34 minute read
Mailbox
Parking Task Force Should Listen to Constituency, Not Dismiss Concerns
To the Editor:
I’d again like to make some comments regarding the Permit Parking Task Force and the odyssey that we, the community, have all been swept up in during this past year due to their efforts and actions.
I’d like to preface this by stating that I can only imagine how crushing it must be at times to be dead set on something — put in the time and work on it — and then have it met with mass criticism, opposition, and unpopularity. On this, the PPTF members have my sincere empathy. I’ve been there in my own endeavors.
With that said, it is vital, for the PPTF to actually listen to their constituency and not simply dismiss their concerns; confident their own opinions are 100 percent correct — thus medicine that must just be accepted. I would ask them to consider the tremendous strain their efforts have put upon many in the community, who have felt under siege throughout this past year. One would think that, with so many residents making their views and concerns known — directly at meetings, as well as in public forums and letters — that some heed would be paid, and that the PPTF would’ve taken these strongly expressed concerns into account. Instead, it appeared that they were exceedingly dismissive, stubbornly entrenched in their ideas, and determined to do what they pleased. They have demonstrated this repeatedly, through a lack of transparency and with a seeming vested interest in favoring the desires of businesses over residents — all culminating in a decided disinterest in these expressed concerns. Their efforts to push through with their plans during times when people were generally away — distracted in the summertime, and recently during the holidays — optically appear exceedingly disingenuous.
While it’s refreshing to finally see that some effort has been made in response to the overwhelming pushback, it is still troubling and not nearly enough. At best it needs more work via actual concerted input from concerned and engaged residents; at worst it should be scrapped and begun anew with a fresh, more transparent process and outlook that engenders trust. The fact that the plan continues to include complicated conditional rules, which charge residents for permits to park on their own streets in their own neighborhoods, is simply a non-starter and needs to be scrapped.
Something simple and all-encompassing for the already over-extended taxpaying resident, along the lines of, say, two gratis street permits per household, is what’s in order. It’s unacceptable to set a precedent of granting businesses permits to park on residential streets. It’s inappropriate to view residential streets as a resource to solve businesses’ obligation to provide parking for their employees. Resources like the downtown parking garages and the Westminster Choir College are appropriate and should be vigorously pursued, and the residential streets left to be just that — residential.
There is more to be said and considered. Many letters are out there and are still coming in. I strongly urge the PPTF to read them and truly give them the respect and consideration that they are due.
BRUCE LAWTON Hawthorne Avenue from overspill parking. Earlier versions of the Task Force’s recommendations proposed employee permit parking in the Western Section and the High School neighborhood. These recommendations were dropped only when residents of those neighborhoods strongly objected. Recently the Task Force added streets to the Tree Streets neighborhood that have never been considered part of the Tree Streets. Residents of those streets are strongly objecting.
For more information, see the excellent website, sensiblestreets.org.
Why should you oppose the “town-wide overnight parking” recommendation?
The current informal system works well. The police receive an average of only 11 requests a day. The Task Force’s recommendation bureaucratizes, monetizes, and arbitrarily limits these requests, while actually increasing the burden on police.
If the Task Force’s recommendations are approved by Council, the W-J and Tree Streets neighborhoods will be harmed, no residential neighborhood in Princeton will be safe from non-resident parking, and overnight parking will be more difficult.
Attend the January 11 meeting and speak in opposition. PHYLLIS TEITELBAUM Hawthorne Avenue
Encouraging Residents to Attend Virtual Meeting Regarding Parking
To the Editor:
The Permit Parking Task Force has issued a press release with recommendations that it intends to propose to Princeton Council. These include an extremely controversial recommendation that employees of Princeton businesses receive permits to park on residential streets. If you live on a residential street in Princeton that is within 1/2 mile of Princeton businesses, your street is at risk. Many people also object to the Task Force’s town-wide overnight parking recommendation.
Fortunately, there will be a virtual public meeting, with mayor and Council in attendance, to hear residents’ opinions. Be sure to attend and to speak in opposition to the Task Force’s recommendations.
