WHITE RIVER CROSSING and FLESH

Poetic justice—the practice of rewarding good characters and punishing evil ones by the end of a story—didn’t originate with the European neoclassicists, but it flourished under their strict adherence to “rules.” Their guiding principle was that art should not reflect life as it is, but as it ought to be. Hence Nahum Tate in 1681 rewrote Shakespeare’s King Lear so that Cordelia and Edgar married at the end of the play, while the jolly, chastened, and very much alive Lear and Gloucester witnessed the ceremony. It sounds like such a travesty in comparison with Shakespeare’s majestic original, and it is, but Tate’s was the only version of the play seen by the public in theaters between 1681 and 1820, when the Romantics restored Shakespeare’s text to the boards. And let’s admit it: we all like to see happy endings, wherein the heroes and villains receive their just deserts. In the hands of good writers (I’m looking at you, Jane Austen) poetic justice makes for the most satisfying of conclusions. 

Geoffrey Chaucer knew that. His Canterbury Tales, 626 years old and going strong, remains the best collection of stories in our language. He models for us how to write tragedy, comedy, satire, and romance, and even today writers borrow from his deeply ironic “Pardoner’s Tale.” In Chaucer’s version three men go looking for Death in hopes of killing It. A man they encounter assures them that they will find Death waiting for them under a certain tree. There they find buried treasure, turn on each other, and indeed find death at each other’s hands. Today those three men show up regularly. Take John Huston’s film adaptation of B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, wherein three men learn about a cache of gold from a stranger, discover it, and then lose it after (only) one of them dies. Or the 1992 movie “Trespass,” the title of which comes directly from Chaucer and which happens to be the only show I’ve ever seen starring two actors named Ice (-T and –Cube), wherein two firemen learn of a cache of gold hidden by a dying man, go to retrieve it and turn on each other after they find both the gold and a violent gang also interested in the loot. In the end, the lust for gold destroys nearly everyone in the cast.

Now Ian McGuire has given us the latest version of Chaucer’s exemplum with his new novel White River Crossing, wherein three men, inspired by the testimony of an itinerant stranger, head into the Canadian wilderness in 1766 to search for gold. McGuire is a great writer of historical fiction. His The North Water grips us in an irresistible adventure set onboard a 19th Century sailing ship, and with this new book, McGuire’s scrupulous, extensive research helps to bring the world of 18th Century Canada and its occupants into vivid, often thrilling detail. But I regret to report that we can see the ending coming long before it arrives. It’s all back to the Pardoner’s lesson: radix malorum est cupiditas.

David Szalay would probably be shocked to hear me associate his new novel Flesh with another Medieval source: the anonymous allegory Everyman, which dramatizes how every person must die stripped of all worldly belongings. In this counter-Reformation play Beauty, Strength, Fellowship, and Possessions all abandon the protagonist Everyman at the grave. Only his Good Deeds (this is, after all, a work of Roman Catholic propaganda) will follow him into the afterlife. Flesh is not an allegory and is not a religious text, and yet there’s something vaguely parable-like in its structure. We meet Istvan, Szalay’s Hungarian protagonist, when he’s an adolescent, curious but inexperienced with sex until a neighbor woman seduces him. Then we follow him as he ages through a series of episodes, many of them grounded in a sexual relationship. We see him acquire and lose wealth and loved ones in a story hypnotically engrossing, and while he’s not on his deathbed at the end, the final word of the book is “alone.” Szalay won the Booker Prize for this work reminiscent at first of Camus’s Meursault, the detached, affectless protagonist of The Stranger; Istvan does develop the ability to feel in the course of his life, but he does his best to suppress it. What makes Szalay’s novel so memorable is that it rejects poetic justice for the sake of a more unsettling, cerebral goal: to present one life not as it ought to have been, but as it was.

BLUE MOON and BUCKEYE

Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, which stars Ethan Hawke in a brilliant portrayal of the Broadway legend Lorenz Hart, unfolds like a filmed stage play. Picture a curiously empty Sardi’s with spotlighted conversations between Hawke’s Hart and a series of single characters—a bartender played by Bobby Cannavale, a piano player (Jonah Lees), a laconic E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), a Yale student named Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley). It’s the night of the opening of Oklahoma in 1943, and Hart, former lyricist for Richard Rodgers, is jealous and bitter over the pending success of Rodgers and his new partner, Oscar Hammerstein.

Screenwriter Robert Kaplow has based his script on the real-life letters exchanged between Hart and Weiland, and the happy result for Ethan Hawke is that he gets to declaim Hart’s shrewd, coarse, sardonic, witty, catty, and penetrating observations about the process of writing lyrics for Broadway in general and his objections to Hammerstein’s sentimentality in particular. There are plenty of inside jokes for people familiar with the historical figures and the context: Qualley’s character shows up with a young man who says he wants to be a director; when he introduces himself as George Hill, we can fill in his middle name of Roy. When Hammerstein introduces Hart to his precocious 13-year-old neighbor Stevie, we understand that we’re meeting the young Sondheim. Andrew Scott appears in a fine turn as Richard Rodgers, who is accustomed to being acclaimed by the theater crowd, and who with Hart is in turn aloof, exasperated, and empathic.

We know from the outset that Hart is doomed to die in six months, and that’s the looming outcome that generates the energy of all these conversations. So what we get is a movie that is the antithesis of an action flick. It’s Hart’s night to demonstrate his intellect, his pettiness, his hypocrisy, his limitations, and his genius, and Hawke rises to every occasion. Blue Moon is all character-driven, and it’s all-compelling for anybody who is a fan of “The Lady is a Tramp,” “Ten Cents a Dance,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Blue Moon,” or any of the other 1,000 or so songs Hart wrote with Rodgers over two decades.

Last month I wrote about The Slip, an interesting but ultimately flawed first novel. I have just finished another first novel that is much more accomplished: Patrick Ryan’s Buckeye, an expansive old-fashioned (in the best sense) novel that brings us intimately into the lives of endearing but not saccharine characters. Ryan is the editor of One Story and the author of two short story collections, and his mastery of story-telling (how to pace one effectively, how to develop a character, how to choose the telling detail and gesture) is evident in every chapter. Ryan begins with Cal Jenkins, a regular guy working in his father-in-law’s hardware store who is startled when a strange woman named Margaret Salt enters the store looking for a radio she can turn on to hear the news about the end of World War II. When the announcement comes, she further startles Cal by kissing him. Ryan takes his time in getting us the background for that kiss and for the two characters who engage in it, but we readers are happy to indulge him as we meet Cal’s family and larger circle of acquaintances in the fictional Ohio town of Bonhomie, a distant cousin of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, all with their own stories, all interesting. When Margaret Salt eventually re-enters the novel, she takes a turn at center stage, and then her husband, Felix Salt, rotates into the spotlight. We don’t get a glimpse of the meaning of the title until Page 272, and by then we’ve settled into the back seat of Ryan’s narrative and are happy to let him drive us where he will.  Only toward the end, when Ryan speeds his narrative pace to get us to the Vietnam era, does our engagement flag, but not fatally. I loved this big, generous book for its wealth of dynamic characters and for its commitment to following them to their inevitable fates, some sad, some happy, some bittersweet, all ringing true. 

SEVEN DIALS and THE SLIP

Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials on Netflix, a two-hour movie stretched to occupy three one-hour episodes, is for people who found “Murder, She Wrote” to be a little too edgy. Or for people who wished that the Crawley family of “Downton Abbey” could have belonged to one of those ridiculous, only-in-the-movies secret societies in which the members meet wearing masks and cloaks for no logical reason, given that no one outside the group can see them and they all know each other. Based on the eponymous Christie novel from 1929, the show offers lots of nice location shooting in England and plenty of 1920’s atmosphere, but the only good reason to watch it is for the strong performance by Mia McKenna-Bruce as Bundle Brent, the spunky amateur sleuth who is determined to get to the bottom of the inevitable nefarious activities, including the murder of her almost-fiancé. Aside from a cameo by Iain Glen, a secondary role for Helena Bonham-Carter as Bundle’s mother (a casting choice that eventually makes sense), and a wasted Martin Freeman as a tedious Scotland Yard detective, I had a hard time sorting out the rest of the cast. All the foppish young men circling around Bundle seemed interchangeable, as did the older men and women tasked with playing high-society red herrings. Skip this one and watch Jon Bernthal and Tessa Thompson in the sleazy, hugely entertaining adaptation of Alice Feeney’s novel His and Hers instead. I’ll bet you a million dollars you’ll never guess whodunit.

Lucas Schaefer’s The Slip is a first novel, but it doesn’t read like one. Schaefer avoids nearly all the missteps of the first-timer, which can include the insertion of extraneous and obviously autobiographic details, the tendency to explain or describe too much, the dialogue that runs on past its service of advancing the plot, and the shaky control of point of view. Schaefer gives us a series of scenes that never fail to engross us, and he writes with precision and wit in multiple voices, all of which he is in masterful control. I couldn’t put this book down because of the way each self-contained episode engages and entertains and because of the suspense that Schaefer builds from episode to episode, but after I got to the end and reflected on the sum of the parts, I realized with dismay that I didn’t especially like the finished product.

The ending of the book offers a resolution so dumbfoundingly improbable, not to mention inexplicable, that it forced me to revisit other moments in the novel where Schaefer veers into the surreal and the contrived. A boxing match in Africa ends when the ring gets washed out to sea in a storm. Important characters with stories of their own get written out abruptly. People in possession of an important driver’s license carry it with them even in outlandish circumstances (see the aforementioned African boxing match on the beach). Ditto for a Haitian passport. Teen romances push the boundaries of mistaken identity tales. Schaefer is a damn good writer (grade A+ for stylistic artistry) but his audacity as a storyteller could use some redirection (grade B- for narrative control). I should note in fairness that this novel is on several “Best of” lists for 2025 and that I am filing a minority report.

