ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN and JAMES

I don’t like grandiose predictions, and I understand that I risk sounding silly by making one now. But I’m going to predict that Percival Everett’s James, a novel just released to considerable fanfare, is going to transform the study of American literature across the country. At last we have a novel that can serve as a foil to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and thus can return Twain’s book to the classroom. Everett’s novel is every bit as radical as Twain’s in its use of language and point of view and subversive irony. What happens, in case you have missed the excited articles in the NY Times and the Washington Post and the New Yorker, is that Everett re-tells Huckleberry Finn in the voice of Jim, Huck’s companion. He shows us a story that both chimes with and diverges from the one told by Huck, and the result is a narrative that evolves from cheerful homage to furious corrective.

As a storyteller Everett compels us to keep turning those pages. As a polemicist, he ranks with Voltaire, who happens to make more than one cameo appearance in James. As an artist who can imagine his way into the atrocities of slavery, he’s as good as one can get. Yes, I’ve read Frederick Douglass’s Life, which derives its power from the eyewitness accounts and first-hand knowledge of enslavement. I’ve read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which registers for me more as 19th Century melodrama than as trustworthy testimony. Until I read Everett’s novel, the two most artistically successful explorations of slavery have been Toni Morrison’s Beloved and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom. They remain monumental, breathtaking, triumphant works of genius. But nobody until Everett has revealed to me the sense of eternal despair that the American slave faced. We get a glimpse of a 15-year-old enslaved girl who lived her entire life never more than twenty yards away from the workplace where she was born. We see a routine rape by an overseer who has sent an enslaved woman’s husband away for a few hours in order to make the man’s wife available. We understand that life and imprisonment are synonymous for the slave, who is born into bondage, spends every day in fear, and dies without hope. Everett has achieved what seems impossible: he has made a reader in 2024 see the horrors of 19th-Century slavery afresh.

But before we get any farther with Everett’s masterpiece, let’s consider his source. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not an anti-slavery book. There’s no need for it to be anti-slavery; it was published in the U.S. in 1885, twenty-three years after the Emancipation Proclamation, twenty years after the end of the American civil war, and 17 years after the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing citizenship to every person born in the United States. Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, when slavery was thriving. Hers was an anti-slavery novel. Twain set Huckleberry Finn in the mid-1840’s, and he very clearly demonstrates how awful slavery was. But he’s not attacking an institution that died two decades earlier. He’s attacking the racist attitudes that prevailed in his day and that we still observe in ours.

Consider the moment in the final section of Twain’s novel, the cringe-worthy Evasion Sequence, when Huck shows up at the home of Silas and Sally Phelps, two good, law-abiding Christians who turn out to be the aunt and uncle of Tom Sawyer. Huck improvises a lie about being delayed by a serious mechanical problem on a steamboat. Here’s the crucial moment in the conversation. Aunt Sally speaks first and reveals just how dismissive this culture is when it considers the humanity of black people:

“Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

“Well it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”

Later, when Tom Sawyer arrives and learns that Jim is shackled and confined to a flimsy shed, he withholds the news that Miss Watson has died and freed Jim in her will. Instead, he contrives an elaborate plan to free Jim using methods he’s read about in The Count of Monte Cristo and other romances. Tom Sawyer becomes an emblem of the complacent, unthinking, smug American citizen for whom a black man is nothing more than a plaything. When a disillusioned Huck learns the truth about Tom’s deception, he decides that he’s going to light out for the Indian Territory—alone, by himself, “ahead of the rest”—in order to leave both Tom and his country behind. That country has taught Huck that he’s going to Hell for helping Jim find freedom, and then he has seen Tom Sawyer make a joke of the entire process of emancipation. Twain’s target is not slavery. His target is the legacy of slavery, specifically the social muscle-memory of regarding black people as things, as property, as inferior.

Now Everett lets Jim speak. The opening line—“Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass”—pulls us into the story with a replay of an early scene in Twain’s novel, when Tom and Huck prank Jim by stealing his hat and then telling him that witches must have done it. Now, however, Jim reveals that he’s aware of their scheme and indulges them for his own safety, given that white people will not feel threatened by his presence, and thus be inclined to sell him to a plantation downriver, if they perceive him as stupid. Then we learn that all African-Americans are bilingual; they speak perfectly standard English among themselves, but in front of whites they adopt the dialect that Twain uses for all of Jim’s speeches. Later, in a language lesson with some slave children, Jim says, “…the more you talk about God and Jesus and heaven and hell, the better [white people] feel.” Then we get this exchange between Jim, who is clearly a superb teacher, and his pupils:

The children said together, “And the better they feel, the safer we are.”

“February, translate that.”

“Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”

“Nice.”

This kind of satirical comedy does not last. The deeper we get into Jim’s journey, the farther Everett diverges from Twain’s story. By the end we’re caught up in a thrilling and terrifying escape narrative that recalls, in no particular order, Ralph Ellison, Nat Turner, Malcolm X, and Colson Whitehead. So I’m hoping, fellow English teachers, that you will let your students hear the voices of both Mark Twain’s Huck and Percival Everett’s Jim. If you run into resistance, push back. If necessary, get in touch with the marvelous Jocelyn Chadwick, who not only knows schools and knows Twain, but who recognized the dignity of Jim way back in 1998 with the publication of The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn. Good for Percival Everett for his ingenious re-imagining of Jim, but Jocelyn Chadwick got there first. Or, as Huck Finn might say, she’s been there before.

James McBride and Beto O'Rourke

I have known for years of James McBride’s reputation as a masterful storyteller, but only recently did I encounter his talents first-hand with my reading of The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store. What an astonishing novel! Imagine if Elmore Leonard came up with the idea for a caper and asked Michael Chabon and Toni Morrison to collaborate on the manuscript. That’s not fair, actually, because James McBride came up with this profoundly satisfying work all on his own. If I’m going to invoke the names of other writers, I should cite William Faulkner, whose Light in August gives us a comic plot with Lena Grove, a tragic plot with Joe Christmas, and a melodramatic plot with Gail Hightower. McBride quite skillfully assembles a cast of Jewish characters, represented initially by the hapless and good-hearted Moshe Ludlow and his wife Chona; African-American characters, who slip into the narrative in cameo roles only to become full-blown protagonists, particularly Nate Love and his wife Addie; and White characters, who are mostly awful to the others but who get their share of humanity, too. We get a comedic love story that turns tragic with Moshe and Chona; a tragic love story that ends happily with Nate and Addie; and a melodrama complete with secret tunnels, an evil sexual predator, and the daring rescue of a deaf boy from a horrific madhouse. I dare anybody to put this book down once you start to read.

What’s especially impressive about McBride’s accomplishment is that in a prologue—which I reread after I’d finished the book—he pulls a Citizen Kane on us and, just as Herman Mankiewicz and Orson Welles do with their opening newsreel at the start of their celebrated movie—tells us everything that’s going to happen in the next couple of hundred pages. His summary is so swift, however, and our familiarity with the characters so minimal, that we don’t register all the spoilers he has provided. He even gives us a Rosebud: there’s a body discovered in the shaft of an old well from decades before, and found with it is a mezuzah. We have to wait until the end to find out whose body it is, and when we do, we are very, very happy. McBride renders to us a teeming universe within the confines of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and he even uses the historical flood of 1972 as a Biblical analogue to wash everything clean. In a coda he lovingly, ironically, and delightfully sends his surviving African-American characters to paradise in—surprise!—the American South. James McBride has a heart and a wicked sense of humor, and he has earned all the kudos he has received.

And now for something completely different: We’ve Got to Try, the new book by Beto O’Rourke. This nonfiction social history provides a meticulous survey of voter suppression in the United States. You will read it with interest for the specific examples O’Rourke uses to illustrate how pernicious and dangerous voter suppression has been and threatens to become again, and you will finish it with outrage and a compulsion to help resist some lawmakers’ increasing efforts to keep certain groups away from the ballot box. The book is dedicated to Lawrence Nixon, a courageous African-American doctor in Texas who tried for twenty years before he finally succeeded in winning the right to vote. It’s Nixon who gives the book its title. Told by two White officials that they could not allow him to vote, he replied, “I know you can’t. But I’ve got to try.”

Woodberry Forest School has produced lots of good writers since its founding in 1889, including the lyricist and composer Johnny Mercer, and I wouldn’t dare try to list all of them. But I got to know several writers-in-the-making when I worked there between 1982 and 2020. John Hart has enjoyed smashing success as a writer of mystery thrillers, one of which, The Last Child, we used as a school-wide summer reading selection. Logan Ward has written a fine memoir (See You in a Hundred Years, which we read in one of my senior English classes). We also read Chris Swann’s excellent debut novel, Shadow of the Lions, which was set in a school that resembled Woodberry more than a little. I’m ashamed that I didn’t find time to give class attention to John Copenhaver’s sensational Dodging and Burning, his first novel, which won the Macavity Award in 2019. (Sorry, John, but I was already thinking about retirement, and sorry, too, to Michael Craven, who has been publishing well-received mysteries since 2009.) And, after collaborating with a colleague on a book about the war on drugs, Beto O’Rourke has joined this fine company and has published his first book written all on his own. I’ve mentioned just a few of the published ones; Chris Lindsey, for example, has written an excellent novel that deserves an ISBN and a place on the bookstore shelves. The Woodberry Forest writers are too eclectic to form an official movement, like Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate with the Fugitives, but they are making their mark, and I am pleased to salute them here.. 

PRAYER FOR THE FRENCH REPUBLIC and APPROPRIATE

Almost a year ago, in March of 2023, I confessed that I am sometimes in the mood for the theatrical equivalent of a hot fudge sundae, and I proceeded to write about two ethereally entertaining Broadway musicals to illustrate my point. At other times, however, I hunger for theatrical red meat, and when I happen to be served a prime cut, I will ravenously devour it no matter how raw it is. In a recent excursion to New York I stumbled onto two stunning productions of two brilliant plays. I’m still replaying moments from both of them in my head, and I’m still awed by how utterly satisfying they were. Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic dazzled with its intellectual depth even as it managed to break our hearts. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate delivered one emotional jolt after another as it blew our minds.

I have been impressed with Joshua Harmon for many years now, but with Prayer for the French Republic he has made a gargantuan leap in his artistic ambition. I first encountered him in two solid productions in Washington, D.C., Bad Jews and, a few years later, Admission. But those two plays were in the A.R Gurney or Wendy Wasserstein school of mild satire with small casts and easily recognizable targets. With Prayer for the French Republic he has stepped up to the George Bernard Shaw/Tom Stoppard level of taking on great big societal problems and exploring them on an epic level. The cast of eleven certainly doesn’t sound epic, but these superb actors swiftly got the audience grappling with international anti-Semitism, American provincialism, the Holocaust, the purpose of the State of Israel, the value or lack thereof of religious faith, and contemporary French and American politics. If that sounds too heavy or tendentious, rest assured that Harmon is still able to summon plenty of laughs. And also occasional tears. Two branches of the same family, the Salomons and the Benhamous, become as familiar to us as members of our own families, with all their quirks and irritations and prejudices and aspirations, and by the end we have toggled back and forth with them from the mid-1940’s to the mid 2010’s in their struggles to survive not merely as Jews, but as proud French Jews. Anthony Edwards may have been cast for his box office appeal lingering from his Top Gun and ER days, but my favorite actor was Nancy Robinette, who plays a grandmother bravely hoping that some of her children will come home from the concentration camp. The play ran over three hours with two intermissions, and, honestly, I would have gladly sat through three more hours with these people. In addition to Robinette and Edwards, the pitch-perfect cast included Betsy Aidem, Nael Nacer, Francis Benhamou, Aria Shahghasemi, Molly Ranson, Richard Masur, Daniel Oreskes, Ari Brand, and Ethan Haberfield. David Cromer was the visionary, deft director.

As with Joshua Harmon, I first saw the work of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in Washington, where his An Octoroon sliced and diced Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon, a 19th-Century melodrama that became the launching pad for Jacobs-Jenkins’s hilarious and unsettling examination of legacy racism. And again as with Harmon, when I saw his latest, Appropriate, in New York, I admired how much farther his vision had extended. If Joshua Harmon is joining the company of Shaw and Stoppard, Jacobs-Jenkins is nodding to Sam Shepard, David Lindsay-Abaire, John Guare, and Caryl Churchill as he proceeds to become entirely and impressively himself. We start this play in familiar territory: a Southern family arguing over what to do with the decaying plantation house occupied until recently by their late father. We think that we’ve been here before with Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and A Streetcar Named Desire and Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes.  But now I invite you, dear reader, to consider the main character of that latter play, Regina Giddens (played by Bette Davis in the movie version), who cold-bloodedly allows her husband Horace to die of a heart attack right in front of her because she doesn’t want him to change his will. Please don’t stop there. Revisit the most vicious female characters you have ever seen onstage, starting with Medea and stretching through Edward Albee’s Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I can assure you that in Appropriate the character of Toni Lafayette, played by Sarah Paulson with deservedly acclaimed ferocity, makes Goneril and Regan seem like Maria von Trapp. Oh. My. God. Not since the Compsons in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury has a family been more dysfunctional (to put it mildly), but miraculously Jacobs-Jenkins manages to keep us laughing (sometimes in astonishment at how awful people can be to each other) between, and often during, occasions when we have to digest a new jaw-dropping revelation.

To avoid spoilers I don’t want to say too much about the plot except to note that Jacobs-Jenkins introduces quite early the presence of a large, unmarked slave cemetery in the woods near the house and then brings onstage a photo album devoted to images of African-American victims of lynching. Toni, her brothers Bo (Corey Stoll) and Frank (Michael Esper), her son Rhys (Graham Campbell), her sister-in-law Rachael (Natalie Gold), her niece Cassidy (Alyssa Emily Marvin), her nephew Ainsley (Lincoln Cohen on the night I saw it), and Frank’s girlfriend River (nicely played by Elle Fanning in her Broadway debut), all find themselves changed by their contact with this album. Bravo to all in the cast and to dots (sic), for the astonishing set design. The director who pulled off this coup is Lila Neugebauer. Ms. Neugebauer, I will follow you anywhere.

TOM LAKE and NORTH WOODS

I finished 2023 and began 2024 by reading Ann Patchett’s latest, the very fine Tom Lake, which turned out by pure accident to be a perfect novel to open as one year gives way to another. Shifting back and forth between present day and past, the story looks backward to events that transpired long ago and simultaneously anticipates the characters’ resolutions for the future. Sixteen-year-old Laura Kenison, who will soon drop the “u” to become Lara in honor of her favorite character in Doctor Zhivago, is a high school student helping with the casting of a small-town production of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town when she decides to audition for the role of Emily Webb herself. She gets the part, and then, boom, we learn that the day of the casting occurred decades ago, and that Lara is telling the story of her first role onstage to her three grown daughters as they pick cherries from the orchard on their family farm. At this point we inevitably register a Chekhov alert: the mother who was a former actress, the three sisters, the cherry orchard. But Patchett requires no knowledge of Chekhov for a reader to enjoy this intricately and deftly structured novel. For those who do know the work of Russia’s first modern playwright, Patchett strikes a Chekhovian tone of rueful comedy balanced with stoical tragedy. There are villains and heroes, but the villainy comes with a quietly redeeming asterisk, and the heroism takes the form of everyday decency. It’s a rewarding and solidly satisfying book.

In hands less skilled than Patchett’s, the framed narrative might be merely irritating. As she and her daughters pick cherries, Lara doles out in tiny pieces the story of her summer at Tom Lake in rural Michigan, when she was in her early 20’s and beautiful and talented and again playing Emily in a production of Our Town. That was when she fell in love with the dashing Peter Duke, three years older, unbearably handsome, and every bit the charming rogue we have known from literature of the past six centuries. I have long been a Patchett fan and have never thought of her as prudish, but there’s a lot more sex in this book than I recall from previous works. And the sex is vital to the plot. In one particularly shocking scene that comes at the end, Patchett uses a sordid assignation in a bathroom as a way of emphasizing just how disgustingly self-absorbed one particular character is and has always been. It’s a sad, appalling, and entirely believable moment of degradation, and no reader is likely to forget it. But it’s a low point in a novel that offers plenty of high points. Tom Lake swings from the interior depths of the theater to the gorgeous expanses of the great outdoors, from lust to love, from love to indifference, from youthful naivete to aged wisdom, from wild flings to serene happiness. I have a little trouble believing that actors in a Sam Shepard play are going to get actually drunk in the course of the play, but that’s my only quibble with a backstage portrait of a woman unafraid to tell her extraordinary story.

As Ann Patchett salutes Chekhov in Tom Lake, Daniel Mason in North Woods evokes at various turns Henry David Thoreau, Mary Rowlandson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Saunders, James Joyce, John Steinbeck, Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Bronte, and William Blake. My God, when I got to the end of this astonishing miscellany of a novel, a book that grows better and stranger and grander with every page, I tossed my catalogue of literary influences aside and decided that what I was reading was pure Daniel Mason, a writer as original and daring and stunning in his range as anybody practicing the art today. Mason joins Bruce Holsinger as a living embodiment of what I consider the ideal life: professor at a major university by day (in Mason’s case, Stanford), writer of dazzling and commercially successful fiction at night. And with this ever surprising novel, a mixture of genres and voices, a mock-scrapbook of images, ballads, and ever-shifting prose pieces, Mason celebrates what the ancients called the genius loci, the animating spirit of a place.

That place is a habitation in western Massachusetts first settled by a pair of unnamed colonial-era lovers fleeing the wrath of Puritan settlers. Time passes and brings Charles Osgood, a man obsessed with apples who has found the perfect specimen growing on this land. Mason is unafraid to evoke parallels with Eden, but there’s nothing formulaic or predictable in the story of Osgood and then of his twin daughters and then of the various folks who follow as we progress into the modern day. At one point Mason provides a passionate sex scene with beetles. At another, recalling Steinbeck’s tortoise carrying a seed from one side of the highway to another, he follows a spore as it hitches a ride to a vulnerable stand of chestnut trees. When the first ghost appeared, I laughed out loud, as much for the surprising delight at the intrusion of the supernatural as for the karmic justice that the ghost was about to deliver. By the end Mason dares like Anthony Doerr in Cloud Cuckoo Land to leap into the future, and I will not risk spoiling anything in the final glorious pages except to say that the final sentence left me awed and overwhelmed with admiration. This book appeared on many Ten-Best lists for 2023, and even though this new year is only a couple of weeks old, I am certain that it will be one of the ten best books I will read in 2024. How can there be ten better?

ELF THE MUSICAL and ELF the movie

I’ll admit that I saw the movie Elf for the first time only a few days ago. Up until then, the trailer and snippets I’d catch when changing the channel in December were enough for me. Its star, Will Farrell, like his contemporary Adam Sandler, for many decades served as a reason for me to avoid, rather than attend, any movie with either one of them in the cast, and even their early appearances on Saturday Night Live struck me as desperate straining to please rather than effective comic delivery. But I’ll admit that I’ve been unfair to Will Farrell. (I still haven’t boarded the Adam Sandler train.) I enjoyed Farrell’s performance in Spirited on Netflix, and when I watched him as Buddy the Elf a few days ago, I realized that he wasn’t desperate, but generous. He was willing to do whatever it took to make the movie work. And, perhaps most strangely of all, the reason I watched Elf in the first place was that on the night before, I had seen the musical version onstage (also for the first time) at our local Mill Mountain Theatre here in Roanoke. Elf the Musical turned out to be a delight, not because the score was especially hummable, not because the book was especially witty, but because the cast was uniformly excellent, and the man playing the Will Farrell part of Buddy, Jarrett Jay Yoder, turned in one of the finest performances I’ve ever seen on the Mill Mountain stage. And I’ve been attending their shows ever since I was twelve years old, when in the summer of 1964 the Mill Mountain Playhouse opened its first season.

I had seen Yoder turn in a solid performance as Tommy in Mill Mountain’s Jersey Boys earlier in the season, but though I should have known better, I mistook his tough-guy persona as a measure of his acting range. Sorry, Mr. Yoder; that was both amateurish and unfair on my part. From the moment he appeared in Elf the Musical, Yoder was unrecognizable to anyone who had seen him as Tommy. From the outset and throughout the entire two-and-a-half hours of the show he delivered a fully committed, brilliantly specific, courageous, intelligent, high energy, flat-out dazzling incarnation of Buddy the Elf. I’ve directed over 30 plays and musicals, and I expect high standards in professional theater. But when somebody gets cast in a role this goofy, the actor may be tempted to succumb to self-consciousness and play the part with a winking acknowledgment of how silly his character is. Yoder entirely and bravely avoids that trap and gives us a Buddy who is utterly innocent of meanness, selfishness, irony, or guile. The result is that Buddy the character charms the audience with his goodness. Simultaneously Yoder the actor charms us with his willingness to go as far as necessary to demonstrate that all of us have an innate elfin goodness that, if we allow it to emerge, is capable indeed of saving Christmas year after year.

