"Tough Without a Gun:" A Flat Tale of a Dimensional Star

My beginnings as a cinephile were unusual, going, as I did, to a Waldorf school where TV was frowned upon, and belonging, as I did, to obedient parents. My sister and I were, however, allowed the requisite one or two movies on the weekend. Disney was verboten, so there was a lot of Shirley Temple flicks, which graduated into Rogers and Astaire, and finally, pivotally, Noir.

The foreign twang of the word was enough to satisfy me and my 14-year-old cohorts; eager, budding culture snobs that we were. Sleepovers were popcorn-packed nights of Hitchcock, Gilda, The Third Man, and Humphrey Bogart. Finally, ultimately, Humphrey. We fell for the cantankerous, weather beaten antihero as so many had before us, sketching out lines from To Have and Have Not in our margins and whistling for our imaginary Steves. (To my everlasting delight, my high school sweetheart met my Lauren Bacall in full rumrunner regalia one Halloween.)

All this is by way of saying that I had to read “Tough Without A Gun: The Life and Extraordinary Afterlife of Humphrey Bogart” by Stefan Kanfer. I was excited to learn about my gruff idol, find out if he was the face of the Gerber baby, and how it was that he had dodged his third wife (whom he called “Slugger”) to make Lauren his fourth.

I got my answers but the delivery was a little dull. Kanfer clearly reveres the star and faithfully takes his readers through Bogart’s life, which began in 1899. Humphrey was born to a well-to-do family in New York City, the eldest, with two younger sisters. Although bright, he rebelled against authority and it was evident early on that he would not be following in his father’s footsteps toward the medical profession.

Bogart got his start on Broadway, as most stars had to at the time. He married and divorced, slowly rising to roles of more prominence. Upon Bogart’s move to Hollywood, Kanfer patiently unpacks his cinematic choices and outlines how one sort of movie led to another, culminating in the films that define how Bogart is viewed today: He is renowned as classic, unshakably masculine. He withholds his affection but there is tenderness beneath the crust.

Kanfer spends a good amount of time quoting reviews from the era. He details the many ways that history intersected with Bogart’s career, affecting his trajectory as a star and sculpting his image. These tie-ins were often striking, and yet when Kanfer directly quotes his subject, Humphrey never comes off the page. Even Kanfer’s descriptions of Hollywood and the Bogarts’ travels in Africa fall flat. There are glimmers of dimension but ultimately the biographer sticks too close to his facts without illuminating the contours of the scenes or personalities. I never felt like I got to know Kanfer’s subject better, though he handled the impact of Bogart’s afterlife with much more skill.

My sense is that the author’s respect for the figure and for his family outweighed his desire to make Bogart human. The decision to avoid sensationalist guesses about his fidelity is admirable, but Kanfer’s whitewashed approach is tiresome. Somewhere there is a happy medium, maybe the next biographer will reach it. Because it is obvious that though Bogart reached his cinematic heights in his 40s, and died more than 50 years ago, this is only the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Fourth Novel is a Finely Tunned "Tale" of Wealth

Julia Glass is the author of a wonderful book called “Three Junes” (which you can always get a copy of at the bookstore “Three Lives,” read it to find out why). Last fall she published her latest novel “The Widower’s Tale.” It’s largest and perhaps only real flaw is the title. The book is about much more than the charming, cantankerous, widowed Percival Darling and the title oozes a treacly sentiment that is absent in the novel.

Glass is partial to male narrators and the four we have in “The Widower’s Tale” are a diverse bunch. The aforementioned Percy lives on the property where his wife died 30 odd years ago in an accident for which he thinks he is to blame. The novel opens as his barn is being transformed into a fancy pre-school, a surprising decision fueled by his desire to ground his eldest daughter. Ira is one of the teachers at Elves and Fairies. He is damaged, recovering from the harsh loss of his previous job as a result of false accusations stemming from his sexuality. Then there is Celestino, an illegal immigrant from Guatemala whose life looked immeasurably brighter before he fell in love with his patron’s daughter years before. The youngest protagonist is Robert, Percy’s grandson, a bright boy at Harvard, blithely following his mother’s footsteps toward med-school.

