The marriage of artful prose and big ideas in Scott Cheshire’s “High As The Horses’ Bridles” left a lasting impression on me. With a keen ear for living speech, Cheshire reconstructs the idioms of the previous generation and captures the vernacular rhythms of the present one. He builds on Faulkner and McCarthy to carve out an oracular register perfectly suited to that uniquely American theatrical mode, preaching. He takes on big themes: the complexities of filial responsibility, the anguish of the loss of faith, the difficulty and reward in loving others. And he delivers a thoroughly convincing portrait of the great plurality of Queens, the heartening meeting of ethnicities, religions and classes that is that borough’s—and by extension the City’s, even the country’s—lifeblood. This is a book that stays on the mind and lives in the heart.
In a year of many “best books,” I found Julia Elliott’s debut collection, “The Wilds,” to be singularly exhilarating—by turns deeply moving and disturbing. These eleven stories escort readers into opulently imagined worlds where some people live in trees and others in futuristic nursing homes overseen by a medical-industrial complex run amok; some people float while others interface with the robotic. Oh, and watch out for the feral dogs. At once sci-fi and speculative, dystopian and fabular, “The Wilds” is also somehow weirdly realist. It addresses the intricacies of being human and surviving in a world that is often cold and unforgiving, and never loses sight of our shared fragilities, failures, and occasional triumphs.
My favorite book of the year—in a year full of great debuts and new books from living masters—was Brian Hart’s “The Bully of Order.” Setting his story in the midst of the massive logging operation of the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the century, Hart achieves something magical. You taste the sawdust and mud and blood, while coming to understand the titanic scale of the endeavor to painfully deforest great swaths of American wilderness, a challenge on par with the construction of the pyramids. Nestled in this setting of teeming violence (sailors knew better than take shore leave in such logging towns), is a story of astonishing hurt and heart, as the Ellstrom family tries and all too often fails to overcome the hardships inherent to this time and place.I mean, no, I haven’t seen too many English professors with Jim’s sharp-dressed-man affect (or his high-end BMW), although that might have been vaguely more believable in 1974. Also, I don’t really grasp what area of academic expertise would include teaching a course on Shakespeare and a course that involves Camus – but ditto as to 1974. Given that every aspect of Jim’s persona is projected male fantasy, those are silly objections. He can teach whatever the hell he wants; he’s not a real person. Camus and Hamlet are in there, of course, to underline the idea that Jim has chosen his own road to perdition. He’s a good-looking white guy from a wealthy L.A. family who has had every educational opportunity and every form of privilege, and is expressing his existential freedom by getting repeatedly beaten up by criminals of other races.
When his story begins Jim is already hundreds of thousands in debt to a sinister Asian gambling tycoon, and doubles down on that by borrowing money from an African-American gangster actually called Neville Baraka (Michael Kenneth Williams). He identifies the one undergraduate (Brie Larson) in his orbit with obvious literary talent, and then shamelessly hits on her. He yearns to be broke, fired, beaten to a pulp and killed, in no particular order, or at least to be set free from the oppressive destiny of being himself. Wahlberg brings a guileless, unquenchable spark to the role – “convincing” is really the wrong standard to apply – perhaps because he has no idea how hackneyed and nostalgic this vision of masculine escape is. It’s like Charles Bukowski as retold by Bret Easton Ellis and then summarized in Playboy.
Wyatt is a capable director with a good sense of space, who keeps the train humming from one horizontal California location to the next but leaves time for loquacious, irrelevant side trips in true ’70s Hollywood fashion. (The movie is set now, but might as well not be.) Jessica Lange shows up a couple of times as Jim’s brine-pickled mother, either refusing to bail him out or offering money he will promptly squander. Goodman, an accomplished veteran at rescuing scenes in the most dire of motion pictures, plays a forbidding mountain of flesh, the Lucifer of Jim’s journey into hell, offering him a final choice between redemption and annihilation.The Catapencil. This is a seemingly innocent No. 2 Pencil until you get near the top, where it splits into a V-shape and has two erasers. Attached just beneath the erasers is a rubber band making the pencil into a functional slingshot. While the packaging says it should only be used for target practice, it does not come with any warnings or age recommendations. Consumer Watchdog, which put the Catapencil on its list of the year’s worst toys, warns that someone could easily misfire a dangerous projectile, causing bodily harm to others. And think of the havoc the Catapencil could create in the classroom or cubicle farm.
William Monahan’s rewrite of Toback’s original screenplay uneasily bounces off our contemporary sense that gambling addiction is a disease and that somebody like Jim has no control over his behavior – which is pretty much the opposite of what’s conveyed by all that existential hoo-ha. The original Toback-Caan film (directed by Karel Reisz) rested on the idea that everything the main character does is an expression of freedom, and also on a 19th-century romantic conception of gambling as a profound metaphor for Life or Fate or whatever. Now it just seems like a really stupid reason to get into trouble. Some fragments of that Dostoevskian romance linger on here: Just enough so that Wyatt and Wahlberg nail the climactic scene, when Jim is literally playing for his life, and make it momentarily seem to mean something. But not quite enough that you’ll remember what that something might be the next day.
