It’s confirmed. The voiceover on the video trailer for Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel, the noirish Inherent Vice, is the reclusive author himself. Reading in character as Doc Sportello, the novel’s private-eye protagonist, he has the same laid-back doper’s cadence as Jeff Bridges’ “the Dude” from The Big Lebowski. Pynchon is still cool at seventy-two. Reviews of Inherent Vice have been mixed. (“Feels more like a Classic Comics version of a Pynchon novel than like the thing itself,” says Kakutani in the New York Times.) Nevertheless, Will Blythe’s thoughtful online review at The Second Pass has me wanting to pick up the novel sooner rather than later. (Blythe’s verdict: “Inherent Vice, an act of minor Pynchon, is still major enough.”)
Category: Literature
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The Comedy of Errors
Marcus Truschinski & Susan Shunk in The Comedy of Errors Debate has raged in the Coffee Spew household the last two summers over the decision by American Players Theatre to forego their classical approach to Shakespearean set and costume design. We’ve agreed that last year’s updating of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was Felliniesque, but not as a compliment. The set was a construction site complete with porta-potty and the “rude mechanicals” as working-class laborers in hardhats. There were starlets in sunglasses and paparazzi on cell phones. We’re feeling more warmth toward this year’s Casablanca-inflected The Comedy of Errors, with its playful foreign-intrigue backlot designed by Kevin Depinet. (We attended last night’s clear, if humid outdoor performance.) The dizzying identical-twins mix-up lends itself to fast-paced and intricately choreographed screwball comedy and slapstick farce, hallmarks of Hollywood in the 30s and 40s, as well as American Players Theatre at its audience-pleasing best. (Laurel and Hardy—among many—used a version of Shakespeare’s plot for their 1936 film, Our Relations, in which they played both sets of identical twins via trick photography.)
Perhaps the biggest success of the night was the imaginative work of costume designer Devon Painter. Actresses Carey Cannon and Susan Shunk—strong in their roles as Adriana and Luciana, respectively—were dressed like glamorous holograms of Ingrid Bergman and Katharine Hepburn. Cleverist modernization touch would have to go to the “lock-out” scene (Act III, Scene I). The gate to Antipholus of Ephesus’s (Andy Truschinski) home became in director William Brown’s staging a locked townhouse door with an electric buzzer and speakerphone. Dromio of Syracuse (Steve Haggard) was offstage (inside the house), while his onstage twin, Dromio of Ephesus (Darragh Kennan), responded to his brother’s increasingly hostile insults issuing from the tinnily amplified speaker. Haggard and Kennan wrung maximum laughs from line readings and agile physical comedy throughout the night. Equally memorable was composer Andrew Hansen’s rousing soundtrack-like music score. (The Comedy of Errors runs through October 4th.)
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The Decemberists in Madison
The Decemberists came to Madison last Wednesday and rocked the plushly appointed concert hall. The Overture Center for the Arts ain’t no Mudd Club or CBGB, but it’s ideal for live performances of concept albums like Brian Wilson’s Smile or The Decemberists’ new rock opera, The Hazards of Love, brainchild of frontman Colin Meloy. Katjusa Cisar’s generally positive 77 Square review of the show is for the most part on target, even her amusing—if snarky—nutshell appraisal of the album’s story line:
The story—well, nevermind the story. A mash-up of renaissance fair, Rush and The Titanic, sprung from the mind of Meloy, it’s all very mystic: a druid-nymph love affair torn by a jealous queen and snarled by deals-gone-bad and marriage-by-drowning. Someday, it’ll make juicy fodder for an ambitious graduate student studying the link between Nordic folk tales and prog rock.
The Hazards of Love is compelling musically and dramatically (after locating a synopsis, here or here, which is something the CD booklet could really use). I do take issue with Cisar’s characterization of Meloy’s performance as “weirdly stiff” and “emotionally flat.” He seemed ironic and cerebral to me. Weirdly stiff and emotionally flat in a good way. No question that guest vocalist Shara Worden brought classic rock sizzle to her Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature role as the forest Queen. But “upstaging” Meloy, as Cisar claims? I’d say instead that their contrasting styles define the composition’s strength, its off-kilter clash of hot and cool, intellect and bombast. Colin Meloy’s penchant during the evening for alternating sips from a long-stemmed glass of red wine and a cheap plastic bottle of water pretty much says it all.
