My third book, Small Rain, comes out on September 3. Please pre-order by asking for it at your local bookstore, or through any of these links: Bookshop, Powells, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Amazon. There are even more links at the Macmillan page.
Tickets for David T. Little’s operatic adaptation of my first novel, What Belongs to You, directed by the iconic choreographer Mark Morris and starring Grammy–winning tenor Karim Sulayman, are now available. Please join us at the University of Richmond’s Modlin Center for performances on September 26th & 28th, and for a (free!) panel discussion with Little, Mark Morris, Alan Pierson, and me on September 27th.
This is a free newsletter. If you’re able, please consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber.
I had a wildly vivid dream the other night, a new variation on an old theme. I was at music camp, Interlochen or Tanglewood, though in real life I was never a camper at either, and somehow I was there not as a singer but as a composer and violinist. The problem was that I had lied my way in: I don’t remember if I was really a composer in the dream, but I had certainly never touched a violin in my life. But I was assigned to be part of a string quartet, and in the dream I was aware that, several days in, I had exhausted all my excuses for missing rehearsals: my quartet mates were exasperated and insisting that I needed to show up already and play. This was the moment the dream inhabited, extended, suspended: walking to rehearsal, knowing I was going to be revealed as a fraud, trying to come up with some miracle save. I could break my hand, maybe, or (a more extreme option) the violin.
As I say, a variation on a theme. I have dreams like this often enough, as lots of people do; we live in an anxious age. In my most common scenario, I discover I’ve been enrolled all semester in a class I’ve never attended, and have to take a final on a subject I know nothing about. But there was something different about this dream, maybe just because the dread I felt was so vivid: I could hear the sound I would make, humiliating, discrediting, when I drew the bow across the strings.
Anyway, that’s pretty much a perfect representation of what it feels like to be two months away from a novel’s publication. Break the violin! may be my mantra on book tour, except that at this point I’m not sure there’s a violin to break.
The best that can be said about the misery of moving houses is that it’s a pretty good distraction from the misery of publishing a book. (The only thing more miserable would be not publishing a book.) I’ve been in Iowa City exactly three weeks. We arrived (me from New York, Luis from Madrid) to find various crises: a storm knocked a tree down behind our house—a small one, thank goodness, but it did some minor damage that we need to see to; and in the two years the cats were away mice moved into our basement and made the most extraordinary mess. This has made homecoming, already happy—they love the house and they love Luis—even happier for the cats, for Oppen especially, who was raised to be a barn cat and who steps into the fullness of his being only when he can hunt; but my vegetarian heart has quailed. Better cats than exterminators, though, and so far as we can tell the mice seem to have gotten the message; at least Oppen is spending much less time in the basement.
I feel crazy when I don’t have a functional work space, and so in the weeks that Luis and I were waiting for our stuff to arrive from New York, and then in the resulting chaos of boxes, I’ve been escaping to my favorite café. It’s called Coffee Emporium now but I’ll always think of it as High Ground, the name it had for my first decade in town. (Nothing else about the café has changed; even the wifi network is still “High Ground.”) That’s where I am now, at the same table where I remember writing “Gospodar,” the second chapter of Cleanness—the first thing I wrote after moving back to the States in 2013. I’ve been spending a few hours here pretty much every morning before heading home to more unpacking. We’re slowly getting things in shape: my desk is in place, finally, the desk I bought for the apartment in New York, which is not at all fancy but is bigger than the desk I had here; and the art is mostly up on the walls; and when our twice-delayed-already new bookshelves arrive (supposedly this week) we’ll be able to unpack the final boxes of books.
It has been impossible to do any sustained thinking, and what forces I’ve had I’ve been pouring into an essay on James Baldwin—an essay I’ve been trying to write for years, and a version of which I’ll be giving as a craft talk at Bread Loaf in August. Which means I finally have to write it, no more delay and no faking, another reason I’m having anxiety dreams. It also means that the thoughtful, sustained Substacks I still intend to write will remain unwritten for a bit longer. In lieu of those, this week I thought I’d share some quick thoughts about the movies Luis and I have seen since my arrival. I mentioned in my last newsletter Iowa City’s independent cinema, FilmScene; we’ve been visiting it often. Here are some thoughts, uncharacteristically spoiler-free (I think), on a few things I’ve enjoyed.
*
Humanist Vampire Seeks Consenting Suicidal Person
Luis and I saw this last night, and we both loved it. The first feature from Canadian writer-director Ariane Louis-Seize (she shares a writing credit on the film with Christine Doyon), it’s impeccably stylish and beautifully acted, a vampire love story that owes less to Twilight (thank God) or Interview than to John Hughes romcoms and the sweeter goth stylings of 1990s Tim Burton. It begins in a middle class Québécois household, with an otherwise typical family who just happen to be vampires. They’ve arranged for a clown for their daughter’s birthday, a double gift: a bit of comedy and magic, then dinner. But instead of joining in the feast, young Sasha is traumatized by watching her family feed: thanks to a bit of faulty emotional wiring, she responds to scenes of violence with compassion, not appetite; in a case of psychosomatic delayed development, her fangs refuse to come in. (She drinks from IV bags of blood, spoils of her put-upon mother’s hunts.) Maybe all vampire stories are existential parables; I’ll always be engaged by the drama of a being radically opposed, as really we all should be, to the conditions of her own survival.
