More from the Stacks: The Horse, After This, Warlight, The Comfort of Ghosts

 

 

From the Stacks II

 

Here’s more from my literature clean out efforts, with more to come!

 

 

Sometimes fate thrusts a book into your hands you’d probably overlook otherwise. Such a novel is The Horse (2024, 192 pages), a short work from Willy Vlautin. An old musicians’ joke has it that life goes downhill the day you get a guitar. That’s the story of Al Ward, who got one from one of his mother’s boyfriends: a 1958 butterscotch Telecaster. Al wasn’t much for school, but he became a fine picker and composed hundreds of songs, mostly old-style country western, though he wasn’t keen on the genre. Vlautin tells Al’s story with a lot of flashback memories that takes us from the first time he went on the road, inside the truck stop bands that were going nowhere, and gigs with polished outfits that almost made it. In the present he’s living on inherited land in a Nevada ghost town that’s miles from anywhere. He survives on booze, music, Campbell’s soup, old memories, and few old compadres who help out. One day a blind horse wanders onto his property that triggers–see what I did there– memories of heartbreaks and losses. What does a guy who has been mostly reactive, lives as a hermit, and knows nothing about horses do next? It’s a poignant tale that’s by turn poignant, funny, and sad. ★★★★

 

 

 

How I love the literary prose of Alice McDermott. McDermott’s characters embody the broader changes in post-World War II American society. After This (2006, 279 pages)  introduces us to Mary, an Irish-American gal in a Manhattan typing pool with sad sack Pauline. Mary ponders whether she will get married, but by page 19 she is Mrs. John Keane and well on her way to birthing four children: Jacob, Michael, Annie, and Claire. Manhattan gives way to blue-collar life on Long Island. John, a vet, has a limp from the war, but also bearing scars from being older than Mary and discomfort with how fast the world is changing. Jacob is named for one of John’s war comrades but is ridiculed for having a Jewish name and becomes reclusive. Michael, though, is a rambunctious kid with his toy soldiers and a bit of a troublemaker. Annie will be an early adopter of social mores; Claire, the youngest, is pious and saintly. After This takes us from the early 50s through the Nixon years of the 1970s and is full of unexpected surprises. John and Mary struggle to make sense of a life that’s not as they imagined it. I can’t begin to do justice to this amazing book in a capsule review, but suffice it to say that McDermott so expertly captures small details that define the Zeitgeists of the 1950s and 60s that you’ll feel the wax paper crumble, smell the Brylcreem, and experience John’s anxiety over Pauline, his ethnic neighbors, and the moral gap between duty and the Vietnam War. Seldom has the shift from a faith-based to a questioning society been captured with such elegance. ★★★★★

 

 

 

 

Speaking of great stylists, Michael Ondaatje fits that bill. Many readers (and film fans) know him for his Booker Prize-winning The English Patient, but if you’d like to delve into his writing more deeply, Warlight (2018, 285 pages) is a superb novel. It delves into the question of when a war ends. Warlight opens in 1945 after the defeat of Germany and flashes back to the days of the Blitz of London. As you imagine, London and much of Europe are years away from reconstructing what was destroyed by bombs and battles, but that’s not the rubble on the minds of Nathaniel or his older sister, Rachel. During the Blitz, their parents left them in the hands of Walter, whom they call The Moth. The official story is that their father had business in Asia and that their mother went to be with him. That’s untrue, but where did they go and why? Warlight is told mostly from Nathaniel’s point of view. To say that he and his sister had a very unusual path to maturity undersells matters. Warlight has some of the characteristics of a coming of age tale–education, first love, new experiences–but theirs is also a home through which other dodgy people pass, including The Darter, whom they suspect is a criminal. Imagine also misty morning drop-offs along the Thames, people with foreign accents, vague reassurances, trips to smuggle greyhounds to dog tracks, the return of a parent, a death, and Nathaniel’s 12-year-search for the truth. How all of this connects to a kid thatching a roof is yours to discover. ★★★★★

 

 

 

The Comfort of Ghosts (2014, 338 pages) is also set in England during and after World War II. Is has been billed as the final installment of the Maisie Dobbs mysteries of author Jacqueline Winspear. You need not have read them all to appreciate this one, though it helps to know that Maisie grew up on an estate where her parents were domestics, was a nurse during World War I, lost her husband, and became a ward/heir of the estate owners. She is also a psychologist and private investigator married to an American diplomat and has oodles of money. As a PI, she’s more like a middle-aged version of Jane Marple than a dashing Sherlock Holmes. After the war quite a few empty or partially destroyed domiciles became home to squatters hoping that owners would not return. A delirious, weakened man makes his way to one and is cared for by a group of fearful street children surviving by theft, subterfuge, and wit. As Maise investigates a sinister wartime plot, she will meet the children and their patient. Winspear takes us inside a wartime program of which very few people know. As in Warlight we see that what comes after a war is over can be as fraught as the war itself. Note, though, that the two books are quite different. There is more grit in Warlight; The Comfort of Ghosts is more genteel. ★★★ ½

Dreaming Walls: Old New York versus the New

 

Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel (2022)

Directed by Mya Duverdier and Amélie Elmbt

Magnolia Pictures, 80 minutes, not-rated

★★★★

 

Dreaming Walls is billed as a documentary, but it’s also a ghost story. The film looks at both a building and a cavalcade of artists, beatniks, bohemians, counterculture figures, celebrities, misfits, poets, punk rockers, and radicals who lived at or passed through New York City’s Chelsea Hotel. That’s a long list that includes: Dylan (both Bob D. and D. Thomas), Leonard Cohen, Salvador Dali, Jane Fonda, Alan Ginsberg, Ethan Hawke, Jimi Hendrix, Jack Kerouac, Willem de Kooning, Janis Joplin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bette Midler, Marilyn Monroe, Phil Ochs, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, and most of his “superstars.” Warhol famously used the hotel as the backdrop for his 1965 underground film Chelsea Girls.

 

Dreaming Walls is all the more a ghost story courtesy of the decision of directors Mya Duverdier and Amélie Elmbt to shoot much of it as “layered” movie with sharp focus present-day footage with shadowy stock film montage of past residents running in the background. The eerie soundtrack of Michael Andrews lends a paranormal feel, as does our discomfort at viewing the remaining fulltime residents of the Chelsea puttering their way around the construction rubble as the old 1883 building is slowly converted into a mid-century modern themed luxury hotel. With few exceptions–like multimedia artist Steve Willis–most of the residents living in rent-controlled spaces are husks of their younger selves whose occupancy will expire as soon as they do. We see artist Bettina Grossman and dancer/choreographer Merle Lister-Levine, who is our voiceover for much of the film, negotiating long detours with their walkers or seeking help with getting their parcels to upper rooms because of out-of-service elevators. Speaking of ghosts, 94-year-old Grossman died in 2022, as did Lister-Levine’s elderly husband. If you need any more ghosts, the Chelsea Hotel is where Sid Vicious was accused of murdering Nancy Spungen.

 

Whether or not you think Sid killed Nancy, the Chelsea Hotel was a dodgy place from the 1970s on. Sex, drugs, wild parties, deferred maintenance, the anarchic views of residents, celebrity tantrums, and a laissez-faire manager turned the Chelsea into something resembling a decaying/decadent commune. Dreaming Walls provides a quick overview of the Chelsea’s  circular path from a Gilded Age luxury hotel in 1883 to a residency hotel in the early 20^th century to a haven for non-conformists from the 1930s into the early 21^st century, and back to a luxury hotel after 2022. Plan on about $600/night if you want to stay there during high season these days. Through all of this old debates rage: old New York versus modern New York, gentrification versus cheap lodging, the morality of displacing long-time residents….

 

Whatever its iteration, it’s easy to see the Chelsea is, as architects say, a building with good bones. Amazing grill work, light fixtures, lounges, and public gathering places have been home to ground floor concerts, restaurants, office spaces, retail shops, and easy access for offbeat New Yorkers who weren’t living in Greenwich Village. 

 

Through it all viewers can’t help but think about the famous question posed by theologian/historian Francis Schaeffer in 1976: How shall we then live? As we hear Grossman speak of hanging original art in the staircase or watch barely mobile Lister pose a dancer draped over a railing, are we experiencing a reminder of how to live in a creative community or the last light of a played out aesthetic?

