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‘Breaking the Mould’ book review: An unrealistic vision of the future

Raghuram rajan and rohit lamba's ‘breaking the mould’ is a pushback against production-linked incentives but the alternatives they offer are not logical.

Decades ago, the great trade economist Jagdish Bhagwati observed that India’s “misfortune” was to have almost too many “brilliant economists, an affliction that Far Eastern super-performers (Taiwan, Korea, etc.) were spared”. His point was that there were always going to be Indian economists ready to argue one view or another and frequently justify government policy, no matter how misguided. Former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) governor Raghuram Rajan has long been an exception. His RBI press conferences were renowned for clear-eyed and accessible explanations of monetary policy, and he opposed demonetisation. During his three-year tenure that began in the midst of the 2013 taper tantrum caused by sharply rising Treasury yields and ended in 2016, the rupee was stabilised and inflation brought down.

In his latest book, Breaking The Mould: Reimagining India’s Economic Future , co-authored with Penn State professor Rohit Lamba, Rajan begins well by explaining why the Narendra Modi government’s subsidies to boost the manufacturing sector are the wrong strategy. But then the authors stumble in suggesting unrealistic alternatives such as moving the economy towards high-end services, including global capability centres for large investment banks and consulting firms, while turning India’s back on competing for low-end manufacturing because the margins are razor-thin. This is an overly defeatist approach regarding prospects for manufacturing in India, reminiscent of the export pessimism former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh argued against in his PhD thesis at Oxford in the 1960s.

Also read: The deepening schisms between India and China

While it is true that Vietnam and Bangladesh have received more foreign direct investment than India in sectors such as electronics and garments, respectively, as many firms adopt China + 1 strategies to minimise dependency on China, the move out of that country will continue for many more years. Giving up on low-end manufacturing, as Rajan and Lamba seem to suggest, is a bad idea, even if global trade is slowing.

To drive home their point that India’s comparative advantage is competing for high-end activities, the authors contrast Apple’s $3 trillion market capitalisation with Foxconn’s of under $50 billion: “Apple is sixty times as valuable, even though it manufactures nothing! That is because it provides the R&D and product design services at the beginning of the global supply chain for iPhones, as well as the branding, marketing and content at the end.” What this muddled argument overlooks is: 1) no other company globally has the brand appeal or product innovation capabilities that Apple has in electronics, and no Indian company comes close; 2) At Foxconn’s peak employment levels in China, it employed one million workers; their salaries may have been a fraction of those at Apple’s headquarters in California, but Foxconn’s investment boosted incomes for lots of families in China and helped build a large suppliers’ ecosystem.

Rajan and Lamba are on more solid ground debunking the Central and Gujarat state government’s plans to offer massive subsidies to a US company to build a semiconductor plant in Gujarat. They calculate this amounts to a subsidy of ₹ 3.2 crore per assembly and testing job in a plant expected to create 5,000 jobs. Once again, New Delhi policymakers’ obsession with capital-intensive industries, which goes back more than half a century, is all too apparent.

This book and its attendant cross-country tour is a useful pushback against the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme, which, partly because of its opacity, has not been given the scrutiny such a major policy merits. The PLI schemes now span industries as diverse as food processing and textiles, some consumer durables and solar photovoltaic modules. While the US and Europe are subsidising manufacturing deemed strategic, in no other major economy are the industries so haphazardly diverse and the procedures for claiming incentives so bureaucratically time-consuming.

New Delhi’s PLI scheme thus increasingly looks like a microwaved serving of the license raj. At the end of December, auto manufacturers told Mint that almost two years after the scheme was announced there remains “a lack of clarity about the process to apply for subsidies”. The scheme is creaking under the weight of requiring complex proof of domestic value addition as well as of sales and investments made by companies. Some apparel manufacturers say that instead of a subsidy they would be happier if the government concluded free trade agreements (FTAs) with, among others, the European Union, where the negotiations have been grinding on for almost a dozen years.

But, the authors do not spend many pages analysing why India’s approach to PLIs may not work as they jump to their alternative to low-value-addition manufacturing. To support their vision of high-end services, they invent a fictional character named Professor Erali, who, based in India and using virtual reality headsets, teaches “busy executives all round the world, doing an MBA while holding a full-time job”. They lead us through his mind-numbing case study of the day, involving carbon taxes in Rajasthan. “And so the case went, challenge and counter-challenge, debate and argument, until everyone, even Professor Erali emerged wiser than before.”

This is not a claim I would make for Breaking The Mould . The book’s maddening digressions while stringing together plenty of compelling facts is a huge opportunity lost. Its biggest flaw is the argument that what the economist Dani Rodrik identified as “premature deindustrialisation”, the early decline in the share of manufacturing in many developing country economies, is not a bad thing at all. Their “counter-challenge” to the PLI is primarily that India is now doing very well gaining thousands of remote financial analyst and management consultant jobs outsourced by firms in the West. This is a trend outlined in much greater detail by Neelkanth Mishra, chief economist, Axis Bank, in a report in August, which showed that our services export surplus now comfortably dwarfs our persistent trade deficit in manufacturing, making India’s external accounts much more comfortable.

