Liars and Saints

 There is a terrific example of an "I Am" song in "Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York." Dougal is planning to enter a church where his negligent father will get married. Dougal is ambivalent. He calls his mother--a person who was once abandoned mid-pregnancy--and leaves a voice message. He describes the scene: I'm wearing my suit with the scuffs in the knees-- The one that we got for my GCSEs. If I stand in the street any longer, I'll freeze. If I put my eye to the door, I can just about see-- There are hundreds of people and stars on the tree. I'd better go in and say, Hi, Dad, it's me.... As he makes observations, Dougal is thinking. He is crossing a bridge from childhood to adulthood--he is recognizing (at a cost) that someone who remains silent for twenty-five years is likely someone who does not care about you. The good news is that Dougal does not need his father; Dougal already has what he needs. The last time I wore this, I looked lik...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/books/best-thriller-books-21st-century.html It's standard practice to complain when a newspaper publishes a "Year's Best" list. Best movies. Best fashion statements. Best actors. A complaint then triggers a counter-complaint: "If you wanted to include THAT addition, which name would you REMOVE from the current list?" I'm not writing in a serious spirit. I'm not going to argue for *subtractions* from the NYT thriller list. I'm just going to say that certain omissions surprised me. First, Anthony Horowitz is among the most important popular writers in England right now. He has created a series for Lesley Manville, updated the James Bond series in plausible ways, insightfully championed the works of other writers (Ira Levin, Sarah Waters). Horowitz is on the current list for "Magpie Murders," a great novel. But his career-defining series--Horowitz and Hawthorne--is off the list. At least one of the...

 "I Won't Mind" is a well-liked cabaret song from an unfinished musical. It's like a faux-Sondheim song. It's someone lying to herself--and that's a topic Sondheim handled well. But Sondheim didn't write this. The song plays with two meanings of the expression  I won't mind.  The first is this: "I won't protest." I won't complain if you spill porridge on me. The second is this:  I won't be mindful . I won't be the adult. If there is a dangerous blurring of boundaries, I will neglect my responsibility; I will look the other way. The fun of the song is seeing the slow change from meaning one to meaning two. What starts as something sweet gradually becomes something mildly sinister. Real pain is legible in an actor's eyes. It's not about "indicating": wringing one's hands, or shouting, or kneading the hem of one's skirt. It's the eyes. The actor has to decide (1) to "access" that pain and (...

 We went to a cat cafe and ordered from a "KitTea List." The shop was named--unfortunately--the "Alley Cat Cat Cafe." It doesn't trip off the tongue. It's like the record store that called itself "The Vinyl Solution." Giacometti once made a wonderful cat. It was on display--for a long while--next to the Temple of Dendur. It seemed to accompany a resting "Sphinx of Hatshepsut." And my family likes the cats at the zoo. Recently, the lions have hogged the spotlight; the lioness gave birth. But I'm equally fond of the cheetah and of the snow leopard, now starring in its own non-fiction book, "The Ghost of the Mountains." At the cat cafe, my husband played with a small stuffed kitty, which he then chose to buy "for our daughter." I studied the scene. You can't bring your purchase to the "cat area." A thick glass window-wall separates the cat-guests from the coffee-drinking guests. To fraternize with the ca...

  Elmore Leonard said that interesting writing is dialogue. If your book isn't mostly dialogue, then you're in trouble. The crime writer Janice Hallett has taken this advice to extremes; Hallett's novels are just transcripts from email exchanges, text exchanges, voice mail recordings. So--in a way--the writing is *all* dialogue. There are always two parts of a message: the content of the message *and* the style of delivery. Hallett has fun with passive aggression, terseness, crazy effusiveness, sloppiness, neediness. Hallett generally has two or three investigators working through a bundle of documents. The documents contain a mystery. We, the readers, see the documents, but we also see the exchanges between the investigators as they do their interpretive work. The documents need to support the investigators' conclusions. But the documents also need to seem to tell a different story--a *wrong* story--so we can understand why the investigators were needed in the first pl...

  Fran Kranz made an interesting debut with "Mass." It's a movie about language--groping for language. That's the entirety of the movie. Two couples meet at a church. Clearly, something terrible has occurred. The couples try to find words. They do a little dance involving a potted plant. It's a gift from Ann Dowd to Martha Plimpton. Does Martha have to accept it? Where should it sit in the room? Is it to be "interpreted," or is it just a potted plant? What emerges is that Ann Dowd's son has murdered Plimpton's son. Dowd's son was essentially Dylan Klebold; there is a "Columbine" story in Dowd's past. Kranz has done his research. Two offshoots of the Columbine story involved diagnoses and God. (1) Do we say Klebold was evil, or that he was in pain? Some people argue that the "psychopathy" diagnosis is meaningless--it encourages us to stop asking questions when we should keep asking questions. (2) What to make of the Chr...