Liars and Saints

She’s moving meetings again. Your employer wanted a meeting to discuss a recent meeting, so you set up the new meeting. But then that new meeting needed to be shortened, moved, and renamed, and then, on the day of Meeting about the Meeting, there was again a late change, such that the other participants in the meeting, who never wanted the meeting, were flummoxed and disgruntled. “It takes two to tango,” say several sage observers. And: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” But what would the solution be?  One answer: Make your face very, very blank. In the Tonya Harding movie, the assailant says, “I made myself blank before I went for the kneecap, because when you’re blank, everyone around you calms down.” So: Your employer says, “Write me a reminder to call my dentist. I have a toothache.” Surely this exceeds the parameters of your job description? Surely the toothache is itself its own reminder ? Surely a simple phone call, then and there, i...

Once you think of Larry David as a schlemiel, the cases of "unwritten rules" start to pile up: -The cutoff. You may not call another adult after 10 pm. That's "the cutoff." (But some think it's 10:30, and others, with kids, 9:30. I have a colleague who routinely texts me after 10 pm, so I especially enjoyed this episode.) -Appropriate dinner table conversation. "Larry, my daughter is allowed to be at this dinner party. She is an adult." Fair enough, but when you start to tell a dirty joke, the daughter is--suddenly--no longer an "adult." -How we treat children. In one egregious moment, Susie's talentless daughter presents, as a "gift" to Mary Steenburgen, a dreadful rendition of "I Love You, Baby," from "Jersey Boys." (The choice of song is especially delicious. You can imagine the parents in this wealthy home playing the soundtrack, reliving their childhood, over and over, and you can imagine the d...

"Tell me things I won't mind forgetting," she said. "Make it useless stuff or skip it. ” I began. I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like a banana—you see it looking full, you're seeing it end-on. The camera made me self-conscious and I stopped. It was trained on us from a ceiling mount—the kind of camera banks use to photograph robbers. It played us to the nurses down the hall in Intensive Care. "Go on, girl," she said. "You get used to it. ” I had my audience. I went on. Did she know that Tammy Wynette had changed her tune? Really. That now she sings "Stand by Your Friends"? That Paul Anka did it too, I said. Does "You're Having Our Baby." That he got sick of all that feminist bitching. "What else?" she said. "Have you got something else? ” Oh, ...

My old teacher’s new book is coming out on February 13!  It imagines the love affair of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, an actual person who seems actually to have had an entanglement with Eleanor. Amy Bloom (the author, my old teacher) has written novels set in the past--"Away” and “Lucky Us”--but this upcoming work, “White Houses,” is the first time (as far as I know) she will write at length from the perspective of an actual person who really existed. I admire her for pushing herself. The historical novels were a bold leap--fifteen-ish years ago. She had made her name by writing contemporary short stories. Entering the terrain of biography-via-novel: That’s yet another big step. Bloom has said we all have limited time; it makes sense to work, work, work. She seems to live by this precept. In honor of the upcoming book, and to make public my quiet obsession, I’ll quote from one of Bloom’s early stories, “Love Is Not a Pie,” where she knocked it out of the park...

"Under the Dome" begins to feel like a fairy tale toward the climax. There are curses and reverses. Like Shakespeare, King makes sure people don't end up where they started. An earnest Selectman has a conversation with a meth dealer, and by the end, the Selectman is a dyed-in-the-wool full-on meth addict. The key to Barbie's salvation is smuggled into his prison cell via Corn Flakes; the guards spit and flick their boogers into the Corn Flakes, and King lingers over a description of one booger (laced with blood). At the bottom is a note explaining the first steps for Barbie's release from jail. Meanwhile, the once-powerful Rennie seems to be shrinking; his health is getting worse and worse, just as his son seems to be slowly losing his mind. And Andi throws off her OxyContin addiction to become a crime-fighting warrior goddess (at least, that's what I predict for her). Another fairy-tale twist: Do you remember when Rennie murdered the pastor with his gold-pl...

If you're bored with a given scene ("Under the Dome"), it's certain King will take you somewhere different within two pages. And the places are lurid. Our hero must watch as his captor pees all over his belongings. The heavens become almost black when the sun goes behind a particular patch of pollutants on the dome. A woman discovers her neighbor--now dead by self-inflicted gunshot wound, and floating in a puddle of blood. And then there's Jim Rennie--viewing his own storm troopers as expendable, setting up individual minions for failure. (And maybe King was thinking about Mitt Romney here.) It's also worth noting that King pays a good deal of attention to marital love--in this book, in the JFK novel, and in "On Writing." He lingers over the very-adult reconciliation of Linda and her husband, which becomes very sexual very quickly. People swallow their pride and use humor to get what they want. Like Val McDermid's characters, the smart ones, in...

OK, I have to say some things about Taylor Swift now. For a while, I dismissed "Gorgeous." I dismissed it because it didn't have emotional oomph. Also, the NYTimes said it "starts promising but runs out of ideas." I think I haven't given it its due. Just a few things to notice. As usual, it's a song about ambivalence. The boys in the song are less important than the idea of a Divided Self; this is TS's bread and butter; like Chekhov, TS recognizes that ambivalence is the universal human condition. So: TS is "so happy, it turns back to sad"; TS notes there's nothing she hates more than "what I can't have." ("Wondering if I just dodged a bullet or just lost the love of my life." "And I wish I could run to you; and every time I don't, I almost do.") To me, the nicest moments are classic Taylor-the-Student-of-Human-Behavior snippets. So, the young lady is so disturbed by her surge of feelings, she not...

The fun King has here reminds me of some of the pseudo-science of "11.22.63"; there, if you went back in time and changed just one detail of history, there could be a butterfly effect, causing cataclysms greater than anything you'd ever imagined. So, sparing JFK's life might seem to be a good thing, but it could actually lead to an apocalyptic war with Russia and Cuba (!). Or: preventing some random dude from hacking at his wife with a meat cleaver might seem like a good idea, but, through dazzling chains of cause-and-effect, it might somehow lead to the destruction of an entire continent. Portents and weird moments of soothsaying also unite "11.22.63" with "Under the Dome." In the former, there's a bizarre Yellow Card Man who seems to advise the narrator about terrible stuff down the road. (In this way, he's like the three witches in "Macbeth.") In "Under the Dome," children appear to have seizures, and to say scary t...

OK. Some other notable “Under the Dome” features: (1) The villainous father/son pair. King would return to this with “Mr. Mercedes,” but with a twist: It’s the mom, there, who spawns the villain. (And she makes him sleep with her. He responds with confusion and rage and self-delusion; he can’t consciously accept that what’s happening is wrong, because this would shatter him. King does this troubling mix so well.) In “Under the Dome,” you have the villain, Junior, viewing his evil father from a distance. The father has done bad things; he runs the country’s largest meth lab; he murdered his wife. Junior, too, goes on sprees; he kills two women and stores them in his attic, then begins to think about mating with their rotting corpses. It’s such fun to watch Junior interact with his father, because you know things won’t turn out well between these two. Thieves fall out. (2) The unexplained event. One element of the Gothic is lingering mystery. We don’t see the baby in “Rosemary’s Baby...