Picnic – Youth, Dreams, and Disillusion Unfold at Dramaworks

In the context of the placid decade of the 50’s, and its small town mid-western setting, Picnic by William Inge took on the daring theme of sexual repression.  It also encapsulated classic literary themes of the American Dream and disillusionment. Inge was from Kansas and the characters he wrote about were emblazoned in his mind and empathetically translated to drama.

It is a Pulitzer Prize winning play, well worth seeing again, and it demands careful orchestration to bring a modern audience into yesteryear and make this still relevant.  It doesn’t help that burnished in one’s mind is the movie version with the woefully inappropriate, over-aged William Holden playing Hal, the young man who energizes the action (as much as I admire Holden as a screen actor). But Bill Hayes, the play’s director, has indeed avoided the “overly theatrical approach” and stereotypical characters, to create more “realistic and complex characters” with an ideal cast.

Inge prefaces his play with a Shakespearean quotation from Sonnet 94:  The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet. If you read the entire Sonnet, particularly what follows that quotation, it establishes one of the central themes of the play, a person is defined by his/her behavior, and there are a number of choices made by the characters in the play that carry significant consequences.

Picnic takes place in the shared yard – so often the gathering point in neighborhoods of the 1950s when people actually connected with one another-- of Flo Owens and Helen Potts. Upstage there is a fence that opens to an alley and beyond that is a panorama of the town buildings.  The set is very important in this intricately arranged play, and scenic design has always been one of PBD’s many strong points

Act I introduces the characters with only some mild hints of what is about to unfold later. Mrs. Potts, the elder stateswoman of the neighborhood, has given some work to a stranger in town, Hal Carter, a young down on his luck drifter, in exchange for something to eat.  He has jumped a freight train to this small Kansas town to see his former college fraternity brother, who he considers his last friend in the world, Alan Seymour, hoping to find a job through Alan’s wealthy father.  Hal had flunked out of college (where he was a star athlete) and had tried unsuccessfully to make his way in Hollywood.  Hal, his shirtless body on display for most of the first act, becomes a lightning rod for some of the lonely women in the play. At first he is only casually noticed by Madge Owens the high school homecoming queen who her mother, Flo, has been plotting for her to marry Alan for the secure life of a country club belle. 

Hal and Madge

Hal is played by Merlin Huff, in his PBD debut, parading his manly presence around the stage like a badge, stomping and posturing, yet inwardly feeling totally insecure. It is a difficult role as Inge provides for little nuance and character development. He is a free spirit, who is yearning to become a “success” which nothing in his dysfunctional background has prepared him to achieve.

His friend, Alan, is convincingly played by Taylor Miller, also making his PBD debut, with his wholesomeness, and innate confidence from having grown up in the “right” family and following their expectations, only conscious of Madge’s desirability as a beauty. He looks up to Hal as a rebel and admires his animal attraction to the women he encounters.

The key role of Flo, who is trying to orchestrate the lives of her two daughters, hoping that they will marry well, is outstandingly played by PBD veteran Patti Gardner, capturing her anxiety that her daughters should not have disappointing lives as she’s had.  Flo’s husband had walked out on her after the birth of their second child so she is very wary of a man such as Hal. She is a strong mother lion guarding her cubs.

Alas, for Madge, she feels her beauty may be a detriment, as revealed in an exchange between Madge and her mother in the first act:

Alan and Madge

MADGE.  What good is it to be pretty?

FLO.  Well…pretty things…like flowers and sunsets and rubies… and pretty girls, too….they’re like billboards telling us that life is good.

MADGE. But where do I come in?

FLO. What do you mean?

MADGE. Maybe I get tired being looked at.

FLO. Madge! Don’t talk so selfish!

MADGE.  I don’t care if I am selfish.  It’s no good just to be pretty.  It’s no good!

