The terrific star of Chicago Shakespeare’s new Richard III, Wallace Acton, took a little getting used to in the role for me. He plays it with a pinched, mannered quality that goes against the tide of recent performances I’ve seen in which our hunchbacked schemer boasts a measure of treacherous sex appeal, gimping around with a certain swagger. Not this Richard (though his movement is remarkable, especially a tortured, twisting jump onto a table). Acton and director Barbara Gaines play Richard’s repellency straight and pure–it’s mitigated only by his silver tongue, and the effect is to magnify the power and charms of that language and rhetoric.
Their commitment to an unappealing Richard has dramatic payoffs too. When Anne is seduced and Elizabeth coerced by him–the “true love’s kiss” he commands her to bear to her daughter in Act 4, Scene 4 is forced on Elizabeth, at length–visceral shudders at the violation ripple through the audience. When Richard appears publicly as king, a couple of bludgeon-wielding heavies silently daring the townspeople not to acclaim him, some of the playgoers comply with halting applause.
In the playbill, Gaines says it struck her, rereading the play, “how every major character has a feeling, an intuition, that they then repress.” When the repressed returns, she and the scenic and special effects designers spare little in rolling out the red carpet for it. They have surprises in store that I won’t ruin here, but that make the final battle as riveting as possible, with an unexpected layer of complexity. I don’t know enough about the history of the play’s production to say whether the ghosts of Richard’s victims have ever made such an affecting and harrowing return, or whether they’ve played such a decisive role in how the last act unfolds. But they’re unforgettable in this production, a terror and a true moral center.
Richard III runs through November 22. The cast is great and the staging is sharp, juxtaposing period costumes with the occasional appearance of selected modern objects: a steel gurney, a plastic bag, all the most menacing props. There are small details to savor for their emotional resonance, for instance the widowed Queen Margaret’s entrance in a gown that’s a rotting version of the same one Queen Elizabeth is wearing.
If you’re in Chicago or can get here, don’t miss it.

I’ve just returned from seeing Barbara Gaines’s haunted, haunting Richard III at Chicago Shakespeare, and will have more to say about it Monday. For now I’ll just say: Go, go, go. There are four performances this weekend, and it’s not to be missed. I’ll elaborate on this advice next week. (The show runs through November 22.)

I’m sick while my cobloggers are both traveling, but here’s a little something to tide you over. In Lolita, D. G. Myers finds, Humbert Humbert offered many of the same lines of defense that Roman Polanski and his supporters are spewing today.

Polanski is a “renown [sic] and international artist,” say Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, Martin Scorsese, and other film people in a petition demanding his immediate release. “The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets,” Humbert protests–“not crime’s prowling ground.”

Read the rest.

It’s so easy to stop reading a book. To find a first paragraph that commands one’s extended attention at once is rare. Even among books I adore, few hit their first few hundred words out of the park. Almost all of them need a grace period of two or three or twenty pages to hook you. Here’s a paragraph that I think is a great beginning of a book:

Nolan pulls into the parking garage, braced for the Rican attendant with the cojones big enough to make a point of wondering what this rusted hunk of Chevy pickup junk is doing in Jag-u-ar City. But the ticket-spitting machine doesn’t much care what Nolan’s driving. It lifts its arm, like a benediction, like the hand of God dividing the Red Sea. Nolan passes a dozen empty spots and drives up to the top level, where he turns in beside a dusty van that hasn’t been anywhere lately. He grabs his duffel bag, jumps out, inhales, filling his lungs with damp cement-y air. So far, so good, he likes the garage. He wishes he could stay here. He finds the stairwell where he would hide were he planning a mugging, corkscrews down five flights of stairs, and plunges into the honking inferno of midafternoon Times Square.

