The Next-to-Last Page: October 2023

Monday, October 9, 2023

Review: The Successor

The Successor by Ismail Kadare
My 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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