Teddy Starr, A Man Reinvented: Ross Barkan's ‘Colossus’

 

 

Ross Barkan's recent novel, Colossus, returns to a theme he explored in Glass Century: concealed family relationships and the reinvention of self in an unmoored America.

 

The subject is clearly a personal one for Barkan, but unlike Glass Century, which often felt driven by emotion, Colossus initially seems more intellectual than heartfelt. Only about halfway through does the novel reveal the emotional core that has been hidden beneath its portrait of a declining Americana. I found myself wondering whether Barkan might have developed the story more chronologically rather than withholding so much of Teddy Starr's back story until Part Two. Yet there is method in the structure. By delaying the revelation of Starr's origins, Barkan creates a mystery that sustains the reader through the novel's opening movement.

 

Teddy Starr is the pastor of Trinity Church in Pine Haven, a fictional Michigan town. At first he resembles a fox among the hens of his congregation, pursuing unhappy parishioners' wives with a confidence that John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom might have admired while simultaneously cashing in on local real estate opportunities in a manner reminiscent of Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe.

 

The Richard Ford influence is impossible to miss. Barkan even opens with an epigram from The Sportswriter: "All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life."  Indeed, Teddy Starr has shut the door on his past and like Bascombe, Starr also becomes a real estate agent, giving him a unique vantage point on his community (and ability to profit on it): “A realtor is a showman, a handmaiden, and advertiser for your arriving life, the one you want to live.”

 

And it is in his depiction of Pine Haven that Barkan’s writing truly excels. The town becomes a miniature America, where affluent retirees and struggling laborers live only blocks apart, and where chain restaurants, economic anxieties, and cultural fragmentation define the landscape. The novel's greatest strength may be its portrait of contemporary middle-America, observed with both affection and skepticism.  The area’s annual Flapjack Festival is its entertainment pinnacle.

 

Starr himself is not particularly admirable. He is married to Daniella and the father of three children, yet he moves through life in the community assuming privileges he has never earned. He cheats almost casually, regarding temptation as one of the benefits of being Teddy Starr. His rationalizations are often revealing, particularly when he reflects on the limitations facing women in Pine Haven and quietly congratulates himself for having "sought my advantages."

 

Yet Starr does not entirely escape consequences. His relationship with his pubescent son Theodore is strained, and the estrangement between fathers and sons becomes one of the novel's recurring concerns. Here again one hears echoes of Richard Ford.

 

There are comparisons to Sinclair Lewis as well. Although Starr is no Elmer Gantry, Lewis's skeptical eye toward Main Street America hovers over much of the first half of the novel. Then comes the event that changes everything: a mysterious man begins following Starr and claims to be his brother.

 

From that moment the novel pivots.

 

Barkan signals the turn with one of the book's most powerful passages, a meditation on secrets, reinvention, and the curtains we draw between ourselves and the past:

 

“Imagine Daniella now what she would say, another man calling the only child, Theodore Starr a brother. Imagine, really, what Daniella would say if she knew it all, even this afternoon with Guinevere, if whatever she suspects matches up against vertiginous reality, if she can even produce a notion. But few can. Few can fathom what waits behind the curtain. Curtains are thick, after all, and it’s a greater feat than it looks to pull one back, to force one back.  And what if only disease and rot are behind them? What if, by closing the curtain, you escaped it all, as any individual with a modicum of intellect and ambition would? This is the pioneer spirit, the American Mundus, reinvention to starve or perdition, to work your way closer to God, the true God. And my brother, and his people, knew nothing of that.“

 

Suddenly the reader is thrust backward into another life entirely.

 

Without venturing too far into spoiler territory, Part Two reveals that Teddy Starr (né Reuvain Gantz) was raised in Brooklyn and that his origins are far removed from the evangelical Protestant identity he has constructed. The details emerge gradually, but the central conflict is familiar: family expectations versus personal freedom.

