Liars and Saints

She had excuses, if she wished to use them....Her husband had been remarkably handsome in a preppy kind of way--tall, with a thatch of blonde hair that flopped elegantly across his forehead.....   "Monogamy" is an unusual new novel by an American legend, Sue Miller.  Graham, the affable owner of a Cambridge bookstore, has a roving eye. Though Graham is happily married to an artist, Annie, Graham has big appetites, and he would maybe prefer an open marriage. Graham manages his appetites with an occasional affair; late in life, he begins seeing Rosemary, a friend and recent survivor of a divorce. Elated, sickened, Graham can't help but share the details with a male colleague. "Rosemary waxes herself down there," he says, then he immediately feels repelled by his own tackiness. When Graham dies, Annie begins a standard "mourning process"--or so she thinks. Having spotted an extremely weepy Rosemary at a memorial service, Annie "puts two and two toget...

 We had a block party.    My husband likes to find "the other gay couple" at any given party--and make a beeline for that couple. Me? I prefer to stay home and watch reruns of "The Good Wife." This is a tense bit of subtext in any party Marc and I attend--Marc knows I am silently asking, Why can't we be home watching "The Good Wife"?-- and, anyway, we manage the tension as best we can. We stood with the gays. Lea Salonga's "A Whole New World" was playing, in the background, for the children, and my husband loudly acknowledged that he had wanted this for our wedding song. Looks of horror passed briefly over all of the faces around us, and then the conversation moved somewhere else. In Covid times, there is a standard story you hear at any gathering, and we did encounter it here: "My elderly mother in Queens thinks she is immune to coronavirus. She wanted to travel out to some special ethnic grocery store for high-grade mozzarella. I s...

 We're celebrating the five-year anniversary of the Deaf West Broadway production of "Spring Awakening." This is a show that has a special place in my heart. The original Broadway production--years before Deaf West--launched three now-massive names: Lea Michele, Jonathan Groff, and Tony-winner John Gallagher. Also, the score has several canonical moments for theater nerds: "The Bitch of Living," "My Junk," "Mama who Bore Me." Any story involves a stranger coming to town, and in "Spring Awakening," the stranger is puberty. The kids in the show--residents of 1800s Germany--have no understanding of sex or childbirth; if they ask an adult about conception, they're told this just happens "when you love someone very, very much." Alienation and miscommunication and pain lead to tragedy: One boy, drowning at school, ends up committing suicide. Another student winds up dead during a botched abortion; like Rapunzel, she hadn...

 We could talk about Amy Barrett, or we could be frivolous. Sometimes, frivolity is therapeutic. A thought. My top three stories this week: (1) "Ratched" and "Fargo: Season Four" both seem to be dead on arrival. Ah, well. (2) Promoting "Ratched," Cynthia Nixon appeared on TV with Sharon Stone. The fabled "SATC III" script came up. This script is so great, people can't just let it go. "I think Sharon Stone would make a fabulous Samantha," said one viewer. Stone became excited. Shrewd Cynthia Nixon cleared her throat. "That would be wonderful," she said. "But Kim Cattrall has made clear that she would like a person of color in the role." And indeed: Kim has mentioned both Oprah and Tiffany Haddish. Stay tuned. (3) Michael Riedel's theater book, "Singular Sensation," will come out in November. This will chronicle the drama of Broadway in the 1990s. To prepare, I've dug up "Variety" review...

 Jerry Pinkney worked on a collection of Aesop's Fables--years ago--and, after that, he found himself returning again and again (in his thoughts) to "The Lion and the Mouse."   This is a standard tale of two unlikely friends assisting each other. (It took an aquatic form in William Steig's "Amos and Boris.") A mouse flees an owl and plunges into the fur of a majestic lion. The lion ponders this situation. He could have a mouse for a snack. But he is magnanimous; he releases the mouse. Later, his kindness is repaid. Poachers ensnare the lion. But the mouse--recalling earlier generosity--runs to the lion and chews through various knots. The lion is freed.   Pinkney says--as a child--he mainly admired the mouse. That clever guy--asserting some power over a lion! But, in adulthood, Pinkney recognizes that the lion is just as enchanting as the mouse. To have great brute force, and to choose *not* to use that force in a punitive way: That's a sign of nobility....