The marriage of artful prose and big ideas in Scott Cheshire’s “High As The Horses’ Bridles” left a lasting impression on me. With a keen ear for living speech, Cheshire reconstructs the idioms of the previous generation and captures the vernacular rhythms of the present one. He builds on Faulkner and McCarthy to carve out an oracular register perfectly suited to that uniquely American theatrical mode, preaching. He takes on big themes: the complexities of filial responsibility, the anguish of the loss of faith, the difficulty and reward in loving others. And he delivers a thoroughly convincing portrait of the great plurality of Queens, the heartening meeting of ethnicities, religions and classes that is that borough’s—and by extension the City’s, even the country’s—lifeblood. This is a book that stays on the mind and lives in the heart.
In a year of many “best books,” I found Julia Elliott’s debut collection, “The Wilds,” to be singularly exhilarating—by turns deeply moving and disturbing. These eleven stories escort readers into opulently imagined worlds where some people live in trees and others in futuristic nursing homes overseen by a medical-industrial complex run amok; some people float while others interface with the robotic. Oh, and watch out for the feral dogs. At once sci-fi and speculative, dystopian and fabular, “The Wilds” is also somehow weirdly realist. It addresses the intricacies of being human and surviving in a world that is often cold and unforgiving, and never loses sight of our shared fragilities, failures, and occasional triumphs.
My favorite book of the year—in a year full of great debuts and new books from living masters—was Brian Hart’s “The Bully of Order.” Setting his story in the midst of the massive logging operation of the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the century, Hart achieves something magical. You taste the sawdust and mud and blood, while coming to understand the titanic scale of the endeavor to painfully deforest great swaths of American wilderness, a challenge on par with the construction of the pyramids. Nestled in this setting of teeming violence (sailors knew better than take shore leave in such logging towns), is a story of astonishing hurt and heart, as the Ellstrom family tries and all too often fails to overcome the hardships inherent to this time and place.I mean, no, I haven’t seen too many English professors with Jim’s sharp-dressed-man affect (or his high-end BMW), although that might have been vaguely more believable in 1974. Also, I don’t really grasp what area of academic expertise would include teaching a course on Shakespeare and a course that involves Camus – but ditto as to 1974. Given that every aspect of Jim’s persona is projected male fantasy, those are silly objections. He can teach whatever the hell he wants; he’s not a real person. Camus and Hamlet are in there, of course, to underline the idea that Jim has chosen his own road to perdition. He’s a good-looking white guy from a wealthy L.A. family who has had every educational opportunity and every form of privilege, and is expressing his existential freedom by getting repeatedly beaten up by criminals of other races.
When his story begins Jim is already hundreds of thousands in debt to a sinister Asian gambling tycoon, and doubles down on that by borrowing money from an African-American gangster actually called Neville Baraka (Michael Kenneth Williams). He identifies the one undergraduate (Brie Larson) in his orbit with obvious literary talent, and then shamelessly hits on her. He yearns to be broke, fired, beaten to a pulp and killed, in no particular order, or at least to be set free from the oppressive destiny of being himself. Wahlberg brings a guileless, unquenchable spark to the role – “convincing” is really the wrong standard to apply – perhaps because he has no idea how hackneyed and nostalgic this vision of masculine escape is. It’s like Charles Bukowski as retold by Bret Easton Ellis and then summarized in Playboy.
Wyatt is a capable director with a good sense of space, who keeps the train humming from one horizontal California location to the next but leaves time for loquacious, irrelevant side trips in true ’70s Hollywood fashion. (The movie is set now, but might as well not be.) Jessica Lange shows up a couple of times as Jim’s brine-pickled mother, either refusing to bail him out or offering money he will promptly squander. Goodman, an accomplished veteran at rescuing scenes in the most dire of motion pictures, plays a forbidding mountain of flesh, the Lucifer of Jim’s journey into hell, offering him a final choice between redemption and annihilation.The Catapencil. This is a seemingly innocent No. 2 Pencil until you get near the top, where it splits into a V-shape and has two erasers. Attached just beneath the erasers is a rubber band making the pencil into a functional slingshot. While the packaging says it should only be used for target practice, it does not come with any warnings or age recommendations. Consumer Watchdog, which put the Catapencil on its list of the year’s worst toys, warns that someone could easily misfire a dangerous projectile, causing bodily harm to others. And think of the havoc the Catapencil could create in the classroom or cubicle farm.
William Monahan’s rewrite of Toback’s original screenplay uneasily bounces off our contemporary sense that gambling addiction is a disease and that somebody like Jim has no control over his behavior – which is pretty much the opposite of what’s conveyed by all that existential hoo-ha. The original Toback-Caan film (directed by Karel Reisz) rested on the idea that everything the main character does is an expression of freedom, and also on a 19th-century romantic conception of gambling as a profound metaphor for Life or Fate or whatever. Now it just seems like a really stupid reason to get into trouble. Some fragments of that Dostoevskian romance linger on here: Just enough so that Wyatt and Wahlberg nail the climactic scene, when Jim is literally playing for his life, and make it momentarily seem to mean something. But not quite enough that you’ll remember what that something might be the next day.
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