Edward Copeland's Tangents

By Edward Copeland
When contemplating possible headlines for my 25th anniversary tribute to Alan Parker's thriller Angel Heart, I almost considered using the words SPOILER ALERT. The 1987 movie is one of the first films released in my moviegoing lifetime in which an essential part of its appeal comes from the plot twist revealed near the end, though I had guessed it earlier in the film and the gimmick doesn't distract from the solid atmospherics, the great lead performance by Mickey Rourke and several supporting performances including one credited as "Special Appearance by Robert De Niro." If by chance you have not seen Angel Heart, move along now because it's difficult to discuss without giving away its secrets, even 25 years later. Some other titles containing twists might come up as well. It reminds me of a very early post on this blog about twists in films. You have been warned. It also makes me recall my dream that when any friends become new parents I beg them to keep all knowledge about Psycho away from the child until they see it since by the time I saw it, I knew what was coming. Then again, in the original 1960 trailer, Alfred Hitchcock points out the shower and the top of the steps, shows Janet Leigh screaming and suggests something's wrong with Anthony Perkins' character, so Hitch didn't try to hide it much himself.

Though Alan Parker's filmography always glowed eclectically, 1987's Angel Heart marked yet another turn in the British director's career as he helmed his first unabashed mystery thriller — and one with supernatural and voodoo undercurrents at that. In an introduction recorded for the 2004 special edition DVD, Parker discussed watching Angel Heart for the first time in many years. "It's strange seeing it at a distance because you kinda see it for the first time," Parker said. "Actually, seeing it again, I'm very proud of it. I think it holds up."

I found myself much in the same position as Parker when I revisited Angel Heart for this anniversary tribute, though the film left such an impression on me when I originally saw it in 1987 and a few more times in years soon after that it surprised me how well its specifics had stayed with me, thanks to the craftsmanship, the screenplay (which Parker also wrote, adapting it from the novel Falling Angel by William Hjortsberg) and the acting. Parker admits changing the novel quite a bit. While the novel took its setting exclusively certain parts of New York, primarily Brooklyn, Parker expanded it to Harlem and added the New Orleans element entirely. Parker also created characters, dialogue and shifted the time period backward from 1959 to 1955 because he wished to keep it further away from the 1960s and closer to the 1940s as a period piece. What, perhaps, startled me the most — seeing how young Mickey Rourke looked back when he was at the peak of his powers, though from a 2004 interview with Rourke on the DVD, you wouldn't get that. Rourke says he was close to losing his house when Angel Heart came his way and had been weighing quitting acting. The chance to work with Alan Parker attracted Rourke to Angel Heart more than the film itself. Thankfully, Rourke made his comeback after his flirtation with boxing, first in Sin City and then in The Wrestler (don't know if I should count Iron Man 2 or not), but I wonder how many great roles we lost while he was lost.

Of course, Angel Heart also includes that great supporting performance by Robert De Niro that reminds you of the days when he seemed to take parts for more than just a paycheck. In an interview on the DVD, Parker says he originally sought De Niro to play Harry Angel (Rourke's role), but De Niro expressed more interest in the Louis Cyphre role. Parker had been chasing Jack Nicholson for Cyphre, but Jack got to be devilish in a different 1987 film, as Darryl Van Horne in the in-title only adaptation of John Updike's The Witches of Eastwick. The process of nabbing De Niro, according to Parker, was an arduous game of back-and-forth until one day De Niro finally phoned and told Parker, "I'm of a mind to do the film." I gave you the spoiler warning up top, so, as the song goes, I hope you guessed De Niro's character's name and since he's a punny devil — Louis Cyphre…Lou-Cyphre…Lucifer. As Cyphre explains, "Mephistopheles is such a mouthful in Manhattan." Also like the lyrics of The Rolling Stones' classic, De Niro portrays Cyphre as a man of wealth and taste, well-dressed with frighteningly long fingernails, always playing with his cane. Many sources claim that De Niro's performance actually is a wicked impersonation of Martin Scorsese. Physically, he might resemble how Scorsese looks at times but that certainly isn't Marty's vocal style. De Niro's Angel Heart character speaks too deliberately without a shred of accent and never sounds as if he's on fast-forward as Scorsese does. I've said this many times about great actors and probably about De Niro, but his excellence extends to masterful manipulation of props. In Angel Heart, De Niro displays it with the cane and, later, with an egg. Like Rourke, 1987 gave moviegoers two memorable De Niro turns. He also preached "teamwork" as Al Capone in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables.

Angel Heart opens by getting the audience in a properly creepy mood opening on a dark street where a dog barks wildly on the pavement while way above the canine a cat hisses on a fire escape. At the bottom of the fire escape, where the pooch continues to make noise lays the violently slain body of a woman. Honestly, the movie never gets back around to telling us who she was or how she relates to rest of the story but the tableau combines with Trevor Jones' slightly sinister score and the proper look provided by d.p. Michael Seresin, who served as cinematographer on many Parker films including Midnight Express, Fame and Birdy. Seresin's work goes far in creating Angel Heart's atmosphere and accomplishing Parker's stated goal of making "a black-and-white film in color." After that opening, we appear to be on the same street, knowing now that it's Brooklyn 1955 as Mickey Rourke pops a bubble and then lights a cigarette as a faceless voice greets him as "Harry." Soon, he's sitting behind his desk in his disheveled office when he gets a phone call. "Harold Angel. Middle initial R. Just like in the phone book," he answers. "Of course I know what an attorney is. It's like a lawyer only their bills are higher," he tells the person on the phone. He scrounges for pen and paper, passing a gun in his desk drawer, and scrawls Winesap and McIntosh. Harry then adds Louis Cyphre and sets up a meeting, a bit out of his usual stomping grounds in Harlem, but Angel pledges to be there.

The best running gag in Angel Heart, since the film never tries too hard to conceal Louis Cyphre's true identity, has half of his meetings with Harry Angel taking place in churches — and Cyphre gets on the private detective when he uses unsavory language. Their first meeting takes place at a Harlem church. Harry climbs to the church's second level where he meets Herman Winesap (Dann Florek, who we now know best as Captain Kragen on the original Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU but always will be L.A. Law 's Dave Meyer to me). As Winesap prepares to take Harry to meet Cyphre, Angel notices a shrouded woman furiously scrubbing blood off the wall of a room. "An unfortunate husband of one of Pastor John's flock took a gun to his head," Winesap explains. "Most unpleasant." When Winesap opens the door to another room, we see that hand and those long fingernails playing with the handle of his cane before we see Louis Cyphre himself. Though De Niro makes no attempt at any sort of accent, he's introduced as "Monsieur Louis Cyphre." Without getting up, he shakes Harry's hand. In fact, Cyphre never stands in the entire film. He asks to see Angel's identification. "Nothing personal. I'm a little overcautious," Cyphre admits. De Niro's performance displays such control that it really makes me nostalgic for that De Niro. Harry asks how they came up with his name, assuming it was the phone book since most of his clients pick him since his last name starts with an A and they are lazy. As Harry spins his theory, Cyphre silently and definitely shakes his head no. That's a gesture most humans could make, but the De Niro of that time conveys so much with that small motion. He and Winesap then explain the case they want Angel to take. "Do you by chance remember the name Johnny Favorite?" Cyphre inquires.

The name Johnny Favorite doesn't ring a bell with Harry Angel, but Cyphre explains that Favorite was a crooner prior to the war. "Quite famous in his way," Louis adds. "I usually don't get involved in anything very heavy. I usually handle insurance jobs, divorces, things of that nature. If I'm lucky sometimes I handle people, but I don't know no crooners or anybody famous," Harry tells the mysterious Cyphre and his attorney. They inform the detective that Favorite’s real last name was Liebling, but Harry doesn’t know that name either. He asks the pair if this Johnny owes them money and that’s why they’re looking for him. “Not quite. I helped Johnny at the beginning of his career,” Cyphre says, leading Angel to ask if he was the singer’s agent. “No! Nothing so…,” the bearded man semi-smiles, not bothering to complete his thought. “Monsieur Cyphre has a contract. Certain collateral was to be forfeited in the event of his death,” Winesap steps in to explain. That takes Harry back a bit. “You're talking about a guy that's dead?” he asks. Cyphre and Winesap go on to tell Angel the story of how they lost track of Johnny Favorite. In 1943, the entertainer was drafted to aid the U.S. war effort in North Africa as part of the special entertainment services. Soon after his arrival, an attack severely disfigured Favorite, both physically and mentally. “Amnesia. I think you call it,” Cyphre tells Harry, who tosses out, “Shell shock.” Cyphre concurs with Angel’s description and his interest gets piqued when the private eye admits to knowing how that condition feels. He asks Harry if he was in the military. ‘I was in for a short time, but I got a little fucked up, excuse my language. They shipped me home, and I missed the whole shebang — the war, the medals, everything. I guess you could say I was lucky,” Harry declares. Louis continues Johnny Favorite’s story, telling Harry that Johnny wasn’t lucky. “He returned home a zombie. His friends had him transferred to a private hospital upstate. There was some sort of radical psychiatric treatment involved. His lawyers had the power of attorney to pay the bills, things like that, but you know how it is. He remained a vegetable, and my contract was never honored…I don't want to sound mercenary. My only interest in Johnny is in finding out if he's alive or dead,” Cyphre insists. “Each year, my office receives a signed affidavit confirming that Johnny Liebling is indeed among the living, but last weekend Monsieur Cyphre and I, just by chance, were near the clinic in Poughkeepsie. We decided to check for ourselves, but we got misleading information,” Winesap informs Harry. “I didn't want to cause a scene, I hate any sort of fuss. I thought, perhaps you could subtly and in a quiet manner…,” Cyphre doesn't have to finish his sentence. “You want me to check it out,” Angel surmises as he accepts the case. He rises and shakes Cyphre’s hand. ”I have a feeling I've met you before,” Cyphre tells Harry, but Harry doesn’t think so. Admittedly, the first time I saw Angel Heart, I figured out the twist before its reveal, but not this early though it’s so obvious in retrospect that I don’t see how I missed it. With two more recent films with twists, Fight Club and The Sixth Sense, I knew their secrets before I saw them. In the case of David Fincher’s satiric masterpiece, I don’t think I would have figured out its twist on my own, but knowing that going in allowed me to watch more closely as I watched the film and admire it all the more. As for The Sixth Sense, I honestly don’t get why it wasn’t obvious to everyone who saw it that Bruce Willis’ character was dead all along. I also could watch that film more closely for the signs, but it didn't prevent dissatisfaction with the whole. Lots of movies stick pivotal scenes at the very start, be it another 1987 release such as No Way Out with Kevin Costner or Evil Under the Sun, the second Agatha Christie adaptation that had Peter Ustinov play Hercule Poirot, hoping that the scene slips the audience’s mind so when the film finally comes back to it, they are surprised. That’s the curse of my good memory. I remembered that odd scene of Costner in the room yelling at a two-way mirror, asking when they were going to come out, and guessed early that he indeed worked as a Russian mole. The entire time I watched the overrated Sixth Sense, I kept coming back to the first scene and wondering, “What happened to that deal with the patient that shot Willis in his bedroom?” Angel Heart lacks any scene like that, but the clues get placed before the moviegoer early and often and it’s a tribute to the skills of all involved that it engaged me to the point that I didn’t catch the hints until much later than I should have otherwise.

