This month I’m excited to recommend two brand new works of art that explore the ways human beings respond when cataclysmic weather events threaten to break them. One, Bruce Holsinger’s novel The Displacements, takes place perhaps an hour into the future. The other, Ron Howard’s movie Thirteen Lives, reflects on headlines from a couple of years ago. But whether we’re looking slightly ahead or slightly behind, we’re riveted by what we’re experiencing, and we can’t look away.
Ron Howard has been making very good movies for a very long time, and while he’s certainly respected in Hollywood as a competent crafter of popular entertainment and enjoys the cachet of winning the Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture for A Beautiful Mind, I still sense that the film world is reluctant to rank him where he belongs, with the very best. I would argue that he deserves a promotion in public perception from Craftsman to Artist. We’ve all grown up with the guy we considered Little Ronnie as Opie Taylor on The Andy Griffith Show and Richie Cunningham on Happy Days, and we’re biased. How could a former child actor (don’t forget his turn as Winthrop Paroo in the movie version of The Music Man) who achieved adulthood without any scandals, traumas, dirty secrets, infidelities or enemies possibly qualify as a genius? He has no angst. He has no psychic pain to tap. He’s about to celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary with his high school sweetheart. Surely he’s too damn square to qualify as an artist. But he’s a hell of a lot more than a journeyman. Watch Thirteen Lives and then try to name a flaw in that movie.
It was only four years ago that twelve Thai soccer players and their coach were trapped by flash flooding in the Tham Luong Nang Non cave. All of us followed the story. All of us shared the astonishment when a team of divers rescued all thirteen after 18 days. The story of that rescue, like the story of Apollo 13, which Ron Howard also told in a stirring movie, is one in which history has provided the ultimate spoiler: we know they get back safely. But knowing the outcome actually helps the effect. We’re watching the story unfold, and we can’t help wondering repeatedly How? How did they ever pull this off? Howard takes great big movie stars--to be exact, Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen--and manages to make them seem like regular blokes. (That’s a tribute to the actors’ talent as well.) He choreographs hundreds of extras for crowd scenes to give us a sense of the scale and the frenzy of the rescue operation. He elicits beautifully natural performances from the amateur Thai kids playing the soccer team. He employs subtitles to translate Thai dialogue to increase the sense that we’re watching a documentary. And he keeps the pacing just right by not rushing any sequences but not dawdling over days when the action repeats something we’ve already seen. He takes us back to the recent past and appalls us with how much we didn’t know about the impossible odds against this coup of human ingenuity.
Bruce Holsinger, by contrast, takes us into the near future. Holsinger is a professor of English at the University of Virginia who specializes in Medieval literature, the author of such works as Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer and The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory. He’s also a real-life literary Indiana Jones as a writer of popular novels, and his latest, The Displacements, suggests that he’s not only an expert in Medieval literature but also in federal government rescue operations, mortgage and banking regulations, the insurance industry, modern American culture, and meteorology. In this marvelous and terrifying novel Holsinger betrays his Medieval expertise only a couple of times, including a swift, brief reference to the tradition of the florilegium, a collection of extracts from other writings, and the novel itself, with its shifting points of view and occasional interruptions from a report filed long after the plot of the book is resolved, could perhaps be a wink at the florilegium tradition. But perhaps the most significant nod to earlier eras in storytelling comes from the name of his protagonist, Daphne, who undergoes a metamorphosis every bit as profound as the one experienced by her namesake in Ovid. I really loved this book. It’s so utterly anchored in our time, and its employment of climate as the catalyst to set the plot in motion feels so creepily at one with the daily news, that I felt none of the distance we tend to provide ourselves when we’re reading about the old wars between humanity and nature. (“To Build a Fire”? I’d never be stupid enough to go out in that weather. Jaws? Don’t go into the water. The Andromeda Strain? Wear a mask.) Holsinger gives us a cast of characters ranging from small children to grandparents and gives to each a rich, distinct inner life. He shows us that there’s such a thing as a character-driven page-turner. Lately I’ve been complaining that every time I settle down to read a book, I fall asleep within twenty minutes. Holsinger has reassured me that there’s nothing wrong with my attention span or my energy. He kept me up late and got me up early so that I could follow the plights of these endearing, exasperating characters.