her is to be able to know that side of her roots, because Cuba is just so wonderful. There is still that sense of community and I would really like her to have that.”

He intends to spend more time in his homeland: “What I am planning is maybe to have a company in Cuba, maybe a small theatre to run, and at the same time to dance things that are suited for my age and more contemporary, which is easier for the body. I would like to do choreography also.”

And perhaps another novel. “I’d like to write about somebody coming from Cuba, who goes to London. These two worlds, so different, and the search for the soul along the way. This is all very vague – I am still thinking about it. But I like the idea of somebody on a quest: starting there, and coming here, with a conclusion that I still don’t know. Does he go back, or not? I don’t know. We’ll see.”

Why you should begin well

Vikram Kapur in The Hindu

In life as in literature, there is nothing like making a great first impression.It is hard to overstress the importance of beginnings. I once heard the Booker Prize-winning Nigerian writer Ben Okri
say that if the first sentence of a book does not grab him, he is liable to close the book then and there. A bit extreme, perhaps, but it does illustrate how crucial beginnings are.


There are all kinds of first sentences — atmospheric, interrogative, informational, reflective, action-packed… One thing, however, all of them have in common is that they set the tone for the book that follows. This month let us look at some first sentences to see how they help forge an effective beginning.


Haruki Murakami’s novel Sputnik Sweetheart begins: “In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.” Over the course of this short sentence, Murakami introduces us to his main character and tells us that she is a young woman of 22. He also lets us know that this is going to be a novel about first love. While most of the sentence is literal, the use of the word “spring” lends it a deeper meaning. Instead of “spring”, Murakami could have said “April” which would have been a more accurate reflection of exactly when Sumire fell in love for the first time. However, he chose to use the more metaphoric “spring”. The season of spring, in many cultures, symbolizes passion. The use of the word here sets the tone for the extreme passion that Sumire goes on to feel for the object of her affection.


Beginning in the middle

On the other hand, instead of beginning with a statement, you can begin right in the midst of action. Take a look at this first sentence from Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity: “The trawler plunged into the angry swells of the dark furious sea like an awkward animal trying desperately to break out of an impenetrable swamp.” A sentence like that instantly summons images of darkness, frenetic action, and the trawler being tossed about haplessly in the midst of it all. It isn’t surprising that Ludlum wrote thrillers. You would hardly expect a story of first love to ensue after reading such a beginning. 


Then there is this first sentence from the iconic Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” The most interesting thing here is how Garcia Marquez instantly places the reader in two time frames. He is going to tell us about what happened on that afternoon. At the same time, however, he is inserting the burning question — how did Aureliano Buendia come to face a firing squad? — in the reader’s mind. Furthermore, Aureliano Buendia is being taken to “discover” ice. By using the word “discover”, Garcia Marquez captures the sense of wonder someone feels at seeing ice for the first time. Since the discovery was made many years ago when Aureliano Buendia was a boy, the whole effect of it on him would be magical.


From a completely different sensibility comes this first sentence from the prolific British Asian writer Hanif Kureishi’s novel Intimacy: “It is the saddest night, for I am leaving and not coming back.” Unlike Garcia Marquez’s two time frames, Kureishi is firmly entrenched in one time frame — the night before the parting. The despondent tone of the sentence instantly communicates the mental state of the narrator. He is suffused with regret and guilt, and is clearly talking about leaving loved ones. The tone suggests a failed marriage, and reading on, one is not surprised to learn that the narrator has decided to leave his wife and children the next morning for a younger woman.


Finally, here is the first sentence of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: “I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time.” The sentence is, at once, a play on words, cleverly inverting the old way of beginning a story: “Once upon a time…” It also places the novel in Bombay and, consequently, in India. Finally, it tells us that the novel is going to take the form of a fictional autobiography. Only in this case it is an autobiography that tells us about the life of a person, as well as a country.


These are just five examples of beginnings. There are several more, and it would be worth your while to study them. Think of the beginning of a novel like a serve in tennis. It is, perhaps, the only time where you have the reader’s undivided attention. Hence, everything is in your hands. You can hit an ace, which will allow you to win over the reader. Or you can lose it all by hitting a fault.


-----

In the last week of February, I was writer-in-residence at Pondicherry Central University. There, during one of the lectures, a student asked: How should a writer live? Should a writer be a hermit? Or live out in the world?

As far as I am concerned, a writer must live out in the world. It is only when you engage in the world that you gather its sights, sounds and smells; that you get to experience its various paradoxes. Experience, as the great Latin American writer Roberto Bolano reminds us, is the seed from which great writing sprouts. A hermit can only write from memory, or what he or she can glean from books. The only current experience that he or she has to share is that of being a hermit, which most of the world does not care about. True, you have to retreat into your cave from time to time to be able to write. But a cave is not the place to live.

Riveting conversation

After coming home from Puducherry, I attended a discussion between the novelist and short story writer Bulbul Sharma and V.K. Karthika, Editor-in-chief of HarperCollins India, at the Alliance Francaise in New Delhi. It was a telling reminder of how enjoyable a literary conversation can be when the moderator and writer are in concert. At the Jaipur Literature Festival, the two often seemed to be on different planes. More often than not, that occurred because the moderator had not bothered to acquaint himself with the writer's body of work, and was clearly winging it. Thankfully, there was no chance of that happening here. Karthika is Bulbul Sharma's editor, and, therefore, knows her fiction intimately.

Bulbul's fiction illustrates the value of writing what you know. Bulbul, who is currently 60, got married at 19. In her stories, she deals chiefly with women in families. These are ordinary women, drawn mostly from her generation, who live caged lives within the confines of a traditional Indian family. Many of them only get to see the outside world after they are widowed. One of the stories from her collection My Sainted Aunts is about a character going abroad for the first time at the age of 70.

Listening to Bulbul read from her work, I was reminded of how compelling simplicity can be in fiction. Bubul's characters are ordinary people. Her prose is pared back rather than purple. Her stories deal with the small defeats and victories of people living a run-of-the-mill existence. They instantly evoke the iconic Hindi writer Premchand, who Bulbul mentioned as an influence. To me they are also reminiscent of Jane Austen in the way they hone in on women in family situations. They exemplify how resonant simplicity can be even in an age where writers are known more for their bag of tricks than what they write.

Two weeks after Bulbul's event, I wandered into the amphitheatre of the India Habitat Centre where Penguin India was holding its Spring Fever festival. That night Rahul Bhattacharya, who won The Hindu Literary Prize last year, and acclaimed fiction writer Anjum Hasan were in conversation with the critic Sunil Sethi. Regrettably, I could not stay for the entire discussion. But I did hear Rahul Bhattacharya read from his first book Pundits From Pakistan which has been re-issued by Penguin.

Characters come alive

Pundits From Pakistan is a cricket book dealing with the Indian team's historic tour of Pakistan in 2004. The passage the author read from dealt with an instance in the first Test match where Rahul Dravid, filling in for an injured Saurav Ganguly as captain, declared with Sachin Tendulkar close to a double hundred. While describing the reaction to that momentous declaration, the author effectively mimicked the voices of Tendulkar, V.V.S. Laxman, Imran Khan, Ian Chappell, and other well-known cricket personalities. He was using ventriloquism in a bid to enhance the audience's enjoyment of his performance. In the same way, a writer can employ his or her ability as a ventriloquist to bring various characters to life in a book. Many of the great writers are superb ventriloquists. Salman Rushdie gets into the skin of his characters in that manner. So does J.D. Salinger. The best ventriloquists in literature, though, are the playwrights for whom writing dialogue is their chief stock-in-trade. Most prose writers use dialogue in its most basic form, which is to move the story forward. They lack the ear to do anything more with it. Playwrights, on the other hand, utilise it as a key ingredient for building character, as well as negotiating between status shifts. As one of my old professors told me: If you want to learn how to write good dialogue, then read a good playwright.

Fiction takes you to places that life can't

Philip Hensher in The Independent:

It takes a novelist, not a psychologist, to explain why people sometimes behave out of character

Saturday, 9 July 2011

 

What's it like to die? There's no answer to this cheerful question, or there shouldn't be.

People have told us what it's like nearly to die, to come back from the brink. The external process of death has been gone over in great detail. But no one has definitively returned from the other side, to tell us what it's like to feel the last breath leaving your body. We don't know anything about it.

Or rather, we shouldn't know anything about it. In 1886, Tolstoy published a short story called "The Death of Ivan Ilych", which follows a fairly unremarkable man to the complete extinction of life. After reading that, you feel you know what death will be like: "Suddenly some force struck him in the chest and side, making it still harder to breathe, and he fell through the hole and there at the bottom was a light. What had happened to him was like the sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction." How could Tolstoy possibly know that? You will read any number of academic studies of the processes of death without coming near the novelist's instinctive understanding.

A wonderful Canadian academic and psychologist, Keith Oatley, has carried out some research on readers and non-readers of fiction, and has questioned this widespread assumption. Speaking to the Today programme this week, he shared his conclusion that habitual readers of novels were much better at coping with social situations and with a wide range of human beings. The usual image of the thick-lensed bookworm who can't cope with people – Philip Larkin's character who says "when getting my nose in a book/cured most things short of school" – is far from reality.

Well, all of us Dewey-botherers knew that. I guess from day one, I had a general sense that novels were going to introduce me to more sorts of people than life would. There was Mummy and Daddy and my big sister; there was Mr and Mrs Griffiths next door, and there were the Skittles at the end of the garden. On the other hand, if you opened a book, there wasDorothy and her friends the lion and the tinman and a boy called Tip, later transformed into Princess Glinda of Oz.

Later on, there were girls who went away to a super school called Malory Towers, not very much like anyone I knew; there were robots and Boy Detectives and a talking spider called Charlotte (who died) and a foul-tempered talking pudding and a larrikin koala, some rather intimidating children called Bastable and a boy called Philip Pirrip.

Whenever I hear someone say "I don't read novels – I prefer to read about the truth," I wonder about their notion of "the truth". The conviction that reading fiction is a dispensable part of a rich, full life is a widely held one. Members of my own family, to this day, will say to me if they find me engrossed in a thriller, "If you're not doing anything...".

The saddest expression of this attitude must be Quentin Crisp's famous landlady, who was always commenting on his actions. If she came across him having his lunch, she would say "Eating." If she saw him sewing a button on, she would say "Mending. Once, she found him reading a novel. She looked at him, and said "Waiting."

I don't suppose any reader complains for a moment that his life is failing to introduce him to as interesting a collection of people as he will find in 10 minutes in the nearest bookshop. On the other hand, real life has a way of intruding itself. You can't live your life entirely within the pages of a novel, as much as some of us attempt to. And when real life starts to expand beyond the small domestic circle, then your reading of novels is going to prepare you for what life can hold. India is not completely strange if you have read Narayan; nor is old age after Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.

Fiction won't tell you the whole story, but it will take you to places that life won't – Sicilian ducal houses, 13th-century convents, cities in Calvino that never existed. And sometimes with a shock of recognition, you meet in real life a friend from a book. I have a dear old German friend who, the very first time I met him, I thought "Snufkin". He really was Tove Jansson's charismatic, silent, solitary wanderer to the life. I wouldn't have known what to make of him without those magical novels.

How do novelists do it? They throw themselves into lives very unlike their own; their imaginative reconstructions are as apt to be as convincing as reports back from experience. Tolstoy knows what it is like to die; Stephen Crane tells us what war is like in The Red Badge of Courage, only experiencing battle after writing it. Conrad undoubtedly knew what it was like to endure a stupendous tropical storm. Thousands of sailors went through events like the ones described in Typhoon, but only one had the imaginative sympathy to write it down.

