SONG OF THE SOUTH and SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY

The first movie I ever remember seeing in a theater was Walt Disney’s Song of the South in 1956, ten years after its original release. In 1956 I would have been four years old, going on five, and I remember being amazed by the movie’s mixture of live action and animation. (And you thought Who Framed Roger Rabbit was ground-breaking!) Set on a plantation in Georgia during the post-Civil-War Reconstruction Era, the plot features Johnny, grandson of the owners of the plantation, who takes his problems to an elderly black man, Uncle Remus, whose sunny outlook and folk tales offer the boy solace in the form of life lessons based on African folk tales. These folk tales had already become popularized by Joel Chandler Harris’s stories of Uncle Remus, and the movie animates several of those most memorable narratives, including that of Br’er Rabbit and his begging not to be thrown into a briar patch after his primary predator, Br’er Fox, has caught him by placing a tar baby along the rabbit’s path. It was a story that I knew even before I saw the movie because my parents had read abridged versions of it to me for much of my brief-to-that-point life. There were also songs in the movie, but the only one I remember is the cheerful “Zip-a-dee Doo Dah.”

These are meandering, fond recollections, but I have to add that Song of the South is the second-most-racist movie I have ever seen after D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. (Griffith’s famous movie is full of appalling depictions, including white actors in blackface acting like near-animals, and it culminates with the Ku Klux Klan riding to the rescue of endangered Southern womanhood.) The Disney studios have locked up Song of the South in their vaults and have never released it on DVD or VCR because of the outcry over its contents. For examples, the animated crows in the story are voiced by actors with distinctly African-American accents, and in fact all the black characters speak in what we might call plantation dialect while the white characters speak in conventional American English. Do I need to point out that the “tar baby” trope is a highly offensive racial slur?  Uncle Remus might as well be Uncle Tom, a man whose entire existence apparently serves to entertain and comfort a little white boy with stories. And in “Zip-a-dee Doo Dah” he sings of how “everything is satisfactual” with no acknowledgment of his recent history of working in the fields as the enslaved property of white owners. Indeed, the whole movie supports the Lost Cause mythology of happy slaves who remained with their owners after emancipation because they had nowhere better to go. But in 1956, when Brown v. Board of Education was only two years old and Virginia had already launched its massive resistance campaign to avoid racially integrating schools, Song of the South was a popular movie, one that my mom gladly took me to see for what was then considered its sweet, family-friendly content.

By contrast, the most recent movie I’ve seen in a theater is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which features and celebrates a multiracial trio of gifted young actors: the white Tom Holland, the biracial Zendaya, and the Filipino/Hawaiian Jacob Batalon.  Having been charmed by all of the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, I was curious to find out what would happen after the last film ended with the entire world forgetting that Peter Parker ever existed. (Don’t ask how such a thing could happen if you haven’t seen the movie. The explanation, involving interdimensional portals, magic spells, and the incipient destruction of planet Earth would take too long and, anyway, is far too contrived.) This latest chapter turned out to be the perfect movie to mark my return to a theater in 16 months. Getting myself from home to theater seat by myself felt like an accomplishment worthy of Roald Amundsen, and yet, while I was celebrating my solo accomplishment, I had to concede that it wasn’t really solo; there were people who held doors open for me and employees who found me a good seat in the handicapped row. As if in confirmation, the film argued the benefits of being part of a social group. In it Peter Parker comes to understand how he can’t simply operate on his own, that he needs social connections, that he needs friends, and of course his story arc and my own have been almost identical. Pre-stroke I prized my independence, my ability to get on a train or a plane to go wherever I wished, to stay as long as I liked, to walk long distances, to cook for myself, to entertain when I felt like it, and, in short, to depend on nobody else. The stroke taught me how much I need others, how important it is to have family and friends in my life, and, strangely, to consider what a blessing it has been to find out how much people are willing to help me. SONG OF THE SOUTH is about assigning people to rigid, artificial social roles; the Spider-Man movies promote relationships that straddle social boundaries. I realize that it’s ridiculous for a near-75-year-old to expend so much analysis on a couple of Hollywood movies and, by implication, to compare himself to Spider-Man, but, as readers of this blog know, I’m often ridiculous.

By the way, the most recent movie I’ve seen on a streaming service is Mayday on Apple TV+, which I strongly recommend. Trust me: just tolerate the first 15 minutes, when it seems that you’re in for a couple of hours of Ryan Reynolds doing his been-there-done-that-Top-Gun schtick. Wait for Kenneth Branagh to show up. He’s clearly having a blast, and the fun is contagious. This is an action comedy that manages to find fresh ways to deliver both action and comedy.