THE DREAM FACTORY and ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

Daniel Swift’s The Dream Factory: London’s First Playhouse and the Making of William Shakespeare is a scholarly but accessible history of the first commercial theater in London, which was called, conveniently enough The Theater. I felt compelled to order a copy after reading Ed Simon’s rave review in the New York Times. Simon, an English professor at Carnegie Mellon, described Swift’s book as “riveting reading…fascinating…” and “a transfixing portrait of the theater that made Shakespeare who he was.” My own reaction was more muted. At first I found Swift’s material to be mostly a slog. For example, at times the narrative seemed to be only a barely narrative collection of Swift’s notes from his research, as in this passage from Page 94:

Specific professions tended to cluster in neighborhoods. There were apothecaries on Bishopsgate and grocers on Bucklersbury, and in Shoreditch there were weavers. One of the tenants on the Holywell site in 1576, when James Burbage first leased it from Giles Allen, was a weaver named Edwin (or Ewen) Colefaxe. He died in 1592 and was buried at St. Leonard’s. Before him, there are records of a clothworker and citizen named Sir John Davis, who owned two tenements on the corner of Holywell Lane, immediately to the south-east of the priory; he died in 1566. The artillery ground a little farther to the south, by Bishopsgate, where the gunners from the Tower of London practiced on Thursdays, was still known as the teasel ground, after the teasels grown for use in clothworking here in the 1520s.

I trudged through 100 pages of that sort of thing before Swift brought Shakespeare into the mix in Part 2 of his three-part book. Here we get some interesting substance. Swift demonstrates that in the mid-1580’s, Shakespeare would have seen the Queen’s Men perform four mediocre plays: The Troublesome Reign of King John, King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and The True Tragedy of Richard III. He would remember them and rewrite them all with his own improvements of his source material. (In the English Renaissance there was no sense of plagiarism; all work was considered to be “original,” that is, based on an identifiable origin.)  

Swift argues that, just as the first commercial theater was built by carpenters and their apprentices, so Shakespeare learned the craft of creating plays from apprenticing with more experienced writers.  It was at this time that a writer of plays became known as a playwright. A cartwright makes carts; a boatwright makes boats; a wheelwright makes wheels; a playwright makes plays. In 1585 the term “work of art” entered the English language. We use the phrase so commonly nowadays that we don’t stop to think about the relationship between “work” as in livelihood or occupation and “art” as a creative venture. In due time an apprentice becomes a journeyman, a competent worker who may be employed for a salary. Only when the journeyman becomes a master of his craft is he eligible to work independently, or, as we say today, to be self-employed. In order to become a master, the journeyman must create a masterpiece, an example of his craft that demonstrates his skills.

In the most interesting part of the book Swift argues that in 1595 Shakespeare presented his “masterpiece” in the form of two plays, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Many critics have noted that the former begins like a comedy, with parents serving as obstacles to two young lovers who prevail over all impediments and marry, and the latter ends with a tragedy, the deaths of Pyramus and Thisbe, who die by suicide when one lover believes the other to be dead and kills himself while the survivor discovers the corpse of her beloved and then takes her own life. That is, of course, exactly what happens with Romeo and Juliet. But with Midsummer Night’s Dream, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe is played for laughs. Swift argues that Shakespeare demonstrates his command of his craft by turning a comedy into a tragedy and then, reversing himself, turning a tragedy into a comedy. For his meticulous scholarship, I salute Daniel Swift. However, I will not be recommending his book to any book clubs.

Unlike the case with Swift’s book, which I rushed to order as soon as I read one gushing review, I ignored all the raves and 10-best list entries and buzz about awards when Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest movie One Battle After Another was released. My scant exposure to Anderson’s work, including Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood, left me with some indelible images but little excitement over the complete products. I left each of those movies thinking that I was supposed to like them more than I did and that I struggled to find likeable characters with whom to bond. But when One Battle After Another became available for streaming, I tuned in, and I needed little time for the movie to hook me. The effectiveness of the storytelling relies on four primary actors, two white guys and two black women. The white guys are Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, who have both been in the business since childhood and have reached the point in their careers when they obviously don’t give a damn about looking glamorous on the screen. DiCaprio plays a drug-addicted domestic terrorist who spends much of the movie in a ratty bathrobe and an equally ratty man-bun. We end up liking him. Penn plays a military officer named Steven J. Lockjaw—the character’s actual name, apparently—and is almost unrecognizable at the outset of the movie with his permanent snarl and bizarre accent. We end up not liking him. The two black women include Teyana Taylor, playing a ferociously violent activist who calls herself Perfidia Beverly Hills; halfway through the movie she cedes her screen time to the actor playing Perfidia’s daughter. I am talking about the breakout star performer with the Paul-Thomas-Anderson-sounding name of Chase Infiniti. These two women are impossible not to watch and easily hold their own with the likes of DiCaprio and Penn. And the story, which covers 16 years or more, zips along with the propulsion of a surface-to-air missile.

Bonus track for December: A report from the end of the year

A couple of days ago I woke up to discover that my eye had fallen out. It clinked up against one lens of my glasses right after I put them on, and its departure from its socket initially rattled me. Michael Hughes, the gifted ocularist who had fashioned my first one for me in 2008, had warned me that I was likely to dislodge it during my first night sleeping with it and had given me a diagram showing how to restore it to its rightful place. Sure enough, in the middle of my slumber in that spring of 2008 I did something to jar it loose, and out it fell into the bedclothes and then onto the bedroom floor. I was teaching English at Woodberry Forest School at the time and living on campus, and that night we happened to have one of our occasional power failures. So I went downstairs and lit a couple of candles to provide light. I wasn’t trying to be ghoulish or gothic by forgoing a flashlight; I was going to need two free hands to replace the eye, and the candles would be easier to situate near my how-to diagram. Still, I couldn’t help chuckling over how the scene would look to an outsider:  a cyclops holding a burning torch to search for his missing eye.

Prosthetic eyes are not round. They don’t roll around like marbles, but they do wobble. Out of the eye socket they look like tiny, shallow, asymmetrical bowls. Mine moves within its socket with the help of an orbital implant attached to my eye muscles by my surgeon—the fantastic Dr. William Deegan—and the delicate craftsmanship of Michael Hughes. Most people who meet me don’t realize that I wear it.

There was nothing cinematic or archetypal about this most recent displacement. When I had the truant eye in hand, I placed it on the tray attached to my walker while I got dressed and ate breakfast. Then I returned to the bathroom to replace the eye at the sink and the mirror. Over the past 17 years I have done so enough times to know how to proceed without consulting a guide, but I don’t do it especially often because I like to leave the eye in place 24/7. Step one: get the baby shampoo I keep on hand solely for this purpose, squeeze a little into the palm of one hand, and wash and rinse the eye thoroughly. Then I have to go more or less by instinct and muscle memory. I use one hand to hold up the lid of my right eye socket while I look down and use the other hand to slip the eye under the upper lid and then to pull the lower lid over the bottom edge of the eye. On my first try I put it in improperly, with the sides reversed, so that the iris was pointing impossibly sideways: the world’s worst case of strabismus. I keep a handy little rubber suction cup in the medicine cabinet, so I used that to pull the eye out to start over. With suction it comes out quite easily. In fact, it’s amazing that the thing stays in place at all. As a piece of medical-grade plastic that feels like porcelain, it’s fairly heavy, and if it weren’t designed to mesh perfectly with the implant left by Dr. Deegan, I sense that my eyelids would be insufficient to hold it in place. Indeed, I am amazed that it doesn’t pop out more often.

This has been a year of having things pop out of place. The last time I operated my car was on May 16, when I drove from Home Depot to my mom’s house in order to take care of a maintenance problem. During this routine chore, the time slipped out of joint when a hemorrhagic stroke took me to the ICU and then, eventually, to the same nursing home where my mother was living. When she died in June, that marked another dislocation; I had lived for every moment of my life with her as a part of it, and suddenly she was gone. What I have come to appreciate in the interim is that her physical absence doesn’t spoil my relationship with her, a relationship that continues to evolve as I reflect on her inveterate resilience.  I am profoundly grateful to share some genes with a woman who set such an example of stoic defiance in the face of health problems. She accepted what she was forced to, but up to the very end, she refused to allow despair to infiltrate her view of the world. Troubles come? Sure. So shrug them off and keep living. Your eye pops out? Stick it back in and get on with your day.

WHAT WE CAN KNOW and WAKE UP DEAD MAN

Unfortunately, the first book I read by Ian McEwan was Atonement. Why was that unfortunate? Because it was his best book, and it spoiled me; everything of his I read after that was something of a letdown. While I could be impressed by the technical mastery of having the action all take place in one day (Saturday) or allowing a fetus to serve as first-person narrator (Nutshell), I found the fundamental cynicism of On Chesil Beach and Solar to be troublesome. It was as if McEwan had contrived plots to set up his characters for improbable disasters. So I took a break from him for a while. Then the rave reviews for his latest, What We Can Know, persuaded me that I should give him another chance. I’m glad that I did. With this novel McEwan has written an indictment of our current society’s denial of the obvious dangers we’re creating for ourselves. In many ways it’s an old-fashioned political novel in the spirit of Dickens, Orwell, and Atwood.

Set roughly 100 years from now, What We Can Know initially unfolds through the point of view of Thomas Metcalfe, a British academic, a professor of literature specializing in the period roughly between 1990 and 2030. This device allows McEwan to comment freely on the obtuseness through which we ignore obvious problems of our own immediate past, present day, and prospects for the immediate future. But the primary driver of the plot is Metcalfe’s search for a lost poem by the poet Francis Blundy, described as the rival of Seamus Heaney for the title of greatest poet of his day. People have been searching fruitlessly for this poem ever since the now-legendary dinner party when Blundy presented the one and only copy of the poem to his wife, Vivien, in honor of her birthday. Ever since that night, when Blundy read “A Corona for Vivien” aloud to a small group of guests, no one has seen the poem. Furthermore, Blundy destroyed all notes and drafts of this work, an intricate sonnet sequence, leaving the bedeviling mystery of what became of the original. For the past 100 years scholars have been searching for the one extant copy of the poem to no avail. So why would Metcalfe think that he can track down what has eluded the world for a century? What seems like a pointless search for lost manuscript becomes more practical when a clue to a possible place of concealment materializes.

