Respect an Uneven Look at Aretha Franklin

 

RESPECT (2021)

Directed by Liesl Tommy

United Artists, 145 minutes, PG-13

★★★

 

 

 

In 2009, an African American student in my class at Smith College asked me who sang “My Country t’is of Thee” at Barack Obama’s inauguration. It took me aback, but I had the presence of mind to ask her to YouTube more Aretha Franklin and read about her. Bless her heart, that’s exactly what she did and the “Queen of Soul” had a new young fan.

 

I tell this story because Respect is a bit like Franklin at Obama’s inauguration: a taste for those who know little about her. It won’t, however, tell them much. It lost money at the box office, but racism was not to blame. Like too many biopics in the “based upon” category, Respect tried to do too much, assumed too much, and relied too heavily on name recognition. It’s a decent movie, but ultimately a mid-pack pick.

 

The mature Aretha was played by Jennifer Hudson, Franklin’s own choice. As we see in the clip as the credits roll, she’s no Aretha, but who is? Hudson is about as close as it gets and deserves any kudos that come her way. The problem lies with Tracey Scott Wilson’s screenplay, which follows Franklin from 1952-72, when she recorded her best-selling record, the gospel album Amazing Grace. Twenty years isn’t a bad sweep for a biopic, but unless you know about Franklin’s life (or read up in advance), you’ll be lost in a welter of important-but-unexplained characters. For instance, at one point in the film a distraught Aretha calls upon her friend Sam.” That would be Sam Cooke (Kelvin Hair), who practically invented soul. Nor will you understand that when Aretha made Amazing Grace, “James” (Tituss Burgess) the minister comforting and accompanying her was James Cleveland, known as the “King of Gospel for reinventing the genre.

 

Respect is an odd film in several ways. There’s a lot about the dynamics between Aretha and her overbearing father, C. L. Franklin (Forest Whitaker), but it would have helped to state what is implied: that the Rev. Franklin was better at preaching than following the gospel. When we see Aretha pregnant at 12—and not by the man implied in the film–she was following C. L.’s footsteps; he impregnated at 12-year-old himself, plus two more before he married Barbara Siggers (Audra McDonald in a cameo), Aretha’s mother. On the positive side, the Rev. Franklin was an early civil rights activist, which is why famous people like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (Gilbert Glenn Brown) hung out at C. L.’s Detroit home.

 

And so it goes. We get wonderful performances from Hudson, the woefully underrated Whitaker, Marlon Wayans as Franklin’s abusive first husband Ted White, Saycon Sengbloh and Hailey Kilgore as Aretha’s sisters Emma and Carolyn, Mary J. Blige as the tempestuous Dinah Washington who loves Aretha but doesn’t want her stepping on her turf, and Marc Maron as the manic music producer Jerry Wexler who made Franklin into a star.  

 

The last point is crucial. Aside from C. L., Wexler, and White, most of the rest of the people are there because they were in Aretha’s orbit. Alas, they are more like wallpaper than foundations. Director Lisel Tommy too often allows her film to become an African-American version of A Star is Born. Yet, she is uncertain whether she is making a film for the cognoscenti or the newbies. The first, of course, already know Aretha was the Queen of Soul; the second–the bulk of ticket-buyers these days–don’t get enough information to know much more than Aretha switched from a small market gospel singer to a chartbuster when Wexler sent her to Muscle Shoals to record with a bunch of White backcountry good ole boys. (They were far more than that!)  Add lots of music–superbly done by Ms. Hudson–and we get a very long film that’s also part musical documentary.

 

Put another way, Respect is a trifurcated film, part psychological drama, part Star is Born, and part cover album. It’s too bad, because the acting is really topnotch. Forest Whitaker should have gotten a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod and Hudson should be singing the film’s title song, but Respect will be absent from the Oscars. Mid-pack films don’t generally get a lot of love when it comes to major awards. You can give it some, but educate yourself in advance.

 

Rob Weir

 

Hue and Cry at the Clark: What is Art?

 

 

HUE AND CRY:

            FRENCH PRINTMAKING AND THE DEBATE OVER COLORS

Clark Art Institute

Williamstown, MA

Through March 6

{Click on any image for bigger size/better color} 

 

The venerable Clark is far better known for its collection of iconic paintings than for printmaking, but Hue and Cry might make you reconsider your preconception. While you’re at it, rethink how you consider posters and other (potentially) reproducible works. These are so much part of both the consumer and art worlds of today that many people don’t know that there was once fierce debate over whether they were “art” at all.