I've never written about one of the all-time classic Sondheim songs, "I'm Still Here," partly because I sort of think the song is too long. (Heresy! I know!) But, given the awfulness of the news, I find myself thinking of "I'm Still Here": Good times and bum times.... I've seen them all, and, my dear.... I'm still here. Plush velvet sometimes; Sometimes, just pretzels and beer. But I'm here. Sondheim talks about form matching content--and you see that with the constantly repeated, "I'm here." "I'm still here." It's almost irritating--just as we imagine the speaker needed to be a bit irritating, at varying points in her life, to survive. (When the words in a sentence are repeated but shift their position in the sentence? That's chiasmus. "Plush velvet sometimes; sometimes, just pretzels and beer....") I've stuffed the dailies in my shoes.... Strummed ukuleles, sung the blues.... Seen all my dre...

 "Lilly and Friends" is out, and it's glorious. I'm not a Henkes expert, so there are big gaps in my knowledge. The new omnibus taught me a few things, right away: (1) The major mice books are often spaced apart by a few years. (2) There hasn't been a landmark Henkes mouse book in several years. (3) Lilly has a significant role in many books, not just the books with "Lilly" in the title. Take "Chester's Way," where two fastidious mice--Chester and Wilson--have a solid friendship. They enjoy certain predictable activities: daily jam-and-toast, raking leaves, adamantly refusing to pelt one another with snowballs, using hand signals while biking. Then Lilly arrives. Flamboyant Lilly strays from the norm. She enjoys disguises, and she always carries a water gun. She cuts her sandwiches into stars and bells; she doesn't just cut on the diagonal. She exclaims, "I LOVE EVERYTHING!" And she sometimes has fruit for breakfast--not bread...

 Today, I'm looking at images from Steven Kellogg's adaptation of "Jack and the Beanstalk." Kellogg is among the country's most-honored artists; his tall tales ("Johnny Appleseed," "Paul Bunyan") are especially beloved. I like the illustrations in the tall tales, but the tales themselves feel episodic; they don't have characters I love. Maybe it's Sondheim's influence; I just prefer Jack, and Cinderella, and Red Ridinghood, and other fairy-tale characters. "Jack and the Beanstalk" centers on an incautious boy. He trades his cow for magic beans. The beans are, in fact, magical; they yield an enormous beanstalk. Using the stalk, the boy begins to steal from an ogre couple up in the heavens. (The wife seems to aid and abet Jack; we might look more closely at the ogre marriage.) Eventually, a talking harp sells Jack out--but crafty Jack ensures that the beanstalk is sliced open, and the angry ogre spills down to his death, bef...

 Driving to Rosh Hashanah dinner, my husband became reflective. "I think you can say this was a genuinely awful year for our country," he remarked. "Regardless of your political beliefs." He said, "There is a Jewish tradition that if you die on Rosh Hashanah, it means God really loved you. God had such a hard time subtracting you from the Earth.....He waited until the very last moment, the very end of the year. So people are saying that about Ruth Bader Ginsburg." Marc's irreverence: "Of course if you die right AFTER Rosh Hashanah....right at the START of the new year....it means God didn't care about you very much......JK!" My own year has been a blur. It would have been a blur regardless of Covid. It's a great deal of baby time. The other day, I passed by the Irish Pub in our neighborhood, and I saw a sign: WE'RE HALFWAY TO ST. PAT'S DAY 2021! And this told me that lockdown has lasted for a half-year; we were already in lock...

  A friend of mine was being treated in a local hospital that specializes in treating her particular type of cancer. I had come to visit this friend, this very dear old friend whom I had not seen in several years, and whom, given the gravity of her illness, I might not see again.... The new Sigrid Nunez novel concerns a writer facing two kinds of despair. In one corner, the writer's cancer-plagued friend (who seems to be Susan Sontag, or Sontag-adjacent) wants help with the process of committing suicide. In another corner, another friend (who seems to be Jonathan Franzen, or Franzen-adjacent) can't stop shouting about the coming apocalypse. One situation "comments on" the other. The Sontag character feels she is in a burning building and must jump; but maybe the burning is manageable, and maybe the pain of another day isn't something she fully wants to reject. Maybe suicide won't happen. And the Franzen character feels that life, now, is hollow and inexcusable...

