Chris Bohjalian's Blog, page 41
May 1, 2011
Things that go bump inn the night
Years ago, when my friend Adam Turteltaub and I were groomsmen at a buddy’s wedding in Mobile, Ala., he took one look at the spectacular four-poster bed in my room at the bed and breakfast where we were staying and observed — referring to my wife — “I can’t believe they’re wasting this room on you when Victoria is home in Vermont.” Indeed, the inn was elegant, inviting and romantic.
I have, of course, stayed at inns that were somewhat less appealing. Once I stayed at a place that felt a little bit like the Bates Motel of bed and breakfasts.
Now, when I’m traveling on business, I don’t need a flat screen TV the size of a billboard, turndown service at dusk or chocolates on my pillow. I may want those things — especially the chocolates — but I don’t need them.
And when I’m staying in a bed and breakfast, I’m likely to be especially content because most folks who become innkeepers like people and derive disturbing amounts of pleasure from scrambling eggs. The only downside to a bed and breakfast is the guilt you feel when you steal the soap. It’s one thing to steal soap from anonymous corporate monoliths: It’s not as if you’re pillaging Paris Hilton’s doctoral program trust fund when you throw an unwrapped cake of Ivory into your carry-on. It’s another thing, however, to steal the soap from retirees Hal and Mindy who just offered you a breakfast scone that Mindy baked herself.
I mention this so you know that my hospitality standards are not rock star ridiculous. They are only novelist ridiculous, which means that I don’t have to have specially selected colors of M&M’s waiting for me in a bowl: I simply have to have a bed.
Which is pretty much what this inn offered. My room had been booked by the venue that had invited me to speak, and I arrived there about 1:30 in the afternoon. (You will note that I am not revealing the name or location of the inn. That would be an abuse of columnist clout. Besides, others have done this for me on a website for travelers. A few reviews could only be called damning.) The inn’s exterior did not look dingy, but the door was locked. I knocked and rang the bell and was about to give up when the innkeeper came to the door, as well as the inn’s one other guest: A woman in a nightgown, bathrobe and tattered slippers who exuded scary silent film star in denial. The front hall was dark, shadowy and a little dusty. When I asked where I might get a bite to eat for lunch, the innkeeper gave me a warning: “You’ll just get lost if you go into town.”
Oh.
“There’s only one other guest here,” she said when she showed me the room, “and if you hear a door slam in the night, it’s not her.” On a bureau was a television about the size of a lunchbox.
“Then who would be slamming the door?” I asked.
She shrugged and gave me the code to log on to the Internet. It didn’t work. And then she disappeared. There was a phone, but no handset.
That night I did hear a door slam. (In all fairness, it wasn’t followed by a scream.) The next morning when I went to check out, there was no sign of human habitation. The dining room table was set for two and there was a small handwritten menu, offering toast and cereal and eggs. But the innkeeper was nowhere to be found. Absolutely no sign of her anywhere.
Later, when I called the inn from my car to give her my credit card number, she did pick up.
“I was right in the kitchen,” she said.
“No you weren’t,” I corrected her. “I called out for you. I went into the kitchen looking for you.”
“Well, we have solid walls,” she said.
I shook my head. I really wished I had stolen the soap.
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on May 1, 2011. Chris’s next novel, The Night Strangers, arrives on October 4, 2011.)
I have, of course, stayed at inns that were somewhat less appealing. Once I stayed at a place that felt a little bit like the Bates Motel of bed and breakfasts.
Now, when I’m traveling on business, I don’t need a flat screen TV the size of a billboard, turndown service at dusk or chocolates on my pillow. I may want those things — especially the chocolates — but I don’t need them.
And when I’m staying in a bed and breakfast, I’m likely to be especially content because most folks who become innkeepers like people and derive disturbing amounts of pleasure from scrambling eggs. The only downside to a bed and breakfast is the guilt you feel when you steal the soap. It’s one thing to steal soap from anonymous corporate monoliths: It’s not as if you’re pillaging Paris Hilton’s doctoral program trust fund when you throw an unwrapped cake of Ivory into your carry-on. It’s another thing, however, to steal the soap from retirees Hal and Mindy who just offered you a breakfast scone that Mindy baked herself.
I mention this so you know that my hospitality standards are not rock star ridiculous. They are only novelist ridiculous, which means that I don’t have to have specially selected colors of M&M’s waiting for me in a bowl: I simply have to have a bed.
Which is pretty much what this inn offered. My room had been booked by the venue that had invited me to speak, and I arrived there about 1:30 in the afternoon. (You will note that I am not revealing the name or location of the inn. That would be an abuse of columnist clout. Besides, others have done this for me on a website for travelers. A few reviews could only be called damning.) The inn’s exterior did not look dingy, but the door was locked. I knocked and rang the bell and was about to give up when the innkeeper came to the door, as well as the inn’s one other guest: A woman in a nightgown, bathrobe and tattered slippers who exuded scary silent film star in denial. The front hall was dark, shadowy and a little dusty. When I asked where I might get a bite to eat for lunch, the innkeeper gave me a warning: “You’ll just get lost if you go into town.”
Oh.
“There’s only one other guest here,” she said when she showed me the room, “and if you hear a door slam in the night, it’s not her.” On a bureau was a television about the size of a lunchbox.
“Then who would be slamming the door?” I asked.
She shrugged and gave me the code to log on to the Internet. It didn’t work. And then she disappeared. There was a phone, but no handset.
That night I did hear a door slam. (In all fairness, it wasn’t followed by a scream.) The next morning when I went to check out, there was no sign of human habitation. The dining room table was set for two and there was a small handwritten menu, offering toast and cereal and eggs. But the innkeeper was nowhere to be found. Absolutely no sign of her anywhere.
Later, when I called the inn from my car to give her my credit card number, she did pick up.
“I was right in the kitchen,” she said.
“No you weren’t,” I corrected her. “I called out for you. I went into the kitchen looking for you.”
“Well, we have solid walls,” she said.
I shook my head. I really wished I had stolen the soap.
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on May 1, 2011. Chris’s next novel, The Night Strangers, arrives on October 4, 2011.)
April 27, 2011
A pre-pub alert about "The Night Strangers" from Library Journal
"Bohjalian goes ghostly in his latest, featuring married couple Chip and Emily Linton, who seek escape by buying a crumbly Victorian in New Hampshire. In the basement there’s a mysterious door sealed by 39 bolts—39 being exactly the number of passengers who died when pilot Chip was forced to land his 70-seat regional jet on Lake Champlain. Soon Chip is haunted (literally) by the dead passengers. A departure for the issues-loving Bohjalian, so I am especially interested to see how it will unfold."
And (voila), here is the link top the full entry:
http://blog.libraryjournal.com/prepub...
And (voila), here is the link top the full entry:
http://blog.libraryjournal.com/prepub...
April 24, 2011
Some enchanted evening: A review of Chris Adrian’s “The Great Night”
Recently when British novelist David Mitchell was a guest on the National Public Radio show “Fresh Air,’’ he told host Terry Gross, “Shakespeare cleaned everything up. There’s no new turf after him, really. All the postmodern themes, the play-within-a-play, metafiction, it’s already been done in the 17th century.’’ Certainly a sizable bookcase could be filled with contemporary writers borrowing from the bard, sometimes in wildly inventive ways. Exhibit A? David Wroblewski’s “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle’’ — a.k.a., “Hamlet with Dogs.’’ Exhibit B? Jeanne Ray’s “Julie and Romeo’’ — a retelling of “Romeo and Juliet’’ featuring AARP-ready florists.
“The Great Night,’’ Chris Adrian’s phantasmagorically inspired new novel, is a part of that tradition. It is a sequel to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’’ (And make no mistake, this feels far more like a sequel than a mere retelling in another place and time.) Adrian has demonstrated a vast imagination in his earlier books, particularly “The Children’s Hospital,’’ a tale of doctors and patients and angels (yes, angels) in a post-apocalyptic hospital that has become the world’s new ark. He is a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology and a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, and his work indeed suggests a profound interest in where life meets death and how we make sense of that great undiscovered country.
“The Great Night’’ is no exception. One night in mid-June, three brokenhearted lovers — Henry, Molly, and Will — wander into San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, each of them a stranger but each on the way to the same party. Henry is a pediatric oncologist still reeling from his breakup with Bobby, another physician. Molly, a dropout from divinity school and now a slacker shop girl, has spent two years grieving over Ryan, her boyfriend who hanged himself. And Will, an arborist, is still hoping he can find a way to rekindle his relationship with his beloved Carolina, who is unwilling to forgive him for a casual but appallingly thoughtless sexual dalliance.
Ryan is the strange but powerful glue that links all three young adults: Not only was he Molly’s lover, he was Carolina’s brother. He also shares a deeply disturbing childhood secret with Henry.
In addition, that night the park is filled with the powerful Queen Titania and her court of faeries and magical creatures. Her husband, Oberon, is long gone, finding himself unable to cope with the death of his and Titania’s adopted, mortal boy, and the queen’s unbearable mourning. The child died of leukemia, and our view of his sickness, death, and the oncology ward are conveyed largely from Titania’s perspective, all presented with a combination of wrenching precision and wistful poetry. As Titania watches the boy cry and grow sick from the chemotherapy, she tries to make sense of the medicine: “Titania could not conceive of the way [the drugs] were made except as distillations of sadness and heartbreak and despair, since that was how she made her own poisons, shaking drops of terror out of a wren captured in her fist or sucking with a silver straw at the tears of a dog.’’
Titania’s grief is so excruciating that she decides to end it all by unleashing a beast that will kill her, her court, and the mortals who happen to be in Buena Vista Park. In this case, that means setting Puck free from his servitude and allowing him to revert to a horrific monster. “Milady,’’ he says once the spell that has kept him in bondage is lifted, “I am in your debt, and so I will eat you last.’’
In short, this is a far cry from the lighter Shakespearean comedy of misplaced spells and comedic sprites.
In five parts, Adrian slowly reveals to us the three mortals’ secrets and longings and regrets: the paths that have led them into the park that night. Interspersed with their personal histories are their battles to survive Puck — and his ability to make real their innermost demons and fears.
Ironically, “The Great Night’’ felt most magical to me when Adrian focuses on the mortals’ pasts and Titania’s profoundly human grief. The secret behind Henry’s lost childhood years is especially haunting. The novel is less successful when the mortals are trapped in the park and under the spells of either Puck or the faeries. Some of the moments cross the line that separates disturbing and disgusting, such as when Will witnesses “a sea of disembodied penises, softly shambling toward him on variously sized testicle feet,’’ and then is attacked by “a swarming flock of vaginas that flew all around his head, biting him toothlessly on his ears and his cheeks and his neck.’’
Nevertheless, Adrian once again left me feeling both meditative and moved. It’s simply that in this book, the most enchanted evenings occurred well before the great night itself.
(This review originally ran in the Boston Globe on April 24, 2011. Chris Bohjalian is the author of 14 books. His next novel, “The Night Strangers,’’ will be published in October.)
“The Great Night,’’ Chris Adrian’s phantasmagorically inspired new novel, is a part of that tradition. It is a sequel to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’’ (And make no mistake, this feels far more like a sequel than a mere retelling in another place and time.) Adrian has demonstrated a vast imagination in his earlier books, particularly “The Children’s Hospital,’’ a tale of doctors and patients and angels (yes, angels) in a post-apocalyptic hospital that has become the world’s new ark. He is a fellow in pediatric hematology-oncology and a graduate student at Harvard Divinity School, and his work indeed suggests a profound interest in where life meets death and how we make sense of that great undiscovered country.
“The Great Night’’ is no exception. One night in mid-June, three brokenhearted lovers — Henry, Molly, and Will — wander into San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, each of them a stranger but each on the way to the same party. Henry is a pediatric oncologist still reeling from his breakup with Bobby, another physician. Molly, a dropout from divinity school and now a slacker shop girl, has spent two years grieving over Ryan, her boyfriend who hanged himself. And Will, an arborist, is still hoping he can find a way to rekindle his relationship with his beloved Carolina, who is unwilling to forgive him for a casual but appallingly thoughtless sexual dalliance.
Ryan is the strange but powerful glue that links all three young adults: Not only was he Molly’s lover, he was Carolina’s brother. He also shares a deeply disturbing childhood secret with Henry.
In addition, that night the park is filled with the powerful Queen Titania and her court of faeries and magical creatures. Her husband, Oberon, is long gone, finding himself unable to cope with the death of his and Titania’s adopted, mortal boy, and the queen’s unbearable mourning. The child died of leukemia, and our view of his sickness, death, and the oncology ward are conveyed largely from Titania’s perspective, all presented with a combination of wrenching precision and wistful poetry. As Titania watches the boy cry and grow sick from the chemotherapy, she tries to make sense of the medicine: “Titania could not conceive of the way [the drugs] were made except as distillations of sadness and heartbreak and despair, since that was how she made her own poisons, shaking drops of terror out of a wren captured in her fist or sucking with a silver straw at the tears of a dog.’’
Titania’s grief is so excruciating that she decides to end it all by unleashing a beast that will kill her, her court, and the mortals who happen to be in Buena Vista Park. In this case, that means setting Puck free from his servitude and allowing him to revert to a horrific monster. “Milady,’’ he says once the spell that has kept him in bondage is lifted, “I am in your debt, and so I will eat you last.’’
In short, this is a far cry from the lighter Shakespearean comedy of misplaced spells and comedic sprites.
In five parts, Adrian slowly reveals to us the three mortals’ secrets and longings and regrets: the paths that have led them into the park that night. Interspersed with their personal histories are their battles to survive Puck — and his ability to make real their innermost demons and fears.
Ironically, “The Great Night’’ felt most magical to me when Adrian focuses on the mortals’ pasts and Titania’s profoundly human grief. The secret behind Henry’s lost childhood years is especially haunting. The novel is less successful when the mortals are trapped in the park and under the spells of either Puck or the faeries. Some of the moments cross the line that separates disturbing and disgusting, such as when Will witnesses “a sea of disembodied penises, softly shambling toward him on variously sized testicle feet,’’ and then is attacked by “a swarming flock of vaginas that flew all around his head, biting him toothlessly on his ears and his cheeks and his neck.’’
Nevertheless, Adrian once again left me feeling both meditative and moved. It’s simply that in this book, the most enchanted evenings occurred well before the great night itself.
(This review originally ran in the Boston Globe on April 24, 2011. Chris Bohjalian is the author of 14 books. His next novel, “The Night Strangers,’’ will be published in October.)
Time for Peeps on Earth
I have never been shy about how much I like my Peeps. In this case, I am not referring to friends or buddies, as in, “I was hangin’ with my peeps watchin’ Nightline.” The fact is, no one who calls people “peeps” watches Nightline. The whole idea that I would put “peeps” and “Nightline” in the same sentence is absolute proof that I do not know how to use the Urban Dictionary definition of “peeps.”
I am, of course, talking about the marshmallow candies shaped like baby chicks and bunnies that are now sold at holidays year-round, but are most prevalent around Easter. Over the years, readers have told me how best to savor a Peep: How to properly age them to get that slightly stale crunch, or whether it’s better to dunk a Peep in coffee or hot cocoa or even chocolate fondue. Some readers – the sort who can get away with referring to their pals as “peeps” – shared with me how much fun it is to microwave a peep until it expands, explodes, or melts. (Do not try this at home. I repeat, do not try this at home. The website www.youtube.com has plenty of videos of people creating marshmallow Peep snuff films with microwaves, firecrackers, a garlic press, and a door. Yes, I watched them all.)
Recently, I went to the Peeps website, mostly out of intellectual curiosity, to see the recipes the Peeps company has for its bunnies and chicks. There’s a lot there, but a typical recipe is this: Bake a cupcake and put a Peep on top. Or make some pudding and put a Peep on top. I’m not precisely sure what I expected: Peep sushi? Peep stuffing?
The reality is that no Easter basket is complete without a pack of Peeps. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 million of them are sold every year, or more than two chicks for every man, woman, and child in this great nation. The company behind them, Just Born, is headquartered in – and here is a lovely irony – Bethlehem, Penn. The people behind Peeps are also the people behind “Mike and Ike,” everyone’s favorite movie candy when the movie concession stand has sold out of everything else – and I mean everything. Even the Milk Duds.
Just for the record, my wife actually likes Milk Duds, a candy designed by dentists to extract fillings from teeth. The Just Born company has tried to make “Mike and Ike” the Easter basket jellybean of choice, but so far that marketing initiative has been only a little less successful than the Doritos 2011 Super Bowl commercial with a guy sniffing a peep’s – er, pal’s – pants because they have Dorito dust on them.
In any case, I have every expectation that when the Easter Bunny visits Lincoln, Vermont and leaves me a basket, it will include some Peeps. If I’m lucky, they will even be the new dark chocolate covered Peeps. I do love the symbolism of the Easter chick: New life, rebirth, and the emergence from the tomb. And, of course, I appreciate the symbolism of the bunny: Spring, renewal, and abundance.
Easter is not the commercial juggernaut that Christmas is, even with the sales of all those marshmallow chicks, chocolates bunnies, and kaleidoscopic, corn syrup-rich jellybeans. But given the significance of the holiday and what it means to me in this life and, perhaps, in the next, I’m glad. The movement this week has been from a darkness of the soul to an absolutely exquisite brightness. There is the magic and the meaning of a resurrection. And so this morning, once again, I will savor peeps (lower case) everywhere, and that wonderful moment where faith and hope collide.
Happy Easter. Happy Passover. Peace.
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on April 24, 2011. Chris's next novel, a ghost story called THE NIGHT STRANGERS, arrives on October 4, 2011.)
I am, of course, talking about the marshmallow candies shaped like baby chicks and bunnies that are now sold at holidays year-round, but are most prevalent around Easter. Over the years, readers have told me how best to savor a Peep: How to properly age them to get that slightly stale crunch, or whether it’s better to dunk a Peep in coffee or hot cocoa or even chocolate fondue. Some readers – the sort who can get away with referring to their pals as “peeps” – shared with me how much fun it is to microwave a peep until it expands, explodes, or melts. (Do not try this at home. I repeat, do not try this at home. The website www.youtube.com has plenty of videos of people creating marshmallow Peep snuff films with microwaves, firecrackers, a garlic press, and a door. Yes, I watched them all.)
Recently, I went to the Peeps website, mostly out of intellectual curiosity, to see the recipes the Peeps company has for its bunnies and chicks. There’s a lot there, but a typical recipe is this: Bake a cupcake and put a Peep on top. Or make some pudding and put a Peep on top. I’m not precisely sure what I expected: Peep sushi? Peep stuffing?
The reality is that no Easter basket is complete without a pack of Peeps. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 million of them are sold every year, or more than two chicks for every man, woman, and child in this great nation. The company behind them, Just Born, is headquartered in – and here is a lovely irony – Bethlehem, Penn. The people behind Peeps are also the people behind “Mike and Ike,” everyone’s favorite movie candy when the movie concession stand has sold out of everything else – and I mean everything. Even the Milk Duds.
Just for the record, my wife actually likes Milk Duds, a candy designed by dentists to extract fillings from teeth. The Just Born company has tried to make “Mike and Ike” the Easter basket jellybean of choice, but so far that marketing initiative has been only a little less successful than the Doritos 2011 Super Bowl commercial with a guy sniffing a peep’s – er, pal’s – pants because they have Dorito dust on them.
In any case, I have every expectation that when the Easter Bunny visits Lincoln, Vermont and leaves me a basket, it will include some Peeps. If I’m lucky, they will even be the new dark chocolate covered Peeps. I do love the symbolism of the Easter chick: New life, rebirth, and the emergence from the tomb. And, of course, I appreciate the symbolism of the bunny: Spring, renewal, and abundance.
Easter is not the commercial juggernaut that Christmas is, even with the sales of all those marshmallow chicks, chocolates bunnies, and kaleidoscopic, corn syrup-rich jellybeans. But given the significance of the holiday and what it means to me in this life and, perhaps, in the next, I’m glad. The movement this week has been from a darkness of the soul to an absolutely exquisite brightness. There is the magic and the meaning of a resurrection. And so this morning, once again, I will savor peeps (lower case) everywhere, and that wonderful moment where faith and hope collide.
Happy Easter. Happy Passover. Peace.
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on April 24, 2011. Chris's next novel, a ghost story called THE NIGHT STRANGERS, arrives on October 4, 2011.)
April 21, 2011
Ward Just’s ‘Rodin’s Debutante’: Coming of age in post-World War II Chicago
There is a Chinese proverb that I recalled once before when reading Ward Just, and I thought of it again while considering his wistful, pensive new novel, “Rodin’s Debutante.” It goes like this: “There are three truths: my truth, your truth and the truth.”
Just, the author of 17 novels, has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He is a rarity in American letters: a beautiful stylist who is capable of writing a gripping political thriller. While his novels often have a relentless narrative power, his characters are meticulously drawn. He has a grasp of the demons that drive us all.
“Rodin’s Debutante” is set largely in the suburbs of Chicago and the city’s South Side in the middle of the last century. Chicago feels like a character itself, with Just’s delightfully economic, descriptive asides: “This was Chicago, nobility measured in the length and width of a dollar bill.” The novel is a coming-of-age story, the tale of Lee Goodell, an observant, morally decent boy from a fictional town north of the Windy City that is starting to show its age after World War II. When a hobo is murdered and Magda Serra — one of Lee’s classmates — is sexually assaulted, Lee’s mother wants to move to a well-mannered North Shore suburb, and Lee is sent to a misbegotten Illinois boarding school with Andover-like aspirations.
The origins of Ogden Hall fill the opening of the novel, a prologue set largely at a dinner party on the eve of World War I. Tommy Ogden, the son of a railroad robber baron, and his wife, Marie, are entertaining at Ogden’s palatial estate — 42 rooms in the main house and 250 acres overall. Ogden drinks hard and plays hard, though most of the playing involves big-game hunting and retreats to a South Side brothel. He is a blowhard and a bully who later counsels Lee, “You don’t learn a god damned thing from defeat.” This is the sort of irony Just loves: Only pages earlier, the school’s headmaster had ruminated, “A man learned more from defeat than from victory because defeat usually came with a lesson.”
When Marie sees a Rodin bust of a Chicago debutante, she wants one of herself for their mansion. Instead of acquiescing, Tommy announces that he is going to turn the entire estate into a school — and not just any school: “A school for boys, midwestern boys of good family to show those bastards in the East what a real school looks like. . . . I know what I’m talking about. I went to seven boarding schools, three in one year.”
Lee’s parents like the idea of his remaining in the Midwest, and so he enrolls at Ogden Hall. There he will lead the football team to its first undefeated season and — like many other students — wonder about the school’s Rodin sculpture of a young woman (presumed, mistakenly, to be Marie). Later, he will enroll at the University of Chicago, where he will fall in love with Hyde Park and with the daughter of a professor, and will experience some of the best (and worst) that the Windy City has to offer.
And, all the while, Lee will sculpt. He works in black marble, creating numbered, abstract pieces.
Toward the end of the novel, Lee’s classmate Magda contacts him, wanting to discuss the day she was assaulted. Their lunch together is, like so much of the book, an elegantly rendered and poignant moment of self-discovery for both characters.
But also like much of “Rodin’s Debutante,” it has a flatness that left me craving greater emotional connection with Lee. The book is a series of beautifully crafted set pieces in Lee’s life, but it lacks the compelling narrative that usually marks Just’s work. There are gaps in Lee’s story, beginning with the reality that he doesn’t seem to study art: He just starts sculpting when he arrives in Hyde Park.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the novel, and it may very well be that Just’s plan was to lull us into contemplating the sagas and stories that exist beneath the ordinariness of most of our lives. The novel opens, “This is a true story, or true as far as it goes.” Lee has his own myths about his life. So does Magda Serra. So did Tommy Ogden. And as a meditation on how different my truths are from yours, “Rodin’s Debutante” left me thinking long after I had finished the book.
(This review originally ran in the Washington Post on April 22, 2011. Chris's next novel, "The Night Strangers," arrives on October 4, 2011.)
Just, the author of 17 novels, has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He is a rarity in American letters: a beautiful stylist who is capable of writing a gripping political thriller. While his novels often have a relentless narrative power, his characters are meticulously drawn. He has a grasp of the demons that drive us all.
“Rodin’s Debutante” is set largely in the suburbs of Chicago and the city’s South Side in the middle of the last century. Chicago feels like a character itself, with Just’s delightfully economic, descriptive asides: “This was Chicago, nobility measured in the length and width of a dollar bill.” The novel is a coming-of-age story, the tale of Lee Goodell, an observant, morally decent boy from a fictional town north of the Windy City that is starting to show its age after World War II. When a hobo is murdered and Magda Serra — one of Lee’s classmates — is sexually assaulted, Lee’s mother wants to move to a well-mannered North Shore suburb, and Lee is sent to a misbegotten Illinois boarding school with Andover-like aspirations.
The origins of Ogden Hall fill the opening of the novel, a prologue set largely at a dinner party on the eve of World War I. Tommy Ogden, the son of a railroad robber baron, and his wife, Marie, are entertaining at Ogden’s palatial estate — 42 rooms in the main house and 250 acres overall. Ogden drinks hard and plays hard, though most of the playing involves big-game hunting and retreats to a South Side brothel. He is a blowhard and a bully who later counsels Lee, “You don’t learn a god damned thing from defeat.” This is the sort of irony Just loves: Only pages earlier, the school’s headmaster had ruminated, “A man learned more from defeat than from victory because defeat usually came with a lesson.”
When Marie sees a Rodin bust of a Chicago debutante, she wants one of herself for their mansion. Instead of acquiescing, Tommy announces that he is going to turn the entire estate into a school — and not just any school: “A school for boys, midwestern boys of good family to show those bastards in the East what a real school looks like. . . . I know what I’m talking about. I went to seven boarding schools, three in one year.”
Lee’s parents like the idea of his remaining in the Midwest, and so he enrolls at Ogden Hall. There he will lead the football team to its first undefeated season and — like many other students — wonder about the school’s Rodin sculpture of a young woman (presumed, mistakenly, to be Marie). Later, he will enroll at the University of Chicago, where he will fall in love with Hyde Park and with the daughter of a professor, and will experience some of the best (and worst) that the Windy City has to offer.
And, all the while, Lee will sculpt. He works in black marble, creating numbered, abstract pieces.
Toward the end of the novel, Lee’s classmate Magda contacts him, wanting to discuss the day she was assaulted. Their lunch together is, like so much of the book, an elegantly rendered and poignant moment of self-discovery for both characters.
But also like much of “Rodin’s Debutante,” it has a flatness that left me craving greater emotional connection with Lee. The book is a series of beautifully crafted set pieces in Lee’s life, but it lacks the compelling narrative that usually marks Just’s work. There are gaps in Lee’s story, beginning with the reality that he doesn’t seem to study art: He just starts sculpting when he arrives in Hyde Park.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed the novel, and it may very well be that Just’s plan was to lull us into contemplating the sagas and stories that exist beneath the ordinariness of most of our lives. The novel opens, “This is a true story, or true as far as it goes.” Lee has his own myths about his life. So does Magda Serra. So did Tommy Ogden. And as a meditation on how different my truths are from yours, “Rodin’s Debutante” left me thinking long after I had finished the book.
(This review originally ran in the Washington Post on April 22, 2011. Chris's next novel, "The Night Strangers," arrives on October 4, 2011.)
April 17, 2011
Vermont pageant contestant walks the talk for homelessness
Someday a Vermonter is going to be crowned Miss America. And someday Paris Hilton is going to be governor of California, Lindsay Lohan is going to play Lady Macbeth, and Snooki Polizzi is going to be paid more than Toni Morrison to speak at Rutgers.
Okay, my bad on the snarky sarcasm. This spring Rutgers did pay Snooki more than they paid the 1993 Nobel laureate in literature. But you get my point.
“Vermont is definitely seen as an underdog in the Miss America competition,” Nydelis Ortiz told me. “No Vermonter has ever made the top 15. But I think it’s refreshing that we have opinions.” Ortiz, 21, would know. She was Miss Vermont USA 2010 in Donald Trump’s pageant. Now she will be competing in June to be Miss Vermont and represent our illustrious state in the Miss America competition in January 2012 in Las Vegas. (Trump’s pageant is separate from Miss America. The Miss America Organization is the world’s largest provider of scholarship assistance to young women.)
Ortiz is not your typical pageant contestant: No big scary pageant hair, no big scary pageant mom hovering, and she has a mind more interested in books than bathing suits. She graduated at the age of 20 from Castleton State College, plays the violin, and works as an accounting technician with the Department of Homeland Security in Williston, Vermont. Her immediate post-pageant goal is the Peace Corps; her longer term goal is an MBA and to work in international business. She lives with her family in Essex.
But what really separates her from so many other cookie-cutter contenders for the crown is this: When she was six years old, Burlington’s Committee on Temporary Shelter kept her and her mother and brother from winding up homeless. The three of them had just journeyed to the Green Mountains from San Juan, Puerto Rico, hoping to build a better life here. They landed in Burlington in July, but Ortiz still couldn’t get over how cold it was compared to Puerto Rico. Not long before they arrived, however, her mother had had a stroke and couldn’t work.
“COTS helped us to get back on our feet,” Ortiz recalls. “There was an affordable housing program that helped us find a place to live, the social worker found afterschool programs for my brother and me, and when my mother started to recover, they found her a part-time job – and then a full-time one.” (Ortiz’s mother eventually would make a full recovery and now works with Nydelis at Homeland Security.)
“I’m part of an outreach program where I work, and this winter when I was dropping off food at the [Chittenden] Emergency Food Shelf, it all came back to me that I had gone there as a little girl to get food,” she said.
Ortiz has not forgotten COTS. Two weeks from today, May 1, she will be participating in the three-mile COTS Walk in Burlington for the second time in her life, this time with other Miss Vermont contenders she is rounding up. “Everyone deserves a home,” she said firmly, and has made educating people about homelessness her personal pageant platform.
The goal of the COTS Walk this year is to raise $175,000, and the need is greater than ever. In addition to all of the homeless women and men COTS served in 2010, last year 111 families depended upon a COTS shelter. COTS helped another 450 families – each in some way reminiscent of the Ortiz family – remain in their homes.
Clearly the face of poverty is changing. And perhaps one way to open people’s eyes to how easy it is to wind up at the food shelf or the shelter is with a beauty queen from Vermont who has flirted with homelessness.
* * *
There is plenty of time to join Ortiz and easily 1,500 other Vermonters on the May 1 COTS Walk. To sign up and start recruiting pledges, simply visit www.cotsonline.org or call 540-3084, ext. 204.
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on April 17, 2011. Chris's next novel, a ghost story called THE NIGHT STRANGERS, arrives on October 4, 2011.)
Okay, my bad on the snarky sarcasm. This spring Rutgers did pay Snooki more than they paid the 1993 Nobel laureate in literature. But you get my point.
“Vermont is definitely seen as an underdog in the Miss America competition,” Nydelis Ortiz told me. “No Vermonter has ever made the top 15. But I think it’s refreshing that we have opinions.” Ortiz, 21, would know. She was Miss Vermont USA 2010 in Donald Trump’s pageant. Now she will be competing in June to be Miss Vermont and represent our illustrious state in the Miss America competition in January 2012 in Las Vegas. (Trump’s pageant is separate from Miss America. The Miss America Organization is the world’s largest provider of scholarship assistance to young women.)
Ortiz is not your typical pageant contestant: No big scary pageant hair, no big scary pageant mom hovering, and she has a mind more interested in books than bathing suits. She graduated at the age of 20 from Castleton State College, plays the violin, and works as an accounting technician with the Department of Homeland Security in Williston, Vermont. Her immediate post-pageant goal is the Peace Corps; her longer term goal is an MBA and to work in international business. She lives with her family in Essex.
But what really separates her from so many other cookie-cutter contenders for the crown is this: When she was six years old, Burlington’s Committee on Temporary Shelter kept her and her mother and brother from winding up homeless. The three of them had just journeyed to the Green Mountains from San Juan, Puerto Rico, hoping to build a better life here. They landed in Burlington in July, but Ortiz still couldn’t get over how cold it was compared to Puerto Rico. Not long before they arrived, however, her mother had had a stroke and couldn’t work.
“COTS helped us to get back on our feet,” Ortiz recalls. “There was an affordable housing program that helped us find a place to live, the social worker found afterschool programs for my brother and me, and when my mother started to recover, they found her a part-time job – and then a full-time one.” (Ortiz’s mother eventually would make a full recovery and now works with Nydelis at Homeland Security.)
“I’m part of an outreach program where I work, and this winter when I was dropping off food at the [Chittenden] Emergency Food Shelf, it all came back to me that I had gone there as a little girl to get food,” she said.
Ortiz has not forgotten COTS. Two weeks from today, May 1, she will be participating in the three-mile COTS Walk in Burlington for the second time in her life, this time with other Miss Vermont contenders she is rounding up. “Everyone deserves a home,” she said firmly, and has made educating people about homelessness her personal pageant platform.
The goal of the COTS Walk this year is to raise $175,000, and the need is greater than ever. In addition to all of the homeless women and men COTS served in 2010, last year 111 families depended upon a COTS shelter. COTS helped another 450 families – each in some way reminiscent of the Ortiz family – remain in their homes.
Clearly the face of poverty is changing. And perhaps one way to open people’s eyes to how easy it is to wind up at the food shelf or the shelter is with a beauty queen from Vermont who has flirted with homelessness.
* * *
There is plenty of time to join Ortiz and easily 1,500 other Vermonters on the May 1 COTS Walk. To sign up and start recruiting pledges, simply visit www.cotsonline.org or call 540-3084, ext. 204.
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on April 17, 2011. Chris's next novel, a ghost story called THE NIGHT STRANGERS, arrives on October 4, 2011.)
April 12, 2011
Vermont libraries put their cards on the table
If you really want to irritate Marti Fiske, bring up Marian the Librarian. Marian was the prim and proper River City librarian with sensible shoes from “The Music Man.” Or just sidle up to someone at the Dorothy Alling Memorial Library in Williston, Vermont, where Fiske is the director, and bring your finger to your lips and go “Shush!” The only thing Fiske might hate more than the stereotypes we have of librarians is the stereotypes we have of libraries themselves.
“The library today is not your old mausoleum of silence and dusty classics,” she says. “Libraries are not the stuffy worlds some people recall from their childhood.”
Beginning today – which also happens to be the start of National Library Week – the Vermont Library Association is hoping to squash that sort of typecasting and convey to Vermonters what a modern library is really like. Fiske, president of the VLA, is among the masterminds behind a multimedia campaign to convince us that libraries are not the blacksmith shops of the twenty-first century. Three 15-second public service announcements will be airing on television this week, along with three matching print ads, all of which share the theme, “Vermont libraries can take you anywhere.” The TV was produced by RETN, with 21-year-old University of Vermont senior and aspiring filmmaker Stephan Ruiz in charge of the project and directing the videos.
And this indeed might be one of those cases where perception and reality are separated by a frost heave the size of Mount Mansfield. The perception is that the library is a dinosaur and no one uses them. This notion is especially ingrained among some legislators and politicians. To wit: My aunt, who lives in Georgia, emailed me when my most recent novel was published with what she presumed was good news. “You are so popular! I am 63rd on the waiting list at my library for your new book!” I pointed out to her this was not a testimony to the popularity of my work; it was an indication of how badly her library’s budget had been slashed in a tough economy.
The reality is that in most places, library usage is either stable or up. Vermont has 183 public libraries and between 2009 and 2010, circulation, visits, and program attendance were more or less even. Computer use, however, increased by 10 percent and what librarians call “off-site services” – daycares, bookmobiles, and senior centers – skyrocketed by 36 percent.
That’s one of the things I love about libraries: They remain one of the few parts of our culture that is magically and unambiguously multigenerational. Debi Gray is the librarian in Lincoln, Vermont. “The thing I love and value most about libraries is their ability to connect with people across age boundaries. Today a library is a community center,” she says, and then rifles off the bone builders workshops for seniors, story times for toddlers, and upcoming author appearances that are on the schedule at her library.
And, clearly, the Vermont Library Association awareness campaign understands that libraries transcend any one demographic. One of the PSAs features a young girl, while another stars a senior citizen.
Likewise, the effort stresses the role that libraries play in our digital future. “You can try out all kinds of new technologies here,” Fiske explains, adding that more and more patrons are bringing their eReaders into her library and asking how the devices will work with library products. This is, of course, just one more indication of the way her job has evolved beyond the uptight, hair-in-a-bun spinster from River City.
“Libraries are far more than just the materials in the building. It’s the librarians who know the information and can provide access to it,” Fiske says.
And, best of all, these days they’re far less likely to shush you.
(Chris Bohjalian’s most recent novel, Secrets of Eden, was just published in paperback. His next novel, The Night Strangers, arrives on October 4, 2011. This essay originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on April 10, 2011.)