 

Most of us have gotten past snobbish debates over taste, but the exhibit at the Clark does two things: It reminds us that the very use of color was once a battleground and it shows that printmaking is more complex than most of us imagine. The Clark show focuses on the French Belle Époque (1890s), though it also explores earlier printmaking as it developed following the French Revolution. A few terms are useful. Relief is perhaps the best known. Anything can be used, but wood is commonplace. An image is carved onto the wood, inked, and printed. Intaglio (including etchings, engravings, and mezzotints) starts with a plate of some sort (often metal) and the image is scored. The ink is applied and the plate transferred to a press. How the ink is applied leads to a whole bunch of other designations but I’ll spare you those except for the marvelous A la poupée, which means that the various colors are meticulously daubed onto the plate with wads. Various types of planographic images, which use prepared surfaces (like stone, which is a lithograph) and a clever process in which the image is made with something greasy (special pencil, crayon, etc.) and chemically sealed. The ink adheres to the surfaces, but not the grease. 

 

Debucourt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are some images from the show. One of the earliest is Philibert Louis Debucourt’s Dance Mania (1809) from the Napoleonic Era that parodies upper crust culture. It’s made by the poupée process discussed above. It might not fit your view of art, but it’s a great satire and reminiscent of the sort of cartoon England’s William Hogarth did a century earlier but made into prints. Printmaking got more serious when Impressionists such as Camille Pissarro got into the act. It’s not the most stunning image in the show, but there’s a small crayon sketch of his Peasant Women Weeding the Grass (1894) with his instructions of how to apply colors. 

 

 

 

If a name pops out more than any other it that of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He perfectly captured the Belle Époque in all of its energy, cultural rebellion, and decadence. Among my favorites are Box in the Grand Tier (1897) and The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge (1892). If you’re wondering why said Englishman is in grey, it’s because he’s trying to pick up one or both of the actresses in the assumption that they were also prostitutes. (He probably wasn’t wrong!) Critics wondered why some of Lautrec's reds were so lurid and why his perspectives were skewed. Note how he used furniture as framing devices. But what really set their teeth on edge is what we see in the billboard below and the poster for Vin Mariani: Lautrec was unabashedly commercial in many of his commissions. This shocked those who felt that art should somehow be above crass things. 

 

 

 

That’s as if artists weren’t flogging their wares in other ways. Paul Cézanne reproduced his famed The Bathers (1897) in lithographs for mass consumption and again invited debate over whether it was actually “art.” One wonders what they made of Émile Bernard, who rendered his Saint Mary Mother of God with a Lily (1895) as if it were something from the Middle Ages. 

 

 

 

And then there were Les Nabis, who sought to move beyond Impressionism, which was by then old hat. They were something of a bridge between the Impressionists and the Modernists, as we see in these image from Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. Whether or not you like Bonnard’s Little Laundress (1896), his minimalist approach tells you all you need to know about the scene. It’s intriguing to think that Picasso was 15 when Bonnard’s images were en vogue, so you can imagine what next loomed on the horizon. And, of course, critics weren’t immediately impressed. Tell that to the collector who recently paid $106.5 million for one of Pablo’s works! 

 

 

 

Rob Weir

Jack Barksdale February Artist of the Month

 

Jack Barksdale

Death of a Hummingbird

 

  

Your first impression of Death of a Hummingbird might be that the vocals sound very young. You’re right, but you might want to cut some slack; Jack Barksdale is young–as in all of 14 now and just 13 when he made this record. Now listen to the instrumentals and you’ll wonder who the older dude is playing in the background. That’s also Barksdale. Now you’ll wonder how in the blazes a kid that young has fingers that old. Yep, this youngster from Fort Worth, Texas, is the proverbial child prodigy–and an enigmatic one at that.

 

One of the great debates about human beings is whether we are products of nature or nurture. Insofar as Barksdale is concerned, he’s almost entirely a force of nature. His father Brent says he can’t sing a note, has never played an instrument, and listened to a lot of Nirvana and Leonard Cohen when Jack was even younger–not exactly fodder for a repertoire that leans heavily upon blues and country with a just a tiny bit of Cohen around the edges. His mother Clara may have influenced him some by playing Nancy Griffith and Lucinda Williams records, but neither she nor Brent had the slightest idea until several years later that Jack had been writing original songs since he was seven. Ask Jack and he’ll tell you that his influences (besides Cohen) were Johnny Cash, Guy Clark, Lead Belly, Willie Nelson, and Townes Van Zandt. And he’s not just name-dropping. 

