I’m Dreaming of a Celluloid Christmas

Christmas movies are as much a part of my holiday traditions as parties and presents, candy and carols. I love films in every genre, but certain Christmas movies are among my favorite films of all time—I’m talking stranded-on-a-deserted-island favorite.

If I did find myself on an island this yuletide season, these are the movies I’d want with me.

“It’s A Wonderful Life” ranks among my favorite movies of all-time, perhaps even tied for first place with “Casablanca”, and the only film that comes anywhere close to moving me as much as it does is “Keys of the Kingdom.”

George Bailey has so many problems he’s thinking about ending it all on Christmas. A film so dark it’d be noir if not for the happy ending, there’s far more to “It’s A Wonderful Life” than most viewers imagine.

George Bailey is me, he is you, and he reminds us all that our little lives can make a big difference in the lives of others. George Bailey teaches us what the wonderful writer Frederick Buechner says so eloquently: “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, feel your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

Richard Curtis is a revelation. I’ve loved his work since I first saw “Four Weddings and a Funeral” by myself in a small theater in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when it first came out. A few years later, when I saw “Notting Hill,” I knew I would be a fan of everything he wrote, and as powerful as “The Girl in the Café” is, I believe “Love Actually” to be his best film so far.

“Love Actually,” an extremely entertaining film, is also, by turns, poignant and heartbreaking. It, better than any other modern movie, and perhaps any movie in history, captures the magic of Christmas, using the dizzying effects of romantic love as a metaphor for its gentle madness.

Crime movies don’t get much darker or more comedic than the neo noel noir, “The Ice Harvest.”

In icebound Wichita Falls, Kansas, Christmas Eve is as dark, depressing, and desperate a night as any of the year, and Charlie Arglist (John Cusack) is trying to escape it, leave town with two million dollars of mob boss Bill Guerrard’s money. Can he escape Wichita Falls? Can any of us?

Though all performances are strong, it’s Cusack’s embodiment of Arglist that sets the film apart. His ability to make the small-time, small-town, lawyer a likable everyman trying to break out of his quiet life of desperation gives the film its charming and redeeming qualities.

“The Ice Harvest” is dark, quirky, and blackly comedic, but it also has some poignant moments of existential meditation, erudite contemplations of the elusiveness of the spirit of the season, and stinging satire on the hypocrisy of Christmas.

“As Wichita Falls, so falls Wichita Falls” is written and spoken repeatedly throughout the film like a lost line of poetry or a riff of jazz, and it says it all. It’s about existentialism, karma—something made far more obvious in the alternate ending included on the DVD.

Two of the things most associated with Christmas—family and home—are brilliantly captured in “The Family Stone.” A dramaedy about the only thing crazier than Christmas—family, the perfectly cast film makes me wish I were a member of the Stone family. As much about life and death, loss and love, as anything else, Christmas provides a prison-like cauldron to heat up the explosive elements and dynamics of all families, but none more than those of the Stone family.

“The Holiday” starring Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet is a well written and wildly romantic holiday movie, sentimental without being overly sappy. The story revolves around two disillusioned women, one from England, the other from the US, who switch lives and find what they’ve been missing. Like the season in which it’s set, the movie is magic.

This holiday season, give yourself the gift of great movies. Travel with George Bailey on his dark journey, Charlie Arglist on his even darker one, spend some time with the Stone family, careful to give and receive the gift of love, not knowing which Christmas will be your last, and fall in love all over again as you realize, as Kate and Cameron do, that at Christmas love is actually all around.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good Movie Night!

The Reader, The Read-to

I love to read.

I also love being read to.

Many of the books I “read” are actually read to me by professionals. Rarely am I without my ipod and the thousands of unabridged audio books it and Audible.com give me access to.