Her oddball match is Paul, a sweetly outcast waif of a boy in love with death. Both Sara Montpetit, as Sasha, and Félix-Antoine Bénard as Paul are wonderful; Bénard’s huge, expressive, vulnerable eyes call equally to mind Edward Scissorhands and a silent-screen ingenue. Montpetit beautifully humanizes the emo goth-girl archetype, at once desperately desiring Paul—as a vampire desires, I mean: she wants to eat him—but also wanting to love him in a less literally consuming, more human way. Her fangs finally come in, she discovers, whenever he’s in peril. (Her fangs also put him at greater peril, a nice feedback loop.) Paul, for his part, is eager to be eaten, to die for a good cause, as he says. As a delaying tactic—she’s never killed before, she’s nervous—Sasha insists he act out a dying wish; the bulk of the film involves this midnight quest, his small acts of revenge against high-school tormentors.
The film traces familiar emotional contours, but renovates them, too. It’s beautifully written; even the smallest characters spring to life. Sasha’s family is immense fun to spend time with, lovably and recognizably dysfunctional, with only touches, never overbearing, of Addams Family weirdness. The secondary performances are uniformly wonderful, maybe especially that of Noémie O’Farrell as Sasha’s cousin Denise, who tries to initiate Sasha into the joys of picking up dumb, expendable boys. (O’Farrell, in the film at least, bears an uncanny resemblance to Kate McKinnon, which only increases her appeal.)
It’s all great fun, and features the most charming dance scene I’ve seen in a recent film. Highly recommended. Not least because it’s a joy to spend a couple of hours immersed in the very beautiful music of Québécois French, which we get too few chances to relish in American movie houses.
*
Thelma
Another film with recognizable contours, a terrifically clever variation on a Mission Impossible–style heist revenge. Thelma Post, 93 years old, is scammed of $10,000 when she receives a call saying that her beloved grandson has been arrested. Her family see this as a sign of her inability to live alone (her husband of many decades died two years before) and the cops are no help, so Thelma decides to get her money back herself. With the help of her friend Ben (Richard Roundtree, terrific) and his scooter, she crosses LA to confront her scammers.
I don’t think Thelma renovates its genre sources as thoroughly or successfully as Humanist Vampire, and things get unpleasantly treacly for a bit half-way through. But when it sticks to action-comedy beats I found it immensely satisfying and fun. And instructive, since satisfaction isn’t lessened by coming on a radically reduced scale. Recent Hollywood blockbusters, not to mention Netflix series, have illustrated the diminishing returns of ever-greater thrills. (In narratives as in economies, the myth of eternal growth has devastating consequences.) In Thelma, there’s no threat of the end of the world, no elaborate stunts; the chase scenes are staged with mobility scooters. But it all works, it’s all exciting, and it offers a lesson I wish more narrative artists, in whatever medium, would study: things don’t always have to get bigger and busier, more and more frantic; smaller canvases, with events and effects scaled to their dimensions, can offer equal satisfaction. What matters most in Thelma is that the emotional stakes are high: an elderly woman insisting on her dignity.
June Squibb is wonderful beyond words. Now 94, she’s had a long and beloved career as a character actor; this is her first leading role. She commands the screen, fully inhabiting determination, fear, defeatedness, self-delight. May she have many more showcases. She’s matched in the film by another wonderful supporting cast, especially Fred Hechinger as her grandson, her relationship with whom is beautifully drawn, intimate and conspiratorial. Also wonderful: Parker Posey, alt-film queen of my youth, in neurotic perpetual motion, equally and movingly bedraggled in her roles of daughter and mother.
I can’t think of another film that treats so seriously the lives of nonagenarians, and in this the film overcomes its sentimental instincts. We see the full gamut of old age: Thelma and Ben’s vitality is juxtaposed with mute and bed-bound nursing home residents. At one point Thelma, heartbreakingly, ticks off the names of friends who have died; but one also gets a sense of social life in enlivening cameos from other elders: Ivy Jones, Annie Korzen, Malcolm McDowell. The movie’s most moving scene comes when Ben and Thelma visit their friend Mona, whom they find impeccably dressed in her roach-infested home, watching television footage of birds—clearly a radically different, radically diminished person from the friend they remember. As Mona, the 95-year-old Bunny Levine is extraordinary in the few moments she has on screen, at once desperately sad and invincibly dignified.
A light-hearted, charming romp that takes death seriously. It’s worth your time.