But can we therefore turn away from low-end manufacturing? This doesn’t make sense, given that, as the authors themselves point out, India’s labour participation rate has now fallen to just 46 out of every 100 in the working age cohort, significantly below levels in Brazil and Indonesia. Services exports from global capacity centres in India are growing apace. Yet, the multiplier effects from that in terms of low-end service jobs, such as being a cook, street cleaner or security guard, for Prof. Erali and others as the book approvingly outlines, are nowhere near sufficient. Before we dismiss certain manufacturing jobs as low-end, perhaps we could ask workers in garment factories whether they would prefer to be Prof. Erali’s cook. And, rather than be further distracted, New Delhi needs to urgently conclude broader FTAs so our factories’ products are not hamstrung by import duties for years to come when bidding for business against Vietnam and Bangladesh, whose garment exports are now more than double ours.

Once again, even as the authors make the sensible point that one large semiconductor assembly plant will not do much for us in terms of strategic security, they distract themselves by speculating about chip supply disruptions if the democratic world turned against India. That is a much less likely prospect than China invading Taiwan, manufacturer of 90% of the world’s advanced chips, which, incredibly, the authors do not discuss.

As Bhagwati joked, eminent Indian economists often trip themselves up with their elaborate counterarguments. But, only Prof. Erali perhaps, with his virtual reality headsets, could divine how Breaking The Mould ends up reading as if it were written by a harried executive MBA student who has a deadline looming.

Rahul Jacob is a former South China correspondent for the Financial Times and writes the World Apart column for Mint.

Also read: An Indian scholar's Chinese adventures

• FIRST PUBLISHED 11.01.2024 | 06:00 AM IST
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How did Ian Fleming create James Bond? He looked in the mirror.

A new biography, ‘ian fleming: the complete man,’ by nicholas shakespeare, recounts the storied life of the writer behind 007.

Some years ago, I gave a talk to the graduating seniors at a local school. Whatever I said that night — probably something about the importance of books and reading — has utterly vanished from my memory except for three words. During the question period, a young woman stood up and asked, “Mr. Dirda, what fictional character would you most like to be?” A number of possibilities flashed through my mind, and I almost said Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy, because then I’d be married to Elizabeth Bennet. But instead, I put on my most sardonic smile and silkily whispered into the microphone, “Bond, James Bond.”

It’s hard to imagine that I might have answered “Secretan, James Secretan.” That was what Ian Fleming initially called his hero in the typescript of “Casino Royale,” first published in April 1953. Fortunately, just as Arthur Conan Doyle realized that Sherrinford Holmes wasn’t quite the right name for the greatest of all detectives, Fleming recognized that he needed something punchier than “Secretan” for the greatest of all secret agents.

According to Nicholas Shakespeare, in his huge, immensely detailed new biography, “ Ian Fleming: The Complete Man ,” there may have been two or three sources behind the final, seemingly inevitable choice. The 43-year-old Fleming, who was living two months of each year in Jamaica, regularly consulted “Birds of the West Indies,” by a Philadelphia ornithologist named James Bond. And back when he was working in British Naval Intelligence during World War II, one operation was saved from disaster by a heroic Rodney Bond. Somehow, though, I can’t imagine we’d be watching movies today about Rodney Bond.

One of the strengths — or, arguably, weaknesses — of Shakespeare’s 821-page biography is its length. If not exactly too much of a good thing, there’s always a little more than seems necessary. Take the long central section devoted to Fleming’s wartime intelligence work. While documentation is sketchy, since the relevant records were either destroyed or remain classified, Shakespeare deduces that Fleming was far more than the deskbound assistant to the head of Naval Intelligence and quite probably the department’s guiding mastermind. In these chapters, he describes in detail espionage strategies, meetings with American spymasters and botched operations — all of which may well be catnip to students of military history but will send other readers off for a cat nap. In any event, Fleming almost certainly based Bond on a composite of several agents and commandos he knew, as well as himself and his intrepid older brother, Peter Fleming, who is now remembered mainly for the classic travel book “Brazilian Adventure.”

Overall, though, “Ian Fleming: The Complete Man” is a dazzling, even dizzying achievement, despite that ludicrous-sounding subtitle. A “complete man,” Fleming believed, would resemble one of those swashbuckling Elizabethan all-rounders who were simultaneously poets, courtiers, lovers and soldiers. For Fleming, I think being a “complete man” remained largely aspirational. In his personal life, he was, by turns, a youthful rebel, a resentful mama’s boy, a modern-day Don Juan and a middle-aged melancholiac.

Consider his family background, tailor-made for psychological disaster. Grandfather Robert Fleming was Britain’s leading banker, one of the richest men in the world. After Ian’s father, Valentine, was killed during World War I, Winston Churchill, no less, wrote the obituary for the Times. From that point on, Val was held up to his four young sons as an unattainable ideal. His widow, Eve, would blackmail the boys into doing what she wanted by invoking their father’s spirit and example. As it happens, the eldest, Peter, excelled at everything effortlessly, from athletics to academics, was dubbed the “king” of Eton and was even regarded as a good bet to become a future prime minister. Born in 1908, Ian, the moody, insecure second son, dwelled in Peter’s shadow until the Bond novels reversed the relationship. The two youngest brothers happily entered the banking business but, like Scottish lairds, spent as much time as possible hunting and fishing on their highland estate.

Eve Fleming ruled Ian through her absolute control of the family purse strings. She even made him break up with the woman he wanted to marry by threatening to cut off his allowance. Mummy herself was extravagant in every way: A maid said that if it were raining, Eve would put on a new pair of shoes to walk to her waiting car and never wear them again. She never remarried, partly because her late husband’s will stipulated that she would then forfeit much of her enormous wealth. But this didn’t preclude an affair with the painter Augustus John, with whom she had a daughter, Ian’s half sister, Amaryllis.

As Ian grew up, he not only discovered an ability to charm women, he also used it. Again and again, Shakespeare notes his subject’s casual seductions, affairs with the girlfriends and wives of his friends, and, most disagreeably, a gigolo-like willingness to accept gifts and money from rich older women in his thrall — one gave him the equivalent of what would today be a quarter-million dollars to build his Jamaican compound, Goldeneye. While obviously whip smart and capable, Fleming nonetheless found nearly all his jobs, starting with a stint as a journalist for Reuters, through the interventions of fond women.

Yet, once hired, he would quickly win the almost paternal affection of his boss, whether Adm. John Godfrey of Naval Intelligence or Lord Kemsley, owner of the Sunday Times, who made him the paper’s foreign editor, with an exorbitant salary and two months of paid holiday each year. Fleming lived luxuriously even before the first Bond movies started to bring in the serious cash. While 007 might occasionally be an agent provocateur, his creator was always an agent-entrepreneur.

Again and again, Shakespeare’s biography reminds us of what a tight little island Britain could be for those of its privileged class. If you’ve read any of the books about the Brideshead generation , you’ll find many of the same people cropping up in Fleming’s life, including the critic Cyril Connolly, a former Eton classmate, and Evelyn Waugh, whose novels Fleming would like to have written more than his own. He even counted the multitalented showman Noel Coward as a confidant and once shared a wealthy girlfriend with Roald Dahl, to whom he gave the idea for a famous story, “Lamb to the Slaughter.”

Then there was the socialite Ann O’Neill (nee Charteris), whose Etonian husband was killed in World War II while she was having an intense affair with the newspaper magnate Esmond Rothermere, whom she eventually married. Soon thereafter, Ann broke Rothermere’s heart by sleeping with their friend Ian Fleming. Against the advice of almost everyone he knew, Ian married Ann in 1952, having kept his mind off the upcoming nuptials by writing “Casino Royale.” It took him just a month. A son was soon born, but the new Mrs. Fleming loved dinner parties and house guests, while her new husband was at his happiest snorkeling and playing golf. Neither was faithful to the other.

As with his excellent biography of the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, Shakespeare has produced one of those books you can happily live in for weeks. It will deservedly become the standard life of Ian Fleming, replacing a fine one by Andrew Lycett that appeared almost 30 years ago. Bond devotees, however, should be aware that there are no close analyses of the novels, and the only films discussed are the early ones with which Fleming was involved. But Shakespeare certainly recognizes that Bond’s creator, especially when young, behaved much like his hero toward women — in fact, much worse. He regularly comes across as a callous, sexist jerk, no matter how vehemently his friends, lovers and admirers testify to the man’s charisma, thoughtfulness and ability to light up a room. Not even Fleming’s book collecting — he focused on works that changed history — wholly improves his image: It seems to have been more for ostentation than for use. However, he did establish and underwrite Britain’s premier bibliophilic journal, the Book Collector, an act that pays many debts.

A far more likable, even mellow Fleming appears in his letters, edited by his nephew Fergus Fleming for the book “The Man With the Golden Typewriter” (2015). The creator of James Bond could be remarkably courteous in answering correspondents, even those who pointed out his factual errors or other slips. Didn’t he know that the perfume Vent Vert came from Balmain, not Dior, and that a Beretta is a lady’s gun rather than a proper weapon for a secret agent? The letters also make plain that the directors of the publisher Jonathan Cape despised the Bond books, regarding them as sadistic trash even though they ended up keeping the firm afloat.

Fleming died in 1964 at the relatively young age of 56 from cardiac disease, to which smoking 60 or more cigarettes a day doubtless contributed. Today, the real question is: Do the original James Bond thrillers stand up to rereading in the 21st century?

All too often, the only version of 007 most people are familiar with is the one created by Hollywood. Until the humorless, even unpleasant, albeit gripping Daniel Craig films, most of the Bond movies could be likened to commedia dell’arte, drawing on a set formula and softening the violence with cheeky quips, double entendres and even a weird campiness, as in the two films featuring Jaws, the assassin with steel teeth. The movies remain, above all, pure eye candy through their glamorous settings, expertly choreographed action sequences and one gorgeous “Bond girl” after another. Not that Bond himself isn’t the ultimate heartthrob. As I once heard a woman sigh, most men are boys, Sean Connery is a man.

Over the years, the movies have paid less and less attention to the Fleming thrillers from which they borrow their titles. In my experience, the original books — a dozen novels and two short-story collections — remain compulsive page-turners, while being grounded in their time, the Cold War era of the 1950s. Bond is nothing if not patriotic and deeply conservative. In “Casino Royale,” he maintains that “women were for recreation,” while in “Live and Let Die” the Black characters are largely stereotypes. Whether working for SMERSH or SPECTRE, Fleming’s villains invariably turn out to be “foreigners”: Even Sir Hugo Drax, from “Moonraker,” was born Hugo von der Drache.

Still, the best novels — “Casino Royale,” “From Russia, With Love,” “Dr. No,” “Moonraker” and “Goldfinger” — surmount any occasional drawbacks, energized as they are by elements from Fleming’s own life as well as by the speed and freshness of his prose. Who else could make a long chapter about a bridge game (in “Moonraker”) so riveting? Little wonder that poet Philip Larkin spoke of Fleming’s “mesmerizing readability.” What’s more, though the books emphasize action and violence, they don’t utterly shy away from elegance and lyricism, or even the occasional philosophical reflection:

“Mania, my dear Mister Bond, is as priceless as genius. Dissipation of energy, fragmentation of vision, loss of momentum, the lack of follow-through — these are the vices of the herd.” Doctor No sat slightly back in his chair. “I do not possess these vices. I am, as you correctly say, a maniac — a maniac, Mister Bond, with a mania for power. That” — the black holes glittered blankly at Bond through the contact lenses — “is the meaning of my life. That is why I am here. That is why you are here. That is why here exists.”

Those last three sentences, and particularly the last, demonstrate that when Ian Fleming is on point, nobody does it better.

Ian Fleming

The Complete Man

By Nicholas Shakespeare

Harper. 821 pp. $45

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A Gender Theorist Who Just Wants Everyone to Get Along

Judith Butler’s new book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?,” tries to turn down the heat on an inflamed argument.

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WHO’S AFRAID OF GENDER?, by Judith Butler

As the example of Judith Butler shows, the boons of intellectual celebrity come at a cost. Yes, your work will command the kind of attention that would be the envy of most scholars; but the substance of that work will get eclipsed by your name, and your name will trigger a reaction in people who have never read a single thing you wrote. Throw some misogyny into the mix, and the most scornful attacks can take a lurid turn — even (or especially) if, like Butler, you identify as nonbinary. In 2017, when Butler visited Brazil for a conference on democracy, far-right protesters burned an effigy of Butler dressed in a pink bra and a witch hat.

Despite its notoriously opaque prose, Butler’s best-known book, “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (1990), has been both credited and blamed for popularizing a multitude of ideas, including some that Butler doesn’t propound, like the notions that biology is entirely unreal and that everybody experiences gender as a choice.

So Butler set out to clarify a few things with “Who’s Afraid of Gender?,” a new book that arrives at a time when gender has “become a matter of extraordinary alarm.” In plain (if occasionally plodding) English, Butler, who uses they/them pronouns, repeatedly affirms that facts do exist, that biology does exist, that plenty of people undoubtedly experience their own gender as “immutable.”

What Butler questions instead is how such facts get framed, and how such framing structures our societies and how we live.

Any framework conditions norms and expectations. A binary framework, Butler says, is necessarily complicated by a more expansive view of gender — one that actually takes into account the variety of human experience and expression. “To refuse gender is, sadly, to refuse to encounter that complexity,” Butler writes, “the complexity that one finds in contemporary life across the world.”

Butler, who was trained as a philosopher, finds it curious that their dense, jargon-filled work has been invested with an almost supernatural authority. Conservative Christians have been especially fervent in their insistence that scholars like Butler are corrupting the youth, as if mere exposure to a text amounts to ideological inculcation: “Gender critics imagine that their opponents read gender theory as they themselves read the Bible.”

“Who’s Afraid of Gender?” started with that burned effigy in Brazil, when Butler realized that gender had become a bugaboo — or “phantasm,” as the book puts it — for a “rights-stripping” movement that is gaining traction worldwide and is “authoritarian at its core.” This “anti-gender ideology movement” targets trans and queer people; it also targets reproductive freedoms. It depicts sexed identity as something that is not only natural, obvious and unquestionable, but also zero-sum; it asserts that tolerance means exclusion, not inclusion — that advocates of “gender ideology” want to take rights away from everyone else.

“It is not possible to fully reconstruct the arguments used by the anti-gender ideology movement because they do not hold themselves to standards of consistency or coherence,” Butler writes. Pope Francis, despite being known for some of his progressive views, has compared gender theory to nuclear annihilation and the indoctrination of Hitler Youth.

But incoherence can be powerful. So-called gender ideology has been portrayed as both a licentious force and a totalitarian one — stoking personal liberty and steamrolling it at the same time. The church draws menacing connections between gender theory and pedophilia and harm to children. Butler finds such sanctimony especially rich: “In this standoff between church and feminism and LGBTQIA+ rights, where has the child molestation actually taken place?”