Okay, you’re thinking, so what, these are very low stakes, there’s nothing original here. The whole lost manuscript plot has been around for ages. Consider Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, to cite a couple of literary examples, but there seems to be at least one thriller or mystery per year built upon the search for a lost map or book or letter. So we think that we know where McEwan is going, and we follow for the sake of his trenchant insights into climate change denial and the madness of stockpiling nuclear weapons. But we’re so wrong. The final segment of his novel demands that we reconsider everything that we thought we knew about these characters, and the final pages fully satisfy our urge for resolution and our delight in being surprised. I will say no more to avoid spoilers.

The new Knives Out movie, Wake Up Dead Man also has fun with literary tropes, mostly those found in murder mysteries. Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed, did his apprenticeship as a mystery writer by reading extensively novels from the Golden Age of mystery—the 1920’s and 1930’s—with a special concentration on Agatha Christie. In this latest edition of the clever series, Johnson has concocted a variation on the locked-room mystery with lots of nods to his Golden Age predecessors. As he did in the first two movies, he has assembled an all-star cast, headed by the astonishing Josh O’Connor—astonishing because he can play any role, from brooding and morose (see God’s Own Country) to scheming and manipulative (Challengers) to cheerful and charming (The Durrells) to the earnest and principled priest he plays here—and Daniel Craig, reprising his role as Benoit Blanc, the brilliant detective who speaks in an accent derived, apparently, from Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana and Deputy Dawg. It’s a long movie, but that simply allows for more plot twists and scenery-chewing from the likes of Josh Brolin, Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Jeremy Renner, Daryl McCormack, Andrew Scott, Mila Kunis, Thomas Haden Church, and Jeffrey Wright (Wright has a smallish part, but that just demonstrates the size of Johnson’s budget and the prestige of being in one of these Knives Out movies.)

A Stroke and THE SECRET GARDEN

This is my first posting since May. That’s not because I tired of blogging, but because on May 16 I had a hemorrhagic stroke. I was not overweight. I had been walking 4-5 miles a day. I was eating properly, and I was taking medication for high blood pressure. (The advice I have been offering to all who check in on me: dip your bacon in hot fudge; don’t deprive yourself of a pleasure for fear of what might come later on.) After months of treatment, for the first few weeks in the hospital and then in a rehab facility, I came back home on September 30. During my convalescence I read lots of good books, including Jess Walter’s So Far Gone, Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability and The Gifted School, Rick Atkinson’s The British Are Coming, Virginia Evans’s The Correspondent, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Richard Osman’s The Impossible Fortune, Stephen King’s Never Flinch, and, most recently, Beth Macy’s Paper Girl. I also listened to the audio version of Ron Chernow’s biography of Mark Twain. Except for the Stephen King, which was not one of his best, I would recommend all of them. But last week I got the urge to read something absolutely affirmative, so I went to the basement and hunted down an old paperback of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, which I had experienced only in an abridged version that Miss Jean Austen had read aloud over several weeks to my Fifth-Grade class. But I could remember that it had a happy ending, and that’s what I craved.

Sigmund Freud was 55 years old when Burnett published this book in 1911. I can find no evidence that Freud discussed the book in any of his writings, but he’d have found abundant material to support his theories of repressed emotions and cures for the resulting neuroses. The protagonist, Mary Lennox, is a spoiled, lonely child whose English parents have foisted her off on a team of obsequious servants in their home in India. When an epidemic kills the parents and nearly everyone else in the household, Mary goes back to England to live with her uncle, a remote, cold widower still mourning the death of his wife a decade earlier. Mary finds herself living in a gothic mansion of 100 rooms isolated on the Yorkshire moors. Her housekeeper is a young country woman from the vicinity who speaks cheerfully of her large family and who refuses to indulge Mistress Mary in the way that she was pampered in India. Bored and unhappy, Mary goes outside and notices a robin that flies over a wall to perch on the branch of a tree. She grasps that the tree is inside an enclosed space, but there’s no obvious door to allow entry. After careful exploration, Mary finds a door hidden behind a screen of ivy. The friendly robin eventually leads Mary to a buried key that will open the door to what turns out to be an abandoned garden, the secret garden of the title.

You can see where Herr Freud would be going berserk at this turn of events. A buried key that must be brought to the surface before Mary can enter a state of consciousness that is invisible to the outside world! A garden that appears to be lifeless but that begins to stir once Mary becomes aware of it! Mary confides in a local boy with the uber-Freudian name of Dickon, who is, of course, all boy (dick-on), and who embodies the healing life force of the natural world. Dickon befriends wild creatures and channels the energy of the moors into the secret garden and thus into the life of Mary Lennox, who begins to bloom like the plants she’s tending.

On a stormy day, when she can’t go outside to the garden, Mary goes exploring in the gigantic house and discovers Colin, the sickly son of her uncle, who has left his only child to wither away as an invalid. Here, too, Freud would be delighted to see Mary burrowing into her id to come face to face with a version of her previous self.  Colin is initially presented as effeminate and petulant, analogous to the way Mary was when she first arrived at the house. (I don’t suppose Burnett dared to name him Dickoff.) But soon Colin catches the urge to go outside, where he immediately begins to gain strength and good health. By the end, Colin pretty much hijacks the story and surprises his father by presenting himself as a strong, healthy boy.

The final chapter daringly and gorgeously opens up to a global perspective as it shifts to the point of view of the father, whose own outdoor excursions in a foreign country have worked the same healing magic that Colin and Mary have experienced on the English moors. Frances Hodgson Burnett today would be vociferously opposed to giving kids Ritalin or Adderall, and she’d be appalled at the ubiquity of video games and streaming apps. She would be telling us all to go outside and feel the wind in our faces and the sun on our backs.  In her beautiful, strange story about physical and spiritual renewal, she builds to the happy ending I was seeking—powerfully gratifying enough to become a tearjerker.

Karen Russell’s THE ANTIDOTE and Dan Jones’s HENRY V

If you look back at my entries for 2024, you’ll see that I discussed few books during the entire year. The reason was not that I had quit reading, but that I was working under a non-disclosure agreement for Mystery Writers of America, an agreement that finally lapsed on May 1, 2025. At last I may now reveal to the world that I was working as a judge for the Best Novel category in the annual Edgar Allan Poe Awards, the top prize for mystery writers. I read lots and lots of mystery novels, many part-way (far enough to know that the book would not be a contender), and many all the way through. I hope to find more chances to discuss the details of the job in future entries. For now, I just want to explain why I was writing throughout 2024 so much about plays, movies, and people and so rarely about books.

This month I’m eager to discuss two new books that illustrate just how expansive the general topic of history can be. First, Karen Russell’s The Antidote is a novel set in the United States in 1935. Second, Dan Jones’s Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King is a biography of the man to whom Shakespeare gave his famous “band of brothers” speech. Russell’s novel includes elements of the fantastic; Jones’s biography scrupulously observes all the conventions of good scholarship, including extensive notes and a long bibliography. Both works aim to deliver the truth about their subjects, and they both succeed, even though the kinds of truth they provide are utterly different.

Let’s begin with the novel. In an author’s note co-written with the Native American historian James Riding In at the end of The Antidote, Karen Russell admits that she “uses fantastical conceits” to illuminate psychological truths. In other words, to use Marianne Moore’s famous description of poetry, The Antidote presents imaginary gardens with real toads in them. The book begins with the notorious Black Sunday dust storm of April 14, 1935, which turned the sky black with dust and ruined farmland, and it ends with the Republican River flood of May 30, also in 1935, just six weeks after the cataclysmic dust storm. Between these two nearly inconceivable and historically documented natural disasters, Russell sandwiches her imaginary gardens, focusing on Antonina Rossi, better known among the other characters as The Antidote, a so-called prairie witch or “vault” who has the ability to store memories for people who don’t want to remember unpleasant events from their past. Within this imaginary garden we get a very real toad: an indictment of the pernicious American habit of simply forgetting about any sordid or shameful part of our history. Russell was working on her novel long before Donald Trump and his team scolded the Smithsonian and other museums for their supposed failure to emphasize the positive, cheerful elements of American history, but whether she was psychic, prescient, or merely lucky with her timing, Russell and her novel challenge everyone who wishes to obliterate or conceal sordid moments in our national past. What elevates a potential screed into art is her cast of dynamic characters, including a good-hearted farmer, his lively niece, and an African-American photographer who possesses a “quantum” camera that produces photographs of events from the past and the future. The Antidote joins the ranks of such works as Daniel Mason’s North Woods, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, and Frances Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz as recent examples of speculative fiction—that which employs the fantastical just enough to explore “what if” in an otherwise familiar world.  

Now let’s turn to the biography. If ageism is a bias based on age, and sexism is bias based on sex, may I coin the term nominalism to describe bias based on a person’s name? I’ve seen an exercise used for new teachers wherein the educator-in-training gets a list of first names—nothing more—and assigns a grade to each student based on the name. Repeatedly “Elizabeth” receives higher grades than “Bubba,” even though the grade-assigner would have never met either student and would be looking at no data about their performance in class. That’s nominalism. And I was guilty of it when I heard that a man named Dan Jones had written a biography of Henry V. Dan Jones? That is not the name of a serious scholar. Serious scholars have names like Leon Edel and Robert Caro. Dan Jones sounds like the quarterback of your high school football team. But in truth Dan Jones combines painstaking scholarship with eloquent writing to give us a life of Henry V that never fails to engross us and forever succeeds in clarifying the truth about this man from the myth perpetuated by the likes of Raphael Holinshed and William Shakespeare.

Consider that Shakespeare introduces Prince Hal as a fun-loving party boy who initially prefers the holiday world of the tavern to the sober responsibility of the palace. Not until his father rebukes him does Shakespeare’s Hal step into his role as the heir to the throne. His great test comes at the Battle of Shrewsbury, where he defeats his rival Hotspur to assure his eventual ascension to the throne. This plot makes for great drama and a stirring climax to one of the best plays ever written. In truth, however, as Dan Jones so carefully demonstrates, Hal was only sixteen years old when he fought at the Battle of Shrewsbury. Hotspur was in his mid-30’s. They never met in combat, and Hal was seriously injured when he took an arrow in his face. Somewhat melodramatically, Jones begins his biography with the surgical operation required to save the life of the young prince. After that arresting opening with its foregone conclusion—spoiler alert: the prince survives—the Henry who emerges from Jones’s biography makes much more sense than the one Shakespeare portrays. I’ll concede that Shakespeare’s character is much more fun for audiences watching him on the stage. But Jones lays out methodically and clearly the historical context for Henry’s long and finally exhausting military campaigns in France and his complex relationship with his father. Henry V was a reader, a musician, and a military tactician superior to any of his contemporaries because of his long apprenticeship on the field of battle, an apprenticeship that began in his early teens.

These two books remind me of how escapism need not be scanty in intellectual content.  Karen Russell transports us to an era 90 years ago that is at once strange and cringingly familiar. Dan Jones escorts us several centuries earlier to a fractious Medieval England by using the man who became Henry V as his portal. I’m happy to read—and sometimes write—mystery novels as a way of distracting myself from the current political scene, but I’m even happier to read more substantial works for the sake of simultaneous distraction and illumination. Karen Russell and Dan Jones, thanks for the experiences.

DREAM STATE and ADOLESCENCE

Since I began writing this blog a few years ago, I have discussed relatively few books, but two of them—Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land and Daniel Mason’s North Woods—have boldly presented a narrative that starts in a distant past and culminates in the future. Now I’ve come across another new novel that traces the same arc, Eric Puchner’s Dream State, which begins in a not-so-distant 2004 and concludes fifty or sixty years later. Oprah Winfrey chose Dream State as her latest title for her popular book club, but I read it because my go-to reviewer, Ron Charles of the Washington Post, praised it. Mr. Charles has never steered me wrong, and I also have the highest regard for Oprah’s impeccable taste, so ordering the book was an easy decision. Reading it, however, brought some challenges.

At first we meet Cece Calhoun, who is in rural Montana to plan her imminent marriage to Charlie Margolis, and we assume that Cece is our protagonist. But she turns out to be one of many. She meets Garrett Meek, Charlie’s best friend from college days and the officiant at the wedding, and takes an instant dislike to him, though perhaps her early antipathy springs from the more complicated element of fascination and curiosity. Now Puchner shifts into Garrett’s point of view, and we appear to be reading a story about a budding relationship between Cece and Garrett. But in a rare authorial intrusion, Puchner editorializes, “What a rare story this would be, if we paid no attention to Charlie,” and from there we shift into Charlie’s point of view and then smoothly into a roundelay of shifting relationships as time passes and families grow and children grow up to seize their own narrative space. If all this sounds confusing, then I’m reporting it badly. Puchner keeps us fully grounded in time and space, even if the leaps in time come swiftly and unexpectedly; we get no signals of a time leap in the chapter titles, but we must rather infer them from the action unfolding before us. In the end we have the epic sense of having experienced all these lives as the characters themselves have, with inevitable adjustments to unexpected twists, many of them heartbreaking, many shocking, many gratifying. That Puchner chooses to conclude by taking us back to where he started, with Cece on her wedding day, feels both exactly right and devastatingly ironic now that we know all that is to come.

An even more unconventional narrative comes to us on Netflix in Adolescence, a four-part television series written by the reliable Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham and directed by Philip Barantini. Somehow Jack Thorne has yet to become a familiar household name to American audiences despite his astonishing gifts for creating popular entertainment. He’s the man who gave us Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and Let the Right One In on the stage, Enola Holmes and His Dark Materials on television, and Wonder in the movie theaters. His writing partner for this project, Stephen Graham, appears onscreen in Adolescence in the crucial role of the father of a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a classmate. And the young actor who plays the accused, Owen Cooper, delivers a letter-perfect performance as a complex kid whose roiling adolescence manifests as sweetness, charm, vulnerability, rage, cunning, and menace.

What makes the series so unconventional, however, is that it does not follow the familiar tropes of storytelling. In Episode 1 we begin with a closeup of a British policeman who is griping to his partner about his trivial annoyances at home. Quickly we learn that he’s in charge of a massive raid on the home of a suspected murderer. He remains central to the narrative through Episode 2, and then he disappears. The same occurs with a sympathetic solicitor who comes to the police station to assist his 13-year-old client; he’s a central character in one episode, and then he vanishes from the story. The outraged friend of the murder victim appears to be destined for a central role in the story, but she makes her appearance in one episode and then never appears again. A psychologist interviewing the 13-year-old prisoner enters and exits the narrative in Episode 3, which consists primarily of a dazzling, claustrophobic interview at a detention center. By the end of the episode, which treats the psychologist with disturbing ambiguity, we squirm as we wonder just what was driving her with some of her questions.

Miraculously, ambitiously, daringly the director Barantini chooses to film each episode as one continuous shot. I remember when the movie Birdman appeared to arrive as one shot, but in fact the creative team for that movie filmed multiple shots and then trick-edited them to make the visuals appear seamless. In the case of Adolescence, however, Barantini literally uses one camera, pushes the record button, and lets the actors go. The performers have to be as disciplined as stage actors with their lines, cues, and blocking, and they all deliver. The camera travels in an out of moving vehicles, circles the performers, tracks different characters, all in real time, and once even takes a ride in a drone to follow a vehicle as it travels from one scene to another. The result is the sense that we’re watching a live documentary that happens to be catching people during devastating trauma.  In the end, few of the characters achieve what we would conventionally call a resolution, and yet we all grasp that this particular chapter of their lives has concluded. I have never seen anything like it.

PLAYWORLD and MICKEY 17

In the end I liked Adam Ross’s new novel Playworld a lot, though getting to that assessment was not easy. Our narrator, Griffin Hurt, is recalling the year when he was fourteen, a year when he was the naively consensual victim of two different sexual predators. One, a 36-year-old married mom and friend of the Hurt family named Naomi Shah, slowly leads Griffin into physical intimacy by way of initially sitting in a parked car and talking, then proceeding to kissing, near-consummation, and finally full seduction. The other, Kepplemen, his wrestling coach, is creepier and more loathsome, a man who uses his professional access to teenaged boys to bully and assault them. However, I’m not sure that Griffin would approve my use of the word assault just now. He’s a remarkably detached observer of the adult actions around him, and at times his reporting of criminal adult behavior is so casually matter-of-fact as to sound comic. In fact, both Naomi and Kepplemen are but two supporting characters in a tale that embraces a large cast. We get to know Griffin’s parents and his younger brother, Oren; we see Griffin engaging with his friends both in and out of school; we ride along for Griffin’s first major crush on a girl from another school; and we watch Griffin at work. He’s a child actor, a very successful one, with a recurring role on a television series and successful auditions for the movies. Ross provides Griffin so much plot that at times the novel reads like a brainstorming exercise in which the protagonist drifts from place to place in hopes of finding a coherent narrative. Yet by the end Ross pulls all the strands of his story into a series of satisfying resolutions. Griffin takes us on an epic adventure in this ambitious bildungsroman, and the annoyances along the way turn out to be negligible.

One of those annoyances is that Griffin alternates between Candide-like naivete and Owen-Meany-level precocity. He repeatedly purports to know nothing about masturbation because nobody has ever taught him about it—a bizarre claim all on its own—but for a kid who has grown up in Manhattan, had a career in show business, spent months in the locker room during wrestling season, and developed plenty of peer friendships, his ignorance makes no sense. On the other hand, when an adult tosses him the keys, he manages with minimal difficulty to drive a standard-shift car around Long Island without a license and without a wreck. Adam Ross is such a skillful writer that I have to regard these distractions as deliberate on his part. He has said that the book is autobiographical—he himself was a child actor—so he’s writing with a lot of authority, but I found these odd collisions with reality to be distracting.

On the other hand, the name of the novel is Playworld, and the world of the novel is full of play. Griffin plays roles on television and in the movies, and he plays roles offscreen with friends, teachers, family, teammates, and predatory adults. Likewise Griffin’s father is an actor always hustling for the next big role and frequently concealing his episodes of cheating on his wife. Griffin gets cast in school plays. His entire year consists of a collection of outsize experiences suited for the stage or the screen. The resolutions to his many challenges come in the form of renunciations, and by the end he joins the parade of so many American heroes as he heads west, even if his destination is merely the west side of Manhattan.

A few days after I finished reading Playworld, abundant and laudatory reviews led me to Roanoke’s Grandin Theatre—you can tell it’s an art house by the way it spells theater—to see Mickey 17, the latest work from Bong Joon Ho (or Bong Joon-ho, or Bong Joon-Ho, depending upon which website you visit). For me the movie did not deliver what the enthusiastic reviews had promised. Unlike Bong’s Parasite, which was consistently fresh and surprising, Mickey 17 was Groundhog Day without enough comedy to leaven the darkness and one of many sci-fi movies to argue that weird alien presences need not be hostile or dangerous. The title character is called “17” because he’s the seventeenth iteration of the same person. Mickey is an Expendable on a mission to another planet, and as an Expendable he’s the go-to crew member to face life-threatening problems. When he dies, as he has done sixteen times already, he’s simply printed out in a new version with all of his stored memories intact. What kept me in the theater for the duration of the movie was the astonishing performance of Robert Pattinson as Mickey. I haven’t seen much of Pattinson in performance (no Twilight, no Batman, no Lighthouse), but I understand now why he’s so respected within and without the industry. He’s an actor willing to go for whatever the role demands, and his endearing turn as the resigned but hopeful Mickey 17 as well as the angry and aggressive Mickey 18 deserves the Range and Generosity Award, a prize which I just invented but am willing to present to Pattinson if he wants to join me for lunch here in Roanoke at Crystal Spring Grocery.

