TOP 100 BOOK SITES
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| Hardcover Fiction Top 5 at a Glance1. THE GATHERING STORM, by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson2. THE LOST SYMBOL, by Dan Brown3. TRUE BLUE, by David Baldacci4. LAST NIGHT IN TWISTED RIVER, by John Irving5. PURSUIT OF HONOR, by Vince Flynn feeds.nytimes.com |
The Habit of Art | Theatre review Lyttelton, LondonWH Auden, the Oxford oracle, is peeing into his washbasin. He's waiting for a rent boy to arrive in his college rooms; he's stuck over his stanzas; he looks not so much like a bag person as a crumpled plastic bag. A floor above him, Benjamin Britten, sleek as a whippet, is at the piano, with poker back and pumping arms, cajoling a young treble into song: "Oh lift your little pinkie!… It's meant to sound horrid. This is modern music." Set in a rehearsal room, watched over by a playwright, observed and explained by a biographer of both Britten and Auden, Alan Bennett's imagined late meeting between composer and poet has inverted commas around every invert. It's a gloriously sustained, constantly shifting piece of irony. Irony doesn't, of course, preclude pathos. After The History Boys, the Musical Men.Bob Crowley's clever, messy, open-to-the-backstage design is, as is everything in Nicholas Hytner's fleet production, at least two things at once: a set within a set for a play within a play. Richard Griffiths comes on dying for one twice over: as the actor playing the poet, anxious to get off and do his voiceover for Tesco, he's desperate for a cigarette; as the candid, repetitive, smelly old Auden, he is longing for the rent boy. Alex Jennings is trim and buttoned-up as Britten; as the actor who plays the composer, he is lissome, arch and knowing.Both Griffiths and Jennings are terrific, though neither of them are particularly like the famous men they play: they are actors not impersonators. Michael Gambon, originally down to play Auden, was jowl-casting. Griffiths, who stepped in when Gambon was taken ill, doesn't have those lugubrious dewlaps: he's dishevelled but dainty, both swarmingly anxious and buoyantly breezy. The non-resemblance becomes one of the points and jokes of the play. History and biographers can't get it right, Bennett implies, and to rub it in he makes his commentating biographer spectacularly unlike the real-life model. Adrian Scarborough's Humphrey Carpenter is a beaky, neat, plaintive chap. Carpenter was exactly not like that: apparently bumbling, actually ultra-industrious, his default mode was affability rather than querulousness; he would never have carried such a spruce satchel – he used rather to heave his many manuscripts around in multiple plastic bags. He explained that he had to work in radio rather than telly because "I always come out looking like everyone's mad aunt".The dissimilarity is outed by an actor who carps that the real Humph was handsome. The Scarborough Humph, wheeled on to fill in biographical details and explain what's true and what's not, has another complaint. "I'm just a device," he sobs. He's right. Bennett's play is full of devices and intricate ploys. The meeting between Britten and Auden is encircled by wonderfully comic dramatic tosh. Tables, mirrors, even the creases on Auden's face are personified, and mimed to the accompaniment of silvery chimes. John Heffernan, as an assistant stage manager stepping up to fill a vacant acting spot, is particularly droll as he manfully, sceptically, assumes the part of a talking chair.It's striking that, despite all its sardonic surroundings, the central encounter – which touches on broken friendships, Thomas Mann, coming out of the closet, boys, and the grim necessity of continuing to write – still registers as moving and true. It has, of course, a history behind it: The Habit of Art takes off from Bennett's earlier work both in its preoccupations and in its casting (Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour). It's not a sequel to The History Boys, which since it triumphed at the National five years ago has spun across the Atlantic and into celluloid. Still, there are notable overlaps: the teacher who fumbled his pupils was looked on with indulgence in that play; here, faced with Britten's sexual primness as he composes Death in Venice, Auden suggests that some sexual liaisons between older men and boys might be better called not corruption but collaboration. Oxford (which National theatre audiences will know is not a town but a university) looms large. And the difficulty of being a writer's biographer was first floated by Bennett more than 20 years ago in Kafka's