Liars and Saints

 Sometimes, Sandra Boynton rejects narrative. She writes a kind of lyric poem. One example is "Opposites," which takes maybe thirty seconds to read. Each time I read it, I see a new detail. The text is a rhyming poem: "Big and small, short and tall. High and low, fast and slow. Heavy and light, day and night. In and out, whisper and shout. Right and wrong; weak, strong. Hot and cold, young and old. Wet and dry; hello, goodbye." One treat is the pictures: "wrong" is a pig wearing a rotary phone on his head. "Out" is a turtle standing on top of his own shell; he wants to see a friend (and the friend happens to be a turtle *in* a shell, wearing a shell). For "day," the horizon line is part of a shallow window seat; at "night," that same line becomes the edge of a bed. Additionally, Boynton plays with font. The "slow" font makes use of a vast expanse of white space. The "heavy" font is, itself, heavy; the thick...

  Kimberly Levaco is dying -- just as everyone else is dying -- and she'd very much like a "great adventure." She'd like to travel. She'd also like to have "a normal family." The stakes are high for Kimberly because she might not see her seventeenth birthday; she has a rare disease that causes her to look sixty even as she makes her way through high-school biology.  To raise money for a barnstorming cross-country trip, Kimberly chooses to "wash checks." She has a law-breaking aunt who steals a mailbox, and then she just needs a kind of flytrap device to suck sealed checks up and out of the box. This actually works -- and Kimberly has a breezy time dressing as a friendly grandmother and chatting with an innocent teller at her local bank.  But if money is easy, family is hard. Despite being wise, Kimberly can also be foolish; she thinks she can force her narcissistic parents to behave themselves. When Mom and Dad forget to find gifts for Kimberly...

 The Short Hills Mall is like an extra-extra-large milkshake; I want it, and then I really, really don't. My family always starts out strong; my husband, moved by a change in the winds, makes a quirky, unplanned purchase. (This could be a Keith Haring tee shirt, or a small, stuffed polar bear holding a menorah.) I do nothing "off-book"; I have a script in my heart, and the script requires that I buy a new novel. This is compulsive behavior; for at least five minutes, the new novel seems to be an answer to all of my existential woes. The glow of conquest floods my face; for a half-second, I'm on top of the world. At this point, the trip should end, but my spouse and I always persuade ourselves that it's a good idea to take the kids to the Cheesecake Factory. Our kids are stressed by the bright lights, the thudding Katy Perry tunes, the pained faces of rabid consumers. Milk spills from great, great heights; my daughter dumps macaroni noodles onto her own head. The a...

 Children can be brutal, and you miss this if you're watching "Daniel Tiger." But Russell Hoban knew the truth. He didn't mince words. In "Best Friends for Frances," Frances wants to play ball. Her sister, Gloria, asks to play, and Frances bluntly says, "You're too little." As Gloria cries, Frances sings a song: "Sisters that are much too small are really not much good at all -- except for crying." And Frances is our heroine! Children can be brutal, but also, children can be resilient. For Gloria, a setback is merely a setback. Gloria knows how to catch frogs -- and this is a kind of social capital. Gloria will exchange her knowledge for a game of baseball.  It seems to me that Frances doesn't deserve Gloria. But Russell Hoban knows some things about karma, and it's quite satisfying when thoughtless Frances is coolly dismissed by her "friend" Albert. (Gloria rubs a little salt in a wound. "Wow," she says to...

  A few years ago, a law professor made his way through a nasty divorce. His controlling behavior became unbearable; it seemed he wanted to crush his ex with his boots. He had been an insufferable spouse; in divorce, he was worse. So the ex-wife's family arranged a murder. The mother paid cash for the death of her former son-in-law. (I'm thinking of the murder victim Dan Markel.) This might seem to be an odd source of inspiration for an intermittently comedic TV show, but it's basically what we're watching when we watch "Bad Sisters." There is a man; he is almost cartoonishly awful. His in-laws try several times to murder him, and he ends up dead. (I'm only halfway in, so I don't know if the actual death results from a murder plot. Regardless, the in-laws have "sinned" in their minds.) The writer, Sharon Horgan, asks: Is it really so hard to sympathize with murderers, in certain cases? She has great fun inventing the victim. He kills a cat, t...

  Maplewood is now posting sub-arctic temperatures, so I'm mostly glued to my sofa. But the outside world still intrudes, in interesting ways, and I'm happy about that. In our town square, for example, some kind of church has erected a tacky manger with a beatific Jesus and some saintly donkeys. A few feet away, in a kind of "subtweet," the NJ Society of Atheists has posted a sign. "In the season of the WINTER SOLSTICE, remember there can be no freedom of religion without THE FREEDOM TO DISSENT. Keep God and State separate. Remember the Constitution." Next to the sign, a sassy, cardboard Benjamin Franklin holds a pen; he seems to be giving the side-eye to the Christmas tree. This is Maplewood in living color. Marc and I did drag ourselves to a movie on December 24th; at least one of us enlisted the help of thermal underwear. During the screening, I studied an elderly couple two rows down; these people were like Ghosts of Christmas Future. "What do they ...

  I went back to the Mary Rodgers memoir, just because so many critics ranked it high in "best-of-year" lists, and here are the stories that really startle me: *When Mary's toddler died, Mary's icy mother said, "I guess you'll need to gather the remaining children and drive across the state to our house, in Connecticut...." (You can't make that up.) *When Mary's own child, Adam Guettel, was in the running for a Best Musical Tony Award, he turned to his mother to express his love. And Mary said, correctly, "You're about to lose. The winner will be SPAMALOT." *When Mary offered a candid assessment of ANYONE CAN WHISTLE, the writer, Arthur Laurents, said, "I hate you, and everyone in the cast hates you. Don't come with us to Philadelphia." *Mary's sister had Juilliard-level talent, but Dick and Dorothy Rodgers did not think that anyone should pursue an unpleasant life as a classical musician. So they simply failed to ...

 It seems strange to recommend "Emily the Criminal" in this holiday season. This is a brutal movie about a Hobbesean world; a young woman (Emily) loses her power after a felony conviction, and she has to fight to stay afloat. She works for UberEats (or something like this) in an attempt to pay off her student loans. A colleague alerts her to an opportunity. If you purchase a TV with a stolen credit card, various thugs will reward you with cash. You just need to breathe deeply and wear a poker face. Emily is tough and smart, and she performs her new work without seeming to sweat. But the tasks get dicier. In one upsetting scene, a buyer follows her to her front door, then assaults her on the carpet. He steals everything from her; he holds a knife to her throat and says, "Remember, I know where you live." Amazingly, Emily dusts herself off, grabs her taser, and follows her assailant to his car. She strikes him, grabs her stuff, looks through various wallets, and reads...

 If your spouse is generally enthusiastic, then date night can be a challenge; you have to establish ground rules. My husband has a strong connection to musical theater, and this can be a problem: Once, we went to a screening of "Newsies on Broadway: One Night Only," and I had to remind Marc that the event was not a sing-along. Additionally, in "Frozen," Marc gasped in horror when a crucial trickster character was "unmasked." The gasp became an event for literally everyone in orchestra seating. I was really proud of my husband for holding it together at "The Sound of Music" last week; he did have some belly-laughs, but no one noticed. The lines that really "spoke" to him: "Sister Hester, the convent is no place for the pious." "Gretl can't sing because she pinched her finger." "Mother gives all postulant clothing away to the poor....but...this dress? The poor didn't want this one." At intermission, ...

  It's difficult to write about mundane life in a lively way; this is a gift that Anne Lamott has, and it's also something I see in Lamott's friend, Meredith Maran. Maran's memoir, "The New Old Me," doesn't involve a long period of captivity, or a family member throwing herself off the edge of the Grand Canyon, or a battle with life-threatening body dysmorphia (or sexual abuse). It's just about a woman who divorces at sixty, and who moves to Los Angeles to start a new life. Maran hints that her ex had an addiction issue, and she spends some time in Al-Anon. "Having given several years to marketing work, I admire the 'recovery' slogans. They're better than anything I could write.  GOD is the Gift of Desperation. If it feels urgent, it's not urgent. Don't just do something. STAND THERE! " Maran has a special talent for poking fun at herself, so she shows moments where she believes she can magically win back her wife. She lea...

  I'm cautiously interested in the new Broadway-bound "Merrily We Roll Along." I've seen this show three times, and I buy into the received wisdom: stunning score, one of the all-time great overtures, who cares about these three middle-aged dopes? One thing that "Merrily" does especially well, in any version, is to narrate a story of unrequited love. This theme consistently puts wind in Sondheim's sails--whether he is describing Desiree in "Night Music," Sally in "Follies," Mrs. Lovett in "Sweeney," John Hinkley in "Assassins." But the love theme is really special in "Merrily." Sondheim's mentor, Oscar Hammerstein, would famously stuff a Second Act with reprised numbers. The reprise would tie a little bow around a story. Liesl von Trapp flirts in Act One; in Act Two, using the Liesl melody, Maria delivers a gooey sermon about the virtues of waiting before sex. Nettie ends one part of "Carousel...

  I am often timid and stuck in my ways, so I'm grateful to have Susie around. This weekend, she taught herself to run. I'm certain I didn't teach her. She just did it. And she immediately found various ways to "be chased." Another thing I admire about her: She has a great time with an empty box. For now, it seems she is incapable of being bored. And a final thing: She listens intensely. I've never met anyone so captivated by bad TV, or so fascinated by "Twinkle, Twinkle." I think about how gurus work their way through difficult situations: "Listen, stay in the moment, use light humor." These words seem to be lifted directly from  Susie's Guide to Life. We're reading "Snuggle Puppy" and "What to Do with a Box." I'm stunned (and distressed?) to report that a Pre-K application has already found its way to my inbox.

 A favorite movie of mine is "Capote." One thing it reminds me of us is an apparent quote from Bob Fosse: If you're a dancer, you have to use every part of your body. The way you hold your fingers, or move your shoulder, or nod your head: Each moment should be a conscious decision, and the moment should help to create a mood. Philip Seymour Hoffman is dazzling in his big movie, not just because of his Oscar-reel scene at the end, but also because of his silences, his laugh, and even the way he breathes just before addressing a crowd. People forget that Catherine Keener also earned an Oscar nomination for this movie, and I like to try to locate the moments in the script she might have especially admired. In a way, the script feels like a Nicole Holofcener piece (and it's interesting that Holofcener has moved away from of-the-moment contemporary-setting work, in the last few years). Keener has a great opening; she watches a porter praising "Breakfast at Tiffany...

  My favorite story about empathy is "The Book," by James Marshall. I think of it often in this house, when we're imploring Josh not to grab or swat at his sister, and we're forgetting to consider J's point of view. Sometimes, in my son's world, his sister is a usurper; all was well, and then Susie arrived, and an unwanted contest popped up. And who is to say this won't happen again, and again? We're asking for a great deal of depth and reflection from one growing three-year-old brain. In "The Book," George can't read because Martha is making chit-chat. The one sentence George digests, on the page, is this: "We must show consideration for our friends. Sometimes, we might forget to imagine their perspective." Drunk with rage, George believes that this line is a strong defense of his own right to be frustrated. He confronts Martha with the text. But, before he can speak, Martha says, "I'm sorry to talk so much. I was just...

 My main halting attempt to reenter the world is through the PTA at my child's school. This group is moms--it's literally all moms; hello, 2022--and the moms make me think of "The Ladies Who Lunch." Here's to the girls who play wife-- Aren't they too much? Keeping house and clutching a copy of  LIFE -- Just to stay in touch. The ones who follow the rules.... And meet themselves at the schools.... Too busy to know that they're fools.... This is not the sort of mom I want to be. One person decides it would be great to compile "thank you" video tributes to the underpaid teachers, for the holidays, and everyone hops on the wagon. (No one asks: "What if my child is deeply anxious and non-verbal?") A few video submissions trickle in, and it becomes obvious that no mom has the know-how to put the videos together into a kind of seamless uber-video, and this problem becomes a topic of twenty to thirty additional emails. Many of these emails are ...

  I've been lucky to acquire some good books in recent days. Here are three: *"Blood and Ink." Named by the Times one of the true-crime standouts of 2022, this is the story of a pastor and a choir member who had a blatant affair in the Roaring Twenties. They were found murdered, outdoors, in their Jersey town. The one thing I look for, in any book, is great characters. This one has a "man of God" leaving sexy notes for his girlfriend in certain dusty hymnals. A bereaved spouse becomes hooked on "the spiritual world," and he looks for his wife's ghost at a seance. A reporter invents emotional scenes to try to force one suspect to (accidentally) confess. A widow with secrets gets a makeover; she thinks journalists will be kinder to her if her style evolves, and she becomes "Insta-ready." The more things change, the more they stay the same. Wonderful book. *"Dickens and Prince." This is Nick Hornby observing that Dickens and Prince...