Madge is played by the appropriately beautiful Kelly Gibson, who portrays the essence of a young woman tottering on the brink of full blown womanhood and what the future holds for her, trying to understand who she is other than what the mirror and people tell her she is.  There are constant references to that power she holds over men, but in a sense she remains pure (a “summer flower” not tarnished by “base infection” as Shakespeare puts it), trying to break out to find something more relevant than her looks alone.  As she says so poignantly in the second act to her mother,

MADGE. It just seems that when I’m looking in the mirror that’s the only way I can prove to myself I’m alive.

FLO.  Alive?

MADGE. Yes.  Lots of the time I wonder if I really exist.

Flo’s boarder, Rosemary Sydney, is a school teacher, who hangs out with two other unmarried teachers, and has a long-time beau, Howard Bevans.  The story of Rosemary’s and Howard’s relationship is juxtaposed to the one which emerges between Hal and Madge, two middle aged people, who have let their years slip by vs. the story of youth and their expectations of the future.  

Margery Lowe’s performance as Rosemary is terrific. She is a woman who has had failed romances in the past and knows she is on the precipice of spinsterhood, especially after seeing the young people she is surrounded by, a desperation Lowe practically breathes from every pore.  (And Lowe “cuts a mean rug” even after Rosemary becomes intoxicated.)  

Another PBD familiar face, Michael McKeever, undertakes the role of the ambivalent Howard with an engaging homey affability.  Fear of commitment shadows Howard who seems set in his ways.

Those are the basic ingredients for Inge’s brew that boils over in Act II as the town’s annual Labor Day picnic is about to take place.  Madge’s slightly younger, brainy, tom-boyish sister Millie has no date and Mrs. Potts (to Flo’s horror) suggests that Hal becomes Millie’s escort.  Millie suddenly becomes obsessed with her looks as well (deeply jealous of the attention her sister commands) although throughout most of the play she remains true to her intellectual stand-offish self.  In a sense she represents Inge’s presence in the play. (She is reading Carson McCullers The Ballad of the Sad Café, which in some ways parallels the play.) Maren Searle, makes her PBD debut as a Millie and is on stage most of the time, maturing right before our eyes, and while she fights with her older sister, she deeply loves her as well. Searle brings an acting maturity to her role of a sixteen-year old.

Meanwhile, poor Hal, as much as he tries to “fit in” with everyone, he just seems to say the wrong thing and becomes self conscious about everything he’s about to say.  In a sense, he’s an innocent, another “summer flower.”It doesn’t help that his friend Alan has indeed offered him a job, but as the lowest manual laborer which Alan does not let Hal forget.  Still Hal wears his optimism, tempered by humiliation, on his shirtless sleeve.

Hal has Mrs. Potts,  – so amiably and skillfully played by the seasoned PBD actress Elizabeth Dimon -- in stitches telling stories about his father – who he obviously loved in spite of his  alcoholism and jail time.  Mrs. Potts, her mother’s caretaker who we only hear offstage, sees the inherent goodness in Hal and accepts his youthful, manly countenance without the criticism or jealousy of the other mature women.  Perhaps that is because of her own impetuous love affair when she was very young resulted in a marriage that her own mother had annulled only 24 hours later. She understands the urges of youth and acts as an observer, and a reconciler of some of the ensuing conflict.

Howard produces a bottle of liquor to share before the picnic, the truth serum which particularly Rosemary has more than a swig of, erupting in a vicious attack of Hal, and everything he represents – youth and freedom. – culminating in her direct accusation:

ROSEMARY. ….You’re just a piece of Arkansas white trash!  And braggin about your father!  And I’ll bet he wasn’t any better’n you are!  I’ll bet you lose that job before your two weeks is up….You think just ‘cause you’re young you can push the old folks aside.  You’ll end your life in the gutter and it’ll serve you right ‘cause the gutter’s where you belong.

 Howard puts a stop to the tirade.

Hal and Madge finally make an electrically charged connection at the end of the second act and cannot take their hands off each other, kissing passionately all over the yard, on the porch, in front of the shed.  However, they now have to face the headwinds of Flo’s disapproval, not to mention Alan who becomes insanely jealous and feels utterly betrayed by both. 

