THE DISPLACEMENTS and THIRTEEN LIVES

This month I’m excited to recommend two brand new works of art that explore the ways human beings respond when cataclysmic weather events threaten to break them. One, Bruce Holsinger’s novel The Displacements, takes place perhaps an hour into the future. The other, Ron Howard’s movie Thirteen Lives, reflects on headlines from a couple of years ago. But whether we’re looking slightly ahead or slightly behind, we’re riveted by what we’re experiencing, and we can’t look away.

Ron Howard has been making very good movies for a very long time, and while he’s certainly respected in Hollywood as a competent crafter of popular entertainment and enjoys the cachet of winning the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture for A Beautiful Mind, I still sense that the film world is reluctant to rank him where he belongs, with the very best. I would argue that he deserves a promotion in public perception from Craftsman to Artist. We’ve all grown up with the guy we considered Little Ronnie as Opie Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show and Richie Cunningham on Happy Days, and we’re biased. How could a former child actor (don’t forget his turn as Winthrop Paroo in the movie version of The Music Man) who achieved adulthood without any scandals, traumas, dirty secrets, infidelities or enemies possibly qualify as a genius? He has no angst. He has no psychic pain to tap. He’s about to celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary with his high school sweetheart. Surely he’s too damn square to qualify as an artist. But he’s a hell of a lot more than a journeyman. Watch Thirteen Lives and then try to name a flaw in that movie.

It was only four years ago that twelve Thai soccer players and their coach were trapped by flash flooding in the Tham Luong Nang Non cave. All of us followed the story. All of us shared the astonishment when a team of divers rescued all thirteen after 18 days.  The story of that rescue, like the story of Apollo 13, which Ron Howard also told in a stirring movie, is one in which history has provided the ultimate spoiler: we know they get back safely. But knowing the outcome actually helps the effect. We’re watching the story unfold, and we can’t help wondering repeatedly How? How did they ever pull this off? Howard takes great big movie stars--to be exact, Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen--and manages to make them seem like regular blokes. (That’s a tribute to the actors’ talent as well.) He choreographs hundreds of extras for crowd scenes to give us a sense of the scale and the frenzy of the rescue operation. He elicits beautifully natural performances from the amateur Thai kids playing the soccer team. He employs subtitles to translate Thai dialogue to increase the sense that we’re watching a documentary. And he keeps the pacing just right by not rushing any sequences but not dawdling over days when the action repeats something we’ve already seen. He takes us back to the recent past and appalls us with how much we didn’t know about the impossible odds against this coup of human ingenuity.

Bruce Holsinger, by contrast, takes us into the near future. Holsinger is a professor of English at the University of Virginia who specializes in Medieval literature, the author of such works as Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer and The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory. He’s also a real-life literary Indiana Jones as a writer of popular novels, and his latest, The Displacements, suggests that he’s not only an expert in Medieval literature but also in federal government rescue operations, mortgage and banking regulations, the insurance industry, modern American culture, and meteorology. In this marvelous and terrifying novel Holsinger betrays his Medieval expertise only a couple of times, including a swift, brief reference to the tradition of the florilegium, a collection of extracts from other writings, and the novel itself, with its shifting points of view and occasional interruptions from a report filed long after the plot of the book is resolved, could perhaps be a wink at the florilegium tradition. But perhaps the most significant nod to earlier eras in storytelling comes from the name of his protagonist, Daphne, who undergoes a metamorphosis every bit as profound as the one experienced by her namesake in Ovid. I really loved this book. It’s so utterly anchored in our time, and its employment of climate as the catalyst to set the plot in motion feels so creepily at one with the daily news, that I felt none of the distance we tend to provide ourselves when we’re reading about the old wars between humanity and nature. (“To Build a Fire”? I’d never be stupid enough to go out in that weather. Jaws? Don’t go into the water. The Andromeda Strain? Wear a mask.) Holsinger gives us a cast of characters ranging from small children to grandparents and gives to each a rich, distinct inner life. He shows us that there’s such a thing as a character-driven page-turner. Lately I’ve been complaining that every time I settle down to read a book, I fall asleep within twenty minutes. Holsinger has reassured me that there’s nothing wrong with my attention span or my energy. He kept me up late and got me up early so that I could follow the plights of these endearing, exasperating characters.

THE MINUTES and FUN HOME

Those of us who love theater love it for reasons best articulated by Shakespeare in his description of Cleopatra: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.” Recently I sampled that infinite variety in two vastly different theatrical experiences, a pair of performances that pretty much span the extremes of staged entertainments. In New York at Studio 54, once a famous (notorious?) nightclub and now a Broadway theater, I saw Tracy Letts’s new play, The Minutes, in a sold-out house. A couple of weeks later at the Mill Mountain Theater in Roanoke, Virginia, I saw the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home performed in the small confines of a black box with fewer than half the seats occupied. Oddly enough, perhaps, I enjoyed the local musical more than I did the twisty satire in New York.

At this point allow me to distinguish between going to see a show and going to see a cast. The people flocking to The Music Man at the Winter Garden Theater in New York are going to see a cast. Well over ninety percent of them have seen The Music Man already. Many of them have no doubt participated in a production of The Music Man. But they’re going back to see Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster, Jayne Houdyshell and Jefferson Mayes, Shuler Hensley and all those young Broadway stars in the making. For these people the “show” elements are important, of course, and they’re rightfully expecting to enjoy great big Broadway production values, but the costumes and the size of the orchestra are secondary to them. They want to see the stars. They want to see this familiar script performed on the largest scale possible. By contrast, people who are still buying tickets to Hamilton are primarily interested in seeing the show. They don’t care who’s playing Hamilton or Burr on the night when they attend. They want to see the famous musical play called Hamilton, and while they’d be delighted if Leslie Odom and Lin-Manuel Miranda showed up for the performance, they aren’t expecting to see those who originated the roles.

