Liars and Saints

  Tom Perrotta is a name I'll always notice; among his novels, "The Wishbones," "Election," "The Leftovers," and "Joe College" are my favorites.  Perrotta's special skill is his ability to describe moments of mundane discomfort. We all live through these moments; we just don't commit them to the blank page. In the new novel, "Ghost Town," a young man, Jimmy, meets a stranger and bluntly concedes that his mother has just died. But then he thinks he sounds glib, so he offers a few sentences about his mourning. And he realizes that the sentences might be what they (in fact) are: nervous, meaningless throat-clearing. Life goes on. "Ghost Town" is set in Garwood (called "Creamwood"), NJ, in the 1970s. Everyone is white; everyone smokes cigarettes. A dispute might involve a schoolteacher and a hippie at the local McDonald's. "I understand your  flat feet  kept you out of Vietnam...." In this small...

 To feel more "involved" in my community, I've been listing the suburban quirks that I hate the most. See below. *The blowout toddler birthday parties. This is an entire industry--I'm guilty of participating. You pay four hundred dollars to a slovenly stranger, so that he can produce oddly shaped bubbles from a dirty vat. The *kids* don't need this--the kids are fully entertained by a stick and a cardboard box. Whom is the "bubble man" really for ? *Our bookstore is closed on Mondays. I find this so profoundly irritating. Imagine if "Three Lives," in Greenwich Village, suddenly, inexplicably, reduced its hours of operation by one-seventh. It's absurd. *I have a new nemesis. Let me explain. A few years ago, the actor Zachary Levi made a billion enemies by suggesting that Gavin Creel's death was linked with Creel's decision to get the Covid vaccine. And Laura Benanti said, "I always knew Levi was an obnoxious bully. He made every...

 Over the weekend, the NYT named Victoria Clark one of the actors you have to see. In other words, if Clark's name is in the ad, you just buy the ticket. I can't argue with that. The mini-essay claims that Clark acts *through* the notes, not on top of them. I think I know what this means. Here are three examples: *"Before I Go." Clark sings, "Maybe you'll see me while I'm still here. I'm still here." By the end of the line, she is running out of breath--the fight to get to the last word conveys a sense of exhaustion and exasperation. It's not that Clark doesn't understand breath control; she could easily "reengineer" her delivery so that every note is fully supported. But the choice she makes tells us something about her character. This is deliberate. *"Yes, you can." The climax of "The Light in the Piazza." Clara is fretting that she cannot steer herself through the adult world. Clark's Margaret cuts thr...

 Before "Hamilton," I saw Renee Elise Goldsberry in "Two Gentlemen of Verona," "Good People," "The Color Purple," and "Rent." This wasn't by design. She just kept popping up. She was consistently a standout--she earned an Outer Critics Circle nomination for "Good People." But--if she had stopped--no one would have cared. That's what fascinates me about the arts. You really need a will of steel. After Sondheim flopped with "Merrily We Roll Along," he considered quitting. And his agent said, "Sure. Stop writing--literally no one will lose sleep over that." The new film about Goldsberry--"Satisfied"--isn't very good. At times, Goldsberry is so goopy-celestial that she seems to be doing self-parody; she seems to be playing Wickie from "Girls5eva." The documentary does that annoying thing where the star is asked to "recreate" a pivotal moment, and we're all forced to...

 The Headlines: -Sondheim wrote "Into the Woods" while falling deeply in love with cocaine. This makes sense. "Woods" has always seemed overstuffed and sloppy. It's a show that may make you think, "Here, the writer was abusing cocaine...." -Many lyricists make grammatical errors. Tim Rice, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Steven Sater: These are all writers who have trouble with grammar. But Sondheim is an exception. So the following line always bothered me. "Nice is different than good." I now know that Sondheim *deliberately* made this error--he believed that Little Red would not say different from ....Sondheim insisted on the choice he had made even when others questioned the choice. -Daniel Okrent offers a smart reading of the song "Finishing the Hat." The money note occurs in the bridge--you get a startling jump from the bottom to the top of the scale. "And how you're *always* turning back too late from the grass or the stick or th...

  I have been hired to teach reading and writing to a student -- there is no ISEE, no SAT, attached. This sort of thing fills me with terror, because there is no built-in structure, no test date, no bubble sheet. I had a writing teacher in college who would enter class in a serene way, with chocolate-covered blueberries, and who would then just speak eloquently about Raymond Carver for ninety minutes. She did not have an advanced degree. She had bottomless depths of self-confidence; she was mesmerizing. My current student, a fifth grader, is working on her own newspaper. She interviews residents of her town and publishes her findings. Since Mother's Day is approaching, she has chosen to interview a mother -- and her thought process is straightforward, unimpeachable. "I chose K, three doors down from me, because she has three kids. No one else has *three* kids. So K must be the most interesting mother." My student and I ran through the standard soft-ball questions. "W...