New Releases for August 2017

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I recently devoted a column to female musicians, so it's only fair that to give equal time to the gentlemen and rogues of the road.

My favorite in this batch is Cold Answer, an EP from Matthew Perryman Jones. The Pennsylvania-born, Georgia-raised, Nashville-based Perryman has been recording since 2000, and this EP is a distillation of a 2015 full-length album. His best tracks evoke the smart, pensive songs of Richard Shindell.  When Jones sings of "Wrestling Tigers," it's self-analysis and the dangerous beast inner self-destructiveness. The title track is melodic and lush, but its look at a dead relation cuts deeply: Remember saying all the places we'd go/Once we've found the road to take us there/But we spend too much time waiting by the window/And ended up not going anywhere. I don't know much about his personal life, but songs like "Can't Get It Right, and "I'm Sorry" certainly suggest he has hit a few potholes here and there. But don't expect self-pity or apology. There is a repeating line from his you-can-do-better leaving song "I Can't Go Back Now" that runs, This is not what I planned. Jones' combination of raw emotions, lovely tunes, and sensitive voice linger and haunt long after you've taken out your ear buds.   ★★★★

http://www.pledgemusic.com/projects/mpj  

The Adam Ezra Group is a six-person lineup from Boston that has been recording since 2003. Hurricane Wind, their 7^th album, airs out a repertoire that's on the rock end of the folk rock scale. Ezra anchors the band with vocals that are simultaneously growly in tone but smooth in transition. Sometimes, as in the song "The Toast" with its parting song feel, the AEG sounds like an Irish folk rock band biding us goodnight.  By contrast, here's a countrified boot rock kick to "Steal Your Daughter" and a pop/party shimmer to "You Speak Girl." One of my favorite tracks is "Let Your HairDown," an affecting take on seizing the moment when boy-meets-girl and sparks ignite a fire that might not last the night. The AEG is superb at doing little things well—a splash of piano, rapid-fire couplets, or just a quirky line that's just right: You're sweet like a melon/sly like a felon/and I've been watchin' you dance all night. John Oates guests on the last track—a good match of talents that are not quite pop, folk, or rock but something of all three.★★★ ½ 

adam_ezra @adamezra

Drew Holcomb has just released a new CD titled Souvenir. To promote it he has released a previous record, Medicine, on Noisetrade, for whom he is its first artist in residence. Souvenir continues the musical journey of an artist who manages to remind us of old favorites without being derivative of any of them. On the new record, "Fight For Love" has a post-1975 Bob Dylan feel, yet "Postcard Memories" and "Mama's Sunshine, Daddy's Rain" evoke the wry commentary and stripped down instrumentation of John Prine. Overall, Holcomb and his band often draw comparisons to The Jayhawks. The pay-as-you-wish Noisetrade release of Medicine includes Holcomb standards such as the country/folk/Appalachian blend "American Beauty," the funky, LA rock with a secular gospel choir "Sisters and Brothers," and the instantly relatable "Ain't Nobody Got it Easy." My favorite is "Shine LikeLightning," which is just great rock n' roll—the kind someone like Springsteen might sweat his way through. ★★★★

 http://www.drewholcomb.com/souvenir

  

Waldemar is the professional persona of Wisconsin-based Gabe Larson. His EP Visions has been described as "painting with sound." If it has a genre, it 's experimental rock, but that's hardly adequate for Larson's pastiche of electronics, piano, ambient vocals, trombone, guitar, and percussion. Visions is challenging—perhaps more of an artistic statement than concert music. Give a listen. You'll know pretty quickly whether you wish to imbibe further or if it's simply not your cup of tea. ★★ ½

