CIA satirical novel
Dec. 30th, 2010 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nancylebovIntelligence by Susan Hasler is a hybrid bitter insider's look at being an analyst at the CIA and a romantic comedy.
Maddy is shell-shocked from not having the resources or trust to pursue leads that warned of 9/11, and now there are hints that a new major terrorist attack is getting developed. Furthermore , her horrible narcissistic mother has moved in with her and is driving her crazy.
The office politics are extremely plausible. The viewpoint of a terrorist not so much, and I have a tentative theory about why. The thing is, we get told about his miserable background and his ideological motivations (credit goes to the author for not including 72 virgins), but it seems generic. My experience is that people have something of a personal relationship with their ideologies-- they know who's influenced them and even if they're not involved in faction fights, they at least know more about the divisions than any but the most dedicated outsiders have ever heard of. All of that is missing.
The gender stuff is interesting, and I'm curious about what you guys think of this bit: All hell has broken loose in a way that involves the death of some children (I'm not calling this a spoiler-- anything resembling a normal novel which has an imminent terrorist attack will have a terrorist attack), and the female analysts are full of shock, horror, and rage. One of the male analysts is humming the Andy Griffith theme song, and a woman asks him how he can be happy. (From memory)--he says "This is the great war of my generation, and this is the front line. How can I want to be anywhere else?".
On the whole, I liked the book with a couple of caveats. All the fat characters are obnoxious. As might be expected, there is a coercive interrogation which is of a hateworthy person, produces reliable information, and has no unwanted side effects.
Maddy is shell-shocked from not having the resources or trust to pursue leads that warned of 9/11, and now there are hints that a new major terrorist attack is getting developed. Furthermore , her horrible narcissistic mother has moved in with her and is driving her crazy.
The office politics are extremely plausible. The viewpoint of a terrorist not so much, and I have a tentative theory about why. The thing is, we get told about his miserable background and his ideological motivations (credit goes to the author for not including 72 virgins), but it seems generic. My experience is that people have something of a personal relationship with their ideologies-- they know who's influenced them and even if they're not involved in faction fights, they at least know more about the divisions than any but the most dedicated outsiders have ever heard of. All of that is missing.
The gender stuff is interesting, and I'm curious about what you guys think of this bit: All hell has broken loose in a way that involves the death of some children (I'm not calling this a spoiler-- anything resembling a normal novel which has an imminent terrorist attack will have a terrorist attack), and the female analysts are full of shock, horror, and rage. One of the male analysts is humming the Andy Griffith theme song, and a woman asks him how he can be happy. (From memory)--he says "This is the great war of my generation, and this is the front line. How can I want to be anywhere else?".
On the whole, I liked the book with a couple of caveats. All the fat characters are obnoxious. As might be expected, there is a coercive interrogation which is of a hateworthy person, produces reliable information, and has no unwanted side effects.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 03:33 am (UTC)Thank you for posting about this -- it's a nifty hook for something I've been thinking about lately.
I've been watching "Dexter" from the beginning, thanks to Netflix streaming, and I was struck by the portrayal of Deb's career aspirations. She's the sister of the protagonist, and a cop, and at the very beginning of the show, she's in Vice, and desperately, desperately wants to be assigned to Homicide. So anything interesting happens with someone getting killed, say, evidence of a new serial killer, is a matter of longing and hope for her. When, a few shows in, she gets assigned to Homicide, her reaction to news of a grisly new crime is evident pleasure that she gets to work on it. And this is absolutely normalized; all of the (predominantly, but not exclusively male) cops and techs she works with feel similarly. It's a significant plot point in the second season when she asks to be taken off a high-profile murder case, because of past trauma; it's taken by fellow cops as self-evident indication that something's not OK with her and that she needs help and support to get over whatever it is that has interfered with her (for a homicide cop) normal healthy reaction to an interesting murder.
This has been fascinating to me to watch, in light of my own reflections on my own profession. Last year, as I was in discussions prior to starting my present position, a soon-to-be-coworker was talking to me, in a "know what you're in for" sense, about a tough day he had which involved not one but two childhood incest/rape PTSD cases. And when he concluded his story, I said something to the effect of, "Wow, yes, that sounds really awful. And, um, I hope you wont take this the wrong way, but this is exactly the sort of work I went to grad school to do and I'm really excited about working with your patients."
Since then, I've generally found that while my fellow therapists are all very... discreet... about expressing such sentiments, they're all clear it's reasonably normal in the field, and apparently your fellow clinicians don't think there's something unsavory about you if you are all, "A batterer up on drug charges with PTSD from gang warfare and an late-diagnosed/undertreated MMI! YES!" I did get some o_Os from coworkers when I was burbling happily about how I might have finally gotten my first Antisocial Personality Disorder case, but I never got the impression they thought I was inappropriate, just masochistic.
And we're close to a nice even 50/50 M/F split, at my clinic.
I would suspect that the author knows what she's talking about, about the cultural norms inside the intelligence community, and that it's just different there. I would not be surprised to find a gender difference about this... this... I don't know what to call this phenomenon. After all, girls are more strongly socialized to be "nice" and generally, for whatever reason, turn out to be more sensitive to social norms, and more loathe to violate them. I could easily see that being just enough differential, that, in the right organizational culture, the women would never espouse enthusiasm that way (even while maybe thinking/feeling it), while (some/all) the men did.
I wonder if this differential exists, and if it does, whether it's something that inhibits women in progressing in their careers. I can easily imagine that if you don't feel it's decorous to express your enthusiasm for harder cases -- whether you're a surgeon, a detective, a therapist, or an intelligence analyst -- you might find them going to someone who makes it clearer that they want them.
[ETA: spelling.]
no subject
Date: 2010-12-31 12:08 pm (UTC)I can't remember whether the happy guy had been there for 9/11-- Hasler says that the analysts who'd been through 9/11 had taken a lot of emotional damage because they knew something might happen, didn't have the chance to do their work properly, and then were blamed.
Hasler might have chosen to make happy guy an emotional jolt for the reader, while he wasn't quite that unusual for the agency.
She was also maximizing Maddy's suffering for the first half or so of the book, presumably for the sake of a happy ending.