by Edward Champion

The Maltese Falcon (Modern Library #56)

What do you do when you clearly admire and recognize the greatness and influence of a major work of literature but you don’t actually love the novel in question?

(This is the forty-fifth entry in The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: Parade’s End.)

I have never frowned upon mysteries and I’ve always been a huge film noir nerd. During the waning days of the 20th century in which I came of age, I was deeply smitten with Raymond Chandler (Farewell, My Lovely‘s “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake” remains one of my favorite similes of all time), James M. Cain (see my 2011 essay on The Postman Always Rings Twice), Jim Thompson, Donald E. Westlake (especially Richard Stark and the excellent Parker series, which I reread last year in a crazed white heat of excitement!), David Goodis, Dorothy B. Hughes, Patricia Highsmith, Chester Himes, Cornell Woolrich, Ian Rankin, Charles Willeford (will I ever get a chance to read Grimhaven?), Gregory Mcdonald’s Fletch books (especially the early ones; incidentally, a huge influence on filmmaker Kevin Smith’s dialogue), Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series (Archie Goodwin was a wiseacre after my own heart), Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski series, and Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins books (a significantly underappreciated multivolume anthropological study of Black Los Angeles). I scarfed down all these books like some unrestrained college kid overcooked on edibles just discovering the stockpile of snacks in the pantry.

And then there’s Dashiell Hammett, one of the vital godfathers of detective fiction (although let’s not discount Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” — the detective story is a purely American invention!). I’ve always admired him, but I’ve never entirely loved him. This has caused certain detective fiction aficionados, the ones who assign godhood status to Hammett much in the same way that Star Wars nerds can’t not deify George Lucas, to look upon me as if I am some vulgarian or arriviste inexplicably invited to the opening night of Stravinsky’s Les Noces in 1923. The guests encourage Jean Cocteau to throw a flute of champagne in my face and Picasso to paint me in a hideous cubist caricature (actually, that latter act of outrage against my putative lack of taste would be really cool!). But, nope, I’m sticking with my guns here.

My instinctive Hammett resistance is somewhere between borderline anhedonia and reluctant ennui. Because I do recognize that the man had chops. He was unquestionably a master of smooth hardboiled prose, with much of the concise shoe leather reporting he picked up as a Pinkerton detective translating into impressive streams of sparse nouns and no-frills modifiers. Nearly every tidy storytelling move Hammett served up was economical, rarely wasted. (Indeed, few authors would be able to pull off The Maltese Falcon‘s masterful denouement within Sam Spade’s cramped apartment, complete with a betrayal and Wilmer Cook, probably my favorite supporting character in the book, becoming more unhinged.) But unlike other hardboiled practitioners, I’ve never felt that infectious frisson with Hammett.

The fault is likely mine. I possess too much of an exuberant theatrical personality and I have hit an age in which Hammett’s moribund tone now hits me differently than my first escapades with Dashiell as a younger man. I am too old now to seek out models for manhood in fiction. I am now more thrilled with expressive novelty and deep life than chronic detachment. (This is also probably why Kubrick’s films, veritable catnap for a young man like me who wore a lot of black T-shirts and blasted loud and depressing industrial music, matter less to me now and Altman’s films now epitomize everything that I love and value in art and that I definitely didn’t fully appreciate in my youthful folly.) In rereading all of Hammett this year — including all the Continental Op stories — I discovered Red Harvest was a far richer political novel than I had recalled, that The Dain Curse, despite drugs and a wild cult serving as the crux of the tale, was, to me, now more of a lumbering and largely unpleasant millstone, and that The Thin Man was a significantly accomplished comic novel, with rich chemistry between Nick and Nora, the “lanky brunette with the wicked jaw.”

And then there’s The Maltese Falcon, the subject of this Modern Library installment. Is it great? Yes. Does it land with me? Not as much as I would like it to. The novel contains a rich tapestry of memorable characters (the ever patient Effie Perine (who can’t feel for her with that devastating ending? how many times has Spade done this to her?), the sinister Lieutenant Dundy, the “young boy” Wilmer Cook played by the brilliant character actor Elisha Cook in John Huston’s excellent movie, a baroque plot about a missing bird worth a great deal of money, the perfect serving size of murders (believed by some scholars to be Hammett’s response to criticism of the Continental Op stories being too violent), a wide variety of policemen occupying many points on the corruption spectrum, a double cross, some brilliant depictions of methodical detective work, and Sam Spade’s geometrical presence (from the opening line) looming large throughout.

Yes, Hammett indisputably paved the way for mysteries to be taken seriously as literature. And every mystery writer owes Hammett that. Why then have I always felt half-hearted about him? I say this even as I fully recognize that Edmund Wilson’s infamous 1945 essay “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” is less about a principled man upholding critical standards and more about a humorless snob sneering down at readers (“a meagerness of imagination,” “ranks somewhere between smoking and crossword puzzles”) who enjoy and recognize the prima facie adrenaline rush (and even the imaginative possibilities) of a crime-driven pageturner. (Wilson also misread Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder,” falsely claiming that Chandler had seen Hammett as his father when Chandler himself was observing something altogether different.) Well, let’s hear from Raymond himself:

How original a writer Hammett really was it isn’t easy to decide now, even if it mattered. He was one of a group—the only one who achieved critical recognition—who wrote or tried to write realistic mystery fiction. All literary movements are like this; some one individual is picked out to represent the whole movement; he is usually the culmination of the movement. Hammett was the ace performer, but there is nothing in his work that is not implicit in the early novels and short stories of Hemingway.

Verisimilitude is an invaluable tool for storytelling. And Falcon has plenty of it. Biographer Sally Cline wisely noted that the number of American police doubled between 1910 and 1930 — and with that came aggressive scumbags like Lieutenant Dundy and, to some degree, the scheming district attorney Bryan. (At one point, Sam Spade quips of Bryan, “He’s more interested in how his record will look on paper than anything else. He’d rather drop a doubtful case than try it and have it go against him.”).

Chandler also rightly commended Hammett on being “spare, frugal, hard-boiled” and writing “scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” And whenever I revisit Hammett with a modest internal whisper of inexplicable resistance, I have to keep reminding myself that his taut prose — with its .45 Thompson spray of crisp adjectives and tough guy mannerisms (although it is genuinely surprising to encounter the word “swell” so ubiquitously; the adjective seems veritably cornball during the year that I write this and reminds me of many conversations I had as a kid with my late great grandmother) — was very much ahead of its time. I admire the manner in which Hammett revitalizes the “monkey wrench into the works” cliche by having Spade declare, “My way of learning is to heave a wild and unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery.” That crucial “heave” reloads the tonal balance onto the verb. The integral phrase “wild and unpredictable” is a confident remixing of “my way of learning.” Even today, the “lathy youth with salient ears” who escorts Spade into Bryan’s office is a sui generis touch for a walk-on character. And then there is this great description of Gutman:

The fat man was flabbily fat with bulbous pink cheeks and lips and chins and neck, with a great soft egg of a belly that was all his torso, and pendant cones for arms and legs. As he advanced to meet Spade all his bulbs rose and shook and fell separately with each step, in the manner of clustered soap-bubbles not yet released from the pipe through which they had been blown. His eyes, made small by fat puffs around them, were dark and sleek. Dark ringlets thinly covered his broad scalp. He wore a black cutaway coat, black vest, black satin Ascot tie holding a pinkish pearl, striped grey worsted trousers, and patent-leather shoes.