There's a standing joke about the dearth of happy songs in folk music. That helps explain why so many artists draw upon the pen of Jesse Terry and why they want to record with him. Terry writes sunny, pop-infused folk that will remind graybeards of the light-voiced, optimistic Emitt Rhodes. Terry has just released a new LP, Stargazer, and has followed Holcomb's lead in bundling a few tracks with back catalogue material for those seeking to discover his music. The title track of the new record was inspired by his boyhood devotion to the Electric Light Orchestra. Dar Williams joins him on a song with a drift-across-the-night-sky feel. He rocks out a bit more on "Runaway Town," but the mood is like a more upbeat Roy Orbison. Finally, there is "Kaleidoscope" (with Sarah Darling), which is introspective and so atmospheric that it skirts lullaby terrain. These three are bundled with five other songs on Natural. Each track features a guest artist. I particularly enjoyed the Paul Simon-like "Mr. Blue Sky" with Liz Longley, and "Carry" with Kim Richey. You might long for a tad more diversity from Terry, but it's hard to quarrel with optimism. ★★★ ½    [Note: Williams and Richey are not on the YouTube clips]

 #jesseterry

"Sunny" isn't an adjective routinely applied to Justin Townes Earle and Kids in the Street won't alter that. That's not to say that it's a downer, but it is shot through with C&W heartache. "There Go a Fool" is the kind of tale Willie Nelson would tell—a guy who's been around the block enough times to suspect that tonight's date won't end well. "Faded Valentine" also lays on the pathos, though in the deliciously retro fashion of an old country weepy. From the content of "Maybe a Moment" it sounds as if Earle knows a few less savory Memphis streets. This one is acoustic, but sung in a soulful syllable-packed manner reminiscent of Van Morrison. For something more cheerful, try "Champagne Corolla," with its big horns, rolling arrangement, and N'awlins flavoring. Who can resist a pretty lady on the open road? ★★★

#justintownesearle

Are you a Greg Brown fan? Peter Mulvey is another artist in the same growly Midwestern acoustic folk blues style. Eleven Ways of Looking at Peter Mulvey is a good introduction to good introduction to his music. Fellow songwriters tend to admire the emotive concision of Mulvey's songs. "Are You Listening?" exemplifies this. It's a deliberately shaky-voiced song about being dumped with repeated and simple lines—Are you telling me you got a new life?—that capture that endless loop of despair that comes from being dumped. On the other end of the spectrum is the caffeinated splatter of words in "The Other Mornin Over Coffee." Mulvey's "Song for Michael Brown" has gotten attention and (alas!) its politics remain relevant. The fiddle texture of this one is evocative of Civil War era music, frighteningly appropriate for what he has to say about dangerous angry white men. Mulvey also dabbles in poetry and this collection has two spoken word tracks. I confess that I prefer songs with stronger melody, hence my favorites from Eleven Ways are "Shirt" and "Kids in the Square."  ★★★

 #petermulvey

R.I.P. USA

The United States of America: 1776-2017?

 

"We the people of the United States…." How familiar the opening words of the Constitution. But it was all a dream. This is not a love letter; it is an obituary. Maybe it's premature, but, as in the case of famous people, it's on file awaiting the coroner's certification of the official time of death.

The United States of America experienced a difficult birth in 1776, when the Declaration of Independence heralded the arrival of a sickly child. It was conceived in myth and survived against long odds, but it never thrived or grew to maturity. It was always a loner—never a "we," not even in its rebellious years against its British parents when a third of its colonial citizens remained loyalists and another third stood neutral. The cause of rebellion was never noble—colonists paid far lower taxes than their British cousins and, though they were sometimes punished, they were never held to standards not expected of their peers. Tom Jefferson knew he was writing propaganda, so (with help from his peers, the well-heeled), he laid it on thickly and eloquently.

So did Madison. "We the people" did not mean the masses—whom Madison and most of his fellow Founders held in fearful contempt—nor did he mean the distaff side of anyone's family. He certainly did not mean Indians, slaves, free people of color, or unsavory non-English immigrants like the Irish. Small wonder that just 73 years after Madison's words were ratified, the republic was rent asunder by civil war, a bloody reminder that many wished the nation to remain the fiefdom of white men of means and the lackeys they tricked into maintaining their estates. For a short time, it looked as if elites might relinquish their robes, but the collapse of Reconstruction, the advent of Social Darwinism, triumph in the labor wars, periodic "red" scares, Jim Crow, domestic ideology, and time-tested applications of divide-and-conquer patched the holes and righted the throne. The Great White Fist ruled supreme.