Act III takes place the morning after the picnic.  Everything has changed.  Madge and Hal returned late in Alan’s car.  Alan has the police now looking for Hal on the trumped up charge that his car was stolen.  Flo is outraged. 

Rosemary has seen her future and does not like the vision of old lady spinster she knows she will become; she has begged Howard to marry her and before Howard knows what has happened he has been railroaded into a future he never thought would become real, although, deep down, he does love Rosemary.  

Hal plans to flee on the freight train that can be heard in the distance, urging Madge to come with him, telling her where to look for him in Tulsa.  He sees in Madge “the only real thing I ever had,” and he imagines a life with her, settling down, perhaps buying a farm, a future.  Their relationship is different than the others, based on strong sexual desire and the unbounded optimism of youth. Hal is no longer the drifter.

In spite of Flo’s disappointment and objections, Madge follows on the next bus.  Flo’s neighbor, Helen Potts, has to restrain Flo who still can’t believe that her beautiful daughter could be throwing away her life, but Madge has opted for HER life, as Rosemary did.

That freight train whistle is a constant leitmotiv in the play, a reminder of a vast nation with sprawling opportunities, at the heart of the American Dream.  Hal arrives and departs via that beckoning train. From Inge’s description of the setting before the beginning of the play:  Far off, the whistle of a train is heard coming to town. It is a happy promising sound.

And near the beginning of the play, these exchanges between the Owens women foreshadow much of the play:

MADGE: Whenever I hear that train coming into town, I always get a feeling of excitement….in here. (Hugging her stomach)

MILLIE: Whenever I hear it, I tell myself someday I’m going to get on that train and I’m going to go to New York.

FLO: That Train only goes as far as Tulsa.

MILLIE: Well, in Tulsa I could catch another train.

MADGE: I always wonder, maybe some wonderful person is getting off here, just by accident, and he’ll come into the dime store for something and see me behind the counter…

Interesting that Dramaworks’ season opens with this classic play, as it did last year with Our Town, a play with which it shares many characteristics, simple but direct fundamental themes unfolding in a small-town setting, superbly staged and acted.  Clearly this where Dramaworks excels, in the details of the staging.

It is a complicated production, even requiring a choreographer, Michelle Petrucci, for the sexy and disturbing dance number on the crowded stage in Act II.

Set Under Construction

 There can never be enough praise for scenic design by Michael Amico, and the set for Picnic is spot on, exactly as Inge required, and even for PBD’s relatively new home and larger stage, must have been a challenge for Mr. Amico.  Challenge accepted and achieved!

Finished Picnic Set

Costume design is by Brian O'Keefe who did not want to use stock dresses, hand crafting more than a dozen for the show, with Madge’s blue dress requiring 60 hours of work!

More about the devil is in the detail: the lighting design by Donald Edmund Thomas, something the audience might take for granted, was carefully planned to be in sync with the costumes and as the play takes place within 24 hours, the morning sunrise light begins on stage left, moves overhead during the day, and “sets” stage right. There are a number of “wake up” changes of light and there are some eighty lighting cues in the production.

The music (all original scores) and sound design are by Steve Brush, perfectly setting the tone and mood of the production.  I loved the opening which indeed captured the morning of a late summer day, the sun coming up; the whistle of a train in the distance, a barking dog, and then the play unfolds. At night the sound of crickets fill the theatre.

Although in minor roles, special mention should be made of Julie Rowe and Natalia Coego who play Rosemary’s unmarried schoolteacher  friends, a kind of Greek chorus, one younger than Rosemary who teaches, what else, feminine hygiene (sounds very 50s to me) and the other, an older woman who reminds Rosemary what she might easily become. And kudos to young Riley Anthony who plays Bomber, the newspaper boy who unmercifully teases Millie, and naturally is gaga over Madge (although even his opinion of Madge changes at the end).

This is a huge undertaking for a regional theatre, flawlessly directed by Bill Hayes who obviously has a great rapport with his actors and behind-the scenes technicians – a promising start to Dramaworks’ new season.  

Leading Cast Members

Carly Sidesteps

I’m still stunned by the Meet the Press interview with Carly Fiorina last week, and how it juxtaposed to an interview on the same program with Hillary Clinton.  Chuck Todd kept Hillary on the defensive over her private server and the missing emails.  Nothing much else was discussed.  He would not let it drop and she answered him to the best of her ability (“I’m not a techie!”), although, admittedly, chameleon-like in many respects. 

The interview with Carly Fiorina, in contrast, it was she on the offensive, being able to make whatever claims she wanted (although Todd picked up on those, she simply ignoring the questions and speaking to her well-scripted talking points).  First there was the claim of the existence of a Planned Parenthood tape where fetus body parts were being auctioned.  Todd picked up on that saying, well, the footage you describe at best is a reenactment. The people even-- the people that made the videos admit it's stock footage. Yet, you went right along and said, "It's Planned Parenthood."

Fiorina condescendingly ignored Todd’s statement with a generalization: Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck. Do you think this is not happening? Does Hillary Clinton think this is not happening? So sad that you missed the opportunity to ask Mrs. Clinton why she said, "Late-term abortions were only performed for medical purposes." That is patently false. This is happening in America today. And taxpayers are paying for it. That is a fact. It is a reality. And no one can run away from it.   

That’s an answer to a specific question regarding Planned Parenthood and that footage? 

In response to Todd’s comments about her track record at HP, she said: I think people are looking for a president who will run to the problems that this nation faces. Yes, I led HP through a very difficult time. The NASDAQ dropped 80%. Some of our strongest competitors went out of business all together, taking every job with them. We saved 80,000 jobs. We went on to grow to 150,000 jobs. We quadrupled the growth rate of the company, quadrupled the cash flow of the company, tripled the rate of innovation of the company. And went from lagging behind to leading in every single product and every single market. I will run on that record all day long.

How many “Pinocchios” is that statement good for? 

In the last “debate” Fiorina denounced one of her critics on her job record, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld who is the senior associate dean of Leadership Studies and Lester Crown Professor of Practice Management at the Yale School of Management.  Of course he was not there to defend his views.  She simply proclaimed that he is a “Clintonite” and therefore his views are false.  Sonnenfeld answered her in Politico, and I just happened to see it today, so I am providing the link to his article: Why I Still Think Fiorina Was a Terrible CEO: She can diss me all she wants on live TV, but personal attacks won’t take her from colossal business failure to leader of the free world.  WELL worth reading and considering.

I had thought that Fiorina was in the race as a logical VP candidate if Hillary does indeed become the Democratic candidate.  Although that still might be the case, I’m not so sure anymore that she will be satisfied with “only” the VP nomination. 

Switching gears to one of the major issues of our times, gun control.  I’ve written about this topic before and it is sad that we make no progress in this area and now, still, another mass slaughter, this one at the Umpqua Community College in Oregon.  CNN now reports that the police have identified thirteen (!) weapons connected with the murderer. 

As President Obama wearily declared in his news conference, these incidents have become routine in this country and our response is routine:  commiserate with the families and do absolutely nothing to diminish the problem.  Thank you NRA and its obedient congressional cronies.   

I’m no Pollyanna when it comes to this subject.  People should have the right to have registered weapons for target practice and hunting, and for self protection (with licensing akin to getting a driver’s license, testing etc.), with stringent background checks before any weapon could be bought.  Assault weapons should be banned.  Would those steps eliminate the problem?  No.  But it’s a start.  On a macro basis, it is a cultural problem (just look at popular culture which glorifies violence and guns), as well as educational and income equality feeding the problem.  These must be addressed as well.  I’ve written several times on the topic, and I’m excerpting a couple here….

