→ March 5, 2013
→ By

They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

I had a post this morning on Taijuan Walker, Nolan Arenado, and some other M’s and Rockies. No game for me today, but thanks to all of you for your well wishes after hearing that my daughter’s stomach virus sent us to the ER last night. She’s fine now, but everyone’s exhausted, of course.

Horace McCoy’s novella They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? reads like an extended film treatment, a la Graham Greene’s The Third Man, which is what it actually was, although in McCoy’s case the film wasn’t made until long after his book was published and he had already died. The film earned nine Academy Award nominations, a record for a film that didn’t get a Best Picture nod, with Gig Young* winning the award for Best Supporting Actor. While it deviates somewhat from the book’s plot, both revolve around a dance marathan that exploits desperate would-be actors and hangers-on in Hollywood in the 1930s, all run by a sleazy promoter who takes advantage of the contestants to line his own pockets. (Disclaimer: I haven’t seen the film.)

*Young eventually killed himself and his wife of one month in 1978; his final film, Game of Death, was also Bruce Lee’s final film, compiled from unfinished footage shot before Lee’s death from a cerebral edema in 1973.

The sparse 120-page book is more a showcase for McCoy’s bleak, hard-boiled writing style and worldview than for any depth of plot, although there’s enough story here to sustain you through its 30,000 or so words. The book opens with Robert confessing to the murder of Gloria, essentially pleading no contest, after which we get the full story of how they met and how he came to kill her. The two are in Hollywood trying to land bit parts as extras – Gloria wants to be an actor, assuming she wants to be anything at all, while Robert wants to be a director, although it’s not clear he knows what that entails – and meet on the street after failing to earn parts that morning in their auditions. She mentions that she’s heard of a dance marathon being held with a small cash prize and the chance to be noticed by some Hollywood big shots, so he reluctantly agrees, mostly because he has nothing better to do.

The marathon is a rough, demeaning endurance contest, with dancers pushed to the limit by the unscrupulous organizers, including a bizarre nightly racing “derby” in which the losing couple is eliminated from the marathon, and a staged marriage designed to court positive and negative attention from the local press. Gloria is quickly revealed to be depressed and hopeless, picking pointless fights with other dancers and wishing aloud that she were dead. Robert is more interesting in going along to get along, but he’s just as aimless as Gloria, without the rage or hopelessness. When the contest ends in tragedy and the dancers are all sent off with a pittance for weeks of effort, Gloria pulls out a gun and tells Robert that she wants to kill herself but doesn’t have the guts, an ending foretold from the beginning of the story.

The book’s introduction says it was well-received in existentialist circles in France while it was derided or ignored in the United States until decades after its publication, and the connection to Sartre and Camus is apparent – but McCoy writes with a fire that the classic literary existentialists, so bent on telling us that everything is pointless, always lack. They Shoot Horses has an angle of suspense even though you know it ends in Gloria’s death, which to me reads as a rejoinder to existentialism: That life ends in death does not mean it lacks all meaning. We can know the ending of the story and still find interest in the journey. McCoy’s message isn’t uplifting – after all, his main characters are all devoid of purpose – but it’s not inherently nihilistic, since Gloria, the most hopeless character of all, is shown in the most unflattering light.

Next review: Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,
→ September 10, 2011
→ By

Winter’s Bone.

Winter’s Bone was one of the eight hundred, or more accurately ten, nominees for Best Picture in this year’s Academy Awards, and of the six I’ve seen it was pretty clearly the best movie. It wasn’t the most enjoyable, and I’m not sure I’d be all that eager to watch it again, but for plot, dialogue, direction, visuals, and key performances, this one edges out The King’s Speech.

Set in a backwoods community somewhere in the Missouri Ozarks, Winter’s Bone focus on Ree (played by Jennifer Lawrence), a 17-year-old girl who is her family’s de facto parent. Her mother is catatonic, and her father, a meth addict and meth maker as well, is out of the picture, leaving Ree in charge of her much younger brother and sister. Ree is barely holding things together with a little help from neighbors when she’s told that her father put up their rickety house and property as bond for his most recent court date and has now disappeared. She has just a few days to locate him or face losing the house.

