Maror by Lavie TidharMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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Friday, December 29, 2023
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Review: The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob, and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America's Forgotten Capital of Vice
Thursday, November 9, 2023
Review: You Will Know Me
You Will Know Me by Megan AbbottMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This one has been on my list since it came out more than a year ago when a student (thanks, Callie) recommended it to me. I’m glad I waited, though, because outside of a Summer Olympics when the gymnasts get their quadrennial two weeks of fame, this Winter Olympics with its analogous figure skaters is the perfect backdrop for reading this.
As I see it, Megan Abbott is the premier woman writing in noir. I loved her afterward to Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place because it showed the conscious ways in which she sees the potential for bringing a female perspective to the form and its generic concerns. She’s a good writer, that’s clear. More impressively, she’s reinventing the genre in ways I certainly couldn’t imagine.
In place of a detached tough guy who enters a mystery in the capacity of detective – whether formally a detective or incidentally – we get a mother who’s already hip-deep in the world of her family and her child-prodigy daughter’s elite gymnastics world. She isn’t glimpsing some deep unsettling ‘noir’ truth; she’s encountering the dark, then darker, then darkest side of the seemingly perfect family she’s nurtured.
I don’t want to give too much away in the form of spoilers, but this begins with Katie dimly suspecting something dark in the spangled world of her daughter’s gymnastics. There’s a hit-and-run accident – which may not be an accident – and it becomes increasingly clear that it’s connected to an effort to maintain the façade of innocence in their gymnastics world. First we suspect one person, then another, and then finally the real culprit – and it’s the last person we’d have imagined, the one who most represents the supposed happy world. Abbott gets us from one of those suspects to another, gradually unpeeling the red herrings until we’re confronted with what we don’t want to see.
I can see criticizing this for moving slowly. I thought it dragged early, and Callie warned me that it would. She also urged me to stick it out, and I’d glad I did. There may still be room for some tightening in the text early – I don’t want to be too presumptuous with Abbott, who’s taught me to admire her – but I suspect the power of the ending comes in part through its contrast with that carefully sketched world of the opening chapters.
By the end, I found myself holding my breath. It wasn’t a matter of being afraid to find out who did it – Abbott had prompted that realization pretty carefully in the final quarter of the novel. Instead, it had to do with realizing that she really had the guts to end this on such a dark and damning tone.
I admire Abbott in part because her sense of noir incriminates all of us. Here, Katie is a “good mother,” yet that fundamental pose leads her to endorse the worst sorts of crime. This book not only condemns the world of pushed-and-posed girls gymnastics, but it calls into question how complicit we are in our family’s crimes when we justify them in the name of being a parent.
That is a very long way from The Continental Op or Philip Marlowe, but it’s a provocative extension of the same fearless ethical inquiry into how we justify our decisions in the Modern world. I thought Abbott’s Queenpin was really good, but this is even more ambitious. Now, everything she’s written is on my list.
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Thursday, November 2, 2023
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Sunday, October 15, 2023
Monday, October 9, 2023
Review: The Successor
The Successor by Ismail KadareMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’ve made it a point to read as many Saturday Night Live memoirs as I can find…once they go on sale. It’s a genre unto itself, and I think I must be up to about a dozen. I think I’ve found that the ones that offer the most pleasant surprises – Chris Kattan’s and Rachel Dratch’s – come from the performers whose careers never quite took off after the show. The worst, predictably, comes from the smarm of someone like David Spade who can’t seem to see himself without the fame that he now feels is his due.
I think Molly Shannon lands in a middle place. She’s not Tina Fey, of course, but she has had an impressive late-career renaissance. I know her best now from her equal parts daffy and human role as the mother in the terrific (and lamentably canceled) The Other Two. There, she pulls off a tight-rope act as a ‘regular mom’ suddenly elevated to near-Oprah-level talk-show-host celebrity. She balances her boy-toy boyfriend with sincerely meant pablum sympathy for the title characters.
It’s a demanding part, and she pulls it off, somehow remaining likeable in the midst of ever-growing absurdity.
In the best parts of this memoir, she talks about her theory of characterization. She’s a comedienne, of course, and she’s after laughs, but she’s also invested in finding out what makes her characters human. She wants zany, but she also wants something that seems, for lack of a better word, poignant. She’s looking for something between the flatness of a two-dimensional character and the fullness of real drama. Call it a goal of two-and-a-half dimensionality.
