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the first three years of life. There is no get-ting around it. All roads lead to Rome.

The message of the conference wasat once hopeful and a little alarming.On the one hand, it suggested that theright kind of parenting during thosefirst three years could have a lasting ef-fect on a childs life; on the other hand,it implied that if we missed this oppor-tunity the resulting damage might wellbe permanent.Today, there is a zero-to-three movement, made up of advocacygroups and policymakers like HillaryClinton, which uses the promise and

the threat of this new brain science topush for better pediatric care, earlychildhood education, and day care.Reiner has started something called theI Am Your Child Foundation, devotedto this cause, and has enlisted the sup-port of, among others, Tom Hanks,Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Charl-ton Heston, and Rosie ODonnell.Some lawmakers now wonder whetherprograms like Head Start ought to bedrastically retooled, to focus on babiesand toddlers rather than on preschool-

ers.The state of California recently ap-proved a fifty-cent-per-pack tax oncigarettes to fund programs aimed atimproving care for babies and toddlersup to the age of five. The state govern-ments of Georgia and Tennessee sendclassical-music CDs home from thehospital with every baby, and Floridarequires that day-care centers play clas-sical music every dayall in the beliefthat Mozart will help babies build their

minds in this critical window of devel-opment. During the first part of thetwentieth century, science built a strongfoundation for the physical health ofour children, Mrs. Clinton said in herspeech that morning. The last years ofthis century are yielding similar break-throughs for the brain. We are . . . com-ing closer to the day when we shouldbe able to insure the well-being of chil-dren in every domainphysical, social,intellectual, and emotional.

The First Lady took pains not tomake the days message sound too ex-treme. I hope that this does not createthe impression that, once a childs thirdbirthday rolls around, the importantwork is over, she said, adding thatmuch of the brains emotional wiringisnt completed until adolescence, andthat children never stop needing thelove and care of their parents. Still,there was something odd about the pro-ceedings. This was supposed to be ameeting devoted to new findings inbrain science, but hardly any of thebrain science that was discussed wasnew. In fact, only a modest amount ofbrain science was discussed at all. Manyof the speakers were from the worlds ofeducation and policy. Then, there wasMrs. Clintons claim that the experi-ences of our first few years could deter-mine whether we grow up to be peace-ful or violent, focussed or undisciplined.We tend to think that the environmen-

tal influences upon the way we turn outare the sum of a lifetime of experi-encesthat someone is disciplinedbecause he spent four years in the Ma-rines, or because he got up every morn-ing as a teen-ager to train with theswim team. But Hillary Clinton wasproposing that we direct our attentioninstead to what happens to children in avery brief window early in life. TheFirst Lady, now a candidate for theUnited States Senate, is associating her-self with a curious theory of human de-

velopment. Where did this idea comefrom? And is it true?

JOHN BRUER tackles both these ques-tions in his new book, The Myth ofThe First Three Years (Free Press;$25). From its title, Bruers work soundslike a rant. It isnt. Noting the culturalclout of the zero-to-three idea, Bruer,who heads a medical-research founda-tion in St. Louis, sets out to compare NI

COLECLAVELOUX

INApril of 1997, Hillary Clinton was

the host of a daylong conferenceat the White House entitled What

New Research on the Brain Tells UsAbout Our Youngest Children. In heropening remarks, which were beamedlive by satellite to nearly a hundredhospitals, universities, and schools, inthirty-seven states, Mrs. Clinton said,Fifteen years ago, we thought that ababys brain structure was virtually com-plete at birth. She went on:

Now we understand that it is a workin progress, and that everything we dowith a child has some kind of potentialphysical influence on that rapidly formingbrain. A childs earliest experiencestheirrelationships with parents and caregivers,the sights and sounds and smells and feel-ings they encounter, the challenges theymeetdetermine how their brains arewired. . . . These experiences can determinewhether children will grow up to be peace-ful or violent citizens, focussed or undisci-plined workers, attentive or detached par-ents themselves.

At the afternoon session of the con-ference, the keynote speech was givenby the director turned childrens advo-

cate Rob Reiner. His goal, Reiner toldthe assembled, was to get the public tolook through the prism of the firstthree years of life in terms of problemsolving at every level of society:

If we want to have a real significant im-pact, not only on childrens success in schooland later on in life, healthy relationships,but also an impact on reduction in crime,teen pregnancy, drug abuse, child abuse,welfare,homelessness, and a variety of othersocial ills, we are going to have to address

BOOKS

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BABY STEPSDo our first three years of life determine how well turn out?

BY MALCOLM GLADWELL

THE CRITICS


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what people like Rob Reiner and Hil-lary Clinton are saying to what neuro-scientists have actually concluded. Theresult is a superb book, clear and engag-ing, that serves as both popular scienceand intellectual history.

Mrs. Clinton and her allies, Bruerwrites, are correct in their premise: thebrain at birth isa work in progress. Rel-atively few connections among its bil-lions of cells have yet been established.In the first few years of life, the brainbegins to wire itself up at a furious pace,forming hundreds of thousands, evenmillions, of new synapses every second.Infants produce so many new neuralconnections, so quickly, that the brainof a two-year-old is actually far more

dense with neural connections than thebrain of an adult. After three, that burstof activity seems to slow down, and ourbrain begins the long task of rationaliz-ing its communications network, find-ing those connections which seem to bethe most important and getting rid ofthe rest.

During this brief initial period ofsynaptical exuberance, the brain is es-pecially sensitive to its environment.David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, ina famous experiment, sewed one ofthe eyes of a kitten shut for the firstthree months of its life, and when theyopened it back up they found that theanimal was permanently blind in thateye. There are critical periods early in

life, then, when the brain will not de-velop properly unless it receives a cer-tain amount of outside stimulation. Inanother series of experiments, begunin the early seventies, William Gree-nough, a psychologist at the Universityof Illinois, showed that a rat reared in alarge, toy-filled cage with other ratsended up with a substantially more de-veloped visual cortex than a rat thatspent its first month alone in a small,barren cage: the brain, to use the wordfavored by neuroscientists, is plasticthat is, modifiable by experience. Inother words, Hillary Clintons violentcitizens and unfocussed workers mightseem to be the human equivalents ofkittens whove had an eye sewed shut,

Infancy is an experimental research program, the authors of The Scientist in the Crib argue, and the parents are the lab rats.


