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29 july '00
24 july '00
20 july '00
9 july '00

29 july '00

House of Sand and Fog, a novel by Andre Dubus III

"It's so wrong to invade someone else's home," says Kathy Nicolo, one of the narrators of Andre Dubus's compelling stemwinder of a story. It's heavy with emotion, and centers on three appealing, but imperfect lead characters: Kathy, a feckless recovering alcoholic living in coastal California; Lester Burdon, a deputy sheriff looking for a way out of an unsatisfying marriage; and Colonel Mahmoud Behrani, who, by bureaucratic error, acquires Kathy's house in a tax auction. The stakes are high for Behrani and Kathy alike -- Behrani, an Iranian expatriate official from the court of the Shah, has a dwindling nest egg with which to support his family, while Kathy, estranged from her family, has no valuable assets other than her ancestral dwelling.

The author summons specific sensations to describe his sympathetic, yet repellent characters. Kathy, at the prospect of meeting Lester for a tryst, says,

...when I hung up it was if I wasn't anchored all the way to the ground, like when you've had too much to drink but you don't know it until you lie down and it's that instant right before the room begins to turn when you feel the chains break away.

Soothed by a cigarette, she speaks of "the nicotine sticking its legs down into my chest like a baby."

Dubus's writing is strongest for Kathy. Sometimes the Colonel's flashbacks to Iran are too abrupt and forced. Repeated images of stuffy noses, of scents of aftershave, of the sensation that one can't breathe foreshadow the novel's satisfying, though unhappy end.

24 july '00

Contemporary American Theater Festival, Shepherdstown, West Virginia

The festival, in its tenth season, focuses on material that is in the process of development, often with playwrights in residence who are making script adjustments during the rehearsal process. Performance spaces are on the cream-brick campus of Shepherd College. There is the 450-seat auditorium of the Frank Center, very wide and designed for commencement exercises (but with apparently generous backstage facilities), and the black-box studio theatre in Sara Cree Hall, seating about 160 in a galley configuration. Athletic facilities at Shepherd College seem to be plentiful.

Mary and Myra, by Catherine Filloux, directed by Lou Jacob, is a speculation about the relationship between Mary Todd Lincoln and Myra Bradwell, at the time of Mary's confinement to a mental institution in 1875 by her son Robert. Wracked with grief over her husband's death ten years before, Mary shows symptoms of what the Victorians called hysteria. Myra is an entrepreneur and legal scholar, prevented from practicing in Illinois on the basis of her gender. The text feels choppy at times, with rough edges between the transitions, and sometimes the actors don't seem to be connected with the text.

Miss Golden Dreams, a play cycle by Joyce Carol Oates, directed by Producing Director Ed Herendeen, is a reenactment of several of the well-known events in the life of Marilyn Monroe. Hardly a cycle, it consists of five short acts. No character has a specific personality. Stacey Leigh Ivey, as Marilyn, achieves a remarkable vocal impersonation.

The weekend improves quite a bit with Hunger, by Sheri Wilner, directed by Greg Leaming. The play is a very fine one-act fantasy on longing. Leaming elicits physical, sensual performances from his three actors, including Ivey again as Diana.

The most accomplished script is the steely-eyed comedy Something in the Air, by Richard Dresser, directed by Herendeen. It's about a chap named Walker, somewhat down on his luck, who is offered a chance at a morbidly remunerative investment scheme. There's a running gag about Walker's overcoat, which looks like cashmere but is actually Vectilene, endowed with a comic series of miracle fabric characteristics.

We meet Nurse Holloway, an idealist in a Wonderbra, who assists Walker in his darkening plans. In the second act reversal, Walker's Vectilene is shiny with dirt and Holloway is a successful investment adviser. She quips, "the world really opens up when you don't give a good goddamn about anybody else."

Dresser acknowledges a film noir influence, and the creative team has played it up with a black and white color scheme. There are these marvelous set pieces on wagons and the pipes that incorporate panels of light. Each scene begins and ends with the actors frozen in silhouette before the panel. For the scenes in investor Neville's office, the light is blinding and is accompanied by a thundering sound effect. For scenes in a bar, each of the two women characters towers menacingly over Walker on an improbably high barstool.

If the festival's scripts are uneven, the production values for all four shows are top notch. Myra wears a series of well-executed nineteenth-century outfits, while Mary sticks to nuances of widow's black; even the running crew are in costume. The three actors of Hunger, along with a crew of four extras, conjure an ocean storm with in the black box with little more than flapping banners. And Something in the Air shows lots of polishing: crew members spin a set piece around as an extra flourish before moving it into place; actors leave a scene during a set change in character, arm in arm.

20 july '00

Nightmare Alley, a novel by William Lindsay Gresham

Another crime novel from the Library of America anthology, likewise translated into film. This is a genre novel with genuine literary ambitions, with a broader story line, an epigraph from T. S. Eliot, and chapters named for cards in the Tarot. Gresham's protagonist, Stanton Carlisle, observes his fellow passengers in a railroad coach at night:

How helpless they all looked in the ugliness of sleep. A third of life spent unconscious and corpselike. And some, the great majority, stumbled through their waking hours scarcely more awake, helpless in the face of destiny. They stumbled down a dark alley toward their deaths. They sent exploring feelers into the light and met fire and writhed back again into the darkness of their blind groping.

Stan's preparations and detective work as a "psychic" are entertaining, and dare I say informative. The novel's narrative course is rather predictable, but it's an interesting ride getting there.

A Neotropical Companion, ecology by John Kricher

Kricher's subject is the ecosystems of the tropical Western Hemisphere -- not just rain forests but also dry forests, the Brazilian woodland called cerrado, and coastal systems like mangroves -- and the creatures that live there.

There are the antbirds, two families of passerines who subsist on arthropods flushed by advancing columns of ants. And the capybara, the world's largest rodent, a 4 foot-long, 120-pound river dweller.

Thoroughly grounded by surveys of the literature, the book is enlivened by Kricher's extensive field work. As example, consider his discussion of the coevolution of Cecropia spp. trees and Azteca spp. ants, who are sheltered by the trees and in turn provide its defense:

I have frequently encountered these ants, and they are not nice ants.... The ants of a cecropia are pugnacious and thus protective of their tree. If I were a cecropia, I'd want some of these ants living on me.

Sometimes the book's breezy approach results in a confusing organizational structure. For instance, a chapter on "The Neotropical Pharmacy" digresses into a discussion of mimicry systems. But the occasional strange editing is redeemed by nuggets of information like the explanation of flash coloration.

Backmatter is generous, and there are 177 small color photographs.

Groove is a good-natured romp through a night's illicit rave in a San Francisco warehouse. In its third section, Sunshine has some good moments between Fascist-chasers William Hurt and Ralph Fiennes, but the movie would have been a lot shorter if Valerie had not lost the recipe.

Director Bryan Singer delivers the goods: he injects a jolt of humanity into the comic-book plot of X-Men, and keeps it short and sweet and sequel-friendly. It's too bad that Anna Paquin's Meridian, Mississippi accent wanders.

From M. Emmet Walsh's ratty VW beetle, to Dan Hedaya blue-lit by a bug zapper on the back steps of his honky-tonk, Blood Simple is the essence of the noir thriller. That's all there is to say.

9 july '00

The Lime Twig, a novel by John Hawkes

This is a dreamlike, experimental novel from 1960. The plot, such as it is -- a landlord and his lodger conspire to steal an out-to-stud race horse and enter him in the Golden Bowl at Aldington -- merely provides an armature from which several harrowing episodes are hung. There is something in this book of the lives of the saints, or the temptations of Christ, in the way that the situations are meticulously rendered in shadowy, seductive, almost ecstatic tones.

Emotionally Weird, a novel by Kate Atkinson

Atkinson's third U. S. book blows in from Scotland on a breath of A. S. Byatt; piloted by a narrator given to allusions to Emily Dickinson, Doctor Who, and Lewis Carroll; and bearing a load of Scottish geographical references, vocabulary ("trachle," "glaikit"), and brand names. Feckless student Effie's story of her college days is enlaced with a tale of a sojourn with her mother Nora on a remote, mystical island.

As Effie tells her college story to her mother, both of them comment on it as a work of fiction: Nora is especially critical of the way that characters keep piling into Effie's narrative as if they were in a scene in second-rate Marx Brothers movie. Indeed, some of the weaker bits of the work give the impression that Atkinson has reclaimed this book from an earlier draft of a conventionally-told novel of undergraduate days.

Everyone in this book is writing his own story, an Atkinson's typographical whimsy helps us keep them straight. The students' wordplay -- like a riff of rhymes with "Glasgow" -- is endearing.

And I like the way that Atkinson heightens the scenes in her books with theatrical, Shandyesque devices. Here, Effie closes her eyes to avoid looking at a traffic accident involving a stray dog, and the rest of of page is covered in swirling gray mist.

The Big Clock, a novel by Kenneth Fearing

It's very interesting to compare this novel of 1946 with the screenplay of its film that starred Charles Laughton and Ray Milland. The clever core plot device -- a journalist (George Stroud) is assigned to investigate and find a man who will be framed for murder, and the journalist's target is the journalist himself -- is shared by the two works. But the movie suppresses the book's homosexuality theme, which is not too surprising given then times. The intriguing "big clock" of the movie, a walk-in timepiece that sets the pace of Janoth Enterprises, is an invention of the screenwriters; the book's big clock is a metaphorical machine that controls the lives of Stroud and Janoth alike. The movie's clock improves the payoff of the final chase. And the film drops the book's punchless subplot concerning Funded Individuals. Fearing's book tells the story from multiple points of view, but sometimes his narrators' voices aren't distinctive enough. All in all, the movie is one of the rare cases that improves upon the original.

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