When I went to see The Minutes, I was going to see the cast. And that was a poor reason to go in this season of lingering covid-19. Understudies have never been busier during this pandemic, and I should have known that the odds were long against my seeing the original set of eleven actors on my chosen Tuesday night. Still, I was dismayed when I opened my playbill and saw six of those little inserts they provide to let you know that an understudy would be appearing. Six out of eleven replacements! I did get to see excellent performances from Jessie Mueller and Noah Reid, but there was no Tracy Letts, no Blair Brown, and, perhaps worst of all, no Austin Pendleton, of whom I’ve been a fan ever since he played Moodus in the 1970 movie version of Catch-22. Did I enjoy the play? Absolutely. The realistic set missed no details in recreating the municipal chamber where the council of a small town would meet. The lighting and sound were flawless. And the script itself made me impressively uncomfortable. As Robert Scholes said of John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” the play starts in realism and ends in allegory, and it turns out to be a deftly devastating indictment of current American culture. Still, despite the fine acting chops of the understudies, I couldn’t help thinking that the originals would have been better. The unexpected cast changes hampered my willing suspension of disbelief.

Now let’s go to the other end of the theatrical universe for a minimalist chamber musical set in a series of locales, most of them evoked by a scant prop or two and some shifts in lighting. Lisa Kron took Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, teamed up with composer Jeanine Tesori, and turned a graphic novel into a graphic musical. At the outset we learn that the Bechdel family lives in a funeral home (the “fun home,” get it?), that both Alison and her father are gay, and that the father is going to die of suicide. It’s not a show for those who go to The Music Man guaranteed of a happy ending. But it’s a hell of a show, and the cast at Mill Mountain was brilliant in rendering it. Nobody in that cast was famous (yet?), but everybody superbly inhabited each role. Without the burden of expecting to see a specific actor in a particular part, I could enjoy the story, the music, the surprises, the delights, the chance to live an experience with endearing characters. There will always be star vehicles, and seeing stars is always going to be fun. But I hope I’ll have enough sense in the future to buy my tickets and take my odysseys for the play, not for the names of the actors in it.

Peter Swanson, Chris Pavone, Douglas Day, and William Faulkner

Summertime, according to Porgy and Bess, is when the livin’ is easy. But that claim sprang from a Manhattan-born White man whose experience with African-American culture in Charleston, South Carolina, was non-existent. As we so well know, the living was anything but easy for Black people living in the South during the summer or any other season. And how—dear reader, please forgive this abrupt, jarring, and utterly forced transition—did summer get associated with easy reading? I’m not the first person to note that summer is a great time to read something long and challenging and old. The next book I read is going to be Faulkner’s Flags in the Dust (aka Sartoris). But reading a good mystery or thriller is essentially like reading an action movie, and I’m happy to indulge during any season of the year. I’ve just finished a couple of good examples.

I first got to know the work of Peter Swanson when a friend gave me his Eight Perfect Murders, an entertainment that Swanson might have written with me in mind: bookstore-owning protagonist, a series of murders based on those found in eight famous Golden-Age mysteries, and deft, controlled writing. Thus when Swanson newest novel, Nine Lives, arrived to good reviews, I bought a copy. Here Swanson limits his Golden Age tribute to one novel, Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians, in which a group of houseguests gets picked off one at a time by a killer in their midst, but Swanson’s novel sprawls over a broad geographic area unlike Christie’s claustrophobic one-set experiment in whodunit misdirection. As is often the case with books of this genre, including Agatha Christie’s, the greatest fun comes in the beginning and the middle, when we readers learn the terms of the mystery at hand. We keep turning pages in order to learn the solution, of course, but the great revelation for me isn’t nearly as entertaining as the journey to reach it. But Swanson is clever enough to provide one satisfying surprise as denouement.

I had never read anything by Chris Pavone until I opened Two Nights in Lisbon, a thriller enthusiastically recommended by a friend in my chapter of the Mystery Writers of America. Here’s another successful entertainment, even if the title is forgivably misleading. (The bulk of the novel covers three days and two nights in Portugal, but the entire tale takes place over a much longer period.)  A woman wakes up in a hotel in Lisbon and sees that her husband is missing, and I really can’t say much more without spoiling the fun. My favorite parts of this novel were Pavone’s occasional digressive comments about the state of modern culture. He’s an excellent writer, as we would expect from an editor at Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, and he’s not afraid to drop a shrewd social observation into his pell-mell plot. His eye for detail is dazzling, and he’s able to skewer the privileged and the super-rich as skillfully as Tom Wolfe or, for that matter, Alexander Pope. This man knows the English language and controls it beautifully; so why and how could he and his editors repeatedly allow eyebrows to “raise” rather than rise? I don’t want to be the quibbling pedant here, but anybody who can write this well ought to know the difference between a transitive and an intransitive verb.

My copy of Flags in the Dust contains an introduction by its editor, Douglas Day, whom I used to see around the English Department at the University of Virginia when I was in graduate school in the mid-1970’s. Day was one of the legends, a Parnassian figure who had just won the National Book Award for his biography of Malcolm Lowry, a handsome, manly man who walked with a limp because of an automobile accident, and a person I regarded with awe from afar. My God, I would think, what an enviable life that man lives. He was Hemingwayesque in his manner and appearance, and it turned out that the parallels were terribly consistent in his multiple marriages and suicide. But I didn’t suspect any of those traumas were in the works when I saw him on the grounds of the university. And now I have begun reading his edition of Faulkner’s third novel, the first to be set in Yoknapatawpha County, the first in which Faulkner found his milieu and his voice.  So far it’s knotty, disorienting, and, by today’s standards, unbelievably racist. But before you write Faulkner off as another Southern bigot, read Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War. Faulkner lived among people who perpetuated the Lost Cause myth, but he could never bring himself buy into it. Absalom, Absalom appeared in 1936, the same year as Gone with the Wind. Margaret Mitchell sold millions of more books than Faulkner did, but today it’s the Faulkner novel that most wrenchingly presents the toxic culture of racism in the American South. Faulkner would not pretend that the living was ever easy for Black people in his part of the world.

