the Richard Larson blog

Yes, Manohla, that was the problem:

If those blows don’t resonate, it’s largely because Mr. Mendes’s investment in this story feels professional, diagnostic. Part of what makes the novel so powerful, beyond its familiar American theme of self-discovery, is its unwavering fury and how each intimate and acid word feels personal, as if Yates had dredged them up from some place deep inside his own being. No one gets off the hook in “Revolutionary Road,” least of all its author, whose insistence on stripping his characters down to the marrow is so relentless it can’t help but feel like an act of self-flagellation. As a film director, at least, Mr. Mendes comes across as too coolly diffident for that kind of blazing heat. He keeps his distance.

A.O. Scott on movies and "hard times":

However much has changed since the 1930s, it still seems that in hard times people go to the movies. ... The movies remain a popular art, which means an art for the people. Unlike the atomized landscape of solitary iPods and lonely widescreen TV sets, the crowd in the movie theater is an image of community. This may be a legacy of the Great Depression, which we remember as a golden age of movies. Back then, everyone went to the movies because whatever else was going on, everyone was in it together.

Holidays...

On break now. Reading a bunch of stuff (the new Jeffrey Ford collection, Before Night Falls by Reinaldo Arenas, even some Flaubert!) and watching the rest of this year's movies that I've missed, all while visiting family and friends in St. Louis for the holidays and attending a wedding immediately after New Year's. See you on the other side, as they say. Oh but just one thing: Synecdoche, New York is my favorite film of the year, and I'm not embarrassed to say it, nor do I think I'm pretentious for finding it incredibly moving, heartbreaking, and also affirming, a testament to the power of the mind and also to its inevitable (but beautiful, almost, in that we often fight against it anyway) surrender to the machinations of life itself, the physicality of everything: the human consciousness in opposition to the body.

Unplugged

I just heard via Niall Harrison that Rich Horton, editor of the annual SF: The Best of the Year and Fantasy: The Best of the Year volumes from Prime Books, will also be putting out an anthology of the year's best online fiction with Wyrm Publishing called Unplugged: The Best Of Online Fiction.  I think this is a great idea, in theory, and could be an opportunity to showcase some really interesting web writing, and Horton has my trust right now because I'm really excited about his choices for his other Year's Best books for 2009.  But I don't know if following such a traditional print anthology format is necessarily the best way to approach an anthology of web writing.  It seems to me that Horton has chosen his favorite story from a variety of different genre webzines and is publishing them together simply as a straightforward print collection, and I'm not sure how I feel about that transition being made so abruptly without taking into consideration the inherent differences between online and print publishing, and the unique advantages the web offers for writing.  I haven't read all of the stories that Horton has chosen, but I'm pretty sure that none of them are hyperlink narratives (for example), that none of them were serialized, that none were originally posted to blogs... For example, Dzanc Books published a Best of the Web anthology last year that included fiction, essays, criticism, etc, and I think this is what the genre world would benefit from with future editions of Horton's Unplugged, especially with the proliferation of the SF blogosphere and the variety of experiments being done in fiction within the genre on a web format (such as "Twenty-three Small Disasters" in Ideomancer and "New Practical Physics" by Matthew Cheney, which he calls an "experimental hypertexty bloggy thing" and also, fittingly, a collage). 

And also, just another thing I thought worth noting is that Horton selected at least seven stories for his two other Year's Best anthologies (including Meghan McCarron's "The Magician's House" and Alice Sola Kim's "We Love Deena," two exceedingly smart stories published in Strange Horizons this year) that were published exclusively online, and they do not appear on the table of contents for Unplugged.  While I appreciate the desire to publish a greater variety of stories across the three volumes, I think that eliminating seven stories which were deemed to be of a higher quality than countless other stories published in print publications throughout the year is a missed opportunity to make this first book in a series as strong as it could have been. 

So anyway, kudos to Rich Horton for bringing such a book into the world, and I'm excited to buy my copy.  However, I hope it can become an important part of the annual genre anthology conversation by perhaps hewing closer to the idea of online writing as a unique form, rather than trying to fit it into a box better reserved for other shapes and sizes.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” is a somewhat stodgy and stilted look at a life lived backwards, a man being born into old age and growing into infancy. Much is made of the prejudices and fears bound up in ideas of status and reputation, the notion that such a hideous aberration could bring “ruin” to a family in 19th century Baltimore society, and the story unfolds as the family chooses to “make the best of it,” soldiering onward and helping Benjamin navigate his destiny with as little conflict as possible.

Initially mired in mildly amusing (but ultimately distracting) anecdotes about Benjamin’s father, Roger, buying baby clothes and toys for his new son, the story functions mostly as a parable of overcoming one’s less-than-ideal circumstances. Benjamin attempts to undergo a "normal" trajectory of life experiences, in spite of his obvious setbacks. This struggle allows Fitzgerald to comment on the traditional conflict between youth and experience, the idea of love as an ageless force (“Blind with enchantment,” Fitzgerald writes as Benjamin meets the woman who will eventually become his wife, “he felt that life was just beginning.”), and the relationship between truth and the narratives we construct for public consumption. Benjamin succumbs ultimately to the “eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end,” a description initially applied to his aging wife but which also speaks to Benjamin’s experience of becoming younger and younger, more and more dissociated from his environment and the people around him, and as such becomes a universal: no matter how hard we try, we can’t avoid the physical and emotional tolls that life will inevitably take on us, the way we will ultimately become an inconvenience, a non-entity, before we “fade out altogether” like “unsubstantial dreams.”

David Fincher’s film adaptation (written by Eric Roth of Forrest Gump fame) has a more elegaic feel but is still directly and earnestly addressing the universal tragedy of life itself, using Benjamin Button's reverse aging as a device with which to illustrate the impossibilities of lasting connection and the inherently unknowable nature of our own individual futures -- and, perhaps to a lesser degree, the problem of communication across generations, however one chooses to define that term.  The press notes indicate that "the film tells the grand tale of a not so ordinary man and the people and places he discovers along the way, the loves he finds and loses, the joys of life and the sadness of death, and what lasts beyond time," which initially feels like an unnecessary over-generalization but eventually becomes, after the film is fully digested, a remarkably specific statement about the film's project.  This is sort of an Every-Narrative: love story, coming-of-age story, dying parent story, discovery-of-origins story, adventure story ... even, annoyingly, a disaster story, as the present-day frame narrative takes place in New Orleans as Katrina is about to hit. 

And I'm sure there are more little stories crammed in there.  In stacking all of these genres (complete with derivative hallmarks and pitfalls, maddening cliche and manipulative climaxes), Roth shows that he hasn't gotten very far since Forrest Gump; in attempting to find something for everyone, that "everyone" sometimes ends up feeling alienated and vaguely disoriented.  But it actually works here.  We're supposed to feel the wholeness of Benjamin's life in all its splendor -- and, conversely, with all its banality -- and this ultimately comes through.  The familiar trajectory is here; birth, learning about the world, first love, venturing out with wide-eyed dreams, coming back home a little wiser... an eventual repackaging of our dreams into something more tangible, more in line with our newly realistic worldview.  We become slowly indoctrinated into an acceptance of Benjamin's fantastic circumstances so that by the end of the film his situation has become fully relatable, clearly in line with how we imagine our lives may play out, and the poignancy of his relationships and the tragedy of his eventual decline are felt as though removed from fantasy altogether.  This is not just metaphor; rather, it is a unique way of describing the human experience in terms of emotional realism, one divorced perhaps from "the possible" but nonetheless true.  A reversal of the aging process doesn't necessarily "mean" anything here, but instead it illustrates the cyclical nature of existence, how we clearly go through a series of phases of experience during our lives. 

While Forrest Gump's experiences themselves feel absurdly fantastic and choppy, made to fit an agenda of cumulative historical review, Benjamin Button successfully relates to more personal truths about the way we live and the way we see the world (and the people) around us.  Brad Pitt is in an unusual position here as the star of a film who doesn't really do anything.  He doesn't rescue hordes of wounded soldiers during the Vietnam War; he doesn't run spontaneously across the United States; he doesn't get to meet the President.  He does fall in love, but he loves in a very accessible, non-extravagant way: cautiously, passionately, but with a certain attention to realism, an understanding that things can't be perfect forever.  At one point in the film, he pulls Daisy (played by Cate Blanchett) to his side as they stand before a mirror, and he remarks that he wants to remember them "like this forever," acknowledging that this is perhaps the peak of perfection, as good as it gets.  And maybe it's this acceptance of universal tragedy, along with the determination to find joy and meaning in tragic circumstances, that makes the film resonate so strongly. 

Or maybe it's an early monologue spoken by an old and dying Daisy (the frame narrative I mentioned earlier) about a man who lost his son in World War I and has constructed a clock that runs backwards in a symbolic effort to offer a chance to recapture things that have been lost.  Wouldn't it be wonderful, this seems to suggest, if we could just go backwards and undo everything that has gone wrong?  The rest of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button envisions and then challenges this question, imagining the possibility of living life in reverse and then recognizing that we can always find things that we wish were different, along with things that we can't imagine were ever this good. 

Even backwards.

"Lifestyle" lit-crit:

Newspaper book reviews exist as extensions of "lifestyle" reporting. Some books also provide more refined grist to the conventional newsreporting mill, but in either case reviews function not as instances of literary criticism, not even in its most limited generalist mode, but as sources of information, sometimes as "stories" in their own right. Since most readers of lifestyle journalism undoubtedly want mostly feel-good stories (negative stories only get in the way of "lifestyle" contentment), it only makes sense to provide book reviews, book coverage in general, that portrays the "bookworld" as full of pretty nice stuff. Anyone who thinks that real criticism--either as the serious examination of literary works in general or as the frank assessment of any particular "current book"--can be found in such coverage just hasn't come to terms with the shallow and complacent practices of contemporary journalism. 

-- Dan Green at The Reading Experience