Archives for August 23, 2007

Late in Kate Christensen’s deceptively wicked novel The Epicure’s Lament, the Jernigan Memorial Psychiatric Hospital makes a telling appearance. But by the time the reference turns up, Christensen’s debt to David Gates’s bleaker 1991 novel has proven more cosmetic than substantive. The antihero of her novel, Hugo Whittier, may be dying a painful death, but for bitter, black misanthropy he ultimately has nothing on Gates’s physically healthy but spiritually stunted David Jernigan. On the surface Christensen’s novel is all sharpened elbows and bared cuspids, but ultimately these outward edges are covering for a reasonably soft heart.
Christensen’s novel takes the acerbic form of four of Hugo’s notebooks, kept during the last year of his illness with Buerger’s disease, a circulatory condition usually caused by heavy tobacco use. Indeed, the forty-year-old Hugo is hopelessly addicted to smoking–as well as to good food, casual sex, and as much distance as he can place between himself and the fellow humans whose less refined ways so offend his sensibilities. Heir to a very good deal of very old money, Hugo has led his life free of financial constraint but ever oppressed by the poisonous aftertaste of his widowed mother’s unnatural attachment to and queasy demands on him as a boy.
As an adult, Hugo dissembles. He lies to the people in his life, and he lies to us, the readers of his notebooks, too–for instance, he doesn’t despise those people in his life nearly as much as he’d like us to think. His disavowed compassion shows itself now and again, like the lowered hem of a slip. The moments when it does make the novel’s ultimate softening not as much of a stretch as it might have been; and their unexpectedness along the way, along with Hugo’s own abashed surprise at them, makes them genuinely moving.
(The question of what Hugo would like “us” to think, incidentally, raised another interesting question I ask myself a lot: just who do we think we are writing for when we keep a notebook, diary, or journal? Like most of us who keep these kinds of private records, Hugo through most of the novel wants and doesn’t want an audience. By the last pages, however, you feel that he has wanted one earnestly and that his being read has saved him, in more than just the most obvious way. It made me wonder about my own ambivalence between the wish for privacy and the wish for a reader, and made me see, for an instant, even the most secretive journal-keeping as a furtive plea to be read, to be understood–just maybe to be saved.)
I’m a bit behind the curve, obviously, on my Christensen reading. Her new novel, out only about a week, is the talk of the web, even garnering a glowing notice from my co-blogger (see the Top Five, to the right). As The Epicure’s Lament was compulsively readable and nearly single-handedly roused me from a summer-long reading funk, I don’t think The Great Man will be far behind on my reading list.
Up first, though: This Side of Paradise and Lost Illusions.

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears in this space each week. This week’s installment comes from Matthew Sharpe, whose perverse and wonderful novel Jamestown is the Lit Blog Co-op’s Read This! Selection for summer. Join the LBC discussion of the novel happening this week, which features a podcast, entries from Sharpe and Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash, and other shenanigans.
When I think of the novel as it blossomed in the nineteenth century, I tend to think of plucky, independent-minded young men and women who, despite a series of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, succeed in marrying above their station in the closing pages; or, alternatively, languid, morbid-minded young men and women who, succumbing to a series of insurmountable obstacles, succeed in being crushed to death by love or fate in the closing pages. But defying this identification of novels with youth are what I like to call geezer novels, a sub-genre wherein the protagonists are old, or nearly so, and the adventures that befall them therefore all that much more surprising. So here is my mini-celebration of five geezer novels, in alphabetical order by author, more or less.
1. The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. This fantastical novel whose author is probably better known as a painter concerns a 90-year-old woman whose family cannot distinguish between her, a rooster, and a cactus. She dies and comes back… as a 90-year-old woman.
2. Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. Whose protagonist is the OG (Original Geezer).
3. Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf by Paul Fattaruso. My fellow Soft Skull author’s novel is wise and beautifully written and its protagonist, being an unfrozen dinosaur, is way older than any of the others on this list.
4. All the Names by Jose Saramago. An epic journey undertaken by a lowly late-middle-aged filing clerk in an unnamed European city that may be the same one where Kafka’s The Trial takes place.
5. Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett. “…waiting for the joy to end, straining towards the joy of ended joy.”

I’ve been working like a fiend all week in anticipation of a trip to Martha’s Vineyard this weekend with my friends Hortense and Boozy (who live in New York). Although, I’ll admit, the furious pace of this work flow may have been compromised by my trotting to the bathroom every ten minutes to see if my Dr. Denese self-tanner had taken effect. It (the self-tanner) did eventually kick in, and I now emanate a lustrous St. Tropez glow, especially if viewed at night, in a well-curtained room, illumined by the benevolent light of a lone flickering candle. Alas, in direct sunlight the effect is somewhat diminished. In short: If you’re in Martha’s Vineyard this weekend, and you spot a woman whose unevenly streaked skin suggests recreational hours spent rolling joyfully in a basin of coffee grounds, I hope you’ll say hello.
Still: the beach, ocean! Gin! Our trio’s required reading for the trip is Joan Aiken’s Nightbirds of Nantucket (a Dido Twite special), with additional reading on the subjects of whaling, cannibalism and tragic shipwreck strongly encouraged. I have Moby Dick packed (my second trip through), along with Kate Christensen’s Great Man (see Terry’s recommendation in the Top Five at right) and Northanger Abbey, for a bit of Gothic before bedtime.
I’m not taking my laptop, so not a peep from me till Tuesday. See you then!