So Harry Angel embarks on his investigation to find out what happened to Johnny Liebling nee Favorite after the war. He starts his search where Cyphre and Winesap got the "run-around" — The Sarah Dodds Harvest Memorial Clinic in Poughkeepsie. Pretending to be from the National Institute [sic] of Health, Harry inquires if they have Jonathan Liebling. The nurse (Kathleen Wilhoite) at the reception window tells Harry that he can't see a patient without an appointment, but Angel explains he just needs to know if he's "on the right track." Checking the files, the nurse informs Harry that Liebling once was a patient there but was transferred to another hospital. Spinning the file around so that Harry can see, the transfer date, written in pen, reads 12/31/43 and an Albert Fowler signed the form. Harry points out to the nurse that whoever wrote the transfer note did it with a ballpoint pen — and ballpoints weren't around in the U.S. in 1943. He asks her if this Dr. Fowler still works at the clinic, but she says he only does part-time now. Harry finds Fowler's house, but the old doctor isn't there, so he breaks in and waits. Snooping in the meantime, he discovers a huge stash of morphine in Fowler's refrigerator. When Fowler (Michael Higgins) returns home, he threatens to call the police but Harry doubts he'll do that with his "opium den" and grills him about Johnny Favorite. The doctor lies and says he transferred him to a VA hospital in Albany, but Angel shoots that theory down. Fowler obviously needs a fix, but Harry won't let him have one until he gives him something he can use, like where Johnny is now. "Some people came one night years ago. He got in the car with them and left," Fowler confesses. Harry inquires how a man who reportedly was in a vegetative state managed to get into a car. "At first, he was in a coma, but he quickly recovered," Fowler tells him, adding that Valentine still had amnesia. Harry pumps him for details about the friends. The doctor says the man was named Edward Kelley, but he didn't know about the woman because she stayed in the car. He believes they went Down South. They paid Fowler off to keep up the charade that Valentine remained in the clinic. Harry decides he could use some food and Fowler could clear his head so he helps the doctor to his bedroom, promising a fix when he returns, locking the doc in his room in the meantime. After a cheeseburger in a diner, Harry returns to Fowler's, grabs a bottle of morphine from the fridge and heads upstairs. He unlocks the bedroom door and finds Fowler dead, apparently a suicide, clutching a photograph and a Bible. Harry strikes a match off Fowler's shoe and wipes his prints off everything. When he wipes off the Bible, it opens and turns out to be hollowed out with bullets inside. Fowler will be just the first of many stiffs that cross Harry's path on what one could call the ultimate journey to find yourself.

