Trump’s truth: Stranger than fiction?

February 8, 2017

President Donald J. Trump’s “America first” campaign isn’t an original idea, as several historians have pointed out. There was the isolationist America First Committee that sought to keep the United States out of World War II and that featured aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh as a member. Needless to say, the committee ended with the attack on Pearl Harbor, life having a way of forcing your hand.

But in “Water Music” (2014) – the first novel in my series, “The Games Men Play” – Sen. Morris Severance campaigns on the idea “Keep America Safe, First.” ...

Esteban Santiago and the unending narrative in the literature of rejection

January 8, 2017

When news broke of the murder of five people and the wounding of eight more at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, TV anchors were quick to note that we did not know the motivation of the alleged shooter, Esteban Santiago. This was to damp down the rampant speculation that has inflicted the digital age, in which what is said or written is considered true by virtue of the fact that it is said or written.

Admirable as such discretion is, I’m afraid we knew Santiago’s motives even before knowing his story. ...

The post-election and what I wore

December 12, 2016

The devil, they say, is in the details. And so it proved recently as I found myself serving and volleying furiously in a conversation with my Republican uncle about Barack Obama and Donald Trump. (If this had been a tennis match, it would’ve been John McEnroe and Ilie Nastase circa 1979, Madison Square Garden – don’t ask.)

Normally, I am the soul of forbearance with said uncle, who is elderly and served in the Korean Conflict – as he often reminds me. And I have a high tolerance for personal insults, being a confident person and having spent more than 35 years in a newsroom. But when someone I love or admire is attacked, my back is up. Uncle disparaged the current president, and we were off, shouting and talking over each other like a particularly maniacal Eleanor Clift and Pat Buchanan on the late, lamented “The McLaughlin Group.” (The idiosyncratic political round table was even funnier than its “Saturday Night Live” sendup.)

Late into the dustup with Uncle, he delivered what he no doubt thought was the coup de grace: The outfit I wore to the family’s Thanksgiving gathering made me look like a bag lady. ...

A writer’s solitary choice

November 27, 2016

The Bookends column of The New York Times Book Review – which each week poses a provocative question that two writers then answer in essay form, often offering diametrically opposed viewpoints – had a goodie for Thanksgiving weekend: “Are domestic responsibilities at odds with becoming a great artist?”

It’s a question I’ve wrestled with periodically but particularly at holiday time when gathering with married family members makes me acutely aware of my singleton status. I often suspect that the invitations are accompanied by a tacit, “Poor thing, what else would she do, where else would she go?” as much as by a genuine desire to see me. And, indeed, if this were the 19th-century such a woman would be an object of pity, Jane Austen notwithstanding. ...

Of talent and temperament: Nick Kyrgios and Tim Tebow

November 16, 2016

In his new book, “Shaken” (Waterbrook, 213 pages, $25), Tim Tebow considers the failure of his NFL career after his successful run with the Denver Broncos. He’s now trying to make it as a baseball player with the Arizona Fall League, where, once again, he’s been hailed for his good work ethic, leadership skills and clutch play but is still struggling to master the outfield. NFL legend and ESPN analyst Steve Young is among those pulling for him. But many who admire Tebow say he simply doesn’t have pro-quality aptitude.

He has, in other words, the temperament but not the talent. ...

The remains of the day

November 15, 2016

I’m still trying to wrap my mind – and, more difficultly, my heart – around the presidential election. You can talk about the failure of the Democrats to appeal to working-class voters; their reliance on the Barack Obama coalition (blacks, Latinos, women, millennials), which did not hold for the Dems – at least not in great enough numbers, and that includes you, Colin Kaepernick; a certitude, a smugness even, that wasn’t justified; the role of F.B.I. director James Comey in underscoring the tightening race in the last two weeks before the election; but at the end of the day, it was all about the zeitgeist.

Donald Trump was not merely the “change” candidate, again (Remember when Obama was the change candidate?); he was the regular-guy billionaire you could sit down and have a cheeseburger with, the one who understood America’s deeply ingrained nativist, isolationist, homogenous longings. This has always been – for all our forays into wars around the world – a determinedly inward-looking country. ...

Bosom buddies – art and our breast fixation

November 4, 2016

Freud said there were no such things as accidents so it should come as no surprise that The New York Times would carry a front page story on women who decided against reconstruction after mastectomy – complete with fascinating photographs of their flat, scarred and, in many cases, beautifully tattooed chests – at a moment that The Frick Collection in Manhattan is exhibiting “Cagnacci’s ‘Repentant Magdalene’” (through Jan. 22).

As several Times posters noted, the newspaper would not be displaying those photos had the breast cancer survivors had one or both breasts. And that’s in part because of artists like Guido Cagnacci, the Italian Baroque master whose subjects included Cleopatra and who helped sexualize the female body and female breasts in particular. ...