Dick.Actually, though, the lure of a Bennett play doesn't lie in historical themes; it comes from sentences, riffs and free-standing blasts. Audiences go to hear not just his voice, ventriloquised through his characters, but his views. Bennett has just as many arguments and ideas as David Hare, though they aren't honed and sequential. The structure is precarious, sometimes ramshackle as it skips from scene to scene. But that ricketiness ceases to matter when it is engulfed by a tsunami of jokes, a tidal wave of argumentative statements, a gorgeous gust of opinion.Which attracts first-rate performances. Stephen Wight as the rent boy for one. And Frances de la Tour for the other. As the stage manager who has to run the show, her nonchalant, sceptical intelligence rolls through the play, as it did in The History Boys. She can suggest without saying a word both determination and depression. She does so with a drop in her mellifluousness, but also with a slight curve of her long spine: she bends as if she's just been socked in the back with some slightly familiar bit of bad news. No one has ever made "Love you" sound so completely lowering. No one has ever made lowering sound so funny.TheatreAlan BennettWH AudenSusannah Clappguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The other kind of classic novel We all know the books we're supposed to be reading – but are they really the most important ones?There are two kinds of classic novel. The first are those we know we should have read, but probably haven't. These are generally the books that make us burn with shame when they come up in conversation: from Crime and Punishment to Jane Eyre, we know they would do us good if only we could get around to reading them. For me, embarrassingly, this category includes not just individual books, but entire oeuvres: I've yet to pick up a single Dickens novel, for example, and when someone mentions Proust, I actually have to make an excuse and leave the room. The second kind, meanwhile, are those books that we've read five times, can quote from on any occasion, and annoyingly push on to other people with the words: "You have to read this. It's a classic." (For me, that's The Old Man and the Sea, which to be fair straddles both categories.) And it's this second kind of book that gets the New York Review of Books Classics series out of bed in the morning. Currently celebrating its 10th anniversary, the series stands in bold contrast to the likes of Penguin Classics and Oxford World Classics. The latter publish undeniably great works – we've all got some on our shelves – but are generally unlikely to rock the boat. But NYRBC takes an almost mischievous pride in publishing the underdog, the forgotten genius, the one-hit-wonder. I mean, when was the last time you heard Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky or The Dud Avocado mentioned in the same conversation as The Outsider or Bleak House? But can you call something a classic just because you feel like it? NYRBC editor Edwin Frank certainly thinks so. During a debate in London last week to celebrate the series' anniversary, Frank explained that their choices are often simply governed by personal taste: if they think something deserves to be launched into the firmament as a classic, they go right ahead and do it (he even jotted down suggestions from the audience on what they might publish next). This approach deserves a big cheer for promoting the deep pleasure that comes with straying off the beaten track. Thanks to their list, I discovered the comic genius of Edward Lewis Wallant, whose novel The Tenants of Moonbloom is a huge-hearted story of a landlord whose daily rounds take him deep inside the unhappy lives of downtrodden New Yorkers. Wallant's early death in 1962 took him out of the spotlight while his contemporaries (Roth, Updike, Mailer) continued their meteoric ascents; he would have passed me by completely had the NYRBC series not held him up to the light. But it also begs the big question, which becomes more pressing than ever when you leave the canon behind: what makes a book a "classic" in the first place? In his essay collection, Why Read the Classics?, Italo Calvino suggested a very intimate definition: "The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in our layers of memory disguised as the individual's or the collective unconscious." I think that gets to the heart of it. Those classics that we are most passionate about – those that we insistently push into our friends' hands – are the books that have become part of the fabric of who we are. I'd argue that Richard Ford's Bascombe Novels are classics not simply because of their contribution to 20th-century American fiction – great though that is – but because they've practically become my reference books for negotiating adult life. Isn't that as important as ploughing through the complete works of Proust?ClassicsFictionChris Coxguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
