Liars and Saints

This is a recent book from Kevin Henkes. It concerns five figurines who stare through a window. The bear-with-sled waits for snow. The owl waits for the moon. And so on. Sometimes, the figurines "sleep." (They get knocked over.) Sometimes, one leaves--but the departing figure inevitably returns. Just when you imagine there won't be a plot, a new figure arrives. A little porcelain cat. And the cat doesn't have an umbrella; she isn't waiting for rain. She doesn't have a kite; she isn't waiting for wind. Baffled by the cat, you wonder if she is without purpose. And, just then: She explodes. She is a "matryoshka doll"; she has been "waiting" to give birth to the four little porcelain cats hidden inside of her. There is a real sense of wonder when the matryoshka doll explodes; for a moment, you're a kid, able to feel thrilled by a little piece of porcelain. Other artists wouldn't pay attention to this moment; certainly, other artists...

 Obviously, it's important for Joshua to have early exposure to a "queer studies" curriculum. This can take many forms, and in my hands, it's a Survey of the History of the Suffering Diva. Josh wasn't thrilled when I made him watch "Sudden Fear," starring Joan Crawford. In this one, an aging Crawford marries a much younger man, and she thinks it's love, love, love, but really the man wants to kill her. Crawford is ferocious, and she earned a third Oscar nomination for her work--and watching made me recall that Josh still hasn't seen "Mildred Pierce" or "Baby Jane." Josh sat quietly for around three minutes, then he threw himself from my lap and tried to eat a power cord.   Great acting isn't just a product of the black-and-white era; today, we have Olivia Colman. I haven't shown Josh a Colman masterwork--Suffering Diva Fireworks, aka "The Favourite"--but I have introduced Josh to "Broadchurch." In t...

 "Tim and Lucy Go to Sea" starts with a normal problem: What is a kid to do all day? We're in fantasy terrain, so our kid, Tim, has a bizarre answer: Buy a yacht! Tim persuades his new friends--Lucy and Mr. Grimes--to provide the funding. (It's good to kill off the parents in a picture book, and this one wisely neglects to mention a strict mom and dad. Mr. Grimes is a kooky benefactor; he can see no issue with putting small children in charge of a large boat.) A boat brings new treats: fun jerseys with the boat name ("Evangeline") printed across the front, tales from the grizzled cook. You can stare out at sea, or up at the sky, at a passing plane. You can row a little lifeboat on short "day-trip" excursions. But any adventure also involves challenges, and this one has potential mutineers and a crabby governess, and it's unclear if Tim will win a battle on either front. (Hint: Tim manages the mutineers, and he wins over the governess.) One thin...

 My can't-wait books are usually different from the big splashy "press-sensation" books, so I'm adding my two cents, here, for the fall:   *"The Searcher." This actually will be a big splashy book. Tana French always gets buzz, sometimes more than the work deserves. You can anticipate a murder and a great deal of action; French has said she wanted to do a "market correction," because she felt her previous effort, "The Witch Elm," lacked action. *"Still Life." No one reads Val McDermid. Well, I read Val McDermid. I think she is among the best thriller writers alive, much better than her colleague J.K. Rowling, who seems to borrow from her. (The Strike/Robin affair seems like a rewrite of McDermid's Carol/Tony saga, if someone had stripped McDermid of her talent.) *"Cary Grant." Scott Eyman last wrote a wonderful book about Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda; now, we're getting Eyman's thoughts on Grant. Have you ...

  My husband and I have spent our Covid months rewatching the Glenn Close vehicle "Damages." (Spoiler alert.) This is a show where Glenn Close is a crusading lawyer, but she's also not what she seems: She is herself a bully, even though she makes money by fighting bullies. Rose Byrne is her young helper; through fighting Glenn, Byrne's character becomes strong, but perhaps she becomes "too" strong, perhaps she herself becomes a bully. Over five seasons, the ladies wear many daring frocks--sleeveless sweaters, sweater-coats, snow-white "Nehru" jackets, pin-stripe suits, exquisitely-tailored cardigans. And their hair changes. Long, "natural" hair means you have abandoned Manhattan to become a virtuous stay-at-home mom. Spiky "Devil Wears Prada" hair means you have embraced ambition and lost your moral compass. (The show was written by three men, and the men really ought to have consulted with female colleagues now and then. As I r...