The search for Ree’s father isn’t the main narrative element in the movie; the court date passes and the narrative splinters into an effort to prove he’s dead (if he is, which Ree doesn’t know for sure) and a few desperate plot strands related to it. The central story is the reactions of Ree’s neighbors, all relatives of hers, some distant, some as close as her father’s brother Teardrop (John Hawkes), but most of whom stonewall her in her attempts to locate her father. She’s turned away, bought off, threatened, and eventually beaten to try to get her to stop looking.

You could argue Winter’s Bone is about one of two things. One interpretation a few of you offered on Twitter was that the film (based on a novel of the same name) is about finding slivers of humanity in a situation that bears neither physical nor emotional resemblance to anything most people seeing this film would recognize as modern life. Ree’s people are all broken to various degrees; even Teardrop, who shows the most kindness towards Ree over the course of the movie, is a drug addict who tells his wife “I said shut up once already, with my mouth.” No one seems truly good except Ree and her friend Gail (played by Lauren Sweetser, who appears to be one of the many locals cast in various roles in the film, which was shot entirely on location), and even Ree is pushed to the boundaries of her goodness.

I saw the movie much more as a character study of Ree, one that could only succeed if the writing was strong enough and the performance of the actress matched it. Ree’s love for her siblings pushes her forward into uncomfortable and even dangerous situations; the threat of violence doesn’t deter her, and ultimately the evident strength of her resolve forces her antagonists to change their tactics in dealing with her. Nothing shakes her; her dedication to her task on behalf of her siblings is absolute, much like the Man shows for his son in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And she’s a child who has been prematurely aged emotionally by the horrific circumstances of her home life, let down explicitly by her father and implicitly by her mother (who had a breakdown related to Ree’s father).

Had Jennifer Lawrence been anything less than perfect in her role as Ree, Winter’s Bone would not have succeeded. Her character is so central to the movie that the actress’ credibility as a child who acts in almost every way like an adult is critical, and Lawrence nailed it. She looks young, and of course is dressed to look young, yet projects adult determination and toughness in confrontation after confrontation with the irrational, unfeeling, often intimidating adults who are standing between her and a possible solution to this looming catastrophe. I found her utterly convincing in look, in tone, in timing, and in conveying this very faint hint of vulnerability, or maybe fear – not fear for herself, but fear that she’ll fail. I haven’t seen Black Swan yet, but either Natalie Portman gave a historic performance, or Oscar voters are every bit as subject to the narrative as baseball writers are.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ May 30, 2011
→ By

The Fixer.

New mock draft is up. Updated top 25 pro prospects list goes up on Tuesday, followed by another projected first round on Friday.

Free Brandon Belt.

–

”So sleep now, without fear for your life, and if you should ever manage to get out of prison, keep in mind that the purpose of freedom is to create it for others.”

Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1967, a bit surprising given the award’s focus on works that deal with the American experience. The Fixer is a fictionalized account of the arrest and trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Russian Jew falsely accused of the murder of a young Ukrainian boy for the purposes of some arcane blood ritual. Malamud indicated that Bok was also inspired by the Dreyfuss and Vanzetti affairs, but the case in his novel is undeniably Beilis’.

The fixer of the title is Yakov Bok, a Jewish carpenter who leaves the countryside for the city of Kiev after his wife leaves him for another man. While in Kiev, he finds a job working for an anti-Semitic factory owner, with an apartment included in a district forbidden to Jews. When the boy’s corpse is discovered, Bok – who had once chased the boy out of the factory’s brickyard – becomes an unlikely suspect given the accusations because he’s alienated from God and his own religion, but he finds himself steamrolled in a Kafka-esque legal process designed to produce a confession or a guilty verdict.

