Summer 2010... Books

 Two books I just finished and definitely recommend:
1. Pillars of the Earth... yes, it was written over 20 years ago by Ken Follett, but I'm so glad I got around to it on the Nook.  Now I get to watch an 8-part mini series on STARZ, which I don't have and do not plan on subscribing to. I'll figure something out. Oh, yes, the book has a gazillion pages.

2. Tinkers ... well written, interesting first novel about a man experiencing his final days... meticulous detail,  stream of consciousness type of narrative, but not quite --  like "The Jilting of Granny Wetherell."

On tap:
Reliable Wife (on the Nook)
City of Thieves (Nooking it)
Namesake (a reread)
Life of Pi (another reread)
For One More Day (A Mitch Albom book that will take 2 hours, tops)
A Thousand Splendid Suns
The Things The Carried 
Ethan Frome (another reread)
and some kiddie lit..
Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Westing Game
Hunger Games

I really should take a crack at completing all the titles on the Bethpage Summer reading list. Check out shelfari.com, a cool place to keep track of, review, and discuss books you're reading now, planning to read, and have already read.

Denzel Washington Triumphs in August Wilson's Fences

I've never attended a Broadway show by myself, a movie either. I attended Fences solo,  a play I have read and taught many times and have never seen performed, live or on film. It was one of the most profound theatrical experiences I have ever had. Yet at times, irritating. Many audience members, I think, were more smitten by Denzel Washington's presence than attuned, at times, to Troy Maxson's powerful, flawed, yet profound character. Or maybe, I was the one out of tune.
In any case,  the revival of Wilson's Pulitzer Prize winning classic was discussed far better than I could in this week's America magazine under the title An American Tragedy by Rob Weinert-Kendt.

It seems only fitting, then, that this string of shows is capped by a rip-roaring revival of August Wilson’s 1987 Pulitzer-winner, “Fences,” starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis as Troy and Rose Maxson, a couple facing challenges from without and within Pittsburgh’s Hill District in the late 1950s. Given that Troy is a retired baseball star from the long-defunct Negro Leagues, the sports metaphor is irresistible: With bases loaded and a couple of outs (the early closing of “Ragtime” and “Finian’s Rainbow”), Wilson’s family drama constitutes a gratifying grand slam.

We should not let the whooping cheers that greet not only the headlining stars but the entire “Fences” team distract us from the play’s tragic weight or from its dire but not entirely despairing diagnosis of the nation’s social ills in microcosm. Like most of the 10 plays Wilson wrote in his cruelly brief life (one play set in each decade of the 20th century), “Fences” portrays a people in transition, pinned between American history and the American promise. Typically, their urgent struggle to claim both their patch of earth and their human dignity only half succeeds. Wilson’s characters do usually manage to locate some sense of their authentic self or “their song,” as the conjurer Bynum memorably put it in Wilson’s masterpiece “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” (seen on Broadway last season). In the process they often pay with their lives, their peace of mind or, most commonly and wrenchingly, with severe collateral damage to their families and children.

“Fences” could be a case study out of The Moynihan Report, Senator Patrick Moynihan’s analysis of the status of the underclass in this country in the 1960s, specifically African-Americans. By play’s end, Troy can count one child each by three different women. All his progeny are hovering in the sympathetic but sturdy orbit of the only woman he married, long-suffering Rose, herself the child of what might charitably be called an “extended” family. It’s not a new point, but Wilson makes it with force over and over, and nowhere more forcefully than in “Fences”: The women keep the home fires burning while the men are off finding themselves, often in contention with each other. That is a worthy quest, no doubt, but all too often it includes a component of sexual conquest alongside other emblems of validation. Wilson created many exemplars of both the rover and the homebody in his plays, but no couple so iconic as Troy and Rose. None of his loyal women is more tested than Rose, and none of his questing men crash down to earth with a greater thud than Troy.

For while some of Wilson’s heroes are lone wolves or gadabouts whose ties to home or hearth are gossamer-thin, Troy is an innately social creature, as entangled in the relationships that sustain him as he is restless for the next new thing. A garbage collector who works the back end of the truck with his buddy Bono (Stephen Mckinley Henderson, a Wilson expert who makes the role look easy), Troy is pushing management to let him move to the front of the truck, as it were, and become the city’s first black driver. He also has a wandering eye, despite his still-simmering marriage to Rose. And his brusque, even brutal treatment of his cowed teenage son, Cory (Chris Chalk), suggests that Troy stubbornly views family obligations as just that, no more and no less.

With his smiling good looks and hard-to-hide charm, Denzel Washington easily embodies Troy’s feisty good humor, his ribaldry, his comfort at the center of attention, so much that Wilson’s play almost settles into the rhythms of a good-natured sitcom. Washington seems typecast in these moments: He is a star playing a star, albeit a fading one. But it is in the “fading” part that Washington’s performance is ultimately revelatory. There is the searing monologue about a scrap with his own unloved, unlovable father; there are tall tales about wrestling with Death and the Devil, which grow less and less outlandish as the play rolls on.

Above all, there is the second-act tête-à-tête in which Troy quietly delivers to Rose a bombshell that will destroy their marriage and finally seal his isolation. It is a tough, gasp-worthy moment, in which an unsolicited confession from Troy unleashes a furious response from Rose, which Viola Davis turns into a bitterly effective aria. What’s easy to miss about this scene, with its heavy shudder of melodrama, is that Troy’s hand has not been forced; he has no reason to bring such bad news to his wife apart from his own confused sense of integrity. In its own awful way, it is an act of courage—one that, as it happens, utterly ignores his wife’s feelings, as she does not hesitate to point out, but an act of rare fortitude nonetheless.

This is Troy’s tragedy, and August Wilson’s unflinching point: A 53-year-old man might indeed still grapple for a sense of who he is and what he should be, even at the expense of those he loves. This is not only because he is a flawed male of the species, but because he still lives in a nation that does not recognize or validate his larger-than-life manhood. In part, you could say it is a matter of bad timing; Troy, after all, lives on the cusp of America’s huge civil rights breakthroughs. But even those triumphs have been interlaced with tragedy. When in 1968 Memphis garbage workers went on strike under the defiant slogan, “I Am a Man,” the nation’s greatest civil rights leader rushed to march with them. And we all know how Martin Luther King Jr.’s trip to Memphis ended.

The play continues until July 11, but the only tix available are "premiere" (See also "really expensive") or SRO which one can get at 10AM at the box office day of performance only. I might consider the latter option for another chance to see this outstanding play.

Sentences I Like

Up close the three men were a small anthology of body odors. (The Believers)


It was 1953, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs. (The Bell Jar)


It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young man in a possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife. (Pride and Prejudice)


So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. (The Great Gatsby)


If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.  (Catcher in the Rye)


First, the colors.
  Then the humans.
  That's usually how I see things.
  Or at least I try.  (The Book Thief)

All warfare is based on deception. (The Art of War)

It is only with one's heart that one can see clearly. What is essential is invisible to the eye. 
(The Little Prince)


"A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. "
— Tim O'Brien (The Things They Carried)


Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori  (Wilfred Owen 1918)


                         Goodnight, sweet prince
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. (Hamlet)