As Martin Amis has said, we still have no real idea what it is like to go into space. No one who has done so has had the ability to write well about the experience. Whatever systematic analysis is undertaken of a human experience, still the novelist's human spread seems the most substantial, authentic, accurate account.
Psychologists can offer explanations of behaviour, but they can't explain why people sometimes act out of character, or against their own interests. Even so subtle an analyst of behaviour as Erving Goffman, say, would struggle to account for the moment at the end of Vanity Fair where Becky Sharp hands Amelia Osborne the letter, destroying her own interests. And yet we know it to be true in the deepest sense.

The writer Marc Abrahams has shared an amusing encounter with a psychologist, who told him: "Whenever any group of really good research psychologists gets together socially, after a few drinks they always – and I do mean always – talk about why novelists are so much better at it than we are."

It's true. No psychologist is as good a psychologist as Graham Greene, let alone Tolstoy. And it's also true that no social life contains the range and interest of a shelf of novels. We love our friends: human beings fascinate us endlessly; and to teach us how they work, there are always novels. I've never met anyone remotely like Emma Bovary, Miss Flite, or Belinda, the madcap genius of the Fourth Form at Malory Towers. But one day, they'll come along, and when they do, I'll recognise them instantly.

Testosterone and high finance do not mix: so bring on the women

Gender inequality has been an issue in the City for years, but now the new science of 'neuroeconomics' is proving the point beyond doubt: hormonally-driven young men should not be left alone in charge of our finances…

Tim Adams
Tim Adams
The Observer, Sunday 19 June 2011


Brokers Continue To Trade During Financial Turmoil
Panic hits the trading floor in October 2008. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

For the past few weeks I've had two books by my bed, both of which offer a first draft of what history may well judge the most significant event of our times: the 2008 financial crash. Read together, they are about as close as we might come to a closing chapter of The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. As literature, one of them – the final report of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission of the US Treasury – doesn't always make for easy reading: there are far too many nameless villains for a start. And, quite pointedly, there is not a heroine in sight. Reading the report I became preoccupied by, among other things – the fairy steps from millions to billions to trillions, say – the overwhelming maleness of the world described. The words "she", "woman" or "her" do not appear once in its 662 pages. It is a book, like most historical tragedies, written about the follies and hubris of men.

The other book, an entirely compulsive companion volume, is Michael Lewis's best-selling The Big Short, which Google Earths you into the crisis. Rather than looking at a global picture, it lets you into the bedrooms and boardrooms of the individual corporate men who catastrophically lost billions of dollars and, on the other side of those bets, the extraordinary ragtag of obsessive individuals who saw what was coming and made eye-watering fortunes. It gives the crash a human face, and once again that face is universally male.

The books are linked by more than subject matter, though. Lewis, a one-time bond trader himself – he left, 20-odd years ago, in incredulity and disgust to write his insider's account, Liar's Poker – gave evidence to the Crisis Inquiry Commission over the course of its 18-month sitting. In the end, however, he refused to sign off the report; and not only did he refuse to sign it, he also refused to put his name to the dissenters' addenda to the report, which three of the committee insisted upon. And not only that, he did not add his name to that of the single individual who insisted on a further addendum stating that he dissented from the dissenters' view. Lewis was not a fan of the report.

The reason for this was simple, he suggested. He felt that the committee, for all its considered judgment, had not understood, from the outset, a single, pivotal word. That word was "unprecedented". Though the inquiry had set out in the belief that the crash was an event different in kind to anything that had gone before, it nevertheless proceeded to judge it in the terms of previous crashes. What it failed to do, in Lewis's eyes, was this: it neglected to look for the things that might have changed in Wall Street or the City, the things that might have made individuals on the trading floors act in ways that were seen to be entirely, unprecedentedly, reckless. When he came to consider these things himself, Lewis felt that perhaps chief among the unprecedented novelties was this one: women.

"Of course," he observed, with tongue firmly in cheek, "the women who flooded into Wall Street firms before the crisis weren't typically permitted to take big financial risks. As a rule they remained in the background, as 'helpmates'. But their presence clearly distorted the judgment of male bond traders – though the mechanics of their influence remains unexplored by the commission. They may have compelled the male risk-takers to 'show off for the ladies', for instance, or perhaps they merely asked annoying questions and undermined the risk-takers' confidence. At any rate, one sure sign of the importance of women in the crisis is the market's subsequent response: to purge women from senior Wall Street roles…"

When I first read those remarks it was not clear how much in earnest Lewis had been when he made them. Subsequently, though, I heard him speak at the London School of Economics, and he took this idea in a slightly different direction. When asked what single thing he would do to reform the markets and prevent such a catastrophe happening again, he said: "I would take steps to have 50% of women in risk positions in banks." Pressed on this, he went on to suggest how science reveals that women in general make smarter decisions regarding investment than men, that when it comes to money, women in couples are demonstrably better at evaluating risk than their partners, and single women much better still.

Though those of us males who have an uncanny sense of money always slipping through our fingers might anecdotally believe this to be true, I was surprised to hear it stated as a fact. It seemed to beg a number of questions. First, if women really are better at making these judgments, why is it always men, still, without exception, who troop out before select committees to explain where it all went wrong, and how they weren't really to blame. And second, would it really be different if women were in charge?

You don't have to look too far into the science to realise that Lewis's claim, in broad terms, stands up. The first definitive study in this area appeared in 2001 in a celebrated paper that broke down the investment decisions made with a brokerage firm by 35,000 households in America. The study, called, inevitably, "Boys will be Boys" found that while men were confident in making multiple changes to investments, their annual returns were, on average, a full percentage point below those of women who invested the family finances, and nearly half as much again inferior to single women.

A more recent study of 2.7 million personal investors found that during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, men were much more likely than women to sell any shares they owned at stock market lows. Male investors, as a group, appeared to be overconfident, the author of this study suggested. "There's been a lot of academic research suggesting that men think they know what they're doing, even when they really don't know what they're doing." A fact that will come as a surprise to few of us. Men, it seemed, typically believed they could make sense of every piece of short-term financial news. Women, never embarrassed to ask directions, were on the whole far more likely to acknowledge when they didn't know something. As a consequence, women shifted their positions far less frequently, and made significantly more money as a result.

Naturally, if these findings were widely applicable, then it would be hard not to agree with Lewis's suggestion for reforming the sharpest end of capitalism. Rather than ring-fencing casino investment banks or demanding that high street banks hold vastly greater capital, as we heard at the Mansion House last week, wouldn't a safer model just be to hire more women?

To argue this case, you would probably need more than just behavioural evidence; you might need to understand some of the mechanisms which produced the trillion-dollar bad decision-making that led to what happened in 2008. In recent years, and particularly since the crash, a new science of such decision-making – neuroeconomics – has become fashionable in universities and beyond. It proposes the idea that you will create a better understanding of how people make economic choices if you bring to bear advances in neurobiology and brain chemistry and behavioural psychology alongside traditional economic maths models. Not surprisingly, neuroeconomics has plenty to say about the question of whether decision-making, in high-pressure situations, divides on gender lines.

The problem is that most of the scenarios used to investigate this divide are artificial. It is one thing attaching someone to an MRI scanner and telling him or her that a million pounds rests on their decision in a game; it is another when that person actually stands to lose a million pounds. Only one study, as far as I could discover, has had access to the brain chemistry, the neural biology, of young men actually working on trading floors. But the results it produced were nonetheless startling.

The study was led by a pair of Cambridge researchers. One, Joe Herbert, is a professor of endocrinology, and the other, John Coates, a research fellow in neuroscience and finance. Herbert, a specialist in the effect of hormones on depression, was fascinated to put some of his theories about the role of chemicals on decision making into practice. The curious thing about banks, he told me, "was that they know all about computers and systems and markets but they know next to nothing about the human machine sitting in the chair in front of screens making decisions. Nothing. We aimed to correct that just slightly."

It was Coates, though, who made the experiment possible. Having met Herbert at his lab in Cambridge, I met Coates in a pub in west London. He had a special advantage in gaining access to bond traders' brains, he explained: he used to possess one himself. Sharp-eyed and fit-looking, Coates retains the intensity of a man who used to run a trading desk on Wall Street during the dotcom bubble. He started off at Goldman Sachs and went on to Deutsche Bank. After some years trading, and making a lot of money out of a lot of money, he became increasingly fascinated by the way, during the dotcom years, the traders he worked alongside radically changed behaviour. They became, he says, "euphoric and delusional. They were taking far more risks, and were putting up trades with terrible risk-reward profiles". The dotcom was fun, in a way, he suggests; it was like the roaring 20s. "But I don't think anyone looks back on the housing bubble and laughs."

Coates was a relatively cautious trader himself, but there had been times when he too felt this surge, this euphoria: "When I had been making a lot of money myself, I felt unbelievably powerful," he recalls. "You carry yourself like a strutting rooster, and you can't help it. Michael Lewis talked about 'Big Swinging Dicks', Tom Wolfe talked about 'Masters of the Universe' – they were right. A trader on a winning streak acts exactly that way."

The second thing that Coates noticed was even more revelatory to him. "I noticed that women did not buy into the dotcom bubble at all," he says. "You couldn't find one who did, hardly. And that seemed like a pretty cool fact to me."

With this cool fact in mind, Coates began splitting his time between his trading desk and the Rockefeller University in Manhattan, which is perhaps the world's leading institute for the study of brain chemicals. There he started to become interested in steroids, and in particular something called "the winner effect". This occurs when two males enter a competition and their testosterone levels rise, increasing their muscle mass and the ability of the blood to carry oxygen. It also enhances their appetite for risk. Much of this testosterone stays in the system of the winner of a competition, while the loser's testosterone melts away fast; in evolutionary terms, the loser retires to the woods to lick his wounds. In the next round of competition, though, the winner already has high levels of testosterone, so he starts with an advantage, and this continues to reinforce itself.

"Steroids," Coates explains, "like most chemicals in your body, display what is called an inverted U-shaped response curve." That is to say, when you have low levels of them you lack vitality, and do very poorly at mental and physical tasks. But as the levels rise you get sharper and more focused until you reach an optimum. The key thing is this, however: "If you keep winning, your testosterone level goes past that peak and sliding down the other side. You start doing stupid things. When that happens to animals, they go out in the open too much. They pick too many fights. They neglect parenting duties. And they patrol areas that are too large." In short, they behave like traders on a roll; they get cocky.

Coates became convinced that this winner effect was what he observed in bullish trading markets, and what ended up dramatically distorting them. It also explained why women were mostly immune to the euphoria, because they had only 10% of the testosterone of men. What struck him most, though, was that, for all the literature about financial instability, economics, psychology, game theory, no one had ever clinically looked at a trader who was caught up in a bubble.

Coates wrote a research proposal. He came back to Cambridge where he had done his first degree, and because of his background eventually gained access, with Herbert, to a major City bond-dealing floor in London. They tested the traders for two hormones in particular, testosterone and cortisol (the anxiety induced, depressive "stress hormone"), and mapped their levels over a period of weeks against the success or failure of trades, individual profit and loss. Coates had imagined the experiment to be a preliminary study but the correlations he found – for evidence of irrationality produced by the winner effect and its converse – was "an absolute dream". They not only discovered that a trader's morning testosterone level could be used to predict his day's profitability. They also found that a trader's cortisol rose with both the variance of his trading results and the volatility of the market. The results pointed to a further possibility: as volatility increased, the hormones seemed to shift risk preferences and even affect a trader's ability to engage in rational choice.

Though the sample was limited, and suitable caution was needed in claiming too much, the correlations suggested that over a certain peak, testosterone impaired the risk assessment of traders. "And cortisol," he suggests, "was in some ways even more interesting than testosterone. We thought cortisol would rise when traders lost money," Coates says, making individuals more than usually cautious, "but actually it was going up incredibly when they were faced with just uncertainty. The stress hormones were switching over to emergency states all the time. There was an optimal level but these stress hormones can linger for months. Then you get all sorts of really pathological behaviours. If you are constantly prepared for high tension it affects your brain, and it causes you to recall stressful memories and become exaggeratedly risk-averse and kind of helpless."

Unfortunately this particular study ended in June 2007, before the full effect of the crisis, but its implications account, Coates believes, for some of what he subsequently heard from the trading floor. "If cortisol goes beyond a certain point, then it may become very difficult for traders to assess any risk at all. These guys are not built to handle adversity that well. There is an observable condition called 'learned helplessness', which if you are submitting to great stress over a long period of time makes you give up suddenly. Lab animals develop it: you open the cage and they won't escape. Traders have it too. They just slump in their chairs. In the crisis there were classic arbitrage opportunities as the markets were falling. Free money. But traders would sit there staring at the numbers and not touching it."

Since then, Coates has partly been working on the other strand of his original hypothesis, looking at the brain chemistry of women working in the markets. Because of the small sample sizes he has to work with – there were only three women out of 250 traders on the floor he first tested – the detail of that is far from complete, and he is properly reluctant to draw conclusions. What he will go so far as to say, though, is this. "Central bankers, often brilliant people, spend their life trying to stop a bubble or prevent a crash, and they are spectacularly unsuccessful at it. And I think it is because, at the centre of the market, you have these guys either ripped on testosterone or overwhelmed by cortisol so that they become completely price insensitive." Coates wrote a couple of articles after that research was published, suggesting that, if the winner effect was right, it was possible that bubbles were an entirely young male phenomenon. And if that were the case, then the best way of preventing boom and bust was to have more women and more older men – less in thrall to hormones – in the markets. "We know that opinion diversity is crucial to stable markets. What no one talks about is endocrine diversity, a diversity of hormones. The billion-dollar question is how to achieve it."

To most experienced, male, investment bankers, of course, this sounds like fighting talk. An old friend of mine, who traded his Cambridge English degree for an extremely lucrative life as a bond dealer, offered this, when I presented Coates's evidence to him. "It would be nice to think that having more female traders on the floor would make for less volatility," he said, "but that's wishful thinking. Financial markets are now global, so while we in the west might decide not to chase trends or react instinctively to breaking news because there are mature mothering types in boardrooms and sitting on risk committees, the rest of the world will, and our banks would lose out." And that's not all. "Many of the women I know who have managed money or have put capital at risk for banks have tended to be even more aggressive with risk than their male counterparts, as if perhaps to compensate for their supposed diffidence. Fighting their way through a male-dominated environment to a position in which they can invest/punt/ risk-manage, many women develop an ultra-masculine persona so as to be thought of as ballsy…"

Just a cursory glance through some of the recent spate of books and blogs written by young women who have worked in the City and lived to tell the tale would certainly seem to support this observation. Melanie Berliet, who worked as one of the only female traders in Wall Street, set the tone in her confessional blog: "If anything," she observed, "my token status gave me an extra thrill. I enjoyed being called a 'fucking dullard' or being instructed, patronisingly, to 'remove head from ass', because my reaction – to grin rather than cry – impressed the guys. I loved their attention and the daily opportunities to prove that I fitted in. What separated me from my colleagues was physical: my 5ft 9in, 120lb frame, my long, blondish hair – and my vagina. I had two options with my boss: trade sexual banter or resist. Typically, I chose the former. Like most traders, my base salary wasn't terribly high—$75,000 at the start of my third year. The bonus was all, and getting the right number rested on one thing, as I saw it: my willingness to promote my boss's fantasy of fucking me…"

John Coates doesn't believe the caricature, or at least he believes that in the upper reaches of banks, things have moved on. "A lot of my former colleagues are running divisions, or whole banks," he says. "I don't buy the sexist macho argument. The big investment banks desperately want women traders. But when they interview women who are qualified, the women don't want to do it…"

Neuroeconomics also starts to provide the answers to some of the reasons for that. Muriel Niederle is a professor at Stanford University, looking at gender differences in risk decisions. Over a period of years Niederle has developed clear evidence for the theory that though in non-competitive situations women demonstrate an advantage over men in making investment decisions, they either shy away completely from making those decisions in intensely competitive environments, or they respond less well than men to competition with very short-term high intensity and results-driven focus. This pattern is set, Niederle proves, from a very young age (and no doubt has a good deal to do with the differential presence of troublesome testosterone). Joe Herbert told me at his lab in Cambridge: "What is clear is that there are neurological differences between the sexes. Women, in very general terms, are less competitive, and less concerned with the status of being successful. If you want to make women more present, you have to remember two things: the world they are coming into is a man-made world. The financial world. So, either they become surrogate men… or you change the world."

Ah, changing the world. In the wake of 2008, there was a good deal of talk about that heady idea. Much of this talk concerned the creation of more gender balance in the city. The Economist coined the phrase "Womenomics" and argued that excluding nearly 50% of talent from crucial positions in business and finance was not only discriminatory but caused serious harm to stability and growth. Iceland's banks brought in women to clear up the mess that men had left. A good deal was made of the fact that the extraordinary success of microfinance in the developing world was because 97% of the loans were granted to women (men were – biologically? culturally? – not to be trusted). Science, neuroeconomics, was harnessed to develop some of those themes. And then, well, nothing. The commissions and the select committees decided that a return to something like the status quo, with all its implicit risks and inequalities, was the only option.

