Short Takes
Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious
By Gerd Gigerenzer
Viking, 269 pp., $25.95
Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin , describes "how the mind adapts and economizes by relying on the unconscious, on rules of thumb, and on evolved capacities." He locates specific strategies that the unconscious mind uses to solve problems. These are not impulsive or capricious responses, but evolved methods that lead to superior choices.
In short chapters, using vivid examples and ordinary language, Gigerenzer explains how an outfielder catches a fly ball not by complex calculations but by unconsciously adjusting his running speed so that the angle of his gaze at the ball remains constant. In problem-solving, having too much information is often as harmful as having too little; having just enough information works best. German students guessed more accurately than American which city had the bigger population, Detroit or Milwaukee -- they simply had not heard of Milwaukee.
After giving many memorable examples of intuitive intelligence, Gigerenzer concludes, "There are many good reasons to trust your gut." While this conclusion is useful, it is the specific examples that the mind (conscious and unconscious) will take away from this clever book.
Rules for Saying Goodbye
By Katherine Taylor
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 320 pp., $24
Katherine Taylor, the author and heroine of this novel, is a clever writer and an appealing character. Her voice is smart and sassy, and, like many other hip narrators, she uses it to obscure her feelings as well as to express them. As a teenager in Fresno, Calif ., she is impatient to get away from home and go east to a posh boarding school. There she learns the ways of sophisticated cosmopolitan girls and soon becomes one herself. Living on the Upper East Side of New York City, she drinks alone, with her old chums, and with boyfriends chosen for their "reckless glamour." While dreaming of grand artistic success, she writes small articles for glossy magazines and tends bar. Romance takes her to London, Brussels, and Rome and then lands her back at home with her parents.
In swift strokes, she describes the characters in her world. Her mother "doesn't need antidepressants. . . . She needs flowers and sometimes she needs antiques." Her "father's role is to call everyone 'buddy' or 'sweetheart' and to tell the same jokes over and over and over." Her friend Delia is "one of those people unassumingly blessed with luck and charm and bone structure." Brief bursts of brilliant dialogue and description illuminate many already bright scenes from California to Massachusetts to Rome, from teenage through 20-something. Taylor's story moves far and fast and is engaging and entertaining at every point.
Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking
By Aoibheann Sweeney
Penguin, 257 pp., $23.95
Miranda's father, a reclusive scholar, is engaged in translating Ovid's "Metamorphoses." He never finishes this work, never starts anything else, never leaves their home on a tiny island off the coast of Maine. Unlike Ovid's shifting subjects, he doesn't change. And as a child Miranda never guesses that he may have had another shape at another time.
After her mother takes out a boat alone and disappears in the fog, Miranda is raised by her father and his only friend, Mr. Blackwell. These odd events and arrangements seem as natural to her as Ovid's world, in which trees speak and limbs melt. Her narrow childhood expands in high school, then explodes when she is sent to New York City after graduation. Living in New York at the scholarly foundation where her father had worked, she slowly sees the familiar blurred shapes of her parents come into sharp focus.
Revelation comes to her gradually, at a pace somewhat behind a reader's. Earlier, she had thought Ovid wrote happy stories of change; later she thinks, "Ovid's stories [are] about how hard it is before you change, when everything feel like it's going to explode, or it has exploded, and you can't put together any of the pieces." This insight is followed by another: " All I had discovered was everything I knew all along." Many novels arrive at this same insight, but Aoibheann Sweeney moves toward it with sure and subtle grace.
Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York. See "Bookings," facing page, for information on a local appearance by Aoibheann Sweeney. 