I realize most people view the ipod as a portable music and movie device, but it’s as a book that it really excels. Thanks to Apple and Audible I’m able to read hundreds more books each year than I would otherwise—listening to them while I drive, work, workout, lie in bed sleeplessly. Confucius said there are three ways to learn wisdom—reflection, which is noblest; imitation, which is easiest; and experience, which is bitterest—but if he’d have lived today, I’m pretty sure he’d have added a fourth, audio books on the ipod, which is coolest.

My most recent reading—or rather, being read to—experience was Bernhard Schlink’s “The Reader,” and what a moving experience it was.

It’s a resonate story—made no less so because I could see where it was headed from the very beginning (one of the many hazzards of being a professional storyteller)—read with saturnine appropriateness by Campbell Scott.

I chose to read “The Reader” at this time because I plan to see the adaptation starring the remarkable, beautiful, talented Kate Winslet later this month when it’s released, and I wanted to read the book before I saw the film. But as was the case with “Brokeback Mountain,” I was so satisfied by the book, I no longer have a strong desire to see the movie (I’ve read “Brokeback Mountain several times and have yet to see the adaptation)—except this time, with respect to Heath and Jake, I’ll see “The Reader” in order to see Kate, whose role is reported to have saved Mirage Enterprises a lot of money on wardrobe.

The story of “The Reader” is a simple one, a love story of sorts filled with eroticism, secrets, horror, and compassion—all of which unfold against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.

When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers even more shameful than murder.

Because “The Reader” is an intimate story told in the first person by a male protagonist, I identified with Michael, even, at moments, became him, but because I was being read to, I also became Hanna. I had the experience of simultaneously being the reader and the read to, which was paradoxical, powerful, profound.

“The Reader” has my highest recommendation. Read it—or have it read to you—as soon as you can. Its elegance, resonance, profundity will stay with you long after the reader—you or Campbell Scot—reads the final work.

Conversations with Women Before Sunrise

Few things in life are more meaningful than a meaningful conversation.

A dialog is an exchange not just of words and ideas, thoughts and feelings, but of our very selves. As we talk, closely, intimately, we actually breathe in each other.

Though I’ve enjoyed many great conversations with male friends, there’s something about conversations with women that take talk to a whole other dimension. Women are typically more communicative, start at an earlier age (therefore, have had more practice), and are usually more willing to invest the time a great conversation usually requires.

I don’t just enjoy conversations in life, but in art, as well.

Some of my favorite films, particularly romances, are little more than a guy and a girl having a conversation.

Of course, in a way, every love story is a conversation between two lovers, even classics like “The Song of Songs” and “Romeo and Juliet,” but the dialog often involves others —family, friends, even adversaries. And as good as these kinds of love stories can be, there’s something special about the stripped down, essential nature of two lovers having one long uninterrupted conversation that I find more intense, intimate, inspiring.

I’m focusing here on the magic that’s possible between a guy and a girl, but I in no way think it can only happen between a guy and a girl, or one guy and one girl. Two guys or two girls or three or five can be just as true, just as intense, just as revealing. For me, heterosexuality and monogamy are not requirements.

The two very best long-form conversations in film, the purest examples of the form, and the ones that have my highest recommendation are “Before Sunset” and “Conversations with Other Women.” These two extraordinary films take something quite ordinary—former lovers having a conversation—and elevate it to the realm of truth and art and pain and beauty and loss, and for a brief moment make us feel less alone in the world.

“Before Sunset” has the added advantage of an earlier film that shows the same two lovers in a long, uninterrupted conversation nearly a decade earlier in “Before Sunrise.” In fact, “Before Sunrise” is a great film in its own right, but I find far more depth and meaning in the older lovers and in their pain and loss and regret-tinged conversation than in that of the young, hopeful, mostly unscarred, a-little-too-removed-from-it-all, whole-life-in-front-of-them kids they were when they first met.

In both “Before Sunset” and “Conversations with Other Women,” pain and loss and disappointment suffuse the subtext and prevent the lovers from being too cool or cavalier about life or love or each other.

And in each film, the lovers converse under the looming deadline—the sun setting, a plane’s departure—of a forced parting. Far more than a dramatic device, for me, this represents how finite all our connections are, how short life itself is, how important it is to make each and every word of every conversation count.

The films remind us that we have a limited supply of words, sentences, encounters, connections. Ultima Forsan, perhaps the last—something I have written into the flesh of my arm so as not to forget—every moment, every encounter, every sentence, every single word could be our last, and soon one, in the too-near future, will be.

“Rachel Getting Married” is a Home Movie Work of Art

I often drive eighty miles over to Tallahassee to see independent and foreign films at the Regal Miracle Five movie theater on Thomasville Road. Admittedly, eighty miles is a long way to travel for a movie, but the only time I’ve ever been disappointed was the one time I arrived to discover that the Internet listing was wrong and the film I drove all that way to see wasn’t there.

The times I actually got to watch the movie I drove over for—movies such as “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” “November,” “Broken Flowers,” “You, Me, and Everyone we Know,” “The Lives of Others,” “Lonesome Jim”—I always thoroughly enjoyed them, and often left inspired.

Now, added to that list, is Jonathan Demme’s “Rachel Getting Married.”

Though not as difficult to watch as “SherryBaby,” Demme’s film certainly has its painful moments—watching awkward, addicted, in-denial people interact, particularly in the disturbing dynamic of dysfunctional families can always make an audience uncomfortable.

Watching “Rachel Getting Married” is like stumbling upon the unfiltered, unedited outtakes of someone’s home movies—deleted scenes that somehow didn’t get deleted. We know we should look away, but quickly overtaken by the raw drama, we are unable to, so we stare, transfixed at the slow motion wreck unfolding in front of us.

Demme’s directing is stellar in his best film since “Silence of the Lambs,” and there are many fine performances, but this a breakout for Anne Hathaway, who takes full advantage of the amazing opportunity afforded her by the role of Kym.

When Kym (Anne Hathaway) returns to the Buchman family home for the wedding of her sister, Rachel (Rosemarie Dewitt), she brings a long history of personal crisis and family conflict along with her. The wedding party’s abundant cast of friends and relations have gathered for an idyllic weekend of feasting, music and love, but Kym with her dark, tragic wit and knack for bombshell drama is a catalyst for long-simmering tensions in the family dynamic.

Peopled with the rich and eclectic characters, “Rachel Getting Married”is insightful, perceptive, provocative, profound, and occasionally hilarious. Director Demme, first-time writer Jenny Lumet, and the stellar cast lift this lean family drama into the best of these type movies, and Demme’s best since “Silence of the Lambs.”

Inspired by Dogme 95 films such as “The Celebration” and “The Idiot,” Demme shot “Rachel Getting Married” in HD video instead of film. His goal, “The most beautiful home movie ever made.” He succeeds. “Rachel Getting Married” has the energy, spontaneity, and documentaryesque feel only video can achieve, but it also has the confidence, assurance, beauty, and performances only a skillful old filmmaker can achieve (this is Demme’s 36th film).

Of all the reasons to recommend “Rachel Getting Married” to you, number one on the list is the profoundly painful performance by Anne Hathaway. Kym is not only her best role to date, it may just be the role of a lifetime, and, as if knowing that, Ms. Hathaway embodies the broken young woman to such an extent, she disappears into her.

Go see “Rachel Getting Married” —even if you have to drive eighty miles to do so. For as highly recommended as “Rachel getting Married” is, the Regal Miracle Five is even more so.

Novelist Still a Reporter

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Michael Connelly, who began his writing career as a reporter, once again reports his way to an intricately plotted, well executed crime novel.

As I read “The Brass Verdict,” I pictured Mr. Connelly, narrow notebook and pen in hand, sitting in courtrooms, interviewing attorneys, cops, and criminals—in the LA way, of course—“Off the record, on the QT, and very hush hush.”

With the pride and preciseness of a professional reporter, Michael Connelly consistently gets it right—LA, the justice system, the courtroom, the cop shops, and most of all, the blue religion

This time out, Mr. Connelly loses his blue religion—or nearly—leaving his series detective Harry Bosch in the background in order for L.A. lawyer, Mickey Haller, last seen in “The Lincoln Lawyer” to tell the story. It’s only fair. It is, after all, Mickey’s story, but you can bet Bosch won’t stay in the background for long.
Haller inherits the practice and caseload of a fellow defense attorney, Jerry Vincent, who’s been murdered. With the practice comes the high-profile, double-homicide case against famed Hollywood producer Walter Elliot, accused of shooting his wife and her alleged lover. It’s the case of a lifetime, and it takes priority. As Haller scrambles to build a defense, he finds himself getting entangled with LAPD Detective, Harry Bosch, the inimitable hero of Connelly’s long-running series (“The Black Echo,” etc.), who’s working Vincent's murder. When Haller realizes that the Elliot affair is bigger than simply a jealous husband killing his cheating wife, he and Bosch grudgingly agree to work together to solve what could be the biggest case in both their careers. But in the process, Haller realizes Vincent’s killer may be coming after him.

“The Brass Verdict” brings together Michael Connelly’s two most popular characters, Bosh and Haller, for an entertaining legal thriller with more twists and turns that Mulholland Drive.

With obvious painstaking research and concrete details that lend credibility, Mr. Connelly writers novels that thrill and excite, but also read like true crime stories. He’s got a reporter’s ear and eye, and puts them to good use in novels only a skilled, experienced, careful reporter could write. And if “The Brass Verdict” leaves you wanting more Harry Bosch, I’d be willing to bet that’s exactly who journalist Connelly is researching and reporting about right now—so a year from now we can enjoy another of Bosch’s resonate cases.

Personal Note: Michael Connelly is a friend, and I have to say that not only is he a good writer, he’s a good guy—one of the nicest, most generous authors you’re likely to meet. Though one of the most successful crime fiction writers in the world, he spends a lot of his time supporting and encouraging other writers—even those far, far less successful (like me).

Exciting News: Michael Connelly will be the Special Keynote Speaker for the 10th Annual Gulf Coast Writers Conference, September 18-20, 2009. For more information, go to www.GulfCoastWritersConference.com

“Changeling” a True, True Story

There are movies. There are films. Then, there is art.

“Zack and Mira Make a Porno” is a movie. “Appaloosa” is a film. Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” is a work of art.

“Changeling” is a quiet masterpiece by a seventy-eight year-old auteur who has a least three things in common with my favorite director, Alfred Hitchcock. Both Eastwood and Hitchcock did their best work late in life (after a lifetime of good work). Both filmmakers functioned as independents within the studio system. And both enjoy commercial and critical success.

Of course, Eastwood isn’t the only artist involved in “Changeling.” Screenwriter Michael Straczynski turns in a stellar novel-like script and Angelina Jolie is beyond brilliant in an understated and deeply affecting performance.

Set in 1928 Los Angeles, “Changeling” is the story of a single mother, Christine Collins, who returns home one day to discover her nine-year-old son, Walter, missing. Several months later, Christine is told that her son has been found alive, but when Christine sees “Walter” she doesn’t recognize him. Captain Jones pressures a confused Christine into taking the boy home “on a trial basis.”

After Christine confronts Captain Jones with physical discrepancies between the little boy claiming to be”Walter” and her son, Jones orders Christine to the Los Angeles County Hospital’s psychopathic ward, and told repeatedly that if she will just admit she was mistaken about “Walter” and say the LAPD was right, she’ll be released.

What really happened to Walter Collins is later revealed. Sort of. But this powerful story is not so much about the abduction or the investigation, but the faith and fortitude of a powerless single mother in the face of the all-powerful, male-dominated, corrupt police department. It’s a reminder of how easily power is abused, and how very much accountability and checks and balances are essential to protect citizens from their government.