That’s the first paragraph of Francine Prose’s novel A Changed Man, about a neo-Nazi trying to reform. It tells you a good deal about Nolan while dispensing gemlike phrases like “honking inferno.” And it left me wanting to know much more about the reluctance for which the character “passes a dozen empty spots and drives up to the top level.” It roped me right in. That doesn’t mean the book as a whole will deliver–though based on my previous experience reading Francine Prose, I expect it will, and then some.
I’ve become such an admirer of Prose this year, beginning January 1 when I bought her most recent novel, Goldengrove, on the basis of the title’s allusion to the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem and D. G. Myers’s recommendation. In the spring I read The Blue Angel, about a creative writing teacher entangled with a student. And last month I picked up one of her young adult novels, After, out of curiosity (retrieving the link above, I saw that Myers recently posted a review of a new YA novel by Prose). I’m more comforted than cowed to see that twelve further Prose novels await me after I finish A Changed Man. The ones I’ve read so far are real tours de force.
(If you get a chance to see Prose read or speak, take advantage of it. She was here in March to read a new story and take questions about Goldengrove, and it was a riveting evening even for someone who isn’t generally a fan of readings. She’s formidably smart and says what she thinks–she was most interesting talking about subjects I didn’t agree with her about.)
Previous books whose first paragraphs I love include Elaine Dundy’s The Old Man and Me, now widely available, wonderfully.

Hi there, I’m just back from a largely internet-free vacation (except for some road tweeting) and am pretty busy catching up on everything, including my blog reading. Here are some items that have made me a little bit less sad to be back from perch dinners and rockhounding.
● At A Commonplace Blog, D. G. Myers reviews the new Richard Russo novel That Old Cape Magic and includes Russo’s Empire Falls in his best American novels of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Find out his other four here.
● Levi Stahl is reading Anthony Powell again. He has some especially nice observations here.
● Finally, the Walrus reminds us that before there was texting, there was passing notes in class. What’s been lost in the transition? Penmanship as an added means of expression, certainly–“I am attempting to write neater this time so I won’t give away my frenzied state of mind,” one of the reprinted notes reads–and the happy fact that these snapshots of Saskatchewan school life around 1960 survived at all.
Enjoy, and eat cherries.

This is awesome.
Donald E. Westlake, you are missed.
That is all.

Quick, who’s your all-time favorite writer? When was the last time you read one of his or her books? Last weekend a friend who’d started The Portrait of a Lady on my enthusiastic recommendation said she was enjoying the book, and it struck me that I haven’t read it myself in 20 years–roughly half my lifetime, and most of my adulthood. Soon I realized that I haven’t read any James novel in three or four years, at least. What am I even talking about when I call him my favorite writer? That was a different person who read most of those books.

This evening I picked up Portrait again and read a few pages. The last time I read anything James wrote before 1886 must have been fifteen years ago. If the later fiction is what you’re used to, the difference is startling. The 1880 Portrait (my edition is from the revised 1907 New York Edition) has the beginning of an essay:

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not–some people of course never do,–the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime.

As if creatures of delicate sensibilities, we’re lowered into the story gently and the reassuring presence of the narrator never feels very far away. Later, James will omit the overt layer of narration and plunge us into the midst of things. As in The Wings of the Dove.

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him.

In short, the first pages make it clear that the James of The Portrait of a Lady is not any longer the James I know. Not after spending years in graduate school poring over The Princess Casamassima, The Wings of the Dove, What Maisie Knew, and “In the Cage.”

So who was it who got hooked on that other James? Let’s have a look at what she underlined.

It appeared to Isabel that the unpleasant had been even too absent from her knowledge, for she had gathered from her acquaintance with literature that it was often a source of interest and even of instruction.

The poor girl liked to be thought clever, but she hated to be thought bookish; she used to read in secret and, though her memory was excellent, to abstain from showy reference. She had a great desire for knowledge, but she really preferred almost any source of information to the printed page; she had an immense curiosity about life and was constantly staring and wondering.

She was a person of great good faith, and if there was a great deal of folly in her wisdom those who judge her severely may have the satisfaction of finding that, later, she became consistently wise only at the cost of an amount of folly which will constitute almost a direct appeal to charity.