There have been moments in which the crown tottered—Lincoln, New Deal, the temporary victory over fascism, civil rights, and liberation movements—but in the end, the Fist has always leveled its golden hammer. Now the Fist is shaky and the United States has entered its sclerotic old age. What will the history's death certificate list as the cause of death?

But America is a mighty nation, you protest. If that's the case, why must it become great "again," as its Madman in Chief insists? Sorry, but great nations do not arm lunatics and allow them to parade down public streets, or turn their backs when daily they aim guns at school children, movie attendees, shoppers, co-workers, and neighbors. Great nations do not elect gropers to lead them, don't entrust their future to pirates, or treat their women like ten-dollar whores. Great nations do not look away from the raging fires of environmental Armageddon or demonize their intellectuals. They do not sacrifice science and reason upon altars of blind faith or superstition, surrender the greater good to the greed of Croesus, or hold profits in higher regard than prophets. They do not allow paramilitary cops to slaughter its citizenry.  A great nation does not see the world in monochromatic white.

Matters such as these are deemed "ideological" or "political" only in lands where Jeremiah wails in the Wilderness to the deaf while demagogues, monsters, and madmen shake their fists from ahigh and laugh. They do not notice the Reaper behind the curtain. 

Ian McGuire's Whaling Novel Thrills and Chills

THE NORTH WATER (2016)

By Ian McGuire

Henry, Holy & Company, 255 pages.

Ian McGuire @ReadingsBooks #northwater 

★★★★

Pirates are usually the poster children for the reprobate life, but the view that comes through in British writer Ian McGuire's realist novel is that 19^th century whalers make those scurvy dogs look like choirboys. His is a corrective to popular views of whaling that fall into one of two stereotypes, the romantic and the honorably tragic. If you ever visit the informative New Bedford Whaling Museum or step aboard Mystic Seaport's Charles W. Morgan, you'll learn a lot about whaling and its hardships, but the overall impression is that of intrepid lords of the foam commanding crews of ship-born industrial workers during the golden age of sail. The tragic view comes closer to the mark. Chapels called Seamen's Bethels were a standard feature of fishing and whaling towns—places where considerably more memorial services than christenings took place. One estimate holds that as many as 20,000 whalers died at sea before the turn of the 20^th century.

Tragedy is tragedy, but we often stereotype it as well. Think of exaggerated paintings of saw-toothed whales chewing up hapless sailors, or of crews being led to their doom by mad captains like Herman Melville's Ahab. Ian McGuire has a different take on why a whaler's life was often short and brutish: many of them were brutes. Many who 'read' Moby Dick skim or skip didactic chapters to get at the more thrilling material. But if you take the time to delve into the chapter titled "The Try-Works," you'll quickly learn that it took a taste for blood, filth, violence, and stink to stomach (literally) a whaler's life. In The North Water, Cetacean hunters fall into two categories: the ones with something to hide and those so far beyond the margins that they know longer bother with social pretenses.

The novel is set in 1859, a time in which whaling is on its last fins—a victim of over-harvesting and obsolescence occasioned by cheaper coal gas and petroleum. When Captain Arthur Barlowe agrees to skipper The Volunteer, he does so with the foreknowledge that it may well be its last voyage. As it is, he's headed for the Canadian Arctic pretty late in the season as that's where, if anywhere, sperm whales can be taken (as well as seals, foxes, and polar bears). In the waning days of the trade, recruitment was even more from the fetid bottom of the barrel. Barlowe's crew consists mostly of poverty-stricken Shetland islanders and dodgy characters scrounged from English ports of call. The curiosity is greenhorn ship surgeon, Patrick Sumner, who formerly served with the British army in India. What could possibly motivate such a learned man to give up the warmth of the South Asian sun for the gray waters of the North Atlantic and the ice of the Arctic? The rest are a rank (physically and morally) collection of drunkards, drug-addled fools, buggerers, thieves, cutthroats, and those with more crabs in their groins than teeth in their heads.