Circumstance and humanity bring these lives into the same orbit in crucial ways. Percy’s careful widowhood is reshuffled by a new love and the pleasures, risks and heartbreaks associated. He is the only character given a first person narrative and his voice is often hilarious in its high brow, dry humor. The reader experiences Percy’s awakening in an immediate manner, and we find ourselves puzzled and righteously appalled by the privilege that has altered his small town into something he finds absurdly gentrified.

Robert, Celestino, and Ira’s stories are interesting but they lack the vibrancy of Percy’s voice. Each character’s transformation is crucial and fleshes out another dimension of current society.

The novel is not just of men. But they are our lenses, a perspective Glass manages quite well, faltering only with the college age slang Robert and his roommate Turo mouth. Almost across the board Glass’s women are tough. As mothers, doctors, scholars, and even lovers, they have a somewhat fierce outer layer that their men want to penetrate. I liked these women well enough, but my understanding of them was less complete, more fractured, and I wanted to be better acquainted with their weaknesses and their drive.

Issues of the moment are central to the narrative. The novel encompasses capitalist greed, gay marriage, illegal immigration and the seepage of technology into the way we live. This is not done obliquely or in a preacher’s tone. The subjects’ presence never feels forced (unlike the racial and class crossings that occur in the popular “Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand” by Helen Simonson). Percy’s wealthy Boston suburb becomes the victim of a mysterious eco-terrorism group, clever pranks he initially finds amusing. The impact of these attempts to right an imbalance in wealth and spotlight an abuse of resources is both startling and thought provoking. The logic might be sound, but the execution is badly misdirected.

What I ultimately appreciated about Glass’s novel is that very little is neatly packaged at its conclusion. Like many novels before it, it ends with a wedding. But the event felt more like a beginning of something or a continuation for all the characters. There were no clear answers or sure destinies, but the possibility of transformative opportunities just might be on the horizon.

Visiting with Egan's "Goon Squad"

Winning an award for your work is inevitably an honor and for some readers the mark of the Pulitzer Prize is a compelling emblem; for others it is intimidating. This year’s winner is a laudable accomplishment as well as a comprehensible and engaging read. In fact the most elusive feature of Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad” is the title.

The first chapter, and first story, introduces us to Sasha. She is a thirty-something single woman in New York, discussing her most recent setback with her shrink. The scene is typical so far. Sasha, it turns out, is a kleptomaniac and her fervid encounter with an online date concludes in forgettable sex and a poignant theft.

Sasha's story introduces a few of the characters who appear in the successive stories. Egan cleverly extracts minor figures from early stories and fleshes out their worlds as the book proceeds. For a time, the reader is traveling backward in time, retracing history, but ultimately we arrive somewhere in the future. While Sasha’s presence is a fundamental thread in the book, she never entirely reclaims the narrative as her own. The reader pieces her life together through the eyes of her contemporaries and acquaintances, and we learn almost as much about them along the way. It is fair to say that the story is no more hers than it is any of theirs.

“Goon Squad” follows its population of protagonists to Naples, Africa, and the suburbs, but it always returns to New York. The city harbors the wounded and spits out the derelict. It is a place where gifted musicians become riverside fishermen, PR magnates light their guests on fire, people find their callings, and others find themselves selling their foundering souls. By reconnecting with Egan’s characters in different stages of their lives, we become acquainted with a panorama of their choices. Throughout the book their mistakes and triumphs come into focus and give them a very human identity. An aging producer who seduces young girls is also a father and a mentor while an American sweetheart actress morphs into a political rebel. Egan’s characters are unfailingly complex, and like most people, they continue to surprise us.

In addition to the creative tool of intersecting but not continuous or chronological storylines, Egan uses a variety of methods to tell her story. A troubled college student speaks about himself entirely in the second person, until he reaches a mental climax and collapse. A young girl illustrates the fluctuating complications of her family via power point, and a few conversations are had entirely via abbreviated Ts, a form of texting reduced further than our own. These methods reflect both time and states of mind.

