Archive | Book Matters

No Condition for Love

From a 1984 interview with author Edna O’Brien:

Interviewer: Some think your preoccupation with romance verges at times on the sentimental. You quote Aragon in answer: “Love is your last chance, there is really nothing else to keep you there.

O’Brien: But my work is concerned with loss as much as with love. Loss is every child’s theme and writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart. I might, if the gods are good to me, find that my understanding of love has become richer and stronger than my dread of loss.

Interviewer: Is that why, in nearly all your novels, women are longing to establish a simple, loving, harmonious relationship with men, but are unable to do so?

O’Brien: My experience was pretty extreme, so that it is hard for me to imagine harmony, or even affinity, between men and women. I would need to be reborn.

The Absurdist Spacecraft of ‘Inherent Vice’

If “The Big Lebowski” is the ultimate movie about stoners, “Inherent Vice” is the ultimate stoned movie. It’s nearly impossible to watch this surprisingly faithful adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel without feeling high ourselves. But dig it, man: Resistance to the film’s addled charms is futile. This is director Paul Thomas Anderson’s most lavishly light-footed work since 1997’s “Boogie Nights.”

Joaquin Phoenix is Doc Sportello, a private eye with a heart of Hawaiian Gold, and it’s a role he was born to play (though Joaquin seems born to play every one of his roles, doesn’t he?). Decked out in John Lennon shades and muttonchops to make the Founding Fathers weep, waddling in a pelvis-first slouch with feet splayed in Huaraches, mumbling in a drug-fueled burr, scribbling inanities like NOT hallucinating in his reporter’s notebook, and forever “rooting through the city dump that is his memory,” Doc is the love child of Doctor Teeth and 1960s-era Elliott Gould whom we didn’t know we were seeking. He doesn’t really know who he’s seeking, either – which, though an admittedly odd quality in a detective, is perfectly in keeping with this shaggy spaceship of a mystery. Continue Reading →

Oates (and ‘Boyhood’) for Lunch

Without a doubt, the headline news at an early December “Boyhood” luncheon at NYC’s Lotos Club was the New York Film Critics Circle Awards that the film won minutes into the event. As attendees swilled cocktails, the announcement came that Patricia Arquette had won Best Supporting Actress, Richard Linklater had won Best Director, and the film had nabbed Best Picture honors, confirming the coming-of-age drama’s position as this year’s Oscar frontrunner. But for some attendees of the event – including “Boyhood” star Ethan Hawke – the biggest news was author Joyce Carol Oates, who moderated a discussion with the film’s cast and director.

As Oates, Hawke, Linklater, Arquette, and costar Ellar Coltrane settled into folding chairs, Hawke, a published novelist himself, burst out, “It’s such an honor to sit with you.” (Several film journalists looked befuddled about the National Book Prize winner’s identity.) Oates, clad in her standard uniform of demure, dark garments, smiled quickly and dove into a discussion of the film, which was shot over the course of twelve years. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy