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Procession of Maigrets

October 18, 2025
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Every once in a while as if by a miracle, something good is transformed by art into something godawful. Case in point: the most recent remake of the detective stories of Georges Simenon that go under the heading “Maigret.” 

The Belgian writer pumped out (and that is about the only way you can describe his method) some 75 novels and piles of short stories featuring his creation Jules Maigret, commissaire of the police judiciaire at le Quai des Orfèvre in Paris. 

I just tried watching the new Maigret series on PBS Mysteries and, honestly, someone needs to be shot before a firing squad. They seem to have turned Maigret and his team into “Le Mod Squad.” Simenon’s Maigret is famously middle aged and looks like a tired bureaucrat. That’s how Simenon wrote him. To turn him into a — and I quote — “young, streetwise leader of an elite crime unit known as ’The Maigrets’” — is worse than a travesty, it is pandering of the worst sort. 

“Le Mod Squad” hardly ridicules it enough. “Montmartre 90210”  perhaps — No pipe, no hat, no overcoat. Probably doesn’t even drive a Citroen. And that curated day-old chin scruff — what a tired cliche! And from the images I’ve seen online, the series seems to be lit in the contemporary flat digital style, with faces darker than the background. Oy veyzmir. 

In other words, I don’t think I’ll be watching this series. I could barely make it through the first episode. In fact, I couldn’t. The episode was a two-parter and I quit after the first part. 

Its sins are legion. Perhaps if it had been made under some other title, like “Les Flics a la Mode,” it might have served a purpose on network TV, alongside long running series. Maybe even “CSI: Paris.” But its questionable status as a remake of the famous French detective is not its only or worst sin. Its dialog is straight out of a soap opera, with great lumps of exposition floating like unincorporated lumps of flour in a gravy. The script seemed assembled rather than written. 

It’s not that I object to modernizing or updating a classic. Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat did a great job with the BBC’s Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch, keeping all the quirkiness but adding a digital world. But the new Maigret is simply ham-handed. 

Simenon wrote his Maigret books from 1931 until 1972, which were only a fraction of his immense literary output. Right from his apprenticeship, writing under 17 pen names, he produced 358 pulp novels and short stories from 1921 to 1934. He was writing at a pace of 70 typed pages a day. Even after he began writing under his own name, his production was prodigious. There can be no count, only approximations. Estimates have run from 170 books to about 500. What is more amazing is the quality level. No less than Andre Gide wrote, “I consider Simenon a great novelist, perhaps the greatest, and the most genuine novelist that we have had in contemporary French literature.”

Simenon’s mysteries are functionally different from the standard model, where, as in Agatha Christie books, suspects and clues pile up and at the end, Miss Marple sorts it all out and solves the crime. With Maigret, we often know who the perpetrator is in the first few chapters and the bulk of the book is Maigret figuring out how to catch the bad guy, or what motivates him and could lead to his capture. The heart of a Maigret book is not the mystery, but the characters and their psychologies. It seems almost as if Simenon begins with a vivid character or two and builds a story around that. We read them not to find out “whodunnit,” but to spend time with fascinating personages. 

All of his Maigret novels remain in print — the whole series in English translation is published by Penguin Books. Numerous other translations are available, and multiple compilations. 

At least 70 films and TV series have been made from his works, beginning with Jean Renoir’s La Nuit du Carrefour, from 1932, starring the director’s brother Pierre Renoir as Maigret. The same year saw Le Chien Jaune (“The Yellow Dog”), with Abel Tarride as the commissaire, directed by his son, Jean Tarride. The following year, Julien Duvivier directed Harry Baur as Maigret in La tête d’un homme (“A Man’s Neck.”) 

Over the years, at least 35 actors have smoked the pipe as Inspector Maigret, give or take some forgotten versions. They were made in several languages, including Italian, German, Russian, and Japanese. 

Albert Prejean, Michel Simon, Jean Gabin

But most notable, in English or French, including three films made with Albert Prejean as Maigret in the mid-1940s, by a wartime German film company in occupied France; and another three, from 1958 to 1963 with Jean Gabin. The great Michel Simon took his turn in 1952 in one-third of the anthology film Brelan d’as. Maurice Manson played him in Maigret dirige l’enquête (1955). 

And Gerard Depardieu was an especially bulky commissaire in Maigret (2022). The prolific (and prodigious) French actor had previously played a Maigret clone in 2009’s Inspector Bellamy. 

Charles Laughton, Richard Harris

English language one-offs begin with Charles Laughton in The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1950), and Richard Harris, in a tweed hat, in Maigret (1988), of which, the less said, the better. 

Rupert Davies

But, when you have 75 novels and 28 short stories to draw from, the ideal version of Inspector Maigret is a television series. The first — 53 episodes from 1960 to 1963 — featured Rupert Davies, who would have been the ideal Maigret except for the fact that the episodes were only 50 minutes long, and the production was rather studio-bound (other than some excellent exteriors actually shot in Paris). Standard TV lighting and sets. 

Jean Richard, Michael Gambon, Bruno Cremer

Jean Richard starred in 88 90-minute episodes from 1967 to 1990, and was the version Simenon said he liked best. Bruno Crèmer filmed 53 episodes from 1991 until his death in 2005, each 90 minutes long. These are probably my favorites. 

Michael Gambon gave what might be the definitive English language version in only 12 episodes from 1992 and 1993. Although each episode was only 50 minutes, he embodied Maigret so perfectly, at least for an English-language audience, that his successors all pale in comparison. 

And those include Rowan Atkinson in four 90-minute versions from 2016 and 2017. Atkinson (aka Mr. Bean) does a very good job, but the filmmakers attempted to turn the books into noir films, mostly shot at night or in moody rain, and dumped so much dialog, they were almost silent films. The Maigret books are almost pure dialog, very like the earliest Dragnet episodes. 

I have not seen the Dutch versions, first with Kees Brusse in 6 episodes from 1964; or 17 episodes with Jan Teulings from 1966-1969. Nor the Italian version with Gino Cervi from 1967-1972. And not the 25 episodes in Japanese with Kinya Aikawa from 1978, where the inspector’s name is transliterated as “Megure.” “Meg-goo-ray.” I’m not sure where any of these might be found. 

And that leaves us with the latest misery, a poor substitute for the real Maigret. 

Simenon

L’Envoi

Georges Simenon was as much a character as those he stuffed into his novels. His writing was prodigious — those hundreds of novels — but so was his sex life. He was one astonishing horn dog. 

When he married, the pair took on a young housemaid, and by the evening of her hiring, Simenon had already had sex with her. This went on for some time. His wife seems to have become inured to his proclivities, which included frequent visits to brothels. 

When his wife went away for a spell, he hired a second maid. Same result. When his wife finally left him, everyone moved up a notch. Later a third maid took over from the second, in a kind of musical beds. Although beds are not really the issue. One report has him coming home one day and seeing his maid washing dishes, and then coming up behind her, lifting her skirts, having his way while she continued the scrubbing. 

He once claimed to have had sex with 10,000 women, although his second wife, Denyse, said, “Georges always exaggerates. We worked it out ourselves once and it came to no more than 1,200 women.” 

How strange, then, that Jules Maigret was so faithful and attentive to his wife, Louise — aka Madame Maigret.

Required reading

November 28, 2024
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I have infinite respect for school teachers. My late wife was one. I was one myself, for six years earlier in my career. Teachers work harder and for less pay that pretty much anyone else I can think of. And more than anyone else, the best teachers I had made me what I became in life. 

But. 

There was something about the teachers I had in public schools — grade school and high school — that mystifies me to this day. It was “required reading.” Nothing against the idea of having students read, but the problem was the books they had us read. 

They were “great books,” unquestionably, and among the best of literature in the English language. But what, I ask, what can a 13 year old possibly make out of The Scarlet Letter? It is written in a rather formal  early 19th century style, about a culture long faded in America, and involving minute shades of thought and feeling, with, like an iceberg, more beneath the surface than above. I was required to read it in eighth grade and was bored silly by it, mostly because I could not possibly understand it. 

I remember one of the test questions on the book. “What is the significance of Hester naming her daughter ‘Pearl?’” Uh — I dunno. I was 13 years old and I had a hard time telling the difference between Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth. Perhaps I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Most likely the book was way over my head. Way over the head of any 13 year old. Which is my point. Why was it assigned? 

My teachers wanted to expose me to the best in literature, I’m sure. And Scarlet Letter is certainly a great novel. I’ve read it as an adult and was amazed at how different it was from the same book I read in eighth grade. Deep and true, and subtle. All of which was lost on a boy with not enough life experience to be able to absorb what I was reading. 

For most kids at that age, a novel was its plot. If I could keep the story clear in my head, that was what I took from the book. So, there were a few assigned books that I read and enjoyed. Oddly, one of them was Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, by Lew Wallace. It was assigned in seventh grade, and it was, at the time, the longest book I had ever read. 

It was no doubt assigned because of the 1959 movie, but I had not yet seen the film, and so I never had to compare the book with Charlton Heston. It was fresh to my eyes. 

But it was a story told without excessive subtlety. If I followed the plot, I got out of the book pretty much all that was put into it by its author. I was 12 and at the time, fascinated by history. Lots of that in Ben-Hur.

It should be pointed out that I had nothing against reading books. I read them all the time. I was an avid reader, but pretty much every book I picked up was non-fiction. (I once complained about novels, “Why would I want to read anything that wasn’t true?” Little did I understand.) I read tons of books about World War II. I was obsessed with the war my father had fought in. 

And so, Ben-Hur was right up my alley. A story clearly told and with little hidden between the lines.  

Another great choice for a young person was To Kill a Mockingbird. As a pubescent teen, I was deeply moved by the injustice and the countering righteousness of Atticus Finch. I read it at a time of the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S., and it seemed instantly relevant to my life. The fact that it was told through the eyes of 8-year-old Scout, and the moral issues seemed so clear only made it easier to digest at my tender age. 

The novel is still taught in many schools, and is perhaps the perfect book for required reading, although at the age I was asked to read it, I had no clue as to the the fact that its author also addresses issues of class, courage, compassion, and gender roles in the Deep South.

All the subtleties and complexities in the book were irrelevant to my reading it at the perfect age to encounter it. But then, as Flannery O’Connor said, “It’s interesting that all the folks that are buying it don’t know they’re reading a child’s book. Somebody ought to say what it is.”

In contrast, we also were assigned The Great Gatsby. On the surface, it is not difficult to understand. The language, unlike that in Scarlet Letter, was reasonably modern. But the book relies almost entirely on what is between the lines, which is exactly the part that a 14-year-old cannot perceive. When I first read it, in eighth grade, I thought it was a story about Nick Carroway. After all, he narrates it. This Gatsby guy seemed entirely peripheral and I couldn’t understand why the book had his name on it. And what the heck were those giant eyeglasses about? And that green light? No clue. 

Oh, I followed the plot well enough, I thought. But boy, I had not the first inkling of what the book was actually about. 

And how could I have. One has to have a decent fill of life’s vicissitudes, disappointments, misunderstandings, loves, longings, sex, ulterior motives — to say nothing of complex, multiple motives — before one can take in all that is going on in Fitzgerald’s book. 

Or any book written for grown-ups. We were assigned The Grapes of Wrath, and I enjoyed most of it, but on the test, we were asked why Chapter Three talks about a turtle crossing a highway. A chapter that fits what Steinbeck calls “hooptedoodle.” In Sweet Thursday, a character says, “Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. … Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

And so, Chapter Three seems to have nothing to do with the story. Or does it? At an age before hair began growing in unfamiliar places, I had no clue. 

Worse, the end of the book just seemed like a vaguely smutty joke to make a teen laugh like Beavis and Butthead. Now, as an adult, it makes me weep. 

There were other books assigned that my yet-vacant mind could not get around: Emma, The Return of the Native, Oliver Twist. Why were such books put into the hands of a boy who had not yet outgrown Cocoa Puffs? 

I could barely make it through Emma, and couldn’t for the life of me understand why such a self-involved cupcake should be worthy of my attention (I said to my utterly self-involved teen self). At that age, irony is an unfathomable concept. No one my age at the time should be forced to read Jane Austen. Way above my pay grade at the time. 

And worse, Thomas Hardy. I had no notion of what a reddleman might be, nor furze, nor a heath. Reading the prose was like chewing dry straw. Why, why, O why was this book handed to a pre-teen American boy, who never cut a wisp of furze in his life? 

Last year, I found a used copy of the paperback book I was given back then, so many decades ago, and I began reading it to see if it was as bad as I remembered it, and surprise: I found some of the most resonant, deeply felt writing I’ve ever read. As twilight settles, on the first page of the book: “Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home.” That image rings so instantly true. I’ve been there. When I was a kid, not so much. 

There were other books assigned that memory has happily wiped from my mind. 

But worst of all, and for this I hold Miss Irene Scheider completely guilty, was my lifelong inability to read Charles Dickens. She was otherwise a fine teacher of my eighth grade class, but she decided she would assign each student his own book, chosen by her as the perfect match for his taste and personality. And for me, she chose Oliver Twist. 

I cannot tell you how much I hated, hated, hated that book. I found it turgid, boring, endlessly prolix, and completely unrelatable. I trudged through it dutifully, But I found it the absolute opposite  of anything my taste and personality would have fancied. “Please sir, I want less.” 

No blame should be ascribed to Dickens for this failure. I believe the enthusiasm so many intelligent readers feel for his books. But my experience with Oliver Twist in the eighth grade has ruined Dickens for me for the rest of my life. I cannot even pick up another of his books. My muscles twitch and my eye develops a tick. “Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!”

I understand the impulse of grade school teachers to introduce great lit-rich-your to young minds. But forcing a teenager to read works they are not equipped to comprehend can only deter them from ever wanting to read books they haven’t been assigned. 

I was lucky. I loved reading too much to be thrown off by boring books. I had my own direction. Before high school, most of what I read was non-fiction. I always had a book or two going. Some I read so avidly, I finished them in a day. You could not have stopped me from reading. But I only came to fiction and an appreciation for what it had to afford, after my brain had become fully formed, in my twenties. Then, I attacked all those classics I had dreaded when I was younger. Ulysses, yay! “Madame’s Ovaries,” whoopee! “Lady Loverly’s Chatter,” sign me up! 

I am pretty sure that if you want to instill a love of reading into young minds, you have to let them read what they choose for themselves. Don’t worry if it’s not great literature. Don’t worry even if it’s trash. Or even if it’s comic books. If they enjoy it, they will keep reading. And if they keep reading, they will grow out of the junk and seek the real deal. 

There are books that speak directly to eager minds. The Catcher in the Rye is only possible to read when you are young. Believe me, I tried to re-read it a few years ago and nearly upchucked. It’s not for adults. And there is a huge market for YAF (an acronym that makes me hiccup: Young Adult Fiction) that is surprisingly well written and tackles subject meaningful to their audience. Encourage that. Don’t, my god, hand them Brothers Karamazov. 

So, let them soak up Harry Potter if they want. It’s OK. Better than never being able to read Charles Dickens again. 

Heart’s desire

July 11, 2024
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My Uncle Stanley had an ambition in life to own a Weimaraner hound. I was only a boy at the time and didn’t quite understand the appeal of such a dog, but for the IBM typewriter technician he was, living in New Jersey in the 1960s, I imagine it had something of the attraction a solid gold toilet had for Elvis Presley. The rest of us had dogs that we lucked into, finding a stray, or getting a mutt from the dog pound. But the Weimaraner was a pricey breed and my uncle wanted one. He finally got one. It was a nice dog, but for me, that’s just what it was — a dog. 

Many, I think, have some similar focus in their lives, some object that signifies arrival, or a sense of completeness in life. Most items hold that position only for as long as they are unachieved. Yet there remains a pride in the achievement, even if the reward is rather less than anticipated. 

I think of those who have yearned to own a Cadillac. They may live in a mobile home and work as janitor in the local factory, but if they can park a Caddy out front, it will show they aren’t complete failures. 

As in the familiar song, St. James Infirmary: When I die, “Put a twenty-dollar gold piece on my watch chain,/ So the boys’ll know that I died standin’ pat.”

The idea of getting that bit you believe you want or need is common. Perhaps it is a $300 Wüsthof chef knife; or a Rolex watch; or a bespoke suit from Hong Kong. Whatever is your icon of either quality or status or style, it chases you through life until you can finally afford it. I certainly have felt it. When I was young, it was a Nikon camera, then a Leica and then a Hasselblad. I finally got each and while I wasn’t disappointed — they are all as good as their reputations — they never quite made that great a difference in the photographs I made. 

I imagine that if the People’s Republic of China ever finally get their hands on Taiwan, it will not prove to be quite so satisfying a triumph as they had imagined. 

I never chased a particular car or watch, but there are books I longed for. I have managed to get some of them; others still elude me. But here are the big three I lusted after for years.

The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World

Beginning in the third grade, I loved maps. And what I loved more than any were the big maps in the classroom that were pulled down like a windowshade, and were richly colored in thick inks — not halftone dots: The green was dark green ink, not a mix of yellow and cyan dots. Mountain regions were a rich chestnut brown. Those maps were beautiful. They may have been out of date even in my childhood, but I didn’t love them for their accuracy, but as art. 

Years later, I found something very similar in older editions of the Goode’s School Atlas, where the maps were created using wood engravings, so there were straight-line cross-hatchings for shadings, and again, multi-colored inks for the printing. I saw them as art books. I found a few in old, musty used book stores and I still treasure them. 

The very first puzzle pieces I remember, as far back as infancy, were map puzzles, where each U.S. state was a single piece. I took apart and redid that states puzzle hundreds of times, even as, in my infant-tongue the states were Uncle Homer and Miss Thompson. 

Later, as a young man, newly empowered with a car and an income, I began traveling, and to aid that travel, I had a Rand McNally Road Atlas. I have updated them every other year or so, but I also acquired vintage versions from 1935 and 1942, which are things of beauty of their own, in two-color printing, with most roads in dark blue and highways in red. I treasure the old ones, while the newer, full-color maps are merely disposable useful tools. 

But, out there on the horizon, was the Times Comprehensive Atlas of The World, published in constantly updated editions from 1895 through its 16th edition in 2023. By 1959, the Midcentury Edition of the atlas was a five-volume elephant folio edition measuring 12-by-19-inches. It was the Cadillac of world atlases and it was way out of my price range when I was young. I did manage to get the single volume 10th edition, picked up used. 

It was a large, handsome volume. The maps were halftones, so, not as esthetically distinct as the Goode’s, but still, it was by all counts the best atlas on the market. Unfortunately, when I retired, I had to sell off about 75 percent of my library to make the move across the country from Phoenix to North Carolina, and the Times atlas was one of the casualties. Kept the Goode’s, though. 

The Encyclopedia Brittanica

By the time I was in sixth grade, I wanted to learn everything. I was young enough still to think that possible. And where would I find all this knowledge? I’d read the encyclopedia. 

My neighbors had an old Compton’s Picture Encyclopedia, from the 1930s, which they gave us, and I read it over and over, with its streamlined steam trains, autogyros and biplanes. But even as a kid, I knew the books were out of date. A wonderful long entry on “The Great War,” but, although I was reading it in 1953 or so, less than 10 years after WWII, there was no mention of any of it. 

My mother wanted to help, and so, she began buying the promotional supermarket offering Funk and Wagnalls, one per week, for 99 cents each, until we had the full set, cheaply printed and bound. I used them for years to write theme papers for school. But I always knew that they weren’t the “real thing.” For that I needed the Britannica, which was way outside my family’s budget. 

I continued lusting for my own Encyclopedia Britannica, all through college, the jobs that followed and into my years at the newspaper in Arizona, when I finally got a set at Bookman’s, a used book store in Mesa. But my enthusiasm was tempered by the fact that the set I got was not the traditional Britannica, but the combined “micropædia” and “macropædia,” in which the entries were divided into the more popular entries, in shorter, easier to read versions — the micropædia — and the more in-depth entries in the rest of the volumes. It felt like a dumbed-down, even trendy version of what I truly wanted. I wanted the Belmondo Breathless and got the Richard Gere Breathless. 

Years later, I came across the revised 14th edition, in 24 volumes and its leathery maroon covers and thistle logo, and managed to buy it. This was the real thing, at last. The pride of my collection. 

At Bookman’s, I later also found a facsimile version of the original three-volume Encyclopædia Britannica, from 1768. The replica was quite convincing, even including (imitation) foxing on some of the pages. More interesting was evidence that the 18th century project engaged the enthusiasm of its makers early on, and then rather petered out. The first volume covers the letters “A” and “B.” The second includes “C” through “L.” And the third and slimmest volume gets to cover everything else to the letter “Zed.” The facsimile edition was published in 1971. 

Then, of course, the internet came along, with its Wikipedia. The Britannica sat on the shelf as a kind of trophy, but largely unused. And when we moved, it was one of the casualties. So long in the getting, so short in the forgetting. 

The Oxford English Dictionary

But the real prize, the one thing that I lusted for more than any other, was the Oxford English Dictionary, the 20 volume final word on the English language. 

I was a long-time reader of dictionaries. From second-grade on, I loved learning vocabulary. From 8th grade on, I loved learning the etymologies of words, and how they could change meaning over time. The OED contained all that information. Entries were long, involved and gave dozens, maybe scores, of citations, each dated and quoted. A simple word with multiple meanings, such as “set,” went on for pages, and required 60,000 words to describe some 580 senses. The whole of the dictionary was 21,730 pages and 59 million words covering more than 300,000 entries. It was heaven. It was also pricey. The set could sell from $1500 to $2000, depending on where you bought it. 

The full OED is still my unicorn. I have never found an affordable used set. But, in the 1970s, the Oxford Press put out a 2-volume Compact Edition, with every four pages of the original OED shrunk photomechanically down to quarter-size and printed four original pages squeezed into each single page of the edition, which required the use of a magnifying glass (included) to be able to read it. The Compact Edition was offered at rock-bottom price as a promotion through a book club, and I signed on, and got my copy.

It is very hard to read, even with the magnifying glass, and the volumes were big and bulky and uncomfortable to use, but at least I owned a version of the OED. This was as close as I got to Nirvana. 

I still have the Compact Edition, occupying the upper shelf of a coat closet. I haven’t dragged it out in years, but I still have it, a reminder of those things I once thought would change my life forever. Perhaps they did. 

So, what did you always want and did or didn’t finally achieve? 

Click on any image to enlarge

Closure

May 11, 2024
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Of all the pop psychology detritus that litters our culture, none bothers me more than the fatuous idea of “closure.” People talk about it as if it were not only a real thing, but an obvious one. But “closure” is a purely literary concept, ill suited to describe the actual events of our lives. 

By “literary,” I mean that it fulfills the esthetic necessity we humans feel to round out a story. A story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end (“but not necessarily in that order,” said French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard). For each of us, our “life story” is a kind of proto-fiction we create from the remembered episodes of our lives. We are, of course, the hero of our own life story, and the supporting characters all fit into a tidy plot. 

But, of course, actual life is not like that. Rather it is a bee-swarm of interconnecting and interacting prismatic moments seen from the billion points of view of a riotously populated planet. There is no story, only buzzing activity. Eight billion points of view — and that is only counting the human ones. One assumes animals and even plants have their own points of view and no narrative can begin to encompass it all. It is all simply churn. 

Of course, there are anecdotes, which are meant to be stories, and end, usually, with a punchline. Like a joke, they are self-contained. But our lives are not anecdotes, and tragedies, traumas, loss, are not self-contained. There is no punchline.

So, there is a smugness in the very idea that we can write “fin” at the completion of a story arc and pretend it means something real. It is just a structure imposed from outside. 

In his recent book, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, author Salman Rushdie notes the meaninglessness of the concept of “closure.” After he was attacked by a would-be assassin in 2022, he came desperately close to death, but ultimately survived. The thought that he might face his attacker in court might bring some sort of closure is dismissed. He went through medical procedures and therapy, and even the writing of the book. “These things did not give me ‘closure,’ whatever that was, if it was even possible to find such a thing.” The thought of confronting his attacker in court became less and less meaningful. 

Writers, in general, are put off by such lazy ideas as “closure.” Their job is to find words for actual experience, words that will convey something of the vivid actuality of events. Emily Bernard, author of Black is the Body was also the victim of a knife attack, and her book is a 218-page attempt to come to terms with her trauma: The book opens up a life in connection with the whole world. She never uses the word “closure.” 

Both Bernard and Rushdie to their utmost to describe their attacks with verbal precision and without common bromides. It is what all serious writers attempt, with greater or lesser success. It is easy to fall into patterns of thought, cultural assumption, cliches. It is much harder to express experience directly, unfiltered. 

The need to organize and structure experience is deeply embedded in the human experience. And art, whether literary, musical, cinematic or visual, requires structure. It is why we have sonnets and sonata-form, why we have frames around pictures, why we have three-act plays. 

