When David Mamet’s play, “Speed-the-Plow,” first premiered on Broadway in 1988, Madonna, fresh off her “Who’s that girl?” tour and a year before the release of her hit single, “Express Yourself,” was cast in the play’s sole female role, starring alongside Mamet regular Joe Mantegna and the lesser-known Ron Silver. Having spent her career alternating between roles of sex symbol and feminist spokeswoman, the Material Girl was an appropriate emblem of one of the play’s central questions: What is the moral distinction between making art and making entertainment? But one can guess that it wasn’t just her acting or the symbolism of her pop culture identity that inspired Madonna’s being cast; her brand name must have majorly upped box office sales. Read More »
At first, Philip Roth’s umpteenth novel Indignation seems a YouTube reel of familiar Rothian tropes: tradition-addled kids, annoying parents; Newark; prudes, shikses — yet it bears so many ancient grudges, so much destabilizing rage, that its fury makes it thrilling and unique.
Like almost every Roth protagonist, Marcus Messner is the son of a Newark shopkeeper — in this case, a butcher — but the violence and sheer gross-out he encounters with his father sets Indignation apart. “It was my job not just to pluck the chickens but eviscerate them. You slit the ass open a little bit and you stick your hand up and you grab the viscera and you pull them out…Nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done. That’s what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.” The butcher, after all this stabbing and gouging, becomes obsessed with the idea that the boy will die of contact with the world, which means he must be hidden from it. The farther Marcus runs, the stronger his father gets; the boy is alienated from everything.
He flees Newark, but at tiny Winesburg College, he can belong to nothing else—not the Jewish fraternity or the bohemian fraternity, not his roommates, not the baseball team, and not the damaged WASPy dreamboat Olivia Hutton, whose eagerness to blow him leaves him as estranged as the evil hyper-Christian Dean of Men does. The Dean is a kind of stock villain whose moustache-twisting wickedness burns a hole through any kind of credible representation, but this is not a realistic book, it’s an anti-sentimental Frankenstein kept alive by its own seething. Marcus and his mother flirt with freedom — she by divorce, he with Olivia Hutton — but their fear of abandoning the crazy kosher butcher leaves them chained to the madness of convention. It won’t be long before the kid is cut up like a chicken. Read More »
Nellie Hermann is a master of memory. In her harrowing debut novel The Cure for Grief, nine-year-old Ruby, the youngest of four and the only girl in the Bronstein family, lives through unfathomable loss. When a number of family members succumb to illness in the opening chapters, the book might initially read as over-dramatic (“Loss! Regret! Change!”). But rather than tell the story of Ruby’s life in strict linear fashion, Hermann carefully doles out memories from Ruby’s past, resulting in a story that is truer to the actual grieving process, as we tend to only allow ourselves to remember after time has passed. The novel quickly becomes more about Ruby’s learning to grieve than about the events she is going through. It is as though Hermann herself is becoming comfortable with the audience, allowing us to see behind the wall Ruby has constructed to deal with her grief.
Ruby is finishing college when we learn of a funeral that took place when she was in high school; this missing piece in the story of Ruby — the sound of dirt hitting the coffin as friends and family take up their shovels — reverberates throughout the rest of the novel. Difficult memories, as well as joyful ones, are held back. After we learn Ruby’s brother Nathan has a life-threatening illness, Hermann takes us back to the childhood games Ruby and Nathan played: “There was Raggedy Andy, when Nathan’s body would be a doll, limbs flailing, and Ruby would prop him up….‘I am Raggedy Andy,’ she would say, moving his jaw with her hand, his head leaning back against the couch….‘I can eat Cheerios! I’m hungry!’ Ruby would squeal, stuffing the cereal into his mouth.” It is through these moments that the characters become more than suffering individuals; with each memory the grief and the family become more familiar until we are left looking at the rubble with Ruby, feeling the pain as if it were our own.
Perhaps the most beautiful segments in the novel come when Ruby allows herself to be angry at God and to cry and scream. It is here that her father’s words come back to her and carry throughout the rest of the book: “Life is the highest good….Whenever it is possible, choose life.” This is not, Ruby comes to realize, just about keeping things alive, but about choosing to truly live the life you were given. Life keeps going, as beautiful and strange as it may be, and we can hope that this young author will keep going, and keep writing. Read More »
