There is a fragile balance that must be adhered to when reporting on socioeconomic issues, especially in the days following a recession that threatens to turn into one of the double dip variety. President Obama recently signed a bill to extend the Bush era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, and he did so in exchange for an extension of long term unemployment benefits. Knowing this should be more than ample evidence that we're not out of the woods yet and that there are a lot of people out there feeling the bite of layoffs, slim prospects for jobs, and a sluggish economy that can't seem to get itself on track for longer than a week at a time. Listening to NPR, though, one might get the sense that we're actually in a period of sustained economic growth and not two steps removed from a second Depression.

When one listens to NPR, or reads publications such as the New York Times, there's a certain conceit one has to buy into: both are squarely aimed at liberals. This isn't a secret or even something that's not readily acknowledged. It just is.

What one expects from this type of liberal publication can be found in the editorials, analysis and reporting on a variety of issues. Along with this, one would expect a certain amount of sympathy for the lower classes, and one certainly gets this throughout the year, but especially during the holidays when individuals are featured in a series called the Neediest Cases in the New York Times. On NPR, one could recently hear a listener comment regarding the tale of giving jackets and other clothing to two impoverished school children.

All of this seems to be paying nothing more than lip service to the cause when it's balanced out with stories on NPR regarding shoppers having to face the indignity of patronizing a Wal-Mart instead of a Bloomingdales, or the numerous stories in the Times chronicling the hardly struggling classes tricking their spouses with generic versions of common grocery items like canned vegetables or the rise of the dollar store. This is not to mention the numerous stories of unemployed individuals who can't seem to find any work, which, on the face of it, may be true, but it seems to neglect to mention that the individuals, who had high paying jobs in any number of sectors, are looking for jobs only in that particular field and pay range. None of these stories seem to feature typical lower class workers from the service industry or any other types of jobs that have been decimated in these harsh times.

The low point of this particular trend seemed to be in evidence during Friday's broadcast of Morning Edition. The author, Steve Dublanica, of Keep The Change: A Clueless Tipper's Quest To Become The Guru Of The Gratuity gave helpful hints on how much to tip during the holiday season. How much, for instance, does your doorman or gardener deserve? How about a week's salary! Tips on top of tips, especially during the holidays, seems to be the call of the day for those wealthy enough to have a doorman. One only needs to peruse the comments to see that my reaction is hardly uncommon. Terms and phrases such as "bribes" and "subsidizing an employer's ability to employ and employee" are scattered throughout, as is "cheapskate" for those who don't tip and, thus, are deserving of substandard service.

Sure, tips are a large part of a large portion of the service industry's many employees, but this type of story serves little purpose in furthering the notion that if pay scales were corrected and these workers actually made a livable wage, the need to rely on tips would not exist. When a doorman confides that he makes upwards of $9000 on tips, which constitutes a huge portion of his yearly income, one has to wonder whether or not this is 1. a lie 2. the truth that has happened on more than one occasion and that it has, in fact, become a huge percentage of his yearly income simply because it's happened and is expected. Expecting a gift and actually needing it are two different things, and, again, this seems lost on NPR, which does nothing but solidify my belief that they are superficial at best and condescending and demeaning at worst.

The Slasher Film
Going to Pieces: The Rise and the Fall of the Slasher Film presents a thorough history of the slasher film that saw its peak in the early 80s with the release of numerous films that cashed in on the template provided by, what most consider the first of its kind, Halloween. What's interesting about the history of the slasher film, which unlike most other films in the horror genre that are relegated to the status of substandard film and/or dismissed as nothing more than a step above pornography, is the contempt and hatred felt towards them by many critics and the easily offended public.

Slasher films, like most other films, follow a pattern and narrative structure that's easily dissected, pardon the pun, and thus quite easily imitated, hence the glut of films during this period, a good portion of which are not very good. Aside from the obvious violence and gore, most critics felt that the films objectified women as victims of a sexually frustrated male figure, who slaughters them in any number of disturbing and horrifying ways. Lost on many is the fact that most of these films feature very highly intelligent and prominent female figures who, more often than not, serve as the heroine who stops the kill crazy rampage. Also lost are the many deeper themes that are addressed, like the white flight syndrome and conservative notions of sexual freedom, as evidenced by the fact that victims in many of these films are sexually promiscuous. The fact of the matter is that, like any other work of art, slasher films can be critically appreciated on a level equivalent to those of more revered genres.

Now, while it's all fine and good to think that slasher films can and should be accepted as legitimate works, that's not to say they are without problems. While one can dismiss most as wholly unrealistic and far fetched, there are those that push the boundaries, the most notorious being Silent Night, Deadly Night. What struck a cord with this film is the fact that the killer wore a Santa Claus outfit throughout. Clearly, co-opting such a prominent figure and transforming him into a killer is going to rub some people the wrong way and while it's easy to dismiss those who balk as being hyper sensitive and incapable of parenting, one argument that isn't made is the fact that the majority of the killers in these films, from Jason Vorhees to Freddy Krueger to Michael Myers, are wholly supernatural and unrealistic in all aspects. The killer in the Silent Night, Deadly Night series is clearly a troubled individual who, while committing equally absurd acts, could be found in the real world. This does not take into account that the impetus for this transformation was the troubling and far more disturbing fact that, as a youth, he witnessed the rape and murder of his parents on the side of the road by a crazed killer in a Santa Claus suit. Taken as a whole, this is a blueprint for disaster. One would be hard pressed to dismiss any arguments against this type of film as flimsy.

Another troubling aspect of the genre is that every fan is assumed, and quite wrongly, to enjoy the slaughter in the films and simply views them in the hopes of seeing something they haven't seen before. I think this is hardly the case and seems quite at odds with the notion that these films should be taken seriously. What one saw in the evolution of the genre is that each subsequent release tried to one up the last in terms of gore and outrageous special effects. Obviously, these films are made to make money, but in some of the lesser films in the genre, it appears as if the filmmakers built a story around the killings and not vice versa.

Like most trends the genre seemed to sputter out in the late 80s and early 90s in a cloud of absurdity and tediousness. What happened in the meantime is that we entered the late 90s and the early 00s with the innovation of the internet that promised access to a vast underbelly of not only pornography but other disturbing content. Inevitably, when the slasher film was revived, it not only tried to update the conventions and market them to a new audience, it also had to push buttons that had grown increasingly difficult to push in this new information age. Why this is of concern is that defenders seem to fixate on the fact that, yes, this content is in fact available on the internet and, yes, kids aren't as easily shocked as they once were in the 80s when a arrow to the eye was cutting edge special effects. Ignored is the fact that, while it is in fact harder to shock and much more troubling news comes out of perpetual war and terror than any slasher film, we, as a society, especially our youth, seem to be growing desensitized to all sorts of traumas that should, on face value, be deeply disturbing and hard to shake.

I consider myself a fan of slasher films and enjoy them immensely, but I also find myself growing more disturbed by how far some of the new wave horror films push the boundaries. An R rating of a film surely seems more liberally applied now than in decades past, and by that I don't mean in terms of easily getting an R rating on a film that otherwise wouldn't be granted such. I sense that the levels of violence and disturbing content are pushed to the very limits in terms of acceptability by a board that is notoriously conservative in nature. Hypocritical seems like the right way to describe this and also seems to reinforce the fact that conservative repression is only buried skin deep. It's probably not a coincidence that the rise of the slasher film corresponded with the rise of Reagan.

Next
Fiction is never a true representation of real life, hence it's attraction and lasting legacy. However, it pains a reader to have to endure such instances in fiction that feel forced or contrived in what is otherwise an interesting and appealing work. There are certain genres that certainly are based solely on these contrivances and that constitute their backbone, but when you are in the midst of a work that doesn't feel as if it should be considered threadbare and trite, it devalues the work in such a way that any resemblance or relationship you might have had with the characters is disregarded. James Hynes' novel, Next, is just such a fictional work.

What starts out with a premise that's easily recognizable to anyone who has drifted career-wise quickly turns into a rumination on the absurd. The narrator, Kevin Quinn, boards a plane to fly to Austin, Texas in the hopes of landing a job at a publishing company. Kevin, who is fifty years old, has been working as nothing more than a glorified staffer at a local university in Michigan. (In the interest of full disclosure, I worked at a university in a staff job for four years and know and can relate to the predicament Kevin finds himself in, but my empathy ends with that simple trait.) Surely, rational behavior is not what one reads fiction to encounter. Plain, run-of-the-mill daily minutiae does not make for a good, gripping narrative. However, when the actions of a character shift from truly humanistic to implausibly irrational, it's hard to remain invested either emotionally or simply quizzically in the hopes of following a narrative arc to its logical and well earned conclusion. This is shameful, because Hynes constructs a perfect setup for a novel in our day and age.

Terrorism, and the fear of it, weighs heavily on Kevin. Anyone in America can relate to this sense of unease that has pervaded the country in the years since 9/11. While 9/11 alone would have provided Hynes with more than enough to endear Kevin to the reader, he goes further in having subsequent attacks having happened in the recent past that weigh heavily on Kevin and hears unceasing fear. Having that backdrop may have been enough to sustain our interest in Kevin, but Hynes isn't content to leave it at that.

Kevin's obsessiveness quickly drifts from the fear of attack to the desire to follow his seatmate on the plane. Thus, the entire narrative descends into the realm of the ludicrous. And this is in the span of the first fifty or so pages. What can be described as a man in the midst of a mid-life crisis seems to devolve into the ruminations of a man past his prime both in terms of a new career as well as with the opposite sex. As Kevin totally abandons the realm of the sane, nervous, eager to impress job seeker, his mind races from relationship to relationship that should be the last thing one would expect someone to be thinking about in the midst of a day in a new city with the express purpose of getting a new job. Adding insult to injury, Kevin's journey around the city apparently leaves his mind in such benumbed state that his ability to ascertain that during this very day another round of attacks are occurring has been lost in a haze of sexual regret and the looming prospect of fatherhood. It seems a stretch to concede that someone so infatuated with the possibility of a terrorist attack would be so oblivious to the fact that one is occurring. Paranoia, a trait that is clearly evident in the opening pages, is lost in what can only be described as a sad cataloging of past and present relations with women.

Kevin's quest may have been better served in a short story or novella form where it would have been less likely for the reader to become tired of the character amidst the main arc of the narrative. What makes Hynes' effort seem even more wasted is when you contrast his novel with Joshua Ferris' The Unnamed, which is based on an even more absurd premise, Tim Farnsworth's inability to stop walking, but who is infused with such delicate humanity and a family life that's both compelling and familiar. Ferris seems to take some flack for his writing, but I find that it's much less tiresome or filled with cliches that wear a reader down and bog a narrative in detritus. His sentiments might seem trite and trendy, but it's much more effective in terms of a novel. Hynes has previously descended into the realm of the supernatural in his novels that seemed to be grounded wholly in the real world. What happens when he tries to stay afoot in the real world is indicative that he's more adept at the former than the latter.

The Corrections
It's been eight years since the initial release of Johnathan Franzen's eagerly anticipated novel, The Corrections. Upon its release in 2001, it was heralded as a masterpiece by a virtually unknown but promising Franzen. It was a book that was supposed to be as close to the Great American Novel as anyone could get within recent memory and came with about as much buzz as a book could get. It contained within it the portrait of a contemporary American family that spoke volumes about our condition and the state of the United States. It wasn't pretentious or postmodern in the least. It was accurate, and it told a straightforward tale that was moving in its portrayal of us. It did not fail to deliver on that wave of anticipation. A National Book Award winner proved that it was nothing short of a success.

Eight years, however, have blunted its affect in numerous ways, or maybe it's just in the eyes of this reviewer who has aged in those eight years. I don't feel the connection any longer to the Lambert family that I once did. The prose is still beautifully constructed, but the family portrait that once resonated with me, no longer does. Each member of the Lambert family is flawed to some extent, but, at one time, they held so much more that made you care about them that it was easy to overlook the superficial aspects that were lurking in the background. Now, it's not that easy.

Alfred Lambert, the focal point of the book, suffers from Parkinson's Disease and dementia, and his struggle is still painful to witness and heartbreaking in its brutal swiftness. What stands out on a second reading is just how normal and besieged the patriarch seems. Often, the sections depicting his decline are wrenching, especially when put into the context of one's own aging parents. However, what starts out promising takes a leap into the commonplace when Alfred and Enid's sexual lives are probed in ways that aren't necessary to complete the character. Alfred, a staunchly proud worker, amid a railroad system that's on the verge of being bought out, is surrounded by lesser men who can't control their impulses, or at least try to act on them in ways that society accepts. Alfred, on the other hand, seems repressed and nearly puritanical in his own silent suffering. His cold and brutal manner is mirrored in his frigid handling of Enid in all matters. Nearly halfway through the text, all sympathy for this afflicted individual has been exhausted. It's shameful that Franzen resorts to this tired and overplayed aspect of a man's character, because Alfred really could be more than just the sexually repressed head of, what is supposed to be, a typical family.

Enid and the children, Gary, Chip, and Denise, are likewise all deprived of sympathetic characteristics. Instead, Enid seems to exist in a state of denial and perpetual stupidity. A character that should be sympathetic throughout is tossed around as some sort of country rube in all matters, from Chip's non-existent job at the Wall Street Journal to her desire for one last Christmas at their home in St. Jude. Her struggles with maintaining anything that even resembles a normal home life with the deteriorating Alfred starts out as quite affecting, but the aforementioned aspects of her character quickly emerge and take over. Her fate, saved at the end, by a glimmer of hope and liberation is hardly worth the wait.

As for the children, basically all of their problems are the result of some sort of sexual or monetary proclivities and obsessions. All three suffer some form of a fall from grace, whether it's Gary's troubles with his all too perfect family to Denise's sexual dalliances with her boss and his wife to Chip's squandered academic career after having a drug and sex fueled encounter with a student. In all manners, the three are yuppies and betray any resemblance to most siblings from small town America.

And this is where Franzen falters. After such a strong set up, the entire family turns out to be nobody you can relate to on anything but a superficial level. They occupy an economic strata of society that demands that their problems, even one as serious as the impending death of the head of family, seem to be nothing more than minor disturbances in a life that's wholly owned and fueled by money and sexual appetites. Most small town families aren't like this in the least, mine isn't, and it strains credibility to think that anyone with a predominantly middle to lower class background could think anything remotely positive about the Lamberts.

Reading this book eight years ago, I'm sure I was blown away by the prose and the stunning portrayal of, what I thought at the time to be, a typical American family. Most of the postmodernist fiction that I was consuming at the time gave nothing but the barest bones in terms of characters, many of whom signified something else in terms of the greater narrative. Eight years and a growing appreciation for the realities of economic independence, have blunted the initial wave of awe. Franzen is a talented writer, to be sure, but in terms of portraying a typical family in the throes of disarray, he has some work to do.