Britt-Marie Was Here Covers Both Old and New Turf

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BRITT-MARIE WAS HERE  (2015)

By Fredrik Backman

Atria Books, 324 pp.

* * * ½

Let's see, a sometimes-cranky central character with OCD who is often unintentionally funny. Swedish author Fredrik Backman is on dangerous turf here; His titular figure in Britt-Marie Was Here is, in many ways, Ove in drag, the latter being the protagonist of his sensational debut A Man Called Ove. I almost set aside Britt-Marie, but luckily I persevered, as Backman imagines enough side journeys to avoid self-plagiarism.

Britt-Marie takes the biggest journey–away from her regimented suburban routine to the chaotic small town of Borg. Borg is a fictional place that we infer is an hour or so from Stockholm, but you know its type. Borg is a nowhere used-to-be town on the road to somewhere else. Backman describes it thus: "One remarkable thing about communities built along roads is that you can find just as many reasons for leaving them as excuses to stay. Some people never quite stop devoting themselves to one or the other." Think a cross between a town and a village that got kicked in the teeth by late 20^th century deindustrialization and then in the gut by the 21^st century financial crisis. Even if you live in Borg—a word from Old Norse that translates as stronghold, but also as credit—you know better than to bet dwindling resources on a future recovery. Credit is exactly how many locals survive in Borg. The main business is the local pizzeria, which is akin to a strip mall that also serves as a makeshift grocer, barber, car repair shop, bank, post office, black market, credit agency, and community center. Locals have names, but in such down-on-their-luck places nicknames proliferate: Pirate, Psycho, Bank, or just plain "Someone."

Britt-Marie is there because she's 63-years-old and has just left her husband, Kent, a self-styled "entrepreneur" who spends more time contemplating deals with "the Germans" than paying attention to her. Britt-Marie needs to be needed, but it's been years since Kent appreciated that, and she worries she will die without anyone every having known she existed. So it's off to an employment agency that sends her to Borg, to be the temporary caretaker of a community center slated for budget-cut closure right after the Christmas holiday. Never mind that Britt-Marie hasn't held a formal job since her youth, that her skills center mostly on cleaning, that that she believes a person's character cam be discerned from how he or she organizes their cutlery drawers, that she talks to a rat, or that she is sorely lacking in anything resembling people skills. Oddly, though, the children of Borg are drawn to her, as is a local police officer, Sven. Against all odds, Britt-Marie becomes immersed in the kids' soccer skirmishes, though she hasn't the slightest interest or knowledge of the game, and is appalled by untidy uniforms. ("Skirmish" is the best word for how these blue-collar throwaways play!)

As it transpires, Britt-Marie isn't the only one with offbeat ideas about human nature; most of the locals think you can tell all you need to know from which English football team a person supports. (Manchester United wins so much that its fans think both the team and they deserve to triumph continually. Liverpool supporters are the great middle: people who neither dazzle nor disappoint in big way. Aston Villa followers are just perverse!) That Britt-Marie should find herself the center of soccer madness is unexpected, unorthodox, and affecting. As in A Man Called Ove, Backman's soccer ball of circumstances careens over improbable turf, and when we least expect it, it poignantly rises and smacks us in the forehead. Okay—forced analogy. Guilty! But the point is that we, as readers, end up caring about characters that we'd otherwise ignore, just as we'd normally lock the car doors and made haste through towns like Borg. Above all, we care about how Britt-Marie resolves her own late-life existential crisis.

Britt-Marie Was Here is ultimately about the search for grace in its various guises. It is a deeply satisfying read that is, at turns, funny, melancholic, profound, and a bit contrived. We can forgive the small slips because Backman never stoops to pat answers and leaves us with just enough ambiguity to feel hopeful, but slightly unsure that we should.   Rob Weir

The Swans of Fifth Avenue a Delicious Read

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THE SWANS OF FIFTH AVENUE: A Novel (2016)

Melanie Benjamin

Delacorte Press, 369 pp.