 

 

It's weird enough hearing blues from a pre-pubescent voice, or see Barksdale sharing stage swith grizzled vets, but it’s stunning to hear him go down the fretboard on guitar (acoustic, electric, slide), ukulele, and mandolin; blow out soulful notes on the harmonica; and tickle the old (non-) ivories on keyboards. Plus, I don’t know about you, but when I was 13, I would have had a lot of trouble fitting phrases like “translucently moving through time,” “blinded by the clouds,” “keep the spider fed,” “gypsy day dreams,” or “raindrops soaking my moral stances” into any kind of intelligible sentence, let alone fitting them into a song. And I’m 100% certain I couldn’t have written a song about young love like “Death of a Hummingbird.” (At 13, I wasn’t even looking for it!)

 

I’ll confess that I’m not a big fan of kids’ voices but man, can this youngster play! I can already imagine him a few years from now singing in deeper tones, and it’s almost scary to consider how much better he’ll be as an instrumentalist. “Sideways” feels like a novelty song at present. Now picture it with a voice that can add some spit and gravel and it becomes a Barksdale staple for years to come. He also delves into spooky gospel-influenced blues (“Revival Song No. 3”), sizzles the strings on “Bugle Boy Blues,” and I can only wonder where he came up with blues like “World Full of Nothing” and “Man in the Ground” My cowboy hat’s off to Barksdale for even having the guts to put blues like those on an album. I mean, sheesh, he’s not old enough to have that many blues.

 

Here he is on slide. Wait until he grow into those cowboy boots!  

 

 Rob Weir

 

 

 

Topsy-Turvy for Gilbert & Sullivan Fans

TOPSY-TURVY  (1999)

Directed by Mike Leigh

Pathé Films, 160 minutes, R (For brothel nudity, but I wasn’t corrupted)

★★★

 

When I was in junior high school, I made my only stage appearance in a production of H.M.S. Pinafore. I had pretty much forgotten about my short and inglorious acting career until recently seeing Topsy-Turvy, a look at the famed collaboration between librettist W(iliam) S(chwenck) Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and composer Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner).

 

Most people either love Gilbert and Sullivan operettas or find them as embarrassing as soiled trousers. I’m in neither camp; in moderation I’m mildly amused, though I quickly OD on them. I was surprised when I first read that Mike Leigh directed this comic drama. Leigh is an unreconstructed lefty advocate of dumping the British monarchy and is more at home behind the camera of gritty working-class political dramas. It is its own testament to the enduring fame of Gilbert and Sullivan that he would indulge in such bourgeois pleasures.

 

"Topsy-turvy" is an archaic expression that means disorderly and upside down. That was the hallmark of Gilbert librettos that disrupted social convention. He was so famed for this that he appropriated topsy-turvy as a self-descriptor. Like any stratagem, though, overuse can turn a sockdolager into a pair of smelly gym socks. That’s the dilemma facing Gilbert and Sullivan in the film. Theirs was a wildly successful partnership, though they couldn’t stand each other and lived in different worlds. Gilbert was careless with money and often irreverent but he was also stubborn, impatient, and had an annoying talent for hearing only what he wished to hear. By contrast, Sullivan was a playboy, had aristocratic pretensions, wanted to write critically-acclaimed compositions, and dearly desired to see the back of Gilbert.

 

He almost got his shot. The duo is tapped out and revivals of past works are closing faster than a front door on a proselytizer. Even their actors are reaching the end of their respective ropes. You could run through a lot of pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with a cast like the insecure Richard Temple (Timothy Spall), backstabber Rutland Barrington (Vincent Franklin), and tipsy Leonora Braham (Shirley Henderson). Both men are running out of patience talking someone down from a tantrum-du-jour or dealing with Savoy Theatre owner Richard D’Oyly Carte (Ron Cook) who cares only about putting fannies in the seats. Gilbert is nobody’s Mr. Sensitive and Sullivan has decided it's time to make critics realize he’s a musical genius.

 

Sullivan’s problem is that he’s not nearly as good at the highbrow stuff as with the low. For his part, Gilbert needs money, pays scant attention to Sullivan’s alternative plans, and wants Arthur to listen to his latest bit of topsy-turvy. That might have gone better had he not filled it with rehashed devices that made it cliché upon cliché. In short, Sullivan needs a dose of reality and if Gilbert wants to draw another salary, he needs something fresher than limp celery. Fortunately, a London exhibition of Japanese arts and crafts unleashes new creative energies. The Mikado opened in 1885 and proved to be their biggest hit (672 performances), even though it did crib from The Sorcerer (1877). Gilbert and Sullivan launched five more productions before Gilbert retired in 1897.  

