Archives for May 7, 2009

I’m also reading Sarah Waters’s new novel, The Little Stranger, this week. I’m about midway through, and so far I’m in agreement with Laura Miller’s praise for the book. On the surface, the book is a creepy, highly readable Gothic ghost story set in post-WW II England. But of course, ghost stories are never just ghost stories, or at least the good ones aren’t, and Miller makes a great argument for what Waters has achieved with the novel, writing: “Ghosts are not supposed to exist, which is one reason why ghost stories are often about things that people try to deny. The rage and sexual longings of lonely, well-bred women, for example, infuse the two great classics of the form: Henry James’ ‘Turn of the Screw’ and Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Haunting of Hill House.’ … [With this novel] Waters has boldly reassigned all these gothic motifs from their usual Freudian duties to another detail entirely: “The Little Stranger” is about class, and the unavoidable yet lamentable price paid when venerable social hierarchies begin to erode.”
The novel’s beautifully written too. Last night while reading, I came across this passage, which reminded me of Elizabeth Bowen in the acuteness of the psychological description. It takes place as the male narrator is leaving a dance with a younger female friend:

The gesture jarred with me. She had had that brandy early in the evening, and, after that, a glass or two of wine, and I’d been glad to see her–as I’d thought of it then–letting off steam. But where, for those first few dances, she’d been genuinely loose and tipsy in my arms, it seemed to me now that her giddiness had something just slightly forced about it. She said again, “Oh, isn’t it a shame we have to leave!”–but she said it too brightly. It was as if she wanted more from the night than the night had so far given her, and was broadening and hardening her strokes against it in an effort to make it pay up.

The last sentence is the one I think is so good; it seems like the perfect description of when the end of the night turns you brassy.

It has been raining in Asheville for the past couple weeks. All varieties: Light rain, heavy rain, rain accompanied by thunder, rain accompanied by tornadoes, dribbling rain, rain rain rain. Somewhere in there Lowell became convinced that the Weather Service knew that the rain was never going to stop but was only forecasting one to two days at a time so as to not “completely destroy the spirits of the people.” We’re lucky to work at home but this kind of weather can make you feel extra confined, as if the circumference of the world has been reduced to the computer and the window with the rain streaking down it. So on Tuesday we played hooky — went to 12 Bones for beef brisket, cornbread and grits, and then downtown to visit Malaprop’s and Captain’s Bookshelf . It was a really lovely outing, which of course I would say because I clearly got to commandeer the itinerary.
At Malaprop’s, I picked up the new Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, which looks marvelous. At Captain’s, I got two books I’ve had my eye on for a while, The Collected Poems of Roethke (I’ve had the library’s copy since December and they’d probably like it back) and the collected stories of Elizabeth Bowen. The latter is a very pleasing hardcover edition by Jonathan Cape; beautiful typesetting, pretty engravings by Joan Hassall. I’ve been visiting it for over a year — always looking it over, feeling desire, then returning it to the shelf and acting excessively virtuous about it. But Tuesday, the book fell open to one particular story and I knew I had to bring it home.
It’s the opening of “The Confidante,” one of Bowen’s early stories. The odd thing that day was I’d just spend the entire morning trying to describe a character in my book’s “secret preoccupation” and had finally given up on the paragraph before going out. And then there was Bowen, describing the same emotion so vividly yet economically:

“You are losing your imagination,” cried Maurice.
It was a bitter reproach. He stood over her, rumpling up his hair, and the wiry tufts sprang upright, quivering from his scalp.
Penelope gulped, then sat for a moment in a silence full of the consciousness of her brutality. She had never dreamed that her secret preoccupation would be so perceptible to Maurice. Unconsciously she had been drawing her imaginations in upon herself like the petals of a flower, and her emotions buzzed and throbbed within them like a pent-up bee.
The room was dark with rain, and they heard the rip and rustle of leaves in the drinking garden.

See? It had to come home.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) 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:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

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

• Exit the King (disturbingly black comedy, PG-13, closes June 14, reviewed here)

• God of Carnage * (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes July 19, reviewed here)

• Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (drama, PG-13, some adult subject matter, accessible to adolescents with mature attention spans, closes June 14, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• Mary Stuart (drama, G, far too long and complicated for children, closes Aug. 16, reviewed here)

• The Norman Conquests (three related comedies, PG-13, comprehensively unsuitable for children, playing in repertory through July 25, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

• Waiting for Godot (drama, PG-13, accessible to intelligent and open-minded adolescents, extended through July 12, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

• Our Town (drama, G, suitable for mature children, reviewed here)

• Ruined (drama, PG-13/R, sexual content and suggestions of extreme violence, closes June 28, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK OFF BROADWAY:

• Distracted (serious comedy, PG-13, closes May 17, reviewed here)

“To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.”
Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea