Liars and Saints

  "Are you Martha Boyle?" Martha nodded. "You don't know me," said the woman at the door. "Olive Barstow was my daughter. I was her mother." Martha heard herself gasp. A small, barely audible gasp. "I don't know how well you knew Olive," said the woman. "She was so shy." The woman reached into the pocket of the odd smock she was wearing and retrieved a folded piece of paper. "But I found this in her journal, and I think she'd want you to have it." The rusty screen that separated them gave the woman a gauzy appearance. Martha cracked open the door to receive the pink rectangle.... This is from Kevin Henkes's masterwork, "Olive's Ocean," and it's almost like a parody of other Henkes writing. The hushed quality, the melodrama, the subtle weirdness (note that "odd smock") of the characters....I'm suddenly transported to Henkes Country, where mice worry about deterioratin...

Guess who's in the news? It's Stephen Sondheim. John Mulaney has written a parody of a documentary regarding the taping of a cast album of an original Sondheim show, "Company." This is what happens when you are Stephen Sondheim. The NYT called Sondheim to ask what he thought of the spoof, and he said, bluntly: "I liked it fine. The people I watched with hadn't seen the original documentary, so they didn't get the spoof at all. Does Mulaney understand that? Does he understand this will be funny only for a very small audience?" And Mulaney--and his friend, Seth Meyers--couldn't care less. Just thrilled to be upbraided by Stephen. "Thank you, Mr. Sondheim." The Times piece ends with a joke. The joke is this: "Sondheim, what did you think of the actual songs in the spoof?" Sondheim, without apparent irony: "I'd have to listen again. The lyrics are a bit crowded." The joke? How could Sondheim accuse another wr...

The aching, crying need for will and purpose in your life--anybody's life--was something Charles Shepard knew about from long and helpless experience. He was a retired army officer, a man with poetic habits of thought that he'd always tried to suppress, and it often seemed that his own capacity for zeal had vanished with the Armistice of 1918. As an impassioned young second lieutenant of infantry, newly married to the prettiest girl at the officers' club dance and reasonably sure she would pray for him, he had arrived in France three days after the war ended--and his disappointment was so intense that more than a few other officers had to tell him, impatiently, not to be silly about it. "I'm NOT," he would insist, "I'm NOT." But he always knew there'd be no escaping the truth; he had even begun to suspect that a queasy sense of abortion might haunt the rest of his life. This passage from Richard Yates's "Cold Spring Harbor...

I'm pretty awful with middle schoolers. This wasn't a happy time in my own life, and I don't recall a truckload of gracious adults working to "connect" with me when I was in seventh or eighth grade. (I do remember a teacher confronting me after a big speech, a speech I was proud of. I imagined this teacher might say something nice. Instead, he rolled his eyes and said, "Your collar buttons were undone the whole time." A comment that seemed small to the adult--but not to the middle-school kid. A moment I'll never forget.) When I try to "relate" to my middle schoolers, I lean heavily on movies. I once asked a group of tweens if they had seen "A Star Is Born": The smartest of the group guffawed and said, "We *might* have gone to see that....if we were forty-year-old housewives." I later learned that this kid had recently given a big presentation on Stephen  Sondheim,  and that her mother writes books on Dolly Parton for a...

Tim Burton will soon be in the news for "Dumbo," and I can't wait. Do you know what I sit around hoping for, in this world? I hope for a live-action remake of "Dumbo," with witchy Eva Green doing nefarious things in the shadows. And do you know who is here to supply my "fix"? It's Tim Burton. One of the greatest things I bought this year was "Ed Wood," by Tim Burton. You can purchase it on Amazon. The opening credits involve spaceships and creatures from black lagoons and tombstones. Eerie high-pitched zombie music plays. You're swept into another world. The protagonist--whom Burton clearly loves--just wants to explore his interests through art. Those interests: outer space, cross-dressing, reviving the dead, squid-monsters. Ed Wood seems not to have talent, or a high level of quality control, but he has zeal. He has a thirst for improvisation. He has a vision, and he will stop at nothing to realize his dreams. The greatness here ...

