Love Is the Greatest Threat: A Review of Jane Shapiro's The Dangerous Husband

The Dangerous Husband by Jane Shapiro is the predecessor of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, a marital thriller that amuses itself with unexpected turns of phrase and wiles away the hours by punishing the reader’s loyalty.

“Help me,” he said in greeting. “I’m in a mess.”

“I’m not the one to save you!” I snapped, and we laughed like maniacs.

This conversation, the book’s meet cute, takes place in a surreal landscape that uncomfortably echoes our own, where love is the greatest threat to future happiness. An unnamed woman marries a hunky oaf named Dennis who turns out to be a terminal klutz, causing her to fear for her cat, him, her frog and her own life. The woman hires a hit man and vacillates on whether someone so prone to unhealthy mistakes with permanent consequences should be permitted to blunder about in the world.

A funny book about a serious subject that delights in its unreliable narrator and her oddly believable husband. Is the abuse accidental? Are you privy to the marital secrets on the pages or are they not secrets at all? How familiar is all of it and how does that correlate to its level of funniness? Is accidental abuse still abuse? Does original intent alter the crime? Is it no longer a crime, now relegated to a mere mistake, no matter how painful?

The best part of the book is Shapiro’s bland descriptions of the way disenchantment tends to creeps up on a person, even as complacency takes over and mildly boring routine becomes the new order. What was once disarming has decayed into the unforgivable, what was once irksome now intolerable, and what was once possible to overlook is now all that can be seen.

Despite its indulgently pretentious tone The Dangerous Husband is imminently readable. It is a darkly comic, self-aware, postfeminist portrayal of a marriage falling apart. And staying together. And getting hurt. And falling apart again. So we greet and snap and laugh like maniacs because what else is there to do?

An Invisible Threshold that Can Ignite an Otherwise Unforeseen Epidemic: On Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point

My whole life, I’ve had this kind of crazy intuition that I was meant to change the world for the better somehow. It would happen much farther into the future, but not so far that I would already be dead. To this day, I still can’t quite explain the nature of this conviction myself, other than that I’ve felt it deeply within me for as long as I can remember.

Let me clarify. What I mean is that, yes, I really do want to change the world around me, and I’ve always wanted to. In my perfect world, everyone would be kind to each other, everybody would follow the rules, everybody would care just a bit more about each other’s well being. No one would be prejudiced, no one would suffer at another’s hands, no one would talk about another behind his or her back. Also, the general population would stop littering. That includes anything to do with cigarettes. Everyone would just behave and then get a little gold star for it at the end of the day. Or another color, if gold isn’t your thing.

My friends tell me that I am idealistic, and I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing. I’ve heard stories of people who have done terrible things in the name of who they love or what they stand for, and with all my heart, I always just pray that I do not end up one of them. All I am saying is that as captivating as our world is, there is room for so much more improvement. Am I naïve for thinking that such a future is possible?

When I picked up a copy of The Tipping Point, I was given hope that perhaps I am not. The Tipping Point was actually a book my little sister was assigned to read over the summer for her upcoming Language and Composition class. I was interested when she began sharing these statistics and facts with me from this very book: “Hey, Sam, did you know that 80% of nearly all group work is done by only 20% of the group?” or “Wow, Sam, read this passage on conversational body language!” I was definitely interested. Once it was finally my turn to read it through, I was ready to learn just what this “Tipping Point” business was all about.

The “Tipping Point”, as it turns out, is an invisible threshold that, when broken, can ignite an otherwise unforeseen epidemic of immense magnitude that spreads almost instantaneously. Gladwell writes about this phenomenon:

We are all, at heart, gradualists, our expectations set by the steady passage of time. But the world of The Tipping Point is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than possibility. It is – contrary to all our expectations – a certainty.

Doesn’t that sound fascinating?

Gladwell argues in The Tipping Point that it is not the mass-scale actions that set the fiercest or most rampant trends into motion, but the small. “We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events,” Gladwell writes, “and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly.” The Tipping Point leads us through numerous real-world examples of the phenomenon and then dismantles completely the inner workings of how and why a certain social epidemics came to be. His argument appears paradoxical on the surface, but his prose makes understanding his argument relatively easy. Gladwell’s writing remains transparent and polished all throughout, and manages to craft an argument that is consistently convincing and conceivable. Furthermore, Gladwell supports his claims with numerous astounding facts and statistics from the most compelling and surprising of studies; it is evident that he is an experienced and nuanced researcher. Take, for example, this passage detailing the results of Zimbardo’s prison experiment:

In the early 1970s, a group of social scientists at Stanford University, led by Philip Zimbardo, decided to create a mock prison in the basement of the university’s psychology building…Zimbardo and his colleagues picked the 21 who appeared the most normal and healthy on psychological tests. Half of the group were chosen, at random, to be guards…The other half were told that they were to be prisoners…The purpose of the experiment was to try to find out why prisons are such nasty places.