The meeting is on Tuesday, January 11, at 7 p.m. To obtain the link, on Monday, January 10, go to princetonnj. gov, click on Calendar, go to January 11 and click on Special Council Meeting — Work Session on Permit Parking, click on More Details, then click on the link.
Why should you oppose the “employee permit parking” recommendation?
Because it will hurt the neighborhoods it claims to help. The recommendation applies to two residential neighborhoods (the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood and the Tree Streets neighborhood) that have serious chronic parking problems. Their problems are caused by “overspill” parking — employees, customers, and other non-residents parking on residential streets. Obviously, to solve the problems, employees must park elsewhere, not in these neighborhoods.
Because it is completely unnecessary. There is now an enormous supply of parking for employees within walking distance of businesses. A total of 370 spaces are available. There are 193 on the Westminster Choir College campus that the mayor and Council wisely arranged to rent. And the Task Force itself has identified 177 underutilized metered parking spaces to convert to parking for employees.
Because it will set a dangerous precedent that will hurt other residential neighborhoods in the future. Some members of the Task Force believe that all residential neighborhoods should be forced to accept parking by employees and other non-residents. They want to abolish restrictions like 2-hour parking and “resident permit parking only” that protect residential neighborhoods
Further Discussions Needed on Parking Lot Options for Business Employees
To the Editor:
After reading the Town Topics article entitled “Permit Parking Task Force Revising Recommendations in Response to Feedback” (December 8, page 1), we were dismayed to read that off-street parking for employees of businesses was still being considered as a part of the proposal for the Tree Streets and Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhoods. This was a surprise particularly since the article described the exclusion of the Western Section (without any explanation for the reversal).
We very much agree with the authors of “Revised Parking Proposal Should Not Single Out Residential Neighborhood for Employee Parking” featured in the December 22 Town Topics Mailbox. Particularly when it comes to the Witherspoon-Jackson neighborhood, off-street parking is a significant challenge since many houses have shared or no driveways. We similarly question why off-street parking for business employees is being considered over identifying alternative surface lot options.
In addition to the successful negotiation of securing 240 spaces within the Westminster Choir College and MacLean lots, perhaps discussions could also be initiated with Princeton University to use spaces within the new garage near Jadwin Gym. We applaud the efforts to secure off-street parking for Princeton residents (via permit parking), but believe further discussions need to continue to exhaust the surface lot options for employees of businesses. LANCE AND LATONYA LIVERMAN Witherspoon Street
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TOWN TOPICS, PRINCETON, N.J., WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5, 2022 • 14
Mailbox
Offering Some Thoughts on Residential Street Parking
To the Editor:
Regarding residential street parking, we are recommending no business employee permits, one permit per house without a driveway, and no second car permit. The cost of a permit for houses without a driveway should relate to property tax paid on houses with a driveway.
Business parking on the Tree Streets: Businesses need employees and customers to thrive. A parking spot can be used by one all-day employee, or say six short-term customers. A parking spot used by one employee means six customers driving away, annoyed — or 42 a week or perhaps 160 per month. The multi effect is staggering. Shoppers give up, change their habits, and don’t return. Businesses fail.
Twenty years ago I ran a business in Lambertville. Employees were allowed to “feed the parking meter,” i.e., an “all-day permit.” It was a disaster.
Residential Parking on the Tree Streets: Selling all-day employee parking space eliminates perhaps eight shortterm customers per day. It also eliminates the ebb and flow of residential parking which allows for services, vital caregivers, deliveries, and family and friends, as you would expect in a residential neighborhood. Depriving residents and customers of parking on the residential streets in favor of all-day business employees is a poor choice.
Residents without a driveway: They need parking. Offering free permits is questionable however. No permits should be free. Driveways are costly in terms of property taxes. On-street permits should relate to that cost — $.66 a day does not relate.
Second car permit: These would delete too many spaces, removing the ebb and flow which offers everyone a chance to park.
