In the American-history textbook I used in my public high school, the chapter that covered Reconstruction included a photo of Thaddeus Stevens, the nineteenth-century radical Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, who appeared, to judge by the evidence of this daguerreotype, to have been in a foul mood. I distinctly remember how the photo’s caption referenced Stevens’s glowering, stormy countenance as an outward and visible sign of his spiteful scorn for the vanquished Confederacy. As far as the textbook’s authors were concerned, such vengeance—and only such vengeance—accounted for what they seemed to believe was overly harsh and restrictive federal rule over the

We Americans are a narcissistic bunch. The French, who understand themselves in light of ancient inheritances of language, ethnicity, and culture, have long possessed a swagger born of confidence in who they are as a nation and a people. Americans swagger, too. We may even swagger more, because we are constitutionally confused about who we really are. To be an American is to be vexed about what it means to be an American. It is to gaze at our collective navel and to wonder aloud what our country is, has been, and will become.

“Paranoids are not paranoid because they’re paranoid,” Thomas Pynchon wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow, “but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.” This line could easily slot into a eulogy for Larry “Doc” Sportello, the “gumsandal” hippie private eye at the heart of Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s seventh novel, recently adapted for the screen by Paul Thomas Anderson. Compared to Pynchon’s other books, which serve up boundless complexity and vertiginous implication in a candy-apple coating of pot resin and screwball farce, Inherent Vice is little more than an entertainment, though in the most generous, Graham Greene sense of

In the early ’70s three important novels were published that sorted through the wreckage of the Faustian project that was the American ’60s and reckoned up the costs of our excesses and hubris: Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-two in the Shade, Don DeLillo’s Great Jones Street, and Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers. And the greatest of these was Dog Soldiers.

Fanaticism has an unerring ability to undermine its most cherished values. The fanatic’s fog of irrationality and rage typically renders him (and the most powerful fanatics are reliably hims) not only incapable of successfully pursuing imagined goals, but often only effective in damaging or destroying them. The thugs who broke into the offices of the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo yesterday and murdered twelve people in the name of God and religion no doubt imagined that they were “avenging blasphemy.” But in reality, they committed an act of supreme blasphemy. They insulted, traduced, and denigrated the Prophet Muhammad, Islam, and

I doubt any writer has suffered longer over the plight of American unions or described their troubles more vividly than Thomas Geoghegan. His first book, Which Side Are You On? (1991), managed to make the struggle to revive what he called the “dumb, stupid mastodon” of organized labor seem heroic, even as the author feared it might be hopeless. Mixing personal anecdotes with his deep knowledge of history and law, Geoghegan, who has been toiling in Chicago as a union-side attorney since Jimmy Carter was a failing president, narrated the movement’s decline through a series of poignant and/or outrageous tales: