Statues in a Garden

I have piles and piles of books in the basement that I've kept for years that I told myself (and others) I would read in my retirement. Now that I'm retired, I've been trying to make good on that promise. I picked this slim novel up on a whim years ago at a second-hand bookstore in East Lansing and as I was about to pitch it in a mini-frenzy of weeding the other day, I decided to give it a go. It's one of the best novels I've read in years. 

I read Colegate's The Shooting Party way back in the 1980s and saw the movie, and liked both. This one, written earlier, shares some of the atmosphere of that book. It's set in England during the summer of 1914, leading you to believe that WWI will play a part, but it doesn't really, except for a handful of contact points. It's been described as being about scandal overtaking a high class family, but really, it's about what happens before the scandal. The aftermath, though important and devastating, is dealt with mostly in brief in the final pages.  The story concerns the aristocratic Weston family: Aylmer Weston, a cabinet member who is used to a busy life, his wife Cynthia who is used to a life of ease, their two children and their nephew Philip whom they adopted as a child. Philip, though much loved by Cynthia, has never quite fit in. This summer, Philip starts a chain of actions that threatens to blow up their perfect sleepy summery family life. To say more would be spoiling a surprising narrative.

As interesting as the story is, I was captivated by the narrative style. One Goodreads review refers to Colegate's technique as "Virginia Woolf lite" and that's a perfect way to put it. There is a narrator of sorts, though we don't learn who it is until the end, but most of it is told third person with shifting perspectives with the first person coming up only occasionally. It's more like it's being told by a hive mind, so to speak, of all the characters. It takes a few pages to get used to this style, but it's very effective. As interesting as the story is, I was At under 200 pages, it can be read in a couple of sittings, though I tried to stretch it out because it was so good. I will try to dig up more Colegate.

Barbra

I'm not exactly a Streisand fan, but I don't dislike her, either. I much prefer her as a singer. For my money, her best acting was in What's Up Doc in which she pulls off the feat of making the frantic screwball heroine likable—something Katherine Hepburn couldn't do in Bringing Up Baby, the model for What's Up Doc. This book took Streisand ten years to finish; at over 900 pages, it's an exhausting read, and was undoubtedly exhausting to produce. Much of it is fun to read, with some juicy tidbits about her co-workers. But for me, the biggest problem is that her overall point seems to be to rebut her reputation for being controlling, demanding, and egotistical. At this, she largely fails. Even as she insists she is not those things, many of her anecdotes show her to be exactly those things.

I will grant her this: her reputation has been made worse because she's a woman. As a director, Stanley Kubrick was certainly as demanding and controlling as Streisand, but rarely called out for being a pain in the neck like she has been. (Of course, she has not, to my mind, directed a movie as great as Dr. Strangelove or 2001 or Clockwork Orange or even his lesser films like Barry Lyndon or The Shining.) Her controlling attitude as as actor, singer and director (an attitude she has had since her first stage appearance in 1961) has hurt her reputation in ways that wouldn't have hurt a male artist. Still, she shows in this book that she is, indeed, demanding and controlling, sometimes in fairly petty ways. I'm not sure she's aware of how badly she comes off sometimes, though it is brave of her not to sugarcoat her behavior, beginning with her very first Broadway role right up to her latest concert tour. As a singer, she is spectacular. As an actor, she is fine. I can't judge her as a director, because Yentl is the only film she's directed that I've seen and I wasn't terribly impressed with that (though she did take on lots of directorial chores in A Star is Born which I liked). Still, despite wild overusage of phrases like "Point is" and "Needless to say," for a 900 page book, this is a breezy read and feels like it gives a fairly honest idea of what she is like, for better or worse.

A Queerish Earnest

We actually went out to a theater to see the National Theater Live production (recorded) of The Importance of Being Earnest. It's always fun to see filmed theater, and I wish there was more of it. The production had a campy style, which seemed appropriate for an Oscar Wilde play, and a gay subtext which seemed less necessary. It's like a queer veneer was laid over the action of the play at random, having little to do with anything that was actually going on (Algernon and Jack prancing about and bumping butts, Gwendolen and Cecily kissing on the lips). One reviewer called it "subversive-lite." I know some critics have detected a more serious gay subtext in Algernon's concept of "bunburying," making up a story or an identity in order to lead a double life. Algernon and Jack could have been presented with at least the actual possibility of a physical relationship. There seems to be no attraction between the two women, so their kiss and grabs are totally unmotivated.

But the production was colorful and well-acted by all. Lady Bracknell, the real star character of the show is often played in a campy manner (or sometimes by a man in drag). Sharon D. Clarke plays her a bit more realistically as someone who is ostentatiously used to having power over others and getting her way. Hugh Skinner (Jack/Ernest—the standing man in white in the photo above) looks and acts exactly like a young monied man of his time. Ncuti Gatwa as Algernon gives a very queer reading of the part, to the point where his sudden attraction to Cecily barely registers. But he is fun, and his character largely steals the show from Jack, who is sort of the title character (his name actually being Ernest is a plotpoint). Ronke Adekoluejo tries a bit too hard to toughen up the character of Gwendolen, and Eliza Scanlen, in mostly underplaying, is sometimes in danger of being disappearing.

I generally think that colorblind casting is a good thing. Here, Algernon, Lady Bracknell and Gwendolen are played by Black actors, which brings a Bridgerton tone to the play (realistically, there is a vanishingly small possibility that these characters would have been Black in the Victorian era). It makes mincemeat of one of the last plot revelations, but generally, the casting works. I should add that I have never been able to buy the ridiculous conceit of a woman assuming she can only be attracted to someone of a specific name (Gwendolen to Ernest). It's so stupid, it almost makes me mad—couldn't Oscar Wilde have thought of a better device? But the play has so many good laugh lines, it's hard not to just give in. (Pictured just above are Skinner and Gatwa.)