THE TYRANNY OF E-MAIL

The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox

By John Freeman

On a recent weekday, 126 messages made it to my e-mail in-box. The rest were mass mailings or “cc’s,” including 17 messages from a Listserv, eight dispatches from news media I subscribe to, seven  google alerts on a subject I’m interested in, four political rants and five pieces of spam, four of them in Cyrillic characters.

By John Freeman’s lights, that makes me a bad guy. In “The Tyranny of E-Mail,” he writes that “one of the biggest generators of excess mail is a medium-size message sent to a group of people, which then causes a pinball effect as people chime in and comment, having a virtual discussion.” And the problem is? Take the time to make 50 separate calls, intruding on people who aren’t interested in this issue? (Scan and delete an e-mail message: three seconds at most, at a time of one’s choice. Conduct a telephone call with me: 30 seconds, minimum, at a time of my choice, resulting in major interruption.)

The case of the Russian spam illustrates a problem with this book. In his zeal to expose e-mail’s dark side, Freeman, the editor of Granta, ignores its good and useful features.

I am far from the proverbial power user (the “average corporate worker,” Freeman tells us, in a characteristically unsourced factoid, gets about 200 e-mail messages a day). But I have felt e-mail’s tyranny, and Freeman has some good innings on this subject. It is an instantaneous, demanding, borderline addictive medium that has insinuated its way into hitherto private spaces. (Sixty-two percent of Americans, Freeman read somewhere, write and answer work e-mail on vacation.) It is abused by spammers, identity thieves, phishers and chronic forwarders and cc-ers.

Unfortunately, Freeman’s Chapters 1 and 2 undercut his jeremiad, which appears in Chapters 3 and 4. An editorial in an English newspaper in 1901, referring to the telegraph, lamented: “Our desire to outstrip Time has been fatal to more things than love. Remove the quotation marks, and the lines would fit perfectly into Freeman’s argument.

Books about social problems are often strong in describing the problem but fairly lame when it comes to suggesting solutions. The opposite is true of “The Tyranny of E-Mail.” Among other things, Freeman advises us to limit how many e-mail messages we send and how often we check our in-box, to keep a written to-do list, to be careful reading and composing e-mail, and not to “debate complex or sensitive matters by e-mail.” Ultimately, e-mail is a social, cultural and literary phenomenon that demands a more nuanced approach than Freeman’s high dudgeon provides. Every day, I get a half-dozen or more fine e-mail messages: short, (often) witty, (usually) pointed, (sometimes) thoughtful and always written in that correspondent’s particular register. You could have the book here.

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The book of genesis

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Sixty Feets, six inches

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Juliet naked

Jarrettsville

A Life beyond Limit

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THE INTERROGATIVE MOOD

By Padgett Powell

Does The Interrogative Mood sound like a C.I.A. agent’s whimsical memoir, an epistemological study, a grammar guide, a dating primer or a book that playfully and provocatively asks so many questions - funny, sad, informative, rhetorical, prurient, maudlin, political and absurd questions - that under its spell you’ll more clearly envision a better world while valuing no less intensely the flawed, fractured, fast-forward one you’re in?

If I said that The Interrogative Mood, the fifth novel by Padgett Powell, was that kind of book, and a captivating and often glorious reading experience, and if you believed me, would you get a copy soon, or would you decide that even though captivating, often glorious books don’t come along ­every day, you aren’t ready for something as open-­ended and seemingly uncertain as this? If, then, I assured you that embedded in its all-question format are ideas and images and emotions uniquely and powerfully expressed, and that it is a great-hearted assault on ambivalence, would you realize that you are ready?

It is nothing like his “Edisto,” “Edisto Revisited” or “Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men,” fictions of some lyrical force that suffered from rickety characters and unmoored plots, but instead a fearless meditation on the sublime and the trivial, a hydra-headed reflection of life as it is experienced and of thought as it is felt. With echoes of the Tao Te ­Ching, “My Funny Valentine,” Pascal’s “Pensées, Green Eggs and Ham,” Annie Dillard’s “This Is the Life” and countless other quests for conviction that secretly understand and depend on the futility of such quests, it is wondrous strange.

Would you be embarrassed or rather thrilled by yourself if you were caught by Einstein with your hand in his coat pocket?

“The Interrogative Mood” demands to be read deliberately, for it is courageous and entertaining and interested in the essential mysteries of self and society. You could have the book here.

READ ELSE BOOKs:

The Immortals

The Fourth Star

Bacome a movie star

The discoverer

The book of genesis

The book of father

Sixty Feets, six inches

Memories of the Future

Juliet naked

Jarrettsville

A Life beyond Limit

Chronic City

Worse then War

Feminism in America

THE IMMORTALS

By Amit Chaudhuri

A devotee of Indian classical music, the boy is intent on defending this tradition against the threat of commercialism. Chaudhuri is not only a devotee of Hindustani music, but also a professional musician with several releases to his credit. Like his main character, Chaudhuri was tutored by a songstress mother and a beloved Rajasthani guru.

Chaudhuri lends Nirmalya his own health condition (a heart murmur), his own cosmopolitan identity (as a Bengali raised in Bombay - now Mumbai - and schooled in London) and the addresses of his own youth (the Senguptas retire from a luxury high-rise in downtown Bombay to Bandra, which at the time was on the frontier of the feverishly growing city, a suburb of churches and gulmohar trees where the Chaudhuris also lived).