The Sweet Spot, by Peter Hartcher

Peter Hartcher’s new book, The Sweet Spot, celebrates the economic policy work of Australian governments over the past thirty years. Australia, through the diligent work of its politicians, managed to get the balance right between a free economy and a welfare state. But such economic progress is at risk of stagnating if Australians become too complacent.

Peter Hartcher is one of Australia’s classier print journalists. His work is politically non-partisan, and his style urbane without being elitist. He writes for the serious citizen interested in public policy in a way that is also accessible to the common reader. Economically he is convinced of the efficacy of open markets, and lauds the work done by both the Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello governments in modernising the Australian economy. As Hartcher sees it, this has provided great wealth and opportunity for the people of Australia. Before these substantial changes under Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, Australia was a closed shop reliant on high tariffs to protect its industries.

Australia, however, didn’t pursue economic freedom at the expense of fairness and equity, and this is why Hartcher has called his book The Sweet Spot. What this means is that Australia’s economic policy settings have found the right balance between, say, the ruthless economic freedom of Hong Kong and the generous social welfare benefits of a country like France. All in all, Australia has provided its citizens maximum wealth and the certainty of a safety net.

Overall, The Sweet Spot is really an economic history of Australia, from inauspicious convict beginnings to today’s sophisticated, world-class economy. The major story arc takes the reader from the protected, high tariff economy, when Australia could rely on the mother country, England, as a key trade partner, to the dismantling of that protection and the opening up of the Australia to the rest of the world.

In amongst this historical narrative Hartcher provides fascinating national economic portraits, both successful and dire, ranging from North Korea to the emerging success story of China. Against this broad canvas of differing economies, Hartcher endeavours to instruct the reader but also put forward his case for Australia as having one of the best economies in the world, achieved by the diligent work of its political class. The Sweet Spot provides a fairly rosy picture and pleads with the reader that to maintain such high living standards, vigilance is needed on the part of its citizens.

There are a few sour notes in The Sweet Spot, primarily the performance of Labor governments from 2007 under Kevin Rudd and 2010 under Julia Gillard. He sees both of these governments as weak on economic policy, lacking in the courage to take the necessary hard steps that Australia will need to take to keep its economy competitive. He cites the unwillingness of either Rudd or Gillard to tackle an emissions trading scheme (Rudd abandoned it, urged on by Gillard. Gillard only pursued it once minority government made it an imperative.) Nor does he let opposition leader Tony Abbott off the hook, describing him as an egregious opportunist with no serious interest in economic policy.

The Sweet Spot makes for a solid overview of Australia’s economic performance over the past two decades, and puts forward convincing arguments for why its citizens need to be especially alert to the danger of complacency. With so much economic strife happening in Europe and America, with the Chinese story still yet to fully play out, Peter Hartcher’s economic history of Australia makes for timely reading.

The Sweet Spot: How Australia Made Its Own Luck and Now Could Throw It All Away, by Peter Hartcher. Published by Black Inc. ISBN: 9781863954976

Into the Woods, by Anna Krien

Anna Krien’s Into The Woods provides a multifaceted investigation into the fraught and highly-contested debate on how best to exploit Tasmania’s precious forestry endowment. With a novelist’s skill, she describes the key personalities, conflicts and factual grey areas of a controversial policy area, making Into The Woods a thought provoking book that provides no easy answers.

Anna Krien is a Melbourne based journalist who has published in The Monthly, The Age and The Big Issue, amongst other publications. Her first book, with its rather Bambiesque title, Into The Woods, follows a style of journalism made famous by George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). The author immerses herself in her subject matter, body and soul, and reports back at intimate length. This is not a facts and figures journalism, gleaned from picking over reports, official investigations and inquiries. Here the journalist to some degree also becomes the subject: personal prejudices, doubts, failings and misgivings are all candidly disclosed. These admissions of the writer’s fallibility goes someway to giving the over all work a greater feeling of honesty.

Journalistic works of this type (the other great recent example if Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man), do not pontificate from on high, but rather crawl through the mud to bring a more realistic picture. Complexity, contrary views and the general clamour of differing voices that make up contentious issues are all given an airing. The book format, with its hundreds of pages, makes this type of writing possible, where time and patience are needed to tease out ideas and explore various intellectual avenues.

It seems pretty clear from the opening pages of Into The Woods that Anna Krien is by and large sympathetic to the activists that are trying to conserve Tasmania’s forests and stop the loggers. Nonetheless, Krien soon gets fairly impatient with the campaigning style and doggedness of the activists, especially when she is confronted with a pub full of knockabout men who are sympathetic to the loggers and hostile to the ‘greenies’. She decides that it’s the activists who need to be out in the pubs talking to the enemy, learning a few things, and not sitting up a tree.

Into The Woods does attempt to look at the big picture, despite its author’s obvious biases. Krien does a fascinating job of interviewing activists, leading politicians, scientists, forestry officials and loggers, trying to get a true picture of just how fragile Tasmania’s ecology has become due to the demands of its economy: logging and wood chipping. The picture that emerges is of a state that is divided down the middle between conservationists and loggers, with neither giving way. You get the picture of a state that simply doesn’t know how to function outside of this dichotomy.

If we’re to believe former Tasmanian premier Jim Bacon’s last minute call to activist and garden show host Peter Cundall, two weeks before he died of lung cancer, urging Cundall to never give up the fight against the big business interests that he claimed ran the state, then Tasmania is a plutocracy run by powerful money interests. During that phone call Bacon told Cundall that there was nothing politicians could do to stop huge companies like Gunns. The politicians were simply the hired staff at a lavish party where they served Tasmania’s precious resources on a platter to the greedy and all powerful corporations.

There’s much to commend in Anna Krien’s finely written book. Her intimate attention to detail and well rounded portraits make for fascinating reading. Krien has the novelist’s gift for pacing, timing, description and evocative use of language, making Into The Woods a must-read.

Into The Woods: The Battle for Tasmania’s Forests, by Anna Krien. Published by Black Inc., 2010. ISBN: 9781863954877

Cakes and Ale, by W. Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale attempts to show writers not as celestial beings that float above the hoi polloi, but as embarrassingly human, full of failure and weakness. It’s a deeply iconoclastic novel that’s interesting enough, revealing as it does Maugham’s experiences of the literary world, but its lack of emotional disclosure makes it not entirely successful.

The blurb on the back of the Vintage Classics edition of W. Somerset Maugham’s wonderfully titled Cakes and Ale (1930), proclaims it to be a ‘wickedly satirical novel about contemporary literary poseurs and a skilfully crafted study of freedom’. It’s not really that. There isn’t much wicked satire in Cakes and Ale; Maugham doesn’t indulge in bitchy barbs and witty put downs. While the novel clearly relies on much first hand observation of the literary scene and its ambitious participants, the tone is more sombre and brooding.

The narrator, Willie Ashenden, is a writer himself, and with a sigh accepts the ruthlessly competitive nature of the literary world. Rivalries, petty jealousies and duplicitous friendships are the order of the day. These writers may publish high minded tomes, but underneath the exalted prose lies vain, flawed human beings. Willie Ashenden sees and describes the messy, embarrassing and often ignoble side of the writer’s life, the one that the adoring public doesn’t. Touch our idols, wrote Gustave Flaubert, and the gilt comes off on our hands. Cakes and Ale is a very iconoclastic novel.

Nor can it be said that Maugham has written a ‘skilfully crafted study of freedom’. The free spirit of the piece, Rosie Driffield, first wife of famous novelist Edward Driffield, is a morally dubious character that fascinates but also repulses. To put it politely, Maugham suggests that she’s a woman of easy virtue. Rosie’s philosophical utterances about free love and jealousy can’t be taken seriously either. She is, to a large extent, a selfish adventurer. It’s hard not to think that there’s a whiff of misogyny in Maugham’s characterisation of Rosie Driffield, and of women in general.

The plot, without confusing the reader too much, is essentially a biography of the early life of Edward Driffield, a famous writer recently deceased. When Driffield’s second wife - his nurse that he later married - commissions an authorised biography of her famous husband, Willie Abersham is brought in to recollect some of his early memories of Edward Driffield and his somewhat notorious first wife, Rosie. What we learn of this first marriage turns out to be very sordid indeed.

The various aspects of Cakes and Ale don’t really gel that well. It’s hard to believe that a figure like Edward Driffield would have married the fast track Rosie in the first place (an excuse is given late in the novel, but it seems like a literary device to explain an unlikely union). The emotional dynamics of the novel don’t make sense either. Maugham’s misogyny (if indeed that’s what it is; he even talks about all women being constipated at one stage, which seems bizarre) gets in the way. His highly accomplished literary style, which features a strong, muscular prose, could be a fog to hide emotional deficiencies.

Cakes and Ale turns out to be an interesting literary curio, but one that leaves you scratching your head. The interesting aspect is the iconoclastic portrait of the great writer, but it’s depictions of women and love disappoint.

Cakes and Ale, by W. Somerset Maugham. Published by Vintage Classics. ISBN: 978-0-099-282778.

The Complete Short Stories, by Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor took as her canvas the Southern milieu she grew up in and observed. Her short stories are thronged with gritty eccentrics and bizarre situations that are true to life, as they are too uncanny to have been invented. She adds to this mix a perfect ear for dialogue and a deeply ironic worldview, making her fiction often laugh-out-loud funny. Her complete stories don’t contain a lacklustre one in the whole book.

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) died young, at thirty-nine, and managed to publish two novels during her short life, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear it Away (1960). She was also a short story writer of immense perception and intellect. Born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Georgia State College for Women, her work is heavily influenced by her Southern upbringing and culture. The language, characters, beliefs and eccentricities of her native South are carefully detailed in a fiction that is strikingly alive. O’Connor’s Roman Catholic faith forms another major component of her work, giving her novels and stories many violent climactic scenes and raw, no-nonsense characters.

Flannery O’Connor’s style is deeply ironic and often outright funny. She wields a wicked sense of humour that is never used at the expense of her characters, but more pokes fun at the absurdity of the world. While the reader may often laugh at the dumbly racist characters in her stories and novels, the joke is never on the simple Southern folk she observed with such accuracy. If anything, her criticism is directed at the do-gooder, educated characters who try to lord it over the bigoted and gullible.

The Collected Short Stories comprises youthful pieces composed while the writer was a student, stories written as the opening chapters of her novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away, and the mature work of her later career. They are organised chronologically, so the reader can get an understanding of how O’Connor developed her short story style. All of the early pieces such as ‘The Geranium’ and ‘The Barber’ are of a remarkably high quality, and don’t read as the work of a literary novice. For those who have read Wise Blood, it may be a little frustrating to read the early chapters of this novel worked out as a series of short stories.

The strongest stories perhaps come from the middle section, such as ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ and ‘A Late Encounter with the Enemy’. These stories frequently show O’Connor’s dark humour and taste for the ludicrous at its best. This reviewer frequently found himself laughing out loud at the sharp dialogue and ridiculous situations.

The later stories in the collection are not as humorous, and introduce more educated characters and the friction that develops when they try to change their more simple-minded relatives or racist compatriots. This is especially so in O’Connor’s brilliant ‘Everything that Rises Must Converge’, a story that highlights the hypocrisy and cruelty of the educated liberal.

It’s hard to pin down what Flannery O’Connor’s themes are as a writer. She mixes comedy, irony, violent religious feeling and authentic characterisations of the people she observed and grew up with in Southern Georgia. Her ear for dialogue and gift for evocative description make her fiction fresh and alive today, over fifty years after it was first written. She seems determined to paint people as they really are, warts and all, yet doesn’t look down her nose at the racists, blasphemers and fools that drive the action of her stories. She sees the human side above all else, and can sympathise with people who are bad. Like the mother in ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’ who condescendingly thinks black children are ‘cute’, but baulks at any type of integration.

The cultural landscape in Flannery O’Connor’s stories is bleak, full of hucksters, racists, cheap entertainment and misguided values. What the reader takes away is a raw picture of the American South, of life stripped back with little in the way of spiritual nourishment. Religious salvation or escape from such a desolate landscape is always violent and extreme. When life’s profound ironies are examined by O’Connor’s shrewd intellect, the only response is a kind of laughter in the dark.

The Complete Short Stories, by Flannery O’Connor. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN: 978-0374515362

The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence

In The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence asks the question, ‘How to become oneself’. The narrative takes the reader through three generations of the Brangwen family, and finally comes to focus closely on Ursula Brangwen, a universal feminist character that poses the great questions of modern humanity.

D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920) were both originally written as one novel, but split into two at the suggestion of his publisher. Upon publication, The Rainbow quickly got itself into hot water for its candid descriptions of love, sensuality and the body. An obscenity trial ensued, causing a five year delay before Women in Love could made its appearance.

The Rainbow, if one were looking for a conventional description, would call the novel a family saga. Three generations of the Brangwen family, their marriages, love, hates and turbulent inner lives, are described in Lawrence’s abundant, cornucopian prose-poetry. Lawrence is renowned for his mammoth literary output: letters, novels, plays, short stories and poetry. Words came tumbling out of him like a great running river.

In The Rainbow, Lawrence's literary consciousness is so large and powerful it almost overflows even the novel’s huge capacity. Every page teems with ideas, complex psychology and a poetry of the body and nature. His subject matter is individual consciousness and the friction caused when it rubs up against society, twenty-first century progress and changing gender roles. In this Lawrence is unique and completely modern. Conventional literary forms could not contain him, and hence he comes virtually born into literature as a complete self-invention. He seems to have no literary antecedents.

The Rainbow has many feminist aspects. While the first half concentrates on the generations of the Brangwen family, the second half comes to focus on the eldest daughter of Will and Anna Brangwen, Ursula. The portrait of Ursula is something that Virginia Woolf could only have dreamt of writing. We come to experience Ursula as a young woman facing all of life’s big questions: marriage, love, economic independence, the place of women in society. In the end Ursula turns her back on conventional marriage and chooses her right to self-discovery. On the way to this fraught decision, she poses some extraordinary questions. Arguably, of all male writers, only Shakespeare and D. H. Lawrence could write such deeply complex and intellectually compelling women characters. Both Shakespeare and Lawrence seem the least sexist of writers, the most intellectually and spiritually bi-gendered, if it can be put like that.

Here Lawrence describes Ursula Brangwen’s crisis of identity:

“How to act, that was the question? Whither to go, how to become oneself? One was not oneself, one was merely a half-stated question. How to become oneself, how to know the question and the answer of oneself, when one was merely an unfixed something – nothing, blowing about like the winds of heaven, undefined, unstated.’

D. H. Lawrence’s novels are as difficult to interpret and understand as the most ambiguous poetry. The reader can’t approach The Rainbow with the expectation of easy answers and pat explanations to life’s dilemmas. Lawrence’s capacious mind and imagination constantly breaks all bounds and conventions. Lawrence, as a writer who asked ‘How to become oneself’, invented his own literary form, a prose poetry that examines heart, soul, individual consciousness, nature, art, gender and society.

D. H. Lawrence is considered one of the great moderns of twenty-first century literature, yet there is a timelessness about him that ensures his work will last for as long as people read, think and feel the world around them. His sense of fate and tragedy, of the permanence of the self, recalls the writers of antiquity, like Homer and Sophocles.

The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence. Published by Penguin Classics. ISBN: 978-0141441382

The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson

Readers of Jon Ronson’s books, such as Them: Adventures with Extremists and The Men Who Stare at Goats, will not be disappointed with The Psychopath Test. Ronson goes on many a fascinating adventure, interviewing real life psychopaths, CEOs and Broadmoor inmates, finally reaching the conclusion that madness may well be in the eye of the beholder.

British journalist Jon Ronson has made a name for himself by seeking out eccentric nut cases and turning these people and their obsessions into entertaining and insightful books. The reason for Ronson’s success is that he mixes light humour with disturbing subject matter. Ronson’s books almost read like novels. They are filled with funny dialogue, fascinating characters, entertaining episodes and a general air of intellectual suspense that make them compulsive page turners.

Ronson always keeps an open mind on what he’s investigating, and is candid in revealing the many twists and turns in his own thinking. Refreshingly, Ronson is happy to admit that he’s a fallible thinker, prone to making mistakes. Even when he’s making somewhat peremptory judgements based on emotion or prejudice, there’s an honesty that makes Ronson likeable, an author you’re likely to trust almost as a friend.

The Psychopath Test, as the subtitle says, is a ‘journey through the madness industry’. Ronson meets all sorts of people in the psychiatry trade, and the patients that the industry diagnoses and in some cases incarcerates indefinitely. The most notable interviewee is Bob Hare, who invented the psychopath checklist, or test. Ronson becomes quite obsessed with the checklist.

The notion of being able to diagnose possible psychopaths gives him a sense of power. Suddenly friends and critics alike begin to register as possible psychopaths according to the test. Ronson admits to ‘going a little mad with power’ to make a point about how the practice of psychiatry might do more harm than good, creating platoons of practitioners whose mere opinions have the power to medicate and incarcerate. (We learn of one child, diagnosed with bi-polar, who is over medicated and dies as a result. Diagnosing children with bi-polar remains controversial.)

Picking up Hare’s theory that many leaders in politics and business are high on the psychopath checklist, Ronson sets out somewhat half heartedly to prove the theory correct. Most alarmingly, he goes off to visit Al Dunlop, notorious CEO and corporate downsizer who ruthlessly threw many out of their jobs and gloated about it. It’s impossible not to tense up and worry for Ronson’s safety as he suggests to Dunlop, while interviewing the man in his own house, that he may possibly be a psychopath. Dunlop doesn’t take too kindly to this of course, but Ronson manages to get himself out of strife.

The central mystery of The Psychopath Test is a young man named ‘Tony’ who had been incarcerated at Broadmoor’s Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder unit for twelve years. Tony faked a mental illness at the time of his conviction, thinking he would be put into a cushy hospital rather than having to sweat out a prison sentence (he’d committed a violent crime at the age of seventeen.) Once in Broadmoor, however, he couldn’t get out: his clinician had determined he was a psychopath.

The central theme, then, of The Psychopath Test, is the definition of madness, who get to define who as mad, and the power that it accrues. Tony’s violent crime would have got him a seven year sentence, but his faking a mental illness, and inability to prove he wasn’t mad or a psychopath, kept him incarcerated for twelve years. No matter what he did in Broadmoor, no matter how normal he tried to behave, everything was written down and recorded as proof of his mental instability. It’s all alarmingly Kafkaesque, as Ronson shows how it’s almost impossible to prove you are sane. If you fall into the wrong hands, it seems nothing you do may be considered normal.

This inability to consider everyday behaviour normal may be the reason that the DSM, the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic handbook, has expanded so much since it was first published (it currently lists 374 mental disorders). DSM-I was a 65 page booklet, but the current version, DSM-IV-TR, runs to 886 pages. In a fascinating interview with David Spitzer, the editor of the third version of the DSM (Spitzer almost quadrupled the size of DSM-III to 494 pages from 134 pages), Ronson asks about the possibility that he may have mislabelled some ordinary behaviours as mental disorders. Ronson waits for three minutes for Spitzer to answer, until he finally says, ‘I don’t know’.

‘Do you ever think about that?’ I asked him.
‘I guess the answer is I don’t really,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should. But I don’t like the idea of speculating how many of the DSM-III categories are describing normal behaviour.’
‘Why don’t you like speculating on that?’ I asked
‘Because then I’d be speculating on how much of it is a mistake,’ he said.
There was another long pause.
‘Some of it may be,’ he said.

The take-away from The Psychopath Test is that most likely we’re all a little mad, and that the mental health industry may have a little too much power. Interestingly, the pharmaceutical industry loves new mental disorders being discovered, as it gives them a chance to sell more drugs.

The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson. Published by Picador. ISBN: 978-0-330-45136-9

Liar’s Poker, by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker explains to the lay reader such arcane subjects as mortgage and junk bond markets. As an employee with Salomon Brothers during the mid-eighties, Lewis gives a mildly amusing insiders account of his time with the firm. The more substantial sections of the book provide a well researched financial history of mortgage bond markets, the same financial product that would play a pivotal part in the 2007 subprime crisis.

Michael Lewis goofed his way into an entry level position with the prestigious Salomon Brothers in the mid-eighties. Within a couple of years he had managed to join that elite of traders known as the ‘Big Swinging Dicks’. But the buzz of making huge amounts of money soon left him cold, and Lewis quit the firm.

Liar’s Poker is Lewis’s memoir of that period during the eighties when junk bonds, collateral debt obligations and other dubious financial products made their debut, wreaking eventual economic havoc. This was a period of fierce financial innovation. New, dazzling financial products were being brought onto the market so quickly that only young bond traders could really understand them.

Lewis’s memoir covers the cocky attitudes of young trainees, the high testosterone environment of aggressive finance, and the almost pointless and self-defeating greed of the industry. The autobiographical sections of the book are interesting enough, but feel a bit dated and thin when reading them today (the book was originally published in 1989).

The most interesting section (and I’m guessing the reason the book is still published today), is the chunky middle part that details the rise of the mortgage bond market and the invention of the collateralised mortgage obligation, or CMO. This is where the debts of a whole lot of mortgages are pooled together and sold off as an investment. Fast forward to the 2007 sub prime melt down, and you can see where the problem originated. How this bond market came into being and flourished makes for fascinating reading.

Lewis also provides an interesting chapter on how junk bonds were born. For anyone interesting in financial history, Lewis has a knack for explaining complex financial transactions in a down to earth language.

By and large Liar’s Poker is interesting enough. Personal memoirs of working life in big and powerful institutions can tend to lean to the dull side. Students of junk and mortgage bond markets would probably be better to go for a straight financial history of the period. The big laughs promised on the cover blurb by Tom Wolfe didn’t really materialise for this reader.

Liar’s Poker, by Michael Lewis. Published by Hodder. ISBN: 978-0-340-83966-6