BLIND INJUSTICE and DEATH BECOMES HER

On a recent trip to New York City, my sister Ginny and I caught two very different musical performances, so different, in fact, that they form the boundaries of all that musical theater can be. Blind Injustice, based on the nonfiction book by Mark Godsey detailing the work of the Ohio Innocence Project, is an opera performed on a bare stage with everyday costuming and a strong political message. Death Becomes Her, a gaudy, glitzy, multi-million-dollar Broadway musical adaptation of a cult movie, offers a token hint of reflections upon human vanity and the nature of immortality, but nobody leaves the theater grateful for the life lessons. Death Becomes Her exists for spectacle and laughs, and it provides them in abundance. On the broad spectrum stretching between these two polar opposites lie the complete works of Giacomo Puccini, Wayne Newton, Richard Wagner, Liberace, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Donny Osmond, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Cher, Stephen Sondheim, Elton John, Jeanine Tesori, Kendrick Lamar, and John Corigiliano.

On our way to Lincoln Center to see Blind Injustice we walked past the huge indoor shopping mall on the west side of Columbus Circle. I had been inside the place many times to buy meals at the Whole Foods in the basement, but I had never explored any of the other fifty or so shops on the upper floors. On the sidewalk we passed a sign advertising JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER, but we knew that Lincoln Center was five blocks north. However, when we tracked down the Rose Building at Lincoln Center, we learned that our performance would be at the Rose Theater in the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex inside the shopping mall. Yes, the huge 1856-seat Rose Theater occupies Floors 5 and 6 of a shopping mall, but you would never know once you set foot inside the theater. It’s like being inside a hollow egg, with perfect acoustics, clean sight lines, and a vast performing space. My niece Anna, who grew up in Cincinnati and knew of the Ohio Innocence Project, put us onto the performance of Blind Injustice—running for two nights only—and joined us for the performance. We were all floored by how good it was.

Six chairs sat equidistant on a black stage floor, each in a tight spotlight. These were the seats of the six featured victims of false convictions in our system of criminal justice. Behind these principals were rows of chairs for a chorus, and behind those rows were tiers of box seats for more choral singers. The playbill listed 33 names for the chorus, but honestly, the group looked and sounded more like fifty or sixty to me. Supertitles assured that we could understand every word of David Cote’s libretto, and the rich chorus italicized every note of Scott Davenport Richards’s score. For ninety uninterrupted minutes we heard six horror stories whose endings could be only so happy when the protagonists had spent so many years unfairly imprisoned. It was political theater at its finest and most stripped-down. We needed no sets and costume changes in order to appreciate and recoil at these stories. Stepping out of the theater and walking past Williams-Sonoma made for a jarring contrast with what we had just heard. (The next night, when Ginny and I saw Sanaz Toossi’s English on Broadway, we wished that we’d had supertitles there, too.)

Even before Death Becomes Her began, the pink and lavender lights filling the interior of the theater as room-sized curtain-warmer made clear that subtlety was not in store. Indeed, once Michelle Williams rose into sight in her spangly oversized gown, the audience broke into sustained entrance applause before she had said or sung a single note. Our fellow theater-goers had apparently arrived knowing exactly what the show delivered: camp, cattiness, outrageous behavior, and wickedly funny one-liners, of which there were seemingly hundreds. Megan Hilty plays a Broadway diva named Madeline Ashton, who stars in a show called Me Me Me, and her opening number, “For the Gaze,” runs with the pun in its title into a marathon of increasingly outrageous, over-the-top-of-the-last-over-the-top gags. In a quick costume change she’s suddenly Liza Minnelli, and then in another quick-change she’s Judy Garland as Dorothy, and then, just to put a button on it, somebody tosses her a stuffed Toto. She later appears in a leopard gown that matches perfectly the leopard couch in her apartment; need I go on? Her partner in crime, an initially mousy novelist named Helen Sharp, was played on the night we saw it by Natalie Charle Ellis, understudy to Jennifer Simard, and Ellis more than held her own at chewing the scenery with the voracious Hilty at her side.  If you don’t already know the plot, which Marco Pennette cleverly adapted from the movie of the same name by David Koepp and Martin Donovan, then I’ll simply say that a magic potion grants eternal youth and beauty to anyone who swallows it, but a fatal accident will remove the youth and beauty and leave only the eternal existence part of the bargain. Julia Mattison and Noel Carey’s lyrics and music serve the source material well, much in the same way that Mel Brooks’s The Producers became a better show as a musical.  It’s worth the price of admission to see the moment when Helen Sharp pushes Madeline Ashton down the stairs, a fall that seems to take several minutes and inflicts a number of fatal injuries before Ashton finally splats, contorted and splayed, on the floor. And that’s not even the end of the first act.

Judi Dench and Billy Wilder

This month’s post is going to be somewhat shorter than usual because I find myself happily employed—as in, working for a salary—for the rest of the month of January. North Cross School recruited me to cover two sections of A.P. English Literature while the teacher is away, and I find myself delighted to be back in the classroom. North Cross is a wonderful community led by superb Head of School, and the seniors in these two sections of A.P. Lit are a hoot. So I’m spending time making lesson plans and sending out pep talks via email. I would advise anybody who wants a cure for the January blahs to do the same.

But let’s talk for a minute about the book I just finished, Judi Dench’s SHAKESPEARE: THE MAN WHO PAYS THE RENT. The whole book consists of transcripts of interviews with Dench conducted by fellow thespian Brendan O’Hea, with each chapter devoted to one of more of the roles played by Dench in a particular Shakespearean play. O’Hea asks good questions, and Dench answers them with wit, insight, and more than occasional bite. The result is a series of master classes with a theatrical legend. My favorite chapter was the one on THE COMEDY OF ERRORS, wherein Dench talks about a particular production with additional musical numbers performed and filmed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1976. I could find the complete production on YouTube, and so I had the fun of reading Dench’s commentary while watching a smashing production of a challenging play directed, in this instance, by Trevor Nunn. The cast includes Roger Rees, Francesca Annis, Richard Griffiths, and Michael Williams (Dench’s husband). Fifty years ago the RSC was the best in the business of performing classical theater, and this glimpse into that golden era, narrated by one of its stars, was almost like being backstage.

The other writer I want to mention this month is Billy Wilder, who with his writing partners (particularly I.A.L. Diamond) gave us some of Hollywood’s best and most lasting treasures. Just recently I re-watched SABRINA, STALAG-17, and SOME LIKE IT HOT, all so different, all so good. But on New Year’s Eve, Turner Classic Movies gave the prime 8:00 p.m. spot to THE APARTMENT, which I recorded and watched a couple of days later. The hosts for the evening declared that it was a perfect movie, and I have to agree. I first saw it in 1960, when I was nine years old, and my mother and aunt took me and my cousin to the Grandin Theater to see what the newspapers advertised as a riotous comedy. I can still remember how appalled my mother and her sister were after the show was over and they faced so many questions about marital infidelity, attempted suicide, and seedy office politics. My memory of the movie was that it was boring and not funny. But now I admire so much the feminist sympathies, the corporate satire, the artistry that went into constructing the seamless plot, and the performances by all concerned, particularly Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred McMurray. All three had careers that showcased their astonishing range, and here, captured so young and so gifted, they inhabit Billy Wilder’s vision and give us a movie that ends on New Year’s Eve with a literal bang.

POKER FACE and THE DAY OF THE JACKAL

Just a few weeks ago I subscribed to Peacock because I’d heard good things about the reboot of The Day of the Jackal, but before I started watching that, I got distracted by Poker Face, which friends had strongly recommended when it first appeared. It turns out that I got my money’s worth out of this initial investment in Peacock. Both shows are excellent, though I do have some quibbles with this new incarnation of The Day of the Jackal. More about that in a moment.

First, Poker Face. From its opening titles, which look like those we’d have seen in 1960’s-era television, Poker Face presents itself as a retro treat. It’s set very much in the modern day, and its language is too coarse ever to appear on network television in the 20th Century, but it’s still a refreshing return to the days when a weekly episode was self-contained; that is, we’d get a conflict at the beginning, complications in the middle, and a resolution at the end. (I gather that the official tv lingo for such shows is “case of the week.”) These episodes run less than an hour but include all the pleasures of the best vintage Columbo movies, and there’s a cheerful Columbo-like persistence to Natasha Lyonne’s character Charlie Cale, who just can’t let a misdeed go without setting it right.

The gimmick is that Charlie, played with an endearing bourbon-and-cigarettes rasp by Lyonne, can always tell when somebody is lying. She’s not a superhero. She’s very much flesh and blood, and she can get hurt as badly as anybody else; nevertheless, she does have that one skill of identifying a falsehood every time she hears one. She thus becomes a skilled amateur detective—not a policewoman, as she is quick to point out—and therefore not necessarily interested in following legal procedures herself. In the first episode her skills get her into trouble with a dangerous man in Las Vegas, and his pursuit of her allows for the season-long plot device of her moving from town to town to seek subsistence work while she tries to outrun her predator. We’re talking about The Fugitive crossed with Route 66 (sorry, younger readers; you’ll have to Google those) in a series of beautifully written mysteries. I pride myself on being able to anticipate where a plot is going, but I’ve always been surprised by at least one plot twist and every denouement during the first season. (Season Two is on the way.) Perhaps the ingenious plotting should be no surprise with Rian Johnson, the Knives-Out guy, as the creator of the series.