The Long and the Short of It: MAN OVERBOARD! and JOHN OF JOHN

Don’t be misled by the jacket of Kathleen Rooney’s MAN OVERBOARD!, starting with that exclamation mark at the end of the title. The cover art shows a man floating on his back in an ocean rendered in cheerful green brush strokes. Above the title, which has a canted MAN tilting into a submerged OVERBOARD, floats a colorful life preserver from which unscrolls a message from Adriana Trigiani: “Destined to be the BEST BOOK OF THE SUMMER.” Everything you see implies a lighthearted misadventure, and the physical size of the book—under 200 pages, and surely under 50,000 words long—suggests a disposable beach read. Indeed, when we first meet the protagonist, Patrick “Kick” Kilpatrick, he has just fallen from a cruise ship into the Gulf of Mexico and is shedding his clothes to help himself stay afloat. He can’t remember how he ended up in the water because he was seriously drunk until this sudden immersion has somewhat sobered him up. We’re all set for hijinks and comedy. We are wrong. This slim novel becomes increasingly suspenseful and philosophical as Kick floats alone in the gulf waters on Thanksgiving Day and considers the life that threatens to be over.

One early clue that we’re about to read something meatier than a screwball comedy arrives almost immediately, with epigraphs from Moby Dick and Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. Then in a series of brief chapters, the first of which starts at a quarter to midnight on the night before Thanksgiving Day, we learn that Kick has always been afraid of the ocean but is a skilled, physically fit swimmer. Everything else takes place hour by hour on the holiday itself. With every chapter we learn more and more about Kick’s family, his relationships, and his problems. Reported in his initially sardonic voice, which gives way to something more somber, more serious, more poignant, Kick’s immersion takes a while to become no laughing matter. As he becomes more and more exhausted, he has a series of hallucinatory conversations with sea creatures, conversations that we readers understand to be interior psychodramas as Kick interrogates his choices and finally admits how he came to fall into the water in the first place.

How serious I am in praising this novel: When my caregiver interrupted my reading because it was time for a trip to my weekly physical therapy session, I told her that I couldn’t leave yet because I had five more pages to read and had to know what was going to happen. It’s been a long time since I’ve been unable to put a book down.

It’s also been a long time since I was sad to see a book end, but that was the case with Douglas Stuart’s JOHN OF JOHN, the antithesis of MAN OVERBOARD! in every way: a long, rich tale with a large cast of characters and a setting that, paradoxically, is more immersive than the ocean where Kick Kilpatrick treads water. Set on an island modeled on the Isle of Harris in the Scottish Hebrides, the novel features the Macleod family, starting with son Cal, who is gay but can’t come out to his conservative Presbyterian father. This father, John, also has a secret that he cannot share with his son. Cal’s grandmother, Ella, serves as catalyst, mediator, irritant, and comic relief for the two men, father and son, with whom she shares a house. Cal’s mother has moved out to take up living with her husband’s brother. Once we learn these bare facts, we think that we have these characters pegged, but we are mistaken. They are all dynamic, full of surprises that unfold at a brisk pace, and as we get more and more acquainted with them, the more invested we become in their fates.

Stuart doesn’t coddle his readers. We have to gather on our own what a croft is, what a blackhouse is, what a whitehouse is, how the weaving of tweed is governed by strict rules—as is the local church—and how the traditional Gaelic of the island can serve to exclude those who only speak English from following a conversation. But Stuart is a gifted enough artist to know just how much exposition to provide for us to avoid confusion. Almost instantly his language draws us into this remote world where at first we may feel like awkward tourists but soon become part of the community. Like Kathleen Rooney, Douglas Stuart writes a story that always threatens tragedy and delivers self-discovery and reconciliation, but by operating on such a larger scale than Rooney, Stuart supplies more substance, more breathtaking twists of plot (all of which are entirely believable) and a conclusion that leaves us touched and awed.

