Charles Finch

I won't post much more on this subject, but since I already have twice it's worth following up with the new information that Stanford, which in comparison with Yale has roughly $5 billion less in its endowment and a third more students, has now pledged never to charge tuition fees for anyone whose family makes less than $100,000 a year. I applaud them for it. Any time news like this breaks, as it seems to pretty often now that universities have begun to understand how bad their financial aid policies look, my alma mater falls in both the public's esteem and my own. Meanwhile we have to read about Yale's president angling after money in the New Yorker.

One of Schwarzman’s most controversial proposed gifts was to Yale, his alma mater, which, during the late nineties, agreed to name the freshman dining commons after Schwarzman in return for $17 million. Some people at Yale thought the commitment was in hand, but it emerged that Schwarzman’s gift would actually be a contribution to one of Blackstone’s investment partnerships on Yale’s behalf. No money would change hands until the fund was liquidated, and there was a risk that the investment might be worth far less than $17 million (although there was also the possibility that it would be worth more). Yale balked at trading a significant naming opportunity for what it considered a speculative commitment, and Schwarzman did not give the money. (The naming opportunity remains.)

The president of Yale, Richard C. Levin, won’t discuss the incident other than to say, “We’re still good friends.” He points out that Schwarzman has raised money for Yale as a member of the executive committee of the current fund-raising campaign and was co-chair of the New York region during the previous one. “He’s been supportive and enthusiastic.” Yale, of course, is hoping for generosity in the future. Levin says, “Now that he’s reached a new level of liquidity, we hope that he’ll become a world-class philanthropist.”

Has the dignity of Levin's office fallen so far that even with $22 billion in hand they prospect some minor titan's liquidity as if it were the Sacramento River during the Gold Rush?

I couldn't be more delighted with this cover, which fits so well with the book's subject and also ties in well with the cover of The September Society. The yellow is great too. Click on the image to see it in a larger size.

It betrays my relative youth that I've never voted for a winning Presidential candidate, unless you count Al Gore in 2000. Or John Kerry in 2004, if you believe Mark Crispin Miller's claims about Ohio, which I'm rather inclined to.

I raise this point because I voted for Barack Obama today, and I hope he's the candidate who changes my losing streak. For the first time in my political life I feel that I have the chance to witness a genuine sea change in the way my country functions; all that I missed from being born after Selma, after The Great Society, after 1968 and Robert Kennedy. I'll be watching the returns tonight not simply with my natural curiosity about politics, but also with hope. It's exhilarating.

*****

This space has been quiet for some time. I'm working on a new book, and The September Society doesn't come out until August 5th, so I may blog irregularly until the publication process again draws my attention. Starting in May or so I'll write here much more consistently, and at some point after that it will be my honor to blog on Moments in Crime, which I highly recommend to all mystery lovers even before that time. In the meanwhile I will be adding posts here as the spirit moves me, and I urge people to e-mail me (at charles@charles-finch.com) if there's any particular aspect of writing or publishing that they're curious about. I'd be more than happy to oblige.

If I have a favorite living writer, it's probably Philip Roth; but Kazuo Ishiguro, most famous for writing The Remains of the Day and then having the good fortune to see Anthony Hopkins star in a movie adaptation of it, runs Roth a close second. For Christmas I gave a friend my favorite of Ishiguro's novels, Never Let Me Go, and when she was too slow to start it I stole it back for another read.

Prose is perhaps the only form of art that cannot accommodate surrealism; but Ishiguro manages something close to surrealism by writing in the form of a scrupulous realist, in the mold of Henry James. The Remains of the Day is to me one of the genuinely misunderstood books of our age. It has generally been interpreted - and Merchant and Ivory probably bear the responsibility for this - as an elegy for Victorian England, or at least a book about English stoicism. I'm not sure that it's not in fact something like the reverse; remember that the chief aristocrat in the novel is a fascist, even a Nazi-sympathizer, and that the butler, Stevens, is emotionally hollow to the point of total blankness. It reminds me of people who quote the speech Polonius gives to Laertes in Hamlet ("And these few precepts...to thine own self be true," etc) which when one reads it in full seems less like an inspiring bestowal of wisdom than a stale precursor of the Successories poster.

I won't spoil the plot of Never Let Me Go, which relies on the slow pace of its revelations for so much of its tension, but I will say that I think it's Ishiguro's best novel, better even than The Unconsoled, and that it's subject is much wider than it initially appears: What begins as a mixture of science fiction and Tom Brown's Schooldays becomes, in the end, a fable about how difficult it is for all of us to be what we are; human.