Heroic people abound in this story. There’s Christine Collins, of course, but there’s also the outspoken minister, Gustav Briegleb, and Detective Ybarra (Michael Kelly) who conducts the actual investigation into what happened to Walter Collins in spite of enormous pressure by Captain Jones not to do so. And, as usual, heroes are ordinary people just being decent human beings when the entire mighty rushing river of corrupt culture is pounding them, pushing them to conform, to go along to get along, to let go and just go with the flow.

The highest compliment I can give the near-perfect, perhaps even perfect, “Changeling” is that it is a true story. And I don’t just mean that is was based on real people and actual events, but that it is true in every single sense of the word. If fiction is the lie that tells the truth, then this story is the truth that tells an even deeper truth. “Changeling” is a deeply, devastatingly, powerfully, profoundly true work of art, and it doesn’t get any truer than that.

Cops and Cowboys, Novels and Films

Environs change, but heroes stay the same.

Long before lone private eyes with heaters holstered beneath their seersuckers walked down the mean streets of uncaring urban back alleys, lone gunmen with six-shooters strapped to their waists walked down the dusty main streets of one-horse towns.

Listen to Raymond Chandler’s praise of the hard-boiled detective and tell me it couldn’t be applied to western gunslingers:

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

Chandler’s description of this type of hero could apply as much to Robert B. Parker’s detective, Spenser, as much as his new leading man, western lawman, Virgil Cole.

If any modern detective fiction writer understands the relationship between cowboys and detectives, it’s Parker. Not only is he the most popular and prolific contemporary writer of the private eye novel, but he has studied the form, its origins and evolution—even writing his Ph.D. dissertation on “The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage and Urban Reality.”

In “Appaloosa,” two Old West lawmen, Virgil Cole, and his deputy, Everett Hitch, who narrates the tale, take on corrupt rancher, Randall Bragg, who ordered the killing of the previous marshal and his deputy. Bragg is arrested, tried and sentenced to be hung, but hired guns bust him out, leading to a long chase through Indian territory, a shootout between Cole’s men and Bragg's, a further escape and a final showdown.

“Appaloosa” showcases what Parker does best—exploring why hard-boiled men are the way they are—and, this time especially, why they’re so good at honorable friendships. As usual, Parker’s prose is spare, his dialog-laden writing stripped-down and simple, which fits the western even more than the PI novel.

Linked by ethos, code, and honor, literary cowboys and private cops, particularly as Parker writes them, have far more in common with each other than either has with his contemporaries. Spenser could be in a western, just as Virgil Cole could easily be in a hard-boiled detective novel.

Landscapes change. Heroes remain the same.

Faithful to Parker’s masterful western, Ed Harris’s adaptation, which lifts many of Parker’s lyrical lines directly from the book, will satisfy fans of the novel, while working wonderfully as a new medium. In addition to proving himself once again as an artist behind the camera, too (something he did in “Pollack”), Harris makes for a compelling Virgil Cole, while Viggo Mortensen is a pitch-perfect Everett Hitch, and the chemistry between the two is magic. Like the book, the movie is more about friendship than anything else, and we have no reason not to believe that Harris and Mortensen admire and respect each other in the same way Cole and Hitch do.

One of Parker’s best books, “Appaloosa” the novel is highly recommended. Some of Harris’s best work, “Appaloosa” the movie is highly recommended.

Mix Tape Teen Romance

The music we listen to becomes the soundtracks of our lives. This is true nowhere more so than in adolescence—when music doesn’t just move from background to foreground, but becomes the language we speak. Because of this, there is nothing quite like the poetry of the teenage romance mix tape—or its modern equivalent, the playlist.

Music is magical, and its enchanted ability to capture the emotions we can’t express as teens, when we’ve yet to develop an adequate language for all we feel, is part of the magic of “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.”

A boy and a girl. A night and a city. An infinite playlist. An infinite date. “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” is a nocturnal indie rock odyssey romance that keeps it real.