So what became of the experiment?

What Zimbardo found out shocked him. The guards, some of whom had previously identified themselves as pacifists, fell quickly into the role of hard-bitten disciplinarians. The first night they woke up the prisoners at two in the morning and made them do pushups, line up against the wall, and perform other arbitrary tasks. On the morning of the second day, the prisoners rebelled. They ripped off their numbers and barricaded themselves in their cells. The guards responded by stripping them, spraying them with fire extinguishers, and throwing the leader of the rebellion into solitary confinement.

From this revolutionary experiment on the dynamics of people’s immediate environment, Zimbardo was able to conclude that “there are specific situations so powerful that they can overwhelm our inherent predispositions.” Thus, it is not fair to claim that prison is as horrible as it is primarily because of the people in it; the situation wields at least just as much significance.

Gladwell discusses this famous experiment to ultimately explain the sharp decline of a viciously rampant New York City crime epidemic in the late 1980s, which Gladwell attributes to one principle of the Tipping Point, the Power of Context, which states that humans are highly sensitive to their surroundings and will act in accordance with what their specific surroundings allow and encourage. The Power of Context is actually one of three major concepts that determine whether an epidemic will spark; the other two are the Law of the Few, which states that trends can begin in the hands of only several key types of people, and the Stickiness Factor, which asserts that the content and presentation of a message or product are critical, as well.

In addition, Gladwell explains plenty of other perplexing Tipping Point phenomena that have occurred throughout history. He explains, for example, what certain production values allowed the popular children’s shows Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues to become so successful, what particular traits of Paul Revere himself made his message so memorable on his “midnight ride” to Lexington, and what happens when a group’s population expands past 150. Particularly meaningful to me were his case study on why teenage smoking is so prevalent in Western society and his quest for the “unsticky” cigarette. Gladwell explores the impact of the really small factors that no one would suspect actually play a monumental role. Turns out, it’s a science.

Gladwell’s exploration of why big trends happen really did change my view of the world. I hadn’t thought of this before, but there are trends everywhere, from the latest political craze to the new hip iProduct. Why, exactly, are these messages or ideas or products so popular now? What do these obsessions hint about our intrinsic values? What do they say about us as humans?

Gladwell, as it turns out, had a second purpose for writing this book. Gladwell believes that if we can investigate specifically why social epidemics happen, surely we can harness the potential to ignite benevolent epidemics of our own. On one hand, the world of the Tipping Point is mysterious and unpredictable and very real, yet on the other, it has massive potential to do great good. Think about it. What if somebody, careful and intelligent in his or her actions, managed to start a major movement for health awareness or education reform, for example? The idea that such change is possible in the world gives me so much hope that my heart aches from it. Very few non-fiction works have made me feel this way.

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is such a magnificent read. I recommend that all my fellow idealists give this bad boy a swing. It lent me such a different perspective on how the world works, contrary to almost everything I have believed before. I am a strong believer that what goes in must equal what comes out, that what goes around is sure to equal what comes around, but The Tipping Point has revealed to me that such does not have to be a case. In fact, Gladwell has convinced me that the only way to cultivate these major changes is to make the small moves. He writes, “That’s why social change is so volatile and so often inexplicable, because it is the nature of all of us to be volatile and inexplicable.”

Don’t be ashamed to think that the world can be a better place. It can, and The Tipping Point will prove that transforming your vision into a reality is indeed possible. With just one small, smart move, everything can change drastically in a matter of days, hours, minutes, seconds. It will be beautiful, bigger than anything you could ever imagine. The world is in your hands. But there’s just one question.

Are you ready for it?

David Wallace Disappears 100 Pages In: A Review of DFW's The Pale King

““David was a perfectionist of the highest order, and there is no question that The Pale King would be vastly different had he survived to finish it.””