HISTORICAL Fiction and Historical FICTION

Many years ago I was lucky to meet the late Nigel Tranter, a beloved and prolific Scottish author whose work remains known to relatively few readers in the United States. That’s a pity, because the man knew how to hook a reader and keep that reader turning the pages. It was Nigel who made me aware of the two types of historical fiction. His type was to write about actual historical figures and actual historical events. He invented dialogue and incidental details of daily life, but the casts of his books really lived, even if not with the precise thoughts and words that Nigel attributed to them. We might call Nigel’s form historical fiction, with the emphasis on the adjective; his characters and plots were true to history.  The second type was of the sort practiced by his friend Dorothy Dunnett, who created fictional protagonists and dropped them into selected historical eras. Let’s call her type historical fiction, with the emphasis on the noun. She imagined characters and used literary photoshopping to place them into actual events. I’m not planning to engage in a debate over which type is better artistically or more difficult to pull off successfully. I’m simply amazed that so many people manage to deliver so many superb novels set in eras before they were born. I don’t know how they do it.

Take, for example, Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink, which I mentioned in last month’s posting but never discussed. Kadish presents two interlocking tales. The first is of Ester Velasquez, a Portuguese Jew who arrives in London in the mid-17th Century and, through unusual circumstances, becomes a scribe for a blind rabbi. Ester is literate, curious, and ferociously intelligent, and she uses the rabbi’s generosity and blindness to advance her education and literary output. The second plot involves Helen Watt, an aging English scholar also of ferocious intelligence, and Aaron Levy, a cocky young American graduate student who initially dislikes but comes to love Helen as his partner in researching the manuscripts left behind by Ester. Theater fans may sense a parallel with Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, which for my money is the finest play written in English in the 20th Century—okay, okay, we can argue about that—wherein modern-day scholars try to solve the mystery of events at a stately English home two centuries earlier. We in the audience get to see the actual events in the past, and then we watch the modern-day characters misinterpret the documents left behind. Stoppard’s play is the only one I know that is simultaneously a comedy and a tragedy, the only one daring enough to examine the poetry of Lord Byron next to a discussion of fractal geometry and chaos theory, the only one to invite a debate over the claims of classicism and romanticism. Kadish’s novel, while not as antic or comic as Stoppard’s play in skewering academic politics, nevertheless also successfully and deftly marries intellectual intensity to emotional punch. This book allowed me to eavesdrop on conversations among people much smarter than I, and it turned out to be an enriching experience, one simultaneously intellectual and emotional.

Likewise I also experienced that enlargement of perspective in a very different historical novel, James Kestrel’s Five Decembers, which I chose to read because it recently won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Novel of 2021. The jacket of this novel evokes tawdry pulp paperbacks from the 1940’s: a naked woman sitting on a bed covers herself with a sheet while a naked man holding a gun looks out the window at a sky full of warplanes. Yikes! Not my kind of thing! Except that the novel inside the jacket grabbed me by my lapels and refused to let go until I eagerly consumed every word. Kestrel’s historical novel, like Kadish’s, is of the Dorothy Dunnett type, with fictional characters dropped among actual historical events. His protagonist, Joe McGrady, is a young detective in Hawaii asked to investigate a homicide in the late fall of 1941, just a few days before December 7. Here Kestrel employs a favorite device of the historical novelist: creating tension by starting a story on the eve of a cataclysmic event unforeseen by the characters but already known to the reader. (Robert Harris uses this trick to great effect in his fine novel Pompeii, which opens two days before the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.) McGrady in many ways checks all the boxes for the hardboiled detective in 1940’s noir. He’s tough, smart, flawed, principled, and dogged. Kestrel writes with the terseness of Hemingway or James M. Cain, but this novel is no pastiche. In Kestrel’s talented hands we readers time-travel to World War II, to Hawaii and to Asia, to a murder mystery and a romance, to a series of violent episodes and interludes of reflection and heartbreak. Mr. Kestrel—whose name is a nom de plume—deserves his award. And I say that as one who also admired one of the other nominees for the prize, S. A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears, which I discussed in an earlier posting. (In a different context, I also talk about Five Decembers on the “Something is Going to Happen” blog managed by Janet Hutchings.)

I am no poet, and so I admire the work of poets with awe. I am no historian, nor am I a patient researcher, and so I also admire the work of historical novelists with gratitude for their willingness to spend the time and the energy to bring us the past with such intense emotional pleasure. Am I going to try it myself one day? I’m urging myself to say yes.

Karen Abbott (Abbott Kahler) and Oliver Roeder

This month’s posting is going to be brief. I’ve spent the bulk of the month writing a story for a contest and reading Rachel Kadish’s astonishing novel The Weight of Ink, and I’m not going to discuss either one today. Instead I’m going to focus on a couple of highly entertaining and quite educational works of nonfiction.

The first is The Ghosts of Eden Park, a work of popular history by Karen Abbott, a scrupulous researcher and a teller of tales skillful enough to rival Erik Larsen. I’m calling the author Karen Abbott because that’s the name on her book, but if you Google her, you will learn that she recently changed her name to Abbott Kahler for reasons she explains quite clearly on her website. Ghosts of Eden Park resurrects the once-infamous, now forgotten George Remus, known in his day as the King of the Bootleggers, and clearly a model for Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby. (Abbott uses lines from The Great Gatsby as section titles in her book.) In telling this sordid tale and documenting all of it with over 70 pages of notes, Abbott reintroduces the modern reader to Prohibition and its concomitant corruption. George Remus, the central figure around whom so many other zanies orbit, could have been a character out of a noir by James M. Cain: the crafty crook who believes he’s invincible until he’s undone by a femme fatale. In this case, the femme was his wife.  

The second title I want to mention is Oliver Roeder’s Seven Games, which the jacket describes as “a group biography of seven enduring and beloved games,” and which delivers delightfully on that promise. Roeder gives us the history, the rules, the reigning human champions, and the computer programmers who attempt to “solve” each of these games, in this order: Checkers, Chess, Go, Backgammon, Poker, Scrabble, and Bridge. Whether you have played these games or not—and I would suspect that most Americans have played Checkers and that few Americans have played Go—you will learn a lot and will enjoy Roeder’s lively reporting. Despite the claim on the jacket that the book is a biography of games, Roeder himself calls it “A Human History,” and while it’s unlikely that this work will end up as the central text in an anthropology class, Roeder finds plenty of highly skilled experts whose love for and obsession with each game gives each chapter its pulse.  

