Home Address

Andrew Pyper has come to be known for his thriller novels.  His first book, though, was a collection of short stories.  Kiss Me concerns youth, especially the passage to thirty.  The narrator of "If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now" is on the younger side of the collection's age-span, being in his late teens.

II.

The narrator's new stepmother, Beth, is a woman of strong religious views.  Her husband has joined her in belief, and father and stepmother together have sought to persuade the narrator.  "For a time they tried to get me, too, but I closed my ears, smiled, nodded, and recited Smiths lyrics in my head." <1>  

The narrator lives in a rural Ontario town, "where 'town' is used to describe a collection of streets radiating out from the perpendicular meeting of two dead-straight, two-lane highways."  Toronto is to the east, and we aren't particularly surprised when the narrator jumps on a bus one day, and goes "AWOL" to the city.  Arrived, he sets about looking for a place to stay.

He finds The Project.  The house is on Beverley&Queen streets, and often serves as a hangout for "messed-up people", who also might answer to being musicians, artists, filmmakers, or actors.  When asked which of those groups he belongs to, the narrator decides on a "well-told" lie, that he's a writer.  Thus far in the story, the narrator has gone unnamed.  Passing himself off as a writer in the Project earns him a nickname.  Hemingway.

Hemingway attends a Project party one night, where he notices a young woman.  He approaches her.  In an effort to be interesting in a writerly way, Hemingway riffs on the existential implications of feeling like a piece of dust.  "She looked at me with her mouth partly open...and the sweetness was gone. 'Is that the best you can do?' she said."

III.

There is understated comedy in "If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now".  The humour bears reflection, whether something else is being suggested as well.  The sadness that might come with issues of belonging and identity.
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<1>Pyper, Andrew. "If You Lived Here You'd Be Home By Now". Kiss Me. The Porcupine's Quill, 1996.

Class Reunion at Evanston

Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004) has acquired a cult status in the years since I first saw it.  Came the news, now, that the movie was being produced as a stage musical.  It's set to premiere at the end of this month, and features book by the movie's original screenwriter, Tina Fey.  Time for another look at the film, maybe?

II.

The first impression is that I quickly recalled liking Mean Girls back then, too.  Here again is Lindsay Lohan the teen, playing the teen Cady Heron.  Cady has been away in Africa with her parents, her education having been homeschooled.  The Heron return to America means that Cady will now be attending a public high school in Evanston, Illinois.

At the school, Cady meets Regina George (Rachel McAdams) of the clique The Plastics.  Regina is Queen Plastic of the group, which also includes Gretchen Wieners (Lacey Chabert), and Karen Smith (Amanda Seyfried). The Plastics' activities include marching about snootily, spreading petty and malicious gossip about other (mostly female) students, all to maintain the image of being the prettiest, the most popular and envied, at their high school.

Janis (Lizzy Caplan) and Damian (Daniel Franzese) are not of the popular crowd.  They earlier made a point of warning Cady about the Plastics.  But when Janis notices Regina being friendly with Cady, she sees an opportunity to use Cady as a willing mole, in carrying out mischief against the Queen.

Will the operation to topple Regina be successful?  Can Cady pretend to be cosy with the Plastics without becoming as superficial and mean as Regina?  Just how does a particular "Burn Book" of assorted gossip and insults figure in all this?  

III.

Tina Fey's screenplay is attentive to the sights and sounds of a period high school.  Parents and teachers are shown amused and bemused, or plain made amusing, by teenhood.  The emerging detail will have developed a nostalgic patina for some viewers. Others - not.

When there are lapses in the comedy, Mark Waters' direction suggests a natural pause, just before the delivery of another deft punchline. The cast acting is sharp and agile.  Certainly in the case of Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams, Mean Girls remains among their best performances.

Forever Overhead

The premise of the story is thin.  On the day of his thirteenth birthday in late summer, a boy dares himself to jump from a high-dive tower, at a public pool in Tucson, Arizona.  David Foster Wallace brilliantly turns that lean scenario into something of a meditation, in "Forever Overhead".  A meditation on, well, let's have a look at the story.

II.

The public pool has a "strong clear blue smell...a bleached sweet salt, a flower with chemical petals", Wallace tells us, that "connects with a chemical haze inside you, an interior dimness that bends light to its own ends, softens the difference between what leaves off and what begins." <1>  We are being directed to measure connection and disconnection, passing and becoming: leaving off and beginning. 

Indeed, to the near distance are mountains, "darkening into definition against a deep red tired light...their sharp connected tops form a spiked line", a line strikingly evoked by Wallace as an "EKG of the dying day."  The boy makes his way over to the diving tower.  "Each of your footprints is thinner and fainter. Each shrinks behind you on the hot stone and disappears."  

