Thursday, August 08, 2013
Karen Black (1939-2013)
Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Karen Black occupied a singular place in movies, hovering in that rarefied atmosphere that placed her somewhere between character actress and star. It landed her roles in many of the decade's classics as well as some of its silliness (such as Airport 1975) As the '80s came along, more of her work came on television and in low-budget horror films, but her early work kept her a recognizable name. Black died today at 74 after a battle with ampullary cancer diagnosed in 2010.
Born Karen Ziegler in Park Ridge, Ill., the actress attended Northwestern University before heading east and attending The Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg. She appeared in several off-Broadway plays and as an understudy in the 1961 comedy Take Her, She's Mine starring Art Carney before making her starring debut in 1965's The Playroom whose cast also included Bonnie Bedelia and Richard Thomas. Her second feature film made a mark for many people when she joined the cast of Francis Ford Coppola's 1966 comedy You're a Big Boy Now starring Elizabeth Hartman, Geraldine Page, Rip Torn and Tony Bill, among others. She made lots of episodic television appearances until she gained noticed in the small role of a hooker named Karen who drops acid in a cemetery with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in 1969's Easy Rider. Her counterculture journey continued the following year when she played the role of Rayette, the country-music loving waitress who becomes crazy in love with the alienated Robert Dupea (Jack Nicholson) in Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces. The part earned Black her sole Oscar nomination as supporting actress.
Black teamed with Nicholson again the following year, only Nicholson sat in the director's chair as she starred opposite Bruce Dern in Drive, He Said. She soon followed that by assuming the part of the Claire Bloom surrogate Mary Jo Reid or The Monkey opposite Richard Benjamin in Ernest Lehman's adaptation of Philip Roth's comic novel Portnoy's Complaint. In 1974, she joined Zero Mostel when he brought his Tony-winning role from Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros to the big screen co-starring Gene Wilder. That same year she assumed the role of Tom Buchanan's mistress, Myrtle Wilson, in Jack Clayton's version of The Great Gatsby starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow and the film won Black a Golden Globe for best supporting actress — and she did it in two dimensions! Finally, she completed 1974 by playing the scrappy stewardess trying to fly a crippled jumbo jet whose flight crew got taken out when a small plane crashed into its side in the funniest of the Airport movies, Airport 1975 (which I'll always love for having Gloria Swanson playing herself dictating her memoirs into a tape recorder as the plane is going down).
Black found herself busy again in 1975, beginning with the cult classic horror film Trilogy of Terror where she starred in three shorts all based on stories by the recent passed Richard Matheson. She also co-starred in John Schlesinger's film of the Nathanael West classic novella Day of the Locust. Her epic piece for that year though involved her first collaboration with Robert Altman in his masterpiece Nashville. Black played country superstar Connie White, filling the bill for another ailing star Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakeley), during events surrounding the political campaign of Replacement Party candidate Hal Philip Walker. In 1976, Black worked again with Nashville co-star Barbara Harris and frequent co-star Bruce Dern as well as William Devane to appear in what would be the final film of the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock's darkly funny tale of crooks, con men and kidnapping, Family Plot. In 1982, she returned to Broadway under Altman's direction as part of the ensemble of Come Back to the Five & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. Altman's impossible-to-see film version featuring Black came out later that same year. Aside from some notable television appearances, most of her post-1982 career has been in horror and science fiction, but Karen Black delivered so much great work when her career was hot, she won't soon be forgotten. RIP Ms. Black.
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Labels: Altman, Awards, Coppola, Geraldine Page, Gloria Swanson, Hitchcock, Hopper, Mia Farrow, Nicholson, Obituary, Oscars, Redford, Rip Torn, Roth, Television, Theater
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Friday, November 05, 2010
Jill Clayburgh (1944-2010)
In the mid-1970s, Jill Clayburgh turned in great screen performance after great screen performance earning consecutive Oscar nominations for An Unmarried Woman and Starting Over in 1978 and 1979, then she seemed to vanish from the scene. In recent years, she had begun to reappear again in smaller roles, and I always hoped for a comeback as she always has been one of my favorites. Unfortunately, the cause for her disappearance appears to have been her health, particularly a form of chronic leukemia which has taken the actress's life at the age of 66.
She made her Broadway and film debuts practically in the same time period. In 1968, she hit the stage in the play The Sudden & Accidental Re-Education of Horse Johnson, which ran a mere five performances. That same year she had a brief part on a TV series called N.Y.P.D. before making her film debut in 1969's The Wedding Party directed by Brian De Palma and featuring Robert De Niro. That same year, she began a two-year run on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow.
She departed the soap for a starring role in the Broadway musical The Rothschilds which starred Hal Linden and with music by the Fiddler on the Roof team of lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry Bock, who died just earlier this week. She also was an original cast member of the musical Pippin and Tom Stoppard's play Jumpers. Her last Broadway appearance was in a 2006 revival of Barefoot in the Park.
In 1972, she appeared in the film adaptation of Philip Roth's novel Portnoy's Complaint. She appeared in various roles of episodic television before starring opposite Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor in 1976's Silver Streak. She stuck to comedy again the next year in Semi-Tough with Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson.
In 1978, she got one of her strongest roles and her first Oscar nomination as a sudden divorcee in Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman, the part which may be the best she ever put on screen, perfectly blending the shock, humor and pathos of a woman whose husband leaves her and is forced to re-enter the dating world.
In 1979, she co-starred with Burt Reynolds again in another comedy-drama concerning divorce, Starting Over, which brought her a second consecutive Oscar nomination. That same year, she starred in Bernardo Bertolucci's controversial Luna as a decidedly nontraditional mother and opera star and recent widow with an extremely close relationship with her teenage son.