As Harry told Cyphre and Winesap, his cases usually involved divorces and insurance, nothing heavy — and nothing weighs heavier than a corpse such as Dr. Fowler's. Harry's prepared to tell Cyphre what he knows when he meets him at a tiny Brooklyn eatery and then wash his hands of this case. He informs Cyphre, who plays with a dish of hard-boiled eggs, about what he learned concerning this Edward Kelley taking Johnny Favorite away while paying Fowler all these years to make it appear as if he still resided in the Poughkeepsie clinic. It's that great scene I alluded to earlier involving De Niro's manipulation of the egg. YouTube has the clip but, alas, embedding isn't allowed so click here and watch, then return. Of course, Cyphre convinces Harry to stay on the case. Besides — what would happen with the rest of the movie if he quit? I've never read Falling Angel but despite the changes that Parker acknowledges, I imagine the essential plot remains the same. Harry Angel hunts for Johnny Valentine and in a standard thriller, you could say that Valentine really serves as the MacGuffin, but Angel Heart pulls off something that not even Hitchcock tried. Sure, Norman assume his mother's identity in Psycho and Judy pretended to be Madeleine in Vertigo, but both are a far cry from Angel Heart where the MacGuffin actually is the main character, Harry Angel. He's hunting down himself and he's not aware of it. De Niro's Devil knows the whole time, but the people who aided Jonathan Liebling must pay a price and who better to deliver the bill than Johnny himself, unaware of what he's doing. Of course, selling your soul to the devil is an old story, but an innocent whose life becomes possessed by someone malevolent, even though Johnny Valentine appears just to be a rotten human being, foreshadows the inhabiting spirits, specifically BOB, of Twin Peaks who would commit heinous acts while in control of poor Leland Palmer, but Leland would have no memory until BOB exits and Leland's dying. When Harry gets together for a sexualromp with Epiphany Proudfoot (Lisa Bonet), the offspring of Johnny Valentine and a voodoo-practicing woman, he doesn't realize until it's after the fact — just like Leland — that he raped and murdered his own daughter. In a lot of ways, looking at Angel Heart now, it seems to portend some of the Lynchian trademarks that wouldn't really come to fruition until Twin Peaks and Wild at Heart. Blue Velvet debuted almost six months before Angel Heart, but for me it looks like a rough draft for the David Lynch template that he'd start perfecting in the '90s, especially with the large menagerice of eccentric characters.

Those characters start coming to the forefront as Harry makes his way to New Orleans. Even before that, we encounter the blatant "give me" preaching of Pastor John (Gerald L. John) who opens tells his parishioners that if they love God, he shouldn't be driving a Cadillac, he should be driving a Rolls-Royce. Harry's investigative trail takes him to old musician Spider Simpson (Charles Gordons), whose band Johnny used to play with, in a resting home (providing some of those doddering old folks that Lynch would revel in) who sends him to Coney Island chasing a gypsy fortune teller named Madame Zora. Despite Parker's insistence that he wanted to make a black and white film in color, Michael Seresin paints some bright and beautiful beach scenes when he meets with two more leads, Izzy (George Buck) and his wife (Judith Drake) who stands in the ocean in the belief it helps her varicose veins, even though Izzy says she hates the water. The Izzy conversation proves hysterical as he likes to give away nose shields from a box he found beneath the Boardwalk. Harry notes there isn't much sun. "Yeah, but it keeps the rain off too," Izzy tells him. He remembers Zora and his Baptist wife knew her well. Toward the end of their talk, Harry asks Izzy what he does in the summertime. "Bite the heads off of rats," he answers. "What do you do in the winter?" Harry inquires. "Same," Izzy replies, scratching his balls. His wife lets him know that Madame Zora is the same person as a Louisiana heiress named Margaret Krusemark. "She wasn't a gypsy, she was a debutante," the wife informs Angel. The wonderful but woefully underused Charlotte Rampling plays Margaret.

The cast of interesting characters stretches further than those. There's Stocker Fontelieu as Ethan Krusemark, Margaret's wealthy and connected daddy who ends up explaining the whole situation to Harry. We even get an early role by Pruitt Taylor Vince as one of the detectives aggravating Harry about the bodies that keep popping up connected to him. I made a reference earlier to Lisa Bonet's role. Harry first meets Epiphany with her infant son as she visits the grave of her mother, Evangeline Proudfoot, Johnny's secret lover. "Your mom left you with a very pretty name, Epiphany," Harry tells her. "And not much else," she replies. It seems so funny now how controversial it was at the time that she made this movie and ended up getting her booted off The Cosby Show because of her heavy duty sex scene with Mickey Rourke, soiling Denise Huxtable's innocent image. Apparently, the elaborate voodoo dance number where she appears to sacrifice a chicken and bathe her breasts in its blood was OK. (Interestingly enough, the same person staged the elaborate voodoo dance ritual as did the dance numbers in Fame — the late Louis Falco.) I wonder what would have happened if the story of Bill Cosby paying for the child of his former mistress had been revealed while the show had been on the air. Would he have kicked himself off the show? On the DVD, Parker admits that coming from England, he knew nothing of The Cosby Show or who Bonet was when he cast her. He said they all took great care to protect Bonet, then 19, when time came to film the explicit scene, but she exhibited fewer nerves than anyone else. Bonet, like most of the cast, got some good dialogue. Parker didn't write many of his films (and other than Bugsy Malone, the ones he did tended to be his lesser ones such as Come See the Paradise, The Road to Welville and Evita), but if he's telling the truth and he didn't take that much dialogue from the novel, he came up with a lot of keepers here. Before Harry and Epiphany couple, he asks her what her mother said about Valentine. "She once said that Johnny Valentine was as close to true evil as she ever wanted to be," Epiphany answers, adding that Evangeline called Johnny the best lover she ever had to which Harry shrugs as if to say, "That figures." Epiphany recognizes his reaction and tells him, "It's always the badass that makes a girl's heart beat faster."

As I mentioned early on, Parker said that rewatching the film for him was like seeing it for the first time. Parts of it did play like that for me with the exception of one character and the person who played him, who wasn't even an actor by trade. I forget who spoke the words but I remember a critic once saying that the mark of a memorable character was when the character's name stayed with you long after you'd finished watching the movie. It's 25 years, give or take, since I don't recall how soon I saw Angel Heart after its opening, and Toots Sweet remains vivid in my mind. It's a small role, a musician who played with Johnny Valentine and takes part in the voodoo rituals, portrayed by a real blues legend, Brownie McGhee. In real life, McGhee was known both for his solo work and his longtime musical partnership with blind harmonica player Sonny Terry. Harry offers to buy Toots a drink when he takes a break from his set, but Toots gets his drinks comped and takes a very special order. "Two Sisters cocktails. I don't know what's in it but gives a bigger kick than six stingers," Toots tells him. When Harry reminds him of Spider Simpson, Toots recalls, "I remember Spider. He used to play his drums like jack rabbits fuckin'." He then excuses himself for the rest room before has to play again. "A piss and a spit and back to work," the musician says, but Harry follows him and pushes for information and Toots finds the warning of a chicken foot in the toilet. He'll eventually become one of the string of bodies, dying in a particularly graphic way, but in his brief time in the movie, McGhee's Toots Sweet has stayed with me for a long time. There's another supporting player that I've neglected to honor with the plaudits he deserves for his essential role in Angel Heart. His work shows up in every scene of the movie despite the fact that his corporeal form doesn't appear. I'm referring to Gerry Hambling, whose superb film editing controls every aspect of Angel Heart, especially once Harry's memories mixed with Johnny's begin to come back to him with recurring images of fans that stop and switch directions, the shadows of those fans, soldiers in 1943 Times Square, a building with a single lit window, gazing down upon a long spiral staircase with various figures and steel elevators descending to somewhere you probably don't wish to go. Hambling and Parker's collaboration began with two short films in 1974 and has continued through 14 feature films, earning Hambling Oscar nominations for Parker's Midnight Express, Fame, Mississippi Burning, The Commitments and Evita. Hambling earned another nominated for editing Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father and his additional credits include Absolute Beginners and the infamous Bill Cosby bomb Leonard Part 6.

When boiled down, it's merely four great scenes by De Niro and a helluva performance by Rourke that gives Angel Heart its power a quarter-century after its release. The actors' third scene together, in the pews of a church, may be my favorite. Look for yourself. De Niro's Cyphre gets great lines (as usual) such as "The future isn't what it used to be, Mr. Angel" and "They say there's just enough religion in the world to make men hate one another but not enough to make them love." Cyphre via De Niro also gets to do a great wink and smile of the "Tsk, tsk" sort when Harry curses, reminding him they're in a church to which Angel indicates he doesn't care. "Are you an atheist?" Cyphre asks him. "Yeah, I'm from Brooklyn," Harry replies. What prompted his profanity was Cyphre's continued politician-like way to skirt straight answers to direct questions. "I'm a little fed up with fuckin' 'vaguely.' 'Vaguely' is starting to put a noose around my neck and it's starting to choke," Harry barks at him. Rourke performs superbly as a hardened private eye who slowly unravels as he realizes that everything he thought he knew wasn't true and he'd just traveled across the country obliviously chasing his own tail. Once Harry learns the truth about himself and Cyphre, he returns to his New Orleans hotel room, shocking the detectives that he'd come back to the scene of Epiphany's murder. The lead detective tells him that he's going to burn and he calmly responds, "I know — in hell." Alan Parker has a funny line in his interview on the DVD when he insists that he considers the story in Angel Heart doesn't get enough credit for its realism. "I think people sell their souls to the devil every day of the week. In Hollywood, even more regularly," Parker says.

