Liars and Saints

It was a party that had lasted too long; and tired of the voices, a little too animated, and the liquor, a little too available, and thinking it would be nice to be alone, thinking I'd escape, for a brief interval, those smiles which pinned you against the piano or those questions which trapped you wriggling in a chair, I went out to look at the ocean. There it was, exactly as advertised, a dark and heavy swell, and far out the lights of some delayed ship moving slowly south. I stared at the water, across a frontier of a kind, while behind me, from the brightly lit room with its bamboo bar and its bamboo furniture, the voices, detailing a triumph or recounting a joke, of those people who were not entirely strangers and not exactly friends, continued. It seemed silly to stay, tired as I was and the party dying; it seemed silly to go, with nothing home but an empty house.... This is another Alfred Hayes book, "My Face for the World to See," and it's just as strong a...

Ian Rankin has identified three important stages in any good crime novel: the crime, the cover-up, and the investigation. Obviously, the investigation is the least-sexy part. There's an inevitable let-down once you know who the killer is (which is often before the detectives, so then there's some slogging required). Ruth Rendell solved this problem by saving the resolution for (literally, sometimes) the last sentence. Val McDermid addresses the issue by injecting constant, twisty workplace politics into the investigation. PD James had a real  blindspot  with resolutions. She would have a thrilling wrap-up to the hunt for the murderer, but then she would go on and on, for additional pages, about Dalgliesh's love life.  Who ever  cared about that love life?  Who ever  cared about those final twenty pages? Janet Malcolm does not write crime fiction, but she does write a bizarre variant on a standard true crime story. One thing I love about her work is th...

One thing Sondheim "paints" well is bad faith. It can be a source of humor, or poignancy, or both. You see it in the arrangement between Fredrik and Anne, and you see it again between Sweeney and Lovett. There are parallels. Fredrik has married Anne when, in fact, he wants Desiree. Anne has married Fredrik when, in fact, she wants Henrik. Unhappy in their situation, unable to admit the depths of their own unhappiness, the two must make do with a kind of hypocritical non-life. (Does this sound funny? I guess it doesn't.) Sondheim goes to town on Anne. He imagines that she does not really *see* her husband; she calls him "dear old," and believes that this is affectionate, but of  course  we can infer that Fredrik doesn't love the nickname. I also love that "dear old" just trails off. "Dear old WHAT?" What is the noun?? Anne has so little interest in sex with Fredrik, she can't even enumerate some activities she'd like to try...

Home early for once. Maybe he'd start getting home early regularly now August had begun, the silly season. Criminals as well as the law-abiding take their holidays in August. As he turned the car into his own road, Wexford remembered his grandsons would be there. Good. It would be light for another three hours, and he'd take Robin and Ben down to the river. Robin was always on about the river because his mother had read The Wind in the Willows  to him, and his great desire was to see a water rat swimming. Sylvia's car was parked outside the house. Odd, thought Wexford. He'd understood Dora was having the boys for the afternoon as well as the evening and that they'd be staying the night. As he edged his own car past his daughter's into the drive, she came running out of the house with a screaming Ben in her arms and six-year-old Robin looking truculent at her heels....   "A Sleeping Life" is one of only two Wexford novels to earn a nomination for ...

With Sondheim,  sound  often  re-enforces  sense. In other words, you get the impression he has chosen particular words specifically because they have a dead or dull sound (or the opposite). That sound  re-enforces  the atmosphere Sondheim is trying to create. Here's an example. It's a middle-aged man who has tried to hang on to virility by marrying a virginal adolescent wife. (And how many other writers would use this worldly scenario on the Broadway musical stage?) The problem is that the man--let's call him E--has never wondered whether he is compatible with his new wife, Anne. And Anne is such a child, she refuses any kind of physical intimacy. So E, a horny old lawyer, asks himself how he can get his rocks off. (Sondheim says that humor more often comes from an absurd situation than from a well-crafted line, and this is an inherently funny situation.) E thinks aloud--and, because he is a lawyer, he labels his daydreams: "(A) I could ravish her,...

This is ridiculous! What am I doing here? I'm in the wrong story! "Into the Woods" is sometimes marketed for kids, though I don't think it's a kids' story. This is my problem with the movie. The movie seems to nail the First Act, which is easy to nail. It's pleasing, it ends with crisp resolutions, people behave as we expect them to behave (more or less). But the Second Act is bizarre; it should be unapologetically bizarre. Maybe it should even feel stylistically separate, or detached, from Act One. The Baker's Wife  cheats . The smart, sympathetic heroine "strays"--and it's not even with a great guy, but with a jackass, and BW maybe *recognizes* that the guy is a jackass. To me, the moment of BW's "transgression" is revolutionary for musical theater; it's maybe up there with the "bench scene" from "Carousel." You're just not prepared. In fact, you're prepared for the opposite, given th...

What is a plot? It's an effort one character makes to get what he wants. If you have an ambition, duplicitousness will almost certainly follow. It's in the nature of human behavior. You package your motives in nice, fancy paper, and you hope that no one looks too closely. You try to get other people to behave in the way you desire--and misunderstandings and comedy almost certainly pop up, as a result. For Shakespeare, a metaphor for life's messiness was cross-dressing.  You have  a grand dream? The realization of that dream will almost always entail pretending to be a  boy,  when you're a  girl,  or vice versa. At least in the land of Shakespeare. For John le Carre, a wish almost always involves spying. You pretend to be an ally when you're not, and you gather info covertly, and the tension inherent in a "performance" is the tension that keeps readers turning pages. In my view, one of the most scintillating recent Broadway plots is not actually from a ...

From now to Christmas, I'm making an effort to catalogue every thought I've had about Broadway. Uninterested in musical theater? Check out now. The thoughts won't be in any particular order, but just as they come to me. My model here is--bizarrely--"Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man," which is also just a collection of thoughts and memories. So: here goes. -This morning, I wrote about "The Glamorous Life." There's something else I want to say about Sondheim's work in that song. The girl seems often to be pointing out the artifice in her mother's work: Desiree is "brought on by inches," "coughing for hours" while remaining poised, sporting a glass broach, struggling with unraveling costumes. It seems to me that the threadbare nature of Desiree's work parallels the threadbare lie in Desiree's home. The girl is on the brink of unearthing a painful truth. The mother/daughter relationship is not what she insist...

Ordinary mothers lead ordinary lives— Keep the house and sweep the parlor, Mend the clothes and tend the children. Ordinary mothers, like ordinary wives, Make the beds and bake the pies And wither on the vine... Not mine. Dying by inches every night— What a glamorous life! Pulled on by winches to recite— What a glamorous life! Ordinary mothers never get the flowers, And ordinary mothers never know the joys, But ordinary mothers couldn't cough for hours, Maintaining their poise..... Sondheim makes it look easy. But it's not easy. Walk through the first sentence. Content dictates form: The hum-drum, oppressive life the speaker describes is paired with blunt, stressed syllables, "keep the house," "sweep the parlor," "mend the clothes," "tend the children." Monosyllabic verbs, each with one direct object. "Keep," "sweep," "mend," "tend." And there's the greatness of the last word: "children...

* If it's a novel, keep it under 300 pages. Who wants to stay with a story for over 300 pages? This is why I can't read Russell Banks's "Affliction." How self-indulgent: To imagine the tale on your tongue requires so many stacks of paper! My old teacher, Amy Bloom, tried to write "medicine-ball prose." Very few sentences, but each sentence contained a great deal of mass (a great deal of meaning). To those who insist on stretching out over 400, or 500, pages, I'd say: Why not take a lesson from Chekhov and simply abandon the First Act? Act Two becomes Act One. Simple! Why can't I read Tana French's new novel? It's over 500 pages, and also, she's incapable of writing a sentence as clean as: "I was tired." Instead, it's always: "I was one-foot-in-the-grave tired, so tired I'd lost touch with reality, sleep-stunned, zombie state, can't-even-remember-my-name exhausted." Good grief. Who wants to read nons...

