Since the last few weeks haven't been great--my energy level has been low and the G-I problems have been more severe again--I've spend a lot of time reading.  The major undertaking was Bull by the Horns by Sheila Bair, who was head of the FDIC during the worst days of the financial crisis.  It was very slow reading, in part because I was so out of my depth.  After I'd read about securitizations, I'd have to stop, put the book down, and review (and try to grasp) exactly what I'd just read before moving on to how tranches work and their consequences (advantage to the rich, of course).  Another pause, another tentative understanding before moving on to credit default swaps.  I learned, I think, a lot, though how sure my grasp is is questionable.  Bair is not shy about giving herself credit at every step of the way, and again, not having a clear context, I'd find myself nodding along and giving her the approbation she wants--and then having to remind myself that her perspective is hardly disinterested.

Relief arrives in the character portrayals along the way.  In the background are Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin, Clinton's secretary of the treasury, with their unbridled faith in unregulated markets and their confidence that the "irrational exuberance" was just that--irrational and, thus, temporary.  But the bad guy during her tenure is Timothy Geithner, about whom she has absolutely nothing good to say.  Among politicians, despite the fact that Bair is a Republican, Barney Frank is clearly the one for whom she has the most respect as prescient in understanding the coming crisis and working both before and during it to move policy in the right direction. 

At the end of the book, she gives credit to her husband, who has edited the book.  Editing, however, doesn't seem to be his forte, as the book is full of clichés, of clashing tones and registers, and of needless repetition.  A more critical, less involved editor would have wielded his blue pencil more frequently.

After Bair's book, I gave myself a break and read Alice Munro's new collection of short stories, Dear Life.  These are quiet, psychologically astute stories of people living lives of quiet resignation.  Munro captures the dreariness and insularity of small-town Canadian life at the end of the last century and of the consequences--both tentative and tenuous--of the choices her characters make.  Individually, the stories are effective, but collectively they suffer from a thinness of material.  She seems to me a short story writer like Hawthorne or Flannery O'Connor who is best read a story or two at a time, not straight through.  After four or five of them, I began longing for something to happen, for a more interesting variation on her theme, for a narrator who wasn't so hesitant.  Her stylistic devices (and I think the same thing is true with Hawthorne and O'Connor) become more tics than considered decisions.  The stories are lovely, perfect for The New Yorker, where most of them first appeared and where, I realized, I had read most of them before.  But it's a book better dipped into than read through.

And last night, I finished Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth, a "spy" novel set in the drab and dreary London of the early 1970s.  I was first introduced to McEwan in France and read three novels in a row in French, a rather counter-intuitive procedure.  I began with Enduring Love, the title of which is masterfully ambiguous.  (The French title, Folle d'amour, can also be read two ways, but doesn't have the richness of the original.)  I loved the first three-quarters of Enduring Love, but thought it fell apart completely at the end.  I've had the same reaction to everything else I've read by McEwan: he's very clever at complicating plots and characters, but he's too clever by half, and the last half of Sweet Tooth has the same problem as he disentangles the story.  The main character and narrator is the Serena (an ironic name indeed) Frome, which she tells everyone rhymes with 'plume,' a red herring that goes nowhere.  She is hired by MI5 in a program called Sweet Tooth (a name which never acquires much resonance in the novel) to recruit unsuspecting writers with the hope that they will lead to a cultural enthusiasm for the West in the last years before Communism crumbles.  Serena bumbles her way through a variety of men and becomes increasingly committed (as much as she's capable of commitment) to what she's doing--or at least to the man she's in charge of.  For half the book I was hooked, even though I knew that I couldn't trust anything I was reading.  But by the second half, the dreariness of the setting, the internecine quarrels, and the coy hints that double agency applied not only to the business of spying but also to that of writing (and reading) became tedious.  Although Serena prefers traditional fiction (and is a voracious, but indiscriminate reader, announcing at one point that Valley of the Dolls is the equal of anything Austen wrote), McEwan's novel is self-reflective meta-fiction.  There are real editors and authors in the novel, thinly disguised characters based on real people, and a young novelist, Serena's charge, whose life and writings parallel those of McEwan.  By the last half, the games wear thin, the coyness cloys, and the ending fails to surprise.

There is one image, though, that sticks with me.  Serena has had an affair with an older man who, after he leaves her, she discovers has been dying of cancer.  She regrets her impatience with his increasing need for naps.  "Sleep comes on like the tide," she thinks.  I think I'll borrow the simile.  Not only is it accurate and suggestive, but after writing too often about the "black wall" and the "crashes," I need a new metaphor.  "Like the tide" it is.