That fucking bell. There’s always a split-second between the moment a contestant at the Scripps National Spelling Bee finishes a word and the moment that bell rings out, and in that split-second you can see everything: panic, fear, terror, embarrassment, denial, anger ... all of it.
Most of the kids who took the stage at the Gaylord National Convention Center last night knew when they got a word wrong. And so the bell served as a confirmation of their worst fears. Or maybe they had a fleeting thought like, “Hey, maybe I stumbled my way into spelling it right!” only to have the bell dash those hopes in a hurry. A bell usually means: Dinner! Or: You can stop boxing for a few seconds now. Or: Ooooh, let’s ring this 500 times to see if the hotel clerk gets pissed. Those are all good things. The bell at the spelling bee is the hangman’s bell. It should ring out low and long, and Metallica should come roaring in as you’re whisked off the stage.
This book is Zimmer at his best: obliterating misconceptions about science with gentle prose. He brings the reader on his journey of discovery as he visits laboratory after laboratory, peering at mutant mosquitoes and talking to scientists about traces of Neanderthal ancestry within his own genome. Any fan of his previous books or his journalism will appreciate this work. But so, too, will parents wishing to understand the magnitude of the legacy they’re bequeathing to their children, people who want to grasp their history through genetic ancestry testing and those seeking a fuller context for the discussions about race and genetics so prevalent today.
What starts out as a study of how things go wrong becomes a study in how things go right, and the green shoots are not the work of the paramilitaries. The narrator of Milkman disrupts the status quo not through being political, heroic or violently opposed, but because she is original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique: different. The same can be said of this book.
Like so much autobiography, “First Person” is about nostalgia, for a lost age when once we could be horrified by outright lies, use the word “evil” to describe it and fear what might follow our acceptance of it.
What followed, Kif thinks in that Manhattan bar, was our world, “a world where something had ended and something else, something unimaginable, was beginning, against which we were powerless to act, but could only observe, waiting to wake up and scream, never knowing that we were in fact being condemned to a waking nightmare that never ended, a world where not one heart knew how to touch another.”
A world where everyone wants to be the first person.
Appropriately enough, Theroux professes irritation with writers who draw road maps to their souls, even as he compulsively writes about himself. Thus the final essay is titled “The Trouble With Autobiography,” which he derides as “a hinting form.” He coquettishly denies that he will ever write one. But he doesn’t need to. His essence has been captured by indirection, via a gigantic lifetime write-around. If you seek his monument, look at the “also by” page in the front of this book.