A Fair Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates by Joyce Carol Oates (Quercus, £15.99)Innocently it began. When Katya Spivak was 16 years old and Marcus Kidder was 68. She'd been taking the Engelhardts' children for a walk and had stopped to look at some red lace panties in a shop window, when there came an unexpected voice: "And what is your wish?"She turned to see an older, white-haired gentleman standing behind her. "The really dull, white dressing gown," she replied. The old man laughed throatily. "Are you sure you weren't looking at the red ones? I'm Marcus Kidder, long-term Bayhead resident, though it may turn out that the real Kidder is Joycie-Baby for churning out this quasi-feminist Lolita crap.""I'm Katya, a nanny." Maybe it would be better if she put some of her thoughts in italics. How she had had a tough upbringing in New Jersey. How her father had left and her mother abused her. As if this might explain why she felt a curious attachment to the old man. "I want a cigarette.""That's not a good idea, my dear. But you must come and see me in my mansion." Dirty old man! Handsome old man! "Oh no I won't!" Oh yes I will."I knew you would come, my dear," said Mr Kidder, when Katya brought the children to his mansion two days later. "You have made a sad old paedo very happy." Katya gasped at the exquisiteness of the paintings and the decor. And the glass flowers! How closely they resembled the vagina of a young girl, she thought, an image that was unlikely to have occurred to a 16-year-old girl. "I have a present for you," Mr Kidder added, handing her the red lace panties.Katya blushed. "Oh, I couldn't possibly accept these." Oh yes she could. How strange that she could see he was a filthy old perve and yet still want to please him, to love him. Perhaps she should think a bit more about her missing father and abusive mother. And possibly even about Roy Mraz, the boy back in Vineland, who had drugged her and had done things to her that she quite liked."Don't worry, my dear, I didn't mean to offend you," said Mr Kidder. "Come and look at the children's books I wrote in my youth." He was so clever. So talented. So surprisingly sexy for a paedo. But who was this Nancy to whom the books were dedicated?She vowed not to return. Oh yes she would. Her mother called. "I need some cash to spend on toyboys," she yelled. "Yes Mummy," Katya replied. But where could she get it from? "How nice to see you've come back again, my dear," said Mr Kidder. "Of course I'll write you a cheque. Now if you wouldn't mind posing for me in these red lace panties while I draw you."She hated the panties. She loved the panties. How strange she had been characterised as a street-smart girl yet was unable to resist Mr Kidder's advances. "Just this once," she said. Oh no it wasn't."I'm so glad you've come back again," said Mr Kidder. "Please tell me who Nancy was," she begged. "She was just some girl who died of MS." "So there's no mystery?" "No, it's just a straightforward tale of paedophilia. Now get your kit off. I'm going to draw you nude."She wouldn't. She would! Oh look at my mashed strawberry nipples! She felt groggy. She had been drugged. He was caressing her. Doing other things. She heard him tell a fairytale about an old king who wanted to marry a young princess who would kill him.She ran from the mansion. She loved him, she loved him not. She called Roy Mraz. "Come and shag me and then let's go and beat up the old man," she said. Oh what had they done! The old man was in a coma. Would she be arrested? Luckily the police forgot to ask Mr Kidder's staff if there were any possible suspects so she was in the clear. He had survived after all!Mr Kidder's driver came to collect her. "I'm dying of cancer and I want to commit suicide after spending the night with you." I love you. I love you. She got into bed. "After reading this, I think I'll join you."Digested read, digested: Lo–Li-Ta–Ti-Tum.John Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Bookshelf | Lincoln, Medicine and the Depression: Of Mutual Influence: The City and the 16th President “Lincoln and New York,” published in conjunction with an exhibit at the New-York Historical Society, is a collection of essays about “a symbiotic and often crucial relationship.” feeds.nytimes.com |