* * * *

My late mother-in-law used to tell tales of post-World War Two New York City that made it sound like the most sophisticated place on earth. It might have been. Author Melanie Benjamin—the pen name for Melanie Miller Hauser–scored big with her 2013 novel The Aviator's Wife, but the Swans of Fifth Avenue is even more compelling. She takes us into the city my mother-in-law loved, but inside circles of which she could have only dreamed: those of what today we'd call the one-percent.

Benjamin's latest effort is subtitled "A Novel" because it fictionalizes dialogue and situations of real people. Her namesake "swans" (so dubbed in real-life) were New York socialites Barbara "Babe" Paley, the wife of CBS founder and magnate William S. Paley; Lady Nancy "Slim" Keith, a fashion model (barely) married to British royalty; Mexican-born beauty Gloria Guinness; actress, columnist, and dilettante C. Z. Guest, who once posed nude for Diego Rivera; and Pamela Churchill Hayward, later known as the Democratic Party hostess and diplomat bearing the last name of her third husband, W. Averell Harriman. Around our five swans circle a bouquet of women with slightly lesser pedigrees: actress Lauren Bacall; Washington Post heiress Katherine Graham; Italian Princess Maella Agnelli, the wife of Fiat's largest stockholder; fashion columnist Diana Vreeland; Rose Kennedy; and scores of others. It is a world that centers on Saxs Fifth Avenue, Bergdorf Goodman, the Hotel St. Regis, Vogue, Esquire, Vanity Fair, and lunches at posh venues such as 21, Le Pavillon, and Le Côte Basque. Those lunches, over which Babe Paley presided like a cross between a duchess and a saint, were the distaff equivalent of the Algonquin Table, a place where regal, beautiful women exchanged gossip, quips, and mutual support. Benjamin lets us know early on that we will be voyeurs of their lives. These women only "lunch," because they have private chefs to prepare dinners back in their private hotel suites. Almost none of the meticulously prepared petite fours and sandwiches are actually consumed. The cigarettes each chain-smoked were more than the custom of the time–elegance was handmaiden to a perpetual starvation diet.

It's our first clue that there is trouble in what outsiders saw as Paradise. These women graced the covers of style magazines, but their cultural capital was literally skin-deep, and their social power was a veritable fiction. They collected husbands like they shopped for jewels, but powerful men were happy to display such eye candy as confirmations of their importance–as long as sexual fidelity wasn't part of the bargain. Babe was practically a nun for having had just one previous husband, though Bill Paley had the promiscuous habits of an alley cat. For the women, though, shopping for diamonds and husbands was emblematic of stultifying boredom. Like swans, their primary role was to adorn the pond—in this case, their husbands' public world. They also collected fascinating people, a polite society version of court jesters. And into their early 1960s social scene pranced writer Truman Capote—a pet monkey for the swans.

Capote was everything the swans couldn't be: flamboyant, catty, naughty, openly arrogant, and unafraid to proclaim his own genius. His openly homosexual lifestyle was less prelude to the yet-to-emerge gay rights movement than an affirmation of the old adage that, if you're going to be swim outside of the mainstream, call a press conference before you jump, do so with both feet, and thrash about so outrageously that those tempted to condemn or fear you are instead amused. Benjamin leaves us with questions of who was playing whom. Was Capote a mere plaything for bored socialites, or did he use them to open doors that would have never opened on their own.? Except Babe didn't see it either way. She called Truman "True Heart," the only person who ever saw her without her face made up or her reserve set to high alert. Was theirs a strange kind of love, or was Capote incapable of loving anyone other than himself?