While in prison for the remainder of the book – the novel ends as Bok heads for his long-delayed trial – the fixer endures numerous physical and psychological torments, but finds or develops an inner strength that previous to his arrest he lacked or simply didn’t know he had. Even through attempts to dehumanize him and force him to confess, he retains some vestige of freedom by choosing not to submit – the only choice he’s allowed in the unconscionable conditions of his imprisonment. That becomes his victory even before the ultimate victory of an acquittal. (Beilis was acquitted amid an international outcry over his arrest and trial; Dreyfuss was also exonerated after Émile Zola’s famous “J’accuse!” editorial. Vanzetti and his co-conspirator Sacco were executed, although their guilt is still in question; shortly before Malamud wrote The Fixer, historian Francis Russell published a major book on the case called Tragedy in Dedham that concluded that Vanzetti was innocent.)

Malamud’s work covered not just anti-Semitism but prejudice, injustice, corruption, and mob mentality in the midst of the U.S. civil rights movement and barely two decades after the end of the Holocaust while also exploring how the human spirit can survive in unbearable circumstances. Bok himself is harsh and unlikable during the brief period before his arrest, but becomes sympathetic because of the cartoonishly evil nature of his captors. (His one ally of sorts is eliminated far too soon from the novel’s pages, making most of the book’s second half even bleaker than the first.) But despite the often graphic descriptions of Bok’s life in solitary confinement and the faint hope of any redemption or rescue, The Fixer was compelling because of its bigger themes, ones that probably apply just as well in Bosnia or Rwanda or even today in the Middle East. Malamud’s irreligious Jew stands in for every oppressed people throughout human history.

Incidentally, Beilis himself wrote a memoir of his imprisonment and trial called The Story of My Sufferings that appears to be long out of print and probably in the public domain. I imagine it’s a difficult read, but I hope its historical significance encourages some e-book publisher to put it out there in electronic form.

Next up: I won’t have much time to read this week, so I picked Graham Greene’s brief “entertainment” The Captain and the Enemy.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ May 3, 2008
→ By

Independent People.

I love this book. It is an unfolding wonder of artistic vision and skill – one of the best books of the twentieth century. I can’t imagine any greater delight than coming to Independent People for the first time.

That’s not my take on Halldór Laxness’ novel; it’s from novelist Jane Smiley, who wrote a more direct takeoff on King Lear and provided the above blurb for the cover of Independent People. No, I didn’t think that the novel was a revelation on every page or a life-changing experience. I thought it was awful.

To be more specific, I think it is the most bleak, humorless, and misanthropic book I’ve ever read. Laxness himself admitted that his protagonist, Bjartur, was “stupid,” but it’s worse than that – he’s a complete asshole whose lack of regard for the feelings of others, above all women, borders on sociopathy. The ideal of “independence” around which the novel is structured is folly and leads to Bjartur’s ruin in various ways. And none of the supporting characters is built with enough depth or dimension to overcome the long shadow of Bjartur’s obstinate, materialist, misogynistic point of view.

Independent People is the story of Bjartur’s adult life as he leaves the servitude of the local Bailiff of Myri and attempts to build an independent life as a self-sufficient farmer on a local croft. He marries twice, although his stubbornness and lack of empathy lead to the deaths of both women. His eldest child, Asta Sollilja, is the only one to whom he shows any affection, but when she becomes pregnant at fifteen at the hands of a rapscallion whom Bjartur himself invites into the home, he throws her out and resolves (with finite success) to have nothing more to do with her. Depending on how you interpret the ending, his assholishness may lead to her death too. Around all of this happiness is famine, bankruptcy, fraud, parochialism, and the pointless deaths of several people and many animals.

What made the book so difficult to gut my way through was the complete lack of warmth. You could freeze your drink if you sit it too close to the novel; the only glimmers of empathy from any major character come from Asta, but they’re depicted as the confused feelings of an ultra-sheltered teenaged girl, and she too falls into a cynical stoicism when her father throws her out. Laxness tries to create some embers of emotion in the short conclusion, but it seemed forced.

Laxness won a Nobel Prize and appears to have a small but highly devoted following, at least in the literary world. All I can say is that I’m glad I went to Iceland long before I read this book, because I doubt he would have made the country come off any worse if he’d written that the locals bite the heads off of live puppies.

Next up: Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, a modernist comedy of psychoanalysis and self-absorption.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,