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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 10, 2020

Traveling the world through a novel—or twenty

June 10, 2020 by Terry Teachout

I’ve written a “Staying Inside Guide” piece for The Wall Street Journal about the novel sequence, highlighting three of my favorite authors who have worked in the genre. Here’s an excerpt.

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The French don’t always have a word for it, but their term for what in English is blandly known as a “novel sequence,” a series of novels tied together by shared characters and an overarching, all-encompassing story arc, is striking: They call it a roman-fleuve, a river-novel. The phrase was coined by Romain Rolland to describe “Jean-Christophe” (1904-12), his Nobel-winning 10-novel sequence, of which he said that it “has always seemed to me to flow like a river.” It has since acquired currency in our own language as well, not least because so many English novelists have also been drawn to the form. Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire and Palliser novels are at least as well known to English-speaking readers as Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” and Balzac’s “Human Comedy” are to the French….

To take on a roman-fleuve in a single go is the literary equivalent of binge-watching a TV series. Under normal circumstances it can seem daunting, but there is nothing normal about life in the coronavirus pandemic, and I suspect that far more readers than usual might feel like plunging into the alternate fictional world of a roman-fleuve, in which it is not merely possible but easy to get happily lost for hours at a time. To that end, I have three suggestions for those who’ve had more than enough of the horrors of the world around them and long to take a vacation from it, at least in their minds….

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Read the whole thing here.

Snapshot: André Watts makes his TV debut in 1963

June 10, 2020 by Terry Teachout

André Watts, Leonard Bernstein, and the New York Philharmonic perform Liszt’s First Piano Concerto as part of a Young People’s Concert featuring young classical performers, originally telecast by CBS in 1963. It was this telecast that introduced the sixteen-year-old Watts to the American public and launched his career:

(This is the latest in a series of art- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

Almanac: Barbara Pym on candor

June 10, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“She liked to think of herself as a straightforward sort of person. ‘People always know where they are with me,’ she would say rather smugly; it never occurred to her that people might not always want to know such things.”

Barbara Pym, No Fond Return of Love

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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