In 1980, she had to choose between boyfriend Charles Grodin and her new stepmother's son (Michael Douglas) in It's My Turn. In 1981, she starred opposite Walter Matthau as the first woman Supreme Court justice in First Monday in October, ironically the same year the U.S. got its first woman Supreme Court justice. In 1982, she played a woman addicted to prescription medication in I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can.
After that, her screen and television appearances became less frequent, though she did have a particularly good guest shot on an episode of Law & Order as a divorce attorney in 1998 and a recurring role on Ally McBeal as Ally's mom. She received an Emmy nomination for a guest appearance on Nip/Tuck. She was a regular on Dirty Sexy Money.
Clayburgh was one of the many talents wasted in the film Running with Scissors. She will be seen later this month in Edward Zwick's Love and Other Drugs starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Another film featuring Clayburgh, Bridesmaids, directed by Paul Feig and starring Rose Byrne and Jon Hamm is due next year.
She is survived by her husband, the playwright David Rabe, and their daughter, the actress Lily Rabe.
RIP Ms. Clayburgh.
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Labels: Awards, Burt Reynolds, De Niro, De Palma, Grodin, J. Gyllenhaal, Law and Order, M. Douglas, Matthau, Mazursky, Musicals, Obituary, Oscars, Roth, Stoppard, Television, Theater, Zwick
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Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Three strikes and you're out
By Edward Copeland
Think how much money could be saved the next time Noah Baumbach seeks financing for a film if instead of someone ponying up for a full-scale production, they simplify the process by simply giving him a cameraman and filming his sessions with his psychiatrist. Better yet: Don't actually film them and spare viewers from having to endure Baumbach working through his issues.
Many artists have worked through their neuroses in their art and done so in astoundingly great works of film, literature, theater and television. While Baumbach has been at it a while and I admit I haven't seen his earlier directing efforts, his last three films do so in such an overt way with such annoying and downright unlikable characters that you wish you could enter the film and slap the whole fucking lot of them.
With The Squid and the Whale, the ensemble of Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg and even young Owen Kline were so good that their performances managed to overcome the script's deficiencies and make the experience of watching the film less painful than it might otherwise have been.
Then came Margot at the Wedding, which I would call insufferable if I weren't afraid it could come off as high praise for such a miserable waste of film.
While the screenplay for Greenberg is credited to Baumbach, surprisingly story credit is shared between him and his real-life wife, the gifted actress Jennifer Jason Leigh, who has a small role in this film. I hate to blame her for part of this mess as well, especially considering that she co-wrote and co-directed, with Alan Cumming, the underrated 2001 gem The Anniversary Party.
Ben Stiller stars as Roger Greenberg, recently released from a mental hospital in New York, who travels to Los Angeles to housesit for his brother while he and his wife take a trip to Vietnam. This brings Roger in contact with his brother's assistant Florence (Greta Gerwig), the only character in the film that doesn't come off at some point as an asshole.
I do have praise for one scene. When Roger decides to throw a party that somehow attracts throngs of twentysomethings, he launches into a coke-fueled speech about their generation that I do have to admit was quite funny. It was Stiller's best moment as well as the movie's. Also, I'll give Greenberg this much: It's not as painful as Margot at the Wedding was, where I dreamed of a Dynasty-style terrorist massacre to take out the entire wedding party.
I could delve further into the machinations of the story of Greenberg, but it's honestly not worth the effort. Once I finished the torture of watching the film, I would have ejected the DVD, but out of habit I checked to see what bonus features were offered. One was titled "Greenberg: A Novel Approach." In it, Baumbach, obviously suffering from delusions of grandeur, said he hoped to make a movie similar to a novel that would have been written by a Philip Roth or John Updike or Saul Bellow.
Of course, the only thing Greenberg has in common with those writing greats is that their books and Baumbach's screenplay were printed in English. To make the extra more ridiculous (before I shut it off) others involved in the film tried to compare it to classic films of the 1970s, such as something Hal Ashby might have made.
So, it's going to take a lot of convincing to get me to watch the next Noah Baumbach-directed project. I'll be nice and go easy on movies he only participates in the writing of, even though I've only liked one of those, Fantastic Mr. Fox. Next time Noah, maybe you should let your wife do the heavy lifting.
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Labels: 10s, Ashby, J.J. Leigh, Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Roth, Updike
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Tuesday, January 27, 2009
John Updike (1932-2009)
"At the moment when Mary Pickford fainted, the Rev. Clarence Arthur Wilmot, down in the rectory of the Fourth Presbyterian Church at the corner of Straight Street and Broadway, felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct — a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward."
From In the Beauty of the Lilies by John Updike
By Edward Copeland
For a long time, a friend and I had an agreement: When the unfortunate day arrived that the great Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Updike died, we would drop whatever we were doing and make a pilgrimage to his funeral to honor him. Sadly, my condition, a severed friendship and the evil practices of the trucking industry prevent that, but I can still at least pay tribute to the late, great man here.
I purchased my first John Updike novels when I was in the seventh grade. He'd just won his first Pulitzer Prize for Rabbit Is Rich so I bought the entire trilogy at once. Alas, even though I was slightly advanced for my age, I wasn't ready for the brilliant,
deep prose of Rabbit, Run yet, and I put the books aside. When I was a junior in high school and my English teacher told us to select a novel for a five paragraph essay, I wanted to do a John Irving, but she said no, calling him "a cheap knockoff of Kurt Vonnegut." I substituted The Witches of Eastwick, which I had purchased knowing a Jack Nicholson movie version was forthcoming (The movie and the book have very little to do with one another). It was a revelation as I was then ready for Updike. Every sentence, every paragraph was a wonder to behold. That summer, I had my wisdom teeth pulled, and as I recovered, read the Rabbit trilogy back to back. In a way, I think that's the best way to do it, because you can see Updike's gifts actually growing since they were written 10 years apart dating back to around 1960. The novels and the artist get better. Hungry for more, my friend Jennifer loaned me her copy of his short novel Of the Farm, a lovely little chamber piece and I was hooked and Updike held a permanent place as my favorite author that he still holds, though he eventually shared the title with Philip Roth.This isn't to say that Updike was perfect. He was a much better writer than he was a novelist and I have to admit that there were some that I just didn't finish. However, they were few and the glorious ones way outnumbered them: A Month of Sundays, Couples, Marry Me and one of my very favorites, the undervalued In the Beauty of the Lilies. Of course, I can't forget that there was a great fourth Rabbit book, Rabbit at Rest, which won him a second Pulitzer Prize and many fine short stories, essays and works of criticism.
I even listened to him read some of his own novels on tape and after that I couldn't read anything by him without hearing his voice in my head. Because of frequent headaches, I can't read books as fast as I used to, so lying on my nightstand happens to be his final novel, The Widows of Eastwick. Somehow, it seems appropriate that my life with Updike starts and ends in Eastwick and there is a little comfort knowing that I have one novel left.
RIP Mr. Updike. I can't possibly add up the hours of joy you've given me over the years.
"Maybe the dead are gods, there's certainly something kind about them, the way they give you room. What you lose as you age is witnesses, the ones who watched from early on and cared, like your own little grandstand."
From Rabbit Is Rich
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Labels: Awards, Books, Fiction, Irving, Jennifer, Nicholson, Obituary, Roth, Updike, Vonnegut
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Thursday, October 23, 2008
Indignation by Philip Roth
By Edward Copeland
Philip Roth was born in 1933 and his first novel-length fiction, Goodbye Columbus, was published in 1959. Nearly 50 years since its publication, Roth continues to be one of America's most prolific and greatest novelists and as evidenced by his latest work, Indignation, neither his output nor his talent shows any sign of slowing down.
What's even more amazing than Roth's output is that he doesn't seem to repeat himself. Indignation is basically the first person 1950s coming-of-age tale of one Marcus
Messner, navigating the path from child to adulthood and fleeing the nest as his father grows more unbearable to attend his second year of college at a formerly religious school in Winesburg, Ohio, far from his Jersey environs.
However, the story is more complicated than that: About one-fourth of the way through the novel, Roth reveals that Marcus is telling his tale from the afterlife, where one's life passes in front of you for eternity.
Even removing that aspect and the time-specific setting though, people of all ages will recognize what Marcus is going through, that time when all sorts of oats must be sowed, when principles must be tested, even when they come at a cost.
The cast of characters populating the 1950s college campus will probably be familiar to anyone who has gone to college at any time.
What's also new about Indignation when compared with other Roth works is an underlying sweetness. This isn't the vulgar comedy of a Portnoy's Complaint, it's a short, taut and touching tale.
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Philip Roth was born in 1933 and his first novel-length fiction, Goodbye Columbus, was published in 1959. Nearly 50 years since its publication, Roth continues to be one of America's most prolific and greatest novelists and as evidenced by his latest work, Indignation, neither his output nor his talent shows any sign of slowing down.
What's even more amazing than Roth's output is that he doesn't seem to repeat himself. Indignation is basically the first person 1950s coming-of-age tale of one Marcus
Messner, navigating the path from child to adulthood and fleeing the nest as his father grows more unbearable to attend his second year of college at a formerly religious school in Winesburg, Ohio, far from his Jersey environs. However, the story is more complicated than that: About one-fourth of the way through the novel, Roth reveals that Marcus is telling his tale from the afterlife, where one's life passes in front of you for eternity.
Even removing that aspect and the time-specific setting though, people of all ages will recognize what Marcus is going through, that time when all sorts of oats must be sowed, when principles must be tested, even when they come at a cost.
The cast of characters populating the 1950s college campus will probably be familiar to anyone who has gone to college at any time.
What's also new about Indignation when compared with other Roth works is an underlying sweetness. This isn't the vulgar comedy of a Portnoy's Complaint, it's a short, taut and touching tale.
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Saturday, November 10, 2007
Norman Mailer (1923-2007)
Earlier this year, when Philip Roth released his final Nathan Zuckerman, his fictional writer protagonist commented upon the passing and aging of his fellow novelists, mentioning the diminished physical state of Norman Mailer specifically. Mailer now joins Zuckerman's list of those who have shuffled off this mortal coil with news of his death at 84.
Of course, Mailer was far more than just a mere novelist. He changed the rules of nonfiction as well with his riveting account of Gary Gilmore's life, crimes and execution in The Executioner's Song, which won him the second of his two Pulitzer Prizes (the first came for Armies of the Night, an account of the 1968 Democratic convention). He blended his own career with fiction in the great Advertisements for Myself. He wrote screenplays of his novels and even tried his hand at directing, including the adaptation of his own novel Tough Guys Don't Dance. He even did some acting, most notably as the architect Stanford White in Milos Forman's Ragtime. According to IMDb, his last acting credit was as Harry Houdini in 1999's Cremaster 2. He helped to found The Village Voice. Of course, he also was a figure of great controversy, stemming from the stabbing of one of his wives and his mentorship of prisoner turned writer Jack Abbott, who promptly stabbed someone to death upon his release to a halfway house.
Though he made his name with a great World War II novel, The Naked and the Dead, he was often an antiwar figure, writing a book called Why Are We in Vietnam? and then turning expectations on their heads since the book depicted a bear hunt and didn't mention Vietnam once outside the title. During the current quagmire in Iraq, he published a more straight-forward book asking Why Are We at War?