Once In Cold Blood was published in 1965, the press clippings confirmed Capote's high opinion of himself, though Benjamin leaves it to us to determine whether we are reading a tragedy or a study of megalomania. Capote (1924-84) never finished another book. In fact, he wrote very little of consequence in his time left on earth, except a vicious 1975 magazine article titled "Côte Basque, 1965" that told tales out of school and earned the ever-lasting enmity of the swans. Did it also break Babe's heart? Was Capote, in the end, exactly what he appeared to be: a mincing windbag fraud surviving on celebrity blood?*

The Swans of Fifth Avenue is a delicious, moving, and guilt-inducing read that is a 20^th century analog to Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence. Should we feel ashamed for eavesdropping? Smug and superior to those who thought they had it all? Is this a tale of hubris, or just a very sad story? Benjamin's final chapters, set amidst New York's descent into cheap glitz and tawdriness in the 1970s, rip the sheen off of the city's grandeur. When, she asks, did rich people stop living in hotels? That simple question makes us wonder if New York's graciousness was always just a gilded front, or if something magical and hopeful faded like the swans' beauty. A good book takes us to unfamiliar worlds and makes us ponder. This is a very good book indeed.

Rob Weir

*For the record, I am among those prone to seeing Capote as a charlatan. In Cold Blood was crisply written and was certainly unique at the time, but other works–especially Breakfast at Tiffany's–feel antiquated. Like his Southern friend Harper Lee, Capote may have only had one good book in him.         

Hunt for the Wilderpeople: Don't Miss It

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HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE  (2016)

Directed by Taika Waititi

Defender Films, 101 minutes, PG-13

* * * *

The late Roger Ebert once faced the questions every critic is asked at some point: Do you really think people listen to you? Do critics matter at all? In a moment of candor and insight Ebert admitted that in most cases his impact was minimal. How, after all, can a single voice stand against the Hollywood Hype Machine? In the case of blockbusters, people will go see the latest installment of Dumb and Dumber even if a critic declares it idiotic. Where critics matter is when they expose the public to wonders that fly under the radar screen and would otherwise be overlooked.

In that spirit, let me give four Eberts to the New Zealand film Hunt for the Wilderpeople. It’s not pathbreaking, there are no Oscar-worthy performances, and, truth be told, it’s pretty silly in a lot of places. In the hands of a hack director, in fact, it would be lightweight fluff. Luckily, Taika Waititi is no hack; Hunt for the Wilderpeople is an absolute delight that will make you smile from start to finish. If you’re a fan of the Kiwi band Flight of the Conchords you already know that few people on the planet do kooky as well as New Zealanders, and Waititi’s film hums to that groove. He sets the tone with a self-deprecating introduction to the movie that strays into absurdity, likes what it sees, and stays there. (Later he does an amusing cameo turn as a minister.)

Hunt for the Wilderpeople centers on a pudgy Maori foster child, Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison). Ricky is childcare caseworker Paula’s (Rachel House) worst nightmare. He's the incorrigible kid who washes out of every placement she makes. Paula has come to see him as the spawn of Satan, though Ricky’s really very smart, has a low tolerance for faux sweetness, and knows exactly which buttons to push. The action begins when Paula places Ricky with an older couple, Bella (Rima Te Wiata) and Hector (Sam Neill), who have a hardscrabble farm in the Coromandel boondocks. Bella is sweet as well, but also tough as nails, while menacing, scowling “Hec” wants nothing to do with Ricky—and he’s certainly not buying any of Ricky’s Auckland street thug swagger. This triangle is played out with a combination of poignancy and hilarity.

The film’s namesake hunt for the wilderpeople (pronounced will-der-people) begins when tragedy throws Ricky and Hec together for a six-month flight from Paula, who seeks to place Ricky in “juvie” (juvenile detention center). The film is, in essence, a combination manhunt/ caper film with Paula cast as a wackier version of The Fugitive’s Detective Gerard (fused with Nurse Ratched), except she’s seen so many bad American cop movies she's slightly unhinged. Good luck finding Hec in the “bush;” he doesn’t play survivalist, he is one. Enjoy hearty surrealistic laughs as our unlikely comrades negotiate the bush and encounter three of the most inept bounty hunters in history, not to mention the stark raving mad Psycho Sam (Rhys Darby).   

New Zealanders generally have low tolerance for pretense, egotism, or officiousness. Waititi has a field day satirizing formulaic religion, by-the-numbers bureaucracy, blow-dry TV blowhards, New Zealand “bloke” culture, and American-style machismo. The structure and vibe of Waititi’s film resembles Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, but it’s far wittier and it avoids the slapdash sloppiness that made Anderson’s film feel incomplete. The roly-poly Julian Dennison is exceedingly winning—perhaps the most affecting young actor out of New Zealand since Keisha Castle-Hughes in Whale Rider (2002). Sam Neill is, as he always has been, solid and malleable. Neill always makes us believe in his character, as he does with Jeremiah Johnson-like Hec. (Contrary to popular misconception, Sam Neill is a New Zealander, not an Australian.) As noted, House is suitably intense and demented, which makes her character fodder for lampoon. And let’s also give a shout-out for the New Zealand landscape, a character in its own right.

See this film—it’s too marvelous to miss. Then thank your faithful critic.

Rob Weir

Click here to hear Waititi explain some New Zealand slang. You’ll instantly see his wackiness. 

Want more NZ slang? Click here.

Nudes of the Prado Unveiled at the Clark

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SPLENDOR, MYTH, AND VISION: NUDES FROM THE PRADO

Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA

Through October 20

If you've been to the Prado, perhaps you've considered skipping the current show at the Clark Art Institute: Splendor, Myth, and Vision: Nudes from the Prado. After all, it's just 28 paintings, plus it's in Williamstown, a place no one confuses with Madrid. (In fact, I can't recall that anyone has ever uttered the words "exciting" and "Williamstown" in the same non-ironic sentence.) It would be a mistake to take this point of view.

Rubens, Fortuna--a manly girl

First off, several of these canvases—especially out-sized paintings by Titian and Rubens–have never before left Spain. (This show is a partial payback for the Clark's loan of 31 Renoirs in 2010-11.) But mainly, seeing these paintings in a small show like that of the Clark allows us to really look at them and, in the process, educate ourselves in new ways. I've been fortunate enough to have been at the Prado, where I saw scads of pictures from this show's stars: Tintoretto, Titian, Velasquez, Rubens, and others that once hung in the galleries of Philip II (1556-58) and Philip IV (1621-65), rulers when Spain was Europe's richest and most powerful kingdom and paintings were among the many precious commodities found in the royal coffers.

A recent talk on this show was titled "Art, Power, and Politics," and this sums up a better way to approach the nudes on view–especially Christendom's hypocritical attitudes about sex. In theory, our good Christian monarchs were supposed to focus on heavenly matters, not the temptations of the flesh, but because Spanish kings were so politically powerful, they convinced clerical censors to allow fleshy nudes in the royal palace so long as they were displayed in salon reservados hidden from the public areas of the palace. It helped also, if the pictures purported to recount Biblical or mythological themes. These made them didactic "art," not just a bunch of naked people upon which randy kings and courtiers could gaze. Oh yes, another thing—a revelation that was new to me. Have you ever looked upon a solid Rubens or Tintoretto and wondered why female backs and buttocks were so muscular? During the 16^th and 17^th centuries, it was viewed as unacceptable for male artists to use naked female models, so they posed men and imagined breasts!

