Books

Eudora Welty: A Biography
     
      Literary biographies have an obstacle to overcome, which is that writers, unlike lawyers, are not very interesting to watch. A lawyer's biographer usually has courtroom battles for drama. A writer's biographer generally must rely on
      some sort of internal struggle in the writer's life that either is documented or witnesses can comment on, be it an obstinate muse, political engagement, the lure of alcohol, or financial want.
     
      Unfortunately, no such struggle can be found in this biography of Eudora Welty, which is essentially a long date book of lunches, dinners, theater engagements, and an apparently trouble-free succession of publications. Marrs, one of Welty's friends in her last years, was prompted to write this salute to the legendary, lifelong inhabitant of Jackson, Mississippi, in response to an earlier, unauthorized biography and an unflattering profile in the New Yorker. Marrs wanted to banish the image of Welty as a housebound spinster, a Southern Emily Dickinson, a victim of her mother's tyranny, an ugly duckling, a repressed lesbian.
     
      Her book is careful, judicious, and respectful. But she apparently could not bring herself to leave out a single stop along Welty's 92-year-long itinerary. She describes endless "hilarious" get-togethers, outings in "high spirits," and "grand times." But this biography suffers from two more-important failings. First, it does not explain why Welty is proclaimed a genius. She may well have been one-she won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the National Medal of Literature, and eight O. Henry Awards. But evidence of her depth, subtlety, or originality is scarce; indeed, Welty's letters to a multitude of friends are choppy, unengaging, and often superficial.
     
      Second, Marrs does not delve into the great unanswered question of Welty's loneliness. For all her hundreds of friends, she loved just two men: John Robinson, who was gay (a development Marrs announces in passing), and Kenneth Millar, better known as Ross Macdonald, who was married and lived 2,000 miles away. With the latter she spent a total of six weeks and probably never had sexual relations. It simply will not do to tell us that their epistolary relationship was as deep and meaningful as a more conventional one. Her closest female friend, meanwhile, was British writer Elizabeth Bowen. Their relationship was "tremendously meaningful," according to Marrs, and Welty revered her. Her letters might suggest sexual longing, but Marrs dismisses that possibility (and tells us much later in the book, again in passing, that Bowen was married). It is a biographer's duty to figure out why someone as gifted and popular as Welty would have constructed her personal life in a fashion destined to produce frustration. Though some biographers can be unseemly in their race toward the sexual and the perverse, a refusal to even nod in that direction hardly does the subject, or readers, any favors.
     
      Mississippi in the 1960s, of course, was not just any place, and Welty endured criticism for not taking a stronger stand in favor of civil rights. To her credit, she was a devoted writer of letters to various newspapers. She came down on the liberal, enlightened side of political issues ranging from race to Watergate to the first Gulf war, but she drew the line at doing anything about them. Marrs, in a typically unsatisfactory characterization, says Welty "would publicly oppose racism and support egalitarian change," a statement she follows by describing Welty's enthusiasm for black music. In September 1962, when James Meredith tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi, violence ensued; "the Oxford mess," as Welty referred to it, troubled her deeply, but she remained silent. The night of Medgar Evers's murder, however, Welty sat down and wrote a story in the voice of the killer, a brave thing to do. "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" was published in the next New Yorker.
     
      Welty's long old age was spent watching her friends and colleagues die. But she herself did not wait quietly for death. She served on national arts and humanities boards, received truckloads of honorary degrees, and delivered lectures nationwide. However, she pretty much ceased writing in the early 1980s. In the words of Reynolds Price, "the life-long absence of an intimate love silenced her before she was ready for silence," a more poetic and perceptive comment than Marrs ever offers.-Ruth MacKay is a writer for Stanford University 
     
      California: A History
      Modern Library, 400 pages, $24.95, hardcover
      By Kevin Starr
     
      The myth began in 1510 when a Spanish writer created a fictional island close to paradise named California. On this island full of gold, Queen Calafia ruled the black Amazon people known as Californians. When Spanish explorers found the west coast of North America, it took them years to understand that this land was not an island. But they called it California anyway. California has come to represent both a wish come true and a disappointment, and Kevin Starr's new book, California: A History, explores this contradiction.
     
      Starr was the state librarian for ten years and is a scholar of the California Dream. His latest book is a basic historical chronicle and the perfect read for a know-it-all wannabe. For example, did you know that one of the first laws passed after statehood was a tax on foreigners mining for gold-a tax directed at Mexicans? That San Quentin State Prison is built at the point on San Francisco Bay where a prison ship previously anchored? Or that A. P. Giannini started the Bank of America, a small-sums bank, because he saw his father shot and killed in a dispute over less than two dollars?
     