This is the closest Hammett comes to the type of writing that excites me. You can imagine Chandler reading and rereading the clustered soap-bubbles line and, upon devising an entirely new and beautifully wild metaphor on his latest novel, quietly saying to himself, “Yo, Dash, hold my beer.”

And yet I still resist Dashiell even as I confidently defend his position on the Modern Library list! What is wrong with me?

Many of the later crime fiction practitioners I have named took the Hammett storytelling approach and made it their own by adding a more stylized voice. I suspect that the excellent hardboiled films noir that emerged later with their endearing 1940s patois and scene-stealing character actors, were also leaning into the same fount of inspiration. But it wasn’t just tone. The Hammett style immortalized in Falcon emerged from an ideal grounded in real-world experience:

Spade had no original. He is a dream man in the sense that he is what most of the private detectives I worked with would like to have been and what quite a few of them in their cockier moments thought they approached. For your private detective does not — or did not ten years ago when he was still my colleague — want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with, whether criminal, innocent by-stander, or client. — Dashiell Hammett’s introduction to the 1934 Modern Library edition, also contained in the handsome Library of America volume edited by Steven Marcus.

This may very well be Hammett’s most important contribution to literature and, given the fact that Hammett signed his letters “Sam” when he reenlisted to the Army in 1942, it may have been extremely personal. Hammett innovated by presenting detectives, namely the Continental Op, who were working stiffs rather than flashy and eminent. But Sam Spade was resourceful rather than honorable. And despite the savage ways in which Spade betrays the people around him (the brutal stripping of Brigid O’Shaughnessy for the missing one thousand dollar bill in the bathroom, the affair he carries on with Iva (his partner Miles’s wife), the way in which he leads poor Effie on), he does have a baseline code of honor in the way he (initially) cares for Brigid, quietly brewing coffee and making beds. Or perhaps, more accurately, a sullied (and often sullen) slate of ethics. Because he’s also happy to sneak into apartments, pilfer keys, and search through everything with a skilled clandestine hand, not unlike the crooks he’s paid to catch. Spade, unlike the Op, is a dashing romantic figure — a veritable “blond Satan” defined by devilish Vs. He’s not some fugly schlub pursuing leads. He is his own man, reporting to no one.

I love unlikable Mephistophelian protagonists in fiction. But I can’t say that I liked spending time with Spade. Even though I am clearly adept at recognizing why Hammett is widely recognized as a mack daddy.

The inspirations for Falcon are quite fascinating: Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, as well as Hammett lightly cannibalizing a few of his previous stories: “Laughing Masks” (a detective rescuing a dame from a dicey villain), “The Whosis Kid” (the shady seducer), “The House in Turk Street” (the man with the “drawling British voice” is an early version of Fat Man Gutman), and “The Girl with the Silver Eyes” (an early version of Brigid — “She was a thing to start crazy thoughts even in the head of an unimaginative middle-aged thief-catcher”).

Hammett told his editor Harry Block that, even though he was in desperate need of money, he refused to shed “the to-bed and the homosexual parts” and was also adamant about sustaining the careful sentence structure that gives Falcon its lively momentum. So you can’t accuse Hammett of not having artistic integrity. (Hell, the man’s brave stance against Joseph McCarthy and his refusal to name names demonstrates that Dashiell Hammett had more integrity than most people!)

So why can’t I boogie with all my heart to all this? The poor bastard who started this Reddit thread is very much in the same boat as me. Like me, he’s a huge fan of Chandler. Like me, he would rather love Hammett than admire him. I think Jim Clair is actually closer to describing this conundrum when he compares Hammett to Chuck Berry and Chandler to AC/DC. He’s right. Goddammit, that explains it! I’m more likely to blast “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It)” or “Thunderstruck” than “Maybellene.” But I also have to express gratitude to Clair for another of his observations. Unlike Hammett, Chandler was classically educated. As such, Philip Marlowe is more of a Homeric figure than Sam Spade. Does this mean my literary tastes are more traditional? Not necessarily. Every year, I look at the Deep Vellum and Dalkey Archive catalogs and order the longest and most experimental titles they have. I’m very much enjoying China Mieville’s groundbreaking 1,200 page epic, The Rouse, right now and strongly recommend it. And I am greatly looking forward to reading William T. Vollmann’s A Table for Fortune when this tetralogy of doorstoppers arrives in a few weeks. Not exactly the reading diet of a normie!

It could very well be that Dashiell Hammett, despite revolutionizing detective fiction, didn’t especially care about any continuity to earlier schools of fiction or even where his work resided in the canon. The fact that he never published any additional fiction in the last three decades of his life — the result of being ravaged by political persecution, alcoholism, and the poor health that dogged him all his life (and ironically made him a writer) — represents one of the great tragedies of 20th century literature. Perhaps if Hammett had written more, his greatness might have grown ever larger, securing the endorsement of a hapless Redditor and this wacky bald man in Brooklyn.

Next Up! Jack Kerouac’s On the Road!

by Edward Champion

The Mark of Cain

It’s taken me many months to summon the courage to write about this, but, during the summer, I experienced a series of humiliating misfortunes concerning a strange mark that appeared on my forehead. Should you see anyone with such a mark, please show empathy and understanding!

[As something akin to a “special feature” on an ancient disc-based format that was all the rage until recently, I’ve put together a “behind the scenes” video of this essay in which I document my experiments editing this piece in Claude AI. Please note that I would never use AI to write in any way. I would rather drive head-on into a bridge than do anything of the sort! The fun of writing is in the quest for the original and the human. And as I document in my video, Claude just doesn’t get tone. I do feel that AI is highly dangerous for new writing voices. It really did its damnedest to sanitize my writing. Young writers, please continue to write fearlessly. We need your fire! Now more than ever!]

This summer I learned that the Mark of Cain was on my forehead. I have never had a brother (a few thuggish and abusive stepbrothers during my mother’s second marriage; a few more benign close friends who are like brothers; that’s about it), nor have I murdered anybody. Even if I possessed the desire to fulfill some sick fratricidal fantasy, the reality of who my mother popped out of her uterus would quickly kibosh the gauche bloodlust. (For the record, my official position on murdering members of your family is that it is a very bad thing to do and it should be avoided. It’s a far better policy to stay in shape and sustain a healthy pescatarian diet just so you can outlive your more annoying relatives, encourage them to eat food drenched in saturated fat, carbs, and cholesterol, and then tap dance on their graves when they die five to ten years before you do.)

Nevertheless, the Mark was there. It has always been there. A forensic head specialist — a learned gentlewoman who is friendly and congenial (aside from the belligerent manner in which she screams at her manservant) has put in several decades examining cranial protrusions that exist in some liminal state of palpable observation — later informed me that the Mark was forged in early childhood when my head became stuck between the slats of my bed and I screamed for help and somehow fell asleep, waking up to very kind firemen who delicately raised their thick boots over the toys sprawled messily across my bedroom floor so as not to crush them. The firemen rescued me and neatly restored the bed to its original condition, but the baleful presence of my nasty and abusive father had created circumstances for a barely visible mist to penetrate my noggin and produce the Mark in question. It appeared that the foolhardy clumsiness of my youth had unknowingly sown the seeds for my incredibly annoying middle-aged predicament.

The Mark decided that 2026 was the big year for a coming out party. Sometime around April, friends began drifting away from me and, when I asked why, they invented lies to create excuses so that they could skedaddle from me permanently. One of my friends was absolutely convinced that I had kidnapped her dog, boiled it in a large pot, and served it for dinner with asparagus and potatoes au gratin. When I told her that her dog was presently raising its leg and pissing on my shoe, she said, “You’re missing the point! Get out!” And I removed my urine-stained shoe and hopped to the subway with various people whispering, “Look at his head.” My girlfriend accused me of unspeakable things that I had never done and we broke up and I became homeless, staying for weeks in a Harlem warren with a very long and creepy hall and being beaten daily by two Russian women so I could get the discount rental rate. Now I did have to turn around so that the two Russian women would not see the Mark and they could focus on the important business of desecrating my bottom with painful red welts. But as humiliating as this all was, it did allow me to move into my new apartment under budget. (If you are a boarder between apartments faced with such a predicament, I have one piece of advice. The ass heals. Deal with it.)

Needless to say, my life swiftly turned to shambles. I thought I was being unintentionally untoward or a little clumsy. Yes, it’s true that we’re all living in the worst timeline, but how could all of these misfortunes have happened to me so quickly? When I held the door open for a woman as I was about to buy some groceries, she stomped hard and painfully on my foot, pointed to my head, and said, “Don’t you see it?” “See what?” I replied. Then she screamed, “You idiot!” And she kicked me in the balls and I could not get a rise in my pants for three weeks. Not that I had any lover waiting in the wings to pleasure. Somehow that latter detail was more humiliating.

The Mark was entirely indiscernible to me in the mirror. But when I traced my brow with my fingers, I could find no grooved texture on my skin, nor any scaly malodorous patch, nor ruddy ridges, nor any unsightly bump resembling the carcass of a long-popped cyst. I only knew that the Mark was a soft spot indistinguishable from the rest of my flesh, roughly an inch and a half on my forehead closer to my right eye than my left. I knew that was the source of what scared so many away because that was where I felt my grief when I shed the dead weight of tears as more misfortunes accrued.

Yet everyone else could see the Mark as plain as day. The Mark was not as flagrant as a neon sign advertising a roach trap motel fifty miles off the two-lane highway to Vegas. It was more like Peggy Guggenheim’s nose, but worse.

The Mark had been placed on my forehead by a fictitious deity that I had never believed in. Or perhaps it was some secular cosmic joke from the universe. None of the experts knew for sure. I consulted doctors and psychiatrists and even a professional knife thrower who thought he could crack the case but who accidentally tossed one of his tangs into the secretary’s abdomen. (The injury didn’t kill her, but when she woke up and saw my Mark, the paramedics couldn’t resuscitate her and I felt even more depressed.) They all told me that the Mark couldn’t be cauterized or frozen off with liquid nitrogen. Part of the problem was that every time someone felt even a whit of compassion for me, the Mark would fade ever so slightly into this ephemeral halo, making it difficult to angle a scalpel or aim a lesion gun. I was told that I was burdened with the Mark even though I had never known an Abel. You might say that the people who rebuked me practiced an altogether different form of Abelism.

I had tried to cover it: a difficult task for something I could not see. And not just corporeal touchups, but an understated grace that I never announced. An invisible kindness practiced daily that I hoped that others would detect, but that few took the trouble to see. The Mark was intended to neutralize all natural good will that I tendered.

When I started lowering my watch cap as the rains began to pelt Brooklyn in the fall, the Mark was still there. Invisible to me but an eyesore that caused others to recoil. Texts and emails went unreturned. Invitations were politely declined at a steadier clip. I had managed to pull myself out of yet another abyss, but now the Mark was more radioactive. A stranger muttered, “It glows,” before running away from me as if I was a leper offering a handshake. It was a stigmatic symbol that even the astigmatists could espy with their twitching eyeballs.

I think one of the reasons why so many people with physical and mental infirmities began to revile me was because they had finally found a subhuman specimen in which they could feel superior. I adopted a policy of taking it on the chin. But this grew tiring and I succumbed to a great state of depression. None of the therapists I called would agree to see me because they said that the Mark made them feel physically disgusted. Unlike the two Russian women, they could sense the Mark even when I was lying on a couch with my head turned opposite from the therapist’s exacting chair. I considered trying to carve up my forehead, doing the very thing that the surgeons and the knife thrower claimed they could not do, but, because my new landlady was so nice (the new landlady, who called herself Justice, was fond of wearing a blindfold at all hours for reasons that were never explained to me; so this may explain why I was granted this unanticipated kindness), I felt it would be rude to stain the hardwood floors of my new apartment with blood.

So I’ve decided instead to live with the Mark and hope that eventually someone will emerge with an even more hideous and unsightly Mark than mine. I mean, the way things are going, pretty much everyone in this sad and dystopian nation will probably have a Mark at some point. So maybe I’m simply an early adopter.

by Edward Champion

Unfiltered Agony

What happens when performing and pretending replace empathy as the singular method of negotiating the Sisyphean realities of life? Well, kids, welcome to 2026 America!

Agony. My life, like the lives of so many Americans quietly quivering with fear, has drifted into some alien realm I scarcely recognize. It is a dystopian wasteland populated by techbro serpents and slimy venture capitalists cooking the books to disguise and delay our inevitable economic collapse. And it is little more than agony.

I walk the streets with gushing exuberance and cautious optimism. Because kindness and good times require no effort and it makes me happy to give someone else a reason to carry on fighting another day. It is also my responsibility as a citizen. I crack jokes and smiles. If a modest reserve of energy overtakes me, I spend it on others who need my guidance and reassurance and who have less than I do.

I generate this vital inner fuel by taking in the many sights and sounds and figures who make life so precious and special, all the while nursing the Matroyshka doll of hopeless hurt and suffering that bounces within me, caused in part by the worst and cruelest breakup of my life (this time, not my fault) that transpired six weeks ago and the significant energy and maintenance I have had to expend to secure a permanent roof over my head during the worst housing crisis in a century.

Take the top half of one painful layer and there’s another sad face, the mouth caught in an exasperated Soviet O, to unscrew beneath. Sometimes an invisible hand adds another doll to dwarf and occlude and ensnare the full nest. But I have agile and resilient hands. I am often surprised to find that I can organize these dolls within dolls of pain, even as these dolls keep multiplying like some porcelain cancer that won’t stop metastasizing.