Half the remaining spaces for employees: After providing permits for no driveway and all the permits for a second car, what do you have left? How many second-car permits will be allowed? In number of spaces left, in reality how many would that be? Is this really sensible? STEPHEN POLEN AND DELORIS VERCHERE Chestnut Street To the Editor:
“I want to remind everybody that the roads are public property, they are not the property of the residents who live on the streets. To say that nobody else can use the parking because you want the occasional luxury of being able to park on the street in front of your house doesn’t make sense to me.” These are the comments of Councilman David Cohen, the Permit Parking Task Force’s chief architect, talking to the Princeton High School neighborhood last Spring (https://vimeo.com/623580557/f383ea1737).
For the past several years, Mr. Cohen has been tallying up the residential parking spots which the Council could appropriate then lease to for-profit enterprises as a “low cost solution” to subsidizing business parking expenses. Couple that with maps Mr. Cohen recently presented of mile-wide circles showing neighborhoods across Princeton that could be used as commercial parking lots, and there is no ambiguity as to the long-term intent: all of Princeton’s residential streets are at risk of being appropriated for business parking.
The Task Force’s final proposal, to be presented at a meeting on January 11, includes the first step towards that goal. It includes the establishment of a business parking subsidy program in which the municipality appropriates up to 50 percent of street parking in Jackson-Witherspoon and Tree Streets and leases them to businesses. Voters from across Princeton are uncomfortable with the conflicts of interest of the Task Force that drafted the proposal. For one, its members include the very merchants who would profit from the policy they had a hand in writing. Jack Morrison, its most vocal merchant, is both the former president of the Merchants Association and also a political donor to Councilmembers leading the Task Force. The mayor and Council have failed to respond to inquiries about what, if any, ethics standards are in place to prevent self-dealing and conflicts of interest in Princeton’s policy-making process, a question voters see as extending beyond the issue of just parking.
Hundreds of citizens have signed petitions that reject the very premise of taxpayers subsidizing a business expense, but the Permit Parking Task Force deployed tactics to prevent this fundamental question from being discussed (e.g., canceling a public meeting last month when this became the central issue). For Princetonians to trust that a parking policy is in their best interest, this Task Force must be disbanded in favor of a transparent process.
All of our residential neighborhoods are the community parks where we raise our children and grow old with friends. Even if parking capacity exists in certain residential neighborhoods, it does not mean it should be appropriated for profit. Just because a mineral deposit exists under a national park, doesn’t mean business interests have equal right to exploit it. National parks are preserved for the exclusive use of citizens. So too can Princeton’s residential streets. Like any community park, ensuring its initial and ongoing protection for the exclusive use of residents will require the voices of citizens to be heard and listened to, something this Task Force is unable to do.
JONATHAN HOPKINS Library Place
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Council Members Respond to Concerns Regarding Permit Parking Proposal
To the Editor:
We want to thank Jonathan Hopkins for accurately quoting David Cohen’s statement regarding Princeton’s public rights-of-way. A fundamental postulate of the work of the Permit Parking Task Force (PPTF) over the past three years has been that these roadways, which are public property, are an asset that must be managed to benefit all members of the public, not just a select few who happen to live nearby.
To extend Mr. Hopkins’ helpful analogy comparing our roads to our public parks, we couldn’t agree more — just as Princeton’s public parks are open to all members of the community, and indeed members of the public from outside the community who choose to visit Princeton, so should our roads be open to all. Just as we take care to ensure that use of our public parks does not negatively impact neighbors who live nearby, so should we manage our roadways to protect nearby residents. Our parks are not open for midnight soccer games, or for drunken carousing, but we would never dream of requiring proof of residency to bring an afternoon picnic to Community Park or Herrontown Woods, or even worse, to restrict access to only those residents whose property happens to abut the parks. Similarly, we are looking to put in place rules that preserve parking access for the convenience of residents while also allowing non-residents to park.
Regarding Mr. Hopkins’ allegation that the work of the PPTF somehow is tainted by a conflict of interest, we vigorously defend the composition and conclusions of the Task Force. Residents of every affected neighborhood have been represented on the Task Force. It would have been an unpardonable tilting of the playing field if members of the business community had not also been included in the deliberative process. The give and take has been feisty, and in the final recommendations, the business owners have gotten much less than they would have wished.
