→ July 6, 2020
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Mindware.

I appeared on the Inquiring Minds podcast this spring to promote my book The Inside Game, and co-host Adam Bristol recommended a book to me after the show, Dr. Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking. Dr. Nisbett is a professor of social psychology at the University of Michigan and co-directs the school’s Culture and Cognition program, and a good portion of Mindware focuses on how our environment affects our cognitive processes, especially the unconscious mind, as he gives advice on how to improve our decision-making processes and better understand the various ways our minds work.

Nisbett starts out the book with an obvious but perhaps barely understood point: Our understanding of the world around us is a matter of construal, a combination of inferences and interpretations, because of the sheer volume of information and stimuli coming into our brains at all times, and how much of what we see or hear is indirect. (If you want to get particularly technical, even what we see directly is still a matter of interpretation; even something as seemingly concrete as color is actually a sensation created in the brain, an interpolation of different wavelengths of light that also renders colors more stable in our minds than they would be if we were just relying on levels of illumination.) So when we run into biases or illusions that affect our inferences and interpretations, we will proceed on the basis of unreliable information.

He then breaks down three major ways in which we can understand how our minds process all of these stimuli. One is that our environments affect how we think and how we behave far more than we realize they do. Another is that our unconscious minds do far more work than we acknowledge, including processing environmental inputs that we may not actively register. And the third is that we see and interpret the world through schemas, frameworks or sets of heuristics that we use to make sense of the world and simplify the torrent of information coming at us.

From that outline, Nisbett marches through a series of cognitive biases and errors, many of which overlap with those I covered in The Inside Game, but explains more of how cognition is affected by external stimuli, including geography (the subject of one of his previous books), culture, and “preperception” – how the subconscious mind gets you started before you actively begin to perceive things. This last point is one of the book’s most powerful observations: We don’t know why we know what we know, and we can’t always account for our motives and reasons, even if we’re asked to explain them directly. Subjects of experiments will deny that their choices or responses were influenced by stimuli that seem dead-obvious to outside observers. They can be biased by anchors that have nothing to do with the topic of the questions, and even show effects after the ostensible study itself – for example, that subjects exposed to more words related to aging will walk more slowly down the hall out of the study room than those exposed to words relate to youth or vitality. It seems absurd, but multiple studies have shown effects like these, as with the study I mentioned in my book about students’ guesses on quantities being biased by the mere act of writing down the last two digits of their social security numbers. We would like to think that our brains don’t work that way, but they do.

Nisbett is a psychologist but crosses comfortably into economics territory, including arguments in favor of using cost/benefit analyses any time a decision has significant costs and the process allows you the time to perform such an analysis. He even gets into the thorny question of how much a life is worth, which most people do not want to consider but which policymakers have to consider when making major decisions on, say, how much and for how long to shut down the economy in the face of a global pandemic. There is some death rate from COVID-19 that we would – and should – accept, and to figure that out, we have to consider what values to put on the lives that might be lost at each level of response, and then compare that to economic benefits of remaining open or additional costs of overloaded hospitals. “Zero deaths” is the compassionate answer, but it isn’t the rational one; if zero deaths in a pandemic were even possible, it would be prohibitively expensive in time and money, so much so that it would cause suffering (and possibly deaths) from other causes.

In the conclusion to Mindware, Dr. Nisbett says that humans are “profligate causal theorists,” and while that may not quite roll off the tongue, it’s a pithy summary of how our minds work. We are free and easy when it comes to finding patterns and ascribing causes to outcomes, but far less thorough when it comes to testing these hypotheses, or even trying to make these hypotheses verifiable or falsifiable. It’s the difference between science and pseudoscience, and between a good decision-making process and a dubious one. (You can still make a good decision with a bad process!) This really is a great book if you like the kind of books that led me to write The Inside Game, or just want to learn more about how your brain deals with the huge volume of information it gets each day so that you can make better decisions in your everyday life.

Next up: I just finished Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House this weekend and am about halfway through Patrick Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland.

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→ June 22, 2020
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Being Wrong.

Kathryn Schulz won a Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for her New Yorker story “The Really Big One,” about the earthquake that is likely to devastate the Pacific Northwest in the next half-century. It is one of the greatest longreads I’ve ever read, and one of the major reasons I’ve expanded my Saturday link roundups from what used to be a few links on most weekends to a dozen or more stories headlined by the best longreads of each week. It’s also why I wouldn’t move out to Seattle or Portland despite all of the benefits of living in that part of the country.

Her first book was 2010’s Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, a meditation on and paean to the power of making mistakes, and an explanation of how our brains respond to the feeling of being wrong and how we use it, sometimes without realizing it, to learn and make better decisions in the future. It’s a book I wish I’d read a decade ago, and certainly before I wrote The Inside Game, but also helped affirm my longstanding commitment to owning my mistakes at work by detailing when and why my evaluations of certain players were wrong.

Schulz writes with a clarity and joy in the subject that is evident from the first lines. She asks “Why is it so fun to be right? As pleasures go, it is a second-order one at best,” and immediately has your attention: It is fun to be right, but why? And why does it feel so bad to be wrong, even if what you’re wrong about is ultimately something trivial?

Being Wrong breaks down the experience into three parts – where errors come from, what it’s like to be wrong, and what we can gain from being wrong and learning to embrace it. Part one dovetails well with other books I’ve read about the ways we think, but gets even further down into our mental processes than the sort of cognitive biases and errors I discussed in The Inside Game, such as describing how inaccurate our own memories can be (and why eyewitness testimony isn’t the unassailable truth our judicial system has long assumed it to be), how prior beliefs affect memory and observation (leading to cognitive dissonance), and how our thinking evolves as we mature and yet is still vulnerable to confirmation bias or forming conclusions based on insufficient evidence.

Part two goes into how we experience wrongness, while also continuing to explore the ways in which we are or become wrong. We can disbelieve things we know or strongly believe to be true simply because of the influence of others, which applies to spheres as different as religion or science. Schulz looks at some of the history of doomsday prophets who claimed that the Second Coming or a similarly cataclysmic event would occur on a certain date; when it didn’t happen, many of these prophets’ adherents didn’t give up on their faith in their soothsayers, but cooked up post hoc rationalizations why the prophets weren’t actually all that wrong in the first place. One such event, in 1844, spawned the Seventh Day Adventists, a sect that claims over 25 million followers even though it was founded by three followers of a prophet whose prophecy failed, leading them to concoct an explanation – utterly unverifiable, of course – that has hoodwinked people for over 150 years.

Schulz also delves into the persistence of memory – and how easily it can lead us astray, giving the story of Penny Beernsten, whose identification of the man who attacked and sexually assaulted her was overturned by DNA evidence that identified her actual attacker 18 years later. Beernsten has been extremely open about her experiences, including describing how she tried to remember details of her attacker’s face during the attack and how certain she was about her identification after the fact, as well as what happened to her when she learned that she was wrong and had sent the wrong man to prison for nearly two decades. This leads into a discussion of flawed prosecutions, where police officers and/or government attorneys will often cling to prior beliefs even when tangible evidence disproves them.

The third section, Embracing Error, looks at people and institutions that have made the active choice to accept errors as a part of life and build processes to trap them, minimizing their short-term impact and long-term frequency. This covers medical errors, which ended up the entire impetus for Atul Gawande’s excellent book The Checklist Manifesto, and how simple solutions like pre-operation (or pre-flight, or pre-anything) checklists can lead to significant reductions in errors, saving lives, injuries, or just cash. Schulz also explains how the awareness that we might be wrong makes us more apt to listen to the feedback or contrary opinions of others, avoiding the ‘yes men’ mentality of many leaders in government and industry. She wraps up the book with a detour into humor, asking why it’s so funny to us when other people are wrong (there’s quite a bit of research on this, which surprised me) but less so when the mistakes are ours, and uses that to launch into a philosophical discussion of fact versus art, certainty versus uncertainty, and how being wrong is essential to our survival and progress as a species. That assumes, of course, that we can admit we’re wrong, and then do something about it, which is certainly not the case in the United States today, where falsehoods are merely “alternative facts” and an entire party preaches science denial from wearing masks to stop a pandemic to denying evolution and climate change in its platform. Maybe they should read Being Wrong, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t get through.

Next up: About 2/3 of the way through Richard Nisbett’s Mindware: Tools for Smart Thinking.

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→ June 18, 2020
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Mystic Market.

Mystic Market ($20) is a marvelous light family game that you can quite easily play with your kids, requiring nothing more than color-matching and a little arithmetic to play. There are just a few simple elements to it, with some direct and indirect player interaction, perhaps a little too much take-that for younger players, but also enough to satisfy gamers who insist on a bit of meat even in their lighter games. I’m surprised it hasn’t found more of an audience.

Players in Mystic Market are trying to gather ingredients, in the form of cards in six different colors, that can be combined in sets and sold for prices that vary depending on the color of the ingredients – and the timing of the sale. You can collect these ingredients by buying one or two of them them from the market for one, two, or three coins apiece, based on their current sale price on the ingredient track, or by swapping cards from your hand, one or two at a time, without regard to color or current value.