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or rats whove been reared in a barrencage. If in the critical first three years ofsynapse formation we could give peo-ple the equivalent of a big cage full oftoys, she was saying, we could makethem healthier and smarter.

Put this way, these ideas sound quitereasonable, and its easy to see why theyhave attracted such excitement. But

Bruers contribution is to show how, onseveral critical points, this account ofchild development exaggerates or mis-interprets the available evidence.

Consider, he says, the matter of syn-apse formation. The zero-to-three ac-tivists are convinced that the number ofsynapses we form in our earliest yearsplays a big role in determining ourmental capacity. But do we know thatto be true? People with a form of men-tal retardation known as fragile-X syn-drome, Bruer notes, have higher num-

bers of synapses in their brain than therest of us. More important, the periodin which humans gain real intellectualmaturity is late adolescence, by whichtime the brain is aggressivelypruningthe number of connections. Is intelli-gence associated with how many syn-apses you have or with how efficientlyyou manage to sort out and make senseof those connections later in life? Nordo we know how dependent the initial

burst of synapse formation is on envi-ronmental stimulation. Bruer writes ofan experiment where the right hand ofa monkey was restrained in a leathermitten from birth to four months, ef-fectively limiting all sensory stimula-tion. Thats the same period whenyoung monkeys form enormous num-bers of connections in the somato-

sensory cortex, the area of the monkeybrain responsible for size and texturediscriminations, so youd think thatthe restrained hand would be impaired.But it wasnt: within a short time, itwas functioning normally, which sug-gests that there is a lot more flexibil-ity and resilience in some aspects ofbrain development than we might haveimagined.

Bruer also takes up the questionof early childhood as a developmentalwindow. It makes sense that if children

dont hear language by the age of elevenor twelve they arent going to speak,and that children who are seriously ne-glected throughout their upbringingwill suffer permanent emotional injury.But why, Bruer asks, did advocates ar-rive at three years of age as a cutoffpoint? Different parts of the brain de-velop at different speeds. The rate ofsynapse formation in our visual cortexpeaks at around three or four months.

The synapses in our prefrontal cortexthe parts of our brain involved in themost sophisticated cognitive taskspeak perhaps as late as three years, andarent pruned back until middle-to-lateadolescence. How can the same cutoffapply to both regions?

Greenoughs rat experiments areused to support the critical-windowidea, because he showed that he couldaffect brain development in those earlyyears by altering the environment of hisanimals.The implications of the exper-iment arent so straightforward, though.The experiments began when the ratswere about three weeks old, which is al-ready past rat infancy, and continueduntil they were fifty-five days old, whichput them past puberty. So the experi-ment showed the neurological conse-quences of deprivation not during somecritical window of infancy but duringthe creatures entire period of matura-tion. In fact, when Greenough repeatedhis experiment with rats that were fourhundred and fifty days oldwell pastmiddle agehe found that those keptin complex environments once againhad significantly denser neural connec-tions than those kept in isolation.

Even the meaning of the kitten withits eye sewn shut turns out to be farfrom obvious. When that work was re-peated on monkeys, researchers foundthat if they deprived both eyes of earlystimulationrearing a monkey in dark-

ness for its first six monthsthe ani-mal could see (although not perfectly),and the binocularity of its vision, theability of its left and right eyes to cor-dinate images, was normal. The expe-riment doesnt show that more stimu-lation is better than less for binocularvision. It just suggests that whateverstimulation there is should be balanced,which is why closing one eye tilts thedevelopmental process in favor of theopen eye.

To say that the brain is plastic, then,

is not to say that the brain is dependenton certain narrow windows of stimula-tion. Neuroscientists say instead that in-fant brains have experience-expectantplasticitywhich means that they needonly something that approximates anormal environment. Bruer writes:

The odds that our children will end upwith appropriately fine-tuned brains are in-credibly favorable, because the stimuli thebrain expectsduring critical periods are the

Right. How could anyone look at a rotting zebracorpse and not believe theres a God?


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kinds of stimuli that occur everywhere andall the time within the normal developmen-tal environment for our species. It is onlywhen there are severe genetic or environ-mental aberrations from the normal thatnatures expectations are frustrated andneural development goes awry.

In the case of monkeys, the only wayto destroy their binocular vision is tosew one eye shut for six monthsanentirely contrived act that would almostnever happen in the wild. Greenoughpoints out that the complex environ-ment he created for his ratsa largecage full of toys and other animalsisactually the closest equivalent of the en-vironment that a rat would encounternaturally. When he created a super-enriched environment for his rats, onewith even more stimulation than theywould normally encounter, the ratswerent any better off. The only wayhe could affect the neurological de-velopment of the animals was to putthem in a barren cage by themselvesagain, a situation that an animal wouldnever encounter in the wild. Bruerquotes Steve Petersen, a neuroscientistat Washington University, in St. Louis,as saying that neurological develop-ment so badlywantsto happen that hisonly advice to parents would be Dontraise your children in a closet, starvethem, or hit them in the head with afrying pan. Petersen was, of course,being flip. But the general conclusionof researchers seems to be that we hu-

man beings enjoy a fairly significantmargin of error in our first few years oflife. Studies done of Romanian orphanswho spent their first year under condi-tions of severe deprivation suggest thatmost (but not all) can recover if adoptedinto a nurturing home. In another study,psychologists examined children froman overcrowded orphanage who hadbeen badly neglected as infants and sub-sequently adopted into loving homes.Within two years of their adoption, onepsychologist involved in their rehabilita-

tion had concluded:We had not anticipated the older chil-

dren who had suffered deprivations forperiods of 2 1/2 to 4 years to show swiftresponse to treatment. That they did soamazed us. These inarticulate, underde-veloped youngsters who had formed norelationships in their lives, who were aim-less and without a capacity to concentrateon anything, had resembled a pack of ani-mals more than a group of human beings. . . .As we worked with the children, it becameapparent that their inadequacy was not the


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chologist; we parents are the laboratoryrats.

These ideas about child developmentare, when you think about it, oddlycomplementary to the neurological ar-guments of John Bruer. The paradox ofthe zero-to-three movement is that, forall its emphasis on how alive childrensbrains are during their early years, itviews babies as profoundly passiveas hostage to the quality of the experi-ences provided for them by their par-ents and caregivers. The Scientist inthe Crib shows us something quitedifferent. Children are scientists, whodevelop theories and interpret evidencefrom the world around them in accor-dance with those theories. And whenevidence starts to mount suggesting thatthe existing theory isnt correctwaita minute, just because I like crackersdoesnt mean Mommy likes crackersthey create a new theory to explain theworld, just as a physicist would if con-fronted with new evidence on the rela-tion of energy and matter. Gopnik,Meltzoff, and Kuhl play with this ideaat some length. Science, they suggest,is actually a kind of institutionalizedchildhood, an attempt to harness abili-ties that evolved to be used by babies oryoung children. Ultimately, the argu-ment suggests that child developmentis a rational process directed and pro-pelled by the child himself. How does

the child learn about dif-

ferent desires? By sys-tematically and repeat-edly provoking a responsefrom adults. In the broc-coli experiment, the adultprovided the fourteen-month-old with the in-formation (I hate Gold-fish crackers) necessaryto make the right decision.But the child ignoredthat information untilhe himself had developed

a theory to interpret it.When The Scientist inthe Crib describes chil-dren as budding psychol-ogists and adults as labo-ratory rats, its more thana clever turn of phrase.Gopnik, Meltzoff, andKuhl observe that our in-fluence on infants seemsto work in concert with

result of damage but, rather, was due toa dearth of normal experiences withoutwhich development of human quali tiesis impossible. After a year of treatment,many of these older children were show-ing a trusting dependency toward the staffof volunteers and . . . self-reliance in playand routines.

SOMEyears ago, the Berkeley psychol-ogy professor Alison Gopnik andone of her students, Betty Repacholi,conducted an experiment with a seriesof fourteen-month-old toddlers. Repa-choli showed the babies two bowls offood, one filled with Goldfish crackersand one filled with raw broccoli. All thebabies, naturally, preferred the crackers.Repacholi then tasted the two foods,saying Yuck and making a disgustedface at one and saying Yum and mak-ing a delighted face at the other. Thenshe pushed both bowls toward the ba-bies, stretched out her hand, and said,Could you give me some?

When she liked the crackers, thebabies gave her crackers. No surprisethere. But when Repacholi liked thebroccoli and hated the crackers, thebabies were presented with a difficultphilosophical issuethat different peo-ple may have different, even conflict-ing, desires. The fourteen-month-oldscouldnt grasp that. They thought thatif they liked crackers everyone likedcrackers, and so they gave Repacholi thecrackers, despite her expressed pref-

erences. Four months later, the babieshad, by and large, figured this principleout, and when Repacholi made a faceat the crackers they knew enough togive her the broccoli. The Scientist inthe Crib (Morrow; $24), a fascinat-ing new book that Gopnik has writtenwith Patricia Kuhl and Andrew Melt-zoff, both at the University of Wash-ington, argues that the discovery of thisprinciplethat different people havedifferent desiresis the source of theso-called terrible twos. What makesthe terrible twos so terrible is not thatthe babies do things you dont wantthem to doone-year-olds are plentygood at thatbut that they do thingsbecauseyou dont want them to, the au-thors write. And why is that? Not, as iscommonly thought, because toddlerswant to test parental authority, or be-cause theyre just contrary. Instead, thebook argues, the terrible twos repre-sent a rational and engaged explorationof what is to two-year-olds a brand-new ideaa generalization of the in-sight that the fact that they hate broc-coli and like crackers doesnt mean thateveryone hates broccoli and likes crack-ers. Toddlers are systematically test-ing the dimensions on which their de-sires and the desires of others may be inconflict, the authors write. Infancy isan experimental research program, inwhich the child is the budding psy-

We feel that your female characters are somewhat undeveloped.


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opment of babiesare swift, sponta-neous, automatic and unpremeditated.

DOES it matter that Mrs. Clintonand her allies have misread theevidence on child development? In onesense, it doesnt. The First Lady doesnot claim to be a neuroscientist. She is apolitician, and she is interested in thebrains of children only to further an en-tirely worthy agenda: improved daycare, pediatric care, and early-childhoodeducation. Sooner or later, however, badjustifications for social policy can startto make for bad social policy, and thatis the real danger of the zero-to-threemovement.

In Lise Eliots book, for instance,theres a short passage in which shewrites of the extraordinary powers ofimitation that infants possess. A fifteen-month-old who watches an experi-menter lean over and touch his foreheadto the top of a box will, when presentedwith that same box four months later,do exactly the same thing. The factthat these memories last so long is trulyremarkableand a little bit frighten-ing, Eliot writes, and she continues:

It goes a long way toward explaining whychildren, even decades later, are so prone toreplicating their parents behavior. If toddlerscan repeat, even several months later, actionstheyve seen only once or twice, just imaginehow watching their parents daily activitiesmust affect them. Everything they see andhear over timework, play, fighting, smok-

ing, drinking, reading, hitting, laughing,words, phrases, and gesturesis stored inways that shape their later actions, and themore they see of a particular behavior, thelikelier it is to reappear in their own conduct.