 

Leigh's film is a bit of topsy-turvy in that he assumed audiences brought foreknowledge to the movie theater. If you don’t, you may find it tough going until you get a handle on personalities and circumstances. (They already had nine co-productions under their belts when the film picks up the story.) It’s also one of those movies in which considerable scenery is chewed by everyone on the screen. For me, Broadbent’s performance stands out, as do those from Spall, Eleanor David as Sullivan’s mistress, and Andy Serkis as fey choreographer John D’Auban. I can always do without the grating Shirley Henderson and 22 years on, some may find The Mikado culturally offensive.

 

It is, however, a visual treat whose critical awards came mostly for costuming, makeup, and art direction. In a sense, it’s like a Gilbert and Sullivan production in that it’s fun in places but inconsequential as a whole. But maybe I’m just bitter that agents didn’t call after my stint in H.M.S. Pinafore.

 

Rob Weir    

If You've not Read the bone people, You Must!

 

 

the bone people [sic]

By Keri Hulme

Penguin books, 1986, 445 pages.

★★★★★

 

Hulme wanted her title in lower case!

 

On December 27, 2021, Keri Ann Ruhi Hulme died in a dementia unit in Waimate, New Zealand. Hers was a difficult life. She came from a multicultural background; her father John carpenter was a carpenter of English ancestry and her mother Mary Ann Miller was a credit manager with Scottish, Faroe Islands, and Máori heritage. She was christened “Kerry” but, in 2001 changed it the Keri, which was more Máori. In her words, “Of all my family, I look the least Máori but feel the most Máori.” Before he died when Keri was 11, John Hulme called his daughter “my Máori princess” and she spent vacations with her mother’s Máori relatives in Moeraki on New Zealand’s North Island. Keri took care of her mother’s home until Mary died in an accident.

 

Ms. Hulme was a hard person to get along with. She dropped out of law school because she felt “estranged,” which also describes her relationship with her five younger siblings. She was a poet, short story writer, novelist, and painter. Hulme was a solid woman who played guitar, had authority issues, and smoked a pipe and cigarillos. After leaving school she picked tobacco and hops, was obsessed by whitebait (fry fish), and built most of her house with her own hands on a plot of land that she won in a 1973 lottery near the remote former gold mining town of Ókárito (South Island). She was an atheist, asexual, and skeptical of romance. In her spare time, she wrote and painted, some of the latter good enough for exhibitions. Her home had more than 12,000 books, Keri’s greatest company. Locals knew her for her fierce temper, strong opinions, cooking wizardry, and heavy drinking.

 

It took 17 years for Hulme to see the bone people in print, as it was rejected by virtually every publisher in New Zealand. Conservatives wanted no part of it and liberal whites accused her of cultural appropriation. In Wellington, a group of feminists formed the Spiral Collective to publish Hulme’s debut. In 1985, Hulme got a phone call advising that she had won the Booker Prize, Europe's most prestigious book award. Her response was, “Oh–bloody hell.” As you might surmise, she wanted nothing to do with fame, critics who lambasted her style, nor those who wondered how she could have won over writers such as Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch.

 

If you’re wondering why I’ve written an obituary instead of reviewing the book, the answer is simple; one of the three main characters has every characteristic I described above. She’s even named (ahem!) Kerewin Holmes. I first read the bone people in 2001 and reread it in 2022. The experience was even more rewarding the second time around. I hesitate to call it fiction in any sense other than story details. It’s autobiography, first person, third person, poetry, political commentary, anthropology, naturalism, magic, and mysticism. Truly, it is one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever set eyes upon.

 

Go slowly; it’s not an easy read. Among other things, there is a mix of English and Máori dialogue. Keep a bookmark in the back for translation, but pay attention; she expected readers to learn as they went along and didn’t hold hands a second time. (You could ignore the Máori, but why would you?) That’s because one intention was to build a “bridge” (her words) between Máori and non-Máori Pákehá. (This Pákehá wishes white folks would cease the racist practice of appointing themselves as guardians of people of color.)

