Archives for March 12, 2004

“So far as I know ours is the only language in which it has been found necessary to give a name to the piece of prose which is described as the purple patch; it would not have been necessary to do so unless it were characteristic.”

W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

I’m back from giving that speech in Michigan, and too tired to do much more than give you the inside skinny on my drama column in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, in which I reviewed Craig Lucas’ Small Tragedy, a backstage play about a production of Oedipus Rex, and Charles Mee’s Wintertime, about which the less said, the better.

I loved the Lucas play, though I didn’t expect to:

The good news is that Craig Lucas’ characters never act like puppets on a better writer’s string, nor is “Small Tragedy” a parasitical “commentary” on Sophocles. It is a play with a life of its own about a group of interestingly complicated people with lives of their own, one in which the process of staging a show is simultaneously satirized and illuminated, an exceedingly neat trick. Mr. Lucas likes to teeter on the edge of political correctness and agonizing predictability–one character is HIV-positive, another is a Good European who spends most of the first act condescending to his na

Publishers Weekly has a story about the Sam Tanenhaus appointment, based on interviews with Bill Keller and Bob Loomis (Tanenhaus’ editor at Random House). No link, alas, but here are some quotes:

Tanenhaus, said Keller, displayed particular proficiency at matching reviewer to book–one of the tests apparently had interviewers holding up a work of fiction and asking how the candidate would handle it–and other skills which further “reassured us that this guy was quite impressive and could hold his own against anyone.” He added that Tanenhaus “has a tremendous amount of energy, which in a small operation is a lot of the battle. You have to be able to inspire, and he’s an inspirational presence.”…

Keller also continued to emphasize timeliness and relevance, in both fiction and non-fiction, for TBR. Tanenhaus’ background lies in history, biography and, perhaps most critically, current affairs, expertise the Times thinks could apply to unexpected areas. “I think he can bring a bit of a news sensibility to the reviewing of fiction,” said Keller. “By that I don’t just mean that he’ll get excited by a book that is a new discovery but that the Review will write about fiction in a way that ties into the modern world. People who write fiction don’t live in seclusion from the world.” Tanenhaus himself has a somewhat unexpected background in fiction; in 1984 he wrote Literature Unbound, an incisive survey of Western Lit, despite being just seven years out of college.

Tanenhaus, of course, still has work cut out for him; besides staff, there’s the perennial hobgoblin of space and the pressure to keep the section literary while revamping its dusty reputation. Indeed, if the twin, sometimes incompatible, concerns for the Times in the selection were snap and seriousness, the newspaper seems to feel like it has achieved both with its choice, who has literary cred and magazine buzz, Robert Caro by way of Graydon Carter.

I was just about to praise Household Opera for a major breakthrough in phonetic orthography–Rrrowr!–but then I googled it and came up with 450 hits. Next thing you know, somebody will be writing to tell me it’s actually from Finnegans Wake….

While we’re on the subject, more or less, I have settled on Eeuuww! as my preferred spelling of that now-essential expletive. Any questions?

(I also prefer Fuhgedaboudit, as rendered by Tom Wolfe in The Bonfire of the Vanities, but no standard rendering has yet been universally accepted, alas. These things matter!)

From the Los Angeles Times story about Sam Tanenhaus’ appointment as editor of the New York Times Book Review:

He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1998 for his biography “Whittaker Chambers” (Random House), about a key figure in the Alger Hiss spy trial.

Um, right. And David was a “key figure” in the later career of Goliath. And Die Frau ohne Schatten is an anti-abortion opera.

Memo to the L.A. Times culture desk: get some culture. Fast.