On such a ship, Otto, the German Swedenborgian fatalist, passes for normal. Everyone seems to have an agenda: Sumner, Barlowe, ship owner Jacob Baxter, First Mate Michael Cavendish, amoral harpooner Henry Drax…. The problem is, none of the agendas match. McGuire's yarn is a good one, though it's decidedly not for the squeamish. Cruelty toward animals and one's fellow man are staples of The North Water; treachery, double cross, roguery, and degradation are subthemes. McGuire's description of the Arctic chills in various ways. He skillfully weaves many strands, develops complex characters, dabbles in foreshadowing, and brings matters to a satisfying conclusion without being as wordy as, well, Herman Melville. Nor does he sacrifice drama or intrigue for the sake of economy. In fact, in places The North Water is evocative of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, if I can be forgiven for substituting the barren Arctic for the lush Congo. By the time you've finished McGuire, you will have marooned all romantic notions of whaling on a Baffin Islands ice sheet.

Rob Weir

Queen A Katwe a Light, Joyous Diversion

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QUEEN OF KATWE (2016)

Directed by Mira Nair

Disney Studios, 124 minutes, PG.

★★★  
#QueenOfKatwe

Director Mira Nair is best known to American audiences for Mississippi Masala (1991) and Monsoon Wedding (2001). Her forte lies in presenting people of color in a positive light and in underscoring cultural misunderstanding. This time she turns her attention to Africa. She has joked that Queen of Katwe is the first Disney film made on that continent that doesn't star a singing animal.

It is a feel-good movie set in an unlikely place: the Katwe slums of Kampala, Uganda. Katwe is a desperate place where those lucky enough can rent a makeshift plywood and tin hovel, which is where 10-year-old Phiona lives with her widowed mother, Nakku Harriet (Lupita Nyong'o), her infant brother, and her take-a-walk-on- the-wild-side older sister Night (Taryn Kyaze). There's not much hope for Katwe kids; they are the sort that must hawk goods in traffic each day to help put food in the cooking pot.

Phinoa's life takes a detour when she (Madina Nalwanga) spies Robert Katendi (David Oyelowe), a missionary school recreational director, teaching kids how to play chess. He invites her to come into the school, though she smells so bad that even younger slum kids scorn her. But not for long, as Phiona soon masters chess in ways that are intuitively brilliant. Dare she, or the peers who come to admire her, dream of life outside of Katwe? There are several touching scenes in which the Katwe children journey to posh places and are literally overwhelmed by what they see. Should such children even consider going beyond their station in life? Of what good is a chess champion in the slums?

One might assume that, from a direct standpoint, Nair's challenge would be to make chess visually exciting. That's actually not as hard as it sounds. In United States, baseball, boxing, and horse racing are the sports most often presented on film– probably because they lend themselves the best to dramatic 'moments' on which the outcome rests. So too for chess, which has been the subject of dozens of very successful films, quite a few of which spotlight how it helps those from disadvantaged backgrounds experience moments of glory. That's partly true, because it seems that topnotch chess players are often born rather than trained. (Some sports for harder to depict on film. Have you ever seen a film featuring tennis, golf, or basketball that looks realistic?)

Queen of Katwe is based on a true story and is indeed a feel-good flick. Is a path- breaking filmmaking? In all honesty, it could have been a made-for-TV film, which is how most people will see it: as a download on the small screen. That's fine, as there is nothing here that a large screen would enhance. It's also okay that this film deceptively elides time, is loaded with clichés, and sports all-too-convenient triumphs in situations that would have been more dire in actual context. The film is well acted especially by Ms. Nyong'o (who won an Oscar in 12 Years a Slave). She plays well beyond her thirty-four years and is totally convincingly as a fierce protective mother of three. As always, David Oyelowe (Selma, The Butler, The Last King of Scotland) is superb, and Ms. Nalwanga is simply infectiously charming.  

Sometimes you just want to feel-good movie. As Disney films go, this one is pretty good. And there are no singing animals—though there is a soundtrack that features pop stars such as Alicia Keyes, P-Square, and Radio and Weasel.