 

However we come down on such questions, we know the answer to where things are headed. It says volumes to know that this documentary won awards in Europe, but was off the radar screen in the United States. In the showdown between affordability and what the market will bear, counterculture and mainstream culture, and bohemians versus capitalists, on whom/what would you place your bets? Dreaming Walls is a fascinating film in which the final ghost is the Chelsea Hotel itself. The old Chelsea has become an artifact. Depending upon your personal values you can chant “The Chelsea is dead” or Long live the Chelsea.”

 

Rob Weir

No Hard Feelings? I Have a Few

 

 

 

 

 

No Hard Feelings (2023)

Directed by Gene Stupnitsky

Sony Pictures Releasing, 103 minutes, R (nudity, sexuality, language)

★★

 

No Hard Feelings is the kind of film that Hollywood critics too young to remember that good comedy has barbs not just dumb situations, label “charming.” Oh dear. Let me state from the get-go that the premise of this film is that 19-year-old Percy Beckman (Andrew Barth Feldman) spends a lot of the movie saying he does not want to have sex with Jennifer Lawrence. Now there’s a statement no man, woman, Vogon, or inanimate object would say–ever!

 

This is a coming of age film that riffs off American Pie, Risky Business, The Breakfast Club, and Clueless without the raunch of the first, the laughs of the second, the coolness factor of the third, or a (yes) a clue like the fourth. Director Gene Stupnitsky cowrote No Hard Feelings with John Phillips. It’s your standard boy-needs-to-lose-his-virginity movie whose only twist is that this is his parents’ point of view, not Percy’s. He is a smart but unpopular loner who stays in his room a lot and still considers his nanny a friend. Mom Allison (Laura Benanti) and dad Laird Beckman (Matthew Broderick) think that Percy needs to date and have sex before attending Princeton in the fall and are willing to give a car to a woman in her 20s who will school him in the birds and bees.

 

Stupnitsky and Phillips aver that this was an actual ad on Craigslist, which is a sad commentary on American society. Lawrence plays Maddie Barker, whose own car is about to be impounded by the ex-boyfriend she ghosted. Her traffic fines and lack of registration are among the many bills she owns as she tries to hold onto her deceased mother’s home in Montauk. This forces her to roller blade across town to the Beckmans’ upscale home and talk her way into the assignment, though she’s 32, not in her twenties. She first meets Percy at his job in an animal shelter–Chekov’s gun alert!–(barely) dressed in a skintight dress, heels, and straps that “accidentally” fall down to expose a breast. How “smart” can Percy be if he still thinks Maddie wants to adopt a dog?

 

At heart this is a movie about a cougar stalking her prey for purely materialistic reasons. The question of “Will they or won’t they?” could be seen as a big striptease, except that this happens much earlier in the film when Maddie browbeats Percy into going skinny dipping if she promises not to try to have sex with him. Huh? Call the White Cane Program! To sustain what The Mikado called “a bald and unconvincing narrative,” No Hard Feelings stretches matters by stitching in all manner of  threads: spitting out Long Island Iced Tea, getting sick at a graduation party, the contrast in date formal wear, Maddie’s friends who, like her, can’t afford to live in Montauk–shades of Mystic Pizza–and premature ejaculation. Are you doubled over with laughter yet? There’s also a wrecked car scenario cribbed from, yes, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I could almost hear Matthew Broderick thinking, “How in the name of Zeus, Odin, and Ahura-Mazda did I get so freaking old that my career has come to this?”

 

I should say, however, that both Feldman and Lawrence did well with what the script asked them to do. Feldman is the vacillator and Lawrence the vixen. Lawrence was praised for her physical comedy, which you can take with a small grain of salt given that the film and Lawrence also got Golden Globe nominations. One wonders, though, about tiny cameos for Zahn McClarnon (Native American), Hasan Minhaj (South Asian American), and Amalia Yoo (Korean/Puerto Rican American), which are color props to tick PC boxes. I’ll also give the film credit for introducing to me an unfamiliar term. Several reviewers blasted the film for “sexual grooming.” I guess that’s a known thing, but I had to look it up. (I also don’t think it applies as 19-year-olds are not minors under the law.)

 

Still, the DVD box sports a cover with the word “Pretty” over Lawrence’s head and “Awkward” over that of Feldman. If you wanted a two-word review, “pretty awkward” would suffice. Another short judgment might be: who would go through this for a used Buick?

 

Rob Weir