Titian, Rape of Europa

Rubens copy, Rape of Europa

Furini, Lot's Daughters

Tintoretto, Lady Exposing Her Breast

By today's standards, this show is barely (pun intended) salacious—except in a few instances. Two of the more famous canvases, a Titian and a Rubens copy of The Rape of Europa, seem more like studies in anatomy and drama than the sexual violence implicit in Zeus' forced seduction of the maiden Europa. If you are looking for something more alluring, look at two lesser known paintings: Francesco Furini's Lot and His Daughters and Lady Exposing Her Breast. In each case, the models were clearly female, not men in unconvincing drag, and both shine with the luminosity of real flesh rather than allegorical skin. Furini was a new painter for me, but a search of his work quickly reveals that he had an appreciation for the female form that strongly suggest that he violated nude female modeling taboos. The picture on display is soft and beautiful; one's skin crawls only if one actually knows the Biblical story of Lot's daughters. Tintoretto's model gazes into the room unashamed of her exposed breasts. She was probably a courtesan, but I also learned that baring one's breast was considered a form of sincerity. Shall I make a bad joke about how easily I would be convinced of the subject's probity? Let's not go there.

Titian, Venus with Organist and Cupid

These were my favorite paintings in the show. For me, the only truly creepy paintings are those dealing with voyeurism. Giovanni Barbieri gives us lecherous old men secretly spying on the naked Susannah, a Biblical story, but also clearly a painting intended to titillate in a pornographic sense. And then there is what might be the single most famous canvas on display: Titian's Venus with Organist and Cupid, which is both odd and unsettling. Why is there an organist in this composition at all? Why display him as if he were a Peeping Tom about to tell his friends something to the effect of, "I was hired to play music but, holy shit! There was this stark naked chick on the sofa cavorting with some damned flying baby. I couldn't keep my eyes off her crotch!" I've always wondered why this painting is so famous and I still don't know.

A critique of the show: the curation could have been much stronger. I wonder about the above painting because I was offered very little that would help me "get" it. Almost all the commentary is about technique, quite a lot of it redundant, and most of which could have been reserved for an art history lecture. You'll need a copy of Bullfinch's Mythology handy, as almost none of the classical myths are related in any detail and you're not going to get any cellphone coverage to help you in the Clark's subterranean special exhibit space. (Yes, I'm still railing over the museum's uber-expensive-butt-ugly makeover.)

So Williamstown isn't Madrid, and the Clark show is only half as informative as it should have been, but let's hear it for small shows in vest-pocket places. I didn't really "see" these paintings at the Prado because, well, it's the frickin' Prado. You find yourself in a place like that and, despite your better instincts, you try to cram it all in because you never know if you'll ever make it back. So you stare at these painters and dozens equally famous until you're so numb you're strolling past images that scarcely register. The Clark's 28 loaners tell us a lot, even if it's not what the curators want us to consider.

Rob Weir

Justin Kurzel and Michael Fassbender Redo Macbeth

Thoughts on Macbeth and Movies

MACBETH            (2015)

Directed by Justin Kurzel

The Weinstein Company, 113 minutes, R (violence and brief sexuality)

* * * *

When I turned 50, I gave myself permission to dislike a bunch of things that "sophisticated" people are supposed to like: Bach, opera, Baroque art, ballet, and Shakespeare. This shocks some of my dearest friends, especially the ones who think Shakespeare is the very embodiment of all that is good and fine in Western civilization. I  have issues with the Bard—starting with the fact that a lot of the same intellectuals that scoff at Biblical literalists treat Shakespeare's every word as if it is sacred. They don't care about the staging–you can dress the actors in mukluks if you wish–but don't touch the prose. I happen to think Shakespeare was wordier than a slum full of Dickens. Plus, I don't speak Elizabethan—nobody does these days, except on stage.

My other big issue is that Billy Shakes was a terrible historian! Fine—his job was to entertain, not to lecture, but because his words have been sanctified, a lot of utter rubbish has come to be perceived as a true record of the past. Take Richard III, for example. Who actually knows that he was a decent king who was quite handsome, not Shakespeare's mincing hunchback? Of all of Shakespeare's slanders, the worst was his take on Macbeth. I'll get back to this, but first let's consider a new film version that hews the Bard's propagandist storyline, but takes liberties with the production in ways guaranteed to perturb purists, scene-chewing thespians, and directors more ambitious than Justin Kurzel.