 

His father, an overbearing, workaholic collector of apartment buildings and something of a slumlord, expects his son to inherit the business (one of course can draw parallels to a certain contemporary figure). The prospect repels him. Ironically, it is his brother who is being groomed for scholarship and religious life. The burden of expectation hangs heavily over the household.

 

How Reuvain becomes Teddy Starr is the heart of the novel. Two figures shape that transformation: Talia, his first youthful love, and Teddy, an extraordinary Asian handball player whose influence proves even more significant.

 

The handball sequences are among the finest passages in the book. Much as tennis functioned as a metaphor in Glass Century, handball becomes a metaphor for life itself—competition, discipline, courage, and self-definition. On the handball court even the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans defer to Teddy.  “It was fury, and it was a dance.  With balletic rage, he rearranged the geometry of the courts, his ball cracking low against the wall, unreachable every time.”

 

Eventually Reuvain must confront his father: “I anticipated, always, my father‘s rage. I was like a mariner reading the clouds for a rainstorm. I had chosen the handball courts over him, and I would pay.“ He accuses his father of running “a gutter empire” and soon the confrontation becomes deadly.

 

He flees Brooklyn.  He borrows his new first name from his handball court mentor and as he boards a random bus to Detroit, he sees a neon sign “Starr and Co., Deli” and so life changes for the reborn “Teddy Starr” and he ultimately begins the life we have already seen unfolding in Pine Haven.

 

Part Three examines the consequences of that reinvention. The truths Starr has concealed are exposed to his wife, his congregation, and his community. Daniella's furious assessment of him as a fraudulent outsider cuts directly to the novel's central concern: how much of a life can be built upon invention before the structure collapses?

 

Forced to confront his congregation, Starr prepares to deliver his sermon and confession: “they shimmer, my flock, even as they begin to bend my way, their wet lips crinkling, curiosity, commingling with fury… I feel oxidized and ancient like the same statue was striding the Rhodesian Harbor, my brassy flesh, collapsing into the brine. They gape at my crumbling.”   

 

Yet this is also a novel about America, and America has always had a remarkable capacity for reinvention. Time passes. Wounds heal. The disgraced pastor discovers that public life remains open to him. Indeed, he is even offered an even greater opportunity: a run for Congress.

 

The irony is unmistakable. The man who built his life on concealment and reinvention is rewarded rather than punished. One might even view his ascent as a metaphorical ride UP the escalator to seize the golden ring of success. Yet Barkan's point is not simply political. Teddy Starr embodies a distinctly American belief that identity is endlessly renewable, that the past can be escaped, rewritten, or transformed into advantage, no matter how corrupt that past might have been.  Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby similarly tried to hide a past in his delusional pursuit of the American Dream. 

 

In Colossus, Ross Barkan has produced a worthy successor to Glass Century and an impressive second installment in what appears to be an emerging trilogy examining authenticity, family, ambition, and American political life.

 

One final note. I found the hardcover's overall low-contrast typographical design and leading to be tiring on older eyes during extended reading. A minor complaint, but one worth mentioning.

 

And a coda, totally unrelated, sunrise this morning during my daily early walk…

 

‘Going All The Way’ Rings True

 

 

They grew the boys down on the farm the same sex starved way they did on the East Coast.  No wonder Willard (”Sonny”) Burns of Indianapolis is reminiscent of Portnoy and Holden Caulfield, as portrayed in Dan Wakefield’s 1970 novel, Going All the Way.  This is an unlikely read for me but I was led to it via a recent New York Times obituary of the author, by a NYT writer who had, himself, died three years earlier, David Stout. 

As Wakefield was 91 when he died and had no longer been writing, retiring to the community he came from in the environs of Indianapolis, and had stature as a writer of non-fiction, fiction, and as a magazine writer, this was one of those prepared obits waiting for its inevitable moment.  

 

I am now a regular reader of obits as I consider them to be an overlooked source of sometimes great writing (and Stout’s is among the best), reflecting on the lives of others who are about my age who were enveloped by the same times as mine.  More frequently there are ones of people I either knew or at least knew of. 