The game has a track with little ingredient bottles (filled with glitter), and at the start of the game they’re arranged in rainbow order, with purple at the bottom and the most valuable at 15 coins for a set, while red is at the top and returns only 5 coins for a set. The catch is that when you sell a set, its color drops in value to the top of the track (5 coins), with every other color falling down the track to the next highest price. Thus there’s a huge timing element to the game, both in terms of when to sell your own sets, and whether to try to take cards your opponents might need to sell high-value sets.

The number of cards you need for a set also varies by color, from four red cards or four orange cards for a set of those colors to just two of blue or purple, and their frequency in the deck declines as their starting value increases. Thus at some point during the game the purple set, which is hard to collect given its scarcity, will sell for just five coins because someone else just sold a set, and collecting it becomes less profitable.

It rarely makes sense to sell sets at 5 or 6 coins, and you’ll usually sell at 10-12-15 and turn a profit. The heart of the game is that process of buying and selling, working the timing of your sales, and keeping an eye on what your opponents are collecting, whether it’s to grab a card they might need or to time your sale in a way to get the high price for yourself and make whatever your opponents were collecting far less valuable. There are also three “supply shift” cards randomly shuffled into the deck each game; each one moves one bottle to the highest value on the track and moves everything that was higher than that bottle back to the lowest point, disrupting all of the values and thus your strategy if you were mid-set.

If that were all there was to Mystic Market, it would be good enough but probably wouldn’t have much replay value. The Potion deck contains cards with special, single-use powers, and you can buy those for specific combinations of two ingredient cards. Buying (“crafting”) a potion is a free action, as is using any potion. Several of them do something nasty to an opponent – stealing a card, forcing them to discard a card of your choosing, swapping a card with you – while others boost you, such as letting you sell a half set for full price, letting you substitute a potion card for one ingredient to complete a set, or letting you take a single ingredient card for free. There’s even a card that has no power at all, but can be redeemed for 15 coins, very useful if you’re left with a blue card and a purple card but can’t complete either set later in the game. You could choose to remove the take-that cards from this deck if you don’t want to play with them when you have younger kids in the game, but I do think they add quite a bit to the game both in strategy and in making it harder for one player to run away with things.

Mystic Market plays two to four players and is suitable for kids as young as 8, maybe a little younger if they’ve played a few games before; there’s a little text in the game, on the Potion cards, that requires sufficient reading and thinking skills that would stymie much younger players. You play until the ingredient deck is exhausted, which I’ve found takes about 45 minutes for a full game regardless of player count. If you’re looking for a good family game while we’re all still mostly staying home, I think this would fit the bill.

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→ May 29, 2020
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La Isla.

I’ve got a mixed take on Stefan Feld’s “point salad” games. The Castles of Burgundy is one of my favorite games ever, probably my favorite heavy (or heavier, depending on your perspective) game. Bora Bora is a shade heavier, and pretty good, although I have to be in the right mood for it. His last two games have left me cold, however. Merlin was a total mess where it took a lot of work to get tiny gains in points. Carpe Diem was somewhat better but still not good, with at least one scoring method too many and a tile-selection mechanic that makes it way too easy to end up stuck.

La Isla isn’t his newest, but it’s probably his least-known title, and I don’t see any good reason for that. It’s not a point-salad game, really; there are only a few ways to score and they are all connected, logically and thematically. The game also features a lot of simultaneous play, so turns are very short, and you can play a whole game in under an hour. Yet it has the kind of strategic thinking I expect from Feld games, along with an extremely satisfying mechanic at the heart of the game that I find I really enjoy.

Players in La Isla are explorers trying to photograph five rare animals spread throughout the island represented by the game’s board. That board is variable, with ten interlocking pieces around a circular center piece, and both the board and the distribution of animals varies every time you play. The animals go in the green spaces around the board, and every such space is surrounded by places where players can place their explorer tokens. When a player places explorers on all spaces surrounding one animal – which can be two, three, or four spaces – they take that animal token and score for the number of explorers it took to claim it. Each player starts the game with a large, two-point token for one of the five animals.

That’s the heart of the game, but there’s more to the scoring, of course. There’s a deck of cards in La Isla that governs most of the play itself, with each card showing three things: a special ability, a resource color, and one of the five animals. Each player gets three cards on every turn and must choose one to use for its ability, one to gain the shown resource, and one to advance the shown animal on the scoring tracks. Each player has a cardholder with three spaces in it, and on each turn will place one card in one of those slots – covering existing cards from the fourth round onward – to gain that ability for as long as the card is still showing. The card selection process is simultaneous for all players, so the rounds move quickly.