He also was incredibly prolific, releasing The Castle in the Forest, which depicted agents of Satan grooming Hitler for his later evil deeds, earlier this year. It seems appropriate that a career that began with World War II would finish with an imaginative biography of that conflict's architect.
RIP Mr. Mailer.
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Of course, Mailer was far more than just a mere novelist. He changed the rules of nonfiction as well with his riveting account of Gary Gilmore's life, crimes and execution in The Executioner's Song, which won him the second of his two Pulitzer Prizes (the first came for Armies of the Night, an account of the 1968 Democratic convention). He blended his own career with fiction in the great Advertisements for Myself. He wrote screenplays of his novels and even tried his hand at directing, including the adaptation of his own novel Tough Guys Don't Dance. He even did some acting, most notably as the architect Stanford White in Milos Forman's Ragtime. According to IMDb, his last acting credit was as Harry Houdini in 1999's Cremaster 2. He helped to found The Village Voice. Of course, he also was a figure of great controversy, stemming from the stabbing of one of his wives and his mentorship of prisoner turned writer Jack Abbott, who promptly stabbed someone to death upon his release to a halfway house.
Though he made his name with a great World War II novel, The Naked and the Dead, he was often an antiwar figure, writing a book called Why Are We in Vietnam? and then turning expectations on their heads since the book depicted a bear hunt and didn't mention Vietnam once outside the title. During the current quagmire in Iraq, he published a more straight-forward book asking Why Are We at War?
He also was incredibly prolific, releasing The Castle in the Forest, which depicted agents of Satan grooming Hitler for his later evil deeds, earlier this year. It seems appropriate that a career that began with World War II would finish with an imaginative biography of that conflict's architect.
RIP Mr. Mailer.
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Labels: Books, Fiction, Mailer, Nonfiction, Obituary, Roth
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Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
"Nothing is certain any longer except that this will likely be my last attempt to persist in groping for words to combine into the sentences and paragraphs of a book. Because permanent groping is what it is now, a groping that goes well beyond the ancient groping for fluency that writing is to begin with."
By Edward Copeland
Rumors of Nathan Zuckerman's demise have been greatly exaggerated, despite Philip Roth's insistence that Exit Ghost is the final go-around for his literary alter ego. If Roth has indeed closed the book on Zuckerman, Exit Ghost is a fine conclusion, even if it fails to reach the heights of Roth's recent spate of great books.
In his most recent appearances, Zuckerman has been an observer more than a participant, as he shared the stories of the people in Roth's great trilogy of American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain.
While Zuckerman's still watching in Exit Ghost, he's also clearly the protagonist for the first time in a long time, in a story that takes him back to his very first tale The Ghost Writer.
Set in 2004, Exit Ghost picks up Zuckerman as he's returning from a self-imposed exile following death threats and 11 years of impotence and incontinence following prostate cancer.
"I don't go to dinner parties. I don't go to movies. I don't watch television. I don't own a cell phone or a VCR or a DVD player or a computer," Zuckerman writes. "I continue to live in the Age of the Typewriter and have no idea what the World Wide Web is. I no longer bother to vote."
The promise of a medical procedure that could ease his bladder problems drags him out of his Berkshire hideout and back to New York for the first time in a long time, a New York that while familiar seems alien at the same time. Particularly troubling to the writer, now past his 70th birthday, is the sudden explosion of cell phones everywhere. As he notes, used to be that you only heard crazy people talking to themselves on the streets of Manhattan, now practically everyone does. Zuckerman:
"found myself entertaining the idea for a story in which Manhattan has turned into a sinister collectivity where everyone is spying on everyone else, everyone being tracked by the person at the other end of his or her phone, even though, incessantly dialing one another from wherever they like in the great out of doors, the telephoners believe themselves to be experiencing the maximum freedom."
While he's in New York, he also stumbles into the past in the form of an eager would-be literary biographer who wants to reawaken interest in Zuckerman's long-dead mentor E.I. Lonoff at the same time he reveals what he thinks is a long-hidden secret to the late writer's work.
While Lonoff is dead, his lover from The Ghost Writer, Amy, the young woman Zuckerman once fantasized was really Anne Frank, still hangs on, albeit barely, fighting both brain cancer and the overzealous biographer. She enlists Zuckerman in her effort to keep Lonoff's supposed secret buried with him and to stop the writer from redeeming Lonoff's literary reputation by ruining Lonoff the man.
Exit Ghost tackles the preoccupation with mortality that has popped up frequently recently in Roth's work as well as the art of writing itself. It also evokes Zuckerman's own look at his own life, if not in specific, then in going back and re-reading the classic writers of his youth and remembering friends such as George Plimpton, now gone, and colleagues, such as Norman Mailer, literally on his last legs.
Zuckerman's opposition to the Lonoff biographer goes beyond the spilling of private secrets and asking why one's work needs explaining in the first place, especially by a young man seeking to make his name on the back of someone else's. "Old men hate young men? Young men fill them with envy and hatred? Why shouldn't they?" Zuckerman asks.
Exit Ghost is a very quick, satisfying read, even with a somewhat abrupt ending that leaves most of the issues it has raised hanging. Still, if this truly is Zuckerman's last stand, it's not a bad one.
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Labels: Books, Fiction, Mailer, Roth
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Monday, May 21, 2007
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
By Edward Copeland
There's always something astounding about "discovering" a new, talented writer, but that's how I felt when I first read Michael Chabon upon the publication of Wonder Boys. Every page seemed to have a wonderful turn of phrase or plot development that left me giddy with awe. Here was an author somewhat close to my age, who showed promise as being able to stand on the same high plane with my other literary idols such as John Updike or Philip Roth. Hell, Chabon even seemed to manage to be both a great prose stylist and a great storyteller, an imagined fusion in my mind — Updike Roth, if you will.