Butler makes ample use of such rhetorical questions. The tone of “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” is mostly calm, the argument methodical, the mockery gentle. A chapter on the incendiary subject of trans-exclusionary feminism focuses on debates in Britain. Butler calls it “stunning and sad” that feminists who consider themselves progressive could find common cause with a “new fascism,” a movement that is bent on imposing the kind of patriarchal hierarchy that feminism has always opposed. Butler asks trans-exclusionary feminists who argue that “gender mutability” amounts to an attack on “womanhood” to notice that their own bodies and genders are still intact: “Has anything truly been lost or taken away?”

Feminists, Butler says, need to keep their eyes on the prize: “a world in which we can move and breathe and love without fear of violence.” Coalitions have always been necessary to feminism, and they have always been difficult. “Coalitions do not require mutual love,” Butler writes. “They require only a shared insight that oppressive forces can be defeated by acting together and moving forward with difficult differences without insisting on their ultimate resolution.”

It’s certainly a hopeful sentiment — one that stands out in a debate in which hopeful sentiments often seem exceedingly rare. Conversations about gender have become so inflamed that the task, Butler says, “is to slow the entire public discussion down.” Indeed, since “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” was published, some critics have faulted Butler for turning the temperature down too low — for making an argument that is “tepid” and “uninspiringly careful” ; for stating the obvious by training such mighty brainpower on “the silliest figments of conservative fantasies” ; for being so committed to coalition building that the book lands on “a needlessly conciliatory position.”

Yet the same book has also been excoriated for doing the exact opposite: for demonizing opponents and for dismissing them as “fascist-adjacent.” It’s a mark of how charged the subject is that Butler’s book-length intervention, their bid “to slow the entire public discussion down,” has been received as both a tame peace offering and an outrageous insult.

And perhaps there’s a vacuum left by this book precisely because Butler, in a bid to bring people together, generally steers clear of some of the most inflammatory nodes of the debate. They easily challenge red-state directives to investigate parents seeking gender-affirming care for their children, which are patently cruel and controlling; but they don’t really get into the fierce disagreements among people, including those who want to support their children, on what that care should entail and when it should happen.

On a recent episode of the podcast “Why Is This Happening,” Butler was asked how they thought about such questions. “I think gender-affirming care is, broadly speaking, or should be, a commitment to listening to what young people are saying and trying to give them a safe environment in which to explore everything they need to explore,” Butler said. “I don’t think it should be accelerated, in a panicked way. I also am very opposed to it being blocked.” It’s a generous, open-minded answer; but it also sounds like a bit of a cop-out.

Toward the end of the book, Butler makes a few obligatory remarks about the importance of continuing the conversation, about the need to listen to one another, about the dangers of shutting people down. “We cannot censor each other’s positions just because we do not want to hear them,” they declare, somewhat cryptically, issuing this free-speech directive at everyone in general and therefore no one in particular. Still, I appreciated Butler’s commitment to holding open a space for thinking. “In the grip of a phantasm, it is hard to think,” Butler writes. “And yet thinking and imagining have never been more important.”

WHO’S AFRAID OF GENDER? | By Judith Butler | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 308 pp. | $30

Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times. More about Jennifer Szalai

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Reckoning with long shadow of 1960s counterculture

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By Max Ludington St. Martin’s Press: 400 pages, $29 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

The long shadow of the 1960s looms over “Thorn Tree,” a sprawling second novel by Brooklyn-based author Max Ludington. Set largely in Los Angeles in 2017, the book concerns two baby boomers dealing with the fallout from their countercultural pasts. It’s a novel of regrets and reckonings, traumas repressed and returning. Commentary on the allure of dangerous subcultures, combined with fleeting references to the Trump administration, suggests that the conflicts and divisions of the 1960s remain, awaiting a moment to reemerge.

The “Thorn Tree” of the title is a gigantic figurative sculpture welded in the Mojave Desert in the mid-1970s by a young man named Daniel. His art is the product of an existential crisis sparked by the mysterious death of his girlfriend, Rachel, as well as a stint in prison for LSD possession. On his release, Daniel rediscovers his creative purpose just as his outlook reaches a nadir. The work that results brings him art-world fame, followed a few years later by national notoriety when he decides to literally blow it all up.

In 2017, when the novel begins, Daniel is retired and living in Beverly Hills next door to a rising young actress, her son and her offbeat father, Jack — another 1960s casualty, though from the seamier side of the psychedelic tracks. Celia, the actress, is in Arizona playing the lead in a “surrealist, sci-fi Anna Karenina reboot” and sleeping with her married driver, Leo. Grampa Jack stays at home, ostensibly looking after 6-year-old Dean, though he doesn’t always have the boy’s best interests at heart. Gradually, we learn that the connection between Daniel and Jack is more than merely neighborly. Flashbacks to 1969 reveal the shared significance of a fateful Grateful Dead concert, a hippie commune in Marin County and a death cult that offers its disciples a dangerous kind of absolution. With Jack’s behavior becoming more erratic, long-buried secrets threaten to come out.

Twenty-one years have passed since Ludington’s first novel, the well-reviewed “ Tiger in a Trance .” It too took the countercultural revolution as its subject, adopting the perspective of a young Deadhead taking more and heavier drugs till something ultimately has to give. In “Thorn Tree” Ludington gives himself a much larger historical canvas to play with and essays some more complex techniques. The story ranges across time and place. The safety of a single first-person persona is eschewed in favor of a series of close-third-person viewpoints. Most challenging, perhaps, are the tragical-mechanical challenges of the plot.

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Unfortunately, “Thorn Tree,” like Daniel’s early attempts at sculpture, creaks and buckles under the weight of its contrivances.

The problems are both structural and tonal. Ludington’s main plot concerns the tragedy of Daniel and Jack, yet nearly a quarter of the book is told from Celia’s perspective. Not a problem in itself, except that so much of what happens to her, including her desultory affair with Leo, is superfluous to the principal story line, doing little to complicate or complement it. As if acknowledging this, Ludington relegates her to a narrative back seat in the book’s second half as the death-cult subplot, which does bear on Daniel and Jack’s futures, comes to the fore.

This plot line requires the introduction of new characters including an alienated teenage boy who stumbles on a book about the cult’s philosophy in a yard sale, and his troubled girlfriend. These latecomers disrupt the book’s established range of perspectives and further threaten its cohesiveness.

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March 22, 2024

Backed into a corner by the mechanics of his close-third-person style, Ludington is forced into flights of self-consciously purple description to explain how the cultists think: “Sitting still outside for any length of time should have been torture for him, but with the Destination in sight he found he could let go and allow himself to experience the convolutions and obscurities of Truth and illusion — interwoven so closely, sometimes seamlessly. The riptide-power of the world against his leaky boundaries didn’t threaten him as it usually did.” Passages like this do little to convey the seductive power of a cult nor to convince the reader why anyone would ever believe such things.

The Celia/Hollywood chapters are the main source of the book’s tonal inconsistencies. Most of the characters in these scenes are hackneyed, by-the-numbers types, the mad-genius director of Celia’s movie coming over as little more than an assemblage of chauvinist clichés. (The idea that two sequels to his Tolstoy-inflected space opera would be greenlighted while the first movie is behind schedule and in constant rewrites also seems unlikely.) Other flimsy caricatures orbiting Celia include a sardonic gay best friend, a ruthless agent and a debonair old flame. At times they feel like they wrote their own parts.

The historical sequences, though generally better, don’t quite escape the cartoon treatment. “What’s tonight? You serious? The Dead are playing the Fillmore!” one character exclaims, as if the late 1960s required clearer signposting even than the tableaux of “thick-maned men in jeans and beads, willowy women shorn of inhibition, whispering through the grass, all touching each other easily, draping themselves over each other on the warm earth.”

All of this undercuts the dramatic heft of Daniel and Jack’s story.

A list of the book’s flaws overlooks passages of very strong writing, not to mention some lovely resonances and patterns that Ludington weaves skillfully into the narrative. The complicated relationship between Daniel and his sometime lover, Tanya, is nuanced and touchingly observed. Rachel’s promise, on the unknowing cusp of death, to return to Daniel chimes powerfully with Jack’s obsession with reincarnation. And the glimpsed suicide of Jack’s father hints at the latent American berserk pulsing beneath the book’s surface. Here is the high-minded tone Ludington seems to be seeking.

But in the end, he has to work too hard to smooth over the coincidences and plot machinations that drive “Thorn Tree” forward. It emerges somehow both half-baked and overdone; an inorganic assemblage, like the sculpture of its title, in which all the joins are visible.

Charles Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music.

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'The Sympathizer' review: Even Robert Downey Jr. can't make the HBO show make sense

A TV show shouldn't have to try so hard to be great.

HBO's "The Sympathizer" has all the appearances of a prestigious, Emmy-worthy series. Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning 2015 novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen , it has weighty subject matter (the Vietnam War and espionage), the star power of Robert Downey, Jr. and beloved South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook as one of its masterminds. It's produced by buzzy indie studio A24.

Yet in spite of all this talent and raw potential, "Sympathizer" (Sundays, 9 EDT/PDT, and streaming on Max, ★½ out of four) is the dictionary definition of underwhelming. Overly complicated, overly stylized and often boring, Park and co-creator Don McKellar can't coalesce the series' shifting timelines, disparate characters, cartoonish costuming and moral ambiguity into a story that pulls you in. It's a whole lot of stuff shoved in your face with very little resonance to show.

The series' protagonist, the never-named Captain (Hoa Xuande), begins the story as a Viet Cong plant in the South Vietnamese secret police in the mid-1970s, just before the end of the war. To the Americans and the South Vietnamese, he's the loyal lieutenant to a foppish, idiotic General (Toan Le). But he's secretly passing intelligence to the communists on the other side of the border. When the general and the Americans flee the country as Saigon falls, the Captain is ordered by the Viet Cong to continue feeding information to his superiors as a refugee in Los Angeles.

