—Bob Wake

Index

America, America (1963) (film)
American Dreamer by John C. Culver & John Hyde (bio)
Brecht & Company by John Fuegi (bio)
The Birds (1963) (film)
The Browning Version (1994) (film)
Chaplin & Agee by John Wranovics (bio & screenplay)
David Copperfield (1999) (Masterpiece Theatre)
David Copperfield (2000) (Turner Broadcasting)
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001) (novel)
Dreamcatcher by Stephen King (novel)
A Death in the Family (2002) (Masterpiece Theatre)
Doctor Zhivago (2003) (Masterpiece Theatre)
Drives Like a Dream by Porter Shreve (novel)
The Dying Animal by Philip Roth (novel)
Esperanza (2000) (opera)
Eyes Wide Shut by Frederic Raphael & Arthur Schnitzler (screenplay & novella)
Ex-Friends by Norman Podhoretz (memoir)
Fidelity by Michael Redhill (short stories)
French New Wave by Jean Douchet (memoir/film history)
Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis (novel)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers (memoir)
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
Into the Tangle of Friendship by Beth Kephart (memoir)
Journey to Portugal by José Saramago (travel/history)
King Lear (1999) (BBC)
Last Call (2002) (Showtime)
Last Things by Jenny Offill (novel)
Lightning on the Sun by Robert Bingham (novel)
Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men by Padgett Powell (novel)
My Father, Dancing by Bliss Broyard (short stories)
Narralogues by Ronald Sukenick (essays)
The Night Inspector by Frederick Busch (novel)
Novel with Cocaine by M. Ageyev (novel)
Oblivion by David Foster Wallace (short stories)
Oliver Twist (1999) (BBC)
The Ponder Heart (2001) (Masterpiece Theatre)
Portrait of an Artist, As an Old Man by Joseph Heller (novel)
Ravelstein by Saul Bellow (novel)
Stolen Kisses (1968) (film)
The Stones of Summer by Dow Mossman (novel)
The Suppression of ‘Salt of the Earth’ by James J. Lorence (film/cultural history)
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (novel)
Tender Comrades by Patrick McGilligan & Paul Buhle (film/cultural history)
Under the Greenwood Tree (2005) (Masterpiece Theatre)
Until I Find You by John Irving (novel)
The Wages of Fear (1953) (film)
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon (novel)

It’s been said that Eudora Welty was more comfortable writing short stories than novels. Her publisher nudged her in the direction of longer narratives. Critical consensus has over the years echoed Welty’s misgivings: it is as a short story writer that her reputation has largely rested. But the truth is that her five novels have quietly gained the same canonical stature as her Collected Stories. The funniest and sharpest of her novels is The Ponder Heart (1954), which tells of the eccentric Daniel Ponder, generous heir to the Ponder fortune and, unexpectedly, a holy fool charged with first-degree murder. A stage adaptation played Broadway in 1956. Masterpiece Theatre is now chiming in with a PBS version of The Ponder Heart for its American Collection series. If not the best of all possible tributes to the author, who passed away last summer at the age of 92, this is an above-average and entertaining PBS offering.

Filmed on location in Mississippi, the production effectively uses existing architecture and landscapes to suggest the novel’s pre-World War II setting. Director Martha Coolidge (Rambling Rose, HBO’s If These Walls Could Talk 2) keeps the farcical proceedings low-key and believable. Close attention is paid to atmosphere. Lush tree-lined country roads, Southern manses, and the lazy charm of rural communities are all nicely evoked, albeit scrubbed and romanticized to a greater degree than in the author’s work. If there’s a casualty here, it’s not Welty, but rather pop composer Van Dyke Parks (like Welty, a native Mississippian), whose Dixieland-inflected score for The Ponder Heart is a surprising disappointment. Only a few snatches of music appear to have been composed—owing no doubt to budget constraints—and they’re repeated annoyingly throughout the film.

Edna Earle Ponder (JoBeth Williams) is proprietor of the Beulah Hotel in the fictional town of Clay. On the cusp of spinsterhood, Edna Earle has settled into her role as mediator between staid Grandfather Ponder (Boyce Holleman) and impulsive Uncle Daniel Ponder (Peter MacNicol of TV’s Ally McBeal). Daniel, like Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street, walks a fine line between lunacy and blithe philanthropy. When the young scion begins giving away tracts of family property and business holdings, the apoplectic elder Ponder escorts Daniel to the insane asylum in Jackson. (The summer storm that greets their arrival looks like real Mississippi rain rather than special effects weather.) A staff nurse assumes that the old man with the high blood pressure is the crazy person. It’s a punch line we can smell a mile away, but is no less funny for it: Grandfather Ponder finds himself institutionalized while Uncle Daniel heads back to Clay in the family Studebaker.

Plan A having failed, Grandfather and Edna Earle put Plan B into play. They decide to “fork up a good wife” for Daniel in the form of the matronly widow Miss Teacake Magee (Joanne Baron). Moments before the wedding, however, kismet intervenes and Daniel meets the love of his life: seventeen-year-old Bonnie Dee Peacock (Angela Bettis). Much of the story’s comedy centers on the disastrous marriage that ensues between Daniel and Bonnie Dee. Peter MacNicol and Angela Bettis are funny together and near-perfect embodiments of Welty’s peculiar brand of humor. One of the author’s distinguishing traits is her sly ability to hint at a dirty joke without succumbing to easy prurience. (The kimono-clad Uncle Rondo in the short story “Why I Live at the P.O.” is a classic example.) Rather than a nymphet disguised as a petulant child, Bonnie Dee is a petulant child with no disguise or guile (or sex drive) whatsoever. Daniel’s willful innocence all but crumbles in her presence.

The adaptation (by Gail Gilchriest) has reconfigured the novel in a number of ways, some elements more successfully than others. The alleged murder committed by Daniel Ponder has been simplified in its motivation and execution. Moreover, Welty’s cold-eyed depiction of racial and class divisions in the South is missing from the production. (Although, to be fair, full-strength Welty can seem gauche and politically incorrect to today’s readers.) Her method of storytelling favors tone and voice over plot. The script captures enough of the plot and some of the tone. The voice isn’t so easily conveyed. Because the novel is narrated by Edna Earle Ponder, it’s as much about her idiosyncratic state of mind (and her nostalgic longing) as it is about Daniel Ponder’s predicament. Reading The Ponder Heart can make you dizzy with pleasure over its multiple levels of irony and silliness. Masterpiece Theatre goes no deeper than one level here, but it’s performed admirably, and may inspire viewers to further explore Eudora Welty’s unique literary world.

Jonathan Franzen’s strength as a fiction writer lies in his micromanagement of characterization. It’s no oxymoron to call The Corrections a large-scale intimate portrait of an American family. By burrowing deep inside the bruised middle-class psyches of Alfred and Enid Lambert and their three grown children, Franzen intends to expose not just this particular nuclear family but the nucleus of our collective desires and fears as human beings and as a nation. The author is on record as wanting to forge a hybridized link between cerebral postmodern literature and character-driven mainstream novels. Indeed, this is exactly what he’s done. At its best, the mixture makes for dazzling fiction. When the balance falters, the narrative lapses into self-indulgence or flirts with soap opera. What’s remarkable is how often this 568-page novel succeeds on its own grandiose terms.

Alfred Lambert, retired railroad inspector and family patriarch, is deteriorating. He’s suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he’s medicated, he’s listless and confused. At home in St. Jude—the novel’s mythical Midwestern city—Alfred has retreated “underground” to his basement enclave and workshop. His wife Enid wants desperately to rally the family for what she fears might be their final Christmas together. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Gary, their investment banker son, is coping with depression in Philadelphia, and Gary’s wife Caroline wants nothing to do with Christmas in St. Jude. Chip, the Lambert’s rebellious middle child, has been fired from his college teaching post and taken an unlikely job in Lithuania working for a post-Communist dot-com start-up. Daughter Denise, a sexually conflicted chef at an exclusive Philadelphia restaurant, is barely on speaking terms with her mother, who believes Denise is having an affair with a married man.

Each Lambert family member is fitted with an interconnected story line comprised of elaborate set pieces and sharp detail. Here, for example, is a vivid flashback to Alfred’s job as a younger man inspecting stretches of railway for the Midland Pacific:

In his shirt and tie and wing tips he nimbly took the catwalk over the Maumee River, forty feet above slag barges and turbid water, grabbed the truss’s lower chord and leaned out upside down to whack the span’s principal girder with his favorite whacking hammer, which he carried everywhere in his briefcase; scabs of paint and rust as big as sycamore leaves spiraled down into the river. A yard engine ringing its bell crept onto the span, and Alfred, who had no fear of heights, leaned into a hanger brace and planted his feet in the matchstick ties sticking out over the river. While the ties waggled and jumped he jotted on his clipboard a damning assessment of the bridge’s competence.

The 42-year-old author has a protean talent for processing complex data and finding heightened literary uses for the way things work. From stock market transactions to the neurochemistry of antidepressants, The Corrections refuses to skimp on minutiae. In his two previous novels—critically praised but little read—Franzen utilized a similar strategy of injecting three-dimensional characters into metafictional frameworks that allowed his brainy knowledge-crunching skills to shine. The Twenty-Seventh City (1988) fused elements of the mystery/suspense genre with an intricate vivisection of St. Louis machine politics. Strong Motion (1992) wove a fanciful thematic skein around the disparate topics of earthquake research, abortion rights, and corporate malfeasance. 

For all of its intelligence, however, The Corrections strains awkwardly for Big Ideas. As if crafting a ready-made source for future academic dissertations, Franzen flags the text with tiresome variants on the theme of “corrections.” Chip Lambert’s inability to change his life is expressed through a neurotic fixation on making “corrections” to a screenplay he’s attempting to write. In a flashback to Chip and Gary’s childhood, we learn that their natural impulse to hug their father had been “corrected out of them.” A pharmaceutical wonder drug is marketed under the name Corecktall. There are references to the Connecticut State Department of Corrections and to a children’s “house of correction” built of Popsicle sticks. There’s even a self-referential pun aimed at the novel’s bloated sense of importance when Enid Lambert attends a lecture on the stock market titled, “Surviving the Corrections.”

Fortunately, the novel’s Big Ideas don’t get in the way of the storytelling. There are several novella-length sections of The Corrections that are as close to a gold-standard as anything in contemporary American fiction. Among the highlights is a long, deliriously funny episode tracing the escalating domestic battles that precipitate Gary Lambert’s breakdown in the Philadelphia suburbs. The petty humiliations include his son Caleb’s video surveillance camera spying as Gary guzzles midday vodka from the kitchen liquor cabinet. Equally memorable is the emotionally rich portrait of Denise Lambert’s gay sexual awakening. “Her affair,” the author writes, “was like a dream life unfolding in that locked and soundproofed chamber of her brain where, growing up in St. Jude, she’d learned to hide desires.”

Franzen shares much in common with state-of-the-art postmodern novelists like Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace, but the strongest material here recalls John Cheever’s beautifully modulated stories of WASPish marital discord and urban anxiety. While not the instant “masterpiece” proclaimed by its publisher, The Corrections is an impressive achievement destined for its share of year’s-end literary awards and honors.

Diametrically unlike the brooding masterpieces of his mature style, Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) is a frothy pastoral romance. Its charming metaphoric language (“A curl of wood-smoke came from the chimney and drooped over the roof like a blue feather in a lady’s hat …”) signaled the author’s burgeoning talents as both a poet and a novelist. The title springs from a line in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Hardy’s trademark pessimistic realism is only hinted at in the novel’s lightly ironic touches and wouldn’t emerge in earnest until two years later with Far From the Madding Crowd (1874). But there’s much to be said for the uncomplicated pleasures of Under the Greenwood Tree.

The story follows two intertwining threads. First is the downward spiral of the Mellstock parish choir, a rustic ensemble of cider-fueled fiddlers threatened with obsolescence due to the parson’s majestic new-fangled harmonium organ. Second is the arrival in the village of a pretty new schoolmistress—who happens also to be a crackerjack harmonium player—and the ensuing kerfuffle when three local men, including the parson and at least one member of the parish choir, vie for her hand.

The schoolmistress is named Fancy Day and is capably portrayed by actress Keeley Hawes in Masterpiece Theatre’s adaptation. Hawes is especially blessed with one quality essential to Thomas Hardy heroines: luscious milk-white skin that colors easily in anger or arousal. Sigmund Freud believed that Hardy’s writing displayed an intuitive grasp of psychoanalysis. It’s no wonder. The deceptions and desires of his characters are often revealed physiologically by blood rushing to the neck and face. During a typically telling moment with Fancy Day, for example, Hardy writes, “Her heart quickened—adding to and withdrawing from her cheek varying tones of red to match each varying thought.”

The novel concludes with Fancy musing about “a secret she would never tell.” Readers of the book will recognize the secret. Viewers of the Masterpiece Theatre version scripted by Ashley Pharoah will have no idea that Fancy Day has a secret, let alone that she’s intending to keep it to herself. This crucial element of the plot—indeed one could argue that Fancy’s secret is the plot—has been inexplicably gutted from the story. Other incidents, nowhere to be found in the novel, have been invented out of whole cloth and given weird prominence as central plot points. Thus we’re treated to elaborate but bogus set pieces such as a vindictive choir member sabotaging the harmonium by dumping a jug of hard cider into its machinery, and a drawn-out episode in which Fancy Day’s father is seriously injured when his ankle is caught in the metal jaws of a mantrap. Nothing remotely similar to these events occurs in the pages of Hardy’s novel.

We expect this kind of desecrating rewrite of classic literature when talking about Hollywood movies, but less so in regards to Masterpiece Theatre, which has a reputation for being reasonably faithful to its source material. Not that tampering on occasion hasn’t led to interesting results, like Alan Bleasdale’s striking reconfiguration of Oliver Twist (2000). But Bleasdale’s script was touted as a unique enterprise. Under the Greenwood Tree is being deceptively presented as business as usual. Sadly, this misguided adaptation does justice neither to Thomas Hardy nor to the venerable Masterpiece Theatre franchise.

Any lingering doubt as to the literary standing of James Agee (1909-1955) should be dispelled later this year when the prestigious Library of America publishes two volumes devoted to the writer’s work, which includes screenplays, film criticism, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (A Death in the Family), and a masterpiece of New Journalism years ahead of its time (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). As a warm-up, Agee aficionados and cinema buffs can feast on John Wranovics’s Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay, a marvelous new book that brings to light a previously unpublished (and largely unknown) 80-page film treatment that Agee wrote in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing with the hope of convincing Charles Chaplin to direct and star in the project.

Agee’s startling script idea was to place Chaplin’s Little Tramp character in a crumbling New York City following an atomic blast. Envisioned as a silent film with music and sound effects, the darkly comic story casts the Tramp as the benevolent leader of a ragtag society of survivors. Among the screenplay’s most intriguing passages is a description of the community’s utopian social politics encouraging “free love, ménages à trois, and racial inbreeding.” Conflict arises when a second group of survivors emerges from the rubble: a band of scientists living in an underground bunker. Before long, the scientists—whom Agee describes as representing “the extreme opposite to individualism”—entice the Tramp’s community with laborsaving gadgets and a HAL-like supercomputer that becomes dangerously neurotic after a mouse crawls inside its machinery. Ostracized and alone at the end of the film, the Tramp shuffles off toward the horizon, his expression “a blend of indestructible hope with irreducible disillusion.”

Chaplin as Verdoux

Wranovics’s extensive introductory chapters provide a trove of historical and biographical context, mixing established sources with a good deal of fresh archival material. Particularly illuminating is an examination of the rough-draft notes for Agee’s overly enthusiastic review in The Nation of Chaplin’s 1947 box-office failure Monsieur Verdoux. A black comedy with political overtones in which the comedian plays a serial wife-murderer, the controversial film has had few wholehearted defenders over the years. Agee’s uncompromising reverence for Chaplin was a blind spot. Wranovics quotes the writer’s friend and fellow film critic Dwight MacDonald: “I suspect that Agee’s response is an example of his chief weakness as a critic: his directorial imagination which sometimes remade the movie inside his head as he watched it, so that what came out on his page was often more exciting than what had appeared on the screen.” On the other hand, Agee had studied Chaplin’s work so assiduously over the years that the screenplay he wrote for the Tramp character is filled with uncanny simulacrums of Chaplin’s pantomime style and gag construction.

It was likely naïve to believe that a self-consumed filmmaker like Chaplin—who clearly preferred writing his own material, as well as starring in and directing (and composing the music for) the movies he made—would have the slightest interest in someone else’s screenplay. In fact, the Chaplin Studios were adamant about returning unsolicited manuscripts, which is initially what happened to Agee’s script. How it eventually landed in Chaplin’s hands, and the ensuing friendship between the two men, makes for a rich and compelling narrative. It was a friendship destined to be cut short not only by Agee’s untimely death, but also by the State Department, who barred Chaplin from re-entering the U.S. in 1952 on trumped-up McCarthy-era charges. Writing Agee from exile in Switzerland, Chaplin lambasted America as “that stink-pot country of yours.” Wranovics paints a dispirited portrait of Agee in New York, his health broken, confessing to an actress with whom he was having an affair: “I am a drunk.”