Monday, January 20, 2014

"Existential Illegitimacy"

There have been twenty mass shootings since Obama became president and he is helpless to do anything about it without the complete cooperation of Congress.  After the shooting in Newton, Connecticut, only a few miles from where we lived for twenty plus years, there was a ground swell (verbal only) in Congress to do something to control the sale of certain automatic weapons, but by the time the NRA got finished with their lobbying campaign, that effort was AK47ed to death.  Explain that failure to the parents of the children slaughtered.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

You Call That a Gun?

Florida airwaves are chock full of reports of surging gun sales and crowded local shooting ranges before the sword of Damocles (Obama) comes swiftly down.  Interestingly, or tellingly, it is the sales of the AK47 type of military weapons that are selling most briskly and at record prices, soldier citizens plunking down $1,000 or more for their favorite assault weapon.  Apparently, their rationalization for needing a military weapon is, well, for their inevitable confrontation with the US Military.  These particular stalwart supporters of the Constitution (a.k.a. conspiracists) "know" of clandestine government plans to send troops door-to-door to confiscate their booty.  The problem with that is if they are harboring AK47s, perhaps the military might come knocking on their doors with a tank?  Now that's a gun!

In a more serious vein, it's about time after all the empty talk that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution be brought into the 21st century.  The framers of the Constitution could never have envisioned what now constitutes the word "arms."

Antidote of the day…Dawn…

Purity – Purely Dazzling

With Updike now gone, and Roth no longer writing, the baton of “Great American Novelist” has been passed to Jonathan Franzen.  After all, he was anointed as such by Time Magazine after the publication of his last novel, Freedom.  Sure, there are other important American novelists; John Irving, Anne Tyler, Richard Russo, Joyce Carol Oats, to name but a few.  But Franzen happens to stand out, although John Irving also merits such consideration.  Irving is the more prolific and they share a Dickensian perspective on character development and social commentary.  These are writers of substance and so when Franzen’s Purity was published, I made sure I was first on Amazon’s list to receive a copy – it was even delivered on a Sunday.

I wish I had had the time to simply sit down and read it through in a couple of days.  Instead, my usual routines encroached as well as my propensity to draw out the books I enjoy the most, lingering over certain passages.

Franzen, like Irving, is a writer’s writer, possessing a unique take on story development, the intersecting of characters, the timelessness of subjects he covers, as well as his observations of contemporary life.  Remember Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities – his social commentary on the themes of the 1980’s, greed, racism, politics and class separation?  Franzen addresses the “new” issues of the post millennium, power struggles between men and women, global warming, the changes wrought by the Internet – both in how we communicate and how it’s impacted interpersonal relationships – and the hanging Sword of Damocles which is nuclear catastrophe.  These are high wire themes, anxiety producing, and disturbing.

So one could say that social realism is Franzen’s strength, but his writing is more than that.  In reading this novel I had the sense that it was writing itself, it having an internal energy that flowed through, rather than by, the author.  I know that sounds otherworldly, but I felt as if I was witnessing something that is happening in the here and now, a story into which the reader gives himself over, with characters that are real.

I used to rely on Updike’s Rabbit novels, a new one published approximately every ten years for four decades, to capture this nation’s Zeitgeist, and I felt part of it.  Franzen is like Updike in this regard, not to mention matching Updike’s towering intellect. These are two very smart, robust writers.  Updike was elegantly fluent with language, whereas Franzen’s prose hits you like a sledgehammer, delving deeply into his characters’ inner lives.   Purity expands upon his last novel, Freedom which concludes with the first few years of the 21^st century.  The state of our hyper world is evolving faster than in Updike’s time and it is remarkable to see those changes so well documented in this novel.

At the heart of the story is a literal murder, but there are symbolic murders throughout, men and women in sexual power struggles, adult children and their parents who have their own special power struggles, identity crises in abundance. Through their actions, these characters bring about an existential disconnection that seems to epitomize this second decade of the 21^st century.  There is a healthy dose of misanthropic analysis to be pondered.