Wonder Boys prompted me to seek out his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which I loved nearly as much. Then came the long wait until his next one, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, another great effort from the rising star of the young literati. However, then things started to dry up a bit. He penned a child-like fantasy novel called Summerland and a short Sherlock Holmes-type riff titled The Final Solution: A Story of Detection. While I enjoyed both of them well enough, they didn't sate my longing for a full-fledged Chabon masterwork. Thankfully, that wait has ended with the publication of The Yiddish Policemen's Union.
The above passage is just one of the many sprinkled throughout The Yiddish Policemen's Union that left me in awe in much the same way certain Updike passages can do. While I don't think it's quite up to the level of his first three novels (Wonder Boys remains my favorite), the new book displays yet another example of Chabon trying something new without sacrificing the gifts that made me worship him in the first place.
The premise of The Yiddish Policemen's Union truly is an imaginative one. In this novel's world, the state of Israel never took off in 1948 and Jews were forced once again to flee their homeland, this time for a most unusual promised land: the Sitka District of Alaska, formed before Alaska was even officially part of the United States. The haven came with a catch: the Jews would only have the land for 60 years and the lease is about to expire, a process known as "Reversion."
That premise alone would provide for a fascinating alternate universe, but it's just the setting for what essentially is a murder mystery. The lead gumshoe is a down-on-his-luck homicide detective named Meyer Landsman, irreligious and broken in terms of his career and his personal life. In fact, the slaying occurs in the seedy motel he's currently calling home. The victim turns out to be a former chess prodigy hiding under an assumed name, the troubled son of an important rabbi.
To tell much more would spoil the unfolding of the plot, which shows that this killing cuts deeper than your run-of-the-mill murder. Still, the mystery isn't what drives The Yiddish Policemen's Union to near greatness: It's Chabon's style and ingenuity. He uses what could be just a fictional flight-of-fancy and weaves a tapestry that simultaneously pays homage to detective lore and historical fiction, creating something unique and fulfilling. Chabon truly is back and lovers of novels should be grateful.
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There's always something astounding about "discovering" a new, talented writer, but that's how I felt when I first read Michael Chabon upon the publication of Wonder Boys. Every page seemed to have a wonderful turn of phrase or plot development that left me giddy with awe. Here was an author somewhat close to my age, who showed promise as being able to stand on the same high plane with my other literary idols such as John Updike or Philip Roth. Hell, Chabon even seemed to manage to be both a great prose stylist and a great storyteller, an imagined fusion in my mind — Updike Roth, if you will.
Wonder Boys prompted me to seek out his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which I loved nearly as much. Then came the long wait until his next one, the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, another great effort from the rising star of the young literati. However, then things started to dry up a bit. He penned a child-like fantasy novel called Summerland and a short Sherlock Holmes-type riff titled The Final Solution: A Story of Detection. While I enjoyed both of them well enough, they didn't sate my longing for a full-fledged Chabon masterwork. Thankfully, that wait has ended with the publication of The Yiddish Policemen's Union.
Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined dessert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the skin left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man. They clumped the dough of his arms and legs to the dough of his body, then jammed his head down on top. A millionaire could cover a Rolls-Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe's frock coat and trousers. It would required the brain strength of the eighteen greatest sages in history to reason through the arguments against and in favor of the deep, a man-made structure, or an unavoidable act of God. If he stands up, or if he sits down, it doesn't make any difference in what you see.
The above passage is just one of the many sprinkled throughout The Yiddish Policemen's Union that left me in awe in much the same way certain Updike passages can do. While I don't think it's quite up to the level of his first three novels (Wonder Boys remains my favorite), the new book displays yet another example of Chabon trying something new without sacrificing the gifts that made me worship him in the first place.
The premise of The Yiddish Policemen's Union truly is an imaginative one. In this novel's world, the state of Israel never took off in 1948 and Jews were forced once again to flee their homeland, this time for a most unusual promised land: the Sitka District of Alaska, formed before Alaska was even officially part of the United States. The haven came with a catch: the Jews would only have the land for 60 years and the lease is about to expire, a process known as "Reversion."
That premise alone would provide for a fascinating alternate universe, but it's just the setting for what essentially is a murder mystery. The lead gumshoe is a down-on-his-luck homicide detective named Meyer Landsman, irreligious and broken in terms of his career and his personal life. In fact, the slaying occurs in the seedy motel he's currently calling home. The victim turns out to be a former chess prodigy hiding under an assumed name, the troubled son of an important rabbi.
To tell much more would spoil the unfolding of the plot, which shows that this killing cuts deeper than your run-of-the-mill murder. Still, the mystery isn't what drives The Yiddish Policemen's Union to near greatness: It's Chabon's style and ingenuity. He uses what could be just a fictional flight-of-fancy and weaves a tapestry that simultaneously pays homage to detective lore and historical fiction, creating something unique and fulfilling. Chabon truly is back and lovers of novels should be grateful.
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Thursday, November 23, 2006
The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
By Edward Copeland
With The Lay of the Land, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford sets out to turn his character of Frank Bascombe into a New Jersey version of Rabbit Angstrom, complete with asides to current events (in this case, the contested 2000 presidential election) and to give Bascombe a trilogy following his great debut in The Sportswriter and his masterful return in the novel that won him the Pulitzer, Independence Day. Unfortunately, the third time is not the charm for Ford or Bascombe, as The Lay of the Land seems aimless and meandering and lacks the forward momentum that made the first two Bascombe novels, especially Independence Day, so superb.
This time out, Bascombe still works in real estate, though his second marriage has disintegrated thanks to unexpected arrival of his wife's long-missing first husband. On top of that, Bascombe himself still is dealing with the death of a son and his own brush with mortality with a case of prostate cancer.
