And death remains the ultimate punch line to the absurdity that is life's joke. How does one overcome a fear of death? he...
Late last year, Nora Ephron, a writer renowned for Manhattan-sharp observations and a penchant for probing personal neuroses, released I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, her first collection of short pieces in decades. Now comes Woody Allen with Mere Anarchy, an intermittently funny sequel to his popular trilogy of humor collections: Getting Even (1971), Without Feathers (1975), and Side Effects (1982).
It appears that Woody Allen is back in the business of being Woody Allen, having resumed writing for The New Yorker (where the last ten of these selections first appeared; the first eight are new to this collection), and making movies (at least 2005's Match Point) that cause a cultural ripple beyond the dwindling ranks of Allen diehards. Since much of Allen's appeal depends on public perception of his persona, the question is how profoundly the changes in that public persona have affected the work and its reception. When he last published a collection 26 years ago, he was still almost universally beloved as the director-star of Annie Hall, with The Purple Rose of Cairo and Hannah and Her Sisters soon to come. He had established himself as the intellectual nebbish who found it easier to make a woman laugh than ignite her lust. He touched a common nerve by sharing the insecurities that so many of us share – and by making our darkest fears funny. People thought they knew Woody Allen, and they liked what they knew. Then came scandal: the notorious breakup with Mia Farrow after his seduction of her adopted daughter (subsequently his wife). For many who had formerly found Allen hilarious, his explanation that "the heart wants what it wants" sounded pathetic, his romance a little creepy. So the new Allen establishes a considerably less personal relationship with his readers, as Mere Anarchy doesn't explore Allen's heart or his libido. Instead, it offers riffs of various amusement on oddities that he has read in the New York Times – one about the abduction of an Indian movie star, another about "Technologically Enabled Clothing," another about film camp for kids. Yet even when he was much younger, Allen's obsessions were those of a much older man, haunted by mortality. In the year that he will turn 72, he addresses man's place in the cosmos in "Strung Out," which explores the practical applications of everyday physics (again inspired by a Times piece). "I am greatly relieved that the universe is finally explainable," he opens. "I was beginning to think it was me."
And death remains the ultimate punch line to the absurdity that is life's joke. How does one overcome a fear of death? he asks in "Sing, You Sacher Tortes": "By dying," he writes. "I figured it out – it's really the only way."Pub Date: June 19, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6641-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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