Mourning Becomes Electra

Eugene O'Neill's 1931 play reminds me of the difficulties of producing an abstracted work in these times. At a performance I attended a few years ago of Verdi's Don Carlo, the conductor appeared on stage between acts to announce to the audience that they should not be laughing: The opera is a tragedy, and the laughter was disturbing the performers. I think the audience's problem in that case was part of the execrable critical approach that seeks to "identify with" a character. If you attempt to put yourself in the place of a king who is making grandiloquent statements, you may well laugh. But as Fran Lebowitz pointed out in a recent documentary, a novel (or play or opera, I would add) is not supposed to be a mirror but a door. I can only cringe at the thought of today's audiences chuckling at the overheated dialogue of O'Neill's masterful retelling of Greek myth.

The Looking Glass War

This novel, the follow-up to John Le Carré's wildly popular The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, was apparently a commercial dud, but it is in fact superior to its predecessor. The Looking Glass War reveals the spy business in all its sordidness. The base human traits of selfishness, ambition, and snobbery are on display in a mission that begins unraveling from the opening pages. Despite a series of failures, a froth of happy talk buoys the participants as they head toward a conclusion that is as sickening as it is inevitable.  

Welcome to Hard Times

E.L. Doctorow's first novel, published in 1960, might be called an anti-Western. It is unblinking in its depiction of the hardships of the frontier, in this case the Dakota Territory, including a chilling account (pun intended) of a brutal winter. Narrated by a character named "Blue," informally the mayor of Hard Times, the story has the usual Western cast of characters – prostitutes, storekeepers, drunkards – and a madman, the Man from Bodie, who literally destroys the town single-handedly in the first few pages. The town's effort to reconstitute itself forms the bulk of the novel, a project that Sisyphus would surely recognize.

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

I had the advantage, or perhaps it was a disadvantage, of having seen the excellent Martin Ritt film of this novel several times before reading the book, so the trick of the story was not a surprise and I could see how the author dropped hints here and there leading up to the climax. Yet the book itself was still largely satisfying, with a good mixture of spycraft, philosophy, action, and romance.