Womenomics still persists in a few places, however. The 30% Club was an initiative set up last November by executive women, and some senior men in FTSE 100 companies and accountancy and legal practices, to increase the number of women in decision-making and boardroom positions to that figure. It goes a little further than Lord Davies's recent report on the subject. But 30% is not an arbitrary number; it is thought – by neuroeconomists again, and through observation – to be the minimum proportion of women at the top of an organisation required to begin to change the culture; below that number, women tend to behave "like surrogate men"; above it, the subtle differences produced by gender might begin to influence the way decisions are made. In Britain there is still a good way to go: only 5.5% of executive directors in FTSE 100 companies are women (yet evidence shows that companies with women leaders have a 35% higher return on equity, and companies with more than three women on their corporate board have an 80% higher return on equity). On city trading floors, the percentage remains, for some of the reasons outlined above, at around 3% or 4%. Testosterone rules.

The country that has attempted most radically to change this balance is Norway, where a Conservative minister imposed a quota of 40% female directors in every boardroom. Most of the data suggests the initiative has been a great success, both culturally and commercially (though some, male, commentators argue that the turnaround is better explained by the spike in oil prices).

It would be hard to find many people in the city, even among women, who would favour quotas, though that argument can be made. John Coates, wearing his dealmaker's hat, suggests a practical solution. "The question is not whether men are risk takers and women are risk-averse. It is more what kind of risk do they want to take? My hunch is that women don't like high-frequency trading, so what you have to do is change the accounting period over which they are judged."

He then gives me a potted description of how things remain: "Say you have two traders. One trader makes $20m a year for five years, of which she might typically pocket a couple of million a year herself. At the end of five years she has made the bank the best part of $90m. Another trader makes $100m a year for four years. They don't want that guy to go off to a hedge fund so they let him take home $20m a year. But then in the fifth year – because of the winner effect – he loses $500m. That is essentially what happened in the financial crash. The bank has lost $100m and the trader has gained $80m. If you were judging these things over a five-year period, then you can see which person you would hire."

But, of course, that would require a very different idea of markets, and of money, to the one that is currently desperately being defended and remade. It would certainly require a greater degree of "endocrinal diversity". Still, the next time you hear someone suggest that things are getting back to "normal" in the city, and that we should at all costs start believing in exponential growth again, at least you can look him in the eye and state that you think his hormones might be playing up.
Neuroeconomics: Six things that the science of decision-making reveals

■ If groups of young men are shown pornographic pictures of women and then asked to choose between safe and risky investments, compared with men shown non-pornographic pictures they choose far riskier portfolios.

■ Our brains are designed to seek out novelty, but too much information can overwhelm them; we are generally better at assessing risk when listening to Bach than with the chatter of TV news.

■ Men's brains tend to shut down after they have proposed a deal, waiting for the response. Scans show that women brains continue to be active, analysing whether they have done the right thing.

■ Humans are the only animals that can delay gratification, a function of the prefrontal cortex. However, the prefrontal cortex only matures after the age of 30, and later in men than women. Before that, we are more likely to seek immediate gratification.

■ Our brains reward social interaction with the release of a chemical called oxytocin. It makes us feel good when we follow the herd. Stock market bubbles are one likely result of this.

■ Our brains are wired for human oxytocin-mediated empathy (or HOME). We are biologically stimulated to love (or hate) what is most familiar to us. We are built to form attachments, to value what we own more than what we do not own. This fact skews the rationality of all our investment decisions

Not Every Adulterer is a Villain

Terence Blacker: Not every adulterer is a villain

A Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private

Tuesday, 14 June 2011

There are signs that, as in so many areas of modern life, standards of infidelity are in decline. An American congressman called Anthony Weiner has admitted having taken photographs of his crotch and sent them to a number of women he had never met. Here it has been reported that a famous footballer had an affair with his sister-in-law which had resulted in an abortion.

No wonder that audiences are flocking to the Comedy Theatre to see Betrayal, Harold Pinter's famous play from the golden age of adultery, the 1960s, based on his equally famous affair with Joan Bakewell. For the seven years during which they were seeing each other – in the biblical sense – both were glamorous public figures, yet they managed to keep their love out of the public gaze. When, eventually, some of their friends realised what was going on, they took a grown-up approach and kept a discreet silence.

"There was something different about life then," Bakewell wrote this weekend. "People had a sense of the right to privacy... It was assumed that affairs arose from the dynamic of human relations – the unavoidable attraction of more than one person in one's life – and were viewed benignly until people began to get hurt."

Since those days, infidelity has rather gone off the rails. It may be that, away from priapic footballers and weinering politicians, some honourable affairs, passionate and sad, are taking place, but Bakewell is right: the attitude which surrounds the love life of others has changed. The sense of sympathy, the awareness that, even in the best-ordered lives, people can fall in love with the wrong person at the wrong time, has faded. The modern view is prim and unforgiving. We are fascinated by the sex lives of others but, even as we ogle, we tend to take a position of bogus moral superiority.

A man who messes up his marriage by falling in love with another woman is, it is unquestioningly assumed, a rat of misbehaviour who should forever be distrusted. The career of Robin Cook never quite recovered from the way his marriage ended, and that of Chris Huhne may be heading in the same direction.

The betrayed wife is offered an unattractive choice. Either she can make a career out of her victimhood, writing about the awfulness of men in public life every time a new scandal appears in the press. On the other hand, if she fails to rage and vow revenge in a satisfactory manner, she is likely to be treated with particular contempt. She is a doormat, that undignified and old-fashioned thing, the Stand-By-Your-Man wife.