Through the proposed employee parking fees, business owners are footing the bill for enhanced enforcement and free resident permits. Our local businesses contribute to the tax base and the vitality of our town — they are part of what makes Princeton such a desirable place to live. We have yet to hear a single rationale presented by Mr. Hopkins or other opponents of the plan justifying why business users should be relegated to the status of second-, or even third-class citizens when it comes to accessing the public rights-of-way.
The volunteers on the PPTF have worked diligently to create a plan that will help alleviate parking congestion and they will make their recommendations to Council at a special meeting on January 11. We have had numerous meetings with concerned neighbors, and have in fact invited Mr. Hopkins and other members of the Sensible Streets organization to present their viewpoint. We look forward to further dialogue and hope to conclude with good policy decisions that will help the community. LETICIA FRAGA MICHELLE PIRONE-LAMBROS DAVID COHEN Princeton Council Members Witherspoon Street
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To the Editor:
Recently, the Princeton Public Schools Board of Education issued a position statement listing their concerns regarding the Princeton Cannabis Task Force’s (CTF) rapidly developed plans to allow up to three cannabis dispensaries in Princeton. The CTF’s recommendations are aggressive, and do not include any setbacks for playgrounds, child care facilities, bus stops, houses of worship, drug treatment centers, public pools or public libraries. Further, the CTF recommends an astounding minimum setback of only 200 feet from schools.
The CTF’s recommended setbacks (or lack thereof) stand out as the most aggressive (and most favorable to the cannabis industry) in New Jersey and also in the country. For example, Bordentown, New Jersey, requires a 1,000-foot setback from schools. Dispensaries in Denver (with among the highest density of dispensaries in the country) have to be 1,000 feet away from schools, child care facilities, and drug treatment facilities. Of the New Jersey towns which have opted in, they typically require 1,000 feet setbacks.
Letters to the Editor Policy
15 • TOWN TOPICS, PRINCETON, N.J., WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5, 2022
Town Topics welcomes letters to the Editor, preferably on subjects related to Princeton. Letters must have a valid street address (only the street name will be printed with the writer’s name). Priority will be given to letters that are received for publication no later than Monday noon for publication in that week’s Wednesday edition.
Letters must be no longer than 500 words and have no more than four signatures. All letters are subject to editing and to available space. At least a month’s time must pass before another Evidence-Based Public Debate Must Ensue Before Council Votes on Cannabis Issue letter from the same writer can be considered for pub- To the Editor: lication. Our elected offi cials often point to various task forces and Letters are welcome with views about actions, committees as vehicles for community members to shape policies, ordinances, events, performances, buildings, town policies and as evidence of collaborative decisionetc. However, we will not publish letters that include making. The relentless push for retail cannabis dispensaries content that is, or may be perceived as, negative to- in Princeton while our neighboring towns have opted out wards local figures, politicians, or political candidates calls into question the exact purposes of the Cannabis Task Force (CTF). The 23-member CTF, according to its mission statement, serves in an advisory capacity to provide input to the mayor as individuals. When necessary, letters with negative content may be shared with the person/group in question in order Pennington Montessori School to allow them the courtesy of a response, with the un- and Council on the major areas of concerns regarding legal cannabis. It was noted [Town Topics, June 2, 2021, page 9] to include local representatives from, among other areas, law enforcement, public schools, and social services. Clearly, derstanding that the communications end there. Letters to the Editor may be submitted, preferably by email, to editor@towntopics.com, or by post to Town Premier Early Childhood Education Topics, PO Box 125, Kingston, N.J. 08528. Letters public safety, underage use, and drug abuse aren’t “major submitted via mail must have a valid signature. areas of concerns” for the CTF as representatives from these areas had no presence in any of the CTF public meetings. Call to schedule6 Weeks thru Kindergarten Academic Curriculum a tour! Music-Spanish-Outdoor Education 6O9.737.1331
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Despite protests from townspeople and the BOE, the CTF has strongly resisted changing their recommendation for 200 feet from schools and zero feet from other sensitive locations. This shows the CTF’s lack of collaboration with townspeople and the BOE. Here are some facts to consider: the CTF includes three of the six Princeton Council members. It also includes several Cannabis Industry consultants, and two employees of Princeton University. The CTF has indicated their recommendations for these minimal setbacks have been “unanimous” among their 21 members. What about the question of whether town residents even want dispensaries? A survey from Princeton Perspectives indicated 60 percent of the 90 residents polled do not want dispensaries in town. A recent survey of town residents on Next Door indicates that 52 percent of over 330 residents polled do not want dispensaries in town. A petition on change.org against Princeton dispensaries with over 750 signatures continues to gain support. The CTF has dismissed these data points while indicating the town cannot do its own survey. Shouldn’t the CTF start with the question of whether residents actually want dispensaries in their neighborhoods? Notably, other nearby towns Montgomery, Plainsboro, West Windsor, and Cranbury have opted out. The CTF and town Council members involved should be challenged to conduct a democratic process that is free from conflicts of interest and is aligned with the town’s residents and institutions. The CTF’s interests do not appear to be aligned with the majority of town residents, or the educational mission of the PPS BOE. Town residents should reach out to Council members on this issue. Thank you. DAVID JENKINS Leabrook Lane Pennington Montessori School
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Neither are there any meeting minutes or voting records that can prove representatives from these areas have ever meaningfully participated in the deliberation. It was no coincidence that the 90-minute CTF presentation on November 30 made little mention of public safety and the underage use portion of the presentation lasted less than 90 seconds.
