A coming-of-age tale and an intellectual history both cast an eye on modern misadventures.
By Matt Jennings
In Dan Elish’s debut novel, Nine Wives, he introduced us to Henry Mann, a beleaguered young man prone to fantasies of marital bliss—fantasies involving nine different women (thus the title) with a surprised tenth closing the story. Henry was a bumbling, endearing, at times hapless, yet, most of all, earnest character. “Henry’s a regular guy,” Elish told Blair Kloman, our reviewer. “He just happens to get a little carried away in his fantasies.”
So it would be easy to write off Justin Hearnfeld, the protagonist of The Misadventures of Justin Hearnfeld (St. Martin’s Press, 2008), as Henry Mann 2.0. Like Henry, Hearnfeld is a 20-something searching for self and love in New York City. He, too, can be described as eager and earnest, bumbling and hapless, and prone to fantasizing (including a hilarious early set piece involving a biology lab, the dissection of a fetal pig, and a Bunsen burner inadvertently set on high). Yet Justin Hearnfeld is as distinct from Henry Mann as he is similar; much like filmmaker Judd Apatow (The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up), Dan Elish ’83 is quickly establishing himself as a chronicler of comical male Sturm und Drang, whose characters share a common pathos, yet navigate their plight in their own way.
In 13 short pages, Elish gets us up to speed on Justin Hearnfeld, to date. He was born (“a bright spring morning in the fifth year of Ronald Reagan’s presidency”); he had a “normal” Manhattan childhood (“as a toddler, his life was defined by nannies, playgrounds, and, ultimately, real estate”); he went to summer camp (“it was there that Justin had his first, and possibly greatest, triumph with the opposite sex”); his parents divorced (“as it turned out, a spacious three-bedroom apartment wasn’t enough to save his parents’ long, failing marriage”); he suffered through high school (“[his] pants were hugging [his] ankles, and he was standing before the entire Clarke community dressed as Benjamin Franklin . . . in red boxer shorts!”); he saw a shrink (“at the boy’s last session of the summer, Dr. Koplinsky crossed a line”); and he went to college (“the minute Justin announced his newfound availability, the demand for his companionship dropped like a stone”).
That’s where we are when the book begins: A regular guy who has suffered the indignities and thrills of adolescence and young adulthood, who has skirted the borders of acceptance, even desirability, among peers and the opposite sex, and who may or may not, be a virgin. (The night in question was an alcohol-fuelled “blur” that left him with the “question for the ages.”)
And, oh yes, there was this: when Hernfeld graduated from high school, he vowed never again to darken the threshold of the Clarke School for Boys. Funny how such declarations can lose their staying power when one is unemployed and living at home post-college, especially when a respected mentor calls with a job offer.
The job in question is in the English department at his alma mater, and in the book’s first chapter, Elish establishes that not much as changed for Justin Hernfeld—the Clarke School for Boys is still fertile ground for the most cringe-worthy of embarrassing moments. In fact, this opening scene initially borders on distraction. Hernfeld and a colleague have squeezed in among “a gaggle of voice-cracking sophomores” to dissect the aforementioned fetal pig in a biology lab,
an administration-inspired effort to have Clarke faculty members participate in each others’ classes, “so we can keep in touch with what each other is up to.” At first, this narrative manipulation feels clichéd, too easy a solution to place Hearnfeld in a situation not just reminiscent but duplicative from high school (especially when the biology instructor was a former tormentor). Yet Elish pulls it off. The scene is funny, it furthers the story (we’re introduced through dialogue and fantasy to the three women who will play a large role in the protagonist’s delayed rite of passage), and, somehow, it’s fresh. Just when you think that Elish is mining well-trod territory, he surprises you, and it’s these surprises—coupled with even more cringe-worthy moments that would make Judd Apatow blush—that makes The Misadventures of Justin Hearnfeld a charming follow-up to Elish’s successful debut.
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In August 2005, J. Peter Scoblic the executive editor
of The New Republic, wrote a 6,000-word piece for the Washington, D.C.-based political journal titled “Moral Hazard,” in which he laid out in painstaking detail his fear that the ideology behind the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror” has left the United States more vulnerable to nuclear terrorism.
The former editor of Arms Control Today, Scoblic has written extensively on national security matters, focusing specifically on the nuclear threat, and in his New Republic piece, he warned that the administration’s preoccupation with regime change in Iraq had distracted the country from larger nuclear threats (specifically Iran and North Korea and the potential for nuclear proliferation). Scoblic, who spent two summers studying Chinese at Middlebury’s Language Schools, concluded that while describing the war on terror as a battle between freedom and tyranny, the administration was appealing to the “public’s need for narrative in politics.” Yet, Scoblic argued, America’s immediate antagonist should not be described ideologically, but technologically. “Nuclear weapons—not simply abstractions like tyranny or hate or evil—pose the greatest threat to the United States,” he wrote, and this threat was not receiving the attention it deserved.
After writing the piece, Scoblic was convinced that the administration’s judgment was compromised, severely clouded by a desire to fit everything into a “good vs. evil” narrative. After conducting more research, he thought that he had hit upon something that was being overlooked in critical examinations of Bush foreign policy: Scoblic believed that the origins of the Bush administration’s foreign policy could be traced to the founding of the modern conservative movement. “The Bush administration was not sui generis, not an abstraction, but a culmination of a long ideological process,” he would later tell me. “Nobody had defined it in those terms, but I felt that there were a lot of parallels.” So Scoblic set out to define this process and show its timeline, and the result is a scathing indictment of not only Bush foreign policy but the modern conservative movement in a provocatively titled book U.S. vs. Them: How a Half-Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America’s Security (Viking, 2008).
A few months before the book was published, Scoblic met me for lunch in downtown Washington, a few blocks from his office at the New Republic. We chatted for a bit about the origins of the book, and Scoblic explained that what started as a critique of Bush foreign policy evolved into an intellectual history that argues, “ideas have consequences.” I pointed out that his book is divided into just those two parts—“ideas” and “consequences”—and he chuckled. “Well, I wanted to make sure that that point wasn’t lost,” Scoblic said. These ideas, he explained, could be traced back to an ideological genealogy fathered by William F. Buckley in the 1950s, and George W. Bush was a direct descendent (a “prodigal son,” as described in the book) of this movement.
It just so happened that Buckley had died the day before our meeting, and I mentioned this coincidence to Scoblic. His face darkened, and a genuine sadness could be detected in his response. “We obviously did not share similar world-views, but I had a great deal of respect for Bill Buckley,” Scoblic said. “He was an incredible guy, a remarkable intellectual figure, and I found myself deeply saddened when I heard of his death. I had developed a real fondness for him.”
I then asked him how he thought his book would be received. (Several Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and biographers had offered advance praise for the work, calling it “intellectual history at its best” and a “highly original study. . . a clear succinct guidebook to the troubled first decade of the 21st century.”) Scoblic admitted that there was “probably some Bush foreign policy fatigue,” but he hoped that it would be taken seriously. He specifically mentioned that he hoped “conservatives take it seriously,” and I off-handedly mentioned that if nothing else, the title would make a lot of people mad. Scoblic politely, but forcefully, shot back: “This is not a polemic. It’s not a Franken book. It took a lot of research, and I think I earned the conclusions that I reached.
“Yes, the book is hard, but it’s fair. Of course it’s not neutral, but it’s objective. I strived for that. And I think that’s what this book is.”