Rob Weir

Maudie: A Small Life with a Big Heart

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MAUDIE (2016/17)

Directed by Aisling Walsh

Mongrel Media, 115 minutes, PG-13

★★★★★

This film's titular character is Maud (Dowley) Lewis (1903-1970), could be considered the Grandma Moses of Nova Scotia, except that Anna Mary Robertson Moses (1860-1961) lived a charmed life compared to that of Lewis.

Lewis is played by British actress Sally Hawkins, who contorts her stick figure body into all manner of grotesque proportions to portray the rheumatoid arthritis that plagued Ms. Lewis for her entire life. This was but one of many of the bad cards Maud was dealt. Teased unmercifully by other children for her deformities and assumed retardation, Lewis left school after the fifth grade. After both parents died within two years of each other (1935 and 1937), Maud lived with authoritarian older brother Charles (Zachary Bennett), who farmed her out to her Aunt Ida (Gabrielle Rose) when she was impregnated and jilted by a local lad.

This is where Maudie picks up the tale. In the hands of director Aisling Walsh and screenwriter Sherry White, Lewis emerges as a sneakily assertive woman who finds joy and beauty despite her physical challenges and the ugliness of some of the villagers. That ugliness included the man she eventually married, Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke), a fisherman, woodsman, and jack-of-all-trades with whom she lived in a 10 by 12 foot shack from 1937 until her death 24 years later. If the size sounds daunting, consider also that the cottage was on an isolated dirt road across a causeway more than a mile from the Digby County village of Marshalltown. Winters are long, deep, and hard in a place where the Bay of Fundy and St. Mary's Bay come together. Imagine spending it with Everett, who tells Maud that his levels of concern were, in order, "me, the dogs, the chickens, and then you." He probably exaggerated in placing her fourth!

Art was Lewis' salvation. The film concentrates on the years 1945 through 1970, a time in which Lewis transformed the cottage into a colorful canvas of flowers, animals, plants, and village life as viewed through a window. A fortuitous meeting with Sandra (Kari Matchett), a New Yorker who summered in Marshalltown, led to commissions of folk art greeting cards and then experimentation with larger works (8-10") painted on scraps of wood, which she peddled from the cottage. None sold for more than $10 in her lifetime, though she was indeed hailed as the Canadian Grandma Moses, was lionized by a Canadian Broadcasting Company documentary, and even Richard Nixon owned two of her paintings. Earlier this year one of her works fetched $45,000 at auction. (In 2006, a Moses painting went for a record $1.2 million.)

The Lewis cabin now stands in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax* and a steel replica marks its original spot in Marshalltown. Posthumous fame always seems unfair, but Walsh emphasizes Lewis' humanity rather exiling her to a tragic realm. As she is fading, Hawkins-as-Lewis tells us that her small world is the one she chose and that her window was the frame through which she viewed and painted it. Hawkins gives a bold and convincing performance. To underscore an earlier observation, Hawkins twists her body to convey Lewis' crippling arthritis. No prosthetics were used and Hawkins' physicality should draw rightful comparisons to the Oscar-winning turn of Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot (1989).

Were I nominating Oscars, though, I'd hand one to Ethan Hawke, who endows the brutish and gauche Everett Lewis with more depth and dignity than he had in real life. Hawke is like a reed that bends with a gale but never breaks. We come to like him more than we first did, but no one will walk away mistaking Everett Lewis for a good man. At his core he is as icy and difficult as a February blizzard.

Kudos also to Walsh for the ways in which geography, topography, and weather are subtly woven into the film's fabric. (The filming actually took place in Newfoundland, which evokes post-World War II Digby County.) Walsh shows the fragility of summer and the harshness of winter, but uses repetition and understatement to present challenges that lesser directors convey with melodramatic one-offs. Walsh and White did take a few biographical liberties—Sandra is a composite used to heighten contrasts between urban sophistication with homespun perspectives; Everett was worse than presented, and Maud perhaps not as sunny**—but little is sacrificed in stretching the story at the margins. Maudie is a triumph. Like last year's Icelandic film Rams, it testifies that it is still possible to make small movies with big hearts that beat louder than the thunder of big-budget schlock.

