David Thayer

Just when we thought book reviews could not influence opinion, Robert Pinsky does with his review of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. The memoir is framed by the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “o the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall..” Didion’s title suggests experiences both harrowing and final, the illness of her daughter, the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. Even before reading the body of the text, a powerful sense of foreboding fills the heart and soul. The sudden death of a loved one juxtaposed with the extreme anxiety of a parent for a child seems like an exceptionally cruel circumstance, as though her resources weren’t stretched thin enough, her husband dies at the dinner table with one hand raised, a gesture mistaken for the beginning of a joke.

The book is not written as a response to cruel fate or a maudlin look at me tale of prepackaged woe. It is a portrait of an artist enduring the worst of times, a studied and measured analysis of the language used in the multi-sided transactions of crisis, death, the business of illness, survival, and the terms of surrender to grief. Didion describes how she tries to deal with death and fear, her magical thinking, and the complexity of social devices we use to manage grief. Hard, sweet wisdom in the words of another poet. In this case, the phrase seems like understatement.

A few weeks have passed since Rachel Donadio’s article about the state of fiction appeared in the NYT. She commented that we “live in a non-fiction moment”, offering the explanation that fiction these days lacks opacity. To extrapolate a bit I think she meant that if a novel could be stretched across current events like a hide, it would offer the condolence of insight or a kick in the seat so that events in the real world might be better understood.

A random sampling of recent events reveals a serious challenge for novelists. The president is talking to God, who told him to invade Iraq. Bush clarified by saying he did not mean that literally. Two Supreme Court nominees named Rita and Katrina moved the court to the right by several yards. Lots of material here, but the caution flag is out. A novelist might be able to have a character, a president, talking to God. That’s okay. The tricky part is having God talk back. God said to Abraham, kill me a son. Your character is hitchhiking on Highway Sixty One. Hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes are devices that a novelist should use sparingly, but in non-fiction, feel free to load the wagon. Sink an entire city. Throw in lava, and, in the film version, make sure the tires of the getaway car erupt in flame. Good moment for the main characters to realize that, dammit, they’re in love, they don’t want to be, but there’s molten lava, and even though her face is streaked with volcanic ash, well, she is more beautiful than ever. No, no, don’t stop for that hitchhiker. He set the volcano off in the first place, with a well paced block of C4. Bitter about his best friend’s issues with the Patent Office, he’s proven to be both an unreliable narrator and indifferent to human life. Remember, the tires are on fire.

Rachel, we can’t work with material like this. We have to turn inward, I’m afraid, as the non-fiction moment needs serious rewrites. We’re going to cut the second hurricane, delete all references to gasoline and distillate fuels. No discourse with Supreme Beings. As long as Martin Sheen is President, we’re fine. Even Rob Lowe is behaving himself. We’ll get the Patent Office situation straightened out. All that’s needed is a little scene blocking. Cameron Diaz as a Supreme Court nominee who just can’t find a guy. My people are calling her people; can she work with lava?

The New York Observer has found that the devil wearing Prada this fall, this glorious autumnal moment in Publishing History, is none other than Lauren Weisberger. Lauren’s new novel had not even reached the shelves before she and the horse she rode in on were savaged on Gawker. Gawker. The question at hand seems to have its origins in this regard: Lauren is not in, she’s out. In fact, she was never in, never an integral part of the party savant scene. Her first novel was simply a Roman a clef, drawing in great thirsty gulps of Anna Wintour and what it’s really like working at Vogue. Further, the NYO continues, Lauren’s new novel is bad. Bad to the bone. Not only is the novel bad, Lauren bad, her publisher bad, she has swept aside years of marketing construct and destroyed chick lit.

Now what? I have some ideas. The alternative to the Roman a clef is job hunting. Because I need to know what it’s like to work for Anna Wintour, I’m applying for a job at Vogue. Here are some of my qualifications. I wear clothes. And, Ms. Wintour, I am the sole ( or is it soul?) of discretion. I would never betray your trust with a thinly disguised memoir. Hiring me may seem counter-intuitive, but fashion is in my blood. Once, on Seventh Avenue, I dodged one of the racks of designer dresses those schmucks had tipped over and I yelled, “hey, that’s haute couture, fool.”

There are a few problems so let’s address them, get them out of the way. I’m unfamiliar with cell phone use, require frequent and lengthy breaks for stress management purposes, I don’t ‘do’ Starbucks, but I do promise to hate Lauren Weisberger and all her works. I also think Vogue should chase down middle aged balding fat guys as a target demographic now that baseball is winding down. Put a fat guy on the cover, Anna. That’s what I’m talking about.

Thematically, my friends, The Diviners is more than a parody of Hollywood, Bollywood, television, glamour, bulimia, PR firms, the Manhattan Moment, organized religion, mental illness, our attitudes on aging, the collective farm, what Attila Really Wanted, and the decline of western civilization. The novel is about how we keep busy, the drugs we need, the clothes, cell phones, digital devices, heroes and villains, doughnuts, the Trade Center attack, anxiety, crisis, fantasy, peptic ulcers, sex, hallucinations, wallpaper and those crazy guys on bicycles. Like Madison, we stand on our toes surveying the closet in the childlike hope of finding something we did not put in there, something magical and transformative, or, at least, unexpected. Like Minivan, we’re certain that success and happiness are byproducts of frenzy, denial, strain, compulsion, and the Lotus position offered by the swift consumption of a dozen original glazed.

Time is not of the essence. It explodes with every sunrise, bursting through the confines of our inadequate physics, irradiating the dials of our Oedipal Rolex. Moody recreates Genesis in order to see the world afresh, that the dawn of man is treated with the full accompaniment of The Fall. Rosa, like John the Baptist, is privy to a knowledge both frightening and inadequate, repulsive and soothing. She hears everything, understands nothing, caught in the down warp of unattractive illness. Moody searchs in the wreckage of an arsonized Krispy Kreme as though examining the ruin of the Temple of Solomon, aghast how little the debris has to offer. Attila, the man with a plan, is on his way. He will sack and burn Las Vegas. Better read all about it.

I read the announcement that Ron Hogan and Sarah Weinman were taking over Galley Cat as editors with an odd mix of emotions. First of all, it’s weird that I would feel any emotion at all. I’ve never met Ron or Sarah, but I feel as though I know them. This is the weirdness of blogging wherein many degrees of separation vanish while others flourish creating a fourth dimension of strangers whose lives intersect frequently but rarely in corporeal form. Fans of Beatrice and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind have peered inside their brains without so much as a handshake to set the deal in motion, give it the familiarity of social tradition, the traction of names to a face or a faces to a name. Back to the emotional content, a scintilla of unease. What do these changes mean?

I’m not a Galley Cat fan. The tone has been too inside the Beltway for my taste, and my tastes are notorious for both their general irrelevance and contrariness. I’m prone to liking things others dislike just because they are held in such low regard. Here are some things that I like: Curtis Mayfield, the movies Performance, Putney Swope, and the idea of John Waters more than the reality. I like Ferdnand Leger, Edna St. Vincent-Millay, Willy Mays, Carlos Santana, Clint Eastwood, and all the members of The Band. William Kotzwinkle, Motherless Brooklyn but not Fortress of Solitude, Spike Lee, Eli Manning, Denise Mina, James Agee, a lot of the Four Tops, Beggars Banquet, Highway 61 Revisited, Earl the Pearl and Clyde, Fried Green Tomatoes, A Wrinkle in Time, Anne Sexton, the place in the Village with the great hamburgers that I think is on Jane Street. No one goes there and they should.

What can be distilled from all this? Unreliable narrator, former of square hamburger patties, critic without portfolio, all these things are true. I’ll probably read Galley Cat now. Ron and Sarah, good luck.

One of the things that the financial pages deliver is humor. Nothing is funnier than money. The affluent to moderately rich are an overlooked source of humor yet offer a rich vein for business writers to mine. A case in point are the scribes at Yahoo Finance who offered a quiz today about American spending habits. Do we spend more on jewelry or pets? Shoes or pets? Sporting goods or pets?

According to the Census Bureau, pets win. Two curiosities emerge almost simultaneously, pleading for elucidation. First, how does the Census Bureau know this? Second, is anyone tracking the number of pets out there who feel slighted by the news that in the upper echelons of pet wealth, life is good. Let’s say you’re a dog who lives in Ohio, Winesburg, for Sinclair Lewis fans, and you wake up every morning as a dog in a modest but friendly environment. The master is a middle management type, something of tightwad, predictable except in the arena of cell phone use. You’re glad that you’re a dog and exempt from the lectures on cell phone use. Then a neighbor dog shares this bit of information with you: dogs owned by the rich and famous are treated to some of the following perqs:

Massages after vet visits. You get what? A shot and a ride in the station wagon.

Paul Mitchell grooming products for dogs, including cologne. A quick check of the master bath reveals Old Spice which you already know gives you a rash.

Luxury dog hotels including bathrobes. This is a killer. You’ve longed for a personalized bathrobe. Sure the kids have draped you in their bathrobes before adult intercession permitted anything close to luxuriating in the bath robe’s unique properties. Yesterday you were a happy dog in Winesburg Ohio, slightly worried about cell phone use, slightly torn and frayed from a lack of personal grooming products, but, by and large content. Now, you’re bitter. Now you know that there are dogs out there with personal trainers, anxiety coaches, and bathrobes. You hop a bus to Cinci…because sometimes a dog’s gotta do what a dog’s gotta do. A ticket to DC. You’re going to the Census Bureau where it all began. You rehearse your speech. I’m Bruno and I want a bathrobe.

Whew. Had to wrestle with the Forty Third Earl and his aristocratic sidekick, Grand Duke Guy, in order to post today. The two of them were at Fenway this afternoon wearing Red Sox regalia as if either of them had a clue as to what was unfolding before them. The Earl got me on his cell phone to report his impressions. He told a woman in front of him to sit down only to realize too late that she was seated. This drew the attention of her extended family during the seventh inning stretch.

“Thus, I was confronted by a dozen ruffians whose mood was clearly influenced by the Yankees success and the vast amounts of beer they’d consumed. I was unfamiliar with the ‘beehive’ coiffure, a hairstyle one might consider majestic in a certain sense…fortunately, the Grand Duke had the presence of mind to throw five dollars bills at the hooligans. They jostled one another in pursuit of the cash, while the offended damsel held a security guard in a headlock…”

Safe and sound at the Ritz Carlton the Earl remarked, ” that Boston is much as we left it.” The Arch Duke was impressed with the Yankees: “A certain undeniable hauteur…even in gray road uniforms.”

Tomorrow, they’re going to see the Pats.