I already mentioned that the cast supporting Yoder was uniformly terrific, and here I’ll cite only a few by name. Rebecca Lee Lerman and Calan Johnson as Buddy’s stepmother and stepbrother respectively have fine chemistry, particularly in their duet in which they compose a wistful letter to Santa Claus. Joining them as Buddy’s father is Jeffrey McGullion, who rises to the tough challenge of having to pull off a Scrooge-level transformation in the course of the show. Credit of course must go to Hector Flores, the director, and to Joe Barros, assistant director and choreographer, for finding the ways into these characters and providing the dance steps to reveal them. I thought of all the elements of the Mill Mountain show as I watched the movie on the night after I left the theater, and I realized that Yoder’s performance on the stage showed me how wrong I’d been about Will Farrell. Buddy calls for an actor willing to banish all traces of worldly wisdom from his character, and that’s a feat both difficult and magnanimous. Pulling it off is a gift to the audience, and both Farrell and Yoder have delivered spectacularly.  

THE BEE STING and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG

I just finished reading Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, which left me with what James Joyce called a riot of emotions when I reached the final word. Primary among those emotions was fury, followed closely by outrage, bewilderment, disbelief, and then, a bit later, grudging acceptance of a conclusion I did not want to see. Murray, like his contemporary Claire Keegan, has to be one of the greatest living writers of fiction in English. I adored his Skippy Dies, and I suppose that my happy memories of that novel set me up for more expectations of wry humor, occasional slapstick, and a conclusion that wraps everything into a satisfying farewell. The Bee Sting is quite different. Katy Waldman in The New Yorker describes Bee Sting as structurally similar to Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and that's not a bad analogy: a dysfunctional family, shifting points of view among the four members, long passages of interior monologue and, in one case, no punctuation, though the lack of punctuation presents little impediment to the reading, thanks to Murray's skill with sentence structure and capitalization. In retrospect I have to wonder whether my anger was the result of my own dashed expectations, not the way the author chose to finish his book.

But, ending aside, I have serious concerns about some of the blatant contrivances Murray uses to get his plot to unfold as he wants it to. The Barnes family, consisting of Dickie (the father), Imelda (the mother), Cass (the daughter), and PJ (the younger brother) is struggling at the beginning of the novel. A global financial downturn has hurt business at Dickie’s two automobile dealerships; Cass is undergoing the typical trials of being a 15-year-old teenaged girl; PJ, age 12, is being bullied at school; and Imelda, who was passionately in love with Dickie’s late brother, Frank, is intensely frustrated by her husband’s refusal to ask his wealthy father for financial assistance. In other words, we’re starting where a typical comedy begins: with the characters troubled and unhappy. By the end, we expect their fortunes to rise and for their condition to be happily improved. But Murray, a master of confounding our expectations, traces the downfall of the Barnes family as their lives grow worse and worse. By the end, Murray’s hand is for me just a bit too evident in setting up a convergence of all the characters and all the plot lines during a Biblical-level deluge in a forest primeval. I would make the same charge about his characterization of Dickie, whose behavior often strikes me as improbable. Some of his sections in the middle of the book sag with Dickie’s exasperating, implausible choices. Still, everyone in the Barnes family becomes a vivid, highly sympathetic character (even Dickie).  I was turning the pages at a feverish pace during the last hundred pages. The writer is an artist of the first rank, but I do wish that his editor had pushed harder for trimming and tightening and for rethinking some of the behaviors of his primary adult male character. 

In late October I took the train to New York to meet my friends Kathy and Adam from Chicago, where we went as a trio to see the revival of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along, directed by the brilliant Maria Friedman, who finally, forty years after the show debuted as a notorious Broadway flop, found the secret of making the show work. The story, moving backward in time, depicts the dissolution of a friendship shared by Mary (a novelist who becomes a bitter alcoholic), Charlie (a playwright and one-time collaborator with the third member of the group), and Franklin, a gifted composer who sells out his art for the sake of money. Past productions presented the show as the story of this trio. Friedman’s epiphany was to focus it on Franklin alone. The play becomes his bitter memory of how his promising career began and how it, his marriages, and his friendships came to ruin.

There were multiple pleasures in the production. First of all, the three principal actors (Lindsay Mendez, Daniel Radcliffe, and Jonathan Groff) were all perfect in roles that demanded a lot physically as well as emotionally and artistically. The three have made the rounds of talk shows and have thus demonstrated to the world their personal chemistry. But they are all quite adept at delivering those Sondheim melodies with those intricate Sondheim lyrics. Sondheim is, after all, the genius here in this backward-moving show. He has written reprises to appear in the before the actual musical number comes up; he has written a clever pastiche of a review song typical of what we would experience in a 1960’s-era Greenwich Village cabaret; he has given us a stirring ode to friendship and a wry, very hummable song about how he doesn’t write hummable tunes and an ironic anthem to close the action just as the characters are at their youngest, most idealistic, most purely joyful selves. Sondheim delivered the songs, and he was well served by the entire cast. I offer a particular salute to Daniel Radcliffe, who could, if he wished, retire and spend his life milking his fame as Harry Potter but who instead challenges himself with eight shows a week of live theater. Good for you, Mr. Radcliffe, and kudos to your spotlight-sharers Mr. Groff and Ms. Mendez for good measure.

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and HOLLY

October has become a month-long national celebration of horror, gore, creepiness, jump-scares, and fear-mongering. No longer do people wait until October 31 to put up the Halloween decorations. I saw one yard decorated with a gigantic skull on September 30, and on nearby Stanley Avenue here in Roanoke, the houses have featured throughout the month spiderwebs, ghosts, jack-o-lanterns, inflatable ghoulies (and at one house, an inflatable Hogwarts castle straddling the sidewalk to the front door), witches, and skeletons. In full October spirit, I’m writing today about two gruesome tales, one true, one fiction, both page-turners.

In an earlier post I mentioned that I wanted to read more by David Grann, and so, prodded by an abundance of television commercials plugging the coming movie from Martin Scorsese, I read Killers of the Flower Moon, another fine work of nonfiction and scrupulous research. Because of oil rights, the Osage Indians in the 1920’s were among the richest people in the United States. Naturally, with the combined power of racism and greed, they became the targets of white people who wanted to get their hands on the Indians’ money. Some of these predators used legal loopholes and became “guardians” of fully capable adult Osage people; these guardians could legally control how much of their own money the Osage could spend, and from there it was an easy step to begin skimming from the reserves in the bank. Others, not content to get some of the money, opted to acquire all of it by arranging for a series of murders that would funnel inherited millions into the pockets of whites who had shrewdly married their way into the Osage culture. It’s a story of appalling treachery—though of course treachery to Native Americans is long-established custom here—but also of great tenacity by Tom White and his team of investigators working for J. Edgar Hoover in the nascent F.B.I.

Grann is an extraordinary reporter for lots of reasons: his limpid style, his ability to evoke an exotic setting economically, his careful research. But what I particularly admire about him is his determination to visit the scene of the crime, so to speak. When he was writing The Wager, he traveled to Patagonia and visited the very island where the British castaways had eked out their survival, and for Killers of the Flower Moon, he traveled to the Osage Nation in Oklahoma and spent time in Pawhuska, the municipality where so much of his story unfolded. His book comes with dozens of photographs of the principal characters and places, and the result for the reader is to be thoroughly educated in a series of outrages perpetrated by many people over many years.

Grann provides the nonfiction horrors. In the new novel Holly Stephen King provides goosebumps no less riveting because they happen to be fiction. Here King puts front-and-center a character he introduced in Mr. Mercedes and has gradually promoted to a starring role: Holly Gibney, the obsessive-compulsive, quiet, brilliant, lovable, and unlikely detective who has, in early middle age, already encountered a lifetime of evil, twisted, terrifying characters. In this novel, as he did in Mr. Mercedes and its sequel, Finders Keepers, King avoids the supernatural to deliver plenty of horror of the entirely human sort. As King has aged, his villains have aged as well. He assembled a terrifying group of ostensibly harmless old codgers in Dr. Sleep, a senior-citizens brigade of vampiric predators who kill for the sake of the life force that escapes the body after death by slow torture. Shudder. Now in Holly he’s given us a couple of octogenarian academics who happen to practice cannibalism. That’s not much of a spoiler. We know who they are from the outset, and while it takes a couple of pages to establish their motives for grabbing people (they use a technique that works very well for Jamie Gumb in The Silence of the Lambs), they waste no time in establishing their bona fides as dangerous and nasty.

King employs his regular stable of actors in the Holly canon, particularly Jerome and Barbara Robinson, brother and sister who have served as vital assistants to Holly as she unravels the bizarre mysteries that come her way. In this book I might quibble that Jerome and Barbara enjoy unbelievable success as novice writers, but if anybody knows the publishing business, it’s Stephen King, and if he wants to grant these two talented youngsters some credulity-straining rewards for their writing, then I’m willing to buy his story.  The book was 450 pages long but took only a couple of days for me to burn through, and now that it’s over, I can declare that Mr. King has once more delivered a superior entertainment that also works nicely as social commentary. Stephen King is our own Charles Dickens, a writer who knows how to get us emotionally responding to indelible characters even as he holds the mirror up to a flawed society. Dickens, however, tends to write about delectable Christmas feasts and hearty daily fare, while in this book in particular Mr. King gives us all too many reasons to skip a meal or two.

WHALE FALL and WHISKEY WHEN WE'RE DRY

To illustrate my last remark:

Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark.

What did they do, just when everything seemed so dark?

They said you have to ac-cent-u-ate the positive,

e-lim-i-nate the negative,

latch onto the affirmative.

Don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.

