Liars and Saints

 "Good One" is a journey story. A teenager agrees to a weekend camping trip with her dad, Chris, and a family friend, Matt. On one level, the struggles are predictable: One character gets car-sick, another forgets a sleeping bag, another believes that he communicated certain requirements about his wardrobe (but in fact a miscommunication has occurred). On a different level, everything is a surprise. Though it's a work of fiction, this seems to be a movie about real people (which makes it rare). Chris has issues with his contracting business, because he lies to clients, then expects the clients to be magnanimous and forgiving. He has cheated on his wife, then sought solace with a woman half his age; because he is under the young woman's spell, he has agreed to raise an infant (though he, Chris, is 60 years old). Also, Chris enjoys antagonizing his friend Matt (which is odd, given that neither Chris nor Matt is a middle- or high-school student). The central teenager see...

 We're trying to introduce Josh to show tunes. For example, we've spent some time with a YouTube tribute to Jerry Herman. Josh will sometimes half-watch the tunes, and he will even drum on his chest in a rhythmic way. Mostly, though, he enjoys chewing on the corner of a cell-phone case, or ripping pages out of pop-up books. Our reading this week: *"Fog Island." Can you think of a better story? A crazed old man on an island has drilled a hole to the center of the Earth. Our planet's molten core meets and vaporizes little drops of sea-water--and this is why we have fog. *"A Swim." Lobel's masterpiece, about planning poorly and being mortified. Subversive and haunting moment for Frog and Toad. *"Snow White in New York." Fun with the colorful images, but also with the poisoned Cosmo, the seven "jazz-men," the Queen of the Underworld, the "Daily Mirror" ...... We (cautiously) look forward to "The Octopus Escapes," c...

Maile Meloy Lovers: Meloy has a perceptive piece about detective fiction in "Town and Country." Like the author of this blog, Meloy particularly loves mysteries set in Britain. Meloy singles out certain writers for praise: J.K. Rowling (the "Strike" mysteries), Kate Atkinson, Waters ("Fingersmith" and "Paying Guests" are crime novels), Pullman's "Sally Lockhart" books (ostensibly for kids). One treat: Meloy reveals that Le Carre's first two books were actually short mysteries, more than they were spy novels. (Brief and centered on a puzzling death? I'll take it.) Meloy also rejects a theory from Auden, who said that we read mysteries as a way of coping with our own guilt. (Hmmm?) Meloy says--more plausibly--that the comfort of rooting out evil is just addictive. It's especially nice in these unsettling Trumpian times. What I can't take is a *bloated* mystery; I think Ruth Rendell's early mysteries (e.g....

One of my all-time favorite stories is Maile Meloy's "Red from Green": The summer before she turned fifteen, Sam Turner took her last float trip down the river with her father. It was July, and hot, and the water was low. Hardly anyone was on the river but them. They had two inflatable rafts with oaring frames--Sam and her father in one, her uncle Harry and a client from Harry's law firm in the other. In the fall, she would be a sophomore, which sounded very old to her. She had been offered a scholarship to a boarding school back East, but she hadn't accepted it yet. Applying had been her father's idea, but now he looked dismayed every time the subject came up..... Meloy loves the idea of the child protagonist--the sensation you get when you, the reader, understand there's danger in the air, and the protagonist doesn't have the same apprehension (because the protagonist is just a wide-eyed, trusting child). This is a big feature of the novel ...

At Christmas, it's nice to remember Maile Meloy's story, "O Tannenbaum": It was a fine tree, Everett's daughter agreed. His wife said it was lopsided and looked like a bush. But that was part of its fineness--it was a tall, lopsided Douglas fir, bare on one side where it had crowded out its neighbor. The branchless side could go against the living room wall, the bushy side was for decorations, and now the crowded tree in the woods had room to grow. Everett dragged their find through the snow by the trunk, and Anne Marie, who was four, clung to the upper branches and rode on her stomach, shouting, "Faster, Daddy!" What a way to establish a mood! Everett's wife maybe has a point about the tree, but Everett isn't really listening; we might wonder if this is a marriage with staying power. (And does Everett possibly identify with the "crowded" tree in need of "room to grow"?) It's also striking that the prize tree has two...