Egan’s characters' narratives come together like puzzle pieces. It is a sly approach and one that Egan executes with grace. It is somewhat disappointing, however, not to acquire a full view of any one of her characters. This is partly a compliment to Egan's craftsmanship as a writer that we want to intimately understand everyone she creates. But the sliver we are given, no matter how substantial, is never enough. Arguably our chagrin at remaining on the fringes of these realities should be swallowed in homage to artistic license. Egan is, perhaps, using these slices to paint a larger picture. I resented the deprivation nonetheless. “A Visit from the Goon Squad” is a novel in short stories. I am a fan of both genres and Egan’s book is a well-developed delight, but I couldn’t help wishing I’d had one or the other because both didn’t give me enough of either.

Dark Corners in "Swamplandia!"

Karen Russell’s second book “Swamplandia!” is a novel of the south, set deep in the swampy groves of Florida. The lush plant life and entangled landmasses permeate the book’s atmosphere and provide a climate not often explored in fiction or even by non-fictional people. The story is about children and the timbre of the tale is dark, an effect deepened by the innocence of the children’s voices.

“Swamplandia!” is full of oddities. The title refers to the amusement park/tourist attraction located off the mainland run by the Bigtree family. The Bigtrees are not an ounce Indian but they don the garb and raise alligators, or Seths as they call them, and impress their audiences with death defying performances. Ava, our primary narrator, is the third generation of the Bigtree dynasty and a witness to its collapse. She is the youngest member of the alligator wrestling family, baby sister to her brother Kiwi and sister Ossie.

Their mother dies at the outset of the novel and Ava doesn't quite know how to deal with the fact that it was cancer that killed her, though she defied death regularly during her alligator swims. Her mother’s tragic but mundane demise disappoints the tourists and without the star of the most popular attraction, the audience to dwindles.

The appeal of the Bigtree theme park is further diminished by the establishment of the sinister World of Darkness on the mainland. The new park is host to a vast array of disturbing rides and the slick, manufactured nature of the entertainment is something Chief Bigtree looks down on. But Ava’s father, while a safe presence, has no grasp of how to care for his children and when Kiwi runs away to the mainland to help bail out the family, the Chief leaves Ossie and Ava on their own soon after.

The three children are displaced by the loss of their mother and they take very different tacks to manage the situation. Their attempts to embrace and escape their legacy are central to the story and tainted by darkness.

Ossie is dreamy, the middle sister. In the wake of her mother’s death she begins to obsess over, and eventually consort with, ghosts. Thick in the margins of adolescence, Ossie becomes enamored with a young dredgeman, Louis, who died decades before she was born. Ava listens to her sister’s recitation of Louis’s tale (perhaps the best section of the novel) and is swept up in the romance but never believes the way Ossie does, and can’t discern the limits of her sister’s imagination.

When Ossie disappears into the everglades, Ava begins her own odyssey to find her. Her guide is a sinister, mystical guy called Bird Man, who claims he can lead her to the underworld and retrieve the sister she has lost. Russell has asked us to suspend our disbelief to minor degrees throughout the book and by this point we want to trust in the Bird Man as much as Ava, even though our better judgment tells us to be wary.

Parallel to Ava’s adventures through the slippery waterways, is Kiwi’s exposure to mainland culture. The bright, homeschooled boy is used to being the star of his surroundings and is suddenly thrust in the judgmental mediocrity of teenage life.
Kiwi is dealt the surprise of different uncertainties, neither more nor less prickly than Ossie and Ava’s precarious involvements.

Russell constructs a strange world for her protagonists and deftly guides the reader around its contours. The distinction between fantasy and reality is tenuous in the worlds of the Bigtree children and Russell expertly reminds us of the appealing possibilities that accompany this fluidity as well as the dangers.

The Continuous Pleasure of "Just Kids"

The 2010 winner of the National Book Award is a modest tome brimming with charm. Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” is a memoir of love. It is a love story written for New York and for Robert Mapplethorpe. Smith tells her tale without frills and her matter-of-fact delivery makes her brushes with celebrity more compelling and her relationship with Mapplethorpe incredibly affecting. Her path to success feels almost accidental and incites a certainly misplaced nostalgia for the trials of the past. Smith manages to create a Neverland out of New York, despite the fact that this was actually her life and the challenges she overcame were quite real.