Happy reading.

1972 and 2022

My mother no longer drives, but she still uses her driver’s license as a form of identification. Yesterday the freshly renewed license came in the mail, and I must say that such a potentially banal event produced a lot of awe. The new license is good until July 28, 2024—my mom’s 100th birthday. She seemed genuinely surprised to consider that she was only a couple of years away from that anniversary, and I understood her surprise. The strange quality of aging—of the passage of time in general—is that the numbers don’t match up to the lived experience. Has it been only two years since covid closed down our country? It seems like much longer. Has it been 50 years since I was living in that college fraternity house? It seems so much shorter. As everyone knows, time is accordion-like in its ability to expand and contract. But when I consider that I’ve been an adult for half a century, my memories of fifty years ago seem as strange and foreign as the events of a historical novel.

No one knew it at the time, but 1972 was the last full year of the 1960’s, which began in 1963 with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I know, I know. If you look at the calendar, the Sixties stretch from 1960 to 1969. But when we talk about the Sixties, we think of war protests, long hair, bra- or draftcard-burning, race riots, Vietnam, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Woodstock, and the awful deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Before JFK died, we had beatniks, but not hippies; we had Beach Boys singing about a teen rebel who drove to the hamburger stand instead of the library, not the Doors churning up the haunting request to light their fire; we danced to (or mocked) the Twist, not the Jerk. After the Kennedy assassination, the country experienced a decade of turmoil and internal division, very much like the era in which we live now, and the decade didn’t end until 1973, when an OPEC oil embargo triggered inflation and lines at the gasoline pumps, when the Nixon administration signed a peace treaty with North Vietnam (a treaty that both sides ignored, but that still indicated a winding down of the war), when the draft ended, and when the country reached an uneasy internal peace as it reckoned with the shock of learning that petroleum-exporting countries could significantly change our way of life.

Those twelve months of 1972 straddled my sophomore and junior years of college. In 1972 we would drive down the road from Lexington to Hollins or Mary Baldwin or Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (now Randolph College) or Sweet Briar—round trips of between 75 and 110 miles—and the three passengers in the car would give the driver a quarter each to cover the cost of the gasoline. In 1972 George Orwell’s 1984 was still about an imagined future, as was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Those of us who lived as young adults in 1972 recall that windows in cars literally had to be rolled up, that telephone receivers were literally hung up to end a call, that typing occurred on manual typewriters, that carbon copies were literally made with carbon paper, that movies were literally on film, and that computers were gigantic machines the size of refrigerators that required hundreds of perforated cards or massive rolls of tape to operate. In 1972 we used flash bulbs for photographs and record players that allowed us to stack several albums on top of one another and pay phones that required dialing 0 for an operator before we could make a long-distance call. In 1972 we had four television networks, though no one paid much attention to the brand-new PBS, and in order to watch a show, we had to be in front of the set at a specific time on a specific day. In 1972 I voted in my first Presidential election, and I’m still embarrassed that my very first vote went to Richard Nixon (though, to be fair, I was not alone). In 1972 the year 2022 was inconceivable to me, and fifty years sounded like an impossibly long time. Now fifty years seems so short. Could so much change really occur in only half a century?

I’m astonished at how lucky I’ve been to live through this brief segment of human history, to witness Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon, to overlap lifespans with the likes of William Faulkner, Arthur Miller, Flannery O’Connor, T.S. Eliot, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, Lorraine Hansberry, and Eleanor Roosevelt. But then I think about my mother, approaching her centennial, who saw the discovery of penicillin and the polio vaccine, the Great Depression, the dropping of the atomic bomb, the arrival of television. Is it any wonder that she has trouble keeping her chronology straight from day to day? She has so much to remember. William Faulkner, in “A Rose for Emily,” writes of the elderly as those “to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches.” Mom is moving into that meadow now, where the living and the dead mingle and converse, and watching her, I recall her 1972 iteration, the savvy, visionary, self-reliant woman who was gifted in architecture, accounting, and raising a family, among her many skills. As I muse about centuries and half-centuries, I realize that there’s no such thing as a long life. It’s just that some lives are shorter than others.  

THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO (unabridged novel and 2002 movie)

            My old friend Johnny Anderson, a man of excellent taste, reported recently that he’d just finished reading for his book club the unabridged text of Alexander Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo. I was impressed by both his accomplishment and the ambition of his book club, and I decided that a long 19th Century classic was just what I needed to pass the winter. When I used to teach in boarding school, the trick to getting happily through the cold months for both students and teachers was to become as busy as possible. I would take on the directing of plays or musicals in addition to my regular winter classes, and thereafter the span between Thanksgiving and spring break would zip along. Now, after some weeks of pleasantly sinking into 1243 pages of Robin Buss’s eloquent translation for Penguin Classics, I have reluctantly emerged, grateful for the reading tip from my friend Johnny, and indebted forever to Alexander Dumas, whose work I had underestimated and dismissed as children’s fare. As Humphrey Bogart said in a different context, I was misinformed.

            In a scholarly but accessible introduction to the edition I was reading, Robin Buss addresses immediately the mistaken assumption that Dumas is for kids. As Buss so deftly notes, “there are not many children’s books, even in our own time, that involve a female serial poisoner, two cases of infanticide, a stabbing and three suicides, an extended scene of torture and execution, drug-induced sexual fantasies, illegitimacy, transvestism and lesbianism, a display of the author’s classical learning and his knowledge of modern European history, the customs and diet of the Italians, [and] the effects of hashish.” I could add that Dumas manages to sustain a narrative that comprises several distinct genres, including swashbuckling romance, satirical social commentary, slapstick comedy, gothic melodrama, murder mystery, Arabian-nights fantasy, religious conversion, more than one tragic love story, coming-of-age, and psychological realism. 

