II.

“Devil May Care,” the latest post-Fleming James Bond novel, is another ”horribly efficient” contribution to the Bond canon. British author Sebastian Faulks, better known for literary works like his novel ”Birdsong,” cranked out his bit of the Bond saga in a mere six weeks. It’s not hard to tell. The story reads as if Faulks sat down with a stack of paperbacks from Fleming’s back catalog and a copy of Umberto Eco’s critical essay “Narrative Structure in Fleming,” and started ticking off boxes on the checklist of requisite story elements like a fourth grader writing a book report (his novel is an ADBCADFGEGHBHI on the Eco-meter, by the way).

But Fleming, after all, set a rather ambitious authorial agenda of his own, writing a Bond novel every year during his two-month vacation in Jamaica. And Faulks fakes Fleming so well and with such fun that it’s hard to hold the banality against him.

Consider the panache with which he ticks off those boxes: an Eastern European villain with a hideous deformity and a maniac eccentricity? Check. Here it’s Dr. Julius Gorner, a Lithuanian opiate magnate born with a monkey paw and raised with an obsessive hatred of all things English. Sadistic henchman presented in uncomfortable, occasionally racist caricature? Look no further than Chagrin, the surgically enhanced Viet Minh torture expert with “the epicanthic lids of the Orient and flat, inert features,” who seems to Bond “not fully alive.” Add to this a harebrained technocratic Cold War scheme to flood Britain with heroin and fake a nuclear attack on Russia, a tennis match early in the novel as gripping as golf with Goldfinger, and a jaunt off to Reza Shah’s Persia. On top of it all, not one but two gorgeous and absurdly named girls—Scarlett and Poppy Papava—who are identical twins. Here, pastiche verges on parody, but Faulks treads the line with surprising success.

Then again, Faulks is terribly awkward when he fails. The novel is set in 1967, after the events of Fleming’s last Bond story, “The Man With the Golden Gun,” and though Faulks’ occasional hints at current events evoke the Cold War, cultural toss-offs to the Rolling Stones (“the ones with the hair down to their shoulders that make such a racket”) and hippiedom (“Bond could smell the bonfire whiff of marijuana he’d previously associated only with souks in the grubbier Moroccan towns”) are as cringeworthy as they come. So are some of his more fantastic characters, like Felix Leiter, equipped with arm and leg prostheses after surviving a shark attack in Thunderball, who spends much of the third act cumbersomely clamoring about Tehran, or the soggy-handshaked homosexual CIA agent who double-crosses our virile hero.

But in this novel, the character that counts—Bond himself—is hugely more human than his current cinematic counterpart. Faulks gives us a Bond at the end of his espionage career, recovering from his wife’s murder, dealing with a recent spell of amnesia, and asking himself if he’s still cut out for the job. At the beginning of the story, Bond is on mandatory sabbatical, considering whether or not to trade in his license to kill for a position as a glorified Moneypenny pushing papers for Her Majesty’s Secret Service. “‘You’re tired,’” Bond says to himself, “‘You’re played out. Finished.’” He subjects himself to a regimen of cold showers, hoping to invigorate the younger agent within. A far cry, and a refreshing one, from the invulnerable berserker on the silver screen. Plus, the little facets and foibles that make Bond—scrambled eggs, cold gin, cigarettes—are included here in abundance.

Unlike the dour plot of “Quantum,” this book’s great flaw is that, as a passable imitation of a middling Bond novel, it is not serious enough. Like most of Fleming’s thrillers, this is Hardy Boys for macho misanthropes: an enjoyable few hours of accelerating action, this time with Faulks’ tongue tucked in cheek. But though Faulks clones Fleming’s feel, he doesn’t quite grok his substance, and as a result, the reader feels misplaced, like the novel’s middle aged Bond watching the flower power world unfold around him.

It’s not Faulks’ fault—Fleming brought something ineffable to Bond in his novels, written, as a friend of mine recently put it, “to work out his penis issues about the Empire.” Today, both the Empire and Fleming’s penis are gone for good—and perhaps the James Bond he created is, too.

Age-less skin, clear veins, firm muscles. Millions of dollars a year are spent selling Americans the idea that they need products to keep from aging.

Of the various -isms discussed in the past presidential primary season, ageism was left rather inconspicuously absent. Racism received dozens of articles in the Times and a cover on both New York and TIME magazine. Sexism received less press but still received more-than average coverage and plenty of water-cooler debate. Comments about John McCain’s age, however, were seen as legitimate concerns. Certainly the greater likelihood of McCain’s death before the end of term created warranted scrutiny on his VP pick, but many equated his age with being out-of-touch.

In Coming of Age, oral historian Studs Terkel interviewed 70 Americans over 70 about growing up in the twentieth century. Not only does Coming of Age illuminate many aspects of history, the wisdom of Terkel’s subjects provides a window into the American present and future. The wisdom and its attendant respect accorded older people in other cultures is central to Terkel’s project. As the title shows, the book challenges the idea that you have to be young to be in your prime.

Holden Caulfield cedes ground to an acclaimed economist, a former mayor of Pittsburgh, a Tony Award-winning actress, CEOs, lawyers, a stockbroker. In place of solipsistic angst and the nihilism that often accompanies the stock coming-of-age novel–the people that occupy Terkel’s pages look outward. They hope for the future, reflect on the past, and only occasionally reference themselves.

The commonality in their stories is a deep concern with the present state of affairs and a desire to engage. A former businessman writes with regret about the greater concentration of businesses and wealth. They lament greed, apathy, and the attitude that being old means being inactive. A female stockbroker still works at age 82. A veteran of Cesar Chavez’s quest for migrant rights remains involved in organizing protests. A former CEO, bored with the passive life, became a well-paid corporate consultant who still had time for a game of golf.

Coming of Age is read best in segments, a few interviews at a time. The interviews provide perspective, humor, and a deeply poignant and valuable look at America’s past and possibilities.

To purchase Coming of Age, click here or visit your local bookseller.

Jillian McLaughlin is an editor and regular contributor to The Kosmopolitan. She writes the blog, “Stuff Liberal Arts Students Like” and writes for the Current Affairs section. She is currently a Junior at Kalamazoo College majoring in political science.

A review of The Ascent of Money, by Niall Ferguson

By Jillian McLaughlin

Subprime mortgage crisis, solvency, liquidity, Henry Paulson, Chris Cox, capital gains, preferred stock. The current economic crisis exposed a level of financial illiteracy never fully realized by many in the younger generation. Credit meant our parents paid later. Mortgages, what?  And when I first heard the names of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, I thought a restaurant chain was going bankrupt (you know, the kind with watered-down coffee and key-lime pie you can buy by the slice). However, with Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan ceding the national spotlight to fat, white business executives, the college students of the United States have to similarly re-order their priorities. Understanding finance has never been more important than now, amid one of the biggest economic debacles in the history of the world.

From money’s humble clay-tablet beginnings, various financial instruments arose.  The institution that made most others possible is the bank. Initially, at least in the European context, Jews operated many of the banks because they were not allowed to practice other professions. In the Christian faith at the time, usury (lending money at interest) was a sin. Even arguing that it wasn’t a sin was a sin. In the Torah, lending money is also a sin, but a very helpful clause was written in–Jews could lend money to strangers (i.e. Gentiles). Thus, modern banking. The Medici in Florence ended up modifying the bank by skirting around usury laws and instead took a proportion of profit from any ventures in which they invested. Soon, banks proliferated and grew more powerful in their ability to help finance political ventures and, significantly, war.

From banks, Ferguson takes up bonds. Bonds are issued usually by governments to investors who buy them at a certain value with the promise that they will receive interest set at a certain rate. The fun begins when inflation happens and bonds lose their value.  Financial instruments are not usually interesting in and of themselves, but in terms of how they interact within the larger social and political milieu.

From stocks to insurance, Ascent traverses social welfare in Japan, boom-and-bust stock markets, and, most relevantly for us, property, traditionally considered one of the safest vehicles for investment. Currently, there are 9,000 foreclosures every day in the U.S. Much of the problem lies in subprime loans. Ferguson focuses his analysis on the lending market in Detroit. Many lenders offered loans with minimal down payments and interest rates that were extremely low for the first two years of the mortgage. Then interest rates spiked, leaving many people with unaffordable mortgages. As people defaulted on mortgages they could not afford,    the supply of houses for sale increased, causing prices to plummet.  Soon, many people found themselves with mortgages worth more than their houses.

This analysis of the current economic woes is undergirded by an understanding of bonds, which Ferguson explained earlier. Bundles of mortgages were bound together and sold to banks, mutual funds, and other firms as secure bonds that would yield a set amount of interest. Because property is traditionally secure and people tend to make their mortgage payments, the cluster of subprime mortgages looked like it would yield a regular amount of interest.  And that’s how the cookie crumbled, so to speak. The predatory lenders did not feel the need to offer more affordable rates because they made money from selling the mortgage to others; these lenders needed neither the capital to withstand buyers’ defaults nor the long-term focus because they did not hold these toxic mortgages. 

By the last page, this ignorant college student gained a firm grasp on our current economic debacle, as well as a background in the financial successes and failures of the past. Ferguson deftly weaves narrative, analysis, and quirky facts into a decidedly readable book. If I cannot put down a book on the origins of financial instruments, clearly the book is exceptional. Some of his normative prescriptions reside on the conservative end of the spectrum, but Ferguson is too good an academic to imbibe Ascent with unqualified free market dogma. Instead, he gives a balanced approach which favors deregulation but also acknowledges the success of more progressive financial institutions and areas where regulation should still exist.

For anybody who wants the opaque world of finance illuminated, purchase The Ascent of Money.

Click here to buy the book at Amazon.com

Jillian McLaughlin is an editor and regular contributor to The Kosmopolitan. She writes the blog, “Stuff K Students Like” and writes for the Current Affairs section. She is currently a Junior at Kalamazoo College majoring in political science.