Smith's prose is imbued with a grounded ingenuity. She arrives in NY after a little bit of college, giving a child up to adoptive parents, and with an interest in poetry and art. She not so marches as glides into the New York of '67, the summer Coltrane dies, as she marks it.

Her memories of New York are stippled with gravestones. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and finally, Robert Mapplethorpe. The way she depicts the times, the New York of these artists was roiling with creative opportunity. They lived beneath the surface and made their worlds the center of the universe.

Patti meets Robert by chance on a hot day in Brooklyn. Their second and third encounters are as accidental as the first, but they are the beginning of an enduring love affair and, more importantly, a relationship between artist and muse.

The cursory knowledge I had of Mapplethorpe before this book was of his later photographs. It is impossible to forget his images of nudity and bondage once you have seen them. If the subject matter doesn’t appeal, the beauty of his execution does. His photographs suggest a sexual preference; an assumption that is easily made and not quite accurate.

Patti walks alongside Robert as his sexuality burgeons and changes. His metamorphosis is terrain she does not play a part in and yet her embrace is complete. “Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art,” she writes. “He worked without apology, investing the homosexual with grandeur, masculinity and enviable nobility. Without affectation, he created a presence that was wholly male without sacrificing feminine grace.” Smith’s rendering of Mapplethorpe’s personal expansion is incredibly gentle and a tribute to their bond as well as to her patience and desire to understand him.

Reading about the New York of 40 years ago today is delicious. The cost of living makes your mouth water and the casual encounters Smith has with artistic legends are simple and savory. Smith blossoms separately from Mapplethorpe, but their work was in constant conversation with the other’s. Smith lists toward the light, while Mapplethorpe probes at the darkness. "Just Kids" is in many ways a work of poetry and though it falters at times in its center, its artistry and emotion make it an overwhelming success.

The morning I took “Just Kids” out of my purse, I dined on eggs in the West Village. Looking up after ordering, I saw a woman with a cappuccino in front of her, and a notebook. She had a pen on the table but was reading from the book and smiling from time to time. The restaurant was tiny and I didn’t want to invade her privacy, but I whispered to my companions, “It’s her! It’s Patti Smith!” The serendipity of the moment felt like a slice of the old New York she knew. The coincidence of the sighting was a moment of urban grace, which wrapped us up in the world she wrote of.

"Freedom" and its Disappointments

I almost hate to add my voice to cacophony surrounding Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom.” For weeks after its publication you could barely get three paragraphs into an arbitrary New York Times article without mention of the book.

The wild success of Franzen's latest suburban fiction is baffling to me. I read “The Corrections” in high school and abhorred the characters so intensely that I have no recollection of the novel beyond my dislike. The lack of redemption and personal depth in each cranky, self-involved figure seemed a belittlement of their live, equally flawed, counterparts. I read “Freedom” hoping the extra years would open my eyes to the strengths of the author’s oeuvre and perceptions.

I did like “Freedom” more than “The Corrections,” which is like saying I like a vicious hangover more than food poisoning. “Freedom” is an easy read. The characters are less despicable than those found in “The Corrections,” but ultimately every one comes up with a less than full deck of humanity.

Walter and Patty Berglund are surburbanites, the harbingers of gentrification in a Minnesota neighborhood. On the surface they are a Pleasantville unit of contentment, which contributes to their neighbors' enjoyment when the family begins to implode. It should come as no surprise that the pages are full of infidelity, superiority complexes, and helicopter mothering.

The conceit of the characters in “Freedom” is that they appear to be fully realized, complex figures. Franzen does not shy away from exhibiting the flaws of his characters' "human natures" and at first glance this reads as depth. But as my uncle noted in a correspondence about the text, we never really know, and thus don’t like, any of the characters.

The majority of the Berglunds actions are driven by anger, revenge, repression, etc, and are held up as prototypes of middle-class normality. I agree that people are inherently self-interested, but not that they are exclusively, constantly so.

