A gang of girlfriends also rushes to the support of their friend, Pallas Saunders, who loves her work running Weddings in a Box, a “theme wedding” venue. Sparks fly between Pallas and Nick Mitchell (“he was a world-renowned artist who had won awards” and has been in People magazine), but he’s finding it hard To Commit. The real conflict, however, is between Pallas and her domineering mother, who is determined to have Pallas join her in running the family bank. What’s a girl to do? Luckily, the sex in Susan Mallery’s You Say It First is just fine.
And then there’s Catherine Bybee’s Lori, in Fool Me Once, a flourishing attorney who works with a small elite marriage-for-hire service for the rich and famous, marriages designed to be temporary that include an uncontested and lucrative divorce. Lori takes three of her recent divorcées off on a European jaunt to help them re-enter a husbandless existence, and they bond: “First Wives Club or bust.” “Girl power.” But what about gorgeous Reed, some mysterious kind of private investigator? Whom is he working for? Can he be trusted? No matter: “His kiss was an inferno in under a second,” so no surprise that “a lick, a nibble and a suck, and Lori was lost.” But Reed still must earn her trust. The lesson: A lick and a nibble are all to the good, but complete honesty is essential. All truths must be told, especially by the man.
* * *
THE EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN, abundant sexuality steamily reported, and female bonding rule the current roost, yet the biggest phenomenon in recent romance is atypical. Originally published privately in Australia, the E. L. James Fifty Shades trilogy, with its saga of a nice college girl giving herself over to the S & M predilections of a tormented (but gorgeous) zillionaire, has sold over 125 million copies in half a dozen years. James has been derided for her less-than-sterling prose, but mostly by readers—Salman Rushdie is one—who I doubt are familiar with the standard romance literature: E. L. James is no better or worse a writer than most of her compeers. What’s made her so astoundingly successful is the trope of spanking, give or take the odd whip and manacle.
Does this mean that what vast numbers of women are really looking for is bondage, not bonding? Or is this just a daring momentary flirtation with one extreme possibility of romantic relationship? If this season’s crop of romances is anything to go by, there’s no general rush to the whip: E. L. James and a few other spankers may have both stirred up a vast market and satisfied it. We shall see. Not unexpectedly, her books, while breaking the rules in some areas, hew slavishly to others. Yet again we have the girl of modest circumstances winning today’s equivalent of the duke, the multimillionaire—the Lizzie Bennet syndrome. And yet again we have the girl of empathy and generosity curing the tormented man: Jane Eyre redux. Spanking apart, it’s the same old song.
You can’t get farther away from quirky E. L. James than adorable Debbie Macomber (200 million copies sold). In her recent If Not for You, not only does piano teacher Beth defy her controlling mother to mate with superior garage mechanic Sam, but she reunites her beloved Aunt Sunshine (yes), a highly acclaimed artist, with the man she loved when they were young, pulling off this miracle through a canny ruse featuring fish tacos. In Macomber’s current Any Dream Will Do, she brings together the tragically widowed Pastor Drew Douglas with the just-out-of-prison Shay (she embezzled only to save her brother’s life). Best line of dialogue, spoken by Sadie, Shay’s co-waitress at the café where they work: “You got the hots for a man of God?” And in Macomber’s just-off-the-press annual Christmas book, Merry and Bright—she’s MERRY Smith, he’s Jayson BRIGHT, get it?—handsome, rich, but deeply despondent boss and pretty, warm, life-loving temp fall in love through the Mix & Mingle dating website, unaware that they’ve crossed swords (and looks) in the office. (Yes—it’s You’ve Got Mail, fully acknowledged—to say nothing of Lubitsch’s sublime The Shop Around the Corner, unacknowledged.) Crucial to the story is Patrick, the light of Merry’s life: her enchanting eighteen-year-old brother, who has Down syndrome.
And finally there’s the redoubtable Danielle Steel, who according to Wikipedia is the fourth-best-selling writer of fiction in history, right behind Agatha Christie, Shakespeare, and Barbara Cartland. Recently Steel abandoned her predictable contemporary world of the rich and famous overcoming adversity, and ventured back into the Regency. Yes, Danielle Steel has given us the bestselling The Duchess! A Regency with a twist.