According to Councilwoman and CTF Chair Eve Niedergang, one third of the CTF members were absent when the offi cial CTF recommendations were voted on. Yet, that didn’t stop the CTF from calling their recommendations to allow up to three recreational cannabis dispensaries “unanimously supported.” This fi xation over consensus is probably best explained by one CTF member who described one of the main objectives of the CTF as “manag(ing) the narratives.”
At the December 16 CTF meeting, it became all but apparent that this lack of representation wasn’t accidental when CTF members openly scorned the Board of Education’s position statement that suggests serious concerns of the potential negative consequences local dispensaries can have on students’ health and wellness, and voted again “unanimously” to “press on” with its original recommendations.
The CTF is stacked with cannabis advocates. The four citizen representatives picked out of more than 20 volunteers all happened to be strong supporters of local dispensaries. This kind of conformity is likely the reason that the question whether Princeton should allow retail dispensaries doesn’t appear to have been seriously considered at all. Councilwoman Eve Niedergang always goes back to this same line of reasoning: “There is cannabis in Princeton, and there will be both legal and illegal cannabis in Princeton, so that’s not the issue before the task force. ” (The Daily Princetonian, September 9, 2021). If the subject of the debate isn’t cannabis dispensaries but gun shops, will the same logic still be applied?
It’s in the interest of the Council, mayor, and the whole community to ensure the objectivity of the CTF. If robust debate of the pros and cons of local dispensaries could not happen within the CTF, an evidence-based public debate must happen before the Council proceeds to vote on this issue. JIAN CHEN Ettl Farm
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TOWN TOPICS, PRINCETON, N.J., WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5, 2022 • 16 BOOK REVIEW
On the Eve of January 6, Flaubert’s Parrot Intercepts Le Tellier’s “Anomaly”
According to Merriam-Webster, the “full definition” of anomaly is “something different, abnormal, peculiar, or not easily classified.” My first column of 2022 brings together Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, a 72-page novella published in 1877, with Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, a 389-page novel published last year. By definition, then, Flight 22, Paris to Princeton, will be an anomaly about an anomaly, fueled by the fact that the only thing these two enterprises appear to have in common is that both were translated from the French and are landing on the same page at the same time.
No Comparison
Le Tellier’s novel begins, “It’s not the killing, that’s not the thing.” The speaker is a passenger on Air France Flight 006, a hired assassin “who builds his life on other people’s deaths.”
Flaubert’s novella begins, “Madame Aubain’s servant Félicité was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l’Évêque for half a century.”
When I first read that sentence, I was a college sophomore on the rebound from Madame Bovary. So I put the book aside, figuring that the life of a servant in the provinces could not compare with the story of a star-crossed adulteress. 145 years from takeoff, A Simple Heart has arrived. The question now is how can it compare with a literary mystery timed for the misinformational, confrontational turbulence of the current Omicron moment, on the eve of the first anniversary of the January 6 assault on democracy?