Worth noting for fans: Meloy appears to be blogging now, quoting from Infinite Jest and recounting childhood disagreements with his sister about Depeche Mode lyrics. His sister is Maile Meloy, who has a well-received new book of short stories out, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It.
[Editor’s update: I’d be remiss if I didn’t give the last word on the Decemberists’ show to Augie, who’s penned his own enthusiastic review.]
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The Typewriter Satyr
Dwight Allen writes meticulous, witty fiction about dysfunctional underachievers. The dual protagonists of his funny and warm new novel from the University of Wisconsin Press, The Typewriter Satyr, are two rudderless ships colliding in the night. Oliver Poole, middle-aged typewriter repairman, and Annelise Scharfenberg, thirtyish community radio show host, seem at first to share little in common aside from fragile befuddlement. Set in a pastoral make-believe Wisconsin town called Midvale (hilariously mirroring Madison’s blend of corporate pragmatism and pothead eccentricity) during the escalating indignities of George Bush’s second term of office circa 2004, Oliver and Annelise’s love affair is neither inevitable nor remotely convenient for either individual. Oliver is already married with four sons and Annelise is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. The abuse angle is more than a little daring on Allen’s part, especially given that no less a talent than John Irving was defeated by similarly queasy material at the center of his 2005 novel, Until I Find You. Irving’s approach was fetishistic and muddled with slapstick, which felt grotesque and out of place. Allen, on the other hand, has struck the perfect tone, respectful of his characters and his readers, and bringing depth to the narrative instead of derailing it. The Typewriter Satyr, like Allen’s short story collection, The Green Suit (2000), and his luminous first novel, Judge (2003), is beautifully constructed storytelling that’s built to last.
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Lorrie Moore
The summer 2009 issue of Wisconsin People & Ideas has scored a fascinating interview (unfortunately not posted online) with Lorrie Moore on the eve of the September release of her new novel, A Gate at the Stairs. Interviewer Alison Jones Chaim, director of the Wisconsin Book Festival, opens the proverbial can of worms by confronting Moore with, “You have a history of declining to discuss whether certain elements in your work are autobiographical, even though people often want to know.” Moore of course cleverly proceeds to evade and dismiss the subject, while Chaim to her credit doesn’t back down. The result is a crackling, sometimes tense give and take on the topic of how fiction writers transmute lived experience into literature. Discussing her role as a creative writing professor at the University of Wisconsin, Moore is unexpectedly revealing:
I’m sure as a teacher I’ve entered into biographical musings myself. The best students know what is interesting about their lives and know how to use it. But sometimes students are avoiding what is most interesting because it is also the most difficult. Sometimes, as a teacher, I’ve attempted to say to a student, “Here’s what I know is interesting about your life and what you might want to think about when embarking on a fictional tale.” But these are dangerous waters …
Also worth checking out in the issue is the first-place winning story in the magazine’s annual fiction contest, “Deference,” by Nancy Jesse. It’s a sharply written Vietnam-war era story about a mother and son struggling to keep a family farm running in northern Wisconsin. The draft board beckons. The son has literary and academic aspirations. Mom has other ideas. Creating a twist ending that is both surprising and plausible isn’t easy, but “Deference” manages a “Gift of the Magi” double-reversal that satisfies on both counts.
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The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Robert Mitchum Versatile British film director Peter Yates gave Steve McQueen one of his defining roles as a laconic steely-nerved San Francisco cop in Bullitt (1968). Yates did something similar for an aging Robert Mitchum in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), a film finally getting a long-overdue and much-anticipated DVD release. Rather than a signature role for an emerging superstar, the part of hardluck hood and Boston mob gunrunner Eddie Coyle is low-key and unassuming, ideally suited to Mitchum’s disaffected persona. Disaffection was Mitchum’s stock-in-trade, reflecting a kind of no-bullshit post-WWII cynicism and emotional guardedness. In his fifties when Eddie Coyle was made, Mitchum’s sagging jowls seem finally to have caught up with the smartass defeatism behind his jaded line readings. He appears in only a quarter of the film, but it’s a great performance that haunts the story even when he’s off screen. Call it a disappearing act. Mitchum disappears in the role and the role disappears in the movie, dimming in the end to darkness like a burnt-out taillight on a ’68 Ford Galaxie.
George V. Higgins’s 1970 novel—a stunning debut for the author, a former journalist and attorney who died in 1999 at 59—has only improved with age, a must-read for fans of the movie. Find a copy of the 2000 paperback reissue with Elmore Leonard’s introduction, in which he states flat-out that The Friends of Eddie Coyle is “the best crime novel ever written.” It’s also first-rate literary fiction. (One of the chapters originally appeared in the North American Review.) Higgins didn’t much care for being pigeonholed as a genre writer, as he discusses in his still relevant and useful 1990 writer’s manual, On Writing:
Regardless of whether you relish the prospect, every reader who encounters your prose, whether amateur (your friends and family) or professional (heartless editors if you’re unlucky, brilliantly insightful editors if you are blessed), with the first sentence will automatically commence the process of categorizing it, subjectively determining—often if not usually quite erroneously—where it belongs in the stream of current writing (I learned this the hard way: my first published book was categorized as a “hard-boiled detective story”—it was not—and most of the others since have been critically rated by reference to the same ill-chosen scale, thus neatly deflecting the general reader—the reader I have in mind—while deceitfully luring the crime-story addict. This leaves many in the first group cruelly deprived of acquaintance with my genius, many in the second group feeling themselves meanly bilked, and me with much smaller royalty checks than I would prefer to receive).
Higgins relied heavily on dialogue, seemingly naturalistic yet stylized wiseguy lingo, in a manner that would influence not only Elmore Leonard, but also David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino (who borrowed the name “Jackie Brown” from a character in Eddie Coyle).
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The Curious Case of Frances Kroll Ring
F. Scott Fitzgerald was never well-served by Hollywood. It was a love/hate relationship that he explored in seventeen acerbic short stories about a down-on-his-luck screenwriter named Pat Hobby. Then there was last year’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a big-budget film not without charm, but with scant connection to the Fitzgerald story upon which it claimed to be based. He was better served by Frances Kroll Ring, his 22-year-old personal secretary during those final months before his death from heart failure in 1940 (at age 44, like Chekhov, which seems more and more unbelievably young, especially as I grow older) when he was working on his never-to-be-completed Hollywood-themed novel The Last Tycoon.
Frances Kroll Ring David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times has written a wonderful profile of Ring, now 92 years old. In 1985 she published a brief self-effacing memoir of her time working for Fitzgerald, Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald. The book was made into a solid 2002 Showtime movie titled Last Call. British actor Jeremy Irons might seem an unlikely candidate to play the Minnesota-born Fitzgerald, but he’s very effective in the role. The young Frances Kroll Ring is played with appropriate doe-eyed innocence by Neve Campell.
Also of interest is an article and accompanying video documenting a recent visit by the remarkably spry amanuensis/author to a class of literature students at the University of Missouri.
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Tree of Smoke
Caffeinated and jittery, I’ve been on a ragged Denis Johnson high the last couple of months reading Tree of Smoke, his 2007 National Book Award-winning Vietnam War novel. There were moments early on when I wasn’t always convinced that it was the book I wanted it to be, having thoroughly enjoyed the unhinged quality of his 1997 novel about pre-Proposition 215 marijuana harvesting in California, Already Dead (memorably panned by Michiko Kakutani as an “inept, repugnant novel”). Tree of Smoke, said to have been ten years in the writing, is a more controlled work, its pacing methodical, its moments of madness born of deeper narrative immersion. (Kakutani was kinder; B.R. Myers was bent out of shape.) There’s a King Lear-like eye-gouging dead center in the middle of the book that’s breathtakingly brutal; ditto a sexual assault by U.S. soldiers of a Vietnamese woman, late in the novel, by which time we’ve come to appreciate the derangement of servicemen stretched beyond sanity by multiple tours of duty, one of Tree of Smoke’s many pointed parallels to our current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It’s not a flawless work. Johnson strains a bit trying to elevate the novel’s Colonel Sands—a WWII vet and instigator of a rogue PsyOps Vietnam mission code-named Tree of Smoke—into a kind of mythic Kurtz character. Heart of Darkness and, unavoidably, Apocalypse Now, hang rather heavy over the novel’s final section involving a journey deep into primordial jungles in search of a rumored Colonel Sands-in-hiding. In fairness, an argument could be made that allusions to Conrad and Coppola are as valid as Shakespeare’s leaning on Homer and Ovid for added metaphoric ballast. Johnson’s novel ultimately stands on its own as an impressive work, as ambitious and singular in its way as Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano or Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky. It restores one’s faith in the literary novel much as Johnson’s masterful Jesus’ Son (1992) re-energized the American short story form.