Kurzel's Macbeth is truncated in several ways. First, a normal stage production generally runs from 2.5-3 hours, but Kurzel's film is under two. He has cut dialogue–quite a lot, actually, as he uses the medium of film to full advantage: facial expressions, smoky special effects, scarred bodies, brooding silences, sweeping pan shots, etc. that convey information in images rather than words. The film unspools at a much faster pace, but the crosscutting between speech and image actually tells the story with greater clarity and accessibility.

Kurzel hasn't altered the content. King Duncan (David Thewlis) is near defeat by Northumbrian enemies before skilled general and Thane (baron) of Glamis Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) turns the tide and saves Duncan's throne. A grateful Duncan bestows an additional title upon Macbeth, Thane of Cawdor, but a witches' prophecy unsettles Macbeth. They tell him that he shall be king, but that his friend Banquo (Paddy Considine) will sire the line of future kings. Driven by poisonous ambition and the vainglorious prodding of Lady Macbeth (Marion Cotillard), Macbeth turns monster in an attempt to alter fate. After dispatching Duncan and frightening the king's son Malcolm (Jack Reynor) to flight, Macbeth subsequently arranges for the murder of Banquo and his son Fleance (Lochlan Harris), though the latter escapes via magical deception. As they say, things fall apart from there. Macbeth descends into madness, Lady Macbeth kills herself, and the tragedy ends in Macbeth's demise via a sword wielded by his main accuser, Macduff, the Thane of Fife (Sean Harris).

Macbeth is among Shakespeare's bloodiest plays, and Kurzel graphically depicts this. Violence is literally etched upon Fassbender's body: oozing head wounds, a road-map of scars, blood running as thickly as sweat…. Battle scenes are gruesome and Duncan's murder is sanguinary and grisly. Some critics have panned Fassbender for his mumbling delivery and exaggerated physicality, but I saw this as a way of placing Macbeth inside the Hobbesian man-against-man savagery of 11^th century Scotland. Okay, he's not Olivier, McKellen, or Welles, but in many ways, Fassbender's primal Macbeth is more historical than robed figures delivering eloquent soliloquies. My only quarrel with the film is its sloppy elision of time, which so compresses Macbeth's rise and fall as to make it seem instantaneous.   

So let's talk about history. Shakespeare gets a flat-out "F" for his version of Macbeth. The real MacBheatha mac Fhionnlaigh (Gaelic for "son of life") did not murder his king; Duncan died in battle against the Northumbrians in 1040. His fellow thanes chose Macbeth king over Duncan's son Malcolm, who fled Scotland. There was some opposition to Macbeth's kingship, but that was the norm for whoever wore the crown back then. He ruled from 1040 to 1057, and no contemporary accused him of regicide, corruption, tyranny, or misrule. He too died in battle against a Northumbrian army, one led by none other than Malcolm, an act easily viewed as traitorous, which probably explains why Macbeth's adopted son was his immediate successor, though he was feeble-minded. (Malcolm murdered him a year later and took the throne as Malcolm III.)

Why such tinkering with the historical record? It probably had less to do with Shakespeare's need to find the proper vehicle for his clever words than it did with the fact that his patron was King James VI of Scotland (James I of England), who was descended from Malcolm III. In other words, Shakespeare was sucking up to his patron. Today we'd use words like "embedded" and "toadyism" to describe his actions. So I don't mind at all when someone edits Shakespeare.* They're unlikely to butcher the Bard as badly as the Bard carved up history.

Rob Weir

*Adam McNaughtan's "Oor Hamlet" reduced a 4 ½  hour play to a three-minute song. Brilliant!  

Caleb Carr's Surrender, New York a Failed Novel

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Surrender, New York. (2016)

By Caleb Carr.

Penguin Random House, 624 pages.

*

There’s no reason to mince words: Surrender, New York is a failed novel—at least in the non-proofed advance copy I read. It won't happen, but Penguin ought to delay release of this book, assign a stern developmental editor, and advise author Caleb Carr to excise a few hundred pages and rework some head-scratching and totally unbelievable detail. It pains me to say this, because two of Carr’s previous novels—The Alienist (1994) and The Angel of Darkness (1997)—are high on my list of thrilling reads.

Both of the above featured the character and/or theories of Laszlo Kreizler, the namesake alienist of the 1994 novel. During the late 19^th century that antiquated term referenced today’s fields of psychology and psychiatry, which were in their infancy and seemed to the uninformed as mysterious as spiritualism. Carr fashioned Kreizler as a hybrid of criminal profile pioneers such as Cesare Lombroso (1835-1903) and Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914), with what I suspect was a bit of early Freud tossed into the mix—perfect for solving two Gilded Age serial killer cases.

Surrender, New York is the name of a fictional town set in equally fictional Burgoyne County, but in contemporary times. You can, if you wish, try to play the game of what the stand-in town might be, but all you need to know is that it’s three-hours north of New York City, within a reasonable driving distance of Albany, and that Route 22 runs nearby. Route 22 factors into the story as it is the artery that connects the Big Apple to rural New York, where local officials seek to track down a serial killer responsible for the deaths of several young people. A few local cops are perturbed by the direction of the investigation and call upon the services of criminal profilers L. Trajan Jones and Michael Li to assist them. The duo quickly surmises that the “murders” are, in fact, suicides, a theory that infuriates officials in Albany. Why? Because Jones and Li detect that the victims were “throwaway children” abandoned by their parents, but who seemingly made their way down Route 22 to the Big Apple and acquired the trappings of money. We are led to believe that New York’s ambitious governor, state attorney, and other Albany bigwigs would prefer a serial killer to an abandoned children scandal that might touch the rich and powerful. Find that hard to swallow? It is.

LT and Mike have to tread lightly, though, as they have no official standing and are, themselves, exiles in Surrender, having once been stars within the New York City Police Department before they got too close to blowing the whistle on powerful people involved in the man/boy sex trade. They rebounded by retreating to Surrender, where the Jones family has long been viewed as the local patriciate and LT’s aunt has a farm where he can den his cheetah—yes, we’re straying upon more illogical ground—and where the good “doctors,” who have Ph.D.s in psychology, can support themselves by teaching online courses for SUNY Albany on the “context” theories of—you guessed it—Laszlo Kreizler. Why Carr freezes the evolution of criminal psychology in the late 19^th century is anyone’s guess, but fine. But I must ask this question: How much money does Carr suppose one makes teaching online? Let me answer that. It depends upon the number of students and the institution, but it’s in the $1,500 to $5,000 range—surely not enough to outfit the lab these boys have in the barn. Did I mention it’s filled with high tech links built into the converted hulk of a vintage Junker aircraft? Or that student protocol is to address an instructor as “professor” rather than “doctor,” and that both Jones and Li would have been fired in a New York minute if they humiliated their young charges with the language used in Carr’s novel.

Speaking of language, our highly educated doctors both speak as if they are escapees from a Mickey Spillane first draft, with a bit of teenage bad boy mixed in. We do get some profiler deductive reasoning, but mostly it’s a procession of “F” bombs and rants on why forensics is garbage science. In fact, the book’s number one takeaway is that Carr hates, really hates, CSI in all its iterations. Jones and Li would also be arrested for child endangerment if they, as in this novel, took in a 15-year-old assistant, allowed him to view an autopsy, and constantly put him in harm’s way. I suppose it’s pointless to suggest that this character, Lucas Kurtis, always speaks the way that 15-year-olds speak only in the locker room, yet somehow is capable of leaps of reason that elude most adults. Should I even dwell on the point that he too is a throwaway child living with his blind sister Ambyr? Or that Ambyr is gorgeous and that she and the one-legged cancer survivor LT develop a “thing?” Carr’s descriptions of their intimacies are embarrassing—not because they are salacious, but because they are puerile. Should we get into the ethnic slurs good naturedly exchanged between LT and his Chinese-American partner? (Is this banter, or just an excuse for Carr to be a bit naughty?)