To place an explorer on the board, you need to pay two resources of the matching color of the space where you want your explorer to go. (You only have five explorers, so once you’ve placed your fifth one, you start moving them, which is itself a strategic decision because you only have a few explorers to use to surround any animal token.) There are many special abilities that make this easier – you may gain a resource for where you place an explorer or the animal you take, or you may get to go on a certain type of space for one resource instead of two – making those abilities especially valuable in the early and middle parts of the game.

At the end of each round, players move up the five markers on the scoring board, one for each animal. When you move up a specific animal marker, you score one point for every animal token of that type you already have, so concentrating on one animal type has significant scoring benefits. The scoring board affects the end-game values of those same animal tokens, which start at zero but increase in value every few spaces; when the sum of the five values across all tracks reaches 7/9/11 points for 2/3/4 players, the game ends.

At end-game, the big points come. You score for each of your animal tokens based on their values on the tracks. For each set of all five animal tokens you have, you get another ten points – one of a few ways where Feld makes sure you can’t win just by going for a single animal type. And you get one point for every two resources left over.

La Isla requires you to have quite a bit of strategic planning, but you’re also always limited by the randomness of the cards. You have to have a long-term plan for what animals to go after, looking for areas of the board where you can be more efficient with your explorers and make the most use of the ability cards you have, but after a few rounds you’ll also be dependent on the resources that show up on the cards you draw. It’s easy to end up with a turn where you can’t place an explorer – it’s not ideal, and if you do that twice in a game you probably won’t win – because of that resource limitation, so planning ahead for that inevitability also becomes a strategic consideration. You’ll also want to push the animal you’re gathering up the track while trying not to push others up, although on some turns you won’t be able to move up your preferred animal at all and will have to determine which one to move that might just help their opponents the least.

There are two levels of ability cards in the game, with 120 level 1 cards and 60 more level 2 cards that introduce a bit more complexity to the game – some of which allow you to add up to two more explorers to your supply, others let you add a fourth slot for ability cards, and so on. They’re absolutely worth using but I agree with the rulebook’s suggestion that you play without them at least once to get the hang of the game itself.

Feld’s reputation for overly involved point-salad games is well-deserved, but La Isla isn’t one of them. There are only a few main ways to score – when you take an animal token, when you move up a marker on an animal’s scoring track, and at game-end for your animal tokens, so they’re all related, and require you to consider balance in your strategy. It’s also a brightly colored, visually appealing game, like Bora Bora (and definitely not like the original Castles of Burgundy), in a space where those features often get short shrift. If you’ve wanted to bump up to games a bit more complex than the family games I often recommend, but still want something good for kids 10+ and that plays in an hour or so, I would definitely suggest giving La Isla a shot.

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→ May 5, 2020
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All Our Names.

Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American author of three novels, most recently the 2014 book All Our Names, as well as an essayist and literature professor at Bard College. I’d never heard of him prior to seeing that novel of his show up on sale for the Kindle, and bought it on a whim based on the description and what I could find in a quick search about Mengestu himself. It’s a smart, incisive, and very fast-reading novel of alienation and identity that spans two continents and asks us to examine who we really are.

The novel alternates narratives between those titled Isaac and those titled Helen, but both are connected by a man who came from an unnamed central African country to a midwestern U.S. city as a refugee. In the Isaac sections, two young, poor men, one of whom will eventually flee for America, get caught up in a budding revolution that’s stirring around a university campus where the men hang around but can’t afford to be students. In the chapters titled ‘Helen,’ Isaac, the refugee, and the woman who picks him up at the airport begin a complicated love affair – and, since the novel is set in the 1960s or early 1970s, good ol’ American racism is one of those complications, so Isaac ends up facing threats on both ends of his trip.

Mengestu succeeds here by making both stories equally compelling despite their substantive and dramatic differences. The half of the book set in Africa is fraught with danger as the two boys are swept up by events surrounding them, and eventually join forces with one revolutionary group, so that they’re frequently endangering themselves or merely endangered by their mere existence as young men in a newly independent, barely functioning state. The half set in the United States, by contrast, has very little physical danger; the risk is of an interracial romance in an era and place that did not accept such couples, and of Isaac’s distance from Helen because of the unknowns in his past.

How he ties those two together is enough of a spoiler that I won’t go into it, but it’s clever, and revealed early enough in the novel that you have time to adjust to this new knowledge and reassess what’s come before while still working through the remainders of both stories. It could seem like a gimmick, and it didn’t quite help that I encountered the same gimmick two months earlier in a novel from 2019, but Mengestu makes it work because the eventual revelation makes everything that came before it fit. (I had a suspicion of what was coming a few chapters ahead, so it’s not that big of a spoiler.)

