The Magician's Assistant, Ann Patchett

J.C. Leyendecker, Couple Descending Stairs

(April 22) Underwhelming. I picked this up because I enjoyed Bel Canto so much. It can barely hold a candle to it, but it wasn’t as terribly disappointing as Housekeeping was after Gilead.

It reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver’s lesser works: an impossibly beautiful woman, a genius and a loner, suffers a life-altering loss, travels to a foreign part of the U.S. and faces all kinds of truths about herself. Ho hum. I find these hard to believe at the best of times – the heroines never seem to do too much before everyone is eating out of their hands and acknowledging their intellectual superiority – but this version is particularly incredible because the beautiful genius loner woman who travels to Nebraska is supposed to be a magician’s assistant who was in love with a gay man for 20 years, and there is nothing about Sabine Parsifal that is convincing as either a magician’s assistant or a sexual misfit.

There is a little bit of Fargo shock in this novel but it’s not enough to lift it out of apprentice-novelist territory.

Don't Shoot the Dog, Karen Pryor

Francis Barraud, His Master's Voice

(April 11) Very interesting. I’m a big fan of the animal world anyway, but this book had come up in discussions about human behaviour, and reminded me of a New York Times story I read last summer that was eye-opening: “What Shamu Taught Me About a Good Marriage,” by Amy Sutherland, so Don’t Shoot the Dog was doubly interesting to me. And it was rewarding reading on both topics.

This is not the first book I’ve read that’s proven loving-kindness is powerful --­ all the spiritual books do that, or try to (e.g., Deepak Chopra, Dan Millman, David Hawkins, Tony Schwartz, Jack Kornfield) and many of the health / social psychology books I’ve read lately do, too (e.g., Martha Sout, Gabor Maté). So what is astonishing is not just additional proof that positive reinforcement (a businesslike application of loving-kindness) is productive, but that human beings continue to try to control the world with bitching, kvetching, sulking, bullying, anger and coldness instead.

Yep, I’ll be getting a clicker.

Charming excerpt from Don’t Shoot the Dog:

Shanti [an elephant] quickly learned to fetch the Frisbee to me in return for a toot on the whistle and snack from the bucket. She also quickly learned to stand just a little bit farther away each time so I had to reach farther in for the Frisbee. When I didn't fall for that, she whopped me on the arm. When Jim and I both yelled at her for that (a sign of disapproval, which elephants respect), she started fetching nicely but pretended she'd forgotten how to pick up carrots. It took her a full minute, feeling the carrot in my hand with her trunk, while looking meaningfully into my bucket, to get me to understand that she preferred the apples and sweet potatoes that were also in there.

When I proved to be intelligent and biddable in this matter and started giving her the preferred reinforcers, she immediately used the same technique -- feeling with the trunk tip while making meaningful glances and eye contact -- to try to get me to open the padlock on her cage. Elephants are not just a little bit smart; elephants are eerily smart.

Species temperament shows up in many, many species in a shaping session. When I inadvertently failed to reinforce a hyena, instead of getting mad or quitting, it turned on the charm, sitting down in front of me, grinning and chuckling like a fur-covered Johnny Carson. In shaping a wolf to go around a bush in its yard, I made the same mistake, failing to reinforce it when I should have; the wolf looked over its shoulder, made eye contact with a long, thoughtful stare, then ran on, right around the bush, earning all the kibble I had in my pocket; it had sized up the situation, perhaps deciding that I was still in the game since I was still watching, and it had taken a chance and guessed at what would work. Big risk takers, wolves. If hyenas are comedians, wolves are Vikings.

Sometimes the animals understand reinforcement perfectly. Melanie Bond, in charge of the National Zoo's great apes, had started reinforcing Ham, the chimpanzee, for various behaviors. One morning he was accumulating his food rather than eating it, with the intention, Melanie supposed, of eating outdoors. When Ham saw that at last Melanie was going over to open the door and let him outside, he knew what to do: He handed her a stalk of celery.