Perhaps what turns out to be most shocking about Angel Heart concerns the course of Mickey Rourke's career. That it took until The Wrestler for Rourke to be recognized with an Oscar nomination. Snubbed in 1987 for both Angel Heart and Barfly when the weak actor field consisted of two essentially supporting roles (Michael Douglas in Wall Street and William Hurt in Broadcast News); a performance in an Italian film few people have seen even now, 25 years later (Marcello Mastroianni in Dark Eyes); an Oscar favorite in a deadly dull prestige picture (Nicholson in Ironweed); and a manic comic doing his shtick in the form of a war biopic (Robin Williams in Good Morning, Vietnam). Rourke also was overlooked in previous years for The Pope of Greenwich Village and, especially, Diner. On the other hand, they did get around to nominating Rourke sooner than they did Gary Oldman.

As for Angel Heart, the movie certainly has detractors — as most films that hinge on major twists do. In my mind, what raises it above other films with surprising turns — or for that matter makes any "twist" film that works such as The Crying Game or Fight Club — stems from the fact that Angel Heart provides solid filmmaking prior to the twist. I don't know if a great Angel Heart could have been made without that story turn, but the film Alan Parker made prior to the revelation was a damn good one and the secret kicked it to an even higher level of success.

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Labels: 80s, A. Parker, Books, Costner, De Niro, De Palma, Fiction, Fincher, Hitchcock, Law and Order, Lynch, Mickey Rourke, Movie Tributes, Nicholson, Oldman, Rampling, Scorsese, Twin Peaks, Updike, Willis

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By Edward Copeland
Werner Herzog's voice has embedded itself inside my brain. Each time I watch a documentary he directed and inevitably narrated, it takes longer to shake his German-accented English voiceover from my mind. A similar thing happened when I once listened to John Updike read one of his books on tape. After that, every time I read something by the great writer, I heard the prose in his voice. It's not an exact parallel with Herzog, since I only heard Updike when I read Updike. Once Cave of Forgotten Dreams finished, though Herzog's narration ceased to emanate from my TV, for some time afterward and as I write this, his voice continues to echo in my head.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams shares a thematic similarity with Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World except instead of looking at our least-explored continent, Herzog gains access to an ancient cave in southern France, sealed for thousands of years, that gives fascinating insight into what man's ancestors saw and could do in terms of paintings and sculptures believed to be the oldest ever found. The Chauvet Cave, named for Jean-Marie Chauvet, one of three cave explorers who followed an air current during an expedition in 1994 and found the cave apparently sealed to humans for more than 20,000 years.

France seized custody of the prehistoric site to prevent degradation, installing a locked steel door to bar access. The government allowed Herzog access under strict conditions, letting him film no more than four hours a day and if anyone had to leave during that time, the shoot stopped for the day. Making it more challenging, Herzog, who generally dismisses the need for 3D, felt it would make the experience more exciting for the viewer here (alas, Hugo remains the only 3D film I've seen since the gimmick's comeback). However, the narrow passages of the Chauvet Cave made the equipment necessary for 3D filming impossible so a special 3D camera had to be designed.

While some dispute the dating of what's been found in the cave, (Who wants to quibble between 20,000 and 32,000 years ago when either figure will set creationists' hair on fire?) even in two-dimensions the paintings astound. Depictions of animals extinct or evolved, some drawn in a succession that with the dim light almost make them appear to be the precursor of cinema. Handprints indicating an ancestor with a deformed finger is used as a map to trace the journey of the artist and the cave. The two sculptures found even indicate early depictions of a human-like form.

Herzog, always a jokester at heart, throws in an epilogue that questions both what our next step in the history of the world might be as well as whether France might see the tourist potential in this great find.

Herzog used to make some of the most interesting foreign language features around, especially when his stormy acting muse, Klaus Kinski, still lived to produce films ranging from the idiosyncratic (Woyzeck) to the astounding (Fitzcarraldo), from the one-of-a-kind (Aguirre, the Wrath of God) to a remake of a classic that became that rare classic remake itself (Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht).

Following Kinski's death in November 1991, Herzog turned almost exclusively to documentary filmmaking. Nonfiction works always held a place in Herzog's repertoire — both before and during his days with Kinski — but most were shorts made for television with theatrical features dominating his directing career. From the start of Herzog's feature career with Signs of Life in 1968 through his final film with Kinski (Cobra Verde) in 1987, Herzog directed 14 documentaries, all shorts except for three feature-length, only two of which were made for theatrical release.

Since 1987, Herzog only has directed five feature films (one of which was a fictionalized version of one of the documentaries he made in that time). With the exception of directing episodes of three separate German TV series, all his work in that time period has been on nonfiction filmmaking — shorts and feature-length, for television and theaters. What's even more fascinating is that his documentaries such as Cave of Forgotten Dreams prove far more interesting than the handful of fictional features that barely get released and, when they do, turn out to be flat-out disasters such as The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans starring Nicolas Cage.

