When animals age

If old age can be rough for human beings, even with Social Security and retirement communities, it must be much worse for animals. Herbivores become easy prey when they slow down, and carnivores can starve to death when they can no longer catch anything to eat.

Yet this is not always true, as Anne Innis Dagg tells us in The Social Behavior of Older Animals (2009).

A quick death in old age is not always certain in many species, although roles and behaviors certainly change. Dominate males and females lose their place when they age, as younger and stronger rivals take charge. Yet in many species the elderly are valued for their wisdom, and they may actually become leaders again when a crisis forces others to follow their lead. Older right whales, for example, know best where to find food in certain situations. Older mountain goats know what to do when a storm approaches.

In some species, older females continue to give birth, although their young may be fewer and born farther apart. Because of their experience, the older mothers often have a better success rate when it comes to raising their young.

Dagg's book is not based on any new research. Rather she simply reports what others have discovered while researching something else. Her book is valuable because so few others have focused specifically on the subject of what happens to older animals.

Better than sticks and stones

Most parents engage in wishful thinking when they regard name-calling as good-natured fun which their children will soon grow out of. Name-calling is not good-natured and children do not grow out of it; as adults they merely become more expert in its use.

Peter Farb, Word Play

That children do not grow out of name-calling, as Peter Farb suggests above, can be shown by the current political climate — and in fact by the political climate in the United States for all of its 250 years. When in doubt, call your political opponent names, it seems.

Do adults "become more expert in its use"? That is debatable.

Democrats say it is beneath the dignity of the president of the United States to refer to them as "Dumocrats" or to call Sen. Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" just because she pretended for years to be an American Indian. Yet they see nothing undignified about them labeling the president of the United States a racist, a fascist or even a Nazi.

According to American Heritage, George Washington was called illiterate. John Adams called Thomas Jefferson ignorant. Ulysses Grant said of James Garfield that he had "the backbone of an angleworm." Theodore Roosevelt called Woodrow Wilson a skunk. Herbert Hoover called Franklin D. Roosevelt "a gibbering idiot."

It is probably wishful thinking to believe our politicians will ever grow out of name-calling.

Sensitive, but is it a crime?

Sometimes the line between one's work and one's personal life can get a bit blurred, as it does for Ulf Varg in Alexander McCall Smith's The Talented Mr. Varg (2020).

Varg is the detective in charge of the Department of Sensitive Crimes in Sweden. His case this time — if it can even be called a case — comes when Anna, a fellow police officer in his department, asks him to investigate whether her husband is having an affair. She has found an earring in his underwear. An added complication is that Varg is secretly in love with Anna. If he can find conclusive evidence of an affair, would he possibly have a chance with her?

Complications follow, of course, not the least of them being the fact that he is using police force time and police force personnel to investigate what is clearly not a police matter. But then the investigation points to what may be an actual crime.

McCall Smith has three different series of detective novels in progress, but they can all be described as detective light. Murders don't happen, and other acts of violence are rare. Mostly there is just conversation about everyday topics, most of it interesting but hardly suspenseful. And such is the case in this novel, as well.

Yet Varg is a fascinating character, and Martin, his deaf and depressed dog who can read lips, may make this novel worth reading.

Watching the novel

Watching the movie after one has read the novel can often be disappointing, which can also be true when one does it in the opposite order. Kristen Lopez looks at things a little differently in But Have You Read the Book? (2023). She argues that the book and the movie may often tell somewhat different stories, but they both can have value.

She looks at 52 movies, from Frankenstein in 1931 to Passing in 2021) and the novels from which they were adapted. Her conclusion? The novels are as worth reading as the films are worth watching.

As the title suggests, Lopez writes with a movie bias. That is, she starts with the movie, then tells us what's different in the novel, rather than vice versa. Rarely does she say that one is better than the other, even when they are very different.

As a practical matter, to tell the entire story contained in a typical novel, including all the characters and all the conversations and events, could make the adapted film six hours long or more. Thus much has to be cut out.

Less forgivable, at least to those who read and loved the book first, filmmakers often change the names of characters, the locales, the titles and even the plots. The first filmed version of Frankenstein, for example, is radically different from Mary Shelley's book. Some remakes have been more faithful, yet that doesn't make the original film any less worth watching. The same is true of Rebecca, Dr. No, Rosemary's Baby, True Grit, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Princess Bride, Fight Club and all the other films/novels she discusses.