Porter Shreve’s 2000 debut novel, The Obituary Writer, was a fresh and engaging shaggy-dog tale narrated by a plucky 22-year-old newspaperman named Gordie Hatch. Marooned in St. Louis as a lowly obituary-page reporter, Hatch dreams of becoming a big-time investigative journalist like his father, whose memory is kept burnished by Hatch’s feisty widowed mother, Lorraine. The cleverly plotted story seemed to lose its focus toward the end, however. Shreve devoted too many pages to a lurid confession from the novel’s femme fatale, while sidestepping a far more compelling subplot concerning Hatch’s mother. As if recognizing that there were familial conflicts left unexplored in his first book, the author has placed a strong maternal theme and presence at the center of his new novel, Drives Like a Dream.

Lydia Modine is a 61-year-old divorcée living in suburban Detroit, where she has made a name for herself as a Motor City historian. The first third of Drives Like a Dream is orchestrated beautifully, introducing a large cast of characters brought together for the marriage of Lydia’s ex-husband, Cy, to a much younger woman. The novel alternates its point of view between Lydia and her 27-year-old daughter, Jessica, who, along with siblings Davy and Ivan, has returned home to attend their father’s wedding. Shreve deftly shifts back and forth between Lydia and Jessica’s often clashing perspectives. The blighted landscape of Detroit’s run-down business district is evoked with naturalistic detail, while Lydia’s scholarly knowledge of the automotive industry adds to the verisimilitude.

Drives Like a Dream unfortunately doesn’t fulfill the promise of its well-crafted opening pages. A flirtation between Lydia and an activist professor of urban and environmental planning escalates to sitcom silliness when Lydia begins embellishing the comments she makes to her children about the state of the romance. Adding to the hurly-burly, Lydia befriends her ex-husband’s eccentric new in-laws and she learns that her late father may have been guilty of corporate espionage in the 1940s when he worked for maverick carmaker Preston Tucker. Shreve works hard to intertwine the multiple plot threads, and to suggest that this is a dysfunctional family taking a circuitous route toward acceptance of one another’s frailties, but he succeeds only in straining credulity. The mystery surrounding Lydia’s father, for example, is resolved in a preposterous fashion that seems as much a failure of nerve on the author’s part as a failure of imagination.

The finest scene in the novel has an unforced emotional honesty. Lydia’s ex-husband Cy drops by unannounced after his big weekend wedding. Living alone now in the house they’d shared for thirty-three years, Lydia is stunned by his visit. As they talk about basement bric-a-brac and the remnants of Cy’s abandoned hobbies gathering dust, Lydia’s resentment slowly begins to churn beneath the civilized surface of their conversation. (“Yet she could imagine now, as he stood there holding the door for her, his voice in perfect control as if tuned to the sympathy channel, that as the months and years accumulated, as he drifted away and became unrecognizable, she could become angry, even bitter.”) The scene is layered with sadness and regret. Too often, the frenetic pace of Shreve’s story crowds out or sabotages moments like this.

Drives Like a Dream has the unmistakable earmarks of a second-novel slump: while more ambitious than The Obituary Writer, its contrived narrative never finds its voice or momentum, qualities that brought distinction to the earlier book. Porter Shreve nonetheless remains an author to watch. His talents are such that he seems poised to surprise us down the road with a first-rate novel.

In contrast to several of John Irving’s large-scale comic novels of the past thirty years, Until I Find You likely won’t attract a wave of enthusiastic new readers to the writer’s work. (There are ardent fans of A Prayer for Owen Meany, for example, who have read nothing else by Irving, including his career-making The World According to Garp.) In theory, all the ingredients are here for a compelling novel. Indeed, it’s been widely reported that writing Until I Find You was a wrenching experience. Irving has candidly revealed in interviews that as a young boy—like the novel’s protagonist Jack Burns—he was sexually molested by an older woman.

Sexually wounded children have of course played indelible supporting roles in some of Irving’s finest work, in particular rape survivor Ellen James in Garp and pregnant incest victim Rose Rose in The Cider House Rules. With his new book, however, the ambitious decision to center an elaborate 820-page narrative on an abused protagonist has yielded frustrating and unsatisfying results.

Readers can safely deduce that in no conventional sense is Until I Find You an autobiographical novel. Jack Burns’s globe-trotting coming-of-age rise from Copenhagen tattoo-parlor urchin to first male enrollee at a Toronto all-girls’ school to international fame as a female-impersonator in Hollywood movies doesn’t strain credulity so much as shred it like confetti and toss it to the winds. Irving long ago secured his reputation as a hardworking New England fabulist comprised of equal parts Dickens and Fellini. At his dizzying best, he bridges postmodern and mainstream literary tastes by championing an idealized but recognizably human sentimentality set against forces of melodramatic calamity and absurdist circus-of-life plot twists.

Most disconcerting about Until I Find You is its portrayal of sexual abuse. The various episodes are rendered in a slapstick tone that undercuts the stern moralizing that Irving later interjects about the “thieves of Jack’s childhood.” Jack is ten years old when a middle-aged Portuguese housemaid named Mrs. Machado initiates a series of wildly athletic sexual encounters with the boy. Neither the first nor the last older woman to molest Jack under comic circumstances, Mrs. Machado’s character and dialogue are painted in broad farcical strokes complete with phonetically tortured accent (“What ees Meester Penis theenking?”).

Holding the story line tenuously together is an overarching search for Jack’s father, William. (This is another much-reported parallel between Jack Burns and the author, who was likewise abandoned by his father at an early age.) The missing father hovers teasingly at the edges of the plot like a Rabelaisian sensualist. For the greater part of the novel, we hear about William Burns only through whispered innuendo and a chain of obscure clues that stretch around the world. He’s a classically trained church organist, a passionate womanizer on the lam, and an “ink addict” whose skin is tattooed with hymns and liturgical texts like a ream of human sheet music. There is eventually a satisfying sense of closure to the mystery of the father’s whereabouts, but readers who stick around for the ending will be hard-pressed not to feel that Irving is struggling to wring emotion from an unfocused tale rife with improbable characters and situations.

It might seem cheeky of Masterpiece Theatre to attempt a new adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s monumental novel about the 1917 Russian Revolution so close on the heels of a sumptuous DVD restoration of David Lean’s blockbuster movie. For some, Omar Sharif and Julie Christie embody Doctor Zhivago’s star-crossed lovers as memorably as Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh personify Rhett and Scarlett in Gone With the Wind. But Lean’s 1965 film has always had detractors, and justifiably so. The grandeur that the director achieved a few years before with Lawrence of Arabia gave way in Doctor Zhivago to mawkishness. Worse, Pasternak’s book was whittled down to its most numbingly banal components. Veteran Masterpiece Theatre screenwriter Andrew Davies clearly relished the opportunity to bring a fresh approach to the material. PBS viewers who tune in with only the mildest curiosity may find their low expectations overturned. Evocatively filmed in the Czech Republic (versus Lean’s uninspired use of Spain and Canada), this lavish two-part four-hour production succeeds in giving the earlier film a serious run for its money.

The universality of Pasternak’s novel—and its implicit rebuke of Communism—can be discerned in the book’s reverence for artistic self-expression and the sanctity of individual conscience. The author’s poet-doctor surrogate, Yury Zhivago, perceives life as a luminous pantheistic force that is “constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring.” Although Zhivago is sympathetic to the underlying spirit of the revolution, he despairs that “it has cost such a sea of blood that I’m not sure that the end justifies the means.” Published to stunning worldwide success beginning in 1957, the novel was an embarrassment to Soviet authorities. Its publication was blocked in the USSR for thirty years until glasnost finally cleared the air. Pasternak felt compelled to turn down the Nobel Prize for Literature when it was announced in 1958 that he’d won. He never saw the Prize money or the substantial royalties that his novel accrued in the West. A state-sponsored campaign of vilification contributed to his declining health. He died in Russia at the age of seventy in 1960.

Knightley as Lara

While this Masterpiece Theatre offering boasts a first-rate script and energetic direction (by Giacomo Campiotti), the casting is less consistent. Hans Matheson (Mists of Avalon) brings little more than conventional leading-man earnestness to the title role of Zhivago. Rising young actress Keira Knightley (Bend it Like Beckham, Pirates of the Caribbean) is a cream-complexioned vision of beauty as Zhivago’s adulterous lover Lara, but connecting with her character’s deeper layers of strength and anguish ultimately seems beyond her range. Knightley does her best work in the drama’s first half depicting Lara’s descent into sexual exploitation at the hands of the malevolent lawyer Victor Komarovsky, played by Sam Neill (Jurassic Park, The Piano). Rod Steiger was a powerhouse of scene-stealing menace in the role of Komarovsky for David Lean. Neill, a skilled but far from menacing actor, wisely opts for a different interpretation that mingles foppish arrogance with a hint of polymorphous perversity. It’s a witty scene-stealing performance in its own fashion—sort of John Malkovich-Lite—and it provides Neill with a gleeful holiday from the plodding stalwarts and milquetoasts he’s often saddled with playing.

Knightley & Neill

The story’s tension is built around the fateful manner in which Zhivago and Lara, although married to others, find themselves repeatedly thrown together in the unlikeliest of highly charged circumstances. Whether it’s the attempted suicide of Lara’s mother (Maryam d’Abo), or Lara’s attempted murder of Komarovsky, or tending the wounded on a WWI battlefield, or in an isolated village hospital far from Revolutionary Moscow, Zhivago invariably arrives on site as an attending physician and conveniently stumbles upon Lara nearby. Andrew Davies’s script thankfully goes further in bringing out the novel’s larger theme of human hearts in conflict with political expediency. As in Pasternak, the romance isn’t always center stage; well-drawn subsidiary characters find their way to the fore. Memorable supporting roles include Lara’s husband Pasha (Kris Marshall), who convincingly progresses from naïve idealist to treacherous revolutionary to disillusioned lost soul. Also making a strong impression is actor Hugh Bonneville (familiar from Masterpiece Theatre roles in Daniel Deronda and Madame Bovary) in a harrowing train ride flashback as Zhivago’s father, a wealthy industrialist ruined through his association with the ubiquitous Komarovsky.

Pasternak’s use of coincidence and recurrence—admittedly ham-handed on occasion—is intended less for melodramatic effect than as a kind of mystical alignment of historical and divine forces. (Novelist and Russian émigré Vladimir Nabokov dismissed Pasternak’s book as “penny-awful” pulp fiction. Critic Edmund Wilson, who’d taken to feuding with Nabokov on the subject of Russian literature, argued at length for Doctor Zhivago’s brilliance and called it “one of the great events in man’s literary and moral history.”) Zhivago, in opposition to Marx, proclaims “life is never a material, a substance to be molded.” Not surprisingly, this is a love story that at times assumes the solemnity of a religious allegory, which in this production is beautifully evoked when Zhivago glances out a café window and first sets eyes on Lara. With their faces superimposed over one another in the pane’s reflection, they appear momentarily like stained-glass saints fused in eternal longing.

Fifteen years ago, Errol Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line famously resulted in freeing an innocent man from prison. Last year, in what is arguably a comparable turn of events, Mark Moskowitz’s documentary Stone Reader rescued a forgotten American writer from obscurity. Moskowitz’s scruffy and warmly personal film recounts his obsessive search for Dow Mossman, the author of a long out-of-print 1972 novel, The Stones of Summer. For the last three decades, it turns out, Mossman has been living where he was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and working the kinds of blue collar jobs—welding, bundling newspapers—that writers are supposed to have before they publish their big novel, not after. And make no mistake, at nearly six hundred pages The Stones of Summer is a big novel. Its ambition and scale are matched only by the monumental mystery of why no one seems to have ever heard of it.

Hermetically sealed for thirty years, Mossman’s weird lyricism (“the lawn was a wet bowl stirred and thickened, a lilac’s throat”) is startlingly fresh and pungent. If not a lost masterpiece, it’s clearly the work of an enormously talented writer. The novel’s three sections follow a classic coming-of-age trajectory from idealized youth, to troubled adolescence, to an adulthood blindsided by drugs and instability. Virtually without plot, the narrative is constructed of richly textured anecdotes and set pieces, many of which Mossman has said are autobiographical. The protagonist is named Dawes Williams, the state is Iowa, and the hometown is coyly rechristened Rapid Cedar.

The early chapters are chockablock with vivid characters. Dawes’s profane grade-school chum Ronnie Crown is expelled for assailing their teacher, Miss Wilma Spent, with crude sexual epithets. The eight-year-old Crown later confesses that he has no idea what the f-word means. “I still can’t figure out,” says Dawes, sounding not unlike a wry Peanuts character, “how they could expel you for a word if you didn’t know what it meant.” Mossman’s novel is a flurry of words, a logorrheic avalanche. His intoxicating voice is ideal for conveying the enchantment and sensuality of a recollected childhood: “The thick, white moon ran like a round, naked rain through the dry spines of the trees.” Languid Augusts are whiled away on a farm where Dawes’s quick-to-rage uncle Arthur raises greyhounds. The finest writing in the novel is a rollicking ten-page depiction of an epic croquet match between Dawes and his uncle that turns deadly earnest.

But as the pages pile up with precious little momentum or suspense propelling them forward, the law of diminishing returns settles in somewhere around the middle of the book. The scenes of teenage pranks feel protracted and repetitive. There’s an interminably unpleasant chapter in which Dawes and his pals set about humiliating one of “the doggy girls of Waterloo” living in a nearby town. Mossman’s galvanic prose struggles mightily but fails to elevate the predictability that overtakes the material: Dawes’s growing rebelliousness, his lost weekends with a beer-guzzling carload of boastful buddies, and his fumbling toward romance with the aptly but improbably named Summer Letch (“her hair was thick and rich as heaven”). The spectacular automobile crash that closes section two doesn’t touch us as deeply as it might because the occupants of the car have been too thinly developed and differentiated as characters.

The final third of the novel, chronicling Dawes’s dissipation in Mexico, is both a tour-de-force and something of a slog. Instead of the timeless quality of the novel’s opening section, the concluding pages reflect the nadir of 1970s literary pretentiousness. There are poems and epigrammatic excerpts from Dawes’s notebooks (“family understanding, indeed all of the great middle-class virtues, are not what they are cracked up to be”), and long passages from a novel-in-progress, and letters from a buddy in Vietnam. Much marijuana and Mexican beer are consumed. Dawes intimates that he’s suffering from schizophrenia, but it’s presented less as an illness than the sort of oracular “divine madness” espoused by R. D. Laing during the era. According to Moskowitz’s documentary, Mossman was briefly hospitalized for a nervous breakdown while completing The Stones of Summer. Ten years in the writing, the book may have in the end depleted the author’s psychic reserves. Despite its flaws, it’s an impressive debut novel. The significant achievement is Mossman’s voice. And the good news is that he is writing once again.

Oblivion is David Foster Wallace’s third and best collection of short stories to date. Without sacrificing his flair for brainy surreal prose and dead-on social satire—which have on occasion seemed like ends in themselves—Wallace has added a stronger than usual emphasis on narrative drive and ingenious plotting. Consistently impressive is his much-admired talent for bringing a plaintive three-dimensionality to the inner lives of his characters. Six of the eight stories here are long and intricate examples of the author’s labyrinthine tale spinning. And yet, one of the most memorable pieces is only three pages in length. A masterpiece of heart-stopping brevity, “Incarnations of Burned Children” concerns the frantic efforts of a mother and father to console their infant son who has been severely scalded from an overturned pot of boiling water on the stove. The child’s screams, we’re told, “were regular as breath and went on so long they’d become already a thing in the kitchen.” As the title suggests, Wallace imbues the story with a mythic universality. The characters and the locale are never named, thus allowing readers to distance themselves from the horrific scene while at the same time pondering the eternal verities of familial tragedy.

In the story “The Suffering Channel,” a corporation with the motto “consciousness is nature’s nightmare” plans to launch a cable channel devoted to human misery. It’s a motto suitable for much of Wallace’s work. No other contemporary American author has so painstakingly—and hilariously—mapped the incessant dysfunctional chatter that streams through our heads and masquerades as rational thought. Several of the stories in Oblivion are tours de force of cognition gone awry. The title piece is an increasingly desperate first-person account of the sleep-deprived meltdown of Randall Napier, an assistant systems supervisor for a company called Advanced Data Capture. Embroiled in a dispute with his wife over the issue of his nighttime snoring, Napier no longer can sleep at all. His brain-fried daytime hours are given over to aural and visual hallucinations (“sometimes, for instance, trying to shave in the mirror, my visage will appear to have an extra eye in the center of my forehead…”). Visits to an unsympathetic psychiatrist and a high-tech sleep clinic succeed merely in compounding Napier’s frustration. The ending delivers a double whammy that will have enterprising readers going back over the narrative and trying to follow the breadcrumb trail of bizarre clues.

Wallace is nothing if not fearlessly ecumenical in his literary tastes and influences, at times blending elements of science fiction and fantasy with a kind of micromanaged naturalism. “Good Old Neon,” for example, begins as a painfully detailed confession of one man’s route to suicide. “I know this part is boring,” he laments, “but it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies.” Remarkably, the story fulfills its promise: We’re treated to an eerily plausible and unsentimental glimpse of the afterlife. Sometimes Wallace’s relentless quest for offbeat material can become tedious and self-indulgent on the page. The collection’s opening piece, “Mister Squishy,” relies rather too heavily on the drone of acronym-laden corporate-speak at a Chicago ad agency. (“Down the hall and past the MROP Division’s green room, in another R.S.B. conference room whose windows faced NE, Darlene Lilley was leading twelve consumers and two UAFs into the GRDS phase of Focused Response without any structured QA or ersatz Full-Access background.”) It’s something of a lost cause, but “Mister Squishy” springs fitfully to life with an impending act of domestic terror involving a deadly batch of home-brewed ricin.

The triumph of Oblivion is a deepening sense of compassion in Wallace’s work. While alienation and despair remain key themes, his characters are so richly drawn that they behave less like pawns of injustice or fate than tragic purveyors of their own limitations. “The Soul Is Not a Smithy” is notable for the graceful manner in which its layered story lines intertwine and mirror one another in unexpected ways. The narrator is recalling a traumatic experience from his childhood when he was nine years old and a grade school teacher suffered a nervous breakdown at the blackboard. Fervently daydreaming in the back of the room, the narrator failed to notice the exodus of frightened classmates. “For my own part,” he tells us, “I had begun having nightmares about the reality of adult life as early as perhaps age seven.” As he reflects on the monotonous insurance company job his father dutifully held for years, an unspoken parallel emerges between the school teacher and the father, as well as the narrator himself. How does an individual avoid going crazy in dehumanizing circumstances? Fear, it seems, is subdued via the transformative gestalts of storytelling and daydreaming. Chaos is held at bay by shaping and refining it into a coherent narrative. David Foster Wallace has long been a master at showing us the face of chaos. Oblivion represents his blossoming into a writer of profoundly artful coherence.

Writer James Agee was 45 years old in 1955 when he died of heart failure in the backseat of a New York taxicab. His unfinished novel, A Death in the Family, was posthumously edited and published to great acclaim two years later. It’s a deeply felt autobiographical remembrance of Agee’s childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the car crash that took his father’s life when the author was six years old. The novel won a Pulitzer Prize and became the basis for a stage play, All the Way Home, that garnered a Pulitzer of its own. (The play was adapted into a virtually forgotten 1963 film starring Robert Preston and Jean Simmons.) Agee’s literary legacy—which includes poetry, fiction, journalism, screenplays and movie reviews—has since undergone endless reappraisal and academic nitpicking. It says something about our cinema-saturated era that Agee is perhaps most celebrated today for the engaging film criticism he wrote during the 1940s for Time magazine and The Nation.

Because A Death in the Family has seemingly lost its canonical luster, it’s an inspired choice for rediscovery on the American Collection branch of Masterpiece Theatre. As with last year’s teleplay of Eudora Welty’s The Ponder Heart, filmed on location in Mississippi, this adaptation of A Death in the Family benefits enormously from location filming in and around Knoxville, Tennessee. Especially eye-catching are the mist-shrouded back roads that frame the fateful automobile excursion by Jay Follet (John Slattery) in his Model-T Ford. Additional screen time might have been allotted to the sylvan eeriness that embodies the doomed road trip. However, director Gilbert Cates (I Never Sang for My Father) can’t be faulted for preferring to focus his attention on the strong performance by Annabeth Gish (The X-Files) as Mary Follet, the character based on Agee’s grief-stricken mother.

When the novel’s Mary Follet crumbles at the news of her husband’s death, we feel Agee’s authorial presence striving to console this hologram of his mother conjured from childhood wounds. On the page, this phenomenon is profoundly moving and peculiarly unsettling, as if the author is pouring and sharing the repeated glasses of whiskey that Mary chokes down to anesthetize her hurt. Annabeth Gish’s performance in the PBS production captures a similar wellspring of haunted emotions that transcend the teleplay’s constricting earnestness. One of her finest moments lasts but a few seconds: her character’s uncontrollable tears when young son Rufus (played by an awkward child actor named Austin Wolff) asks the inevitable question, “Is Daddy dead?” Gish’s acting is strikingly naturalistic in a manner that clashes with, or at least overshadows, other cast members such as James Cromwell (Babe, L. A. Confidential), who brings his familiar stoic resolve to the role of Mary’s pragmatic father.

The script is by Robert W. Lenski, a veteran of adapting for television popular novels like Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons. The liberties he’s taken with Agee’s text are a mixed bag. An invented flourish that works nicely is giving Mary Follet’s brother Andrew (David Alford) a vocation as a landscape painter, making the character more of a sensitive Agee-surrogate than he is in the novel. We see him brushing the final touches on a work titled “Secrets of the Lawn Waters.” The painting depicts a tranquil middle class neighborhood with fathers arcing the spray of garden hoses across their front yards. It’s an ingenious allusion to the novel’s prefatory essay, “Knoxville: Summer, 1915,” in which Agee describes the watering ritual in Whitmanesque intonations:

So many qualities of sound out of the hose: so many choral differences out of those several hoses that were in earshot. Out of any one hose, the almost dead silence of the release, and the short still arch of the separate big drops, silent as a held breath, and the only noise the flattering noise on leaves and the slapped grass at the fall of each big drop. That, and the intense hiss with the intense stream; that, and that same intensity not growing less but growing more quiet and delicate with the turn of the nozzle, up to that extreme tender whisper when the water was just a wide bell of film.

The production is less rewarding in its too careful avoidance of the novel’s racial themes. Gone are the slurs of the schoolboys who taunt Rufus for having a “nigger name.” The teasing remains, but it’s generic grade school bullying. Gone, too, is the exuberant black midwife, Victoria, who arrives for a visit when Mary Follet is expecting another child. A truer depiction of race—both divisive and diverse—would have honored the author’s social conscience.

If Agee’s novel is no longer held in as high esteem as it once was, it’s due in part to having been embraced more for its small town nostalgia and moral uplift than its literary merit. There’s no escaping the fact that A Death in the Family is a fragmentary work as sadly unrealized as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon and Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth. It’s fair to assume that Agee would have imposed a more compelling structure on the material than the blandly linear composite text that was assembled from his scattered manuscript pages. For all the pleasures it affords in the reading, A Death in the Family offers the tantalizing promise of greatness in lieu of its fulfillment. The PBS production doesn’t aim as high as the novel, but it succeeds overall in its quiet competence and modest intentions.

Joseph Heller reportedly finished writing Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man just before his death last December at the age of 76. The novel has been posthumously published with little fanfare. One can only surmise that Simon and Schuster knew the book wasn’t much of a capstone to Heller’s celebrated literary career. The stark black-and-white cover is so unappealing that it seems intended to dissuade readers from even bothering to look inside. Regrettably, there is ample cause to be forewarned. While there are passages as caustic and funny as anything Heller wrote in his lifetime, the narrative is disjointed and gives the unfortunate impression of being an incomplete draft rather than a polished work.

At first, this inchoate quality almost works to the book’s advantage, since it is literally the story of an aging author, Eugene Pota, who has run out of ideas for his next novel. We’re presented with Pota’s discarded plot outlines and excerpts from abandoned stories, along with his dyspeptic rants about writing, growing old, marriage, sex, and adultery. Heller fails in weaving these elements into a larger overarching coherence. Conversely, if his intent was to write a postmodern anti-novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man isn’t unconventional enough to warrant its ragged formlessness. There are listless stabs at a kind of metafictional playfulness and experimentation, but the results are unfocused. The curious revelation that “Pota” is an acronym (it’s no brain teaser) is more likely to be greeted with a baffled shrug than an appreciative smile.

The best satirical piece in the book is prime Heller: a mordant 20-page story titled “Tom Sawyer, Novelist.” The fictional Sawyer steps out from the pages of Mark Twain and declares that he, too, wishes to be a writer. But Sawyer’s creator is unable to offer advice or inspiration. Twain is deeply depressed over mounting debts, a failed publishing company, the death of a son and daughter, and a fickle public that isn’t much interested in his cynical late works like Pudd’nhead Wilson. Undaunted, Tom Sawyer sets off across America in search of a mentor. What he finds instead is a litany of awfulness: the alcoholic Jack London is dead at forty; Joseph Conrad is subject to nervous breakdowns; Herman Melville is toiling in obscurity; Stephen Crane succumbs to tuberculosis at twenty-eight. To Sawyer’s dismay, the American literary scene is nothing but a “mortuary of a museum.” At the end of his travels, his resolve is clear: “Tom Sawyer would no sooner think of a career writing fiction for a living than placing himself in front of an oncoming locomotive or diving headlong from the highest cliff he could find into the Mississippi River.”

Heller’s subjects have varied over the years, but his trademark blend of fatalism and absurdity has remained a constant since Catch-22, his seminal World War II satire published in 1961. His style proved remarkably adaptable, whether skewering middle-class marriage and the corporate workplace in Something Happened (1974), Washington politics in Good as Gold (1979), or the Old Testament in God Knows (1984). Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man, however, never locates much of a target for Heller’s gifts. Eugene Pota, like Heller, is a successful writer with a comfortable lifestyle. As we read his cornball sketches—slangy scatological updates of Greek myths, Biblical pastiches, a modern slapstick retelling of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”—we’re left puzzled as to the point of it all. (It’s hard not to suspect that Heller pulled most of this hit-and-miss material from his own reject files.) Nothing appears to be at stake, either artistically or psychologically. The novel’s many self-referential asides are less ironic than merely banal: “This is a book about a well-known, aging author trying to close out his career with a crowning achievement, with a laudable bang that would embellish his reputation rather than with a fainthearted whimper that would bring him only condescension and insult.” In the case of Joseph Heller’s final work, the lion’s share of “condescension and insult” deserves to be directed at Simon and Schuster. It’s inconceivable that Heller meant the book to be published as it stands.

But even if this is the book he wanted us to see, it clearly hasn’t received the attention of a copy editor. There’s a clever moment when we’re told that one of the characters is facing a Catch-22, but when the identical thing is said about another character ten pages later it’s a pretty good bet that Heller—or a decent editor—would have preferred to excise one or the other of these in-joke references. The first one makes us laugh, and the second one makes us sorry we laughed the first time. There are inexcusable typos, such as the misspelling of writer Jerzy Kosinski’s name. Several of the later chapters seem inexplicably underwritten and dashed-off, suggesting Heller didn’t have the opportunity to sharpen or rewrite portions of the book before he died. In his best work, Heller’s punch lines are like vaudeville spotlights illuminating our crushing fears and petty behaviors. If not in the same league as Samuel Beckett, he certainly shares a similar banana-peel nihilism. At one point, Eugene Pota quotes the famous line “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” from Beckett’s The Unnamable. Although Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man has the jokes and the despair, they seem to cancel one another out instead of combusting into a sublime portrait of human futility. The multiple story lines immerse us in wretchedness without exploring its heartbreak, and the one-liners dissipate our empathy.

There are a few brief moments in which we glimpse the plaintive eloquence that too often eludes Heller throughout the novel. Pota visits two of his former lovers, both of whom suffer from crippling ailments, one woman has severe burns from a boating accident, and the other has contracted Lou Gehrig’s disease. Amid jokes about blow jobs and the fervent sexuality of years long gone, Pota’s sorrow finds its core of emotional truth. Adele, the ex-lover with ALS, asks Pota to sit beside her:

He rose stiffly and crossed the room to join her on the sofa. She extended an outstretched arm to steady him as he turned to seat himself, and he came to rest with his hand inside her thigh. He squeezed gently, rubbing a bit, and left it there. She stared down at his hand for a moment. Then, turning in toward him, she reached her arms around his shoulders, and as they settled together against the backrest, she began weeping noiselessly, making not one sound, spilling tears against his neck that felt ice cold.

“It’s just what I would have done,” Pota tells her, “if you hadn’t done it first.” He’s not the only one. Disheartened readers of Joseph Heller’s sad final literary gasp may feel like shedding a few tears, too.

The Birds is generally regarded as an Alfred Hitchcock classic despite the uninspired casting of Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor in the lead roles. Hedren, a fashion model whom Hitchcock hired after seeing her in a TV commercial, is particularly awkward and unconvincing as bratty socialite Melanie Daniels. It’s not a performance that’s grown in stature over the years, like Kim Novak in Vertigo, or attained the iconic permanence of Grace Kelly in Rear Window. What has become the stuff of legend, however, is Hitchcock’s perverse mistreatment of Hedren on the set of The Birds, famously recounted in Donald Spoto’s 1983 biography, The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock. The five-day ordeal of filming the climactic scene in which her character is trapped in a roomful of attacking birds—hundreds of live crows and gulls were hurled at her face by off-camera stagehands—resulted in Hedren being hospitalized and the production closed down for a week. “An established actress,” says Spoto, “would never have submitted to this extreme abuse.”

It is the birds themselves, of course, who are the stars of the show (the watchful protection of the ASPCA didn’t extend to Hitchcock’s cruelty toward Hedren). The movie isn’t character-driven, and in fact it’s barely plot-driven. With nearly 400 special effects shots, The Birds is the granddaddy of A-list horror shockers like Jaws and Alien. Hitchcock’s film is designed to accentuate the increasing ornithological mayhem. It’s not that the human actors are superfluous to the story—although no other top-drawer Hitchcock film so thoroughly overrides its cast—but they are at best subliminal pawns in a narrative comprised of murky and veiled motivations. From a technical standpoint, Hitchcock is working at the pinnacle of his formidable skills in The Birds, and it arguably represents his purest cinematic achievement. Indeed, the movie is a textbook of brilliantly edited set pieces and ingenious uses of color, sound, and landscape.

Hitchcock and screenwriter Evan Hunter borrowed only the title and basic conceit of Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 short story, “The Birds.” Du Maurier’s tale, conventional and utterly humorless, is a Cold War parable that uses the unexplained bird attacks as an apocalyptic metaphor for nature thrown out of balance by technology and warfare. It’s told from the perspective of Nat Hocken, a disabled war veteran and farmhand living in a cottage with his family in the British Isles. As the bird assaults escalate, Nat holes up with his wife and two children behind boarded-up doors and windows. For a while they follow BBC radio reports of similar chaos all across the country. There are rumors that the Russians have poisoned the birds to make them vicious and suicidal. RAF squadrons are dispatched to combat the birds, but the aircraft engines become clogged with winged carcasses. Planes crash at sea and along the coast near Nat’s cottage. His wife wonders if America will send reinforcements. The story ends with the radio dead and Nat out of cigarettes as he again hears the birds clamoring outside:

Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.

Comparing the short story and the film, it’s clear that the central metaphor functions quite differently in each case. By shifting the context and jettisoning du Maurier’s banal antiwar message, Hitchcock was able to attach the same apocalyptic imagery to his own radical thematic concerns: sexual repression and existential alienation. In the film’s desolate vision, we’re cut off from any semblance of integration or wholeness with the natural world and with one another. We’ve lost our capacity for giving and accepting love. Personal desires and yearnings have been twisted beyond recognition by our damaged psyches and broken families. Instead of Nat Hocken and his vague “wartime disability,” Hitchcock and Hunter give us a rogues’ gallery of Freudian dysfunction: Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor), a San Francisco lawyer and mama’s boy incapable of committing to an intimate relationship; Lydia Brenner (Jessica Tandy), Mitch’s neurotic mother, depressed since the death of her husband four years ago and desperately jealous of any woman who shows an interest in her son; Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), a spinsterish school teacher still bitter and obsessed long after Mitch has spurned her affections; and, finally, the frigid and vain Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), who begins a flirtation with Mitch that seems destined for the same failure that beset Annie Hayworth’s scuttled relationship.

Hitchcock and Hedren on the set of "The Birds"

It’s important to realize that these characters are static personalities. Nothing about their behavior suggests that they are capable of change or growth or insight of any kind. Their lives are condemned to a robotic repetition of neurotic impulses. (Adding to the unsettling atmosphere, Tippi Hedren’s clipped amateurish line readings and flat acting style are a remarkable simulation of psychotic dissociation.) Every interaction between the major players shows them emotionally stunted, and the screenplay refuses to advance or facilitate their maturation. During an ostensive romantic interlude with Mitch and Melanie sharing martinis on a cliff overlooking Bodega Bay, Mitch playfully says, “You need a mother’s care, my child.” Melanie reacts to the joke with pained grief, explaining to Mitch that she hasn’t seen her mother since childhood. Moments later, they rejoin an outdoor birthday party for Cathy Brenner, Mitch’s eleven-year-old sister (the same age at which Melanie was deserted by her mother). Suddenly a flock of crazed gulls dive-bombs the children playing in the backyard. This pattern of murderous interruption and failed intimacy is repeated throughout the film. Donald Spoto, in his analysis of The Birds, remarks that “each incident with birds immediately follows a scene describing a character’s fear of being alone or abandoned.”

Much attention has been given to the groundbreaking electronic soundscape (conceived by Remi Gassmann, Oskar Sala, Bernard Herrmann and an early synthesizer-like instrument called the Trautonium) that accompanies the film in lieu of a music score. But The Birds is also notable for numerous scenes that are keyed to simple ambient noises, like the spitfire whoosh of Melanie’s sports car as she zips along the California coast to Bodega Bay, and the putt-putt outboard that propels her rented boat to the Brenner house. Later, Mitch’s mother will make her fateful visit to the Fawcett farm in a rough-running pickup truck. The film’s famous final shot, too, is of Melanie’s sports car, now driven by Mitch, with Melanie as catatonic passenger. These sequences all invariably include at least one image of the vehicle in question dwarfed by a pitiless and immense landscape, the rasping motor little more than a death rattle echoing in the void.

Even minus a manipulative music score, The Birds manages to incorporate songs that add an ironic and disquieting commentary to the film. During Melanie’s dinner visit with the Brenner household, she sits at the piano and plays Debussy’s soothing “Arabesque No. 1” while Cathy talks about one of Mitch’s court cases, a client who “shot his wife in the head six times.” (Mitch gleefully adds the details: the husband was watching a ball game on TV and his wife changed the channel.) The scene is filled with macabre Hitchcock touches like the dour portrait of the deceased Brenner patriarch that hangs prominently on the wall above the piano, as if glaring at Melanie while she plays. The entire sequence seems to mock the cultured domesticity of Debussy’s music. In another scene—one of the film’s greatest—Melanie nervously watches crows massing on a playground jungle gym. We hear the children inside the Bodega Bay grade school singing chorus after chorus of an innocuous folk song with the refrain, “ristle-tee rostle-tee, hey donnie-dostle-tee.” Between the repetitions of the sprightly song and the ominous portent in the school yard, Hitchcock powerfully evokes the primal chills of a Grimms’ fairy tale. And as Melanie anxiously smokes her cigarette and eyes the crows, we feel the sickening transformation of a child’s fantasy into the grisly madness of a punishing adult world.

Robert Bingham’s high-toned thriller, Lightning on the Sun, moves nimbly between Cambodia and New York City. An international cast of characters cross paths when a jaded young American living in Phnom Penh decides to try his luck at smuggling heroin into the United States. The story’s geopolitical backdrop and its climate of moral dissipation are an updating of a genre perfected by Graham Greene and Americanized by Robert Stone. As if to emphasize the pedigree he’s aiming for, Bingham includes a prefatory quotation from The Comedians, Greene’s 1966 novel set in Haiti during the era of “Papa Doc” Duvalier. While it probably comes as no surprise that Lightning on the Sun isn’t in Greene or Stone’s league, it’s nevertheless an ambitious and entertaining first novel. Sadly, the 33-year-old author died last year from a drug overdose just as his book was being prepared for publication. It’s a substantial literary loss. Robert Bingham was a writer of real talent and even greater promise.

The Cambodian opening of Lightning on the Sun is told from the perspective of a thirtyish ex-UNESCO worker named Asher—we never learn his full name—who joined the organization on the rebound from a busted Stateside romance. His former lover is a wisecracking and beautiful Harvard grad named Julie (referred to by Asher as Julie G-Spot), who is currently slumming as a bartendress at a New York striptease club. In the novel’s often pulpy vernacular, their affair had “fallen like a dead cat thrown from an apartment building.” Asher’s UNESCO work—“cleaning bat shit off Khmer statues housed in the National Museum”—is equally dispiriting, which is why he is now jobless in Phnom Penh. He spends his days and nights drinking, drugging, whoring, and hanging out with cynical newspaper reporters at the Foreign Correspondents Club. Meanwhile, Asher and Julie G-Spot have reconnected via e-mail. Together they concoct a scheme whereby Asher will use his last $3,000 to purchase high-grade Cambodian heroin that can fetch $100,000 or more in the United States. Thanks to Julie’s drug-dealing boss at the strip club—a sleazy dwarf (“practically a midget”) named Glen—unloading the heroin in New York looks like a piece of cake.

Complications immediately arise when Asher attempts to score the drug. Most of his cash is confiscated by the Cambodian police before he can close the deal. He has to quickly borrow $2,000 from Mr. Hawk, the shady owner of a Phnom Penh massage parlor. The loan comes with exorbitant weekly interest fees and dangerous ties to the Asian underworld. After finally procuring the heroin, Asher enlists an unwitting American journalist, Harry Reese, to act as a courier. Reese is heading back to the States for his sister’s wedding. It’s customary that reporters returning home take along their colleagues’ letters addressed to family and friends. By mailing the letters on U.S. soil, everyone can avoid the unreliable Third World postal service. Reese believes he’s delivering a movie script that Asher has written. In reality, the tightly wrapped envelope contains the heroin earmarked for Julie G-Spot and Glen the dwarf.

Bingham, who worked at one time as a reporter for the Cambodia Daily, is particularly good with the details of political instability. This is very much the exhausted and debauched Phnom Penh of the 1990s that Henry Kamm documented two years ago in his book, Cambodia: Report from a Stricken Land. Bingham knows the territory and the players, the dizzying array of guerrilla factions, communist splinter groups, royalists, and brutal government forces. Placed in the midst of this scorched wasteland, Asher’s boozy end-of-the-road weariness has affinities with a whole tradition of hard-boiled antiheroes.  Bingham’s chiseled and well-honed sentences could have been mined directly from Hemingway or Hammett:

It had become for [Asher] a soiled city of compromised friendships, of weak links and petty betrayals, years of mixing business and pleasure, of crossing lines, of sharing women and information, of corrupt maneuvering, of tainted favors given and received, and through it all the nightly numbing of his nerves, the dulling of his wits and watering of his brain.

Once the story shifts to New York, Julie G-Spot further complicates matters by double-crossing Glen. She decides to nab Asher’s drug shipment from the unsuspecting Reese when he checks into the Gramercy Park Hotel. Some of this material is mordantly funny: Julie spikes Reese’s drink with the date-rape drug Rohypnol after they have sex. She only wants him unconscious while she ransacks the room for Asher’s heroin. Like several of the female characters in Bingham’s marvelous 1997 short story collection, Pure Slaughter Value, Julie G-Spot is a ballbuster with a deadly wit.  (When Reese hurls his spent condom against the hotel room wall, where it sticks with a thud, Julie chimes: “The spaghetti is ready.”) Glen the dwarf finds out about Julie’s double-cross, of course. The novel is less successful with the knuckleheaded slapstick between the knife-wielding Glen and his gun-toting black sidekick, Dwayne. It’s lame and tired stuff. Bingham seems to be straining at times for Elmore Leonard’s unique brand of quirky tough-guy comedy, but he doesn’t have Leonard’s ear for lowlife dialogue or the ability to bring something fresh to characters who are little more than stereotypical hoods.

Bingham’s most effective literary milieu, portrayed with frightening immediacy in Pure Slaughter Value, is the crumbled Camelot of East Coast blue bloods and trust fund yuppies. It’s no secret that he knew this world intimately as the heir to a Kentucky newspaper fortune. His own trust fund wealth was such that Bingham never had to work a day in his life if he didn’t care to. This reality appears to have bred within him—and his characters—a curious mixture of arrogance, self-loathing, substance abuse, and, on occasion, a willful drive for genuine achievement. The strongest sections of Lightning on the Sun are incidental to the novel’s unremarkable story line, but they return Bingham to the corrosive landscape of his short stories. Reese visits his former Massachusetts prep school to present a slideshow and talk to the assembled students about his work as a journalist. Before the lecture, he gets roaring drunk with an old classmate named Weatherly (unfortunately, the vagaries of Bingham’s coincidence-laden plot require that Weatherly is a long-time customer of the New York strip club where Julie works). The two men are chased from a pizzeria by a gang of local high school thugs who taunt Reese and Weatherly—with appropriate New England accents—as “preppy fahts.” It’s all very funny and rueful in its acknowledgment of class hostility, and Bingham doesn’t push too hard on these scenes or try to spin them into stale genre fiction.

Lightning on the Sun has much to recommend it. Certainly it’s far superior to run-of-the-mill mystery or espionage thrillers. But the novel never really resolves the contradictory impulses between mainstream and serious literature. (It’s a contradiction that occasionally defeated Graham Greene, too.) Lightning on the Sun seesaws awkwardly between the sublime and the just plain silly. Bingham’s Vietnam short story, “How Much for Ho Chi Minh?,” for instance, covers some of the same themes more adroitly. And William T. Vollmann’s chilling 1993 novel, Butterfly Stories, captures the crushed spirit and the nihilism of modern day Cambodia with considerably more force. Robert Bingham undoubtedly could have written a book as good as Vollmann’s within the next few years, had he lived to nurture his talent and build his confidence as a novelist.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Saul Bellow at 84 has written a novel as graceful and funny as Ravelstein. But who could have predicted that he would also stir up a hornets’ nest of controversy? The character of Abe Ravelstein is based on Bellow’s late friend and colleague, Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind, the 1987 best-seller that became a lightning rod for the culture wars of the Reagan era. What hasn’t heretofore been public knowledge is that Bloom, who died in 1992, was homosexual. By outing his friend and asserting that his death resulted from AIDS, Bellow is facing accusations of betrayal and exploitation.

Some have gone as far as to suggest that Ravelstein is a sort of jealous revenge enacted against Bloom, who wrote The Closing of the American Mind at Bellow’s urging. Bloom’s book championed the Greek classics and condemned modern college campuses as lax and ineffectual (with much of the blame placed on the 1960s counterculture and the burgeoning climate of political correctness). It made Bloom a millionaire and an unlikely egghead celebrity welcomed at White House dinners and invited on Oprah. He was vilified by left-wing critics to such a degree that potential detractors were just as anxious to read his book as were enthusiastic supporters. Not even Bellow’s 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature could equal the attention that was lavished on Bloom and his enormously successful jeremiad, which had the throat-clenching subtitle of “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students.”

Let the pundits have their field day with Ravelstein. Let them again dredge up the old charges that Bellow lacks the skills of a first-rate novelist, that he writes chit-chatty essays in the guise of fiction, that his characters are crudely cribbed from friends and family members and ex-wives, and that his own outsized ego is the star of the show. When the bickering dies down and the smoke of recrimination clears, Ravelstein should emerge as the heartfelt masterpiece it assuredly is. Regardless of who Abe Ravelstein is modeled after, he is a fully realized character that lives on the page with the élan of a modern-day Dickens eccentric. As with Humboldt’s Gift, Bellow’s other great roman à clef (based on his friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz), Ravelstein evokes with detail and precision the map of a mind, the outline of a soul. While the earlier novel showed us the dark and punishing slide of a failed literary career, Ravelstein presents a tale of outrageous good fortune—it’s “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” with smarter questions and a French beret for Regis.

We first meet the sixtyish bald-pated Ravelstein attired in a Japanese kimono and ensconced on the seventh floor of the Hotel Crillon in Paris (two floors below is pop star Michael Jackson and his entourage). “He had written a book,” we’re told by Ravelstein’s visiting friend, Chick, who is also the novel’s narrator (and Bellow’s surrogate), “a spirited, intelligent, warlike book, and it had sold and was still selling in both hemispheres and on both sides of the equator.” Asleep in the next room is Ravelstein’s gay Asian lover, Nikki (“layers of black hair reaching his glossy shoulders”). Chick and Ravelstein dawdle over a tray of wild strawberries and hot coffee and begin an in-depth discussion of—what else?—the economic policies of John Maynard Keynes at the close of the First World War. It turns out that Chick has written a brief biographical sketch of Keynes at Ravelstein’s request, with the understanding that Chick might next attempt a memoir about Ravelstein.

Bellow has always enjoyed capturing the exuberance of intellectuals talking, thinking, and dazzling one another with high culture and low jokes:

Ravelstein, with his bald powerful head, was at ease with large statements, big issues, and famous men, with decades, eras, centuries. He was, however, just as familiar with entertainers like Mel Brooks as with the classics and could go from Thucydides’ huge tragedy to Moses as played by Brooks. “He comes down from Mount Sinai with the commandments. God had handed down twenty but ten fall from Mel Brooks’s arms when he sees the children of Israel rioting around the Golden Calf.” Ravelstein loved these Catskill entertainments; he had a natural gift for them.

The refined Ravelstein chain-smokes Marlboros and laughs uproariously at bad puns. He thinks nothing of buying a $4,500 Lanvin sports jacket on impulse before lunch and then absentmindedly soiling the lapels with spilled espresso. Back home in Chicago, his apartment on Lake Shore Drive is stuffed with silver and crystal, pricey paintings, $10,000 stereo speakers, and—the holy of holies—an industrial-size espresso machine in the kitchen. Like the hero of Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, Ravelstein embodies the rapacious American spirit of “I want, I want, I want, oh, I want…”

But there is no implied criticism of Yankee materialism in Ravelstein’s nouveau riche lifestyle. Indeed, we come to accept his insatiable hunger for luxury as indistinguishable from his mind’s thirst for philosophical truth. (Of course, it is this linkage between wealth, privilege, and intellectual refinement that often gets Bellow pegged—with some justification—as an elitist and a cultural conservative.) Ravelstein sees all human desire in lofty terms reflecting the Socratic pursuit of Eros in Plato’s Symposium. Philosophy and art are not sublimated sexuality, as Freud would have us believe. Rather, they are the very soul of eroticism. The thrust of Ravelstein’s (and Bloom’s) critique of academia isn’t simply that the free-love hippies and leftists had taken over the universities in the Sixties. Ravelstein/Bloom insists that the hippies and leftists destroyed the free-love that had always been a natural component of education and replaced it with slogans and political noise.

Ravelstein is diagnosed with HIV and his weakened immune system becomes increasingly susceptible to illness and infection. Yet, this is a remarkably unsentimental story. Ravelstein refuses to indulge in self-pity. He continues to chain-smoke and hold court from a hospital bed. He’s on the telephone to Germany debating the upholstery color and CD player for a new BMW he’s having shipped to the states for Nikki. Former students come to visit, many of whom are well-placed in their fields as “historians, teachers, journalists, experts, civil servants, think-tankers.”  (There’s a marvelous party scene earlier with Ravelstein receiving top-level Gulf War reports via phone calls from a former student working in the State Department.)

Grief seems to overtake Chick a few years after Ravelstein’s death. Bellow beautifully portrays the subtle ache of absence that occurs when the dead seem to reach out and touch us in silence and memory: “I shan’t pretend that he didn’t come in obliquely from wherever it was that he continued to exist.” On a quotidian level, the aging Chick feels “the persistence of Ravelstein” in his life because “it had become my habit to tell him what had happened to me since we last met.” And then, as if to better prepare him to write a book about his friend, Chick experiences “a rehearsal of my own with death” when he nearly dies from food poisoning while vacationing in the Caribbean. His young wife Rosamund—one of Ravelstein’s stellar graduates—manages to get him on a plane back to the U.S., where he survives heart failure and pneumonia in an intensive care unit. Once healthy again, Chick finds the clarity and inspiration to write the memoir that Ravelstein had asked him to undertake in the novel’s opening scene.

As Ravelstein makes its way up the best-seller list this summer, it will be interesting to observe what effect Bellow’s portrait has on Allan Bloom’s perceived reputation as an icon among the kind of hard-core conservatives who would frankly exclude him on the basis of his sexuality. At the height of his fame, Bloom argued that his cultural concerns were of a more radical nature than any party affiliation could satisfy, whether conservative or liberal. In a sense, this is the service Bellow has rendered unto his old friend: he’s rescued Bloom from the province of political hacks and axe-grinders by allowing us the full measure of his humanity. Bellow’s novel is an eloquent defense of Eros as unifying and inclusive.

Last Call is an elegiac dramatization of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final days writing The Last Tycoon, the unfinished Hollywood novel he hoped would restore his reputation. Fitzgerald’s spectacular Jazz Age fame and subsequent slide into alcoholism and obscurity are the stuff of well-trod literary folklore. The end is as familiar as a melancholy bedtime story: On December 21, 1940, the 44-year-old writer suffered a fatal heart attack in the home of his companion and lover, gossip columnist Sheilah Graham. The chronology covered in this Showtime Original is roughly similar to that of Graham’s autobiography, Beloved Infidel, which became a soapy 1959 film starring Deborah Kerr as Graham and a laughably miscast Gregory Peck as Fitzgerald. However, Last Call has found a surprisingly fresh angle from which to approach its subject. Writer-director Henry Bromell’s script is based on an unpretentious 1985 memoir, Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald, written by Frances Kroll Ring, who was Fitzgerald’s personal secretary during the last twenty months of his life. Best of all, Last Call boasts a first-rate performance by Jeremy Irons (Reversal of Fortune, Lolita) as the dissipated novelist.

Irons’ lanky frame and chiseled face don’t readily call to mind the doughy lost soul we know from Fitzgerald’s late-career photographs. Nevertheless, he beautifully evokes the “sensual fatigue”—in the apt phrase of biographer Arthur Mizener—that infused the writer’s world on and off the page. Irons flattens out his own British accent in deference to Fitzgerald’s Minnesota upbringing, while retaining a hint of the self-willed blue-blood posturing that seemed key to the author’s personality. (Recordings of Fitzgerald’s voice bear an uncanny resemblance to the elocutionary fastidiousness of British-born actor Claude Rains.) Last Call is fully attuned to its central character’s enormous contradictions. Despite ill-health, crippling self-doubts, cycles of binge boozing and drying out, Fitzgerald miraculously succeeded in pulling himself together and writing something that even in its incomplete form is recognized today as a classic American novel. Jeremy Irons brings an almost spiritual luminance to the portrait of a burnt-out writer rediscovering and flexing his creative powers.

Irons & Campbell

Frances Kroll Ring’s brief 150-page memoir is so low-key and self-effacing that it’s not inherently dramatic. Henry Bromell’s script for Last Call consequently resorts to embellishments, some more credible than others. At times, the narrative recalls Akiva Goldsman’s controversial screenplay for last year’s Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, which was “inspired” by a biography of mathematician John Nash. Where Goldsman invented from whole cloth a delusional parallel universe to represent John Nash’s schizophrenia, Bromell fashions for Fitzgerald a late-night series of alcohol-fueled hallucinations involving the writer’s wife Zelda, played here by Sissy Spacek in the passive-aggressive mode she perfected for In the Bedroom. The scenes never quite jell, in part because Spacek is being asked to portray a symbolic projection of Fitzgerald’s inner demons rather than a flesh-and-blood Zelda, who was confined to a mental hospital in North Carolina during the time Fitzgerald was working in Hollywood.

Bromell has better luck transforming Frances Kroll Ring’s modest secretarial reminiscences into a coming-of-age story of unrequited love. It helps tremendously that twentysomething Frances is played with great charm by Neve Campbell (Three to Tango, Wild Things). The real-life Frances states flatly in her book that she had “compassion rather than passion” for F. Scott Fitzgerald. Last Call, by contrast, fabricates a soulful liplock in a parked car and makes the moment all but inevitable. The Frances Kroll of Showtime’s movie—unlike the business-minded amanuensis in her memoir—is an aspiring fiction writer anxious to glean wisdom from her employer. The memoir records no kiss, soulful or otherwise, merely a spurned out-of-character “grab” from a playfully drunk Fitzgerald. But it’s easy to forgive Last Call for romanticizing its source material. (It’s less easy to forgive the film’s curious substitution of Pepsi-Cola in place of Fitzgerald’s well-documented on-the-wagon preference for Coca-Cola.) Jeremy Irons and Neve Campbell are splendid sparing partners. Their characters convey a multitude of veiled emotions. And like protagonists in an elegant Fitzgerald tale, they nourish one another in unexpected and profound ways.

Canadian author Michael Redhill spent ten years writing his debut novel, Martin Sloane, published to wide acclaim in 2001. As if challenging himself to master the whole of Henry James’s The Art of the Novel in one fell swoop, Redhill fashioned a meticulous and structurally flawless narrative. Told largely through the first-person voice of a female character recounting her love affair with an enigmatic artist who later disappears under ambiguous circumstances, Martin Sloane is that rare instance of an intelligent page-turner that permits readers to respect themselves in the morning. And now, in a collection titled Fidelity, Redhill exhibits a jeweler’s precision in crafting short stories. Not all of the ten pieces here are equally strong, and a few are burdened with unnecessary or arbitrary twists, but this is compelling work from a writer who is rapidly acquiring a “must-read” reputation.

Invariably cast as middle-class denizens of dreary contemporary cityscapes, Redhill’s characters are often disaffected and clueless to a fault. In the story “A Lark,” a businessman on assignment in Calgary lapses into a casual affair with a coworker. (“It was possible, it came to him, to be perfectly content in a marriage and still be capable of infidelity, and this surprised him.”) The divorced Upstate New York couple depicted in “Mount Morris” reunite once a year for a drunken evening of escalating insults and desultory sex. Their annual ritual growing stale, the ex-wife bitterly confesses to her ex-husband that she almost cheated on him when they were married. “I should have,” she stingingly tells him, “but my optimism made me stupid.” The author’s background as a poet and playwright is seen to good effect in his sharp dialogue, which crackles with undercurrents of hostility and inarticulate yearnings. He even manages the impressive feat of building tension and dread in a sixteen-page story (“Split”) comprised entirely of aimless chitchat around a blackjack table at an Indian casino.

While the less successful stories are diligent and workmanlike, admirers of Martin Sloane will expect more of Redhill. Overtly provocative themes seem to undermine the integrity of his oblique style. “The Victim, Who Cannot Be Named,” for example, concerns a suburban couple who stumble across a sexually explicit video tape showing their teenage daughter cavorting with two classmates. The story’s execution never rises above movie-of-the-week sensationalism. In “The Flesh Collectors,” middle-aged thrice-married Nathan Roth is confronted with the frustrating predicament of his current wife’s allergy to latex condoms. He reluctantly consents to having a vasectomy. Against the moral counsel of his rabbi—who is little more than a straight man for the story’s jokey premise—Roth considers a sperm bank donation to hedge his bets. The protagonist’s name is no doubt a sly nod to Philip Roth’s torrentially randy fiction. Redhill, however, lacks the prurient conviction and scabrous wit needed to kick-start this kind of ribald material. Only at the end, in a breathtaking denouement totally at odds with the sniggering tone that precedes it, does he find the astringent blend of farce and anguish that should have informed “The Flesh Collectors” from the beginning.

Worth the price of the book is “Human Elements,” a beautifully modulated first-person narrative of a depressed and love-scarred poet named Russell. Seeking Thoreauvian solitude in the woods, he rents a summer cabin beside a lake. It’s not long before his mopey tranquility is disrupted by a pair of bickering marine biologists tracking frogs along the water’s edge. After a particularly scalding argument, the woman of the team decamps to Russell’s front yard and they begin a wary but oddly healing friendship-cum-courtship. It’s fitting that this is the final story in the collection. As fine as some of the book’s earlier pieces are, they read like apprentice work when compared to the novelistic detail and bruised emotionality Redhill brings to “Human Elements.” No twisty plot turns this time, just the deep pleasure of reading a story whose characters behave in a believably unpredictable fashion. Contemplating a frog’s life limited to peripheral vision, Russell muses, “Letting life come in from the side was a wise thing…”

No longer a fashionable writer at the time of his death, British playwright Terence Rattigan (1911-1977) has posthumously emerged as a subject of renewed interest. Heralded in the 1930s and 40s as a master of the well-made play, he was by the mid-1950s dismissed as reactionary. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, with its landmark kitchen-sink naturalism, galvanized the London stage in 1956 and sounded a death knell for Rattigan’s fastidious drawing-room dramas and urbane farces. In the 60s and 70s, when postmodern playwrights like Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter were in ascendance, Rattigan’s reputation shrank to near-oblivion. Reappraisal has been long overdue. In addition to an engrossing 1997 biography by Geoffrey Wansell, there have been two notable film adaptations of his work in recent years. The Winslow Boy (1999), meticulously directed by David Mamet, is a stirring drama about a family’s legal battle to clear their son’s name in connection with a military school theft. Not as successfully adapted, but still worth a look, is The Browning Version (1994), directed by Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas, Timecode) and showing this month on BBC America.

Modine & Scacchi

Albert Finney (Erin Brockovich, The Gathering Storm) skillfully dampens his emotional register to play the introverted prep-school classics teacher Andrew Crocker-Harris in The Browning Version. The screenplay, by Ronald Harwood (The Pianist), is an updating of the material, but the humiliations visited upon Crocker-Harris remain intact from Rattigan’s original 1948 one-act play and the subsequent 1951 film starring Michael Redgrave. The schoolmaster’s health is failing. He has little choice but to seek a less demanding teaching post elsewhere for reduced pay. School officials consider him expendable. Students ridicule him behind his back. His termagant wife, Laura (Greta Scacchi; The Red Violin, Cotton Mary), is cheating on him with a younger colleague (Matthew Modine; Full Metal Jacket, Short Cuts). Emotionally repressed and unfulfilled, Crocker-Harris is a chilling portrait of the despair hiding behind British middle-class reserve. (Biographer Geoffrey Wansell suggests that Rattigan’s characters and themes often serve a secondary function as submerged metaphors for the writer’s closeted homosexuality.)

When Crocker-Harris reveals that years ago he poured his heart into translating the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, a student named John Taplow (Ben Silverstone) purchases a secondhand edition of Robert Browning’s verse translation of the Greek play and warmly inscribes it to the teacher. Overwhelmed by Taplow’s gift, Crocker-Harris responds by weeping uncontrollably. Lost youth, lost ambition, lost love, a lifetime of regret seems to tumble forth from every pore of his being. It’s a deeply touching scene poised daringly between the maudlin and the sublime. Albert Finney, like Michael Redgrave before him, performs the tearful meltdown with gut-wrenching abandon. Seconds later, as if to sucker punch anyone mistaking this for Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Rattigan has Crocker-Harris’s spiteful wife verbally demolish her husband’s remaining shred of dignity.

The Browning Version doesn’t especially benefit from being rewritten as a contemporary piece. Ronald Harwood’s R-rated dialogue and additional scenes—such as Taplow getting sexually bullied by an older student in the shower room—are jarringly at odds with Rattigan’s customary restraint. Repression isn’t merely a theme in his work. It’s intrinsic to his style as a writer. Critic André Bazin’s observation that “censorship is essential to cinema and dreams alike” is also true in regards to Terence Rattigan’s genius for British understatement, which derives its impact from motives that are tantalizingly indirect rather than coarsely exposed.

If anything, the filmmakers lack the confidence to allow us the full measure of Rattigan’s uniquely British sensibility. This is particularly apparent in the decision to change the role of Frank Hunter—the science teacher played by Matthew Modine—from a native Brit to a visiting American instructor. Clearly a capitulation to U.S. box office hegemony, the result severely mars the integrity of the production. Modine is even forced to act the cliché of a befuddled Yank watching a cricket batsman and remarking, “Every time he hits the ball, I think he’s going to drop the bat and run to first base.” Nothing, however, ultimately detracts from Albert Finney’s excellent work here. It’s a major performance and a fitting tribute to Terence Rattigan’s complex creation of Andrew Crocker-Harris.

Ronald Sukenick is one of the leading lights of postmodern literature in the United States. He was a founding member of the Fiction Collective, a famed alternative press started in 1974 and still thriving. His first novel was published in 1968. Since then, in over a dozen works, he’s written short story collections, literary criticism, cultural history, and several more novels. Narralogues, published this year by the State University of New York (SUNY) Press, is a slim 133-page volume, but it has the wide-ranging scope of a major work. For anyone whose eyes glaze over when confronted with innovative writing, Sukenick’s book is surprisingly accessible and enormously fun to read. “I’ve got the hots for you,” he informs us in the introduction. After all, storytelling is “an erotic adventure.” True to his word, Narralogues is a palpably seductive blend of autobiography, fiction, satire and politics.

Sukenick’s view is that literary fiction has been thoroughly usurped by the entertainment industry. We’re drowning in novels and stories designed to narcotize us with “mind-numbing make-believe” and “intellectual passivity.”  Too often, the most interesting writers are marginalized and ignored. Valiant small presses are fighting “an uneven battle” against “publishing conglomerates and the electronic media.” Sukenick wants his work to stand as a rebuke to the avalanche of mainstream literature that “robotically reflects the status quo with no illuminating angle of its own.” If this sounds as if he’s written little more than a harangue aimed at our media-saturated age, that would be a misconception. “Literature,” he says, “should not try to mirror our experience, it should intervene in it.” Sukenick’s goal in Narralogues is to intervene in our lives as readers, to liberate our confining notions of what fiction is and what it is capable of expressing.

With influences as diverse as Plato’s Dialogues and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and with nods to the American Beats and the French Situationists, the ten “narralogues” that make up Sukenick’s book mesh disparate styles and forms. At times, he abandons words altogether for pictograms that resemble cave drawings. A recurring character named Waldo—an underpaid teaching assistant and part-time pornographer—exclaims at one point: “I’m simply saying that the forms of culture we have to work with don’t work and that the only kind of form worth talking about today is form that’s completely eccentric.” There’s no shortage of eccentricity in Narralogues. Categories and genres collapse into one another and redefine themselves. How can words validate our lives when “even autobiography has become a commodity”? Sukenick believes that we need a subversive literature that isn’t afraid to question our cultural assumptions. He delights in turning his stories upside down and inside out, such as when a seemingly fictional moment is reinterpreted for us in a postscript titled “Feedback Fed Back”:

The Norwegian freighter episode, speaking of human interest, was actually a trip I took with my ex-wife, with whom I remained deeply if ambivalently attached. She died recently of breast cancer. She always used to complain that I didn’t put her into my stories. So here she is, now that it’s too late.

Like a circus ringmaster or a loquacious talk show host, Sukenick flits in and out of his narralogues, sometimes appearing in the first person, sometimes in the third. Characters argue with him, or talk about him behind his back. He becomes a Henry Milleresque sexual braggart proclaiming that a character’s lewd exploits are actually based on Sukenick’s “explosive sexuality” following a reading at the University of Iowa Fiction Workshop. In another guise, he’s a sour expatriate drawing a startling parallel between the looted ruins of Rome and his dying mother robbed of her medical insurance in Reagan’s supply-side America. He can also be found in the Colorado Mountains (Sukenick is an English professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder) contemplating the apocalyptic symbolism of a raging snow storm while fretting about the C.I.A.’s interest in one of his novels.

What is the net effect of this hyperactive authorial gamesmanship? Without personally knowing Sukenick, for instance, can we be certain that the postscript about his ex-wife’s death is any more “true” than the assumed fiction that precedes it? The subtitle of his book is “Truth in Fiction,” and it seems clear that literary truth for Sukenick isn’t about documentary mimesis. Rather, it’s being faithful to our innate sense of creativity and artistic vision: “the moment of truth in fiction is the moment of composition.” Sukenick still has at least one foot in the 1960s counterculture revolution. He fervently believes that writing should be a radical life-affirming enterprise, or what his teaching assistant Waldo refers to as “Sukenick’s yahoo ideas about art and social wellbeing, his corny conviction that art in the long run could only justify itself by helping to create a culture that abetted the richness of common experience and encouraged social justice.”

Waldo is a wonderfully sly creation. Appearing in four of the book’s narralogues, he has a love/hate relationship with Sukenick, who is Waldo’s professor, mentor and literary guru.  Waldo is the sort of disingenuous campus leftist that Sukenick can’t resist satirizing:

[Waldo’s] favorite thing was to methodically seduce as many of the coeds in his classes as possible, the better to politicize them. It was one of the advantages of being a low paid, no-benefit academic temp. Besides, he could double dip by using the seduction adventures in writing pornography to supplement his income. He also liked to get drunk and drive fast.

In the book’s introduction, Sukenick admits to having been stung by left-wing critics who felt his work “didn’t come to grips with political reality.” Waldo’s character seems in part a response to what Sukenick perceives as leftist hypocrisy and tone deafness toward the arts. Throughout the book, leftists and neoconservatives alike are skewered as narrow-minded ideologues. Waldo is more than a poseur, however. He’s able to take to heart what Sukenick teaches him. In a delicious twist of poetic injustice, Waldo eventually becomes a famous novelist by aping his teacher’s writing style. Sukenick, meanwhile, remains at the university, languishing as “an author of the kind of literary fiction nobody was much interested in any more.”

It’s hard not to see Waldo as representative of hot young writers like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, both of whom have brought a domesticated form of postmodernism to the bestseller list. Sukenick might be inclined to shake his fist at the heavens and wonder why his own work—which would surely appeal to the Wallace and Eggers crowd—hasn’t met with similar success over the years. Certainly Narralogues and his extraordinary 1999 novel, Mosaic Man, prove that Ronald Sukenick is writing today with the kind of lucidness and artistry that few authors attain in the course of their careers.

José Saramago’s Journey to Portugal offers the pleasures of an engaging travel book coupled with the deeper enjoyment of sharing an excursion with a world-class storyteller. Written several years prior to his acclaimed 1995 novel Blindness, Saramago’s Journey to Portugal is only now appearing in an English translation. But make no mistake: this is a major work of nonfiction that should further enhance his reputation among a readership that has grown exponentially since his 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature. Annotated with maps, dozens of evocative black and white photographs, and an extensive index, it’s sure to become an indispensable Baedeker for visitors to the author’s homeland. At over 450 pages, the book’s scope is vast, from the bucolic Old World landscape of sheep farmers and coastal fishermen to the cosmopolitan “Gates of Lisbon.” Serious tourists, armchair travellers and fans of Saramago’s extraordinary fiction will all find something of value here.

