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The Neuroscience of Fair Play:
Why We (Usually) Follow the Golden RuleBy Donald W. Pfaff
Dana, 300 pp., $20.95
Donald Pfaff, head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology and Behavior at the Rockefeller University, presents here a theory of the neuroscience of ethical behavior. Just as Noam Chomsky claimed we are wired to produce language, Pfaff claims that we are wired to favor good behavior.
He begins with a review of the scientific evidence to demonstrate bodily responses to fear. He then describes the brain's ability to lose information, to blur identity, allowing us to see our own fear in someone else's and thus treat him or her as we would wish to be treated. This creates positive, group-oriented, friendly behaviors and supports the useful mechanism of reciprocity. Pfaff marshals a vast number of different kinds of studies to buttress his premises and sustains a persuasive argument throughout. His final chapters on how to encourage friendly behavior and discourage antisocial behavior uphold the theory that scientists and social scientists are wired differently.
Every Last Cuckoo
By Kate Maloy
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 277 pp., $22.95
Sarah is a familiar figure in recent fiction: the plucky older woman who picks herself up after tragedy and gets on with her new life. After losing the beloved husband who shared her nest for many years, Sarah finds herself providing a home for a variety of "cuckoos" - family, friends, and strangers in need. The life she had anticipated as a solitary widow is replaced by new pleasures and frustrations. Kate Maloy tells this story with feeling, but it takes a lot to make this old bird sing.
Maloy nicely portrays the long, imperfect, but still lusty marriage of Sarah and husband Charles, moves gracefully through the shock of loss, and charts the steps back into community. But what feels most original and moving is Maloy's sense of how Sarah sees herself connected to other generations: "How many girls and women she had been - she carried a multitude inside who shared only memory and character traits."
The Commoner
By John Burnham Schwartz
Doubleday, 351 pp., $24.95
To portray reticence and restraint can be compelling, but to imitate these qualities risks boredom. John Burnham Schwartz has chosen to tell the story of the first commoner to marry into the Japanese royal family (based loosely on fact) in her own voice. It is a bold choice that does not always pay off.
Despite some apprehension, Haruko, the well-bred, well-loved daughter of a wealthy businessman, marries the crown prince of Japan. She fails to understand the loss of personal freedom and identity that are part of the marriage contract. But she is made cruelly aware of these restrictions by the current empress, her mother-in-law; by the rigidly maintained court structure; and by her own isolation. Although she loves her husband, who displays some kindness and sympathy for her, she falls into depression, mutism, and disgrace. Finally, emerging from silence, she produces an heir and accepts her life as not her own, but as a part of history, a piece of tradition. Of her privileged yet impoverished life, she says, "It is so much that it is not very much. It's a great nothing, a fantastic void, and I am nothing in it." Schwartz has re-created this fantastic void so chillingly and in a voice so controlled that his narrative often feels dulled into lifelessness.
Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