“The library today is not your old mausoleum of silence and dusty classics,” she says. “Libraries are not the stuffy worlds some people recall from their childhood.”
Beginning today – which also happens to be the start of National Library Week – the Vermont Library Association is hoping to squash that sort of typecasting and convey to Vermonters what a modern library is really like. Fiske, president of the VLA, is among the masterminds behind a multimedia campaign to convince us that libraries are not the blacksmith shops of the twenty-first century. Three 15-second public service announcements will be airing on television this week, along with three matching print ads, all of which share the theme, “Vermont libraries can take you anywhere.” The TV was produced by RETN, with 21-year-old University of Vermont senior and aspiring filmmaker Stephan Ruiz in charge of the project and directing the videos.
And this indeed might be one of those cases where perception and reality are separated by a frost heave the size of Mount Mansfield. The perception is that the library is a dinosaur and no one uses them. This notion is especially ingrained among some legislators and politicians. To wit: My aunt, who lives in Georgia, emailed me when my most recent novel was published with what she presumed was good news. “You are so popular! I am 63rd on the waiting list at my library for your new book!” I pointed out to her this was not a testimony to the popularity of my work; it was an indication of how badly her library’s budget had been slashed in a tough economy.
The reality is that in most places, library usage is either stable or up. Vermont has 183 public libraries and between 2009 and 2010, circulation, visits, and program attendance were more or less even. Computer use, however, increased by 10 percent and what librarians call “off-site services” – daycares, bookmobiles, and senior centers – skyrocketed by 36 percent.
That’s one of the things I love about libraries: They remain one of the few parts of our culture that is magically and unambiguously multigenerational. Debi Gray is the librarian in Lincoln, Vermont. “The thing I love and value most about libraries is their ability to connect with people across age boundaries. Today a library is a community center,” she says, and then rifles off the bone builders workshops for seniors, story times for toddlers, and upcoming author appearances that are on the schedule at her library.
And, clearly, the Vermont Library Association awareness campaign understands that libraries transcend any one demographic. One of the PSAs features a young girl, while another stars a senior citizen.
Likewise, the effort stresses the role that libraries play in our digital future. “You can try out all kinds of new technologies here,” Fiske explains, adding that more and more patrons are bringing their eReaders into her library and asking how the devices will work with library products. This is, of course, just one more indication of the way her job has evolved beyond the uptight, hair-in-a-bun spinster from River City.
“Libraries are far more than just the materials in the building. It’s the librarians who know the information and can provide access to it,” Fiske says.
And, best of all, these days they’re far less likely to shush you.
(Chris Bohjalian’s most recent novel, Secrets of Eden, was just published in paperback. His next novel, The Night Strangers, arrives on October 4, 2011. This essay originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on April 10, 2011.)
April 9, 2011
The perfect literary crime and the chance for the most exquisite literary revenege
When I was in college, the school had a series of writers-in-residence, one of whom was a novelist whose work my mother had cherished. At the time, I read one of her books, too, and was mightily impressed. She was teaching a composition course one semester, and I wanted very much to be among the anointed – the few, the proud, the chosen – with whom she was going to share the mysteries of her craft. That meant submitting a short story or essay for her consideration, which dutifully I did.
Days later, I was summoned to her office in the brick monolith that housed the school's English Department, and there I met her for the first time. She was seated behind a desk the size of a putting green. When she saw me, she said, her voice a little distracted, "You're Chris. I'm not going to try to pronounce your last name."
I nodded, only a little apprehensive. I had not yet learned to trust the gift of fear.
She slid my short story across the expanse of desk as if the pages were road-kill. "Well, Chris I'm-Not-Going-to-Try-to-Pronounce-Your-Last-Name," she began, "I have three words for you." This clearly wasn't going to be good, but I am nothing if not optimistic. And so I waited.
"Be a banker," she said. That was it. I was dismissed.
This might not have been especially troubling counsel, except that I had spent much of my freshman spring trying desperately to pass Economics 11. At one point the econ professor, trying to be comforting, reminded me, “You’re a writer guy. I see your byline in the newspaper. It’s not like you’re going to be a banker.”
I am honestly not sure that a week has gone by when for one reason or another I haven’t recalled that moment of humiliation in her office. I had a lot of drive before our thirty seconds together, but even more after we had parted company. Some early mornings or late nights when I was in my twenties, writing fiction in the hours before and after my day job in an advertising agency, I would allow myself a small dram of righteous anger as I worked.
Although I have told people this story before, rarely (if ever) have I shared the novelist’s name. I was never precisely sure why.
Now I know: It was because over a quarter of a century later, I was going to be given the chance for the most exquisite revenge imaginable. Not too long ago a book editor at a prestigious newspaper emailed me a list of four new novels that would soon be arriving, wondering if there was one among them I might like to review. There was: The writer-in-residence whose sole critique of my work extended to four syllables had a new book in the pipeline and it was mine for the taking.
Had I shared this novelist’s name over the years when I told readers this story, there would have been no way I could have reviewed her new book. Why? Because the people who assign books for review tend to be much bigger people than the novelists who review them. These editors actually worry about objectivity and conflicts of interest.
Novelists? Not so much. We view schadenfreude the way well-adjusted people view dark chocolate gelato. We tattoo La Rochefoucauld onto our souls: “It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.” Trust me, we are really, really small people.
Moreover, I was confident that this other writer would have absolutely no recollection that once, on a dusky afternoon back in the Mesozoic era, she had eviscerated me with three words. I could savage her far more publicly – and with complete impunity.
It was the perfect literary crime.
Nevertheless, I stared at this book editor’s email for a couple of hours. It’s not that my spine was surgically removed at birth, but rather that I’ve always wondered: What if the short story I asked that writer to read so many years ago really was the sort of train wreck that indicated I was indeed better suited to, I don’t know, Enron? The fact was, in the following years I would manage to amass 250 rejection slips for short stories before I would sell a single word. There’s a good reason I write novels: Apparently, I can’t describe a sneeze in fewer than fifty words.
(Just for the record, my first few novels were pretty awful, too. Exhibit A? “A Killing in the Real World,” which just might be the single worst first novel ever published, bar none.)
And so, in the end, I fessed up. I revealed to the book editor my history with one of the writers behind one of those four books – which meant I would not be reviewing it.
The truth is, when I considered the possibility of reviewing this other writer’s new book, the amateurish quality of my own early work nearly smothered me like a landslide. In hindsight, I doubt that short story deserved more than a four-syllable critique. And regardless of whether she meant to inspire me, she did. She did.
Someday I might share with the world who that writer was. But, in the end, I think it’s just as likely that one day I might dedicate a book to her.
___________________________________
Chris Bohjalian's most recent novel, Secrets of Eden, was just published in paperback. His next novel, The Night Strangers, arrives on October 4, 2011. This essay originally ran in the Washington Post on April 8, 2011.
Days later, I was summoned to her office in the brick monolith that housed the school's English Department, and there I met her for the first time. She was seated behind a desk the size of a putting green. When she saw me, she said, her voice a little distracted, "You're Chris. I'm not going to try to pronounce your last name."
I nodded, only a little apprehensive. I had not yet learned to trust the gift of fear.
She slid my short story across the expanse of desk as if the pages were road-kill. "Well, Chris I'm-Not-Going-to-Try-to-Pronounce-Your-Last-Name," she began, "I have three words for you." This clearly wasn't going to be good, but I am nothing if not optimistic. And so I waited.
"Be a banker," she said. That was it. I was dismissed.