Rob Weir

* Personal Note: I have seen the Lewis cottage in Halifax, though I confess not knowing much about Maud Lewis until this film. The cottage and the art gallery are among many reasons why you should visit Halifax if you have a chance.

** Biographical notes: Maud Lewis's biographer claims that Everett never loved Maud, and kept her around because he liked the money her paintings brought in. A burglar murdered him in 1979. Unlike the film, Maud was not obsessed with the daughter she lost and wasn't as content as portrayed.

#maudiefilm
#maudie

Four Past Shows Highlight Top Curatorship at MFA

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts doesn't have the cash or cachet of the Met in New York City, but I get to the MFA much more often. This affords me the luxury of taking in just a few exhibits at a time so I can contemplate things in depth rather than breadth. Four recent shows illustrate what I mean. Don't despair if you didn't make it to these. The thing about great urban museums is that most of their "special" exhibits tend to expand upon things already in their collection.

The MFA owns Virgin and Child with St. John the Baptist, a truly great work by Sandro Botticelli (c. 1445-1510). It was a key part in "Botticelli and the Search for the Divine." which was reputedly the largest Botticelli exhibit ever displayed in the United States. But that isn't that many, as much of the famed Renaissance painter's works are too big, too fragile, or too important to loan.

Botticelli is considered one of the giants of the Florentine Renaissance and few have rivaled his use of lush color—especially his eye-popping blues. His patron was one of the giants of Italian history, Lorenzo de Medici (1449-1492), a man of such power that he was known in his lifetime as Il Magnifico. He gave Botticelli the freedom to explore emerging humanist values and to break with the somber hues and stiff formalist poses of pre-Renaissance religious art. Courtesy of new ways of cleaning away the accumulated grime from medieval and Renaissance art, we now know that another Renaissance innovation was the cartoon-like vibrancy of figures, which we see in the MFA's own Botticelli. And there were the earthy qualities that come through in works such as Minerva and the Centaur, a work I first embraced at the Uffizi; to mention nothing of increasingly sensual nudity. The Birth of Venus didn't leave Florence, but a full-sized study did.

Newton observed that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The Florentine Renaissance ended abruptly upon Lorenzo's death and the city fell under the sway of the friar Savonarola (1452-1498). He plunged Florence into a period of religious zealotry (1494-98) from which it took decades to overcome. All things worldly and secular were suspect, even destroyed. (Burnings under Savonarola gave us the phrase "bonfire of the vanities.") Botticelli's work was seriously hampered, though there were veiled references to the era's horrors.

 Speaking of horrors, Polish photographer Henryk Ross (1910-1991) documented the Nazi roundup of Jews and Roma in the Lodz Ghetto. Are there words that can express the barbaric savagery of the Holocaust? Probably not. That's why a picture is indeed worth a thousand words. The good news is that MFA's photographic collections are strong and seeing images on the wall allow us to remember all that is noble about humanity—and all that is dark and must not prevail.

On a much sunnier note, the MFA has lately paid more attention to illustrators. Who better to showcase than Robert McCloskey, whose 1941 Make Way for Ducklings was set in Boston and remains a children's book favorite. The MFA recently showcased 50 of McCloskey's works—many of them from a collection housed at Emporia State University in Kansas. In addition to his beloved fowl in the city drawings, there were others from equally fun books such as Blueberries for Sal (1948) and Centerburg Tales (1951).

 Do you know a museum of consequence that doesn't have works by Henri Matisse (1869-1954)? The MFA's Matisse in the Studio put his wonderful, whimsical, inventive career in literal context: 34 paintings, 26 drawings, 11 bronzes, 9 woodcuts, 3 prints, and 39 personally collected objects from the Musée Matisse. Believe me when I tell you that this is only the iceberg's tip. I've been to his Matisse's home in Nice where the museum is now housed, an experience I'd not trade, though I have to say that the MFA display allowed to relieve it sans sensory overload. It was subdivided into four self-descriptive themes: "The Object is an Actor," "The Nude," "Studio as Theatre," and "Essential Forms." Painter, sculptor, printmaker, draftsman… Lump Matisse with Cézanne and Picasso as the troika that reinvented Western art in the 20^th century.  