If he can keep finding topics such as Cave of Forgotten Dreams, the loss of Herzog the fiction filmmaker with Herzog the documentarian might make for a worthy swap.

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Labels: 10s, Documentary, Herzog, Nicolas Cage, Remakes, Updike

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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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NOTE: Ranked No. 51 on my all-time top 100 of 2012

As a filmmaker, Quentin Tarantino works like a crafty pickpocket, approaching strangers and diverting their attention with entertaining conversation. It's only later that the victim realizes something more serious has transpired. This is definitely the case with Tarantino's second film, Pulp Fiction. There is so much energy and joy overflowing in Pulp Fiction that the viewer has too much fun to realize there is a deeper film at work. It takes awhile for the film's full wallop to register.

Like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction is a true ensemble work with a brilliant cast. Pulp Fiction builds on the unique structural technique Tarantino utilized in Reservoir Dogs and takes it several steps further, telling disparate stories out of chronological order. To tell too much of the story would diminish the visceral and comic impact of the film, which Tarantino also wrote from stories he and Roger Avary conjured up.

From the tale of a prize fighter (Bruce Willis) paid to take a dive to the amazing speech that Christopher Walken gives that lurches from the reverent to the absurd, Tarantino's words are almost quicker than the ear's ability to catch them. The performances are all top notch, with special notice given to Walken, John Travolta, Amanda Plummer and Tim Roth. Samuel L. Jackson, who gives one great performance after another, paints perhaps his most vivid portrait as Jules, a verbose hit man considering a career change.

Harvey Keitel, one of the most intrinsically interesting actors around, pops up late in the film, steals his scenes and makes a hasty exit. In a vengeful mobster's drug-taking wife, Uma Thurman finally finds a role that capitalizes on the potential she's shown. The actors are able to perform well thanks to the script itself. No one writes dialogue like Tarantino. Every word sounds as if it came from the same mouth, yet every character has humanity and individuality.

Tarantino's direction has grown more polished. He's got a great eye. His gift isn't really an animalistic passion like Martin Scorsese, but a biting comic brilliance rarely seen. What's so fascinating about Tarantino is as much what he takes out as what he leaves in. He tells a boxing story without showing a fight, makes the contents of a briefcase important without revealing them.

In fact, Tarantino's method is reminiscent of a passage from U and I, novelist Nicholson Baker's autobiographical essay about his imagined relationship with John Updike. Baker talks about his fascination with the "narrative clogs" of fiction, the passages that give a work its flavor even though they might be extraneous. He writes: "... the trick being to feel your way through each clog by blowing it up until its obstructiveness finally revealed not blank mass but unlooked-for-seepage points of passage."

In the end, that's where Pulp Fiction excels, showing the passage of time and of various criminal lowlifes in a sometimes disturbing but consistently comic way.

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Labels: 90s, Keitel, Samuel L. Jackson, Scorsese, Tarantino, Travolta, Updike, Walken, Willis

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"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

PREVIOUS POSTS ON UPDIKE

In the Beauty of the Lilies

Memories of the Ford Administration

Philip and John: My two favorite writers

Terrorist

U&I by Nicholson Baker

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Labels: Awards, Books, Fiction, Irving, Jennifer, Nicholson, Obituary, Roth, Updike, Vonnegut

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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.

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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Labels: Books, Chabon, Fiction, Roth, Updike

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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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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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Labels: Books, Irving, Jennifer, Nicholson, Roth, Updike

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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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For anyone who aspires to be a writer or who reads avidly, mutually inclusive attributes that they are, U and I is a must read.

Following Nicholson Baker's wonderful novels The Mezzanine and Room Temperature, Baker turns to autobiography, but it resembles no autobiography you're likely to have read for it concerns the "imagined friendship" Baker shares with John Updike, arguably America's best living prose stylist.

The entire book, which closely resembles an essay, explores the influence the words that people read have on their whole, a point made all the more ironic since Baker admits to having read only eight of Updike's books in their entirety.

U and I functions as both criticism and hero worship, showing Baker appalled both by Updike's description of a fictional wife and the fact that an author Baker knows personally gets to play golf with Updike instead of Baker himself. The most interesting aspect of the book, which overflows with interesting aspects, is Baker's idea that how and what we remember from the books we read are just as important as the book themselves and that when, as he does often, misquotes passages from Updike, the mistaken remembrance brings a resonance to the words that probably could not have been achieved any other way.

U and I provides a wonderfully neurotic exploration of the desire to live up to one's idols and, eventually, to surpass them. Baker is no John Updike, but then Updike is no Nicholson Baker and U and I should not only entertain but will give the reader a heightened awareness of Baker himself before one sets out to read his previous novels.


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A ripple of electricity tiptoes across a reader's neck when he or she comes across a previously unknown writer whose prose emphatically announces a new, impressive talent.