Sometimes, the best available fiction is Kevin Henkes's "Chrysanthemum." Henkes has a standard plot. A character is anxious about some aspect of himself. The character is not *wrong* to be anxious; in other words, the perceived problem is a *real* problem. Foolish adults tell the character not to worry, and this advice isn't helpful at all. The character continues to worry. Finally, the character meets someone who has *his same problem* -- and the knowledge that others are making their way through the world, flawed, struggling rather than suffering, is somehow *enough* ....Our main character decides he can *go on* .... I'm thinking of "Wemberly Worried," where Wemberly should indeed worry. She knows that she is a wreck. Her parents say, basically, "Stop being a wreck" ....and this gets her nowhere. It's only a chance meeting with another insane child-mouse -- in school -- that gives Wemberly the courage she needs to proceed. The same...

Did you spend the weekend contemplating Burke Ramsey's (possible) involvement in the death of Jonbenet? Then tune in here! Some thoughts.... -You can tell a great deal from a title. Michelle McNamara's beautiful site--"True Crime Diary"--has a modest, thoughtful title. (McNamara wrote one of my all-time favorite books, "I'll Be Gone in the Dark," and I wish someone else would do something similarly great this year.) By contrast, the inconsistent, sloppy site "True Crime Diva" has a title that seems to broadcast the fact of its writer's prickliness. And, indeed, the writer is a diva--and not in a "positive" sense. She proudly announces that she won't correct factual inaccuracies in her own writing. She brazenly speculates without a great deal of evidence. (Her Maura Murray post is one example of real *unearned* confidence.) Worst, True Crime Diva is bizarrely rude and aggressive when people raise questions about her the...

Isaac Mizrahi, Tom Perrotta, Janet Malcolm, Lorrie Moore: All are united by their love of Philip Roth. My father had lost most of the sight in his right eye by the time he'd reached eighty-six, but otherwise he seemed in phenomenal health for a man his age when he came down with what the Florida doctor diagnosed, incorrectly, as Bell's palsy, a viral infection that causes paralysis, usually temporary, to one side of the face. The paralysis appeared, out of nowhere, the day after he had flown from New Jersey to West Palm Beach to spend the winter months sharing a sublet apartment with a retired bookkeeper of seventy, Lillian Beloff, who lived upstairs from him in Elizabeth, and with whom he had become romantically involved a year after my mother died in 1981. At the West Palm airport, he had been feeling so fit that he hadn't even bothered with a porter (whom, besides, he would have to tip), and carried his own luggage from the baggage area all the way out to the taxi st...

(3) Ben Platt is getting plaudits for having released a new album, and for having "bravely" addressed his anxiety "in song." People swoon whenever someone owns up to having anxiety. Here's my problem with this. The "I own up to having anxiety" moment renders insignificant the question: Does this artist have anything new to say? You can't criticize the song, because that would be taken as an attack on a good guy! A guy who bravely admits he has anxiety! I find Platt's new single "Ease My Mind" deeply boring and cliched. Here's the plot. Ben wakes up with nameless, sourceless anxiety all the time! It eats away at him! His life is difficult! But a hunky young man is really helpful. That hunky young man continuously appears in Platt's kitchen, and helps to "ease" Platt's "mind." I think--if you're going to be banal--then just write about sex. Be raunchy and playful. Years before Platt, another Broad...

That night when he came to claim her, he stood on the short lawn before her house, his knees bent, his fists driven into his thighs, and bellowed her name with such passion that even the friends who surrounded him, who had come to support him, to drag her from the house, to murder her family if they had to, let the chains they carried go limp in their hands. Even the men from our neighborhood, in Bermuda shorts or chinos, white T-shirts and gray suit pants, with baseball bats and snow shovels held before them like rifles, even they paused in their rush to protect her: the good and the bad--the black-jacketed boys and the fathers in their light summer clothes--startled for that one moment before the fighting began by the terrible, piercing sound of his call. This is serious, my own father remembered thinking at that moment. This is insane. I remember only that my ten-year-old heart was stopped by the beauty of it all. Sheryl was her name, but he cried, "Sherry," drawing ...

The Academy Awards! Reliably among the most boring TV spectacles in any annual schedule. Awarding work that sometimes isn't distinguished, awarding work that sometimes isn't even very good. And yet: the gowns! The occasional triumph of a deserving movie, such as "Spotlight"! Trivia! As John Waters has said, "If you aren't obsessed, you are NOTHING." Join me in this trivial obsession! -A woman once won an Oscar for playing a man. She was Caucasian, and she was playing an Asian man. This wouldn't fly today. People loved the movie; the actress is still alive; and she seems, still, to take pride in her performance. -Timothy Hutton won for "Ordinary People"--youngest ever, in that category--and then he did *not* disappear. He didn't! You could see him as the head coach in season two of that relentlessly gloomy soap opera, "American Crime," not to be confused with "American Crime Story." He was facing off against sli...

She keeps being sick. A woman in the washroom says: "You'd be better off in the fresh air. Wouldn't you go up on the deck?" It's cold on the deck and the wind hurts her ears. When she has been sick over the rail she feels better and goes downstairs again, to where she was sitting before she went to the washroom. The clothes she picked out for her journey are in two green carrier bags; the money is in her handbag. She had to pay for the carrier bags in Chawke's, fifty pence each. They have Chawke's name on them, and a Celtic pattern round the edge. At the bureau de change she has been given English notes in exchange for her Irish ones.  Not many people are traveling. Shrieking and pretending to lose their balance, schoolchildren keep passing by where she is huddled. A family sits quietly in the corner, all of them with their eyes closed. Two elderly women and a priest are talking about English race-courses..... - Just in time for St. Patrick's D...

Here is how Raymond Carver opens a story: Carlyle was in a spot. He'd been in a spot all summer, since early June when his wife had left him. But up until a little while ago, just a few days before he had to start meeting his classes at the high school, Carlyle hadn't needed a sitter. He'd been the sitter. Every day and every night he'd attended to the children. Their mother, he told them, was away on a long trip. Debbie, the first sitter he contacted, was a fat girl, nineteen years old, who told Carlyle she came from a big family. Kids loved her, she said. She offered a couple of names for reference. She penciled them on a piece of notebook paper. Carlyle took the names, folded the piece of paper, and put it in his shirt pocket. He told her he had meetings the next day. He said she could start to work for him the next morning. She said, "Okay." I don't generally love short stories. I find that the work required to sink into the world of a story isn...

From Raymond Carver, the concise history of a relationship: So Roxy and J.P. saw some movies together. They went to a few dances. But mainly the courtship revolved around their cleaning chimneys together. Before you know it, J.P. says, they're talking about tying the knot. And after a while they do it, they get married. J.P.'s new father-in-law takes him in as a full partner. In a year or so, Roxy has a kid. She's quit being a chimney sweep. At any rate, she's quit doing the work. Pretty soon she has another kid. J.P. is in his mid-twenties by now. He's buying a house. He says he was happy with his life. "I was happy with the way things were going," he says. "I had everything I wanted. I had a wife and kids I loved, and I was doing what I wanted to do with my life." But for some reason—who knows why we do what we do?—his drinking picks up. For a long time he drinks beer and beer only. Any kind of beer—it didn't matter. He says he could drin...

Bored at work? Frustrated with people who aren't returning your calls? It's time to contemplate the greatness of Michelle Pfeiffer. -Ms. Pfeiffer has been called a character actress in a movie star's body. In other words, she is stunningly beautiful but also she is an idiosyncratic and surprising performer. My husband wondered if Ms. Pfeiffer's dazzling beauty has actually kept her from being taken as seriously as we might wish; I doubt this. Emma Stone, Jennifer Lawrence, and Natalie Portman are all glamorous and lovely people who also have Academy Awards. -I do think that Ms. Pfeiffer made some questionable choices at the peak of her career. She was wanted--ardently--for "Thelma and Louise." She said no. People wanted her for "Silence of the Lambs"--but the material was, in her view, "too dark." Just imagine what could have been! -During her hiatus from acting, Ms. Pfeiffer painted. Yes! She made paintings. She couldn't stop her...

Raymond Carver's "Where I'm Calling From," continued: In his chair on the front porch, J.P. keeps his hands in his lap. I smoke cigarettes and use an old coal bucket for an ashtray. I listen to J.P. ramble on. It's eleven o'clock in the morning—an hour and a half until lunch. Neither one of us is hungry. But just the same we look forward to going inside and sitting down at the table. Maybe we'll get hungry.     What's J.P. talking about, anyway? He's saying how when he was twelve years old he fell into a well in the vicinity of the farm he grew up on. It was a dry well, lucky for him. "Or unlucky," he says, looking around him and shaking his head. He says how late that afternoon, after he'd been located, his dad hauled him out with a rope. J.P. had wet his pants down there. He'd suffered all kinds of terror in that well, hollering for help, waiting, and then hollering some more. He hollered himself hoarse before it was over. But...