All this has frustrated students down through the years who have written "book reports" after watching the movie.

So typically different are novels and the movies based on them that it can be startling when a movie like No Country for Old Men comes along. The Coen Brothers film is essentially the same as the Cormac McCarthy novel. So if you've seen the movie, why read the book? Lopez asks. But look at it the other way around. When one loves a novel, what one most wants is a movie that puts the identical story on the screen.

The enemy of novelists?

Novelists are often portrayed by their natural enemies, biographers, as throughly in the grip of unconscious impulses or addictions or social pressures, or other forces that produce the novels, or produce what the novels really are (as opposed to what the novelists themselves thought they were).

Jane Smiley, 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel

There's lot to unpack in that convoluted Jane Smiley sentence, so let's take a stab at it.

The essential point may be her assertion that biographers are the "natural enemies" of novelists. Is this really true? I think of Tim Page, whose impressive biography of Dawn Powell led to a temporary revival of her work. Her books were all republished thanks to Page. There are other examples of biographers whose work revived interest in novelists.

Yet Smiley nevertheless has a valid point. A biographer's job when writing about a novelist is to not only tell us about that writer's life but also to tell us how that life became reflected in the novelist's work. Sometimes biographers go too far.

Of course, one's life is often reflected in one's writing. So many novels, especially first novels, are autobiographical. And these are often the best work the writer ever does. And the society in which a novelist is raised — Larry McMurtry on a Texas ranch, for example — often proves vital in the novels later written.

Yet biographers can give the sense that the novels are all but inevitable, that novelists are little more than conduits that lack free will. Biographers can also give the impression that their interpretation of novels is the correct one, even if novelists themselves say differently.

The beauty of great novels is that they can be interpreted differently by different people. The biographer is not always right. But then neither is the novelist.

Wear the old coat

Austin Phelps

Austin Phelps was a 19th century Congregational minister and educator who, among other noteworthy comments, said, "Wear the old coat and buy the new book."

One's priorities are reflected in how one spends money. Some people with modest incomes dress spectacularly. Someone else with the same income might drive a fancy car or live in a beautifully furnished apartment. Another travels overseas regularly. None of them can afford all these things at the same time, but they make a choice according to their priorities. Thus, the person who drives a luxury car may live in a dumpy house. The one who wears the latest fashions may drive a 30-year-old wreck.

Relatively few of us can afford to own everything we might want. Thus we have to make choices. In the view of Austin Phelps, that choice should be books. I tend to agree.

I may shop for clothing twice a year, if I have to. I got to a bookstore at least twice a month.

I have not always been this way. When I had a wife and child to support, my priorities were different. I once put a high priority on travel. I used to have to dress for my job. Today I live alone and am old enough that my needs and priorities are few. Spending my money on books, even books I doubt I will ever have time to read, does not seem wasteful to me. A new coat, however? Who needs it?

Bad choices, good results

If one makes bad decisions that somehow lead to a wonderful result — such as a bad marriage that results in a good child — were they actually bad decisions?

Leif Enger's 2008 novel So Brave, Young, and Handsome leads the reader to think such thoughts. The title comes from The Cowboy's Lament, which places that dilemma in this couplet: "For we loved our comrade, so brave, young, and handsome/We all loved our comrade, although he'd done wrong."

Enger's novel is narrated by a frustrated writer, Monte Becket, who after one successful novel seems unable to write anything of value. He, his wife and son become fascinated by a boat-building neighbor named Glendon. When Glendon decides to go West to try to find his Mexican wife, whom he abandoned years before, Becket decides to go with him, a decision his wife, Susannah, somehow approves of.

Along the way, Becket learns that abandoning his wife is the least of Glendon's sins. He is also a train robber and murderer being pursued by an aging, former Pinkerton agent named Siringo, who never gives up.

Instead of returning to his family in Minnesota, Becket decides to stick with Glendon, even when this makes himself a fugitive pursued by Siringo.

The consequences of Becket's decisions go from bad to worse, yet somehow it all works out in the end. And Becket, who tells his wild story, proves he can still write after all.