There are just three characters in the book, the two named and the other young man in Africa, with Helen probably the weakest of the three. The two men seem to stand in for the two paths available to young men in such environments, with revolution brewing around them – the true believer, ready to stir up trouble and even take up arms; or the reluctant rebel, seeing no other path out of poverty but hardly believing in the cause of the rebels any more than he believes in the government. Helen comes across more as observer than participant, and it’s never really clear – despite her narration – why she went to bed with Isaac, or how they fell in love. Once there, what follows is far more convincing, but the lead up to that requires some buy-in.

If you accept the twist that ties the two narratives together, All Our Names works as a portrait of a man adrift in two countries, fleeing his homeland, where he couldn’t feel safe, for a new life as a refugee in a country that will always view him as an outsider. It left me hoping Mengestu will return to fiction at some point, as he hasn’t published anything in the six years since this book came out.

Next up: I’m several books behind but right now I’m reading 24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid, Willie Mays’ and John Shea’s collaboration that’s part autobiography, part biography of the New York/San Francisco Giants great, due out on May 12th.

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→ April 6, 2020
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Lent.

Jo Walton’s Among Others was one of my favorite novels from my reading of (nearly) all of the Hugo winners, a perfect use of fantasy elements to elevate a brilliant story, rather than relying on the fantasy (or sci-fi) bits to provide the entertainment. Her latest novel, Lent, goes a bit further in leaning on a single fantastical quirk to take the real-life story of Girolamo Savonarola, a martyred monk in 1490s Italy who was believed to have the gift of prophecy, and turn it into an extensive meditation on how small choices in our lives can have extensive, long-lasting effects on our world.

The first third or so of the book seems like a straightforward telling of the last six years of Girolamo’s life, from 1492 until the infamous “bonfire of the vanities” that led to a turning of public sentiment against him and his eventual imprisonment, torture, and hanging at the hands of the “do as we say, not as we do” Catholic Church. Girolamo preaches against corruption and secular art, gets under the skin of the Pope and other powerful clergy, and eventually they manage to win the political battle and execute him. After his death, however, we learn something about Girolamo before he returns to earth, back in 1492, to try it all over again – but this time with the knowledge of what transpired in his previous life, as well as that new bit of information, and thus can alter his choices to see if he can get the outcome he ultimately desires. He’ll fail again, return to earth, make new decisions, fail again, and so on until the final chapter where we will learn if he gets it “right” in the last attempt in the novel.

That conceit itself isn’t new, but the reason Girolamo gets to play life as a sort of role-playing game where he restarts from his last save is a new twist that provides a stark backdrop to the choices he makes – and, in many ways, makes some of them more selfless than before. Walton thus gives us a meditation on free will and chaos theory within a story about grace and salvation, one that upends traditional Catholic theology while playing around within its borders. There’s a slow build in the first section, but once you see what’s going on, and Girolamo himself is armed with the same knowledge, the entire concept becomes more interesting, and every subsequent decision that he makes carries much more weight, even when you know that it’s going to ultimately fail and lead him back to restart the cycle from some point in his past.

Girolamo himself makes for a fascinating protagonist as Walton writes him, although I think she’s softened his character a little to emphasize his generosity of spirit and belief in the church as a way to spread the religious and mundane philosophies of Jesus Christ in the world, thus deemphasizing to some extent his puritanical beliefs and attacks on secular art and culture. There’s one scene of a burning of secular or “profane” works, although even within that Girolamo is presented as more resigned to the event than the fanatic he appears to have actually been. He becomes friends with more than one character who is committing adultery, including a woman who would certainly have been seen as “fallen” in that time, which seems like it may not have been consistent with the actual Girolamo (although it’s a reasonable use of poetic license).

The magic of Walton’s writing seems to be in the getting there more than the destination itself, as I think it’s fairly clear where Lent is likely to end; it’s how Walton gets to that point that captivates. I wish she’d been able to give a bit more depth to the panoply of characters around Girolamo, many of whom are interesting even when a bit two-dimensional and just required more page time to help flesh them out, but the main character is so fascinating – as is the side character Crookback, whose real-life identity may be apparent to astute readers – that the book still soars without it.

Next up: José Saramago’s The Double.

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→ March 24, 2020
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Uncut Gems.