The apparent answer: a very young female person–one of a million–who identified in a hopeful way with Isabel Archer, “her meagre knowledge, her inflated ideals,” and all. (At least through the first half of the novel; the underlining ceases soon after Osmond starts really closing in.) No more surprising is the lessened sympathy I feel for Isabel now, not to mention for the slightly absurd 20-year-old who thought she might be like her.

A. J. Liebling is making me laugh out loud, a lot. His not-so-funny subject is wartime in Europe, specifically his brief life on a tanker that brought him from England to America in December 1941. His shipmates are a gaggle of Norwegians. He figures the chances of a German torpedo attack on them to be about 90 to one. What nobody’s expecting is the news they hear on December 7:

There is a difference of thirteen and a half hours between the time in Hawaii and Great Britain, and I was asleep before Grung, the radioman, picked up the first bulletin about the attack on Pearl Harbor. I heard the news when I went up on the bridge next morning. Bull, the third officer, pumped my hand and said, “We both allies now!” It felt more natural to be a belligerent on a belligerent ship than that anomalous creature, a neutral among belligerent friends.

Liebling’s observations of day-to-day human behavior during wartime are touching, even heartening. He’s drawn to the most life-goes-on strains of men’s responses to existential threat. A pilot on his ship who lost seven motorboats at Dunkirk remembers the port best for the motorbike races the soldiers there ran and bet on. The exigencies and uncertainties of war make people only more vividly themselves.
And what selves the Norwegian shipmen are. There’s the steward who’s keeping clear of schoolteachers:

The fellow, who was wearing a white jacket, was obviously a steward. He was of medium size but had long arms, so the jacket sleeves ended midway between elbow and wrist, baring the tattooing on his wide forearms. On the right arm he had a sailor and his lass above the legend, in English, “True Love.” The design on the left arm was a full-rigged ship with the inscription “Hilse fra Yokohama,” which means “Greetings from Yokohama.” His head was large and bald except for two tufts of red hair at the temples, looking like a circus clown’s wig. He had a bulging forehead and a flat face with small eyes, a turned-up nose, and a wide mouth. As soon as I got my breath, I said, “Passenger,” and he took me in charge with a professional steward’s manner, which, I afterward learned, he had acquired while working for a fleet of bauxite freighters that often carried tourists. The bauxite freighters had operated out of a port the steward called Noolians, and most of the tourists had been vacationing schoolteachers from the Middle West. Fearing emotional involvement with a schoolteacher, he had switched to tankers. “Tankers is safe,” he said. “No schoolteachers.” His name was Harry Larsen.

And the captain of few words:

At meals with Captain Petersen I had plenty of time for eating, because there was not much conversation. Once he said, as he began on his first plate of cabbage soup, “I have an uncle in New York who has been fifty-two years with the Methodist Book Concern.” Twenty minutes later, having finished his second helping of farina pudding, he said, “He came over in a windyammer.” On another occasion he said, “We had a Chinaman on the ship once. When we came to Shanghai he couldn’t talk to the other Chinamen.” After an interlude during which he ate three plates of lobscouse, a stew made of leftover meats and vegetables, he explained, “He came from another part of China.” And once, taking a long look at the shipowner’s portrait, he said, “I went to see an art gallery near Bordeaux.” After eating a large quantity of dried codfish cooked with raisins, cabbage, and onions, he added, “Some of the frames were that wide,” indicating with his hands how impressively wide they were. Once, in an effort to make him talk, I asked him, “How would you say, ‘Please pass me the butter, Mr. Petersen,’ in Norwegian?” He said, “We don’t use ‘please’ or ‘mister.’ It sounds too polite. And you never have to say ‘pass me’ something in a Norwegian house, because the people force food on you, so if you said ‘pass’ they would think they forgot something and their feelings would be hurt. The word for butter is smor.”

“Westbound Tanker” is collected in Just Enough Liebling. I’m happy to be only halfway through it. I got onto Liebling after reading James Marcus’s interview with Pete Hamill, who edited the new Library of America edition of Liebling. (If you’re reading The House of Mirth, as you should, you’ll be way ahead of me on this.)