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Baxter on Porter
Charles Baxter’s excellent New York Review of Books piece on the fiction of Katherine Anne Porter isn’t freely available online, but it’s worth seeking out. The Library of America has just published Porter’s Collected Stories and Other Writings. Here’s an insightful snippet from Baxter’s review focusing on “impulsive behavior” in Porter’s stories and as a compelling component of short story writing in general:
Her tales tend to take place on a small dramatic stage with characters who find themselves claustrophobically entrapped. These protagonists typically discover themselves to be at a logical or emotional stalemate at the very moment when they must make a decision; if they don’t make such a decision, it will be made for them. Refusing to do what the moment demands, they enact a buried impulse, often violent, or they go into a kind of impersonal delirium quickly followed by remorse. The reliance of her characters on impulse puts them rather neatly within the short story genre, which as a form tends to downplay history in favor of sequences in the present tense. Dramatized impulsive behavior requires very little background material to be plausible, and short stories thrive on it. […]
The problem with impulsive behavior, her characters discover, is that it reveals another distasteful and incompatible self unknown in daily life, whose desires are—for one reason or another—unpresentable. The question then quickly becomes whether anyone can live, can coexist, with that (unfortunately genuine) self once it has been revealed. The answer is usually “No.” Porter’s understanding of this throttled condition is of a very high order, and it is here, I think, that she can be compared to the greatest of short-story writers, particularly in what may be her finest story, “Noon Wine.”
Along with “Noon Wine,” which Baxter discusses at length, he rates four other Porter stories as “unsurpassed in American literature in their genre”: “Rope,” “Flowering Judas,” “Old Mortality” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.”
Baxter is in agreement with critics who say Porter’s 1962 novel, Ship of Fools, has deservedly fallen out of favor. She spent twenty years writing it. The book became a bestseller and made her rich and famous in a way her short stories never could have done. But its reputation has suffered and it’s rarely read or discussed today. Baxter suggests that a moralizing tone had overtaken Porter’s fiction and sucked out the artfulness. Possibly. I’d like to think Ship of Fools might yet get a second life. In fact, one could argue that Stanley Kramer’s lousy film adaptation has done more to dampen interest in Porter’s novel than the novel itself. To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel from the same era, has an insufferably high-handed moral tone about it, but the book was turned into a supremely entertaining movie that’s still frequently screened in classrooms as an adjunct to the text.
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Eisenberg on Tower
Wells Tower’s short story collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, is getting raves. Must-read books are piling up on my coffee table and in the literary Netflix queue in the back of my mind. I’m tempted to bump Tower to the front of the line. If I do, it’ll be because of Deborah Eisenberg’s beautifully written review in the New York Review of Books. Her piece is filled with provocative thoughts on fiction and fiction writing. Here’s Eisenberg discussing how plot functions differently in a short story vs. a novel:
It could be said, as an expedient, that the plot of a given piece of fiction is a phantom organism—an embodiment and enactment of the author’s preoccupations and obsessions—and that this organism is what allows us to experience the piece’s deep pleasures: its insight, its beauty, its mystery, its power—whatever are the essential properties of the piece; that a plot, like a grammatical structure, is an expression of innate relationships in the mind. Long fiction has room to fill things in whereas short fiction, due to the stringency of selection it imposes, tends to demand a more active role from the reader, who must supply a chargeable receptivity, a medium in which compressed signals can unfold and send an associative web of sparks flying out between them. And it seems to me—to make yet another broad and possibly somewhat rickety generalization—that because a work of short fiction must so quickly and unerringly present evidence of the world that lies under its surface, the plot of a good story is likely to be a stranger, more volatile, and more evanescent sort of thing than the plot of a novel.
Coffee Spew 