      Starr often stops to explore themes such as how Californians simultaneously worship and destroy nature or how the state marginalizes immigrants even while becoming a society where minorities are the majority. California: A History illustrates just how the state retains a golden image long after the land has been stripped of the precious metal.-Malaika Costello-Dougherty
     
      Covering: The Hidden Assault on
      Our Civil Rights
      Random House, 282 pages, $24.95, hardcover
      By Kenji Yoshino
     
      In his first book, Covering, Yale law professor Kenji Yoshino successfully forges a new-and rather audacious-analysis of civil rights legislation. He navigates miles of thorny legal terrain, exhumes some especially ugly moments in our country's history, and emerges with a thoughtful approach to the interplay between civil rights and identity. Covering is part an intrepid work of legal scholarship and part memoir: As a gay Japanese-American, Yoshino expertly blends personal details about himself, his background, and his struggle to cultivate an authentic identity with a steady-handed look at how we govern differences.
     
      Yoshino sees assimilation-the singularly American prerequisite to success and comfort-not as a goal but as a demand placed on outsiders to "cover" their true selves. People who are members of "disfavored" groups-racial and religious minorities, homosexuals, disabled persons, and to a somewhat lesser extent, women-are protected by law so long as they mute the full expression of who they really are. Using various examples of contemporary court decisions, Yoshino successfully demonstrates the ways the advancement of civil rights has been stymied. Immutable traits (such as skin color and, more recently, sexual orientation) merit judicial protection, while mutable characteristics (such as personal grooming practices, aesthetic choices, or speech patterns) do not. The justification for this coerced covering is conformity for conformity's sake. Courts are willing to protect being but not doing, same-sex desire but not unions, national origin but not language, and-in one especially vivid instance-being African American but not wearing cornrows.
     
      Yoshino refuses to indulge the fractured battleground climate that is identity politics today. As he asserts in his preface, everyone covers in some form. Every human being contains a multitude of covered selves, and it is in the interest of not only the individual but of society to embrace and exhibit the self that is the most alive and engaged. Ultimately, Yoshino calls for a reformed civil rights paradigm structured around the notion of individual liberty rather than the more slippery equality. A former poet, Yoshino allows his lyrical voice to step in and amplify his moral imperative-at no cost to his legal reasoning.
     
      Yoshino braids a solid legal argument with a gripping and beautifully distilled narrative of alienation and empowerment. The result is a compelling case for, if not an entirely restructured civil rights paradigm, then the virtues of autonomy, authenticity, and personal liberty as the antidotes to the lingering prejudices that continue to haunt our nation's judicial process. -Annie Gaus is a writer in San Francisco
     
      Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong
      for America
      Basic Books, 281 pages, $26, hardcover
      By Cass R. Sunstein
     
      During the confirmation hearings of Chief Justice John Roberts, Sen. Orrin Hatch began his questioning by mentioning University of Chicago Law School professor Cass Sunstein's new book, Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America (a title that, incidentally, Hatch never mentioned). "[Sunstein] discussed various philosophies with regard to judging," said Hatch. "And I just would like to ask you this question: Some of the philosophies he discussed were whether a judge should be an originalist, a strict constructionist, a fundamentalist, perfectionist, a majoritarian, or minimalist-which of those categories do you fit in?"
     
      It is a measure of Sunstein's influence-and timeliness-that the nominee was asked to fit himself into Sunstein's analysis, not the other way around.
     
      Although Hatch got the details wrong (Sunstein proposes only four strands of theorists: Majoritarians, Perfectionists, Fundamentalists, and Minimalists), he was not wrong about Sunstein's goal. Radicals in Robes is Sunstein's effort to change the political discourse about judges.
     
      Most important, Sunstein's analysis doesn't simply divide judges between liberals and conservatives. Majoritarians, for instance, defer to the democratic branches of government unless a law is baldly unconstitutional. Where Perfectionists and Fundamentalists view the judiciary as another political branch, Majoritarians see the judiciary as subservient to them. Sunstein asserts that Majoritarians are absent from the bench these days.
     
      Sunstein clearly favors the political goals of liberal activists, or Perfectionists, but thinks that when judges lead, it is usually a sparsely attended parade. Perfectionist decisions that get in front of the polity either are ignored (six years after Brown v. Board of Education not a single school in the South was integrated, according to Sunstein) or, as in the case of Roe v. Wade, incite backlash. Perfectionists are on the wane however, and the true villains of this book are the conservative activists, dubbed Fundamentalists.
     
      Fundamentalists claim their goal is the restriction of judicial power through a return to the original understanding of the ratifiers of the Constitution. "All constitutional problems are transformed into historical questions," says Sunstein. But Fundamentalists don't like to work on the small stage of specific cases. Instead, Sunstein says, they envision a future where American constitutional law would allow compulsory sterilization of criminals; let states establish official churches; end federal environmental, gun control, and civil rights legislation; and permit the reimposition of poll taxes.
     
      Sunstein argues instead for Minimalism, which avoids the Scylla of Perfectionism and the Charybdis of Fundamentalism. Minimalism requires dogged allegiance to the facts of a specific case and a strong respect for precedent. It prefers incremental steps to revolutions. After 40 years of judicial preening from liberals and conservatives, Sunstein seems to be calling for a bit of peace from the bench.-Benjamin Temchine is a radio producer at KALW in San Francisco
     

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