Now for The Day of the Jackal. Frederick Forsyth published a bestseller by that name in 1971, and in 1973 Fred Zinnemann directed a hit movie that was plenty faithful to the novel. What’s now playing in ten episodes on Peacock has almost no resemblance to the original story. Yes, there’s a skilled assassin nicknamed The Jackal, and yes, there’s a determined MI-6 agent pursuing him, but the story transpires in the modern day. There’s no mention of Charles DeGaulle because the target this time is an Elon-Musk-like tech billionaire. I’m going to get my quibbles out of the way first without providing any spoilers. Complaint Number One: how does that woman who represents his clients keep finding the Jackal when nobody else on the planet seems capable of doing so? Complaint Number Two: At the end of the final season, one character asks another, “How did you survive that?” Good question, since what just happened would have been unsurvivable in real life.

But let’s talk about the strengths of this excellent entertainment. First of all, Eddie Redmayne establishes himself as an actor of astonishing range. Moviegoers who know him as Newt Scamander in the Harry Potter universe remember a bashful, stammering, animal-loving innocent, a Hugh Grant with a magic wand. Sometimes we glimpse that diffidence here, but only when the Jackal is playing a role himself. Redmayne assumes multiple personas to disguise himself in the course of the story, but his steely, implacable Jackal manages to be both terrifying and sympathetic. Lashana Lynch, who plays Bianca Pullman, the British agent tasked with finding and stopping the Jackal, turns in an equally superb performance in a well-written role. Both characters try to juggle the love for their families—both have a spouse and one child—with the extremities of their work. The police are not especially good guys in this show, and the Jackal is not entirely evil. In fact, the moral ambiguity keeps us just as riveted as the action sequences do. Both the Jackal and Bianca Pullman do reprehensible things, and yet both earn our sympathy. Moreover, the Jackal’s target is an arrogant, insufferable man, but what that target wants to do for the world is admirable and unselfish. The people who want him dead are the true villains.  Poker Face ends each episode with poetic justice. The Day of the Jackal does nothing of the kind, but, like Poker Face, it does deliver a rousing good time.

The Election of 2024 and CONCLAVE

What follows is the tale of a man who twice this month found himself out of step with the majority.

I’m going to make this posting very brief, not because I am speechless, but because I don’t want to repeat what so many people have already expressed in editorials, interviews, YouTube videos, and podcasts. To my astonishment, more people wanted Donald Trump to be President than not, and for the first time in three elections, he won the popular vote. I didn’t vote for Donald Trump. I thought that Kamala Harris was going to win. I am mystified by the choice that a majority of my fellow citizens made, and the one sliver of good news is that Trump’s victory was so decisive that there’s no room for questioning the outcome. Yet while I am dumbfounded and aghast, I am not especially depressed. All right, America. You asked for what’s about to come. Let’s see how it all works out. So far Mr. Trump seems determined to prove Karl Marx’s claim that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. He has just nominated Matt Gaetz to be the U.S. Attorney General. That’s akin to asking Charles Manson to supervise Health and Human Services.

Ironically, a couple of days ago, in an effort to escape the madness called reality, I made an exception to my habit of avoiding movie theaters and bought a ticket for Conclave. I wanted to see it on the big screen because of its strong reviews, its equally strong cast, and its source, a novel by Robert Harris, one of today’s best practitioners of historical fiction. I settled into my seat in the sparsely populated theater, endured the string of trailers, and watched eagerly as the movie began. Almost immediately I was surprised by how languidly the story opened, with a solemn bedside vigil for a dying pope. For the next hour I watched a grave and fretful Ralph Fiennes navigate the intrigue of Vatican politics with agonizing—that is, agonizing for both Fiennes’s character and me—delicacy. I watched Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow, both praised by critics for their performances, both terribly miscast in my view, maneuver and manipulate in failed attempts to become the new pontiff. Finally I had to ask myself, do I care what the hell happens in this unbearably ponderous movie? When the answer came back as a decisive “no,” I left without regret. But I find myself again in the minority and again baffled by the reactions of my fellow movie watchers, most of whom liked what they saw.

Before I sign off, however, let me note that I was recently in Cincinnati to witness the double christening of my great-nephews, Teddy and George Seward. Teddy is just a few days away from turning three, and George is going on seven months. They are both very happy boys with wonderful parents and grandparents. They were the unanimous delight of the congregation at Knox Presbyterian Church, and they were the equal delight of the family when my sister and brother-in-law hosted a post-baptismal reception at home. In contrast to my perplexity over the recent election, there’s nothing baffling about the joy generated by Teddy and George. “In the nightmare of the dark,” W. H. Auden wrote in 1939, “all the dogs of Europe bark.” But despite the timeliness of Auden’s words today, George smiles without expecting anything in return, and Teddy, without being asked, exuberantly belts out all the words and much of the instrumentation to “Build Me Up, Buttercup.” His voice overwhelms the sound of any barking dogs or woeful pundits, and his grin holds back the darkness. He recalls for us the optimism of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, who, returning home from a long journey, sees a single candle in her window and marvels at its power: “How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” Teddy and George, you’re our candles.

BAD MONKEY and SLOW HORSES

I grew up on Lassie, Flipper, Rin-Tin-Tin, and Mr. Ed, so I am perfectly accustomed to seeing animal names as the titles of television shows and movies. But more recently, somehow, this familiar device has devolved into the stranger practice of using animal species to name shows about human beings. For example, here in the waning months of 2024 we have Wolfs, a movie with Brad Pitt and George Clooney, about a couple of competing fixers for underworld bosses (and why, by the way, are they “Wolfs” and not “Wolves”?). We have Reservation Dogs, about Native American kids. We have The Bear, about a very high-strung chef in Chicago. We have Baby Reindeer about a stalker and her victim. And, as perceptive readers have already noted in the title of this post, we have Bad Monkey and Slow Horses, only one of which has an actual animal in the cast—it’s the monkey—and this eponymous monkey appears peripherally and contributes nothing to the plot.

Bad Monkey, an Apple TV+ series based on a novel by Carl Hiaasen, might have been better compressed into eight episodes rather than the more bloated ten. Of those ten, the first five are the best. The visual pleasures of seeing the vibrant colors of South Florida and the Bahamas are alone a treat, and Vince Vaughn’s deadpan, wry incarnation of Andrew Yancy, a smart but unorthodox detective, serves as a nice foil to the eccentricities of those around him. Those accompanists include Natalie Martinez as a medical examiner who teams up with Yancy; Meredith Hagner as Eve, a properly named femme fatale; Jodie Turner-Smith as a practitioner of local magic; Rob Delaney as a dupe who is manipulated by Eve into increasingly awful behavior; Michelle Monahan as Yancy’s charming but amoral ex-wife; Alex Moffat as a frustrated neighbor of Yancy; and Ronald Peet as a Bahamian who owns the monkey of the title. Initially we appear to be in familiar Hiaasen territory, a land bustling with zany people and black humor. But there are certain contractual expectations that come with a tale that begins so playfully. We expect the plot to conclude with satisfactory poetic justice for all, with the evil properly foiled and the good rewarded. But as the series grows darker and darker and tempers our expectations of a tidy denouement, I found myself laughing less and sighing more. Zany surrenders to dismay at worst, disappointment at best, and while all the performances are first rate, I would prefer fewer deaths, less bile, and more sunshine at the end.

Slow Horses, on the other hand, smashingly succeeds in finding the perfect blending of dark humor and genuine suspense. Season 4, which I just finished watching, continues the streak established by the first three seasons, which offer superb entertainment with an unapologetically sardonic view of British intelligence services. Like Bad Monkey, this series is also based on the work of a novelist, Mark Herron, but this show establishes immediately that the stakes are truly high despite the often-hilarious bickering and outrageous behavior among the principal characters, most of them relegated to Slough House, a branch of MI5 for agents who have, for various reasons, made an egregious error in fulfilling their assignments. Without the brilliant performance of Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, the slovenly, decrepit, and wily leader of Slough House, the show would not be nearly so much fun. Kristin Scott Thomas is Oldman’s polished, steely foil at the top of the MI5 leadership, and Jack Lowden plays the more conventional spy who has landed for mostly political reasons at Slough House. The ensemble cast of British actors is uniformly excellent, as is the writing, and while I might have a couple of quibbles with this latest season—Hugo Weaving’s forced American accent, the borrowing of a plot device from Anthony Horowitz’s Point Blanc—they interfered not at all with the suspense, the twists, the laughter, and the satisfying conclusion.  Bring on Season 5. Please.

Shakespeare's HENRY IV, PART 1 and HENRY V

Members of the venerable Shakespeare Club of Roanoke have read, studied, discussed, and seen in performance the plays of Shakespeare for generations. Despite its long-held policy of offering membership to women only, the club doesn’t mind having a man show up for an occasional guest appearance, and this November, the members have invited me. I’ll be talking about Henry V for about twenty minutes before the group begins to read the play in its entirety. I’m frankly daunted to be speaking to such a gathering of intellectual powerhouses, women who have joined an organization that is almost as old as the city itself in order to continue their educations at the loftiest of levels. But I am reassured in knowing that they have already read Henry IV, Part 1. Thus I’ll be able to refer to the earlier play as I offer some observations about Henry V, which is a seriously inferior play to its predecessor. Yes, Henry V does offer some famous lines (the muse of fire, the breach into which the soldiers must go once more, the band of brothers), and it serves as a perennially popular infomercial for those eager to recall the glorious days of England’s military victory at Agincourt. But as a play, as a piece of stagecraft made by an artist, it’s dismayingly flawed. From Henry IV to Henry V: what a falling-off was there.