Furthermore, I registered how frequently other writers have plundered Dumas’s novel for devices that are now commonplace, how Edmond Dantès blazes the path for so many imitators. He escapes from the Chateau D’If by posing as the corpse of another prisoner. Think of Hannibal Lector’s ruse of replacing himself with the body of a dead policeman to escape confinement, or of Michael Chabon’s Joe Kavalier riding out of Nazi territory inside a coffin.  Dantès, with his immense wealth, mastery of disguise, and ability to defeat any foe with any weapon, surely supplies the template for Bruce Wayne as Batman and all those other superheroes whose secret identities conceal their unlimited reach. Dumas was not the first to depend on revenge as a driver of the plot—his occasional allusions to Hamlet acknowledge as much—but the revenge comes with misgivings, regrets, changes of heart, and accrued wisdom, just as it does in so many modern tales of injustice rectified, from The Sting to the real-life stories of Nelson Mandela and Louis Zamperini, two men who lived a version of Dantès’s prison nightmare, rejected revenge altogether, and moved directly into forgiveness.

It’s easy to understand why so many of us might have thought of this novel as a mere entertainment.  A story this grand would naturally appeal to adaptors for stage and screen, and yet, ironically, all adaptations must omit so much of what makes the novel so rich. According to Wikipedia, so far the world has seen thirteen film adaptations either for movie theaters or television. After I finished the book and gave myself a couple of days for it to settle in my memory, I rented the 2002 screen version written by Jay Wolpert, who in a sad coincidence died just over a month ago, in January of 2022. As demanded by Hollywood, Wolpert gives us a happier ending than Dumas does, but he, too, manages to include a chance for Dantès to grow out of his furious quest for vengeance and to replace rage with love.  I’ll avoid spoilers, but I will salute Wolpert for coming up with an ingenious explanation for why Mercedes is so quick to marry Fernand and for making the inevitable Hollywood ending true to the spirit, if not to the letter, of the novel.

I understand now why James Joyce includes a moment when Stephen Dedalus fancies himself an avatar of Edmond Dantès in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and why James O’Neill, father of the playwright Eugene, spent much of his career playing the Count onstage and even in a silent movie: this character appeals to both the romantic excess of youth and the rueful self-reflection of middle age. Despite a lengthy interlude when he stops being a character and becomes a superhuman incarnation of vengeance, Dantès is, in the end, a sympathetically dynamic figure, and by the end of his story, when he realizes that his urge for revenge was petty and insufficient, he accepts an ending that is not so much happy as it is right and true. He settles for the best he can do, and the mixture of sadness and satisfaction we feel at that conclusion surely traces its source to our own grudging understanding that life does not follow the script we write for ourselves in childhood.

WHISPER HOUSE and THE MUSIC MAN

Recently I attended previews for two musicals in New York, enjoyed both, and appreciated the chance to see two such vastly different productions. One was an intimate chamber piece from Duncan Sheik and Kyle Jarrow, Whisper House, performed by the Civilians at the 59E59 Theaters off-Broadway. The other was the huge, splashy revival of The Music Man, quite literally on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theater.  Interestingly enough, the revival of the old standard seemed fresher than the brand spanking new chamber musical.

Whisper House felt like a revival of an older play from the late 1940’s or 50’s. During World War II a boy must live with his prickly, unmarried aunt at a remote lighthouse in Maine after his father dies in combat and his mother requires hospitalization. The aunt employs a Japanese man as her helper, and the local sheriff is determined to comply with recent laws requiring the internment of Japanese citizens. The “whispering” of the title comes from a couple of malevolent ghosts, whose fate, we learn, is related to the lives of the aunt and the boy’s late father. It’s a melodrama with flawless performances from the cast, an effectively evocative set, and—for me, anyway—a satisfying experience of returning to live theater. But as I said to one of my companions, the material was awfully familiar, and the lyrics sounded very much pre-Sondheim: predictable, plodding, and too frequently banal.

Down the street The Music Man also offered some notable lyrics, particularly those that have been tweaked from the originals. Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman wrote new words for “Shipoopi,” and insiders claim that Sutton Foster’s improved “My White Knight” comes out of interpolations originally added by Barbara Cook. Whatever the source, the new “My White Knight” pushes the show along nicely when in the past it brought the action to a dull pause. Hugh Jackman headlines as Harold Hill, and he really is the greatest showman, rarely offstage and always at high energy. But Sutton Foster unsurprisingly proves to be Jackman’s equal as Marian, and the dazzling supporting cast—Jane Houdyshell, Jefferson Mays, Shuler Hensley, and legions of talented singers and dancers—provides continuous delight. The boy playing Winthrop, Benjamin Pajak, is a star on the rise. (Keep this kid healthy, folks. He could be the next Tom Holland.) I attended with the four women who played the “Pick a Little” ladies in the Woodberry Forest School production of the show in 2020, and we were surrounded by others who had some connection with The Music Man. Jerry Zaks, the 75-year-old director, did more than simply dust off a museum piece for the tourist crowd. This production reconsiders every syllable, every note, every dance break, and makes all of them new.

In the end what struck me about both productions was the sustained generosity of everyone involved. With the temperature officially at 18 degrees but with wind chills driving it down to zero, a devoted staff member stood outside the 59E59 Theater to check our vaccination status and our i.d.’s. Ushers gave N95 masks to audience members on the front row. We had the same scrupulous screening before we could enter the Winter Garden. Everyone in both audiences wore masks throughout the shows. And the casts worked their hardest to reward our attendance. Despite having just come off covid infections, both Sutton Foster and Hugh Jackman delivered unrestrained star turns at our matinee and then came back that evening to do the same for another audience.  And what did the audience give back? Lively entrance applause, audible signals of delight throughout the action, and roars of approval during a long standing ovation. For too few delirious moments there, I was part of a group that was unanimously, unabashedly happy.  

Stephen Sondheim and Antony Sher

The week between November 26 and December 2, 2021, was catastrophic for the theater community. Stephen Sondheim died just after Thanksgiving, and Antony Sher followed six days later. In many ways these two figures stood at opposite boundaries of the theatrical universe. Sondheim dominated musicals as an innovator and stunning lyricist; Sher was a classical actor renowned for his Shakespearean roles and his occasional appearances in the movies and on television. They both performed at the peak of their profession. They both left hordes of admirers to recall their work. I am one of those admirers.

