Short Takes
August 15, 2013
‘Blue Jasmine’ — a minority view
Almost every critic flipped for “Blue Jasmine.” Most of my friends swooned. My wife was moved. I must have seen a different film, because I winced early and often at Woody Allen’s recreation of “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
The story in brief: Jasmine has fled New York, where her husband was convicted of financial fraud and she lost both her marriage and his fortune. Now she’s in San Francisco, staying with her sister, who works as a grocery cashier and has a predictable blue-collar boyfriend. It’s hard going for Jasmine until she meets the next man who might take care of her, an attractive widower contemplating a political career. He has an empty house. She claims to be an interior decorator. You know what follows.
Set aside the dialogue that covers the same ground over and over and over (“Your husband was a crook!” “You never had time for us when you were on top!” “They found you talking to yourself on the street!”) and consider just the romance with the politico. Her lover — or a shopkeeper — never suggests that she use her resale number to get a discount. And considering that her fiancé literally casts Jasmine for the role as Campaign Asset, it seemed odd — very, very odd — that he never bothered to Google her.
But I think I understand why otherwise critical people cheer this movie, which is on its way to becoming Allen’s biggest commercial hit. Two words: Cate Blanchett. Always amazing, she outdoes herself here. If you had to read Woody Allen’s screenplay, you’d say it was lazy and cliché-drenched. But Blanchett breathes life into clichés. You actually believe that she has a chance of making a new life for herself. As everyone says, she gets an Academy Award nomination for this role.
Blanchett is so remarkable and Allen’s satiric scenes in the Hamptons and the East Side of Manhattan are so diverting that it’s easy to miss the message of the film: Jasmine never had a chance. She’s lost her money. Her illusions are all she has left. A 1 percenter becomes a 99 percenter. And then she’s ground down again.
A tragic story? In other hands, perhaps. But the way Woody Allen has set it up, you’re too busy sneering at the film’s rich East Siders and Hamptonites to care deeply about the woman they’ve cast off.
July 14, 2013
Joan Schenkar on James Purdy: The Oddball of American Literature
Joan Schenkar, author of The Talented Miss Highsmith, champions a long-neglected writer, now back in print.
James Purdy (1914-2009) is the Oddball of American Literature — surely one of the oddest ever to be lobbed over the National Net. He writes in a style entirely his own: that of a lavender uncle who decorates his closet with the corpses of the American Dream. His antique vocabulary accoutres these noirish creations with fanciful foulards and beautiful braces. He is nothing if not unsettling.
Purdy belongs in the company — though not exactly in the presence — of writers like Djuna Barnes, Jane Bowles, and Patricia Highsmith: writers who brought back from the ends of their nerves strange new terroirs with which their names are now associated. (In other work, I have given Miss Highsmith’s imaginative terrain a local habitation and a handle: "Highsmith Country." Mr. Purdy’s territory, which mixes races as well as sexual offenses, is waiting for its place-card.)
Eccentricity, wit and excellence are the private clubs to which Purdy’s clawing peculiarity and fanged approach to phrasing admitted him — and his fellow club members welcomed him extravagantly. Dame Edith Sitwell said Purdy would "come to be recognized as one of the greatest living writers of fiction in our language;" Dorothy Parker opined he was a "writer of the highest rank in originality, insight and power;" Gore Vidal called him "an authentic American genius."
Purdy’s short stories have been collected and published for the first time by Norton/Liveright in "The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy." [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.], accompanied by a snappy introduction from another witty eccentric, John Waters. With this volume, and with the reissue of his 1965 novel, "Cabot Wright Begins,"
James Purdy’s publishers have done us all a favor. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
July 11, 2013
Two American Families: How do they manage?
Did you watch the Frontline documentary? (You still can, online.) It tracks two Milwaukee families, one African-American, one white, over 20 years, as they struggle to stay in the middle class. Weird timing for me; I’d just finished writing about one of the richest families in Milwaukee. So watching this documentary wasn’t like watching another part of town. More like another planet. A planet of people with remarkable tenacity. Over and over I thought: How do they keep on? I couldn’t.
Marcie lives in Milwaukee. She was kind enough to watch the documentary and comment: “I’m still reeling. I was teaching in the Welfare to Work program started in the 90’s by the Clinton administration with the best of intentions. (It failed.) Last night’s program miraculously, brilliantly, captured the truth. Heartbreaking in how we’ve colossally failed hard-working American families and heartbreaking that the mother of the Stanley family believed she had personally failed. Watching ‘Two American Families’ made me think about our fragility, how hard it can be to raise a family, even with the most basic expectations – it made me think about love.”
June 30, 2013
Andre Aciman: “Have I ever felt at home at Harvard, at home in America?”
André Aciman, an Egyptian exile, came to Harvard in the late 1970s for a Ph.D. Now Aciman, one of our most stylish writers, has published “Harvard Square,” a novel about an Egyptian exile who comes to Harvard in the late 1970s for a Ph.D. What gives? I explain all in Harvard Magazine. [To buy the book, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]