Irish Miniatures: Colm Tόibín and Claire Keegan

A friend recently sent me a copy of The News from Dublin, the latest short-story collection from the award-winning Irish writer Colm Tόibín, which I read with great interest. It inspired me to go back to another Irish writer’s collection of short stories which I’ve possessed for some time: Claire Keegan’s Antarctica. Tόibín and Keegan have more than their Irishness in common. They both deftly control the English language. They both, coincidentally enough, set some of their stories in Ireland (no surprise) and some in the United States (surprise, at least to me).  And they both like to deliver the subtle epiphany at the end. Of the two, Tόibín is the more prolific. He’s written plays, novels, poetry, and nonfiction in an oeuvre that expands over more than two dozen books, while Keegan is renowned and revered for a comparatively scant series of short stories and novellas, two of which I have written about before in this blog. Antarctica was Keegan’s first collection of stories, while Tόibín published The News from Dublin as the latest in his hefty body of work, so it may appear that I am unfairly contrasting the young Keegan with the well established Tόibín. But, having completed both sets of stories, I must say that Keegan edged out Tόibín to deliver more than one devastating conclusion. I found Tόibín to be perhaps a bit too subtle—I realize that I am publicly confessing to be a philistine here; surely this great writer doesn’t need my endorsement to enjoy a lifetime of earned success—when too often the end of his stories evoked at most a “huh.” Keegan didn’t always floor me, but more often than not I finished her tales with a gasp.

One of Tόibín’s stories that elicited more than a “huh” for me was “A Sum of Money,” about a boy who observes his father using a wire to open the family cash-box after his mother had lost the key. At his boarding school the boy applies the same lock-picking technique to steal from his fellow students. The story resonates with me of because of my background of working at a boarding school where theft on a dormitory is one of the most unsettling offenses in a community based on open doors and trust.  When the boy gets caught and sent home, his parents are “embarrassed,” and “don’t know what to say.” The heartbreaking final image is that of the boy returning to his room to change into dry clothes—his father has forced him to walk from the gate to their farmhouse in a downpour—and leaving the door open for his parents to come and speak to him. The final line is chilling: “He would close the door only when he was sure they had gone to bed.” The final story in the collection, “The Catalan Girls,” is the length of a novella and traces the lives of three sisters from childhood to old age. It’s an ambitious, cynical meditation on the delicate and vulnerable bonds among siblings, and it caps a collection of sad glimpses into characters searching for some kind of reassuring connection with others.

Claire Keegan also writes of siblings in her eponymous “Sisters,” but her story stretches over weeks, not years, and delivers a satisfying comeuppance with one snip of the scissors. Keegan can be pleasingly mordant, as in “Love in the Tall Grass,” in which a long-anticipated twosome becomes an unexpected and awkward threesome. She can be empathic, as in “Close to the Water’s Edge,” in which a closeted young Harvard student is tormented almost to the point of suicide by a cruel, boorish, wealthy stepfather, only to find the courage to reset and keep living. One of the most impressive (and comedic) of her tales is “Ride if You Dare,” which takes place in the American South and captures American idiom perfectly. The story sounds less like the work of an Irish woman and more like something by Larry Brown or Cormac McCarthy:

The waitress comes over and takes a pencil from behind her ear. “You folks ready?” She keeps her eyes on the cowboy hat as she takes their orders. It’s a great big hat with a Saints button pinned into the band. Raw oysters with dirty rice and another Bud for the cowboy. Boiled crawfish for the lady, and scotch, straight up.

“You ain’t driving?” he asks.

“No. I got here on a white mule.”

“The lady has a sense of humor. I like that.”

“Glad you approve.”

But of Keegan’s many gifts, the finest is her sense of an ending. To avoid spoiling her payoffs, I will offer only one example, from the title story, about a woman who comes to the city looking for a chance to have an affair with a complete stranger. She accomplishes her mission, but she ends up confined in a room, abandoned, naked, handcuffed, and gagged. Her captor has left open the window, through which a chilly breeze enters. Here are the last two sentences: “She thought of Antarctica, the snow and ice and the bodies of dead explorers. Then she thought of hell, and then of eternity.” A less confident writer might have gone on to clarify that the woman realizes that her life has changed permanently and that she’s never going to escape, but Keegan knows exactly when to shut up.

Who versus How: THE ENDING WRITES ITSELF and Game 4 of the NBA Finals

            It’s a wonderful coincidence that “who” and “how” are anagrams of each other because I have just come to appreciate their competition as the crucial elements of mystery and suspense. When I first started writing murder mysteries, I was convinced that the whodunit was the apex of the genre; that is, I thought that a writer who kept us guessing as to the identity of a killer was providing the most satisfying experience for a reader. After a lifetime of reading and writing such mysteries, I remain a fan of the whodunit, but my admiration is now more nuanced. I recently enjoyed reading THE ENDING WRITES ITSELF, a novel which, like the Knives Out movie series, both winks at and celebrates the whodunit tradition. The author, Evelyn Clarke, is the pen name of V.E. Schwab and Cat Clarke, two experienced pros who decided to collaborate for the first time in their careers. I’m guessing that they started by brainstorming the standard tropes of the golden age mystery and then tossed in as many as possible: a group of strangers in a large and isolated house on a remote island; each of the characters dying, one by one, mostly by the hand of an unidentified killer; at least one murder occurring in a locked room; homage to Anton Chekhov’s principle that if a gun appears onstage in Act 1, it must be fired by Act 3; lots of red herrings; hidden doors and secret passages; a mysterious stranger lurking around the scene of the crimes; you get the idea.

What makes this novel better than the ordinary is that it’s not only a murder mystery, but also a sendup of the publishing industry. We have an imperious literary agent, a shrewd editor, a dolt of an editorial assistant who stays employed via nepotism, and a collection of mid-list writers in different genres—mystery, thriller, sci-fi, horror, young adult, romance—competing for a high-stakes prize that could propel them to the bestseller list. There’s a lot of inside baseball for writers, but the material is not so arcane that readers would miss the jokes. I really enjoyed the book, with two caveats.

First, it has lots of one-sentence paragraphs.

I mean a lot of them.

Often fragmentary.

            I had to wonder about this stylistic choice until I realized that it would be happening from beginning to end and that I should read the novel as if it were a long work of free verse. Aside from her distracting paragraphing, “Evelyn Clarke” is a good writer who manages to stay ahead of the reader with her surprises and can be forgiven for Caveat #2:

Like most whodunits, the journey, as opposed to the final reveal, provides most of the fun. This book is clever and twisty enough to avoid a crash landing, but still, as one character puts it, the killer turns out to be the most obvious one of the batch. Kudos to “Clarke” for saying so just as we readers are likely to be thinking the same thing. So this entertaining book had the side effect of getting me to consider the inherent weakness of having everything in the payoff depend upon the “who” in the whodunit.

Bear with me now as I wrench the conversation to professional basketball.  I promise that what I’m about to say will apply to the topic of writing eventually. I was a huge New York Knicks fan in 1973, when they won the NBA championship. How could anybody not be a fan of a team that included Willis Reed, Earl Monroe, Bill Bradley, Dave DeBusschere, and (my favorite, the coolest of the cool) Walt “Clyde the Glide” Frazier? Like the mystery genre, the Knicks also enjoyed a golden age, and it peaked in 1973. I stopped paying attention to the team until this year, when the whole city united in cheering for their Knickerbockers, and after the team took a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series, I was among the hordes hoping that they would sweep their way to the championship. But when their opponents, the estimable San Antonio Spurs, won the third game decisively at Madison Square Garden, I felt the ill wind of a momentum shift. So when I sat down to watch Game 4 and saw the Knicks fall behind by 27 in the first half, I turned off the television. However, having seen enough miraculous comebacks in the NBA finals, I pushed the Record button before I retired for the night, and so I was quite pleased to hear in the morning that the Knicks had somehow won the game and that therefore I would be able to watch their second half comeback.

And that’s exactly what I did. But as I watched, I was mystified. The Knicks were down by 29 at one point in the third quarter, and after New York cut the San Antonio lead to 15 at the beginning of the fourth quarter, the Spurs surged back to go ahead by 20 points with less than ten minutes remaining in the game. By this point, knowing that the Knicks were destined to win by one point, I found myself in great suspense. The question of their victory was ordained, but the even greater question was “How?” How could they have possibly won this game? And that’s when I realized that how could be even more effective as a driver of suspense than who.

Consider The Silence of the Lambs. There we know who the bad guy is well before the tense conclusion, but the question is how will Clarice Starling possibly prevail over such a formidable foe, especially when he has the home-court advantage? Likewise, in the Harry Potter books and movies, we know that Voldemort is out to destroy Harry, and we wonder how J.K. Rowling will come up with a plausible way for her young hero to emerge victorious. For that matter, how is the crucial question in much great literature. How could Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy possibly get married after they have created so many obstacles for themselves? How could Raskolnikov, who has literally gotten away with murder, come to turn himself in for his crimes? How is Yossarian going to escape the Hobson’s choice between actual death and the dehumanizing system known as Catch-22? In most great literature we know who the villain is; I’m looking at you, Claudius, Iago, Roger Chillingworth, Regina Giddens, Miss Havisham. But we don’t know whether or how they will get their comeuppance. For my next project, I’d like to try my hand at a mystery novel that’s very much a mystery but is not a whodunit, a book that generates suspense using how over who.

As Evelyn Clarke might put it, I’m still figuring out how.     

American Grandeur: An opera version of KAVALIER AND CLAY and Season Two of THE PITT

Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is one of my favorite novels. I have taught it—and therefore read it—multiple times, and each time it provides a fresh pleasure. So when I heard that the Metropolitan Opera was mounting a version of it with music by Mason Bates and libretto by Gene Scheer, I was eager to see it but realized that travel to New York, much less the cost of a good ticket, would be prohibitive. I was therefore delighted to stumble onto a broadcast of the show on PBS as part of its Great Performances series. Aristotle asserted that the most important elements of drama were plot, character, and diction, but he also included spectacle and music as crucial parts of the package. As a great fan of the book, I was let down by the changes to the plot (no Golem! no Antarctica!), though I recognized that they were necessary if the work was to avoid being the length of Wagner’s entire Ring cycle. Still, I was bewildered by some changes to character (Joe Kavelier’s brother becomes a sister, and thus his son becomes a daughter for the sake of symmetry?). But full marks to Mason Bates for the music, which works in three different idioms (somber and traditional for Europe, jazzy for New York, and electronic for the world of the comic books). And a standing ovation to director Bartlett Sher and his team of designers for the astonishing sets and projections. After seeing this production, Aristotle might have bumped spectacle up to the top of his list.

A gigantic cast performs on a gigantic stage on a gigantic set that magically and seamlessly segues from interiors to exteriors, from nightclubs to battlefields, from the top of the Empire State Building to the pages of comic book adventures that the two creators are drawing and realizing. I have never seen such a grandly ambitious staging that works so well. But I was glad that I got to see it on TV for free rather than in the opera house for hundreds of dollars per seat. The shortcuts to the story kept the characters at a distance despite their glorious venue to occupy.

Also on television, and ironically closer to the actual length of Wagner’s full Ring Cycle, is the 15-episode, 15-hour second season of The Pitt. I have heard of people griping that Season 2 doesn’t reach the heights of Season 1, and to me that’s akin to quibbling that Hamlet doesn’t quite measure up to King Lear.  Here we have a different kind of grandeur: a television show that has committed whatever resources are necessary to pull off the visual equivalent of James Joyce’s Ulysses: one day in the lives of multiple characters, with tones running the all-inclusive gamut from comic to tragic. According to IMDB, there have been over 300 actors with speaking parts appearing over the two seasons.  That number does not include the supernumeraries, those extras who must sit in the waiting room or fill the gurneys and wheelchairs in the background.  Glimpsed in the course of the day, these people not only complete the world of the overcrowded, overwhelmed hospital, but also evince the investment that HBO has committed to making this series as brilliant as anything on television. And before all you Game of Thrones fans start clearing your throats, let me say that I saw and admired the original GOT, though not the later iterations. That’s a damn good show. But in the end it’s fantasy melodrama—good versus evil, with dragons. By contrast, The Pitt explores fully human characters, flawed but aspirational, who are in this emergency room not because they seek power or wealth, but because they want to resist the cruelties of a whimsical universe.

Aside from a few scenes outdoors, we are inside the confines of the emergency room throughout the day. I hope that my readers are aware that Episode 1 starts at 7:00 a.m., unfolds roughly in real time, and ends at 8:00 a.m., whereupon Episode 2 takes up the narrative until, hour by hour, fifteen episodes later we get to 10:00 p.m. and something resembling a respite for some, but not all, of the characters. Everyone in the cast is excellent. Special kudos to Noah Wyle, who carries the action, and to Sepidah Moafi, a newcomer in Season 2, who serves as a worthy foil to Wyle’s Doctor Robby. One of the quieter, more intimate moments occurs when Nurse Dana Evans, played to perfection by Katherine LaNasa, helps to collect the rape kit for a victim of sexual assault. The show takes its time with this process and allows the nurse, whom we see typically snarling at colleagues and the occasional patient, to demonstrate her empathy. This show is not afraid to close the doors for a while on the raucous waiting room and the chaotic emergency department to allow for a scene free of histrionics. That’s as courageous as any of the daring risks taken by the ER doctors and nurses throughout their daunting day, In its willingness to play the entire narrative scale between intimacy and tumult, this show is as grand as any opera, even if you watch it on your telephone.

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.