            --Johnny Mercer

If you know these Johnny Mercer lyrics and the Harold Arlen tune to which they are set, then you are likely to summon that song repeatedly once you get into Whale Fall, Daniel Kraus’s astonishing tour-de-force of a novel. It’s the most audacious book I have read all year, and it manages a miracle of story-telling by delivering a profound meditation on death in the form of a beat-the-clock thriller. Ernest Hemingway claimed in For Whom the Bell Tolls that a person can live a full life in three-score-and-ten hours, not years. Kraus reduces Hemingway’s allotted time to one jaw-dropping hour in this Hemingway-esque yet entirely original tale that he might have called The Young Man and the Sea. Jay Gardiner is 17 years old when he sets out to dive off the Pacific coast in search of his drowned father’s bones. We meet Jay in a first chapter titled “3000 PSI,” and don’t worry if the term mystifies you; the explanation will come soon enough. And if you’re getting annoyed with me for being so vague about the plot, please consider that I’m trying to avoid spoilers. (Although my quoting Johnny Mercer’s lines as epigraph might qualify as a major spoiler indeed.) Let me just assure you that Daniel Kraus has employed extensive research for dazzling effects and that, in the process, he settles forever any question of whether the Biblical story of Jonah is figurative or literal. I stayed up late to finish this thrilling novel, and I am recommending it to every serious reader I know.

Johnny Mercer’s words might also apply with only a bit of strain to John Larison’s Whiskey When We’re Dry, another fine novel with a young protagonist on a quest to reunite with a missing family member. Jessilyn Harney’s mother died in childbirth; her father died when she was a teen; and her brother Noah (see how much I’m straining to connect Mercer’s lyrics to this novel?) has become a notorious outlaw. We’re far from Jay Gardiner’s ocean and the modern day in this increasingly unsettling tale set in the dusty, unforgiving American West of the 19th Century, but never once do we tire of the company of Jess, our stalwart narrator, even when her story takes strange but irresistible turns. Orphaned and alone, she chops off her hair and disguises herself as a young man. She has also taught herself to shoot, and her skill as a sharpshooter leads her into both triumph and catastrophe as she searches for the increasingly infamous Noah. Their reunion echoes strongly Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” in a surreal masked ball in an oasis of sham civility surrounded by bleakness and anarchy, and their subsequent adventures culminate in an ending that’s simultaneously heartbreaking, cathartic, and deeply satisfying. Larison and Kraus together fill me with joy for the state of American letters. There are so many superb writers out there, and these two, both in their forties and roughly five years apart, have delivered knockout work in what I hope will be the early stage of their careers.

David Grann and C.J. Box

This month I’m looking at adventure stories, one nonfiction, one fiction.

I have read only one book by David Grann to date, but I want to remedy that shortcoming quickly. Just a few days ago I finished The Wager, and I’m afraid that even its Grand Guignol subtitle (A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder) can’t do justice to the harrowing true story that Grann has researched and rendered so skillfully. The Wager was a ship assigned in the early 1740’s to a fleet tasked with generally harassing Spanish vessels on the high seas and specifically finding and capturing a galleon full of treasure. Unfortunately for the captain and crew of The Wager, the ship sank as it tried to round Cape Horn, and the survivors landed on a bleak, inhospitable island off the coast of Patagonia. So far you may be thinking, yes, okay, Ernest Shackleton redux, but you should stop right there. Shackleton managed to save every member of his crew. The men and boys of The Wager were not so fortunate, and one of the many great coups Grann manages is to distinguish individual characters as if in a novel and to keep us in suspense over which of them will survive.

One character we know will survive is 16-year-old John Byron, a midshipman who would grow up to have a distinguished naval career and to become the grandfather of George Gordon, the poet Lord Byron. John Byron, like the ship’s gunner, John Bulkeley, kept a journal of the voyage and the ordeal, and Grann meticulously incorporates their eyewitness accounts into his narrative. David Cheap, the captain of The Wager, also kept records and also becomes a prominent figure in the cast. What we get from this book is not merely the expected astonishment over the power of the human will to survive, but also a vivid history of what life was like for British sailors in the middle of the 18th Century. (Hint: it’s not comfy.) Whether he’s teaching us the origin of the term “under the weather”—sick sailors stayed belowdecks, where wind and rain could not reach them, so they were hence under the weather—or showing us the injustices of the press gangs or depicting in gruesome detail the horrors of scurvy, Grann makes every page an educational and eloquent pleasure to read. We turn those pages quickly.

Several months ago I decided that it was past time for me to get acquainted with Joe Pickett, C.J. Box’s likeable game warden who has now appeared in 24 mystery novels. Happily I chose to read the books in order of appearance, and I’d recommend the same practice to anyone like me coming late to this series. (I’ve never seen the television adaptation on Paramount Plus, now in limbo after Season 2, and I’m in no rush to get there. The books are plenty vivid.) Having just finished Number 4, Trophy Hunt, I’m looking forward to the next in the series, which I’ll pick up in a couple of months after I do some other reading. What’s best about Box’s protagonist is that he’s not a macho superman. He’s plenty tough, of course, but he can also feel queasy at the sight of a gruesome crime scene, and he can make, and admit to, mistakes. Another asset is that he lives with three intelligent, feisty women—his wife and two daughters—and the family story can be just as appealing as the mystery. In fact, Joe’s precocious daughter Sheridan maybe deserves a series of her own when she grows up. I will confess that I found Trophy Hunt to be inferior to its three predecessors because of the supernatural elements Box decided to introduce into a very fussy plot. This novel felt like one that he’d had to rush in order to meet a publisher’s deadline—I have no evidence of such, but the book reads like something that could have used another couple of drafts for tightening and clarification—and I got downright impatient when I could so clearly see a looming plot twist even though Joe Pickett was somehow blind to it. In a couple of weeks I’ll hope to meet C.J. Box in San Diego when I’m there for Bouchercon. I will spare him my quibbles over his fourth novel and will congratulate him sincerely for his ability to render both the wilds of Wyoming and a cast of appealingly dynamic characters so deftly.   

Paul Rudnick and Patrick Dennis

For years I have laughed aloud at Paul Rudnick’s short pieces in the “Shouts and Murmurs” department of The New Yorker, and so when I saw a glowing review of his new novel, Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style, I ordered myself a copy and jumped right in. To my surprise—and perhaps unfairly to Rudnick, who has made no promises about how funny anything he writes is going to be—the novel was not breathtakingly hilarious. It was clever. It was well written. But almost immediately I started thinking of Tony Kushner’s subtitle for his two-part Angels in America: “a gay fantasia.” Rudnick’s gay fantasia tells the story of Nate Reminger, a schlubby Jewish guy from New Jersey who falls in love with a WASP Adonis who is not only so extraordinarily good looking that he gets offered movie roles even when he doesn’t work in the movies, but is also richer than Daddy Warbucks and Bill Gates combined and has the altruistic impulses of a Mother Teresa (who is a prominent offstage presence). Most fantasy-fulfilling of all, Farrell Covington is as madly in love with our narrator, Nate Reminger, as Nate is with him.

At times this novel reads like a handbook for those who need to be educated about everyday gay life, as if Nate were Arthur Frommer writing a guidebook to Gayville. (“Style has no limits,” our narrator asserts. “Which is such a gay thing to say.” Or, “Scholars argue: Why are certain gay men so mesmerized by outsize female icons, by single names like Cher, Judy, and Bette?  Theories abound….”) Sometimes he over-explains, as when he provides the definition of a portcullis or when he tells us that Joe Allen is a restaurant in the theater district. As we proceed, we sense that we’re reading a memoir disguised as a novel. Nate writes a play about the ghost of a renowned actor who played Hamlet coming back to advise a modern-day actor in the famous role, a play that instantly evokes memories of Paul Rudnick’s I Hate Hamlet. Nate writes a movie script about a bawdy entertainer who disguises herself as a nun, and readers are going to remember Rudnick’s screenplay for Sister Act. Nate writes an off-Broadway play that nobody wants to produce because it’s a comedy about AIDS, and yet we know that it’s going to be a hit because we know what happened with Rudnick’s Jeffrey. I’m not complaining about Rudnick’s plotting, and the autobiographical novel is hardly unusual. It’s always fun to find Easter eggs, and Rudnick’s dialogue and one-liners are polished and witty. But the greatest strength of this book is that it becomes a grand love story spanning decades. I haven’t read one of those since Wuthering Heights.

Patrick Dennis (real name Edward Everett Tanner III) also wrote a gay fantasia. His appeared in 1955 under the title Auntie Mame, and while Rudnick has written a memoir disguised as a novel, Dennis wrote a novel disguised as a memoir, in which “Patrick Dennis” describes life under the care of his lively, iconoclastic aunt, a woman who, in every sense of that word again, is fabulous. At this point, gentle reader, you may be wondering why I’m calling this novel a gay fantasia when it’s narrated by a straight character and featuring a straight protagonist. Consider, please, that Auntie Mame Dennis represents the iconic gay friend—sassy, flamboyant, unconditionally accepting, loyal, and absolutely free of any sexual interest. When I was still in elementary school, I auditioned with Billy McIlhaney and Buddy Smith for the role of Patrick in the local community theater’s production of the play adapted from the novel (a role that went to my later friend Bristow Hardin, Jr.), and when I didn’t get the part, my parents allowed me as consolation to attend the performance, where my vocabulary improved considerably. (What, I asked, is a lesbian? And a bastard?)

I didn’t want to re-read Auntie Mame, but I could remember reading and enjoying Dennis’s The Joyous Season in the mid-1960’s, when I was in eighth grade. Many of the jokes eluded me, but I could remember it vaguely as a good read. So I ordered a copy from Abe Books and sat down to revisit it, and I was very quickly laughing aloud to a degree that I never reached with the Rudnick novel. Patrick Dennis was a master of social comedy. There were times when his dialogue reminded me of the best of Noel Coward, and The Joyous Season still works beautifully as a comedy-of-manners gem. He’s able to skewer the old money families and their excesses, but he aims his sharpest darts at the climbers, the poseurs, the snobs, the pretentious, the insufferable arrivistes.

Edward Everett Tanner knew well the worlds of which he wrote whether he was using the name Patrick Dennis or Virginia Rowans. He made millions of dollars and lost all of them on impulsive spending and unwise real estate investments. He was a married father of two and was also a bisexual active in the New York gay scene. He quit writing to work as a butler for hyper-wealthy people, including Ray Kroc, the man who gave the world McDonald’s fast food, who said he had no idea that his employee was a famous novelist. He died all too soon in 1976, age 55, of pancreatic cancer. He should have died thereafter, but in those madcap 55 years, he gave the world many joyous seasons. Indeed, The Joyous Season ends in June, the month farthest away from Christmas, and that’s surely a deliberate corrective for those who assume that the title refers to only one time of year.  

SUCCESSION and TED LASSO

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By coincidence, two extremely popular television series concluded their runs within a few days of each other in late May. “Succession,” HBO’s King-Lear-riffing tale of family dysfunction aired its last episode on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, and on the following Wednesday, Apple TV+ gave us the conclusion of “Ted Lasso,” a show so warm and lovable that even the characters on “Succession” might have embraced it. Aside from the happenstance convergence of their conclusion dates, the only thing these two series had in common was that Harriet Walter played an eccentrically self-absorbed mother in both. “Succession,” mordant and nasty, derived its dark humor from the unfettered depths to which the characters would sink in order to advance their interests. “Ted Lasso,” by contrast, celebrated redemption and the astonishing contagion of the abundant goodness in human beings.

Spoilers are going to abound in the following paragraphs. I’ve warned you.

The single most pervasive atmospheric quality of “Succession” is gloom. To begin with, its palette for sets and costumes is overwhelmingly gray. Much of the action takes place indoors, with characters in dark suits or neutral clothes. The interior living spaces are grand, of course, as we would expect for those with access to billions of dollars, but the offices and apartments tend to emphasize the gray, the taupe, the greige. When characters travel by car or helicopter or plane, color remains muted. Lighting at parties is dim. If a scene does take place outdoors, the sky is overcast or the scenery drab. Even onboard a yacht surrounded by glittering sea, nobody enjoys the glory of nature or the elegance of their vessel. “Succession” tamps down brightness and color and cheer. The characters are so busy scheming or trying to guess what someone else is scheming that they have no time for beauty or happiness.

So from whence springs the pleasure of watching “Succession”? Primarily from pitch-perfect performances from actors impeccably matched to their roles. (Jesse Armstrong, the creator and chief writer for the show, alternates his dialogue between unfinished, Mamet-esque fragments and eloquently zinging barbs, all of which usually include one or more of the principal parts of the verb to fuck.)  Brian Cox (Logan Roy, the gruff family patriarch), Alan Ruck (Connor Roy, a dimwitted dilettante), Jeremy Strong (Kendall Roy, a preening doofus who is forever striving to be cool and important), Kieran Culkin (Roman Roy, a cynical man-child psychologically stuck in early adolescence), Sarah Snook (Siobhan Roy, often called by her appropriate nickname reminiscent of homemade prison weaponry, Shiv), Matthew Macfadyen (Shiv’s fawning husband Tom Wambsgans, constantly scrambling for security within the company and the family), and Nicholas Braun (Cousin Greg, a desperate, money-hungry leech whose moral compass spins like a helicopter blade) collaborate with the huge, equally talented supporting cast to provide delicious heaps of schadenfreude for the ravenous audience to feast upon. Sure, they are obscenely wealthy, we muse, but they are also obscene, and obscenely unhappy.

In glorious contrast, “Ted Lasso” arises from and generates joy. The final season begins with a closeup of Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso and ends with another such shot. What happens in between is an ever-increasing delight. As the season progresses, and we viewers become more and more committed to the plot, the writers take more and more risks, all of which pay off. I will guess that the longest argument in the writers’ room involved whether or not to go with “So Long, Farewell” performed by the football club to say farewell to Ted Lasso. But, as the winners of the argument must have known, by then we viewers would accept anything they offered. Special kudos to Sudeikis, of course, but also to his astonishing teammates, nearly all of whom enjoyed dynamic growth over three seasons: Phil Dunster as the ever-maturing Jamie Tartt, Juno Temple as Keeley, Brendan Hunt as Coach Beard, Jeremy Swift as Higgins, Billy Harris as Colin Hughes, James Lance (whose turn as Trent Crimm rivaled the metamorphosis of Jamie Tartt), Toheeb Jimoh as the catalytic Sam Obisanya, and everybody else in the cast.

What I loved about this show, and especially about its final episode, was its consistently fine storytelling. The many superb writers, including Brett Goldstein, who epitomized deadpan as Roy Kent, brilliantly paced the action. We might anticipate where the plot was heading only to be proved wrong again and again. When the writers do set us up for an inevitable plot development, they don’t waste our time by showing us a superfluous scene confirming what we have anticipated. Instead, they jump to the next event in the story, the one that we can’t imagine. For example, at the end of the penultimate episode, we see Ted telling his boss Rebecca (played by the magnificent Hannah Waddingham, who is suddenly and gratifyingly everywhere on television, from Sex Education to Tom Jones), that he has news for her. We know the news: he’s quitting and heading home. Rather than start the next episode with a scene confirming our assumptions, we begin with Rebecca morosely refusing to discuss the prospect of life without Ted in London. Or, to cite another example, we see in one episode Nate (finely played by Nick Mohammed) become disillusioned with Rupert (the only unabashedly nasty character in the show, incarnated superbly by Anthony Head). Then in the next episode Nate has already separated from Rupert’s team. We don’t have to watch the expected; these writers make plenty of room for the unexpected. And the final montage, a community epilogue to show us where everybody lands, fulfills every wish that a viewer could have.

If you want to read another comparison of these two shows, check out Sophie Gilbert’s analysis in the on-line Atlantic. For the record, I wrote this essay before I read Gilbert’s, and she wrote hers before I posted mine.

The Inscrutable Sam Shepard and the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

In the fall of 1989, accompanied by my friends Nat and Wistie Jobe, I drove the 45 minutes from Woodberry Forest School to the no-longer-existing Seminole Square Cinemas in Charlottesville to see Jeff and Beau Bridges and Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys. Like every multiplex in the 1980’s, Seminole Square offered a vast asphalt lot for easy customer parking. I pulled into a convenient spot, exited the car with my two passengers, pushed the automatic door lock, and slammed the door just a nanosecond before I realized that I’d left the keys in the ignition. Nat and Wistie laughed, then shrugged: we could worry about the keys later. We enjoyed the movie (a bargain matinee starting circa 5:00 p.m.), and emerged from the theater around 7:00-ish to rejoin reality. My white Toyota Camry was still locked, and the keys were still inside.

Only here’s where this story, though historically accurate, enters the realm of magic realism, of ineffable grace, of astonishing luck, of Hollywood happy endings. While we stood at my car and tugged fruitlessly on the handles of locked doors, a box truck selling specialty tools drove right past us in the parking lot, and Nat flagged it down. Never before or since in my entire life have I seen such a truck, and I still can’t understand why one would be driving through the parking lot of a movie theater early on a Saturday evening. But there it was, as if we were characters in a poorly plotted television movie, and Nat was able to purchase a slim t-shaped aluminum jimmy apparently designed for the sole purpose of enabling car thieves. But this device required some practice and a fine touch in order to catch exactly the right bar at exactly the right spot to work the mechanism that would unlock the car door. Nat and I took turns trying it. We looked somewhat like preppy craftsmen trying to churn tiny servings of butter inside the doors of my automobile.

During one of Nat’s turns a black sedan pulled up beside us, and a couple emerged. It was getting to be time for the next showing of the movie.

“We’re breaking into cars,” Nat said to the emerging occupants of the sedan without looking up.

“You’re arrested,” said the man, and that’s when I recognized the speaker as Sam Shepard. His companion was Jessica Lange, who said nothing, but who looked right at me with a joltingly thrilling smile that astonished me into speechlessness. For that moment I was no longer in an urban parking lot, but away in a vast green meadow at midnight with other deer hypnotized by high beams. Nat never noticed. Wistie grinned.

I thought of that encounter many times over the past couple of weeks as I was reading Robert Greenfield’s excellent biography True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times. The man I glimpsed in the parking lot was cheerful and quick-witted and clearly enjoying the chance to take his partner Jessica to a movie starring her old buddy Jeff Bridges. However, the man I met in Greenfield’s book left me feeling the way I do at the end of any great tragedy: not pity and fear, exactly, with apologies to Aristotle, but pity and awe. The pity arises from the way so many calamities were the result of the man’s own poor choices; the awe, from the astonishing heights to which this kid out of nowhere rose.  Shepard was just a couple of years older than I, but when I was 19, I was a sheltered little undergraduate taking English courses and pledging a fraternity. When Shepard was 19—and Greenfield describes this moment in a glorious opening chapter—he arrived penniless in New York City, all alone and ready to make his fortune, but so broke that he had to sell a pint of blood in order to get his first meal. I was in the audience for the disastrous production of Shepard’s True West at the Public Theater in 1980. I was also in the audience at the New York Theatre Workshop to see Shepard perform in Caryl Churchill’s A Number in late 2004. That’s a play about a man (Shepard) who has cloned several versions of his son (all played by Dallas Roberts). I can see why anyone would want to perform in a play by Caryl Churchill, but after reading this book, I think Shepard would have been better cast as the multiple clones. In his polymathic life he achieved fame in a number of incarnations: prolific playwright and screenwriter, memoirist, poet, movie star, rock musician, stage actor, father, philanderer, cover model. The man who played Chuck Yeager in the movie The Right Stuff also won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for writing Buried Child. This robust amalgam of Falstaff, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Randall P. McMurphy, this gigantically vibrant dynamo, died of Lou Gehrig’s disease at age 73. Up to the end he was driving his truck with his knees and elbows when his hands wouldn’t work.

Shepard’s story was a real-life wonder, but I’ve also encountered fictional marvels this month, specifically the final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime, and I must say that the title does not lie. Mrs. Maisel, as played so well by Rachel Brosnahan, truly has been marvelous for all the preceding seasons, but in this one, the best of all, the writing in the show has risen to the celestial. Every time I think I know where a plot is going, I turn out to be delightfully wrong. We faithful viewers have been watching Midge Maisel’s career advance, hit setbacks, recover, hit more setbacks, and painstakingly and hilariously thrive. This season, however, in the second episode, the writers make the startling and, as it turns out, brilliant decision to go all Citizen Kane on us. The episode begins not with a newsreel, but with a piece on Sixty Minutes about Midge’s life and career. No spoilers here. I am about to become quite nonspecific. But, just as Herman Mankiewicz did with Charles Foster Kane, we get the complete story of Midge’s career in a few minutes, and then we spend the rest of the season learning how such a turn of events came to be. And the results are entirely satisfying.