 

The heart of the story–and I emphasize that that’s only part of the book–is the relationship between Kerewin, Joseph Ngakaukawa Gillayley, and his found son Simon Peter. As you can see, racial lines are blurry. Joe identifies as Máori and so does Kerewin. As for Simon, who knows? Joe’s wife and child died in an accident and “Simon” is the name he gave to the only survivor of a shipwreck. No one knows much about Simon; he’s intelligent, but mute, writes, but was too young to recall his life before he knew Joe. Simon is also very difficult. He is ridiculed by other kids and fights back ferociously; he also skips school, drinks, smokes, and steals anything that’s not bolted down.

 

Like Joe, Simon is fun-loving and pleasant one moment, and violent and destructive the next. Joe loves Simon, but he also beats him. Simon’s wandering ways bring him to Kerewin’s odd compound–it sports a handmade tower–and soon he and Joe intrude on her solitude. I will say nothing more except if you think this is going to turn into anything resembling a family fairy tale, you're on the wrong island. The book is about broken people; in real life, healing doesn’t happen in a straight line and sometimes not at all. Nor, in Hulme’s imagining, are there hard-fast boundaries between reality, visions, and dreams. It’s a bridge between Máori and Pákehá, but an intentionally rickety one.

 

I cannot overemphasize what a remarkable book this is. Do take my advice and read in small doses. Maybe even study the Máori in the back matter. I can help a little with that (see below*). You will not be the same when you finish.

 

Rob Weir

 

*I’m bad with languages, but it helps to vocalize words. Máori looks tough but its long words are generally easier to pronounce that you might think. In most cases, you can break the words into groups of adjoining letters without stress syllables. Pákehá (white people)  is Pá/ke/há and pronounced something like Pa-key-ha.

 

There are exceptions, of course. (Think of the illogical of English.) Double vowels run together. Mao/ri comes out sort of like the Chinese name “Mao” + ree (i is usually a long e sound and e the short a of English.) There are lots of ng words and you mush them together. Words beginning with w are tricky. If it stands alone, it’s w; if it’s wh, an f sound, which I found out when I visited the Máori homeland of whakarewarewa, which comes out a bit like Fucka-rah-weir-ah!)

Love at the Worcester Museum of Art

 

 

LOVE STORIES FROM THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON

Worcester Museum of Art

Worcester, Massachusetts

Through March 13, 2022

 

London’s National Portrait Gallery is an underappreciated gem. It’s filled with so many splendorous things that it can loan enough items to fill a large exhibition. That’s a good thing indeed if you can get to the Worcester Art Museum (WAM) before March 13. Call Love Stories from the National Portrait Gallery the perfect art show for Valentine’s Day. It consists of lovers from the 15^th century to the present. Best of all, its definition of love is broad.

 

The Sandys 1571 Artist Unknown

In that spirit, the first thing one sees upon entering the gallery is a series of photos of Audrey Hepburn (1929-93), surely one of the most beloved screen stars of all time. I’ve heard it said that she was the kind of person who, upon first viewing, one simply wished to cuddle. I’m not sure everyone felt that way, but I surely did. But to jump back in time, I was also enamored of a double portrait of Edwin Sandys and his wife Cicely. You wouldn’t infer from their faces, but theirs was a forbidden love; as Archbishop of York before the Reformation, his marriage was deemed illegal. Yet he and Cicely had nine children, so stuff that in your papal mitre and smoke it!

 

Burton and Taylor by Terry'Neill 1971

Paul and Linda McCartney by Humphrey Ocean 1976

John and Yoko by Tom Blau 1969

Hughes and Plath by Rollie McKenna 1959

John Maynard and Lydia Keynes by William Roberts 1932

 

I’ll circle back to forbidden love, but first let’s take a look at famous lovers. Robert and Elizabeth Browning fell into that category, but I was more moved of a bronze casting of their intertwined hands than of their painted portraits. Being that WAM borrowed from a British collection, we see paintings and photographs of famous UK lovers, even when their main squeezes are from the Colonies and beyond: Paul and Linda McCartney, Mick and Bianca Jagger, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb, and John Maynard Keynes and Lydia Lopokova, among others. The latter has a particularly unusual quality, as John Maynard is painted conventionally for the time, but Lydia has an art deco abstracted look. 