There he goes on his own personal odyssey, often surrounded by white paternalistic figures who aim to use the Captain in some way. All of them are played by Robert Downey Jr. in various states of prosthetic makeup: A CIA operative, a college professor, a film director and a congressman. The captain also begins a steamy affair with Sofia Mori (Sandra Oh), an older Japanese American woman who's as eager to rid herself of association with her Asian heritage as the captain is to cling to his.

It's a lot to keep track of, and even harder when the series can't make you care about the captain or his scheming and spying. The stakes are muddled, and the characters feel like symbols more than people.

The series deals in binaries, not quite as clever a device as the creators think it is. In addition to being a double agent, the captain is biracial, half French and half Vietnamese. One of his best friends is a devoted communist, and another a soldier of the South. The captain is deeply dedicated to communism and his homeland but is easily seduced by American popular culture. He refuses to live in shades of gray and thus becomes an (intentionally) confused, ever-shifting figure. It all has the unfortunate side effect of distancing the protagonist from us. He is neither appealing enough to engender loyalty and investment, nor interesting enough to hold our gaze as an antihero.

The bigger problem, however, is the series' multiple timelines. There is a rough frame structure in which the captain relates the story of his time in America to his superiors, clearly under some kind of imprisonment and duress. And yes, humans don't always tell stories in the right order. But any insight gleaned from the constantly shifting timeline is sacrificed by the confusion it creates. And this sort of blatantly pretentious "artistic choice" attempts to mask the fact that the story underneath is not particularly compelling. While I've not read the novel, it's easy to see how this kind of lackadaisical pace and intentionally obfuscating timeline works on the written page, where readers can take the text at their own speed and an omniscient narrator can be so much more effective. On screen, it's just a bit dull and dense.

It's a shame because "The Sympathizer" offers a perspective on American imperialism that's so often lost to our culture. Stories about the Vietnam War are almost always told from the viewpoint of the American soldier, all "The Deer Hunter" and "Apocalypse Now." But we weren't the protagonists; it wasn't our country that was tearing itself apart. The much-praised novel deconstructed Americans' perception of the conflict. But by the time you finish the series, you're likely to be nonplussed, which is one of the worst criticisms I could offer a piece of art. It's not good, it's not bad, it's just unaffecting .

Considering the intensely political and moral questions the series raises, it should create some kind of philosophical and emotional response in us. And yet I cannot sympathize.

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Author Interviews

Caleb carr's new book is a memoir about life spent with his beloved rescue cat.

Scott Simon

NPR's Scott Simon talks with Caleb Carr, author of the best-selling novel, "The Alienist." Carr has written a memoir, reflecting on his life through the companionship of his scrappy rescue cat, Masha.

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Much of the story we're about to hear will be delightful, and some of it will be hard. Caleb Carr is our guest. He's written a memoir called "My Beloved Monster." It's the story of his life over 17 years with Masha, whom he calls his emotionally remarkable cat. They share play and jokes, affection and, finally, the challenge of cancer. Caleb Carr, bestselling novelist, author of "The Alienist" and "The Angel of Darkness," joins us now from his home in upstate New York. Thanks so much for being with us.

CALEB CARR: Thank you so much, Scott.

SIMON: How did you and Masha kind of pick each other out at the animal shelter outside of Rutland, Vt.?

CARR: She picked me out. I sort of turned around. I sensed something, and I turned around, and there was this cat in a little cage, and she had decided already that we were at least going to have an interview together. And then when we had the interview, she really decided that I was going to take her home.

SIMON: You found out she'd kind of rejected everyone else, hadn't she?

CARR: Well, she had been abandoned in an apartment and locked up when the people moved, which is, unfortunately, a very common thing in this country. And she'd made so much noise, breaking things and kind of banging around, that she got taken into a shelter. But at the shelter, that experience, I think, largely had just made her very distrustful. And she had attacked the staff. She had attacked people who tried to adopt her. But when I went into the interview room with her, she was as sweet as could be. And the one attendant sort of grabbed me by the arm and said, you've got to take that cat.

SIMON: She was a Siberian forest cat, I guess you discovered.

CARR: She was a breed that I - until then, I had never heard of. They really are ferociously physical and just fascinating cats, really smart. They really have this wild intelligence.

SIMON: Living in the country, you gave her a lot to react to. Let me put it that way.

CARR: Yes, yes. As I say in the book, there is a big debate about whether cats should be allowed outdoors these days. But when you live in some place that's as wild as this - and it really is just a house on - in the foothills of a mountain - I couldn't have stopped her from going outside. It would have killed her. She took one look out the door at the trees that start right at the back porch of the house, and she just was home, and she patrolled that with a dedication and a fierceness that I have never seen before. And Siberians are known for that.

SIMON: May I ask you about your childhood, Mr. Carr?

CARR: Sure.

SIMON: And I'll take the license to call it a horrible childhood. Your father was often drunk and violent. How did a cat named Zorro (ph) and your love of history help you survive?