Uncut Gems was one of the best-reviewed movies of 2019, taking home the Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Actor honors at the Independent Spirit Awards in February, and landing at the top of many critics’ year-end lists, including those of my friends Will Leitch and Tim Grierson. (I count 20 critics who put it on top of their 2019 lists on this Metacritic roundup, which includes Tim’s list but not Will’s.) After finally catching it on demand this week, I can at least add my voice to the chorus – it’s tremendous, maybe not my favorite movie of last year but close to it, and one of the most intense, relentless movie experiences I’ve had in quite a while. (It’s available to rent now on amazon and iTunes.)

Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a jeweler in New York’s Diamond District who has a sliiight gambling problem and, as a result, makes one reckless decision after another, including regularly pawning valuable pieces that other people have loaned to him. As the film opens, we see the discovery of a large black opal in an Ethiopian mine, a stone that Ratner has negotiated to obtain so that he can sell it at auction for what he expects to be over a million dollars. He’s harassed by goons from a loan shark, Arno (Eric Bogosian, looking pained at every moment), who is extremely pissed that Howard keeps betting rather than paying him back. And in another early scene, Howard’s assistant Demany (Lakeith Stanfield) manages to get then-Celtics star Kevin Garnett into the shop, where Garnett becomes obsessed with the uncut black opal stone and asks to borrow it because he seems to think it will bring him good luck on the court. Howard is also busy having an affair with an employee while still living with his estranged wife, and appears to owe several other people money, but can’t stop himself from betting or making other really terrible decisions.

Directed and co-written by the Safdie brothers, Uncut Gems grabs you by the throat from the start and never lets up until the closing sequence (a gimmicky shot that mirrors one from the beginning of the film). Everything about this movie will induce anxiety in the viewer, not least the music, which often feels like the soundtrack to a 1980s arcade game, and the frenetic cinematography, which often puts the viewer uncomfortably close to the action. The story itself never gives you a chance to catch your breath: Any time it appears that Howard might have a way out of trouble, something goes wrong, usually something of his own doing. Meeting Garnett turns out to be the worst-best thing to ever happen to him, not least because he’s a bit starstruck and suddenly decides to bet huge amounts on complicated parlays involving Garnett and the Celtics. This four-dimensional balancing act he’s trying to pull is absurd and you know it’s destined to fail and you shouldn’t even want this guy with no apparent redeeming qualities to succeed, but knowing what the consequences will likely be if it doesn’t work will still put you on the edge of your seat and have you rooting for Ratner in spite of yourself.

Sandler’s performance here is remarkable, and it’s a crime he wasn’t nominated for Best Actor here. Gone is the joking, crude comedian persona, replaced by a nervous, obsequious, crude version of himself, with minuscule changes to his appearance that somehow were enough to make him seem like Not Adam Sandler. He is this character, so that everything he does fits with what we know about him; without the performance there’s no way this film would be watchable, let alone good, because everything depends on him being credible. Garnett is the other real revelation here – sure, he’s playing a version of himself, but, as with Sandler/Howard, you have to believe that Garnett really wants that stone, and you have to believe his interactions with Howard are authentic. There’s a lot of stunt casting here – Mike Francesa appears as a bookie/restaurateur, John Amos has a brief cameo (which makes for a good in-joke about the Safdies’ prior film, Good Time), the Weeknd plays himself, Tilda Swinton and Doc Rivers make voice cameos – but Garnett’s is the one that has to be credible for the film to work, and he does it.

I still have two more movies I want to see before posting a very-late ranking of 2019 movies, but this is clearly in my top 5 for last year. I couldn’t put it over Parasite, which was just as gripping, and also quite funny in parts (as is Uncut Gems), but also has a more serious underpinning than this film does. The Uncut Gems script also has a few moments that don’t quite add up, but the ending works, and some of the flourishes that pop up towards the end of the film (Wayne Diamond’s character doesn’t appear until maybe 80% of the way through, but damn is he effective) pay off in more substantial ways than I expected. I’m not that shocked that an indie thriller starring an actor known for lowbrow comedies was snubbed by the Academy, but Uncut Gems deserved more recognition than it got.

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→ March 18, 2020
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Wild Rose.

Jessie Buckley’s first film role was in the highly underrated, barely-seen independent thriller Beast back in 2017, a star turn by the young Irish actress just four years who had previously only worked in theater and on British television. She had a minor role in last year’s Judy, which was probably Americans’ first exposure to her work, but once again starred in an independent film, this time the musical comedy-drama Wild Rose, which plays with the standard formula of such smalltown-girl-makes-good movies and shows off Buckley’s impressive vocal and acting range. It’s free on Hulu and available to rent on amazon and iTunes.