Her most famous character – and it really is an SNL hall-of-famer – is superstar-aspiring Mary Katherine Gallagher. Dressed most famously in Catholic schoolgirl clothes, MKG goes manic in her goal to impress one audience or another. Until I read this, I’d forgotten how physical and funny Shannon was in that role. She talks here of the crazy stunts and of the abuse she put herself through as she clanged through chairs, flew threw balsa walls, and collided with anything someone had left in the wrong place.
What’s more, Shannon reads MKG in interesting ways. She owns the aching need for “stardom” at the heart of the character, the drive to impress others without fear for her own safety – to risk humiliation for a goal that may not even exist. (What is a “superstar” in the end?)
So, this memoir accomplishes something impressive: it gives a through-line to a thoughtfully calculated career. Shannon works as a performer because she finds a way to make her characters vulnerable at the same time as they’re absurd. I’d grown to like her a lot, but it’s taken her explanation for me to understand what she does so well.
All that said, those are the best parts – and they’re worth reading. But they comprise only about a quarter of the book. The rest is less gripping. It’s difficult to hear about the awful car accident that killed her mother and younger sister when she was only four, but it’s eventually clear that she’s not ready to wrestle in fresh ways with that long ago tragedy. And, for much of the end, it’s almost intriguing to read about her father – a recovering alcoholic who acknowledges only late in life that he’s gay – but she doesn’t bring enough memoir skill to the table to make it as compelling as she clearly wants.
And, I also have to say, there’s weak writing in too many key parts. Events too often culminate in adjectives. Something is “awesome” or “so sad” instead of explored in full.
I remain a Shannon fan and am grateful for the best of what’s here, but maybe her success has made it harder for her to do the deeper memoir digging of the best of these.
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Monday, October 2, 2023
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Thursday, September 28, 2023
Review: Mother for Dinner
Mother for Dinner by Shalom AuslanderMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book is relentlessly offensive and in sustained bad taste…and thank goodness it is.
Our first-person protagonist, Seventh, is the middle child of 12 – or 13 – in the last Cannibal-American family. Their mother, aka Mudd, gave birth to as many sons as possible in an effort to restore her fading people. And now Mudd, who could not have been a worse mother if she tried (though perhaps she did try to be terrible), is dying. She summons Seventh and all the others for the final ritual of her life (or death).
They assemble in order – by Cannibal custom – to eat her.
Yes, that’s disturbing. But Auslander is so funny, so incisive throughout, that it’s inspired.
So, read this just for the laughs, and you’ll find it worthwhile. There are knee-slapper one-liners and there are hysterical scenes.
And then there are the details of Cannibal culture – their rhyming lessons about how to eat their dead, the legends of their forebears tricked by Henry Ford, and their communal disappointment with Jack Nicholson.
But this is ultimately more than just a very funny novel. It’s also a sensitive critique of identity culture, of the impulse to understand our individual lives as linked to – literally “chained” in one of the central metaphors – a communal history. For all that it’s an absurd tale, it’s also a not-so-lightly veiled Jewish-American novel. (And that puts it in the tradition of Catch-22, another deep satire that uses a non-Jewish protagonist to make its cultural point.)
Seventh (Mudd has named her children in ordinal numbers to make it easier of future historians to recount the generation that restored Cannibal-Americans to their full glory) begins the novel hostile to his heritage and angry at Mudd. He tells himself he won’t take her calls…but he does. He tells himself he won’t go back to her home…but he goes. He tells himself he will leave soon into the ceremony…but he stays.
(view spoiler)
All of this happens in the professional context of Seventh’s work as a publisher where he explicitly complains about novels that turn on identity narratives. It works as part of the novel, but it’s also catnip to an academic. He’s aware of literary trends, and he’s mocking them – with “he” meaning both Seventh and Auslander.
In other words, this is a novel that tells us the literary questions that it’s asking, and that it goes on to answer in complicated and conflicting ways.
And, given that it’s also a veiled inquiry into communal narrative in general – and Jewish-American narrative in particular – it’s a deeply thoughtful work...
Whomever it might offend along the way.
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Thursday, September 21, 2023
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