Diabolus ex Machina: Why The Brutalist Is So Bad
& other irresponsible Oscar opinions
Small Rain has been longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award. I’m honored to be in the company of the other nominees. You can see the full list here.
Many thanks to all of you who came to the first meeting of the To a Green Thought Book Club. I loved seeing you on the Zoom, and am grateful to your comments and questions for helping me deepen my reading of Dinaw Mengestu’s Someone Like Us. Our second meeting will be on April 20, when the book under discussion will be Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost. To join us, all you need to do is subscribe to this newsletter (or upgrade your subscription) at the Founding Member level. You can do that by clicking on the Subscribe button below. Email greenwellassistant@gmail.com with any questions. And for my thoughts about book clubs and why they’re great, click here.
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I’ve always been kind of charmed by it, actually, the creaky embarrassment of the deus ex machina; it happens all the time in baroque and classical opera. Think of the end of Glück’s Orfeo ed Eurydice, which the Met put on last season in Mark Morris’s very good production: Orpheus has looked back, Eurydice has been dragged down to the underworld again, hope is lost; and then Amor magically descends to save the day. An easy solution to a hard narrative problem, I guess, if you’re bent on a happy ending; though in opera it doesn’t really feel like that, maybe because opera (at its best, I’d say, almost) doesn’t really care about narrative problems. Instead it feels like emotional maximalism. Everybody gets to be tragic and sing beautiful sad music about Eurydice’s loss; then we get to be happy and sing beautiful joyful music about Eurydice’s restoration. Who’s going to complain?