Buckley is Rose-Lynn Harlan, who is just getting out of jail as the film opens and heads home to her two children and her mother (Dame Julie Walters), who has been taking care of them for a year while Rose-Lynn served out her sentence for a minor drug charge (revealed a bit later in the film). She’s never without her white cowgirl boots, and her only goal in life is to get to Nashville and become a country-music star, even if it means neglecting her kids or spurning the few people in her life willing to help her, including her mother and the woman whose house Rose-Lynn cleans for work. Susannah (Sophie Okonedo, who does not age) hears Rose-Lynn singing and tries everything to help her get to Nashville, but Rose-Lynn simply can’t get out of her own way.

Wild Rose is half formulaic, but manages to zig and zag enough times to get away from most of the clichés of the genre – notably the way such films generally rely on extraordinary good fortune to push their protagonists along the path to stardom. Rose-Lynn could have that, maybe, but every time she has such an opportunity, reality intercedes, often in the form of her own irresponsibility. She had her two children quite young and still hasn’t accepted the obligations of parenthood, nor does she seem to recognize the burden she places on her mother through her behavior. Yet she’s also spirited and driven and a talented singer and you’ll probably find yourself rooting for her in spite of her actions, even when she has gone past deserving our support. There are some moments that made me cringe, but that is what most helps this script avoid the saccharine elements of typical up-from-nowhere music films.

Nearly all of the songs Rose-Lynn sings in the film, and the majority of the songs on the soundtrack, are covers, many of them well-known country songs (John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” is a particular standout), along with a cover of Primal Scream’s “Country Girl” and a few originals. The closing song “Glasgow (No Place by Home),” co-written by Mary Steenburgen, is one of the two best songs in the film along with “Angel” and deserved one of the five Best Original Song nominations, at least over the Diane Warren song and I’d argue over the Elton John/Bernie Taupin track that won.

Buckley is an absolute star, though – she’s magnetic on screen and, it turns out, quite a singer too. (She finished second on a British reality-TV singing competition show at age 19, which led her to drama school and eventually to this career on screen and stage.) I’m not sure what it’ll take for her to land a  role in a major film that gets the attention of American audiences, but after three films, two in which she was the star, she’s reached the “I’ll watch anything she’s in” status for me. She earned a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress along with four nominees for the Oscar for the same award, taking the nod that Cynthia Erivo received here. She makes this movie work, even when it’s a bit uneven, and carries off the star-is-almost-born role to make every aspect of it credible, even when the plot seems a little farfetched (the Susannah bits). The resolution here is just perfect as well, avoiding the sentimental or the maudlin for a conclusion that’s just atypical enough to be satisfying.

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→ March 12, 2020
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Feast Your Eyes.

Myla Goldberg’s latest novel Feast Your Eyes, shortlisted for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Fiction,employs a novel narrative technique – or gimmick, depending on your point of view – to tell the stories of two women, mother and daughter, whose lives were both affected by a few very specific choices they both made. The mother, Lillian, was a photographer who made headlines when a series of photos she took led to an obscenity trial; her daughter, Samantha Jane, is the narrator, and tells the story of Lillian’s life in a series of essays and quotes as she writes the catalog for a retrospective of her mother’s work. It is an unusual way to tell a story, and has a long ramp-up until it truly gets rolling, but when it clicks it zooms by – puns intended – as Goldberg has created a truly memorable, compelling, complicated character in Lillian, and wants to talk to readers about just how monumental and important a woman’s right to choose can be.

Lillian grew up outside Cleveland in modest but not poor circumstances, and fell in love with photography at an early age, deciding not long after high school that that was how she wanted to make her living – or, at least, to make art, and hope to find a living to support it. She moves to New York, becomes pregnant while still young, and goes to have an abortion, only to bail at the sketchy and unsanitary circumstances. That baby is Samantha, whose very existence alters the course of Lillian’s life, mostly for the better, although the artificial/societal conflict between motherhood and vocation becomes explicit – pun intended – when Lillian publishes a series of photos called Mommy is Sick, which shows a half-naked, prepubescent Samantha handing a glass to Lillian, who is in bed, bleeding after a completed abortion. Samantha was the subject of some of her mother’s photos before that series, but when it lands Lillian and the gallery owner in jail, and eventually goes before the Supreme Court, Samantha’s life is permanently changed as well, as she is now The Girl in the Photos and later switches to her middle name, Jane, to try to avoid the unwanted notoriety the photos have given her.

We know early in the book that Lillian has already died young, but Goldberg still makes her death pack an emotional punch because of how Mommy is Sick drove a permanent wedge between mother and daughter, and from how Lillian never quite grasped its impact on Samantha. Lillian is a reluctant feminist, progressive for her era but less so even to her own daughter, writing just twenty years or so later, especially as Lillian never wanted the First Amendment fight she sparked; for Lillian, it was about making art, and that was enough. Samantha clearly feels like she was often second to that desire to make art, but also strives to understand her mother through her photographs, and interprets the photographs (and thus her mother) for the reader through the series of essays and comments, interspersed with remembrances from several major people in Lillian’s life whom Samantha contacted for the catalog. She resents her mother for making her a symbol in her photos, and for choosing a lifestyle of working poverty that allowed her to keep taking photographs, but also accepts the sacrifices her mother made for her, especially when Samantha has an abortion of her own and considers how that choice changed the course of her mother’s life (and created her own).

You have to buy into the narrative device to appreciate Feast Your Eyes, and I imagine some readers simply won’t be able to get on the book’s wavelength for that reason. For the first few pages I wasn’t sure if I would, but it started rolling for me maybe 20-30 pages in as the story itself began to grab me and the titles of the photographs or series faded into the background. Goldberg’s best trick here is that she pivots within each comment or essay from the photo right into something larger from Lillian’s past; there actually isn’t that much detail about photos that we never see, which could have been dreadful to read. It also works here because Goldberg manages to tie the fabricated photographs to times and places that spur different recollections, by Samantha, or former friends or lovers of Lillian’s, that explore more aspects of her character, and sometimes of Samantha’s as well. Even without the two overarching, feminist themes – how society pressures women to choose between motherhood and career, and how essential a woman’s right to choose is to her agency elsewhere in life – Feast Your Eyes would have been a strong character study, but those additional layers give it impact beyond most of the 2019 novels I’ve read so far.

Next up: Another novel from last year, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

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→ February 26, 2020
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Trust Exercise.

Susanne Choi won the National Book Award this year for Trust Exercise, a novel that sneaks up on the reader, starting out on familiar ground as a story of teenage drama among students at a school for the arts before Choi’s ambition becomes apparent in the novel’s second and third parts. It’s metafictional and disorienting – I still don’t quite know what happened within the book – and morphs into a question of who owns the truth, or just has the right to tell it.

Sarah and David are classmates at CAPA, a prestigious (fictional) high school in Houston, where they’re both in the school’s vaunted theatre program, led by the enigmatic Mr. Kingsley, the sort of dream teacher you might expect to find in Fame. He pushes his students when he sees greatness within, and blurs boundaries with his favorites, inviting them out to lunch or occasionally to the home he shares with his husband – this, in the 1980s, when it was rare for a man to be openly gay, much less to do so in Texas where I believe it was still a capital crime. Sarah and David are drawn to each other, start an intense relationship, break up over something stupid, have a tryst in the school hallway, stop speaking to each other, and, when a group of young actors and their teacher/chaperone arrive from England, get entangled with other people. This all appears to come to a head when one of the older actors from England forces himself on Sarah in a way that she herself doesn’t entirely understand as nonconsensual.

That’s about half of the novel, and after that everything shifts in a way that can’t be discussed without spoiling the great pleasure of watching Choi handle the vehicle she’s created. This is much more than a story about star-crossed lovers, and it’s more than just the story of a sexual assault and its aftermath; Choi brings the reader in for a close look at the action, and then pans the camera back for a wider view, and then pans it back even further for one last glimpse. With each move backward in granularity, Choi moves forward in time, emphasizing the nature of narrative and who actually ‘owns’ the right to tell a story – a theme that works especially well because it is never clear what the facts of the story are. The first half of the novel appears to be a completely conventional story, and then Choi reveals that it’s so much than what it seems, which opens up the book to a set of timely themes and questions. In an era of public allegations of sexual harassment, who gets to tell these stories – and, of course, how they’re told – should be part of every discussion.

Saying too much more about Trust Exercise risks spoiling the various surprises and twists of the book, which jarred me at first but ultimately work well and forced me to think and rethink about what Choi was trying to express. The downside is that I’m still not sure exactly what happened, both in the sense of what parts of the narrative were factual (within the fiction) and in the sense of who was telling the truth, right down to the ambiguous epilogue involved a new character whose true identity is never made clear. There’s value in this abstruseness, even in disorienting the reader, but I was also left deeply confused by what I’d just read, and that eventually yielded to some dissatisfaction with Choi’s decision to reveal too little when she might have answered a few of the open questions without affecting the critical themes of the book.

Next up: Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School, which, like Choi’s book is a potential contender for this year’s Pulitzer Prize; Lerner’s book is one of the five finalists for this year’s National Book Critics Circle award for Fiction.

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