**Imelda Staunton is riveting in the Amazon Prime $2.99 rental, "Gypsy." Big surprise. What is genuinely notable is how moving Louise is. The director seems to have chosen an actress specifically meant to evoke thoughts of Laura Benanti (smart move). I was especially touched--and unnerved--by "Little Lamb," in which Louise, normally a picture of stillness and quiet, hints at her inner life. She suggests to us that she has dreams of escape. She does this by singing--creepily--to her stuffed animals. Everything about the moment is deliberately "off"; Louise is too old to be doing this. "Will I get my wish?" Louise asks, of a stuffed fish, and we're left to infer what that wish might be. Famously, the song ends: "Little lamb, little lamb....I wonder how old I am...." and we're struck by the realization that life under Rose's thumb means not even knowing how old you are. It's like a moment from Catherine Keener's ...

The opening paragraph from Carver's "Where I'm Calling From": J.P. and I are on the front porch at Frank Martin's drying-out facility. Like the rest of us at Frank Martin's, J.P. is first and foremost a drunk. But he's also a chimney sweep. It's his first time here, and he's scared. I've been here once before. What's to say? I'm back. J.P.'s real name is Joe Penny, but he says I should call him J.P. He's about thirty years old. Younger than I am. Not much younger, but a little. He's telling me how he decided to go into his line of work, and he wants to use his hands when he talks. But his hands tremble. I mean, they won't keep still. "This has never happened to me before," he says. He means the trembling. I tell him I sympathize. I tell him the shakes will idle down. And they will. But it takes time.... -Raymond Carver: the poet of loss. The bard of weirdos--and we're all weirdos, in one way or another...

It's trendy to dislike Anne Tyler's novels. Even Ron Charles--who praises almost everything in "The Washington Post"--had some reservations about the most recent Tyler novel, "Clock Dance." Bizarrely, Lorrie Moore makes some observations about Tyler in an essay on "The Wire." Moore notes all the prominent Baltimore artists who get shout-outs in "The Wire," then points out the omission of references to Tyler. Moore then speculates that the omission is a result of Tyler's work's refusal to change; Tyler isn't in "The Wire" because she hasn't "kept up with the times." All of this makes me think of a funny and astute essay Hilary Mantel wrote about Anita Brookner toward the end of Brookner's career. Brookner had fallen out of favor, in some circles, because she had written about too many gloomy protagonists. Enough already, people said. Write about someone who sticks to a Prozac regimen--someone who...

The opening of Alice McDermott's "After This": Leaving the church, she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit against her stockings and her cheeks--the slivered shards of mad sunlight in her eyes. She paused, still on the granite steps, touched the brim of her hat and the flying hem of her skirt--felt the wind rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves. And all before her, the lunch-hour crowd bent under the April sun and into the bitter April wind, jackets flapping and eyes squinting, or else skirts pressed to the backs of legs and jacket hems pressed to bottoms. And trailing them, outrunning them, skittering along the gutter and the sidewalk and the low gray steps of the church, banging into ankles and knees and one another, scraps of paper, newspapers, candy wrappers, what else?--office memos? shopping lists? The paper detritus that she had somewhere read, or had heard it said, trails armies, or was it (she had seen a photograph) the scraps of lette...

Where did Michael Connelly come from? He was a reporter--just as Laura Lippman was a reporter. And Jane Harper. At some point mid-career, Connelly decided to write a novel, and it won a major prize, right off the bat. Connelly values art; he bought a home just because it had played a role in another writer's work, and he also has a large print of Bosch's "Hell," a painting from the 1490s, in his office. The painting "Hell" is an example of world-building. It has many fantastical characters--bumping into one another, pursuing idiosyncratic agendas. Connelly thinks of his own work in the way Bosch may have thought of "Hell": Connelly has invented a world, and he returns to it again and again, adding complications. (This is also how Louise Penny views her work. Three Pines, the fictional town she has invented, serves as a kind of escape for her. Part of the fun of her books--which I find intermittently irritating--is knowing that you'll in...

Since we're looking at a new version of "Gypsy," down the road, I have to say I'm a bit obsessed with "Let Me Entertain You": Let me entertain you Let me make you smile Let me do a few tricks Some old and some new tricks I'm very versatile And if you're real good I'll make you feel good I want your spirits to climb So let me entertain you And we'll have a real good time, yes sir We'll have a real good time This is a song that Rose presumably wrote (Sondheim is writing as Rose-the-writer), and it is reprised ad nauseam throughout the first act. We hear it over and over, and we sense that Rose can't be bothered to generate new material (and we also feel some of the exhaustion that Rose herself is surely feeling). What I love: -The song is a bit needy. "Let me entertain you": The writer is pleading with us. Wouldn't a more "effortless" performer simply launch into the entertainment? But Rose actually can...

I can't get enough of "Crime Junkie." It's two women who pick lurid cases and then discuss the storylines. Real-world, true crime cases. There aren't any gimmicks. The ladies aren't sipping wine, having digressions about their hometown, or attempting stand-up routines. They're extremely disciplined. Podcasting seems to be a democratic field--perhaps *too* democratic. You don't need to impress funders. You don't need to reach a broad demographic. You just need to record yourself. This means that quality control tends to be fairly minimal. I admire the "Crime Junkie" experts because they write a script, they stick to a tight thirty-five minutes, and they know how to tell a story. They can make your hair stand on end. Also, they pick enjoyably complex tales: the murder of Robert Wone, the baffling disappearance of Asha Degree. Their most recent piece is a small work of art. It concerns a woman, Sneha Philip, I'd never heard abo...

**"Frozen II" is now an idea in the world. We have a trailer. A story happens when a character goes on a journey. The writers of "Frozen II" have--intelligently--opted for a literal journey. Elsa will leave her kingdom. How do you leave? By crossing the ocean. How do you cross? If you're Elsa, you do this by casting a temporary spell on the waves, so that they become ice-bridges. But the ice lasts only for a moment, so your life is in danger. Kinetic, unusual film-making. I'm hooked! **The newest Bosch novel has odd mysteries: A woman who seems to have been attacked really just had her face eaten off, postmortem, by a hungry cat. A semi-sinister sidewalk preacher may or may not have murdered a young girl. In another subplot, bullet-trajectory analysis suggests that a bullet might have boomeranged, after having been released, and assailed a certain shooter "in the balls." If only we could find a badly-injured man who paid a recent visit to the hos...

The first graders will do "Rose and Thorn." This is in reference to the song "Every Rose Has Its Thorn." Rose: a pleasant recent memory. Thorn: A memory you can live without. Reflecting on their week, the first graders actually cannot produce a thorn. Everything is amazing all of the time! "My rose," says one child, "is everything. And my ultra-rose is designing a mansion for rich dogs. " (A trend in education is MakerSpace, where all the kids use tin foil and cardboard tubes and dental floss to erect models of world-saving devices. Recently, the first graders have been asking: How can we design spaces for animals in need ? It's unclear why my students have chosen to focus on *rich* dogs, but I suppose rich dogs have needs, just as any other dogs have needs. The design question came from my colleague, whose pug is dying. I find it touching that he has channeled his feelings into a MakerSpace project. He arrives at work stricken, making re...

They drove east through the desert towns: Hesperia to Victorville to Barstow to Yermo, past the dusty bed of Soda Lake, dry now, a ghostly crater waiting for rain. The route was familiar, a memory stored in his bones. The return trip, Sandy had driven in every condition--exhausted, panicked, blind drunk, sick with shame. But the eastbound journey occurred, always, under controlled conditions. They'd left L.A. at three in the afternoon. YOU'RE CRAZY, said Myron Gold, whose car he'd borrowed this time. IT'S THE HOTTEST PART OF THE DAY. But the timing was no accident; it was part of the protocol: rolling into Vegas at first dark, slipping away (this was the hope) before dawn. Vegas at noon would look stripped and diminished, like a Christmas tree in daylight. It was no place he wanted to see. This extraordinary paragraph opens "A Place in the Sun," a story by Jennifer Haigh. Little bombs, deposited, awaiting a chance to be detonated. Who are "they"? ...