Lionel Sampson reads to his brother from the flight magazine. "'The Seeing Eye dog was invented by a blind American.'" Buster laughs. "Really. Invented . Man must have gone through a hell of a lot of dogs." Julia's sons, Buster and Lionel, are flying from Paris to Boston, to be picked up and driven to their mother's house for Thanksgiving. Their driver will be an old Russian guy they've had before, big belly, a few missing teeth, with cold bottled water and The New York Times in the backseat. The two men are as happy as clams not to be driving in Buster's wife's minivan with all the kids and their laptops and iPods and duffel bags and Jewelle's gallon containers of creamed spinach and mashed sweet potatoes, which Jewelle now brings rather than making them at her mother-in-law's, because now that Julia's getting on, although the house is clean and Jewelle is not saying it's *not* clean, you do have to tidy up a little b...

I was wrong about Nora Ephron's "I Remember Nothing." I thought it was shameless. I thought it should not have been marketed as a book. It's only approximately 130 pages, after all. But: Think about it. Do you really want to read a book of personal essays that extends well beyond 130 pages? It seems to me that that's really the perfect length. And the essays themselves are short and (mostly) sweet. There are a couple of stinkers. The one about going to the movies doesn't seem to have a point. The one about Internet Scrabble also seems a bit threadbare. Wisely, Ephron buried these essays in the middle of the book. (It's like when you're listening to Taylor Swift's "Reputation," and you skip right over "So It Goes" and "Look What You Made Me Do.") But consider the gems! Ephron looked at the things that were hard and ugly in her life. Unlike others, she chose to make these things the centerpiece of her work. So, for...

(5) It's Monday, and it's time to talk about Taylor Swift. Have you noticed what an effective song "I Wish You Would" is? This is, like so many other TS songs, a statement about ambivalence. "What a crooked love; we're a straight line down." "Makes you want to run and hide, but it made us turn right back around." "You gave me everything and nothing." A lesser writer would present an all-or-nothing scenario: Either the ex is awful, or he is a lost treasure. But in TS's hands, the ex is BOTH awful AND a lost treasure. I love this lady. Just had to say that. (4) Here are your true crime stories for the week. Two Dutch ladies went missing in Panama a few years ago. Then their bones were found: pelvic bone, foot in  boot . It was thought they'd simply injured themselves and then starved to death. But why weren't there marks of animal teeth on the bones? The other story: A small kid falls off a balcony in California and dies. ...

I see the sun has knocked you out. But let's not overdo it, eh. It's supposed to go up to ninety today. Maybe I should get you some water. And while I'm at it a nice tall glass of iced tea for myself. Oh, look at that. Butterflies. A whole swarm of them, floating like a small white cloud across the lawn. I don't think I've ever seen so many flying together like that, though it's not unusual to see them in pairs. Cabbage whites, I think. Too far to tell if there are black dots on the wings. They should watch out for you, o eater of insects. One snap of those jaws would take out most of them. But there they go, heading right for you, as if you were no more than a giant rock lying in the grass. They shower you like confetti, and you--not a twitch! Oh, what a sound. What could that gull have seen to make it cry out like that? The butterflies are in the air again, moving off, in the direction of the shore. I want to call your name, but the word dies in my...

During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, they had witnessed the atrocities for which the Khmer Rouge, which had been in power from 1975 to 1979, was well known. Many of the women had been raped or tortured or otherwise brutalized. Most had seen family members murdered in front of them. One woman, who never again saw her husband and three children after soldiers came and took them away, said that she had lost her sight after having cried every day for four years. She was not the only one who appeared to have cried herself blind. Others suffered from blurred or partial vision, their eyes troubled by shadows and pains. The doctors who examined the women--about a hundred and fifty in all--found that their eyes were normal. Further tests showed that their brains were normal as well. If the women were telling the truth--and there were ...

I feel bad about my stomach. Like Nora Ephron, I have tried to combat my "body issue." Unlike Nora Ephron, I haven't tried very hard. Ephron didn't like her small breasts, and so she would sleep in a certain position for years, believing that this would change things. She would purchase physique-altering garments. She would change her diet. None of this worked, of course. To combat the issue of my stomach, I lazily step onto a treadmill. I do this maybe once or twice per week. Tops. The duration of my treadmill visit is four songs. And they're Taylor Swift songs, so they aren't particularly long. It's not like four Adele songs. I'm so irritated at the thought of visiting the treadmill, I refuse to make any concession to normal behavior. I do not change into "gym clothing." I do not "stretch" or "hydrate." I strip down to my underwear and my argyle socks--impatiently--and I throw on some ratty old shoes, and that'...