Elise Blackwell

Contrary to another reviewer’s opinion, I thought each character had enough depth for me to feel I knew them, their backgrounds and motivations. It’s a slow burn though, that’s for sure. Nothing really drastic happens, but the atmosphere is tense and at first you don’t know how the four are connected. New Orleans after Katrina was the perfect setting for the events to unfold. Things by their very nature are unsure; buildings are collapsed, services are off line, people have vanished show more and everyone left struggles to keep body and soul together. Blackwell’s depiction of the Lower Quarter neighborhood around Decatur was really effective. I felt like I would recognize it if I went there.

Told in three major sections, each tackles a particular aspect of the plot and the relationships between the characters. Part one is Inherent Vice where we will get our introductions to each damaged participant. Part two is Water Damage where we will understand how that past created the present and what are each person’s remaining options. Part three (final) is Approaches to Cleaning and Restoration where we learn their fates and whether any (or all) find redemption. Each section’s chapters are devoted to a single character at a time and are labeled as such; Johanna, Eli, Clay and Marion. Their stories are revealed by inches and so are their personalities. I really enjoyed the artful vocabulary and oblique ways of illuminating a point. Just enough to give you a flavor, but gives your imagination something to chew on as well.

In the end it’s about redemption, reclamation and release. Clay and Eli are looking to be redeemed of past sins and reclaimed to the straight path. Johanna is looking for release from her demons. Marion just wants to ease into a life that isn’t about the utilitarian. She wants to soar.

Spoilers -
The painting in the vortex of the storm is really a McGuffin. It only serves for things to happen and when J loses it from her own foolishness, I didn’t have any sympathy for her. She should have taken better precautions. That she and Eli have crashed into each other brings an important element of the positive into a novel that could have been a total downer. Clay and Marion have a more transactional relationship and I found her role as go-between with him and Johanna was unexpected. And in a way he serves as go-between with her and Eli. He was one of her original abusers when she was forced into prostitution by the Czech Ladislav. (who is dead and who's missing painting spins the whole plot). Only after he came away from his sadistic encounter with her did he realize she was a slave, not a willing participant. Getting her away from LAs was Clay’s ultimate redemption. Creepy doesn’t begin to describe it. Just what was his father ordering anyway? Did he only send the book to Johanna or did dad get something bound in his skin? There’s just enough information and inference to make it a really unsettling ending. show less

She was unprepared to see the coast, plot after plot either empty or a pile of rubbish that used to be a house she envied. Miles and miles of destruction. She tried to find some pleasure in the fact that for once the wealthy had fared worse that the poorer people who couldn't afford to live on the water, but the effort failed. It was all carnage.

This novel is set in New Orleans in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. People are slowly returning and there's also an influx of new residents, show more eager for a fresh start. As Katrina bore down on the city, a man was murdered in a French Quarter hotel room but with the devastation, the police aren't doing much to solve the crime. But others are interested in what happened, especially since the man had in his possession three painting, only two of which are recovered from the hotel room. To find that third painting, Elizam, fresh out of prison, is sent in from the west coast. One of his first contacts is a woman named Johanna, a beautiful blonde who makes her living restoring artwork. She has plenty of work, repairing the damage the hurricane and the subsequent mold and humidity caused. Then there's Clay, the son of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in New Orleans. He's waiting for his share of the family wealth, occupying his time with various internet pursuits and in his own particular sexual practices. And, finally, there's Marion, who is scrambling to make ends meet through a variety of jobs, from sex work to bartending. She's really an artist, though, if she can find the time and money to keep painting.

Johanna was familiar with this move: a man seeking sympathy for being married to someone he had chosen to marry. It occurred to her that he might think she'd worn the blue dress--which was modest in its neckline but short enough to show her knees when she sat and mad of a snug-fitting knit--because of him. She wasn't above pursuing such men. Married men were usually easier to get rid of quickly. But not always, and then they were the biggest problem of all because they felt entitled to whatever it was they thought they were exploding their lives to obtain.

This novel is only superficially a crime novel and there are elements of noir in it, from the tough and haunted PI to the blonde bombshell with the mysterious past at the center of the novel. At heart, this is a novel about a specific city at a specific time in its history and a character study of four people. While it was well-written, that tension between what it appears to be and what it is makes the book less effective than it could be. Still, who doesn't like a bit of art theft and vivid rendering of a beautiful city as it remakes itself? show less

Hunger is a short novel, but one that has a powerful voice to tackle issues of history, life at the edge of survival, and what happens to ethical and intelligent people when the things they care about are torn asunder. Set during the Siege of Leningrad from 1941-1944, the book focuses on issues of survival that go beyond the immediate needs of the protagonists themselves, ultimately leading to ruminations on betrayal, duplicity, and what it really means to be a moral person. Given the short show more length, the narrative is tight and relatively fast-paced, leaving the reader to fill in some of the blanks. But that's all to the good - Elise Blackwell does indeed manage to turn her story into something of a mirror, asking the reader to reflect on what they might do in similarly extreme situations. A solid piece of literature all around. show less

Bartels and Achen challenge what they call the “folk theory of democracy.” The “folk theory” seems to have its roots in the idea of the “rational man” — an Enlightenment idea, certainly, but one that seems to have made its way into popular politics. The idea is that democracy works (when it does) via choices of representatives or directly of policies as informed by their interests and values. Representatives and policies then reflect those choices — the government embodies show more and enacts the will of the people.

Then they undertake a quantitative study of the validity of that folk theory. They actually examine two theories of rational voter behavior.

The first is policy voting — that, in simple terms, voters vote for candidates with whom they share policy positions more than alternative candidates.

Policy voting fails in part because voters are unable or don’t take the time to discern the policy positions of candidates. And in fact, there is little actual policy alignment between voters and the candidates they vote for to support the hypothesis that such a thing is behind voters’ behavior. This point echoes what Bartels showed in his earlier book, Unequal Democracy — that the policy positions of members of the House of Representatives do not correlate well with those of their constituents (particularly their lower income constituents).

In fact, foreshadowing some later discussions on group identity and group influence, Achen and Bartels hint that where there is agreement between voters and candidates on policies, the arrow of fit and influence may go in the opposite direction. Voters may not choose candidates who reflect their policy positions so much as adopt policy positions held by the candidates they choose.

The second theory of rational voter behavior is retrospective rationality. Voters assess the performance of office holders and vote them in or out depending on performance, viewed in terms of the voters’ individual or collective welfare.

Retrospective rationality fails in part because voters do not separate factors influencing their welfare that are due to the office holders’ action from those that are not. Famously, Woodrow Wilson lost re-election votes in New Jersey’s shore area in 1916 due to shark attacks on swimmers. Wilson had nothing to do with the attacks of course, but statistical analysis shows that in fact he did suffer at the polls. Voters in the area felt things weren’t going well, and they blamed the office holder. Achen and Bartels of course cite other cases, including a century long correlation of drought or severe rainfall with voters’ behavior that punished incumbents.

The second half of the book tries to pick up the pieces.

Suppose the critique of “folk democracy” is correct. Voting behavior is not rational, in either sense of policy voting or retrospective assessment. What then? For some, the obvious response is to re-assert what has been disproven, but this time as a “should” rather than an “is”. What we need is a more educated, more “rational” voter. Some readers may even at this point simply congratulate themselves as bucking the evidence, because they view themselves as exceptions, well-informed, rational voters. In fact, though, as Achen and Bartels show, the politically more informed voters are more, not less, likely to fail tests of rational voting behavior. Raising the information level of voters won’t correct the problem.

By contrast, Achen and Bartels pursue a “realist” theory of democracy. “In our view, a realist theory of democracy must be founded on a realistic theory of political psychology. At present, nothing of that kind exists.” (p. 230). They don’t pretend to have such a theory of political psychology themselves. But they believe they can begin. No such theory, they believe, can ignore the role of group identity. Research shows too clearly that policy positions, the starting point in the folk theory, are not the starting point at all, but are rather themselves heavily influenced if not produced by group identity. We adopt the policy positions we adopt, in large part because of the social group(s) with which we identify.

Of course this is ideological anathema to individualists (themselves a group, of course, no matter how some would like to deny it). But Achen and Bartels stand on realist grounds, and they subject their hypothesis to case studies. These case studies are the partisan political realignments of the New Deal in the 1930s, Kennedy’s Catholicism as a point of contention in 1960, the collapse of the solid Democratic south following the Jim Crow era, and the emergence of abortion as a powerful issue in the 1980s and 1990s. In each instance, they find compellng evidence, in the data, of powerful group influence.

So what direction would all of this lead us in, if we maintain a democratic ideology? As the authors argue, we must pay much more attention to the roles of groups in generating political positions and policies. “Groups” will include everything from political parties to unions to PACs to lobbyists to more informal citizen, professional, and business groups.

How do these groups influence the thinking of the voting public, and how do they influence the policies of the political parties in power? In particular Achen and Bartels recommend applying scrutiny to the role of money (and other forms of inordinate power) in politics — some groups are advantaged in their ability to influence, obviously, by their ability to speak more often, more loudly, and with more skill than others. As a consequence they are in a position to advance their group interests more effectively. Doing anything about them is more easily said than done, of course, for the very reasons Achen and Bartels have cited.

Bartels and Achen believe in democracy, and they are trying to determine how to help make it work. They believe in democracy in the sense that they believe a government that responds to and represents the interests of its people can be a positive force in their lives. Their obvious chagrin is with the fact, as shown in studies of voter behavior and the responsiveness of elected government, we neither have a responsive government nor do we behave at the polls in a way that will give us one.

I think the critique is a needed one. There is a need for throwing a wrench into our popular political discourse. We toss around tired ideological claims and perceptions as self-proclaimed liberals, libertarians, conservatives or whatever like blunt and tired tools, even deluding ourselves into thinking our “side” of the debate to be enlightened. It is too easy to claim that the public, as a whole, is too uninformed or doesn’t have sufficient time to educate itself for its role in a democratic system. Achen and Bartels don’t deny that that is the case, but their point directs us away from such a fatiguing defeatism.

Their arguments regarding the role of groups are not as tight, I think, as their critique of rational voting behavior. The notion of a “group” is itself pretty slippery and pretty complicated. I belong to many groups, with many associated identities — everything from explicit political affiliations to geographic identities, professional associations, cultural identities, and on and on. “My group identity”, if we can speak of it in any unified way, might best be seen as some sort of complex vector space rather than a simple assignment to some uber-identity.

With that in mind, I think Achen and Bartels do their best job here as challenging us to think differently about political behavior. The simple model of individual political rationality doesn’t work. And its failure isn't a matter of our failing to behave properly as voters — it fails because it is false to human political behavior per se. We don’t fall into the influence of groups because we fail to behave adequately as rational individuals. The influence of groups is simply an aspect of human behavior (I would even say human rational behavior, although that would get us into a much bigger argument about what constitutes “rationality” and whether it can have inherently social aspects or must properly be conceived on the scale of the individual).

Nothing could be more critical in reading this book than including yourself as a subject. It would be too easy to say that Achen and Bartels are talking about other people, not me. That’s not true. In reading their book, I see that tendency — “Most people fail to live up to rational standards, but I know I do.” But I am just like everyone else — I certainly have group identities, they certainly influence my perceptions, my judgements, and my political behavior. Thinking otherwise would be unbearably smug. As the authors say, “It is a book about the conceptual limitations of human beings — including the authors of this book and its readers.” show less