Henry IV, Part 1 is about as close to perfect as a play can be. It teems with subplots, memorable characters, changes of location, tonal shifts, and grand speeches, but it’s also beautifully constructed. Here Shakespeare demonstrates just how skillful he is as a play wright, as a maker of plays. Scene 1 begins in the palace, where the title king bemoans his problems with Welsh incursions in the west and Scottish raids in the north. But he also takes the time to complain of the dissolute behavior of his son, Prince Hal, who spends too much time in the taverns, and to compare Hal with young Harry Percy, nicknamed Hotspur, who is valiant and brave and eager to fight those Scottish troublemakers. In the next scene we see Hal in the tavern with Sir John Falstaff, Shakespeare’s greatest comic creation, where the prince confirms his father’s accusations of low behavior but also, in his only soliloquy in the play, promises to step into his role as crown prince when the time is right. In Scene 3 we return to the palace, where we observe the king in conversation with Hotspur. And so it goes for much of the play: moments of serious palace politics juxtaposed with those of boisterous tavern carousing until both worlds, palace and tavern, converge on the battlefield. Hal and Hotspur never appear onstage until their one final showdown in the final act, but they are aware of each other and comment about each other throughout the play. Each scene advances the plot clearly and effectively, and each scene features either King Henry, Prince Hal, Hotspur, or Falstaff. It’s a tight, compelling rendering of English history from two centuries before Shakespeare lived and wrote the play. National mythology is always good for the box office, as those who have seen Hamilton can testify.  

That draw of national mythology explains why Henry V remains such a popular play today even though it needs some significant editing. Once again Shakespeare gives us grand palace intrigue that leads to the battlefield, and once again he alternates the high-stakes political and military events with scenes of low comedy and clownish characters. But too frequently those scenes with the clowns don’t have any clear reason for being. Critics can find ways to justify their presence (they counter or parallel the serious events with comic pastiches; they demonstrate just how benevolent the grown-up Prince Hal is when, as king, he declares these men to be his brothers in combat), but too often they slow the momentum and register as filler. King Henry V does occasionally mix with these lowly characters, sometimes to suggest that he has not abandoned his love of the practical joke from his tavern days, but too often we get random characters showing up to have a little comic interplay before they disappear. The play we call Henry V sprawls and tests the limits of our patience as we wait for the next plot-advancing scene to arrive. And the character of the king, with his frequent and pious-sounding references to God and his cold-blooded order to murder all French prisoners, is a one-dimensional bore and hypocrite who is nearly unrecognizable from his days as the madcap Prince Hal, a complex, dynamic character who grows from a good-time boy in the tavern into a thoughtful, generous, courageous prince deserving of the crown he will inherit. I plan to present this approach in November, and I hope I don’t put the members of the Shakespeare Club off their reading. But I suspect that the play itself will do that for me.

Tim Kaine and Ely, Minnesota

The Commonwealth of Virginia has wisely elected to the U.S. Senate two men with good minds, good values, and good instincts. Neither Mark Warner nor Tim Kaine receives or deserves mockery on late-night television. (Eat your hearts out, Tennessee with your Marsha Blackburn, Texas with Ted Cruz, Louisiana with John Neely Kennedy, Missouri with Josh Hawley, and South Carolina with both Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham. And I’m just concentrating on the Senate. If I were to include the House, then the list would grow much longer. I’m thinking of you, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz.) And now, to bolster my case for the Virginia senators as people to admire, Tim Kaine has written a fine book: Walk Ride Paddle: A Life Outside. It’s not your typical political biography and does not belong in the haystack of vanity projects written by so many participants in public life. Rather it’s a celebration of three of the many outdoor recreational opportunities offered by Virginia, and it’s also a candid, unsentimental reflection on the life of the author, the history of our commonwealth, and the people who live here.

The title comes from a series of journeys Kaine took between May of 2019 and October of 2021 to celebrate his turning sixty. First he walked the Appalachian Trail from the northern border of Virginia to the southern; then he rode his bicycle long the entire Skyline Drive and the Virginia portion of the Blue Ridge Parkway; and finally he paddled the length of the James River, which runs completely within the Old Dominion. Much of the first two trips took him through territory I have roamed myself, and I particularly enjoyed reading about his experiences at the Peaks of Otter and McAfee’s Knob. (The technical name for the latter is McAfee Knob, but we locals have always made it a possessive, and I’m going to claim squatter’s rights.) Kaine’s trip down the James, broken into a series of short trips, might have become the dullest part of his book had he not been so acutely observant about the people he met along the way and the insights he gained from having time to muse on the sites he passed. One of my favorite anecdotes included his discovery of the North Fork Plantation Bed and Breakfast and its devout proprietor. But I really sat up when he began to discuss the role of Virginia in creating slavery as a national disgrace. After all, he argues persuasively, when those first Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619, English law did not permit slavery, but only allowed indentured servitude for a specific term, after which the servant was free to pursue a life of his or her own. But Virginians decided not to grant the same privileges to Africans, and over the next several decades our legislature enacted more and more onerous laws to assure lifetime bondage for anyone born of a Black mother. The Virginia history book I used in the 4th Grade, which showed well-dressed African immigrants cheerfully shaking the hands of those who were about to enslave them, was a work of undeniable propaganda. Kaine pushes the culpability into several generations beyond 1619. But the prosecution of slavery is, in the end, only a detour. Primarily Kaine reports the contagious joy of traveling with his wife, Anne, and with his many friends who joined him for various legs of his journeys.

His paddling and portaging reminded me of a trip I took 51 summers ago with three people who remain among my best friends today: Bill Nash, Billy Wallace, and Bud Wright. The three of us drove my mother’s yellow Ford LTD from Roanoke to Ely, Minnesota, where we acquired two canoes, loads of freeze-dried food, four fishing licenses, one outboard motor, a half-dozen cans of gasoline for fuel, and two sturdy poles with abundant rope for lashing the canoes into a catamaran when we were on open water. We had brought with us from Roanoke tents and sleeping bags and rain gear, and from the outfitter in Ely we set out into the boundary waters of Minnesota and the Quetico recreation area of Canada for eight days of camping, fishing, portaging, and listening at night for the cry of the loon. At times we were carrying upended canoes on our shoulders to portage from lake to lake. At other times we were wading through chest-deep water to find our way clear as we hoped that the aquatic leeches would leave us alone. We got rained on, and we saw rainbows. Some of us caught fish; I dropped my pole into the lake, where it undoubtedly remains half a century later. We fought black flies and mosquitoes with something called Fly Dope, a viscous liquid that dissolved the ink on our freeze-dried food when I accidentally spilled some. We admired cosmic sunsets. We were proud of ourselves when we returned intact.

Today the rules of that area are strict and restrictive: only a certain number of people may enter the parks on any given day; drinking water should be filtered; no bathing is allowed within 150 yards of the lakes; camping is permitted only in designated spots supplied with latrines and fire grates. In 1973 we dipped our cups into the lakes and drank freely and fearlessly, swam and bathed wherever we wished, and camped in any spot we found suitable. I’ve never done anything so outdoorsy since then—about the closest I’ve come was to sit in the rain for an outdoor performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Regent’s Park—but I still draw on the memories for stories I write today. And when I was in the wedding parties of all three of my companions, who all got married within four months of each other in 1975 and remain happily married today, I celebrated as somebody who had shared with each groom a journey far outside my comfort zone, and who was grateful to each for their reassuring company along the way.

Perry Epes and Nat Jobe

July 11 is the birthday of E.B. White, Harold Bloom, and James McNeill Whistler—respectively an essayist, a critic, and an artist. Appropriately July 11 is also the anniversary of the death of Perry Epes, who, as an essayist, a critic, and an artist, embodied the best of White, Bloom, and Whistler. Perry was an extraordinary teacher and friend to thousands of people. I was one of those thousands who learned from Perry and who enjoyed his friendship for decades, and I was one of the thousands who were shocked when his wife Gail—also a dear friend and teacher—sent word that he had died. Perry had been in and out of hospitals for so long that we were all accustomed to his recoveries. He was always pulling through, and when he didn’t this time, the shock waves registered worldwide.

I met Perry in late February or early March of 1982, when he picked me up at the Charlottesville airport and drove me to Woodberry Forest School for an interview. It was my first time on the campus, and immediately I felt at home—at one, actually—with Perry and Gail and their cottage on the edge of the golf course. He was head of the Woodberry English Department and hence my boss when I began work there in the fall. But he wasn’t bossy. He led by listening, by demonstrating a full understanding of all points of view, and then by suggesting a mutually acceptable way forward. Perry was not a painter, like Whistler, but a poet, and when I discovered his artistic output, I was intimidated. To me poets were legendary presences in anthologies, not living human beings who laughed readily and talked Civil War history and baseball. In the spring of 1983, when he directed a hugely popular production of Macbeth on the Woodberry stage, I asked the athletic director if I might be excused from assisting with the track team in order to help out with the stage show. (I was incompetent in both track and theater, but I presented a much better bet to help with the play than with anything directly connected to athletics. That spring production marked my first time dabbling in directing a show.) Soon after, Perry invited me to team-teach A.P. English with him in the fall, and immediately I was awash in Aristotelian criticism, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, and Against Deep Meaning, Perry’s own textbook designed for a trimester drama course. I had always wanted to be a writer, but it was Perry who jumpstarted that ambition into practice. I was working with somebody who actually wrote books, and I wanted to participate. When Gail was called to the Episcopal priesthood, the Epes family moved to Northern Virginia and Perry’s alma mater, Episcopal High School, where Perry and Gail won every major award and every member of the community’s love. Despite the distance, never did our friendship attenuate. We saw each other on both campuses, met for lunches in Middleburg, attended plays in Washington, and exchanged letters and phone calls regularly. I was fully up to date with them when Perry died, and thus I felt the loss as if we had been housemates.

In a more recent blow, Nat Jobe died on June 25 of this year, just a couple of weeks ago. Nat and his wife Wistie were also good friends from Woodberry, and his death from the effects of Parkinson’s disease came as both a blow and a relief after his friends had witnessed his heartbreaking decline. He’d been a beloved and brilliant teacher of history, department head, and baseball coach throughout a rich career, and when he retired to live with Wistie at an idyllic cabin on the Maury River in Rockbridge Baths, I kept in close touch and visited frequently. I’m grateful to Nat for being the kind of friend who wouldn’t hesitate to tell me the truth. When I actually began to practice the writing that Perry Epes had by example nudged me to do, Nat was one of my trusted readers. I was so grateful for the way he would tell me what didn’t work in a manuscript; when I learned of a misstep that I’d overlooked or hadn’t considered, I could correct the problem and prevent the inevitable criticism (or uproar, if I’d made an egregious enough miscalculation). We had so many memorable times—a trip to Deerfield to visit their classes and talk with our counterparts there, excursions to the Birchmere for the Seldom Scene, countless dinners at the Jobes’ house or at mine, and, most valuable for my professional development, team-teaching a class in American Studies for three glorious years, a class that ended only when I took an ill-timed sabbatical. Everybody who knew Nat can tell just as many stories. He was everybody’s best friend and every Woodberry student’s favorite teacher.

In Merrily We Roll Along, a musical that ends on a happy note only because it goes backward in time, Stephen Sondheim offers a sardonic, clinical analysis of friendship among three characters who prematurely consider their own friendship superior to the rest:

Most friends fade,

or they don’t make the grade.

New ones are quickly made,

And in a pinch, sure, they’ll do.

But us, old friends,

What’s to discuss, old friends?

Here’s to us.

Who’s like us?

Damn few.

There were damn few like Perry and Nat, and the empty spaces they left in the lives of those who survived them are not ever going to refill. Indeed, we’re going to remember both of them every day by their absence, by every moment when we want to call them, or consult them, or ask their opinion, or share a book, or pass along an article, or sit down with them for a meal. Each day offers countless reminders, and for those reminders we can be grateful. In a memorable application essay for Harvard written forty years ago, a young woman named Maeve O’Connor described her family’s quiet tribute to her late father on what would have been his 53rd birthday. At the end she mentioned the drafty house and her habit of slipping into her father’s favorite sweater, a garment so old that it was unraveling and full of holes. And yet, “I love the holes,” she wrote.

I finally understand what she meant.

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THE LOST BOYS and the Lost Boys (and Girls)

AMC recently added to its lineup the 1987 vampire movie The Lost Boys, a cut above the typical comedy-horror movie thanks to a strong script and a superb cast. The A-List adults—Dianne Wiest, Barnard Hughes, Edward Hermann—join an extraordinary company of young actors, including Jami Gertz, Alex Winter (who two years later would join Keanu Reeves in the title roles of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), Jason Patric, and Kiefer Sutherland, just at the outset of his career as a malevolent young vampire. Corey Feldman has a major role that was among his last before he fell into the sickness of chemical dependency. But the actor who breaks my heart is Corey Haim, who plays the lead, the kid who is trying to save his older brother from turning into a creature of the night. A couple of weeks ago I watched the movie for the first time since 1987, and I was both astonished and saddened to confirm my memory of what a fine performance Haim gave, how much talent he had, what a future might have awaited him. But he died before he reached 40 years old, burned out, short-circuited, fried on drugs and alcohol, destroyed by his addictions and by a Hollywood system that too frequently leaves young talent to fend for itself.

So many former child actors have succeeded in Hollywood that the casual observer might mistakenly conclude that landing a role on the Disney Channel or a network sitcom as a kid is a guarantee of stardom by age 35. And I say good for Jason Bateman, Jeff Bridges, Ryan Gosling, Keke Palmer, Daniel Radcliffe, Keri Russell, Brooke Shields, Zendaya, and others who have managed to find considerable success as adults in a tough business. But their arrival at their current status is something of a miracle. There are four general outcomes for child stars. Tier One belongs to those listed above and the likes of Ron Howard, Jodi Foster, Tom Holland, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who had sufficient adult guidance to make the transition more or less seamlessly from childhood to adulthood in front of the camera. (In Howard’s case, also behind the camera.) Maybe the most famous example is Mickey Rooney, who lived into his 90’s, made his first movie in 1926 during the silent era, and made his last in 2021. Tier Two includes people like Drew Barrymore, Zac Efron, and Haley Joel Osment, who survived challenges—depression, alcoholism, drugs, for examples—and who stumbled while processing all the fame and attention that came so early in their lives before they steadied themselves. Tier Three features those who tried the business and then walked away from it, like Phillip Alford and Mary Badham, who played Jem and Scout Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and then, after trying another couple of roles, retired from acting. Tier Four, the saddest, comprises the kids who got chewed up and are now dead (Haim, Brad Renfro, River Phoenix, Gary Coleman) or are still wrestling with their demons (Lindsay Lohan, Macauley Culkin, and Feldman). Judy Garland, whose career was the inverse of that of her old friend Mickey Rooney, represents Tier Four most wrenchingly: the multi-talented woman whose movies still play constantly on television and who died sadly at age 47. At her funeral Ray Bolger, who played the Scarecrow opposite her in The Wizard of Oz, declared that “she just plain wore out.”

Most recently I’ve been watching Audrey Hepburn, who at age 24 was no child when she starred in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina from 1954, but she plays one quite convincingly in the first part of the movie, and as we watch, we feel that complex mixture of awe at her youth and beauty, joy in knowing the smashing career she was going to enjoy, and sadness at the prospect of her painful death from cancer at age 53. That’s what happens when we revisit Judy Garland as Dorothy or River Phoenix as young Indiana Jones. For every kick we get out of seeing little Ronny Howard as Opie and knowing that he’s going to become an Oscar-winning director, married to his childhood sweetheart, father of Dallas Bryce Howard, we get the shock of seeing Corey Haim in The Lost Boys, the movie that launched a career for Kiefer Sutherland and sadly marked the apex of Corey Haim’s professional life. John Keats was way ahead of me when he wrote his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” wherein he muses on the image of two lovers depicted on the side of the urn; they are poised to kiss, and they will forever be preserved as young and beautiful and always ecstatic over the intimacy about to come. Yet they will never complete the kiss, never get to consummate their love. So is it better to be frozen in one ecstatic moment of eternal youth, or better to live a dynamic life of mutability and risk? In the case of these actors, whose faces are preserved, Grecian-urn-like, on film, we celebrate the moments they enjoy forever in each movie frame and dread what’s coming for them when the pictures wrap.

CHALLENGERS and THE FALL GUY

On two recent Sunday evenings I went to see a movie at an actual movie theater. Pre-covid such an announcement would have epitomized banality. And perhaps it still does. But nowadays when I go to a theater, I am there to see a play. Movies will appear eventually on television, where I don’t need to worry about whether somebody behind me will be talking or somebody in front of me will be scrolling through messages on their cell phone or somebody beside me will want to get up in the middle of the show to visit the lobby. Nevertheless, I went to a movie theater on two consecutive Sunday nights, and I was glad that I did. These two movies were worth the risk, and, as it happily transpired, the audiences for both were impeccable.

Challengers deserves its hype and its raves from the critics. Usually I despise ambiguity, but here, in the hands of director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, the ambiguity works in tandem with a series of brisk revelations to hook the audience instantly and pull us into a consistently surprising and entertaining world. The three actors at the center of the story—Zendaya (age 27), Mike Faist (32), and Josh O’Connor (33)—all began their careers in childhood and thus are already seasoned professionals who are still ascendant in their journeys to stardom. I’m not going to say much about the plot of the movie because almost everything would be a spoiler. But I will say that I’ve been watching the work of these three for years, and they seem to have no boundaries to their range as performers. Zendaya started on the Disney Channel, and perhaps her work in the Spider Man movies has made for the most logical transition into Hollywood blockbusters, but Disney would faint at her work on HBO’s “Euphoria,” and here, in Challengers, she reads just as convincingly as a mom and a wife as she does as a teenaged tennis prodigy. I saw the then-unknown Mike Faist at Arena Stage in Washington when he was originating the role of Connor Murphy in Dear Evan Hansen before the show moved on to Broadway. More people got to know him when he played Riff in Steven Spielberg’s version of West Side Story, so, yes, the guy can sing and dance and play tennis and act. Josh O’Connor I first saw playing a lugubrious gay farmer in God’s Own Country, and I thought that he must be like his character: taciturn, introverted, morose. Then I saw him as the cheerful, exuberant Lawrence Durrell in all four seasons of The Durrells in Corfu on PBS and initially couldn’t recognize him. I have not watched The Crown, but I know O’Connor earned much praise for his portrayal of Prince Charles on the series. He’s also done plenty of stage work. The movie works because of flawless performances from astonishingly intelligent, talented actors and a beautifully constructed script. Don’t take my word for it. Go.

While Challengers offers us stars on the rise, The Fall Guy, which is entertaining in an entirely different way, relies on established talent to work its clever meta-narrative. Drew Pearce handed director David Leitch a funny, satisfying screenplay, and then Leitch, a former stuntman, cast Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, and Hannah Waddingham in the principal roles. All deliver perfect deadpan turns in a movie that both mocks and embraces the excesses of Hollywood and celebrates and elevates the usually anonymous stunt doubles who take all the risks and absorb all the pain for stars who get the credit. This is the kind of movie where Emily Blunt, playing a director, will talk on the telephone with Ryan Gosling, playing a stunt man, and will ask him what he thinks about split-screen effects. Then the movie will use a split screen to show the rest of the conversation. That moment for me was the only spot where the humor was predictable and sophomoric in an otherwise witty homage to and sendup of the Hollywood action movie. Stay for the final credits, where you get to see the actual stunt people working out of disguise and then, at the very end, a final coda to the movie itself. It’s funny, fun, and self-aware, and it makes for a fine evening out on a Sunday or any other day of the week.