At the top of the tower, the boy is now second in line to dive.  He observes the progress of the woman in front of him.  "In no time she's at the end of the board, up, down on it, it bends low like it doesn't want her."  But gravity does, as earlier with the boy, climbing the tower.  "You have real weight on the ladder. The ground wants you back."

III.

Up above, over the pool, will the boy jump into the water below?  Wallace remarks in the story that the "lie is that it's one or the other."  Both, and neither.
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<1>Wallace, David Foster. "Forever Overhead". Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. Back Bay Books, 2000.

Family Business

The emergence of Liam Neeson as an action star has been a sensational turn at the movies.  It really began with Taken (Pierre Morel, 2008).  In a taut thriller, Neeson dealt the required beatdown, and then some.  But Neeson also brought a distinctive gravitas to his role, of retired CIA agent Bryan Mills.

II.

Run All Night (Jaume Collet-Serra, 2015) has Neeson playing former criminal enforcer Jimmy "The Gravedigger" Conlon.  He now spends the days trying to forget his violent past, through the eraser of alcohol.  His son Mike is played by Joel Kinnaman, who fans of The Killing will recognize as Stephen Holder from the TV series.

A depth of quiet pain is suggested between father and son.  Mike is unable to forgive Jimmy, for abandoning Mike's mother and him in his youth.  Nor can Mike accept Jimmy as the foul drunk he has now become.  Mike has cut his father out of his life, keeping Jimmy away also from his granddaughters, Lily and Catelyn.

Jimmy's employer from his criminal past, Shawn Maguire (Ed Harris) has a son as well, Danny (Boyd Holbrook).  As opposed to Mike, Danny is anxious to impress his father with his own criminal skills.  It happens that Mike witnesses Danny committing murder, during one of his shady schemes. 

Danny sets out to silence Mike permanently.  He is a moment from pulling the trigger on Mike, when he himself is shot dead by a vigilant observer.  Jimmy Conlon.

III.

Shawn Maguire vows revenge on Jimmy, and he means to take Mike's life in return.  The Conlons, father and son, must run for their lives as night falls on the city.  Run All Night is enhanced by its excellent lead performances, and of course, the compelling work of Liam Neeson.

Words & Practice

Emily Vanderpool has a precocious ability with insults.  She has occasionally even surprised herself "when this irrevocable slander, this terrible, talented invective, came boiling out of my mouth."<1> She also throws a type of tantrum that leaves her breathless and turning blue; Emily has learned that the resulting parental distress is useful in getting her way.  What a character!

II.

"Bad Characters" by Jean Stafford sets off with Emily at the age of eleven, suddenly dishing out some cheer to her friend Virgil Meade.  "I called him a son of a sea cook, said it was common knowledge that his mother had bedbugs and that his father...was a bootlegger on the side."  Virgil retaliates by throwing Emily to the ground, and scrubbing her face with the seasonal snow.  Emily also pays a larger price for her sharp words.  "Because I had already alienated everyone I knew...I would have no companion but Muff, the cat, who loathed all human beings except, significantly, me".

No companion, until Emily meets Lottie Jump.  Lottie's family has come to live in Adams, Colorado from Muskogee, Oklahoma. Lottie herself has come into Emily's house to steal a chocolate cake. Since Emily has caught her in the act, Lottie is forced to explain her presence in the Vanderpool kitchen.  "'I came to see if you'd like to play with me,' she said. I think she sighed and stole a sidelong and regretful glance at the cake."

So begins Emily's association with a thief.  Lottie offers to school Emily in the practice of recreational shoplifting.  "I was thrilled to death and shocked to pieces. 'Stealing is a sin,' I said. 'Ish ka bibble! I should worry if it's a sin or not,' said Lottie with a shrug."

III.

Lottie's shoplifting is eventually foiled by Emily's spoken expressiveness, the details of which I won't reveal.  I can affirm however that justice is conveyed, in this mischievous and superb tale.
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<1>Stafford, Jean. "Bad Characters". The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford. University of Texas Press, 1993.

Til We Meet Again

When our most significant relationships fail or end, we revisit the accumulated details of a shared life.  Such is our second acquaintance, as a measure of loss.

II.

The marriage of Richard and Joan Maples, in John Updike's "Separating", has been failing for some time.  Updike speaks of that failure when he alludes to Richard having an affair.  The moment has come to inform the Maples children, that their parents have decided on a formal separation.  "All spring he had been morbidly conscious of insides and outsides, of barriers and partitions. He and Joan stood as a thin barrier between the children and the truth." <1> 

Joan decides that their four children should hear the news separately, as individuals.  Note the associations to splitting, cutting - separating.  "Her plan turned one hurdle for him into four--four knife-sharp walls".  Poor Richard.  Updike will later have him dismantle a lobster at a family meal.  "Tears dropped from his nose as he broke the lobster's back". 

