READ IT AND WEEP.(The Talk of the Town)

Summer reading lists are meant both for self-improvement and to impress an audience. That boy reading Proust on the beach has an eye for the girl nearby turning the pages of Virginia Woolf as much as he does for his own vow to get to the end of the damn thing at last. Presidential summer reading lists are no different, meant as much to titillate a particular public as to inventory a private disposition. When the President announces that he is reading, say, a new three-volume history of the Louisiana Purchase, he may actually be reading it, but he is also signalling to the commentariat watching from the next dune that it's time for them to go into their "surprisingly thoughtful statesman" bit.

Nonetheless, it is hard not to brood, in old-fashioned Kremlinological style, on the meanings of George W. Bush's syllabus for this particular summer. Where in summers past he has read fiction by Tom Wolfe, or a comprehensive history of salt--both very good things in the right seasonal doses--this summer, perhaps under the pressure of events, he has embarked on a more strenuous list. An amazingly strenuous list, actually. It includes Albert Camus's novel "The Stranger"; Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's book about Robert Oppenheimer and the invention of the atomic bomb; and Richard Carwardine's new biography of Abraham Lincoln.

Already, it seems, the President has polished off the Camus and had a debate with his new press secretary, Tony Snow, on the origins of existentialism. Now, it's possible to feel misgivings about the President's ranch reading. Hasn't there been, over the years, more useful material for him to scrutinize--memos, for instance, about Osama bin Laden's intention to strike in the United States, or State Department studies on the difference between Sunnis and Shiites in a country he was about to invade? But it is the sunny optimism of humanism to imagine that books change lives, and that no one can come away from "The Stranger" entirely unaffected, particularly one who is, as he reminds us, a wartime President.

The book, after all, takes up the mysterious origins and horrific consequences of irrational acts of violence committed in the Arab world. Meursault, a French kid in Algeria caught up in a funk of alienation, shoots dead a stranger on the beach--a "native," at that--for reasons he cannot explain even to himself. (He has had minor confrontations with Arabs, but Camus makes it plain that it hardly accounts for this act.) Camus's purpose is to dramatize the psychology of pathological violence as a self-defining act, and his point, though open to debate with Tony Snow, is that violence may arise not as a result of premeditation and ideological fixation but as a sporadic and unplanned impulse, a kind of perpetual human temptation. To look too narrowly for rational purpose in it is to mistake its very nature. The freedom to act includes the freedom to do evil, and the murderer within us is no further away ...