Archives for July 2008

Bless Jessa Crispin for this review of Sarah Hall’s Daughters of the North. It’s a great novel — well-paced, thought-provoking, beautifully written — the kind of novel you finish and immediately want to make all your friends read. Except the first couple times I tried to pass it on, my friends ran fleeing from the book, afraid it was The Handmaid’s Tale revisited. Because like Handmaid’s Tale, Hall’s novel is set in a dystopian future where, among other bad things, women are fitted with metallic doohickies that keep them from reproducing. But unlike Handmaid’s Tale, Sarah Hall’s novel isn’t, well, boring.
As Jessa writes:

I am aware that as a human being, and especially as a woman, I am supposed to like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. But when I read her 1985 novel of women living in a repressive theocratic regime, forced into either celibacy or involuntary breeding, all I could think was, “OK, so when do these women start stabbing people?” I like a good dystopia as much as anyone, but I prefer mine to come with an organized resistance army.

Exactly! I love Atwood, but I’ve always ranked The Handmaid’s Tale as my least favorite of her books (with The Blind Assassin at the top). It’s been a while but in my memory reading it was like taking a long forced march through flat, didactic country. Like reading The Fountainhead, where you stagger through the long speeches and philosophy desperately hoping for another scene of Howard Roarke and Dominique What’s-Her-Face throwing down.
In a Q & A that appears in the back of Daughters of the North, Sarah Hall says she set out to write a book that “[took] a look at the relationship between war and society and ask several questions. Under what circumstances might we have to turn to violence? Do we renege on our claim to be civilized when we go to war? Can we go to war in the defense of civilization? When is war right, and when is it wrong? And can women make good soldiers?” All big questions, but what I appreciated is how fully digested they were into the novel, and that the novel, in fact, remained a true novel: rich and engrossing and expressive of ambivalence, or negative capability. No polemic to duck, no long speeches to skip. (If anything, the novel’s chief flaw is its brevity; the ending is overly rushed and abrupt and a couple of the later narrative lines — such as the one with Chloe and Martin, if you’ve read the book — are advanced too quickly.)
One reason I think Daughters of the North works so well is how rooted it is in a very specific landscape, the Lake District in Cumbria in the north of England. The region colors not only the setting but the disposition of the characters — individual freedom may not make it to the future, but regional differences do — as well as the flavor of the novel’s sentences. Take this description as the novel’s heroine, Sister, leaves town:

Past the settlement border, in the lower area, the roads had deteriorated. They were much worse than I had imagined. In their years of redundancy they had sagged and rucked. Whole sections had been pulled away by the floods. They felt loose underfoot, like scree.

It’s the “rucked” and “scree” I like. Hall never overdoes it — you never feel like you’re being forced to eat an Anglo-Saxon dictionary — but she has a lovely, aware way of making the prose fit the landscape.
And when the landscape is described it’s with a beautiful, exacting simplicity:

An owl was flying over the grassland, sweeping down towards the ground and then up. Its white, clock-like face hovered gracefully, while its wings worked hard and silently in the air. For a second I caught a reflection in its eye, a weird flash of yellow-green, like a battery light flaring on then off again.

In that same back-of-the-book Q & A, Hall is asked to describe “the importance of Cumbria in your work,” and she answers:

My agent and editor have coined this phrase for my writing — “geo-fiction” — because landscapes feature so strongly in the novels, be it Morecambe Bay, New York, or Cumbria. I keep returning to the north of England in my work though. It’s difficult to say what it is about it that I find so compelling– but I don’t think it’s the fictive romantic notion of the Lake land. I don’t suffer from any romantic illusions about my home turf (stillborn lambs and filthy rains aren’t all that sublime), though I don’t deny its drama. I suppose being brought up in such a remarkable, natural, and feral place — my home was very remote and I spent most of my time outdoors, so you could say the land in part raised me — I now feel beholden to include it in my work.

RELATED: Listen to the Bat Segundo podcast with Sarah Hall.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps * (comedy, G, suitable for bright children, reviewed here)

• August: Osage County * (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• Boeing-Boeing (comedy, PG-13, cartoonishly sexy, reviewed here)

• A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 17, reviewed here)

• Gypsy * (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Little Mermaid * (musical, G, entirely suitable for children, reviewed here)

• Passing Strange (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• South Pacific * (musical, G/PG-13, some sexual content, brilliantly staged but unsuitable for viewers acutely allergic to preachiness, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• Adding Machine (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter, too musically demanding for youngsters, closes July 20, reviewed here)

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children capable of enjoying a love story, reviewed here)

IN SUBURBAN CHICAGO:

• The Lion in Winter (serious comedy, PG-13, adult subject matter, closes Aug. 3, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK ON BROADWAY:

• November (comedy, PG-13, profusely spattered with obscene language, closes July 13, reviewed here)

CLOSING SATURDAY IN CHICAGO:

• A Taste of Honey (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

CLOSING SUNDAY IN WASHINGTON, D.C.:

• Julius Caesar/Antony and Cleopatra (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, performed in alternating repertory, reviewed here)

“I was going to be the hero of my own life. When you live in a world of make-believe it’s not because something is bad but because something is more in the make-believe. Everything was more heightened, more love, more death. I’m an opera. If I didn’t act, I’d be all over the place.”
Amanda Plummer, interview, New York Times (April 28, 1996)