There is something to this. Why weact the way we do is obviously the resultof all kinds of influences and experi-ences, including those cues we pick upunconsciously as babies. But this doesntmean, as Eliot seems to think it does,that you can draw a straight line be-tween a concrete adult behavior andwhat little Suzie, at six months, saw her

mother do. As far as we can tell, for in-stance, infant imitation has nothing todo with smoking. As the behavioral ge-neticist David Rowe has demonstrated,the children of smokers are more likelythan others to take up the habit becauseof genetics: they have inherited the samegenes that made their parents like, andbe easily addicted to, nicotine. Once youaccount for heredity, there is little evi-dence that parental smoking habits in-

childrens own learning abilities. New-borns will imitate facial expressionsbut not complex actions they dontunderstand themselves. And the au-thors conclude, Children wont takein what you tell them until it makessense to them. Other people dont sim-ply shape what children do; parentsarent the programmers. Instead, theyseem designed to provide just the rightsort of information.

It isnt until you read The Scientistin the Crib alongside more conven-tional child-development books that youbegin to appreciate the full implicationsof its argument. Here, for example, isa passage from Whats Going On inThere? How the Brain and Mind De-velop in the First Five Years of Life, byLise Eliot, who teaches at the Univer-sity of Chicago: Its important to avoidthe kind of muddled baby-talk thatturns a sentence like Is she the cutestlittle baby in the world? into Uz see dacooest wiwo baby inna wowud? Care-givers should try to enunciate clearlywhen speaking to babies and young chil-dren, giving them the cleanest, simplestmodel of speech possible. Gopnik,Meltzoff, and Kuhl see things a littledifferently. First, they point out, by six orseven months babies are already highlyadept at decoding the sounds they heararound them, using the same skills wedo when we talk to someone with athick foreign accent or a bad cold. If you

say Uz see da cooest wiwo baby innawowud? they hear something like Isshe the cutest little baby in the world?Perhaps more important, this sort ofMotheresewith its elongated vowelsand repetitions and overpronounced syl-lablesis just the thing for babies to de-velop their language skills. And Moth-erese, the authors point out, seems tobe innate. Its found in every culture inthe world, and anyone who speaks to ababy uses it, automatically, even withoutrealizing it. Babies want Motherese, so

they manage to elicit it from the rest ofus. Thats a long way from the passivebaby who thrives only because of thespecialized, high-end parenting skills ofthe caregiver. One thing that sciencetells us is that nature has designed usto teach babies, as much as it has de-signed babies to learn, Gopnik, Melt-zoff, and Kuhl write. Almost all of theadult actions weve describedactionsthat are critical for the cognitive devel-


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fluence children; the adopted childrenof smokers, for instance, are no morelikely to smoke than the children of non-smokers.To the extent that social imita-tion is a factor in smoking, the psychol-ogist Judith Rich Harris has observed, itis imitation that occurs in adolescencebe-tween a teen-ager and his or her peers.So if you were to use Eliots ideas to de-sign an anti-smoking campaign youddirect your efforts to stop parents fromsmoking around their children, and missthe social roots of smoking entirely.

This pointthe distance betweeninfant experience and grownup be-havioris made even more powerfullyin Jerome Kagans marvellous newbook, Three Seductive Ideas (Oxford;$27.50). Kagan, a professor of psychol-ogy at Harvard, offers a devastating cri-tique of what he calls infant determin-ism, arguing that many of the trulycritical moments of socializationthemoments that social policy properly con-cerns itself withoccur well after theage of three. As Kagan puts it, a per-sons level of anxiety, depression, apathyand anger is linked to his or her sym-bolic constructions of experiencehow the bare facts of any experience arecombined with the context of that event,attitudes toward those involved, expec-tations and memories of past experience.The Palestinian youths who throwstones at Israeli soldiers believe that theIsraeli government has oppressed them

unjustly, Kagan writes. He goes on:The causes of their violent actions are

not traceable to the parental treatment theyreceived in their first few years. Similarly,no happy African-American two-year-oldknows about the pockets of racism in Amer-ican society or the history of oppressionblacks have suffered. The realization thatthere is prejudice will not take form untilthat child is five or six years old.

Infant determinism doesnt just en-courage the wrong kind of policy. Ulti-mately, it undermines the basis of so-cial policy. Why bother spending money

trying to help older children or adults ifthe patterns of a lifetime are already, ir-remediably, in place? Inevitably, somepeople will interpret the zero-to-threedogma to mean that our obligations tothe disadvantaged expire by the timethey reach the age of three. Kaganwrites of a famous Hawaiian study ofchild development, in which almostseven hundred children, from a varietyof ethnic and economic backgrounds,

men who are actually vending. Always sym-pathetic to their struggles in a society whosereactions typically range from disapprovalto fear, Duneier nonetheless avoids soci-ological romance and doesnt fight shy ofissues like criminality and drug abuse.

A WEAKNESS FORALMOST EVERYTHING:NOTES ON LIFE , GAST RON OMY, AND

TRAVEL, by Aldo Buzzi, translated fromthe Italian by Ann Goldstein (Steerforth;$9.50). When Buzzi is caught watchinghis dinner cook through the oven door, heexplains that he has a weakness for scal-lops, whereupon his host retorts, You havea weakness for almost everything. Theseelegant yet informal essaysa sequel ofsorts to Buzzis 1996 collection, Journeyto the Land of the Fliesconfirm thisobservation as the authors curiosity leadshim from the Roman Empire to Sputnikand back again. But whether he is apolo-gizing to a pair of favorite shoes that hemust consign to the garbage or musing onthe exact location of paradise, thoughts ofthe kitchen are never far away. A bird-filled garden is described as a restaurantfor a cat, and a fresco of San Lorenzo inthe Italian countryside prompts a cookingtip: Without meaning to, the saint demon-strates the best way to use the grill.

A LIFE ONTHE STAGE, by Jacob Adler, trans-lated from the Yiddish by Lulla Rosen-feld (Knopf; $30). When Adler, the GreatEagle of the Yiddish stage, died, in New

York in 1926, between fifty and a hun-dred thousand people gathered on theLower East Side to mourn him. His mem-oirs, first published in the Yiddish news-paper Die Varheit more than eighty years

ago, constitute the pilgrims progress of arough Odessan youth whose monumentalpresence on the stagein roles rangingfrom Uriel Acosta to the Yiddish KingLearmade him a star. Adlers career alsospanned the birth, growth, and maturityof the Yiddish theatre, a development thathe was largely responsible for. In the pro-logue to his memoirs, he writes, My lifehas been no walking shadow, no brief mo-ment. When I measure it with the mea-sure of my feelings, it has been an eter-nity, an ocean.