 

Also, my friend Ron is from Indiana and he has told me a lot about his childhood experiences.  Between those and reading this obituary, scenes of “Hoosiers” and the evocative music of Jerry Goldsmith drifted through my mind. 

 

Wakefield was like a Thomas Wolfe character in “You Can’t Go Home Again” as when he left Indianapolis, he felt he couldn’t return having written about his childhood memories and friends.  But he finally returned after becoming a very successful writer of both fiction and nonfiction.  His memoir Returning: A Spiritual Journey was highly praised, detailing his personal round trip journey from being a man of faith to becoming an atheist and then to humanism and spiritualism in his later years.

 

The obituary led me to what is considered to be his definitive work of fiction but I was really drawn by the concluding paragraph:

 

Asked to define his philosophy of life, Mr. Wakefield quoted Philo, the ancient philosopher of Alexandria, Egypt: “Be kind, for everyone you know is fighting a great battle.” As for his life beyond writing, reading and reflecting, he said, “No golf, no horseshoes, no stamp-collecting, no hobbies.” And, he added, “No regrets.”

 

Amen to that.

 

Wakefield’s seminal novel Going All The Way (an amusingly lurid title), was published in 1970 and a movie was made from it in the 1990’s.  His novel was praised by another graduate of his high school, Kurt Vonnegut.  I have no idea how the novel and the film went under my radar at the time other than I still had my shoulder too much to the grindstone of work 

 

This would have appealed to me, and still does as the travails of its protagonist, Sonny, are painfully familiar.  I was the same timid boy in high school, wanting to fit in, but not considered to be part of the chosen cliques.  That was usually reserved for the jocks and the extraverts who also had their fair share of sex, if you believed them. 

 

The level of testosterone level ran high.  It is almost laughable in retrospect as to how much of our lives were consumed by trying to have sex.  And that is what Wakefield’s novel is about, Sunny trying to fit in, having his sexual fantasies fulfilled, and breaking loose from the hypocrisy of parental expectations.  

 

Returning from a stint in the service on the train in the early 1950s he has a chance meeting with another ex serviceman, one of the “chosen ones” in high school, Tom Casselman (“Gunner.”); you get the picture, a handsome popular boy, a jock. 

 

Sonny tries to act cool and is surprised that Gunner remembers him: “You were one of the quiet ones, you just sat back and observed. Watched us run around chasing our tails, a bunch of green asses. You were a detached observer.” Sonny shifted uneasily and took a gulp of beer. “Well sort of,” he said. The truth was he had been an unattached observer because he was never asked to be a participant. Now it was like he was getting credit for being something he had no other choice than to be. It was sort of weird….Denying the credit for having been something he couldn’t help being, Sonny realized it probably sounded like genuine modesty making him seem even more nobler.”… Gunner had this particular picture of him, and he liked the way that picture of himself looked.

 

It gradually becomes a coming-of-age buddy novel. Ironically, Sonny had a steady girlfriend who would have done anything for him sexually, but, oh no, he wanted what we all wanted at that age, the idealized, hard to get girl next door as pictured in popular culture and our favorite magazine Playboy, if you were fortunate enough to find your father’s stash, or successfully buy one at the corner store without being recognized.

 

As Sonny’s quiet presence with Gunner is mistakenly interpreted as his being profound, a notion he continues to do nothing to discourage, it culminates in Sonny having the opportunity to meet his ideal, set up by Gunner and his girlfriend, a blind double date in a parent’s empty house stocked with booze.  The latter renders Sonny unable to perform and this in turn leads to the kind of humiliation which Sonny (spoiler here) thinks about resolving with a razor blade and his wrist.

 

As a consequence, Gunner now feels an obligation to “fix” Sonny, which leads to an automobile accident (again, booze), minor injury to Gunner, but a major one to Sonny with a long recovery period during which Gunner sets out for NYC to find himself and reconnoiter for Sonny when he eventually emerges from the hospital and the cocoon of the mid-West.  Then life can begin as it so often does in the big Apple.  Mine did.  My wife’s did.  Wakefield’s did.  Add millions before and after.

