And death remains the ultimate punch line to the absurdity that is life's joke. How does one overcome a fear of death? he...
Late last year, Nora Ephron, a writer renowned for Manhattan-sharp observations and a penchant for probing personal neuroses, released I Feel Bad About My Neck: and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, her first collection of short pieces in decades. Now comes Woody Allen with Mere Anarchy, an intermittently funny sequel to his popular trilogy of humor collections: Getting Even (1971), Without Feathers (1975), and Side Effects (1982).
It appears that Woody Allen is back in the business of being Woody Allen, having resumed writing for The New Yorker (where the last ten of these selections first appeared; the first eight are new to this collection), and making movies (at least 2005's Match Point) that cause a cultural ripple beyond the dwindling ranks of Allen diehards. Since much of Allen's appeal depends on public perception of his persona, the question is how profoundly the changes in that public persona have affected the work and its reception. When he last published a collection 26 years ago, he was still almost universally beloved as the director-star of Annie Hall, with The Purple Rose of Cairo and Hannah and Her Sisters soon to come. He had established himself as the intellectual nebbish who found it easier to make a woman laugh than ignite her lust. He touched a common nerve by sharing the insecurities that so many of us share – and by making our darkest fears funny. People thought they knew Woody Allen, and they liked what they knew. Then came scandal: the notorious breakup with Mia Farrow after his seduction of her adopted daughter (subsequently his wife). For many who had formerly found Allen hilarious, his explanation that "the heart wants what it wants" sounded pathetic, his romance a little creepy. So the new Allen establishes a considerably less personal relationship with his readers, as Mere Anarchy doesn't explore Allen's heart or his libido. Instead, it offers riffs of various amusement on oddities that he has read in the New York Times – one about the abduction of an Indian movie star, another about "Technologically Enabled Clothing," another about film camp for kids. Yet even when he was much younger, Allen's obsessions were those of a much older man, haunted by mortality. In the year that he will turn 72, he addresses man's place in the cosmos in "Strung Out," which explores the practical applications of everyday physics (again inspired by a Times piece). "I am greatly relieved that the universe is finally explainable," he opens. "I was beginning to think it was me."
And death remains the ultimate punch line to the absurdity that is life's joke. How does one overcome a fear of death? he asks in "Sing, You Sacher Tortes": "By dying," he writes. "I figured it out – it's really the only way."Pub Date: June 19, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6641-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.
The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.
This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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