While Ford still has great skills as a writer of both prose and dialogue and creates many memorable scenes throughout The Lay of the Land, the novel as a whole fails to come together and while you muddle through its 400-plus pages you spend a great deal of time being reminded of other authors who have covered similar territory and better. In addition to the obvious parallels to John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, the health plight of New Jerseyan Bascombe can't help but recall many of Philip Roth's works and, as good as Ford can be, he can't compete with those two giants.
Part of the problem I think stems from the fact that the previous two Bascombe novels were great as novels, not necessarily because of the Bascombe character. Since this novel seems lacking, the character alone can't carry it. I was a big fan of The Sportswriter and Independence Day, so The Lay of the Land proved particularly disappointing to me.
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With The Lay of the Land, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford sets out to turn his character of Frank Bascombe into a New Jersey version of Rabbit Angstrom, complete with asides to current events (in this case, the contested 2000 presidential election) and to give Bascombe a trilogy following his great debut in The Sportswriter and his masterful return in the novel that won him the Pulitzer, Independence Day. Unfortunately, the third time is not the charm for Ford or Bascombe, as The Lay of the Land seems aimless and meandering and lacks the forward momentum that made the first two Bascombe novels, especially Independence Day, so superb.
This time out, Bascombe still works in real estate, though his second marriage has disintegrated thanks to unexpected arrival of his wife's long-missing first husband. On top of that, Bascombe himself still is dealing with the death of a son and his own brush with mortality with a case of prostate cancer.
While Ford still has great skills as a writer of both prose and dialogue and creates many memorable scenes throughout The Lay of the Land, the novel as a whole fails to come together and while you muddle through its 400-plus pages you spend a great deal of time being reminded of other authors who have covered similar territory and better. In addition to the obvious parallels to John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, the health plight of New Jerseyan Bascombe can't help but recall many of Philip Roth's works and, as good as Ford can be, he can't compete with those two giants.
Part of the problem I think stems from the fact that the previous two Bascombe novels were great as novels, not necessarily because of the Bascombe character. Since this novel seems lacking, the character alone can't carry it. I was a big fan of The Sportswriter and Independence Day, so The Lay of the Land proved particularly disappointing to me.
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Labels: Books, Fiction, Roth, Updike
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Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Philip and John: My two favorite writers
By Edward Copeland
Whenever anyone asks me who my favorite writer is, I generally have two answers. For writing alone, no one stands above John Updike for me. However, if the subject is broadened to novelists, then Philip Roth takes the prize. As luck would have it, both authors recently released new novels, a short tome called Everyman by Roth and a novel called Terrorist by Updike. I figured the occasion was a good enough reason for me to explore my reading relationships with both greats.
PHILIP ROTH
My reading relationship with Philip Roth got off to a rocky start. My first exposure to him came in high school when I read Portnoy's Complaint, which I found silly and immature. I never read anything else by him for several years, but about the time American Pastoral started earning acclaim, I decided to give Roth another chance — and boy was I glad that I did. He really grabbed me with American Pastoral and it encouraged me to seek out his older works. Soon, I was immersed in the many worlds of Nathan Zuckerman through the main trilogy, The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson, onto the many other works in which Roth's writer surrogate would appear. Some of my favorite Roths turned out to be ones that didn't involve Zuckerman at all — especially Sabbath's Theater, which may well be my favorite Roth novel, and the incredibly original and hard to describe Operation Shylock and the true-life memoir of his relationship with his aging and dying father, Patrimony. Roth is a great writer — he doesn't have the prose brilliance of Updike, but something about him just grabs you. Sure, some of his books that I've read have bored me, but I've completed every single one I've started. The same can't be said for Updike. What's most amazing to me is how he seems to keep getting better and better. When you think of his recent output such as American Pastoral, The Human Stain and The Plot Against America, it's quite amazing. As for his most recent novel, Everyman, it's a short, good exploration of mortality and a failing body, but it didn't grab me the way many of his other works have. Here is a list of the Roths I've read to completion, along with a three-grade assessment of fair, good or great. I'm not rating Portnoy's Complaint, because I feel I need to give it another chance and I never have.
Goodbye, Columbus: Good.
Portnoy's Complaint: Not rated.
The Breast: Fair
My Life As a Man: Good.
The Professor of Desire: Fair.
The Ghost Writer: Great.
Zuckerman Unbound: Great.
The Anatomy Lesson: Great.
The Counterlife: Great.
Deception: Great.
Patrimony: Great.
Operation Shylock: Great.
Sabbath's Theater: Great.
American Pastoral: Great.
I Married a Communist: Good.
The Human Stain: Great.
The Dying Animal: Fair.
The Plot Against America: Great.
Everyman: Good.
