Jenny Hendrix

Blind idealism is an easy target for comedy. But when idealism fails - as it did in the lost utopias of Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and most cruelly of all in Jonestown - we are left with a tragedy of misplaced hope, an awareness of the fragility of our noblest intensions. Joe Dunthorne’s second novel, “Wild Abandon,’’ is a case in point: It goes in for a laugh but ends, either purposefully or not, with a sizeable lump in its throat.

Like “Submarine,’’ Dunthorne’s debut (recently adapted for the screen), “Wild Abandon’’ is set in the author’s native Wales - this time in Blaen-y-Llyn, a failing anticapitalist commune founded in the ’90s by a group of college graduates. Originally a success (though it’s not entirely made clear how or why) “the community,’’ as it’s referred to by its residents, is now withering. Symbolizing this decline is a parallel weakening in the marriage of its founders, Don and Freya, who with their two children, 17-year-old Kate and 11-year-old Albert, make up the community’s unstable nucleus.  [Read more…]

One of the difficulties of adapting Persuasion, Jane Austen’s sixth and final finished novel, for film is that so much of its drama is internal: encoded in an indirect glance, in the brush of hand against skin, the muffled thump of a heart. Passion, passed through the sieve of eighteenth-century English propriety, is visible only diffusely in the text, as coloring in the landscape or in the minutiae of gesture. The novel quietly condemns the social conventions that demand this: Austen is archly dismissive of the Regency woman’s “art of pleasing,” her “usual stock of accomplishments,” and her frivolous feminine occupations, like “cutting up silk and gold paper.”  [Read More…]

The successful author, though encouraged to name influences, is usually assumed to be fundamentally and inviolably unique. We approach the source of authorial talent with wariness, as though in poking at a beloved writer’s voice, we might disturb whatever precarious convergence of circumstances enabled it to be.

Jonathan Lethem, a successful writer himself, is not prone to this breed of caution: “Of the writers I know,” he wrote in “The Disappointment Artist,” his 2005 essay-collection-cum-memoir, “I’ve been the most eager to point out my influences, to spoil the illusion of originality by elucidating my fiction’s resemblance to my book collection.”

It was in second grade that I decided to be a writer, which also happened to be the year my teacher read The Phantom Tollbooth in class. I can’t help but believe that these are connected, that the emergent symptoms of what would become my chronic infatuation with language were somehow picked up during this sojourn in Norton Juster’s joyously allegorical world.

It would in any case be safe to say that it was Juster (or perhaps Milo, his rather torpid hero) who diagnosed me. His words — enlivened, electrified, transmogrified into pun — made obvious and specific what I’d only guessed about language in general. Names alone were enough to send the imagination reeling: the Whether Man, Officer Short Shrift, Dr. Kakofonous A. Dischord, the Terrible Trivium, Faintly Macabre, the Dyne, the Dodecahedron. TheTollbooth proved that words could have the qualities of characters; that they could be real places I could go, enter into and explore; that metaphors could be tangible; that objects had synesthetic qualities as true as those I could see.Words — like the absurdly literal “square meals” served by Digitopolis’s King Azaz — were themselves accessible to taste, touch and smell.

At the end of the year, my teacher gave me her copy of the book. She had marked a passage for me at the end:

Outside the window, there was so much to see, and hear, and touch — walks to take, hills to climb, caterpillars to watch as they strolled through the garden. There were voices to hear and conversations to listen to in wonder, and the special smell of each day. And, in the very room in which he sat, there were books that could take you anywhere, and things to invent, and make, and build, and break, and all the puzzle and excitement of everything he didn’t know — music to play, songs to sing, and worlds to imagine and then someday make real.

I still treasure this as, among other things, an artifact of what the world promised to an eight-year-old at the start of a love affair with the written word: it was a place that I recognized, but at the same time one somehow strange and mysterious and new. The Tollbooth’s world was the writer’s world, the world as it might be, but never quite is. Which is why, I imagine, we keep trying get there.

Kermit Westergaard, an interior designer, had come to SoHo from his home in the neighborhood where Greenpoint, Brooklyn, nudges up against Ridgewood, Queens, to attend a 110th anniversary retrospective of works by Erté, the “father of Art Deco,” at the Martin Lawrence Gallery. Westergaard, an affable, lightly balding man, seemed somewhat underdressed in comparison to the other gallery attendees, but clothes were in fact the purpose of his visit: from his mother, the theatrical producer Louise Westergaard, he had inherited twenty costumes designed by Erté. The garments are in a storage locker, and Westergaard hoped to find someone at the gallery who could put them to use. “I would rather have the drawings of the costumes than the costumes themselves,” he said, somewhat sadly. “I mean, what do you do with them?” He held a catalog of the costumes under his arm, and took it out to show me. They were exquisite, diva-worthy confections: stars and pearls and spiderwebbed dresses, halolike headpieces, cascading nets of rhinestones, and silver lamé. They brought to mind the sparse garb of the exotic dancer and spy Mata Hari, for whom, in fact, Erté had also designed, in 1913.  [read more…]

A nine-foot-tall statue of Sherlock Holmes stands outside the Marylebone exit to the Baker Street Tube station in London. Solemn and gaunt, Holmes looms over traffic in his trademark Inverness cape and deerstalker, pipe in hand. The statue, London’s first to its famous fictional denizen, was unveiled in 1999. It was primarily funded by the Abbey National Building Society, formerly of 219-229 Baker Street, which, starting in 1932, began receiving the thousands of letters mailed each years to Sherlock Holmes at his 221B Baker Street address. At one point, the society employed a full-time secretary to answer them. When in 1990, the Sherlock Holmes museum down the street (in actual fact between numbers 237 and 241) changed its address to 221B, it led to a fifteen-year dispute over which entity would have the honor of receiving Holmes’ mail. Abbey moved its headquarters in 2005, and the museum, which has recreated the flat shared by Holmes and Watson down to its tobacco-filled Persian slipper, has retained the right.

This letter appears on the museum’s website:

Dear Sherlock Holmes,

I have heard that some of the lads of London help you from time to time in solving crimes. I would like to let you know that I also am at your service. Any time you need help solving some of the cases which are connected with the United States of America, I will be there for you, especially if the case involves dinosaurs or fish, as these subjects are my specialty. Just let me know. Give my regards to Dr. Watson,

Yours sincerely,
Brandon Sellers (5 y/o).

Such is Holmes’ magnetism that it’s not only five year olds who address the detective as if he were a real figure. Indeed, Sherlock Holmes is so vivid a fiction as to have left many footprints in the realm of fact. Even his closest critics treat him as though he once lived.

[Read more…]