Perhaps my life has been unfairly filled with generous people. But I come from a world of comfort and privilege and nothing I've encountered resembles the selfish, bad behavior of “Freedom.” I agree with Franzen that our boundless range of opportunity has provided us with more reasons, not fewer, to be disappointed by our circumstances. I agree that humans are flawed, egocentric and prone to making mistakes. What infuriates me about Franzen's work is that he creates caricatures and proceeds to endow them with so much history, a full 562 pages, that we are tricked into believing they are three-dimensional.

Recently, a friend asked me what was wrong with reading about characters you don’t like. Perhaps it’s a blind spot of mine, but my feeling is: Why bother? Which is not to say that I dismiss literary figures based on whether or not I would take them to dinner or agree with their morals. There is humanity in reprehensible characters, think of Humbert Humbert, and when that humanity is accessed the reader can identify or reflect upon similar vulnerabilities, moral or emotional, in herself.

Franzen’s characters made me want to smack them over the heads for being so self-consumed. They are in a state of paralysis, unable or unwilling to adjust their circumstances. There is a bit of silver lining at the end, but at that point I couldn't forgive them and just wanted to forget.

"Cleopatra: A Life" is a Chance to Enjoy the Enduring Wiles of the Egyptian Queen

“She really was impressive, wasn’t she,” said my great-aunt Phoebe over the soup. We were discussing our mutual fascination with Stacy Schiff’s biography “Cleopatra: A Life.” Aunt Phoebe’s sparkling eyes brightened talking about the victories of the queen. Although a figure infamous for her sexual allure, Schiff separates the strength of the woman from the strength of her notorious legacy. The result is a sumptuous depiction of the era, with a discerning eye turned toward the biases of the time.

The tumultuous world of Cleopatra's Egypt is easily accessible on the arm of Schiff. Her extensive research puts her at ease in her subject's world and gives her the ability to enthrall those who are unfamiliar with its terrain. Schiff deftly organizes the clutter of history and hearsay and she brushes the cobwebs off of intrigues 2,000 years old.

The name Cleopatra is tossed around with such frequency that one imagines one knows her entire story. Her seduction of Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, her venomous suicide, her deadly allure. Cleopatra's name is practically synonymous with devastating beauty. The primary point that Schiff makes about the queen is that we have virtually no idea what she looked like. The exquisite cover of the book shows the arch of a woman's neck, her face turned away. Cleopatra was a woman who always held something back, making her all the more dangerous and powerful.

It is difficult to trust the descriptions we do have of the queen and its necessary to examine the sources. Notably, no one was able to mention her beauty without also elaborating on her intelligence. In an early biography of Marc Antony by Plutarch, Cleopatra dominates more than have the narrative. Schiff is mindful of the fact that people writing about Cleopatra wrote a hundred years after her death, or more. Inevitably they were men. Cleopatra’s accomplishments were extensive, (presiding as an unmarried queen over an enormous empire, enlisting the help of Rome in the face of a siege, carrying the children of two Caesars) and it is unsurprising that the commentary about her success is biting.

Schiff pokes fun at the attitudes of the time, and indeed some details inspire frank amazement. Members of the Ptolemy clan routinely married uncles, mothers and daughters. Cleopatra was likely the daughter of a brother and sister. The family was also known for brutally murdering each other in order to achieve the throne. Amusingly the Greek language was considered one of "low morals, the dialect of sex manuals, a language 'with fingers of its own.' The Greeks covered all bases, noted a later scholar, ‘including some I should not care to explain in class.'"

Schiff educates us on the customs of the times, and describes the opulent approach of the queen that it becomes impossible not to get lost in her world. The evidence shows that Cleopatra was educated in the same manner as Julius Caesar and that their personalities were uncommonly alike, as was their desire to rule their empires.

Throughout the book Schiff debunks a few myths. An asp undoubtedly did not strike the queen in the breast, despite the poetry of the image. For all the accusations of Cleopatra being a skilled and wanton seductress, she was a virgin when she became Caesar's lover and Marc Antony may have been the only other. There are moments of repetition in the tome, but by and large the information, based on thorough research and clever guesswork, is a spectacularly engaging biography.

What with all the conjecture around the infamous temptress, what remains is Cleopatra's indomitable wit and her ability to shape the world around her despite her gender. Whatever the whispering tongues of history have said or will say, she lived her life as she chose to, no small feat.