• Makoto Fujimura, with whom I sit on the National Council on the Arts, is a Japanese-American abstract expressionist who uses traditional Japanese painting techniques to strikingly modern effect. His canvases (one of which hangs in the Teachout Museum, much to my delight) are at once tranquil and deeply involving. “Charis,” an exhibition of recent paintings by Fuijmura, goes up today at the Dillon Gallery in Chelsea. The show is on view through August 2. I’ll be there–you come, too.
For more information, go here.
• Charlie Victor Romeo is playing at the Undergroundzero Festival. I reviewed it in The Wall Street Journal four years ago, at a time when I was undergoing therapy for fear of flying–proof, if anyone needed it, that I take my job very seriously. Here’s part of what I wrote about the show in 2004:

Forget reality TV. If you want to watch raw slices of real life–and death–transformed into the highest possible drama, go see “Charlie Victor Romeo,” a performance piece based on transcripts of the black-box recordings of six airplane crashes. (The title is military alphabetic code for “Cockpit Voice Recorder.”) “Charlie Victor Romeo” holds you in a hammerlock for 90 unforgettable minutes. It’s the most frightening show I’ve ever seen….
You stroll into a grubby black-box theater (talk about ironic!) in which a nondescript mock cockpit is placed at center stage. The house goes dark and a slide flashes on a screen overhead, telling you the flight number and date and how many people were on board, followed by a stark description of what went wrong: ICING. EXPLODING ENGINE. MULTIPLE BIRD STRIKES. Then the lights come up and all hell breaks loose.
Not always at once, though. Instead, you might find a pilot and co-pilot chatting away agreeably, flirting with a flight attendant, griping about this or that minor nuisance. But sooner or later–always without warning–something terrible happens, and in an instant the theater becomes a sweatbox. You watch in horror as the crew scrambles to save the ship while alarms beep and buzz, the radio crackles urgently and passengers scream on the far side of the cockpit door….

Four shows only, on July 8-11. To order tickets–if you dare–go here.

Noël Coward sings “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” on CBS in 1955:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“Provincialism is not merely lacking city taste in arts and manners; it is also an increasingly vital antidote to all would-be central tyrannies.”
John Fowles, introduction to G.B. Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page

I read Paul Collins’ article in Slate about the decline and fall of the semicolon with interest and amusement. I confess, though, that the first thing I did was search through the piece for George Orwell’s name. While Orwell was mentioned in passing, Collins failed to include the wonderfully trivial fact that the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four claimed to have written an entire novel, Coming Up for Air, that contains no semicolons whatsoever. “I had decided about this time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one,” he explained in a letter to Roger Senhouse.

But did he succeed? It’s been years since I last read Coming Up for Air, and I didn’t collate it for semicolons on that occasion. Since then a searchable e-text of the book, which was published in 1939, has been posted by Project Gutenberg, and no sooner did I start trolling for the allegedly superfluous punctuation mark than I found this characteristic passage, in which Orwell’s narrator describes a nasty little diner to which he paid a visit in search of an edible meal:

Behind the bright red counter a girl in a tall white cap was fiddling with an ice-box, and somewhere at the back a radio was playing, plonk-tiddle-tiddle-plonk, a kind of tinny sound. Why the hell am I coming here? I thought to myself as I went in.There’s a kind of atmosphere about these places that gets me down. Everything slick and shiny and streamlined; mirrors, enamel, and chromium plate whichever direction you look in. Everything spent on the decorations and nothing on the food. No real food at all. Just lists of stuff with American names, sort of phantom stuff that you can’t taste and can hardly believe in the existence of. Everything comes out of a carton or a tin, or it’s hauled out of a refrigerator or squirted out of a tap or squeezed out of a tube. No comfort, no privacy. Tall stools to sit on, a kind of narrow ledge to eat off, mirrors all round you. A sort of propaganda floating round, mixed up with the noise of the radio, to the effect that food doesn’t matter, comfort doesn’t matter, nothing matters except slickness and shininess and streamlining. Everything’s streamlined nowadays, even the bullet Hitler’s keeping for you. I ordered a large coffee and a couple of frankfurters. The girl in the white cap jerked them at me with about as much interest as you’d throw ants’ eggs to a goldfish.

Damn.

Having found that a cherished literary myth was nothing more than that, I searched the rest of Coming Up for Air and located four more semicolons. I was shocked–shocked! Maybe Louis Menand was right after all.

As for me, I rarely use semicolons in my own writing. This is not a quirk: I’ve spent years cultivating the art of writing the way I talk, and you can’t really “speak” a semicolon out loud. (Maybe John Gielgud could, but I can’t.) So I eschew them–usually. I can’t remember the last time I used one in a Wall Street Journal column. The manuscript of Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong, which is 175,000 words long, contains no more than one or, at most, two semicolons per chapter, not counting those that appear in quotations from other writers. Several chapters are entirely semicolon-free.

For what it’s worth, here’s an example of how I used the semicolon in Rhythm Man:

For all his virtuosity, Armstrong was never at his best when playing at fast tempos. It was in ballads, swinging medium-tempo numbers, and the blues that he did his most creative improvising. If he had recorded nothing but “Star Dust” and “St. Louis Blues,” he would still be remembered as the greatest jazz soloist of his time; if he had recorded nothing but “Chinatown, My Chinatown” and “I Got Rhythm,” he would be remembered only as a high-note specialist with a funny voice.

And yes, you can say that one out loud. Try it.

“Tabitha went to Church with the Priaulx and to Service with my mother sometimes; but I am not sure she had a religion really. She had faith. I don’t know in what, or how. She suffered in her life, yet I doubt if she was ever truly unhappy. She seemed to know that underneath everything was good. I wish I could think the same.”
G.B. Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page