Structurally the novel consists of several intersecting stories, timelines sometimes out of order.  At the heart is “Pip” as Purity Tyler is known.  Pip’s nickname is Franzen’s hat tip to Dickens’ character in Great Expectations.  Like Dickens’ Pip, Purity is the thread that ties together many lives. First our Pip is on a quest to discover the identity of her father – and by so doing hoping to eradicate a student loan of six figures (“her student debt was functionally a vow of poverty”), and find out exactly who she is, intellectually, morally, socially.  She is adrift and works at a “shit job” (the implication being all loan-burdened graduates are subjugated to those kinds of jobs) as a cold call sales agent for “Renewable Solutions” -- selling home owners on using government renewable energy tax credits by investing in projects for their homes, the firm taking a big slice of the tax credit. 

The work is demeaning to her intellect.  Her boss is demeaning.  She retreats each night to a rented room in a home populated by a number of dissidents who have a Utopian vision – under the rubric of the “Occupy movement.”  Their theory was that the technology driven gains in productivity and the resulting loss of manufacturing jobs would inevitably result in better wealth distribution, including generous payments to most of the population for doing nothing, when Capital realized that it could not afford to pauperize the consumers who bought its robot-made products.  Unemployed consumers would acquire an economic value equivalent to their lost value as actual laborers, and could join forces with the people still working in the service industry, thereby creating a new coalition of labor and the permanently unemployed, whose overwhelming size would compel social change.

She considers the name “Purity” the most shameful word in the English language because it was her given Name.  It made her ashamed of her own driver’s license, the Purity Tyler beside her sullen head shot, and made filling out any application a small torture.

There are two male figures dominating her life, Andreas Wolf, an East German ex-pat, and now a renegade charismatic leader of a Wiki-leaks kind of organization dubbed the “Sunshine Project,” and Tom Aberant, a brilliant on line journalist, founder of the Denver Independent with money left to him by his ex-wife’s father. 

Tom’s ex-wife, with whom he was madly in love, Anabel Laird, eschews money as the root of all her family’s sins, and during their eleven years of marriage leads Tom around like a trained animal.  Hilarious – getting him to pee sitting down as that’s the way women do it!  And she can only have sex during the three days around the full moon. Anabel impresses me as a nut job.

Nonetheless they endure a marriage mired in a “vow of poverty” which culminates in a power struggle sexual conquest.  In a departure from Franzen’s third person narrative, there is one chapter with a first person narrative from Tom’s perspective in which he describes their very strange relationship (in my day, you simply fell in love, got married, and had kids – not so simple any more).

Earlier, Tom had met Andreas, both as relatively young men, a chance meeting, like many of the crisscrossing incidents in the novel (a little like Hardy!), so they have a long standing connection.  Andreas Wolf is compared to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, although Wolf considers his “Sunlight Project” more “purpose driven.”  He becomes an Internet rock star and having come from a totalitarian regime in East Germany finds the Internet at first his savior and then his burden.  He is plainly a sociopath. 

While still in East Germany Andreas meets the beautiful but very young Annagret.  Although she is half his age, Annagret becomes Andreas’ first real love.  He is willing to do anything for her.  Ultimately Annagret becomes part of the Sunlight Project and she is the one who inveigles Pip to join and be an intern in Bolivia where Andreas’ operation becomes ensconced.  Pip becomes Andreas’ new love object as by that time Annagret is out of the picture.  He allows Pip access to some of his inner thoughts:  There's the imperative to keep secrets, and the imperative to have them known. How do you know that you're a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside you, because, if you don't, there's no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity. But identity in a vacuum is also meaningless. Sooner or later, the inside of you needs a witness. Otherwise you're just a cow, a cat, a stone, a thing in the world, trapped in your thingness. To have an identity, you have to believe that other identities equally exist. You need closeness with other people. And how is closeness built? By sharing secrets.  Pip to Andreas: But it's a pretty weird theory for a person who exposes people's secrets for a living.

Andreas remembers the Old Republic in light of today’s massive disintermediation by technology, an interesting passage which in effect describes a “new class” that is nonetheless as heartless as the class it replaced:  The privileges available in the Republic had been paltry, a telephone, a flat with some air and light, the all-important permission to travel, but perhaps no paltrier than having x number of followers on Twitter, a much-liked Facebook profile, and the occasional four-minute spot on CNBC. The real appeal of apparatchikism was the safety of belonging. Outside, the air smelled like brimstone, the food was bad, the economy moribund, the cynicism rampant, but inside, victory over the class enemy was assured…. Outside, the middle class was disappearing faster than the icecaps, xenophobes were winning elections or stocking up on assault rifles, warring tribes were butchering each other religiously, but inside, disruptive new technologies were rendering traditional politics obsolete. Inside, decentralized ad hoc communities were rewriting the rules of creativity, the revolution rewarding the risk-taker who understood the power of networks. The New Regime even recycled the old Republic's buzz-words, collective, collaborative. Axiomatic to both was that a new species of humanity was emerging. On this, apparatchiks of every stripe agreed. It never seemed to bother them that their ruling elites consisted of the grasping, brutal old species of humanity.

After Tom’s torturous relationship and parting with his wife, a professional journalist, Leila, enters Tom’s life.  Leila’s relationship with Tom is an unusual one as she continues to be married to an over-the-hill, and now partially paralyzed, novelist /professor, Charles, keeping two homes, one with Charles and the other with Tom.  One of the overarching themes of the novel – the “new” feminism is expressed in her relationship with Tom:  Tom was a strange hybrid feminist, behaviorally beyond reproach but conceptually hostile. ‘I get feminism on an equal-rights issue….What I don’t get is the theory.  Whether women are supposed to be exactly the same as men, or different and better than men.’  And he’d laughed the way he did at things he found silly, and Leila had remained angrily silent, because she was a hybrid the other way around:  conceptually a feminist but one of those women whose primary relationships had always been with men and who had benefited professionally, all her life, from her intimacy with them.  She’d felt attacked by Tom’s laughter, and the two of them had been careful never to discuss feminism again.

After Pip interns for Andreas on the Sunshine Project (naturally, Andreas falls for Pip but Pip keeps her distance with some regrets), she winds up as Leila’s protégé in Denver, learning the craft of journalism. (Long story about the “coincidence” that leads to that connection and a spoiler as well, so enough said.) But Leila is jealous of Pip’s good looks and youth.  

Leila – with Pip as her researcher, skills she learned from the Sunshine Project --is trying to scoop a story for Tom’s online Denver Independent before the Washington Post gets to it: the lack of controls of a nuclear arsenal in Amarillo.  Here Franzen gives a humorous hat tip to the famous scene from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie, Dr. Strangelove, with Maj. 'King' Kong played by Slim Pickens riding a thermonuclear bomb to its target. Two minor characters in the novel, Cody, who has stolen a replica of an A-Bomb, and his girlfriend, Phyllisha who thinks it is real (and it could have been because of the lack of controls) play out this scene:   He wanted her to feel the kind of power he had at his disposal.  He wanted her to take off all her clothes and put her arms around the bomb and stick her little tail up for him….She went ahead and did what he said….To be that close to so much potential death and devastation, to have her sweaty skin against the cool skin of a death-bomb, to imagine the whole city going up in a mushroom cloud when she orgasmed.  It was pretty great, she had to say.

It is through Tom and Leila that thermonuclear anxiety and a healthy dose of misanthropy emerges: Tom's theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if the galaxy abounded with earthlike planets, the chances of one civilization sticking around to get a message from another were vanishingly low, because it was too damned easy to split the atom. Leila neither liked this theory nor had a better one; her feeling about all doomsday scenarios was Please make me the first person killed; but she'd forced herself to read accounts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what it was like to have had your skin burned off entirely and still be staggering down a street, alive. Not just for Pip’s sake did she want the Amarillo story to be large. The world's fear of nuclear weapons was unaccountably unlike her fear of fighting and, vomiting: the longer the world lasted without ending in mushroom clouds, the less afraid people seemed to be….Climate change got more ink in a day than nuclear arsenals did in a year. To say nothing of the NFL, passing records that Peyton Manning had broken as a Denver Bronco.  Leila was afraid and felt like the only one who was.

Amen to that, Jonathan Franzen.

Speaking of Jonathans, Franzen knows how to engage in some self deprecating humor, Leila’s novelist husband, Charles, saying to Pip: So many Jonathans.  A plague of literary Jonathans.  If you read only New York Times Book Review, you’d think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness.  Ambition, vitality.

In Andreas’ life we have an overbearing mother, as we have a passive but doting mother in Pip’s life and Tom’s mother is omnipresent, warning Tom about Anabel.  There are story lines galore, many characters, multigenerational dysfunctionality, and then the real world of the 21^st century to channel.  Franzen captures all in this episodic novel.

[Pip] and her peers were well aware of what a terminally fucked-up world they were inheriting. Towards the end of the novel Pip was thinking about how terrible the world was, what an eternal struggle for power.  Secrets were power.  Money was power.  Being needed was power.  Power, power, power:  how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it? But those thoughts did not deter her from her quest for honesty and trust which underlies her entire journey. 

One can only have “great expectations” for Jonathan Franzen’s future work.

And I’ll Raise You a Hail Mary

It’s that silly season of the presidential primary beauty pageant and with Donald Trump in the Republican fray, there is no shortage of material for late night comedy hosts.  But where are Jon Stewart and the “old” Stephen Colbert when you need them?  Their cable comedy shows became the real news while the national newscasts seemed more like the comedy shows.

I’ve purposely avoided writing about politics for some time, mostly because it’s just too disheartening and I write merely one person’s opinion, not with the clout of, say, a Cal Thomas who clutches his bible when expressing his political views.  I have no such source of “truth” to cite.

But speaking of the Good Book, there is the recent amusing exchange between Ben Carson and The Donald, a school-yard square-off to demonstrate who might be more Christian.  Poor Mike Huckabee; he’s been going down yellow brick Evangelical road for so long and no presidential nomination, boo-hoo.  I’m more Christian than you are na-na na-na boo-boo.  Apparently, Carson casteth the first stone, citing Proverb 22:4: “By humility and the fear of the Lord, are riches and honor and life.”  He continued to say, referring to The Donald as “him,” –“And that's a very big part of who I am. Humility, and fear of the Lord. I don't get that impression with him. Maybe I'm wrong."

It must be tough to have lots of humility as a billionaire, particularly one who has monetized his name, not to mention being born to money, and bullied his way to billionaire status with financial tactics that would be the envy of Vito Corleone.  See Andy Kessler’s article in the Sept. 10 Wall Street Journal for the detail: “The Art of The Donald in 10 Easy Steps -- First, be born rich. Then acquire political influence. After that, pile up debt, write books and…. run for office.”

But Trump showed his other cheek to Carson in a relatively benign Christian Tweet: "Wow, I am ahead of the field with Evangelicals (am so proud of this) and virtually every other group, and Ben Carson just took a swipe at me."  According to Politico: “Weeks earlier, he told a crowd of religious conservatives in Iowa that he couldn't recall ever asking God for forgiveness, though he said he has taken Communion. ‘When I drink my little wine — which is about the only wine I drink — and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness, and I do that as often as possible because I feel cleansed,’ Trump said.”

Now he might have criticized Carson on something more substantive such as Dr. Carson’s belief in creationism and his denial of climate change, but, instead, I suppose he had a little wine and a little cracker to cleanse the matter.

This is what the candidates talk about when running for The Presidency? “God” forbid the pious rhetoric if an atheist ever runs.

And let’s not forget the Democrats in the two ring circus, and the plight of poor Hillary who was considered a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination not long ago.  The Clintons always get in trouble with denials rather than stepping up to the plate and admitting to a mistake.  I did not have sex with that email server!

Let the games begin!