Even when public marriages come to an end in an apparently civilized fashion, as in the recent case of Trevor Nunn and Imogen Stubbs, the public view of them is sceptical, faintly incredulous.

Some might argue that we have become more sensitive in recent decades, that we understand the pain and hurt which betrayal can cause, and are no longer prepared to stand by and accept it. If we did, we would somehow be complicit in the act of infidelity.

With this new moral vigilantism, a Pinter-Bakewell affair would have not the slightest chance of remaining private. A conscientious friend would feel obliged to have a quiet word with a journalist whose paper, again with the most elevated motives, would run a campaign of disapproving revelation.

These are the morals of a Victorian novelette. Any kind of human muddle involving the competing demands of love, desire, loyalty, fear and daring is reduced to the level of villain or victim, bad or good.

Yet what a shallow, priggish view of love, of men and women, these assumptions represent. How absurd – and how dreary – it is to believe that to be decent and honourable, a person should always live and love according to the same unbending precepts.

As Pinter, like all great writers, knew, there is often something true, tragic and noble in betrayal.

Arundhati Roy on India's fight against Corruption

We are here, all of us, because like many others in this country we are concerned about the rampant corruption that is hollowing out the institutions of our democracy. Twenty years ago, when the era of “liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation” descended on us, we were told that public sector units and public infrastructure needed to be privatised because they were corrupt and inefficient.

We were told the problem was systemic. Now that nearly everything has been privatised, when our rivers, mountains, forests, minerals, water supply, electricity and communications systems have been sold to private corporations, we find that corruption has grown exponentially, the growth rate of corruption has surpassed everything we could possibly imagine. In scam after scam, the figures that are being siphoned away are completely off the charts. It is not surprising that this has enraged the people of this country. But that anger does not always show signs of being accompanied by clear thinking.

Among the millions of understandably furious people who thronged to Jantar Mantar to support Anna Hazare and his team, corruption was presented as a moral issue, not a political one, or a systemic one — not as a symptom of the disease but the disease itself. There were no calls to change or dismantle a system that was causing the corruption. Perhaps this was not surprising because many of those middle-class people who flocked to Jantar Mantar and much of the corporate-sponsored media who broadcast the gathering, calling it a “revolution” — India’s Tahrir Square — had benefited greatly from the economic reforms that have led to corruption on this scale. (The same media has in the past ignored rallies of hundreds of thousands of poor people who have gathered in Delhi in the past because their demands did not suit the corporate agenda). It was not surprising then, that several corporate CEOs generously donated lakhs of rupees to support the campaign, cellphone companies weighed in with free SMS messages — here was their chance to undo the beating the public image of the corporate sector and corporate media had taken when the 2G scam hit the news.

When corruption is viewed fuzzily, as just a touchy-feely “moral” problem then everybody can happily rally to the cause — fascists, democrats, anarchists, god-squadders, day-trippers, the right, the left and even the deeply corrupt, who are usually the most enthusiastic demonstrators. It’s a pot that is easy to make but much easier to break. Anna Hazare threw the first stone at his own pot when he shocked his supporters from the left by rolling Narendra Modi onto centre-stage, in his “Development Chief Minister” clothes. Leaving aside the debate on Modi’s extremely dubious achievements in the field of “development” — many of us were left to wonder whether we were being offered a supposedly incorruptible fascist as an alternative to hopelessly corrupt supposed democrats.

I am not against having a strong anti-corruption body, though I would like to be reassured that it in itself does not become an unaccountable, undemocratic institution accruing great powers to itself. However I do not believe that we can fight communal fascism or economic totalitarianism (that has led to us having more than 800 million people in this country living on less than 20 rupees a day) with only legal measures.

As long as we have these economic policies in place, the National Employment Guarantee Act will never be able to do away with hunger and malnutrition, anti-corruption laws will not do away with injustice, and criminal laws will not do away with communal fascism, the twin sibling of economic totalitarianism. They will, at best, be mitigating measures. As the historian Howard Zinn said “the rule of law does not do away with the unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and power in such complicated and indirect ways as to leave the victim bewildered.”

Will the Right to Information Bill or the Jan Lokpal Bill force the government to disclose the secret MoUs with private corporations it has signed in Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand for which it is prepared to wage war against its poorest citizens? If they do, then these MoUs will disclose the fact that the government is selling the country’s minerals to private corporations for a pittance, a small royalty. It’s not corruption. It’s completely above board, it’s legal plunder which is more scandalous, and has economic, environmental and human costs that will outstrip the 2G scam several times over. If we do get the information, what will we do with it? I do believe that if anyone present at the “revolution” at Jantar Mantar had raised the question of the secret MoUs, the adoring TV coverage and a good proportion of the crowd would have disappeared very quickly.

The lawyer Prashant Bhushan who is on the drafting committee for the Jan Lokpal Bill understands all of this very clearly. In his years as a public interest litigation lawyer he has consistently represented mass movements as well as individuals who have been fighting these policies with their backs to the wall. He is the counsel in the PIL in the 2G scam in which Tata and Reliance, the biggest corporations in the country, along with their allies in the government and the media, have been badly exposed. Yesterday in court he asked why only the paid employees of these corporations were being arrested and not their proprietors. Such a man must be targeted, taken down, right?

The viciousness of the smear campaign against him is proof of the threat he poses to vested interests. I have known Prashant Bhushan for years. First as a comrade and now as a close friend. We may disagree about some things, but I would vouch for his integrity anytime, anywhere. He is acutely aware of his family’s social and economic privilege. Even more so of the fact that that most of that privilege is derived from his father to whom is he is very close, but with whom he has major ideological differences. Like many of us who are privileged compared to the majority of the people in this country (some of us by birth, caste, race, gender, and/or by virtue of writing a best-selling novel), Prashant had to decide what to do with that privilege. He chose to use his training as a lawyer to create as much space as possible for those against whom the Powers are arraigned. This is why he has been at the barricades of almost every issue of social justice that is being fought in this country. This is what has been turned against him. And this is why he is being hunted down.