Small wonder that Backrooms and It Ends, genre flicks that brilliantly captured the Sisyphean hellscape of American life, have been hits this year. Their cinematic cousin, Obsession, sealed the triptych by adding incel coercion and toxic masculinity to the grisly Joycean nightmare that we all can’t wake up from and we are all desperately trying to escape. Horror movies have become more dutiful in documenting American life in 2026 than our increasingly censored news outlets.

Why do I not give up? Well, it is because I am a student of history. You have to keep moving like a shark during dark times to get to the light that awaits you on the other side. And rest assured. There is something after the Orange Fuhrer’s demise. Though how many of us will be irreparably broken when that joyful moment arrives? This is why empathy now operates at “too big to fail” levels (though not at the expense of people’s homes or financial portfolios). I want to help as many souls as I can, but I am learning that even I can max out. It is a weird guilt to possess about one’s finite limits, but I cannot seem to shake it.

It is the promise of this future luminescence that keeps me going. But am I believing in a lie? Prosperity is just around the corner! That was muttered by a fraud malingering in the executive branch one hundred years before us. He was, if you can believe it, more capable than Donny, the eighty-year-old monster who will not die — even as the Grim Reaper smites national treasures like Dolly Parton and Tim Curry. I have to consider the possibility that this small and diminishing aperture into a more secure life that is situated so far ahead, so indeterminate in its timing, may not arrive until my own existence terminates. And isn’t that a depressing thought! But that is the hellscape of Trumpism and rising rents and escalating prices and dodgy unregulated food and diminishing shots at affordability. All Americans have dreams but we increasingly don’t have the means. Corporate profits go up. Data centers plunder our water and our power and cause the good people of Gary, Indiana to suffer without electricity. And if you’re unemployed, it’s now a game of Beat the AI Algorithm! Be prepared to apply for four thousand jobs minimum.

And that is what I mean by agony. Unfiltered agony rather than “depression.” Originating from agōnia in Greek. A constant jostling for victory. An endless series of struggles. Contests, countless contests.

I am a man of words and I choose “agony” with care. Agōnia came from agōn — a public gathering for games. Does that not bear an uncanny cadence to the whims of social media? I was a main character well before it was fashionable and nobody outside of a small group of people knows the true story. I have spent the last twelve years of my creative life in exile, expressing my deepest fears and anxieties bluntly and baldly in multiple media formats (and even through the prism of award-winning audio drama), knowing that I am rebuked by media people who have lied and prevaricated about my history because they resented my voice and my knack for getting through to people. They invented whole incidents that never happened and that they never questioned. They could never get me on my work and they will never stop me from writing. And now that they are losing their jobs, they are discovering that they cannot stand with robust legs against the vicious wakes of the sea. But I can. I’m actually somewhat grateful to them in a morbid way. When you have defeated Erebus once, you can defeat him again.

Still, this is agony. A neverending series of contests. I am constantly wrestling with a grave sadness that threatens to jostle the robustly jocular foundations of my spirit. Because now everyone on every point of the political spectrum can say anything. Alternative facts have become democratized. AI has twisted the knife further by turning vast swaths of our population into softheaded morons cutting and pasting pablum. The craziest thing is that they feel entitled to being a fraud.

In Everything is Now, J. Hoberman rightly noted that cheap rent was one of the mechanisms that allowed New York to be the center of American culture for many decades in the 20th century. It was a great shock to learn that the average one bedroom apartment — even in Brooklyn — now goes for $3500. Multiply by forty and that means you need $140k/year just to live here. And even if your credit is very good, they’ll still demand that you sign with a guarantor. Just to humiliate you.

When I first moved to Prospect Lefferts Gardens a little less than twenty years ago, I paid $900 in rent. You only needed $36k/year to sign a lease. And I somehow managed to generate enough money as a full-time writer for a while. But those days are now gone. A recent Streeteasy listing showed that the present rent is now three times what I paid.

I still wrote. I can’t not write. It is how I stay sane and kind and honest. It is how I am able to give and help.

Before she wounded me this summer, my ex said one very smart thing: “You put the worst parts of yourself online, Ed. Why don’t you put the best parts?”

Well, this is the first essay I’ve written in six weeks. I don’t know if this reflects my good parts or my bad parts. Maybe it’s all parts. We’ve become so accustomed to presenting nothing but our best parts that life has become little more than a performance. Why then can we not perform truthfully even under these imaginary circumstances?

by Edward Champion

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Modern Library Nonfiction #69)

Thomas Kuhn’s classic text about paradigms and scientific revolution has been frequently paraphrased, but not properly understood by the latest round of grifters. This Modern Library essay tackles what “paradigm” actually means and applies Kuhn’s criteria to AI.

(This is the thirty-second entry in The Modern Library Nonfiction Challenge, an ambitious project to read and write about the Modern Library Nonfiction books from #100 to #1. There is also The Modern Library Reading Challenge, a fiction-based counterpart to this list. Previous entry: The Strange Career of Jim Crow.)

When I was a child in the 1980s, I observed many men in early middle age (i.e., my mother’s dates) using the word “paradigm” in everyday conversation.  At the time, my freshly budding mind associated the word “paradigm” with a specific series of television commercials known to frighten small animals that were then airing ubiquitously on UHF stations. These ads featured an exploding volcano and kept referencing something called “Dianetics” — an alleged “spiritual ideology” that had been devised by some guy named L. Ron Hubbard. 

Even in my younger days, I possessed enough critical thinking skills to detect that all this igneous noise between reruns of What’s Happening!! and Star Trek represented a business venture more than a religion. Years later, when I learned all about L. Ron’s grand scam, I realized that I hadn’t been far off.  Much like the man who had told my mother “There’s something of the devil in that boy” when I blossomed into a young atheist and started poking holes in the Bible during Sunday school after I was dragged against my will to church. This is probably why I took a shine to history and felt closest to “heretics” like Socrates, Joan of Arc, Oscar Wilde, and Galileo before I had even started fourth grade.

The commercials all featured a yammering synthesizer intended to suggest Vangelis-style import, with accompanying title cards citing allegedly seminal questions from the book.  But this manufactured cacophony only succeeded in giving me a throbbing headache.

I asked many of these men what “paradigm” and “Dianetics” were. They all told me that I was far too young to be positing such questions and proceeded to guzzle down more beer in one sitting than the weekly limit established by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Nearly all of these men were balding and many of them had extremely thick mustaches. Now millennial hipsters can boast all they like about the soi-disant “lumberjack” movement in Williamsburg in the early 2010s or even the “slutty little mustache” that was popular for a while in dive bars.  But they had nothing on the thirtysomething and fortysomething men of that era. You see, after the sideburns craze of the 1970s, men who suffered from male pattern baldness had an overwhelming desire to grow hair in places where it could still grow — in large part because there was still an inexplicable shame in being bald.  (When I decided to go bald in my thirties after the curls above my forehead receded to a threadbare thatch that resembled a malfunctioning Chia pet, I eschewed mustaches.  Every time I tried to grow one, I looked like some gay porn star who had been flown in from Düsseldorf. And while I won’t gainsay that there were certain lovers who appreciated this aesthetic, particularly when my swiftly grown and objectively preposterous mustache was accompanied by my fairly accurate “bam-chikka-chikka” impression of period detail porn music in the boudoir, my great respect for the admirable mustache growers of the 1980s (along with my desire to eliminate the possibility of terrorizing strangers) curtails any need to sprout hair above my upper lip.)

