On “The Edge of Marriage” by Hester Kaplan *****

I was blown away by this collection when I read it about twenty years age, which is why it resides so much in my memory as a great work. This time around, I could see the skill involved—Kaplan is a remarkable writer—but at the same time, I felt more manipulated. I'm not as much of a fan of fiction as I once was. What made me like fiction was that I felt like I was getting a deeper glimpse into the society and the people in it than one could get from nonfiction; these days, though, I tend to feel all the more the writer's use of puppet strings, the artistry of the fiction itself, which rather undoes the mistique of genuiness I used to find in such works.

Most of the stories in Kaplan's first collection, as one might expect from the title, revolve around marriages in some state of disrepair. “Would You Know It Wasn't Love?” subtly hints at a man's growing dimensia even as it revolves around a grown daughter who has come back to live with her parents after her marriage has proven to be somewhat less than satisfactory; the dad is not too keen on this, even while the mother seems perfectly fine with the situation.

“Dysaesthesia” is the most powerful story in the collection and the one that probably sold me most on the book when I first read it. An older first-time wife who married in part just to be able to have a marriage and family finds herself with a husband, an art professor, who is a prolific cheater, even as she attempts to raise their daughter, who idealizes both parents. The issue, however, is that one of those cheating sections goes disastrously awry, and now the wife finds herself the likely caretaker to a mostly disabled and unemployable husband. Were it not for the daughter, I would figure this marriage would be on its way to a quick divorce. As it is, however, one really ends up feeling just awful for this woman and the family in general—and even a bit of the husband's frustration.

“From Where We've Fallen” involves another couple with an adult child, this one a kid who can't hold down a job except as employed by his dad. Alas, even that is tenuous, as the son's actions put his father's business in jeopardy, and the father finds himself lying to protect his family but in the process hurting others.

“Cuckle Me” focuses on an old man and his youngish female caretaker, one who has come to love him almost as a husband, even as the man's son isn't particularly keen on the closeness that has arisen between the two.

The title story focuses on an older couple, the wife of whom has lost her best friend, leaving of course just her husband as her main social conduit. The story basically details how our relationships change with age. “Goodwill” walks a similar line, this time with a daughter grieving her mother's death, as she goes through her mother's things deciding what to keep and what to throw away (probably the weakest story in the collection, insofar as there are no real surprises here, and it seems mostly just a laundry list of items attached to memories).

“Claude Comes and Goes” focuses on a couple and their best friend—an ex-lover of the wife's, who lives a stereotypical bachelor life: different women all the time, never eating at home, and so on. In this case, Claude tries to establish a relationship with a grown daughter of his who had previously never met, but as with so many such storylines, the bachelor finds that his no-connections lifestyle is not conducive to suddenly having a relative care about him.

“The Spiral” focuses on a stairwell in a house's center, and a couple's relationship with it, with the older not-so-healthful husband confined to the downstairs and the wife with her own life upstairs, until of course life changes the way they use the different parts of the house.

“Live Life King-Sized” focuses on a grown son who takes care of a resort that his family owns. But really, it's about that son's relationship with a man and his wife, a man who has decided to live out the rest of his life, what little there is of it, at the resort, scaring away other patrons in the process.

On “On Killing” by Dave Grossman *****

I first heard of this text when Russia first invaded Ukraine and drafted a number of young men to serve in the army, pushing them to the front lines apparently with little training. The skeptical author of the article noted how it takes training not just to kill but even to be able to kill—and the author noted this text.

This book was amazing, insofar as it opened up a world of information about the U.S. military and about military service in general that I simply did not know. Through World War II, the author notes, only about 20 percent of combat soldiers even managed to shoot their guns at a person. Many simply didn't shoot, or if they shot, they would shoot into the sky or something like that. People don't want to kill people. It is disturbing. Huge numbers of rounds were expended to kill a single person, suggesting deliberate missing. How does the military get beyond that? By Korea, the number of combat soldiers actually shooting at the enemy had risen to 55 percent, and by Vietnam it was 90 to 95 percent. The key? Proper conditioning.

Grossman notes how the military has managed to do this, through, for example, exercises wherein people's first instincts kick in in battle—and those instincts become to kill. You practice shooting at the enemy, almost without thought. Target practice, for one.

Another key is to separate the soldiers from the enemy. There's a sliding scale, wherein the more distant one is from the enemy, the less disturbing it is to the soldier to kill. (Interestingly, even those whose lives are at stake find it somewhat less disturbing, because it's less personal, more like a natural disaster, something that can't be helped, or blamed on an individual person.) Place two soldiers in close proximity, however, Grossman notes, and they'll often just leave each other alone—they see the other person as a person. There are many such anecdotes he offers. (There is conditioning for this as well, though, such as training to kill people by using models with oranges for heads.) By contrast, a bomber often feels little for the people he kills—the people are never seen. Move in to snipers, then bayonets (almost never used anymore because they do require such close proximity), to swords and knives, and finally hands: each lowers the effective kill rate and raises the amount of anxiety a person feels in killing.

The problem with conditioning, however, getting people to kill even when they can see the enemy, is that it still doesn't deal with the psychological toll it takes on an individual after the deeds are done. If a community supports the soldier, and if the soldier is part of a unit wherein there is support (and peer pressure and commands as well), the soldier will be more able to handle the fallout (by essentially rationalizing the actions, as not entirely belonging to the self rather than a community), but such was not the case with the Vietnam War, where soldiers were with their units for only short periods rather than long ones and where the war was unpopular at home. The trauma for such veterans was unfathomably worse, as such.

Grossman closes with a study of how our video games and television have anesthetized our youths to violence and made killing easier. There are many people who will disagree with this, and no study, as even Grossman admits, can absolutely show the connection, because there are too many variables involved. However, there is a close corollary to the availability of such things and the rise in violence in society, suggesting that this is more than just a coincidence. As school shootings and mass shootings proliferate, I can't help but think part of the reason this is possible isn't just the availability of guns but also the fact that watching such things really has made younger generations more callous to this sort of thing.

On “Traffic” by Tom Vanderbilt ****

I was expecting more of an urban planning and studies work, but the first part of this text—and indeed, the last part also—is more about human psychology. Vanderbilt does get to urban planning eventually, as I would find, and once he does, the book became more interesting to me. But I can see why he started with psychology, because it is after all the psychology that affects so much of how and why we plan our roads the way that we do. That said, the book as a whole was fairly unsettling, insofar as it made me realize just how unsafe driving in general is. I wish I could get away without it, but even as I might wish that, if we deal with vehicular traffic at all, even as pedestrians, we're in danger (and perhaps even greater danger).

I might summarize this book as being a set of counterintuitive findings about roads and driving, which Vanderbilt seems to be set on presenting. That is, of course, what makes the text as interesting as it it. I'll note just a few of the odd facts that he runs down for us:

Should you merge early or late? That is one of the opening questions. I'd say I'm usually an early merger, as I don't want the stress of trying to get into the correct lane later. The issue with merging early, though, is that you're failing to use the full available space of the road. So the key would be to merge late? Vanderbilt eventually shows that the best thing to do is to simply move forward in whatever lane you're in, merging (if you must) when time arises. This isn't exactly late merging, because if you happen to be in the lane to which people are merging, you shouldn't shift to the other one to try to speed past other cars—that creates other dangers.

Have you ever wondered why insects don't get into traffic jams? I hadn't given it much thought, until Vanderbilt brought it up. Ants, I guess, have a whole system laid out where lines of traffic go more heavily in certain directions and so on. But the advantage is that they have a team goal. When we drive, it's usually each vehicle for itself. This encourages behavior that usually ends up hurting everyone. He comes back to this when talking about searching for car spaces, which I'll come back to as well. The other insect he discusses is the locust, which really is kind of every insect out for itself. The insects at the front of the pack eat up the food; at the back, the insects eat the insects that are in front of them, given that the food is gone. Wow! What a life.

So parking spaces. When they are scarce, do you sit and wait for a spot to open up or drive around looking for one? Women apparently are more likely to do the former, men the latter. Both add to congestion. Men are also more likely to park further away on the central aisle and just walk, while women are more likely to try to snag a closer spot, even though it might take more time. I am definitely a man in that regard, though I wouldn't say I just park on the central aisle as far back as needed. I usually park farther out so as not to have to deal with cars around me, but I'll often go to the side.

Congestion also results from out tendency to be in for ourselves, the way, say, that if one had a community pasture, there are few conditions to discourage overgrazing. What I mean is that if there is scarcity, the only way to avoid such is to cooperate. But if the system is set up as first-come first-serve, cooperation doesn't really pay off for the individual user. In such a system, even if the pasture is overgrazed, I'm better off sending my sheep there and at least getting some feed than not even bothering. And so it is with spots on a highway or in a parking lot. I could choose to drive a route that is an hour longer and twenty miles out of my way, but if I do that, I'm helping others more than myself. If I can squeeze onto the highway, even if I only save a half hour (and slow it down for everyone else), it's still a net gain for me. This is one reason that GPS tracking used to filter cars to less traveled routes in heavy traffic times probably won't work—the other being that travel times are very dynamic (so a route might slow or speed precipitously in a given short period of time). It's also why bigger roads usually don't result in less traffic, as people congregate toward that shared pasture.

An interesting chapter revolves around how more dangerous roads are actually, statistically, usually safer for driving. There are fewer fatal crashes, for example, in heavy traffic. After all, everyone is going slower! Here Vanderbilt gets deep into urban planning, discussing how some cities have actually created zones within the city where driving is actually more difficult, where cars are forced to slow, where there is more mixed use of streets. This restores the vitality of such zones of the city while also slowing cars down—all this without speed bumps and other awkward traffic inventions, because cars now can't treat the street like a thoroughfare to be simply passed through as quickly as possible.

Returning to psychology, Vanderbilt discusses how driving habits differ in different locales and how safer cars often lead to more dangerous driving. That's the whole counterintuitive aspect to virtually everything revolving around traffic. Bigger roads lead to more traffic, not less. Safer cars lead to people driving less safely. It seems there's a kind of equilibrium that we're set to return to, no matter how much we might try to compensate.

On “A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23” by Phillip Keller ****

 

My wife was somewhat surprised to find me reading this. It seemed a bit too inspirational and touchy-feely. Indeed, the book is that. I would say that Keller probably could have written something that was about half or a quarter of its length and made his point. He fills the text out to book-length by giving readers nice-sounding discussions about faith and God and stuff like that.

But the meat of the book is extremely useful, which is why I decided to read it this second time (the first time being well more than a decade ago). Not having been a shepherd, I have no way of otherwise gleaning the various subtleties of this most famous of Psalms. Keller, with his extensive experience with sheep keeping, has much info to provide about what each line of the Psalm actually goes much deeper than we might otherwise expect. Indeed, I usually think of the last portions of the Psalm as moving away from the sheep metaphors, but Keller shows how even such acts as the spreading of oil on the head is a shepherding act—meant to keep male sheep from butting each other too hard, meant to keep insects and flies from alighting on the sheep and laying their eggs. I'll likely return to this book again at some point.