  First, I made three predictions about this season--and I scored a 33/100! That's a failing grade, but it's not a zero. Early in the season, Mike White had Cameron screaming about his luggage. ("He just gets like this sometimes.") I guessed that Cameron would not be responsible for the killing, because he seemed too much like Jake Lacy. Having "the Jake Lacy guy" end someone's life just felt too repetitive. Mid-season, my husband texted me with rumors about Greg engineering an eventual murder of Tanya. I said, "That just seems too elaborate for Mike White, imo." Wrong! When I finally accepted the reality of the murder plot, I was touched by Tanya's effort to help Portia, and I wrote, "Maybe these two will save each other in the finale." Wrong again! I just want to mention how moved I was by Valentina's story. At the start, Valentina seems repressed and gratuitously mean. (She tells Tanya, "You look like Peppa Pig.")...

 My son is learning about kindness, turning the other cheek, etc. And that's maybe fine? But I'd like to say a word for Hammurabi. There are issues with "an eye for an eye." But, as the philosopher Scott Hershovitz observes, the  lex talionis  is sometimes dismissed too quickly, too smugly. If you have a reputation for well-crafted revenge, then other people won't fuck with you. Also, there is a nice symmetry in revenge: If you steal from me, I will help you to understand my experience. Why should a transgression "go unchecked"? For months, I've been at war with a terrorist racoon. He has shredded my trash bags. He has pierced a dog-food delivery and scattered kibble through the yard. He has gained access to my Amazon Fresh cupcakes--and he has dribbled his germs on my pita chips. I respect this raccoon; he is the opposite of neurotic. He understands his own wishes, and he is methodical and disciplined. Also, I want him to suffer. Right now, my enemy...

  "SVU" had a great deal of work to accomplish this past week, and mostly, the writers did their job well. (One writer was Julie Martin; I can't remember the other.) A rookie might think that the Rollisi wedding would be the climax of the hour--but, wisely, Martin understood that this isn't *really* why people care about Amanda Rollins. People care because of the Amanda/Olivia bond. So we had the wedding right away--and we were left to wonder what the *actual* fireworks might be. (We wondered for a half hour.) The craftiness makes me think of "Ozymandias," from "Breaking Bad." If you murder Uncle Hank in minute five, how do you manage the rest of the episode? Another grace note I admired: Olivia is engulfed in ominous music during the "upstate Christmas-house segments," and the horror-film score clashes nicely with the reindeer and the Santas. But, mostly, the upstate Christmas-house parts are *not* terrifying: Noah's new friends are ...

  I tend to read mystery novels, and Elinor Lipman is my exception.  Lipman writes romantic comedies about outrageous characters; you know that the story will move briskly; you know that sex will play a big role. In one novel, an IVF specialist goes to jail when it's revealed that he sometimes assisted clients through "an old-fashioned method" of conceiving life. In another novel, one-third of a love triangle is consumed with sexual jealousy, and then tries to murder the triangle's other two-thirds (as in the Betty Broderick story). A constant in a Lipman novel--as in a great deal of detective fiction--is that you have a smart, resourceful, passionate protagonist, someone you can easily root for. I don't sit around thinking about influences, but I know that Lipman's personal essays have had a tremendous impact on me. Lipman has a book, "I Can't Complain," where she simply talks about how she and her husband address the issue of snoring, or how sh...

 Do you recall the famous "Simpsons" episode where Homer needs to purchase a gift for Marge, and he chooses a bowling ball? And Marge is so upset with this transparent self-service, she contemplates an affair with another man? (I think this might be "Last Exit to Springfield.") The other night, my husband showed me an image of plaid flannel pajama pants; the pants had snapshots of my dog's head scattered all through the fabric. My dog was wearing a Santa hat, and he was surrounded by the words: "DOG DAD. DOG DAD. DOG DAD." I drew a thick, bold line, right there. "You may not buy those pants for me, for Hanukkah or Christmas. If you want them, you must buy them for yourself." My husband answered immediately, as if I had just tapped into an argument raging within his own head: "I can't give myself the pants. I'm too tall. I'm sure they'd end at my knees." This has been a somewhat difficult year for Salvy. He became too...