At first I didn’t get Sondheim. I was one of those people who complained that his tunes weren’t hummable. (Sondheim responded to those of us with tin ears in a song called “Opening Doors” in Merrily We Roll Along.) In those early days I thought he should have stuck to writing lyrics and left the music to the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Jule Styne, his collaborators on West Side Story and Gypsy, respectively, and I considered his A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum to be his best work. Then I started to develop some taste. One day in 1978 my friends Bud and Kathy and I went to what was then the Uris Theater to see Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury perform Sweeney Todd, and I emerged from the theater gobsmacked. The man had written a musical thriller, a piece that was both horrifying and shamefully funny. If he had given us nothing but “A Little Priest,” Sondheim would deserve canonization on Broadway, but of course he bequeathed us much, much more.

I got to the Kennedy Center in 2001 for three of the six shows in the Sondheim Celebration, and it was there, during Company, that I first witnessed what it meant to stop the show. At the end of one number—I can’t recall which—the audience clapped and cheered and wouldn’t cease; the applause just went on and on, and the show perforce had to stop until the house quieted. It was there that I first saw A Little Night Music and its intricate, dazzling series of tours de force, including “Now/Later/Soon,” three intertwining songs sung by three actors simultaneously, and “A Weekend in the Country,” which kept building from solo to duet to trio to quartet to quintet to chorus. Not everything he tried was commercially successful. I got to watch a few rehearsals for Road Show at the Public Theater in 2008, and I was put off by both the pretentiousness of the director and the thinness of the material. But I admired Sondheim for continuing to tinker with material that didn’t work, for always pushing himself, for never resting on those extensive laurels. Fifty years after Richard Wilbur published “The Death of a Toad,” the poet mused on whether he should change the word “steered” to “veered.” One single word, half a century later, was still on the writer’s mind. That was how Sondheim lived as well, forever looking forward, but never forgetting the blemishes that he wanted to correct.

Antony Sher was also a creator. He wrote journals, memoirs, and novels, and he brought the world’s most famous fictional personalities—I’m talking about the characters in Shakespeare’s plays—into startlingly fresh form on the stage.  He was not a conventionally handsome actor; it would be hard to imagine him as Lieutenant Cable in South Pacific. But he was a ferociously intelligent one, and he gave every ounce of energy to every role he created. I saw him first in July of 1982 in Stratford, England, on one of the greatest days I’ve ever spent in a theater. That afternoon I watched Sinead Cusack and Derek Jacobi as Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, a pleasant, conventional rendering of the play that turned out to be a nice warmup act for the headliner that evening: King Lear directed by Adrian Noble with Michael Gambon in the title role and Antony Sher as the Fool. It was an all-star cast in a jaw-dropping production: Jenny Agutter as a beautiful, sadistic Regan; Malcolm Storry as a tall, stoic Kent; Jonathan Hyde as a patrician Edgar; David Bradley as Albany. But Sher stole the show as a manic, raw-egg-eating music-hall clown who ended up dying onstage when a mad Lear accidentally stabbed him. Later, in 1985, I took my parents and sister to see Sher play Richard III at the Barbican in London. That was the role that made him a star, a spidery Richard on crutches with a grotesque prosthetic hump on his back that, at one point, was bare to the audience. Sher wrote his first book about the experience, Year of the King, which he followed with Year of the Fat Knight (about playing Falstaff) and Year of the Mad King, describing his return to Lear to play the king himself. He died too young at age 72, as did Sondheim at 91, But, damn, they left behind a huge pair of comet tails blazing across the boards.

Anthony Doerr, Amor Towles, Hillary Clinton, and Louise Penny

On Halloween of 2021, which happened to fall on a Sunday, the Washington Post published its weekly list of hardback bestsellers, and to my amusement, the first three fiction titles were The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles, Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, and State of Terror by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny. Why was I amused? Because those are the three books that I just finished reading consecutively, and because my reading list rarely consists of current bestsellers.

Since I’m so uncharacteristically au courant, I feel not merely nudged but called to comment on these three quite different and successful novels. All three are long. (Okay, the Clinton-Penny novel is maybe a bit too long, but not fatally so.) All three are ambitious. All three are page-turners. All three have benefited from strong reviews and the reputations of their authors. All three present appealing characters and substantial themes. All three could generate a classic elevator pitch:

Towles, Two brothers set out on the most entertainingly episodic journey since Huck and Jim found that raft.

Doerr: An ancient manuscript inspires a series of interlocking heroic actions over several centuries.

Clinton and Penny: A feisty American Secretary of State confronts a series of threats at once personal, national, and global.

But all three supersede the confines of the elevator pitch triumphantly.

Before I go any farther, let me clarify that the Towles and Doerr books are literary novels that could reasonably earn nominations for Pulitzers, National Book Awards, and Booker Prizes. The Clinton and Penny collaboration is, to borrow from Maureen Corrigan, who in turn borrowed from Graham Greene, an entertainment. Towles and Doerr craft elegant sentences and conjure vivid scenes; Clinton and Penny rely frequently on the sentence fragment and the one-sentence paragraph to sketch enough of a setting to get us grounded in time and space. There’s an art to what all four writers are doing, but I can’t call State of Terror a work of art. Still, it’s a commendably distracting yarn. Clinton’s expertise with affairs of state and her personal experience with government at the highest levels marries smoothly with Penny’s skill in setting multiple plots in motion and keeping them all clear for a reader. The result is a book that feels at once like a good season of “24” on television and an inside look at how intelligent government officials would respond to one crisis after another. Moreover, as an English teacher, I had to admire the variety and wit of the rhetorical devices used as a private code between Ellen Adams, the protagonist, and Betsy Jameson, her best friends and confidante.  One of them types a text message—An oxymoron walks into a bar—and the other confirms her identity with an appropriate reply: and the silence was deafening. At nearly 500 pages State of Terror will probably not conjure memories of Samuel Johnson on the topic of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, but Johnson’s famous assessment of Milton’s epic—“none ever wished it longer”—fits. Still, you get your money’s worth.

