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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for February 7, 2006

OGIC: Modern-day Maturin and cold feet

February 7, 2006 by Terry Teachout

This story makes me really want to see Master and Commander all over again. Which will make my dad invoke the tall stack of O’Brian books he months ago placed so invitingly on the bureau in my room back in Michigan. Could this be the year I finally tackle O’Brian? But what if I fall for him? How will I ever read anything else ever again? That stack positively towers–a commitment must be made. I just don’t know if I’m ready for something quite so long-term…


In any case, don’t miss the slide show.

TT: Almanac

February 7, 2006 by Terry Teachout

“The trouble was that he had set out to write a masterpiece. He had tensed his intellectual muscles and had sweated in his earnestness in order to make each word a jewel, each sentence a concise gem of thought, and the whole a symphony of words; and what was worse, you could tell that he had been thinking of what the critics would say.”


John P. Marquand, Wickford Point

OGIC: Fortune cookie

February 7, 2006 by Terry Teachout

(This cookie dedicated to Tyler Green)


“In an otherwise generous review of my most recent novel, Barney’s Version, that appeared in the London Spectator, Francis King had one caveat. Noting the sharpness of protagonist Barney Panofsky’s intelligence and the breadth of his culture, he doubted that he could also be a sports nut. ‘Would such a man, obsessed with ice hockey, be able to pronounce with such authority on topics as diverse as the descriptive passages in the novels of P.D. James, Pygmalion as play, musical, and film, the pornography published by Maurice Girodias’s Olympia Press and Dr. Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes?–rather strains credulity.'”


Mordecai Richler, “Writers and Sports”

OGIC: Half a book

February 7, 2006 by Terry Teachout

I was in the Baltimore Sun last weekend with a review of Paul Watkins’s novel about English mountaineers in World War II, The Ice Soldier. I found it a starkly divided book, half of it spectacular and half of it pedestrian. All of the best parts took place in the Italian Alps; describing exigent circumstances and this particular landscape seems to bring out the best in Watkins’s writing, and when it is good, it is very, very good:



[Watkins’s] rendering of wartime and combat is moored to reality by a vivid array of tiny but enormously striking material details: the graininess of the chocolate that serves as emergency rations, for instance, or the “rotten-lung gasping” sound that a flare makes when it is exposing one’s position to the enemy. I’ve seldom read a more precise and sensually anchored representation of deadly confusion than the gripping late scene in which Bromley and his men are surprised by an advance guard of the German army on their way to the glacier.


The same is true of Bromley’s final journey to the Alps with his friend Stanley…. This time their quest is idiosyncratic and personal rather than patriotic, but it is no less harrowing. Watkins’ writing is at its best when it is focused on the minutiae of human survival in inhospitable conditions and when it is steeped in the Alpine landscape’s menacing beauty. The summit that Bromley and Stanley must attempt, Carton’s Rock, memorably stands “by itself, and the first impression was of a ship with black sails, moving slowly through an ocean made of clouds. It was like a mirage, shimmering in the heat haze which rose off the ice.”


On human strength and frailty in extreme circumstances, Watkins and The Ice Soldier are superb. While I was immersed in Bromley’s Alpine adventures, you could not have pried this book from my hands with a crowbar. When it focuses elsewhere, however, the book is often only serviceable, leaning too heavily on bursts of exposition and straining to deliver symbols and metaphors that arrive overdressed or flat-footed. Its pat, happily-ever-after conclusion is especially unworthy of the churning darkness and daunting beauty of its best stretches.


And when it is bad, it is…not horrid exactly, but certainly no better than so-so. Still, on balance, I’d recommend this book if the mountaineering or war angles strike a chord for you.

OGIC: Our inimitable referral logs

February 7, 2006 by Terry Teachout

We got a hit yesterday afternoon from the results of the following Google search:

“Why didn’t the snobbish potatoes want their daughter to marry a news broadcaster?”

And if anyone has a plausible answer to that question, I hope you’ll share. I’m so curious, in fact, that there could even be a little something in it for you.

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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