Before “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist” was a hit movie, it was a hip, heady young adult novel about two teens thrust together for one fun, funny, chaotic, sleepless night in a world of queer-core bands, teen hook-ups, and, loud, live music.

Written in alternating his and her chapters by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, the authors imbue their characters with passion, intelligence, and integrity, and treat their young audience with a rare respect, absent of any condescension. Cohn and Levithan demonstrate an impressively intimate knowledge of both contemporary teens and the Manhattan indie rock scene. Both Nick and Norah are believable, fully fleshed-out members of the YouTube, My Space, Face Book generation. Perhaps the only two straight-edges out on this wild night, neither Nick nor Norah drink or drug. Music, friends, and soon each other, not mood-altering substances, are their obsessions.

The movie is good. The book is far better. But both novel and film have scenes that give them depth and meaning, and elevate them far beyond the typical teen romance into something like art—very much like.

Of the many particularly poignant moments in a night full of insight and revelation, here are my two favorites.

“There’s one part of Judaism I really like,” Norah says. “Conceptually, I mean. It’s called tikkun olam. Basically it says that the world has been broken into pieces. All this chaos, all this discord. And our job—everyone’s job—is to try to put the pieces back together. To make things whole again.”

Nick says, “Maybe we’re the pieces. Maybe it isn’t that we’re supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we’re the pieces.”

Or this scene when Nick is talking to his gay friend and band member, Dev.

Dev glides his hand into mine and intertwines our fingers.

“Other bands, it’s about sex. Or pain. Or some fantasy. But The Beatles, they knew what they were doing. You know the reason The Beatles made it so big?”

“What?”

“‘I wanna hold your hand.’ First single. That’s what everyone wants. Not 24-7 hot wet sex. Not a marriage that lasts a hundred years. They wanna hold your hand. Every successful love story has those unbearable and unbearably exciting moments of hand-holding.”

I wanna hold Nick and Norah’s hand. I wanna listen to their infinite playlist over and over again. It holds not a single superfluous song. They’re the perfect tunes to connect to—to hold hands to, to touch souls to, to fall in love to. And that’s exactly what I did.

A Week in the Life

I have little patience for those who complain that our area suffers from a dearth of culture.

It’s simply not true.

If you can’t see all the extraordinary arts on display in our area, it’s because you’re not looking.

Last week, I had five incredible, intense, interesting days of plays, exhibits, shows, and films. True, not every week is so extraordinary, but it’s more the norm than not.

It started on Friday.

Rosie O’Bourke and her wonderful performing arts department of Gulf Coast Community College brought The True Adventures of Pinocchio to the Tupelo Theatre in Wewahitchka. I founded the theater to bring just such events to the small arts-starved town, and it was so gratifying to witness. As usual, Rosie’s students were stellar, and everyone was entertained and inspired by the performance.

To clarify, I did use the words theater and Wewahitchka in the same sentence. The Tupelo is a special place. Just over the past few months it has hosted plays, classes, workshops, and art exhibits. www.TheTupelo.com

After working with the hardworking GCCC theater students to dismantle and pack up the Pinocchio set, I jumped in my trusty Mustang and drove into Darkness—the amazing opening for the new show at the Gallery Above. The 3rd Annual Darkness Show lived up to its name, and the well-attended opening was an amazing experience. Patrons dressed in their darkest attire and were treated to art, food, drink, live music, tarot card readings, and body painting.

No one I know is doing more for art or local artist than Heather Clements and her Gallery Above. An extremely gifted artist, Heather’s powerful work is only one of the many things she’s sharing with our area. Her gallery is quickly becoming the Mecca for art and culture and fun in downtown Panama City. Darkness runs through the end of the month. www.GalleryAbove.com

On Saturday, still a little drained from the dark night before, I went to see Nick and Nora’s Infinite Play List (review of book and film coming soon) and then to the Kaleidoscope Theater to see my old buddy Jason Betz in Jerry Finnengan’s Sister. He did a wonderful job of bringing Brian Down to life, and his co-star, Chloe Storey-Smith, was an irresistibly adorable Beth Finnegan. On Sunday I drove to Tallahassee to see Ed Harris’ adaptation of Robert Parker’s novel, Appaloosa. It was well worth the drive (review of book and film coming soon).

I spent much of Monday working on my new play, Spending the Night with Alyson Adler, which will be coming to The Tupelo Theatre and The Gallery Above in November/December.

On Tuesday, thanks to Jennifer Jones and the Bay Arts Alliance, I saw Sweeney Todd at the Marina Civic Center, and witnessed some of the most insanely talented actors/singers/musicians on any stage in any city on any night.

On Wednesday, I drove over to the Seaside Rep to see Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Long Day’s Journey into Night. The disintegrating family’s long day and even longer dark night of the soul was a deliciously disquieting experience. www.SeasideRep.org

All of this in just five short days. Don’t tell me there’s nothing cultural to do in our area. Art is all around. Open your eyes—and hearts and minds—and imbibe. If you do, I promise it’ll quench your thirsty soul.

Rereading Roth

I’ve been rereading Philip Roth, and am reminded of the rewards of reading a gifted and challenging writer. What a profound pleasure reading Roth is!

It’s random really, this rereading of Roth. I’m not sure why I started exactly—except maybe it’s that I knew he had a new book coming out (Indignation—which is next on my TBR pile). Or that a new film, Elegy, based on one of his previous novels, The Dying Animal, was about to hit theaters.

It’s sort of like when I get a new album (I know I should say CD or digital download, but they’ll always be albums to me) of a singer/songwriter I love, and it makes me go back and listen to his (John Mellencamp) or hers (Jann Arden) or their (Gin Blossoms) entire catalog. But, it’s only sort of like that since I returned to the Roth catalog before getting his new novel or seeing the new film based on his older novel.

There are many, many albums in the Roth catalog. The prolific writer has been at it for several decades, and now, in his seventies, shows no signs of diminishment—in quantity or quality. From his extensive body of work, I’m choosing just two novels to recommend, and like all of his books, these are about the body—about sex and identity and mortality. And that’s what Roth does best—sex, death, and rock and roll (the last a stand-in for art).

The most recently published of the Roth novels I’ve been reading is Exit Ghost—his 28th book, and it appears, the final Zuckerman novel, which began with The Ghostwriter way back in 1979.

A 71-year-old Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after more than a decade in rural New England to visit a doctor about a prostate condition that has him incontinent and impotent. Within a few days of arriving in New York, Zuckerman encounters Amy Bellette, the muse of his beloved idol, the writer S.I. Lonoff. He also meets a young novelist and immediately begins using his writer’s imagination to fantasize about the young writer’s beautiful wife.

Sex, death, and art. Even when Roth’s protagonist can’t have sex, the book is still about sex, but it’s also powerfully and profoundly about death, as well—or more precisely, dying, the cruel process through which all is lost. All.

Speaking of dying, my second recommendation is The Dying Animal.

Again, all about sex and death, though unlike Exit Ghost, more about sex than death.

David Kepesh (of The Breast and The Professor of Desire), who left his wife and son during the sexual revolution vowing to indulge his erotic needs without encumbrance is now an eminent sixty-something-year-old cultural critic and lecturer at a New York college. The novel is the recounting of a devastating, all-consuming affair he’s had eight years prior with voluptuous 24-year-old Consuela Castillo, a former student of his. Obsessed with Consuela, driven mad by jealous desire and the “unavoidable poignancy” of their age difference, Kepesh’s erotic memoir is honest and humiliating and humanly, personally, tragic.

Other titles I highly recommend, but don’t have room to discuss here are The Human Stain and Goodbye Columbus.

If you haven’t read Roth, read him. If you have, do what I did—reread him. He will challenge and provoke you. Make you think and feel. His works of art will do what art is meant to do—enable you to explore some of the most essential elements of being human—of being a social, political, sexual, cultural, and ultimately dying animal.