The new novel by the author of “In the Fall” is now available. Looks good.

A question of marketing, though: How did Lent go from this author photo, taken by the same photographer, Marion Ettlinger, who gave us Cormac McCarthy, to this. Does the marketing work? Are you more compelled to read one Jeffrey Lent or the other? And what does it mean, if anything, for an author to do a 180 on his image? Jeffrey Lent #2 looks happy, a family man. Is that what having children does to a man?

I’m in the middle of this novel right now and had quite a strange experience with it yesterday. I should say up front that it’s a compelling novel that might be best read without spoilers, so stop now if you don’t want me to ruin anything.

My overall analysis: This is my first Saramago, and he’s got a strange style – long paragraphs, a unique way of writing dialogue (all in a single paragraph, with commas to denote pauses, periods to denote a change in speaker). Every time I sit down to read a section, it takes me a page or two to get back into it, but then I’m hooked, drawn in by the language and the narrator. It’s an interesting study in tension, because there’s not much of a plot. Ricardo Reis returns to Lisbon after 16 years in Brazil, and he checks into a hotel and wanders around town. The only real plot tension for the first hundred pages is, Who is this man, why did he leave Portugal, and why has he now returned? But what really compels the reader is the lively narrator. The book is close third person, but there’s definitely a narrator who pulls back and says things like, “Forgive these prosaic details, but they’ll be important later,” and, “Not that Ricardo Reis knows that much about botany, but somebody’s got to describe what’s around him.” The narrator is funny, but it’s a subtle humor.

What’s really strange about this book, though, is what it’s doing with fiction. I haven’t finished, so I don’t know exactly where this is going. There was a real-life poet named Fernando Pessoa, who, if I understand correctly, created a series of characters, including one named Ricardo Reis. Saramago has used that character and made him real. This novel is set right after Pessoa’s death, and in this narrative Reis is a friend of the poet who created him. Pessoa’s ghost comes back and haunts Reis. It’s not as explicitly metafictive as “Breakfast of Champions,” where Kurt Vonnegut steps in and talks with Kilgore Trout, but it’s still a bit odd.

And then, when I was reading up on the economy, I stumbled onto this. Made me feel for a moment like I was a character in a Thomas Pynchon novel.

The Nation has a good article on the recent changes at The Wall Street Journal:

Why the new emphasis on scoops, news and speed? One reason, it seems, has to do with Murdoch’s stated goal of vanquishing the New York Times. Murdoch can’t easily do that in New York City, where the Times has deep loyalty and penetration. But he is obviously keen to persuade educated, affluent readers in San Diego or Atlanta to switch from the Times to the Journal. (The hiring of Thomas Frank, who writes a political column every Wednesday, can certainly be viewed as a play for liberal-minded Times readers.) But it must be said that the news-oriented approach at the Journal is not Murdoch’s innovation: faced with mounting competition in the 1970s and ’80s, Journal editors allowed more news to appear on Page 1, a trend that accelerated after 9/11, when the paper unveiled a major redesign of its front page that emphasized color and readability; critics howled that the page had been “neutered.”

A Murdochian business strategy that accelerates the news tempo of Page 1 has clearly resulted in fewer stories with “moral force.” But the approach has yielded some rich results nevertheless. The Journal’s coverage of the terrorist assault on Mumbai in late November, for example, was a deeply impressive display of talent and resources; it is unlikely that the old Journal, with its feature-writing orientation, could have equaled it. Other examples abound: on March 3, when federal prosecutors announced that the CIA had destroyed ninety-two videotapes of interrogations of Al Qaeda suspects, the Journal put the story smack in the middle of Page 1; the New York Times ran it on Page A16.

I’m neither a politician nor an economist nor a businessman, so I don’t really understand all the implications of this list, but it certainly looks scary. Happy Sunday.

Here’s one:

Chuck was the Director of Marketing for the Lund Cadillac Group. We are sure he would still want all to know that 0.9% financing is still available on all New 2008 Hummer H2′s.

In the style of Marginal Revolution, I give you sentences to ponder from this Atlantic article:

But we’re in a strange moment in American history when a mouse-eating barefoot survivalist in the mountains of Arizona makes more sense than the chief investment strategist of Merrill Lynch.
[...]
The average person can’t really trust anybody. They can’t trust a broker, because the broker is interested in churning commissions. They can’t trust a mutual fund, because the mutual fund is interested in gathering a lot of assets and keeping them. And now it’s even worse because even the most sophisticated people have no idea what’s going on.
[...]
It’s difficult for the average investor to even conceptualize what we’re talking about. For this reason, I think financial advisers are still worthwhile, but the average investor can no longer pay them what they felt they were worth. You should find someone who isn’t overpromising or overcharging.

I’ve been thinking about that last sentence since I left the office, and I think I’m on the verge of having my first original idea about economics. There’s this theory about disparity of knowledge that predicts it impossible for you to ever buy a good used car (and that our health insurance system is screwed). The theory goes that, presumably, a used car dealer knows whether what he’s selling is a lemon, and, presumably, you as the consumer don’t. But you suspect it might be, given the reputation of used cars, so you won’t pay a non-lemon price for it (assuming there’s no guarantee of quality). But if no one’s willing to pay non-lemon prices, dealers don’t have any incentive to sell non-lemons, so eventually all the used cars on the market end up being lemons. There’s an aspect of trust related to that. The way around the lemon theory is someone like Carmax, a brand name that stands behind its used cars. You might trust the brand, even if you wouldn’t trust the salesman.

My kernel of an idea is that you can apply that lemon theory to financial advisers right now. We pay financial advisers to manage our money. Presumably, they know whether this or that fund is a good investment. But if we lose our trust in their abilities, if we begin viewing them like we view used car salesmen, we won’t pay them non-lemon fees because we won’t believe that won’t be getting a non-lemon return on our investment. We believe there’s a good probability that our investments will be lemons, so we’ll only pay lemon prices to the financial advisers. If the financial advisers are only making lemon profits, either (1) they lose the incentive to find us non-lemon deals, or (2) the smartest advisers (who know what they’re doing) will do something else, and the remaining advisers will only know enough to make lemon investments. I know there’s the whole commission thing, like mayhaps they have an incentive for us to make money by only getting paid by a percentage of our returns, but that still won’t take care of number 2. The people who know what they’re doing are probably finding way to do it that doesn’t involve peons like me.

What can you say about this book? It’s a history of the CIA, from the post-war Truman years to the intelligence failures in modern Iraq, and the book cuts to the bone of American foreign policy for the past sixty years. Based on extensive interviews and recently declassified materials, the CIA Weiner presents is not the efficient intelligence organization of the movies. Rather, it’s an unorganized bureaucracy constantly subjected to the ideological whims of an administration. In the early years, they had little analysis, and, as Weiner presents it, the CIA’s early successes were mere accidents, surrounded by countless failures. It gets worse in more recent years, when good analysis gets ignored or suppressed. I’d heard a lot of the stuff here: The CIA knew about bin Laden, they had been tracking him through the 90s, they’d written reports suggesting the possibility of an aerial assault from a hijacked plane. But what’s interesting about this book is that Weiner’s analysis shows why that intelligence failed. For instance, one line of reasoning is that the CIA botched Sudan and blew up a pharmaceutical company they thought was a chemical weapons factory, so the director became timid about ordering other bombings or assassinations. Weiner does a good job of staying objective through most of the book. It’s straight reporting until the end, just showing one failure after another and giving some reasons behind it. But at the end his critique becomes painfully scathing, the failures of Iraq unforgivable. He closes the book by showing an organization in utter shambles, unable to recruit good talent, uncertain of its mission, and unclear on its future.