Posts From Author: Charles Arrowsmith
Imperfect Bliss
Imperfect Bliss by Susan Fales-Hill NY: Atria Books, 2012; 304pp The narrative and social challenges facing women in the early twenty-first century are at the center of Susan Fales-Hill’s second novel, the romantic comedy Imperfect Bliss. Its heroine, Bliss (Elizabeth) Harcourt, spends much of her time attempting to shield her young daughter, Bella, from the pernicious myth that princesshood is both attainable and desirable. Her sisters — Diana, Charlotte, Victoria — all struggle, more or less consciously, with the roles pressed upon them by that oppressive Big Other of adulthood, reality TV. Their mother, a woman who’s so successfully internalized the racist jibes she suffered as a child that she’s placed a ban on her daughters marrying black men, is the grotesque (if not unsympathetic) product of a lifetime of such social molding. Forsythia’s aspirations for her daughters are grand, as evinced by her naming them after British royals, but they do not necessarily involve happiness. When we meet Bliss, she’s on day 375 of a sex drought following her separation from her by-now-ex-husband Manuel, a politician she caught cheating in his campaign office. Divorced, mid-thirties, and sharing a room with Bella in her family home in an upmarket suburb […]
Read MoreThe Boom Years: P.J. O’Rourke On What Went Wrong… And Right
The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way And It Wasn’t My Fault And I’ll Never Do It Again by P.J. O’Rourke NY: Grove Press, 2014; 272pp “History would have been very different,” writes P.J. O’Rourke; “a C+ at least — if the Baby Boom had ruled the world.” Born in the two decades between the end of the Second World War and the advent of The Beatles on US shores, the Baby Boom is a 75-million-strong demographic that got American history in a headlock in the Sixties and likely won’t let go for another couple decades, given the way the next election’s shaping up. As a generation (and a generalization) they are responsible, near enough entirely, for the world we live in now. And the contradictions of a generation that can be all Haight-Ashbury one minute and selling collateralized debt obligations the next may seem too titanic for a single book to lasso. O’Rourke, though — a journalist, satirist, commentator, and sort of one-man fourth estate — is up to the task. It helps that O’Rourke is one of the funniest and sharpest commentators of his generation. Not for naught is he allegedly the most cited living person in […]
Read MoreReadEasy, 12 January 2015
A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is your regular round-up of literary oddities, reviews, and entertainment from the World Wide Web. You guys, I find that a lot of poetry lately? I don't understand it.(That felt good to get off my chest.)— Elizabeth Gilbert (@GilbertLiz) January 9, 2015 Watch the Golden Globes last night? Check out reviews we wrote of winners Boyhood (Best Motion Picture — Drama; Best Director — Richard Linklater; Best Supporting Actress — Patricia Arquette), Whiplash (Best Supporting Actor — JK Simmons), and Leviathan (Best Foreign Language Film). With more than a faint whiff of WikiLeaks and Anonymous, the Australian writer Peter Carey‘s new novel, Amnesia (Knopf, 2015), is the story of a leftwing journalist investigating a hacker whose computer virus has compromised the security of prisons in Australia and the US. In this interview with NPR, Carey discusses Julian Assange (“[he] really was the reason I started writing the book, but I didn’t want to write about Assange”), Facebook (“the naked playground”), and the attack this week on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris (“sickened, afraid, really aware of the nature of the perilous conflicts in the modern world, in big multinational capitals…”). Carey’s other work […]
Read MoreFilms To See In January: Leviathan; Ida; Two Days, One Night
As awards season looms, with its predictable bows to prestige and heritage movies, three reasons to venture down the road less traveled by. Leviathan has been receiving messianic reviews since its premiere at Cannes last year, where it won the Best Screenplay award, and by the end of its two-and-a-half-some hours it’s easy to see why. I have an undeveloped theory that so-called “foreign” films do well in direct proportion to their correspondence with national stereotypes. With a land dispute, a visiting lawyer from Moscow, sublime landscapes, political corruption, and titanic quantities of vodka on display, you could say that Russia’s submission to the 87th Annual Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film ticks all the boxes. But Leviathan, directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, is also a serious film of grand scope and ambition that deserves to be seen both in and out of the context of Putin’s Russia. At the outset, Kolya (Alexey Serebryakov) is locked in a dense legal battle against local mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov) over a plot of land his family has lived on for generations. Eventually shanghaied out of the property by corrupt officials, and cuckolded by the lawyer friend (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) he’d called on to […]
Read MoreReadEasy, 5 January 2015
A new feature for 2015, ReadEasy is your regular round-up of literary oddities, reviews, and entertainment from the World Wide Web. Meet the new year, same as the old year. Wouldn't it be nice to go a month or two w/o anything too horrible happening?— Stephen King (@StephenKing) December 31, 2014 Dan Chiasson on Marlon Brando… “Anyone who has tried to recapture the magic of a joke by retelling it has felt, in miniature, what Brando must have felt in his career.” So writes Dan Chiasson in a deft summary of what made Marlon Brando great, and then kinda not so great, in this week’s New York Review of Books. He’s writing about Susan L. Mizruchi‘s new book, Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work (Norton, 2014), which excavates some pretty entertaining factoids along the way. Did you know that Brando was the favorite actor of the National Theater for the Deaf? “They always understood exactly what he was expressing,” writes Mizruchi. Her book, Chiasson proclaims, “is a gallant attempt to rescue Brando from the spectacle of his late career[, which was in turn] a test of whether his greatness could survive the most ingenious forms of sabotage he could […]
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