Short Takes
Maynard and Jennica
By Rudolph Delson
Houghton Mifflin, 292 pp., $24
Can a breezy California girl find happiness with a dyspeptic New Yorker, or are these opposites bound to repel? That is the question posed by this offbeat romantic comedy, the author's fictional debut.
Maynard, an aspiring composer and (very) independent filmmaker, spots lovely Jennica while riding the Lexington Avenue local on a steamy day in August 2000. "She was one of these women who strike your heart," he tells us, "and leave it ringing like a bell." Jennica, a banker in spite of herself, has a Princeton degree, a tiny, mouse-infested Greenwich Village apartment, and a sad suspicion that she'll never meet Mr. Right. Miraculously (this is after all the "city of strangers" of Stephen Sondheim's panic-stricken serenade), they run into each other again and fall cautiously in love. Then comes Sept. 11, 2001, which brings out Maynard's innate cynicism - while bringing back the conniving wife to whom he's still technically married - and leaves heartsick Jennica California dreaming.
This approach-avoidance love story unfolds by way of serial monologues in which dozens of characters, major and minor, plus the occasional inanimate object, get to put their two cents in, a self-consciously clever device pretty deftly managed by this novice novelist.
Thomas Paine's Rights of Man
By Christopher Hitchens
Atlantic, 142 pp., $19.95
He was the self-made philosopher of freedom who signed himself "Common Sense." No wonder Thomas Paine, antimonarchist and religious dissenter, appeals so elementally to Christopher Hitchens, eloquent contrarian of our own day.
Although the title invokes only one work, "The Rights of Man," Paine's defense of the French Revolution in the face of his friend Edmund Burke's argument to the contrary, Hitchens's quirky essay engages the full range of Paine's writings and his adventurous life as well. An English corset maker's son, Paine was a failure at every profession he tried before arriving in Philadelphia in 1774 with a tepid commendation from Benjamin Franklin. Those were interesting times - "times that try men's souls," as Paine would famously put it - and he became an instant sensation as a political pamphleteer. He served as midwife to two revolutions, urging greater boldness on the slaveholding hypocrites of the Continental Congress and, after his return to Europe, greater caution on Robespierre, who promptly threw him in prison. The revolution he most wanted to inspire, in his native England, never came to pass.
In an age of reason and rebellion, Paine was the thinking man's swashbuckler. Hitchens gives both his life and writings the vigorous and engaging reading they demand.
Smoot's Ear: The Measure of Humanity
By Robert Tavernor
Yale University, 192 pp., $25
It has been said that man is the measure of all things, a truism with special meaning for the Boston-Cambridge area because of an epochal 1958 event to which this engaging cultural history prominently alludes: the use of MIT fraternity pledge Oliver R. Smoot as a human yardstick to measure the Harvard Bridge. Author Robert Tavernor notes that local police still find it convenient to refer to the bridge's "smoot" marks when filing accident reports.
Like "smoots," early units of measurement, such as feet and yards, derived from the human body, easily comprehended but also wildly variable. Enlightenment thinkers sought a more scientific approach, looking to the swing of the pendulum, and later to the transit of light waves, in order to remove sloppy human subjectivity from the serious business of measuring things. This resulted in centuries of cultural warfare over whose objectivity was the most objective.
The United States, the British author points out, got to the moon while remaining the only world power that doesn't use the metric system. He considers it not merely quaint but downright humanistic of us to cling so staunchly in an age of giga-thises and nano-thats to concepts of measurement dating from the days of the Domesday Book.
Amanda Heller is a critic and editor who lives in Newton.