Anthony Doerr and Amor Towles both faced the challenges of high expectations after each delivered hugely popular and acclaimed novels with All the Light You Cannot See and A Gentleman in Moscow. Both writers have met the challenge magnificently. Doerr, in Cloud Cuckoo Land, risks charges of being a show-off when he so deftly manages multiple genres, many points of view, and a distinctive set of narrative voices in this stunning tour de force. We get historical fiction, modern-day social commentary, and sci-fi in a work that recalls David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas but stands very much on its own. Despite my willingness to do the elevator pitches earlier in this posting, I detest the very idea of reducing a huge, ambitious novel to one theme or sound bite. (It’s so glib and easy to summarize Hamlet as a play about a man who can’t make up his mind. If that were all that Hamlet offered, then Shakespeare could have rendered it as a quatrain in one of his sonnets.) But one of Doerr’s most striking themes is that of the resilience of literature and story. As many critics have noted, much of the novel takes place in a library, a repository of books, and Doerr’s novel itself serves as a repository of multiple stories. Bravo, Mr. Doerr, you dazzler.

I’m equally enthusiastic about Towles’s The Lincoln Highway. His protagonist, Emmett Watson, is your basically good guy, a 17-year-old recently released from a work camp to which he’d been sentenced for a crime. Emmett’s sidekick, his eight-year-old brother Billy, is almost unbelievably cute, endearing, and intelligent. (Lots of reviewers have called him precocious. That’s accurate enough, but he’s extraordinarily self-possessed, affectionate, and principled.)  You have to love both of these kids. But the character who threatens to run away with the novel is Emmett’s friend Duchess, the son of a ne’er-do-well actor and an escapee from the work camp where Emmett was incarcerated. Duchess is dangerous but is also acutely aware of living in a moral universe. He’s a teenage version of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit before the Misfit has chosen a life of nihilism. Much of this novel considers the settling of debts and obligations, and Duchess is a primary catalyst in such transactions. If Emmett is Oliver Twist—parentless, good-hearted, and kind—then Duchess is the Artful Dodger, who is not at all a good boy but who is a hell of a lot of fun on the page.

When I say that Billy is almost unbelievable, I’m getting at one of the most striking characteristics of this novel. At times Towles tiptoes right up to the border of the surreal or the fabulous, but he never quite crosses the line. Even in 1954, when the novel is set and when automobile traffic would be greatly reduced from the way it is today, surely driving from Nebraska to New York City would be more difficult than it seems in Towles’s telling. Indeed, driving from the outer suburbs into the heart of the city comes off as no more difficult than riding a bike from Opie’s house to Sheriff Taylor’s office in Mayberry. I might quibble, too, that tracking down an alcoholic should be a bit harder than it is for these kids. But I’m not complaining. Towles is inviting us to join these characters in their own odyssey, or perhaps I should say Odyssey, in a novel where tales of derring-do and heroism and fantastic events, including a pared-down version of the travels of Odysseus himself, speak to and affect the lives of a large cast of well-drawn characters. Perhaps the most impressive feat of all for Mr. Towles is that this novel is the antithesis of his last work. A Gentleman in Moscow unfolds within the claustrophobic world of a luxury hotel in Russia. The Lincoln Highway races into motion by car, train, and foot, and it roars to the ideal conclusion, one simultaneously surprising and inevitable.  

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S.A. Cosby and James Fenimore Cooper

S.A. “Shawn” Cosby has joined John Grisham, David Baldacci, and Patricia Cornwell as nationally famous crime writers who live in Virginia, but Cosby’s writing is all his own. Alerted to his presence with the publication of Blacktop Wasteland, which I have not yet read, I bought his follow-up novel Razorblade Tears just to see what all the fuss was about. It didn’t take long for me to confirm that Cosby’s acclaim is no fluke. Cosby manages to create endearing, distinct, and quite dynamic characters who frequently experience (and inflict) extreme violence, but the bedrock of the story is social justice and fair play. His are not simply sensational thrillers, but also skillful ruminations on the current state of our world. And he manages to leaven it all with wit, clever repartee, and steady laughs. I’m impressed.

The protagonist of Razorblade Tears is a Black man named Ike Randolph. Ike has done time and was known in his criminal life as Riot, a nickname reflecting his volatile temper and physical intimidation. Nowadays he’s a married man who runs a legitimate landscaping service, but when the novel opens, he is grieving over the loss of his son, a gay man killed in an atrocious hate crime.  Enter Buddy Lee Jenkins, another grieving dad whose gay son was married to Ike’s son and who died in the same hate crime.  Buddy Lee, whose ready quips and open-mindedness complicate his potentially stereotypical incarnation as an alcoholic roughneck, teams up with Ike to find whoever killed their sons, and from that moment on, the action never relents. I expected the violence. I did not expect the complexities, humor, and depth of these two appealing characters. Despite their many flaws, you have to love these guys; they are on the right side of justice, even if it’s the vigilante sort.

In Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins the clever Mr. Cosby has tapped into one of the oldest and most successful tropes in storytelling: the complementary companions whose combined skills make them an unstoppable team. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza provide an early example from Spanish literature; Holmes and Watson serve the same function slightly more recently.  But as Leslie Fiedler, Arnold Rampersad, and other critics have noted, this pairing motif works especially well in American literature, where so often these partners are of two different races: Huck Finn and Jim, Han Solo and Chewbacca, Danny Glover and Mel Gibson (in the Lethal Weapon movies), the Lone Ranger and Tonto, Robert Culp and Bill Cosby (in 1960’s-era television show called “I Spy”), Ishmael and Queequeg, to name a few.  

