My review of Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down appears in today’s Baltimore Sun. I didn’t like the novel very much at all:

Nick Hornby’s first couple of novels, High Fidelity and About a Boy, installed him as part of the pop-culture firmament. He did three things very well in those books: He established ownership of a character type with wide appeal, the overgrown, callow, but well-meaning fanboy; he built protagonists with ample room to grow; and he wrote in an up-to-the-minute conversational style that proved screenplay-ready. In fact, the film versions in both cases made the books themselves seem almost dispensable.

As a recipe, this looked foolproof. Hornby’s best novels aren’t high art, but they are well-made stories that droves of readers have identified with. While he deserves credit for attempting to transcend that recipe in his next novels, How to Be Good and the newly released A Long Way Down, the results suggest that he shouldn’t throw away the cookbook just yet…

In other words, hold onto your twenty-five bucks.

It’s Friday, but I’m not back from Washington yet, so OGIC is posting my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser by remote control from her headquarters in the Windy City.

Two plays this week, Elaine May’s After the Night and the Music
and Julia Cho’s BFE:

Whenever I see J. Smith-Cameron’s name on a cast list, I smile, knowing that whatever horrors may await me, I can count on seeing at least one worthwhile performance. The real-life wife of playwright-filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan, who is directing her in his second movie this fall, Ms. Smith-Cameron is one of those actors who never fails, as theater people say, to deliver the mail. She’s smart, sharp, and possessed of the bull’s-eye timing that can turn a fair joke into a killer. She plays three widely varied roles in “After the Night and the Music,” the Manhattan Theatre Club’s triple bill of new one-act plays by Elaine May, and does it so well that she almost fools you into thinking the show is better than it really is….

Playwrights Horizons wraps up an uneven season with Julia Cho’s flawed but promising “BFE.” (I wish I could tell you what the initials stand for, but the Journal is a family paper.) Centered on a Korean-American family living in an unnamed Arizona city, “BFE” is a hodgepodge of variously interesting ideas about postmodern American life, directed by Gordon Edelstein with a speed and fluidity that keep most of Ms. Cho’s dramatic balls in the air for longer than she had any right to expect. Though I wasn’t convinced by the touches of fantasy, much less the climactic swerve into melodrama, I was never bored….

No link. The alternatives are as per usual: (A) Buy today’s paper and read the whole thing. (B) Subscribe to the Online Journal by going here. (A) is cheaper, (B) the better deal.

“Like a city in dreams, the great white capital stretches along the placid river from Georgetown on the west to Anacostia on the east. It is a city of temporaries, a city of just-arriveds and only-visitings, built on the shifting sands of politics, filled with people passing through. They may stay fifty years, they may love, marry, settle down, build homes, raise families, and die beside the Potomac, but they usually feel, and frequently they will tell you, that they are just here for a little while. Someday soon they will be going home. They do go home, but it is only for visits, or for a brief span of staying-away; and once the visits or the brief spans are over (‘It’s so nice to get away from Washington, it’s so inbred; so nice to get out in the country and find out what people are really thinking’) they hurry back to their lodestone and their star, their self-hypnotized, self-mesmerized, self-enamored, self-propelling, wonderful city they cannot live away from or, once it has claimed them, live without. Washington takes them like a lover and they are lost.”

Allen Drury, Advise and Consent

Apologies, but I drove off the road somewhere between the three pieces I wrote from scratch on Monday and Tuesday and the performance I heard last night (maybe it was during the hour-long subway ride I took to the Brooklyn Museum
yesterday morning to see the Basquiat retrospective). Whatever the reason, I decided that going to bed was the better part of not cracking up, so I temporarily suspended blogging service. Now I’m getting ready to catch a Metroliner to Washington to visit the Phillips Collection and see Arena Stage’s production of Anna Christie, which leaves me with just about enough time to take a shower and say hello.

I’ll be back in New York some time on Friday, with lots of stories to tell. In the meantime, here are some quick words to the wise:

– Jack Jones is singing at the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room through June 11. Go. Tony Bennett already has–he was sitting across the room from me on Tuesday night.

– Luciana Souza is singing at the Jazz Standard through Sunday. Go. I was there last night, and so were what seemed like half the musicians I know.

That’s all for now. See you when I get back.

“There is nothing
like desire for preventing the thing one says from bearing any
resemblance to what one has in one’s mind. Time presses, and yet it
seems as though we were seeking to gain time by speaking of subjects
absolutely alien to that by which we are obsessed.”

Marcel Proust, Le C

Here’s my main trouble in life: I’m a morning person and a night owl. I think I never really got over the sense of injustice and deprivation all children harbor about having to go to bed–the certainty that they’ll miss out on something, the slight skepticism that another day will really dawn and the whole cycle will start over again, and the instinctive resistance to endings of any kind. When you’re eight, bedtime feels like a life sentence.

“Work at first rescues us, then ravages us.”

It lives. I haven’t been much in evidence around here lately, I know. There was an impromptu visit home for the long weekend, which came as a surprise to some–my mother nearly fainted dead away–a writing deadline, and very, very little sleep since I left Detroit a day and a half ago. Going to bed right this minute is the only sane thing to do, but I hope to post a couple of things Wednesday night and then resume my scheduled weekend bloggifying.