The mix of history and modern-day descriptive detail was born of a six-month cross-country automobile trip undertaken during 1979-80. Saramago playfully adopts the third-person guise of “the traveller” throughout Journey to Portugal. It grants the author a kind of wry detachment and imbues his voice with novelistic shadings of irony and self-deprecation. (It’s a strategy that Norman Mailer perfected years ago in The Armies of the Night, which was filtered through a mischievous third-person braggart named “Mailer.”) Here’s Saramago taking obvious delight in exploiting the technique:

The traveller pauses when the highway reaches Bertiandos; he peers through the metal grilles of its gate like a poor beggar, and his observations are repaid by the felicity of its Baroque architecture taken together with the sixteenth-century tower, which brings him to ask himself what kind of curse has befallen contemporary architecture, bereft of any kind of harmony in combining styles, witness the constant clashes between what went before and what has been constructed alongside.

Saramago’s traveller can be ill-tempered at times (“To see carriages used for pomp and ceremony annoys him”) and curmudgeonly. When an amorous young couple in the town of Viana do Castelo misdirects him in his search for the ruins of an old chapel, the traveller is outraged toward “these two ignorant lovers with little future ahead of them if they didn’t learn more about love than its earthly manifestation.” He is something of a loner and a teetotaling aesthete. Cordial villagers invariably offer him a glass of indigenous port wine or locally brewed spirits. “Alas,” Saramago informs us, “the traveller is not a drinker.” Instead, his attention is drawn to the stonework of the ancient castles, churches and monasteries—some of them intact from the late Roman era—that seem to be fixtures of many Portuguese villages and towns.

While the past evoked in Journey to Portugal is sometimes exalted at the expense of the present, Saramago isn’t a reactionary holdout for a lost or mythical Golden Age. On the contrary, once we discover the traveller’s penchant for “embellishing every tale with fresh insights,” we come to recognize how culture is nourished and renewed from generation to generation. Rather than mourning the past, Saramago grieves for the modern world and its inattention to the legacies and lessons of history. The traveller confesses to being perplexed by human nature and “the difficulty men have in comprehending good things and the ease with which they repeat the bad.” On visiting Lisbon’s Archaeological Museum, he views a collar once worn by a black slave and still inscribed, “This negro belongs to Agostinho Lafetá do Carvalhal do Obidos.” Saramago writes:

The traveller is truly grateful to whoever picked it up and did not destroy the evidence of such a horrendous crime. Since he has never refrained from speaking his mind, however outlandish his views may have seemed, he will now make another judgment: that the collar of Agostinho de Lafetá’s negro slave should be placed in a room all of its own, so that there will be nothing to distract visitors from it, and no-one could say they had not seen it.

In Blindness, the author imagined a plague of sightlessness afflicting our eyes and casting us into a “strange dimension, without direction or reference points, with neither north nor south, below or above.” The novel was an allegory for our perpetual lot on earth, whether by existential fiat or willful ignorance. In Journey to Portugal, Saramago restores our vision by affirming the achievements of history and culture, while at the same time demanding that our sight lines convey a moral imperative. His principled worldview makes Journey to Portugal an inspiring guidebook.

David Kepesh is a breast man. When author Philip Roth first introduced us to him in the 1973 novella The Breast, the 38-year-old professor of comparative literature was the victim of a Kafkaesque medical anomaly that resulted in his metamorphosis into a 155-pound mammary gland. Kepesh reappeared in 1977 as the oversexed narrator and protagonist of The Professor of Desire, one of Roth’s richest novels. A sort of expanded prequel to The Breast, The Professor of Desire concludes with Kepesh fearful of unnamed “transformations yet to come.” And now, a quarter of a century later, David Kepesh has again returned—older if no less libidinous—in a forceful new novella, The Dying Animal.

Having begun the Kepesh trilogy on a note of macabre existential fantasy, Roth completes the journey firmly in the realist tradition. The synecdochic fixation on the female bosom nonetheless remains a central metaphor. The Dying Animal achieves a startling level of poignancy when one of Kepesh’s former students and lovers arrives at the professor’s apartment on New Year’s Eve of 1999 to tearfully announce that she has been diagnosed with breast cancer. The revelation transpires during the last fifty or so pages of this brief 156-page book. “In every calm and reasonable person,” Kepesh mourns, “there is a hidden second person scared witless about death.” The climactic scene is rendered with such artful compassion that it overturns our hardening perceptions toward the character of Kepesh, who is otherwise portrayed as one of Roth’s unapologetic mixes of brainy sophisticate and borderline sexual predator.

As an aging roué Kepesh has grown impatient with the time-consuming social conventions of seduction. “The French art of being flirtatious is of no interest to me,” he declares. The only thing that matters is gratifying “the savage urge.” He bluntly muses, “Do men find women so enchanting once the sex is taken out?” Employing a strategy that the author used to brilliant effect with the satyric puppeteer Mickey Sabbath in Sabbath’s Theater, Roth all but dares us not to be outraged by Kepesh’s comments and behavior. Each school year he targets a sexual prospect from among his female students:

They come to my first class, and I know almost immediately which is the girl for me. There is a Mark Twain story in which he runs from a bull, and the bull looks up to him when he’s hiding in a tree, and the bull thinks, “You are my meat, sir.” Well, that “sir” is transformed into “young lady” when I see them in class.

If equating college women with “meat” isn’t enough to qualify Kepesh as a pig, Roth pushes the character over the line with a shocking scene of rough sex that will doubtless offend some readers.

Nothing about The Dying Animal seems narratively gratuitous or exploitative, however. Roth is playing a high-stakes poker game with his thematic material. The point as stated by Kepesh is not necessarily profound—nor new to Roth’s fiction—but it is eternally sobering: “No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you’re not superior to sex.” We can no more escape the lineaments of lust than we can escape death. One of the strongest scenes is a vivid illustration of desire’s primal grip upon even our ravaged and decaying bodies. Momentarily awakening from a coma after a stroke, Kepesh’s 55-year-old colleague George O’Hearn begins mutely and frantically clawing and embracing friends and family at his bedside. Reaching for his ex-wife, he pulls at her blouse and bra, trying to undress and fondle her. “He didn’t die for another twelve hours,” Kepesh informs us, but “we all knew that what we had witnessed was the last amazing act of George’s life.” (Afterwards, his ex will ask Kepesh, “I wonder who it is he thought I was.”) The book’s title, taken from Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” comes clearly into focus: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire/ And fastened to a dying animal…”

Those who have accused Roth of objectifying women or, worse, outright misogyny (a charge that has trailed other male writers of Roth’s generation such as John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer) will likely find nothing to change their view here. It probably doesn’t help that the novella’s two prominent female characters—the caramel-skinned young Cuban emigré Consuela Castillo and the middle-aged American businesswoman Carolyn Lyons—are seen exclusively through the eyes of a hardcore sensualist like David Kepesh. After all, Kepesh is a 1960s survivor for whom the greatest legacy of the free-love era is today’s liberated female students, whom he gleefully classes as “an astonishing generation of fellators.” While not composed on the same grand canvas as the celebrated volumes in Roth’s recently completed “American Trilogy” (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain), The Dying Animal is a provocative small-scale work from an author working at the top of his form.

In his 1988 autobiography, A Life, director Elia Kazan recounts a disagreement he had with his production advisors while working on America, America. The film’s protagonist, a twenty-year-old Anatolian Greek of humble origins named Stavros (Stathis Giallelis), arrives as an immigrant in the United States, whereupon he falls to his knees in gratitude and kisses the ground. Kazan was told that the gesture was a cliché and should be cut from the movie. He at first relented, but then had second-thoughts: “I doubt that anyone born in the United States has or can have a true appreciation of what America is.” The ground-kissing scene was left intact. America, America was too close to Kazan’s heart for compromise. He wrote the screenplay (and novel) as a means of exploring his family’s cultural heritage and honoring the dreams that brought Europeans pouring into America at the turn of the century. Kazan, born in Turkey, was four years old when he came to the U.S. with his parents in 1912.

The character of Stavros Topouzoglou is based on Kazan’s uncle, who was the first member of the family to immigrate. America, America primarily concerns Stavros’ journey from central Turkey to the harbor city of Constantinople, where he eventually boards passage to the States. Filmed on location under difficult circumstances, the movie looks and sounds unlike anything Kazan had directed before. The first hour is an extraordinary depiction of impoverished villages percolating with vibrant folk music and whispered political tensions. Fog-shrouded mountain vistas stretch across the landscape. Oppression rears its head when the Turkish Army sets fire to a church filled with Armenian women and children. No small measure of the impact of these powerful images is due to cinematographer Haskell Wexler and editor Dede Allen. Wexler’s framing at times recalls the classic compositional rigor of Potemkin or Citizen Kane. (While praising his camerawork, Kazan claims that Wexler was a “pain in the ass” who despised the director’s reactionary politics and hated the script.)

As the action shifts toward Constantinople, America, America becomes a different kind of story, a picaresque tale, and requires a lighter touch than Kazan brings to the material. He’s never evinced a talent for humor, even in an ostensibly satirical film like A Face in the Crowd, which mixes glum sociological messages with heavy-handed irony. Something similar befalls America, America. There is a painfully protracted sequence, clearly meant to be sardonic and funny, in which Stavros is slowly divested of his money and belongings by a wily traveling companion named Abdul (Lou Antonio). The indignities and humiliations don’t build with any comic or dramatic force, so we fail to respond emotionally when the worm turns and Stavros stabs Abdul to death.

Stathis Giallelis

A fatal weakness at the film’s center is the performance by Stathis Giallelis as Stavros. Kazan discovered the actor sweeping floors in an Athens film production office. Although photogenic and likable, Giallelis’ limitations are glaringly discernible. He’s not up to the challenge of creating a complex characterization or holding our interest for the film’s nearly three-hour length. When Stavros becomes involved in a phony marriage scheme to raise money for his ship fare to the U.S., neither Giallelis nor Kazan seem certain of how to convey the character’s conflicted motivations from scene to scene. Kazan uses the actor as a brooding presence whose single-minded obsession with America is supposed to be our key to understanding him. This strategy works fine earlier in the film, but because America, America is also Stavros’ coming-of-age story, we expect more depth from the character as his experiences broaden.

Supporting roles are strong. John Marley (later to star in John Cassavete’s Faces) appears briefly as a lusty, almost Zorba-like, Greek separatist who introduces Stavros to whorehouses and terrorism. Paul Mann is robust and paternal as Aleko Sinnikoglou, a wealthy carpet merchant who hopes to make Stavros his son-in-law. As Aleko’s fetching daughter, Thomna, Linda Marsh has the delicate yearnings of a Tennessee Williams’ heroine, but she is given little to work with in her scenes with Stavros. Perhaps in an effort to disguise Giallelis’ wooden performance, the final third of the film is overcrowded with unnecessary subsidiary characters and melodramatic subplots. By the time we’re finally aboard ship headed for America, Kazan has his hands full orchestrating one climactic crescendo after another.

The film was not a commercial success in the United States. Critical response was mixed. (Its Oscar win was for Gene Callahan’s art direction.) If time has not improved its flaws, the movie’s stylistic virtues remain impressive. One can sense Kazan learning to apply aspects of cinematic language that were new and exciting for him. At its best—when the images are allowed to speak for themselves—America, America achieves a rare poetic grace.

In Danse Macabre, an engaging nonfiction exploration of cinematic and literary horror, Stephen King wrote nostalgically about the science fiction films of his 1950s boyhood. Movies like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and Invasion of the Body Snatchers were frightening on more than one level. According to King, the films touched “phobic pressure points” in the culture at large, which during the 50s had an undeniable component of Cold War paranoia. The author’s latest novel, Dreamcatcher, is an updated alien invasion epic with all the classic trimmings of UFO sightings, extraterrestrial fungi, telepathic mind control, and slimy bug-eyed creatures baring sharp teeth and lethal tentacles. Political paranoia isn’t a subtextual concern. (There are a couple of references to a disputed “Florida Presidency”—clearly a last-minute addition to the book before it went to press.) As for “phobic pressure points,” King’s discarded original title for Dreamcatcher perhaps says it all: Cancer.

The story centers on four men in their late thirties, friends since childhood, meeting in the Maine woods for their annual autumn deer hunt. This year’s reunion finds each of the men burdened with midlife woes. Henry Devlin, a psychiatrist by trade, is sunk in a suicidal depression; Gary “Jonesy” Jones, a college history professor, is mangled in body and spirit after being hit by a car; Joe “Beaver” Clarendon, a carpenter, is divorced and aimless; and Pete Moore, a salesman, is bottoming out from alcoholism. There is a fifth friend—someone the others haven’t contacted in years—who has mysteriously reappeared in their collective thoughts. His name is Douglas “Duddits” Cavell, born with Down’s syndrome and now suffering the added insult of leukemia.

The strongest material in Dreamcatcher is comprised of flashbacks to the junior high school days of the principle characters. Henry, Jonesy, Beaver and Pete befriended Duddits after rescuing him from an assault. King has always had a knack for portraying the terrain of adolescence: the boastful profanity and sex talk of close friends, the casual cruelty of bullies, and the loneliness of kids who are perceived as “different” by their peers. Duddits is a risky creation. With his ever-present Scooby-Doo lunch box and impaired speech—“Fit neek?” (“Fix sneaker?”)—he often seems on the verge of being crassly infantilized by the author. But by the end of the novel, our perceptions of the character are overturned and he emerges with a kind of unsentimental nobility. (The inspiration for Duddits may have come from the late science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, who placed a ten-year-old boy with autism at the center of his 1964 novel, Martian Time-Slip.)

While Dreamcatcher breaks no new ground, it does—in the words of the rock band Spinal Tap—“break like the wind.” The alien fungus plants itself inside our lower intestines and wreaks gaseous havoc. Riffing on the notorious “chest-burster” scene in the movie Alien, King’s otherworldly creatures are hatched with a similar explosive force from their victims’ rear ends. One doesn’t have to trace the genealogy of scatological jokes from Chaucer to Howard Stern in order to appreciate George Carlin’s succinct truism: “Farts are funny.” Dismissing Stephen King as “juvenile” is beside the point. His gleeful wallowing in the most literal and offensive sort of bathroom humor gives Dreamcatcher the hilarious kick of an unfettered Lenny Bruce routine.

King doesn’t leave a lot to the reader’s imagination. If we smile knowingly at an insane Air Force officer with the name “Kurtz,” it’s a safe bet that another character will blazon the allusion in neon so no one misses the joke: “Perlmutter had read Heart of Darkness, had seen Apocalypse Now, and had on many occasions thought that the name Kurtz was simply a little too convenient.” And for anyone not up to speed on the metaphoric connection between the alien fungus and the ravages of cancer, it’s spelled out for us: “…the crud was dining on him the way the cancer that killed his father had dined on the old man’s stomach and lungs.” At moments like these, the author’s pulp-driven sensibilities get the better of his literary instincts. It reveals a lack of confidence in the material, a fear that readers won’t look beneath the surface of the text unless a running commentary does the work for them.

The novel isn’t as focused or tightly written as Bag of Bones or Hearts in Atlantis, both of which brought King a new level of acclaim in recent years. Overall, Dreamcatcher is uneven and formulaic, interspersed with some ingenious set-pieces (especially good is an extended sequence with one of the characters locked inside his own mind battling an alien for control of his memories). Fans will be intrigued by the autobiographical elements of the story. Dreamcatcher was written while King was undergoing months of painful physical rehabilitation after being struck by a reckless driver’s van in the summer of 1999. The character of Jonesy experiences similar injuries. Last year, King published an eloquent nonfiction book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, that discussed his harrowing accident and its aftermath in detail. Also contained in On Writing is an oddly relevant childhood memory: an abusive babysitter used to “playfully” sit on King’s head and fart in his face.

Filmed in 1998, this adroit BBC/WGBH-Boston production of William Shakespeare’s King Lear is of particular note for preserving Ian Holm’s celebrated stage performance in the title role. Stellar interpreters of Lear haven’t always been so fortunate. Laurence Olivier was frail and in ill health by the time he was brought before the cameras for a 1984 television adaptation. Paul Scofield was in prime form for the 1971 film version, but his powerful acting was undermined by Peter Brook’s dreary stylized direction. Orson Welles fell victim to television’s infancy in 1953 when he played Lear in an absurdly truncated 73-minute teleplay—complete with boom-mike shadows and wobbly cardboard sets—coincidentally directed by a much younger Peter Brook. When asked about the severely chopped-down script, Welles replied at the time: “The central story will still be there. That’s all people remember anyhow.”

Ian Holm’s King Lear is significantly trimmed, too, but at two-and-a-half hours the play’s structure and thematic threads remain clearly delineated. More importantly, the director (Richard Eyre) and the strong supporting cast are retained from the 1997 Royal National Theatre stage production. While not “opened up” in the full cinematic sense, stagebound claustrophobia is minimized by the use of expressionistic studio sets and fluid editing. Early scenes inside Lear’s castle are torch-lit and have a sepulchral eeriness that seems keyed to the King’s line, “I think the world’s asleep.” Walls, floors, and sheet-draped furniture are all bathed in a lurid orange hue. We feel ourselves submerged in a kind of pagan no-man’s-land from which reason and sanity have departed.

