The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

Evelyn Waugh never wrote about the lower classes -- didn't know them, didn't understand them, wasn't interested. Alan Sillitoe is a Waugh for the rest of England, as this collection of stories shows. His characters have vitality and cunning, and when they demonstrate insight it is theirs alone, not some authorial welfare project.

Babel

If time is the best censor, as Chopin said, then John Cournos is one of its victims. I doubt there are fifty people in the world who read one of his books last year, yet Babel (1922), literature of exile that teems with ideas and the search for meaning in a world turned upside down, doesn't deserve total obscurity. Cournos, a Russian Jew born in 1881, moved to the United States at age 10. His alter ego in Babel has a similar story, and flits around Europe trying to be a writer after spending years in what he calls a soul-deadening newspaper job in Philadelphia. Cournos wrote imagist poetry, and some of his descriptions of London, where the character ends up, are subtle and evocative. Babel's cavalcade of characters includes representatives of anarchism, modernism, futurism, and suffragism; prostitutes and spongers; artists and frauds. It adds up to a portrait of an age, often overheated and over-sincere, valuable more as artifact than art.

My Movie Business

John Irving, a former wrestling coach, writes about his novel The Cider House Rules being turned into a movie and his inspiration for the abortionist lead, his colorful grandfather. He is more charitable with the vile money people and creative lunkheads that infest Hollywood than is usual for this type of book -- Monster comes to mind as one that treated them more scathingly -- but maybe Irving simply had a good deal. Director approval and cast approval were his, plus he worked on the script. While My Movie Business encourages me to see the film, it does nothing to entice me to Irving the writer, who was, by his own account, an excellent wrestling coach.

Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It

Geoff Dyer won me over last year with his novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, so I put his earlier books on my list. This one is a collection of essays that are part autobiography, part travelogue. Dyer can sometimes be guilty of attaching too much importance to the things that happen in his life, but for the most part this series of adventures in Cambodia, Amsterdam, Detroit, and elsewhere is rich in ideas and humor. Dyer is simple and sharp stylist, with a good ear. As jokey and eager to get stoned or laid as he can sometimes be, there is always a humane core -- as when he is genuinely moved at Black Rock City and quotes the line, "No one ever became poor by giving."

Tender Mercies

In a newly released letter, J.D. Salinger writes to a friend, "Most stuff that is genuine is better left unsaid." That is a notion that Tender Mercies, but not its low-rent cousin, Crazy Heart, takes to heart. The latter impresses in isolation but shrinks to near nothingness when when compared side-by-side with the 1983 film, written by Horton Foote and directed by Bruce Beresford. In Tender Mercies the drunken ex-singer quits drinking and marries a good woman with a young son. We never see how he quits; his wife says he just stopped, but not without falling off the wagon a few times. Crazy Heart inflicts the viewer with 12-step mush. In Crazy Heart there are repellent scenes of drunken, sloppy sex; in Tender Mercies there is one kiss between the man and woman -- one -- that is more powerful than anything said or done in the other film. Crazy Heart gives us a mumbling Colin Farrell; Tender Mercies has Betty Buckley in a superb performance and singing like an angel. Tender Mercies is not perfect; a couple scenes are more corny than genuine. But in its reticence, gentleness, and dignity, it towers above its coarse and blowsy cousin.

Il Divo

Usually I'll watch the supplemental features on a DVD, but Il Divo leaves such a strong impression that there's no sense piercing the mystery by listening to the director or a "making of" featurette. This Italian film about the politician Giulio Andreotti is visually flamboyant, reminiscent of The Conformist, without ever falling into pat patterns. For instance, there is a sequence set to loud music that intercuts Andreotti at the race track with an assassination of a political opponent, but there is also a long, uncut scene in which a stationary camera focuses on a journalist's face as he delivers a scathing indictment of the prime minister. Andreotti appears in the film as a stiff, heavy-lidded, implacable oddball. He takes walks at 5 a.m. and tears a page from a paperback thriller because he doesn't want to know who the criminal is. He appears to feel emotion only on the subject of Aldo Moro, whom he let be killed. When it comes time to run for president, Andreotti says, "I know that I am of average height, but I don't see any giants around." The film is full of these epigrammic moments, and the director effectively uses the chilly music of Sibelius to deepen his portrait of this cold soul. What matters to Andreotti? The final word in the film probably says it: niente.

The Passenger

Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger is a film that can be watched once a year for life. Starkly beautiful, reticent, and ambiguous, it is the perfect antitode to an age that is obvious, loud, and ugly. The denouement is an extended, magnificently choreographed scene with no cuts. "I never knew him," says the main character's wife, standing over his corpse. I like the idea that Borges (I think) had of writing a mystery story with a wrong ending but with a true solution not in the text that only a few readers would figure out. In a plodding, literal-minded culture, surely something like that would never find a publisher.

Norman Rockwell

Norman Rockwell's birthday today was marked by Google on its home page. That reminded me of a line from the 1922 novel Babel by John Cournos: "Art's effort in the past has been to seduce. Its aim today is to violate." Which is the more worthy goal?

Bashan and I

Thomas Mann is not a writer to skim over the surface of things. In Bashan and I he devotes 247 pages -- admittedly with wide margins and large typeface in my 1924 Henry Holt edition -- to describing his dog. Anyone who is a dog person will feel a pang of recognition when Mann describes the behaviors of Bashan and draws connections between human and animal emotions. But as revealing as the book is about a dog, it is just as useful as an example of Mann's technique of deep, deep detail. He even explains himself in two spots. "But I am moved to add further details to this transcript of Bashan's character, so that the willing reader may see it in the nth degree of vivid verisimilitude," and later, "I am attached to this stretch of landscape and grateful to it, and so I have described it with something of the meticulosity with which the old Dutch masters painted." As to the reason for selecting the Hebrew Bashan to replace the dog's original name, Lux, Mann devotes not one syllable.