 

It is a touching coming of age novel, funny, uncomfortably true, a young man making his way through the uncertainty about the future.  Page after page there were experiences I can relate to.  Dan Wakefield could have been a friend if I had met him.  And now I feel as if I did.

 

Topdog / Underdog Encapsulates Brotherly Love, Rivalry and Despair

 

Palm Beach Dramaworks concludes its outstanding 2022/23 season with Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize-Winning Topdog / Underdog.  When it premiered some twenty years ago it had an absurdist slant, but it has now moved closer to stark realism.  Director Be Boyd further bends this stunning new PBD production toward the dystopian reality of today.  It is a tragic-comedy, an ode to black men and their estrangement from the American Dream.  The three-card Monte leitmotif of the play is steeped in metaphor and symbolism characterizing the America of today, a zero-sum game of being either a winner or loser, frequently merely by the nature of one’s birth.

 

This production evokes a deep emotional resonance on many different thematic levels, a family drama, a cautionary tale of racially based economic inequality, and the consequences of dealing with mental illness, guns and violence.  It is a perfect two-hander play that nonetheless comes across as big drama in the hands of Director Be Boyd and the Palm Beach Dramaworks team.

 

The rhythmic street language of the play is mesmerizing, an incantation drawing you into the lives of two black brothers who were given the names of “Lincoln” and “Booth” a great cosmic joke perpetrated by their boozy, philandering father who, along with their mother, long ago abandoned both when they were just youngsters, both boys unformed and uneducated.

 

Now in their 30s, they share Booth’s rundown cramped boarding room, a place where brotherly love and rivalry abound as well as the hardships of being dealt a bad hand in life. 

 

Director Be Boyd and the PBD technical crew bring the outside chaos inside the brothers’ lives where mere survival is the bottom line.  The toilet is down the hall.  Lincoln even pees into a cup on stage.

 

George Anthony Richardson and Jovon Jacobs Photo by Alicia Donelan

 

Lincoln was once a highly successful three-card-Monte hustler which he walked away from after his partner was shot.  He now has a “real” job, as honest Abe Lincoln, wearing a stovepipe hat and whiteface, at an arcade attraction.  Like Franz Kafka’s “Hunger Artist,” he now strives for perfection playing his namesake so customers can line up to “assassinate” him.  He is always working on his skills as a performance artist (or during slow moments, composing songs in his head), Booth even making suggestions for his improvement on the one hand while really wanting him to go back to “the game.”

 

Booth is ferociously performed by Jovon Jacobs who is appearing in his third PBD production.  He just gets better as an actor each time and now is at the top of his game.  Booth can only dream of being a three-card Monte hustler as he lacks the artistry of his older brother.  His are dreams of money and women, obsessed with making his girlfriend Grace love and have sex with him.  His expertise is being a crook, a shoplifter.

  

Jacobs’ internal energy seems infinite, explosive, attacking the words, seething from within.  His character’s fantasies drive the physicality of his performance, his magnetism frenetic, with exuberant mannerisms.  It is a bravura performance.  The striptease of his stolen goods shows great comic chops. 

 

George Anthony Richardson and Jovon Jacobs Photo by Alicia Donelan

 

Lincoln is played with a quiet dignity, befitting his namesake, by George Anthony Richardson (PBD debut), remarkably a last-minute replacement for the actor originally cast.  Serendipitously Richardson was the understudy for the recent Tony Nominated revival of the play, so he hits the ground running, although future performances will build upon the chemistry between these two fine actors who have had so little time together.

 

Richardson’s role as the sometimes more than tolerant, submissive older brother, resigned to his job and performance, does finally give in to the draw of “the game”...…..like the alcoholism that runs in his family, a compulsive generational hopelessness.  Richardson effectively portrays his character with docile resignation, but transforms into an animated actor with smooth hands and mesmerizing voice when he deals the cards.  This is his milieu.   

