Liars and Saints

  The extraordinary paragraph featured here is from Donald Hall's essay "Out the Window." Hall--having spied his ninetieth birthday on the horizon--had committed himself to writing prose. We don't get many books from octogenarians. In fact, Lorrie Moore has specifically said that she thinks a writer's career ends at the eightieth birthday; "I have turf until I turn eighty, and then I need to cede my spot." This is nonsense--and Donald Hall enjoys taking on the contrarian role. It's clear throughout the essay that he is writing  as an act of service --he knows there are not many literary reports from the pen of a "post-post-retirement" man, and he is filling a gap. I'm especially moved by his descriptions of his mother. The subtext is evident: "This, now, is what it was like for her. This is what she couldn't find words for. This is what she couldn't tell me." A writer has to recognize shame as an opportunity. Most of u...

 I'm always drawn to "The Thankful Poor," by Henry Ossawa Tanner, at the Met. No one will advertise the fact that this painting briefly belonged to Bill Cosby. The family dinner table is a dramatic setting; as a dad, I can't help but wonder if the child in the painting is about to knock his little cup on the floor. I also think of the climactic dinner scene from "Kimberly Akimbo": Isn't this nice? Everybody's being so nice. Nothing is wrong-- Troubles have passed. Everybody civil and getting along-- Will it last? I'm guessing that the grandfather will quickly run out of topics to discuss--and will wish that the child could be a bit more like Barbara Walters. The child is agitated because the library hour was cancelled--without explanation--at school today. A final thing I love is the unbalanced nature of the sleeves on the boy's shirt. I can imagine the grandfather saying, "Check yourself in the mirror and tidy up--Henry Ossawa Tanner is...

 Wightman is a farm that gracefully does its job. You get a scenic tractor tour, a pumpkin patch, a hay "gym," a corn maze, a donut stand. The patches of wildflowers are the highlight of the tractor event; these patches are saved for the end, in the same way that you don't get "Rose's Turn" until the final minutes of "Gypsy." I especially like the country music soundtrack, which always catches me by surprise. At home, my family's sonic landscape tends to feature Ariana Grande or the most famous numbers from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Cats." Suddenly, at Wightman, I'm plunged into a melodic world of Jesus stories and descriptions of pickup trucks. It's like I've entered another universe. My daughter struggles with the idea of apple-picking; impetuously, she grabs the half-rotten apple corpses from the soil. I don't mind; I secretly think apples are overrated. There is a website that has a damning observation about...

 The new  "SVU" caused some discord in my house yesterday. As I watched, I involuntarily said, "This writing is so bad." And my husband made me take it back. Let me clarify. The episode had ideas. The central concern is that the system is broken. When the country is so unfair to women, it makes sense to bend the rules. (It's sort of like civil disobedience.) A nurse suggests to a victim that it's wise to say, "I was *forced* to drink." When it's clear that a misogynistic jury will sympathize with an attacker, Olivia wins leverage by putting the attacker's mother in jail. ("If you want Mom to be freed, you'll need to give me something....") My problem is the issue of continuity. Olivia Benson has done her job for thirty years. This week's episode suggests a large rupture in Olivia's own system of ethics--but the abruptness is not plausible. The tension between Olivia and Carisi is interesting--but these are not characte...

  Curtis Sittenfeld writes beautifully, and her recent NYT piece has a shrewd opening: I’ll offer it up right away, the part that, depending on your perspective, might seem ironic or juicy or enviable or tragic: I’m now divorced. It would be difficult to stop reading at this point. What makes the sentence "pop" is the absence of self-pity. Sittenfeld has a healthy sense of perspective. (She *consistently* has this.) Also, Sittenfeld has an imagination: she can anticipate her news "landing" in several different ways, and she lists these ways. I find it hard to know how long I was married. My former husband and I considered ourselves separated by fall 2024, but maybe it was before that? He didn’t move out until fall 2025, and the divorce was legal in January 2026. There is an impression of chattiness--but I believe Sittenfeld works to select the insights that really seem (potentially) universal. Also, she is writing from the gut. Now I welcome advice from other divor...

  "Hadestown" succeeds because of its ending. Writers struggle with endings. If you see the crazy new film "Verity," you'll notice that it doesn't even have a conclusion! It's as if the storyteller just tossed her pen out the window and shrugged. But "Hadestown" has a surprising, effective, layered finale. We revisit lines from the first ten minutes of the show. Once again, we're told that Orpheus can see how the world *could* be -- "in spite of the way that it is." The sentence has acquired a new punchiness, because we've just seen "the way that it is." People die, people lose faith. That's the way the world is. "It's a sad song -- but we're gonna sing it again." Often, and particularly on Broadway, producers feel a need to pander -- an ending needs to be "happy" if it's going to be palatable. By contrast, Hermes looks directly at the audience and names what has happened in *his* ...