You might say that the mustache trend among balding men in the 1980s was its own paradigm waiting for the likes of Sean Connery and Patrick Stewart (both not Americans) to demonstrate that it was okay to be bald and only grow facial hair if your face could pull it off.  But at the time, none of the men (even the ones without mustaches) could explain to me why they grew mustaches or even what a “paradigm” was. So I came to associate “paradigm” with cockamamie get-rich-quick schemes. Given that many used car salesmen during the Reagan era had mustaches (a detail that Robin Williams picked up in Cadillac Man), it all made sense within my young free associative mind.

It was not until I read Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions this year — a book that was one of the most frequently cited texts from 1976 to 1983 and a volume that I had put off reading for decades — that I started to more properly understand that “paradigm” was more correctly associated with knowledge, not dubious capitalist ventures. And that difference is vital to delineate in our age of limitless techbro grifters muddying the waters (quite literally with their data centers) with only a third-hand understanding of Kuhn’s true ideas.

The “paradigm grift” is perhaps observed most prominently today with the rise of AI, often described by starry-eyed marketing sociopaths as a “paradigm shift” occurring in real time. Yes, AI can automate a lot of repetitive tasks and definitely reflects a new era in computing. (I’ve found it particularly useful for parsing code, audio transcripts, and identifying spectral points on an audio file.) But it is still not a foolproof or financially sustainable technology, particularly given the considerable harm and significant error rates it has caused thus far. As Kuhn himself noted, when Einstein’s paradigm had superseded Newtonian science, “some Newtonians were so incautious as to claim that Newtonian theory yielded entirely precise results or that it was valid at very high relative velocities.” The fact that AI seems to be getting worse and less applicable to most business functions would almost suggest that it has already become some hoary failure in the grand scheme of science and technology.

AI thus represents a perfect litmus test for our widely name-checked but woefully underrated friend Mister Kuhn! To offer a recap of AI’s many mishaps and follies, Microsoft’s Copilot was so regularly inaccurate with its results that the software giant was forced to alter Copilot’s terms, pointing out that its unwanted Clippy-like AI feature was “for entertainment purposes only.” The sheer amount of AI financial waste is best summed up by the brutally truthful website Is AI Profitable Yet? (spoiler alert: it isn’t!), which also breaks down the 21st century answer to Tulpenwoerde by company. While blinkered techbro evangelists are inclined to look the other way on these points, particularly the exploitative slave labor required to establish LLMs (all of these capitalist horrors are documented in Karen Hao’s excellent book, Empire of AI), even respected Internet pioneers like Vint Cerf have suggested that AI is a paradigm shift. But Cerf doesn’t actually engage directly with Kuhn. He bases his claim on a wildly general definition (“changing the way things are done”).

Let’s unpack why this is wrong. If I were to learn to contort my hips by hiring a twerk instructor, I suppose this would likewise be “changing the way things are done.” Or, more accurately, changing the way in which a rather strange middle-aged man, one who hasn’t entirely atrophied and who can still cut the rug at a wedding or a bar mitzvah, negotiates a dance floor. But I could not in good conscience call my twerking erudition a “paradigm shift” — particularly since few people outside of my girlfriend would want to observe such a blinding booty pop. (And even she, being the sagacious and sensible partner that she is, would swiftly discourage me from such aesthetically frightening activity.)

A proper paradigm shift that upends human knowledge — as formulated by Kuhn — involves one or more of the following three foci: (1) a “class of facts” that a paradigm has demonstrated to be particularly revealing of the nature of things (think Copernicus stumping for the heliocentric model of the solar system as the hounding halitotic breath of geocentric Catholics blew fiercely upon his back), (2) natural facts that can be compared against the predictions of the new paradigm (e.g., Einstein’s theory of relativity, the big bang theory, Darwinism putting the final nail into the view that all species were immutable, germ theory dethroning foul-smelling air as the source of disease, et al.), and (3) a great empirical wave of data tabulation and fact gathering to confirm the new paradigm (for all of you quantum mechanics nerds, think of the giddy manner in which John von Neumann went to town measuring the physical attributes of Hilbert space). Certainly one can feed data into Claude or ChatGPT and have the AI engine return coruscating graphics and synthesized tabular data wrangling. But if one is asleep at the wheel and relying on either an autonomous car or cruise control, is this really driving? (This month, Anthropic’s recently introduced AI models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, suggested the potential beginnings of a true paradigm shift. Unfortunately, both were shut down by the American government by way of an emergency export-control directive.)

I’m certain that any soulless free market crusader who happens to be reading this piece holds the diseased belief that scaling any venture in the most cartoonish manner imaginable will automatically accommodate all of Kuhn’s criteria. (After all, it worked for Jeff Bezos and Amazon!) But capitalism is not science and the pursuit of money does not ensure a windfall of knowledge (and vice versa). We saw this with the Piltdown Man in 1912, in which a grifter by the name of Charles Dawson claimed to have a fossil linking apes to humans. But when the scientists examined the fossil, they discovered that this phony “missing link” was little more than a mockup of an orangutan and a chimpanzee. (One can see similar “scientific breakthroughs” motivated by capitalism and/or the desire for fame, attention, and ladder-climbing with such hoaxes as the Cardiff Giant of 1869 and Shinichi Fujimura’s phony “discoveries” of “Stone Age artifacts” that he buried at archeological dig sites.) Anyone who has ever dealt with the greed of software vendors releasing a new version to fill the coffers rather than advance the product (particularly when a “new version” is indistinguishable from a patch release) knows quite naturally that an LLM does not automatically guarantee that you will replace a paradigm.

Additionally, Kuhn is careful to note that “special equipment” (he includes such examples as telescope technology, the Atwood machine, and Cavendish’s apparatus) is often required to extract and measure data associated with any given paradigm. AI has unquestionably accelerated turnaround time. But there’s an underlying question over whether augmented technology on its own is enough to create a paradigm. DNA sequencing is arguably a more salient example of a new technology creating a new way of measuring. It has completely overhauled forensic investigation, the ability to measure viruses that are too small to be seen through a microscope, and, should you opt to pucker your lips and spit into a 23andme kit, has opened the floodgates for extremely distant relatives to harangue you for unwanted brunch meetups when not bombarding you with certain probabilities about your future health flapped in front of you like an air traffic controller preventing a plane from crashing into a terminal. With AI, the paradigm shift is not as clear-cut. Just ask any gloomy white-collar worker held hostage in a corporate boardroom meeting by some executive demanding how AI is being used in his department. Even the cutthroat capitalists over at the Harvard Business Review recently had to confess that AI was “far from perfect for the task of evaluating text as a bona-fide, valuable, meaningful AI use case” and pointed to the inseparable role of human judgment in nearly all AI tasks.