The Princeton Connection
One thing the two books have in common is that I almost put aside The Anomaly. The characters, including the assassin, left me cold. Fortunately I skipped ahead for a look at the Princeton chapter, which begins at Fine Hall (on a campus that’s “trying to look like Hogwarts”) with two unkempt genius mathematicians — “a probabilities expert” named Adrian Miller and his coworker Meredith Harper, the British topologist he at first glance thought “plain ugly” with “her overthin legs and her overtidy brown hair, her overlong nose and her overdark eyes.” Now, after a few beers, she’s becoming “irrationally attractive” as she blows through the small talk (he wants to ask her about “specifically symmetrical spaces,” she wants to get “conscientiously drunk”) with a haphazard story-of-her-life monologue about her “crappy bungalow in Trenton” and how long it’s been since she slept with anyone, which ends: “How about you, Adrian? Everything okay? House, car, sex life?”
Amazing, suddenly a sympathetic character dances off the page, thanks to author’s obvious affection for the anomaly of appearances (the “sweet disorder in the dress” syndrome). I know the feeling. I was hoping someone like Meredith would come along. And here she is in Princeton, a thinking, feeling, sexually alive human being who would fit right in with the bedhopping academics in Roberto Bolaño’s 2066 and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, which features a bisexual mathematicial genius Russian orphan named Yashmeen Halfcourt.
Although I didn’t really expect anything Pynchonesque in a carefully programmed “page-turner” like The Anomaly, I was curious to see what happens when Adrian’s called away on a secret government mission involving the mystery of Flight 006 at the very moment he and Meredith are getting physical, “pressed against each other for a little while, not even daring to kiss.”
Dr. Strangelove
The dumbed-down essence of the anomaly that The Anomaly revolves around is stated in a phone call in which the American president tells his Chinese counterpart, “Two days ago an Air France plane landed on U.S. soil. A plane that already landed two months ago.” It wasn’t until the Trump-based POTUS put the situation in those terms that I flashed on Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which long ago provided Merriam-Webster with a convenient label “for any irrational, circular, and impossible situation.”
While the Chinese president is still trying to make sense of “landed, already landed,” the president hands him over to “one of my scientific advisers, Professor Adrian Miller of Princeton University.” As Adrian tries to explain the inexplicable, echoes of Catch-22 merge with the War Room scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.
Meredith
Unbound
In fact, the character closest to the author’s heart, mind, and humanity made the Strangelove connection the moment she laid eyes on the vast hangar at McGuire Air Force Base. In the preceding chapter, on her way to eloquently demonizing and demolishing the most recent scientific/mathematical/ philosophical consensus for the why and wherefore of the Air France 006 anomaly — that everything and everybody is simulated — Meredith was on her fourth cup of coffee (“I refuse to be a program!”) as she vented on “this bonkers hypothesis, the most elaborate conspiracy theory devised by the most enormous imaginable conspiracy.” After riffing sarcastically on the possibility of “a non-afterlife after our non-death,” she began singing, “I can’t be no simulation” to the tune of the Stones’ “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” Dancing and spinning, she grabbed the dazzled Adrian by both hands (“Come on, Adrian, don’t stand there like a lemon!”). By now you know Le Tellier’s smiling, watching her, like Adrian, with “a vermillion enchantment in his heart.”
A Geographical Anomaly
The epitaph for Part I of The Anomaly, comes from Victor Miesel’s Anomaly, the novel inside the novel: “There is something admirable that always surpasses knowledge, intelligence, and even genius, and that is incomprehension.”
You better believe it. After his suicide, Miesel’s ashes are scattered into the English Channel from a cliff in Yport, a town in Normandy 44 miles north of Pontl’Évêque, where Flaubert’s Félicité lives out her life.
While it’s easy to comprehend the geographical coincidence shared by two novels, as well as the fact that the real-life novelist Flaubert died in Normandy on May 8, 1880, it’s hard to fathom the idea that a fictional novelist who took his fictional life on April 22, 2021, has appeared in Normandy on June 29 to witness the scattering of his own ashes. To sustain that massive “suspension of disbelief” it definitely helps to believe in the surpremacy of incomprehension.
