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Wisely, the makers of Shattered Glass have not pitched their story to viewers—or the media—as being about the inner workings of a hundred-year-old publication or the pitfalls of modern political journalism. No, according to the film’s writer-director, Billy Ray, Shattered Glass is “bigger than journalism”—it’s about “right and wrong.” Reviewers and critics have generally bought into this point of view, agreeing that Shattered Glass is, if not “bigger than journalism,” still about journalism’s big issues: It “puts journalistic ethics on trial,” according to blurb-whore repeat offender Peter Travers. Rex Reed raves (does he ever not?) that it “will teach you something about ethics gone awry.” The Washington Times sees it as a “vivid morality play.” David Edelstein, writing for the Glass-obsessed organ Slate (by my count, they’ve run ten stories about Glass in just the past six months), gets rather scarily into the spirit of such moralizing, writing that Shattered Glass “makes us feel the way our forefathers must have felt after a really good public stoning.”

This is all quite a windup for a movie in which the central moral quandary isn’t much of a head-scratcher: Is it wrong for a journalist to make up stories? Well, yes. Not since Saving Private Ryan’s faux-philosophizing—“Is the life of one man worth risking the life of many?”—has such a simple question generated such a flurry of non-answers.

To be fair, critics would have to do some fabricating themselves to find a true ethical dilemma in the story of serial myth-maker Stephen Glass as told by Ray. While superficially compelling, the Shattered Glass version of the events that brought down a rising young magazine writer and threatened a venerated magazine feels less like a meditation on right and wrong than a police procedural. In May 1998, Glass was fired from the perennially almost-relevant New Republic after a writer for the unfortunately named (and now defunct) Forbes Digital Tool unraveled the first of what would prove to be a string—nay, a whole skein—of almost totally invented feature articles. Shattered Glass tells that story and nothing else: None of the ulcer-inducing questions about the propriety of using anonymous sources, or the legitimacy of using the press as judge and jury—questions whose thorniness would exemplify a true dilemma. There’s just Glass and his made-up stories, presented with all the depth of character of an episode of Law & Order.

Much has been made, for instance, about Ray’s decision to keep Glass—in a manner of speaking—opaque. We don’t find out much about his motives, hear little about his past, and learn only the barest outline of the mechanics of his fraud. On this score, the movie fails as even a genre flick; the best part of any film about a con is finding out how it’s done.

And it was undoubtedly necessary to telescope Glass’s two-year career at the New Republic, but the events of the movie feel as though they take place over a matter of days. No sooner are questions raised about a Glass story on hard-partying young Republicans than the magazine’s editorship changes hands: The fatherly Michael Kelly (played by Hank Azaria of Simpsons fame) is replaced by the young (and, as played by Peter Sarsgaard, almost reptilian) Charles Lane. Impervious to the writer’s nebbishy charm, Lane senses that Glass is up to something almost, it appears, immediately. Questions arise about another story, Lane smokes out Glass’s lies. The magazine prints an apology to the readers. Wham, bam, we’re sorry, ma’am. While this quick-cut approach might have stemmed from a desire for more effective movie-making, it has the effect of making Glass’s tenure at the magazine seem brief, and absolves the magazine’s management from responsibility for the twenty-two stories—twenty of which the magazine later repudiated—that appeared between the first hint that something might be wrong and the final, ugly proof that it was all a sham.

The result of this temporal sleight of hand and, more significantly, characterless shadow-play is a film that feels small in a dozen different ways—not just made-for-TV-movie small (it was produced by HBO Films) but small in scope, small in ambition, small in moral imagination. The questions that Ray wants the audience to deal with all have simple answers; that’s part of the problem, and it makes Shattered Glass feel less like a morality play than a morality skit.

The other problem with Shattered Glass is more subtle but also more substantive. If the “dilemma” set out by Ray is whether to lie or not lie, the stakes of the choice are absurdly, insultingly low. By the moral calculus of the film, Glass is wrong to lie because he made the New Republic look bad. But those most damaged by Glass’s falsehoods were the New Republic’s readers, and they—unlike the people Glass defamed—don’t even get to sue. The closest the movie gets to realizing that journalism is a public service and not a personality contest is a line that’s really meant to underscore how important the magazine itself is: “What you write gets read by people who matter.” This, and the movie’s repeated assertion that the publication was “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One,” suggest that the journalistic line Glass crossed is worth holding not just because he hurt the feelings of those he worked with but also because, you know, “people who matter” might make decisions based on what they read in the New Republic. If they’re no more trustworthy than the CIA, we’re in trouble.

Maybe focusing on the difference between Glass’s lies upsetting his colleagues and Glass’s lies influencing public policy is nitpicking. After all, Glass didn’t write about anything as important as ethanol subsidies. In fact, throughout the movie, magazine staffers use “a piece on ethanol subsidies” as shorthand for the kind of dry, wonky inside-the-Beltway journalism that Glass didn’t practice. Glass wrote about people and pop culture ephemera with just enough attention paid to politics and policy that it didn’t feel irrelevant; Glass had a feel for what would make a fine zeitgeisty, counter-counterintuitive snapshot of the country’s mood—or, rather, the mood of the moderate-liberal intellectual readers of the New Republic. The magazine still publishes these kinds of pieces; my personal favorite was a 2001 cover story entitled “In Praise of Conventional Wisdom.” But many of the New Republic’s most famous and infamous stories of the modern era fit into this rubric, from the mild endorsement of racial essentialism of “The Bell Curve” to the passive-aggressive anti-SUV harrumphing of “The Axle of Evil.”

Which brings us to the question I kept hoping Shattered Glass would ask. As interesting as the answer to “Why did he lie?” might have been, discovering “Why did anyone believe him?” could be a more fruitful investigation. Ray tries to make the answer to this question easy as well. “We were entertained,” one character says, and that’s pretty much the end of any discussion about the true journalistic dilemma at the heart of Shattered Glass. What do you do when a story seems too good to be true? When you love a story idea so much you ignore its veracity, whose fault is it? These are questions for editors, not for reporters like Glass.

In hindsight, almost all of Glass’s stories have the “if it ain’t true it oughta be true” ring of urban legends: Wall Streeters who worshiped Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, bored executives who paid outdoorsmen a bundle of money to be dropped in the middle of nowhere, a trade show specializing in trinkets commemorating the Monica Lewinsky affair, those drunk young Republicans, and, of course, the story that brought him down, the hackers employed by major electronics companies to use their powers for good, not evil. Glass’s stories made it into the pages of the New Republic because the magazine’s staff and its r
eaders wanted to believe they were true. This willingness to believe is not, by any means, as great a sin as the many transgressions Glass committed, but it’s a sin nonetheless. If, as David Edelstein put it, Shattered Glass makes those whom Glass betrayed “feel the way our forefathers must have felt after a really good public stoning,” I would hope that what he means by that is “guilty.”

Don’t ever let anybody tell you that fabulousness can’t be found in the first-tier suburbs. Since her cabaret debut in 1996, the former beauty queen and current post-office switchboard operator known as Miss Richfield 1981 has been wowing audiences with her combination of civic boosterism and flamboyant fashion sense. (Sometimes she answers to the name Russ King, who really did graduate from Richfield High in 1981.) Besides her frequent local shows, Minnesota’s answer to Dame Edna has branched out nationally over the past couple of years, including a regular gig on the Atlantis cruise line, where she calls bingo and helps promote the Richfield-area business community to tourists visiting Cancún. She’ll regale us with tales of her travels at her annual holiday show, playing through December 20 at the Illusion Theater. Fall on Your Knees’ fifth outing will be a familiar mix of old and new comedy bits, hilariously mangled carols, and plenty of good-natured teasing of the audience, accompanied by pianist Todd Price and dancers Megan McClellan and Brian Sostek, whose show Trick Boxing has been a hit on the national fringe-festival circuit. Knowing she’s had some recent experience on boats, we asked the divine Miss R. to play our monthly what-if game and tell us what five items she’d take along if she wound up stranded somewhere far off the cruise ship’s trajectory. We’re not entirely sure that she quite understood what “marooned” meant—though unfailingly cheerful, she does tend to live in a world of her own—but she answered with the aplomb you’d expect of a pageant finalist.

1. Stamps, so I can send postcards back home. [But you know there aren’t any mailmen where you’d be, right? –Ed.] Yes, but I have faith in the U.S. Postal Service to deliver anywhere, even deserted islands.

2. My Miss Richfield 1981 sash, crown, and tiara, just in case there are any formal occasions or parades.

3. Hot rollers—even though we’re going to be alone, we still look our best at all times!

4. A mirror, so I’ll have someone to talk to.

5. My purse, with all the usual items I carry in it: lipstick, nylons, Pamprin, Sanka, lighter fluid, a signal flare, a shortwave radio, and duct tape.

American Guitar Stallions, by Keith Pille
Reviewed by Keith Pille

I come to bury American Guitar Stallions, not to praise it. Which is good, because burial, not praise, is what this stinking sack of crap merits. Deep burial. In a fortified and lead-sealed vault. American Guitar Stallions is easily among the worst novels of the new century. If anything, its very status as a novel is doubtful. It possesses some, but certainly not all, of the commonly- accepted elements of a novel. Characters? Well, there’s one, at least, and a few supporting cutouts—most notably a sex-crazed girlfriend who appears only in wordy smut scenes. Plot? Not really. Theoretically, we’re reading about a lovable rogue’s efforts to win an unlikely American Idol-style guitar contest; but for each page of competition we get six of verbose description of how it feels to play “Back in Black” through a vintage amp. A unifying theme? Insight into the human condition? Emotional hooks? Nowhere to be found.

What Stallions does have is words—38,614 of them. This number, in fact, represents half of Stallions’ claims to being a novel; any collection of words that large must be some sort of book, and this is certainly no technical manual. The rest of its claim comes from Stallions’ having been willed into existence during National Novel Writing Month.

For the past five years, a growing crowd of masochists around the world have dedicated November to clogging their computers or notebooks with awful prose in pursuit of writing a fifty-thousand-word novel in thirty days. They register at the NaNoWriMo website, where they post information about themselves and their projects, and where they can log on daily to update their word counts. FAQs and forums provide tips for reaching fifty thousand (set a daily quota and stick to it; don’t be afraid to write total dreck) and a supportive community.

And now a confession: I am the wretch responsible for American Guitar Stallions. And while I have left the world of forced-march fiction for the greener pastures of weirdly self-referential journalism, the Twin Cities have emerged as a hub of NaNoWriMo activity. More than three hundred people in the state of Minnesota signed up for this year’s campaign, working on projects ranging from “sort of the great American immigrant novel, with the Yugoslav civil war as the backdrop” to a Norwegian adaptation of Goodfellas.

Gathering at a St. Paul coffee shop shortly before the ordeal was to begin, this year’s participants were giddy with optimism. A rookie who went by the handle “Tomislav” (naturally, he’s the one working on the immigrant novel) drew cheers by boasting, “This is going to be my first year finishing NaNo!” Others related cautionary tales. “Sasha’s novel had a breakdown,” warned participant Cory Strode, speaking of a previous-year participant. “In about the last ten thousand words, where she was literally telling herself she couldn’t do it in the novel itself…the novel was going along and then all of a sudden, ‘There’s no way I can do this. I am such a horrible writer and this completely sucks.’ Ten thousand words of that.” I had grown accustomed to the silly grin usually affixed to Strode’s face, but now it had twisted into a kind of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I horror.

Reaching that final goal requires the novelist to produce an average of just about seventeen hundred words a day, a daunting task even without worrying about quality. Why do people put themselves through this? The most common answer to this reasonable question is that everyone says they want to write a novel, but no one ever sits down and does it. NaNoWriMo (yes, we really call it that; it’s both a nod to the postmodern impulse to reduce everything to an acronym, and a willful kind of rule-bending that, I think, says a lot about this whole stressful misadventure) offers a tough-self-love way to beat the urge to procrastinate, to silence your inner censor by drowning him in sheer volume. Grinning Strode falls into this camp, estimating that he writes more every November than he does in all the other months of the year combined. Mischievously confusing his first- and second-person, Strode said, “I honestly think that without the pressure, you don’t write.” Other writers nodded their heads in agreement, and I remembered my own because-it’s-there feeling of challenge that resulted in Stallions.

Balancing the pain, all NaNos look forward to the sweet feeling of logging onto the website on November 30 and recording that they have forced themselves across the fifty-thousand-word finish line. Megan Spencer finished previously by “giving myself a word count, every single day….I managed to stick to it last year.” And then? “I printed it out, put it in a binder, and thought about editing it, but didn’t because I was almost failing a few classes and had finals.” Harsh, yes, but she’s still finished one more novel than most people.

Binder-banishment sounds like just the thing for American Guitar Stallions. The prose feels as though it had been written by a sixth grader with more ambition than vocabulary. Stallions possesses a strange, lurching rhythm; the text leaps forward with something resembling writerly energy for maybe two paragraphs before settling into a tired, forced plod in which the English language is visibly stretched and disfigured by an apparent insistence to use five words where one will clearly do. Invariably, this continues for bursts of seven pages (which, coincidentally, would be about seventeen hundred words) and ends awkwardly, without warning, often in mid-action. The cycle repeats itself. At one point, possibly the climax, there is a seven-page transcript of pointless jokes emailed between the main character and his friends that feels suspiciously genuine, almost cribbed from real life.

Stallions’ ending is appropriately incompetent. You can identify the exact spot at which the author flamed out from the effort of churning out word after word of egregious crap, the psychic burden of bringing so much verbal violence into the world finally taking its terrible but inevitable toll. One minute, the main character is preparing himself for another round of competition. The page turns, the goal is within reach, and “He loses and his girlfriend leaves him. THE END.” Given the book’s near-total absence of plot progression, it’s tough not to find this fitting. Anything else would have looked out of place at the end of this miserable milk-mustache on the face of American letters.

It’s not just women, of course; it takes two not to tango. So why do married couples have such a hard time talking about sex? Part of the problem, I realize now, is that women are uncomfortable talking about sex apart from all the other things that go into a relationship. Men have an easier time talking about strict issues of plumbing. Women, on the other hand, go Def-Con Five without a lot of stage setting and context- framing and handholding. We sensitive males know how to jump through these hoops. But we often choose not to, because it makes a simple conversation with your loved one so much more work than it ought to be. (There’s an obvious parallel there having to do with foreplay, but never mind.)

This is something I’ve learned through hard experience with this column. Most men enjoy reading it, most women do not. (Though I note that angry women are much more loyal readers than amused men. I assume the women like to get mad at me. All I can say is that if this is your kind of thing, you really ought to listen to Tom Barnard for thirty seconds on any given morning, you’ll have enough rage to keep you titillated for a lifetime.) As I’ve pursued conversations with the incensed women in my life, I realize that ninety percent of the time they think I’m “objectifying women.” By which they mean I am not talking about something other than their bodies. This is undoubtedly true, given the title of this column.

Sex is a lot of things to a lot of people, of course. But generally, can’t we agree that the single common thread in all of it is that it’s a physical thing, involving the interaction and reaction of bodies that are attracted to one another? In some ways, I think this whole line of thinking—the “objectifying women” argument— is hogwash. Speaking philosophically, it accepts the traditional Cartesian distinction between mind and body, and then discredits the body as a lower stratum of being. The mind, the soul, the spirit—these are what distinguish us from animals. Our bodies, on the other hand, are dirty. Our physical impulses and appetites are hollow at best, and wicked at worst. If that’s the way you see the body, and sexuality, then I can see why women get upset. I just think the premise is wrong. Why not enjoy the gifts of sensuality? Why not revel in bodily pleasure—with or without a higher purpose? Why get so pissed off at your humble, male sex columnist? Funny that no one complains to The Rake’s food columnist that she objectifies eaters by reducing them to nothing but their tongues. Maybe they do, but I doubt it. [They don’t.—Editors.]

There was an interesting study recently. A university in Israel developed a software program that could determine what the gender of a text’s writer is. The program is amazingly accurate. We writers are childish and egocentric maniacs who want our names in lights, so it’s not like there’s a widespread problem identifying whoever wrote that fabulous review of Guided By Voices or Jonathan Lethem. But what the study did prove is that women and men use language differently. Very differently. It seems that men essentially talk about objects. Women talk about relationships.

Actually, marketers have been on to this for decades. They know that women tend to prefer advertisements that are emotional, that establish relationships between people. (This sounds like a stereotype, and it is. Most stereotypes exist because they have some basis in fact.) So anyway, my point is this: Women have a very hard time talking about anything in isolation and without emotion. It is not possible for women to talk about sex the way men do, at least not without blowing a gasket.

Pete wants to buy his wife a sex toy, but she does not want one and will not discuss it. Don asked his girlfriend if she’d like to have a little shaving party in the bathtub, and she couldn’t believe he would ask her such a thing, end of discussion. Ben is dying for a change of position, but his wife thinks the suggestion itself is misogynist. If the basic problem with sex and the married man is that we are entrenched in the same old patterns, the same old positions, how can we ever break out and make sex exciting for both of us again—if you ladies won’t talk about it? If married men agree to talk about all the other aspects of our wonderful relationship, will you finally loosen up a little?

My teenage daughter hurt my feelings the other day, and this bizarre thing happened. The light in the room shifted, there was a faint static, and a tremor ran through my body. Suddenly, I was channeling my brother-in-law’s Jewish mother (odd, since she is still alive and well in Louisville).
“Sophie,” I heard myself lament. “Can’t you see this from my perspective? I carried you, I gave birth to you, I nursed you and took you to work with me, I breastfed you during meetings in front of rowdy young sales guys, and then I quit the job to raise you—which was not always a cake walk, I might add.”

You see, Sophie was easily the most stubborn child in world history. “How did this happen?” I remember thinking to myself back then, during the car ride home after a particularly harrowing tantrum at Grandma’s. “We’re reading all the best parenting books, we’re raising her with love, patience, and respect, we’re doing everything right, and still, she’s plotting to destroy us.”

Sophie, three years old and unnervingly silent in the back seat, read my thought and promptly pulled out a tuft of her baby brother’s hair. “I’m gonna win this one,” she screamed, as her father pulled the car over and I unclenched her fist from the baby’s wispy golden locks, one chubby finger at a time.

Even Sophie remembers some of the highlights of those years. But she insists her vexing tendency to pull out her brother’s hair was not entirely her fault. “I always had a reason. And besides, it comes out very easily,” she explained recently. “It’s very poorly rooted.”

Only during the aftermath of my marriage to Sophie’s father did I gain insight into my daughter’s dogged resolve to take life by the throat and shake what she wants out of it. I gleaned this insight through basic (if belated) observation of my own and my ex-husband’s behavior. If I had wanted a docile, easygoing child, her father and I should have had personality transplants. Of course, I never really wanted an easy child. I loved the feisty one I got as if she were an aching piece of my own heart, fragile and exposed, pounding mightily, forever seeking shelter within the safe cavity of my ribs.

Last week I had coffee with my ex-husband. Those who know us will undoubtedly be stunned to hear this. Three and a half years after our separation, we are still not the “let’s chat over espresso and biscotti” sort of ex-spouses. We are the “isn’t it nice that we’re so flexible and reasonable with each other, but you make one false move and I’ll make you regret it forever” kind of ex-spouses. We’re both Aries, and evidently, Aries-to-Aries matrimony does not make for tidy divorce.

“Your mistake,” I told Sophie’s father as we sipped bad coffee and took turns picking off each other’s scabs, “was that you grossly underestimated my obstinacy.”

“Not at all,” he said. “I’ve always known full well how obstinate you are. We’re two of the most tenacious SOBs on the planet.” Yes, thank you very much. How else would we have gotten so much done in our eleven-year marriage? Two postgraduate degrees (his), two book deals (mine), and three kids plus several foster children in four different houses (ours), just for starters. It takes a stubborn streak to get things done. But to mix it with conflict is to concoct one bitter, obstreperous cocktail. We have this perverse and unreasonable resistance to control. Under the wrong circumstances, we behave like poorly trained cairn terriers, who must stupidly insist on having everything be our own idea. We like to win more than we like to admit among more evolved company.

My ex-husband and I had arranged this coffee talk in hopes of further improving the way we work things out on behalf of our kids. And toward that end, we didn’t get all that far. Instead, we sidetracked ourselves by reminiscing about all the horrible things we’d said and done to each other during our breakup. He even shared a few gruesome ideas he hadn’t managed to carry out. We both laughed. Only as our meeting began to close in on itself—bound by the expectations of those who waited at home, worrying—did we gingerly reveal our ugliest scars and most enduring regrets. All the while making sure to point out repeatedly how much more perfect and idyllic our lives are now. Hey, what did you expect? Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.

Already the only writer to win the Booker Prize twice, South African novelist Coetzee nabbed an even bigger honor in October in this year’s Nobel. He certainly didn’t net such accolades by avoiding controversial topics-consider 1999’s Disgrace, a complex story about animal rights, racism, and his homeland’s iniquitous history and uncertain future. He’s notoriously enigmatic, rarely grants interviews, and once gave a lecture at Princeton not as himself, but in character as a fictional novelist speaking at a fictional college. His new novel expands that last premise into a fully fleshed-out book, an odd duck that’s not exactly fiction and not exactly a collection of essays. Elizabeth Costello’s titular heroine is a renowned Australian writer whose career is resonantly similar to Coetzee’s own; just how much we’re meant to correlate the two is one of the book’s sources of mystery. Structured as a series of eight public lectures that obliquely function as Costello’s autobiography, it’s a work with next to no traditional plot, but much in the way of thought-provoking and even deliberately confrontational ideas. This is writing intended to draw blood. There is certainly some self-observation taking place when Coetzee, in the book’s opening chapter, wonders why the public adores Costello even though “she is by no means a comforting writer. She is even cruel.”

Often considered Holland’s best hope to win the Nobel Prize, Harry Mulisch has built a reputation chiefly on two powerhouse novels-his World War II epic The Assault, and his sky-spanningly surreal The Discovery of Heaven, an ambitious work in the Umberto Eco vein. Mulisch’s aim in his latest, Siegfried, is pretty ambitious as well-an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the enigmatic evil that drove Adolf Hitler, via a fictional what-if tale involving der FŸhrer’s secret bastard son. It’s only partially successful. Many pages are wasted on a witty but ultimately self-indulgent bookend section concerning a Mulisch-like novelist, but the big problem is one that Mulisch himself takes pains to point out: It would be nearly impossible to create a fictional story more horrible that what the Nazis did in real life. And the sorrows of young Siegfried, while tragic, just don’t measure up. That weakness of the novel in turn makes the final one-third of the book fall apart into nonsense.