PLAYWORLD and MICKEY 17

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

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

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

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

BLIND INJUSTICE and DEATH BECOMES HER

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

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

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

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

Judi Dench and Billy Wilder

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

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

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

POKER FACE and THE DAY OF THE JACKAL

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

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

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

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

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

The Election of 2024 and CONCLAVE

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

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

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

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

BAD MONKEY and SLOW HORSES

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

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

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

Shakespeare's HENRY IV, PART 1 and HENRY V

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

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

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

Tim Kaine and Ely, Minnesota

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

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

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

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

Perry Epes and Nat Jobe

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

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

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

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

Most friends fade,

or they don’t make the grade.

New ones are quickly made,

And in a pinch, sure, they’ll do.

But us, old friends,

What’s to discuss, old friends?

Here’s to us.

Who’s like us?

Damn few.

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

I finally understand what she meant.

{Reminder: If you wish to comment on a particular posting, simply click on the title and then scroll to the end of the piece. You will see the comment box available there.]

THE LOST BOYS and the Lost Boys (and Girls)

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

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

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

CHALLENGERS and THE FALL GUY

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

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

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

ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN and JAMES

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

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

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

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

“Good gracious! Anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

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

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

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

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

“February, translate that.”

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

“Nice.”

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

James McBride and Beto O'Rourke

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

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

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

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

PRAYER FOR THE FRENCH REPUBLIC and APPROPRIATE

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

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

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

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

TOM LAKE and NORTH WOODS

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

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

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

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

ELF THE MUSICAL and ELF the movie

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

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

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

THE BEE STING and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG

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

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

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

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

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and HOLLY

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

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

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

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

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

WHALE FALL and WHISKEY WHEN WE'RE DRY

To illustrate my last remark:

Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark.

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

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

e-lim-i-nate the negative,

latch onto the affirmative.

Don’t mess with Mr. In-Between.

            --Johnny Mercer

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

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

David Grann and C.J. Box

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

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

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

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