 

There are tons of good shows coming up at the MFA, including photographs by Alfred Stieglitz and Charles Sheeler, Inuit art, idealized female images in Japanese art, and posters and graphics from the 1967 Summer of Love.  Check out: http://www.mfa.org/news/advance-exhibition-schedule

Rob Weir

Ten Dead Comedians Reworks Agatha Christie

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TEN STAND UPS, NINE MURDERS, ONE SOLUTION (2017)

By Fred Van Lente

Quirk Books/Penguin Random House, 289 pages

★★★

Is there a worse kept secret in the entire entertainment world than the fact that a lot of comedians are seriously screwed up individuals? The world of comedy is littered with self-inflicted corpses, but what if someone decided to pick out nine stand up comics and do the job for them? That's the premise of Fred Van Lente's debut mystery novel Ten Stand Ups, Nine Murders, One Solution.  Van Lente has hitherto been known for writing zombie comics and the occasional graphic novel, including Cowboys and  Aliens, which was made into a film that bombed critically and at the box office.

One suspects that some of Van Lente's experience got exorcised in his novel, as its pivotal character, Dustin Walker, was once a big late night TV star who fell from grace after making a trashy but surprise hit film, I Married a Cat. It spawned a series of ludicrous sequels that ultimately exiled its creator to a fate worse than death: celebrity irrelevance. That is, unless you're an insider and still think guys like Walker have pull. When his personal assistant, Meredith, invites nine individuals to come to Walker's private island to discuss a future "project," the allure proves too great to resist. To be sure, their motives are less than lofty—vanity, flagging careers, seeking to bask in reflected glory, perchance to brag…. They come, but Walker is nowhere in evidence, the Wi-Fi code doesn't work, groundskeeper Dave is missing, Meredith seems clueless about everything, and there's no way off the island until the boat that brought them returns. In short, they are left their own devices, a tool chest that mostly contains professional jealousy, one-upmanship, and mutual loathing. And then things really go wrong: a video showing Walker's apparent suicide is prelude to stand ups meeting grisly ends.

Comedy fans will entertain themselves by matching egos and biographies to the imperiled islanders. The washed-up TV host Walker has many parallels—among them, Joey Bishop, Chevy Chase, Jerry Lewis, and David Brenner—and his character is probably a composite, but how about Janet Kahn, the Real Queen of Mean? Joan Rivers, anyone? Or Margaret Cho as the inspiration for lesbian comic Ruby Ng, who blew her career by uttering something unutterable. It's pretty hard not to think of Sarah Silverman as a template for Zoe Schwartz, the gagster who delights in talking about her vagina to the point where she becomes—if I might mix body parts—the butt of her own routine. How can we not imagine Sam Kinison as a stand-in for William Griffith, aka/ "Billy the Contractor," a rich jerk who pretends to represent "Real America?" Is Dante Dupree part Richard Pryor? Who is Oliver Rees, aka "Orange Baby Man," a decidedly unfunny person who portrays a grown infant and has a knack for trade marking associated kitsch? (Andy Kaufman?) Or T J Martinez, who fancies himself a revolutionary Latino—as long as it doesn't crimp his comfortable lifestyle? And then there's improv teacher Steve Gordon, whom TJ pretends not to know, though they once worked together.

The structure and content of the book is pretty much that of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None. This is, depending on your point of view, either homage or intellectual pilfering. I'm willing to give Van Lente the benefit of the doubt and call it a Christie update. Let's face it, we don't read many mysteries because they are literary masterpieces; we consume them for cheap thrills and as respites from that denser genre we label "literature." Van Lente is not a great stylist, but he enlivens his text with excerpted monologues from his comedians and demonstrates, if nothing else, that he knows his way around comedy clubs. His debut novel is entertaining. It's summertime. That's enough.

Rob Weir

#fredvanlente