This might not have been especially troubling counsel, except that I had spent much of my freshman spring trying desperately to pass Economics 11. At one point the econ professor, trying to be comforting, reminded me, “You’re a writer guy. I see your byline in the newspaper. It’s not like you’re going to be a banker.”
I am honestly not sure that a week has gone by when for one reason or another I haven’t recalled that moment of humiliation in her office. I had a lot of drive before our thirty seconds together, but even more after we had parted company. Some early mornings or late nights when I was in my twenties, writing fiction in the hours before and after my day job in an advertising agency, I would allow myself a small dram of righteous anger as I worked.
Although I have told people this story before, rarely (if ever) have I shared the novelist’s name. I was never precisely sure why.
Now I know: It was because over a quarter of a century later, I was going to be given the chance for the most exquisite revenge imaginable. Not too long ago a book editor at a prestigious newspaper emailed me a list of four new novels that would soon be arriving, wondering if there was one among them I might like to review. There was: The writer-in-residence whose sole critique of my work extended to four syllables had a new book in the pipeline and it was mine for the taking.
Had I shared this novelist’s name over the years when I told readers this story, there would have been no way I could have reviewed her new book. Why? Because the people who assign books for review tend to be much bigger people than the novelists who review them. These editors actually worry about objectivity and conflicts of interest.
Novelists? Not so much. We view schadenfreude the way well-adjusted people view dark chocolate gelato. We tattoo La Rochefoucauld onto our souls: “It is not enough to succeed; others must fail.” Trust me, we are really, really small people.
Moreover, I was confident that this other writer would have absolutely no recollection that once, on a dusky afternoon back in the Mesozoic era, she had eviscerated me with three words. I could savage her far more publicly – and with complete impunity.
It was the perfect literary crime.
Nevertheless, I stared at this book editor’s email for a couple of hours. It’s not that my spine was surgically removed at birth, but rather that I’ve always wondered: What if the short story I asked that writer to read so many years ago really was the sort of train wreck that indicated I was indeed better suited to, I don’t know, Enron? The fact was, in the following years I would manage to amass 250 rejection slips for short stories before I would sell a single word. There’s a good reason I write novels: Apparently, I can’t describe a sneeze in fewer than fifty words.
(Just for the record, my first few novels were pretty awful, too. Exhibit A? “A Killing in the Real World,” which just might be the single worst first novel ever published, bar none.)
And so, in the end, I fessed up. I revealed to the book editor my history with one of the writers behind one of those four books – which meant I would not be reviewing it.
The truth is, when I considered the possibility of reviewing this other writer’s new book, the amateurish quality of my own early work nearly smothered me like a landslide. In hindsight, I doubt that short story deserved more than a four-syllable critique. And regardless of whether she meant to inspire me, she did. She did.
Someday I might share with the world who that writer was. But, in the end, I think it’s just as likely that one day I might dedicate a book to her.
___________________________________
Chris Bohjalian's most recent novel, Secrets of Eden, was just published in paperback. His next novel, The Night Strangers, arrives on October 4, 2011. This essay originally ran in the Washington Post on April 8, 2011.
April 3, 2011
Thanks, Marvin, for the rock solid advice
Two and a half weeks ago, I had a chocolate doughnut at 11 at night at a Dunkin' Donuts in Fort Lauderdale, and I don't think I've ever appreciated 270 calories quite so much. Actually, the calories, the doughnut and even the paper cup of decaffeinated coffee were, more or less, irrelevant. It was the reason I was there in the first place that is always going to leave me a little awed by how big a small gesture can be.
I was visiting my dad, who even infrequent readers know has been sick a lot this past year. He's 83, but in all fairness he has the body of a 103-year-old. I haven't been especially private about his march through the inner rings of Dante's medical inferno. In any case, last month, after 23 years in his Florida home with a golf course fairway outside his living room, he moved to an assisted living community. It felt to me like a terrific place when we started looking in September, but it is nevertheless a community of people who aren't penciling the 2020 Olympics into their calendars.
My father wasn't especially wild about this plan, but he agreed to its necessity. I wasn't enamored of it either, for the obvious reason that it initiated what is invariably my father's endgame.
We were having dinner two nights before the big move with some of his friends at a casual Italian restaurant. Present that night was my dad's buddy, Marvin Rock. Marvin is only in his 70s, so he was the youngster on his side of the table. He is still 6 feet and change and looks like a retired linebacker from one of Vince Lombardi's great Green Bay Packer teams. (That might be blasphemy for Marvin. He's from upstate New York and has always stood by his beloved Buffalo Bills.) My father was, as he has been at these weekly dinners for most of the past year, very quiet.
About an hour after we had gotten back to my dad's after supper, I got a call from Marvin. My father and I were watching "Glee" with the volume set at jet engine so my dad could hear it. Marvin wanted to know whether I would be awake at 10:30, when he said he would be done losing at poker for the evening. I said absolutely. He said to be outside my dad's then, to come alone, and not tell anyone where I was going. I didn't ask why.
"I'm buying you a cup of coffee," he said when I climbed into his car. "Come on."
We made small talk on the way to Dunkin' Donuts, skirting the reason why we were reenacting a moment from a Ken Follett thriller.
Finally, about 11 at night, as we were sitting in a pair of chairs in the warm evening air outside the restaurant, eating our doughnuts and drinking our coffee, he said, "You didn't seem yourself at dinner. You seemed ... out of sorts."
"Really?"
"You're worried about your dad. It's obvious."
"Well, yes."
He shook his head and leaned into me. "Don't," he said simply, his voice firm. "You're doing the right thing. I've known him for years and I love him like a brother, but he's ready. This is the right move. It may not be the easy move, but it's the right one."
Marvin was, of course, correct. Not necessarily about whether this is the right move. That remains to be seen. But he knew what he was talking about when he observed that inside I was writhing in guilt and self-loathing. And the whole idea that this guy I know only as a good friend of my dad's spotted it and reached out to me in the midst of this monumental transition meant more to me than he could possibly have imagined.
It was a great catch and I will think of that doughnut a long time -- and be grateful, yet again, to my father for having such good sense in friends. Or, perhaps, for having friends with such good sense.
Thank you, Marvin.
(This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on April 3, 2011. His next novel, THE NIGHT STRANGERS, arrives on October 4, 2011.)
I was visiting my dad, who even infrequent readers know has been sick a lot this past year. He's 83, but in all fairness he has the body of a 103-year-old. I haven't been especially private about his march through the inner rings of Dante's medical inferno. In any case, last month, after 23 years in his Florida home with a golf course fairway outside his living room, he moved to an assisted living community. It felt to me like a terrific place when we started looking in September, but it is nevertheless a community of people who aren't penciling the 2020 Olympics into their calendars.
My father wasn't especially wild about this plan, but he agreed to its necessity. I wasn't enamored of it either, for the obvious reason that it initiated what is invariably my father's endgame.
We were having dinner two nights before the big move with some of his friends at a casual Italian restaurant. Present that night was my dad's buddy, Marvin Rock. Marvin is only in his 70s, so he was the youngster on his side of the table. He is still 6 feet and change and looks like a retired linebacker from one of Vince Lombardi's great Green Bay Packer teams. (That might be blasphemy for Marvin. He's from upstate New York and has always stood by his beloved Buffalo Bills.) My father was, as he has been at these weekly dinners for most of the past year, very quiet.
About an hour after we had gotten back to my dad's after supper, I got a call from Marvin. My father and I were watching "Glee" with the volume set at jet engine so my dad could hear it. Marvin wanted to know whether I would be awake at 10:30, when he said he would be done losing at poker for the evening. I said absolutely. He said to be outside my dad's then, to come alone, and not tell anyone where I was going. I didn't ask why.
"I'm buying you a cup of coffee," he said when I climbed into his car. "Come on."
We made small talk on the way to Dunkin' Donuts, skirting the reason why we were reenacting a moment from a Ken Follett thriller.
Finally, about 11 at night, as we were sitting in a pair of chairs in the warm evening air outside the restaurant, eating our doughnuts and drinking our coffee, he said, "You didn't seem yourself at dinner. You seemed ... out of sorts."
"Really?"
"You're worried about your dad. It's obvious."
"Well, yes."
He shook his head and leaned into me. "Don't," he said simply, his voice firm. "You're doing the right thing. I've known him for years and I love him like a brother, but he's ready. This is the right move. It may not be the easy move, but it's the right one."
Marvin was, of course, correct. Not necessarily about whether this is the right move. That remains to be seen. But he knew what he was talking about when he observed that inside I was writhing in guilt and self-loathing. And the whole idea that this guy I know only as a good friend of my dad's spotted it and reached out to me in the midst of this monumental transition meant more to me than he could possibly have imagined.
It was a great catch and I will think of that doughnut a long time -- and be grateful, yet again, to my father for having such good sense in friends. Or, perhaps, for having friends with such good sense.
Thank you, Marvin.
(This column originally ran in the Burlington Free Press on April 3, 2011. His next novel, THE NIGHT STRANGERS, arrives on October 4, 2011.)
March 27, 2011
Child's play? No this musical.
Two dozen dancing Hinesburg middle schoolers have just managed a vaguely synchronized Broadway-like kickline and pinwheel in a Tuesday afternoon rehearsal for their upcoming musical, “Annie Get Your Gun.” Their director, 17-year-old Amelia Munson of Williston, calls out to them as they stand in their final poses, “Okay, you’re smiling, but your eyebrows are scary. Let’s try and smile without the scary eyebrows.” Then she demonstrates and the cast gets the difference between mugging like Jim Carrey with a fire hose and smiling because you’re a chorus geek who loves show business.
It’s been a long time since I was in an eighth grade school play, but I have two recollections. The first is that my dad observed after my performance opening night, “Son, there’s a difference between projecting and screaming.” Then, before the second show, I spilled Hawaiian Punch on the white sheet that was most of my costume, but the audience – apparently – was so enamored of my newfound ability to project instead of scream that no one said a word.
Or, perhaps, there were simply far bigger problems with my (and I use this word advisedly) “performance” than the fact that my sheet looked like a prop from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
As Munson told me before she began that afternoon’s rehearsal, “I want the show to be good, but I am as interested in the process as I am in the product. I want the kids to be having fun and learning. I want them to be responsible.”
Usually the Hinesburg Community School has an adult directing their annual musical. Not this spring. Munson is a senior at Champlain Valley Union High School, and while she has performed in musicals with the Lyric Theatre, the Stowe Theatre Guild, and in school plays since she was in elementary school, this is her first time directing. Her stage manager is another CVU senior, Greg Zengilowski.
Now, there is no truth to the rumor that originally Hinesburg wanted to hire the fired “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” director, Julie Taymor. Given the ever-growing casualty list at the Broadway fiasco – T. V. Carpio, this week – school officials always feared there wouldn’t be enough eighth graders left alive to move on to ninth grade at CVU if they brought Taymor on board. Also, Munson was less expensive.
Actually, according to Jenny Cianciola, the music teacher at Hinesburg, the real reason she wanted Munson was that she liked the idea of “a team of young, hip high schoolers to inspire our kids and give them a hint of what’s to come for them at CVU.” And Munson has done an absolutely terrific job in Cianciola’s opinion.
Moreover, Munson is succeeding despite serious hurdles. There have been seven cancelled rehearsals due to snow this winter. The day I was watching rehearsal, the student playing Annie Oakley was home sick with what might have been strep throat.
But the cast was focused that rehearsal and having fun: Munson’s two goals. Hoyt McCuin, 14, is the eighth-grader who was cast back in December as the musical’s other romantic lead, Frank Butler. McCuin, however, also plays ice hockey, soccer, and lacrosse – especially ice hockey. He is the first line center for the state champion Chittenden South Burlington Bantam A Hawks, a team that travels to Buffalo, N.Y. this coming weekend to play in a national tournament. That tournament conflicts with the musical’s show weekend and McCuin, talented as he is, can only be in one place at one time. His choice? “How could I not support Amelia and Greg?” he told me. “I want to give back to the community the way they do.”
Consequently, when the show opens this coming Thursday night, he will indeed be in the multipurpose room that serves as the Hinesburg school’s gym and theater, performing alongside 36 of his middle school peers. That’s responsibility. And show business.
And I’m confident that when the kids are smiling at the end of their performance, none of them will have scary eyebrows.
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on March 27, 2011.)
It’s been a long time since I was in an eighth grade school play, but I have two recollections. The first is that my dad observed after my performance opening night, “Son, there’s a difference between projecting and screaming.” Then, before the second show, I spilled Hawaiian Punch on the white sheet that was most of my costume, but the audience – apparently – was so enamored of my newfound ability to project instead of scream that no one said a word.
Or, perhaps, there were simply far bigger problems with my (and I use this word advisedly) “performance” than the fact that my sheet looked like a prop from “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
As Munson told me before she began that afternoon’s rehearsal, “I want the show to be good, but I am as interested in the process as I am in the product. I want the kids to be having fun and learning. I want them to be responsible.”
Usually the Hinesburg Community School has an adult directing their annual musical. Not this spring. Munson is a senior at Champlain Valley Union High School, and while she has performed in musicals with the Lyric Theatre, the Stowe Theatre Guild, and in school plays since she was in elementary school, this is her first time directing. Her stage manager is another CVU senior, Greg Zengilowski.
Now, there is no truth to the rumor that originally Hinesburg wanted to hire the fired “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” director, Julie Taymor. Given the ever-growing casualty list at the Broadway fiasco – T. V. Carpio, this week – school officials always feared there wouldn’t be enough eighth graders left alive to move on to ninth grade at CVU if they brought Taymor on board. Also, Munson was less expensive.
Actually, according to Jenny Cianciola, the music teacher at Hinesburg, the real reason she wanted Munson was that she liked the idea of “a team of young, hip high schoolers to inspire our kids and give them a hint of what’s to come for them at CVU.” And Munson has done an absolutely terrific job in Cianciola’s opinion.
Moreover, Munson is succeeding despite serious hurdles. There have been seven cancelled rehearsals due to snow this winter. The day I was watching rehearsal, the student playing Annie Oakley was home sick with what might have been strep throat.
But the cast was focused that rehearsal and having fun: Munson’s two goals. Hoyt McCuin, 14, is the eighth-grader who was cast back in December as the musical’s other romantic lead, Frank Butler. McCuin, however, also plays ice hockey, soccer, and lacrosse – especially ice hockey. He is the first line center for the state champion Chittenden South Burlington Bantam A Hawks, a team that travels to Buffalo, N.Y. this coming weekend to play in a national tournament. That tournament conflicts with the musical’s show weekend and McCuin, talented as he is, can only be in one place at one time. His choice? “How could I not support Amelia and Greg?” he told me. “I want to give back to the community the way they do.”
Consequently, when the show opens this coming Thursday night, he will indeed be in the multipurpose room that serves as the Hinesburg school’s gym and theater, performing alongside 36 of his middle school peers. That’s responsibility. And show business.
And I’m confident that when the kids are smiling at the end of their performance, none of them will have scary eyebrows.
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on March 27, 2011.)