CARR: Well, I was the child in my family that noticed things and commented on them. When you're dealing with alcoholics, it doesn't earn you any points. And so I experienced a certain amount of violence. And because of that, most nights I was up most of the night and watching and listening what the adults were doing just in case it was coming my way, basically. And Zorro was the first cat that I really chose that was mine. She would come out and lie down next to me as I sat on the top of the stairs. And she had this remarkable capacity to make me feel safe and sort of understood.

SIMON: Cats are really good at companionship, aren't they? They're just there for us.

CARR: Yeah, they are really good at companionship. It's a distinctly different kind of companionship than you get from any other animal, but once you accept it on their terms, it's really amazing. They are always there, often without being there. But they're beside you. They're not on top of you the way that dogs are.

SIMON: Can you tell us about Masha's taste in music?

CARR: Masha had a very refined ear for music, and it's not as weird as it sounds. Cats are very sensitive to the upper ranges of sonics, and they don't like high-pitched sounds, which means that most of the popular music, you're going to find that cats don't really enjoy. But when I discovered that she liked classical music, I would experiment with playing different composers for her while I was working. Before long, it was clear that she had a particular affinity for Wagner. And I know it sounds crazy, but it was true. And I eventually made her her own CDs of orchestral selections, and particularly the prelude to "Das Rheingold."

(SOUNDBITE OF RICHARD WAGNER'S "DAS RHEINGOLD")

CARR: She would just come shooting in from wherever she was. She would hear it going on in my study. If she wasn't already there, she would come shooting in, throw herself on the floor and just start rolling in absolute ecstasy. And I asked a musicologist friend of mine about it, and he said, well, that doesn't surprise me at all. It's probably the most primal piece of classical music that there is.

SIMON: After almost 17 years together, you and Masha just grew sick in astonishingly similar ways, didn't you?

CARR: Yes. And that's part of the most astonishing part of the story. Masha had - certainly had arthritis from the time she was very young. We never really knew what exactly caused it, whether it was trauma or abuse or just having the genetics for it. But she had arthritis in her back legs and her hind legs, and I ended up coming down with peripheral neuropathy quite badly. And then, eventually, we both ended up coming down with cancer.

And it was part of the amazing - the most amazing details of our story that our illnesses were so similar. Because of that, we knew we were tied in even more in terms of knowing what to do for each other and knowing what was going on with each other. And she made it possible - really possible for me to survive. I like to think - I hope that I did the same for her.

SIMON: What do you think that cord is between us and the animals we love, as you've experienced it, and especially strongly with Masha?

CARR: There are so many things that are difficult and lacking in human life that are provided by animals. And there are so many things that we've gotten away from in our civilized human life that are so basic to being alive that animals provide. And it's just that it is so much more basic. And to use a word I used in reference to Masha's musical taste, it's so much more primal that it takes us to a place that kind of defies all of the complications that we've put on life in our own species.

SIMON: Caleb Carr - his book, "My Beloved Monster." I'm so glad you wrote it. Thanks so much for being with us.

CARR: Thank you so much, Scott.

Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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LSG vs DC: Rishabh Pant argues with umpire over review call, appears 'utterly disgruntled'

Rishabh Pant was even seen having a lengthy argument with one of the on-field umpires ahead of the replay of the incident sparked a major confusion.

Fighting for the survival in the ongoing Indian Premier League 2024, Rishabh Pant-led Delhi Capitals is facing KL Rahul-led Lucknow Super Giants on Friday at Ekana Stadium.

With the match proceeding in DC favour, an incident miffed Pant and he was utterly disgruntled. He was even seen having a lengthy argument with one of the on-field umpires ahead of the replay of the incident sparked a major confusion.

ALSO READ: IPL 2024: Tristan Stubbs lauds DC skipper Rishabh Pant, says 'He's a gifted player'

Pant had called for a review for a wide ball on the 4th over of the match with Ishant Sharma bowling a wide down the leg side against Devdutt Padikkal, as the on-field umpire immediately gave it a wide.

Unhappy with umpire's decision, the Capitals' skipper got into an argument with the umpire.

According to the commentary box, its was initially concluded Pant probably did not want a review before the broadcasters showed a replay.

With confusion deepening, former India captain Sunil Gavaskar felt that it was probably made towards the fielder at mid-off , seeking on whether to take the review.

But former cricketers Pommie Mbangwa and Deep Dasgupta revealed later annoyed over no use of snickometer to check if there was an outside edge.

ALSO READ: Virat Kohli, Rishabh Pant almost confirmed in India's T20 World Cup 2024 squad: Report

Meanwhile, it was later clarified that the on-filed umpire didn't do anything wrong and DC lost the review.

In the next over by Khaleel Ahmed, LSG's Padikkal for just three runs. Following this, Kuldeep Yadav picked two wickets in two successive balls.

LSG vs DC IPL 2024:

Playing against DC, LSG won the toss ad decided to bat first. However, the DC bowlers dominated from the very beginning, until the last report, LSG had scored 121/7 in 16 overs.

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