 Several months ago--celebrating one "Sopranos" anniversary or another--the NYTimes chose the twenty "best" TV dramas post-Tony-and-Carmela. Some of the choices were predictable: "The West Wing," "Deadwood," "The Good Wife," "The Wire," "The Leftovers." Other choices surprised me: "Grey's Anatomy," "Atlanta" (which is not exactly a drama), "Veronica Mars." A special treat at the end. Several critics offered bits of dissent, as if they were Supreme Court Justices. The dissents tended to have one flavor: "I know people are breathless about A Certain Relentlessly Serious Show, but I also know of something that's much more fun...." So, for example: "People in thick, scholarly glasses get excited about 'Rectify'.....but watching makes me want to gouge out my own eyes....." Or....."I'm certainly *meant* to enjoy 'The Leftovers'.....but do yo...

 Today, I tip my hat to “The Little Red Hen,” by Jerry Pinkney. This is a simple fable. A hen finds some seeds. Will her friends help her to make bread? The dog is a good digger; he could help with planting. The rat has a reliable tail; this could assist with threshing. The goat carries things all day; he could certainly carry materials to the miller. And the pig loves the kitchen; he could help with baking. Each animal--at least mildly self-obsessed--says, “No, I won’t help.” So, when the bread arrives, the hen makes a natural choice. It’s bread for her babies; it’s not going to the goat, the dog, the rat, the pig. As always, Pinkney distinguishes himself with his love for detail and his attention to the natural world. Each flower has a very tiny face; the sun studies the hen with intelligent eyes; in the background, a frog shoots its tongue at a fly. Costuming tells us about character; only the fastidious hen, of all the animals, wears a hat as protection against the sun. Scale i...

  If you love to read, and you particularly like a creepy story in the fall, I have to tell you about "The Monster in the Box." This was a late effort by my hero, Ruth Rendell ("the female Hitchcock"), and it concerns a possible serial killer. A guy seems to stalk people who have a "good" reason for offing a friend or loved one. Say, you're embroiled in an affair, and you want your spouse out of the picture. Or you're tired of caring for your demanding teenager--her presence is ruining your love life--and you'd just like to be unattached once again. This awful guy will find you and propose a murder--and then nothing can ever be proved. That's one part of the story. Elsewhere, in the village of Kingsmarkham, a woman may or may not have been the victim of a ritual killing. Maybe she just disappeared. She was once a promising high-school student, so the thought that she might not pursue further studies is distressing to a couple of liberal obs...

  These are Covid bodega rules that have been circulating for months. There are multiple versions, attributed to sites in multiple cities. LA, NY, somewhere in the Midwest. Like any urban legend, this one seems to contradict itself. (Each version of the story begins, Someone just invented this in my city ! But, of course, the sign was invented only once.) I like the particular version referenced here, because the poet--in paraphrasing--made the work his own. The many exclamation points. The way STFU just bleeds into "buy your shit" .....without punctuation. The strange capitalization of "Shoe" in "titty or Shoe money." (I assume "titty money" is a wad of cash that you tuck into your bra.) I'm also fond of the capitalization of "Motherfuckers" and "You." ("You cough, You are OUT!!!!") We're told to write passionately and honestly--and here you have a gold-star example. One of my favorite bits of writing from t...

 I (always) root for gay parents, so it was a pleasure to attend a Zoom gay baby shower recently. These two dads are wonderfully eccentric--they spend their free time touring the homes of former vice presidents, and they might on occasion send you a postcard featuring Spiro Agnew's 1958 Christmas tree--and I was pleased to see the eccentricity on full display at the shower. For example, the dads have announced their unborn child's name: Lena Gus Borden Tanner. (That's "LGBT.") Asked about unchartered territory, the dads said there is one thing that slightly intimidates them: "labial folds." I was most touched by the dads' confessions of nervousness: "We have no idea what we're doing, where we'll be living, and we're a little wary when people say it's easier than it looks ." At one point, we guests had a chance to share our wishes for Lena-to-be, and I mentioned: learning to listen well, tolerating uncertainty, and always wea...

 Joshua received, as a gift, "Click, Clack, Moo," and I'm obsessed. This is a 2000 picture book by Doreen Cronin, and it has been ranked among the 100 "Greatest Picture Books." (Whatever that means?) Beverly Cleary has indicated that writing requires a simple, funny idea, and Doreen Cronin has listened. In "Click, Clack, Moo," some cows grab an old typewriter, buried in their barn. Once-inarticulate, the cows can now give voice to their own deep concerns. They write to their owner, Farmer Brown; they demand electric blankets for the cold nights. Soon, the cows request blankets for the hens, as well. Like any oppressor--like Trump, in response to protests--the Farmer insists that the old order was "just fine." But he caves under pressure (striking farm animals). Brown will deliver the blankets if the cows return the typewriter. (A triumph of collective bargaining!) A final twist: The guy carrying the typewriter back to Brown is a duck, and he ...

Today, I'm sharing three images from Paul Zelinsky's "Rumpelstiltskin." This book was written in the 1980s, and though it didn't win *top* recognition from the Caldecott people, it did win silver medals. (Zelinsky's "Rapunzel" did *indeed* win top honors.) Zelinsky is mainly an artist, but he'll re-tell a story now and then. We all know Rumpelstiltskin. He is the man with a plan. He wants a kid. He can't get one. Inventiveness is required. Rumpelstiltskin uses his one random talent--turning straw into gold--to help a poor woman. He'll get her the gold if she sacrifices her first-born. This deal is made in haste--and, later, when a first-born actually arrives, the shit hits the fan. I'm not sure there is a moral here; maybe it's just that life is terrifying, and you need to think on your feet, and even then, you may be in trouble. In any case, I appreciate the scariness, and I appreciate how Zelinsky makes his villain half-funny/ha...

 The best essay I read this summer was "A Fine Nomance," by Elinor Lipman (you're correct that she invented a word), and it's about dating after your husband has died: At 59, I was a new widow writing a novel about a new widow who was socially maladroit. When her story started to stagnate, I knew I had to get her out of the house. Me, too. I signed us both up for Match.com. Dates followed. Not all were horrible, but the reporter in me liked the worst ones for their anecdotal value. There was the man who stuck his Nicorette gum under his seat, the 70-ish actor who had been among the six husbands of one of the “Golden Girls” and the guy who asked proudly if I had noticed that he stirred his coffee without the spoon touching the cup. I had not. I decided to drop out. Just before hitting the “remove” button of Match.com, I remembered I was mining comically bad biographical bits for fictional use and should stick with it. For the first time in weeks, I checked that day’s m...

It's nice to discover a really weird plot--plots can seem so stale, after a while--and I think I'm in luck.  "The King of Staten Island" concerns a young man, a bit like Pete Davidson. (The actor is Pete Davidson.) This guy is a mess and in pain; he is mourning the loss of his dad, and he has some psychiatric issues. Lost in a fog, he routinely mistreats the people around him, and things reach an early climax when he meets a kid in the woods. The kid wants a tattoo; he is just a kid. PD should know better, but he starts working with his tattoo needle, and the kid has a panic attack.  Permanently scarred, the kid runs to his father, who seeks vengeance. It's this quest that leads to a new romance--involving PD's mom--and, soon enough, PD is half-pursuing a shot at self-rehabilitation, through childcare errands. PD walks and walks with his former victim, and these scenes are a bit cliched (think of Amy Schumer with her nephew, in "Trainwreck.") Cliched...

I find new books by skimming the book sections of NPR, the NY Times, and the Washington Post. I think it's good to skim a few different sections--because one paper may miss a major event. For example, the "Post" is great with Ruth Ware coverage. The NY Times will tell you a bit about Sarah Shun-lien Bynum. I tend not to read the reader reviews in Goodreads and Amazon, because I find--often--that the complaint is: "This is not the book I had imagined in my head." So--it doesn't matter if the actual book is actually good. If you pick up "Pride and Prejudice" and expect to encounter a superhero battle, Goodreads empowers you to give one star to "P and P," and to complain online that there weren't any superhero battles. None of this is a reflection on the real quality of "Pride and Prejudice." (BUT, if a book is getting really ecstatic reader reviews, I'll give that weight. That is generally a good sign. Just as a book's...

I'm not sure if this is a general-interest piece, but if you're curious about my work life, it's going reasonably well. After triumphantly planning my departure from secretarial life, I was told I'd need to stay on for an extra month. (This isn't exactly how it happened--but if you factor in vestigial Catholic guilt, you'll understand it's always hard for me to say no.) On off hours, I work with one child via Zoom, and one child via in-person visits. Life sometimes hands you an unexpected gift, and a great treat for me this fall is that I'm working with a theater fan. During our icebreaker session, I invited her to ask me any question in her brain (she is in seventh grade), and, without hesitating, she produced this: Which of all the Broadway characters would you want to play on stage? This was like being handed a bag of candy, and it's a question I had never, never fielded. I sighed. I said, "Darling, let's be clear. I haven't acted in ...

My husband and I had a summer film exchange. Marc curated the sports films; I chose the musicals. I was introduced to: "Remember the Titans," "The Blind Side," "Field of Dreams," "The Weight of Gold," "Bull Durham," and "Draft Day." I cried during Selections Two and Three; there may also have been tears during "Titans." On the flip side, Marc encountered: "Rent," "Gypsy," "Joseph," "Phantom of the Opera," "Enchanted," "The Music Man," ""Oklahoma," "Cats," "Meet Me in St. Louis," "Sweeney Todd," "Hello, Dolly," "Carousel," "The Sound of Music," "Hamilton," "West Side Story," "Into the Woods," and "South Pacific." (You can see that this film exchange was a bit lopsided. Also, some of the musicals here were true movie-musicals; some were filmed sta...

We're celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the Hollywood film "Rent"--not a very good film, but an important one for countless suburban kids-with-dreams--so....a few thoughts.... *"Rent" is one year in the life of an invented family. Would-be artists in Alphabet City confront various crises. A flighty actress leaves her boyfriend for a woman. People struggle with HIV and making rent payments. Extracurricular affairs occur, and occur again. *The heart and soul of "Rent" is Mimi, and it's shocking that Daphne Rubin-Vega did *not* win a Tony for her performance. (Only Angel won.) Mimi tends to get the best material. When we meet her, she is claiming to be nineteen (and this is up for debate)....and she dances professionally at a club. She falls for a singer, but both she and the singer are contending with the awareness of encroaching (early, tragic) death -- and depression leads to bad choices. As Mimi and Roger fall in and out of love, your heart...

One book I particularly liked this summer was "The Order," by Daniel Silva. Silva writes adventure novels about an Israeli spy, Gabriel. In "The Order," Gabriel becomes enmeshed in a Vatican scandal. It seems someone has murdered the progressive pope. This is already delightful, but then things take a bizarre turn. Could someone have murdered the pope because he possessed the Secret Gospel of Pontius Pilate ? Is it possible that sinister right-wing Catholics have suppressed the words of Pilate because these words reveal that the "official" Gospels are wrong ? In the "canonical" Gospels, an apparent "apologia for"/invitation to anti-Semitism is offered; more than one Gospel writer seems to blame the crucifixion on Jewish people, and to specify that "the responsibility for this murder will travel down through generations." Historians have pointed out that there is more than one factor to make this scene implausible--but the Chur...

 I have kids' books on the brain....and I may have a few suggestions.....so, herewith, an update on Joshua's library: *There's a wonderful essay about James Marshall's technique at the back of "The Collected George and Martha." The writer discusses Marshall's way of subtracting, subtracting, subtracting, so that the reader is required to make inferences and guesses. Marshall became *more* adept at subtracting (and the text became sparer) as he went along.  The writer also discusses Marshall's gift for surprise; the best of the stories don't seem schematic, in any way. For example, in "The French Lesson," it's genuinely bracing (to me, at least) when Martha says, "I knew you were going to do that." And, in another story, when snakes pop up out a cake box, I'm actually caught off guard. (And don't get me started on the twists in "The Misunderstanding" ....) It's said that Marshall was an heir of Tomi Unge...

  I really like Alex Trebek's memoir--and one reason I like it is that it's a bit clumsy. This is endearing. Trebek states, early on, that he isn't a writer, and this admission seems to free him to "speak naturally." You feel you're talking to a friend. Also, a famous writer has said that a personal essay should "swing for the fences"; you should reach for lessons, for profundity, because if you're not doing that, then you're wasting your reader's time. (Laura Lippman and Colin Jost both need to do some work in this area.) Trebek isn't afraid to extract lessons from his own life, maybe because he is dying. (Maybe the proximity of death makes him fearless.) The lessons aren't earth-shattering, but it's very moving to read the words of someone in the final stages of pancreatic cancer, someone who has chosen to address you directly: *Be ten minutes early to all professional events. *Be vulnerable in public; this requires more chu...