When the news is revealed to them, the daughters Judith and Margaret have a muted reaction.  It's their son, John, that speaks up.  "'Why didn't you tell us?' he asked, in a large round voice quite unlike his own. 'You should have told us you weren't getting along.'"  But Updike also observes Richard and Joan's realization, that "the child was drunk, on Judith's homecoming champagne."

There remains the other son, Richard Jr.  His immediate response to the separation is subdued.  Later, he has a question for Richard. "In his father's ear he moaned one word, the crucial, intelligent word: 'Why?'. Why. It was a whistle of wind in a crack, a knife thrust, a window thrown open on emptiness."

III.

The possibility of separation details the things, the routines, the emotions at their permeable joints, in the Maples marriage and family.  There is much elegance in John Updike's prose, as he relates "Separating" with irony comic, and melancholy.
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<1>Updike, John. "Separating". The Norton Anthology of American Literature. W.W. Norton & Company, 1986. 

Now & Forever

High school sweethearts Celeste and Jesse married young.  The marriage didn't last, and as Celeste and Jesse Forever (Lee Toland Krieger, 2012) opens, the couple has filed for divorce.  We could reasonably infer that a few years of marriage might have a maturing effect on a couple.

To judge by their go-to gratification gag, not so much. But then, this romantic comedy makes a point of carrying on without judgement. Celeste and Jesse's failings are shown without underscoring, thus lending intrigue to that very smooth hum of the screen story. 

II.

Before they married, Celeste (Rashida Jones) and Jesse (Andy Samberg) were good friends.  Jones and Samberg do fine work in portraying the easygoing warmth of the couple's friendship.  In this respect, their decision to divorce doesn't seem so much the end of something, but more a reversion, to the couple's original friends-only status.

Celeste is an ambitious partner in a media company.  Jesse is an unemployed artist, who projects the ambition of, well, continued slacking.  With her focus on control, it was Celeste who took the initiative, and dumped Jesse, ending their marriage.

Celeste and Jesse begin to date other people with mixed results, all the while annoying their mutual friends with their ambiguous behaviour.  It comes as little surprise that such ambivalence leads C.J back into each other's arms.  Of little surprise too is that the return to romance doesn't last. 
  
III.

Celeste and Jesse certainly have their flaws, and Krieger's film allows them to flail about, trying to find their way.  An entertaining and funny film, Celeste and Jesse Forever may well leave you figuring how it went about its comedy.

The Light Of Being

From whose bourn no traveller returns
Hamlet. 3, i.

An especially cruel blow, the second.  Already there were the grievous losses from a continuing world war.  And now in 1918, this deadly influenza pandemic.  What would be the cumulative effect on a suffering and fearful world?  What might be the effect on the soul, in particular of a sensitive and thoughtful person?

II.

Katherine Anne Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" begins with a young woman, Miranda, dreaming about running from Death. "His pale face smiled in an evil trance, he did not glance at her." <1>

The dream ends.  Awake, the facts and tropes of death restate and persist. 

In explaining how Miranda feels about people sitting on her office desk, Porter describes their eyes "roving"; how Miranda's thoughts "roved hazily"; and much later, that Miranda's "memory turned and roved after another place".  To rove is to wander, to drift, to roam. Such a roving may connote the attenuation of something.  Or from.  There are, too, certain Liberty Bond representatives, "cawing back and forth over [Miranda's] head".  Crows are said to caw.  And one type of crow is the carrion.

Miranda's gentleman friend is a young soldier, Adam Barclay.  She attends a play with Adam, where Miranda is beset with a "deep tremor", forcing a resistance to self "as if she were closing windows and doors...against a rising storm."  A specific foreshadowing is to Miranda contracting, and almost dying, from the influenza.

Taken to hospital, Miranda becomes delirious, and falls further and further away from the living.  "[T]o keep her small hold on the life of human beings...between her and the receding world."  As that hold slips, Porter's artistry ascends.  "[A]nd there remained of her only a minute fiercely burning particle of being...this fiery motionless particle set itself unaided to resist destruction".  The passage concludes with a moving assertiveness.  "Trust me, the hard unwinking angry point of light said. Trust me. I stay."

III.

Miranda lives.  Her soul bears the intimations.  Katherine Anne Porter proposes and elaborates most acutely, in the brilliant and haunting "Pale Horse, Pale Rider".
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<1>Porter, Katherine Anne. "Pale Horse, Pale Rider". The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. Jonathan Cape, 1967.