To return to Cerf’s thoughts on AI, his strongest example of AI representing a paradigm shift lies in machine learning — in which every form of data imaginable (including your own private data and creepy scrapes from the dark web) is used to expand an LLM. Though even this “revolutionary” tool has any number of “erroneous hallucinations.” Cerf, to his credit, notes that all this “sets the stage” for a paradigm shift. So we aren’t necessarily there yet. Certainly the fact that data centers require a frighteningly gargantuan magnitude of resources (electricity, water, the innocent virgin blood of newborn babies, et al.) to fuel the enormous scale of computing power would suggest an overturning of previous conventions. But given that Sam Altman, Kevin O’Leary, Mark Zuckerberg, and other extremely obnoxious tyrants are using brute force to push through their data center projects and given that we are all being forced to use AI in our work even if it has no real application, is this more of a rigged “revolution” rather than a natural expansion of human knowledge? Kuhn observed rightly that Lagrange, Euler, Gauss, and Laplace all contributed some of the most brilliant work of their lives to reconcile Isaac Newton’s paradigm with what they observed in the heavens. And while Kuhn doesn’t expressly state that this type of scientific “mutual aid” — that is, the legitimate pursuit of knowledge existing outside the rigid boundaries of capitalism that I alluded to earlier — could be a vital part of locking down a new paradigm, it would seem to me that the tyrannical “every man for himself” mentality behind pushing AI into every corner of human existence (whether compatible or not) has less to do with natural evolution of ideas and more to do with involution and the capitulation of volition.

Moreover, Kuhn observes that an effective paradigm change is only successful if there is a “promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples.” With AI, we are obviously dealing with a new stratum that is wildly incomplete. Despite the massive leaps of GPT-5.5, the latest AI build comes saddled with plentiful capacity warnings, “agentic” limitations, and metadata bugs — all of which would suggest that the success we were promised by Altman and his stooges has been largely countermanded in situ. Kuhn further tells us that the actualization of a paradigm is only achieved by “extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm’s predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself.” As recently as a few weeks ago, Google’s AI chatbots, seen through Gemini and its search engine, were proven to be easily manipulated — if anything, sullying the preexisting paradigm of knowledge with biased and inaccurate information. The two major political parties in America have reported significant problems with AI, ranging from Republican tech policy advisor Katie Harbath observing that AI is 90% wrong on midterm election queries to AI deepfakes of Democratic candidates used as campaign videos. Our preexisting knowledge of the facts is directly threatened by AI because AI is parasitically drawn to feed any garbage into its LLM and the makers of these almighty chatbots haven’t considered such vital and durable human practices like fact checking, skepticism, and critical thinking.

Of course, the stalwart AI champion who still believes that AI, largely used for mimetic parlor tricks, can generate new knowledge (OpenAI has been capable of writing its own code for the last year, which comes very close to a paradigm shift) will come at me with journalism being “the first draft of history.” Even Kuhn himself acknowledged that Newton’s Principia Mathematica contained meaning that was only understood when it was actually applied to a new paradigm. But Sam Altman and his fellow cronies are capitalists, not scientists. In Empire of AI, Hao describes the reckless manner in which OpenAI junked developer review before the release of GPT-4 without any plan in place by the company’s trust and safety team. OpenAI’s executives refused to give this team the resources it needed and it certainly wasn’t collecting the vital data points to assign unique identifiers to users. One vital observation from Kuhn is that paradigms are robust enough to insulate a scientific community “from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the puzzle form.” In other words, a true paradigm shift doesn’t just involve the tools (in this case, AI chatbots) that a new paradigm supplies. But we now live in a world in which DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis wins a Nobel Prize for chemistry and talks about AI protein folding as “a puzzle.” And then there are the wags — like OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever — who assiduously avoid the word “puzzle” even as they use phrases like “very confusing” or “strange” to describe the difficulties of arriving at Artificial General Intelligence, the great goal (the hoped for future paradigm?) of all these AI evangelists. A mischievous computer science expert, who rightly framed all this as “an inscrutable puzzle,” put Sutskever’s words into DeepSeek (another AI chatbot), asking about the intellectual viability of this vision. DeepSeek replied:

Sutskever’s performance here is a masterclass in how someone can, in the same breath, diagnose a fundamental methodological flaw and yet package it as a profound mystery, eliding the straightforward explanation that would undermine the very enterprise he’s built his reputation on.

When the very engine behind your professed paradigm shift calls you out on your bullshit, there’s a fairly strong chance that you may be running on hot air rather than substantive ideas.

Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions with an understated eloquence guaranteeing to the reader that he had given serious thought and considered every possible angle about what a paradigm shift entailed. This is one major reason why it’s so disheartening to see marketing people (and even incurious men with mustaches) thoroughly cheapen Kuhn’s great contributions. It’s a significant insult to the serious thinking that Kuhn collected so valiantly into a short and highly readable book that wanted to reckon with the often awe-inspiring manner in which humankind expands its collective mind. In one chapter documenting the discovery of oxygen, Kuhn notes that three separate people (Scheele, Priestley, and Lavoisier) were involved in unpacking the world’s most famous element — indeed, the very thing we silly ape-descended life forms need to survive. And given such complexity, it is often impossible to nail down the precise point in history in which this was a bona-fide paradigm shift. Just as Spider-Man understood that with great power comes great responsibility, so does any real scientist understand that a bona-fide paradigm shift is not something to apply to scientific knowledge like some college kid thoughtlessly putting on a random T-shirt while nursing a massive hangover.

There’s admittedly a case to be made about what conditions would allow AI to invoke a legitimate paradigm shift. Having a series of rules would be one way to bolster it. Avoiding gimmicks (and changing the end goal for every new iteration of GPT to avoid marketing gimmicks) would be another method. As Kuhn helpfully informs us, “Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none.” The gee whiz factor in science is more for the spectators sitting in the bleachers rather than the methodical scientists.

Kuhn’s book is a vital reminder in an epoch of limitless con men of what we should properly identify as a revolutionary change in human knowledge. Had many of the men whom I encountered in the 1980s taken the time to teach their kids about what Thomas Kuhn was really trying to tell us, we might have had a larger army of doubting Thomases rightfully practicing their critical thinking skills against the many fraudsters and swindlers who have somehow persuaded easy marks that they are geniuses.

Next Up: Jonathan D. Spence’s The Gate of Heavenly Peace!

by Edward Champion

Parade’s End (Modern Library #57)

Ford Madox Ford’s introspective tetralogy has been held up as a major work of literature for decades, but Ford’s leaden dialogue and one-note characters are embarrassingly regressive in the 21st century.

(This is the forty-fourth entry in The Modern Library Reading Challenge, an ambitious project to read the entire Modern Library from #100 to #1. Previous entry: The Age of Innocence.)

Very few people read Ford Madox Ford (née Ford Madox Hueffer) these days and there are salubrious and soul-preserving reasons why this is so. He’s the rare “great writer” who has as much relevance in the twenty-first century as some huckster trying to sell you an anti-garroting cravat. Parade’s End is ostensibly about the psychological effects of World War I, but, even on my second read of this plodding tetralogy, I found myself revisiting Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, and even Rebecca West’s underrated The Return of the Soldier — all far more poignant and perspicacious volumes into how the Great War shaped human history. If anything, Parade’s End is an unwelcome reminder that the crusty white dudes who concocted the Modern Library canon were more motivated by what certain insiders deemed “great literature” rather than bona-fide literary standards.

Of course, I am merely one man on a literary journey — perhaps, more accurately, an asshole on the Internet with an opinion. Even so, when I posted a photo on my Instagram story of me wincing while holding up the Ford omnibus (complete with the unanticipated aesthetic touch of a bandage taped to my forehead, the result of a shaving accident rather than a sustained session in which I repeatedly banged my noggin against a stop sign pole, although my head often felt more like the latter while reading Parade’s End), a friend pointed out that she had indeed suffered with me when she had taken a stab with Ford. Her surprise revelation, delivered in a dramatic “Luke, I am your father” timbre, helped me to feel less alone. Yes, Ford Madox Ford had been dead for a good eighty-seven years and was thus an easy target for a cranky middle-aged bald dude like me who really wanted to write about Kerouac or Faulkner rather than this guy. But our bond of friendship became tighter, cemented in some shared reading agony that we had not hitherto known about. We shook our fists into the air and condemned the dreaded surname “Tietjens.”

You see, only the stodgiest tastemakers imaginable would have the stonecold cruelty to recommend this dull and insufferable perorater to some starry-eyed young reader hoping to secure a foothold in the daunting Modern Library canon. It’s especially aggravating that I have to deal with Ford not once, but twice, on this infernal list. Yes, I am fated to suffer through The Good Soldier when we get to ML 30.  I am not happy about this. But I did take a ridiculous literary oath fifteen years ago and I am a man of my word. This slimmer and more potent novel is admittedly a bit better than Parade’s End — “better” in the way that getting swiftly kicked in the balls is preferable to having a limb sawed off.

But as a graying though exuberant Gen Xer, I am duty-bound to tell any enthusiastic Zoomer or tap-dancing millennial that they would be better off watching Sam Levinson’s exploitative television series Euphoria than reading Ford Madox Ford. It can be sufficiently argued that the only reason that the 2012 BBC television adaptation of Parade’s End was memorable at all is because the brilliant Tom Stoppard (may he rest in peace) rearranged the events and added new scenes and dialogue — most tellingly taking on an “unfaithfully faithful” approach.

Who reads this man today? Perhaps a few superannuated Ford stans can be found whispering “Tietjens” as they slap their fading chits onto lonely numbers in moribund bingo hall parlors swarming with smoke. But I cannot in good conscience join this gloomy coterie of literary losers. These Ford boosters have so deluded themselves into blinkered advocacy that even Julian Barnes had the startling temerity to declare that Ford made Graham Greene, who rightly called out Last Post as “an afterthought,” look old-fashioned. Seriously bro?

Gentlemen don’t earn money. Gentlemen, as a matter of fact, don’t do anything. They exist. Perfuming the air like Madonna lilies. Money comes into them as air through petals and foliage. Thus the world is made better and brighter.

Compare this with Greene in The Quiet American and you see a significant difference between dowdy bloviating and taut observational precision:

A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.

Christopher Tietjens — intended to reflect the dying gasps of an Edwardian age only now appreciated by husky buzzards pinching tobacco in glum dens boxed by dowdy leatherbound walls — is surely among the least interesting protagonists in 20th century literature. He is the “last Tory” — a clumsy, blunt, physically gargantuan, and very rude statistician incapable of a jocular remark or a jolly jolt in his gait. Ford banged out pages and pages of leaden dialogue from this insufferable mansplainer. And his observations possess all the pleasure of a two hundred pound steel weight being thrown repeatedly into your solar plexus, presumably with some automated Peloton instructor shrieking into your eardrums with the unsettling tenor of an ICE agent preparing to murder someone in broad daylight. “You betray your non-Anglo-Saxon origin by being so vocal…And by your illuminative exaggerations!” “Little nippers like you don’t stop things….Besides, feel the wind!” The ellipses falsely suggest a free associative genius, but only succeeded in reducing me to unintended laughter. (How else was I supposed to soldier through this book? With a stern and self-immolating chin?) Ford actually presages many of these hokey lines with a breezy “Tietjens said:” in the paragraph before just so he can pad out his pages with the unpersuasive momentum of an undergrad trying to hit the 1,000 word minimum on the essay due the next morning.

Tietjens is often outlined as brilliant, but Ford’s descriptive approach is all tell and no show:

The fly that took them back went with the slow pomp of a procession over the winding marsh road in front of the absurdly picturesque red pyramid of the very old town.

Now even someone with a particularly acute case of ADHD will look to such a sentence and see that it is trying way too hard to sound “literary” when it doesn’t say much of anything at all. What are we supposed to dwell on here? The putter of the prewar Smith Flyer? Well, we don’t actually feel its spurts or its undulations in this sentence. But we do have the sense that the fly here is in “slow pomp,” or on display. Which doesn’t really conjure up a distinct image. Okay. Fine, Ford. You do you. But how does the “winding marsh road” contribute to the imagery? Does it serve in some juxtaposition to the fly? Of course not. The road image is used to get us to “an absurdly picturesque red pyramid” that stands in apparent counterpoint to “the very old town.” But what kind of red pyramid? How is it picturesque? Again, we don’t know. And it’s utterly maddening. Ford never describes this “pyramid” again. This isn’t poetic at all. It’s word salad. Ford delivers elegant variations that aren’t even interesting in the manner by which they fail — such as “an extraordinary Falstaff’s battalion of muddy odd-come shorts.” Ford stitches together random phrases, but he only succeeds in giving us disorienting incongruities that read more like some well-read guy tagging along with you on a drunken night in Vegas, though without the pleasure of slot machine clinks or a comely stranger you accidentally hook up with. (Hey, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!)

And there’s more hapless syntax where that came from, folks! Should I mention the shadow “falling across the bar of light that the sunlight threw in at his open door” or how a fellow named McKechnie “swallowed as men are said to swallow who suffer from hydrophobia”?

By contrast, here is P.G. Wodehouse describing a golf course at the beginning of “A Woman is Only a Woman”:

It is a vantage-point peculiarly fitted to the man of philosophic mind: for from it may be seen that varied, never-ending pageant, which men call Golf, in a number of its aspects. To your right, on the first tee, stand the cheery optimists who are about to make their opening drive, happily conscious that even a topped shot will trickle a measurable distance down the steep hill. Away in the valley, directly in front of you, is the lake hole, where these same optimists will be converted to pessimism by the wet splash of a new ball. At your side is the ninth green, with its sinuous undulations which have so often wrecked the returning traveler in sight of home. And at various points within your line of vision are the third tee, the sixth tee, and the sinister bunkers about the eighth green⁠—none of them lacking in food for the reflective mind.

This is infinitely more enjoyable than Ford — and not just because Wodehouse is almost always a delight to read. Wodehouse maps out the territory and the types to be found in his setting and he somehow turns golfing — which I myself have never enjoyed outside of the brilliantly designed miniature courses that you find all throughout Ocean City, Maryland — into a joyfully absurd reverie for optimistic philosophy. Where Ford is muddled and confused, Wodehouse is clear and specific, complete with phrases like “wet splash of a new ball.” It is the difference between being stuck at a party with a bitter and rambling old man who gave up on finding felicity at least two decades earlier and a giddy eccentric who plans to cut the rug well into old age — or, at least, as long as his legs will two-step.