JOHN UPDIKE
My first brush with Updike came when he won the Pulitzer for Rabbit Is Rich. I was in junior high and I rushed out and bought the entire trilogy in paperback: Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux and Rabbit Is Rich. I attempted to start Rabbit, Run, but I guess I wasn't ready for it at that age yet. The next Updike I picked up was The Witches of Eastwick in high school. I bought the book because I knew a movie version with Jack Nicholson was forthcoming and because my junior English teacher rejected my choice of John Irving's The World According to Garp for a paper. It might be the biggest favor a teacher ever did for me. Once I read Witches, my thirst for Updike came to life. Around the same time, I ended up layed up (I think it was with wisdom teeth, but memory gets fuzzier with age) and my dearly missed friend Jennifer loaned me her copy of Updike's short novel Of the Farm, a beautiful chamber piece that really tossed me into the Updike universe unabated. His writing was a revelation — I don't remember ever reading a writer before him that made me gasp so frequently at the sheer power of his prose. Sometimes, he seemed to overreach, but mostly the sentences he constructed were things of wonder. After that, I threw myself back into the Rabbit Angstrom trilogy and I read all three in quick succession — a fascinating experience. Updike was great from the beginning, but by reading the three books, each written about a decade apart, in short order, you could really watch as his power as a prose stylist took hold. The trilogy, later joined by the fourth and final book, Rabbit at Rest, are considered Updike's crowning achievements and it's hard to argue with that. The four books really mark his most successful merging of his ample writing talent with his novelistic skills, which are sometimes lacking. With five Updike novels under my belt, I was a true Updike obsessive — and this was before Philip Roth had re-entered my reading life. If you've never had a chance, it's worth reading Nicholson Baker's fun book U & I, which describes his reading relationship with Updike and in many ways mirrors my own. He admits that there are some Updike novels he's just never finished and the same is true for me. His writing always is great, but some of the novels just don't hold you the way they should. There are some other great ones such as Couples, A Month of Sundays, Marry Me: A Romance (a personal favorite) and what I think may be his most underrated novel, which I worship, In the Beauty of the Lilies. In the Beauty of the Lilies represents a trend in Updike's work — the need to experiment with different subjects and forms. In the case of Lilies, it works magnificently. In other novels, such as The Coup or Toward the End of Time, I just couldn't get through them. I had intended to hold this post until I completed Terrorist, but that is taking longer than I expected due to circumstances in neither my nor Updike's control. So far, I like it. His prose is sterling as usual, though there are some digressions I've read already that don't quite seem to fit to me. I expect this is an Updike novel I'll finish, not one I abandon and once I do, I'll probably do a separate post just on it. Now, like with Roth, I'm gonna rate the Updike novels I've tried. I'm not including the myriad short story collections or books of criticism or poetry, I'm limiting it to the novels. He's just too damn prolific to go further, though technically the Bech books are collections. One other curious thing I'd like to note when comparing Updike and Roth: While Roth's characters are frequently writers, Updike seems to avoid them like the plague, aside from the Bech books. I wonder what that says about each of them.
Rabbit, Run: Great
The Centaur: Good
Of the Farm: Great
Couples: Great
Bech: A Book: Good
Rabbit Redux: Great
A Month of Sundays: Great
Marry Me: A Romance: Great
The Coup : Unfinished
Rabbit Is Rich: Great
Bech Is Back: Good
The Witches of Eastwick: Good
Roger's Version: Good
S. : Unfinished
Rabbit at Rest: Great
Memories of the Ford Administration: Fair
Brazil : Unfinished
In the Beauty of the Lilies: Great
Toward the End of Time : Unfinished
Bech at Bay: Good
Gertrude and Claudius: Fair
Seek My Face: Fair
Villages: Fair
Terrorist: I'll let you know
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Whenever anyone asks me who my favorite writer is, I generally have two answers. For writing alone, no one stands above John Updike for me. However, if the subject is broadened to novelists, then Philip Roth takes the prize. As luck would have it, both authors recently released new novels, a short tome called Everyman by Roth and a novel called Terrorist by Updike. I figured the occasion was a good enough reason for me to explore my reading relationships with both greats.
My reading relationship with Philip Roth got off to a rocky start. My first exposure to him came in high school when I read Portnoy's Complaint, which I found silly and immature. I never read anything else by him for several years, but about the time American Pastoral started earning acclaim, I decided to give Roth another chance — and boy was I glad that I did. He really grabbed me with American Pastoral and it encouraged me to seek out his older works. Soon, I was immersed in the many worlds of Nathan Zuckerman through the main trilogy, The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson, onto the many other works in which Roth's writer surrogate would appear. Some of my favorite Roths turned out to be ones that didn't involve Zuckerman at all — especially Sabbath's Theater, which may well be my favorite Roth novel, and the incredibly original and hard to describe Operation Shylock and the true-life memoir of his relationship with his aging and dying father, Patrimony. Roth is a great writer — he doesn't have the prose brilliance of Updike, but something about him just grabs you. Sure, some of his books that I've read have bored me, but I've completed every single one I've started. The same can't be said for Updike. What's most amazing to me is how he seems to keep getting better and better. When you think of his recent output such as American Pastoral, The Human Stain and The Plot Against America, it's quite amazing. As for his most recent novel, Everyman, it's a short, good exploration of mortality and a failing body, but it didn't grab me the way many of his other works have. Here is a list of the Roths I've read to completion, along with a three-grade assessment of fair, good or great. I'm not rating Portnoy's Complaint, because I feel I need to give it another chance and I never have.