I went to hear Osvaldo Golijov’s Pasión según San Marcos at the Mostly Mozart Festival last Sunday night. Allan Kozinn’s New York Times review describes it accurately, if coolly. My Washington Post review of the 2002 New York premiere, by contrast, is stronger on enthusiasm than detail:

As for the New York premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s “Pasión según San Marcos” at the BAM Opera House in Brooklyn, well, I’d have flown back from Tierra del Fuego on a two-seater to hear it, in part because I’d heard so much about it. No recent piece of classical music has been talked up more enthusiastically than this singularly ambitious setting of the Passion According to St. Mark. Not having been able to get up to Tanglewood last spring to check it out, I was eager to confirm or refute the fast-building buzz.
Guess what? It’s all true. Golijov’s St. Mark Passion is a rich musico-dramatic stew in which seemingly incompatible styles are jammed together like the sounds you might hear through the open window of a fast-moving car on a hot summer night. Classical strings, chattering brass, Afro-Cuban percussion, flamenco guitar, a Venezuelan chorus that struts and hollers like a black gospel choir–you name it, Golijov has stirred it in, not merely for effect but with the shrewd self-assurance of a composer who knows exactly what he’s about.
At the heart of the piece are two sharply contrasted female vocal soloists, and though it was Dawn Upshaw who had the most memorable aria, the elegant “Colorless Moon,” Luciana Souza stole the show anyway. Souza (pronounced SOH-za), a Brazilian jazz singer based in New York, has been mentioned in this space fairly frequently in the past year (Brazilian Duos, her latest CD, is my favorite vocal album of 2002), but this was the first time I had heard her other than in a club, and I was floored by the high drama of her singing. A slight woman dressed in a simple white shift and slippers, she looked and sounded ten feet tall: wild, charismatic, totally present. Even among jazz buffs, Souza is not yet widely known, but I left the theater sure that she is going to become a very bright star.
My hunch is that the same thing will happen to Osvaldo Golijov. The St. Mark Passion, mind you, is not without flaws. It’s a bit harmonically static and somewhat repetitive, and the over-miked Brooklyn Philharmonic failed to make the most of the string writing, though Robert Spano conducted the orchestra to within an inch of its life. Still, these are the merest quibbles over a piece whose total effect is roughly similar to the sensation of being knocked down by a tornado. It’s as if the whole thing comes at you in a single communicative flash and makes itself manifest instantaneously–which is, lest we forget, the mark of a masterpiece. Take note, Kennedy Center: This is a work you need to be presenting right away.
I’ve gone on a bit about Golijov’s St. Mark Passion because–well, just because I wanted to. For me, it was the major event of the year to date….

The St. Mark Passion has been recorded, but I didn’t listen to it again until last Sunday, partly because I was less impressed by the other works of Golijov that I’d heard in the meantime. I wondered whether I’d been bowled over by its sheer shock effect, and was more than a little bit skeptical about how it would strike me the second time around. I admitted as much to Alex Ross, who replied, “It will be interesting to see what you think of the Golijov encore. Listening again last summer (or was it the summer before) I found it less wild and festive, more of a serious, coherent, cannily controlled composition (possibly the result of Spano’s own control of the material). In all, I admired it even more.”
In fact I felt pretty much the same way about the St. Mark Passion on Sunday that I did in 2002. I still find it harmonically static–which is the main problem I have with Golijov’s other music–but the extraordinary textural variety makes up for the lack of strong tonal movement, and the overall effect of the piece is still pretty damned overwhelming, all the more so because I have an ingrained suspicion of the kind of flamboyant excess to which Golijov is inclined. Alex was right, though: a second hearing of the St. Mark Passion suggested to me as well that it is a much tighter, more precisely calculated piece of work than I’d realized.
As for Luciana Souza, I’m pleased and proud to say that I’ve been in her corner ever since I first heard Brazilian Duos late in 2001. My 2002 New York Times profile subsequently helped to put her in the spotlight, and what I said about her in my Post review of the St. Mark Passion, which came out a couple of months after the Times piece, has since been borne out in spades.
A good day’s work, in short. It’s gratifying to look back on an old review and know that you got it on the nose.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q * (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)

• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.”

Brad Bird, screenplay for Ratatouille