Let’s not; it’s simply not worth it. Had I not committed myself to writing a preview, I would have ditched 150 pages in. The solving of the central mystery isn’t particularly clever or complex; in fact, I had most of it puzzled out before I hit page 400—complete with exposing the red herrings. Here’s the unassailable fact for which you’ll need neither psychology nor forensics to uncover: even good writers are capable of writing junk. Shame on Penguin Random House for allowing this one to get past the first read-through.

 

The Whimsical World of Bernard Langlais

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Bernard Langlais:

Maine's Quirky Artistic Treasure

Are you heading to Maine any time this summer or fall? If so, keep a keen eye peeled for the art works of Bernard Langlais (1921-1977). They shouldn't be hard to spot. Thanks to efforts spearheaded by the Kohler Foundation and Colby College, hundreds of his works have been dispersed throughout the state, an initiative formally known as the Langlais Art Trail. Dozens of public libraries, civic spaces, parks, and art museums are sprinkled with his work and you'll know it immediately–its whimsy will bring a smile to your face and you'll embrace it without judgment of its artistic merit.

Cezanne phase

On that last point, one of the many intriguing things about Langlais is that he challenges preconceptions about art. Like most creative people, he went through the process of finding his niche. Check out an early Picasso and you'll find a man emulating naturalistic painters, and even his famed "blue" and "rose" periods are a mere patch on what he produced after he saw his first African mask. John Marin wanted to be an architect, then flirted with academic painting–until he went to Paris in 1905 and saw modern art.

Langlais similarly had to free himself from convention. He was born in Old Town, Maine, first trained as a commercial artist, but then went to art school, where he developed affection for Cezanne and Matisse. After World War II, he was back in Maine on a scholarship at the innovative Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, before heading off to New York, France, and Norway, the latter on a Fulbright stint that instilled a love of the paintings of Edvard Munch. His earliest works show him echoing many of his influences, a task he did well though hardly with great distinction. He

Inspired by Munch

enjoyed some success in New York, but grew bored with its art scene. (Contrary to legend, people can and do get bored with New York.)

In 1966, Langlais moved to Cushing, Maine, not far from where Andrew Wyeth summered. There he purchased a farm along the St. George River that needed some work, which rekindled his love of working with wood. He also discovered an unusual artistic inspiration: National Geographic Magazine. Wildlife photos held special fascination for him, and he began assembling fanciful 3-D images of animals in small and large-scale. Some are anatomically approximate, but most bear resemblance to folk art. That is to say, the highly trained "Blackie" Langlais–as he was known by locals–reinvented himself as if he were an untrained folk artist. For all of his schooling, Langlais is best known for a 62-foot carved Indian that stands in Skowhegan.

The ennui of sheepiness

For my money, Langlais' offbeat carvings—often fashioned from rough plywood—contribute far more to the art world than another Cezanne or Munch wannabe ever could. In academic discussions of the aesthetics of art, the word "fun" is too often missing. Langlais' carvings are chimerical, droll, and filled with wonder. In many cases, they capture the essence of the world of beasts far better than any realistic rendition could. (There is, after all, just so much a painter can capture in two dimensions.) Most of all, each work is handcrafted and unique–the perfect antidote for our age of mass-assembly cookie-cutter sameness. Seek Langlais' work next time you're in the Pine Tree State.

The photos in this piece were taken from an exhibition of his work from the Ogunquit Museum of American Art. Alas, that show closed at the end of June, though several of the sculptures continue to adorn the lawn. Those traveling to Cushing should definitely go to his studio, recently opened to the public. While you're there, go to Wyeth's house where it will take you all of about 30 seconds to understand his famed 1948 work Christina's World.

Rob Weir  

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