 

He has one steady customer who whispers in his ear, does the show go on when no one is looking?  The monologue leading up to this frequent visitor has particular relevance in today’s times, where everyday violence and shootings are endemic to our lives.  What might have been unimaginable not long ago, a carnival attraction for the mock assassination of a President such as Lincoln, impersonated not only by someone named Lincoln, but a black man as well, could be ordinary in today’s sideshow.

 

He says he can see his arcade customers in the reflection of a silver metal fuse box in the partial darkness, the image being upside down, remarking about his usual customer:  And there he is.  Standing behind me.  Standing in position.  Standing upside down.  Theres some feet shapes on the floor so he knows just where he oughta stand.  So he wont miss.  Thuh gun is always cold…..And when the gun touches me he can feel that Im warm and he knows Im alive.  And if Im alive then he can shoot me dead.  And for a minute, with him hanging back there behind me, its real.  Me looking at him upside down and him looking at me looking like Lincoln.  Then he shoots I slump down and close my eyes.  And he goes out thuh other way.  More come in.  Uh whole day full.  Bunches of kids, little good for nothings, in they school uniforms.  Businessmen smelling like two for one martinis.  Tourists in they theme park t-shirts to catch it all on film.  Housewives with they mouths closed tight, shooting more than once.  They all get so into it.  I do my best for them.  And now they talking bout cutting me, replacing me with uh wax dummy.

 

Booth wants his brother to return to “the game,” being hustlers together.  BOOTH: It was you and me against the world, Link.  It could be that way again.  Lincoln though doubts Booth would even have the skills to be the “sideman” playing along with the dealer, suckering people in.  LINCOLN: First thing you learn is what is.  Next thing you learn is what aint.  You don’t know what is you don’t know what aint, you don’t know shit.  Dark humor abounds in the play.

 

Offstage characters of Lincoln’s former wife Cookie, and Booth’s fixation on his on and off girlfriend Grace, give rise to anther central theme, masculinity and sexuality, a story of domination of women, or more pathetically, not having one, certainly not like their father who use to have them, leaving leftovers for Lincoln when he was just a young boy.  These relationships give further rise to their rivalry and trash talking.

 

Given their names and their love/enmity relationship, we all know this is going to end badly, but in leading to the how, why, and when, Director Be Boyd builds on the intrinsic conflict and tension.

 

 

As important as the text, is the look and feel of the production which starts with the scenic design by Seth Howard, his PBD debut, depicting their small claustrophobic room, built on a cold concrete slab, elevated at an angle, the squalor and chaos of the outside discernible.  It is like a price fighting ring, but without the ropes, where blood will be split as the rivalry for “topdog” is never ending. 

 

Kirk Bookman, lighting designer, floods the dingy dark space with light from the outside, and during transitional moments projects images of the black experience bringing in an element of their world in the form of a documentary.  This is well done from a lighting perspective but was a directorial choice and I wonder whether just the musical rap transitions would have sufficed.

 

The sound design by Roger Arnold contributes to the pulse of the play, with those of the city noises rising to a roar at times like an incoming freight train underscoring their victimization.

 

Brian O’Keefe’s costume designs reinforce their disheveled, poverty plagued world, interpreting their personalities without creating archetypical characters.  Booth’s stolen suits, ties and shoes are redolent of off the rack circa Target.  Lincoln’s “work attire” which we only fully see at the beginning of the play captures the absurdist quality of the play, his hand-me-down clothes from the previous performer, stovepipe hat, dime store beard, and his white face, a triumph for both O’Keefe’s clothing design and Bookman’s lighting. This creepy image of honest Abe will stay with you long after you leave the theater.

 

The final con brings out the ultimate fury of Booth, returning us to the futility of their lives, their lost sense of purpose and the ultimate price of mental illness.  The tragic ending is gut-wrenching.  This production is yet another testament to Palm Beach Dramaworks’ commitment to "theatre to think about."