Ford Madox Ford was all influence and overhyped “talent.” It’s certainly no accident that the great Jean Rhys devoted her ferocious (and far more gifted) energies to savaging this bombastic tyrant in Quartet — revenge from Rhys after a protracted carnal entanglement. You see, there’s an undeniably skeeze quality to Ford both on the page and in his life. While serving as editor of The Transatlantic Review, Ford used his outsize literary influence to serve as a “literary mentor” to young writers (ahem, young women) decades younger than him. He would publish their early stories and exact a boudoir form of remuneration. This was a less enlightened time in which literary men in positions of power could not be held accountable. And these poor women had to endure Ford’s selfish clit-ignorant thrusts while lying back and thinking of publication. After Ford was rightfully spurned by Violet Hunt (she spent eight ghastly years with Ford; Ford, meanwhile, was cheating on his wife), Ford ruthlessly caricatured her not once, but twice — as Florence Dowell in The Good Soldier and, with evermore preposterous misogyny, as the philandering Sylvia Tietjens (Christopher’s wife) in Parade’s End. Sadly, this was what passed for eminence grise among writers in the early 20th century.

It’s safe to say that, like many clueless male authors who preceded him, Ford could not write women especially well. And this extends to Valentine Wannop, the young suffragette who Tietjens falls for. At the beginning of A Man Could Stand Up–, the third book of Parade’s End, Ford not only has Valentine confused about how to use the telephone, but portrays her dreaming of doing nothing more than eating “pomegranates beside an infinite washtub of Recklitt’s blue.” Recklitt’s Blue, for those of you who aren’t familiar with 19th century household items, was a laundry whitener that helped brighten the hues of your clothes. Despite the fact that we are introduced to Valentine as a free-spirited suffragette in the first volume (unsurprisingly, her best moments in the tetralogy), she not only longs to perform domestic duties, but she complains that she is so alone and lives a “nunlike” existence (“And no one had ever wanted to marry her….No one even had ever tried to seduce her.”).

Now anybody even remotely familiar with the suffragettes knows that they were hardly reticent when it came to passion and sex, either with the men who dated them, with each other, or, quite frequently, as they learned to “control their passions” through the power of theoretical abstinence. (You’d honestly be better off hearing about the suffragettes from Diane Atkinson’s Rise Up, Women than from Ford Madox Ford the chronic mansplainer.) But in reading Parade’s End, we don’t get any real sense of the richer life that Ford was perhaps too incurious or incompetent to draw from. James Longenbach has observed that Ford “took pleasure in feeling more qualified to diagnose the problems with women than women themselves.” (And for anyone who wants to do a deep dive, Reconstructionary Tales, a blog run by Paul Skinner, has a great overview of Ford’s conflicted feelings about the suffragettes.)

My eyes winced with incredulity as Tietjens berated Valentine Wannop for being slightly inaccurate quoting a passage. My soul plummeted into a protective crouch as I realized that Tietjens’s knowledge of the world was largely gleaned from memorizing passages in books with lifeless exactitude and even by reading the encyclopedia in alphabetical order. Almost every time a man showed up in a scene dominated by women, he would flap his lips and I felt very much like Fiona Apple trapped in a bar with the coked out and garrulous egotist Quentin Tarantino.

And here’s the thing. Valentine sees very clearly what a fool Tietjens is:

She knew that his poor mind was empty of facts and of names; but her mother said she was of great help to her. Once provided with facts his mind worked out sound Tory conclusions — of quite startling and attractive theories — with extreme rapidity. This Mrs. Wannop found of the greatest use to her whenever — though it wasn’t now very often — she had an article to write for an excitable newspaper. She still, however, contributed to her failing organ of opinion, though it paid her nothing.

Since I’ve been lambasting the man at length, I’ll give Ford a few modest props for this more clear-eyed passage, but this still circles back to one of my primary gripes about Parade’s End. Obviously, Ford possessed enough cognizance to understand how “modern” women of that era were juggling love and career. But Ford, like many mediocre men before him, is largely incurious about the latter and vitiates what talent he possessed by saturating himself in the former. Hell, even Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa — a massive masterpiece that happily occupied weeks of my reading time last year — showed far more curiosity about the inner life of a young woman than Ford did in Parade’s End. And that’s also accounting for the 18th century’s comparatively more atavistic genuflection to the patriarchy.

Furthermore, activists are fiercely loyal to their causes, particularly if they protest (as Valentine does) on a daily basis. Near the end of Some Do Not…, there is a lengthy section in which Valentine agrees to become Tietjens’s “mistress” — although nothing is consummated — and we are beholden to what is arguably the most pathetic male fantasy on the Modern Library list: namely, Valentine’s fawning admiration for the “poor mind” of this hopeless dullard.

* * *

The first of the Parade’s End books was published two years after Ulysses and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a year before Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and while Proust was five books into In Search of Lost Time. These modernist geniuses served up poetic passages about consciousness. They used abstract prose in thrilling and experimental ways to unpack the crags and nuances of human existence. Ford, by contrast, has merely given us clunky prose in which the reader is randomly deposited into a new time and location. Upon solving any “riddle” that Ford presents us, the answer itself proves to be disappointingly pedestrian. It really doesn’t help that Ford is fond of having his characters repeat the title of his novel. “No more parades” obviously means that the pomp and circumstance of established social routines derived from the old social order aren’t exactly going to be practiced after machine guns, mustard gas, and trench warfare demonstrated the truly monstrous possibilities of humankind. And the Groby Great Tree cut down at Tietjens’s estate is more of a blunt and obvious metaphor of the old order collapsing rather than anything especially profound. Ford then commits the grave sin of not only believing himself to be much more clever than he really is, but in giving us a clunky journey in which we increasingly do not care about the destination.

Those who have praised Ford have done so on the basis of what I would deem “consciousness presented through continuous partial attention.” Yet they hold their tongues at the extremely contrived setups throughout the work. Mr. Duchemin, for example, goes insane without any specific reason. There is one particularly awful scene in Some Do Not… in which the “brilliant” Tietjens dukes it out with a banker over a series of overdraft charges.

Oh, but all the confusion and contradiction! The stuff of true literature! It’s why Parade’s End is on this list! Well, I see these more as significant liabilities rather than virtues. I simply cannot believe that Parade’s End was carefully designed as an invaluable modernist contribution — in large part because Ford, at times, doesn’t seem to know Tietjens. We learn, for example, that Christopher has two brothers (one that appears on page) in Some Do Not…. By the time we get to No More Parades, Christopher conveniently has a sister, who has previously been unmentioned. If this is the “inner life” meant to hammer home the conflict between the old and the new social orders, then I’d rather soak in a season of Bridgerton. But, hey, at least I’m now free of this dreadful opus. Don’t worry. I’m quite fond of the next few titles and I’ll behave myself slightly better in future installments!

Next Up! Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon!