NYTimes Review: ABSINTHE & FLAMETHROWERS by William Gurstelle

For Those Who Like Danger, the Home Book of Things Not to Try at Home

By DWIGHT GARNER

It’s only a few weeks before the Fourth of July, the time of year that the thinking person — or at least the type of thinking person who likes to hear things go whoosh andka-blam — begins to consider how best to spend the holiday.

Some guys, and I know who a few of you are, will be loading up the car in states where, unlike New York, the sale of fireworks is legal. (Those Phantom Fireworks discount cards can really burn a hole in your wallet.) Others like to prepare emotionally and mentally for the Fourth by getting some reading done.

Two books that put me in the mood for rockets’ red glare are George Plimpton’s classic “Fireworks: A History and Celebration” (1984), and, less conventionally, Jim Paul’s shaggily artful book “Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon” (1991).

But when it comes to the theory and practice of making your own noisy, mildly dangerous fun in the backyard, America has a new poet laureate. His name is William Gurstelle, and he staked his claim to do-it-yourself greatness in 2001 with his friendly paperback book “Backyard Ballistics.” Its subtitle tells you all you need to know: “Build Potato Cannons, Paper Match Rockets, Cincinnati Fire Kites, Tennis Ball Mortars, and More Dynamite Devices.” According to the author, it has sold more than 250,000 copies. I keep a well-thumbed copy in the upstairs bathroom.

Mr. Gurstelle, a professional engineer, has now returned with a more contemplative if no less wonky and gonzo book called “Absinthe & Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously.” It explores the significance of moderate risk taking to our happiness, well-being and career advancement. (Managers who take the greatest risks are the most successful, he observes.)

It’s also a book that contains meticulous directions for making a real, live, beastly flamethrower in your garage — albeit the propane kind, not the ridiculously dangerous liquid-based variety.

Mr. Gurstelle’s book begins with the words of David Brooks, the New York Times Op-Ed columnist, who complained in 2005 that we are living “in the age of the lily-livered,” where “everything is a pallid parody of itself.”

Mr. Brooks continued: “Gone, at least among the responsible professional class, is the exuberance of the feast. Gone is the grand and pointless gesture.”

For Mr. Gurstelle, this column was as rousing as Henry V’s speech at Agincourt. He is also an admirer of Hunter S. Thompson, who in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” introduced the term “edge-work” into the lingo. (“It was dangerous lunacy,” Mr. Thompson wrote about one of his enterprises, “but it was also the kind of thing a real connoisseur of edge-work could make an argument for.”)

Mr. Gurstelle warns against incorporating Thompson’s hallmarks — “shotguns, LSD and anarchy” — into your lifestyle. Because you are not Hunter S. Thompson. And because he does not want you to die stupidly and young. Just as important, he observes, it is hard to make playing with shotguns, LSD and anarchy artful. And for him, style, ingenuity and playfulness are everything.

In “Absinthe & Flamethrowers,” Mr. Gurstelle burrows into the difference between what he calls “Big-T types” (genuine thrill-seekers) and “little-t’s” (total milquetoasts), while suggesting that most of us dwell somewhere in the middle. He even provides a test that indicates where, on the thrill-seeking scale, a reader stands. He notes “the specific brain chemicals — dopamine, monoamine oxidase and norepinephrine, among others — that underlie the personality traits of risk taking, impulsivity and self-preservation.”

There are pages and pages of warnings in “Absinthe & Flamethrowers.” Some of these are very funny. (“Do not eat any chemicals no matter how tasty they smell.”) All are serious. Mr. Gurstelle does not want you to get hurt. But he notes: “Part of the appeal of living dangerously may be that there is a real possibility of death. However, that possibility should be extremely, extremely remote.”

Mr. Gurstelle exactingly describes how to make your own gunpowder, a substance he calls “the most significant chemical compound mankind has ever developed.” It’s the foundation for many of his book’s activities, the same way the perfect fish stock undergirds dozens of recipes in a cookbook.

Making even small quantities of gunpowder, he adds, “puts you in the rarefied company of such important historical figures as Joan of Arc, Roger Bacon, Mark the Greek, Lammot du Pont, Black Berthold and Leonardo da Vinci.” From there, he’s on to making things like fuses, rockets and an eprouvette, or small cannon.

“Absinthe & Flamethrowers” is not “The Anarchist’s Cookbook Redux.” Making your own gunpowder or small-scale rocket is real work, hardly worth a terrorist’s time.

“Even underage delinquents have easier opportunities for finding materials with which to cause problems,” Mr. Gurstelle writes, “than to go through the rather long and demanding processes described here.”

When Mr. Gurstelle begins to explore things like drinking absinthe, mastering bullwhips, eating hot chili peppers and throwing knives, his book runs briefly into the shallow weeds. There is even a disquisition on “danger dogs,” that is, hot dogs wrapped with grilled bacon. That’s not edge-work, it’s pigging out. I have nothing against any of these things, but Mr. Gurstelle is at his best in the garage with a “This Old Tennis Ball Mortar” sort of project.

“Absinthe & Flamethrowers” ends with Mr. Gurstelle’s own kind of Declaration of Independence, one perhaps worth reading aloud on the Fourth of July, ideally after strapping a battered football helmet onto your head so you look a bit like B. D. from “Doonesbury.”

“We, the intellectually curious, may soon find ourselves trapped in a pen, fenced in by rule-bound sticklerism and overzealous concern for our personal safety, unless we exercise our civil liberties and our curiosity,” he declaims. And so, “It’s time to retake authority from those whose goals are to limit, not expand, intellectual and physical pursuits.”

Bravo, sir. It’s the kind of speech you want to punctuate with a potato cannon blast.

Movers and Shakers in Art Books

Perhaps it says something about our era: The three headlining art books of the season are as much about commerce as they are about art.

Old Masters, New World, by Cynthia Saltzman, examines the acquisition of art by western oligarchs;

Jonathan Lopez’s The Man Who Made Vermeers looks at a master-forger seduced by the Nazis and by the opportunity to fake-for-a-buck;

Edward Dolnick takes on the same topic in The Forger’s Spell, which, according to the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl, is just a lesser version of the Lopez book. (Incidentally: Gawker noticed that the NYTimes seems to be shamelessly boosting Dolnick, who is a Times insider.) The Saltzman book is about the market in a fairly direct way and the other two less so. But I think there’s a pretty common theme running through a lot of art-related journalism and publishing: It’s about the market first, and art last. If the art world decides that’s an unfortunate focus, it’s going to have to do something to change it.

University press to the rescue: The University of California press is releasing an updated version of Lawrence Weschler’s classic book on Robert Irwin, complete with a new cover picture that seems to be from Irwin’s recent MCASD exhibition. [via] The hardcover will retail for $50 (!), but you can pre-order the paperback for under $17. (Also from UC Press: A quarter-century of Weschler’s conversations with David Hockney.)

From Tyler Green’s Modern Art Notes

NYTimes Review: 'Fools Gold' by Gillian Tett

Rewriting the Rules

By PAUL M. BARRETT / New York Times

To understand the calamity on Wall Street, we need erudite financial analysis and good old-fashioned stories about human fallibility. Gillian Tett, who oversees global market coverage for The Financial Times, offers some of each. In “Fool’s Gold,” she describes how a small group of bankers at storied J. P. Morgan built a monster that got out of control and helped destroy much of their industry. Tett’s tale doesn’t explain all of the recent mayhem, but it is one place to start.

She shows us the financial world through the eyes of her talented but short-sighted subjects: geniuses at math and marketing, they thought they had discovered how to defy the laws of nature. The old rules didn’t apply.

Beginning in the mid-1990s, the wizards at Morgan decided they could defeat the banker’s oldest foe — the danger that borrowers will not repay their loans. If that sounds as audacious as bringing the dead to life, it’s not far off. The Morgan team thought they could combine esoteric financial instruments so cleverly that repayment risk would simply disappear, or at least become so diluted as no longer to matter. Relieved of risk, banks would lend more money, corporations would grow more quickly and capitalism would blossom.

Accomplishing this “bold dream,” as Tett puts it, required arduous toil in the financial laboratory — accompanied, at times, by after-hours antics of “Animal House” proportions. The author excels at recreating this fevered environment. She also deciphers Wall Street mumbo-jumbo in terms that a lay reader, or at least a determined lay reader, can understand.

The Morgan bankers assembled innovative amalgams of what are known as credit derivatives. In its simplest form, a credit derivative is a contract between two parties in which the seller agrees to compensate the buyer if a loan goes into default. Used conservatively, a derivative can provide a hedge against risk. Bank A, worried about a loan it has made, strikes a derivative deal to pay a fee to Bank B in exchange for Bank B’s promise to compensate Bank A if the loan sours. Bank A sheds some of the uncertainty related to its loan and feels emboldened to make fresh loans. Bank B assumes some of the risk but immediately enjoys the fee income. It’s “win-win,” as the Morgan bankers told themselves and anyone else who would listen.

They went on to combine the derivatives with a process called securitization, which traditionally involved lenders selling their loans to an investment bank. The investment bank “bundled” the loans together and sold pieces of the bundle to pension funds and other investors. The original lenders, having offloaded their loans, could make new ones. The investors acquired a slice of the loan bundle and its interest income without having to go to the trouble of meeting and assessing the borrowers. Win-win, again.

The Morgan group broke new ground by securitizing not just loans but credit derivatives. They industrialized the procedure, selling securitized debt and derivatives on an extraordinary scale. It got very, very complicated.

The intricacy itself appealed to the Morgan bankers, as did the magical idea of dispersing risk to investors far and wide so that lenders could lend without hesitation. The author introduces characters like the evocatively named Blythe Masters, a pretty blond British woman with a “BBC accent,” an economics degree from Cambridge and fervor for credit derivatives. “I think these products appealed to me because I had a quantitative background,” Masters told Tett, “but they are also so creative.”

Masters became the alluring public face for Morgan’s derivative “products,” marketing them to clients impressed by the concept that risk could vanish. Channeling Masters, Tett writes: “For the first time in history, banks would be able to make loans without carrying all, or perhaps even any, of the risk involved themselves. That would, in turn, free up banks to make more loans, as they wouldn’t need to take losses if those loans defaulted.” By now, you must be seeing the too-good-to-be-true aspect to all this.

Morgan exercised some restraint in imbibing the derivatives potion it peddled to others. That’s one reason that, years later, it is one of the survivors on Wall Street, although as part of J. P. Morgan Chase. Less prudent were Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and American International Group.

Tett explains that Morgan’s rivals took the reckless, and in some cases fatal, step of adding subprime mortgage loans to the derivatives-and-securitization mix. That’s an important distinction. When the real estate bubble burst in 2006 and 2007, derivatives and securities tied to subprime mortgages suddenly lost value. It turned out that Wall Street’s computer models simply hadn’t anticipated a national housing crash. The supposedly benign dispersal of risk was revealed for what it really was: a global plague that spread dangerous risk to nearly all major financial institutions. Lenders that had spewed loans with abandon abruptly froze up, refusing to do business even with trusted corporate customers. Investors panicked; stock markets crashed.

Tett’s close focus on Morgan illustrates how the hubris of a relative handful of little-known financiers contributed to the worldwide crisis. But the author’s contention that the “bold dream” conjured up at Morgan was “corrupted” by others may absolve Masters and her comrades too neatly. First, Tett strangely plays down how lavishly Morgan paid its derivatives clique to pursue their bold dream. Surely fat bonuses helped obscure the dangers.

The Morganites sold the notion that financial gravity had been overcome—that risk had been vanquished and that lending could proliferate endlessly. That some would take this to absurd extremes seems entirely foreseeable. The retrospective shock that Tett’s subjects express in interviews rings hollow, especially when we learn that some of them, although not Blythe Masters, left Morgan and personally imported derivatives know-how to institutions that behaved more rashly.

Morgan’s culpability doesn’t end there, either. Tett notes that Morgan provided key manpower and initiative in a ferocious Wall Street lobbying campaign that persuaded Congress, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Clinton and Bush administrations to back off from regulating derivatives trading in any meaningful way. Industry advocates received vital backing from the high priest of free market ideology, Alan Greenspan, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

The argument that persuaded Washington to allow manic derivatives trading to go unchecked boiled down to the myth that financiers had a powerful self-interest in keeping one another honest. Wrong. As Tett reports, Greenspan went before Congress last October to admit that “he had made a ‘mistake’ in believing that banks would do what was necessary to protect their shareholders and institutions. ‘[That was] a flaw in the model . . . that defines how the world works,’ ” Greenspan confessed belatedly.

Based on Tett’s account, most former members of the Morgan derivatives squad haven’t acknowledged similar regret. That’s ominous, because while many on Wall Street have lost their jobs, a lot of the Morgan alumni are still out there, as are many of their competitors who displayed even greater irresponsibility during the derivatives madness. This book leaves one wondering whether we’ll be smart enough to rein them in with tougher regulations before they open their next bag of tricks.

Paul M. Barrett is an assistant managing editor of BusinessWeek.

Washington Post Review: 'The Myth of the Rational Market' by Justin Fox

On Wall Street, the Price Isn't Right

The upside of the current Great Recession is that it could drive a stake through the heart of the academic nostrum known as the efficient-market hypothesis. This theory holds that stock and bond markets are nearly perfect -- even during such crazes as the dot-com mania -- and that prices on the exchanges instantly and accurately reflect the available information about publicly traded securities. After the market crash of 1987, Yale University economist Robert Shiller called that belief "the most remarkable error in the history of economic theory." He could have said "most harmful error" as well. Yet it lived on and contributed mightily to the mortgage bust.

One presumes from the title of Justin Fox's "The Myth of the Rational Market" that he has come to bury, not to praise. And certainly, the opportunity for such an undertaking is rich. Proceeding from the assumption that economic actors are unerringly rational, the theory's disciples have endowed market prices with the wisdom of every moment. Thus, at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reflects the accumulated financial knowledge of civilization, and equally so at 2 on Thursday -- even if the market has moved hundreds of points in the interim.

How did this faith in the supremacy of market group-think do us harm? For one, as the dot-com and other manias demonstrated, the crowd occasionally gets it wrong. The mistaken faith in markets turned regulators into fawning groupies. Notably, former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan doubted that he or anyone else could detect -- or regulate -- a bubble in advance.

The power of the doctrine was its grand design: the comforting notion that the financial universe adhered to absolute laws. But that was also its flaw. Prices couldn't be wrong; if they were, someone would seek to profit from the error and correct it. The illustrative joke was of two economists who spot a $10 bill on the ground. One stoops to pick it up, whereupon the other interjects, "Don't. If it were really $10, it wouldn't be there anymore."

Theorists such as Eugene Fama decreed that if prices are unforeseeable, then the future direction of the market is random. And if the market is truly random, prices should follow what mathematicians call a bell-curve distribution. In nature, this works. We don't know whether your neighbor will be tall or short, but we can predict, with pretty close approximation, how many very tall people will live in your town. In nature, extreme results such as a village of seven-footers will never occur.

Fox tells the story of how financial engineers assumed that markets would behave the same way, with generally predictable variances in prices. In particular, the theory of option pricing, the cornerstone of modern finance, has built into it the assumption that prices are random. The theory was devised by Fischer Black, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton. The last two won the Nobel Prize in 1997 and were partners in Long-Term Capital Management, the hedge fund that blew up in 1998.

What happened to LTCM? It turned out that in financial markets, extreme events do happen. People get emotional and decide to buy (or sell) in unison. All of LTCM's trades went sour simultaneously. Nonetheless, the modelers kept at it. Rating agencies assumed that subprime mortgagees would behave in random fashion -- large numbers of people would never default at the same time, right? (Oops.)

Fox, a business columnist for Time, spins a fascinating historical narrative, beginning with economist Irving Fisher's paean to markets in, alas, 1929. Postwar economists such as Paul Samuelson noticed that most investment pros do not beat the averages. This led to the one positive contribution of the efficient-market hypothesis: Jack Bogle's invention of index funds, which mimic the performance of the stock market as a whole and keep ordinary people from wasting their money trying to beat it.

Fox recognizes that true believers in the market's efficiency suffered from a "blinkered" mindset and "tunnel vision." Yet I think he lets them off too easily. He laments (as if it were necessary) the lack of any alternative "grand new theory" and finds that the debate has resulted in a "muddle." Fox concludes, "If you do come up with an idea for beating the market, you need a model that explains why everybody else isn't already doing the same thing." Not necessarily. Markets aren't physics. Maybe no one model explains them.

The emerging school of behavioral finance fills in many of the gaps left by the efficient marketers. Behavioral finance, which Fox discusses at length, holds that financial man -- far from the perfect, mechanical trader depicted in textbooks -- is a rather neurotic fellow. He follows the crowd, fails to plan ahead and often makes mistakes. To think that his every price is perfect is a remarkable error indeed.

Roger Lowenstein is the author of "While America Aged." His next book, "The End of Wall Street," will be published in 2010.

VQR Review: 'The Man Who Made Vermeers' by Jonathan Lopez

The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren, by Jonathan Lopez. Harcourt, August 2008. $26

Imagine this as the plot of a novel: in the 1920s, a moderately talented Dutch painter reacts furiously to bad reviews and becomes a forger of Old Masters in revenge. He paints six phony Vermeers with biblical subjects, thus creating a religious phase in the master’s career and fooling many established experts. During World War II, he collaborates with the Nazis and becomes the richest painter in the world from his fakes. Then Hermann Goering decides he must have a Vermeer because the Fuhrer has two and buys the phony “Christ and the Adulteress” in 1943. Arrested after the war for trading with the enemy, the artist claims he faked Goering’s masterpiece to fool the Germans. He then becomes a folk hero in the Netherlands despite being sentenced to a year in jail for forgery. But that’s not fiction; it actually happened, and one of the fakes, “The Supper at Emmaus,” still hangs in the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam. Lopez strips away the folk hero veneer of van Meegeren by deep research into archives and a thorough understanding of the complex world of art, faking art, and selling it. He says, “Although the best forgeries may mimic the style of a long-dead artist, they tend to reflect the tastes and attitudes of their own period.” The faked Vermeers don’t look like Vermeers today, but in the 1940s, they did, as well as looking like National Socialist art. Here is a serious, funny, ironic, informative study of a delicious scoundrel that reads like a novel.
—Don Fry

NYTimes Review: 'Go Like Hell' by A.J. Baime

 Getting the Tire Tracks on Paper

By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: June 8, 2009

Randy Harris for The New York Times

The author A. J. Baime at the Monticello Motor Club.

-------

A. J. Baime’s new book, “Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans,” is set in the 1960s but evokes a world that now seems vanished and fantastical. General Motors and Ford, far from bankrupt, are two of the mightiest companies in the world.

Gas is as plentiful as water, and almost as cheap. Nobody buys a car because of its fuel efficiency or its safety features. All that matters is how fast it goes. Race drivers are heroic figures who appear on the cover of Time and Newsweek almost as often as they turn up in emergency rooms or the morgue. When Ralph Nader starts complaining about the Corvair, G.M. hires private detectives to dig up dirt on his private life.

The centerpiece of the story is the quest by Henry Ford II, or the Deuce, as he was known, to end Ferrari’s string of victories at Le Mans, the 24-hour road race that at the time was probably the world’s most dangerous sporting event. He was convinced that Ford’s racing success would translate into sales back home in the showroom, but he was also locked in a personal rivalry with the imperious Enzo Ferrari, head of the Italian car company. It took Ford three tries and countless millions, but he finally prevailed when a Ford GT40 Mk II, driven by Bruce McLaren, won at Le Mans in 1966.

In many ways, though, the feud persists. There are still car enthusiasts who prefer the elegance and nimbleness of the Ferrari, and those who swear by the muscle and straight-ahead speed of the Ford GT. Mr. Baime, an executive editor at Playboy, where he oversees the automotive coverage, is partial to Ferraris, and recently borrowed a bright red $300,000 599 GTB Fiorano and drove it to the Monticello Motor Club, a private track in the Catskills.

The car is so valuable that Ferrari also sent a guy to the track whose job it was, apparently, just to stand around and worry. In case you were wondering, it gets about 11 miles per gallon driving around the neighborhood, and less than that out on the track.

The Monticello Motor Club is a sort of country club for people who own high-performance cars and want to do more with them than collect speeding tickets on the Merritt Parkway. They can take racing lessons, book time on the 4.1-mile track or lounge around, in their driving shoes and racing suits, on sofas designed to resemble sports car upholstery.

On any afternoon the parking lot is apt to be full of very expensive machinery with long-winded names: Ferrari 360 Stradales and F430 Scuderias, Porsche 911 GT3’s, Lotus Exige S 260’s, Beemer M3 GTR’s, Audi R8’s. If you arrive in your dinged-up, 10-year-old commuter heap, you probably want to park it over on the side and out of the way.

On the other hand, you might feel less guilty about having postponed the muffler job you so badly need. Your engine, which used to sound loud and embarrassing, now seems sweet and throaty, and, feeling turbocharged, you may even be emboldened to take the wheel of the Ferrari yourself when the guy from the company isn’t looking.

William McMichael, the president of the club and its managing member, is a Ferrari man, and owns several. Ari Straus, one of his partners in the club, prefers the Ford GT and backed one out of a garage to show off its long, low lines, its rumbling power plant.

“It’s a real car,” he said. “It’s a man’s car, an American car. And it’s a rocket ship on the straightaway.” Its weakness is cornering, he admitted, and the GT actually makes less sense than the Ferrari on a track like Monticello, which has 22 turns, and where the longest straight stretch is only three-quarters of a mile. To fly around the club’s track, Mr. Straus also owns a bone-rattling Lotus in which you strap yourself inside like a jet pilot.

Mr. Baime’s personal ride is a four-cylinder Subaru station wagon in need of a wash, but he has hung around tracks enough to become a competent race driver. At Monticello he went out first with an instructor, but then took the wheel himself and, flicking the paddle shifter, easily booted the Ferrari up to 135 or so, well below the car’s capability but fast enough to create G force in the cockpit and terrify a passenger.

The trick, he explained, was not so much spinning the wheel or stomping on the accelerator as finding that straight line that connected the apex of one turn to another. If you’re good enough, according to Mr. Straus, you can steer mostly with the gas pedal, which straightens the car out as you accelerate and ducks it into a turn if you let up.

On the other hand, if you’re used to a commuter heap, you’re apt to find steering merely with the wheel challenge enough; even at 90, the turns at Monticello come on you as suddenly as those in a video game.

Car racing is a lot safer than it used to be, Mr. Baime said, sitting in one of the club’s lounge areas, and that may explain why it has lost some of its glamour.

“I think it was the danger of motor sport that made it so fascinating,” he said. “That it could be so violent was part of the appeal.”

He added that it was the driver Jackie Stewart who began to change things. “At the 1966 Belgian Grand Prix he was in an accident and was pinned beneath the car while fuel leaked on him. He retired in 1972 or 1973, at the peak of his fame, and he was the first one to say: ‘Excuse me. We have a problem here.’ ”

As he researched the book, Mr. Baime went on to say, he was struck by how practically everyone he read about seemed larger than life.

“It wasn’t just Henry Ford and Enzo Ferrari who were great characters, there were all these others,” he said, and he began to list them: Carroll Shelby, builder of the legendary Cobra, who directed Ford’s winning Le Mans campaign; the drivers Mario Andretti, Phil Hill and Ken Miles, whose death in 1966, while testing-driving Ford’s experimental J-Car, gives the story its tragic end.

Mr. Baime began “Go Like Hell” four years ago, when he had little inkling of what would happen to the American automobile industry. “I saw the book as an action-adventure story and also as a cultural history, about the fascination of speed in the 1960s. But it’s also a business story about a company that is going to try to survive at the very dawn of globalization.”

He picked up a copy and read the end of the second-to-last chapter: “ ‘We don’t want to buy Ferrari anymore,’ Henry II told one reporter before leaving France. ‘Now we fear most of all the Japanese.’ ”

“If you think about it,” Mr. Baime said, “ this is the first chapter in a very long story. It’s still a story about a struggle for the technology of the future. The difference is that now they’re going to have to reinvent the wheel.”

Copyright New York Times Corp. 2009 All rights reserved

Boston Globe Book Review: Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi' by Geoff Dyer

Exploring life, and all its madness

Geoff Dyer's new novel is set in Italy and India. (Jason Oddy)

By Ted Weesner Jr.

Boston Globe Correspondent

In properly versatile hands, the loose baggy monster that is a novel can be made to demonstrate its manifold versatility. Or, as writer Geoff Dyer might put it, were he to continue to channel his karma-tuned protagonist in "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi," a novel's true versatility becomes evident only when one is convinced of its complete and utter bagginess.

Which is to say that this British writer - master of multiple genres, including the essay, cultural study, novel, and travelogue - has packed this particular casing with a lot of varied cuts and yet managed to produce a memorable taste event. The last 20 pages approach magnificence: a virtuosic melding of style and repertoire that come together as a sort of yogic "one."

As suggested by the title, the novel is divided down the middle, the first half set in tourist-soaked Venice, the second in death-tinged Varanasi, India. Jeff, the protagonist and point-of-view character, is a jaded, 40-something arts journalist who's covering the Biennale in Venice over a very hot summer weekend.

Then along comes a lovely American named Laura, who is predictably elusive. Dyer amps the elusiveness by claiming neither of them has a cellphone. Even if this ratchets up suspense - all encounters must be left to chance - it's about as buy-able as finding a tourist-free trattoria in the City of Canals.

Luckily, Laura doesn't take a whole lot of effort to seduce. With Dyer's great ear for flirtation, the two banter famously. In a sense she's the female equivalent of Jeff. She's got some "life" under her belt. And yet through the thin air of an uncommitted life, Jeff falls for Laura. It's hard to know whether this amounts to more than passing fancy, because Dyer cuts to Varanasi, and Laura vanishes from Jeff's mind.

If there's an engaging undercurrent to the Venice section - beyond Dyer's highly atmospheric rendering of the city and spot-on portrayal of the chic/shallow art set - it's Jeff's struggle with his evaporating youth. In the style of Gustav Aschenbach, an earlier visitor to Venice in Thomas Mann's masterpiece, Jeff dyes his hair for the visit.

Then, in India, his dance with mortality picks up as Dyer raises the travelogue ante, bringing the holy, filthy, mesmerizing city of Varanasi to fetid, rhapsodic life. Jeff's listlessness starts to feel dire: "I sat on the bed and did not know what to do, and then I decided that not knowing what to do was a form of knowing what to do, which was to do nothing, so that is what I did."

When Jeff truly goes off the rails, Dyer's writerly versatility braids into something madly compelling as the narration becomes comically and tragically unreliable. For the first time one genuinely feels the character's plight, his increasing undone-ness.

Yes, death and deprivation are everywhere in Varanasi, though where it's usually at the far end of a tourist's camera, Jeff begins to live it. Roosting in a strange hotel, he starts to renounce just about everything. Instead of dyeing his hair, he gets it shaved off (eyebrows and beard included). To the astonishment of visiting Westerners, he takes dips in the polluted Ganges and turns to worshiping his own version of a Hindu god. Finally, here, we're in the grips of a core-shaken character. Where before we've enjoyed the sights along with the protagonist, in the novel's last quarter the viewfinder is ripped from a reader's hands, and we're no less devastated than he is.

Ted Weesner Jr. is a writer living in Somerville.

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.