— Michael Pietsch, in the Editor’s Note for The Pale King

People die, even when they are in the middle of something important. And not only did David Foster Wallace write himself out of his own life, he wrote himself out of The Pale King, his last unfinished novel. David Wallace himself appears as a character in the densely populated IRS Center in Peoria where the majority of the book takes place, but David Wallace the writer had no intention of seeing his own story through to the end. Pages of his notes accompany The Pale King, and I found this one to be the most haunting: David Wallace disappears 100 pages in.

I’m not the type of person who is affected by the death of public figures. I understand that no one is exempt, no matter how talented that person may or may not be. But I was sitting in a cubicle at a dead end job, decrying my lack of writing time and my slow ascent up the slip’n’slide of success when his death appeared as a blip on the Internet. I hit the denial phase first and plugged his name into every search engine. Then I got pissed. How could someone so talented give up like that? How could he be so selfish? That’s when I shut down. I stopped working, put my head on my desk and breathed shallowly into the crook of my arm. I didn’t cry. Honestly. I just needed a minute to reassess. He and I had grown close as I read through his books and short stories and essays. Infinite Jest, in particular, had seen me through an extended bout of unemployment. These embarrassing emotions happened over the course of maybe three minutes and in plain view of my co-workers. Turns out I wasn’t sad, though. I was extremely disappointed.

I waited to read The Pale King. Part of me was going on about how busy I was, and I didn’t have time for a 600-page book. But in reality, I didn’t want to be done. When I put this book down, there wasn’t going to be another.  So I didn’t even buy it. I kept looking at it in the bookstore, pulling it up online, reading a few reviews. It wasn’t until the paperback was released that I desperately searched for a first edition hardcopy that I would have gotten if I’d just bought the damn book when it came out in the first place. Sorry everyone, I got it on Amazon.

First I read the editor’s note by Michael Pietsch. Then I read it again. Then again. I read that handful of pages six times before I even looked at the first chapter. I made my wife listen as I read excerpts of Pietsch’s account of assembling The Pale King from all those finished and unfinished pages. All those notes.

The book feels fragmented as a result. I’m confident that you could pick up The Pale King and read any chapter and it would stand alone. In fact, a few of my friends actually read it that way. There is some overlapping and some chapters give backgrounds into later characters, but it’s very much like a series of vignettes with no resolution. The emphasis on no resolution.

The most surprising element is the warmth of the book. There is a real affection, a gentle touch. Gone was the aloof wise-cracker who wrote The Broom of the System. This was a mature, caring creator of real people, even if they still found themselves in ludicrous situations and possessed unworldly abilities. I’ve heard this book described as an exploration of boredom, but I found the book to be alive in a way I hadn’t seen from him before. It was full of insight into human nature. Many times I found myself nodding along when Wallace got something exactly right.

Like this:

“The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, ‘What’s wrong?’ You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, ‘What do you mean?’ You say, ‘Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?’ And he’ll look stunned and say, ‘How did you know?’ He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it.”

Wallace spends pages describing the traffic patterns in front of the IRS center and the “me first” culture of driving. Entire chapters are devoted to what characters do to stave off the tedium of looking at tax returns. One character in particular is so detached from the repetitive nature of the job that he is visited by the ghost of a previous employee. Another concentrates so intently that he levitates in his chair.  In a section that also appeared in the New Yorker, we learn that one of the men spent the majority of his childhood attempting to kiss every inch of his body. Which of course, took a lot of dedication and concentrated thought. If you like all of your questions answered, this would not be the book for you. But if you’re looking for a meditative look at the redundant minutiae of life, then look no further. We all experience the tedium of the workplace and the small horrors of our advanced society, but no one can portray it more hilariously or with more generosity than David Foster Wallace.

I’m the first to admit that not everything works here. Namely the chapters that are almost exclusively dialogue with no indication as to who is talking. But I truly believe if you’ve never read Wallace before, this is the place to start. Or if you read his previous stuff and he left you cold, give The Pale King a shot. It doesn’t matter if you can keep everyone straight or remember how one person relates to another. It’s worth the price of admission to read the David Wallace chapters, where he interjects as the author to talk about his own (totally bogus) experiences at the IRS center. The bureaucratic foul-ups that propel his first day are some of the funniest stuff I’ve read in years. But I work in an office. I think the first chapter of Something Happened by Joseph Heller is a laugh riot. If I even think about the hacked emails that are sent out in Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris I giggle uncontrollably. The really fun thing about The Pale King is that if you don’t like the chapter you’re on, you’ll probably love the one coming up.

And then it’s over.