Exquisite Angélique is the eighteen-year-old daughter of the Duke of Westerfield (cousin of George IV) and Marie-Isabelle, “a Bourbon on one side of her family and Orléans on the other, with royals on both sides.” It was a love match, despite a big disparity in age, and Marie-Isabelle loved Belgrave Castle as much as the duke himself did, “helping him to add beautiful decorative pieces to his existing heirlooms.” Unfortunately, she dies giving birth to Angélique, who is raised in happy seclusion by her doting father, adored by all. But Daddy dies, and her wicked half brother, the new duke, who hates her, exiles her from Belgrave to work as a nursery maid somewhere far away. She can inherit nothing, because of the entail, except for some jewelry of her mother’s. But providentially, as her father is dying, he hands her a pouch containing £25,000 that he has squirreled away.
Bravely Angélique accepts her fate, and settles into her new life of service. But when she rejects the advances of a salacious young master, she’s fired—without a reference! Therefore no domestic work for her in England, and when she tries France, she has no better luck there. Down and out in Paris and London, knowing no one and with nothing but her pouch between her and destitution, what does this pure, delicate flower of the aristocracy do? Just what you or I would do: Practically overnight, she opens what rapidly becomes the most elegant, successful bordello in Paris (preserving her own virtue, needless to say). Then on to America, marriage to a hugely rich lawyer who dies (of plot), leaving her with a dear little boy and a fortune. Meanwhile, her wicked half brother has overspent, so has to sell Belgrave Castle, which she secretly buys … and so forth.
The entire preposterous story is predicated on Angélique’s not grasping what anyone in her place would certainly know—that £25,000, even cautiously invested in the famous 4 percents, would have provided her with a sizable income for life: no need to be a nursemaid or a madam. But we (and she) would have missed all the fun.
This retro venture, flatly written like all Steel’s books, is just further evidence of how romance can swing any which way. Regency, psychopaths, wedding planners, ranchers, sadists, grandmas, bordellos, dukes (of course); whips, fish tacos, entails, Down syndrome, recipes, orgasms—romance can absorb them all, which suggests it’s a healthy genre, not trapped in inflexibility. Its readership is vast, its satisfactions apparently limitless, its profitability incontestable. And where’s the harm? After all, guys have their James Bonds as role models. Are fantasies of violence and danger really more respectable than fantasies of courtship and female self-empowerment? Or to put it another way, are Jonathan’s Bolognese and Cam’s cucumber salsa any sillier than Octopussy’s Alfa Romeo and Bond’s unstirred martinis?
The New York Times Book Review
OCTOBER 1, 2017
The Book of Books
AMERICAN MUSICALS
DURING THE GOLDEN AGE OF BROADWAY, people generally referred to musicals by the names of their songwriters: Seen the new Cole Porter? The new Rodgers and Hart? The new Gershwin? The songs were the thing. Or, if a major star was involved, it might be the new Ethel Merman or the new Mary Martin. Then, when the choreographer/director took over in the fifties and sixties, there was the new Jerry Robbins, the new Bob Fosse. And, in a category of its own, the new Steve Sondheim. But nobody ever labeled a musical by the author of its book. The phrase “Book by” in the credits was like a pathetic tail dangling from a dog.
And yet you couldn’t have a musical without a book: something to hang a story, a situation, a conflict on; a trigger for the songs; an opportunity for actors to … act. A rotten book could (but didn’t always) sink a show; a terrific book couldn’t often
(but sometimes did) keep a show from sinking. Yet who really took notice? Great songs from a show go on to a life of their own, and great performances are treasured long after they’ve become history. But books?
As part of its current strategy to pep up (some carpers might say dumb down) its weighty list, the Library of America has decided to throw light on the subject, publishing in two volumes, under the title American Musicals, sixteen books (including lyrics) from sixteen famous shows, ranging from 1927 to 1969. You could argue over some of the choices (and I will), but most of these sixteen would undoubtedly appear on anyone’s list of the classics.
In fact, there’s only one real surprise: the Irving Berlin–Moss Hart As Thousands Cheer, probably Broadway’s most celebrated revue, its sketches and songs famously taking off from “today’s” headlines and celebrities. All Broadway buffs know about it—the 1933 show that gave us “Easter Parade” and “Heat Wave” and “Supper Time” and “Harlem on My Mind,” the last three sung by the showstopping Ethel Waters—and about the problems between Waters and her (white) co-stars, which Waters blamed on racism. But we haven’t known what, exactly, those Moss Hart sketches were like. Printing this text, though it’s far from a standard “book,” is a real contribution.
And the news is that, even this early in his career, Moss Hart was right on target. Here he is observing the Herbert Hoovers evacuating the White House as FDR and Eleanor move in. (Mrs. H: “I’m not going to leave anything for those Roosevelts, I can tell you that. Did you bring that electric toaster up from the kitchen, Herbie?”) And here’s the breakup of the Joan Crawford–Doug Fairbanks Jr. marriage. (Joan to the press: “I want you to be sure to say that this divorce can never change our spiritual relationship. Douglas will always remain to me the lover eternal—the finest man I have ever known. I shall always keep and treasure his water colors.”) You can see why As Thousands Cheer ran for a year.
The most striking thing about the shows with proper books—almost all of them postwar, when book shows really took hold—is that they’re nearly all adaptations: some from a novel (Show Boat, The Pajama Game); some from a group of stories (Pal Joey, South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret); some from plays (Kiss Me, Kate, My Fair Lady, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Oklahoma!). Gypsy was “suggested” by the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee; On the Town was based on Jerome Robbins’s ballet Fancy Free. Only Finian’s Rainbow and 1776 are totally new.
The adaptation closest to its original is My Fair Lady—so close that when I first saw it, when it opened in 1956, it felt to me like a performance of “Pygmalion” irritatingly interrupted by songs. Today the songs are more famous than “Pygmalion,” but when you compare the text of the book with the text of the play, you realize (a) how closely (and wisely) Alan Jay Lerner followed George Bernard Shaw and the extent to which he simply recycled Shaw’s dialogue (which is, of course, why Lerner’s book is by far the best of all), and (b) how unlike in tone Lerner’s lyrics are from Shaw. Can you imagine Shaw writing “Someone’s head resting on my knee / Warm and tender as he can be”? But Lerner deployed the songs brilliantly. And the glorious climactic “Rain in Spain” sequence is essence of Broadway.
Ethel Waters singing “Heat Wave” in As Thousands Cheer
The librettos of Oklahoma! and Guys and Dolls and Gypsy are very satisfying to read—they’re cannily structured and strongly written and have persuasive individual voices preserved from their originals. The exuberant Pajama Game works on the page; Cabaret doesn’t—it’s disjointed, the characters barely sketched in. Fiddler seems somewhat mawkish in its special pleading. Oscar Hammerstein’s moving Carousel, based on Ferenc Molnár’s play Liliom, would have been a more convincing choice than his South Pacific, based on James Michener, with its heavy message of Tolerance. Not all the humor of On the Town, which as a teenager I found dazzlingly sophisticated, has worn well; Pal Joey, with its rat of a hero, isn’t as daring today as it must have seemed in 1940; and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is so convoluted and dependent on physical comedy that it’s hard to take in on the page.
The two originals are vastly unalike. The somewhat dated book of Finian’s Rainbow is an unlikely mixture of Irish whimsy, anti-racism agenda, hillbilly comedy, and young romance, but somehow these all come together as the perfect spawning ground for an extraordinary number of first-rate songs: “Old Devil Moon,” “Something Sort of Grandish,” “Look to the Rainbow,” “If This Isn’t Love,” “When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love,” and, of course, “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” Only Show Boat, Oklahoma!, and Annie Get Your Gun (not included here) can match it in this regard.
By contrast, 1776 didn’t spawn a single lyric I recognize—I had to watch as much of the movie as I could bear in order to get a sense of what the score was like. Yet its book, by Peter Stone, has fanatic admirers for the way it dramatizes the struggle to get the thirteen colonies to vote for independence. Yes, it’s cleverly structured and pumped for suspense, but the tone of much of it is so cute, cute, cute that it reduces the birth of the United States to a sitcom with powdered wigs. A sly Pickwicky Ben Franklin? A moony, lovestruck Tom Jefferson too busy humping his luscious bride to turn out the Declaration of Independence? There’s so much speechifying that hours—days—seem to go by without a snatch of song, which may be just as well since the songs themselves are so mediocre. 1776 is a straight play pretending to be a musical.