Though Michael Chabon wrote the novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and A Model World, a collection of short stories, I wasn't aware of him until Wonder Boys. Reading the 31-year-old's novel was a revelation.

Wonder Boys takes place entirely during a literary festival held on a weekend at a small Pittsburgh college. One of the chief organizers of the festival is Grady Tripp, a burned-out professor who is losing a struggle with the gargantuan manuscript that is supposed to become his next novel.

Attending the same weekend is Grady's agent, Terry Crabtree, who has accompanied Grady on many a misadventure, and soon finds himself involved in another through the acts of a writing student named James Leer, who is obsessed with Hollywood suicides.

The plot itself is entertaining, but what's dazzling about Wonder Boys is Chabon's writing, which offers at least one phrase, one sentence, one description that makes the reader's jaw drop in awe, admiration or envy on nearly every page.

Wonder Boys earns Chabon the right to be mentioned in the same breath as John Updike, but Chabon's presence is even more exciting, given his age. As for now, he stands alone as the only novelist promising to be one of his generation's greatest writers.

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"To me it seemed Genevieve was always singing one song, that went up and down, and returned upon itself as music does, repeating, repeating more urgently, looking for that thing it never does quite find."

John Updike writes the preceding paragraph in his latest novel, perfectly signifying both his place as America's greatest living prose stylist and the problems at the root of the novel.

The premise of Memories of the Ford Administration has Updike's latest hero, college professor Alf Clayton (bearing an uncanny resemblance at times to Updike's classic character Rabbit Angstrom), invited to write an essay for a scholarly journal looking back at the short tenure of the only man to serve as both vice president and president without having been elected to either office.

Instead, Clayton submits a rambling collage of his thoughts on his personal life at the time, when he was torn between ending one marriage and beginning another while obsessing about writing a book about James Buchanan, the 15th U.S. president.

While Updike's prose dazzles as always, the book seems divided into two unsatisfying halves. The juxtaposition of Buchanan's 19th century life and Alf's mid-1970s dilemmas never quite come together beyond the shared personality trait of indecisiveness that Updike's creation and the late president share.

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Of all the great reading experiences of my life, the best was when I read John Updike's first three Rabbit novels over the course of two weeks.

The novels, which were written and set roughly 10 years apart, not only traced the life of Harry Angstrom but gave the reader a fascinating glimpse into the growth of Updike's talent. Rabbit Redux showed more of Updike's prose wizardry than its predecessor and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Is Rich took Updike to an even higher level. The final novel, Rabbit at Rest, also won the Pulitzer when it came later. While it was among Updike's best works, it seemed to me his skills had plateaued since Rabbit Is Rich. This shouldn't have been unexpected — after all, Updike has been a writer all of his adult life and was 58 when the last Rabbit was published. Why shouldn't he have reached a peak?

Leave it to Updike to prove me wrong with his latest novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, another great leap forward for the author that deserves its place among his very best.

Not bad for someone in his 64th year to still be learning new tricks. In the Beauty of the Lilies, which takes its title from a verse of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," spans 80 years in the lives of the Wilmot family.

It begins their tale with Presbyterian minister Clarence Wilmot in Paterson, N.J., before spinning through the lives of his son Teddy, Teddy's daughter Essie and, finally, Essie's son Clark, who brings the novel up to 1990.

Though certainly smaller in scope and focus and more conventional, in a way it reminded me of John dos Passos' USA trilogy. Like the Rabbit novels, which highlighted significant events occurring in the same era, Lilies glances past much of history and culture in the 20th century.

Four sections divide the novel, each focusing on one of the principal characters. They almost are like interconnected novellas, but they hold together as a single work, even when their structure changes from the straight-forward slices of life — Clarence's loss of faith and Teddy's desire to get through life with as few mental wounds as possible — that launch the book.

While the first half is good, Lilies really takes off in the third section about Essie, the minister's granddaughter who becomes a movie star. In a mere 133 pages, Updike manages to condense Essie's growth from a precious 7-year-old who always got "excited when it rained, as if God was touching her somehow," to the tired actress with a neglected son she becomes. Updike manages to draw her character's life convincingly and vividly in fewer pages than any single book of the Rabbit series.

The fourth section changes form again, as it bounces between a present setting and flashbacks to paint a portrait of Clark's troubled life, which takes the young man into a Branch Davidian-type cult compound. The novel's multitudinous themes are best left for the reader to discover and ponder, though the main thrust concerns the battle between culture, mass media and religion. In a way, it shows that the more the universe expands, the smaller and less important human and spiritual connections become.

While Updike seemed to me to stumble with his last two novels, Memories of the Ford Administration and Brazil, he's never exerted more control of his powers than he does here. His prose is as stunning as always, but the story doesn't suffer in this one and it may well be his finest work as well as his most compulsive page turner.

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