*
Ghostlight
Ghostlight has no business being as moving as it is. Its large-scale contours are embarrassingly broad: a burly, emotionally mute, old-school man’s man construction worker stumbles into community theater and is reconciled to his son’s suicide by the crypt scene in Romeo and Juliet. Come on. The film goes for a Shakespearean play-within-a-play structure, with a theater troupe as colorfully characterized as Bottom’s players in Midsummer Night’s Dream. But alas there’s no “What, dead, my dove?” sublimity, and the theater scenes, despite the valiant efforts of Dolly de Leon and Tommy Rivera-Vega, are the least compelling part of the film.
What’s extraordinary are the scenes between Dan, that construction worker; his wife, Sharon; and their daughter, Daisy. In these scenes the film is a gorgeously drawn, very moving portrait of a family being blown apart in a suicide’s ongoing blast. The three actors—Keith Kupferer, Tara Mallen, and Katherine Mallen Kupferer—are a real-life family, which may account for the lived-in quality of their scenes together, their rare authenticity. Most film portrayals of coming-apart families get the pitch wrong, to my ear; but in Ghostlight you see, achingly, love as much as discord. Another kind of story that I always find compelling: people trying, and maybe failing, in desperately difficult circumstances, to love one another.
That more intimate story wins out, in my experience of the film, over the unconvincing theater shenanigans. It’s really Dan’s movie (though Daisy and Sharon are beautifully acted), and Kupferer plays emotionally shut-down masculinity with great eloquence. You can imagine a different movie, maybe much longer and slower, less mainstream in its beats, that might really inhabit the theater and its artmaking, and so make Dan’s emotional opening up and reconciliation with his son’s decisions credible; maybe then the theme of theater as a genuinely therapeutic, soul-building endeavor wouldn’t ring so hollow, even to a sympathetic ear. This isn’t that movie, but it’s full of beautiful moments.
*
Janet Planet
Janet Planet, the first feature from Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Annie Baker, deserves its own essay, not just a few paragraphs; in ambition and achievement it’s of a different order from the other films I’ve written about here. But like them (and maybe like much of the art I like best) it claims a small canvas: a single summer in the life of Janet and her 11-year-old daughter, Lacy. It’s the early 1990s, we’re in rural Massachusetts, and the film nails place and time and Zeitgeist, the peculiar flavor of patchouli-scented vaguely pagan mostly white liberalism that reigned for a few years in the pages of the Whole Earth catalog.
Title and Julianne Nicholson’s absolutely luminous performance aside, it’s really Lacy’s movie, and Zoe Ziegler gives one of the great child performances I know. I’m not sure I’ve seen a film that captures so uncannily the feel of solitary childhood summers, their languors and longueurs; Jean Stafford’s great novel The Mountain Lion might come closest. Lacy practices piano on a tiny electric keyboard, she stages elaborate dinners with little figurines in a dollhouse, she wonders why she doesn’t have friends. In a film of close shots, Ziegler’s face is inexhaustibly interesting, at once vulnerable and distant, odd in the best, most eloquent sense of the word. She’s smart, quirky, independent; she’s desperate for love. Her relationship with her mother is beautifully and disquietingly close, and the film captures it with excruciating intimacy.
Every shot is gorgeous—it’s one of the most visually beautiful films I’ve ever seen—and also unpretentious; there’s a kind of winning, demotic elegance that feels distinctive, the product of a homegrown auteur. I was mesmerized for much of the film, and I need to see it again—it was in its final days at FilmScene when I arrived last month, and Luis and I caught one of the last showings. But on a first viewing, I wasn’t as entirely, as unreservedly won over as some of my friends have been. Nearly every scene with Lacey alone, or with Lacey and Janet, felt right to me. But the film’s narrative is structured in three chapters, each of which concerns a lover or friend of Janet’s who drifts in and then out of their lives. I had a hard time—again, on a first viewing; I don’t doubt that I’ll feel differently when I see it again—sensing how these episodes added up to something satisfyingly coherent, how the parts enriched and ramified each other. This was true even in the second and most substantial chapter, enlivened by a brilliant performance from Sophie Okonedo. By the third chapter, the supposed love object was so clearly gestural, insubstantial, that, in what I think is the film’s unique departure from narrative realism, he simply vanishes from one frame to the next.
Even so, I haven’t stopped thinking about the film in the weeks since I saw it—and the ending moments are kind of transcendentally right, a perfect exit from the narrative, or non-narrative, of the film. Whether my reservations persist or are conquered by future viewings, it has made me very eager for whatever Baker does next. In the meantime, I’ll be catching up on her plays.
As always, thanks for reading—
G.
Oh, dude.
“That’s where I am now, at the same table where I remember writing “Gospodar,” the second chapter of Cleanness—the first thing I wrote after moving back to the States in 2013.”
You have no idea how much pleasure it brings me to hear where and how Cleanness was written. Hell yeah.