Translations
I sensed from the first paragraph that translator Adriana Hunter was in tune with Le Tellier. “Gotta watch, monitor, think, a lot, and — come the time — carve into the void.” You can feel the author’s compositional pulse in those words. As it happens, the assassin’s credo could be applied with a few adjustments to what Flaubert does in A Simple Heart: he watches, monitors, thinks, carving his way into the void of provincial life, all part of the quest for “le mot juste” or “the unique phrase,” as Harry Levin puts it in his introduction to the 1944 New Directions version translated by Arthur McDowall. While noting McDowall’s skill in “surmounting the many difficulties involved,” Levin declares “a few of them” to be “insurmountable.” Not to worry. The insurmountable wonder of Flaubert’s tale is that it contains a natural translator in the form of a parrot named Loulou. And somehow you sense early on that “something different, abnormal, peculiar, or not easily classified” is coming your way.
One Late Afternoon
I read A Simple Heart in one deeply satisfying late afternoon. It’s wonderful, the way you can feel yourself settling into a work of art even when no one sentence strikes you or stops you or makes you pause to savor it. The element is warm and fluid, so on you go, feeling, thinking, absorbing every word, all the components in a temperate balance, aware all the while that the inarticulate Félicité, who works for an “unamiable” mistress in a house behind the market in Pont-l’Évêque, is inhabited and beloved by Flaubert. He not only loves her, he becomes her (as he famously became Emma Bovary), much as she “becomes” Virginie while watching her mistress’s young daughter take the sacrament during her first communion: “When Virginie’s turn came Félicité leaned forward to see her and with the imaginativeness of deep and tender feeling it seemed to her that she actually was the child; Virginie’s face became hers, she was dressed in her clothes, it was her heart beating in her breast.”
A few years later when Virginie dies, Félicité sits through two nights with the body. At the end of the first vigil “she noticed that the face had grown yellow, the lips turned blue, the nose was sharper, and the eyes sunk in. She kissed them several times, and would not have been immensely surprised if Virginie had opened them again.” At this point, Flaubert feels the need to tell us that in “minds like hers the supernatural is quite simple.”
A Great Happiness
Soon after the girl’s death, “a great happiness befell” Félicité. “His body was green, and the tips of his wings rose-pink; his forehead was blue, and his throat golden.” Since the parrot also had “the tiresome habit of biting his perch, tearing out his feathers, sprinkling his dirt about, and spattering the water of his tub,” Madame Aubain gave Loulou to Félicité “for good.”
How the parrot became confused with the Holy Ghost is easier to explain than the strange fate of Flight 006. While for minds like Félicité’s “the supernatural is quite simple,” making great literature of it is not. After numerous adventures, Loulou dies, is taken to be stuffed on a journey that nearly kills Félicité, after which she “formed the idolatrous habit of kneeling in front of the parrot to say her prayers. Sometimes the sun shone in at the attic window and caught his glass eye, and a great luminous ray shot out of it and put her in an ecstasy.” Her last request, is that the parrot be given a place on the altar, where he was “hidden under roses, and showed nothing but his blue forehead, like a plaque of lapis lazuli.” Dying, Félicité wonders, “Does he look well?” As “she sighed her last breath she thought she saw an opening in the heavens, and a gigantic parrot hovering above her head.”
The Spirit of 1/6/2021
Having carved his vision out of the void, Le Tellier has to deal with the inevitable adjustments and consequences, such as how do the passengers go on with their double lives in the shadow of a government coverup, since their existence is a threat to the sizable lunatic fringe on the Christian right that considers them “Satan’s spawn.” After slaughtering two young women who enjoy their doubleness so much that they want to show it off, a member of the Army of the Seventh Day has a vision. Through “half-closed eyes,” he sees three spirits rising from the mouths of the dragon and the Beast and the false prophet, “and these three spirits look not unlike frogs.”
At the end, unaware that a third Air France Flight 006 has been spotted in the Atlantic skies, the Princeton mathematicians, Adrian and Meredith, are in bed in Venice, talking quietly, snuggling “under a pyramid of sheets,” as “Meredith’s clear laughter rings out.”
—Stuart Mitchner
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