Word: conning
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...read with pleasure your review of Gary Lindberg's The Confidence Man in American Literature [Dec. 28]. Surely you should have cited one of the most noteworthy examples of American con: Tom Sawyer lining up the young and unsuspecting to whitewash Aunt Polly's fence. Dale G. Haake Rock Island...
More important, however, Trow fails to delve any deeper into the causes of the emptiness of popular culture. Loneliness, after all, has always existed, but talk shows haven't. Trow's sole explanation, which consists of his pointing a finger at the marketplace and calling it a "con," is facile. Certainly, popular culture has its moguls and manipulators who know how to supply the required "comfort," even how to mold the public yearning for it. Yet one must wonder if the success of the transaction, the apparent (if usually silent) satisfaction of the consumers, does not suggest a widespread desire...
Lindberg still detects the trend in society and fiction. Packaging is frequently given more attention than the product; politicians unashamedly talk about their image and how to sell it. In movies and books, notes the author, "con men now not only appear in a zany mix of styles, but they simultaneously carry on criminal activities and redemptive ones." In short, we no longer clearly distinguish between the good confidence...
Lindberg is a good con man. Contemporary literary critics can be lifeless and dutifully impenetrable. As Saul Bellow's Von Humboldt Fleisher put it in Humboldt's Gift, "Their business is to reduce masterpieces to discourse." Lindberg takes care of more business than most readers may care to handle. But his new readings of old books demonstrate how ingeniously some of our best writers juggled the subject of high ideals and low practices. It is an act that requires more than grace under pressure. In Lindberg's felicitous and confident phrase, it takes "poise in ambivalence...
...trades becomes the shape-shifting diddler, a reminder of how many occupations can be made to turn on the evasion of work. The cultural promise that one can make a self by shrewdness and diligence has, then, in the world of Huckleberry Finn, soured into a battle of con artists...