Reading these books, however effective (or not) each of them may be, presents a common problem: responding to a lyric when you don’t know the music. Or you can reverse it: responding to a lyric without being affected by the music you do know. Try reading “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’” or “I could have danced all night” without hearing it. On the other hand, try these obscure Lorenz Hart lines, chosen almost at random from Pal Joey: “Danger’s easy to endure when / You’re out to catch a beaut; / Lie in ambush, but be sure when / You see the whites of their eyes—don’t shoot!” This is why reading American Musicals can be such an uneven experience: One moment you’re caught up in a song you love, happy to be able to place it in its natural context; the next, you’re floundering.
I’m not complaining, though—it’s good to have these complete books, even when they’re less than inspiring. They may be more rewarding as history or nostalgia than as art, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a place in the Library of America, given that the classic American musical is one of our great cultural accomplishments. The Library could have done its part of the job a little more helpfully, though. The basic introduction by the editor, Laurence Maslon, is both thin and hyperbolic, although his later notes on each production are substantial. Worse, the credits for each show are tucked away in the back, almost impossible to locate when you want them: You have to fumble your way through hundreds of pages to discover the date of a show, or its cast.
And then there are the typos, particularly egregious when they mutilate lyrics. In “Wunderbar,” from Kiss Me, Kate, the leads drink “To the join of our dream come true.” And, Pal Joey himself, in the classic “I Could Write a Book,” sings: “And the simple secret of the plot / Is that to tell them that I love you a lot.” Come on, Library of America: Take yourself more seriously.
The Wall Street Journal
OCTOBER 24, 2014
The Writer
SEBASTIAN BARRY
HOW DID IT COME ABOUT that an Irishman, Sebastian Barry, has written one of the most illuminating and moving recent novels about America—and nineteenth-century America at that? And what odds would you have given that it would be published in the United States within weeks of that other superb novel set in the same period: George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo? (Please don’t tell me that the novel is dead.)
Days Without End is Barry’s eighth novel, a number that includes an early, ambitious, and pretentious Joycean effort called The Engine of Owl-Light, which is unavailable and which you can safely ignore. Every one of his other novels is lum
inous. Not one of them sounds like anyone else. In Britain, he’s a major figure—he’s twice won the Costa (previously Whitbread) Book Award, not only for best novel but for Book of the Year, the only novelist to be so honored. Two of his books have been shortlisted for the Booker; two have won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. His reviews are almost unanimously rapturous. In America they’re equally splendid—and have been mostly ignored; he has ardent admirers here but remains relatively unknown, although he’s traveled and taught in America and knows it well.
This should change with Days Without End, a book of such feeling, charm, persuasiveness, and suspense that Barry’s American audience will surely swell. Who could resist the voice of its narrator, the young Thomas McNulty, who has escaped famine-struck Ireland—his family dead of starvation—in one of the notorious “coffin ships” that carried hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants to America in pre–Civil War days? Those ships were hell, and for many of the new Americans, life here was hell too. Thomas, blundering across the country, desperate for any kind of work, finds himself in Missouri—alone, in rags, and hungry. Ducking under a hedge in a sudden downpour, he runs into another untethered boy: Handsome John Cole, as Thomas likes to refer to him. Thomas is about fifteen but “wren-sized”; John Cole is a year or two younger but tall. From that first moment, they belong to each other.
Together they head out, ready to take on any menial job, however degrading, that they may stumble upon. They find themselves in a small mining town, hired by a well-intentioned saloon owner to dress up as girls and dance (and only dance) with the miners in a place where there are no women to speak of. Thomas is completely comfortable in his new garb and in this role, until he and John just can’t hide their boyness any longer and are back on the road. As for their sexuality, it’s dealt with in one astonishing sentence, dropped into the narrative so casually that it’s as natural as it is shocking: “And then we quietly fucked and then we slept.” That’s just about it for the sexual life of these two men, except for a casual affectionate kiss, through the twenty-five years or so that we observe their deeply happy union.
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