 God is in the details, and that's clear from a Prince song: When you were mine, i gave you all of my money. Time after time, You done me wrong. It was just like a train. You let all my friends come over and meet. And you were so strange: You didn't have the decency to change the sheets. The guy in this song doesn't seem to mind that his former lover had a series of affairs ("just like a train"). The problem is that she didn't change the used sheets before (her actual, literal) bedtime. When you were mine, You were kinda sorta my best friend. So I was blind: I let you fool around.  I never cared. I never was the kind to make a fuss-- When he was there-- Sleeping in between the two of us. The use of hyperbole is intensified: The faithless lover never changed the sheets, and sometimes, she just forgot to kick her extra boy-toy back to the guest quarters. When you were mine, You were all I ever wanted to do. Now I spend my time-- Following him whenever he's w...

 A few more thoughts on "The White Lotus": *Mike White speaks with Terri Gross this week, and he acknowledges that "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" is an influence. You see this in the two young married couples. White was raised on "psychodramas." Cameron and Daphne seem to attract and to repel each other: they call each other nasty names even as they're hopping into bed. There is some speculation that one of Daphne's children is actually the spawn of Daphne's trainer; he is blonde and blue-eyed, like the trainer, and Daphne shows his photo when she (wrongly) believes she is showing the trainer's photo. *The season looks at the gap between fantasy and reality. F. Murray Abraham thinks he will have a fabulous homecoming in Catania; in fact, he is dismissed from the property. Valentina has a long gay affair, in her head, with her employee; in fact, the employee is not only uninterested, but also fully heterosexual. Tanya believes that she...

  My favorite neighbor is Eve, who baked cookies, and who left an email address and a phone number right when I moved in.  So many of my neighbors are enmeshed in private dramas--and they just spill out the details. They spill and spill. One couple has twins, and they're teething, and they don't sleep. Another is living through a difficult, long holiday from school, with her small child; she says, "If I have to watch  Frozen  one more time, I'll kill myself." A third whispers to me, as if to a priest: "A good friend of mine voted for Trump. She said she understood the implications, but casting that vote would just (potentially) make a big family-money issue much easier, in the short term...." I'm interested in all of these stories, but I'm happiest to see Eve, who just expresses unfeigned gratitude for nice weather. Or who points to my daughter's flannel bunting and asks, "Don't you wish you yourself could wear one of those things?...

 Sandra Boynton attended the Yale School of Drama, but she found that the work was not easy to balance with the project of starting a family. So she dropped out; eventually, she began writing silly board books. (She did return to Yale, to give a talk to students: "The Curious Misuse of a Yale Education.") Boynton has conquered America; she is the subject of a scholarly piece by Pulitzer finalist Ann Patchett, and she has earned a shout-out in "Law and Order: SVU." (Noah Benson's favorite book is "Barnyard Dance.") Readers tip their hats: "My son never would have loved books without Sandra Boynton," "I'm so excited to learn there is a sequel to ...But Not the Hippopotamus! ") Boynton's work is joyful, and it's grounded in truth. You sense that these stories just bubble up out of the writer. A sequel might not have been a given, for "Moo, Baa, La La La." But when you imagine the cow on Halloween, how can you not ...

  If you're following "The White Lotus," here are a few thoughts: *The Ringer has made an extended comparison between Portia and the Helena Bonham Carter character in "A Room with a View." In the Merchant Ivory film, HBC travels to Italy and then must choose between a gentleman and a tough, swarthy dude; she really wants the tough, swarthy dude. It seems plausible that Mike White, an LGBT writer, would deliberately borrow from E.M. Forster, the godfather of all LGBT writers. *Another influence seems to be "The Portrait of a Lady" (from another OG gay novelist, Henry James). In "Portrait," a naive American woman finds herself in Europe; she is soon under the spell of the worldly European Gilbert Osmond, who is not the person he seems to be. Famously, James's heroine loses her innocence when she spies on Gilbert; she detects something carnal between Gilbert and his "friend," Madame Merle. Mike White takes the idea far, far off int...

  My new friend is Nurse Steffi, who calls me from my son's school; she calls early in the day, and she calls often. I now have PTSD when I see her name on my phone--although I understand that she is just doing her job. I think of Nurse Steffi as someone like Judge Judy, observing from above; she has a gavel and a stern face, and she is out for blood. The first time she called, she introduced herself, and then she dug in: "You aren't trimming your son's nails enough, and he scratched himself on the arm." There was a long silence, and I detected subtext: " This, Daniel, is a generous read of the situation. I'm trying to assume that you yourself don't scratch your child, as part of some sick and punitive ritual. I'm assuming you are not Catherine Keener, from  An American Crime ...." I apologized excessively--"I'm a rule-follower! I meet all deadlines! Please, please, like me!!!"--and I planned to do better. (I say this, but tryin...