Liars and Saints

  Alice Munro married Gerald Fremlin and began writing about him. He inspired the central man in “Labor Day Dinner”—he was the man making fun of Roberta’s body. Speaking with a reporter, Munro said, “My husband doesn’t read my stories.” And Gerald made a correction: “I read them. We just don’t talk about them.”   Gerald popped up as Orpheus in “The Children Stay,” as Ladner in “Vandals,” as the murderer in “Dimension.” Although Rachel Aviv does not mention “Floating Bridge,” I think Gerald was there, too—he was the emotionally abusive partner. He was the suicide case in “Comfort.”   After Gerald died, Alice asked not to be buried near him. While senile, Alice mentioned that she never “wanted that pedafil”—she seemed to invent a word somewhere between “pedophile” and “pitiful.” Rachel Aviv writes about cycles of trauma—Alice once moved far away from her own mother, and later, Andrea Skinner detached herself from Alice. Skinner once observed a vacancy in Alice’s eyes; “it w...

  Critics are celebrating Matthew Rhys for his WTF fuck. It’s a great face—but all Rhys faces are great faces. Rhys in horror, yes, but also Rhys in discomfort, Rhys in frenzy, Rhys in anger. The Rhys of “Widow’s Bay” is sweaty, desperate, and needy—he is relatable. There must be a cost to exposing so much inner weakness. What a gift Rhys has.   In “Widow’s Bay,” Rhys has lied to his adolescent son: “Your mother died in childbirth.” In fact, the mother lived for years, and her schizophrenic letters are waiting to be discovered. Rhys learns that he can lift a curse on “his” island—to promote tourism, he just needs to murder a certain tainted citizen. (There is an elaborate story about a poisoned bloodline.) The problem is that the citizen in question is Rhys’s octogenarian receptionist—can he really bring himself to smother her with a pillow?   People have written about “Widow’s Bay” and its relationship to history. In America, we try to build industries on nostalgia—but, ...

  Sondheim writes big iconic introductions--some of the most famous intros in Broadway history. "The Jet Song," "Comedy Tonight," "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd." These songs establish a mood; they tell us what we're going to get.  When you're a Jet-- You're the top cat in town. You're the gold-medal kid With the heavyweight crown! When you're a Jet-- You're the swingin'est thing. Little boy, you're a man. Little man, you're a king! By contrast, the opening of "Sunday in the Park" initially feels small. It's a rare case in which we do *not* start with a choral number. We get two people--one singing, one making bitchy comments. Dot does not want to model so early in the morning. She also has doubts about George's romantic commitment. This doesn't interest George--who is comically over-invested in making a perfect sketch. Given that this is Sondheim, Dot drowns in ambivalence. She finds George's pric...

  Growing up, I enjoyed "To Kill a Mockingbird," and I dreamed of living in some version of Harper Lee's community (without the racism). Lee--an obvious talent--transformed her own memories of childhood into a kind of picture gallery. All the denizens of the town presented themselves on various sunporches. The mean old lady addicted to opioids, the upright lawyer, the quirky gay kid, the "scandal" family. In the novel, little Scout learns about human behavior by studying her neighbors. By observing what is said and what is *not* said. My own hometown had characters. One mom would not allow her kids to play "Sega Genesis" because the brand name seemed to include a veiled allusion to the serpent in the Bible. A lonely old man distributed candies--maybe because of a warm heart, maybe because of certain unsavory wishes. A widow--a former soldier's wife--comforted herself by staring at her tricorn flag. She would ask me to march around with it while the...

 Recently, I saw an ineffective movie called "Pressure," in which Dwight Eisenhower tries to predict how the weather might impact the Normandy invasion. The weather is not a great "big bad"--that's because you can't fight the weather. You just wait to see if it does what it seems to want to do. By contrast, "Jaws" is a masterpiece. You *can* fight a shark. The movie is structurally unusual. We begin with a town in its entirety. The mayor doesn't want to concede that a celebrity shark is dangerous--shutting down the beach would mean losing profit-making opportunities. (In this way, "Jaws" seems to be an ancestor of the buzzy series "Widow's Bay.") Meanwhile, local kids cause chaos by "becoming" the shark; they purchase fake fins and hide underwater. (Spielberg seems to be offering a self-portrait here; we perceive the director's empathy, his sense of a connection with his own childhood.) But here is what I m...

 My daughter is falling for books. Not reading. She has no interest in phonics (and in this way she reminds me of me). But she likes to listen--especially to the tales of Jack and Annie in the Magic Tree House. I love what Susie herself does with words. She knows that her doctor--Dr. Buono--is friendly, so she has invented a kind of shorthand; the doctor is now "Dr. Elmo." Susie knows that a hotel is a source of excitement, like "show and tell." So a hotel is now a "hoe and tell." Aware that dragons are a common wellspring of terror, Susie sometimes speaks breathlessly about Boris Karloff and "Victor Dragon-stein." So I appreciate Donna Leon's recent thoughts on words--she has written about how words become seductive (below). One of the best kids' books I know of is--literally--nonsense. It's James Marshall's "A Pocketful of Nonsense," and it features Marshall in a "Dr. Seuss" mode. There was an old man of Blac...