The fundamental structure of art is the exposition, the development, and the denouement. Stasis; destablization; reestablishment of order. It is the rock on which literature and art is founded. When we read an autobiography, there is the same tripartite form: early life; the rise to success with its impediments and challenges; and finally, the look back at “what we have learned.” 

We read history books the same way, as if U.S. history ended with the signing of the Constitution, or with Appomattox, or the Civil Rights movement, or the election of Reagan. But history is a continuum, not a self-contained narrative. Books have to have a satisfying end, but life cannot. 

Most of us have suffered some trauma in our lives. It could be minor, or it could be life-changing. Most often it is the death of someone we love. It could be a medical issue, or a divorce. We are wrenched from the calm and dropped into a turmoil. It can leave us shattered. 

And the story-making gene kicks in and we see this disruption as the core of a story. We were in steady state, then we are torn apart, and finally we “find closure.” Or not. Really no, never. That is only for the story. The telling, not the experience. 

In truth, the trauma is really one more blow, one more scar on the skin added to the older ones, one more knot on the string. We will all have suffered before, although the sharpness may have faded; we will all suffer again. 

Closure is a lie. All there really is is endurance. As Rushdie put it, “Time might not heal all wounds, but it deadened the pain.” We carry all our wounds with us, adding the new on top of the old and partly obscuring what is buried. 

There are myriad pop psychology tropes. They are like gnats flying around our heads. Each is a simplifying lie, a fabricated story attempting to gather into a comprehensible and digestible knot the infinite threads of a life. 

I have written many times before about the conflation of language and experience, and how we tend to believe that language is a one-to-one mirror of reality, when the truth is that language is a parallel universe. It has its own structure and rules — the three-act play — while those of non-verbal life are quite other. And we will argue — even go to war — over differences that only matter in language (what is your name for the deity?)

Most of philosophy is now really just a branch of philology — it is about words and symbols. But while thoughtful people complain about the insular direction that philosophy has taken, it has really always been thus. Plato is never about reality: It is about language. His ideal bed is merely about the definition of the word, “bed.” As if existence were truly nouns and verbs — bits taken out of context and defined narrowly. Very like the question of whether something is a particle or a wave, when in truth, it is both. Only the observation (the definition) will harness it in one form or the other. It is all churn. πάντα χωρεῖ

A story attempts to make sense of the senseless. I’m not sure life would be possible without stories, from the earliest etiology of creation myth to the modern Big Bang. All those things that surpass understanding can only be comprehended in metaphorical form, i.e., the story. 

But stories also come in forms that are complex or simple, and are true or patently silly. My beef with “closure” is that it isn’t a story that reflects reality, but a lie. A complacent lie. 

Like most of popular psychology, it takes an idea that may have some germ of truth and husks away all the complex “but-ifs” and solidifies it into a commonly held bromide. It is psychobabble. 

That is a word, invented by writer Richard Dean Rosen in 1975, which he defines as “a set of repetitive verbal formalities that kills off the very spontaneity, candor, and understanding it pretends to promote. It’s an idiom that reduces psychological insight to a collection of standardized observations that provides a frozen lexicon to deal with an infinite variety of problems.”

And afternoon TV shows, self-help books and videos, and newspaper advice columns are loaded with it. It is so ubiquitous that the general populace assume it must be legitimate. We toss around words such as co-dependent, denial, dysfunctional, empowerment, holistic, synergy, mindfulness, as though they are actually more than buzz words and platitudes. Such words short-circuit more meaningful understanding. Or a recognition that there may be no understanding to be had. 

(In 1990, Canadian psychologist B.L. Beyerstein coined the word “neurobabble” as an extension of psychobabble, in which research in neuroscience enters the popular culture poorly understood, with such buzz words as neuroplasticity, Venus and Mars gender differences, the 10-percent-of-the-brain myth, and right- and left-brain oversimplifications.)

 As a writer (albeit with no great claim to importance), I know how often I struggle to find the right word, phrase or metaphor to reach a level of precision that I don’t find embarrassing, cheap, or an easy deflection. Trying to find the best expression for something distinct, complex and personal — to try to be honest — is work. 

This is true in all the arts: trying to find just the right brown by mixing pigments,; or the right note in a song that is surprising enough to be interesting, but still makes sense in the harmony you are writing in; or giving a character in a play an action that rings true. We are so mired in habits of thought, of culture, that finding that exactitude is flying through flak.