The final episode aired today, May 26, and I just finished watching it. Without spoiling a thing, I can declare with gratitude and relief that the finale rises to the challenge of capping a superb season for a superb series. Some may quibble with the epilogue set in 2005, but I’m already getting over my initial misgivings to appreciate all the subtleties and complexities of the final image before the credits roll. Thank you, Mrs. Maisel, for giving us so much color, choler, cleverness, and craft for five extraordinary seasons. Long may you stream.

Marion Turner and Eleanor Catton

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When I was in graduate school at the University of Virginia in the fall of 1975, I happened upon a book in the stacks of Alderman Library called The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, a product of the Victorian era by Mary Cowden Clark. I didn’t read the book. I didn’t even remove it from the shelf. But I’ve never forgotten the title, which struck me as an astonishingly silly topic to explore and to deserve a place in a section full of serious Shakespearean scholarship. Today we’d call it Fan Fiction and shrug it off as a harmless amusement. But nearly half a century ago and still today, I marvel at its location in the library.

So when I heard that Marion Turner had published The Wife of Bath: A Biography, I thought that a noted biographer of Chaucer had decided to dabble in some fan fiction of her own. Then I read the reviews, and then I read the book. Turner’s “biography” of a fictional character is actually an accessible and enlightening work of scholarship. In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer tells us that the Wife of Bath is named Alison—the name that Turner uses throughout her book—and that she has had five husbands, has traveled extensively, and is adept at cloth-making. Turner begins her book by examining the frequency with which medieval women remarried—it was not at all unusual—and by discussing the ways that women could be property holders, operators of businesses, travelers, and possessors of independent wealth. We get to know the literary ancestors of Alison, especially in the character La Vielle in The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, and in due time we meet her literary descendants. I thought that Turner was straining when she claimed that Shakespeare created Falstaff as a male version of the Wife of Bath, but I have to admit that in the play where Falstaff first appears, Henry IV, Part 1, there’s a direct reference to pilgrims traveling to Canterbury, a clear sign that Shakespeare knew the works of Chaucer. Turner makes a stronger case for Molly Bloom as a version of Alison in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and there’s no denying the continuing reimagining of Alison by today’s writers, perhaps most famously by Zadie Smith in The Wife of Willesden, a play drawing on and modernizing Chaucer. This biography is the antithesis of fan fiction. It opens a window onto the heritage and the legacy of one of the most significant characters in literary history.

The other most memorable book I read this month was Eleanor Catton’s Birnham Wood, the title of which ominously recalls one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest and most unsettling plays. Catton is a New Zealander. She sets the novel in her home country, and yet the villain—the Macbeth-like billionaire whose mastery of technology gives him an almost supernatural ability to manipulate cell phones and other devices—is an American. Taking her time to introduce us to a large cast of characters, Catton jumps from one point of view to another and initially is Jane-Austen-esque in so forthrightly telling us about what the characters are thinking and how they came to their current state. Then gradually and relentlessly Catton gives us more conversation and more action. She heightens the suspense when our exposure to these various points of view have tipped us to the disastrous misinterpretations and assumptions each character is making. By the end of the novel she has delivered an unabashed thriller with an ending that nobody could predict and yet everybody will believe. This is my first encounter with the works of Eleanor Catton, but it won’t be the last. She’s the youngest person ever to win the Booker Prize (for The Luminaries in 2013, when she was 28), and in Birnam Wood she has written what turns out to be one hell (pun intended) of a story.

KIMBERLY AKIMBO and SOME LIKE IT HOT

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With the Tony Award nominations coming in early May, I would like to discuss two deserving candidates. You never know what those Tony voters are going to do—almost thirty years later, I’m still reeling over the way they picked local favorite Terrence McNally and his Love! Valor! Compassion! over Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, one of the greatest plays written in English—but I suspect that they will want to acknowledge both of the shows I’m highlighting today. Honestly, I love good theater in every form. I’ll gladly drive a couple of hours to see Taylor Mack’s zany Hir at Woolly Mammoth. I’ll ride the train to the darker reaches of London to watch The Yorkshire Play, one of the so-called Shakespearean apocrypha. I’ll happily buy a ticket to see the Chatham, Massachusetts, community troupe mount No Sex Please, We’re British. I’ll fight the D.C. traffic and parking hassles to see Caryl Churchill’s Far Away at Studio Theatre. And I’ll live-stream Between Riverside and Crazy and Shakespeare’s The Tempest if I can’t make it to the theater. But sometimes what I really crave is the thespian equivalent of a hot-fudge sundae, and when that craving comes, the only way to satisfy it is with a Broadway musical.

So a month ago I saw Kimberly Akimbo, a musical adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s play of the same name. As Broadway musicals go, it’s a small chamber piece with a total of nine performers in the cast. Lindsay-Abaire provided the book and lyrics, and Jeanine Tesori wrote the music.  If you know Lindsay-Abaire’s Fuddy Meers, then you know he has a quirky but compassionate sensibility. One of the characters in Fuddy Meers has a speech impediment, and when she tries to describe the “funny mirrors” that warp and distort one’s appearance at carnivals, she calls them “fuddy meers.” That kind of warping and distortion is evident here, but so is Lindsay-Abaire’s delicate willingness to confront heartbreak, just as he does in Rabbit Hole. In Kimberly Akimbo, the eponymous heroine is a 15-year-old girl with a rare disease causing her to age four to five times faster than normal. She’s played by Victoria Clark, who, when I saw the show, was 63 years old.  Kimberly reaches her 16th birthday in the course of the action, and she is aware that most people with her illness do not live much longer than sixteen years. Yet somehow what sounds like a sad, grotesque downer manages to be affirmative, joyful, and very funny. In addition to Victoria Clark, I want to single out Justin Cooley, who plays Kimberly’s exuberant, loving boyfriend, and Bonnie Milligan, playing her Aunt Debra, who is an outrageous criminal and simultaneously the one member of Kimberly’s family who understands what her niece is suffering. But now that I’ve gone this far, I can’t stop with the kudos. Steven Boyer and Alli Mauzey as Kimberly’s bumbling parents find just the right tone, and Olivia Elease Hardy, Fernell Hogan, Nina White, and Michael Iskander play Kimberly’s high school friends flawlessly. It’s not a big show, but it lands with a big splash, and I’m grateful to Jessica Stone for finding the way to direct and stage it so deftly.

Casey Nicholaw likewise brilliantly directed the show I saw the next day, a new musical adaptation of Billy Wilder’s movie Some Like It Hot. Here’s an example of what we can only find on Broadway: a great big gigantic musical extravaganza with a cast of 25 (at least), gorgeous sets and lighting, hundreds of costumes, clever songs (music by Marc Shaiman, lyrics by Scott Whitman and Shaiman), a propulsive plot (book by Matthew Lopez and Amber Ruffin), endearing characters (led by Christian Borle and J. Harrison Ghee in the Tony Curtis/Jack Lemmon roles from the movie), and enough tap-dancing to satisfy every aspiring Billy Elliot and Reno Sweeney in the crowd. Nicholaw even stages chase scenes with tap dancing, and why not? By that point everything onstage is whirling, and the audience is on board for whatever new delight this exuberant production delivers next. In fact, I enjoyed watching the scene changes, which were seamless and surprising, as much as I enjoyed the scenes themselves. And with big voices like those of NaTasha Yvette Williams (Sweet Sue) and Adrianna Hicks (Sugar, the role originally played by Marilyn Monroe) and the comic perfection of Kevin del Aguila (Osgood, played by Joe E. Brown in the movie), the whole experience presents the perfect antidote to the winter blahs. Also, I might add, to the spring, summer, and fall blahs. I lingered in the theater after the bows to hear the orchestra finish playing off the cast and to cling for just a little longer to the scene of such satisfying entertainment.

Ann Beattie and Lincoln Perry

I gravitate toward pairs in these blog postings, but this is my first time discussing two artists who are already a pair, a married couple—Ann Beattie, the writer of all those short stories for The New Yorker and all those novels and essays, and Lincoln Perry, the painter and sculptor perhaps most famous for his murals. Both have written new books. Beattie’s isn’t scheduled for publication until summer and came to me in the form of galley proofs. Perry’s I found in an art gallery in Lynchburg, and now that I’ve read both, I’m eager to advertise their virtues. Full disclosure: I was Ann Beattie’s student at the University of Virginia in the 1970’s and have kept in touch with her ever since. I met Lincoln through Ann and have known him for years. But don’t read this posting as a puff piece for friends. If I didn’t see the need to highlight the books, I wouldn’t mention them.

Let’s start with Perry’s Seeing Like an Artist: What Artists Perceive in the Art of Others.  Reading this book is akin to auditing the most interesting art class you’ve ever taken. Prepare to go slowly. I had my iPad on my lap as I read so that I could study the paintings that Perry uses to exemplify his various lessons, and he wastes no time in showing us how to see planes, air, design, and color in paintings. If this book ever gets reprinted as a standard textbook like Janson’s History of Art, then maybe the publishers will be willing to spring for the expensive glossy full-color reproductions that the book demands. Perry does well at including his own sketches of black-and-white renderings of many of the paintings he discusses, but his greatest gift to readers arrives on his website, where he provides fifty different images of the works he’s examining. Because he mentions so many other artists and pieces, however, I found myself constantly pausing in my reading to go to the appropriate internet images. Frescoes by Tiepolo, etchings by Rembrandt, buildings in Venice—the tour is capacious, and I finished this book genuinely enlarged by the experience. I also fought the urges to get on a plane to St. Louis when Perry was discussing particularly his murals there.

And now for Ann Beattie. In his trilogy known as The Norman Conquests, the playwright Alan Ayckbourn presents three full-length plays set during the same weekend at the same country house populated by the same characters. One play takes place in the dining room, one in the living room, and one in the garden. Each show stands alone, and audiences may choose to watch one, two, or all three, but only those who opt to see the full trio can appreciate all the subtleties of what has transpired. Ann Beattie, in Onlookers, gives us a similar experience in six substantial short stories, all set in present-day Charlottesville, all standing alone, all readable in any order. Characters step in and out of each other’s tales, and in the final one, “The Bubble,” the characters converge. As a habitué of Charlottesville, I recognized and loved all the local references, but the stories work whether a reader knows the city or not. These stories are very much of our time; Beattie seems to have written some of them fifteen minutes ago with her references to the New Yorker writer Evan Osnos and Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. The “onlookers” of the title are survivors of trauma. In Charlottesville the community still reels in the aftermath of the Unite the Right Rally of 2017 that resulted in the death of Heather Heyer and the lingering tension over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee on horseback. (Traveller, Lee’s horse, even gets some attention.) As we would expect, Charlottesville also endures the trauma of covid-19. But Beattie’s characters cope with other shattering events as well: the deaths of mothers, the effects of the Trump presidency on political discourse, the gathering of obscure protesters in darkness, the loss of a lover or a house, the birth of a child in a public restroom, the arrival of a medical helicopter for an unidentified neighbor. Yet one of the central locations of these stories is an assisted-living facility called Solace House, and solace is what these characters eventually find.

For me Beattie’s most astonishing accomplishment is to create such a vast cast to populate her narratives. Her mind teems with characters. Legend has it that William Faulkner, when asked by students at the University of Virginia about the people in his novels, would talk about events that never appeared in print. Beattie is both Dickensian and Faulknerian in her ability to generate characters by the dozen and to plug each one into a fully realized context. I know that I’m not supposed to quote from galleys, but the example I’m about to offer is harmless. Even if, in the least likely outcome, this passage doesn’t make it into the final version of the book, it demonstrates how one Beattie character’s background can reticulate into infinite associated histories. The narrator of “Alice Ott” mentions a faraway friend who never figures into any of the stories and lives in New York, but Beattie can’t help giving her a history and then exploring another branch of the family tree: “I’d have much preferred being in Brooklyn with Sophie, who had an entry-level job in publishing and was supported by her father, forever guilty for leaving her and her brother when they were only three and five.” I have no doubt that if Beattie were in the Louvre in front of one of her husband’s favorite paintings, Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana, she would be able to tell us the personal history of every figure in that vast canvas.  

Feel-Good and Feel-Bad

Back in my drinking days, I would frequently go dry-January, which seems in 2023 to be all the rage. Since I’m now dry-January-to-December, having given up alcohol permanently, I’ve lately been practicing another avoidance so that I might, at least in spirit, join the hordes in the rest of the country who are so chatty about their abstinence. After the grittiness of Slow Horses  (Apple TV+), the decadence of The White Lotus, Season 2 (HBO Max), the 24-wannabe formula of Jack Ryan, Season 3 (Amazon Prime Video), the dark comedy of Glass Onion (Netflix), I have decided to forgo darkness in my viewing habits for the month of January. Surely PBS had me in mind when it scheduled the new season of All Creatures Great and Small to begin broadcasting after the first of the year. But this month I need more than an hour a week of endearing Brits helping large animals and navigating human relations with superhuman kindness.

Norman Cousins famously wrote about curing his depression and illness with laughter. He watched classic film comedies on videotape and, so he claimed, laughed his way to better health. Now I’m not depressed, not wistful, not melancholy, not blue, not even a wee bit triste, if I understand the mild connotation of that French adjective. But I’m not writing fiction at this moment in my life, and I’m at my happiest when I’m writing a story. For now I’m allowing the 40,000 or so words I wrote in the fall to settle into something I can go back to revisit. My imagination is hibernating for now, and while I’ve learned to live with that dormancy, I don’t like it. So on New Year’s Eve I taped all six of the Thin Man movies starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. The first three, written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and directed by W.S. Van Dyke, are the best, but all six are cheerfully entertaining. All the movies make light of Nick Charles’s astonishing addiction to alcohol, but it’s nice to see that Nick and Nora genuinely enjoy and love each other.

But January is a long month. I need a heavy-duty dose of inspiration, and so it came to pass that I subscribed to the ad-free version of Disney+ for the month and went on a feel-good rampage. First stop: the 2017 film version of the Broadway musical Newsies, with superb performances by Jeremy Jordan, Andrew Keenan-Bolger, and the entire scenery-chewing cast under the steady direction of Jeff Calhoun and the Olympic-gymnastic-level choreography by Christopher Gattelli. Next up: Iron Will from 1994, with McKenzie Astin deftly carrying the movie about a kid who has to win a 500-mile dog race in order to save—I kid you not—the family farm. It was interesting to see the now-reviled Kevin Spacey performing so well alongside so many other old pros, including Brian Cox, who, unlike his character in Succession, never tells a single person to fuck off during the entire movie. After that: Third Man on the Mountain, with James MacArthur, playing an 18-year-old who, at the outset of the movie, saves the life of Michael Rennie’s character and thus earns a chance to climb the Matterhorn. Then a super-feel-good two-night viewing of The Rookie, the 2002 movie starring Dennis Quaid as Jimmy Morris, the real-life high school baseball coach who in middle age was able to realize his lifelong dream of playing major-league baseball. I’m leaving out a lot. But those movies are so feel-good that they make the stuff on the Hallmark Channel seem like the work of Martin McDonagh.

Finally, I want to talk about Miracle, the 2004 movie about the U.S. Olympic hockey team’s 1980 victory over the team from the Soviet Union. It stars Kurt Russell, who plays Herb Brooks, a prickly, driven, histrionic coach whose methods today would raise eyebrows and probably objections. But Russell, who has been appearing in Disney movies since he was a boy, somehow manages to keep the audience sympathetic to this man even as he drives his team to exhaustion and tests the patience of his wife, nicely played by Patricia Clarkson. After all this Disney dosing, I am feeling fine and am ready to return to the mordant stuff. But you know what would really make me feel good long after this January is over? To know that Kurt Russell is going to win a long-overdue award for his acting. He deserves one.

Barbara Kingsolver and Claire Keegan

Recently I finished reading one long novel and two slender novellas. The long novel is a fine piece of work. The two novellas are perfect.

The long novel, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, ambitiously aspires to transplant Dickens’s David Copperfield to Southwest Virginia during a stretch of time roughly 20-30 years ago. Some of the transformation involves a simple adjustment of names: Peggotty becomes Peggott, Ham becomes Hammer, Agnes becomes Angus. Many elements of the plot find modern-day parallels. Our narrator Damon, who quickly acquires the nickname Demon, echoes his counterpart David by starting with his own birth. Then, following the Dickensian model, his mother dies early after marrying a cruel stepfather, and the boy has a series of adventures before he grows into a successful artist. Those who have read the earlier novel will undoubtedly get ahead of the plot and anticipate major events before they occur. But Kingsolver is an artist herself, and her set pieces—a drowning at a mountain stream during a nearly supernatural storm, an unsettling conversation full of double entendres that escape young Demon but register chillingly with the reader—depart sufficiently from Dickens to keep pure predictability at bay. I must confess, however, that for me the departures from Dickens went so far afield that I wondered why she needed to rely so much on the 19th Century masterpiece for her framework in the first place. David Copperfield never gets into teen sex and serious drugs in the way that his modern avatar does. Dickens works abundant social commentary about abuse of impoverished children into his novel, and in turn Kingsolver addresses opioid addiction. But having read Beth Macy’s Dopesick, which describes the ravenous hunger for a high that afflicts so many addicts, I think that Kingsolver makes Demon’s drug use too easy for him to shake. (To be fair, that is not the case with his beloved Dori.) In the end Kingsolver delivers an absorbing and ultimately satisfying read even though—for me—her narrative sags in the second half.

Maybe I’m not raving about Kingsolver sufficiently because I just finished Claire Keegan’s flawless fictional gems, “Foster” (95 pages of generously sized words) and “Small Things Like These” (115 pages of equally readable text). I’ve listed them in the order in which they appeared in print, but I read them in reverse order, and when I finished “Small Things Like These,” I felt the same astonishment, awe, and wonder that I experienced at the end of Tolstoy’s “Master and Man,” another indelible, painfully beautiful novella. Keegan sets these stories in rural Ireland, her home country, and for my money she ranks right up there with James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, William Butler Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Edna O’Brien, and the other stars in the huge Irish constellation of brilliant storytellers. Witness her skill and economy in building a world with these opening lines from “Foster”:

Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexford towards the coast where my mother’s people came from. It is a hot day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish, sudden light along the road. We pass through the village of Shillelagh, where my father lost our red Shorthorn in a game of forty-five, and on past the mart in Carnew where the man who won the heifer sold her shortly afterwards.

In a mere 83 words we’re situated not only in time and space, but we have inferred a sinking understanding of what the father is like. Or take the third sentence in “Small Things Like These”: In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke, which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain. There is no way to describe this language as other than poetry. Keegan takes ordinary words (hairy, strings, stout) to describe ordinary events (smoke emerging from chimneys, rivers rising with rainfall) and gets us to see those commonplace occurrences as if for the first time. Note that I’m not saying much about the plots of these stories. That’s deliberate. I’d rather urge people to read them and let each story speak to each reader with maximum surprise. As a bonus, “Small Things Like These” is a Christmas story. I was glad to read it when I did, during Advent, but I know that it would have knocked me over just as powerfully if I had read it on the Fourth of July.

FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS and THE MOSQUITO BOWL

Buzz Bissinger is an anthropologist who disguises himself as a sports writer. Way back in 1990, when he was more formally writing as “H.G. Bissinger” rather than “Buzz,” he published Friday Night Lights, which justifiably earned lots of attention and rave reviews, and which has subsequently been overshadowed by the eponymous television series based on it. I am not qualified to discuss the television series, but I know that it’s been popular as a teen drama as it has fictionalized Bissinger’s nonfiction. I’m more interested in the original book and its subtitle: “A Town, a Team, and a Dream.” Note that the town gets top billing. Bissinger temporarily moved his family to Odessa, Texas, so that he could observe up close the Permian High School football team and the status granted it by the citizens of Odessa. He may have begun the work as a study of small-town football mania, but what he delivered was a profile of a community. It has been more than thirty years since I read Friday Night Lights, but I still remember the overwhelming sadness of reading about young men whose lives most likely peaked during their senior year of high school.

Just a few days ago I finished Bissinger’s The Mosquito Bowl, which also comes with a subtitle: “A Game of Life and Death in World War II.” That subtitle, frankly, is the weakest element of this deftly researched history. The Mosquito Bowl was a football game played by bored Marines on Christmas Eve, 1944, in Guadalcanal. Many of those Marines had been college football players, and from Bissinger’s brief account—he spends perhaps a page on the game itself—they seem to have enjoyed playing to a tie in a rough-and-tumble contest. But nobody died. It wasn’t a game of life and death. It was merely an entertainment for the American troops posted in the South Pacific as they waited for orders into combat. Jay Jennings, reviewing the book in The New York Times, calls the title a “feint,” the perfect word.

No, the death comes later at Okinawa, and here’s where Bissinger’s skill as an empathic journalist rises to the level of artistry. Again, as in Friday Night Lights, we see young men whose lives peaked far too early. But at least in Odessa, Texas, there was life after high school, no matter how dreary that life might have been. In The Mosquito Bowl Bissinger profiles one remarkable young Marine after another so that when we reach the true subject of the book—the protracted and ill-planned invasion of Okinawa—we care intensely about their fates. Those of us who admire Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 recall the absurd competitions for power between General Dreedle and General Peckem and the cavalier indifference of officers sending their subordinates out to die. Until I read Bissinger’s history of the war in the South Pacific, I had always assumed Heller was distorting reality for the sake of satire. But Bissinger shows us that such jostling and elbowing for prestige and control were all too real. The result is a brilliant, tart, nonfiction scream of exasperation at the loss of so many good lives that might have been saved under different leadership.

Queen Elizabeth II and Angela Lansbury

My friend Bud Wright put it most succinctly: 2022 has been a bad year for 96-year-old women.

It’s a commonplace cliché by now for us to reveal how touched we were by the recent death of Queen Elizabeth. Nearly everyone has expressed the same sensation of disorientation at the loss of her reassuring continuity, on the way that she was always there as the monarch of England while so many upsetting events roiled the world and so many other prominent figures came and went. And for those of us with an interest in theater, the same could be said for Angela Lansbury. Both Elizabeth II and Lansbury had started their careers when I was born in late 1951, and both seemed immortal in their abilities to remain effective and celebrated in their work well into old age. I saw each of these women only once in person, but each occasion was indelible, and each for me epitomizes why these two people were so beloved.

In 1976 I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia and experiencing what I can now confess, all these decades later, to be the unhappiest year of my academic life. I had gravitated toward schools because they were places where I could be successful. I wasn’t good at much, but I was good at getting good grades. I was one of those types I came to recognize so clearly when I became a teacher myself: a student who knew all the answers on the test but hadn’t actually learned anything of value. In the graduate program at Virginia, I had to face the reality of my mediocrity. There were lots of people in that program who were not only smarter than I was (that was nothing new for me), but who were also better at getting good grades. The department operated on a five-step grading scale. From lowest to highest: Fail, Pass, High Pass (Level 2), High Pass (Level 1), and—the highest possible score—Distinction. As I recall, the Pass level translated to a B on the transcript, and all the others were equivalent to A’s. But in order to proceed to the Ph.D. level, one had to earn Distinctions. I just couldn’t do that. I could get those High Pass Level Ones, but I could never quite reach the level of brilliance and dazzle required to get a Distinction, and I never could figure out why. I had gone to UVA as what they rather ominously called a terminal master’s degree candidate, but I hated thinking that the door to the doctorate was closed to me.

In July of 1976, I was finishing the work for my M.A. and living in a basement apartment on Park Street in Charlottesville, where I was the tenant of an unpleasant landlord whose lovely wife could not offset her husband’s arrogance. It had not been a happy rental. It had not been a happy year. Only a few weeks earlier had I acquired a teaching job for the coming school year after months of searching and no offers. (I had started applying to jobs in the New York City area and had gradually worked my way south; I ended up at a small school in Georgia after months of increasing desperation.) I was a few weeks away from concluding an academic year that had left me shaken, uncertain of myself, and eager to leave Charlottesville forever. Such was my malaise as I walked a couple of miles to the grounds of the University and waited with the hordes of other onlookers for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to emerge from their lunch in the Rotunda. Eventually out they came, and while I know that there were thousands of other people there, in my memory I’m the only person standing on the lawn as the queen walks by, her husband a few steps behind. She smiled so genuinely and so graciously, and for just a moment she seemed to be smiling directly at me, and I packed up that memory and have moved it with me, like a lucky silver dollar or a favorite photograph, wherever I have lived ever since. We never exchanged a word, of course. She was never aware of my existence. But the memory of her visiting the university designed by the man who wrote the document declaring the American colonies to be free of British rule, of her tacit declaration that all was forgiven, that old troubles could give way to new and lasting friendship, gave me a little moment of peace in my troubled heart as I limped my way to the end of a sobering (and, in the long run, enormously beneficial) year of uncertainty and fear that I was never going to be good enough at anything.

Three years later, in 1979, I was enjoying the life of a boarding school teacher, though God knows I still had plenty to learn. I was so ignorant, in fact, that I was merely lukewarm on the topic of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals. I thought that A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was his best show, and while I respected his lyrics for West Side Story, I considered his music to be atonal, dissonant, unmelodic, and too cerebral. In short, I was an ignorant little philistine who seriously needed a tutorial in musical theater. My student Steve Murray lent me the double soundtrack album of a new musical, Sweeney Todd, which to my untrained ear sounded terrible—loud factory whistles, dark minor-key ballads, operatic arias, thumping sound effects of recently slain bodies. Then Steve set me straight: “It’s funny,” he said, and that was enough to get me interested in seeing the show. Some months later my friends Bud and Kathy and I went to the Uris Theater (now the Gershwin) to see Angela Lansbury, Len Cariou, and the rest of the original cast perform Sweeney Todd, and that was the day that the scales fell from my ears, so to speak, the day when I began to admire and eventually worship Sondheim. That afternoon I learned that it was possible to create a musical thriller that was darkly comic and gratifyingly gory as I watched two musical professionals perform what I still consider to be the single cleverest song in American musical history, “A Little Priest.”

That was the only time I would see Angela Lansbury in person, but that one encounter was enough to make me a lifetime fan. I’ll admit that after a couple of seasons I tired of “Murder, She Wrote,” but I never tired of Lansbury. She could play a lascivious cockney maid in Gaslight when she was still a teenager. She could play Lawrence Harvey’s coldblooded, amoral mother in The Manchurian Candidate when she was only three years older than he. She could create the character of Mame for Jerry Herman’s eponymous musical. She could play a teapot in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. And at age 83 she could win her fifth Tony for playing a kooky clairvoyant in Blithe Spirit. She was a deftly flexible performer who mastered stage, movies, and television, and she shared her gifts with the world until the very end.

In 2022 we celebrate the centenary of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and James Joyce’s Ulysses, two modernist works that have bedeviled, challenged, touched, and astonished readers for one hundred years. During all but four of those years the world enjoyed the presence of two extraordinary women who—dare I say it?—may not have been as highbrow as Eliot and Joyce but who engendered greater affection and joy than either one of those male geniuses. I don’t begrudge Eliot and Joyce their literary immortality, but we don’t live in posterity. We live in the here and now, and Elizabeth II and Lansbury’s long presence among us was a blessing.

ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING and THE BEAR

Hulu has been on quite a roll lately, at least for me. I just finished watching two utterly different series on the streaming platform and thoroughly enjoyed both. If you haven’t yet heard of Only Murders in the Building yet—and surely there can’t be that many of you—then start watching Season 1 right now. There will be no spoilers in this blog, but if you watch the terrific first season, you will appreciate my claim that Season 2 is even better. Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez star as occupants of an elegant New York apartment building. When there’s a homicide on the premises, they decide to investigate and air their findings on a podcast called “Only Murders in the Building.” The title originated with Steve Martin, who a decade or so ago imagined three old men who wanted to solve crimes but were too lazy to get out for extended legwork, so they committed to solving only murders in the building where they lived. One of those old men became Selena Gomez, who is neither old nor male, thank God, and whose deadpan delivery perfectly balances Short’s mania and Martin’s dry exasperation.

Lots of stars show up for cameos. Tina Fey and Nathan Lane play crucial supporting roles, as does Jayne Houdyshell (most recently on Broadway as Eulalie Shinn in The Music Man) as the president of the managing board of the building. Paul Rudd has just joined the fun for Season 3, which hasn’t dropped yet. You’ll see Sting, Amy Schumer, Michael Rappaport, Shirley MacLaine, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Ali Stroker, Amy Ryan, and Jackie Hoffman, among many others. (I could have sworn that I also spotted Josh Gad for a one-liner, but I can’t find any corroboration of that.) Perhaps the biggest breakout role comes for James Caverly, who is deaf and who plays Nathan Lane’s deaf son in the series. Caverly recently headlined as Harold Hill in a production of The Music Man featuring both hearing and deaf actors at Olney Theatre in Maryland. But perhaps the biggest scene-stealer is Michael Cyril Creighton, who plays a cat-loving neighbor and who, like everyone else in this show, has flawless comic timing. Honestly, I started laughing just when Nathan Lane stepped into the elevator with Martin Short. It was that rare anticipatory laughter that comes when you are certain that something surprising and hilarious is about to follow, and you are correct.

The Bear, by contrast, takes place in a very gritty Chicago. Jeremy Allen White plays Carmy, a renowned young chef who returns home to take over a failing dive left to him by his brother, who died of suicide. The performances in this show are so realistic that I had to remind myself not to hate Ebon Moss-Bachrach as Carmy’s cousin Richie, who is so despicable and obnoxious, at least at first, that I was hoping to see him lapse into a permanent coma. Liza Colón-Zayas is another actor who so thoroughly inhabits her role as a jaded line chef that I found myself forgetting that I was watching fiction, not a documentary. Among the more sympathetic characters, Ayo Edibiri brilliantly plays Sydney, an African-American chef almost straight out of cooking school who is deeply in debt but wants to learn and wants to help Carmy restore and improve his sad little eating establishment. My personal favorite was Abby Elliott as Carmy’s sister, who is grieving a dead brother and worried sick about her living one and his obsessive desire to make the restaurant work. Carmy’s last name, by the way, is Berzatto, from which his nickname, The Bear, is derived. 

You’ll see cameos in The Bear, too. Molly Ringwald pops up briefly as the leader of an Al-Anon meeting. Oliver Platt comes and goes. Joel McHale and Jon Bernthal make the most of their brief appearances. But honestly, the story is so gripping and the acting so good that I never registered these actors until later. I don’t want to say too much. But if you’re tired of the antiseptic kitchens inhabited on network television by Gordon Ramsey and his ilk, then watch The Bear for another look at how professional restaurants operate. You will also find yourself bonding tightly with this struggling group of complex characters. Is there a happy ending for the last episode? I’m not telling, but I will say that there’s going to be a Season 2, and I am pulling hard for the creative team to avoid a sophomore slump.