 

Helen and Kate by Graham Hughes 2014 

Strachey

Pears and Britten by Kenneth Green 1943

 

 

The exhibit isn’t confined to heterosexual love. You can also see Oscar Wilde posing with Lord Alfred Douglas, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, singer Peter Pears and composer Benjamin Britten, Olympian gold medalists Helen and Kate Richardson-Walsh, and Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington. The latter couple had perhaps the most daring of all relationships. Theirs was a lavender marriage, a term indicating that he was a gay man and she a lesbian. I posted Strachey’s painting by Carrington, as it captures Strachey’s understated effeminate qualities.

 

Ellen Terry by Watts, 1864

Peake and Gillmore, 1940s

 

 

Other items in the exhibition are simply stunning images. George Frederic Watts’ oil of his young bride actress Ellen Terry is one such image; artists Maeve Gilmore and Mervyn Peake’s oil paint selfies another. It’s hard not to see the humanity in Ford Maddox Brown’s painting of Henry and Millicent Fawcett, as she tenderly ministers to her husband who was blinded in a hunting accident. The most unorthodox image is surely Ben Nicholson’s self-portrait with Barbara Hepworth, a marriage made in modernist heaven. There is even unrequited love such as that painter George Romney (1734-1802) held for his muse Emma Hamilton, a maid and a bawdy one at that.

 

The Fawcetts by Ford Maddox Brown, 1872

Nicholson and Hepworth 1933

 

 

If you are one of those who tend not to read museum labels, I understand; many curators tell us way more than we need or want to know. I would, however, urge you to break that habit for this exhibit. Those wall placards tell us about the relationships as well as the art and many of the former are touching. In the time of pandemic, maybe all we need is love.

 

Rob Weir

Summerwater: Brilliant or Annoying?

 

SUMMERWATER (2020)

By Sarah Moss

Picador, 125 pages.

★★ ½ 

 

 

 

If you thought I was neutral about the movie Dune, I’m positively cowardly in my evaluation of Summerwater. I rated it 2 ½ stars because my wife loved it and I was pretty much annoyed with it from start to finish. Luckily, at just 125 pages, the finish came quickly. It’s short because its inspiration is a poem: William Watson’s “The Ballad of Semmerwater.” You will notice that Watson wrote Semmerwater rather than Summerwater. That’s appropriate, as the setting is in the Trossachs region of Scotland, where Watson’s spelling would be more in line with local brogues.

 

From what I gather from how others have rated it there is a decided gender breakdown concerning this novella from Sarah Moss. The best part of Moss’ work is that most of what we read is what is seldom said: the internal perceptions and judgments of characters, most of whom wouldn’t dare voice their thought bubbles. That’s especially the case because most of them are English and they are not known for being vocal about their emotions.

 

Think of Summerwater as one day in a vacation from hell. It is set in a holiday park, a British phrase that references destinations of various quality in which there are activities that encourage guests to stay within the camp confines most of the time. We infer from the context that this park is more rustic than posh. What is not open to interpretation is the weather. The six families gathered therein have seen rain, rain, and more rain. Most are going stir crazy and we all know that crazy is crazy. In such matters, reason tends to fly out the door.

 

Among the guests are a teenage boy forced to share a room with his sister and looking for a place where he can masturbate in peace. That leads to a kayak trip in the wind and teeming rain that could have ended quite badly indeed. There is a young married couple seeking mutual orgasm, or at least he is; she is thinking about everything else under the “bruise-colored clouds.” There are kids on a lochside swing set that sways over the water, an elderly couple peeking out at others, a man in a tent whom an obsessed jogger imagines an axe murderer (he’s not); a busy mother given an hour to herself and cleans because she can’t think of anything else to do; and a loud group of partying Eastern Europeans of indeterminate origin that induce outrage among everyone else–perhaps because they actually wish they too had joie de vivre.

 

Those who like Summerwater have praised its elemental qualities; that is, its mix of sky, water, animal, land, and human interactions. It also wins kudos for its style that has won raves from Hilary Mantel. That’s another way to tell if this book is for you. Mantel is the acclaimed author and two-time Booker Prize winner for her novels on Thomas Cromwell. If you think she’s a marvel, try Summerwater; if you find Mantel’s work more style than substance, you’ll feel the same about Moss.

 

An oft-made comment is that Summerwater is a funny book. It is amusing to contemplate what we might hear if the aforementioned thought bubbles took on a life of their own. My beef is that I didn’t care what any character thought about anything. They reminded me of those whom I got out of my way to avoid: whiny, self-centered people who complain about everything. Critical thinking is one thing, but you know the type to whom I allude, those with such low esteem that they judge others so they can feel self-righteously superior. But what do I know? Like I said, my wife loved this book.

 

Rob Weir