In a filthy battle such as this one, in which facts are made up, none of us can ever be pure enough or righteous enough. None of us can hope to emerge untainted. However, the fight will continue. Retreat is not an option.

After the Chinese Mother, another instance of Americans spooked by the Chinese

 Nation of 'wusses' gets wake-up call
By Benjamin A Shobert

In the midst of a particularly cold, unusually blustery winter blizzard, Governor Ed Rendell (Democrat-Pennsylvania) decided to make a particularly interesting, unusually candid comment on local radio.

Obviously frustrated at the National Football League's decision to cancel a Philadelphia Eagles game due to weather, Rendell suggested this was part of America becoming a "nation of wusses". The reaction to this momentary lapse of honesty on the part of a modern politician was immediate and appeared to be the sort one remembers from sibling "you just crossed my side of the bedroom" fights, full of symbolism and short on substance.

Rendell's comments resonated with the American public in part because Rendell's stream of consciousness ably connected a canceled national football game to a shortage of national fortitude, and to why those pesky Chinese are beating the US at a game it invented - national economics.

One need not rely on inference to make the connection as the governor made the job fairly easy: "My biggest beef is that this is part of what's happened in this country. I think we've become wussies. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything. If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down."

While Rendell might pay a price come next election for this sort of atypical truth telling from a national political figure, his comments expressed in raw form what many Americans are beginning to wonder themselves: Are we in economic trouble partially because we've gone soft?

Asked more directly, the governor's assertion suggests that our economic doldrums are less because of other countries' comparative advantages through lower labor costs and rather because our global competitors work harder for longer, anticipate more setbacks and absorb more sacrifice than we are willing to accept in the US. Calling Americans "wusses" may be playground talk, but it has struck a nerve.

On more occasions that most of us would like to admit, Americans have sheepishly exited the bathroom having stood one moment too long at the faucet, waiting and wondering at why the water has not been triggered by the sensor only to realize that it is an "old-fashioned" manual sink, or sporting a bruised nose (and ego to match) at having walked into what one assumed was an automatically opening door.

True enough then Rendell: American living standards are hardly Spartan, and for most of the people, what constitutes struggle and sacrifice would be unrecognizable as such to Depression-era grandparents. It has only now begun to dawn on America and its leaders that the role of sacrifice, specifically the sort required to renew society, is poorly understood and even more poorly embraced.

This realization isn't where we started. In the 1990s, Americans believed economic gains from the country's innovation engine would outstrip economic losses, so much so that we comfortably unleashed a great good on the world - the wonders of free and unfettered trade - with little expectation that the swap might not be quite that simple.

But for most of the 1990s, the costs of this transaction went overlooked as cheap credit made Americans feel their standard of living was increasing when, in fact, they were barely treading water. Now overwhelmed by the consequences of this exchange, we are acutely aware that we spent too much of the 1990s focused on using that credit for consumption instead of investment. And, to Rendell's point, money spent on consumption rarely hardens the soul or stiffens the spine.

This is perhaps why his hasty comment, said tongue-in-cheek but remarkable for its clarity, interjected itself so quickly into America's consciousness. Americans are beginning to come to grips with the idea that maybe our current struggle is more our own fault than we were willing to admit in the aftermath of 2008.

The villains of Beijing and Wall Street will always provide convenient fodder for those who want to be distracted, but Rendell's comments force an admittedly unpopular gaze inwards. His comments harbor a deeper truth, an acknowledgement that American politics - more than any canceled football game - reflect a national wussiness, a marked inability and unwillingness to make the difficult choices necessary to maintain a fiscally responsible government, capable of executing meaningful economic-development initiatives through bipartisan leadership.

Rendell's criticism of American culture isn't necessarily unique to the US. Voices within Japan have been asking similar questions since Japan's economic climax over two decades ago, wondering aloud if the country's struggles are due in part to a generation that does not understand the sort of work ethic and single-minded focus on achievement that staying on top demands. And, frankly, within America's own story, this sort of criticism isn't unique either: in the midst of the Roaring Twenties, themes of decadence and decay are woven throughout the American novels of William Faulkner, Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.

Perhaps becoming a nation of wusses is an inevitable, if regrettable, stage for countries that experience unparalleled success. Already, the lauded Chinese are seeing a different sense of shared sacrifice reveal itself within its youth, marked by the current generation's fixation on material possessions above a sense of community or social sacrifice.

Some China-watchers believe the slightly more heavy hand of President Hu Jintao's regime is the result of these very fears among old-timers within the Communist Party. It may well be that regardless of which country this transition presents itself in, the stage marks a very real inflection point where society must choose between descending into a further morass of materialism, or calling once again for the sort of dedication and striving that marked earlier success.

For Americans, Rendell's comments may be a necessary wake-up call, the sort of gut check that harkens back to an era where coaches could yell at their players, daring to risk emotional damage through their heavy-handed use of negative reinforcement, but always with an eye towards improving the players' - and the team's - performance.

The reality, which may strike some as harsh, is that as bad as today's economy feels, and as real the pain many Americans feel today, those who came through the Great Depression had it much worse.

Our ideas of what pain and sacrifice mean today are nowhere near the sorts of deprivation and scrap for survival that our grandparents knew. We may not be a nation of wusses, but we do need a reminder that to keep what we have is going to take a lot more dedication, effort, and hard choices from our elected leaders than the false promises of the 1990s held out.

Benjamin A Shobert is the managing director of Teleos Inc (www.teleos-inc.com), a consulting firm dedicated to helping Asian businesses bring innovative technologies into the North American market.