But if you want to visit the single novel where American literature begins, go to James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. I know. It’s easy to mock Cooper—Mark Twain reveled in doing so—for his turgid prose and his romantic excesses (for me the low point of the novel occurs when Hawkeye disguises himself as a bear in order to rescue a captive). Cooper, however, was a genius, a man of vision, and when he sets his novel (published 1826) in 1757, he chooses a time when all the assets and all the problems of the yet-to-be-established republic are coming into relief. In this novel Cooper addresses racism, misogyny, and the advent of multiculturalism. The woods of upstate New York, where the action of the novel unfolds, are as dense and as scary as any forest primeval in fairy tales, an untamed natural wilderness where anything is possible. Cooper wrestles with the inevitability of European intrusion into this pristine continent, knows that the native people will die in order for the new country to come into being, and encapsulates the tragedy of native genocide in the stunning death of Uncas, the last of the Mohicans. Cooper’s protagonist, Duncan Heyward, is a European who learns from, absorbs, and assimilates the culture of the native people and becomes something new, an American amalgam. His two mentors and foils are Hawkeye, who calls himself “a man without a cross,” by which he means cross-breeding of blood lines, and Chingachgook, father of Uncas and a pure-blooded Mohican. These two complementary companions, Hawkeye and Chingachgook, make an unstoppable team, but by the end of the novel, both are childless, and both represent the last of their kind. Without entering the melting pot, they face a future of solitude.

Go on. Get yourself a copy of Razorblade Tears and of The Last of the Mohicans. Once you get past Cooper’s numbing opening chapter (it’s not long), you’ll find that the pace of the old canonical classic is just as fast as that of Cosby’s brand new thriller.

John Steinbeck and Harry Potter Hanukkah

What I’m hoping to accomplish with this blog is to generate a conversation about the creative arts across the centuries and the continents. If that sounds a bit too ambitious and grandiose, I apologize. I’m always going to be aiming to connect with readers with shared experiences, and I hope to marry discussions of popular culture with classic works of the past. That’s hardly original, I know, but if The New Yorker can offer “The Talk of the Town” to its readers, then surely I might aspire, here from my home in southwest Virginia, to present “Talk of the Provinces” to a few inquisitive souls. Note that I’m not claiming to post the talk of the provinces, merely some of it.

I retired from teaching at Woodberry Forest School in June of 2020, and since then I’ve been on something of a tear in my writing—at least for me. While I was teaching, I would maybe finish a short story every three or four years. During the twelve months after my retirement, I finished two short stories (one of which has been purchased by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine) and one of which, a non-mystery, is under submission at literary journals. I’ve also tweaked and edited a novel manuscript and, to my great pleasure, have trimmed it from 122,000 words to 98,000.  All that work was lots of fun.

Now, however, I find myself in that awful state of being between projects. I’m not like Anthony Trollope, who wrote from 5:30 to 8:30 a.m. and kept himself on a strict schedule of 250 words every fifteen minutes, for a total of 3,000 words per day. If Trollope finished a novel before the three hours had expired, he started a new one. Good for him, but I can’t do that. I have to wait for the imaginative well to fill up again, and I have learned over many years that there’s nothing productive about demanding a visit from the Muse before she is ready to sing. But I’m ready to get started on a new project and am feeling impatient. So what am I doing to keep myself open for the next big idea?

First, I’m reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and am finding it a fascinating mess. By the early 1950’s, when Steinbeck was assembling the novel (published in 1952), he was famous and well established and had already won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award for The Grapes of Wrath. Now that I am 500 pages into East of Eden, I’m thinking that the early success bred a degree of languor over editing and revising this big, sprawling, erratic saga. The first fifty pages read like brainstorming or free-writing, the kinds of things we writers might do if we’re trying to find a way into a story. But I sense that Steinbeck simply wrote what was on his mind for any particular day, saved the pages, and handed them over to his editor without another glance. I’m still reading. I’m still a fan and an admirer of Mr. Steinbeck. But his novel strikes me as surprisingly undisciplined.

Second, when I learned that HBO Max had re-acquired the rights to broadcast all eight of the Harry Potter movies, I decided to give them another look. I had seen them all when they had first appeared in the theaters and had read all the books, but it had been several years since I’d visited J.K. Rowling’s most famous creation to date. Rowling, like Steinbeck, is a story-telling genius and a remarkably prolific one, but I thought that she, too, grew a bit undisciplined starting with Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when there were so many characters to track and so much story to absorb that the books began to feel bloated. Waiting for a new book or movie in the Potter cycle to appear, I would lose track of some of the secondary characters.  So a couple of weeks ago, I decided that I would celebrate what I came to call Harry Potter Hanukkah: eight consecutive nights of watching one Harry Potter movie per night, a festival of narrative binging.

I established several rules. I couldn’t start watching before 10:00 p.m. because I wanted to guarantee that I would accomplish something less self-indulgent during daylight hours. It also seemed right to be watching while it was dark outside and getting late, to add to the sense of bonus entertainment at the end of the day. I couldn’t skip ahead and watch more than one movie per day, though I was allowed to cue up the next one in line for the following night’s viewing. All these rules were arbitrary, of course, but I sensed (correctly, I think) that it would be quite possible to overdose and to spend too long in the land of Hogwarts, like eating an entire box of candy at one sitting. As King Henry IV said to his son Hal, it’s possible for one to begin to loathe the taste of honey, “whereof a little more than a little is by much too much.” But eight movies in eight nights turned out to be just right—enough for me to keep fresh with the unfolding epic without sacrificing exercise, regular meals, and human contact.

The pleasure of such an exercise came for me in watching those young actors grow up on the screen. In Sorcerer’s Stone they are children, and they—as characters and as actors—had no idea of what kind of international celebrity they had launched when Ron, Hermione, and Harry met on that train for the first time. I felt the same ripple of awe that I get when I look back at Chapter 6 of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Here’s the moment I mean:

Tom hailed the romantic outcast:

“Hello, Huckleberry!”

“Hello yourself, and see how you like it.”

“What’s that you got?”

“Dead cat.”

 Neither Tom Sawyer nor Huck nor Mark Twain himself had any inkling of just what a monumental, controversial, beloved, provocative character had just made his entrance onto the world stage. I’d argue that Huck’s entrance was every bit as significant as Falstaff’s three hundred years earlier in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1. And while I loved to see J.K. Rowling bring her mammoth undertaking to such a satisfying and grand conclusion, I loved the beginning even more. I love to be there at the start, when so much of the adventure lies ahead.

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