Ian Holm

Scholars have speculated about the play’s desolate worldview and brutal pessimism. Is King Lear simply reflective of Jacobean fatalism or is Shakespeare revealing something of his own personal despair in the chilling poetry of “pent-up guilts” and “climbing sorrow”? What has never been in dispute is the universality of Lear’s profoundly crippled and cross-wired relationship with his three daughters. His vain misreading of Regan and Goneril’s condescension is matched only by his blindness to Cordelia’s respect. “Things must change or cease,” we’re told by a passing gentleman on the heath, where Lear soon encounters his own elemental truth. Change finally comes to the old King’s heart, although his sweetest speech to Cordelia is delivered as the two of them are led away to prison. Reconciliations are grievously delayed or undercut by misery and violence throughout King Lear. Awash in corpses, the play ends with slim differentiation between “to change” and “to cease.”

A controversial aspect of Holm’s performance was the decision to strip naked during the storm scene. The gesture is implicit in the text: “Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here.” In fact, it’s remarkable that no Lear before Holm felt compelled to give us a Shakespearean full monty. If the moment was startling on stage, the teleplay is too carefully restrained. While not exactly censored, the nudity is all but unnoticeable from a distance in dim light, heavy rain, and the skittish lens of a handheld camera. Worse, the thunderous sound effects drown out much of the dialogue. (Seasoned Masterpiece Theatre fans may wish to have a copy of the play at hand; the storm can be found in Act III, Scene IV.)

As he has shown in his movie roles, Ian Holm is the purest of conduits for the behaviors and motivations of the characters he plays. Whether portraying button-down negligence attorney Mitchell Stephens in The Sweet Hereafter, or Greenwich Village gadfly Joe Gould in Joe Gould’s Secret, Holm disappears into his roles with thorough self-effacement. His Lear is naturalistic and devoid of theatrical cant. We’re reminded that Shakespeare’s language needn’t be forcibly gnawed to work its effects. In scenes where Holm is matched with a similarly unfussy performer, such as Victoria Hamilton playing Cordelia, the results can be extraordinary. A highlight of the production is Lear awakening (Act IV, Scene VII) and saying, “Do not laugh at me;/ For, as I am a man, I think this lady/ To be my child Cordelia.” His daughter’s response—“And so I am, I am”—is a rare moment of lucid beauty in an angry landscape. Holm and Hamilton bring a breathtaking poignancy to the scene.

David Warner

The Fool in King Lear is a gnomic and often misunderstood presence. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, shortened versions of the play omitted the character altogether. Although the role has been reduced for this production, it has also been daringly reconfigured. Rather than a manic young whippersnapper—as the character is commonly acted—Michael Bryant plays the Fool as a decrepit hanger-on as ancient and tired as Lear himself. Bryant is like a dyspeptic vaudevillian gamely firing zingers from the dais at a Friars Club roast. It’s an inspired idea and hints that Lear and his Fool have accompanied one another into a bitter late-life. Lear asks, “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” When the Fool responds, “Lear’s shadow,” we suspect that the Fool has known Lear long enough to mourn the King’s ignoble decline.

Shakespeare crafted one of literature’s great parallel narratives in the story of Gloucester and his two sons, the calculating bastard Edmund and the steadfast Edgar. The subplot mirrors and enlarges the drama of Lear’s clash with his daughters. Actor Paul Rhys interprets Edgar as callow and disengaged during the play’s opening scenes, which is effective in two ways: it makes Edgar a believably easy mark for the duplicitous Edmund, and it allows room for Edgar’s transformation in his dark-night-of-the-soul on the heath. Edmund is played with sleek menace by the aptly named Finbar Lynch, who also brings a rapacious eroticism to his scenes with Goneril (Barbara Flynn) and Regan (Amanda Redman). Anyone familiar with King Lear will want to know how the production handles the blinding of Gloucester (Timothy West) by the barbarous Cornwall (Michael Simkins). It’s gruesome stuff and suggests that PBS operates under the same double standard as commercial television: Gloucester’s punctured eye sockets oozing blood are apparently more acceptable viewing than Lear’s blessed nakedness.

Last Christmas, Turner Broadcasting and Hallmark Entertainment joined forces for a threadbare adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol starring Patrick Stewart. The modest budget seemed to be gobbled up in the first half-hour when Marley’s ghost was granted a few seconds of costly CGI special effects. Nevertheless, the teleplay was successful enough with audiences to inspire the producers to return this holiday season with a far more ambitious and expensive two-part miniseries of David Copperfield. The results are surprisingly felicitous, thanks to its elegant production design and the energetic efforts of veteran director Peter Medak (The Ruling Class, The Krays). Although the acting talent overall isn’t equal to the first-rate David Copperfield that aired a scant nine months ago on PBS Masterpiece Theatre, this latest version is visually impressive and captures a fair measure of the novel’s Dickensian spirit.

British newcomer Hugh Dancy (last seen in Masterpiece Theatre’s Madame Bovary) is very fine indeed. He brings an air of suppressed rage and sensuality to his portrayal of the adult Copperfield. It’s a romanticized interpretation of the role, yet remains true to Dickens. The novel, it should be remembered, is narrated by Copperfield in his late-twenties, wise beyond his years and brimming with dark emotions and heartbreak. Previous adaptations have invariably given us a hapless grown-up naif without the smoldering complexities that churn beneath the character’s genteel façade. Like Dickens himself, Copperfield rapidly matured into a self-assured writer. Also like Dickens, he is incapable of forgetting the psychic and physical abuse of his childhood.

The strongest scene in the teleplay—scripted by John Goldsmith—epitomizes the theme of unresolved childhood wretchedness carried into adulthood  On the surface it’s a familiar moment in every film version of the novel: eight-year-old Copperfield (Max Dolbey) is beaten mercilessly by his malevolent stepfather, Mr. Murdstone (Anthony Andrews). Scriptwriter Goldsmith, however, does something unique with the material. He crosscuts between the young Copperfield’s beating and the adult Copperfield trying—and failing—to restrain his emotions as he puts pen to paper. Each bruising snap of Murdstone’s hickory switch ricochets across the years and causes the fledgling author to recoil in recollected misery. The sequence is powerfully edited and imparts an unforgettable illustration of the wounding persistence of memory.

Michael Richards

Somewhat less credible in their roles are the two American “name” talents added to the mix as audience insurance: Michael Richards and Sally Field. Richards (best known as the hyperkinetic Cosmo Kramer on Seinfeld) plays Wilkins Micawber, one of Dickens’ most fanciful and memorable characters. Clearly taking his cue from W.C. Fields’ hilarious turn as Micawber in the 1935 George Cukor film, Richards gives a shtick-laden performance complete with googly-eyed double-takes, head-over-heels pratfalls, stumbling into doorways, and spinning on his heels like a windup automaton. In other words, he plays Micawber as a Victorian-era Cosmo Kramer. It’s a weirdly clever idea and Richards is undeniably funny in his 1850s wardrobe and gleaming bald head. After all, Micawber and Kramer both share a kind of holy fool’s optimism in the face of adversity and ill-fated schemes. Unfortunately, the performance is fatally marred by Richards’ godawful elocutionary attempt at a stentorian British accent.

Sally Field has excelled in no-nonsense film roles (Norma Rae, Places in the Heart, Not Without My Daughter) that embody bedrock American values like self-reliance and plucky resolve. She effectively transposes these qualities to the character of Betsey Trotwood, Copperfield’s stern aunt and eventual benefactor. But Field seems to lack a peculiarly British strain of loopy eccentricity that the role demands. When called upon to perform Betsey Trotwood’s signature behavior of chasing donkeys from her lawn (to the battle cry of “Don-keysss! Don-keysss!”), the actress is shrill and humorless rather than endearingly nutty.  Aside from Richards and Field (both of whom take up less screen time than their star-billing would suggest), David Copperfield is admirably populated with a competent British cast. Actor Frank McCusker, virtually unknown in the States, is exceptional as Copperfield’s unctuous nemesis, Uriah Heep. It’s also great fun to see a seasoned performer like Alec McCowen (Frenzy, Travels With My Aunt) shine in the brief but beautifully etched role of Mr. Jorkins, a harried and supercilious investment lawyer.

Filmed on location in Ireland, the production has the requisite look and feel of nineteenth century England (which apparently isn’t as easy to recreate in modern-day England) replete with Georgian architecture, crumbling labyrinthine apartments, quaint shops, and ominous factories. As is to be expected, several of the subplots are either short-changed or jettisoned altogether. Uriah Heep’s story line holds up better than some of the others, although his crime is inexplicably altered from the novel’s bookkeeping fraud and embezzlement into a simplistic jewelry theft. The dastardly wooing of Copperfield’s childhood sweetheart by his school chum Steerforth (Paul Bettany) is set up in an interesting fashion, but then unceremoniously dropped from the script without a satisfying conclusion. To be fair, no adaptation of this length can adequately address the richness of the convoluted and interlocking narratives. For viewers who find the yuletide season incomplete without a dose of Dickens, TNT’s David Copperfield is a diverting alternative to the competing versions of A Christmas Carol that fill the television schedules.

The 1954 motion picture Salt of the Earth, based on the true story of a New Mexico zinc miners’ strike, can easily be rented or purchased today on video and DVD. However, if you were among the two thousand moviegoers on May 28, 1954 who bought a ticket to see the film at Chicago’s Cinema Annex theater, you would have been out of luck. The projectionist never showed up. After turning away frustrated ticket-holders for three days, the theater finally cancelled the booking. In fact, there wasn’t a theater or projectionist anywhere in Chicago—or Detroit or dozens of other American cities—that would touch Salt of the Earth. This extraordinary turn of events is the subject of James J. Lorence’s prodigiously researched book, The Suppression of Salt of the Earth, published last year by the University of New Mexico Press. The book’s thesis is spelled out in its muckraking subtitle: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America.

Salt of the Earth was the inaugural film project of the Independent Productions Corporation (IPC), formed in 1951 by a small group of Hollywood Communists who were convinced they could circumvent the industry’s blacklist by working outside of the studio system. The film’s director, Herbert Biberman, had spent six months in prison as one of the Hollywood Ten who declined to give testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Biberman and his blacklisted IPC partners—Paul Jerrico, Michael Wilson, and Adrian Scott—had all been members at one time or another of the Communist Party and were steadfast believers in the inseparability of art and ideology. The Salt project was born when the filmmakers were told of a strike by Mexican-American mine workers against the Empire Zinc Corporation in Bayard, New Mexico. The issues at stake included racist “dual wage rates” that allotted higher pay to Anglo workers over Mexican-Americans, and Empire Zinc’s “policy of hiring only Mexican-Americans for underground work.” The film was scripted and shot on location in Bayard within months of the strike’s settlement. Workers and wives who had walked the picket lines took prominent roles in the movie and helped to shape Michael Wilson’s screenplay.

The strikers were members of Local 890 of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers (also known simply as Mine-Mill), an organization victimized by the same anticommunist purges underway in Hollywood. Mine-Mill was booted from the CIO in 1950 because of alleged Communist activity. As Lorence makes clear in The Suppression of Salt of the Earth, Red-baiting was a notoriously effective means of union-busting during the Cold War. Undoubtedly there were Communists in Local 890, as well as assorted leftists and radicals of varying degrees. But in Lorence’s view, there was no evidence that union leaders or rank-and-file members were beholden to Communist Party principles at the expense of legitimate bread-and-butter grievances. The same must be said of the filmmakers as well. Lorence is at pains to make this point because Salt of the Earth has been assailed over the years from both the left and the right as hardcore Communist propaganda. (The film’s $250,000 budget was bankrolled by Los Angeles theater-owner Simon M. Lazarus, an outspoken left-wing activist with no ties to the Communist Party. The FBI struggled mightily to uncover a financial link, but none was ever established.)

Given the witch-hunting hysteria of the 1950s, it’s hardly surprising that the film ran into serious trouble from its inception. Even before the cameras began to roll in Bayard, the Hollywood Reporter proclaimed that a “commie” film was being shot in New Mexico under “direct orders from the Kremlin.” California Republican congressman Donald Jackson was soon denouncing Salt of the Earth from the floor of the House of Representatives, promising to do all he could “to prevent the showing of this Communist-made film in the theaters of America.” The darkest force inveighed against the film was the enormous power of the Hollywood blacklist, particularly Roy Brewer of the International Alliance of Theatrical Employees. Brewer made it virtually impossible for the filmmakers to hire Hollywood union crews (unless, like editor Barton Hayes, they also happened to be FBI informants). Laboratories refused to process the film once it was shot, thus delaying postproduction work for months. Perhaps the saddest indignity heaped upon the filmmakers was the deportation of Rosaura Revueltas, the Mexican actress who plays the movie’s central character of Esperanza. Her visa was revoked and she wasn’t allowed back in the States to promote the film during its ill-fated marketing campaign.

The McCarthy era has been subject in recent years to renewed controversy and academic interest. Lorence—a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin—doesn’t shy away from pinpointing the major fault line: “Because of the contentious contemporary debate over Communist influence in left-wing unions, rational evaluation and historical generalization have often been difficult.” To his credit, he explores this problem with a thorough grasp of its complexities. While his sympathies clearly lie with Local 890 and the filmmakers, Lorence’s own conflicted leftism wisely restrains him from painting the story in simple black and white terms. His criticisms of the film include “romanticism, naivete, and an incomplete grasp of Chicano/Chicana history,” in addition to a screenplay that “left much to be desired, especially as a documentary record of historical events.” Furthermore, Lorence is unexpectedly tough on director Herbert Biberman, who is portrayed throughout the book as a hapless and deluded idealist, “politically naive,” and “borderline racist” in his dealings with the Mexican-American cast of the film. Prior to his death in 1971, Biberman published a self-serving but nonetheless invaluable 1965 memoir, Salt of the Earth: The Story of a Film.

Salt of the Earth never received the wide release its makers had hoped for, but it did manage to play briefly in New York and San Francisco to enthusiastic crowds and generally warm reviews. (Its harshest detractor was Pauline Kael, who reviewed the film for Sight and Sound in 1954 and labeled it “as clear a piece of Communist propaganda as we have had in many years.”) There were successful screenings in Toronto and Mexico City. In France, it won the 1955 International Grand Prize from the Académie du Cinema de Paris. During the 1960s and 70s, Salt of the Earth was rediscovered and embraced by America’s New Left and became a staple of labor rallies, campus film clubs, and art houses. More recently, it has been the basis for an opera, Esperanza, which premiered in Madison, Wisconsin in August, 2000. The concluding words of James J. Lorence’s fascinating book are an eloquent summation of the film’s legacy: “For all the vicissitudes of its troubled history, Salt of the Earth remains a fragile celluloid monument to [the] culture of resistance.”

This wildly original adaptation of Oliver Twist will likely disappoint Dickensian purists. Adventurous and open-minded viewers, on the other hand, should find it riveting. Screenwriter (and co-executive producer) Alan Bleasdale has invented a backstory that runs parallel to Dickens’ narrative and elevates minor characters to leading roles. Inspired by the sketchy account of Oliver’s origins that Dickens shoehorned into two brief chapters toward the end of the novel, Bleasdale has constructed an elaborate two-hour prologue. Moreover, when the familiar Oliver Twist plot takes hold in the second installment of this six-hour Masterpiece Theatre presentation, the backstory is kept alive by combining the screenwriter’s newly fleshed-out characters with Dickens’ central story line. Subplots are reconfigured and the novel’s more preposterous coincidences are sharpened into a larger conspiratorial design. Motivations that Dickens left murky or unstated are given a richer context and significance. The revisions are audacious, to say the least, but they don’t undermine Dickens. Indeed, Bleasdale seems to have a preternatural intimacy with every detail of the book.

Charles Dickens was twenty-six years old when Oliver Twist—his second novel—was published in 1838. Its breathless plot owes much to the conventions of stage melodrama and magazine serialization, qualities which Dickens’ later work transcended with greater dexterity. The memorable characters include the pompous and farcical Mr. Bumble, the malevolent Bill Sikes, and the complex (and glaringly anti-Semitic) Fagin “the Jew” and his gang of young gin-swilling pickpockets. Although the melodrama is creaky, the novel’s imagery is forceful and often larded with shocking realism. Bill Sikes’ bludgeoning of the prostitute Nancy is one of the most brutal scenes in Victorian literature. There is also a startling immediacy to Dickens’ depiction of filthy London slums festering with poverty and disease and a desperate criminal underclass. (The vividly rendered atmosphere influenced Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.) The novel was in part an attack on the New Poor Law of 1834 that consigned the homeless and destitute to the squalid drudgery of workhouses. Oliver Twist’s forlorn mother has arrived at one of these workhouses to give birth to Oliver in the opening chapter.

Alan Bleasdale’s screenplay also begins with Oliver’s birth, but the scene dissolves to a flashback of the doomed love affair between Oliver’s unwed middle class parents, Agnes Fleming (Sarah Miles) and Edwin Leeford (Tim Dutton). Edwin is a good-hearted but weak-willed philanderer unhappily married to another woman, and Agnes is the teenage daughter of Edwin’s good friend, the flinty sea-captain Mr. Fleming (Alun Armstrong). Once Agnes becomes pregnant, Edwin is neither legally in a position to marry her nor courageous enough to face her stern father. The promise of a large inheritance from a dying uncle in Rome sends Edwin packing for Italy with hopes of using the money to free himself from his first marriage. He arrives in Rome just in time to witness his uncle’s spluttering demise in the shallow pool of a public bathhouse. It’s a grotesquely amusing scene that wouldn’t be out of place in a film by Peter Greenaway or Fellini. The embittered and cancer-ridden uncle has a baseball-size tumor growing out of his neck and dangling in a sack of skin like a monstrous testicle (as if mocking Edwin’s sexual indiscretion with Agnes).  None of these details are to be found in Dickens, of course. The inheritance plot that unspools late in the novel is little more than the kind of conventional third-act denouement that was well-worn even in 1838. (Dickens amazingly cranked out the last six chapters of Oliver Twist in three weeks while simultaneously working on installments of Nicholas Nickleby.)

The novel’s shadowy villain is Oliver’s half-brother, Edward Leeford, a.k.a. “Monks,” the son from Edwin Leeford’s past marriage. He’s largely off-stage until the end of the book, at which point he reveals the mystery of Oliver’s parentage and rightful inheritance. In Bleasdale’s version, Monks—played with gleeful relish by actor Marc Warren—has a meatier role as a sickly mama’s boy plagued by epileptic seizures, savage rages, and a titanic Oedipal complex. With his ghostly pallor and oily black hair, he’s an Edward Gorey drawing come to life. The seizures are in fact alluded to in Dickens’ text, when we’re told in passing that Monks “has desperate fits, and sometimes even bites his hands.” Monks’ mother, Elizabeth Leeford (Lindsay Duncan)—mentioned only fleetingly during the novel’s wrap-up—has taken the biggest leap of all to become the production’s Lady Macbeth, a murderous harpy responsible for the pivotal machinations of the plot. It’s a daring and outrageous departure from Dickens. Lindsay Duncan gives a bone-chilling performance, whether plunging a letter opener into an adversary’s stomach or ridiculing her son by mimicking his epilepsy.

Robert Lindsay

Film versions over the years have had to grapple in one fashion or another with the portrayal of Fagin, who is both a fascinating character and a racist stereotype. The novel draws an unmistakable correlation between “Jew” and “vile and repulsive.” David Lean’s 1948 film was censored in the U.S. because Alec Guinness’ sinister performance as Fagin was deemed anti-Semitic (viewed today, the actor’s exaggerated hook-nosed make-up still seems remarkably offensive, the equivalent of a blackface routine). Ron Moody reduced Fagin to a non-threatening bug-eyed clown in Oliver!, the Oscar-winning 1968 musical. Not surprisingly, the character has been overhauled in the new PBS adaptation. In keeping with the book’s larger theme of confronting our origins, the screenplay provides Fagin with an elegiac past that he mourns. Thus, we now have an Eastern European Fagin, formerly of Prague, where he had a career as a stage magician. Robert Lindsay brings an intriguing air of debauched mysticism and sideshow sleaziness to the role. Fagin’s clothing consists of remnants from his exotic theatrical robes. If drunk or bored, he’s given to barroom card tricks or the conjuring of doves from beneath a greasy cape.

The production isn’t without flaws. The role of Oliver Twist—which admittedly is a flattened symbolic character to begin with—barely registers, played with angelic passivity by child actor Sam Smith. The Artful Dodger (Alex Crowley) has lost his colorful braggadocio and appears to have fallen victim to the reshuffling of major and minor roles. There are a few ragged transitions and some awkward cross-cutting that may not be the fault of the script or Renny Rye’s competent direction. Oliver Twist ran two hours longer in Britain and has been cut from eight hours down to six for U.S. television. That’s a shame. By any measure, Alan Bleasdale’s screenplay is an impressive achievement. The complete eight-hour drama deserves to be shown uncut on both sides of the Atlantic.

Beth Kephart has chosen an elusive theme for Into the Tangle of Friendship. “The more we let others into our lives,” she writes, “the safer we become and also the more endangered.” Her prose style, like the subject of her memoir, is a risky alliance of counterpoised harmonies, a tripartite melding of poet, essayist, and storyteller. The narrative unfolds through an accumulation of graceful meditations and vignettes. Time frames are shuffled and then examined for underlying metaphoric patterns. High school memories are recalled, as well as literary struggles, her marriage to a Salvadoran architect and artist, her unusual and sometimes prickly relationships with neighbors and coworkers, and her challenges as a parent. The recounting is more impressionistic than the author’s highly praised 1998 memoir, A Slant of Sun, a finalist for the National Book Award. The earlier book chronicled her son Jeremy’s pervasive developmental disorder (PDD), which was diagnosed at age two and sent Kephart’s life into an agonizing tailspin.

Jeremy was a miraculously normalized seven-year-old in the final pages of A Slant of Sun. In the new book, he’s nine years old and Kephart makes no overt mention of any lingering developmental difficulties (which may confound some admirers of the previous work who are looking for a diagnostic update). Her concerns for her son are now blessedly universal in scope:

How do parents help their children get ready for friends who are not, in some manner, just like themselves?… I don’t know all the answers; no one does. But for now I use stories when I can find them. Stories from life, stories from books, stories that matter. I ask Jeremy himself to fashion stories about unexpected friendships. I encourage the communion of unlikely souls…

Storytelling is perceived as a redemptive force throughout Into the Tangle of Friendship. There are stories within stories, sometimes comprised of accounts from friends and family. Her husband Bill tells a riotous tale of the dress-up games played by his grandmother and her female companions in El Salvador; Jeremy and his best buddy James weave a fanciful ghost story about the pilot light flickering inside the basement furnace; Kephart’s friend Andrée writes of her husband’s final days in the cancer ward of a Korean hospital. Like a Scheherazade of the suburbs, Beth Kephart tells stories to save her life—and all of our lives—by bestowing a fragile nobility upon human connectedness. One doesn’t have to read too far between the lines to surmise that her reverence for language and social interaction stems in part from having witnessed her son’s retreat into a near-autistic silence and withdrawal from the world.

Into the Tangle of Friendship stands on its own, but it achieves a deeper resonance when seen as a response to some of the issues raised in A Slant of Sun.  Kephart was hard on herself in the earlier book, both as a writer and as a parent. Prior to the diagnosis of PDD, she wondered if Jeremy’s “deviations” from the norm weren’t in some fashion the result of being “the offspring of artists.” She felt shame when confessing that she and her husband were “not really people people, if you know what I mean.” A Slant of Sun never fully resolved this ambivalence toward the solitude of artistic creation and its seeming denial of fellowship. By focusing on storytelling as a foundation for intimacy, Into the Tangle of Friendship succeeds in reconciling the paradox between solipsism and community. It’s clear that stories assist Jeremy in engaging with other people and with his environment. Moreover, we come to recognize that Kephart’s literary life flourishes in a shared culture of friends and readers.

Seen in this light, her latest book is a revealing portrait of a writer’s emerging faith in the grandeur of her profession. She invokes the work of authors—Elias Canetti, William Maxwell, M.F.K. Fisher, Capote and Hemingway—whom she admires for their craft and the themes addressed in their work. When she talks about the courtship of her future husband Bill, the rituals don’t revolve around dinner dates and moviegoing, but rather pursuing their artistic passions—her writing and his painting—late at night together in his apartment. “We gave each other silence,” she tells us. “Hours would go by, and there we would be, taking our light from separate splinters of the moon, I with a pen, he with a paintbrush, the sounds of the city through the window.” Charting her development as a writer, Kephart describes a six-year period during which she and her next door neighbor Andrée forged a two-party literary salon via their front porch mailboxes. Poems and stories and critiques crisscrossed their lawns on a regular basis:

Back and forth, back and forth, the ground rules somehow establishing themselves, the notes couriered, always, in the dark, down the sidewalk, up the steps, across the porch floorboards, on very quiet shoes… This is what I needed more than my sleep, which I began, in increments, to sacrifice…

The dance of “back and forth” is an apt metaphor for the comingling of the mind’s creative energy and the world’s validating embrace. Kephart’s “tangle” in the title of her book ultimately suggests both the intertwining of camaraderie and the threaded lifeline of literary striving that extends outward from her authorial vision. “If you think friendship is an organ of convenience,” she warns us, “think again: it takes its toll.” The toll, in this instance, is the burnished purity of her rich and satisfying memoir.

An unjustly neglected figure in American political history, Henry A. Wallace (1888-1965) is usually remembered—if at all—in vague terms as a hapless footnote to the 1948 national election between President Harry S. Truman and Thomas E. Dewey. As the presidential candidate of the Progressive Party, Wallace was vilified as a third-party spoiler and a Communist dupe, charges that hung in the air for decades and contributed to his marginalized legacy. Two events during the 2000 election year conspired to restore Iowa native Henry Wallace to a degree of prominence. When Ralph Nader’s Green Party candidacy briefly flickered to life with press coverage and polling momentum, statistically-minded journalists were quick to inform us that Nader had mounted the first significant left-wing third-party presidential bid since Wallace’s 1948 campaign. (Nader would ironically come to be maligned in a manner sadly similar to the treatment afforded Wallace, and both men ended up capturing near-identical electoral percentages; 2.4 percent for Wallace; and 2.7 percent for Nader.) But the milestone that truly marked 2000 as the “Year of Henry Wallace” was the triumphant publication of John C. Culver and John Hyde’s majestic biography, American Dreamer: A Life of Henry A. Wallace.

Ten years in the writing, American Dreamer recounts in vivid detail the full breadth of Wallace’s accomplishments, particularly his key role as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s crusading Secretary of Agriculture (1933-40) during the depths of the Depression. He later also served one term as Roosevelt’s vice president, and briefly as secretary of commerce. The phrase “reinventing government” has become an empty slogan in recent times, but FDR’s New Deal was a breathtaking experiment in social democratic reform. Although it’s generally accepted today that the New Deal’s achievements were modest (the Second World War, not the New Deal, was the spark that rekindled the economy), the first two years of FDR’s initial term in office were unprecedented in the scope of legislative remedies sought and enacted.

Henry Wallace’s activist leadership of the Department of Agriculture, according to authors Culver and Hyde, “broke new ground on every front—economic, social, scientific—and permanently changed the relationship between government and agriculture…” Wallace brought soil conservation and erosion control to the forefront, as well as initiating crop insurance programs, land-use planning, and credit assistance to sharecroppers. His concept of the “ever-normal granary” was instrumental in building the nation’s stockpile of grain reserves. American Dreamer is rich with fascinating facts:

Under Wallace the department’s research center… became the largest and most varied scientific agricultural station in the world… The department’s scientists combated plant and animal diseases and pests, from grasshoppers and chinch bugs to brucellosis and Dutch elm disease… Over fifty varieties of wheat were developed at the department during the 1930s. Thatcher wheat, which didn’t exist when Wallace came into office, was growing on 14.5 million acres in the United States and Canada when he left.

An endlessly curious part-time scientist himself, Wallace was one of the inventors of hybrid seed corn. In 1926 he founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company, which later became Pioneer Hi-Bred and made Wallace’s wife and heirs enormously wealthy after his death (the company was purchased by Du Pont in the 1990s for nearly ten billion dollars).

American Dreamer wouldn’t qualify as a state-of-the-art political biography without a scandal or character flaw to exploit, and the authors have happily complied. Wallace’s “dark side,” however, was endearingly kooky. A lifelong fascination with mysticism and the occult appears to have made him an easy mark for charlatans, among them a faux-Indian medicine man and opera composer named Charles Roos, who was given to addressing Wallace as “Poo-Yaw” and “Chief Cornplanter.” Wallace considered Roos a soul-mate. In the 1930s the two men purchased a tract of land together near Taylor Falls, Minnesota intended for spiritual retreats where they could, in Wallace’s words, “find the religious key note of the new age.” More politically damaging was his friendship and correspondence with an expatriate Russian artist and “guru”—complete with bald head and Fu Manchu mustache—named Nicholas Roerich. Wallace eventually gave Roerich a Department of Agriculture expense account and sent him on a $75,000 expedition to Central Asia in search of drought resistant grasses. The raucous story of Roerich’s fleecing of Wallace and the U.S. Government is straight out of a Preston Sturges comedy and is one of the many highlights of American Dreamer. Regrettably for Wallace, a cache of the nutty letters he penned to Roerich was made public and unquestionably tarnished his reputation. Critic Dwight Macdonald famously dismissed Wallace as a “corn-fed mystic” during the 1948 presidential campaign.

Wallace’s Progressive Party run for the presidency was plagued by mishaps and blunders (not to mention the familiar criticism that Progressives were destroying the Democratic Party and helping to elect a reactionary Republican). But there were heroics, too. On his campaign tour of the American South, Wallace became the first presidential candidate to refuse speaking engagements before segregated crowds; nor would he stay in segregated hotels or eat in segregated restaurants. Threats of violence forced some of his speeches to be canceled. One of Wallace’s supporters was stabbed. Only once did his public composure give way to anger: after being pelted yet again with eggs during a heated demonstration in Burlington, North Carolina, Wallace grabbed a bystander and shouted at him, “Are you an American? Am I in America?” Thanks to this impressive and indispensable biography, Henry Wallace’s remarkable life is at last securely woven into the fabric of our history.

For weeks prior to the show’s opening, the city of Madison was abuzz with anticipation about Esperanza, a professionally mounted opera that had its world premiere August 25th at Old Music Hall on the University of Wisconsin campus. An opera premiere is unusual enough for Madison, but Esperanza has also attracted a unique level of interest across several generations of the city’s left-wing political spectrum. The opera is based on the controversial 1954 film Salt of the Earth, the true story of a New Mexico zinc miners’ strike told from the perspective of the Mexican-American mine workers and their wives. The movie has gained legendary status over the years because it was made outside of the Hollywood studio system by blacklisted filmmakers. Carlos Morton’s libretto for Esperanza closely follows the narrative of Salt of the Earth and creates musical settings for portions of dialogue from Michael Wilson’s screenplay.

Playing to sold-out crowds and standing ovations, Esperanza is unquestionably a hit with Madisonians. Whether this will translate to success in other cities remains to be seen. The Madison cast is headed by two nationally recognized and appealing singers, soprano Theresa Santiago in the role of Esperanza, and baritone William Alvarado as Esperanza’s mining husband, Ramón. Also deserving of praise is Jeffrey Picon, a tenor with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, who plays Ramón’s earnest friend, Vicente. As a rule, secondary roles in regional productions are not strongly cast, and Esperanza for the most part is no exception. A more serious disappointment is the sight of Anglo performers playing characters meant to be of Hispanic heritage (which is the case, unfortunately, with the otherwise exceptional Jeffrey Picon).

New York composer David Bishop’s beguiling score is the best argument in support of the opera’s future prospects. Uncluttered and melodic, its blend of bedrock Americana and Mexican folk music recalls the work of Aaron Copland. There are echoes of Leonard Bernstein in the score’s playfulness and wit. Arias and duets, even when sentimental, never sink to the maudlin, and the rousing choruses never rise to bombast.

Among many highlights is the enchanting duet between Esperanza and Ramón in scene three of the first act, when they sing to their soon-to-be-born son, “We wait for you, we welcome you, we live for you.” William Alvarado is given a luminous climactic aria in the final scene when Ramón feels remorse after an argument with Esperanza and he sings movingly of “something she said, something she said to me.” The orchestra performs competently under conductor and artistic director Karlos Moser, an emeritus professor of music with the University of Wisconsin. Moser, along with Kathleen McElroy, originated the project and raised the funds to stage Esperanza from more than 500 individuals, labor organizations, and state arts councils.

The opera is not without humor, most of which derives from gender-role reversals. A court injunction prevents the miners from picketing, so their wives take over the picket line while the men stay home with the laundry and the children. After a taste of washing clothes, the miners come to appreciate why their wives wanted hot water added to the list of strikers’ demands. Ramón—dressed in an apron several sizes too small—sings a show-stopping duet with Vicente in praise of “hot running water.” Though it must be said the production on occasion strains too hard for laughs. Stage director Norma Saldivar has engineered some unfortunate slapstick during a confrontation between the picketing women and two sheriff’s deputies that seems altogether out of place in the show.

Scenic designer Joe Varga has created a multi-level clapboard set with an overhanging backdrop of blue New Mexico desert sky and a blazing sun (which doubles as a lustrous moon for nighttime scenes). With a minor adjustment of props by cast members, sections of the stage are effectively transformed into a union hall, a barroom, a mine shaft entrance, or Esperanza’s kitchen.

With the stain of Red-baiting long since vanquished, the themes expressed by Salt of the Earth and Esperanza seem remarkably innocent today: racial and gender equality, workers’ solidarity, and corporate accountability. However, this is a story that succeeds on the strength of its innocence and idealism. The strike has mythic overtones because the miners and their wives experienced their struggle in mythic terms. Esperanza has reached back across the decades and reclaimed a measure of dignity for an honorable motion picture that was sucker-punched by McCarthyism.