My first brush with Updike came when he won the Pulitzer for Rabbit Is Rich. I was in junior high and I rushed out and bought the entire trilogy in paperback: Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux and Rabbit Is Rich. I attempted to start Rabbit, Run, but I guess I wasn't ready for it at that age yet. The next Updike I picked up was The Witches of Eastwick in high school. I bought the book because I knew a movie version with Jack Nicholson was forthcoming and because my junior English teacher rejected my choice of John Irving's The World According to Garp for a paper. It might be the biggest favor a teacher ever did for me. Once I read Witches, my thirst for Updike came to life. Around the same time, I ended up layed up (I think it was with wisdom teeth, but memory gets fuzzier with age) and my dearly missed friend Jennifer loaned me her copy of Updike's short novel Of the Farm, a beautiful chamber piece that really tossed me into the Updike universe unabated. His writing was a revelation — I don't remember ever reading a writer before him that made me gasp so frequently at the sheer power of his prose. Sometimes, he seemed to overreach, but mostly the sentences he constructed were things of wonder. After that, I threw myself back into the Rabbit Angstrom trilogy and I read all three in quick succession — a fascinating experience. Updike was great from the beginning, but by reading the three books, each written about a decade apart, in short order, you could really watch as his power as a prose stylist took hold. The trilogy, later joined by the fourth and final book, Rabbit at Rest, are considered Updike's crowning achievements and it's hard to argue with that. The four books really mark his most successful merging of his ample writing talent with his novelistic skills, which are sometimes lacking. With five Updike novels under my belt, I was a true Updike obsessive — and this was before Philip Roth had re-entered my reading life. If you've never had a chance, it's worth reading Nicholson Baker's fun book U & I, which describes his reading relationship with Updike and in many ways mirrors my own. He admits that there are some Updike novels he's just never finished and the same is true for me. His writing always is great, but some of the novels just don't hold you the way they should. There are some other great ones such as Couples, A Month of Sundays, Marry Me: A Romance (a personal favorite) and what I think may be his most underrated novel, which I worship, In the Beauty of the Lilies. In the Beauty of the Lilies represents a trend in Updike's work — the need to experiment with different subjects and forms. In the case of Lilies, it works magnificently. In other novels, such as The Coup or Toward the End of Time, I just couldn't get through them. I had intended to hold this post until I completed Terrorist, but that is taking longer than I expected due to circumstances in neither my nor Updike's control. So far, I like it. His prose is sterling as usual, though there are some digressions I've read already that don't quite seem to fit to me. I expect this is an Updike novel I'll finish, not one I abandon and once I do, I'll probably do a separate post just on it. Now, like with Roth, I'm gonna rate the Updike novels I've tried. I'm not including the myriad short story collections or books of criticism or poetry, I'm limiting it to the novels. He's just too damn prolific to go further, though technically the Bech books are collections. One other curious thing I'd like to note when comparing Updike and Roth: While Roth's characters are frequently writers, Updike seems to avoid them like the plague, aside from the Bech books. I wonder what that says about each of them.
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Labels: Books, Irving, Jennifer, Nicholson, Roth, Updike
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Sunday, June 18, 2006
Terrorist by John Updike
By Edward Copeland
As I promised back in June when I wrote my post about Philip Roth and John Updike, I've finally written a review of Updike's Terrorist once I finished the novel. As with most Updikes, there are multiple pleasures to be found in Terrorist and it certainly works better than some of his other ventures into uncharted (for him) territory, but as a whole it doesn't quite hold together. When I took a novel writing class in college, the professor's religion of choice was the idea that to sell a successful novel, you needed a solitary viewpoint to hold the reader. I didn't agree with him then and I don't agree with him now, but I can see his point to some extent in Terrorist.
The story's main focus is on 18-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, a graduating New Jersey high school student and product of an absent Egyptian father and a troubled Irish-American mother, who has embraced radical Islam and becomes part of a plot to set off explosives in New York's Holland Tunnel. Ahmad's character certainly couldn't be further from the ethnic and religious backgrounds Updike knows best, but the master novelist gives it the old college try and hits more than he misses.
What mucks up the story in Terrorist are Updike's occasional diversions into other lives. The sections dealing with Ahmad's concerned high school counselor Jack Levy do serve a purpose (and his affair with Ahmad's mother Teresa does provide the requisite adulterous sex that no Updike novel can live without), but sections that deal solely with Levy's wife and especially with the Homeland Security secretary (obviously a parody of Tom Ridge) and his secretary just slow down the story, despite their eventual integral nature to the plot, though I'd argue that Updike would have produced more suspense without those scenes.
On top of that, the novel's climax, which does produce momentum unusual for an Updike novel, has some very questionable developments that I'll avoid going into to avoid spoiling it for those who haven't read the book yet. As always, Updike provides some beautiful prose and many insights into religions of all kinds and life in modern America, but overall I think Terrorist fails more than it succeeds, though kudos to Updike for continuing to explore new territory well into his 70s.
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As I promised back in June when I wrote my post about Philip Roth and John Updike, I've finally written a review of Updike's Terrorist once I finished the novel. As with most Updikes, there are multiple pleasures to be found in Terrorist and it certainly works better than some of his other ventures into uncharted (for him) territory, but as a whole it doesn't quite hold together. When I took a novel writing class in college, the professor's religion of choice was the idea that to sell a successful novel, you needed a solitary viewpoint to hold the reader. I didn't agree with him then and I don't agree with him now, but I can see his point to some extent in Terrorist.
The story's main focus is on 18-year-old Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, a graduating New Jersey high school student and product of an absent Egyptian father and a troubled Irish-American mother, who has embraced radical Islam and becomes part of a plot to set off explosives in New York's Holland Tunnel. Ahmad's character certainly couldn't be further from the ethnic and religious backgrounds Updike knows best, but the master novelist gives it the old college try and hits more than he misses.
What mucks up the story in Terrorist are Updike's occasional diversions into other lives. The sections dealing with Ahmad's concerned high school counselor Jack Levy do serve a purpose (and his affair with Ahmad's mother Teresa does provide the requisite adulterous sex that no Updike novel can live without), but sections that deal solely with Levy's wife and especially with the Homeland Security secretary (obviously a parody of Tom Ridge) and his secretary just slow down the story, despite their eventual integral nature to the plot, though I'd argue that Updike would have produced more suspense without those scenes.
On top of that, the novel's climax, which does produce momentum unusual for an Updike novel, has some very questionable developments that I'll avoid going into to avoid spoiling it for those who haven't read the book yet. As always, Updike provides some beautiful prose and many insights into religions of all kinds and life in modern America, but overall I think Terrorist fails more than it succeeds, though kudos to Updike for continuing to explore new territory well into his 70s.
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Labels: Books, Fiction, Roth, Updike
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