THE FLASHBOAT: POEMS COLLECTED ANDRECLAIMED, by Jane Cooper (Norton;$23.95). Reclaiming a number of for-

merly uncollected poems, this retrospec-tive traces Coopers impressively variedcareer from the late forties to the mid-nineties. Quietly lyrical and pointedly po-litical by turns, Cooper eventually re-placed the flinty formalism of her postwarlyrics with lines cast in the natural speechof the breakfast table. Whether survey-ing the oils of OKeeffe, the novels ofCather, or the plight of King Kong,Cooper handles with equal assurance pub-lic statement and private reflection, eachmarked by what she values as the san-ity of observed detail.

THE HOUSEGUEST, by Agnes Rossi (Dut-ton; $23.95). In 1934, Edward Devlinmoves from Ireland to Paterson, New Jer-sey, in the hope of finding a new life:money, love, and the ability to forget allthat came before, which included fightingfor the I.R.A. and losing his wife to tu-berculosis. He soon meets up with an oldbut distant friend, John Fitzgibbon, a

wealthy entrepreneur, and his much youngerwife, Sylvia. Fitzgibbon is a version of JayGatsbyhis coiffure, white shirts, and goldcufflinks lend him a compelling veneer ofgreatnessbut Edward is far more ag-gressive than Nick Carraway. His seduc-tion of Sylvia (and its effect on Fitzgib-bon) is its own artfully told and patently

American story.

SICK PUPPY, by Carl Hiaasen (Knopf; $25).A twenty-six-year-old self-styled ecoter-rorist spots a man tossing trash from hiscar window onto a Florida highway andbegins stalking him. The litterbug turnsout to be a fat-cat lobbyist and politicalfixer, and his gonzo comeuppance sendshim bouncing like a pinball among a hand-ful of cartoonishly venal politicians, shore-line developers, animal smugglers, and hitmen. Hiaasens over-the-top plotting anddark hilarity, however, are always in theservice of a passionate sense of outrage atFloridas culture of excess, and at the will-ingness of his fellow-natives to sell outtheir home state.

JOSEPH MCCARTHY: REXAMINING THELIFE AND LEGACY OFAMERICAS MOSTHATED SENATOR, by Arthur Herman(Free Press; $26). In this revisionist his-tory, a right-wing academic attempts to

make us think better of Joe McCarthy.He fails for several reasons, among themhis admission that McCarthy preferredto exaggerateeven lie when he launchedhis accusations. In addition, despite thebooks apparatus of scholarship, Hermanuncritically takes part in the vendettaagainst the New Deal. He neglects to ac-knowledge, for example, that liberal Dem-ocrats were doubtful about accusationsof Communism because his conservativeheroes had been calling both the Demo-crats and such measures as Social Secu-rity Communist since the nineteen-thirties. The authors justification for Mc-Carthys crusade is the reality of Com-munist espionage. This, unfortunately,

has continued in spite of McCarthyslabors, which succeeded only in taintinganti-Communism.

SIDEWALK, by Mitchell Duneier, with pho-tographs by Ovie Carter (Farrar, Straus &Giroux; $27). Since 1992, Duneier, a so-ciologist, has been a participant-observerin the lives of a group of street vendersmostly poor, black, and maleoperat-ing in the center of Greenwich Village.He anatomizes an extensive unofficial econ-omy that comprises whole strata of pan-handlers and scavengers in addition to the

BRIEFLY NOTED


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were followed from birth to adulthood.The best predictor of who would de-velop serious academic or behavioralproblems in adolescence, he writes, wassocial class: more than eighty per cent ofthe children who got in trouble camefrom the poorest segment of the sam-ple. This is the harsh reality of childdevelopment, from which the zero-to-three movement offers a con-venient escape. Kagan writes,It is considerably more ex-pensive to improve the qualityof housing, education andhealth of the approximatelyone million children living inpoverty in America today than to urgetheir mothers to kiss, talk to, and playwith them more consistently. In hisview, to suggest to poor parents thatplaying with and talking to their infantwill protect the child from future acade-mic failure and guarantee life successis an act of dishonesty. But that doesnot go far enough. It is also an unwit-ting act of reproach: it implies to disad-vantaged parents that if their childrendo not turn out the way children ofprivilege do it is their faultthat theyare likely to blame for the flawed wiringof their childrens brains.

IN 1973, when Hillary Clintonthen,of course, known as Hillary Rod-hamwas a young woman just out oflaw school, she wrote an essay for the

Harvard Educational Review entitledChildren Under the Law.The courts,she wrote, ought to reverse their long-standing presumption that children arelegally incompetent. She urged, instead,that childrens interests be consideredindependently from those of their par-ents. Children ought to be deemed ca-pable of making their own decisionsand voicing their own interests, unlessevidence could be found to the contrary.To her, the presumption of incompe-tence gave the courts too much discre-

tion in deciding what was in the childsbest interests, and that discretion wasmost often abused in cases of childrenfrom poor minority families. Childrenof these families, she wrote, are per-ceived as bearers of the sins and disabil-ities of their fathers.

This is a liberal argument, because acentral tenet of liberalism is that socialmobility requires a release not merelyfrom burdens imposed by poverty but

also from those imposed by familythatabsent or indifferent or incompetentparents should not be permitted to de-stroy a childs prospects. What else wasthe classic Horatio Alger story about? InRagged Dick, the most famous ofAlgers novels, Dicks father runs off be-fore his sons birth, and his mother diesdestitute while Dick is still a baby. He

becomes a street urchin, be-fore rising to the middle classthrough a combination of hardwork, honesty, and luck.Whatmade such tales so powerfulwas, in part, the hopeful no-tion that the circumstances of

your birth need not be your destiny; andthe modern liberal state has been an at-tempt to make good on that promise.

But Mrs. Clinton is now promotinga movement with a different messagethat who you are and what you are ca-pable of could be the result of how suc-cessful your mother and father were inrearing you. In her book It Takes a Vil-lage, she criticizes the harsh geneticdeterminism of The Bell Curve. Butan ideology that holds that your futureis largely decided at birth by your par-ents genes is no more dispiriting thanone that holds that your future mightbe decided at three by your parentsbehavior. The unintended consequenceof the zero-to-three movement is that,once again, it makes disadvantaged chil-dren the bearers of the sins and disabil-

ities of their parents.The truth is that the tradit ional

aims of the liberal agenda find am-ple support in the arguments of JohnBruer, of Jerome Kagan, of JudithRich Harris, and of Gopnik, Meltzoff,and Kuhl. All of them offer consider-able evidence that what the middleclass perceives as inadequate parentingneed not condemn a baby for life, andthat institutions and interventions tohelp children as they approach matu-rity can make a big difference in how

they turn out. It is, surely, a sad ironythat, at the very moment when sciencehas provided the intellectual reinforce-ment for modern liberalism, liberalsthemselves are giving up the fight. o

3

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR!

[Headline in the Tulsa(Okla.) World]STEP UP TO THE PLATE AND

FISH OR CUT BAIT


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IN the twentieth cen-tury, the Met haspresented world pre-mires of twenty Amer-ican operas. None of

them, with the possible exception ofSamuel Barbers Vanessa, has founda place in the repertory. Playing nowat the Met is another attempt at whatmust seem a cursed genreAmericanopera on a grand scale. The composeris John Harbison; the subject is The

Great Gatsby. It would be a pleasureto report that, as the century expired,the Met finally found a major new workworthy of its gigantic stage. John Har-bison is an excellent craftsman, a mas-ter of many genres, and he has beenyearning to write a Gatsby operafor much of his life. And there weremoments when he seemed to have thattantalizing goalthe great Ameri-can operawithin his grasp. That helet it slip away makes one wonderwhether any living composer is up to

the task.The Mets history with Americanais strange and sad. Early in the cen-tury, premires were offered seeminglyon a first-come basis: such names asJohn Laurence Seymour, John AdamHugo, Charles Wakefield Cadman, andReginald De Koven are now shroudedin an aura of dull mystery. In the mid-dle of the century, when the Met couldhave turned to genius populists likeCopland and Bernstein, it lost interestin new opera. In the last decade, things

have picked up. John Coriglianos TheGhosts of Versailles appeared in 1991;Philip Glasss The Voyage followed in1992; and new operas by Tobias Pickerand Tan Dun are slated for the nextfew years. The Mets commissioningprocess has become more saneandperhaps too cautious. The companydoes not seem prepared to take a chanceon a younger composer, or on one whomight stir up some stylistic or political

controversy. If the Met wants to banishonce and for all the pale ghost of J. L.Seymour, it might have to put its trustin a composer who will try to shake thehouse at its foundation, rather than onewho wishes to crown a distinguishedcareer.

Gatsby is, in purely musical terms,a considerable achievement. UnlikeCoriglianos Ghosts, it speaks in itsown individual and original language.In the annals of modern Met premires,

only Vanessa rivals it for substance.Here, for once, is a new opera that can-not be summed up with a checklist ofborrowed tunes. Harbisons personalityis present right from the start: tonalchords grind against each other in dis-sonant formations; the music picksup steam in insistent, irregular rhythms;attenuated melodies rise and fade; anewly minted nineteen-twenties tunetwirls in a vaguely surreal harmonicspace. Harbison commands a very widearray of styles, all of them filtered

through his own spiky, polytonal vo-cabulary. At one moment, he indulgesin sighing Renaissance polyphony orchugging Bachian counterpoint. Thenhe writes an expert, hummable torchsong or tango. At his best, he createsmusic of brittle brilliance and mobilecomplexity.

With a running time of over threehours, however, Gatsby outstays itswelcome and becomes monotonous.The libretto is by the composer him-self, and, although it ingeniously tele-

scopes certain episodes from the novel,it should have left out still more. Aftera while, claustrophobia sets in. Thosegrinding chords of the overture keepreturningaugmented C major andD-flat major, with one tone of eachsticking like a thorn in the side of theotherand they create a humid, nox-ious atmosphere. Theres a lot of tonal-ity in the piece, but simple triads arefew and far between: Harbison is for-

MUSICAL EVENTS

6

GATSBYESQUE

Making an opera of Fitzgeralds masterpiece.

BY ALEX ROSS


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ever piling them up in bitonal clumps,so that the bright colors of commonchords mix into shades of brown andgray. En masse, Harbisons orchestramakes a gritty, brassy sound. Whatdoes all this have to do with the sar-donic suavity of F. Scott Fitzgerald?Only when Harbison writes in jazzidioms does he get the texture ofthe prose. Otherwise, he uses a lan-guage that would seem better suited

to Brecht.Most curious is the vocal writing,

which doesnt seem to follow the flow ofFitzgeralds language, or, for that matter,the flow of anyone elses. It goes upwhere one would expect it to go down,and vice versa. At odd moments, it leapsacross wide, awkward intervals, like thebad twelve-tone vocalizing of old.WhenGatsby enters, he sings, over a descend-ing octave, Im Gatsby, and the first

note is sustained for nearly two bars. Hecomes across not as a charming charla-tan but as a pompous fool. Nick Car-raway responds with an overheated de-scending octave of his own. (For thosewho recently saw Tristan at the Met,the exchange is unfortunately reminis-cent of the moment in Act II whenTristan and Isolde greet each other.)Harbison usually sets Gatsbys signaturephrase, old sport, as a falling fourth,

with the first syllable drawn out in away that it never is in conversationalspeech. The intent may be to exposeGatsbys pretensions, but the characterbecomes maladroit and nerdynot un-like Al Gore when hes trying to soundSouthern.

If the Met had a sexy, strong-voicedAmerican tenor to give the title rolespit and polish, Gatsby might havemore impact. But Jerry Hadley sounded

strained on opening night, his voicedrying out in the big aria that pre-cedes his demise. Stuffed into a pinksuit, he did not resemble a man who,as people speculate in the book, killeda man once. He looked nothing likeRobert Redfords Gatsby and a lotlike Robert De Niros Rupert Pupkin.Dwayne Croft was so much more as-sured and resonant in the baritone roleof Nick that I wondered whether Gats-

bys part should have been transposeddown and assigned to him instead.Dawn Upshaw, kicking a leg backwardin swing style, was a bright-voiceddelight as Daisy Buchanan. LorraineHunt Lieberson, the consummate Ba-roque diva, made a belated Met dbutas Myrtle Wilson, and she seems tohave a knack for the blues. Mark Bakershouted a lot as Tom Buchanan, not tothe detriment of the character, who is

From left: Dwayne Croft, Susan Graham, Jerry Hadley, Dawn Upshaw, Mark Baker, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson.


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EVERYTHING hap-pens at once inOliver Stones pro-football movie, AnyGiven Sunday. The ball

is snapped, thighs churn, bodies lock to-gether, and, as the coach screams andpoints, an arm is raised to throw a pass.Most of the time, Stone takes us deepinside the action, so deep that we mayfeel were being threshed by the bladesand teeth of a ma-chine. The footballscenes are brutallyf ragmented, andwe cant see the de-sign of any givenplayits the slamand clash that mat-ter to Stone, theHomeric melee,which gets pulledto pieces and thencombined like theflailing limbs of amusic video. Any

Given Sunday hasbeen made withenormous skill.Th e so undt ra ck ,for instance, is ak ind of techno-logical miracleaspiked underbrushof crowd noises,yelled instructions,random curses. But this is an over-dynamized and exhausting movie.Stone, God bless him, wants to have

three orgasms at once. He wants ustohave them, too; but, however pleasanta goal in life, this bonanza may not bethe best thing for art.

In order to get a script for AnyGiven Sunday, Stone merged a vari-ety of different football projects thatwere lying around Hollywood, eachwith its attendant screenplays and re-visions. The result is a compendium ofthundering clichs.There is the haggard

always shouting about something. Su-san Graham, as Jordan Baker, mingledher creamy mezzo with Upshaws so-prano to create some of the eveningsmusical high points. James Levine con-ducted vigorously.

Whats best about this Gatsby isits ensembles, its crowd scenes, its cos-tumes, its look. Michael Yeargans sets,Duane Schulers lighting, and JaneGreenwoods costumes mix soft twi-light tones and bold flapper styles.In the party scenes at Gatsbys man-sion, Chinese lanterns glimmer infront of a full moon and the famousgreen light across the bay. RobertLa Fosse, the choreographer, stagessome neat two-step dancing. MarkLamos, the director, periodically shiftsthe whole cast into dreamlike slowmotion. When the onstage band startsup one of Harbisons ersatz jazz num-berswith wittily rhyming lyrics byMurray HorwitzFitzgeralds wholedecadent West Egg world comesto life. Then Hadley starts singinghis needling octaves, and the spellis broken.

WHAT contemporary opera couldfill the Mets cavernous spaces?Olivier Messiaens St. Franois dAs-sise, for one. It is the last will andtestament of the French master, whodied in 1992, and it is just beginningto make its way in the world. A new

recording on Deutsche Grammophonpart of the labels increasingly indis-pensable 20/21 seriesmakes thestrongest possible argument for a piecethat some critics greeted as a ponder-ous theological exercise at the time ofits premire, in 1983. A previous re-cording, under the direction of SeijiOzawa, gave only a hazy impression ofMessiaens score, but this one, underKent Nagano, is crystalline. St. Fran-ois is, indeed, a collection of tab-leaux from the saints life, but its music

comes at the listener at such a pitch ofintensity that the minutiae of visionsbecome the stuff of drama. Jos vanDams performance of the title rolemarks the summit of a magnificentcareer. Nagano conducts the HallOrchestra in a ferocious live perfor-mance from the Salzburg Festival. Thisis an essentially perfect document ofwhat may be the greatest religious op-era ever written. o

veteran coach of the Miami Sharks,Tony DAmato (Al Pacino), who hassacrificed his life to the game; the blond-bitch, money-mad owner (CameronDiaz), a retread from the baseball movieMajor League; the aging star quarter-back (Dennis Quaid), a popular herowho plays hurt, just as Nick Nolte didin North Dallas Forty; and a younghotshot, the black quarterback WillieBeamen ( Jamie Foxx), a brilliant but

arrogant athlete who changes the playsin the huddle and gets other playersinjured. Like dozens of young movie

heroes before him, from Tyrone Powerto Richard Gere, Willie is out for him-self; he has to be humbled by his team-mates and then educated into virtueby the old coach in order to become thegreat player that his talents have fatedhim to be.

Stone speaks through a bullhorn,but at least his instincts as an enter-tainer have revived. All the charactersin the movie are caught at an extreme

THE CURRENT CINEMA

6

ON THE BATTLEFIELDTwo studies in American cojones.

BY DAVID DENBY

Dramatic cantata: Pacino as the veteran coach of Stones team.

STEVEBRODNER

TNY1/10/00PAGE 90LIVE OPI R7368133 LS#2


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of desire: we know immediately whatthey want, and we know that they wantit all the time. Stone measures vital-ity by the strength of aggression, andvirtually every scene is a confronta-tion of one sort or another. The rit-ual combat on the field continues offthe field, for life is just football by othermeans, and everyone plays to win. Theuniformed gladiators carry off the long-limbed girls as the spoils of victory;the executives carry off money andpower. Like much of Stones work,Any Given Sunday is obvious butforceful, sensational but utterly sincere.Professional football, as Stone por-trays it, has become a corporate prisonthat traps serious men like Tony DAm-ato, a traditionalist who feels that tel-evision has pulled the game out ofshape, distorting values on the field,turning players into celebrities who riskmaiming themselves for the bonusesthat TV sales provide. This is one ofPacinos hoarse-voiced, grandstand-ing performances, and, of course, hesgreat at it, building a pre-game speechinto a dramatic cantata. The irony ofthe movie is that Any Given Sundayis itself an example of corporate art.Stone no longer believes in the powerof a single image, and, like any makerof commercials or music videos, hesends the images at us in cascades.What he puts onscreen has much morepower than a commercial, but Stone is

still addicted to a very hard sell.

THE HURRICANE is a square in-spirational movie with one ex-traordinary sequencea sequence sogood that it makes this rather clumpyand untrustworthy exercise in righ-teousness worth the trouble. Writtenby Armyan Bernstein and Dan Gor-don and directed by Norman Jewison,the film is the story of Rubin (Hur-ricane) Carter, the black boxer fromNew Jersey who spent years in prison

on a false murder charge. Convictedat the height of his career, in 1967,when he had a shot at the middle-weight championship, Carter (DenzelWashington) shows up in the statepenitentiary in Trenton wearing a beau-tiful silver-gray suita real stunner,which he refuses to relinquish for prisonstripes. I will not wear the clothes of aguilty man, he tells the warden, whoclamps him in solitary confinement for

ninety days. Sitting on the floor inhis magnificent duds, Carter seems tosplit in two. One part of him, eyes afire,is all wound up, punching and jabber-inghes very much the whirlwindweve seen at the beginning of themovie, the boxer who destroys his op-ponents in the early rounds of a fight.The other, still seated, is a frightenedman struggling to prevent his con-sciousness from dissolving altogether.The two halves tr y to contro l eachother, and the seated man gradually si-lences the punching jabberera literal-minded but effective way of suggestingthe dissociation that threatens manyprisoners in solitary confinement. Hisschizophrenia tamed, Carter makeshis days in solitary the beginning ofa great transformation. He learns todo the timeaccept the years as akind of necessary trial, a forge of self-transcendence. Gradually, he changesfrom a violent fighter to the lean, as-cetic thinker, adorned with specs, baldhead, and goatee, who becomes the sev-enties icon of the black man unjustlyincarcerated.

To say that Denzel Washingtongives his usual fine performance isperhaps to take for granted how verygood he is in one movie after another. Ihave grown accustomed to his extra-ordinary concentration, his quickness,his stern, appraising gaze; I love theway he holds back from obvious em-

phasis and lowers his voice when hesmost earnest and deadly. The trouble is,Ive become too accustomed to thesethings. In such films as Cry Freedom,Glory, Malcolm X, and CrimsonTide, Washington has played a proudblack man whom whites try to pulldown, and he has gone through theprocess, again and again, of provinghis dignity and sanity by renouncingviolence and asserting his mind andwill. This is a major theme, of coursethe black males self-creationand one

could make the case that many peo-ple, white and black, still need to hearabout it. Unfortunately, Washington isin danger of being trapped by the no-ble and necessary myth that he has con-structed, just as Sidney Poitier, anothervery gifted actor, was trapped by a com-parable myth thirty years ago. SinceWashington can be wickedly funny,Id love to see him play a wider rangeof rolesa real sleaze, a song-and-


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dance man, a Johnnie Cochran smarty-pants. In The Hurricane, he has aburnished and beautiful intensity, buteverything he does carries a solemn,didactic weight. At times, he seems tobe playing Malcolm X all over again.

This may not be entirely an accident.Norman Jewison, who had earlier donesuccessful work with black themesin such movies as In the Heat of theNight and A Soldiers Story, was setto direct the Malcolm story, from ascript by James Baldwin, when SpikeLee, in one of his lesser moments, race-carded Jewison off the table, bully-ing him out of the project and taking

it on himself, in 1991. Whatever onethinks of Lees actions, The Hurri-cane suggests that when Jewison hasa story to tell, he doesnt quite knowhow to tell it. In the movie, the law-yers working on Carters behalf havefailed, and so three white Canadians(Liev Schreiber, John Hannah, andDeborah Kara Unger) and an Ameri-can black teen-ager (Vicellous ReonShannon) combine their efforts andgather the fresh evidence that leads toCarters freedom. As accounts in the

January 3rdNation and a Jack Newfieldcolumn in the New York Post makeclear, the Canadians didnt do half ofwhat the movie suggests, and manyother people played a role in Cartersliberation. But, even if one didnt knowthe actual facts, one might be dubiousabout The Hurricane, which feels likea liberal fairy tale. What, for instance,are the romantic arrangements amongthe two Canadian men and the woman,

Lisa Peters, who all live together? Thefilmmakers are coy about this, and failto tell us that Peters and Rubin Carterlater got married.

A story so filled with goodness mighthave worked onscreen if the charac-ters were odd or funny in some way,or loaded with ambivalence and hostil-ity that they overcame, but Carters res-cuers, in this telling, are merely good,and rather bland; Jewison, who wasborn in Toronto, doesnt seem to real-ize hes underlining all the jokes aboutthe blandness of Canadians. The Hur-ricane feels false, evasive, and factuallyvery thin. What other violent activi-

ties did Carter perform in New Jerseybesides boxing? He may have been in-nocent of murder, but was he innocentof everything? Im not convinced bythis movie that he was. The Hurri-cane would have been a lot more inter-esting if the Devil that Carter con-quered in prison had owned a largerpart of his soul. But the movie is notreally concerned with character andquickly evolves into a moralized racialmelodrama. There are bad whites andgood whites. The bad ones, such as the

Javert-like police detective (Dan He-daya), who looms out of the darknessto pursue the hero, are implacably racist;the good ones appreciate the genius ofRubin Carter. The Hurricane revelsin the moral simplicities of the six-ties. Its like something intended to beshown in school. But many of us havelearned these lessons before, and per-haps we can now pray for a time whenwe no longer need to learn them again. o

There comes a point in a mans life when he just has tostop and say, O.K., I have hair on my back.

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