Americans know Trump's impeachment story, but Jeffrey Toobin tells it really well, and he adds details that I had missed, details I'll now always remember: *During the silly attempt to disrupt impeachment proceedings, Republicans bought many pizzas. The pizza-for-politicians came from an artisanal pizzeria; the pizza for reporters, a "gift," came from Domino's. Reporters mostly avoided the pizza, so it congealed in its box. (This chapter is called "Two Kinds of Pizza," perhaps a reference to the novel "Two Kinds of Truth.") *Nancy Pelosi works longer days than any colleague's days, and that's not even factoring in the hair appointment that precedes literally every single day that she is on the job. Manafort once purchased a $15,000 "ostrich coat." Trump's long red tie is weirdly long for the specific goal of paunch-concealment. When Alan Dershowitz popped up recently, he was taking a break from life in a retirement home. A...

 It's hard to imagine a better--wiser, stranger--children's book than "Rufus." I'm not sure how I made it past thirty without having discovered this book. In "Rufus," a bat happens to find himself at a drive-in movie. He has never seen color before--after all, he is nocturnal--so the blues and reds and yellows on the screen are dazzling. Rufus tells himself he must see more. He stays awake past daylight. Enchanted by the world's hues, he finds a paintbrush and a pallet, and he adds color to his own "hooks," his stomach, his wings. (I think the stomach gets "a big green star.") This is great, but of course the intolerant world concludes that Rufus is a monster; someone tries to shoot Rufus out of the sky. A friendly entomologist rescues Rufus, and the two pursue moths together, and eventually Rufus returns to his nocturnal world (but he is forever enriched, forever changed). Obviously, people have seen this as an allegory for comin...

Howard Ashman won a second and final Oscar for a title song -- "Beauty and the Beast." In that year, he could have won for "Belle" or for "Be Our Guest" (both were also nominated) -- but the Academy made the right choice. There is really only one version of "Beauty and the Beast." It's not Emma Thompson's. It's not Audra's. It's not the versions authored by John Legend and by Celine Dion. The only version is the first version, Angela Lansbury's. "Beauty and the Beast" is a work of musical theater, and there's something electrifying (and "meta") about having a theater legend (Mrs. Lovett, Rose, Cora Hooper) deliver the commentary at the climax of the story. The words of the song "Beauty and the Beast" are simple and direct; they actually seem to have been handed down through generations. They do not seem to have originated at a desk in the late eighties or early nineties. And this is a case...

 Jeffrey Toobin is my dream writer. I've read all of his books but his first one; they tend to be gossipy, smart, highly-opinionated accounts of scandalous national news events. "The Run of His Life"--Toobin's book about OJ, and his masterpiece--can stand next to "In Cold Blood." (I think it's more fun than "In Cold Blood.") One of many pleasures in a new Toobin book is the sexy title. Just look at this list! "The Oath," "The Nine," "American Heiress," "A Vast Conspiracy," "Too Close To Call" -- book titles are in this guy's big, big bag of tricks. In "The Oath," Toobin had a nervous John Roberts attempting to get an oath from Barack Obama, while a bumbling Biden made foolish, unsolicited remarks in the background. The new book, "True Crimes and Misdemeanors," opens with a similar scene. This time, Mueller is meeting Trump.  Toobin takes a moment to comment. Both of these...

  As September approaches, may I remind you of a minor classic, Beverly Cleary's "Muggie Maggie": After her first day of third grade, Maggie Schultz jumped off the school bus when it stopped at her corner. "Bye, Jo Ann," she called to the girl who was her best friend, sometimes. "See you tomorrow." Maggie was happy to escape from sixth-grade boys who called her a cootie and from fourth-grade boys who insisted the third grade was awful, cursive writing hard, and Mrs. Leeper, the teacher, mean. Just to state the obvious: Nearly every sentence in this paragraph is special. Maggie doesn't simply get off the bus; she jumps off. (We see that impulsivity once again, later, in the famous "Sorry So Sloppy" note.) Jo Ann is a best friend--but, note, she is a best friend only sometimes. Also, school is hell; if you're not dodging gender-obsessed sixth-grade boys, you're contending with the fourth graders, who feel a need to mythologize thei...

 Tomi Ungerer, "Crictor": Madame Bodot is a schoolteacher in France; her son is off studying reptiles in a jungle somewhere. As a gift, a box arrives for Mme. Bodot. It's a boa constrictor. Bodot cares for her snake and researches his needs. She calls him "Crictor." In exchange for good care, Crictor provides several services. For example, he teaches small boys how to tie knots. (He himself--contorted in many ways--serves as "the knot.") He becomes a jump rope for little girls. He becomes a pedagogical device; he can twist himself into an "S," for "Snake," an "N" for "Nothing," and so on. He can turn himself into a "7," for "Seven Little Dwarfs," or an "8," for "The Eight Arms of the Octopus." At this point, Ungerer needs to toss in a conflict. He has a burglar invade Bodot's flat. Crictor ensnares the burglar; the town celebrates with an honorary sculpture; a Parisian ...

  Laura Lippman's new collection of personal essays is uneven, but God Bless Her for trying something different. A while ago, she wrote an essay about becoming a mom in one's fifties--"Game of Crones"--and the new book grew out of that. Lippman continuously pushes herself; in her late thirties, she left a newspaper job to focus on a fiction-writing career; now, as an established writer, she is attempting a new genre. An important part of essay-writing is being a contrarian--thinking "against" conventional tides--and Lippman has this mastered. "Anthony Hopkins was the least-compelling Hannibal. I don't like Ian McEwan novels. I don't feel bad about my neck, and I have decided to eat exactly what I want when I want it." Other things we learn in this book: *Lippman generally seems to have liked the final season of her husband's show, "The Wire." *Lippman sometimes dines with a Famous Actress. (I'm assuming this is Mindy Kalin...

  I'm leaving secretarial work. I ought never to have started.    A large part of being a secretary is offering false, tolerant smiles to entitled people who are shouting at you. I imagine the entitled people are far, far worse when the secretary is female. There is the cliche: The things you love about a new situation are the same things that you will come to hate. I became a secretary because the mundane, predictable tasks appealed to me. Now the predictability drives me up the wall. I think the number-one thing I hate about secretarial work is The Diplomatic E-mail Task. Your privileged client has not done the thing you've requested. You know this--clear as day--but you can't begin your follow-up email by saying, "You didn't do that simple thing you needed to do." You must feign tact, even feign a small amount of mystification: "My record indicates you have not set up your account. The record may be in error. If so, could you please..... But if the rec...

 Turner Classic Movies has just released a book on the first film version of "West Side Story." (The second film version was once slated for 2020, but don't hold your breath.) In celebration of the book, a few tidbits: *Jerome Robbins gets a great deal of credit for the movie, but clearly some of that credit belongs to his co-director, Robert Wise. *The story seems to have come from an actual news story. ("Several Teens Dead Near High-School Dance.") *Sondheim's favorite Bernstein score isn't WSS; it's "Candide." *People don't put WSS at the very top of the movie-musical pantheon; they save those spots for "Singin' in the Rain" and "Top Hat." *TCM contrasts WSS with "South Pacific" and "My Fair Lady." TCM says, when you think of the films "South Pacific" and "My Fair Lady," you think, THOSE ARE FILMED VERSIONS OF THE FAMOUS MUSICALS FROM BROADWAY. But with the film WSS, you...

 I had my doubts about music class with the baby. A big benefit seems to be social time, but the kid can't really socialize if he is in a Covid bubble. Also, can you learn anything about music if you're *one* year of age? But I attended lessons because (a) this was my husband's ardent wish and (b) a part of me was curious. That part of me was delighted--off and on. Being in baby music lessons was like stepping into an asylum. The babies stare off, glassy-eyed; sometimes, they shriek. Their nannies covertly check little iPhone screens. Basically, no dad ever, ever attends--and here I am bragging. My husband and I were DADS OF THE MILLENNIUM. A teacher--with extraordinary grace and patience and energy--would dust off her tambourine week after week, and she would ignore the stratospheric thermometer readings, and she would work for her money. She would shout at us about galloping ponies, burping frogs, twinkling stars. Around the thirty-minute mark, each class, she'd get t...

 If you're like yours truly, you've been waiting for ages for "Howard," the Disney documentary about Howard Ashman. It's here--on Disney-Plus. My husband and I watched just the beginning last night; it's immediately gripping. Ashman--as a small child--would cloister himself in his room with tiny cowboy figurines, outlaw figurines. He would add glitter and paint and new costuming to the figurines, and he would turn them into new characters, people more idiosyncratic and more complex than you might expect. (Can you draw a straight line from this to Ursula? I think you can.) Ashman would invite his sister into his room to show off his creations. The documentary jumps to one of Ashman's signature oddballs, Gaston: Right from the moment when I met her, saw her.... I said SHE'S GORGEOUS and I fell.... Here in town there's only she.... Who is beautiful as me..... So I'm making plans to woo and marry Belle.... Do you see how instantly ridiculous (and m...

 Benjamin Dreyer's totally charming book about writing mechanics, "Dreyer's English," has a few things going for it: *Dreyer writes that Cole Porter was generally excellent with English, but he once included this error: "One of those bells...that now and then rings...." The correct phrase would be: "One of those bells that now and then ring....." Lena Horne made the correction, even though this fucked with the rhyme scheme. *Dreyer has thoughts on: "If I WAS...." vs. "If I WERE....." I won't go into the details; I'm just happy there's someone out there thinking about this matter. *Also, Dreyer poses a question. Let's say you want to announce yourself. "It is I who am here." Really? Or: "It is I who is here." Hmmm....Dreyer has the right solution. The right thing to do is write: "I'm here." I don't know that I need to read 250 pages on English mechanical/stylistic matters--a l...

Some final thoughts on Mary Trump. *God is in the details--and Mary, a gifted writer, understands this. Over and over, we're treated to strange, memorable bits. Mary once took pity on her complicated grandmother and whispered, "You are my favorite person" -- while thinking  I am telling a lie.  Melania could sit through a family dinner while contributing a grand total of one word. Mary's mother was once banned from holidays because her presence "made Ivana feel sad." At the Kushner/Trump wedding, Kushner, Sr., went on at length about his former belief that Ivanka would never be good enough to make an entrance within the Kushner family. How can you forget bits like that? *At the same time, something is very wrong. A memoir becomes suspicious when the storyteller is continuously above reproof, and everyone around her is relentlessly venal. That's basically what you get here. So you start to find that you can't fully believe basically anything Mary Trum...

You’ve surely seen “Enchanted.” It’s the one where Amy Adams is set to marry Prince Charming, but then Susan Sarandon says NO. Adams goes on an odyssey; she finds herself in New York City. So strange to be among manholes and billboards when you are a forest maiden! Clumsy encounters with a Shonda Rhimes guy lead to self-discovery. Adams is in fact *not* meant to be in the forest. She is meant to be with The Shonda Rhimes Guy. The End!   The movie isn’t perfect. For example, the Stephen Schwartz lyrics bother me. “Don’t treat her like a mind REA-der!” Shouldn’t this be…. “Don’t treat her like a MIND reader” --? And “Do something to lead her to believe you love her….” This is just clumsy; it’s unworthy of the World of Howard Ashman. It sounds like advice for a serial killer: “Lead her to this false belief…..Mwah hah hah hah…”   Anyway, despite this, there are three things to love in the film:   *Fish out of water. The Shonda Rhimes Guy needs to learn to embrace romance, yes...

I've alluded to Tomi Ungerer before, and I'm by no means the Ungerer authority, but here are a few things to know: *Tomi Ungerer was called, by Maurice Sendak, a "spectacular graphic genius." Ungerer's only true heir--according to Sendak--was James Marshall. *Ungerer wrote many, many picture books, and he did his own illustrations--and he is known for defying expectations. In "Otto," for example, you think you're getting a sweet story about a teddy bear, but in fact you're getting a tour of WWII, gun violence, and brutality on the streets. (This is a children's book!) ...."Fog Island" concerns a mysterious Fog Man who has direct access to the magma at the center of the Earth--and who uses this magma to heat water and make fog. "The Three Robbers" has menacing robbers terrifying the countryside with a "pepper-blower"--and a pepper-blower is not something that actually exists in the world. It's just something U...

I'm not done with Mary Trump's memoir, but I have to say I found the idea irresistible. A Trump-insider tell-all is a tasty thing. If the tell-all is written by someone professionally conversant in psychobabble ? You have my attention, and my credit card. This is not a fully plausible book--although I was surprised to see that Mary does actually name the person who took Trump's SAT. Too often, bits of dialog are "reconstructed" to give a you-are-there vibe--but couldn't Mary simply say, "Here's what I believe might have happened," without becoming a crazed writer of a soap-opera script? In any case, if you accept that this is partly a work of fiction (as maybe all memoirs are), you can start to feel spellbound. There's Mary arriving at the White House for a family reunion, appalled that she is getting only one "comp" night at the Trump Hotel, and surprised that the hotel is not as gilded or as tacky as she might have imagine...

Michael Phelps made a documentary, "The Weight of Gold," for HBO. It's clear that Phelps is a beautiful person--because he has made use of his suffering in an intelligent way. I struggle to think of other heterosexual male athletes who have been so open about mental illness and therapy. "The Weight of Gold" is so-so. Its problem is that none of its subjects really "pops." If you're filming actual people, you can't coach them to become significantly more compelling than they actually are. This is why, if you're making a documentary, it's sensible to pursue Joan Rivers, or Tomi Ungerer, or Ruth Bader Ginsburg. "The Weight of Gold" says this: If you're coached for national adulation, then you have a few weeks in the spotlight, and that's (maybe) nice, and then you are forgotten and you begin to try out reckless behavior. Several Olympic athletes have carried out or attempted suicide, or come close: Phelps, Jovanov...